On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 12:58, Jerry Feldman wrote: > On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 12:39:44 -0400 > Jon maddog Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I will have to agree with Ben. Despite the fact that I too love the > > feeling of pages turning between my hands, and I love taking that book > > out under the tree, or into the hammock in the back yard, there are > > economies that will force printed books out of existence. > Great post. > I too prefer books. I am uncomfortable reading large amounts of online > text. Maybe if I had one of Thad Starner's wearables with high > resolution glasses, I could join Maddog under the tree with a computer. > Years ago I learned how to use an abacus. I still have it somewhere. > It's much closer to Linux than Windows since you never get a blue screen > of death with it :-)
I fondly recall my slide rule I used to carry around with me everywhere when I was in 6th grade on. Now, almost no one would want to use a slide rule for anything. Having said that, I will also say this. I have spent a good portion of my career designing user interfaces. The user interface of a thing IS the experience of a thing. Someone had mentioned that the reed organ is not built anymore, but has been supplanted by the canned samples in synthesisers. But if you think of it, the *user interface* of the two are quite similar. But, despite the advent of the Casio Keyboards of the world, we still have real pianos. There is something about the sound of a grand piano, for instance, that will never be quite captured electronically. Plus pianos are deeply embedded in our culture, and that "cultural meme" replicates itself nicely every time there is a gathering around a good pianist. You can't beat that. So there is more to a thing than just the user interface, even though the UI plays an important role. Now, let's talk about the user interface aspects of dead-tree books vs. e-books. It's the feel, its the smell. It's the sound the turning of a page makes. The crispness of the letters and pictures, if any. The weight, dead-tree books are very durable, too. They can go everywhere you do, get chewed by the dog, get kicked by the kid, and they will still be usable. The e-book, on the other hand, does not stand on its own. It requires a computer to render it readable, whether it's a laptop, palmtop, or desktop. Current computer displays don't do well in direct sunlight, palmtops are simply too small to read comfortably, laptops can be dropped or get wet or stolen, and they all require power. There is something highly annoying about worrying when the power will run out on the laptop or palmtop, which distracts from the experience. And don't let your dog chew on it or the kid kick it -- you've got those extra concerns as well. But you can do text searches and what not. But then a book with a half-decent index is good too. And the advantage to the index is that you can browse it in a way you can't with an electronic lookup. Both have their places. To save cost on dead-tree books, we don't need to use trees at all, but hemp. And that can happen as soon as a certain government gets its head out of its ass. And even with technical manuals and reference books, when grokking them I prefer the dead-tree version. I can grok them anywhere, especially places I would not want to take my laptop. But for regular reference uses, I prefer the on-line manuals with the search capabilities. And so I find myself using both. Same with GUI vs. CLI. I use both, exploiting the advantages of each. The command-line console will never go away, no matter how "fancy" GUI gets. And I absolutely adore Emacs which works nicely in either mode. So before someone can say that "X is going away because Y is so much better", one has to look deeply at the UI aspects of both X and Y. And the UI experience will determine if Y is truly that much better than X. Usually X and Y becomes complimentary rather than competitive. -- Fred -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- place "[hey]" in your subject. There are inflows and outflows -- and you're just a little node. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss