That only works if the reader has stopped spelling and actually started reading whole words, and preferably if he can do without subvocalizing. Which is good enough for me, but not for the people who actually need the exercises from that book.
OTOH, when I really want to read fast, like when I had to read 'Crime and Punishment' in high school (only got the book in the evening, and next day at 2 pm the book had to be read and prepared), it took me 6 hours with detailed note-taking (at least for the first half; then I gave up on that).
You can actually read a page of text in a very short time, though it takes a whole lot of practice. I've been thinking of taking up sign language, too; one of the added benefits is that signing widens your field of vision, i.e. correct perception of outside your immediate focus (while signing, you look at the other person's eyes, yet most of the signing is done way below the eye level). That would, I guess, also allow you to increase your reading speed, as you'd be able to perceive the words at the edges (if you're scanning down the middle of the page).
Though there is another bottleneck: brain's processing speed. I've heard (so I may be wrong; at least the person who told me that has been way wrong before) of a guy with functional eidetic memory, who can take a glance at a page of text and memorize it. So he leafs through a book, scanning every page, but then he reads from his memory - so in reading, he's usually several pages behind.
The real question is how much redundancy can we remove from printed words for faster information dispersal while still expressing things clearly. Sure, having everything spelled correctly and in long form is great for books for pleasure (art) but do we really need it for basic information sharing? Especially if doing so increases the time spent needlessly?
I think that would be redundant, or even counter-productive.
Our brains eliminate superfluous information automatically. However, something you find redundant may be necessary to me, e.g. because I speak a different first language (pulling a parallel with phonetic systems). Therefore it may mean a bit less work for some, and a lot more work for everyone else.
I thought I'd give it a try, if only to see what I'm doing wrong.
Then I found out I could have written that book: it only teaches lousy readers stuff people who have had enough reading practice learned by themselves.
One of the first things in the book is testing your own reading speed. And the book says an average American should score about 200-250 words per minute, as calculated by the provided formula.
So I tested myself. And since the book's in English, I tested myself in English, which is not my native tongue.
I scored 453 wpm. On a completely unfamiliar English text.
Anyway, one of the first and easiest techniques described in the book was reading more than one letter at a time. Gee, thanks; I learned that when I was what, four?
So unless they conducted the study on first-graders, I'd say it's practically useless. Good readers focus on whole words, subliminally recognizing their shapes. That's why I can spot a spelling mistake in a text I'm not even reading - I just spot an odd, unfamiliar, "wrong" shape (at least in Croatian; English still takes a tiny little bit of conscious effort).
BTW, I'm so very disappointed in the survey for one more reason: I'd thought its results would help the development of OCR, but I guess that was too much to expect.
In Germany, you're now accused of being a "hacker" if you own "hacking tools" (like nmap or other tools used to secure your own network). So I wouldn't feel too safe. Depending on where you are, of course.
OK, I'm never going to Germany.
I could easily be accused of being a rapist, since I "own" certain "raping tools", i.e. a penis.
There are data recovery firms that routinely suck data off of mangled hard drives. Recovering overwritten data would not be much more work.
According to a poster several posts up, no data recovery company advertises overwritten data recovery.
A mangled drive can still be analysed, as long as its magnetic properties are still present. Overwritten data, however, is way too much trouble: it has to be done bit by bit, and there's quite a lot of work involved for each bit. And current drives measure in hundreds of gigabytes.
And, if you didn't know, even if the process was fully automated up to the level it only took 1 second to analyse each bit, and they worked on 8 bits in parallel, 1 GB would take, oh, some 32 years of constant work.
In my experience, there are far more people insisting that other people (IE or Opera users) to use Firefox, than there are people doing the same for Opera.
And again, I repeat: I. am not. talking. about numbers.
I'm not talking about how many people shill for any of the sides. I couldn't care less.
I'm talking about the behaviour and attitude of Opera fanboys, at least those I've had the misfortune to meet.
You are contradicting yourself. You like one browser more than other because of extensions. Then you say Lynx is better than IE.
Two words ending in -gry are angry and hungry. There are three words in the English language. Which is the third word?
I have not said Lynx is better than IE because of extensions. It is simply better.
I just like Firefox better than Opera (partly) because of extensions.
Newsflash: IE has supported extensions for about 10 years now and Lynx has... how long? Zero or am I being misinformed? Who cares?
And you are incorrect about Opera and Apple comparison. Opera tends to be actually innovative. Haven't seen much innovation coming from Apple recently. Or do you call phone w/o MMS functionality an innovation? (Yes, that was the trolling part of the message)
Well, as a guy with four kittens in my back yard, I'm not the one to let a troll go hungry.
Seeing how much both MS and Linux folk copy from Apple's UI, I'd say they invent quite a bit. Even if all they invent is polish.
The very fact that you make that statement suggests that the opposite is true.
Nonsense.
I'll grant I wasn't talking about Opera fanboys on/. as I don't recall seeing (m)any (though the one right below your post seems to be proving my point), but the aggressive "use Opera, everything else is crap" attitude I've encountered is comparable only to the one Windows fanboy trolling Mac topics on one other forum, and he was probably just a school kid with no brains and loads of attitude.
I'll also grant you may not share my personal experience and impressions, but that doesn't make my statement any less true.
By far, it's far more common for people to be telling people to switch to Firefox, not Opera. Hype over things such as "tabs", or it being fashionable to switch from IE, only happened when Firefox appeared; years before, people were silently using Opera. (Of course, not all fanboy-ism is bad; it can be good if it spreads awareness of a product.) And just look at any Slashdot story to see which way the mod points usually go.
I'm not talking about the amount of fanboys, nor the quantity of shilling. I'm talking about quality.
And while Opera may be the bestest browser there is and ever was, some of their fanboys are not at all a pleasing bunch.
However, be that as it may, it is not a criterion that influences my choice of browsers. I simply like Firefox better.
Good browser it may be, but I don't like it. It's better than IE, but then, so is Lynx.
I like Firefox not so much for its speed (I'll admit Opera is faster), but for the extensions.
And yes, some of the more often used extensions do come off as copies of stuff first introduced in Opera, which makes Opera a bit of the Apple of the browser world.
And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined.
Actually, I find that the Obligatory Pratchett Quote explains it even better:
Don't tell them. Ask them. Ask them if it's true. You can beg them to tell you it's not true. Or you can even tell them you've been told to tell them it's not true, and that is the best of all.
Because Rincewind knew very well that when the four rather small and nasty Horsemen of Panic ride out there is a good job done by Misinformation, Rumour and Gossip, but they are as nothing compared to to the fourth horseman, whose name is Denial.
(Yes, I've had religious fanatics "proving" the existence of gods by claiming that we couldn't possibly be talking about them if they didn't exist, which is the point I usually bring the Invisible Pink Unicorn into play.)
Anyway, denial, corrections etc. really don't mean all that much to those that aren't prepared to pay attention. If you want to pay attention, you can learn; if you don't, you can only gather some general impressions and quasi-information.
Don't be an idiot. There are many uses for an older laptop, often running DOS.
Oh, I'm sorry. I was under the impression that we were discussing new laptops from HP.
You know, the ones TFA is all about.
I still contend that people generally don't buy laptops with FreeDOS to run DOS on them. And while older laptops most certainly are usable with DOS or any other OS that'll run on them, a new laptop with wireless networking, gigs of ram and hundreds of gigs of HD space are, simply said, overkill, i.e. over-expensive.
Oh, come on. Who uses DOS on a laptop? And what for?
However, if you point me to readily-available software utilizing all the capabilities of a given laptop, from gigs of memory to wireless networking, card readers and so on, I not only might, but will be surprised.
What I want to know is, when you're already scanning someone's eyes with an infra-red beam, why not just scan their retinas and get it done with? No passwords to remember, and the tech should be quite similar... right?
From what I saw at Best Buy this weekend, I think the sales may go up even more. I hadn't realized that they were selling them now, but I saw a crowd ganged around a table where they had the laptops and iMacs sitting out for people to play around with. There was a steady stream of people and you could feel a sense of excitement about it.
Macs have always been considered as overpriced.
From what I've seen in the last few weeks, they are still regarded as such, but to a much lesser extent - a year ago, there was not a single topic about Macs on the largest Croatian forum; now there are quite a few, and most are about MacBooks.
I think their desktop sales will go up as well - for one, when I finish college and start earning real money, I'm switching my desktop to Mac, too. But I know people enough who want a Mac as well.
Slashdot Mirror
That only works if the reader has stopped spelling and actually started reading whole words, and preferably if he can do without subvocalizing. Which is good enough for me, but not for the people who actually need the exercises from that book.
OTOH, when I really want to read fast, like when I had to read 'Crime and Punishment' in high school (only got the book in the evening, and next day at 2 pm the book had to be read and prepared), it took me 6 hours with detailed note-taking (at least for the first half; then I gave up on that).
You can actually read a page of text in a very short time, though it takes a whole lot of practice. I've been thinking of taking up sign language, too; one of the added benefits is that signing widens your field of vision, i.e. correct perception of outside your immediate focus (while signing, you look at the other person's eyes, yet most of the signing is done way below the eye level). That would, I guess, also allow you to increase your reading speed, as you'd be able to perceive the words at the edges (if you're scanning down the middle of the page).
Though there is another bottleneck: brain's processing speed. I've heard (so I may be wrong; at least the person who told me that has been way wrong before) of a guy with functional eidetic memory, who can take a glance at a page of text and memorize it. So he leafs through a book, scanning every page, but then he reads from his memory - so in reading, he's usually several pages behind.
Yeah, well, the title doesn't suggest that...
Guess that's really no news here ;)
I think that would be redundant, or even counter-productive.
Our brains eliminate superfluous information automatically. However, something you find redundant may be necessary to me, e.g. because I speak a different first language (pulling a parallel with phonetic systems). Therefore it may mean a bit less work for some, and a lot more work for everyone else.
That's been known since cuneiform times at the very least.
I recently got a book on speed-reading.
One of those "as seen on TV" type.
I thought I'd give it a try, if only to see what I'm doing wrong.
Then I found out I could have written that book: it only teaches lousy readers stuff people who have had enough reading practice learned by themselves.
One of the first things in the book is testing your own reading speed. And the book says an average American should score about 200-250 words per minute, as calculated by the provided formula.
So I tested myself. And since the book's in English, I tested myself in English, which is not my native tongue.
I scored 453 wpm. On a completely unfamiliar English text.
Anyway, one of the first and easiest techniques described in the book was reading more than one letter at a time. Gee, thanks; I learned that when I was what, four?
So unless they conducted the study on first-graders, I'd say it's practically useless. Good readers focus on whole words, subliminally recognizing their shapes. That's why I can spot a spelling mistake in a text I'm not even reading - I just spot an odd, unfamiliar, "wrong" shape (at least in Croatian; English still takes a tiny little bit of conscious effort).
BTW, I'm so very disappointed in the survey for one more reason: I'd thought its results would help the development of OCR, but I guess that was too much to expect.
OK, I'm never going to Germany.
I could easily be accused of being a rapist, since I "own" certain "raping tools", i.e. a penis.
And I carry it with me all the fscking time.
There are data recovery firms that routinely suck data off of mangled hard drives. Recovering overwritten data would not be much more work.
According to a poster several posts up, no data recovery company advertises overwritten data recovery.
A mangled drive can still be analysed, as long as its magnetic properties are still present. Overwritten data, however, is way too much trouble: it has to be done bit by bit, and there's quite a lot of work involved for each bit. And current drives measure in hundreds of gigabytes.
And, if you didn't know, even if the process was fully automated up to the level it only took 1 second to analyse each bit, and they worked on 8 bits in parallel, 1 GB would take, oh, some 32 years of constant work.
And again, I repeat: I. am not. talking. about numbers.
I'm not talking about how many people shill for any of the sides. I couldn't care less.
I'm talking about the behaviour and attitude of Opera fanboys, at least those I've had the misfortune to meet.
Two words ending in -gry are angry and hungry. There are three words in the English language. Which is the third word?
I have not said Lynx is better than IE because of extensions. It is simply better.
Newsflash: IE has supported extensions for about 10 years now and Lynx has... how long? Zero or am I being misinformed? Who cares?I just like Firefox better than Opera (partly) because of extensions.
And you are incorrect about Opera and Apple comparison. Opera tends to be actually innovative. Haven't seen much innovation coming from Apple recently. Or do you call phone w/o MMS functionality an innovation? (Yes, that was the trolling part of the message)
Well, as a guy with four kittens in my back yard, I'm not the one to let a troll go hungry.
Seeing how much both MS and Linux folk copy from Apple's UI, I'd say they invent quite a bit. Even if all they invent is polish.
Nonsense.
I'll grant I wasn't talking about Opera fanboys on /. as I don't recall seeing (m)any (though the one right below your post seems to be proving my point), but the aggressive "use Opera, everything else is crap" attitude I've encountered is comparable only to the one Windows fanboy trolling Mac topics on one other forum, and he was probably just a school kid with no brains and loads of attitude.
I'll also grant you may not share my personal experience and impressions, but that doesn't make my statement any less true.
By far, it's far more common for people to be telling people to switch to Firefox, not Opera. Hype over things such as "tabs", or it being fashionable to switch from IE, only happened when Firefox appeared; years before, people were silently using Opera. (Of course, not all fanboy-ism is bad; it can be good if it spreads awareness of a product.) And just look at any Slashdot story to see which way the mod points usually go.I'm not talking about the amount of fanboys, nor the quantity of shilling. I'm talking about quality.
And while Opera may be the bestest browser there is and ever was, some of their fanboys are not at all a pleasing bunch.
However, be that as it may, it is not a criterion that influences my choice of browsers. I simply like Firefox better.
I tried Opera.
Good browser it may be, but I don't like it. It's better than IE, but then, so is Lynx.
I like Firefox not so much for its speed (I'll admit Opera is faster), but for the extensions.
And yes, some of the more often used extensions do come off as copies of stuff first introduced in Opera, which makes Opera a bit of the Apple of the browser world.
And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined.
You forgot commercial breaks, which make our attention stop and go and stop and go...
Actually, I find that the Obligatory Pratchett Quote explains it even better:
Don't tell them. Ask them. Ask them if it's true. You can beg them to tell you it's not true. Or you can even tell them you've been told to tell them it's not true, and that is the best of all.
Because Rincewind knew very well that when the four rather small and nasty Horsemen of Panic ride out there is a good job done by Misinformation, Rumour and Gossip, but they are as nothing compared to to the fourth horseman, whose name is Denial.
(Yes, I've had religious fanatics "proving" the existence of gods by claiming that we couldn't possibly be talking about them if they didn't exist, which is the point I usually bring the Invisible Pink Unicorn into play.)
Anyway, denial, corrections etc. really don't mean all that much to those that aren't prepared to pay attention. If you want to pay attention, you can learn; if you don't, you can only gather some general impressions and quasi-information.
You Houyhnhnm, you.
And do you buy brand-new laptops for that? (Hey, AFAIK many new laptops don't even have a serial port.)
Oh, I'm sorry. I was under the impression that we were discussing new laptops from HP.
You know, the ones TFA is all about.
I still contend that people generally don't buy laptops with FreeDOS to run DOS on them. And while older laptops most certainly are usable with DOS or any other OS that'll run on them, a new laptop with wireless networking, gigs of ram and hundreds of gigs of HD space are, simply said, overkill, i.e. over-expensive.
I.e. the same reason Windows comes pre-installed as well.
Oh, come on. Who uses DOS on a laptop? And what for?
However, if you point me to readily-available software utilizing all the capabilities of a given laptop, from gigs of memory to wireless networking, card readers and so on, I not only might, but will be surprised.
You mean, the first day they're on sale?
Kind of like firemen in Fahrenheit 451...
Well, I've seen HP laptops with FreeDOS. And they're usually priced lower than comparable HP laptops with Windows.
Of course, I cannot guarantee that they're comparable in every single component, but that's my general impression.
While RHEL isn't every Linux user's choice, at least they're now getting a real, usable OS instead of FreeDOS.
What I want to know is, when you're already scanning someone's eyes with an infra-red beam, why not just scan their retinas and get it done with? No passwords to remember, and the tech should be quite similar... right?
I don't know which way you're aiming: I bought my MacBook Pro online.
So while a good point in itself (that the data is incomplete), it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Macs have always been considered as overpriced.
From what I've seen in the last few weeks, they are still regarded as such, but to a much lesser extent - a year ago, there was not a single topic about Macs on the largest Croatian forum; now there are quite a few, and most are about MacBooks.
I think their desktop sales will go up as well - for one, when I finish college and start earning real money, I'm switching my desktop to Mac, too. But I know people enough who want a Mac as well.