On 10/12/2015 1:03 PM, Robert Green wrote:
"Don Y" wrote in message
we look things up? I know I used to go to the library at least once a
week
before the Internet and I haven't been back in years.

I still hit the library regularly to pick up mind rot but I haven't done
any
serious researching there in years unless I was bumming the wifi.

I use the public library:
- as a source for "free" rental DVD's

Got Netflix. Comes right to my door. Gave up premium cable for it and
don't miss it.

We each pick up 10 DVD's each week on our drives past our respective
library branches (we frequent different parts of town). Costs us
nothing but the time to walk in and pick them up off the "reserved"
stacks (place orders online)

(we don't watch broadcast/CATV; just "movies" or "series" off DVD)

Personal choice? Bad reception? Parsimonious?

Is there something we're *missing*? Last I checked, TV was all "reality"
shows (i.e., things that are cheap to produce and usually reflect that
in their content!). Why *pay* for cable and then "need" to make it
worth the expense (by sitting in front of the TV)?

- reference city/county data
(researching property taxes, etc.)

Lots of jurisdictions (like mine) have that on line. I usually go to the
county courthouse to get the real scoop on a property or neighborhood.

The online portions are essentially summaries. If you want to
compare properties (and the taxes thereon) you need more detail.

- reference texts available via ILL

Got a professional librarian friend who gets me what I need from
Interlibrary Loans in exhange for having her own private help desk (me).

As we are "big users" of the library's resources (DVDs, research
titles, etc.) I've befriended most of the staff. "The woman" (Sue)
who does the ILL's knows me by name/sight as well as by my ILL needs.
While ILL's cost a fair bit of money to fulfill, the library folk
appear to *welcome* this "expense" as it is directly indicative of the
library being *used*.

I submit name of article/book, publication name, date, author, etc. online
and it magically appears with my "reserved" DVDs/books whenever the library
manages to acquire it.

(some titles: _Pai Gow Poker_, _

About 530,000 results from Google

It's not enough to know how to play, the cultural history of Pai Gow, etc.
but, rather, how to design an optimal playing algorithm to embody in
a gaming device. Owner/operators aren't keen on gaming devices that
pay out more than they take in (because the implementation isn't clever
enough).

[No, you can't "cheat" and deliberately screw the player; the game must
be "fair" -- YOU just need to be a much better player than the human!]

From text to speech: The MITalk System_

Date Published: May 1987 - I find technical info from that long ago to be
mostly curiosities and not particular useful in daily ops. That was even a
problem for me when I had access to the UM's engineering library. Lots of
great stuff but much of it woefully out of date.

The codebase predates the text. Probably by ~5 years -- so, by your
assessment, its even *more* "out of date". E.g., the DECtalk (same
pedigree) dates from ~84. I'd have to check the DECtalk Express's
(portable/battery operated) date of manufacture to see how quickly
it "shrank".

Comparable synthesis products of that time period included the Votrax
(about the size of the DTC-01 and it had no "smarts", relying on an
external computer to feed it phoneme codes) and TI's LPC offering
(which was limited domain).

But, if you do the research, you'll discover that it *is* the state of the
art for formant-based synthesizers. Newer technologies (diphone, catenative,
MBROLA, PSOLA, etc.) require large unit inventories, part-of-speech databases,
exception dictionaries, etc -- all of which lead to implementations that are
considerably larger than a formant synthesizer (small phoneme inventory with
~dozen parameters governing each) and an *algorithmic* grapheme-to-phoneme
conversion algorithm (instead of storing "pronunciations" in a large
dictionary).

For an unconstrained vocabulary, the "new" approaches are only practical
when you have lots of resources to devote to speech (e.g., a PC)

[My synthesizer could run on a PC XT (make sure you understand how FEW
resources the XT originally had!). Most "modern" synthesizers wouldn't
*fit* on the magnetic media available from the XT, let alone run
*without* it!]

- research papers usually only available through "subscription" services
("A Simple Method of Computing the Input Quantization and
Multiplication
Roundoff Errors in a Digital Filter")

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login...mber%3D1162595
Date of publication 1974 - again, having a librarian friend is a great asset
if I want something from a sub. journal that the university has access to.

If it's available on-line in a PDF, that's where I got it. If not,
then Sue gets a request and I forget about it until it until she
locates it for me.

Most "papers" have no copying charges (and are probably FAX'ed to the library
from wherever). If it comes to me in paper form, I scan it and make a PDF
for my archive. If I locate it online, I save the original (in whatever
form) and print a reference copy.

The same is not true of books -- which are typically too large to photocopy.
So, if I find myself referencing a book extensively, I locate a copy for
my dead-tree collection. The MITalk book was one such acquisition as the
material it covers (and *references*) is far too much for me to have
absorbed in the 3 week (non-renewable) period that the book was available
to me via ILL.

The same is true of _The Multics System_, _Versalog Slide Rule Instructions_,
_Programming Under Mach_, etc. -- each titles that need to "linger" for
the occasions when I need to refresh some memory. The library gives me
a great way to "try before you buy" -- something that a brick and mortar
store *wouldn't* (esp with older titles).

- scant few titles that I'd never want to have to keep on my own shelves
(we've been actively ridding ourselves of books/paper for the past 20
years -- let the *library* keep a copy of the latest NEC, CRC, etc.)

If I need to know something from the NEC it's usually NOT when the library's
open and more importantly, I can get some pretty good info from the NEC
codemeisters here in AHR.

I can almost always defer a decision until I can get the information that
I need. How long are you willing to wait for a reply to a post, here?
How willing are you to trust the interpretation (of text you can't see)?
What if illustrations are involved?

But I get your point. For some people the library still has value - just
not for me.

As a physical building, it has very little value for me -- other than
as a pickup/dropoff point for materials that I've "ordered" online.
From talking with friends around the country, it appears that libraries
are trying to become "social centers"... places where people congregate
to *do* things (listen to lectures, listen to musicians, let their
children play together, etc.) so the appeal as a place to "do research"
is sorely limited.

The local university has a respectable library system. But, the campus
is far too large to make access easy for a "non-student"... AFAICT,
there are no places where "commoners" can park to access any of their
facilities (other than football games!).

Additionally, the (state!) university requires a UNIVERSITY library card
to withdraw materials. Neither of these "problems" exist with the
public library facilities.