But how in the hell does he manage a casual assertion that Word is unusable for documents over 40 pages?
It's been my experience as a technical writer that Word is to be avoided at all costs when composing documents with inserted graphics, tables, figures, and complicated formatting. Word will - and I guarantee this - choke and start crashing while trying to parse these complicated documents and doing something else simultaneously.
At that point, your only recourse is to copy everything out of the old document and into a new one, which usually works, but isn't exactly the hallmark of a stable document creation product.
For a 300+ page novel with four styles and nothing but text, Word is probably fine, but I'll stick with FrameMaker when I can. When Frame goes away, I'll be very sad, because there won't be a well supported writing tool that can handle heavily-laden technical documents.
Have you considered that are people for whom $400 isn't a small fortune? You can mock people for making a good living if you want, but it seems kind of ineffective.
I don't consider the folks up the street (who have an obnoxious home, a Gallardo, two Hummers, and a Cayman) stupid.
If a nuclear weapon were detonated in a U.S. city how could we verify it wasn't our bomb if we can't keep track of where our weapons are? By their distinct isotropic signature.
We can tell U.S. Plutonium from Soviet Plutonium from Chinese Plutonium. Rather easily, I gather.
Practically everything but the airframe and engines is new in those jets - and some systems on the B-52 are more modern than those on the B-1 and B-2 bombers.
There's a nice list and diagram on this page outlining some of the upgrades to keep the B-52 effective, despite its large radar cross section. If Congress ever lets Boeing upgrade the engines, (4xCFM-56, last time I heard) it'll be able to fly farther on less fuel and with less maintenance, too.
The B-52 is quite state of the art - nothing quite compares, except for maybe stuffing the latest computer hardware inside of an original IBM XT case.
No, the worst thing that could have happened is that they could have been stolen. As a previous poster mentioned, the Air Force is supposed to know exactly where every warhead is, all of the time. Period.
They didn't even know these five warheads (not armed, and not able to be armed) were off the base in Minot until someone in Louisiana noticed that they were "hot" shots.
To lose track of one warhead - much less FIVE - is a very serious transgression.
First off, other way to get your message across to the people who matter:
Call Joe Libonati, NBC Universal Television Group Publicity @ 1-818-840-3050 And Amy Zelvin, NBC Universal Digital Media Communications @ 1-212-664-7436
Now, let me get this straight:
I am a mobile professional. I don't watch TV at home, but I enjoy staying up-to-date on my favorite shows by using iTunes in whatever hotel/airport lounge/etc. I happen to be in between flights.
I watch shows on my iPod when my MacBook Pro isn't convenient.
According to NBC, I'm not the kind of customer they want. Reasonably well off, well connected, and quality-minded. They'd prefer for me to wait six months and uy a DVD set I'm never home to watch, or watch the shows, riddled with ads, for "free" on their web site (I guess I'll have to bring a book for those 4-5x monthly transcontinental flights, where there is no Internet).
What morons the executives at NBC must be.
I cannot and will not use a Microsoft DRM-based solution - they've switched strategies several times over the past three years, while the first track I ever bought from iTunes still works.
I won't resort to piracy either, but face it; I have no interest (and usually no time) to sit in a hotel room or my house and watch programming, nor do I want to mash everything up on my tivo - iTunes was a perfect solution - no commercials, easily obtainable, watch anytime, anywhere - and NBC just shut it off because they're greedy. Forget about the customer...
Or on XBox Live. They just started putting episodes of Heroes up there last week. Seems NBC already found a new channel to replace iTunes... And since the justice department is willing to do whatever anyone wants within a certain political agenda, it looks like they'll get away with using Apple as a test run, then putting all their downloadable video business with their 'news' partner, MSNBC.
Or how about depositing money into an account that isn't yours. You know, my employer does this twice a month. Healthy numbers - and not always the same amount.
I am wary of coming across like Christopher Hitchins, so vitriolic the candidate will defend themselves rather than answer the question. Just don't record your question drunk. That oughta do the trick.
The only CD I've ever experienced having a non-scratch related failure was in an enclosed space with some spilled DOT 3 brake fluid.
My theory is that the edges of the disc weren't sealed properly and the ammonia or other solvents in the brake fluid corroded/dissolved the aluminum somehow. You could see right through the disc.
IMHO if something happens during a space walk, You still can bring the astronaut back on board, and still can try an unrepaired re-entry. But even if the repairing astronaut dies (which is very unlikely), the others are still alive. And what if the astronaut perched at the end of a 100-foot boom crashes into the tiles he's repairing, damaging them more extensively, or even beyond repair? After all, the arm is very heavy and the EVA suit is 300 pounds, along with the 200lb astronaut inside of it. That's a lot of mass to be swinging around next to all the other, undamaged tiles.
Or what if the 'goop', applied unevenly, causes a hot spot on another tile? Right now, the damaged tiles are located over a wing spar - the thickest structural part of the wing, and a section that can take more heating. Since the depth of the gouge indicates that the plasma flow over it will 'eddy' over the deepest area, keeping it from the greatest heat of reentry, models indicate that the aluminum structure of the shuttle won't fail, and that temperatures won't exceed 350f.
The problem with speculating on NASA decisions, as so many coffee urn quarterbacks are doing this morning, is that they really have no idea how complex the shuttle and its mission really are. The items I've outlined here, available in almost no major news stories about the decision, were easily obtained at NASA Tv and Aviation week - and they're a small sample of the factors in this decision.
They should have stuck an Apollo Command Module on the front of the orbiter where the flight deck is and carried a launch escape tower for the first couple of minutes of flight. That way the crew would always have the option of ejecting if the orbiter fails. I don't disagree. But we were stuck with this design 32 years ago. How does that fit the parent coment's assertion of brain drain since the latter half of the 1990s?
I can't see that it does in any way, shape, or form. Parent has an axe to grind against something he or she doesn't understand.
The shuttle has become a death trap because NASA has placed image before technological reality.
Oh, bullshit.
The shuttle may have been a flawed design to begin with, and that may have been because NASA was concerned with big-budget DoD and pie-in-the-sky programs during the 70s...but practically everything except the shape of the ship has changed since the Shuttle first flew in 1981.
It hasn't "become" a death trap. Even LEO flight is risky, and the Shuttle is heavy and uses very bleeding-edge technology (still) like throttled H2/LO2 engines. Be honest and argue about the fundamentals of the Shuttle designs, but don't try to bullshit me and claim that things have gotten more dangerous for Shuttle crews now.
Maybe they should have started Constellation ten years ago - but on the whole, the Shuttle is safer now than it has ever been; in other words, still very dangerous, but less so than before Columbia.
I apologize for the brusque tone, but it really cheeses me off when people who do nothing but read NASAWatch.com think they know how complex and difficult manned spaceflight really is - especially with 35-year-old technology.
Most of us would be happy for Intel/OSX native versions of Adobe/Macromedia products.
No kidding. Adobe killed Framemaker by taking it off of the Mac (after they made a half-hearted effort at porting it to Linux.
I'd love to know how many licenses they're selling now that every just uses Word (which won't work reliably for anything over about forty pages) instead.
I don't see anyone losing if there's two professional-quality graphics applications competing with each other. Except possibly Adobe's share price.
How about professional graphic artists and other who have to exchange files between the two suites all the time? I'm pretty sure they'll lose:
-Money. They'll have to buy both suites. -Money. They'll have to keep two platforms and three binaries around if they're a Mac shop, and they'll have to have someone manage all of it. -Productivity. Even if interoperable somehow, converting from one tool/platform to another rarely goes smoothly. -Time. It'll all take longer.
Adobe does a great job with it's tools. I'd love to see someone develop something from the ground up that does most of what Photoshop or (insert your favoite Adobe tool here) using the same file formats Adobe currently uses.
Microsoft, however, is known for mediocre approaches using mediocre tools. I'm not eager to see what they plan to do using new file formats and new approaches. I'll be the first to admit it i I'm wrong, but all I see happenening is a repeat of the desktop publishing market in the early-to-mid 90s: lots of different software, lots of delays, and lots of clueless newbies who think that because it says "Microsoft", it's automagically an accepted standard.
Perhaps this is a foolish question, but are there a lot of dead cycles on a high end supercomputer?
Obviously you've never worked for a government contractor. A stage example:
1: CONTRACTOR, pacing in an untidy OFFICE filled with EQUIPMENT: "We need to order, configure and install this thing at 12/10s speed to meet deadline! Where the f*ck is the chimp from the CDW ads????"
(CRICKETS sing...six weeks pass)
2: CHIEF SCIENTIST, inside raised floor lab filled with immaculate, slab-sided computing machines: "Hey, can we use this thing to run some Mandelbrot sets?"
PHYSICAL PLANT GUY: "Not until we upgrade the chillers." UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: "I'm not sure we can afford that!"
3: TOUSLED-HAIRED SCIENTIST, in grimy, pizza and book-strewn home: "If only I could get enough cycles to build my next great open source project...we could save the world from the impending unnamed crisis! Crap!"
SCIENTIST'S CAT:(forbiddingly) "Meow-rarwerews"
4: BUSH SCIENCE ADVISOR in a rather spare-looking OFFICE without a COMPUTER: "Let's shut this (supercomputer) thing down. We can shunt the money off to a lobbyist, and rake in 200% on the backend for our downstream contractors. What, Lockheed is on the phone? Hang on..." FADE OUT
5: VIEW OF EARTH FROM ORBIT. EARTH BLOWS UP. (Maybe use coal dust as per George Lucas)
We have Pakistan (our ally) collaborating with the Taliban [indianexpress.com], there are Over 20 million displaced homeless [npr.org] due to floods in India, and let's not mention the hypocrisy of the government at home. If The New York Times feels that this is a worthy exercise for their investigative reporters....
Maybe it's the only kind of investigative reporting that they can do these days without being arrested.
Don't scoff - Bush himself went on a rampage after the NYTimes outed his little "go around the courts" wiretapping program.
Most modern lazer printers don't emit near the levels of Ozone that older models did. Some don't put out Ozone at all.
That may be the case, but at the last giantcorp(TM) I worked at, there were scads of LaserJet 4 and 5s with depleted ozone filters chugging away a ream at a time to make sure some PHB had a printed set of PowerPoint slides for people to ignore along with the crap on screen.
There are still a lot of old 1990-95-ish Fuji-Xerox engines out there, too - and I can guarantee those things are virtual smog generators.
When these [dry air] concerns were brought to management, they responded by saying dry air is better for the computers and other electronic equipment
Sure! Because dry air makes static, and static is electricity...and, uh, computers run on electricity!
I'd think the biggest air quality issues have to do with older laser printers that not only fluff toner, but which also have depleted ozone filters. An office full of ozone is definitely bad news - and every LaserJet 4 or 5 I've seen over the past few years has been one of these 'gross polluters'.
Slashdot Mirror
But how in the hell does he manage a casual assertion that Word is unusable for documents over 40 pages?
It's been my experience as a technical writer that Word is to be avoided at all costs when composing documents with inserted graphics, tables, figures, and complicated formatting. Word will - and I guarantee this - choke and start crashing while trying to parse these complicated documents and doing something else simultaneously.
At that point, your only recourse is to copy everything out of the old document and into a new one, which usually works, but isn't exactly the hallmark of a stable document creation product.
For a 300+ page novel with four styles and nothing but text, Word is probably fine, but I'll stick with FrameMaker when I can. When Frame goes away, I'll be very sad, because there won't be a well supported writing tool that can handle heavily-laden technical documents.
Have you considered that are people for whom $400 isn't a small fortune? You can mock people for making a good living if you want, but it seems kind of ineffective.
I don't consider the folks up the street (who have an obnoxious home, a Gallardo, two Hummers, and a Cayman) stupid.
I consider their purchases stupid.
Take a lesson, GP.
We can tell U.S. Plutonium from Soviet Plutonium from Chinese Plutonium. Rather easily, I gather.
PMITA prison, here we come.
Right, because a B-52 is state of the art.
Practically everything but the airframe and engines is new in those jets - and some systems on the B-52 are more modern than those on the B-1 and B-2 bombers.
There's a nice list and diagram on this page outlining some of the upgrades to keep the B-52 effective, despite its large radar cross section. If Congress ever lets Boeing upgrade the engines, (4xCFM-56, last time I heard) it'll be able to fly farther on less fuel and with less maintenance, too.
The B-52 is quite state of the art - nothing quite compares, except for maybe stuffing the latest computer hardware inside of an original IBM XT case.
They didn't even know these five warheads (not armed, and not able to be armed) were off the base in Minot until someone in Louisiana noticed that they were "hot" shots.
To lose track of one warhead - much less FIVE - is a very serious transgression.
It's odd - I was watching Dr. Strangelove last night, before this story broke.
Those guys at Minot are gonna have to answer to someone...and it a'int gonna be the Coca-Cola company.
First off, other way to get your message across to the people who matter:
Call Joe Libonati, NBC Universal Television Group Publicity @
1-818-840-3050
And Amy Zelvin, NBC Universal Digital Media Communications @
1-212-664-7436
Now, let me get this straight:
I am a mobile professional. I don't watch TV at home, but I enjoy
staying up-to-date on my favorite shows by using iTunes in
whatever hotel/airport lounge/etc. I happen to be in between
flights.
I watch shows on my iPod when my MacBook Pro isn't
convenient.
According to NBC, I'm not the kind of customer they want. Reasonably well
off, well connected, and quality-minded. They'd prefer for me to
wait six months and uy a DVD set I'm never home to watch, or
watch the shows, riddled with ads, for "free" on their web site (I
guess I'll have to bring a book for those 4-5x monthly
transcontinental flights, where there is no Internet).
What morons the executives at NBC must be.
I cannot and will not use a Microsoft DRM-based solution -
they've switched strategies several times over the past three
years, while the first track I ever bought from iTunes still works.
I won't resort to piracy either, but face it; I have no interest (and
usually no time) to sit in a hotel room or my house and watch
programming, nor do I want to mash everything up on my tivo -
iTunes was a perfect solution - no commercials, easily
obtainable, watch anytime, anywhere - and NBC just shut it off
because they're greedy. Forget about the customer...
Pretty shitty, if you ask me.
You forgot CowboyNeal.
I don't think they're being investigated.
The only CD I've ever experienced having a non-scratch related failure was in an enclosed space with some spilled DOT 3 brake fluid.
My theory is that the edges of the disc weren't sealed properly and the ammonia or other solvents in the brake fluid corroded/dissolved the aluminum somehow. You could see right through the disc.
Or what if the 'goop', applied unevenly, causes a hot spot on another tile? Right now, the damaged tiles are located over a wing spar - the thickest structural part of the wing, and a section that can take more heating. Since the depth of the gouge indicates that the plasma flow over it will 'eddy' over the deepest area, keeping it from the greatest heat of reentry, models indicate that the aluminum structure of the shuttle won't fail, and that temperatures won't exceed 350f.
The problem with speculating on NASA decisions, as so many coffee urn quarterbacks are doing this morning, is that they really have no idea how complex the shuttle and its mission really are. The items I've outlined here, available in almost no major news stories about the decision, were easily obtained at NASA Tv and Aviation week - and they're a small sample of the factors in this decision.
Premiere Election Solutions
Now when elections are stolen, people will be PESsed off.
I can't see that it does in any way, shape, or form. Parent has an axe to grind against something he or she doesn't understand.
The shuttle has become a death trap because NASA has placed image before technological reality.
Oh, bullshit.
The shuttle may have been a flawed design to begin with, and that may have been because NASA was concerned with big-budget DoD and pie-in-the-sky programs during the 70s...but practically everything except the shape of the ship has changed since the Shuttle first flew in 1981.
It hasn't "become" a death trap. Even LEO flight is risky, and the Shuttle is heavy and uses very bleeding-edge technology (still) like throttled H2/LO2 engines. Be honest and argue about the fundamentals of the Shuttle designs, but don't try to bullshit me and claim that things have gotten more dangerous for Shuttle crews now.
Maybe they should have started Constellation ten years ago - but on the whole, the Shuttle is safer now than it has ever been; in other words, still very dangerous, but less so than before Columbia.
I apologize for the brusque tone, but it really cheeses me off when people who do nothing but read NASAWatch.com think they know how complex and difficult manned spaceflight really is - especially with 35-year-old technology.
Most of us would be happy for Intel/OSX native versions of Adobe/Macromedia products.
No kidding. Adobe killed Framemaker by taking it off of the Mac (after they made a half-hearted effort at porting it to Linux.
I'd love to know how many licenses they're selling now that every just uses Word (which won't work reliably for anything over about forty pages) instead.
I don't see anyone losing if there's two professional-quality graphics applications competing with each other. Except possibly Adobe's share price.
How about professional graphic artists and other who have to exchange files between the two suites all the time? I'm pretty sure they'll lose:
-Money. They'll have to buy both suites.
-Money. They'll have to keep two platforms and three binaries around if they're a Mac shop, and they'll have to have someone manage all of it.
-Productivity. Even if interoperable somehow, converting from one tool/platform to another rarely goes smoothly.
-Time. It'll all take longer.
Adobe does a great job with it's tools. I'd love to see someone develop something from the ground up that does most of what Photoshop or (insert your favoite Adobe tool here) using the same file formats Adobe currently uses.
Microsoft, however, is known for mediocre approaches using mediocre tools. I'm not eager to see what they plan to do using new file formats and new approaches. I'll be the first to admit it i I'm wrong, but all I see happenening is a repeat of the desktop publishing market in the early-to-mid 90s: lots of different software, lots of delays, and lots of clueless newbies who think that because it says "Microsoft", it's automagically an accepted standard.
Perhaps this is a foolish question, but are there a lot of dead cycles on a high end supercomputer?
...six weeks pass)
Obviously you've never worked for a government contractor. A stage example:
1: CONTRACTOR, pacing in an untidy OFFICE filled with EQUIPMENT: "We need to order, configure and install this thing at 12/10s speed to meet deadline! Where the f*ck is the chimp from the CDW ads????"
(CRICKETS sing
2: CHIEF SCIENTIST, inside raised floor lab filled with immaculate, slab-sided computing machines: "Hey, can we use this thing to run some Mandelbrot sets?"
PHYSICAL PLANT GUY: "Not until we upgrade the chillers."
UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: "I'm not sure we can afford that!"
3: TOUSLED-HAIRED SCIENTIST, in grimy, pizza and book-strewn home: "If only I could get enough cycles to build my next great open source project...we could save the world from the impending unnamed crisis! Crap!"
SCIENTIST'S CAT:(forbiddingly) "Meow-rarwerews"
4: BUSH SCIENCE ADVISOR in a rather spare-looking OFFICE without a COMPUTER: "Let's shut this (supercomputer) thing down. We can shunt the money off to a lobbyist, and rake in 200% on the backend for our downstream contractors. What, Lockheed is on the phone? Hang on..." FADE OUT
5: VIEW OF EARTH FROM ORBIT. EARTH BLOWS UP. (Maybe use coal dust as per George Lucas)
6: FIN
We have Pakistan (our ally) collaborating with the Taliban [indianexpress.com], there are Over 20 million displaced homeless [npr.org] due to floods in India, and let's not mention the hypocrisy of the government at home.
If The New York Times feels that this is a worthy exercise for their investigative reporters....
Maybe it's the only kind of investigative reporting that they can do these days without being arrested.
Don't scoff - Bush himself went on a rampage after the NYTimes outed his little "go around the courts" wiretapping program.
Most modern lazer printers don't emit near the levels of Ozone that older models did. Some don't put out Ozone at all.
That may be the case, but at the last giantcorp(TM) I worked at, there were scads of LaserJet 4 and 5s with depleted ozone filters chugging away a ream at a time to make sure some PHB had a printed set of PowerPoint slides for people to ignore along with the crap on screen.
There are still a lot of old 1990-95-ish Fuji-Xerox engines out there, too - and I can guarantee those things are virtual smog generators.
When these [dry air] concerns were brought to management, they responded by saying dry air is better for the computers and other electronic equipment
Sure! Because dry air makes static, and static is electricity...and, uh, computers run on electricity!
I'd think the biggest air quality issues have to do with older laser printers that not only fluff toner, but which also have depleted ozone filters. An office full of ozone is definitely bad news - and every LaserJet 4 or 5 I've seen over the past few years has been one of these 'gross polluters'.
And here is a nice video explaining the whole VECO scandal.
It doesn't look good for Ted.