I was wondering if perhaps you were misinterpreting or if the hearing test was not as exhaustive as it could be, but I concede my assumption was incorrect.
Perhaps instead of having your hearing tested, perhaps you should consult a neurologist. Apparently, within the Autism Spectrum of disorders, there are people who have difficulty with auditory input. This link discusses a variation called Sensory Processing Disorder, and seems to echo your description above dealing with your issues with sound.
It is not as uncommon as one would think for adults to be diagnosed late in life with conditions we often associate with children, such as ADHD or Asperger's Syndrome. Could be relevant to your situation?
This is "nerve deafness". Basically, different frequencies in your ear's cochlea are picked up by different hair cells. If these hair cells die off, then you can't hear in particular frequencies that were received via different hair cells that died off.
It may be that you have lost enough hair cells to lose certain parts of the frequency spectrum, but still have enough to hear the sounds. As a result, your hearing is slightly "muddied" so when there is a lot of sound, you can't pick up on finer frequencies that would allow you to filter out the background noise. You might not show hearing loss, but you now can't filter because you aren't getting fine enough frequency data to pick out finer details.
Think of dead pixels on an LCD screen. You can see a big image, but there are tiny black spots all over it, but you can still see the image fine. In fact, often you can completely ignore or might not even notice that there are dead pixels. But if enough pixels die off and you fill the screen with dozens of images and you have to shrink the images to fill the screen, those black spots become more significant to each image and makes it harder to pick out what the subject is in each image.
This is a natural process of growing old. I basically avoid holding detailed conversations in rooms that are very echoey or have a lot of background noise. This is why hearing aids will always be good business: we are all going to grow old and lose hair cells. Researchers are looking into ways of restoring the damaged hair cells, and the results look promising. It might even become doable within our lifetimes. Just be thankful you don't (I hope) have tinnitus with it!
I'm inclined to agree with Tridus and Darkness404: buy an Otterbox or similar hardened case to protect the phone and put the saved cash into your own savings account for just in case. I've owned several Otterbox products over the years, and I've been very happy with their performance, so I feel you can have some confidence that the case will protect your iPhone 5 in all but the most extreme incidents. Plus, the money you save by putting the cash into your own savings account (and earning interest) can go towards replacing the iPhone 5 should the unmentionable occur, or buying the next best thing when it comes out in a few years.
I've had an iPhone 3Gs for years, and it managed to survive all this time. The iPhones are beautifully designed, but they are so smooth that they are downright slippery. My 3Gs has slipped out of my shirt pockets on a regular basis, it's been dropped when my hands were dry during the winter. It finally took a near-fatal blow several months ago when I was trying to answer a call too quickly and it slipped out of my hand and shattered the screen when it landed on the edge of a granite curb. I had the screen replaced ($120), but the 3Gs has been somewhat wonky ever since. With that history in mind, I've purchased an Otterbox to go with the iPhone 5 I have on order.
If an insurance plan was offered for just pennies, yeah I'd consider it. But for $10 a month? My iPhone 3Gs would easily have lasted a few years longer, had I been a bit more careful with it. In the expected lifespan of five years (expected by me), $10 a month would be better than the replacement cost of a new iPhone. Accidents are going to happen. But if you mitigate the potential damage that could happen in the event of an accident, then you can save a great deal of money with a protective case instead of insurance. If I was regularly in environments such as highly active sports or work environments where potentially catastrophic damage could occur to my iPhone 5, insurance would be a good idea. Regular everyday use, probably not.
RealityImpairedat the opening of this thread made an excellent point about saving some money and getting the previous year's model of a smart phone. For those who have not yet purchased, but are considering purchasing an iPhone, this is a valid point. The 4S can utilize all the new capabilities that the 5 can in iOS 6 and one can save up to $300 depending on what versions your are comparing.
Best of luck with your new toy! I can't wait until mine arrives, too!
A British company, Maltron, does make single-handed keyboards. They can be purchased in the U.S. here at Enablemart. But these keyboards are pretty pricey, so it might not be worth the investment to get one, unless you expect your injured hand is going to be out of commission much longer than a few weeks.
About thirteen years ago, I had sustained a horrific injury to my left arm that resulted in my arm being put into an immobilization cast for the better part of fourteen weeks and a brace for months after. My fingers, however, were still functional. The immobilization cast kept me from positioning my hand over a keyboard. I rigged a dowel using some duct tape so I could at least press the shift, option and command keys with on my left while I typed with my right hand. I definitely couldn't type as fast, but I was able to get the job done.
If you have an Apple Macintosh computer, it already has the Dvorak one-handed keyboards built into it. Just go to the Language and Text pane in the System Preferences application to switch to one or the other. Look up the keyboard layout and download the image so you have something to look at while you learn to type the layout. This will be a LOT cheaper than buying a specialized keyboard for a condition that you say will only last a few weeks.
If your hand is immobilized for just a few weeks, it probably is not worth the effort to learn a new layout like that. It takes a couple of weeks at least to become proficient using a new layout to make it productive, and a couple of months to really develop the reflexes needed to touch type using the new layout without having to glance at the keyboard to find the key you want. If your hand is out of commission for a couple of months or longer, then it is certainly worth the effort to learn a new keyboard layout to maintain productivity. If your hand is out of commission for longer than a year or perhaps permanently, then a one-handed keyboard would be worth the expense.
Above all, don't panic and think through what you really need. And DON'T skimp on your physical therapy! P.T. is what will bring the usability of your hand back to you. Shirk your P.T., and your hand could heal permanently out of order.
I stand Korrekted! Dern them pescy spel kurrekturs lett'n them thar mispelin's git thru! Serves me right for not double-checking before I sent that out!
Spider Robinson was given the honor of completing Robert Heinlein's last known novel, Variable Star. An excellent read created from a manuscript that publishers rejected, so Heinlein packed it away with the intent of completing it at a later date. The story was originally written during Heinlein's adventure story phase, before he got into experimental social fiction. Robinson did an excellent job capturing Heinlein's style, and mixing in a bit of Heinlein's later style.
Robinson is currently working on a sequel to Variable Star called Orphan Stars.
There used to be an old yarn about being an engineer at Apple. If you were on the elevator and happened to be lucky/unlucky enough that Steve Jobs stepped onto the elevator with you, by the time the elevator reached your floor you would either have been promoted or fired. Whether true or not, it was very well known that Steve Jobs was very tough and demanding on engineers. He would routinely prowl through the engineering departments to surprise people with spot checks.
For creative people, this kind of intrusion can be very disruptive -- even the possibility can keep someone from entering "flow state", the scientific term for a mental state creative people enter when they are at their most creative and productive. This in turn, creates a great deal of stress on an individual.
So, a few years ago, not long after Apple added Bluetooth to their computers, another story began to circulate. Jobs started noticing that his surprise spot checks didn't seem to be as much as a surprise as he thought. Engineers would be conveniently on a coffee break, stepping out to go to the bathroom, etc. For some odd reason or another, they just wouldn't be at their desks when he thought they would be. It wasn't just engineering. The effect began to spread to other departments in the company. Jobs began to suspect something after a while, but couldn't quite put his finger on it.
Eventually, the "something" became so widespread, that it was due that someone would slip up, and Jobs discovered what was going on. One of the engineers wrote a program that would listen for the bluetooth transponder in a cellphone and query its serial number. Then, by propagating the program onto computers throughout the company, the system would track Jobs by the serial number of his cellphone via bluetooth. Every time Jobs walked past a computer with the software on it, the computer would send out a signal showing Jobs' position within the company, and that was displayed on a window on any computer listening for the signal. This way, engineers knew when Jobs was on the prowl, where he was, where he was going, and they would know when to clear out to avoid getting blistered by the boss!
The legend ends with Jobs ordering that the software be removed and the engineer who came up with it was given a raise for creative thinking outside the box.
Are there any Apple engineers out there that can prove or disprove the validity of this tale? I did a quick search on Google, but came up bupkis.
I can say that in all the cases I listed above, there were absolutely no H-1B workers involved. In fact, I never worked with anyone who was an H-1B until the last lab I worked. While they were all quite competent, it was abundantly clear that the management of the lab hired them as a tax dodge. (In fact, the management of the company were all H-1Bs as well!)
In all my cases, one thing was obvious: the unabashed greed of the C-level management. By laying people off, they get a "bonus" that usually exceeded the money saved by the layoffs by at least 10%. Which means the company could easily have kept those people employed, rather than dumping them onto the taxpayers. The Republicans in the U.S. government gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy, claiming that these people were the ones in charge of companies and were the ones who would create jobs. As the ultimate insult to the American citizens, they started calling the rich the "Productive Class." They are NOT the productive class! They are the Parasitic Class. They have created no jobs whatsoever -- indeed, they have actually accelerated the job losses in order to take that money that could have gone to jobs and pocketed it themselves. All the parasitic class has done is suck wealth and productivity out of the economy.
Another issue is that a lot of the business-focused, mid-level management doesn't like hiring true experts because they realize that the new hire could easily replace them in their job. And just as bad are the mid- to high-level management that goes into Save-My-Own-Ass mode. While in school, I worked for a retail chain called Lechmere -- a store chain that Best Buy modeled itself after. The individual who was the regional sales manager for their photography sales started pumping hundreds of cheap, awful photo albums on us to sell. We were going rapidly out of stock of the items that customers actually wanted to buy. We figured out how to game the computer system and force shipment of the vital things that customers wanted to buy. Our sales started skyrocketing. When reported there was a problem in the inventory system and how to work around it, he told our direct manager to stop it or she would be fired immediately. So we did so. As a result, the things people wanted disappeared from our inventory, and stores were flooded with these awful photo albums that no one wanted to buy. Then we discovered what was really happening.
The photo albums had a margin of 45%. Things that people wanted, such as lens filters, lenses, and cameras, at best had markups of 15% to 20%. Lechmere was about to be bought out by a new owner. So, this individual was basically showing them a spreadsheet that demonstrated he was bringing in a 40% profit margin in sales. Sadly, that was 40% in margin in only a couple thousand dollars a week in sales, instead of 20% in margin on the over $75,000 per week that the department was capable of doing in that one store alone. That SMOA attitude was rampant among the mid- and high-level management in Lechmere. They gutted the very thing that made the store chain successful -- expert sales people -- in order to make themselves look good. It was so bad, Lechmere went bankrupt.
Another nasty attitude that has become a plague in American businesses is the managerial attitude, "You can be replaced!" There is truth to that. Employees can be replaced. Business managers to think that employees who are afraid for their jobs are somehow more productive. But, an employee who is stressed over the possibility that he may lose his job is more likely to be sending out resumes than putting in extra effort. The attitude comes from the office where business trained people are easy to replace. Well, it is significantly easier and cheaper to replace someone in the business side of a company than it is to replace an engineer or designer. Then there are those individuals who can NOT be replaced. Nearly all of those who cannot be replaced are those who are in engineering or development. You lose one o
In over twenty years working in prototype development, I saved for being laid off instead of retirement. Anytime there was a hiccup in the economy, the first thing that management would cut from was R&D and product development. The mentality of a business focused management -- as opposed to a product focused management -- was since they were already manufacturing product, they could delay the release of new product for a while. As any idiot with half a brain can figure out, when you stop or delay developing new products or improvements to existing products, your company can quickly fall behind the competition and become irrelevant.
As a testament to that, most of the companies I used to work for no longer exist. One was bought out by their primary competitor. Another still struggles to exist.
Hand-in-hand with this was the fact that the moment they put someone with an MBA in the role of CEO, the company was doomed. Because these people had no concept of what it took to develop and manufacture product, they would start making cuts indiscriminately in order to increase the profit margin -- not profit -- of the company. They would cut a few thousand workers from the payroll in order to "save" $3 million and then pay the CEO a bonus of $5 million for saving the $3 million by putting a few thousand people out of work. Immediately after, the CEO would pull on his golden parachute and jump the company, leaving it to fail.
Anyone in doubt of a business-focused CEO vs. a product-focused CEO need only look at the most perfect textbook example company: Apple Inc. After they ousted the product-focused Jobs from being CEO, they stuck business-focused men at the helm. Apple all but failed until product-focused Jobs retook command of the company. The first thing Jobs did when he returned was immediately put a stop to the financial dealings and focused the company on producing product again. The rest is history.
Business people do not value their creative staff. I remember listening to a vice president complaining about the salary that a particular engineer was being paid, saying the guy brought in no business, didn't sell anything, didn't spend any time on the phone talking to customers and just sat quietly in a corner all day doing nothing. The VP felt that any engineer being paid more than $60K per year was being overpaid. The engineer in question was the very man who designed and developed the technology behind the product the company sold. The very reason the company existed! The VP made life very unpleasant for the engineer and eventually the engineer gave up and quit. Over a short period of time, most of the people who worked with him left as well. The VP reported to the Board of Directors that he had managed to save nearly $1 million in 'administrative costs' (the salaries of the people no longer there) and successfully campaigned this into a six-figure salary increase. What this VP actually did, without realizing it, was effectively scuttle the company. After I left the company, I learned from others it was well over a year before the CEO and board members of the company discovered what had happened. By then it was too late. Lack of improvements and enhancements to their product made them irrelevant in the market. Their competitors, on the other hand, suddenly exhibited a surge in improvements and enhancements to their products, as well as the introduction of new products.
This was not an isolated case! One of the best examples of management not understanding or appreciating the true assets in the company was the case of Motorola vs. Intel. The Motorola PowerPC processor was the first mass produced CPU chip to break the 1 GHz barrier. The PPC was making inroads against Intel's Pentium line of processors and was rapidly moving ahead as the microprocessor of choice for new computers. Intel's line, on the other hand, had reached its theoretical maximum speed and was not moving ahead. Then, just as it seemed the PPC was about to truly gain momentum, things ca
How is 1 cm any better? Different displays are a different number of cm in width, and fonts are different sizes in relation to cm, so the same amount will look different depending on the display and font size. em is a little better, but different displays are different numbers of characters in width as well.
You are correct!
1 cm = 1 cm
15 px can equal 3 mm or 1.5 cm depending on the resolution of the screen displaying the print. One screen might have 28 pixels per centimeter (72 ppi) while another can display 118 pixels per centimeter (300ppi).
If you define your paragraph indentation as a fixed 15 pixels, on one display that indentation might only be 5 mm in from the margin, while on another display it might only be 1 mm from the margin.
A better unit of measurement is the em, which is recommended for web design by the W3C for standardization of web page display. Em is now defined for digital use by being relative to the point size defined by the display in use. With the font-size set in points, this means that the em is defined in a relative manner to the size of the font being displayed, thence the display screen resolution, and is thereby scalable. The result is, if you set your indentation to a given number of em, then no matter on what display your text is showing or the font size selected, the paragraph indentation will always be the same number of characters in from the margin. Another advantage using the em is that if one decides to print the text on paper, it should appear on the paper as it did on a digital display without any modification. (That's the theory at least. We all know that famous quote by Yogi Berra: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.")
The E Ink Pearl imaging film, which both the Kindle and Nook use, has an imaging resolution of over 200 DPI (dots per inch). As the Kindle and Nook--depending on the model--use screen resolutions roughly around 150 PPI (pixels per inch), it means that those ebook readers are using 1.3 dots per pixel to render characters. If another ebook reader only uses a screen resolution of 100 PPI, then one em on that display will be different from one em on the Nook or Kindle, so the fonts would be sized differently on the different displays. But 1 em on any given device should still display and indentation of the same number of characters relative to the screen of that device, from one ebook to another. In the event of different screen resolutions for the same ebook, the user is going to have to make adjustments to the available font-size to make the text readable from one device to another.
Nowadays, screens with fixed character width are very rare, outside simple digital displays on equipment or devices such as a calculator. Even those are now using pixelated displays rather than each character having a fixed display unit. Dedicated ebook readers today do not use fixed-character displays.
I must admit, my initial post could have been better worked out. I was writing quickly being pressed for time. So, I figured using the fixed value of 1 cm vs. the pixel would be easier to follow by the readers than trying to explain the em. Good catch!
For the record, I set the CSS in the ebooks I fixed to 1.25em for the text indentation for paragraphs on my Nook Simple Touch.
Yeah, this has been a pain in the ass for me. Ballantine Press (Random House imprint for Sci-fi & Fantasy) has really screwed up the typography on their ebooks. It is clear that there is absolutely no QA going on in the publishing houses. I have yet to buy an ebook from Ballantine that does not require editing of the ebook to make it readable.
McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy collection is in terrible shape. Typographical errors are bad enough, but the books are loaded with spelling errors as well. It was so bad, I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the publisher. I forked over good money for a story I enjoyed, and found it almost unreadable due to the problems. One of the worst examples was the place name "Ruatha". I found over twenty times when it was misspelled as "Ruath"--in one case, it was even misspelled on a page where they had the correct spelling in the following paragraph!
Of a number of ebooks I've bought from Ballantine, I've had to break open the ebook files on all of them an edit the text and the CSS to correct the errors. It is clear to me that publishers have placed such a low priority on ebooks that they are willing to put out substandard product into the market without any quality control. In Piers Anthony's Xanth series, all it took was two tiny changes to the CSS to fix their typographical mistakes to make it a pleasure to read again.
Example: In the CSS in some of the ebooks, I noted that they had listed paragraph indentation defined as pixels. Well, 15 pixels on an ebook reader are not the same size as 15 pixels on a computer screen or a smart phone display. Pixels are a subjective value where one device can have 300 pixels in an inch another can have just 72. It is better to define text indentation as an objective value such as 1 cm or 1.5 em so it gets indented properly, no matter the device that is displaying the text. By defining the indentation in pixels, the paragraph indentation in some ebooks was so minimal that the paragraphs just ran together and couldn't be differentiated.
I find it ironic that the ebooks being sold by independent (e.g. self-published) authors to be flawless in their display while the ebooks from the big publishing houses with all their resources are all messed up.
Nasa has a list of plants that actually clean the air. A PDF of the original study is here, or you can go to a simplified list on Wikipedia. I think we are all aware of "sasquatches", individuals who while technically gifted are hygienically challenged. Having been 'squatched (trapped in an enclosed area by a sasquatch with precious little fresh air rejuvenation) far too many times, I also offer up a list of scented plants that can help. Humans tend to respond most favorably to rose-scented flowers (hence the popularity of roses). Sickly-sweet perfumes (such as lilies) can be unpleasant to some people. Miniature roses and rose-scented geraniums are probably the easiest to care for. Avoid poisonous plants (e.g. Angel trumpet) as at some point, a teenager (with little or no impulse control) is going to think it's funny (or for revenge) to slip a few bits of the plant into someone's drink or food without giving much thought to the potential outcome. If your high school has a gardening club, it would be wise to involve them. This could be a good lesson plan for students interested in biology and interior design.
Remove all fluorescent light tubes and replace them with LED banks. Preferably full spectrum or with a blend of colors. Make sure the lighting is always indirect and that the source points (the LEDs themselves) are not directly viewable. This makes for good, soft all-around lighting with little or no glare. Very easy on the eyes. Fluorescent lighting is very harsh on the eyes. I would build the banks based on five LEDs: cool white, warm white, red, green, and blue. I would also sprinkle in a couple of black-light purple LEDs. Turn this into a lesson and have the kids build such banks with an Arduino to control them. The kids could learn to program various light levels and colors to simulate various natural lighting situations. You could program the LED banks along the walls to actually change the color of the room. Also, full-spectrum lighting is good for the plants, just as it is calming for the humans in the room.
The room design is important as well. I would have the walls painted white with a slight bluish or cool grayish tint to it. Neutral grey colors are best for rooms where computer graphic design or image processing are taking place, to avoid the eyes being fooled about the color balance of an image. While greys are a cold and sterile color, the room can be warmed up by adjusting the color balance of the LED lights mentioned above. One wall should have a 16:9 rectangle painted in reflective paint to be used as a screen or have a retractable screen in front of an optional chalkboard for lessons. In a computer class, the teacher can then show code samples on the screen and demonstrations of changes to the code. Outgoing vents should be placed along the chalkboard or whiteboard, so dust from chalk and fumes and dust from the markers exits the room via the vents to protect the computers from dust. Good ventilation is also important due to the incidence of 'squatches mentioned above.
Chairs should have gel padding in the seats. There should be footrests beneath the desks. Being comfortable is vital when coding. Cheap, hard, plastic seats become uncomfortable very quickly and that becomes distracting while trying to work out some code.
For equipment, I would suggest Unix-based computers with a centralized administration console. Students should only have non-administrative accounts on their computers. Windows could be run via WINE or Parallels or Fusion, depending on the parent OS of the computers. Virtualized environments can easily be cleansed should a student introduce or create malicious software. Students should be encouraged to try and figure out how to escalate their permi
The basic idea of Amazon's program is certainly intriguing. And Amazon itself is fully aware that this program must be compelling for authors to sign on with it. There must be a decent reward for an author to sign an exclusivity deal with them. The idea is, Amazon puts up a kitty of $500K. All authors who join into the program and add a title (or more) to the free lending library for Amazon's Prime subscribers (This in important! Remember 'Amazon Prime' as you read all this!). Let's say 1,000 books were borrowed by Amazon Prime subscribers during the month, and 100 of them were yours. That means that 10% of the books borrowed were your title. So, you get 10% of the $500,000 for a cool $50K pay day at the end of the month. That's pretty damned nice! VERY compelling to join into the pool!
Essentially, in exchange for 90 days of exclusivity and allowing your book to be read for free by Amazon Prime subscribers, you get a share of the pool each month. You also get good exposure by allowing some readers to see your book for free. If they liked it, they may blog or tell their friends about it, which would only increase the number of borrowings from Amazon Prime subscribers. In addition to this, if a subscriber likes your book enough that they'd like to own it outright, they can buy it and you get paid again!
So? Where's the catch? It's in the numbers. Several groups of numbers, actually.
First, there will be a lot more than just a thousand borrowings of a book. And a lot more than just a few authors offering their books. And all you need is ONE big name author to add a book to the mix to completely skew the results. If Stephen King decides to offer his next awesome book to the offering as an exclusive, every King fan is going to want to download it for free. That means, if your book got 100 downloads, but King's book got 100,000, then you only get at most.1% of the kitty that month, for a whopping sum of $500. That means that King gets that extra Jaguar in his garage for just in case the Lotus gets a flat. (He has neither, I'm just making a point.) Any time some big time author—King, Gibson, Steele, Roberts, Rowling—feel they need an extra $400,000+ real quick, all they have to do is offer their book as an exclusive for three months and allow folks to borrow it via the KDPSelect program, and all the little guys are pretty much SOL. Note: in truth, it is the publishing companies who control distribution of the books these authors write, and the publishers are the ones who will benefit the most from such a deal.
Second, who is borrowing from Amazon's lending program? NOT everybody. Only paying subscribers to Amazon's Prime program will have access to the Kindle Owners Lending. So, out of the Kindle owners out there, only those who chose to pay a subscription fee to Amazon each month will have access to the lending pool. Each member is only allowed to borrow one title per month. That's important! So, they are going to be choosy about what they borrow for free. Are they going to use their one chance per month to borrow the hottest title on the market (like the Jobs biography)? Or try out some unknown author? Unless they've heard something about the unknown author, they are going to go with the guaranteed good read. What's vital about this is that the number of subscribers is a small subset of the total of Kindle owners.
As of November 2011, the Amazon Kindle had about 41% of the market share of all ebook readers sold, down from 47% at the end of 2010. Apple's iPad is in second, and Barnes & Noble's Nook is in third and rapidly gaining market share. The number of Kindle owners subscribing to Prime membership will only be a small percentage out of that 41% of the total market.
That means, as a new and unknown author, I would be limiting exposure of my first book to maybe less that 5% (WAG) of the total ebook reader market for a total of 90 days. And if there is a big name author in
The cg team and the story and director team are so far removed you can not blame one for the other...
Actually, the direction team and the CG team were heavily involved with each other. They were working very hard at producing photorealistic CGI for the movie. I mention the skin quality, because Square developed the algorithms that made the skin surfaces of the characters look so real. That process has been adopted by other digital movie companies. So much effort and attention went into the technical aspects of creating the film, that the story development was literally put on the back burner and received so little attention that when it was time to put it together, there really wasn't anything developed for the story. It showed. Painfully so. It nearly ruined Square, and caused Enix to rethink their merger because of the failure of the movie. (The merger was approved a few years later and resulted in the creation of Square Enix.
Need anyone mention that bastion of "putting all one's eggs into the CGI basket", Final Fantasty: The Spirits Within? They put all their efforts into the CG to make highly realistic skin surfaces and artificial actors. So much so, that they completely forgot to put effort into actual story development. It was beautiful to watch, but terrible to have to follow.
While it was a fantasy, I thought that Lord of the Rings was an excellent use of CGI without getting in the way of the storytelling or acting. Consider the case of Gollum. A fully artificial being generated via CGI within the movie, yet he was so integral to the story.
One science fiction story I would love to see brought to "life" on the silver screen would be Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. That is a story that would need CGI on the scale of Cameron's Avatar to make it visually believable.
One of my favorite storytellers! I still enjoy reading her stories over and over again.
I "first" discovered her stories when The White Dragon came out. But, a number of years later, I remembered that I had read one of her short stories--The Smallest Dragonboy--back when it was first published. At my age then, the story strongly resonated with me. It's probably why I enjoyed The White Dragon so much. After reading The White Dragon, I bought the other books in the series that were then available. I loved how in the HarperHall Trilogy, she took the commoners point of view in the daily life of Pern.
I loved how she brought many of her series of stories to create a single cohesive universe. The Brainship series and the Crystal Singer series came together nicely. I also enjoyed how Dragonriders went from a fantasy setting to hard science fiction as the history of Pern was slowly revealed. I always wondered if ever McCaffrey was going to have Pern rediscovered by a Brainship and re-enter galactic society? I guess that one is for our collective imaginations or for Todd to pursue, if within Anne's canon.
Most of the Biopharmaceutical companies in the Boston area are going to look at your Ph.D. to determine whether it is relevant to the work they do. But it won't be the only thing they look for.
Many biopharms are leaning very heavily on computer simulations to model various molecules they are pursuing as potential drug candidates. Having a an advanced degree in biology and the ability to prove strong computer skills might open vastly more doors for you than just having a Ph.D. in a relevant field. Having a programmer who can also intimately understand what the scientists are trying to accomplish is desperately needed by many companies.
But don't sell yourself as a programmer with a doctorate in biology. Rather, sell yourself as a biology doctorate with advanced computer skills. If they think you are a programmer, they'll treat--and pay--you like one. Sadly, there are still WAY too many CEOs (and CIOs, CFOs, and COOs) who are still under the 1980's notion that "high school kids could do this work," and treat computer engineers like they are unskilled labor. As a "respected scientist" you'll be treated far more appropriately by management/business types.
If there is one thing I have learned, nowadays no company will admit that their product has a problem. It opens them up to liability. Due to the litigation-happy society we live in, companies now find it wiser and safer to deny their product has an issue.
Personally, I would much rather a company come out and say, "Yeah, there is an issue we've uncovered and we are working on the fix." I can live with that. If it is an issue they can't fix in a timely manner, of course I would want to return the product and get my money back until they have it fixed. But, to have the company duck the issue when it is obvious? I find that insulting. I would rather bring my hard-earned money to a company that is being fair and honest with me than one that is being evasive and lying.
As much as I am satisfied with the Apple products I own, I usually warn people to never buy the latest and greatest from Apple right off the bat. Often, there is such a glitch in the item. It is best to wait a few months so the bugs can be worked out and then buy the new toy. (Admittedly, I don't always follow this advice, myself.)
The biggest problem is that those of us who want to move to Google+ can't convince enough of our less techy friends to move over...
I'd say you pretty much nailed it. People, especially luddites, tend to stick with what they know. Facebook has already become the killer app on the internet that was finally able to give the technophiles who have been using the internet for years a good reason to convince all the holdouts (parents and grandparents) that there was a good use for the internet. Google+ is different in how it works, which would make these luddites very uncomfortable with using it. Consider how many years the internet was around before Facebook, and how many people on Facebook didn't start using the internet until family members convinced them to use Facebook. It would be a real stretch to convince them to switch to something new!
Second, all these late comers that might look at Google+ would find that their friends have not yet tried it. Almost none of my friends with whom I connect with via Facebook are to be found on Google+. That does make it fairly difficult to use Google+ to communicate as effectively as Facebook.
On the bright side of it, I've found that the people who have adopted Google+ to be a hell of a lot more intelligent than what is to be found on Facebook. Mainly, because the people who have adopted Google+ are those who are very comfortable with new technologies and adapting to them. Such people tend to be much better educated and open minded. The discussions I have found in the G+ stream have been on a whole different level than what I find in Facebook; being concerned with technical advances, political insight, various arts, etc. On G+, I have yet to see someone post a "funny" video of some moron trying to attain his position among the Darwinian Achievement Award winners. I have yet to see anyone post something laced with profanity on G+. (I have nothing against swearing. Swearing is appropriate for when you run out of words to match a given situation. Sadly, there are some people who run out of words in their vocabulary all too quickly.)
Many people have commented on the fact that for 99, one can by an awful lot of crap on the ebook market. Yeah, there are some pretty awful books out there. Fortunately, most of the sales channels for ebooks allow a reader to download a sample of the book to read (the first chapter or two) so the reader can judge whether or not a given book is worth their hard-earned money. I've come across quite a few that were so terrible, I could barely get past the first paragraph before I was compelled to delete it from my Nook. The spelling and grammatical mistakes were just too much to take!
You wonder, "How does Apple/Amazon/Barnes&Noble let this crap on their servers?!"
The answer, "Because it cost them nothing." All they did was make the shelf space available. It is up to the writer to put their book there and to go out and promote their book so it sells. All the ebook markets make their money by exacting a commission from each sale (30%). If the book is really terrible, then the author has an uphill battle to fight getting any kind of meaningful sales. If the book is terrific, then sales will skyrocket once word gets out among readers that it is a good read. If you as a reader are willing to sift through a lot of crap, there are some incredible gems to be found for 99!
The Patronage model of supporting an author (or any artist, really) doesn't really work today. There are incredibly few rich individuals today who are willing for fork over money to support some random "deadbeat artist" to create some kind of artistic work. The MacArthur Foundation's Fellows Program (aka "The Genius Award") only gives out money to an average of 30 people each year to pursue their work. On average, there are 30,000 people in America alone each day trying to submit the next great novel. That disparity of numbers pretty well demonstrates the Patronage model will never work today. I would dearly love for the McArthur Foundation to hand me a check and say, "Here, this ought to tide you over until you finish your book." But I know that's not going to happen. I am far more likely to win one of the big multi-state lotteries here in the US than to have someone I know hand the manuscript of my book to the McArthur Foundation's secret recommendation panel.
Getting published by a traditional publisher certainly has better odds of happening. The readers benefit by the publisher filtering out the crap and the publisher benefits by a literary agent filtering out the crap. So a writer today has to breach two barriers to getting published by convincing and agent to review and promote their work or being luckier still by finding an editor at a publisher that is willing to review their work. A publisher brings a lot of services to the use of the author such as professional editing, marketing and promotion, typographic services and printing and--of course, that big money maker--distribution. If a publisher is really excited about an author's work, they'll offer a pretty large sum of money for the rights to the book, as well as any follow up books. If they are not so enthused about a book but still think it can sell, they might offer a budding author an advance that the author can pay back out of the sales of the book.
Self-publishing has a very bad stigma in the writing profession. As little as twenty years ago, self-publishing (aka "Vanity Publishing") was pretty much the only recourse for really bad writers. Writers whose books were so bad, they had to pay a printer to get their books published. The articles cited by the O.P., seem to come from this camp. They are so sure that the flood of so many author-wannabes are going to overwhelm the book market with so much crap, that readers will completely throw up their hands in disgust and completely abandon the self-published e-author and the whole writing industry is going to completely collapse.
If a friend told you that they just read a new book, enjoyed it, and recommended you try it, would you? That's how most books get sold. That is how I came to like a "little-kn
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering if perhaps you were misinterpreting or if the hearing test was not as exhaustive as it could be, but I concede my assumption was incorrect.
Perhaps instead of having your hearing tested, perhaps you should consult a neurologist. Apparently, within the Autism Spectrum of disorders, there are people who have difficulty with auditory input. This link discusses a variation called Sensory Processing Disorder, and seems to echo your description above dealing with your issues with sound.
It is not as uncommon as one would think for adults to be diagnosed late in life with conditions we often associate with children, such as ADHD or Asperger's Syndrome. Could be relevant to your situation?
This is "nerve deafness". Basically, different frequencies in your ear's cochlea are picked up by different hair cells. If these hair cells die off, then you can't hear in particular frequencies that were received via different hair cells that died off.
It may be that you have lost enough hair cells to lose certain parts of the frequency spectrum, but still have enough to hear the sounds. As a result, your hearing is slightly "muddied" so when there is a lot of sound, you can't pick up on finer frequencies that would allow you to filter out the background noise. You might not show hearing loss, but you now can't filter because you aren't getting fine enough frequency data to pick out finer details.
Think of dead pixels on an LCD screen. You can see a big image, but there are tiny black spots all over it, but you can still see the image fine. In fact, often you can completely ignore or might not even notice that there are dead pixels. But if enough pixels die off and you fill the screen with dozens of images and you have to shrink the images to fill the screen, those black spots become more significant to each image and makes it harder to pick out what the subject is in each image.
This is a natural process of growing old. I basically avoid holding detailed conversations in rooms that are very echoey or have a lot of background noise. This is why hearing aids will always be good business: we are all going to grow old and lose hair cells. Researchers are looking into ways of restoring the damaged hair cells, and the results look promising. It might even become doable within our lifetimes. Just be thankful you don't (I hope) have tinnitus with it!
I'm inclined to agree with Tridus and Darkness404: buy an Otterbox or similar hardened case to protect the phone and put the saved cash into your own savings account for just in case. I've owned several Otterbox products over the years, and I've been very happy with their performance, so I feel you can have some confidence that the case will protect your iPhone 5 in all but the most extreme incidents. Plus, the money you save by putting the cash into your own savings account (and earning interest) can go towards replacing the iPhone 5 should the unmentionable occur, or buying the next best thing when it comes out in a few years.
I've had an iPhone 3Gs for years, and it managed to survive all this time. The iPhones are beautifully designed, but they are so smooth that they are downright slippery. My 3Gs has slipped out of my shirt pockets on a regular basis, it's been dropped when my hands were dry during the winter. It finally took a near-fatal blow several months ago when I was trying to answer a call too quickly and it slipped out of my hand and shattered the screen when it landed on the edge of a granite curb. I had the screen replaced ($120), but the 3Gs has been somewhat wonky ever since. With that history in mind, I've purchased an Otterbox to go with the iPhone 5 I have on order.
If an insurance plan was offered for just pennies, yeah I'd consider it. But for $10 a month? My iPhone 3Gs would easily have lasted a few years longer, had I been a bit more careful with it. In the expected lifespan of five years (expected by me), $10 a month would be better than the replacement cost of a new iPhone. Accidents are going to happen. But if you mitigate the potential damage that could happen in the event of an accident, then you can save a great deal of money with a protective case instead of insurance. If I was regularly in environments such as highly active sports or work environments where potentially catastrophic damage could occur to my iPhone 5, insurance would be a good idea. Regular everyday use, probably not.
RealityImpairedat the opening of this thread made an excellent point about saving some money and getting the previous year's model of a smart phone. For those who have not yet purchased, but are considering purchasing an iPhone, this is a valid point. The 4S can utilize all the new capabilities that the 5 can in iOS 6 and one can save up to $300 depending on what versions your are comparing.
Best of luck with your new toy! I can't wait until mine arrives, too!
The Frogpad is no longer made.
A British company, Maltron, does make single-handed keyboards. They can be purchased in the U.S. here at Enablemart. But these keyboards are pretty pricey, so it might not be worth the investment to get one, unless you expect your injured hand is going to be out of commission much longer than a few weeks.
About thirteen years ago, I had sustained a horrific injury to my left arm that resulted in my arm being put into an immobilization cast for the better part of fourteen weeks and a brace for months after. My fingers, however, were still functional. The immobilization cast kept me from positioning my hand over a keyboard. I rigged a dowel using some duct tape so I could at least press the shift, option and command keys with on my left while I typed with my right hand. I definitely couldn't type as fast, but I was able to get the job done.
If you have an Apple Macintosh computer, it already has the Dvorak one-handed keyboards built into it. Just go to the Language and Text pane in the System Preferences application to switch to one or the other. Look up the keyboard layout and download the image so you have something to look at while you learn to type the layout. This will be a LOT cheaper than buying a specialized keyboard for a condition that you say will only last a few weeks.
If your hand is immobilized for just a few weeks, it probably is not worth the effort to learn a new layout like that. It takes a couple of weeks at least to become proficient using a new layout to make it productive, and a couple of months to really develop the reflexes needed to touch type using the new layout without having to glance at the keyboard to find the key you want. If your hand is out of commission for a couple of months or longer, then it is certainly worth the effort to learn a new keyboard layout to maintain productivity. If your hand is out of commission for longer than a year or perhaps permanently, then a one-handed keyboard would be worth the expense.
Above all, don't panic and think through what you really need. And DON'T skimp on your physical therapy! P.T. is what will bring the usability of your hand back to you. Shirk your P.T., and your hand could heal permanently out of order.
I stand Korrekted! Dern them pescy spel kurrekturs lett'n them thar mispelin's git thru! Serves me right for not double-checking before I sent that out!
:-D
Try Pair.com in Pittsburg, PA. I've been with them for over 16 years now and I've been very happy with their service and support.
For a most awesome lair! THIS HOUSE is available for sale! It even comes with its own runway!
Spider Robinson was given the honor of completing Robert Heinlein's last known novel, Variable Star. An excellent read created from a manuscript that publishers rejected, so Heinlein packed it away with the intent of completing it at a later date. The story was originally written during Heinlein's adventure story phase, before he got into experimental social fiction. Robinson did an excellent job capturing Heinlein's style, and mixing in a bit of Heinlein's later style.
Robinson is currently working on a sequel to Variable Star called Orphan Stars.
Another one of my favorite series! Courtesy of Baen Books, you can download Berserker Throne for free.
If you are a fan of hard science fiction, your collection is not complete without this series!
I always enjoyed Schmitz's The Witches of Karres. Courtesy of Baen Books, you can read the first few chapters for free here
Baen Books also maintains a library of free book, Baen Free Library. I say this is worth a look.
There used to be an old yarn about being an engineer at Apple. If you were on the elevator and happened to be lucky/unlucky enough that Steve Jobs stepped onto the elevator with you, by the time the elevator reached your floor you would either have been promoted or fired. Whether true or not, it was very well known that Steve Jobs was very tough and demanding on engineers. He would routinely prowl through the engineering departments to surprise people with spot checks.
For creative people, this kind of intrusion can be very disruptive -- even the possibility can keep someone from entering "flow state", the scientific term for a mental state creative people enter when they are at their most creative and productive. This in turn, creates a great deal of stress on an individual.
So, a few years ago, not long after Apple added Bluetooth to their computers, another story began to circulate. Jobs started noticing that his surprise spot checks didn't seem to be as much as a surprise as he thought. Engineers would be conveniently on a coffee break, stepping out to go to the bathroom, etc. For some odd reason or another, they just wouldn't be at their desks when he thought they would be. It wasn't just engineering. The effect began to spread to other departments in the company. Jobs began to suspect something after a while, but couldn't quite put his finger on it.
Eventually, the "something" became so widespread, that it was due that someone would slip up, and Jobs discovered what was going on. One of the engineers wrote a program that would listen for the bluetooth transponder in a cellphone and query its serial number. Then, by propagating the program onto computers throughout the company, the system would track Jobs by the serial number of his cellphone via bluetooth. Every time Jobs walked past a computer with the software on it, the computer would send out a signal showing Jobs' position within the company, and that was displayed on a window on any computer listening for the signal. This way, engineers knew when Jobs was on the prowl, where he was, where he was going, and they would know when to clear out to avoid getting blistered by the boss!
The legend ends with Jobs ordering that the software be removed and the engineer who came up with it was given a raise for creative thinking outside the box.
Are there any Apple engineers out there that can prove or disprove the validity of this tale? I did a quick search on Google, but came up bupkis.
I can say that in all the cases I listed above, there were absolutely no H-1B workers involved. In fact, I never worked with anyone who was an H-1B until the last lab I worked. While they were all quite competent, it was abundantly clear that the management of the lab hired them as a tax dodge. (In fact, the management of the company were all H-1Bs as well!)
In all my cases, one thing was obvious: the unabashed greed of the C-level management. By laying people off, they get a "bonus" that usually exceeded the money saved by the layoffs by at least 10%. Which means the company could easily have kept those people employed, rather than dumping them onto the taxpayers. The Republicans in the U.S. government gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy, claiming that these people were the ones in charge of companies and were the ones who would create jobs. As the ultimate insult to the American citizens, they started calling the rich the "Productive Class." They are NOT the productive class! They are the Parasitic Class. They have created no jobs whatsoever -- indeed, they have actually accelerated the job losses in order to take that money that could have gone to jobs and pocketed it themselves. All the parasitic class has done is suck wealth and productivity out of the economy.
Another issue is that a lot of the business-focused, mid-level management doesn't like hiring true experts because they realize that the new hire could easily replace them in their job. And just as bad are the mid- to high-level management that goes into Save-My-Own-Ass mode. While in school, I worked for a retail chain called Lechmere -- a store chain that Best Buy modeled itself after. The individual who was the regional sales manager for their photography sales started pumping hundreds of cheap, awful photo albums on us to sell. We were going rapidly out of stock of the items that customers actually wanted to buy. We figured out how to game the computer system and force shipment of the vital things that customers wanted to buy. Our sales started skyrocketing. When reported there was a problem in the inventory system and how to work around it, he told our direct manager to stop it or she would be fired immediately. So we did so. As a result, the things people wanted disappeared from our inventory, and stores were flooded with these awful photo albums that no one wanted to buy. Then we discovered what was really happening.
The photo albums had a margin of 45%. Things that people wanted, such as lens filters, lenses, and cameras, at best had markups of 15% to 20%. Lechmere was about to be bought out by a new owner. So, this individual was basically showing them a spreadsheet that demonstrated he was bringing in a 40% profit margin in sales. Sadly, that was 40% in margin in only a couple thousand dollars a week in sales, instead of 20% in margin on the over $75,000 per week that the department was capable of doing in that one store alone. That SMOA attitude was rampant among the mid- and high-level management in Lechmere. They gutted the very thing that made the store chain successful -- expert sales people -- in order to make themselves look good. It was so bad, Lechmere went bankrupt.
Another nasty attitude that has become a plague in American businesses is the managerial attitude, "You can be replaced!" There is truth to that. Employees can be replaced. Business managers to think that employees who are afraid for their jobs are somehow more productive. But, an employee who is stressed over the possibility that he may lose his job is more likely to be sending out resumes than putting in extra effort. The attitude comes from the office where business trained people are easy to replace. Well, it is significantly easier and cheaper to replace someone in the business side of a company than it is to replace an engineer or designer. Then there are those individuals who can NOT be replaced. Nearly all of those who cannot be replaced are those who are in engineering or development. You lose one o
In over twenty years working in prototype development, I saved for being laid off instead of retirement. Anytime there was a hiccup in the economy, the first thing that management would cut from was R&D and product development. The mentality of a business focused management -- as opposed to a product focused management -- was since they were already manufacturing product, they could delay the release of new product for a while. As any idiot with half a brain can figure out, when you stop or delay developing new products or improvements to existing products, your company can quickly fall behind the competition and become irrelevant.
As a testament to that, most of the companies I used to work for no longer exist. One was bought out by their primary competitor. Another still struggles to exist.
Hand-in-hand with this was the fact that the moment they put someone with an MBA in the role of CEO, the company was doomed. Because these people had no concept of what it took to develop and manufacture product, they would start making cuts indiscriminately in order to increase the profit margin -- not profit -- of the company. They would cut a few thousand workers from the payroll in order to "save" $3 million and then pay the CEO a bonus of $5 million for saving the $3 million by putting a few thousand people out of work. Immediately after, the CEO would pull on his golden parachute and jump the company, leaving it to fail.
Anyone in doubt of a business-focused CEO vs. a product-focused CEO need only look at the most perfect textbook example company: Apple Inc. After they ousted the product-focused Jobs from being CEO, they stuck business-focused men at the helm. Apple all but failed until product-focused Jobs retook command of the company. The first thing Jobs did when he returned was immediately put a stop to the financial dealings and focused the company on producing product again. The rest is history.
Business people do not value their creative staff. I remember listening to a vice president complaining about the salary that a particular engineer was being paid, saying the guy brought in no business, didn't sell anything, didn't spend any time on the phone talking to customers and just sat quietly in a corner all day doing nothing. The VP felt that any engineer being paid more than $60K per year was being overpaid. The engineer in question was the very man who designed and developed the technology behind the product the company sold. The very reason the company existed! The VP made life very unpleasant for the engineer and eventually the engineer gave up and quit. Over a short period of time, most of the people who worked with him left as well. The VP reported to the Board of Directors that he had managed to save nearly $1 million in 'administrative costs' (the salaries of the people no longer there) and successfully campaigned this into a six-figure salary increase. What this VP actually did, without realizing it, was effectively scuttle the company. After I left the company, I learned from others it was well over a year before the CEO and board members of the company discovered what had happened. By then it was too late. Lack of improvements and enhancements to their product made them irrelevant in the market. Their competitors, on the other hand, suddenly exhibited a surge in improvements and enhancements to their products, as well as the introduction of new products.
This was not an isolated case! One of the best examples of management not understanding or appreciating the true assets in the company was the case of Motorola vs. Intel. The Motorola PowerPC processor was the first mass produced CPU chip to break the 1 GHz barrier. The PPC was making inroads against Intel's Pentium line of processors and was rapidly moving ahead as the microprocessor of choice for new computers. Intel's line, on the other hand, had reached its theoretical maximum speed and was not moving ahead. Then, just as it seemed the PPC was about to truly gain momentum, things ca
How is 1 cm any better? Different displays are a different number of cm in width, and fonts are different sizes in relation to cm, so the same amount will look different depending on the display and font size. em is a little better, but different displays are different numbers of characters in width as well.
You are correct!
1 cm = 1 cm
15 px can equal 3 mm or 1.5 cm depending on the resolution of the screen displaying the print. One screen might have 28 pixels per centimeter (72 ppi) while another can display 118 pixels per centimeter (300ppi).
If you define your paragraph indentation as a fixed 15 pixels, on one display that indentation might only be 5 mm in from the margin, while on another display it might only be 1 mm from the margin.
A better unit of measurement is the em, which is recommended for web design by the W3C for standardization of web page display. Em is now defined for digital use by being relative to the point size defined by the display in use. With the font-size set in points, this means that the em is defined in a relative manner to the size of the font being displayed, thence the display screen resolution, and is thereby scalable. The result is, if you set your indentation to a given number of em, then no matter on what display your text is showing or the font size selected, the paragraph indentation will always be the same number of characters in from the margin. Another advantage using the em is that if one decides to print the text on paper, it should appear on the paper as it did on a digital display without any modification. (That's the theory at least. We all know that famous quote by Yogi Berra: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.")
The E Ink Pearl imaging film, which both the Kindle and Nook use, has an imaging resolution of over 200 DPI (dots per inch). As the Kindle and Nook--depending on the model--use screen resolutions roughly around 150 PPI (pixels per inch), it means that those ebook readers are using 1.3 dots per pixel to render characters. If another ebook reader only uses a screen resolution of 100 PPI, then one em on that display will be different from one em on the Nook or Kindle, so the fonts would be sized differently on the different displays. But 1 em on any given device should still display and indentation of the same number of characters relative to the screen of that device, from one ebook to another. In the event of different screen resolutions for the same ebook, the user is going to have to make adjustments to the available font-size to make the text readable from one device to another.
Nowadays, screens with fixed character width are very rare, outside simple digital displays on equipment or devices such as a calculator. Even those are now using pixelated displays rather than each character having a fixed display unit. Dedicated ebook readers today do not use fixed-character displays.
I must admit, my initial post could have been better worked out. I was writing quickly being pressed for time. So, I figured using the fixed value of 1 cm vs. the pixel would be easier to follow by the readers than trying to explain the em. Good catch!
For the record, I set the CSS in the ebooks I fixed to 1.25em for the text indentation for paragraphs on my Nook Simple Touch.
Yeah, this has been a pain in the ass for me. Ballantine Press (Random House imprint for Sci-fi & Fantasy) has really screwed up the typography on their ebooks. It is clear that there is absolutely no QA going on in the publishing houses. I have yet to buy an ebook from Ballantine that does not require editing of the ebook to make it readable.
McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy collection is in terrible shape. Typographical errors are bad enough, but the books are loaded with spelling errors as well. It was so bad, I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the publisher. I forked over good money for a story I enjoyed, and found it almost unreadable due to the problems. One of the worst examples was the place name "Ruatha". I found over twenty times when it was misspelled as "Ruath"--in one case, it was even misspelled on a page where they had the correct spelling in the following paragraph!
Of a number of ebooks I've bought from Ballantine, I've had to break open the ebook files on all of them an edit the text and the CSS to correct the errors. It is clear to me that publishers have placed such a low priority on ebooks that they are willing to put out substandard product into the market without any quality control. In Piers Anthony's Xanth series, all it took was two tiny changes to the CSS to fix their typographical mistakes to make it a pleasure to read again.
Example: In the CSS in some of the ebooks, I noted that they had listed paragraph indentation defined as pixels. Well, 15 pixels on an ebook reader are not the same size as 15 pixels on a computer screen or a smart phone display. Pixels are a subjective value where one device can have 300 pixels in an inch another can have just 72. It is better to define text indentation as an objective value such as 1 cm or 1.5 em so it gets indented properly, no matter the device that is displaying the text. By defining the indentation in pixels, the paragraph indentation in some ebooks was so minimal that the paragraphs just ran together and couldn't be differentiated.
I find it ironic that the ebooks being sold by independent (e.g. self-published) authors to be flawless in their display while the ebooks from the big publishing houses with all their resources are all messed up.
Nasa has a list of plants that actually clean the air. A PDF of the original study is here, or you can go to a simplified list on Wikipedia. I think we are all aware of "sasquatches", individuals who while technically gifted are hygienically challenged. Having been 'squatched (trapped in an enclosed area by a sasquatch with precious little fresh air rejuvenation) far too many times, I also offer up a list of scented plants that can help. Humans tend to respond most favorably to rose-scented flowers (hence the popularity of roses). Sickly-sweet perfumes (such as lilies) can be unpleasant to some people. Miniature roses and rose-scented geraniums are probably the easiest to care for. Avoid poisonous plants (e.g. Angel trumpet) as at some point, a teenager (with little or no impulse control) is going to think it's funny (or for revenge) to slip a few bits of the plant into someone's drink or food without giving much thought to the potential outcome. If your high school has a gardening club, it would be wise to involve them. This could be a good lesson plan for students interested in biology and interior design.
Remove all fluorescent light tubes and replace them with LED banks. Preferably full spectrum or with a blend of colors. Make sure the lighting is always indirect and that the source points (the LEDs themselves) are not directly viewable. This makes for good, soft all-around lighting with little or no glare. Very easy on the eyes. Fluorescent lighting is very harsh on the eyes. I would build the banks based on five LEDs: cool white, warm white, red, green, and blue. I would also sprinkle in a couple of black-light purple LEDs. Turn this into a lesson and have the kids build such banks with an Arduino to control them. The kids could learn to program various light levels and colors to simulate various natural lighting situations. You could program the LED banks along the walls to actually change the color of the room. Also, full-spectrum lighting is good for the plants, just as it is calming for the humans in the room.
The room design is important as well. I would have the walls painted white with a slight bluish or cool grayish tint to it. Neutral grey colors are best for rooms where computer graphic design or image processing are taking place, to avoid the eyes being fooled about the color balance of an image. While greys are a cold and sterile color, the room can be warmed up by adjusting the color balance of the LED lights mentioned above. One wall should have a 16:9 rectangle painted in reflective paint to be used as a screen or have a retractable screen in front of an optional chalkboard for lessons. In a computer class, the teacher can then show code samples on the screen and demonstrations of changes to the code. Outgoing vents should be placed along the chalkboard or whiteboard, so dust from chalk and fumes and dust from the markers exits the room via the vents to protect the computers from dust. Good ventilation is also important due to the incidence of 'squatches mentioned above.
Chairs should have gel padding in the seats. There should be footrests beneath the desks. Being comfortable is vital when coding. Cheap, hard, plastic seats become uncomfortable very quickly and that becomes distracting while trying to work out some code.
For equipment, I would suggest Unix-based computers with a centralized administration console. Students should only have non-administrative accounts on their computers. Windows could be run via WINE or Parallels or Fusion, depending on the parent OS of the computers. Virtualized environments can easily be cleansed should a student introduce or create malicious software. Students should be encouraged to try and figure out how to escalate their permi
The basic idea of Amazon's program is certainly intriguing. And Amazon itself is fully aware that this program must be compelling for authors to sign on with it. There must be a decent reward for an author to sign an exclusivity deal with them. The idea is, Amazon puts up a kitty of $500K. All authors who join into the program and add a title (or more) to the free lending library for Amazon's Prime subscribers (This in important! Remember 'Amazon Prime' as you read all this!). Let's say 1,000 books were borrowed by Amazon Prime subscribers during the month, and 100 of them were yours. That means that 10% of the books borrowed were your title. So, you get 10% of the $500,000 for a cool $50K pay day at the end of the month. That's pretty damned nice! VERY compelling to join into the pool!
Essentially, in exchange for 90 days of exclusivity and allowing your book to be read for free by Amazon Prime subscribers, you get a share of the pool each month. You also get good exposure by allowing some readers to see your book for free. If they liked it, they may blog or tell their friends about it, which would only increase the number of borrowings from Amazon Prime subscribers. In addition to this, if a subscriber likes your book enough that they'd like to own it outright, they can buy it and you get paid again!
So? Where's the catch? It's in the numbers. Several groups of numbers, actually.
First, there will be a lot more than just a thousand borrowings of a book. And a lot more than just a few authors offering their books. And all you need is ONE big name author to add a book to the mix to completely skew the results. If Stephen King decides to offer his next awesome book to the offering as an exclusive, every King fan is going to want to download it for free. That means, if your book got 100 downloads, but King's book got 100,000, then you only get at most .1% of the kitty that month, for a whopping sum of $500. That means that King gets that extra Jaguar in his garage for just in case the Lotus gets a flat. (He has neither, I'm just making a point.) Any time some big time author—King, Gibson, Steele, Roberts, Rowling—feel they need an extra $400,000+ real quick, all they have to do is offer their book as an exclusive for three months and allow folks to borrow it via the KDPSelect program, and all the little guys are pretty much SOL. Note: in truth, it is the publishing companies who control distribution of the books these authors write, and the publishers are the ones who will benefit the most from such a deal.
Second, who is borrowing from Amazon's lending program? NOT everybody. Only paying subscribers to Amazon's Prime program will have access to the Kindle Owners Lending. So, out of the Kindle owners out there, only those who chose to pay a subscription fee to Amazon each month will have access to the lending pool. Each member is only allowed to borrow one title per month. That's important! So, they are going to be choosy about what they borrow for free. Are they going to use their one chance per month to borrow the hottest title on the market (like the Jobs biography)? Or try out some unknown author? Unless they've heard something about the unknown author, they are going to go with the guaranteed good read. What's vital about this is that the number of subscribers is a small subset of the total of Kindle owners.
As of November 2011, the Amazon Kindle had about 41% of the market share of all ebook readers sold, down from 47% at the end of 2010. Apple's iPad is in second, and Barnes & Noble's Nook is in third and rapidly gaining market share. The number of Kindle owners subscribing to Prime membership will only be a small percentage out of that 41% of the total market.
That means, as a new and unknown author, I would be limiting exposure of my first book to maybe less that 5% (WAG) of the total ebook reader market for a total of 90 days. And if there is a big name author in
The cg team and the story and director team are so far removed you can not blame one for the other...
Actually, the direction team and the CG team were heavily involved with each other. They were working very hard at producing photorealistic CGI for the movie. I mention the skin quality, because Square developed the algorithms that made the skin surfaces of the characters look so real. That process has been adopted by other digital movie companies. So much effort and attention went into the technical aspects of creating the film, that the story development was literally put on the back burner and received so little attention that when it was time to put it together, there really wasn't anything developed for the story. It showed. Painfully so. It nearly ruined Square, and caused Enix to rethink their merger because of the failure of the movie. (The merger was approved a few years later and resulted in the creation of Square Enix.
Need anyone mention that bastion of "putting all one's eggs into the CGI basket", Final Fantasty: The Spirits Within? They put all their efforts into the CG to make highly realistic skin surfaces and artificial actors. So much so, that they completely forgot to put effort into actual story development. It was beautiful to watch, but terrible to have to follow.
While it was a fantasy, I thought that Lord of the Rings was an excellent use of CGI without getting in the way of the storytelling or acting. Consider the case of Gollum. A fully artificial being generated via CGI within the movie, yet he was so integral to the story.
One science fiction story I would love to see brought to "life" on the silver screen would be Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. That is a story that would need CGI on the scale of Cameron's Avatar to make it visually believable.
Don't forget Meteor Crater in AZ! For an added bonus, the Petrified Forest National Park is roughly 80 miles by road to the east.
One of my favorite storytellers! I still enjoy reading her stories over and over again.
I "first" discovered her stories when The White Dragon came out. But, a number of years later, I remembered that I had read one of her short stories--The Smallest Dragonboy--back when it was first published. At my age then, the story strongly resonated with me. It's probably why I enjoyed The White Dragon so much. After reading The White Dragon, I bought the other books in the series that were then available. I loved how in the HarperHall Trilogy, she took the commoners point of view in the daily life of Pern.
I loved how she brought many of her series of stories to create a single cohesive universe. The Brainship series and the Crystal Singer series came together nicely. I also enjoyed how Dragonriders went from a fantasy setting to hard science fiction as the history of Pern was slowly revealed. I always wondered if ever McCaffrey was going to have Pern rediscovered by a Brainship and re-enter galactic society? I guess that one is for our collective imaginations or for Todd to pursue, if within Anne's canon.
Most of the Biopharmaceutical companies in the Boston area are going to look at your Ph.D. to determine whether it is relevant to the work they do. But it won't be the only thing they look for.
Many biopharms are leaning very heavily on computer simulations to model various molecules they are pursuing as potential drug candidates. Having a an advanced degree in biology and the ability to prove strong computer skills might open vastly more doors for you than just having a Ph.D. in a relevant field. Having a programmer who can also intimately understand what the scientists are trying to accomplish is desperately needed by many companies.
But don't sell yourself as a programmer with a doctorate in biology. Rather, sell yourself as a biology doctorate with advanced computer skills. If they think you are a programmer, they'll treat--and pay--you like one. Sadly, there are still WAY too many CEOs (and CIOs, CFOs, and COOs) who are still under the 1980's notion that "high school kids could do this work," and treat computer engineers like they are unskilled labor. As a "respected scientist" you'll be treated far more appropriately by management/business types.
If there is one thing I have learned, nowadays no company will admit that their product has a problem. It opens them up to liability. Due to the litigation-happy society we live in, companies now find it wiser and safer to deny their product has an issue.
Personally, I would much rather a company come out and say, "Yeah, there is an issue we've uncovered and we are working on the fix." I can live with that. If it is an issue they can't fix in a timely manner, of course I would want to return the product and get my money back until they have it fixed. But, to have the company duck the issue when it is obvious? I find that insulting. I would rather bring my hard-earned money to a company that is being fair and honest with me than one that is being evasive and lying.
As much as I am satisfied with the Apple products I own, I usually warn people to never buy the latest and greatest from Apple right off the bat. Often, there is such a glitch in the item. It is best to wait a few months so the bugs can be worked out and then buy the new toy. (Admittedly, I don't always follow this advice, myself.)
The biggest problem is that those of us who want to move to Google+ can't convince enough of our less techy friends to move over...
I'd say you pretty much nailed it. People, especially luddites, tend to stick with what they know. Facebook has already become the killer app on the internet that was finally able to give the technophiles who have been using the internet for years a good reason to convince all the holdouts (parents and grandparents) that there was a good use for the internet. Google+ is different in how it works, which would make these luddites very uncomfortable with using it. Consider how many years the internet was around before Facebook, and how many people on Facebook didn't start using the internet until family members convinced them to use Facebook. It would be a real stretch to convince them to switch to something new!
Second, all these late comers that might look at Google+ would find that their friends have not yet tried it. Almost none of my friends with whom I connect with via Facebook are to be found on Google+. That does make it fairly difficult to use Google+ to communicate as effectively as Facebook.
On the bright side of it, I've found that the people who have adopted Google+ to be a hell of a lot more intelligent than what is to be found on Facebook. Mainly, because the people who have adopted Google+ are those who are very comfortable with new technologies and adapting to them. Such people tend to be much better educated and open minded. The discussions I have found in the G+ stream have been on a whole different level than what I find in Facebook; being concerned with technical advances, political insight, various arts, etc. On G+, I have yet to see someone post a "funny" video of some moron trying to attain his position among the Darwinian Achievement Award winners. I have yet to see anyone post something laced with profanity on G+. (I have nothing against swearing. Swearing is appropriate for when you run out of words to match a given situation. Sadly, there are some people who run out of words in their vocabulary all too quickly.)
Many people have commented on the fact that for 99, one can by an awful lot of crap on the ebook market. Yeah, there are some pretty awful books out there. Fortunately, most of the sales channels for ebooks allow a reader to download a sample of the book to read (the first chapter or two) so the reader can judge whether or not a given book is worth their hard-earned money. I've come across quite a few that were so terrible, I could barely get past the first paragraph before I was compelled to delete it from my Nook. The spelling and grammatical mistakes were just too much to take!
You wonder, "How does Apple/Amazon/Barnes&Noble let this crap on their servers?!"
The answer, "Because it cost them nothing." All they did was make the shelf space available. It is up to the writer to put their book there and to go out and promote their book so it sells. All the ebook markets make their money by exacting a commission from each sale (30%). If the book is really terrible, then the author has an uphill battle to fight getting any kind of meaningful sales. If the book is terrific, then sales will skyrocket once word gets out among readers that it is a good read. If you as a reader are willing to sift through a lot of crap, there are some incredible gems to be found for 99!
The Patronage model of supporting an author (or any artist, really) doesn't really work today. There are incredibly few rich individuals today who are willing for fork over money to support some random "deadbeat artist" to create some kind of artistic work. The MacArthur Foundation's Fellows Program (aka "The Genius Award") only gives out money to an average of 30 people each year to pursue their work. On average, there are 30,000 people in America alone each day trying to submit the next great novel. That disparity of numbers pretty well demonstrates the Patronage model will never work today. I would dearly love for the McArthur Foundation to hand me a check and say, "Here, this ought to tide you over until you finish your book." But I know that's not going to happen. I am far more likely to win one of the big multi-state lotteries here in the US than to have someone I know hand the manuscript of my book to the McArthur Foundation's secret recommendation panel.
Getting published by a traditional publisher certainly has better odds of happening. The readers benefit by the publisher filtering out the crap and the publisher benefits by a literary agent filtering out the crap. So a writer today has to breach two barriers to getting published by convincing and agent to review and promote their work or being luckier still by finding an editor at a publisher that is willing to review their work. A publisher brings a lot of services to the use of the author such as professional editing, marketing and promotion, typographic services and printing and--of course, that big money maker--distribution. If a publisher is really excited about an author's work, they'll offer a pretty large sum of money for the rights to the book, as well as any follow up books. If they are not so enthused about a book but still think it can sell, they might offer a budding author an advance that the author can pay back out of the sales of the book.
Self-publishing has a very bad stigma in the writing profession. As little as twenty years ago, self-publishing (aka "Vanity Publishing") was pretty much the only recourse for really bad writers. Writers whose books were so bad, they had to pay a printer to get their books published. The articles cited by the O.P., seem to come from this camp. They are so sure that the flood of so many author-wannabes are going to overwhelm the book market with so much crap, that readers will completely throw up their hands in disgust and completely abandon the self-published e-author and the whole writing industry is going to completely collapse.
If a friend told you that they just read a new book, enjoyed it, and recommended you try it, would you? That's how most books get sold. That is how I came to like a "little-kn