Disclaimer: I own a KindleDX and am incredibly happy with it.

you have a lot of good points, but there are some things that you fail to recognize:

For one, the size and weight of books. For a casual reader, the KindleDX is overkill. It's large, expensive and the benefits don't outweigh the hassles (recharging, fragility, etc). For those of us that have large libraries of tech books, the KindleDX allows us to store our entire bookshelf on a single device that takes up less room and weighs significantly less than a single book.

This brings me to my second point: The Kindles (an ebook readers in general) have better displays for reading large quantities of text. It's easier on the eyes than a laptop. Also, for those of us that use mass transit to commute and don't always have a seat, a laptop is not an option. Have you ever tried to stand up in a crowded subway and use a laptop? Even sitting down and using the laptop is a pain. Laptop battery life is also significantly worse than the Kindle's--my kindle hasn't needed to be charged a single time since I got it nearly 3 weeks ago. It also beats out the laptop because you can travel light with it; you don't need to carry a laptop bag. All you need is the device, and since it doesn't require frequent charging, you don't even need to bring the charger (USB cable) with it.

Third point: When using ebooks for reference (or following a tutorial in the book) while you're doing work on the laptop, it's nice to have a separate device. This was one reason why I stuck to buying physical books rather than purchasing PDFs exclusively.

So, while $700 (KindleDX + tax + shipping + 2 year warranty + sleeve) is quite a steep price to pay, for those of us that will use it a lot, it's worth the price. If I wasn't in such need for the solution, I would have held off a year or so and waited for it to come down in price or for a cheaper solution to be released.

My coworker picked up the Sony PRS-700 a couple months ago and he's mostly very satisfied. It was around $375 + tax, but has a significantly smaller screen. Although it's got a touchscreen, the touchiness is kinda flakey and it's got some weird glare because of the touch surface. Also, PDF support in the thing is mediocre--the zoom sucks and it really needs a larger screen.

I was going to hold out for the PlasticLogic (http://www.plasticlogic.com/) but I was hoping for something that I could get real books on, too. Since I really liked the Kindle (my dad picked one up last year) and the features that come with it (cellular websurfing/wikipedia/wireless book delivery and books that you can buy FROM the device), I opted for the DX.

Like I said, the DX isn't for everyone. It's pretty big and it's expensive, but I feel that I'm definitely getting my money's worth.

"Accenture"? You mean Andersen Consulting? The people that you'd have to be a complete idiot to do business with after the Enron disaster?

I'm can't say that I'm familiar with what involvement they had with Enron, but I've had a half-dozen friends who have worked at Accenture and from what I know of them, they do pretty good work usually.

The key point is that MS was involved with development. Several people I've talked to about this article have said ".NET is NOT ready for enterprise applications of this scale with those requirements." If that's such a well-known fact, you'd have thought that MS would have thrown a red flag up and pressured to have a different tech used for the project.

Maybe this was just a learning experiment for MS (like the first xbox and first couple zunes) and they could afford to lose such a high-profile customer. But that just proves that no matter how big you are, MS doesn't really care about you. Why make the best when good enough sells better?

It's not Windows vs Linux.

You say it's not Windows' fault and I agree--it wasn't an OS problem (per se), but rather an application issue. In actuality, it's Microsoft's fault; the application was developed in joint by Accenture AND Microsoft. With the requirements not being met that it be a high-performance, real-time application and the fact that they were unable to deliver even with MS being involved made them lose faith in the company and their products (.NET, Windows Server, SQL server).

I'd say that if MS wasn't involved in the development of the app that it's possible that they would scrap the app rather than the OS/framework, but if I was in that position, I'd do the same thing.

It's possible that they also look at the chicago stock exchange and the NYSE and the fact that their apps are running on Linux and have decided to move to a proven, successful system.

Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management [wikipedia.org] tools you can buy

Document management software is great, but when you have enormous numbers of documents (100s of thousands like in the summary), it becomes necessary to have a content management system in place. Something that's intelligent enough to break the documents up into pieces and allow searches, but something more robust than full-text search.

We've been using this software called MarkLogic Server (http://marklogic.com). It's an XML database and has a content processing framework for document ingestion. So, basically, assuming that documents are structured similarly, they can be converted into XML so they can be queried with custom weights being applied to content in different portions of the document. The software has built-in Word support so it'll automatically convert .doc files with proper formatting as well as the ability to add custom handlers for other formats including plaintext.

We're currently managing a couple million documents and generating dynamic documents on the fly for some processes. Since on-the-fly documents may take time to generate, we have a system in place that saves the result in the database which can also be queried at a later date. It's all really cool.

Of course, there's a bit of a learning curve to writing your own software for it since it uses XQuery, but it's not much harder to learn than SQL, and so far, it seems to be far more powerful.

Disclaimer: I'm not a shill nor am I being paid in any way by MarkLogic... I'm just seriously blown away by what their technology has enabled us to do.

I totally understand why they do it... however what upsets me is that they treat new customers (who potentially could be really crappy customers) better than customers that have been with them for years. There's no points for loyalty with AT&T anymore; that seems to have gone out the window around the same time they originally merged with Cingular. I've got stories, but this isn't the place for that.

Luckily I haven't purchased new hardware from AT&T in about 2 years. My first gen iPhone was given to me through work (from the boss when he upgraded to his 3G), so I qualified for reduced pricing.

Use ESXi. Its free.

Since ESXi became free, I've installed it on several servers at work. The problem is that its hardware requirements are pretty specific. It won't install on just any PC. It would be nice if I could install it on some of the older servers we have kicking around (DL-140s) or some decommissioned desktops, but it just doesn't support those pieces of hardware.

The primary reason that Server's disk I/O performance is so horrid is that your VM's disk(s) is being stored as a file on the host OS's filesystem. That causes extra layers of system calls to access files in the guest OS. Between talking to the virtual disk that has to get translated to physical disk, plus the guest OS's filesystem, which appears to the guest as a contiguous physical disk, may become fragmented on the host OS; double fragmentation can occur which causes SERIOUS performance penalties. ESX has a specialized vmfs that it uses to store your images which is designed for VM performance.

Personally, I would recommend Xen over ESX if you don't have the proper hardware and/or don't want to pay licensing fees. Although it's got a higher learning curve, it's easier to automate (especially since ESXi got rid of CLI support) and there are a plethora of free tools and documentation around. Being that ESX isn't free, it's harder to find support in forums other than VMWare's own site.

Also, VMWare Server's performance in general leaves a lot to be desired. I would *never* use it for production systems. I've had it installed on machines with 6x15K SaS drives (this is before ESXi) and 8 cores and it would start to choke after about 4 or 5 VMs. Plus VMWare Server doesn't handle multi-core VMs very well. Incredible performance issues arise and you're better off creating your application to scale out to multiple single-core VMs rather than make them dual-core. Server also doesn't handle memory nearly as well as the Type1 hypervisors that Xen and ESX use.

Up to now, every "cloud" solution has been completely different, meaning that once you invest in getting one to work, you lose much of that investment if try moving to another. ... Open source would change all that.

I've actually been hearing about a couple of startups (I don't have their names handy) that are creating integration software for different virtualization and cloud computing platforms. The example they gave me was how we could tie our VMWare infrastructure (ESX and VMWare Server installs) to future growth using amazon's EC2 all from a single control application. Their software could even allow us to deploy our ESX images to EC2 and vice versa. It seemed really interesting although they don't yet have a working demo from what I understand. They're also planning on supporting Eucalyptus and other cloud-based virtualization services.

About the open source stuff... I think I must be missing something, but what exactly would be the point of open sourcing EC2? What would they opensource? Their client tools all use openly published APIs for communicating with AWS and their imaging tools seem pretty straight forward. I believe the way they work is published, too. What am I missing? What would the advantage be to opensource their backend tools that we never see anyway?

you're right, actually. But you can't name the bookmarks like on the 700; so if you have a bunch of bookmarks, then you can't tell the difference between them... of course it's the same functionality as dog-earing the book.

I dunno. After playing with sony's offering I just didn't have the feeling that I HAD to buy one. The Kindle, I want and I don't know why. It just feels awesome, but until the DX model with bigger screen and PDF support, I couldn't justify the purchase.

I've used both the 505 and the 700, but I was referring to the 700 in the post. I only played with the 505 in the store, but my co-worker bought the 700.

I probably would have bought a 505, but it didn't have the ability to create bookmarks and the interface for clicking links on pages and whatnot was kinda clunky without touch.

The 700 could be much, much better, but the things that are holding it back are teh things that could potentially make it great.

My biggest issue with it is the screen. It's got an insane amount of glare because it's got a touchscreen covering. It's also got LED lighting, but it's not very good. The quality of the touchscreen leaves a lot to be desired, too. The hand gestures to turn the pages only pick up the gesture about half the time. My co-worker bought one and I almost did, too. I'm glad I held back and decided to borrow my co-worker's 700. Playing with it in the store made me want it really bad.

I'm curious what other ebook readers you're looking at. So far, I've used a Foxit eBook reader, Sony PRS-700, kindle, iPhone and various computers.

The Foxit totally sucks. It's got a nice formfactor, but it's slow and difficult to read PDFs without having the text get wrapped and lose all spacing (sometimeswordsgetjumbledtogetherlikethis).

The Sony reader is pretty good except that the glare totally sucks and when reading PDFs, it's only got pre-set zoom levels; no fit-to-width, so the text is constantly either too small or it's the right size, but wraps all over the place.

I was waiting for the PlasticLogic to come out (something like mid 2010, last I heard). It's a good size, so PDFs will render well and it seems fast and very sturdy.

I haven't had a chance to check out any ePub books, yet, but I've heard good things. The only problem is that Amazon has a HUGE selection of eBooks for the kindle and ePub doesn't have that many commercial books; at least, I was only able to find 1 book I wanted in ePub format and 2 or 3 in PDF format.

Considering that books from O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers and other tech publishers are available only in PDF (since the kindle format doesn't support fonts for code snippets), I feel like the new KindleDX is the perfect solution--not only does it allow me to buy the most widely available eBook format but it also allows me to read PDFs on an acceptably large screen.

I tried to hold off, but I HAD to preorder the KindleDX... I'm a little concerned that it's not gonna be as good as I hope, but I think it'll be a good purchase in the longrun. I really hope that amazon/publishers come to their senses and stop with this garbage of disabling TTS or other features.

When I first moved to NYC from New Jersey about 5 years ago, my friends were freaking out about the fact that I was paying about 20% more in rent. Once I did the math, I was able to show that I was saving significantly more money by not having a car between gas, maintenance, tolls, parking, insurance, etc. I get an unlimited metrocard for the same cost that I was spending on gas every month (this is in 2004, so I was spending about $60-70/month).

When I moved back to jerz, I opted to not get a car. I still worked in the city and would walk about a mile to the train station every day and take the train in... the monthly train pass was around $250, and I could avoid getting a metrocard since I could walk to work from the train station. Although the monthly cost of a car would probably be under $250, the up-front cost of the car just didn't make me want to get one.

Now that I'm living in NY again, I just take the subway everywhere. I really wish there was better public transportation outside of major metropolitan areas.

In today's Virtual world, physical access to the machine doesn't mean meatspace access. My company and several of my friend's companies are looking into virtualized desktops by using small desktop boxes and low-end PCs to connect to PCs in the datacenter over either RDP or other proprietary protocols.

With the proliferation of cloud-based applications, it's only a matter of time before someone offers a browser-based virtual desktop in the cloud. Once someone hacks into some server up there, they have physical access to the machines for all intents and purposes.

This is a very interesting threat from a virtual infrastructure security standpoint.

I'd imagine that they're not intentionally blocking google because they're a competitor (although it could be a contributing factor). I would think that they consider Live.com to be more compatible with family filter and google allows access to cached pages which the family filter may not be able to block.

Of course, one way that MS could show good faith would be to open up the family filter's API in some way so as to let it play nice with google and allow google to disable cached pages for users of the filter.