Why should that matter? Christmas is a national holiday in the US (meaning it is defined by law as such), anyone regardless of religious preference should get the day off. (Or get paid double pay.) I'm an atheist BTW, my family never went to church, I have celebrated Christmas my entire life, and I love the holiday. Christmas is a day to get together with friends and family, enjoy the lights and trees and decorations, and exchange gifts with your loved ones.
Contrary to what some would like you to believe, Christmas is not necessarily a "Christian" holiday to everyone.
I'd mod you insightful if I had any mod points left. I 100% agree with you that apparently we're unable to take an entire day off as a country. I heard about all the stores opening earlier and earlier on Black Friday, and then some started opening up the middle of the day on Thanksgiving. Come on, give your poor overworked underpaid employees one damn day off to spend at home with their families! And Christmas Day, NOTHING should be open but 7-11 and a few gas stations.
Depending on how it's used, I often find "sheeple" to be highly insulting. I hear it the most in online politics discussions. The Republicans call the Democrats sheeple, the Democrats call Republicans sheeple. It implies that you don't have any idea what you're talking about, that you do no research, and you just follow the herd in everything. It's assuming that just because someone has a certain point of view, they must not have done their research to come up with that point of view. I personally have very good reasons that I believe what I believe, and I've done plenty of research on my positions. I completely agree with you, it is a simple way to point at people smugly and dismiss their views as being misinformed.
Yep, I'm planning my next car to be a full electric. Considering that I don't plan on buying another car for at least 3-4 years, should be plenty of time for electric car tech to mature. Plus I live in the Portland Oregon area, and there's a huge push here to put charging stations all over the place (I've already seen them in several locations on the west metro area), and Nissan and several other manufacturers are having pilot EV programs here.
How many "average American" families only own one car though? Most families have more than one car. For example, I have a compact car that I drive every day to work (15 miles round trip), and we almost never take my car on trips. I would love to replace my car with a full electric, I would never exceed the maximum driving distance. My wife has a Mazda 5 minivan which we take on all our family trips. So I don't see what the problem is.
Interesting. You might be right, re-configurable devices might be the future, but I think they're still in their infancy so who knows. It really all comes down to execution. After all, tablets are not at all new - but it took Apple to finally make them usable and popular. I'm no fan of Apple's policies and lack of power user options on the iPad, but you have to admit they know how to make a device useable and that sells.
The only re-configurable device I've seen that pretty much works as advertised is the Transformer. The Atrix I haven't heard much good about - the "netbook" interface when you dock the phone isn't even Android, it's a completely different Linux-based interface, so it runs completely different apps. For another take on a phone/tablet convergence, check out the Asus PadFone. It consists of an Android smartphone and a tablet with a pocket in the back to dock your smartphone. I have no idea how well that will work, we'll see when (if) it gets released.
I think the real spoiler will come from ARM-based Windows 8. The big question is app support. If Microsoft comes out with ARM versions of all its big apps (Office in particular), they could have a big winner: tablet form-factor, long battery life, plus runs the apps you're used to. But you still won't be able to run all the other ecosystem of non-Microsoft Windows x86 apps, unless the vendor writes a new version. And seeing how glacial most software vendors have been in even coming up with non-Windows XP versions of their apps...
You said "The important thing is that the device should adjust its UI to the form factor." Which is what I think Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 (but so far we've only seen the Developer's Preview, and Microsoft is being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their plans.) You can use the Metro interface when your tablet is undocked, then drop to desktop UI (explorer) when you have a keyboard and mouse attached. The big question though is still apps. Can an app be written to work just as well with a mouse and keyboard, as it works with a touch interface? Do you need to write two completely different UI's? I don't think we know the answers to those questions yet.
IMO x86 tablets will never catch up to ARM based tablets - x86 just has too high of power needs. Although I wouldn't put it past Intel to pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with something both low-powered and powerful - but if they were anywhere near beating ARM in this area, you'd think they'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops. So I'm skeptical.
Just because a politician is a Democrat, doesn't mean they aren't owned by corporations and their big money. With Republicans, you can pretty much assume they're wholly owned by corporations (there's a couple good ones but damn few), with Democrats it's a pretty good chance they're wholly owned but there's more chance they're good ones. And I say this as a Democrat who voted for Obama and plans to do so again in 2012.
IMO the Democrats are right on most of the issues, but when corporations say they want something done, they all tend to do their bidding and sell us common folk down the river.
But we won't be able to fix any of this until we get all the money out of politics. http://www.getmoneyout.com/
So then you're really just talking about an x86 Windows/Linux netbook with long battery life, aren't you? Not any kind of new thing. Seems we already have those, although I don't know of any that get 10-12 hours battery life.
To address what you said in your original post above though, about 16-18 hours of battery time being more than most people practically need. As an owner of an Asus Transformer and the keyboard dock, which together get 14-16 hours on a charge in my experience, I find that that extra battery capacity is really freeing. It changes your behavior. I was recently at a conference, and with the super long battery life I was able to just concentrate on taking notes and the information being presented, and I didn't have to even think about finding a plug in. And I didn't have to carry a cord with me, since I was confident that I could use my tablet for over 12 hours straight, and just plug it in at the end of the day before bed. Having massive battery life is huge for a tablet/netbook, in my opinion.
I really think we're getting into an era of specialization of devices. The push in the past seems to have been towards general computing devices (x86 computers) that do everything you ask of them, from light web browsing, to heavy image editing and content creation. But since I got my tablet, I've come to realize that there is a lot of value in having different devices with different capabilities. I can't do the heavy content creation things on my tablet, but then how often do I really need to do those things, relative to the amount of time I spend doing email and web browsing? The way I've been finding myself using my tablet and desktop is this:
- I use the tablet 80-90% of the time for web browsing, email, playing games, etc.
- 10-20% of the time when I need to do something with more computing power (or something that needs a mouse), I go to my desktop.
Unlike others who say that a tablet should be able to do everything a desktop does, I think they're missing the point, or maybe they just haven't ever used a tablet for an extended amount of time. Creating a tablet with the same power as a desktop, I believe, would be futile. It would require so much battery power, that it would be very heavy - which negates the advantages of a light mobile device.
Obligatory car metaphor:
It's like having a truck and a small commuting car. A lot of people would think "well I have the need sometimes to haul stuff, so I'll just buy a truck that can do everything." And then they use that truck for daily commuting, and they burn tons of gas. The most efficient thing to do would be to get a second small car that gets great mileage, and drive that one every day to work and back. Of course, many people can't afford two cars, which is why we have so many trucks being used for commuting in the US. Similarly, many people can't afford to buy both a traditional computer, and a tablet.
Fair enough. In my personal code of ethics, just because something is illegal or a violation of some law or rule, that doesn't mean it's wrong. I wasn't arguing that what I do is legal. If the laws in the US were just, and followed hundreds of years of legal precedence, you would have to prove a loss to be able to extract a penalty. However, the laws have been tilted so far in the rights-holders' favor that I don't feel any guilt downloading a copy.
However, I do buy media when I know the artist themselves is going to get a large part, or most, of the purchase price. If I know that the majority of the cost is going to the record or movie company? I don't bother, but I do try to see recording artists in concert and buy their live recordings if they sell them directly. Again, YMMV.
Of course the obvious reply to that is that by downloading a copy of a copyrighted item, but then never watching it, what exactly have I deprived the rights-holder of? I never would have bought the item in the first place, and since I never watched it I never got any value from it. How has the rights-holder been wronged - in other words, where is the damage that the rights-holder has suffered?
I don't steal real-world items. I do violate copyright. I do not consider these to be equivalent acts. YMMV.
1) Agreed, I don't think we actually threw them away - just wanted to keep my post fairly short and not go into all the specifics. Since I'm big on recycling and I don't think you can recycle those using curbside recycling, we may have gotten rid of them using Craigslist, or they might still be in boxes in the garage. Re-using is much better than recycling, I agree, and I have donated books and music CDs to my local library before.
2) I'm wary of binders. I had several hundred CDs in binders for about 5 years, which we moved from house to house for several years. I looked at them recently, and the vast majority of the discs were pretty much ruined by having big scratches and scuffs over a section of the disc. Possibly because the pocket didn't cover the entire back of the disc. I find though, that having anything physically touching the entire back of the disc (even if it's plastic) tends to scratch the disc over time. I realize storing in spindles also has each disc touch the disc next to it, but I don't find much scratching happening when stored this way - possibly because there's a lot less jostling around in a spindle.
In addition - remember I said we had 4000 DVDs - I don't have enough money to buy that many binders.:) Also, with binders if you get a movie that belongs alphabetically in between two others, you have to rearrange the whole binder.
3) We considered and rejected organizing by category, except the broad category of separating movies and TV shows. Not only because of the added complexity and the fact that many movies fit into more than one category, but so that I didn't have to look up any movies I'm unsure about. I'm going for least amount of work on my part (i.e. efficiency) vs ease of finding movies.
How did I get 4000 DVDs? I bought them all of course! Just kidding. I have a fast internet connection and a monthly subscription to a premium newsgroup provider (Giganews.) I've been using newsgroups for over 15 years and never saw the benefit of bittorrent. Have I downloaded many discs that I probably won't ever watch? Sure, I admit there's a bit of hoarding/collecting going on. There's some TV shows that I was downloading for years and never watched. I pretty much stopped doing that though, and now I only download movies or TV shows that my wife or I actually intend to watch.
Compromising halfway between yours and the previous poster's points, here's what my wife and I do with our 4000+ DVD collection:
1) Removed all the physical discs from their cases, removed the insert and saved it in a box in case we ever want it later (I doubt we will but all the inserts take up only one small box.) Throw away all the jewel cases.
2) Get a bunch of empty DVD and CD cake boxes (2 garbage bags full free from Craigslist.) Have a separate cake box for each letter of the alphabet (some common letters like S will have more than 1 box per letter.) You can alphabetize within each box, but I've found that's way too much work when within a couple months they'll start to get out of order. YMMV.
3) Put the cake boxes on shelves in alphabetical order. When you want to see a movie, grab that letter and rifle through it until you find it. Time to find a movie: depends mostly on luck depending on several factors, I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers, but it's generally between 1 and 10 minutes.
This method has lowered our storage space needed for our discs from 8+ entire shelving units to only 2 (with plenty of space to grow still.) I think it strikes a decent balance between convenience (it's not search-click-watch easy) and the facts that it doesn't cost anything extra and doesn't take all the effort and cost that ripping everything to large hard drives does. Of course this method presupposes that you have a computer with a DVD drive everywhere you want to watch a movie, which I do, so again YMMV. I feel my time is better used actually enjoying watching a movie rather than ripping every movie or TV show that honestly, I might never watch again. I do like another poster's idea of identifying the movies that you actually watch over and over, and ripping only those and utting the rest in easily-accessible storage.
I've calculated that I have something like 20 TB worth of data on physical discs, I don't exactly have that much storage space or money to buy that much storage. A way to access the discs I already have without having to convert them into something else would be more convenient for me. In other words, choice is good.
I really think that Android needs to support external DVD drives and watching DVD movies. Yes I know downloaded videos are the future, but during this transition time when lots of people have both physical DVDs and downloaded videos, it would definitely help ease the transition.
250 GB USB external HD and an Asus Transformer Android Tablet with the keyboard dock that has full size USB ports on it? Worked pretty awesome for me when I flew to Vegas for a conference last week. And with the mini HDMI port on the tablet and my mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, I was even able to plug it into my hotel HDTV and watch the same videos in my room (as well as streaming my whole home mp3 collection over WiFi using Google Music.)
Of course the fact that I get the vast majority of the videos I watch downloaded from newsgroups and not from DVDs makes this setup that much easier. But I do have a vast library of physical DVD videos, so I wish there was a way to connect an external DVD drive to an Android device and watch DVD movies (Cyanogen please make this happen!) My wife brought the DVD issue up as the only thing stopping her from switching from a Windows laptop to an Android tablet, and I think it is a very valid point if you have many legacy DVDs in your collection. I wouldn't want to have to rip all my DVD movies for travel.
I'm in Hillsboro, Verizon were heavily building out in this area a couple years ago, then they pretty much stopped and sold all their non-wireless assets to Frontier. As far as I know, Frontier hasn't done any further build-out, but I could be wrong. Hillsboro seems to be pretty competitive for internet and TV, you can get FIOS, Comcast internet, and probably DSL also in most areas. Consequently the prices are kept reasonably priced. I imagine Frontier is aggressively competing with Comcast - a customer service rep was talking to my wife about a service issue (not Frontier's fault) and let my wife know they could give us 35/35 for $15 LESS than we were currently paying for 25/25. No catch, so of course we went for it.
By contrast, my friends living in the Portland city limits only have one or two much slower options, DSL or cable. Hooray for monopolies!
I count myself as very lucky for the internet options where I live. I currently have Frontier FIOS, 35 Mbps up/down, for $60 a month, no caps whatsoever (I would have easily found out about any caps with my downloading habits.) Portland area in Oregon. But that's one benefit from living within 5 miles of 6 Intel manufacturing plants.
I haven't seen any of the cheap Chinese knockoffs out in the wild - I think people in general stay away from those since they're so obviously cheap crap. ALL tablets are Chinese made though, even the iPad.
Doesn't seem like all the Android tablet manufacturers are too worried about sharing a smaller piece of the pie - since every technology manufacturer out there has a tablet out or plans for one. Just because Apple make multi-billions in profit, doesn't mean that a smaller manufacturer wouldn't be perfectly happy with a couple million in profit. Asus is currently the second-biggest selling tablet manufacturer, and they seem perfectly happy with that. I actually expect to see more manufacturers copy their ideas (keyboard dock, etc.) now that they're selling decent numbers and are coming out with their next version.
I've had several friends and co-workers buy an Android tablet after seeing mine. One was a geek, one was not.
You do realize that Android tablet sales are now about 25% of the tablet market, when only a year ago Android tablets were only about 3% of the market? The momentum is building.
My original Asus Transformer has gotten at least *four* OS updates from Asus since I've had it - and that was only two months. And Asus has publicly stated in multiple venues that it for sure WILL get the next version of Android - 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, most likely by the end of the year. These updates come directly from Asus and I get a notification when they're ready to install. So far they've fixed issues, added features, and even added free (useful) apps like a full-featured drawing and note-taking program. Asus has only done very light skinning to the stock Android 3.0 Honeycomb, so they don't have to do a huge amount of testing before releasing updates (contrast this with HTC, with their custom Sense UI, which frequently takes months and months to push out updates - if they update your phone at all.)
Buy a tablet from a cell provider where they control the updates, and you're taking your chances about whether they'll release timely updates. I wanted full control of my tablet and didn't want another monthly bill, so I had no need for a tablet with 3G - I can wirelessly tether to my smartphone if I'm somewhere WiFi isn't available.
If you can live with a 4" display when leaving your house, just bring your phone. If you will be doing something which needs a bigger screen, bring the display to create a "tablet".
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Why should that matter? Christmas is a national holiday in the US (meaning it is defined by law as such), anyone regardless of religious preference should get the day off. (Or get paid double pay.) I'm an atheist BTW, my family never went to church, I have celebrated Christmas my entire life, and I love the holiday. Christmas is a day to get together with friends and family, enjoy the lights and trees and decorations, and exchange gifts with your loved ones.
Contrary to what some would like you to believe, Christmas is not necessarily a "Christian" holiday to everyone.
I'd mod you insightful if I had any mod points left. I 100% agree with you that apparently we're unable to take an entire day off as a country. I heard about all the stores opening earlier and earlier on Black Friday, and then some started opening up the middle of the day on Thanksgiving. Come on, give your poor overworked underpaid employees one damn day off to spend at home with their families! And Christmas Day, NOTHING should be open but 7-11 and a few gas stations.
Depending on how it's used, I often find "sheeple" to be highly insulting. I hear it the most in online politics discussions. The Republicans call the Democrats sheeple, the Democrats call Republicans sheeple. It implies that you don't have any idea what you're talking about, that you do no research, and you just follow the herd in everything. It's assuming that just because someone has a certain point of view, they must not have done their research to come up with that point of view. I personally have very good reasons that I believe what I believe, and I've done plenty of research on my positions. I completely agree with you, it is a simple way to point at people smugly and dismiss their views as being misinformed.
Yep, I'm planning my next car to be a full electric. Considering that I don't plan on buying another car for at least 3-4 years, should be plenty of time for electric car tech to mature. Plus I live in the Portland Oregon area, and there's a huge push here to put charging stations all over the place (I've already seen them in several locations on the west metro area), and Nissan and several other manufacturers are having pilot EV programs here.
How many "average American" families only own one car though? Most families have more than one car. For example, I have a compact car that I drive every day to work (15 miles round trip), and we almost never take my car on trips. I would love to replace my car with a full electric, I would never exceed the maximum driving distance. My wife has a Mazda 5 minivan which we take on all our family trips. So I don't see what the problem is.
Glenn Beck, is that you?
Interesting. You might be right, re-configurable devices might be the future, but I think they're still in their infancy so who knows. It really all comes down to execution. After all, tablets are not at all new - but it took Apple to finally make them usable and popular. I'm no fan of Apple's policies and lack of power user options on the iPad, but you have to admit they know how to make a device useable and that sells.
The only re-configurable device I've seen that pretty much works as advertised is the Transformer. The Atrix I haven't heard much good about - the "netbook" interface when you dock the phone isn't even Android, it's a completely different Linux-based interface, so it runs completely different apps. For another take on a phone/tablet convergence, check out the Asus PadFone. It consists of an Android smartphone and a tablet with a pocket in the back to dock your smartphone. I have no idea how well that will work, we'll see when (if) it gets released.
I think the real spoiler will come from ARM-based Windows 8. The big question is app support. If Microsoft comes out with ARM versions of all its big apps (Office in particular), they could have a big winner: tablet form-factor, long battery life, plus runs the apps you're used to. But you still won't be able to run all the other ecosystem of non-Microsoft Windows x86 apps, unless the vendor writes a new version. And seeing how glacial most software vendors have been in even coming up with non-Windows XP versions of their apps...
You said "The important thing is that the device should adjust its UI to the form factor." Which is what I think Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 (but so far we've only seen the Developer's Preview, and Microsoft is being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their plans.) You can use the Metro interface when your tablet is undocked, then drop to desktop UI (explorer) when you have a keyboard and mouse attached. The big question though is still apps. Can an app be written to work just as well with a mouse and keyboard, as it works with a touch interface? Do you need to write two completely different UI's? I don't think we know the answers to those questions yet.
IMO x86 tablets will never catch up to ARM based tablets - x86 just has too high of power needs. Although I wouldn't put it past Intel to pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with something both low-powered and powerful - but if they were anywhere near beating ARM in this area, you'd think they'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops. So I'm skeptical.
Just because a politician is a Democrat, doesn't mean they aren't owned by corporations and their big money. With Republicans, you can pretty much assume they're wholly owned by corporations (there's a couple good ones but damn few), with Democrats it's a pretty good chance they're wholly owned but there's more chance they're good ones. And I say this as a Democrat who voted for Obama and plans to do so again in 2012.
IMO the Democrats are right on most of the issues, but when corporations say they want something done, they all tend to do their bidding and sell us common folk down the river.
But we won't be able to fix any of this until we get all the money out of politics.
http://www.getmoneyout.com/
So then you're really just talking about an x86 Windows/Linux netbook with long battery life, aren't you? Not any kind of new thing. Seems we already have those, although I don't know of any that get 10-12 hours battery life.
To address what you said in your original post above though, about 16-18 hours of battery time being more than most people practically need. As an owner of an Asus Transformer and the keyboard dock, which together get 14-16 hours on a charge in my experience, I find that that extra battery capacity is really freeing. It changes your behavior. I was recently at a conference, and with the super long battery life I was able to just concentrate on taking notes and the information being presented, and I didn't have to even think about finding a plug in. And I didn't have to carry a cord with me, since I was confident that I could use my tablet for over 12 hours straight, and just plug it in at the end of the day before bed. Having massive battery life is huge for a tablet/netbook, in my opinion.
I really think we're getting into an era of specialization of devices. The push in the past seems to have been towards general computing devices (x86 computers) that do everything you ask of them, from light web browsing, to heavy image editing and content creation. But since I got my tablet, I've come to realize that there is a lot of value in having different devices with different capabilities. I can't do the heavy content creation things on my tablet, but then how often do I really need to do those things, relative to the amount of time I spend doing email and web browsing? The way I've been finding myself using my tablet and desktop is this:
- I use the tablet 80-90% of the time for web browsing, email, playing games, etc.
- 10-20% of the time when I need to do something with more computing power (or something that needs a mouse), I go to my desktop.
Unlike others who say that a tablet should be able to do everything a desktop does, I think they're missing the point, or maybe they just haven't ever used a tablet for an extended amount of time. Creating a tablet with the same power as a desktop, I believe, would be futile. It would require so much battery power, that it would be very heavy - which negates the advantages of a light mobile device.
Obligatory car metaphor:
It's like having a truck and a small commuting car. A lot of people would think "well I have the need sometimes to haul stuff, so I'll just buy a truck that can do everything." And then they use that truck for daily commuting, and they burn tons of gas. The most efficient thing to do would be to get a second small car that gets great mileage, and drive that one every day to work and back. Of course, many people can't afford two cars, which is why we have so many trucks being used for commuting in the US. Similarly, many people can't afford to buy both a traditional computer, and a tablet.
Runs all existing x86 Android apps? Didn't think there were any.
Fair enough. In my personal code of ethics, just because something is illegal or a violation of some law or rule, that doesn't mean it's wrong. I wasn't arguing that what I do is legal. If the laws in the US were just, and followed hundreds of years of legal precedence, you would have to prove a loss to be able to extract a penalty. However, the laws have been tilted so far in the rights-holders' favor that I don't feel any guilt downloading a copy.
However, I do buy media when I know the artist themselves is going to get a large part, or most, of the purchase price. If I know that the majority of the cost is going to the record or movie company? I don't bother, but I do try to see recording artists in concert and buy their live recordings if they sell them directly. Again, YMMV.
Of course the obvious reply to that is that by downloading a copy of a copyrighted item, but then never watching it, what exactly have I deprived the rights-holder of? I never would have bought the item in the first place, and since I never watched it I never got any value from it. How has the rights-holder been wronged - in other words, where is the damage that the rights-holder has suffered?
I don't steal real-world items. I do violate copyright. I do not consider these to be equivalent acts. YMMV.
Of course Stephen King isn't dead, but he probably keeps a spare grave out in his back yard that he can roll around in.
1) Agreed, I don't think we actually threw them away - just wanted to keep my post fairly short and not go into all the specifics. Since I'm big on recycling and I don't think you can recycle those using curbside recycling, we may have gotten rid of them using Craigslist, or they might still be in boxes in the garage. Re-using is much better than recycling, I agree, and I have donated books and music CDs to my local library before.
:) Also, with binders if you get a movie that belongs alphabetically in between two others, you have to rearrange the whole binder.
2) I'm wary of binders. I had several hundred CDs in binders for about 5 years, which we moved from house to house for several years. I looked at them recently, and the vast majority of the discs were pretty much ruined by having big scratches and scuffs over a section of the disc. Possibly because the pocket didn't cover the entire back of the disc. I find though, that having anything physically touching the entire back of the disc (even if it's plastic) tends to scratch the disc over time. I realize storing in spindles also has each disc touch the disc next to it, but I don't find much scratching happening when stored this way - possibly because there's a lot less jostling around in a spindle.
In addition - remember I said we had 4000 DVDs - I don't have enough money to buy that many binders.
3) We considered and rejected organizing by category, except the broad category of separating movies and TV shows. Not only because of the added complexity and the fact that many movies fit into more than one category, but so that I didn't have to look up any movies I'm unsure about. I'm going for least amount of work on my part (i.e. efficiency) vs ease of finding movies.
How did I get 4000 DVDs? I bought them all of course! Just kidding. I have a fast internet connection and a monthly subscription to a premium newsgroup provider (Giganews.) I've been using newsgroups for over 15 years and never saw the benefit of bittorrent. Have I downloaded many discs that I probably won't ever watch? Sure, I admit there's a bit of hoarding/collecting going on. There's some TV shows that I was downloading for years and never watched. I pretty much stopped doing that though, and now I only download movies or TV shows that my wife or I actually intend to watch.
Compromising halfway between yours and the previous poster's points, here's what my wife and I do with our 4000+ DVD collection:
1) Removed all the physical discs from their cases, removed the insert and saved it in a box in case we ever want it later (I doubt we will but all the inserts take up only one small box.) Throw away all the jewel cases.
2) Get a bunch of empty DVD and CD cake boxes (2 garbage bags full free from Craigslist.) Have a separate cake box for each letter of the alphabet (some common letters like S will have more than 1 box per letter.) You can alphabetize within each box, but I've found that's way too much work when within a couple months they'll start to get out of order. YMMV.
3) Put the cake boxes on shelves in alphabetical order. When you want to see a movie, grab that letter and rifle through it until you find it. Time to find a movie: depends mostly on luck depending on several factors, I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers, but it's generally between 1 and 10 minutes.
This method has lowered our storage space needed for our discs from 8+ entire shelving units to only 2 (with plenty of space to grow still.) I think it strikes a decent balance between convenience (it's not search-click-watch easy) and the facts that it doesn't cost anything extra and doesn't take all the effort and cost that ripping everything to large hard drives does. Of course this method presupposes that you have a computer with a DVD drive everywhere you want to watch a movie, which I do, so again YMMV. I feel my time is better used actually enjoying watching a movie rather than ripping every movie or TV show that honestly, I might never watch again. I do like another poster's idea of identifying the movies that you actually watch over and over, and ripping only those and utting the rest in easily-accessible storage.
I've calculated that I have something like 20 TB worth of data on physical discs, I don't exactly have that much storage space or money to buy that much storage. A way to access the discs I already have without having to convert them into something else would be more convenient for me. In other words, choice is good.
I really think that Android needs to support external DVD drives and watching DVD movies. Yes I know downloaded videos are the future, but during this transition time when lots of people have both physical DVDs and downloaded videos, it would definitely help ease the transition.
so where does the source come from ? Unless you download it from bit torrent
Newsgroups. Oh wait we're not supposed to talk about those. ;)
250 GB USB external HD and an Asus Transformer Android Tablet with the keyboard dock that has full size USB ports on it? Worked pretty awesome for me when I flew to Vegas for a conference last week. And with the mini HDMI port on the tablet and my mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, I was even able to plug it into my hotel HDTV and watch the same videos in my room (as well as streaming my whole home mp3 collection over WiFi using Google Music.)
Of course the fact that I get the vast majority of the videos I watch downloaded from newsgroups and not from DVDs makes this setup that much easier. But I do have a vast library of physical DVD videos, so I wish there was a way to connect an external DVD drive to an Android device and watch DVD movies (Cyanogen please make this happen!) My wife brought the DVD issue up as the only thing stopping her from switching from a Windows laptop to an Android tablet, and I think it is a very valid point if you have many legacy DVDs in your collection. I wouldn't want to have to rip all my DVD movies for travel.
I'm in Hillsboro, Verizon were heavily building out in this area a couple years ago, then they pretty much stopped and sold all their non-wireless assets to Frontier. As far as I know, Frontier hasn't done any further build-out, but I could be wrong. Hillsboro seems to be pretty competitive for internet and TV, you can get FIOS, Comcast internet, and probably DSL also in most areas. Consequently the prices are kept reasonably priced. I imagine Frontier is aggressively competing with Comcast - a customer service rep was talking to my wife about a service issue (not Frontier's fault) and let my wife know they could give us 35/35 for $15 LESS than we were currently paying for 25/25. No catch, so of course we went for it.
By contrast, my friends living in the Portland city limits only have one or two much slower options, DSL or cable. Hooray for monopolies!
I count myself as very lucky for the internet options where I live. I currently have Frontier FIOS, 35 Mbps up/down, for $60 a month, no caps whatsoever (I would have easily found out about any caps with my downloading habits.) Portland area in Oregon. But that's one benefit from living within 5 miles of 6 Intel manufacturing plants.
I haven't seen any of the cheap Chinese knockoffs out in the wild - I think people in general stay away from those since they're so obviously cheap crap. ALL tablets are Chinese made though, even the iPad.
Doesn't seem like all the Android tablet manufacturers are too worried about sharing a smaller piece of the pie - since every technology manufacturer out there has a tablet out or plans for one. Just because Apple make multi-billions in profit, doesn't mean that a smaller manufacturer wouldn't be perfectly happy with a couple million in profit. Asus is currently the second-biggest selling tablet manufacturer, and they seem perfectly happy with that. I actually expect to see more manufacturers copy their ideas (keyboard dock, etc.) now that they're selling decent numbers and are coming out with their next version.
I've had several friends and co-workers buy an Android tablet after seeing mine. One was a geek, one was not.
You do realize that Android tablet sales are now about 25% of the tablet market, when only a year ago Android tablets were only about 3% of the market? The momentum is building.
My original Asus Transformer has gotten at least *four* OS updates from Asus since I've had it - and that was only two months. And Asus has publicly stated in multiple venues that it for sure WILL get the next version of Android - 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, most likely by the end of the year. These updates come directly from Asus and I get a notification when they're ready to install. So far they've fixed issues, added features, and even added free (useful) apps like a full-featured drawing and note-taking program. Asus has only done very light skinning to the stock Android 3.0 Honeycomb, so they don't have to do a huge amount of testing before releasing updates (contrast this with HTC, with their custom Sense UI, which frequently takes months and months to push out updates - if they update your phone at all.)
Buy a tablet from a cell provider where they control the updates, and you're taking your chances about whether they'll release timely updates. I wanted full control of my tablet and didn't want another monthly bill, so I had no need for a tablet with 3G - I can wirelessly tether to my smartphone if I'm somewhere WiFi isn't available.
If you can live with a 4" display when leaving your house, just bring your phone. If you will be doing something which needs a bigger screen, bring the display to create a "tablet".
Like this? http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/asus-padphone/19460/