Ah, your post reminds me that I forgot an argument:
5. The pebble already does this!
I'd like it to not be bigger than a regular watch, to have looks closer to some jewelry than some nerdy toy thingy (i.e., no plastic, not rectangular), to be waterproof (at least to the extent as regular waterproof watches are), and the battery to last at least 24 hours straight
Ok, the pebble fails at your couple requirements (while it's not much bigger overall than a regular watch, the rectangular corners and whatnot make it more cumbersome. It always get caught in my long sleeves. And it's cheesy-looking), it is waterproof and the battery lasts almost a week.
Here we go again. Let's just skip ahead to the arguments made every time there's a story about smart watches. Please note that the exclamation point at the end of each argument is the indicator that THIS argument is right, and everyone else is a moron.
1. Nobody wears watches anymore, they are just jewelry!
1a. These are too cheap and ugly to count as jewelry. I only wear a $180000 dollar watch to show off how awesome I am!
1b. I wear a watch, because I hate pulling my cell phone out of my pocket!
2. These are dumb, the charge doesn't last long enough to be useful.
2a. My $5 watch from 1993 never needs to be charged!
2b. My $180000 watch doesn't have a battery, it is wound by a servant that comes into my room every night to care for the watch!
3. They aren't rugged/waterproof enough!
3a. Neither is your $1800000 jewelry watch!
3b. I don't care what happens to my $5 watch, but it keeps on working, what about these?
3c. I regularly go scuba diving, parachuting, race car driving, and enjoying fine wine on my yacht. That's when I'm not busy having great sex twice a day. This watch won't work for me!
4. I don't want to be MORE plugged in! What happened to just getting away from all your notifications and enjoying life?
Ok, now that we've gotten those out of the way, is there any NEW discussion about these things, or should we just move on?
Well for those long distance trips catch a sleeper on a train and rent on location, hell with high speed rail, oh wait the Republicans killed those, I was going to say you wouldn't even need the sleeper, just a seat and luggage space and quicker than the car without all of the fuss of a plane.
And unfortunately, with a family, it's still more expensive than driving.
I live a half-mile from an amTrak station, so I almost always check amTrak before a trip to see if it would save me money or time or both. So far, it's never been cheaper OR faster for any trip that I've investigated. If you're traveling alone, the price is comparable to driving. Once you get to 2 or 3 people (let alone a family of 5), driving is significantly cheaper. And you get to go directly to your destination, as opposed to ending at a train station. And you have a car when you get there. I keep hoping that the train makes sense someday, but today is not that day.
I disagree. There has never been a time when you could not write software for your personal device (at least since Apple provided a compiler for IOS). You may still complain about file system accessibility, but you can write personal software for your IOS device.
You can't write personal software for your iOS device without paying a $100/year subscription. (Well, you can write it, but you can't run it) I'm sorry, I don't want to have to pay a subscription to write software for my own device.
Please tell me what apps you sideload that are must haves that you cant get on the play store. because everyone I know that is huge fans of side-loading are simply pirates that are too cheap to actually pay for their software. I would love to find this source of apps that are must have but not available on the play store.
I have yet to find a software repository of legitimate and great apps for side loading. the only time I use it is for my own junk I compile for dinking around with arduinos.
Well, first, as you answered yourself, "my own junk I compile" is enough for me, and the reason I switched from iOS to Android. Beyond that, in my limited experience, there's an excellent SNES emulator (Snes9x EX+) which, when I first got it, was available directly from the developer but not on the Play Store. (He's since been able to get it into the play store, so that is not longer a great example. Other than the fact that iOS won't allow you to use emulators at all). Those may be minor examples, but they're just the ones I could think of based on my own anecdotal use.
Same thing goes for all that other "human touch" crap. Why would anyone go to a restaurant where the food is made manually, rather than in a replicator, if they can't tell the difference? Are they going to go in the kitchen and verify no replicators are being used?
This used to be great. But it doesn't work quite right on Jelly Bean and up*, and the author has stopped updating and supporting it. I used to highly recommend it, but not any longer.
* You can still sort of make it work, but it always complains that it's not connected to wifi, and you can't manually start syncs.
Thanks for this reasonable response (if I had mod points, I'd mod you up instead of replying).
It's true that there's a lot of ridiculous hype and grandstanding about this, but either way, people are getting a chance to be introduced to programming in an interesting way, and possibly learning from it.
No, those millions of lines of poorly-written "hello world" code aren't going to serve a useful purpose. But that's not the point. The point is that a lot of people engaged, at least to some extent, in learning programming.
Now it's time for the angry hordes to come tell us why we're wrong and why this is horrible.
Dang, I wish I still had mod points. This is my concern with the shift as well.
But as I think about it, the general public's desire for nice-looking games and fast web browsing (on the crappiest kludges of nasty javascript-heavy sites) means that even devices optimized for content-consumption will continue push performance. The new iPad has better resolution than my laptop, and should have plenty enough performance to do software development -- we just need better tools than "they" like to give us. iOS (as well as every Android flavor I've used) just have a terrible interface for efficiently getting work done, and a shortage of decent tools.
So I'm (mostly) not worried about the hardware. That will change over time, but will continue to be powerful. It's the UI, software, and the locked-down nature of these devices that worries me.
No kidding. I read a study at least 5 years ago saying that you should not flick on veins to bring them to the surface when drawing blood. The pain response will constrict the veins. Instead, you should gently massage the area. To this day, I've always had my veins flicked at. Thankfully I have very large veins, but my wife isn't so lucky.
Sheesh, where do you give blood? I donate blood pretty regularly, and I've never had somebody flick at my veins. They put on a pressure cuff, have me squeeze a ball, then they gently poke at the veins. Sounds like you might need to switch facilities.
Maybe the young kids have just figured out what the older generations haven't, which is that meetings are often a life-draining waste of time? They could be answering their phones in passive-aggressive protest of being locked up wasting their time in a conference room. </snark>
One out of three people decided they looked like a dork with that awful thing on their wrist.
This is slashdot, and we're making fun of people for looking like dork's for wearing a gadget? *sigh* Of all the places to worry about that.
My own experience: I've always worn a watch. I find it to be MUCH more convenient for checking the time than pulling my cellphone out, hitting the power button, then putting it back in my pocket. When the Pebble kickstarter was going on, I backed it, thinking it would be fun to have a watch that I can write software for.
It took awhile for me to be happy with the Pebble (the out-of-the-box experience sucked, but eventually 3rd parties wrote enough cool software for it), although I'm not sure it's really worth the price. The things it does well, I'm quite happy about. The fact that it vibrates when I get a phone call or text is quite helpful -- if I'm walking in a noisy environment, I used to miss calls and texts, but now I'm aware of them. A quick glance at your wrist lets you know whether you want to take the call or not. That's handy. The battery life (between 4 and 10 days depending on how I use it) is good enough. The size is a tiny bit bigger than my previous watch, but not a problem. If I don't have my phone with me, it still functions as a normal watch. (And it alerts me when my phone goes out of range)
There's a handy Android app that somebody wrote that lets you design and push smart watchfaces to it -- currently I have the time, date, weather, and my next calendar appointment showing on my watch. That's handy. Sure, it's nothing revolutionary, but it's convenient.
I just don't understand all the hate on slashdot. I don't care if you think it looks dorky. I don't care if you think it's silly that it duplicates phone functionality. I'm happy because it took something I always used (my watch) and made it somewhat more useful.
But hey, nevermind that, let's all make fun of people for being dorks. Then we can go make fun of nerds for liking computers, right?
As a foreigner you are only allowed to stay in certain hotels. Not sure if it has anything to do with allowing you unfettered internet access or to spy on everything you do while there. (maybe both) Just try to book a hotel that a normal Chinese person would stay in, you will find it almost impossible.
That was not my experience. I've stayed in nice hotels that cater to foreigners, and a number of crappy hotels (by American standards) that generally cater to locals. Neither was any more difficult to book (other than the language barrier at the small hotels that aren't used to foreigners). At any of the hotels, you just had to show your passport when you arrived. All the ones I stayed at (other than in Hong Kong) had sites blocked by the Great Firewall.
I will say that the nice hotels I stayed at were only in Beijing. I've stayed at cheaper ones in a number of other cities.
Do many households have one and only one way to access the net?
Yes.
It's easy to assume that most everyone is like us, living in a place with reasonable internet, with plenty of devices connecting to it, but there are plenty of people and places where this isn't true.
I grew up in a small rural town, and when I return home, I see families that can't get any sort of high speed internet, so they use dial-up, or they drive 5-10 miles to McDonalds to use the wifi on their one computer. And what's the point of a smartphone if you can't get 3G most places you go? (and can't get any sort of cell reception at home?) I also know plenty of older folks in my current town (with plenty of options for high-speed internet) who have one computer that they use to check email once per day. That's their only internet access. They see no need for smart phones, smart TV's, tablets, etc, etc.
So yes, there are many households that have only one way of connecting to the internet.
That's crap. Do you think they didn't test this 'change' before pushing it out? Of course they did. BTW, changing the API so it won't stream local content is still just changing the API.
The ChromeCast hasn't been out long enough for products to be taking advantage of "undocumented" APIs when the whole thing is too new to have anything realy built around it.
You are just completely wrong. This whole kerfluffle was because the API was changed in such a way that Koush's aircast app for android stopped working. An app that used some undocumented API's to work around google's device whitelisting system. So yes, I'm sure google tested this thing. And (if you believe them), they still don't mind local content playing through it (which is likely, as they never broke streaming local content via a chrome tab). But if changing an undocumented API breaks a 3rd party app (particularly one that worked to get around the standard APIs), then so be it.
That said, I was still mad that they made the change, as I liked using Aircast. Hopefully it will be back at some point.
Considering that hasn't happened with laptops yet, I'd be very surprised to see it happen with phones, at least in the near future. Just like with laptops and desktops, just because you can mostly get the same performance in a much smaller form factor doesn't mean everyone's going to want to pay the premium for the smaller size.
While it hasn't completely happened with laptops, it has to a great extent. At my office, most people get assigned laptops. 80% of the time, they are attached to a keyboard/mouse/monitor. The only people I know who buy desktops at home tend to be gamers or developers. Everyone else buys laptops. So no, they may never _completely_ replace desktops, but they might for the average user.
Has anyone ever detailed the relationship between this guy (J.S.) and Slashdot (editors, readers, seemingly everyone). He (not necessarily undeservedly) has gotten a steady stream of love from this site for many years.
There's no relationship. Joel's just a well-known blogger that writes fairly intelligently about computing topics. A sort of micro-celebrity in the programming world. People like that end up being quoted and talked about in places like slashdot. Particularly when they do things that relate to the general categories that slashdotters love to get angry about (patents, microsoft, etc).
Wouldn't it be nice if you could have an IDE that gives you the impression that you're programming a regular desktop application, but that would take care of the deployment aspects? And once you get there, you can imagine higher level, languages that would generate the JavaScript for you if you're not a fan.
Getting slightly offtopic, but you might want to check out Vaadin. It's a java framework that attempts to do what you're talking about -- you write everything in java in a fashion similar to a desktop application (with a widget toolkit that's similar to other desktop widget toolkits), and it takes care of building the html and javascript, and managing the ajax connections. You can run and debug it in an IDE and almost pretend you're not dealing with all the nastiness of the web. (I say "almost" -- it's not perfect by any means, but it's the closest thing I've found to what you're talking about)
I went to a library once last year. It felt like I stepped back in time to when I was in high school. Nothing had changed. The books hadn't changed, the computers hadn't changed, their sense of relevance hadn't changed. On top of that it was noisier than hell as people were using it as a meeting place so it was an awful place to study. I backed out of there slowly and I'll probably never visit a library again.
Your city must have a poorly managed library. My small-city library is always getting new interesting books (I look through the computer & technology books and magazines every month, and there's always new stuff on the shelves). If they don't have a book you're looking for, they'll request another library to mail it to them, and so you can borrow just about any book you can think of, without any sort of fee. They're always working to incorporate new technology (they lend out kindles, they have an ebook lending program, you can use your smartphone to checkout books by scanning the barcode). They also host all sorts of programs (cultural events, performances, etc) to try to engage the community and bring people into the library.
I guess it depends on your library, but some libraries are pretty cool places.
So I went to school at Illinois, and still live in C/U. We've all known for years just how bad Suburban Express is, but unfortunately there's enough people that don't know, and enough new people each year, that keep them in business. While it's weird that this made Slashdot, it's nice to see them get the publicity that they deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, your post reminds me that I forgot an argument:
5. The pebble already does this!
I'd like it to not be bigger than a regular watch, to have looks closer to some jewelry than some nerdy toy thingy (i.e., no plastic, not rectangular), to be waterproof (at least to the extent as regular waterproof watches are), and the battery to last at least 24 hours straight
Ok, the pebble fails at your couple requirements (while it's not much bigger overall than a regular watch, the rectangular corners and whatnot make it more cumbersome. It always get caught in my long sleeves. And it's cheesy-looking), it is waterproof and the battery lasts almost a week.
Here we go again. Let's just skip ahead to the arguments made every time there's a story about smart watches. Please note that the exclamation point at the end of each argument is the indicator that THIS argument is right, and everyone else is a moron.
1. Nobody wears watches anymore, they are just jewelry!
1a. These are too cheap and ugly to count as jewelry. I only wear a $180000 dollar watch to show off how awesome I am!
1b. I wear a watch, because I hate pulling my cell phone out of my pocket!
2. These are dumb, the charge doesn't last long enough to be useful.
2a. My $5 watch from 1993 never needs to be charged!
2b. My $180000 watch doesn't have a battery, it is wound by a servant that comes into my room every night to care for the watch!
3. They aren't rugged/waterproof enough!
3a. Neither is your $1800000 jewelry watch!
3b. I don't care what happens to my $5 watch, but it keeps on working, what about these?
3c. I regularly go scuba diving, parachuting, race car driving, and enjoying fine wine on my yacht. That's when I'm not busy having great sex twice a day. This watch won't work for me!
4. I don't want to be MORE plugged in! What happened to just getting away from all your notifications and enjoying life?
Ok, now that we've gotten those out of the way, is there any NEW discussion about these things, or should we just move on?
Well for those long distance trips catch a sleeper on a train and rent on location, hell with high speed rail, oh wait the Republicans killed those, I was going to say you wouldn't even need the sleeper, just a seat and luggage space and quicker than the car without all of the fuss of a plane.
And unfortunately, with a family, it's still more expensive than driving.
I live a half-mile from an amTrak station, so I almost always check amTrak before a trip to see if it would save me money or time or both. So far, it's never been cheaper OR faster for any trip that I've investigated. If you're traveling alone, the price is comparable to driving. Once you get to 2 or 3 people (let alone a family of 5), driving is significantly cheaper. And you get to go directly to your destination, as opposed to ending at a train station. And you have a car when you get there. I keep hoping that the train makes sense someday, but today is not that day.
Boughten is perfectly cromulent.
<grammar police>That site lists it as an adjective. He used it as a verb. I don't think that qualifies as cromulent in that case.</grammar police>
I disagree. There has never been a time when you could not write software for your personal device (at least since Apple provided a compiler for IOS). You may still complain about file system accessibility, but you can write personal software for your IOS device.
You can't write personal software for your iOS device without paying a $100/year subscription. (Well, you can write it, but you can't run it) I'm sorry, I don't want to have to pay a subscription to write software for my own device.
Please tell me what apps you sideload that are must haves that you cant get on the play store. because everyone I know that is huge fans of side-loading are simply pirates that are too cheap to actually pay for their software. I would love to find this source of apps that are must have but not available on the play store.
I have yet to find a software repository of legitimate and great apps for side loading. the only time I use it is for my own junk I compile for dinking around with arduinos.
Well, first, as you answered yourself, "my own junk I compile" is enough for me, and the reason I switched from iOS to Android. Beyond that, in my limited experience, there's an excellent SNES emulator (Snes9x EX+) which, when I first got it, was available directly from the developer but not on the Play Store. (He's since been able to get it into the play store, so that is not longer a great example. Other than the fact that iOS won't allow you to use emulators at all). Those may be minor examples, but they're just the ones I could think of based on my own anecdotal use.
Just watch out for this:
https://xkcd.com/1319/
Either way, you'll have a lot more fun maintaining the script than you would doing the same boring task over and over :)
Same thing goes for all that other "human touch" crap. Why would anyone go to a restaurant where the food is made manually, rather than in a replicator, if they can't tell the difference? Are they going to go in the kitchen and verify no replicators are being used?
Answer: hipsters.
Syncs images and videos to a SMB share whenever you are connected to your LAN:
https://play.google.com/store/...
Simple and works for me.
This used to be great. But it doesn't work quite right on Jelly Bean and up*, and the author has stopped updating and supporting it. I used to highly recommend it, but not any longer.
* You can still sort of make it work, but it always complains that it's not connected to wifi, and you can't manually start syncs.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the language. Does that translate as "Next Teusday"?
It's "very fast".
Thanks for this reasonable response (if I had mod points, I'd mod you up instead of replying).
It's true that there's a lot of ridiculous hype and grandstanding about this, but either way, people are getting a chance to be introduced to programming in an interesting way, and possibly learning from it.
No, those millions of lines of poorly-written "hello world" code aren't going to serve a useful purpose. But that's not the point. The point is that a lot of people engaged, at least to some extent, in learning programming.
Now it's time for the angry hordes to come tell us why we're wrong and why this is horrible.
Dang, I wish I still had mod points. This is my concern with the shift as well.
But as I think about it, the general public's desire for nice-looking games and fast web browsing (on the crappiest kludges of nasty javascript-heavy sites) means that even devices optimized for content-consumption will continue push performance. The new iPad has better resolution than my laptop, and should have plenty enough performance to do software development -- we just need better tools than "they" like to give us. iOS (as well as every Android flavor I've used) just have a terrible interface for efficiently getting work done, and a shortage of decent tools.
So I'm (mostly) not worried about the hardware. That will change over time, but will continue to be powerful. It's the UI, software, and the locked-down nature of these devices that worries me.
phlebotomists tend to miss veins too much IMO
No kidding. I read a study at least 5 years ago saying that you should not flick on veins to bring them to the surface when drawing blood. The pain response will constrict the veins. Instead, you should gently massage the area. To this day, I've always had my veins flicked at. Thankfully I have very large veins, but my wife isn't so lucky.
Sheesh, where do you give blood? I donate blood pretty regularly, and I've never had somebody flick at my veins. They put on a pressure cuff, have me squeeze a ball, then they gently poke at the veins. Sounds like you might need to switch facilities.
Maybe the young kids have just figured out what the older generations haven't, which is that meetings are often a life-draining waste of time? They could be answering their phones in passive-aggressive protest of being locked up wasting their time in a conference room. </snark>
This is slashdot, and we're making fun of people for looking like dork's for wearing a gadget?
Crap, s/dork's/dorks/g. I swear sometimes my brain doesn't kick in until AFTER I finish doing the "preview" that slashdot requires.
One out of three people decided they looked like a dork with that awful thing on their wrist.
This is slashdot, and we're making fun of people for looking like dork's for wearing a gadget? *sigh* Of all the places to worry about that.
My own experience: I've always worn a watch. I find it to be MUCH more convenient for checking the time than pulling my cellphone out, hitting the power button, then putting it back in my pocket. When the Pebble kickstarter was going on, I backed it, thinking it would be fun to have a watch that I can write software for.
It took awhile for me to be happy with the Pebble (the out-of-the-box experience sucked, but eventually 3rd parties wrote enough cool software for it), although I'm not sure it's really worth the price. The things it does well, I'm quite happy about. The fact that it vibrates when I get a phone call or text is quite helpful -- if I'm walking in a noisy environment, I used to miss calls and texts, but now I'm aware of them. A quick glance at your wrist lets you know whether you want to take the call or not. That's handy. The battery life (between 4 and 10 days depending on how I use it) is good enough. The size is a tiny bit bigger than my previous watch, but not a problem. If I don't have my phone with me, it still functions as a normal watch. (And it alerts me when my phone goes out of range)
There's a handy Android app that somebody wrote that lets you design and push smart watchfaces to it -- currently I have the time, date, weather, and my next calendar appointment showing on my watch. That's handy. Sure, it's nothing revolutionary, but it's convenient.
I just don't understand all the hate on slashdot. I don't care if you think it looks dorky. I don't care if you think it's silly that it duplicates phone functionality. I'm happy because it took something I always used (my watch) and made it somewhat more useful.
But hey, nevermind that, let's all make fun of people for being dorks. Then we can go make fun of nerds for liking computers, right?
As a foreigner you are only allowed to stay in certain hotels. Not sure if it has anything to do with allowing you unfettered internet access or to spy on everything you do while there. (maybe both) Just try to book a hotel that a normal Chinese person would stay in, you will find it almost impossible.
That was not my experience. I've stayed in nice hotels that cater to foreigners, and a number of crappy hotels (by American standards) that generally cater to locals. Neither was any more difficult to book (other than the language barrier at the small hotels that aren't used to foreigners). At any of the hotels, you just had to show your passport when you arrived. All the ones I stayed at (other than in Hong Kong) had sites blocked by the Great Firewall.
I will say that the nice hotels I stayed at were only in Beijing. I've stayed at cheaper ones in a number of other cities.
Name one decent off contract phone for less than [$250].
The Nexus 4. It may be a little old now, but it's still decent. $199.
Do many households have one and only one way to access the net?
Yes.
It's easy to assume that most everyone is like us, living in a place with reasonable internet, with plenty of devices connecting to it, but there are plenty of people and places where this isn't true.
I grew up in a small rural town, and when I return home, I see families that can't get any sort of high speed internet, so they use dial-up, or they drive 5-10 miles to McDonalds to use the wifi on their one computer. And what's the point of a smartphone if you can't get 3G most places you go? (and can't get any sort of cell reception at home?) I also know plenty of older folks in my current town (with plenty of options for high-speed internet) who have one computer that they use to check email once per day. That's their only internet access. They see no need for smart phones, smart TV's, tablets, etc, etc.
So yes, there are many households that have only one way of connecting to the internet.
That's crap. Do you think they didn't test this 'change' before pushing it out? Of course they did. BTW, changing the API so it won't stream local content is still just changing the API.
The ChromeCast hasn't been out long enough for products to be taking advantage of "undocumented" APIs when the whole thing is too new to have anything realy built around it.
You are just completely wrong. This whole kerfluffle was because the API was changed in such a way that Koush's aircast app for android stopped working. An app that used some undocumented API's to work around google's device whitelisting system. So yes, I'm sure google tested this thing. And (if you believe them), they still don't mind local content playing through it (which is likely, as they never broke streaming local content via a chrome tab). But if changing an undocumented API breaks a 3rd party app (particularly one that worked to get around the standard APIs), then so be it.
That said, I was still mad that they made the change, as I liked using Aircast. Hopefully it will be back at some point.
Considering that hasn't happened with laptops yet, I'd be very surprised to see it happen with phones, at least in the near future. Just like with laptops and desktops, just because you can mostly get the same performance in a much smaller form factor doesn't mean everyone's going to want to pay the premium for the smaller size.
While it hasn't completely happened with laptops, it has to a great extent. At my office, most people get assigned laptops. 80% of the time, they are attached to a keyboard/mouse/monitor. The only people I know who buy desktops at home tend to be gamers or developers. Everyone else buys laptops. So no, they may never _completely_ replace desktops, but they might for the average user.
Has anyone ever detailed the relationship between this guy (J.S.) and Slashdot (editors, readers, seemingly everyone). He (not necessarily undeservedly) has gotten a steady stream of love from this site for many years.
There's no relationship. Joel's just a well-known blogger that writes fairly intelligently about computing topics. A sort of micro-celebrity in the programming world. People like that end up being quoted and talked about in places like slashdot. Particularly when they do things that relate to the general categories that slashdotters love to get angry about (patents, microsoft, etc).
Wouldn't it be nice if you could have an IDE that gives you the impression that you're programming a regular desktop application, but that would take care of the deployment aspects? And once you get there, you can imagine higher level, languages that would generate the JavaScript for you if you're not a fan.
Getting slightly offtopic, but you might want to check out Vaadin. It's a java framework that attempts to do what you're talking about -- you write everything in java in a fashion similar to a desktop application (with a widget toolkit that's similar to other desktop widget toolkits), and it takes care of building the html and javascript, and managing the ajax connections. You can run and debug it in an IDE and almost pretend you're not dealing with all the nastiness of the web. (I say "almost" -- it's not perfect by any means, but it's the closest thing I've found to what you're talking about)
I went to a library once last year. It felt like I stepped back in time to when I was in high school. Nothing had changed. The books hadn't changed, the computers hadn't changed, their sense of relevance hadn't changed. On top of that it was noisier than hell as people were using it as a meeting place so it was an awful place to study. I backed out of there slowly and I'll probably never visit a library again.
Your city must have a poorly managed library. My small-city library is always getting new interesting books (I look through the computer & technology books and magazines every month, and there's always new stuff on the shelves). If they don't have a book you're looking for, they'll request another library to mail it to them, and so you can borrow just about any book you can think of, without any sort of fee. They're always working to incorporate new technology (they lend out kindles, they have an ebook lending program, you can use your smartphone to checkout books by scanning the barcode). They also host all sorts of programs (cultural events, performances, etc) to try to engage the community and bring people into the library.
I guess it depends on your library, but some libraries are pretty cool places.
So I went to school at Illinois, and still live in C/U. We've all known for years just how bad Suburban Express is, but unfortunately there's enough people that don't know, and enough new people each year, that keep them in business. While it's weird that this made Slashdot, it's nice to see them get the publicity that they deserve.