... what sort of data you're expecting on the forms.
If it's handwritten, just forget it. You'll have enough problems getting people able to read it, much less computers. The postal service does do some of this, but they have a secret: they know all the valid addresses and can do cross-referencing between different parts if they really have to.
If it's typed you might be able to OCR it, but don't count on it being truly reliable and plan on saving the image as well - you're going to have to be able to go back to it.
If it's filled and printed you might be able to put something together, but if you have that why not have them send the data electronically instead?
If it's fill and print but you can't communicate it electronically, see if you can generate barcodes. If this is the case, I assume it's generated by an application instead of an HTML form, since an HTML form could be communicated back to the server.
The main situation I know of where OCRing worked well was for an imaging system - the company wanted to store images of all the work order pages for each customer (to include signatures & handwritten notes), tied back to the database. Since the initial work orders were printed, all that needed to be OCRed was the work order number, which both included check digits and needed to match against a known work order already in the database. Even then, there were provisions for dealing with the ones that weren't recognized. Barcodes weren't used because the imaging system was separate from the creation system, which didn't have the capability to generate them.
USB = plenty of bandwidth for compressed data
on
Mac PVR Coming Soon
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· Score: 3, Informative
As someone else has also pointed out, running uncompressed video over USB is a problem, but if you have a box that's doing hardware compression and just sending the compressed file over USB for storage then you shouldn't have any problems.
The review mentions that the standard (only?) compression results in about 650MB of data for each hour of recording. Basing an estimate of USB bulk data transfer capacity on the fact that you can get 4x USB CDR drives, this thing is only using approximately 1/4 of the capacity of a USB connection.
There's some history of all this on Budweiser Budvar's page on the trademark dispute. Basically, it looks like it's not completely clear on either side - kind of like if someone had started making "Deutsche Bier" in the US, then started exporting to Germany.
Hm. It's probably written much that way in the actual law.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when Roman Catholics are no longer the dominant religion in Italy. Apparently the birth rate among native Italians has dropped (how are those Catholics managing it?), but the Muslim population has been continuing to grow.
Encryption in printers is available
on
Secure Printing?
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· Score: 2
The company I work for resells two different kinds, primarily with a print package of our own that's used among other things for quite a bit of financial and medical printing. One brand is based on Lexmark printers and one based on HPs; the companies that manufacture them basically do their own custom firmware that's added in with the original firmware. Jobs are either produced encrypted by software packages that are able to do it or are encrypted by the driver (the only ones I know of are on Windows, sorry), then sent to the printer.
Some things to keep in mind:
Expect to pay a fairly significant premium for encryption, I'm not sure how much.
Expect to pay more of a premium, because almost all of the secure printers will also support MICR and you'll be paying for that capability even if you use regular toner.
Expect to track the passwords unless you're using the same one on all systems and never changing it.
Realize that whatever package your payroll people use is probably set up for either local printers or this kind of encryption.
Talk to your bank about setting up a second checking account that you'll use for online items (including PayPal). You don't even need to get actual checks - just get from them the number that will go in the MICR line at the bottom of the checks. As noted above, be sure they don't turn on overdraft protection.
If your bank wants to charge you for an account, get another bank.
If you feel a need to screw your coworkers like this if you quit/get fired/whatever, you're at the wrong company. Quit now before you do something stupid and vindictive that's likely to mess up your life, because if you feel like that now even if things improve you'll never really be happy there.
If you can't grasp that, grasp that most companies that inspire this sort of feeling are the large impersonal ones that are likely to survive, and that eventually they may figure out what you did at which point you're screwed for the rest of your life and they're minorly inconvenienced. Not worth it.
Though their website is sappier than I would've believed possible, "Loving Pup" has a service along these lines for folks in the US. They aren't looking for notifications, they get the death notifications (by SSN) from the US government; when your SSN is listed they send the email messages that you'd set up in advance. Of course, they also charge an annual fee ranging from $12-24.
If nothing else, it's certainly safer in terms of vacations.
Is the Usenet group where such things are generally discussed. There are a few folks on my ISP who've tried several and settled on Giganews. Expect to pay whereever you go.
If you just want text, there are at least two free services out there, at least one of which may allow posting (or you could use your Giganews account for that). Free services are discussed in alt.free.newsservers.
I doubt that they're getting the software for free - Walmart.com probably has some sort of agreement with Mandrake to provide one or two support calls for these systems, which is one of the things you get with the boxed sets as well.
Car/Plane adapters and deep-cycle batteries
on
24/7 Notebook Power?
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· Score: 5, Informative
For a lot of notebooks you can now get DC adapters that let you use them with external power in a car or in business class on many of the US airlines. These are DC-DC converters, which avoids the problem of power loss in an inverter.
For deep-cycle batteries, you should be able to find fairly small ones, but do the math to figure out how much capacity you need to be able to run for multiple days.
Someone else mentioned using CE devices or something similar - that's actually a very good plan depending on what use these will be seeing.
Keep in mind as well that you're entering a world of regulatory hell if these things are going to be anywhere near patients. If it's close to a patient, it's not a computer - it's a piece of medical equipment no matter how much you might think it looks like a computer. You can debate that, but be sure you talk to your legal folks first because you'll lose your shorts when someone dies while there was non-certified medical equipment around.
Side note: I've talked to folks who charge $6-800 for a replacement 2GB hard drive, and can do it because that particular piece of medical equipment is certified only with that no-longer-available-new component and they prepurchased them knowing they'd need them as replacement components. The medical equipment world is a whole different place.
On the OS side: how much does XP Professional (or W2K Professional) cost schools per workstation? You weren't thinking of running a public lab for students on ME or XP Home were you?
For software, if you're running an MS OS, I can almost guarantee that you're not putting StarOffice or OpenOffice on it. For that matter, the school probably has to negotiate all the software at the same time, and if they negotiate for the OS but not for Office do you think MS would drop as far on the price? (By the way, that would've been one potential benefit of splitting MS into OS and Applications groups.)
For the hardware, consider this $498 OS-less computer from WalMart. For that matter, why go with a 1.6GHz P4 when a 1GHz Celeron or Duron is available for $100 less and will still more than meet your needs for student workstations? No monitor, but how much more will a 15-17 inch monitor cost? For that matter, how many existing monitors are there that could be kept and reused?
"So what you're telling me..."
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
when this happened to me (twice), my credit card company advised me that while they would allow me to dispute the charge each month, they could not prevent future billings and thus I'd have to call every month to get the charge reversed.
"So let me get this straight: what you're telling me is that I can't tell you that charges from Company XYZ are not to be accepted and that while I could report my card lost and get a new number issued, you might helpfully forward those recurring charges to my new number since I've done business with that merchant before. So I'll know when I call next month, how long does it take to cancel my card? Also, can I have your name and/or employee number again?"
The publishers are the ones that produce and sell the books, who get returns (or the ripped off covers of them), who get the orders for replacement copies, etc. They have all this information, though probably filtered somewhat through distributors. The bookstores already have this as well, down to the per-store level. The only people who really haven't had this are the press and members of the general public.
In the Chicago area, I know of precisely one: The Stars Our Destination. Comments at various times have given me the impression that there are probably less than 10 in the country - possibly less than half that.
In addition, Stars moved a couple of years ago to a better location, but has largely found that there's no longer enough demand for a specialty store to make having a storefront a truly viable proposition.
So, what stores are they going to be drawing these new listings from?
If folks in the US want to send them a donation, what's the minimum practical amount given conversion fees?
I know that for many European countries check cashing/currency conversion fees can easily be more than the actual value of a check, and while I'm sure it's much simpler (and cheaper) between the US and Canada I'm also sure that there will be some charges.
HP is a bit expensive - to take a single PC, monitor and inkjet printer they'll charge US$59. For more than 10 pieces (say 5 old PCs, 3 old monitors, and 3 old printers) they have a custom quote page, so I assume prices get lower from there.
I tried paypal for a few transactions then closed my account when I realized they have uncontrolled access [to] my $$$.
That's why when I started to hear horror stories about PayPal I dropped by my credit union and started a second checking account. I told the woman I was talking with that I'd started to do some online purchasing and wasn't comfortable with having my regular account details out there, and she was more than happy to set it up. She started to ask if I wanted automatic overdraft protection from my main account, then answered herself "No, I guess you wouldn't want that."
It's the same credit union (though banks should do it as well) as my main account, so all I have to do is dial up every once in a while and transfer a few hundred dollars over. If PayPal gets a bit twitchy with the account it might be a minor annoyance, but not much more than that.
They seem to be shooting for PDA capabilities when it's not docked, and desktop capabilities when it is. As a PDA, you're likely to have it closer to your face than you would a desktop screen.
Still, it looks an awful lot like the next generation of the Newton to me.
With PCS/cellular dialup-style connections in the US, bandwidth is limited to ~9.6 kbps or ~13.3 kbps (not 14.4), depending on the underlying network. These connections simply pull from a pool of voice minutes, so they can be quite cheap on a per-minute basis for heavy users.
With GPRS connections, bandwidth is much higher but so is cost - the US providers with high-bandwidth solutions seem to be around $40/month for up to 10 MB of traffic during the month. That's not megabytes per second, that's megabytes per month. If you can afford to play MMORPGs over those connections, you probably won't be doing it on the bus because you're probably independently wealthy.
CDPD ("I'm not dead yet!") is still around, but maxes out at 19.2 Kbps.
In a few areas Ricochet may yet come back, and that's about the only option for this in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's handwritten, just forget it. You'll have enough problems getting people able to read it, much less computers. The postal service does do some of this, but they have a secret: they know all the valid addresses and can do cross-referencing between different parts if they really have to.
If it's typed you might be able to OCR it, but don't count on it being truly reliable and plan on saving the image as well - you're going to have to be able to go back to it.
If it's filled and printed you might be able to put something together, but if you have that why not have them send the data electronically instead?
If it's fill and print but you can't communicate it electronically, see if you can generate barcodes. If this is the case, I assume it's generated by an application instead of an HTML form, since an HTML form could be communicated back to the server.
The main situation I know of where OCRing worked well was for an imaging system - the company wanted to store images of all the work order pages for each customer (to include signatures & handwritten notes), tied back to the database. Since the initial work orders were printed, all that needed to be OCRed was the work order number, which both included check digits and needed to match against a known work order already in the database. Even then, there were provisions for dealing with the ones that weren't recognized. Barcodes weren't used because the imaging system was separate from the creation system, which didn't have the capability to generate them.
The review mentions that the standard (only?) compression results in about 650MB of data for each hour of recording. Basing an estimate of USB bulk data transfer capacity on the fact that you can get 4x USB CDR drives, this thing is only using approximately 1/4 of the capacity of a USB connection.
There's some history of all this on Budweiser Budvar's page on the trademark dispute. Basically, it looks like it's not completely clear on either side - kind of like if someone had started making "Deutsche Bier" in the US, then started exporting to Germany.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when Roman Catholics are no longer the dominant religion in Italy. Apparently the birth rate among native Italians has dropped (how are those Catholics managing it?), but the Muslim population has been continuing to grow.
Some things to keep in mind:
If your bank wants to charge you for an account, get another bank.
If you can't grasp that, grasp that most companies that inspire this sort of feeling are the large impersonal ones that are likely to survive, and that eventually they may figure out what you did at which point you're screwed for the rest of your life and they're minorly inconvenienced. Not worth it.
If nothing else, it's certainly safer in terms of vacations.
If you just want text, there are at least two free services out there, at least one of which may allow posting (or you could use your Giganews account for that). Free services are discussed in alt.free.newsservers.
Wrong. You can get Google to remove postings you made with no-longer-extant email addresses. See the Google Groups help, specifically this entry.
I doubt that they're getting the software for free - Walmart.com probably has some sort of agreement with Mandrake to provide one or two support calls for these systems, which is one of the things you get with the boxed sets as well.
For deep-cycle batteries, you should be able to find fairly small ones, but do the math to figure out how much capacity you need to be able to run for multiple days.
Someone else mentioned using CE devices or something similar - that's actually a very good plan depending on what use these will be seeing.
Keep in mind as well that you're entering a world of regulatory hell if these things are going to be anywhere near patients. If it's close to a patient, it's not a computer - it's a piece of medical equipment no matter how much you might think it looks like a computer. You can debate that, but be sure you talk to your legal folks first because you'll lose your shorts when someone dies while there was non-certified medical equipment around.
Side note: I've talked to folks who charge $6-800 for a replacement 2GB hard drive, and can do it because that particular piece of medical equipment is certified only with that no-longer-available-new component and they prepurchased them knowing they'd need them as replacement components. The medical equipment world is a whole different place.
Is BitTorrent basically the same thing as the transport layer of MojoNation (apparently discontinued, but with parts still alive as MNet>?
For software, if you're running an MS OS, I can almost guarantee that you're not putting StarOffice or OpenOffice on it. For that matter, the school probably has to negotiate all the software at the same time, and if they negotiate for the OS but not for Office do you think MS would drop as far on the price? (By the way, that would've been one potential benefit of splitting MS into OS and Applications groups.)
For the hardware, consider this $498 OS-less computer from WalMart. For that matter, why go with a 1.6GHz P4 when a 1GHz Celeron or Duron is available for $100 less and will still more than meet your needs for student workstations? No monitor, but how much more will a 15-17 inch monitor cost? For that matter, how many existing monitors are there that could be kept and reused?
"So let me get this straight: what you're telling me is that I can't tell you that charges from Company XYZ are not to be accepted and that while I could report my card lost and get a new number issued, you might helpfully forward those recurring charges to my new number since I've done business with that merchant before. So I'll know when I call next month, how long does it take to cancel my card? Also, can I have your name and/or employee number again?"
The publishers are the ones that produce and sell the books, who get returns (or the ripped off covers of them), who get the orders for replacement copies, etc. They have all this information, though probably filtered somewhat through distributors. The bookstores already have this as well, down to the per-store level. The only people who really haven't had this are the press and members of the general public.
In addition, Stars moved a couple of years ago to a better location, but has largely found that there's no longer enough demand for a specialty store to make having a storefront a truly viable proposition.
So, what stores are they going to be drawing these new listings from?
I know that for many European countries check cashing/currency conversion fees can easily be more than the actual value of a check, and while I'm sure it's much simpler (and cheaper) between the US and Canada I'm also sure that there will be some charges.
So, what's a practical level?
Consider using Alt-LeftArrow and Alt-RightArrow instead.
Here's a link to their general recycling program for laser and ink cartridges and PC hardware: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/community/environment/rec ycle/index.htm.
HP is a bit expensive - to take a single PC, monitor and inkjet printer they'll charge US$59. For more than 10 pieces (say 5 old PCs, 3 old monitors, and 3 old printers) they have a custom quote page, so I assume prices get lower from there.
That's why when I started to hear horror stories about PayPal I dropped by my credit union and started a second checking account. I told the woman I was talking with that I'd started to do some online purchasing and wasn't comfortable with having my regular account details out there, and she was more than happy to set it up. She started to ask if I wanted automatic overdraft protection from my main account, then answered herself "No, I guess you wouldn't want that."
It's the same credit union (though banks should do it as well) as my main account, so all I have to do is dial up every once in a while and transfer a few hundred dollars over. If PayPal gets a bit twitchy with the account it might be a minor annoyance, but not much more than that.
Still, it looks an awful lot like the next generation of the Newton to me.
With GPRS connections, bandwidth is much higher but so is cost - the US providers with high-bandwidth solutions seem to be around $40/month for up to 10 MB of traffic during the month. That's not megabytes per second, that's megabytes per month. If you can afford to play MMORPGs over those connections, you probably won't be doing it on the bus because you're probably independently wealthy.
CDPD ("I'm not dead yet!") is still around, but maxes out at 19.2 Kbps.
In a few areas Ricochet may yet come back, and that's about the only option for this in the US.
Two questions: