I wish, but MS will use their browser market dominance to make sure that IE doesn't support it. Or if they do decide to incorporate it they'll use their tried-and-trusted tactic of "embrace(alter) and extend", so any W3C standards that are supported suddenly only seems to work properly in IE, thanks to a few subtly different things (not that they've done that before, cough - document.all, element.innerHTML - cough!). And as they'll have also aquired Dreamweaver (the most popular web development tool) they will therefore control the output format of 90% of the code produced; I dread to think how this'll affect the web as a whole.
Wouldn't surprise me if they just stuck their middle finger up at the W3C and took control for themselves... or am I being overly paranoid?
This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.
Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading/. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.
I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.
Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.
Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:
They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological
disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
Although fictitious, they all represent real people with
disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with
disabilities use the Internet.
They all have difficulty reading your web site.
By using these characters he encourages you to put yourself in their shoes, and therefore be more considerate.
If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.
Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these
standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll
see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group
responsible for these guidelines.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such
as Tantek Çelik
(who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about
standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the
time...
Here in the Isle of Man there are now only two record stores, HMV and Switched On Records. Yes, you can do mail order but there's nothing as convenient as being able to buy something straight away at a store.
HMV shut down all the local shops by pricing them out of the market, when they first arrived, but now have an average (non-sale) price of £18.99 for a CD, which is just extortionate.
Switch On survives because the owner Gid works hard and is enthusiastic about what he does, and mainly 'cause he isn't in direct competition with HMV, targetting vinyl and DJs instead. And he supports local bands, allowing them to sell their CDs through his shop with little/no markup - something HMV are not willing to do AT ALL (company policy apparently).
In conclusion I'd agree that CDs are way too expensive over here, but what can the consumer do about it? Personally I DON'T download music, but I support local bands a lot, buy secondhand whereever possible, and if I can't get it secondhand I'll wait for a sale until I can get the CD I want for
Cheers,
VNC seems to be the way ahead as screen capture is generally a very different problem to standard video capture/encoding. so using VirtualDub with Huffy, DivX, etc. would all be pretty useless for this application, as they're not designed for screen capping.
I'd check out the mailing lists at the real VNC website and maybe ask the question there. Trolling through the above archives I found a link to this, which seems like it may well be ideal (though very rough round the edges from the looks of things, I haven't had time to check it out yet).
Linux/UNIX but as the guy says should work with CygWin. Don't think it's GPL, but an e-mail to the man may clarify what you can do with it.
You can of course get VNC for windows at the above site, or TightVNC over at SourceForge(which may/may not work with the above, I'd stick to straight VNC until you've tested the above).
It is properly S-Q-L because Sequel is something different (Structured English Query Language, an IBM project that never went anywhere). But the term "sequel" for SQL has come into common use, so it's the de facto pronounciation.
I pretty sure it's interchangeable.
SEQUEL is indeed Structured English QUEry Language, which was invented by IBM back in the 70's as the query language for their relational database System/R. But it did go somewhere: into the public domain, where the acronym was shortened to SQL.
Its success is as much attributeable to Relational Software Inc. as IBM (who continued to use it in System/R's followup SQL/Data System, and SQL/DS's successor DB2), as Relational Software chose it as the query language for their fledgling RDBMS, which you may have heard of - ORACLE
As it became apparent that SQL was here to stay, ANSI created a standard definition (the first of which was SQL-89). Today's SQL standard is based mostly on IBM's implementation, with a good few substantial additions.
So as I understand it, SQL is not really something different to SEQUEL, it's just a newer evolution.
Wired just recently did a complete redesign of their site to follow Web standards and use XHTML and CSS. More info is here [wired.com].
Yes, I submitted a story on this to Slashdot, but apparently it wasn't considered "newsworthy".
Nevermind that it's probably the biggest milestone for XHTML and CSS supporters yet. Nevermind that it proves that a large, popular, high-traffic website can successfully design and implement a site that makes itself accessible and easy to read in Lynx, that doesn't need to use tables for layout, needs less bandwidth to run, with less server load, will be easier to maintain, and will be viewable in every browser, whether Netscape 1 or a Pocket IE. Nope not newsworthy. Instead we get articles telling us how duct tape can remove warts, great... Alright, alright, I'll stop whining now!
I wouldn't download the raw TIFFs though unless you have a use for them, and like 38MB images:) Sample 1 has brown splodges all over the wall areas, which I don't think are artifacts from the camera but rather markings on the walls themselves. I'm quite surprised that Canon didn't use some proper studio settings here for 1 & 2. Sample 3 also appears to have artifacts though at first glance, notice all along the left-hand side on the wall, on the colour chart and below the fruit, hmmmm... strange... I'll have to inspect the full-res. versions and see what I can find. Image sharpness around the edges looks good though, I guess Canon must have found a way round the CCD falloff?
I've got to say I'm damn impressed by these, I was unsure how the newer SLRs would fare, especially given the teething-troubles of the new Contax, but Canon have come up with a winner here IMHO. Think I'll stick with my EOS-3 until these babies come down in price a bit though !!:)
Cheers,
While the UI isn't brilliant it's certainly useable, but what make HTML-Kit great is that it's got HTML-Tidy integration! - Import and tidy up sloppy code (not mine I might add), upgrade to CSS automatically, convert to XHTML in 5 seconds, auto-indent and beautify code, etc.etc. Truly fantastic stuff.
I've got one at home and it's very sweet looks wise (esp. when combined with a TFT and a wireless keyb. & mouse), but the internal design leaves a LOT to be desired.
Basically the power supply is at the FRONT of the case, below where the floppy drive sits (if you put one in), and air is sucked in through the front (by a 6cm fan mounted at the back of the case towards the top), then goes through the power supply, into the flat IDE cables, past the HDD and then out the back at the top through a 6cm fan. The PSU itself has a tiny 4cm (very noisy) fan that is mounted on the left side, and blows STRAIGHT INTO THE SIDE OF THE CASE, instead of OUT.
This is some of the worst airflow design I've ever seen, as it's basically heating up the air straight away (through the PSU), then flowing it over the HDD (extra-bad if you've got a 7200RPM disk in there), then out the back.
So if you've got a dremel, do a bit of modding and cut a nice neat airhole in the left side next to the PSU fan [grin]
Note that they've fixed this in the SS51, the PSU is now mounted at the back (where it should be), and its fan now blows out of the case through a grill. All in all a much better design.
What's your opinion on the paths of computer games and movies and their relationship?
For instance, could you see games and films converging to the point where the effects algorithms (eg. pixel/vertex shaders, or particle fx for tornadoes and the like) are basically the same for both? Have you ever done an collaborations like this with games software houses already?
Also, do you think consumer graphics hardware (games consoles, PC graphics cards, etc.) and commercial-grade equipment are getting closer in their abilities, or is the gap as wide as ever?
It'd do eBay a whole lot of good to have an web service interface, the added flexibility would surely increase their sales considerably.
Their whole "e-mail when you get outbid" and MS Messenger alert system is waaay too slow. I usual get my "auction has finished" mails about a 24 hrs after it actually finished, and messenger alerts tend to take about 10 minutes or more (no good when someone snipes you in the last 5 min of the auction), so the ability to write a web service that'd tell me INSTANTLY that I've been outbid (or whatever) would be very handy.
Of course eBay might not want you to be able to bid via a web service (they might want you to have to use their own designed interfaces to make things fair for everybody), but in that case it's simple enough to just leave those methods for the moment and stick to the "read-only" and search functions.
The other thing that I'd wish for is that companies like Amazon would roll-out their services SIMULTANEOUSLY worldwide. It sucks that it only applies to.com, what about.co.uk,.de,.fr,.co.jp?
Obscure film references:
Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead
of blue and assign it hex value of $0204FB. The color
looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer would
have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like.
Only someone intimately familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know
that Lancelot's favorite color was blue. If a maintenance programmer can't quote
entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a
programmer.
Based around the MiniITX spec, these integrated-solution PCs have a very small form factor (approx. 20cm x 20cm motherboard), and can be squeezed into whatever case you can find (or make yourself).
Ok, granted. Problem is, business systems need a good database on the scale of DB/2 or Oracle. A toy database built by volunteers just won't cut it.
Have you heard of Interbase? It's an industrial-strength DBMS written by Borland,
very much along the lines of Oracle/MS-SQL et al. Did you know they open-sourced it a few years ago?
The result:
Firebird is ACID-compliant, includes stored procedures, views, sub-selects, transactions,
replication, etc. (ie. all the stuff that MySQL doesn't do/claims to do
"soon" in the documentation), and runs on the following platforms:
32-bit Windows
Linux (i386)
Solaris (Sparc)
HP-UX (i386)
MacOS X
Lesser-supported builds:
FreeBSD
Solaris (i386)
Sand AIX
Historically, Firebird (under it's original name) has also been built and run
on the following platforms: DG-UX, SGI-IRIX, NCR3000, CRAY, DEC-Ultrix, DEC-VMS,
UnixWare, Apollo, OS2, Novell Netware and HP MPE/XL.
So it's definitely NOT a "database built by volunteers".
Besides, the coders/contributors to the Firebird source that I've personally spoken to (and
that hang around the Delphi-DB
list) I'd rate as some of the most knowledgeable dbms experts around. Want
to contribute?
Guess you haven't heard of it, otherwise you'd probably be using it already....
Personally I'm usually pretty drained after a fun day staring at the screen and typing like a monkey, and sometimes completely avoid the PC when I get home, prefering to chill with a decent book (currently
Cradle to Cradle), zone-out in front of the TV, or go cycling in the beautiful Isle of Man (watch "Waking Ned Devine" for an idea of the
scenery - jealous?<grin/>).
So I guess my completely-non-tech question is:
What do you do in "loafing" time (ie. loaf - To pass time at leisure; idle.),
when you've left the office, "lost" the pager/Blackberry/PDA/mobile
etc., and got away from it all?
Also check Philip Greenspun's (of
ArsDigita fame) photo.net which is a possibly the
best (and original) one-stop photography resource on the net.
The tutorials are fantastic, and the community
is incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, you honestly won't find more pros and
experts in one place.
Latest digital reviews include the Minolta
Dimage 5, the Canon EOS D60 (I
so want one of these! Or an EOS-1D if I won the lottery), and the Nikon
D100, so it proves that they're very up-to-date.
Just thought I'd drop a few links that those of us using Borland's fantastic Delphi should definitely check out:
DUnit- is an Xtreme
testing framework, very similar to JUnit for Java (on which DUnit is
based). The basic idea is that you develop appropriate verification
tests at the same time you develop your code, and then use these test to
make sure you haven't screwed anything up inadvertantly! Free and Open
Source (Mozilla 1.1)
PASDoc is the Pascal equivalent of JAVADoc, which
lets you automatically generate HTML and LaTeX documentation directly from
your Pascal unit source code files. Nice!
GPProfile - a nice free
and Open Source profiler for Delphi. Does what it says on the tin.
MemCheck is a debugging tool
which hunts memory leaks, memory corruption, use of an object after its destroying, etc.
Very useful, if a bit archaic to use. Free and Open Source.
OptimalCode is a fantastic
site dedicated to high-performance Delphi code. If you need to
optimise a routine so it's faster than sh*t off a shovel, this site'll show
you how.
That should be enough to get your code into shape, get cracking:)
Microsoft are still shipping the embraced and extended Java, of course, but now they call it 'C#'.
Well, kindof. I'd say this is actually more embracing and extending Borland's Delphi, as MS bought out Anders Hjelsberg (the creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi/Object Pascal) and got him to write C#. But yes, C# does indeed borrow a fair amount from JAVA too:)
I think it'd help to get Mark Thomas on the case of this.
For those who haven't heard of him, he's a comedian with a very strong political slant who has a show on British terrestrial TV called "The Mark Thomas Comedy Product", I guess the closest U.S. equivalent would be Micheal Moore? See the BBC article "Mark Thomas: Taking comedy seriously" for a good overview on what he's on about. There's also another BBC article on how a British Government offical tried to mount a smear campaign against him (hmmm, sounds all too familiar!), so he must be doing something right!
I'm sure he'd help in bringing this issue closer to the public, and educate people as to why they need to do something about it. Get in touch with the man by using his site's feedback form or post a question for him on the forums.
Oh, and there's also an unofficial site that's worth a look.
As far as I remember it needs four times as much disk space than the original picture (this is needed for things like filtering and undo).
Almost right. This setting is adjustable, under Preferences - Memory & Image Cache. Change the cache levels from 4 to say 1 if you're working with large images (eg. 4000dpi medium format RGB slide scans - ooooh Nikon Coolscans rock [grin]). You can also set the amount of physical memory available to Photoshop here, as well as which disks to use for swapping under Plug-ins & Scratch Disks.
Oh, also worth mentioning is that you can purge this cache (and the clipboard, etc.) through "Edit - Purge - All" which is handy if you're swapping-out already and are about to do an memory intensive operation.
I don't know of a cheaper alternative that would do the trick.
Might be worth taking a look at Photoshop Elements, I think you can get this as cheap as $40USD or so if you hunt around. Don't think it supports CMYK though, but then if you're working with press images you'll probably need the full Photoshop anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Then perhaps people would switch away from Flash, to a fully open, free, W3C-supported standard like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)? (See a comparison of SWF and SVG functionality and a description of how Flash animation maps to SVG - both fairly old articles BTW.)
I wish, but MS will use their browser market dominance to make sure that IE doesn't support it. Or if they do decide to incorporate it they'll use their tried-and-trusted tactic of "embrace(alter) and extend", so any W3C standards that are supported suddenly only seems to work properly in IE, thanks to a few subtly different things (not that they've done that before, cough - document.all, element.innerHTML - cough!). And as they'll have also aquired Dreamweaver (the most popular web development tool) they will therefore control the output format of 90% of the code produced; I dread to think how this'll affect the web as a whole.
Wouldn't surprise me if they just stuck their middle finger up at the W3C and took control for themselves... or am I being overly paranoid?
Damn I sure do hope this is just a rumour...
Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.
I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.
Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.
Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:
By using these characters he encourages you to put yourself in their shoes, and therefore be more considerate.
If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.
Cheers,
Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.
Haahahaa (sorry, I couldn't help myself). This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign in October then (as did Zeldman)? See the news post over at the Web Standards Project (scroll to the bottom of the page).
In summary: Invalid. Inaccessible. Undecipherable in a text-only browser.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such as Tantek Çelik (who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...
Depending on where you are.
Here in the Isle of Man there are now only two record stores, HMV and Switched On Records. Yes, you can do mail order but there's nothing as convenient as being able to buy something straight away at a store.
HMV shut down all the local shops by pricing them out of the market, when they first arrived, but now have an average (non-sale) price of £18.99 for a CD, which is just extortionate.
Switch On survives because the owner Gid works hard and is enthusiastic about what he does, and mainly 'cause he isn't in direct competition with HMV, targetting vinyl and DJs instead. And he supports local bands, allowing them to sell their CDs through his shop with little/no markup - something HMV are not willing to do AT ALL (company policy apparently).
In conclusion I'd agree that CDs are way too expensive over here, but what can the consumer do about it? Personally I DON'T download music, but I support local bands a lot, buy secondhand whereever possible, and if I can't get it secondhand I'll wait for a sale until I can get the CD I want for
Cheers,
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
- 2002-10-11 14:09:06 Wired redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)
- 2002-12-06 16:39:05 W3C redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)
There are couple more comments on the Wired changeover at the Web Standards site and CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's site - both sites are excellent examples of XHTML & CSS themselves BTW.Cheers,
VNC seems to be the way ahead as screen capture is generally a very different problem to standard video capture/encoding. so using VirtualDub with Huffy, DivX, etc. would all be pretty useless for this application, as they're not designed for screen capping.
I'd check out the mailing lists at the real VNC website and maybe ask the question there. Trolling through the above archives I found a link to this, which seems like it may well be ideal (though very rough round the edges from the looks of things, I haven't had time to check it out yet).
It's basically a VNC session recorder/replayer
Linux/UNIX but as the guy says should work with CygWin. Don't think it's GPL, but an e-mail to the man may clarify what you can do with it.
You can of course get VNC for windows at the above site, or TightVNC over at SourceForge(which may/may not work with the above, I'd stick to straight VNC until you've tested the above).
Hope that helps,
...and there was me thinking I'd cleared that up in my last Slashdot post.
In summary: either S - Q - L or "sequel", interchangeably. Or "squirrel" if you're a freak [grin]
Cheers,
SEQUEL is indeed Structured English QUEry Language, which was invented by IBM back in the 70's as the query language for their relational database System/R. But it did go somewhere: into the public domain, where the acronym was shortened to SQL.
Its success is as much attributeable to Relational Software Inc. as IBM (who continued to use it in System/R's followup SQL/Data System, and SQL/DS's successor DB2), as Relational Software chose it as the query language for their fledgling RDBMS, which you may have heard of - ORACLE
As it became apparent that SQL was here to stay, ANSI created a standard definition (the first of which was SQL-89). Today's SQL standard is based mostly on IBM's implementation, with a good few substantial additions.
So as I understand it, SQL is not really something different to SEQUEL, it's just a newer evolution.
Oh, and back on topic, here's an excellent online introduction to SQL by James Hoffman. I'd also recommend checking out the Google Directory's SQL FAQs, Help, and Tutorials.
Cheers,
Oh, just to add to the info on the Wired redesign, there's an excellent article over at Netscape's DevEdge:
An Interview With Douglas Bowman of Wired News
Yes, I submitted a story on this to Slashdot, but apparently it wasn't considered "newsworthy".
Nevermind that it's probably the biggest milestone for XHTML and CSS supporters yet. Nevermind that it proves that a large, popular, high-traffic website can successfully design and implement a site that makes itself accessible and easy to read in Lynx, that doesn't need to use tables for layout, needs less bandwidth to run, with less server load, will be easier to maintain, and will be viewable in every browser, whether Netscape 1 or a Pocket IE. Nope not newsworthy. Instead we get articles telling us how duct tape can remove warts, great... Alright, alright, I'll stop whining now!
There's a couple more comments on the Wired changeover at the Web Standards site and CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's site (both excellent examples of XHTML themselves BTW).
Cheers,
Get 'em while they're hot! (note - Flash required)
Canon Japan's EOS-1Ds page
I wouldn't download the raw TIFFs though unless you have a use for them, and like 38MB images :) Sample 1 has brown splodges all over the wall areas, which I don't think are artifacts from the camera but rather markings on the walls themselves. I'm quite surprised that Canon didn't use some proper studio settings here for 1 & 2. Sample 3 also appears to have artifacts though at first glance, notice all along the left-hand side on the wall, on the colour chart and below the fruit, hmmmm... strange... I'll have to inspect the full-res. versions and see what I can find. Image sharpness around the edges looks good though, I guess Canon must have found a way round the CCD falloff?
I've got to say I'm damn impressed by these, I was unsure how the newer SLRs would fare, especially given the teething-troubles of the new Contax, but Canon have come up with a winner here IMHO. Think I'll stick with my EOS-3 until these babies come down in price a bit though !!I'll second that.
While the UI isn't brilliant it's certainly useable, but what make HTML-Kit great is that it's got HTML-Tidy integration! - Import and tidy up sloppy code (not mine I might add), upgrade to CSS automatically, convert to XHTML in 5 seconds, auto-indent and beautify code, etc.etc. Truly fantastic stuff.
THAT'S why I use HTML-Kit [grin]
About the best use for an SV24 IMO.
I've got one at home and it's very sweet looks wise (esp. when combined with a TFT and a wireless keyb. & mouse), but the internal design leaves a LOT to be desired.
Basically the power supply is at the FRONT of the case, below where the floppy drive sits (if you put one in), and air is sucked in through the front (by a 6cm fan mounted at the back of the case towards the top), then goes through the power supply, into the flat IDE cables, past the HDD and then out the back at the top through a 6cm fan. The PSU itself has a tiny 4cm (very noisy) fan that is mounted on the left side, and blows STRAIGHT INTO THE SIDE OF THE CASE, instead of OUT.
This is some of the worst airflow design I've ever seen, as it's basically heating up the air straight away (through the PSU), then flowing it over the HDD (extra-bad if you've got a 7200RPM disk in there), then out the back.
So if you've got a dremel, do a bit of modding and cut a nice neat airhole in the left side next to the PSU fan [grin]
Note that they've fixed this in the SS51, the PSU is now mounted at the back (where it should be), and its fan now blows out of the case through a grill. All in all a much better design.
Cheers,
Hi Thad,
What's your opinion on the paths of computer games and movies and their relationship?
For instance, could you see games and films converging to the point where the effects algorithms (eg. pixel/vertex shaders, or particle fx for tornadoes and the like) are basically the same for both? Have you ever done an collaborations like this with games software houses already?
Also, do you think consumer graphics hardware (games consoles, PC graphics cards, etc.) and commercial-grade equipment are getting closer in their abilities, or is the gap as wide as ever?
Cheers!
It'd do eBay a whole lot of good to have an web service interface, the added flexibility would surely increase their sales considerably.
Their whole "e-mail when you get outbid" and MS Messenger alert system is waaay too slow. I usual get my "auction has finished" mails about a 24 hrs after it actually finished, and messenger alerts tend to take about 10 minutes or more (no good when someone snipes you in the last 5 min of the auction), so the ability to write a web service that'd tell me INSTANTLY that I've been outbid (or whatever) would be very handy.
Of course eBay might not want you to be able to bid via a web service (they might want you to have to use their own designed interfaces to make things fair for everybody), but in that case it's simple enough to just leave those methods for the moment and stick to the "read-only" and search functions.
The other thing that I'd wish for is that companies like Amazon would roll-out their services SIMULTANEOUSLY worldwide. It sucks that it only applies to .com, what about .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp?
Cut-and-pasted from How To Write Unmaintainable Code (the "Naming" section):
Obscure film references: Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue and assign it hex value of $0204FB. The color looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer would have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like. Only someone intimately familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know that Lancelot's favorite color was blue. If a maintenance programmer can't quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer.
Yeah, Mac OS XII is a bit too close to Mac OS cross-eyed :)
Based around the MiniITX spec, these integrated-solution PCs have a very small form factor (approx. 20cm x 20cm motherboard), and can be squeezed into whatever case you can find (or make yourself).
See here for more info
They're also really cheap, a guy at work here just bought one to use as a small Linux firewall for under £150 UKP (approx. $230 USD) all-in.And here for some fully assembled product reviews
Cheers,
Have you heard of Interbase? It's an industrial-strength DBMS written by Borland, very much along the lines of Oracle/MS-SQL et al. Did you know they open-sourced it a few years ago? The result:
Firebird
Firebird is ACID-compliant, includes stored procedures, views, sub-selects, transactions, replication, etc. (ie. all the stuff that MySQL doesn't do/claims to do "soon" in the documentation), and runs on the following platforms:
Lesser-supported builds:
Historically, Firebird (under it's original name) has also been built and run on the following platforms: DG-UX, SGI-IRIX, NCR3000, CRAY, DEC-Ultrix, DEC-VMS, UnixWare, Apollo, OS2, Novell Netware and HP MPE/XL.
So it's definitely NOT a "database built by volunteers". Besides, the coders/contributors to the Firebird source that I've personally spoken to (and that hang around the Delphi-DB list) I'd rate as some of the most knowledgeable dbms experts around. Want to contribute?
Guess you haven't heard of it, otherwise you'd probably be using it already....
Personally I'm usually pretty drained after a fun day staring at the screen and typing like a monkey, and sometimes completely avoid the PC when I get home, prefering to chill with a decent book (currently Cradle to Cradle), zone-out in front of the TV, or go cycling in the beautiful Isle of Man (watch "Waking Ned Devine" for an idea of the scenery - jealous?<grin/>).
So I guess my completely-non-tech question is:
What do you do in "loafing" time (ie. loaf - To pass time at leisure; idle.), when you've left the office, "lost" the pager/Blackberry/PDA/mobile etc., and got away from it all?
Cheers,Also check Philip Greenspun's (of ArsDigita fame) photo.net which is a possibly the best (and original) one-stop photography resource on the net.
The tutorials are fantastic, and the community is incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, you honestly won't find more pros and experts in one place.
Latest digital reviews include the Minolta Dimage 5, the Canon EOS D60 (I so want one of these! Or an EOS-1D if I won the lottery), and the Nikon D100, so it proves that they're very up-to-date.
Check it out!
Just thought I'd drop a few links that those of us using Borland's fantastic Delphi should definitely check out:
That should be enough to get your code into shape, get cracking :)
Well, kindof. I'd say this is actually more embracing and extending Borland's Delphi, as MS bought out Anders Hjelsberg (the creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi/Object Pascal) and got him to write C#. But yes, C# does indeed borrow a fair amount from JAVA too :)
Cheers,I think it'd help to get Mark Thomas on the case of this.
For those who haven't heard of him, he's a comedian with a very strong political slant who has a show on British terrestrial TV called "The Mark Thomas Comedy Product", I guess the closest U.S. equivalent would be Micheal Moore? See the BBC article "Mark Thomas: Taking comedy seriously" for a good overview on what he's on about. There's also another BBC article on how a British Government offical tried to mount a smear campaign against him (hmmm, sounds all too familiar!), so he must be doing something right!
I'm sure he'd help in bringing this issue closer to the public, and educate people as to why they need to do something about it. Get in touch with the man by using his site's feedback form or post a question for him on the forums.
Oh, and there's also an unofficial site that's worth a look.
Cheers,
As far as I remember it needs four times as much disk space than the original picture (this is needed for things like filtering and undo).
Almost right. This setting is adjustable, under Preferences - Memory & Image Cache. Change the cache levels from 4 to say 1 if you're working with large images (eg. 4000dpi medium format RGB slide scans - ooooh Nikon Coolscans rock [grin]). You can also set the amount of physical memory available to Photoshop here, as well as which disks to use for swapping under Plug-ins & Scratch Disks.
Oh, also worth mentioning is that you can purge this cache (and the clipboard, etc.) through "Edit - Purge - All" which is handy if you're swapping-out already and are about to do an memory intensive operation.
I don't know of a cheaper alternative that would do the trick.
Might be worth taking a look at Photoshop Elements, I think you can get this as cheap as $40USD or so if you hunt around. Don't think it supports CMYK though, but then if you're working with press images you'll probably need the full Photoshop anyway.