To add to the above: you've got to use what the publisher can process into their internal intermediate format. They'll then process that into PDFs, e-books, print, and whatever other formats are ultimate required. Your tools need to enable you to productively edit text and mark it up correctly (according to the publisher's stylesheet -- which usually has little to do with what the document will ultimately look like and everything to do with what each piece of text represents).
The OpenOffice info there seems to be out of date -- they have a pretty good OpenOffice.org stylesheet. I wrote my two O'Reilly books ("Fedora Linux" and "X Power Tools") in OpenOffice.org that way.
OOo is a pretty reasonable choice, especially with a custom stylesheet, because it is XML-based and can be transformed into other formats.
This weekend I used a DVD player at my brother's house (a fairly inexpensive unit). The remote had no PLAY, PAUSE, or STOP button. You could access those functions, but only using "rethought" controls. It was absolutely maddening.
The record companies lobbied here in Canada for a levy on blank media for years. They got it in 1999, and in return, consumers got the right of Private Copying. Actually, this deal favors most consumers, because we are permitted to copy music from any source for our own use; I can take CDs out of the library or borrow them from you and make my own copies, and it's entirely legal up here. The record companies would like you to think that you can only copy on to media subject to the levy, but a close reading of the Copyright Act disproves this view.
A couple of years ago, though, I saw a Norah Jones CD at POS in a Chapters store, and it looked interesting until I saw on the back that it was encumbered with anti-copying technology. I wrote the record company (BMI IIRC) and asked how it is, on the one hand, that they are happy to take my levy money in return for private copying, and on the other hand, that they're attempting to block my copying? The letter challenged them to either give up their portion of levy revenue or drop copy protection. Their response was that the levy "does not begin" to offset losses due to private copying and therefore they had the right to copy-protect. (This whole discussion didn't even touch on whether such copy protection had any chance of working).
There are few industries that think they should get money (levy revenue) in return for something (private copying rights), and then not deliver (copy-protect the media). These companies have successfully exploited both consumers and artists for far too long, and deserve to be totally cut out of the producer-consumer transaction.
I'm seeing some comments saying "this is hard and will always be hard" or suggestions to use this-or-that third party tool. But I'd really, really encourage you to take a look at Revisor from the Fedora Project.
Fedora doesn't really produce a Linux distribution anymore -- they produce a well-integrated Linux repository and the tools to make distribution media "spins" (live disc, installation disc, repository subset) from that repository or to do installations directly from that repository. The Fedora 7 ISO images are really just sample spins.
Revisor is the GUI frontend to the tools for producing spins (which are pungi and livecd-creator). It enables point-and-click selection of the software set for installation with full dependency resolution. A few more clicks and you have your ISO image ready to burn.
I have a stable 4-seat system at home that I use daily -- along with my wife and two daughters. It takes a bit of work to get a multiseat system set up, but once you do, you save electricity, hardware costs, and admin costs, and in a school setting you could deploy the same configuration across a number of systems. Previous posts have mentioned my blog entry and related discussion: http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/ 14-Multiseat-X-Under-X11R6.97.0.html -- it's getting a bit dated but the basics will send you in the right direction. (There are other ways to do multiseat, too, and I'm including them in a chapter of an upcoming O'Reilly book).
My system is a 32-bit AMD (Athlon XP 2800) with one AGP and three PCI NVIDIA cards, along with one PS/2 keyboard+mouse set and three USB keyboard+mouse sets. I have 1 GB of RAM, which has worked well until recently, when I added a Xen guest domain with some web services and dropped the amount of RAM available for multiseat use... so now I'm shopping for a 64-bit box with a bit more RAM. We run standard desktop apps: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the Gimp, various photo management programs, music players, Evolution, Google Earth, and so forth, and the performance is quite acceptable.
3D desktops (Compiz/Beryl) do work in this configuration, but this machine is a bit under-powered to make them work really well. When I get my new box I expect that we'll all be running Compiz:-)
Fortunately, you can correct for this by creating a custom ICC profile for your ink+paper combination. Profiling is not something that your Mom will want to do (unless she's a graphic designer), but it can be done.
Maybe the ink vendors should create and distribute ICC profiles. It could be a good advertising point: Our ink is consistent enough batch-to-batch that we have produced a colour profile for it! (But perhaps some of the manufacturers hard-code the profile into the printer driver?)
Talk to the cellphone carrier(s) about this -- I know Telus in Canada had a program where they would install RF equipment (boosters or micro-cells, I'm not sure) for use in warehouses, etc. (though of course I can't find the page right now!). If your volume is small, you might pay, but if you have enough users they might put in a micro-cell on their dime. If they are aware of the business opportunity they will probably figure out how to accomodate you.
Best description I've seen for /etc...
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...is that it is the "home directory for the system". To me, that captures the sense that it's where a particular system gets its configuration (/etc/inittab,/etc/ttys) and personality (/etc/motd,/etc/issue).
Personally I'm in the "et setera" camp, and prefer the spoken form "et see".
I'm annoyed that car chargers aren't standard with phones, too. But I bought a $20 75W mini-inverter plug (12 vdc -> 110 vac) that lets me connect my cellphone charger (or laptop, or self-inflating airbed, or...) to my car's accessory outlet. It's great having AC on the road.
Why is it that everyone in the free software community has this automatic assumption that the rest of the world should go out of their way to support them?
Why are you bringing "the free software community" into this? Opera isn't free software*, and XP isn't free software, so what does this have to do with the free software community?!
(* Opera is free to download, but it is not Free Software in the sense of the phrase "free software community").
I just tried a search on Yahoo and got the same ad. They must have checked the User Agent string to see that I was using Firefox. But why didn't they check to see if I was using Windows? -- why bother advertising IE to me if I can't run it on my system?
Also, when it comes to support Microsoft kicks ass. Really. If you have paid for support from MS, you really do get it. Seriously. Big time.
True -- but you have only a single source of support. If MS comes through, great; but if they don't, you're sunk.
Think about it: you can have the largest consulting firm -- Accenture, EDS, even IBM -- support your Windows-based development and rollout; but when a bug appears (and one always will), when a security problem is found (and one always will be), when push comes to shove, even the biggest consulting outfits must wait for MS to issue a fix. They can perhaps lean on MS a bit, or hunt for a workaround, but that only takes you so far. If you instead deploy on top of Linux and other Open Source software, your consultants (or in-house staff) can fix that inevitable bug themselves and then submit the patch upstream.
When your support provider has the source code, there's no one that they can blame: the buck stops with them. If they can't handle your needs, you can walk with the source and find someone who can. All support providers are competing on the basis of ability (not secrets): this in turn can lead to real competition, and, therefore, competitive support pricing.
Open Source reminds me of the Nike logo: Just Do It(tm).
Why don't you have the customers send PDFs? The fonts are embedded in the PDF file, so the output is supposed to be exactly the same anywhere. No pirated software, no unlicensed fonts, you punt the issue back to the customer.
Some would call them butt-ugly (MS Comic? Arial?!?!), but the MS core web fonts are still available: http://fontconfig.org/webfonts/ -- MS licensed them in a way that makes it hard to put the Genie back in the bottle.
- In terms of summer events, the Ottawa Linux Symposium is supposed to be a great event. I haven't made it to one yet but I've wanted to for a few years. It's July 19-22 in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada).
- [Shameless Plug] This doesn't quite match your description but I thought I'd mention it anyways: I teach at Seneca College, Toronto, and we have a 10-month intensive Linux Administration graduate certificate program that I think is one of the best Linux training programs available. We've had students from all different backgrounds including current staff from large systems vendors. We also throw a great Free Software and Open Source Symposium in October; this year we have Mike Shaver and Neil Deacon (Mozilla), Nat Freidman (Ximian/Novell), Chris Blizzard (One Laptop Per Child), and a raft of others.
And I agree that there's no substitute for getting dirt under your fingernails and actually working with the technology!:-)
...less [time] if you use a dedicated high-current circuit...
There's no reason why the charger/base station unit couldn't load up an internal capacitor over a longer period of time and then rapidly dump that energy into a portable device in a few seconds. That give you the rapid recharge times without using a clothes-dryer style power plug or browning out your lights whenever you recharged your cellphone (or, worse yet, laptop).
I think the biggest obstacle to rapid charging will be the physical connectors: nobody wants a 3x8 cm charging connector on an iPod or Razor! (But a few of minutes charge time instead of a few seconds is no big deal: you plug in your cellphone, brush your teeth, and by the time your're done it's fully charged and ready to go).
- Consider carefully whether you trust your tape safe. I've seen tapes damaged at temperatures lower than some tape safes are rated for.
- If you have offsite backups, you should also have offsite tape drives. If your main site is destroyed in some catastrophic disaster, it's not too hard to get emergency replacements for server hardware, especially x86. But urgently sourcing the right model of tape drive (in many cases a model that is a few years old) can be a nightmare. While most drives of [insert favorite tape technology family here] generation N+1 will read tapes from generation N, it's very easy for time to slip by to the point that most of the drives on the market are actually generation N+4, and their support for reading generation N is spotty (even if the spec sheet says otherwise). If you're using proprietary backup software, make sure you can get your hands on a copy of it quickly, too.
Yes, the published story about the Xerox camera-copiers mentioned the Soviet embassy in Washington - http://www.parascope.com/articles/0197/xerox.htm has a rehash of the PopSci article - but the Stover article noted that "Judging by the number of parts ordered from Xerox, Zoppoth [Xerox engineer who broke the story] believes that spy cameras may have been installed in photocopiers all over the world, to keep an eye on U.S. allies as well as enemies."
I saw a ThinkPad x60 at LinuxWorld Canada a few weeks back. Working with Lenovo, a [Waterloo-based?] company has released free [beer or speech, not sure] drivers for the few bits that didn't already have drivers, such as the fingerprint reader.
So that's a sweet laptop, just over 3lb, good battery life, and Linux drivers for everything. (I want one!!).
Whenever I hear someone say that they have learned (or improved) their HTML/xHTML/CSS/JavaScript/ECMAscript skills by hitting 'view source' in a browser -- which is just about anyone who knows those languages -- it occurs to me that that proves the benefits of open source.
The web is the proof-of-concept of the open source movement.
Big cities don't even need the *country* name. Fashion houses and publishers have for years just listed the city: Paris - New York - London - Tokyo. It's nice to see Toronto join that list over the past few years.
(And yes, of course there is more than one place named 'Toroto' just as there is more than one Boston, London, or Paris).
Slashdot Mirror
To add to the above: you've got to use what the publisher can process into their internal intermediate format. They'll then process that into PDFs, e-books, print, and whatever other formats are ultimate required. Your tools need to enable you to productively edit text and mark it up correctly (according to the publisher's stylesheet -- which usually has little to do with what the document will ultimately look like and everything to do with what each piece of text represents).
The OpenOffice info there seems to be out of date -- they have a pretty good OpenOffice.org stylesheet. I wrote my two O'Reilly books ("Fedora Linux" and
"X Power Tools") in OpenOffice.org that way.
OOo is a pretty reasonable choice, especially with a custom stylesheet, because it is XML-based and can be transformed into other formats.
This weekend I used a DVD player at my brother's house (a fairly inexpensive unit). The remote had no PLAY, PAUSE, or STOP button. You could access those functions, but only using "rethought" controls. It was absolutely maddening.
The record companies lobbied here in Canada for a levy on blank media for years. They got it in 1999, and in return, consumers got the right of Private Copying. Actually, this deal favors most consumers, because we are permitted to copy music from any source for our own use; I can take CDs out of the library or borrow them from you and make my own copies, and it's entirely legal up here. The record companies would like you to think that you can only copy on to media subject to the levy, but a close reading of the Copyright Act disproves this view.
A couple of years ago, though, I saw a Norah Jones CD at POS in a Chapters store, and it looked interesting until I saw on the back that it was encumbered with anti-copying technology. I wrote the record company (BMI IIRC) and asked how it is, on the one hand, that they are happy to take my levy money in return for private copying, and on the other hand, that they're attempting to block my copying? The letter challenged them to either give up their portion of levy revenue or drop copy protection. Their response was that the levy "does not begin" to offset losses due to private copying and therefore they had the right to copy-protect. (This whole discussion didn't even touch on whether such copy protection had any chance of working).
There are few industries that think they should get money (levy revenue) in return for something (private copying rights), and then not deliver (copy-protect the media). These companies have successfully exploited both consumers and artists for far too long, and deserve to be totally cut out of the producer-consumer transaction.
I'm seeing some comments saying "this is hard and will always be hard" or suggestions to use this-or-that third party tool. But I'd really, really encourage you to take a look at Revisor from the Fedora Project.
a rchives/70-Fedora-7-Custom-Spins-with-Revisor.html
Fedora doesn't really produce a Linux distribution anymore -- they produce a well-integrated Linux repository and the tools to make distribution media "spins" (live disc, installation disc, repository subset) from that repository or to do installations directly from that repository. The Fedora 7 ISO images are really just sample spins.
Revisor is the GUI frontend to the tools for producing spins (which are pungi and livecd-creator). It enables point-and-click selection of the software set for installation with full dependency resolution. A few more clicks and you have your ISO image ready to burn.
http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?url=
I have a stable 4-seat system at home that I use daily -- along with my wife and two daughters. It takes a bit of work to get a multiseat system set up, but once you do, you save electricity, hardware costs, and admin costs, and in a school setting you could deploy the same configuration across a number of systems. Previous posts have mentioned my blog entry and related discussion: http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/ 14-Multiseat-X-Under-X11R6.97.0.html -- it's getting a bit dated but the basics will send you in the right direction. (There are other ways to do multiseat, too, and I'm including them in a chapter of an upcoming O'Reilly book).
... so now I'm shopping for a 64-bit box with a bit more RAM. We run standard desktop apps: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the Gimp, various photo management programs, music players, Evolution, Google Earth, and so forth, and the performance is quite acceptable.
:-)
My system is a 32-bit AMD (Athlon XP 2800) with one AGP and three PCI NVIDIA cards, along with one PS/2 keyboard+mouse set and three USB keyboard+mouse sets. I have 1 GB of RAM, which has worked well until recently, when I added a Xen guest domain with some web services and dropped the amount of RAM available for multiseat use
3D desktops (Compiz/Beryl) do work in this configuration, but this machine is a bit under-powered to make them work really well. When I get my new box I expect that we'll all be running Compiz
Fortunately, you can correct for this by creating a custom ICC profile for your ink+paper combination. Profiling is not something that your Mom will want to do (unless she's a graphic designer), but it can be done.
Maybe the ink vendors should create and distribute ICC profiles. It could be a good advertising point: Our ink is consistent enough batch-to-batch that we have produced a colour profile for it! (But perhaps some of the manufacturers hard-code the profile into the printer driver?)
Talk to the cellphone carrier(s) about this -- I know Telus in Canada had a program where they would install RF equipment (boosters or micro-cells, I'm not sure) for use in warehouses, etc. (though of course I can't find the page right now!). If your volume is small, you might pay, but if you have enough users they might put in a micro-cell on their dime. If they are aware of the business opportunity they will probably figure out how to accomodate you.
...is that it is the "home directory for the system". To me, that captures the sense that it's where a particular system gets its configuration (/etc/inittab, /etc/ttys) and personality (/etc/motd, /etc/issue).
Personally I'm in the "et setera" camp, and prefer the spoken form "et see".
I see your logic ... The English system must be based on binary since 12 is a power of 2 :-)
I'm annoyed that car chargers aren't standard with phones, too. But I bought a $20 75W mini-inverter plug (12 vdc -> 110 vac) that lets me connect my cellphone charger (or laptop, or self-inflating airbed, or ...) to my car's accessory outlet. It's great having AC on the road.
Why is it that everyone in the free software community has this automatic assumption that the rest of the world should go out of their way to support them?
Why are you bringing "the free software community" into this? Opera isn't free software*, and XP isn't free software, so what does this have to do with the free software community?!
(* Opera is free to download, but it is not Free Software in the sense of the phrase "free software community").
I just tried a search on Yahoo and got the same ad. They must have checked the User Agent string to see that I was using Firefox. But why didn't they check to see if I was using Windows? -- why bother advertising IE to me if I can't run it on my system?
Also, when it comes to support Microsoft kicks ass. Really. If you have paid for support from MS, you really do get it. Seriously. Big time.
True -- but you have only a single source of support. If MS comes through, great; but if they don't, you're sunk.
Think about it: you can have the largest consulting firm -- Accenture, EDS, even IBM -- support your Windows-based development and rollout; but when a bug appears (and one always will), when a security problem is found (and one always will be), when push comes to shove, even the biggest consulting outfits must wait for MS to issue a fix. They can perhaps lean on MS a bit, or hunt for a workaround, but that only takes you so far. If you instead deploy on top of Linux and other Open Source software, your consultants (or in-house staff) can fix that inevitable bug themselves and then submit the patch upstream.
When your support provider has the source code, there's no one that they can blame: the buck stops with them. If they can't handle your needs, you can walk with the source and find someone who can. All support providers are competing on the basis of ability (not secrets): this in turn can lead to real competition, and, therefore, competitive support pricing.
Open Source reminds me of the Nike logo: Just Do It(tm).
s/kde/gnome/
Why don't you have the customers send PDFs? The fonts are embedded in the PDF file, so the output is supposed to be exactly the same anywhere. No pirated software, no unlicensed fonts, you punt the issue back to the customer.
Some would call them butt-ugly (MS Comic? Arial?!?!), but the MS core web fonts are still available: http://fontconfig.org/webfonts/ -- MS licensed them in a way that makes it hard to put the Genie back in the bottle.
Two thoughts:
:-)
- In terms of summer events, the Ottawa Linux Symposium is supposed to be a great event. I haven't made it to one yet but I've wanted to for a few years. It's July 19-22 in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada).
- [Shameless Plug] This doesn't quite match your description but I thought I'd mention it anyways: I teach at Seneca College, Toronto, and we have a 10-month intensive Linux Administration graduate certificate program that I think is one of the best Linux training programs available. We've had students from all different backgrounds including current staff from large systems vendors. We also throw a great Free Software and Open Source Symposium in October; this year we have Mike Shaver and Neil Deacon (Mozilla), Nat Freidman (Ximian/Novell), Chris Blizzard (One Laptop Per Child), and a raft of others.
And I agree that there's no substitute for getting dirt under your fingernails and actually working with the technology!
...less [time] if you use a dedicated high-current circuit...
There's no reason why the charger/base station unit couldn't load up an internal capacitor over a longer period of time and then rapidly dump that energy into a portable device in a few seconds. That give you the rapid recharge times without using a clothes-dryer style power plug or browning out your lights whenever you recharged your cellphone (or, worse yet, laptop).
I think the biggest obstacle to rapid charging will be the physical connectors: nobody wants a 3x8 cm charging connector on an iPod or Razor! (But a few of minutes charge time instead of a few seconds is no big deal: you plug in your cellphone, brush your teeth, and by the time your're done it's fully charged and ready to go).
Two thoughts related to storage:
- Consider carefully whether you trust your tape safe. I've seen tapes damaged at temperatures lower than some tape safes are rated for.
- If you have offsite backups, you should also have offsite tape drives. If your main site is destroyed in some catastrophic disaster, it's not too hard to get emergency replacements for server hardware, especially x86. But urgently sourcing the right model of tape drive (in many cases a model that is a few years old) can be a nightmare. While most drives of [insert favorite tape technology family here] generation N+1 will read tapes from generation N, it's very easy for time to slip by to the point that most of the drives on the market are actually generation N+4, and their support for reading generation N is spotty (even if the spec sheet says otherwise). If you're using proprietary backup software, make sure you can get your hands on a copy of it quickly, too.
Yes, the published story about the Xerox camera-copiers mentioned the Soviet embassy in Washington - http://www.parascope.com/articles/0197/xerox.htm has a rehash of the PopSci article - but the Stover article noted that "Judging by the number of parts ordered from Xerox, Zoppoth [Xerox engineer who broke the story] believes that spy cameras may have been installed in photocopiers all over the world, to keep an eye on U.S. allies as well as enemies."
I saw a ThinkPad x60 at LinuxWorld Canada a few weeks back. Working with Lenovo, a [Waterloo-based?] company has released free [beer or speech, not sure] drivers for the few bits that didn't already have drivers, such as the fingerprint reader.
So that's a sweet laptop, just over 3lb, good battery life, and Linux drivers for everything. (I want one!!).
Whenever I hear someone say that they have learned (or improved) their HTML/xHTML/CSS/JavaScript/ECMAscript skills by hitting 'view source' in a browser -- which is just about anyone who knows those languages -- it occurs to me that that proves the benefits of open source.
The web is the proof-of-concept of the open source movement.
Big cities don't even need the *country* name. Fashion houses and publishers have for years just listed the city: Paris - New York - London - Tokyo. It's nice to see Toronto join that list over the past few years.
(And yes, of course there is more than one place named 'Toroto' just as there is more than one Boston, London, or Paris).
45 kg is actually ~100 lb (ok, 99.208). Just google '45 kg in lb' for the answer via Google calculator.
I used to work in a bakery. Old-timers used to talk about 100 lb bags of flour, but they all said 45 kg on them when I worked there...