I don't play FPSes on consoles so I can't speak to what makes sense for FOV there. I've never been willing to give up the fine degree of control and responsiveness that you get from the keyboard+mouse combination.
I agree with you that three monitor set ups with 120 degrees per monitor does cross the line. That's a bit much to be able to accept.:-)
Oh, I understand the issue perfectly. I've been playing FPSes for about 20 years. Yes, at times I've played on organized ladders (sometimes with a great deal of success).:-) I contend that FOV is in fact the heart of the issue for game balance/fairness or we wouldn't be having this debate.
Older games that allowed complete freedom of the definition of the FOV were generally limited in the ladder play that I participated in. However, the limits were always larger than 90 degrees.
My bone of contention isn't necessarily the imposition of a limit for such play. I just happen to think that 90 degrees is a ridiculously small, arbitrarily chosen limit designed to meet the limitations of the 4:3 ratio monitors that we used to play on.
Push it out to the 110 or 120 degrees that I referred earlier and I have less of a problem with it, especially since the newer 16:10, 16:9 and wider ratio displays can handle the view without distortion. Throw in multiple monitor set ups and I don't see why, say, 140 degrees shouldn't be doable these days.
To your point about playing with a 360 view? Have you actually tried that on any sort of large scale or architecturally busy map? It might work on a simple, cartoonish flat palette map design like TF2 where the sight lines are also typically limited to 10-20 meters. Then it might be possible to train yourself to pick out players fast enough to be able to react. I'd eat your lunch playing any game where sight lines are generally much longer and/or terrain is much more complex.
I can't imagine playing the OpFlash/ArmA series that way, for example. Forget Red Orchestra, the Battlefield series, Soldier of Fortune, Joint Ops, etc.
Call of Duty or America's Army? Maybe. The maps tend to be a bit smaller for CoD. AA's maps tend to be tight urban ones these days instead of the much larger ones from earlier in the series.
As a point of comparison: it's considered cheating in most first and third person shooting games multiplayer to increase your FoV beyond certain limit.
An attitude which I never understood. Games designed to enforce a 90 degree FOV fail to take into account that on average, our peripheral vision encompasses about 150-160 degrees for most people.
This is so because it gives you vastly superior awareness of your surroundings, making it much harder to surprise you with flanking.
Well, that's sort of the point of peripheral vision, isn't it? There's an easy test that I was taught in junior high that quickly demonstrates this. Hold your arms out in front of you, thumbs up. Move them to the edges of your vision on both sides until you can just see them. Stop, and take a quick look left and right. If you're like most people, you'll find that you're arms are now almost straight out from your sides.
Games which take into account this awareness tend to to do one or both of two things. The first is to allow an FOV up to some arbitrary limit somewhat greater than 90 degrees, say 110 or 120 degrees. Anything after that tends to get so distorted as to be useless on a single monitor anyhow.
The second option is to show some sort of indicators on the side of your monitor and/or allow a quick free look around of just your head. The best implementation of this model belongs to an FPS series that emphasizes realism in its player model to an extent that I've seen nowhere else. I'm speaking of course of the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA I-III series. This game series has been working on this basic model since, what? 1998? The ArmA branch of that series has also provided native support for multiple monitors and TrackIR since the first iteration.
If a FPS this fanatically dedicated to realism (OK, as long as you forget the brain dead AI and concentrate on everything else!) thinks this is OK, then why can't other games at least acknowledge the issue?
My dad had some "Best of" Analog and Astounding collections dating back to the mid-'50s. Those omnibus editions got me hooked on sci-fi at a very young age.
I remember reading more than one story out of those where using pulsars to determine a ship's current position was a key plot point. According to Wikipedia, the first pulsar was discovered in 1967. Given the intense interest that most sci-fi writers and readers had in astronomy, I would be very surprised if that information wasn't common knowledge within the community almost immediately.
And all those new buildings and stadiums going up at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (each!) has nothing to do with rising costs. Nope, not at all.
Gapminder.Org is a GREAT site for seeing how things have improved for the entire world's population over the past 200 years. Dozens if not hundreds of variables are available for plotting. If you let the default graph of life expectancy over income per person play out, you'll see that every country has seen vast improvements over that span.
The Sub-Saharan African countries in particular didn't really see much improvement until the end of WWII, but since then the average life expectancy has gone from around 30 to the mid 50s and lower 60s. Cape Verde is all the way up to 75 years.
Income per person has increased in some cases by more then a couple orders of magnitude. Even the poorest nations have seen at least some growth in income.
One of the best ways to affect increased income is to increase education. Higher literacy rates translates directly to the ability to learn new skills. Availability of educational resources that are available over the Internet therefore directly impact people's ability to earn more, which directly impacts their ability to feed their families.
While I'm not a devout Christian by any means, this whole debate boils down to that simple proverb: "Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
I have two sisters with Masters degrees. One went the fairly traditional route of 4 years for an undergrad degree, a decade or so in the work force, then another decade or so working on her Masters at a traditional institution as time and budget permitted. She finally completed her degree shortly after she turned 40. She has been working as an globe hopping industrial trainer, author, and project manager all along.
My other sister took about 20 years to complete her undergrad degree and another 4 to complete her Masters' in non-profit administration online. She is now the director of a small non-profit organization that trains dogs as companions/ assistants for people with various physical disabilities.
While my younger sister would concede that the MOOC does have some disadvantages when compared to the more traditional model, she chose to go that route because it was (a) cheaper and (b) was something that she could largely adapt to her schedule.
Neither one of my sisters felt it was necessary or beneficial to be buried in a Masters' program for 24 hours a day, though. I think that's a model that may fit well with particular areas of study. I certainly don't think it's the only model that works.
So have some cheap ass iron bullets for the range and some expensive tungsten ones for when your life is on the line.
Iron won't work because it's not soft enough. The bullet has to deform to grip the rifling inside a barrel. Besides, the whole point of going to the target range is to become a better shooter. You can't do that when the bullets you're using differ significantly from the ones you hunt with. The ballistics properties change too much.
Steel shot has become more popular for duck hunting, though. Many states require it. The big drawback with steel when compared to lead is the significant drop in range due to faster loss of pellet speed. The normal advice is to bump up a pellet size or two. That works to some extent, but a hunter still risks creating cripples until a s/he learns the limits of shooting with steel.
Finding a replacement for bullet lead that is both (a) reasonably abundant and cheap, (b) has a reduced impact on the environment, and (c) conforms reasonably well to the performance characteristics of lead isn't easy. Hopefully we'll find a solution soon.
LyX is a project that I'm very fond of. It doesn't follow the WYSIWYG model at all. Instead, it leverages TeX's different way of thinking about document creation entirely; separate the data from the presentation and manage the creation of both separately. The whole idea is to concentrate on the task of writing without getting distracted by constant re-formatting challenges. It works quite well once you learn to relax and not obsess over every paragraph and image placement while you're writing.
Frankly, I think LyX creates some of the most beautiful printed documentation I've ever seen. Sadly, it doesn't do so well at e-publishing yet. I have hopes that will change, though. I would love to use it to handle all of my document creation needs.
As it is, I end up writing in LyX, exporting to.xhtml, then using Sigil and other tools to get a clean, good looking.epub output.
Play around with the stats on Gapminder some time. There's the objective, empirical data that you're looking for.
Look at how the various societies do over time. Look for the sharp breaks in how well a given country is doing. At those points you're liable to find a change in the type of government.
Oh, I agree that Iron Sky does fall flat after a great start. Still, it's at least as good as the dreck that Hollyweird has been producing while starting a much more original premise.
WAoVW, sadly, is just not my cup of tea. OTOH, Wikipedia shows that 1966 saw some other great films from a variety of genres: "The Blue Max", "Fahrenheit 451", "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", "Modesty Blaise", "Is Paris Burning?", "Murderer's Row", "A Man for All Seasons", "A Time for Burning", "The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound", "Way...Way Out", "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?", "What's Up, Tiger Lily?", "The Wild Angels", "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree". There was something out that year for virtually everybody.
For me, the point is that mainstream Hollywood has largely lost its creative spark. The films that used to be made that provoked us to think or told us an original story just aren't getting the funding from the big studios these days.
Personally, I would far rather spend a $8 to watch Iron Sky on Netflix online than drop $15 or $20 to take my wife to a theatre these days.
IMDB page. Brought to you by the same oddball Finns who gave us that wonderful series of Star Trek parodies called Star Wreck (although this time they had some German and Australian help). A wonderful send up of Nazis as "Invaders From the Moooon." Well worth your time if you love silly sci-fi movies.:-)
I'm sure there are other examples around, but here's one from my home state, the Minnesota Experimental City. For those who are not intimately familiar with Minnesota geography, the proposed location was about 90 miles west of Duluth and about 3 hours north of the Twin Cities. Nothing there but a map dot called Swatara, trees, and a few dairy farms. That pipe dream started back in the '60s and eventually fizzled out in the late '70s.
..I don't know that I would recommend Javascript myself. It's finally cracked the top 10 at Tiobe and it's definitely growing. However, it's still not exactly mainstream. It's also inherently limited to a narrow development niche. The GP could choose to dive into some sort of mix of C, C++, ObjectiveC, Perl, and/or Python instead. S/he would probably have more success out of the gate because all of those languages have a broad applicability to a much larger set of use cases.
However, I think the larger point you're trying to make is a valid one. The rate of change isn't slowing down for anyone. These days nobody in IT can afford to be a one trick pony. In order to stay relevant in the market, developers need to have more than a passing familiarity in several languages and environments. At minimum they should be competent in at least a couple and reviewing one or two others. (What? You thought you were done studying when you got out of college?)
Not really, most of each of thousands of projects have at most a few core developers and extraneous people who occasionally submit patches to fix specific itches. There is no "A team" scouring all open source for vulnerabilities from the simple fact such vulnerabilities most certainly do exist as innocent bugs and have not been reported by such teams.
To illustrate this point the linux kernel is developed by armies of smart people yet an automated tool found a laundry list of shit that has been around for years nobody noticed.
The results show that the number of defects detected by the Coverity analysis system has decreased from over 2000 to less than 1000 while, during the same period of time, the source code has quadrupled in size and the power of Coverity's detection capabilities has increased markedly. We conclude using this data that the Linux kernel is a robust, secure system that has matured significantly.
You want a real eye opener? Check out Coverity's current press release:
Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary softwareâ"and both continue to surpass the accepted industry standard for good software quality. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. Coverityâ(TM)s analysis found an average defect density of.69 for open source software projects that leverage the Coverity Scan service, and an average defect density of.68 for proprietary code developed by Coverity enterprise customers. Both have better quality as compared to the accepted industry standard defect density for good quality software of 1.0. This marks the second, consecutive year that both open source code and proprietary code scanned by Coverity have achieved defect density below 1.0.
(snip)
Linux remains a benchmark for quality. Since the original Coverity Scan report in 2008, scanned versions of Linux have consistently achieved a defect density of less than 1.0, and versions scanned in 2011 and 2012 demonstrated a defect density below.7. In 2011, Coverity scanned more than 6.8 million lines of Linux code and found a defect density of.62. In 2012, Coverity scanned more than 7.4 million lines of Linux code and found a defect density of.66. At the time of this report, Coverity scanned 7.6 million lines of code in Linux 3.8 and found a defect density of.59.
(snip)
While static analysis has long been cited for its potential to improve code quality, there have been two significant barriers to its adoption by development organizations: high false positive rates and a lack of actionable guidance to help developers easily fix defects. Coverity has eliminated both of these obstacles. The 2012 Scan Report demonstrated a false positive rate for Coverity static analysis of just 9.7 percent in open source projects. Additionally, the 2012 report noted more than 21,000 defects were fixed in open source codeâ"more than the combined total of defects fixed from 2008-2011.
The real conclusion that you should draw is twofold. First, if you're relying on software that isn't doing static code analysis, you're probably relying upon insecure code.
Second, Every. Single. App. Has. Bugs. The difference is that open source lets anyone do the analysis and fix the bugs. The same can't be said when of any closed source package.
So, which is safer? The OSS app where everything is publicly discussed and bug fixes generally get acted upon fast, or the closed source app where the vendor may be handing the known vulnerabilities off to the NSA or its equivalent in the country of your choice? I know which way I choose.:-)
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Tomi Ahonen pointed out in March that we already have 6.7 billion _active_ mobile accounts. This clearly means that we are already FAR past that point when you include all the devices not on telecomm networks.
BTW, in the same blog post Ahonen also estimated that the point at which active accounts would exceed the world's population would happen some time this summer.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my wife and I spent 4 days poolside in the Dominican Republic with a Kindle Fire and a Nook Color. Conditions bright enough every day for both of us to need sunglasses.
Yet, strangely enough, neither one of us had any problem whatsoever using our tablets to read ebooks for hours on end.
Am I saying that tablets with color LED displays are _better_ than e-ink readers for long term reading and battery life? Absolutely not! But the days when reading from a bog standard tablet to be a pain outdoors are long gone.
Well, if stability is a major concern there's always the option of going to the grandaddy of any number of Linux distros. Install Debian stable for rock solid reliability, Debian testing for something a bit more up to date and pretty thoroughly debugged, Debian unstable for reasonably up to date and generally as stable as most distros, or experimental if you like the bleeding edge.
The really neat thing about Debian is that it's possible to build a system on stable and select individual applications to install as experimental. Works fine for packages that don't have version specific dependencies on libraries. That's how I'm currently running LyX on my main system, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling
Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling
Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling
I don't play FPSes on consoles so I can't speak to what makes sense for FOV there. I've never been willing to give up the fine degree of control and responsiveness that you get from the keyboard+mouse combination.
I agree with you that three monitor set ups with 120 degrees per monitor does cross the line. That's a bit much to be able to accept. :-)
Oh, I understand the issue perfectly. I've been playing FPSes for about 20 years. Yes, at times I've played on organized ladders (sometimes with a great deal of success). :-) I contend that FOV is in fact the heart of the issue for game balance/fairness or we wouldn't be having this debate.
Older games that allowed complete freedom of the definition of the FOV were generally limited in the ladder play that I participated in. However, the limits were always larger than 90 degrees.
My bone of contention isn't necessarily the imposition of a limit for such play. I just happen to think that 90 degrees is a ridiculously small, arbitrarily chosen limit designed to meet the limitations of the 4:3 ratio monitors that we used to play on.
Push it out to the 110 or 120 degrees that I referred earlier and I have less of a problem with it, especially since the newer 16:10, 16:9 and wider ratio displays can handle the view without distortion. Throw in multiple monitor set ups and I don't see why, say, 140 degrees shouldn't be doable these days.
To your point about playing with a 360 view? Have you actually tried that on any sort of large scale or architecturally busy map? It might work on a simple, cartoonish flat palette map design like TF2 where the sight lines are also typically limited to 10-20 meters. Then it might be possible to train yourself to pick out players fast enough to be able to react. I'd eat your lunch playing any game where sight lines are generally much longer and/or terrain is much more complex.
I can't imagine playing the OpFlash/ArmA series that way, for example. Forget Red Orchestra, the Battlefield series, Soldier of Fortune, Joint Ops, etc.
Call of Duty or America's Army? Maybe. The maps tend to be a bit smaller for CoD. AA's maps tend to be tight urban ones these days instead of the much larger ones from earlier in the series.
An attitude which I never understood. Games designed to enforce a 90 degree FOV fail to take into account that on average, our peripheral vision encompasses about 150-160 degrees for most people.
Well, that's sort of the point of peripheral vision, isn't it? There's an easy test that I was taught in junior high that quickly demonstrates this. Hold your arms out in front of you, thumbs up. Move them to the edges of your vision on both sides until you can just see them. Stop, and take a quick look left and right. If you're like most people, you'll find that you're arms are now almost straight out from your sides.
Games which take into account this awareness tend to to do one or both of two things. The first is to allow an FOV up to some arbitrary limit somewhat greater than 90 degrees, say 110 or 120 degrees. Anything after that tends to get so distorted as to be useless on a single monitor anyhow.
The second option is to show some sort of indicators on the side of your monitor and/or allow a quick free look around of just your head. The best implementation of this model belongs to an FPS series that emphasizes realism in its player model to an extent that I've seen nowhere else. I'm speaking of course of the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA I-III series. This game series has been working on this basic model since, what? 1998? The ArmA branch of that series has also provided native support for multiple monitors and TrackIR since the first iteration.
If a FPS this fanatically dedicated to realism (OK, as long as you forget the brain dead AI and concentrate on everything else!) thinks this is OK, then why can't other games at least acknowledge the issue?
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-11-06
My dad had some "Best of" Analog and Astounding collections dating back to the mid-'50s. Those omnibus editions got me hooked on sci-fi at a very young age.
I remember reading more than one story out of those where using pulsars to determine a ship's current position was a key plot point. According to Wikipedia, the first pulsar was discovered in 1967. Given the intense interest that most sci-fi writers and readers had in astronomy, I would be very surprised if that information wasn't common knowledge within the community almost immediately.
And all those new buildings and stadiums going up at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (each!) has nothing to do with rising costs. Nope, not at all.
Gapminder.Org is a GREAT site for seeing how things have improved for the entire world's population over the past 200 years. Dozens if not hundreds of variables are available for plotting. If you let the default graph of life expectancy over income per person play out, you'll see that every country has seen vast improvements over that span.
The Sub-Saharan African countries in particular didn't really see much improvement until the end of WWII, but since then the average life expectancy has gone from around 30 to the mid 50s and lower 60s. Cape Verde is all the way up to 75 years.
Income per person has increased in some cases by more then a couple orders of magnitude. Even the poorest nations have seen at least some growth in income.
One of the best ways to affect increased income is to increase education. Higher literacy rates translates directly to the ability to learn new skills. Availability of educational resources that are available over the Internet therefore directly impact people's ability to earn more, which directly impacts their ability to feed their families.
While I'm not a devout Christian by any means, this whole debate boils down to that simple proverb: "Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
I have two sisters with Masters degrees. One went the fairly traditional route of 4 years for an undergrad degree, a decade or so in the work force, then another decade or so working on her Masters at a traditional institution as time and budget permitted. She finally completed her degree shortly after she turned 40. She has been working as an globe hopping industrial trainer, author, and project manager all along.
My other sister took about 20 years to complete her undergrad degree and another 4 to complete her Masters' in non-profit administration online. She is now the director of a small non-profit organization that trains dogs as companions/ assistants for people with various physical disabilities.
While my younger sister would concede that the MOOC does have some disadvantages when compared to the more traditional model, she chose to go that route because it was (a) cheaper and (b) was something that she could largely adapt to her schedule.
Neither one of my sisters felt it was necessary or beneficial to be buried in a Masters' program for 24 hours a day, though. I think that's a model that may fit well with particular areas of study. I certainly don't think it's the only model that works.
Or Common Sense by Tom Paine. Then remember that both sets of documents were originally published anonymously in order to protect the authors.
Still think being Anonymous (especially in this political climate) is a bad idea?
Iron won't work because it's not soft enough. The bullet has to deform to grip the rifling inside a barrel. Besides, the whole point of going to the target range is to become a better shooter. You can't do that when the bullets you're using differ significantly from the ones you hunt with. The ballistics properties change too much.
Steel shot has become more popular for duck hunting, though. Many states require it. The big drawback with steel when compared to lead is the significant drop in range due to faster loss of pellet speed. The normal advice is to bump up a pellet size or two. That works to some extent, but a hunter still risks creating cripples until a s/he learns the limits of shooting with steel.
Finding a replacement for bullet lead that is both (a) reasonably abundant and cheap, (b) has a reduced impact on the environment, and (c) conforms reasonably well to the performance characteristics of lead isn't easy. Hopefully we'll find a solution soon.
LyX is a project that I'm very fond of. It doesn't follow the WYSIWYG model at all. Instead, it leverages TeX's different way of thinking about document creation entirely; separate the data from the presentation and manage the creation of both separately. The whole idea is to concentrate on the task of writing without getting distracted by constant re-formatting challenges. It works quite well once you learn to relax and not obsess over every paragraph and image placement while you're writing.
Frankly, I think LyX creates some of the most beautiful printed documentation I've ever seen. Sadly, it doesn't do so well at e-publishing yet. I have hopes that will change, though. I would love to use it to handle all of my document creation needs.
As it is, I end up writing in LyX, exporting to .xhtml, then using Sigil and other tools to get a clean, good looking .epub output.
Play around with the stats on Gapminder some time. There's the objective, empirical data that you're looking for.
Look at how the various societies do over time. Look for the sharp breaks in how well a given country is doing. At those points you're liable to find a change in the type of government.
Oh, I agree that Iron Sky does fall flat after a great start. Still, it's at least as good as the dreck that Hollyweird has been producing while starting a much more original premise.
WAoVW, sadly, is just not my cup of tea. OTOH, Wikipedia shows that 1966 saw some other great films from a variety of genres: "The Blue Max", "Fahrenheit 451", "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", "Modesty Blaise", "Is Paris Burning?", "Murderer's Row", "A Man for All Seasons", "A Time for Burning", "The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound", "Way...Way Out", "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?", "What's Up, Tiger Lily?", "The Wild Angels", "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree". There was something out that year for virtually everybody.
For me, the point is that mainstream Hollywood has largely lost its creative spark. The films that used to be made that provoked us to think or told us an original story just aren't getting the funding from the big studios these days.
Personally, I would far rather spend a $8 to watch Iron Sky on Netflix online than drop $15 or $20 to take my wife to a theatre these days.
IMDB page. Brought to you by the same oddball Finns who gave us that wonderful series of Star Trek parodies called Star Wreck (although this time they had some German and Australian help). A wonderful send up of Nazis as "Invaders From the Moooon." Well worth your time if you love silly sci-fi movies. :-)
I'm sure there are other examples around, but here's one from my home state, the Minnesota Experimental City. For those who are not intimately familiar with Minnesota geography, the proposed location was about 90 miles west of Duluth and about 3 hours north of the Twin Cities. Nothing there but a map dot called Swatara, trees, and a few dairy farms. That pipe dream started back in the '60s and eventually fizzled out in the late '70s.
..I don't know that I would recommend Javascript myself. It's finally cracked the top 10 at Tiobe and it's definitely growing. However, it's still not exactly mainstream. It's also inherently limited to a narrow development niche. The GP could choose to dive into some sort of mix of C, C++, ObjectiveC, Perl, and/or Python instead. S/he would probably have more success out of the gate because all of those languages have a broad applicability to a much larger set of use cases.
However, I think the larger point you're trying to make is a valid one. The rate of change isn't slowing down for anyone. These days nobody in IT can afford to be a one trick pony. In order to stay relevant in the market, developers need to have more than a passing familiarity in several languages and environments. At minimum they should be competent in at least a couple and reviewing one or two others. (What? You thought you were done studying when you got out of college?)
Heh. Haha. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
First, from the very report that you linked to:
You want a real eye opener? Check out Coverity's current press release:
The real conclusion that you should draw is twofold. First, if you're relying on software that isn't doing static code analysis, you're probably relying upon insecure code.
Second, Every. Single. App. Has. Bugs. The difference is that open source lets anyone do the analysis and fix the bugs. The same can't be said when of any closed source package.
So, which is safer? The OSS app where everything is publicly discussed and bug fixes generally get acted upon fast, or the closed source app where the vendor may be handing the known vulnerabilities off to the NSA or its equivalent in the country of your choice? I know which way I choose. :-)
How much more explicit does it have to get?!?
Thankfully, neither of us suffer from this.
Tomi Ahonen pointed out in March that we already have 6.7 billion _active_ mobile accounts. This clearly means that we are already FAR past that point when you include all the devices not on telecomm networks.
BTW, in the same blog post Ahonen also estimated that the point at which active accounts would exceed the world's population would happen some time this summer.
Can we drop this already?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my wife and I spent 4 days poolside in the Dominican Republic with a Kindle Fire and a Nook Color. Conditions bright enough every day for both of us to need sunglasses.
Yet, strangely enough, neither one of us had any problem whatsoever using our tablets to read ebooks for hours on end.
Am I saying that tablets with color LED displays are _better_ than e-ink readers for long term reading and battery life? Absolutely not! But the days when reading from a bog standard tablet to be a pain outdoors are long gone.
Well, if stability is a major concern there's always the option of going to the grandaddy of any number of Linux distros. Install Debian stable for rock solid reliability, Debian testing for something a bit more up to date and pretty thoroughly debugged, Debian unstable for reasonably up to date and generally as stable as most distros, or experimental if you like the bleeding edge.
The really neat thing about Debian is that it's possible to build a system on stable and select individual applications to install as experimental. Works fine for packages that don't have version specific dependencies on libraries. That's how I'm currently running LyX on my main system, for example.