Sorry, I should have been more clear in my original post. I was intrigued mostly because he said he was doing it on a Mac. I'd heard that the BT specification was supposed to make such things possible, but I was never clear on whether they were actually implemented or not. It sounds like that are -- I'm just not clear on how to use them.
I really doubt it. Not unless there was a multimillion-dollar consulting contract with each cell phone, and IBM could just buy the phones from some nameless chinese factory and slap their name on it.
Seriously, IBM is, at least to my eyes, trying to leave the hardware business as quickly as it can. They see much higher profit margins and repeat business in selling services, perhaps bundled with some hardware that nobody else makes, but mainly the services. It shouldn't be much of a surprise -- after all, the CEO (Sam Palmisano) was formerly head of IBM Global Services, their Service division. I'm pretty sure this is new, as all their previous CEOs were from Manufacturing. (Could be wrong on the history.)
I know your post was a joke, but I thought this was important enough of a point to make.
Just out of curiosity... how do you manage to use the Motorola cellphone as a modem to connect to the internet? I thought this feature was broken or unavailable on Motorola phones currently? Or required USB?
I'd be very interested in doing the same thing -- using my Motorola phone + Bluetooth to access the internet when mobile from my laptop.
I have ZERO interest in using the internet from my actual cellphone display. But using it as a bridge between my computer and the internet when I'm out of range of WiFi, that has some appeal.
On a standard Mac OS X box (not sure about Server), the root user isn't even enabled by default. You need to go pretty deep into the preferences in order to enable it.
The first user you create during the install process is an "Administrator," which means you can 'sudo -s' on the commandline and become root temporarily, but only by re-authenticating. I'm not sure if that meets your criteria for 'root-like entity,' but it seems a pretty good compromise to me.
Anything you run through the GUI (and anything you run through the CLI unless you specifically sudo and become root) executes as a non-root user. So email attachments, etc., cannot execute as root unless the user takes the very unlikely steps of enabling the root user, and then logging in as it.
There were a few privilege escalation bugs in past versions of the OS which allowed an Administrator to become root without properly authenticating again after login, but they were in early versions and I haven't heard of any recently.
Uh, the one problem I have with this is the adjective "virgin" on pulp industry. Does this mean that some people are actually using old-growth wood to make paper?
Where I used to live (Central Maine) there is a lot of paper company activity -- although less than there was in years past -- and most of the land that they use has been cut, replanted, and grown over several times. It's not exactly a slash and burn operation.
They cut the trees from the land at about the same rate that they become mature, so that any any given time across a paper company's land holdings you have areas in various stages of growth. From freshly cut to mostly mature pine trees ready to be cut down again.
I was under the impression that the wood for paper was much more of a "tree farming" operation than, say, the hardwood timber industry which produces wood for construction and furniture. And certainly it's nothing like the rainforest devastation.
I really hate to sound like an Apple fanboy by asking this, but I do mean it as a serious question and not a troll.
Where does the Macintosh OS fit in to your scheme of things? By all measurements it seems to have been built with user friendliness in mind, however it's also generally regarded as being pretty secure by design also.
Is it secure *only* because it's less popular than Windows? I.e., if it had Windows' marketshare, would it be regarded as insecure? Call me biased, but somehow I don't think it would.
User friendliness versus security is not necessarily a one-to-one tradeoff. It's possible to have something of both, although perhaps at the expense of some third quality (speed, or efficiency perhaps?).
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you outright as much as I'm just wondering where some other operating systems fit in on your continuum, if Windows is "user friendly" but insecure and *nix is "secure by design" but not user friendly.
Where did you get off thinking I was defending Microsoft in any part of my post?
I agree with you completely about Apache. That's why I said it was a totally defensible choice. Apache is a good webserver. It's just retarded of them to have tried to run it on Windows.
If you want to run Apache -- and why wouldn't you, it's a good piece of software -- then you should decide that first, and then pick an OS that's well supported, say BSD or Linux or even the commercial Unixes.
Several people have misinterpreted my original post, so I should have been more clear in the opening sentence. DCPS is doing the right thing NOW, by going back and getting rid of Windows, because they went down the wrong road. What I'm saying is correct is the corrective action they've taken -- choose the software first, then the OS. Choose Apache, then BSD. Or whatever. It was stupid of them to have decided on Windows, and then tried to run Apache on it when they wanted a web server. The person I was saying "No, wrong," to, was someone who was trying to blame the Apache developers for this problem.
It's not Apache's problem that someone got a headache from trying to run a production system using an unsupported OS and hardware configuration.
I can't comment on IIS 5, since I've never used it. It quite possibly sucks; I have no reason to disagree. I never defended it in the first place, and I'm not sure why you think I did.
I agree. This is a product I've been waiting for awhile now.
I don't have landline service. At all -- no local dialtone, nothing. However I do have a cell phone. And broadband, via cable. Of course because I'm cheap I have the minimal service plan on the phone, which is only a few hundred free minutes per month.
So anything that would let me make calls via Skype or VoIP from home without using up my cell minutes is great news to me. Especially if I know it's going to be a long call (tech support, a conference call meeting, calling the family), I could use SkypeOut and save myself the minutes for when I'm actually out of the house and need the cell minutes.
Plus, this allows me to use the contacts already stored in my cellphone, which is a big plus since I have several hundred stored in there.
I can also see this being a boon for people who do a lot of international calling, since Skype is significantly cheaper than even the best international plan I've ever seen.
Overall I think this is a neat gadget, although perhaps one with a very niche market.
I don't. What I was saying is that picking the applications, then the OS, then the hardware, is the correct way to do it. I have absolutely zero faith that the DCPS people did that. If they had, they wouldn't be trying to install Apache on whatever Frankenstenian creation they have in their server room.
However, now that the wrong way (pick hardware, pick OS, pick sofware) has failed, they seem to be backing up and starting down the correct path.
I think you and another respondent thought that I was suggesting that DCPS actually did the right thing in the beginning -- I do not think so. They're completely jacked up. I was simply illustrating what they should have done from the beginning, and are only now starting to do, now that they've screwed things up about as badly as they can.
K-8 (1960): Loss of coolant. K-19 (1961): Primary coolant system leak. 8 dead. K-11 (1965): Reactor opened with control rods unsecured. K-27 (1968): Unexplained, possibly leak. Sub later scuttled. K-140 (1968): Minor. Control rods removed without warning. K-123 (1982): Leak of liquid metal coolant in steam generator. K-314 (1985): Refueling accident. 10 dead. K-431 (1985): "Overheating." Possibly coolant leak. K-192 (1989): Primary coolant system leak. Environmental release due to human error.
Not exactly a stellar safety record. However it should be noted that the majority were not due to equipment failure so much as human error, or failure to follow established safety procedures which would have prevented the accidents. When you take human error off of the table, some of the worst releases (although not K-19, which has had the most publicity of late) are no longer present.
The GP however is correct in saying that the U.S. Navy has never had a severe reactor accident. However it has lost two nuclear submarines, the Scorpion in 1968 and the Thresher in 1963. However both losses were unrelated to the reactor systems.
I have a suspicion that this power station IS one of their submarines.
The $200k is just to tow it from wherever it's moored and rusting to this harbor, moor it up, and connect some umbilicals to the generators.
If not that, then it's probably just a few surplus reactors they had around or were using for training, put on a barge along with the required turbines and generators.
There's no way you could come up with a price tag like that, unless the key components were all salvage or surplus.
You are obviously unfamiliar with DC in general, much less the public school system in particular.
That level of incompetence is barely par for the course.
Frankly I think the real function of the DC city government is sort of a sink for dangerously incompetent quasi-governmental professionals. They come there for the promise of power, and stay for whatever small fiefdom they can build up, plus the near impossibility of ever being fired.
On the bright side, just think of how much damage they might be doing if they were actually running around in the real world. I'm just glad every day that they all seem to stay there and out of my company. (Not that we don't have any numbskulls, just none quite that egregious.) Think of the federal dollars as being spent on a sort of "intellectual pollution control."
Actually if they want to run Apache, then IMO, a BSD variant would be the most natural choice.
Although if the person below is correct in saying that they have a bunch of XServes just lying around and doing nothing, then they would be almost criminally negligent not to use them, either with OS X or Yellow Dog.
But then again, this is the D.C. Public School system.
You don't choose an OS and then choose your main-line applications.
You choose the applications you need to run, in order to get whatever job you need done, and then you choose an operating system based on those applications.
In this case, they want or need Apache as a web server. That's a fine, defensible choice. It's popular. It's pretty easy to find support on it, even without a contract. Most sysadmins are familiar with it. It has a good track record. Etc.
They also want Oracle -- exactly why they'd want to do this I'm not sure, but they do. Fine.
Based on that, they should review their choice of an operating system. And from that, they should determine their hardware requirements. Absent of a lot of legacy applications or something which predetermine the OS and hardware decision, there isn't any reason why a person should pick a OS before they choose their software. That's just backwards.
Basically, it sounds like someone just was slightly lazy and didn't want to make the tough call and tell their bosses that they needed a new operating system for their server, and now they're paying the price. Perhaps that's a result of their institutional culture, I don't know. But it sounds like they finally understood that they went the wrong way.
I should clarify, it wasn't necessarily outright hostility, it was more a knee-jerk tendency to blame "that other distro" for any problems that someone might be having, if whatever you're running isn't the same as them.
In both times I was asking questions on application-specific mailing lists, because I was already pretty sure that it was a software issue and not a distribution one. But in both cases the initial responses I got back to my question blamed the problem on my distribution (which was Mepis in one case, Debian in another). However in both cases later I got responses that actually solved the problem.
I would be wrong of me to call their responses "hostile," because they weren't. I'm sure actually they thought they were being helpful. But really they didn't know the answer to my question, and in the absence of an answer just pointed fingers at the biggest thing I had different from them.
I'm not sure if it's really anything that we can "solve," as another responder to my comment suggested, I think part of it is just human nature and the fact people are (justifiably!) proud of their personal choices and systems. It just gets a little old when you're trying to get advice.
Interesting -- thanks to you and the other person that responded. Seems like it could be a useful feature if you were willing to move it to a flat surface to scan books or objects.
As to the 'one-touch xerox' feature, that's neat, but I doubt that it'll work with Mac OS X. Actually I'd be much more interested in one-step scan to PDF, but I doubt that's implemented for Mac either.
Right now when I want to scan something to a PDF, I bring it in to the office and use one of their "photocopiers" (which is a misnomer, since it's not a photocopier in the traditional sense at all, in fact it's just a high speed sheet-fed flatbed scanner sitting next to a big laser printer) and hit the "Scan to Email" button, type in my own address, and scan away. It's a pretty slick system, with a big sheet feeder on the scanner. I've never timed it but I'm guessing at least 80ppm. It's made by IBM, I think.
That's a very interesting suggestion re the alignment strip. I've never had it happen, but I'm going to keep in mind. It makes sense for the scanner to white-balance itself against something every time it gets turned on. That way it compensates for changes in the bulb's light, etc.
Does anyone know how film scanners calibrate themselves? Obviously they don't have a white alignment strip. But I have a 35mm film scanner and everything that I scan with it comes out with a slight yellowish cast. It's a real pain to take out in photoshop afterwards.
If you really do that very often, there is a device made for doing all of the holding and lighting for you, it's called (perhaps not too creatively) a copy stand.
They used to be used all the time by anyone who was making presentation slides, because the easiest way to make a slide from a reflective original is many times just to take a picture of the reflective original with a camera. I think this sort of thing has mostly gone by the wayside now that we're in the Age of Powerpoint, and you can probably get one cheap off of eBay. You will probably have to replace the bulbs (properly called lamps) in the lights.
But use a copystand and you're sure to get consistent focus, lighting, and no keystoning. Plus, if you ever want to make 35mm slides, just attach your film camera to the mount instead of your digital and away you go.
Only problem I can see is if you have a digital camera that doesn't have the tripod socket on the lens axis, you might need to do some futzing around.
Just out of curiosity, are these OS X drivers that you developed available anywhere?
Although I doubt that I'll ever acquire (or be able to afford) one of those big industrial sheet-feeder jobs, as much as I'd like to, it'd be nice to know that the drivers are available in case I ever had the need.
How do you arrange paper and photos on the scanner bed when it's held vertically like that? Does it have clips?
Or is it just for storage, with the assumption you'll take it down from this holder and lay it flat before use?
It sounds like a really nice scanner otherwise. I used to have an old Microtek SCSI unit, but I got sold it after it sat around and collected dust for too long because there weren't any OS X drivers available.
Interesting. Would you mind letting us know the models, and whether all the features work? (Especially scanning. I'm going to assume that any "one button" type features they have are Win only.)
Wow, 2/3rds of the way down the page and I finally get an interesting response.:)
Yeah I'm wondering the same thing too. My guess is that Skype was just caught unaware and was sitting there with its ass in its hands like the original Napster service was. Big centralized login server, easy to block. "Problem" for the Chinese, solved.
VoIP isn't just going to go away, although Skype as a corporation probably will, at least from the Chinese market. But there are lots of ways to disguise an internet phone call -- encrypt it and bury it in HTTP traffic, for instance. You'd have to decentralize the system and probably lose any opportunity to make profit at least in the way Skype does now, but it's not tough to do. I don't think the Chinese would be stupid enough to just block all encrypted data traffic, since it would shut down basically all electronic commerce and banking.
The peer-to-peer file networks basically do the same thing: they provide a directory which you then use to open a direct connection between two computers on the internet, to transfer information. In the U.S., where telephones are ubiquitous and service is cheap, they get used for (mainly contraband) data. But perhaps in China, where you can buy the latest pirated movies on every corner, it's the phone conversations that are the contraband that want to be moved over such a network. The same sort of distributed database which normally holds file names, hashes, and other metadata could contain people's names or aliases and IPs.
I find it interesting and a little ironic that the file sharing networks of the U.S. and Europe could potentially become a disruptive freedom-spreading tool for people living under an oppressive government. Or maybe it's not ironic at all, it's just the degree and type of oppression they're being used against.
Okay, perhaps it's not "well marketed," but the progression is at least mostly linear.
Try doing that for Linux distributions -- it would be impossible. There are tons of them operating concurrently, each with overlapping features and areas that are strong and weak. The closest you could really get to a progression like that is not based on technological progress but popularity (top distrowatch download every month for the past few years, for example).
However, I don't think that businesses necessarily care about that. The only distributions that businesses (with the exception of huge ones that have their own IT research departments) are going to consider are the ones which are supported. So SuSE and RedHat are the major players. Within those particular distros, the version progression is pretty linear and easy to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
God yes. :) I have an iBook.
Sorry, I should have been more clear in my original post. I was intrigued mostly because he said he was doing it on a Mac. I'd heard that the BT specification was supposed to make such things possible, but I was never clear on whether they were actually implemented or not. It sounds like that are -- I'm just not clear on how to use them.
I really doubt it. Not unless there was a multimillion-dollar consulting contract with each cell phone, and IBM could just buy the phones from some nameless chinese factory and slap their name on it.
Seriously, IBM is, at least to my eyes, trying to leave the hardware business as quickly as it can. They see much higher profit margins and repeat business in selling services, perhaps bundled with some hardware that nobody else makes, but mainly the services. It shouldn't be much of a surprise -- after all, the CEO (Sam Palmisano) was formerly head of IBM Global Services, their Service division. I'm pretty sure this is new, as all their previous CEOs were from Manufacturing. (Could be wrong on the history.)
I know your post was a joke, but I thought this was important enough of a point to make.
Just out of curiosity ... how do you manage to use the Motorola cellphone as a modem to connect to the internet? I thought this feature was broken or unavailable on Motorola phones currently? Or required USB?
I'd be very interested in doing the same thing -- using my Motorola phone + Bluetooth to access the internet when mobile from my laptop.
I have ZERO interest in using the internet from my actual cellphone display. But using it as a bridge between my computer and the internet when I'm out of range of WiFi, that has some appeal.
No, at least not by my definition.
On a standard Mac OS X box (not sure about Server), the root user isn't even enabled by default. You need to go pretty deep into the preferences in order to enable it.
The first user you create during the install process is an "Administrator," which means you can 'sudo -s' on the commandline and become root temporarily, but only by re-authenticating. I'm not sure if that meets your criteria for 'root-like entity,' but it seems a pretty good compromise to me.
Anything you run through the GUI (and anything you run through the CLI unless you specifically sudo and become root) executes as a non-root user. So email attachments, etc., cannot execute as root unless the user takes the very unlikely steps of enabling the root user, and then logging in as it.
There were a few privilege escalation bugs in past versions of the OS which allowed an Administrator to become root without properly authenticating again after login, but they were in early versions and I haven't heard of any recently.
Uh, the one problem I have with this is the adjective "virgin" on pulp industry. Does this mean that some people are actually using old-growth wood to make paper?
Where I used to live (Central Maine) there is a lot of paper company activity -- although less than there was in years past -- and most of the land that they use has been cut, replanted, and grown over several times. It's not exactly a slash and burn operation.
They cut the trees from the land at about the same rate that they become mature, so that any any given time across a paper company's land holdings you have areas in various stages of growth. From freshly cut to mostly mature pine trees ready to be cut down again.
I was under the impression that the wood for paper was much more of a "tree farming" operation than, say, the hardwood timber industry which produces wood for construction and furniture. And certainly it's nothing like the rainforest devastation.
I really hate to sound like an Apple fanboy by asking this, but I do mean it as a serious question and not a troll.
Where does the Macintosh OS fit in to your scheme of things? By all measurements it seems to have been built with user friendliness in mind, however it's also generally regarded as being pretty secure by design also.
Is it secure *only* because it's less popular than Windows? I.e., if it had Windows' marketshare, would it be regarded as insecure? Call me biased, but somehow I don't think it would.
User friendliness versus security is not necessarily a one-to-one tradeoff. It's possible to have something of both, although perhaps at the expense of some third quality (speed, or efficiency perhaps?).
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you outright as much as I'm just wondering where some other operating systems fit in on your continuum, if Windows is "user friendly" but insecure and *nix is "secure by design" but not user friendly.
Huh?
Where did you get off thinking I was defending Microsoft in any part of my post?
I agree with you completely about Apache. That's why I said it was a totally defensible choice. Apache is a good webserver. It's just retarded of them to have tried to run it on Windows.
If you want to run Apache -- and why wouldn't you, it's a good piece of software -- then you should decide that first, and then pick an OS that's well supported, say BSD or Linux or even the commercial Unixes.
Several people have misinterpreted my original post, so I should have been more clear in the opening sentence. DCPS is doing the right thing NOW, by going back and getting rid of Windows, because they went down the wrong road. What I'm saying is correct is the corrective action they've taken -- choose the software first, then the OS. Choose Apache, then BSD. Or whatever. It was stupid of them to have decided on Windows, and then tried to run Apache on it when they wanted a web server. The person I was saying "No, wrong," to, was someone who was trying to blame the Apache developers for this problem.
It's not Apache's problem that someone got a headache from trying to run a production system using an unsupported OS and hardware configuration.
I can't comment on IIS 5, since I've never used it. It quite possibly sucks; I have no reason to disagree. I never defended it in the first place, and I'm not sure why you think I did.
I agree. This is a product I've been waiting for awhile now.
I don't have landline service. At all -- no local dialtone, nothing. However I do have a cell phone. And broadband, via cable. Of course because I'm cheap I have the minimal service plan on the phone, which is only a few hundred free minutes per month.
So anything that would let me make calls via Skype or VoIP from home without using up my cell minutes is great news to me. Especially if I know it's going to be a long call (tech support, a conference call meeting, calling the family), I could use SkypeOut and save myself the minutes for when I'm actually out of the house and need the cell minutes.
Plus, this allows me to use the contacts already stored in my cellphone, which is a big plus since I have several hundred stored in there.
I can also see this being a boon for people who do a lot of international calling, since Skype is significantly cheaper than even the best international plan I've ever seen.
Overall I think this is a neat gadget, although perhaps one with a very niche market.
I don't. What I was saying is that picking the applications, then the OS, then the hardware, is the correct way to do it. I have absolutely zero faith that the DCPS people did that. If they had, they wouldn't be trying to install Apache on whatever Frankenstenian creation they have in their server room.
However, now that the wrong way (pick hardware, pick OS, pick sofware) has failed, they seem to be backing up and starting down the correct path.
I think you and another respondent thought that I was suggesting that DCPS actually did the right thing in the beginning -- I do not think so. They're completely jacked up. I was simply illustrating what they should have done from the beginning, and are only now starting to do, now that they've screwed things up about as badly as they can.
I do not think that his statement applies to all navies.
y /northern_fleet/report_2-1996/11084.html
The Soviets had several nuclear accidents on board their submarines, and at least one on the surface (a nuclear icebreaking ship).
There is a site with a list here, it seems reasonably authoritative, although the source may be biased (environmentalist):
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/nav
K-8 (1960): Loss of coolant.
K-19 (1961): Primary coolant system leak. 8 dead.
K-11 (1965): Reactor opened with control rods unsecured.
K-27 (1968): Unexplained, possibly leak. Sub later scuttled.
K-140 (1968): Minor. Control rods removed without warning.
K-123 (1982): Leak of liquid metal coolant in steam generator.
K-314 (1985): Refueling accident. 10 dead.
K-431 (1985): "Overheating." Possibly coolant leak.
K-192 (1989): Primary coolant system leak. Environmental release due to human error.
Not exactly a stellar safety record. However it should be noted that the majority were not due to equipment failure so much as human error, or failure to follow established safety procedures which would have prevented the accidents. When you take human error off of the table, some of the worst releases (although not K-19, which has had the most publicity of late) are no longer present.
The GP however is correct in saying that the U.S. Navy has never had a severe reactor accident. However it has lost two nuclear submarines, the Scorpion in 1968 and the Thresher in 1963. However both losses were unrelated to the reactor systems.
I have a suspicion that this power station IS one of their submarines.
The $200k is just to tow it from wherever it's moored and rusting to this harbor, moor it up, and connect some umbilicals to the generators.
If not that, then it's probably just a few surplus reactors they had around or were using for training, put on a barge along with the required turbines and generators.
There's no way you could come up with a price tag like that, unless the key components were all salvage or surplus.
You are obviously unfamiliar with DC in general, much less the public school system in particular.
That level of incompetence is barely par for the course.
Frankly I think the real function of the DC city government is sort of a sink for dangerously incompetent quasi-governmental professionals. They come there for the promise of power, and stay for whatever small fiefdom they can build up, plus the near impossibility of ever being fired.
On the bright side, just think of how much damage they might be doing if they were actually running around in the real world. I'm just glad every day that they all seem to stay there and out of my company. (Not that we don't have any numbskulls, just none quite that egregious.) Think of the federal dollars as being spent on a sort of "intellectual pollution control."
Actually if they want to run Apache, then IMO, a BSD variant would be the most natural choice.
Although if the person below is correct in saying that they have a bunch of XServes just lying around and doing nothing, then they would be almost criminally negligent not to use them, either with OS X or Yellow Dog.
But then again, this is the D.C. Public School system.
They did exactly the right thing.
You don't choose an OS and then choose your main-line applications.
You choose the applications you need to run, in order to get whatever job you need done, and then you choose an operating system based on those applications.
In this case, they want or need Apache as a web server. That's a fine, defensible choice. It's popular. It's pretty easy to find support on it, even without a contract. Most sysadmins are familiar with it. It has a good track record. Etc.
They also want Oracle -- exactly why they'd want to do this I'm not sure, but they do. Fine.
Based on that, they should review their choice of an operating system. And from that, they should determine their hardware requirements. Absent of a lot of legacy applications or something which predetermine the OS and hardware decision, there isn't any reason why a person should pick a OS before they choose their software. That's just backwards.
Basically, it sounds like someone just was slightly lazy and didn't want to make the tough call and tell their bosses that they needed a new operating system for their server, and now they're paying the price. Perhaps that's a result of their institutional culture, I don't know. But it sounds like they finally understood that they went the wrong way.
I should clarify, it wasn't necessarily outright hostility, it was more a knee-jerk tendency to blame "that other distro" for any problems that someone might be having, if whatever you're running isn't the same as them.
In both times I was asking questions on application-specific mailing lists, because I was already pretty sure that it was a software issue and not a distribution one. But in both cases the initial responses I got back to my question blamed the problem on my distribution (which was Mepis in one case, Debian in another). However in both cases later I got responses that actually solved the problem.
I would be wrong of me to call their responses "hostile," because they weren't. I'm sure actually they thought they were being helpful. But really they didn't know the answer to my question, and in the absence of an answer just pointed fingers at the biggest thing I had different from them.
I'm not sure if it's really anything that we can "solve," as another responder to my comment suggested, I think part of it is just human nature and the fact people are (justifiably!) proud of their personal choices and systems. It just gets a little old when you're trying to get advice.
Interesting -- thanks to you and the other person that responded. Seems like it could be a useful feature if you were willing to move it to a flat surface to scan books or objects.
As to the 'one-touch xerox' feature, that's neat, but I doubt that it'll work with Mac OS X. Actually I'd be much more interested in one-step scan to PDF, but I doubt that's implemented for Mac either.
Right now when I want to scan something to a PDF, I bring it in to the office and use one of their "photocopiers" (which is a misnomer, since it's not a photocopier in the traditional sense at all, in fact it's just a high speed sheet-fed flatbed scanner sitting next to a big laser printer) and hit the "Scan to Email" button, type in my own address, and scan away. It's a pretty slick system, with a big sheet feeder on the scanner. I've never timed it but I'm guessing at least 80ppm. It's made by IBM, I think.
That's a very interesting suggestion re the alignment strip. I've never had it happen, but I'm going to keep in mind. It makes sense for the scanner to white-balance itself against something every time it gets turned on. That way it compensates for changes in the bulb's light, etc.
Does anyone know how film scanners calibrate themselves? Obviously they don't have a white alignment strip. But I have a 35mm film scanner and everything that I scan with it comes out with a slight yellowish cast. It's a real pain to take out in photoshop afterwards.
It would be cool if there were a similar fix.
If you really do that very often, there is a device made for doing all of the holding and lighting for you, it's called (perhaps not too creatively) a copy stand.
They used to be used all the time by anyone who was making presentation slides, because the easiest way to make a slide from a reflective original is many times just to take a picture of the reflective original with a camera. I think this sort of thing has mostly gone by the wayside now that we're in the Age of Powerpoint, and you can probably get one cheap off of eBay. You will probably have to replace the bulbs (properly called lamps) in the lights.
But use a copystand and you're sure to get consistent focus, lighting, and no keystoning. Plus, if you ever want to make 35mm slides, just attach your film camera to the mount instead of your digital and away you go.
Only problem I can see is if you have a digital camera that doesn't have the tripod socket on the lens axis, you might need to do some futzing around.
Just out of curiosity, are these OS X drivers that you developed available anywhere?
Although I doubt that I'll ever acquire (or be able to afford) one of those big industrial sheet-feeder jobs, as much as I'd like to, it'd be nice to know that the drivers are available in case I ever had the need.
Now *that* I would run out and buy.
How do you arrange paper and photos on the scanner bed when it's held vertically like that? Does it have clips?
Or is it just for storage, with the assumption you'll take it down from this holder and lay it flat before use?
It sounds like a really nice scanner otherwise. I used to have an old Microtek SCSI unit, but I got sold it after it sat around and collected dust for too long because there weren't any OS X drivers available.
Interesting. Would you mind letting us know the models, and whether all the features work? (Especially scanning. I'm going to assume that any "one button" type features they have are Win only.)
Wow, 2/3rds of the way down the page and I finally get an interesting response. :)
Yeah I'm wondering the same thing too. My guess is that Skype was just caught unaware and was sitting there with its ass in its hands like the original Napster service was. Big centralized login server, easy to block. "Problem" for the Chinese, solved.
VoIP isn't just going to go away, although Skype as a corporation probably will, at least from the Chinese market. But there are lots of ways to disguise an internet phone call -- encrypt it and bury it in HTTP traffic, for instance. You'd have to decentralize the system and probably lose any opportunity to make profit at least in the way Skype does now, but it's not tough to do. I don't think the Chinese would be stupid enough to just block all encrypted data traffic, since it would shut down basically all electronic commerce and banking.
The peer-to-peer file networks basically do the same thing: they provide a directory which you then use to open a direct connection between two computers on the internet, to transfer information. In the U.S., where telephones are ubiquitous and service is cheap, they get used for (mainly contraband) data. But perhaps in China, where you can buy the latest pirated movies on every corner, it's the phone conversations that are the contraband that want to be moved over such a network. The same sort of distributed database which normally holds file names, hashes, and other metadata could contain people's names or aliases and IPs.
I find it interesting and a little ironic that the file sharing networks of the U.S. and Europe could potentially become a disruptive freedom-spreading tool for people living under an oppressive government. Or maybe it's not ironic at all, it's just the degree and type of oppression they're being used against.
It uses up excess money in the Federal budget, duh.
Okay, perhaps it's not "well marketed," but the progression is at least mostly linear.
Try doing that for Linux distributions -- it would be impossible. There are tons of them operating concurrently, each with overlapping features and areas that are strong and weak. The closest you could really get to a progression like that is not based on technological progress but popularity (top distrowatch download every month for the past few years, for example).
However, I don't think that businesses necessarily care about that. The only distributions that businesses (with the exception of huge ones that have their own IT research departments) are going to consider are the ones which are supported. So SuSE and RedHat are the major players. Within those particular distros, the version progression is pretty linear and easy to understand.