RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

  • From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:45:47 -0500

Sure, it's around $3K a semester for grad school. Assuming that it takes you 5 
years to do a PhD, that's 2 semesters per year times
5 which is 10, times $3K which is $30K

I'd pit our graduates against MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc, etc.

Btw, that's the whole tuition, so I included the fee thrown in for library 
access, access to all the digital journals in the world,
etc, etc.

You have to understand that we are literally rated one of the best values for a 
top notch education in this country though. I love
the fact that more folks don't really know about us until it's too late, 
*smile*, so our rates stay down.

Also, we have some good folks here who manage money very well. While all the 
other universities are making their faculty cut back,
go on furlough, etc ... we are hiring new faculty, creating jobs, partnering 
with local businesses, etc.

In fact, we recently were told that we brought over 1 billion dollars of 
business to north Carolina alone, due to our outreach
efforts helping farmers, local businesses, startups, and so on.

We give back 10 times more than we get, and that's a low estimate.

Our chancellor recently stated some even higher goals for outreach, job 
creation, and research funding.

So, I'll let UNC Chapel Hill get all the glory for football, and all that jazz, 
but if you want a real quality education, go Wolf
Pack!

Take care,
Sina

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ken Perry
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:21 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

Tell me how much.

ken

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sina Bahram
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:19 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

Not that much at all my friend.

Look at my school's tuition. We're an R1 with hundreds of millions in solid
funding, some of the best faculty on the freaking
planet, and we don't cost near that much.

Private schools are more, but hey, their private.

Take care,
Sina


-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ken Perry
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:16 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book


I don't disagree phd's have contributed a lot but tell me this.  Why does it
cost 80k 100k to get an education.  I was talking  cost and you skipped the
rails guy.

ken
-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sina Bahram
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:04 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

Bring it. you want to compare results?

Because frankly I think the tangible research we've done in curing cancer,
reducing disease to millions of people, making computers
usable by people who can't so much as move their jaw muscles, enabling
children to read who have severe developmental disabilities,
making the internet faster, making computers better able to help humans
achieve goals, making transportation safer, etc, etc, etc
outweigh any so called wasteful research.

You want to give a list of all the wonderful things AT companies have done
for the world?

You want to compare that list with some executives who now no longer have to
fear their lawyers?

You want to talk about Freedom Scientific taking away the cars and homes of
blind programmers because those programmers wanted to go
work for companies like Apple or Adobe to make their products better for all
of us?

Any freaking time, any freaking place.

Bring it.

Take care,
Sina

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ken Perry
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 6:47 AM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

Grin just like the market for high cost phd's right?

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sina Bahram
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:43 AM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Announcing the Orion Smart book

There's a market alright. Fed by world governments, insane trade agreements,
blood sucking AT companies, and the documentedly most
uneducated consumer base ever to exist in the history of consumer bases.

I so should not get involved in this thread.

Signing off.

Take care,
Sina


-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dale Leavens
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:10 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book

But so far we don't have the price for the braille display.

What I quoted was the current hardware as shown on the LevelStar Site.

Unless they have some new refreshable braille technology the Orion will be a

lot more than two grand and you can have braille on any number of devices 
these days.

I agree. A netbook and at least you have a fully compatible word processor, 
one used by the rest of the world assuming one shares documents with the 
rest of the world.

for a hundred bucks you can buy a 32 GB card for your Stream. Modern SSD 
drives are used these days maybe the Orion will upgrade to a solid state 
drive. Even that on the Icon wouldn't justify $1,300.

I will say that I approve the use of braille but for the speed of speech it 
will have to get a bunch cheaper before I'll be buying int.

I guess there is a market but I don't see it.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book


> Well, if it does braille output, it's got my vote sight unseen.  At
> the price it's selling for, it looks like you can have a little
> braille display for under 2k.  That's really cool.  I still can't
> afford it, mind, but it's really cool.  I wonder if you can use it as
> an external speech synth and/or braille display for a screen reader on
> a laptop or desktop.  That would be really nifty.  The note taker
> stuff isn't really that exciting to me.  I can grab a $150 netbook off
> of craigslist and load up soemthing like Vinux on there and I have a
> powerful note taker right there and then.  You don't even need all the
> stuff Vinux comes with pre-installed really.  All you really need is
> Pico, abook, tudu, mplayer and Lynx running on something with speakup
> installed and you got a decent note taker.  Couple of megs more gets
> you emacspeak and you have something that is just as powerful as any
> word processor out there, imho.  Add a menu feature of some kind which
> launches what you want at the press of a key and you don't even need
> to have the command line come up to bring up your stuff.  That braille
> display and that speech synth though are very attention grabbing for
> me.  Don't get me wrong, I am not knocking all the nice apps featured
> on there.  I just can't see myself going into debt for them when I can
> get a comparable set of them for ffree on a much much cheaper machine.
>
> For daisy, I have a victor reader which also stores songs.  I don't
> need 40 gigs of songs.  IN fact, I have a 2 gig mini flash card for my
> music and an 8 gb one for my audio books.  Podcasts, I get through my
> android phone and stitcher but a braille display, that for under 2
> grand is not to be sneezed at.
>
> Alex M
>
> On 3/9/11, Dale Leavens <dleavens@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Well, I don't get it.
>>
>> The LevelStar Site doesn't give much information on the Icon, look like 
>> you
>> don't get any input other than audio without the docking station which 
>> means
>> $1,300 for the Icon and $600 for the keyboard, $1,900 altogether. For 
>> that
>> you get 8 more gigs of hard drive than you get on an iPhone.
>>
>> I presume you can do input in some way outside of the docking station but
>> they don't tell you anything about that.
>>
>> Having braille output albeit only 18 cells will add to the capability of
>> course but it seems redundant to me to have yet another isolated note 
>> taker.
>>
>> The iPhone and come to that the iPod touch already does all that stuff 
>> and
>> more for less.
>>
>>
>>   ----- Original Message -----
>>   From: Littlefield, Tyler
>>   To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>   Cc: Ken Perry
>>   Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 5:36 PM
>>   Subject: Re: Announcing the Orion Smart book
>>
>>
>>   I seen that! And even with no price tag, it's already making my wallet
>> clench up in fear.
>>   On 3/9/2011 1:39 PM, Ken Perry wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     I can now show you what I am helping to work on.  Here is the
>> announcement that was put out today.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
//www.freelists.org/post/accesscomp/Fw-icondiscuss-A-Glimpse-Of-The-Lev
elStar-Orion-SmartBooks-At-CSUN-2011
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ty
>>
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