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Some people complain because we ended up in a future without flying cars. You can keep your flying cars, which would be more dangerous than ground cars, and probably noisier, too. I like the future we ended up with.
My latest Android tablet weighs less than 18 ounces including the leather case and stylus. With the case closed it is 8.25 by 5.5 inches and less than 1/2 inch thick. It has 16 Gigs of native storage and a 64 Gig SD chip. Neither storage area is close to being filled.
The first hard drive I ever bought cost more than the tablet, and had 20 Megabytes of storage. In constannt dollars, the drive cost more than the tablet, case, SD chip and set of cables and accessories I bought to support the tablet.
I took advantage of some fast hotel wireless to pull my Nook books out of the cloud and into local storage, and between those and various side-loaded epubs and some PDFs and Kindle books, I have more than a thousand books literally at my fingertips in the tablet, which only weighs as much as a pound because I put it in a leather case/reading stand. And the vast majority of the thousand books are novels, not working texts, since I mainly use the Web for working references
In Ada Palmer's excellent talk on the Benedictine monastery of San Marco in Florence (http://www.lumenchristi.org/san-marco/ ) she mentions at one point that when the University of Paris was founded, back before the printing press, it had a huge library (for its time) of 400 books.
I have been traveling a lot on business in the past few months and will be traveling again beginning next week, so I am taking advantage of this interim week to finally rip most of my CD collection. I can carry my music with me in the same pound of tablet and have it with me in the hotel rooms in the evenings. I'm not doing the orchectral classical music or the holiday stuff -- I'll leave those for a later round. I've ripped about 2800 tracks as I write this, and I expect to reach 3000 before I finish this phase of ripping. Adding the classical and holiday tracks will put the count closer to 4000 than 3000, when I get around to ripping them. (With most of phase one of the ripping complete, I'm using less than 9 Gigs for the Music, so the SD chip is less than 1/4 full).
It will be nice to have a choiceof music in the evenings, though I will admit I have encountered a few mysteries. Thee song titles on the one Cranberries disc are generic enough that I can't remember which one or ones led me to buy the disc. And Portishead is even less familiar than that. I'm going to have some exploring to do.
And I dropped a group of discs that included the first Afro Celt Sound System disc before they fell and not when I picked them back up. One problem with discs that use "clever" packages instead of jewel cases is that they hide easily and are hard to scan for. If it had to get lost in the Twilight Zone, I wish it had waited until after I ripped the tracks. Gives me incentive to tidy that storage room, I suppose.
My latest Android tablet weighs less than 18 ounces including the leather case and stylus. With the case closed it is 8.25 by 5.5 inches and less than 1/2 inch thick. It has 16 Gigs of native storage and a 64 Gig SD chip. Neither storage area is close to being filled.
The first hard drive I ever bought cost more than the tablet, and had 20 Megabytes of storage. In constannt dollars, the drive cost more than the tablet, case, SD chip and set of cables and accessories I bought to support the tablet.
I took advantage of some fast hotel wireless to pull my Nook books out of the cloud and into local storage, and between those and various side-loaded epubs and some PDFs and Kindle books, I have more than a thousand books literally at my fingertips in the tablet, which only weighs as much as a pound because I put it in a leather case/reading stand. And the vast majority of the thousand books are novels, not working texts, since I mainly use the Web for working references
In Ada Palmer's excellent talk on the Benedictine monastery of San Marco in Florence (http://www.lumenchristi.org/san-marco/ ) she mentions at one point that when the University of Paris was founded, back before the printing press, it had a huge library (for its time) of 400 books.
I have been traveling a lot on business in the past few months and will be traveling again beginning next week, so I am taking advantage of this interim week to finally rip most of my CD collection. I can carry my music with me in the same pound of tablet and have it with me in the hotel rooms in the evenings. I'm not doing the orchectral classical music or the holiday stuff -- I'll leave those for a later round. I've ripped about 2800 tracks as I write this, and I expect to reach 3000 before I finish this phase of ripping. Adding the classical and holiday tracks will put the count closer to 4000 than 3000, when I get around to ripping them. (With most of phase one of the ripping complete, I'm using less than 9 Gigs for the Music, so the SD chip is less than 1/4 full).
It will be nice to have a choiceof music in the evenings, though I will admit I have encountered a few mysteries. Thee song titles on the one Cranberries disc are generic enough that I can't remember which one or ones led me to buy the disc. And Portishead is even less familiar than that. I'm going to have some exploring to do.
And I dropped a group of discs that included the first Afro Celt Sound System disc before they fell and not when I picked them back up. One problem with discs that use "clever" packages instead of jewel cases is that they hide easily and are hard to scan for. If it had to get lost in the Twilight Zone, I wish it had waited until after I ripped the tracks. Gives me incentive to tidy that storage room, I suppose.
