axlrosen said: (re: low gas prices) >I think more likely they don't do because they'll >get voted out of office, because people like cheap gas. >Especially in the West (or actually anywhere >outside the Northeast) where they rely on cars >much more than anywhere else in the world.
It's really funny how the rest of the world doesn't realize how large the US is---when I was stationed in Texas (you know the triangle of emptiness formed by Midland, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth, Goodfellow Air Force Base is in the middle of that), we'd get foreign officers in for training quite regularly, a lot of the Europeans would buy 30 day Greyhound bus passes in advance of coming here w/ the intent of seeing the US on the weekends.... as to the feasibility of that, well, look up a Greyhound bus schedule for Texas some time;)
William (who wishes that trains were more viable for public transportation in the US, and misses all that narrow gauge track that was pulled up and shipped to Europe for that war...)
Reminds me of once at work---a publisher added a page to a chapter which ended on a left, meaning that all the following pages had to be incremented by 2---not that big a deal, even in Quark XPress (and trivial in the books which I do using TeX or FrameMaker), except that the index had already been done. While everyone else in the shop was busy trying to figure out how many people would have to be diverted to manually updating the index I dumped it to Quark XPress Tags, copied that to my Mac running Mac OS X, worked up a four line awk script to increment all page numbers after the new page by 2, processed the file with the script, brought it back into Quark, et voila!
Seriously, Simson Garfinkel is now a student, and as such is entering his way cool program sBook (see http://www.sbook5.com for downloads for Mac OS X and Windows---sadly the NeXTstep version isn't given away or maintained any longer, the Windows port is done w/ an older version of the QT library and won't work w/ Pen Services for Windows, crashes) in Apple's Developer's Contest this year.
(I know, 'cause I sent in the note which it listed there;)
That's, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ for those who aren't familiar with this wonderful site.
It lists a number of other out-of-print books which're of interest to geeks (and some which are in print such as the.tex source (which one may not process save under specific circumstances) for _The TeXBook_ and _The METAFONT Book_ by Dr. Donald E. Knuth). Books of interest include:
_Unix Text Processing_ Norman Walsh's _Making TeX Work_ (which is on Sourceforge) Eckel's book on programming Java and for those with kids, _The Great Logo Adventure_
Apple's InkWell comes from the ``Rosetta'' print recognizer which Apple developed for the Newton _after_ licensing the Calligrapher cursive recognizer from the Russian firm Paragraph.
Calligrapher, which is used in Tablet PCs and is available for WinCE has the advantage of being trainable, and handling fully connected writing.
Rosetta is supposed to be a bit faster (not an issue these days) and is cheaper for Apple to distribute (unencumbered)
Actually, there are only AFAIK, 2 12.1" Tablet PC units, Motion Computing's M1200 (being sold by Gateway among others), and Toshiba's Portege (which is a convertible).
All of the other units have 10.4" displays, which is okay, sort of, if one doesn't want the verisimilitude of 1:1 correspondence between screen display and printed output (drat Windows programs which're Mac ports and hard-wired to a 72 dpi display!)
Guess nostalgia is good for mod points hereabouts;)
I was rushed, and had meant to note that it's really a shame that even now, there hasn't been a successful and widespread improvement on the 2D spreadsheet---people who grokked and used Javelin and Improv are few and far between, though whether that was marketing or UI is debatable.
William (who still has Lotus Improv on his NeXT Cube;)
Accountant, ``I want a VisiCalc''
on
Implementing VisiCalc
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That was an actual statement made at an Apple dealer I was visiting when I was kid, so the salesperson sold him an Apple ][, and pretty much one of everything in the store (the guy also sprang for a 132 column daisy wheel printer....).
Killing is not blanketly illegal. Legal instances include self-defense, protecting an innocent, ensuring the security of dangerous property, &c. the legal concept here is ``justifiable homicide'' among others.
Moreover, guns have uses beyond just killing people (justified or not), hunting, punching holes in targets, collections which are didactic in nature &c.
Susan Kare left NeXT before doing much at all w/ the interface.
The initial version of Workspace.app was coded up by Chris Franklin, and of course, Keith Ohlfs did the icons (and a spiffy bitmap terminal font), as well as a (buggy) program of that name.
thatguywhoiam said: > the non-licensing of Display PostScript for OS X
Adobe backed out of their promise to provide (first a free, then a low-cost) DPS license for Apple---this is why Apple did away with ``Yellow Box'' and came up with their Mac OS X strategy.
Adobe also had a history of yanking the chains of people who'd bought DPS licenses---like resolution limiting it to less than 800dpi when NeXTstep 3 came out.
For a decent alternative to Distiller for most purposes, look at Frank Siegert's spiffy pStill.app available from www.stone.com for Mac OS X, www.pstill.com for other platforms (and free for NeXTstep, w/ a special license for Linux if memory serves). Unfortunately, it doesn't afford compatibility with.joboptions files as provided by commercial printers for pre-press, but otherwise quite serviceable (and Frank's a real PostScript wizard, and I'm not saying that 'cause he's giving the NeXT version away---I licensed it early on).
William (who mostly uses pdfTeX to makes.pdfs these days;)
Wasted lives are the Kurds whom Saddam Hussein gassed: http://www.phrusa.org/research/chemical_w eapons/ch emiraqgas2.html
Wasted lives are the Kuwaiti civilians killed during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait: http://www.meforum.org/article/238
On the other hand, people who offer up their lives in the hope that another will have a life of liberty is what I'd call a noble sacrifice---here's hoping there won't be many in this conflict if it comes to that.
Note that many Iraqis have already so lost their lives---look up struggles for the city of Kirkuk since the Gulf War, and note especially how Saddam Hussein has attempted to stack the deck there by moving in people loyal to him.
RevAaron said: >However, MS has done nothing to further the state >of the art in pen computing, just added the >ability to draw in windows.
That's disingenuous at best. It's quite a bit more than that---granted most of Tablet PC was done through developing stuff acquired by buying companies outright---but one can draw, annotate / mark up, and write (w/ consistent, trainable recognition). Okay, it's not PenPoint or the Newton OS, but it's way better than Windows for Pen Computing (3.11), and unlike Windows Pen Services 2.0 (95), seems to have few compatibility issues.
I can draw in Windows using FutureWave's SmartSketch, but I can't get HWR w/ Pen Services 2.
Tablet PC would allow me to draw with Corel's Grafigo, or Alias Wavefront's SketchBook (and if the latter isn't good enough, there's a Pro version). My big question is whether or no Windows XP is worthwile otherwise---what's it supposed to offer? Anything equivalent to NeXT/Mac OS X Services? Display PostScript/Quartz? How's the OpenType support? I've done some searching, and glanced at some books in stores or the library, but nothing seems to address these issues...
William (who really wishes NeXT had partnered w/ Go Corp. to use PenPoint machines as a portable / synchable solution)
(Taiwan's Ministry of Information Technology bought all rights to the PenPoint OS and UI back when Go Corp. when bankrupt (see Jerry Kaplan's book _StartUp_) and I'd always wondered if it'd been to use it as bargaining chip to get better prices.)
Even though Apple innaugurated it (pen computing), and they could suddenly be way ahead if they'd just dust off the Newton and re-issue it (w/ native Mac OS X synching / integration, QuickTime / MP3 support and a few other things).
But Steve Jobs wouldn't go for that, and he's assured that Apple's not in a position to do that.
Unsaid, but implicit in the above is that my Fujitsu Pen slate hasn't been able to displace my Newton for note-taking as-of-yet, and that I don't see the Tablet PC-based Windows XP as an appropriate replacement for my NeXT Cube:(
Although the print recognizer from Newton OS 2.0 lives on in Mac OS X as ``InkWell'', the cursive recognizer (licensed from Paragraph) is now central to the Tablet PC (and it's able to learn one's handwriting / improve recognition over time)
Ironically, one of things which Tablet PCs are often criticized for, battery life is a strong suit of Apple's Power PC.
Got modded down for it over at www.macslash.org, but I simply don't understand why Apple can't at least do a pen-enabled convertible version of their iBook. I'd buy it---ideally I'd like a single system to replace my NeXT Cube, Wacom ArtZ tablet, Newton and Fujitsu pen slate and Docking Station---an Apple pen convertible, or an iMac w/ a detachable pen slate display unit would do that very nicely.
Didn't see this one---it's an oldie, but a goodie for those who remember what a certain company was like once upon a time---the tech connection comes in at the punch line.
Three women were sitting in a bar, discussing their lovers.
The first woman says, ``My lover is a wrestler---he's so strong and virile and forceful---it's wonderful!''
The second woman replies, ``My lover is a poet---he's so gentle and thoughtful---it's fabulous!''
They then turn to the third woman who says, ``My lover is a salesman for IBM. He just sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it'll be when I finally get it.''
You're also leaving out Go's PenPoint which had resolution-indepent UI as a designed-in concept.
Moreover, that these OSs (incl. SGI's) failed is not a function of the (alleged) unimportance of resolution independence (which really, only Go implemented), but other forces.
Ironically, Windows has actually had a mechanism for setting logical display dpi for a long while, but it's seldom used 'cause icons don't scale and get too small, and far too many Windows apps are Mac ports w/ hard-wired 72dpi screen settings:( That said, when one does set it up, it can be well worth the trade-off of smaller icon sizes to have larger, sharper text w/o zooming and which approximates 100% size on-screen.
William (who used to have a post-it note on his display at another job, ``167% == 100%'' so that he could set that display setting, hold up a print-out against the screen and compare directly)
My NeXT Cube is still my main machine---it's unequalled for PostScript programming, TeX, PostScript-oriented illustration using Altsys Virtuoso v2 (essentially FreeHand v4, it kills me that one still needs to distill to a.pdf to view custom PostScript fills/strokes in FreeHand in Mac OS X) and general writing and correspondence.
Services, Digital Librarian/Shakespeare, Webster.app (and the Oxford's Book of Quotations), all provide a consistent synergy sadly lacking on other platforms, even Mac OS X.
iocat said: >(It's unclear if LeMay knew this would be the >result, but since he spent the months before >fire-bombing civilian areas, it seems likely >that he probably didn't care that much.)
That's a bit disingenuous.
Japanese cities of the time were not nicely, neatly divided into industrial / residential areas, and a lot of Japanese war production was at the cottage level, making that kind of differentiation in targeting well-nigh impossible. Granted, Life magazine said of the Tokyo fire-bombing, ``We have now proven that a Japanese city when properly kindled will burn like autumn leaves.'', but given the behaviour of Japan during World War II such sentiment can be understood in context.
wrt2 said: > I find it staggering that a US citizen would > quote approvingly a verse calling holy a > treasonous banner under which over 600,000 people > died between 1861 and 1865
Our current president seems to be quite glad that the Brits don't feel that way about the Revolutionary War.
>...and in whose unholy memory an apartheid regime > was built in the southern US which lasted nearly > one hundred years.
I'd prefer to say ``misrepresented memory''.
>As to Lee himself, whose former front yard is now >filled with tombstones, it does not matter to me >if he was occasionally kind, or if he loved >puppies.
By all accounts, he was constantly kind, thoughtful, considerate and polite---his record at West Point (first in his class, zero demerits) hasn't been equalled since. Moreover, a gesture of respect towards another person isn't on the same level as towards an animal, no?
someone asked: >Well, that is strange because I have never seen >this, and I have a few G4s of various age and I >never saw that. Do you have multiple machines like that?
Yes.
>And you are talking iDVD version 1. If this is >true, I don't believe you will find any machines >with iDVD2.
Slashdot Mirror
axlrosen said:
;)
(re: low gas prices)
>I think more likely they don't do because they'll
>get voted out of office, because people like cheap gas.
>Especially in the West (or actually anywhere
>outside the Northeast) where they rely on cars
>much more than anywhere else in the world.
It's really funny how the rest of the world doesn't realize how large the US is---when I was stationed in Texas (you know the triangle of emptiness formed by Midland, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth, Goodfellow Air Force Base is in the middle of that), we'd get foreign officers in for training quite regularly, a lot of the Europeans would buy 30 day Greyhound bus passes in advance of coming here w/ the intent of seeing the US on the weekends.... as to the feasibility of that, well, look up a Greyhound bus schedule for Texas some time
William
(who wishes that trains were more viable for public transportation in the US, and misses all that narrow gauge track that was pulled up and shipped to Europe for that war...)
You should be able to find _The METAFONT Book_ at www.ctan.org
William
Reminds me of once at work---a publisher added a page to a chapter which ended on a left, meaning that all the following pages had to be incremented by 2---not that big a deal, even in Quark XPress (and trivial in the books which I do using TeX or FrameMaker), except that the index had already been done. While everyone else in the shop was busy trying to figure out how many people would have to be diverted to manually updating the index I dumped it to Quark XPress Tags, copied that to my Mac running Mac OS X, worked up a four line awk script to increment all page numbers after the new page by 2, processed the file with the script, brought it back into Quark, et voila!
William
Seriously, Simson Garfinkel is now a student, and as such is entering his way cool program sBook (see http://www.sbook5.com for downloads for Mac OS X and Windows---sadly the NeXTstep version isn't given away or maintained any longer, the Windows port is done w/ an older version of the QT library and won't work w/ Pen Services for Windows, crashes) in Apple's Developer's Contest this year.
William
(I know, 'cause I sent in the note which it listed there ;)
.tex source (which one may not process save under specific circumstances) for _The TeXBook_ and _The METAFONT Book_ by Dr. Donald E. Knuth). Books of interest include:
That's, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ for those who aren't familiar with this wonderful site.
It lists a number of other out-of-print books which're of interest to geeks (and some which are in print such as the
_Unix Text Processing_
Norman Walsh's _Making TeX Work_ (which is on Sourceforge)
Eckel's book on programming Java
and for those with kids, _The Great Logo Adventure_
William
Kind of specific, but lots of fun for those with the Flash plug-in (turn off your speakers if you're at work though).
William
Apple's InkWell comes from the ``Rosetta'' print recognizer which Apple developed for the Newton _after_ licensing the Calligrapher cursive recognizer from the Russian firm Paragraph.
Calligrapher, which is used in Tablet PCs and is available for WinCE has the advantage of being trainable, and handling fully connected writing.
Rosetta is supposed to be a bit faster (not an issue these days) and is cheaper for Apple to distribute (unencumbered)
William
Actually, there are only AFAIK, 2 12.1" Tablet PC units, Motion Computing's M1200 (being sold by Gateway among others), and Toshiba's Portege (which is a convertible).
All of the other units have 10.4" displays, which is okay, sort of, if one doesn't want the verisimilitude of 1:1 correspondence between screen display and printed output (drat Windows programs which're Mac ports and hard-wired to a 72 dpi display!)
William
Maybe ``bookkeeper'' would've been a better term.
;)
;)
Guess nostalgia is good for mod points hereabouts
I was rushed, and had meant to note that it's really a shame that even now, there hasn't been a successful and widespread improvement on the 2D spreadsheet---people who grokked and used Javelin and Improv are few and far between, though whether that was marketing or UI is debatable.
William
(who still has Lotus Improv on his NeXT Cube
That was an actual statement made at an Apple dealer I was visiting when I was kid, so the salesperson sold him an Apple ][, and pretty much one of everything in the store (the guy also sprang for a 132 column daisy wheel printer....).
William
Giving up mod points here.
Killing is not blanketly illegal. Legal instances include self-defense, protecting an innocent, ensuring the security of dangerous property, &c. the legal concept here is ``justifiable homicide'' among others.
Moreover, guns have uses beyond just killing people (justified or not), hunting, punching holes in targets, collections which are didactic in nature &c.
William
Correct.
Susan Kare left NeXT before doing much at all w/ the interface.
The initial version of Workspace.app was coded up by Chris Franklin, and of course, Keith Ohlfs did the icons (and a spiffy bitmap terminal font), as well as a (buggy) program of that name.
William
thatguywhoiam said:
.joboptions files as provided by commercial printers for pre-press, but otherwise quite serviceable (and Frank's a real PostScript wizard, and I'm not saying that 'cause he's giving the NeXT version away---I licensed it early on).
.pdfs these days ;)
> the non-licensing of Display PostScript for OS X
Adobe backed out of their promise to provide (first a free, then a low-cost) DPS license for Apple---this is why Apple did away with ``Yellow Box'' and came up with their Mac OS X strategy.
Adobe also had a history of yanking the chains of people who'd bought DPS licenses---like resolution limiting it to less than 800dpi when NeXTstep 3 came out.
For a decent alternative to Distiller for most purposes, look at Frank Siegert's spiffy pStill.app available from www.stone.com for Mac OS X, www.pstill.com for other platforms (and free for NeXTstep, w/ a special license for Linux if memory serves). Unfortunately, it doesn't afford compatibility with
William
(who mostly uses pdfTeX to makes
Wasted lives are the Kurds whom Saddam Hussein gassed:w eapons/ch emiraqgas2.html
http://www.phrusa.org/research/chemical_
Wasted lives are the Kuwaiti civilians killed during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait:
http://www.meforum.org/article/238
On the other hand, people who offer up their lives in the hope that another will have a life of liberty is what I'd call a noble sacrifice---here's hoping there won't be many in this conflict if it comes to that.
Note that many Iraqis have already so lost their lives---look up struggles for the city of Kirkuk since the Gulf War, and note especially how Saddam Hussein has attempted to stack the deck there by moving in people loyal to him.
William
RevAaron said:
>However, MS has done nothing to further the state
>of the art in pen computing, just added the
>ability to draw in windows.
That's disingenuous at best. It's quite a bit more than that---granted most of Tablet PC was done through developing stuff acquired by buying companies outright---but one can draw, annotate / mark up, and write (w/ consistent, trainable recognition). Okay, it's not PenPoint or the Newton OS, but it's way better than Windows for Pen Computing (3.11), and unlike Windows Pen Services 2.0 (95), seems to have few compatibility issues.
I can draw in Windows using FutureWave's SmartSketch, but I can't get HWR w/ Pen Services 2.
Tablet PC would allow me to draw with Corel's Grafigo, or Alias Wavefront's SketchBook (and if the latter isn't good enough, there's a Pro version). My big question is whether or no Windows XP is worthwile otherwise---what's it supposed to offer? Anything equivalent to NeXT/Mac OS X Services? Display PostScript/Quartz? How's the OpenType support? I've done some searching, and glanced at some books in stores or the library, but nothing seems to address these issues...
William
(who really wishes NeXT had partnered w/ Go Corp. to use PenPoint machines as a portable / synchable solution)
Well darn.
(Taiwan's Ministry of Information Technology bought all rights to the PenPoint OS and UI back when Go Corp. when bankrupt (see Jerry Kaplan's book _StartUp_) and I'd always wondered if it'd been to use it as bargaining chip to get better prices.)
Another great conspiracy theory down the drain.
William
Also meant to say,
Even though Apple innaugurated it (pen computing), and they could suddenly be way ahead if they'd just dust off the Newton and re-issue it (w/ native Mac OS X synching / integration, QuickTime / MP3 support and a few other things).
But Steve Jobs wouldn't go for that, and he's assured that Apple's not in a position to do that.
Bummer man.
Unsaid, but implicit in the above is that my Fujitsu Pen slate hasn't been able to displace my Newton for note-taking as-of-yet, and that I don't see the Tablet PC-based Windows XP as an appropriate replacement for my NeXT Cube :(
William
esp. w/ Microsoft doing so well w/ Tablet PC.
f eb 2003/tc20030226_5785_tc024.htm
/ ch ronicle/archive/2003/02/26/BU189565.DTL& type=tech
Business week had an article on them exceeding analysts' sales expectations and even selling out at Best Buy:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/
and the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on Compaq crediting them with much of the little good news they had:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
Although the print recognizer from Newton OS 2.0 lives on in Mac OS X as ``InkWell'', the cursive recognizer (licensed from Paragraph) is now central to the Tablet PC (and it's able to learn one's handwriting / improve recognition over time)
Ironically, one of things which Tablet PCs are often criticized for, battery life is a strong suit of Apple's Power PC.
Got modded down for it over at www.macslash.org, but I simply don't understand why Apple can't at least do a pen-enabled convertible version of their iBook. I'd buy it---ideally I'd like a single system to replace my NeXT Cube, Wacom ArtZ tablet, Newton and Fujitsu pen slate and Docking Station---an Apple pen convertible, or an iMac w/ a detachable pen slate display unit would do that very nicely.
William
Didn't see this one---it's an oldie, but a goodie for those who remember what a certain company was like once upon a time---the tech connection comes in at the punch line.
Three women were sitting in a bar, discussing their lovers.
The first woman says, ``My lover is a wrestler---he's so strong and virile and forceful---it's wonderful!''
The second woman replies, ``My lover is a poet---he's so gentle and thoughtful---it's fabulous!''
They then turn to the third woman who says, ``My lover is a salesman for IBM. He just sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it'll be when I finally get it.''
William
Well, NeXTstep survives as Mac OS X....
:( That said, when one does set it up, it can be well worth the trade-off of smaller icon sizes to have larger, sharper text w/o zooming and which approximates 100% size on-screen.
You're also leaving out Go's PenPoint which had resolution-indepent UI as a designed-in concept.
Moreover, that these OSs (incl. SGI's) failed is not a function of the (alleged) unimportance of resolution independence (which really, only Go implemented), but other forces.
Ironically, Windows has actually had a mechanism for setting logical display dpi for a long while, but it's seldom used 'cause icons don't scale and get too small, and far too many Windows apps are Mac ports w/ hard-wired 72dpi screen settings
William
(who used to have a post-it note on his display at another job, ``167% == 100%'' so that he could set that display setting, hold up a print-out against the screen and compare directly)
Still cool.
.pdf to view custom PostScript fills/strokes in FreeHand in Mac OS X) and general writing and correspondence.
My NeXT Cube is still my main machine---it's unequalled for PostScript programming, TeX, PostScript-oriented illustration using Altsys Virtuoso v2 (essentially FreeHand v4, it kills me that one still needs to distill to a
Services, Digital Librarian/Shakespeare, Webster.app (and the Oxford's Book of Quotations), all provide a consistent synergy sadly lacking on other platforms, even Mac OS X.
William
iocat said:
>(It's unclear if LeMay knew this would be the
>result, but since he spent the months before
>fire-bombing civilian areas, it seems likely
>that he probably didn't care that much.)
That's a bit disingenuous.
Japanese cities of the time were not nicely, neatly divided into industrial / residential areas, and a lot of Japanese war production was at the cottage level, making that kind of differentiation in targeting well-nigh impossible. Granted, Life magazine said of the Tokyo fire-bombing, ``We have now proven that a Japanese city when properly kindled will burn like autumn leaves.'', but given the behaviour of Japan during World War II such sentiment can be understood in context.
William
wrt2 said:
> I find it staggering that a US citizen would
> quote approvingly a verse calling holy a
> treasonous banner under which over 600,000 people
> died between 1861 and 1865
Our current president seems to be quite glad that the Brits don't feel that way about the Revolutionary War.
>...and in whose unholy memory an apartheid regime
> was built in the southern US which lasted nearly
> one hundred years.
I'd prefer to say ``misrepresented memory''.
>As to Lee himself, whose former front yard is now
>filled with tombstones, it does not matter to me
>if he was occasionally kind, or if he loved
>puppies.
By all accounts, he was constantly kind, thoughtful, considerate and polite---his record at West Point (first in his class, zero demerits) hasn't been equalled since. Moreover, a gesture of respect towards another person isn't on the same level as towards an animal, no?
William
someone asked:
>Well, that is strange because I have never seen
>this, and I have a few G4s of various age and I
>never saw that. Do you have multiple machines like that?
Yes.
>And you are talking iDVD version 1. If this is
>true, I don't believe you will find any machines
>with iDVD2.
Get Info lists v1.0.1
William