i guess microsoft has enough money to buy the best designers around. maybe they have an idea or two about perspective and also a couple of ideas about when to break those rules in exchange to something that simply looks better, and this is the case.
i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them.
i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.
i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.
I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea is just alien to me.
Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).
I don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.
I feel exactly the same, and yet I just bought a Kindle and am very much planning to use it for most of my reading.
How do I resolve this dilemna?
Well, my parents had the same issue, though set up differently. When they fled from Romania after I was born, they had none of the huge library which they had back where they grew up.
So what did they do? They bought books. They bought the kinds of books which they wanted to have sitting on shelves in the house where I grew up, so that I could stumble on them and read them. It worked pretty well.
Most of the best books can be found for cheap in flea-markets. Building a solid library of top quality classics, from Gogol, Dostoievsky, Dumas and Dickens, to Hesse, Mann, Marques and Gary, is not that expensive.
I am extremely annoyed that there is no way to buy and sell used electronic books. It brings me right back to those stupid debates we had in the 90s with RIAA about whether I'm buying a license or an object when I purchase a CD. Then as now, I feel a lot less bad about pirating content when the publishers impose artificial restrictions on what I can and cannot do with things I the stuff I own.
Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder "book" on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas.
The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell , and my personal favorite: Earl Grey.
This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve.
I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.
This bothers me too, I have a hard time sacrificing all the properties inherent to a ownership of physical book for the one convenience that the kindle offers. Instead I find myself returning to buying books and only using the kindle for reading longer things copy-and-pasted from my computer.
i am generally regarded as an intelligent person, but i personally believe that intelligence is a highly overrated quality. speaking generally, being surrounded by intelligent people is "better", but if i ask myself, i'd rather have my girlfriend faithful, sweet and caring, my friends funny and reliable and my co-workers expert and easy-going because being stuck in an office with an intelligent moron 8 hours a day is not something i wish for myself.
so, while it is obviously better to have a friend fun AND intelligent or a girlfriend sweet AND intelligent, in the end pure smartness is never the first quality i look for in people.
to me intelligence is something that's worth to the one who has it, meaning he'll be able to better interpret the reality that surrounds him and will have more power to adapt/readapt/understand things around him so that he doesn't live a miserable life...
hmmm... python had taught me that "battery included" means that out of the package i find a web server, drivers for at least one database server, graphics libraries... a compiler and a lexer aren't what i call "batteries".
We have a roadmap to a truly comprehensive base set, based on peer review from nominated libraries on hackage (which hosts around 4000 libs now). Assuming eg snap or yesod servers are proposed, you might well see them in the next release.
For graphics, OpenGL is already standard, with a medium term plan to add Cairo/GTK.
Finally, all of hackage is a 'cabal install' away, reducing the need for a large core set.
Finally, all of hackage is a 'cabal install' away, reducing the need for a large core set.
This I think is the most important point. The value that the Haskell Platform has is that it includes the stuff that depends on system libraries (X11) and other packages that are more difficult than average to install. That means that once you get the Platform, everything else will probably be easy to install, and so there's no point in including it.
(This is especially true of things like web frameworks; what's popular today may not be in 5 years, and deprecation cycles are hard. Perl still includes CGI.pm, and people still use it because "it's core". Compatibility is nice, but encouraging obsolete programming techniques is not.)
But... Why would you want this? The platform already includes a very good package manager (cabal). What I'd rather like to see is even better dependency handling (currently, version numbers are too important for what they say) and conflict handling.
The latter is partly solved by cabal-dev, which installs packages that are dependencies of a development tree in a sandbox. The former problem could be solved using type-based dependencies [1].
>> hmmm... python had taught me that "battery included" means that out of the package i find a web server, drivers for at least one database server, graphics libraries... a compiler and a lexer aren't what i call "batteries".
The Haskell platform is pretty much the batteries what you want. It includes CGI for web, HTTP for making http requests, regexes, GLUT+OpenGL for Graphics, even a wrapper for Win32. And my favorite: the Parsec parser combinator library. What's missing from your list is the database library and a web server, if cgi doens't fit you. But they're just one "cabal install" away, and there's plenty more in there, like Web App frameworks, etc.
the fact that rails is not for beginners is true (and main developers say so), but suggesting for beginners a smaller framework that gives you less and hence requires you to do more, know more and make choices that rails has done for you is simply nonsense.
i can summarize this pretty easily. competitors that see the argument like "apple is giving 1GB RAM for 500$, i'll give 2GB RAM for 500$!" are really missing the whole point. when you buy an apple phone / mp3 player / tablet / computer you're probably well aware that with the same price you can get a more powerful/feature rich device elsewhere, but you decide, instead, to invest in a brand you trust because has given you other reliable, innovative products that you already own and you know the new device will integrate seamlessly with whatever you already have, or you're buying "the iPhone", not a generic smartphone, the iPad, not a table, an iPod, not a mp3 player, so there's really no choice because apple is the only one doing it.
