Can you dumb it down a bit for me, are you referring to the Asus eee box?

Every year or so I think about building a htpc box, but I don't keep up-to-date on that niche.

It would be interesting to know how many people buy a Kindle and put other stuff on there compared to those who completely succumb to the Amazon cool-aid and do all their shopping there.

I'm guessing most users are not techie enough to do anything but buy from the Amazon store, but obviously I have no data.

I'm sure that's why Amazon tracks those numbers, but the article uses the 3.1 times figure to justify their claim that "consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes".

I didn't word my initial comment well, when I say local chains I meant e.g. driving to my local Barnes & Noble/Borders/whatever. I know that Amazon is growing at those guys' expense, but they still sell a helluva lot of books.

There's a 5GB ebook archive on the Pirate Bay with thousands of ebooks all RARed up, it's easier to download the whole thing and just extract the ones you're interested in.

Or so they tell me...

Comparing ebooks to physical book sales is obviously stupid, because Amazon can't track how many physical books I bought at local chains, or the used shop downtown.

I dunno, Office is ridiculously entrenched. I think they could have reworked Word to require vi style modal editing commands and everyone would still have bent over and upgraded.

I mean what are you going to buy instead? WordPerfect?

Yes, I've often wished it was even harder for people to read and edit each other's word processing documents.

Eh?

Without email, files on the network, network printers, whatever corporate apps you have, internet... what good is that PC?

That's pretty sweet, the first thing I'd do is install a Commodore 64 emulator.

Isn't Guild Wars like that, you can learn lots of skills but can only have a few in your toolbar at any one time?

Underpowered? It's an 800Mhz ARM CPU, surely to fuck it can do a little text processing on 150 character tweets.

I'm guessing top-end mainframes didn't achieve that kind of CPU power until the late 80s.

Back in the day, ftp.cdrom.com pushed ~1TB a day from one 200-MHz P6 Pentium Pro.

Now get of my lawn.

Thx for the link, that was really cool.

Multiply that small number by the insanely huge number of gallons of gasoline consumed.