PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.
People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!
PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.
Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.
So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.
I've got the TJ-37. It's a nice unit, but since Sony exited the PDA market, they're not such a great idea as a new purchase, probably.
Frankly, I like the look of the new Palm T5 a lot, and having it without a camera is actually much better for my purposes.
Not all employers like their employees walking around with digital cameras in their pants, you know.
I've heard such paeans to the FreeBSD ports system for years, but when I actually spent time working with it, I found it a big pain.
First, ports can only really handle installation of software packages under one's/usr/local tree. It doesn't do anything for upgrading other pieces of the file system.
Second, the whole thing isn't very user friendly. I spent a week or so developing a new port, that involved dependencies on a dozen or so other ports. Every time I tried doing a 'make package', it went through all of the dependencies and did a 'make install' on them, which did me exactly 0 good, as I wanted them in package format for installation on another system. I had to write a script to analyze the dependency tree manually, and then go back and run a 'make package' in each of those ports.. after running 'make uninstall' so that it would allow me to do so. Which came into conflict with other ports and packages.. yuck.
RPM is a bazillion times cleaner than that. And much better documented.
Now, granted, there are some very nice things about the FreeBSD system. The use of/usr/local/etc/rc.conf to configure all major subsystems in one place is very nice, and the ability to provide Make variable definitions to semi-globally adjust options like X dependency or no on packages is nice as well. The incredibly fine level of granularity for things like Emacs elisp files and CPAN modules must make some people happy as well, though I find it more of a hindrance than a help (particularly with the aforementioned build issues).
All in all, the limited niceties don't seem to counterbalance the limited power of the system to handle anything other than strictly defined pieces of/usr/local.
That's even setting aside the lack of support for doing in-place upgrades.
And who says you have to exclude them? No one's saying "hey, why don't you make a point to take advantage of those features that Safari, Opera, and Firefox support that IE doesn't", they're saying, "hey, why don't you write your pages in compliance with published standards".
Generally, you do that, the worst you'll have to worry about is some minor degredation on some arbitrary older browser (I'm looking at you, Netscape 4).
Ah, but you could rig up a large scale heliostat in the backyard which used mirrors to focus the Sun's light from a fifth of an acre, say, onto a heat engine. Generate steam, make some electricity, charge up your car's batteries.
No, of course my calling up Austin Energy and telling them to put me on the Green Choice program doesn't mean they string up new lines to my house.. I'm still on the common grid. But they do take my money and build more windmills in West Texas with it.
Even without regenerative braking, the Prius has the ability to instantly shut its engine off at a stop, and to start it up again just as fast. In traffic jams and the like, this can be quite nice.
Hybrids with CVTs also tend to be better at keeping the gasoline engine running in its efficient zone, using the electric assist to more efficiently supplant torque at low RPMs, say.
These benefits are still there even in the absence of regenerative braking, but regenerative braking is money on the table waiting to be picked up when you're doing city driving, so they do that as well.
Leo was speaking specifically to open source implementations of the Unix tradition. Mac OS X is significantly open-sourcey compared to Windows, but as long as it is limited to running on hardware with an Apple label, it will never truly be in a position to challenge Microsoft.
Linux and FreeBSD run on Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel, AMD, Joe's White Boxes R Us.. that's what makes it threatening to Microsoft.
Volume, volume, volume. On the hardware side as well as on the software side.
I have never understood why Sun, upon designing the Graphics2d imaging model for Java 2, version 1.2, SE, didn't immediately propose and implement a standard X11 extension that would allow that imaging model to be carried out inside a standard X server.
We're finally moving in that direction now with the XRender extension and the like, but Sun could have given Java on *nix a nice boost 5 years ago if they had had the foresight to improve Java's performance on Solaris, Linux, and BSD in this way. They would also have seen the development effort that has gone into the underpinnings of Gnome and KDE focused more on the semantics of their APIs, making it easier for desktop developers to switch over to Java.
Java's performance over a remote X connection plummeted when 1.2 came out, and it didn't have to be that way at all.
Active Directory is handy, to be sure, but if one didn't need it to keep Windows clients happy, there would be acceptable ways of living without it.
We've been doing centralized, 'Active' account and DNS management where I work since before AD came out with our own stuff, and folks like Novell have had enterprise-scalable versions for ten years now as well.
The network effects cascade driven by the Windows client affinity to AD is what gives AD value.
But your stats are incomplete. The stat at issue here is uptime, not flavor of card and kernel. Since 2.6.12.2 hasn't been out all that long, I don't imagine your uptime can be _that_ impressive.
Re:For an expert what?
on
Astronomy Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Feh. Ever studied biology? Talk about your hacks..
I'm with O'Reilly on renovating the term Hack. Think of it as 'informally applied cleverness', if it makes you feel any better.
Take a look at Texas A&M's VizLab. They're a part of the school of architecture there, but they do graduate training in computer graphics, generally. A lot of their grads go on to work in the movie business.. Pixar, PDI, Sony, etc.
+1 on this. I'm an insulin dependent diabetic, and the med companies make serious bank on me.
So much so that the nice companies sent representatives to meet and talk with me and to show off their products when I was in the intensive care ward getting my newly diagnosed diabetes under control, back in the day.
I really do have to wonder what company would ever produce a continuous blood glucose measurement system that would kill off their test strip revenue, for instance, or the drug company that would spend a dime to cut off their insulin sales.
Hopefully the insurance companies will act in their interest and help fund the development of such treatments, if they ever get to the point of proving themselves.
Just so long as they understand they're going to be selling their services and products at the lowest cost as well.
This whole thing is just the money sloshing around the planet to reach economic equilibrium. Soon enough wages will rise in India and the dollar and Euro will drop, and the pressures will relent somewhat.
I do wonder about the canonical science fiction question. It's already far more productive to have cheap computers do the work rather than expensive humans for a range of services. What happens over the next few hundred years as the collection of services done by computers grows ever-larger?
What good is capitalism for workers when there's absolutely no scarcity of labor? Money is just a measurement of scarcity, after all, and if there's no scarcity in labor, there's no money.
2.2 Source Code Distribution You also have subject to section 2.4 and Your grant of licenses in accordance with Section 2.3,, a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, nontransferable, non-sublicenseable, personal, worldwide license to distribute or otherwise disclose source code copies of such Licensed Implementation licensed in Section 2.1 only if You (i) prominently display the following notice in all copies of such source code, and (ii) distribute or disclose the source code only under a license that is placed in close proximity to the following notice and does not include any other terms that are inconsistent with, or would prohibit, the following notice:
" This source code includes an Implementation of the specifications entitled " Purported Responsible Address in E-mail Messages", file name draft-lyon-senderid-pra-00.txt, and located at the following link on November 16, 2004, url: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-lyon-sen derid-pra-00 and the specification entitled "Sender ID: Authenticating E-mail", file name: draft-lyon-senderid-core-00.txt, url: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft- lyon-senderid-core-00 . In the context of developing those specifications at the IETF, Microsoft submitted a patent disclosure which can be found at http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html. "
For clarification, this Agreement does not impose any obligation on You to require the recipients of Your source code implementations of such Licensed Implementations to accept this or any other Agreement with Microsoft. Your End Users may use the Licensed Implementations licensed in this section 2.2 or in section 2.1 that they receive directly or indirectly from You without executing this Agreement. This Agreement will be available to all parties without prejudice.
Right. What that means is that MS won't require you to check the driver's license of anyone who downloads your software implementing SenderID, but it does mean that the people who download it from you don't have the right to furhter redistribute your code, and they don't have the right to work on it.
That's precisely what the non-sublicenseable bit is about. They don't mind if people write implementations against the SenderID patent, but they'll be damned if those implementers get the benefit of open source network effects to drive improvements and adoption without going begging to Microsoft at each step along the way.
Second the motion on Analog. Their speculative fiction is fun to read, and their science articles are often very interesting, written as it is for an audience of people looking for developments in science which will change the world in perhaps unexpected ways.
The reason that UNIX CLI is better than the MS Windows varient is that UNIX programs are made to interface with the CLI.
That's true, but Monad is aiming to bring that advantage to Windows as well, and at a higher level of abstraction.
Time will tell how many apps wind up being designed to be manipulated by Monad and WMI and all that, but Microsoft is at least making moves in a good direction.
Slashdot Mirror
PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.
People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!
PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.
Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.
So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.
DOD procurements rules will require IPv6 compliance for all IT gear by Fiscal Year 2008.
There's been some talk to the effect that those requirements might be loosened up if need be, though.
I've got the TJ-37. It's a nice unit, but since Sony exited the PDA market, they're not such a great idea as a new purchase, probably. Frankly, I like the look of the new Palm T5 a lot, and having it without a camera is actually much better for my purposes. Not all employers like their employees walking around with digital cameras in their pants, you know.
Thank you! I read the entire Porter's guide extensively and never came across that.
I've heard such paeans to the FreeBSD ports system for years, but when I actually spent time working with it, I found it a big pain.
First, ports can only really handle installation of software packages under one's /usr/local tree. It doesn't do anything for upgrading other pieces of the file system.
Second, the whole thing isn't very user friendly. I spent a week or so developing a new port, that involved dependencies on a dozen or so other ports. Every time I tried doing a 'make package', it went through all of the dependencies and did a 'make install' on them, which did me exactly 0 good, as I wanted them in package format for installation on another system. I had to write a script to analyze the dependency tree manually, and then go back and run a 'make package' in each of those ports.. after running 'make uninstall' so that it would allow me to do so. Which came into conflict with other ports and packages.. yuck.
RPM is a bazillion times cleaner than that. And much better documented.
Now, granted, there are some very nice things about the FreeBSD system. The use of /usr/local/etc/rc.conf to configure all major subsystems in one place is very nice, and the ability to provide Make variable definitions to semi-globally adjust options like X dependency or no on packages is nice as well. The incredibly fine level of granularity for things like Emacs elisp files and CPAN modules must make some people happy as well, though I find it more of a hindrance than a help (particularly with the aforementioned build issues).
All in all, the limited niceties don't seem to counterbalance the limited power of the system to handle anything other than strictly defined pieces of /usr/local.
That's even setting aside the lack of support for doing in-place upgrades.
I just don't see the appeal.
So you're saying the evidence doesn't support a significant role for manmade carbon emissions in global climate change?
Just so. Sony is supporting OpenGL 2.0 on PS3, so folks will be coding to GL for quite some time to come.
And who says you have to exclude them? No one's saying "hey, why don't you make a point to take advantage of those features that Safari, Opera, and Firefox support that IE doesn't", they're saying, "hey, why don't you write your pages in compliance with published standards".
Generally, you do that, the worst you'll have to worry about is some minor degredation on some arbitrary older browser (I'm looking at you, Netscape 4).
+1 on all of the above. I was only joking, man. ;-)
Ah, but you could rig up a large scale heliostat in the backyard which used mirrors to focus the Sun's light from a fifth of an acre, say, onto a heat engine. Generate steam, make some electricity, charge up your car's batteries.
What do you say to that, Mr. Solar-influx Smarty?
;-)
They do in Austin, Texas, anyway.
No, of course my calling up Austin Energy and telling them to put me on the Green Choice program doesn't mean they string up new lines to my house.. I'm still on the common grid. But they do take my money and build more windmills in West Texas with it.
Even without regenerative braking, the Prius has the ability to instantly shut its engine off at a stop, and to start it up again just as fast. In traffic jams and the like, this can be quite nice.
Hybrids with CVTs also tend to be better at keeping the gasoline engine running in its efficient zone, using the electric assist to more efficiently supplant torque at low RPMs, say.
These benefits are still there even in the absence of regenerative braking, but regenerative braking is money on the table waiting to be picked up when you're doing city driving, so they do that as well.
Leo was speaking specifically to open source implementations of the Unix tradition. Mac OS X is significantly open-sourcey compared to Windows, but as long as it is limited to running on hardware with an Apple label, it will never truly be in a position to challenge Microsoft.
Linux and FreeBSD run on Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel, AMD, Joe's White Boxes R Us.. that's what makes it threatening to Microsoft.
Volume, volume, volume. On the hardware side as well as on the software side.
I have never understood why Sun, upon designing the Graphics2d imaging model for Java 2, version 1.2, SE, didn't immediately propose and implement a standard X11 extension that would allow that imaging model to be carried out inside a standard X server.
We're finally moving in that direction now with the XRender extension and the like, but Sun could have given Java on *nix a nice boost 5 years ago if they had had the foresight to improve Java's performance on Solaris, Linux, and BSD in this way. They would also have seen the development effort that has gone into the underpinnings of Gnome and KDE focused more on the semantics of their APIs, making it easier for desktop developers to switch over to Java.
Java's performance over a remote X connection plummeted when 1.2 came out, and it didn't have to be that way at all.
Active Directory is handy, to be sure, but if one didn't need it to keep Windows clients happy, there would be acceptable ways of living without it.
We've been doing centralized, 'Active' account and DNS management where I work since before AD came out with our own stuff, and folks like Novell have had enterprise-scalable versions for ten years now as well.
The network effects cascade driven by the Windows client affinity to AD is what gives AD value.
UT2004 on Linux, represent!
But your stats are incomplete. The stat at issue here is uptime, not flavor of card and kernel. Since 2.6.12.2 hasn't been out all that long, I don't imagine your uptime can be _that_ impressive.
Feh. Ever studied biology? Talk about your hacks.. I'm with O'Reilly on renovating the term Hack. Think of it as 'informally applied cleverness', if it makes you feel any better.
Oh, come on! You have to admit, the bit where
<spoilers>General Moff Tarkin says 'I say we fire.. now!' and then the Death Star just blows up the f*'ing moon was perfect.
</spoilers>Take a look at Texas A&M's VizLab. They're a part of the school of architecture there, but they do graduate training in computer graphics, generally. A lot of their grads go on to work in the movie business.. Pixar, PDI, Sony, etc.
+1 on this. I'm an insulin dependent diabetic, and the med companies make serious bank on me.
So much so that the nice companies sent representatives to meet and talk with me and to show off their products when I was in the intensive care ward getting my newly diagnosed diabetes under control, back in the day.
I really do have to wonder what company would ever produce a continuous blood glucose measurement system that would kill off their test strip revenue, for instance, or the drug company that would spend a dime to cut off their insulin sales.
Hopefully the insurance companies will act in their interest and help fund the development of such treatments, if they ever get to the point of proving themselves.
This looks like a list of magazine, website, and TV writers. Where is the awards list for game script writers?
Just so long as they understand they're going to be selling their services and products at the lowest cost as well.
This whole thing is just the money sloshing around the planet to reach economic equilibrium. Soon enough wages will rise in India and the dollar and Euro will drop, and the pressures will relent somewhat.
I do wonder about the canonical science fiction question. It's already far more productive to have cheap computers do the work rather than expensive humans for a range of services. What happens over the next few hundred years as the collection of services done by computers grows ever-larger?
What good is capitalism for workers when there's absolutely no scarcity of labor? Money is just a measurement of scarcity, after all, and if there's no scarcity in labor, there's no money.
2.2 Source Code Distribution You also have subject to section 2.4 and Your grant of licenses in accordance with Section 2.3,, a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, nontransferable, non-sublicenseable, personal, worldwide license to distribute or otherwise disclose source code copies of such Licensed Implementation licensed in Section 2.1 only if You (i) prominently display the following notice in all copies of such source code, and (ii) distribute or disclose the source code only under a license that is placed in close proximity to the following notice and does not include any other terms that are inconsistent with, or would prohibit, the following notice:
" This source code includes an Implementation of the specifications entitled " Purported Responsible Address in E-mail Messages", file name draft-lyon-senderid-pra-00.txt, and located at the following link on November 16, 2004, url: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-lyon-sen derid-pra-00 and the specification entitled "Sender ID: Authenticating E-mail", file name: draft-lyon-senderid-core-00.txt, url: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft- lyon-senderid-core-00 . In the context of developing those specifications at the IETF, Microsoft submitted a patent disclosure which can be found at http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html. "
For clarification, this Agreement does not impose any obligation on You to require the recipients of Your source code implementations of such Licensed Implementations to accept this or any other Agreement with Microsoft. Your End Users may use the Licensed Implementations licensed in this section 2.2 or in section 2.1 that they receive directly or indirectly from You without executing this Agreement. This Agreement will be available to all parties without prejudice.
Right. What that means is that MS won't require you to check the driver's license of anyone who downloads your software implementing SenderID, but it does mean that the people who download it from you don't have the right to furhter redistribute your code, and they don't have the right to work on it.
That's precisely what the non-sublicenseable bit is about. They don't mind if people write implementations against the SenderID patent, but they'll be damned if those implementers get the benefit of open source network effects to drive improvements and adoption without going begging to Microsoft at each step along the way.
Second the motion on Analog. Their speculative fiction is fun to read, and their science articles are often very interesting, written as it is for an audience of people looking for developments in science which will change the world in perhaps unexpected ways.
Can perl and python run on MS Windows?
Yes, and quite productively, too.
The reason that UNIX CLI is better than the MS Windows varient is that UNIX programs are made to interface with the CLI.
That's true, but Monad is aiming to bring that advantage to Windows as well, and at a higher level of abstraction.
Time will tell how many apps wind up being designed to be manipulated by Monad and WMI and all that, but Microsoft is at least making moves in a good direction.