http://www.pdinfo.com/record.htm I quote:
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1972, sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1972 copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension. Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
There are, of course, exceptions to everything, and there really are some PD sound recordings. However, the federal and state laws are so tangled and complicated, it is extremely difficult to do confident sound recording PD research. There are several U.S. web sites claiming that sound recordings made in the United States prior to February 15, 1972, are in the public domain, and there are links to U.S. Copyright Office publications stating: "Sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, are not eligible for Federal copyright protection." We have had this reviewed independently by several attorneys across the U.S. Each has confidently and independently told us that between federal and state copyright protection, virtually all sound recordings are protected until the year 2067.
http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3369 Summary: yes, it probably sucks, but if DRM offers significant benefits to the consumer (in this case, it DID not), people will accept it.
I forgot to make the point about using laptops for collaboration. That is an important educational activity, especially for distance learning/establishing study partners with students in other locations.
But you don't need laptops for that. Why not have students check out laptops from the library when they need to use a mobile device and then use something simpler for all other uses?
I am 39 years old and am pleasantly amused at all this talk about laptops. I didn't grow up with laptops, so perhaps I am an "old fogey" about this, but I find it interesting that we are talking about things for children that I as an adult can't justify buying. Even though I currently work in the hardware business and in fact used to work to Dell and own 3 desktop machines (2 self-built), and I plan to buy another, I still cannot justify buying a laptop. The reason? First, the intended use. I personally need to do video editing on it, and you pay quite a premium to get a high performance laptop. Second, the difficulty of doing your own repair. There's not too much maintenance you can do on your own easily.
But the main reason is cost. A decent laptop is $2000 or so (and that includes the MS tax), and Apple laptops are even more expensive. Oh, yes, you can get one for under $1000 (if you seriously compromise on RAM, CPU or your video card). But if you factor in $2000-2500 (add support costs) into your budget, that's a pretty penny. And wait--if the laptop is stolen or lost, who has to pay? I'm sure there are parents who are worried that their son/daughter is walking around with a device almost as expensive as a car that they did not have to pay for. That means insurance, warranties, which add to the costs.
How can students use this? The best use is campus wireless access (BTW, I live in Houston, where wifi access royally sucks). Notetaking perhaps, but that's an expensive fancy pencil there. I can imagine cases where it would be easy to swap files inside the classroom, where you can work outside or in small groups.
Educationally, let's look at the classroom benefits. Chat--BFD, unless you are communicating with the astronauts doing research--well, sure, but school machines could fulfill this purpose just as well transporting schoolwork to/from school: hey, what about yahoo My Briefcase (20$ a year)? what about USB flash keychains?
I have two problems with this push to have laptops. 1)brand names/discounts. When we talk about laptops, we are talking about Dell/Apple most of the time. That means generally we are paying the MS tax for the OS, MS Office, etc. Note that this article talks nothing about the price of laptops or who has to pay, as though money were just a minor detail in the decision whether to buy it.
2)the tendency to teach concepts in terms of MS Office and Adobe products. From what I hear, quite a number of junior high students give Powerpoint presentations in their class.That is bad. We are simply creating MS customers (and I'll be reluctant to endorse any new technology unless the school district specifies open standards and open source software alternatives for everything). It is teaching dependence on a commercial product. Lots of high school students, I've heard, are dependent on Photoshop/Premiere for their creativity, and I'd prefer that public school environments not simply be a way for students to use educational discounts to try out pricy products they'll later pirate.
You make significant compromises by insisting on the laptop form factor. If laptops or similar devices were under $500, I could probably accept that they will be integrated into the public school environment. There are by the way many excellent PDAs under that price (and with wireless keyboard, it is every bit as good a notetaker and ebook reader). 500-800$ can buy you a pretty desktop for home, but not a pretty laptop. If we let peer pressure bring students to demand the latest and greatest laptops from parents, it will only provide a pretext for the upper class student to flaunt his wealth and for the juvenile deliquent to hock it/steal another for drug money.
ITCoversations.com is the obvious answer to your question.
I just listened to 2 talks by Guido van Rossum about python See here and here.
Believe it or not, I heard part of it while shopping at Walmart.
Truthfully though, aside from journalistic coverage of new technology, it's very difficult to present technical information via audio (though not impossible).
Actually, I'm a little surprised that The Teaching Company (the company that produces those college classes on tape) haven't tried any technical classes.
Fle3 is also a fairly mature and nice-looking solution. You deal with object databases instead of sql, which is a little harder to maintain and host though. But this product has been around for a long time and has some cool features
I'm all anti-walmart and pro-reform for copyright/patent/trademark.
(And you really need to check this saga out, which contains a lot of evidence about law and precedents.
I seem to remember one criteria being whether averageconsumers would mistake the site for the legitimate walmart site. The screenshots on the PDF certainly give the impression that a person who is not looking too closely might easily make the mistake. The problem was that the parody was too subtle.
I just want to say that the same thing happened to me a few years ago at target. apparently, they had to deactivate the wallet flap a few weeks later, and then without any reason at all, the flap started setting off the alarm again. It drove me crazy!
It seems likely that the Supreme Court will not overturn the lower Court's decision, and that is good for artists and consumers. Good riddance to the big labels, I say.
But the question of compensating artists has not been addressed. We need to create an environment where downloaders want to support musicians they love rather than simply downloading their stuff for free.
Musicians need to start setting up tipjars and consumers need to ask rigorous question about how much of anything they purchase goes to an intermediary.
I recently went to a concert of Kristin Hersh where she sold no CD's but encouraged people to support her by buying mp3's of demos off her website. I bought $20 of mp3's off her website, of which Hersh received a significant percentage. Is that the future?
no serious readers reads from computer; they read it on pda or (more commonly) a dedicated device.
The ebookwise isn't a technological marvel, but it's cheap (129$) and relatively user-friendly. The 128 mb smartmedia cards (35$) hold about 150 ebooks.
Ebookwise is sturdy and intended for carrying around; it's a great form factor, with a rubbery outside. And yes, I've read it in the bathtub. http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogra mmer/?p=83398151
Wow! I had some spyware overwrite the windows etc/hosts file every time I rebooted, and I couldn't remove it. The solution (for me) was backing up the hosts file and surfing under a user account to prevent a similar kind of infection.
If Admins can modify this file willy-nilly, then could be a major problem for users who haven't bothered to create user accounts.
I opted for flickr because they were cheap, had lots of metadata and open API's. I really missed a linux photo uploader client, which smugmug seems to have, a really big deal.
The best thing going for smugmug is that the open API's might inspire a linux dude to write his own uploader/metadata capture tool.
I'm a fiction writer who works in industry. I love teaching and have strong credentials (taught at prestigious colleges both here and abroad).
We may bemoan the type of writer who works in (and depends on) academia, but academic opportunities are sadly so rare in the humanities that only a tiny fraction of talented writers can actually obtain academic employment. (Demand is different in engineering and computer science; don't assume that the longtime Petrarch scholar/poet will have a reasonable chance of finding a job in business).
It takes an incredible leap of faith for literary types to "pay their dues" for 10-15 years in adjunct teaching jobs while waiting for a professor to pass away. I for one was not willing to risk it.
where is the mention of iriver's great mp3 players. Slightly cheaper than ipod, not as locked in to itunes or other commercial ventures, but full ogg support.
User interface is kind of clunky, but that is more than made up by 1)its recording capability and 2)the fact it is a fAT 32 device (which can be recognized on linux and any platform) and doesn't require intermediary software.
I bought an iriver ihp-140 in january for 450. Now it's down to 350$. By christmas it will be down to $300.
It's probably true that over time fewer employees in the US will call themselves developers/programmers. If tech support can be handled in other countries, it will be.
However, in-house sysadmin jobs aren't going overseas, and the marketing/training/consulting jobs probably aren't disappearing here (esp if it involves lots of face-to-face contact).
People won't be hired to write programs; they will be hired to find solutions and to adapt commercial/open source solutions to a company's needs. To do this, programming skills will probably be helpful. But it will exist as a secondary skill (helpful but not necessary).
Compare this to my own situation. Every business book says how important writing/communication skills are for business. Does that mean I (a talented writer) will never have problems finding work as a writer? No (although I currently work as a tech writer).
You see, accountants, marketing reps, even engineers benefit from excellent writing skills. But it is not the primary skill they are being hired for. Similarly, techies won't be hired solely for programming skills. However, it will be viewed as a desirable secondary skill for the resume.
Actually I know a lot about this subject even though I haven't yet met Ms. Right. I run a relationship weblog called Unsolved Heart which covers these sort of relationship issues.
YOu should check out edatereview for inside tips (and a fun laugh).
Postscript: one reason I decided to give up on edating is that it's frustrating to get such a miserable response rate. Also, I had a programming project that has been occupying all my time as of late. That's the typical geek life for you.
Funny, I have been reading both the online version and the print version over the weekend.
It is in many ways an excellent book, but geared towards more experienced programmers than I. The style is readable, but the program illustrating introspection (chapter 4 I believe) is really hard to get into. Mark could have chosen a better example.
I particularly liked the way that Pilgrim annotated the code. He started out a chapter with the raw code, broke them into blocks with annotations and then concluded the chapter with a review.
The approach of these diveinto books is to introduce unfamiliar concepts and then dissect them one by one. My only complaint is that sometimes he introduces a lot of things all at once. It would have been better (though less succinct) to use more examples with fewer concepts thrown together all at once. On the other hand, I can appreciate the succinctness of the example programs by presenting them without first dumbing them down. The good thing about diveintopython is that it helped me to read a program pretty easily --although that doesn't imply that I can apply this knowledge..Give me another week or two:) The key question is at what point do I feel like coding on my own? I tried the examples in chapters 1 and 2, and then didn't feel like I could start coding until I finished the first 8 chapters. (and am slowly getting the hang of it).
Interestingly, when I started out, I found that I was referring to Oreilly's Python in a Nutshell more and more. Didn't look that user friendly at first, now seemingly more useful.
My sense is that programming is a matter of incremental mastery. (First read Fun with Dick and Jane, then read Wizard of Oz, then Melville, then Shakespearean sonnets). This book starts out by throwing out the Shakespearean sonnets at us and then explaining piece by piece until we have a sense of the whole.
Guido von Rossum's tutorial is more of a stepping stone approach, though the example code is more academic than practical.
One advantage of the online book: great hyperlinked references to Rossum's tutorial and other sources.
Despite my griping, this was still a good instructive read (though challenging). And way to go Mark for putting this online for free!
i have an ihp-140 which I've started to use for recording. A few notes:
It has lots of capability, but recording has some limitations. First, the record button has a lot of latency. Also, you can't adjust volume (but future firmware will change that. The internal mike sucks (no surprise). And the line in supports stereo mikes instead of mono mikes. Also, you'll need to buy a pre-amp.
Still, you can record mp3's of various qualities as well as WAV files. It currently sells for $380 on amazon, and by Christmas it should be around $300. For the purpose of recording, the 20 gig should be fine (same firmware) and substantially cheaper (probably under 200 by xmas).
Please note: iriver is late on firmware updates, and they plan important updates to recording functions on firmware in October (see schedule below).
firmware schedule for iriver h-models. first Upgrade (Expected end of July ~ early August) New features 1) File delete function supported (Files can be deleted from the player itself) - on the fly file delete 2) Format function supported (Will be supported for Window 2000/XP- based devices due to difficulty in formatting 40GB files from the operating platform) 3) Adjustable playback speed supported (Playback speed cannot be manipulated as in the iFPs but adjustments can be made with select speed options) 4) Gaps between songs can be deleted (Gaps are deleted through scanning for silent periods at the end of the music file) - Gapless playback. 5) DB Unicode is supported (Supports technology in Unicode). 6) DB OGG file adding is supported (OGG is supportd in DB Update). 7) Hebrew language added. 8) Sub folders supported for TEXT folders. 9) SHUFFLE function improved to Real Shuffle. 10) Problem with ID3 Tags resolved with EX?? (Problems from using MP3GAIN resolved). 11) Remote control display problems from NAVI functions in PLAYLIST mode fixed. 12) Internal playlist supported (Programming function supported) on the fly playlist. 13) Problems of FM tuner display fixed. 14) Interference on the display from remote control usage is fixed. 15) External battery supported for H100 series (External batteries will be recognizable for the H100 series). 16) Problems recognizing select files in Japanese fixed.
Second Upgrade (Expected in October) New features 1) Recording volume adjustment function supported. 2) No recording delay from the push of the RECORD button. 3) MONO recording supported (Supported during VOICE Recording) 4) Truncated voice recording fixed. 5) SAD function supported. 6) AUTO SYNC function supported.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.pdinfo.com/record.htm
I quote:
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1972, sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1972 copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension. Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
There are, of course, exceptions to everything, and there really are some PD sound recordings. However, the federal and state laws are so tangled and complicated, it is extremely difficult to do confident sound recording PD research. There are several U.S. web sites claiming that sound recordings made in the United States prior to February 15, 1972, are in the public domain, and there are links to U.S. Copyright Office publications stating: "Sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, are not eligible for Federal copyright protection." We have had this reviewed independently by several attorneys across the U.S. Each has confidently and independently told us that between federal and state copyright protection, virtually all sound recordings are protected until the year 2067.
on a gentoo system, I typed:
emerge unmerge portage
Gentoo users probably are laughing hard at this one. I must admit after tearing out my hair I had a good laugh too.
here's a piece I wrote about it yesterday.
http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3369
Summary: yes, it probably sucks, but if DRM offers significant benefits to the consumer (in this case, it DID not), people will accept it.
I forgot to make the point about using laptops for collaboration. That is an important educational activity, especially for distance learning/establishing study partners with students in other locations.
But you don't need laptops for that. Why not have students check out laptops from the library when they need to use a mobile device and then use something simpler for all other uses?
rj
I am 39 years old and am pleasantly amused at all this talk about laptops. I didn't grow up with laptops, so perhaps I am an "old fogey" about this, but I find it interesting that we are talking about things for children that I as an adult can't justify buying. Even though I currently work in the hardware business and in fact used to work to Dell and own 3 desktop machines (2 self-built), and I plan to buy another, I still cannot justify buying a laptop.
The reason? First, the intended use. I personally need to do video editing on it, and you pay quite a premium to get a high performance laptop. Second, the difficulty of doing your own repair. There's not too much maintenance you can do on your own easily.
But the main reason is cost. A decent laptop is $2000 or so (and that includes the MS tax), and Apple laptops are even more expensive. Oh, yes, you can get one for under $1000 (if you seriously compromise on RAM, CPU or your video card). But if you factor in $2000-2500 (add support costs) into your budget, that's a pretty penny. And wait--if the laptop is stolen or lost, who has to pay? I'm sure there are parents who are worried that their son/daughter is walking around with a device almost as expensive as a car that they did not have to pay for. That means insurance, warranties, which add to the costs.
How can students use this? The best use is campus wireless access (BTW, I live in Houston, where wifi access royally sucks). Notetaking perhaps, but that's an expensive fancy pencil there. I can imagine cases where it would be easy to swap files inside the classroom, where you can work outside or in small groups.
Educationally, let's look at the classroom benefits.
Chat--BFD, unless you are communicating with the astronauts
doing research--well, sure, but school machines could fulfill this purpose just as well
transporting schoolwork to/from school: hey, what about yahoo My Briefcase (20$ a year)? what about USB flash keychains?
I have two problems with this push to have laptops.
1)brand names/discounts. When we talk about laptops, we are talking about Dell/Apple most of the time. That means generally we are paying the MS tax for the OS, MS Office, etc. Note that this article talks nothing about the price of laptops or who has to pay, as though money were just a minor detail in the decision whether to buy it.
2)the tendency to teach concepts in terms of MS Office and Adobe products. From what I hear, quite a number of junior high students give Powerpoint presentations in their class.That is bad. We are simply creating MS customers (and I'll be reluctant to endorse any new technology unless the school district specifies open standards and open source software alternatives for everything). It is teaching dependence on a commercial product. Lots of high school students, I've heard, are dependent on Photoshop/Premiere for their creativity, and I'd prefer that public school environments not simply be a way for students to use educational discounts to try out pricy products they'll later pirate.
You make significant compromises by insisting on the laptop form factor. If laptops or similar devices were under $500, I could probably accept that they will be integrated into the public school environment. There are by the way many excellent PDAs under that price (and with wireless keyboard, it is every bit as good a notetaker and ebook reader). 500-800$ can buy you a pretty desktop for home, but not a pretty laptop. If we let peer pressure bring students to demand the latest and greatest laptops from parents, it will only provide a pretext for the upper class student to flaunt his wealth and for the juvenile deliquent to hock it/steal another for drug money.
The answer is simple. Create an rss reader that first authenticates your membership so you can receive the feed.
That way, you get demographic information, possibly subscriptions and possibly some tracking mechanism for feed traffic.
Right now, rss feeds are open. How long will that last?
ITCoversations.com is the obvious answer to your question.
.
I just listened to 2 talks by Guido van Rossum about python
See here and here
Believe it or not, I heard part of it while shopping at Walmart.
Truthfully though, aside from journalistic coverage of new technology, it's very difficult to present technical information via audio (though not impossible).
Actually, I'm a little surprised that The Teaching Company (the company that produces those college classes on tape) haven't tried any technical classes.
Fle3 is also a fairly mature and nice-looking solution. You deal with object databases instead of sql, which is a little harder to maintain and host though. But this product has been around for a long time and has some cool features
I'm all anti-walmart and pro-reform for copyright/patent/trademark.
(And you really need to check this saga out, which contains a lot of evidence about law and precedents.
I seem to remember one criteria being whether averageconsumers would mistake the site for the legitimate walmart site. The screenshots on the PDF certainly give the impression that a person who is not looking too closely might easily make the mistake. The problem was that the parody was too subtle.
That doesn't get walmart off the hook though.
I just want to say that the same thing happened to me a few years ago at target. apparently, they had to deactivate the wallet flap a few weeks later, and then without any reason at all, the flap started setting off the alarm again. It drove me crazy!
It seems likely that the Supreme Court will not overturn the lower Court's decision, and that is good for artists and consumers. Good riddance to the big labels, I say.
But the question of compensating artists has not been addressed. We need to create an environment where downloaders want to support musicians they love rather than simply downloading their stuff for free.
Musicians need to start setting up tipjars and consumers need to ask rigorous question about how much of anything they purchase goes to an intermediary.
I recently went to a concert of Kristin Hersh where she sold no CD's but encouraged people to support her by buying mp3's of demos off her website. I bought $20 of mp3's off her website, of which Hersh received a significant percentage. Is that the future?
Here are some other thoughts about how to reward musicians
http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.h tm
a mmer/?p=83398151
no serious readers reads from computer; they read it on pda or (more commonly) a dedicated device.
The ebookwise isn't a technological marvel, but it's cheap (129$) and relatively user-friendly. The 128 mb smartmedia cards (35$) hold about 150 ebooks.
Ebookwise is sturdy and intended for carrying around; it's a great form factor, with a rubbery outside. And yes, I've read it in the bathtub. http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogr
The real reason why major labels need to charge so much: to pay the pretty dancers in those expensive music videos.
I'm joking of course, but really, it's true.
I really appreciate this input.
I'm going to be shooting in another city and it would really help to run things from a laptop.
I'm somewhat anti-Mac (mainly for price reasons), but the discussion here has given me a lot to ponder. People change. Thanks.
I'm also thinking of buying a machine for videoediting. I'm committed to doing it on linux with open source tools.
The question is: could an HP/IBM laptop handle the load for nonlinear editing and input/output?
Also, is it silly to think that the bus speed for USB2 would exclude the possibility of using USB2 hard drives?
If I'm editing straight video (next to no graphics/animation, etc), is there a point at which extra RAM adds little value?
rj
Wow! I had some spyware overwrite the windows etc/hosts file every time I rebooted, and I couldn't remove it. The solution (for me) was backing up the hosts file and surfing under a user account to prevent a similar kind of infection.
If Admins can modify this file willy-nilly, then could be a major problem for users who haven't bothered to create user accounts.
rj
I've been using green mountain for two years. It's great and makes me feel good (it's about 10-15% more expensive).
Also, it sounds pretty cool to say that my web server is being powered by windmills.
Robert Nagle
No kidding, I bought an ebookwise a week ago, and have been loving it. I also read it in the bath .
(Actually if you must know, I was reading Lessig's book).
Reading in the bath is probably not a good idea to do all the time, but ebookwise devices are 100$, and I exercised proper caution.
I opted for flickr because they were cheap, had lots of metadata and open API's. I really missed a linux photo uploader client, which smugmug seems to have, a really big deal.
The best thing going for smugmug is that the open API's might inspire a linux dude to write his own uploader/metadata capture tool.
The above poster's remark is truly deluded.
I'm a fiction writer who works in industry. I love teaching and have strong credentials (taught at prestigious colleges both here and abroad).
We may bemoan the type of writer who works in (and depends on) academia, but academic opportunities are sadly so rare in the humanities that only a tiny fraction of talented writers can actually obtain academic employment. (Demand is different in engineering and computer science; don't assume that the longtime Petrarch scholar/poet will have a reasonable chance of finding a job in business).
It takes an incredible leap of faith for literary types to "pay their dues" for 10-15 years in adjunct teaching jobs while waiting for a professor to pass away. I for one was not willing to risk it.
This article and discussion is pretty crazy;
where is the mention of iriver's great mp3 players. Slightly cheaper than ipod, not as locked in to itunes or other commercial ventures, but full ogg support.
User interface is kind of clunky, but that is more than made up by 1)its recording capability and 2)the fact it is a fAT 32 device (which can be recognized on linux and any platform) and doesn't require intermediary software.
I bought an iriver ihp-140 in january for 450. Now it's down to 350$. By christmas it will be down to $300.
Well, the article is a little misleading.
It's probably true that over time fewer employees in the US will call themselves developers/programmers. If tech support can be handled in other countries, it will be.
However, in-house sysadmin jobs aren't going overseas, and the marketing/training/consulting jobs probably aren't disappearing here (esp if it involves lots of face-to-face contact).
People won't be hired to write programs; they will be hired to find solutions and to adapt commercial/open source solutions to a company's needs. To do this, programming skills will probably be helpful. But it will exist as a secondary skill (helpful but not necessary).
Compare this to my own situation. Every business book says how important writing/communication skills are for business. Does that mean I (a talented writer) will never have problems finding work as a writer? No (although I currently work as a tech writer).
You see, accountants, marketing reps, even engineers benefit from excellent writing skills. But it is not the primary skill they are being hired for. Similarly, techies won't be hired solely for programming skills. However, it will be viewed as a desirable secondary skill for the resume.
Actually I know a lot about this subject even though I haven't yet met Ms. Right. I run a relationship weblog called Unsolved Heart which covers these sort of relationship issues.
One of my essays, 25 Tips for Edating is probably helpful.
YOu should check out edatereview for inside tips (and a fun laugh).
Postscript: one reason I decided to give up on edating is that it's frustrating to get such a miserable response rate. Also, I had a programming project that has been occupying all my time as of late. That's the typical geek life for you.
Funny, I have been reading both the online version and the print version over the weekend.
It is in many ways an excellent book, but geared towards more experienced programmers than I. The style is readable, but the program illustrating introspection (chapter 4 I believe) is really hard to get into. Mark could have chosen a better example.
I particularly liked the way that Pilgrim annotated the code. He started out a chapter with the raw code, broke them into blocks with annotations and then concluded the chapter with a review.
The approach of these diveinto books is to introduce unfamiliar concepts and then dissect them one by one. My only complaint is that sometimes he introduces a lot of things all at once. It would have been better (though less succinct) to use more examples with fewer concepts thrown together all at once. On the other hand, I can appreciate the succinctness of the example programs by presenting them without first dumbing them down. The good thing about diveintopython is that it helped me to read a program pretty easily --although that doesn't imply that I can apply this knowledge..Give me another week or two:) The key question is at what point do I feel like coding on my own? I tried the examples in chapters 1 and 2, and then didn't feel like I could start coding until I finished the first 8 chapters. (and am slowly getting the hang of it).
Interestingly, when I started out, I found that I was referring to Oreilly's Python in a Nutshell more and more. Didn't look that user friendly at first, now seemingly more useful.
My sense is that programming is a matter of incremental mastery. (First read Fun with Dick and Jane, then read Wizard of Oz, then Melville, then Shakespearean sonnets). This book starts out by throwing out the Shakespearean sonnets at us and then explaining piece by piece until we have a sense of the whole.
Guido von Rossum's tutorial is more of a stepping stone approach, though the example code is more academic than practical.
One advantage of the online book: great hyperlinked references to Rossum's tutorial and other sources.
Despite my griping, this was still a good instructive read (though challenging). And way to go Mark for putting this online for free!
i have an ihp-140 which I've started to use for recording. A few notes:
It has lots of capability, but recording has some limitations. First, the record button has a lot of latency. Also, you can't adjust volume (but future firmware will change that. The internal mike sucks (no surprise). And the line in supports stereo mikes instead of mono mikes. Also, you'll need to buy a pre-amp.
Still, you can record mp3's of various qualities as well as WAV files. It currently sells for $380 on amazon, and by Christmas it should be around $300. For the purpose of recording, the 20 gig should be fine (same firmware) and substantially cheaper (probably under 200 by xmas).
Please note: iriver is late on firmware updates, and they plan important updates to recording functions on firmware in October (see schedule below).
firmware schedule for iriver h-models.
first Upgrade (Expected end of July ~ early August) New features
1) File delete function supported
(Files can be deleted from the player itself) - on the fly file delete
2) Format function supported
(Will be supported for Window 2000/XP- based devices due to difficulty in formatting 40GB files from the operating platform)
3) Adjustable playback speed supported
(Playback speed cannot be manipulated as in the iFPs but adjustments can be made with select speed options)
4) Gaps between songs can be deleted
(Gaps are deleted through scanning for silent periods at the end of the music file) - Gapless playback.
5) DB Unicode is supported
(Supports technology in Unicode).
6) DB OGG file adding is supported (OGG is supportd in DB Update).
7) Hebrew language added.
8) Sub folders supported for TEXT folders.
9) SHUFFLE function improved to Real Shuffle.
10) Problem with ID3 Tags resolved with EX?? (Problems from using MP3GAIN resolved).
11) Remote control display problems from NAVI functions in PLAYLIST mode fixed.
12) Internal playlist supported (Programming function supported) on the fly playlist.
13) Problems of FM tuner display fixed.
14) Interference on the display from remote control usage is fixed.
15) External battery supported for H100 series (External batteries will be recognizable for the H100 series).
16) Problems recognizing select files in Japanese fixed.
Second Upgrade (Expected in October)
New features
1) Recording volume adjustment function supported.
2) No recording delay from the push of the RECORD button.
3) MONO recording supported (Supported during VOICE Recording)
4) Truncated voice recording fixed.
5) SAD function supported.
6) AUTO SYNC function supported.