I bought my spouse a Dymo 400 for xmas ($80 or so at amazon). I was amazed by its speed and ease. One caveat: it came with a label test halfway stuck in and out of the case, without instructions for removing it. Needless to say, I chose to pull it the wrong way, and ended up with bits of label sticker stuck inside the thing. Didn't make for a happy xmas morning. Once I got it out it works great. I tested it on OS X and XP. No printer cartridges either. Deal.
While the link to QuenteCafe is nice and all, it by no means includes summaries of all of the displays. It would be nice to see a site that did, though.
I have a Powerbook and a Thinkpad. The one-button mouse on the Powerbook drives me nuts, and I constantly have to use the [option, control, apple--I can't remember] key with the one button for that virtual right-click. What a waste of my time.
Also, the trackpad on the Mac is far inferior. Despite my selecting the option that says 'blow off the trackpad while I'm typing,' it doesn't. I type away in Word, and every few parapgraphs the cursor jumps and all of the sudden I'm editing some other part of the document. Very annoying and again, time-wasting.
Another problem is the flaming hot underbelly of these things. My 867MHz G4 roasts my legs. Its ok in winter, intolerable in summer (literally can't do it in shorts w/o getting burned).
I'd love a pretty interface on a powerful OS, and I hate the (lack of) aesthetics in XP, but I need a machine that is fast to use and doesn't slow me down. I don't see the Powerbooks in that category.
This is absolutely unbelievable. I would think 64-bit would be top priority. What are they thinking? Even Microsoft is coming out with a 64-bit WinXP soon.
I've tried multiple machines, all of them top of the line workstations (I run an imaging lab).
My usual machine is a dual 2.8GHz Xeon with 4GB RAM. Here's a test for you:
Open a single file in the 10MB range. The scratch usage for this file is 602MB on my machine. Open a couple more near that size and you're up over 1GB of scratch. This is ok if you've got oodles of scratch space (although you're limited by Windows to under 2GB).
But why on earth does PS need 600MB scratch for a 10MB file? Once it goes over your scratch allocation, everything slows down.
I don't have PS7 installed anymore, or I'd try it and give you the results. I did this back when CS first came out, and the differences were astonishing. It had reasonable values for scratch (3 to 6 times original uncompressed file size or something like that--I don't recall exactly anymore).
If you're in the habit of opening one image, editing it, closing it, and loading the next, then it works ok. If you do large panoramas, or like multiple images open at a time, it slows to a crawl. The efficiency drops to single digit percentages.
Its not a hardware issue.
As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing Adobe should be releasing with CS2 is fixing the serious memory bugs they introduced in CS on the PC. Those who use Photoshop for large files (or even medium files) and have used both version 7 and CS know what I'm talking about. CS is much slower when you open more than an image or two. Scratch space usage for even a small couple MB file went from a few MB to nearly a GB.
I and others have complained to Adobe about this. They kind of acknowledge it but don't seem particularly concerned. I'm not sure anyone at Adobe actually uses the program on the PC or they would be going nuts too.
Also, lets hope they have 64-bit support for WinXP-64.
We'll soon be getting an x-ray microtomography instrument. This 3-D CAT scanner with a 4k x 4k CCD produces 3-D image datasets of small objects down to a 5 um resolution. A full dataset can run 270GB! We'll be purchasing a RAID and a dedicated tape library to handle the data.
However, we'll also be doing lots of analysis of that data on multiple machines throughout the lab...and you have to move that data somehow!
Where's the Sal-Mar Construction, created by Salvatore Martirano in the early 1970's, toured throughout the world in the 70's and 80's, and still seen as one of the most interesting improvisatory electronics instrument ever devised? How about one of the first wave synthesizers by James Beauchamp in the 1960's? The page also seems to include some software systems as instruments (as it should), but leaves out most such systems (CMusic, Music V, CSound, Music 4C, max, kyma, etc.).
This is a pretty bad/. post.
This is pretty silly. A major professional orchestra doesn't "require" conducting...get them started (which the concertmaster/mistress) can do, and away they go. I'd love to see footage, but I don't see this as actually "directing" anything.
Bugscope is not meant as a replacement for anything--its a supplement to classroom teaching that provides a new resource not available in the school..
The project provides access to an instrument that the children will never get access to otherwise--a $500,000 environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM). Children get to act just like scientists in that they write a proposal for instrument use, they find a specimen in their own environment, they send it to the Bugscope team, and then they get to interactively control the instrument in real time while they explore their bug(s).
No school will ever have an ESEM in the classroom. The ESEM provides a level of magnification that cannot be achieved by any kind of light microscope. However, Bugscope is often used in conjunction with a light microscope in the classroom. Students will find a specimen, view it on their own microscope, send it in to Bugscope, and then view the features they wanted to see, but couldn't because they were too small. Without Bugscope, the only ESEM images these kids will see is of someone else's specimen from someone else's microscope as a still image on the web or in a book.
Beyond microscope use, the Bugscope team chats with the students throughout the 2-hour session, allowing the students to ask questions about what they see from experts in the field, about what its like to work in the sciences, etc.
Bugscope also extends into those areas that have very few resources beyond a computer with little software and a broadband connection. Participants come from rural, suburban, and urban schools--from all over the U.S., and recently, from Europe as well.
So, Bugscope is certainly not part of a "disturbing trend"--its part of a new revolution in science education that allows the university to actively engage with the community in a way that allows the classroom teacher to leverage the expertise of the academy in the training of their own students.
The Bugscope website contains links to several papers written about the project, including one that charts the way Bugscope is used in the classroom backed up by feedback evidence from the teachers. It has been an ongoing project, week-in, week-out, for four years, bringing free ESEM access to schools over 50 times each year.
webeasel.net is one example of a content system so easy your grandma can use it. Its a locally produced new product from an up-and-coming tech company in town (Urbana, IL). I don't work there but know people who do.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought my spouse a Dymo 400 for xmas ($80 or so at amazon). I was amazed by its speed and ease. One caveat: it came with a label test halfway stuck in and out of the case, without instructions for removing it. Needless to say, I chose to pull it the wrong way, and ended up with bits of label sticker stuck inside the thing. Didn't make for a happy xmas morning. Once I got it out it works great. I tested it on OS X and XP. No printer cartridges either. Deal.
amdnotin.tel
While the link to QuenteCafe is nice and all, it by no means includes summaries of all of the displays. It would be nice to see a site that did, though.
I have a Powerbook and a Thinkpad. The one-button mouse on the Powerbook drives me nuts, and I constantly have to use the [option, control, apple--I can't remember] key with the one button for that virtual right-click. What a waste of my time.
Also, the trackpad on the Mac is far inferior. Despite my selecting the option that says 'blow off the trackpad while I'm typing,' it doesn't. I type away in Word, and every few parapgraphs the cursor jumps and all of the sudden I'm editing some other part of the document. Very annoying and again, time-wasting.
Another problem is the flaming hot underbelly of these things. My 867MHz G4 roasts my legs. Its ok in winter, intolerable in summer (literally can't do it in shorts w/o getting burned).
I'd love a pretty interface on a powerful OS, and I hate the (lack of) aesthetics in XP, but I need a machine that is fast to use and doesn't slow me down. I don't see the Powerbooks in that category.
This is absolutely unbelievable. I would think 64-bit would be top priority. What are they thinking? Even Microsoft is coming out with a 64-bit WinXP soon.
I appreciate the suggestion, but from Adobe's website on the Adjusted Refresh plug-in:
"Note that overall performance may be reduced for users with multiple processors or more than 1 gigabyte of RAM."
I'm afraid I fall into both camps.
I am also using a separate, dedicated scratch disk for Photoshop.
I've tried multiple machines, all of them top of the line workstations (I run an imaging lab). My usual machine is a dual 2.8GHz Xeon with 4GB RAM. Here's a test for you: Open a single file in the 10MB range. The scratch usage for this file is 602MB on my machine. Open a couple more near that size and you're up over 1GB of scratch. This is ok if you've got oodles of scratch space (although you're limited by Windows to under 2GB). But why on earth does PS need 600MB scratch for a 10MB file? Once it goes over your scratch allocation, everything slows down. I don't have PS7 installed anymore, or I'd try it and give you the results. I did this back when CS first came out, and the differences were astonishing. It had reasonable values for scratch (3 to 6 times original uncompressed file size or something like that--I don't recall exactly anymore). If you're in the habit of opening one image, editing it, closing it, and loading the next, then it works ok. If you do large panoramas, or like multiple images open at a time, it slows to a crawl. The efficiency drops to single digit percentages. Its not a hardware issue.
As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing Adobe should be releasing with CS2 is fixing the serious memory bugs they introduced in CS on the PC. Those who use Photoshop for large files (or even medium files) and have used both version 7 and CS know what I'm talking about. CS is much slower when you open more than an image or two. Scratch space usage for even a small couple MB file went from a few MB to nearly a GB.
I and others have complained to Adobe about this. They kind of acknowledge it but don't seem particularly concerned. I'm not sure anyone at Adobe actually uses the program on the PC or they would be going nuts too.
Also, lets hope they have 64-bit support for WinXP-64.
We'll soon be getting an x-ray microtomography instrument. This 3-D CAT scanner with a 4k x 4k CCD produces 3-D image datasets of small objects down to a 5 um resolution. A full dataset can run 270GB! We'll be purchasing a RAID and a dedicated tape library to handle the data.
However, we'll also be doing lots of analysis of that data on multiple machines throughout the lab...and you have to move that data somehow!
Where's the Sal-Mar Construction, created by Salvatore Martirano in the early 1970's, toured throughout the world in the 70's and 80's, and still seen as one of the most interesting improvisatory electronics instrument ever devised? How about one of the first wave synthesizers by James Beauchamp in the 1960's? The page also seems to include some software systems as instruments (as it should), but leaves out most such systems (CMusic, Music V, CSound, Music 4C, max, kyma, etc.). This is a pretty bad /. post.
This is pretty silly. A major professional orchestra doesn't "require" conducting...get them started (which the concertmaster/mistress) can do, and away they go. I'd love to see footage, but I don't see this as actually "directing" anything.
Bugscope is not meant as a replacement for anything--its a supplement to classroom teaching that provides a new resource not available in the school..
The project provides access to an instrument that the children will never get access to otherwise--a $500,000 environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM). Children get to act just like scientists in that they write a proposal for instrument use, they find a specimen in their own environment, they send it to the Bugscope team, and then they get to interactively control the instrument in real time while they explore their bug(s).
No school will ever have an ESEM in the classroom. The ESEM provides a level of magnification that cannot be achieved by any kind of light microscope. However, Bugscope is often used in conjunction with a light microscope in the classroom. Students will find a specimen, view it on their own microscope, send it in to Bugscope, and then view the features they wanted to see, but couldn't because they were too small. Without Bugscope, the only ESEM images these kids will see is of someone else's specimen from someone else's microscope as a still image on the web or in a book.
Beyond microscope use, the Bugscope team chats with the students throughout the 2-hour session, allowing the students to ask questions about what they see from experts in the field, about what its like to work in the sciences, etc.
Bugscope also extends into those areas that have very few resources beyond a computer with little software and a broadband connection. Participants come from rural, suburban, and urban schools--from all over the U.S., and recently, from Europe as well.
So, Bugscope is certainly not part of a "disturbing trend"--its part of a new revolution in science education that allows the university to actively engage with the community in a way that allows the classroom teacher to leverage the expertise of the academy in the training of their own students.
The Bugscope website contains links to several papers written about the project, including one that charts the way Bugscope is used in the classroom backed up by feedback evidence from the teachers. It has been an ongoing project, week-in, week-out, for four years, bringing free ESEM access to schools over 50 times each year.
This is just their second version of the product. The first version (the DVK-E1) was introduced along with the Canon 1Ds in September, 2002.
webeasel.net is one example of a content system so easy your grandma can use it. Its a locally produced new product from an up-and-coming tech company in town (Urbana, IL). I don't work there but know people who do.
Ok, not my field, but what about NAMD and VMD, a molecular dynamics program suite created by some people on the floor below me?