I use InDesign, but I have to admit that I can't compare it to the other ones because I've not used versions of them more recent than 10 years ago.
Things I like about InDesign:
The multi-line justifier: Justifies whole paragraphs instead of one line at a time, leading to a better overall colour.
Full support for OpenType, and optical kerning.
Automatic hanging of horizontal text strokes outside the margins (optional.)
What I don't like:
Hanging of strokes is per-frame attribute, not a paragraph style attribute.
Composing support is lousy. It's better in InDesign CS than in InDesign 2 because they now have the ability to edit your copy in a plain-text window (think Textedit style.) But really, the easiest way to compose copy is in MS-Word.
Support for MS-Word import could be a bit better. Even if you use styles in Word, you still have tons of word-crap-styles (bold is not a style, it's an attribute dammit) that you have to fix in InDesign. It'd be nice if they had a "load new paragraph styles over existing ones" instead of having to do it manually.
Indexing uses too many dialog boxes IMHO. But that's a minor point.
Annoying methods for doing auto-numbering and bulleting (i.e. do them in word.)
Footnote support sucks.
Overall, I think it's a great program. And it's highly extensible, but any non-trivial extentions (e.g. good footnoting) are v. expensive.
That's actually a great opportunity. Many universities right now have a shortage of professors, and as the global economy recovers, more money will filter into the schools, allowing them to hire even more professors.
Right now at my school, most of the professors who don't suck are almost constantly being recruited by other schools. Most professors searching for jobs can easilly find multiple offers.
And the benefits aren't bad either:
Full professors can make $150-$300k per year, depending on the school
If you get tenured, you're basically guaranteed your job for life
You get to work on things that interest you
You can get grants to hire slaves^h^h^h^h^hgrad students to do the boring parts of the work for you.
Given that Crystal Ball
starts at $714 and goes up from there, I can see it being a hard sell at companies where people don't understand statistics...
Hi Boss, I need your signature to buy this "Crystal Ball" product
What's it do?
It lets me do probabalistic analysis and expected values in my spreadsheets.
Well, I expect that the numbers in your spreadsheets are correct, so you don't need a program for that. And I don't know what probabalistic analysis is.
Let me use an analogy - say you flip a coin; you have a 50% probability that it's heads, and 50% that it's tails, right
You mean you want software that helps you guess in your spreadsheets? You're Fired!
I'm finding it funny that people are saying "What? Jail time is way too much for this? Shouldn't you just make them take it down?"
That's no deterrent... Make a million, someone tells you to stop. You still have the million. Where's the deterrance?
On the other hand, most people don't want to go to prison. Prison is bad. It scares people who aren't already criminals. What are you going to answer on the next job interview about what you were doing the past two years? "Oh, I was in prison because of a stupid federal law. And I learnt all about the bizzare kinds of sex that I was redirecting people to first-hand." Or first-arse. Whatever.
Re:"prepare-for-disappointment department"?
on
The Simpsons Movie
·
· Score: 1
it is notoriously difficult to switch from half-hour episodes to a full 90-minute movie
I remember talking about basically the same thing with my friends about fifteen years ago, when they were talking about making a weekly, half hour version of the Simpsons, based on the 45 second spots that were then airing on the Tracey Ullman show.
"There's no way they can make a whole half hour show out of this - It'll just be so lame."
Oh come on, look at it from the other side - Wouldn't it be fun to h4x0r the voting boxes and elect Linus president? Or even better, RMS? Or that lady from the "Where's the Beef" commercials in the mid '80s?
Final election results:
G. Bush: 2 votes
X. Democrat: 3 votes
W.T. Beef: 58,321,742 votes
Actual congress transcript:
Joe X: We see that increasing the M1 money supply will help to invigorate job development in my riding...
President: Where's the Beef?!?
The negative reactions and relentless lawsuits started to take their toll, and Wallace decided to get out of the business in 1997.
"I was getting tired of the controversy. My goal was never to bother people," Wallace said.
Translation:
None of the millions of people, whose inboxes I clogged with some of my billions of pieces of spam were ever bothered by it. But a few corporations and lawyers thought they could make money off me, and that bothered me. Why wouldn't people leave me alone?
Someone should spray-paint "Spam King" every few weeks on his bar. At least. For the man who basically invented spam, the gauntlet should never go down.
It'd be cool if when he's 80 or so, someone punched him in the gut. Anti-spammer actions should be like the mafia... You never escape from them.
Good thing I don't live in New Hampshire, because then I'd have to hate the fact that I'm too law abiding to do it myself.
Network Appliance file servers (www.netapp.com) have had this since, oh, at least 1998 or so. Whenever one crashes, it emails the crash summary and core file to Netapp support, and you semi-magically receive an email telling you that (a) you need to download a patch or (b) new hardware has already been shipped.
I don't know the internals, as my experience was as a satisfied customer, but this sounds awful similar.
Another case of misunderstanding the common user...
Joe Average isn't going to know how to set up a *nix server, nor is he even going to think about it. Joe Average wants to go into his local computer shop and buy something that just works.
I had the same idea for this product last year, but couldn't find an affordable way to build it. He's got a nice price point; let's see if the masses take it on.
Disclaimer: I'm a U of C grad, but I graduated in 1993.
At the time, U of C didn't teach C either. Students were expected to be able to learn "C" on their own by third year, since they'd already been exposed to three or four different programming languages from different spheres. Once you were in third year, you could, for the most part, do your projects in whatever language you wanted, as long as the TA knew the language. Most students did their projects in C.
As well, the first year courses almost always used languages that students were unlikely to have encountered ever before. This helped level the field between the people who were "xc3113nt C h4x0rz" and everyone else. Everyone started from first principles in functional programming.
By the time I'd hit third year, I'd had courses where the language of choice were Pascal and Modula/2 from the "Von Newman" sphere, ML from the functional sphere, and PDP-11 assembly (was being replaced with SPARC assembly at the time) from the low level sphere.)
By the time I'd graduated, I'd added courses that required languages based on category theory (Charity) and one based on primitive recursion (it only had zero(), succ() and recurse(x,y) functions and you had to define the whole rest of the language yourself based on those.) If I'd taken different courses, I would have been exposed to Lisp, Prolog, SQL, etc.
The theory behind all this was they wanted to teach you different ways to think about problems, not just how to pound in a solution in C. People who just wanted to learn to code in C, be able to say they were a "programmer" and go on to a career went to SAIT or DeVry.
Pick any academic program and you'll find people who think something is "missing" or can be "better." That's why they evolve over time. The main flaw I found with the U of C program (IMHO) was that the only course that really required you to deal with a large project (CPSC 510, full year, write a compiler from scratch) wasn't a mandatory course.
But I'm glad I got my degree from U of C. And I'm not crippled in my ability to work in C/C++ because I never took a half-year course in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I use InDesign, but I have to admit that I can't compare it to the other ones because I've not used versions of them more recent than 10 years ago.
Things I like about InDesign:
What I don't like:
Overall, I think it's a great program. And it's highly extensible, but any non-trivial extentions (e.g. good footnoting) are v. expensive.
That's actually a great opportunity. Many universities right now have a shortage of professors, and as the global economy recovers, more money will filter into the schools, allowing them to hire even more professors.
Right now at my school, most of the professors who don't suck are almost constantly being recruited by other schools. Most professors searching for jobs can easilly find multiple offers.
And the benefits aren't bad either:
So perhaps consider getting a Ph. D.
You mean like picking bugs out of each other's hair to show support?
Or having sex with all the females in the office in front of the men to show your power?
Or flinging sh*t at people who say stupid things in meetings?
The funny thing is, it'd still be better than the way things work at my office.
Disclaimer: Actually, I voted for Joe Clark, back before the rednec^h^h^h^h^h^hreform party took over the tories.
Hi Boss, I need your signature to buy this "Crystal Ball" product
What's it do?
It lets me do probabalistic analysis and expected values in my spreadsheets.
Well, I expect that the numbers in your spreadsheets are correct, so you don't need a program for that. And I don't know what probabalistic analysis is.
Let me use an analogy - say you flip a coin; you have a 50% probability that it's heads, and 50% that it's tails, right
You mean you want software that helps you guess in your spreadsheets? You're Fired!
Click regions, then tell me how in the heck to select Canada?
We're not part of the united states... and despite the stereotype, we're not a polar region...
Central America gets its own check box... I guess being the second largest country in the world doesn't mean very much.
Ya got to have blue hair!
Seeing as I live in Canada, and it only accepts US addresses, that's a strange definition of "local."
At least I don't live in Europe or Asia... "Local: Get on a plane..."
So how's this:
That's no deterrent... Make a million, someone tells you to stop. You still have the million. Where's the deterrance?
On the other hand, most people don't want to go to prison. Prison is bad. It scares people who aren't already criminals. What are you going to answer on the next job interview about what you were doing the past two years? "Oh, I was in prison because of a stupid federal law. And I learnt all about the bizzare kinds of sex that I was redirecting people to first-hand." Or first-arse. Whatever.
I remember talking about basically the same thing with my friends about fifteen years ago, when they were talking about making a weekly, half hour version of the Simpsons, based on the 45 second spots that were then airing on the Tracey Ullman show.
"There's no way they can make a whole half hour show out of this - It'll just be so lame."
History proved us wrong...
AIXGaming?
You mean it runs on the RS/6000's PowerPC processor?
Yay! I've gotten so sick of rogue in an xterm.
Final election results:
G. Bush: 2 votes
X. Democrat: 3 votes
W.T. Beef: 58,321,742 votes
Actual congress transcript:
Joe X: We see that increasing the M1 money supply will help to invigorate job development in my riding...
President: Where's the Beef?!?
Translation: None of the millions of people, whose inboxes I clogged with some of my billions of pieces of spam were ever bothered by it. But a few corporations and lawyers thought they could make money off me, and that bothered me. Why wouldn't people leave me alone?
Boo Fscking Hoo.
It'd be cool if when he's 80 or so, someone punched him in the gut. Anti-spammer actions should be like the mafia... You never escape from them.
Good thing I don't live in New Hampshire, because then I'd have to hate the fact that I'm too law abiding to do it myself.
Case in point: Anyone who's ever gone through an employee survey, do you know anyone that checked the box saying "Actually, I think I'm overpaid?"
Or the one "Are you thinking of leaving?" The number of employees that respond affirmatively is way greater than the number who actually leave.
I don't know the internals, as my experience was as a satisfied customer, but this sounds awful similar.
Hmmm, let's see...
Tight Outfit,
Obviously Female,
At a *nix-related function
By comparison to the 0 other women matching that criteria, I'd say she's comparably hot...
Ran out of mobility right before the update. Again. Just call me F0dder.
So where's that Empire game you promised?
Joe Average isn't going to know how to set up a *nix server, nor is he even going to think about it. Joe Average wants to go into his local computer shop and buy something that just works.
I had the same idea for this product last year, but couldn't find an affordable way to build it. He's got a nice price point; let's see if the masses take it on.
When are we going to see a working linux version of SVG?
I'm constantly amazed at how the so-called "Land of the Free" has so little freedom...
At the time, U of C didn't teach C either. Students were expected to be able to learn "C" on their own by third year, since they'd already been exposed to three or four different programming languages from different spheres. Once you were in third year, you could, for the most part, do your projects in whatever language you wanted, as long as the TA knew the language. Most students did their projects in C.
As well, the first year courses almost always used languages that students were unlikely to have encountered ever before. This helped level the field between the people who were "xc3113nt C h4x0rz" and everyone else. Everyone started from first principles in functional programming.
By the time I'd hit third year, I'd had courses where the language of choice were Pascal and Modula/2 from the "Von Newman" sphere, ML from the functional sphere, and PDP-11 assembly (was being replaced with SPARC assembly at the time) from the low level sphere.)
By the time I'd graduated, I'd added courses that required languages based on category theory (Charity) and one based on primitive recursion (it only had zero(), succ() and recurse(x,y) functions and you had to define the whole rest of the language yourself based on those.) If I'd taken different courses, I would have been exposed to Lisp, Prolog, SQL, etc.
The theory behind all this was they wanted to teach you different ways to think about problems, not just how to pound in a solution in C. People who just wanted to learn to code in C, be able to say they were a "programmer" and go on to a career went to SAIT or DeVry.
Pick any academic program and you'll find people who think something is "missing" or can be "better." That's why they evolve over time. The main flaw I found with the U of C program (IMHO) was that the only course that really required you to deal with a large project (CPSC 510, full year, write a compiler from scratch) wasn't a mandatory course.
But I'm glad I got my degree from U of C. And I'm not crippled in my ability to work in C/C++ because I never took a half-year course in it.