I've been a happy Kindle owner for the past 8 months and I am delighted by the overall experience. First of all, I recharged the batter only a few times, say every three weeks, which is awesome and close the battery recharge cycle of a real, paper book.

The most amazing aspect is that you can purchase a book without visiting a library. Plus, you get hundreds of reviews - try to do that in a real library. Overall, Amazon made it very easy to purchase a Kindle book - with one click, you have it on your device. Combine that with low prices, at least compared with paper books in Italy, and you'll find yourself purchasing multiple books in a matter of a few minutes. You must be careful, in a way.

I used to purchase lots of paper books from Play.com, but the very fact that you have to wait a couple of weeks to get them delivered allows Amazon to win hands down. When I purchase a book, I want to start reading it immediately, very much like it happens with books purchased in a library.

The only thing that is not good, in my opinion, is using the store directly from the Kindle. It's very slow and navigation feels sluggish. Much better to use the full store website on your PC and then sync your Kindle.

Regarding Kindle's hardware, I have 3rd gen device. The e-ink screen is very good, although it's not as white as real paper. At any rate, reading feels very comfortable in all light conditions. I think that Kindles are going to be replaced by tablets over time, even without e-ink screens and much lower battery duration. Justifying the purchasing price of a dedicated device is going to be much more difficult and they'll turn into a niche that will be killed, especially if you consider that Amazon is rumored to be planning to sell an Android tablet very soon.

I used to believe that paper books were better than ebooks, but that's not true. It makes no difference to me. Quite the opposite perhaps. With big thanks from our friends the trees.

This post by Scott Hanselman got me thinking a bit more about JavaScript.
The problem with JavaScript is not what kind of features it has or what it allows to do, but rather the lack of real competition. It's a de-facto standard and monopoly.

This is both good and bad.

It's good because you can just learn one language, and you're done. Add one or two frameworks, and your life is not exactly easy, but decent at least.

It's bad because innovation comes from competition. And no, Flash and Silverlight are not competitors at all. They don't allow to script the DOM without first loading large external dependencies, they're not open (in the broader meaning of the term) and they're doomed. They're doomed because there's JavaScript.

So what?

I don't know. I just take JavaScript for what it is. I don't like it very much, mostly because it's weakly typed. No, that's not true (I've grown used to that). I don't like it very much because there is no decent IDE for JavaScript. No, that's not true either. I don't like it very much because Visual Studio is not that good with JavaScript, although I suspect that no IDE is really good with JavaScript. Sure, I could use another editor, but the cost of continuously switching between two editors would be very high, so that's not really an option. I just want the same coding experience I have with C#, but with JavaScript (and dynamically-loaded JSON).

In the end, JavaScript is the future. It's likely that more high-level features will be integrated in the language, but that will happen so slowly that we'll have to rely on frameworks for a long time anyway. So you might ask, why bother adding new features in the first place? The language itself is good (or bad?) enough already, what is making a difference is the availability of frameworks. Good point.

Just got a BizSpark newsletter. There was a section about the new Windows 8 release.

I perfectly understand that an official logo for Windows 8 does not exist yet, but at least they should have used Windows 7's logo, not XP's. The funny part is that the logo they used cannot even be found on their official PressPass website.

Photo by Adam Mulligan.

In the last few days, the same number tried to fax us some ad material. I said tried because those idiots used our phone number. We don't even have a fax number BTW.

I identified the company behind the source number (a simple Google search was enough) and sent them a vitriolic email, just to have some fun on them. They're not into IT obviously.

I wonder how small businesses can still base their spam campaign on faxes. Isn't spam supposed to be an unwanted email message? Is this some kind of backporting of spam to older technologies?

Update: the morons tried to send the fax two more times overnight. Idiots².