I own a model 200, and am pretty happy with it. It may not be perfect, and for now I happen to like my thinkpad more, but it is a reliable bit of hardware, with no moving parts, unless I want to hang my disk drive off of the serial port.
The disk drive has a capacity of about 100 k, or possibly two 100k partitions.
club100.org has more information, and pricing. 102s are going from $150 to $350, depending upon memory and condition. 100's are going from $75 to $150, aldo depending upon memory and condition.
One thing to remember is that 32k of raw text, nor formating, is about the equivalent of 10 8 1/2 x 11" pieces of paper. Unless you are taking more notes than that, you probably won't run out of memory on a daily basis.
I get so frustrated when I hear the words "No open book tests".
Not me. Keep in mind that you are assuming a vast knowledgebase you already possess. Such as how to program, how to analyse data, things like that. How to read and write, even. If you were not required to learn those things (which do, contrary to popular rumour, require you to memorize things), you would be incapable of doing them as needed. Just remember, what you "memorized" back in the day is what you "remember" how to do today.
Here is the primary problem with this "concept" of testing for memorization. Universities are not designed to teach you the skills of writing, programing, of having memorized all the battles of the 30 years war, or other 'technical' skills. If you want to learn those, we have very fine technical schools who will be more than happy to provide instruction in those fields, and very well may cost you less, while giving you the skills to perform those tasks at the levels necessary to provide you with a very well paying job.
A university or college education is oriented around giving you the critical skills of being able to think on your own, and to be able to do the research necessary to explain what you are doing, and how you got to that point. The skills of being able to do research and the like do not fundamentally require the ability to memorize strings of facts, or specific theroms, etc. And testing to see if you remember the exact syntax for calling a function to add two numbers together and return the resulting number as a string of characters, is not testing to see if you are able to be a good researcher.
In software engineering, a better test for whether you have learned the skills of a software engineer would be to give you the language manual for an arbitrary BNF language, give you a task somewhat mroe difficult than you have had to perform so far, and see if you can find a set of procedures or functions within the language that allows you to complete that task.
Of course this presumes that the instructor can confirm that your selection of functions will perform or not perform the task requested. This is not a given, which is very probably one of the reasons that you are going to get tests that see if you recall correctly the print function of ModulaII
No, I can easily make a cluster as expensive as a super computer. Well, assuming I can spend all the money on the hardware necessary. Of course for a couple of million dollars, you can expect a rather impressive cluster.
Let me see, we'll take a quarter mill and use that to purchase the switches an cabling needed to interconnect everything. Might have to spend a bit to upgrade the power to our facilities, and speaking of facilities, we will probably need a warehouse some place to keep all the systems we are putting together into this cluster.
If we dedicate no more than a million to the actual hardware, cases, motherboards, cpu's, memory, (network card built into the motherboard) at perhaps a $100 per set (volume discounts) we are talking about a 10,000 node cluster. If we are talking about a $20M supercomputer, then we might need closer to a million each for networking and space, and we would get a 180,000 node cluster. (or better.)
Of course at that point, we might get better performance with quad, or 8way smp motherboards and processors, which might cost a bit more, but perhaps less than $400 or $800 per package. It could get interesting. Of course by the time the cpu lot got out of Intel, AMD, or IBM it would no longer be their fastest set of processors, but I think that shouldn't be a significant problem for the effectiveness of the volume of processors we would be working with.
We may not have an optimized bit of clustering software to run on it yet, but that's something to be worked out along the way as we are adding blocks of processors to the cluster.
The other problem is that we will probably need to put together a IPV6 infrastructure with over 65,000 nodes in the cluster.
It's also possible that the stats would go up as a result of exploits using the installed IE to continuously send requests to the site, to artificially inflate the IE appearance.
This would be of use in option 3 as well, as one of it's modes of operation is as a usb-wifi adapter. Since it runs off the power the laptop pumps into the USB port, you would not need to carry a second cable around to power the adapter.
Whether it is a 'good' use I don't know. Most laptops come with an ethernet interface these days. That eliminates the need to use a device like this as an ethernet adapter. Add a PCMCIA Wifi card that can act as an AP, and some software in the background to do nat/ipmasq, dhcp services, etc. and you already have just about everything you get out of this device.
The only thing I see this device providing over a laptop with a built in ethernet and a wifi pcmcia interface (or embeded wifi card) is ease of converting from one mode to the other. Whether that is of importance to you, I can't say.
Just did a quick check, and all of the following are 'taken' gmail.com, gmail.net, gmail.org, gmail.cc, gmail.info, gmail.biz, gmail.us. (the engine did not check the variances for.uk, or other country tlds.
gmail.net is owned by javeo.com, created May 2002 gmail.org is owned by someone with a mindspring e-mail address, created August 2002 gmail.cc (taken but no match in whois) gmail.info alec system servic co, Japan, Oct 2001 gmail.biz Go Daddy Software, Registerd January 2004 gmail.us (taken but no match in whois)
(I think we know who gmail.com belongs to, right?)
I don't see any of Cencourse, Precision Research or ProNet Analytics in that list, so...
A couple of things to remmeber include the fact that since this is 'foam' there are a lot of people out there thinking impacts would cause very little to no damage, and even with a 60% event rate (foam poping off) half of that is going to happen on the 'far' side of the tank from the shuttle, meaning that about 30% of the launches would result in some foam poping off on the shuttle side of the tank, and a significant percentage of those events will have no impact with the shuttle as well.
Lastly as has already been noted, it is not unusual for some heat tiles to be lost on most (if not all) launches. The cause for those tile losses is now believed to be (at least in part) the result of foam pieces droping off and hitting tiles.
I am sure there are people out there who were supposed to support the corporate servers, who were told to set up a notification system that would let them know of any outage, and also told that they were responsible for their own cell phones, etc.
If they are discharged, they keep their cell phone, the Automatic Notification system was created at the company's request, and it falls under the classification of a automatic dialer since it is sending messages to a phone that does not belong to the company sending the messages.
I think it would qualify, but I hope never to be in the position of finding out.
... if I set up a system to monitor several servers, or routers, that sends me a status message on device down events, or periodically sends me an update that things are looking good, and the company I did this for lets me go without stopping the notifications, can I take the company to small claims court and get myself $500 for each such notification?
I kind of doubt it, but it might help defray the lost wages...
The Hauppaugg! "theater" card has a built in FM radio tuner, (model 401 card) so with the appropriate software or collection of software, you could schedule to record, and re-code to MP3, ogg vobis, WMA, or other audio format at your convienence. However that leaves out AM, and is not a Digital Radio tuner.
Presuming you can find an AM tuner card (the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is a card that acts as a scanner as well, and I can't recall its information) you could do this as well for AM. Again missing the Digital Radio stations. I seem to recall that the card I am thinking of is rather expensive, but it was a couple of years ago that I last looked at the idea, and there may be some of these cards available on ebay for a lot less than I recall.
Also presuming you can find a card that does the digital radio receiver functions you could probably do this as well with that card. I don't know what the availability of drivers for Linux users would be, but you should have no problems under Windows. I see a couple of links in earlier postings that would provide a possible link for you.
The primary problem with plugging a radio into a sound card is not the conversion of analog to digital, or anything like that, it's the fact that you have to manually re-tune the radio if you are going to record something on another station. That may be alright for you, but most others would be somewhat put out by that.
If you do go with the Hauppauge! card, I don't know what you have to do under Windows, but under Linux you will want to install the btaudio module, then you will use something lik Radio, or GTRadio to tune the station, and using either Jack, or one of the other audio tools run an output to whatever software you are going to use to convert from pcm audio to your favorite format. It can all be done as pipes, but I have not been able to do so myself.
I am not claiming it is a great app. I happen to think it needs a lot of work. However for a quick drawing, to do flow chart type work, you should find it viable.
It's been my observation that of the 1250 hours of broadcast Olympic 'coverage' that the average US citizen has available to them during the Olympics, less than 10% of that time is actual event coverage.
I will grant that I really do not want to see each elimination heat of the 1600 meter relay. I suspect that watching a bunch of guys and galls standing and shooting at targets for hours at a time would probably get old as well. (For a lot of people anyway.)
What gets really old for me however is watching 2 hours of interviews, "background" material, someone pacing an athlete during his or her training in the years before while some narrator discloses how this athlete fought tooth and nail from some long ago disaster. All leading up to a 10 minute tape delayed presentation of the athlete finishing whatever event he or she was a part of, with a 5 minute tape delayed award ceremony with the (you probably never heard of this person more than 3 hours ago) now celebrity athlete being one of the three medalion winners (or part of one of the teams on the stairs.)
Of course that two hours of 'history' is part of four hours of time, the other half of the time being spent providing ad space for the Olympic sponsors. After the half hour spent for the "main event" (10 min of event, 5 min of Awards, 15 min of ads) you might get part of a half hour to wrapup that 'highlights' some of the other events that happened that day, mostly to explain how whichever US athlete was in the event did that day. (But only if they came in close to or as a medalist, and only if whatever producer happens to be running the show that night thinks the event might interest someone with his or her own narrow view of what the Olympics should be.)
1250 'hours' of 'coverage' is probably Wonderful TV, but what the US population sees is hardly coverage of the Olympics.
Yes there are silent pc's available. You can even find them with shielded sound cards. They are not going to be under $300 however, unless you want to build your own, including building your own shielding around that sound card. If you are using a PC with a hard drive, you have a power supply fan, the processor fan, the hard drive, and possibly both a video card fan and a bios fan that are all going to introduce background noise into your recordings.
Most laptops today have a fan in them, and I don't know anyone interested in computers today who would consider the internal microphone of a laptop for any recording beyond very rare sampling.
Before you suggest using an external mic and headphones, remember that there really isn't a laptop out there with a shielded audio system in it. As a result it is invariably going to pick up electrical noise from components within the computer.
The last option I would consider is a USB based sound system. Not because I don't trust the quality, but because of the fact that once you add the price of one to your computer, (laptop or otherwise) you could have picked up a profesional grade digital recorder, and been done with it.
One other thing to take into consideration is the 'setup' and 'teardown' time involved. If you go to a teacher, paying for a 50 min lesson, you are not going to want to spend a significant portion of those 50 min setting up a computer or laptop to start recording your lesson, and your instructor is not going to be pleased if your setup and teardown (especially if you are carrying around mics and stands) eats into some other student's lesson time. Likewise for practice rooms if you need to practice, and can not live with an electronic keyboard in your dorm, appartment or other living arangements.
If you do go with an MD recorder, and a mic, with an optical connection to a PC that allows you to transfer cleanly, I recomend pre-testing your equipment, or at least finding out if all will work within the return time of whomever you are buying the stuff from. My own MD recorder has a very hit or miss pattern with the various mics I have tried with it. At best I can recognize my voice with the volume cranked all the way up. Occasionally I may even be able to recognize what I was saying at the time. Fortunately I don't need to record with it, as I have other options available. (none of them direct to digital, but my erquirements are not as high.)
Well, at least the AC's figured out it is topical and funny.
Topical, relavent to the topic at hand. In this case the fact that it was discussion of a variation of the patent in question, which was how to increase viewers, by rewarding someone who noticed a side effect.
Funny, it takes a dig at AC's who are almost recognizable by the way they begin their posts.
But then, I'm not a moderator today, nor was I yesterday. Perhaps the general IQ level of the Moderators yesterday is so high that the topic, or humor just escaped them.
Now this post on the other hand is not on topic, but may be recognized by today's moderators as humorous. (I should be so lucky...)
... I could offer to mod up responsed to people who come up with the most creative responses to AC's who begin their post's with "You're an idiot..." (or variations on the theme.)
I would suspect that it would work something like the TV taxation enforcement that is done in much of Europe.
Basicly the local enforcement division would do war driving to identify the location of APs, and WiFi adapters, Check to see if the ESSID, physical location, etc. are all part of a registered and paid up user, or not, then send a letter informing anyone who does not have a paid up account that they need to pay the appropriate fees, and register their AP and ESSID, or adapters.
I would suspect that it would be easier to detect WiFi stuff as well, as to do this with TV's, the enforcement people rely upon the stray signals that are broadcast by the TV as part of receiving a TV signal. WiFi communications isn't exactly stray signals.
Whether this is a legitimate use of people's time and efforts is a completly different issue.
I would suspect that camera developers chose JPG because it was a specification from the Joint Photographers Group (hence it's name). If you are going to sell something to photographers, you want to tie it to a standard that photographers are expected to approve of.
Note, I am not saying that it was the best standard to choose, simply that it made sense from a camera developer's standpoint.
I doubt seriously that GIF will be a standard for camra developers to select and store to.
I susect that for the forseable future, uncompressed images will be saved to TIFFs, and compressed (lossy) will be stored as JPG files. How long this status will stay, I can't predict, neither can I predict what standards will take over.
As an occasional graphics developer/creator, I chose not to create graphics in the GIF format.
As a web browser user I did not choose to block GIF files, disable display of them, or attempt to contact the webmasters of sites that did choose to create and distribute GIF files to see if they held a licence from Unisys, or if the graphics creation tools they were published by developers who were paying royalties to Unisys.
For the camcorder, go have a look around on e-bay. I would suggest looking for one of the old analog tape recorders, either full size vhs, or vhs-c. The reason for the full size vhs is that most of the connectors may be reasonably easy to work with. Also on the full size VHS models, it was not at all unusual to find them as 'sholder mount', with the 'viewer' movable from one side to the other, and thus more easily removed.
As an alternative to e-bay, ask at a local camera store if they have some old analog tape camcorders that they are trying to get rid of. Let them know you are not concerned about the tape mechanism, or the lense for that matter.
I have had a couple of camcorders like this that would have worked well. None available at the moment.
The primary down side will be that most of these were black and white displays, so you will probably be limited to that as well.
I do not know for sure, but most of these should work well as 'tv' monitors, if the wearable you are making has vhs out, it should feed directly, though you will probably need to find some sort of power source to feed it as well.
As far as setting one up. I would recomend a system where you mount it to the side of a baseball cap, with the screen facing forward. Use a mirror to direct it 45 degrees across the front of your face, and a half mirror, or even a clear piece of plexiglass supported by the baseball cap to reflect a second time into your eye. The two 'mirrors' will reverse the video twice, so you will not need to find a way to reverse the video you are feeding to the screen.
You may also want to try tinting the second mirror using some of the off the shelf sunglass tinting kits, till you find a good ballance between the screen and your surroundings.
Yes, until you get a good setup, properly housed in a plastic case with a pair of headbands (over the top, and around the back) you are going to look like a geek playing around. Then again, it sounds like you are, so this should pose no shock to anyone.
Publication of an idea, especially such that is timestamped, trumps patent application. This is why Heinlein is famous relative to the waterbed. He published a description of a waterbed in the early to mid 60's, which exceeded the specifications of what was later developed as a waterbed. When whatever company first started marketing waterbeds attempted to enforce a patent, the 'infringing' company presented the description Heinlein had previously poblished, and the pattent was vacated.
(It was either that, or the original manufacturers started making them fully aware that it was not patentable, and when a follow on company attempted to patent, and claim infringement the earlier company pointed to the published description, and effectively said, sorry, too late.)
Then again, with the way the patent office and others have been operating over the past few years, who knows.
Besides I don't have 'Word' on any computer I own. As preparing the patent application in 'Word' is the current requirement, I can't do it. I also can't afford the patent search required.
Perhaps instead of looking at it as a "language" problem, perhaps the 'English' speakers should look at it as a challenge to get more 'English' speakers involved in Orkut.
Since the service is by invitation only, and I suspect was primarily english speaking early on, it tells me that more Brazilian's, and Portuguese speakers have invited more other Brazilian and Portuguese speakers to Orkut than English speakers have.
If you don't like the way that others are treating you at Orkut, then you have three options, Be a Quiter, Be a Whiner, or be a Builder, and get More english speakers invited.
Then again it makes no difference to me. I am not a member of Orkut.
-Rusty
Re:Surely Google can address this technologically
on
Language Tempest At Orkut
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Of course they could come to an agreement with Alta-Vista, or some other company, and perhaps provide a link on every posting to view the posting in some other language, via BabbleFish.
Not being an Orkut user, it doesn't really matter to me however. I think it would be great if google would post a confirmation request as part of the user submitting the posting in Portugese, or Big5, that states in 'English' something along the lines of:
Your posting appears to be in Launguage Below the preview of your posting, is a BabbleFish translation of your posting in English. As the creator of the group you are posting to has indicated that English is the prefered language for the group, the BabbleFish translation is what will appear. If you wrote this in a language other than Language please select the correct language for your source post, so we can show you what may be a more accurate translation of your posting. The Moderator has indicated that if someone posts to this group in a language other than english, or includes profanity in the post, that post is subject to being deleated.
Likewise for other languages as identified relavent to the group being posted to, and it's language preferences.
For groups where 'any' language may be appropriate, a request to identify what language the user is posting in (defaulting to the language preference of the user) and a warning that the translation to other languages may not be completely accurate, would probably suffice.
Then again, if I just stir up the coals a little bit more, perhaps I will get more people fighting. Ah well, crazy talk.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a model 200, and am pretty happy with it. It may not be perfect, and for now I happen to like my thinkpad more, but it is a reliable bit of hardware, with no moving parts, unless I want to hang my disk drive off of the serial port.
The disk drive has a capacity of about 100 k, or possibly two 100k partitions.
club100.org has more information, and pricing. 102s are going from $150 to $350, depending upon memory and condition. 100's are going from $75 to $150, aldo depending upon memory and condition.
One thing to remember is that 32k of raw text, nor formating, is about the equivalent of 10 8 1/2 x 11" pieces of paper. Unless you are taking more notes than that, you probably won't run out of memory on a daily basis.
Good luck.
-Rusty
I get so frustrated when I hear the words "No open book tests".
Not me. Keep in mind that you are assuming a vast knowledgebase you already possess. Such as how to program, how to analyse data, things like that. How to read and write, even. If you were not required to learn those things (which do, contrary to popular rumour, require you to memorize things), you would be incapable of doing them as needed. Just remember, what you "memorized" back in the day is what you "remember" how to do today.
Here is the primary problem with this "concept" of testing for memorization. Universities are not designed to teach you the skills of writing, programing, of having memorized all the battles of the 30 years war, or other 'technical' skills. If you want to learn those, we have very fine technical schools who will be more than happy to provide instruction in those fields, and very well may cost you less, while giving you the skills to perform those tasks at the levels necessary to provide you with a very well paying job.
A university or college education is oriented around giving you the critical skills of being able to think on your own, and to be able to do the research necessary to explain what you are doing, and how you got to that point. The skills of being able to do research and the like do not fundamentally require the ability to memorize strings of facts, or specific theroms, etc. And testing to see if you remember the exact syntax for calling a function to add two numbers together and return the resulting number as a string of characters, is not testing to see if you are able to be a good researcher.
In software engineering, a better test for whether you have learned the skills of a software engineer would be to give you the language manual for an arbitrary BNF language, give you a task somewhat mroe difficult than you have had to perform so far, and see if you can find a set of procedures or functions within the language that allows you to complete that task.
Of course this presumes that the instructor can confirm that your selection of functions will perform or not perform the task requested. This is not a given, which is very probably one of the reasons that you are going to get tests that see if you recall correctly the print function of ModulaII
-Rusty
No, I can easily make a cluster as expensive as a super computer. Well, assuming I can spend all the money on the hardware necessary. Of course for a couple of million dollars, you can expect a rather impressive cluster.
Let me see, we'll take a quarter mill and use that to purchase the switches an cabling needed to interconnect everything. Might have to spend a bit to upgrade the power to our facilities, and speaking of facilities, we will probably need a warehouse some place to keep all the systems we are putting together into this cluster.
If we dedicate no more than a million to the actual hardware, cases, motherboards, cpu's, memory, (network card built into the motherboard) at perhaps a $100 per set (volume discounts) we are talking about a 10,000 node cluster. If we are talking about a $20M supercomputer, then we might need closer to a million each for networking and space, and we would get a 180,000 node cluster. (or better.)
Of course at that point, we might get better performance with quad, or 8way smp motherboards and processors, which might cost a bit more, but perhaps less than $400 or $800 per package. It could get interesting. Of course by the time the cpu lot got out of Intel, AMD, or IBM it would no longer be their fastest set of processors, but I think that shouldn't be a significant problem for the effectiveness of the volume of processors we would be working with.
We may not have an optimized bit of clustering software to run on it yet, but that's something to be worked out along the way as we are adding blocks of processors to the cluster.
The other problem is that we will probably need to put together a IPV6 infrastructure with over 65,000 nodes in the cluster.
Don't forget to include the heads of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Homeland Security while you are at it.
Did they specify the northern hemispher's summer, or just 'summer' which could easily mean this comming summer in Australia...
It's also possible that the stats would go up as a result of exploits using the installed IE to continuously send requests to the site, to artificially inflate the IE appearance.
Not likely perhaps, but a thought to consider...
This would be of use in option 3 as well, as one of it's modes of operation is as a usb-wifi adapter. Since it runs off the power the laptop pumps into the USB port, you would not need to carry a second cable around to power the adapter.
Whether it is a 'good' use I don't know. Most laptops come with an ethernet interface these days. That eliminates the need to use a device like this as an ethernet adapter. Add a PCMCIA Wifi card that can act as an AP, and some software in the background to do nat/ipmasq, dhcp services, etc. and you already have just about everything you get out of this device.
The only thing I see this device providing over a laptop with a built in ethernet and a wifi pcmcia interface (or embeded wifi card) is ease of converting from one mode to the other. Whether that is of importance to you, I can't say.
-Rusty
Just did a quick check, and all of the following are 'taken' gmail.com, gmail.net, gmail.org, gmail.cc, gmail.info, gmail.biz, gmail.us. (the engine did not check the variances for .uk, or other country tlds.
gmail.net is owned by javeo.com, created May 2002
gmail.org is owned by someone with a mindspring e-mail address, created August 2002
gmail.cc (taken but no match in whois)
gmail.info alec system servic co, Japan, Oct 2001
gmail.biz Go Daddy Software, Registerd January 2004
gmail.us (taken but no match in whois)
(I think we know who gmail.com belongs to, right?)
I don't see any of Cencourse, Precision Research or ProNet Analytics in that list, so...
Then again, I could be wrong....
-Rusty
A couple of things to remmeber include the fact that since this is 'foam' there are a lot of people out there thinking impacts would cause very little to no damage, and even with a 60% event rate (foam poping off) half of that is going to happen on the 'far' side of the tank from the shuttle, meaning that about 30% of the launches would result in some foam poping off on the shuttle side of the tank, and a significant percentage of those events will have no impact with the shuttle as well.
Lastly as has already been noted, it is not unusual for some heat tiles to be lost on most (if not all) launches. The cause for those tile losses is now believed to be (at least in part) the result of foam pieces droping off and hitting tiles.
-Rusty
I would prefer not to test, and keep the job.
I am sure there are people out there who were supposed to support the corporate servers, who were told to set up a notification system that would let them know of any outage, and also told that they were responsible for their own cell phones, etc.
If they are discharged, they keep their cell phone, the Automatic Notification system was created at the company's request, and it falls under the classification of a automatic dialer since it is sending messages to a phone that does not belong to the company sending the messages.
I think it would qualify, but I hope never to be in the position of finding out.
-Rusty
... if I set up a system to monitor several servers, or routers, that sends me a status message on device down events, or periodically sends me an update that things are looking good, and the company I did this for lets me go without stopping the notifications, can I take the company to small claims court and get myself $500 for each such notification?
I kind of doubt it, but it might help defray the lost wages...
Yes, and no.
The Hauppaugg! "theater" card has a built in FM radio tuner, (model 401 card) so with the appropriate software or collection of software, you could schedule to record, and re-code to MP3, ogg vobis, WMA, or other audio format at your convienence. However that leaves out AM, and is not a Digital Radio tuner.
Presuming you can find an AM tuner card (the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is a card that acts as a scanner as well, and I can't recall its information) you could do this as well for AM. Again missing the Digital Radio stations. I seem to recall that the card I am thinking of is rather expensive, but it was a couple of years ago that I last looked at the idea, and there may be some of these cards available on ebay for a lot less than I recall.
Also presuming you can find a card that does the digital radio receiver functions you could probably do this as well with that card. I don't know what the availability of drivers for Linux users would be, but you should have no problems under Windows. I see a couple of links in earlier postings that would provide a possible link for you.
The primary problem with plugging a radio into a sound card is not the conversion of analog to digital, or anything like that, it's the fact that you have to manually re-tune the radio if you are going to record something on another station. That may be alright for you, but most others would be somewhat put out by that.
If you do go with the Hauppauge! card, I don't know what you have to do under Windows, but under Linux you will want to install the btaudio module, then you will use something lik Radio, or GTRadio to tune the station, and using either Jack, or one of the other audio tools run an output to whatever software you are going to use to convert from pcm audio to your favorite format. It can all be done as pipes, but I have not been able to do so myself.
Enjoy and take care.
-Rusty
under Linux is Dia.
I am not claiming it is a great app. I happen to think it needs a lot of work. However for a quick drawing, to do flow chart type work, you should find it viable.
Good luck.
-Rusty
It's been my observation that of the 1250 hours of broadcast Olympic 'coverage' that the average US citizen has available to them during the Olympics, less than 10% of that time is actual event coverage.
I will grant that I really do not want to see each elimination heat of the 1600 meter relay. I suspect that watching a bunch of guys and galls standing and shooting at targets for hours at a time would probably get old as well. (For a lot of people anyway.)
What gets really old for me however is watching 2 hours of interviews, "background" material, someone pacing an athlete during his or her training in the years before while some narrator discloses how this athlete fought tooth and nail from some long ago disaster. All leading up to a 10 minute tape delayed presentation of the athlete finishing whatever event he or she was a part of, with a 5 minute tape delayed award ceremony with the (you probably never heard of this person more than 3 hours ago) now celebrity athlete being one of the three medalion winners (or part of one of the teams on the stairs.)
Of course that two hours of 'history' is part of four hours of time, the other half of the time being spent providing ad space for the Olympic sponsors. After the half hour spent for the "main event" (10 min of event, 5 min of Awards, 15 min of ads) you might get part of a half hour to wrapup that 'highlights' some of the other events that happened that day, mostly to explain how whichever US athlete was in the event did that day. (But only if they came in close to or as a medalist, and only if whatever producer happens to be running the show that night thinks the event might interest someone with his or her own narrow view of what the Olympics should be.)
1250 'hours' of 'coverage' is probably Wonderful TV, but what the US population sees is hardly coverage of the Olympics.
Then again, that's my opinion.
-Rusty
... is noise.
Yes there are silent pc's available. You can even find them with shielded sound cards. They are not going to be under $300 however, unless you want to build your own, including building your own shielding around that sound card. If you are using a PC with a hard drive, you have a power supply fan, the processor fan, the hard drive, and possibly both a video card fan and a bios fan that are all going to introduce background noise into your recordings.
Most laptops today have a fan in them, and I don't know anyone interested in computers today who would consider the internal microphone of a laptop for any recording beyond very rare sampling.
Before you suggest using an external mic and headphones, remember that there really isn't a laptop out there with a shielded audio system in it. As a result it is invariably going to pick up electrical noise from components within the computer.
The last option I would consider is a USB based sound system. Not because I don't trust the quality, but because of the fact that once you add the price of one to your computer, (laptop or otherwise) you could have picked up a profesional grade digital recorder, and been done with it.
One other thing to take into consideration is the 'setup' and 'teardown' time involved. If you go to a teacher, paying for a 50 min lesson, you are not going to want to spend a significant portion of those 50 min setting up a computer or laptop to start recording your lesson, and your instructor is not going to be pleased if your setup and teardown (especially if you are carrying around mics and stands) eats into some other student's lesson time. Likewise for practice rooms if you need to practice, and can not live with an electronic keyboard in your dorm, appartment or other living arangements.
If you do go with an MD recorder, and a mic, with an optical connection to a PC that allows you to transfer cleanly, I recomend pre-testing your equipment, or at least finding out if all will work within the return time of whomever you are buying the stuff from. My own MD recorder has a very hit or miss pattern with the various mics I have tried with it. At best I can recognize my voice with the volume cranked all the way up. Occasionally I may even be able to recognize what I was saying at the time. Fortunately I don't need to record with it, as I have other options available. (none of them direct to digital, but my erquirements are not as high.)
I wish you better luck.
-Rusty
Well, at least the AC's figured out it is topical and funny.
Topical, relavent to the topic at hand. In this case the fact that it was discussion of a variation of the patent in question, which was how to increase viewers, by rewarding someone who noticed a side effect.
Funny, it takes a dig at AC's who are almost recognizable by the way they begin their posts.
But then, I'm not a moderator today, nor was I yesterday. Perhaps the general IQ level of the Moderators yesterday is so high that the topic, or humor just escaped them.
Now this post on the other hand is not on topic, but may be recognized by today's moderators as humorous. (I should be so lucky...)
-Rusty
... I could offer to mod up responsed to people who come up with the most creative responses to AC's who begin their post's with "You're an idiot..." (or variations on the theme.)
So I shant...
-Rusty
I would suspect that it would work something like the TV taxation enforcement that is done in much of Europe.
Basicly the local enforcement division would do war driving to identify the location of APs, and WiFi adapters, Check to see if the ESSID, physical location, etc. are all part of a registered and paid up user, or not, then send a letter informing anyone who does not have a paid up account that they need to pay the appropriate fees, and register their AP and ESSID, or adapters.
I would suspect that it would be easier to detect WiFi stuff as well, as to do this with TV's, the enforcement people rely upon the stray signals that are broadcast by the TV as part of receiving a TV signal. WiFi communications isn't exactly stray signals.
Whether this is a legitimate use of people's time and efforts is a completly different issue.
-Rusty
I would suspect that camera developers chose JPG because it was a specification from the Joint Photographers Group (hence it's name). If you are going to sell something to photographers, you want to tie it to a standard that photographers are expected to approve of.
Note, I am not saying that it was the best standard to choose, simply that it made sense from a camera developer's standpoint.
I doubt seriously that GIF will be a standard for camra developers to select and store to.
I susect that for the forseable future, uncompressed images will be saved to TIFFs, and compressed (lossy) will be stored as JPG files. How long this status will stay, I can't predict, neither can I predict what standards will take over.
-Rusty
As an occasional graphics developer/creator, I chose not to create graphics in the GIF format.
As a web browser user I did not choose to block GIF files, disable display of them, or attempt to contact the webmasters of sites that did choose to create and distribute GIF files to see if they held a licence from Unisys, or if the graphics creation tools they were published by developers who were paying royalties to Unisys.
Did you?
-Rusty
For the camcorder, go have a look around on e-bay. I would suggest looking for one of the old analog tape recorders, either full size vhs, or vhs-c. The reason for the full size vhs is that most of the connectors may be reasonably easy to work with. Also on the full size VHS models, it was not at all unusual to find them as 'sholder mount', with the 'viewer' movable from one side to the other, and thus more easily removed.
As an alternative to e-bay, ask at a local camera store if they have some old analog tape camcorders that they are trying to get rid of. Let them know you are not concerned about the tape mechanism, or the lense for that matter.
I have had a couple of camcorders like this that would have worked well. None available at the moment.
The primary down side will be that most of these were black and white displays, so you will probably be limited to that as well.
I do not know for sure, but most of these should work well as 'tv' monitors, if the wearable you are making has vhs out, it should feed directly, though you will probably need to find some sort of power source to feed it as well.
As far as setting one up. I would recomend a system where you mount it to the side of a baseball cap, with the screen facing forward. Use a mirror to direct it 45 degrees across the front of your face, and a half mirror, or even a clear piece of plexiglass supported by the baseball cap to reflect a second time into your eye. The two 'mirrors' will reverse the video twice, so you will not need to find a way to reverse the video you are feeding to the screen.
You may also want to try tinting the second mirror using some of the off the shelf sunglass tinting kits, till you find a good ballance between the screen and your surroundings.
Yes, until you get a good setup, properly housed in a plastic case with a pair of headbands (over the top, and around the back) you are going to look like a geek playing around. Then again, it sounds like you are, so this should pose no shock to anyone.
-Rusty
As a native speaker of English, it should be well known that I don't really care what an Anonymous Coward thinks of my writing abilities.
To any Brazilians who felt offended, I doubt an empty oppology is necessary.
-Rusty
Publication of an idea, especially such that is timestamped, trumps patent application. This is why Heinlein is famous relative to the waterbed. He published a description of a waterbed in the early to mid 60's, which exceeded the specifications of what was later developed as a waterbed. When whatever company first started marketing waterbeds attempted to enforce a patent, the 'infringing' company presented the description Heinlein had previously poblished, and the pattent was vacated.
(It was either that, or the original manufacturers started making them fully aware that it was not patentable, and when a follow on company attempted to patent, and claim infringement the earlier company pointed to the published description, and effectively said, sorry, too late.)
Then again, with the way the patent office and others have been operating over the past few years, who knows.
Besides I don't have 'Word' on any computer I own. As preparing the patent application in 'Word' is the current requirement, I can't do it. I also can't afford the patent search required.
-Rusty
Perhaps instead of looking at it as a "language" problem, perhaps the 'English' speakers should look at it as a challenge to get more 'English' speakers involved in Orkut.
Since the service is by invitation only, and I suspect was primarily english speaking early on, it tells me that more Brazilian's, and Portuguese speakers have invited more other Brazilian and Portuguese speakers to Orkut than English speakers have.
If you don't like the way that others are treating you at Orkut, then you have three options, Be a Quiter, Be a Whiner, or be a Builder, and get More english speakers invited.
Then again it makes no difference to me. I am not a member of Orkut.
-Rusty
Of course they could come to an agreement with Alta-Vista, or some other company, and perhaps provide a link on every posting to view the posting in some other language, via BabbleFish.
Not being an Orkut user, it doesn't really matter to me however. I think it would be great if google would post a confirmation request as part of the user submitting the posting in Portugese, or Big5, that states in 'English' something along the lines of:
Your posting appears to be in Launguage Below the preview of your posting, is a BabbleFish translation of your posting in English. As the creator of the group you are posting to has indicated that English is the prefered language for the group, the BabbleFish translation is what will appear. If you wrote this in a language other than Language please select the correct language for your source post, so we can show you what may be a more accurate translation of your posting. The Moderator has indicated that if someone posts to this group in a language other than english, or includes profanity in the post, that post is subject to being deleated.
Likewise for other languages as identified relavent to the group being posted to, and it's language preferences.
For groups where 'any' language may be appropriate, a request to identify what language the user is posting in (defaulting to the language preference of the user) and a warning that the translation to other languages may not be completely accurate, would probably suffice.
Then again, if I just stir up the coals a little bit more, perhaps I will get more people fighting. Ah well, crazy talk.
-Rusty