Apparently Quickbooks & Quicken run on CrossOver, which
was about $100 last time I looked. Almost certainly they now also run on Wine too, since CrossOver usually donate their changes
back to Wine every few months.
If you haven't looked at Wine for a few years, I'd definitely recommend doing so. Since the 1.0 release it has really
become useful, and seems to have crossed a line where it now runs anything with a few exceptions versus before
where it ran only a few exceptional things.
I'm not worried - I work on the top floor of an office building without any elevators.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Cartoon speech bubble: Ellipse selection, shift-lasso select the arrow (if you can't draw a straight enough line, convert to a path, edit the path to put an arrow in, then convert back to a selection). Fill with background colour using the paint tool (fill whole selection). Stroke selection, choose line style. Put the words in it with the text tool. If you're doing that a lot, make a generic text balloon and save it, then insert it as a layer when you need one.
I'm seriously waiting for someone to mod this +1 funny...
Rich.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Then you want Inkscape instead.
No really I want GIMP to be able to do this.
Example: Take a family photograph
and circle somebody. Or add a cartoon speech bubble.
These things should be single step operations from the main
control pane.
Rich.
Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now?
Yes, I know about gfig, and I know I can laboriously create paths and nonsense like that, but
sometimes I just want to draw shapes simply and directly.
The problem is that if you wipe the data and don't notify the athorities, you've just performed a very illegal act. Yep, that's right, it is extremely illegal to not report improperly handled classified information.
Under which law? The Official Secrets Act doesn't mention anything about
deleting data (although it does make it an offense for officials to be careless
with the data in the first place).
Whether or not he got his personal data back is another question, as anyone knows it is the time invested in generating your own data that is the real value in your PC. I hope he had a backup.
It's OK, he can just buy them back when they turn up on ebay...
Sadly you may be right, although for all the wrong reasons. In civilised parts
of the world we recognise that society exists because of cooperation, and that
includes cooperation with the police.
Unfortunately in cases like these, the police
are undermining that cooperation. As another example, it's rumoured that if you report
child porn on the internet to the relevant authorities in the UK, you should expect
a visit from the coppers and all your computer equipment to be taken away. Which is
why I wouldn't report this, even though child abuse is a terrible thing and it
should be reported.
Now, if I found "terror photos" (whatever they are) on a second hand
laptop or camera, I won't be reporting that either. Just scrubbing any info off the
device and get on with my life.
Funnily enough I was sitting in a busy part of North London yesterday with 4 bars of 3G connection, trying to browse two sites, BBC news and Slashdot. The performance was terrible - extremely slow page loading, total drop-outs and random disconnects from the server. In no way can this be compared to ADSL/broadband.
But there's always going to be some idiot that thinks that the entry on Sapporo, Japan should link to every anime episode set there.
So why not have a link at the bottom of the Sapporo page to List of every anime episode set in Sapporo, Japan? And if those links become too much, then replace them with List of trivia about Sapporo, Japan? There is simply no reason to delete stuff that is true and of interest to someone, no matter how tiny that minority is.
But how far did MkLinux get? I just checked that site, and it's still the same as it was nearly 8 years ago. Sure, the updated dates are the same, but they never did even come out with a 1.0 release.
I actually ran MkLinux on some old Apple computers about 10 years ago, and it
worked pretty well. (About 100x more reliably than Mac OS 9 of the same vintage
which just crashed all the time on the same machines).
However it has to be said that MkLinux was slow, something I attributed
at the time to the overhead of Linux having to do everything on top of the
Mach "not-very-micro"-kernel.
Adding one more flight will not be a huge issue, because there is a rescue flight scheduled for the last current shuttle flight.
Umm, won't they need to schedule a rescue flight for the extra flight?
Rich.
Not to be confused with ...
on
Blown to Bits
·
· Score: 1
Not to be confused with the other
Blown to Bits which seems entirely unrelated. But is also quite a good book, a readable but serious
book about business strategy for companies finding their traditional business damaged by the Internet. Do skip the first chapter though, IIRC
it was a bit dull.
Because even if some people are limited in their understanding of the hierarchic DNS, they are still voters and customers. The easily convinced breed, even.
Yeah, but it was a.org we're talking about. My email address is a.org and people
still stare at me blankly like "what's this thing he's talking about that doesn't end in hotmail.com".
Does your compiler produce typed code for Flash and untyped for Javascript? Note that typical web code is untyped, and on untyped code the Flash Javascript interpreter is pretty slow, since ActionScript is typically typed.
I've no idea - I didn't write it, just playing around.
AIUI, haXe itself is strong, statically typed with type inference.
However once all the types have been inferred and it is generating JS or Flash in the backend then
it's anyone's guess what happens to the type information. Guess you'd have to read the compiler
source or the generated code to find out...
Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition.
I was playing with haXe which is a programming language
that targets both Flash and Javascript back ends. You can (within some constraints) compile the
same program to both targets, so that's what I did yesterday:
Javascript version (requires Firefox 3 or Safari with the canvas widget)
Use keys 1-9 to change demos, and click with the mouse to fire blocks.
I found that Adobe's Flash plugin beat everything, Safari+Javascript was pretty slow, and
Firefox+Javascript was in the middle (but still pretty slow compared to Flash).
Gnash doesn't run this demo at all, although it can run other haXe code.
Most people learn in kindergarten that just because you can get away with doing something wrong doesn't mean you should.
People, yes, not companies. Corporations are pretty much required to do
anything they can to extract profits, so long as it's legal. Filing a patent
like this might be stupid and selfish, but it's certainly not illegal.
Of course that doesn't entirely let MSFT off the hook. They could
do as Red Hat do: file patents but at the same time work to
fix the broken system.
OS X actually does come with a bunch of trial software -- a trial of MS Office, a game, and some presentation software.
Of course on OS X you can trivially remove the stuff (drag the applications to the trash)
It doesn't have virus-scanner-like intrusive crap that actively damages parts of the system,
although that is perhaps just a matter of time.
I used to think that Java's static typing was a big advantage over dynamic typing, but not anymore. While the compiler will catch type errors for you, you still need to test every possible situation for other bugs. Besides, if you don't use generics everywhere (and who would blame you?), you can still get casting errors.
Yeah, I mean I wouldn't really say that Java is a serious contender here. It doesn't even have type inference, and it's got the
effectively typeless Object class which defeats static typing as you say, because the designers of the
language didn't know about polymorphic types. And of course, NullPointerException - modern day languages
have type systems which can catch that.
See my slashdot signature for the language I usually advocate...
There's one big diifference, however: python is a well-designed, highly structured language.
But still, dynamically typed so we get type errors at customer sites, slow, and memory hogging. (Also 'features' of Perl too).
OO-paradigm, so clumsy to use. And the stupid whitespace thing means that patches get misapplied and it's
very easy to accidentally misindent some existing code in the editor, not notice, then have the program do
some totally different thing.
Perl is probably brilliant for simple scripts, but should not be used for large programs
That's complete nonsense. I personally have maintained 100,000-line Perl programs without problems.
Divide the program up, factor out modules as libraries, do lots of testing and code reviews. It's really
not that hard.
I'm happy for them to do absolutely anything with it - provided that all the license plate tracking information, including that of politicians and off-duty police, is a matter of public record.
You probably wouldn't be so happy after your house got burgled because the criminal knew you were away on a long driving trip. Of course, exactly the same thing could be done by a corrupt policeman, which is why the data shouldn't be collected in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently Quickbooks & Quicken run on CrossOver, which was about $100 last time I looked. Almost certainly they now also run on Wine too, since CrossOver usually donate their changes back to Wine every few months.
If you haven't looked at Wine for a few years, I'd definitely recommend doing so. Since the 1.0 release it has really become useful, and seems to have crossed a line where it now runs anything with a few exceptions versus before where it ran only a few exceptional things.
Rich.
I'm not worried - I work on the top floor of an office building without any elevators.
Cartoon speech bubble: Ellipse selection, shift-lasso select the arrow (if you can't draw a straight enough line, convert to a path, edit the path to put an arrow in, then convert back to a selection). Fill with background colour using the paint tool (fill whole selection). Stroke selection, choose line style. Put the words in it with the text tool. If you're doing that a lot, make a generic text balloon and save it, then insert it as a layer when you need one.
I'm seriously waiting for someone to mod this +1 funny ...
Rich.
Then you want Inkscape instead.
No really I want GIMP to be able to do this.
Example: Take a family photograph and circle somebody. Or add a cartoon speech bubble.
These things should be single step operations from the main control pane.
Rich.
Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now?
Yes, I know about gfig, and I know I can laboriously create paths and nonsense like that, but sometimes I just want to draw shapes simply and directly.
The problem is that if you wipe the data and don't notify the athorities, you've just performed a very illegal act. Yep, that's right, it is extremely illegal to not report improperly handled classified information.
Under which law? The Official Secrets Act doesn't mention anything about deleting data (although it does make it an offense for officials to be careless with the data in the first place).
Rich.
Whether or not he got his personal data back is another question, as anyone knows it is the time invested in generating your own data that is the real value in your PC. I hope he had a backup.
It's OK, he can just buy them back when they turn up on ebay ...
Rich.
This is why you never talk to the police.
Sadly you may be right, although for all the wrong reasons. In civilised parts of the world we recognise that society exists because of cooperation, and that includes cooperation with the police.
Unfortunately in cases like these, the police are undermining that cooperation. As another example, it's rumoured that if you report child porn on the internet to the relevant authorities in the UK, you should expect a visit from the coppers and all your computer equipment to be taken away. Which is why I wouldn't report this, even though child abuse is a terrible thing and it should be reported.
Now, if I found "terror photos" (whatever they are) on a second hand laptop or camera, I won't be reporting that either. Just scrubbing any info off the device and get on with my life.
Rich.
Funnily enough I was sitting in a busy part of North London yesterday with 4 bars of 3G connection, trying to browse two sites, BBC news and Slashdot. The performance was terrible - extremely slow page loading, total drop-outs and random disconnects from the server. In no way can this be compared to ADSL/broadband.
Rich.
But there's always going to be some idiot that thinks that the entry on Sapporo, Japan should link to every anime episode set there.
So why not have a link at the bottom of the Sapporo page to List of every anime episode set in Sapporo, Japan? And if those links become too much, then replace them with List of trivia about Sapporo, Japan? There is simply no reason to delete stuff that is true and of interest to someone, no matter how tiny that minority is.
Rich.
But how far did MkLinux get? I just checked that site, and it's still the same as it was nearly 8 years ago. Sure, the updated dates are the same, but they never did even come out with a 1.0 release.
I actually ran MkLinux on some old Apple computers about 10 years ago, and it worked pretty well. (About 100x more reliably than Mac OS 9 of the same vintage which just crashed all the time on the same machines). However it has to be said that MkLinux was slow, something I attributed at the time to the overhead of Linux having to do everything on top of the Mach "not-very-micro"-kernel.
Rich.
Adding one more flight will not be a huge issue, because there is a rescue flight scheduled for the last current shuttle flight.
Umm, won't they need to schedule a rescue flight for the extra flight?
Rich.
Not to be confused with the other Blown to Bits which seems entirely unrelated. But is also quite a good book, a readable but serious book about business strategy for companies finding their traditional business damaged by the Internet. Do skip the first chapter though, IIRC it was a bit dull.
Rich.
Because even if some people are limited in their understanding of the hierarchic DNS, they are still voters and customers. The easily convinced breed, even.
Yeah, but it was a .org we're talking about. My email address is a .org and people
still stare at me blankly like "what's this thing he's talking about that doesn't end in hotmail.com".
Rich.
Does your compiler produce typed code for Flash and untyped for Javascript? Note that typical web code is untyped, and on untyped code the Flash Javascript interpreter is pretty slow, since ActionScript is typically typed.
I've no idea - I didn't write it, just playing around.
AIUI, haXe itself is strong, statically typed with type inference. However once all the types have been inferred and it is generating JS or Flash in the backend then it's anyone's guess what happens to the type information. Guess you'd have to read the compiler source or the generated code to find out ...
Rich.
Once it does, FireFox and Flash 9 should show similar performance profiles.
That's good to know. Does this mean that Adobe Flash & Javascript will both be using this same virtual machine?
Rich.
Ooops, that first paragraph is supposed to be a quote from the grandparent message ...
Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition.
I was playing with haXe which is a programming language that targets both Flash and Javascript back ends. You can (within some constraints) compile the same program to both targets, so that's what I did yesterday:
Use keys 1-9 to change demos, and click with the mouse to fire blocks.
I found that Adobe's Flash plugin beat everything, Safari+Javascript was pretty slow, and Firefox+Javascript was in the middle (but still pretty slow compared to Flash). Gnash doesn't run this demo at all, although it can run other haXe code.
Rich.
Most people learn in kindergarten that just because you can get away with doing something wrong doesn't mean you should.
People, yes, not companies. Corporations are pretty much required to do anything they can to extract profits, so long as it's legal. Filing a patent like this might be stupid and selfish, but it's certainly not illegal.
Of course that doesn't entirely let MSFT off the hook. They could do as Red Hat do: file patents but at the same time work to fix the broken system.
Rich.
OS X actually does come with a bunch of trial software -- a trial of MS Office, a game, and some presentation software. Of course on OS X you can trivially remove the stuff (drag the applications to the trash) It doesn't have virus-scanner-like intrusive crap that actively damages parts of the system, although that is perhaps just a matter of time.
Rich.
Blah blah blah ... I make something and therefore I demand you pay me for it!
PDF created in PowerPoint.
Have they learned nothing???
Rich
I used to think that Java's static typing was a big advantage over dynamic typing, but not anymore. While the compiler will catch type errors for you, you still need to test every possible situation for other bugs. Besides, if you don't use generics everywhere (and who would blame you?), you can still get casting errors.
Yeah, I mean I wouldn't really say that Java is a serious contender here. It doesn't even have type inference, and it's got the effectively typeless Object class which defeats static typing as you say, because the designers of the language didn't know about polymorphic types. And of course, NullPointerException - modern day languages have type systems which can catch that.
See my slashdot signature for the language I usually advocate ...
Rich.
There's one big diifference, however: python is a well-designed, highly structured language.
But still, dynamically typed so we get type errors at customer sites, slow, and memory hogging. (Also 'features' of Perl too). OO-paradigm, so clumsy to use. And the stupid whitespace thing means that patches get misapplied and it's very easy to accidentally misindent some existing code in the editor, not notice, then have the program do some totally different thing.
Perl is probably brilliant for simple scripts, but should not be used for large programs
That's complete nonsense. I personally have maintained 100,000-line Perl programs without problems. Divide the program up, factor out modules as libraries, do lots of testing and code reviews. It's really not that hard.
Rich.
I'm happy for them to do absolutely anything with it - provided that all the license plate tracking information, including that of politicians and off-duty police, is a matter of public record.
You probably wouldn't be so happy after your house got burgled because the criminal knew you were away on a long driving trip. Of course, exactly the same thing could be done by a corrupt policeman, which is why the data shouldn't be collected in the first place.
Rich.