One of the latest gadgets to hit the market with massive fanfare is the Amazon Kindle. It was on the cover of Newsweek, where it was hailed as the future of reading.
It hit Slashdot twice. The first time was as a part of the initial hype wave. The second time was after it sold out in under 6 hours. There are many good comments on the Slashdot threads. In particular, there are some reviews of users of various electronic book readers and some thoughts on the hype surrounding the Kindle.
I am very interested in a good electronic book reader. The Kindle’s major competition is the Sony Reader. However, I just don’t think there’s a single product out there that could meet all my needs, even when I look at a few other readers.
Here’s my list of needs from an electronic reader:
- Must NOT include DRM crap. This may be the most important criteria for me. I don’t want to find myself in ten years with an entire library of books on a device that is obsolete with no control over what to do with them.
- Must allow me to sync with PDFs and other common electronic formats on my computer for free. I can pretty much convert anything I need to read into a PDF, so that’s the key. This is another important criteria for me. As an academic, I spend a lot of time reading academic papers and almost all of them are in an unrestricted (i.e. non-DRM’d) PDF format.
- Must have decent battery life. I consider 3 days of normal use to be a minimum and a week to be about the ideal. I’m really not sure about this criteria, but I think that this seems feasible given what I know about the technology
- Must have a library of books from which I could purchase and download. I don’t think a lack of an internet connection on the device is a show stopper as long as it wasn’t hard to sync from a computer, but it would certainly be nice. (Note: Bonus points if it can work with something like O’Reilly’s Safari, but that would probably require an active Internet connection.)
- Must allow me to sync news sites and RSS feeds for reading. I would strongly prefer if this would not require an active internet connection to read any of these feeds.
- Must have an open interface. I really think products like this are best when anyone can build their own applications to interface with them. I would probably prefer an entirely open source product, but I would settle for a decent open interface.
There’s nothing out there yet, but I think the Kindle might be proof that this is simply a matter of time rather than a pie in the sky idea.
[Edit 2 Dec 2007: I wanted to provide a link to this interesting article on Ars Technica that compares e-books and paper books.]
This is one of the most hilarious books I have read in a long while. It is called Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. The premise of the book is that a 29 going on 30 secretary named Julie Powell from New York City does something extreme to break the mundane routine that has become her life: she decides to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s famous book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.
I know what you’re thinking, but the book isn’t all about cooking. It’s really more of a How-To guide for everyone’s eventual post-college quarter life crisis. You know how it goes. You get to the real world and you finally have “grown-up” by basically every possible standard and there’s nothing. It’s not like you get a prize or anything. You’re just…there. Life is happening and you just have to make your way in the world. This book is one woman’s crazy, hilarious journey to find that inner peace and achieve a level of happiness.
One thing that surprised me is how much I had in common with this woman. We both like playing Civilization, cooking to some degree, and finding the humor in the general idiocy of bureaucracies. It was freaky how many little things there were where I felt a kinship with this woman that I never met. Perhaps it’s just that she comes across as so genuine it’s hard not to find things in the book where you haven’t found yourself in a similar situation.
I can’t recommend the book enough. It’s a crazy project taken on by a woman of arguable sanity, who manages to convey the whole experience in side-splitting fashion. I can’t really even imagine trying to eat 524 French foods in a year, let alone trying to cook them all basically from scratch first.
Of course, there’s a similarity to another book that I read somewhat recently called The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, which was also extremely good. There’s something about these books that feels like a sort of marathon version of Truth or Dare gone wild. These are the sorts of things that kind of make you just sit back in awe and think “Only in America…” Both of these books are excellent. I’m not sure what Julie Powell’s next book might be, but I know A.J. Jacobs is working on a book about a year living biblically, which is essentially about following the Bible as literally as possible, including all the lesser known rules for an entire year. I will certainly be looking into reading that.
I bought an iPod Mini several years ago. Like many iPod owners, I was simply blown away. As a skeptical purchaser of anything, I rarely pay attention to the hype surrounding products, but it was hard to find any review of an iPod that didn’t smack of the typical hype-talk surrounding new technologies. After buying one, I knew why. It really is quite simply the perfect thing. It has achieved immortality as a cultural icon of its time and deservedly so.
Steven Levy‘s book The Perfect Thing is an account of how the iPod came to be ubiquitous. I actually read this book a couple months ago over spring break, but didn’t have time to blog about it then. However, this book is too good not to mention and recommend.
I originally heard about it on a podcast interview with Steven Levy. I was already interested in reading it because I had previously read Crypto and found it to be fantastic. However, one part of the interview really sold me on reading The Perfect Thing. They were talking about the organization of the book. One the things that defined the iPod was its shuffle feature. Steven Levy decided that he wanted to build this into the book in some way. Thus, the chapters in the book are ‘shuffled.’ Thus, if you go to a bookstore and pick up two copies, the chapters will be in different orders. It’s really quite fun to flip through different versions just for the novelty.
The book is similar to Crypto in that both of them involve a lot of very colorful people doing groundbreaking things. The excitement of the time is conveyed palpably. There are few business ventures and technologies that become as successful as rapidly as the iPod. Reading about these people, their excitement, their eccentricities, and ultimately their success was greatly enjoyable and made for a wonderful vacation book. If you are a technologist, a business nut, a music lover, or simply looking for something fun to read, I really encourage you to pick up a copy from the bookstore or the library.
As a JFK assassination buff, I have read several long books about the JFK assassination. However, there is a new book out there that I seriously doubt I will read. This 1632 page long addition to the mass of JFK assassination books is called Reclaiming History and brought to you by the author of Helter Skelter. The New York Times book review is a hilarious account of how long the book is.
The reviewer of the book mentions that some of the length comes from the over-the-top coverage of the topic, which he claims is required because of the fact that the public wasn’t satiated by the Warren Commission report. As I mentioned in my last post, I simply don’t think more exacting coverage will help in this case. People can’t make things add up when something like this happens.
The reviewer also compares Oswald’s age to that of the Virginia Tech shooter, but I think there is also a comparison of the two tragedies in terms of acceptance. People try to find some way to balance the scales when something horrible happens. In the case of the Virginia Tech shooter, they look to blame the school administration, the gun shop, gun control legislation, violent video games, or whatever else comes to mind. Bruce Schneier sort of mentions how silly this blame game is in his latest article on Wired.
The bottom line is that in life, there are things that don’t add up. Humans aren’t good at dealing with incredibly rare or seemingly impossible realities. There’s a similar argument made for randomness. Steven Levy covered this well with respect to the iPod and it’s shuffle feature. Being able to take a step back from things and understand that the human reaction you might have to something like the JFK assassination is important to being able to accept it.
I recently finished reading Brave New Ballot this week. Truly, it is an excellent book. Although dealing with both technology and politics, which each have their own confusing vocabulary, the book comes across as extremely easy to read and understand. Also, at 304 pages, it is a quick read. I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered if their vote really matters.
One of the things that I took away from this book simply is that it is incredible how little attention has been paid to voting technology. As I was reading, it struck me how fundamental this problem is. I’m stunned at how little most people I knew were and are talking about it.
There are a two very important quotes that highlight this profoundly. The lead-in quote for chapter 10 is from Joseph Stalin who said, “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” I had previously run into another quote that I didn’t see in the book and was frankly surprised by it’s absence because it addresses the topic so well. Tom Stoppard said, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”
It is inextricable that democracy depends on fair elections. I would highly encourage everyone with even a passing interest in politics to read this book. Also, for those who are interested in e-voting, this book is utterly essential. Finally, there are many, many resources available online about this topic, but I highly recommend this book as a starting place for those who are confused.
There is a very good New Yorker article about Google’s Book Search feature. I found this through Michael Geist. As with most New Yorker articles, this is a bit long, but very informative. I highly recommend reading the whole thing if you are at all interested in copyright issues or Google.
One of the most important things that doesn’t get covered until somewhat late in the article is that whatever happens here will be established as a precedent for future cases. If there is one thing about the combination of technology and law that trumps all others it is the vast difference in speed between the two. Technology is an ultra fast moving industry. The US legal system moves at the pace of a wounded snail. Thus, when big cases like this come up it is crucial to have them decided fairly. It would take generations of technology to overturn a bad legal precedent.
This weekend I finished reading Blink by Malcom Gladwell. I first heard about this book from Bruce Schneier’s writing about it. It’s a fascinating book that was very easy to read. I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in high speed decision making.
In some ways it is difficult to describe what the book is really about and “high speed decision making” isn’t really all that accurate. I think the primary thing that I took away from this book is that despite the current trend in thinking more information about a problem does not always result in the best decision. In fact, it’s quite possible to have too much information about a problem to solve it correctly. This applies to all kinds of problems from crime fighting to computer programming.
Of course, Blink is about much, much more than just information overload issues. It discusses all aspects of how the subconscious mind makes decisions quickly and how we can learn to understand when those “hunches” are accurate. I think some of the implications of this in the security business are just as breathtaking as the ones that Bruce Schneier mentions.
This sort of reasoning might also apply to the design of just about everything. Ask any designer about what makes a truly “good” design and invariably you’ll find out that there’s an aesthetic quality to it. This aesthetic quality is likely best analyzed, at least initially, by the subconscious mind. Most people have an initial “Blink” impression of an iPod that just screams to them about the quality of the product overall. If this was taken into account during the design of other systems, then perhaps the quality of all designs would be improved.
All in all, Blink is an excellent book. I’m definitely interested in reading Tipping Point now. Almost everyone I talked to about Blink asked me if I had read Tipping Point and recommended it when they found out I hadn’t.
I recently read Crypto by Steven Levy. While I really enjoyed the whole book, I particularly enjoyed the epilogue. It was extremely well written and organized such that all the things I was scared could happen to be mentioned were avoided.
Essentially, the epilogue is about the folks in the British government who originally discovered public key encryption, or as they called it: Non-Secret Encryption. The things that you fear could be mentioned are things like who’s discovery was more impressive, important or in some way distinguished. You fear to find that the folks working on these things could become jealous of the people who are profiting off of them in the private sector.
Envy is a very hard thing to deal with at times and it’s certainly not something you want to have people who are spending their lives on national security issues to have to deal with. With luck, prescreening and testing, those who are able to work in areas sensitive to national security simply don’t have that temperment. Personally, I feel a key to this is that folks in the public domain don’t hold things like this over the heads of those who worked to achieve essentially the same thing secretly for the government.
As such, I’m really glad that Steven Levy didn’t leave his book without telling the untold story of James H. Ellis and his co-workers who worked on public key encryption. It was a very beautiful story, in my opinion, but then, I think I side more with that temperment. I don’t really need massive public recognition or wealth to be happy though at times I’m sure I wouldn’t mind them. Even if there was something where I felt I did really want public recognition, I can’t picture myself breaking my word to achieve it. Of course, it’s easy for me to say such things since I’ve never been put in that position.
Thus, I am glad that there’s a book out there that shows the character of James Ellis. He wanted to be recognized in some form, but he died before it could happen. He spent years of his life knowing that he was the first person to come up with an idea that was independently discovered and used by someone else to revolutionize the world of cryptography and yet he never broke his word and confirmed his discovery. He is an intellectual martyr in that sense.
Of course, now his discovery is public knowledge and anyone who reads Steven Levy’s book will know about it. I hope that everyone can appreciate how well written that section of the book is and I certainly hope that everyone sees James Ellis and everyone else who works on secret projects for the governement just a little differently as a result.
I recently bought an iPod. I wasn’t all that sure that I would find it all that usefull at first, but it was an idea that kept growing on me after having bought a PowerBook for Christmas. I am a huge fan of well-engineered devices and having previously used a Compaq Presario 1700T, the PowerBook left a real impression. Anyhow, I found myself more and more drawn to the idea of getting an iPod.
After the first few weeks of owning my blue iPod mini, I have to say that I’m extremely pleased with the purchase. I was a huge music fan in high school and bought tons of CDs. I was still a huge music fan when I went to college and MP3s became huge. Even though I was still a huge fan of music when I got into some of the harder engineering classes, I ended up spending a lot of time working in study groups in libraries, the student union, and computer labs where I was unable to listen to music. If an iPod had been around back then, I would have absolutely loved it. Even now, it’s surprising how useful and fun to have access to virtually every song I’ve ever really loved virtually everywhere I go.
So I’m currently taking my first Red Hat Training class, and I’m undecided as to how useful it is. It’s a one week class. The class is RHD221: Linux Device Drivers. I have written and played with a few Linux device drivers in the past, but there’s certainly a number of things I’ve never really touched. Plus, the class covers 2.6 and all the stuff I’ve done has been on 2.4. The first day was pretty slow, but I’m hopeful that it will pick up tomorrow. The course outline seems pretty ambitious.
I did get to pick the instructor’s mind about a few book recommendations. I’ve always been a fan of O’Reilly books. In particular, I thought the two best references on the Linux Kernel were Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition and Understanding the Linux Kernel, 2nd Edition. This was when I was working on the 2.4 kernel. As a part of the course, we got a hardcopy of Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition, which covers the 2.6 kernel with no real information on the differences between 2.4 and 2.6. If you want 2.4 information, you should still use the 2nd Edition of the book. However, there’s no 3rd Edition of Understanding the Linux Kernel out yet. Thus, if you want a good reference for the 2.6 kernel internals, you might like Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love. Anyhow, I’ll keep you up to date on how the class goes.