How long before Adobe turns it legal team on
XPDF (violating a possible tradmark [sic] on the letters P, D, & F)?
I belive the Children's Television Workshop
(creators of Sesame Street) own the
trademark on those letters.
In any case, PDF is an open standard, not a program.
Adobe's program is
called "Acrobat", so "KAcrobat" would not be
OK but application called "xPDF" that displays PDF files under X
should be OK. IANAL.
After all these years, Adove has never (to
my knowledge) gone after GhostScript, the
PostScript interprerer --- PS, like PDF is an
open standard (albeit one controlled by Adobe).
...that relentlessly uses a lame remake
of a lame song (Bachman Turner Overdrive's
"You ain't seen nothing yet") in their radio
commercials.
If they don't have any taste, how can you
expect them to have a sense of humor?
Re:Python -- path dependence
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
While I do
like Ruby, it doesn't have the support behind it that Python does. Thats why I use Python, and not Ruby.
This is a nice example of
path dependence. You use it becuase
more people use it, and so on and so on. Things
that don't catch on sometimes don't catch on because of tiny, idiosyncratic, reasons, but then the competition snowballs. The canonical
example
of the QWERY keyborad is overused (and sometimes
disputed), but you get the idea.
Besides, there are so many scripting languages.
David Korn pointed out
here on/. that
ksh can do most anything
perl can. Why not use ksh, then? Ad nausaeum.
I read the headline and before I read the body, I thought SGI was no more.
In terms of having good product but poor
marketing, SGI reminds me a lot of DEC, another
three-letter acronym company. Alpha was way
ahead of its time. There can be no doubt that
hardware "creep" is hurting SGI (i.e. the gulf
between low-end, commodity, hardware and high
end SGI stuff is becoming smaller).
Who will play the role with SGI that Compaq
played with DEC? IBM?
SGI Brass: Shutting down this machine does not
help your customers, will probably hurt morale, and will not help you make more money.Why
are you doing this???
Will Apple stop being innovative in terms of case design?
Cool case design does not seem to have
helped
these guys much, either.
What does it say about the computer consumer?
One could argue that consumers are not fooled
by sleek design when the utilitarian beige box
is available. Or that computer buyers have
no sense for visual design.
Not for kernels and such, but for garden-variety
projects.
Pascal / Modula-x / Oberon / FORTRAN / ???
It's nice to see Pascal still around (Kylix) but
many people seem to scoff at using Pascal for
"serious" programming (defined as whatever they
are doing).
A few years ago I was looking for a desktop
with linux pre-installed or, at least, with
no OS. A few of the big companies (IBM, Dell)
had just made some statements about how cozy
they were with linux, so I called IBM to see
how serious this was.
I told the salesperson that I wanted to buy
an Aptiva with linux. She told me IBM sells
(and I swear I'm not making this up) "Wintel
Solutions".
I told her that's an oxymoron.
She started explaining to me: "yes, it stands
for Windows and Intel".
So, two questions really, do your sales training
manuals now explain the difference between an
acronym and an oxymoron, and can I buy an Aptiva
(or whatever they are called now) with linux installed or with no OS? One single Aptiva, not an officefull?
And... the price will be less than if I got it
with Win (right? no OS license fee).
To me this is the litmus test of a company's
commitment to linux. I'm sick of hearing that
to get linux I need to buy a server or that
I can't be sold a compuer without an OS because
that means I'm pirating my OS.
Over the years, a surprising number of innovations have come from stretching materials.
for example:
Edwin Land's Polaroid sheets were plasic stretched "just so",
aligning the molecules to allow only polarized light to pass. The instant cameras came later.
Gore-Tex is a membrane that allows H20-vapor to pass but blocks H20 drops.
It is made by sretching teflon "just so", inducing holes of the correct diameter.
Spring steel is stretched so that the molecules in the alloy align in a way to give it that property.
...they didn't lighten it by losing
the engine the way these guys did.
That may have been a savvy move on their
part. The Cost Guard and CHP ought to have
a better sense of humor, but this way they
at least avoid "toxic waste dumping at sea"
blah blah blah (residual gas & oil).
And, I'm sorry to say, the Golden Gate Bridge
is more famous than the roof of your school.
MIT (but have they ever accomplished anything this amazing?)
Yes, they have.
Maybe someone has more details, but they
once put a police cruiser (or 75% scale
replica -- but very realistic) ontop
of some domed building at MIT. Including
a dummy cop, eating doughnuts (lifesize
doughnuts). This was about 1993.
The 50-yard-line MIT baloon (Harvard-Yale game)
is my favorite, though.
The piece is not very thought-out, or it
is designed to fool (an eighth grader). The
Antioch College comparison is an obvious
straw man, set up to be knocked down.
If we take away the property rights of
privacy, do we make it a public good?
If so, it's subject to the
Tragedy
of the Commons. Want that? That's what
I thought you'd say.
Of course, in the USA the pigs would never go for a system that actually physically prohbited speeding, since they wouldn't want to give up the
revenues from the tickets.
Are you proposing a system that monitors
your speed, but does not limit it?
That is, you get the ticket in the mail at the
end of the month for all the times you were speeding.
(La)TeX is good for most things, particularly
textbooks and academic papers. It is less suited
to things like pamphlets and corporate annual
reports, where page/framemaker/quark/etc have a
stong following.
(La)TeX excels where mathematics must be typeset.
*one* thing that would be worth modifying in TeX
is the way it treats widows and orphans.
Linebreaks and pagebreaks are calculated
independently, so TeX doesn't make some *lines*
looser to avoid a widow/orphan (unless you tell
it to make this paragraph looser).
The reason is that in 1980 it took a lot of
computing to calculate all those line breaks,
etc. Nowadays, it would be nice, and within the
power of the computers we use, to calculate line
breaks and page breaks together. This would
reduce (not eliminate) the incidence of
widows/orphans, without any intervention of the
user.
Admittedly, this is not the first thing one
looks for in a text processing system, but it
would be great if someone ever bothered to
make this change.
Oh, and by the way, TeX is written in Web, a
dialect of Pascal. Someone posted something
about the TeX C code... (though the web to C
translator is what's used these days).
Fonts can be embedded in PDF --- if Adobe
themselves are distributing PDF files sans
fonts, it's the problem of the specific
file, not of the PDF standard.
The Multiple Master fonts idea means that
in many cases fonts don't _have_ to be
embedded --- I'm a little surprised that you
can't view these, but what you say is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
How long before Adobe turns it legal team on XPDF (violating a possible tradmark [sic] on the letters P, D, & F)?
I belive the Children's Television Workshop (creators of Sesame Street) own the trademark on those letters. In any case, PDF is an open standard, not a program. Adobe's program is called "Acrobat", so "KAcrobat" would not be OK but application called "xPDF" that displays PDF files under X should be OK. IANAL.
After all these years, Adove has never (to my knowledge) gone after GhostScript, the PostScript interprerer --- PS, like PDF is an open standard (albeit one controlled by Adobe).
Thinkpads have geat linux support, and most if not all of the new ones have three-button mice, err pointing devices.
And sound works.
My $0.02.
...that relentlessly uses a lame remake of a lame song (Bachman Turner Overdrive's "You ain't seen nothing yet") in their radio commercials.
If they don't have any taste, how can you expect them to have a sense of humor?
While I do like Ruby, it doesn't have the support behind it that Python does. Thats why I use Python, and not Ruby.
/. that
ksh can do most anything
perl can. Why not use ksh, then? Ad nausaeum.
This is a nice example of path dependence. You use it becuase more people use it, and so on and so on. Things that don't catch on sometimes don't catch on because of tiny, idiosyncratic, reasons, but then the competition snowballs. The canonical example of the QWERY keyborad is overused (and sometimes disputed), but you get the idea.
Besides, there are so many scripting languages. David Korn pointed out here on
Hello, this was in response to my comment, of which it begins with a quote.
It deserves modding up, but why was it moved?
I read the headline and before I read the body, I thought SGI was no more.
In terms of having good product but poor marketing, SGI reminds me a lot of DEC, another three-letter acronym company. Alpha was way ahead of its time. There can be no doubt that hardware "creep" is hurting SGI (i.e. the gulf between low-end, commodity, hardware and high end SGI stuff is becoming smaller).
Who will play the role with SGI that Compaq played with DEC? IBM?
SGI Brass: Shutting down this machine does not help your customers,
will probably hurt morale, and will not help you make more money.Why are you doing this???
"...the G3/G4 Macs which are still available, better machines, and cheaper to boot ."
I always thought, once you bought the machine, that booting it was free.
Will Apple stop being innovative in terms of case design?
Cool case design does not seem to have helped these guys much, either.
What does it say about the computer consumer? One could argue that consumers are not fooled by sleek design when the utilitarian beige box is available. Or that computer buyers have no sense for visual design.
2001-07-04 04:04:15 Mac Cube shelved (articles,apple) (rejected)
Gets re-jected
Another article here
Fair enough? But which language would you prefer?
Not for kernels and such, but for garden-variety
projects.
Pascal / Modula-x / Oberon / FORTRAN / ???
It's nice to see Pascal still around (Kylix) but
many people seem to scoff at using Pascal for
"serious" programming (defined as whatever they
are doing).
"'Wintel' is not an acronym."
Yeah, no shit. I guess you'll never get a job at IBM.
A few years ago I was looking for a desktop
with linux pre-installed or, at least, with
no OS. A few of the big companies (IBM, Dell)
had just made some statements about how cozy
they were with linux, so I called IBM to see
how serious this was.
I told the salesperson that I wanted to buy
an Aptiva with linux. She told me IBM sells
(and I swear I'm not making this up)
"Wintel Solutions".
I told her that's an oxymoron.
She started explaining to me: " yes, it stands
for Windows and Intel".
So, two questions really, do your sales training
manuals now explain the difference between an
acronym and an oxymoron, and can I buy an Aptiva
(or whatever they are called now) with linux
installed or with no OS? One single Aptiva, not
an officefull? And... the price will be less than if I
got it with Win (right? no OS license fee).
To me this is the litmus test of a company's
commitment to linux. I'm sick of hearing that
to get linux I need to buy a server or that
I can't be sold a compuer without an OS because
that means I'm pirating my OS.
There is a strong industry-wide convergence to the IA64 platform...
it's too expensive to roll your own processor platform anymore.
The Compaq decision is not surprising. Look at the other current makers
of 64-bit hardware:
SGI: uses MIPS, but also converting to IA64. And, based on
the current business environment, will we soon read "Silicon
Graphics R.I.P. 1982-2001"?
H-P: PA-RISC, but also involved w/Intel in IA-64 development.
Sun: OK, well, these guys are still holding out w/SPARC.
IBM: POWER, but interested in IA64, particularly wrt Linux.
Over the years, a surprising number of innovations have come from stretching materials.
for example:
Edwin Land's Polaroid sheets were plasic stretched "just so", aligning the molecules
to allow only polarized light to pass. The instant cameras came later.
Gore-Tex is a membrane that allows H20-vapor to pass but blocks H20 drops. It is
made by sretching teflon "just so", inducing holes of the correct diameter.
Spring steel is stretched so that the molecules in the alloy align in a way to give it that property.
Liquid nitrogen is cheaper than water
Municipal water costs what, a few cents per cubic foot?
Liquid N2 costs what, a few cents per liter (in bulk purchase)?
Well, there are 28.32 liters in one cubic foot, so I don't think LN2 is cheaper than H20.
Not to be confused with the X-33 and X-34 projects.
... or the X-11
project.
...they didn't lighten it by losing
the engine the way these guys did.
That may have been a savvy move on their
part. The Cost Guard and CHP ought to have
a better sense of humor, but this way they
at least avoid "toxic waste dumping at sea"
blah blah blah (residual gas & oil).
And, I'm sorry to say, the Golden Gate Bridge
is more famous than the roof of your school.
I give this prank a c-
You're a tough grader.
MIT (but have they ever accomplished anything this amazing?)
Yes, they have. Maybe someone has more details, but they once put
a police cruiser (or 75% scale replica -- but very realistic) ontop of
some domed building at MIT. Including a dummy cop, eating doughnuts
(lifesize doughnuts). This was about 1993.
The 50-yard-line MIT baloon (Harvard-Yale game) is my favorite, though.
The piece is not very thought-out, or it is designed to fool (an eighth grader). The Antioch College comparison is an obvious straw man, set up to be knocked down.
If we take away the property rights of privacy, do we make it a public good? If so, it's subject to the Tragedy of the Commons. Want that? That's what I thought you'd say.
Of course, in the USA the pigs would never go for a system that actually physically prohbited speeding, since they wouldn't want to give up the revenues from the tickets.
Are you proposing a system that monitors your speed, but does not limit it? That is, you get the ticket in the mail at the end of the month for all the times you were speeding.
The Chicken game is non-zero sum.
All you need is two cars, a road, and two teenagers.
Anyone who calls [the cereal]
"Captain Crunch" obviously doesn't
eat it a lot.
It's "Cap'n Crunch". Arrrr.
http://www.capncrunch.com/
You can't make a decent PDF without somehow making a postscript of your document
PDFTeX does. It is possible for applications to generate native PDF, but this has not been the norm to date.
(La)TeX is good for most things, particularly
textbooks and academic papers. It is less suited
to things like pamphlets and corporate annual
reports, where page/framemaker/quark/etc have a
stong following.
(La)TeX excels where mathematics must be typeset.
*one* thing that would be worth modifying in TeX
is the way it treats widows and orphans.
Linebreaks and pagebreaks are calculated
independently, so TeX doesn't make some *lines*
looser to avoid a widow/orphan (unless you tell
it to make this paragraph looser).
The reason is that in 1980 it took a lot of
computing to calculate all those line breaks,
etc. Nowadays, it would be nice, and within the
power of the computers we use, to calculate line
breaks and page breaks together. This would
reduce (not eliminate) the incidence of
widows/orphans, without any intervention of the
user.
Admittedly, this is not the first thing one
looks for in a text processing system, but it
would be great if someone ever bothered to
make this change.
Oh, and by the way, TeX is written in Web, a
dialect of Pascal. Someone posted something
about the TeX C code... (though the web to C
translator is what's used these days).
Fonts can be embedded in PDF --- if Adobe
themselves are distributing PDF files sans
fonts, it's the problem of the specific
file, not of the PDF standard.
The Multiple Master fonts idea means that
in many cases fonts don't _have_ to be
embedded --- I'm a little surprised that you
can't view these, but what you say is possible.
Do you have a better format?