Ahhhh, a "Linux Warrior" serving in the Linux Army seeking world conquest...

Probably about 90%+ (at the very least 80%) of all computer users are
windows based... I simply think of the biggest audience (greatest
good-greatest number, America used to be like that--I miss it...)

I go between Linux and Windows as necessary, my recreation machine is
Slackware based (mp3s, movies, personal coding, etc...) ... Mac I avoid
(but, they can run Linux)... those guys (Mac'ers) are worse then Bill when
it comes to proprietary rights and control...

..pdf is great, but huge...

I thought you were more interested in the free sharing of info than fighting
operating system wars... nothing wrong with either... both serve a
purpose--but best done one at a time...

Warmest regards,
John

"Dave Platt" wrote in message
...
Dave:

Are you familiar with microsoft reader... it reads ebooks in something of
a
"paperback style."

Not familiar with it, don't really care to be. I have a policy of
avoiding the use of Microsoft software on my systems except when no
decent alternative exists.

I am not sure if there is a counterpart in the Linux
world...

Adobe Acrobat Reader has a "continuous, facing" display option - pairs
of pages side by side - which I suspect is close to the "paperback
style" to which you refer. Works fine with the PDFs I'm distributing.

are you dual boot?

No, I don't trust that mode, for a couple of reasons. Some M$
operating systems are known to rather aggressively overwrite or
destroy other OS's partitions or boot blocks, sometimes without asking
or warning. And, given all of the security exploits against Windows
and Explorer and etc. floating around, I feel safer not allowing
Windows to have direct access to my hardware.

I do occasionally run Windows (usually Win98) in a VmWare virtual
machine, with a virtualized hard drive, for things like tax software,
ham-radio programming utilities, etc.. That way, it's running safely
in user mode, can't get to the real hardware, and I can wipe it and
start over from a checkpoint save without affecting the rest of my
system.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Reg:

How come no email from you?

Warmest regards,
John

"Reg Edwards" wrote in message
...
For Pete's sake. You're getting something for free and then
bitching
about it.

=========================

"For Pete's sake" is an interesting American exclamation. How did it
arise?

Did it arise in the 1930's? Any connection with the villain Pegleg
Pete who appeared in Mickey Mouse cartoons of that era?
----
Reg.

Reg Edwards wrote:
"For Pete's sake" is an interesting American exclamation.

Actually, sake is Japanese rice wine. Pete must
be the importer.
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp


----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups
---= East/West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

Rice wine? Only worse idea would be prune wine.. not even a shot of good
whiskey can take the rank taste of rice wine away... frown

Warmest regards,
John

"Cecil Moore" wrote in message
...
Reg Edwards wrote:
"For Pete's sake" is an interesting American exclamation.

Actually, sake is Japanese rice wine. Pete must
be the importer.
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp


----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet
News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000
Newsgroups
---= East/West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

In article ,
Dave Platt wrote:

| In article ,
| John Smith wrote:
|
| I don't think you grasp what is being done here... I am not even
| contemplating using it... but transforming it into other formats
| for others use... 33 megs is pretty big for a book... down about
| one-meg would be more useful...
|
| Getting it down to 1 meg would necessarily sacrifice almost all of the
| detail in the photographs - they'd be unviewable. 1 meg might be
| enough space for the text, and possibly for the black&white charts and
| line drawings (as bitmaps) but the photos would be lost.

The reason it's 33 MB and not 1 MB is because the .pdf file is
basically a bunch of pictures, one of each page. That's also why it's
not searchable, and why you can't cut and paste text out of it.

33 MB is on the small side for books scanned like this.

In comparison, the Bible is only 1.34 MB in size in text format after
being compressed (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10) -- and it's a big
book. Even War and Peace is only 1.16 MB
(http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600).

In order to get it under 1 MB, you'd generally have to use some sort
of OCR software to convert the picture of text into text. I presume
there would also be some pictures, and they'd have to be stored as
pictures, of course.

Unfortunately, good OCR software is hard to find, and I know of no
software that could take a book, scan it, convert it to text and
images as appropriate, and do it accurately enough that a human
wouldn't need to proofread the entire document carefully. And that is
a very large job.

The reason it's available with BitTorrent is because that allows lots
of people to download it relatively quickly without totally sucking up
his bandwidth. It may be a bit more work to download than something
that's just a link on a web page, but it works nicely once set up.

In any event, scanning and distributing out of copyright books like
this is a worthy endeavor. Thank you!

Looks like there's a few other radio related works on Project
Gutenberg. Go to `http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/search' and
search for `radio' for a list. None seem to cover antennas
specifically, but ` The Radio Amateur's Hand Book' looks interesting.


--
Doug McLaren,
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Fine Reader has no equal, still must be proof read, but I am always
surprised how accurate it is, when pages have been scanned at high enough
pixels... 200 is good, 300+ is excellent... it is smart and knows pictures
when it sees them... all this is easy to suck into word and put a book
together rather quickly... microsoft provides a FREE (what was Bill
thinking!) plugin for Microsoft Word which will construct a .lit ebook from
any word doc and presto... you have a ebook of excellent format--and even
with pics--small...

The guys on the #ebooks chan on the undernet servers of IRC used to provide
such books and info on how to create them--it is where I picked it up at...
they create books in all formats... but for quality and size, .lit is what
appeared best to me... microsoft provides a FREE (what was Bill
thinking?--again!) reader to read them, called "Microsoft Reader."

Warmest regards,
John

"Doug McLaren" wrote in message
. ..
In article ,
Dave Platt wrote:

| In article ,
| John Smith wrote:
|
| I don't think you grasp what is being done here... I am not even
| contemplating using it... but transforming it into other formats
| for others use... 33 megs is pretty big for a book... down about
| one-meg would be more useful...
|
| Getting it down to 1 meg would necessarily sacrifice almost all of the
| detail in the photographs - they'd be unviewable. 1 meg might be
| enough space for the text, and possibly for the black&white charts and
| line drawings (as bitmaps) but the photos would be lost.

The reason it's 33 MB and not 1 MB is because the .pdf file is
basically a bunch of pictures, one of each page. That's also why it's
not searchable, and why you can't cut and paste text out of it.

33 MB is on the small side for books scanned like this.

In comparison, the Bible is only 1.34 MB in size in text format after
being compressed (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10) -- and it's a big
book. Even War and Peace is only 1.16 MB
(http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600).

In order to get it under 1 MB, you'd generally have to use some sort
of OCR software to convert the picture of text into text. I presume
there would also be some pictures, and they'd have to be stored as
pictures, of course.

Unfortunately, good OCR software is hard to find, and I know of no
software that could take a book, scan it, convert it to text and
images as appropriate, and do it accurately enough that a human
wouldn't need to proofread the entire document carefully. And that is
a very large job.

The reason it's available with BitTorrent is because that allows lots
of people to download it relatively quickly without totally sucking up
his bandwidth. It may be a bit more work to download than something
that's just a link on a web page, but it works nicely once set up.

In any event, scanning and distributing out of copyright books like
this is a worthy endeavor. Thank you!

Looks like there's a few other radio related works on Project
Gutenberg. Go to `http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/search' and
search for `radio' for a list. None seem to cover antennas
specifically, but ` The Radio Amateur's Hand Book' looks interesting.


--
Doug McLaren,
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

On Mon, 23 May 2005 04:59:53 GMT, (Doug McLaren)
wrote:

In comparison, the Bible is only 1.34 MB in size in text format after
being compressed (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10) -- and it's a big
book. Even War and Peace is only 1.16 MB
(http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600).

Hi Doug,

Also from Gutenberg (along with several dozen other titles) is my copy
of Casanova's Memoires (which fits in my Palm Tungsten E as an ebook).
It runs to 3.9 MB (about two feet of bookshelf space). No pictures by
the way.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

In article ,
John Smith wrote:

Ahhhh, a "Linux Warrior" serving in the Linux Army seeking world conquest...

You might consider being a bit less quick to toss off those
stereotypes, John. They can blind you more than they illuminate.

Probably about 90%+ (at the very least 80%) of all computer users are
windows based... I simply think of the biggest audience (greatest
good-greatest number, America used to be like that--I miss it...)

.... and all of those Windows users can, if they choose, view PDF
documents. "Portable", y'know? The Adobe software is free, and works
fine.

What I'm not particularly interested in doing, is creating a
non-portable (Windows-specific) version. Why restrict the usability?

If you want to do so, go right ahead... as long as you comply with the
simple "noncommercial, share and share alike" copyright terms on the
PDF, you can create a further derivative work to suit yourself.

I'll be curious how many tens, or hundreds of hours of work it takes
to develop a suitably-high-quality textual representation of this
book. Do let us know!

I go between Linux and Windows as necessary, my recreation machine is
Slackware based (mp3s, movies, personal coding, etc...) ... Mac I avoid
(but, they can run Linux)... those guys (Mac'ers) are worse then Bill when
it comes to proprietary rights and control...

And that's pretty much why I stopped using (and developing software)
for my Mac, put it into retirement, and switched to Linux. (Could
have been a *BSD derivative, but there was a big two- or three-way war
going on within the *BSD camp at the time).

.pdf is great, but huge...

By today's standards?

I thought you were more interested in the free sharing of info than fighting
operating system wars...

I am. You raised the subject, and I simply answered the question to
explain why I'm not personally interested in doing what you want.

I've done what I set out to do - get this work back into public
availability, in a useful form. If that form does not suit your
desires, that's your issue, not mine, and you're free to correct the
situation.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Dave, I said an excellent contribution on your part--few will do as much,
here I just repeat what I have already said...

Nothing wrong with .pdf, except it is too large... and in the case of all
graphic content--not text searchable... .lit just gets things a bit more
right, the format is easier to read, and it provides "text to speech", it
will read the book in audio for you--even the visually handicapped can
"read" it... and it is all free to make and read... (well, you have to have
MS Word access)

I have access to a scanner which, if the back rib is cut off a book, and
pages freed, scan a whole thick book in minutes--I have hand scanned books
on my home scanner, a high speed scsi HP, and it does take a bit of time and
effort--I am sure you did the same with the book you are speaking of, and
know well that task... on a fast computer, conversion of a page by fine
reader is seconds... it really just depends on how good the scanned images
are... much less than 5 secs a page for good quality--scanned images...

I was hoping the "bookworms" on Linux would have come up with a compatible
reader for Linux for .lit--I haven't searched--but is an excellent format to
just ignore for petty battles--however, MSs' rights on it may make this
impossible...

However, there are other routes to take too, one is .html, all platforms can
read it and there are ebook creation tools which create to this format (pics
can still be .jpeg's)--and can be read with any browser, ms word, the
freeware star office for linux, html editors, etc...

We live in the land of computers--no task is impossible--many roads all lead
to the same destination(s)... a good broad picture of what is available is
good to have... I am sure I have not been able to find all which is
available... still got the eyes open...

The ONLY "fault" I was finding is the size... download time... storage on
disk (forget floppies, fill up a zip disk, cdrom quick with books that size,
etc)...

I did not intend for you to see my comments as a "slur", rather I respect
your work and your contribution... and like I said on my first post here,
THANKS!!!

I think "Linux Warrior" is accurate... even your post I respond to here
seems to mention and reinforce your commitment to Linux... no big deal...
the corp. I work for does work in both Windows/Linux, I don't have an option
to ignore one or the other, I have no real problems with Windows XP,
Microsoft finally started doing something right... I came from the
commandline prompt in UNIX, then to DOS... was shocked when Linux went
GUI... but got used to it quickly...

Nothing wrong with Linux Warriors... one of my best friends is a general in
the army...grin I just think of myself as living in a "neutral country"
(like Sweden) when it comes to religious and political commitments to an
OS...

Warmest regards,
John

"Dave Platt" wrote in message
...
In article ,
John Smith wrote:

Ahhhh, a "Linux Warrior" serving in the Linux Army seeking world
conquest...

You might consider being a bit less quick to toss off those
stereotypes, John. They can blind you more than they illuminate.

Probably about 90%+ (at the very least 80%) of all computer users are
windows based... I simply think of the biggest audience (greatest
good-greatest number, America used to be like that--I miss it...)

... and all of those Windows users can, if they choose, view PDF
documents. "Portable", y'know? The Adobe software is free, and works
fine.

What I'm not particularly interested in doing, is creating a
non-portable (Windows-specific) version. Why restrict the usability?

If you want to do so, go right ahead... as long as you comply with the
simple "noncommercial, share and share alike" copyright terms on the
PDF, you can create a further derivative work to suit yourself.

I'll be curious how many tens, or hundreds of hours of work it takes
to develop a suitably-high-quality textual representation of this
book. Do let us know!

I go between Linux and Windows as necessary, my recreation machine is
Slackware based (mp3s, movies, personal coding, etc...) ... Mac I avoid
(but, they can run Linux)... those guys (Mac'ers) are worse then Bill when
it comes to proprietary rights and control...

And that's pretty much why I stopped using (and developing software)
for my Mac, put it into retirement, and switched to Linux. (Could
have been a *BSD derivative, but there was a big two- or three-way war
going on within the *BSD camp at the time).

.pdf is great, but huge...

By today's standards?

I thought you were more interested in the free sharing of info than
fighting
operating system wars...

I am. You raised the subject, and I simply answered the question to
explain why I'm not personally interested in doing what you want.

I've done what I set out to do - get this work back into public
availability, in a useful form. If that form does not suit your
desires, that's your issue, not mine, and you're free to correct the
situation.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

John Smith wrote:
Rice wine? Only worse idea would be prune wine.. not even a shot of good
whiskey can take the rank taste of rice wine away... frown

I enjoy hot sake with my Chinese food.
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp

----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups
----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =----