I won't argue that, but PDF operability should be number one on the dev team's list in my opinion. I did desktop support for my university all the way through college. We installed Firefox as the default browser on most computers, and the number one complaint we heard was that "the new browser won't open PDFs correctly". This is a big deal to people (like me) who do a lot of web-based research, including all of those professors, grad students, engineers, et. al who have subscriptions to paper or journal repository websites.
Foxit is a great PDF reader, but I very much prefer opening PDF links in a tab. A lot of times when I'm browsing academic papers or websites, I don't necessarily know whether I am going to get a PDF link or a website. And when I'm opening a bunch of tabs from Google so that I can then click through and read them all, I don't want to open 5-10 instances of Foxit. It also comes up in a separate window, which means I'm just as likely to forget about having ever even opened those links if I did it in the midst of a bunch of others.
I am a Firefox user, but it absolutely _astounds_ me that the devs still can't manage to make their browser work well with Adobe's PDF plugin in Windows. In this day and age, trying to open a PDF should not take 30 seconds - 1 min to render, and even if it does it also shouldn't freeze the rest of the browser up.
I have had to go into my task manage and kill the Acrobat plugin in order to save my browser session many times. This problem has been present in Firefox all the way back to its Netscape days, and on every computer and installation of Adobe I've ever used. It has never been present in IE.
How is it that even with PDF becoming an ISO standard, the dev team _still_ can't make their browser play nice with Acrobat?
It might be that I'm not a particularly good student, but I've never really been able to learn from textbooks unless I already had at least some background knowledge about the subject I was studying. I'm a practicing electronics engineer, and I find that textbooks are a great reference. I also enjoy reading textbooks written on areas where I have some knowledge, but not enough.
That being said, learning something like electronics or signal processing completely from a textbook would be really tough for me. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think the original poster would be much better off taking a class or two than he would be trying to slug his way through something like the Art of Electronics.
I would like to make a plug for your local community college, if you live in a reasonably-sized city. Most community colleges offer a couple of basic-level electronics classes, which teach you basic circuit theory. Books (either eBooks or paper ones) like Misconceptions About 'Electricity' are sort of interesting from a physics perspective, but they don't really offer much insight into electronics. In fact, many of the logical assumptions taught to electrical engineers _aren't_ true, strictly speaking, but are 'true enough' and much easier to understand.
If you're looking for someplace where you can learn about your basic circuit elements (resistors, capacitors, op-amps, etc) a real dyed-in-the-wool intro electronics course might be just what you're craving.
Except not really - all the RIAA and MPAA really do is supply entertainment. Movies, music, these things are just luxuries. If the entire recording industry and every since CD in the world disappeared tomorrow, my life wouldn't really be very different. This is also true for movies and TV (although TV stations aren't really getting into this whole anti-piracy thing). Heck, my life might even be better! I'd have less reason to put off doing the things I need to do and more reason to do the things I want to do.
You don't like the RIAA? Just stop listening to music! It's not a very big deal really. I can't figure out where or why we as a society decided that we had to be surrounded by constant entertainment 24/7.
After reading through the Corel cache of it, I can't help but wonder how all of these peripherals affect the battery life of the EEPC. It doesn't look like this guy built in any way to turn the devices _off_ when they aren't in use, which means they probably draw an additional 4 or 5 watts of power continuously. In a laptop PC that might draw 15 watts by itself, that's a significant power drain.
AC power has two fundamental and distinct advantages over DC power.
1) Is is easier to generate large amounts of it. All of our power plant technology to date except for solar and geothermal works by using mechanical energy (often in the form of steam produced by heat, such as in a nuclear plant) to rotate large magnets inside of a generator. This creates alternating current by its very nature. High-power DC generators are pretty much impossible to design. Thus, in order to generate a DC level one must first generate an AC current and then filter it through one of a few methods to attain some DC level. This is a highly wasteful process at best. For example - your car has an alternator even though all of the electricity it uses is direct-current. If there was any reasonable way to generate DC power directly why would manufacturers bother with using an alternator?
2) Our power distribution system is pretty old. Some parts of our grid have been in place for over 100 years. At the time that our grid was constructed there were no ways to convert a low-level DC voltage into a high-level one at all, and there were no even remotely energy-efficient ways to convert high-level DC voltage to low-level. There weren't switching regulators back then. There weren't even transistors back then. We can't even do it _now_ with the same efficiency that we can AC power. The only way there was at that time to step down a DC voltage was to dissipate (waste) all of the unused power. By contrast, AC voltage can be very easily stepped up or down with minimal losses through the use of transformers.
3) AC power is not distributed at 120VAC, it is distributed at many kilovolts. One can also carry as many as 5 or 6 phases of AC power over the same line, leading to a significantly higher throughput power carried through the wire than a DC system could ever provide, even after cable capacitance losses.
Interesting point, but DC and AC? You've got to be joking. Alternating current is what makes a national power distribution network even possible. There is really no comparison at all - direct current is not viable for transmitting electricity across any appreciable distance. Take a E&M or transmission theory class if you want to know more about it.
You're correct, strictly speaking. Any computer we would have great difficulty translating an eloquent speech into another language. However, we're not talking about eloquent speeches and love letters here, we're talking about factual communication between US soldiers and Iraqi constituents. As long as it was understood by both parties that they had to speak literally and with clear meaning, that it well within the realm of possible.
One of the things which has always bugged me about reading text on an e-reader, PDA, or similar device is the lack of multiple screens. I read pretty quickly, which means that I sometimes gloss over sentences or entire paragraphs, and it's nice to be able to glance back to the previous page immediately to pick up some detail that I might have missed. For technical publications like textbooks, this is pretty much essential.
Features that would get me to buy one of these: 1) Two side-to-side screens, similar to a traditional book 2) Some serious scratch resistance on these things 3) Longer battery life. Instead of wasting power on a CPU that can run an MP3 player, how about designing a product that shuts off entirely except when changing pages? 4) Some way to skip a lot of pages at once. 5) Some really slick OCR/PDF reflow software. I agree that PDF is impractical as an ebook format, so what we need is a really good OCR program that will convert PDFs into flowable text. 6) Low price. I would pay $300 or so, I think, if it worked well and did everything I wanted it to do. Sony could lower costs, unnecessary size, and battery usage substantially by removing every scrap of electronics aside from the e-reader part. Take all of these
IANAL, but it doesn't really seem like an ISP could run this as an open, unprotected service. The legal rammifications to them of becoming more actively involved in torrenting are monstrous.
I would like to see the Firefox dev team collaborate with Adobe to fix their PDF viewer. I have worked in both the academic and corporate world, and one thing which is common between both is that everybody makes heavy use of PDF. Waiting two solid minutes for Firefox to try to render a PDF (which might or might not actually render at all) is completely unacceptable, and it's the primary "deal-breaker" behind why my office uses IE. The only two things I would change about Firefox are: 1) reduce the memory footprint and CPU overhead, and 2) fix PDFs. Both of these should be the real priority, not adding more features to an already full-featured browser.
That is awfully untrue. In fact, you can see the result of cross-pollination in your local supermarket this very day. Ever hear of the tangelo? How about the pluot? Or the marionberry? Or the olallieberry?
Concisely put, the relationship is the same nomatter what units you use. For example, "E" in this case is energy, defined in Joules, where a Joule is (approximately for comparison) the amount of force required to lift 1 kilogram of mass up by 10 centimeters
In Imperial measurements, the relation would be identical, except for semantic differences. The closets unit of measurement in the Imperial system to the Joule the foot-pound, which is the amount of force required to lift 1 pound of material up by 1 foot (a Joule is equal to 0.737 foot-pounds).
If you expressed E=mc^2 in terms of Imperial terms, it would be the same except that E would be in foot-pounds, m would be in pounds, and C would be in feet per second. So the numbers would change, but not the relationship.
You act like merchandising and product promotion are something new. Need I remind you that Star Wars even had its own Breakfast Cereal? And let's not even talk about the toys, the TV specials, the books, the games, the crisps, and so-on.
If I recall correctly, people who have been blind their whole lives can never really 'learn' to see, after age 3 or so. At least, not on anywhere near the same level that people can see naturally, even assuming that they had an absolutely perfect prothesis. Who this will benefit are people who have went blind at some point during their adult life due to injury, glaucoma, diabetes (yes, it can make you go blind), drinking too much rubbing alcohol, or something similar.
Ratings are based on the Nielsen survey, and on usage statistics reported back by your cable box. Much more heavily on the latter than the former, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't argue that, but PDF operability should be number one on the dev team's list in my opinion. I did desktop support for my university all the way through college. We installed Firefox as the default browser on most computers, and the number one complaint we heard was that "the new browser won't open PDFs correctly". This is a big deal to people (like me) who do a lot of web-based research, including all of those professors, grad students, engineers, et. al who have subscriptions to paper or journal repository websites.
Foxit is a great PDF reader, but I very much prefer opening PDF links in a tab. A lot of times when I'm browsing academic papers or websites, I don't necessarily know whether I am going to get a PDF link or a website. And when I'm opening a bunch of tabs from Google so that I can then click through and read them all, I don't want to open 5-10 instances of Foxit. It also comes up in a separate window, which means I'm just as likely to forget about having ever even opened those links if I did it in the midst of a bunch of others.
I am a Firefox user, but it absolutely _astounds_ me that the devs still can't manage to make their browser work well with Adobe's PDF plugin in Windows. In this day and age, trying to open a PDF should not take 30 seconds - 1 min to render, and even if it does it also shouldn't freeze the rest of the browser up.
I have had to go into my task manage and kill the Acrobat plugin in order to save my browser session many times. This problem has been present in Firefox all the way back to its Netscape days, and on every computer and installation of Adobe I've ever used. It has never been present in IE.
How is it that even with PDF becoming an ISO standard, the dev team _still_ can't make their browser play nice with Acrobat?
It might be that I'm not a particularly good student, but I've never really been able to learn from textbooks unless I already had at least some background knowledge about the subject I was studying. I'm a practicing electronics engineer, and I find that textbooks are a great reference. I also enjoy reading textbooks written on areas where I have some knowledge, but not enough.
That being said, learning something like electronics or signal processing completely from a textbook would be really tough for me. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think the original poster would be much better off taking a class or two than he would be trying to slug his way through something like the Art of Electronics.
I would like to make a plug for your local community college, if you live in a reasonably-sized city. Most community colleges offer a couple of basic-level electronics classes, which teach you basic circuit theory. Books (either eBooks or paper ones) like Misconceptions About 'Electricity' are sort of interesting from a physics perspective, but they don't really offer much insight into electronics. In fact, many of the logical assumptions taught to electrical engineers _aren't_ true, strictly speaking, but are 'true enough' and much easier to understand.
If you're looking for someplace where you can learn about your basic circuit elements (resistors, capacitors, op-amps, etc) a real dyed-in-the-wool intro electronics course might be just what you're craving.
Except not really - all the RIAA and MPAA really do is supply entertainment. Movies, music, these things are just luxuries. If the entire recording industry and every since CD in the world disappeared tomorrow, my life wouldn't really be very different. This is also true for movies and TV (although TV stations aren't really getting into this whole anti-piracy thing). Heck, my life might even be better! I'd have less reason to put off doing the things I need to do and more reason to do the things I want to do.
You don't like the RIAA? Just stop listening to music! It's not a very big deal really. I can't figure out where or why we as a society decided that we had to be surrounded by constant entertainment 24/7.
After reading through the Corel cache of it, I can't help but wonder how all of these peripherals affect the battery life of the EEPC. It doesn't look like this guy built in any way to turn the devices _off_ when they aren't in use, which means they probably draw an additional 4 or 5 watts of power continuously. In a laptop PC that might draw 15 watts by itself, that's a significant power drain.
AC power has two fundamental and distinct advantages over DC power.
1) Is is easier to generate large amounts of it. All of our power plant technology to date except for solar and geothermal works by using mechanical energy (often in the form of steam produced by heat, such as in a nuclear plant) to rotate large magnets inside of a generator. This creates alternating current by its very nature. High-power DC generators are pretty much impossible to design. Thus, in order to generate a DC level one must first generate an AC current and then filter it through one of a few methods to attain some DC level. This is a highly wasteful process at best. For example - your car has an alternator even though all of the electricity it uses is direct-current. If there was any reasonable way to generate DC power directly why would manufacturers bother with using an alternator?
2) Our power distribution system is pretty old. Some parts of our grid have been in place for over 100 years. At the time that our grid was constructed there were no ways to convert a low-level DC voltage into a high-level one at all, and there were no even remotely energy-efficient ways to convert high-level DC voltage to low-level. There weren't switching regulators back then. There weren't even transistors back then. We can't even do it _now_ with the same efficiency that we can AC power. The only way there was at that time to step down a DC voltage was to dissipate (waste) all of the unused power. By contrast, AC voltage can be very easily stepped up or down with minimal losses through the use of transformers.
3) AC power is not distributed at 120VAC, it is distributed at many kilovolts. One can also carry as many as 5 or 6 phases of AC power over the same line, leading to a significantly higher throughput power carried through the wire than a DC system could ever provide, even after cable capacitance losses.
Interesting point, but DC and AC? You've got to be joking. Alternating current is what makes a national power distribution network even possible. There is really no comparison at all - direct current is not viable for transmitting electricity across any appreciable distance. Take a E&M or transmission theory class if you want to know more about it.
You're correct, strictly speaking. Any computer we would have great difficulty translating an eloquent speech into another language. However, we're not talking about eloquent speeches and love letters here, we're talking about factual communication between US soldiers and Iraqi constituents. As long as it was understood by both parties that they had to speak literally and with clear meaning, that it well within the realm of possible.
One of the things which has always bugged me about reading text on an e-reader, PDA, or similar device is the lack of multiple screens. I read pretty quickly, which means that I sometimes gloss over sentences or entire paragraphs, and it's nice to be able to glance back to the previous page immediately to pick up some detail that I might have missed. For technical publications like textbooks, this is pretty much essential.
Features that would get me to buy one of these:
1) Two side-to-side screens, similar to a traditional book
2) Some serious scratch resistance on these things
3) Longer battery life. Instead of wasting power on a CPU that can run an MP3 player, how about designing a product that shuts off entirely except when changing pages?
4) Some way to skip a lot of pages at once.
5) Some really slick OCR/PDF reflow software. I agree that PDF is impractical as an ebook format, so what we need is a really good OCR program that will convert PDFs into flowable text.
6) Low price. I would pay $300 or so, I think, if it worked well and did everything I wanted it to do. Sony could lower costs, unnecessary size, and battery usage substantially by removing every scrap of electronics aside from the e-reader part.
Take all of these
I thought that 3G was short for third-generation. Boy, it sure is good that somebody's breaking that fourth-generation barrier!
IANAL, but it doesn't really seem like an ISP could run this as an open, unprotected service. The legal rammifications to them of becoming more actively involved in torrenting are monstrous.
I would like to see the Firefox dev team collaborate with Adobe to fix their PDF viewer. I have worked in both the academic and corporate world, and one thing which is common between both is that everybody makes heavy use of PDF. Waiting two solid minutes for Firefox to try to render a PDF (which might or might not actually render at all) is completely unacceptable, and it's the primary "deal-breaker" behind why my office uses IE. The only two things I would change about Firefox are: 1) reduce the memory footprint and CPU overhead, and 2) fix PDFs. Both of these should be the real priority, not adding more features to an already full-featured browser.
That is awfully untrue. In fact, you can see the result of cross-pollination in your local supermarket this very day. Ever hear of the tangelo? How about the pluot? Or the marionberry?
Or the olallieberry?
NNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!111
I am federal FBI inspector and I will have to see some of this so-call "Deviant Porn" for Thorough Inspection.
In that case, "I'd hit it."
Concisely put, the relationship is the same nomatter what units you use. For example, "E" in this case is energy, defined in Joules, where a Joule is (approximately for comparison) the amount of force required to lift 1 kilogram of mass up by 10 centimeters
In Imperial measurements, the relation would be identical, except for semantic differences. The closets unit of measurement in the Imperial system to the Joule the foot-pound, which is the amount of force required to lift 1 pound of material up by 1 foot (a Joule is equal to 0.737 foot-pounds).
If you expressed E=mc^2 in terms of Imperial terms, it would be the same except that E would be in foot-pounds, m would be in pounds, and C would be in feet per second. So the numbers would change, but not the relationship.
How about a continuous vibration mode? :)
Seriously now, did anybody really expect that it would?
You act like merchandising and product promotion are something new. Need I remind you that Star Wars even had its own Breakfast Cereal? And let's not even talk about the toys, the TV specials, the books, the games, the crisps, and so-on.
If I recall correctly, people who have been blind their whole lives can never really 'learn' to see, after age 3 or so. At least, not on anywhere near the same level that people can see naturally, even assuming that they had an absolutely perfect prothesis. Who this will benefit are people who have went blind at some point during their adult life due to injury, glaucoma, diabetes (yes, it can make you go blind), drinking too much rubbing alcohol, or something similar.
Didn't we learn anything from our 'bout with the Replicators the first time around? Only an ancient weapon was able to stop them.
:)
Wait, what do you mean it's just a television show?
Ratings are based on the Nielsen survey, and on usage statistics reported back by your cable box. Much more heavily on the latter than the former, actually.