Keeping in mind that an oscilloscope consists of basically three parts; data acquisition, acquisition control, and display / data capture, using the PC for the later two pieces works well. I have used and I'm currently using devices from Link Instruments (http://www.linkinstruments.com) that provide a USB connection to the control and acquisition pod and allow for a lot of display and capture options using the power of the PC. Additionally, some of these units also have an integrated logic analyzer, and sometimes the combination can be used to provide complex triggers that neither could provide alone. I've been in engineering for more than 35 years and although some of the high end units from Agilent, Tek, or LeCroy may out perform these pods (for $15K+), for most general engineering the USB units work well. Since most of us travel with our laptops,, the little module simply drops into the bag like any other accessory making sure you always have a scope around when you need it. I am not affiliated with Link in any way, other than as a satisfied customer.
I've been visually impaired (not blind) for nearly 6 years. Add a second monitor (still cheaper than the large 28" plus monitors), enable extended desktop, drag the magnifier onto the second monitor, an re-size to fit. Leave the main monitor at a reasonable high resolution. This allows relative positioning on the main screen, with the details on the magnified screen. There are also some free and inexpensive text to speech programs available that can help. I have several friends with great vision who use the TTS programs to quickly read larger documents. No eye strain at all.
If you think converting corn to cow is inefficient, then converting corn to ethanol to add to the gasoline to make the corn is just plain crazy. But then again, since the gubment subsidizes the ethanol at $0.50 per gallon, maybe it makes economic sense to the corn producer. Ethanol from sugar beets makes a lot more sense, but there isn't a large sugar beet lobby in DC.
live in a rural section of Ohio and we don't heat our barn, granary, or garage. A standard CFL at 10 or 20 degrees F just doesn't cut it. But the city slickers with their heads up their butts in DC don't understand the real world, and probably never will. I for one will be stocking up sometime before the ban goes into effect.
Unless of course you are still trying to get that grant.
I also don't think there's an evil shadowy cabal. Just general scientific ignorance among the masses (at least here in the U.S.) which extends right through some of our most ignorant citizens who work in mass media. Global Warming Melting Ice Caps, makes a much better headline than Global Warming Not A Problem, Keep on Driving that SUV.
It's the classic Man Bites Dog scenario, added to lack of sciense knowledge.
Additionally, treaties like Kyoto, which BTW Clinton & Gore failed to get passed on their watch, give enormous power to governments and environmental groups and their sympathizers.
Never underestimate the combined power of Money, Power, & Ignorance
"No. It hasn't been for a good solid decade now, and you'd have to be an asshole and an idiot to believe otherwise."
So any scientist (and there are plenty) that disagrees with you is an "asshole and an idiot"? What an open minded way to start your rant. There are plenty of peer reviewed studies that don't agree with you that global warming exists, or if it does, that we humans are the cause (for instance, what about increased solar output). Check out the abstracts AND the bibliographies @ http://ff.org/centers/csspp/misc/index.html for a good starting point. Speaking then of idiots, you bring up Al Gore (the famous scientist with no political agenda) discussing articles from unnamed scientific journals and mass media (lot of scientists in the journalism community no doubt). I'd like to see the published list of these journals. I suspect however it is not available. Keeping in mind the sad state of affairs in journalism and the general public when it comes to math & science education, what a bunch of journalists or citizens believe shouldn't be given all that much credibility. Tine to do a little research yourself instead of casting epithets and parroting the words of others.
Actually, if you know anything about RAID, a larger number of smaller (within reason) drives is actually more desirable, since the data is spread accross more drives and the loss of any one drive will mean only a small loss of data. This makes the rebuild process significantly faster. And, in the case of a catastrophic failure, much less data loss occurs. Also, with proper drive management (primarily motor management and cache), you can save significant power. I also don't see anything wrong with buying NEW surplus drives on eBay.
I've talked numerous parents out of laptops and into desktops for their college bound kids. First of all, laptops are a big theft item on college campuses. Set it down & turn your back for a minute and you may no longer have it. Secondly a desktop may be loaded with numerous goodies that make an apartment or dorm room more livable. A large hard drive for storing music (rip all of your CD's the summer before school & you don't have them at school to be lost or stolen). A DVD drive (or a burner if you must) along with a good video card and an FM/TV card PLUS a Good set of speakers, and you have all the entertainment comforts you may need in a simple, easy to move (but a little harder to steal) package. Add a nice 17 or 19 inch flat panel and you shouldn't have any reason not to be able to do work & relax in the same room (unless you're not really serious about work anyway). A PDA or tablet PC is a nice (albeit expensive) thing for taking notes, etc. But the desktop should be adequate for most things.
In the signature panel of my card I wrote SEE PHOTO ID in large block letters. On average I'm asked about 20% of the time for my ID. I always thank the person asking. The other 80% of the time I usually make some wise ass remark to the cashier to show that I am displeased. I'm not sure it actually helps but at least I feel better about it.
There is a lot of good information available @ http://science.nasa.gov/. They have stories on various subjects with mp3 versions available for download. OTOH, as a visually impaired engineer I rely on audio geek information. Find a tutorial or other geek information online (and there is a lot of it) and convert it to audio. For Windoze there is a free text to speech reader available @ http://www.naturalreaders.com/. This software allows a document (.doc,.pdf,.txt, or a web [age) to be read to a file as a.wav file. From there you can convert it for your own needs. On Linux you can use Festival to create similar files. In this way the web is your world.
I've done this very thing; however, not all kids will be "into" math and logic. Some may be more mechanically inclined. SO, instead of merely talking about software specifically, talk about engineering in general. If you are in a large room (such as a gymnasium) you could point to the roof support structures and ask why that big roof doesn't fall down. Tear apart an old cell phone and talk about the engineering that goes into that simple, ubiquitous, common gadget.
Engineers included Materials (pick the correct plastic), Mechanical & Human Factors (layout the case for strength and usability), Digital Hardware Engineers (design the microprocessor, keypad, display, etc.), Radio Frequency Hardware Engineer (for the radio transmitter & receiver), Chemical Engineer (to make that long lasting rechargeable battery) and finally the Software Engineer (to make the phone hardware do all of the work).
This simple exercise will show how much engineering goes into such a simple device, and that there are enough engineering disciplines for everyone's interest.
BTW, the definition I use for engineering in general is the use of math and science to solve puzzles. A very elementary definition.
"A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct."
So not only is a stupid idea patentable, somehow my cat is able to see "invisible light".
I'm from the government and I'm here to help (you patent some really stupid idea)
This is basically an old question. Back about 15 years ago we were using numerous mini-computers and ran into a similar problem with DEC VAX series machines. The C compiler for the MicroVAX and our "large and powerful" (for that era anyway) VAX 11/780 utilized exactly the same binary on exactly the same media, but the cost difference was something like 3-4X. Seems we could expect much better performance from the "big iron" and had to pay accordingly. Never mind the additional $$$ we spent with DEC to purchase the machine. This is a capitalist marketplace and some one will offer the better solution at the best cost. I have no doubt that this too will sort itself out.
Lets see. Bad guy gets a normal working firearm on the black market. Confronts a NJ police officer who has forgotten to change the battery in his firearm (or computer blue screens or it smart gun equivalent). Police officer is shot & perp gets away. At this point the pinhead politicians in NJ will then scream that the police officer being shot was the result of the other 49 states and all of the EVIL(tm) gun owners. Rushing a new and immature technology to a market that can result in life & death is just plain foolish. As a certified firearms instructor who has trained more than 2000 people in the last decade, I can assure you that most properly trained & law abiding firearms owners do not misuse their firearms.
I've used Turbo Tax for years for a rather complex set of tax forms (A, C, F, and others). What I'm paying for is time savings, keeping the forms and calculations up to date (they are slightly different every year), and a guarantee. If TT screws up my calculations and I pay the wrong amount, Intuit has some responsibility. An OSS solution fir a once a year thing that changes significantly every year, and the failure (even minor calculation bugs) could cost you lots of money or in the worst case, jail time. Think I'll drop the $20.00. OTOH, if this is important to you, you could always start a new project on SourceForge.
It's a simple matter of money. The local government will have anything you are willing to pay for. For the most part local governments look to get the most bang for the buck, and therefore police and emergency services plan and train for the most common incidents. If every fire station had HAZMAT equipment, communications equipment, etc. the cost would be prohibitive, and people like you would most likely complain about the expensive equipment that was sitting around and collecting dust. In our county the equipment and training for non-common incidents is maintained by the local county Emergency Management Agency who supplies services to something like 10 fire districts. Our local EMA has the equipment that is needed only on rare occasions for such things as HAZMAT, and communications when the infrastructure has failed. On top of that, most of our EMA members are volunteersm with many of us licensed Hams working with Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services (RACES) and Amateur Radio Emergency Services (ARES). This volunteer activity in most places is called community service.
As an engineer of 30+ years who has recently (ine the last 2 years) become visually impaired, I have looked at, tried, and cobbled together numerous solutions. Here are my observations and recommendations. Keep in mind that Visually Impaired and blind are two different things, and with an aging baby boomer population visual impairments of one sort or another will be on the increase in the coming years. One of the Linux distro's worth watching is Oraluxhttp://www.oralux.org/, a bootable Knoppix based live CD distro that contains an audible desktop and includes braille drivers. I've had mixed luck with this distro depending on what kind of hardware you attempt to boot it on. Personally, I use two types of system configurations to access computer based resources. On my laptop (Win XP PRO) I use ZoonText http://www.aisquared.com/ which is a little expensive, but does the job well. On my desktop(s) (Win XP Pro &/or Win 98) I have a very inexpensive system. A second monitor on which I place the standard windows screen magnifier. Add Virtual Magnifying Glass http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ and Natural Voice Reader http://www.naturalreaders.com/ at a cost of $0.00/$39.95/$69.95 depending on the version. This combination works very well for a desktop system. Add Firefox, Thunderbird, Cygwin, Putty and a few other tools and you can easily use the Web and administer your Linux boxes. On the Linux boces (I have several) I share a 19" or 32" monitor via a KVM switch. This allows reasonable access to a consol. When running X-Windows you can simply add additional entries in the XF86.config (or it's equivalent). This lets you select the zoomable features provided by programs like ZoomText. There are a lot of other pieces availble for Linux (like Festival) but unfortunately none of these are available in a comprehensive, eacy to install set. This makes it hard for the non-geek to easily install & use these tools. This is one of the biggest areas that M$ Windows has it over Linux and OSS for the time being.
Habing taken 4 years of Japanese and looking at a lot of online and computer based training tools, I have a gew observations. Are you planning on simply conversational Japanese or teaching the students to read (and possibly write) the language. The biggest problem for many latin based languages (English, SPanish, etc.) students in learning an Asian language it the new symbol set. This is where I found the computer based tools to be the most useful. Drilling the symbol sets for Hiragana, KataKana, and Kanji was something that I found was very helpful. As for the rest of it, a good well written set of textbooks, a knowledgable instructor, and lots of time to practice conversationally seemed to work best for me, and my class. The textbooks I used were BTW, Japanese for Busy People by The Association for Japanese Language Teaching (AJALT), along with audio & video tapes for support.
I would I guess fall under the Talented Amateur category and had this same problem a couple of years ago. With thousands of slides and 10,000+ negatives I just wasn't getting the quality I required from flatbed adapters. I ended up finding a great Slide/Film scanner used on eBay. I just looked and there are currently at least 4 of the model I purchased, as well as other higher quality models. What I purchased was a Kodak Model 2035 Professional Film Scanner for about $200.00. It's a 6 MegaPixel (35mm only) scanner that works extremely well. I use it with VueScan (mentioned by someone else) under Windows. The downside for some folks is that it has no SANE support and it uses a SCSI interface. Not a problem for me, but possibly for some folks. Windows hasn't been a real problem since it doesn't take a killer machine to scan, and thats about all I use the Windows machine to do.
A Very interesting (but bad) idea
on
Internet Hunting
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Internet hunting could be popular with disabled hunters unable to get out in the woods or distant hunters who cannot afford a trip to Texas, Underwood said."
As a 2nd amendment supporter, a NRA life member, an NRA Certified Instructor and Training Counselor, and a Certified Hunter Education Instructor I am neither shy about nor at all against firearms ownership and use. This application of technology however; although enterprising (for someone trying to make a buck) is IMHO just stupid. Remotely firing a real gun (or is it just really good CG) is the ultimate for couch potatoes. Pointing a gun and squeezing the trigger isn't the hard work. Learningto do it with a real gun takes real skill and practice. Clicking a mouse contains none of those skills or challenges.
As for the quote above - A google search on "disabled hunting resources" yields over 200,000 hits. As a disabled (visually impaired) hunter myself, I can assure Mr. Underwood that most if not every state has resources to help disabled hunters. As an instructor I was given some training on this subject.
As for hunting in Texas, there are plenty of White Tailed Deer in many states (Here in Ohio the herd estimate is 650,000) and most of the folks I know who spend the money to hunt out of state would much rather opt for an Elk or Moose in one of the western states. It's not about killing something, it's about the total experience, and I don't think a video game cuts it.
I don't claim to be an expert on the internal politics and laws in every E.U. country, but here in the U.S. the Treaty has little to do with this president per. se. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted by the U.N. in 1992, in the early part of the first Clinton administration. In order to become a Treaty under U.S. law the president must receive support via a 2/3 majority vote of the senate. The senate (controlled by the Dems in 1992 (IIRC) voted something like 98 to 2 against in a straw vote. President Clinton did not submit the protocol, and it basically died. SO, why is it somehow President G.W. Bush who takes the heat. I heard none of this outcry during the bulk of the Clinton administration. Come on everyone, fair is fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Keeping in mind that an oscilloscope consists of basically three parts; data acquisition, acquisition control, and display / data capture, using the PC for the later two pieces works well. I have used and I'm currently using devices from Link Instruments (http://www.linkinstruments.com) that provide a USB connection to the control and acquisition pod and allow for a lot of display and capture options using the power of the PC. Additionally, some of these units also have an integrated logic analyzer, and sometimes the combination can be used to provide complex triggers that neither could provide alone. I've been in engineering for more than 35 years and although some of the high end units from Agilent, Tek, or LeCroy may out perform these pods (for $15K+), for most general engineering the USB units work well. Since most of us travel with our laptops,, the little module simply drops into the bag like any other accessory making sure you always have a scope around when you need it. I am not affiliated with Link in any way, other than as a satisfied customer.
I've been visually impaired (not blind) for nearly 6 years. Add a second monitor (still cheaper than the large 28" plus monitors), enable extended desktop, drag the magnifier onto the second monitor, an re-size to fit. Leave the main monitor at a reasonable high resolution. This allows relative positioning on the main screen, with the details on the magnified screen.
There are also some free and inexpensive text to speech programs available that can help. I have several friends with great vision who use the TTS programs to quickly read larger documents. No eye strain at all.
If you think converting corn to cow is inefficient, then converting corn to ethanol to add to the gasoline to make the corn is just plain crazy. But then again, since the gubment subsidizes the ethanol at $0.50 per gallon, maybe it makes economic sense to the corn producer. Ethanol from sugar beets makes a lot more sense, but there isn't a large sugar beet lobby in DC.
live in a rural section of Ohio and we don't heat our barn, granary, or garage. A standard CFL at 10 or 20 degrees F just doesn't cut it. But the city slickers with their heads up their butts in DC don't understand the real world, and probably never will. I for one will be stocking up sometime before the ban goes into effect.
1. The police are usually historians. They are not there to protect us.
2. The Second Amendment is the reset button on the constitution. You hope the processes all run & terminate cleanly, but sometimes . . .
Unless of course you are still trying to get that grant.
I also don't think there's an evil shadowy cabal. Just general scientific ignorance among the masses (at least here in the U.S.) which extends right through some of our most ignorant citizens who work in mass media. Global Warming Melting Ice Caps, makes a much better headline than Global Warming Not A Problem, Keep on Driving that SUV. It's the classic Man Bites Dog scenario, added to lack of sciense knowledge.
Additionally, treaties like Kyoto, which BTW Clinton & Gore failed to get passed on their watch, give enormous power to governments and environmental groups and their sympathizers.
Never underestimate the combined power of Money, Power, & Ignorance"No. It hasn't been for a good solid decade now, and you'd have to be an asshole and an idiot to believe otherwise."
So any scientist (and there are plenty) that disagrees with you is an "asshole and an idiot"? What an open minded way to start your rant.
There are plenty of peer reviewed studies that don't agree with you that global warming exists, or if it does, that we humans are the cause (for instance, what about increased solar output). Check out the abstracts AND the bibliographies @ http://ff.org/centers/csspp/misc/index.html for a good starting point.
Speaking then of idiots, you bring up Al Gore (the famous scientist with no political agenda) discussing articles from unnamed scientific journals and mass media (lot of scientists in the journalism community no doubt). I'd like to see the published list of these journals. I suspect however it is not available. Keeping in mind the sad state of affairs in journalism and the general public when it comes to math & science education, what a bunch of journalists or citizens believe shouldn't be given all that much credibility.
Tine to do a little research yourself instead of casting epithets and parroting the words of others.
Actually, if you know anything about RAID, a larger number of smaller (within reason) drives is actually more desirable, since the data is spread accross more drives and the loss of any one drive will mean only a small loss of data. This makes the rebuild process significantly faster. And, in the case of a catastrophic failure, much less data loss occurs. Also, with proper drive management (primarily motor management and cache), you can save significant power. I also don't see anything wrong with buying NEW surplus drives on eBay.
On http://rootprompt.org/ (one of my other home tabs) was this article posted on Saturday (1/14/06) which showed how to build a high performance, 0.5 TB, SCSI RAID array for less than $300. Here's the link, so go take a look, get out your tools, & have at it. http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/PoorMansRaid/Po orMansRaid.aspx
Here's a link from Daily Wireless last Tuesday about the same??? phone, complete with pictures. http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News &file=article&sid=4598/
This of course, may or may not be what Apple will unveil, but the information did come from Motorola via the FCC.
I've talked numerous parents out of laptops and into desktops for their college bound kids. First of all, laptops are a big theft item on college campuses. Set it down & turn your back for a minute and you may no longer have it. Secondly a desktop may be loaded with numerous goodies that make an apartment or dorm room more livable. A large hard drive for storing music (rip all of your CD's the summer before school & you don't have them at school to be lost or stolen). A DVD drive (or a burner if you must) along with a good video card and an FM/TV card PLUS a Good set of speakers, and you have all the entertainment comforts you may need in a simple, easy to move (but a little harder to steal) package. Add a nice 17 or 19 inch flat panel and you shouldn't have any reason not to be able to do work & relax in the same room (unless you're not really serious about work anyway). A PDA or tablet PC is a nice (albeit expensive) thing for taking notes, etc. But the desktop should be adequate for most things.
In the signature panel of my card I wrote SEE PHOTO ID in large block letters. On average I'm asked about 20% of the time for my ID. I always thank the person asking. The other 80% of the time I usually make some wise ass remark to the cashier to show that I am displeased. I'm not sure it actually helps but at least I feel better about it.
There is a lot of good information available @ http://science.nasa.gov/. They have stories on various subjects with mp3 versions available for download. OTOH, as a visually impaired engineer I rely on audio geek information. Find a tutorial or other geek information online (and there is a lot of it) and convert it to audio. For Windoze there is a free text to speech reader available @ http://www.naturalreaders.com/. This software allows a document (.doc, .pdf, .txt, or a web [age) to be read to a file as a .wav file. From there you can convert it for your own needs. On Linux you can use Festival to create similar files. In this way the web is your world.
I've done this very thing; however, not all kids will be "into" math and logic. Some may be more mechanically inclined. SO, instead of merely talking about software specifically, talk about engineering in general. If you are in a large room (such as a gymnasium) you could point to the roof support structures and ask why that big roof doesn't fall down. Tear apart an old cell phone and talk about the engineering that goes into that simple, ubiquitous, common gadget.
Engineers included Materials (pick the correct plastic), Mechanical & Human Factors (layout the case for strength and usability), Digital Hardware Engineers (design the microprocessor, keypad, display, etc.), Radio Frequency Hardware Engineer (for the radio transmitter & receiver), Chemical Engineer (to make that long lasting rechargeable battery) and finally the Software Engineer (to make the phone hardware do all of the work).
This simple exercise will show how much engineering goes into such a simple device, and that there are enough engineering disciplines for everyone's interest.
BTW, the definition I use for engineering in general is the use of math and science to solve puzzles. A very elementary definition.
Patent #5,443,036 on the USPTO website @ http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5443036.WKU.&OS=PN/5443036&RS=PN/ 5443036/ not only seems absurd, but a reading if the abstract shows how bad the patent review system has become.
"A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct."
So not only is a stupid idea patentable, somehow my cat is able to see "invisible light".
I'm from the government and I'm here to help (you patent some really stupid idea)
This is basically an old question. Back about 15 years ago we were using numerous mini-computers and ran into a similar problem with DEC VAX series machines. The C compiler for the MicroVAX and our "large and powerful" (for that era anyway) VAX 11/780 utilized exactly the same binary on exactly the same media, but the cost difference was something like 3-4X. Seems we could expect much better performance from the "big iron" and had to pay accordingly. Never mind the additional $$$ we spent with DEC to purchase the machine. This is a capitalist marketplace and some one will offer the better solution at the best cost. I have no doubt that this too will sort itself out.
Battery? An RFID is parasitically powered. Try a little google search.
Lets see. Bad guy gets a normal working firearm on the black market. Confronts a NJ police officer who has forgotten to change the battery in his firearm (or computer blue screens or it smart gun equivalent). Police officer is shot & perp gets away. At this point the pinhead politicians in NJ will then scream that the police officer being shot was the result of the other 49 states and all of the EVIL(tm) gun owners. Rushing a new and immature technology to a market that can result in life & death is just plain foolish.
As a certified firearms instructor who has trained more than 2000 people in the last decade, I can assure you that most properly trained & law abiding firearms owners do not misuse their firearms.
I've used Turbo Tax for years for a rather complex set of tax forms (A, C, F, and others). What I'm paying for is time savings, keeping the forms and calculations up to date (they are slightly different every year), and a guarantee. If TT screws up my calculations and I pay the wrong amount, Intuit has some responsibility. An OSS solution fir a once a year thing that changes significantly every year, and the failure (even minor calculation bugs) could cost you lots of money or in the worst case, jail time. Think I'll drop the $20.00. OTOH, if this is important to you, you could always start a new project on SourceForge.
It's a simple matter of money. The local government will have anything you are willing to pay for. For the most part local governments look to get the most bang for the buck, and therefore police and emergency services plan and train for the most common incidents. If every fire station had HAZMAT equipment, communications equipment, etc. the cost would be prohibitive, and people like you would most likely complain about the expensive equipment that was sitting around and collecting dust. In our county the equipment and training for non-common incidents is maintained by the local county Emergency Management Agency who supplies services to something like 10 fire districts. Our local EMA has the equipment that is needed only on rare occasions for such things as HAZMAT, and communications when the infrastructure has failed. On top of that, most of our EMA members are volunteersm with many of us licensed Hams working with Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services (RACES) and Amateur Radio Emergency Services (ARES). This volunteer activity in most places is called community service.
As an engineer of 30+ years who has recently (ine the last 2 years) become visually impaired, I have looked at, tried, and cobbled together numerous solutions. Here are my observations and recommendations. Keep in mind that Visually Impaired and blind are two different things, and with an aging baby boomer population visual impairments of one sort or another will be on the increase in the coming years.
One of the Linux distro's worth watching is Oralux http://www.oralux.org/, a bootable Knoppix based live CD distro that contains an audible desktop and includes braille drivers. I've had mixed luck with this distro depending on what kind of hardware you attempt to boot it on.
Personally, I use two types of system configurations to access computer based resources.
On my laptop (Win XP PRO) I use ZoonText http://www.aisquared.com/ which is a little expensive, but does the job well.
On my desktop(s) (Win XP Pro &/or Win 98) I have a very inexpensive system. A second monitor on which I place the standard windows screen magnifier. Add Virtual Magnifying Glass http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ and Natural Voice Reader http://www.naturalreaders.com/ at a cost of $0.00/$39.95/$69.95 depending on the version. This combination works very well for a desktop system. Add Firefox, Thunderbird, Cygwin, Putty and a few other tools and you can easily use the Web and administer your Linux boxes.
On the Linux boces (I have several) I share a 19" or 32" monitor via a KVM switch. This allows reasonable access to a consol. When running X-Windows you can simply add additional entries in the XF86.config (or it's equivalent). This lets you select the zoomable features provided by programs like ZoomText. There are a lot of other pieces availble for Linux (like Festival) but unfortunately none of these are available in a comprehensive, eacy to install set. This makes it hard for the non-geek to easily install & use these tools.
This is one of the biggest areas that M$ Windows has it over Linux and OSS for the time being.
Habing taken 4 years of Japanese and looking at a lot of online and computer based training tools, I have a gew observations. Are you planning on simply conversational Japanese or teaching the students to read (and possibly write) the language. The biggest problem for many latin based languages (English, SPanish, etc.) students in learning an Asian language it the new symbol set. This is where I found the computer based tools to be the most useful. Drilling the symbol sets for Hiragana, KataKana, and Kanji was something that I found was very helpful. As for the rest of it, a good well written set of textbooks, a knowledgable instructor, and lots of time to practice conversationally seemed to work best for me, and my class. The textbooks I used were BTW, Japanese for Busy People by The Association for Japanese Language Teaching (AJALT), along with audio & video tapes for support.
I would I guess fall under the Talented Amateur category and had this same problem a couple of years ago. With thousands of slides and 10,000+ negatives I just wasn't getting the quality I required from flatbed adapters. I ended up finding a great Slide/Film scanner used on eBay. I just looked and there are currently at least 4 of the model I purchased, as well as other higher quality models. What I purchased was a Kodak Model 2035 Professional Film Scanner for about $200.00. It's a 6 MegaPixel (35mm only) scanner that works extremely well. I use it with VueScan (mentioned by someone else) under Windows. The downside for some folks is that it has no SANE support and it uses a SCSI interface. Not a problem for me, but possibly for some folks. Windows hasn't been a real problem since it doesn't take a killer machine to scan, and thats about all I use the Windows machine to do.
As a 2nd amendment supporter, a NRA life member, an NRA Certified Instructor and Training Counselor, and a Certified Hunter Education Instructor I am neither shy about nor at all against firearms ownership and use. This application of technology however; although enterprising (for someone trying to make a buck) is IMHO just stupid. Remotely firing a real gun (or is it just really good CG) is the ultimate for couch potatoes. Pointing a gun and squeezing the trigger isn't the hard work. Learningto do it with a real gun takes real skill and practice. Clicking a mouse contains none of those skills or challenges.
As for the quote above - A google search on "disabled hunting resources" yields over 200,000 hits. As a disabled (visually impaired) hunter myself, I can assure Mr. Underwood that most if not every state has resources to help disabled hunters. As an instructor I was given some training on this subject.
As for hunting in Texas, there are plenty of White Tailed Deer in many states (Here in Ohio the herd estimate is 650,000) and most of the folks I know who spend the money to hunt out of state would much rather opt for an Elk or Moose in one of the western states. It's not about killing something, it's about the total experience, and I don't think a video game cuts it.
Here's one more dot-com I hope goes bust.
I don't claim to be an expert on the internal politics and laws in every E.U. country, but here in the U.S. the Treaty has little to do with this president per. se. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted by the U.N. in 1992, in the early part of the first Clinton administration. In order to become a Treaty under U.S. law the president must receive support via a 2/3 majority vote of the senate. The senate (controlled by the Dems in 1992 (IIRC) voted something like 98 to 2 against in a straw vote. President Clinton did not submit the protocol, and it basically died. SO, why is it somehow President G.W. Bush who takes the heat. I heard none of this outcry during the bulk of the Clinton administration. Come on everyone, fair is fair.