Engadget has a nice review. I was considering selling my Kindle 2 to get a DX -- I'm an academic who reads many multi-column PDFs -- but apparently the DX doesn't do this well :

Another puzzling design choice involves PDF support. For the most part it works well with standard size pages, but there's no zoom, so you're stuck with however the DX decides to display your file -- the only way to get things bigger is to switch to landscape. Since not all PDF pages fit on the screen, that means you often end up with a weird jumble of page breaks and cut-off content -- it's easy to totally lose the structure of a document or slide deck after a while.

It sounds like reading multi-columnar PDFs would be aggravating.If your PDF isn't multicolumnar, it's better suited for reformatting using Amazon's free PDF conversion service -- and these work on the Kindle 2.

They also complain about a hyper-sensitive orientation sensor, and an awkward keyboard.

I tried subversion, and moved to bazaar because it handles renames easily (automv plugin), and it supports pushing a commit to a server (push-and-update plugin). It's also well suited for diffing binary files (as it git).

I am, however, interested in seeing your scripts. I've setup some automated scripts to do this work for me, but I suspect they're not optimal for this. thanks,

This does seem like a very viable option. For those not aware, it's cloud server that you upload from /download to. For
It appears to be a very clean system, but I would be concerned about having open/unencrypted files on an uncontrolled server. Dropbox would be great if you could manage your own server, which doesn't appear to be the case.

thanks for the link.

I never understood the motivation in spending more for the speed of an SSD drive when a bunch of RAID drives can perform at multiples faster than a single drive. Plus you get the added disk space and redundancy built in.

have four magnetic drives running on software RAID 10 -- not the 1+0 variety. I get 3x a single drive's read (200MB/s) and about 1.5-2X write. Plus I have a full backup and 2TB of space. The sw kernel module uses less than 5-10% of one cpu on a quad system

At this time, why not buy many magnetic drives in RAID with the extra $$? Unless you would want to support a burgeoning technology.

you want Excel.

My undergrad labs had stringent safety policies too. We're not talking about educations labs here -- we're talking about research labs. If you drift from your chem 110 lab to the teaching professor's lab, you'll see a big difference. I've seen this consistently in five 'top ten' chemistry schools. I'm an NIH post-doc, and despite the yearly safety training, I see it here too.

There is common sense in lab safety, but there's diligence as well. Not everyone intuitively knows the dangers and hazards of t-butyl lithium. You have to look up the MSDS (which are produced and maintained by the industry, not the government).

"persuade the eBay seller [you] did buy it from to add [you] as an authorized user of his Alienware account."

I'm a kindle 2 owner. I looked at the touch-screen on a Sony device, and I didn't like it. The screen had more glare, and I didn't find it to be a suitable replacement for the keyboard. I suspect this device will have the same shortcomings.

The "article," scant on details, suggests that this device is more "portable." Since it lacks wireless, which makes it infinitely less portable than the kindle, I can only assume that it weighs less. At 10 ounces or so, weight isn't much of an issue, in my mind. That said, I think competition is good. But it would have to include many new, important features to offset the lack of wireless and keyboard. Calendar, notes and contact features are nice, but after having used an e-reader for two months, the slow refresh rate on these would make them a poor replacement for a PDA. I think Samsung has to do better than this to enter the market.

They're already slipping. I try to avoid Elsevier when I publish my articles. Look at this journal, for instance :

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623042/description#description

The fear is the mortality rate. Sure, the "regular" flu kills 35000 a year, but that's a mortality rate of 0.1%. This flu, if it's like the 1918 H1N1, which we already know it is *not*, could be much higher. Even if it's a 1% mortality rate, this is alarmingly high. (Infect 100 million Americans, 1 million die.)

It's interesting that you should bring that up. I went to a talk that studied this curve and the 1918 virus (from exhumed bodies) carefully. The U-curve makes sense because the youngest and oldest are less equiped to fight an infection. The unusual bump -- in the healthiest of people -- coincides with the ages of soldiers. He suggested that this was in part a problem of diagnosis, considering that it was during the end of a World War. i.e. the central numbers might be inflated.

[That would be] ironic... don't you think? (in the Alanis sense)

there's many third variables that need to be studied

It would appear that Karpinski is a heavy facebook user.