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Digitizing Your Dead Trees?
smart2000 asks: "I'm tired of lugging around dead trees. I've just moved offices and had to move over 100 pounds of 'essential' technical books. It is clear to me that the dead tree industry is never going to supply the books I want in electronic form, so it's time to do it myself. What hardware and software should I use?"
"The Plan: Take the binding of each book and cut it off. Feed into a scanner with duplex and cut-sheet feeder. Scan as a 300 DPI jpeg with compression. Then OCR them overnight. I don't expect the OCR to be perfect, just good enough to use as a searchable index.
What are the suitable scanner choices for Linux? Any recommendations for OCR software that will write in an open format? Has anyone done this before?"
He may be able to do so-- obviously you can't.
Dumb Ass
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Seen on comp.risks, please tell the guy what an idiot he is. Or if you happen to live nearby, you may try to give him a third meaning of killall, hehe...:
./configure script fails to
Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 14:52:30 -0500
From: dmaziuk@yola.bmrb.wisc.edu (Dimitri Maziuk)
Subject: GNU in Not Unix (Re: Markettos, RISKS-22.05)
Well, that particular risk is well known to professional Unix systems
administrators -- in fact, I was rather surprised to see that Linux
"killall" made the RISKS now: it's been [in]famous among Unix sysadmins for
quite a while now.
I see two issues here: one is that of false advertising, and another one --
of professionalism (not that they are entirely unrelated).
Stallman's rants about "LiGNUx" have a perfectly good technical reason
behind them: "Linux" (as in "OS based on Linux kernel and free software")
has lots of GNU software in it, and "GNU is Not Unix". Hence, Linux is
Not Unix, regardless of what Linux advocates may be telling us, it is
"GNU". (And, BTW, Unix is Not GNU.)
That was about false advertising, now let's look at professionalism.
Linux killall is perfect illustration of what happens when a product is
designed by a diletante.
Back in 1975 professionals designed an OS called Unix. Being professionals,
they realised the need for certain design principles. Such as splitting a
task into a number of smaller subtasks and designing a separate tool to
handle each subtask (that does one thing, and does it well)[0].
For example, shutting down a computer involves flushing (synchronizing) file
buffers to disk ("sync"), killing all running processes ("killall"), and
powering off the machine ("poweroff", at least on Solaris). All perfectly
neat and logical.
Along comes a layman who is unaware of the above principle, nor of
the significant "prior art"[1]. Result? -- read Theo's message.
(Various observations to show that isn't such a big problem (in
no particular order):
* professionals already know that similarly-named utilities often
behave differently on different operating systems,
* GNU folks never intended to uphold the aforementioned design
principle in the first place (see EMACS), so no surprises there,
after all, you'll only run "killall" on a Unix once.)
We have a bigger problem with another Unix principle: source code
portability.
As software becomes more complex, it requires more sophisticated build
tools. More and more open source software is being developed using GNU
compilers and build tools, and it is becoming dependant on them. The result?
-- While portability at the level of each compilation unit is still
maintained, the whole thing is not portable anymore. It fails to build on
non-GNU systems[2].
GNU project in particular did a great service to software community by
promoting and popularizing free software. It also did a great disservice by
turning the whole thing into a political issue, and pretty much ignoring the
need for competence and expertise on the part of software developers.
Instead of sound software engineering, we now have "Free Speech"
flag-waving[3].
With more companies (individuals, governments) jumping on Linux bandwagon,
the situation becomes eerily reminiscent of the recent dot-com boom; back
then we had The Internet and e-words, now we have Open Source and
Linux. Back then a few cautionary voices drowned in marketing hype, now
they're likely to be branded Paid Advocates of Evil Entertainment Industry
and Oppressors of Free Speech[tm] -- so they shut up and go learn Plan9, or
something.
(BTW, if it sounds like I'm singling GNU out, I'm not. Microsoft
et al., did at least as much as GNU to get us where we are now.
The whole thing would be very different if there was e.g. a
liability clause in every software license.)
But the $15 question remains: would you board an airplane designed by, say,
2nd year biology student as a night-time hobby? So what makes you think
their software design skills are any better?
Hmm. This came out sounding like a rant. Well, it probably is.
Dima
[0] Various aspects of the problems related to complex software systems are
very familiar to RISKS readers. They come up in, what? -- every other RISKS
issue? 25+ years ago Unix authors were well aware of them, too.
[1] Irix and Solaris "killall", for examle, behave like HP-UX one -- not
surprising, considering the "grand scheme of things" outlined above.
[2] Anyone who ever tried building open source software on Solaris using
native build tools knows that 9 times out 10 GNU "libtool" fails to link
shared libraries. The remaining 1 time GNU
determine compiler flags to make position-independent code (needed for said
libraries). And since GNU compiler and build tools are unable to produce
64-bit code on Solaris, the libraries, and all software that uses them must
be built as 32-bit binaries. Now, why did I pay for that 64-bit hardware,
again?
[3] And instead of one Shakespeare, we have a zillion monkeys with C
compilers. As history of Usenet shows, we shouldn't expect them to come up
with even "Hello World" anytime soon, not to mention "Hamlet".
fuck arbor day too.
When are you jerkoffs going to realize that trees are evil and serve no purpose except to inseminate hobbits.
Yeah, it really sucks having to pay for convenience, doesn't it? Everything should be free (beer) and handy and no company should ever prevent you from misusing a service they offer just because they have a right to.
Personally, I subscribe to Safari, and I think it's great. I recognize that the 5 (maybe when you subscribed it was only 3, but now the bottom subscription level is 5) book limit and the "you can only change books once a month" provision and the anti-spidering technology was all to protect O'Reilly's considerable investment in their books and yet still allow me the convenience of reading and searching a selection of their books online.
But yeah, it really sucks when a company tries hard to both cater to internet geeks *and* protect their investments. They should just post all their books online for free and allow me to write everything to my hard drive so I don't have to pay anymore.
-- Dave
Making fun of dumb people since 2009