and the ability to save your layout as an exceptionally lame static-sized web page
QuarkXPress is a tool for precisely placing text and images. Using relative sizing would completely break that. Quark users will not be using Quark to design web pages, but perhaps to preview web designs or preview print pieces on the web. Quark does not expect nor intend to gain share in the web design area.
This isn't hypocrisy. They were restricted from making unfounded claims. In the United States this is called libel, and there are indeed laws against it. Parody and other forms of creative expression are excluded, but harming businesses by making claims and refusing to found them is not legal. It isn't speech people disagree with - how can anyone agree with it when it's false or at least any supporting evidence is being withheld? If I post bill boards claiming Windows XP and Bill Gates are responsible for SARS, I too would be forced to halt my claims.
False. When the system is effective, it will be well known among criminals.
This will be true so called professional car theives. Two things to consider, however.
* Most professional car theives use disposable minions to steal the car. They use various techniques to maximize the chances of success while minimizing risk to the operation. They don't care as much about the actual theif, who usually is ignorant of the reasons behind the procedure given to him/her. * The majority of criminals, especially violent criminals as the parent mentions, do not expect to get caught. Their passion for revenge/money/blood/sex/cars results in them taking risks. Among these risks is the quick departure of the crime scene, usually without thinking of removing or obscuring the liscense tag on the get-away car.
With increasing support options for open source, the support issue is increasingly moot. Really, this email shows us that Microsoft is missing the point a bit. The problem with Microsoft software, even with budget deficits in government, is not just upfront cost but total cost of ownership.
Considering some of the great games you can get on eBay still, mostly new and all under $15, most under $10, I find a Dreamcast quite usefull even without the broadband adapter. With a cheap SVGA adapter, it's a great toy with great picture quality.
I realized I had what must be a ground loop between my stereo and my computer, which are only connected by the line out on the soundcard to a line in on the stereo. Both are on the same outlet but different surge protectors. Actually, I think it is more the switching powersupply on the computer than the surge protectors. In any case, what is a good way to isolate a ground loop on a line level connection? My theory was perhaps a grounded chassis-to-chassis connection, but my tests didn't seem to work.
I run a mail server for several domains, and several dozen users. Here is what I've learned:
First I found that being unable to resolve a PTR record is sometimes not an indication of a lack of a PTR. Depending on what DNS server your mail agent uses to do the reverse lookups, as well as the TTL (time to live) setting of the records, you might find mail gets rejected from legitimate sources. Several clients have had downtime on their DNS servers for their IP space, so PTR records wouldn't resolve. We rejected mail we shouldn't have because their TTLs were short enough that cached records were expired.
We also noticed that many spammers use either improperly configured mail servers, trojaned/hacked dynamic hosts, or temporary accounts (increasingly rare). This accounts for about 95% of spam we receive, and most of it is from hosts with PTRs - cable modems, DSL customers, and mail servers for real users. The other 5% is easily blacklisted.
We found that a more effective solution was to reject mail based on the From sender's domain rather than PTR record. If the domain is unresolvable, it gets rejected. If you run sendmail, making sure that FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains') is commented out is sufficient to do this. This can suffer from the problem with failed lookups as well.
With the U.S. Postal service, this would be returned to the sender. If no return address is on the envelope, the mail would be held and a notice sent to the recipient saying "You have received underpaid mail. Pay $0.37 and we'll give you the mail, or will keep it. Efforts to return the mail were unsuccessful."
With other prepaid mail, senders usually prepay base on the number of responses they expect to get back. When the balence reaches zero, the mail gets withheld until they pay for the remaining. Unfortunately for the recpient, the notices of reply mail being withheld sometimes take several months to arrive and be processed.
I agree. Production costs are a huge financial obsticle to independent musicians, however. So by lowering the costs, we will see the benefits of diversity. New musicians no longer have to pitch lofi demos to big record company executives to score a contract and make an album. Record executives are reluctant to take risks because they are under pressure to get high return on investment. If record executives spend tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars on large numbers of acts to produce their tracks, they will lose money. Now that artists can create quality tracks on their own much more easliy, we can expect more people to avoid contracts with large record labels, at least until they are big enough to sign contracts that work more in their favor. The result? Artists who don't need the help of famous producers like Mutt Lange to make them sound like Def Leppard or Foreigner will now prevail.
It's not that I doubt you, but do you know of any sources on this matter? I know people have devised plans to get "carbon credits" or just help increase biomass and thus carbon storage by creating huge colonies of plankton in the ocean. The idea is that they will be relatively harmless, die and fall to the bottom of the ocean and get buried in sediments.
In fact, AMD doesn't have a lot of capacity for their own stuff. Their biggest problem is on the high end:.13 micron fabs. They have lots of lower-end fab capability, but it's unlikely that Apple needs that kind of capacity..
AMD is also spinning off their flash memory division into a joint venture with Fujitsu, of which AMD will own 60%. The flash memory division represents a significant amount of their fabrication capacity. Fab 25 in Austin is going to be dedicated to this venture, and the 50-50 fab venture in Japan between Fujitsu and AMD will also to be included.
Those aren't just backups, but also archives for auditing purposes. The analyist scandals of the last couple of years really helped drive home the need for these archives.
They of course are also important for business continuity, as Sept. 11, 2001 showed us when several large finacial firms had their data centers destroyed.
With E-Voting you have to worry about another problem. Spontaneous, apathetic voters who are voting.
Have you ever been in a political discussion where you wonder how the other person can even begin to believe his or her arguments are sound? Remember what AOL joining the Internet did to newsgroups, etc?
For Apple to run OS X (or it's descendants) on Apple branded computers, they would have to create serious confusion and frustration among Apple users. Apple users don't want to think about "what processor version installer should I run." Sure there are so-called fat binaries that include binary code for multiple platforms, just as Apple used when transitioning between Motorola 680x0 (aka 68K) processors and PowerPC processors. However, that was a one way transition. People knew that PPC was the future or all Apple as well as an upgrade. PowerPC processors could run 680x0 code through emulation quite well with no user intervention. With a transition to x86, however, Apple would have a huge problem with backwards compatability for existing applications. PowerPC emulators are in the works for x86 (actually, at least one will work on most modern architectures), but believe me, they are not an acceptable solution for production use - especially among most Mac users.
Using two simultaneous platforms is a big problem for sales and developer relations. Which is better? Why even bother with the other platform then? Or, why is the new platform so much better yet it has little available software? Why bother porting to the second platform when sales are sluggish on that platform? Then existing customers get angry. Why is my platform being abandonned? New customers feel the same if the gamble doesn't pay off and gets killed. The only partial exception is if one platform does not substitute for the other, say appliances vs. desktops and servers. Think Sun's purchase of Cobalt.
* Take your power supply out of the case. Consider the Apple Cube: the power supply is external, so the unit doesn't contribute to the system temperature.
Make sure that your power supply is designed for this. The Cube had lower power requirements because of its use of a PowerPC processor, a power and heat conscious design for a motherboard, and very limited expandability. Most switching power supplies for desktop/tower computers will have either limited power capacity or shortened life if operated without forced air circulation.
If technical reasons include production, think of how much harder mercury is to handle than, say, water. It might not require much murcury per chip, but over thousands of chips, it will require many. Then the chips must be tested in their package, where the bad chips must be disassembled. So the mercury in the bad chips must be carefully separated. Again, every expensive. But no one is going to use a technology that allows mercury in to products that end up in landfills in the first place.
You are so blindsided by the fact that Apple uses PowerPC chips that you are ignoring the fact that Apple's operating systems simply would not work at all on these boards, and Apple would never support these motherboards. The boot system on these motherboards is not even OpenFirmware as on most (PCI and later) Apple PPC computers - they used the new and open PPCBoot. Apple cared about them using PPC-based computers about as much as they cared about any embedded manufacturer using PPC-based systems. The processors TerraSoft planned to use were not even close to competing with the latest G4 1GHz and faster, and especially the dual G4 processors Apple is using in their desktop computers.
The processor speed was in fact much of the problem. The motherboards were expected to start at $500 for a a board that was less than spectacular, with a PPC750 (G3) processor running at 600MHz. Total system cost was not successfully reduced enough to make it worthwhile to many systems integrators, operating systems porters, etc.
They were in a catch-22. The systems needed to come down in price to gain wide spread acceptance, and they needed wide spread acceptance to come down in price. The competition is so stiff for servers and clusters that it was hard to compete. It is indeed sad.
Mail? Why are you trusting it to the postal service? If the cost of the mail not arriving is high at all, use FedEx/UPS/Airborne. Certified mail is not tracked at all, but those couriers track it all. Twice I've sent important documents to people via one of those couriers and had someone say "we haven't received it yet, sorry, we can't do anything for you." So while they were on the phone, I tracked it online, saw who signed for it, and told them that perhaps they should check with S. Barney (or whoever), who signed for it three hours ago. In both cases they found the documents while I patiently waited on hold.
Right it is true that there are RealTime calls available. I also believe it is correct that they do not work with Carbon API calls. I wonder if any plugins take advantage of this, assuming they can avoid the non thread-safe functions.
Deveolpers should now concentrate on bringing GIMP up to parity with PS. We need something like the Mozilla project for the GIMP. (as far as the visibility)
I love using PS, but would love to use GIMP more. Free compared to $600 is a big incentive. Let's face it, Adobe is one of the big guns behind BSA, and many of us would go to an alternative if presented.
Here is one reason why free GIMP has trouble competing with PhotoShop. Patents still surround the use of CYMK color management. For home, hobby or even small office use, this is not a problem. But for prepress use, this is a big obstacle. Color matching before four-color printing or six-color printing is important unless you want some funky looking publications. When these patents expire, I expect the more mature GIMP will really start to take off, and more development resources will be thrown at it.
I guess those Adobe folks are on crack...
have you seen PS run on a Mac vs Windows???
It is SO much faster doing nearly all filters. The
3rd party ones even show considerable differences.
- RR
In fact, I have. In addition to systems administration, I've also worked as a professional graphic designer (and sometimes still do for side cash). And pound-for-pound, the newest versions of Photoshop run better and faster on Windows than on Macintosh.
The reason PhotoShop was much faster on Classic (Mac OS 9.x and earlier) for many fucntions was due to the way mutlitasking and memory management were handled.
Multitasking was "competitive" multitasking, meaning that the process in focus could, in theory, steal as many CPU quantums as it wanted and ignore interrupts from other programs. To demonstrate this, start a large network download or upload in an application (Netscape, Finder, and Fetch all work). Now load a large image in PhotoShop, and resize the editting window so horizontal and/or vertical scroll bars appear. Now scroll and hold the mouse button down for about 90 seconds. Go back to the application that was responsible for the download. Notice that it has timed out because it stopped receiving data. The application and its IO interrupts were ignored while you held the mouse button down to scroll. Obviously this is more advantageous when running one process "that matters", such as a filter benchmark.
The memory management on Classic is also pretty simple. First, there is no protected memory in Classic. An application has a preset "Preferred" and "Minumum" amount of memory setting attached to its binary. At runtime, Classic attempts to find as close to the preferred memory setting as possible, down to the minimum amount. It allocates all of that memory at run time, or fails to launch if the minumum memory setting is unavailable at that time. Throughout runtime, memory management really only consists of using that memory and possibly swapping some of it out. This vastly reduces memory management overhead.
With OS X, these advantages are erased. The processing capabilities of the system (especially AltiVec) still help vastly with some filters. However, handling other processes, context switching, memory allocation and of course the more complicated Quartz graphics engine offset the advantages. You can run filters faster in the background, the application and OS is vastly more stable, but you cannot run them them as fast as when they are in the foreground in Classic.
Slashdot Mirror
and the ability to save your layout as an exceptionally lame static-sized web page
QuarkXPress is a tool for precisely placing text and images. Using relative sizing would completely break that. Quark users will not be using Quark to design web pages, but perhaps to preview web designs or preview print pieces on the web. Quark does not expect nor intend to gain share in the web design area.
This isn't hypocrisy. They were restricted from making unfounded claims. In the United States this is called libel, and there are indeed laws against it. Parody and other forms of creative expression are excluded, but harming businesses by making claims and refusing to found them is not legal. It isn't speech people disagree with - how can anyone agree with it when it's false or at least any supporting evidence is being withheld? If I post bill boards claiming Windows XP and Bill Gates are responsible for SARS, I too would be forced to halt my claims.
False. When the system is effective, it will be well known among criminals.
This will be true so called professional car theives. Two things to consider, however.
* Most professional car theives use disposable minions to steal the car. They use various techniques to maximize the chances of success while minimizing risk to the operation. They don't care as much about the actual theif, who usually is ignorant of the reasons behind the procedure given to him/her.
* The majority of criminals, especially violent criminals as the parent mentions, do not expect to get caught. Their passion for revenge/money/blood/sex/cars results in them taking risks. Among these risks is the quick departure of the crime scene, usually without thinking of removing or obscuring the liscense tag on the get-away car.
Gates learned this tactic from his coke dealer.
"Your first hit is free."
With increasing support options for open source, the support issue is increasingly moot. Really, this email shows us that Microsoft is missing the point a bit. The problem with Microsoft software, even with budget deficits in government, is not just upfront cost but total cost of ownership.
Considering some of the great games you can get on eBay still, mostly new and all under $15, most under $10, I find a Dreamcast quite usefull even without the broadband adapter. With a cheap SVGA adapter, it's a great toy with great picture quality.
Good to know. Thanks.
I realized I had what must be a ground loop between my stereo and my computer, which are only connected by the line out on the soundcard to a line in on the stereo. Both are on the same outlet but different surge protectors. Actually, I think it is more the switching powersupply on the computer than the surge protectors. In any case, what is a good way to isolate a ground loop on a line level connection? My theory was perhaps a grounded chassis-to-chassis connection, but my tests didn't seem to work.
I run a mail server for several domains, and several dozen users. Here is what I've learned:
First I found that being unable to resolve a PTR record is sometimes not an indication of a lack of a PTR. Depending on what DNS server your mail agent uses to do the reverse lookups, as well as the TTL (time to live) setting of the records, you might find mail gets rejected from legitimate sources. Several clients have had downtime on their DNS servers for their IP space, so PTR records wouldn't resolve. We rejected mail we shouldn't have because their TTLs were short enough that cached records were expired.
We also noticed that many spammers use either improperly configured mail servers, trojaned/hacked dynamic hosts, or temporary accounts (increasingly rare). This accounts for about 95% of spam we receive, and most of it is from hosts with PTRs - cable modems, DSL customers, and mail servers for real users. The other 5% is easily blacklisted.
We found that a more effective solution was to reject mail based on the From sender's domain rather than PTR record. If the domain is unresolvable, it gets rejected. If you run sendmail, making sure that FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains') is commented out is sufficient to do this. This can suffer from the problem with failed lookups as well.
With the U.S. Postal service, this would be returned to the sender. If no return address is on the envelope, the mail would be held and a notice sent to the recipient saying "You have received underpaid mail. Pay $0.37 and we'll give you the mail, or will keep it. Efforts to return the mail were unsuccessful."
With other prepaid mail, senders usually prepay base on the number of responses they expect to get back. When the balence reaches zero, the mail gets withheld until they pay for the remaining. Unfortunately for the recpient, the notices of reply mail being withheld sometimes take several months to arrive and be processed.
I agree. Production costs are a huge financial obsticle to independent musicians, however. So by lowering the costs, we will see the benefits of diversity. New musicians no longer have to pitch lofi demos to big record company executives to score a contract and make an album. Record executives are reluctant to take risks because they are under pressure to get high return on investment. If record executives spend tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars on large numbers of acts to produce their tracks, they will lose money. Now that artists can create quality tracks on their own much more easliy, we can expect more people to avoid contracts with large record labels, at least until they are big enough to sign contracts that work more in their favor. The result? Artists who don't need the help of famous producers like Mutt Lange to make them sound like Def Leppard or Foreigner will now prevail.
It's not that I doubt you, but do you know of any sources on this matter? I know people have devised plans to get "carbon credits" or just help increase biomass and thus carbon storage by creating huge colonies of plankton in the ocean. The idea is that they will be relatively harmless, die and fall to the bottom of the ocean and get buried in sediments.
In fact, AMD doesn't have a lot of capacity for their own stuff. Their biggest problem is on the high end: .13 micron fabs. They have lots of lower-end fab capability, but it's unlikely that Apple needs that kind of capacity..
AMD is also spinning off their flash memory division into a joint venture with Fujitsu, of which AMD will own 60%. The flash memory division represents a significant amount of their fabrication capacity. Fab 25 in Austin is going to be dedicated to this venture, and the 50-50 fab venture in Japan between Fujitsu and AMD will also to be included.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030331/315443_1.html
Those aren't just backups, but also archives for auditing purposes. The analyist scandals of the last couple of years really helped drive home the need for these archives.
They of course are also important for business continuity, as Sept. 11, 2001 showed us when several large finacial firms had their data centers destroyed.
They aren't complete emulators, but more processor simulators.
They are:
* PSIM http://sources.redhat.com/psim/
* MicroLib http://www.microlib.org/
With E-Voting you have to worry about another problem. Spontaneous, apathetic voters who are voting.
Have you ever been in a political discussion where you wonder how the other person can even begin to believe his or her arguments are sound? Remember what AOL joining the Internet did to newsgroups, etc?
Because cost of parts, manufacture, and engineering would be ridiculous.
For Apple to run OS X (or it's descendants) on Apple branded computers, they would have to create serious confusion and frustration among Apple users. Apple users don't want to think about "what processor version installer should I run." Sure there are so-called fat binaries that include binary code for multiple platforms, just as Apple used when transitioning between Motorola 680x0 (aka 68K) processors and PowerPC processors. However, that was a one way transition. People knew that PPC was the future or all Apple as well as an upgrade. PowerPC processors could run 680x0 code through emulation quite well with no user intervention. With a transition to x86, however, Apple would have a huge problem with backwards compatability for existing applications. PowerPC emulators are in the works for x86 (actually, at least one will work on most modern architectures), but believe me, they are not an acceptable solution for production use - especially among most Mac users.
Using two simultaneous platforms is a big problem for sales and developer relations. Which is better? Why even bother with the other platform then? Or, why is the new platform so much better yet it has little available software? Why bother porting to the second platform when sales are sluggish on that platform? Then existing customers get angry. Why is my platform being abandonned? New customers feel the same if the gamble doesn't pay off and gets killed. The only partial exception is if one platform does not substitute for the other, say appliances vs. desktops and servers. Think Sun's purchase of Cobalt.
* Take your power supply out of the case. Consider the Apple Cube: the power supply is external, so the unit doesn't contribute to the system temperature.
Make sure that your power supply is designed for this. The Cube had lower power requirements because of its use of a PowerPC processor, a power and heat conscious design for a motherboard, and very limited expandability. Most switching power supplies for desktop/tower computers will have either limited power capacity or shortened life if operated without forced air circulation.
If technical reasons include production, think of how much harder mercury is to handle than, say, water. It might not require much murcury per chip, but over thousands of chips, it will require many. Then the chips must be tested in their package, where the bad chips must be disassembled. So the mercury in the bad chips must be carefully separated. Again, every expensive. But no one is going to use a technology that allows mercury in to products that end up in landfills in the first place.
You are so blindsided by the fact that Apple uses PowerPC chips that you are ignoring the fact that Apple's operating systems simply would not work at all on these boards, and Apple would never support these motherboards. The boot system on these motherboards is not even OpenFirmware as on most (PCI and later) Apple PPC computers - they used the new and open PPCBoot. Apple cared about them using PPC-based computers about as much as they cared about any embedded manufacturer using PPC-based systems. The processors TerraSoft planned to use were not even close to competing with the latest G4 1GHz and faster, and especially the dual G4 processors Apple is using in their desktop computers.
The processor speed was in fact much of the problem. The motherboards were expected to start at $500 for a a board that was less than spectacular, with a PPC750 (G3) processor running at 600MHz. Total system cost was not successfully reduced enough to make it worthwhile to many systems integrators, operating systems porters, etc.
They were in a catch-22. The systems needed to come down in price to gain wide spread acceptance, and they needed wide spread acceptance to come down in price. The competition is so stiff for servers and clusters that it was hard to compete. It is indeed sad.
Mail? Why are you trusting it to the postal service? If the cost of the mail not arriving is high at all, use FedEx/UPS/Airborne. Certified mail is not tracked at all, but those couriers track it all. Twice I've sent important documents to people via one of those couriers and had someone say "we haven't received it yet, sorry, we can't do anything for you." So while they were on the phone, I tracked it online, saw who signed for it, and told them that perhaps they should check with S. Barney (or whoever), who signed for it three hours ago. In both cases they found the documents while I patiently waited on hold.
Right it is true that there are RealTime calls available. I also believe it is correct that they do not work with Carbon API calls. I wonder if any plugins take advantage of this, assuming they can avoid the non thread-safe functions.
Deveolpers should now concentrate on bringing GIMP up to parity with PS. We need something like the Mozilla project for the GIMP. (as far as the visibility)
I love using PS, but would love to use GIMP more. Free compared to $600 is a big incentive. Let's face it, Adobe is one of the big guns behind BSA, and many of us would go to an alternative if presented.
Here is one reason why free GIMP has trouble competing with PhotoShop. Patents still surround the use of CYMK color management. For home, hobby or even small office use, this is not a problem. But for prepress use, this is a big obstacle. Color matching before four-color printing or six-color printing is important unless you want some funky looking publications. When these patents expire, I expect the more mature GIMP will really start to take off, and more development resources will be thrown at it.
I guess those Adobe folks are on crack... have you seen PS run on a Mac vs Windows??? It is SO much faster doing nearly all filters. The 3rd party ones even show considerable differences. - RR
In fact, I have. In addition to systems administration, I've also worked as a professional graphic designer (and sometimes still do for side cash). And pound-for-pound, the newest versions of Photoshop run better and faster on Windows than on Macintosh.
The reason PhotoShop was much faster on Classic (Mac OS 9.x and earlier) for many fucntions was due to the way mutlitasking and memory management were handled.
Multitasking was "competitive" multitasking, meaning that the process in focus could, in theory, steal as many CPU quantums as it wanted and ignore interrupts from other programs. To demonstrate this, start a large network download or upload in an application (Netscape, Finder, and Fetch all work). Now load a large image in PhotoShop, and resize the editting window so horizontal and/or vertical scroll bars appear. Now scroll and hold the mouse button down for about 90 seconds. Go back to the application that was responsible for the download. Notice that it has timed out because it stopped receiving data. The application and its IO interrupts were ignored while you held the mouse button down to scroll. Obviously this is more advantageous when running one process "that matters", such as a filter benchmark.
The memory management on Classic is also pretty simple. First, there is no protected memory in Classic. An application has a preset "Preferred" and "Minumum" amount of memory setting attached to its binary. At runtime, Classic attempts to find as close to the preferred memory setting as possible, down to the minimum amount. It allocates all of that memory at run time, or fails to launch if the minumum memory setting is unavailable at that time. Throughout runtime, memory management really only consists of using that memory and possibly swapping some of it out. This vastly reduces memory management overhead.
With OS X, these advantages are erased. The processing capabilities of the system (especially AltiVec) still help vastly with some filters. However, handling other processes, context switching, memory allocation and of course the more complicated Quartz graphics engine offset the advantages. You can run filters faster in the background, the application and OS is vastly more stable, but you cannot run them them as fast as when they are in the foreground in Classic.