Seriously, this. I just don't get why this is such a popular idea, unless I remind myself that the average person is more or less technically uneducated, and doesn't understand that it's wildly energy inefficient. Also, echoing other comments on this topic: This is far from a new idea, and again: there are reasons we haven't gone this way before, but nobody seems to understand that.
I get in a "big huff" because this is the internet, and expressing any opinion contrary to the mainstream on the internet these days gets you flamed to the point of being utterly charred (because there's no accountability and people will say shit they'd never say in person), so I've come to expect to have to defend myself at every turn. It's not personal.
We can agree to disagree, so long as it's not personal. You can call my reasons bullshit all you want, but they're just as valid are your reasons for not having printed books anymore, and I could sit here and refute your counterpoints, but it would be pointless; as you say, we can agree to disagree -- so long as it doesn't degenerate into some sort of 4chan-esque dominance game.
So please, don't make yourself look silly by trying to argue that it is anything but emotional.
Really? Seriously? That's where you decide to go with this? Straight to being insulting?
Tell you what: Let's try a little experiment. Take your e-book reader, and take a printed book. Hold them both by the corner, three feet above a hard surface. Drop them both. How's your e-book reader now? Damaged? Broken? Unusable? How's the book? Maybe you dented the corner a little. Now how about this: Oops! You forgot to plug your e-book reader in to recharge it. Now you can't read anything! The book, on the other hand? All you need is light. You could read by candlelight if necessary.
Oh no, your e-book reader won't boot! No reading for you until it's repaired. The book? Even damaged, you can still read it. Oh no, your e-book reader is out of warranty, and repairing it costs more than replacing it, so you have to replace it. There goes $100. The book? Somehow it got destroyed, you have to replace it. We'll assume it's still in print, or a used bookstore has a copy to sell, and it's a paperback. Maybe you spend $20. You may argue that e-books are more durable because they're digital. There isn't a single form of digital storage media that can't fail, and when they do you're usually faced with 100% unrecoverability: Flash memory can fail. Hard disks can fail. Floppy disks (which of course nobody uses anymore) failed all the time. CDROMs and DVDs have a limited lifespan, can be scratched so bad they're unusable, can be cracked and broken, or eventually just degrade to the point of being unreadable (even pressed CDs/DVDs). I suppose if you keep everything on a RAID-5 array of hard disks you'll have a better chance, but how many people do that? Paper tape? Magnetic tape? I'll include those just to be thorough, but I don't think I need to comment on them. Storage in "the cloud"? The company gets hacked, the company fucks up, the company goes out of business, or (my favorite) someone decides there's a copyright issue and your e-books get yanked, and you have no e-books anymore. Printed books are the original write-once-read-many device.
You speak of sustainability. I have books I've owned my entire life, and they're still usable, and occasionally I still read them. They use no more resources and still deliver content to me. I don't live in Scandanavia and I don't need to worry about living in a space the size of a closet, so storage space is my problem and it's a problem I'll gladly handle, and I have the space for my meager collection of books.
Now, finally: Fuck you and your insulting attitude. You speak to me as if I'm some doddering old fool struggling along with my walker, yelling at neighborhood kids to "get off my lawn", and scoffing at all the "newfangled technology you kids use these days", then proceeding to tell stories to unwilling ears about the "good old days", and how I walked uphill both directions back and forth to school everyday in the snow or somesuch. You make assumptions that I don't like and can't handle technology and that I reject it. Bullshit, sir, bullshit. I live and have always lived a technological lifestyle; I work in electronics, I've written software in multiple programming languages over the years, and have owned most of the tech that you imply I can't handle the "newness" of. To all this, again, I say "fuck you", and furthermore "sideways with a rusty chainsaw, you fuckin' fuck, you".
Just because something is new doesn't make it better. E-books and their associated readers may be wonderful for newpapers and magazines, and personally I think they're ideally suited for things like textbooks, especially considering that wirelessly connected e-book readers could have updates to textbooks pushed to them at will. You speak of sustainability? How about how exhorbitantly expensive textbooks are, and how that expense becomes wasted money because someone changed one paragraph? I do not, however, hold the opini
I suppose that's true if you're one of those people who get rid of books once they're done reading them, as opposed to people like me who keep them and re-read them at later dates. I consider the books I own to be a form of wealth, and they're more valuable to me the more often I read them. If someone offered to replace all of them with e-books for free and give me a reader for free to boot I'd say no.
Yes, but they're easily ignored and relatively unobtrusive, and I can't remember ever buying a hardcover that had the sorts of ads you're referring to, only paperbacks.
I'll continue to stick to printed books, thank you very much. They can't edit them, delete them, or plaster ads all over them once I own them, can they?
Personally I think that so-called "social networking" contributes to the achievement of the opposite of it's intent: It actually keeps people apart rather than bringing them together. It has created another, deceptive definition of the word "friend", whereas now you have "Friends" (with a capital 'F', for your real, actual friends) and "friends" (with a lower-case 'f', for your online 'friends', who very often may as well be 'bots for all the real meaning they have to your life). We have an entire generation of kids growing up who are more sociall awkward than ever before, because "social networking" gives them an excuse to not learn to interact with each other on an in-person level. I'd like to see people outgrow all this so-called "social networking" and get back to actually relating to each other in real life.
Maybe YOU are inept at it, but I for one am NOT.
There's no way in hell I'd have a vehicle that I have no manual override control of. If the world comes to that, then I'm back to riding a motorcycle year-round and not owning a car again.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
Personally I think it's a piece of crap.
Of course, if you definition of 'art' is 'something that evokes and emotional response', then I guess it's art: it evokes a feeling of disgust and revoltion in me, I want to get it as far away from me (and my equipment) as possible.
See, this is in part what I'm alluding to: This really sounds as much like a way to attract investors (to potentially rip off) as it is a serious project. In this fucked-up day and age we're living in, I expect (and often see) more and more scams going on. Why should this be any different? They promise (literally) the Moon and the stars, then they have "problems" somewhere along the line, and none of it happens. Oh well! Thanks for playing. Don't look too close at our books, though, k? Thanks!:p
Wouldn't we need to get back to the Moon, establish some sort of colony there, and create the industry and infrastructure just to build such a thing in the first place? I can't see this all happening in the next 8 years.
Likely because the jackass population on/. is too high and they enjoy modding people down for no damned good reason.
Personally I don't care if this feature is used to spy or not. I won't buy or use Windows 8 if I can possibly avoid it. I'd dump everything and finally switch to some flavor of Linux first.
What if that someone's son wants to grow up to be a world-class cyclist, and they completely screw his chances by ensuring he's over six feet tall?
We are neither smart enough or wise enough as a race to be mucking about with the genes of our offspring. Look at what's happening because of Monsanto and genetically-engineered food crops!
Most people are idiots who have been cowed into the belief that "privacy" is not valuable, or worse, that it's something that only criminals want to protect. I'll be the one pointing and laughing at them all when and if they discover what it is they've thrown away.
I used it extensively at a job I had until recently, and I am unashamed to continue to call it the "Playskool OS". I wouldn't have a copy of this piece of crap if you gave it to me for free -- unless you gave me the receipt as well so I could return it and use the cash for something actually useful. It's a dumbed-down OS for a dumbed-down world. it treats all users like idiot children, it goes out of it's way to hide anything powerful or really useful from you, it smacks your hand when you try to do anything powerful or useful. I'm actually surprised that they didn't completely erradicate the ability to access a command-line interface, too, that would have completed it's descent into complete idiocy.
Back in the day I had more than one machine I'd built (either 8080 or Z80 based) that ran CP/M, and I even wrote software (in C and in assembly language) to run under CP/M. MS-DOS only bore a superficial resemblance to CP/M, in that there are certain elements to a command-line OS that you really can't easily get around.
Slashdot Mirror
..I don't see why it can't exceed 90%
<citation needed>
Seriously, this.
I just don't get why this is such a popular idea, unless I remind myself that the average person is more or less technically uneducated, and doesn't understand that it's wildly energy inefficient. Also, echoing other comments on this topic: This is far from a new idea, and again: there are reasons we haven't gone this way before, but nobody seems to understand that.
I get in a "big huff" because this is the internet, and expressing any opinion contrary to the mainstream on the internet these days gets you flamed to the point of being utterly charred (because there's no accountability and people will say shit they'd never say in person), so I've come to expect to have to defend myself at every turn. It's not personal.
We can agree to disagree, so long as it's not personal. You can call my reasons bullshit all you want, but they're just as valid are your reasons for not having printed books anymore, and I could sit here and refute your counterpoints, but it would be pointless; as you say, we can agree to disagree -- so long as it doesn't degenerate into some sort of 4chan-esque dominance game.
So please, don't make yourself look silly by trying to argue that it is anything but emotional.
Really? Seriously? That's where you decide to go with this? Straight to being insulting?
Tell you what: Let's try a little experiment. Take your e-book reader, and take a printed book. Hold them both by the corner, three feet above a hard surface. Drop them both. How's your e-book reader now? Damaged? Broken? Unusable? How's the book? Maybe you dented the corner a little.
Now how about this: Oops! You forgot to plug your e-book reader in to recharge it. Now you can't read anything! The book, on the other hand? All you need is light. You could read by candlelight if necessary.
Oh no, your e-book reader won't boot! No reading for you until it's repaired. The book? Even damaged, you can still read it. Oh no, your e-book reader is out of warranty, and repairing it costs more than replacing it, so you have to replace it. There goes $100. The book? Somehow it got destroyed, you have to replace it. We'll assume it's still in print, or a used bookstore has a copy to sell, and it's a paperback. Maybe you spend $20.
You may argue that e-books are more durable because they're digital. There isn't a single form of digital storage media that can't fail, and when they do you're usually faced with 100% unrecoverability: Flash memory can fail. Hard disks can fail. Floppy disks (which of course nobody uses anymore) failed all the time. CDROMs and DVDs have a limited lifespan, can be scratched so bad they're unusable, can be cracked and broken, or eventually just degrade to the point of being unreadable (even pressed CDs/DVDs). I suppose if you keep everything on a RAID-5 array of hard disks you'll have a better chance, but how many people do that? Paper tape? Magnetic tape? I'll include those just to be thorough, but I don't think I need to comment on them. Storage in "the cloud"? The company gets hacked, the company fucks up, the company goes out of business, or (my favorite) someone decides there's a copyright issue and your e-books get yanked, and you have no e-books anymore. Printed books are the original write-once-read-many device.
You speak of sustainability. I have books I've owned my entire life, and they're still usable, and occasionally I still read them. They use no more resources and still deliver content to me. I don't live in Scandanavia and I don't need to worry about living in a space the size of a closet, so storage space is my problem and it's a problem I'll gladly handle, and I have the space for my meager collection of books.
Now, finally: Fuck you and your insulting attitude. You speak to me as if I'm some doddering old fool struggling along with my walker, yelling at neighborhood kids to "get off my lawn", and scoffing at all the "newfangled technology you kids use these days", then proceeding to tell stories to unwilling ears about the "good old days", and how I walked uphill both directions back and forth to school everyday in the snow or somesuch. You make assumptions that I don't like and can't handle technology and that I reject it. Bullshit, sir, bullshit. I live and have always lived a technological lifestyle; I work in electronics, I've written software in multiple programming languages over the years, and have owned most of the tech that you imply I can't handle the "newness" of. To all this, again, I say "fuck you", and furthermore "sideways with a rusty chainsaw, you fuckin' fuck, you".
Just because something is new doesn't make it better. E-books and their associated readers may be wonderful for newpapers and magazines, and personally I think they're ideally suited for things like textbooks, especially considering that wirelessly connected e-book readers could have updates to textbooks pushed to them at will. You speak of sustainability? How about how exhorbitantly expensive textbooks are, and how that expense becomes wasted money because someone changed one paragraph? I do not, however, hold the opini
Why does it matter to you that I like and prefer them? Who are you trying to convince here? Or are you trying to justify your own actions?
..waste of space and resources
I suppose that's true if you're one of those people who get rid of books once they're done reading them, as opposed to people like me who keep them and re-read them at later dates. I consider the books I own to be a form of wealth, and they're more valuable to me the more often I read them. If someone offered to replace all of them with e-books for free and give me a reader for free to boot I'd say no.
Or I could skip the whole thing and continue to buy books printed on paper. :-)
Yes, but they're easily ignored and relatively unobtrusive, and I can't remember ever buying a hardcover that had the sorts of ads you're referring to, only paperbacks.
I'm not talking about periodicals.
I'll continue to stick to printed books, thank you very much. They can't edit them, delete them, or plaster ads all over them once I own them, can they?
Sorry, but I disagree with you. I'm not pulling this opinion out of my ass, it's based on my observations of more than just Facebook.
Personally I think that so-called "social networking" contributes to the achievement of the opposite of it's intent: It actually keeps people apart rather than bringing them together. It has created another, deceptive definition of the word "friend", whereas now you have "Friends" (with a capital 'F', for your real, actual friends) and "friends" (with a lower-case 'f', for your online 'friends', who very often may as well be 'bots for all the real meaning they have to your life). We have an entire generation of kids growing up who are more sociall awkward than ever before, because "social networking" gives them an excuse to not learn to interact with each other on an in-person level. I'd like to see people outgrow all this so-called "social networking" and get back to actually relating to each other in real life.
Maybe YOU are inept at it, but I for one am NOT.
There's no way in hell I'd have a vehicle that I have no manual override control of. If the world comes to that, then I'm back to riding a motorcycle year-round and not owning a car again.
So when can I order my super-light, super-stiff CNC composite racing bicycle? Please? Is there a pre-order process? Can I put it on lay-away?
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
Personally I think it's a piece of crap.
Of course, if you definition of 'art' is 'something that evokes and emotional response', then I guess it's art: it evokes a feeling of disgust and revoltion in me, I want to get it as far away from me (and my equipment) as possible.
See, this is in part what I'm alluding to: This really sounds as much like a way to attract investors (to potentially rip off) as it is a serious project. In this fucked-up day and age we're living in, I expect (and often see) more and more scams going on. Why should this be any different? They promise (literally) the Moon and the stars, then they have "problems" somewhere along the line, and none of it happens. Oh well! Thanks for playing. Don't look too close at our books, though, k? Thanks! :p
Wouldn't we need to get back to the Moon, establish some sort of colony there, and create the industry and infrastructure just to build such a thing in the first place? I can't see this all happening in the next 8 years.
Why is the parent moded -1?
Likely because the jackass population on /. is too high and they enjoy modding people down for no damned good reason.
Personally I don't care if this feature is used to spy or not. I won't buy or use Windows 8 if I can possibly avoid it. I'd dump everything and finally switch to some flavor of Linux first.
What if that someone's son wants to grow up to be a world-class cyclist, and they completely screw his chances by ensuring he's over six feet tall?
We are neither smart enough or wise enough as a race to be mucking about with the genes of our offspring. Look at what's happening because of Monsanto and genetically-engineered food crops!
If that turns out to truly be the case then I'm happy I'm a throwback in that regard.
I don't disagree with that, either. I'm still running XP (no reason to change it) and I have everything looking like Win2K.
Most people are idiots who have been cowed into the belief that "privacy" is not valuable, or worse, that it's something that only criminals want to protect. I'll be the one pointing and laughing at them all when and if they discover what it is they've thrown away.
I used it extensively at a job I had until recently, and I am unashamed to continue to call it the "Playskool OS". I wouldn't have a copy of this piece of crap if you gave it to me for free -- unless you gave me the receipt as well so I could return it and use the cash for something actually useful. It's a dumbed-down OS for a dumbed-down world. it treats all users like idiot children, it goes out of it's way to hide anything powerful or really useful from you, it smacks your hand when you try to do anything powerful or useful. I'm actually surprised that they didn't completely erradicate the ability to access a command-line interface, too, that would have completed it's descent into complete idiocy.
..magnet links
Actually it sounds to me like just another way of saying "everything is going to the Cloud", which I happen to think is the worst idea ever.
Back in the day I had more than one machine I'd built (either 8080 or Z80 based) that ran CP/M, and I even wrote software (in C and in assembly language) to run under CP/M. MS-DOS only bore a superficial resemblance to CP/M, in that there are certain elements to a command-line OS that you really can't easily get around.