The trouble is, it's all about future languages. For the desktop at the moment my choices seem to be Python or Ruby for scripting -- both good, choice down to programmer preference and availability of pre-rolled code relevant to the project in hand -- and C# or Java for larger-scale stuff, both bogged down with corporate ownership issues. I'm almost tempted to revert to C++ unless somebody can point me to a real viable alternative rather than an experimental language. (There's some stuff I do in Ada, but that's a bit heavy for general purpose stuff).
If you are using a language with a centralised official body mandating correct usage, such as French or Esperanto, yes. English isn't one of those languages.
Do you have a pdf reader that tries to increase the font size, or make font substitutions, rather than just zooming the whole page?
Yes, my eReader, because it only has the facility to turn the page, not to move around the page. And as far as I'm concerned, it's not the fault of the reader for trying to do that, it's the fault of publishers supplying content in a format that tries to stop me, which I view in the same light as DVDs that won't let me pause the main feature while I take a comfort break. I don't want to have to read a broadsheet newspaper through a letter box by asking somebody on the other side of the door to move it around.
Some documents are typographically complex, or convey their meaning partly through layout and typography, and these elements will be destroyed by typical e-book software and are not preserved in e-book formats.
And won't be displayed on my eReader, even if you use PDF. Yes, PDF is a good format for such documents, but not for an eReader because it won't work.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, also: "the incongruity created when the (tragic) significance of a character's speech or actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned; the literary device so used, orig. in Greek tragedy; also transf."
We (the audience) saw this coming, but Oracle don't seem to have. So that's irony in this, one of the earliest senses.
Yes, you've pointed out the drawbacks with deploying as pdf, which I agree are real. And I think I've pointed out the advantages of pdf, and the drawbacks of ebook formats as they are currently implemented. If you're an author and you care or want to control what the document actually looks like, then pdf (or a bunch of images) is your only option.
No, it isn't an option. PDF doesn't do that unless you also control the device on which it is displayed. When I view a PDF with large text on my eReader I'm damn sure that what I see isn't what the author intended (not all authors can be that demented, surely). If you are trying to do that then you have overstepped your role as an author. If you think you have succeeded then you should try talking to your users (especially ones with visual impairment). PDF does have it's uses, but that isn't one of them.
But one of the main reasons for LaTeX is exactly to separate content from presentation, so I think you're misinformed about that
I used to use laTeX a lot, and was a member of the TUG. LaTeX is better than raw TeX, in terms of separation of content and presentation, but most raw TeX is still there in LaTeX, and LaTeX commands such as \textwidth, \baselineskip, \raisebox (everything to do with boxes, in fact), \vspace, \textbf and so many other laTeX constructs are about presentation, not content. You can write laTeX that separates content from presentation, but tools that claim to process laTeX can't assume that you have; they need to accept all legal laTeX, including all the presentation stuff.
and that point doesn't apply to pdf, which is for consumption only, not for writing.
Internally, PDF is quite like DVI in terms of how it structures a page, and the content and presentation have been well and truly merged. PDF puts blocks in defined positions on the page, and the order of the blocks doesn't necessarily match the order of the content. That's why when you select text in a PDF you often get bits you don't want. And it's why it's hard to go from PDF to EPUP; it's not a simple translation, the software needs to understand the significance of relative positions of blocks of text, which is very far from trivial. Yes, it's a presentation format, but that means that you have lost information needed to make a robust EPUB file from it. A far better option is to start with EPUB and generate your PDF from it and a stylesheet. The only downsides are that free EPUB editing tools are not well developed (unless somebody can point me to one that I've missed) and that EPUB enforces a linear reading sequence (but you're going to have to deal with that anyway if you're going to produce EPUB).
No, the results won't look better. I have poor eyesight, so I choose a large text size on my eReader. If the original is EPUB then the text reflows smoothly and it's all nicely readable. If it's PDF it doesn't, and the results look like crap. The solution you propose means anticipating the individual requirements of every potential user, and producing a customised PDF for that user. What's more, if I'm in bright light then I can move to a smaller text size to see more at one time, but doing it your way I'd need two copies of the file (and some way of synchronising the bookmarks and annotations). We've moved beyond the age of one-size-fits-all, but PDF hasn't. LaTeX doesn't seem to have, either. Essentially, you need to separate content from presentation, which neither PDF nor laTeX does, although there is work on moving laTeX towards that.
The trouble is, PDF is a pretty rotten format for e-readers, because it's all page-layout oriented and so produces output that doesn't scale well for different screen formats and text sizes. It's the wrong format for the job. And DVI has pretty much the same problems. The problem isn't that free software isn't ready for ePublishing -- Calibre and Sigil do the job well. The problem is that there's a disconnect between the assumptions laTeX makes about a document and the assumptions that are valid for ePublishing, Sorry if it's restating the blindingly obvious, but you didn't want the best system for PDF generation, you wanted the best system for PDF and EPUB generation, and that probably isn't laTeX.
Last time I was due to fly from Schipol they told me there was no point in waiting, they couldn't get me to my destination, and put me on a train. They had the advantage that my destination was in continental Europe. The time before that the flight was overbooked and was the last flight of the day. There are many reasons for going to or via Schipol, but avoiding delays isn't one of them.
And yes, you could go via train or car, but if you go by train you've got to lug your baggage between trains at London Paddington station, London Kings Cross International station and Brussels Midi station, instead of checking it through. If you go by car you've still got the problem of getting across the channel and about a five hour drive given European driving conditions, and you either have to rent the car or park it at Schipol for the duration of your journey. And neither option is exactly cheap unless you can get one of the very elusive deals.
I live in London and have done a lot of contract work in The Netherlands, so I'm quite used to the journey to Schipol. Trust me, it's a flight.
Your need is the driver. Believe it or not, your doctor is trying to serve please you.
I'm sure my doctor is -- she seems to be a nice person. But I'm not sure I would be her choice of charity donation.
Adding value added services like portable records do this. And draw your business away from doctors who don't implement this technology.
My doctor has pretty much all the business she can cope with, and so has no incentive to draw more business. Besides, I would need to know when choosing a GP everywhere that I might visit in the future, to check that they had data sharing with doctors there. Doesn't work.
What sort of strange world do you live in where you trust your life with someone who you don't trust with the money you pay them?
Perhaps you should read the original article, and learn that it relates to the UK, and that I don't (directly) pay my doctor. The good news for me is that I only pay (through taxation) a small fraction of what folks in the USA pay, for comparable health outcomes (or have the costs gone down significantly with Obamacare?). You see, your system only works if there is an oversupply -- the good doctors have significant spare capacity -- which is inherently inefficient. And, as I said earlier, it doesn't deal with negative externalities.
You're missing the point. When it becomes necessary to have your records moved around like that, and the need outweighs the cost, it will happen naturally by private hands.
And what would the driver for that be? I have the need, the doctor bears the cost. Sure, the the people who are running and implementing the system know the needs of the system better than some government bureaucrat, but they have no incentive to meet them. Your sort of free-market libertarianism doesn't seem to have an effective mechanism for dealing with negative externalities.
Once again, this proves anything that needs to get done, gets done, privately (doctors implementing their own electronic database) without the need of government.
Except it doesn't do what needs to be done, only the easy part of what needs to be done. It's fine as long as I only fall ill close to home, but if I need to see a doctor when I'm at the other end of the country, well fine, I can see a doctor, but they won't have access to my medical records.
I daresay Heathrow is even further than that. It's a good 30 miles if I recall correctly, without looking at google maps.
It's 15 miles from Central London, not 30. Maybe you are thinking of London Gatwick, which is 23 miles out, London Luton at 32 miles out or London Stansted at 40 miles out. Or maybe you caught the tube instead of the mainline rail service, in which case it feels like 30.
It depends what you mean by London. Heathrow is in London, being in the London Borough of Hillingdon. But I suspect Virgin Media are not planning to put the free WiFi all over London, just all over Central London, in which case you're right. I hope they do mean all of London, though, because it would be handy for me here in the London Borough of Bromley, also on the edge of London.
Can you bundle your app into a single file, and run it by double-clicking it, on any one of a dozen platforms?
Are your runtime requirements available on ALL of the commonly available platforms, so people don't have to change their platform to run your code?
Does he have a requirement for any of those things? Cross-platform costs, and if those costs are not recovered from increased market then it's a bad business model.
I take it you regularly monitor the radiation levels at home to make sure your neighbours aren't messing with stuff like this. (The worrying thing is that you sound like the sort of person who might.)
I have a Windows mobile phone. To unlock it I have to press a key then slide a slider on the touch screen. The difference with my wife's Android phone is that she has to press a key then slide anywhere on the screen, not slide a specific slider. Anybody got the wording of the Apple patent?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the point. If the admins are dicks, they should be personally harrassed and physically attacked, until they cease to be dicks.
The trouble is, it might be the people doing the harassment and attacks who are being dicks, not the admins. The odds go that way.
The trouble is, it's all about future languages. For the desktop at the moment my choices seem to be Python or Ruby for scripting -- both good, choice down to programmer preference and availability of pre-rolled code relevant to the project in hand -- and C# or Java for larger-scale stuff, both bogged down with corporate ownership issues. I'm almost tempted to revert to C++ unless somebody can point me to a real viable alternative rather than an experimental language. (There's some stuff I do in Ada, but that's a bit heavy for general purpose stuff).
If only. I got it from The Jargon File.
If you are using a language with a centralised official body mandating correct usage, such as French or Esperanto, yes. English isn't one of those languages.
Do you have a pdf reader that tries to increase the font size, or make font substitutions, rather than just zooming the whole page?
Yes, my eReader, because it only has the facility to turn the page, not to move around the page. And as far as I'm concerned, it's not the fault of the reader for trying to do that, it's the fault of publishers supplying content in a format that tries to stop me, which I view in the same light as DVDs that won't let me pause the main feature while I take a comfort break. I don't want to have to read a broadsheet newspaper through a letter box by asking somebody on the other side of the door to move it around.
Some documents are typographically complex, or convey their meaning partly through layout and typography, and these elements will be destroyed by typical e-book software and are not preserved in e-book formats.
And won't be displayed on my eReader, even if you use PDF. Yes, PDF is a good format for such documents, but not for an eReader because it won't work.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, also: "the incongruity created when the (tragic) significance of a character's speech or actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned; the literary device so used, orig. in Greek tragedy; also transf."
We (the audience) saw this coming, but Oracle don't seem to have. So that's irony in this, one of the earliest senses.
Any noun can be verbed.
Yes, you've pointed out the drawbacks with deploying as pdf, which I agree are real. And I think I've pointed out the advantages of pdf, and the drawbacks of ebook formats as they are currently implemented. If you're an author and you care or want to control what the document actually looks like, then pdf (or a bunch of images) is your only option.
No, it isn't an option. PDF doesn't do that unless you also control the device on which it is displayed. When I view a PDF with large text on my eReader I'm damn sure that what I see isn't what the author intended (not all authors can be that demented, surely). If you are trying to do that then you have overstepped your role as an author. If you think you have succeeded then you should try talking to your users (especially ones with visual impairment). PDF does have it's uses, but that isn't one of them.
But one of the main reasons for LaTeX is exactly to separate content from presentation, so I think you're misinformed about that
I used to use laTeX a lot, and was a member of the TUG. LaTeX is better than raw TeX, in terms of separation of content and presentation, but most raw TeX is still there in LaTeX, and LaTeX commands such as \textwidth, \baselineskip, \raisebox (everything to do with boxes, in fact), \vspace, \textbf and so many other laTeX constructs are about presentation, not content. You can write laTeX that separates content from presentation, but tools that claim to process laTeX can't assume that you have; they need to accept all legal laTeX, including all the presentation stuff.
and that point doesn't apply to pdf, which is for consumption only, not for writing.
Internally, PDF is quite like DVI in terms of how it structures a page, and the content and presentation have been well and truly merged. PDF puts blocks in defined positions on the page, and the order of the blocks doesn't necessarily match the order of the content. That's why when you select text in a PDF you often get bits you don't want. And it's why it's hard to go from PDF to EPUP; it's not a simple translation, the software needs to understand the significance of relative positions of blocks of text, which is very far from trivial. Yes, it's a presentation format, but that means that you have lost information needed to make a robust EPUB file from it. A far better option is to start with EPUB and generate your PDF from it and a stylesheet. The only downsides are that free EPUB editing tools are not well developed (unless somebody can point me to one that I've missed) and that EPUB enforces a linear reading sequence (but you're going to have to deal with that anyway if you're going to produce EPUB).
No, the results won't look better. I have poor eyesight, so I choose a large text size on my eReader. If the original is EPUB then the text reflows smoothly and it's all nicely readable. If it's PDF it doesn't, and the results look like crap. The solution you propose means anticipating the individual requirements of every potential user, and producing a customised PDF for that user. What's more, if I'm in bright light then I can move to a smaller text size to see more at one time, but doing it your way I'd need two copies of the file (and some way of synchronising the bookmarks and annotations). We've moved beyond the age of one-size-fits-all, but PDF hasn't. LaTeX doesn't seem to have, either. Essentially, you need to separate content from presentation, which neither PDF nor laTeX does, although there is work on moving laTeX towards that.
The trouble is, PDF is a pretty rotten format for e-readers, because it's all page-layout oriented and so produces output that doesn't scale well for different screen formats and text sizes. It's the wrong format for the job. And DVI has pretty much the same problems. The problem isn't that free software isn't ready for ePublishing -- Calibre and Sigil do the job well. The problem is that there's a disconnect between the assumptions laTeX makes about a document and the assumptions that are valid for ePublishing, Sorry if it's restating the blindingly obvious, but you didn't want the best system for PDF generation, you wanted the best system for PDF and EPUB generation, and that probably isn't laTeX.
Last time I was due to fly from Schipol they told me there was no point in waiting, they couldn't get me to my destination, and put me on a train. They had the advantage that my destination was in continental Europe. The time before that the flight was overbooked and was the last flight of the day. There are many reasons for going to or via Schipol, but avoiding delays isn't one of them.
And yes, you could go via train or car, but if you go by train you've got to lug your baggage between trains at London Paddington station, London Kings Cross International station and Brussels Midi station, instead of checking it through. If you go by car you've still got the problem of getting across the channel and about a five hour drive given European driving conditions, and you either have to rent the car or park it at Schipol for the duration of your journey. And neither option is exactly cheap unless you can get one of the very elusive deals.
I live in London and have done a lot of contract work in The Netherlands, so I'm quite used to the journey to Schipol. Trust me, it's a flight.
Your need is the driver . Believe it or not, your doctor is trying to serve please you.
I'm sure my doctor is -- she seems to be a nice person. But I'm not sure I would be her choice of charity donation.
Adding value added services like portable records do this. And draw your business away from doctors who don't implement this technology.
My doctor has pretty much all the business she can cope with, and so has no incentive to draw more business. Besides, I would need to know when choosing a GP everywhere that I might visit in the future, to check that they had data sharing with doctors there. Doesn't work.
What sort of strange world do you live in where you trust your life with someone who you don't trust with the money you pay them?
Perhaps you should read the original article, and learn that it relates to the UK, and that I don't (directly) pay my doctor. The good news for me is that I only pay (through taxation) a small fraction of what folks in the USA pay, for comparable health outcomes (or have the costs gone down significantly with Obamacare?). You see, your system only works if there is an oversupply -- the good doctors have significant spare capacity -- which is inherently inefficient. And, as I said earlier, it doesn't deal with negative externalities.
London's best airport, Schiphol Amsterdam, is a short 355 km (220 mi) away
Just a short flight -- oh, wait...
You're missing the point. When it becomes necessary to have your records moved around like that, and the need outweighs the cost, it will happen naturally by private hands.
And what would the driver for that be? I have the need, the doctor bears the cost. Sure, the the people who are running and implementing the system know the needs of the system better than some government bureaucrat, but they have no incentive to meet them. Your sort of free-market libertarianism doesn't seem to have an effective mechanism for dealing with negative externalities.
Once again, this proves anything that needs to get done, gets done, privately (doctors implementing their own electronic database) without the need of government.
Except it doesn't do what needs to be done, only the easy part of what needs to be done. It's fine as long as I only fall ill close to home, but if I need to see a doctor when I'm at the other end of the country, well fine, I can see a doctor, but they won't have access to my medical records.
I daresay Heathrow is even further than that. It's a good 30 miles if I recall correctly, without looking at google maps.
It's 15 miles from Central London, not 30. Maybe you are thinking of London Gatwick, which is 23 miles out, London Luton at 32 miles out or London Stansted at 40 miles out. Or maybe you caught the tube instead of the mainline rail service, in which case it feels like 30.
Heathrow is a long tube ride away from "London"
It depends what you mean by London. Heathrow is in London, being in the London Borough of Hillingdon. But I suspect Virgin Media are not planning to put the free WiFi all over London, just all over Central London, in which case you're right. I hope they do mean all of London, though, because it would be handy for me here in the London Borough of Bromley, also on the edge of London.
[citation needed]. The RA agrees with the summary.
The "London" in question isn't in the States.
Can you bundle your app into a single file, and run it by double-clicking it, on any one of a dozen platforms?
Are your runtime requirements available on ALL of the commonly available platforms, so people don't have to change their platform to run your code?
Does he have a requirement for any of those things? Cross-platform costs, and if those costs are not recovered from increased market then it's a bad business model.
When a sheep killer has ever actually killed a sheep? Well, yes, sure. A sheep is an object of consumption, isn't it?
What if the teacher is a family friend (very likely in small communities), and then your kid ends up in their class?
Or even the kid's parent?
I take it you regularly monitor the radiation levels at home to make sure your neighbours aren't messing with stuff like this. (The worrying thing is that you sound like the sort of person who might.)
I have a Windows mobile phone. To unlock it I have to press a key then slide a slider on the touch screen. The difference with my wife's Android phone is that she has to press a key then slide anywhere on the screen, not slide a specific slider. Anybody got the wording of the Apple patent?
Apple's "innovation" in taking the hold switch concept and implementing it in a touch-based interface
You mean like Windows Mobile phones have? The lawyers must be looking forward for the next lawsuit on this patent.