I flew to Dubai on Emirates a few years ago, they had the seat-back screen entertainment systems with about 200 music albums, films and games loaded in.
It was the only flight I have ever been on where they didn't mind you sticking the headphones on during taxi once the safety briefings had finished - it was kind of cool having "Back In Black" by AC/DC at full volume in my ears during take off.:-)
Believe me, I've played Starcraft more than a few times, enjoyed it, still crap at it, and my life is far too busy these days to have the time to play it so much that I can ever be excellent at it.
But it *is* interesting to read about these guys who are playing it that much and the strategies they use, I suspect many people like you are so critical of them out of jealousy because your life (like mine) is just too busy to be able to do it yourself.
But apart from the lack of moving around, what they're doing is not a lot different from a sportsperson wanting to be the best at whatever sport he/she does - and I doubt you'd sneer at a professional chess player who spends an equal amount of time learning the game.
If I put my mind to it, it wouldn't take me long to work out from what IP address the scans were coming from and use some appropriate iptables rules on the Linux host to totally stop you finding out anything about the XP VM I was running on it.
I get on well with my own corporate IT guys because they're nice guys & open to discussion - but try that arrogant "I'm a smartass corporate BOFH" stuff on me and I will *BRING YOU DOWN*!!!
Sorry, I don't see where OS X fits into the equation, apart from it running on a fashion accessory computer that matches your wife's shoes and handbag.
Windows is the defacto standard for corporate desktops at the moment, but because Linux is an open UNIX system that you can hack to your heart's content, you can easily get it to play nicely in corporate Windows domains and do some neat things in the process. Plus most corporations do have big back-end UNIX servers already serving Windows clients so I've never found it a problem to get my IT guys open to the idea of using Linux for some stuff - many of them even use Ubuntu at home.
But I've seen very few Apple machines in corporate environments and, quite frankly, to the average corporate they're just an overly expensive way of deploying UNIX-like desktops.
Besides, the whole marketing around OS X and Macs is how much easier it is to use and how you're not supposed to fiddle with its guts - so its fine for lay home users who just want to run apps and not worry about how a computer works.
As a mainly Linux guy, let me apologise on behalf of the zealot who gave you a -1 Troll for what seems to be a perfectly reasonable comment and opinion.
Unfortunately, whereas most of us treat OSes as tools to do a job with an interest in learning about other technologies even if we will never use them, there are clearly those who view it as some kind of religion in all of the OS camps.
It's a shame really because having kept an open mind to both Linux and Windows, I've learnt a lot about integrating the two together and been able to solve some complex architectural problems by using a bit of both of them in the past.
I work as a security consultant on Linux-based telephony servers for my company and I have a good working relationship with our corporate IT guys over here in the UK. Pretty much all of them are Windows guys but they're certainly trying out Linux at home a lot, judging by the questions I get from them, mainly around Ubuntu.
I think it's like everything else during economic slowdowns and budget cuts, they stick with what they're doing and there's no money for training or upgrades.
As for my own personal corporate Linux experiences, because I do what I do and get on okay with the IT guys, I'm pretty much left to running what I want on my corporate laptop which, at the moment, dual boots XP and Gentoo Linux. When I'm working in the office, I can pretty much do everything that I can do on Windows on Linux, I sync my Outlook calendars with Google Calendars and then pull it back into Linux and my Android phone that way. Since we're still on Office 2003, OpenOffice doesn't have too much of a compatibility issue with the Microsoft Office docs that I work with.
The only issue I need to resolve is connecting to the office from home with VPN in Linux. We use a web-based VPN connection at the moment, there are options to connect onto it as a Windows PC Domain or Linux PC Domain but I've been told by the IT guys that the Linux PC options have never been set up - so I'm working on that one at the moment.
I'm also not sure yet about how you can do Windows / Active Directory Domain password changes in Linux but I'm messing about in our lab later on this week to see how I can get LDAP to integrate to AD and maybe do it that way.
Ultimately I'd like to just boot Linux on the laptop and just keep an XP virtual machine handy if I need to do something Windows specific.
I would imagine that because Google already do so much development on Linux, this is pretty much a "no brainer" for them.
Apart from some of the bespoke tools that come with some of the Linux distros like Red Hat or SuSE, and maybe some tools like Webmin, for sysadmin tasks you pretty much use the standard tools that come with any Linux distro - the power of Linux administration comes from using those tools to do complicated manipulations with text (remembering of course that the configuration for an application is held in the user's directory and is invariably in a text or text-like format like XML) and writing scripts to put all those things together, and then even schedule them with cron if you want.
Plus you can also do some neat things like deploying SSH without interactive passwords (using public keys) so you can then drive a remote terminal session on a remote machine from within a shell script.
I have to admit I'm very rusty on Windows administration and should trawl through Microsoft's site more as I suspect there are one or two useful tools on there that can help automate some of the XP administration that I do.
Aside form things like Picasa, I can't see much of a need for Windows
You are aware that there is a version of Picasa for Linux, aren't you? I believe it is just the Windows version running on a WINE layer that gets installed with it but it's certainly been available now for quite some time in the Gentoo Linux repositories (which are what I use).
I accept that people commit suicide and that if somebody really wants to take their own life then there's probably not much that can be done to stop them.
But I dislike the application of statistics around it that seem to serve only one purpose - namely to create a threshold at which nothing needs to be done to *prevent* further suicides because as long as the actual number of suicides is below the threshold value, then that's okay and nothing to worry about.
On a wider scale, if, say, you're quoting a statistic for the percentage of bank customers who are likely to be victims of fraud or identity theft, then what that says to customers is "We don't mind you experience some fraud and won't do anything about it unless that fraud gets to a point where it's more than predicted".
Unfortunately, those statistics are an admission of defeat and are meaningless to you if you were in the "0.1% of bank customers who suffered fraud" group, in the "5% of callers who weren't answered with 10 seconds" group or in the "suffered from food poisoning by virtue of ingesting the 0.1% of bacteria not killed by a bottle of kitchen worktop cleaner".
The point I'm trying to make is that if you *stop* at 95% or 99.9% then at that point you have accepted a degree of failure - and whilst I accept 100% may be unachievable in many scenarios, continually striving to try to get to 100% should also always be the case.
The problem with statistics is that they only mean something to those who are outside of the system being statistically measured. For example, if you're a potential bank customer faced with going to one bank that states that only "95% of our customers suffered no fraud last year" and another that claims that "98% of our customers suffered no fraud last year", then the chances are that based on that statistic you would feel more secure with the second bank. However, if you joined that bank and then suffered fraud, the fact that you're in that 2% is meaningless to you and also doesn't imply that had you joined the other bank, you would automatically be in their 5% of fraud victims.
The other thing to bear in mind also is that statistics are an excuse for not researching something in much greater detail in order to get to a point where you know exactly who will suffer what fate. Again, as an example, if you looked at Chinese suicide rates and took into account many other possibilities like the history of depression in each individual's family, how good their diet is, how close they live to a convenient bridge to jump off, etc. etc., you will eventually get to a point where you can predict, with high accuracy, just who will and who won't eventually commit suicide - and if you get to that point, then you can do something about those factors.
Statistics, to me, seem to be an acceptable way of saying "Here's how it is but we cannot be bothered to spend the time or money investigating it any further". If anything, I'm unintentionally defending Apple's position here because if the suicide issue was *just* about salaries then the assumption would be that everyone on the same lowest salary would commit suicide.
I don't know what eBook readers, if any currently, use Linux as a platform OS but eBook readers would seem to be an ideal hardware application for it.
The problem is, as usual, that companies like Amazon are not going to release DRMed client readers for Linux (as has been the case for the software Kindle client which has been released for Windows and Mac) because of the "perils" of the GPL and because Linux is an open hackable platform.
DRM on music has pretty much died a death now so Linux can play it, but if Linux cannot be made to support whatever new universal format is chosen, then surely this creates a very dangerous precedent where only a handful of proprietary eBook reader creators (Apple, Amazon and Sony) control access to the vast majority of eBooks, with no possibility of other manufacturers not getting a look in on eBook readers because there's no way they can afford the R&D costs of developing a new platform OS from scratch that is closed and supports the chosen DRM ebook format.
Once again, don't forget the pollution caused in manufacturing and disposing of the electronics in the eReader device.
As for the theft part, it still happens. Not to mention dropping an eReader or pouring a liquid over it - at worst, you have to go and buy another copy of the paper book.
Public domain paper books can be bought for next to nothing due to copyright expiry but they're still only a small proportion of the books read by most people - and you cannot lend others DRM-protected media. Even five devices is more limited than being able to lend it to anyone.
Yes, you can change font sizes but I seem to recall coming across books with bigger print or Books On Tape at low cost for the blind/poor sighted.
And eBooks may be allergen free but what about the damage caused by the chemicals in the manufacture of the readers?
I blame the lack of backbones in our governments that stops them standing up to the corporations.
I take a simplistic view that selling products or services in a country takes money out of it and employing people in the country or sponsoring sports teams, etc., puts money back into the country. Therefore our governments should take the latter from the former and apply a huge tax to the difference. If all the rich governments did this overnight together, then there's nowhere the corporations could "hide" to avoid paying the taxes that make outsourcing so expensive.
It would also mean paying more for everything because of higher local salaries but if everyone was employed there'd be more money anyway - and if the governments were extracting more taxes from the corps then they could charge us lower employment taxes.
And the ink? And the diesel trucks shipping it all over? I find that all unlikely.
I don't know enough about ink technology to comment, you could be right. But as I said previously, what about the pollution due to the manufacture and disposal of the electronics in eBook readers.
Slashdotters are just weird. Every day, they drive their car 600 miles without stopping, ten hours continuous, so electric cars are totally useless for them. They only read books in continuous 12 hour stretches, always at the beach in full sunlight, always far away from an electrical outlet.
Not at all, but clearly a printed book has greater versatility in terms of where, and for how long, you can read it.
I give away electronic media, and apply my revenue (zero) toward the (free) cost of my next electronic media, if you know what I mean. Seriously, "buying media" is only done as a fan donation or as a hoarder/collector mentality now a days. Welcome to the '10s.
Yes, but that's *NEVER* a valid answer, is it? To something to give away free to others "in this manner" means that it had to be created in the first place and bought by enough people to justify its creation... if *EVERYONE* gave it away then no money would be made from it so it wouldn't be published in the first place.
Printing books has a long pollution consequence chain, from the paper mill onward.
What about the pollution from the factories making all the integrated circuit boards for the readers? And what about disposal of eBook readers? Paper rots...
7. Electronic media are great for giving to friends. I email.pdf manuals quite often. Did I mention "no packing or postage"?
You can buy a paper book and legally loan it to a friend or give it to someone else. Is a PDF going to be licensed in the same way? What about digital watermarking on eBook so it can be traced back to you?
I can carry many electronic pubs on my USB key. No one steals my electronics at airports because I hand-carry them too.
That's a moot point. Far more electronics are stolen in public places than paperback books because of the value, how careful you personally are is irrelevant.
On the other side, you have to carry the dead weight of some paperbacks in your luggage, instead of just one light eBook reader.
Most hand luggage isn't weighed in my experience, and nobody in their right mind will put a sensitive electronic device in their check-in baggage.
How exactly do you do that? I mean, if you don't happen to be the publisher of the book.
The publisher has nothing to do with the paper source, at least as I understand it. The publisher gets a printer to print the book, the printer gets their paper from a supplier, presumably its the paper manufacturer that works out which pulp source to use.
eBook readers (based on e-ink) can stay about a week, of continuous use without recharging. I charge mine only when putting new books inside, and it's enough.
Not knowing more about the subject, I'll accept this answer.
eBooks can be given to everybody, encouraging worldwide goodwill
With DRM, by which most eBooks are currently published, that's not possible. Plus the article makes no real comment about DRM-free formats, only that it needs to be a universal one.
You have a point there, even if the price of the books should go down thanks to ebooks, reducing the second advantage.
That's yet to be seen and has not happened with music, where individual tracks cost more than the actual CD. But I accept that might change.
I don't have any need to use any Apple OSes so cannot comment, but can you please explain to me how Microsoft documentation is better than for Linux?
No, Linux documentation isn't perfect and most people hate reading man pages, I agree. But from my perspective, I'm quite "rusty" with Windows because for the past 10 years or so I've focused mostly on Linux. I don't "hate" Windows by any means but if I need to get the answer to a Linux question or a Windows one then without getting the answer from a phone call to a local expert, I need to search the web or read a book for the answer - and the process to get the answer from the web usually involves some Google searching whereupon I stumble across it.
I don't *see* a great difference in the approach for either OS, to be honest. Sure, I accept a Windows expert can probably fly around the Microsoft support site like the best of them but I haven't see too many thickly bound user manuals for the Windows products I've used in my time.
I think a lot of this "urban legend" comes from the fact that there are more people familiar with Windows than with Linux and therefore far more newbie users on Linux than Windows - but it does work both ways, believe me.
1. Someone will steal an iPad or eBook reader from your bag at the airport, not a dog-eared paperback.
2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources.
3. If it takes you 12 hours to read a book from start to finish, it will take you the same time to read the eBook. On most devices that means carrying around a spare set of batteries or finding somewhere to recharge.
4. Electronic media is all about "me me me" whereas physical media can be loaned to family and friends, thus encouraging more social interaction.
5. A used book can be given away to a charity or be sold to go towards the price of the next book.
If that was the case then UNIX would be dead as an operating system and replaced by those which are totally GUI reliant.
There is far more to computing than you realise, anyone involved in any form of program development or system administration will tell you that there are many occasions when you simply cannot beat the speed of a keyboard for entering information - the core UNIX philosophy is based around text entry at the shell or text programs that allow very powerful automation of systems.
GUIs have their usages but it's not all about graphics and pointers...
...and that's the problem with the good old "globalAmericanisation" plague inflicting our planet - this idea that if a statistic says it's "within acceptable limits" then everything is okay and nobody needs to do anything about it.
This is why we now have things like huge interest rates and high insurance premiums - because in both cases, there is an "accepted" level of loss or fraud that nobody in the organisation does anything about, apart from making it more expensive for honest people who have to pay increased charges to cover those losses. There's *NO* concept of 100% anymore, everything is "95% of all calls answered in 10 seconds" or "kills 99.9% of all known germs"...
As long as only 90 Americans in 100,000 commits suicide, or an equivalent number of Chinese, then we can all sit back on our fat backsides because *IT'S THE NORM!"
Sorry, why would I buy a *restricted* device only to *unrestrict* it and more than likely invalidate the warranty in the process?
Besides which, even if I wanted to, the cheapest iPad is $499 without sales tax - and because I'm in the UK, I'd have to add sales tax and shipping on top of that if buying from the US, or pay £429 (= $620) for one in the UK. Either way, it's more than the $500 limit I'd pay for such a device.
Finally, I'm a shell/PERL/Python scripter, not a fully-fledged programmer - so the main criteria would have to be the ability to run already available software, not write new stuff; if it ran Linux, then I could just get the source code and compile it, if it ran Windows then it would probably have pre-compiled binaries of all the software I needed.
And even if I *did* write my own stuff, who's to say Apple would allowed it to be sold in their store?
If you're into graphics design then there's some justification in what you say and there's been odd bits of technology like light pens and graphics tablets to plug into computers to help with graphics work.
But if you're administering or programming a computer then you cannot beat the tactile feel of an external keyboard - they're pretty much unchanged on computers for 5 decades now so I don't think they'll be changing any time soon.
My missus has the Asus 1000HE EEE PC running XP with 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard disk in it, she gets somewhere around 4-6 hours battery life on it.
I have the cheaper 1001HA EEE PC running XP/Linux dual boot, same memory and disk, I get around 2-2.5 hours doing similar work, I know the battery in mine is lower quality due to the pricing - but I just carry a spare.
Yes, there's a difference in battery performance but also remember that the 1000 series have hard disks in them which doesn't help battery life at all, whereas a tablet will be all solid state.
Admittedly I don't buy many soundtrack CDs but this really isn't the case for standard music albums. Yes, there are cases in point for the quality of remixes and the fact that they're remixed at a louder volume on rereleases, but usually the tracks are the same except for some additional ones tacked on to the end.
As for your other comment, I picked an album at random to compare prices on Amazon:
It was the second album I tried admittedly as the first one I tried was The Beatles "Abbey Road" but you cannot download that from Amazon.
However, for the BOC album, I can buy the CD for £4.93 or each of the 14 tracks at about £0.89, with no sign of any "whole album" discount - clearly, in that instance, the CD is much cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
I flew to Dubai on Emirates a few years ago, they had the seat-back screen entertainment systems with about 200 music albums, films and games loaded in.
It was the only flight I have ever been on where they didn't mind you sticking the headphones on during taxi once the safety briefings had finished - it was kind of cool having "Back In Black" by AC/DC at full volume in my ears during take off. :-)
...and you need some tolerance and interest.
Believe me, I've played Starcraft more than a few times, enjoyed it, still crap at it, and my life is far too busy these days to have the time to play it so much that I can ever be excellent at it.
But it *is* interesting to read about these guys who are playing it that much and the strategies they use, I suspect many people like you are so critical of them out of jealousy because your life (like mine) is just too busy to be able to do it yourself.
But apart from the lack of moving around, what they're doing is not a lot different from a sportsperson wanting to be the best at whatever sport he/she does - and I doubt you'd sneer at a professional chess player who spends an equal amount of time learning the game.
If I put my mind to it, it wouldn't take me long to work out from what IP address the scans were coming from and use some appropriate iptables rules on the Linux host to totally stop you finding out anything about the XP VM I was running on it.
I get on well with my own corporate IT guys because they're nice guys & open to discussion - but try that arrogant "I'm a smartass corporate BOFH" stuff on me and I will *BRING YOU DOWN*!!!
Sorry, I don't see where OS X fits into the equation, apart from it running on a fashion accessory computer that matches your wife's shoes and handbag.
Windows is the defacto standard for corporate desktops at the moment, but because Linux is an open UNIX system that you can hack to your heart's content, you can easily get it to play nicely in corporate Windows domains and do some neat things in the process. Plus most corporations do have big back-end UNIX servers already serving Windows clients so I've never found it a problem to get my IT guys open to the idea of using Linux for some stuff - many of them even use Ubuntu at home.
But I've seen very few Apple machines in corporate environments and, quite frankly, to the average corporate they're just an overly expensive way of deploying UNIX-like desktops.
Besides, the whole marketing around OS X and Macs is how much easier it is to use and how you're not supposed to fiddle with its guts - so its fine for lay home users who just want to run apps and not worry about how a computer works.
As a mainly Linux guy, let me apologise on behalf of the zealot who gave you a -1 Troll for what seems to be a perfectly reasonable comment and opinion.
Unfortunately, whereas most of us treat OSes as tools to do a job with an interest in learning about other technologies even if we will never use them, there are clearly those who view it as some kind of religion in all of the OS camps.
It's a shame really because having kept an open mind to both Linux and Windows, I've learnt a lot about integrating the two together and been able to solve some complex architectural problems by using a bit of both of them in the past.
I work as a security consultant on Linux-based telephony servers for my company and I have a good working relationship with our corporate IT guys over here in the UK. Pretty much all of them are Windows guys but they're certainly trying out Linux at home a lot, judging by the questions I get from them, mainly around Ubuntu.
I think it's like everything else during economic slowdowns and budget cuts, they stick with what they're doing and there's no money for training or upgrades.
As for my own personal corporate Linux experiences, because I do what I do and get on okay with the IT guys, I'm pretty much left to running what I want on my corporate laptop which, at the moment, dual boots XP and Gentoo Linux. When I'm working in the office, I can pretty much do everything that I can do on Windows on Linux, I sync my Outlook calendars with Google Calendars and then pull it back into Linux and my Android phone that way. Since we're still on Office 2003, OpenOffice doesn't have too much of a compatibility issue with the Microsoft Office docs that I work with.
The only issue I need to resolve is connecting to the office from home with VPN in Linux. We use a web-based VPN connection at the moment, there are options to connect onto it as a Windows PC Domain or Linux PC Domain but I've been told by the IT guys that the Linux PC options have never been set up - so I'm working on that one at the moment.
I'm also not sure yet about how you can do Windows / Active Directory Domain password changes in Linux but I'm messing about in our lab later on this week to see how I can get LDAP to integrate to AD and maybe do it that way.
Ultimately I'd like to just boot Linux on the laptop and just keep an XP virtual machine handy if I need to do something Windows specific.
I would imagine that because Google already do so much development on Linux, this is pretty much a "no brainer" for them.
Apart from some of the bespoke tools that come with some of the Linux distros like Red Hat or SuSE, and maybe some tools like Webmin, for sysadmin tasks you pretty much use the standard tools that come with any Linux distro - the power of Linux administration comes from using those tools to do complicated manipulations with text (remembering of course that the configuration for an application is held in the user's directory and is invariably in a text or text-like format like XML) and writing scripts to put all those things together, and then even schedule them with cron if you want.
Plus you can also do some neat things like deploying SSH without interactive passwords (using public keys) so you can then drive a remote terminal session on a remote machine from within a shell script.
I have to admit I'm very rusty on Windows administration and should trawl through Microsoft's site more as I suspect there are one or two useful tools on there that can help automate some of the XP administration that I do.
Aside form things like Picasa, I can't see much of a need for Windows
You are aware that there is a version of Picasa for Linux, aren't you? I believe it is just the Windows version running on a WINE layer that gets installed with it but it's certainly been available now for quite some time in the Gentoo Linux repositories (which are what I use).
You're missing my point.
I accept that people commit suicide and that if somebody really wants to take their own life then there's probably not much that can be done to stop them.
But I dislike the application of statistics around it that seem to serve only one purpose - namely to create a threshold at which nothing needs to be done to *prevent* further suicides because as long as the actual number of suicides is below the threshold value, then that's okay and nothing to worry about.
On a wider scale, if, say, you're quoting a statistic for the percentage of bank customers who are likely to be victims of fraud or identity theft, then what that says to customers is "We don't mind you experience some fraud and won't do anything about it unless that fraud gets to a point where it's more than predicted".
Unfortunately, those statistics are an admission of defeat and are meaningless to you if you were in the "0.1% of bank customers who suffered fraud" group, in the "5% of callers who weren't answered with 10 seconds" group or in the "suffered from food poisoning by virtue of ingesting the 0.1% of bacteria not killed by a bottle of kitchen worktop cleaner".
The point I'm trying to make is that if you *stop* at 95% or 99.9% then at that point you have accepted a degree of failure - and whilst I accept 100% may be unachievable in many scenarios, continually striving to try to get to 100% should also always be the case.
The problem with statistics is that they only mean something to those who are outside of the system being statistically measured. For example, if you're a potential bank customer faced with going to one bank that states that only "95% of our customers suffered no fraud last year" and another that claims that "98% of our customers suffered no fraud last year", then the chances are that based on that statistic you would feel more secure with the second bank. However, if you joined that bank and then suffered fraud, the fact that you're in that 2% is meaningless to you and also doesn't imply that had you joined the other bank, you would automatically be in their 5% of fraud victims.
The other thing to bear in mind also is that statistics are an excuse for not researching something in much greater detail in order to get to a point where you know exactly who will suffer what fate. Again, as an example, if you looked at Chinese suicide rates and took into account many other possibilities like the history of depression in each individual's family, how good their diet is, how close they live to a convenient bridge to jump off, etc. etc., you will eventually get to a point where you can predict, with high accuracy, just who will and who won't eventually commit suicide - and if you get to that point, then you can do something about those factors.
Statistics, to me, seem to be an acceptable way of saying "Here's how it is but we cannot be bothered to spend the time or money investigating it any further". If anything, I'm unintentionally defending Apple's position here because if the suicide issue was *just* about salaries then the assumption would be that everyone on the same lowest salary would commit suicide.
I don't know what eBook readers, if any currently, use Linux as a platform OS but eBook readers would seem to be an ideal hardware application for it.
The problem is, as usual, that companies like Amazon are not going to release DRMed client readers for Linux (as has been the case for the software Kindle client which has been released for Windows and Mac) because of the "perils" of the GPL and because Linux is an open hackable platform.
DRM on music has pretty much died a death now so Linux can play it, but if Linux cannot be made to support whatever new universal format is chosen, then surely this creates a very dangerous precedent where only a handful of proprietary eBook reader creators (Apple, Amazon and Sony) control access to the vast majority of eBooks, with no possibility of other manufacturers not getting a look in on eBook readers because there's no way they can afford the R&D costs of developing a new platform OS from scratch that is closed and supports the chosen DRM ebook format.
Most were overpriced compared to CDs
They still are.
Once again, don't forget the pollution caused in manufacturing and disposing of the electronics in the eReader device.
As for the theft part, it still happens. Not to mention dropping an eReader or pouring a liquid over it - at worst, you have to go and buy another copy of the paper book.
Public domain paper books can be bought for next to nothing due to copyright expiry but they're still only a small proportion of the books read by most people - and you cannot lend others DRM-protected media. Even five devices is more limited than being able to lend it to anyone.
Yes, you can change font sizes but I seem to recall coming across books with bigger print or Books On Tape at low cost for the blind/poor sighted.
And eBooks may be allergen free but what about the damage caused by the chemicals in the manufacture of the readers?
I blame the lack of backbones in our governments that stops them standing up to the corporations.
I take a simplistic view that selling products or services in a country takes money out of it and employing people in the country or sponsoring sports teams, etc., puts money back into the country. Therefore our governments should take the latter from the former and apply a huge tax to the difference. If all the rich governments did this overnight together, then there's nowhere the corporations could "hide" to avoid paying the taxes that make outsourcing so expensive.
It would also mean paying more for everything because of higher local salaries but if everyone was employed there'd be more money anyway - and if the governments were extracting more taxes from the corps then they could charge us lower employment taxes.
And the ink? And the diesel trucks shipping it all over? I find that all unlikely.
I don't know enough about ink technology to comment, you could be right. But as I said previously, what about the pollution due to the manufacture and disposal of the electronics in eBook readers.
Slashdotters are just weird. Every day, they drive their car 600 miles without stopping, ten hours continuous, so electric cars are totally useless for them. They only read books in continuous 12 hour stretches, always at the beach in full sunlight, always far away from an electrical outlet.
Not at all, but clearly a printed book has greater versatility in terms of where, and for how long, you can read it.
I give away electronic media, and apply my revenue (zero) toward the (free) cost of my next electronic media, if you know what I mean. Seriously, "buying media" is only done as a fan donation or as a hoarder/collector mentality now a days. Welcome to the '10s.
Yes, but that's *NEVER* a valid answer, is it? To something to give away free to others "in this manner" means that it had to be created in the first place and bought by enough people to justify its creation... if *EVERYONE* gave it away then no money would be made from it so it wouldn't be published in the first place.
Printing books has a long pollution consequence chain, from the paper mill onward.
What about the pollution from the factories making all the integrated circuit boards for the readers? And what about disposal of eBook readers? Paper rots...
7. Electronic media are great for giving to friends. I email .pdf manuals quite often. Did I mention "no packing or postage"?
You can buy a paper book and legally loan it to a friend or give it to someone else. Is a PDF going to be licensed in the same way? What about digital watermarking on eBook so it can be traced back to you?
I can carry many electronic pubs on my USB key. No one steals my electronics at airports because I hand-carry them too.
That's a moot point. Far more electronics are stolen in public places than paperback books because of the value, how careful you personally are is irrelevant.
On the other side, you have to carry the dead weight of some paperbacks in your luggage, instead of just one light eBook reader.
Most hand luggage isn't weighed in my experience, and nobody in their right mind will put a sensitive electronic device in their check-in baggage.
How exactly do you do that? I mean, if you don't happen to be the publisher of the book.
The publisher has nothing to do with the paper source, at least as I understand it. The publisher gets a printer to print the book, the printer gets their paper from a supplier, presumably its the paper manufacturer that works out which pulp source to use.
eBook readers (based on e-ink) can stay about a week, of continuous use without recharging. I charge mine only when putting new books inside, and it's enough.
Not knowing more about the subject, I'll accept this answer.
eBooks can be given to everybody, encouraging worldwide goodwill
With DRM, by which most eBooks are currently published, that's not possible. Plus the article makes no real comment about DRM-free formats, only that it needs to be a universal one.
You have a point there, even if the price of the books should go down thanks to ebooks, reducing the second advantage.
That's yet to be seen and has not happened with music, where individual tracks cost more than the actual CD. But I accept that might change.
I don't have any need to use any Apple OSes so cannot comment, but can you please explain to me how Microsoft documentation is better than for Linux?
No, Linux documentation isn't perfect and most people hate reading man pages, I agree. But from my perspective, I'm quite "rusty" with Windows because for the past 10 years or so I've focused mostly on Linux. I don't "hate" Windows by any means but if I need to get the answer to a Linux question or a Windows one then without getting the answer from a phone call to a local expert, I need to search the web or read a book for the answer - and the process to get the answer from the web usually involves some Google searching whereupon I stumble across it.
I don't *see* a great difference in the approach for either OS, to be honest. Sure, I accept a Windows expert can probably fly around the Microsoft support site like the best of them but I haven't see too many thickly bound user manuals for the Windows products I've used in my time.
I think a lot of this "urban legend" comes from the fact that there are more people familiar with Windows than with Linux and therefore far more newbie users on Linux than Windows - but it does work both ways, believe me.
..ink on paper. Advantages as follows:
1. Someone will steal an iPad or eBook reader from your bag at the airport, not a dog-eared paperback.
2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources.
3. If it takes you 12 hours to read a book from start to finish, it will take you the same time to read the eBook. On most devices that means carrying around a spare set of batteries or finding somewhere to recharge.
4. Electronic media is all about "me me me" whereas physical media can be loaned to family and friends, thus encouraging more social interaction.
5. A used book can be given away to a charity or be sold to go towards the price of the next book.
If that was the case then UNIX would be dead as an operating system and replaced by those which are totally GUI reliant.
There is far more to computing than you realise, anyone involved in any form of program development or system administration will tell you that there are many occasions when you simply cannot beat the speed of a keyboard for entering information - the core UNIX philosophy is based around text entry at the shell or text programs that allow very powerful automation of systems.
GUIs have their usages but it's not all about graphics and pointers...
...and that's the problem with the good old "globalAmericanisation" plague inflicting our planet - this idea that if a statistic says it's "within acceptable limits" then everything is okay and nobody needs to do anything about it.
This is why we now have things like huge interest rates and high insurance premiums - because in both cases, there is an "accepted" level of loss or fraud that nobody in the organisation does anything about, apart from making it more expensive for honest people who have to pay increased charges to cover those losses. There's *NO* concept of 100% anymore, everything is "95% of all calls answered in 10 seconds" or "kills 99.9% of all known germs"...
As long as only 90 Americans in 100,000 commits suicide, or an equivalent number of Chinese, then we can all sit back on our fat backsides because *IT'S THE NORM!"
It's pathetic really...
Sorry, why would I buy a *restricted* device only to *unrestrict* it and more than likely invalidate the warranty in the process?
Besides which, even if I wanted to, the cheapest iPad is $499 without sales tax - and because I'm in the UK, I'd have to add sales tax and shipping on top of that if buying from the US, or pay £429 (= $620) for one in the UK. Either way, it's more than the $500 limit I'd pay for such a device.
Finally, I'm a shell/PERL/Python scripter, not a fully-fledged programmer - so the main criteria would have to be the ability to run already available software, not write new stuff; if it ran Linux, then I could just get the source code and compile it, if it ran Windows then it would probably have pre-compiled binaries of all the software I needed.
And even if I *did* write my own stuff, who's to say Apple would allowed it to be sold in their store?
The iPad is a total non-starter for me...
It depends what you need a computer to do.
If you're into graphics design then there's some justification in what you say and there's been odd bits of technology like light pens and graphics tablets to plug into computers to help with graphics work.
But if you're administering or programming a computer then you cannot beat the tactile feel of an external keyboard - they're pretty much unchanged on computers for 5 decades now so I don't think they'll be changing any time soon.
My missus has the Asus 1000HE EEE PC running XP with 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard disk in it, she gets somewhere around 4-6 hours battery life on it.
I have the cheaper 1001HA EEE PC running XP/Linux dual boot, same memory and disk, I get around 2-2.5 hours doing similar work, I know the battery in mine is lower quality due to the pricing - but I just carry a spare.
Yes, there's a difference in battery performance but also remember that the 1000 series have hard disks in them which doesn't help battery life at all, whereas a tablet will be all solid state.
Admittedly I don't buy many soundtrack CDs but this really isn't the case for standard music albums. Yes, there are cases in point for the quality of remixes and the fact that they're remixed at a louder volume on rereleases, but usually the tracks are the same except for some additional ones tacked on to the end.
As for your other comment, I picked an album at random to compare prices on Amazon:
Blue Oyster Cult "Spectres"
It was the second album I tried admittedly as the first one I tried was The Beatles "Abbey Road" but you cannot download that from Amazon.
However, for the BOC album, I can buy the CD for £4.93 or each of the 14 tracks at about £0.89, with no sign of any "whole album" discount - clearly, in that instance, the CD is much cheaper.