Amazon can "Kindle" the Future of Reading: NewsWeek

A great weekend read from NewsWeek for people who are both book-lovers and Web 2.0 enthusiasts. This story talks about kindle, a new electronic appliance (& service) from Amazon, which is to reading as I-Pod is to music. Buying books for Kindle would be as easy as buying new songs from Itunes. So, Kindle is everything a normal book is (its shape, texture and size are that of a paperback) plus also the following additional features:

* A book that holds several hundreds of books in it
* A book that is connected in real-time to other books and the web. Making a book connected enables real-time updates/changes.



I'm going to grab a gadget as soon as I can afford it. My only worry is the Digital Rights Management around the service (which in case of music industry has led it to destruction instead of flourishing it).

Ranting after some break

I haven't touched this blog for months together. For one, I was travelling like crazy or busy with work or busy with chores. Now, in another country, but not yet settled, thought I would just rant something.

I want to write about the previous and current travel experiences, but it will take some time to consolidate, so let me talk about Ubuntu (my favourite OS) again.

I was running Ubuntu 6.06 without any issues, but one fine day I did stop the OS forcefully when I think it was doing something serious, then that's it, the kernel went panic.

Then I decided to try Kubuntu 7.10. While KDE is highly configurable, after sometime I decided that I should also have a GNOME. So I installed GNOME on top of Kubuntu. Then read about Xubuntu, also wanted to try it, so installed Xfce on the top of Kubuntu. So, now I had one OS with 3 desktop environments, bloating each other.

I found myself almost always booting to GNOME. It also turned out that GNOME and KDE were not that interoperable, with my favourite K programs (for eg., Korganizer & Konqueror) often hanging in GNOME. After some time, I ran out of space, so I uninstalled xfce.

One fine morning, all of my K programs stopped working under GNOME. And GNOME was an irresistible environment for me (I am aware of fiery KDE Vs. GNOME war and that KDE almost always wins).

So I had no choice but to uninstall KDE Desktop altogether. So, it was a kind of reverse migration (Start with a full blown Kubuntu desktop and end up in a Ubuntu desktop).


But till today I didn't regret my decision. I'm able to run the latest version of Lotus Notes on Ubuntu and new Lotus Symphony Editor from IBM. I'm able to access my encrypted Wi-Fi from Ubuntu currently sitting in my bedroom.


So the conclusion, Ubuntu Rocks!