I don't know him. Seems like a bad enough accusation. Then, check the DoB. On the list at a few days past 14 (must have been 13 at the time). Still on after 18.
Yep. Noise is pernicious. My office also doubles as a low-rent recording studio (we do audio work on e-books). My main desktop is a fanless thin client. Dead silent == PERFECT!
The one I have is fairly common on eBay. Search for "hisense tuner". There was a failed business plan a few years back for paid/encrypted subchannels on ATSC broadcasters (called USDTV). The inventory remaining are on eBay. AFAIK, the ones that will be in the stores with the coupons should have a significantly newer chipset and work better.
As for me, I don't watch much TV. No way I'd pay the $650 a year that "basic" cable including taxes costs from the local ma-and-pa cable. And, I don't care about HD at all. I watch on a 25" TV I got for $10 at Goodwill and am happy. I do watch some broadcast sports. And, I get 2 PBS affiliates, with 7 broadcasts between them (with subchannels). Having 7 PBS options means one is usually somewhat distracting (filling the Discovery/History channel need in my life).
The converters are nearly impossible to find (I have an older one) because of the federal government. They are implementing a $40 "coupon program" for them, starting in January. The market research decided that very few people were going to spend $60 a piece on a converter box, particularly while analog NTSC was still around. But, they would pay $20, particularly if they thought they were pulling one over on the government. Now, the manufacturers might have been able to sell them at $20 or $30, but wouldn't you rather make $60 or $70? So, they've been holding off on the production. There are hundreds of thousands of them being made in China right now and loaded onto cargo ships to be on your Wal-Mart shelf by February.
The adjacent channel thing is true. Also, the subchannel thing (divvying up your 6MHz into more than one channel) helps. Around here, some of the minor networks (CW, MyNetwork, Telefutura) operate as subchannels of the majors (NBC, ABC, and Univision). This means they aren't going to request their own frequency assignment, and they get better coverage being part of a 5 megawatt signal, not their own rinky-dink transmitter.
I know one place to hear new music. Meatspace. In my genres of interest (folk, bluegrass, celtic) we have lots of festivals, large and small. You either come for one act or just to meet up with friends and end up listening to (and buying directly from) a dozen independent artists. There are festivals in rock and country, too, though typically a whole lot more expensive and commercial. Besides festivals, we also have concert series. Lots of folkies get in the habit of attending every house concert in a series and learn about new artists that way.
The choice of cable vs DSL is clear as day here. The ma-and-pa local cable company isn't cheap has a strict download cap. Past it, they charge like hell per MB. Plus, I have no interest in cable TV (particularly when the most-basic TV plan is $630 a year after taxes... hell no). DSL is pretty reasonably priced.
As such, I need a landline for my DSL. I actually use it a fair bit. I trimmed it as much as possible (there was a fee to have a long-distance provider... I finally convinced them I wanted no long distance ability at all).
For cellphones, I average about $120 a year of spending on Tracfone. I don't even use the 800 minutes a year that gives me. I know 15c/minute sounds bad, but a normal plan is, what, $450 or $500 a year after taxes? With the Tracfone, I get unlimited incoming SMS, including email->SMS. This, I use as a "server is down" automated pager.
And, I pay for Skype unlimited.
So, my annual pay for phones (including some mobility, and all the long-distance I want) and sorta-broadband internet is $660 a year including taxes. And, no cable TV bill. Could be worse.
In no small degree, American small businesses are hurt by things like our nutters health system. A big chain like Best Buy can negotiate a better deal for insuring the staff that take health insurance. Joe small business cannot negotiate and doesn't want to spend hours and hours dealing with insurance options (and state tax regs, and county inspectors, etc, etc).
Plus, there's the diffusion of responsibility. When Betty at Joe's store needs to take a week off for an emergency, he's going to feel guilty in doing something to screw her over. Same with a customer with a legitimate but expensive complaint. The Best Buy manager can play "corporate says... only following orders".
Thus, they're cheaper. And America is nothing if not the country looking for the cheapest alternative, all else be damned.
My main box was the TI-99/4A. We stayed TI-99 people *way* longer than was reasonable (until I could afford junker DOS PCs from my own money some time around '93.) My father was kicking out desktop publishing (of a sort) and doing finances on the old beast until '95 or so.
Fascinating community. I'd suggest that the Atari and TI communities were even more like the Open Source world. Commodores and Apple ][s were being made, and commercial software for them was developed through the early 1990s. Lots of Apple ][ people kept using Appleworks and Oregon Trail and Print Shop (and the culture of copying those programs, along with the escalation copy-protection and cracks lingers today). The TI was abandoned much earlier (1983), and the commercial world dried up soon thereafter. But, there were thousands of shareware programs still being written, distributed through floppies and user groups. Very few people ever expected to make a penny writing TI software, but they wrote a lot anyway.
Yes, even a CB would have helped immensely. There were numerous search planes flying over the huge region he was thought to be in. If any of them thought he would have reason to transmit on CB emergency channel 9, relatively simple radio direction finding equipment (either a quick hack of a aeronautical NDB or VOR receiver, or equipment a good ham radio club could build in a few hours) could have found him pretty quickly. From the air, on an empty channel, his signal would be detectable for many miles on the 4W of legal CB. Same is true if he were a ham and might be expected at 146.52 (even on AA batteries). And that is just direction-finding. Having functioning communications and GPS means he'd be out in time for dinner.
Obviously a thousand mistakes were made in his case. It's impossible to blame him for not being any more prepared than 99% of people. But, that doesn't mean I didn't learn something from his mistakes.
Yes, the percentage of your class that will be in the industry will be using Photoshop and Dreamweaver (although those programs will be totally different in 5 years).
But, I think you're better off encouraging students' curiosity for use *at home*. Which would you rather hire to use Photoshop, someone who's spent 100 hours using Photoshop 5 in a classroom a several years ago, or someone who's played with everything in GIMP for 600+ hours, built some webpages, entered some silly photo-editing contests, etc, and is still using it?
In reality, of course, if you subtly imply that Photoshop is the only way to go, they'll just pirate it to work at home. This is pernicious. I'm betting 'moral education' is a part of your school's mission statement. Live it.
Teach students to use Open Source software. Hand out discs with the PortableApps files. Accept ODF/RTF/TXT/PDF files as well as DOC.
What I'm amazed with is that all the prepaid plans I've looked at in Canada charge for long distance (even in the same province... if I'm in Edmonton and calling a guy in Edmonton with a Calgary-number phone... 25 or 35c a minute on top of the prepaid rate. Holy cow.)
Long distance is just sort of a given in the States. Hell, with my Tracfone, at basically the 19-20c/minute I pay for minutes, I can call anyone in the US, Canada, or landlines in most of the western world and a fair bit of Latin America. Really.
In the US, at least, a new handset for prepaid (Tracfone) goes for $15 plus sales tax. You can get a year's worth of operation for $80 (if you buy a $20 card quarterly) or $100 (for more minutes than that). Minutes that you use are much cheaper than the 50 cents + long distance for a payphone call.
Plus, any cellphone can call 911, activated or not. Lots of working ones for $3.99 with a charger at my local Goodwill.
Not saying it's a good deal, or that I can't understand not wanting to bother with one. But, they aren't that expensive in this country.
Canada on the other hand doesn't have anything nearly as affordable as Tracfone (or I would get one for use when I'm traveling there).
My bugaboo with calendaring has been devices. We're a introspective enough shop that we get away with a lot of open source. But, for calendars? Blackberrys, Symbians, PalmOS, Windows Mobile for Smartphones and PDAs, iPhones... and the list grows. I hope CalDAV picks up soon, because even Exchange isn't 100% on syncing with all these devices.
I've found just the opposite. When you have a small enough laptop, you use it for totally different purposes than desktop replacement.
The computer I'm using now is a 12" optical-drive-free (external or in a dock) 900 MHz ultralight (Dell X200, in this case). My wife and I have his-and-hers laptops on the living room table. No heat issues. Pulls from 5 to 15 watts with the lid closed. I want to check something, I check it. It's on. Small enough that I can toss it in a neoprene sleeve and actually take it.
I still have a desktop for media encoding (I'd game with it if I gamed). But the 12" sub-2-pound form factor is great. The keyboards don't bother me much. My history has been Toshiba Portege 7200, Dell X200, ThinkPad X32. The next one? Either another Lenovo X-Series or an Asus Eee.
Look. 2.4ISM is an unlicensed band. Under 200mW, I have rights to transmit anything I want to. Period. If your router interprets it as a part of an HTTP request, that's not my fault. The "I'm swinging my arms, and if you walk into them it's your fault" theory.
And, I do think someone needs to introduce RFC 2131 (DHCP) into evidence. An open router responds to a polite request with a positive acknowledgment. It is possible to configure the box not to give that acknowledgment, probably via an encryption key, but also by MAC filters or turning off DHCP. Introduce the owner's manual while you're at it.
Get a laptop next time.
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I understand there are perfectly good reasons to want a moderately-transportable powerhouse machine that can encode and render and whatever. Great. But, they still need a desk.
For lap use, 12" is where it's at. I'd argue that a one-spindle laptop (i.e., one without CD/DVD ability built in, though it may have a docking station) with WiFi built-in is best. Low power consumption = long battery and low heat. A somewhat older model will surf fine, play any media you can name, and isn't too expensive. Consider the Dell X200/X300 models, some Toshiba Portege's, and the Thinkpad X-series models. The Asus Eee may grow to fit this niche even better.
A 12" think WiFi machine with a neoprene sleeve is small and light enough that you'll actually carry it, thus have it when you want it.
Bandwidth is comparatively cheap to get somewhere. A few redundant loops of fiber... undersea if need be. Fiber does not suffer transmission losses in the way that sending electricity the other way would.
One fairly obvious location for this would be Labrador in Canada. Very well cooled. Absolutely lots of hydroelectric. Churchill Falls is huge. They lose half the energy sending it down to the US, but no one closer needs the power. Several major untapped hydro locations, too. Lots of land for approximately free.
I've actually been in this datacenter. Tried to host some boxes there for a while... and when I finally gave up on their shenanigans, I was not near Chicago, so I just abandoned them there (cheaper than shipping).
First, this datacenter is literally two blocks from what is left of the infamous Cabrini-Green projects. Tough neighborhood, so it's not entirely impossible that it is an outside cracked-up scheme.
There was none of the double-man-trap doors or whatever there. The one staffer was in the back playing a Playstation. The couple of customers in the center exchanged cell numbers, so we could call each other to get let back when we needed to use the toilet.
The Dallas billing people weren't any better. Worst... host... ever.
The only problem I have ever had with OpenBSD was rustiness. I tend to have Linux on things that are close at hand and and I'm playing with regularly. I've used OpenBSD on boxes that are install-and-forget. I had a primary box for me at a colo running OpenBSD 2.9 until just this summer (a few days short of 6 years). I had to panic on the day of the OpenSSH vulnerability... and that was it. Just kept working. So, when I decided to replace it, I had to brush of on some of OpenBSDs uniquenesses from Linux.
Not that they're bad uniquenesses. Good ones mostly. And, I think the old saw still holds true. Linux is for people who don't like Windows. BSD is for people who actually love UNIX. I use both.
They deserve a bigger check than they gotten from me so far.
One factor that may make a difference is that power at point A is not equivalent to power at point B. The places where power is ultra-cheap tend to export it in the form of manufactured products (i.e., the Columbia River historically being a cheap place to refine Aluminium lead Boeing in Seattle). If energy were somewhat more expensive, something that is net Energy-Return-on-Energy-Invested positive (making solar cells) will be even more net-positive in a cheap energy climate.
I can't be the only sub-5-digit Slashdotter who still works in the same building, same floor (different office number) that I was ten years ago when I registered.
I swear, I'll finish my thesis one of these days (grin)!
My dream gadget would be something a somewhat larger than a iPhone/Palm/Zaurus, smaller than the Thinkpad X-series I usually carry. Tablet form-factor, probably sans keyboard, but with a well-protected screen? Reasonably open architecture. SD-card reader that could play MP3 and Xvid. Bluetooth, wifi, USB-on-the-go. The critical feature, though, is the screen... high-res, low power, readable in the sun. A black and white mode is fine for this. I want to get away from paper books. I want to load a few dozen books, PDF articles, automatically-retrieved magazines, RSS feeds, etc, and have it display for 12-hours-plus on a charge. But, I want this same e-book reader to be usable for some web-browsing and media as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Riddle me this guy:
http://maps.kansasgis.org/kbi/kbi.cfm?id=SOP04716
I don't know him. Seems like a bad enough accusation. Then, check the DoB. On the list at a few days past 14 (must have been 13 at the time). Still on after 18.
Yep. Noise is pernicious. My office also doubles as a low-rent recording studio (we do audio work on e-books). My main desktop is a fanless thin client. Dead silent == PERFECT!
The one I have is fairly common on eBay. Search for "hisense tuner". There was a failed business plan a few years back for paid/encrypted subchannels on ATSC broadcasters (called USDTV). The inventory remaining are on eBay. AFAIK, the ones that will be in the stores with the coupons should have a significantly newer chipset and work better.
As for me, I don't watch much TV. No way I'd pay the $650 a year that "basic" cable including taxes costs from the local ma-and-pa cable. And, I don't care about HD at all. I watch on a 25" TV I got for $10 at Goodwill and am happy. I do watch some broadcast sports. And, I get 2 PBS affiliates, with 7 broadcasts between them (with subchannels). Having 7 PBS options means one is usually somewhat distracting (filling the Discovery/History channel need in my life).
The converters are nearly impossible to find (I have an older one) because of the federal government. They are implementing a $40 "coupon program" for them, starting in January. The market research decided that very few people were going to spend $60 a piece on a converter box, particularly while analog NTSC was still around. But, they would pay $20, particularly if they thought they were pulling one over on the government. Now, the manufacturers might have been able to sell them at $20 or $30, but wouldn't you rather make $60 or $70? So, they've been holding off on the production. There are hundreds of thousands of them being made in China right now and loaded onto cargo ships to be on your Wal-Mart shelf by February.
The adjacent channel thing is true. Also, the subchannel thing (divvying up your 6MHz into more than one channel) helps. Around here, some of the minor networks (CW, MyNetwork, Telefutura) operate as subchannels of the majors (NBC, ABC, and Univision). This means they aren't going to request their own frequency assignment, and they get better coverage being part of a 5 megawatt signal, not their own rinky-dink transmitter.
My reason for Pine (or mutt or such) as an option (as well as a personal webmail install and using Tbird most of the time):
Nothing... absolutely nothing works as well at 28.8k. This road warrior ends up doing dial-up on a not-infrequent basis, even today.
I know one place to hear new music. Meatspace. In my genres of interest (folk, bluegrass, celtic) we have lots of festivals, large and small. You either come for one act or just to meet up with friends and end up listening to (and buying directly from) a dozen independent artists. There are festivals in rock and country, too, though typically a whole lot more expensive and commercial. Besides festivals, we also have concert series. Lots of folkies get in the habit of attending every house concert in a series and learn about new artists that way.
The choice of cable vs DSL is clear as day here. The ma-and-pa local cable company isn't cheap has a strict download cap. Past it, they charge like hell per MB. Plus, I have no interest in cable TV (particularly when the most-basic TV plan is $630 a year after taxes... hell no). DSL is pretty reasonably priced.
As such, I need a landline for my DSL. I actually use it a fair bit. I trimmed it as much as possible (there was a fee to have a long-distance provider... I finally convinced them I wanted no long distance ability at all).
For cellphones, I average about $120 a year of spending on Tracfone. I don't even use the 800 minutes a year that gives me. I know 15c/minute sounds bad, but a normal plan is, what, $450 or $500 a year after taxes? With the Tracfone, I get unlimited incoming SMS, including email->SMS. This, I use as a "server is down" automated pager.
And, I pay for Skype unlimited.
So, my annual pay for phones (including some mobility, and all the long-distance I want) and sorta-broadband internet is $660 a year including taxes. And, no cable TV bill. Could be worse.
Opera's chief mission is mobile platforms. There's nothing even in the ballpark on Symbian or Windows Mobile.
In no small degree, American small businesses are hurt by things like our nutters health system. A big chain like Best Buy can negotiate a better deal for insuring the staff that take health insurance. Joe small business cannot negotiate and doesn't want to spend hours and hours dealing with insurance options (and state tax regs, and county inspectors, etc, etc).
Plus, there's the diffusion of responsibility. When Betty at Joe's store needs to take a week off for an emergency, he's going to feel guilty in doing something to screw her over. Same with a customer with a legitimate but expensive complaint. The Best Buy manager can play "corporate says... only following orders".
Thus, they're cheaper. And America is nothing if not the country looking for the cheapest alternative, all else be damned.
My main box was the TI-99/4A. We stayed TI-99 people *way* longer than was reasonable (until I could afford junker DOS PCs from my own money some time around '93.) My father was kicking out desktop publishing (of a sort) and doing finances on the old beast until '95 or so.
Fascinating community. I'd suggest that the Atari and TI communities were even more like the Open Source world. Commodores and Apple ][s were being made, and commercial software for them was developed through the early 1990s. Lots of Apple ][ people kept using Appleworks and Oregon Trail and Print Shop (and the culture of copying those programs, along with the escalation copy-protection and cracks lingers today). The TI was abandoned much earlier (1983), and the commercial world dried up soon thereafter. But, there were thousands of shareware programs still being written, distributed through floppies and user groups. Very few people ever expected to make a penny writing TI software, but they wrote a lot anyway.
Yes, even a CB would have helped immensely. There were numerous search planes flying over the huge region he was thought to be in. If any of them thought he would have reason to transmit on CB emergency channel 9, relatively simple radio direction finding equipment (either a quick hack of a aeronautical NDB or VOR receiver, or equipment a good ham radio club could build in a few hours) could have found him pretty quickly. From the air, on an empty channel, his signal would be detectable for many miles on the 4W of legal CB. Same is true if he were a ham and might be expected at 146.52 (even on AA batteries). And that is just direction-finding. Having functioning communications and GPS means he'd be out in time for dinner.
Obviously a thousand mistakes were made in his case. It's impossible to blame him for not being any more prepared than 99% of people. But, that doesn't mean I didn't learn something from his mistakes.
Yes, the percentage of your class that will be in the industry will be using Photoshop and Dreamweaver (although those programs will be totally different in 5 years).
But, I think you're better off encouraging students' curiosity for use *at home*. Which would you rather hire to use Photoshop, someone who's spent 100 hours using Photoshop 5 in a classroom a several years ago, or someone who's played with everything in GIMP for 600+ hours, built some webpages, entered some silly photo-editing contests, etc, and is still using it?
In reality, of course, if you subtly imply that Photoshop is the only way to go, they'll just pirate it to work at home. This is pernicious. I'm betting 'moral education' is a part of your school's mission statement. Live it.
Teach students to use Open Source software. Hand out discs with the PortableApps files. Accept ODF/RTF/TXT/PDF files as well as DOC.
What I'm amazed with is that all the prepaid plans I've looked at in Canada charge for long distance (even in the same province... if I'm in Edmonton and calling a guy in Edmonton with a Calgary-number phone... 25 or 35c a minute on top of the prepaid rate. Holy cow.)
Long distance is just sort of a given in the States. Hell, with my Tracfone, at basically the 19-20c/minute I pay for minutes, I can call anyone in the US, Canada, or landlines in most of the western world and a fair bit of Latin America. Really.
In the US, at least, a new handset for prepaid (Tracfone) goes for $15 plus sales tax. You can get a year's worth of operation for $80 (if you buy a $20 card quarterly) or $100 (for more minutes than that). Minutes that you use are much cheaper than the 50 cents + long distance for a payphone call.
Plus, any cellphone can call 911, activated or not. Lots of working ones for $3.99 with a charger at my local Goodwill.
Not saying it's a good deal, or that I can't understand not wanting to bother with one. But, they aren't that expensive in this country.
Canada on the other hand doesn't have anything nearly as affordable as Tracfone (or I would get one for use when I'm traveling there).
My bugaboo with calendaring has been devices. We're a introspective enough shop that we get away with a lot of open source. But, for calendars? Blackberrys, Symbians, PalmOS, Windows Mobile for Smartphones and PDAs, iPhones... and the list grows. I hope CalDAV picks up soon, because even Exchange isn't 100% on syncing with all these devices.
I've found just the opposite. When you have a small enough laptop, you use it for totally different purposes than desktop replacement.
The computer I'm using now is a 12" optical-drive-free (external or in a dock) 900 MHz ultralight (Dell X200, in this case). My wife and I have his-and-hers laptops on the living room table. No heat issues. Pulls from 5 to 15 watts with the lid closed. I want to check something, I check it. It's on. Small enough that I can toss it in a neoprene sleeve and actually take it.
I still have a desktop for media encoding (I'd game with it if I gamed). But the 12" sub-2-pound form factor is great. The keyboards don't bother me much. My history has been Toshiba Portege 7200, Dell X200, ThinkPad X32. The next one? Either another Lenovo X-Series or an Asus Eee.
Look. 2.4ISM is an unlicensed band. Under 200mW, I have rights to transmit anything I want to. Period. If your router interprets it as a part of an HTTP request, that's not my fault. The "I'm swinging my arms, and if you walk into them it's your fault" theory.
And, I do think someone needs to introduce RFC 2131 (DHCP) into evidence. An open router responds to a polite request with a positive acknowledgment. It is possible to configure the box not to give that acknowledgment, probably via an encryption key, but also by MAC filters or turning off DHCP. Introduce the owner's manual while you're at it.
I understand there are perfectly good reasons to want a moderately-transportable powerhouse machine that can encode and render and whatever. Great. But, they still need a desk.
For lap use, 12" is where it's at. I'd argue that a one-spindle laptop (i.e., one without CD/DVD ability built in, though it may have a docking station) with WiFi built-in is best. Low power consumption = long battery and low heat. A somewhat older model will surf fine, play any media you can name, and isn't too expensive. Consider the Dell X200/X300 models, some Toshiba Portege's, and the Thinkpad X-series models. The Asus Eee may grow to fit this niche even better.
A 12" think WiFi machine with a neoprene sleeve is small and light enough that you'll actually carry it, thus have it when you want it.
Bandwidth is comparatively cheap to get somewhere. A few redundant loops of fiber... undersea if need be. Fiber does not suffer transmission losses in the way that sending electricity the other way would.
One fairly obvious location for this would be Labrador in Canada. Very well cooled. Absolutely lots of hydroelectric. Churchill Falls is huge. They lose half the energy sending it down to the US, but no one closer needs the power. Several major untapped hydro locations, too. Lots of land for approximately free.
I've actually been in this datacenter. Tried to host some boxes there for a while... and when I finally gave up on their shenanigans, I was not near Chicago, so I just abandoned them there (cheaper than shipping).
First, this datacenter is literally two blocks from what is left of the infamous Cabrini-Green projects. Tough neighborhood, so it's not entirely impossible that it is an outside cracked-up scheme.
There was none of the double-man-trap doors or whatever there. The one staffer was in the back playing a Playstation. The couple of customers in the center exchanged cell numbers, so we could call each other to get let back when we needed to use the toilet.
The Dallas billing people weren't any better. Worst... host... ever.
The only problem I have ever had with OpenBSD was rustiness. I tend to have Linux on things that are close at hand and and I'm playing with regularly. I've used OpenBSD on boxes that are install-and-forget. I had a primary box for me at a colo running OpenBSD 2.9 until just this summer (a few days short of 6 years). I had to panic on the day of the OpenSSH vulnerability... and that was it. Just kept working. So, when I decided to replace it, I had to brush of on some of OpenBSDs uniquenesses from Linux.
Not that they're bad uniquenesses. Good ones mostly. And, I think the old saw still holds true. Linux is for people who don't like Windows. BSD is for people who actually love UNIX. I use both.
They deserve a bigger check than they gotten from me so far.
One factor that may make a difference is that power at point A is not equivalent to power at point B. The places where power is ultra-cheap tend to export it in the form of manufactured products (i.e., the Columbia River historically being a cheap place to refine Aluminium lead Boeing in Seattle). If energy were somewhat more expensive, something that is net Energy-Return-on-Energy-Invested positive (making solar cells) will be even more net-positive in a cheap energy climate.
I can't be the only sub-5-digit Slashdotter who still works in the same building, same floor (different office number) that I was ten years ago when I registered.
I swear, I'll finish my thesis one of these days (grin)!
My dream gadget would be something a somewhat larger than a iPhone/Palm/Zaurus, smaller than the Thinkpad X-series I usually carry. Tablet form-factor, probably sans keyboard, but with a well-protected screen? Reasonably open architecture. SD-card reader that could play MP3 and Xvid. Bluetooth, wifi, USB-on-the-go. The critical feature, though, is the screen... high-res, low power, readable in the sun. A black and white mode is fine for this. I want to get away from paper books. I want to load a few dozen books, PDF articles, automatically-retrieved magazines, RSS feeds, etc, and have it display for 12-hours-plus on a charge. But, I want this same e-book reader to be usable for some web-browsing and media as well.
In some ways, a high-end OLPC.