dvipdfm is quite capable of generating most everything you could want in PDF; it can do hyperlinks and thumbnails and so on.
the xfig format has several different vector-based software designers -- as in, there are several programs on CTAN that'll convert specially formatted commands into xfig format.
my personal opinion is that you have everything you need with those three tools.
Use a packet shaper. The one that comes to mind (proprietary, however) is Packeteer. These filter based on protocol (I think), so usually they can keep out resourceful programs like gnutella, etc.
Physics still uses LaTeX quite a bit; for astronomy, it's the standard. Once you get used to it, you will find that it's much easier to use, and especially for formatting data -- you can reformat a LaTeX data table with sed&awk in seconds.
If you look around, many of the journals accept the LaTeX source -- I know that ApJ does, and I believe APS does. But you'll also notice that submissions to the NSF can be done in DVI format, as well. Many people still use it, and many still require it.
But, hey, if you don't like it, use something else and then convert it to LaTeX later. But I guarantee that if you start using it, you'll love it. I can't stand WYSIWIG word processors anymore, mainly because I can't be guaranteed of reproducible results.
Read the whole thread; not everyone thinks it was because of the peace comments. (Not that it would be surprising to this particular slashdotter.)
Something else that ought to be looked at is the Microsoft angle -- in the past they've put pressure on public institutions to avoid supporting open source projects and instead invest in the "free" market. in this particular climate, of jingoism and nationalism, how hard would it be for them to target OpenBSD as a Canadian, anti-capitalist movement, and then to shove a couple hundred copies of IIS under DARPA's nose?
But, then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding the nature of the grant. It is quite possible that DARPA was funding it specifically because of the non-proprietary nature of the software.
My guess? We'll never know the whole story. (But, I've been wrong before. I used to think Enterprise had promise.)
Geeks that hate Microsoft and put Linux on their XBox are not likely to buy XBox games and play them. Microsoft loses money on every XBox sold and only makes a profit from you if you buy more than four or five games over the life of the system.
This is a dangerous meme... Let's say, for instance, that MS spends $800 (numbers exaggerated for clarity) on each X-Box. They then get sold for $400. MS lost $400 on this transaction. They expect to sell 4 $100 games over the next year or so to the 'consumer' (Geek A) that bought that X-Box.
So, if we as geeks all buy an X-Box, Microsoft is losing $400 on each one! Let's all team up, get about a hundred million geeks to do this, and we'll have seriously depleted their cash reserves!
And yet, somehow, this doesn't have quite the same impact as letting MS twist in the wind, having lost $800 on the X-Box that Geek A didn't buy, that is now being left for dead in a ditch on the side of the road.
We mitigate their losses whenever we buy an X-Box, even if we don't buy a single game. I intend to do no mitigating.
GW used to be a much different organization. As they became bigger and bigger, it seems like they really lost touch with the gamers, and they kept targetting a younger and younger crowd. I mean, if you can, get your hands on a copy of "Rogue Trader" -- and then compare the feel of the rules to the ones from the latest edition of WH40k. They've added more models, and yeah, they're better models, but it feels like they've surrounded them in a web of dense, arbitrary rules.
I suppose that's necessary, for the climate of gaming nowadays. It's much more important to win than to play, which it didn't feel like when I first got into WH/WH40k oh-so-long ago.
Well, anyway, this doesn't surprise me. TSR went through a phase like this, before WotC bought them out. Remember when all the online D&D supplements were curiously void of any actual references to D&D? I think GW is making that same transition -- from a company made of gamers to a company selling to gamers.
My favorite is the Random Number error. It took a while, but someone discovered that apparantly one of the portable random number generators behaves poorly during the first 2000 or so of each seed number. So, naturally, Dr. Knuth corrected it almost immediately.
Never have I seen a man so humble that so amply deserved to be arrogant...
I loved this game... In fact, I think it's the last game I've played to completion, and the first one I had in several years. It was funny, the engine didn't overshadow the game, the characters were likable, it had a really cool premise, and even good voice acting.
Too bad they never made the sequel that it set up at the ending...
The bandwidth limitation is a big thing for me. I am pretty pleased to see it -- wget has had it for a while, and I like to be able to shut my connections off above 25k or so when it's during peak hours, to be considerate. Now I have that option for secure copying.:-)
I think everybody know what he wants to ask. "Ask Slashdot: Digital 4 Track Recorders?"
Yes, it turns out, Bruce Willis was dead through the entire movie. He only realized it when he saw that his wife dropped the ring; but there were numerous clues dropped, like his choice of attire through the entire thing, as well as some foreshadowing with the "I see dead people."
For a little bit of fun, hold down CMD+OPT+O+F at the boot chime. This will put you into the PROM, which is scriptable in Forth.
As I recall, isn't the FreeBSD bootloader scriptable in FORTH? Is OpenFirmware a completely separate development from the FreeBSD bootloader, or is Forth just particularly well-suited to that time of application?
I registered for COMDEX a couple years ago under the name of a company I was employed by; it was a three or four person company, and I won't comment on their licensing schemes here.
Regardless, I have gotten two letters in the last week -- one from the BSA, one from Microsoft -- saying I could be liable for an audit.
I'm no longer employed by the company, and the letters were sent to my dorm room. Will these guys come in and ransack my place? I'm running all Free Software but I still would rather avoid having the BSA tramp across my new floor rug.
More than that, the parent company of COMDEX is now bankrupt. This is the first time I can remember getting actual mail addressed to me as a programmer -- did COMDEX sell my info to stave off bankruptcy? Or did they always have that policy?
I have to agree that the GUI interfaces, as given, in XINE and MPlayer are both unweildy. I don't like the use of the SHAPE extension or whatever, which makes them very slooooow when moved around the desktop. And yeah, most of the skins suck -- too glitzy and whatnot, and I can't tell which button does what (although there was a corner-skin that was rather nice for a while.) XINE is worse than MPlayer, imo, because it doesn't have the wide formats of MPlayer, plus it uses exclusively the skinned GUI.
Ogle was a bit better in my book because it used widget sets and didn't try to implement its own. Yeah, it was ugly, but at least it was quick and I could move the control window around easily.
Recently, however, I've taken to using KMPlayer. It's a quick-and-dirty GUI for MPlayer written for KDE. It has DVD sensing, so it'll list the languages available, as well as subtitle support for DVD, and it's got very simple, usable controls at the bottom of the window. I previously used konqueror to navigate around my filesystem and then play the video files in MPlayer with the -nogui option, but now I can open them directly from within KMPlayer. Best part is that it's easy to use, and a very quick system -- no lag between drag/draw, that sort of thing.
As far as I'm concerned, this is what we need -- more simple, usable GUIs, and less of the elaborately skinned [anime/stereo/usflag/quake/matrix]-themed GUIs.
I always use Konqueror with Bitstream Charter, Bitstream Courier, Adobe Times and Adobe Helvetica.
In addition, I've found that my eyes are accustomed to having fonts with smaller spaces and no hinting, so with Xft1 I compiled with the xft-quality patch from Keith Packard, and for Xft2 I compile with the spacing part applied and then manually set/etc/fonts/fonts.conf to turn off hinting on the Bitstream fonts.
What on earth does the geekiest geek on God's green earth need *seven* terminal programs for?
I can see up to four being useful.
1. KDE -- konsole. This for integration with KDE; having it in the konq window and so forth.
2. GNOME -- gterminal, for full integration with a GNOME desktop.
3. Eterm/Aterm/rxvt for colorful, purty output, for mutt sessions and the like.
4. Xterm, for that one application that needs the tektronix emulation, or the peculiar mouse button behavior.
BUT, yes, all in all it's overkill. Anybody that needs tektronix emulation can sure as hell grab it themself, ya know? (And yes, I know xterm is part of the XFree86 distribution.:)
Well, I am a card carrying member of the BTTF fan club, and I remember from one of the four magazine issues I recieved a Q&A section, where the magazine was given the question of why did the future family exist, when Marty and Jennifer were brought forward -- the future they traveled to should have been a future where they disappeared in 1985. The answer was a blunt "we messed up," with an explanation that the future HAD to exist, because the ending of the first movie had the statement "Something's gotta be done about your kids!" and they couldn't very well go back on that, eh?
it's been said before, but it bears saying again. i, like many of you, was raised on a keyboard. my data entry skills with a keyboard are much higher than handwriting; in fact, i'd be so bold as to say that's the case with most people of the "computer" generation.
Unless they develop some killer feature (yes yes, in ADDITION to Linux support, these notwithstanding) I've got absolutely no intention of purchasing one. I'll buy a laptop or another desktop -- my PDA is good enough for incidental use, and, conveniently enough, fits in my pocket as opposed to my backpack...
My girlfriend and I are planning on going as Lilo and Stitch. Unfortunately, as it's probably not very likely to find a Stitch costume that fits me, I'm probably going to have to go as Lilo.:-/
Ok, this is important to me. Yeah, it sounds stupid that the suit was over silence - but what it really was about was that he credited Cage as an author and did not pay the estate. THAT caused the problem. Even Sonic Youth did a track of silence and didn't get sued - because they didn't have the cavalier audacity to credit someone else without checking the ramifications.
So how about we stop making fun of the situation? Cage's estate isn't at fault here. That guy shouldn't pull such stupid shit.
I'd be much more worried about the superficial phoenetic similarity to "Krautware," which I think could be much more detrimental to this German project.
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that can cause big problems later on.
I laughed out loud when I saw that it featured a quotation by "head of the SQL Server project" opposing a quotation by "head technical Yahoo." Somehow I'm much more reassured having a Yahoo on our side than a stuffed shirt...
Slashdot Mirror
dvipdfm is quite capable of generating most everything you could want in PDF; it can do hyperlinks and thumbnails and so on.
the xfig format has several different vector-based software designers -- as in, there are several programs on CTAN that'll convert specially formatted commands into xfig format.
my personal opinion is that you have everything you need with those three tools.
Use a packet shaper. The one that comes to mind (proprietary, however) is Packeteer. These filter based on protocol (I think), so usually they can keep out resourceful programs like gnutella, etc.
Physics still uses LaTeX quite a bit; for astronomy, it's the standard. Once you get used to it, you will find that it's much easier to use, and especially for formatting data -- you can reformat a LaTeX data table with sed&awk in seconds.
If you look around, many of the journals accept the LaTeX source -- I know that ApJ does, and I believe APS does. But you'll also notice that submissions to the NSF can be done in DVI format, as well. Many people still use it, and many still require it.
But, hey, if you don't like it, use something else and then convert it to LaTeX later. But I guarantee that if you start using it, you'll love it. I can't stand WYSIWIG word processors anymore, mainly because I can't be guaranteed of reproducible results.
How can Bill Gates be connected to the BSA?
billg made it to life scout, but not to eagle, if memory serves. He was one of the examples that Boys' Life trotted out when I was in the scouts...
Read the whole thread; not everyone thinks it was because of the peace comments. (Not that it would be surprising to this particular slashdotter.)
Something else that ought to be looked at is the Microsoft angle -- in the past they've put pressure on public institutions to avoid supporting open source projects and instead invest in the "free" market. in this particular climate, of jingoism and nationalism, how hard would it be for them to target OpenBSD as a Canadian, anti-capitalist movement, and then to shove a couple hundred copies of IIS under DARPA's nose?
But, then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding the nature of the grant. It is quite possible that DARPA was funding it specifically because of the non-proprietary nature of the software.
My guess? We'll never know the whole story. (But, I've been wrong before. I used to think Enterprise had promise.)
Geeks that hate Microsoft and put Linux on their XBox are not likely to buy XBox games and play them. Microsoft loses money on every XBox sold and only makes a profit from you if you buy more than four or five games over the life of the system.
This is a dangerous meme... Let's say, for instance, that MS spends $800 (numbers exaggerated for clarity) on each X-Box. They then get sold for $400. MS lost $400 on this transaction. They expect to sell 4 $100 games over the next year or so to the 'consumer' (Geek A) that bought that X-Box.
So, if we as geeks all buy an X-Box, Microsoft is losing $400 on each one! Let's all team up, get about a hundred million geeks to do this, and we'll have seriously depleted their cash reserves!
And yet, somehow, this doesn't have quite the same impact as letting MS twist in the wind, having lost $800 on the X-Box that Geek A didn't buy, that is now being left for dead in a ditch on the side of the road.
We mitigate their losses whenever we buy an X-Box, even if we don't buy a single game. I intend to do no mitigating.
GW used to be a much different organization. As they became bigger and bigger, it seems like they really lost touch with the gamers, and they kept targetting a younger and younger crowd. I mean, if you can, get your hands on a copy of "Rogue Trader" -- and then compare the feel of the rules to the ones from the latest edition of WH40k. They've added more models, and yeah, they're better models, but it feels like they've surrounded them in a web of dense, arbitrary rules.
I suppose that's necessary, for the climate of gaming nowadays. It's much more important to win than to play, which it didn't feel like when I first got into WH/WH40k oh-so-long ago.
Well, anyway, this doesn't surprise me. TSR went through a phase like this, before WotC bought them out. Remember when all the online D&D supplements were curiously void of any actual references to D&D? I think GW is making that same transition -- from a company made of gamers to a company selling to gamers.
Someone has to make a Knuth joke. I tried, couldn't come up with anything. Come on people!
Here's his errata.
My favorite is the Random Number error. It took a while, but someone discovered that apparantly one of the portable random number generators behaves poorly during the first 2000 or so of each seed number. So, naturally, Dr. Knuth corrected it almost immediately.
Never have I seen a man so humble that so amply deserved to be arrogant...
I loved this game... In fact, I think it's the last game I've played to completion, and the first one I had in several years. It was funny, the engine didn't overshadow the game, the characters were likable, it had a really cool premise, and even good voice acting.
:-)
Too bad they never made the sequel that it set up at the ending...
Then again, this movie looks promising.
The bandwidth limitation is a big thing for me. I am pretty pleased to see it -- wget has had it for a while, and I like to be able to shut my connections off above 25k or so when it's during peak hours, to be considerate. Now I have that option for secure copying. :-)
slashdot.org
newsforge.com
theregister.co.uk
my university's daily newspaper (no link!)
fark.com
the smirking chimp
dr. fun
the daily vault (although i review there once in a while)
google news
daily rotten
lwn.net
crackmonkey archives
the dot
kde-look.org
corona's coming attractions
snopes' update page
doc's weblog
And I think that's about it for a daily basis.
I think everybody know what he wants to ask. "Ask Slashdot: Digital 4 Track Recorders?"
Yes, it turns out, Bruce Willis was dead through the entire movie. He only realized it when he saw that his wife dropped the ring; but there were numerous clues dropped, like his choice of attire through the entire thing, as well as some foreshadowing with the "I see dead people."
Question answered.
For a little bit of fun, hold down CMD+OPT+O+F at the boot chime. This will put you into the PROM, which is scriptable in Forth.
As I recall, isn't the FreeBSD bootloader scriptable in FORTH? Is OpenFirmware a completely separate development from the FreeBSD bootloader, or is Forth just particularly well-suited to that time of application?
I registered for COMDEX a couple years ago under the name of a company I was employed by; it was a three or four person company, and I won't comment on their licensing schemes here.
Regardless, I have gotten two letters in the last week -- one from the BSA, one from Microsoft -- saying I could be liable for an audit.
I'm no longer employed by the company, and the letters were sent to my dorm room. Will these guys come in and ransack my place? I'm running all Free Software but I still would rather avoid having the BSA tramp across my new floor rug.
More than that, the parent company of COMDEX is now bankrupt. This is the first time I can remember getting actual mail addressed to me as a programmer -- did COMDEX sell my info to stave off bankruptcy? Or did they always have that policy?
It's actually Kuck and Associates that was acquired by Intel, not Kuch and Associates as listed in the article.
I have to agree that the GUI interfaces, as given, in XINE and MPlayer are both unweildy. I don't like the use of the SHAPE extension or whatever, which makes them very slooooow when moved around the desktop. And yeah, most of the skins suck -- too glitzy and whatnot, and I can't tell which button does what (although there was a corner-skin that was rather nice for a while.) XINE is worse than MPlayer, imo, because it doesn't have the wide formats of MPlayer, plus it uses exclusively the skinned GUI.
Ogle was a bit better in my book because it used widget sets and didn't try to implement its own. Yeah, it was ugly, but at least it was quick and I could move the control window around easily.
Recently, however, I've taken to using KMPlayer. It's a quick-and-dirty GUI for MPlayer written for KDE. It has DVD sensing, so it'll list the languages available, as well as subtitle support for DVD, and it's got very simple, usable controls at the bottom of the window. I previously used konqueror to navigate around my filesystem and then play the video files in MPlayer with the -nogui option, but now I can open them directly from within KMPlayer. Best part is that it's easy to use, and a very quick system -- no lag between drag/draw, that sort of thing.
As far as I'm concerned, this is what we need -- more simple, usable GUIs, and less of the elaborately skinned [anime/stereo/usflag/quake/matrix]-themed GUIs.
Also, I forgot to mention -- subpixel rendering definitely helps keep down the fuzziness with hinting turned off.
I always use Konqueror with Bitstream Charter, Bitstream Courier, Adobe Times and Adobe Helvetica.
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf to turn off hinting on the Bitstream fonts.
In addition, I've found that my eyes are accustomed to having fonts with smaller spaces and no hinting, so with Xft1 I compiled with the xft-quality patch from Keith Packard, and for Xft2 I compile with the spacing part applied and then manually set
What on earth does the geekiest geek on God's green earth need *seven* terminal programs for?
:)
I can see up to four being useful.
1. KDE -- konsole. This for integration with KDE; having it in the konq window and so forth.
2. GNOME -- gterminal, for full integration with a GNOME desktop.
3. Eterm/Aterm/rxvt for colorful, purty output, for mutt sessions and the like.
4. Xterm, for that one application that needs the tektronix emulation, or the peculiar mouse button behavior.
BUT, yes, all in all it's overkill. Anybody that needs tektronix emulation can sure as hell grab it themself, ya know? (And yes, I know xterm is part of the XFree86 distribution.
Well, I am a card carrying member of the BTTF fan club, and I remember from one of the four magazine issues I recieved a Q&A section, where the magazine was given the question of why did the future family exist, when Marty and Jennifer were brought forward -- the future they traveled to should have been a future where they disappeared in 1985. The answer was a blunt "we messed up," with an explanation that the future HAD to exist, because the ending of the first movie had the statement "Something's gotta be done about your kids!" and they couldn't very well go back on that, eh?
it's been said before, but it bears saying again. i, like many of you, was raised on a keyboard. my data entry skills with a keyboard are much higher than handwriting; in fact, i'd be so bold as to say that's the case with most people of the "computer" generation.
Unless they develop some killer feature (yes yes, in ADDITION to Linux support, these notwithstanding) I've got absolutely no intention of purchasing one. I'll buy a laptop or another desktop -- my PDA is good enough for incidental use, and, conveniently enough, fits in my pocket as opposed to my backpack...
My girlfriend and I are planning on going as Lilo and Stitch. Unfortunately, as it's probably not very likely to find a Stitch costume that fits me, I'm probably going to have to go as Lilo. :-/
Ok, this is important to me. Yeah, it sounds stupid that the suit was over silence - but what it really was about was that he credited Cage as an author and did not pay the estate. THAT caused the problem. Even Sonic Youth did a track of silence and didn't get sued - because they didn't have the cavalier audacity to credit someone else without checking the ramifications.
So how about we stop making fun of the situation? Cage's estate isn't at fault here. That guy shouldn't pull such stupid shit.
I'd be much more worried about the superficial phoenetic similarity to "Krautware," which I think could be much more detrimental to this German project.
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that can cause big problems later on.
I laughed out loud when I saw that it featured a quotation by "head of the SQL Server project" opposing a quotation by "head technical Yahoo." Somehow I'm much more reassured having a Yahoo on our side than a stuffed shirt...