It's not ridiculous to ask for 100% (or at least 99 and 44/100ths percent) compatibility with MS-Word. Like it or not, MS-Word is the standard in business. If you're going to work in the business world, you at the very least need to read and produce docs in MS-Word format. "Almost" ain't good enough to get an application accepted. People will just see that documents created by said app look like crap in MS-Word (or, worse, can't even be opened in Word!) and will disregard the app as "not good enough".
I think you misunderstand the users' requirements. They don't want an Open Source / Free Software office suite that has all the functionality of MS-Office, but a different file format. They want drop-in compatibility, so they can read and produce documents from and for users of the de facto standard. And telling your customers/clients "switch to this relatively unknown program" isn't a solution.
An aside: While job hunting this past summer, I sent my resume around as HTML. I had more than one potential employer ask, "Can you send this to me in Word format instead?" Never mind the fact that MS-Word will happily open an HTML file, these epsilon-minus HR drones couldn't deal with it if it they couldn't double-click and have Word open right up. I would not have wanted to send an OpenOffice DOC file that looked crummy in honest-to-goodness MS-Word. And, now that I'm employed again, I would not like to send an OpenOffice DOC file to a customer.
Do I think it's possible to create an open source app with 100% file compatibility with MS-Word? No, not until there's an open document format supported by MS-Word, one which has all the features of a Word document. Which probably means never, which probably means that OpenOffice will always occupy the same niche as Corel's WordPerfect office suite. The secondary players will compete with each other, but without 100% MS-Office support none will ever touch the 500lb. gorilla.
Manager type: "What? Are you kidding? You picked a *pornographic IP address*? What kind of tech are you? NetNanny says that addresses that include 69 are pornographic! You're fired!"
True story: Yesterday, my 10yo son wanted to register on the LEGO site. So I sat down with him and we filled out the form. He entered his name as his userid, but when he hit "Submit" the form came back with "Userid 'Fred' is already taken. Try using 'Fred369' instead". So we did, and were greeted with "Pick another userid. Userids can't contain the number '69'."
Would have been nice if the the authors of the random userid generator and the dirty words filter had actually talked to each other...
Since then... None of the 20th century SF seems to have gotten the world around the year 2000 right.
Read some of John Brunner's work, notably Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider. Written in the 60s and 70s, it's scary how well they seem to be predicting the early 21st century.
If you ever you wonder whether you might need a lawyer, you probably do.
I'm serious. For most people, this is a seldom-to-never occurance. But when you're in doubt, just spend the $50 for a half-hour consultation and find out.
ObAnecdote: I was recently fired for a really dumb reason. Was it legal? I didn't know. $50 and half an hour later I'd gotten a legal opinion that yes, it was a really dumb reason, but no, there was no legal recourse. Heck, it was worth the $50 just to keep from sitting up at night wondering, "Should I have sued those bastards?"
This is the head of the Woods Hole Oceanagraphic Institute...and he's basing his model on what he sees taking place in the oceans...this is fairly reliable scientific analysis...it can't be duplicated thru experimentation, but it's an interesting hypothesis nevertheless.
<cynic> In other news, there's nothing like impending global disaster to save your institute from a major funding cut... </cynic>
Okay, I'm not saying this is necessarily the case. But those last few paragraphs... Geez! They just scream, "The sky is falling! But we can stop it if you send us more money!"
My Nokia 7650 has Bluetooth and a camera and will happily send pictures to my PC or a Pocket PC or even a Palm Pilot. Mostly I use it to send pictures to my HP printer, which also has Bluetooth, it took no setting up or drivers, just unpacked the phone, took a photo, pressed "send" and out it comes.
But imagine that Bluetooth becomes ubiquitous, and you have multiple printers within range. Where does it print? Say you and I have adjacent offices. How do I prevent your nifty Bluetooth-enabled phone from printing on my printer?
Bluetooth is a truely wonderful thing.
Bluetooth is a wonderful solution to a very limited problem set. And that set, unfortunately, is not congruent with the problem set of "what happens when these things are everywhere?"
Why the hell wouldn't a bathroom have a switch in it? What the freak is so dangerious about a switch???
I'm an American and not the best to talk about UK wiring standards, but I had noticed the pull-chain thing when I was visiting a friend over there. When I asked about it, he said that the whole 220V thing is a real bummer when you're dripping wet from the shower. (Actually, I think he said something more along the lines of namby-pamby American power versus real mains.:-) Modern switches are probably not a big issue. This is probably more of a holdover from retrofitting existing houses for electric service, since modern switches built into the wall should pose little or no risk.
In the UK they also have something known as a "shaver outlet", for plugging in one's electric razor. I believe these are current-limited, and possibly a different voltage as well. There are adapter plugs so you can plug a shaver into a standard mains outlet if you have to. I think the shaver outlets can be placed in bathrooms.
In the US, any bathroom made to modern standards is going to have GFI (ground-fault-interrupt) outlets. These monitor for escaped current and trip an internal circuit breaker if there's a leakage anywhere. I expect that these should be adaptable to UK 220V mains if anyone ever decides the law needs changing.
I would probably feel a little more secure about the system if it printed out a ballot that I then had to put in a ballot box, so it wouldn't be any worse than what we have now (from a fraud standpoint).
Amen, brother! IMHO this is exactly what we need at the moment. Use the computer to help create a valid ballot (no more of this "hanging pregnant chad" BS, which sounds more like a goatse.cx link than a reason for national uproar), then count the ballots the good old fashioned way. The way people know and trust (more or less). Best part is, it leaves a paper trail that can be audited later when the loser inevitably calls "Foul!"
One of the benefits of this system is that you could use any old non-secure terminals for the user interface. And any software, for that matter, so long as it produces a readable ballot. The voter can take that ballot, look at it, and verify for himself that all his choices are there. This eliminates the possibility of rigged terminals influencing the vote.
It's simple. It's inexpensive (compared to the other electronic solutions, at least). It's both human and machine readable. It's auditable. The voter can be sure the ballot he turns in is correct, and the recount can be done by hand if necessary.
All reasons why this sort of system will never get implemented...
TeraTerm is a darned fine open source serial/telnet program for Windows. It's supposedly been ported to WinCE, though it seems there hasn't been any development in the past couple years. Might still be worth checking out, though.
This is a false economy. Not only would I be more than willing to pay $5 for flash, but the lack of it will probably cost Handspring my business in the future.
But look at it from the company's point of view. On the whole, whether or not they have flash or ROM isn't going to change the sales figures. Sure, a few of us care and won't buy something without flash, but the vast majority of the PDA-buying market neither know nor care about the difference. Net loss, a fraction of a percent of their market share.
However, say the price difference between flash and a masked ROM is $5. (Not sure if this is accurate, but I know that masked ROM is cheap, cheap, CHEAP!) They're not likely to pass the savings onto the customer now, are they? The price is determined by the marketting department at what they think people will pay for the device, not what it costs to build. So the company will pocket the $5. Multiply that by the sale of 100,000 units, and you've made a cool half-million in extra profits. profits. Okay, let's say that 1% of your potential market is lost because they want flash. You've lost 1,000 sales. So your profit from using a masked ROM instead of a flash is only $495,000. Still sounds like using a masked ROM makes better sense.
Okay, so why does the Treo have an unadvertised flash? Could be that they're planning to remove the capability in the next rev. Maybe they were rushing this design to market and didn't have the lead-time to get a masked ROM made. Maybe it was easier to manufacture with a flash instead of an EPROM. Substitutions get made all the time, often because the purchasing department finds a better deal on something.
Case in point -- In a product I worked on, we had to add last-minute support for another manufacturer's flash because purchasing found a slightly better price from them. We had to add new drivers to the firmware, but that's a one-time engineering cost as opposed to a recurring cost on the bill of materials. Now we can manufacture the devices with whichever flash parts are cheapest. I can imagine the same argument holding true for using flash vs. ROM.
(Although one time this sort of cost reduction came back and bit the company in the butt. We released a product with "just enough" RAM, because going to the next larger size chips would have added $1/unit to the bill of materials. The very next firmware release, marketting told us that they wanted all sorts of new features that weren't possible with the amount of RAM in the product. Sorry, you lost.)
And do manufacturers understate the device's capabilities? You better believe it! We had two similar models. The actual advertised difference was that one had a high-quality long-life part, where the other had a cheaper shorter-life part instead. However, that wasn't enough product differentiation for the marketting team. They were afraid too many customers would buy the model with the cheaper part instead of the more expensive (and higher profit margin) model. So, they decided that the model with the cheaper part should run slower. The two units had the exact same CPU board, but we had to put in extra wait-states to slow down the code on the cheaper model. The two units even used the same code; we simply detected whether we found the cheap or expensive part, and programmed the memory wait-states appropriately.
The moral of the story is, companies will do anything they can to make a buck. And the minds of marketting folks are often incomprehensible to us engineers, and vice-versa.
I really liked this system too, especially for a space-faring culture which has no need for marking time as integer fractions of the rotation of an arbitrary blue-green planet. Seems to me that it'll make a whole lot of sense to use something like this when we get permanent off-planet colonies. (Especially Martian colonies, where a day is close enough to an Earth day for the residents to live by the Martian light/dark cycle, but just enough off to bollox calendars between there and mother Earth.)
Of course, my favorite part about this system is Vinge's description of when the calendar began...
Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely... the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
Actually, IE blew it. Width and min-width cannot be applied to non-replaced inline elements. Take a look at the spec [w3.org], then go visit the validator [w3.org].
Huh. Mea culpa. Serves me right for reading a
CSS tutorial instead of the actual spec. The tutorial didn't mention this.
Now if I could only figure out what the W3 means by "inline, non-replaced elements" as opposed to "inline, replaced elements"...
Now, how about finding a decent standards-compliant WYSIWYG web page builder [...]
There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG web page builder. HTML specifically leaves most rendering decisions up to the browser. Different browsers should render a page differently. One of the problems with WYSIWYG editors (for anything, not just web pages) is that people will do really bad formatting that just happens to "look right". Centering a line by using leading spaces or spacer GIFs, for example, instead of the "align=center" property. Looks great on their screen, but looks like hell if someone has their screen width or font set differently.
I'd also mention using physical <i> and <b> tags instead of logical <em> and <strong> tags, but that battle was lost years ago. It is an example of using the wrong markup just because it happens to "look right" on their screen, though!
If someone really wants WYSIWYG, maybe they should publish as a PDF document instead.
I'd really like to see a GUI HTML editor that does a good job using the proper tags, instead of acting like a paint program and producing crappy HTML to try to force the end user into seeing a pixel-by-pixel copy of the author's screen. I suspect this is what you meant by "standards compliant", and I'm sorry I can't help you there.
I was really annoyed the other day. I was trying to do some moderately tricky but perfectly legal CSS stuff. I wanted to have a bitmap as a background for a link. I didn't want to pre-render the text onto the button in a paint program, but have the browser render it in the user's default font. So I thought I'd just give the <a> tag an id property, and specify its background-image and min-width (or even just width) in a style sheet. As far as I can tell, this should be the right way to do it.
The result? IE6 rendered it perfectly. Mozilla 1.0 (on Win2k) rendered the image, but completely ignored the width. WTF? I thought Mozilla was supposed to be the completely compliant browser? I had to go back to the old technique of placing the link within a table cell to get it the right width.
I really hate to say it, but in at least this one case my CSS presentation would have "looked better in IE" because IE actually implemented the standards correctly, and Mozilla blew it. I hate it when Microsoft is right!
Re:Is it really worth the trouble?
on
Secure Printing?
·
· Score: 2
[...] not to mention the fact that the last page is still technically on the print drum till it is used again.
And, in some cases, the printers have debug modes where its entire memory (including the data spool) can be read out via SNMP. I believe this is a feature of the HP JetDirect print servers.
I don't know that there is a general way in which network printers can be secured. There's probably an encryption option in IPP, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find printers, print servers, and clients which support it.
Hey, that's my line! I actually did that to a newspaper telemarketer...
Droid: Hello, would you like to receive our paper? Me: No, thank you. I'm illiterate. Droid: You mean you can't read at all? Me: That's right. [pause] Droid: Um, it has some very nice pictures.
Gotta say, I have to give her points for trying. A few moments later our second phone line rang. Same lady.
Droid: Hello, would you like to receive our paper? Me: Hi, this is [my name]. I talked with you just a minute ago! Droid: The illiterate!? Oh, sorry...
Why would I want to stop telemarketing calls when they're so much fun? Oh, and for a good time, try this one:
Droid: Hi, I'm from the Singles Connection. Would you like to meet singles in your area? Me: Why yes, I'm glad you called! My wife and I have been looking for a playmate. Do you have listings for bi women into the group scene? Droid: [CLICK!]
Don't know what she was upset about. I mean, she called me, right? Whaddaya expect when you try to sell a dating service to a married guy?
Cotton Expressions has a bunch of great science and astronomy related shirts, as well as a number of shirts with Sidney Harris cartoons. They're not fully online yet; the shirt catalog is there, but the ordering system is "fill in the form, then print and fax it". (Matthew, it's the 21st century already. Get with the program!:-)
I lose every single time. Why? Because no matter what I do, the computer is always there first with more units and a souped up hero that trounces anything I can build. The comp. players are don't have this nuisance of having to click around to build things like we do.
I agree; this is a major flaw in the game. IMHO the skirmish AI is way too powerful. The only way to beat the computer in a skirmish match is to cut off its resources and starve it to death. I can beat the AI about half the time on maps that give you a good, defensible starting position. On the other hand, on open maps you're toast. The AI can manage resources and buildings much more efficiently than a human who has to click everywhere, and the AI can micromanage combat with ease. Take the "sleep" spell, for instance. Puts an enemy unit to sleep until it's attacked. For a human player, hit the hotkey then try to target an enemy unit. Just try to pick him out of the middle of a melee bunch with a slightly sluggish mouse. Oh, and even if you do get him, try to convince your army to stop attacking him and move on to someone else! Ha! They just continue to beat on him, waking him up right away. Gobs o' mana, wasted. The AI, on the other hand, has precision targetting and can simultaneously command the rest of the army to break off and attack something else.
On maps that actually have you physically separated (by rivers, trees, etc.) the AI is utterly incompetent. It has a hard time establishing a secondary base, and effectively starves itself with another goldmine sitting there just beyond a line of trees.
In general, I really like some of the changes they've made to the game. I like the concept of heroes, and I really like the "upkeep" penalty for keeping a huge standing army. The variation in races is good (although a bit too reminiscent of Starcraft). I really look forward to playing against other people. But it's not a great single-player game.
I ought to add some gripes about the game engine as long as I'm here. First, it's dark! I have to crank the gamma way up, to the point where everything looks washed out. This could be a flaw in my video drivers, since the 2D controls look okay. It's just the 3D that's dark. (And, oddly, the 3D seems much better after a cinematic is run. Maybe they're forgetting to set or clear a value for the regular game?) Second, the 3D is not put to good use. You can tilt and rotate the camera, but there's no reason to. Tilting it just makes it hard to play, and the rotation snaps back to normal when you release the button. And there's no zoom! I really want to zoom out to see more on the screen, but I can't. Zoom would have been way more useful than camera tilt. The 3D terrain isn't put to good use, either. I haven't really seen any change in behavior for being on high ground or being down in a valley. It seems to be just eye-candy layered on top of a Starcraft-like elevation system. I think this game would have done better as a traditional 2D RTS.
CAMPAIGN SPOILER WARNING
The campaign scenarios are much more fun and well-balanced. Unfortunately, there are no sympathetic characters! In the human campaign you play Prince Arthas. He starts out okay, but then he turns to the dark side, disregards his advisors and friends, slaughters a human town, turns on his mercenaries, and pretty much condemns his own army to death. In the final cinematic he murders his father the king in cold blood. I had absolutely no sympathy for this guy. None. I felt no reason to want him to win. I even to run tried the slaughter-the-town scenario without killing the villagers; just going after the bad guy. Nope, no can do. You have to kill 100 villagers or no cookie.
Okay, the villagers were infected and were going to turn into undead. Maybe he did have to kill them. But jeez! Make him seem heroic about it! He's a Paladin, for cryin' out loud! He shouldn't be going into this berzerker rage. He should show some compassion even if there's no other way. (I know, that wouldn't mesh with the later storyline, but it would have been a lot more satisfying to play.)
By the end of the human campaign I was so disgusted with this guy I was really hoping he'd get his ass kicked by the undead in the second campaign. But no, you end up playing him there, too. At least I can revel in treachery and vile deeds when I'm playing an undead. Slaughtering towns of innocents is good, unclean fun! I still want to off Arthas, though.
The game has its high points, but it has a number of flaws as well. It's a good successor to Warcraft II and Starcraft, but nothing revolutionary.
I know it was suspenseful and all, but the effect was likely 10x better in the theater than late night on cable tv.
Yes, it was. A couple months ago I had the pleasure of seeing 2001 in a theater with a 70mm print. It was amazing. No, the movie didn't make any more sense in the theater, but it really showcased Kubrick's skill as a filmmaker. That "10 minutes of just some guy breathing" was intense. Breathing. Breathing. Pod moves in. Breathing stops. Body drifts off, flailing about. No breathing. Body stops flailing about. If there had been dramatic music or other sound effects the impact of the scene would have been lost.
Clarke knows his stuff about science. Kubrick knows his stuff about filmmaking. But that movie was made for the theater, and it does not translate well to the small screen!
Amen. I've been using Daemon Tools for exactly this purpose for almost a year now. I love it. The kids never need to search for the CDs and I don't have to worry about a favorite game getting scratched. I've been using it for my games, too, just because it's so much more convenient. (That, and my CDROM drive sounds like a jet engine warming up...)
Slashdot Mirror
HTML Tidy does this as well.
Isn't Osama the love-child of Bigfoot and Bat-Boy? Or was that Elvis?
Nice troll, but I'll bite.
It's not ridiculous to ask for 100% (or at least 99 and 44/100ths percent) compatibility with MS-Word. Like it or not, MS-Word is the standard in business. If you're going to work in the business world, you at the very least need to read and produce docs in MS-Word format. "Almost" ain't good enough to get an application accepted. People will just see that documents created by said app look like crap in MS-Word (or, worse, can't even be opened in Word!) and will disregard the app as "not good enough".
I think you misunderstand the users' requirements. They don't want an Open Source / Free Software office suite that has all the functionality of MS-Office, but a different file format. They want drop-in compatibility, so they can read and produce documents from and for users of the de facto standard. And telling your customers/clients "switch to this relatively unknown program" isn't a solution.
An aside: While job hunting this past summer, I sent my resume around as HTML. I had more than one potential employer ask, "Can you send this to me in Word format instead?" Never mind the fact that MS-Word will happily open an HTML file, these epsilon-minus HR drones couldn't deal with it if it they couldn't double-click and have Word open right up. I would not have wanted to send an OpenOffice DOC file that looked crummy in honest-to-goodness MS-Word. And, now that I'm employed again, I would not like to send an OpenOffice DOC file to a customer.
Do I think it's possible to create an open source app with 100% file compatibility with MS-Word? No, not until there's an open document format supported by MS-Word, one which has all the features of a Word document. Which probably means never, which probably means that OpenOffice will always occupy the same niche as Corel's WordPerfect office suite. The secondary players will compete with each other, but without 100% MS-Office support none will ever touch the 500lb. gorilla.
True story: Yesterday, my 10yo son wanted to register on the LEGO site. So I sat down with him and we filled out the form. He entered his name as his userid, but when he hit "Submit" the form came back with "Userid 'Fred' is already taken. Try using 'Fred369' instead". So we did, and were greeted with "Pick another userid. Userids can't contain the number '69'."
Would have been nice if the the authors of the random userid generator and the dirty words filter had actually talked to each other...
Read some of John Brunner's work, notably Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider. Written in the 60s and 70s, it's scary how well they seem to be predicting the early 21st century.
If you ever you wonder whether you might need a lawyer, you probably do.
I'm serious. For most people, this is a seldom-to-never occurance. But when you're in doubt, just spend the $50 for a half-hour consultation and find out.
ObAnecdote: I was recently fired for a really dumb reason. Was it legal? I didn't know. $50 and half an hour later I'd gotten a legal opinion that yes, it was a really dumb reason, but no, there was no legal recourse. Heck, it was worth the $50 just to keep from sitting up at night wondering, "Should I have sued those bastards?"
<cynic>
In other news, there's nothing like impending global disaster to save your institute from a major funding cut...
</cynic>
Okay, I'm not saying this is necessarily the case. But those last few paragraphs... Geez! They just scream, "The sky is falling! But we can stop it if you send us more money!"
But imagine that Bluetooth becomes ubiquitous, and you have multiple printers within range. Where does it print? Say you and I have adjacent offices. How do I prevent your nifty Bluetooth-enabled phone from printing on my printer?
Bluetooth is a wonderful solution to a very limited problem set. And that set, unfortunately, is not congruent with the problem set of "what happens when these things are everywhere?"
I'm an American and not the best to talk about UK wiring standards, but I had noticed the pull-chain thing when I was visiting a friend over there. When I asked about it, he said that the whole 220V thing is a real bummer when you're dripping wet from the shower. (Actually, I think he said something more along the lines of namby-pamby American power versus real mains. :-) Modern switches are probably not a big issue. This is probably more of a holdover from retrofitting existing houses for electric service, since modern switches built into the wall should pose little or no risk.
In the UK they also have something known as a "shaver outlet", for plugging in one's electric razor. I believe these are current-limited, and possibly a different voltage as well. There are adapter plugs so you can plug a shaver into a standard mains outlet if you have to. I think the shaver outlets can be placed in bathrooms.
In the US, any bathroom made to modern standards is going to have GFI (ground-fault-interrupt) outlets. These monitor for escaped current and trip an internal circuit breaker if there's a leakage anywhere. I expect that these should be adaptable to UK 220V mains if anyone ever decides the law needs changing.
Amen, brother! IMHO this is exactly what we need at the moment. Use the computer to help create a valid ballot (no more of this "hanging pregnant chad" BS, which sounds more like a goatse.cx link than a reason for national uproar), then count the ballots the good old fashioned way. The way people know and trust (more or less). Best part is, it leaves a paper trail that can be audited later when the loser inevitably calls "Foul!"
One of the benefits of this system is that you could use any old non-secure terminals for the user interface. And any software, for that matter, so long as it produces a readable ballot. The voter can take that ballot, look at it, and verify for himself that all his choices are there. This eliminates the possibility of rigged terminals influencing the vote.
It's simple. It's inexpensive (compared to the other electronic solutions, at least). It's both human and machine readable. It's auditable. The voter can be sure the ballot he turns in is correct, and the recount can be done by hand if necessary.
All reasons why this sort of system will never get implemented...
TeraTerm is a darned fine open source serial/telnet program for Windows. It's supposedly been ported to WinCE, though it seems there hasn't been any development in the past couple years. Might still be worth checking out, though.
She wants a diamond. You want her.
Buy her the damned ring, you idiot!
Q.E.D.
But look at it from the company's point of view. On the whole, whether or not they have flash or ROM isn't going to change the sales figures. Sure, a few of us care and won't buy something without flash, but the vast majority of the PDA-buying market neither know nor care about the difference. Net loss, a fraction of a percent of their market share.
However, say the price difference between flash and a masked ROM is $5. (Not sure if this is accurate, but I know that masked ROM is cheap, cheap, CHEAP!) They're not likely to pass the savings onto the customer now, are they? The price is determined by the marketting department at what they think people will pay for the device, not what it costs to build. So the company will pocket the $5. Multiply that by the sale of 100,000 units, and you've made a cool half-million in extra profits. profits. Okay, let's say that 1% of your potential market is lost because they want flash. You've lost 1,000 sales. So your profit from using a masked ROM instead of a flash is only $495,000. Still sounds like using a masked ROM makes better sense.
Okay, so why does the Treo have an unadvertised flash? Could be that they're planning to remove the capability in the next rev. Maybe they were rushing this design to market and didn't have the lead-time to get a masked ROM made. Maybe it was easier to manufacture with a flash instead of an EPROM. Substitutions get made all the time, often because the purchasing department finds a better deal on something.
Case in point -- In a product I worked on, we had to add last-minute support for another manufacturer's flash because purchasing found a slightly better price from them. We had to add new drivers to the firmware, but that's a one-time engineering cost as opposed to a recurring cost on the bill of materials. Now we can manufacture the devices with whichever flash parts are cheapest. I can imagine the same argument holding true for using flash vs. ROM.
(Although one time this sort of cost reduction came back and bit the company in the butt. We released a product with "just enough" RAM, because going to the next larger size chips would have added $1/unit to the bill of materials. The very next firmware release, marketting told us that they wanted all sorts of new features that weren't possible with the amount of RAM in the product. Sorry, you lost.)
And do manufacturers understate the device's capabilities? You better believe it! We had two similar models. The actual advertised difference was that one had a high-quality long-life part, where the other had a cheaper shorter-life part instead. However, that wasn't enough product differentiation for the marketting team. They were afraid too many customers would buy the model with the cheaper part instead of the more expensive (and higher profit margin) model. So, they decided that the model with the cheaper part should run slower. The two units had the exact same CPU board, but we had to put in extra wait-states to slow down the code on the cheaper model. The two units even used the same code; we simply detected whether we found the cheap or expensive part, and programmed the memory wait-states appropriately.
The moral of the story is, companies will do anything they can to make a buck. And the minds of marketting folks are often incomprehensible to us engineers, and vice-versa.
I really liked this system too, especially for a space-faring culture which has no need for marking time as integer fractions of the rotation of an arbitrary blue-green planet. Seems to me that it'll make a whole lot of sense to use something like this when we get permanent off-planet colonies. (Especially Martian colonies, where a day is close enough to an Earth day for the residents to live by the Martian light/dark cycle, but just enough off to bollox calendars between there and mother Earth.)
Of course, my favorite part about this system is Vinge's description of when the calendar began...
"Beginning of the epoch" indeed!
Huh. Mea culpa. Serves me right for reading a CSS tutorial instead of the actual spec. The tutorial didn't mention this.
Now if I could only figure out what the W3 means by "inline, non-replaced elements" as opposed to "inline, replaced elements"...
There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG web page builder. HTML specifically leaves most rendering decisions up to the browser. Different browsers should render a page differently. One of the problems with WYSIWYG editors (for anything, not just web pages) is that people will do really bad formatting that just happens to "look right". Centering a line by using leading spaces or spacer GIFs, for example, instead of the "align=center" property. Looks great on their screen, but looks like hell if someone has their screen width or font set differently.
I'd also mention using physical <i> and <b> tags instead of logical <em> and <strong> tags, but that battle was lost years ago. It is an example of using the wrong markup just because it happens to "look right" on their screen, though!
If someone really wants WYSIWYG, maybe they should publish as a PDF document instead.
I'd really like to see a GUI HTML editor that does a good job using the proper tags, instead of acting like a paint program and producing crappy HTML to try to force the end user into seeing a pixel-by-pixel copy of the author's screen. I suspect this is what you meant by "standards compliant", and I'm sorry I can't help you there.
I was really annoyed the other day. I was trying to do some moderately tricky but perfectly legal CSS stuff. I wanted to have a bitmap as a background for a link. I didn't want to pre-render the text onto the button in a paint program, but have the browser render it in the user's default font. So I thought I'd just give the <a> tag an id property, and specify its background-image and min-width (or even just width) in a style sheet. As far as I can tell, this should be the right way to do it.
The result? IE6 rendered it perfectly. Mozilla 1.0 (on Win2k) rendered the image, but completely ignored the width. WTF? I thought Mozilla was supposed to be the completely compliant browser? I had to go back to the old technique of placing the link within a table cell to get it the right width.
I really hate to say it, but in at least this one case my CSS presentation would have "looked better in IE" because IE actually implemented the standards correctly, and Mozilla blew it. I hate it when Microsoft is right!
And, in some cases, the printers have debug modes where its entire memory (including the data spool) can be read out via SNMP. I believe this is a feature of the HP JetDirect print servers.
I don't know that there is a general way in which network printers can be secured. There's probably an encryption option in IPP, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find printers, print servers, and clients which support it.
Hey, that's my line! I actually did that to a newspaper telemarketer...
Gotta say, I have to give her points for trying. A few moments later our second phone line rang. Same lady.
Why would I want to stop telemarketing calls when they're so much fun? Oh, and for a good time, try this one:
Don't know what she was upset about. I mean, she called me, right? Whaddaya expect when you try to sell a dating service to a married guy?
Cotton Expressions has a bunch of great science and astronomy related shirts, as well as a number of shirts with Sidney Harris cartoons. They're not fully online yet; the shirt catalog is there, but the ordering system is "fill in the form, then print and fax it". (Matthew, it's the 21st century already. Get with the program! :-)
SoftWear Toys & Tees is also worth a look-see, especially if you're a Lois McMaster Bujold fan. Order via PayPal, or use the print-and-mail form.
I agree; this is a major flaw in the game. IMHO the skirmish AI is way too powerful. The only way to beat the computer in a skirmish match is to cut off its resources and starve it to death. I can beat the AI about half the time on maps that give you a good, defensible starting position. On the other hand, on open maps you're toast. The AI can manage resources and buildings much more efficiently than a human who has to click everywhere, and the AI can micromanage combat with ease. Take the "sleep" spell, for instance. Puts an enemy unit to sleep until it's attacked. For a human player, hit the hotkey then try to target an enemy unit. Just try to pick him out of the middle of a melee bunch with a slightly sluggish mouse. Oh, and even if you do get him, try to convince your army to stop attacking him and move on to someone else! Ha! They just continue to beat on him, waking him up right away. Gobs o' mana, wasted. The AI, on the other hand, has precision targetting and can simultaneously command the rest of the army to break off and attack something else.
On maps that actually have you physically separated (by rivers, trees, etc.) the AI is utterly incompetent. It has a hard time establishing a secondary base, and effectively starves itself with another goldmine sitting there just beyond a line of trees.
In general, I really like some of the changes they've made to the game. I like the concept of heroes, and I really like the "upkeep" penalty for keeping a huge standing army. The variation in races is good (although a bit too reminiscent of Starcraft). I really look forward to playing against other people. But it's not a great single-player game.
I ought to add some gripes about the game engine as long as I'm here. First, it's dark! I have to crank the gamma way up, to the point where everything looks washed out. This could be a flaw in my video drivers, since the 2D controls look okay. It's just the 3D that's dark. (And, oddly, the 3D seems much better after a cinematic is run. Maybe they're forgetting to set or clear a value for the regular game?) Second, the 3D is not put to good use. You can tilt and rotate the camera, but there's no reason to. Tilting it just makes it hard to play, and the rotation snaps back to normal when you release the button. And there's no zoom! I really want to zoom out to see more on the screen, but I can't. Zoom would have been way more useful than camera tilt. The 3D terrain isn't put to good use, either. I haven't really seen any change in behavior for being on high ground or being down in a valley. It seems to be just eye-candy layered on top of a Starcraft-like elevation system. I think this game would have done better as a traditional 2D RTS.
CAMPAIGN SPOILER WARNING
The campaign scenarios are much more fun and well-balanced. Unfortunately, there are no sympathetic characters! In the human campaign you play Prince Arthas. He starts out okay, but then he turns to the dark side, disregards his advisors and friends, slaughters a human town, turns on his mercenaries, and pretty much condemns his own army to death. In the final cinematic he murders his father the king in cold blood. I had absolutely no sympathy for this guy. None. I felt no reason to want him to win. I even to run tried the slaughter-the-town scenario without killing the villagers; just going after the bad guy. Nope, no can do. You have to kill 100 villagers or no cookie.
Okay, the villagers were infected and were going to turn into undead. Maybe he did have to kill them. But jeez! Make him seem heroic about it! He's a Paladin, for cryin' out loud! He shouldn't be going into this berzerker rage. He should show some compassion even if there's no other way. (I know, that wouldn't mesh with the later storyline, but it would have been a lot more satisfying to play.)
By the end of the human campaign I was so disgusted with this guy I was really hoping he'd get his ass kicked by the undead in the second campaign. But no, you end up playing him there, too. At least I can revel in treachery and vile deeds when I'm playing an undead. Slaughtering towns of innocents is good, unclean fun! I still want to off Arthas, though.
The game has its high points, but it has a number of flaws as well. It's a good successor to Warcraft II and Starcraft, but nothing revolutionary.
It'd be interesting to feed Katz articles (or Slashdot articles in general) to Columbia Newsblaster and see how it summarized them...
Yes, it was. A couple months ago I had the pleasure of seeing 2001 in a theater with a 70mm print. It was amazing. No, the movie didn't make any more sense in the theater, but it really showcased Kubrick's skill as a filmmaker. That "10 minutes of just some guy breathing" was intense. Breathing. Breathing. Pod moves in. Breathing stops. Body drifts off, flailing about. No breathing. Body stops flailing about. If there had been dramatic music or other sound effects the impact of the scene would have been lost.
Clarke knows his stuff about science. Kubrick knows his stuff about filmmaking. But that movie was made for the theater, and it does not translate well to the small screen!
Amen. I've been using Daemon Tools for exactly this purpose for almost a year now. I love it. The kids never need to search for the CDs and I don't have to worry about a favorite game getting scratched. I've been using it for my games, too, just because it's so much more convenient. (That, and my CDROM drive sounds like a jet engine warming up...)
Y: Pinned I have you, Count Dooku. Why then smiling you are?
D: Because I know something you do not know, Master Yoda. You see, I am not left-handed!