Just use a N900. It won't unnecessarily broadcast its MAC address.
Of course, then you have to deal with it being so slow and swapping all the time, and the interface that's clunkier than a museum jalopy. As I like to say, the N900 is a piece of crap. But it's the best piece of crap in the world!
I doubt most mathematicians really understand the Pythagorean Theorem. You get so used to theories and their application that you fool yourself into thinking you know them. Take manual long division or multiplication for example. We understand how to line up the numbers and perform the operations but prove to me that it works or *why* it works!
I disagree. Some math concepts are deep, but not Pythagoras. Probably the top 5% of high school graduates understand it, and the only reason the majority of the other 95% don't is that they haven't really tried enough. You really can't understand this animated GIF?
You're talking about mathematicians, who have decided that they will be devoted working with math more than any other field, and you think they don't understand? I can't imagine a single mathematician who can't understand Pythagoras.
And long division -- you don't understand why the numbers line up? How it works? I certainly look down on you for not understanding at this moment, but even then I bet if you thought about it for a bit, you'd understand. It's the decimal system -- meaning that the four digits ABCD represent Ax1000 + Bx100 + Cx10 + D -- and the distributive property of multiplication/division over addition/subtraction.
I can't imagine anyone STARTING to learn to become a mathematician without understanding long division (yes, I mean really grasping it, not just how to write the numbers), much less having become a mathematician.
Do you know what copyright even means?!?! Clearly you don't. Copyright is how you secure credit for something you created. You boys are DENSE.
As far as I can tell, one major difference between (what I mean by) "credit" and "copyright" is that copyright can be bought or otherwise transacted for money. For example, after you create a work (let's say a book), you can sell the copyright so that someone else (say the publisher) holds the right to receive remuneration for reproducing the work. But that does not take away your ability to say, "You know, I'm the one who did that." See also the comment from the sibling poster amaurea.
If by "credit" you mean "remuneration", then I would agree with your statement that "Copyright is how you secure credit for something you created". But that's not what I'm talking about, nor the OP. Of course there may be circumstances where, due to other contractual obligations, you are not allowed to take credit (undercover ops, ghost writing, etc.), but that's not related to the current situation.
If by "DENSE" you mean "solid; robustly built; able to withstand attacks" then I thank you for the compliment.
Agree: this is more about credit than about copyright.
If you had built a bridge for your city, you should be able to list that as one of your accomplishments. It does not mean that you can walk off with the bridge. At the same time, you'd be perfectly justified in getting pissed off if someone else said that it was they, not you, who had built it.
If anybody wants some pre-alpha scripts for grabbing their pg&e, comcast, cigna, at&t, schwab, nvenergy statements, let me know.
In a similar vein to http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3623835&cid=43389299, I would say: yes, please post to pastebin or github or something (maybe even your own Slashdot journal); if you GPL it, someone might even do some fine-tuning for you.
Question, while we're on the subject. I've recently been editing some video, and kdenlive was one of the few video editors I could get to work. However, I've found no way to use the parts of the original video that I haven't modified as they are, without re-encoding. Since most of what I've done is cutting out time ranges from the original footage, using the original data without re-encoding would save a lot of time and quality degradation. Is there any way to do this (using kdenlive or another FOSS video editor)?
Avidemux may be what you want. I use it to crop out parts of video files, by specifying beginning and end points of where I would like video removed. It will then splice it together, and there is a "smart copy" feature where you don't need to re-encode if you choose the same video/audio encoding, and it saves a lot of time. It doesn't always work, though, if there is audio involved: it gets out of sync. If video without audio, it works well, as long as the portions you splice together starts with a key frame (generally where there is a big change from frame-to-frame, such as scene changes, etc.).
Avidemux is a simple video editor, and after splicing/cropping the parts you want, you may want to use a different editor for more advanced stuff.
Supposedly these are easy to set up: you put one at home, let it hook up to your home wireless router, and it will take pictures which it will upload to DLink; then while you are vacationing in the alps or Bahamas, you can get on the internet and look at how the thieves are (or, more hopefully, are not) breaking into your empty house.
The thing is, not only am I basically telling the Internet world that I have an empty house to break into, but there is a device in my home which could be trying to root my other devices on my network, and which would have a legitimate reason to be talking to some outside agency. For all I know, there could be malware on the camera under the control of DLink, or some renegade (former?) employee at DLink, or not at all related to DLink (the way some iPods came preinstalled with Windows malware).
Is there some sort of encryption and security that can be put into/around these cameras to keep it from doing anything underhanded? The only thing I can think of is to stop it from phoning home altogether (ie. don't use the DLink SeeYourOwnHome.Dlink.com type video upload service and just store stuff on my home server), but maybe other Slashdotters can come up with something more creative.
I admit this is not exactly the type of "Encrypted Digital Camera/Recording Devices" that the OP was talking about (the original question is more about protecting the camera from the outside), but I thought I'd use the opportunity to draw on the Slashdot wisdom about protecting the rest of my home from the camera.
not sure about OS X, but gcal (from GNU) lets you add --type=special (or the "-i" flag). I'm pretty sure you could implement what you find with a shell script looking at $0. So, seems handy, but just a curiosity, I'd say.
A close friend, who uses Tmobile in the SF Bay Area for the Nokia N900, got an iPhone 4S half a year ago. Both phones were bought at the non-subsidized expensive price, unlocked. Where the N900 had been getting 3G signals, in the same location the iPhone 4S would get EDGE only. Siri would be useless. Apparently the iPhone 3G was not on the same frequency as the N900 3G.
That changed about a month ago, where suddenly during the long daily commute up the peninsula (between Silicon Valley and San Francisco), suddenly there would be big areas with the iPhone 4S lighting up with a nice strong 3G signal where there previously had not been any before. We speculated that this was due to MetroPCS merging into Tmobile, but we really didn't know that much (does MetroPCS even have iPhone-compatible 3G?).
While the usual convention is to measure speed, I wouldn't say it's non-intuitive to measure slowness. Slowness would be the reciprocal of speed, so if it requires twice the time, then it's twice as slow.
In a similar vein, in the US, people seem to measure fuel performance by mileage (miles/gallon), whereas in Canada, it's measured by fuel consumption (litres/100km). So better fuel performance is a higher number in the US, but lower in Canada, the advantage of the latter being that it is additive (you can take two numbers and average them, unlike mileage).
So that addresses your other examples: thinness can be measured in pages/inch (in the case of paper, say) or # rack servers/metre, etc. And coldness would be Kelvin[to the power of]-1, of course.
I've always wanted to know: is there an email client that can run on command-line? Is this what Mutt is? (I know it has an interactive interface, but not sure if it also has command line.) I'd like to have something that I can script --eg. remotely ssh in with a non-interactive command to 'mutt --retrieve --most-recent --condition="WHERE Sender Matches mom@her_email.com" | grep -i "my new phone number is" '
In my particular case in mind, I'm trying to send a bunch of Christmas email greetings. I'll probably have a short text and a PDF attachment, and just have some script grind it out slowly, sending to 1 email address at a time. I don't care if it takes 48 hours to send them all --I've had enough with snags about how I can't send to all 2000 recipients at a time, and how I have to break it up into 30-50 recipients at a time, keep track of who has been sent what, etc. Not to mention: in the past, Kmail has refused to compose HTML messages, Thunderbird had some funny incompatibility with my email provider (which was also my shell host and web host, but I just didn't have time to go figure out the problem), and installing Evolution completely steamrolled my Kubuntu installation with some GNOME crap (KDE wouldn't unmount devices properly because GNOME thought it would be fun to just automount every single thing I plugged into USB).
Also, I want something command-line for my N900. Enough with interfaces -- I'll let bash talk to my email client. I'll compose my text in Vim and let some script take care of sending. If Mutt is it, then I'll install Mutt.
My own $0.02 as someone who went to medical school after specializing in a tech field (graduate engineering degree and licensed professional engineer).
I found medical school quite different from engineering and had to approach it differently. Before med school, I would have agreed with most people here who said: don't worry about notes and just pay attention; you'll understand it better, and can review the textbooks. It worked great for engineering.
That does not work for medical school. There is an overwhelming amount of factual information to absorb, and most of it you won't be able to comprehend as a cohesive whole. Sometimes it's because the information is coming at you too quickly. Sometimes it's because you haven't learned the necessary background theory yet to understand it; sometimes it's because *medical science* hasn't learned the theory behind the phenomenon yet. Sometimes there *is* nothing to understand --the facts simply are. And you often can't fall back on textbooks, because often there *are* no textbooks to use, especially in upper years -- medical science advances too quickly for textbooks. Instead, you're going to get a lot of info from journal articles, seminars, and just hearing your peers and teachers converse.
Thus the goal is to absorb information as much as possible; you may be more able to conceptually connect and assimilate the information later, perhaps later that day, perhaps a few years down the road. You'll want to take notes quickly, and yet do it in a searchable manner so you can easily retrieve information later.
For me personally, and I suspect for the majority of Slashdotters, this would mean a laptop to take text notes. I would be able to quickly type and get ideas on text, while reserving most of my brain power for trying to understand what I could of the concept. If later on I had to look up something, I could always do a text search. In my case I would probably use vi because that's what I'm familiar with, and maybe identify keywords with a "#" (so I could, for example, look for "#hyponatremia" later on). But any software is fine as long as it's something you're comfortable typing on, including Microsoft Word For People Who Don't Really Care About FOSS And Just Want To Type The Damn Text.
But the software has to be DEAD EASY to use, the equivalent of paper and pencil. If you want something with more features, make sure they can be used in the blink of an eye, like one keystroke to bring the cursor to the end of the text and begin adding notes. If you have to do Alt-O Alt-B Down Down Down Enter just to start typing, you're going to lose your train of thought. Forget about grammar checkers and spell checkers messing up the screen, and pop-up windows that say "You have typed this 14-letter would 3 times already. Would you like to assign this to Alt-Ctrl-Shift F12?" You want something on which you can type without even having to look at the screen.
One advantage of text files is that you start to accumulate a corpus of notes which may last you well into the clinical rotations and possibly even in practice as a doctor. You'll easily be able to go back to very old notes and connect it with new information, allowing you to assimilate and organize your knowledge --something that I still do on a weekly basis as a practicing physician.
My own med school notes were on paper; if only I had a laptop and vi back then! It was a very sharp transition point when I started accumulating electronic notes instead of on that burgeoning notebook on paper. All I learned which I noted on paper is a vague fuzzy memory now; all I learned which I noted electronically is easily recallable and thus has probably been so recalled many times in the course of just doing my job.
In summary: 1. In med school, information arrives more quickly than can be immediately assimilated without taking notes. 2. Typing as text file has the easy of pencil and paper and the retrievability of electronic data.
This is a tremendous strength of PowerShell that you will only realize once you dive into it: PowerShell is much more than a CLI. It is an automation framework where the CLI is merely *one* application using it.
How does this compare with DBUS (or DCOP previously)? It sounds similar --one would have the program internals receive signals (e.g. GoToNextTab or PopUpMenu or other more program-specific jobs involving calculations or files etc.) or send signals (e.g. what is the name of the file currently being operated on?) but I am not familiar with the Microsoft way of doing things.
I want to sneak in a question about GRUB to which I have tried long to find an answer, in vain: GRUB can apparently have its settings changed just be editing a configuration file, unlike LILO which needs to be reinstalled with the configuration settings you want. My question is: - where are the Grub settings stored?
If it's in one of the partitions, then aren't you screwed if that partition is deleted? Suppose you have 3 partitions named Linux1, Linux2, Linux3 and you use GRUB to boot between them. If the config is stored on the Linux1 partition, then if there is an error or you wipe the Linux1 partition, then the entire drive can't boot, even if Linux2 and Linux3 are working fine! I mean, suppose you haven't used Linux1 for ages but the config files are there...
Or is it replicated in all partitions? in that case, where is it stored on each partition?
Or can you put a GRUB config file on any partition, and it will find it? in that case, what happens if there are two conflicting configs on different partitions?
Or is it stored on the MBR just like LILO, and when the config file on the partition goes AWOL, GRUB will just use the MBR copy?
From what I can tell, the answer seems to be the first option, but I don't see how this makes GRUB a good thing if I'm beholden to a partition (Linux1 in this case) which may be obsolete and waiting to be wipe and installed over with the latest Linux distro.
I'll sneak in a somewhat OT question here to take advantage of the expertise of the collective Slashdot hive mind:
- how will the prices for the 3GS and other available (unlocked) iPhones be affected in the near future? - will the iPhone 5 announcement announcement also be at WWDC?
I'm looking to buy an iPhone 4S for my wife -- unlocked, of course, so we don't have to go begging for the freedom to put any microSIM we want into the phone -- and am wondering whether prices will drop in a few weeks after WWDC, especially if they announce the iPhone 5 with 3-D display and Siri-2 with the mind-reading features.
The paper proposes that, contrary to popular opinion, Rybka probably did not misappropriate parts of Fruit. It was enough for me to tend toward believing Rybka and not believing 34 panelists on ICGA, but I'll let you judge for yourself. If you know the background of the SCO vs Linux case, especially how the pundits made their pronouncements, you will appreciate this paper more. I can definitely say that I no longer unequivocally conclude that Rybka stole from Fruit.
A similar situation, where copyright shows its ugly leash, appears in everyday medical practice. The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes describe the type of service that a doctor has provided (e.g. simple office visit, complex office visit, appendix operation, etc.) and is used a few dozen times a day by insurance companies all around the USA to determine payment for services. It becomes essential for every doctor and every clinic/hospital to know the definition of these codes in order to remain financially solvent. If you surgically extracted a lipoma, but didn't know that the correct code for that particular case was 11424 (if the incision was 4cm long and the location was on the foot), then the insurance company just got a free ride and your other patients are subsidizing the cost of that operation.
You'd think that, for such an important part of daily operations, there'd be a list of all the CPT codes and what they mean. It should be a plain text file. I myself tried to get such a list --a simple text file, to call up on my laptop or handheld or something. Alas, nothing so simple. Yes, there's a list available for purchase, published on paper in thick books the size of a white page phone book (remember those?). If you wanted an electronic version, you'll have to hope someone wrote an app for your particular platform to display the text, because the American Medical Association holds the strings to that piece of text and doesn't want you to do your own searches in your favourite editor or sort the text alphabetically, etc. I'm not sure why such a code is not in public domain if it's so essential to keeping healthcare running smoothly.
I'm told that doctors are one of the most developmentally delayed professions when it comes to adapting to technology, and this is not the first time they seem woefully ignorant of issues in the information age which are screwing them over. I imagine that if someone held the intellectual property rights to the names of diagnoses ("You're not allowed to say 'appendicitis', doctor, because you haven't paid the licensing fees!") then doctors would just bend over and hand over some lube.
"""I think that AdBlocking on a phone can only improve the usage.I don't see what problem you could possibly have with the idea? AdBlock Plus on my N900 works great, and makes certain sites much less intensive on my phone. Unfortunately, there's no NoScript equivalent for the Maemo browser, which IMO is a must have as well."""
Alas, it's also not in the cards short of rooting your phone.
First, Google owns AdMob, the largest mobile ad company out there. They sell in-app ads (Google knows your app usage habits bevcause of this). It's not in their interest to let you easily block it.
Not sure what you mean: GP poster was talking about N900, which more or less comes with root. Not sure how Google would have anything to say about the Maemo browser (micro-B, I think it's called) or how they could make it less/more easy to have NoScript equivalent. Presumably you can run NoScript on Fennec (ie. Firefox for N900) although I haven't tried on mone.
This would not work for those middle-of-the-night surprise raids, but would work if you could get a 5- or even 1-minute warning; definitely works for airport crossings, etc.
Put a keyfile on a removable USB stick. It *looks like* that stick is acting as a physical key. Instead of typing a password, you direct TrueCrypt (or whichever other encryption program) to use that file. When law enforcement arrives, you get rid of the USB key and the drive is undecryptable.
The trick is that the keyfile is something easy for you to memorize, like some lines from Shakespeare or something. (If you like, insert your mother's maiden name before the 17th word to salt the text.) Law enforcement has no way to know that this is not a bunch of random characters, if they don't have the USB key.
"""Moral of the story - make sure you are logged off from Skype before file sharing."""
... because there's no way they can acquire the Skype identification at "random time A", and then correlate that with the BitTorrent traffic at "random time B"...
Right, at least for those users whose ISP gives them a dynamically reassigned IP address. Log off Skype, disconnect from the Internet and then reconnect, hopefully getting a new IP address (I remember one Slashdot user who kept getting reassigned the same "random" address), and then your IP addresses won't be correlatable.
I pity the guy who ends up with your recycled IP address, though.
Since you mention the Kindle, I'll slip in this question about the Kindle. Apparently they are $80 on Amazon now, which is cheaper than the HP $99 WebOS tablet (but of course it also does less).
How hackable is the Kindle? Is it worth it at $80?
I basically want something to hold *MY* documents to read, either HTML or text (but I can convert to PDF, etc.). Would be a bonus to be able to edit them, save under subdirectories, etc. but that would be secondary. Would be a bonus to be able to grab documents wirelessly from my home web server but again I'm willing to put on documents via USB.
Other suggestions for cheap easy-to-use, easy-to-read tablets (with any DRM jailbroken) would also be welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Just use a N900. It won't unnecessarily broadcast its MAC address.
Of course, then you have to deal with it being so slow and swapping all the time, and the interface that's clunkier than a museum jalopy. As I like to say, the N900 is a piece of crap. But it's the best piece of crap in the world!
I disagree. Some math concepts are deep, but not Pythagoras. Probably the top 5% of high school graduates understand it, and the only reason the majority of the other 95% don't is that they haven't really tried enough. You really can't understand this animated GIF?
You're talking about mathematicians, who have decided that they will be devoted working with math more than any other field, and you think they don't understand? I can't imagine a single mathematician who can't understand Pythagoras.
And long division -- you don't understand why the numbers line up? How it works? I certainly look down on you for not understanding at this moment, but even then I bet if you thought about it for a bit, you'd understand. It's the decimal system -- meaning that the four digits ABCD represent Ax1000 + Bx100 + Cx10 + D -- and the distributive property of multiplication/division over addition/subtraction.
I can't imagine anyone STARTING to learn to become a mathematician without understanding long division (yes, I mean really grasping it, not just how to write the numbers), much less having become a mathematician.
As far as I can tell, one major difference between (what I mean by) "credit" and "copyright" is that copyright can be bought or otherwise transacted for money. For example, after you create a work (let's say a book), you can sell the copyright so that someone else (say the publisher) holds the right to receive remuneration for reproducing the work. But that does not take away your ability to say, "You know, I'm the one who did that." See also the comment from the sibling poster amaurea.
If by "credit" you mean "remuneration", then I would agree with your statement that "Copyright is how you secure credit for something you created". But that's not what I'm talking about, nor the OP. Of course there may be circumstances where, due to other contractual obligations, you are not allowed to take credit (undercover ops, ghost writing, etc.), but that's not related to the current situation.
If by "DENSE" you mean "solid; robustly built; able to withstand attacks" then I thank you for the compliment.
Agree: this is more about credit than about copyright.
If you had built a bridge for your city, you should be able to list that as one of your accomplishments. It does not mean that you can walk off with the bridge. At the same time, you'd be perfectly justified in getting pissed off if someone else said that it was they, not you, who had built it.
In a similar vein to http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3623835&cid=43389299, I would say: yes, please post to pastebin or github or something (maybe even your own Slashdot journal); if you GPL it, someone might even do some fine-tuning for you.
Avidemux may be what you want. I use it to crop out parts of video files, by specifying beginning and end points of where I would like video removed. It will then splice it together, and there is a "smart copy" feature where you don't need to re-encode if you choose the same video/audio encoding, and it saves a lot of time. It doesn't always work, though, if there is audio involved: it gets out of sync. If video without audio, it works well, as long as the portions you splice together starts with a key frame (generally where there is a big change from frame-to-frame, such as scene changes, etc.).
Avidemux is a simple video editor, and after splicing/cropping the parts you want, you may want to use a different editor for more advanced stuff.
This conversation resonates with a topic I've been looking into for some time now: wireless security cameras.
DLink, among others, sells wireless security cameras; they were pretty cheap ($60 before rebate) at Fry's.
Supposedly these are easy to set up: you put one at home, let it hook up to your home wireless router, and it will take pictures which it will upload to DLink; then while you are vacationing in the alps or Bahamas, you can get on the internet and look at how the thieves are (or, more hopefully, are not) breaking into your empty house.
The thing is, not only am I basically telling the Internet world that I have an empty house to break into, but there is a device in my home which could be trying to root my other devices on my network, and which would have a legitimate reason to be talking to some outside agency. For all I know, there could be malware on the camera under the control of DLink, or some renegade (former?) employee at DLink, or not at all related to DLink (the way some iPods came preinstalled with Windows malware).
Is there some sort of encryption and security that can be put into/around these cameras to keep it from doing anything underhanded? The only thing I can think of is to stop it from phoning home altogether (ie. don't use the DLink SeeYourOwnHome.Dlink.com type video upload service and just store stuff on my home server), but maybe other Slashdotters can come up with something more creative.
I admit this is not exactly the type of "Encrypted Digital Camera/Recording Devices" that the OP was talking about (the original question is more about protecting the camera from the outside), but I thought I'd use the opportunity to draw on the Slashdot wisdom about protecting the rest of my home from the camera.
Thanks for any ideas or links you can provide.
not sure about OS X, but gcal (from GNU) lets you add --type=special (or the "-i" flag). I'm pretty sure you could implement what you find with a shell script looking at $0. So, seems handy, but just a curiosity, I'd say.
A close friend, who uses Tmobile in the SF Bay Area for the Nokia N900, got an iPhone 4S half a year ago. Both phones were bought at the non-subsidized expensive price, unlocked. Where the N900 had been getting 3G signals, in the same location the iPhone 4S would get EDGE only. Siri would be useless. Apparently the iPhone 3G was not on the same frequency as the N900 3G.
That changed about a month ago, where suddenly during the long daily commute up the peninsula (between Silicon Valley and San Francisco), suddenly there would be big areas with the iPhone 4S lighting up with a nice strong 3G signal where there previously had not been any before. We speculated that this was due to MetroPCS merging into Tmobile, but we really didn't know that much (does MetroPCS even have iPhone-compatible 3G?).
While the usual convention is to measure speed, I wouldn't say it's non-intuitive to measure slowness. Slowness would be the reciprocal of speed, so if it requires twice the time, then it's twice as slow.
In a similar vein, in the US, people seem to measure fuel performance by mileage (miles/gallon), whereas in Canada, it's measured by fuel consumption (litres/100km). So better fuel performance is a higher number in the US, but lower in Canada, the advantage of the latter being that it is additive (you can take two numbers and average them, unlike mileage).
So that addresses your other examples: thinness can be measured in pages/inch (in the case of paper, say) or # rack servers/metre, etc. And coldness would be Kelvin[to the power of]-1, of course.
I've always wanted to know: is there an email client that can run on command-line? Is this what Mutt is? (I know it has an interactive interface, but not sure if it also has command line.) I'd like to have something that I can script --eg. remotely ssh in with a non-interactive command to 'mutt --retrieve --most-recent --condition="WHERE Sender Matches mom@her_email.com" | grep -i "my new phone number is" '
In my particular case in mind, I'm trying to send a bunch of Christmas email greetings. I'll probably have a short text and a PDF attachment, and just have some script grind it out slowly, sending to 1 email address at a time. I don't care if it takes 48 hours to send them all --I've had enough with snags about how I can't send to all 2000 recipients at a time, and how I have to break it up into 30-50 recipients at a time, keep track of who has been sent what, etc. Not to mention: in the past, Kmail has refused to compose HTML messages, Thunderbird had some funny incompatibility with my email provider (which was also my shell host and web host, but I just didn't have time to go figure out the problem), and installing Evolution completely steamrolled my Kubuntu installation with some GNOME crap (KDE wouldn't unmount devices properly because GNOME thought it would be fun to just automount every single thing I plugged into USB).
Also, I want something command-line for my N900. Enough with interfaces -- I'll let bash talk to my email client. I'll compose my text in Vim and let some script take care of sending. If Mutt is it, then I'll install Mutt.
My own $0.02 as someone who went to medical school after specializing in a tech field (graduate engineering degree and licensed professional engineer).
I found medical school quite different from engineering and had to approach it differently. Before med school, I would have agreed with most people here who said: don't worry about notes and just pay attention; you'll understand it better, and can review the textbooks. It worked great for engineering.
That does not work for medical school. There is an overwhelming amount of factual information to absorb, and most of it you won't be able to comprehend as a cohesive whole. Sometimes it's because the information is coming at you too quickly. Sometimes it's because you haven't learned the necessary background theory yet to understand it; sometimes it's because *medical science* hasn't learned the theory behind the phenomenon yet. Sometimes there *is* nothing to understand --the facts simply are. And you often can't fall back on textbooks, because often there *are* no textbooks to use, especially in upper years -- medical science advances too quickly for textbooks. Instead, you're going to get a lot of info from journal articles, seminars, and just hearing your peers and teachers converse.
Thus the goal is to absorb information as much as possible; you may be more able to conceptually connect and assimilate the information later, perhaps later that day, perhaps a few years down the road. You'll want to take notes quickly, and yet do it in a searchable manner so you can easily retrieve information later.
For me personally, and I suspect for the majority of Slashdotters, this would mean a laptop to take text notes. I would be able to quickly type and get ideas on text, while reserving most of my brain power for trying to understand what I could of the concept. If later on I had to look up something, I could always do a text search. In my case I would probably use vi because that's what I'm familiar with, and maybe identify keywords with a "#" (so I could, for example, look for "#hyponatremia" later on). But any software is fine as long as it's something you're comfortable typing on, including Microsoft Word For People Who Don't Really Care About FOSS And Just Want To Type The Damn Text.
But the software has to be DEAD EASY to use, the equivalent of paper and pencil. If you want something with more features, make sure they can be used in the blink of an eye, like one keystroke to bring the cursor to the end of the text and begin adding notes. If you have to do Alt-O Alt-B Down Down Down Enter just to start typing, you're going to lose your train of thought. Forget about grammar checkers and spell checkers messing up the screen, and pop-up windows that say "You have typed this 14-letter would 3 times already. Would you like to assign this to Alt-Ctrl-Shift F12?" You want something on which you can type without even having to look at the screen.
One advantage of text files is that you start to accumulate a corpus of notes which may last you well into the clinical rotations and possibly even in practice as a doctor. You'll easily be able to go back to very old notes and connect it with new information, allowing you to assimilate and organize your knowledge --something that I still do on a weekly basis as a practicing physician.
My own med school notes were on paper; if only I had a laptop and vi back then! It was a very sharp transition point when I started accumulating electronic notes instead of on that burgeoning notebook on paper. All I learned which I noted on paper is a vague fuzzy memory now; all I learned which I noted electronically is easily recallable and thus has probably been so recalled many times in the course of just doing my job.
In summary:
1. In med school, information arrives more quickly than can be immediately assimilated without taking notes.
2. Typing as text file has the easy of pencil and paper and the retrievability of electronic data.
How does this compare with DBUS (or DCOP previously)? It sounds similar --one would have the program internals receive signals (e.g. GoToNextTab or PopUpMenu or other more program-specific jobs involving calculations or files etc.) or send signals (e.g. what is the name of the file currently being operated on?) but I am not familiar with the Microsoft way of doing things.
I want to sneak in a question about GRUB to which I have tried long to find an answer, in vain:
GRUB can apparently have its settings changed just be editing a configuration file, unlike LILO which needs to be reinstalled with the configuration settings you want. My question is: - where are the Grub settings stored?
If it's in one of the partitions, then aren't you screwed if that partition is deleted? Suppose you have 3 partitions named Linux1, Linux2, Linux3 and you use GRUB to boot between them. If the config is stored on the Linux1 partition, then if there is an error or you wipe the Linux1 partition, then the entire drive can't boot, even if Linux2 and Linux3 are working fine! I mean, suppose you haven't used Linux1 for ages but the config files are there ...
Or is it replicated in all partitions? in that case, where is it stored on each partition?
Or can you put a GRUB config file on any partition, and it will find it? in that case, what happens if there are two conflicting configs on different partitions?
Or is it stored on the MBR just like LILO, and when the config file on the partition goes AWOL, GRUB will just use the MBR copy?
From what I can tell, the answer seems to be the first option, but I don't see how this makes GRUB a good thing if I'm beholden to a partition (Linux1 in this case) which may be obsolete and waiting to be wipe and installed over with the latest Linux distro.
I'll sneak in a somewhat OT question here to take advantage of the expertise of the collective Slashdot hive mind:
- how will the prices for the 3GS and other available (unlocked) iPhones be affected in the near future?
- will the iPhone 5 announcement announcement also be at WWDC?
I'm looking to buy an iPhone 4S for my wife -- unlocked, of course, so we don't have to go begging for the freedom to put any microSIM we want into the phone -- and am wondering whether prices will drop in a few weeks after WWDC, especially if they announce the iPhone 5 with 3-D display and Siri-2 with the mind-reading features.
I think we need to read the following paper which defends Rybka. I got the link from the Wikipedia entry on Rybka.
http://www.chessbase.com/news/2011/riis01.pdf(It's a PDF file, in case you hadn't noticed the extension.)
The paper proposes that, contrary to popular opinion, Rybka probably did not misappropriate parts of Fruit. It was enough for me to tend toward believing Rybka and not believing 34 panelists on ICGA, but I'll let you judge for yourself. If you know the background of the SCO vs Linux case, especially how the pundits made their pronouncements, you will appreciate this paper more. I can definitely say that I no longer unequivocally conclude that Rybka stole from Fruit.
A similar situation, where copyright shows its ugly leash, appears in everyday medical practice. The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes describe the type of service that a doctor has provided (e.g. simple office visit, complex office visit, appendix operation, etc.) and is used a few dozen times a day by insurance companies all around the USA to determine payment for services. It becomes essential for every doctor and every clinic/hospital to know the definition of these codes in order to remain financially solvent. If you surgically extracted a lipoma, but didn't know that the correct code for that particular case was 11424 (if the incision was 4cm long and the location was on the foot), then the insurance company just got a free ride and your other patients are subsidizing the cost of that operation.
You'd think that, for such an important part of daily operations, there'd be a list of all the CPT codes and what they mean. It should be a plain text file. I myself tried to get such a list --a simple text file, to call up on my laptop or handheld or something. Alas, nothing so simple. Yes, there's a list available for purchase, published on paper in thick books the size of a white page phone book (remember those?). If you wanted an electronic version, you'll have to hope someone wrote an app for your particular platform to display the text, because the American Medical Association holds the strings to that piece of text and doesn't want you to do your own searches in your favourite editor or sort the text alphabetically, etc. I'm not sure why such a code is not in public domain if it's so essential to keeping healthcare running smoothly.
I'm told that doctors are one of the most developmentally delayed professions when it comes to adapting to technology, and this is not the first time they seem woefully ignorant of issues in the information age which are screwing them over. I imagine that if someone held the intellectual property rights to the names of diagnoses ("You're not allowed to say 'appendicitis', doctor, because you haven't paid the licensing fees!") then doctors would just bend over and hand over some lube.
the text of Mozilla's questions
CollegeHumor did some videos that did use Google Street images and animation. Kinda neat.
Here's the first one, and that should lead you to more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35LqQPKylEA
Wait, no one has mentioned this yet?
So, with the Raspberry Pi running the QT 5 operating system, of course this combination will be called ...
the QT Pi
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week ...
Not sure what you mean: GP poster was talking about N900, which more or less comes with root. Not sure how Google would have anything to say about the Maemo browser (micro-B, I think it's called) or how they could make it less/more easy to have NoScript equivalent. Presumably you can run NoScript on Fennec (ie. Firefox for N900) although I haven't tried on mone.
This would not work for those middle-of-the-night surprise raids, but would work if you could get a 5- or even 1-minute warning; definitely works for airport crossings, etc.
Put a keyfile on a removable USB stick. It *looks like* that stick is acting as a physical key. Instead of typing a password, you direct TrueCrypt (or whichever other encryption program) to use that file. When law enforcement arrives, you get rid of the USB key and the drive is undecryptable.
The trick is that the keyfile is something easy for you to memorize, like some lines from Shakespeare or something. (If you like, insert your mother's maiden name before the 17th word to salt the text.) Law enforcement has no way to know that this is not a bunch of random characters, if they don't have the USB key.
Right, at least for those users whose ISP gives them a dynamically reassigned IP address. Log off Skype, disconnect from the Internet and then reconnect, hopefully getting a new IP address (I remember one Slashdot user who kept getting reassigned the same "random" address), and then your IP addresses won't be correlatable.
I pity the guy who ends up with your recycled IP address, though.
anon coward replying with useful info; currently at +0.
Since you mention the Kindle, I'll slip in this question about the Kindle. Apparently they are $80 on Amazon now, which is cheaper than the HP $99 WebOS tablet (but of course it also does less).
How hackable is the Kindle? Is it worth it at $80?
I basically want something to hold *MY* documents to read, either HTML or text (but I can convert to PDF, etc.). Would be a bonus to be able to edit them, save under subdirectories, etc. but that would be secondary. Would be a bonus to be able to grab documents wirelessly from my home web server but again I'm willing to put on documents via USB.
Other suggestions for cheap easy-to-use, easy-to-read tablets (with any DRM jailbroken) would also be welcome.