But one possibility is that companies will simply refuse to get into similar deals with them in future.
Um...yeah, right.
Nobody wants to deal with Microsoft. Microsoft partners have a lousy history of getting the short end of the stick. You know what, though? They don't have a choice. You can't ignore the most influential computer company, with multiple crucial monopolies, simply because they're risky to deal with.
Bush attacks Iraq: we can ignore that, everybody already knew he was planning to do that.
I was already expecting Bush to work on his ongoing US-police state project, so that's not really news.
Seriously, I just noticed on Google News that Rev. Sharpton is planning to run for President.
That's undoubtedly the best news the Repulicans have had for years. It'll neatly split the Dem supporters, and seriously damange any opposition to continued Republican dominance. I mean, this seriously negates any Dem benefit the whole Lott debacle might have caused.
corresponding operators on hypercomplex numbers similar to the way in which steel replaced bronze as the ingredient for making swords during the Renaissance...
How the hell did Hemos let this one by?
Let's rewrite the article to be useful instead of stupid:
"The Generalized Number System (N+) implements commutative hypercomplex arithmetic to provide an alternative to vectors for processing multivariate data in three or more dimensions. Because of similarities between N+ and the complex number system, software for processing multivariate signals is readily derived from that for processing complex (or real) numbers. The derivation involves replacing operators on complex (or real) numbers with corresponding operators on hypercomplex numbers similar to the way in which steel replaced bronze as the ingredient for making swords during the Renaissance. In both cases, improved performance and capabilities of the product are attributed to properties of the new ingredient while many aspects of making and using the product remain the same. N+ and its application to signal and image processing is described on the website at www.hypercomplex.us".
becomes:
The Generalized Number System (N+) is numerical processing software that uses commutative hypercomplex arithmetic to solve multivariate data problems in more than two dimensions. This outperforms the more traditional vector-based approach.
I mean, all the info thrown out here can be comfortably mentioned on the website, and it doesn't look like a blatant attempt to get "wow, that's complicated" comments.
Not enough information
on
Make Ogg Portable
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Without any sort of price range, all they're going to get is people saying "Yeah, I'd like a vorbis player...I'd get one." Few people can make a reasonable judgement without some idea of the cost.
I mean, is this going to cost more than a Zaurus?
I'd probably get one if it was less than $200, but probably wouldn't if it were more than $300. The features certainly play a role -- is this CD-based? Flash-based? HD-based? What kind of interface? Do we get Linux mass storage device support for uploading music?
These are pretty critical.
I can say that I'd be more inclined to buy a vorbis than an mp3 player.
KDE has some sort of high-level messaging protocol so that one can send events, making it appear as if menu items were chosen and whatnot.
Not sure how concise the syntax is, but this allows command-line control of the app.
I can't wait until someone *finally* has a GUI, drag and point interface to setting up interapp messag sending. I mean a rapid development environment where I can choose a menu item, drag a little line to a button in another window, and have that button trigger said menu item.
Cocoa is fairly similar, but there's no free equivalent, and Cocoa, AFAIK, does not have a lot of work put into making it interact with the command line well, which would also be important.
Seriously, what was *up* with that? I was thinking that too much was being made of the movie -- okay, good and new special effects, okay, grab a pretty basic philosophical idea, have some detailed fight scenes. And that makes it a great movie?
I started laughing out loud when they did the power generation explanation.
And when they started doing the "phones mysteriously transport you in and out of the Matrix" bit, the image that came to mind was the people first adapting to phones and thinking people could do things like poison them or reach through the phone across the phone line.
I mean, as tech movies go, *Tron* was more plausible. Does none of this come off as *stupid* to anyone else?
Every time someone says "foo is a joke" they get Troll moderated, and I realize that in retrospect that might have not gone over well, so let me clarify.
HTTPS is designed to secure the path between the client browser and the web server. The web server is the one that owns the cert. In general, this path is already relatively secure. Sure, it doesn't hurt to have HTTPS in place, and because it's designed to be (relatively) cheap and easy for busineses to run down to VeriSign and get a cert and set up business, it's quite popular.
This does not address security on the web server itself, which is probably the weakest point. If someone can attack the web server, at the very least they can start snagging credit card numbers.
Second, if the web server is compromised and arbitrary data can be sent to the back-end database, bad things may happen. In a proper setup, the database and the web server are separate systems (ideally with a direct link connecting only the two), and *any* communications from the web server to the database/back end system should be given no more weight than you would give to data coming from a client. Then the back end system validates everything coming from the web server.
The problem is, this sort of thing is much more of a pain to do properly. So we get the ever-so-common situation in the security world of taking the easy, sellable, mostly-useless route. Firewalls (which then are promptly tunneled through with Web Services), HTTPS. Sheesh.
If the security industry really cared about securing e-commerce (their emphasis is on easy-to-set-up and easy-to-sell), there would be standards in place for end-to-end signed stuff, rather like international banks to. The *back* end system has a certificate for *Foo Corp Retail*, and a signed message (in a standard format) granting a transaction for $500 payable to Foo Corp. It goes from the client to the webserver, which can't do anything to it, and ideally couldn't even read it. The web server hands this fund transfer authorization over to the back end system, which then can use that to tell the credit card company or bank to do a transaction. Finally, a cryptographically signed recipt is handed back to the web server, which hands it to the client. Then you get an actually meaningful recipt, instead of a forgeable printout of some webpage that's just handed to a customer to make them feel like they're being taken care of.
Incidently, this also means that there is no reason to send the credit card number -- the remote host has an authorization. They don't need a name, number, or expiration date...just an authorization.
All the people that have tried to do things like this have had dollar signs in their eyes, and tried to take a percentage of the transaction. A percentage of e-transactions is simply not going to be acceptable to the world.
So, until such time as some security firm can settle for coming up with a standard and not trying to monopolize it and take a percentage, here we languish, with the almost pointless HTTPS giving the remote person a little "lock" icon in their browser. Lovely.
The other problem is that any serious security folks that want to implement this usually get bogged down in peripheral issues. Maybe it's putting smart cards on everyone's computer to get a totally secure path (card generates fund transfer authorization), or maybe it's trying to come up with value-added services so that the customer has some *additional* reason to buy the thing. They then get tied to the security system, and you have to sell users on the extra services to get them to use the system.
What we need, right *now*, is a secure system. The current one is atrocious, and until the rate of people swiping credit cards from databases and committing fraud is so high that insurers find it worthwhile to give large benefits for implementing things like this, it's not going to change.
I mean expressing a new concept purely within the language -- not introducing a new thing and then creating a new mapping for that thing. Producing the concept of a human without ever having encountered a human.
To be entirely fair, they were using a brute force mechanism and dealing with a changing, hostile environment. We can use a controlled environment.
Yet I don't see this hitting the market in the next ten years.
I remember about eight years ago an article about how the future of storage was going to be in a frozen solid containing bacteria that change shape when a certain intensity of light hits them -- two lasers, each with half the requisite amount of light, would shine in to cause the bacteria to change shape where they met. Terrabytes in a little cube. Never happened.
But I see more and more the trend towards businesses going toward the lowest bidder. That and the lack of certification of e-commerce service providers are, I predict, going to seriously inflate the degree of credit card number theft, as people slap databases and webservers on the same machine or trust the webserver, or improperly secure one or the other.
HTTPS is a joke for e-commerce. No one breaks into a router and sniffs for credit card numbers. They go after poorly secured databases of tens of thousands of numbers.
Last summer I was using IE's FTP client. I had "do not save password" enabled, yet even after rebooting, IE automatically entered the password when reconnecting. I was running the lastest version of IE available through Windows Update (probably 6.x).
Which probably means that on the machines of IE FTP users have a bunch of their passwords sitting around somewhere.
You bitter or what? Seriously...he said basically "Moz has tabbed browsing, which makes it better than IE".
You then go "Opera is a pioneer, and Moz is just a robber. Plus, IE is going to do the same soon, so it's no benefit."
If you haven't tried Moz recently, I'd suggest doing so. At one point, it was dog-slow and I used Opera too. But those days are long gone, and Moz's compatibility is better and performance on roughly the same level (at least in the Linux version of Opera).
Plus, Moz doesn't force you to use MDI. God, I hate MDI. Sucks horribly with multiple viewports (even when I'm using Windows, I gotta have a pager).
That's right, who cares if it violates standards to do so? I run Windows! All bow before me! Fuck the rest of you that don't run Windows!
I run stop signs--it gets me to work quicker! Who cares if I break the law--as long as I get there!
The difference is that with running stop signs, the community has recognized issues with the behavior, and goes out of its way to increase the cost of this behavior (police cars, fines, tickets, license revocations).
This hasn't happened with MS deliberately violating standards (not sure they were in this case, though it's definitely happened in the past). The problem is that because so many people use IE, simply blocking IE from downloading pages from your server usually doesn't work very well.
A better solution is to give perks to the other people. Not infrequently, Linux versions of software are less expensive or free (I was just using icc the other day, for example). Instead of trying a zero-tolerance policy, it's better to give people little perks for engaging in the behavior you like.Regulating IE Use.
You realize the silliness of this when you look at not-broadband wireless computing.
What, you're talking about packet radio? Yeah, TCP/IP isn't designed for that. You also don't use it for that.
For wireless Ethernet, it makes a tremendous amount of sense -- as a matter of fact, not waiting for acks would really suck, since wireless Ethernet has relatively good latency, but has these short periods of complete packet loss or corruption.
Suddenly the chatty TCP/IP takes on this enormous liability and it looks like a foolish design. When [b]each message[/b] takes 15 to 30 seconds round trip, blowing away all the garbage and bundling requests for dozens of things in one message and one return message suddenly seems like a good idea.
How does this relate to IIS servers and the article at all?
If our monuments are destroyed, we have to build them again exactly as they were before. That's because the key thing about monuments is not what they represent, but their particular physical specifications. By rebuilding exactly as before, we send a message to the terrorists that we keep very good records, and aren't afraid to use them.
I assume that everyone realizes that this has little or nothing to do with terrorism. It's almost certainly simply that the Park Service wanted to produce maps of the damn things (to fix stuff later on, to let people build models with, etc), and couldn't get the funding. The way everyone has been getting funding for the past two years is claiming a terrorist tie-in, so the Park Service went for it.
After the French got together the money to build the Statue to gift us with and built it, they couldn't convince us to pony up the money to actually have the damn thing shipped over. It took Hearst and a bunch of media work to get enough people to pay for the transportation.
Obviously, people have different definitions for what a language is, but the one I've heard and use is not simply "is there a mapping between a sound and an object". That's true of many, many animals. I just yesterday was reading a National Geographic talking about meerkats having different warning sounds for humans and some other sort of predator (I forget what). The test is, instead, "can a *new concept* be expressed with the language". That requires a level of abstraction from simple noise-object mappings.
You're missing a whole level of functionality then. xpdf searches for text, too. How is it you've missed this? Probably because you're impatient and callously toss something away instead of appreciating it for what it is.
Just to make absolutely certain you're wrong, I *just* pulled out a copy of xpdf, LaTeXed a document, and searched for a word. It registers no hits.
I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I've used a ton of ps/pdf viewers, wrote my current print filter, and do tons of ps and pdf processing each week. PDF support for Linux is bad. It's quite true. I use Linux (only Linux) as my desktop environment, and those of you that read my posts know that I'm a tremendous Linux fan. Doesn't change the fact that the PDF support sucks.
Also, esd makes mixing sound simple, and there already are drivers for mixing two streams of sound all over the drivers.
I'm not sure what you intended to say here, but you neatly avoided my complaints. (a) esd sound resampling quality and latency sucks, (b) there's no way to play sound and have the system opportunistically use hardware channels until it runs out and then use software fallback. I did, in fact, run out and purchas a SB Live just so that I could get multi-channel sound on Linux. Had I been using Windows, I could have made do with my older sound card and had exactly what I was looking for. This is not something to sneeze at, telling someone that they can "use a new operating system, but they have to buy new hardware to make up for a deficiency in the sound system".
How is it you've missed this functionality? Beats me. Maybe you were too busy whining about it on Slashdot.
I'm thinking the same thing, but about you not reading my question.
After LaTeXing a document I just wrote, I searched for a word in a section header, just to test. xpdf didn't find it. I don't know what it does internally, but it's definitely flawed.
OTOH, you are correct about the bounding box -- xpdf *did* correctly orient the bounding box, whereas gv, and ggv failed on the Linux Alpha Centauri manual that I just tested.:-) gsview worked on this one, though it fails on others. This is good. I haven't used xpdf for ages, though it's been sitting around on the system. Thanks at least for that much.
Slashdot Mirror
But one possibility is that companies will simply refuse to get into similar deals with them in future.
Um...yeah, right.
Nobody wants to deal with Microsoft. Microsoft partners have a lousy history of getting the short end of the stick. You know what, though? They don't have a choice. You can't ignore the most influential computer company, with multiple crucial monopolies, simply because they're risky to deal with.
Bush attacks Iraq: we can ignore that, everybody already knew he was planning to do that.
I was already expecting Bush to work on his ongoing US-police state project, so that's not really news.
Seriously, I just noticed on Google News that Rev. Sharpton is planning to run for President.
That's undoubtedly the best news the Repulicans have had for years. It'll neatly split the Dem supporters, and seriously damange any opposition to continued Republican dominance. I mean, this seriously negates any Dem benefit the whole Lott debacle might have caused.
Yay, more Dubya.
Bah, looks like 3 minute job with a white paintbrush in the GIMP. :-)
Seriously, though, at least some of this *has* to be a photo-manipulated composite, or else they never would have gotten that cloud in the background.
WTF? Is this a lousy article or what?
corresponding operators on hypercomplex numbers similar to the way in which steel replaced bronze as the ingredient for making swords during the Renaissance...
How the hell did Hemos let this one by?
Let's rewrite the article to be useful instead of stupid:
"The Generalized Number System (N+) implements commutative hypercomplex arithmetic to provide an alternative to vectors for processing multivariate data in three or more dimensions. Because of similarities between N+ and the complex number system, software for processing multivariate signals is readily derived from that for processing complex (or real) numbers. The derivation involves replacing operators on complex (or real) numbers with corresponding operators on hypercomplex numbers similar to the way in which steel replaced bronze as the ingredient for making swords during the Renaissance. In both cases, improved performance and capabilities of the product are attributed to properties of the new ingredient while many aspects of making and using the product remain the same. N+ and its application to signal and image processing is described on the website at www.hypercomplex.us".
becomes:
The Generalized Number System (N+) is numerical processing software that uses commutative hypercomplex arithmetic to solve multivariate data problems in more than two dimensions. This outperforms the more traditional vector-based approach.
I mean, all the info thrown out here can be comfortably mentioned on the website, and it doesn't look like a blatant attempt to get "wow, that's complicated" comments.
Without any sort of price range, all they're going to get is people saying "Yeah, I'd like a vorbis player...I'd get one." Few people can make a reasonable judgement without some idea of the cost.
I mean, is this going to cost more than a Zaurus?
I'd probably get one if it was less than $200, but probably wouldn't if it were more than $300. The features certainly play a role -- is this CD-based? Flash-based? HD-based? What kind of interface? Do we get Linux mass storage device support for uploading music?
These are pretty critical.
I can say that I'd be more inclined to buy a vorbis than an mp3 player.
KDE has some sort of high-level messaging protocol so that one can send events, making it appear as if menu items were chosen and whatnot.
Not sure how concise the syntax is, but this allows command-line control of the app.
I can't wait until someone *finally* has a GUI, drag and point interface to setting up interapp messag sending. I mean a rapid development environment where I can choose a menu item, drag a little line to a button in another window, and have that button trigger said menu item.
Cocoa is fairly similar, but there's no free equivalent, and Cocoa, AFAIK, does not have a lot of work put into making it interact with the command line well, which would also be important.
Seriously, what was *up* with that? I was thinking that too much was being made of the movie -- okay, good and new special effects, okay, grab a pretty basic philosophical idea, have some detailed fight scenes. And that makes it a great movie?
I started laughing out loud when they did the power generation explanation.
And when they started doing the "phones mysteriously transport you in and out of the Matrix" bit, the image that came to mind was the people first adapting to phones and thinking people could do things like poison them or reach through the phone across the phone line.
I mean, as tech movies go, *Tron* was more plausible. Does none of this come off as *stupid* to anyone else?
Every time someone says "foo is a joke" they get Troll moderated, and I realize that in retrospect that might have not gone over well, so let me clarify.
HTTPS is designed to secure the path between the client browser and the web server. The web server is the one that owns the cert. In general, this path is already relatively secure. Sure, it doesn't hurt to have HTTPS in place, and because it's designed to be (relatively) cheap and easy for busineses to run down to VeriSign and get a cert and set up business, it's quite popular.
This does not address security on the web server itself, which is probably the weakest point. If someone can attack the web server, at the very least they can start snagging credit card numbers.
Second, if the web server is compromised and arbitrary data can be sent to the back-end database, bad things may happen. In a proper setup, the database and the web server are separate systems (ideally with a direct link connecting only the two), and *any* communications from the web server to the database/back end system should be given no more weight than you would give to data coming from a client. Then the back end system validates everything coming from the web server.
The problem is, this sort of thing is much more of a pain to do properly. So we get the ever-so-common situation in the security world of taking the easy, sellable, mostly-useless route. Firewalls (which then are promptly tunneled through with Web Services), HTTPS. Sheesh.
If the security industry really cared about securing e-commerce (their emphasis is on easy-to-set-up and easy-to-sell), there would be standards in place for end-to-end signed stuff, rather like international banks to. The *back* end system has a certificate for *Foo Corp Retail*, and a signed message (in a standard format) granting a transaction for $500 payable to Foo Corp. It goes from the client to the webserver, which can't do anything to it, and ideally couldn't even read it. The web server hands this fund transfer authorization over to the back end system, which then can use that to tell the credit card company or bank to do a transaction. Finally, a cryptographically signed recipt is handed back to the web server, which hands it to the client. Then you get an actually meaningful recipt, instead of a forgeable printout of some webpage that's just handed to a customer to make them feel like they're being taken care of.
Incidently, this also means that there is no reason to send the credit card number -- the remote host has an authorization. They don't need a name, number, or expiration date...just an authorization.
All the people that have tried to do things like this have had dollar signs in their eyes, and tried to take a percentage of the transaction. A percentage of e-transactions is simply not going to be acceptable to the world.
So, until such time as some security firm can settle for coming up with a standard and not trying to monopolize it and take a percentage, here we languish, with the almost pointless HTTPS giving the remote person a little "lock" icon in their browser. Lovely.
The other problem is that any serious security folks that want to implement this usually get bogged down in peripheral issues. Maybe it's putting smart cards on everyone's computer to get a totally secure path (card generates fund transfer authorization), or maybe it's trying to come up with value-added services so that the customer has some *additional* reason to buy the thing. They then get tied to the security system, and you have to sell users on the extra services to get them to use the system.
What we need, right *now*, is a secure system. The current one is atrocious, and until the rate of people swiping credit cards from databases and committing fraud is so high that insurers find it worthwhile to give large benefits for implementing things like this, it's not going to change.
Sigh.
I mean expressing a new concept purely within the language -- not introducing a new thing and then creating a new mapping for that thing. Producing the concept of a human without ever having encountered a human.
To be entirely fair, they were using a brute force mechanism and dealing with a changing, hostile environment. We can use a controlled environment.
Yet I don't see this hitting the market in the next ten years.
I remember about eight years ago an article about how the future of storage was going to be in a frozen solid containing bacteria that change shape when a certain intensity of light hits them -- two lasers, each with half the requisite amount of light, would shine in to cause the bacteria to change shape where they met. Terrabytes in a little cube. Never happened.
But I see more and more the trend towards businesses going toward the lowest bidder. That and the lack of certification of e-commerce service providers are, I predict, going to seriously inflate the degree of credit card number theft, as people slap databases and webservers on the same machine or trust the webserver, or improperly secure one or the other.
HTTPS is a joke for e-commerce. No one breaks into a router and sniffs for credit card numbers. They go after poorly secured databases of tens of thousands of numbers.
I don't read The Register very much, but I wasn't aware that they didn't have a good reputation. This true?
Last summer I was using IE's FTP client. I had "do not save password" enabled, yet even after rebooting, IE automatically entered the password when reconnecting. I was running the lastest version of IE available through Windows Update (probably 6.x).
Which probably means that on the machines of IE FTP users have a bunch of their passwords sitting around somewhere.
How about popup blocking (doing this in a proxy, as one must do on IE, is slower and less reliable)?
Business is business...
Yet I stop hearing this from Windows people when people write worms and exploits for Outlook or IE or Word.
All depends on which shoe the foot is on, doesn't it?
I don't know anyone that likes AutoComplete, actually. Everyone I know disables it (and the "password manager").
You bitter or what? Seriously...he said basically "Moz has tabbed browsing, which makes it better than IE".
You then go "Opera is a pioneer, and Moz is just a robber. Plus, IE is going to do the same soon, so it's no benefit."
If you haven't tried Moz recently, I'd suggest doing so. At one point, it was dog-slow and I used Opera too. But those days are long gone, and Moz's compatibility is better and performance on roughly the same level (at least in the Linux version of Opera).
Plus, Moz doesn't force you to use MDI. God, I hate MDI. Sucks horribly with multiple viewports (even when I'm using Windows, I gotta have a pager).
That's right, who cares if it violates standards to do so? I run Windows! All bow before me! Fuck the rest of you that don't run Windows!
I run stop signs--it gets me to work quicker! Who cares if I break the law--as long as I get there!
The difference is that with running stop signs, the community has recognized issues with the behavior, and goes out of its way to increase the cost of this behavior (police cars, fines, tickets, license revocations).
This hasn't happened with MS deliberately violating standards (not sure they were in this case, though it's definitely happened in the past). The problem is that because so many people use IE, simply blocking IE from downloading pages from your server usually doesn't work very well.
A better solution is to give perks to the other people. Not infrequently, Linux versions of software are less expensive or free (I was just using icc the other day, for example). Instead of trying a zero-tolerance policy, it's better to give people little perks for engaging in the behavior you like.Regulating IE Use.
You realize the silliness of this when you look at not-broadband wireless computing.
What, you're talking about packet radio? Yeah, TCP/IP isn't designed for that. You also don't use it for that.
For wireless Ethernet, it makes a tremendous amount of sense -- as a matter of fact, not waiting for acks would really suck, since wireless Ethernet has relatively good latency, but has these short periods of complete packet loss or corruption.
Suddenly the chatty TCP/IP takes on this enormous liability and it looks like a foolish design. When [b]each message[/b] takes 15 to 30 seconds round trip, blowing away all the garbage and bundling requests for dozens of things in one message and one return message suddenly seems like a good idea.
How does this relate to IIS servers and the article at all?
If our monuments are destroyed, we have to build them again exactly as they were before. That's because the key thing about monuments is not what they represent, but their particular physical specifications. By rebuilding exactly as before, we send a message to the terrorists that we keep very good records, and aren't afraid to use them.
I assume that everyone realizes that this has little or nothing to do with terrorism. It's almost certainly simply that the Park Service wanted to produce maps of the damn things (to fix stuff later on, to let people build models with, etc), and couldn't get the funding. The way everyone has been getting funding for the past two years is claiming a terrorist tie-in, so the Park Service went for it.
* Linus Torvalds
* Richard Stallman
* Eric S. Raymond
* Bruce Perens
And Stallman and Raymond could be sort of looking at each other and snarling.
After the French got together the money to build the Statue to gift us with and built it, they couldn't convince us to pony up the money to actually have the damn thing shipped over. It took Hearst and a bunch of media work to get enough people to pay for the transportation.
Obviously, people have different definitions for what a language is, but the one I've heard and use is not simply "is there a mapping between a sound and an object". That's true of many, many animals. I just yesterday was reading a National Geographic talking about meerkats having different warning sounds for humans and some other sort of predator (I forget what). The test is, instead, "can a *new concept* be expressed with the language". That requires a level of abstraction from simple noise-object mappings.
You're missing a whole level of functionality then. xpdf searches for text, too. How is it you've missed this? Probably because you're impatient and callously toss something away instead of appreciating it for what it is.
Just to make absolutely certain you're wrong, I *just* pulled out a copy of xpdf, LaTeXed a document, and searched for a word. It registers no hits.
I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I've used a ton of ps/pdf viewers, wrote my current print filter, and do tons of ps and pdf processing each week. PDF support for Linux is bad. It's quite true. I use Linux (only Linux) as my desktop environment, and those of you that read my posts know that I'm a tremendous Linux fan. Doesn't change the fact that the PDF support sucks.
Also, esd makes mixing sound simple, and there already are drivers for mixing two streams of sound all over the drivers.
I'm not sure what you intended to say here, but you neatly avoided my complaints. (a) esd sound resampling quality and latency sucks, (b) there's no way to play sound and have the system opportunistically use hardware channels until it runs out and then use software fallback. I did, in fact, run out and purchas a SB Live just so that I could get multi-channel sound on Linux. Had I been using Windows, I could have made do with my older sound card and had exactly what I was looking for. This is not something to sneeze at, telling someone that they can "use a new operating system, but they have to buy new hardware to make up for a deficiency in the sound system".
How is it you've missed this functionality? Beats me. Maybe you were too busy whining about it on Slashdot.
I'm thinking the same thing, but about you not reading my question.
After LaTeXing a document I just wrote, I searched for a word in a section header, just to test. xpdf didn't find it. I don't know what it does internally, but it's definitely flawed.
:-) gsview worked on this one, though it fails on others. This is good. I haven't used xpdf for ages, though it's been sitting around on the system. Thanks at least for that much.
:-(
OTOH, you are correct about the bounding box -- xpdf *did* correctly orient the bounding box, whereas gv, and ggv failed on the Linux Alpha Centauri manual that I just tested.
I still can't search, though.