Between OS 6 and OS X I *did* prefer NT. Back in '94 I had the option of another Mac (had a Plus and an SE previously) which would run MacOS or a PC that would run BSD or Windows or NextStep or... well, pretty much anything but MacOS. The PC was the better buy. MacOS wasn't improving and NT was like Windows that didn't completely suck; good stability and mostly a decent programming model. (Except for the UI APIs. And they went from bad to worse with MFC, gah.)
I got a Mac for my wife in 2001 as a purely defensive measure; I figured OSX based on UNIX could not possibly be as bad as Win9x. 10.1 had its teething pains, kept forgetting its printers for instance, but it was still a huge win over Win9x. I was running Linux at the time on the laptop, which was a great Java platform, and XP on the desktop for broad application support. When the Dell running Linux died I decided I liked my wife's Mac so much I'd get me one too.
Six months later and I was shocked that I was using the Mac almost 100% of the time and the high-zoot Windows PC was mostly idle. The Windows PC, despite the horsepower, was a lousy system for doing photo work and Java was still better done on Linux (never did get into Java on the Mac, it was always a step behind).
Since that point it's been steady improvement in stability and function on the Macs, and it's been amazing to me that every subsequent release of OS X has run better on the same hardware than the one before it. I compare that to Windows where I keep having to replace the whole damn PC every couple of years in order to keep up with exploding memory requirements... if not with the OS (Vista was stupid hungry for RAM for no apparent reason) then with the tools... VS.NET is an unbelievable pig (though it does at least show visible functional improvements with each release).
I never had to do UI programming on the Mac though, mostly I do server work and photography on the side. For photography the Mac is king in my book, although I don't do the heavy compositing that would benefit from a 64-bit photoshop like a previous writer.
We have McAffee mandated at work too. I have to turn of scanning on the development directories or system performance is more than halved; I'd never get anything done. It's still two to three times faster to do work on Linux, even running it in a VM, than on Windows... in C++ these days.
There is truth to this, but generally speaking I've found Apple's product quality -- likelihood of failing, durability of construction -- to be superior to Dell. Sometimes very, very superior. It's no accident that I buy Apple laptops instead of Dells these days, that's experience both ways. Even if the Apple is more expensive based on the spec sheet it certainly is not in terms of expected life and ongoing maintenance costs. Dell laptops were typically failing inside of two years; Apples pull five before I retire them (with two typical service issues usually in the first year), and seven to failure. When put in that perspective Apple is very inexpensive. I note that I have had similar experiences with Thinkpads, which are priced pretty much the same as Apple's stuff. Makes you think.
Even if the hardware is equal the software surely is not. The $130 price point quoted above is for an upgrade -- something Microsoft charges anywhere from $90 to $160 for on the desktop, depending on version. But that doesn't tell the whole story as Macs include a lot more software in-the-box, enough to make it useful without buying anything else. Once I get done buying antivirus ($50) and back-up ($80) software for my Windows PC I'm already eating well into the so-called Apple Tax... and that's before we talk about maintenance costs. Where Microsoft puts in applications that are clearly checkbox quality, Apple's bundled applications are often superb -- similar to things I have to pay hundreds of dollars for on Windows. All this adds up to significant value in the software package.
But none of this is or was a primary motivator for me. No, it was maintenance costs that drove me to try Apple again in 2001. Windows installations were requiring significant maintenance every 3 months, like clockwork, and total failures requiring from-scratch rebuilds were near universal within 18 months. I had hoped that XP would improve things, and it did from the standpoint of corrupted disks, but malware costs with XP have been out of sight.
OS X has been a dream come true in terms of maintenance -- there are glitches, but so far none have taken more than 90 minutes to solve, most take only a couple of minutes, and the sum total of such glitches over eight years I can count on my fingers (though it does take both hands). I have never had to rebuild a Mac from scratch! I am still amazed at that fact. Time savings in a single year completely swamp any extra money I pay to Apple for hardware.
Then there are the little things. Let's say that fifth year comes around and I buy a new laptop to replace one that's really old-in-the-tooth. Bringing the new one on-line requires connecting it to the old one during set-up and waiting for data to transfer between them. When you get done the new one is a newer, shinier version of the old one -- all applications and documents are transferred neat-as-you-please. The first time I did this my jaw dropped; the process typically takes many hours with Windows because it's effectively impossible to transfer application installations due to the registry.
It's things like that which will keep me buying Macs. Real thought and effort goes into making them work well long-term. Much longer hardware life coupled with much lower maintenance costs equals huge savings in my book.
YMMV, and probably does. I find Windows indispensable in some areas and still have plenty of Windows boxes around. Still, the Macs are workhorses that do their jobs and let me spend my time doing what I bought the computer for rather than just trying to keep it running. I'll take more of that, thanks.
Maybe Win7 will be an improvement. Vista sure wasn't, what a disappointment.
I've long said that for a lot of purposes the move to color screens in PDAs was a step backward. I used to get 20 hours or so of use out of the Palm 5000, Palm V, and Handspring Edge... my presumption is your Clie is about the same, since the hardware is about the same.
For some things (like games) the color screen made a big difference, but for basic tasks and e-book reading it cut battery life by two thirds or more. For e-book reading this took PDAs from being really practical to being marginal on trips.
As an aside, I don't see any reason why monochrome LCD e-book readers could not have been successful. They certainly had good enough image quality a long time ago and they were much more stingy with their power consumption. But all of the devices built with them sucked both in that it was hard to get books onto them and hard to get books for them. It took Amazon to beat the publishers into submission.
But now that the publishers are opening up I foresee a wide range of technologies being used for e-books, spanning wide price points and capability sets. We've only just seen the beginning.
Well, that's certainly better life than I ever saw from any LCD-based display device, even with the backlight turned way down... and I've used a hell of a lot of them. Usually "battery that fits their needs" is not even a possibility, you get what the device has in it, or what can fit in the shell.
Ahh, I misunderstood. This is certainly true, although recent reports say that they're going to provide books for non-Kindle devices in the near future too so it won't be a device lock-in.
On the one hand I think it's unfortunate that the publishers have been so reluctant to give content to other retailers, but on the other it's nice to see someone get a large catalog of e-books.
The one support issue I've had with my Kindle 1.0 was that its battery burned up at the 10 month point. It was reasonably cheap and very easy to replace, but 10 months was very quick for LiIon (even the Thinkpads typically get 12). (Friends and co-workers have not mentioned theirs dying, so maybe I got a bum battery.)
I don't really put much weight on the "no removable battery" since I have had no trouble replacing the "not removable" batteries on various PDAs and iPods. It might take a little effort but it's not the kind of thing you're doing every day.
No SD card slot is moot. From their claims it has 2G built-in, and that's a crapload of books, and it won't accidentally eject when you drop it.
You're never going to "break even" on a device like this--it doesn't appreciate in value and it doesn't offer any savings over what you might have spent on books, since eBooks are currently the same price as paper books.
That's not true of e-books purchased through Amazon. Typically the savings versus paper are 20-40%, but I've had current releases where I saved 60% versus what paper would have cost (not cover price, actual price). I broke even on the device in less than 7 months; I had predicted 10 months when I bought it.
What you say is still true of most books purchased through most (maybe all) other e-book retailers. Amazon had the clout to force discounts, the (much!) smaller retailers didn't.
It's like the weather; if you don't like it, wait a little while.
Approximately $200 of the cost of every Kindle is the display. Nobody expects it to remain that expensive for long, but for now that really sets a minimum for the price of the readers. Sony's $269 reader is pushing the margin really hard.
I was a little surprised that the price didn't drop to about $300 with this new unit (the Oprah $50 discount made the price $309 for a couple of weeks), but with a backlog a mile long and more desire for features than lower prices there's no reason for them to do it yet. I would expect it to fall to that point before next Christmas season, though, and continue to fall with every passing year... just like the iPod did.
We will see bare-bones e-book readers in the very near future, possibly this year but certainly next, the newspapers are looking seriously at giving away readers with subscriptions.
The first successful e-book reader shipped only 14 months ago. It is not usually until the 3 year point that the electronics for a new gadget get cheap enough to go mass market. Come back in another year and a half to two years and see how much has changed.
Hah, it's not just you. Over the years my wife, daughter and I have accumulated something like 5,000 paper books... so many that it's difficult to even wade through them to find the stuff we don't want anymore to donate or toss. (We do a few boxes a season. We accumulate them much faster than that.) They take up a lot of space.
The price savings on new books alone were enough to pay for both 1.0 and 2.0 versions of Kindles, and in cases where I loved the book enough to want one on my bookshelf (only a few!) I bought it again. If the book is that good they deserve more money anyway.
The one thing that I am somewhat depressed about is that this model is going to kill retail bookstores. I like them a lot, but there will be little chance of them surviving as most publishing goes electronic (and it will, the economics are just too good).
One thing the "can't lend my book" people ignore is that there are some benefits: If we have two Kindles, my wife and I can read the same book simultaneously with only one purchase, no waiting. We don't yet have Kindles for everyone in the family but I can see it coming... and one of my co-workers already does this on a regular basis.
One thing that Amazon hasn't done anything about is "gifted" books. My wife can't buy me an e-book in advance for my birthday; it'll show up on my account and I'll know it right away. But hey, that's just software, it will get figured out eventually.
Most of the books on my Kindle are eReader format, a few Mobipocket. I never bought any in Microsoft Reader or Sony EReader format, neither of which supported any of the devices I've ever tried to read an e-book on.
The Secure eReader books I bought did not come over, which was a fair number (forty? fifty?). Maybe they'll be supported sometime in the future, one way or another, but I could strip the DRM if I wanted. That's the great thing about electronic formats: They are so malleable.
The one that most people complain about that's missing on the Kindle is PDF. You can even read some of those by feeding it through a converter, although I have had poor luck with such conversions. To be frank, though, I'd be just as happy to see PDF die -- it really sucks everywhere except printed output, and I print very little these days. Give me a format that is designed to be re-flowed to fit the output device....
I have no idea where you got the idea that the price of an e-book on the Kindle was comparable to a hardcover copy. That is not the case; it's not even close.
Typical hardcover prices these days, bought at discount, are $15-20. Cover prices are $22-28 but I couldn't tell you when I last paid full retail.
The same books on the Kindle are usually $10. To me that is a savings of 30-50% over what I would pay for discount hardcover -- not "comparable" at all.
Moreover, most books aren't anywhere near that expensive. If it's not a best-seller or recent release it is probably priced at $4-7, which is cheaper than a new paperback ($8-10 these days). And there are numerous places to get books entirely for free, something that is not so easy with paper.
I have not seen any case where the Kindle book was priced higher than the paper version, or even at the same price. That was a big change from before the Kindle shipped: What you say was certainly the case with Peanut Press, ereader.com, and fictionwise.com -- and is still the case for many books in the Sony bookstore -- due to publisher demands. Amazon had the power to break that practice, and they did.
My average purchase price of books on the Kindle is around $6. This compares to my average paper book purchase through Amazon at $10, and my average retail book purchase of close to $15 (I buy more hardcovers at retail stores).
Over the last 14 months that has resulted in very substantial savings -- enough to pay for both the original Kindle 1.0 in less than 7 months (I expected 10) and the new 2.0 I just ordered too (the old one goes to my daughter).
I think the Kindle is still priced much too high for mass-market appeal, but it's easy to see that this will not be the case for more than a few more years. Book prices, though, are not what's going to hold it back.
All of the non-DRMed books I've purchased through Fictionwise, and even a number of DRMed ones, loaded fine on my Kindle. I just dragged-and-dropped them onto it via a USB connection. (Secure eReader format documents didn't make it.)
So in this way it's no worse than the Sony devices, and with wireless delivery and lower book prices Amazon wins pretty big in both convenience and long-term cost.
I do like the PRS-700's touchscreen interface quite a bit, except for their page-turning buttons which don't seem well placed, and the build quality and form factor are terrific. Unfortunately the added layer of the touchscreen increases glare noticeably and Sony should just shoot all of the people working on their sync software and start from scratch, they are idiots who need removal from the gene pool lest they go off and do more damage to the software industry. That quality level wasn't even good in a 1.0 software product and they're on generation three!
You mention not being able to purchase an eBook on Amazon without a Kindle but I am not seeing why you'd want to. The Amazon-purchased books are locked to the device -- no device, nothing to lock to, right? What's the point of selling them to you then? If you do have a device it's certainly easy enough to get it to local storage either via downloading it directly from amazon.com or by having it sent to the Kindle and then dragging it off via USB. I have complete local back-ups of everything I bought from Amazon.
I have used a wide variety of PDAs as e-book readers, and they have their strengths, but they fail big both in terms of long reading periods (eyestrain!) and especially battery life.
I haven't tried the Dell specifically but similar devices pull 4-6 hours of read time -- not a week of significant use by any stretch of the imagination. WinCE-type PDAs like that Dell are almost always on the low end of that; PalmOS devices and iPod touches on the high end. That is just not good enough for extended reading periods (like flying coast-to-coast). A Kindle 1.0, even with the EvDO wireless turned on, pulls 46 hours straight (heavy reading, never turned off)... and if you turn EvDO off it runs for six days. This is a minimum of seven times better battery life, and as much as twenty-four times better... assuming you never turn it off. The Kindle 2.0 does better (although I am skeptical of Amazon's "4 days" and "two weeks" claims; 25% better would be more like "2.5 days" and "8 days").
That's the difference between having a book for your whole week-long backpacking trip and having a dead battery before you even hit the trail. On long trips I used to carry paper books with me in addition to my PDA because the battery surely would fail long before I got to a charger -- usually while sitting in the airport waiting for the 2nd leg of my flight. With a Kindle I don't have to even take a charger.
There are certainly deficiencies: I would like to see color (possibly late 2010, almost certainly by mid-2011); I would like more user-interface improvements; I would like more document formats. But extended battery life, a fantastic screen for extended reading, and that EvDO connection for buying a book almost anywhere are really big wins.
This is not true. I have around 80 books purchased through Fictionwise, most long before the Kindle even existed, that display just fine on the Kindle.
I also have free books from various sources.
Not all is happy and free, I have a number of DRMed books purchased from other sources that I can't read on the Kindle (primarily eReader format), and of course books purchased through Amazon are only readable on the Kindle today (although reports are that this won't be the case much longer), but it's not the case that you're locked to Amazon's format or Amazon as a supplier if you're using a Kindle.
He's talking about charging up the ship to GeV potentials. I envision severe side-effects of this practice, particularly with electronic control equipment. (The words that popped into my head were "play holy havoc.")
Well, given how poorly that Windows has historically handled SMP one would think that the news is that maybe it's not as bad as we all thought. But this shouldn't be news, we've known for a long time that Microsoft has been gradually improving SMP performance.
My experience with Windows is that, in general, NT really didn't scale much beyond 2 CPUs, and 2000/XP leveled off around 4, and Vista's improvements become marginal by 8 -- except in cases where you try pretty hard to avoid OS interactions.
Maybe it's just me but I think the litmus test isn't that Windows is improving in this area, but how well it does against the competition (what you might call "general state of the art"). And it's here that I think Windows' weaknesses show: Generally they haven't done very well against players like Sun (which to me is amusing since Sun had to rework a truly awful codebase to get to where they are today, and they did it in a lot less time than Microsoft) and these days they're not even doing that well against Linux. The latter is pretty surprising since they had both a lot more resources and a heck of a head start over the free software folk. It seems clear that the multiple-competing-approaches development paradigm the FOSS folk use produces excellent results over the long term. Kind of like natural evolution.
As an aside, I had to laugh at the "whopping 430 concurrent execution threads." That's not really pushing thathard, even if it's a whole lot more than most desktop users are going to push it.
Anyway what I take out of the article is that Win7 will be able to effectively utilize the core counts we expect to be in wide use over the next five years or so. Good news, if not entirely unexpected by anyone who was paying close attention to Windows performance previously.
Once the cards got into the multi-GB range I stopped needing to swap between them, excepting on my DSLR where I want a back-up card (and frames are 8MB apiece, so they eat up storage pretty quickly, although it's rare to fill a 4G card in a single shoot).
So there's really nothing to manage. Leave the card in the device. Occasionally take it out, copy data to a computer, and use that for archive. Empty card and put it back in the device.
The idea of managing lots of them seems to presume that the cards are good for long-term storage, which they're not. They degrade faster than any other long-term storage device. If you're trusting them for long periods you should reconsider.
Regarding figuring out whose is whose, I write on their label with a marker. My last name and the date I put it in service. The date is important: I find that many of the cards start to have trouble in the 2-3 year range. I like to replace them every couple of years. Having said that I do have 4+ year old cards still in service, just not in anything I deem important.
I don't get the "they don't fit if you put labels on them" comment I saw earlier; excepting microSD cards all of the SD and CF cards I've ever purchased came with a label already on it, and usually they have a spot to write on too.
This just doesn't seem like a real problem to me these days. It's not like the days when a 32MB card was big....
On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off.
I'm not sure he was so far off. Sure, personal computers don't use it, but have you gone through a phone interface recently? It's not natural language but I've used some of them that are pretty free-form.
Well you certainly have me beat in volume, I have maybe 200 e-books spread across the various technologies. We have thousands (and thousands) of paper books in the house so I am with you on the dead tree thing... but my wife is a librarian and she loves paper.
I wonder what will happen when I hand her the old Kindle after v2.0 ships. Or maybe my 8 year old daughter will get it, she really likes it, although I'm more than a little wary of giving her anything with an open credit card attached to it. Amazon really needs to fix that.
'95 seems unlikely, the first Palm came out in 1996 and the WinCE devices debuted in 1997 (I got to see a wire-wrapped version in 1996).
I bought a Palm 1000 in spring of 1997 (upgraded a year or so later to a 5000). I can't verify it but I believe the Peanut Reader came out in 1998; that's certainly when I got it. I don't recall when e-books came to WinCE but it was certainly later than that since it was a couple of years before the first successful WinCE palmtop.
Back then PeanutPress was publishing content from unknown authors (anyone else remember Sister?); it wasn't until 1999 that they started getting much in the way of known authors, aside from classics that were out of copyright, and only from small publishers. As a result I bought very little from them until 1999.
Like you I was often asked how I can read stuff on a screen that small but it wasn't that bad; mostly the irritation was changing pages every few seconds. Still, it was nice to be able to carry 3 or 4 books around at a time and I was taking the bus a lot so the form factor was great.
I think color was a big step backward for PDAs as e-book readers, it killed battery life. I could read for about 20 hours on a Palm 5000 before needing to switch batteries; a Palm V was similar (though of course you couldn't switch batteries). But my Clie with its gorgeous color screen could manage maybe 5 if I kept the backlight fairly dim, and the Palm T|X wasn't any better although it was a breakthrough in that I could load my entire library at once. The iPod touch gets 6 or 7 hours on a charge. This is enough to give me something to read in a pinch but isn't enough to get across the country before the battery dies. The Kindle is the first device since the Palm V that I've owned that could pull that off... and it's way more readable than any palmtop I've ever seen.
I hadn't heard about Plastic Logic but they're going to have similar problems to Sony: Specifically a much smaller library than the Kindle and higher prices to boot. Being the world's largest bookseller gives Amazon quite an edge in this market.
In my mind the old monochrome LCD technology was sufficient for e-books, and cheap to boot, but who was going to buy those things when there were almost no books available? The Kindle shipped with almost five times as many books available as the next largest e-book retailer (Fictionwise, I believe) and by far the easiest purchase-and-load system of anything out there (although eReader on the iPod/iPhone is pretty good at this point).
I welcome the competition in any case. The devices will get better and cheaper very fast; I expect that by 2011 we'll be seeing readers bundled with the purchase of several books and we'll probably see them bundled with an electronic edition newspaper subscription in 2010 (though maybe not in the U.S.). By 2015 they will be everywhere and much that is in paperback now will not be available in paper at all.
It will be great fun to watch this happen, as a gadget-lover. I can only hope that boutique book printing also takes off so I can continue to get the books I like the most in paper too.
It took me less than an hour to learn to handle it without accidentally turning buttons. It's a lot easier if you have the cover on it, that gives you plenty of edges to hold onto. (As an aside, another poor design is the cover attachment system; the aftermarket guys all use four-corners systems that work well.)
I don't really get the "too heavy" comment. It's lighter than a paperback. If anything I'd like them to build it out of metal for better durability despite the added weight -- like Sony does -- although the thing has withstood a year of constant use and a lot of falls without case cracks or other damage so it's hard to complain.
Having said all that I'm looking forward to v2.0 which looks like it will fix several ergonomic issues. I've read enough (discounted) books to have saved more than enough money to justify the new device.
I wonder if you ever actually used a Kindle. In pictures it looks clunky, in reality it's pretty sleek. I have my list of complaints about it but clunky isn't one of them. Button design is; it's too easy to turn pages by accident. You learn to deal with it but a little better design would make a big difference in day-to-day use. I note that I'm even less fond of Sony's design which is less prone to accident but is much more annoying when you're actually reading.
These things are nits though. The win with the Kindle is two-fold: Automatic delivery and a stellar screen. I'll talk about this more in a minute, first a diversion.
Those "just use an iPhone" people are nuts, I have an iPod touch (think iPhone without the AT&T contract) and while it's by far the best handheld web device out there it's actually a poorer reading device than was my old Palm for a variety of reasons (like no hard buttons for flipping pages, and it's useless if you're wearing gloves, and in its iPhone incarnation its battery life is not so hot). I use it to read books but only if nothing else is available: The type is microscopically small... and God Help You if it's sunny.
The eInk screen on the Kindle is absolutely terrific, nothing at all like an LCD. If you haven't seen one yet you just cannot possibly form a valid opinion until you do. It's extremely sharp and works better and better the brighter the environment (and, let's face it, most environments people are in are fairly bright). You can hold it at weird angles (like paper) and it's still perfectly readable. If the Kindle isn't the right device it's pretty darn close, especially since it needs recharging so seldom (every couple of days if you leave the wireless on and run it constantly, a week or so if you run it constantly without the wireless). I never turn it off. Ever. It's reasonable to take the thing on a week long vacation and leave the charger at home; my touch can't even make it across the country, to say nothing of an iPhone with its greater power requirements and therefore shorter life.
Getting to electronic versus print editions, I subscribe to a few e-versions of print publications and by and large they are not complete editions by any stretch of the imagination. They lack the ads, which could be considered a win or not depending on your perspective, but they are usually distilled down to someone's idea of the more significant content. I've only subscribed to three different dailies on the Kindle -- San Jose Mercury News, New York Times, and Boston Globe -- but there were constants across all of them. Much Sunday edition content is missing entirely from The Globe, for instance, including all of the Auto and Real Estate sections. Worse, many stories only show up as a headline so brief that it's useless, with no peek at the content, making you dig into every link to see if it's interesting. Between limited content, poor formatting, and extremely limited photographic content the cost of the e-editions on the Kindle are sometimes questionable.
Still, it's very convenient to have it download to the device automatically every day... and searchable as well! I usually keep a few weeks worth of papers on the device so I can look things up.
Regarding the Kindle as a reading system, I don't believe it's the ideal device -- lack of color in particular is crushing when it comes to displaying ads (which are really needed to make news media supportable long-term) and its display of photographs is reminiscent of 19th century print. It needs to do better. Even so it is a vastly better reading experience than a handheld, laptop, or desktop when you're reading more than snippets and the wireless delivery system is brilliant. Given that it was Amazon's first try it is truly remarkable as-is.
For reading books, a Kindle is a no-brainer. It exceeds paper in many ways and really only falls down if you're hooked on the tactile nature of paper or if you need to leaf through the pages qu
It makes me laugh to hear about Stroustrup complaining about which languages kids are learning to use. Look at what a mess C++ made... and it's not like they didn't know during its formative years just how messed up it was.
I'm of the opinion that the language is almost immaterial. Within a few semesters a student should be exposed to multiple languages anyway, so grinding that axe is missing the point entirely. Team issues, though... I'll get to that in a minute.
It's not just the quality of CS grads and it has nothing to do with what language they're taught. The quality of grads in general is usually pretty low. The fact that it hasn't improved despite generations of languages isn't surprising: Basic business training is not nearly as difficult as CS, and we have millenia of experience in that domain, and yet those guys come out pretty damn green too.
I think this is largely because the teaching paradigm is almost entirely memorize-and-regurgitate. This is a fine way to teach multiplication tables but it's not very applicable to most real-world skills. Generally speaking it's far more valuable to know where to find information than to have memorized the information itself; this not only expands your ultimate capabilities, it makes you less error prone. Yet when was the last time you saw information retrieval as a college-level course? The only time I have seen that was when my wife was working on her masters in library science.
The value of looking things up is taught in (physical) engineering (mis-remembering physical constants makes bridges fall down) but it seems wholly ignored in most college-level disciplines. I credit Google for improving the tendency for people to look things up rather than memorizing them, kind of contrary to what you might have read in The Atlantic last summer. Information retrieval is an incredibly valuable skill. It's why skilled programmers used to have bookshelves of reference material. (In some respects I miss that, it was always fun to guess how a person thought by looking at the books he had on his shelf.)
As Stroustrup says this problem is compounded by the fact that students, even at the college level, are treated as singletons. How many jobs have you held where you were the only one doing everything? I've been there and done that, but most of the time we work in teams, and it's quite rare to find courses teaching people how to work together effectively as teams.
I'm not talking about just splitting something up into tasks done by multiple people, but rather the concept of layered skills on a team: mentoring or apprenticeship.
There is a reason why trade skills have been taught using apprenticeship for millennia (it's not just a way of limiting the influx of competition). It's because learning your trade solving real problems working with people who know how to do that kind of thing is far more enlightening that trying to bend your mind around abstract examples written on a white board sitting in a room with three hundred other people.
Brooks' team design from The Mythical Man-Month has (mostly) withstood the test of time; it should be something that is put in practice in the classroom, not just discussed for a few days in the abstract.
High-quality education needs both hands-on in a team and white-board theory! And yet it is beyond rare to see students of various levels (e.g. grad students and freshmen) mixed up on a classroom project. Instead we have them build toys, individually. They puzzle through building toys then we kick them out into the workaday world having never done anything more complicated than that.
The whole of our educational system is designed incorrectly, segmented and stepped rather than mixing and a continuum. It puts far too much load on teachers because you just can't have much one-on-one time when you're the only one the students can rely on; in a one-room school, for instance, it was common to have more-ski
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I got a Mac for my wife in 2001 as a purely defensive measure; I figured OSX based on UNIX could not possibly be as bad as Win9x. 10.1 had its teething pains, kept forgetting its printers for instance, but it was still a huge win over Win9x. I was running Linux at the time on the laptop, which was a great Java platform, and XP on the desktop for broad application support. When the Dell running Linux died I decided I liked my wife's Mac so much I'd get me one too.
Six months later and I was shocked that I was using the Mac almost 100% of the time and the high-zoot Windows PC was mostly idle. The Windows PC, despite the horsepower, was a lousy system for doing photo work and Java was still better done on Linux (never did get into Java on the Mac, it was always a step behind).
Since that point it's been steady improvement in stability and function on the Macs, and it's been amazing to me that every subsequent release of OS X has run better on the same hardware than the one before it. I compare that to Windows where I keep having to replace the whole damn PC every couple of years in order to keep up with exploding memory requirements ... if not with the OS (Vista was stupid hungry for RAM for no apparent reason) then with the tools ... VS.NET is an unbelievable pig (though it does at least show visible functional improvements with each release).
I never had to do UI programming on the Mac though, mostly I do server work and photography on the side. For photography the Mac is king in my book, although I don't do the heavy compositing that would benefit from a 64-bit photoshop like a previous writer.
We have McAffee mandated at work too. I have to turn of scanning on the development directories or system performance is more than halved; I'd never get anything done. It's still two to three times faster to do work on Linux, even running it in a VM, than on Windows ... in C++ these days.
Even if the hardware is equal the software surely is not. The $130 price point quoted above is for an upgrade -- something Microsoft charges anywhere from $90 to $160 for on the desktop, depending on version. But that doesn't tell the whole story as Macs include a lot more software in-the-box, enough to make it useful without buying anything else. Once I get done buying antivirus ($50) and back-up ($80) software for my Windows PC I'm already eating well into the so-called Apple Tax ... and that's before we talk about maintenance costs. Where Microsoft puts in applications that are clearly checkbox quality, Apple's bundled applications are often superb -- similar to things I have to pay hundreds of dollars for on Windows. All this adds up to significant value in the software package.
But none of this is or was a primary motivator for me. No, it was maintenance costs that drove me to try Apple again in 2001. Windows installations were requiring significant maintenance every 3 months, like clockwork, and total failures requiring from-scratch rebuilds were near universal within 18 months. I had hoped that XP would improve things, and it did from the standpoint of corrupted disks, but malware costs with XP have been out of sight.
OS X has been a dream come true in terms of maintenance -- there are glitches, but so far none have taken more than 90 minutes to solve, most take only a couple of minutes, and the sum total of such glitches over eight years I can count on my fingers (though it does take both hands). I have never had to rebuild a Mac from scratch! I am still amazed at that fact. Time savings in a single year completely swamp any extra money I pay to Apple for hardware.
Then there are the little things. Let's say that fifth year comes around and I buy a new laptop to replace one that's really old-in-the-tooth. Bringing the new one on-line requires connecting it to the old one during set-up and waiting for data to transfer between them. When you get done the new one is a newer, shinier version of the old one -- all applications and documents are transferred neat-as-you-please. The first time I did this my jaw dropped; the process typically takes many hours with Windows because it's effectively impossible to transfer application installations due to the registry.
It's things like that which will keep me buying Macs. Real thought and effort goes into making them work well long-term. Much longer hardware life coupled with much lower maintenance costs equals huge savings in my book.
YMMV, and probably does. I find Windows indispensable in some areas and still have plenty of Windows boxes around. Still, the Macs are workhorses that do their jobs and let me spend my time doing what I bought the computer for rather than just trying to keep it running. I'll take more of that, thanks.
Maybe Win7 will be an improvement. Vista sure wasn't, what a disappointment.
For some things (like games) the color screen made a big difference, but for basic tasks and e-book reading it cut battery life by two thirds or more. For e-book reading this took PDAs from being really practical to being marginal on trips.
As an aside, I don't see any reason why monochrome LCD e-book readers could not have been successful. They certainly had good enough image quality a long time ago and they were much more stingy with their power consumption. But all of the devices built with them sucked both in that it was hard to get books onto them and hard to get books for them. It took Amazon to beat the publishers into submission.
But now that the publishers are opening up I foresee a wide range of technologies being used for e-books, spanning wide price points and capability sets. We've only just seen the beginning.
Well, that's certainly better life than I ever saw from any LCD-based display device, even with the backlight turned way down ... and I've used a hell of a lot of them. Usually "battery that fits their needs" is not even a possibility, you get what the device has in it, or what can fit in the shell.
On the one hand I think it's unfortunate that the publishers have been so reluctant to give content to other retailers, but on the other it's nice to see someone get a large catalog of e-books.
I don't really put much weight on the "no removable battery" since I have had no trouble replacing the "not removable" batteries on various PDAs and iPods. It might take a little effort but it's not the kind of thing you're doing every day.
No SD card slot is moot. From their claims it has 2G built-in, and that's a crapload of books, and it won't accidentally eject when you drop it.
They should come down over time, but for now that's a big limiting factor in dropping the price.
That's not true of e-books purchased through Amazon. Typically the savings versus paper are 20-40%, but I've had current releases where I saved 60% versus what paper would have cost (not cover price, actual price). I broke even on the device in less than 7 months; I had predicted 10 months when I bought it.
What you say is still true of most books purchased through most (maybe all) other e-book retailers. Amazon had the clout to force discounts, the (much!) smaller retailers didn't.
Approximately $200 of the cost of every Kindle is the display. Nobody expects it to remain that expensive for long, but for now that really sets a minimum for the price of the readers. Sony's $269 reader is pushing the margin really hard.
I was a little surprised that the price didn't drop to about $300 with this new unit (the Oprah $50 discount made the price $309 for a couple of weeks), but with a backlog a mile long and more desire for features than lower prices there's no reason for them to do it yet. I would expect it to fall to that point before next Christmas season, though, and continue to fall with every passing year ... just like the iPod did.
We will see bare-bones e-book readers in the very near future, possibly this year but certainly next, the newspapers are looking seriously at giving away readers with subscriptions.
The first successful e-book reader shipped only 14 months ago. It is not usually until the 3 year point that the electronics for a new gadget get cheap enough to go mass market. Come back in another year and a half to two years and see how much has changed.
The price savings on new books alone were enough to pay for both 1.0 and 2.0 versions of Kindles, and in cases where I loved the book enough to want one on my bookshelf (only a few!) I bought it again. If the book is that good they deserve more money anyway.
The one thing that I am somewhat depressed about is that this model is going to kill retail bookstores. I like them a lot, but there will be little chance of them surviving as most publishing goes electronic (and it will, the economics are just too good).
One thing the "can't lend my book" people ignore is that there are some benefits: If we have two Kindles, my wife and I can read the same book simultaneously with only one purchase, no waiting. We don't yet have Kindles for everyone in the family but I can see it coming ... and one of my co-workers already does this on a regular basis.
One thing that Amazon hasn't done anything about is "gifted" books. My wife can't buy me an e-book in advance for my birthday; it'll show up on my account and I'll know it right away. But hey, that's just software, it will get figured out eventually.
The Secure eReader books I bought did not come over, which was a fair number (forty? fifty?). Maybe they'll be supported sometime in the future, one way or another, but I could strip the DRM if I wanted. That's the great thing about electronic formats: They are so malleable.
The one that most people complain about that's missing on the Kindle is PDF. You can even read some of those by feeding it through a converter, although I have had poor luck with such conversions. To be frank, though, I'd be just as happy to see PDF die -- it really sucks everywhere except printed output, and I print very little these days. Give me a format that is designed to be re-flowed to fit the output device....
Typical hardcover prices these days, bought at discount, are $15-20. Cover prices are $22-28 but I couldn't tell you when I last paid full retail.
The same books on the Kindle are usually $10. To me that is a savings of 30-50% over what I would pay for discount hardcover -- not "comparable" at all.
Moreover, most books aren't anywhere near that expensive. If it's not a best-seller or recent release it is probably priced at $4-7, which is cheaper than a new paperback ($8-10 these days). And there are numerous places to get books entirely for free, something that is not so easy with paper.
I have not seen any case where the Kindle book was priced higher than the paper version, or even at the same price. That was a big change from before the Kindle shipped: What you say was certainly the case with Peanut Press, ereader.com, and fictionwise.com -- and is still the case for many books in the Sony bookstore -- due to publisher demands. Amazon had the power to break that practice, and they did.
My average purchase price of books on the Kindle is around $6. This compares to my average paper book purchase through Amazon at $10, and my average retail book purchase of close to $15 (I buy more hardcovers at retail stores).
Over the last 14 months that has resulted in very substantial savings -- enough to pay for both the original Kindle 1.0 in less than 7 months (I expected 10) and the new 2.0 I just ordered too (the old one goes to my daughter).
I think the Kindle is still priced much too high for mass-market appeal, but it's easy to see that this will not be the case for more than a few more years. Book prices, though, are not what's going to hold it back.
So in this way it's no worse than the Sony devices, and with wireless delivery and lower book prices Amazon wins pretty big in both convenience and long-term cost.
I do like the PRS-700's touchscreen interface quite a bit, except for their page-turning buttons which don't seem well placed, and the build quality and form factor are terrific. Unfortunately the added layer of the touchscreen increases glare noticeably and Sony should just shoot all of the people working on their sync software and start from scratch, they are idiots who need removal from the gene pool lest they go off and do more damage to the software industry. That quality level wasn't even good in a 1.0 software product and they're on generation three!
You mention not being able to purchase an eBook on Amazon without a Kindle but I am not seeing why you'd want to. The Amazon-purchased books are locked to the device -- no device, nothing to lock to, right? What's the point of selling them to you then? If you do have a device it's certainly easy enough to get it to local storage either via downloading it directly from amazon.com or by having it sent to the Kindle and then dragging it off via USB. I have complete local back-ups of everything I bought from Amazon.
I haven't tried the Dell specifically but similar devices pull 4-6 hours of read time -- not a week of significant use by any stretch of the imagination. WinCE-type PDAs like that Dell are almost always on the low end of that; PalmOS devices and iPod touches on the high end. That is just not good enough for extended reading periods (like flying coast-to-coast). A Kindle 1.0, even with the EvDO wireless turned on, pulls 46 hours straight (heavy reading, never turned off) ... and if you turn EvDO off it runs for six days. This is a minimum of seven times better battery life, and as much as twenty-four times better ... assuming you never turn it off. The Kindle 2.0 does better (although I am skeptical of Amazon's "4 days" and "two weeks" claims; 25% better would be more like "2.5 days" and "8 days").
That's the difference between having a book for your whole week-long backpacking trip and having a dead battery before you even hit the trail. On long trips I used to carry paper books with me in addition to my PDA because the battery surely would fail long before I got to a charger -- usually while sitting in the airport waiting for the 2nd leg of my flight. With a Kindle I don't have to even take a charger.
There are certainly deficiencies: I would like to see color (possibly late 2010, almost certainly by mid-2011); I would like more user-interface improvements; I would like more document formats. But extended battery life, a fantastic screen for extended reading, and that EvDO connection for buying a book almost anywhere are really big wins.
I also have free books from various sources.
Not all is happy and free, I have a number of DRMed books purchased from other sources that I can't read on the Kindle (primarily eReader format), and of course books purchased through Amazon are only readable on the Kindle today (although reports are that this won't be the case much longer), but it's not the case that you're locked to Amazon's format or Amazon as a supplier if you're using a Kindle.
He's talking about charging up the ship to GeV potentials. I envision severe side-effects of this practice, particularly with electronic control equipment. (The words that popped into my head were "play holy havoc.")
My experience with Windows is that, in general, NT really didn't scale much beyond 2 CPUs, and 2000/XP leveled off around 4, and Vista's improvements become marginal by 8 -- except in cases where you try pretty hard to avoid OS interactions.
Maybe it's just me but I think the litmus test isn't that Windows is improving in this area, but how well it does against the competition (what you might call "general state of the art"). And it's here that I think Windows' weaknesses show: Generally they haven't done very well against players like Sun (which to me is amusing since Sun had to rework a truly awful codebase to get to where they are today, and they did it in a lot less time than Microsoft) and these days they're not even doing that well against Linux. The latter is pretty surprising since they had both a lot more resources and a heck of a head start over the free software folk. It seems clear that the multiple-competing-approaches development paradigm the FOSS folk use produces excellent results over the long term. Kind of like natural evolution.
As an aside, I had to laugh at the "whopping 430 concurrent execution threads." That's not really pushing thathard, even if it's a whole lot more than most desktop users are going to push it.
Anyway what I take out of the article is that Win7 will be able to effectively utilize the core counts we expect to be in wide use over the next five years or so. Good news, if not entirely unexpected by anyone who was paying close attention to Windows performance previously.
Once the cards got into the multi-GB range I stopped needing to swap between them, excepting on my DSLR where I want a back-up card (and frames are 8MB apiece, so they eat up storage pretty quickly, although it's rare to fill a 4G card in a single shoot).
So there's really nothing to manage. Leave the card in the device. Occasionally take it out, copy data to a computer, and use that for archive. Empty card and put it back in the device.
The idea of managing lots of them seems to presume that the cards are good for long-term storage, which they're not. They degrade faster than any other long-term storage device. If you're trusting them for long periods you should reconsider.
Regarding figuring out whose is whose, I write on their label with a marker. My last name and the date I put it in service. The date is important: I find that many of the cards start to have trouble in the 2-3 year range. I like to replace them every couple of years. Having said that I do have 4+ year old cards still in service, just not in anything I deem important.
I don't get the "they don't fit if you put labels on them" comment I saw earlier; excepting microSD cards all of the SD and CF cards I've ever purchased came with a label already on it, and usually they have a spot to write on too.
This just doesn't seem like a real problem to me these days. It's not like the days when a 32MB card was big....
Steel Is Real.
I'm not sure he was so far off. Sure, personal computers don't use it, but have you gone through a phone interface recently? It's not natural language but I've used some of them that are pretty free-form.
I wonder what will happen when I hand her the old Kindle after v2.0 ships. Or maybe my 8 year old daughter will get it, she really likes it, although I'm more than a little wary of giving her anything with an open credit card attached to it. Amazon really needs to fix that.
I bought a Palm 1000 in spring of 1997 (upgraded a year or so later to a 5000). I can't verify it but I believe the Peanut Reader came out in 1998; that's certainly when I got it. I don't recall when e-books came to WinCE but it was certainly later than that since it was a couple of years before the first successful WinCE palmtop.
Back then PeanutPress was publishing content from unknown authors (anyone else remember Sister?); it wasn't until 1999 that they started getting much in the way of known authors, aside from classics that were out of copyright, and only from small publishers. As a result I bought very little from them until 1999.
Like you I was often asked how I can read stuff on a screen that small but it wasn't that bad; mostly the irritation was changing pages every few seconds. Still, it was nice to be able to carry 3 or 4 books around at a time and I was taking the bus a lot so the form factor was great.
I think color was a big step backward for PDAs as e-book readers, it killed battery life. I could read for about 20 hours on a Palm 5000 before needing to switch batteries; a Palm V was similar (though of course you couldn't switch batteries). But my Clie with its gorgeous color screen could manage maybe 5 if I kept the backlight fairly dim, and the Palm T|X wasn't any better although it was a breakthrough in that I could load my entire library at once. The iPod touch gets 6 or 7 hours on a charge. This is enough to give me something to read in a pinch but isn't enough to get across the country before the battery dies. The Kindle is the first device since the Palm V that I've owned that could pull that off ... and it's way more readable than any palmtop I've ever seen.
I hadn't heard about Plastic Logic but they're going to have similar problems to Sony: Specifically a much smaller library than the Kindle and higher prices to boot. Being the world's largest bookseller gives Amazon quite an edge in this market.
In my mind the old monochrome LCD technology was sufficient for e-books, and cheap to boot, but who was going to buy those things when there were almost no books available? The Kindle shipped with almost five times as many books available as the next largest e-book retailer (Fictionwise, I believe) and by far the easiest purchase-and-load system of anything out there (although eReader on the iPod/iPhone is pretty good at this point).
I welcome the competition in any case. The devices will get better and cheaper very fast; I expect that by 2011 we'll be seeing readers bundled with the purchase of several books and we'll probably see them bundled with an electronic edition newspaper subscription in 2010 (though maybe not in the U.S.). By 2015 they will be everywhere and much that is in paperback now will not be available in paper at all.
It will be great fun to watch this happen, as a gadget-lover. I can only hope that boutique book printing also takes off so I can continue to get the books I like the most in paper too.
I don't really get the "too heavy" comment. It's lighter than a paperback. If anything I'd like them to build it out of metal for better durability despite the added weight -- like Sony does -- although the thing has withstood a year of constant use and a lot of falls without case cracks or other damage so it's hard to complain.
Having said all that I'm looking forward to v2.0 which looks like it will fix several ergonomic issues. I've read enough (discounted) books to have saved more than enough money to justify the new device.
These things are nits though. The win with the Kindle is two-fold: Automatic delivery and a stellar screen. I'll talk about this more in a minute, first a diversion.
Those "just use an iPhone" people are nuts, I have an iPod touch (think iPhone without the AT&T contract) and while it's by far the best handheld web device out there it's actually a poorer reading device than was my old Palm for a variety of reasons (like no hard buttons for flipping pages, and it's useless if you're wearing gloves, and in its iPhone incarnation its battery life is not so hot). I use it to read books but only if nothing else is available: The type is microscopically small ... and God Help You if it's sunny.
The eInk screen on the Kindle is absolutely terrific, nothing at all like an LCD. If you haven't seen one yet you just cannot possibly form a valid opinion until you do. It's extremely sharp and works better and better the brighter the environment (and, let's face it, most environments people are in are fairly bright). You can hold it at weird angles (like paper) and it's still perfectly readable. If the Kindle isn't the right device it's pretty darn close, especially since it needs recharging so seldom (every couple of days if you leave the wireless on and run it constantly, a week or so if you run it constantly without the wireless). I never turn it off. Ever. It's reasonable to take the thing on a week long vacation and leave the charger at home; my touch can't even make it across the country, to say nothing of an iPhone with its greater power requirements and therefore shorter life.
Getting to electronic versus print editions, I subscribe to a few e-versions of print publications and by and large they are not complete editions by any stretch of the imagination. They lack the ads, which could be considered a win or not depending on your perspective, but they are usually distilled down to someone's idea of the more significant content. I've only subscribed to three different dailies on the Kindle -- San Jose Mercury News, New York Times, and Boston Globe -- but there were constants across all of them. Much Sunday edition content is missing entirely from The Globe, for instance, including all of the Auto and Real Estate sections. Worse, many stories only show up as a headline so brief that it's useless, with no peek at the content, making you dig into every link to see if it's interesting. Between limited content, poor formatting, and extremely limited photographic content the cost of the e-editions on the Kindle are sometimes questionable.
Still, it's very convenient to have it download to the device automatically every day ... and searchable as well! I usually keep a few weeks worth of papers on the device so I can look things up.
Regarding the Kindle as a reading system, I don't believe it's the ideal device -- lack of color in particular is crushing when it comes to displaying ads (which are really needed to make news media supportable long-term) and its display of photographs is reminiscent of 19th century print. It needs to do better. Even so it is a vastly better reading experience than a handheld, laptop, or desktop when you're reading more than snippets and the wireless delivery system is brilliant. Given that it was Amazon's first try it is truly remarkable as-is.
For reading books, a Kindle is a no-brainer. It exceeds paper in many ways and really only falls down if you're hooked on the tactile nature of paper or if you need to leaf through the pages qu
I'm of the opinion that the language is almost immaterial. Within a few semesters a student should be exposed to multiple languages anyway, so grinding that axe is missing the point entirely. Team issues, though ... I'll get to that in a minute.
It's not just the quality of CS grads and it has nothing to do with what language they're taught. The quality of grads in general is usually pretty low. The fact that it hasn't improved despite generations of languages isn't surprising: Basic business training is not nearly as difficult as CS, and we have millenia of experience in that domain, and yet those guys come out pretty damn green too.
I think this is largely because the teaching paradigm is almost entirely memorize-and-regurgitate. This is a fine way to teach multiplication tables but it's not very applicable to most real-world skills. Generally speaking it's far more valuable to know where to find information than to have memorized the information itself; this not only expands your ultimate capabilities, it makes you less error prone. Yet when was the last time you saw information retrieval as a college-level course? The only time I have seen that was when my wife was working on her masters in library science.
The value of looking things up is taught in (physical) engineering (mis-remembering physical constants makes bridges fall down) but it seems wholly ignored in most college-level disciplines. I credit Google for improving the tendency for people to look things up rather than memorizing them, kind of contrary to what you might have read in The Atlantic last summer. Information retrieval is an incredibly valuable skill. It's why skilled programmers used to have bookshelves of reference material. (In some respects I miss that, it was always fun to guess how a person thought by looking at the books he had on his shelf.)
As Stroustrup says this problem is compounded by the fact that students, even at the college level, are treated as singletons. How many jobs have you held where you were the only one doing everything? I've been there and done that, but most of the time we work in teams, and it's quite rare to find courses teaching people how to work together effectively as teams.
I'm not talking about just splitting something up into tasks done by multiple people, but rather the concept of layered skills on a team: mentoring or apprenticeship.
There is a reason why trade skills have been taught using apprenticeship for millennia (it's not just a way of limiting the influx of competition). It's because learning your trade solving real problems working with people who know how to do that kind of thing is far more enlightening that trying to bend your mind around abstract examples written on a white board sitting in a room with three hundred other people.
Brooks' team design from The Mythical Man-Month has (mostly) withstood the test of time; it should be something that is put in practice in the classroom, not just discussed for a few days in the abstract.
High-quality education needs both hands-on in a team and white-board theory! And yet it is beyond rare to see students of various levels (e.g. grad students and freshmen) mixed up on a classroom project. Instead we have them build toys, individually. They puzzle through building toys then we kick them out into the workaday world having never done anything more complicated than that.
The whole of our educational system is designed incorrectly, segmented and stepped rather than mixing and a continuum. It puts far too much load on teachers because you just can't have much one-on-one time when you're the only one the students can rely on; in a one-room school, for instance, it was common to have more-ski