Yeah, they're called "Noise canceling headphones."
You may have heard of them - possibly in the previous post. Also usable are those ear guards for use with heavy machinery.
Anyway, they completely cover your ears, thus blocking the low frequencies that are picked as vibrations by the cartilige that surrounds your ears.
It's not magic or some strange desire by the earplug manufacturers that high frequencies are blocked, and not by design. They'd like to make earplugs that block everything, but this whole "physics of sound" thing gets in the way. The reason it seems to be attenuated is because that's all you're getting - the lows, and so you become more sensitive to it. With more absorbent materials, they can make it better, but short of ripping off everything surrounding your ear canal, it's not going to be perfect.
Buzzie: Hey Flaps, So what we were going to do? Flaps: I don't know, what'cha wanna do? Buzzie: Look Flaps, first I say "what were going to do?" then you say "I don't know, what'cha wanna do?" then I say "what we're going to do" then you say what'cha wanna do" let's do something. Flaps: Ok. What'cha wanna do?
First thing I did when I got a palm was to find technical solutions to exactly these problems.
Par can convert any kind of file into the associated Palm database format. If the program you've got can read it, you're good to go.
For text formats, another approach, and the one I take is to convert everything to html. This is always possible because both OOo Writer and Word can export html. I recommend the latter; it produces better looking code. From html you can store it compressed using plucker.
If you have a small-minded program that won't read anyone else's formats, but you want to be able to use a file on multiple programs, you can change the database information using Filez to switch to other formats - exactly like you could with par.
Umm...browsers are one of the most complicated internet products in existence.
You're going to have to be more specific if you're talking about something that uses the internet which is more complicated than a browser - especially something more complicated that actually has other things that depend on it. I can't think of anything like that myself.
Are you sure you're not talking about Windows again? The place where the browser is part of the operating system?
Actually, I have a fair idea about what I'm talking about thanks to my fraternity, which happened to be a music fraternity. Half of the people in there who were training to become professional musicians were going to be teachers (and then there were five or so who were becoming teachers in other domans...strange coincidence). Also, my mom is a teacher.
You are very wrong about the amount of certification you need if you think it's the same as a masters degree. I'm finishing up my masters degree as I speak in EE after my seventh year, while my teacher friends were out and teaching in four years. Further, the one friend that I had who was teaching Math didn't even have to take calculus because he wasn't going to be teaching it. In other words, he didn't know as much about the subject as pretty much any engineering student right out of school (or even as I did out of high school).
This is not what I would call high quality in teaching. I would suggest that you try working in the private sector for a while and then teach afterward. It might open your eyes.
Sure, there are plenty of very, very good teachers. I had some. But they'll take anybody because they have to fill all the positions, and there aren't enough of those very, very good ones to go around. Are you saying you didn't have a single teacher who was a glorified babysitter?
may take months to patch the initial security hole
This is the Windows way. Linux security fixes usually take a few hours up to a few days for services (ssh, apache, Bind, ntp). Also, if you use nonstandard ports for anything else and install active intrusion detection software then hackers won't get past the initial port scan.
Oh, and web browsers are inherently complex. I put a proxy in front of mine with ClamAV to innoculate any pages sent to the browser, just in case there is an exploit.
I will be very surprised if this level of vigilence doesn't continue to be enough to stop malware from ending up on my machine.
I don't know anybody that actually believes that saying overly much. To some degree, I buy it simply because it's so easy to be a teacher since the payrate is so low.
It all comes down to why they became teachers.
I also say "Radio Shack: you have questions. We have blank stares." This is a similar thing: they stopped paying electricians enough to work at Radio Shack and replaced them by barely trained cell phone salesman monkeys. Anyone capable of actually answering my questions who is working at Radio Shack isn't doing it for the money.
I'll stop thinking that no one with a marginally good grasp of engineering works at Radio Shack when they start making a decent wage. I'll start thinking that teachers have as good a grasp as working professionals in the fields when they pay them a decent wage.
Oh, except any history teacher who prefers to be called "Coach." Those, I think, don't really know anything about history, and never will.
You were born in the eighties or ninties, weren't you? Compact discs popular when you were growing up, yes?
You have little or no memory of records? Your parents don't own a record player?
CDs are much more resistant to scratches than records. They can still get scratches, yes, but, for example, touching them with your finger isn't going to affect how they play.
Well, I can't speak for every University, but mine (Purdue university) has one lab that is half filled with Macs (out of the 30 or so available labs). All the rest of the labs use PCs, except for the one used by Electrical and Computer Engineering, which has three rooms - one half filled with Solaris boxes, half with Windows boxes, one filled with Windows boxes, and one filled with Linux boxes (PCs).
I have a friend who goes to MIT. I don't think it's true for them either. From all the conversations I've had with him, I gather they use PCs more than anything else. That's what he was issued for his research, for example.
I got faster at typing from interactive fiction when I was in middle school.
I've gotten better at handwriting progressively since I started (it used to be very, very bad, and now it's pretty good).
But since the internet, I remember fewer facts than I ever did before, though I read about three times as fast as I used to. I don't believe that this is a coincidence.
You convinced at least five posters that you were serious while simultaneously spouting an illogical collection of computer-related jargon and utterly false statements. I expect to see you here again on April 1st.
Are you nuts? Didn't you see Spiderman 2? You'll go crazy and try to kill people!
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
I'm with you except for the "digests open formats." This should all be done on the PC. The reader really only needs to handle one format, but the format has to be ubiquitous enough that anything can convert into it.
I'm thinking html is probably best for exactly this reason.
And really, my PDA does get better resolution than printed text because the rendering is more exact than you get from printing. It's 320x320 with a smaller footprint than your last Ipaq.
Yes or no. The standard 300 page 6"x4" novel is about 800KB uncompressed. Some ebook formats, most notably Microsoft's can actually double that. On the other hand, there are formats that compress it. So you'd only be able to fit a few books on a Visor if you used the standard readers.
As I stated in my previous post, plucker can compress anything written in html (or plaintext). So if you can convert your e-book to that format somehow, you're set.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You know, I feel exactly the opposite way.
Before I got my PDA, I hadn't read more than two books for the fun a year since middle school. Two years ago I got a PDA and have read about 300 novels since then - finishing off the works of most of my favorite authors and starting new ones. I just started and finished the complete works of R.A. Salvatore last month, for example (well...half a book left, and then I'm starting on Tad Williams).
Here are the things I love about it: You can read while drifting off to sleep. Reading a book requires page turning, which, when you're very, very relaxed, is an effort of coordination. Getting up and turning off the light is enough to make you wake back up again. The PDA will shut itself off, and I can set it to autoscroll, or just press the down button on my pda, both which are very minimal efforts by comparison. Why would I want to read when I'm that relaxed? It's a common phenomenon that the state right before sleep is when you have the greatest connection to your subconsious mind - your imagination is the strongest. Think of it as surround sound for books.
It's less strain on your eyes. With a good PDA, you get better resolution than normal text, and there's a backlight. You can read for longer periods of time without feeling eyestrain. After having seen and tried them, I would never buy an e-book reader because they don't consider this that important, whereas I find it paramount. This may be why there are so many people like you, who think that it's worse. The PDA that I currently use almost exclusively as an e-book reader is a Palm Tungsten E, which is noted for it's especially sharp screen.
You don't have to plan to carry books. A PDA is a convenient thing to have around anyway, so I've got a book with me anywhere. Standing in lines is much more fun now.
I put all my books into my PDA by converting whatever format I have into HTML, and then storing that with plucker, which compresses text into chunks (it uncompresses as the text is needed in an almost unnoticable manner). Usually I have about ten ~300 page novels on my PDA at any one time, which take up about 1.5MB. I have 26MB available for storage. Finish a book, start another without having to go get it.
As far as reading in the bath, I would suggest that a printed copy of a book would be ruined just as PDA would if you got it wet. However, e-books can be printed out, and if the print-out gets wet, you lose little. You don't have to print it all, either, so don't use the argument that printing takes a while. 30 pages at 8 1/2 x11 should be more than enough to turn your wife into a prune before she finishes.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you've hit upon exactly why it's almost the same.
When you have a person read to you, you get their inflections, their impersonations, and their fake voices for the characters.
A computer adds none of these things. You have to imagine what the words would sound like to you just as you would with a written page. The only thing I don't like about it is the speed. You can't adjust it easily, and I tend to read through character actions quickly and dialog slowly.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 1
it's all going to come pre-loaded anyway Maybe on the device itself, but the other thing you need to think about is cross-compiling, which is another embedded area in which Gentoo is a big winner. Gentoo has fairly sophisticated method of cross-compilation development which is much, much easier to set up and use than anything else I've tried.
Keep in mind that this pretty much has to be done from source, and that each compile chain will have components from possibly different places. To do this, you need a distro that is capable of having possibly multiple versions of the same package installed, and it has to be easy to change compilation options. It would also be nice to quickly and easily change chains depending on what you're compiling for.
I mean going there specifically from google adverts that many times. Once you go to the site, you'll browse the site itself, maybe, but that's just one google click. You might even accidentally close your browser and have to go back there the way you know how: from google ads, but you won't do it much unless you're trying to defraud the company. It's just not practical, and people don't browse that way.
At that rate, we're talking about closing, clicking and opening at a rate of just over once per minute.
Google advertising is like ads in the yellow pages. You don't have any problem with ads there, do you? You see ads for what you're searching for.
I've gone to google LOOKING for the ads when I wanted to find the major companies that sold an esoteric product I was interested in seeing. There are places where ads are relevant, and this is one of them.
So, on that note, I have a solution for them: they keep track of surfing habits for click-throughs by giving advertisers a monitoring program to run. Abnormal click patterns would indicate fraud.
This would almost always work because for fraud to be effective, it requires lots and lots of clicks without purchases, which means you'll see the same IP address/block click-in and then die. Maybe they'll even click on some other things, but they still won't buy anything. Going to the same purchase site 40 times in an hour without buying anything is wierd.
They could also do that thing they do with internet sign ups: give an image that is machine-unparsable and require users who wish to click through to type in the values it indicates. It doesn't even have to be that secure; a single value would be enough. Any IP that has too many failures at this could be locked out.
Then again, that would keep google from selling to advertisers who sell anything for the blind...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they're called "Noise canceling headphones."
You may have heard of them - possibly in the previous post. Also usable are those ear guards for use with heavy machinery.
Anyway, they completely cover your ears, thus blocking the low frequencies that are picked as vibrations by the cartilige that surrounds your ears.
It's not magic or some strange desire by the earplug manufacturers that high frequencies are blocked, and not by design. They'd like to make earplugs that block everything, but this whole "physics of sound" thing gets in the way. The reason it seems to be attenuated is because that's all you're getting - the lows, and so you become more sensitive to it. With more absorbent materials, they can make it better, but short of ripping off everything surrounding your ear canal, it's not going to be perfect.
kids cartoon
Cartoon Movie - Jungle Book
3 little ducks
2 Buzzards
Buzzie: Hey Flaps, So what we were going to do?
Flaps: I don't know, what'cha wanna do?
Buzzie: Look Flaps, first I say "what were going to do?" then you say "I don't know, what'cha wanna do?" then I say "what we're going to do" then you say what'cha wanna do" let's do something.
Flaps: Ok. What'cha wanna do?
Copy and paste? Bleh.
First thing I did when I got a palm was to find technical solutions to exactly these problems.
Par can convert any kind of file into the associated Palm database format. If the program you've got can read it, you're good to go.
For text formats, another approach, and the one I take is to convert everything to html. This is always possible because both OOo Writer and Word can export html. I recommend the latter; it produces better looking code. From html you can store it compressed using plucker.
If you have a small-minded program that won't read anyone else's formats, but you want to be able to use a file on multiple programs, you can change the database information using Filez to switch to other formats - exactly like you could with par.
Actually, I moved, and the new place I had my server wouldn't let me run a personal mailserver. Then I moved again to a place that would allow it.
Umm...browsers are one of the most complicated internet products in existence.
You're going to have to be more specific if you're talking about something that uses the internet which is more complicated than a browser - especially something more complicated that actually has other things that depend on it. I can't think of anything like that myself.
Are you sure you're not talking about Windows again? The place where the browser is part of the operating system?
Actually, I have a fair idea about what I'm talking about thanks to my fraternity, which happened to be a music fraternity. Half of the people in there who were training to become professional musicians were going to be teachers (and then there were five or so who were becoming teachers in other domans...strange coincidence). Also, my mom is a teacher.
You are very wrong about the amount of certification you need if you think it's the same as a masters degree. I'm finishing up my masters degree as I speak in EE after my seventh year, while my teacher friends were out and teaching in four years. Further, the one friend that I had who was teaching Math didn't even have to take calculus because he wasn't going to be teaching it. In other words, he didn't know as much about the subject as pretty much any engineering student right out of school (or even as I did out of high school).
This is not what I would call high quality in teaching. I would suggest that you try working in the private sector for a while and then teach afterward. It might open your eyes.
Sure, there are plenty of very, very good teachers. I had some. But they'll take anybody because they have to fill all the positions, and there aren't enough of those very, very good ones to go around. Are you saying you didn't have a single teacher who was a glorified babysitter?
Don't be fooled: there are plenty of stupid ones.
I shut down my e-mail server for a year and a half when I was getting the strange Spanish spams.
When I brought it back online again, I started seeing them again.
may take months to patch the initial security hole
This is the Windows way. Linux security fixes usually take a few hours up to a few days for services (ssh, apache, Bind, ntp). Also, if you use nonstandard ports for anything else and install active intrusion detection software then hackers won't get past the initial port scan.
Oh, and web browsers are inherently complex. I put a proxy in front of mine with ClamAV to innoculate any pages sent to the browser, just in case there is an exploit.
I will be very surprised if this level of vigilence doesn't continue to be enough to stop malware from ending up on my machine.
I don't know anybody that actually believes that saying overly much. To some degree, I buy it simply because it's so easy to be a teacher since the payrate is so low.
It all comes down to why they became teachers.
I also say "Radio Shack: you have questions. We have blank stares." This is a similar thing: they stopped paying electricians enough to work at Radio Shack and replaced them by barely trained cell phone salesman monkeys. Anyone capable of actually answering my questions who is working at Radio Shack isn't doing it for the money.
I'll stop thinking that no one with a marginally good grasp of engineering works at Radio Shack when they start making a decent wage. I'll start thinking that teachers have as good a grasp as working professionals in the fields when they pay them a decent wage.
Oh, except any history teacher who prefers to be called "Coach." Those, I think, don't really know anything about history, and never will.
Well...you know. Fibre. Creates blockage.
If Congress hadn't eaten all those burritos last night, it wouldn't have passed at all.
While PACs do generate some pressure to help pass bills, the thing that really gets them though is Pepto-Bismol.
You were born in the eighties or ninties, weren't you? Compact discs popular when you were growing up, yes?
You have little or no memory of records? Your parents don't own a record player?
CDs are much more resistant to scratches than records. They can still get scratches, yes, but, for example, touching them with your finger isn't going to affect how they play.
That was me.
I was trying out my new death-ray. I had it miscalibrated so that you could see it.
Don't worry about it. When death comes and strikes from the heavens for real, it'll be completely invisible.
-Ming the Merciless
Well, I can't speak for every University, but mine (Purdue university) has one lab that is half filled with Macs (out of the 30 or so available labs). All the rest of the labs use PCs, except for the one used by Electrical and Computer Engineering, which has three rooms - one half filled with Solaris boxes, half with Windows boxes, one filled with Windows boxes, and one filled with Linux boxes (PCs).
I have a friend who goes to MIT. I don't think it's true for them either. From all the conversations I've had with him, I gather they use PCs more than anything else. That's what he was issued for his research, for example.
I got faster at typing from interactive fiction when I was in middle school.
I've gotten better at handwriting progressively since I started (it used to be very, very bad, and now it's pretty good).
But since the internet, I remember fewer facts than I ever did before, though I read about three times as fast as I used to. I don't believe that this is a coincidence.
You, sir, are the man.
You convinced at least five posters that you were serious while simultaneously spouting an illogical collection of computer-related jargon and utterly false statements. I expect to see you here again on April 1st.
Funny. Actually, KVim is quite broken when it comes to embedding.
Maybe the Emacs folks just didn't want the embarassment (btw I'm a pure VIM user myself).
Are you nuts? Didn't you see Spiderman 2? You'll go crazy and try to kill people!
I'm with you except for the "digests open formats." This should all be done on the PC. The reader really only needs to handle one format, but the format has to be ubiquitous enough that anything can convert into it.
I'm thinking html is probably best for exactly this reason.
And really, my PDA does get better resolution than printed text because the rendering is more exact than you get from printing. It's 320x320 with a smaller footprint than your last Ipaq.
Yes or no. The standard 300 page 6"x4" novel is about 800KB uncompressed. Some ebook formats, most notably Microsoft's can actually double that. On the other hand, there are formats that compress it. So you'd only be able to fit a few books on a Visor if you used the standard readers.
As I stated in my previous post, plucker can compress anything written in html (or plaintext). So if you can convert your e-book to that format somehow, you're set.
You know, I feel exactly the opposite way.
Before I got my PDA, I hadn't read more than two books for the fun a year since middle school. Two years ago I got a PDA and have read about 300 novels since then - finishing off the works of most of my favorite authors and starting new ones. I just started and finished the complete works of R.A. Salvatore last month, for example (well...half a book left, and then I'm starting on Tad Williams).
Here are the things I love about it:
You can read while drifting off to sleep. Reading a book requires page turning, which, when you're very, very relaxed, is an effort of coordination. Getting up and turning off the light is enough to make you wake back up again. The PDA will shut itself off, and I can set it to autoscroll, or just press the down button on my pda, both which are very minimal efforts by comparison. Why would I want to read when I'm that relaxed? It's a common phenomenon that the state right before sleep is when you have the greatest connection to your subconsious mind - your imagination is the strongest. Think of it as surround sound for books.
It's less strain on your eyes. With a good PDA, you get better resolution than normal text, and there's a backlight. You can read for longer periods of time without feeling eyestrain. After having seen and tried them, I would never buy an e-book reader because they don't consider this that important, whereas I find it paramount. This may be why there are so many people like you, who think that it's worse. The PDA that I currently use almost exclusively as an e-book reader is a Palm Tungsten E, which is noted for it's especially sharp screen.
You don't have to plan to carry books. A PDA is a convenient thing to have around anyway, so I've got a book with me anywhere. Standing in lines is much more fun now.
I put all my books into my PDA by converting whatever format I have into HTML, and then storing that with plucker, which compresses text into chunks (it uncompresses as the text is needed in an almost unnoticable manner). Usually I have about ten ~300 page novels on my PDA at any one time, which take up about 1.5MB. I have 26MB available for storage. Finish a book, start another without having to go get it.
As far as reading in the bath, I would suggest that a printed copy of a book would be ruined just as PDA would if you got it wet. However, e-books can be printed out, and if the print-out gets wet, you lose little. You don't have to print it all, either, so don't use the argument that printing takes a while. 30 pages at 8 1/2 x11 should be more than enough to turn your wife into a prune before she finishes.
I think you've hit upon exactly why it's almost the same.
When you have a person read to you, you get their inflections, their impersonations, and their fake voices for the characters.
A computer adds none of these things. You have to imagine what the words would sound like to you just as you would with a written page. The only thing I don't like about it is the speed. You can't adjust it easily, and I tend to read through character actions quickly and dialog slowly.
it's all going to come pre-loaded anyway
Maybe on the device itself, but the other thing you need to think about is cross-compiling, which is another embedded area in which Gentoo is a big winner. Gentoo has fairly sophisticated method of cross-compilation development which is much, much easier to set up and use than anything else I've tried.
Keep in mind that this pretty much has to be done from source, and that each compile chain will have components from possibly different places. To do this, you need a distro that is capable of having possibly multiple versions of the same package installed, and it has to be easy to change compilation options. It would also be nice to quickly and easily change chains depending on what you're compiling for.
Gentoo can do all these things.
It doesn't have to be in their backend. It could just be a plug-in proxy. There may be a million engines, but only a few operating systems.
It would be simple for google to make a modified version of squid with link-tracking to cover them all.
I mean going there specifically from google adverts that many times. Once you go to the site, you'll browse the site itself, maybe, but that's just one google click. You might even accidentally close your browser and have to go back there the way you know how: from google ads, but you won't do it much unless you're trying to defraud the company. It's just not practical, and people don't browse that way.
At that rate, we're talking about closing, clicking and opening at a rate of just over once per minute.
Google advertising is like ads in the yellow pages. You don't have any problem with ads there, do you? You see ads for what you're searching for.
I've gone to google LOOKING for the ads when I wanted to find the major companies that sold an esoteric product I was interested in seeing. There are places where ads are relevant, and this is one of them.
So, on that note, I have a solution for them: they keep track of surfing habits for click-throughs by giving advertisers a monitoring program to run. Abnormal click patterns would indicate fraud.
This would almost always work because for fraud to be effective, it requires lots and lots of clicks without purchases, which means you'll see the same IP address/block click-in and then die. Maybe they'll even click on some other things, but they still won't buy anything. Going to the same purchase site 40 times in an hour without buying anything is wierd.
They could also do that thing they do with internet sign ups: give an image that is machine-unparsable and require users who wish to click through to type in the values it indicates. It doesn't even have to be that secure; a single value would be enough. Any IP that has too many failures at this could be locked out.
Then again, that would keep google from selling to advertisers who sell anything for the blind...