True, but many of the things they can't do are things they shouldn't do. My boss does not pay me to change my background, or save things to the C drive. (or post to/.) I can change my background, but anyone who does should be doing it on their own time.
Worse yet is the C drive. Nobody should know are care about the C drive, it is a stupid, obsolete convention from when you accually had a physical floppy disk drive for each drive letter. It almost made sense then, it makes no sense today when you save everything to the drive on the server so it is backed up. Local copies need to be carefully controlled. I have not used the floppy drive in my work comptuer this year!
Users will complain at first that they can't find things, but they will soon learn that by default everything is saved to home, which you can access from ANY comptuer in the company, and anyone else can access (you can introduce permissions latter), but not overwrite, with a simple ~email address! They will think it is cool, and they don't even have to know that email address isn't correct terminology.
Advanced users can be introduced to grep, or version control. (Grep will probably alays be advanced users, but version control would be worth requireing for all documents if you can make people use it effectivly)
True, but if everyone who lived in the last 5000 years had each touched that stone tablet, the stone would wear away such that there would no longer be anything left to touch, digital data doesn't suffer from the same problem.
Also, touching stone leaves traces that make other archiological work harder. You might be able to find the finger prints of the authors, but they will be faint after 5000 years, you will have no chance of finding them if other people have touched the tablet over the years. (I don't know if we can find fingerprints after that long, but I think you see the danger even if what they are looking for is more subtile)
I don't know, I suspect the linux trademark would be easy to break. Linux himself has intentionally done nothing to defend the trademark. (IIRC someone else registers Linux in their own name, and lawsuit was brought which proved the Linus is the rightful owner. Linux said thanks, but I'm not enforcing it because trademrk protection is not something that linux needs.
I would install as many alternatives as you can, and make them the default. Open a doc in staroffice, and things should work. You can get at word, but not without going through a wrapper that requires you to email what staroffice cannot do that you need. Users will try to use staroffice where they can, where it fails they will tell you what doesn't work.
Or to save even more money, just start migrating people to linux/kde/koffice, after verifying that their applications will work.
Remember, you are a company, you have work to get done. Find out what tasks you really need to do, and then find a linux program to do it. For those who only use a few features of Word this is easy, koffice is there already. For those who need something complex, you might need wine, or devolpe your own solution.
Do not forget to do some practice runs. Take your backups, restore them to a equivelent systems, and convert that system to linux with the old data, and run some fake transactions. (be careful not to get this data into the real world). And don't convert anyone before a major deadline. Accounting gets converted right after payday, and nowhere near april 15th!
You don't have a hurry now, if the BSA does come knocking, or Microsoft does start demanding unreasonable fees, you have a plan in place to convert quickly, otherwise just convert as an open source alteranative is just as good as the windows equivelent. (Note, I said just as good for your pruposes, and Not as good. If you never use some feature, then there is no reason to wait for it)
BINGO! here you have people with a bad goverment holding them back (amoung many other problems). They cannnot fix it internally without being killed, even if they could (democracy might be the best solution, but it isn't a mircle cure, it takes years for results, in which time it is easy to fall into corruption). I cannot do it because I'm an outside force.
I suspect Opera has a valid anti-monopoly law-suit against microsoft. A monopoly cannot lock out compititors, and microsoft has already been found a monopoly for purposed of browsers, so this is a strong case.
Too bad I'm not a lawyer. I'd like to see the compnay persue this angle though. (lynx and mozilla should too, and perhaps kde and whoever else makes a web browser)
It has been found that alphabitical only helps keyboardist for the first few minutes. It doesn't take long with any layout to learn the locations of the common keys, and once that happens alphabitical is of no help. Even when you are first learning, an alphabitical layout isn't much help because you don't normally think of the letters within a word in relation to the alphabit, so you have to think about each letter or search it out.
Since alphabitical has essentially no effect on a good typist is makes sense to find a layout that works. QWERTY works to prevent jams in mechanical typewriters so it is what we use. Dvorak is faster (one of many faster layouts, and the best known, I don't know if it is the best) than either alphabitical or qwerty.
OKay, what do you do when you have one customer left that uses 8 inch disks? Those old drives fail once in a while, but the customer will never buy enoguh to make anoutehr production run worthwhile, yet they still need them. Now what? that is a real world case, I know the company that found themselves scrambling to find hidden 8 inch disks so they could keep they equipment running while engineers upgraded to support something newer. (Maybe not the last, but at least on)
Although you have to wonder about a company that wouldn't see the writing on the wall for old technology and upgrade. OTOH, you gotta agree with the "It ain't broke, don't break it" philisopphy that results in this situation. I've seen many situations where an upgrade (that may have been needed in the long run) broke everything just for the sake of new technology.
Ordinarly I would agree that Tesla disproved Eddison on the insperation/persperation arguement. However this isn't just a matter of getting something to work. this is getting something that will work, and then making it work for 3-5 billion people who do not currently have the standard of living we do.
Even with your good thinking, you design something that comes out perfect the first time, all the thinking effort will be overwhelmed by the effort required to impliemnt it on 3 billion people.
Too much cleanliness may be a problem. As some think
There are many philosiphers who long for a simpliler life. Of course many of the latter are not willing to actually give up the benifits of our modern life to get the benifits.
Anyone who works on these tasks should keep in mind that not everything that can be done for worse off people is a good idea. I can't answer the philisophical questions (at least not in a way that will convince anyone). I don't have the medical answers. However I do know to keep them in mind.
Remember innovation is 99% persperation, and 1% insperation. Looks like they are focusing on the 1%, and assuming that the rest will take care of itself.
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that these third world areas are in desperate need of people to do some work. Someone to come in and create a stable goverment (that will not starve opponents). Teachers to show them how to think. There is a total glut in the food market. (The US could easially supply all the world's nutrirtion needs if people would be willing to live food that doesn't taste good)
AIDS is a large problem in Africa. We don't have a cure, but we know how to prevent the spread. However most goverments in Africa are doing little to prevent the spread. (In fact some are actively doing things to cause more cases - at least in groups they don't like) We could use a cure, but until there is a cure, we don't need more non-biologists thinking about AIDS (where they are unlikely to make progress), but we could use those same people in Africa teaching people how to prevent aids. Of course if you actually go to Africa you will soon discover that other problems need to be solved before the AIDS problem can be solved.
We don't need more thinkers, we need more doers. That is much harder. I can go home tonight and think about a methane digester that can be used in a mud hit. I can't go to a village and build them after work tonight.
I think they were trying to imply that (in market speak) when they said efficencies of up to 80%, compared to a fridge of 50%, or peltier of 10%. The latter two numbers are about right for real world. If they can achive 80% efficiancies and the chip doesn't cost too much (the guts of a fridge are a hundred or so) this could easially replace all the fridges and air conditioners out there at a net savings of a large amount of electrisity.
Sure you have to get rid of the heat, but it doesn't appear that they were claiming you didn't have to do that, rather they seem to be cliaming that you have to get rid of less heat then other technologies.
My company decided that my login wasn't good enough (set by an old standard), and changed it to fit the new standard. Unix handle it okay, but it took weeks to synchronize all the databases I use (bug reporting system, system outages reports, etc). There are still some databases that I cannot access, but I don't use them anymore and I'm tired of getting things changed. They can deal with the disk space they are taking up.
Unfortunatly, like everythink else, there are a million footnotes to the study such that it is useless for practical purposes.
Examples: My dad grew up on a farm, and remembers when they finially got indoor plumbing and didn't have to use the outhouse. (which was right next to the well) He cannot mow the lawn without wearing a resperator.
My cousins have asthma, blamed on the carpet in their basement.
The above aside, I generally agree with the results, that is if you don't get enough exposure to illness, your system gets weak. However there is a lot more than exposure to wellness.
Comptuers are not pluged into the SAME ground. Many intersting things happen with grounds, None that I can explain in a/. post.
Differential signaling isn't enough for protection. The voltage differences that can build up between houses (which might be static) can easially overwhelm the minimal protection in a standard ethernet card and wreck your computer.
Unfortunatly the above is all things that can happen, but not nessicarly will. That is you can do it, and you might be safe for years and then suddenly boom.
(to repeat something critically important that the other guy said)
Parking brakes are also for emergency use. What is the driver of this new fangled car going to do with the elecrtical system shorts out completly and there is no power. Not only does he have a fire under the hood, but there is no way to stop the car. Or what happens when the brake line break? Mechanical systems are subject to breakage you know.
I'm saleried, so it doens't matter how many hours I work (over 40) in a week I get the same pay. If I was paid by the hour it might be worth working longer hours to buy a commerical model. However I don't get paid more for working more (unless they give me a raise, to compensate, but they rarely pay attention to that)
What I'm saying is I can't afford to spend $5000 on a toy, but I can spend a few hundred on it, and I will learn something in the process.
I don't know about that. My cell phone bill the same price as my regular phone bill today, and I never use my regular phone. My cell phone includes extras on the land line (voice mail, caller id, and others that I don't use). It seems that even though wireless is expensive to get going, the costs are much less than wired for moderate bandwidth. When you need large amounts of bandwidth you need wires, but most of us don't use that much, so wireless is cheaper than running wires.
802.11 probably won't stand up to video, but it is enough for most internet users.
Byond the factors other posters mentioned, you cannot strng cat-5 to your neighbor's because of ground problems. It is entierely possibal for your comptuer to be at 100 volts realtive to your neighbors. So long as they are unconnected you are safe, but connect them with wire and it will destroy your computers. Wireless doesn't have that problem.
I remember back when I was in school we had big problems with comptuers. Seems both the macs and the PCs were single user systems, and so students would regularlly, and intentionally change something on the local disk. (the stupid ones just deleted something critical, the "smarter" ones changed something subtile that you didn't even notice for a while. Remember, these are teens going through the worst years of their life from an honesty standpoint.
Linux by contrast was designed from the ground up to be a multi-user system. Give someone a login, and they get access to their files, and only their files. They can run programs, but only the ones allowed by the administrator. (it is fairly easy to mount home noexec, and move programing students to a different disk)
I graduated in 93, so win3.1 was the latest windows, and the macs were m68k. things have advanced some (windows 95 is a little better for multi-user, but it still sucks compared to linux when you cannot trust the users)
Remember, these are students, not employees. They are immature, and untrustworthy. (I wasn't, and I was one of the more honest students)
You just described a site license: you have the right to install as many copies of windows as you want in your company/school. Microsoft won't sell that though, they will sell one license per comptuer, which is not the same. (with a site license up to so many seats, if you can prove that some machine runs linux it doesn't count)
Of course since it is impossibal (for practical purposes) to buy a PC without windows today, I think they have a good arguement in court "I'd like to call to the stand Mike Dell who will testify that this model of comptuer was never sold without windows".
Oh come on now. Granted God rarely takes an interest in computers, but when he does, watch out. Nothing like lightening from the skys to remind people to be good. And life in the slammer is nothing compared to infinity in hell. Accually God hasn't been known to act directly in a few thousand years, but that doesn't mean he won't act again.
Or do you belive in some other god with less or different powers? Thats your choice, as for me, when I'm told God is watching I'm extra careful as the potential enforcement is a lot worse than anything root can cook up. Root just is more likely to act.
Start with google. There is a lot of technical information online, and google will find it. Not as good as those dead trees, but if you can find it and it is accurate, google is often easier than searching indexes. Best of all, dead trees are limited to the ones you own, while google is limited to whatever someone found useful to put online.
Note the last line of the above: google is limited to what someone else finds useful to put online. So if you can't find it on google, take some time to put it online for the rest of us. If/when you find yourself going back to the same few sites often, link to them from your homepage so google knows you find them useful. In other words, google is interactive, make it work for you and it will work for everyone. The internet is not a one way street.
Finially, some things are just plan eaiser to look up in dead tree format. I would strongly recomend you keep your books intact. Put the information you need on the web (what you can do legally), and keep the books for the rest. If you find you are not using a book anymore because all the information is on the web (including you put it there), then throw it out. My monitor is only 19 inches, not nearly enough to hold all the information I have scattered about my desk.
I'd like to agree. After all, my taste is clearly not mainstream in other areas. However what else can I go on?
Sure, I know from expirence that if the name Andre Norton appears on the book, I can buy it, but that is getting overused and I've bought a few duds with that name. Now that I own the book, it sits on my bookshelf, and is never read.
What I want is a foolproof system that next time I walk into a bookstore will point out "You will like this book. You will hate this book, but read it anyway cause everyone else loves it. Don't waste you time on this one. Look for this one in the library, you won't like it enough to pay for it"... However there is no such system.
I love to read. I hate reading bad books. I hate spending money on a book that I might or might not like, becuase once I read it I can't take it back (I suppose I could, but that is immoral)
Why do we buy bibles? Several reasons that apply to me.
First of all, I belive the bible, and I do study it for my daily insperation. Even though bibles are generally printed on quality materials, it still wears out. I have replaced several because of wear.
I don't speak very good greek or hebrew (read none at all), so I read my bibles in translation. Even though few books are translated as accuratly as the bible, it is still a translation, and reading different translations is helpful.
When I started to learn spanish I bought a spanish bible. (I don't know much spanish, but I try)
I have used etext version of the bible, they are very handy but reading a paper version is easier than an online version. If nothing else because etext cannot be easially marked up.
Bible's come in several different sizes. When I'm camping I don't take a full bible with, just pocket size new testiment. At home I like the full version. As my eyes get older I'm thinking about a large print version for home use, but they are inconvient to take with me, so i'll still keep the normal version.
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True, but many of the things they can't do are things they shouldn't do. My boss does not pay me to change my background, or save things to the C drive. (or post to /.) I can change my background, but anyone who does should be doing it on their own time.
Worse yet is the C drive. Nobody should know are care about the C drive, it is a stupid, obsolete convention from when you accually had a physical floppy disk drive for each drive letter. It almost made sense then, it makes no sense today when you save everything to the drive on the server so it is backed up. Local copies need to be carefully controlled. I have not used the floppy drive in my work comptuer this year!
Users will complain at first that they can't find things, but they will soon learn that by default everything is saved to home, which you can access from ANY comptuer in the company, and anyone else can access (you can introduce permissions latter), but not overwrite, with a simple ~email address! They will think it is cool, and they don't even have to know that email address isn't correct terminology.
Advanced users can be introduced to grep, or version control. (Grep will probably alays be advanced users, but version control would be worth requireing for all documents if you can make people use it effectivly)
True, but if everyone who lived in the last 5000 years had each touched that stone tablet, the stone would wear away such that there would no longer be anything left to touch, digital data doesn't suffer from the same problem.
Also, touching stone leaves traces that make other archiological work harder. You might be able to find the finger prints of the authors, but they will be faint after 5000 years, you will have no chance of finding them if other people have touched the tablet over the years. (I don't know if we can find fingerprints after that long, but I think you see the danger even if what they are looking for is more subtile)
I don't know, I suspect the linux trademark would be easy to break. Linux himself has intentionally done nothing to defend the trademark. (IIRC someone else registers Linux in their own name, and lawsuit was brought which proved the Linus is the rightful owner. Linux said thanks, but I'm not enforcing it because trademrk protection is not something that linux needs.
I would install as many alternatives as you can, and make them the default. Open a doc in staroffice, and things should work. You can get at word, but not without going through a wrapper that requires you to email what staroffice cannot do that you need. Users will try to use staroffice where they can, where it fails they will tell you what doesn't work.
Or to save even more money, just start migrating people to linux/kde/koffice, after verifying that their applications will work.
Remember, you are a company, you have work to get done. Find out what tasks you really need to do, and then find a linux program to do it. For those who only use a few features of Word this is easy, koffice is there already. For those who need something complex, you might need wine, or devolpe your own solution.
Do not forget to do some practice runs. Take your backups, restore them to a equivelent systems, and convert that system to linux with the old data, and run some fake transactions. (be careful not to get this data into the real world). And don't convert anyone before a major deadline. Accounting gets converted right after payday, and nowhere near april 15th!
You don't have a hurry now, if the BSA does come knocking, or Microsoft does start demanding unreasonable fees, you have a plan in place to convert quickly, otherwise just convert as an open source alteranative is just as good as the windows equivelent. (Note, I said just as good for your pruposes, and Not as good. If you never use some feature, then there is no reason to wait for it)
BINGO! here you have people with a bad goverment holding them back (amoung many other problems). They cannnot fix it internally without being killed, even if they could (democracy might be the best solution, but it isn't a mircle cure, it takes years for results, in which time it is easy to fall into corruption). I cannot do it because I'm an outside force.
I suspect Opera has a valid anti-monopoly law-suit against microsoft. A monopoly cannot lock out compititors, and microsoft has already been found a monopoly for purposed of browsers, so this is a strong case.
Too bad I'm not a lawyer. I'd like to see the compnay persue this angle though. (lynx and mozilla should too, and perhaps kde and whoever else makes a web browser)
It has been found that alphabitical only helps keyboardist for the first few minutes. It doesn't take long with any layout to learn the locations of the common keys, and once that happens alphabitical is of no help. Even when you are first learning, an alphabitical layout isn't much help because you don't normally think of the letters within a word in relation to the alphabit, so you have to think about each letter or search it out.
Since alphabitical has essentially no effect on a good typist is makes sense to find a layout that works. QWERTY works to prevent jams in mechanical typewriters so it is what we use. Dvorak is faster (one of many faster layouts, and the best known, I don't know if it is the best) than either alphabitical or qwerty.
OKay, what do you do when you have one customer left that uses 8 inch disks? Those old drives fail once in a while, but the customer will never buy enoguh to make anoutehr production run worthwhile, yet they still need them. Now what? that is a real world case, I know the company that found themselves scrambling to find hidden 8 inch disks so they could keep they equipment running while engineers upgraded to support something newer. (Maybe not the last, but at least on)
Although you have to wonder about a company that wouldn't see the writing on the wall for old technology and upgrade. OTOH, you gotta agree with the "It ain't broke, don't break it" philisopphy that results in this situation. I've seen many situations where an upgrade (that may have been needed in the long run) broke everything just for the sake of new technology.
Ordinarly I would agree that Tesla disproved Eddison on the insperation/persperation arguement. However this isn't just a matter of getting something to work. this is getting something that will work, and then making it work for 3-5 billion people who do not currently have the standard of living we do.
Even with your good thinking, you design something that comes out perfect the first time, all the thinking effort will be overwhelmed by the effort required to impliemnt it on 3 billion people.
Too much cleanliness may be a problem. As some think
There are many philosiphers who long for a simpliler life. Of course many of the latter are not willing to actually give up the benifits of our modern life to get the benifits.
Anyone who works on these tasks should keep in mind that not everything that can be done for worse off people is a good idea. I can't answer the philisophical questions (at least not in a way that will convince anyone). I don't have the medical answers. However I do know to keep them in mind.
Remember innovation is 99% persperation, and 1% insperation. Looks like they are focusing on the 1%, and assuming that the rest will take care of itself.
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that these third world areas are in desperate need of people to do some work. Someone to come in and create a stable goverment (that will not starve opponents). Teachers to show them how to think. There is a total glut in the food market. (The US could easially supply all the world's nutrirtion needs if people would be willing to live food that doesn't taste good)
AIDS is a large problem in Africa. We don't have a cure, but we know how to prevent the spread. However most goverments in Africa are doing little to prevent the spread. (In fact some are actively doing things to cause more cases - at least in groups they don't like) We could use a cure, but until there is a cure, we don't need more non-biologists thinking about AIDS (where they are unlikely to make progress), but we could use those same people in Africa teaching people how to prevent aids. Of course if you actually go to Africa you will soon discover that other problems need to be solved before the AIDS problem can be solved.
We don't need more thinkers, we need more doers. That is much harder. I can go home tonight and think about a methane digester that can be used in a mud hit. I can't go to a village and build them after work tonight.
I think they were trying to imply that (in market speak) when they said efficencies of up to 80%, compared to a fridge of 50%, or peltier of 10%. The latter two numbers are about right for real world. If they can achive 80% efficiancies and the chip doesn't cost too much (the guts of a fridge are a hundred or so) this could easially replace all the fridges and air conditioners out there at a net savings of a large amount of electrisity.
Sure you have to get rid of the heat, but it doesn't appear that they were claiming you didn't have to do that, rather they seem to be cliaming that you have to get rid of less heat then other technologies.
My company decided that my login wasn't good enough (set by an old standard), and changed it to fit the new standard. Unix handle it okay, but it took weeks to synchronize all the databases I use (bug reporting system, system outages reports, etc). There are still some databases that I cannot access, but I don't use them anymore and I'm tired of getting things changed. They can deal with the disk space they are taking up.
Unfortunatly, like everythink else, there are a million footnotes to the study such that it is useless for practical purposes.
Examples: My dad grew up on a farm, and remembers when they finially got indoor plumbing and didn't have to use the outhouse. (which was right next to the well) He cannot mow the lawn without wearing a resperator.
My cousins have asthma, blamed on the carpet in their basement.
The above aside, I generally agree with the results, that is if you don't get enough exposure to illness, your system gets weak. However there is a lot more than exposure to wellness.
Comptuers are not pluged into the SAME ground. Many intersting things happen with grounds, None that I can explain in a /. post.
Differential signaling isn't enough for protection. The voltage differences that can build up between houses (which might be static) can easially overwhelm the minimal protection in a standard ethernet card and wreck your computer.
Unfortunatly the above is all things that can happen, but not nessicarly will. That is you can do it, and you might be safe for years and then suddenly boom.
(to repeat something critically important that the other guy said)
Parking brakes are also for emergency use. What is the driver of this new fangled car going to do with the elecrtical system shorts out completly and there is no power. Not only does he have a fire under the hood, but there is no way to stop the car. Or what happens when the brake line break? Mechanical systems are subject to breakage you know.
I'm saleried, so it doens't matter how many hours I work (over 40) in a week I get the same pay. If I was paid by the hour it might be worth working longer hours to buy a commerical model. However I don't get paid more for working more (unless they give me a raise, to compensate, but they rarely pay attention to that)
What I'm saying is I can't afford to spend $5000 on a toy, but I can spend a few hundred on it, and I will learn something in the process.
I don't know about that. My cell phone bill the same price as my regular phone bill today, and I never use my regular phone. My cell phone includes extras on the land line (voice mail, caller id, and others that I don't use). It seems that even though wireless is expensive to get going, the costs are much less than wired for moderate bandwidth. When you need large amounts of bandwidth you need wires, but most of us don't use that much, so wireless is cheaper than running wires.
802.11 probably won't stand up to video, but it is enough for most internet users.
Byond the factors other posters mentioned, you cannot strng cat-5 to your neighbor's because of ground problems. It is entierely possibal for your comptuer to be at 100 volts realtive to your neighbors. So long as they are unconnected you are safe, but connect them with wire and it will destroy your computers. Wireless doesn't have that problem.
I remember back when I was in school we had big problems with comptuers. Seems both the macs and the PCs were single user systems, and so students would regularlly, and intentionally change something on the local disk. (the stupid ones just deleted something critical, the "smarter" ones changed something subtile that you didn't even notice for a while. Remember, these are teens going through the worst years of their life from an honesty standpoint.
Linux by contrast was designed from the ground up to be a multi-user system. Give someone a login, and they get access to their files, and only their files. They can run programs, but only the ones allowed by the administrator. (it is fairly easy to mount home noexec, and move programing students to a different disk)
I graduated in 93, so win3.1 was the latest windows, and the macs were m68k. things have advanced some (windows 95 is a little better for multi-user, but it still sucks compared to linux when you cannot trust the users)
Remember, these are students, not employees. They are immature, and untrustworthy. (I wasn't, and I was one of the more honest students)
You just described a site license: you have the right to install as many copies of windows as you want in your company/school. Microsoft won't sell that though, they will sell one license per comptuer, which is not the same. (with a site license up to so many seats, if you can prove that some machine runs linux it doesn't count)
Of course since it is impossibal (for practical purposes) to buy a PC without windows today, I think they have a good arguement in court "I'd like to call to the stand Mike Dell who will testify that this model of comptuer was never sold without windows".
Oh come on now. Granted God rarely takes an interest in computers, but when he does, watch out. Nothing like lightening from the skys to remind people to be good. And life in the slammer is nothing compared to infinity in hell. Accually God hasn't been known to act directly in a few thousand years, but that doesn't mean he won't act again.
Or do you belive in some other god with less or different powers? Thats your choice, as for me, when I'm told God is watching I'm extra careful as the potential enforcement is a lot worse than anything root can cook up. Root just is more likely to act.
Start with google. There is a lot of technical information online, and google will find it. Not as good as those dead trees, but if you can find it and it is accurate, google is often easier than searching indexes. Best of all, dead trees are limited to the ones you own, while google is limited to whatever someone found useful to put online.
Note the last line of the above: google is limited to what someone else finds useful to put online. So if you can't find it on google, take some time to put it online for the rest of us. If/when you find yourself going back to the same few sites often, link to them from your homepage so google knows you find them useful. In other words, google is interactive, make it work for you and it will work for everyone. The internet is not a one way street.
Finially, some things are just plan eaiser to look up in dead tree format. I would strongly recomend you keep your books intact. Put the information you need on the web (what you can do legally), and keep the books for the rest. If you find you are not using a book anymore because all the information is on the web (including you put it there), then throw it out. My monitor is only 19 inches, not nearly enough to hold all the information I have scattered about my desk.
I'd like to agree. After all, my taste is clearly not mainstream in other areas. However what else can I go on?
Sure, I know from expirence that if the name Andre Norton appears on the book, I can buy it, but that is getting overused and I've bought a few duds with that name. Now that I own the book, it sits on my bookshelf, and is never read.
What I want is a foolproof system that next time I walk into a bookstore will point out "You will like this book. You will hate this book, but read it anyway cause everyone else loves it. Don't waste you time on this one. Look for this one in the library, you won't like it enough to pay for it"... However there is no such system.
I love to read. I hate reading bad books. I hate spending money on a book that I might or might not like, becuase once I read it I can't take it back (I suppose I could, but that is immoral)
Why do we buy bibles? Several reasons that apply to me.
First of all, I belive the bible, and I do study it for my daily insperation. Even though bibles are generally printed on quality materials, it still wears out. I have replaced several because of wear.
I don't speak very good greek or hebrew (read none at all), so I read my bibles in translation. Even though few books are translated as accuratly as the bible, it is still a translation, and reading different translations is helpful.
When I started to learn spanish I bought a spanish bible. (I don't know much spanish, but I try)
I have used etext version of the bible, they are very handy but reading a paper version is easier than an online version. If nothing else because etext cannot be easially marked up.
Bible's come in several different sizes. When I'm camping I don't take a full bible with, just pocket size new testiment. At home I like the full version. As my eyes get older I'm thinking about a large print version for home use, but they are inconvient to take with me, so i'll still keep the normal version.