I agree with you about what PDF is FOR. But what I NEED is
a) a fixed-layout format (like PDF/ InDesign/ Quark/ LaTeX, but not like.doc or HTML) that is reasonably easy to edit in...
b) that you can edit with the right software (like everything but PDF)... and
c) that everyone can read with software that is already on most computers and all major platforms, and preferably free. (which applies to PDF, HTML,.doc, txt, rtf, gif, jpg, swf and mp3. Obviously, some of those aren't appropriate for my other points )
Which is why there is apparently nothing in existance that does what I need, but why I was hoping someone knew something.
Personally, I believe the most likely solution is when somebody (Adobe probably) comes out with a way to make a "magic" PDF - one that renders fine in the free viewer but ALSO retains all the editing information in it, so that if I (for instance) create it in InDesign, send it to somebody and they open it in InDesign it has all the editing information and they can work on it just like I sent them the InDesign document, because it was embedded in the PDF.
I realize that a zip file containing a PDF and an Indesign document mostly fufills my needs, but it wouldn't automatically sync them on save. I have no idea if there's an easy way to stick a hidden payload in a PDF, but I'm guessing there is - which implies that I just need somebody to add this feature to their non-terrible layout program, and it doesn't have to be Adobe.
I just now got this vision of commercializing the cute little penguin with magic powers, but with this backdrop of being in a cheesy clown horror movie.
The penguin sold in the supernatural equivalent of ThinkGeek or the like... advertised as helping with "the one area of life we couldn't help you with before"... having to sacrfice something to the little penguin with a knowing smirk on it's face.
Sold in a bunch of varieties based on what sort of partner you're trying to attract...
That's a record for me - your entire post rebutted by the very first line of the post I ALREADY made. woot!!!!
" You misunderstood./. wants everything. Especially because different people want different things...)"
The rest was, naturally, a joke. Which is why, naturally, it was modded insightful. But that's not my fault (unless I really do have superpowers I haven't confirmed).
At this moment apparently it's an insightful funny troll - I think 4/1/1) And my other reply (which was, in my opinion, much less funny) is a +2 funny -1 offtopic. So naturally the less funny one is marked more funny. Which I find funny, Karma about talking about mods be damned.
PS. At this moment the ggp is modded +4, 70% insightful, 20% Funny, 10% Troll. Which adds up to 100, but implies that it's more funny than troll, and I can't make the math work out, even with significant rounding, unless it's +1/-1 Funny/Troll, which would imply that they should be the same, however you're rounding. Does it just give whatever is left to the last category? Did somebody complain too much about it not adding up to 100%? It rounding to the nearest 10% saving cycles somewhere?
if it were up to me, I'd mod up your post before mine - that was witty AND concise.
Naturally, I try to write something funny, and I get insightful. The only time I can remember getting a funny mod was when I complained about only getting insightful mods - like this - which is a pretty perfect example of something that shouldn't be modded funny, so it was one of my least deserving moments.
You misunderstood./. wants everything. Especially because different people want different things...)
They quite literally want to build a automatic cake making machine so they can have lots of cake while they're eating their cake : )
They want a blindingly fast machine with a 90 inch display that fits on their keychain and uses no power. They want this machine to be completely secure while allowing random applications to do whatever necessary to squeeze their hardware. They want it to use an OS that is unpopular enough instill geek pride but is somehow the primary development platform of all cool games.
Oh, and it should be Free as in speech, Free as in beer, and produced by a trusted public company that somehow makes money off this without doing anything that would make them unloved.
And they want cute little penguins to somehow get them laid by actual women, generally without them having to go anywhere they might actually meet women.
I'm not saying any of these individual goals are bad ideas, I'm just saying you can't always have everything you want.
(Incidentally, I'm in favor of really paranoid IE settings, but since by using it you're implicitly trusting MS, the Office update site could probably have been automatically added to that list. I think that's why the gp noted it.)
There are myriad free tools to read PDF. There are myriad free tools to write to PDF (or especially "print to PDF")
There is a serious, design driven lack of any way to edit PDFs. As in, I create a PDF in an application foo, send it to my friend who also has foo, they make changes and send it back. Word has been doing this for more than a decade, and PDF, as far as I can tell, doesn't do this ever. If one of those pieces of software does this, please point it out.
If you want a more detailed text case, try editing text in a paragraph without having to manually reflow the paragraph.
The next-best option available is to use Quark or InDesign, LaTeX or some other decent page layout program, and send back and forth the original files, exporting to PDF when you need to. But you're not editing PDFs if you do that.
I'll build you one. Seriously. You make a list of all the drive interfaces you want, and I'll put together a system or systems (depending on how many) that automatically overwrite all data on them to match DoD 2250 on any boot.
Obviously this won't be able to overwrite data where the heads have failed, but it'll make a good attempt to blow away whatever is possible without hardware intervention.
As noted in another reply, the real answer is to change your RMA contract so you only have to return the covers.
I saw an interview with him where he said someone, room service or something, came to his hotel room. And he hadn't had anything to do, so he'd turned on the TV. And ST:tNG had been on... and the guy noticed it was him on TV.
Apparently they'd shot so many episodes of TNG that he couldn't remember what was going to happen, so it was still interesting.
But he said it must've been the most pathetic appearance ever, of this guy, alone, watching himself on TV.
He's awesome, and this is a moderately funny story : )
I never meant to suggest it's a generally good idea. Obviously, it can be a good or bad deal depending on the actual $ values involved. I was just trying to point out why it MIGHT be better than it appears at a glance. I tend to think leases are less competitive because the terms are more complicated.
You're right about the timing of the tax hardship being passed on, but another ROI-esque thing comes into play.
Here's a silly illustration: Alice is starting a company, so she gets the bank go give her an unsecured line of credit at 20% interest. Bob has a bunch of money in a COD getting 5% interest. Alice needs to buy a computer.
She can buy it on her bank line at 20%, or she can get a loan secured by the computer at 15% from Bob. This is a good deal for both of them. A lease is vaguely like Bob loaning her the money and ALSO loaning her the tax break.
The disadvantage of leases is really that it's so complicated it's easy to get it wrong, especially because many people can't handle simpler math. The advantage is that the "tax break" is a loan that's 100% guaranteed to be repaid, even if Alice goes bankrupt, because it gets repaid as the property depreciates.
I am not an accountant. Generally, if you take a structure that should have certain tax consequences and recharacterize it to have better tax consequences that is illegal. Even retroactively, as another poster pointed out.
If you write a lease that's got enough clauses that the leasee EFFECTIVELY owns during the whole lease, that would be illegal. Another poster pointed out that this may not be legal if it really isn't the fair market value of the item at the end of the lease. For a lot of computers, though, the fair market value is pretty close to 0.
Also, my apologies for not realizing the IRS had fixed the 7 year thing - tax law is only about my 109th job function, and that particular piece isn't actually very relevant to me.
"Discounted Cash Flow" is accountantspeak. "ROI" was accountantspeak, but now it's general buisiness speak and picked up meaninglessly by the media.
I sustain that this is the key concept of ROI - that we shouldn't put money in something unless we get a lot more back, because we always have better things to do with it. I didn't mean to imply there wasn't a bunch more concepts involved in ROI.
No, it's not the same thing. Because if you have (for instance) a 10 sided die you can't do anything but discard those extra results. And if you discard them, that means you have to roll again which is quite unacceptable in a simultaneous multiroll situation.
That means that what matters is only the highest power of 2 in your die - so a d8 has the highest density, while a d4, d12, d20 and d100 all have exactly the same bit density.
The only other solution is to generate a stream of bits which may be of an indeterminate length... so you keep appending the bits from each consequetive die and you don't know how many you'll end up with in the end. For instance, a d20 can provide 2 definite bits (it's always divisible by 4) and 2 more bits 4/5 of the time. It provides 2 bits if the result is divisible by 5 or 4 bits otherwise. This gives an average bit density of 3.6 bits, which is slightly higher than a d8's 3 bits. d20s are also in a smaller font, however, and a physically bigger I don't think the substantial added work is worth.6 bits/die.
If you really want to increase bit density of the box, the larger boxes will fit 2 d8s per box. If you can reliably order them (always the darker color first, or something) this works fine. Arguably you could pick whichever one ends up more left or something, but I'd start to worry that human nonrandomness would interfere in judgement calls.
I decided I should clarify this. The important bit, which I just sortof assumed, is: money now is a lot better than money later, especially because as a corp you probably borrowed money from somewhere, so you're paying interest on anything you have to spend now. This is what "Return on Investment (ROI)" is all about - to spend more money on something it has to be worth substantially more in the long term, not just a little more.
(The rest of this is all massively, massively approximated. I am also not an accountant.)
Say you have an originally $1000 3 year old computer that's 60% depreciated If you keep it, you'll eventually get to write the other $400 (40%) off - over the next 4 years. This might save you $200 in taxes over those 4 years.
If you sell it for $2 you get to write off the rest of it immediately - so you immediately get $398 of writeoff and $2 - or $201 you've made, and it's all right now. This equation only gets better if you get more than $2 at the end.
This tax part basically hugely exaggerates or perhaps magnifies the "money now" part of a lease, especially if you can't guarantee that you'll immediately dispose of it.
So a lease for $400/yr for three years might be $200 after tax each year, while buying it is more like $850 the first year and then it gives you some money back each additional year.
Basically, it's because the tax law depreciates most of that hardware over something like 7 years. So in the first year you'll get to write off something like 20% of the value.
With a lease you expense 100% of the amount you pay as soon as you pay it.
This is why a very common option is lease-to-buy with a very cheap buy option at the end of some number of years. This is essentially an apparently legal scam to allow you to write it all off. (It's legal because the leasor really does still own it until the end)
The next-best option is to sell the hardware the day you stop using it, because then you immediately get to write off the difference between the amount you've already devalued it and the amount you actually got for it. Because computers aren't worth anything much sooner than 7 years, you always get a tax benefit when you sell a computer that just became obsolete.
128 bits. Roll one 8-sided die 51 times (discarding the least-significant bit of the last roll).
To speed up the process, get one of those clear boxes they use to make sure people take the right number of pills per day. Get one with more than 22 boxes. (4 times a day for a week = 28, fairly common)
Put dice in boxes. Put a sheet of something solid on the door side. Shake. Invert. voila, random byte strings. w/ 28 boxes you have 84 random bits. Repeat twice for your 152 bit key, dropping the last 16 bits.
chessex.com has a variety of dice - you can can order single d8s for.50c. I'm fairly certain you could find cheaper prices. I estimate the total cost of this hardware randomizer at $20 if done on the cheap.
Someone will probably complain about the non-cryptographic quality randomness of this process. But you only need cryptographic quality randomness when you're going to use it very repeatedly and someone can attack the similarity between them. Since the nonrandomness isn't known to anyone outside and you probably aren't generating a massive number of keys you're fairly safe. To increase security, buy dice from multiple manufacturers and occasionally switch around the lots.
(every 4 d8 values converts to 3 hex values. If you're converting by hand, you could alternately use a pair of dice for a hex value, generating only 56 bits per shake but only needing a table of 16 values to convert by hand to hex. You could also use 4 sided dice for this equally well, since you're only using 4 bits per pair.)
I don't have a link right in front of me, but I've heard you should stretch your eyes every 15 minutes or so - which roughly means to focus on something as far away as possible to contrast your up-close monitor.
Unless you're on a strange planet with multiple suns or a very odd rotation, it can't be more than 1 complete day from the end of your local day. And that's only if you live just barely on the West side of the International Date Line.
Not that I'm saying I necessarily agree, but I suspect the gp would say they were well-trained but uneducated. I definitely agree that practical English is fairly fuzzy on words to provide precise distinction between these meanings.
I might define "mainstream education" as "degrees and achievements where progress generally decreases the time needed to get some PhD"
I might define "professional training" as "the systematic improvement of skills related to the profession"
By those definitions, the crew probably had a high degree of professional training and a tiny amount of mainstream education.
[getting a second, different BS still counts as mainstream education, because it gets you closer to a _different_ PhD]
MacOS has supported _12_ mouse buttons for years - it might be more now. Of course, this is assuming the application has something to do with 12 mouse buttons.
Here's what you do: Buy a mac mini. Buy a USB mouse with more buttons. Plug it in. Done.
Apple specifies that basic application functions should be available with a single button - so that novice users can always use the apps, and to discourage arbitrarily hiding functions in context-menus.
Generally the context-menu (right-click) is ALSO mapped to ctrl-click. The middle click is mapped also, but I can't remember if it's mapped to option/alt or to cmd/appl.
As to Photoshop - compared to PCs, I think they're essentially even, because Macs have an additional modifier button - shift cmd/appl, option/alt and ctrl
Try sleeping better. I was very similar for a long time - it turns out sleep apnea is wildly underdiagnosed. (There are other possible problems, of course) But if you're not sleeping enough in the right order, it'll always be hard to get up, your long term memory will suffer, and you'll have other symptoms of fatigue (muscle pain)
Here's a hint - it's supposed to take 20-30 minutes to fall asleep. Any faster and you're overtired, either not sleeping enough or well enough.
PDFs are not a major area of my expertise. I know that they're only supposed to be a "distribution" format. However, I've ended up doing some informal support on the following problem:
Alice writes a document in format X. Bob (in legal) edits text all over the document. Then Bob saves it in format Y and distributes it to 900 employees. Now, in my opinion PDF is the only good option for format Y - distribution with a good printable layout.
Right now format X is.doc, which I think is pretty poor choice. Format X ought to be the same as Format Y. But Acrobat doesn't seem to let you edit paragraphs... it seems to save every line of text separately.
So what I really want is for somebody to have made a better PDF editor, or to tell me how to have working paragraphs in Acrobat. Failing that, I want there to be a universally accessible format that has similar capabilities. (HTML/CSS seems best;.doc LaTeX, Quark and Pagemaker have all been mentioned. RTF doesn't have enough formatting)
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I agree with you about what PDF is FOR. But what I NEED is
.doc or HTML) that is reasonably easy to edit in...
.doc, txt, rtf, gif, jpg, swf and mp3. Obviously, some of those aren't appropriate for my other points )
a) a fixed-layout format (like PDF/ InDesign/ Quark/ LaTeX, but not like
b) that you can edit with the right software (like everything but PDF)... and
c) that everyone can read with software that is already on most computers and all major platforms, and preferably free. (which applies to PDF, HTML,
Which is why there is apparently nothing in existance that does what I need, but why I was hoping someone knew something.
Personally, I believe the most likely solution is when somebody (Adobe probably) comes out with a way to make a "magic" PDF - one that renders fine in the free viewer but ALSO retains all the editing information in it, so that if I (for instance) create it in InDesign, send it to somebody and they open it in InDesign it has all the editing information and they can work on it just like I sent them the InDesign document, because it was embedded in the PDF.
I realize that a zip file containing a PDF and an Indesign document mostly fufills my needs, but it wouldn't automatically sync them on save. I have no idea if there's an easy way to stick a hidden payload in a PDF, but I'm guessing there is - which implies that I just need somebody to add this feature to their non-terrible layout program, and it doesn't have to be Adobe.
I just now got this vision of commercializing the cute little penguin with magic powers, but with this backdrop of being in a cheesy clown horror movie.
The penguin sold in the supernatural equivalent of ThinkGeek or the like... advertised as helping with "the one area of life we couldn't help you with before"... having to sacrfice something to the little penguin with a knowing smirk on it's face.
Sold in a bunch of varieties based on what sort of partner you're trying to attract...
Let's just hope nobody gets a defective one!
If you followed the other replies, plenty of them seemed to want literal cakes, lots of literal cakes. In addition to the other machine : )
If you don't want lots of literal cakes, maybe you haven't tried the right cake? I'm partial to angel food - beautiful, light, and cholesterol free.
That's a record for me - your entire post rebutted by the very first line of the post I ALREADY made. woot!!!!
/. wants everything. Especially because different people want different things...)"
" You misunderstood.
The rest was, naturally, a joke. Which is why, naturally, it was modded insightful. But that's not my fault (unless I really do have superpowers I haven't confirmed).
At this moment apparently it's an insightful funny troll - I think 4/1/1) And my other reply (which was, in my opinion, much less funny) is a +2 funny -1 offtopic. So naturally the less funny one is marked more funny. Which I find funny, Karma about talking about mods be damned.
PS. At this moment the ggp is modded +4, 70% insightful, 20% Funny, 10% Troll. Which adds up to 100, but implies that it's more funny than troll, and I can't make the math work out, even with significant rounding, unless it's +1/-1 Funny/Troll, which would imply that they should be the same, however you're rounding. Does it just give whatever is left to the last category? Did somebody complain too much about it not adding up to 100%? It rounding to the nearest 10% saving cycles somewhere?
PPS fnord
(to the parent - not the gp, who is me : )
if it were up to me, I'd mod up your post before mine - that was witty AND concise.
Naturally, I try to write something funny, and I get insightful. The only time I can remember getting a funny mod was when I complained about only getting insightful mods - like this - which is a pretty perfect example of something that shouldn't be modded funny, so it was one of my least deserving moments.
*sigh*
What's worse is I was proud of it anyway ; )
You misunderstood. /. wants everything. Especially because different people want different things...)
They quite literally want to build a automatic cake making machine so they can have lots of cake while they're eating their cake : )
They want a blindingly fast machine with a 90 inch display that fits on their keychain and uses no power. They want this machine to be completely secure while allowing random applications to do whatever necessary to squeeze their hardware. They want it to use an OS that is unpopular enough instill geek pride but is somehow the primary development platform of all cool games.
Oh, and it should be Free as in speech, Free as in beer, and produced by a trusted public company that somehow makes money off this without doing anything that would make them unloved.
And they want cute little penguins to somehow get them laid by actual women, generally without them having to go anywhere they might actually meet women.
I'm not saying any of these individual goals are bad ideas, I'm just saying you can't always have everything you want.
(Incidentally, I'm in favor of really paranoid IE settings, but since by using it you're implicitly trusting MS, the Office update site could probably have been automatically added to that list. I think that's why the gp noted it.)
There are myriad free tools to read PDF. There are myriad free tools to write to PDF (or especially "print to PDF")
There is a serious, design driven lack of any way to edit PDFs. As in, I create a PDF in an application foo, send it to my friend who also has foo, they make changes and send it back. Word has been doing this for more than a decade, and PDF, as far as I can tell, doesn't do this ever. If one of those pieces of software does this, please point it out.
If you want a more detailed text case, try editing text in a paragraph without having to manually reflow the paragraph.
The next-best option available is to use Quark or InDesign, LaTeX or some other decent page layout program, and send back and forth the original files, exporting to PDF when you need to. But you're not editing PDFs if you do that.
I'll build you one. Seriously.
You make a list of all the drive interfaces you want, and I'll put together a system or systems (depending on how many) that automatically overwrite all data on them to match DoD 2250 on any boot.
Obviously this won't be able to overwrite data where the heads have failed, but it'll make a good attempt to blow away whatever is possible without hardware intervention.
As noted in another reply, the real answer is to change your RMA contract so you only have to return the covers.
Email me if you're actually interested in this.
Brent Spiner has done a fair bit - 50 movies only about 15 of which seem to be TNG.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000653/
The biggest box-office ones were probably:
Independence Day (head of Area 51 research)
Phenomenon (Dr. Bob Niedorf)
The Aviator (Robert Gross)
He hasn't managed to achieve major star power, but he's definitely still there in a variety of characters.
I saw an interview with him where he said someone, room service or something, came to his hotel room. And he hadn't had anything to do, so he'd turned on the TV. And ST:tNG had been on... and the guy noticed it was him on TV.
Apparently they'd shot so many episodes of TNG that he couldn't remember what was going to happen, so it was still interesting.
But he said it must've been the most pathetic appearance ever, of this guy, alone, watching himself on TV.
He's awesome, and this is a moderately funny story : )
I never meant to suggest it's a generally good idea. Obviously, it can be a good or bad deal depending on the actual $ values involved. I was just trying to point out why it MIGHT be better than it appears at a glance. I tend to think leases are less competitive because the terms are more complicated.
You're right about the timing of the tax hardship being passed on, but another ROI-esque thing comes into play.
Here's a silly illustration: Alice is starting a company, so she gets the bank go give her an unsecured line of credit at 20% interest. Bob has a bunch of money in a COD getting 5% interest. Alice needs to buy a computer.
She can buy it on her bank line at 20%, or she can get a loan secured by the computer at 15% from Bob. This is a good deal for both of them. A lease is vaguely like Bob loaning her the money and ALSO loaning her the tax break.
The disadvantage of leases is really that it's so complicated it's easy to get it wrong, especially because many people can't handle simpler math. The advantage is that the "tax break" is a loan that's 100% guaranteed to be repaid, even if Alice goes bankrupt, because it gets repaid as the property depreciates.
I am not an accountant. Generally, if you take a structure that should have certain tax consequences and recharacterize it to have better tax consequences that is illegal. Even retroactively, as another poster pointed out.
If you write a lease that's got enough clauses that the leasee EFFECTIVELY owns during the whole lease, that would be illegal. Another poster pointed out that this may not be legal if it really isn't the fair market value of the item at the end of the lease. For a lot of computers, though, the fair market value is pretty close to 0.
Also, my apologies for not realizing the IRS had fixed the 7 year thing - tax law is only about my 109th job function, and that particular piece isn't actually very relevant to me.
"Discounted Cash Flow" is accountantspeak. "ROI" was accountantspeak, but now it's general buisiness speak and picked up meaninglessly by the media.
I sustain that this is the key concept of ROI - that we shouldn't put money in something unless we get a lot more back, because we always have better things to do with it. I didn't mean to imply there wasn't a bunch more concepts involved in ROI.
No, it's not the same thing. Because if you have (for instance) a 10 sided die you can't do anything but discard those extra results. And if you discard them, that means you have to roll again which is quite unacceptable in a simultaneous multiroll situation.
.6 bits/die.
That means that what matters is only the highest power of 2 in your die - so a d8 has the highest density, while a d4, d12, d20 and d100 all have exactly the same bit density.
The only other solution is to generate a stream of bits which may be of an indeterminate length... so you keep appending the bits from each consequetive die and you don't know how many you'll end up with in the end. For instance, a d20 can provide 2 definite bits (it's always divisible by 4) and 2 more bits 4/5 of the time. It provides 2 bits if the result is divisible by 5 or 4 bits otherwise. This gives an average bit density of 3.6 bits, which is slightly higher than a d8's 3 bits. d20s are also in a smaller font, however, and a physically bigger I don't think the substantial added work is worth
If you really want to increase bit density of the box, the larger boxes will fit 2 d8s per box. If you can reliably order them (always the darker color first, or something) this works fine. Arguably you could pick whichever one ends up more left or something, but I'd start to worry that human nonrandomness would interfere in judgement calls.
I decided I should clarify this. The important bit, which I just sortof assumed, is: money now is a lot better than money later, especially because as a corp you probably borrowed money from somewhere, so you're paying interest on anything you have to spend now. This is what "Return on Investment (ROI)" is all about - to spend more money on something it has to be worth substantially more in the long term, not just a little more.
(The rest of this is all massively, massively approximated. I am also not an accountant.)
Say you have an originally $1000 3 year old computer that's 60% depreciated If you keep it, you'll eventually get to write the other $400 (40%) off - over the next 4 years. This might save you $200 in taxes over those 4 years.
If you sell it for $2 you get to write off the rest of it immediately - so you immediately get $398 of writeoff and $2 - or $201 you've made, and it's all right now. This equation only gets better if you get more than $2 at the end.
This tax part basically hugely exaggerates or perhaps magnifies the "money now" part of a lease, especially if you can't guarantee that you'll immediately dispose of it.
So a lease for $400/yr for three years might be $200 after tax each year, while buying it is more like $850 the first year and then it gives you some money back each additional year.
Basically, it's because the tax law depreciates most of that hardware over something like 7 years. So in the first year you'll get to write off something like 20% of the value.
With a lease you expense 100% of the amount you pay as soon as you pay it.
This is why a very common option is lease-to-buy with a very cheap buy option at the end of some number of years. This is essentially an apparently legal scam to allow you to write it all off. (It's legal because the leasor really does still own it until the end)
The next-best option is to sell the hardware the day you stop using it, because then you immediately get to write off the difference between the amount you've already devalued it and the amount you actually got for it. Because computers aren't worth anything much sooner than 7 years, you always get a tax benefit when you sell a computer that just became obsolete.
128 bits. Roll one 8-sided die 51 times (discarding the least-significant bit of the last roll).
.50c. I'm fairly certain you could find cheaper prices. I estimate the total cost of this hardware randomizer at $20 if done on the cheap.
To speed up the process, get one of those
clear boxes they use to make sure people take the right number of pills per day. Get one with more than 22 boxes. (4 times a day for a week = 28, fairly common)
Put dice in boxes. Put a sheet of something solid on the door side. Shake. Invert. voila, random byte strings. w/ 28 boxes you have 84 random bits. Repeat twice for your 152 bit key, dropping the last 16 bits.
chessex.com has a variety of dice - you can can order single d8s for
Someone will probably complain about the non-cryptographic quality randomness of this process. But you only need cryptographic quality randomness when you're going to use it very repeatedly and someone can attack the similarity between them. Since the nonrandomness isn't known to anyone outside and you probably aren't generating a massive number of keys you're fairly safe. To increase security, buy dice from multiple manufacturers and occasionally switch around the lots.
(every 4 d8 values converts to 3 hex values. If you're converting by hand, you could alternately use a pair of dice for a hex value, generating only 56 bits per shake but only needing a table of 16 values to convert by hand to hex. You could also use 4 sided dice for this equally well, since you're only using 4 bits per pair.)
I stand corrected. Apparently I spend too much time online; this option didn't occur to me.
: )
I don't have a link right in front of me, but I've heard you should stretch your eyes every 15 minutes or so - which roughly means to focus on something as far away as possible to contrast your up-close monitor.
Possibly get another email provider? I know that's allowed in the RFC, but it shouldn't commonly happen.
Gmail is free, and as of today it gives you Infinity+1 MB of storage space, so there's no reason not to switch. gmail.google.com]
Unless you're on a strange planet with multiple suns or a very odd rotation, it can't be more than 1 complete day from the end of your local day. And that's only if you live just barely on the West side of the International Date Line.
Not that I'm saying I necessarily agree, but I suspect the gp would say they were well-trained but uneducated. I definitely agree that practical English is fairly fuzzy on words to provide precise distinction between these meanings.
I might define "mainstream education" as "degrees and achievements where progress generally decreases the time needed to get some PhD"
I might define "professional training" as "the systematic improvement of skills related to the profession"
By those definitions, the crew probably had a high degree of professional training and a tiny amount of mainstream education.
[getting a second, different BS still counts as mainstream education, because it gets you closer to a _different_ PhD]
MacOS has supported _12_ mouse buttons for years - it might be more now. Of course, this is assuming the application has something to do with 12 mouse buttons.
Here's what you do: Buy a mac mini. Buy a USB mouse with more buttons. Plug it in. Done.
Apple specifies that basic application functions should be available with a single button - so that novice users can always use the apps, and to discourage arbitrarily hiding functions in context-menus.
Generally the context-menu (right-click) is ALSO mapped to ctrl-click. The middle click is mapped also, but I can't remember if it's mapped to option/alt or to cmd/appl.
As to Photoshop - compared to PCs, I think they're essentially even, because Macs have an additional modifier button - shift cmd/appl, option/alt and ctrl
Try sleeping better. I was very similar for a long time - it turns out sleep apnea is wildly underdiagnosed. (There are other possible problems, of course) But if you're not sleeping enough in the right order, it'll always be hard to get up, your long term memory will suffer, and you'll have other symptoms of fatigue (muscle pain)
Here's a hint - it's supposed to take 20-30 minutes to fall asleep. Any faster and you're overtired, either not sleeping enough or well enough.
PDFs are not a major area of my expertise. I know that they're only supposed to be a "distribution" format. However, I've ended up doing some informal support on the following problem:
.doc, which I think is pretty poor choice. Format X ought to be the same as Format Y. But Acrobat doesn't seem to let you edit paragraphs... it seems to save every line of text separately.
.doc LaTeX, Quark and Pagemaker have all been mentioned. RTF doesn't have enough formatting)
Alice writes a document in format X. Bob (in legal) edits text all over the document. Then Bob saves it in format Y and distributes it to 900 employees. Now, in my opinion PDF is the only good option for format Y - distribution with a good printable layout.
Right now format X is
So what I really want is for somebody to have made a better PDF editor, or to tell me how to have working paragraphs in Acrobat. Failing that, I want there to be a universally accessible format that has similar capabilities. (HTML/CSS seems best;
thanks!