Last I checked ghostscript and ghostview supported PDF. I've used ghostview as a poor-man's Acrobat, output to PS file, use gs to render pdf. Also handy for making PS files viewable on Windows machines.
www.zillah.com I mean an Eastern Washington farm town with a bunch of wineries is just so confusingly similar to a fire-breathing radioactive Japanese dinosaur.
Seriously you've really got to wonder in the current climate how long before a trademark holder goes after a small town with a name "confusingly similar" to their mark.
Wow, you have the luxury of using PL/I. A few years back I was involved in a Y2k remediation for a VERY large credit union. Their core financial system was written in MUMPS (now going by the name "Cache").
For whatever reason MUMPS programmers seem to follow a programming style copied from past winners of the obfusticated C and Perl contests. No comments, no indentation, whitespace only where required, single character variable and function names, 255 character lines, the MUMPS equivalent of #define heavily abused to make single character equivalents of various functions and operators, self modifing code, etc. Of course the language itself didn't do much to help, there were certain operations that had to be contained in a single line, the number of spaces after an operator had meaning, most symbols had meaning, the meaning of spaces and symbols changed depending on context.
On the other hand I know it is possible to make perfectly readable MUMPS code since there were some examples of it within the code we were working on.
To this day I am absolutely amazed this code was able to do anything at all without error, much less run a credit union. How they were able to modify this code to add new services and comply with changing regulations defies comprehension.
After working on that system COBOL and PL/I don't seem so bad, heck even RPG was almost tolerable after that.
Ick, SCO. Not my favorite UNIX variant, I wouldn't run this dog unless I had an application that absolutely requred SCO. Back in the day SCO had something to offer (stablity and commercial software support) but nowdays I don't see any advantages over FreeBSD or Linux.
Eeek! that and "Productize" seemed to spew forth from the mouths of the Marketing and Product Management types with alarming frequency. Usually used to sandbag something as in "that's a great idea but we'd have to productize it first", or "we can't give the customer that hotfix until we productize it"
Frankly if I ran a company I would fire anyone who used buzzwords they got from Business 2.0 or Wired.
Huh? Risks of used hardware? I have a Ultra 1 w/128M RAM and Creator 3D video I got a Boeing Surplus for $100, it also came w/2 2G Segate Barracudas I spent $80 to replace with a pair of 9G IBM drives, no CD-ROM, but I picked up a surplus 2x SCSI burner for $10 and an external SCSI case for $10. I also have a Sparc 5/170E w/256M, CD, and 24bit framebuffer I got for free, plus $60 for the 18G SCA drive in it. I also have a Sun 20E monitor I got for $40. I suppose there is a risk some of this hardware might have been DOA but at prices this low do I really care?
As for the risk of buying off of eBay there are some things you can do to protect yourself: 1. Only buy from sellers with lots of auctions of the type of gear your are buying and good feedback ratings. 2. know what you are buying and what range the winning bids are usually in. 3. never assume anything not specificly mentioned in the description of the item. i.e. if the description does not mention RAM do not assume it comes with RAM, if the description does not mention a framebuffer do not assume it comes with a framebuffer.
You may also want to consider a Sun Blade workstation, they start at ~$1100, and can use standard VGA monitors and USB keyboards and mice.
The transition is not finished yet. Barring the company going out of business, if you were selected for a layoff, you were paid too much for that position. End of story. The only time I got laid off, I was one of the last ones to go. I got to watch the doors be closed and locked for the last time. Every inept person in the company was laid off months prior.
Then explain the people who got laid off and were hired back as contractors at 2x-3x their former salaries? Some people I know have been working as contractors for their former employers longer than they were as regular employees.
What is the status of any antitrust action against Microsoft in other countries? I heard a few years back the EU was investigating them, I haven't heard much since.
The problem is if a company is found to be an illegal monopoly this sort of agreement is no longer a "typical price negotiation" its predatory pricing among other things.
If Dell signs an agreement with UPS to only ship UPS for a big discount this isn't the same thing because express shipping is a competitive market. Dell presumably before signing such an agreement would ask FedEx to make an offer. Dell shipping only UPS is not going to put FedEx out of business. If FedEx loses too many customers to UPS from this sort of deal they are going to start undercutting UPS.
The situation in the PC industry is nowhere near the same. There is one OS vendor with over 80% of the market. A majority of PCs sold are made by just 3 or 4 vendors (Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba). So for Microsoft to have an exclusive contract with all of the major vendors means Be, Apple, RedHat or whoever don't stand a chance of taking market share from MS.
As others have stated a Federal Court Judge has determined Microsoft is a monopoly and has illegally used it's monopoly power to extend it's monopoly. The only question at this point is what the punisment will be.
Even worse there was a consent decree with the Justice department back in 1995 or so that specificly addressed Microsoft's relationship with it's OEMs. This agreement prohibited Microsoft from using contract language that required license fees for every computer an OEM sold or required that every computer an OEM sold come with a Microsoft OS. The license terms that go into effect after 9/1/2002 would seem to violate the spirit if not the letter of this agreement.
Frankly I'm hoping the Judge in the antitrust case revokes Microsoft's corprate charter. It isn't that I think Microsoft is particularly evil but I think they should get the boom lowered on them for openly mocking Federal anti-trust law, the FTC, the Justice Department, and the Courts.
Tha thing that really galls me about the current royalty rates for webcasters is how much higher they are than for all other manditory/RAND licensing for music. The fees for broadcast radio and TV, cable radio (DMX), muzak, background music in stores, DJs music at nightclubs, etc. are all far lower per song and per listener than the rates set for webcasters.
Because of its (humongous) size, only the C-5 can carry them.
Actually the new C-17 can carry M1 series tanks.
Several issues with trying to carry cargo on a plane: 1) dimensions of cargo vs dimensions of cargo hold. (it has to fit inside the plane) 2) dimensions of cargo doors vs cargo. (it has to fit in the door) 3) max weight of cargo allowed. (a 68t cargo can't be flown in a plane with a 40t capacity) 4) strength of cargo hold floor. (military cargo planes have heavily re-enforced floors)
These companies aren't going out and banning all the copies of these films with dirty scenes/words in them. They're providing people with more options in order to enjoy them.
Hopefully services like the pre-edited DVDs and videos and the device that automaticly blanks objetionable scenes will lead to less calls for censorship by the studios, TV stations, cable outlets, rental outlets, retailers, etc. If people have a way to watch a movie or TV show that eliminates the parts they object to it makes it harder to argue that EVERYONE should only be able to buy/see a version without the parts they object to.
Actually fair use is what allows video stores to rent videos and DVDs. The MPAA once upon a time when videos were like $80 each tried to stop video rental, they lost, then they realized how much money the video rental market made for them.
I note this was developed in Finland. I suspect logging machines with a low impact on the forest environment are more popular in Scandinavia and Europe in general where there is a greater belief in sustainable forest practices than in the US or Canada. Also if these machines are fairly effcient at logging compared to traditional thinning or clearcutting practices I can see them being used in the US, after all many of the machines used in logging are already quite expensive, heck in some places they log with helicopters!
For the curious, some benchmarks for other processors:
CINT2000 Comp Base Processor Dell 864 Intel Pentium 4 (533 MHz system bus) AMD 738 AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+ Dell 648 Intel Pentium III Compaq 621 Alpha 21264C HP 569 PA-8700
CFP2000 Dell 878 Intel Pentium 4 (533 MHz system bus) Compaq 776 Alpha 21264C AMD 624 AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+ HP 526 PA-8700 Dell 437 Intel Pentium III
Overall winner in CINT200 and SpecInt2k is 2.53GHz P4. Overall winner for SpecFP2k is POWER (Itanium 2 wasn't tested for specfp). P3 (1.4GHz) does supprisingly well on the integer marks. Athlon XP 2200+ does about the same as 2.0 GHz P4 (northwood) on the integer marks and about the same as 1.6GHz P4 on FP.
BTW the OS field for the CFP2000 Itanium 2 tests is: "Linux64 Debian 3.0 with 2.4.18 kernel for Itanium2/zx1". I suspect it did better on the floating point benchmarks than HP-UX 11 since HP-UX was used for the integer benchmarks.
Believe it or not I suspect USPS sponsors cycling for the same reasons FedEx or UPS would sponsor sports, advertising. Many of the USPS services compete with private companies such as Express Mail, and Parcel Post.
hmm... pass out CDs with Sony's copy control system and Sharpies' to each member of the audience. Explain how to circumvent the copy control on the CD. Ask members of audience to proceed...
but if you take a bunch of crummy non-motivated coders and improve their skills and motivation you look good both to management and your co-workers. Funny thing when you teach/mentor is you often get something out of it as well, a better understanding of the subject matter, deep satisfaction, etc.
This is why companies love layoffs. It lets you get rid of the deadwood with less threat of a lawsuit. Unfortunately good employees occasionally get kicked to the curb as well, due to political score settling or whole departments or teams getting cut.
If you are capable of producing their work in a short amount of time, clearly you have an idea of how it can be implemented. Sit down with each one individually and get to finer details of their roles. Help write pseudocode, if necessary, and then let them actually bang it out. I'm suggesting, in a way, that you do it all yourself without quite doing it all yourself.
If you do the above rather than simply going off alone and finishing the project by yourself you should really impress your bosses and most of your co-workers. I would pair-program with each of them on a rotating basis and ask the remaining 2 to pair program with each other. This will allow you to quickly asess where each of them is at. I would also put into place some of the things that are considered "current best practice" in the industry such as daily checkins, daily builds, and weekly or even daily code-reviews.
The problem is the DCMA is a howlizer being used to kill a misquito. There are many legitimate uses of copy control curcumvention technologies such as watching anime DVD's that are never likely to be released in region 1, viewing DRM content on platforms other than Windows, playing content you purchased on devices of your choice, shifting the content to a more convienient format, archival copies, etc. Note that all of these uses, except for the copy control circumvention, perfectly legal under current law (Sony v. Universal, Home Recording Rights Act, etc.). Far more troubling to myself and others are the provisions of the DMCA that make it a crime to describe methods of copy control circumvention, this is what Mr. Perens is protesting. Under this portion of the DMCA if the RIAA were to come out with a new "super" DRM scheme that involved using ROT13 as the "encryption" scheme and you were to post this fact on bugtraq you could be sued or go to jail.
Most members of Congress seem to be asking that snail mail be sent to their local district offices instead of their offices in DC. Most of them suggest Phone calls, FAXes, and email as an alternative to snail mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! you get a whole Ultra 5 to yourself? The truely cheap VP would have you all developing on a shared surplus Ultra 1.
Last I checked ghostscript and ghostview supported PDF. I've used ghostview as a poor-man's Acrobat, output to PS file, use gs to render pdf. Also handy for making PS files viewable on Windows machines.
www.zillah.com I mean an Eastern Washington farm town with a bunch of wineries is just so confusingly similar to a fire-breathing radioactive Japanese dinosaur.
Seriously you've really got to wonder in the current climate how long before a trademark holder goes after a small town with a name "confusingly similar" to their mark.
Wow, you have the luxury of using PL/I. A few years back I was involved in a Y2k remediation for a VERY large credit union. Their core financial system was written in MUMPS (now going by the name "Cache").
For whatever reason MUMPS programmers seem to follow a programming style copied from past winners of the obfusticated C and Perl contests. No comments, no indentation, whitespace only where required, single character variable and function names, 255 character lines, the MUMPS equivalent of #define heavily abused to make single character equivalents of various functions and operators, self modifing code, etc. Of course the language itself didn't do much to help, there were certain operations that had to be contained in a single line, the number of spaces after an operator had meaning, most symbols had meaning, the meaning of spaces and symbols changed depending on context.
On the other hand I know it is possible to make perfectly readable MUMPS code since there were some examples of it within the code we were working on.
To this day I am absolutely amazed this code was able to do anything at all without error, much less run a credit union. How they were able to modify this code to add new services and comply with changing regulations defies comprehension.
After working on that system COBOL and PL/I don't seem so bad, heck even RPG was almost tolerable after that.
Ick, SCO. Not my favorite UNIX variant, I wouldn't run this dog unless I had an application that absolutely requred SCO. Back in the day SCO had something to offer (stablity and commercial software support) but nowdays I don't see any advantages over FreeBSD or Linux.
Eeek! that and "Productize" seemed to spew forth from the mouths of the Marketing and Product Management types with alarming frequency. Usually used to sandbag something as in "that's a great idea but we'd have to productize it first", or "we can't give the customer that hotfix until we productize it"
Frankly if I ran a company I would fire anyone who used buzzwords they got from Business 2.0 or Wired.
Huh? Risks of used hardware? I have a Ultra 1 w/128M RAM and Creator 3D video I got a Boeing Surplus for $100, it also came w/2 2G Segate Barracudas I spent $80 to replace with a pair of 9G IBM drives, no CD-ROM, but I picked up a surplus 2x SCSI burner for $10 and an external SCSI case for $10. I also have a Sparc 5/170E w/256M, CD, and 24bit framebuffer I got for free, plus $60 for the 18G SCA drive in it. I also have a Sun 20E monitor I got for $40. I suppose there is a risk some of this hardware might have been DOA but at prices this low do I really care?
As for the risk of buying off of eBay there are some things you can do to protect yourself:
1. Only buy from sellers with lots of auctions of the type of gear your are buying and good feedback ratings.
2. know what you are buying and what range the winning bids are usually in.
3. never assume anything not specificly mentioned in the description of the item. i.e. if the description does not mention RAM do not assume it comes with RAM, if the description does not mention a framebuffer do not assume it comes with a framebuffer.
You may also want to consider a Sun Blade workstation, they start at ~$1100, and can use standard VGA monitors and USB keyboards and mice.
The transition is not finished yet. Barring the company going out of business, if you were selected for a layoff, you were paid too much for that position. End of story. The only time I got laid off, I was one of the last ones to go. I got to watch the doors be closed and locked for the last time. Every inept person in the company was laid off months prior.
Then explain the people who got laid off and were hired back as contractors at 2x-3x their former salaries? Some people I know have been working as contractors for their former employers longer than they were as regular employees.
What is the status of any antitrust action against Microsoft in other countries? I heard a few years back the EU was investigating them, I haven't heard much since.
The problem is if a company is found to be an illegal monopoly this sort of agreement is no longer a "typical price negotiation" its predatory pricing among other things.
If Dell signs an agreement with UPS to only ship UPS for a big discount this isn't the same thing because express shipping is a competitive market. Dell presumably before signing such an agreement would ask FedEx to make an offer. Dell shipping only UPS is not going to put FedEx out of business. If FedEx loses too many customers to UPS from this sort of deal they are going to start undercutting UPS.
The situation in the PC industry is nowhere near the same. There is one OS vendor with over 80% of the market. A majority of PCs sold are made by just 3 or 4 vendors (Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba). So for Microsoft to have an exclusive contract with all of the major vendors means Be, Apple, RedHat or whoever don't stand a chance of taking market share from MS.
As others have stated a Federal Court Judge has determined Microsoft is a monopoly and has illegally used it's monopoly power to extend it's monopoly. The only question at this point is what the punisment will be.
Even worse there was a consent decree with the Justice department back in 1995 or so that specificly addressed Microsoft's relationship with it's OEMs. This agreement prohibited Microsoft from using contract language that required license fees for every computer an OEM sold or required that every computer an OEM sold come with a Microsoft OS. The license terms that go into effect after 9/1/2002 would seem to violate the spirit if not the letter of this agreement.
Frankly I'm hoping the Judge in the antitrust case revokes Microsoft's corprate charter. It isn't that I think Microsoft is particularly evil but I think they should get the boom lowered on them for openly mocking Federal anti-trust law, the FTC, the Justice Department, and the Courts.
The US has the best government money can buy!
Tha thing that really galls me about the current royalty rates for webcasters is how much higher they are than for all other manditory/RAND licensing for music. The fees for broadcast radio and TV, cable radio (DMX), muzak, background music in stores, DJs music at nightclubs, etc. are all far lower per song and per listener than the rates set for webcasters.
Because of its (humongous) size, only the C-5 can carry them.
Actually the new C-17 can carry M1 series tanks.
Several issues with trying to carry cargo on a plane:
1) dimensions of cargo vs dimensions of cargo hold. (it has to fit inside the plane)
2) dimensions of cargo doors vs cargo. (it has to fit in the door)
3) max weight of cargo allowed. (a 68t cargo can't be flown in a plane with a 40t capacity)
4) strength of cargo hold floor. (military cargo planes have heavily re-enforced floors)
These companies aren't going out and banning all the copies of these films with dirty scenes/words in them. They're providing people with more options in order to enjoy them.
Hopefully services like the pre-edited DVDs and videos and the device that automaticly blanks objetionable scenes will lead to less calls for censorship by the studios, TV stations, cable outlets, rental outlets, retailers, etc. If people have a way to watch a movie or TV show that eliminates the parts they object to it makes it harder to argue that EVERYONE should only be able to buy/see a version without the parts they object to.
Actually fair use is what allows video stores to rent videos and DVDs. The MPAA once upon a time when videos were like $80 each tried to stop video rental, they lost, then they realized how much money the video rental market made for them.
I note this was developed in Finland. I suspect logging machines with a low impact on the forest environment are more popular in Scandinavia and Europe in general where there is a greater belief in sustainable forest practices than in the US or Canada. Also if these machines are fairly effcient at logging compared to traditional thinning or clearcutting practices I can see them being used in the US, after all many of the machines used in logging are already quite expensive, heck in some places they log with helicopters!
For the curious, some benchmarks for other processors:
CINT2000
Comp Base Processor
Dell 864 Intel Pentium 4 (533 MHz system bus)
AMD 738 AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+
Dell 648 Intel Pentium III
Compaq 621 Alpha 21264C
HP 569 PA-8700
CFP2000
Dell 878 Intel Pentium 4 (533 MHz system bus)
Compaq 776 Alpha 21264C
AMD 624 AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2200+
HP 526 PA-8700
Dell 437 Intel Pentium III
Overall winner in CINT200 and SpecInt2k is 2.53GHz P4. Overall winner for SpecFP2k is POWER (Itanium 2 wasn't tested for specfp). P3 (1.4GHz) does supprisingly well on the integer marks. Athlon XP 2200+ does about the same as 2.0 GHz P4 (northwood) on the integer marks and about the same as 1.6GHz P4 on FP.
BTW the OS field for the CFP2000 Itanium 2 tests is: "Linux64 Debian 3.0 with 2.4.18 kernel for Itanium2/zx1". I suspect it did better on the floating point benchmarks than HP-UX 11 since HP-UX was used for the integer benchmarks.
Believe it or not I suspect USPS sponsors cycling for the same reasons FedEx or UPS would sponsor sports, advertising. Many of the USPS services compete with private companies such as Express Mail, and Parcel Post.
hmm ... pass out CDs with Sony's copy control system and Sharpies' to each member of the audience. Explain how to circumvent the copy control on the CD. Ask members of audience to proceed ...
but if you take a bunch of crummy non-motivated coders and improve their skills and motivation you look good both to management and your co-workers. Funny thing when you teach/mentor is you often get something out of it as well, a better understanding of the subject matter, deep satisfaction, etc.
This is why companies love layoffs. It lets you get rid of the deadwood with less threat of a lawsuit. Unfortunately good employees occasionally get kicked to the curb as well, due to political score settling or whole departments or teams getting cut.
If you are capable of producing their work in a short amount of time, clearly you have an idea of how it can be implemented. Sit down with each one individually and get to finer details of their roles. Help write pseudocode, if necessary, and then let them actually bang it out. I'm suggesting, in a way, that you do it all yourself without quite doing it all yourself.
If you do the above rather than simply going off alone and finishing the project by yourself you should really impress your bosses and most of your co-workers. I would pair-program with each of them on a rotating basis and ask the remaining 2 to pair program with each other. This will allow you to quickly asess where each of them is at. I would also put into place some of the things that are considered "current best practice" in the industry such as daily checkins, daily builds, and weekly or even daily code-reviews.
The problem is the DCMA is a howlizer being used to kill a misquito. There are many legitimate uses of copy control curcumvention technologies such as watching anime DVD's that are never likely to be released in region 1, viewing DRM content on platforms other than Windows, playing content you purchased on devices of your choice, shifting the content to a more convienient format, archival copies, etc. Note that all of these uses, except for the copy control circumvention, perfectly legal under current law (Sony v. Universal, Home Recording Rights Act, etc.). Far more troubling to myself and others are the provisions of the DMCA that make it a crime to describe methods of copy control circumvention, this is what Mr. Perens is protesting. Under this portion of the DMCA if the RIAA were to come out with a new "super" DRM scheme that involved using ROT13 as the "encryption" scheme and you were to post this fact on bugtraq you could be sued or go to jail.
Break ROT13, go to jail!
Most members of Congress seem to be asking that snail mail be sent to their local district offices instead of their offices in DC. Most of them suggest Phone calls, FAXes, and email as an alternative to snail mail.