I remember that putting FRAME=E000 freed up some more of those precious 640 kB, usually enough that you didn't have to bother for further optimizations that might have broken some applications like, Falcon 3.0. *g*
That's a very good case for why a well-rounded education, including science and math, is necessary especially for managers.
The point is, he is not a manager. He is a former client who bought the company (around 40 employees) around 15 years ago. And he doesn't have the slightest clue what the IT dept. does. The PHB from Dilbert comes to mind, but he's not as harmless.
Skinner had a lot to say about this.
Oh yes, I remember Skinner. I took the advanced psychology courses and we talked about him and his frigging doves for weeks. If only I could figure out how to give electric shocks to my Boss whenever he picks at food. *g*
If they are able to complete their assigned work in the time allotted, what is the problem?
My bosses answer to this is easy. If they can complete a certain workload in the given time and still have time to spend on something else, they are not working at 100% and could do more work (=more $$$) in the same time with no additional cost.
Where I work, if people let them (and only the stupid do), they will pile stuff on them ad nauseum, no matter what it means in terms of overtime. The occasional overtime is okay, but they made several people work 16 hours a day for a period of four weeks. This is FOUR weeks. Other people, who could have done the same work, went home early regularly in the same period of time. I expect management to balance work on people fairly, not put them in a Gulag just because they happened to be the poor souls who were working on the job first and not assigning additional people because "it would slow the others down to explain the job to them, they are the Experts(TM) on the job and they DO the job".
If you worked in construction, would you expect the foreman to provide a computer on the internet so you could browse Ebay while you were on break? Then why would you expect this from an office job?
Because the equipment is already there at an office and can be used without any problems as the resources are usually available anyway. You can deny and grant access easily through using a gateway with ipfw on it. Using two different config files and a very small shell script as a cron job, you can grant Internet access at break time, e.g. from 12:00 to 13:00 and have it off the rest of the day. Works fine where I work, and keeps everyone happy. This hour doesn't make much traffic and is definitely a fair move as people don't bother to D/L stuff in that time. They use their webmailers and IM and surf the web in that time and feel it's only fair they don't get Internet access in the rest of the time.
The best thing to really lock them down is to allow them to only use whitelisted executables.
How do you do this? Don't you have to whitelist every single system executable that's remotely likely to be run or is this done automatically? I'm not trolling you, I'm just curious as this might be useful if they ever get the idea again that I should administer the Windows boxen at work just because I'm the only one who knows how to use Windows and therefore am considered a Guru(TM). (Please, don't ask. Thank you. I am actually looking for a new job.) This might be useful the next time some machine fucks up and I have to reinstall it because I'm the Guru(TM).
It's not as if we didn't have an adminstrator. He's a guy who has been playing games and surfing the web for years and doesn't shy away from playing around with things while having no clue, so he appeared to be the SuperGuru(TM) because he didn't break really much until now and is actually quite good at hiding things from the bosses and looking like a Hero At Action(TM). So they made him The Administrator(TM). And he is single and spends lots of time at the office (surfing the web, posting on message boards on SUVs), which makes him one of our professional Overtime Heroes(TM). This is the highest title you can earn as a mortal in this company and you can get away with about anything if you are an Overtime Hero(TM).
The best thing about him is, that he is often roaming the building, doing some obscure stuff (i.e. jerking off) or making and receiving private phone calls and, of course, mostly too busy to deal with actual work. So when The Administrator(TM) is "busy", we address the Guru(TM).
Sorry for the rant. I REALLY need a new job. I will post this now before I add more details from it.
If you don't need "prepress stuff", Photoshop is not for you anyways. It's for prepress professionals. Stick with the GIMP and save your money, really. Or if you don't like the GIMP, there are lots of great tools which are cheater than Photoshop and are much better specialized in what you frequently do.
I feel your pain. How many times can you explain the Eudora address book to the PHB and keep yourself from beating him with a big non-virtual clue-stick?
I have this baseball bat in my trunk to play baseball, really.
Let me start off by saying that I don't like XPress either, being XPress user for seven years now. But I have to disagree on some points you are missing or misstating.
It insists on showing graphics onscreen only as low resolution previews, and won't even print them at high resolution.
Nope, it prints images just fine once you disable the low resolution switch in the print options, which you seem to have enabled. And, of course, you need a postscript printer.
Its undo facility is embarrassingly underpowered
This is a polite way of saying that it sucks ass, which it does.
nor is there any equivalent to InDesign's "fit image proportionally to box"
Of course there is. Shift-Alt-Apple-F will do what you want. It's there since XPress 3, and it's well documented in the handbook I might add.
It crashes while trying to render previews of graphics that are too large.
Now there's an interesting thing - I am working at a rather large advertising agency, and we regularly use images which are well beyond the 1 GB barrier, sometimes even approach 2 GB. I have never seen one of our machines crash on this. They need a bit to render, and they need a bit to load the image thereafter, but they never crashed. Are you sure your machines are properly set up, your RAM is okay and your image data isn't corrupted?
It won't let you make different pages different sizes.
Of course it won't, because this is a bad idea. Things are printed in one and only one size. If you need something in another size, it will be printed in the other size anyway. Go to a printing company and look at how things are printed. Look at the technical details. Really, this is not a flame. Do it, and you will understand much better.
Creating a PDF is maddeningly slow and often requires gigabytes of disk space to eventually create a 100Mb file.
Its native file format doesn't support embedding fonts or even images
No, but it supports collecting them into a directory together with the layout. Hint: Embedding images into a layout is a stupid idea in a professional production environment. You can only ensure that the latest version of an image is used for printing if you use it freshly from the server the moment you print. Usually projects are worked at in teams, some people edit the images, some do the layout stuff - this would be a real mess with embedded images.
Speaking of OPI hell, as long as I used healthy data (meaning cleaning those TIFFs off the unused mask channels and paths and make sure the EPS files have all separations available), I never encountered any problems. To me it seems there is a lot out of order in the company you work at. Talk to your boss, you are in desperate need of someone who knows setup and administration of your prepress workflow.
You can, on the other hand, diff foo.c against its previous version
Of course I could diff, but it wouldn't tell me
*anything*. I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer. I want to know what's fixed, not a summary of code changes even someone fond of the language used and the project itself might not understand.
This point, of course, is completely useless regarding Windows, because the source isn't available anyways, but even on the *BSD and Linux machines we have on our network, I'd never diff even if I *were* a programmer. I'd check the changelog to find out where the respective patch(es) concerns us, test it on an appropriate machine and deploy it if everything still works fine after patching.
This means thorough testing anyway if you're talking mission critical machines. This takes a lot of time. I don't know about your job, but at the company I work at, this pretty much takes up most of our time as management doesn't get what we do and thinks another sysadmin or two would be overkill. Diffing would be completely out of the question. No time. (And I wouldn't care anyway, there's lot of other stuff I'd prefer fixing instead of looking at hacks in detail.)
Thanks a lot for that CSSzengarden link - I knew css/edge, but the Zen garden is among the best CSS sites I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. Much to learn there.:-)
You make a point which I know is valid for a lot of people. (I know a lot of those, and I pointed them to InDesign since I saw and played around with version 2.0 at the 2002 CeBit.)
The problem however is, that our core business is pre-print, and all of our clients use XPress. We have bought a copy of InDesign when it came out, even updated it to 1.5, but IIRC it got used only once or twice for purposes other than learning how to do stuff in it. I agree it is vastly superior to XPress (now that even the Typography is better than QXP), but that won't help if my clients don't use it. And yes, we've made clear to our clients that we'd prefer InDesign. It's a shame, but it's reality. And lots of inertia.
for the most part, Quark threw a party and NOBODY showed up
Yeah, and the same happened with XPress 5. We switched to XPress 4 one year ago (because the clients started using it more than once a year), but most people still use 3.32 for the stuff where they can choose. From my perspective, XPress 5 added a new splash screen when starting up, a useless implementation of XML output and Web features that simply don't belong into a PAGE LAYOUT APPLICATION FOR PRINT (dammit).
I work in what I'd consider a typical prepress company, we have about 40 workstations, mostly G4, the rest G3, all with decent RAM (1-2 GB), all running OS9 with a similar set of the common applications (XPress, Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator and so on). We definitely don't upgrade to QXP6, and we definitely don't upgrade to OSX. We'd have to get new licenses for about all of our software as working in Classic sucks ass, and it's because a) it's REALLY expensive and b) the people will be unable to work efficiently with OSX for at least one or two months. Remember, these are people who used to work manually without computers, then learned to use a Mac, and who are used to doing things a certain way. They aren't dumb though - actually they are great in improvising stuff in OS9, but OSX would simply break too many of their "shortcuts" to even be considered.
Services like Yahoo By Phone also let you pick up your e-mail from afar, even without a hand-held gadget. For $4.95 a month, a computerized voice named Jenni will read your messages aloud over the phone.
I can already hear it.
"want to see a huge horse c0ck in a tiny teen c*nt?"
Instant Message programs, a more-immediate form of e-mail now used by millions of employees, can also be reconfigured. Typically, if you haven't touched your computer in a while, the people you chat with online see an "idle" message next to your name. Diehard slackers can crack into the program settings to make themselves appear perpetually available.
Hm. "Diehard slackers can crack into the program settings"?
[_] Auto-Away Mode
Wow. I am the über cracker... um... "slacker". Where do I pick up my "approved computer genius" shirt?
I know it's meant to be funny (in fact, it is *g*), but think about it. Everyone here has some techniques, to say the least. Sharing them means a better repertoire.
And, gosh, am I tired of watching tail -f/var/log/all and tail -f/var/log/smail/logfile on one screen while reading/. and claiming it's "research for the project" on the other.
The fact that these companies are cyber-squatting on more than they could resonably need [...]
There were times when the IPv4 address space seemed bigger than what you'd ever need. You want to decide what's reasonable? Tough job for sure.
# 051/8 Deparment of Social Security of UK (a government department in a relatively small country that has a ridiculously unproportional share)
Yeah sure, cowboy. I mean, it's perfectly reasonable that IBM, HP and Xerox have/8 networks. Or the MIT. I mean, what relevance has the DSS of the UK compared to the all-important MIT?
Perhaps the problem lies in the web page they are accessing and not the browser. There is no shortage of web-based "interfaces" that break the fundamental ways that a web browser works.
I admit that I saw this reply coming, but I was too lazy to address the issue. *g*
The interface is valid HTML designed using the KISS principle (knowing that the users to come are among the most stupid people on Earth). It's a handful of easy questions like "which kind of ad do you want" (leasing, special price, current campaign ads), how many colors should the ad have, which headline do you want, one question at a time and with only a handful of text links to click on. There's no huge chrome, no fancy effects, nothing which could confuse even the most stupid person. You click some text links and you are done. I had my six years old cousin do it just fine, and he had never surfed the web before as his dad won't let him (he doesn't get the web either, but that's another sad story).
Yet it's too difficult even to enter an URL or press a back button. I can't go on about this without getting *really* insulting. Yesterday I had a call from someone who couldn't connect to the Internet because he had (intentionally!) unplugged his modem cable (of course he told me only after 10 minutes of insulting me). Needless to say, he had complained to the management of the Japanese company before, stating at length how much he was pissed off by our incompetence, so I had just another call from there later that day.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm really sick and tired of things like this. Fortunately, this is only a very small portion of my job and I do phone support only occasionally.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember that putting FRAME=E000 freed up some more of those precious 640 kB, usually enough that you didn't have to bother for further optimizations that might have broken some applications like, Falcon 3.0. *g*
The point is, he is not a manager. He is a former client who bought the company (around 40 employees) around 15 years ago. And he doesn't have the slightest clue what the IT dept. does. The PHB from Dilbert comes to mind, but he's not as harmless.
Oh yes, I remember Skinner. I took the advanced psychology courses and we talked about him and his frigging doves for weeks. If only I could figure out how to give electric shocks to my Boss whenever he picks at food. *g*
My bosses answer to this is easy. If they can complete a certain workload in the given time and still have time to spend on something else, they are not working at 100% and could do more work (=more $$$) in the same time with no additional cost.
Where I work, if people let them (and only the stupid do), they will pile stuff on them ad nauseum, no matter what it means in terms of overtime. The occasional overtime is okay, but they made several people work 16 hours a day for a period of four weeks. This is FOUR weeks. Other people, who could have done the same work, went home early regularly in the same period of time. I expect management to balance work on people fairly, not put them in a Gulag just because they happened to be the poor souls who were working on the job first and not assigning additional people because "it would slow the others down to explain the job to them, they are the Experts(TM) on the job and they DO the job".
GOOF off. GOOF. Not JERK.
Geez. It seems it's time to go to bed and stop posting in something other than your native language.
Because the equipment is already there at an office and can be used without any problems as the resources are usually available anyway. You can deny and grant access easily through using a gateway with ipfw on it. Using two different config files and a very small shell script as a cron job, you can grant Internet access at break time, e.g. from 12:00 to 13:00 and have it off the rest of the day. Works fine where I work, and keeps everyone happy. This hour doesn't make much traffic and is definitely a fair move as people don't bother to D/L stuff in that time. They use their webmailers and IM and surf the web in that time and feel it's only fair they don't get Internet access in the rest of the time.
How do you do this? Don't you have to whitelist every single system executable that's remotely likely to be run or is this done automatically? I'm not trolling you, I'm just curious as this might be useful if they ever get the idea again that I should administer the Windows boxen at work just because I'm the only one who knows how to use Windows and therefore am considered a Guru(TM). (Please, don't ask. Thank you. I am actually looking for a new job.) This might be useful the next time some machine fucks up and I have to reinstall it because I'm the Guru(TM).
It's not as if we didn't have an adminstrator. He's a guy who has been playing games and surfing the web for years and doesn't shy away from playing around with things while having no clue, so he appeared to be the SuperGuru(TM) because he didn't break really much until now and is actually quite good at hiding things from the bosses and looking like a Hero At Action(TM). So they made him The Administrator(TM). And he is single and spends lots of time at the office (surfing the web, posting on message boards on SUVs), which makes him one of our professional Overtime Heroes(TM). This is the highest title you can earn as a mortal in this company and you can get away with about anything if you are an Overtime Hero(TM).
The best thing about him is, that he is often roaming the building, doing some obscure stuff (i.e. jerking off) or making and receiving private phone calls and, of course, mostly too busy to deal with actual work. So when The Administrator(TM) is "busy", we address the Guru(TM).
Sorry for the rant. I REALLY need a new job. I will post this now before I add more details from it.
NOTE TO SELF:
1. Write book
2. ???
3. PROFIT!!!
If you don't need "prepress stuff", Photoshop is not for you anyways. It's for prepress professionals. Stick with the GIMP and save your money, really. Or if you don't like the GIMP, there are lots of great tools which are cheater than Photoshop and are much better specialized in what you frequently do.
I feel your pain. How many times can you explain the Eudora address book to the PHB and keep yourself from beating him with a big non-virtual clue-stick?
I have this baseball bat in my trunk to play baseball, really.
Let me start off by saying that I don't like XPress either, being XPress user for seven years now. But I have to disagree on some points you are missing or misstating.
Nope, it prints images just fine once you disable the low resolution switch in the print options, which you seem to have enabled. And, of course, you need a postscript printer.
This is a polite way of saying that it sucks ass, which it does.
Of course there is. Shift-Alt-Apple-F will do what you want. It's there since XPress 3, and it's well documented in the handbook I might add.
Now there's an interesting thing - I am working at a rather large advertising agency, and we regularly use images which are well beyond the 1 GB barrier, sometimes even approach 2 GB. I have never seen one of our machines crash on this. They need a bit to render, and they need a bit to load the image thereafter, but they never crashed. Are you sure your machines are properly set up, your RAM is okay and your image data isn't corrupted?
Of course it won't, because this is a bad idea. Things are printed in one and only one size. If you need something in another size, it will be printed in the other size anyway. Go to a printing company and look at how things are printed. Look at the technical details. Really, this is not a flame. Do it, and you will understand much better.
You are right, but if you use the right tool for the job, the pain goes away.
No, but it supports collecting them into a directory together with the layout. Hint: Embedding images into a layout is a stupid idea in a professional production environment. You can only ensure that the latest version of an image is used for printing if you use it freshly from the server the moment you print. Usually projects are worked at in teams, some people edit the images, some do the layout stuff - this would be a real mess with embedded images.
Speaking of OPI hell, as long as I used healthy data (meaning cleaning those TIFFs off the unused mask channels and paths and make sure the EPS files have all separations available), I never encountered any problems. To me it seems there is a lot out of order in the company you work at. Talk to your boss, you are in desperate need of someone who knows setup and administration of your prepress workflow.
Of course I could diff, but it wouldn't tell me *anything*. I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer. I want to know what's fixed, not a summary of code changes even someone fond of the language used and the project itself might not understand.
This point, of course, is completely useless regarding Windows, because the source isn't available anyways, but even on the *BSD and Linux machines we have on our network, I'd never diff even if I *were* a programmer. I'd check the changelog to find out where the respective patch(es) concerns us, test it on an appropriate machine and deploy it if everything still works fine after patching.
This means thorough testing anyway if you're talking mission critical machines. This takes a lot of time. I don't know about your job, but at the company I work at, this pretty much takes up most of our time as management doesn't get what we do and thinks another sysadmin or two would be overkill. Diffing would be completely out of the question. No time. (And I wouldn't care anyway, there's lot of other stuff I'd prefer fixing instead of looking at hacks in detail.)
Thanks a lot for that CSSzengarden link - I knew css/edge, but the Zen garden is among the best CSS sites I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. Much to learn there. :-)
You make a point which I know is valid for a lot of people. (I know a lot of those, and I pointed them to InDesign since I saw and played around with version 2.0 at the 2002 CeBit.)
The problem however is, that our core business is pre-print, and all of our clients use XPress. We have bought a copy of InDesign when it came out, even updated it to 1.5, but IIRC it got used only once or twice for purposes other than learning how to do stuff in it. I agree it is vastly superior to XPress (now that even the Typography is better than QXP), but that won't help if my clients don't use it. And yes, we've made clear to our clients that we'd prefer InDesign. It's a shame, but it's reality. And lots of inertia.
Yeah, and the same happened with XPress 5. We switched to XPress 4 one year ago (because the clients started using it more than once a year), but most people still use 3.32 for the stuff where they can choose. From my perspective, XPress 5 added a new splash screen when starting up, a useless implementation of XML output and Web features that simply don't belong into a PAGE LAYOUT APPLICATION FOR PRINT (dammit).
I work in what I'd consider a typical prepress company, we have about 40 workstations, mostly G4, the rest G3, all with decent RAM (1-2 GB), all running OS9 with a similar set of the common applications (XPress, Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator and so on). We definitely don't upgrade to QXP6, and we definitely don't upgrade to OSX. We'd have to get new licenses for about all of our software as working in Classic sucks ass, and it's because a) it's REALLY expensive and b) the people will be unable to work efficiently with OSX for at least one or two months. Remember, these are people who used to work manually without computers, then learned to use a Mac, and who are used to doing things a certain way. They aren't dumb though - actually they are great in improvising stuff in OS9, but OSX would simply break too many of their "shortcuts" to even be considered.
Shouldn't that read C cups?
I have never heard of this, but that might be because I'm not too much into SMS for the price. Which provider was it?
Yeah. Let's take this subject for example:
I mean, who is this "yxwijqbsqcbttz" guy anyways?
I'm not offending people, I am educating people which links to avoid.
Nah, avoiding masturbation is way too easy. All it takes is Goatse Man and Tub Girl. I guess they'd make a wonderful couple.
I can already hear it.
"want to see a huge horse c0ck in a tiny teen c*nt?"
Hm. "Diehard slackers can crack into the program settings"?
[_] Auto-Away Mode
Wow. I am the über cracker... um ... "slacker". Where do I pick up my "approved computer genius" shirt?
I know it's meant to be funny (in fact, it is *g*), but think about it. Everyone here has some techniques, to say the least. Sharing them means a better repertoire.
/var/log/all and tail -f /var/log/smail/logfile on one screen while reading /. and claiming it's "research for the project" on the other.
And, gosh, am I tired of watching tail -f
There were times when the IPv4 address space seemed bigger than what you'd ever need. You want to decide what's reasonable? Tough job for sure.
Yeah sure, cowboy. I mean, it's perfectly reasonable that IBM, HP and Xerox have /8 networks. Or the MIT. I mean, what relevance has the DSS of the UK compared to the all-important MIT?
You need a big reality check.
...and here's the original ICQ prank just for the curious.
Greets to the what-the-hell-is-a-google-dept. ;-)
Question: Do you have stairs in your house?
I admit that I saw this reply coming, but I was too lazy to address the issue. *g*
The interface is valid HTML designed using the KISS principle (knowing that the users to come are among the most stupid people on Earth). It's a handful of easy questions like "which kind of ad do you want" (leasing, special price, current campaign ads), how many colors should the ad have, which headline do you want, one question at a time and with only a handful of text links to click on. There's no huge chrome, no fancy effects, nothing which could confuse even the most stupid person. You click some text links and you are done. I had my six years old cousin do it just fine, and he had never surfed the web before as his dad won't let him (he doesn't get the web either, but that's another sad story).
Yet it's too difficult even to enter an URL or press a back button. I can't go on about this without getting *really* insulting. Yesterday I had a call from someone who couldn't connect to the Internet because he had (intentionally!) unplugged his modem cable (of course he told me only after 10 minutes of insulting me). Needless to say, he had complained to the management of the Japanese company before, stating at length how much he was pissed off by our incompetence, so I had just another call from there later that day.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm really sick and tired of things like this. Fortunately, this is only a very small portion of my job and I do phone support only occasionally.