I use this for just about everything too. You don't need all your bills online either to go without paper. I just download my bank account files every week and put them in GnuCash. I mark the transactions under the appropriate accounts, so I can see what i'm spending where. Bills are filed in paper format, because it's the least amount of work for storing them, and it's the default format that most of my bills come in.
Fish-eye would probably be the biggest problem, although i'm not sure how much it would affect the ability of the OCR program. In university we did a robotics project that used a webcam to take a picture of a table with a block, so the robot could pick up the block. We had to do quite a bit of calculation in order to account for the fish eye of the lense. However, the biggest problem is the setup that is needed. The author of the post is talking about an expensive 8 MP camera, on a tripod. You'd have to either leave it in place, or adjust and calibrate it every time you wanted to "scan" a document. With theinexpensive scanners that are available today that can do much better than 300 dpi (try 1200x2400), it's probably better to just stick with a scanner. I realize that it's sometimes tedious to wait for the scanner to finish scanning, and that the software doesn't really help in automating the process, but I don't think the camera setup would solve all those problems. Plus, the entire set up would take up a considerable amount of space.
I think this is the reason I am so good at dealing with computers. My first experience with a computer was a C64, then the ICON, then MS-Dos based machines, then Windows (3.1,95/98/2k/xp), along with Linux, BSD, QNX, and a variety of other OSes. Although I don't have extensive experience in some of those (QNX, BSD) I think that trying them out, and getting a little familiar with them helps you to deal with unexpected situations, and changes in your familiar operating systems.
However, anybody who tried to use Windows 95 on a machine with those specs quickly learned the meaning of "Minimal". Most people I knew first ran Windows 95 with a Pentium 100 or higher, possibly 486 DX4 100, with at least 16 MB of RAM, with probably a half gig hard drive. Those minimum specs are as much as joke as the operating system itself.
This is the thing, the 18-34 year old gamers are just single men with no families. So, between 18 and 24 there's probably a lot of hardcore gamers, but beyond that, the numbers really start to dwindle. I have a family, and between that and my job, I don't have that much time to which I can devote to TV, Movies, Games, Sports, programming for my own interests, hanging out with friends and any other recreational activities that I may want to spend time on. Gaming simply doesn't come that high on the priority list. I suspect that it's the same for most people in this age group. The only people I know who spend a significant amount of time on games are single people.
That sounds like what happened with the M-16 machine gun. It's a really nice gun, but it has really tight tollerances, and doesn't operate very well when it's dirty, and hence it requires lots of cleaning, or it tends to jam. The AK-47 on the other hand, operates pretty well even when it is dirty, which is nice in combat situations, since you don't want your gun jamming in the middle of a battle. For more information, check out the wikipedia article
At least they're not trying to hide their intentions. Liberal parties who aren't liberal seem to come to mind. Democratic parties that fix elections. I would applaud them for letting people know their intentions, and stop trying to have a hidden agenda.
However, it also costs $5.00 to sit down and have a cup of coffee. Everything is relative. My dad went on a business trip to switzerland, and was amazed at the price of even simple things. Thank diety his company paid for it all. You need to be making $300K in that country just to make ends meet.
but what if you're using a DVORAK keyboard? then the whole thing is completely useless? Is there anyway to switch VIM, so that it uses DHTN instead of hjkl?
That depends on your definition that "Doesn't Suck". I think that CD's without copy protection mechanisms don't suck. Sure there are some downsides such as not being able to buy a single track, but it definitely falls into the "Doesn't suck" category. I really don't see the problem with CDs. The quality is great, the price is good (only a little more expensive, sometimes cheaper, than downloading, and you get a physical copy with liner notes), they're pretty durable, provided you know how to take care of them, and they are easily backed up. For the number of hours of enjoyment I can get out of a CD, $10-$15 CDN isn't a bad price to pay.
You just proved my point. Really in the end, it doesn't make that much of a difference whether you use for each, ilength, or i = length -1. I mean, you could argue that it's more efficient to use a for each, but do you really know what's going on under the hood, and whether or not it's just checking the length function anyway. How do you know you're at the end of the array unless you check the length? I guess you could be checking a variable instead of calling a function, but unless you're going for the ultimate in performance, in which case you'd be better off programming the thing in assembly, then it isn't going to matter.
However, if people want real ease of use, for sharing family photos and videos, then I would highly recommend DropShots. Although it doesn't have tons of features, its extremely simple. Just click on the icon in the system tray, then drop the files into the window that displays. I have my own hosting service, with Gallery2, and lots of space, but its was impossible to make an argument against using dropshots for my wife. It was just too easy, and too straight forward. No site I've ever seen has taken something to such a simple level. I know the concept is simple, and probably didn't take long for them to think up, however, I often wonder why nobody else has implemented a similar idea.
I think this is very true. Robotics is a very big field, and it really depends on what part you are interested in. There's the building of the physical gears, belts, and other structures of the robot. Then there's the building of the electronic circuit boards and chips that go into the robot. Then there's the design of the software that controls the robot. I only have experience with the circuit boards, which I found very uninteresting, and very tedious, and with the software, which although very difficult, was actually quite interesting and exciting. However when I speak of the programming, I'm speaking of actually making the robot be able to think a little for itself. Not move from predetermined position A to predetermined position B, but actually be able to use sensors, like cameras, and do actions based on the information obtained from the sensor. This is where it gets really interesting. However, most robots don't do this kind of thing.
Pair programming may stop people from wasting time on slashdot, however, they seem to waste time in a lot of other ways. Like whether a specific for loop should be written as for(i = 0;imyArray.length();i++) or as for(i = 0;i=myArray.length()-1;i++). That and whether the opening brace should be on same line following the for statement, or on the next line. Oh, and whether certain things should be put in functions, or put inline in the code. Peer programming, while I can see the advantages of having someone sitting there, watching you, and correcting you as you go along, also has a lot of downsides. I often program in a very non-linear way. Sometimes i'm aware that I've made a mistake, but finish typing out my entire thought before I go back and correct it. Whenever I have someone watching me, and they point out the mistakes, telling me to go and correct something, I often lose my train of thought. It's like to writing a story and having somebody make you go back and correct all the grammar mistakes before while your done trying to get your thoughts out.
Yeah, but I never quite could get the Voodoo 3500 TV driver working correctly on a 2.6 kernel. I got it working a bit on the 2.4 kernel, but it was still a little buggy. There may be support in Linux for popular hardware, but things like the voodoo 3500 are the reason I still think it would all be so much better if manufacturers released open source drivers. At least then the community could fix this stuff when the manufacturer lost interest.
How much oil did it take for you to submit that comment? How much oil is it taking me to submit this comment. You can't discount the use of a technology just because the industries that support the technology aren't up to snuff. It's completely possible to produce solar panels without oil, and we shouldn't not use them because it currently requires industries that use oil in one way or another. I mean, at that rate, you might as well discount wood boats, because unless you're picking up the wood off the ground and tying it together with some hemp rope you managed to make yourself, then you're probably using a lot of oil in the process.
I'm all for technology where technology is needed, but I hate it when people try to put technology where it doesn't belong. It's one thing to do this as an experiment, to show that it can be done, it's another thing to say that we are now at the point where we should be using solar boats regularly. It's like those washing machines with the 600 different washing modes. Nobody really needs all that, we only need maybe 5 or 6. There's no point to building stuff like this, and it only adds more points of failure by making things more complicated than they need to be. We have plenty of forms of water transport that are zero emissions (sails, paddles, nuclear (which is low emission, and low waste)), we don't need to be using environmentally unfriendly solar panels to power boats.
Do kids today that are interested in soccer not think it's fun because they can't bend it like Beckham the first time they kick the ball? Do people who like woodworking stop because they can't build a perfectly constructed table and chairs, and instead can only build a crappy bird house? I don't think that's really the problem here. Sure there's going to be some kids who are discouraged because they can't program Doom 3 the first time they sit down and code. But those probably aren't the kids who would end up having a career in computers anyway.
However, there's plenty of time in your 4 years of college to learn Assembly, C,C++,Java, and a plethora of other languages. If you're talking about those 1 year career colleges, well, then that's another story completely. You can't learn how to program in a year, no matter how intensive the program is. I've known quite a few people who went to those one year career oriented schools, and they couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. The simple thing is, is that you need a large basis to really understand how to program.
Well, you know, IBM is still making chips, they're quite popular with the console market. I don't think there's any PC's or servers using them now that Apple has gone Intel. Although I'm sure that IBM still sells servers that use their own chips. Oh, and then there's SUN processors for servers and workstations. There's a lot more choice out there than you think. If your on the Windows platform, then you pretty much have just AMD and Intel, but if you're on another operating system link Linux/Unix, then there's a few other architectures you can choose from.
The reason that nobody is going after apple, is because MS's idea of security is building a spyware scanner or a virus scanner or a firewall. Apple doesn't include this kind of stuff in the OS. Instead, the only security that Apple includes is a user/permission system for who can access and run files. Also, in Vista, MS is making it impossible or really hard to install another virus/spyware/firewall tool. So you won't be able to use any other tools like this from anybody else. The MS security tools that are the item of complaint are things that don't need to be part of the operating system (Virus Scanner, Firewall, Spyware Scanner). The tools that apple includes (File Permissions system) are part of the basic operating system, and nobody is complaining about Vista including these sorts of features.
Yes they are playable on the "Free" edition. The free edition of Mandriva is also able to play DVDs with CSS out of the box. There's nothing to stop a distro from including support for Divx. You can play MP3s with only open source software, but there are some patent issues that could require a licence be paid.
THere was lots of other issues with SUSE. Out of the box it couldn't play a simple DIVX movie. I also couldn't find anyway to install packages, short of compiling and installing MPlayer on my own, that made it possible. It does look like a really nice distro, and has a lot of nice admin tools. But in the end I switched back to Mandriva, because of the fact that there's just way too many annoying issues.
The whole point of my post is that I shouldn't have to make changes like this to the base install of the operating system just to get it functional. With Mandriva I don't have to put up with stuff like this, and I've never had to put up with stuff like this. Releasing a.1 operating system that can't even update itself out of the box is terrible, and it makes me stop using it very quickly. Because I cringe at the thought of what would happen if I had to do something complicated.
Slashdot Mirror
I use this for just about everything too. You don't need all your bills online either to go without paper. I just download my bank account files every week and put them in GnuCash. I mark the transactions under the appropriate accounts, so I can see what i'm spending where. Bills are filed in paper format, because it's the least amount of work for storing them, and it's the default format that most of my bills come in.
Fish-eye would probably be the biggest problem, although i'm not sure how much it would affect the ability of the OCR program. In university we did a robotics project that used a webcam to take a picture of a table with a block, so the robot could pick up the block. We had to do quite a bit of calculation in order to account for the fish eye of the lense. However, the biggest problem is the setup that is needed. The author of the post is talking about an expensive 8 MP camera, on a tripod. You'd have to either leave it in place, or adjust and calibrate it every time you wanted to "scan" a document. With theinexpensive scanners that are available today that can do much better than 300 dpi (try 1200x2400), it's probably better to just stick with a scanner. I realize that it's sometimes tedious to wait for the scanner to finish scanning, and that the software doesn't really help in automating the process, but I don't think the camera setup would solve all those problems. Plus, the entire set up would take up a considerable amount of space.
I think this is the reason I am so good at dealing with computers. My first experience with a computer was a C64, then the ICON, then MS-Dos based machines, then Windows (3.1,95/98/2k/xp), along with Linux, BSD, QNX, and a variety of other OSes. Although I don't have extensive experience in some of those (QNX, BSD) I think that trying them out, and getting a little familiar with them helps you to deal with unexpected situations, and changes in your familiar operating systems.
However, anybody who tried to use Windows 95 on a machine with those specs quickly learned the meaning of "Minimal". Most people I knew first ran Windows 95 with a Pentium 100 or higher, possibly 486 DX4 100, with at least 16 MB of RAM, with probably a half gig hard drive. Those minimum specs are as much as joke as the operating system itself.
This is the thing, the 18-34 year old gamers are just single men with no families. So, between 18 and 24 there's probably a lot of hardcore gamers, but beyond that, the numbers really start to dwindle. I have a family, and between that and my job, I don't have that much time to which I can devote to TV, Movies, Games, Sports, programming for my own interests, hanging out with friends and any other recreational activities that I may want to spend time on. Gaming simply doesn't come that high on the priority list. I suspect that it's the same for most people in this age group. The only people I know who spend a significant amount of time on games are single people.
That sounds like what happened with the M-16 machine gun. It's a really nice gun, but it has really tight tollerances, and doesn't operate very well when it's dirty, and hence it requires lots of cleaning, or it tends to jam. The AK-47 on the other hand, operates pretty well even when it is dirty, which is nice in combat situations, since you don't want your gun jamming in the middle of a battle. For more information, check out the wikipedia article
At least they're not trying to hide their intentions. Liberal parties who aren't liberal seem to come to mind. Democratic parties that fix elections. I would applaud them for letting people know their intentions, and stop trying to have a hidden agenda.
However, it also costs $5.00 to sit down and have a cup of coffee. Everything is relative. My dad went on a business trip to switzerland, and was amazed at the price of even simple things. Thank diety his company paid for it all. You need to be making $300K in that country just to make ends meet.
It probably falls under the same umbrella as the Marijuana parties that exist in certain countries.
but what if you're using a DVORAK keyboard? then the whole thing is completely useless? Is there anyway to switch VIM, so that it uses DHTN instead of hjkl?
That depends on your definition that "Doesn't Suck". I think that CD's without copy protection mechanisms don't suck. Sure there are some downsides such as not being able to buy a single track, but it definitely falls into the "Doesn't suck" category. I really don't see the problem with CDs. The quality is great, the price is good (only a little more expensive, sometimes cheaper, than downloading, and you get a physical copy with liner notes), they're pretty durable, provided you know how to take care of them, and they are easily backed up. For the number of hours of enjoyment I can get out of a CD, $10-$15 CDN isn't a bad price to pay.
You just proved my point. Really in the end, it doesn't make that much of a difference whether you use for each, ilength, or i = length -1. I mean, you could argue that it's more efficient to use a for each, but do you really know what's going on under the hood, and whether or not it's just checking the length function anyway. How do you know you're at the end of the array unless you check the length? I guess you could be checking a variable instead of calling a function, but unless you're going for the ultimate in performance, in which case you'd be better off programming the thing in assembly, then it isn't going to matter.
However, if people want real ease of use, for sharing family photos and videos, then I would highly recommend DropShots. Although it doesn't have tons of features, its extremely simple. Just click on the icon in the system tray, then drop the files into the window that displays. I have my own hosting service, with Gallery2, and lots of space, but its was impossible to make an argument against using dropshots for my wife. It was just too easy, and too straight forward. No site I've ever seen has taken something to such a simple level. I know the concept is simple, and probably didn't take long for them to think up, however, I often wonder why nobody else has implemented a similar idea.
I think this is very true. Robotics is a very big field, and it really depends on what part you are interested in. There's the building of the physical gears, belts, and other structures of the robot. Then there's the building of the electronic circuit boards and chips that go into the robot. Then there's the design of the software that controls the robot. I only have experience with the circuit boards, which I found very uninteresting, and very tedious, and with the software, which although very difficult, was actually quite interesting and exciting. However when I speak of the programming, I'm speaking of actually making the robot be able to think a little for itself. Not move from predetermined position A to predetermined position B, but actually be able to use sensors, like cameras, and do actions based on the information obtained from the sensor. This is where it gets really interesting. However, most robots don't do this kind of thing.
Pair programming may stop people from wasting time on slashdot, however, they seem to waste time in a lot of other ways. Like whether a specific for loop should be written as for(i = 0;imyArray.length();i++) or as for(i = 0;i=myArray.length()-1;i++). That and whether the opening brace should be on same line following the for statement, or on the next line. Oh, and whether certain things should be put in functions, or put inline in the code. Peer programming, while I can see the advantages of having someone sitting there, watching you, and correcting you as you go along, also has a lot of downsides. I often program in a very non-linear way. Sometimes i'm aware that I've made a mistake, but finish typing out my entire thought before I go back and correct it. Whenever I have someone watching me, and they point out the mistakes, telling me to go and correct something, I often lose my train of thought. It's like to writing a story and having somebody make you go back and correct all the grammar mistakes before while your done trying to get your thoughts out.
Yeah, but I never quite could get the Voodoo 3500 TV driver working correctly on a 2.6 kernel. I got it working a bit on the 2.4 kernel, but it was still a little buggy. There may be support in Linux for popular hardware, but things like the voodoo 3500 are the reason I still think it would all be so much better if manufacturers released open source drivers. At least then the community could fix this stuff when the manufacturer lost interest.
How much oil did it take for you to submit that comment? How much oil is it taking me to submit this comment. You can't discount the use of a technology just because the industries that support the technology aren't up to snuff. It's completely possible to produce solar panels without oil, and we shouldn't not use them because it currently requires industries that use oil in one way or another. I mean, at that rate, you might as well discount wood boats, because unless you're picking up the wood off the ground and tying it together with some hemp rope you managed to make yourself, then you're probably using a lot of oil in the process.
I'm all for technology where technology is needed, but I hate it when people try to put technology where it doesn't belong. It's one thing to do this as an experiment, to show that it can be done, it's another thing to say that we are now at the point where we should be using solar boats regularly. It's like those washing machines with the 600 different washing modes. Nobody really needs all that, we only need maybe 5 or 6. There's no point to building stuff like this, and it only adds more points of failure by making things more complicated than they need to be. We have plenty of forms of water transport that are zero emissions (sails, paddles, nuclear (which is low emission, and low waste)), we don't need to be using environmentally unfriendly solar panels to power boats.
Do kids today that are interested in soccer not think it's fun because they can't bend it like Beckham the first time they kick the ball? Do people who like woodworking stop because they can't build a perfectly constructed table and chairs, and instead can only build a crappy bird house? I don't think that's really the problem here. Sure there's going to be some kids who are discouraged because they can't program Doom 3 the first time they sit down and code. But those probably aren't the kids who would end up having a career in computers anyway.
However, there's plenty of time in your 4 years of college to learn Assembly, C,C++,Java, and a plethora of other languages. If you're talking about those 1 year career colleges, well, then that's another story completely. You can't learn how to program in a year, no matter how intensive the program is. I've known quite a few people who went to those one year career oriented schools, and they couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. The simple thing is, is that you need a large basis to really understand how to program.
Well, you know, IBM is still making chips, they're quite popular with the console market. I don't think there's any PC's or servers using them now that Apple has gone Intel. Although I'm sure that IBM still sells servers that use their own chips. Oh, and then there's SUN processors for servers and workstations. There's a lot more choice out there than you think. If your on the Windows platform, then you pretty much have just AMD and Intel, but if you're on another operating system link Linux/Unix, then there's a few other architectures you can choose from.
The reason that nobody is going after apple, is because MS's idea of security is building a spyware scanner or a virus scanner or a firewall. Apple doesn't include this kind of stuff in the OS. Instead, the only security that Apple includes is a user/permission system for who can access and run files. Also, in Vista, MS is making it impossible or really hard to install another virus/spyware/firewall tool. So you won't be able to use any other tools like this from anybody else. The MS security tools that are the item of complaint are things that don't need to be part of the operating system (Virus Scanner, Firewall, Spyware Scanner). The tools that apple includes (File Permissions system) are part of the basic operating system, and nobody is complaining about Vista including these sorts of features.
Yes they are playable on the "Free" edition. The free edition of Mandriva is also able to play DVDs with CSS out of the box. There's nothing to stop a distro from including support for Divx. You can play MP3s with only open source software, but there are some patent issues that could require a licence be paid.
THere was lots of other issues with SUSE. Out of the box it couldn't play a simple DIVX movie. I also couldn't find anyway to install packages, short of compiling and installing MPlayer on my own, that made it possible. It does look like a really nice distro, and has a lot of nice admin tools. But in the end I switched back to Mandriva, because of the fact that there's just way too many annoying issues.
The whole point of my post is that I shouldn't have to make changes like this to the base install of the operating system just to get it functional. With Mandriva I don't have to put up with stuff like this, and I've never had to put up with stuff like this. Releasing a .1 operating system that can't even update itself out of the box is terrible, and it makes me stop using it very quickly. Because I cringe at the thought of what would happen if I had to do something complicated.