My laptop only gets 5 hours, but I do know that there are Intel based ones that get approximately 10. Given that Apple is using an ARM chip, it seems kind of embarrassing that they're only able to get 10 hours out of it.
Isn't it the case that tablets carry smaller batteries so as to reduce weight? Besides battery life is not everything. People have the choice between dump phones that last a month, and smart phones that last 2 days. Most pick the smart phone.
Amazon was the one setting their own price to the books. The publishers (supported by Apple) demanded (at the time that the iPad came to the game) Amazon to only sell their books at a fixed retail price.
I use Linux almost everywhere including in my last 2 phones (Androids). Like everyone that uses a platform for a while I grew fond of some goodness present in it, which make me reluctant about migrating (say, to iphone/IOS). However, one mighty selling point of the IOS platform is the continuous stream of software updates.
Google still has this completely messed up. There is no Android phone I can buy which I know I'll have future software support for it. All the Nexus phones are normally only available in the USA and England. They reach the rest of the planet much later, and often NOT as "Google experience" devices. Meaning: "NO continuous stream of software updates". For instance, the XOOM was a Google experience device IN THE US, not in Europe (at least not in most of Europe, perhaps it was in England).
Another PITA of Android are the manufacturers additions to it. I would have already bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 if it wasn't for the fact that I simply don't trust Samsung to re-write Android's user interface.
I think that the "know nothing, aggressive abrasive kids" shouting 'XYZ is cool... ABC sux... i'm elite' is a consequence of the popularity of the platform. Its is a bit like saying that the LaTeX dev groups is one of the most civil that there is (from what I heard, no direct experience). I tend to think that _part_ of the reason for it, is that LaTeX development is not the most exciting piece of software tech around.
The distros brought fragmentation to some extent, but it was mostly because of the problems (packaging) that they were tackling to solve. At the same time the BSD family had fragmentation at the kernel level, which Linux doesn't actually have.
I was working in a government lab in 1994-ish when Sun visited us. We were writing cross-platform C++ code - UNIX (many, many flavors including 64-bit), Windows, Mac, OS/2... you get the idea.
The said it was a little slow at the time, but figured in 5 yrs it would be almost as fast as native C++.
I'm still waiting. My company avoids java applications just like we avoid AIR and Flash and IE apps. It is big and slow.
Any chance Java and hence, Eclipse will ever get tight and fast in the next 30 yrs?
AFAIK Java wasn't meant to be faster than or as fast as C/C++, it was meant to be 'fast enough' (for a number of scenarios), maintanable and SAFE.
Plus paper books last (nearly) forever, you can give them them to kids or, if everything else fails, the nazis/communists/whatev0r can burn them.
Plus paper books take space, have fixed-size small fonts, accumulate dust, won't give me an immediate dictionary look-up, and are a royal-pain-in-the-back when you carry box loads of them when moving to a new house. Oh, 10 paper books also take too much space in my luggage when I take them during my vacations.
[...]
While one's mileage may vary, I haven't yet met a single person that reads a lot that didn't marvel at the possibilities that the e-readers offer.
I don't know what economy you're living in, but I wouldn't say it's dirt cheap. Even $100 (much less than it started at) isn't dirt cheap.
For the kind of tech and convenience you get, I'd say it is dirty cheap. FWIW by convenience, I mean: - the price of bookshelves, and the house space that is not occupied by bookshelves, - I read a lot and my eyes are not 'eagle sharp'. Having adjustable fonts in something which is not a bright monitor is positively awesome and (for me) worth paying a lot more than $100. - carrying loads of books while on vacation without the weight... - etc
Perhaps the $100 is still a lot compared to that for some, but for many I can assure you it is peanuts.
I live in Paris (i.e. square meters cost a lot), there is no way I will pile up DVDs in the house.
Are you serious?!? Rationalize much?
Actually, yes, I am serious. But then you should not take me too literally. I meant to say, I have no basement or a big flat with spare rooms. Flat area is relatively small.
I live in Manhattan where square meters also cost a lot. I have 100 DVDs sitting in front of me. They are on a spool which is a huge 7 inches tall. Given DVDs have a diameter of 12cm and there's a bit under half an inch of spool base sticking out all round, we have a box 14.5 cm x 14.5cm x 18cm.
You don't have room for such a "pile"? You could hang it from the ceiling, taking up no square meters. I'm sure you have 15cm of shelf width somewhere in that house
The point is that I don't want to have more "stuff" in the flat. I don't want to have boxes full books that don't fit the shelves, nor stacks of DVDs, or stacks of paper. I live here;-) I'd rather have an emptier home (*looks around*: boxes of all sorts of stuff, books piled on top of the IKEA shelve, cables running around the table). (I work remotely so I get to look around the house during working hours;-)). Of course I could stuff it somewhere but then it would be even more "stuff" stuffed at places, and I want to avoid that as much as possible. Don't tell me to buy more storage and rip it, I already own a NAS, and I want to get rid of the last computer with a DVD drive in the house.
I donated all old books that I thought I wasn't going to read again. Unless its work related, I only buy digital books (love the Kindle). I actually donated an old printer primarily because it was not wireless and there was no good place to run the USB cable to the router or desktop (which I will hopefully get rid of).
The local video/media library has titles but not that many. We (me+wife) buy DVDs when we really want to see something. My whole point is that the media industry puts so much money and effort to get these laws passed, but they don't really work to take the money from people like me who can afford it but really needs/wants it with 'digital convenience'.
> So let me get this straight... because you dont want to have to leave your apartment, and because its a massive hardship to have a dvd binder on a shelf, you should be allowed to steal.
Let me get this straight: get your reading comprehension improved because it sucks.
Hard to answer without swearing. First downloading torrents is not stealing. Second, what exactly lead you to conclude that I download illegally? Does anyone complaining of the lack of legal digital video download options is to be taken as a criminal?
I either buy DVDs or get them at a local public library. Like with books before I got a Kindle, the nuisance of getting videos (ordering DVD + shelve space, physically going to the library), means we watch less movies than we would otherwise. Having a small baby means going to the cinema is not a trivial thing to do.
My point is that the lack of convenience for getting movies at home is such that even people with the cash to spare don't buy DVDs.
> These days even a mediocre computer can rip a DVD and make an MPEG4 file.
We have an iPad, an MacBookAir, a Lenovo X220, a 5 year old desktop, and a NAS. The desktop is the only one with a DVD drive and my intention is to get rid of it, soonish. The DVD drive is not enough to keep it. I guess I should say "mediocre computers can rip DVDs, the ones I want to have at home can't".
I live in France, and don't know of any one who's got that letter. I think a lot of people in my age and income bracket would be embarrassed to mention they got suck a letter.
What _really_ sucks (not only in France, but in most of Europe AFAIK) is that I have no way of easily renting/buying videos through the internet. All choices I've looked at had a really old and incomplete catalogue. Last I tried to check that was in the beginning of the year, and all alternatives sucked big. I live in Paris (i.e. square meters cost a lot), there is no way I will pile up DVDs in the house.
I can understand that French parliament was lead (read: bought) into writing this legislation, but I really can't understand they did that without requiring the industry to put a legal alternative in place.
Are the stations of these dense enough, that you can just go somewhere else and drop the car? Instead of having to (more or less) be forced into a round-trip?
One thing I hope this system will provide is a high density of stations to allow that. IIRC the system we used in the NL actually required us to return the car to the same spot. But then, it also allowed us to reserve a car at a given location and given time.
A lot of people are commenting that this is not "the first". Who cares?
It is not the first but, for one, it will be the first that will be heard of by people living far from it. Folks get over this: there are more international reporters in Paris than in all of the other quoted cities I've seen so far combined.
More importantly, given the monthly price, it seems to be a lot more geared to the occasional short trip. We (me+wife) used a car pool system in The Netherlands for a couple of years. The trick with it was that the monthly fees were so high that it only made financial sense if you needed a car for a couple of hours a week, every week.
The trick of this Parisian car system is that it costs a small amount to be part of it, that should allow (I hope) for people without constant need for a car to make use of it. It should also go a long way towards giving car-pooling more global visibility.
FWIW, The Netherlands also had an early bicycle sharing program in Amsterdam in the 70s that was a disaster, perhaps they were also the first in it, but again, who cares? It did not work, and was cancelled. France had a huge success with large-scale bicycle sharing programs which spread through all its major cities, and they work. The Velib in Paris (also not the first) works in every way it should, and given the amount of tourists that come to Paris, it is probably the most visible in the planet (i.e. it is the one that spreads the good news, and helps to convince the sceptics).
Someone was complaining that Crashplan was somewhat slow. Do you folks using SpiderOak have any comments regarding sync speed? Is it fast (enough)?
SpiderOak is quite more expensive than Crashplan, would I be getting that difference in performance? (I need to ask as I just realized that I won't get geographic redundancy with them)
For a while I tried to read Proj. Gutenberg books in e-readers (both using the Hanlin v3, and a Kindle DX). The lack of any kind of formatting or typesetting information other than line breaks hurts a lot. Specially with poetry.
The formatting of text in a page influences the reading experience a lot, and in all Gutenberg project books I tried to read, the on-screen result was always a mess. On non-English books things are even worse. I tried using some Perl scripts hacked by some people, and also wrote my own code to create epub or mobi files. At some point I just gave up on reading material from the Guttenberg project.
> Open Source: you're never trapped, you have some great alternatives.
Unless of course I have better things to do with my free time than to be eternally trying and testing different desktop/distros alternatives every 1/2/3 years. Migrating takes time.
I haven't used KDE lately, but I've heard that they are moving in the right direction again after taking a bad turn in the past.
Gnome 3 and Unity are currently in the middle of their bad turn. Whether or not they veer back out of lala land remains to be seen.
The problem with that view is that it seems to assume users are willing to put up with a alpha/beta quality desktop for 2 or 3 years. People want a desktop that works and that they can trust that will just keep working.
I simply cannot trust the KDE project anymore. They really don't give a crap for their users. What I've discovered now, is that I also cannot trust Gnome.
The Linux desktop seems to remain eternally locked into BETA quality. The only applications that are truly top-notch are developer tools and system-administration stuff. The actual desktop applications remain indeed eternally in beta.
What I think it happened is that there was a generation of people who like me got into the "Linux" wave of the 90s. Most people I know with this background (myself included) now have a lot of disposable income, and little spare time. Everybody I know with this background has either moved to OSX or is considering the move to OSX. Younger people have no nostalgia for Linux and are not even considering using it, if they can afford they just get a Macintosh.
[...]
I mean it is fucking 2011, and my desktop crashes because of fancy graphical effects I have no use for. It is fucking 2011 and I still don't have a decent(!) photo organizer that doesn't crash once every 2 days. I have a quad-core desktop with 8G RAM, the whole thing locks every now and then for 10 seconds for no apparent reason.
Re:Each major release is taking longer
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Also, you say you tried a few releases. my guess is you haven't tries in a year. Which is an enormous amount of dev time. So you maybe should keep trying:)
You see that is what many FOSS devs (specially Linux Desktop devs (specially KDE devs)) don't seem to get.
Trying out a desktop takes time and effort. Most people have better things to do in life than "trying out KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc every 3/6/12 months" to see which are the latest (mostly useless) desktop new effects and integration gimmicks.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
Same here.
So for me at least, buying paper books is now a last resort.
The only print books I consider buying are professional books I need for work and can't get on the Kindle.
What I really find amazing is the Slashdot vitriol on e-books. I really get the impression that is all just a bunch of young people who: -- don't own loads of books; -- who never had to move said loads of books to another house/flat; -- who never thought out the costs of having all that paper stored in a shelve. -- have eagle eyes and don't care about small & crappy fonts
Not to mention the convenience of getting new books while travelling.
As a consumer who chose Apple products myself, I'm not even sure I'd say Apple has a great marketing machine. They're not BAD, but honestly, I've often been surprised at how little they've really attempted to advertise.
You probably live in a desert. Where I live, at some point one third of all subway advertisements were an ipad photo.
Star athletes make more money because (thanks to mass-media), they provide entertainment to many, many people. The same applies to star musicians, actors, writers etc. The local swimming / golf / basketball instructor at the local club does not make the same money as Phelps / Woods / Jordan.
Honestly, I think they should be teaching Math. Unlike Chess or Go (which I play) Math can be directly used in real life, and honestly most adults are incapable of using math in its most basic form (see Innumeracy)
If you need to make students create some form of creative thinking make them understand probability and get them to try to apply it to understand real life problems (such as finding flaws in news articles).
Slashdot Mirror
The story is vast as an ocean, and deep as a plate.
My laptop only gets 5 hours, but I do know that there are Intel based ones that get approximately 10. Given that Apple is using an ARM chip, it seems kind of embarrassing that they're only able to get 10 hours out of it.
Isn't it the case that tablets carry smaller batteries so as to reduce weight? Besides battery life is not everything. People have the choice between dump phones that last a month, and smart phones that last 2 days. Most pick the smart phone.
Amazon was the one setting their own price to the books. The publishers (supported by Apple) demanded (at the time that the iPad came to the game) Amazon to only sell their books at a fixed retail price.
I couldn't agree more.
I use Linux almost everywhere including in my last 2 phones (Androids). Like everyone that uses a platform for a while I grew fond of some goodness present in it, which make me reluctant about migrating (say, to iphone/IOS). However, one mighty selling point of the IOS platform is the continuous stream of software updates.
Google still has this completely messed up. There is no Android phone I can buy which I know I'll have future software support for it. All the Nexus phones are normally only available in the USA and England. They reach the rest of the planet much later, and often NOT as "Google experience" devices. Meaning: "NO continuous stream of software updates". For instance, the XOOM was a Google experience device IN THE US, not in Europe (at least not in most of Europe, perhaps it was in England).
Another PITA of Android are the manufacturers additions to it. I would have already bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 if it wasn't for the fact that I simply don't trust Samsung to re-write Android's user interface.
I think that the "know nothing, aggressive abrasive kids" shouting 'XYZ is cool... ABC sux... i'm elite' is a consequence of the popularity of the platform. Its is a bit like saying that the LaTeX dev groups is one of the most civil that there is (from what I heard, no direct experience). I tend to think that _part_ of the reason for it, is that LaTeX development is not the most exciting piece of software tech around.
The distros brought fragmentation to some extent, but it was mostly because of the problems (packaging) that they were tackling to solve. At the same time the BSD family had fragmentation at the kernel level, which Linux doesn't actually have.
When will Java be fast? Another 30 yrs?
I was working in a government lab in 1994-ish when Sun visited us. We were writing cross-platform C++ code - UNIX (many, many flavors including 64-bit), Windows, Mac, OS/2 ... you get the idea.
The said it was a little slow at the time, but figured in 5 yrs it would be almost as fast as native C++.
I'm still waiting. My company avoids java applications just like we avoid AIR and Flash and IE apps. It is big and slow.
Any chance Java and hence, Eclipse will ever get tight and fast in the next 30 yrs?
AFAIK Java wasn't meant to be faster than or as fast as C/C++, it was meant to be 'fast enough' (for a number of scenarios), maintanable and SAFE.
Call "eclipse -initialize" once. It will improve your start-up time (a little).
Plus paper books last (nearly) forever, you can give them them to kids or, if everything else fails, the nazis/communists/whatev0r can burn them.
Plus paper books take space, have fixed-size small fonts, accumulate dust, won't give me an immediate dictionary look-up, and are a royal-pain-in-the-back when you carry box loads of them when moving to a new house. Oh, 10 paper books also take too much space in my luggage when I take them during my vacations.
[...]
While one's mileage may vary, I haven't yet met a single person that reads a lot that didn't marvel at the possibilities that the e-readers offer.
I don't know what economy you're living in, but I wouldn't say it's dirt cheap. Even $100 (much less than it started at) isn't dirt cheap.
For the kind of tech and convenience you get, I'd say it is dirty cheap. FWIW by convenience, I mean:
- the price of bookshelves, and the house space that is not occupied by bookshelves,
- I read a lot and my eyes are not 'eagle sharp'. Having adjustable fonts in something which is not a bright monitor is positively awesome and (for me) worth paying a lot more than $100.
- carrying loads of books while on vacation without the weight...
- etc
Perhaps the $100 is still a lot compared to that for some, but for many I can assure you it is peanuts.
I live in Paris (i.e. square meters cost a lot), there is no way I will pile up DVDs in the house.
Are you serious?!? Rationalize much?
Actually, yes, I am serious. But then you should not take me too literally. I meant to say, I have no basement or a big flat with spare rooms. Flat area is relatively small.
I live in Manhattan where square meters also cost a lot. I have 100 DVDs sitting in front of me. They are on a spool which is a huge 7 inches tall. Given DVDs have a diameter of 12cm and there's a bit under half an inch of spool base sticking out all round, we have a box 14.5 cm x 14.5cm x 18cm.
You don't have room for such a "pile"? You could hang it from the ceiling, taking up no square meters. I'm sure you have 15cm of shelf width somewhere in that house
The point is that I don't want to have more "stuff" in the flat. I don't want to have boxes full books that don't fit the shelves, nor stacks of DVDs, or stacks of paper. I live here ;-) I'd rather have an emptier home (*looks around*: boxes of all sorts of stuff, books piled on top of the IKEA shelve, cables running around the table). (I work remotely so I get to look around the house during working hours ;-)). Of course I could stuff it somewhere but then it would be even more "stuff" stuffed at places, and I want to avoid that as much as possible. Don't tell me to buy more storage and rip it, I already own a NAS, and I want to get rid of the last computer with a DVD drive in the house.
I donated all old books that I thought I wasn't going to read again. Unless its work related, I only buy digital books (love the Kindle). I actually donated an old printer primarily because it was not wireless and there was no good place to run the USB cable to the router or desktop (which I will hopefully get rid of).
The local video/media library has titles but not that many. We (me+wife) buy DVDs when we really want to see something. My whole point is that the media industry puts so much money and effort to get these laws passed, but they don't really work to take the money from people like me who can afford it but really needs/wants it with 'digital convenience'.
> So let me get this straight... because you dont want to have to leave your apartment, and because its a massive hardship to have a dvd binder on a shelf, you should be allowed to steal.
Let me get this straight: get your reading comprehension improved because it sucks.
Hard to answer without swearing. First downloading torrents is not stealing. Second, what exactly lead you to conclude that I download illegally? Does anyone complaining of the lack of legal digital video download options is to be taken as a criminal?
If you are so interested in my media habits I invite you to read this post (posted before your retarded reply BTW) http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2462320&cid=37624726
I either buy DVDs or get them at a local public library. Like with books before I got a Kindle, the nuisance of getting videos (ordering DVD + shelve space, physically going to the library), means we watch less movies than we would otherwise. Having a small baby means going to the cinema is not a trivial thing to do.
My point is that the lack of convenience for getting movies at home is such that even people with the cash to spare don't buy DVDs.
> These days even a mediocre computer can rip a DVD and make an MPEG4 file.
We have an iPad, an MacBookAir, a Lenovo X220, a 5 year old desktop, and a NAS. The desktop is the only one with a DVD drive and my intention is to get rid of it, soonish. The DVD drive is not enough to keep it. I guess I should say "mediocre computers can rip DVDs, the ones I want to have at home can't".
I live in France, and don't know of any one who's got that letter. I think a lot of people in my age and income bracket would be embarrassed to mention they got suck a letter.
What _really_ sucks (not only in France, but in most of Europe AFAIK) is that I have no way of easily renting/buying videos through the internet. All choices I've looked at had a really old and incomplete catalogue. Last I tried to check that was in the beginning of the year, and all alternatives sucked big. I live in Paris (i.e. square meters cost a lot), there is no way I will pile up DVDs in the house.
I can understand that French parliament was lead (read: bought) into writing this legislation, but I really can't understand they did that without requiring the industry to put a legal alternative in place.
Are the stations of these dense enough, that you can just go somewhere else and drop the car? Instead of having to (more or less) be forced into a round-trip?
One thing I hope this system will provide is a high density of stations to allow that. IIRC the system we used in the NL actually required us to return the car to the same spot. But then, it also allowed us to reserve a car at a given location and given time.
A lot of people are commenting that this is not "the first". Who cares?
It is not the first but, for one, it will be the first that will be heard of by people living far from it. Folks get over this: there are more international reporters in Paris than in all of the other quoted cities I've seen so far combined.
More importantly, given the monthly price, it seems to be a lot more geared to the occasional short trip. We (me+wife) used a car pool system in The Netherlands for a couple of years. The trick with it was that the monthly fees were so high that it only made financial sense if you needed a car for a couple of hours a week, every week.
The trick of this Parisian car system is that it costs a small amount to be part of it, that should allow (I hope) for people without constant need for a car to make use of it. It should also go a long way towards giving car-pooling more global visibility.
FWIW, The Netherlands also had an early bicycle sharing program in Amsterdam in the 70s that was a disaster, perhaps they were also the first in it, but again, who cares? It did not work, and was cancelled. France had a huge success with large-scale bicycle sharing programs which spread through all its major cities, and they work. The Velib in Paris (also not the first) works in every way it should, and given the amount of tourists that come to Paris, it is probably the most visible in the planet (i.e. it is the one that spreads the good news, and helps to convince the sceptics).
Hi,
Someone was complaining that Crashplan was somewhat slow. Do you folks using SpiderOak have any comments regarding sync speed? Is it fast (enough)?
SpiderOak is quite more expensive than Crashplan, would I be getting that difference in performance? (I need to ask as I just realized that I won't get geographic redundancy with them)
For a while I tried to read Proj. Gutenberg books in e-readers (both using the Hanlin v3, and a Kindle DX). The lack of any kind of formatting or typesetting information other than line breaks hurts a lot. Specially with poetry.
The formatting of text in a page influences the reading experience a lot, and in all Gutenberg project books I tried to read, the on-screen result was always a mess. On non-English books things are even worse. I tried using some Perl scripts hacked by some people, and also wrote my own code to create epub or mobi files. At some point I just gave up on reading material from the Guttenberg project.
> Open Source: you're never trapped, you have some great alternatives.
Unless of course I have better things to do with my free time than to be eternally trying and testing different desktop/distros alternatives every 1/2/3 years. Migrating takes time.
I haven't used KDE lately, but I've heard that they are moving in the right direction again after taking a bad turn in the past.
Gnome 3 and Unity are currently in the middle of their bad turn. Whether or not they veer back out of lala land remains to be seen.
The problem with that view is that it seems to assume users are willing to put up with a alpha/beta quality desktop for 2 or 3 years. People want a desktop that works and that they can trust that will just keep working.
I simply cannot trust the KDE project anymore. They really don't give a crap for their users. What I've discovered now, is that I also cannot trust Gnome.
The Linux desktop seems to remain eternally locked into BETA quality. The only applications that are truly top-notch are developer tools and system-administration stuff. The actual desktop applications remain indeed eternally in beta.
What I think it happened is that there was a generation of people who like me got into the "Linux" wave of the 90s. Most people I know with this background (myself included) now have a lot of disposable income, and little spare time. Everybody I know with this background has either moved to OSX or is considering the move to OSX. Younger people have no nostalgia for Linux and are not even considering using it, if they can afford they just get a Macintosh.
[...]
I mean it is fucking 2011, and my desktop crashes because of fancy graphical effects I have no use for. It is fucking 2011 and I still don't have a decent(!) photo organizer that doesn't crash once every 2 days. I have a quad-core desktop with 8G RAM, the whole thing locks every now and then for 10 seconds for no apparent reason.
> Also, you say you tried a few releases. my guess is you haven't tries in a year. Which is an enormous amount of dev time. So you maybe should keep trying :)
You see that is what many FOSS devs (specially Linux Desktop devs (specially KDE devs)) don't seem to get.
Trying out a desktop takes time and effort. Most people have better things to do in life than "trying out KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc every 3/6/12 months" to see which are the latest (mostly useless) desktop new effects and integration gimmicks.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
Same here.
So for me at least, buying paper books is now a last resort.
The only print books I consider buying are professional books I need for work and can't get on the Kindle.
What I really find amazing is the Slashdot vitriol on e-books. I really get the impression that is all just a bunch of young people who:
-- don't own loads of books;
-- who never had to move said loads of books to another house/flat;
-- who never thought out the costs of having all that paper stored in a shelve.
-- have eagle eyes and don't care about small & crappy fonts
Not to mention the convenience of getting new books while travelling.
As a consumer who chose Apple products myself, I'm not even sure I'd say Apple has a great marketing machine. They're not BAD, but honestly, I've often been surprised at how little they've really attempted to advertise.
You probably live in a desert. Where I live, at some point one third of all subway advertisements were an ipad photo.
Star athletes make more money because (thanks to mass-media), they provide entertainment to many, many people. The same applies to star musicians, actors, writers etc. The local swimming / golf / basketball instructor at the local club does not make the same money as Phelps / Woods / Jordan.
Honestly, I think they should be teaching Math. Unlike Chess or Go (which I play) Math can be directly used in real life, and honestly most adults are incapable of using math in its most basic form (see Innumeracy)
If you need to make students create some form of creative thinking make them understand probability and get them to try to apply it to understand real life problems (such as finding flaws in news articles).