I favour physical books over ebooks by a large margin, but this is an undeniable advantage of ebooks. No special large print edition is required.
In fairness a person can use a magnifier on a paper book, but they're usable on any eInk ebook reader too (LCD displays are probably not as fun to read when magnified, Apple Retina possibly excepted). But when you can increase the font size yourself, that makes life a lot easier.
I'm only 45... but I have my Kindle set to be one font size bigger than default just to make it a little more comfortable to use.
Yes, but in fifty years, the books of their grandparents will still, largely, survive but the iPads of their childhood will be long obsolete, their lithium ion batteries impossible to replace.
Think of it now. We all know how much WiFi sucks when it's overused. That's what advertising-supported on-board Internet will be like. It will be slow (the bandwidth to the ground is single-digit megabits per second, so divide that by 50 to 300 passengers - and some passengers will have multiple devices).
On the other hand, charge a a few bucks for it and only the people who really want it will pay for it. Yes, some will be business users, but I already think the pay-per-day prices aren't all that bad. If I'm bored, especially on a a long flight, I'll happily pay ten or twenty bucks to go online and kill some time. If the fun or utility of the Internet isn't high enough, I'll do something else that doesn't cost me anything, just like I do now.
If it's free I fear that there will be dozens of people on a plane trying to watch streaming video or listen to streaming audio, or running torrents t get content. The layperson just doesn't understand how bandwidth works. They have tens of megabits at home and they expect they'll have it everywhere, but they can't and they won't. Every user will struggle to get dialup speeds if the now-precious resource is just given away for free.
In Canada, there is a copyright levy on blank CD-R media (and only this media) and indeed, you are allowed to duplicate music onto CD-Rs for personal use without infringing on the law.
The law is a bit obsolete now given that people store pirated music on hard disks and NAS devices and flash drives, but while I didn't agree with it for economic reasons, it did have some logic to it at the time.
Not to mention, POTS phone service is a lot higher quality than cellular. It's less likely to go down, and the audio quality is superior. VoIP is a little harder to gauge because there are far more variables with it, but good VoIP is higher quality than cellular (although uptime may not be better).
Also, a good wired telephone handset is a lot more comfortable to use than any mobile phone. (On a really long call, handsfree wins, but most times I use my handset.)
To me this is sort of like the argument, "What's better, trucks or cars?" Umm... depends?
That's like my company laptop. I don't need it when I'm away from the office that much (and my personal laptop is much better anyway), so it stays at my office in a docking station most of the time.
Canada overproduced the $1 and $2 coins in their first year of production, to make up for the fact that all existing $1 and $2 bills were being withdrawn. Think of your change today. Almost none of it is this year's mintage. Thus, when you introduce a new coin you have to produce a lot of it to make up for that lack of prior production.
We still have a ton of 1987 $1 coins in our change in Canada because of that, which is evidence as to their durability and the fact that at least some of them circulate widely.
$2 bills were unpopular in western Canada... until we got rid of $1 bills. Acceptance shot up rapidly after that.
If people won't take them, offer them $1 coins instead. People will relent in a hurry.
At the end of the day, money is money. The only downside to $1 and $2 coins is size and weight, but you get used to them. If the weight bothers you, give them to charity or plug someone's parking meter.
Getting rid of $1 bills isn't despotism, it's pragmatism.
Should the US start printing 25-cent bills? 10-cent bills? More choice is better, right?
At a certain point, you have to realize that having unlimited choices is just silly. A $1 coin functions just as well in an economy as a $1 bill (and lasts longer, thus costing society less). If you don't like increasing amounts of change, do what most Americans do and use credit or debit cards.
As a side effect, use cash, save those increasing piles of change and you can put hundreds of dollars into your savings account every year just by rolling it all up.
They'll relent. Canadian vending machines take $1 and $2 coins. Making coins similar in size and weight to Canadian ones, and adapting Canadian-type hardware, would let you have modern vending machines at very little cost.
It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of current US vending machines can already accept Canadian dollar coins if programmed correctly, so it would be a very easy transition to customize them to US coins of similar specifications.
It was a failure because the US didn't pull the $1 bill out of circulation.
Canada started withdrawing paper $1 bills when the $1 coin was introduced. If you didn't want a $1 coin in your change, within a few weeks all a store could give you instead was quarters or smaller instead. That got rid of a lot of people's resistance. (Mind, we still had $2 bills and they were increased in circulation, but they were withdrawn in the same manner for a $2 coin a few years later.)
Before long no one worries about it anymore. It is what it is and people get used to it.
We've lost 10-cent bus fare, 10-cent payphone calls and 1-cent candy and managed to do just fine. We can live without small bills too.
(Perhaps interestingly, the Canadian paper money in largest circulation is not the $5, it's the $20 bill... because of bank machines.)
Or just shove a surplus hard drive in a $10 USB case and plug it in. Done.
I personally like the storage being open like this. While it's less pretty, perhaps, it leaves me in control. USB hard drives and flash drives are ubiquitous enough that as long as there are working Wii U consoles, they'll be an option. I won't be dependent on Nintendo for them.
They're low-res and perfectly adequate for our purposes. They're roughly 400 kB each in JPG format.
The RAW files from my Nikon D800 are over 40 megabytes (even the JPGs are 11-12 MB), but we have no need for such resolution. The photos get viewed on a computer screen and that's it.
The 1 GB SD cards (or even smaller) might do fine - I'll have a look on eBay.
Until there are 50-cent, rewritable at will and without hassle, flat storage media, floppy disks still have some utility. Obviously the utility is declining because of their limited capacity, but I still use 'em. I throw adequate-res photos of clients' property into their insurance files. Way faster and easier than burning an optical disc.
USB flash drives are just as convenient, but they're still too pricey for some applications. If you could buy tens-of-megabyte thin, flat flash drives for tens of cents each, I'd buy a case of them.
Sports - and not even always then, but I still prefer to watch sporting events live so I can't have a brain cramp and accidentally look at sports websites and see the score.
My team was up by 17 with 4:00 remaining in a game a few weeks ago in a CFL game, and I accidentally read an article that said "Roughriders lose in overtime". It's amazing how your mind can talk you out of the news being true when it just seems to improbable. But of course, it was true. It would have been more exciting if I'd actually watched the wheels fall off naturally instead of trying to anticipate how it was going to happen.
Even if the price advantage of desktops disappears, the upgradability and repairability of desktops (excluding laptop-like desktops like Mac Minis) will still be superior.
I just put a Blu-Ray burner into my 5-year-old desktop machine. The burner cost me less than $60. To upgrade my Core i7 laptop to have that capability would cost the better part of $200, and it would be a slower, more delicate burner, too. This desktop has also had its video upgraded (twice) and its RAM upgraded (once). It also takes cheap SATA drives so I could throw a 3 TB drive in there for a little more than $100. 2.5" 1 TB drives are still slightly hard to find and larger ones do not exist as mass-produced objects yet. Meanwhile, we're knocking on the door of 4 TB 3.5" drive availability.
I think we're at the point where few home users would want only a desktop machine, but I appreciate the advantages that a desktop machine provides and will certainly be replacing mine when the time comes. A laptop is not a substitute for a desktop, for my purposes.
With the exception of bleeding-edge games, if you upgrade the RAM in a 5-year-old machine you can probably run almost everything modern. It's just that people often don't do this.
My desktop is five years old - it's a Core 2 Quad with 4 GB of RAM (all it can take) and it still runs fine. It runs Vista and Ubuntu and would happily run Win7 if I bothered to upgrade it, but I've not yet had a need.
And have to leave my clothes in the hallway after a night of imbibing, so that I don't have to smell the rank smell of stale cigarette smoke? I remember those days altogether too well and have no desire to relive them.
The best thing for beer drinkers like me has been the increasing tendency of bars and restaurants to ban smoking - either voluntarily or through government edict.
Bars and restaurants here were scared they'd lose sales. The first full year of smoke-free dining and drinking, their sales went up 10%, significantly above inflation. Turns out lots of non-smokers avoided bars and restaurants, at least at times, precisely because they hated the cigarette smoke.
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Seems a lot less work just to read paper books.
Quebec suffered a massive ice storm in the 1990s. Some areas lacked electricity for several months.
The apocalypse need not be nuclear.
I imagine there are still areas of New Jersey that lack electricity due to Hurricane Sandy.
If the books truly have no value, put them in your recycling bin and away you go.
I favour physical books over ebooks by a large margin, but this is an undeniable advantage of ebooks. No special large print edition is required.
In fairness a person can use a magnifier on a paper book, but they're usable on any eInk ebook reader too (LCD displays are probably not as fun to read when magnified, Apple Retina possibly excepted). But when you can increase the font size yourself, that makes life a lot easier.
I'm only 45... but I have my Kindle set to be one font size bigger than default just to make it a little more comfortable to use.
Yes, but in fifty years, the books of their grandparents will still, largely, survive but the iPads of their childhood will be long obsolete, their lithium ion batteries impossible to replace.
Think of it now. We all know how much WiFi sucks when it's overused. That's what advertising-supported on-board Internet will be like. It will be slow (the bandwidth to the ground is single-digit megabits per second, so divide that by 50 to 300 passengers - and some passengers will have multiple devices).
On the other hand, charge a a few bucks for it and only the people who really want it will pay for it. Yes, some will be business users, but I already think the pay-per-day prices aren't all that bad. If I'm bored, especially on a a long flight, I'll happily pay ten or twenty bucks to go online and kill some time. If the fun or utility of the Internet isn't high enough, I'll do something else that doesn't cost me anything, just like I do now.
If it's free I fear that there will be dozens of people on a plane trying to watch streaming video or listen to streaming audio, or running torrents t get content. The layperson just doesn't understand how bandwidth works. They have tens of megabits at home and they expect they'll have it everywhere, but they can't and they won't. Every user will struggle to get dialup speeds if the now-precious resource is just given away for free.
In Canada, there is a copyright levy on blank CD-R media (and only this media) and indeed, you are allowed to duplicate music onto CD-Rs for personal use without infringing on the law.
The law is a bit obsolete now given that people store pirated music on hard disks and NAS devices and flash drives, but while I didn't agree with it for economic reasons, it did have some logic to it at the time.
I prefer tmux too, but one nice thing about GNU screen is its ability to be a simple dumb terminal (screen /dev/ttyS0 9600 e.g.).
Not to mention, POTS phone service is a lot higher quality than cellular. It's less likely to go down, and the audio quality is superior. VoIP is a little harder to gauge because there are far more variables with it, but good VoIP is higher quality than cellular (although uptime may not be better).
Also, a good wired telephone handset is a lot more comfortable to use than any mobile phone. (On a really long call, handsfree wins, but most times I use my handset.)
To me this is sort of like the argument, "What's better, trucks or cars?" Umm... depends?
That's like my company laptop. I don't need it when I'm away from the office that much (and my personal laptop is much better anyway), so it stays at my office in a docking station most of the time.
Canada overproduced the $1 and $2 coins in their first year of production, to make up for the fact that all existing $1 and $2 bills were being withdrawn. Think of your change today. Almost none of it is this year's mintage. Thus, when you introduce a new coin you have to produce a lot of it to make up for that lack of prior production.
We still have a ton of 1987 $1 coins in our change in Canada because of that, which is evidence as to their durability and the fact that at least some of them circulate widely.
$2 bills were unpopular in western Canada... until we got rid of $1 bills. Acceptance shot up rapidly after that.
If people won't take them, offer them $1 coins instead. People will relent in a hurry.
At the end of the day, money is money. The only downside to $1 and $2 coins is size and weight, but you get used to them. If the weight bothers you, give them to charity or plug someone's parking meter.
That must be why the Swiss franc is so weak. They have 1, 2 and 5 franc coins and have for decades. Their smallest paper bill is a 10 franc note.
No, wait... the franc isn't weak. Guess that means these things don't correlate. :)
Getting rid of $1 bills isn't despotism, it's pragmatism.
Should the US start printing 25-cent bills? 10-cent bills? More choice is better, right?
At a certain point, you have to realize that having unlimited choices is just silly. A $1 coin functions just as well in an economy as a $1 bill (and lasts longer, thus costing society less). If you don't like increasing amounts of change, do what most Americans do and use credit or debit cards.
As a side effect, use cash, save those increasing piles of change and you can put hundreds of dollars into your savings account every year just by rolling it all up.
They'll relent. Canadian vending machines take $1 and $2 coins. Making coins similar in size and weight to Canadian ones, and adapting Canadian-type hardware, would let you have modern vending machines at very little cost.
It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of current US vending machines can already accept Canadian dollar coins if programmed correctly, so it would be a very easy transition to customize them to US coins of similar specifications.
It was a failure because the US didn't pull the $1 bill out of circulation.
Canada started withdrawing paper $1 bills when the $1 coin was introduced. If you didn't want a $1 coin in your change, within a few weeks all a store could give you instead was quarters or smaller instead. That got rid of a lot of people's resistance. (Mind, we still had $2 bills and they were increased in circulation, but they were withdrawn in the same manner for a $2 coin a few years later.)
Before long no one worries about it anymore. It is what it is and people get used to it.
We've lost 10-cent bus fare, 10-cent payphone calls and 1-cent candy and managed to do just fine. We can live without small bills too.
(Perhaps interestingly, the Canadian paper money in largest circulation is not the $5, it's the $20 bill... because of bank machines.)
Or just shove a surplus hard drive in a $10 USB case and plug it in. Done.
I personally like the storage being open like this. While it's less pretty, perhaps, it leaves me in control. USB hard drives and flash drives are ubiquitous enough that as long as there are working Wii U consoles, they'll be an option. I won't be dependent on Nintendo for them.
They're low-res and perfectly adequate for our purposes. They're roughly 400 kB each in JPG format.
The RAW files from my Nikon D800 are over 40 megabytes (even the JPGs are 11-12 MB), but we have no need for such resolution. The photos get viewed on a computer screen and that's it.
The 1 GB SD cards (or even smaller) might do fine - I'll have a look on eBay.
Until there are 50-cent, rewritable at will and without hassle, flat storage media, floppy disks still have some utility. Obviously the utility is declining because of their limited capacity, but I still use 'em. I throw adequate-res photos of clients' property into their insurance files. Way faster and easier than burning an optical disc.
USB flash drives are just as convenient, but they're still too pricey for some applications. If you could buy tens-of-megabyte thin, flat flash drives for tens of cents each, I'd buy a case of them.
Sports - and not even always then, but I still prefer to watch sporting events live so I can't have a brain cramp and accidentally look at sports websites and see the score.
My team was up by 17 with 4:00 remaining in a game a few weeks ago in a CFL game, and I accidentally read an article that said "Roughriders lose in overtime". It's amazing how your mind can talk you out of the news being true when it just seems to improbable. But of course, it was true. It would have been more exciting if I'd actually watched the wheels fall off naturally instead of trying to anticipate how it was going to happen.
There was a thread about desktops just yesterday. They're cheaper, they're easier to upgrade and they're cheaper to repair. That will never change.
Even if the price advantage of desktops disappears, the upgradability and repairability of desktops (excluding laptop-like desktops like Mac Minis) will still be superior.
I just put a Blu-Ray burner into my 5-year-old desktop machine. The burner cost me less than $60. To upgrade my Core i7 laptop to have that capability would cost the better part of $200, and it would be a slower, more delicate burner, too. This desktop has also had its video upgraded (twice) and its RAM upgraded (once). It also takes cheap SATA drives so I could throw a 3 TB drive in there for a little more than $100. 2.5" 1 TB drives are still slightly hard to find and larger ones do not exist as mass-produced objects yet. Meanwhile, we're knocking on the door of 4 TB 3.5" drive availability.
I think we're at the point where few home users would want only a desktop machine, but I appreciate the advantages that a desktop machine provides and will certainly be replacing mine when the time comes. A laptop is not a substitute for a desktop, for my purposes.
With the exception of bleeding-edge games, if you upgrade the RAM in a 5-year-old machine you can probably run almost everything modern. It's just that people often don't do this.
My desktop is five years old - it's a Core 2 Quad with 4 GB of RAM (all it can take) and it still runs fine. It runs Vista and Ubuntu and would happily run Win7 if I bothered to upgrade it, but I've not yet had a need.
And have to leave my clothes in the hallway after a night of imbibing, so that I don't have to smell the rank smell of stale cigarette smoke? I remember those days altogether too well and have no desire to relive them.
The best thing for beer drinkers like me has been the increasing tendency of bars and restaurants to ban smoking - either voluntarily or through government edict.
Bars and restaurants here were scared they'd lose sales. The first full year of smoke-free dining and drinking, their sales went up 10%, significantly above inflation. Turns out lots of non-smokers avoided bars and restaurants, at least at times, precisely because they hated the cigarette smoke.
Plus many towers have as many as three sectors, so that triples capacity right there.
Capacity is based on how small an area the sector is covering and how much spectrum the carrier has allocated to the cellsite.