Agreed on all counts ! For the last few months I've been reading books only in electronic form (on my Palm Pilot or PC) ; now I bought a few paperbacks and they are much more difficult to use than the electronic books ! my hands get quickly tired from holding the book in the proper position - the Palm is much smaller and more compact and you can use it with one hand, including the scrolling (and no, I'm not using the other hand for anything important;) and the paper books only can be read in well-lighted places which is a problem for me (the Palm Pilot has a backlit screen which is ideal for reading in bed)
You're not alone:) Besides the name itself - HOTMAIL - sounds dirty ! can't stand any products which have the words "hot" or "easy" in their names (unless "hot" is related to the temperature)
Exactly. I don't see why computers have to emulate real life. Computers are supposed to be *better*, they should overcome the shortcomings of the clumsy meat interface. Sticking to the familiar metaphors of the drawers and desks is not innovation.
I use my Palm Pilot almost every day for reading books. The small size and the backlit display make it the ideal media for reading books in bed (for personal reasons, I can't use a lamp at the evening), and the Internet is a practically unlimited source of free or cheap downloadable books.
Tried also to play games (interactive fiction) and to write, but these 2 functions are considerably more inconvenient (at least, using Palm) than simply reading.
Also useless for the people suffering from prosopagnosia aka face blindness - it's a condition which makes it difficult or impossible to recognize faces. (http://www.faceblind.org/research)
In any case, I know that I'd just hate to rely on my subconsciousness to be able to access a computer. What if I'm too sleepy when trying to login; or drunk, or just "feeling not myself" and can't concentrate for any reason. What if a few tokens out of the random choices appear a few times during the past few weeks and I start to recognize them as well. Besides, in case of an error, with a regular password it's possible to retry and type it carefully next time - but it's hardly possible to "do it carefully" with the image recognition if one even doesn't know how exactly it works ! so each error would make me more and more nervous and lower the chances to succeed next time, which would most likely lock me out of the system after the 1st error.
I mean, is it too complicated to simply ask the sales person for the software, and have them burn it onto CD?
Some people would gladly go through a bit of hassle in order to avoid face-to-face interaction with a live human. (I used to think I'm the only one like that, but apparently there's a few more)
I use win98 on all of my VMWare installations (the host is running Linux). It's much more light (in terms of disk space / memory / cpu requirements) than the newer versions and I don't really mind its instability because 1) it's running inside the VMWare so it doesn't affect my working system and
2)I don't use it for more than 30 minutes at time (usually just to test something or other, such as viewability of some page under IE)
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Agreed on all counts ! For the last few months I've been reading books only in electronic form (on my Palm Pilot or PC) ; now I bought a few paperbacks and they are much more difficult to use than the electronic books ! my hands get quickly tired from holding the book in the proper position - the Palm is much smaller and more compact and you can use it with one hand, including the scrolling (and no, I'm not using the other hand for anything important ;) and the paper books only can be read in well-lighted places which is a problem for me (the Palm Pilot has a backlit screen which is ideal for reading in bed)
You're not alone :) Besides the name itself - HOTMAIL - sounds dirty ! can't stand any products which have the words "hot" or "easy" in their names (unless "hot" is related to the temperature)
I sent 3 invites to yahoo addresses and 2 to hotmail, all of them arrived without a hitch. Maybe I was lucky...
Exactly. I don't see why computers have to emulate real life. Computers are supposed to be *better*, they should overcome the shortcomings of the clumsy meat interface. Sticking to the familiar metaphors of the drawers and desks is not innovation.
I use my Palm Pilot almost every day for reading books. The small size and the backlit display make it the ideal media for reading books in bed (for personal reasons, I can't use a lamp at the evening), and the Internet is a practically unlimited source of free or cheap downloadable books. Tried also to play games (interactive fiction) and to write, but these 2 functions are considerably more inconvenient (at least, using Palm) than simply reading.
In any case, I know that I'd just hate to rely on my subconsciousness to be able to access a computer. What if I'm too sleepy when trying to login; or drunk, or just "feeling not myself" and can't concentrate for any reason. What if a few tokens out of the random choices appear a few times during the past few weeks and I start to recognize them as well. Besides, in case of an error, with a regular password it's possible to retry and type it carefully next time - but it's hardly possible to "do it carefully" with the image recognition if one even doesn't know how exactly it works ! so each error would make me more and more nervous and lower the chances to succeed next time, which would most likely lock me out of the system after the 1st error.
When the last digit is >5, I usually do it the other way, i.e. 30*4 - 2*4
I use win98 on all of my VMWare installations (the host is running Linux). It's much more light (in terms of disk space / memory / cpu requirements) than the newer versions and I don't really mind its instability because 1) it's running inside the VMWare so it doesn't affect my working system and 2)I don't use it for more than 30 minutes at time (usually just to test something or other, such as viewability of some page under IE)
The Leisure Suit Larry games had cured my phobia of airports...
Advantages of e-books:
- they don't take space. You can take a few hundred books with you anywhere you go, and at home you don't need bookshelves to store them.
- they are easy to search - just type a word/phrase, no need to turn pages over and over
- they don't get worn out, no matter how many times you read them or how long you keep them.
- they are easy to quote, if you want to quote some phrases/passages in email or blog or essay, you can just copy/paste, no need to type.