Well, you list "screens that work under sunlight" as one of the features people want. So far, e-ink is the only electronic technology that makes that easy. Some kinds of LCD (non-backlit) make that possible, but it's not nearly the contrast.
The Kindle is too expensive and too locked down, but its e-ink is not its achilles heel. It may be its biggest advantage. I have a Sony Reader, and the e-ink is the best thing about it. Lots of people complain about no backlighting for e-ink -- if I had to have backlighting I'd probably give the thing back. Backlit screens are harder on the eyes. You can read better in the dark with backlighting, but it makes reading in the sun much harder, and LCD screens make my eyes tired a lot faster in any light than e-ink. I read a *lot* more in the sun than I do in the dark. And true, current e-ink is monochrome (which is fine for my uses), but color e-ink is supposedly not that far away.
The Kindle, for all its ugliness, did some things better than Sony -- the page turn buttons are much more intelligently designed. If I cared about search, the ugly keyboard would be a plus. I don't, so that doesn't much matter. A user replaceable battery is something that more manufacturers should do -- that's a much bigger deal than most seem to understand.
The wireless seems like a nice idea with no use for someone who wants to put his own content on there. The lack of support for PDF is just silly, the support for HTML (which the Sony doesn't do) is good. Unlike others, so far as I can see, I think I'd *like* the hardware, but the *package* doesn't sound attractive at all.
Not really. If the counterweight really is exactly the same weight as the Bentley + elevator, then the energy to lower the empty elevator (i.e., lift the counterweight) would be the same as it would be to lift the Bentley in the case where the counterweight only offset the elevator itself. Either way, a round trip would involve a dead weight lift equivalent to that of the car. Unless each tenant had his own elevator, in which case it would never have to go down empty, you can't get away from this energy expenditure.
If you have a way to store the energy of the down trip (car or counterweight, it depends on which is heavier) *then* you might come closer to only using up frictional and other thermodynamic losses.
My computer labs in the Computer Science department all have OpenOffice installed (except the Solaris machines which have Star Office.) I think I have two machines in the walk-in lab that have MS Office as well (2003.) This is at one of the smaller Cal State campuses.
The rest of the university computers are still all MS, as far as I'm aware.
Hmm. I have OOo 2.3, but I haven't had much reason to use it since it came out. I don't use word processors all that often.
But it has been my experience in the past that when I received a Word doc, if I opened it in OOo (2.0, 2.1, 2.2), edited it lightly, and saved it again in Word doc format, it always shrank significantly. I can't point you to specifics, since I wasn't paying a lot of attention and didn't care much anyway, but that has been my experience. It was enough that I *did* notice it.
I have a Sony Reader, as well as an old Palm that stays in my pocket.
There are advantages to the Palm, primarily the fact that it *is* in my pocket, so it's nearly always available. If I find myself somewhere with a little time to kill, I can always reach in and read on the Palm -- I generally have two or three books residing on it.
On the other hand, the Sony is a bit large to carry in a normal pocket. In the winter, if I'm wearing a coat, it will fit in an inside jacket pocket (if a mass market paperback will fit, so will the Reader.) In the summer, it will fit in the cargo pockets of my shorts, so availability is not *that* big a problem.
All that said, resolution and screen size makes an *enormous* difference when reading literature. I can read on the Palm for 15 or 20 minutes, and after that I'm pretty much ready to stop. I can read on the Sony for hours with no visual fatigue. The contrast and resolution is not as good as dead tree, but it is far above any other electronic device I've used, and it's nice having 100+ books in my pocket. Many's the time that my dead tree book finished up with the next one in the queue being across town somewhere.
If you make your own PDF files, they work just fine. I have a couple of SED scripts that convert.txt files to.tex, or I use html2latex to convert HTML. With a.sty file optimized for the Sony reader, I get font sizes and layout just the way I want them, and the Sony honors table of contents hyperlinks that are embedded in PDF.
I actually prefer my PDFs on the Sony to the native LRF. Yeah, you can resize and reflow the LRF files, but the ebooks I've tried that were LRF based had so much white space that each page had too little text. The page turns were too big an interruption.
Our last chair stayed on for an extra year because no one else would take it. He refused to stay a fifth year (normally it's a three year term) and we came close to having someone from another department assigned because no one in our department was willing. After intense negotiation, the dean finally convinced someone to step forward.
He's on his second year of three and is already looking forward to going back to being a regular professor.
There are times when it's *nice* not to be tenure track.
Umm. Don't count on the thousands of pages on the cartridges that come with the printer. Even lasers are coming with "starter cartridges" these days.
On the other hand, once buy your first "real cartridges", you are correct. You will get thousands of pages out of them. Well, if you're using the color for high coverage pages, it won't be very many thousands...
My new Thinkpad (which should be shipped Real Soon Now) will be coming with Vista Home Basic. I'd have been happier with no Windows at all, but Home Basic was $50 cheaper than the default "Home Premium", and was $80 cheaper than XP.
Getting it without Windows was not an option, but I can at least get by paying Microsoft the least amount possible. I'll probably also document my refusal of the license and petition Lenovo for a refund, but they have a reputation of not being very receptive to that. We'll see.
A decade is not long enough. My TV is practically brand new -- I bought it in 1992.
Why should I replace it? It does everything I want it to do. Perfectly. I paid $250 in 1992. That's *still* a bit higher than I really care to pay for TV. And there are not TVs available for that price now. I *certainly* have no interest in paying $1000+ for any TV ever made.
The *say* they are reclaiming that spectrum to give it to safety functions, etc. What do you want to bet they auction all (or most) of it off for big bucks?
They can afford to give me a voucher to pay for a conversion box. They should really pay the full load, not $40.
And I can promise you that 1106 DOES have the insecure telnet. You have to apply the patch if you ever want to enable telnet -- and if you choose to enable Network services for some other reason, like, oh, say to use XDMCP, you get telnet enabled as a bonus. .
On the other hand, keep in mind the significantly shorter battery life of phones with color displays as opposed to those with "basic" black and white LCD. The display technology in that case *does* affect the battery life.
I couldn't do that; there aren't any tools for dealing with magnification
Mmmm? I did a demo for my user group when Dapper came out. I was ad-libbing, showing how to install software and discovered the accessibility tools. What I installed was the magnification utility.
I can't tell you much about how good it is, but I know there is such a creature.
Pretty much *any* software of even medium complexity violates numerous patents. That's the crux of the whole software patent debate -- most software patent claims tend to be very broad, covering very basic issues, and software is so complex it pretty much *has* to overlap these claims in multiple directions.
There are wiretaps involved with the NSA's FISA violations, but there has been no accusation of domestic wiretapping in the suits against the Bells.
The Bell suits all have to do with turning over call records, not wiretapping. Wiretapping is *live* monitoring of the contents of telephone calls, and the legal bar to performing a wiretap is considerably higher than "trap and trace" or "pen register" monitoring. The massive turnover of call records is equivalent to trap and trace and pen register, and according to the PATRIOT Act, all the authorities have to do to get an order authorizing these latter types of surveillance to to atest that such monitoring is "necessary to an ongoing investigation."
So when the NSA claims that those requests for records was legal, they're probably right. The question to be asked, of course, is *should* it be legal, and that's a whole different question. Congress had the chance to fix that, but they passed the renewed PATRIOT Act, so I guess that means that *they* thought it was OK.
And there may be actual domestic wiretapping going on, but we don't know that since if there is, that story hasn't yet broken.
I'm not sure who you're quoting, but the Constitution was not drafted while we were colonists in rebellion. It was not signed until 1787. The Treaty of Paris in 1793 recognized the independence of the United States. The British were undoubtedly still unhappy with us, but the signers were under no special threat from Britain.
The Declaration of Independence is a completely different matter.
When prerecorded movies (on tape) first came out they were roughly $90 each. They make a lot more money selling them now at $20 apiece than they did at $90 each because they sell a LOT more of them.
According to TFA on this story, bands typically get 4 1/2 cents per song on iTunes (out of the 70 cents the label gets.) That leaves lots of room left to slice -- if the volume goes up in a similar manner that video sales went up as the price lowered, the bands' total take will go up enough that there will be no reason for the bands to sue their labels. Of course that would mean that a 70 cents per song cut for the labels would be ridiculous. As it is anyway.
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Well, you list "screens that work under sunlight" as one of the features people want. So far, e-ink is the only electronic technology that makes that easy. Some kinds of LCD (non-backlit) make that possible, but it's not nearly the contrast.
The Kindle is too expensive and too locked down, but its e-ink is not its achilles heel. It may be its biggest advantage. I have a Sony Reader, and the e-ink is the best thing about it. Lots of people complain about no backlighting for e-ink -- if I had to have backlighting I'd probably give the thing back. Backlit screens are harder on the eyes. You can read better in the dark with backlighting, but it makes reading in the sun much harder, and LCD screens make my eyes tired a lot faster in any light than e-ink. I read a *lot* more in the sun than I do in the dark. And true, current e-ink is monochrome (which is fine for my uses), but color e-ink is supposedly not that far away.
The Kindle, for all its ugliness, did some things better than Sony -- the page turn buttons are much more intelligently designed. If I cared about search, the ugly keyboard would be a plus. I don't, so that doesn't much matter. A user replaceable battery is something that more manufacturers should do -- that's a much bigger deal than most seem to understand.
The wireless seems like a nice idea with no use for someone who wants to put his own content on there. The lack of support for PDF is just silly, the support for HTML (which the Sony doesn't do) is good. Unlike others, so far as I can see, I think I'd *like* the hardware, but the *package* doesn't sound attractive at all.
Well...
Not really. If the counterweight really is exactly the same weight as the Bentley + elevator, then the energy to lower the empty elevator (i.e., lift the counterweight) would be the same as it would be to lift the Bentley in the case where the counterweight only offset the elevator itself. Either way, a round trip would involve a dead weight lift equivalent to that of the car. Unless each tenant had his own elevator, in which case it would never have to go down empty, you can't get away from this energy expenditure.
If you have a way to store the energy of the down trip (car or counterweight, it depends on which is heavier) *then* you might come closer to only using up frictional and other thermodynamic losses.
My computer labs in the Computer Science department all have OpenOffice installed (except the Solaris machines which have Star Office.) I think I have two machines in the walk-in lab that have MS Office as well (2003.) This is at one of the smaller Cal State campuses.
The rest of the university computers are still all MS, as far as I'm aware.
Hmm. I have OOo 2.3, but I haven't had much reason to use it since it came out. I don't use word processors all that often.
But it has been my experience in the past that when I received a Word doc, if I opened it in OOo (2.0, 2.1, 2.2), edited it lightly, and saved it again in Word doc format, it always shrank significantly. I can't point you to specifics, since I wasn't paying a lot of attention and didn't care much anyway, but that has been my experience. It was enough that I *did* notice it.
I have a Sony Reader, as well as an old Palm that stays in my pocket.
There are advantages to the Palm, primarily the fact that it *is* in my pocket, so it's nearly always available. If I find myself somewhere with a little time to kill, I can always reach in and read on the Palm -- I generally have two or three books residing on it.
On the other hand, the Sony is a bit large to carry in a normal pocket. In the winter, if I'm wearing a coat, it will fit in an inside jacket pocket (if a mass market paperback will fit, so will the Reader.) In the summer, it will fit in the cargo pockets of my shorts, so availability is not *that* big a problem.
All that said, resolution and screen size makes an *enormous* difference when reading literature. I can read on the Palm for 15 or 20 minutes, and after that I'm pretty much ready to stop. I can read on the Sony for hours with no visual fatigue. The contrast and resolution is not as good as dead tree, but it is far above any other electronic device I've used, and it's nice having 100+ books in my pocket. Many's the time that my dead tree book finished up with the next one in the queue being across town somewhere.
If you make your own PDF files, they work just fine. I have a couple of SED scripts that convert .txt files to .tex, or I use html2latex to convert HTML. With a .sty file optimized for the Sony reader, I get font sizes and layout just the way I want them, and the Sony honors table of contents hyperlinks that are embedded in PDF.
I actually prefer my PDFs on the Sony to the native LRF. Yeah, you can resize and reflow the LRF files, but the ebooks I've tried that were LRF based had so much white space that each page had too little text. The page turns were too big an interruption.
Our last chair stayed on for an extra year because no one else would take it. He refused to stay a fifth year (normally it's a three year term) and we came close to having someone from another department assigned because no one in our department was willing. After intense negotiation, the dean finally convinced someone to step forward.
He's on his second year of three and is already looking forward to going back to being a regular professor.
There are times when it's *nice* not to be tenure track.
Umm. Don't count on the thousands of pages on the cartridges that come with the printer. Even lasers are coming with "starter cartridges" these days.
On the other hand, once buy your first "real cartridges", you are correct. You will get thousands of pages out of them. Well, if you're using the color for high coverage pages, it won't be very many thousands...
My new Thinkpad (which should be shipped Real Soon Now) will be coming with Vista Home Basic. I'd have been happier with no Windows at all, but Home Basic was $50 cheaper than the default "Home Premium", and was $80 cheaper than XP.
Getting it without Windows was not an option, but I can at least get by paying Microsoft the least amount possible. I'll probably also document my refusal of the license and petition Lenovo for a refund, but they have a reputation of not being very receptive to that. We'll see.
- an established body of knowledge
- established best practices (codes)
- accredited education programs
- established codes of professional conduct and ethics
- examinations (licensing)
The ACM would like us to be a "Profession", but thinks we're not there yet."I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants!"
A decade is not long enough. My TV is practically brand new -- I bought it in 1992.
Why should I replace it? It does everything I want it to do. Perfectly. I paid $250 in 1992. That's *still* a bit higher than I really care to pay for TV. And there are not TVs available for that price now. I *certainly* have no interest in paying $1000+ for any TV ever made.
The *say* they are reclaiming that spectrum to give it to safety functions, etc. What do you want to bet they auction all (or most) of it off for big bucks?
They can afford to give me a voucher to pay for a conversion box. They should really pay the full load, not $40.
Or leave the damned spectrum alone.
And I can promise you that 1106 DOES have the insecure telnet. You have to apply the patch if you ever want to enable telnet -- and if you choose to enable Network services for some other reason, like, oh, say to use XDMCP, you get telnet enabled as a bonus.
.
On the other hand, keep in mind the significantly shorter battery life of phones with color displays as opposed to those with "basic" black and white LCD. The display technology in that case *does* affect the battery life.
Mmmm? I did a demo for my user group when Dapper came out. I was ad-libbing, showing how to install software and discovered the accessibility tools. What I installed was the magnification utility. I can't tell you much about how good it is, but I know there is such a creature.
Heh.
Get real.
...and most closed source software as well.
Pretty much *any* software of even medium complexity violates numerous patents. That's the crux of the whole software patent debate -- most software patent claims tend to be very broad, covering very basic issues, and software is so complex it pretty much *has* to overlap these claims in multiple directions.
This is the Microsoft party line. The only difference between "commercial" software and Open Source Software is that FOSS is given away for no charge.
Yes, they know better. But that's what they say in public.
What's scary about this statement is that I can't tell if it's tongue in cheek or not.
It's not an uncommon attitude.
Boise *won* DOJ v. Microsoft, then lost it again when he "let" George Bush become president. That's just one loss, though, not two.
Nope. "Current" Word supports an XML file format. It's not .doc, nor is it Word's default format.
.doc either.
Nextgen Word will use an XML format as its native format. It will be the default, but it won't be
Good point. If there was no court order (and are we sure there was no *secret* court order?) then even the PATRIOT Act wouldn't make it legal.
But there's still no wiretap involved.
There are wiretaps involved with the NSA's FISA violations, but there has been no accusation of domestic wiretapping in the suits against the Bells.
The Bell suits all have to do with turning over call records, not wiretapping. Wiretapping is *live* monitoring of the contents of telephone calls, and the legal bar to performing a wiretap is considerably higher than "trap and trace" or "pen register" monitoring. The massive turnover of call records is equivalent to trap and trace and pen register, and according to the PATRIOT Act, all the authorities have to do to get an order authorizing these latter types of surveillance to to atest that such monitoring is "necessary to an ongoing investigation."
So when the NSA claims that those requests for records was legal, they're probably right. The question to be asked, of course, is *should* it be legal, and that's a whole different question. Congress had the chance to fix that, but they passed the renewed PATRIOT Act, so I guess that means that *they* thought it was OK.
And there may be actual domestic wiretapping going on, but we don't know that since if there is, that story hasn't yet broken.
I'm not sure who you're quoting, but the Constitution was not drafted while we were colonists in rebellion. It was not signed until 1787. The Treaty of Paris in 1793 recognized the independence of the United States. The British were undoubtedly still unhappy with us, but the signers were under no special threat from Britain.
The Declaration of Independence is a completely different matter.
When prerecorded movies (on tape) first came out they were roughly $90 each. They make a lot more money selling them now at $20 apiece than they did at $90 each because they sell a LOT more of them.
According to TFA on this story, bands typically get 4 1/2 cents per song on iTunes (out of the 70 cents the label gets.) That leaves lots of room left to slice -- if the volume goes up in a similar manner that video sales went up as the price lowered, the bands' total take will go up enough that there will be no reason for the bands to sue their labels. Of course that would mean that a 70 cents per song cut for the labels would be ridiculous. As it is anyway.