Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Instapundit links to an article by Melanie Scarborough that purports to show that either a telecom engineer or the Bush administration is lying about the domestic “wiretapping” with the clear implication that Bush is the liar.
Unfortunately, her premise is based on a complete misunderstanding of how modern telecommunication works. Both parties are telling the truth.
For the past few years I’ve successfully used xxcopy to backup data to portable hard drives. However, a few days ago, while I was copying the contents of one portable HD to another, with both HDs connected to the same computer via USB 2.0 connections, something happened in the middle of a backup and the source HD became corrupted. (The first symptom of a problem was that the backup stopped and a Windows message balloon appeared indicating that a particular source file could not be read and that I should run CHKDSK on the source HD.)
I’m very intrigued by Amazon’s new Kindle device.
Dave Davison, IT venture capitalist and visualization maven, is very high on the potential of Kindle:
“Amazon “kindles” a new fire in electronic book reading. This 6 minute video shows how you will use this new portable, 10.3ounce, paperback size device. Download your reading library via a wireless connection just like calling on your cell phone. This device and the kindle service will revolutionize the book, magazine,newspaper and blog publishing media space.”
Count me as an avid reader and collector of books but if Amazon has truly solved the ” reading online” problem that causes me to print out anything longer than a handful of pages, with a vision-friendly, virtual-paper screen, then I’d be keen to own a Kindle. Just putting all of my magazines on it to reduce clutter or using it to read on the treadmill instead of lugging books in my gym bag, would be worth it. I would also speculate that, if you buy an absurdly large number of books annually, as I do, a kindl could allow you to purchase strategically; some in dead-tree version and some virtual form, and accumulate a considerable cost savings.
I would also expect that, as a platform, the uses for Kindle are only going to grow.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
(This is a rerun of a 2003 post at Photon Courier. New links added at the end.)
Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)
She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?
I’ve written several posts about the emergence of electronic ink / electronic paper technologies. In a nutshell, these technologies allow information to be displayed on a medium which is (a) thin, (b) flexible (to at least some degree), (c) readable in bright sunlight, and (d) power-efficient (power is used only when changing the page, not for display per se.) As I wrote in 2004:
“These technologies could have major implications for the display of long text documents, eliminating the current undesirable alternatives of reading it on the screen or going to the trouble of printing it out, and I think they could have tremendous influence on the future of the media industry (especially periodicals.)”
A couple of years ago, Sony launched the Sony eReader, a 9-ounce product that can store about 80 average-sized books. Downloading is via an i-Tunes-like interface from a PC. My perception is that eReader has not been a runaway success, although it has developed some niche markets–it seems to be popular, for instance, among fans of romance novels, especially really hot romance novels.
Today, Amazon launched a product called Kindle, which has some interesting attributes: