Does Adobe make any money selling Postscript _drivers_? Sure, PS engines, but they give away a decent Adobe PS driver all the time. Download it off their site.
Yep, it's useless. Well, not completely useless. As a print queuing system, it's ok. You don't have any drivers unless you purchase them, and you may not get good drivers even then. (For instance, the HP672C driver is only marginally better thaan GS.) Assuming you have good drivers, and applications which begin to support it, you will eventually get the capability to control printer features like paper tray, output quality, paper type, etc. This is a good thing.
However, it doesn't do anything for providing apps with printer support like Windows, Mac, Amiga, OS/2 and basically every non-Unix OS do. It doesn't help apps determine what fonts are ok, it doesn't help them create the output, it doesn't give them a working font model, font metrics, the kind of info in afm files, etc.
When I tried ESP Print Pro about a week ago, I found that printing took at least twice as long as GS. The output on my HP672C was better than GS, but it was nowhere near as good as the windows driver. Certainly not worth the cost of licensing it, which would be over $200 so I could let 3 machines print to it. (As far as I could tell, the demo shipped with a network-disabled version of CUPS, and it looked contrary to the licensing agreement to fix cups with the single-user/personal edition so that my home net would print.)
Sorry, thanks but no thanks. I'd rather purchase a PS color laser for $1200.
When the page states: We have been getting lots of requests about whether or not this site is a hoax. We understand the reasons why, but it saddens us. and is subsequently called a hoax, I don't have much pity. I don't think anyone would have called it a hoax if they didn't bring it up themselves.
We've been having constant "wakeup calls" for at least the five years I've been using Linux. Personally, I wish the calls would stop a while so I could get some sleep.
Mail is threaded. Both the References and In-Reply-To headers work to thread it, and I've run across only a few mailers which didn't set one of those headers, even though almost none of them actually did a threaded display. Mail can be threaded just about as well as usenet, exactly as well if you don't have any really sucky mailers there.
Changing the subject doesn't break threading, unless the software is broken. Don't knock the method until you've tried it, because your mailer probably doesn't do real threadng.
It sounds like the attempt isn't inherently flawed, but there were two problems with the implementation.
First, the technology. It sounds like nobody gave any thought to the software you'd need to support the class. For example, email isn't a bad way to discuss things, but you need good software to keep up with any sort of volume. It has to be easy to use, it _has_ to be threaded, and it has to be able to put the class in a separate, readable folder, so it doesn't get jumbled with the masses of other mail you get.
In this case, pine (for instance) is about as bad as you can get. You need something more like a threaded newsreader (ie, Gnus or something else threaded). Pine was really meant to be easy to use for people who get a bunch of personal (non-list email).
You also need to make it easy to communicate complex ideas over the email. If all students are able to read HTML email, it'll make more complex documents easy.
You also need some real-time communication. The class tried this with some chat program. Again, the client wasn't up to the task. It needed a few things: a log posted to the web after each meeting. An easy scrollback function, to satisfy the needs of those who need to refer back to something during the meeting. And it should probably be easier to use than the client they tried.
These are just a coupple examples of how you'd need to analyze the needs of a class, and how they differ from the tasks people normally do with chat and email programs. Right now, it's a lot more work to do, because most software normally sucks for class activities, but there's no no fundamental technical barrier.
More problematic for this class, I'd bet, were students' and the instructor's expectations going in. One big expectation was probably that they wouldn't have to work on the software to make the class work, as I talk about above. Another was probably that they didn't expect to have to put much effort into the _class_ to make things work.
Fact is, if you have a group of people locked in a room together three times a week, it's not too hard to get them to interact. But distance learning is different. While you can still have great interaction, everyone has to work a bit harder, if only because you have to type! You also need to work harder to make yourself clear and understood, because email/chat rooms are a much lower bandwidth connection than the classroom. It sounds like the students and the instructor both disliked the amount of effort they had to put in (complaining about answering email, for instance). With an attitude like that, it's not going to work.
So, these are a couple of major problems, but I think they could be avoided with some effort. You just have to think about them when setting up the system.
Even if Amiga didn't have the Amiga curse, you'd have to wonder how successful a commercial OS could be if they weren't selling machines to go with them.
Part of what made the Amiga so great to use was exactly the same thing that made the Mac successful: a company which had control of the hardware and could make it work extremely well with the OS. For example, I could stick SCSI cards in my old A2000 every day and not have a conflict... I had a couple in when I got rid of it, simply because one had a HD on it, and the other had some memory on it.
But now, we have BeOS and Amiga both trying to market OSes having given up on the hardware. So, they have all the problem Solaris x86 and Linux had (and still have, on occasion) of not having complete or stable support for hardware, and lose the benefit they used to have of seamless integration. Dealing with the morass that is today's commodity hardware market will introduce confusion and difficulty into any OS, so why would a prospective user choose BeOS or Amiga?
Maybe I'm just bitter, having been an old Commodore fan and a Be-hopeful, but the fact that as of last check, BeOS won't run on any of the three machines we have at home doesn't raise my spirits for its success. I just don't see many people going through the pain of findng a compatible system, for the gains they can give...
There are a bunch of enterprise uses already for the palmpilot. DB data entry is a big one, for instance. Enter stuff into the forms in the field, then sync it into the DB when you get home.
Animation isn't _always_ bad. For instance, the Mavica we have has an option to take 9 pictures, separated by a.25 second interval. I postprocess that into an animated gif so my family can see minimovies from our vacation. MPEG would be way overkill for 9 frames.
MS has never really helped NT/Alpha. It took them years to port Office over. The brunt of the development work for the OS (afaik) was done by Digital, ditto marketing. This is no different really from the other chipsets that have dropped NT when their mfrs got tired of maintaining it, like MIPS. (I think there was another, but I can't remember.)
Compaq can stop supporting NT/Alpha development and immediately save lots of money that wasn't being made up in sales. If MS really wants NT/Alpha, let them pay for it.
Wonder what my old company is going to do? They announced they were going to can the DUX (Tru64) port of their software, but keep the WinNT Alpha port. And they had a bunch of Alpha workstations lying around.
UGS was betting that Compaq would nuke the Tru64 division and that NT was the future, but it looks like they were wrong. (Maybe they'll send me all the now useless workstations....)
I don't know why everyone insists that writing a GUI in C is insane. It's not. Writing a GUI with GTK+ in C is pretty darn pleasant, actually. If you want _unpleasant_, I'm sure we can dredge up some examples.
And it's nice to write the GUI in the same language you write everything else... GUI builders can't handle all your gui code unless you're just doing a static form. If you are dynamic form or something else, you'll always need to write code.
Re:Has anyone actually read about the gnome 1.2/2.
on
The Future of GNOME
·
· Score: 1
Yes, we know that Mathias was the founder of LyX. Then,he went off to work on KDE, and the rest of the LyX team carried on by themselves... until he showed up and pissed them all off by porting it to KDE without talking to anyone who was still working on LyX. They've since made up (afaik), but it was certainly ugly for a while.
This isn't your usual license flame, but a serious question. I'm in the process of building a CD with a live version of RH on it, munging the RH installer to set up various things. If their system can recognize all this hardware and set things up, it would be a great help to build a system you could boot off CD and try Linux. (rw storage is handled by a loopback filesystem on the dos drive.)
But I can't use their code unless they have a free license....
See, somehow I got on the list and recieved the email. But I was on my honeymoon and didn't get it until the 28th, when the original deadline was. So I forgot about it.
On the 6th, I discovered that the deadline had been extended, but that I didn't know, and I'd missed it again.
Now I hear about all these extensions... oh, the pain.....
Since you can register 1998 Expenditures, 1998 Budget, and any others that people are likely to look for, it won't be that difficult. Simply index _every_ way people try to find it, and if you find out they can't find it, register what they're searching for.
Re:Why are they allowed to delay source release?
on
Corel Linux Preview
·
· Score: 1
Yes. I do exactly that all the time. (Well, not all the time, but occasionally I have to modify an emacs source file to match some weird internal problem (like suid/non-world-readable rcs programs) that nobody else in the world would want, and I am not forced to give those changes away.)
If you tell me how to build my own notebook, I'd be glad to build my own. I can't wait till I can start buying Linux notebooks from lots of different companies... this announcement (even if only one line in an otherwise desktop article) is a good step.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Adobe make any money selling Postscript _drivers_? Sure, PS engines, but they give away a decent Adobe PS driver all the time. Download it off their site.
Yep, it's useless. Well, not completely useless. As a print queuing system, it's ok. You don't have any drivers unless you purchase them, and you may not get good drivers even then. (For instance, the HP672C driver is only marginally better thaan GS.) Assuming you have good drivers, and applications which begin to support it, you will eventually get the capability to control printer features like paper tray, output quality, paper type, etc. This is a good thing.
However, it doesn't do anything for providing apps with printer support like Windows, Mac, Amiga, OS/2 and basically every non-Unix OS do. It doesn't help apps determine what fonts are ok, it doesn't help them create the output, it doesn't give them a working font model, font metrics, the kind of info in afm files, etc.
When I tried ESP Print Pro about a week ago, I found that printing took at least twice as long as GS. The output on my HP672C was better than GS, but it was nowhere near as good as the windows driver. Certainly not worth the cost of licensing it, which would be over $200 so I could let 3 machines print to it. (As far as I could tell, the demo shipped with a network-disabled version of CUPS, and it looked contrary to the licensing agreement to fix cups with the single-user/personal edition so that my home net would print.)
Sorry, thanks but no thanks. I'd rather purchase a PS color laser for $1200.
When the page states: We have been getting lots of requests about whether or not this site is a hoax. We understand the reasons why, but it saddens us. and is subsequently called a hoax, I don't have much pity. I don't think anyone would have called it a hoax if they didn't bring it up themselves.
We've been having constant "wakeup calls" for at least the five years I've been using Linux. Personally, I wish the calls would stop a while so I could get some sleep.
Mail is threaded. Both the References and In-Reply-To headers work to thread it, and I've run across only a few mailers which didn't set one of those headers, even though almost none of them actually did a threaded display. Mail can be threaded just about as well as usenet, exactly as well if you don't have any really sucky mailers there.
Changing the subject doesn't break threading, unless the software is broken. Don't knock the method until you've tried it, because your mailer probably doesn't do real threadng.
It sounds like the attempt isn't inherently flawed, but there were two problems with the implementation.
First, the technology. It sounds like nobody gave any thought to the software you'd need to support the class. For example, email isn't a bad way to discuss things, but you need good software to keep up with any sort of volume. It has to be easy to use, it _has_ to be threaded, and it has to be able to put the class in a separate, readable folder, so it doesn't get jumbled with the masses of other mail you get.
In this case, pine (for instance) is about as bad as you can get. You need something more like a threaded newsreader (ie, Gnus or something else threaded). Pine was really meant to be easy to use for people who get a bunch of personal (non-list email).
You also need to make it easy to communicate complex ideas over the email. If all students are able to read HTML email, it'll make more complex documents easy.
You also need some real-time communication. The class tried this with some chat program. Again, the client wasn't up to the task. It needed a few things: a log posted to the web after each meeting. An easy scrollback function, to satisfy the needs of those who need to refer back to something during the meeting. And it should probably be easier to use than the client they tried.
These are just a coupple examples of how you'd need to analyze the needs of a class, and how they differ from the tasks people normally do with chat and email programs. Right now, it's a lot more work to do, because most software normally sucks for class activities, but there's no no fundamental technical barrier.
More problematic for this class, I'd bet, were students' and the instructor's expectations going in. One big expectation was probably that they wouldn't have to work on the software to make the class work, as I talk about above. Another was probably that they didn't expect to have to put much effort into the _class_ to make things work.
Fact is, if you have a group of people locked in a room together three times a week, it's not too hard to get them to interact. But distance learning is different. While you can still have great interaction, everyone has to work a bit harder, if only because you have to type! You also need to work harder to make yourself clear and understood, because email/chat rooms are a much lower bandwidth connection than the classroom. It sounds like the students and the instructor both disliked the amount of effort they had to put in (complaining about answering email, for instance). With an attitude like that, it's not going to work.
So, these are a couple of major problems, but I think they could be avoided with some effort. You just have to think about them when setting up the system.
Plain mailing lists _are_ threaded, assuming you have a decent mail program.
Yuk! Never do yourself what the C library will do for you!
#include
#include
int main(void)
{
char string[10];
while (scanf("%[10]%*[ \n]", string) && !feof(stdin))
{
printf("%c", (char)strtoul(string, NULL, 2));
}
return 0;
}
Yes. It's called autorpm, for automatically scheduled upgrades. There's also rpmfind, if you just want to find an rpm for something.
Even if Amiga didn't have the Amiga curse, you'd have to wonder how successful a commercial OS could be if they weren't selling machines to go with them.
Part of what made the Amiga so great to use was exactly the same thing that made the Mac successful: a company which had control of the hardware and could make it work extremely well with the OS. For example, I could stick SCSI cards in my old A2000 every day and not have a conflict... I had a couple in when I got rid of it, simply because one had a HD on it, and the other had some memory on it.
But now, we have BeOS and Amiga both trying to market OSes having given up on the hardware. So, they have all the problem Solaris x86 and Linux had (and still have, on occasion) of not having complete or stable support for hardware, and lose the benefit they used to have of seamless integration. Dealing with the morass that is today's commodity hardware market will introduce confusion and difficulty into any OS, so why would a prospective user choose BeOS or Amiga?
Maybe I'm just bitter, having been an old Commodore fan and a Be-hopeful, but the fact that as of last check, BeOS won't run on any of the three machines we have at home doesn't raise my spirits for its success. I just don't see many people going through the pain of findng a compatible system, for the gains they can give...
Did you read the same article I did? About someone breaking into the author's machine because it _didn't_ have security?
There are a bunch of enterprise uses already for the palmpilot. DB data entry is a big one, for instance. Enter stuff into the forms in the field, then sync it into the DB when you get home.
Animation isn't _always_ bad. For instance, the Mavica we have has an option to take 9 pictures, separated by a .25 second interval. I postprocess that into an animated gif so my family can see minimovies from our vacation. MPEG would be way overkill for 9 frames.
MS has never really helped NT/Alpha. It took them years to port Office over. The brunt of the development work for the OS (afaik) was done by Digital, ditto marketing. This is no different really from the other chipsets that have dropped NT when their mfrs got tired of maintaining it, like MIPS. (I think there was another, but I can't remember.)
Compaq can stop supporting NT/Alpha development and immediately save lots of money that wasn't being made up in sales. If MS really wants NT/Alpha, let them pay for it.
Wonder what my old company is going to do? They announced they were going to can the DUX (Tru64) port of their software, but keep the WinNT Alpha port. And they had a bunch of Alpha workstations lying around.
UGS was betting that Compaq would nuke the Tru64 division and that NT was the future, but it looks like they were wrong. (Maybe they'll send me all the now useless workstations....)
I don't know why everyone insists that writing a GUI in C is insane. It's not. Writing a GUI with GTK+ in C is pretty darn pleasant, actually. If you want _unpleasant_, I'm sure we can dredge up some examples.
And it's nice to write the GUI in the same language you write everything else... GUI builders can't handle all your gui code unless you're just doing a static form. If you are dynamic form or something else, you'll always need to write code.
Yes, we know that Mathias was the founder of LyX. Then,he went off to work on KDE, and the rest of the LyX team carried on by themselves... until he showed up and pissed them all off by porting it to KDE without talking to anyone who was still working on LyX. They've since made up (afaik), but it was certainly ugly for a while.
Actually, I do. Still working as my primary machine, though it's being relegated to server work when I inherit a laptop....
AFAIK, GLX can run remotely, but I'm not sure.
This isn't your usual license flame, but a serious question. I'm in the process of building a CD with a live version of RH on it, munging the RH installer to set up various things. If their system can recognize all this hardware and set things up, it would be a great help to build a system you could boot off CD and try Linux. (rw storage is handled by a loopback filesystem on the dos drive.)
But I can't use their code unless they have a free license....
No, not the IPO, me.
See, somehow I got on the list and recieved the email. But I was on my honeymoon and didn't get it until the 28th, when the original deadline was. So I forgot about it.
On the 6th, I discovered that the deadline had been extended, but that I didn't know, and I'd missed it again.
Now I hear about all these extensions... oh, the pain.....
Since you can register 1998 Expenditures, 1998 Budget, and any others that people are likely to look for, it won't be that difficult. Simply index _every_ way people try to find it, and if you find out they can't find it, register what they're searching for.
Yes. I do exactly that all the time. (Well, not all the time, but occasionally I have to modify an emacs source file to match some weird internal problem (like suid/non-world-readable rcs programs) that nobody else in the world would want, and I am not forced to give those changes away.)
If you tell me how to build my own notebook, I'd be glad to build my own. I can't wait till I can start buying Linux notebooks from lots of different companies... this announcement (even if only one line in an otherwise desktop article) is a good step.