Well, the fix for Adobe Reader sluggishness on Windows is given in the other replies.
I don't see any satisfactory alternative to Adobe Reader. Pdf's are everywhere in academia; they are the standard platform-independent way to exchange articles, even whole books. I have hundreds, maybe even thousands of them on my harddrive.
And sadly, nothing else for viewing them seems to work well enough. Files made with Latex and converted with ghostscript have embedded type 1 fonts (if they're any good at all, that is.)
Foxit PDF Reader doesn't appear to use the embedded fonts; can't tell for sure because it gives no font info, but the rendered text looks crappy. Pdfreader is full of adware. For Linux, xpdf and its derivatives appears not to work well under Ubuntu (saw a message that it renders in tiny text, but I can't find it anymore.) Kghostview I know doesn't work well enough; for the files I tried it on, it showed nothing at all, just blank pages!
For more info on this, see The Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers
If anybody knows a free pdf reader that shows all standard files in good quality and has a text search function, I'd love to hear about it, especially if it's for Linux.
For some time, Ubuntu has been number 1 on Distrowatch's hit list (a good, not perfect measure of popularity.) It seems to be growing exponentially: it now has twice as many page hits per day (2970) as the next most popular distro (Mandriva, aka Mandrake, with 1471). And Kubuntu has come out of nowhere in a short time to reach number 11. This situation is unprecedented in the time I've been watching Distrowatch.
Can someone explain this? Why Ubuntu rather than Fedora, or for that matter Mepis or Kanotix, both fine user-oriented Debian-based distros?
In part, [Thompson] said, the idea was to avoid some of the divisiveness that often characterizes the Windows vs. Linux debate.
What BS. How stupid do they think everyone is? They didn't disclose because they knew that without the disclosure the story would be all over the tech press, and the followup revelation would be mostly confined to a thread on Slashdot.
No, there's nothing ironic about it. The point of academics is to blaze new ground, not rehash 20 year old operating system design like Linus did. How "useful" or "fast" or "free" Linux is largely irrelvant.
Slashdot needs a new system for identifying anonymous cowards. When I read this, I wanted to know whether the guy who wrote it was the same one who wrote
I think Linus needs to progress his operating system kernel experience past his early 1990's university studies. To put it bluntly, the Linux kernel is a severely outdated design and needs to be scrapped and redone from scratch with modern techniques.,
(the comment to which Paradox was replying). Was it the same guy just going on, or was two different opinions along the same line? Slashdot should identify the anonymous authors of comments within an article as "anonymous coward 1," "anonymous coward 2," etc., so that multiple comments from the same person would be clearly indicated. This wouldn't compromise the anonymity of the writer at all.
speling (yes, dodo, I know that's misspelled)
on
IBM to Drop Itanium
·
· Score: 1
Can't the editors at least fix spelling mistakes in the article headers? Regardless of whether the mistakes are due to ignorance (most on/. are) or are just typos, isn't one of the functions of editors to edit? Having "persue" in the headline and in a million links out there in webland is just an embarrassment to every/. reader who might hope to persuade others to take viewpoints expressed on/. seriously....
Have they improved the audio quality...
on
Apple Updates iPod
·
· Score: 1
... of the new mini to the level of the iPod Shuffle?
...would have been an article about when not to buy a digital camera at all. (Though I realize that to buy someone a film camera for Xmas these days is to risk getting oneself pigeonholed as a dinosaur.)
An interesting (and not inflammatory) take on the current situation can be found here, and if you read it it you should also read this.
I'm just a snapshot photographer, and while I don't have dogmatic views about the digital/non-digital decision for other folks, I'm just about fed up with my 3mp Canon Powershot S230. Apart from the ultra-annoying 1 second delay after you press the shutter-- forget about getting candids -- there are the normally slow exposures, which magnify any shake at all in your hand into a blurry exposure, and the completely non-self-evident complement of controls.
I sat down for hours with the manual, partly to learn how to override the default shutter speed, and finally decided the camera was designed without any real feeling for UI considerations. Some features are activated by pressing one button and deactivated by pressing another; other features are activated and deactivated with the same button... It's very hard to remember how to use this camera if you don't use it constantly.
Mr. Rockwell (mentioned above) opines that "The best way to get a digital image is by shooting film and having it scanned." I don't know about all of you more-expert-than-I photographers out there, but I'm going back to my trusty viewfinder 35mm, with which I used to take an occasional pretty good picture.
The author of the above-mentioned article in the Portland Tribune works for a free-market think tank. This means to me that the article is more likely to be ideological propaganda than any kind of thoughtful analysis, and indeed it provides very little comfort to anybody who is worried about the possibility of runaway global warming.
Quoting the Portland Tribune article:
Moreover, economic growth no longer means an automatic rise in CO2. While the U.S. gross domestic product grew by 32 percent from 1990 to 1999, energy-related CO2 emissions grew by only 12 percent. This means that we do not have to impose growth controls in order to minimize greenhouse gases; we simply have to encourage the continued technological innovation that is characteristic of a free-market economy.
The increase in efficiency is admirable, but CO2 production is still increasing with increasing GDP. Nobody should conclude from this statistic that "economic growth no longer means an automatic rise in CO2."
The rest of the article repeats the tired assertion to the effect we don't have incontrovertible evidence that increasing CO2 leads to global warming. Lack of incontrovertible evidence for something is not evidence to the contrary. We probably never will have conclusive evidence, but given the catastrophic nature of global warming, we likely won't be able to wait for it before trying to do something.
I went to Tools/Options/Advanced/Software Update and clicked "Check Now". It confirmed that there was a critical update available, which I let it install immediately. Firefox hung while downloading the update (1.0PR, Windows XP).
I had to terminate Firefox without completing the update, which seemed dangerous, but there was no alternative. When I restarted it, I discovered that I had previously blocked software installs in Tools/Options/Web Features, which might have caused the automatic upgrade to hang. (Of course there should have been a message instead of hanging.) So I checked Allow Web sites to install software. (My "allowed sites" list displayed as empty, incidentally. Is that correct?)
Then I downloaded the update manually (file 259708.xpi) to my harddrive and installed it by opening that file in Firefox. The update installed successfully (no message though). I verified this by checking the install.log in the firefox directory.
Now Firefox should have been at version 0.10.1, but Help/About showed 0.10.0 until I closed Firefox and reopened it. This is surely a bug, and it might allow a user to install the same update twice. Under some imaginable circumstances, that might trash the installation.
Folks, Jackson had to cut the movie down from 4+ hours to 3:12 + 8 minutes of credits. Something had to go.
There was never any real problem in cutting LotR down to size. Just truncate those endless battle scenes, and put the missing storyline back in their place. I'm assuming the finale will be similarly disproportionate.
The best thing to do with Enderle's "essays" is to ignore them. He has a forum, but that doesn't mean that his every blathering needs to be discussed endlessly on Slashdot.
I wonder about the authenticity of this. Who is this "Ken Clark, principal engineer for Diebold Election Systems?" Despite all the teenage geeks on Slashdot who can't spell, I have never run across a literate adult who couldn't spell "lose."
Jed does Wordstar keystrokes. Also does Emacs (keystrokes). Unlimited configuration possibilities. Available in Red Hat and Slackware and probably most other good distributions. Look here.
... Isn't it the shareholders of AOL? Then what's to prevent any company's executives (even the CEO) from releasing code under the GPL and then later taking it back, claiming the release was unauthorized? (The shareholders didn't approve it directly.)
Or else, probably some officer-- the CEO -- has authority to do this on the corporation's behalf. Can that authority be legally delegated lower down the chain? Did Nullsoft's official release of WASTE make the GPL release binding on AOL?
What Rob wants to know -- and what I want to know -- is which format is outselling the other, not which one/.'er X prefers and which one Y has heard has more problems than the other, and not even the rumor that a certain fruity computer company is leaning toward dvd-r (or is it dvd+r, who cares?)
dvdrhelp is a nice site, but they only tell you how many recorder models do one or the other or both and how many dvd player models play one or the other or both. What we want to know is: is one recorder format outselling the other by, say, 5 to 1, because then the war is over and hang the minute technical details. You can't find this out by Googling, unless there is some secret search-term combination; I've tried.
The sales data seems to be as closely held as the crown jewels. Isn't there some industry insider reading this who will post some facts, perhaps as Anonymous Coward?
And curse Sony for starting this whole format war in the first place!
Slashdot Mirror
My bet is that you've never even read "1984."
I don't think the Slashdot editors can spell either. An "editor like Cliffy" recently allowed the word "persue" to appear in a headline.
Well, the fix for Adobe Reader sluggishness on Windows is given in the other replies.
I don't see any satisfactory alternative to Adobe Reader. Pdf's are everywhere in academia; they are the standard platform-independent way to exchange articles, even whole books. I have hundreds, maybe even thousands of them on my harddrive.
And sadly, nothing else for viewing them seems to work well enough. Files made with Latex and converted with ghostscript have embedded type 1 fonts (if they're any good at all, that is.) Foxit PDF Reader doesn't appear to use the embedded fonts; can't tell for sure because it gives no font info, but the rendered text looks crappy. Pdfreader is full of adware. For Linux, xpdf and its derivatives appears not to work well under Ubuntu (saw a message that it renders in tiny text, but I can't find it anymore.) Kghostview I know doesn't work well enough; for the files I tried it on, it showed nothing at all, just blank pages! For more info on this, see
The Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers
If anybody knows a free pdf reader that shows all standard files in good quality and has a text search function, I'd love to hear about it, especially if it's for Linux.
It's also full of adware, it appears on following the posters link. I wouldn't touch it.
For some time, Ubuntu has been number 1 on Distrowatch's hit list (a good, not perfect measure of popularity.) It seems to be growing exponentially: it now has twice as many page hits per day (2970) as the next most popular distro (Mandriva, aka Mandrake, with 1471). And Kubuntu has come out of nowhere in a short time to reach number 11. This situation is unprecedented in the time I've been watching Distrowatch.
Can someone explain this? Why Ubuntu rather than Fedora, or for that matter Mepis or Kanotix, both fine user-oriented Debian-based distros?
In part, [Thompson] said, the idea was to avoid some of the divisiveness that often characterizes the Windows vs. Linux debate.
What BS. How stupid do they think everyone is? They didn't disclose because they knew that without the disclosure the story would be all over the tech press, and the followup revelation would be mostly confined to a thread on Slashdot.
"Researchers", hah.
64kbs is CD quality the same way that Welch's sparkling grape juice is cabernet quality.
5% x 0 = 0
Slashdot needs a new system for identifying anonymous cowards. When I read this, I wanted to know whether the guy who wrote it was the same one who wrote
I think Linus needs to progress his operating system kernel experience past his early 1990's university studies. To put it bluntly, the Linux kernel is a severely outdated design and needs to be scrapped and redone from scratch with modern techniques.,
(the comment to which Paradox was replying). Was it the same guy just going on, or was two different opinions along the same line? Slashdot should identify the anonymous authors of comments within an article as "anonymous coward 1," "anonymous coward 2," etc., so that multiple comments from the same person would be clearly indicated. This wouldn't compromise the anonymity of the writer at all.
Can't the editors at least fix spelling mistakes in the article headers? Regardless of whether the mistakes are due to ignorance (most on /. are) or are just typos, isn't one of the functions of editors to edit? Having "persue" in the headline and in a million links out there in webland is just an embarrassment to every /. reader who might hope to persuade others to take viewpoints expressed on /. seriously....
... of the new mini to the level of the iPod Shuffle?
An interesting (and not inflammatory) take on the current situation can be found here, and if you read it it you should also read this. I'm just a snapshot photographer, and while I don't have dogmatic views about the digital/non-digital decision for other folks, I'm just about fed up with my 3mp Canon Powershot S230. Apart from the ultra-annoying 1 second delay after you press the shutter-- forget about getting candids -- there are the normally slow exposures, which magnify any shake at all in your hand into a blurry exposure, and the completely non-self-evident complement of controls.
I sat down for hours with the manual, partly to learn how to override the default shutter speed, and finally decided the camera was designed without any real feeling for UI considerations. Some features are activated by pressing one button and deactivated by pressing another; other features are activated and deactivated with the same button... It's very hard to remember how to use this camera if you don't use it constantly.
Mr. Rockwell (mentioned above) opines that "The best way to get a digital image is by shooting film and having it scanned." I don't know about all of you more-expert-than-I photographers out there, but I'm going back to my trusty viewfinder 35mm, with which I used to take an occasional pretty good picture.
The author of the above-mentioned article in the Portland Tribune works for a free-market think tank. This means to me that the article is more likely to be ideological propaganda than any kind of thoughtful analysis, and indeed it provides very little comfort to anybody who is worried about the possibility of runaway global warming.
Quoting the Portland Tribune article:
The increase in efficiency is admirable, but CO2 production is still increasing with increasing GDP. Nobody should conclude from this statistic that "economic growth no longer means an automatic rise in CO2."
The rest of the article repeats the tired assertion to the effect we don't have incontrovertible evidence that increasing CO2 leads to global warming. Lack of incontrovertible evidence for something is not evidence to the contrary. We probably never will have conclusive evidence, but given the catastrophic nature of global warming, we likely won't be able to wait for it before trying to do something.
I went to Tools/Options/Advanced/Software Update and clicked "Check Now". It confirmed that there was a critical update available, which I let it install immediately. Firefox hung while downloading the update (1.0PR, Windows XP).
I had to terminate Firefox without completing the update, which seemed dangerous, but there was no alternative. When I restarted it, I discovered that I had previously blocked software installs in Tools/Options/Web Features, which might have caused the automatic upgrade to hang. (Of course there should have been a message instead of hanging.) So I checked Allow Web sites to install software. (My "allowed sites" list displayed as empty, incidentally. Is that correct?)
Then I downloaded the update manually (file 259708.xpi) to my harddrive and installed it by opening that file in Firefox. The update installed successfully (no message though). I verified this by checking the install.log in the firefox directory.
Now Firefox should have been at version 0.10.1, but Help/About showed 0.10.0 until I closed Firefox and reopened it. This is surely a bug, and it might allow a user to install the same update twice. Under some imaginable circumstances, that might trash the installation.
Folks, Jackson had to cut the movie down from 4+ hours to 3:12 + 8 minutes of credits. Something had to go.
There was never any real problem in cutting LotR down to size. Just truncate those endless battle scenes, and put the missing storyline back in their place. I'm assuming the finale will be similarly disproportionate.
The best thing to do with Enderle's "essays" is to ignore them. He has a forum, but that doesn't mean that his every blathering needs to be discussed endlessly on Slashdot.
I sense a loosing battle here though....
I wonder about the authenticity of this. Who is this "Ken Clark, principal engineer for Diebold Election Systems?" Despite all the teenage geeks on Slashdot who can't spell, I have never run across a literate adult who couldn't spell "lose."
Jed does Wordstar keystrokes. Also does Emacs (keystrokes). Unlimited configuration possibilities. Available in Red Hat and Slackware and probably most other good distributions. Look here.
Not everything is a slippery slope
A slope becomes slippery when you're on it and people are pushing you downhill with all their might.
"Limited" DRM will be an extremely transitional phase.
(Warning: if you accidentally hit ENTER instead of SHIFT while editing your subject line, your comment gets instantly submitted, warts and all :))
... Isn't it the shareholders of AOL? Then what's to prevent any company's executives (even the CEO) from releasing code under the GPL and then later taking it back, claiming the release was unauthorized? (The shareholders didn't approve it directly.)
Or else, probably some officer-- the CEO -- has authority to do this on the corporation's behalf. Can that authority be legally delegated lower down the chain? Did Nullsoft's official release of WASTE make the GPL release binding on AOL?
(Obviously, IANAL.)
What Rob wants to know -- and what I want to know -- is which format is outselling the other, not which one /.'er X prefers and which one Y has heard has more problems than the other, and not even the rumor that a certain fruity computer company is leaning toward dvd-r (or is it dvd+r, who cares?)
dvdrhelp is a nice site, but they only tell you how many recorder models do one or the other or both and how many dvd player models play one or the other or both. What we want to know is: is one recorder format outselling the other by, say, 5 to 1, because then the war is over and hang the minute technical details. You can't find this out by Googling, unless there is some secret search-term combination; I've tried.
The sales data seems to be as closely held as the crown jewels. Isn't there some industry insider reading this who will post some facts, perhaps as Anonymous Coward?
And curse Sony for starting this whole format war in the first place!
"De-fecto" standard indeed.
The "Learn more" link doesn't work with Opera (6) for Windows, no matter how I adjust the preferences.