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In Trial, Kindles Disappointing University Users

Posted by kdawson on from the write-on dept.

Phurge writes "When Princeton announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. 'I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,' said Aaron Horvath, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. 'It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.' 'Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'"

6 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Kindle is the future! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    with SIX kindles assembled into one, the ALCHEMIST may forge a TIME CUBE. The TIME CUBE is GODS TRUTH. It is EVIL to read FALSE time books! Simple KINDLE DIVINITY is the TIME CUBE. do you REALIZE earth itself is an E-BOOK? Only through TEMPORAL HARMONY can the TIME-KINDLE spiral universe destiny? You SnotBrains will know hell for ignoring TimeCube. I do not promote or suggest anyone killing you, but you are unfit to live on Earth.

  2. I HATE HATE HATE VISTA!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Yeah, I'm offtopic, and I know it, but SHIT - I need a fuckin' support group or something. Vista is terrrrrrible. How the F$#@! could they release such a F$#@! piece of sh** is beyond me. DAMNIT!! I've read every stupid manual on the Internet on how to fix this piece of shit, and it's made it slightly more bearable, but it still sucks!

    EVERYBODY.... WAIT.... I (Vista) need to page this shit out to the pagefile even though virtual memory is set very reasonable, I've got the maximum allowable RAM for my OS (yet I'm only utilizing half) and I freeze every damn thing on the computer, including this guys (my) term paper! Wait, what am I paging? Well, I dunno! ARGH.

    OH... MY... GOD... somebody please shoot me!!

    (Yeah, you can say use linux, but advanced office features like tracking comments, graphs, etc just won't xfer over well, if at all)

    What THE FUCK is this thing paging???

    Sigh, Jebus - looks like the mouse is actually movable on my other computer now. Screw it, I'll post anyway.

    Hello /.

    1. Re:I HATE HATE HATE VISTA!! by hairyfeet · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Uuuhhhh....Anonymous dude? XP Pro X64 is $139 and you can use ALL the RAM you could ever want (I am currently running 8Gb on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) and I haven't had any trouble running anything on it except for REALLY old, like Win95 era 16 bit crap on it. If your hardware doesn't have 64 bit drivers you can pick up XP Pro 32 for $134 or XP Home for $89.

      So please, don't punish yourself with Vista. I'm sure whatever you did in this life or the last you are REALLY sorry for and don't deserve the "wow, this makes WinME look good!" suffering that is Vista. Just forgive yourself and get a copy of XP. Your sanity and your hairline will thank you for it. Oh, and if you have one of those POS PCs/laptops where they give you ONLY Vista drivers? Just use SIW to find out who made the actual hardware (I'm sure it uses bog standard parts like Realtek and Broadcom) and then hit up driverguide.

      Remember, the Internet is your friend, so use it wisely. I know this works because I have exorcised the demon Vista off of many a Dell and HP including laptops and while the drivers may end up a mix of OEMs, they all actually run XP now and run quite nicely, if I do say so myself. So don't suffer the hell that is Vista, be kind to yourself and go back to the goodness that is XP. And if your machine has X64 drivers you can just bypass Win7 while you are at it, as it will be quite awhile before XP reaches EOL, and I seriously doubt anyone will be using 128Gb of RAM by 2014, at least not on anything but a major server. So release your anger grasshopper, and let go of the evil OS. Life is too short to risk a coronary dealing with the soul sucking evilness that is Vista.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:I HATE HATE HATE VISTA!! by VoltageX · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Is there any difference between SIW and Belarc Advisor?

      --
      "Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
    3. Re:I HATE HATE HATE VISTA!! by justinlee37 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Vista isn't that bad. But getting it for anything other than DirectX 10 is a bad decision. I really wish Microsoft had the balls to sell DirectX as a separate product, then maybe people would respect them more.

    4. Re:I HATE HATE HATE VISTA!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      I run Windows 7. it was free as a beta for a while and will be released soon. Fixes all the bullshit of Vista.

      As for graphs, I do 100% of my graphs in Linux. I wouldn't even know where to begin on Windows for some serious graphing applications.