>
> IMO, it's that last mile, from the CO to your home,
> that's the most critical in the broadband arena.
>
From what I've read, the catchphrase "Last Mile" should be dumped in favor of the more accurate "The Penultimate Mile" -- or, more correctly, "The Penultimate Miles." After all, people located within several thousand feet of the CO can get services that, sadly, are unavailable to those of us not living in the shadow of the local Bell's office blocks. Until the intervening infrastructure gets beefed up, a lot of us are just out of luck. (Well, not me personally, because Cox wired up my humble Rhode Island street, though the wife won't hear of us getting Internet access through those scam srtists who ever took away our TV listings channel last month!)
>
> I afraid of the ($0.32 cost) $199.95 monitor
> arm after a few months and it gets a *little*
> loose, and *slowly* drifts down...slowly...
> like a glacier...
>
"That's OK honey, it happens to a lot of displays..."
Are "Ferrel Elephants" some guy from SNL in a pachyderm suit?
Rider's weight?; Sell 'em to college kids
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Your second concern, the weight, raises an interesting point that I may have missed in the articles I read: does IT perform better with a skinny passesenger -- rider? Itter? -- than a fat one?
All jokes about the average weight of target markets aside (i.e., average American @ 200 lbs vs. average person-from-anywhere-else @ 200 lbs [even though they probably use kilos or stone or something]), will IT go faster with a child onboard than it will with a full-grown man with a brief case and a laptop bag at the wheel? Or will IT govern its own speed to prevent hordes of yowling child bandits racing through downtowns with puffing bicycle cops in pursuit?
And for those people who say that Americans won't buy this thing, I'd like to make a suggestion. Does anyone know if Kamen has contacted college bookstores yet? Those things painted up in, say, BU's red-and-white would beat riding the stoopid "B" line through Allston anyday. Come to think of it, I bet the same is true for sprawling land-grant colleges as it is for schools in urban settings.
Heck, I'm an English major, but I got my start by just getting access to a box at work and trying stuff. Admittedly, I worked at a service bureau (where I printed out stuff from Quark and Pagemaker to film imagesetters and color plotters), and thus got chummy with a sysadmin who gave me an account on our Suns, but the point holds: log in, do a ps and then look up each process with 'man' until you get bored. [That admin was an art history major, who pined for a career in art restoration. Go figure.]
I was stuck in non-admin jobs until I just got together a system and started using it. I tried NetBSD on an old Mac to get the feel for installating, and I tried some Linux distro on a dusty old PC. Eventually I found a support job where I had a server I could legitimately log in to, and I started reading stuff and trying it out.
The books "Unix System Administration Handbook" (be sure to get the 3rd edition) and "Essential System Administration" -- both fairly expensive, but like any good tools, well worth their cost in the long run -- make for good reading even before you start laying hands on a keyboard. (I know: nothing can substitute for real experience.) Mailing lists, like those hosted at sunhelp.org, also make good reading: you can learn a lot from other peoples' mistakes.
It may make you look like a wannabe, but try to get a bit of book-learnin' under your belt, if only to avoid wrecking the first system you get access to.
(Re-reading the above, I have to point out that I had a series of fairly grim support-type roles in places that happened to have Unix around until I found a place willing to hire me as an actual administrator. You have to be willing to start out in a very junior position -- i.e., tape monkey -- in order to get your foot in the door. A corollary is that many places care about your actualy ability and not what certification and training you have in your portfolio. And never mind those people telling you that you'd rather not do it: they're just jealous of your charming innocence and niavete.)
Sadly, I was a regular blood donor for years and hard core platelet donor for a couple years -- double units every other Tuesday and they got a triple from me once by accident, thankyouverymuch -- but recent changes in the FDA's blood donor standards made me ineligible too. I have a friend who works in a blood bank and he's amazed that the FDA has been, relatively speaking, stampeded into this: IANAP (I Am Not A Phlebotomist) but my understanding is that there's no epidemiological connection between my eating (crummy) British beef in the 80's and 90's with me possiblying carrying CJD. (OT: I just found my British blood banking ID folder from the times I donated when I lived there. After each draw, they offered me tea, Fanta, or a stubby of Guinness!)
Anyway, I believe in the need of every person to donate blood enough that I periodically send out email to my healthy, non-British friends and ask them to donate because *I can't*. Think of my scarred elbows and my fat, untapped veins and make an appointment to give next week, or the week after -- because once the injured are all found and healed, and the rubble is all hauled to New Jersey, there will always be a need for blood donors, but a smaller pool of people from which they can be drawn.
>
> "Not true, governments have guns. I doubt
> seriously any business is going to be able
> to fight that."
>
There's a near-future Bruce Sterling novel called "Island in the Net" from 1988 about a couple who work for a company who get involved in revolution (? it's been a few years) as a result of representing their employer's "interests" in a tense political situation. In this story, the corporations are so large and transnational that they transcend states' boundaries and make their own policy. Good enough book; the Amazon reviews call it dated but I liked it.
The public radio program Marketplace, a 30-minute, daily business news program, covered this quite well on 7/31/01. They had mostly-correct details (NT & 2000, IIS, &c.) and some nay-sayers, as well as mentioning the sky-is-falling rhetoric that other media outlets were sticking to exclusively. I think you can get a RealAudio recording of the show on their web site at http://www.marketplace.org/shows/2001/07/31_mpp.ht ml.
The consolidation in real estate (like every other business) means that if you want access to the best stuff -- or more stuff, anyway -- you need to deal with the big players. Here in New England, DeWolfe is eating up smaller agencies pretty quickly, while a few other chains like ReMaxx seem to have the rest of the realtors in their stable. This also means that their customers have first crack at stuff that may not make it into the MLS updates for another day or three.
For example, the Wife & I bought a house in Rhode Island last fall, after searching in RI and Massachusetts for a dog's age. When we worked with a ReMaxx agent (whose husband was a realtor, so she only _showed_ the houses) we saw more places than we saw working with anyone else -- and we saw them on the weekdays *before* they hit the weekend MLS update and the Sunday papers. Of course, when we started working with a local guy in Rhodey he got us into a house in a week or two. He wasn't affiliated with any larger corporate mothership, and in fact was just quitting one to strike out on his own. Anyway, just to point out that dealing with realtors can definitely get you access to properties that aren't even on the web yet, and dealing with the giant franchise shops therefor gets you access to even more stuff.
But, YMMV. And if anyone cares, our guy's name is Peter Dandurand, d/b/a Dandurand Realty in Cumberland, RI. He rules.
From a user's perspective, the hosting crew at Pair Networks has a nice control panel. You might poke around their setup, though I bet it's hand-rolled:
http://www.pair.com/pair/support/mypair/
We hired a company to run new network cabling last month, and one morning I arrived to find a brand new, free-standing wall 30" wide, floor to ceiling, out in the middle of a room: hey, they needed _someplace_ to put the jacks! (That guy was in and out before any of us showed up at 8:00am.)
Ever deal with someone who taps their monitor when they're talking about their computer? Forget the _interface_, the _display_ is usually perceived as the computer by The Common Man. Remember, the article isn't about the internals, but about what'll be seen by the average CompUSELESS shopper, who only cares if he can run a browser, Quicken, and some games. (Kernal? Wha...?)
I read an article in last month's "Worth" magazine about the two biggest players in the RSN satellite radio business, and this sounds exactly like their approach: charge people a monthly fee for 100 stations of specific-format, ad-free content (i.e., jazz or country or NPR or ag reports), or let 'em listen to the free stations (which are, alarmingly, all the same anyway). They expect to charge about $10/mo. Incidentally, the idea of making the player useable outside the car is only just catching on with providers -- that is, making the decoder a unit that could be pulled from your dashbord and then plugged into your home stereo.
The old Larry Niven (an dJerry Pournell?) book "Lucofer's Hammer" is, if I recall, about a comet hitting the earth or some such civilization-crippling disaster. An interesting thread of the story is that one guy gets crates and crates of plastic bags and seals up his whole library of technical books -- and then drops 'em one by one into his septic tank. Knowing that no one will bother them there, the books are safe for later recovery. Also, when the roving gangs of cannibal bikers and religious feaks come to town, there's no precious Alexandrian Library for them to pillage. (It *is* a pretty dated book, and by Larry Niven, after all -- but it's still pretty good. And yeah, it predates "The Postman.")
I'm hesitant about this proposal, too -- mostly because I think teachers should spend their time teaching and not trouble-shooting a room full of computers. I have a relative who manages technology for a whole school district. Teachers are busy enough with their own lesson plans, professional development, and having-a-life -- without the need to get up to speed on Level 1 Tech Support for the thirty to forty (or more?) kids in a typical classroom. I imagine a lot of Slashdot readers do or have done support. I think it's fair to say that a 7th grader is about on par with an outside sales rep in terms of what they can do on their own with a non-functioning laptop. Or look at it this way: if you're in a room with someone whose computer seizes up, do you refer them to the Help Desk or "take a quick look at it"? And how many more people will the schools have to hire to support all these systems? One of the early Gemini (?) austronauts said the scariest thing about the untested rocket was that "every part was built by the lowest bidder"; who do you think will get the deal to supply these laptops? Good luck, Mainers. -wde
I'm hesitant about this proposal, too -- mostly because I think teachers should spend their time teaching and not trouble-shooting a room full of computers. I have a relative who manages technology for a whole school district. Teachers are busy enough with their own lesson plans, professional development, and having-a-life -- without the need to get up to speed on Level 1 Tech Support for the thirty to forty (or more?) kids in a typical classroom. I imagine a lot of Slashdot readers do or have done support. I think it's fair to say that a 7th grader is about on par with an outside sales rep in terms of what they can do on their own with a non-functioning laptop. Or look at it this way: if you're in a room with someone whose computer seizes up, do you refer them to the Help Desk or "take a quick look at it"? And how many more people will the schools have to hire to support all these systems? One of the early Gemini (?) austronauts said the scariest thing about the untested rocket was that "every part was built by the lowest bidder"; who do you think will get the deal to supply these laptops? God luck, Mainers. -wde
Far from being a joke, Beaver College has a real quandry here. Something that readers who weren't liberal arts majors might not know is that they're said to be the biggest study-abroad program in the U.S., and changing their name could dilute or kill that "brand" in order to save the school itself. The real enrollment is tiny (though I know someone who actually went there! Hi, Sally!) but the quantity of students from other schools that pass through the Beaver College programs is enormous: I did, my dentitst's receptionist's kid did, lots of random people do. That means that the larger of the two communities they serve is at risk with the name change ("Now where's that Beaver College that we used to use...?") -- but the smaller community is the whole reason for the larger community's existence. As someone pointed out, it's a shame that the Beavis & Butthead crew lowest common denominator rules. I guess the idiot population finally passed the 50%/critical-mass mark... I feel kind of bad for kids with a Beaver College diploma -- but I still bought a hat when I visited campus 'cause it says Beaver across the front.
(Warning: use of "canon" and other English Lit. terminology ahead.) In England, IFRC, a copy of every book published goes to their national library -- and the same is true of the LOC here in the US. A Slashdot reader's comment to this article suggested that publishers should be compelled to submit an ASCII version of each of their new books to PG. Given the introduction of those systems that print single copies of books on demand [aren't they going to start showing up in Borders RSN?] it's as unlikely that book publishers will give away their raw materials as it is that software publishers will open-source their products.:7)
Project Gutenberg seeks to make as many books as they can, _now_, available. Is this important? Yeah, because publishers won't make much money off of public domain materials, but that doesn't make those works any less important. Look at what books they made you read in school, what pointy-headed academic types call the canon, and see how many of them are available via PG. Other than some of the rubbish that one wild-eyed assistant prof made me read for my English degree, *most* of my high school and college reading lists are downloadable. These are valuable works that we'll still be reading for a long time.
(There are, of course, people who will dismiss most the the canon as Dead White Eupoean Males and by extension most of the PG etexts as tools of the patriarchy but that's a debate that'll never be settled. Read Harold Bloom's book "The Western Canon" for a chapter on each of what he (and many others) consider the most important books of Western literature, and then download the original texts from PG.)
It is possible to read these plaintext books on screen: make the text white and the background black; find a comfy spot and curl up with a laptop, or blow up the point size so that you can sit comfortably in your desk and read it on a monitor; take frequent breaks to rest your eyes. Sure, it's not going to advance your career as a sys admin, but you have to come up for air sometime. Anyone who commutes on a train or subway owes it to themself to read at least one "good" book a season. And the more I talk to people, the more people I'm finding who accidentally read something they skipped in school and rediscover books.
Is this relevant to Slashdot? Sure is, if for no other reason than the "information wants to be free" line.
Libraries in eastern Mass.
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 1
I just checked, and the Somerville library has a copy. Go to the Minuteman Library Network home page at http://mln.lib.ma.us/ with your library card and PIN to put in a request. (By the way: the MLN library network site is great; I use it to find books, request them from far-off libraries, and save trips across town. Borrowing from the library is cheaper than buying, too, and it increases usership so that the library gets more money for access, hardware, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> IMO, it's that last mile, from the CO to your home,
> that's the most critical in the broadband arena.
>
From what I've read, the catchphrase "Last Mile" should be dumped in favor of the more accurate "The Penultimate Mile" -- or, more correctly, "The Penultimate Miles." After all, people located within several thousand feet of the CO can get services that, sadly, are unavailable to those of us not living in the shadow of the local Bell's office blocks. Until the intervening infrastructure gets beefed up, a lot of us are just out of luck. (Well, not me personally, because Cox wired up my humble Rhode Island street, though the wife won't hear of us getting Internet access through those scam srtists who ever took away our TV listings channel last month!)
>
> I afraid of the ($0.32 cost) $199.95 monitor
> arm after a few months and it gets a *little*
> loose, and *slowly* drifts down...slowly...
> like a glacier...
>
"That's OK honey, it happens to a lot of displays..."
Are "Ferrel Elephants" some guy from SNL in a pachyderm suit?
Your second concern, the weight, raises an interesting point that I may have missed in the articles I read: does IT perform better with a skinny passesenger -- rider? Itter? -- than a fat one?
All jokes about the average weight of target markets aside (i.e., average American @ 200 lbs vs. average person-from-anywhere-else @ 200 lbs [even though they probably use kilos or stone or something]), will IT go faster with a child onboard than it will with a full-grown man with a brief case and a laptop bag at the wheel? Or will IT govern its own speed to prevent hordes of yowling child bandits racing through downtowns with puffing bicycle cops in pursuit?
And for those people who say that Americans won't buy this thing, I'd like to make a suggestion. Does anyone know if Kamen has contacted college bookstores yet? Those things painted up in, say, BU's red-and-white would beat riding the stoopid "B" line through Allston anyday. Come to think of it, I bet the same is true for sprawling land-grant colleges as it is for schools in urban settings.
Heck, I'm an English major, but I got my start by just getting access to a box at work and trying stuff. Admittedly, I worked at a service bureau (where I printed out stuff from Quark and Pagemaker to film imagesetters and color plotters), and thus got chummy with a sysadmin who gave me an account on our Suns, but the point holds: log in, do a ps and then look up each process with 'man' until you get bored. [That admin was an art history major, who pined for a career in art restoration. Go figure.]
I was stuck in non-admin jobs until I just got together a system and started using it. I tried NetBSD on an old Mac to get the feel for installating, and I tried some Linux distro on a dusty old PC. Eventually I found a support job where I had a server I could legitimately log in to, and I started reading stuff and trying it out.
The books "Unix System Administration Handbook" (be sure to get the 3rd edition) and "Essential System Administration" -- both fairly expensive, but like any good tools, well worth their cost in the long run -- make for good reading even before you start laying hands on a keyboard. (I know: nothing can substitute for real experience.) Mailing lists, like those hosted at sunhelp.org, also make good reading: you can learn a lot from other peoples' mistakes.
It may make you look like a wannabe, but try to get a bit of book-learnin' under your belt, if only to avoid wrecking the first system you get access to.
(Re-reading the above, I have to point out that I had a series of fairly grim support-type roles in places that happened to have Unix around until I found a place willing to hire me as an actual administrator. You have to be willing to start out in a very junior position -- i.e., tape monkey -- in order to get your foot in the door. A corollary is that many places care about your actualy ability and not what certification and training you have in your portfolio. And never mind those people telling you that you'd rather not do it: they're just jealous of your charming innocence and niavete.)
So is it really room 0111 or is it Room 7? (hee, hee)
Sadly, I was a regular blood donor for years and hard core platelet donor for a couple years -- double units every other Tuesday and they got a triple from me once by accident, thankyouverymuch -- but recent changes in the FDA's blood donor standards made me ineligible too. I have a friend who works in a blood bank and he's amazed that the FDA has been, relatively speaking, stampeded into this: IANAP (I Am Not A Phlebotomist) but my understanding is that there's no epidemiological connection between my eating (crummy) British beef in the 80's and 90's with me possiblying carrying CJD. (OT: I just found my British blood banking ID folder from the times I donated when I lived there. After each draw, they offered me tea, Fanta, or a stubby of Guinness!)
Anyway, I believe in the need of every person to donate blood enough that I periodically send out email to my healthy, non-British friends and ask them to donate because *I can't*. Think of my scarred elbows and my fat, untapped veins and make an appointment to give next week, or the week after -- because once the injured are all found and healed, and the rubble is all hauled to New Jersey, there will always be a need for blood donors, but a smaller pool of people from which they can be drawn.
>
> "Not true, governments have guns. I doubt
> seriously any business is going to be able
> to fight that."
>
There's a near-future Bruce Sterling novel called "Island in the Net" from 1988 about a couple who work for a company who get involved in revolution (? it's been a few years) as a result of representing their employer's "interests" in a tense political situation. In this story, the corporations are so large and transnational that they transcend states' boundaries and make their own policy. Good enough book; the Amazon reviews call it dated but I liked it.
The public radio program Marketplace, a 30-minute, daily business news program, covered this quite well on 7/31/01. They had mostly-correct details (NT & 2000, IIS, &c.) and some nay-sayers, as well as mentioning the sky-is-falling rhetoric that other media outlets were sticking to exclusively. I think you can get a RealAudio recording of the show on their web site at http://www.marketplace.org/shows/2001/07/31_mpp.ht ml.
The consolidation in real estate (like every other business) means that if you want access to the best stuff -- or more stuff, anyway -- you need to deal with the big players. Here in New England, DeWolfe is eating up smaller agencies pretty quickly, while a few other chains like ReMaxx seem to have the rest of the realtors in their stable. This also means that their customers have first crack at stuff that may not make it into the MLS updates for another day or three.
For example, the Wife & I bought a house in Rhode Island last fall, after searching in RI and Massachusetts for a dog's age. When we worked with a ReMaxx agent (whose husband was a realtor, so she only _showed_ the houses) we saw more places than we saw working with anyone else -- and we saw them on the weekdays *before* they hit the weekend MLS update and the Sunday papers. Of course, when we started working with a local guy in Rhodey he got us into a house in a week or two. He wasn't affiliated with any larger corporate mothership, and in fact was just quitting one to strike out on his own. Anyway, just to point out that dealing with realtors can definitely get you access to properties that aren't even on the web yet, and dealing with the giant franchise shops therefor gets you access to even more stuff.
But, YMMV. And if anyone cares, our guy's name is Peter Dandurand, d/b/a Dandurand Realty in Cumberland, RI. He rules.
From a user's perspective, the hosting crew at Pair Networks has a nice control panel. You might poke around their setup, though I bet it's hand-rolled:
http://www.pair.com/pair/support/mypair/
We hired a company to run new network cabling last month, and one morning I arrived to find a brand new, free-standing wall 30" wide, floor to ceiling, out in the middle of a room: hey, they needed _someplace_ to put the jacks! (That guy was in and out before any of us showed up at 8:00am.)
Ever deal with someone who taps their monitor when they're talking about their computer? Forget the _interface_, the _display_ is usually perceived as the computer by The Common Man. Remember, the article isn't about the internals, but about what'll be seen by the average CompUSELESS shopper, who only cares if he can run a browser, Quicken, and some games. (Kernal? Wha...?)
I read an article in last month's "Worth" magazine about the two biggest players in the RSN satellite radio business, and this sounds exactly like their approach: charge people a monthly fee for 100 stations of specific-format, ad-free content (i.e., jazz or country or NPR or ag reports), or let 'em listen to the free stations (which are, alarmingly, all the same anyway). They expect to charge about $10/mo. Incidentally, the idea of making the player useable outside the car is only just catching on with providers -- that is, making the decoder a unit that could be pulled from your dashbord and then plugged into your home stereo.
The old Larry Niven (an dJerry Pournell?) book "Lucofer's Hammer" is, if I recall, about a comet hitting the earth or some such civilization-crippling disaster. An interesting thread of the story is that one guy gets crates and crates of plastic bags and seals up his whole library of technical books -- and then drops 'em one by one into his septic tank. Knowing that no one will bother them there, the books are safe for later recovery. Also, when the roving gangs of cannibal bikers and religious feaks come to town, there's no precious Alexandrian Library for them to pillage. (It *is* a pretty dated book, and by Larry Niven, after all -- but it's still pretty good. And yeah, it predates "The Postman.")
I'm hesitant about this proposal, too -- mostly because I think teachers should spend their time teaching and not trouble-shooting a room full of computers.
I have a relative who manages technology for a whole school district. Teachers are busy enough with their own lesson plans, professional development, and having-a-life -- without the need to get up to speed on Level 1 Tech Support for the thirty to forty (or more?) kids in a typical classroom.
I imagine a lot of Slashdot readers do or have done support. I think it's fair to say that a 7th grader is about on par with an outside sales rep in terms of what they can do on their own with a non-functioning laptop. Or look at it this way: if you're in a room with someone whose computer seizes up, do you refer them to the Help Desk or "take a quick look at it"?
And how many more people will the schools have to hire to support all these systems?
One of the early Gemini (?) austronauts said the scariest thing about the untested rocket was that "every part was built by the lowest bidder"; who do you think will get the deal to supply these laptops? Good luck, Mainers.
-wde
I'm hesitant about this proposal, too -- mostly because I think teachers should spend their time teaching and not trouble-shooting a room full of computers.
I have a relative who manages technology for a whole school district. Teachers are busy enough with their own lesson plans, professional development, and having-a-life -- without the need to get up to speed on Level 1 Tech Support for the thirty to forty (or more?) kids in a typical classroom.
I imagine a lot of Slashdot readers do or have done support. I think it's fair to say that a 7th grader is about on par with an outside sales rep in terms of what they can do on their own with a non-functioning laptop. Or look at it this way: if you're in a room with someone whose computer seizes up, do you refer them to the Help Desk or "take a quick look at it"?
And how many more people will the schools have to hire to support all these systems?
One of the early Gemini (?) austronauts said the scariest thing about the untested rocket was that "every part was built by the lowest bidder"; who do you think will get the deal to supply these laptops? God luck, Mainers.
-wde
Far from being a joke, Beaver College has a real quandry here. Something that readers who weren't liberal arts majors might not know is that they're said to be the biggest study-abroad program in the U.S., and changing their name could dilute or kill that "brand" in order to save the school itself.
The real enrollment is tiny (though I know someone who actually went there! Hi, Sally!) but the quantity of students from other schools that pass through the Beaver College programs is enormous: I did, my dentitst's receptionist's kid did, lots of random people do. That means that the larger of the two communities they serve is at risk with the name change ("Now where's that Beaver College that we used to use...?") -- but the smaller community is the whole reason for the larger community's existence.
As someone pointed out, it's a shame that the Beavis & Butthead crew lowest common denominator rules. I guess the idiot population finally passed the 50%/critical-mass mark...
I feel kind of bad for kids with a Beaver College diploma -- but I still bought a hat when I visited campus 'cause it says Beaver across the front.
(Warning: use of "canon" and other English Lit. terminology ahead.) :7)
In England, IFRC, a copy of every book published goes to their national library -- and the same is true of the LOC here in the US. A Slashdot reader's comment to this article suggested that publishers should be compelled to submit an ASCII version of each of their new books to PG. Given the introduction of those systems that print single copies of books on demand [aren't they going to start showing up in Borders RSN?] it's as unlikely that book publishers will give away their raw materials as it is that software publishers will open-source their products.
Project Gutenberg seeks to make as many books as they can, _now_, available. Is this important? Yeah, because publishers won't make much money off of public domain materials, but that doesn't make those works any less important. Look at what books they made you read in school, what pointy-headed academic types call the canon, and see how many of them are available via PG. Other than some of the rubbish that one wild-eyed assistant prof made me read for my English degree, *most* of my high school and college reading lists are downloadable. These are valuable works that we'll still be reading for a long time.
(There are, of course, people who will dismiss most the the canon as Dead White Eupoean Males and by extension most of the PG etexts as tools of the patriarchy but that's a debate that'll never be settled. Read Harold Bloom's book "The Western Canon" for a chapter on each of what he (and many others) consider the most important books of Western literature, and then download the original texts from PG.)
It is possible to read these plaintext books on screen: make the text white and the background black; find a comfy spot and curl up with a laptop, or blow up the point size so that you can sit comfortably in your desk and read it on a monitor; take frequent breaks to rest your eyes. Sure, it's not going to advance your career as a sys admin, but you have to come up for air sometime. Anyone who commutes on a train or subway owes it to themself to read at least one "good" book a season. And the more I talk to people, the more people I'm finding who accidentally read something they skipped in school and rediscover books.
Is this relevant to Slashdot? Sure is, if for no other reason than the "information wants to be free" line.
I just checked, and the Somerville library has a copy. Go to the Minuteman Library Network home page at http://mln.lib.ma.us/ with your library card and PIN to put in a request. (By the way: the MLN library network site is great; I use it to find books, request them from far-off libraries, and save trips across town. Borrowing from the library is cheaper than buying, too, and it increases usership so that the library gets more money for access, hardware, etc.)