if google were to build the data center in china, they would save a lot of money by upholding the chinese government's ban on the free flow of information to and from that country. that way asia could be home to google's smallest data center, a showcase for energy savings and modernism. heck, they wouldn't even have to actually run any fiber TO the google datacenter in china.
if we let rappers sample the melody from "every breath you take" then fuck it up by putting other words on top, then MST3K should be allowed to make a humorous commentary on top of a movie. not that either of these constitutes "art" in my opinion.
it's like having a kilo of coke in your trunk when you take the car in for an oil change. when changing the oil they need to look under the hood, not the trunk. when installing a dvd-rom, you don't need to peruse someone's hard drive. if he's running xp (the only OS that dipshitquad knows anything about) they had no *need* to dig through any of his files.
that said, it's like the whole saddam hussein thing. sure the guy's an asshole/pedofile, but is it up to me to throw him behind bars? i'm not so sure dipshitsquad had the *right* to dig through his jpg's and mp3's.
the russian-designed and built spacecraft have a better safety record than the US space program. that's because the Soviet/Russian government had control over everything, whereas the US space program depends on contractors who win at least partially based on who's got the cheapest offer. i'd feel safer in a Russian craft than one built in the US what, 30 years ago? any US congresscritter who recommends saving the shuttles based on some kind of nationalistic interest should be forced to ride in the shuttle, risking his/her life as well as the crew's.
to hell with sbc/ameritech/whatever they call themselves. their service was crappy, their rates too high, and now that i'm paying $200/month to f*ckin' t-mobile, there's no money left for a landline.
why 2020? this is such a freebie giveaway to the petroleum-based auto economy it's shameful. had they said "by 2010" it would have meant more. any manufacturer who doesn't push for 35mpg by 2010 deserves to face layoffs and further marginalization.
should the US auto industry ever grow some balls, they'll push for alternative means of energy and tell the petroleum industry and those jackasses in the OPEC nations to pound sand. it would be a nationalistic, proud moment for America, and that would hurt the sales of Japanese / Korean / Chinese cars in the US market. but GM & Ford are too fing stupid/archaic.
Comcast on several occasions has disrupted my internet service and generated a lot of additional effort to reset my home network so that I can use their service. I've had technicians to my house at least 6 times and I've spoken to them on the phone no fewer than 15 times in 2007. Their service SUCKS. But recently I've experienced an outage whereby they sent a disabling signal to my router, causing me much grief. I cannot get my wifi going because they reset my router's settings, and even doing a reboot and reset hasn't made it function properly. I'm pissed off at them, and wonder what law gives them the right to fuck up my home network.
**
12/1/07 - service interruption because of late payment Made payment via telephone at 9pm Still couldn't connect to internet at 10pm Called tech support at 11pm, waited 48 minutes on hold for supervisor Internet back, but it's a class A network and new settings Comcast applied to my router prevent me from getting into my own router to change the settings.
Linksys Wireless G Cable Gateway WCG200 Cable modem + router + 4 port switch + wifi G Comcast sent reconfigure message to my router forcing a reset Now won't let me get to admin page to reset wifi Have restarted 6 times.
Gee, Microsoft has seen enough potential in the smartphone business that they've even been perfecting Windows Mobile. I've got a T-Mobile MDA and am pretty happy with it. Kind of sucks to have a phone without real buttons, but to have the portable internet is genius. I can surf the web while waiting in line or while sitting on the john, so there's no need to carry newspapers or magazines around if I know I'm going to be a while. Integration with Outlook works, and i can create word and xl files and (powerpoint if i *had* to). Never got the FileMaker Mobile product to work quite right but now Apple's nixed that product. Anyway I spent almost $500 on this so I'm not planning on swapping it for the Wing (running Windows Mobile 6) or the iphone for another couple of years.
Dvorak isn't just a crank, he's a hack and it's getting harder and harder to listen to any danged thing he says because he's been so wrong since, oh, 1990 or so.
when you pull constant 12-18 hour days for a crappy IT netadmin salary, why not sleep at work. sometimes it doesn't even make sense to bother driving home.
by promoting crap like this -- selfish, self-interested parties often promote their own agenda, even in the science community -- we're actually helping bush, inc. wage war against science. all of the scientists and science professors I've ever met were more interested in finding the truth than in furthering a single point of view. it's that basic curiosity about how things work which leads to discoveries great and small. by focusing on little people who lack such vision or commitment, it's easy to promote the far-right's attacks on human knowledge.
stupid web blocking tools might prevent me from searching for "Breast Cancer" because that phrase has the sexy word "breast" in it. Similarly, if I were looking to diffuse a bomb, I might need to research different types of bombs to learn what kind was in the package on my desk before attempting to dismantle it. and as for genocide, I highly doubt that those inhuman jackasses who are involved in committing genocide are bothering to research it on the web before killing and torturing people. banning searches for genocide would be tantamount to burying our knowledge of genocide, and would likely lead future generations to become ignorant about the plight of those who have suffered and died at the hands of madmen in power.
Re:Like the famous "We won the Alamo"?
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 1
Like the common misperception that we won the Alamo, or the famed battle cry, "Remember the Maine!"
Except that Gore would have won Florida had the panhandle closed the polls at the same time as the rest of Florida, and the votes thrown out by the bagful been counted, as well as police barricades not been used to keep blacks away from the polls.
>> Well the point of a Beta release is to increase the userbase so as to increase the amount of testing.
> Yea. Increase the userbase. Of course, they just did the opposite and scared them away. Lesson here: never show your unfinished work. A first impression only comes once.
Well if we consider that Windows 1.0, 2.0 and even 3.0 were basically beta-like in their nature (previews of what a mac-like gui would be for owners of intel hardware), enough users were drawn to Windows even though these early versions were pretty ass-tastic. Not until Windows 95 did Microsoft start producing software that was stable, pretty, and functional. [Word 4 & Excel 3 on the Mac were stable and functional, but fairly unattractive.]
1) Maximum PC's tests demonstrated that most people cannot discern the difference between music encoded at 128 & 256 bitrates for MP3.
2) it's obvious that cd's sound better than MP3's because MP3 is a lossy codec. twinkly synth bits and singers breathing and stringed instruments played softly will exhibit a different sound via MP3 than straight off the uncompressed cd
3) this article was pretty stupid. any way we can un-post it?
I do *not* like Front Page. It happens to be the product my boss and others in the organization are familiar with. I've been a Dreamweaver devotee for about 7 years now, having upgraded from Adobe PageMill which I used to build my first site hosted on a Unix box back in 1995. I simply mentioned FrontPage because a) it's a product everybody knows and hates and b) after 10+ years of coding FrontPage, it still sucks as much as it did when it was released... kind of like PowerPoint.
sure, we don't need the whole suite. but the 2-3 people doing print graphics will need illustration, layout, and photo editing plus the ability to save to PDF and submit for printing to a 4-color printing system (through a printing company for more than 5000 impressions). and the 2-3 peopl doing web design will need photo editing, web layout, and possibly the ability to handle pdf's. sadly, adobe's 2 versions of the creative suite in past either included acrobat or they didn't; the new version adds a lot of web ware we won't use (golive, fireworks, imageready, flash) which jacks up the price.
I've trained people to use software for over 20 years. If the software is anything like the industry-leading programs by Adobe, I'll be able to figure out the basic skills in a day or two of use for each program. Then I'll train the users. If the software is useful to them, and they have an interest, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, they'd likely buy copies for home use and the company will pick up the tab for their use at the office.
You're right in asserting the basic fact that the most useful software is that which one knows how to operate.
Acrobat Pro $426 Illustrator $615 Indesign $720 Photoshop $660 Dreamweaver $412 Total if purchased individually $2833
**
I'm not against paying $2600 for having professional-quality products to handle certain tasks -- that's why I own the products both for OSX and XP, because I can justify the cost to myself, since I'm a software trainer in a previous life. However I find taht it's not just enough for a company to own a few cool pieces of software at a single desk; we need to inspire employees across our organization to develop their graphics skills, so implementing multiple workstations at $2600/each is simply not an option. If we could find a quality package in the $500 range, not only could we justify setting this up for a handful of employees, it's also not out of range for them to afford if they wanted to purchase a copy for their own use at home.
you missed the point of dreamweaver for the casual user/print designer. sure, rollovers are just a couple of lines of code, but you could use dreamweaver to build a site and never see any code at all! clicking on buttons and entering text in fields makes using dreamweaver child's play.
the files we generate for print production _must be printable by our printing company_. they already know how to handle Quark XPress and the Adobe line. What happens if we start using cheap or free software is that we're then cut off by printers who don't want our business because it's a hassle to learn new stuff and to fit into their workflow. i believe we're using a number of low-cost printing companies, but one of the things I'd like to do is to help the marketing guys select a couple of companies to do business with, then give them ALL the business in return for building a relationship with our company.
wow, lots of suggestions and just a minute free to reply right now. I'll be brief
Photoshop - I agree, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop, but our users do not need much more beyond redeye reduction, contrast control, cropping, resizing, and the ability to save JPG for web photos and TIF for printed photos.
Illustrator - I'll have to try Inkscape. Not sure how much line art we'll be handling, but as long as it has a file format that can be imported to other programs, much like how Xpress, Indesign, and Pagemaker can import EPS files and PDFs.
InDesign - Scribus looks good so far because it handles multipage full color layouts, CMYK separation, PDF generation, etc. It's a huge step up from Word.
Acrobat Pro - My understanding is that nothing can touch Acrobat for PDF creation and working with electronic forms.
Dreamweaver - We're already using Accrisoft for content management; I was considering PHP NUKE before I learned we had Accrisoft. Now I just need to devote some time to learning Accrisoft myself. However, building static web pages is still a task we'll need in the near term.
Slashdot Mirror
if google were to build the data center in china, they would save a lot of money by upholding the chinese government's ban on the free flow of information to and from that country. that way asia could be home to google's smallest data center, a showcase for energy savings and modernism. heck, they wouldn't even have to actually run any fiber TO the google datacenter in china.
and the fewest number of users, which means non-geeks wouldn't run into flaws unexpectedly.
if we let rappers sample the melody from "every breath you take" then fuck it up by putting other words on top, then MST3K should be allowed to make a humorous commentary on top of a movie. not that either of these constitutes "art" in my opinion.
it's like having a kilo of coke in your trunk when you take the car in for an oil change. when changing the oil they need to look under the hood, not the trunk. when installing a dvd-rom, you don't need to peruse someone's hard drive. if he's running xp (the only OS that dipshitquad knows anything about) they had no *need* to dig through any of his files.
that said, it's like the whole saddam hussein thing. sure the guy's an asshole/pedofile, but is it up to me to throw him behind bars? i'm not so sure dipshitsquad had the *right* to dig through his jpg's and mp3's.
the russian-designed and built spacecraft have a better safety record than the US space program. that's because the Soviet/Russian government had control over everything, whereas the US space program depends on contractors who win at least partially based on who's got the cheapest offer. i'd feel safer in a Russian craft than one built in the US what, 30 years ago? any US congresscritter who recommends saving the shuttles based on some kind of nationalistic interest should be forced to ride in the shuttle, risking his/her life as well as the crew's.
to hell with sbc/ameritech/whatever they call themselves. their service was crappy, their rates too high, and now that i'm paying $200/month to f*ckin' t-mobile, there's no money left for a landline.
why 2020? this is such a freebie giveaway to the petroleum-based auto economy it's shameful. had they said "by 2010" it would have meant more. any manufacturer who doesn't push for 35mpg by 2010 deserves to face layoffs and further marginalization.
should the US auto industry ever grow some balls, they'll push for alternative means of energy and tell the petroleum industry and those jackasses in the OPEC nations to pound sand. it would be a nationalistic, proud moment for America, and that would hurt the sales of Japanese / Korean / Chinese cars in the US market. but GM & Ford are too fing stupid/archaic.
Comcast on several occasions has disrupted my internet service and generated a lot of additional effort to reset my home network so that I can use their service. I've had technicians to my house at least 6 times and I've spoken to them on the phone no fewer than 15 times in 2007. Their service SUCKS. But recently I've experienced an outage whereby they sent a disabling signal to my router, causing me much grief. I cannot get my wifi going because they reset my router's settings, and even doing a reboot and reset hasn't made it function properly. I'm pissed off at them, and wonder what law gives them the right to fuck up my home network.
**
12/1/07 - service interruption because of late payment
Made payment via telephone at 9pm
Still couldn't connect to internet at 10pm
Called tech support at 11pm, waited 48 minutes on hold for supervisor
Internet back, but it's a class A network and new settings Comcast applied to my router prevent me from getting into my own router to change the settings.
Linksys Wireless G Cable Gateway
WCG200
Cable modem + router + 4 port switch + wifi G
Comcast sent reconfigure message to my router forcing a reset
Now won't let me get to admin page to reset wifi
Have restarted 6 times.
Joe - Supervisor on floor
Gee, Microsoft has seen enough potential in the smartphone business that they've even been perfecting Windows Mobile. I've got a T-Mobile MDA and am pretty happy with it. Kind of sucks to have a phone without real buttons, but to have the portable internet is genius. I can surf the web while waiting in line or while sitting on the john, so there's no need to carry newspapers or magazines around if I know I'm going to be a while. Integration with Outlook works, and i can create word and xl files and (powerpoint if i *had* to). Never got the FileMaker Mobile product to work quite right but now Apple's nixed that product. Anyway I spent almost $500 on this so I'm not planning on swapping it for the Wing (running Windows Mobile 6) or the iphone for another couple of years.
Dvorak isn't just a crank, he's a hack and it's getting harder and harder to listen to any danged thing he says because he's been so wrong since, oh, 1990 or so.
when you pull constant 12-18 hour days for a crappy IT netadmin salary, why not sleep at work. sometimes it doesn't even make sense to bother driving home.
by promoting crap like this -- selfish, self-interested parties often promote their own agenda, even in the science community -- we're actually helping bush, inc. wage war against science. all of the scientists and science professors I've ever met were more interested in finding the truth than in furthering a single point of view. it's that basic curiosity about how things work which leads to discoveries great and small. by focusing on little people who lack such vision or commitment, it's easy to promote the far-right's attacks on human knowledge.
without NeXT there'd be no intertube-web-information-highway thingamajig.
without PARC there'd be no mouse
google wouldn't work without either of these companies, but they'd probably do just fine if Microsoft would go under.
stupid web blocking tools might prevent me from searching for "Breast Cancer" because that phrase has the sexy word "breast" in it. Similarly, if I were looking to diffuse a bomb, I might need to research different types of bombs to learn what kind was in the package on my desk before attempting to dismantle it. and as for genocide, I highly doubt that those inhuman jackasses who are involved in committing genocide are bothering to research it on the web before killing and torturing people. banning searches for genocide would be tantamount to burying our knowledge of genocide, and would likely lead future generations to become ignorant about the plight of those who have suffered and died at the hands of madmen in power.
Like the common misperception that we won the Alamo, or the famed battle cry, "Remember the Maine!"
Except that Gore would have won Florida had the panhandle closed the polls at the same time as the rest of Florida, and the votes thrown out by the bagful been counted, as well as police barricades not been used to keep blacks away from the polls.
what about the hundreds of times i've had to re-install windows on a pc whose hardware was working fine?
>> Well the point of a Beta release is to increase the userbase so as to increase the amount of testing.
> Yea. Increase the userbase. Of course, they just did the opposite and scared them away. Lesson here: never show your unfinished work. A first impression only comes once.
Well if we consider that Windows 1.0, 2.0 and even 3.0 were basically beta-like in their nature (previews of what a mac-like gui would be for owners of intel hardware), enough users were drawn to Windows even though these early versions were pretty ass-tastic. Not until Windows 95 did Microsoft start producing software that was stable, pretty, and functional. [Word 4 & Excel 3 on the Mac were stable and functional, but fairly unattractive.]
1) Maximum PC's tests demonstrated that most people cannot discern the difference between music encoded at 128 & 256 bitrates for MP3.
2) it's obvious that cd's sound better than MP3's because MP3 is a lossy codec. twinkly synth bits and singers breathing and stringed instruments played softly will exhibit a different sound via MP3 than straight off the uncompressed cd
3) this article was pretty stupid. any way we can un-post it?
I do *not* like Front Page. It happens to be the product my boss and others in the organization are familiar with. I've been a Dreamweaver devotee for about 7 years now, having upgraded from Adobe PageMill which I used to build my first site hosted on a Unix box back in 1995. I simply mentioned FrontPage because a) it's a product everybody knows and hates and b) after 10+ years of coding FrontPage, it still sucks as much as it did when it was released... kind of like PowerPoint.
sure, we don't need the whole suite. but the 2-3 people doing print graphics will need illustration, layout, and photo editing plus the ability to save to PDF and submit for printing to a 4-color printing system (through a printing company for more than 5000 impressions). and the 2-3 peopl doing web design will need photo editing, web layout, and possibly the ability to handle pdf's. sadly, adobe's 2 versions of the creative suite in past either included acrobat or they didn't; the new version adds a lot of web ware we won't use (golive, fireworks, imageready, flash) which jacks up the price.
I've trained people to use software for over 20 years. If the software is anything like the industry-leading programs by Adobe, I'll be able to figure out the basic skills in a day or two of use for each program. Then I'll train the users. If the software is useful to them, and they have an interest, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, they'd likely buy copies for home use and the company will pick up the tab for their use at the office.
You're right in asserting the basic fact that the most useful software is that which one knows how to operate.
Adobe's $2600 Creative Suite 3= 1153138
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC
Acrobat Pro $426
Illustrator $615
Indesign $720
Photoshop $660
Dreamweaver $412
Total if purchased individually $2833
**
I'm not against paying $2600 for having professional-quality products to handle certain tasks -- that's why I own the products both for OSX and XP, because I can justify the cost to myself, since I'm a software trainer in a previous life. However I find taht it's not just enough for a company to own a few cool pieces of software at a single desk; we need to inspire employees across our organization to develop their graphics skills, so implementing multiple workstations at $2600/each is simply not an option. If we could find a quality package in the $500 range, not only could we justify setting this up for a handful of employees, it's also not out of range for them to afford if they wanted to purchase a copy for their own use at home.
you missed the point of dreamweaver for the casual user/print designer. sure, rollovers are just a couple of lines of code, but you could use dreamweaver to build a site and never see any code at all! clicking on buttons and entering text in fields makes using dreamweaver child's play.
http://menino.com/question-is-moot.mov
oh, but i forgot to add:
the files we generate for print production _must be printable by our printing company_. they already know how to handle Quark XPress and the Adobe line. What happens if we start using cheap or free software is that we're then cut off by printers who don't want our business because it's a hassle to learn new stuff and to fit into their workflow. i believe we're using a number of low-cost printing companies, but one of the things I'd like to do is to help the marketing guys select a couple of companies to do business with, then give them ALL the business in return for building a relationship with our company.
wow, lots of suggestions and just a minute free to reply right now. I'll be brief
Photoshop - I agree, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop, but our users do not need much more beyond redeye reduction, contrast control, cropping, resizing, and the ability to save JPG for web photos and TIF for printed photos.
Illustrator - I'll have to try Inkscape. Not sure how much line art we'll be handling, but as long as it has a file format that can be imported to other programs, much like how Xpress, Indesign, and Pagemaker can import EPS files and PDFs.
InDesign - Scribus looks good so far because it handles multipage full color layouts, CMYK separation, PDF generation, etc. It's a huge step up from Word.
Acrobat Pro - My understanding is that nothing can touch Acrobat for PDF creation and working with electronic forms.
Dreamweaver - We're already using Accrisoft for content management; I was considering PHP NUKE before I learned we had Accrisoft. Now I just need to devote some time to learning Accrisoft myself. However, building static web pages is still a task we'll need in the near term.