First off, in Yellowstone, there is no cellphone service in most of the park despite what the movie 2012 would have you believe.
Correct. The NPS can't and doesn't want to drop cell phone towers, cables, and guy wires to the 3500 square miles of rich unspoiled animal and plant habitat that is largely inaccessible to cell phone companies, so they've opened up the major visitors centers to service. Seeing as cell phone towers aren't what you'd call pretty, part of nature, or useful to bears, I'm actually okay with this.
Second, I have witnessed the ancient diesel noisy belching shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon blow right past people on the side of the road who may be injured or in trouble simply because they weren't standing at a designated pick up point.
As with many things in Yellowstone and the rest of the national parks, that was most likely not the National Parks Service, Forestry Service, or park rangers. That was probably Xanterra, or a similar organization. Xanterra is a private company that has contracted with the NPS to handle the tourism side of things, such as lodge/hotel rooms, tours, etc.
Furthermore, technology isn't the only thing that can get people into trouble. The US Forest Service often doesn't maintain roads that appear on published maps and GPS databases as good roads so people end up in trouble.
I'm sure the Forest Service could do so much about that, seeing as the roads themselves are largely under the purview of the Department of Transportation. GPS data, but only topographic, would be the U.S. Geological Survey, and road conditions, which are constantly changing, is data owned by individual companies like Mapquest, Google Maps, etc. Seeing as the Forestry Service has up-to-the-day road conditions, including construction and warnings of severe weather problems (such as ice and ice-related closings) for most, if not all of their national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, etc. posted on their website, maybe you should quit complaining about the rather limited resources of the significantly (not-entirely) self-funded NPS.
I know you're trying to make a joke, but it's really not funny. If you're slinging a banana peel onto Old Faithful, or any of the other national monuments at Yellowstone, you deserve a nice heavy fine, along with a few minutes out back with some park rangers and a hose. Old Faithful is not something you can "accidentally" have a picnic around, nor are any of the other geyser basins. You'll know if you are there. Primarily by the fact that you're falling into a cavern filled with boiling scalding water that kills you (yes, this has happened, just not at Old Faithful itself).
But there are plenty of people who like to drop coins, trash, and other junk into pools, geysers, and fountains. It's horrible, because it degrades these natural wonders. Consider that Yellowstone is unique on the entire planet. Nowhere else has the diversity of geography, animal and plant life, and scenery, and now imagine that people are slowly destroying by being uncaring a**holes.
All of the national parks are suffering from largely the same problem, too. Yellowstone gets more press about this (as do a couple of others), because it's the largest, first, and most impressive of the national parks.
>who really wants to take an old school map with them. I support GPS and all the other tools fully, I think the problem this post points out is that when stupid people are given simple tools they find away to cause problems for everyone else.
I do. Google Maps does not a 7.5 minute quad topo map make. You can drive to a park with it. You cannot hike with it.
The most popular maps for hiking are the National Geographic maps, but there are others. If memory serves, this is all data from the U.S. Geographical Survey. It is relatively accurate, new date is always forthcoming.
Okay, so maybe "there's an app for that", but what happens if battery dies? What happens if you lose cell signal? The list goes on. When we go hiking, we purchase one of these maps. If we're driving around a national park that has roads and clearly marked driving areas, then I'll use Google Maps.
Actually, the NPS has dealt with this before. A lot. For a series of examples of REALLY stupid people, go check out Death in Yellowstone. Here's the oblig Amazon link:
My wife picked this up when we were there on our Honeymoon (there, Grand Teton, and RMNP). There are countless examples of reeeeeally stupid people. The lady who fed a black bear and got her t*ts ripped off when the bear used her as an accidental scratching post? Check. The guy who jumped into the boiling hot geothermal pool to save his dog and his skin fell off after he got out? Check. The countless people who go hiking through grizzly country, forget to wear bear bells, don't take pepper spray with them, don't walk and talk loudly with a partner, and keep their smelly food in an unsealed cooler inside their tent not only get themselves et, but get bears killed too, whose only crime was responding to instinct (okay, okay... there are plenty of examples of bears gone wild who attacked when people did everything right, and just have to be put down).
Accidents happen, and the tech is there for a reason. There are also plenty of cases where natural selection does its job. The NPS isn't going to stop every case of natural selection, simply because it can't. They'll try, because the park rangers do NOT want anyone to die on their watch. They deal with stupidity a lot, but they're not going to let someone die just because they didn't know what they were doing. It's exasperating to them, I'm sure, but they are dedicated to saving lives and preventing injuries.
Then, I'll have my wife buy it. If she as a left nut, she sure as hell doesn' need it...
If you're wife has a left nut that you don't know about already, then you sure as hell don't need her.
Re:The world's most expensive fire works.
on
NASA's Deep Impact
·
· Score: 1
Great, but there's a treaty that forbids nations (including the U.S.) from detonating nuclear warheads in space.
Of course, if something like Deep Impact were to be on the horizon, and a comet were going to hit the Earth, I'm sure the other countries would probably turn their heads while we nuked the giant ice cube.
DM: An inky black darkness envelopes the area right in front of you, cutting off your vision of the tunnel.
Player (replete with pocket protector and buck-teeth induced lisp): I casth magic missthile at the darknessth!
Oh yeah, I will so be downloading all of these and playing them right alongside my Vivaldi and Mozart mp3's. I tell ya', nothing initiates a Zen-like "self" moment quite like listening to the gorgeous, awe-inspiring arrangement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Spring movement by Vanessa Mae, replete with hard-pounding trance-like fluidity, followed by 6 geeks arguing about the composition and chemical makeup of a 2d6 fireball.
Wow, you use uccp? That's lucky. I've got an antique Chinese abacus that I use to help me convert from digital information to text. Playing Doom is kind of difficult, but Space Invaders works. I move the pieces and my brother throws rocks at it.
On the upside, there is a phone line a few miles away, and I can whistle at 75 baud.
Of course, this was my one Slashdot post for the year, since it will take me another year just to get through the next article.
I personally used eHarmony for several months, and ran into many problems with it, regardless of any religious issues that it may incur (which I never experienced).
Technically, the site is slow, buggy, and difficult to work with. The web-based UI is terrible, and sorting and searching matches was annoying at best.
Match-wise, eHarmony is good for East-Coast residents. Mid-west and West-Coast patrons, from what I've seen, are basically up a creek.
I had nearly a hundred "matches" in about 4 months, most of which never responded.
While I think the methodology and concept behind eHarmony is solid, the execution needs a lot of work. Instead, you'd probably be better off in DreamMates or American Singles.
It's partially that, and it's partially the fact that the Founding Fathers didn't trust the populace to make the right decision. The electoral college, in effect, was to act as a buffer.
This is the same kind of reason why we even have a President, which is to make the ignorant masses think we have a king.
Personally, I believed that the amount of return for any further research put into OCR technology wasn't really worth it at this point. OCR is actually pretty darn reliable for printed characters, even if it sucks wind for handwriting. Mostly, people are interested in OCR'ing printed characters, and handwriting recognition is just one of these nifty, shiny technologies that wouldn't be used that often.
At this point, OCR is a commodity. It's not really worth the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for research to get an extra 2% accuracy, so the technology is stagnant and the prices for standard, printed character OCR are dirt cheap.
With that being said, I see voice dictation as the next big thing. Voice recognition is where OCR was 10 years ago, still new, not many players in the market, and a lot of room for technological improvement. The accuracy isn't that great, even with extensive "training", and more and more, because of the need for archiving, data warehousing, captioning for accessibility (Section 508, W3C WAI and the like), captioning without training is going to become a shining goal within the next 10 years.
I don't even know if it's some sort of joke. Can you buy a braille screen?
Blind users tend to use one of two devices, either a screen reader (which will read the contents of the screen out loud and assist with navigation), or an RBD (Refreshable Braille Display), depending on personal preference.
The most popular screen reader is called JAWS, by the company Freedom Scientific.There is a Linux screen reader, which is open source, known as EmacSpeak
Interestingly enough, Freedom Scientific, and others also make Audio-based and RBD-based PDA's.
Since Nethack is text-based, it's easy to make this game work with Assistive Technology (which is what all of these different technologies are known as), as text is extremely easy to present to someone in alternative formats (spoken, Brailled, enlarged, etc.). Highly visual games, however, require an extra level of accessibility.
You know that some joke company will come out with Flash paper-based discs.
Personally? I can't wait until some sucker asks if they can borrow a Paper-Rom (or whatever we'll term them), and he hears a "Whumf!" coming from his drive after he starts trying to burn something to it.
I work in an IT Division in an institution of Higher Education.
All in all, compared to the corporate world, things are quite a bit quieter, more laid back, and you tend to have more loyalty (you get more of a chance to look at the big picture).
With that being said, this coprorate world mentality of nepotism scams, idiot re-orgs, mass exoduses (exodi?) etc., is beginning to permeate the world of education, which has traditionally been in it's own little world, so I don't know how long things will stay quiet and laid back.
Good luck. It can be the greatest job in the world. It can also really suck at times, as well.
Taking the position would mean a sizable pay-cut
HA! I would love to make what I could in coprorate. But, you don't enter the field of education, even as support staff, to make money. It's just that simple.
I've played the demo. It's...interesting, to say the least.
I suppose it's kind of a new way of looking at gaming, in that it can be simply a sensory experience, and not necessary something with set goals in mind.
Still, this game has nothing on Rez, the game with the Trance Vibrator.
The operation of a vehicle and the controling a vehicle.
Operating a vehicle is what is common referred to is DRIVING or having the car MOVING. Seems simple enough, but it isn't.
Moving is not the only element in driving. Controling is the other element and this has to do with the keys (controling).
If you have the keys you have CONTROL.
Being in a college town, one that used to be the number one party school in the nation, with one of the highest DUI rates in the nation, and having several cops as friends, I've asked them this personally.
One of these cops looked at me, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a little card, with countless details and verbatim laws on it regarding DUI, and began quoting to me the section on "driving", and what definition they used.
This is not a valid excuse, and will not hold up in court.
I have done between 15-20 repairs where no kit was available using nylon mesh cloth saturated with 3M Black Weather stripping Cement thinned with Acetone
I've done several repairs with kits, but none that were "ad-hoc", so to speak, and I dreaded the thought of even using a kit, not to mention making my own surround. You poor, poor bastard.
Oh yeah and next time, buy drivers with rubber surrounds.
Actually, that depends on who you talk to. Foam tends to have a much better response, but rubber is much more durable. There are pros and cons to each. Foam won't decrease the "punch" a driver has, as it's good to have a relatively flexible edge. Of course, if the speaker needs to be rugged (for instance, if you're in outdoor, dirty/dusty, or travelling environments), or you're not in a professional environment, rubber surrounds are the way to go.
It seemed to work well enough at first, but after only a few months of my listening habits, they were shot again. But as usual, YMMV.
This depends. If you get a high quality repair kit, one with good adhesive and high quality foam, you might have better results. It's tedious, difficult work, and requires a steady hand. You have to get everything just so, or else it will lose it's seal after a while and the thing will disintegrate again.
I've had to do this before. Not just wanted to, but had to. On a 2K Watt Yamaha S215IV Full range. One of the woofers had gone out, and replacements weren't exactly in my budget (I actually didn't have one).
I won't debate the performance of a Yamaha speaker in a Sound Reinforcement environment (I'm not a fan of Yamaha, especially their mixers), but these weren't too bad. However, it wasn't my choice to buy them, and if I'd had my way, I'd have just bought new ones as well.
For a professional environment, when a brand new replacement driver can be >$400 (and that's just a driver, not a full box), sometimes repairing the cone can be the way to go.
But, on the other hand, you have something to be thankful for. You think cone repair is tedious and annoying? Just be thankful you don't have to repair a voice coil. It's actually not too difficult to wrap the coil (some kits out there have pre-wrapped and even special tools for wrapping coils easily and quickly), but trying to scrape melted copper off of a heavily overdriven and not very well cooled driver will make you wonder why you ever went into technical audio.
At the end of the day they knew the risks, and they took them...
Indeed, and I respect them as well. Screw Star Trek, these are the true explorers, and I hope their curiosity and wonderment lives on as an example for the rest of humanity.
But, with that being said, why don't we care about the soldiers, peace keepers, missionaries, etc. that die every day, in countries all over the world, trying to help? Just because they're not going on a relatively routine mission into a place with no atmosphere doesn't make their jobs any less important, nor does this mean they don't deserve our respect for their sacrifice.
Not to take anything away from the crew of the Columbia, but I don't agree with ignoring the less "interesting" (in the scientific research sense of the word) sacrifices.
But those that do amazing things tend to be more focused on people than those that do more mundane, or in some cases, less enviable tasks.
The history of Dragon Naturally Speaking and ViaVoice is pretty interesting. Dragon Naturally Speaking was started by a company called Dragon, several years ago. Originally, they marketed a program called Dragon Dictate, which was designed for command and control, more so than for document dictation. They stumbled on a new technology using phonemes, and were able to create Naturally Speaking, which, like the name, allows someone to speak at normal conversational speeds and the software will still recognize it (Dragon Dictate pretty much made you speak like William Shatner on a bad day).
Fast forward a little...Naturally Speaking got sold to a company called Scansoft when Dragon went under (I forget why). Scansoft, within the last year bought ViaVoice from IBM, which had dropped sales and further development of their Linux version of the software, which is now nowhere to be found.
Ultimately, Scansoft pretty much controls the market in terms of Voice Dictation.
I guess the question is... What are you looking for?
The system would not be for replacing the seeing-eye-dog or cane-navigation, but neither can read and it is hard learning Braille at age 65.
Okay, so you need a document enlarger... My personal favorite would be anything from Optelec.
small good quality digital camera as input, to video circuitry with firmware, allowing adjustments/configuration (contrast, color, magnification, etc) and flash-save of user requirements, with output to a good quality video headset (providing adjustable viewing maybe about 125cm@1.5m to 250cm@1m)
Okay, so you really need a Video Telescope system. Here's one at AbleData, but good luck finding any system along these lines for less than $800.
As for a wearable monitor? The Jordy will probably be your best bet, and you can get a stand for it so that it's a document enlarger as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! The Mrs. and I have talked about national parking in Canada, eventually. If we do, I'll keep this in mind.
First off, in Yellowstone, there is no cellphone service in most of the park despite what the movie 2012 would have you believe.
Correct. The NPS can't and doesn't want to drop cell phone towers, cables, and guy wires to the 3500 square miles of rich unspoiled animal and plant habitat that is largely inaccessible to cell phone companies, so they've opened up the major visitors centers to service. Seeing as cell phone towers aren't what you'd call pretty, part of nature, or useful to bears, I'm actually okay with this.
Second, I have witnessed the ancient diesel noisy belching shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon blow right past people on the side of the road who may be injured or in trouble simply because they weren't standing at a designated pick up point.
As with many things in Yellowstone and the rest of the national parks, that was most likely not the National Parks Service, Forestry Service, or park rangers. That was probably Xanterra, or a similar organization. Xanterra is a private company that has contracted with the NPS to handle the tourism side of things, such as lodge/hotel rooms, tours, etc.
Furthermore, technology isn't the only thing that can get people into trouble. The US Forest Service often doesn't maintain roads that appear on published maps and GPS databases as good roads so people end up in trouble.
I'm sure the Forest Service could do so much about that, seeing as the roads themselves are largely under the purview of the Department of Transportation. GPS data, but only topographic, would be the U.S. Geological Survey, and road conditions, which are constantly changing, is data owned by individual companies like Mapquest, Google Maps, etc. Seeing as the Forestry Service has up-to-the-day road conditions, including construction and warnings of severe weather problems (such as ice and ice-related closings) for most, if not all of their national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, etc. posted on their website, maybe you should quit complaining about the rather limited resources of the significantly (not-entirely) self-funded NPS.
I know you're trying to make a joke, but it's really not funny. If you're slinging a banana peel onto Old Faithful, or any of the other national monuments at Yellowstone, you deserve a nice heavy fine, along with a few minutes out back with some park rangers and a hose. Old Faithful is not something you can "accidentally" have a picnic around, nor are any of the other geyser basins. You'll know if you are there. Primarily by the fact that you're falling into a cavern filled with boiling scalding water that kills you (yes, this has happened, just not at Old Faithful itself).
But there are plenty of people who like to drop coins, trash, and other junk into pools, geysers, and fountains. It's horrible, because it degrades these natural wonders. Consider that Yellowstone is unique on the entire planet. Nowhere else has the diversity of geography, animal and plant life, and scenery, and now imagine that people are slowly destroying by being uncaring a**holes.
All of the national parks are suffering from largely the same problem, too. Yellowstone gets more press about this (as do a couple of others), because it's the largest, first, and most impressive of the national parks.
>who really wants to take an old school map with them. I support GPS and all the other tools fully, I think the problem this post points out is that when stupid people are given simple tools they find away to cause problems for everyone else.
I do. Google Maps does not a 7.5 minute quad topo map make. You can drive to a park with it. You cannot hike with it.
The most popular maps for hiking are the National Geographic maps, but there are others. If memory serves, this is all data from the U.S. Geographical Survey. It is relatively accurate, new date is always forthcoming.
Okay, so maybe "there's an app for that", but what happens if battery dies? What happens if you lose cell signal? The list goes on. When we go hiking, we purchase one of these maps. If we're driving around a national park that has roads and clearly marked driving areas, then I'll use Google Maps.
Actually, the NPS has dealt with this before. A lot. For a series of examples of REALLY stupid people, go check out Death in Yellowstone. Here's the oblig Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
My wife picked this up when we were there on our Honeymoon (there, Grand Teton, and RMNP). There are countless examples of reeeeeally stupid people. The lady who fed a black bear and got her t*ts ripped off when the bear used her as an accidental scratching post? Check. The guy who jumped into the boiling hot geothermal pool to save his dog and his skin fell off after he got out? Check. The countless people who go hiking through grizzly country, forget to wear bear bells, don't take pepper spray with them, don't walk and talk loudly with a partner, and keep their smelly food in an unsealed cooler inside their tent not only get themselves et, but get bears killed too, whose only crime was responding to instinct (okay, okay... there are plenty of examples of bears gone wild who attacked when people did everything right, and just have to be put down).
Accidents happen, and the tech is there for a reason. There are also plenty of cases where natural selection does its job. The NPS isn't going to stop every case of natural selection, simply because it can't. They'll try, because the park rangers do NOT want anyone to die on their watch. They deal with stupidity a lot, but they're not going to let someone die just because they didn't know what they were doing. It's exasperating to them, I'm sure, but they are dedicated to saving lives and preventing injuries.
Then, I'll have my wife buy it. If she as a left nut, she sure as hell doesn' need it ...
If you're wife has a left nut that you don't know about already, then you sure as hell don't need her.
Great, but there's a treaty that forbids nations (including the U.S.) from detonating nuclear warheads in space.
Of course, if something like Deep Impact were to be on the horizon, and a comet were going to hit the Earth, I'm sure the other countries would probably turn their heads while we nuked the giant ice cube.
Oh God, this is not what I want to listen to.
DM: An inky black darkness envelopes the area right in front of you, cutting off your vision of the tunnel.
Player (replete with pocket protector and buck-teeth induced lisp): I casth magic missthile at the darknessth!
Oh yeah, I will so be downloading all of these and playing them right alongside my Vivaldi and Mozart mp3's. I tell ya', nothing initiates a Zen-like "self" moment quite like listening to the gorgeous, awe-inspiring arrangement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Spring movement by Vanessa Mae, replete with hard-pounding trance-like fluidity, followed by 6 geeks arguing about the composition and chemical makeup of a 2d6 fireball.
Wow, you use uccp? That's lucky. I've got an antique Chinese abacus that I use to help me convert from digital information to text. Playing Doom is kind of difficult, but Space Invaders works. I move the pieces and my brother throws rocks at it.
On the upside, there is a phone line a few miles away, and I can whistle at 75 baud.
Of course, this was my one Slashdot post for the year, since it will take me another year just to get through the next article.
I personally used eHarmony for several months, and ran into many problems with it, regardless of any religious issues that it may incur (which I never experienced).
Technically, the site is slow, buggy, and difficult to work with. The web-based UI is terrible, and sorting and searching matches was annoying at best.
Match-wise, eHarmony is good for East-Coast residents. Mid-west and West-Coast patrons, from what I've seen, are basically up a creek.
I had nearly a hundred "matches" in about 4 months, most of which never responded.
Here is my full write-up of the service.
While I think the methodology and concept behind eHarmony is solid, the execution needs a lot of work. Instead, you'd probably be better off in DreamMates or American Singles.
Stay the hell away from Friend Finder, btw.
It's partially that, and it's partially the fact that the Founding Fathers didn't trust the populace to make the right decision. The electoral college, in effect, was to act as a buffer.
:)
This is the same kind of reason why we even have a President, which is to make the ignorant masses think we have a king.
I'm just sayin'... is all.
Personally, I believed that the amount of return for any further research put into OCR technology wasn't really worth it at this point. OCR is actually pretty darn reliable for printed characters, even if it sucks wind for handwriting. Mostly, people are interested in OCR'ing printed characters, and handwriting recognition is just one of these nifty, shiny technologies that wouldn't be used that often.
At this point, OCR is a commodity. It's not really worth the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for research to get an extra 2% accuracy, so the technology is stagnant and the prices for standard, printed character OCR are dirt cheap.
With that being said, I see voice dictation as the next big thing. Voice recognition is where OCR was 10 years ago, still new, not many players in the market, and a lot of room for technological improvement. The accuracy isn't that great, even with extensive "training", and more and more, because of the need for archiving, data warehousing, captioning for accessibility (Section 508, W3C WAI and the like), captioning without training is going to become a shining goal within the next 10 years.
I don't even know if it's some sort of joke. Can you buy a braille screen?
Blind users tend to use one of two devices, either a screen reader (which will read the contents of the screen out loud and assist with navigation), or an RBD (Refreshable Braille Display), depending on personal preference.
The most popular screen reader is called JAWS, by the company Freedom Scientific.There is a Linux screen reader, which is open source, known as EmacSpeak
Here's a company that makes good Refreshable Braille Displays, for those who are interested.
Interestingly enough, Freedom Scientific, and others also make Audio-based and RBD-based PDA's.
Since Nethack is text-based, it's easy to make this game work with Assistive Technology (which is what all of these different technologies are known as), as text is extremely easy to present to someone in alternative formats (spoken, Brailled, enlarged, etc.). Highly visual games, however, require an extra level of accessibility.
Just a little FYI.
You know that some joke company will come out with Flash paper-based discs.
Personally? I can't wait until some sucker asks if they can borrow a Paper-Rom (or whatever we'll term them), and he hears a "Whumf!" coming from his drive after he starts trying to burn something to it.
I work in an IT Division in an institution of Higher Education.
All in all, compared to the corporate world, things are quite a bit quieter, more laid back, and you tend to have more loyalty (you get more of a chance to look at the big picture).
With that being said, this coprorate world mentality of nepotism scams, idiot re-orgs, mass exoduses (exodi?) etc., is beginning to permeate the world of education, which has traditionally been in it's own little world, so I don't know how long things will stay quiet and laid back.
Good luck. It can be the greatest job in the world. It can also really suck at times, as well.
Taking the position would mean a sizable pay-cut
HA! I would love to make what I could in coprorate. But, you don't enter the field of education, even as support staff, to make money. It's just that simple.
I've played the demo. It's...interesting, to say the least.
I suppose it's kind of a new way of looking at gaming, in that it can be simply a sensory experience, and not necessary something with set goals in mind.
Still, this game has nothing on Rez, the game with the Trance Vibrator.
If you have nathing[sic] to hide, you won't mind if we put cameras in the bathrooms right?
Hey, buddy, I don't know about you, but I have a hard time hiding it.
Wrongo! But thank you for playing!
In most states, the legal definition of "driving" is being behind the wheel of the car.
Pulled from here
Being in a college town, one that used to be the number one party school in the nation, with one of the highest DUI rates in the nation, and having several cops as friends, I've asked them this personally.
One of these cops looked at me, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a little card, with countless details and verbatim laws on it regarding DUI, and began quoting to me the section on "driving", and what definition they used.
This is not a valid excuse, and will not hold up in court.
I have done between 15-20 repairs where no kit was available using nylon mesh cloth saturated with 3M Black Weather stripping Cement thinned with Acetone
I've done several repairs with kits, but none that were "ad-hoc", so to speak, and I dreaded the thought of even using a kit, not to mention making my own surround. You poor, poor bastard.
I salute you!!!
Oh yeah and next time, buy drivers with rubber surrounds.
Actually, that depends on who you talk to. Foam tends to have a much better response, but rubber is much more durable. There are pros and cons to each. Foam won't decrease the "punch" a driver has, as it's good to have a relatively flexible edge. Of course, if the speaker needs to be rugged (for instance, if you're in outdoor, dirty/dusty, or travelling environments), or you're not in a professional environment, rubber surrounds are the way to go.
But it all depends on the application.
It seemed to work well enough at first, but after only a few months of my listening habits, they were shot again. But as usual, YMMV.
This depends. If you get a high quality repair kit, one with good adhesive and high quality foam, you might have better results. It's tedious, difficult work, and requires a steady hand. You have to get everything just so, or else it will lose it's seal after a while and the thing will disintegrate again.
I've had to do this before. Not just wanted to, but had to. On a 2K Watt Yamaha S215IV Full range. One of the woofers had gone out, and replacements weren't exactly in my budget (I actually didn't have one).
I won't debate the performance of a Yamaha speaker in a Sound Reinforcement environment (I'm not a fan of Yamaha, especially their mixers), but these weren't too bad. However, it wasn't my choice to buy them, and if I'd had my way, I'd have just bought new ones as well.
For a professional environment, when a brand new replacement driver can be >$400 (and that's just a driver, not a full box), sometimes repairing the cone can be the way to go.
But, on the other hand, you have something to be thankful for. You think cone repair is tedious and annoying? Just be thankful you don't have to repair a voice coil. It's actually not too difficult to wrap the coil (some kits out there have pre-wrapped and even special tools for wrapping coils easily and quickly), but trying to scrape melted copper off of a heavily overdriven and not very well cooled driver will make you wonder why you ever went into technical audio.
At the end of the day they knew the risks, and they took them...
Indeed, and I respect them as well. Screw Star Trek, these are the true explorers, and I hope their curiosity and wonderment lives on as an example for the rest of humanity.
But, with that being said, why don't we care about the soldiers, peace keepers, missionaries, etc. that die every day, in countries all over the world, trying to help? Just because they're not going on a relatively routine mission into a place with no atmosphere doesn't make their jobs any less important, nor does this mean they don't deserve our respect for their sacrifice.
Not to take anything away from the crew of the Columbia, but I don't agree with ignoring the less "interesting" (in the scientific research sense of the word) sacrifices.
But those that do amazing things tend to be more focused on people than those that do more mundane, or in some cases, less enviable tasks.
The history of Dragon Naturally Speaking and ViaVoice is pretty interesting. Dragon Naturally Speaking was started by a company called Dragon, several years ago. Originally, they marketed a program called Dragon Dictate, which was designed for command and control, more so than for document dictation. They stumbled on a new technology using phonemes, and were able to create Naturally Speaking, which, like the name, allows someone to speak at normal conversational speeds and the software will still recognize it (Dragon Dictate pretty much made you speak like William Shatner on a bad day).
Fast forward a little...Naturally Speaking got sold to a company called Scansoft when Dragon went under (I forget why). Scansoft, within the last year bought ViaVoice from IBM, which had dropped sales and further development of their Linux version of the software, which is now nowhere to be found.
Ultimately, Scansoft pretty much controls the market in terms of Voice Dictation.
However, there are some interesting things still going on. For instance, Intel has been working on the Audio/Visual Speech Control/Recognition engine, which is part of Intel's OpenCV (face recognition stuff).
Ultimately, try out this link. There's quite a bit of information there.
Netcraft confirms, IIS is dying. ...
Ah, forget it.
I guess the question is... What are you looking for?
The system would not be for replacing the seeing-eye-dog or cane-navigation, but neither can read and it is hard learning Braille at age 65.
Okay, so you need a document enlarger... My personal favorite would be anything from Optelec.
small good quality digital camera as input, to video circuitry with firmware, allowing adjustments/configuration (contrast, color, magnification, etc) and flash-save of user requirements, with output to a good quality video headset (providing adjustable viewing maybe about 125cm@1.5m to 250cm@1m)
Okay, so you really need a Video Telescope system. Here's one at AbleData, but good luck finding any system along these lines for less than $800.
As for a wearable monitor? The Jordy will probably be your best bet, and you can get a stand for it so that it's a document enlarger as well.
Ultimately, when in doubt, try the AbleData website.