Wouldn't scantron sheets (you know, the forms that require you to fill out little holes with a number 2 pencil) be your best bet? Considering this is an NIH funded project, I am assuming that you're working either at a university or at the NIH (with many universities nearby). I don't know of one college, university, or medical school that does not have the facility and equipment to scan in those scantron sheets for their exams or applications. I am certain this is the best option for you, since even corporations are still using them for stuff like proxy voting for the next stockholders meeting---really, if it's cost effective for public corporations, I don't see why they aren't for you (unless I'm missing something).
Go to the source man! I generally refuse to make any comment on any scientific study until I've read the publication. Those of you submitting stories on a new biomedical science publication, please remember to at least point to the PubMedabstract of the paper. For those of you wanting to comment on the study, please read it, before doing so. If any of you can provide free access to the paper, please post it here! Thanks.
I don't think that I'm far off by saying that a large proportion of bugs go unfixed because vendors can easily avert having to address the problem by saying that it's a result of someone else's piece of software on the system. And when the problem is finally pinpointed, the changes needed to rectify the situation probably lies on one specific company (it shall remain nameless, but we all know what company this is--it is the company with the largest desktop OS user base), and they sit on it for ages before something is remedied, if at all. How many times have we heard on slashdot, "I sent them info about such-and-such bug and even a potential solution! And received no word in reply, nor indication that a patch would be made available."
Imagine if the software industry's mode of business shifted from one of "buying a product" to one of "purchasing a SERVICE." For me, I'd rather pay for a service to ensure that I have all the tools necessary to do my job right, without worrying about instability, than to have a product with all the supposed bells-and-whistles that I can use without problems only 50% of the time.
I agree. I'm not interested in encoding DVDs, rather, I'm more interested in encoding my shows. If there was an affordable encoder, I'd re-evaluate the idea of rolling-my-own personal video recorder (PVR), something like TiVo, but without the entangling costs and restrictions for trading.
will it take for someone here to post something about the relatedness of this story with the difficulty in catching on camera Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and giant sea creatures of the deep?
Follow the instructions on changing the interface font from the OpenOffice.org font guide. Be sure to add the changes (with the checkmark) and check the two boxes next to the newly added changes (you'll see what I'm saying when you do it). That should do it for your interface font.
For your other font ugliness problems (i.e. ugly fonts in the documents), the reason this is occurring is because true type fonts are not installed correctly. There are two remedies to this: 1) Do what the font guide from OpenOffice.org tells you (the hard way) or 2) if you have Linux Mandrake installed, run "Drakfont" and add the true type fonts found in your windows partition (c:\windows\fonts -or-/mnt/windows/windows/fonts directory, or if you don't have a windows install partition, just copy all the fonts in that directory from a friend's windows system to a temporary directory and have Drakfont load the true type fonts from that temp dir).
All this in just 10 minutes? Wow, talk about instant gratification.
On a side note, the article says:
Michaelson said his team, made up of people from around the country, had an original launch date of Sept. 26, 2001, but pushed it back to June following the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11.
How much are you willing to bet that Tom Ridge's folks are keeping a keen eye on their team? Whatever they learn about rocketry must give the feds the willies.
If you plan on doing lots of gaming, graphics-intensive, and CPU-intensive computing, then by all means, building your own will save you more money because you get to pick and choose the quality parts at a competitive price. However, if you plan to use it for non-resource intensive applications for surfing the web, word-processing, balancing your checkbook, or creating a powerpoint presentation, then save your time and get a system from Dell, Compgeeks or even one of those Microtel systems from Walmart that slashdot talked about recently.
Personally, for my uses, I'm use the computer for the latter purpose and have been quite happy running Linux on a cheap Cyrix 300 MHz system. I do lot of surfing, writing, and spreadsheet analysis with StarOffice (actually, I've just upgraded to OpenOffice 1.0). However, I have built a number of systems in the past and have found these links are a must:
Techbargains (if you are patient enough to wait for that perfect machine to be affordable)
Your time is really worth the money, and when it comes down to it, those cheap systems from Dell, Compgeeks, or Walmart are actually worth the heartache that you may encounter later when you find out that the motherboard you bought has spotty USB support in Windows 98. And if you add up how much you'd spend to make a comparable system, you'll find out that you're only saving a miniscule amount, if that. But again, if you wanted a high-end machine, then building your own will definitely be worth the time and effort to find the right parts and putting them together.
But in the near term, as the Hollywood experience shows, Linux is gaining at the expense of proprietary versions of Unix.
In my opinion, while the adoption of Linux by large corporations (like Disney) affirms the validity of Linux for professional uses, Bill Gates is clearly not losing any sleep over this one, as the article notes. As much as I'd like to see a decrease in dominance by MS led by Linux, I'm not so sure I'd like to see less choices in *nix OS's in the process.
If she's in an apartment, you can always use more dishes/cookware. Food is also good.
Actually, "if she's in an apartment" without broadband already provided, get her either DSL or cable internet. God knows how often she'll need it to do a google search late, the night before a term paper or exam and can't wait for the slow ass modem to load up the page. Believe me, this is much more important than food when she's procrastinating.
I'll bet Peter Parker's adventure surpasses the upcoming opening weekend of Attack of the Clones and teaches George Lucas something about the power and nature of myth.
And I'll bet 10 to 1 that the Matrix 2 will open far better than either of these two movies, and perhaps for the same reasons Katz espouses in this article.
Re:Out of the woodwork :)
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 1
Mod this comment up so Cherian can see! IANAL either, but if you can pull this case into Federal court, BB will most likely, try to settle rather than set foot in court. Risky play, especially if the little guy has to foot his lawyer fees for litigation in Federal court, but might be well worth it.
Also check out pybliographer (as I have already mentioned in an earlier post) for those of you who strictly run linux (like I do). Hopefully Z39.50 functionality will be integrated soon so that you can search the LoC and other libraries.
There is an open source bibliography management program called pybliographer that will eventually (I hope, as I am the one who is working on part of it) have Z39.50 client functionality. If you are a programmer who knows Python (or wish to learn), please stop by the website, read the discussions and source code (it's really not that bad, it only took me a few months to pick it up), and maybe help out? From what I've been reading in the mailing list is that the main developers are working on a more robust way to store the data--eventually leading to perhaps a share-able database, maybe even adaptable enough to become the program that the parent post is alluding to.
At the risk of getting flamed by KDE enthusiasts here, if you are using X windows, I would have to say that you should look into using window managers other than KDE (or even Gnome for that matter). Although KDE and Gnome very pretty, I still prefer to use just plain Enlightenment. If you want to run KDE or Gnome apps (which I still can and do), just install the libraries. I've removed all my window managers from my install and am just running a clean E desktop. My screen is not cluttered with window bars and icons; my apps are accessible through a pop-up menu with a click of the mouse; and best of all, it's still very fast to login to my account/desktop (faster than windows 95)--and this is all on a dinky Cyrix II 333MHz system that has uptimes on the average of 30-40 days before I reboot for a kernel upgrade or some other system setting change.
I know this issue at hand is a bit offtopic, but the parent post has opened up pandora's box. I'm not familiar with the law, hence I'm replying to drix for some answers.
My first question is: most of your comment is on the onus of/. to cross check references, but what liabilities are there on the original poster, i.e. for this posted story, the user dotslash? He/she was the one who submitted the story and wrote what we see in italics.
My second question: does journalism ethics really apply to a website that, distilled down, is really a moderated bulletin board service. My best analogy to what I see slashdot as (now, correct me if I'm completely wrong), is the local corkboard/kiosk/bulletin board at your local University. Is it the University's responsibility to police what is thumbtacked on their walls that is really meant to function as a service for the community? I don't know about you, but I've seen my share of libelous, even criminal posts, on local kiosks.
Drix, I kinda get what you're saying, but if you can provide me with a hypothetical situation that could get [/.] absolutely nailed sooner or later if they continue to print what are essentially lies accusing other entities of breaking the law, maybe it would be clearer to me.
5.2 already cost $40 for business use. Compare this to MS Office which is over $200 for any use. Charging say, $40-$50 for StarOffice isn't a bad thing, particularly if doing this means they are able to place more copies of StaOffice 6.0 on the shelf beside MS Ofice XP.
Ahhh...but what happens to those who buy MS in bulk and get it for less than $40? I can get my Office XP for $25, for academic use, no-holds barred version on CD. At least when it was free I had a no-brainer choice, now I'm going to stick with Office XP as it will be the more economic choice. If you don't believe that I can get it for this cheap, check it out here.
I've seen a few comments asking where to find old equipment and one comment made a great suggestion--the local university. Those of you who are living in the Washington DC metropolitan area should be happy to know that the University of Maryland, College Park hocks their stuff to the public. Their operation is called Terp Traders. I just checked and they had a few DECs available ($50 or less). Goto Inventory-->Data processing-->CPU. Sorry, I know some of you are terps yourselves and wanted to keep this a secret all to yourselves, but I'm a karma whore. Enjoy! And, go Terps Basketball!
I've certainly been told that Elsevier (another European publisher) is nothing short of a cash cow.
Let me add Science Direct, Wiley, and BioMedNet to the list. It's make you wonder why so many publishers are in this line of business? Just think about it: if they're not making money, they wouldn't be doing this. I agree with you that they're making an exorbitant amount of money. The world of peer-reviewed science does not need this type of competition--in other words, they don't need dozens of systems of online publishing, all of which require separate login and passwords to access the articles and don't forget, they also require separate fees.
Are you just burning audio or are you also including powerpoint slides or images? I'm also a student, and the lectures we have (1 hour lectures at a time) are recorded as wav files and then encoded as mp3 files at a 16K bitrate (trust me, I've listened to them and they work fine for lecture audio) and at that bitrate, the techs managed to squeeze 1 hour in 5 MB's (well, they also squeezed the sample rate down during recording too). That's the size of a regular music track at 192K bitrate, 44.1KHz samplerate--in other words, just the perfect size to publish online and download. Add less than 1 MB for the powerpoint file and you have enough info for most of the students to skip class and just listen to audio while flipping through the slides at home. Let me emphasize again that this is already implemented at my medical school and lots of students skip class due to this feature.;-)
Ok, my question is: why spend the money on CD duplicators? I think it's more worthwhile to spend it on a computer station with all necessary drives for all available media that the students use. You can even turn it into a webserver if it has fast internet access. That way, all the lectures will be on this station and the students would only need to go to it and pop in their zip disk, jaz disk, cd-r or even better, a cd-rw, and then be able to copy what lectures they want. So, I think rather than spend your time trying to build the cd-duplicator, spend your time on writing the software/program that is running on the station that will allow the student to easily choose what they want and then instantly hit the "Burn" or "Copy" button and copy it to their media. In my view, this station is a much better use of your time.
Actually, if you wanted to make it a truly killer app, then instead of copying the mp3's and the powerpoint files separately, have them integrated with, say, a macromedia program that the students can run independently (without the need of either a mp3 player or even powerpoint) and it'll automatically play the audio and show the slides cued to the audio (no need for the students to guess which slide the prof is on).
But then again, I could be totally offtopic and your reasons behind building this cd-copying system far outweighs my suggestion. Anyway, these are just my thoughts.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't scantron sheets (you know, the forms that require you to fill out little holes with a number 2 pencil) be your best bet? Considering this is an NIH funded project, I am assuming that you're working either at a university or at the NIH (with many universities nearby). I don't know of one college, university, or medical school that does not have the facility and equipment to scan in those scantron sheets for their exams or applications. I am certain this is the best option for you, since even corporations are still using them for stuff like proxy voting for the next stockholders meeting---really, if it's cost effective for public corporations, I don't see why they aren't for you (unless I'm missing something).
Go to the source man! I generally refuse to make any comment on any scientific study until I've read the publication. Those of you submitting stories on a new biomedical science publication, please remember to at least point to the PubMed abstract of the paper. For those of you wanting to comment on the study, please read it, before doing so. If any of you can provide free access to the paper, please post it here! Thanks.
I don't think that I'm far off by saying that a large proportion of bugs go unfixed because vendors can easily avert having to address the problem by saying that it's a result of someone else's piece of software on the system. And when the problem is finally pinpointed, the changes needed to rectify the situation probably lies on one specific company (it shall remain nameless, but we all know what company this is--it is the company with the largest desktop OS user base), and they sit on it for ages before something is remedied, if at all. How many times have we heard on slashdot, "I sent them info about such-and-such bug and even a potential solution! And received no word in reply, nor indication that a patch would be made available."
Imagine if the software industry's mode of business shifted from one of "buying a product" to one of "purchasing a SERVICE." For me, I'd rather pay for a service to ensure that I have all the tools necessary to do my job right, without worrying about instability, than to have a product with all the supposed bells-and-whistles that I can use without problems only 50% of the time.
I agree. I'm not interested in encoding DVDs, rather, I'm more interested in encoding my shows. If there was an affordable encoder, I'd re-evaluate the idea of rolling-my-own personal video recorder (PVR), something like TiVo, but without the entangling costs and restrictions for trading.
The article IS from Ballllmore, hun. 'Nuff said.
will it take for someone here to post something about the relatedness of this story with the difficulty in catching on camera Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and giant sea creatures of the deep?
Follow the instructions on changing the interface font from the OpenOffice.org font guide. Be sure to add the changes (with the checkmark) and check the two boxes next to the newly added changes (you'll see what I'm saying when you do it). That should do it for your interface font.
For your other font ugliness problems (i.e. ugly fonts in the documents), the reason this is occurring is because true type fonts are not installed correctly. There are two remedies to this: 1) Do what the font guide from OpenOffice.org tells you (the hard way) or 2) if you have Linux Mandrake installed, run "Drakfont" and add the true type fonts found in your windows partition (c:\windows\fonts -or- /mnt/windows/windows/fonts directory, or if you don't have a windows install partition, just copy all the fonts in that directory from a friend's windows system to a temporary directory and have Drakfont load the true type fonts from that temp dir).
Don't forget to mention that you are using OpenOffice to write to them.
On a side note, the article says:
Michaelson said his team, made up of people from around the country, had an original launch date of Sept. 26, 2001, but pushed it back to June following the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11.
How much are you willing to bet that Tom Ridge's folks are keeping a keen eye on their team? Whatever they learn about rocketry must give the feds the willies.
Personally, for my uses, I'm use the computer for the latter purpose and have been quite happy running Linux on a cheap Cyrix 300 MHz system. I do lot of surfing, writing, and spreadsheet analysis with StarOffice (actually, I've just upgraded to OpenOffice 1.0). However, I have built a number of systems in the past and have found these links are a must:
Pricegrabber
Pricewatch
CNET's price comparison site
Techbargains (if you are patient enough to wait for that perfect machine to be affordable)
Your time is really worth the money, and when it comes down to it, those cheap systems from Dell, Compgeeks, or Walmart are actually worth the heartache that you may encounter later when you find out that the motherboard you bought has spotty USB support in Windows 98. And if you add up how much you'd spend to make a comparable system, you'll find out that you're only saving a miniscule amount, if that. But again, if you wanted a high-end machine, then building your own will definitely be worth the time and effort to find the right parts and putting them together.
But in the near term, as the Hollywood experience shows, Linux is gaining at the expense of proprietary versions of Unix.
In my opinion, while the adoption of Linux by large corporations (like Disney) affirms the validity of Linux for professional uses, Bill Gates is clearly not losing any sleep over this one, as the article notes. As much as I'd like to see a decrease in dominance by MS led by Linux, I'm not so sure I'd like to see less choices in *nix OS's in the process.
http://www.pcpowerzone.co.uk/reviews.php?id=106&pa ge=1
http://www.vr-zone.com/reviews/Shuttle/SS40G/
And look for it to be sold soon here:
Newegg
Actually, "if she's in an apartment" without broadband already provided, get her either DSL or cable internet. God knows how often she'll need it to do a google search late, the night before a term paper or exam and can't wait for the slow ass modem to load up the page. Believe me, this is much more important than food when she's procrastinating.
And I'll bet 10 to 1 that the Matrix 2 will open far better than either of these two movies, and perhaps for the same reasons Katz espouses in this article.
Mod this comment up so Cherian can see! IANAL either, but if you can pull this case into Federal court, BB will most likely, try to settle rather than set foot in court. Risky play, especially if the little guy has to foot his lawyer fees for litigation in Federal court, but might be well worth it.
Also check out pybliographer (as I have already mentioned in an earlier post) for those of you who strictly run linux (like I do). Hopefully Z39.50 functionality will be integrated soon so that you can search the LoC and other libraries.
There is an open source bibliography management program called pybliographer that will eventually (I hope, as I am the one who is working on part of it) have Z39.50 client functionality. If you are a programmer who knows Python (or wish to learn), please stop by the website, read the discussions and source code (it's really not that bad, it only took me a few months to pick it up), and maybe help out? From what I've been reading in the mailing list is that the main developers are working on a more robust way to store the data--eventually leading to perhaps a share-able database, maybe even adaptable enough to become the program that the parent post is alluding to.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22833&cid=2458 224
At the risk of getting flamed by KDE enthusiasts here, if you are using X windows, I would have to say that you should look into using window managers other than KDE (or even Gnome for that matter). Although KDE and Gnome very pretty, I still prefer to use just plain Enlightenment. If you want to run KDE or Gnome apps (which I still can and do), just install the libraries. I've removed all my window managers from my install and am just running a clean E desktop. My screen is not cluttered with window bars and icons; my apps are accessible through a pop-up menu with a click of the mouse; and best of all, it's still very fast to login to my account/desktop (faster than windows 95)--and this is all on a dinky Cyrix II 333MHz system that has uptimes on the average of 30-40 days before I reboot for a kernel upgrade or some other system setting change.
I've posted the answer before here. Doesn't seem like anyone read it.
My first question is: most of your comment is on the onus of /. to cross check references, but what liabilities are there on the original poster, i.e. for this posted story, the user dotslash? He/she was the one who submitted the story and wrote what we see in italics.
My second question: does journalism ethics really apply to a website that, distilled down, is really a moderated bulletin board service. My best analogy to what I see slashdot as (now, correct me if I'm completely wrong), is the local corkboard/kiosk/bulletin board at your local University. Is it the University's responsibility to police what is thumbtacked on their walls that is really meant to function as a service for the community? I don't know about you, but I've seen my share of libelous, even criminal posts, on local kiosks.
Drix, I kinda get what you're saying, but if you can provide me with a hypothetical situation that could get [/.] absolutely nailed sooner or later if they continue to print what are essentially lies accusing other entities of breaking the law, maybe it would be clearer to me.
Ahhh...but what happens to those who buy MS in bulk and get it for less than $40? I can get my Office XP for $25, for academic use, no-holds barred version on CD. At least when it was free I had a no-brainer choice, now I'm going to stick with Office XP as it will be the more economic choice. If you don't believe that I can get it for this cheap, check it out here.
I've seen a few comments asking where to find old equipment and one comment made a great suggestion--the local university. Those of you who are living in the Washington DC metropolitan area should be happy to know that the University of Maryland, College Park hocks their stuff to the public. Their operation is called Terp Traders. I just checked and they had a few DECs available ($50 or less). Goto Inventory-->Data processing-->CPU. Sorry, I know some of you are terps yourselves and wanted to keep this a secret all to yourselves, but I'm a karma whore. Enjoy! And, go Terps Basketball!
Let me add Science Direct, Wiley, and BioMedNet to the list. It's make you wonder why so many publishers are in this line of business? Just think about it: if they're not making money, they wouldn't be doing this. I agree with you that they're making an exorbitant amount of money. The world of peer-reviewed science does not need this type of competition--in other words, they don't need dozens of systems of online publishing, all of which require separate login and passwords to access the articles and don't forget, they also require separate fees.
Ok, my question is: why spend the money on CD duplicators? I think it's more worthwhile to spend it on a computer station with all necessary drives for all available media that the students use. You can even turn it into a webserver if it has fast internet access. That way, all the lectures will be on this station and the students would only need to go to it and pop in their zip disk, jaz disk, cd-r or even better, a cd-rw, and then be able to copy what lectures they want. So, I think rather than spend your time trying to build the cd-duplicator, spend your time on writing the software/program that is running on the station that will allow the student to easily choose what they want and then instantly hit the "Burn" or "Copy" button and copy it to their media. In my view, this station is a much better use of your time.
Actually, if you wanted to make it a truly killer app, then instead of copying the mp3's and the powerpoint files separately, have them integrated with, say, a macromedia program that the students can run independently (without the need of either a mp3 player or even powerpoint) and it'll automatically play the audio and show the slides cued to the audio (no need for the students to guess which slide the prof is on).
But then again, I could be totally offtopic and your reasons behind building this cd-copying system far outweighs my suggestion. Anyway, these are just my thoughts.