Load 'letter' sized paper into the paper cassette tray and continue?
Pretty much nobody outside the US and Canada uses "Letter" sized paper. Almost everyone else uses A4, which is part of ISO-216
Thus worldwide the most common reason for seeing "PC LOAD LETTER" is probably that some application has defaulted to "Letter" sized paper, whereas the user's printer is full of A4 paper.
In my experience applications often default to Letter paper if they do not know better. In one case I found that a Linux version of a popular document reader would always default to "Letter" paper measurements, even though it claimed that A4 was selected (fixed each time by switching to another paper size and back again).
"A"-series paper sizes are great. All the sizes have the same aspect ratio, so enlarging/reducing to go from one size to another is no work at all. In addition, because of the ratio used, two sheets of one size fit exactly onto the next size up, so fitting multiple small pages onto a larger sheet is also a doddle. This is useful for saving paper when printing long documents, or for example when printing four A6 invitations on a sheet of A4.
Oh, I see. I was under the impression that the phrase "It just works" was a synonym for something like "It simply works". Apparently it is a synonym for "It barely works".
OK, that was a bit unfair. Every OS gets the occasional problem when doing updates. Assuming that there is a forthcoming fix in the near future, there is no need to obsess about it.
That is rather unfair -
The problem only affects certain "knowledgeable" users who changed certain operating system files.
An operating system update can hardly be expected to work-around all the hacks people have made to the operating system's own files.
If different versions of the files were required by the user, they should have been installed in a separate location.
I bought my wife an iPhone. First Apple product I've purchased in a LONG time. Makes for a lovely phone -- but we can't access the "Apple Store" and also can't put media onto the device. We use Solaris and Linux.
Doesn't it say that it requires Mac OS or Windows? Perhaps you thought you were "leet" enough to hack around this requirement. How embarrassing!
As I understand it, a fundamental concept of iPods (and iPhones) is that they are not really intended as completely stand alone devices. They sync to your computer so that the data they contain is a subset of the data on your computer. This makes a lot of sense: It's very simple to use, there's little room for inconsistencies to appear between the computer and portable device, and if you loose the portable device you only loose what you had not yet synced. The right software is essential for this to work. That software happens to be iTunes (listed in the requirements).
Can you think of a more straight forward way to keep a portable device in sync with a computer? You plug it in and 5 minutes later it's done. I really don't think trying to work out what files had changed and dragging files between them would be much fun.
I guess having an open API for syncing would be nice, however I can't see why Apple would bother to do this, DRM or not - it would just be something else for them to support. It would be interesting to see what would happen if some regulatory body imposed this.
The iPhone has detectors to tell whether you are holding it against your face, to avoid accidental touch input, I believe this also dims the screen to save battery. The case needs to be designed correctly to avoid interfering with these sensors.
I think a lot of people probably realise that the words "liberal" and "conservative" are rather simplistic labels and don't adequately express their views. The problem is knowing which words to use instead.
This website proposes a two dimension system (Left to Right, and Libertarian to Authoritarian). You can answer a series of questions to see where your ideals fit onto these axes, and there are some really interesting charts showing where various politicians and other famous and infamous people fit.
This leaves me in a dilemma. I'm setting up a Windows XP machine for my parents. I was planning on getting them to use a non-admin account for general day to day usage.
However, this means Firefox cannot update itself. They would have remember to occasionally log in as admin to check for updates, but in the intervening time they could be running an unpatched browser.
The other option is to get them to use IE instead, which would at least be updated through automatic Windows Updates.
You need a defined interface with your customer. It's like an API. So they know what to expect from you and you know what to expect from them.
If you have a high level interface which the customer can access (this could even mean email), then you are at liberty to, for example, change the structure of your database to make it more efficient. The customer doesn't need to know.
If you expose the contents of the database, you're no longer at liberty to change it when you want. Any changes you do make will impact the customer, requiring justification and *support*.
This might be bad for both you and the customer in the long run.
Maybe you could *for an additional fee* provide another way to access the data for custom queries? This could be copying/transforming it into another database which you can give them.
I'm amazed that currently no comment on this article contains the word "boson". I've heard it called the Higgs boson more times than I have the "god particle". Maybe it's just the media I choose to read/watch.
WOW. Apparently you get modded down for being unpatriotic around here. That sucks. Especially when there's an huge number of people who seem to think disagreeing with whoever's in charge is unpatriotic. The whole idea of democracy is that you can disagree with the people in charge. Most real democracies have strict limits on campaign budgets, for example. In the US on the otherhand it just seems that the guys with the most bucks win. Let's see how long it takes for this to get modded down. The truth hurts, heh?
"Britpop" was the big thing in the 60s. The word "Britpop" actually refers to a mid-90s thing. It's most associated with bands like Blur, Oasis, Pulp. It was the return the strong guitar and vocal led pop music.
While these bands were clearly very influenced by the British music of the 60s, the word "Britpop" only refers to what happened in the 90s.
This isn't a bug in the latest flash plugin... only older ones. It may well be fixed in the latest version, but it could still be a problem for a lot of people.
So currently I'm running a rather old version - 9.0.28.0.
If a lot of people, like me, haven't received a notification yet, they are also likely to be running older versions. This could mean that there are significant numbers of vulnerable machines.
No, I do not want the government monitoring my privacy. That is the exact opposite of privacy. You don't understand (or maybe you are a troll). The government doesn't monitor the individual. This is a set of rules to limit what organisations can do with information about individuals.
I know almost nothing about the EU Privacy Directive, but I think the UK's Data Protection Act implements all or part of it, and I have a basic understanding of this. Please note my knowledge is very limited, there may be factual errors in my post, I'm not a lawyer.
The Data Protection Act restricts what an organisation can do with any personal data (such as your address), which it processes.
For example, the organisation:
can only use your data for the purposes stated when you gave them the data.
cannot keep much more data than is necessary for the purpose stated.
cannot pass your data on to a third party without your permission (this means that I get no junk post at all).
must ensure that any data they hold on you is accurate.
is not allowed to hold the information for longer than is necessary.
must keep the data secure.
may not export your data to a place where it is subject to less stringent privacy rules.
must provide you a copy of any data they have on you for a small fee (this is what allows people to request copies of closed-circuit television tapes they may appear in).
That's really interesting, thanks. I'd assumed that it was inkjet because I could see the dithering, but clearly I'd missed the point that other techniques utilise dithering as well. I'll have a chat with them next time I'm in the shop.
I've been meaning to get some of my digital photos printed for ages so it's interesting to know the process.. and that the results could be changed enormously just by cropping etc. and thereby (unintentionally) removing EXIF data.
Seeing as most 1-hour photo labs these days seem to use something that looks like inkjet, it would be interesting to know what the expected life of these prints is, compared to the life of traditional prints.
Personally I like the old analogue film printing method, but the shop I used for this has switched to digital equipment now.
Article 2... states... "The great majority of the carbon dioxide... was put there by the developed world"... the first article... states "It is true that human emissions of CO2 are small compared with natural sources."
Which it is ? How can anybody know what to believe in the face of such huge inconsistencies ? Errr.. it's simple really. You're comparing a quantity with the rate of change of a quantity.
The "great majority of the carbon dioxide...[which] was put there by the developed world" is referring to the excess of carbon dioxide which is not able to be absorbed by historic processes which are fully capable of absorbing historic (comparatively very large) emissions of carbon dioxide.
Bad example. One way or another, it's going to stop the expressway to get that one car across it, and it was probably thought to just let it go as soon as possible.
Err.. The point about not immediately stopping the expressway is that the longer you make the "one car" wait, the greater the chance that another car or two will join it. Then these two or three cars cross together. In that way you only stop the expressway once for two or three cars, instead of two or three times.
Another way to improve the sytem is to put traffic sensors much further up the expressway, and increase the amount of time the "one car" has to wait until you get a gap in the expressway traffic, or a time limit is reached. This would be difficult with a wave system, because the whole series of traffic lights on the expressway would have to be coordinated.
Timing the lights helps somewhat, but you have to get through at the start of the timing otherwise you'll still be stuck behind the wave of green lights that the timing creates.
In a wave system, if you are going the same direction as the waves, it makes no sense to talk about being stuck behind "the wave"... There isn't just one wave! If you are sufficiently slow, you simply slip onto the following wave.
There is an invisible line between being good (as in above average) and good enough (as in gets the job done). He he.. when I first read that I thought that "above average" was worse than "good enough". I.e. to be "good enough" something would have to be spectacular.
Oddly, the only references in the "story" (TFA) are a circular reference back to site itself Yes, that's called a link to a loosely related story.
and an unintelligible link to a story in Japanese. I see nothing that substantiates the claim of 244 copies sold. Believe it or not, those strange Japanese characters actually have a meaning. Just because you (and I) don't understand them doesn't mean the page contains no information. What an odd view of the world you have.
Err... The whole point of stopping analogue transmissions is to sell off those radio frequencies for other uses.
If you decide to start broadcasting a TV station which obliterates several companies' high speed wireless data connections you're going to get shut down by the FCC pretty quick.
They're not just doing it to annoy people, y'know.
Slashdot Mirror
...it is in fact a noun: the OED defines "Lego" as a noun. The plural of a noun has an 's', with the handful of well-established exceptions.
It is a noun, but it's a noun because it's the name of a company's product group. This product group that includes building bricks.
"Cutlery" is a noun, but you don't say "I need a cutlery". It doesn't make sense to have "cutleries". It's exactly the same for LEGO.
There is no such thing as "a LEGO", so there is no plural either.
The plural of "lego" is "lego".
Not exactly. LEGO is the name of a product group, like Meccano or Erector.
There's no such thing "a Meccano" or "an Erector", or "a LEGO". Therefore there are no "Meccanos", "Erectors" or "LEGOs".
There are Meccano and Erector sets, pieces, models. There are LEGO sets, bricks, models etc.
Like Firefox? They've perfected the way they do updates.
Unless you use Windows XP and don't run as administrator.
Updates don't work for non-administrator accounts. This resulted failures where an update had been downloaded but could not be applied.
The Firefox developers "fixed" this issue by not even notifying the user when updates are available.
Well, this is from the country that invented the "AGA" ...
The AGA was invented by a Swede, Dr. Gustaf Dalén. AGA is an abbreviation of Aktiebolaget Gasaccumulator.
Source.
Load 'letter' sized paper into the paper cassette tray and continue?
Pretty much nobody outside the US and Canada uses "Letter" sized paper. Almost everyone else uses A4, which is part of ISO-216
Thus worldwide the most common reason for seeing "PC LOAD LETTER" is probably that some application has defaulted to "Letter" sized paper, whereas the user's printer is full of A4 paper.
In my experience applications often default to Letter paper if they do not know better. In one case I found that a Linux version of a popular document reader would always default to "Letter" paper measurements, even though it claimed that A4 was selected (fixed each time by switching to another paper size and back again).
"A"-series paper sizes are great. All the sizes have the same aspect ratio, so enlarging/reducing to go from one size to another is no work at all. In addition, because of the ratio used, two sheets of one size fit exactly onto the next size up, so fitting multiple small pages onto a larger sheet is also a doddle. This is useful for saving paper when printing long documents, or for example when printing four A6 invitations on a sheet of A4.
Oh, I see. I was under the impression that the phrase "It just works" was a synonym for something like "It simply works". Apparently it is a synonym for "It barely works".
OK, that was a bit unfair. Every OS gets the occasional problem when doing updates. Assuming that there is a forthcoming fix in the near future, there is no need to obsess about it.
That is rather unfair -
The problem only affects certain "knowledgeable" users who changed certain operating system files.
An operating system update can hardly be expected to work-around all the hacks people have made to the operating system's own files.
If different versions of the files were required by the user, they should have been installed in a separate location.
True Apple Story -
I bought my wife an iPhone. First Apple product I've purchased in a LONG time. Makes for a lovely phone -- but we can't access the "Apple Store" and also can't put media onto the device. We use Solaris and Linux.
Doesn't it say that it requires Mac OS or Windows? Perhaps you thought you were "leet" enough to hack around this requirement. How embarrassing!
As I understand it, a fundamental concept of iPods (and iPhones) is that they are not really intended as completely stand alone devices. They sync to your computer so that the data they contain is a subset of the data on your computer. This makes a lot of sense: It's very simple to use, there's little room for inconsistencies to appear between the computer and portable device, and if you loose the portable device you only loose what you had not yet synced. The right software is essential for this to work. That software happens to be iTunes (listed in the requirements).
Can you think of a more straight forward way to keep a portable device in sync with a computer? You plug it in and 5 minutes later it's done. I really don't think trying to work out what files had changed and dragging files between them would be much fun.
I guess having an open API for syncing would be nice, however I can't see why Apple would bother to do this, DRM or not - it would just be something else for them to support. It would be interesting to see what would happen if some regulatory body imposed this.
The iPhone has detectors to tell whether you are holding it against your face, to avoid accidental touch input, I believe this also dims the screen to save battery. The case needs to be designed correctly to avoid interfering with these sensors.
I think a lot of people probably realise that the words "liberal" and "conservative" are rather simplistic labels and don't adequately express their views. The problem is knowing which words to use instead.
This website proposes a two dimension system (Left to Right, and Libertarian to Authoritarian). You can answer a series of questions to see where your ideals fit onto these axes, and there are some really interesting charts showing where various politicians and other famous and infamous people fit.
See http://www.politicalcompass.org/, read the introduction and click the "Take the test" link.
There's a page on the US Presidential Election 2008, here: http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
Only if you run as administrator.
This leaves me in a dilemma. I'm setting up a Windows XP machine for my parents. I was planning on getting them to use a non-admin account for general day to day usage.
However, this means Firefox cannot update itself. They would have remember to occasionally log in as admin to check for updates, but in the intervening time they could be running an unpatched browser.
The other option is to get them to use IE instead, which would at least be updated through automatic Windows Updates.
I don't know which is the least bad option.
You need a defined interface with your customer. It's like an API. So they know what to expect from you and you know what to expect from them.
If you have a high level interface which the customer can access (this could even mean email), then you are at liberty to, for example, change the structure of your database to make it more efficient. The customer doesn't need to know.
If you expose the contents of the database, you're no longer at liberty to change it when you want. Any changes you do make will impact the customer, requiring justification and *support*.
This might be bad for both you and the customer in the long run.
Maybe you could *for an additional fee* provide another way to access the data for custom queries? This could be copying/transforming it into another database which you can give them.
I'm amazed that currently no comment on this article contains the word "boson". I've heard it called the Higgs boson more times than I have the "god particle". Maybe it's just the media I choose to read/watch.
I'm running Leopard, and the dock icon for iCal is still displaying Dec 31 for me, even though it is almost Jan 2 here.
While iCal is running it displays the right date, but reverts to Dec 31 as soon as iCal is quit.
WOW. Apparently you get modded down for being unpatriotic around here. That sucks.
Especially when there's an huge number of people who seem to think disagreeing with whoever's in charge is unpatriotic.
The whole idea of democracy is that you can disagree with the people in charge.
Most real democracies have strict limits on campaign budgets, for example. In the US on the otherhand it just seems that the guys with the most bucks win.
Let's see how long it takes for this to get modded down. The truth hurts, heh?
While these bands were clearly very influenced by the British music of the 60s, the word "Britpop" only refers to what happened in the 90s.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britpop
Flash doesn't appear to automatically update itself. Fortunately, it does have an Automatic Notification system (go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/e
So currently I'm running a rather old version - 9.0.28.0.
If a lot of people, like me, haven't received a notification yet, they are also likely to be running older versions. This could mean that there are significant numbers of vulnerable machines.
It's got to be "say hi to your colleagues"... hasn't it?
Isn't that the most important thing?
I know almost nothing about the EU Privacy Directive, but I think the UK's Data Protection Act implements all or part of it, and I have a basic understanding of this. Please note my knowledge is very limited, there may be factual errors in my post, I'm not a lawyer.
The Data Protection Act restricts what an organisation can do with any personal data (such as your address), which it processes.
For example, the organisation:
See http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/RightsAndResponsibili
It would have been more terrifying if I didn't first have to work out what those ridiculous Imperial units meant...!
That's really interesting, thanks. I'd assumed that it was inkjet because I could see the dithering, but clearly I'd missed the point that other techniques utilise dithering as well. I'll have a chat with them next time I'm in the shop.
I've been meaning to get some of my digital photos printed for ages so it's interesting to know the process.. and that the results could be changed enormously just by cropping etc. and thereby (unintentionally) removing EXIF data.
Seeing as most 1-hour photo labs these days seem to use something that looks like inkjet, it would be interesting to know what the expected life of these prints is, compared to the life of traditional prints.
Personally I like the old analogue film printing method, but the shop I used for this has switched to digital equipment now.
Which it is ? How can anybody know what to believe in the face of such huge inconsistencies ? Errr.. it's simple really. You're comparing a quantity with the rate of change of a quantity.
The "great majority of the carbon dioxide...[which] was put there by the developed world" is referring to the excess of carbon dioxide which is not able to be absorbed by historic processes which are fully capable of absorbing historic (comparatively very large) emissions of carbon dioxide.
Bad example. One way or another, it's going to stop the expressway to get that one car across it, and it was probably thought to just let it go as soon as possible.
Err.. The point about not immediately stopping the expressway is that the longer you make the "one car" wait, the greater the chance that another car or two will join it. Then these two or three cars cross together. In that way you only stop the expressway once for two or three cars, instead of two or three times.
Another way to improve the sytem is to put traffic sensors much further up the expressway, and increase the amount of time the "one car" has to wait until you get a gap in the expressway traffic, or a time limit is reached. This would be difficult with a wave system, because the whole series of traffic lights on the expressway would have to be coordinated.
Timing the lights helps somewhat, but you have to get through at the start of the timing otherwise you'll still be stuck behind the wave of green lights that the timing creates.
In a wave system, if you are going the same direction as the waves, it makes no sense to talk about being stuck behind "the wave"... There isn't just one wave! If you are sufficiently slow, you simply slip onto the following wave.
I.e. to be "good enough" something would have to be spectacular.
Clearly I'm often disappointed with stuff!
Err... The whole point of stopping analogue transmissions is to sell off those radio frequencies for other uses.
If you decide to start broadcasting a TV station which obliterates several companies' high speed wireless data connections you're going to get shut down by the FCC pretty quick.
They're not just doing it to annoy people, y'know.