You are right, that was the most toxic company culture I ever worked at. I'll give you an example. One day, Mr. Asshole Manager ambushed me coming back from a smoke break, he came up to me and said "You Stink!" and sprayed a can of Lysol right in my face. I had to run to the bathroom and rinse my eyes out for 20 minutes before it stopped stinging. But I got even with him, when I busted him for embezzlement.
Exactly. I'll tell you a story from the earliest days of Solitaire, back when it just shipped (must be Win 2.0 IIRC) and way before the day of other timewasters like web surfing.
I used to work in downtown LA. Due to the rush hours, it was pretty much impossible to leave until about 6:30, so I got used to staying late working. One afternoon, while I was on the phone on hold waiting for tech support to answer, I was playing solitaire while waiting, and my asshole boss caught me. He had a snit fit, and said if I could play solitaire while on hold, I could be doing something productive instead. I said that if I lose a game of solitaire because I had my attention divided between waiting on hold and a game, nothing was lost, but if he preferred me to do a half-assed job on my paperwork while I was on hold, I would be sure to do it that way. He told me, "if I EVER catch you playing solitaire on company time, you're fired instantly" and then he stomped away. I took him at his word. From that moment forward, every single day, I stopped working at precisely 5:00PM and played solitaire until I left the office. I spent all my lunch hour playing solitaire. From the moment I arrived in the office until 9:00AM, I played solitaire. I made sure the boss knew it too. Eventually the boss realized that he was losing more than 2 hours of my work capacity per day, and had no way to dock my salary since it was all after hours activities. I got called in for a conference. We had a heated argument about solitaire. I told him I needed a diversion occasionally throughout the day, usually while I was on hold, and that never amounted to more than a few minutes a day at times when I was tied down on the phone and couldn't do some other work, and wouldn't it make sense to allow me my little solitaire diversion? I won. Ha!
Depends on how sensitive you are, I suppose. I used to work in color correction in photography and prepress, and I can instantly see if a room light is fluorescent or tungsten. I still find even the best fluorescents have poor color.
This is the end of the line for Bungie. They started as a Mac-only developer, then got bought by Microsoft, now they are mere puppets of Microsoft, dropping their Mac development completely. This is the kiss of death for a developer. Let me give you a similar example.
Atomic Games started as a Mac-only developer, winning awards for its V for Victory series. Eventually they evolved into doing simultaneous PC/Mac releases. Then in a fit of pique over some API changes in OS X, the lead developer dropped Mac support in the middle of their Close Combat series, and went PC only. Shortly thereafter, they were bought out by Microsoft. After a couple of additional CC releases with decreasing sales, Atomic folded up and ceased development. Now they whore out licensing rights to the CC name to other developers.
This is how to kill your company, by alienating your most devoted customers so you can make a fast buck. I predict Halo 2 is the end of the line for Halo and Bungie. Bungie made their fast buck, they have no incentive to continue making more money for MS than for themselves.
You missed the main disadvantage of fluorescent bulbs: the color sucks. The spectrum of fluorescents provides a less aesthetically pleasing light than tungsten lamps. Fluorescents tend to be greenish and cold, tungsten yellow and warm.
Well of course we got paid. Warner Music was a regular client at our shop, the job was set in motion once the designer signed the job ticket. I was prepared to discard the job and not charge them if they didn't want the output, that's when I called the manager, once I knew the job would complete the RIP successfully. I figured I should do the best I could to help the poor designer, even if he was acting irrationally in an attempt to please some idiot celebrity. So the job wasn't completed as fast as he demanded, but it was done as fast as anyone could complete it. I did my best. And of course it meant nothing in the long run because that wasn't the final artwork they ended up with. I used to deal with this sort of "crisis" every day with hundreds of clients, I guess the designer had never dealt with something like this before. I hope he learned something.
None of that is really relevant, but I'll answer anyway. It started with a tech support phone call, I tried to walk Spielberg through a fix, but it wasn't working out, so he asked me to come out to his home. I went out to his house and fixed his personal computer, his assistants had a check cut for me by the time I walked out the door (as I had prearranged). A couple of days later, I got another phone call from Spielberg, he was really happy with the work and he asked me if I'd sign a contract to be on call 24/7/365 as his personal consultant for an insultingly low amount of money. I declined.
My point was, even people who have armies of people to shield themselves from mundane tasks (like writing checks) can be convinced to pay up if you know how to work with them. For some people, it is the hardest thing in the world, standing up for yourself and demanding payment, but if you want to succeed as a consultant, you have to do it.
This has nothing to do with celebrities, you were obviously in the wrong business. I know lots of "consultants" who have difficulty collecting what is owed, they just don't have the guts to do it. I never had any trouble collecting my fees, even from Steven Spielberg.
I used to work at a big BIG computer store right next to all the LA studios, back in the late 1980s, we were known as "the Computer Store to the Stars." But that was mostly because we had a good reputation for treating the stars like regular people (there is a fine line between being polite and being obsequious). Plus we were discreet, we kept everything strictly confidential, no matter how outrageous (like for example when I attempted to recover data from a famous scriptwriter's floppy disk that had a hole burned through it from a piece of crack that flew out of the pipe's bowl). But, you have to draw the line sometimes. Anyone below the level of Producer was almost guaranteed to be a nice, normal person that you could work with easily, but above that, egos are totally out of hand, and I wouldn't hesitate to tell them to get out of my face. I call this problem "Producer Syndrome." Producers that have the power to order people to set up $2 million in equipment in a corner of a building, and who lose tens of thousands of dollars per minute for production delays, tend to lose perspective.
Oh yeah, I've been on the receiving end of that sort of request. I used to work in a high-end service bureau, one of my jobs was doing Iris inkjet proofs. We had the fastest Iris RIP in town, a MacIIfx, and were known for our ability to turn out rush jobs quickly. One day a frantic designer from Warner Brothers Music comes in, he wants a rush Iris print. I said no problem, I can drop everything in the queue and set up your job immediately, for only 2x the usual rate (our standard rush-drop-everything rate). I sit down with the client at the workstation and open up the Quark XPress file, it's the new CD cover for Prince's "Diamonds and Pearls." But it is totally fucked up. The designer has done everything possible that will take forever to rasterize and print, I can immediately see that this job is going to take at least 90 minutes just to RIP. The designer totally loses it, he says, "but.. but.. I have to get a print done and back to my office before Prince gets there to see it, I need it in the next 15 minutes, Prince is already in a limo on his way to my office! Money is no object, can't you get 5 or 6 people to work on it and get it done sooner?" I wasn't in the mood to explain the Mythical Man-month to him, I said, "look, we've only got one Iris printer and one RIP, but even if I had 6 of them, they don't work cooperatively, we would still only get your first print in 90 minutes, not 1 print in 15 minutes. You really should have gotten this job to us sooner if you wanted a print sooner. This job is going to take exactly as long as it takes, and no less. If you'd set this job up properly, it could complete in 20 minutes, and we go to a lot of work to educate our customers to prepare jobs to run efficiently, so if you'd like, I can explain that to you while we wait for your job to finish." The designer broke down into tears, and ran out of my office and left the building. I decided to complete the job (there was nothing else really urgent in the queue, it could run unattended while I did other jobs), and about 2 hours later it was done (my estimate was a little low). I called the designer at Warner's but nobody could find him, I eventually spoke to his manager. He said Prince was still in the building and was ready to review the proof, so I had it sent over by my fastest, craziest motorcycle courier. I called the manager later to insure the proof was delivered promptly, he said Prince saw it and loved it. However, I noticed that the CD cover that was released for sale was a completely different design. Sheesh!
She should have quit, rather than trying earn her living working with people whose ideas she opposes. But since she didn't quit on her own, she's just another mealy-mouthed hypocrite.
This is just the latest in the notable series of EFF-related defeats that have permanently established restrictions on our civil rights. Someone PLEASE stop these guys from burning what is left of the Constitution with their ill-advised lawsuits!
Gilmore is what lawyers call an "unsympathetic defendant." Judges and juries will go out of their way to rule against them because they're such assholes. Perhaps Gilmore would have had a chance if he wasn't a party in John Barlow's bust by the TSA for transporting ketamine. But now they're all lumped together as a bunch of drug-addled nutballs, and quite right too.
Our constitutional rights are too precious to be defended by this bunch of EFF losers. They lose every major case. Maybe they should work for the OTHER SIDE and then our rights would be safer. Maybe they should quit taking so many hard drugs and dry out for a while before they meddle in constitutional law again.
There is a philosophy amongst some of the more enlightened companies that the best bosses and managers are the people who are most reluctant to become managers. You sound like a perfect example. You have shown competence in your job, and know enough about management to know how difficult it is, and you are reluctant to take on these serious responsibilities. But that is what makes you the perfect candidate. You can become a good boss by cultivating the qualities you desire in your employees and in yourself. That is leadership.
Stress and bad bosses don't cause ulcers. As this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine emphasized, ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, and can be cured easily with antibiotics. You need a better doctor, preferably one that keeps up with recent medical advancements.
One reason why people endure bad bosses: switching jobs can cause loss of benefits like health insurance. Many people are encountering "job lock," a reluctance to change jobs for fear of losing their current health insurance. I've been there.
I saw a solution to this problem a long time ago when laser printers were brand new. One company made a special paper form that was 12.5 inches long, the last 1.5 inch section was perforated and had a self-adhesive label. Then you'd stick these sheets in a legal size paper tray, maybe use that as the secondary tray in a 2 tray laser printer. The idea was that you could print a sticker on the same sheet as your letter, then you'd tear off the little performated strip at the bottom, remove the label, and stick the label on your envelope.
Of course this isn't going to solve the problem at hand.
I agree, this is a job for a simple dot matrix printer and continuous-forms labels. But it is tricky to print just one at a time, you have to design your label forms so your preprinted return address (and logo, whatever) is on the top half of the form, then you print the To: address on the bottom half of the label, so when you do a "form feed" the edge of the label clears the top of the print head and you can tear it off. In other words, the "top of form" mark is really halfway down the label, you start printing "line 1" in the middle of the label, then a Form Feed command pushes the label up so the tear-off perforation is above the printhead. Does that make sense? (BTW, you can probably tell I used to write programs to print labels on dot matrix printers)...
I used to sell a couple of varieties of dot matrix printers that avoided this problem with a clever forms-handling trick, it would pop up the top of the form above the printhead so you could rip off the form, then it would retract the form back down to the printhead so it could start printing on the top line of the next page. But I haven't seen a printer like that since the late 1980s. There used to be a few clever dot matrix printer designs that would allow you to print one label at a time with a slot-fed mechanism, I recall one IBM model from the early 1980s that did this, but AFAIK it was a unique design.
If I had to choose ONE printer above all others that was the best label printer EVER, it was the original Apple LaserWriter, or any other early 1st generation laser printer that used the early Canon laser engine (I think the HP LaserJet 1 was similar). These early models had a manual feed that was "corner fed" so you could print on something as small as a business card. I've never seen any other printer that could print on that small a label. You could probably find one of these early laser printers for cheap, and they were pretty indestructible since the mechanism was in the replaceable toner cart.
Umm, please correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the case eventually get thrown out? Or, to put it more precisely, didn't the MPAA give up because they knew the cat was out of the bag?
OK. You're wrong. Corely lost all the way up to the 2nd District Court of Appeals, the last step before the Supreme Court. He did not appeal to SCOTUS, the EFF even has a press release on their site announcing they gave up. At least the PLAINTIFF knew when he was beaten, unlike the EFF.
It seems to me that you won't be able to find books that don't deal with specific apps like Photoshop at introductory levels. However, back when I first studied computer graphics in the early1970s, the standard high-level image processing/programming books were all vendor-neutral because there really was no standardization, and the books only standardized on one thing: low level code. The books focused on the image processing algorithms and the specifics of output were left up to you to adapt to your specific device. I only vaguely recall these books, but IIRC some early volumes used pseudocode, some used Pascal, and later these same volumes used C as that language became more widely accepted. So it seemed to me that while it might not be possible to avoid product-lockin at newbie levels, it might be possible, even preferable at higher levels. Back in the early days of CG, there was one book, I forget the name, but it was one of those authoritative tomes that was referred to by its author's name. It was called something simple like "Digital Image Processing," because there really weren't any other major books on this new subject. I saw the latest edition a couple years ago as I was browsing in a bookstore, so I decided to go to Amazon and search for it, and I was surprised at what I found. Now most of the high-level books are like "Digital Image Processing with Matlab" or "Digital Image Processing in Java." So perhaps this question is a bigger issue than just how to teach one newbie how to use GIMP instead of Photoshop. Is the Computer Science curriculum becoming too product-specific? Is there an advantage to learning algorithms separate from specific coding implementations in Java, Matlab, C, or whatever? Is there an advantage to learning something highly abstracted from coding specifics (like Knuth's pseudocode) or is everyone in such a rush to implementation that they have no time to really learn what they're doing, and they'd rather just cut and paste a few quickie algorithms?
I have bad news for you: Ziploc plastic bags are NOT chemically inert. Cheap plastic bags are not considered archival storage. If you want truly inert bags, you will have to use a specially formulated bag that is specificaly designed to be archival quality with no outgassing, made of something like archival-grade polyester or acid-free paper. Try a vendor of archival products like Light Impressions for properly archival, chemically inert storage bags.
Magnetic media, even if perfectly shielded from external magnetic fields, is not permanent. Magnetic hysteresis is not perfect, the recorded data will break down over time just due to entropy, even if the magnetic media remains stable. That is the whole point of doing an optical recording on a permanent media like DVDR, the recording will be stable as long as the substrate is stable.
In other words, using hard drives as long-term backups is a stupid idea.
Wow, that book scanner rig is just what I've been dreaming of for years. I've been thinking about mounting a couple of glass plates at a 90 degree angle, and then I could put the open book on apex of the glass, then photograph it with a couple of cameras underneath. This rig is just exactly what I was thinking of, but upside down and even cleverer, with a footpedal to lift the glass up and down onto the book. A very nice piece of design work. The obvious advantage of this rig is that you don't have to open the spine 180 degrees and smash the books flat onto a single glass plane, you don't have to open the book up more than 90 degrees, so it's gentle on the spine of fragile old books. And the glass wedge is always self-centering against the spine of the book. The only way this scheme could work better is if there was a way to turn the pages automatically. But these are old and presumably valuable works, safer to let paid low-wage drones to do the work than risk mechanical damage.
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You are right, that was the most toxic company culture I ever worked at. I'll give you an example. One day, Mr. Asshole Manager ambushed me coming back from a smoke break, he came up to me and said "You Stink!" and sprayed a can of Lysol right in my face. I had to run to the bathroom and rinse my eyes out for 20 minutes before it stopped stinging.
But I got even with him, when I busted him for embezzlement.
Exactly. I'll tell you a story from the earliest days of Solitaire, back when it just shipped (must be Win 2.0 IIRC) and way before the day of other timewasters like web surfing.
I used to work in downtown LA. Due to the rush hours, it was pretty much impossible to leave until about 6:30, so I got used to staying late working. One afternoon, while I was on the phone on hold waiting for tech support to answer, I was playing solitaire while waiting, and my asshole boss caught me. He had a snit fit, and said if I could play solitaire while on hold, I could be doing something productive instead. I said that if I lose a game of solitaire because I had my attention divided between waiting on hold and a game, nothing was lost, but if he preferred me to do a half-assed job on my paperwork while I was on hold, I would be sure to do it that way. He told me, "if I EVER catch you playing solitaire on company time, you're fired instantly" and then he stomped away.
I took him at his word. From that moment forward, every single day, I stopped working at precisely 5:00PM and played solitaire until I left the office. I spent all my lunch hour playing solitaire. From the moment I arrived in the office until 9:00AM, I played solitaire. I made sure the boss knew it too.
Eventually the boss realized that he was losing more than 2 hours of my work capacity per day, and had no way to dock my salary since it was all after hours activities. I got called in for a conference. We had a heated argument about solitaire. I told him I needed a diversion occasionally throughout the day, usually while I was on hold, and that never amounted to more than a few minutes a day at times when I was tied down on the phone and couldn't do some other work, and wouldn't it make sense to allow me my little solitaire diversion? I won. Ha!
Depends on how sensitive you are, I suppose. I used to work in color correction in photography and prepress, and I can instantly see if a room light is fluorescent or tungsten. I still find even the best fluorescents have poor color.
This is the end of the line for Bungie. They started as a Mac-only developer, then got bought by Microsoft, now they are mere puppets of Microsoft, dropping their Mac development completely. This is the kiss of death for a developer. Let me give you a similar example.
Atomic Games started as a Mac-only developer, winning awards for its V for Victory series. Eventually they evolved into doing simultaneous PC/Mac releases. Then in a fit of pique over some API changes in OS X, the lead developer dropped Mac support in the middle of their Close Combat series, and went PC only. Shortly thereafter, they were bought out by Microsoft. After a couple of additional CC releases with decreasing sales, Atomic folded up and ceased development. Now they whore out licensing rights to the CC name to other developers.
This is how to kill your company, by alienating your most devoted customers so you can make a fast buck. I predict Halo 2 is the end of the line for Halo and Bungie. Bungie made their fast buck, they have no incentive to continue making more money for MS than for themselves.
You missed the main disadvantage of fluorescent bulbs: the color sucks. The spectrum of fluorescents provides a less aesthetically pleasing light than tungsten lamps. Fluorescents tend to be greenish and cold, tungsten yellow and warm.
Well of course we got paid. Warner Music was a regular client at our shop, the job was set in motion once the designer signed the job ticket. I was prepared to discard the job and not charge them if they didn't want the output, that's when I called the manager, once I knew the job would complete the RIP successfully. I figured I should do the best I could to help the poor designer, even if he was acting irrationally in an attempt to please some idiot celebrity. So the job wasn't completed as fast as he demanded, but it was done as fast as anyone could complete it. I did my best. And of course it meant nothing in the long run because that wasn't the final artwork they ended up with. I used to deal with this sort of "crisis" every day with hundreds of clients, I guess the designer had never dealt with something like this before. I hope he learned something.
None of that is really relevant, but I'll answer anyway. It started with a tech support phone call, I tried to walk Spielberg through a fix, but it wasn't working out, so he asked me to come out to his home. I went out to his house and fixed his personal computer, his assistants had a check cut for me by the time I walked out the door (as I had prearranged). A couple of days later, I got another phone call from Spielberg, he was really happy with the work and he asked me if I'd sign a contract to be on call 24/7/365 as his personal consultant for an insultingly low amount of money. I declined.
My point was, even people who have armies of people to shield themselves from mundane tasks (like writing checks) can be convinced to pay up if you know how to work with them. For some people, it is the hardest thing in the world, standing up for yourself and demanding payment, but if you want to succeed as a consultant, you have to do it.
This has nothing to do with celebrities, you were obviously in the wrong business. I know lots of "consultants" who have difficulty collecting what is owed, they just don't have the guts to do it. I never had any trouble collecting my fees, even from Steven Spielberg.
I used to work at a big BIG computer store right next to all the LA studios, back in the late 1980s, we were known as "the Computer Store to the Stars." But that was mostly because we had a good reputation for treating the stars like regular people (there is a fine line between being polite and being obsequious). Plus we were discreet, we kept everything strictly confidential, no matter how outrageous (like for example when I attempted to recover data from a famous scriptwriter's floppy disk that had a hole burned through it from a piece of crack that flew out of the pipe's bowl).
But, you have to draw the line sometimes. Anyone below the level of Producer was almost guaranteed to be a nice, normal person that you could work with easily, but above that, egos are totally out of hand, and I wouldn't hesitate to tell them to get out of my face. I call this problem "Producer Syndrome." Producers that have the power to order people to set up $2 million in equipment in a corner of a building, and who lose tens of thousands of dollars per minute for production delays, tend to lose perspective.
Oh yeah, I've been on the receiving end of that sort of request. I used to work in a high-end service bureau, one of my jobs was doing Iris inkjet proofs. We had the fastest Iris RIP in town, a MacIIfx, and were known for our ability to turn out rush jobs quickly.
One day a frantic designer from Warner Brothers Music comes in, he wants a rush Iris print. I said no problem, I can drop everything in the queue and set up your job immediately, for only 2x the usual rate (our standard rush-drop-everything rate). I sit down with the client at the workstation and open up the Quark XPress file, it's the new CD cover for Prince's "Diamonds and Pearls." But it is totally fucked up. The designer has done everything possible that will take forever to rasterize and print, I can immediately see that this job is going to take at least 90 minutes just to RIP. The designer totally loses it, he says, "but.. but.. I have to get a print done and back to my office before Prince gets there to see it, I need it in the next 15 minutes, Prince is already in a limo on his way to my office! Money is no object, can't you get 5 or 6 people to work on it and get it done sooner?" I wasn't in the mood to explain the Mythical Man-month to him, I said, "look, we've only got one Iris printer and one RIP, but even if I had 6 of them, they don't work cooperatively, we would still only get your first print in 90 minutes, not 1 print in 15 minutes. You really should have gotten this job to us sooner if you wanted a print sooner. This job is going to take exactly as long as it takes, and no less. If you'd set this job up properly, it could complete in 20 minutes, and we go to a lot of work to educate our customers to prepare jobs to run efficiently, so if you'd like, I can explain that to you while we wait for your job to finish."
The designer broke down into tears, and ran out of my office and left the building. I decided to complete the job (there was nothing else really urgent in the queue, it could run unattended while I did other jobs), and about 2 hours later it was done (my estimate was a little low). I called the designer at Warner's but nobody could find him, I eventually spoke to his manager. He said Prince was still in the building and was ready to review the proof, so I had it sent over by my fastest, craziest motorcycle courier. I called the manager later to insure the proof was delivered promptly, he said Prince saw it and loved it. However, I noticed that the CD cover that was released for sale was a completely different design. Sheesh!
She should have quit, rather than trying earn her living working with people whose ideas she opposes. But since she didn't quit on her own, she's just another mealy-mouthed hypocrite.
This is just the latest in the notable series of EFF-related defeats that have permanently established restrictions on our civil rights. Someone PLEASE stop these guys from burning what is left of the Constitution with their ill-advised lawsuits!
Gilmore is what lawyers call an "unsympathetic defendant." Judges and juries will go out of their way to rule against them because they're such assholes. Perhaps Gilmore would have had a chance if he wasn't a party in John Barlow's bust by the TSA for transporting ketamine. But now they're all lumped together as a bunch of drug-addled nutballs, and quite right too.
Our constitutional rights are too precious to be defended by this bunch of EFF losers. They lose every major case. Maybe they should work for the OTHER SIDE and then our rights would be safer. Maybe they should quit taking so many hard drugs and dry out for a while before they meddle in constitutional law again.
Booth Babes are a cultural institution.
There is a philosophy amongst some of the more enlightened companies that the best bosses and managers are the people who are most reluctant to become managers. You sound like a perfect example. You have shown competence in your job, and know enough about management to know how difficult it is, and you are reluctant to take on these serious responsibilities. But that is what makes you the perfect candidate. You can become a good boss by cultivating the qualities you desire in your employees and in yourself. That is leadership.
Stress and bad bosses don't cause ulcers. As this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine emphasized, ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, and can be cured easily with antibiotics. You need a better doctor, preferably one that keeps up with recent medical advancements.
One reason why people endure bad bosses: switching jobs can cause loss of benefits like health insurance. Many people are encountering "job lock," a reluctance to change jobs for fear of losing their current health insurance. I've been there.
Well that answers my big question. How the hell can this device be "taking hold" when it isn't even available for sale yet?
I think you meant to say "Minidisc also uses LOSSY compression.." MD encoding in ATRAC is substantially less quality than CD.
I saw a solution to this problem a long time ago when laser printers were brand new. One company made a special paper form that was 12.5 inches long, the last 1.5 inch section was perforated and had a self-adhesive label. Then you'd stick these sheets in a legal size paper tray, maybe use that as the secondary tray in a 2 tray laser printer. The idea was that you could print a sticker on the same sheet as your letter, then you'd tear off the little performated strip at the bottom, remove the label, and stick the label on your envelope.
Of course this isn't going to solve the problem at hand.
I agree, this is a job for a simple dot matrix printer and continuous-forms labels. But it is tricky to print just one at a time, you have to design your label forms so your preprinted return address (and logo, whatever) is on the top half of the form, then you print the To: address on the bottom half of the label, so when you do a "form feed" the edge of the label clears the top of the print head and you can tear it off. In other words, the "top of form" mark is really halfway down the label, you start printing "line 1" in the middle of the label, then a Form Feed command pushes the label up so the tear-off perforation is above the printhead. Does that make sense? (BTW, you can probably tell I used to write programs to print labels on dot matrix printers)...
I used to sell a couple of varieties of dot matrix printers that avoided this problem with a clever forms-handling trick, it would pop up the top of the form above the printhead so you could rip off the form, then it would retract the form back down to the printhead so it could start printing on the top line of the next page. But I haven't seen a printer like that since the late 1980s. There used to be a few clever dot matrix printer designs that would allow you to print one label at a time with a slot-fed mechanism, I recall one IBM model from the early 1980s that did this, but AFAIK it was a unique design.
If I had to choose ONE printer above all others that was the best label printer EVER, it was the original Apple LaserWriter, or any other early 1st generation laser printer that used the early Canon laser engine (I think the HP LaserJet 1 was similar). These early models had a manual feed that was "corner fed" so you could print on something as small as a business card. I've never seen any other printer that could print on that small a label. You could probably find one of these early laser printers for cheap, and they were pretty indestructible since the mechanism was in the replaceable toner cart.
OK. You're wrong. Corely lost all the way up to the 2nd District Court of Appeals, the last step before the Supreme Court. He did not appeal to SCOTUS, the EFF even has a press release on their site announcing they gave up.
At least the PLAINTIFF knew when he was beaten, unlike the EFF.
It seems to me that you won't be able to find books that don't deal with specific apps like Photoshop at introductory levels. However, back when I first studied computer graphics in the early1970s, the standard high-level image processing/programming books were all vendor-neutral because there really was no standardization, and the books only standardized on one thing: low level code. The books focused on the image processing algorithms and the specifics of output were left up to you to adapt to your specific device. I only vaguely recall these books, but IIRC some early volumes used pseudocode, some used Pascal, and later these same volumes used C as that language became more widely accepted. So it seemed to me that while it might not be possible to avoid product-lockin at newbie levels, it might be possible, even preferable at higher levels.
Back in the early days of CG, there was one book, I forget the name, but it was one of those authoritative tomes that was referred to by its author's name. It was called something simple like "Digital Image Processing," because there really weren't any other major books on this new subject. I saw the latest edition a couple years ago as I was browsing in a bookstore, so I decided to go to Amazon and search for it, and I was surprised at what I found. Now most of the high-level books are like "Digital Image Processing with Matlab" or "Digital Image Processing in Java."
So perhaps this question is a bigger issue than just how to teach one newbie how to use GIMP instead of Photoshop. Is the Computer Science curriculum becoming too product-specific? Is there an advantage to learning algorithms separate from specific coding implementations in Java, Matlab, C, or whatever? Is there an advantage to learning something highly abstracted from coding specifics (like Knuth's pseudocode) or is everyone in such a rush to implementation that they have no time to really learn what they're doing, and they'd rather just cut and paste a few quickie algorithms?
I have bad news for you: Ziploc plastic bags are NOT chemically inert. Cheap plastic bags are not considered archival storage. If you want truly inert bags, you will have to use a specially formulated bag that is specificaly designed to be archival quality with no outgassing, made of something like archival-grade polyester or acid-free paper. Try a vendor of archival products like Light Impressions for properly archival, chemically inert storage bags.
Magnetic media, even if perfectly shielded from external magnetic fields, is not permanent. Magnetic hysteresis is not perfect, the recorded data will break down over time just due to entropy, even if the magnetic media remains stable. That is the whole point of doing an optical recording on a permanent media like DVDR, the recording will be stable as long as the substrate is stable.
In other words, using hard drives as long-term backups is a stupid idea.
Wow, that book scanner rig is just what I've been dreaming of for years. I've been thinking about mounting a couple of glass plates at a 90 degree angle, and then I could put the open book on apex of the glass, then photograph it with a couple of cameras underneath. This rig is just exactly what I was thinking of, but upside down and even cleverer, with a footpedal to lift the glass up and down onto the book. A very nice piece of design work.
The obvious advantage of this rig is that you don't have to open the spine 180 degrees and smash the books flat onto a single glass plane, you don't have to open the book up more than 90 degrees, so it's gentle on the spine of fragile old books. And the glass wedge is always self-centering against the spine of the book. The only way this scheme could work better is if there was a way to turn the pages automatically. But these are old and presumably valuable works, safer to let paid low-wage drones to do the work than risk mechanical damage.