E-Books vs. Dead-Tree Books: An Alternate Dialogue

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

The point I am trying to make is that the financial cost of running your PC continuously outweighs any benefit you might gain in the lifetime of the hardware.

For reasons unconnected with the PC, that's not true here. And I'd do the same if it were true: I pay extra for convenience, and avoiding boot cycles is a big one.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

It's a 10-yr old Gateway PC running Windows 2000, and I've already maxxed out the hardware as far as I can without outright replacement of the box (which, at this point, is pretty imminent...)

OK. Win2K does have long boot sequences. No surprise that faster booting was a design goal for XP.

If you upgrade to an XP machine, I recommend a handy freeware utility called TuneXP. It's a "run once" program that lets you tweak an assortment of settings. The big win is an option to reorder the boot drive to place drivers at the beginning for fastest access and boot up. Works a treat.

Your options are more limited in 2K, and beyond defragging and trying to keep the number of things loaded on bootup to a minimum, you can't do a lot to tweak it.

And very beyond my non-IT experience. I'd never seen it used before I started this job, and everyone else in the office thinks it's pretty cool (or spooky, depending on who you talk to). But mostly they just like the idea of being lazy and not having to worry about it.

It's really useful in the data center, where "lights out" operation is the goal, and there may not be anyone to turn a machine on if it isn't when remote access is required.

I've also seen "Wake on modem" options, though those are rather less used.
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Dennis

[Cthulhu]

Not to be that guy who says "Oooh, shiny. I like shiny," but imagine that solid state drives will help reduce energy use in the coming future. For the moment, they are blasphemously expensive.
Of course, even with a SSD, there will still be the cpu that gets hot, requiring a fan, and all those shiny circuit boards will be stressed when the system turns on.

For me, since my computer is in the same room as where I sleep four feet away, generally turn it off at night to remove the light pollution of its many LED's and the disturbing buzz of its little fan.

Anyway, it'll be nice to have such fancy machines to read on once we small all those nasty printing presses.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Cthulhu

Not to be that guy who says "Oooh, shiny. I like shiny," but imagine that solid state drives will help reduce energy use in the coming future. For the moment, they are blasphemously expensive.
Of course, even with a SSD, there will still be the cpu that gets hot, requiring a fan, and all those shiny circuit boards will be stressed when the system turns on.

We're starting to see that. Hitachi is pushing a hybrid approach with a mix of solid state and hard drives. Core OS code is on the SSD for fast booting, while applications and data reside on the hard drive.

Of course, Hitachi is one of the major manufacturers of the flash memory used in SSDs (the others are Panasonic, SanDisk, and Toshiba), so they have in interest in promoting things that will use their products.

Expense is one problem. Flash memory prices are dropping, and will drop further, but most folks still won't want to pay what SSDs with anything like the capacity of hard drives cost.

And there's a technical limit that can bite: flash memory is limited to about 100,000 writes before failing. It's not a problem in things like expansion cards for handhelds. The circuitry on the card transparently maps bad spots as unusable, so degradation will be graceful. And expansion cards in handhelds are read from far more than written to, and you are likely to replace the card with a faster, higher capacity model long before you notice any performance issues. But I think that sort of thing could bite on the sort of applications people do on larger machines.

For me, since my computer is in the same room as where I sleep four feet away, generally turn it off at night to remove the light pollution of its many LED's and the disturbing buzz of its little fan.

Mine is close to where I sleep, too, bit I don't see the LEDs and the fan is inaudible.

Anyway, it'll be nice to have such fancy machines to read on once we small all those nasty printing presses.

Don't hold your breath waiting.
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Dennis

[moz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

And there's a technical limit that can bite: flash memory is limited to about 100,000 writes before failing.

That doesn't affect most of us - static memory and cards in our lissooses have the same problem, and they all have controllers that rotate the writes to mitigate it.

At the risk of introducing maths to the debate let's try doing the numbers. If you could get 3Gb/s (SATA II) out of it, your 64GB disk has 64x8 = 512Gbits in it, so takes about 170 seconds (3 minutes) to write to the whole thing. Then 3 minutes to read back. Times 100,000. 600,000 minutes is 10,000 hours or about 1 1/2 years. But in real life even the fast disks can only write at about 200Mb/s (50MB/s), 15 times slower. So that theoretical 1.5 years is actually 22.5 years with a real disk. And that's only if you continuously write to the drive, rather than actually using it for something.

[Cthulhu]

Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, large capacity SSD's (i.e. above 64 GB) could require as much if not more power than magnetic drives. Seems that durability will be an issue, or rather that SSD is more durable than a magnetic in some cases, more prone to damage in others.

Until we get those cool nano-machine/organic/biometric Cronenberg computers, we will need to live in a world of compromises.

Dennis: I sleep with my mouth wide open as I dream.
;-

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by moz

That doesn't affect most of us - static memory and cards in our lissooses have the same problem, and they all have controllers that rotate the writes to mitigate it.

Yep. I mentioned gradual degradation.

At the risk of introducing maths to the debate let's try doing the numbers. If you could get 3Gb/s (SATA II) out of it, your 64GB disk has 64x8 = 512Gbits in it, so takes about 170 seconds (3 minutes) to write to the whole thing. Then 3 minutes to read back. Times 100,000. 600,000 minutes is 10,000 hours or about 1 1/2 years. But in real life even the fast disks can only write at about 200Mb/s (50MB/s), 15 times slower. So that theoretical 1.5 years is actually 22.5 years with a real disk. And that's only if you continuously write to the drive, rather than actually using it for something.

Agreed that it isn't likely to be a problem. I was thinking of things like OLTP with heavy database access as potential trouble spots. For what most mortals do, it will never be an issue, because you'll replace the device long before you even start to see a problem.
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Dennis

[cklammer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

< ... SNIP .. >

The perfect device for me would be something the size of the HTC Touch, but with a "roll-out" screen for reading on. Perhaps that will arrive in a couple of years.

They have something like this in Barcelona at the Mobile Congress two or three years ago. It was then black and white only. My reference was on heise.de in the english language mobile news section.

It hasn't caught on yet, though.

I sure hope that it will. In the meantime there are netbooks ... some even with tablet-pc-like displays like the Acer T101H which is announced for this month. IMHO, from the netbooks I have personally seen so far the Toshiba NB-100 has the best display and design.

Having said that let e state that I have never had access to any the dedicated ebook reading devices like Kindle and the like. I do not feel deprived by this as I do not like single-task devices at all.

=====================
I am summarizing my experiences on reading on handheld devices. over the last six years or so. I realize that this might not interest everyone and it going off-topic for this thread. If you are not interested stop reading now

I personally have read the three volumes of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings on a Nokia 3230 formatted plain text files. I am currently on PalmOS using Mobipocket and have used previously Adobe and Plucker this platform.

My best reading experience was with a Palm Zire 72: huge and very clear display but lousy battery stamina. I am currently using a Treo 680 and that is OK.

I have favored Plucker (which is only available on Palm OS) until recently and used Adobe on Palm when I had to. But with XP SP 3 I lost the ability of generating my content for Plucker the way I wished and I started introducing Mobipocket to my reading and contenet creation "arsenal".

Then I had a period of alternatively using either Plucker, Adobe or Mobipocket depending on my existing content format. That got to be too cumbersome for me - I was forever searching content in the wrong reader. Until I blew my top and converted everything to Mobipocket.

None of the ebook readers I have used so far is perfect. But the far worst piece of shit was the Windows desktop component of the Adobe Reader for PalmOS: Slow, a memory hog and with lousy results.

The best overall solution is Mobipocket. There some negatives issues both on the Windows desktop and under PalmOS when one creates his own content and/or has a large number of ebooks under PalmOS - but I either just take the hit or work around issues. I won't go into further details as this is a rather long post already.

One the positive side Mobipocket is the best integrated solution so far I have seen for reading books on mobiles. And I am now on a Mobile-OS-independent ebook platform which supports as of today all the major mobile OS platforms: Symbian, Windows Mobile (in all its variations), PalmOS and Blackberry - all of which is got for me as I am now able to go any way when I finally kick PalmOS out.

[cklammer]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As it happens...
http://www.reuters.com/article/email...63412420080121

You must have a very big dog.
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Dennis

I assure you: a three-year-old, a mobile and a toilet make a more devastating combination.

I didn't lose any data though. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP - this is the new millennium. So my biggest problem was unclogging the throne seat drain ....

cklammer

[cklammer]

Originally Posted by Cthulhu

Dennis:

Sounds like you might one of the fifteen people who would actually buy a Palm Foleo.

Or a Celio Redfly ...

Originally Posted by Cthulhu

Personally, I will be very surprised if there are still dumbphones available in another ten years.

You will be surprised: do you seriously think that everybody in third-world-markets will a) have enough money to buy a smartphone compared to a dumb phone and b) will be even literate enough to do so (especially in markets where there are no phones in the major native languages and fonts - e.g. Ethiopia/Amharic). I have heard of plans by Nokia to produce dumb phone for the Indian market where the user interface is entirely in symbols and numbers only in order to cater to illiterate users.

So dumb phones will be available in ten years - even in developed markets. I personally know guys who carry around 3-4 mobile phones around: One for business/work, one (or two) for their wives and one for the girl-friend. What I observed what the "work" phone was the smartphone and the other phones were (small) dumb phones.

cklammer

[cklammer]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Yes, AT&T has announced availability of the Palm Centro. For practical purposes, it's Yet Another Treo, but at a much cheaper price ($100 with a 2 year plan.) Theoretically, it's an entry-level device, but it's not clear wht Palm has that would be considered an "upgrade".
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Dennis

The screen resolution of treo 680 and centro are the same (320x320) but the screen size of the centro is 80% of the screen of the treo 680.

cklammer

[cklammer]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Dream on, Cthulu. the stars aren't right.

I'm a computer guy. I have yet to see computerization that reduced paper, and I don't expect to.

Part of the problem is the one Robert Townsend spoke of in "Up the Organization!", when he talked about computerizing. His first advice was to make sure your manual system was clean and accurate, otherwise you would simply be speeding up the mess. Ideally, the systems analysis you do when figuring out how to automate something should show ways you can improve the process by eliminating unnecessary work. This does not always happen.

Another problem is that use of paper is too ingrained in the culture. Consider the folks who print out email to read it. (I heard about one chap who had an administrative assistant print out posts to some mailing lists he was on for him. I got an "ROFL!" comment when I asked if he dictated replies to the AA for posting. Apparently not -- he was "read only".)

Many years ago, I worked for a bank. Midway through my tenure, the bank got a deal on some space in a building, and decided to consolidate an assortment of separate offices under one roof. Mine was one of them. For a month before actual moving day, people were preparing what to move and tossing the rest. They had the wheeled canvas hampers the Post Office uses for Parcel Post mail, and were throwing out several hamper loads a day of paper to go to recycling. The process convinced me any large company should be required to move every five years, just to force people to throw stuff out.

For better or worse, information printed on paper is taken as more accurate and truthful. (Consider the phrase "right down there in black and white!"). If it's information on a computer printout, it's the sworn-on gospel. That's not changing any time soon.
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Dennis

At work, every piece of paper I get gets scanned and then stored (and maybe post processed with OCR and conversion as a PDF, WinWord or OOO document as the case may be).

The paper originals get either filed, shredded directly or returned to origin.

cklammer