What do you think still keeps Barnes and Noble and all of the classrooms still churning? Ask about them when you go by the applied sciences dept. at the local college.
(you are familiar with continuing ed., right?)
Barnes and Noble stock has dropped -34% in the last year. 11 years ago, the stock peaked at $30.31 but is currently at $7.15. They might be churning for a few years more, but if the present trend continues, they would not be a great investment opportunity.
Why they're still in business and why colleges prefer paper books to electronic media is a messy question. I have a Kindle paper white reader, a Google Nexus 7 tablet, and several Chromebooks, all of which have the Kindle reader software installed, along with various other eBook readers and converters. I'm a prolific reader of technical publications and reports. The electronic readers have several advantages over paper books. They take up less space, the documents can be searched, and they don't get moldy when my roof leaks directly over my bookshelf: Yet, I prefer to read on paper instead of LCD and have to force myself to read the eBook equivalent. The is reason is the same as why Barnes and Noble is still in business... tradition, inertia, habit, and resistance to change. The present trend towards digitized books will continue until all the dinosaurs, like me, are gone.
Of course, the skools are even more conservative, even bordering on reactionary. Electronic textbooks really cut into the textbook vendors profits. The skools are always looking for ways to save money, but textbook sales are a sacred cow, where the complex financial arrangements between the skools and the vendors has stabilized into a mutual beneficial arrangement. Never mind what's good for the students. That arrangement has created abominations such as Elsevier, Springer, etc, which will gladly sell research papers, that were originally paid for by public funds, for exorbitant prices (Paywall). Much of that goes back to the copyright holding skools. When that cozy arrangement finally breaks down, as I'm sure it will, I suspect electronic books and papers will magically become far more popular. Meanwhile, there's Sci-Hub:
Never heard of it. I'm too busy reading, writing, designing, and repairing to bother with any formal education program.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Ooops. Wrong URL for Sci-Hub. This should be the right one.
-- Jeff Liebermann snipped-for-privacy@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #DOn Sat, 16 Sep 2017 20:23:21 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote: (...)
Forgive me, for I have splurged. My shiny new Stihl MS180 is a nice saw but has a weakness. The chain 0.043 gauge instead of the more common 0.050. The stock narrow chain cuts nicely and fast, but needs to be sharpened too often. In cutting up some scrap lumber today, I had to sharpen it after only about 30 min run time. My other saws can go for hours between sharpenings.
I found this YouTube video on how to fix the problem: A little digging found a replacement bar and chain on eBay: For $19 and a 4-6 week wait, it seems like a tolerable risk.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
The guy at the Stihl store told me I can put a different and longer bar on mine. So I'm gonna do what you did. The skinny chain also does not cut as fast as the .05 chain because of the safety anti-kickback feature in the skinny chain. I bought the fastest cutting .043 chain I could find but it still doesn't cut as fast as the non-kickback chain does. BTW, I have been using chain saws for about 40 years and have always tried to be safe. I always tried hard to avoid kickback after I saw the scars on a fellow worker's arm from a saw kicking back. I never, until this last summer, had a saw kick back hard enough that it got even close to a body part. But it finally happened and the chain brake worked just like it was supposed to. Even if the chain had hit me it would have been stopped. Those brakes are a great idea. I never set the saw down without first engaging the brake. Eric
The stock bar is 16" while the most common replacements mentioned are
14". There seems to be some variation in the way the bars are measured. If you look at the video above, the 14" bar appears to be only about 1" shorter, not 2". I ordered a 14" bar because I couldn't find a cheap 16" bar and chain and I have a big saw with a 24" bar. Trying to drive a long bar with only a 32cc engine is not going to work well.Thanks. I've never tried a low-kickback chain. I have a bar nose kickback protection plate on some of my bars. They work, but prevents me from cutting oversized logs. Otherwise, I'm just careful not to dig the nose into the ground or notch in the cut.
My involvement with chainsaws started when I bought this house in
1973. That would be 44 years. However, I'm getting too old for doing my own firewood and have been buying my firewood for exorbitant prices.I've been lucky so far but have had a few close calls. The chain brake saved me once, but that was enough. Oddly, I have had more near accidents when starting a chainsaw than running one. I tend to get sloppy when tired and it shows when starting. These days, I always start a saw on the ground, not tree climber style in the air. I should lock the brake more often, but often forget.
Good luck and I'll let you know how the bar and chain transplant work.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I braze the security tips onto a piece of 1/4" drill rod, or an old screwdriver. With the 1/4" rod, you can make them as log as you want them.
-- Never piss off an Engineer! They don't get mad. They don't get even. They go for over unity! ;-)
Jeff Liebermann wrote on 9/17/2017 12:53 PM:
LCD sucks because it gives eyestrain over longer reading sessions. ePaper is better with much higher contrast, not unlike paper, hence the name.
That said, I don't read much longer than a magazine article these days. So LCD is mostly fine for me. I would like to have an ePaper screen, but I'm not willing to give up ownership of my reading material, so no Kindle for me.
Nonsense. Electronic media *increases* profits due to lower production costs.
One thing that caught my attention when reading about the differences is the idea of connecting emotionally with a book. I realized that I have done this. The act of picking up a book to read creates a strong association between a book and its contents. This doesn't happen with ebooks because the reader is connected to so many other books and if the reader is a laptop, so many other tasks.
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998
Agreed and good timing. I just bought an ancient (2009) Kindle DX reader (with a very dead battery) for $40: It has a 150 dpi (1200x824) 9.7" diag Perl e-paper screen which looks great for MOBI or AZW formatted documents. However, for viewing PDF formatted documents, it's barely readable. I'm investigating the cause and cure as time permits.
ePaper is certainly easier on the eyes (and battery) but the Perl e-paper display is only good for 10:1 contrast ratio. The more recent Carta displays have twice the resolution (300 dpi) and somewhat better
15:1 contrast. Meanwhile, a TN LCD display is good for 1000:1 contrast ratio, and the latest IPS display can do 1,000,000:1. So, it's not the contrast ratio that makes e-paper easier on the eyes. It's the dot resolution that makes e-paper easier on the eyes. I'm currently writing this on a 24" diagonal 1920x1200 LCD display. That's only 94.3 pixels/inch while my Kindle DX is 150 dpi and the latest e-paper is 300 dpi.I've somewhat confirmed this by spending a few days behind one of the newer high resolution displays. At 21" and 3840x2160 dots, that works out to 210 pixels/inch. It was very easy on my eyes and there was no sign of eyestrain (except when I stupidly sat at the machine for a 3hr session and forgot to occasionally focus on some distant object).
Also, I use an Acer Chromebook 14 (CB3-431-C5EX) for reading. It's advertised as a 1920x1080 IPS display, but will do a much higher resolution: dots pixels/inch 1536x864 126 1920x1080 157 2400x1350 197 These are far better than the 94.3 pixels/inch of my 24" desktop monitor. Despite the tiny size of the characters in the highest resolution, everything is perfectly readable with minimal eye strain. It's the pixels/inch, not the contrast ratio that makes things more readable.
However, there's a fly in the ointment. The industry's addiction to semi-transparent desktops results in low contrast text, especially when displayed in faded pastel colors. Despite the improved pixel density, such text is a PITA to read. I find myself using the high contrast color schemes and using "reader view" in the browsers, just to defeat this latest assault on my eyes by the screen artists. Blah.
I just plug my various Kindle's into a USB port. The Kindle shows up as a drive letter. I copy the file from my desktop to the Kindle documents directory. I turn off auto-sync. The files magically appear on the reading list without ever seeing the Amazon servers. I can also send a file directly to a Kindle via email, but that could be read by Amazon, which seems to intercept the file, and instead send me an email informing me that the file is ready to download. It wasn't always that way and I'm suspicious.
Rubbish. The problem is piracy by students. No sooner does a book become available, that it's scanned, converted to various formats, and distributed: "How to Digitize Your Textbooks" Here's a video of a Canon Imagerunner 5000 scanning one of my manuals on both sides of the page in one pass. (4.1MB)
That also happened to me for many years. I had a small collection of my favorite references that I would go to for everything. However, as I moved away from books and into electronic media, the attachment went away because electronic media was electronically searchable, while paper media was a painful slog through the index and table of contents. I didn't realize how far away I had gotten from paper books until I had to look something up in one, and realized what a painful exercise searching for content in a paper book really was.
There's also a question of size. I have a few file cabinets and bookshelves full of books and magazine clippings. I also have a few flash drives and a USB hard disk full of scanned (and searchable) eBooks, captured web pages, and images. Basically, much of my working library in my pocket. As more of what I have on my bookshelf becomes available in electronic format, more of my paper books will become donated or recycled.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Too much here to respond to, but also consider that ePaper displays don't flicker. Even if you don't notice the flicker, moving your eyes creates distortion while the ePaper display is fixed.
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998
Sorry. I was in a hurry and didn't have time to be brief. Actually, I got interested in the topic and decided that it was worth expounding in detail. Enjoy.
Flicker doesn't bother me much, so I don't notice it. The usual method of reducing LCD flicker is to use any vertical refresh rate that's not 60 Hz. However, on my desktop (Samsung SyncMaster 243T
1920x1200), I'm running 60 Hz because higher refresh rates (72 and 75Hz) result in a blurred image. I can't really see it with graphics, but with high contrast text, it's really obvious. I've also noticed this on some other monitors but not on all monitors.I don't know about eye movement causing distortion. The problem is that on an LCD, each pixel is a combination of different color dots. To produce a white pixel, all the color dots need to be turned on resulting in a large and potentially blurry pixel. That's not a problem with e-paper, which only has to deal with turning one B&W dot on and off. Try a magnifier on your devices and see for yourself. More on this (time permitting) if you're interested.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Not sure what you mean when you say flicker doesn't bother you. You don't have to see the flicker for it to cause a problem. The point is your eyes don't adjust to a flickering screen as well as one that isn't flickering. Your eyes constantly readjusting is what makes them tired.
-- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998
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