Alternatively, you can use the avr-gcc toolchain, which is completely free. It even includes a program capable of talking to JTAG/ICE debugging devices, so you can debug with gdb.
I'm a youngin' myself, so I wasn't around for these "good ol' days." However, I recently got hooked on AVR microcontrollers via Arduino, and I'm loving it. Being able to have total control and understanding of the hardware, to hold the entire execution context in ones head, is exhilarating. My laptop is more or less a black box that I stick my code into, but with these AVR chips I understand exactly what's going on with each and every instruction, and there's simply nothing that I can't do.
Right now I'm working on a threads system for the ATMega family of microcontrollers. It's tons of fun, and I'm learning a lot, not only about the hardware and assembly programming, but also about how my "real computer" and "real languages" work (for example, what exactly is going on when function calls happen).
I can't recommend these things strongly enough. I think that it's an essential experience for any programmer, and if you've just started programming in the past five years or so, chances are you haven't dealt with anything like it. Even if you have, you can still do tons of nifty stuff with these things, and they're only $30 for a ready-to-program, USB package.
I'm interested in the Nook because it's very hackable (since it runs Android OS), so I was wondering whether there was any built-in reflow feature of the PDF reader that could intelligently deal with two-column layout. The PRS-600 does look nice, but I'm not as interested in it.
Oh, and by the way, since you solicit corrections in your signature, verbs are never conjugated with apostrophes. Apostrophes are meant to show missing letters in contractions. For example, I should have used "it's" when I asked
Could you try putting something like this paper on your Nook and seeing if its readable? Perhaps post a few pics?
and you should have used "gets" when you said
Unzoomed it's readable after I cropped it tightly, but of course the font get's very small.
You correctly used "it's" earlier in the sentence, where the apostrophe is used to denote that "it's" is a contraction of "it is".
Your English is already pretty good, but good luck continuing to improve it! It's basically a third grader's arts and crafts project of a language–I'm very thankful that it's my native tongue, since learning it has to be very difficult.
I'm interested in getting a Nook, but I haven't been able to find any rundowns of its PDF display capabilities. I'd be looking at reading a lot of CS papers, which are typically two-column with graphics. Could you try putting something like this paper on your Nook and seeing if its readable? Perhaps post a few pics?
You're being intentionally obtuse. It's BSD Unix, of course it has a filesystem. However, it is invisible to the average user. That's the important bit.
I, Google Maps and do a link and, please, I do not think it is successful. Aruuebu, all Web search experts, to discuss the background of existing knowledge. In addition, various efforts and vision, dedication, today (U.S. time askjeeves, wolphramalpha etc.) lead. But this has obviously reached the foreseeable future. However, the search is very useful.
Similarly, from the perspective of our toilet, I can eat, and to translate the conversation reaches the end of a universal translator, the parties, to purchase a backup location to buy me a house helpful must. If there is a need for war and peace, I am one of only two of 11111111 / 100 of the Treaty in all bilingual machine, I can do anything in order to understand them very is convenient to convert to respect the delicate negotiations, if the authorities.
(To find the "equilibrium", it translates the paragraph into Japanese, then translates that result back to English, and so on, until output n = output n+2).
No filesystem, locked down OS, sandboxed apps = impossible for the average user to screw up.
The touch UI is stupid simple. My Mom still struggles with computers since she has trouble remembering UI conventions. I don't see that being a big problem with this device.
People need to stop comparing this to netbooks & other computers. It's a web appliance for people who don't want computers.
Apple has chosen to deliberately not support Ogg Theora, even though it would be trivially easy for them to do so. It has taken this position, I believe, because it knows that Firefox can't implement H.264. I honestly think they want to kill off Firefox so that there's more marketshare for Safari.
Apple really doesn't care about Firefox. The reason they want to H.264 to win out is because all of their embedded products (iPod Touch, iPhone, and soon iPad) have hardware specifically for H.264 decoding. This allows them to decode H.264 with little impact on either battery life or the CPU. If Ogg Theora were the standard, they'd have to switch to doing video decoding in software, which would eat up the CPU and kill battery, if it were indeed practical.
Apple isn't every geek's favorite company for a reason, but they're not supporting H.264 out of malicious intent towards Firefox.
You can override this manually, but why would anyone do that for other purposes than debugging...?
Because their user-agent sniffing doesn't work well for more obscure browsers. I'm using Camino, a lightweight gecko-based browser for OS X, and the demo page defaults to Flash, when it actually runs better with the native SVG option.
So, if you can't be bothered to RTFA, the AP obviously has no idea what they're talking about. Some snake oil salesman came along and told them that Microformats are magic digital beans that will protect their content with some sort of "tracking beacon" that will phone home and prevent infringement.
This is so cluelessly ridiculous that I can't decide if it's hilarious or just sad.
Why not? Just set up a SOCKS proxy via ssh to your home box, and configure firefox & thunderbird to use it for all traffic. Now you've got a secure connection anywhere.
Why would they use an external visualization library? Since the sound is encoded in executable (using a format similar to MIDI), it would be trivial to sync the contrails with those notes in code. Furthermore, there's no way that WMP is good enough to pick out individual notes from a raw audio feed like that. There are a lot of smart people working on audio rhythm/beat analysis, and nobody's produced anything nearly that good. Hell, nothing's that good even when the audio file is available, so the analysis doesn't have to be done in real time and can take multiple passes.
The contrails appear to be a simple shader effect. There's no need to use texture maps for something like that.
The UI gestures on this thing are terrible. They're not at all obvious. I don't imaging anyone will be able to figure out how to bring up, say, text entry without being told. It's also unclear how some of the gestures (such as the upward swipe) are distinguished from scrolling.
Just stick an address bar and a few buttons in there, it'll make all of your user's lives easier. There's definitely room. Sacrificing usability for a "full-screen-web" aesthetic isn't a good idea.
And that's where Ahmadinejad got his 60% of the vote. It might be interesting to enable the 'intellectual elite' of Iran living in the big cities to make their displeasure known to the rest of the world. But as long as they have a semblance of a democratic system, their fundies are going to run the place.
Wrong. This is a popular misconception that has been trotted out by the talking heads that the US news networks have gotten to play devil's advocate on this topic. Most of the rural poor in Iran are ethnic minorities, and have a tendency to vote overwhelmingly for the candidate which shares their ethnicity. This is why Iranian elections often result in runoff elections, as the three or four candidates which get all of the various ethnic minority votes push the two frontliners below 50%.
You would tell these protestors, many of whom were not alive during the revolution of '79, that they do not deserve to have their voiced heard because of choices their parents made?
Actually, I'd say that this would negatively affect e-book sales. The secondhand book market offsets the cost of new books. I'm more likely to buy a $25 new book if I know that I can sell it for $10 later.
First, it's important to clarify that as far as I'm aware, we're not in the business of compromising networks or gaining access to other governments' systems without just cause. When there is a clear threat to national security, we then employ legal and just means to deal with that threat. Also, I'm not able to discuss specific methods that the Army might or might not be employing but only speak in terms of concepts and capabilities that we should have in order to be successful conducting operations in cyberspace. If you have insights and skills that might broaden our capabilities in this arena, I encourage you to consider joining the emerging DoD cyber-workforce.
"Oh, absolutely not. But then again, I can't really say either way. On a completely unrelated note, if you are a l33t haxor, call us!"
Looking only at bound books, and ignoring manuscripts, newspapers, microfilm, et cetera, the Library of Congress contains 32 million volumes. According to Google Answers, the average tome weighs 12 ounces. Through simple multiplication, we find that all the book in the Library of Congress weigh approximately 24 million lbs. So, the cited 15,600 lb weight of a male African elephant works out to roughly 0.00065 Libraries of Congress, or 0.065%.
This is probably on the high side, since the figure for the average weight of a book was taken from an online bookseller's repository. They have a fair number of modern paperbacks, which are quite light, while the Library of Congress contains mostly hardcover tomes, which are heavier.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, you can use the avr-gcc toolchain, which is completely free. It even includes a program capable of talking to JTAG/ICE debugging devices, so you can debug with gdb.
I'm a youngin' myself, so I wasn't around for these "good ol' days." However, I recently got hooked on AVR microcontrollers via Arduino, and I'm loving it. Being able to have total control and understanding of the hardware, to hold the entire execution context in ones head, is exhilarating. My laptop is more or less a black box that I stick my code into, but with these AVR chips I understand exactly what's going on with each and every instruction, and there's simply nothing that I can't do.
Right now I'm working on a threads system for the ATMega family of microcontrollers. It's tons of fun, and I'm learning a lot, not only about the hardware and assembly programming, but also about how my "real computer" and "real languages" work (for example, what exactly is going on when function calls happen).
I can't recommend these things strongly enough. I think that it's an essential experience for any programmer, and if you've just started programming in the past five years or so, chances are you haven't dealt with anything like it. Even if you have, you can still do tons of nifty stuff with these things, and they're only $30 for a ready-to-program, USB package.
It's a much smaller jump to the iPhone/iPad from Mac than from PC.
I'm interested in the Nook because it's very hackable (since it runs Android OS), so I was wondering whether there was any built-in reflow feature of the PDF reader that could intelligently deal with two-column layout. The PRS-600 does look nice, but I'm not as interested in it.
Oh, and by the way, since you solicit corrections in your signature, verbs are never conjugated with apostrophes. Apostrophes are meant to show missing letters in contractions. For example, I should have used "it's" when I asked
and you should have used "gets" when you said
You correctly used "it's" earlier in the sentence, where the apostrophe is used to denote that "it's" is a contraction of "it is".
Your English is already pretty good, but good luck continuing to improve it! It's basically a third grader's arts and crafts project of a language–I'm very thankful that it's my native tongue, since learning it has to be very difficult.
I'm interested in getting a Nook, but I haven't been able to find any rundowns of its PDF display capabilities. I'd be looking at reading a lot of CS papers, which are typically two-column with graphics. Could you try putting something like this paper on your Nook and seeing if its readable? Perhaps post a few pics?
You're being intentionally obtuse. It's BSD Unix, of course it has a filesystem. However, it is invisible to the average user. That's the important bit.
The translation party equilibrium:
I, Google Maps and do a link and, please, I do not think it is successful. Aruuebu, all Web search experts, to discuss the background of existing knowledge. In addition, various efforts and vision, dedication, today (U.S. time askjeeves, wolphramalpha etc.) lead. But this has obviously reached the foreseeable future. However, the search is very useful.
Similarly, from the perspective of our toilet, I can eat, and to translate the conversation reaches the end of a universal translator, the parties, to purchase a backup location to buy me a house helpful must. If there is a need for war and peace, I am one of only two of 11111111 / 100 of the Treaty in all bilingual machine, I can do anything in order to understand them very is convenient to convert to respect the delicate negotiations, if the authorities.
(To find the "equilibrium", it translates the paragraph into Japanese, then translates that result back to English, and so on, until output n = output n+2).
It's not for you. It's for your Mom.
No filesystem, locked down OS, sandboxed apps = impossible for the average user to screw up.
The touch UI is stupid simple. My Mom still struggles with computers since she has trouble remembering UI conventions. I don't see that being a big problem with this device.
People need to stop comparing this to netbooks & other computers. It's a web appliance for people who don't want computers.
Apple has chosen to deliberately not support Ogg Theora, even though it would be trivially easy for them to do so. It has taken this position, I believe, because it knows that Firefox can't implement H.264. I honestly think they want to kill off Firefox so that there's more marketshare for Safari.
Apple really doesn't care about Firefox. The reason they want to H.264 to win out is because all of their embedded products (iPod Touch, iPhone, and soon iPad) have hardware specifically for H.264 decoding. This allows them to decode H.264 with little impact on either battery life or the CPU. If Ogg Theora were the standard, they'd have to switch to doing video decoding in software, which would eat up the CPU and kill battery, if it were indeed practical.
Apple isn't every geek's favorite company for a reason, but they're not supporting H.264 out of malicious intent towards Firefox.
You can override this manually, but why would anyone do that for other purposes than debugging...?
Because their user-agent sniffing doesn't work well for more obscure browsers. I'm using Camino, a lightweight gecko-based browser for OS X, and the demo page defaults to Flash, when it actually runs better with the native SVG option.
That's now how you would pull off this attack. It would go something like this
"Hey, I think my keyboard's acting up. Could I borrow yours for a sec?"
"Sure."
So, if you can't be bothered to RTFA, the AP obviously has no idea what they're talking about. Some snake oil salesman came along and told them that Microformats are magic digital beans that will protect their content with some sort of "tracking beacon" that will phone home and prevent infringement.
This is so cluelessly ridiculous that I can't decide if it's hilarious or just sad.
Why not? Just set up a SOCKS proxy via ssh to your home box, and configure firefox & thunderbird to use it for all traffic. Now you've got a secure connection anywhere.
According to Jon Gruber, who has reliable sources inside Apple, AT&T pulled their weight to make this happen.
Please, YouTube does not even begin to do this gorgeous trailer justice. The only way to watch this is in 1080p.
*salivates*
Why would they use an external visualization library? Since the sound is encoded in executable (using a format similar to MIDI), it would be trivial to sync the contrails with those notes in code. Furthermore, there's no way that WMP is good enough to pick out individual notes from a raw audio feed like that. There are a lot of smart people working on audio rhythm/beat analysis, and nobody's produced anything nearly that good. Hell, nothing's that good even when the audio file is available, so the analysis doesn't have to be done in real time and can take multiple passes.
The contrails appear to be a simple shader effect. There's no need to use texture maps for something like that.
The opt-out page is apparently slashdotted. Convenient....
It's a bad sign when the guy demonstrating the thing has trouble bringing up the keyboard!
The UI gestures on this thing are terrible. They're not at all obvious. I don't imaging anyone will be able to figure out how to bring up, say, text entry without being told. It's also unclear how some of the gestures (such as the upward swipe) are distinguished from scrolling. Just stick an address bar and a few buttons in there, it'll make all of your user's lives easier. There's definitely room. Sacrificing usability for a "full-screen-web" aesthetic isn't a good idea.
And that's where Ahmadinejad got his 60% of the vote. It might be interesting to enable the 'intellectual elite' of Iran living in the big cities to make their displeasure known to the rest of the world. But as long as they have a semblance of a democratic system, their fundies are going to run the place.
Wrong. This is a popular misconception that has been trotted out by the talking heads that the US news networks have gotten to play devil's advocate on this topic. Most of the rural poor in Iran are ethnic minorities, and have a tendency to vote overwhelmingly for the candidate which shares their ethnicity. This is why Iranian elections often result in runoff elections, as the three or four candidates which get all of the various ethnic minority votes push the two frontliners below 50%.
You would tell these protestors, many of whom were not alive during the revolution of '79, that they do not deserve to have their voiced heard because of choices their parents made?
Actually, I'd say that this would negatively affect e-book sales. The secondhand book market offsets the cost of new books. I'm more likely to buy a $25 new book if I know that I can sell it for $10 later.
Keming n. 1. The result of improper kerning.
First, it's important to clarify that as far as I'm aware, we're not in the business of compromising networks or gaining access to other governments' systems without just cause. When there is a clear threat to national security, we then employ legal and just means to deal with that threat. Also, I'm not able to discuss specific methods that the Army might or might not be employing but only speak in terms of concepts and capabilities that we should have in order to be successful conducting operations in cyberspace. If you have insights and skills that might broaden our capabilities in this arena, I encourage you to consider joining the emerging DoD cyber-workforce.
"Oh, absolutely not. But then again, I can't really say either way. On a completely unrelated note, if you are a l33t haxor, call us!"
Looking only at bound books, and ignoring manuscripts, newspapers, microfilm, et cetera, the Library of Congress contains 32 million volumes. According to Google Answers, the average tome weighs 12 ounces. Through simple multiplication, we find that all the book in the Library of Congress weigh approximately 24 million lbs. So, the cited 15,600 lb weight of a male African elephant works out to roughly 0.00065 Libraries of Congress, or 0.065%.
This is probably on the high side, since the figure for the average weight of a book was taken from an online bookseller's repository. They have a fair number of modern paperbacks, which are quite light, while the Library of Congress contains mostly hardcover tomes, which are heavier.