In the past, I have done such things as open a PDF file with Xpdf, then 'print' it to a Postscript file, go in and manually edit the Postscript file with a text editor, then import it back into a PDF file.
I have used such methods to remove diagonal text strips placed on each page in PDF documents, and other things of this sort.
I've also been able to use Xpdf in this fashion (print the PDF to a postscript document) to turn vector-art images saved to PDF into editable/resizable images. I imported the Postscript images into Micrografx Designer and had back editable, resizable vector graphics to tweak as I desired. Designer (Windows only, of course) is available really cheap these days if you buy the "Micrografx Graphics Suite" package for about $50.
Why should a corporation spend tens of thousands of dollars on features only ten people in the company use?
What actually happens is, corporations spend tens of thousands of dollars on features that 60 different groups of ten people in the company use in sixty different ways.
It works out to being a good deal.
This is important stuff to add to the discussion people. It isn't just a log somebody has dropped in the rode to block the discussion.
Why don't we ask: "Should the convention for tapping threads in metal be switched to left hand threads by default?"
Nothing will change as a result of the discussion, and nothing should change. It's the 'simplify UNIX and destroy it in the process' arguement all over again.
People don't want some made up star to follow, they want a real person. And the personalities of the real people are more interesting than writers could ever come up with for fake ones.
I for one am hoping that this new technolgy may be able to kill off the 'Star System' once and for all.
I am TIRED of people breaking my concentration when watching a film with comments like 'I think that charchter is such-and-such.'
When I view films and theatre it's for the story, for the production. A dramatic work is reduced to something less when the 'star' has to carry the film.
And I have long felt that part of my 'nerd' character was not knowing the names of any of those repulsive Hollywood people (aside from a few). And further, not really caring.
The 'Star System' is something trumped up to sell to the public. Nobody should CARE what the actors do off-camera. It's a failure of the dramatic production if it matters. It's the old Elvis shit once again.
As a rule, I ONLY have 'Bell System Property, Not For Sale' phones at home.
Back when the divestiture happened a lot of customers opted to purchase the equipment.
There is no phone on the market for a reasonable price that is as durable and well made as a Bell System phone.
Taking one apart, you'll find different date codes on each component, sometimes with varying dates that span decades. These things were built to last, to standards at least as good as Mil-Spec. Any time a phone was returned to Bell, it was broken up and reassembled from interchangable components.
The Touch-tone phones of the early 70's aren't even digital. They have inductors and LC oscillators to generate the tuned frequencies.
They're available for $3-5 at thrift stores, and easily servicible.
Other than one spread-spectrucm cordless, I won't allow any of the post-breakup crap-phones into my house.
One man throwing a glass of water in another man's face does not do as much damage as millions of people throwing a thimblefull of water into the valley, even though the flood of the combined water in the valley washes out a hospital.
It is just plain dishonest for people to quote a $440 price tag for Windows. If I buy a hard drive, or a Motherboard, or both, I can buy an OEM License for Windows 2000 at the same time for $140. And it's not that bad an idea to keep around an extra license of W2K, as it seems like a good time to cut loose from Microsoft's DRM festival with XP.
Is there a broken X11 calculator that some of you use when pricing up Microsoft OEM products?
Think about that next time the linux bigots howl about how anyone who can't edit obscure config files has no business running linux.
How about instead some of us calmly ask you to stop trying to use Linux and Free Software as a weapon to battle your chosen 'evile enemy' in your holy righteous war?
There are even active Communists out there who criticize the approach of 'Flashy Red Adventurist' propaganda done the 'Revolutionary Worker' way.
Red Baiting would be if he accused Perens of being communist. He accused Perens of being stupidly flashy and 'wave the red flag' adventurist. Like fighting Microsoft is some kid's 'King on the Hill' game.
Now, where's that fucking stack of leaflets? The rally is in fifteen minutes and you idiots don't have the newspaper stuffed into the Goodwill clothes? Get that effegy done! Jesus!
When the server wakes up all those years later it only communicates with TCP/IP. It doesn't have the proper protocols from Microsoft, AOL, ChinaComm, and/or GNUbleprot.
After a short while, though, the feeble squawking on the wire is finally noticed, and a proper Microsoft Linux server notices it and the server is instantly reformatted for use in storing the bitmap patterns for a collection of obscure punctuation symbols.
Well, considering that the 'time machine' concept is really sepearate from the 'parallel universes' concept, if you make a change that causes you to not invent the time machine, *foop* you would cease to exist in the form that travelled back. In other words, you wouldn't be 'trapped in the past' you would just suddenly cease to be there.
I would propose that it's likely that we've all done this an infinite number of times. Then again, I am drinking cheap WalMart 'Mountain Lightening' this morning, instead of proper Mountain Dew so my proposal may have it's flaws.
Are you talking about something Apple Computer did that was innovative?
Their single board computer (the Apple 1) wasn't a whole lot different than several others that entered the market at about the same time.
Apple's 'Great Success' came about because the Apple 2 was the exclusive platform for VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, for it's first year on the market. Businessmen would walk into a computer store and say 'I want to buy a VisiCalc' not knowing, or caring, that the machine they were sold had an Apple logo on it.
Big loopy yarns of myth have been floofed all around to obscure this simple reason for Apple Computer's early success.
To wrap back to the discussion in progress and keep this from being off topic: there weren't any groundbreaking discoveries by amateurs at Apple when the company was starting. The BigBoard, the TRS-80 Model 1, and various other machines implement the same low-cost single-board design. It's important to make a distinction between 'groundbreaking discoveries' and 'marketing phenomena.'
Some people seem to overlook that the government should release software as Public Domain. If other people want to release derivative works under the GPL in order to hold it captive to their political ideology, that is their choice. Of course, first they have to add value beyond what the taxpayers have already paid for.
So do I think that Microsoft did the "right thing?" No way in hell.
What, then, would the 'right thing' to do be?
Should they ship a source tarball for Windows and all of their products on DVD-ROM to their entire customer base? Maybe they should give their entire cash reserves to the EFF?
No, I think that probably wouldn't be enough.
Hatred consumes the one who hates. There are a lot of Microsoft haters who need a nice long break from their preoccupation.
Mathematics isn't a science, though. It's more of a symbolic language. I attended a college where at one point computer programming was classified as a symbolic language, not a science.
There's 'Computer Science' in the way the Microcode is written inside a CPU. Knuth comes up with a purely theoretical machine that he uses in his 'The Art of Computer Programming' series. Note that he calls it an art, right in the title, not a science.
Sometimes it seems like the people grasping to call CS a 'science' are like the social 'scientists' who do the same thing.
Microsoft got sued by Apple Computer in the famous Look and Feel lawsuit.
Microsoft won. In effect, Microsoft set the legal precedent that prevents a company like Apple from suing anybody who makes a desktop theme that looks like an Apple desktop.
It's been said more than once that Microsoft paid the legal bill for everybody else to copy their GUI. Because they don't believe in competing in the courtroom. They're far better at competing in the marketplace. Esp. when they have the kind of control of that market that they presently hold.
It's a mixed bag, but believe me, if Apple had won the suit, you'd be lucky to be allowed to use the Tab Window Manager on your X desktop.
It's not too far along for the market to pull the plug on HDTV.
I don't really care for Mountain Dew commercials to be even more penetrating into my home. I get the information and the entertainment I want with the current technology.
I liken it sort of to listening to 'classic' Jazz recordings. They're all on old 78 RPM platters. I can sit there next to the phonograph obsessing about the lower fidelity, the pops from scratches, etc. Or I can re-experience the music as it was recorded. Guess which one I choose to do?
The medium is NOT the message.
Re:Rumschpringen
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They really played up that 'defame the Amish' show on NPR that you link to. It seemed like the liberals at NPR were actually gleeful in the endless promotional material they played in the weeks before the program. They also allowed the promotional spots to 'lead' the listener to believe the young Amish were engaging in orgies, rather than a little youthful drinking.
Yeah, really efficient embedded stuff is important, but it really has little to do with software engineering.
Huh?
You're saying that writing 'high level' goop using contrived languages and symbols is 'software engineering', versus understanding the instruction set and how to use it to implement algorhythms to move actual physical data, which is not 'software engineering?'
I disagree with Dijkstra's comment, anyway. Computer science has everything to do with computers, and data structures, and algorhythms. His statement would be more accurate if it was: "Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with stars."
Astrononmy could exist without telescopes, and in fact it did for many centuries. Computer science wouldn't exist without computers.
Re:Bhutanese Culture will cease to exist.
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 1
OS/2 was the effort by IBM to recapture and control the destiny of the PC. You're probably only old enough to know OS/2 as the 'superior, heroic attempt to thwart Windows.'
Believe me, when OS/2 v1 came out, with the Microchannel buss, all the 'hackers' on PC's (as opposed to the rich-kid hackers on college campuses with their Sun boxes) opposed it. It represented the closing of the wide-open MS-DOS frontier.
Calling Novell 'the good old days...' eeek. Not even going to go there. You seem to be saying anything not-Microsoft was once cool.
GOTOs are part of the machine. Without them there wouldn't be a heck of a lot of Assembly language.
For 'higher level' structures and languages, they do interfere with the legibility of the code. But some of us still program in Assembly Language. There is no way in hell I can afford to allocate half of the read/write memory in a chip to the stack, just so the code 'reads more clearly.' Hell, I have done things like generate jumptables of NOPs, push an address onto the stack manually, and use a 'RET' command to branch to an arbitrary part of that string of NOPs to generate instruction-cycle-resolution pulsewidths. When your processor has a 32 KHz clock, you do things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
In the past, I have done such things as open a PDF file with Xpdf, then 'print' it to a Postscript file, go in and manually edit the Postscript file with a text editor, then import it back into a PDF file.
I have used such methods to remove diagonal text strips placed on each page in PDF documents, and other things of this sort.
I've also been able to use Xpdf in this fashion (print the PDF to a postscript document) to turn vector-art images saved to PDF into editable/resizable images. I imported the Postscript images into Micrografx Designer and had back editable, resizable vector graphics to tweak as I desired. Designer (Windows only, of course) is available really cheap these days if you buy the "Micrografx Graphics Suite" package for about $50.
Why should a corporation spend tens of thousands of dollars on features only ten people in the company use?
What actually happens is, corporations spend tens of thousands of dollars on features that 60 different groups of ten people in the company use in sixty different ways.
It works out to being a good deal.
This is important stuff to add to the discussion people. It isn't just a log somebody has dropped in the rode to block the discussion.
This is a flamebait topic.
Why don't we ask: "Should the convention for tapping threads in metal be switched to left hand threads by default?"
Nothing will change as a result of the discussion, and nothing should change. It's the 'simplify UNIX and destroy it in the process' arguement all over again.
Good grief.
These are game designers.
Not electronic game designers. There's no cursor buttons nor an A or a B button.
I guess you can do whatever silly things you want with your dice though.
People don't want some made up star to follow, they want a real person. And the personalities of the real people are more interesting than writers could ever come up with for fake ones.
I for one am hoping that this new technolgy may be able to kill off the 'Star System' once and for all.
I am TIRED of people breaking my concentration when watching a film with comments like 'I think that charchter is such-and-such.'
When I view films and theatre it's for the story, for the production. A dramatic work is reduced to something less when the 'star' has to carry the film.
And I have long felt that part of my 'nerd' character was not knowing the names of any of those repulsive Hollywood people (aside from a few). And further, not really caring.
The 'Star System' is something trumped up to sell to the public. Nobody should CARE what the actors do off-camera. It's a failure of the dramatic production if it matters. It's the old Elvis shit once again.
But to make the point "How Replaceable everyone is" cheapens a persons life.
Actually, the person's life was already cheapened before somebody commented that they're not doing a damned thing with it.
People who just trudge through life have chosen their own fate. We can have sympathy for them, but we don't have to pretend we admire them.
As a rule, I ONLY have 'Bell System Property, Not For Sale' phones at home.
Back when the divestiture happened a lot of customers opted to purchase the equipment.
There is no phone on the market for a reasonable price that is as durable and well made as a Bell System phone.
Taking one apart, you'll find different date codes on each component, sometimes with varying dates that span decades. These things were built to last, to standards at least as good as Mil-Spec. Any time a phone was returned to Bell, it was broken up and reassembled from interchangable components.
The Touch-tone phones of the early 70's aren't even digital. They have inductors and LC oscillators to generate the tuned frequencies.
They're available for $3-5 at thrift stores, and easily servicible.
Other than one spread-spectrucm cordless, I won't allow any of the post-breakup crap-phones into my house.
That depends on the scale of it.
One man throwing a glass of water in another man's face does not do as much damage as millions of people throwing a thimblefull of water into the valley, even though the flood of the combined water in the valley washes out a hospital.
It is just plain dishonest for people to quote a $440 price tag for Windows. If I buy a hard drive, or a Motherboard, or both, I can buy an OEM License for Windows 2000 at the same time for $140. And it's not that bad an idea to keep around an extra license of W2K, as it seems like a good time to cut loose from Microsoft's DRM festival with XP.
Is there a broken X11 calculator that some of you use when pricing up Microsoft OEM products?
Think about that next time the linux bigots howl about how anyone who can't edit obscure config files has no business running linux.
How about instead some of us calmly ask you to stop trying to use Linux and Free Software as a weapon to battle your chosen 'evile enemy' in your holy righteous war?
That wasn't red baiting.
There are even active Communists out there who criticize the approach of 'Flashy Red Adventurist' propaganda done the 'Revolutionary Worker' way.
Red Baiting would be if he accused Perens of being communist. He accused Perens of being stupidly flashy and 'wave the red flag' adventurist. Like fighting Microsoft is some kid's 'King on the Hill' game.
Now, where's that fucking stack of leaflets? The rally is in fifteen minutes and you idiots don't have the newspaper stuffed into the Goodwill clothes? Get that effegy done! Jesus!
heh
When the server wakes up all those years later it only communicates with TCP/IP. It doesn't have the proper protocols from Microsoft, AOL, ChinaComm, and/or GNUbleprot.
After a short while, though, the feeble squawking on the wire is finally noticed, and a proper Microsoft Linux server notices it and the server is instantly reformatted for use in storing the bitmap patterns for a collection of obscure punctuation symbols.
Well, considering that the 'time machine' concept is really sepearate from the 'parallel universes' concept, if you make a change that causes you to not invent the time machine, *foop* you would cease to exist in the form that travelled back. In other words, you wouldn't be 'trapped in the past' you would just suddenly cease to be there.
I would propose that it's likely that we've all done this an infinite number of times. Then again, I am drinking cheap WalMart 'Mountain Lightening' this morning, instead of proper Mountain Dew so my proposal may have it's flaws.
Are you talking about something Apple Computer did that was innovative?
Their single board computer (the Apple 1) wasn't a whole lot different than several others that entered the market at about the same time.
Apple's 'Great Success' came about because the Apple 2 was the exclusive platform for VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, for it's first year on the market. Businessmen would walk into a computer store and say 'I want to buy a VisiCalc' not knowing, or caring, that the machine they were sold had an Apple logo on it.
Big loopy yarns of myth have been floofed all around to obscure this simple reason for Apple Computer's early success.
To wrap back to the discussion in progress and keep this from being off topic: there weren't any groundbreaking discoveries by amateurs at Apple when the company was starting. The BigBoard, the TRS-80 Model 1, and various other machines implement the same low-cost single-board design. It's important to make a distinction between 'groundbreaking discoveries' and 'marketing phenomena.'
Some people seem to overlook that the government should release software as Public Domain. If other people want to release derivative works under the GPL in order to hold it captive to their political ideology, that is their choice. Of course, first they have to add value beyond what the taxpayers have already paid for.
So do I think that Microsoft did the "right thing?" No way in hell.
What, then, would the 'right thing' to do be?
Should they ship a source tarball for Windows and all of their products on DVD-ROM to their entire customer base? Maybe they should give their entire cash reserves to the EFF?
No, I think that probably wouldn't be enough.
Hatred consumes the one who hates. There are a lot of Microsoft haters who need a nice long break from their preoccupation.
Like Boolean Algebra.
Mathematics isn't a science, though. It's more of a symbolic language. I attended a college where at one point computer programming was classified as a symbolic language, not a science.
There's 'Computer Science' in the way the Microcode is written inside a CPU. Knuth comes up with a purely theoretical machine that he uses in his 'The Art of Computer Programming' series. Note that he calls it an art, right in the title, not a science.
Sometimes it seems like the people grasping to call CS a 'science' are like the social 'scientists' who do the same thing.
Microsoft got sued by Apple Computer in the famous Look and Feel lawsuit.
Microsoft won. In effect, Microsoft set the legal precedent that prevents a company like Apple from suing anybody who makes a desktop theme that looks like an Apple desktop.
It's been said more than once that Microsoft paid the legal bill for everybody else to copy their GUI. Because they don't believe in competing in the courtroom. They're far better at competing in the marketplace. Esp. when they have the kind of control of that market that they presently hold.
It's a mixed bag, but believe me, if Apple had won the suit, you'd be lucky to be allowed to use the Tab Window Manager on your X desktop.
The Electric Industry has spent billions on Nuclear Power Plants that were never operated.
Right.
And zoologists could spend their entire careers describing in great detail the anatomy, behavior, and appearance of animal species that don't exist.
Not sure how many people would pay much attention to them. Not sure it'd be considered a 'science' any more than the output of a novelist is.
It's not too far along for the market to pull the plug on HDTV.
I don't really care for Mountain Dew commercials to be even more penetrating into my home. I get the information and the entertainment I want with the current technology.
I liken it sort of to listening to 'classic' Jazz recordings. They're all on old 78 RPM platters. I can sit there next to the phonograph obsessing about the lower fidelity, the pops from scratches, etc. Or I can re-experience the music as it was recorded. Guess which one I choose to do?
The medium is NOT the message.
They really played up that 'defame the Amish' show on NPR that you link to. It seemed like the liberals at NPR were actually gleeful in the endless promotional material they played in the weeks before the program. They also allowed the promotional spots to 'lead' the listener to believe the young Amish were engaging in orgies, rather than a little youthful drinking.
One can reject something one has been exposed to.
Yeah, really efficient embedded stuff is important, but it really has little to do with software engineering.
Huh?
You're saying that writing 'high level' goop using contrived languages and symbols is 'software engineering', versus understanding the instruction set and how to use it to implement algorhythms to move actual physical data, which is not 'software engineering?'
I disagree with Dijkstra's comment, anyway. Computer science has everything to do with computers, and data structures, and algorhythms. His statement would be more accurate if it was:
"Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with stars."
Astrononmy could exist without telescopes, and in fact it did for many centuries. Computer science wouldn't exist without computers.
OS/2 was the effort by IBM to recapture and control the destiny of the PC. You're probably only old enough to know OS/2 as the 'superior, heroic attempt to thwart Windows.'
Believe me, when OS/2 v1 came out, with the Microchannel buss, all the 'hackers' on PC's (as opposed to the rich-kid hackers on college campuses with their Sun boxes) opposed it. It represented the closing of the wide-open MS-DOS frontier.
Calling Novell 'the good old days...' eeek. Not even going to go there. You seem to be saying anything not-Microsoft was once cool.
GOTOs are part of the machine. Without them there wouldn't be a heck of a lot of Assembly language.
For 'higher level' structures and languages, they do interfere with the legibility of the code. But some of us still program in Assembly Language. There is no way in hell I can afford to allocate half of the read/write memory in a chip to the stack, just so the code 'reads more clearly.' Hell, I have done things like generate jumptables of NOPs, push an address onto the stack manually, and use a 'RET' command to branch to an arbitrary part of that string of NOPs to generate instruction-cycle-resolution pulsewidths. When your processor has a 32 KHz clock, you do things like that.