Just as you wouldn't trust your valuable books to this page-turning scanner, you wouldn't scan those same books with the typical household USB scanner, either. Those scanners generally require the books to be opened 180 degrees and pressed flat in order to get the scanning element close enough to the margins, and that can damage the pages and/or the binding.
The prototypical DIY scanner uses a book rest and platen set at a 90 degree angle, which is safe for most books, and as you're manually turning the pages it's a fairly gentle system that can work on pretty fragile books.
The Google guy mentioned them in the presentation. The primary drawback to the other DIY scanners is manual operation. Setup involves adjusting the lights, the cameras, and the hinge point for the platen; not a big deal. But in operation, the human has to lift the platen, flip the page, set the platen down, trigger the cameras, and then repeat for each page. My understanding is that a person can scan a 500 page book in about 20-30 minutes, so it's of a comparable speed to this new page-turning scanner. But because it doesn't require constant operator handling, a human could keep ten of these machines filled with books.
If you're scanning a private collection of a few hundred books, the manual scanner doesn't seem so bad. But if you're scanning thousands of books in a large collection or library, that's a serious amount of time to invest.
On the other hand, a human will be less likely to damage the books during the page turning process. If you're scanning rare or otherwise valuable books, the manual scanner would still be superior. And a manual scanner has fewer limitations on book size than this automated page turner.
It's not that simple. (Nothing ever is.) Preserving information for the future runs into a lot of issues.
The media can degrade over time (plastics degrade and become brittle, adhesives let go, corrosion of moving parts, seizure of old lubricants)
The media can be lost (labels fall off, disorganized storage, fire or flood, etc.)
The readers are less available (punched paper tape readers, 9 track tape, cassette tape readers, 8" floppy drives, 5-1/4" floppy drives, DAT, Zip drives, etc.) Even CD-ROMs are on the decline as more things migrate to vendor-provided clouds.
Newer technology media and readers are more sophisticated and store information in a higher density, making them progressively harder to obtain or rebuild a reader.
Media formats are not preserved. Does your floppy drive read FM, MFM, or GCR encoded disks?
File systems are not preserved. Was it recorded on a CBMFS, FFS, or a FAT filesystem?
Application programs are not carried forward. Could you load a copy of Visicalc? Could your current word processor read a WordStar v2.26 file?
Manufacturer induced obsolescence. Does Microsoft have an obligation to support Word 1.0 formatted files anymore? Windows 7 won't run 16-bit Windows apps, so you can't even load up an old copy of Word 1.0 on the modern OS.
Cloud vendors go out of business, removing your ability to access the needed programs, or they may get shut down via government action.
It's not enough to just store a copy on your hard drive. That only takes care of a few of the above cases related to the physical media. Previous-generation hardware is one problem, but you also have to have previous generation applications. In 2050, who is going to have a copy of Adobe Reader that can read the old virus-laden v4.0 formatted PDFs? If you want to read that old Word 1.0 file, you would have to have preserved a copy of VirtualBox that works on whatever hardware and OS exists in the future, plus a working installation of Windows 3.1, plus a working installation of Word for Windows 3.1. When you migrate your data, are you going to ensure that you migrate a tested museum environment along with it?
If you're not going to preserve all the needed ancient environment, you have two choices. You can either migrate the data, or you can dispose of it. It's a lot of work. Every generation of technology will require you to make that choice for each piece of your old data. Let's say that it's migration day today, and you decide that you can just copy the Word 2003 file without migrating it, because Word 2010 can read it. Do you know for sure that the next time you need to migrate that file that you will still have a program that can read Word 2003 files then?
He addresses that in the talk. Yes, this machine can fold or tear pages. But they talked to an archivist, and he said that scanning the books in this machine was less risky than not scanning them at all. If they're scanned, the information is preserved, backed up, spread around, and is then widely available. Any library book is subject to risk from the patron tearing or damaging the book, yet they still accept the risk of making them available.
Besides, how much worse is the risk of possibly tearing a page as compared to a bulk scanner that saws the binding off the book, then feeds the pages through a sheet feeder? That one is guaranteed damaging.
The saddest thing is that I know several Microsoft developers. Brilliant, all of them. The local guys have some of the best software engineering processes I have ever seen, and produce some of the highest quality software out there. But what they don't have is leadership giving them good products to build, and they appear to have been saddled with a collection of usability folks crippled by ADHD, who are obviously self medicating their way through life with kilograms of crack, and who watch reruns of Teletubbies and Robot Chicken non-stop while designing.
One of the guys I know was on the Sync team (the Sync car navigation and electronics system, not the folders-talk-to-databases Sync thing) so I was happy to buy a car with their package installed. In-car electronics have sucked for a long time, especially car stereo interfaces, so I see the dashboard computer as the Next Big Thing. And this product had every chance to become the iPhone of vehicles, to dominate the market because there is simply no decent competition out there. Yet the interface they came out with is still very much rooted in the FILE / EDIT / HELP menu paradigm, and again showed they Just Don't Get It when it comes to users. In case you're wondering, here's the complete set of appropriate uses for a touch screen in a moving car: {}. I can only suspect some brilliant corner office manager must have said "it's got a touch screen, put everything on it just like on my PC. And my tablet. And my Windows Phone. And do something like an app-store. And if someone complains, we'll disable street address entry while the car is moving for 'safety', that ought to show them we care."
I guess I should take back my earlier comment: at least Robot Chicken has a sense of style to it. Sync, on the other hand, is... blue.
No, Apple has always been a "me next" company. They aren't ever first. They look at what others innovated, and said "if we were to do that way better, how would we really do it right? They learned from every single mistake Microsoft made with the Tablet OS and the WInCE phones.
Maybe I should amend that. Apple is frequently the first to do something very well.
No, the real flop was in not understanding that touch is a fundamentally different input paradigm. You can't ignore tiny clickable interface items on the screen, then hope to solve any data entry issues by giving the customer a stylus and admonishing him to improve his aim.
Another failing of Windows Everywhere on tablets was that every Win32 program with a non-touch interface was compatible, and would run on it, even if it sucked from a usability point of view. I think the usability of Microsoft's Tablet OS was so bad it stunted general touch screen acceptance in the marketplace, at least for a while.
Apple understood this was a fundamental change, and so did this better with iOS than any other touch screen OS provider. Instead of making them blindly OSX compatible, they said "no, put a good touch interface on your app, then we'll approve it before we sell it for you." They made a killer platform, ensured it had a usable interface AND monopolistically profiteered from it at the same time. Way, way smarter than Microsoft.
There are "mice" and there are "mice". You might be surprised at how physically painful a badly performing mouse can be after a long day of using one. If a mouse doesn't provide accurate enough input, you subconsciously tighten your grip and adjust the pointer by a few pixels. Repeat this throughout the day, and your hand and wrist will have fatigue and pain. Repeat this for a month or two, and you will have a Repetitive Strain Injury.
Now, where are these mice on the spectrum? Crappy <$10 bargain bin mice are generally to blame. A $20 name brand mouse generally has good enough resolution to avoid these problems for daily work, at least in my experience.
Now, if I look beyond my own selfish needs and extrapolate my experience to the gaming world, I can see that my $40 mouse similarly has not nearly fine enough resolution and control for the twitch gamer. It becomes obvious that our needs are different. I don't have to center the arrow precisely on the X to close a window, I just have to get the mouse over the button surface and click. Gamers, on the other hand, need to pick out the enemy's eye for the headshot, or track a tiny space ship across a blinking field of stars, or whatever it is they do, and they have to click the button within the right window of milliseconds. So where the $40 mouse control is perfectly adequate for me, it delivers a similarly low quality experience to the gamers.
And having used OFA remotes before, I fell in love with the Harmony's "use-case model" of remotes. Want to watch TV? Press the "watch tv" button. It definitely makes the entire entertainment system accessible to the wife and guests. If everybody had to know "set the TV input to HDMI2, set the HDMI switch to port 3, set the receiver to AUX input, have the remote adjust the receiver for audio control and the digits should control the cable box"..., then nobody would be able to run the system but me, and that's just stupid. The last thing I want to do on vacation is answer help-desk calls from the nephew who is house-sitting, trying to explain how to adjust the sound so he can play XBox games.
Harmony did a lot of things right, and they made the very messy domain of home entertainment remote controls very simple for the end users.
And I don't know if you've aware, but you can adjust the delay times on the Harmony so it will wait longer for the TV to boot up after powering it on. It's somewhere under the advanced settings.
HP printer drivers drove me so far over the edge that I swore never to buy another one of their damned products, ever, ever again. They may have the greatest printers/plotters/scanners/laptops in the world, and I'll never know because I wouldn't consider one. So when I heard they came out with the chipped cartridges that thwarted ink and toner refilling, I just got to laugh at all those poor suckers. Meg Whitman isn't the only disaster causing the failure of a once mighty engineering company.
When I shop for devices now, I look at the company and their track record with devices and drivers before buying. I currently own a Brother printer, with plain old plastic ink tanks, and a straightforward TCP socket based control program. Brother has never forgot their embedded machine roots and remains good at making their stuff have very tiny footprints, and no weird DRM crap. Unless they screw that up, they've got me as a customer for life.
Something else to consider is that they built up the IR database at considerable expense, and so they treat it like Intellectual Property. They don't want to send out the full copy of every device's codes, because they don't want a dump of it ending up in LIRC or on remotecentral.com. A custom client helps keep their full database out of our spying hands. Registered users allow them to make sure that nobody's downloading their entire database.
As a customer, it still makes me feel somewhat screwed over, kind of like we all did when the CDDB was hijacked by Gracenote and closed off from all but the authorized clients. I'm less annoyed because I never had full free access to the database, though, and have always known that any contributions I made to Harmony's servers were privately for their use. I'd be happy to jump ship to a FreeDB Open Sourced equivalent version of Harmony, but no such comprehensive database exists outside of Logitech's servers (or at least never really has as far as I know.)
I found that using their RF extender adds a noticeable delay. It seems to come from transmitting the handheld device's code via Z-Wave/Zigbee to the blinker device, where the IR emitter translates the code into device-specific blinks. The delay is annoying, but survivable. I've had it for years, and still occasionally overshoot the target when pressing the button multiple times.
When I was using it in direct IR mode, the blinks coming directly from the remote itself were near enough to real time that it wasn't an issue. But line of sight was a problem, so the extender was the best option in my case.
I tried one of the Radio Shack RF remote extenders. They're all analog and as such they don't suffer from the delays. But their pyramid shaped receiver was feeble at picking up on the remote's blinks, and was so unreliable it went back to the store the same day.
When I first bought a Harmony, I thought as you did. Online? Why not a CD-ROM full of codes? I don't want to be online for this.
But having used and programmed a half dozen of them now, I'd say they produced a very good answer to an ancient technology issue. IR codes are awful ways to control devices, they're non-standard, non-portable, and change continually as new products are introduced. There are no standards for publishing IR codes. There is often no way to get an IR code for a lost remote, especially on a 20 year old receiver.
What Harmony did was to crowd-source the discovery of IR codes. By getting enough people buying the remotes, and having them continually programming and updating them, they can offer those now to every customer. Having the software be online-only ensures that not only does everyone contribute, but everyone benefits. When I went to configure the 20 year old receiver that was missing a remote, Logitech's database had no trouble delivering.
Another time I needed a specific Levitron remote in order to teach 4 IR codes to a LIRC client. Rather than spend a ridiculous $100 list for a five button remote I would never use a second time, I told my Harmony's configuration that it was controlling a Levitron switch, then blinked it at the learning device. Instant success, no cost.
I've come to the conclusion that sometimes, a vendor's server is not the worst answer. But only sometimes. I'd still ditch the Harmony software in an instant for an Open Source programmer that accessed a public database of blinky codes.
Bull ! The tech and gadgets in Bond films were distractions, not movie enhancers. They were generally so unbelievable as to break my willing suspension of disbelief. Trying to make it look like it takes a radio astronomy sized "satellite dish" and a ruby the size of an egg to command a satellite to deploy its weapon? I can push a button on a Spot GPS Messenger which will transmit a signal to a satellite, causing guys in helicopters to come rescue me from a mountain side, and that only takes a tiny plastic toy with three AAA batteries!
Going farther back, Roger Moore used a magnetic wrist watch to drag a boat across an alligator-filled pond. Now there's a technology that would realistically take a magnet the size of the aforementioned radiotelescope to accomplish!
There's gadgets, and there's just plain stupid. Most of the pre-Craig Bond movies never cared if they crossed that line.
Strangely enough, Mission: Impossible did a much better job of showing us believable technology. Go back and watch a few of those old shows, and a lot of the stuff they were doing may have been impossible in the 60's but is everyday tech today.
I can't wait to see Bond and his 'modern' love interest, a mysterious blond PHD computer scientist named Kitty Scripter, code up some GUIs in visual basic to save the day
I would pay full price at an IMAX theater to see that movie!
Bond films were generally filled with stupid gadgets. The Roger Moore era was particularly straining of whatever willing suspension of disbelief I was able to muster, from the gadgets to the villains, to the very worst of the worst, Jaws the Henchman.
Where the Bond films always shined brightest was in their exotic locales, the beautiful women, and the chase scenes. The location shots were always gorgeous, and watching one was like taking an exciting vacation. But the soundstage shots were generally painted cardboard, reflecting the best sets British filmmakers could produce, and the plots went from "ludicrous" to "plaid". Casino Royale actually had me believing that they could start making plausible films again, but then out came Quantum of Shame and the inexplicable Hotel In The Desert Made Entirely of Explosives. I can only hope Skyfall isn't as bad.
That's pretty much the idea. If scientists contribute more to the overall economy than news reporters, then if you produce more scientists, the overall economy will be higher.
I don't think you can treat the economy or workforce like an individual farm where you try to maximize profit by only producing the single most profitable crop.
Sure you can. You might not succeed, you might get really awful results that are harmful to not only the economy but the affected students, but you can certainly try.
We need a diverse workforce in order to have a strong economy just like we need a diverse landscape to produce the variety of crops we need, regardless of which one is most "valuable". As an added bonus, a diverse workforce is more resilient when there is a downturn in an individual sector.
Absolutely. But the governor isn't proposing a reduction in diversity, he's trying to create incentives to encourage students to enter a field where he sees a deficiency. And maybe he's right. I think he's looking at Florida and saying "We did great 30 years ago when we had IBM and NASA here. But now we have only one marginally healthy industry remaining, and that's tourism. We need to diversify again, back into science and technology."
I'd like a source for your proposal that "scientists contribute more to the overall economy" than news reporters, teachers, etc
Then you should have read the preceding word that you didn't include in your quote: "If". I proposed nothing - I was simply carrying the Florida governor's premise through to its logical conclusion.
As for "only smart people" being admitted to public colleges, generally public schools accept anyone with an average ACT score (the public school I went to accepted students with C averages and a 14 on the ACT)
You might be interested to know exactly how lucky you are to live in America. When I was in India last year, there was a big row over some public university raising the required score on their entrance exam to 100%. They had so many applicants that the exam was not able to reduce the number of students to a level they could manage.
I don't necessarily disagree with you. Mostly I just like to argue.
Well then, welcome to Slashdot! But if you want abuse, you'll have to go to Reddit.
'In economics, pricing is all we have to determine and work out supply and demand.
Er, that's not entirely true, I think sometimes supply is governed by capacity and resources. Look at Harley Davidson and Rickenbacker guitars. They have a wait list to buy the damn things yet the companies can only produce so many each year.
A wait list indicates they're underpriced. They could be asking higher prices, which would reduce demand and yet be more profitable.
But I'll agree that it's a fine line, and especially with the unique niche Harley Davidson is in. The more they raise their prices, the more they exclude low-income people, which are the people the high-income riders are trying to be associated with. In their case, the idea that they can't raise prices and must instead implement the "wait list" is an opportunity cost associated with maintaining their brand image.
This solution would be totally unfair to people who are studying to be teachers, nurses, social workers, news reporters and a whole host of other essential non-STEM careers.
That's pretty much the idea. If scientists contribute more to the overall economy than news reporters, then if you produce more scientists, the overall economy will be higher.
Is it fair that only smart people get admitted to public colleges? There are many people who will never be admitted to a public college, because they simply aren't capable of succeeding. I haven't see the resulting storming of the universities by the dropouts who have been excluded.
However, I doubt the governor's approach is the best approach to the problem. The economy doesn't grow because it has 10 more scientists. It grows when they're employed by industries who use their abilities. As it's industry that will grow as a result of getting more scientists, then put the incentives in those industries. Tax breaks for employer-run tuition grant programs would get the horse pulling the cart, and traveling in the right direction.
I agree that the implementation is poor, but your proposal might not help much either. Imagine a student two years in who discovers he can't hack the chemistry major, but knows he can do well in business administration. If he was taking his loans out counting on the payback, he's stuck and doesn't want to risk changing majors, even though that would be the best outcome for everyone.
I think it's better to do nothing and let the market decide. Few people going into a dance program can realistically expect a six figure gig waiting for them as they leave, so demand naturally won't be attracting profit-driven people into that field. If Disney suddenly needs ten thousand dancers, however, they can pay for them.
Exactly how does labelling a cable prevent if from getting tangled?
By helping you recognize where it goes.
Imagine 10 identical gray network cables plugged into a switch that needs replacing. As you start pulling cables out, you can unplug them in order from one end to the other, or from the middle to the outsides, and after replacing the device, restore them in reverse order. Your chances of adding to the tangle goes down.
Or imagine a set of eight similar black USB cables plugged into the back of a PC. Some of the cables head left towards the printer and the scanner, some head up to the keyboard and monitor area, and some head right to the workbench. You pull the PC out to work on it. When you have to return it, you can keep the cables going to the left devices together, the cables going to the right devices together, and the cables going to the keyboard devices together.
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Just as you wouldn't trust your valuable books to this page-turning scanner, you wouldn't scan those same books with the typical household USB scanner, either. Those scanners generally require the books to be opened 180 degrees and pressed flat in order to get the scanning element close enough to the margins, and that can damage the pages and/or the binding.
The prototypical DIY scanner uses a book rest and platen set at a 90 degree angle, which is safe for most books, and as you're manually turning the pages it's a fairly gentle system that can work on pretty fragile books.
The Google guy mentioned them in the presentation. The primary drawback to the other DIY scanners is manual operation. Setup involves adjusting the lights, the cameras, and the hinge point for the platen; not a big deal. But in operation, the human has to lift the platen, flip the page, set the platen down, trigger the cameras, and then repeat for each page. My understanding is that a person can scan a 500 page book in about 20-30 minutes, so it's of a comparable speed to this new page-turning scanner. But because it doesn't require constant operator handling, a human could keep ten of these machines filled with books.
If you're scanning a private collection of a few hundred books, the manual scanner doesn't seem so bad. But if you're scanning thousands of books in a large collection or library, that's a serious amount of time to invest.
On the other hand, a human will be less likely to damage the books during the page turning process. If you're scanning rare or otherwise valuable books, the manual scanner would still be superior. And a manual scanner has fewer limitations on book size than this automated page turner.
It's not that simple. (Nothing ever is.) Preserving information for the future runs into a lot of issues.
It's not enough to just store a copy on your hard drive. That only takes care of a few of the above cases related to the physical media. Previous-generation hardware is one problem, but you also have to have previous generation applications. In 2050, who is going to have a copy of Adobe Reader that can read the old virus-laden v4.0 formatted PDFs? If you want to read that old Word 1.0 file, you would have to have preserved a copy of VirtualBox that works on whatever hardware and OS exists in the future, plus a working installation of Windows 3.1, plus a working installation of Word for Windows 3.1. When you migrate your data, are you going to ensure that you migrate a tested museum environment along with it?
If you're not going to preserve all the needed ancient environment, you have two choices. You can either migrate the data, or you can dispose of it. It's a lot of work. Every generation of technology will require you to make that choice for each piece of your old data. Let's say that it's migration day today, and you decide that you can just copy the Word 2003 file without migrating it, because Word 2010 can read it. Do you know for sure that the next time you need to migrate that file that you will still have a program that can read Word 2003 files then?
And in 2050, will anyone still care?
He addresses that in the talk. Yes, this machine can fold or tear pages. But they talked to an archivist, and he said that scanning the books in this machine was less risky than not scanning them at all. If they're scanned, the information is preserved, backed up, spread around, and is then widely available. Any library book is subject to risk from the patron tearing or damaging the book, yet they still accept the risk of making them available.
Besides, how much worse is the risk of possibly tearing a page as compared to a bulk scanner that saws the binding off the book, then feeds the pages through a sheet feeder? That one is guaranteed damaging.
That was exactly my observation as well.
The saddest thing is that I know several Microsoft developers. Brilliant, all of them. The local guys have some of the best software engineering processes I have ever seen, and produce some of the highest quality software out there. But what they don't have is leadership giving them good products to build, and they appear to have been saddled with a collection of usability folks crippled by ADHD, who are obviously self medicating their way through life with kilograms of crack, and who watch reruns of Teletubbies and Robot Chicken non-stop while designing.
One of the guys I know was on the Sync team (the Sync car navigation and electronics system, not the folders-talk-to-databases Sync thing) so I was happy to buy a car with their package installed. In-car electronics have sucked for a long time, especially car stereo interfaces, so I see the dashboard computer as the Next Big Thing. And this product had every chance to become the iPhone of vehicles, to dominate the market because there is simply no decent competition out there. Yet the interface they came out with is still very much rooted in the FILE / EDIT / HELP menu paradigm, and again showed they Just Don't Get It when it comes to users. In case you're wondering, here's the complete set of appropriate uses for a touch screen in a moving car: {}. I can only suspect some brilliant corner office manager must have said "it's got a touch screen, put everything on it just like on my PC. And my tablet. And my Windows Phone. And do something like an app-store. And if someone complains, we'll disable street address entry while the car is moving for 'safety', that ought to show them we care."
I guess I should take back my earlier comment: at least Robot Chicken has a sense of style to it. Sync, on the other hand, is ... blue.
No, Apple has always been a "me next" company. They aren't ever first. They look at what others innovated, and said "if we were to do that way better, how would we really do it right? They learned from every single mistake Microsoft made with the Tablet OS and the WInCE phones.
Maybe I should amend that. Apple is frequently the first to do something very well.
No, the real flop was in not understanding that touch is a fundamentally different input paradigm. You can't ignore tiny clickable interface items on the screen, then hope to solve any data entry issues by giving the customer a stylus and admonishing him to improve his aim.
Another failing of Windows Everywhere on tablets was that every Win32 program with a non-touch interface was compatible, and would run on it, even if it sucked from a usability point of view. I think the usability of Microsoft's Tablet OS was so bad it stunted general touch screen acceptance in the marketplace, at least for a while.
Apple understood this was a fundamental change, and so did this better with iOS than any other touch screen OS provider. Instead of making them blindly OSX compatible, they said "no, put a good touch interface on your app, then we'll approve it before we sell it for you." They made a killer platform, ensured it had a usable interface AND monopolistically profiteered from it at the same time. Way, way smarter than Microsoft.
Q: What's worse than ants in your pants?
A: Uncles.
Whoosh.
http://www.wired.com/business/2010/08/foxconn-rallies-workers-installs-suicide-nets/
There are "mice" and there are "mice". You might be surprised at how physically painful a badly performing mouse can be after a long day of using one. If a mouse doesn't provide accurate enough input, you subconsciously tighten your grip and adjust the pointer by a few pixels. Repeat this throughout the day, and your hand and wrist will have fatigue and pain. Repeat this for a month or two, and you will have a Repetitive Strain Injury.
Now, where are these mice on the spectrum? Crappy <$10 bargain bin mice are generally to blame. A $20 name brand mouse generally has good enough resolution to avoid these problems for daily work, at least in my experience.
Now, if I look beyond my own selfish needs and extrapolate my experience to the gaming world, I can see that my $40 mouse similarly has not nearly fine enough resolution and control for the twitch gamer. It becomes obvious that our needs are different. I don't have to center the arrow precisely on the X to close a window, I just have to get the mouse over the button surface and click. Gamers, on the other hand, need to pick out the enemy's eye for the headshot, or track a tiny space ship across a blinking field of stars, or whatever it is they do, and they have to click the button within the right window of milliseconds. So where the $40 mouse control is perfectly adequate for me, it delivers a similarly low quality experience to the gamers.
And having used OFA remotes before, I fell in love with the Harmony's "use-case model" of remotes. Want to watch TV? Press the "watch tv" button. It definitely makes the entire entertainment system accessible to the wife and guests. If everybody had to know "set the TV input to HDMI2, set the HDMI switch to port 3, set the receiver to AUX input, have the remote adjust the receiver for audio control and the digits should control the cable box" ..., then nobody would be able to run the system but me, and that's just stupid. The last thing I want to do on vacation is answer help-desk calls from the nephew who is house-sitting, trying to explain how to adjust the sound so he can play XBox games.
Harmony did a lot of things right, and they made the very messy domain of home entertainment remote controls very simple for the end users.
And I don't know if you've aware, but you can adjust the delay times on the Harmony so it will wait longer for the TV to boot up after powering it on. It's somewhere under the advanced settings.
Let's put our egos aside and learn what we can from the Chinese.
Like maintaining our Social "safety net"?
I think he meant specifically learning from Foxconn's experience. Like maintaining "safety nets" in the alleys around the factories.
HP printer drivers drove me so far over the edge that I swore never to buy another one of their damned products, ever, ever again. They may have the greatest printers/plotters/scanners/laptops in the world, and I'll never know because I wouldn't consider one. So when I heard they came out with the chipped cartridges that thwarted ink and toner refilling, I just got to laugh at all those poor suckers. Meg Whitman isn't the only disaster causing the failure of a once mighty engineering company.
When I shop for devices now, I look at the company and their track record with devices and drivers before buying. I currently own a Brother printer, with plain old plastic ink tanks, and a straightforward TCP socket based control program. Brother has never forgot their embedded machine roots and remains good at making their stuff have very tiny footprints, and no weird DRM crap. Unless they screw that up, they've got me as a customer for life.
Something else to consider is that they built up the IR database at considerable expense, and so they treat it like Intellectual Property. They don't want to send out the full copy of every device's codes, because they don't want a dump of it ending up in LIRC or on remotecentral.com. A custom client helps keep their full database out of our spying hands. Registered users allow them to make sure that nobody's downloading their entire database.
As a customer, it still makes me feel somewhat screwed over, kind of like we all did when the CDDB was hijacked by Gracenote and closed off from all but the authorized clients. I'm less annoyed because I never had full free access to the database, though, and have always known that any contributions I made to Harmony's servers were privately for their use. I'd be happy to jump ship to a FreeDB Open Sourced equivalent version of Harmony, but no such comprehensive database exists outside of Logitech's servers (or at least never really has as far as I know.)
I found that using their RF extender adds a noticeable delay. It seems to come from transmitting the handheld device's code via Z-Wave/Zigbee to the blinker device, where the IR emitter translates the code into device-specific blinks. The delay is annoying, but survivable. I've had it for years, and still occasionally overshoot the target when pressing the button multiple times.
When I was using it in direct IR mode, the blinks coming directly from the remote itself were near enough to real time that it wasn't an issue. But line of sight was a problem, so the extender was the best option in my case.
I tried one of the Radio Shack RF remote extenders. They're all analog and as such they don't suffer from the delays. But their pyramid shaped receiver was feeble at picking up on the remote's blinks, and was so unreliable it went back to the store the same day.
When I first bought a Harmony, I thought as you did. Online? Why not a CD-ROM full of codes? I don't want to be online for this.
But having used and programmed a half dozen of them now, I'd say they produced a very good answer to an ancient technology issue. IR codes are awful ways to control devices, they're non-standard, non-portable, and change continually as new products are introduced. There are no standards for publishing IR codes. There is often no way to get an IR code for a lost remote, especially on a 20 year old receiver.
What Harmony did was to crowd-source the discovery of IR codes. By getting enough people buying the remotes, and having them continually programming and updating them, they can offer those now to every customer. Having the software be online-only ensures that not only does everyone contribute, but everyone benefits. When I went to configure the 20 year old receiver that was missing a remote, Logitech's database had no trouble delivering.
Another time I needed a specific Levitron remote in order to teach 4 IR codes to a LIRC client. Rather than spend a ridiculous $100 list for a five button remote I would never use a second time, I told my Harmony's configuration that it was controlling a Levitron switch, then blinked it at the learning device. Instant success, no cost.
I've come to the conclusion that sometimes, a vendor's server is not the worst answer. But only sometimes. I'd still ditch the Harmony software in an instant for an Open Source programmer that accessed a public database of blinky codes.
Bull ! The tech and gadgets in Bond films were distractions, not movie enhancers. They were generally so unbelievable as to break my willing suspension of disbelief. Trying to make it look like it takes a radio astronomy sized "satellite dish" and a ruby the size of an egg to command a satellite to deploy its weapon? I can push a button on a Spot GPS Messenger which will transmit a signal to a satellite, causing guys in helicopters to come rescue me from a mountain side, and that only takes a tiny plastic toy with three AAA batteries!
Going farther back, Roger Moore used a magnetic wrist watch to drag a boat across an alligator-filled pond. Now there's a technology that would realistically take a magnet the size of the aforementioned radiotelescope to accomplish!
There's gadgets, and there's just plain stupid. Most of the pre-Craig Bond movies never cared if they crossed that line.
Strangely enough, Mission: Impossible did a much better job of showing us believable technology. Go back and watch a few of those old shows, and a lot of the stuff they were doing may have been impossible in the 60's but is everyday tech today.
I can't wait to see Bond and his 'modern' love interest, a mysterious blond PHD computer scientist named Kitty Scripter, code up some GUIs in visual basic to save the day
I would pay full price at an IMAX theater to see that movie!
Bond films were generally filled with stupid gadgets. The Roger Moore era was particularly straining of whatever willing suspension of disbelief I was able to muster, from the gadgets to the villains, to the very worst of the worst, Jaws the Henchman.
Where the Bond films always shined brightest was in their exotic locales, the beautiful women, and the chase scenes. The location shots were always gorgeous, and watching one was like taking an exciting vacation. But the soundstage shots were generally painted cardboard, reflecting the best sets British filmmakers could produce, and the plots went from "ludicrous" to "plaid". Casino Royale actually had me believing that they could start making plausible films again, but then out came Quantum of Shame and the inexplicable Hotel In The Desert Made Entirely of Explosives. I can only hope Skyfall isn't as bad.
That's pretty much the idea. If scientists contribute more to the overall economy than news reporters, then if you produce more scientists, the overall economy will be higher.
I don't think you can treat the economy or workforce like an individual farm where you try to maximize profit by only producing the single most profitable crop.
Sure you can. You might not succeed, you might get really awful results that are harmful to not only the economy but the affected students, but you can certainly try.
We need a diverse workforce in order to have a strong economy just like we need a diverse landscape to produce the variety of crops we need, regardless of which one is most "valuable". As an added bonus, a diverse workforce is more resilient when there is a downturn in an individual sector.
Absolutely. But the governor isn't proposing a reduction in diversity, he's trying to create incentives to encourage students to enter a field where he sees a deficiency. And maybe he's right. I think he's looking at Florida and saying "We did great 30 years ago when we had IBM and NASA here. But now we have only one marginally healthy industry remaining, and that's tourism. We need to diversify again, back into science and technology."
I'd like a source for your proposal that "scientists contribute more to the overall economy" than news reporters, teachers, etc
Then you should have read the preceding word that you didn't include in your quote: "If". I proposed nothing - I was simply carrying the Florida governor's premise through to its logical conclusion.
As for "only smart people" being admitted to public colleges, generally public schools accept anyone with an average ACT score (the public school I went to accepted students with C averages and a 14 on the ACT)
You might be interested to know exactly how lucky you are to live in America. When I was in India last year, there was a big row over some public university raising the required score on their entrance exam to 100%. They had so many applicants that the exam was not able to reduce the number of students to a level they could manage.
I don't necessarily disagree with you. Mostly I just like to argue.
Well then, welcome to Slashdot! But if you want abuse, you'll have to go to Reddit.
'In economics, pricing is all we have to determine and work out supply and demand.
Er, that's not entirely true, I think sometimes supply is governed by capacity and resources. Look at Harley Davidson and Rickenbacker guitars. They have a wait list to buy the damn things yet the companies can only produce so many each year.
A wait list indicates they're underpriced. They could be asking higher prices, which would reduce demand and yet be more profitable.
But I'll agree that it's a fine line, and especially with the unique niche Harley Davidson is in. The more they raise their prices, the more they exclude low-income people, which are the people the high-income riders are trying to be associated with. In their case, the idea that they can't raise prices and must instead implement the "wait list" is an opportunity cost associated with maintaining their brand image.
This solution would be totally unfair to people who are studying to be teachers, nurses, social workers, news reporters and a whole host of other essential non-STEM careers.
That's pretty much the idea. If scientists contribute more to the overall economy than news reporters, then if you produce more scientists, the overall economy will be higher.
Is it fair that only smart people get admitted to public colleges? There are many people who will never be admitted to a public college, because they simply aren't capable of succeeding. I haven't see the resulting storming of the universities by the dropouts who have been excluded.
However, I doubt the governor's approach is the best approach to the problem. The economy doesn't grow because it has 10 more scientists. It grows when they're employed by industries who use their abilities. As it's industry that will grow as a result of getting more scientists, then put the incentives in those industries. Tax breaks for employer-run tuition grant programs would get the horse pulling the cart, and traveling in the right direction.
I agree that the implementation is poor, but your proposal might not help much either. Imagine a student two years in who discovers he can't hack the chemistry major, but knows he can do well in business administration. If he was taking his loans out counting on the payback, he's stuck and doesn't want to risk changing majors, even though that would be the best outcome for everyone.
I think it's better to do nothing and let the market decide. Few people going into a dance program can realistically expect a six figure gig waiting for them as they leave, so demand naturally won't be attracting profit-driven people into that field. If Disney suddenly needs ten thousand dancers, however, they can pay for them.
Exactly how does labelling a cable prevent if from getting tangled?
By helping you recognize where it goes.
Imagine 10 identical gray network cables plugged into a switch that needs replacing. As you start pulling cables out, you can unplug them in order from one end to the other, or from the middle to the outsides, and after replacing the device, restore them in reverse order. Your chances of adding to the tangle goes down.
Or imagine a set of eight similar black USB cables plugged into the back of a PC. Some of the cables head left towards the printer and the scanner, some head up to the keyboard and monitor area, and some head right to the workbench. You pull the PC out to work on it. When you have to return it, you can keep the cables going to the left devices together, the cables going to the right devices together, and the cables going to the keyboard devices together.