I am one of those photographers. I make large prints often 30x40 and shoot largeand medium format film. I am pretty nervous about the day I can no longer get a box of 4x5 film and hope technology makes it possible to still get great prints at these sizes. 8 megapixels doesn't cut it. Of course, a large format camera can take a digital back if you have the money for such a beast, but it isn't so practical if you do photography that is off the grid like I do.
There is a medium-format digital back that came out recently with 38-megapixels. Something tells me that by the time your film goes the way of the dodo there will be quite a few options available for you to do the same quality work with digital that you've been doing with film. Printing at 30x40 is a piece of cake even for the 16MP Canon 1Ds Mark II. Is it going to have the same resolution if you look at it with a magnifying glass? No, but what are you doing looking at a poster with a magnifying glass? Unless you're printing billboard-size, you aren't actually seeing all that resolution under most circumstances. If you really do have the skill and the audience that require all that resolution I'm sure you'll be able to afford a digital solution in the near future that will closely approximate what you're doing with film, if not surpass it eventually. Think of it as an opportunity rather than a roadblock.
A good site to check out if you haven't seen it already is luminous-landscape.com, where the owner of the site is an experienced professional photographer who has done some interesting comparisons between digital and film and found to his own amazement that digital has now surpassed the image quality of 35mm film and is working on overtaking even medium-format. That was a couple of years ago. Looks like there is a recent article by another large-format photographer that you may find very interesting, comparing the 4x5 film you use with the very 38MP back that I mentioned earlier. Happy reading:
"In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over," says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. "Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
Anyone care to guess how long it will be before this quote supplants "640K should be enough for anybody" as the Worst Technology Prediction Ever?
I would say the digital photography field is just a little different than the general computing field, so that really isn't that bad a statement. Your average snapshooter isn't clamoring to print his photos at 36x48 inches nor crop 90% of their image and still expect to have decent resolution. There are a lot of people who are really quite happy with their 3- and 4-megapixel cameras. Having eight or more megapixels is just icing on the cake except for people who actually need or want the extra resolution for various reasons. Even a sharp 3MP photo can often be printed up to 13x19 and still look decent. At the consumer level we really have reached the flattening-out part of the curve in terms of the megapixel race.
What the digital camera world really needs more than ever-increasing megapixels at this point is A) improved dynamic range, B) less noise at high ISO ranges (800-3200+), and C) more cameras with built-in image stabilization. These three things will actually solve real-life problems that people have when taking pictures.
I think dynamic range is the biggest problem. Cameras just aren't capable yet of getting information out of both deep shadows and bright highlights in the same image the way our eyes can. This is confusing to most people and ruins a lot of shots. "Blown" highlights and pure black shadows with no retrievable information are the bane of the digital photography world. Sure, you can shoot RAW and try to manipulate it in Photoshop, but that is really way beyond most people.
Besides dynamic range, most shots are ruined by blur. Either the shutter speed was too slow to stop the movement of the subject, which can be helped a lot by higher ISO capabilities, or the camera was moving too much, which can be helped quite a bit by some built-in image stabilization. Bottom line is, lack of megapixels is no longer the cause of most unacceptable photographs for most people. Except for the pros, it's time to move on to improving other features. I can't really envision a world where regular people are screaming for 32-megapixel compact cameras. Ain't gonna happen.
Uh-huh, yeah. I just have two things to say to that.
1. Before Mac OS X version 10.2, I would have agreed, Macs certainly did suck. Especially Mac OS 9 and earlier. It really sucked bigtime. I hated Macs back then.
2. If all those G5 iMacs are operating worse than the PCs on a regular basis, they need to get someone in there to maintain them who has half a clue. Those Macs should be rock solid. I speak from experience with a couple dozen different types of Macs running Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. We're talking anything from G5 towers to gumdrop iMacs from 6 years ago. And proper maintenance is not rocket science either.
You're either full of it or the techs in charge of that campus are morons. Not to mention that anyone with a little training can set up a Mac server and netboot every Mac in the building whereby it's possible to make them basically foolproof and impossible to mess up. You can make them boot from a fresh disk image every time. Great for school environments. But hey, if you hate them that much I know several million people who would be happy to take them off your hands, cheap.
If you've got a specific piece of software that keeps crashing, here's an idea: Stop blaming it on the Mac and replace it with a different piece of software that doesn't crash. It doesn't matter how stable your OS is, if your application is crap it will still crash.
Same here. I have experience with a 350MHz G3 iMac that boots Panther faster than that G5 iMac. That video is totally bogus. The day that a G5 iMac is slower than a G3 iMac, something is wrong.
I had suggested this idea in the past but it doesn't really solve any of their problems. What they need is to be able to keep the PDF document editable so the clients can come in and modify their information and print out a new copy (it's a standard employment form so it has to be updated when they move, get a new job, or apply to a different employer). Anyone can install CutePDF, PDFcreator or this PrimoPDF thing to print to PDF from Windows, and of course Mac OS X supports printing to PDF natively from any application. It solves nothing without buying an editor, and although Foxit PDF Editor would let them re-edit the file it still costs $99 per seat and is much more powerful/complex than they need, plus it fails the cross-platform requirement. Same thing with Scribus, it's way too much for these people who are so technophobic they don't even like the new Macs in their office. They just need to be able to edit the fields, not every word and graphic element in the document. That would really confuse them.
We ended up spending the $19 and within an hour had a fully saveable and re-editable version of the file, so long as we have a copy of Acrobat Reader 6 or later. And apparently the very latest version (7.0.5) is available for all of the important platforms, Win32, Mac, and even Linux, so this is no big deal. Looks like Linux isn't lagging behind anymore, which is nice. I can't really see this office ever using Linux until it's a lot slicker and more self-consistent, but this is another piece that helps make it a valid option for the future.
So, problem solved, for now. They will be able to use the free Acrobat Reader on every computer and even give the form to their clients and they will be able to edit it at home since it no longer requires the full version of Acrobat. Luckily, since they really only work with this one form on a regular basis it has only cost them the $19 required for the conversion from that save-pdf-forms.com place.
I realize many people here have been gaming for a couple of decades now and know exactly what's going on, but some of us either were never into consoles or just couldn't afford (or weren't allowed) to go out and buy a new console and a dozen new games every year for the last 20 years. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is completely out of the loop in this respect. So here's the stupid question from the ignorant side of the fence:
Are there any actual GAMES on this thing when you buy it? Or is it just emulators and you have to actually own any particular game you want to play, and have the hardware and knowledge to get it copied from whatever cartridge or disc it's on and onto this device in order to run it in the correct emulator? (Or *cough*pirate*cough* the ROMs from somewhere for games like NES, I assume.)
If it's the latter, how difficult is it to get the games off the various devices? Don't you need special hardware for some of this stuff? That is, if you want to do it the legal way.
People like you really frighten me. The way you think is very scary. Let's see, point by point (I know it won't do any good, but I have to try, especially after some dumbass modded you insightful, which means someone out there actually agrees with what you said):
Do you really feel safe carrying a gun around? What happens if you do get robbed? Would you give the criminal what they want to avoid bloodshed, or would you pull your gun out and either shoot them or end up being shot yourself?
You left out "give the criminal what they want and then get shot anyway," or "watch your friend or loved one get shot and robbed just before you get shot and robbed yourself because you had no way to defend yourself or your friend/loved one". And several other scenerios that don't quite fit in the either/or box you described. See, if they have a gun they have no particular reason not to shoot you in many situations. Fewer witnesses and all that. So if you're put in a position where it's shoot or get shot, guess what? I'd like a chance to do some shooting if it might protect my life or someone else's.
The simple fact is that there will always be desperate and/or crazy people in this world, and at some point in your life one might try to hurt you or someone you care about. Guess what? The likelihood of a police officer standing within 1 meter of you at any given time, ready to take a bullet for you or take down an attacker, is zero. Sometimes, you have to defend yourself. Scary, huh? Oh my God, I just realized, the police have firearms! Maybe we should take their firearms away, so they'll be safer on the job. Yeah, that makes sense. Just like it makes sense to take all firearms away from private individuals who have never committed any crime and probably never will.
If you don't get robbed, do you really want the temptation to be there to act on a whim and kill someone because you were angry? Would you want the chance a kid or teenager to find that gun and kill someone? Do you really want the chance of an accident happening, and the gun going off and killing yourself or another person?
Wow, now that's really revealing. There are actually people like you who think that the moment someone puts a gun in your hand you're going to go on a killing rampage. You know, those issues are internal, they have nothing to do with the firearm. That kind of attitude sheds light for me on why there is so much gun related violent crime here in the US even though many other countries have the same level of gun ownership in their societies. We all know how many times we've seen a police officer just whip out his firearm and shoot people randomly on the street, or even his partner, simply because he was a little irritated. Yeah, that happens a lot.
It is not a cop-out to say for the millionth time that it isn't the firearm's fault that you decided to shoot somebody for no particular reason, without due cause. The fact that you think the mere presence of a weapon will make you do something horrible... Well, maybe you should get some counseling, friend. You're dangerous, with or without a weapon. Might want to stay away from sharp objects too.
By the way, there really are very few "accidents" with firearms. Most of what you and the press call "accidents" are simply unbelievable stupidity. Anyone who follows ONE or more of the THREE (you can count 'em on one hand!) simple firearms safety rules can avoid having any safety problems with firearms, ever.
1. Keep it pointed in a safe direction at all times, even if you "know" it's not loaded. 2. Keep the action open and the firearm unloaded until you're ready to shoot it. 3. Keep your finger away from the trigger until you're ready to shoot.
And of course the cardinal firearm safety rule that every man, woman and especially children should be taught:
A gun is ALWAYS loaded. Even if you just checked it. Even if you just saw somebody check it. Even if you "know" it's "just a replica," or you "know" there is no ammunition kep
Opera went free and ad-free a couple of months back with version 8.5. There was a big whoopety-doo about it at the time. Those screenshots are out of date, as most screenshots posted on the Internet always seem to be. Not saying you should use Opera, just get your facts straight. For me it was the best browser a few years ago but now nothing can really hold a candle to Firefox plus a few essential extensions:
Adblock + Filterset.G from Pierceive.com FlashGot NoScript PDF Download Tabbrowser Extensions by Shimoda Hiroshi (not the Tabbrowser Preferences available from the "official" extensions site which is a pale imitation, you'll have to Google for it using the author's name). This by itself is the single best extension for Firefox as far as I am concerned. Long live automatic colored tab groups.
Opera is nice but there is no way it can keep up with the simple flexibility of Firefox these days.
As a speaker of American English, considering the name of any company to be a "collective noun" is very contrary to logic. What exactly makes it collective? What if Dell only had one employee? It makes much more sense to refer to anything that is considered a singular unit with "is", not "are". The only way I can imagine it making sense to refer to a unit object as a collection of individuals would be where all of the individuals in the unit are collectively doing some specific thing, but even then it makes more sense to refer to the members of the unit more specifically. In most cases only a portion of or even a single individual is behind any one specific action of a company, and it's really just the unitary legal entity of the company that is making the decision or performing the action. Dell as a company is pre-installing Firefox in the UK, whereas Dell as a collection of individuals is doing millions of different things.
I just can't imagine thinking of a company name as being a collective noun even if I had been brought up being told that was the correct way of doing things. English has enough problems without throwing in completely anti-logical constructs like that. Spelling favor and honor with a U is no big deal in comparison. Those kinds of "regional differences" we can all handle.
Would you say, "Microsoft are a company" or, "Microsoft is a company"? It is a company. What's the point of putting something into a logical grouping if you're just going to treat it as if it's still separate individuals? And it will always fall down when there is only one individual in the "collective", which is easily possible with a company name. I just don't buy it. I think there is a good, logical reason that we don't do it that way anymore over here in the Colonies.
Now it's your turn to point out some equally nonsensical language construct that is only used by us 'mericans.
Forget something?
on
Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No one distributes software on floppies any more. 6-8MB added to your installer isn't a BIG deal. It translates into another 30sec worth of download. If its a burden on anyone, it's a burden on your webservers.
I think you meant to say it IS a big deal, since it translates to 30 MINUTES of extra download time on a dial-up line, which unfortunately most users are still stuck with. Even broadband lines aren't all 1.5Mb/s.
I'm not sure I want to chat with anyone that can't use an IRC or Jabber client and it's hardly as if I'm setting a high standard here.
I'm not sure I want to chat with anyone that can't speak Japanese or German and it's hardly as if I'm setting a high standard here.
What's that, you aren't well-versed in foreign languages? Well then, you must be STUPID, and therefore not worth my time.
Last time I checked both IRC and Jabber were rather confusing to the uninitiated. IRC has the concept of dozens of different networks to connect to with no easy way for a newbie to understand what makes one network preferable over another. Then you've got to decide on a room to be in, etc. It's a whole different world from a simple chat client. I have used IRC quite successfully for a while in the past but I still don't know how it really works so I am not comfortable in that world. Plus I just didn't like real-time chat that much. Consequently I haven't used it for years.
Last time I tried a Jabber client it had somewhat similar problems where you had to go through a whole process to figure out what server to connect to, and that's if you could even find one that supported all the different protocols you wanted to have access to. Maybe it's gotten much better since then but all I know is that at the time it was overly confusing and the available clients sucked. Judging from the page about open Jabber servers on the offician Jabber website, it doesn't look like anything has really changed. Both IRC and Jabber were always more difficult for me to configure than ICQ, MSN, AIM or Yahoo ever were. The same will hold true for any person new to the chat world.
Space key is bottom-center, labeled SpFn. Tap it without hitting another key and it's a space. Hold it down to activate function keys. Seems fairly obvious.
Unfortunately this keyboard does fail to solve one major usability problem which is that Control-key combinations are a real pain. You will still have to remove your hand from the home keys or bend your pinky around into a really awkward position. In comparison, the "Command" key used in most Mac keyboard shortcuts is right next to the spacebar like the Alt key on PC keyboards. On a Mac, one only has to move one's thumb slightly off the spacebar to be able to quickly type a couple dozen keyboard shortcuts without vacating the home keys. When I used the BeOS I got used to using the Alt key in a similar way since they imitated a lot of Mac conventions, and to this day I am still amazed at the comparitive awkwardness of using the Control key for most keyboard shortcuts on Windows and Linux. This keyboard does nothing to solve that problem for me. Too bad, because otherwise it looks interesting.
Well, I have several domains with GoDaddy and I've never had any problems with them doing anything unsavory. Nor have I heard bad things about them before reading this article. Just out of curiosity, if you know so much, who do you recommend as a good registrar in place of GoDaddy? I wouldn't want to be recommending a bad registrar to my clients in the future.
Yeah, so hardware and infrastructure costs money. That's kind of part of my point. I'm still not understanding how it helps the communications company to give away their services for free after they paid millions for the hardware. How does "finding out who uses what and where" help them make money when your service is free? That is what companies do, after all, right? Sell a product or service to make money? Free stuff doesn't usually bring a lot of money in.
1. Give away service for free 2. ??? 3. Profit! (or some other benefit, if we're talking about a city government)
Hope someone can bridge that gap for me. I'm not a total idiot, I swear, but the answer to when free turns into money isn't really popping out for me. That's why this whole concept of "free wifi" for an entire city is still baffling me a bit.
Maybe I'm just completely "out of the loop" so to speak, but I really can't understand how all these cities can A) justify and B) afford to offer all this free wireless internet access. Being devil's advocate here, and ignoring the fact that BellSouth may be a corporation that everyone loves to hate, how is it allowable for a city government to basically destroy the market for local Internet access? I mean, aren't the people who say it's illegal government competition basically correct? It does take away any motive to pay for Internet access, right?
And how can they afford the infrastructure necessary to provide wi-fi in the first place? Honest questions here, this particular aspect of Internet history has been bewildering me for many months now. I guess I just haven't read enough about it. Anyone with a better handle on this phenomenon care to comment?
I guess the last question would be, why are they doing it? Why aren't these places just relying on the open market to provide Internet access? (Let's ignore New Orleans for the moment.) Is it just to attract businesses and people to the area? What is the main purpose of a city going through all the trouble and expense of offering free wi-fi? What is the benefit to the city as a whole? I just don't get it.
That sounds like a XUL problem. I had that one time when I installed a bad extension on the Mac version of Thunderbird. I don't know the specifics but I believe if you backup your bookmarks.html file and then trash your Firefox preferences folder and let it be recreated that might fix the problem. You may also have to trash the system-wide Firefox preferences in/Library or/System/Library, but you should only go in there if you know what you're doing.
There are probably less destructive ways as well, like figuring out how to start FF in safe mode and uninstalling your extensions that way. But I don't know how to use safe mode on the Mac without doing some research. I think it has to be done from the Terminal.
Hopefully someone with more knowledge will respond as well.
Don't expect an official Ubuntu package right away - it's seen as a complicated upgrade:
Maybe it's just me, but this statement seems like a good demonstration of, shall we say, a weakness in "desktop Linux". Linux is going to have a real problem attracting people away from Windows or Mac OS X until the day we can tell someone to just download the "Linux version" of any particular software application. Here is Ubuntu, a distro that everyone seems to be promoting as one of the most user-friendly and cutting edge Linux distros these days, and their users are going to have to wait "a while" for the improved version of this very popular and great application, where our Windows and Mac OS X counterparts have all upgraded themselves already. If you do use the Linux package from the Mozilla team it may or may not work, and may or may not integrate with your package manager. What happens if you install the "official" package from your distro later on, will they conflict? Who knows. I see this as a huge problem holding back Linux on the desktop.
This kind of super-integrated software management may be a great boon to servers and other managed systems, but on individual desktops it kind of sucks. People are going to want Firefox 1.5 as soon as it comes out, whether they run Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. I can't help thinking there is a more flexible way to manage user applications on Linux so that all Linux desktop users can just download the latest version and be off and running like everyone else. But I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you! PLEASE MOD PARENT UP.
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 1
GCC 4.1 has not been released yet.
A modified version of Classpath has been included with GCJ since 3.2.
Azureus may start in GIJ 4.0, but won't work properly because it relies on parts of the Sun JDK which aren't completely implemented yet in GCJ.
Thank you for posting some actually useful and accurate information, which is exactly what I was looking for after the extraordinary claims of this poster. Looks like the original poster really went off half-cocked, even beyond most/. standards. Guess I don't need to waste any further time on this article since it's TOTAL BUNK. Congrats, "editors".
If only I had a subscription, so I could request a refund...
Here I was expecting to read about one of the BSDs again (like when they used NetBSD to break the Internet2 Land Speed Record), but it looks like this time they used an "optimized Linux (2.6.12 + FAST + NFSv4) kernel". I'm not well informed on speed records held by various versions of the Linux kernel, so maybe someone else can tell us whether this is something special for Linux or more run-of-the-mill. I had the impression that professional researchers usually prefer the BSDs for this kind of work. Will this put Linux on the map for more high-end research like this?
There is a widely held and mistaken impression that you can no longer download Quicktime for Windows without iTunes. This is incorrect. They just don't promote the standalone version of Quicktime as adamantly as the combo package. The link has always been there on the same page and probably always will be. If you go to the Quicktime download page and look down and to the right there is a set of text links, one of which says "Quicktime Standalone Installer". There you can download Quicktime for Windows sans iTunes.
GUI improvements have been made, and talked about all over. Much of which seems rather pointless to me. However they are taking the "preview" mode of icons a couple steps fFarther. When you browse to any directory, it tries to automatically look in each fFile and generate a preview of every document in that directory. This seems like a profoundly bad idea to me, fFor one simple reason: browsing your computer now takes 10 times as long because you have to wait fFor it to cache every document and every preview. The demo machine was insatiably bogged down by this task.
Wait, what? This is one of their fabulous innovations that we have to wait and upgrade to Vista to see? Mac OS X has been doing this very well for a few years and I think KDE had icon previews even before that. They both work well even on slow machines. And Microsoft can't even do it reasonably fast on a modern 3GHz machine? That kind of incompetence is impressive.
Parent post is among the most keenly insightful I have read in several years of reading Slashdot. Please mod up to +5, Insightful. Too bad it's AC.
Now, post below with ideas for T-shirt designs and bumper stickers associating the term "American Taliban" with Kansas. Jokes are good, but ideas of a serious nature would be a better way to communicate the gravity of this problem to those who see these designs.
This sort of thing truly is the start of a local theocracy in Kansas. If it isn't contained and/or destroyed it could actually threaten the rest of America the way things are going in the national government. Scary stuff.
While the mac and *nix platforms don't have activeX to worry about, nothing's preventing people from bundling mac spyware with otherwise useful apps, and if the app brings something that people want, they'll ignore the stuff that comes with it. How do you think Gator operates?
(Emphasis mine.)
This is the main problem on the Windows platform. Not that the system is inherently less secure (which it is), but that the market consists of a ton of users who are willing to tolerate having their machine infected with crap just to get some worthless "goodies". Of course it isn't impossible to make spyware/adware/malware for OS X (or Linux), but here is what happens in those communities, as opposed to the glutted-with-crapware Windows community: If there is any inkling of spyware, adware or any sort of malware in a piece of software, either it never appears for download on the sites where people go to download new software or it gets removed very quickly due to the huge community outcry, and that software author will never be trusted again. If a Mac software site consistently allows bad software to be listed and available for download, the users will quickly go elsewhere, permanently. Until the Mac community gets much larger and contains a lot more of the braindead general population, they simply will not tolerate their expensive and wonderful machines getting hijacked by bad software.
Secondly, and perhaps even more important, if you do get infected with something it is ABSURDLY easy to do a clean reinstallation of Mac OS X WITHOUT hosing all of your preferences and important installed software. In comparison in the Windows world it is an absolute nightmare to have to reinstall the OS because you know you will have to reinstall every piece of software that uses the Registry, which is darn near everything. So your average Windows user limps along trying to fix things piece by piece, maintaining a broken, infected system that just keeps getting slower and more broken. The Mac user, on the other hand, does a quick backup of Home and Applications and nukes the thing and starts over. An experienced Mac user can be back up and running as if nothing happened within a couple of hours.
So, wake me up when Apple has 25%+ market share and the malware/spyware writers are "targetting" the Mac platform as enthusiastically as they target Windows. My bet is that even with that much market share the malware will have little effect on Macs as a whole because the community they spring from is just too different and won't put up with it. Even the idiots among them will have their hands held and be constantly led away from doing what they might have done had they still been using Windows and downloading crap from just anywhere without thinking about it.
I really wish I could fathom why this kind of crap gets modded +5, Insightful. WTF does that comment even mean? You think you know these people? Do you know the kid personally? Do you know the parents? Do you know the society? You think you know the best way to raise such a unique human being, if he is indeed that unique?
But know, I'm sure you're right. What they should have done was give him a lobotomy so he could grow up with his "peers" and have a "normal" childhood wasting twelve years of his life learning how to "socialize". Because God knows socializing is infinitely more important than challenging yourself and using your given abilities to their fullest.
Honestly, what is wrong with so many people that makes them want to tear the kid down and force the parents to push him through the same mold as everyone else? If he passed all the damn tests for the lower grades legitimately what exactly is wrong with letting him (letting, not forcing) further his education in order to work toward his dreams? Yeah, an 8-year-old going to college is going to have a difficult time learning about "life", but as far as I can tell learning about real life is hard no matter what path you walk. As long as he has a good support system and really is super-intelligent he should do just as well as any of us. What is with this subtle (or not so subtle) show of disgust as if he is being used or mistreated somehow, and this seeming urge to stuff the kid back in the box marked "NORMAL CHILD"?
I for one am excited by what this says about the potential for human intelligence, if it turns out to be for real and not just some publicity stunt or fluke of eiditic memory or something. It's really an amazing thing. And I'm so irritated when I think about all the students in this country who could have been done with school within a few years if they hadn't been chained to the almost completely inflexible modern school system, where doing your time seems to be more important than learning anything or challenging yourself to find your potential abilities.
Give the kid a break. He'll either be able to hack it or he won't, and he's either a bonafide super-genius or he isn't. The truth will come in due time, either way. It's not your problem, and it's not your place to be judging people halfway around the world based on one little article. I suppose you'll all be pissed off again when CERN hires him right after he gets his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at age 10-1/2. How awful. Poor kid. What a horrible thing it would be for his dream to come true. Gack. Give ME a break, and get off the high horse(s).
Ahh, the old "Vendor Lock-In!!! Run for Your Lives!" argument. The policy Massachusetts is proposing is a lock-in, it's just a standard-based one.
If the state ONLY saves documents in that format from this point forward, then they will be unable to take advantage of any newly developed tech, be it standard or proprietary. ie, if Massachusetts 'locked in" on wax cylinders for playing sounds, it would make it hard to get my CD, cassette tape or futuristic crystal cube device into the state's procurement process.
You seem to be very confused about why vendor lock-in is bad, and why open standards are good (and important). You see, with an open standard like ODF, you aren't locked into anything. First, you aren't locked into any particular software product or vendor. With an openly documented and freely usable document format, any vendor, commercial or otherwise, is free to implement software to compete in the marketplace. Secondly, and just as important, it will be trivial to write automatic translators that will "upgrade" all of the stored documents to any new openly documented free document storage format.
Thirdly, but definitely not least, you also seem a bit confused about the fact that data formats and storage media are two completely different things. If the filesystem format for storing data on all those wax cylinders and other strange proprietary storage media were openly documented, and if the design of the original machines were openly documented, it would be a fairly trivial matter for modern engineering to build a reader to move that data onto newer storage media. And again, if the document format of those old files were openly documented it wouldn't be too difficult to translate those documents into ODF or any future open document format. Or at the very least to develop software to read the files, which is the most important thing.
Please note that document format (the internal structure of the files themselves) and filesystem format (the structure of how the files are stored and read from the storage media) are two very different things. In a perfect world every level from the physical machine specifications to the filesystem to the format of the document would be openly documented. Perhaps then our government wouldn't have nearly as many data storage fiascos where they lose warehouses full of data that nobody knows how to read anymore. That sort of situation should be unacceptable, and open standards will help keep that from happening.
I really can't fathom where you might have given yourself the idea that open standards are somehow limiting or in any way comparable to a single-vendor proprietary, secret, patent-encumbered document format. If you thought things through you would realize that open standards are extremely important to the future of our data (no matter what storage media it is stored on), and to the ability of the people to access their government's data or send data to their government without being restricted by not being able to afford an expensive piece of software from one particular vendor. Open document standards also encourage competition in the marketplace, which is of course good because competition lowers prices and is necessary for a healthy capitalist economy.
Responding to your other point, of course there will always be something newer and cooler coming along every other year. What exactly are we supposed to do, wait until 3237 A.D. when everyone finally settles on one perfect file format? Ain't gonna happen. But as I've stated already, with an open format we are free to "upgrade" our data to take advantage of new features and data formats in the future because we can look at the open specifications and build nearly perfect software translators, and plugins to let new software read old files and probably vice versa. There is no "lock-in" with open docuement formats. And there is nothing stopping any commercial vendor from building software to implement these open document formats and selling it to the public or
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I am one of those photographers. I make large prints often 30x40 and shoot largeand medium format film. I am pretty nervous about the day I can no longer get a box of 4x5 film and hope technology makes it possible to still get great prints at these sizes. 8 megapixels doesn't cut it. Of course, a large format camera can take a digital back if you have the money for such a beast, but it isn't so practical if you do photography that is off the grid like I do.
There is a medium-format digital back that came out recently with 38-megapixels. Something tells me that by the time your film goes the way of the dodo there will be quite a few options available for you to do the same quality work with digital that you've been doing with film. Printing at 30x40 is a piece of cake even for the 16MP Canon 1Ds Mark II. Is it going to have the same resolution if you look at it with a magnifying glass? No, but what are you doing looking at a poster with a magnifying glass? Unless you're printing billboard-size, you aren't actually seeing all that resolution under most circumstances. If you really do have the skill and the audience that require all that resolution I'm sure you'll be able to afford a digital solution in the near future that will closely approximate what you're doing with film, if not surpass it eventually. Think of it as an opportunity rather than a roadblock.
A good site to check out if you haven't seen it already is luminous-landscape.com, where the owner of the site is an experienced professional photographer who has done some interesting comparisons between digital and film and found to his own amazement that digital has now surpassed the image quality of 35mm film and is working on overtaking even medium-format. That was a couple of years ago. Looks like there is a recent article by another large-format photographer that you may find very interesting, comparing the 4x5 film you use with the very 38MP back that I mentioned earlier. Happy reading:
http://luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml
"In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over," says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. "Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate."
Anyone care to guess how long it will be before this quote supplants "640K should be enough for anybody" as the Worst Technology Prediction Ever?
I would say the digital photography field is just a little different than the general computing field, so that really isn't that bad a statement. Your average snapshooter isn't clamoring to print his photos at 36x48 inches nor crop 90% of their image and still expect to have decent resolution. There are a lot of people who are really quite happy with their 3- and 4-megapixel cameras. Having eight or more megapixels is just icing on the cake except for people who actually need or want the extra resolution for various reasons. Even a sharp 3MP photo can often be printed up to 13x19 and still look decent. At the consumer level we really have reached the flattening-out part of the curve in terms of the megapixel race.
What the digital camera world really needs more than ever-increasing megapixels at this point is A) improved dynamic range, B) less noise at high ISO ranges (800-3200+), and C) more cameras with built-in image stabilization. These three things will actually solve real-life problems that people have when taking pictures.
I think dynamic range is the biggest problem. Cameras just aren't capable yet of getting information out of both deep shadows and bright highlights in the same image the way our eyes can. This is confusing to most people and ruins a lot of shots. "Blown" highlights and pure black shadows with no retrievable information are the bane of the digital photography world. Sure, you can shoot RAW and try to manipulate it in Photoshop, but that is really way beyond most people.
Besides dynamic range, most shots are ruined by blur. Either the shutter speed was too slow to stop the movement of the subject, which can be helped a lot by higher ISO capabilities, or the camera was moving too much, which can be helped quite a bit by some built-in image stabilization. Bottom line is, lack of megapixels is no longer the cause of most unacceptable photographs for most people. Except for the pros, it's time to move on to improving other features. I can't really envision a world where regular people are screaming for 32-megapixel compact cameras. Ain't gonna happen.
Uh-huh, yeah. I just have two things to say to that.
1. Before Mac OS X version 10.2, I would have agreed, Macs certainly did suck. Especially Mac OS 9 and earlier. It really sucked bigtime. I hated Macs back then.
2. If all those G5 iMacs are operating worse than the PCs on a regular basis, they need to get someone in there to maintain them who has half a clue. Those Macs should be rock solid. I speak from experience with a couple dozen different types of Macs running Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. We're talking anything from G5 towers to gumdrop iMacs from 6 years ago. And proper maintenance is not rocket science either.
You're either full of it or the techs in charge of that campus are morons. Not to mention that anyone with a little training can set up a Mac server and netboot every Mac in the building whereby it's possible to make them basically foolproof and impossible to mess up. You can make them boot from a fresh disk image every time. Great for school environments. But hey, if you hate them that much I know several million people who would be happy to take them off your hands, cheap.
If you've got a specific piece of software that keeps crashing, here's an idea: Stop blaming it on the Mac and replace it with a different piece of software that doesn't crash. It doesn't matter how stable your OS is, if your application is crap it will still crash.
Same here. I have experience with a 350MHz G3 iMac that boots Panther faster than that G5 iMac. That video is totally bogus. The day that a G5 iMac is slower than a G3 iMac, something is wrong.
I had suggested this idea in the past but it doesn't really solve any of their problems. What they need is to be able to keep the PDF document editable so the clients can come in and modify their information and print out a new copy (it's a standard employment form so it has to be updated when they move, get a new job, or apply to a different employer). Anyone can install CutePDF, PDFcreator or this PrimoPDF thing to print to PDF from Windows, and of course Mac OS X supports printing to PDF natively from any application. It solves nothing without buying an editor, and although Foxit PDF Editor would let them re-edit the file it still costs $99 per seat and is much more powerful/complex than they need, plus it fails the cross-platform requirement. Same thing with Scribus, it's way too much for these people who are so technophobic they don't even like the new Macs in their office. They just need to be able to edit the fields, not every word and graphic element in the document. That would really confuse them.
We ended up spending the $19 and within an hour had a fully saveable and re-editable version of the file, so long as we have a copy of Acrobat Reader 6 or later. And apparently the very latest version (7.0.5) is available for all of the important platforms, Win32, Mac, and even Linux, so this is no big deal. Looks like Linux isn't lagging behind anymore, which is nice. I can't really see this office ever using Linux until it's a lot slicker and more self-consistent, but this is another piece that helps make it a valid option for the future.
So, problem solved, for now. They will be able to use the free Acrobat Reader on every computer and even give the form to their clients and they will be able to edit it at home since it no longer requires the full version of Acrobat. Luckily, since they really only work with this one form on a regular basis it has only cost them the $19 required for the conversion from that save-pdf-forms.com place.
I realize many people here have been gaming for a couple of decades now and know exactly what's going on, but some of us either were never into consoles or just couldn't afford (or weren't allowed) to go out and buy a new console and a dozen new games every year for the last 20 years. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is completely out of the loop in this respect. So here's the stupid question from the ignorant side of the fence:
Are there any actual GAMES on this thing when you buy it? Or is it just emulators and you have to actually own any particular game you want to play, and have the hardware and knowledge to get it copied from whatever cartridge or disc it's on and onto this device in order to run it in the correct emulator? (Or *cough*pirate*cough* the ROMs from somewhere for games like NES, I assume.)
If it's the latter, how difficult is it to get the games off the various devices? Don't you need special hardware for some of this stuff? That is, if you want to do it the legal way.
What's the skinny?
People like you really frighten me. The way you think is very scary. Let's see, point by point (I know it won't do any good, but I have to try, especially after some dumbass modded you insightful, which means someone out there actually agrees with what you said):
Do you really feel safe carrying a gun around? What happens if you do get robbed? Would you give the criminal what they want to avoid bloodshed, or would you pull your gun out and either shoot them or end up being shot yourself?
You left out "give the criminal what they want and then get shot anyway," or "watch your friend or loved one get shot and robbed just before you get shot and robbed yourself because you had no way to defend yourself or your friend/loved one". And several other scenerios that don't quite fit in the either/or box you described. See, if they have a gun they have no particular reason not to shoot you in many situations. Fewer witnesses and all that. So if you're put in a position where it's shoot or get shot, guess what? I'd like a chance to do some shooting if it might protect my life or someone else's.
The simple fact is that there will always be desperate and/or crazy people in this world, and at some point in your life one might try to hurt you or someone you care about. Guess what? The likelihood of a police officer standing within 1 meter of you at any given time, ready to take a bullet for you or take down an attacker, is zero. Sometimes, you have to defend yourself. Scary, huh? Oh my God, I just realized, the police have firearms! Maybe we should take their firearms away, so they'll be safer on the job. Yeah, that makes sense. Just like it makes sense to take all firearms away from private individuals who have never committed any crime and probably never will.
If you don't get robbed, do you really want the temptation to be there to act on a whim and kill someone because you were angry? Would you want the chance a kid or teenager to find that gun and kill someone? Do you really want the chance of an accident happening, and the gun going off and killing yourself or another person?
Wow, now that's really revealing. There are actually people like you who think that the moment someone puts a gun in your hand you're going to go on a killing rampage. You know, those issues are internal, they have nothing to do with the firearm. That kind of attitude sheds light for me on why there is so much gun related violent crime here in the US even though many other countries have the same level of gun ownership in their societies. We all know how many times we've seen a police officer just whip out his firearm and shoot people randomly on the street, or even his partner, simply because he was a little irritated. Yeah, that happens a lot.
It is not a cop-out to say for the millionth time that it isn't the firearm's fault that you decided to shoot somebody for no particular reason, without due cause. The fact that you think the mere presence of a weapon will make you do something horrible... Well, maybe you should get some counseling, friend. You're dangerous, with or without a weapon. Might want to stay away from sharp objects too.
By the way, there really are very few "accidents" with firearms. Most of what you and the press call "accidents" are simply unbelievable stupidity. Anyone who follows ONE or more of the THREE (you can count 'em on one hand!) simple firearms safety rules can avoid having any safety problems with firearms, ever.
1. Keep it pointed in a safe direction at all times, even if you "know" it's not loaded.
2. Keep the action open and the firearm unloaded until you're ready to shoot it.
3. Keep your finger away from the trigger until you're ready to shoot.
And of course the cardinal firearm safety rule that every man, woman and especially children should be taught:
A gun is ALWAYS loaded. Even if you just checked it. Even if you just saw somebody check it. Even if you "know" it's "just a replica," or you "know" there is no ammunition kep
Opera went free and ad-free a couple of months back with version 8.5. There was a big whoopety-doo about it at the time. Those screenshots are out of date, as most screenshots posted on the Internet always seem to be. Not saying you should use Opera, just get your facts straight. For me it was the best browser a few years ago but now nothing can really hold a candle to Firefox plus a few essential extensions:
Adblock + Filterset.G from Pierceive.com
FlashGot
NoScript
PDF Download
Tabbrowser Extensions by Shimoda Hiroshi (not the Tabbrowser Preferences available from the "official" extensions site which is a pale imitation, you'll have to Google for it using the author's name). This by itself is the single best extension for Firefox as far as I am concerned. Long live automatic colored tab groups.
Opera is nice but there is no way it can keep up with the simple flexibility of Firefox these days.
As a speaker of American English, considering the name of any company to be a "collective noun" is very contrary to logic. What exactly makes it collective? What if Dell only had one employee? It makes much more sense to refer to anything that is considered a singular unit with "is", not "are". The only way I can imagine it making sense to refer to a unit object as a collection of individuals would be where all of the individuals in the unit are collectively doing some specific thing, but even then it makes more sense to refer to the members of the unit more specifically. In most cases only a portion of or even a single individual is behind any one specific action of a company, and it's really just the unitary legal entity of the company that is making the decision or performing the action. Dell as a company is pre-installing Firefox in the UK, whereas Dell as a collection of individuals is doing millions of different things.
I just can't imagine thinking of a company name as being a collective noun even if I had been brought up being told that was the correct way of doing things. English has enough problems without throwing in completely anti-logical constructs like that. Spelling favor and honor with a U is no big deal in comparison. Those kinds of "regional differences" we can all handle.
Would you say, "Microsoft are a company" or, "Microsoft is a company"? It is a company. What's the point of putting something into a logical grouping if you're just going to treat it as if it's still separate individuals? And it will always fall down when there is only one individual in the "collective", which is easily possible with a company name. I just don't buy it. I think there is a good, logical reason that we don't do it that way anymore over here in the Colonies.
Now it's your turn to point out some equally nonsensical language construct that is only used by us 'mericans.
No one distributes software on floppies any more. 6-8MB added to your installer isn't a BIG deal. It translates into another 30sec worth of download. If its a burden on anyone, it's a burden on your webservers.
I think you meant to say it IS a big deal, since it translates to 30 MINUTES of extra download time on a dial-up line, which unfortunately most users are still stuck with. Even broadband lines aren't all 1.5Mb/s.
I'm not sure I want to chat with anyone that can't use an IRC or Jabber client and it's hardly as if I'm setting a high standard here.
I'm not sure I want to chat with anyone that can't speak Japanese or German and it's hardly as if I'm setting a high standard here.
What's that, you aren't well-versed in foreign languages? Well then, you must be STUPID, and therefore not worth my time.
Last time I checked both IRC and Jabber were rather confusing to the uninitiated. IRC has the concept of dozens of different networks to connect to with no easy way for a newbie to understand what makes one network preferable over another. Then you've got to decide on a room to be in, etc. It's a whole different world from a simple chat client. I have used IRC quite successfully for a while in the past but I still don't know how it really works so I am not comfortable in that world. Plus I just didn't like real-time chat that much. Consequently I haven't used it for years.
Last time I tried a Jabber client it had somewhat similar problems where you had to go through a whole process to figure out what server to connect to, and that's if you could even find one that supported all the different protocols you wanted to have access to. Maybe it's gotten much better since then but all I know is that at the time it was overly confusing and the available clients sucked. Judging from the page about open Jabber servers on the offician Jabber website, it doesn't look like anything has really changed. Both IRC and Jabber were always more difficult for me to configure than ICQ, MSN, AIM or Yahoo ever were. The same will hold true for any person new to the chat world.
But no, no high standards (or high horses) here.
Space key is bottom-center, labeled SpFn. Tap it without hitting another key and it's a space. Hold it down to activate function keys. Seems fairly obvious.
Unfortunately this keyboard does fail to solve one major usability problem which is that Control-key combinations are a real pain. You will still have to remove your hand from the home keys or bend your pinky around into a really awkward position. In comparison, the "Command" key used in most Mac keyboard shortcuts is right next to the spacebar like the Alt key on PC keyboards. On a Mac, one only has to move one's thumb slightly off the spacebar to be able to quickly type a couple dozen keyboard shortcuts without vacating the home keys. When I used the BeOS I got used to using the Alt key in a similar way since they imitated a lot of Mac conventions, and to this day I am still amazed at the comparitive awkwardness of using the Control key for most keyboard shortcuts on Windows and Linux. This keyboard does nothing to solve that problem for me. Too bad, because otherwise it looks interesting.
Well, I have several domains with GoDaddy and I've never had any problems with them doing anything unsavory. Nor have I heard bad things about them before reading this article. Just out of curiosity, if you know so much, who do you recommend as a good registrar in place of GoDaddy? I wouldn't want to be recommending a bad registrar to my clients in the future.
Yeah, so hardware and infrastructure costs money. That's kind of part of my point. I'm still not understanding how it helps the communications company to give away their services for free after they paid millions for the hardware. How does "finding out who uses what and where" help them make money when your service is free? That is what companies do, after all, right? Sell a product or service to make money? Free stuff doesn't usually bring a lot of money in.
1. Give away service for free
2. ???
3. Profit! (or some other benefit, if we're talking about a city government)
Hope someone can bridge that gap for me. I'm not a total idiot, I swear, but the answer to when free turns into money isn't really popping out for me. That's why this whole concept of "free wifi" for an entire city is still baffling me a bit.
Maybe I'm just completely "out of the loop" so to speak, but I really can't understand how all these cities can A) justify and B) afford to offer all this free wireless internet access. Being devil's advocate here, and ignoring the fact that BellSouth may be a corporation that everyone loves to hate, how is it allowable for a city government to basically destroy the market for local Internet access? I mean, aren't the people who say it's illegal government competition basically correct? It does take away any motive to pay for Internet access, right?
And how can they afford the infrastructure necessary to provide wi-fi in the first place? Honest questions here, this particular aspect of Internet history has been bewildering me for many months now. I guess I just haven't read enough about it. Anyone with a better handle on this phenomenon care to comment?
I guess the last question would be, why are they doing it? Why aren't these places just relying on the open market to provide Internet access? (Let's ignore New Orleans for the moment.) Is it just to attract businesses and people to the area? What is the main purpose of a city going through all the trouble and expense of offering free wi-fi? What is the benefit to the city as a whole? I just don't get it.
Any insights would be appreciated.
That sounds like a XUL problem. I had that one time when I installed a bad extension on the Mac version of Thunderbird. I don't know the specifics but I believe if you backup your bookmarks.html file and then trash your Firefox preferences folder and let it be recreated that might fix the problem. You may also have to trash the system-wide Firefox preferences in /Library or /System/Library, but you should only go in there if you know what you're doing.
There are probably less destructive ways as well, like figuring out how to start FF in safe mode and uninstalling your extensions that way. But I don't know how to use safe mode on the Mac without doing some research. I think it has to be done from the Terminal.
Hopefully someone with more knowledge will respond as well.
Don't expect an official Ubuntu package right away - it's seen as a complicated upgrade:
Maybe it's just me, but this statement seems like a good demonstration of, shall we say, a weakness in "desktop Linux". Linux is going to have a real problem attracting people away from Windows or Mac OS X until the day we can tell someone to just download the "Linux version" of any particular software application. Here is Ubuntu, a distro that everyone seems to be promoting as one of the most user-friendly and cutting edge Linux distros these days, and their users are going to have to wait "a while" for the improved version of this very popular and great application, where our Windows and Mac OS X counterparts have all upgraded themselves already. If you do use the Linux package from the Mozilla team it may or may not work, and may or may not integrate with your package manager. What happens if you install the "official" package from your distro later on, will they conflict? Who knows. I see this as a huge problem holding back Linux on the desktop.
This kind of super-integrated software management may be a great boon to servers and other managed systems, but on individual desktops it kind of sucks. People are going to want Firefox 1.5 as soon as it comes out, whether they run Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. I can't help thinking there is a more flexible way to manage user applications on Linux so that all Linux desktop users can just download the latest version and be off and running like everyone else. But I'm not holding my breath.
GCC 4.1 has not been released yet.
/. standards. Guess I don't need to waste any further time on this article since it's TOTAL BUNK. Congrats, "editors".
A modified version of Classpath has been included with GCJ since 3.2.
Azureus may start in GIJ 4.0, but won't work properly because it relies on parts of the Sun JDK which aren't completely implemented yet in GCJ.
Thank you for posting some actually useful and accurate information, which is exactly what I was looking for after the extraordinary claims of this poster. Looks like the original poster really went off half-cocked, even beyond most
If only I had a subscription, so I could request a refund...
Here I was expecting to read about one of the BSDs again (like when they used NetBSD to break the Internet2 Land Speed Record), but it looks like this time they used an "optimized Linux (2.6.12 + FAST + NFSv4) kernel". I'm not well informed on speed records held by various versions of the Linux kernel, so maybe someone else can tell us whether this is something special for Linux or more run-of-the-mill. I had the impression that professional researchers usually prefer the BSDs for this kind of work. Will this put Linux on the map for more high-end research like this?
Impressive work, either way.
There is a widely held and mistaken impression that you can no longer download Quicktime for Windows without iTunes. This is incorrect. They just don't promote the standalone version of Quicktime as adamantly as the combo package. The link has always been there on the same page and probably always will be. If you go to the Quicktime download page and look down and to the right there is a set of text links, one of which says "Quicktime Standalone Installer". There you can download Quicktime for Windows sans iTunes.
e .html/
linky: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalon
GUI improvements have been made, and talked about all over. Much of which seems rather pointless to me. However they are taking the "preview" mode of icons a couple steps fFarther. When you browse to any directory, it tries to automatically look in each fFile and generate a preview of every document in that directory. This seems like a profoundly bad idea to me, fFor one simple reason: browsing your computer now takes 10 times as long because you have to wait fFor it to cache every document and every preview. The demo machine was insatiably bogged down by this task.
Wait, what? This is one of their fabulous innovations that we have to wait and upgrade to Vista to see? Mac OS X has been doing this very well for a few years and I think KDE had icon previews even before that. They both work well even on slow machines. And Microsoft can't even do it reasonably fast on a modern 3GHz machine? That kind of incompetence is impressive.
Parent post is among the most keenly insightful I have read in several years of reading Slashdot. Please mod up to +5, Insightful. Too bad it's AC.
Now, post below with ideas for T-shirt designs and bumper stickers associating the term "American Taliban" with Kansas. Jokes are good, but ideas of a serious nature would be a better way to communicate the gravity of this problem to those who see these designs.
This sort of thing truly is the start of a local theocracy in Kansas. If it isn't contained and/or destroyed it could actually threaten the rest of America the way things are going in the national government. Scary stuff.
While the mac and *nix platforms don't have activeX to worry about, nothing's preventing people from bundling mac spyware with otherwise useful apps, and if the app brings something that people want, they'll ignore the stuff that comes with it. How do you think Gator operates?
(Emphasis mine.)
This is the main problem on the Windows platform. Not that the system is inherently less secure (which it is), but that the market consists of a ton of users who are willing to tolerate having their machine infected with crap just to get some worthless "goodies". Of course it isn't impossible to make spyware/adware/malware for OS X (or Linux), but here is what happens in those communities, as opposed to the glutted-with-crapware Windows community: If there is any inkling of spyware, adware or any sort of malware in a piece of software, either it never appears for download on the sites where people go to download new software or it gets removed very quickly due to the huge community outcry, and that software author will never be trusted again. If a Mac software site consistently allows bad software to be listed and available for download, the users will quickly go elsewhere, permanently. Until the Mac community gets much larger and contains a lot more of the braindead general population, they simply will not tolerate their expensive and wonderful machines getting hijacked by bad software.
Secondly, and perhaps even more important, if you do get infected with something it is ABSURDLY easy to do a clean reinstallation of Mac OS X WITHOUT hosing all of your preferences and important installed software. In comparison in the Windows world it is an absolute nightmare to have to reinstall the OS because you know you will have to reinstall every piece of software that uses the Registry, which is darn near everything. So your average Windows user limps along trying to fix things piece by piece, maintaining a broken, infected system that just keeps getting slower and more broken. The Mac user, on the other hand, does a quick backup of Home and Applications and nukes the thing and starts over. An experienced Mac user can be back up and running as if nothing happened within a couple of hours.
So, wake me up when Apple has 25%+ market share and the malware/spyware writers are "targetting" the Mac platform as enthusiastically as they target Windows. My bet is that even with that much market share the malware will have little effect on Macs as a whole because the community they spring from is just too different and won't put up with it. Even the idiots among them will have their hands held and be constantly led away from doing what they might have done had they still been using Windows and downloading crap from just anywhere without thinking about it.
So much for letting the kid grow up.
I really wish I could fathom why this kind of crap gets modded +5, Insightful. WTF does that comment even mean? You think you know these people? Do you know the kid personally? Do you know the parents? Do you know the society? You think you know the best way to raise such a unique human being, if he is indeed that unique?
But know, I'm sure you're right. What they should have done was give him a lobotomy so he could grow up with his "peers" and have a "normal" childhood wasting twelve years of his life learning how to "socialize". Because God knows socializing is infinitely more important than challenging yourself and using your given abilities to their fullest.
Honestly, what is wrong with so many people that makes them want to tear the kid down and force the parents to push him through the same mold as everyone else? If he passed all the damn tests for the lower grades legitimately what exactly is wrong with letting him (letting, not forcing) further his education in order to work toward his dreams? Yeah, an 8-year-old going to college is going to have a difficult time learning about "life", but as far as I can tell learning about real life is hard no matter what path you walk. As long as he has a good support system and really is super-intelligent he should do just as well as any of us. What is with this subtle (or not so subtle) show of disgust as if he is being used or mistreated somehow, and this seeming urge to stuff the kid back in the box marked "NORMAL CHILD"?
I for one am excited by what this says about the potential for human intelligence, if it turns out to be for real and not just some publicity stunt or fluke of eiditic memory or something. It's really an amazing thing. And I'm so irritated when I think about all the students in this country who could have been done with school within a few years if they hadn't been chained to the almost completely inflexible modern school system, where doing your time seems to be more important than learning anything or challenging yourself to find your potential abilities.
Give the kid a break. He'll either be able to hack it or he won't, and he's either a bonafide super-genius or he isn't. The truth will come in due time, either way. It's not your problem, and it's not your place to be judging people halfway around the world based on one little article. I suppose you'll all be pissed off again when CERN hires him right after he gets his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at age 10-1/2. How awful. Poor kid. What a horrible thing it would be for his dream to come true. Gack. Give ME a break, and get off the high horse(s).
Ahh, the old "Vendor Lock-In!!! Run for Your Lives!" argument. The policy Massachusetts is proposing is a lock-in, it's just a standard-based one.
If the state ONLY saves documents in that format from this point forward, then they will be unable to take advantage of any newly developed tech, be it standard or proprietary. ie, if Massachusetts 'locked in" on wax cylinders for playing sounds, it would make it hard to get my CD, cassette tape or futuristic crystal cube device into the state's procurement process.
You seem to be very confused about why vendor lock-in is bad, and why open standards are good (and important). You see, with an open standard like ODF, you aren't locked into anything. First, you aren't locked into any particular software product or vendor. With an openly documented and freely usable document format, any vendor, commercial or otherwise, is free to implement software to compete in the marketplace. Secondly, and just as important, it will be trivial to write automatic translators that will "upgrade" all of the stored documents to any new openly documented free document storage format.
Thirdly, but definitely not least, you also seem a bit confused about the fact that data formats and storage media are two completely different things. If the filesystem format for storing data on all those wax cylinders and other strange proprietary storage media were openly documented, and if the design of the original machines were openly documented, it would be a fairly trivial matter for modern engineering to build a reader to move that data onto newer storage media. And again, if the document format of those old files were openly documented it wouldn't be too difficult to translate those documents into ODF or any future open document format. Or at the very least to develop software to read the files, which is the most important thing.
Please note that document format (the internal structure of the files themselves) and filesystem format (the structure of how the files are stored and read from the storage media) are two very different things. In a perfect world every level from the physical machine specifications to the filesystem to the format of the document would be openly documented. Perhaps then our government wouldn't have nearly as many data storage fiascos where they lose warehouses full of data that nobody knows how to read anymore. That sort of situation should be unacceptable, and open standards will help keep that from happening.
I really can't fathom where you might have given yourself the idea that open standards are somehow limiting or in any way comparable to a single-vendor proprietary, secret, patent-encumbered document format. If you thought things through you would realize that open standards are extremely important to the future of our data (no matter what storage media it is stored on), and to the ability of the people to access their government's data or send data to their government without being restricted by not being able to afford an expensive piece of software from one particular vendor. Open document standards also encourage competition in the marketplace, which is of course good because competition lowers prices and is necessary for a healthy capitalist economy.
Responding to your other point, of course there will always be something newer and cooler coming along every other year. What exactly are we supposed to do, wait until 3237 A.D. when everyone finally settles on one perfect file format? Ain't gonna happen. But as I've stated already, with an open format we are free to "upgrade" our data to take advantage of new features and data formats in the future because we can look at the open specifications and build nearly perfect software translators, and plugins to let new software read old files and probably vice versa. There is no "lock-in" with open docuement formats. And there is nothing stopping any commercial vendor from building software to implement these open document formats and selling it to the public or