What about positions like shelf stocking? How much education does that need?
Almost none. However, the tax forms, insurance applications, employee handouts, and all other written communications require a certain bare minimum of intelligence (or special staff qualified to explain such things to the rest). My toddler daughter can stack blocks, but I couldn't hold her responsible for reading an employee handbook.
That's pretty much exactly what I have in mind. My Palm m130 has plenty of CPU for my personal needs, and I can do any work-related stuff by SSHing into a much more powerful machine elsewhere, so I'd rather buy a relatively slow processor with good batter life. The core of my dream system is that highly personalized processing unit, and interact with it using whichever accessories make sense for a particular task (and my budget).
At my desk right now, I'm using a Dell computer, ViewSonic monitor, cheap speakers, IBM Model M keyboard, and Microsoft trackball. I want that kind of freedom with my portables, and I think the first company that can give it to me will own fortunes.
Except for the handwriting recognition, they were available five years ago. There apparently aren't many people who share your needs (although I'd count myself in that group).
Some people won't work on anything smaller than 10", some people will watch TV on a video iPod and call it good because it fits in their pocket. I think this is less a problem with technology that a hurdle created by personal preference.
Know what I want? Components! Make a variety of displays that are basically thin clients (via X11-over-Bluetooth? RDP? Whatever, just as long as it's the standard). Make a variety of processing units. Make a variety of input devices. Make a variety of speaker/headphone/microphone units. Most importantly, make multiple brands work together seamlessly. Convergence? I want divergence by piecing together the set of interoperable parts that fit the way I want to use them!
In my dream setup, I sit down at a public access point and get my 8" screen and compact keyboard out of my bag. That's it. I'm set up and ready to use it. They both talk wirelessly to the real processor which is squirreled away in my messenger bag and only sees the light of day when I need to recharge it. If a cell or VOIP call comes in, it's automatically transferred to my wireless earpiece.
Us geeks will always have the iPod-sized processing equivalent of an overclocked Celeron, but Joe Businessman can buy a quad-Xeon unit and car battery on wheels to power it. Maybe I'm just going to the grocery store, so I'd only take the 3" touchscreen (so I can mark off my shopping list as I go). Have to give a presentation? Bind to the projector client in the conference room until it's over.
I truly think this is the future. I want a cheap Dell processing box that never leaves my shirt pocket, or beltclip, or whatever. I want a nice Samsung client to display it's output. I want a Happy Hacking portable keyboard for input. See, ever since Palm discontinued the IIIxe, their hasn't been a single model of PDA from any manufacturer that covers all the features I want. Dell might not make as much per individual item by selling the components separately, but I truly believe that they'd make a killing by hawking vast numbers of the smaller pieces. No PC maker that I know of sells monolithic PC-screen-keyboard-mouse desktop units, but that's exactly how they expect you to buy your portable electronics.
Wake up, Apple and Dell! There's a whole untapped market of people who'd love to customize their PDAs, particularly those people who have never used one (start off with a cheap CPU and upgrade it later if you like it). And the thing is that all of the hardware, software, wireless tech, and protocols are in common use that could make this happen today.
First, I made sure that I disabled embedded fonts in qtconfig, the print window's "System Options", and in the "Print to File"'s "Driver Settings" tab. Second, I loaded an old school paper. Finally, I noticed that the resulting PDF looks nothing like the on-screen display: the kerning is beyond horrible, and the typeface is not Times New Roman, or even serif.
To complicate matters, if I send it directly to the printer without going through the PDF stage first, it looks different from either of the other two. It uses the same (sans-serif) font as the PDF version but actually has decent kerning this time. I guess that means that disabling the embedded fonts is a step in the right direction, as long as I can figure out which font I should choose to make the end results look something like people expect.
I like LaTeX (but prefer to use Emacs to edit it), to the point that I wrote my resume in it. However, one of my primary uses for a word processor is turning Word docs into hardcopy, and LyX ain't much help there. I guess I could ask our transcriptionist to switch from Word to Lyx, but I won't hold my breath for that to happen.
I think you have the printer setup wrong rather than a KWord problem (though the setup may be at the KDE level).
That's possible, but I wouldn't expect to get the same bad results with several versions of KWord on two different operating systems and two different laser printers. My home printer is a LaserJet 1200, and I send it PostScript via CUPS. Here's my entire printers.conf:
As far as I know, I'm using the default settings in KDE that you get when adding a new printer. That's definitely the case at work when spooling PostScript to our old LaserJet 4.
I can say that the text on the left still looks horrible. You can see it most in the word "be".
Exactly! My PDF sample was actually a bit worse than my normal printing results, but his sample is precisely what I see most often. Some letters are spaced widely, while others literally overlap. The result is so awful that my wife's nurse even asked why her dictation looked so bad and whether we could change it.
the pdfs that I export with koffice look exactly like the document on the screen
My PDF output looks nothing at all like my KWord screen. To make those images, I imported a Word doc that our transcriptionist emailed to us, then printed to PDF. I took a screenshot of KWord and KPDF using The Gimp, and cropped each shot to show a representative snippet of text.
Unfortunately, the PDF looks much more like my printed output that I'd like. I have no idea why my printing looks so awful (only through KWord; oowriter2 looks fine), but that's a pretty accurate example of how bad it is.
Other than the fact that I can't print from it, I love KWord. Of course, that's like asking Mrs. Lincoln how she liked the play.
Therefore, even a dumbass can figure out they want OpenOffice rather than KOffice.
Go ahead and explain to this dumbass why I want to give up a program that fits in with the rest of my desktop, supports KIOslaves, and is document-compatible with your office suite of choice. Really, I'm waiting...
The reason for their coexistence is that they have two different design philosophies, two different styles of programming, are built on two completely different frameworks, and appeal to two different groups of people (KDE users versus everyone else). How would you expect them to reconcile those differences? Do you also want KHTML to merge with Gecko? After all, they both do the same thing.
I like KWord - really, I do - but I can't use it because the printed results are awful. Basically, no matter how good the documents look on my screen, the kerning of their printed versions is completely broken (under both Gentoo and FreeBSD with two different laser printers). The problem supposedly lies with QT3, or so I've read, but that doesn't change the fact that I currently cannot use KWord for anything that will end in a hardcopy.
I know this sounds like a troll but I don't mean it that way. I'd switch from OpenOffice to KOffice in a heartbeat if I could, but I just can't do it right now. Please, please! make printing work right and I'll be eternally grateful.
As of today, I can buy CDs and DVDs that are DRM-free (or so nearly so that I don't care) for cheap, then shift them into the formats I find convenient. I haven't figured out yet what DRM would give me over and above that. Is it price? That certainly doesn't seem to be the case. Convenience? iTunes Music Store is nifty, but since I have to leave my house to go to work each day anyway, that's not a huge win.
So, tell me *AA, what benefit does your DRM supposedly have to me, your customer? What would make me decide that your crippleware is actually something I'd want? Go ahead: we're listening.
No, it's not - when speaking of memory utilization. It maintains filesystem caches, etc., but that doesn't count as "bloat" by any reasonable standard.
The kernel has changed immensely since I started using it in the mid '90s, son, but I wouldn't call it bloat (or "fat" or any of the other dumb adjectives you keep hoping will stick).
The memory footprint for running a Linux distribution (and that means kernel, since it's the core part) has grown over time.
Regardless of how long you supposedly used Linux, you're wrong. The kernel is a very minimal part of the running system on any modern hardware - Firefox and KDE overshadow it by a couple of orders of magnitude on my system.
Linux-the-kernel hasn't grown by huge amount. Linux-the-OS has grown tremendously, but less than proportionally to the amount of functionality you get from it. Put another way, my KDE desktop in a gig of RAM (with plenty to spare) is much more useful than WindowMaker in 128MB.
You say bloat, I say functionality. You say the kernel is the core part, and I say you don't know what you're talking about.
THANK YOU! Seriously, I learned that in elementary school and only came around to "separate-only" in the last few years. Do you have a citation for "seperate" being a real word, or is that only from your memory?
Thankfully some Republicans have awoken and have realized that the GOP is not what it once was.
You're right. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and decided it's time to take my party back. However, as petty as it seems on the surface, I think an important part is giving a movement a good name. What do you call a group of Republicans that really, truly is for limited government, less spending, an end to the War On Drugs, energy independence, and the rule of law?
"Neo"-anything is right out. "Free Republican" and "New Republican" are probably trademarks. "Classic Republican" would probably get transliterated to "Classist" at the first opportunity. I'm serious about this and ready to start moving forward, but I really want to come up with something snappy that's immediately recognizable.
Note: don't bother answering "libertarian", even if there's a lot of truth to it. Many of my friends and I have no intention of leaving our party if there's a chance we can take it back.
You can't keep using that same link in a self-referential loop to prove its own validity.
Yes, the media pushed to the front the loudest and whackiest "global cooling" scientists, but they didn't represent the median scientific view.
Whether that's true or not is immaterial. The reality is that everyone of age in the 70s remembers the dire warnings and bleak predictions broadcast on every TV and radio station. You can't blame the public for remembering what we all heard, or for being skeptical of new global warming claims coming from the same media sources that used to promise the opposite.
No. In fact, I don't remember much about the overpopulation speculation. I was referring to the collapse of food production systems that was surely inevitable whenever the climate grew too cold.
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It's not for the faint of heart, but only takes a couple of "a-ha!" moments to go from lost to competent. Good luck!
Almost none. However, the tax forms, insurance applications, employee handouts, and all other written communications require a certain bare minimum of intelligence (or special staff qualified to explain such things to the rest). My toddler daughter can stack blocks, but I couldn't hold her responsible for reading an employee handbook.
RMS eventually founded the FSF because he couldn't get the source code to a broken printer driver. Learn your history or be doomed to repeat it.
I would upgrade that to "natural law".
At my desk right now, I'm using a Dell computer, ViewSonic monitor, cheap speakers, IBM Model M keyboard, and Microsoft trackball. I want that kind of freedom with my portables, and I think the first company that can give it to me will own fortunes.
He can't decide?
Except for the handwriting recognition, they were available five years ago. There apparently aren't many people who share your needs (although I'd count myself in that group).
Know what I want? Components! Make a variety of displays that are basically thin clients (via X11-over-Bluetooth? RDP? Whatever, just as long as it's the standard). Make a variety of processing units. Make a variety of input devices. Make a variety of speaker/headphone/microphone units. Most importantly, make multiple brands work together seamlessly. Convergence? I want divergence by piecing together the set of interoperable parts that fit the way I want to use them!
In my dream setup, I sit down at a public access point and get my 8" screen and compact keyboard out of my bag. That's it. I'm set up and ready to use it. They both talk wirelessly to the real processor which is squirreled away in my messenger bag and only sees the light of day when I need to recharge it. If a cell or VOIP call comes in, it's automatically transferred to my wireless earpiece.
Us geeks will always have the iPod-sized processing equivalent of an overclocked Celeron, but Joe Businessman can buy a quad-Xeon unit and car battery on wheels to power it. Maybe I'm just going to the grocery store, so I'd only take the 3" touchscreen (so I can mark off my shopping list as I go). Have to give a presentation? Bind to the projector client in the conference room until it's over.
I truly think this is the future. I want a cheap Dell processing box that never leaves my shirt pocket, or beltclip, or whatever. I want a nice Samsung client to display it's output. I want a Happy Hacking portable keyboard for input. See, ever since Palm discontinued the IIIxe, their hasn't been a single model of PDA from any manufacturer that covers all the features I want. Dell might not make as much per individual item by selling the components separately, but I truly believe that they'd make a killing by hawking vast numbers of the smaller pieces. No PC maker that I know of sells monolithic PC-screen-keyboard-mouse desktop units, but that's exactly how they expect you to buy your portable electronics.
Wake up, Apple and Dell! There's a whole untapped market of people who'd love to customize their PDAs, particularly those people who have never used one (start off with a cheap CPU and upgrade it later if you like it). And the thing is that all of the hardware, software, wireless tech, and protocols are in common use that could make this happen today.
...the Roman goddess of bleeding men dry. I'm not divorced, but I think my less fortunate brethren might want to skip over this one.
How 'bout them apples. Thanks for the headsup!
To complicate matters, if I send it directly to the printer without going through the PDF stage first, it looks different from either of the other two. It uses the same (sans-serif) font as the PDF version but actually has decent kerning this time. I guess that means that disabling the embedded fonts is a step in the right direction, as long as I can figure out which font I should choose to make the end results look something like people expect.
So very close, but still not quite there...
There's a "top comments" section?
I like LaTeX (but prefer to use Emacs to edit it), to the point that I wrote my resume in it. However, one of my primary uses for a word processor is turning Word docs into hardcopy, and LyX ain't much help there. I guess I could ask our transcriptionist to switch from Word to Lyx, but I won't hold my breath for that to happen.
That's possible, but I wouldn't expect to get the same bad results with several versions of KWord on two different operating systems and two different laser printers. My home printer is a LaserJet 1200, and I send it PostScript via CUPS. Here's my entire printers.conf:
As far as I know, I'm using the default settings in KDE that you get when adding a new printer. That's definitely the case at work when spooling PostScript to our old LaserJet 4.
Exactly! My PDF sample was actually a bit worse than my normal printing results, but his sample is precisely what I see most often. Some letters are spaced widely, while others literally overlap. The result is so awful that my wife's nurse even asked why her dictation looked so bad and whether we could change it.
My PDF output looks nothing at all like my KWord screen. To make those images, I imported a Word doc that our transcriptionist emailed to us, then printed to PDF. I took a screenshot of KWord and KPDF using The Gimp, and cropped each shot to show a representative snippet of text.
Unfortunately, the PDF looks much more like my printed output that I'd like. I have no idea why my printing looks so awful (only through KWord; oowriter2 looks fine), but that's a pretty accurate example of how bad it is.
Other than the fact that I can't print from it, I love KWord. Of course, that's like asking Mrs. Lincoln how she liked the play.
Go ahead and explain to this dumbass why I want to give up a program that fits in with the rest of my desktop, supports KIOslaves, and is document-compatible with your office suite of choice. Really, I'm waiting...
The reason for their coexistence is that they have two different design philosophies, two different styles of programming, are built on two completely different frameworks, and appeal to two different groups of people (KDE users versus everyone else). How would you expect them to reconcile those differences? Do you also want KHTML to merge with Gecko? After all, they both do the same thing.
I know this sounds like a troll but I don't mean it that way. I'd switch from OpenOffice to KOffice in a heartbeat if I could, but I just can't do it right now. Please, please! make printing work right and I'll be eternally grateful.
So, tell me *AA, what benefit does your DRM supposedly have to me, your customer? What would make me decide that your crippleware is actually something I'd want? Go ahead: we're listening.
No, it's not - when speaking of memory utilization. It maintains filesystem caches, etc., but that doesn't count as "bloat" by any reasonable standard.
The kernel has changed immensely since I started using it in the mid '90s, son, but I wouldn't call it bloat (or "fat" or any of the other dumb adjectives you keep hoping will stick).
Regardless of how long you supposedly used Linux, you're wrong. The kernel is a very minimal part of the running system on any modern hardware - Firefox and KDE overshadow it by a couple of orders of magnitude on my system.
Linux-the-kernel hasn't grown by huge amount. Linux-the-OS has grown tremendously, but less than proportionally to the amount of functionality you get from it. Put another way, my KDE desktop in a gig of RAM (with plenty to spare) is much more useful than WindowMaker in 128MB.
You say bloat, I say functionality. You say the kernel is the core part, and I say you don't know what you're talking about.
THANK YOU! Seriously, I learned that in elementary school and only came around to "separate-only" in the last few years. Do you have a citation for "seperate" being a real word, or is that only from your memory?
You're right. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and decided it's time to take my party back. However, as petty as it seems on the surface, I think an important part is giving a movement a good name. What do you call a group of Republicans that really, truly is for limited government, less spending, an end to the War On Drugs, energy independence, and the rule of law?
"Neo"-anything is right out. "Free Republican" and "New Republican" are probably trademarks. "Classic Republican" would probably get transliterated to "Classist" at the first opportunity. I'm serious about this and ready to start moving forward, but I really want to come up with something snappy that's immediately recognizable.
Note: don't bother answering "libertarian", even if there's a lot of truth to it. Many of my friends and I have no intention of leaving our party if there's a chance we can take it back.
You can't keep using that same link in a self-referential loop to prove its own validity.
Yes, the media pushed to the front the loudest and whackiest "global cooling" scientists, but they didn't represent the median scientific view.
Whether that's true or not is immaterial. The reality is that everyone of age in the 70s remembers the dire warnings and bleak predictions broadcast on every TV and radio station. You can't blame the public for remembering what we all heard, or for being skeptical of new global warming claims coming from the same media sources that used to promise the opposite.
No. In fact, I don't remember much about the overpopulation speculation. I was referring to the collapse of food production systems that was surely inevitable whenever the climate grew too cold.