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Tech Gifts for the Holidays
MrCopilot pointed out that every year there are a slew of gadgets geeks desire for Christmas, and approximately 7 million web pages dedicated to compiling lists of them.
So why shouldn't we join in the fun. Here are stories from
Dallas News,
CBS News,
Seattle Times,
E Media Wire,
Detroit News and
MSNBC. So lets take a crack at your own list. There's still another day or two where things could conceivably be shipped on time for the holidays. I highly recommend Rock Band, although my aching hands might disagree.
What's with the e-paper craze nowadays? I grew up reading things on recycled paper. =/
The e-book thing is an idea that simply refuses to die. Every couple of years, we get more hype about it, but it's never really gotten that far. My personal take on it is that it's a solution looking for a problem. An e-book reader is not really any more convenient to carry around than a paperback book, and is less durable. The only real advantage is the ability to carry around your entire library with you, but so far that hasn't been enough to overcome the disadvantages inherent in reading for extended periods of time from a small electronic device.
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What the hell is with these top-* lists?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Every year, I see these lists and I wonder, do most people really spend that much on a single Christmas gift? I'm sorry, but I'm not buying anyone a $2500 self-tuning electric guitar (CBS list), or a new $2299 Apple iMac (MSNBC list) or even a $400 iPhone this holiday season. I swear these lists must be created by retailers or someone trying to convince you that you have to go all out and spend all your savings every Christmas, just so your friends and family will love you.
At least some of these lists are surprisingly decent - the Dallas and Detroit ones are actually pretty reasonable - accessories for your friends and family that already bought their gadgets. Now those make good gift items.
I don't know, but instead of playing Rock Band, maybe people could learn to play real instruments.
Get off my lawn.
With that list of reqs/specs I'd just go with the original paperback:
1. Low puchase cost
2. Best in class - by far - battery life
3. Best in class - by far - display resolution
4. Lightweight
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
1. Buy gadget
2. Replace batteries
3. Watch it break down
4. Attempt to fix
5. ???
6. Profit (for the person who sold it)
7. Massive unrecycled waste (your gift to planet earth)
Good ideas: plants, books, tools, Slashdot membership, backrubs, fruit, nuts, candy wrapped in paper.
This holiday is about loving your family, go be with them, instead of working extra hours to buy them plastic crap you won't even remember in two years!
technical writing / development
Compared to guitar hero, the set list is a cakewalk. The only song that is difficult is Green Grass and High Tides on Expert - by the time you get to the endless HO's/PO's, your arm/wrist feels like it's jello.
I could see wanting to carry around my entire CD collection, so things like iPod make sense. In 1 hour you could listen to about 15 songs, so if you want a mix from everything you own, instead of just 1 CD, it makes sense to carry your whole collection on you. However, with books I feel it's quite a bit different. You are going to read 4 minutes from 15 different books in a 1 hour trip. Even if you are going on vacation for a couple weeks, you probably wouldn't go through that many different books that it would be a problem to bring a few with you. Unless you like travelling to exotic out of the way places to sit in a hotel and read books all day.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I can scan entire bookshelves in a glance. No time needed for indexing, just a quick look is necessary.
OTOH if you want to read a specific book, and you have more than one bookshelf, finding it can be a bitch. If you have much more than one bookshelf, it can be a REAL bitch.
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Did you go to college? Heaving around all those textbooks SUCKED, especially when I had to walk to campus! This is the one great usage I can see for e-books, or at least PDF releases of texts, but I doubt the printing industry is going to give up on leeching off of college kids.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
And if you feel like the author deserves the money, you buy the DRM'd versions from Amazon and promptly delete them
I'm offered a choice between a sub-par, restricted, limited, crippled version of something for $MUCH and the same thing without these flaws for $NONE.
I'm ready to pay the $MUCH for the unrestricted version. I don't want the restricted version, its price being moot.
So where's the evil of grabbing the 'open' version of the books from torrent, buying the same books in DRM format, then just never using the DRM version?
That I don't pay premium for a reader device with restriction chips? That I can backup them, I can read them on any device I have, without the publisher's approval?
Or that I can decide not pay for the book if I give up reading it one chapter deep, deciding it's utter crap and not worth the money by far, and that the advertisement was deceiving?
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Donald Norman observed it takes about 6 attempts for new technologies to materialize in a form that the market accepts ("The Design of Every Day Things" ). This is simply because good design is hard.
As for the many versions of ebook-readers running around the market lately, I would suggest that 1) the LCD version's don't count (non-starter as a paper replacement), and 2) there have only been two or three iterations of eInk models (e.g. numerous models from various companies, but few generations overall).
Once e-ink resolution has about doubled, I'll be moving my reading from paper to bits. The other posts about reading entire series (aka Diskworld), or textbooks, or technical books are valid and sound. Just lately, I was intrigued by a title in another article ("The Killing Star" as mentioned here in Does Active SETI Put Earth in Danger? ) and I have been unable to find one of thse "Ohhh-paper-is-the-ultimate! versions at all (or at least any price point I would pay for - the last one on Amazon I saw was a used copy for about $200 (Yeah, I wish I was kidding too.))).
Anyway...
Paper books will join pay-phones in the Obsolescence Hall Of Fame; of this I am sure.