top of the line PC 2000 $3000 -- $2740 (1996 dollars, not bad for four years!)
bottle of Coke 1901 $0.05
bottle of Coke 2000 $0.75 -- $0.03 (1901 dollars)
top of the line Xerox Machine 1985 $15,000
top of the line Xerox Machine 2000 $15,000 -- $9390 (1985 dollars)
I rest my case.
-grendel drago
executive summary (mod parent up!!)
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 2
Interesting note: copyright reverts to the author if the book goes out of print. With little-to-no effort, Print-on-Demand keeps books `in print'. So copyright effectively never reverts to the authors now.
Well, shee-it.
-grendel drago
Re:Too big for me, too small for thee?
on
Books on Demand
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· Score: 2
In seven minutes, I am holding a finished book-a trial run of a Simon & Schuster children's title
With 10% downtime, that's 185 (short, monochrome, page-paper covered?) books per machine per day
Uh, ever heard of pipelining? There's no reason the machine can't print and staple while it glues. Yes, the *latency* is seven minutes, but that says nothing about the throughput.
-grendel drago
Re:When will businesses be clueful?
on
Books on Demand
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· Score: 2
Who the hell is going to transmit already-rasterised pages?! That would limit even DVDs to 470 pages. I don't even want to *think* about transmission times.
There's a *reason* printers use PostScript instead of enormous TIFFs. Well, several, actually. But anyhoo.
If not PostScript, what *do* large imaging houses use? I assume they convert from PostScript in the first place...
Like someone said above (now I've lost the cid, of course...), why not have a bookstore that keeps *one* copy of each book, maybe more for Grisham etc., and prints out a copy when you bring the `demo' up front. Kind of like renting a movie.
Absolutely right; laser paper is 20- or 24-pound stock. I was just saying that if your documentation is big and unwieldy, and you don't want a book, just a binder for miscellaneous stuff, then duplexing can help.
-grendel drago
And the concomitant weirdos...
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
And, of course, there will be those weirdos who insist on printing out every interesting article they read, only to toss them in a huge pile...
How can one man go through an entire toner cartridge (LaserJet 4Plus) in a month?!
That's a little note from the product manageer for Adobe InDesign, their New! Spiffy! Incredibly Expensive! tool which, instead of just using an embedded preview, actually Executes the PostScript! and shows you what you're Really Getting!
Uh, yeah. GhostView's been doing that for how long now?
Any `benefits' of PDF are strictly in the fields of multimedia and hypertext. The downside -- you're tied to Adobe's murky `standard' that they and only they are accountable for -- far outweighs any benefits.
Note that you need something called `Extreme' to directly print PDFs. Wanna bet it contains the same closed Supa Secret PDF Decoding Rules that Adobe doesn't publish in their standards?
-grendel drago
Because it's the BETTER solution
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
Um, because of portability? I can open.pdfs with no problem on Macs, PCs, and Linux boxes. And I can print them on any of the linked copiers/printers in the store. That, and more people can understand and use Acrobat and get what they want rather then accidentally sending the.ps file text straight to the printer and get 17 pages of crap.
What about GSView (Windows and Linux) and MacGS (Mac)? Those happen to be *free* (speech 'n' beer) PostScript viewers. Err... what kind of system sends.ps files to the printer instead of saying ``I can't understand this'' or ``Pick an Application''?
Yes, both PDF and PostScript are Adobe standards. The difference is, PostScript created by anyone actually has to run on anyone's PostScript-interpreting printer. PDF created by Adobe's `Distiller' has to work with Adobe's viewer. Period. Hence the creep of little prorietary incompatibilities that plague free PDF viewers...
And why bother "exporting" from MS Word? At Kinko's (plug, plug), I can send it directly to a File Prep tool, which turns it into a.kdf, and then convert the.kdf into a.pdf which looks exactly the same.
Or, funnily enough, I could just print the damn Word file straight out without going through all those steps... (why the hell would anyone export an MS Word file to anything if it will print out just fine from there? 'splain that to me...)
Maybe I wasn't clear... by `export', I meant `print to file'. Ooh, look, PostScript. Cross-platform PostScript. Of course, MS's PostScript drivers suck eggs, but at least they work...
Okay. Summing up. PostScript does everything that PDF does, except it's standardized (PDF has a standard, but it's kind of like MS's standard API(you know, where they leave out cool bits that only they can use).) Viewers are available everywhere and for every platform. Adobe *created* a market where there was no need to sell their `Distiller' tools. ps2pdf does much the same thing.
I ordered Barefoot Gen from Amazon's Used search, and when they got back to me (two months later) they wanted seventy bucks for a book that had drawn a ten- or fifteen-dollar cover price in the eighties.
Plus, with this, I'd get a brand spanking new copy. Mmm, spanking.
You'd be surprised how much thinner things seem when duplexed.
Right, they seem half as big. Smartass.
But the point is that printing lengthy HOWTOs and such is ridiculous mostly because they're twice as big as they need to be, and I've had very, *very* little luck getting laser printers not to mangle the page on the second time through. Autoduplexers rox0rz.
Frankly, Net-HOWTO would look a lot prettier in a book than in the ubiquitous TRB (three ring binder)...
There are free books *everywhere*. Gutenberg. linuxdoc. Graduate theses. The latter two are things you wouldn't be able to get at Borders in any case...
Now someone just has to start making Project Gutenberg's ASCII files into TeX versions. Mmm, TeX.
-grendel drago
Re:Great, now maybe I'll be able to read some manu
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
Well, you can take a Palm into the can... just don't drop it.
Of course, the same goes for a regular book.
Hey, there's an idea -- bog-proof portable e-book readers! Woo!
Why does everyone think that PDF is the start-all, be-all and end-all of document transport?
PDF is (basically) compressed, encoded PostScript with a few bells and whistles (hypertext, (rarely-used) forms and a prettier viewer than GSView) -- it doesn't really do anything that PostScript doesn't.
And if you're thinking of exporting from MSWord, be ready for some piss-poor-looking documentation.
The printing industry already went through this business about portable formats in the late seventies and early eighties. SGML, TeX and PostScript all came out of that.
PDF is an obscured format. In an ideal world, everyone would write in TeX/LaTeX and distribute in DVI...
... but I'm really reaching now. Unless you count almost every MS/PhD student who's written a thesis for a math/physics/CS/engineering department in the last fifteen years.
Slashdot Mirror
xpdf. GhostView.
Great googly moogly, I've done that!
It was some damned government form that I wanted to add forms capability to (we were using a typewriter), but was locked.
That, and once I had to resize an EPS file because CorelDRAW! wouldn't export an illustration as small as we needed.
PostScript rocks. Try doing that with PDF, I dare ya...
-grendel drago.
They're almost a private army. They're contracted for security at various military/secret stuff installations.
But mostly they're well-known for being a part of the prison-industrial complex.
http://www.peacebus.com/junee/junee.html
Google will turn up many more...
-grendel drago
Actually, snail mail will be more likely to be read...
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/contact.html
San Jose Corporate Headquarters
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, California 95110-2704
USA
-grendel drago
I'm not quite sure what to think about this.
http://www.wackenhutstore.com/sweatshirt.html
On the one hand, it's sending money to an **egregiously** evil corp. On the other hand, it's a shirt that says `Wackenhut' on it.
-grendel drago
The Bill Of Rights doesn't apply to anyone... unless they're acting as an agent of the government.
"Congress shall make no law etc etc..." -- congress can't abridge Dmitri's rights any more than they can yours.
The Bill Of Rights doesn't apply to the people; it applies to the government. Didn't anyone here take Civics?
Ideally, anyway.
-grendel drago
I rest my case.
-grendel drago
Interesting note: copyright reverts to the author if the book goes out of print. With little-to-no effort, Print-on-Demand keeps books `in print'. So copyright effectively never reverts to the authors now.
Well, shee-it.
-grendel drago
Uh, ever heard of pipelining? There's no reason the machine can't print and staple while it glues. Yes, the *latency* is seven minutes, but that says nothing about the throughput.
-grendel drago
Who the hell is going to transmit already-rasterised pages?! That would limit even DVDs to 470 pages. I don't even want to *think* about transmission times.
There's a *reason* printers use PostScript instead of enormous TIFFs. Well, several, actually. But anyhoo.
If not PostScript, what *do* large imaging houses use? I assume they convert from PostScript in the first place...
-grendel drago
Like someone said above (now I've lost the cid, of course...), why not have a bookstore that keeps *one* copy of each book, maybe more for Grisham etc., and prints out a copy when you bring the `demo' up front. Kind of like renting a movie.
-grendel drago
Paper class? What kind of school was this? Are you a materials engineer? Sounds interesting.
-grendel drago
Absolutely right; laser paper is 20- or 24-pound stock. I was just saying that if your documentation is big and unwieldy, and you don't want a book, just a binder for miscellaneous stuff, then duplexing can help.
-grendel drago
And, of course, there will be those weirdos who insist on printing out every interesting article they read, only to toss them in a huge pile...
How can one man go through an entire toner cartridge (LaserJet 4Plus) in a month?!
Ahem. Yes, I know someone like this.
-grendel drago
http://www.adobe.com/print/features/psvspdf/main.h tml
That's a little note from the product manageer for Adobe InDesign, their New! Spiffy! Incredibly Expensive! tool which, instead of just using an embedded preview, actually Executes the PostScript! and shows you what you're Really Getting!
Uh, yeah. GhostView's been doing that for how long now?
Any `benefits' of PDF are strictly in the fields of multimedia and hypertext. The downside -- you're tied to Adobe's murky `standard' that they and only they are accountable for -- far outweighs any benefits.
Note that you need something called `Extreme' to directly print PDFs. Wanna bet it contains the same closed Supa Secret PDF Decoding Rules that Adobe doesn't publish in their standards?
-grendel drago
What about GSView (Windows and Linux) and MacGS (Mac)? Those happen to be *free* (speech 'n' beer) PostScript viewers. Err... what kind of system sends
Yes, both PDF and PostScript are Adobe standards. The difference is, PostScript created by anyone actually has to run on anyone's PostScript-interpreting printer. PDF created by Adobe's `Distiller' has to work with Adobe's viewer. Period. Hence the creep of little prorietary incompatibilities that plague free PDF viewers...
Maybe I wasn't clear... by `export', I meant `print to file'. Ooh, look, PostScript. Cross-platform PostScript. Of course, MS's PostScript drivers suck eggs, but at least they work...
Okay. Summing up. PostScript does everything that PDF does, except it's standardized (PDF has a standard, but it's kind of like MS's standard API(you know, where they leave out cool bits that only they can use).) Viewers are available everywhere and for every platform. Adobe *created* a market where there was no need to sell their `Distiller' tools. ps2pdf does much the same thing.
-grendel drago
Pfah. Say that at an AFL-CIO meeting, and see how quickly they stone you.
Show this machine to the people who run its dangerous, complicated, unreliable predecessors, and see how far you get.
Show an American laborer the Southeast Asian immigrant who earns a bag of Doritos a month and claim greater efficiency... eww.
Of course, this will go over like gangbusters with management. Labor will hate it with a passion. UPS too.
-grendel drago
Remaindered hardcovers? Five bucks? Explain, man, explain!
And here I've been saving up to buy from Amazon, the chump that I am...
-grendel drago
All right! Yes!
I ordered Barefoot Gen from Amazon's Used search, and when they got back to me (two months later) they wanted seventy bucks for a book that had drawn a ten- or fifteen-dollar cover price in the eighties.
Plus, with this, I'd get a brand spanking new copy. Mmm, spanking.
-grendel drago
You'd be surprised how much thinner things seem when duplexed.
Right, they seem half as big. Smartass.
But the point is that printing lengthy HOWTOs and such is ridiculous mostly because they're twice as big as they need to be, and I've had very, *very* little luck getting laser printers not to mangle the page on the second time through. Autoduplexers rox0rz.
-grendel drago
Who wants to produce copyrighted works on this?!
Frankly, Net-HOWTO would look a lot prettier in a book than in the ubiquitous TRB (three ring binder)...
There are free books *everywhere*. Gutenberg. linuxdoc. Graduate theses. The latter two are things you wouldn't be able to get at Borders in any case...
Now someone just has to start making Project Gutenberg's ASCII files into TeX versions. Mmm, TeX.
-grendel drago
Well, you can take a Palm into the can... just don't drop it.
Of course, the same goes for a regular book.
Hey, there's an idea -- bog-proof portable e-book readers! Woo!
Why does everyone think that PDF is the start-all, be-all and end-all of document transport?
PDF is (basically) compressed, encoded PostScript with a few bells and whistles (hypertext, (rarely-used) forms and a prettier viewer than GSView) -- it doesn't really do anything that PostScript doesn't.
And if you're thinking of exporting from MSWord, be ready for some piss-poor-looking documentation.
The printing industry already went through this business about portable formats in the late seventies and early eighties. SGML, TeX and PostScript all came out of that.
PDF is an obscured format. In an ideal world, everyone would write in TeX/LaTeX and distribute in DVI...
... but I'm really reaching now. Unless you count almost every MS/PhD student who's written a thesis for a math/physics/CS/engineering department in the last fifteen years.
-grendel drago
I can't believe they listed MSSQL next to DB2 and Oracle! Sheesh!
Yes, MSSQL runs on expensive hardware. Oracle and DB2 run on *really* expensive hardware. And pass the ACID test. And so on.
Guh...
-grendel drago
And they're already available, too!
c ts/specialProducts/OEL/applications.jhtml
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/produ
Okay, I think that's all.
-grendel drago