...The policeman sounded genuinely concerned, but after a while he called me back and told me that since the bank had refunded my money, technically THEY were the victims. The prosecutors will only act if the victim wants them to, and the policeman said in most cases the banks won't act. It's just cheaper for them to absorb the cost...
And there is the problem. You aren't the victim, the stores and banks are in the eyes of the law. Of course, you still HAVE to deal with the mess, include debt collection companies (I've "been a victim" too).
...Just look at any usenet group or irc channel! You can practically feel the love.
Ah! But are IRC and usenet populated mostly by techies or kids trying to look k33l? In any case, nothing can bring people together like a common enemy.
...just sounds like a way to press-gang students into paying a bunch of extra fees for something that will only benefit a few...
This is nothing new. When I attended U of MD, there was a manadatory fee for tickets to all the home games. Didn't matter if you wanted to attend or not (like me and many of my friends), you paid for the tickets. Now here is what really pissed me off. If you didn't pick up your tickets to the next game by a certain time (yes, you had to go get a new ticket for each game), they would offer the "extra" tickets for general sale. Talk about double dipping. Of course, the university never gave any refund to those whose tickets were sold.
To the physics list I would add Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov. I wish I had read the book before I took my college physics courses. I would have done better. BTW, the set is only $10 at bn.com, so it's not pricey.
... How well do those Tektronix printers actually print color?...how about photographs?...
Quite well. IMHO, comparable to magazine cover quality on plain paper. Their one drawback is they really don't do bigger than 8.5x11 (at least the 850's I have access to don't). I have a client with one and a hp5500dn (roughly $3500 street price) and I printed out the same picture on that and a tektronic 850. While the fine lines printed better on the HP, most people I asked preferred the color output of the tektronic.
I remember reading that most of the filter improvements in the 1.1 series are also in 1.0.3.x. My few experiments seem to confirm this. For example, a word document that I opened in 1.0.2 did not look like the MS word original, but when I tried in 1.0.3, it looked identical. Now this may not be true for all documents, but upgrading to 1.0.3 may solve some of your import problems.
...When I'm importing MS Word docs, I'm able to read the documents but the fonts are sometime mess up...
As others have pointed out, this can be a problem going from MS word to MS word, same version! I've encounted this personally. I hardly think this is OO's fault. More likely, some user was using some obscure font they found on the web and almost nobody else has. This was the issue I encounted most recently.
<rant>In fact, a lot of the problems I've seen in word and excel files are due to the user, not the program, and this applies to files imported into OO. There are 2 ways to do any task: (1) The easy way, and (2) The right way. Guess which way most people go. Guess how many even know (2) exists.</rant>
I still think you're missing the boat with Gimp, but that is another story. To answer your question, you're looking for Crossover Office 2.0. This version adds support for Photoshop version 7.0 and earlier. The review I read said performance and installation (of both Crossover and photoshop) were not problems.
...Publish the report in a format for which there are precious few good viewers available on Linux...
It only takes one good viewer to view the file. xpdf worked find for me. Also, the only good viewer I can think of (off the top of my head; I know there are others out there somewhere) for windows is acrobat. For Linux, I know of xpdf, acrobat, and ghostview off the top of my head.
...What's wrong with good old HTML?...
Nothing if you want to only view it on a screen. YMMV, but I've found pdf's print out more consisently across printers than html does. PDF also prints nicer IMHO.
...If they go with the lowest bidder, why do they choose Microsoft over Redhat?...
I didn't see anything about which OS was used, but in a more general case, the government doesn't always go with the true lowest bidder. Nor do they always (Ok, usually) go with the best bidder.
Want a particular vendor (say one that gives kickbacks)? Just write the bid requirements such that only one vendor can meet all the requirements. If you don't meet the requirements, your bid can be disqualified, assuming you even try to submit one. It's easy to rig a bid. Suppose one of the requirements was to use MS SQL server. That just threw open source solutions out the door.
As I said, a good demo is a good demo. The speed thing was unintentional. I was really just demonstrating pop-up blocking. However, in my defense, I should point out that IE got a head start (by at least several seconds; I had Mozilla open, but had to switch windows and type the url in). In addition, the ad probably came from a different server, so I thought IE would finish the non-ad page first. But Mozilla finished about 10 seconds before IE.
...Mozilla is now at least as stable as IE, approximate ly as fast, is open source...
Funny you should mention speed. I was doing a demo of pop-up blocking for someone. I loaded a site I knew used them in IE, then in Mozilla (with blocking turned on) The Mozilla page load was noticibly faster. Mozilla was started later yet was finished while IE was still loading the page. Now this is hardly a scientific experiment or benchmark, but it impressed the user. The fact it loaded faster and no pop-ups to deal with made an excellent demo. The blocked pop-up may be why it loaded faster though, but hey, a good demo is a good demo.
...If you were to magically substitute mozilla for IE in your office or whatever would people (really) notice?
Done properly, probably not. I pulled this on my cousin. I used the IE skin and switched the icons, and loaded the plugins, and it was 2 months before she noticed. And she only noticed because the games at MSN wouldn't work (big surprise there!).
I've got a couple clients that have formally switched, using OE only for sending out because the Access guy can't figure out how to link Access to the Mozilla mail client. They haven't had a virus problem since.
At another site, IE is still the official browser, but a couple of users have discovered Mozilla's features and have switched. Still haven't convinced the boss yet. Maybe the bill from the last "I'll open this strange attachement which is really a network aware virus" incident will help change his mind. If not, well, more future billing for me.
...UPS's delivery service to some addresses is the USPS. They'll literally accept a package for delivery, label it, then drop it off at the local post office...
I can verify this. My father works at one of the mail processing centers (the BIG post offices; several city blocks in size, not counting the parking lot), and every day multiple UPS and FedEx trucks pull up to drop off packages.
Listening to the user community and deciding to help it by fighting a nuisance like spam is great...
This may one of the few things I ever wish M$ luck with. However, I really have to wonder if it will be anymore effective than his various campaigns to stomp out software bugs in M$ products. Afterall, those campaigns have worked <sarcasm>so well</sarcasm>.
I've been thinking. Osama is still probably alive and hiding. This leads me to believe he is a homosexual. Think about it. It says in the Koran if you die in God's service you get 72 female virgins. Now Osama obviously believes he is doing God's work. (Of course believing doesn't make it true.) I don't know about the rest of you guys, but if I knew I was going to get 72 women, I'd be out in the desert with a bullseye taped to me.
...The police are definitely not there to serve the people.
True. In fact, it might surprise some people, but there have been actual court cases where the courts said police have absolutely no legal obligaiton to respond to calls for help. The following is taken from http://www.thisistrue.com/guns.html
...Warren v. District of Columbia is one of the leading cases of this type. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers." The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen..."
...If Gimp does do CMYK with some special plug-in, could someone point me in the right direction?
There is a free program pnmtotiffcmyk in the pbm pack of conversion programs. Save your gimp image as pnm first of course. It's part of the netpbm package (which is also available for windows).
Since this program is freely available, I've really got to question whether there is a patent on cymk. There has been talk on various gimp lists about adding cymk, but so far nothing concrete. Perhaps some./ reading CS student might do this for a school project??
...ame developers aren't going to release their games for Linux regardless.
Lately the trend seems to be, IMHO, to target games primarily for the game consoles, and not windows. Therefore, I would agree with the parent post, although for different reasons. The PC game market is shrinking period.
make the browser spoofing feature hit the same page (with the no-cache pragma, or whatever it takes to avoid any intervening caches) 50 times with the real user-agent for each page it loads with the spoofed user-agent.
While I think that may prove very satisfying, it would not be a good idea. All those requests coming from the same ip in such a short time would be a dead giveaway. Plus word would get out and that info would quietly be discarded by various log analyzers.
Now if someone would write a tool that spoofs the ip address but sends the real user agent (a few times) before sending the fake user agent, that might prove more effective. A few clueless webmasters might actually change.
(Pion with clue to CIO): Sir, look at the logs showing all these people using non-IE browsers who tried to access our IE-only website but couldn't. Think of all that lost business!
(CIO): Change the website to make it standards compliant! (OK, I can dream can't I?)
...I would encourage anyone who doesn't like that state of affairs to spend some effort trying to perfect fusion. Failing that, work on safer fission or cheap space access would be helpful...
I remember reading back in the 70's about what was called powerstats. Basically, they are orbiting solar collectors (which have sunlight 24/7, and don't care about the weather) that use microwaves (I think) to beam the power back to Earth. Haven't heard much about them since. Perhaps that would be an option??
...GIF will result in a smaller file size than PNG.
The problem is mostly likely you are comparing apples to oranges. Remember that, at best, a gif file only has to store 256 colors. A png file, can store 256(Red)*256(Green)*256(Blue)*256(Alpha) colors. All that extra color info takes up space. If you reduce the png to an indexed palette of 256 colors (or less, depending on the gif palette), THEN compare file sizes, you will find the png smaller.
In addition, there is a program called pngcrush which is also good at reducing the png file size without hurting quality, although it won't work the same magic (in file size reduction) as reducing the palette.
...there is no fair way to determine and identify each individual copyrighted item to charge for...
I'm sure if this law gets passed, a whole set of regulations will soon appear to try and answer that question.
...For example, Warner Brothers releases their movie "The Matrix Reloaded" on DVD this year, 2003. If you take a 14 year period, the copyright is set to expire in 2017. However, in 2005, WB releases a DVD of the same movie with more features, e.g. additional audio tracks, angles, alternate ending, etc. Since you could take the whole movie as a single copyrighted item, this update would include the original movie, but integrated with new extra additions, would this effectively "renew" the copyright term for "The Matrix Reloaded" and avoid the system?...
If the regulations are reasonable, no. The original DVD would be public domain on time (2017). Only the new set (original movie, plus the new extras - taken as a set) would have it's own expiration date. This is already pretty much established. For instance, the story of Snow White is in the public domain. Disney's using that story to create a movie did not change that fact. Only this new form of the story (the movie) is copyrighted. And since the orignal would be public domain in 2017, only the extras would have any real copyright protection after that.
...If this type of law gets passed, the govt. will eventually abuse it by raising the amount to a nonotrivial sum. The govt. is always looking for new events to tax...
In which case more works will enter the public domain (fewer people and corps will be willing to pay that fee) and, as a bonus, there will be some record to point to that the work is, in fact, public domain. The public wins so long as there is a REASONABLE free period. YEA!
Slashdot Mirror
And there is the problem. You aren't the victim, the stores and banks are in the eyes of the law. Of course, you still HAVE to deal with the mess, include debt collection companies (I've "been a victim" too).
Ah! But are IRC and usenet populated mostly by techies or kids trying to look k33l? In any case, nothing can bring people together like a common enemy.
This is nothing new. When I attended U of MD, there was a manadatory fee for tickets to all the home games. Didn't matter if you wanted to attend or not (like me and many of my friends), you paid for the tickets. Now here is what really pissed me off. If you didn't pick up your tickets to the next game by a certain time (yes, you had to go get a new ticket for each game), they would offer the "extra" tickets for general sale. Talk about double dipping. Of course, the university never gave any refund to those whose tickets were sold.
To the physics list I would add Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov. I wish I had read the book before I took my college physics courses. I would have done better. BTW, the set is only $10 at bn.com, so it's not pricey.
Quite well. IMHO, comparable to magazine cover quality on plain paper. Their one drawback is they really don't do bigger than 8.5x11 (at least the 850's I have access to don't). I have a client with one and a hp5500dn (roughly $3500 street price) and I printed out the same picture on that and a tektronic 850. While the fine lines printed better on the HP, most people I asked preferred the color output of the tektronic.
I remember reading that most of the filter improvements in the 1.1 series are also in 1.0.3.x. My few experiments seem to confirm this. For example, a word document that I opened in 1.0.2 did not look like the MS word original, but when I tried in 1.0.3, it looked identical. Now this may not be true for all documents, but upgrading to 1.0.3 may solve some of your import problems.
As others have pointed out, this can be a problem going from MS word to MS word, same version! I've encounted this personally. I hardly think this is OO's fault. More likely, some user was using some obscure font they found on the web and almost nobody else has. This was the issue I encounted most recently.
<rant>In fact, a lot of the problems I've seen in word and excel files are due to the user, not the program, and this applies to files imported into OO. There are 2 ways to do any task: (1) The easy way, and (2) The right way. Guess which way most people go. Guess how many even know (2) exists.</rant>
I still think you're missing the boat with Gimp, but that is another story. To answer your question, you're looking for Crossover Office 2.0. This version adds support for Photoshop version 7.0 and earlier. The review I read said performance and installation (of both Crossover and photoshop) were not problems.
It only takes one good viewer to view the file. xpdf worked find for me. Also, the only good viewer I can think of (off the top of my head; I know there are others out there somewhere) for windows is acrobat. For Linux, I know of xpdf, acrobat, and ghostview off the top of my head.
Nothing if you want to only view it on a screen. YMMV, but I've found pdf's print out more consisently across printers than html does. PDF also prints nicer IMHO.
If these are the same inspectors used for M$ quality control, you're in trouble. Lots of it.
I didn't see anything about which OS was used, but in a more general case, the government doesn't always go with the true lowest bidder. Nor do they always (Ok, usually) go with the best bidder.
Want a particular vendor (say one that gives kickbacks)? Just write the bid requirements such that only one vendor can meet all the requirements. If you don't meet the requirements, your bid can be disqualified, assuming you even try to submit one. It's easy to rig a bid. Suppose one of the requirements was to use MS SQL server. That just threw open source solutions out the door.
As I said, a good demo is a good demo. The speed thing was unintentional. I was really just demonstrating pop-up blocking. However, in my defense, I should point out that IE got a head start (by at least several seconds; I had Mozilla open, but had to switch windows and type the url in). In addition, the ad probably came from a different server, so I thought IE would finish the non-ad page first. But Mozilla finished about 10 seconds before IE.
Funny you should mention speed. I was doing a demo of pop-up blocking for someone. I loaded a site I knew used them in IE, then in Mozilla (with blocking turned on) The Mozilla page load was noticibly faster. Mozilla was started later yet was finished while IE was still loading the page. Now this is hardly a scientific experiment or benchmark, but it impressed the user. The fact it loaded faster and no pop-ups to deal with made an excellent demo. The blocked pop-up may be why it loaded faster though, but hey, a good demo is a good demo.
Done properly, probably not. I pulled this on my cousin. I used the IE skin and switched the icons, and loaded the plugins, and it was 2 months before she noticed. And she only noticed because the games at MSN wouldn't work (big surprise there!).
I've got a couple clients that have formally switched, using OE only for sending out because the Access guy can't figure out how to link Access to the Mozilla mail client. They haven't had a virus problem since.
At another site, IE is still the official browser, but a couple of users have discovered Mozilla's features and have switched. Still haven't convinced the boss yet. Maybe the bill from the last "I'll open this strange attachement which is really a network aware virus" incident will help change his mind. If not, well, more future billing for me.
I can verify this. My father works at one of the mail processing centers (the BIG post offices; several city blocks in size, not counting the parking lot), and every day multiple UPS and FedEx trucks pull up to drop off packages.
Listening to the user community and deciding to help it by fighting a nuisance like spam is great...
This may one of the few things I ever wish M$ luck with. However, I really have to wonder if it will be anymore effective than his various campaigns to stomp out software bugs in M$ products. Afterall, those campaigns have worked <sarcasm>so well</sarcasm>.
I've been thinking. Osama is still probably alive and hiding. This leads me to believe he is a homosexual. Think about it. It says in the Koran if you die in God's service you get 72 female virgins. Now Osama obviously believes he is doing God's work. (Of course believing doesn't make it true.) I don't know about the rest of you guys, but if I knew I was going to get 72 women, I'd be out in the desert with a bullseye taped to me.
True. In fact, it might surprise some people, but there have been actual court cases where the courts said police have absolutely no legal obligaiton to respond to calls for help. The following is taken from http://www.thisistrue.com/guns.html
...Warren v. District of Columbia is one of the leading cases of this type. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers." The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen..."
Face facts, you're on your own.
There is a free program pnmtotiffcmyk in the pbm pack of conversion programs. Save your gimp image as pnm first of course. It's part of the netpbm package (which is also available for windows).
Since this program is freely available, I've really got to question whether there is a patent on cymk. There has been talk on various gimp lists about adding cymk, but so far nothing concrete. Perhaps some ./ reading CS student might do this for a school project??
Lately the trend seems to be, IMHO, to target games primarily for the game consoles, and not windows. Therefore, I would agree with the parent post, although for different reasons. The PC game market is shrinking period.
make the browser spoofing feature hit the same page (with the no-cache pragma, or whatever it takes to avoid any intervening caches) 50 times with the real user-agent for each page it loads with the spoofed user-agent.
While I think that may prove very satisfying, it would not be a good idea. All those requests coming from the same ip in such a short time would be a dead giveaway. Plus word would get out and that info would quietly be discarded by various log analyzers.
Now if someone would write a tool that spoofs the ip address but sends the real user agent (a few times) before sending the fake user agent, that might prove more effective. A few clueless webmasters might actually change.
(Pion with clue to CIO): Sir, look at the logs showing all these people using non-IE browsers who tried to access our IE-only website but couldn't. Think of all that lost business!
(CIO): Change the website to make it standards compliant! (OK, I can dream can't I?)
I remember reading back in the 70's about what was called powerstats. Basically, they are orbiting solar collectors (which have sunlight 24/7, and don't care about the weather) that use microwaves (I think) to beam the power back to Earth. Haven't heard much about them since. Perhaps that would be an option??
The insurance industry is the same way.
The problem is mostly likely you are comparing apples to oranges. Remember that, at best, a gif file only has to store 256 colors. A png file, can store 256(Red)*256(Green)*256(Blue)*256(Alpha) colors. All that extra color info takes up space. If you reduce the png to an indexed palette of 256 colors (or less, depending on the gif palette), THEN compare file sizes, you will find the png smaller.
In addition, there is a program called pngcrush which is also good at reducing the png file size without hurting quality, although it won't work the same magic (in file size reduction) as reducing the palette.
I'm sure if this law gets passed, a whole set of regulations will soon appear to try and answer that question.
If the regulations are reasonable, no. The original DVD would be public domain on time (2017). Only the new set (original movie, plus the new extras - taken as a set) would have it's own expiration date. This is already pretty much established. For instance, the story of Snow White is in the public domain. Disney's using that story to create a movie did not change that fact. Only this new form of the story (the movie) is copyrighted. And since the orignal would be public domain in 2017, only the extras would have any real copyright protection after that.
In which case more works will enter the public domain (fewer people and corps will be willing to pay that fee) and, as a bonus, there will be some record to point to that the work is, in fact, public domain. The public wins so long as there is a REASONABLE free period. YEA!