Actually, I was thinking you'd put the PDA inside of you. If you can already get a 128MB USB keychain drive for just over $100, it won't take many more generations to have a 1GB microdrive that could communicate wirelessly a few feet or so and could run off body heat. Stick it in your chest cavity somewhere and plug a receiver unit into your computer.
Perhaps you could actually mount it as a drive (obviously with encrypted data going over an encrypted line so they couldn't scan you without your knowledge at airport terminals). Put it at/mnt/user (heh).
Publish a standard communication interface, and in five years, all your consumer electronics products can talk to it. Just don't rely on it for data storage: bookmarks and profiles are one thing, but you'd hate to need surgery because your drive is full.
(Although, a 1TB iPod 7 in my belly, wirelessly trasmitting over UWB directly to my optic nerve would be pretty cool. Assuming it could do Ogg Vorbis by then, of course.)
Really, it's not hard to record and burn a master then copy 5,000 either through yourself (heh) or pay a third party to do it.
For third-party CD duplication, I can recommend
Midwest Disc. They duplicated our album for us and did a great job. We had a run of only 500 copies, and we got two-tone on the disc itself (not a sticker), a six-panel insert (4-color on the front three, B&W on the back three), a 4-color back panel, and assembly and shrinkwrapping for just over $1500, or about $3.10 per disc. If we'd produced just 1000 discs, the per-disc cost would have been less than $2. We did provide our own art, though I don't think we got a discount for that.
In our case, we didn't have any studio costs (it was a live album mixed straight off the sound board to DAT), so we were able to sell the CDs at $5 and still recover our duplication costs even if we didn't sell all of them. As is was, we sold out all 500 within a few months, but there wasn't enough additional demand to warrant getting another run.
Just a word of advice: it helps your fans to make your packaging match the music production quality inside. If all you've got is a 4-tracked master burned to a CD, don't get it professionally duplicated with booklet insert and full-color everywhere. When the fans see *real* packaging they're going to assume that what they hear is *really* produced as well.
For 4-track stuff, burn them yourself and use stickers. For homemade production (using Cakewalk or whatever), get them professionally duplicated, but only put in a single card (front and back) for the "liner notes". If the production is done in a real studio (or you're uncommonly good at Cakewalk and it sounds *perfect*), go ahead and do the duplication like a real album.
CDs can add more value in the non-digital domain, such as beautifully printed booklets with photographs and lyrics. Again, make it more convenient for the biggest part of the public to buy the CD than to reproduce the contents of the package by burning and printing.
That's it exactly. At $0.25 each, you can download a whole CD (roughly 12 tracks) and burn it to a CD-R for right around $3. Then the question becomes whether or not the higher audio quality (vs 128 kbps mp3s), cover art, liner notes, etc, are worth the additional cost.
At $15 per CD, it's questionable. You're talking about five times the cost for basically a glossy pamphlet. Most people wouldn't do it. But at, say, $5 per CD, I'll bet most people would. (And having had an album professionally produced before, I can tell you that if you don't need a heavy advertising budget and lots of middlemen, $5 per CD can cover the costs of studio production, art design, and duplication when you're talking about 10,000 or 100,000 units sold.)
The majors are in reality no different than the Mafia, except that they don't kill people (that I know about anyway).
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic
hallway, where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's
also a negative side." -- Hunter S. Thompson
You are completely correct across the board. However, I believe we would both agree that there are some highly qualified individuals who could teach excellently but don't go into teaching for primarily financial reasons.
If we divide the world into four types of people (obviously there's really more of a continuum than this...):
highly skilled and great at teaching
highly skilled but can't (or shouldn't) teach
low skills but great at teaching
unable to do it or teach it
Unfortunately, below university levels, there are a lot more teachers at levels 3 & 4 than there should be. And raising teacher salaries would almost certainly increase the number of 1s going into teaching. That was really my point.
Almost didn't see this question because it's not on the main page.
I teach three years of high school Computer Science and will add a webmastering course next year. Currently CS is taught in C++, though we'll be moving to Scheme and Java in the future. Webmastering will cover HTML, CSS, SQL, Perl and maybe PHP.
I use Linux as my primary OS at home, but the kids use Windows 95 and Borland C++ because that's what we bought licenses for 5 years ago. I keep hoping to move to Linux in the lab, but the biggest holdup has been a NetWare client for Linux so the kids can access their home directories.
I do have a degree in CS from a top-ten CS university and was among the top few in many of my classes. I can say that money is definitely an issue for many. I started at $24K five years ago and am now up to $32K in Austin, TX. I have friends with comparable skill levels that graduated with me who are making double to three times that amount in industry.
Teachers should be the best and brightest but often aren't because the pay is so much less than they could get in industry. If teacher salary were only 10% less than industry (rather than 50% or more), you'd see a lot more qualified people looking into teaching.
Oh, and to those who say that teachers only work 8:00-3:30... keep in mind that is only the lecture times. In addition, teachers must deal with parents, grade student work (and we don't have grunt TAs like college professors) and generate new assignments/lecture material. And any teacher who can get all that done during a single "planning period" probably isn't doing a very good job.
I know one industry person that left a job at places like IBM because she wanted to work "shorter hours". She lasted one year as a teacher.
Legal just because you own the music or legal because the music is free? Technically I don't think that you are allowed to play your own CDs in a public place, like a school.
Well, the mp3s are legal. You're correct that the "public performance" is illegal, but if we're going to start busting teachers for that, we won't stop after getting rid of my jukebox. Ever watched a movie in a class?
> Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller.
Is that an invalid comparison or what? Why not compare a VBR mp3 to a VBR Ogg?
Because all the music on my jukebox was encoded CBR. There are still lots of CBR mp3s out there. I suppose the most canonical example would be to compare a 128 kbps CBR mp3, which people call "CD quality", to the equivalent-sounding VBR Ogg (probably 96 or maybe even 80 kbps).
Personally I replaced 128 kbps CBR mp3s (encoded with BladeEnc) with quality 4 (nominal bitrate of 128 kbps) oggs. I save about 3% of space, and the sound quality is noticably better.
I highly doubt you can tell the difference in audio quality on your jukebox, what with the inferior hardware and all.
My "jukebox" is actually a PC feeding a Sony receiver and some $400 a pair bookshelf speakers. And I can tell the difference.
Though I did say "most folks". If I were going to be making sound comparisons of my own to quote, I'd be doing it at home with a expensive pair of headphones and would be ABXing some standard test files. I haven't personally done so, so I just quoted the rule of thumb.
I teach Computer Science at the high school level at a largish school near Austin, Texas. For the past several years there's been a "jukebox" in
my room where students could vote for albums to hear during programming lab time, and random tracks off the winning albums play over the speakers in the classroom.
Over Christmas break I changed the "player" portion of the system to play Ogg Vorbis files instead of mp3s.
Why not mp3?
The sound quality is lower than many current alternatives (AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA).
The patent situation is scary and I fear a recurrence of the whole Unisys/GIF
fiasco.
Saying I have a hard-drive full of mp3s just sounds shady, even though they're all legal.
So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?
Sound quality vs. file size is very nice. Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Patent-free algorithms and open-source license mean The Man can never take my oggs
from me.
Oggs are peelable, meaning that I can encode a file at, say, 160 kbps for listening at home, and peel the file down to 96 kbps later for listening on my portable. The peeling produces a file that has the same quality as if I'd encoded the original source directly to 96 kbps. This is also a big win for streaming folks because you only have to encode one bitrate and can peel to others as needed.
The mailing list is quite active and you can get advice and help in a hurry. Plus there's a bugzilla, so you can easily report any errors you find.
By the way, if you haven't listened to Ogg since 1.0-rc3 came out (on New Year's Day), try it again. The sound quality has been much improved. Note that you should not use the "-b" option to encode as it uses CBR and thus produces larger files at lower quality. Default is quality 3, which is 112 kbps but sounds as good as 160 kbps to most. If you really can tell the difference, quality 4 averages 128 kbps and sounds much better (and is maybe 3% smaller) than an mp3 at that rate. You've got to experiment to find your own sweet spot.
The biggest downside is that whole ubiquity thing. There's been an official Winamp plug-in for quite some time, but Nullsoft have yet to install it by default (rumor has it that it is AOL 's legal department which is holding this up). I'm also pretty sure there's a Windows Media Player codec, but don't quote me on that.
Also the only hardware player that supports Ogg Vorbis is the HipZip (via a firmware upgrade). Other units that support it are coming soon, but not yet available.
Since I don't own a hardware player (yet) and don't download my mp3s, the ubiquity factor isn't an issue for me, however.
On the plate for rc4 is sound quality tuning for the low (a.k.a streaming) bitrates. Then a coat of polish and it'll be called 1.0
Re:A Question for you
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2
So, why not just print to the "FILE:" port with some postscript driver?
To tell you the truth, it never even crossed my mind. Since I don't have any desire for a paper copy I generally don't think about clicking "print", even when the destination is a file.
I wish I had, though. Probably would have saved me at least three hours.
my $55 copy
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Several months ago I paid for and downloaded the DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook version of "God's Debris". I paid $5 for it.
I also downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the book, which was good. However, I didn't like the reader at all. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as.PGMs. Then I booted into Linux (I'd had to be in Windows to run the reader) and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up. Overall, this took me about five hours.
Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted.OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
If I assume that a professional "image -> OCR text -> corrected text" conversion specialist gets paid $10/hour, then the five hours it took me incurred about $50 in labor cost, bringing the total price to around $55. Not as cheap as the dead-tree version (<$15), but easier to grab quotes from. And of course I now have some valuable skills which I could use to help out Project Gutenberg.
I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now just to read the book again.
And I'm glad that there's now a paper version so that most other people can obtain a less legally-encumbered version without having to do the grunt work I did.
I won't be able to crack the book itself, but since it appears on the screen at some point, I'm going to be able to read it sooner or later - and I can copy it.
Exactly. Recently I paid for and downloaded "God's Debris", a thought experiment/novel by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. It's only available as a DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook. I paid $5 for it.
I downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the book, which was good. However, I didn't like the reader at all. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as.PGMs. Then I booted into Linux (the reader only runs under Windows) and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up.
Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted.OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version, since it cost me about 5 hours of labor and proofreading. Plus, I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
Nevertheless I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now just to read the book again.
Descending! Descending! I guess not everyone pictures that exactly the same way;)
When I said descending I was thinking as in: "sort the following nine digits in descending order."
But then many./ers apparently took it to mean "getting smaller over time." Although the more accurate word for that would have been "decreasing" or maybe "diminishing".
Let's have fun with definitions straight outta my brain!
descending - higher things precede lower (usu. spatially, though sometimes temporally)
decreasing - values getting closer to some minimum value over time
diminishing - reduction in size over time
Anyway, I didn't mean to nitpick about the title. I just thought it was ironic that some folk complained about the title when it hadn't been mine.
Your article on slashdot.org about the billionth second of the epoch is sort of (but not entirely) flawed.
I was the slashdotter who submitted the original article. And just for the record, I never said anything about a billion seconds from 1970-01-01, I just pointed out that "soon the magic numbers will say all 9s".
At the time, I felt like a complete dork for even noticing the proximity of UNIX timestamp "987654321", but I felt like it'd be wrong of me not to share, so I did, and threw in the bit about UNIX timestamp "999999999" just for kicks. It was only the second story I'd ever submitted to/., and the only one to get accepted (the first was announcing the release of Mozilla M16, but I'd jumped the gun).
Now that I know that there's someone out there who cares enough to correct my back-of-an-envelope calculations by bringing in leap seconds makes me feel like less of a dork.
(By the way, my title as submitted was "descending unix timestamp"; it was Timothy who
changed the title to "The Quickly Descending Unix Timestamp", which wrongly implies that the timestamp's value is getting smaller over time, IMHO.)
Anyway, maybe now that I can prove I'm not the biggest nerd out there I'll start getting dates again....
Once the 1.0 encoder is available, I think I'll never encode anything in mp3 format again.
I teach high school, and there's a "jukebox" (linux PC w/sound card connected to a Sony receiver) in my classroom with lots of custom software that allows students each period to electronically vote for albums they want to hear. My server then queues up a random selection of tracks off the winning albums and does the deejay thing all period.
Currently I've got 10G of mp3s on there (168 whole albums), mostly from albums submitted by students and ripped and encoded by me. But there's no reason I couldn't have it play oggs instead. I can't hear any sound quality difference on my home computer's crappy speakers, I like the improved file size, and the whole free software/patent-free/open algorithm aspect makes me very happy. Plus, using primarily oggs makes it less likely that people could accuse me of illegally obtaining the songs (say from whatever file-sharing program the kids use these days).
In order to get an album on the jukebox, students must bring in the physical CD and sign a form indicating that 1) they own the album, 2) they haven't made any "archival" copies of said album, and 3) they give me the right to make that copy. Once the student is no longer in my class, I erase the album unless some other student comes forward to sponsor it.
So probably by the end of next year I'll have however many old re-sponsored albums still in mp3 format, and all new albums in ogg. Plus a good 25% to 33% of the albums on the jukebox belong to me personally, so I'll probably re-rip and encode those as oggs, too.
"Like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows is a man who deceives his neighbor and says, 'I was only joking!'" -- Proverbs 26:18-19
Sometimes the Bible is surprisingly relevant.
(BTW, this comment is not intended as a troll; it's just that few people know the Bible has anything to say about the whole "just kidding" thing. Though I fear I may spark a long offtopic thread anyway. Apologies in advance if such a thread ensues.)
This messageboard post looks as much like an alarmist hoax as anything I've ever seen ("please contact my lawyer at his AOL address", and "this is not a rumor"), but....
I ran the distributed.net client on every computer in every lab in the high school where I teach two years ago, myself. But I got permission first.
before anyone else, talked to our tech administrator, who was all for the idea
then briefly explained the concept and got permission from a few of the teachers in the business department, whose computers would also be running the client
then sent a one-page memo to the principal explaining d.net in 100 words or less, and asking if I could run it in my lab and others. He signed off on it, and I still have a copy of the signed memo in my files.
finally, install the thing everywhere
The client is only running in my lab now, but I've still got permission. And in the unlikely event that we win, the $2000 goes to "Leander High School Computer Science Department".;)
Though it doesn't come anywhere near justifying a $0.59/sec cost, I can see people being upset if the admin kept machines on when they otherwise would have been off (e.g. spring break) solely to crack a few more RC-5 blocks. Electricity ain't cheap. OTOH, with proper proxying, bandwidth for d.net is negligible.
If this story is true, the school system is most likely just upset about having software installed on their system without their knowledge (1) which drained system resources (albeit not many) and (2) whose primary purpose had no perceived value for the district (to prove how poor government encryption was at that time/the geek factor/to win money).
If everyone has broadband they should be able to ditch the telephone and chat in real time over one of those IP telephony thingys. (Roger Wilco or CCFaudio or something similar.) The latency should be low enough to keep everybody synced up nicely, and it makes the long distance charges go away.
When streaming the voices to hard drive (assuming there's enough space after all the pr0n^H^H^H^H Christmas photos), 16-bit, 22KHz mono should be plenty, which will consume roughly 2.5MB/min or 150MB/hour. There's reason to believe this will compress fairly well with bzip2 so you've got lossless compression but Nate doesn't have to deal with 150MB email attachments.
Or you could try FLAC, which I have no experience with, but it might work better than bzip2 since it's lossless compression designed specifically for audio. Or if you don't care that much about audio quality, compress the voice streams to a 256Kb MP3 for emailing. See if I care.
And ultimately it'd be nice to see some OGGs for download as the final product. It being free software and all that.
Just for the record, I spent way too long crafting this message that almost no one will read.
I'm now a computer science teacher myself at a high school near Austin, TX. Here's the story of the teacher that influenced me to become a teacher.
As a freshman at the University of Texas, I had the pleasure to learn under Susan Loepp as my assistant instructor for the Emerging Scholars version of calculus discussion section. She was a graduate student in mathematics and was responsible for filling the gaps between calculus lectures and exams for two semesters. I have had no better teacher.
As a graduate student, Susan was fairly young, probably still in her mid-twenties. Accordingly, she had an excitement for learning and for her field that is rare in mathematics. When introducing a new topic, showing some unusual or especially interesting application for a concept we had learned, or when some student was on the brink of understanding, she often grew visibly excited and would hop up from her perch on top of her desk and fly around the room or pause by the chalk board to make her words concrete. Her passion was contagious; I often found myself smiling at or surprised by the elegance of some new theorem.
Not content to merely provide us with the information we needed to complete homeworks or pass tests, Susan also tried to show us the "Why?" of what we were learning. Rather than using simple repetition or memorization (although these methods were used), Susan drew on her deeper knowledge of mathematics to show us the principles that made our techniques work. For example, instead of just stating that integration of a function gives the area under a curve, she used numerous diagrams and example problems to show why it does so. Such minilectures in number theory and higher math gave us a taste of the joy in truly knowing a subject.
Susan was tireless. Although as a graduate student she no doubt had plenty of work to be done, and though our class met three days a week for two hours each day, she was always in class. And not just present; she had a new worksheet of problems for us every day, with examples, explanations, and several exercises of increasing complexity based on the previous day's lecture. She was always prepared for the day's topic, and though flexible, never had to "fly by the seat of her pants", as she was ready for the questions we would ask and anticipated what we would find counter-intuitive. All this she handled almost casually, yet with characteristic intensity, as if she had no other concerns.
Even though she knew more mathematics then than I will probably ever learn, Susan seemed to consider us not students as much as co-laborers. That is, one got the impression that she was just one of us, that she did not consider herself better because she had learned more. She was very down-to-earth, and understood that school often took a back seat to real life. Before exams, there were always pizza and pepperoni rolls at study sessions. She held a superbowl party at her apartment to which we were all invited. Similarly, she came to an end-of-the-year party that another student held. She knew our names, our phone numbers and more, and made sure we knew the same about each other. We were not merely her students but her friends.
Finally, Susan tried to show that there is no better way to learn than to teach. Each student had to do a project showing the solution to some interesting problem. It was presented before the class and we had to defend ourselves and present the material in a way that was understood by others. In addition, before every exam, we were responsible for making up study sheets, which had to be completed early and in sufficient detail so that someone who had never been exposed to the topic in question could learn it and further understand. Predictably, whoever had made the study sheet for a particular type of problem would perform flawlessly on them on the exam. She showed us that the axiom "those who can, do; those who cannot, teach" could not be farther from the truth.
Susan showed me by example what a great teacher should be. She sparked my interest in teaching by allowing me to get a taste of it for myself, by allowing me to see that I can have a similar passion for my field. She taught me calculus better than my professor because she told me the "Why?", and convinced me that it was important to know, that it made a difference. Susan made me want to be a teacher, and I hope that I am for my students what she was, and is, to me.
I have yet to meet a good CS teacher in highschool.
I must admit we're few and far between. But once in a while someone like me comes along with a quirky combination of programming ability, teaching skill, and disdain for consumerism.
Blame it on our values as a nation that we don't pay good teachers what they're worth. I make less than your quoted $35,000 a year, and our head football coach makes maybe $80,000. Gotta love the free market.... But paying teachers differently based on skill (rather than purely years of experience) or on market value isn't going to happen in Texas anytime soon.
I find it ironic that 100% of students completing my third-year course last year are now working at some tech company while attending college, and making $11 an hour or more. Oh, well. I reject offers from Dell and Tivoli from time to time. I just really, really love my job.
For the record, a good percentage of my third-year kids also use vi by the time they leave....
Check out my mad HTML skills on my class webpage. The semester final is firewalled out, so don't bother.
Just had to say that we are out here, if hard to find.
Sorry about that. I had to rush off and missed that in the preview.
Oh, and my use of the term 'fuck' in the above comment does not reflect the opinions of Leander High School or the Leander Independent School District.;)
Why should I not be able to discuss ideas on web-bulletin boards? Why should I not be able to read about medical conditions? Why should I be subjected to censorship when I am a Senior, and over 18 years old?
Again, as I said in much greater detail in my other comment, this is not N2H2's doing. My high school uses N2H2 filtering software and we have access to slashdot, kuro5hin, mp3.com and many others.
N2H2's normal filtering does not block such sites. If they are blocked for you, it is almost certainly the result of decisions made by your school administrators or school board members.
On the other hand, keep in mind that the school has no obligation to provide you with unfiltered (or "uncensored", if you prefer) internet access or even internet access of any kind. If you want to read about medical conditions or get into web bulletin-board discussion, pay for your own internet access at home like the rest of us.
I'll answer your question with a question: why should you be given free internet access when you are a Senior, and over 18 years old?
I don't mean to poke fun, but consider the implications of what you are demanding. I don't recall seeing "government-sponsored internet access" in the Bill of Rights.
Also keep in mind that you are not being subjected to censorship. If anyone, the author of the blocked content is being censored. But just because I don't buy a DVD movie for you and give it to you to watch doesn't mean that I'm censoring you or even the movie studio that produced it. I'm just choosing not to provide a favor that someone else might.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I was thinking you'd put the PDA inside of you. If you can already get a 128MB USB keychain drive for just over $100, it won't take many more generations to have a 1GB microdrive that could communicate wirelessly a few feet or so and could run off body heat. Stick it in your chest cavity somewhere and plug a receiver unit into your computer.
Perhaps you could actually mount it as a drive (obviously with encrypted data going over an encrypted line so they couldn't scan you without your knowledge at airport terminals). Put it at /mnt/user (heh).
Publish a standard communication interface, and in five years, all your consumer electronics products can talk to it. Just don't rely on it for data storage: bookmarks and profiles are one thing, but you'd hate to need surgery because your drive is full.
(Although, a 1TB iPod 7 in my belly, wirelessly trasmitting over UWB directly to my optic nerve would be pretty cool. Assuming it could do Ogg Vorbis by then, of course.)
Really, it's not hard to record and burn a master then copy 5,000 either through yourself (heh) or pay a third party to do it.
For third-party CD duplication, I can recommend Midwest Disc. They duplicated our album for us and did a great job. We had a run of only 500 copies, and we got two-tone on the disc itself (not a sticker), a six-panel insert (4-color on the front three, B&W on the back three), a 4-color back panel, and assembly and shrinkwrapping for just over $1500, or about $3.10 per disc. If we'd produced just 1000 discs, the per-disc cost would have been less than $2. We did provide our own art, though I don't think we got a discount for that.
In our case, we didn't have any studio costs (it was a live album mixed straight off the sound board to DAT), so we were able to sell the CDs at $5 and still recover our duplication costs even if we didn't sell all of them. As is was, we sold out all 500 within a few months, but there wasn't enough additional demand to warrant getting another run.
Just a word of advice: it helps your fans to make your packaging match the music production quality inside. If all you've got is a 4-tracked master burned to a CD, don't get it professionally duplicated with booklet insert and full-color everywhere. When the fans see *real* packaging they're going to assume that what they hear is *really* produced as well.
For 4-track stuff, burn them yourself and use stickers. For homemade production (using Cakewalk or whatever), get them professionally duplicated, but only put in a single card (front and back) for the "liner notes". If the production is done in a real studio (or you're uncommonly good at Cakewalk and it sounds *perfect*), go ahead and do the duplication like a real album.
CDs can add more value in the non-digital domain, such as beautifully printed booklets with photographs and lyrics. Again, make it more convenient for the biggest part of the public to buy the CD than to reproduce the contents of the package by burning and printing.
That's it exactly. At $0.25 each, you can download a whole CD (roughly 12 tracks) and burn it to a CD-R for right around $3. Then the question becomes whether or not the higher audio quality (vs 128 kbps mp3s), cover art, liner notes, etc, are worth the additional cost.
At $15 per CD, it's questionable. You're talking about five times the cost for basically a glossy pamphlet. Most people wouldn't do it. But at, say, $5 per CD, I'll bet most people would. (And having had an album professionally produced before, I can tell you that if you don't need a heavy advertising budget and lots of middlemen, $5 per CD can cover the costs of studio production, art design, and duplication when you're talking about 10,000 or 100,000 units sold.)
The majors are in reality no different than the Mafia, except that they don't kill people (that I know about anyway).
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Amusing, but not original. This was posted to comp.lang.c and several other newsgroups on April 27.
See the original (?) C: A Dead Language.
You are completely correct across the board. However, I believe we would both agree that there are some highly qualified individuals who could teach excellently but don't go into teaching for primarily financial reasons.
If we divide the world into four types of people (obviously there's really more of a continuum than this...):
Unfortunately, below university levels, there are a lot more teachers at levels 3 & 4 than there should be. And raising teacher salaries would almost certainly increase the number of 1s going into teaching. That was really my point.
Almost didn't see this question because it's not on the main page.
I teach three years of high school Computer Science and will add a webmastering course next year. Currently CS is taught in C++, though we'll be moving to Scheme and Java in the future. Webmastering will cover HTML, CSS, SQL, Perl and maybe PHP.
I use Linux as my primary OS at home, but the kids use Windows 95 and Borland C++ because that's what we bought licenses for 5 years ago. I keep hoping to move to Linux in the lab, but the biggest holdup has been a NetWare client for Linux so the kids can access their home directories.
I do have a degree in CS from a top-ten CS university and was among the top few in many of my classes. I can say that money is definitely an issue for many. I started at $24K five years ago and am now up to $32K in Austin, TX. I have friends with comparable skill levels that graduated with me who are making double to three times that amount in industry.
Teachers should be the best and brightest but often aren't because the pay is so much less than they could get in industry. If teacher salary were only 10% less than industry (rather than 50% or more), you'd see a lot more qualified people looking into teaching.
Oh, and to those who say that teachers only work 8:00-3:30... keep in mind that is only the lecture times. In addition, teachers must deal with parents, grade student work (and we don't have grunt TAs like college professors) and generate new assignments/lecture material. And any teacher who can get all that done during a single "planning period" probably isn't doing a very good job.
I know one industry person that left a job at places like IBM because she wanted to work "shorter hours". She lasted one year as a teacher.
Obligatory self-promotion: you can see what my classes are doing right now, and also find out more than you ever wanted to know about me.
Is that firmware upgrade available to the public?
Not yet. Coming soon, I think.
And Windows Media Player does not yet play Oggs.
Legal just because you own the music or legal because the music is free? Technically I don't think that you are allowed to play your own CDs in a public place, like a school.
Well, the mp3s are legal. You're correct that the "public performance" is illegal, but if we're going to start busting teachers for that, we won't stop after getting rid of my jukebox. Ever watched a movie in a class?
;-P
> Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller.
Is that an invalid comparison or what? Why not compare a VBR mp3 to a VBR Ogg?
Because all the music on my jukebox was encoded CBR. There are still lots of CBR mp3s out there. I suppose the most canonical example would be to compare a 128 kbps CBR mp3, which people call "CD quality", to the equivalent-sounding VBR Ogg (probably 96 or maybe even 80 kbps).
Personally I replaced 128 kbps CBR mp3s (encoded with BladeEnc) with quality 4 (nominal bitrate of 128 kbps) oggs. I save about 3% of space, and the sound quality is noticably better.
I highly doubt you can tell the difference in audio quality on your jukebox, what with the inferior hardware and all.
My "jukebox" is actually a PC feeding a Sony receiver and some $400 a pair bookshelf speakers. And I can tell the difference.
Though I did say "most folks". If I were going to be making sound comparisons of my own to quote, I'd be doing it at home with a expensive pair of headphones and would be ABXing some standard test files. I haven't personally done so, so I just quoted the rule of thumb.
I teach Computer Science at the high school level at a largish school near Austin, Texas. For the past several years there's been a "jukebox" in my room where students could vote for albums to hear during programming lab time, and random tracks off the winning albums play over the speakers in the classroom.
Over Christmas break I changed the "player" portion of the system to play Ogg Vorbis files instead of mp3s.
Why not mp3?
So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?
By the way, if you haven't listened to Ogg since 1.0-rc3 came out (on New Year's Day), try it again. The sound quality has been much improved. Note that you should not use the "-b" option to encode as it uses CBR and thus produces larger files at lower quality. Default is quality 3, which is 112 kbps but sounds as good as 160 kbps to most. If you really can tell the difference, quality 4 averages 128 kbps and sounds much better (and is maybe 3% smaller) than an mp3 at that rate. You've got to experiment to find your own sweet spot.
The biggest downside is that whole ubiquity thing. There's been an official Winamp plug-in for quite some time, but Nullsoft have yet to install it by default (rumor has it that it is AOL 's legal department which is holding this up). I'm also pretty sure there's a Windows Media Player codec, but don't quote me on that.
Also the only hardware player that supports Ogg Vorbis is the HipZip (via a firmware upgrade). Other units that support it are coming soon, but not yet available.
Since I don't own a hardware player (yet) and don't download my mp3s, the ubiquity factor isn't an issue for me, however.
On the plate for rc4 is sound quality tuning for the low (a.k.a streaming) bitrates. Then a coat of polish and it'll be called 1.0
So, why not just print to the "FILE:" port with some postscript driver?
To tell you the truth, it never even crossed my mind. Since I don't have any desire for a paper copy I generally don't think about clicking "print", even when the destination is a file.
I wish I had, though. Probably would have saved me at least three hours.
Several months ago I paid for and downloaded the DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook version of "God's Debris". I paid $5 for it.
I also downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the book, which was good. However, I didn't like the reader at all. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as .PGMs. Then I booted into Linux (I'd had to be in Windows to run the reader) and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up. Overall, this took me about five hours.
Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted .OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
If I assume that a professional "image -> OCR text -> corrected text" conversion specialist gets paid $10/hour, then the five hours it took me incurred about $50 in labor cost, bringing the total price to around $55. Not as cheap as the dead-tree version (<$15), but easier to grab quotes from. And of course I now have some valuable skills which I could use to help out Project Gutenberg.
I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now just to read the book again.
And I'm glad that there's now a paper version so that most other people can obtain a less legally-encumbered version without having to do the grunt work I did.
Actually that doesn't work for my (6.0 beta) of vim, but then I may not have properly installed it. What does work is
:help tutor
(where the colon is significant) from inside vim or just
% vimtutor
from the shell.
I won't be able to crack the book itself, but since it appears on the screen at some point, I'm going to be able to read it sooner or later - and I can copy it.
Exactly. Recently I paid for and downloaded "God's Debris", a thought experiment/novel by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. It's only available as a DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook. I paid $5 for it.
I downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the book, which was good. However, I didn't like the reader at all. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as .PGMs. Then I booted into Linux (the reader only runs under Windows) and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up.
Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted .OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version, since it cost me about 5 hours of labor and proofreading. Plus, I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.
Nevertheless I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now just to read the book again.
Descending! Descending! I guess not everyone pictures that exactly the same way ;)
When I said descending I was thinking as in: "sort the following nine digits in descending order."
But then many ./ers apparently took it to mean "getting smaller over time." Although the more accurate word for that would have been "decreasing" or maybe "diminishing".
Let's have fun with definitions straight outta my brain!
Anyway, I didn't mean to nitpick about the title. I just thought it was ironic that some folk complained about the title when it hadn't been mine.
Your article on slashdot.org about the billionth second of the epoch is sort of (but not entirely) flawed.
I was the slashdotter who submitted the original article. And just for the record, I never said anything about a billion seconds from 1970-01-01, I just pointed out that "soon the magic numbers will say all 9s".
At the time, I felt like a complete dork for even noticing the proximity of UNIX timestamp "987654321", but I felt like it'd be wrong of me not to share, so I did, and threw in the bit about UNIX timestamp "999999999" just for kicks. It was only the second story I'd ever submitted to /., and the only one to get accepted (the first was announcing the release of Mozilla M16, but I'd jumped the gun).
Now that I know that there's someone out there who cares enough to correct my back-of-an-envelope calculations by bringing in leap seconds makes me feel like less of a dork.
(By the way, my title as submitted was "descending unix timestamp"; it was Timothy who changed the title to "The Quickly Descending Unix Timestamp", which wrongly implies that the timestamp's value is getting smaller over time, IMHO.)
Anyway, maybe now that I can prove I'm not the biggest nerd out there I'll start getting dates again....
Once the 1.0 encoder is available, I think I'll never encode anything in mp3 format again.
I teach high school, and there's a "jukebox" (linux PC w/sound card connected to a Sony receiver) in my classroom with lots of custom software that allows students each period to electronically vote for albums they want to hear. My server then queues up a random selection of tracks off the winning albums and does the deejay thing all period.
Currently I've got 10G of mp3s on there (168 whole albums), mostly from albums submitted by students and ripped and encoded by me. But there's no reason I couldn't have it play oggs instead. I can't hear any sound quality difference on my home computer's crappy speakers, I like the improved file size, and the whole free software/patent-free/open algorithm aspect makes me very happy. Plus, using primarily oggs makes it less likely that people could accuse me of illegally obtaining the songs (say from whatever file-sharing program the kids use these days).
In order to get an album on the jukebox, students must bring in the physical CD and sign a form indicating that 1) they own the album, 2) they haven't made any "archival" copies of said album, and 3) they give me the right to make that copy. Once the student is no longer in my class, I erase the album unless some other student comes forward to sponsor it.
So probably by the end of next year I'll have however many old re-sponsored albums still in mp3 format, and all new albums in ogg. Plus a good 25% to 33% of the albums on the jukebox belong to me personally, so I'll probably re-rip and encode those as oggs, too.
"Like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows is a man who deceives his neighbor and says, 'I was only joking!'" -- Proverbs 26:18-19
Sometimes the Bible is surprisingly relevant.
(BTW, this comment is not intended as a troll; it's just that few people know the Bible has anything to say about the whole "just kidding" thing. Though I fear I may spark a long offtopic thread anyway. Apologies in advance if such a thread ensues.)
This messageboard post looks as much like an alarmist hoax as anything I've ever seen ("please contact my lawyer at his AOL address", and "this is not a rumor"), but....
I ran the distributed.net client on every computer in every lab in the high school where I teach two years ago, myself. But I got permission first.
The client is only running in my lab now, but I've still got permission. And in the unlikely event that we win, the $2000 goes to "Leander High School Computer Science Department". ;)
Though it doesn't come anywhere near justifying a $0.59/sec cost, I can see people being upset if the admin kept machines on when they otherwise would have been off (e.g. spring break) solely to crack a few more RC-5 blocks. Electricity ain't cheap. OTOH, with proper proxying, bandwidth for d.net is negligible.
If this story is true, the school system is most likely just upset about having software installed on their system without their knowledge (1) which drained system resources (albeit not many) and (2) whose primary purpose had no perceived value for the district (to prove how poor government encryption was at that time/the geek factor/to win money).
This is a good idea.
If everyone has broadband they should be able to ditch the telephone and chat in real time over one of those IP telephony thingys. (Roger Wilco or CCFaudio or something similar.) The latency should be low enough to keep everybody synced up nicely, and it makes the long distance charges go away.
When streaming the voices to hard drive (assuming there's enough space after all the pr0n^H^H^H^H Christmas photos), 16-bit, 22KHz mono should be plenty, which will consume roughly 2.5MB/min or 150MB/hour. There's reason to believe this will compress fairly well with bzip2 so you've got lossless compression but Nate doesn't have to deal with 150MB email attachments.
Or you could try FLAC, which I have no experience with, but it might work better than bzip2 since it's lossless compression designed specifically for audio. Or if you don't care that much about audio quality, compress the voice streams to a 256Kb MP3 for emailing. See if I care.
And ultimately it'd be nice to see some OGGs for download as the final product. It being free software and all that.
Just for the record, I spent way too long crafting this message that almost no one will read.
I'm now a computer science teacher myself at a high school near Austin, TX. Here's the story of the teacher that influenced me to become a teacher.
As a freshman at the University of Texas, I had the pleasure to learn under Susan Loepp as my assistant instructor for the Emerging Scholars version of calculus discussion section. She was a graduate student in mathematics and was responsible for filling the gaps between calculus lectures and exams for two semesters. I have had no better teacher.
As a graduate student, Susan was fairly young, probably still in her mid-twenties. Accordingly, she had an excitement for learning and for her field that is rare in mathematics. When introducing a new topic, showing some unusual or especially interesting application for a concept we had learned, or when some student was on the brink of understanding, she often grew visibly excited and would hop up from her perch on top of her desk and fly around the room or pause by the chalk board to make her words concrete. Her passion was contagious; I often found myself smiling at or surprised by the elegance of some new theorem.
Not content to merely provide us with the information we needed to complete homeworks or pass tests, Susan also tried to show us the "Why?" of what we were learning. Rather than using simple repetition or memorization (although these methods were used), Susan drew on her deeper knowledge of mathematics to show us the principles that made our techniques work. For example, instead of just stating that integration of a function gives the area under a curve, she used numerous diagrams and example problems to show why it does so. Such minilectures in number theory and higher math gave us a taste of the joy in truly knowing a subject.
Susan was tireless. Although as a graduate student she no doubt had plenty of work to be done, and though our class met three days a week for two hours each day, she was always in class. And not just present; she had a new worksheet of problems for us every day, with examples, explanations, and several exercises of increasing complexity based on the previous day's lecture. She was always prepared for the day's topic, and though flexible, never had to "fly by the seat of her pants", as she was ready for the questions we would ask and anticipated what we would find counter-intuitive. All this she handled almost casually, yet with characteristic intensity, as if she had no other concerns.
Even though she knew more mathematics then than I will probably ever learn, Susan seemed to consider us not students as much as co-laborers. That is, one got the impression that she was just one of us, that she did not consider herself better because she had learned more. She was very down-to-earth, and understood that school often took a back seat to real life. Before exams, there were always pizza and pepperoni rolls at study sessions. She held a superbowl party at her apartment to which we were all invited. Similarly, she came to an end-of-the-year party that another student held. She knew our names, our phone numbers and more, and made sure we knew the same about each other. We were not merely her students but her friends.
Finally, Susan tried to show that there is no better way to learn than to teach. Each student had to do a project showing the solution to some interesting problem. It was presented before the class and we had to defend ourselves and present the material in a way that was understood by others. In addition, before every exam, we were responsible for making up study sheets, which had to be completed early and in sufficient detail so that someone who had never been exposed to the topic in question could learn it and further understand. Predictably, whoever had made the study sheet for a particular type of problem would perform flawlessly on them on the exam. She showed us that the axiom "those who can, do; those who cannot, teach" could not be farther from the truth.
Susan showed me by example what a great teacher should be. She sparked my interest in teaching by allowing me to get a taste of it for myself, by allowing me to see that I can have a similar passion for my field. She taught me calculus better than my professor because she told me the "Why?", and convinced me that it was important to know, that it made a difference. Susan made me want to be a teacher, and I hope that I am for my students what she was, and is, to me.
I have yet to meet a good CS teacher in highschool.
I must admit we're few and far between. But once in a while someone like me comes along with a quirky combination of programming ability, teaching skill, and disdain for consumerism.
Blame it on our values as a nation that we don't pay good teachers what they're worth. I make less than your quoted $35,000 a year, and our head football coach makes maybe $80,000. Gotta love the free market.... But paying teachers differently based on skill (rather than purely years of experience) or on market value isn't going to happen in Texas anytime soon.
I find it ironic that 100% of students completing my third-year course last year are now working at some tech company while attending college, and making $11 an hour or more. Oh, well. I reject offers from Dell and Tivoli from time to time. I just really, really love my job.
For the record, a good percentage of my third-year kids also use vi by the time they leave....
Check out my mad HTML skills on my class webpage. The semester final is firewalled out, so don't bother.
Just had to say that we are out here, if hard to find.
...and then add your "proxy" to our black list.
Sorry about that. I had to rush off and missed that in the preview.
Oh, and my use of the term 'fuck' in the above comment does not reflect the opinions of Leander High School or the Leander Independent School District. ;)
Why should I not be able to discuss ideas on web-bulletin boards? Why should I not be able to read about medical conditions? Why should I be subjected to censorship when I am a Senior, and over 18 years old?
Again, as I said in much greater detail in my other comment, this is not N2H2's doing. My high school uses N2H2 filtering software and we have access to slashdot, kuro5hin, mp3.com and many others.
N2H2's normal filtering does not block such sites. If they are blocked for you, it is almost certainly the result of decisions made by your school administrators or school board members.
On the other hand, keep in mind that the school has no obligation to provide you with unfiltered (or "uncensored", if you prefer) internet access or even internet access of any kind. If you want to read about medical conditions or get into web bulletin-board discussion, pay for your own internet access at home like the rest of us.
I'll answer your question with a question: why should you be given free internet access when you are a Senior, and over 18 years old?
I don't mean to poke fun, but consider the implications of what you are demanding. I don't recall seeing "government-sponsored internet access" in the Bill of Rights.
Also keep in mind that you are not being subjected to censorship. If anyone, the author of the blocked content is being censored. But just because I don't buy a DVD movie for you and give it to you to watch doesn't mean that I'm censoring you or even the movie studio that produced it. I'm just choosing not to provide a favor that someone else might.