I suggest going to the local public library and just grabbing handfulls of CDs off the shelves, take them home and rip them all with a high speed rip program like Xing. Convert them to MP3 variable speed-HIGHest quality (190-250 bps) and burning them to inexpensive blank CDs. (When using really cheap CD blanks, be sure to load the songs back into the PC to verify that there aren't CRC errors from the inexpensive disks) This works best with genres of music that you are not familiar with such as world music, jazz, and classical for rock and pop fans.
Services like www.allmusic.com give brief and concise descriptions of the artist's background along with recommendations of the best albums of their sometimes massive outputs.
After collecting several hundred albums in this manner, get an inexpensive 40-80 gig hard disk and copy everything to it. Index all the recordings into a seperate text file easily found.
Then trade, lend, share your hard disk library with your friends, co-workers, and other music lovers. Physically trade hard disks with your friends and install the private library hard drives onto your home PC. Copy stuff that you don't have in your library onto blank CDs or onto the local harddisk that stays in your PC; the one with the operating system.
Check with the lending disk's owner if it is OK for you to copy your library of several hundred MP3 albums onto the hard disk that was loaned to you. Many MP3 home librarians will wish to keep their collection intact as single unit while others will use a hard disk swap to draw new large numbers of albums into their own library.
Don't be concerned about overlaps and duplicate albums when you copy a new hard disk library into your own collection, you can always delete them later. Also, don't refuse to copy a block of a hundred or so albums into your collection from a circulating hard disk simply because you have never heard of or have never enjoyed a certain musical genre in the past. Tastes change over time. It may be possible that in five or ten years you may evolve into a different type of music. Plus, it is quite likely to be impossible to actually get access to broad collections of a certain genre through public library access in five years. After all, it only would only take one bribed and corrupt federal judge to force all of the public libraries to remove all of their music CD collections from the public access. This can happen at any time, overnight.
One final tip, when assembling hundreds of classical CDs into libraries on a circulating hard disk, be sure to include more information as to the composer, orchestra, conductor and even original CD recording label company disk number than you would for rock or popular music. In classical music there are many different recordings available of the same composition. Often MP3 services like CDDB will label a CD track as 'Allegro' or 'Adagio' which are actually descriptions of the musical style and can be shared by hundreds of tracks from different recordings.
It is likely that the exchange of large libraries of music through hard disk swapping will become the main means of exposure to new musical styles and the main means of developing a musical education in the near future as the more traditional methods of music exposure become inaccessable. No doubt as DRM technology succeeds in closing off CD format-shifting the price for individual CDs will greatly increase as prices always do in monopoly markets. Clear Channel will continue to constrict new music exposure on the radio to clones of established pop stars and also continue to raise concert ticket prices and deny venue access to only established best selling acts. Predator lawyers will force public libraries to remove CD collections from the shelves and prohibit the public sale of used CDs. ect...ect...
In the long term (several hundred year time frame) there will be a gap in the record of musical history from 1940 to 2040 as corporate ownership of world culture leads to a tragic and inevitable destruction of musical recordings from this era when ability to unlock the DRM codes of the recordings passes along with corporations that originally imposed them.
I have three PCs and when I want to swap a small file between them, I'll use a floppy disk. It's quick, easy, and dependable. Many times I have thought that I have lost files only to find them later on transfer floppies.
Since the whole purpose of computers is to provide a functional dependable tool with which to acomplish real productive work, I say keep the floppy drive in the PC forever. It's one more piece of technology that has proven its worth and can be counted on to work when everything else fails.
I recall a trick discovered in the 1970's where clubs would remove (using a high-Q notch filter) the 400Hz and 650Hz frequency areas from loud music.
Since most audio energy in male speech is concentrated in the 400Hz range and most female speech energy is in the 650Hz range, removing these two frequency bands allowed people to continue to talk to each other (and be heard intelligibly) in the club even while the music was really blasting. The speech audio filled the audio spectrum holes created by the notch filters.
Perhaps soon the legal issues will weigh over the artistic issues. The RIAA is working to make every public performance illegal and then decide whether to prosecute according to how much money you feed back to them after the commission of your 'crime'.
In these situations, it's a lot easier to run away from the police with 4000 songs in storage medium the size of a video cassette than to try and make a quick exit carrying two turntables and 4000 albums.
I've been using home computers since the VIC-20 and I've come to dread and fear the possibility of being forced to adopt Linux as a result of Microsoft's heavy-handedness.
After being hyped by friends and co-workers about the pleasures of this great and fantastic open-source operating system, I attempted to load Linux, not once but four times on three year old PC that was previously running Win98.
The first time took me about an hour to realize that I had to reformat the hard disk and wipe out years worth of work (after backing it up on CD-R). Then I had to figure that the only way to get the Linux CD to actually start loading was to boot it from the CD by modifying the CMOS settings as the PC was starting up. A simple line suggesting this that could have been printed on the CD would have saved a lot of time!
After loading a whole gigabyte of stuff onto the empty hard drive (do I really need to load 50 megabytes of TeX fonts when I'm just trying to get a demo of Linux????), the entire process halted when the floppy disk drive didn't respond. The Linux loader demanded a working floppy backup of some obscure file be made and since I've never used the floppy drive, I didn't know that it didn't work. The installation process locked up and I had to reboot.
The reboot left me in UNIX hell: a black screen half filled with incomprehensible characters with a single flashing dollar sign as the only indication that the entire PC was still working. No matter what I typed or tried (simple intutitve commands like 'help' 'review' 'exit' 'restore' 'dir' 'What the fuck is happening?') nothing made any intelligent response except for returning me to the flashing dollar sign. Shit! I'm in Dante's seventh circle of hell for misers. I was forced to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows in order to confirm that I still had a working PC.
I bought a new floppy drive that I will never use in order to load this wonderful and fantastic operating system. Reformated the hard drive, reset the CMOS, and loaded a whole gig of worthless junk from the penguin CD. Everything loaded and I made all of the selections for keyboard and mouse ect... The system rebooted and got to the point where it should have started to work and simply stopped. No response to mouse, keypress, or anything.
I reloaded Windows (it worked perfectly) and decided to load Linux on my new good computer. I ended up back bashed back in UNIX hell and having to load Windows and ALL of my programs and files from CD backups, which took hours.
I convinced that Linux is some kind of really bad joke or else an 'emperor's new clothes' type of mass hallucination.
How can anyone with a pretension of being a computer professional seriously believe or claim that this junk is ready to take on Windows?
Could someone please tell me what exactly this chip is projected to be used for? What common applications deliver/generate more wealth to the chip's (or the PC system that this chip will be part of) purchaser compared to the 800MHz Celeron? What is the current advantage to buying this chip instead of an older chip that is 5-10% of the cost of these ultra-fast state-of-the-art CPUs?
In October 2000 I bought several thousand dollars of Intel stock. That very night the stock price lost 40% of its value; going from $62 per share to the low $40s. It has never recovered and is currently in the upper $20s per share. What is this chip going to do to restore the value of Intel's stock?
I'm serious. Please give me some of your Slashdot insight as to why anyone would want to buy this thing? Will the sales of this thing ever generate the funds needed to recoup the R&D investment (never mind generate enough excitement to actually boost the depressed stock price)?
Often the coder can describe the program in one-on-one discussions far better than he can write a detailed description or remember to add comments.
In this case, get one of those speech-to-text programs like Dragon or Kurtzweil or IBM and have the programmer go through the voice training. Then have him (it's almost always a him) do a long description of the program in voice and append the text generated from the speech to the code.
If this is too much of a hassle then simply use a boom box to voice record the programmer throughly describing the code and convert the recording to a mono voice quality MP3 file. Include this MP3 file with all of the other files of the project. Better yet, link the sections of MP3 description right into the code. This entails having a second source code file that isn't ASCII, but it's the 21st century and it's time to upgrade these old text-based inflexable compilers to multimedia input/output.
This is quick, easy, and a whole lot better in the long run than incomprehensible comments scattered in the source. Programmers and project managers have to start thinking 'outside of the box', especially since programming is the most conservative (and reactionary) sector of the computer/electronics industry.
I am also faced with the task of converting thousands of pages from paper to text files. I suggest looking into using a high resolution digital camera in a custom docking station above a flat surface that holds the printed material. (a photo enlarger comes to mind). Then instead of waiting for the scanner carriage to pass downward over the page, you can take a snapshot of the page.
Send the image directly from the camera to the OCR program. I find that the Xerox TextBridge program can do OCR on a page almost as fast as I could turn the page were I not using a scanner to input the text. TextBridge is quite ackward to use and not very customizable for new types of applications such as this.
Using a high resolution digital camera to input OCR text is also a good way to get around the question of whether or not to cut off the binding of the book.
By the way, I assume that you're wishing to scan european language text. Doing OCR on Japanese, Chinese, or Korean I would assume is much slower than recognizing ASCII. Does anyone know of an available program that will do OCR on Chinese?
With our friends in the middle east obsessed with blowing the shit out of us, it might be time to develop an open-source program that will do OCR on Arabic and Farsi, along with a translation program companion. Would Arabic be much more difficult to OCR because all of the phonetic symbols are joined together? I sometimes wonder about these things when I'm bumming about not having a life.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest going to the local public library and just grabbing handfulls of CDs off the shelves, take them home and rip them all with a high speed rip program like Xing. Convert them to MP3 variable speed-HIGHest quality (190-250 bps) and burning them to inexpensive blank CDs. (When using really cheap CD blanks, be sure to load the songs back into the PC to verify that there aren't CRC errors from the inexpensive disks) This works best with genres of music that you are not familiar with such as world music, jazz, and classical for rock and pop fans.
Services like www.allmusic.com give brief and concise descriptions of the artist's background along with recommendations of the best albums of their sometimes massive outputs.
After collecting several hundred albums in this manner, get an inexpensive 40-80 gig hard disk and copy everything to it. Index all the recordings into a seperate text file easily found.
Then trade, lend, share your hard disk library with your friends, co-workers, and other music lovers. Physically trade hard disks with your friends and install the private library hard drives onto your home PC. Copy stuff that you don't have in your library onto blank CDs or onto the local harddisk that stays in your PC; the one with the operating system.
Check with the lending disk's owner if it is OK for you to copy your library of several hundred MP3 albums onto the hard disk that was loaned to you. Many MP3 home librarians will wish to keep their collection intact as single unit while others will use a hard disk swap to draw new large numbers of albums into their own library.
Don't be concerned about overlaps and duplicate albums when you copy a new hard disk library into your own collection, you can always delete them later. Also, don't refuse to copy a block of a hundred or so albums into your collection from a circulating hard disk simply because you have never heard of or have never enjoyed a certain musical genre in the past. Tastes change over time. It may be possible that in five or ten years you may evolve into a different type of music. Plus, it is quite likely to be impossible to actually get access to broad collections of a certain genre through public library access in five years. After all, it only would only take one bribed and corrupt federal judge to force all of the public libraries to remove all of their music CD collections from the public access. This can happen at any time, overnight.
One final tip, when assembling hundreds of classical CDs into libraries on a circulating hard disk, be sure to include more information as to the composer, orchestra, conductor and even original CD recording label company disk number than you would for rock or popular music. In classical music there are many different recordings available of the same composition. Often MP3 services like CDDB will label a CD track as 'Allegro' or 'Adagio' which are actually descriptions of the musical style and can be shared by hundreds of tracks from different recordings.
It is likely that the exchange of large libraries of music through hard disk swapping will become the main means of exposure to new musical styles and the main means of developing a musical education in the near future as the more traditional methods of music exposure become inaccessable. No doubt as DRM technology succeeds in closing off CD format-shifting the price for individual CDs will greatly increase as prices always do in monopoly markets. Clear Channel will continue to constrict new music exposure on the radio to clones of established pop stars and also continue to raise concert ticket prices and deny venue access to only established best selling acts. Predator lawyers will force public libraries to remove CD collections from the shelves and prohibit the public sale of used CDs. ect...ect...
In the long term (several hundred year time frame) there will be a gap in the record of musical history from 1940 to 2040 as corporate ownership of world culture leads to a tragic and inevitable destruction of musical recordings from this era when ability to unlock the DRM codes of the recordings passes along with corporations that originally imposed them.
Thank you,
I have three PCs and when I want to swap a small file between them, I'll use a floppy disk. It's quick, easy, and dependable. Many times I have thought that I have lost files only to find them later on transfer floppies.
Since the whole purpose of computers is to provide a functional dependable tool with which to acomplish real productive work, I say keep the floppy drive in the PC forever. It's one more piece of technology that has proven its worth and can be counted on to work when everything else fails.
I recall a trick discovered in the 1970's where clubs would remove (using a high-Q notch filter) the 400Hz and 650Hz frequency areas from loud music.
Since most audio energy in male speech is concentrated in the 400Hz range and most female speech energy is in the 650Hz range, removing these two frequency bands allowed people to continue to talk to each other (and be heard intelligibly) in the club even while the music was really blasting. The speech audio filled the audio spectrum holes created by the notch filters.
Perhaps soon the legal issues will weigh over the artistic issues. The RIAA is working to make every public performance illegal and then decide whether to prosecute according to how much money you feed back to them after the commission of your 'crime'.
In these situations, it's a lot easier to run away from the police with 4000 songs in storage medium the size of a video cassette than to try and make a quick exit carrying two turntables and 4000 albums.
I've been using home computers since the VIC-20 and I've come to dread and fear the possibility of being forced to adopt Linux as a result of Microsoft's heavy-handedness.
After being hyped by friends and co-workers about the pleasures of this great and fantastic open-source operating system, I attempted to load Linux, not once but four times on three year old PC that was previously running Win98.
The first time took me about an hour to realize that I had to reformat the hard disk and wipe out years worth of work (after backing it up on CD-R). Then I had to figure that the only way to get the Linux CD to actually start loading was to boot it from the CD by modifying the CMOS settings as the PC was starting up. A simple line suggesting this that could have been printed on the CD would have saved a lot of time!
After loading a whole gigabyte of stuff onto the empty hard drive (do I really need to load 50 megabytes of TeX fonts when I'm just trying to get a demo of Linux????), the entire process halted when the floppy disk drive didn't respond. The Linux loader demanded a working floppy backup of some obscure file be made and since I've never used the floppy drive, I didn't know that it didn't work. The installation process locked up and I had to reboot.
The reboot left me in UNIX hell: a black screen half filled with incomprehensible characters with a single flashing dollar sign as the only indication that the entire PC was still working. No matter what I typed or tried (simple intutitve commands like 'help' 'review' 'exit' 'restore' 'dir' 'What the fuck is happening?') nothing made any intelligent response except for returning me to the flashing dollar sign. Shit! I'm in Dante's seventh circle of hell for misers. I was forced to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows in order to confirm that I still had a working PC.
I bought a new floppy drive that I will never use in order to load this wonderful and fantastic operating system. Reformated the hard drive, reset the CMOS, and loaded a whole gig of worthless junk from the penguin CD. Everything loaded and I made all of the selections for keyboard and mouse ect... The system rebooted and got to the point where it should have started to work and simply stopped. No response to mouse, keypress, or anything.
I reloaded Windows (it worked perfectly) and decided to load Linux on my new good computer.
I ended up back bashed back in UNIX hell and having to load Windows and ALL of my programs and files from CD backups, which took hours.
I convinced that Linux is some kind of really bad joke or else an 'emperor's new clothes' type of mass hallucination.
How can anyone with a pretension of being a computer professional seriously believe or claim that this junk is ready to take on Windows?
Could someone please tell me what exactly this chip is projected to be used for? What common applications deliver/generate more wealth to the chip's (or the PC system that this chip will be part of) purchaser compared to the 800MHz Celeron?
What is the current advantage to buying this chip instead of an older chip that is 5-10% of the cost of these ultra-fast state-of-the-art CPUs?
In October 2000 I bought several thousand dollars of Intel stock. That very night the stock price lost 40% of its value; going from $62 per share to the low $40s. It has never recovered and is currently in the upper $20s per share. What is this chip going to do to restore the value of Intel's stock?
I'm serious. Please give me some of your Slashdot insight as to why anyone would want to buy this thing? Will the sales of this thing ever generate the funds needed to recoup the R&D investment (never mind generate enough excitement to actually boost the depressed stock price)?
Often the coder can describe the program in one-on-one discussions far better than he can write a detailed description or remember to add comments.
In this case, get one of those speech-to-text programs like Dragon or Kurtzweil or IBM and have the programmer go through the voice training. Then have him (it's almost always a him) do a long description of the program in voice and append the text generated from the speech to the code.
If this is too much of a hassle then simply use a boom box to voice record the programmer throughly describing the code and convert the recording to a mono voice quality MP3 file. Include this MP3 file with all of the other files of the project. Better yet, link the sections of MP3 description right into the code. This entails having a second source code file that isn't ASCII, but it's the 21st century and it's time to upgrade these old text-based inflexable compilers to multimedia input/output.
This is quick, easy, and a whole lot better in the long run than incomprehensible comments scattered in the source. Programmers and project managers have to start thinking 'outside of the box', especially since programming is the most conservative (and reactionary) sector of the computer/electronics industry.
I am also faced with the task of converting thousands of pages from paper to text files. I suggest looking into using a high resolution digital camera in a custom docking station above a flat surface that holds the printed material. (a photo enlarger comes to mind). Then instead of waiting for the scanner carriage to pass downward over the page, you can take a snapshot of the page.
Send the image directly from the camera to the OCR program. I find that the Xerox TextBridge program can do OCR on a page almost as fast as I could turn the page were I not using a scanner to input the text. TextBridge is quite ackward to use and not very customizable for new types of applications such as this.
Using a high resolution digital camera to input OCR text is also a good way to get around the question of whether or not to cut off the binding of the book.
By the way, I assume that you're wishing to scan european language text. Doing OCR on Japanese, Chinese, or Korean I would assume is much slower than recognizing ASCII. Does anyone know of an available program that will do OCR on Chinese?
With our friends in the middle east obsessed with blowing the shit out of us, it might be time to develop an open-source program that will do OCR on Arabic and Farsi, along with a translation program companion. Would Arabic be much more difficult to OCR because all of the phonetic symbols are joined together? I sometimes wonder about these things when I'm bumming about not having a life.