Books are better for some things, but the ebooks are better in some ways too. I listed the disadvantages in another comment. Here are some of the advantages of the ebook.
I can read it in the dark. This is great in bed when the wife is sleeping or on long car trips when my wife is driving. It works in trains or airplanes or at a bus-stop.
I can carry a library with me wherever I go. Do I want to carry 2 600-page books with me so I can start the second when I'm done with the first? One real book is not too bulky, but several together are.
When I finish reading a book, if I like it I can get the sequel immediately, anytime, day or night. This means no more buying the first 2 or 3 books of a series so I'll have the second book ready when I'm done with the first, only to find out that the first wasn't as great as I was hoping.
It lays flat on the table, so I can read it while I eat a hamburger or pizza or whatever other messy two-hand food I have. You can hold a book open with one hand and eat with the other- any serious bookworm is good at that- but an ebook reader is better for this.
Like just about anything else, it's not all good and it's not all bad.
The reader is too expensive. I like to carry it around with me wherever I go, and the wear and tear just destroys them. I am on my third reader after the first one turned out to be total junk, the second one was still pretty lousy and needed major repairs once because I got it wet. The third one (an iPAQ) is out of commission because the power cord wore out where it gets plugged in to the PDA and I can't recharge the PDA anymore. I keep meaning to figure out how to get a new power cord, but really, it's not worth the effort or expense. These PDA's are costing me about $200 a year in purchase price or repairs. I want them to be more durable.
I don't mind the DRM, because the DRM uses my credit card number as a password to decode the book. That means that the book can go wherever I go and be used on any system I want, but I can't give it to other people without giving them my credit card number.
I'm an engineer. I just lost 20 pounds doing pretty much what AssFace said: burn more calories than you take in.
One thing an engineer should really do, though, is take a scientific approach: measure and count. Subjective feelings are unreliable- you don't really know how hungry you are.
Measure and count: to lose one pound of fat, you must burn 3500 calories. An average weight-maintenance diet is around 2000 calories/day (it depends on a lot of things and it's very personal- you should measure your own to figure out what it is). Measure all the food you eat- every crumb, every morsel. Measure your weight.
For my diet, I decided to take in 1600 calories/day on weekdays and 1200/day on weekends (because it's too hard to think if I'm extremely hungry). Whatever amount I went over my "budget" I burned off in a measurable way: on a treadmill or elliptical crosstraining machine at a gym. I ended up eating the same on the weekends as on weekdays, but I spent an hour and a half on the treadmill. So what? On the weekends I have time.
I can tell you the things I had to give up that I liked: soda and french fries. I didn't rule them out of my diet, but when it came time to do my daily budget, it was always two cans of soda or a ham sandwich, and I'm afraid I went for the ham sandwich. I ended up switching to diet soda, which tastes lousy, but it has no calories.
Oddly, fast food restaurants were good for me, because they always post their nutrition information online. A ten-piece order of Chicken McNuggets was very convenient and 510 calories. (It's a little too fatty to be healthful, but it is very easy to eat, and I could eat less fatty things for other meals to have a good daily average). A medium cheesesteak sandwich is around 700 calories- a fine, fine lunch for my 1600 calories/day. My colleagues chuckled at my cheesesteak and chicken nugget diet, but they chuckled less when I was thin and they weren't.:-)
As for low-fat diets: a good idea in general, but really, calories are king. Count them. Limit them. Don't cheat, even a little bit- what kind of scientist fudges his measurements?
There's a ton of good information online. Things like: don't lose more than a pound or two a week, because you'll lose muscle instead of fat, and be sure that you get at least some exercise every day so your muscles don't atrophy. That's another thing a good scientist should do: research the subject.
So my method isn't really office-related, but it's something geeks can relate to: if you want something real, you have to do it scientifically.
Ebooks have their good and bad points, but I've found that I've gotten hooked on them. The bad points are that they don't feel as good in your hand as paper, they have small screens, and their batteries can run out. But I've found that the same things that make me love reading make me love reading ebooks. I read ebook novels on my PDA. Some points in their favor:
1. I can read ebooks while I eat a sandwich. Sounds minor, but really, I like to read while I eat lunch, and a PDA stays open and flat and changing the page is trivial.
2. I can read them in the dark- in the car at night (when somebody *else* is driving, of course) or in bed without bothering my wife.
3. I can fit several ebook novels in my pocket. This means that I can have a book with me wherever I go. I can read a book standing in line at McDonald's, or at the bank, or while I'm sitting in the car waiting for my wife to come out of work.
4. They're cheaper. You can get a lot of books, especially classic literature, for free, and even current, popular ebooks cost less, so I can read more for less money. On the downside, if you don't have a PDA already you have to buy some kind of a reader.
5. I can download the sequel to a book I like at any time. At bookstores I used to buy books 1 and 2 or 1, 2, and 3 of a series I like, but now I buy just the first one online, and if I like it I can download #2 and have it in less than a minute if I liked the first one.
6. I can get back-order or out-of-print books more easily. Regular bookstores nessarily have limited space. Buying paper books online requires me to wait until they arrive in the mail.
So while they're not perfect, I find that I read ebook novels more and more and paper ones less and less.
As for copy protection and book formats, you can buy a lot of ebooks with no protection at all in any of multiple formats. Check out http://www.baen.com or http://www.fictionwise.com for examples- that's where I buy many of my ebooks.
I'm a Charter cable customer in the Worcester, MA area. I found that they have something called Small Office/Home Office service that gives a higher bandwidth- 1 Mbs download and an increase in upload speed as well, though I can't remember what it is. They also relax the EULA so that you are allowed to (legitimately) run a server on your home machine, and with it they give you a static IP address. It costs around $65/month, so it was something I could afford. I'm willing to pay a little more to get a little more.
Oddly, they didn't advertise this service at all and I only found out about it after calling them and asking if they had such a service.
Charter seems to be fast and reliable. The only real problem I have with them is that their customer service stinks. They're available 24/7 to not give any meaningful answers to your questions.
I use Netflix, and I like it, but my wife doesn't. It kind of depends on the way you think about it. For me, their plan means that I can take my time and watch the movie when I'm good and ready and not worry about returning it- mail it back when I want to, and there's no pressure. When I rented movies locally, I was always returning them late or rushing to work feeling pressured to return them.
My wife, however, doesn't like Netflix because she feels pressured to watch the movies as fast as possible to try to get her maximum money's worth out of it. When she sees the movies lying on the counter she feels like there's money going down the drain.
For the record, I don't really get my money's worth out of Netflix. Sometimes I watch the movies fast enough and sometimes I don't, but it gives me peace of mind not worrying about returning them.
The film selection overall is great. I kind of wish they had more selection on foreign language films, though. They have some, but it's not as extensive as I had hoped.
I subscribe to Emusic. One thing worth mentioning is that their FAQ says that they split the profits from the song 50/50 with "the label or artist", not directly with the artist, which I think is the way it has to be.
Emusic is a decent site. I wish they had a lot more good, new music, but they have a pretty good selection of old music that is hard to buy elsewhere:
a smattering of 80's (remember "The Land Down Under"?), Glenn Miller (in case you need an emergency "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" fix), and so on. They have some new music too, but not a whole lot. Still, IMHO they're worth $10/month for me to be able to listen to legal MP3's.
I'm listening to the Meshell Ndegeocello song now. It's not bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Loderunner.
Raid on Bungling Bay.
Lords of Conquest.
Spy Vs. Spy
I can read it in the dark. This is great in bed when the wife is sleeping or on long car trips when my wife is driving. It works in trains or airplanes or at a bus-stop.
I can carry a library with me wherever I go. Do I want to carry 2 600-page books with me so I can start the second when I'm done with the first? One real book is not too bulky, but several together are.
When I finish reading a book, if I like it I can get the sequel immediately, anytime, day or night. This means no more buying the first 2 or 3 books of a series so I'll have the second book ready when I'm done with the first, only to find out that the first wasn't as great as I was hoping.
It lays flat on the table, so I can read it while I eat a hamburger or pizza or whatever other messy two-hand food I have. You can hold a book open with one hand and eat with the other- any serious bookworm is good at that- but an ebook reader is better for this. Like just about anything else, it's not all good and it's not all bad.
I don't mind the DRM, because the DRM uses my credit card number as a password to decode the book. That means that the book can go wherever I go and be used on any system I want, but I can't give it to other people without giving them my credit card number.
One thing an engineer should really do, though, is take a scientific approach: measure and count. Subjective feelings are unreliable- you don't really know how hungry you are.
Measure and count: to lose one pound of fat, you must burn 3500 calories. An average weight-maintenance diet is around 2000 calories/day (it depends on a lot of things and it's very personal- you should measure your own to figure out what it is). Measure all the food you eat- every crumb, every morsel. Measure your weight.
For my diet, I decided to take in 1600 calories/day on weekdays and 1200/day on weekends (because it's too hard to think if I'm extremely hungry). Whatever amount I went over my "budget" I burned off in a measurable way: on a treadmill or elliptical crosstraining machine at a gym. I ended up eating the same on the weekends as on weekdays, but I spent an hour and a half on the treadmill. So what? On the weekends I have time.
I can tell you the things I had to give up that I liked: soda and french fries. I didn't rule them out of my diet, but when it came time to do my daily budget, it was always two cans of soda or a ham sandwich, and I'm afraid I went for the ham sandwich. I ended up switching to diet soda, which tastes lousy, but it has no calories.
Oddly, fast food restaurants were good for me, because they always post their nutrition information online. A ten-piece order of Chicken McNuggets was very convenient and 510 calories. (It's a little too fatty to be healthful, but it is very easy to eat, and I could eat less fatty things for other meals to have a good daily average). A medium cheesesteak sandwich is around 700 calories- a fine, fine lunch for my 1600 calories/day. My colleagues chuckled at my cheesesteak and chicken nugget diet, but they chuckled less when I was thin and they weren't. :-)
As for low-fat diets: a good idea in general, but really, calories are king. Count them. Limit them. Don't cheat, even a little bit- what kind of scientist fudges his measurements?
There's a ton of good information online. Things like: don't lose more than a pound or two a week, because you'll lose muscle instead of fat, and be sure that you get at least some exercise every day so your muscles don't atrophy. That's another thing a good scientist should do: research the subject.
So my method isn't really office-related, but it's something geeks can relate to: if you want something real, you have to do it scientifically.
1. I can read ebooks while I eat a sandwich. Sounds minor, but really, I like to read while I eat lunch, and a PDA stays open and flat and changing the page is trivial.
2. I can read them in the dark- in the car at night (when somebody *else* is driving, of course) or in bed without bothering my wife.
3. I can fit several ebook novels in my pocket. This means that I can have a book with me wherever I go. I can read a book standing in line at McDonald's, or at the bank, or while I'm sitting in the car waiting for my wife to come out of work.
4. They're cheaper. You can get a lot of books, especially classic literature, for free, and even current, popular ebooks cost less, so I can read more for less money. On the downside, if you don't have a PDA already you have to buy some kind of a reader.
5. I can download the sequel to a book I like at any time. At bookstores I used to buy books 1 and 2 or 1, 2, and 3 of a series I like, but now I buy just the first one online, and if I like it I can download #2 and have it in less than a minute if I liked the first one.
6. I can get back-order or out-of-print books more easily. Regular bookstores nessarily have limited space. Buying paper books online requires me to wait until they arrive in the mail.
So while they're not perfect, I find that I read ebook novels more and more and paper ones less and less.
As for copy protection and book formats, you can buy a lot of ebooks with no protection at all in any of multiple formats. Check out http://www.baen.com or http://www.fictionwise.com for examples- that's where I buy many of my ebooks.
Oddly, they didn't advertise this service at all and I only found out about it after calling them and asking if they had such a service.
Charter seems to be fast and reliable. The only real problem I have with them is that their customer service stinks. They're available 24/7 to not give any meaningful answers to your questions.
My wife, however, doesn't like Netflix because she feels pressured to watch the movies as fast as possible to try to get her maximum money's worth out of it. When she sees the movies lying on the counter she feels like there's money going down the drain.
For the record, I don't really get my money's worth out of Netflix. Sometimes I watch the movies fast enough and sometimes I don't, but it gives me peace of mind not worrying about returning them.
The film selection overall is great. I kind of wish they had more selection on foreign language films, though. They have some, but it's not as extensive as I had hoped.
I subscribe to Emusic. One thing worth mentioning is that their FAQ says that they split the profits from the song 50/50 with "the label or artist", not directly with the artist, which I think is the way it has to be. Emusic is a decent site. I wish they had a lot more good, new music, but they have a pretty good selection of old music that is hard to buy elsewhere: a smattering of 80's (remember "The Land Down Under"?), Glenn Miller (in case you need an emergency "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" fix), and so on. They have some new music too, but not a whole lot. Still, IMHO they're worth $10/month for me to be able to listen to legal MP3's. I'm listening to the Meshell Ndegeocello song now. It's not bad.