I did a thing on IRS IT modernization in college in the mid-90s, and it was about the same story back then. Nothing new, really. Any company that actually manages to modernize the IRS deserves a $20 billion fee.
Of course we could just abolish the IRS and solve the problem rather cheaply.
OTOH, they also updated their other domains, and haven't extended the registration of Lindos.com to as far out as Lindows.com, so they've likely not settled on it yet.
They've already registered lindos.com with no site up, and have recently updated it, so I'd say Lindos is in the running. But unfortunately, Lindos.xx where xx=various country codes is already taken.
There aren't enough bottles of compressed air in the world to blow the sand out of the PCs in the backs of the trucks and the tents in the Arabian deserts. Finally scrounged up a hose to hook up to the compressed air tanks of a 5-ton truck.
Fast forward a bit over 10 years and this time we remember to bring a compressor. Probably a good idea since these new Pentiums run a bit hotter than the 286s we had the first time.
I love it. They touted Office's lip service to XML as an advantage, forgetting that OO's internal file format is pure XML with an open published DTD. A decent programmer can make software to read and repurpose an OO document with 100% accuracy.
Anyone with knowledge of both can blow away most of these arguments. However, some do have merit in certain circumstances.
Then you must have been to one I was in. When I left that one we were running PM 6.5, Photoshop 5 and Illustrator 8 on Windows 98/2000. The platform wasn't a limiting factor on what went to our Heidelberg presses. However, our imagesetter was crap so we had to outsource for quality color separations because management wouldn't spring for a better imagesetter (ours was good enough for the rest of the work).
But at least that way I got lots of cool gifts from the service bureau we used.
Sad thing is that PageMaker was almost up to par with Quark, and even beat it in areas, before Adobe decided to rename the upcoming PageMaker 7 to InDesign. PageMaker's name could have lived on as the premier DTP app it has been at times in history, but is instead relegated to secretary and home use in the marketplace (although I do know many who still use it for pro publishing).
that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
No, Adobe bought out Aldus, sold Freehand to Macromedia because they already had Illustrator, and went ahead with improving PageMaker as their page layout product. PM7 is worlds better than the PM5 of Aldus days.
It's all about multiple channels and masks, proper color profile support and things like channel mixing and calculations which no other program can do.
Add 16 bpp color and certified PANTONE and HKS matching, although the latter is really only a question of copyright. But if you work with PANTONE or HKS you can afford Photoshop and the bit of the price that goes to license PANTONE and HKS.
Why the hell are you importing Acrobat files into a document? An Acrobat file is an end-product, not an exchange format.
Although for his specific case it appears you may be right, trying to import a multi-page document into Frame, Acrobat is a good exchange format. It's practically industry standard for moving ads and other stuff among publishers and companies to be included in other documents.
A lot of this is why I think they should make a version of InDesign for long documents. It doesn't yet do the cool document structure and head stuff like Tex or even Frame, but:
Automatic ligatures: Done, with automatic ligature substitution.
H&J: Not only controlled by paragraph styles, but will also run back through the entire paragraph to get the "color" right. It will adjust a break on line 2 and watch the effects cascade in order to try to fix a bad line 23. To help things, you can specify a lot of factors in hyphenation decisions and allowable letter spacing ranges. It will also hyphenate in most popular languages out of the box.
Baseline shifting: Of course, extremely fine.
Plus optical kerning and optical margin alignment with hanging punctuation can in cases give a very clean look to the paragraphs (like how normally a hyphen in fully justified text leaves an indentation in the block).
They said that the core code is such a mess, they couldn't find any programmers willing or talented enough to make sense of it.
That's the same problem they had with PageMaker. It was written in different languages, even some using custom Aldus development tools. Plus, the structure of the database that constitutes a document was hopelessly broken. Nobody wanted to touch that stuff.
Adobe decided to replace PageMaker with InDesign when PageMaker wasn't that old.
PageMaker was pretty old, but only recently acquired by Adobe just prior to version 6. InDesign was supposed to be PageMaker 7 rewritten from the ground up to overcome various architectural problems with PM, but the stigma of the PageMaker name in many DTP circles made them pick a new name. Since they had a new name, and therefore a new product, they decided to keep PM around, slap some templates and such on it, and market it against Publisher and the like.
I don't see InDesign integrating FrameMaker's features. InDesign is not a word processor.
I see it coming. InDesign is built on a small core framework, with everything including text composition and color being a plugin. Repurposing InDesign to long document work shouldn't be hard within that framework.
One possibility is that they're buying licenses so that SCO can be nailed for fraud when its case for owning Linux folds. Not likely, but it makes me smile.
warning them that playing peek-a-boo with the four year old code is a violation of the law.
IANAL, but I'm not sure this is illegal. I don't think receiving copyrighted work is illegal, although distributing without license is. I also don't know how simply reading the code could be a copyright violation.
Someone help me out on what laws could be violated by downloading and looking. Although I have no interest in seeing it myself, I'd like to know the legal angles.
if a PDF reader is bought from Adobe, there must be a way to read PDF files even if Adobe goes under and the software becomes unavailable for the new machines, possibly for a different OS in a few years. PDF should be an open standard, at minimum,
PDF is an open format. The specs are there for anyone to write his own reader or writer. I agree with your point, but you picked a bad example.
Slashdot Mirror
Whole, skim or low-fat?
When I get home I'll download and see if I can set up a tracker and post a torrent somewhere.
I did a thing on IRS IT modernization in college in the mid-90s, and it was about the same story back then. Nothing new, really. Any company that actually manages to modernize the IRS deserves a $20 billion fee.
Of course we could just abolish the IRS and solve the problem rather cheaply.
OTOH, they also updated their other domains, and haven't extended the registration of Lindos.com to as far out as Lindows.com, so they've likely not settled on it yet.
They've already registered lindos.com with no site up, and have recently updated it, so I'd say Lindos is in the running. But unfortunately, Lindos.xx where xx=various country codes is already taken.
There aren't enough bottles of compressed air in the world to blow the sand out of the PCs in the backs of the trucks and the tents in the Arabian deserts. Finally scrounged up a hose to hook up to the compressed air tanks of a 5-ton truck.
Fast forward a bit over 10 years and this time we remember to bring a compressor. Probably a good idea since these new Pentiums run a bit hotter than the 286s we had the first time.
Publisher is desktop publishing. The Open Source equivalent for that is Scribus.
As happened with Linux, you know you're ready for prime time as soon as Microsoft breaks out the FUD machine for your product.
Nice ligatures, but that comma intersecting the K swash is annoying.
I love it. They touted Office's lip service to XML as an advantage, forgetting that OO's internal file format is pure XML with an open published DTD. A decent programmer can make software to read and repurpose an OO document with 100% accuracy.
Anyone with knowledge of both can blow away most of these arguments. However, some do have merit in certain circumstances.
Then you must have been to one I was in. When I left that one we were running PM 6.5, Photoshop 5 and Illustrator 8 on Windows 98/2000. The platform wasn't a limiting factor on what went to our Heidelberg presses. However, our imagesetter was crap so we had to outsource for quality color separations because management wouldn't spring for a better imagesetter (ours was good enough for the rest of the work).
But at least that way I got lots of cool gifts from the service bureau we used.
But even there, they "shine" primarily because Quark dropped the ball and took so LONG
Interestingly, relative upstart Quark is only where it is because Aldus dropped the ball on PageMaker for several years.
Pagemaker: Executive Secretary and home stuff
Sad thing is that PageMaker was almost up to par with Quark, and even beat it in areas, before Adobe decided to rename the upcoming PageMaker 7 to InDesign. PageMaker's name could have lived on as the premier DTP app it has been at times in history, but is instead relegated to secretary and home use in the marketplace (although I do know many who still use it for pro publishing).
that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
No, Adobe bought out Aldus, sold Freehand to Macromedia because they already had Illustrator, and went ahead with improving PageMaker as their page layout product. PM7 is worlds better than the PM5 of Aldus days.
It's all about multiple channels and masks, proper color profile support and things like channel mixing and calculations which no other program can do.
Add 16 bpp color and certified PANTONE and HKS matching, although the latter is really only a question of copyright. But if you work with PANTONE or HKS you can afford Photoshop and the bit of the price that goes to license PANTONE and HKS.
Why the hell are you importing Acrobat files into a document? An Acrobat file is an end-product, not an exchange format.
Although for his specific case it appears you may be right, trying to import a multi-page document into Frame, Acrobat is a good exchange format. It's practically industry standard for moving ads and other stuff among publishers and companies to be included in other documents.
A lot of this is why I think they should make a version of InDesign for long documents. It doesn't yet do the cool document structure and head stuff like Tex or even Frame, but:
Automatic ligatures: Done, with automatic ligature substitution.
H&J: Not only controlled by paragraph styles, but will also run back through the entire paragraph to get the "color" right. It will adjust a break on line 2 and watch the effects cascade in order to try to fix a bad line 23. To help things, you can specify a lot of factors in hyphenation decisions and allowable letter spacing ranges. It will also hyphenate in most popular languages out of the box.
Baseline shifting: Of course, extremely fine.
Plus optical kerning and optical margin alignment with hanging punctuation can in cases give a very clean look to the paragraphs (like how normally a hyphen in fully justified text leaves an indentation in the block).
They said that the core code is such a mess, they couldn't find any programmers willing or talented enough to make sense of it.
That's the same problem they had with PageMaker. It was written in different languages, even some using custom Aldus development tools. Plus, the structure of the database that constitutes a document was hopelessly broken. Nobody wanted to touch that stuff.
Adobe decided to replace PageMaker with InDesign when PageMaker wasn't that old.
PageMaker was pretty old, but only recently acquired by Adobe just prior to version 6. InDesign was supposed to be PageMaker 7 rewritten from the ground up to overcome various architectural problems with PM, but the stigma of the PageMaker name in many DTP circles made them pick a new name. Since they had a new name, and therefore a new product, they decided to keep PM around, slap some templates and such on it, and market it against Publisher and the like.
I don't see InDesign integrating FrameMaker's features. InDesign is not a word processor.
I see it coming. InDesign is built on a small core framework, with everything including text composition and color being a plugin. Repurposing InDesign to long document work shouldn't be hard within that framework.
For Netscape, add that they messed with DLLs so that Netscape wouldn't work anymore.
One possibility is that they're buying licenses so that SCO can be nailed for fraud when its case for owning Linux folds. Not likely, but it makes me smile.
warning them that playing peek-a-boo with the four year old code is a violation of the law.
IANAL, but I'm not sure this is illegal. I don't think receiving copyrighted work is illegal, although distributing without license is. I also don't know how simply reading the code could be a copyright violation.
Someone help me out on what laws could be violated by downloading and looking. Although I have no interest in seeing it myself, I'd like to know the legal angles.
Because your post seemed to refer to it as a closed example that needs to be open.
if a PDF reader is bought from Adobe, there must be a way to read PDF files even if Adobe goes under and the software becomes unavailable for the new machines, possibly for a different OS in a few years. PDF should be an open standard, at minimum,
PDF is an open format. The specs are there for anyone to write his own reader or writer. I agree with your point, but you picked a bad example.