Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of the IT companies don't get Linux and OSS.
Hint to Larry (and IBM, HP, Novell, etc): Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft. Commoditize the OS and make your money providing services and software on top of it.
I guess it depends on what you're photographing, but if you are copying normal old prints then a good digital camera has more than enough resolution - in fact higher resolution would be completely unnecessary.
If you already have a good digital camera and you want to digitize prints, my advice is to photograph them. There are special rigs specifically for photographing documents, but it's actually fairly easy to set up yourself. Get a tripod that allows you to reverse the central stand, i.e. so it points down between the legs. Then place is on a desk, do some tests so that you have it manually focused correctly on the desk. Take photographs of graph paper to make sure everything is level. Also, get some good lights - it's just the bulb that is important - you want ones that are "full spectrum". Diffuse the light through something, or bounce it. If you do some tests you should be able to get it so the photo is very evenly lit.
The advantage with this setup is that once it is all correctly set up, you can photograph a lot of pictures very quickly. If you have a Mac, you can plug your camera into it and use the Automator to trigger the camera shutter so you don't even have to touch the camera and risk knocking it. You can even get the Automator to automatically crop/thumbnail/whatever the images.
This looks like a good moment to remind everyone of the amazing missions to Venus of the Russians. Sending back pictures from Venus in 1975 was an amazing achievement, and it's a great shame that we heard so little about it at the time.
It's also a good time to remember that the USA government has always made out that they do not do "psyops" on American citizens, but during the Cold War it is clear that they did. I fear that they are also doing so today with the new "Long war".
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
This was a telephone survey of 1200. What kind of people agree to be surveyed over the phone? I bet half of the Slashdot community would tell the pollster to get stuffed. So how valid are the results?
And besides, actions speak louder than words. Somehow I don't think many Americans are going to all stop driving their big cars and start taking the public bus any day soon, no matter what they tell a telephone pollster...
1) SPAM 2) No guarantee a message is received 3) Sometimes not even a notification if a message doesn't get through 4) Not secure
email is one area where OSS could really innovate, because a open standards, non-proprietry solution could take off if it was better than existing email.
Why can't this happen (for example):
When I click on send, the email app checks to see if the recipient is online. If they are, it sends the message via secure, direct P2P. It marks the message as having been received. If the person isn't online, it either stores the message locally and sends it when they are, puts it on a server (if available) which will deliver it when the user is online, or as a last option sends it as a normal email. If the OSS community came up with something like this, and then built it into all OSS email clients, then I'm sure it would gain the required momentum and take off.
What I fear is that Microsoft will eventually come up with something like this and everyone will end up using it because it came with the system.
What I find interesting is that Microsoft had so many large failures recently and yet they seem to manage to get away with them without too much negative press. Remember how the whole.NET platform was going to revolutionize the way computers worked? Quitely dropped. Their MSN ambitions, Windows on mobiles - both have performed well below expectations. And yet they rarely receive bad press in the mainstream. I guess as long as their two cash cows, Windows and Office, continue to deliver amazing profits, people will see them as successful, and repeated failures will be ignored.
I imagine that this report was done by a male scientist who spends all his day in the lab, meanwhile his wife is at home spending all day with the children.
He comes home at 7pm one evening: "Darling I've made a wonderful discovery! Babies can learn words as young as ten months! Isn't that wonderful!" His wife looks at him distainfully and says: "Your son said his first word at eight months."... "Did he? Oh!"
As a father of two I don't find this surprising at all. In fact, if these scientists has just bothered to ask a group of mothers they would have found this out in five minutes.
Cast: TJ: Prince of Wales GC: Oscar Wilde MP: George Bernard Shaw JC: James McNeill Whistler
JC: Right, Your Majesty is like stream of bats' piss! All: Whuh!? TJ: What!? JC: It was one of Wilde's. GC: It certainly was not! It was Shaw's! TJ: Well, Mr. Shaw? MP: I-I-I merely meant Your Majesty that you shoned like a shaft of gold when all around is dirt. All: Oooooh... TJ: Oh, oh, very witty! MP: Right! Your Majesty is like a dose of clap!
I'd first like to say that I think there's a significant chance that you're trolling here. Secondly, if this person really did make that statement, they should have some sort of disciplinary action taken against them (if not fired out right). My guess is that if he/she really did make that statement and you had reported it to anyone, he/she would have been shit-canned on the spot.
I'm not trolling. That really happened to me, not only that but the person said it as if I was quite dumb to think otherwise. This was in about 1997. Possibly Microsoft today is a different company, but in the past their employees have been arrogant and even abusive.
No, I think they are dumb comments that show Gates is completely out of touch with the realities of education in developing countries. So he gives money to charities? So what. Is that such a big deal for someone who has so much of it?
A little personal story about MS. I used to work for an educational organisation in the UK. We were working with Microsoft on a project to demonstrate Microsoft software to schools, in return they were giving the org I was working for some free software. In discussion with their head of marketing to the education sector, I raised the point that the demonstrations weren't actually very good from a educational perspective. He said to me condescendingly - "Microsoft is not interested in education, we just want schools to buy our software". That kind of sums up MS for me.
If you're referring to the Iraq war, they did have a plan. It went something like this
1) Easily win the war 2) Iraqi's rejoyce and love the USA! 3) Privatize all of Iraqs businesses - have American companies buy them up 4) Iraqis can buy stuff from the now American companies 5) Send Iraq a big bill for the war 6) Net transfer of wealth from Iraqi oil -> USA 7) Profit!
Are you talking about the same Japan that loves the iPod?
It's got nothing to do with nationalism. The US market is different to the Japanese one. Microsoft didn't get that at all with the XBox, they're understanding it but still not succeeding with the 360.
This attitude of treating everyone as a criminal is a current trend. Not only are employers treating their employees as potential criminals, but companies treat their customers as thieves, and even the government is seems to be moving that way. Time to go live in a cabin in the mountains...
Did Microsoft ever say this was going to be a "Photoshop killer" or is that just editorial? This kind of editorial doesn't help at all, in fact it muddies the waters if it is not meant to be a product that competes with Photoshop. Editors are supposed to clarify things.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of the IT companies don't get Linux and OSS.
Hint to Larry (and IBM, HP, Novell, etc): Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft. Commoditize the OS and make your money providing services and software on top of it.
I guess it depends on what you're photographing, but if you are copying normal old prints then a good digital camera has more than enough resolution - in fact higher resolution would be completely unnecessary.
If you already have a good digital camera and you want to digitize prints, my advice is to photograph them. There are special rigs specifically for photographing documents, but it's actually fairly easy to set up yourself. Get a tripod that allows you to reverse the central stand, i.e. so it points down between the legs. Then place is on a desk, do some tests so that you have it manually focused correctly on the desk. Take photographs of graph paper to make sure everything is level. Also, get some good lights - it's just the bulb that is important - you want ones that are "full spectrum". Diffuse the light through something, or bounce it. If you do some tests you should be able to get it so the photo is very evenly lit.
The advantage with this setup is that once it is all correctly set up, you can photograph a lot of pictures very quickly. If you have a Mac, you can plug your camera into it and use the Automator to trigger the camera shutter so you don't even have to touch the camera and risk knocking it. You can even get the Automator to automatically crop/thumbnail/whatever the images.
This looks like a good moment to remind everyone of the amazing missions to Venus of the Russians. Sending back pictures from Venus in 1975 was an amazing achievement, and it's a great shame that we heard so little about it at the time.
It's also a good time to remember that the USA government has always made out that they do not do "psyops" on American citizens, but during the Cold War it is clear that they did. I fear that they are also doing so today with the new "Long war".
I was about to post the same thing.
This is just about a Canadian company that got too successful in a key technology area in the USA, so the USA system f*cked it.
I hope not. I think most people will use the Windows just for the stuff they really can't get on OSX. Like many games.
Also this:
Word to the Wise
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
Dear employee,
We hope you enjoy working here. Please work hard and do some great work for us!
Thanks,
Your employer.
P.S. WE DON'T TRUST YOU.
This was a telephone survey of 1200. What kind of people agree to be surveyed over the phone? I bet half of the Slashdot community would tell the pollster to get stuffed. So how valid are the results?
And besides, actions speak louder than words. Somehow I don't think many Americans are going to all stop driving their big cars and start taking the public bus any day soon, no matter what they tell a telephone pollster...
The ramifications of requiring direct a p2p connection are ridiculous.
Why? A lot of other P2P software does it successfully.
A system like Skype, for instance, works and has been amazingly successful. What is the problem?
Email sucks:
1) SPAM
2) No guarantee a message is received
3) Sometimes not even a notification if a message doesn't get through
4) Not secure
email is one area where OSS could really innovate, because a open standards, non-proprietry solution could take off if it was better than existing email.
Why can't this happen (for example):
When I click on send, the email app checks to see if the recipient is online. If they are, it sends the message via secure, direct P2P. It marks the message as having been received. If the person isn't online, it either stores the message locally and sends it when they are, puts it on a server (if available) which will deliver it when the user is online, or as a last option sends it as a normal email. If the OSS community came up with something like this, and then built it into all OSS email clients, then I'm sure it would gain the required momentum and take off.
What I fear is that Microsoft will eventually come up with something like this and everyone will end up using it because it came with the system.
What I find interesting is that Microsoft had so many large failures recently and yet they seem to manage to get away with them without too much negative press. Remember how the whole .NET platform was going to revolutionize the way computers worked? Quitely dropped. Their MSN ambitions, Windows on mobiles - both have performed well below expectations. And yet they rarely receive bad press in the mainstream. I guess as long as their two cash cows, Windows and Office, continue to deliver amazing profits, people will see them as successful, and repeated failures will be ignored.
I imagine that this report was done by a male scientist who spends all his day in the lab, meanwhile his wife is at home spending all day with the children.
He comes home at 7pm one evening: "Darling I've made a wonderful discovery! Babies can learn words as young as ten months! Isn't that wonderful!" His wife looks at him distainfully and says: "Your son said his first word at eight months."
As a father of two I don't find this surprising at all. In fact, if these scientists has just bothered to ask a group of mothers they would have found this out in five minutes.
Oscar Wilde's Party
Cast:
TJ: Prince of Wales
GC: Oscar Wilde
MP: George Bernard Shaw
JC: James McNeill Whistler
JC: Right, Your Majesty is like stream of bats' piss!
All: Whuh!?
TJ: What!?
JC: It was one of Wilde's.
GC: It certainly was not! It was Shaw's!
TJ: Well, Mr. Shaw?
MP: I-I-I merely meant Your Majesty that you shoned like a
shaft of gold when all around is dirt.
All: Oooooh...
TJ: Oh, oh, very witty!
MP: Right! Your Majesty is like a dose of clap!
My dog doesn't have an iPod!
But then, I don't have a dog.
I'd first like to say that I think there's a significant chance that you're trolling here. Secondly, if this person really did make that statement, they should have some sort of disciplinary action taken against them (if not fired out right). My guess is that if he/she really did make that statement and you had reported it to anyone, he/she would have been shit-canned on the spot.
I'm not trolling. That really happened to me, not only that but the person said it as if I was quite dumb to think otherwise. This was in about 1997. Possibly Microsoft today is a different company, but in the past their employees have been arrogant and even abusive.
transforming the middle east into a haven for democracy
It makes me sad that people are so naieve and willing to swallow the government progaganda.
I think he's expressing genuine concern.
No, I think they are dumb comments that show Gates is completely out of touch with the realities of education in developing countries. So he gives money to charities? So what. Is that such a big deal for someone who has so much of it?
A little personal story about MS. I used to work for an educational organisation in the UK. We were working with Microsoft on a project to demonstrate Microsoft software to schools, in return they were giving the org I was working for some free software. In discussion with their head of marketing to the education sector, I raised the point that the demonstrations weren't actually very good from a educational perspective. He said to me condescendingly - "Microsoft is not interested in education, we just want schools to buy our software". That kind of sums up MS for me.
If you're referring to the Iraq war, they did have a plan. It went something like this
1) Easily win the war
2) Iraqi's rejoyce and love the USA!
3) Privatize all of Iraqs businesses - have American companies buy them up
4) Iraqis can buy stuff from the now American companies
5) Send Iraq a big bill for the war
6) Net transfer of wealth from Iraqi oil -> USA
7) Profit!
Unfortunately the plan didn't quite work out...
Don't underestimate the nationalism of Japan.
Are you talking about the same Japan that loves the iPod?
It's got nothing to do with nationalism. The US market is different to the Japanese one. Microsoft didn't get that at all with the XBox, they're understanding it but still not succeeding with the 360.
This attitude of treating everyone as a criminal is a current trend. Not only are employers treating their employees as potential criminals, but companies treat their customers as thieves, and even the government is seems to be moving that way. Time to go live in a cabin in the mountains...
Sorry that should have been:
"British Rail regret to announce... We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you."
The b*stards.
Is this the same British Rail that can't even keep a train running on time? What chance have they got with a flying saucer?
"British Rail would like to announce that the 17.34 UFO to Mars has been delayed due to a slight wind and a few leaves blowing in the air..."
Did Microsoft ever say this was going to be a "Photoshop killer" or is that just editorial? This kind of editorial doesn't help at all, in fact it muddies the waters if it is not meant to be a product that competes with Photoshop. Editors are supposed to clarify things.
Me too!
Anyone from Skype reading this - hurry up with Skype 2 for Mac. It will be a perfect match for the latest Apple Power Books.