Kind of true... it's not that strict though. Yes, road signs here are in miles and mph, and many people use feet and inches, but metric is taught in school so most people under 30 generally use metres and centimetres.
It's also worth noting what happened a couple of years ago (most people blame the EU) - greengrocers had to start listing prices in pounds (the currency) per kilogramme rather than pounds per pound. There was a lashback at the time but most people seem to have accepted it (and most greengrocers list both now).
Having said that, if somebody asks my weight or height, I'd tell them in stones and feet, so we still have a way to go.
There is a drive to convert road signs to metric - again, partly because of our EU membership - but there's no easy, straightforward way to do it. One interesting idea, coupling with the concept of reducing our speed limits in general, is to leave the speed limit signs as they are but tell everyone that they now refer to KPH rather than MPH (ie. a 30 MPH limit becomes a 30 KPH limit). But of course, the number of people who want our speed limits reduced is relatively small, and that would be a much harder change to propose than metric!
This seems a little foolish to me. If you're anything like me you'll forget to check in one day, maybe when you go on holiday. What kind of failsafes have you built in? Does it attempt to contact you in a variety of ways before assuming you're dead? Leaving it to an overly logical machine seems dangerous - there are several things which could well happen:
1) It fails to recognise your bucket-kicking and doesn't send out any of the vitally important information, so none of your friends get the passwords (or turn up to your funeral);
2) Somebody else overrides it, physically or electronically preventing it from recognising your checkin, and stealing your data;
It falsely thinks you've dropped off the plain, through a bug or human failure, and prematurely sends out all the vital data to everyone, and your wife discovers that you're dividing your fortune amongst your mistresses a little earlier than you'd like.
These reasons seem to me an overwhelming argument for using the old-fashioned approach of a trusted (or legal) person holding a will and other data. They're more likely to make sensible decisions in unexpected situations (like, if you're in a coma for a month, come round and find your computer has automatically wiped your pr0n, God forbid)
I work for a charity, and we run Windows 2003 on our web servers.
I'd have to agree with the findings, simply because any idiot (like me) can run a Windows 2003 server. All you need is Windows experience (which everyone has nowadays). Linux requires special knowledge and/or training. I know any techie worth his/her salt will have this, but not every company has a handy Linux geek. Not to mention if your Linux geek is on holiday, you need another Linux geek to make the simplest of changes... sorry to say this, but Linux isn't user friendly enough for the average workplace drone to administer.
Of course, if your company does have people familiar with Linux, then the TCO is going to be WAAAAY lower. But we're talking about averages here, and most small/medium companies can't afford to hire somebody extra purely because they have Linux experience.
I wouldn't go as far as to recommend Windows as the catch-all solution to this problem - if I was building up my business from scratch again, I probably would try to hire techies with Linux experience, and that's what I'd recommend to anyone else. But that's hindsight for you.
I was about to suggest iPhoto, as finkployd seems to like iTunes. When you think about it, can you export all the iTunes tags? Not really, as you can't export AAC tracks without converting them to MP3 and losing some of the information...
I use iPhoto extensively, although of course unlike iTunes there isn't a Windows version. But if you do use MacOS, iPhoto plays nicely with Aperture and Photoshop. The tag organisation is superb, although I haven't investigated exporting them.
You spend a third of your life at work (and another third asleep, so essentially half your waking life). Don't you think being happy is more important than money?
Unless you think more money = more happiness. Personally, I haven't experienced anything to justify this theory.
I have to say, I have no idea who owns Business.com, Diamond.com and Sex.com or what they do with them (although with the latter example I have a fairly good idea). But if I was looking for diamonds, diamond.com wouldn't be my first port of call - I'd be more likely to search, or go to a known brand name retailer online.
So unless somebody wants to brand their own business hell.com and spend mega-bucks promoting it, it all seems a bit pointless. After all, eBay does fine without being called auction.com; Google does fine without being called search.com. In fact, it could be argued, they do BETTER - decent, unique brand names stick in consumer's minds far better than relying on a recycled word.
I'm sure hell.com will sell for a fair bit - but it will only be effective as a one-off marketing ploy (hey! Look! So-and-so casino has bought hell.com), no long term value in it.
It seems to be a common mistake that people outside of Britain think the BBC is government controlled. It isn't; in fact it's usually the first to be critical of the government.
The BBC is THE most impartial news agency I know - part of their mandate is to be unbiased, and as there's no politically biased financiers, and no advertisers, they can be free to criticise anyone.
It isn't funded by the government either; it is paid for by the license fee, which is mandatory for anyone with a TV set, which admittedly does imply some kind of state control, but if the government did try to interfere there would be a massive outcry.
Put it this way: I'm British, and I'd take the BBC over any independant news agency financed by advertisers any day:-)
I think Steve Job has intentionally missed the point. Yes, the whole sharing thing is pointless and won't be used. But Wi-Fi will be the future (hopefully for iPods too) for uploading music to the device and playing back to speakers.
For example, I play music from my MacBook wirelessly to my speakers through my AirPort Express (yes, I'm an Apple fanboy) a lot. I really wish I could do the same, but from my iPod, so I don't have to power up the MacBook. If iPod had Wi-Fi - ta da! Problem solved.
I think Steve knows this is the future but is spreading a little FUD about the Zune. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of video iPod has wi-fi - carefully timed to arrive with the iTV - so it can play video wirelessly too. It's the next logical step.
I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all.
No, they don't need lawyers. They're not in court; for the simple reason that it's a US court which has no jurisdiction over the UK. I suggest you read their response:
1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
No, they're not saying this. Even if it went to a federal court, it still wouldn't have any jurisdiction over a UK company. Note that e360's activities (while legal in the US) are undoubtably illegal in the UK.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
No, Spamhaus have quite rightly never agreed that an Illinois court has power over a UK company. David Linhardt had to lie to the court in the first place to con the judge into believing that Spamhaus is an Illinois company.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.
No, they haven't broken the law - the only law broken in this affair is David Linhardt breaking UK law by spamming British citizens, which is why they haven't filed the case in the UK, which would be the proper place to do it if they had any chance of enforcing a judgement against Spamhaus.
What Channel 4 didn't mention is that there have been far greater losses through the same kind of fraud within the UK than from India. So taking the figures to their logical conclusion, it's safer to have your call centres in India than in Britain. But that doesn't make such good headlines!
At work we use a Watchguard java applet, which I don't particularly like, but it does the job as you describe. We use it to restrict users/workstations to our own websites and limited tech support sites.
To enable this access on the client PC, the user opens IE, goes to a local page that contains the applet, and enters their password in the applet. As long as that window is open in the background, they have access to the allowed sites.
I don't deal with the server end myself but I think it comes in hardware or software flavours.
I give it a couple of days at most before a whole new genre of online gaming is created. For starters, two player chess is a doddle to set up - as long as you don't mind your pieces labeled 'White Knight' in text.
Similar functions for Google Earth?
on
Google Goes to Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I really like the Elevation/Visible/Infrared options - I wonder if they have similar data for Earth? It would be fascinating to study a city in infrared.
Of course, they have elevation data for the executable Google Earth but it would also be interesting to see a colour map.
This sounds like it has possibilities, especially as it'll have very low heat emissions. Plus, presumably, some of the speed limitations will be removed as (in a very basic sense) a magnetic signal travels so much faster than an electical signal. And I especially like the idea from the article that it retains data when the power switches off - true instant on computers at last.
My only reservation is that magnetic memory doesn't seem that reliable in the long term - I've had to throw out a lot of flash based memory after a few years, whereas I've never had a processor fail spontaneously (discounting heat transfer problems, naturally - I can't deny I've had many go up in smoke).
It's a shame they haven't been available to review yet, but to be fair, Apple aren't really missing anything. They will sell like hotcakes to start with, even if they turn out to be bricks with LEDs strapped on.
Of course, they didn't mention that most flame wars are started by a) Thirteen year old boys who are new to the whole testosterone thing, or b) Borderline Asperger's Syndrome types who cannot understand emotions anyway.
After all, women are naturally better at communicating and understanding emotion, and without wishing to generalise, in most cases seem to communicate fine over the web without misunderstandings.
I used to sell these; maybe not this model, but this design has been around for at least five years. Good in theory - it eliminates the unnatural twisting of the hand - but in practice there's hardly a market for it.
The companies that sell these (I know, I used to work for one) aren't actually aiming for the disabled-by-RSI market - in practice, there's very few people who actually HAVE disabling computer related RSI, and those that do usually just cut down on the intensity of their computer use - who they're aiming for is big businesses (call centres and the like) who they try and scare with the 'Unless you buy ten thousand of these, your employees will get RSI and SUE YOU!!!' line. Nobody much buys it, except maybe in the USA.
Of course, the bottom line is, does it actually work? When selling this kind of thing I tried using this and a variety of other 'ergonomic' mice intensively, and most of them gave me more pain than a 'normal' mouse did - mainly because my use of a normal mouse adapts easily depending on what position it is in relative to me, whereas these vertical mice have to be used sitting straight at the desk with your hand and arm in the 'proper' position. Anything else - especially using it standing up - is extremely difficult and contorts your hand unnaturally.
I hate to piss all over somebody's design, but I've seen so many different 'ergonomic' mice come and go. None of them has caught on - the only one that has got close is Microsoft's curvy mouse, and that's just because MS had enough investment power behind them to put one in the box of every new computer. Interestingly, I haven't seen one of them for a while, all the same.
Frankly, as no system I know of has 100% efficiency in sorting spam from real messages, I don't trust it one inch in prioritising my messages either.
I wonder what criteria it uses to sort email - if it's simply looking at the email address, then it's going to take up the user's time in setting up relationships and sort criteria, something which I can guarantee most people can't be bothered to do.
I can hardly find the time to sort email into folders, which is why I'm quite fond of gmail - as it doesn't have folders, I don't feel guilty about not using them...
I would say that most of the 'eBay Fraud' is actually PayPal fraud.
This story caught my eye because I've literally just today been defrauded out of 250 GBP due to a PayPal chargeback. At least PayPal have a phone number (more than most internet companies do) but the employees I talked to said they're not doing anything about it - the buyer instructed his credit card agency to cancel the transaction, leaving PayPal 250 pounds out of pocket, so they deduct it from my account, which automatically charges my credit card 250 pounds.
What frustrates me is that it is so obvious what has happened and who is at fault, but PayPal are only interested in recovering their own money - they couldn't give a sh*t about which of their customers has been screwed over.
All I can say is roll on Google - there's a big gap in the market of guys like me who have been stung by eBay/PayPal and want a RELIABLE, SECURE alternative.
The user often doesn't know that they can change fonts
I agree totally, but surely you are contradicting yourself? If users take 'a bit of education' then you must realise that the vast majority of web users won't learn or bother to set their own fonts. Certainly nobody I know, other than web-techie types, does this.
So saying that the client shouldn't specify fonts and that the user should is a bit of a cop out. When clients/designers want fancy fonts I personally advise them on what fonts are available (ie. standard cross-platform availability, like Arial, Helvetica, etc) and give them that choice. Of course this still leaves it open for users to view the content with their own fonts.
(By the way, I usually use Verdana or Arial for big blocks of text - they may be boring, but they're easy to read and everyone has them)
This is one of my gripes with SlashDot by the way - 99% of people reading this stuff see it as Times New Roman - a lot of it in italics. Which is possibly one of the most unreadable fonts in the world!
Not to throw cold water on this or anything...
on
A Programmer's Bookshelf
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I find lo-tech paper books aren't costworthy in today's tech environment - they go out of date too quickly, and are thus resource wasteful (In my area - web tech - anyway). Any reference books I buy in digital form, as this is usually more cost-efficient.
So for a REAL bookshelf... probably some IT-angled fiction. This is tricky as most authors fail to research tech angles correctly (like Hollywood computers, but not quite as glaringly obvious). Douglas Copeland's Microserfs was OK, and quite entertaining.
For an intelligent recommended read though, I can't recommend the usual Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance highly enough. It really makes you think, which is nice. I've been meaning to check out Scott Adam's (of Dilbert fame) God's Debris too. That's free to download by the way. So it might be worth reading a bit and if you like it, you could buy paper copies for your friends.
We haven't got much HDTV in this country (UK) yet, but I can see the same thing happening here when we do;
One of my girlfriend's friends hasn't got a DVD player yet, but bought DVDs and got me to copy them to VHS tape. When I asked why she didn't just buy them on VHS, she said that she wanted to watch them in DVD quality!
It's just the same with surround sound - I know so many people who have shelled out for full 5.1 or 8.1 speaker sets but due to amateur wiring are really just listening to stereo.
To be fair, it still sounds a little better than two speakers due to the number of speakers, even though they're all pumping out the same signal. I imagine a similar thing applies to HDTV - even if the resolution is no higher, the mere fact that HDTVs are newer, clearer and have great contrast will probably mean the picture looks nicer; hence these people being convinced they're watching a HDTV signal.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of true... it's not that strict though. Yes, road signs here are in miles and mph, and many people use feet and inches, but metric is taught in school so most people under 30 generally use metres and centimetres.
It's also worth noting what happened a couple of years ago (most people blame the EU) - greengrocers had to start listing prices in pounds (the currency) per kilogramme rather than pounds per pound. There was a lashback at the time but most people seem to have accepted it (and most greengrocers list both now).
Having said that, if somebody asks my weight or height, I'd tell them in stones and feet, so we still have a way to go.
There is a drive to convert road signs to metric - again, partly because of our EU membership - but there's no easy, straightforward way to do it. One interesting idea, coupling with the concept of reducing our speed limits in general, is to leave the speed limit signs as they are but tell everyone that they now refer to KPH rather than MPH (ie. a 30 MPH limit becomes a 30 KPH limit). But of course, the number of people who want our speed limits reduced is relatively small, and that would be a much harder change to propose than metric!
This seems a little foolish to me. If you're anything like me you'll forget to check in one day, maybe when you go on holiday. What kind of failsafes have you built in? Does it attempt to contact you in a variety of ways before assuming you're dead? Leaving it to an overly logical machine seems dangerous - there are several things which could well happen:
1) It fails to recognise your bucket-kicking and doesn't send out any of the vitally important information, so none of your friends get the passwords (or turn up to your funeral);
2) Somebody else overrides it, physically or electronically preventing it from recognising your checkin, and stealing your data;
It falsely thinks you've dropped off the plain, through a bug or human failure, and prematurely sends out all the vital data to everyone, and your wife discovers that you're dividing your fortune amongst your mistresses a little earlier than you'd like.
These reasons seem to me an overwhelming argument for using the old-fashioned approach of a trusted (or legal) person holding a will and other data. They're more likely to make sensible decisions in unexpected situations (like, if you're in a coma for a month, come round and find your computer has automatically wiped your pr0n, God forbid)
I work for a charity, and we run Windows 2003 on our web servers.
I'd have to agree with the findings, simply because any idiot (like me) can run a Windows 2003 server. All you need is Windows experience (which everyone has nowadays). Linux requires special knowledge and/or training. I know any techie worth his/her salt will have this, but not every company has a handy Linux geek. Not to mention if your Linux geek is on holiday, you need another Linux geek to make the simplest of changes... sorry to say this, but Linux isn't user friendly enough for the average workplace drone to administer.
Of course, if your company does have people familiar with Linux, then the TCO is going to be WAAAAY lower. But we're talking about averages here, and most small/medium companies can't afford to hire somebody extra purely because they have Linux experience.
I wouldn't go as far as to recommend Windows as the catch-all solution to this problem - if I was building up my business from scratch again, I probably would try to hire techies with Linux experience, and that's what I'd recommend to anyone else. But that's hindsight for you.
I was about to suggest iPhoto, as finkployd seems to like iTunes. When you think about it, can you export all the iTunes tags? Not really, as you can't export AAC tracks without converting them to MP3 and losing some of the information... I use iPhoto extensively, although of course unlike iTunes there isn't a Windows version. But if you do use MacOS, iPhoto plays nicely with Aperture and Photoshop. The tag organisation is superb, although I haven't investigated exporting them.
You spend a third of your life at work (and another third asleep, so essentially half your waking life). Don't you think being happy is more important than money? Unless you think more money = more happiness. Personally, I haven't experienced anything to justify this theory.
I have to say, I have no idea who owns Business.com, Diamond.com and Sex.com or what they do with them (although with the latter example I have a fairly good idea). But if I was looking for diamonds, diamond.com wouldn't be my first port of call - I'd be more likely to search, or go to a known brand name retailer online.
So unless somebody wants to brand their own business hell.com and spend mega-bucks promoting it, it all seems a bit pointless. After all, eBay does fine without being called auction.com; Google does fine without being called search.com. In fact, it could be argued, they do BETTER - decent, unique brand names stick in consumer's minds far better than relying on a recycled word.
I'm sure hell.com will sell for a fair bit - but it will only be effective as a one-off marketing ploy (hey! Look! So-and-so casino has bought hell.com), no long term value in it.
Got writer's block; couldn't finish...
It seems to be a common mistake that people outside of Britain think the BBC is government controlled. It isn't; in fact it's usually the first to be critical of the government.
:-)
The BBC is THE most impartial news agency I know - part of their mandate is to be unbiased, and as there's no politically biased financiers, and no advertisers, they can be free to criticise anyone.
It isn't funded by the government either; it is paid for by the license fee, which is mandatory for anyone with a TV set, which admittedly does imply some kind of state control, but if the government did try to interfere there would be a massive outcry.
Put it this way: I'm British, and I'd take the BBC over any independant news agency financed by advertisers any day
I think Steve Job has intentionally missed the point. Yes, the whole sharing thing is pointless and won't be used. But Wi-Fi will be the future (hopefully for iPods too) for uploading music to the device and playing back to speakers.
For example, I play music from my MacBook wirelessly to my speakers through my AirPort Express (yes, I'm an Apple fanboy) a lot. I really wish I could do the same, but from my iPod, so I don't have to power up the MacBook. If iPod had Wi-Fi - ta da! Problem solved.
I think Steve knows this is the future but is spreading a little FUD about the Zune. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of video iPod has wi-fi - carefully timed to arrive with the iTV - so it can play video wirelessly too. It's the next logical step.
I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all.
No, they don't need lawyers. They're not in court; for the simple reason that it's a US court which has no jurisdiction over the UK. I suggest you read their response:
http://www.spamhaus.org/legal/answer.lasso?ref=3
1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
No, they're not saying this. Even if it went to a federal court, it still wouldn't have any jurisdiction over a UK company. Note that e360's activities (while legal in the US) are undoubtably illegal in the UK.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
No, Spamhaus have quite rightly never agreed that an Illinois court has power over a UK company. David Linhardt had to lie to the court in the first place to con the judge into believing that Spamhaus is an Illinois company.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.
No, they haven't broken the law - the only law broken in this affair is David Linhardt breaking UK law by spamming British citizens, which is why they haven't filed the case in the UK, which would be the proper place to do it if they had any chance of enforcing a judgement against Spamhaus.
What Channel 4 didn't mention is that there have been far greater losses through the same kind of fraud within the UK than from India. So taking the figures to their logical conclusion, it's safer to have your call centres in India than in Britain. But that doesn't make such good headlines!
At work we use a Watchguard java applet, which I don't particularly like, but it does the job as you describe. We use it to restrict users/workstations to our own websites and limited tech support sites.
To enable this access on the client PC, the user opens IE, goes to a local page that contains the applet, and enters their password in the applet. As long as that window is open in the background, they have access to the allowed sites.
I don't deal with the server end myself but I think it comes in hardware or software flavours.
I give it a couple of days at most before a whole new genre of online gaming is created. For starters, two player chess is a doddle to set up - as long as you don't mind your pieces labeled 'White Knight' in text.
I really like the Elevation/Visible/Infrared options - I wonder if they have similar data for Earth? It would be fascinating to study a city in infrared.
Of course, they have elevation data for the executable Google Earth but it would also be interesting to see a colour map.
This sounds like it has possibilities, especially as it'll have very low heat emissions. Plus, presumably, some of the speed limitations will be removed as (in a very basic sense) a magnetic signal travels so much faster than an electical signal. And I especially like the idea from the article that it retains data when the power switches off - true instant on computers at last.
My only reservation is that magnetic memory doesn't seem that reliable in the long term - I've had to throw out a lot of flash based memory after a few years, whereas I've never had a processor fail spontaneously (discounting heat transfer problems, naturally - I can't deny I've had many go up in smoke).
It's a shame they haven't been available to review yet, but to be fair, Apple aren't really missing anything. They will sell like hotcakes to start with, even if they turn out to be bricks with LEDs strapped on.
Question is, what would you call them? As long as it's not something like 'Infotainment', I don't mind...
Of course, they didn't mention that most flame wars are started by a) Thirteen year old boys who are new to the whole testosterone thing, or b) Borderline Asperger's Syndrome types who cannot understand emotions anyway.
After all, women are naturally better at communicating and understanding emotion, and without wishing to generalise, in most cases seem to communicate fine over the web without misunderstandings.
I used to sell these; maybe not this model, but this design has been around for at least five years. Good in theory - it eliminates the unnatural twisting of the hand - but in practice there's hardly a market for it.
The companies that sell these (I know, I used to work for one) aren't actually aiming for the disabled-by-RSI market - in practice, there's very few people who actually HAVE disabling computer related RSI, and those that do usually just cut down on the intensity of their computer use - who they're aiming for is big businesses (call centres and the like) who they try and scare with the 'Unless you buy ten thousand of these, your employees will get RSI and SUE YOU!!!' line. Nobody much buys it, except maybe in the USA.
Of course, the bottom line is, does it actually work? When selling this kind of thing I tried using this and a variety of other 'ergonomic' mice intensively, and most of them gave me more pain than a 'normal' mouse did - mainly because my use of a normal mouse adapts easily depending on what position it is in relative to me, whereas these vertical mice have to be used sitting straight at the desk with your hand and arm in the 'proper' position. Anything else - especially using it standing up - is extremely difficult and contorts your hand unnaturally.
I hate to piss all over somebody's design, but I've seen so many different 'ergonomic' mice come and go. None of them has caught on - the only one that has got close is Microsoft's curvy mouse, and that's just because MS had enough investment power behind them to put one in the box of every new computer. Interestingly, I haven't seen one of them for a while, all the same.
Frankly, as no system I know of has 100% efficiency in sorting spam from real messages, I don't trust it one inch in prioritising my messages either.
I wonder what criteria it uses to sort email - if it's simply looking at the email address, then it's going to take up the user's time in setting up relationships and sort criteria, something which I can guarantee most people can't be bothered to do.
I can hardly find the time to sort email into folders, which is why I'm quite fond of gmail - as it doesn't have folders, I don't feel guilty about not using them...
I would say that most of the 'eBay Fraud' is actually PayPal fraud.
This story caught my eye because I've literally just today been defrauded out of 250 GBP due to a PayPal chargeback. At least PayPal have a phone number (more than most internet companies do) but the employees I talked to said they're not doing anything about it - the buyer instructed his credit card agency to cancel the transaction, leaving PayPal 250 pounds out of pocket, so they deduct it from my account, which automatically charges my credit card 250 pounds.
What frustrates me is that it is so obvious what has happened and who is at fault, but PayPal are only interested in recovering their own money - they couldn't give a sh*t about which of their customers has been screwed over.
All I can say is roll on Google - there's a big gap in the market of guys like me who have been stung by eBay/PayPal and want a RELIABLE, SECURE alternative.
The user often doesn't know that they can change fonts
I agree totally, but surely you are contradicting yourself? If users take 'a bit of education' then you must realise that the vast majority of web users won't learn or bother to set their own fonts. Certainly nobody I know, other than web-techie types, does this.
So saying that the client shouldn't specify fonts and that the user should is a bit of a cop out. When clients/designers want fancy fonts I personally advise them on what fonts are available (ie. standard cross-platform availability, like Arial, Helvetica, etc) and give them that choice. Of course this still leaves it open for users to view the content with their own fonts.
(By the way, I usually use Verdana or Arial for big blocks of text - they may be boring, but they're easy to read and everyone has them)
This is one of my gripes with SlashDot by the way - 99% of people reading this stuff see it as Times New Roman - a lot of it in italics. Which is possibly one of the most unreadable fonts in the world!
I find lo-tech paper books aren't costworthy in today's tech environment - they go out of date too quickly, and are thus resource wasteful (In my area - web tech - anyway). Any reference books I buy in digital form, as this is usually more cost-efficient.
So for a REAL bookshelf... probably some IT-angled fiction. This is tricky as most authors fail to research tech angles correctly (like Hollywood computers, but not quite as glaringly obvious). Douglas Copeland's Microserfs was OK, and quite entertaining.
For an intelligent recommended read though, I can't recommend the usual Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance highly enough. It really makes you think, which is nice. I've been meaning to check out Scott Adam's (of Dilbert fame) God's Debris too. That's free to download by the way. So it might be worth reading a bit and if you like it, you could buy paper copies for your friends.
We haven't got much HDTV in this country (UK) yet, but I can see the same thing happening here when we do;
One of my girlfriend's friends hasn't got a DVD player yet, but bought DVDs and got me to copy them to VHS tape. When I asked why she didn't just buy them on VHS, she said that she wanted to watch them in DVD quality!
It's just the same with surround sound - I know so many people who have shelled out for full 5.1 or 8.1 speaker sets but due to amateur wiring are really just listening to stereo.
To be fair, it still sounds a little better than two speakers due to the number of speakers, even though they're all pumping out the same signal. I imagine a similar thing applies to HDTV - even if the resolution is no higher, the mere fact that HDTVs are newer, clearer and have great contrast will probably mean the picture looks nicer; hence these people being convinced they're watching a HDTV signal.
Bless.