Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.
Agreed. I publish a newsletter for a club with 3,000 people. inDesign handles everything so nicely and has a variety of features Scribus could never hope to match (for example, I doubt you can choose between display modes, ie fast for displaying low-res previews of your 600DPI photos so you can scroll around and edit text, or high-res for showing off what the final product will look like). I've got styles defined which let me typeset the whole thing consistently; article title is one style, author's name is another. They all inherit qualities from their parents, so if I want to make it New Times Roman tomorrow, it's one click and a quick trip through the pages to check for any text box sizing problems. Its PDF support is absolutely amazing. It supports color management, something linux bumbles almost completely. It takes Adobe Illustrator, EPS etc directly. My only complaint is that it doesn't have support for imposition, and Adobe says that's because it's not designed for large documents over a few pages- yeesh, what a bunch of bullshit. Tip- if you have to put a faq entry in about why you pulled a feature from your program(it was pulled in 2.x), you shouldn't have pulled it, dumbasses.
The authors showed themselves to be utterly and hopelessly clueless when they said the following:
In fact, it has evolved into a worthy competitor to the print industry's premier layout programs for the PC and Mac: PageMaker and QuarkXPress.
PageMaker hasn't been "the industry's" premiere ANYTHING for years because it DOES NOT RUN ON OS X. QuarkXPress has been consistently loosing market share and only companies who are tied into it irrevocably are still using it. It's a pathetic, buggy, overpriced, underfeatured dinosaur piece of bloatware.
I tried Scribus last time a new version came out, and it crashed constantly, and was extremely poorly documented. inDesign is ROCK solid and --does not crash--. Further- the documentation is astoundingly good and easy to search; probably the first electronic documentation I've actually found useful, especially as someone who's not a publishing 'pro'. I picked up inDesign essentially from scratch and within a week had a newsletter people raved about.
Every Sunday I fire up my Quake2 Xatrix server to play with friends that live local. Afterwards we all meet in a local boozer. WELL! The discussions of the game get really heated
...and then someone slams their pint on the table and yells, "ALRIGHT! That's it. You and me, on the net, right now!"
Want to see The Future? Go to the UK, where radar cameras are just about EVERYWHERE.
Top Gear, a BBC motoring show(I highly recommend watching it, it's great fun even for non-motorheads) has been having a field day with them.
They pointed out that:
The idiot doing her makeup on the wrong side of the road is not caught by the speed camera
The mass-murder with the body sticking out of the trunk isn't caught by the speed camera
The 18 year old hopped up on pot and drinking a can of beer, so incapacitated he can't manage to get above 25mph, isn't caught by the speed camera
Osama Bin Laden, most wanted man in the world, is not caught by the speed camera- because he's doing 25mph.
the host's grandmother, who hasn't had an accident in decades, on her way to church, doing 27mph in a 25 zone- is nailed by the speed camera.
Further, despite speed cameras increasing SIGNIFICANTLY and revenues increasing significantly as well- guess what? Traffic deaths remained exactly the same over the last 2-3 years. In other words- speeding has exactly bullshit to do with accident rates.
But wait- it gets even better. The UK government responded to criticism that it was using the cameras for revenue collection by changing the fines. Used to be a flat fine. Now, it's a lower fine if you're going only about 2mph over the limit. But if you're doing anything more than 2-3mph over the limit, the fine's much more. Wait wait, it gets better- you get FEWER points taken off your license, and more points before your license is revoked! THEY'RE MAKING MORE MONEY!
Cops and speed-limit nazis love to point to statistics showing "speeding is a factor in X percentage of crashes" and it's something well over 50%. Now listen to the news. "So and so was cited for drunk driving, resisting arrest, illegal weapon possession and speeding. He was caught when he hit a tree." Gee- couldn't have been because he was DRUNK, could it have? Two teenagers smack into a barrier at twice the speed limit and police say "speed was the cause of this accident". NO, it was inexperience and/or impaired judgment! Doing 50 on the highway is safe- doing 50 around that hairpin bend was not. Duh.
There is a HUGE difference between "speeding" and "reckless driving". I can drive recklessly at 55mph on the highway- in fact, these days, going the speed limit is more dangerous than moving with traffic- but I can also do 120mph down the road perfectly safely, if a)my vehicle is well maintained and properly equipped (good tires, brakes, etc) b)I am capable of controlling the vehicle c)conditions (road surface, traffic density, weather) are appropriate.
Furthermore, cops aren't doing jack shit about the newest cause of most accidents- road rage. And guess what the #1 cause of road rage accidents is? Fucking morons who sit in the left lane doing 65mph, dead even with the guy next to them.
Want to know the best part? Next time you get pulled over by a cop using a laser gun, thank Geico- they buy them by the dozens for state and municipal police departments. Result? Their customers get written up for speeding, Geico makes a shitload of money off the rate increase, and most of the time they win big time because SPEEDING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ACCIDENT RATES!
The whole speed camera mess is best exemplified by a story I saw from another commenter a couple months ago. He/she said that a legislator suggested amending the state's proposed speed camera law to include one warning. The response from the state and speed camera company(!) was "oh, that'd cost us too much in ticket fees!" To which he coolly replied, "well, is the purpose to promote safe driving, or make money?" After that- the law died a quick death.
If you think about what a capacitor is, I don't think it is all that thermally sensitive.
Electrolytic capacitors are very heat sensitive, if you "think about what it is"; it's a liquid-filled device. They're rated for a fixed lifetime, and that lifetime is a certain number of hours at a certain temperature. The "fixed lifetime" bit is why electrolytic capacitors are NEVER milspec-rated; they can't be. Tantalum capacitors are, but they're a)expensive b)take up more space c)expensive d)expensive.
The original poster you responded to was naive. For example- the capacitors could be high-temperature rated; the case will say so. I forget the ratings but 85 degrees C and 105 degrees C are coming to mind. The hour rating also varies drastically- you can buy some that will last 4-5 times longer than others. You can buy 'overvoltage' capacitors that are rated well above the voltage you'll be using(though they'll be larger). So on, etc. As previously mentioned, they could also be tantalum.
Furthermore, he/she/it seems to think heat will be a problem off the PSU. No doubt it uses convection, and notice the PSU is at the bottom of the machine, getting the coolest air? my G4 17" PB power supply brick runs fairly cool under normal use- and it has no venting, it's a solid plastic case. In fact, I just found it buried under my jacket on the rug- well insulated- and it's lukewarm. Charging the battery is another matter, but the G5 imac doesn't have one of those.
So, honestly, I think everyone is not giving Apple a chance on this one and engaging in a lot of slack-jawed armchair engineering. Given the potential for fire and whatnot, I'm sure Apple was very careful about thermal design. What I find more interesting is that none of the photos are real- they're very clearly CG mockups. 3-4 week delivery? Hahah. AHAHAHAHAHAH. AHAHAHAHAHAAH [collapses from heart attack from laughing fit].
The lubricant on the disc surface is just to help protect it from damage (platters are already have a protective layer, but this new one has better characteristics at high speed and is simpler to apply because it doesn't require seperate adhesives).
Didn't IBM, now Hitachi, use some sort of glass coating on their laptop drives? Combined with that and the drop sensor (accelerometer which causes the drive to park the heads when it senses it's falling) they're supposed to be very tough little buggers (they're nothing like the deskstars, which were crap as we all know).
I know one reason I considered Java uncool was because people who claimed to know it were earning twice as much as me- a "lowly" sysadmin.
They never got calls after midnight, never once had to deal with "this needs to be done in the next 5 minutes", and it was the exception, not the rule, for them to do anything other than get told what to work on- and rarely more than one thing at a time.
Furthermore, while I actually had to demonstrate proven skills to be hired- they had to show up for the interview and have a pulse. Without naming names, let's say that 99% of them were on visas. They had atrocious English skills and/or horrible accents, so understanding them enough to support them was a pain. Rudimentary computer skills (for a programmer, there's little excuse) so they required lots of support. Lastly, they also tended to form their own clique and resisted multiple attempts by other staff to get friendly etc- pretty much ignoring the two or three programmers who were not from their country.
I once caught one of the new hires printing out a 600 page "learning Java" PDF well after closing hour- he didn't expect (foolish man) someone from IT to be around at 7pm. I hand-delivered it to his desk and told him that he had come within a millimeter of his boss finding out he was printing rudimentary books he shouldn't need. I was completely disgusted.
Wasn't as bad as the consultants who were paid $120 an hour for specialized development- and didn't know how to use Sun's desktop environment. Every time I walked into their room I found them playing solitaire, checking their stock portfolios- in one case, a guy was playing Quake (he was summarily fired within days).
I mean, look at the demographic most likely to own web cams and leave them connected to their computer. Would you really WANT to spy on them?
A friend who went to WPI set up a webcam which amused all of us for a while- it was very hip and trendy at the time(this was many, many years ago- circa the original Quickcam). Totally innocent intentions, he just diddling with it for fun.
He had it up for barely a few days before it suddenly and unceremoniously featured a "privacy" switch which he told me was installed within easy reach of the bed; I found out because he was trying to figure out how to poll the parallel port to detect the switch. It wasn't necessary for several days, however- SHE was way too pissed.
I never did see the image in question, but apparently all of their WPI friends had seen it within the hour after one of them found it:-)
Nice to see I can get modded up to 4 by people who agree with me about space/defense funding.
...and then 5 minutes later modded down for being "flamebait". Happens every time I post a comment that goes contrary to the "because it's there" space fanboyism.
God forbid someone should express an opinion that's unpopular, right folks?
The problem is that killing NASA won't solve those problems you state or remotely fund a fix on any of them, unless you want an emotional band-aid.
I see. So we should just keep throwing money at defense technology? We spend more on defense per capita than the next top three nations combined- do you realize that includes North Korea, widely considered to be a "military state"?
The problem is that taxes are all interlinked, because they're all paid by you and me out of the same place- our bank accounts. So when federal taxes go up, guess what? That means more political pressure on state and local politicians. They have to cut local and state taxes because people are screaming blue bloody murder that their taxes are outrageous. Perfect example- MA's governor, Mitt Romney, wants to slash taxes- but his last budget severely cut funding for a lot of very important stuff- programs for the mentally ill and money for state colleges, for example. There's no money left in the coffers for improving the state's roads- even though we have a fantastic system of arteries in Boston now, soon as you get off them, you find some of the shittiest roads in the country.
You want local services to be locally funded? Fine. Cut the money out of the budget- don't redirect it to "terrorism" crap or defense stuff- I want to see my federal tax bill for 2005 go down. Second, get corporations back to footing half the taxes, like they did in the 1950's, instead of the 2% of today.
The things wrong with the educational system goes far deeper than money, throwing more money at it without solving the other problems would only make things worse, IMO.
When schools have to shut down all their extracurricular activities and students have to share BOOKS in this day and age- uh, I beg to differ. Throwing money is EXACTLY what needs to be done. But, enior citizens hate taxes, don't have kids in school, and vote in large numbers.
The 2003 engine has the potential to power future missiles, aircraft, and access-to-space vehicles. Last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Navy, Boeing, Aerojet, and Johns Hopkins University also ground-tested a scramjet engine, which was constructed primarily from nickel alloys, powered by JP10 jet fuel, and intended exclusively for hypersonic missiles.
Great. So now we'll have missiles that can do mach 15. It's being billed for aircraft as well, but nobody seems to have addressed issues of, gee, say, it only being useful at incredible altitudes. Nevermind that the airline industry is crumbling requiring massive bailouts from the Feds, and the only supersonic aircraft to date to do commercial passenger flights was never profitable in almost 40 years of operation.
The most influential of these efforts was NASA's National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program, established in 1986 to develop a vehicle with speed greater than Mach 15 and horizontal takeoff and landing capabilities. The program ended in 1993,
"The program ended"? What a polite way of saying "we failed. But along the way we spent almost 10 years and probably billions on some futuristic space plane with no real purpose."
I'm sick of NASA justifying themselves as an organization for exploration and science- when they're instead spending most of their time (and my money) on weapons platform research and lining defense contractor pockets. We haven't managed to do anything for millions of Americans with no health insurance , our kids are dumb as bricks because their schools are cutting programs and staff, and our police/fire/ems departments are laying off staff left and right from budget cuts...but hey, we've got a plane that can do mach 15 at 100,000 feet! Sweet!
The Internet (yes, the Internet) is running at the slowest speed ever, due to the clog being offered forth by the spam zombies, unpatched Windows boxes mass-scanning entire subnets due to virus and worm infection, and residential porn downloads.
In one of those glass-half-empty deals- I'd say it's running at its fastest speed ever, because of all that garbage.
Guess what? Nobody who matters cares. The internet isn't run on ideals and dreamy visions- it's run by backbone companies who, just like the telephone companies with telemarkets- profit from every single bit of it.
Do you really think backbones are going to chase after their customers? Nope. They're going to happily invoice for every bit of it- whether the customer ISP is paying by the byte or needs to upgrade to a faster line, either way- the backbone provider wins. I don't think you'll see them leaping for joy at anti-spam and spyware laws- they'll claim free speech this or that, but in reality be only concerned about loosing traffic that they can bill for.
If bandwidth used by DDoS's and spam couldn't be charged for, the problem would have been stamped out a long, long, long time ago by ISPs and backbones. They have the ability to stop zombies and whatnot- they just don't give a shit.
Jesus, everyone blows that out of proportion, like 5300's were exploding left and right. It happened in an Apple test lab, with a PREPRODUCTION model, with a DEFECTIVE BATTERY supplied by the battery manufacturer. I have no idea where MacNN got that it was two batteries.
Not a single customer was affected by the problem- Apple took the precautionary measure of switching to NiMH after the problem, and most people never even saw a Lithium Ion battery in their 5300.
So, I ask, how could they possibly have handled the problem any better, mmm? Comparing it to the iPod battery bit, which was not handled as well- is absurd.
What are you going to do, live life as a total shut in, in your glass and sheet-metal room?
Believe it or not, this actually makes you more sick- because your body -needs- minor exposure to germs to keep your immune system "current".
Once you go into isolation, your immune system gets "lazy" and you actually become highly likely to get sick from even minor exposure. I don't suggest licking doorknobs, and YES, you still should clean your mouse, keyboard, desk, etc and observe proper sanitary procedures in your kitchen- but don't go psycho with the antibacterial stuff- among other things, people don't use it properly 95% of the time.
Funny story- I was one on the subway and let out a minor sneeze. I was exceptionally polite- I actually held my nose, leaned forwards and down, sneezed as little as possible, etc. The woman next to me BOLTS upright and zooms half a car length away to the door. The three people opposite me- who probably received more than she did, if anything- all burst out laughing.
People with multiple chemical sensitivity are usually depressed, and reject suggestions by attending doctors that they see a psychologist, dismissing it as patronizing- they're truly offended and think the doctor is dismissing their claims, when the doctor is actually recognizing someone who's depressed and regardless of physical symptoms, needs to see a trained psychologist.
MCS also is almost always self-diagnosed; patients come to doctors claiming they have it. That is a hallmark of invented diseases and hypochondriacs.
The chemicals leeched off by plastics- and particularly vinyl in cars and the like- are very toxic, actually- but the simple solution is to air out the object in question. Put the keyboard on your porch or something for a few days or something, or for chrissakes, leave the window open.
The last time my palm "crashed" was when I was mucking about with a new program. Prior to that, I had an "uptime" approaching 6 months.
You complained about bootup time. I told you it was irrelevant. Don't change the focus- it's not a pissing contest, it was an argument against your insinuation that bootup time is a major hassle. It's not even a concern.
I'll note that you totally ignored the HDD seek, power consumption, and cost arguments. How nice of you.
I ignored HDD seek because I've got a GB of ram and it doesn't really affect me that much; my HD doesn't seek in a blocking fashion when I'm surfing webpages, typing emails, etc.
Power consumption is maybe 50W -fully- loaded down(screen, processor, GPU, CDROM all operating at full power draw). Doing nothing but surfing the web or typing emails, it's cool enough to sit on my bed or rug and not even get past "lukewarm". Used lightly, I can make my battery last a full 8 hour workday. Sleep mode can be used extensively since it takes about 2 seconds to wake and become useable.
Cost? Well, that's like a Yugo owner telling a Bentley owner, "your car is inferior, mine costs less." I've got a 17" full color screen, full size keyboard(which glows in the dark, thank you very much!), 60GB hard drive, Wifi(802.11G, handy for accessing my 360GB fileserver from, say, the hammock) and a DVD burner.
I'd like to see you generate 60 GB of real text--or even 256 MB. You can even have a month to do it.
One word, 5 characters. Starts with V, ends with o. One word, 5 characters, starts with P, ends with o. You can do neither on your fruity little palm. Thank you for playing. Oh, and I have about 500MB of email, and another 200MB compressed in an archive.
(And we'll ignore that the main point of the WiFi card is to eliminate the Palm's native-memory standard. Want an archive of old documents? Just share with the harddrive
Or I could just walk over to the computer and use it- full size keyboard, nice pointing device, big screen that (gasp!) supports- get ready for it- color. Oooooooo.
I have a 486 that's been gathering dust for years, too.
I said 3 years- and 486's aren't 3 year old technology- yet more useless comparisons for theatrics. My newest PC is about 3 years old(athlon thunderbird) and my main server is a celeron the -original celeron-) 300. My router is a 6 year old laptop and my fileserver is a P3/500. All of it ancient technology, and still perfectly useable.
My Handspring failed at its only mission in life, to store my contacts, because the fucking thing didn't have nvram and thus every time I went to use it to look up a phone number, its batteries were dead and its memory erased. I'd have to find some AA's, dig out the cradle, sync it up. Wonderful, except when you're on the fucking side of the road and you need to call a friend, and you just put new batteries in the fucking thing two weeks ago.
A few years ago I worked at a place where we had two Cisco PIX (the 1U widgets, dunno what model, sorry) in a failover configuration. For those that don't know, you can run two kinds- stateful and non-stateful failover.
In stateful failover mode, the two units share their connection state info over a dedicated ethernet crossover cable- in theory, if one unit's hardware shits the bed, the other one immediately notices and takes over, and all users will notice is maybe a few seconds pause in everything, if that. It's all very clean and good, the slave even takes over the MAC address of the failed unit (something they've patented, and hence isn't useable in Linux HA; Linux has to force an ARP announcement, which is messier. Goooooo Cisco!)
Anyway, that's great, except when you have a software defect. Oh, say...where the PIX OS (PIXes didn't run IOS or whatever, they ran a separate OS unique to the PIX family) gets into a certain situation based on state and locks up hard.
Well, guess what happens to its twin, running the same PIX OS version, and sharing the same data? Yup, it crashes too.
The pair actually did it once right in front of us- one stopped blinking its lights...the master/slave light blipped on the backup unit, and then a few seconds later, it too crashed- and everything ground to a halt.
It was terribly amusing that Cisco was incompetent enough to not include a hardware watchdog in the PIX box so that if it hung it would reboot itself; my Sonicwall SOHO has this, why can't a PIX for chrissakes? The problem only happened every few days, and would have been manageable(ie ignorable;-) if they had both simply rebooted themselves. Instead, someone had to trundle in and power cycle both of them, until we figured out that it was state-based, and disabled stateful failover. Then someone just had to check every day to make sure one of them hadn't kicked the bucket.
Solid-state memory and an always-on OS eliminate both boot-up time and HD seek.
Um...I last rebooted my powerbook for the 10.3.5 system update. Prior to that, I had a 38 day uptime. Furthermore- I've rarely actually run out of battery time. I laugh when people talk about boot up times- they've clearly never used a powerbook if they make such an inane comment. You open the lid. 2 seconds later you've got your network connections and you can start work, unless you turned on password locking. Hell, half the time my SSH tunnels are still useable- even after the PB has been asleep for hours! Not like reboots take any more than a minute on a 1Ghz G4 anyway.
Comparing a laptop to a PDA is absurd. You can't watch video/DVDs, surf webpages with any decent speed or clarity, or write with anything approaching speed or easy of use(I guarantee I can type at least ten times faster than you can "grafiti"). I'd also like to see you fit 60GB of data onto your palm pilot. Even if it was possible- its OS couldn't efficiently handle that much storage.
A lot of people can use their palms as easily as a computer. For some folks, it's even easier.
Um, are you seriously suggesting people can just "pick up" grafiti? It took me weeks before I could stop looking at the cheat sheet.
With my iPod and phone (Siemens S56) both supporting full contact info and calendaring as well as text notes for things like directions, I sync them both to iCal and Address Book with two clicks. My Visor has been sitting in the closet gathering dust for 3 years.
Well, say, you take a project like GnuRadio and make your own GPS receiver.
GPS depends upon measuring the time it takes radio signals to travel less than a meter or two. That's not possible without very specialized electronics. Furthermore- GPS units, at least the kind -you- can buy for a few hundred dollars, don't do any of this bull. They just use WAAS- aka broadcast-via-satellite DGPS.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but not everything can be done in software.
Open Office on the Mac is a joke. It runs under X and looks like crap.
Fair enough, even if the comment was trollish. The article aims to help make it less of a joke, but you really have to ask yourself this-
There are a lot of talented mac progammers working on all sorts of cute but worthless apps, like 5 billion "download songs off your iPod" programs. The OpenOffice team has repeatedly asked for volunteers to help with the port to Aqua. There are a lot of people who really don't like Microsoft.
So why is it that OpenOffice for Aqua is so far off? Come on people- stop bitching, step up to the plate!
Introducing Motion, the only motion graphics package with real-time previews, procedural behavior animation and Final Cut Pro HD integration.
Seems BorisFX has had all this nailed for quite some time, and at a variety of price points- ranging from the OEM bundles all the way up to stuff like Boris Red. A lot of their stuff is OpenGL accelerated, so it should be just as fast, and it works on both Mac and PC NLE platforms...almost two dozen of them? Nevermind that BorisFX gives away the Keyframer authoring program so you can diddle and learn the interface or even work on projects on laptops, home systems, workstations other than your production rig, etc.
So I have to ask- what's the big deal here? It's been a couple of years since I looked at any of this, so someone please lay it out for me.
"If you have recently published a paper and want to give it publicity or your company wants to publish a press release please click here to contact PhysOrg team."
Someone else mentioned the strong emphasis on patents and whatnot. There's also the genius sole inventor, who is president of the company- kinda sketchy. Lastly, outlandish claims- "bandwidth limits beyond 1000 GB/sec".
Um. Riiiiight. Call me when he has published results and a working prototype he's shown. Until then, he's just a "don't look under that large 40 gallon-sized compartment in my infinite motion car" scam artist.
Sarnoff and RCA are the scum of the earth; they ruined a guy's life simply to not have to pay him royalties; thankfully, history has for the most part set the record straight for anyone who digs a little.
Pretty sad; Farnsworth never saw a dime and went into deep depression over the whole thing. Farnsworth saw the waste of his invention almost from the get-go; as the Time article says, his son said "I suppose you could say that he felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives."
Nothing's changed in 50 years- corporations still bully the "little guy" like this. Back in the 80's, a company my father started had technology stolen from them by NCR (National Cash Register Corporation). Despite a signed NDA, NCR ripped off technology they were demo'd. There was clear evidence NCR had stolen the design, they had the NDA in hand, etc- but NCR managed to drag it out in court for years. I believe the suit was abandoned due to lack of funds, but I don't recall- it was a subject that was not discussed often or pleasantly in our house.
I hope they rot in hell- they helped cripple the company, which was working on some really innovative touch screen technology. Much of the touchscreen technology, now in use by PDAs and whatnot, you can owe to DTI- Digital Techniques Inc- a tiny little Burlington, MA company nobody ever heard of. Probably their most "famous" product was the very early touchscreen system in Super Stop and Shop where you could enter a product name and get a map to where it was in the store; they also did some award winning videodisk based exhibits for the Museum Of Science. They were also bullied out of an air traffic control system project with the FAA...by Raytheon. DTI designed a system that, in the late 80's, would have allowed a controller to manage all his electronics(radios and whatnot) from one small touchscreen system. Decades ahead of its time.
Pretty much anything featured on MST3K could be considered for the "worst... movie... ever..."
Yeah. but among those- Killdozer was probably the worst.
Plot? A bunch of construction equipment becomes possessed thanks to a meteor. The worst(best?) part is that the good guys are getting chased by...um...bulldozers. Which, in case you never noticed, can be outrun by my grandmother- without her walker.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I publish a newsletter for a club with 3,000 people. inDesign handles everything so nicely and has a variety of features Scribus could never hope to match (for example, I doubt you can choose between display modes, ie fast for displaying low-res previews of your 600DPI photos so you can scroll around and edit text, or high-res for showing off what the final product will look like). I've got styles defined which let me typeset the whole thing consistently; article title is one style, author's name is another. They all inherit qualities from their parents, so if I want to make it New Times Roman tomorrow, it's one click and a quick trip through the pages to check for any text box sizing problems. Its PDF support is absolutely amazing. It supports color management, something linux bumbles almost completely. It takes Adobe Illustrator, EPS etc directly. My only complaint is that it doesn't have support for imposition, and Adobe says that's because it's not designed for large documents over a few pages- yeesh, what a bunch of bullshit. Tip- if you have to put a faq entry in about why you pulled a feature from your program(it was pulled in 2.x), you shouldn't have pulled it, dumbasses.
The authors showed themselves to be utterly and hopelessly clueless when they said the following:
In fact, it has evolved into a worthy competitor to the print industry's premier layout programs for the PC and Mac: PageMaker and QuarkXPress.
PageMaker hasn't been "the industry's" premiere ANYTHING for years because it DOES NOT RUN ON OS X. QuarkXPress has been consistently loosing market share and only companies who are tied into it irrevocably are still using it. It's a pathetic, buggy, overpriced, underfeatured dinosaur piece of bloatware.
I tried Scribus last time a new version came out, and it crashed constantly, and was extremely poorly documented. inDesign is ROCK solid and --does not crash--. Further- the documentation is astoundingly good and easy to search; probably the first electronic documentation I've actually found useful, especially as someone who's not a publishing 'pro'. I picked up inDesign essentially from scratch and within a week had a newsletter people raved about.
...and then someone slams their pint on the table and yells, "ALRIGHT! That's it. You and me, on the net, right now!"
Want to see The Future? Go to the UK, where radar cameras are just about EVERYWHERE.
Top Gear, a BBC motoring show(I highly recommend watching it, it's great fun even for non-motorheads) has been having a field day with them.
They pointed out that:
Further, despite speed cameras increasing SIGNIFICANTLY and revenues increasing significantly as well- guess what? Traffic deaths remained exactly the same over the last 2-3 years. In other words- speeding has exactly bullshit to do with accident rates.
But wait- it gets even better. The UK government responded to criticism that it was using the cameras for revenue collection by changing the fines. Used to be a flat fine. Now, it's a lower fine if you're going only about 2mph over the limit. But if you're doing anything more than 2-3mph over the limit, the fine's much more. Wait wait, it gets better- you get FEWER points taken off your license, and more points before your license is revoked! THEY'RE MAKING MORE MONEY!
Cops and speed-limit nazis love to point to statistics showing "speeding is a factor in X percentage of crashes" and it's something well over 50%. Now listen to the news. "So and so was cited for drunk driving, resisting arrest, illegal weapon possession and speeding. He was caught when he hit a tree." Gee- couldn't have been because he was DRUNK, could it have? Two teenagers smack into a barrier at twice the speed limit and police say "speed was the cause of this accident". NO, it was inexperience and/or impaired judgment! Doing 50 on the highway is safe- doing 50 around that hairpin bend was not. Duh.
There is a HUGE difference between "speeding" and "reckless driving". I can drive recklessly at 55mph on the highway- in fact, these days, going the speed limit is more dangerous than moving with traffic- but I can also do 120mph down the road perfectly safely, if a)my vehicle is well maintained and properly equipped (good tires, brakes, etc) b)I am capable of controlling the vehicle c)conditions (road surface, traffic density, weather) are appropriate.
Furthermore, cops aren't doing jack shit about the newest cause of most accidents- road rage. And guess what the #1 cause of road rage accidents is? Fucking morons who sit in the left lane doing 65mph, dead even with the guy next to them.
Want to know the best part? Next time you get pulled over by a cop using a laser gun, thank Geico- they buy them by the dozens for state and municipal police departments. Result? Their customers get written up for speeding, Geico makes a shitload of money off the rate increase, and most of the time they win big time because SPEEDING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ACCIDENT RATES!
The whole speed camera mess is best exemplified by a story I saw from another commenter a couple months ago. He/she said that a legislator suggested amending the state's proposed speed camera law to include one warning. The response from the state and speed camera company(!) was "oh, that'd cost us too much in ticket fees!" To which he coolly replied, "well, is the purpose to promote safe driving, or make money?" After that- the law died a quick death.
Electrolytic capacitors are very heat sensitive, if you "think about what it is"; it's a liquid-filled device. They're rated for a fixed lifetime, and that lifetime is a certain number of hours at a certain temperature. The "fixed lifetime" bit is why electrolytic capacitors are NEVER milspec-rated; they can't be. Tantalum capacitors are, but they're a)expensive b)take up more space c)expensive d)expensive.
The original poster you responded to was naive. For example- the capacitors could be high-temperature rated; the case will say so. I forget the ratings but 85 degrees C and 105 degrees C are coming to mind. The hour rating also varies drastically- you can buy some that will last 4-5 times longer than others. You can buy 'overvoltage' capacitors that are rated well above the voltage you'll be using(though they'll be larger). So on, etc. As previously mentioned, they could also be tantalum.
Furthermore, he/she/it seems to think heat will be a problem off the PSU. No doubt it uses convection, and notice the PSU is at the bottom of the machine, getting the coolest air? my G4 17" PB power supply brick runs fairly cool under normal use- and it has no venting, it's a solid plastic case. In fact, I just found it buried under my jacket on the rug- well insulated- and it's lukewarm. Charging the battery is another matter, but the G5 imac doesn't have one of those.
So, honestly, I think everyone is not giving Apple a chance on this one and engaging in a lot of slack-jawed armchair engineering. Given the potential for fire and whatnot, I'm sure Apple was very careful about thermal design. What I find more interesting is that none of the photos are real- they're very clearly CG mockups. 3-4 week delivery? Hahah. AHAHAHAHAHAH. AHAHAHAHAHAAH [collapses from heart attack from laughing fit].
Didn't IBM, now Hitachi, use some sort of glass coating on their laptop drives? Combined with that and the drop sensor (accelerometer which causes the drive to park the heads when it senses it's falling) they're supposed to be very tough little buggers (they're nothing like the deskstars, which were crap as we all know).
I know one reason I considered Java uncool was because people who claimed to know it were earning twice as much as me- a "lowly" sysadmin.
They never got calls after midnight, never once had to deal with "this needs to be done in the next 5 minutes", and it was the exception, not the rule, for them to do anything other than get told what to work on- and rarely more than one thing at a time.
Furthermore, while I actually had to demonstrate proven skills to be hired- they had to show up for the interview and have a pulse. Without naming names, let's say that 99% of them were on visas. They had atrocious English skills and/or horrible accents, so understanding them enough to support them was a pain. Rudimentary computer skills (for a programmer, there's little excuse) so they required lots of support. Lastly, they also tended to form their own clique and resisted multiple attempts by other staff to get friendly etc- pretty much ignoring the two or three programmers who were not from their country.
I once caught one of the new hires printing out a 600 page "learning Java" PDF well after closing hour- he didn't expect (foolish man) someone from IT to be around at 7pm. I hand-delivered it to his desk and told him that he had come within a millimeter of his boss finding out he was printing rudimentary books he shouldn't need. I was completely disgusted.
Wasn't as bad as the consultants who were paid $120 an hour for specialized development- and didn't know how to use Sun's desktop environment. Every time I walked into their room I found them playing solitaire, checking their stock portfolios- in one case, a guy was playing Quake (he was summarily fired within days).
A friend who went to WPI set up a webcam which amused all of us for a while- it was very hip and trendy at the time(this was many, many years ago- circa the original Quickcam). Totally innocent intentions, he just diddling with it for fun.
He had it up for barely a few days before it suddenly and unceremoniously featured a "privacy" switch which he told me was installed within easy reach of the bed; I found out because he was trying to figure out how to poll the parallel port to detect the switch. It wasn't necessary for several days, however- SHE was way too pissed.
I never did see the image in question, but apparently all of their WPI friends had seen it within the hour after one of them found it :-)
Name a single one that came from:
Nice to see I can get modded up to 4 by people who agree with me about space/defense funding.
...and then 5 minutes later modded down for being "flamebait". Happens every time I post a comment that goes contrary to the "because it's there" space fanboyism.
God forbid someone should express an opinion that's unpopular, right folks?
I see. So we should just keep throwing money at defense technology? We spend more on defense per capita than the next top three nations combined- do you realize that includes North Korea, widely considered to be a "military state"?
The problem is that taxes are all interlinked, because they're all paid by you and me out of the same place- our bank accounts. So when federal taxes go up, guess what? That means more political pressure on state and local politicians. They have to cut local and state taxes because people are screaming blue bloody murder that their taxes are outrageous. Perfect example- MA's governor, Mitt Romney, wants to slash taxes- but his last budget severely cut funding for a lot of very important stuff- programs for the mentally ill and money for state colleges, for example. There's no money left in the coffers for improving the state's roads- even though we have a fantastic system of arteries in Boston now, soon as you get off them, you find some of the shittiest roads in the country.
You want local services to be locally funded? Fine. Cut the money out of the budget- don't redirect it to "terrorism" crap or defense stuff- I want to see my federal tax bill for 2005 go down. Second, get corporations back to footing half the taxes, like they did in the 1950's, instead of the 2% of today.
The things wrong with the educational system goes far deeper than money, throwing more money at it without solving the other problems would only make things worse, IMO.
When schools have to shut down all their extracurricular activities and students have to share BOOKS in this day and age- uh, I beg to differ. Throwing money is EXACTLY what needs to be done. But, enior citizens hate taxes, don't have kids in school, and vote in large numbers.
Great. So now we'll have missiles that can do mach 15. It's being billed for aircraft as well, but nobody seems to have addressed issues of, gee, say, it only being useful at incredible altitudes. Nevermind that the airline industry is crumbling requiring massive bailouts from the Feds, and the only supersonic aircraft to date to do commercial passenger flights was never profitable in almost 40 years of operation.
The most influential of these efforts was NASA's National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program, established in 1986 to develop a vehicle with speed greater than Mach 15 and horizontal takeoff and landing capabilities. The program ended in 1993,
"The program ended"? What a polite way of saying "we failed. But along the way we spent almost 10 years and probably billions on some futuristic space plane with no real purpose."
I'm sick of NASA justifying themselves as an organization for exploration and science- when they're instead spending most of their time (and my money) on weapons platform research and lining defense contractor pockets. We haven't managed to do anything for millions of Americans with no health insurance , our kids are dumb as bricks because their schools are cutting programs and staff, and our police/fire/ems departments are laying off staff left and right from budget cuts...but hey, we've got a plane that can do mach 15 at 100,000 feet! Sweet!
In one of those glass-half-empty deals- I'd say it's running at its fastest speed ever, because of all that garbage.
Guess what? Nobody who matters cares. The internet isn't run on ideals and dreamy visions- it's run by backbone companies who, just like the telephone companies with telemarkets- profit from every single bit of it.
Do you really think backbones are going to chase after their customers? Nope. They're going to happily invoice for every bit of it- whether the customer ISP is paying by the byte or needs to upgrade to a faster line, either way- the backbone provider wins. I don't think you'll see them leaping for joy at anti-spam and spyware laws- they'll claim free speech this or that, but in reality be only concerned about loosing traffic that they can bill for.
If bandwidth used by DDoS's and spam couldn't be charged for, the problem would have been stamped out a long, long, long time ago by ISPs and backbones. They have the ability to stop zombies and whatnot- they just don't give a shit.
Jesus, everyone blows that out of proportion, like 5300's were exploding left and right. It happened in an Apple test lab, with a PREPRODUCTION model, with a DEFECTIVE BATTERY supplied by the battery manufacturer. I have no idea where MacNN got that it was two batteries.
Not a single customer was affected by the problem- Apple took the precautionary measure of switching to NiMH after the problem, and most people never even saw a Lithium Ion battery in their 5300.
So, I ask, how could they possibly have handled the problem any better, mmm? Comparing it to the iPod battery bit, which was not handled as well- is absurd.
Believe it or not, this actually makes you more sick- because your body -needs- minor exposure to germs to keep your immune system "current".
Once you go into isolation, your immune system gets "lazy" and you actually become highly likely to get sick from even minor exposure. I don't suggest licking doorknobs, and YES, you still should clean your mouse, keyboard, desk, etc and observe proper sanitary procedures in your kitchen- but don't go psycho with the antibacterial stuff- among other things, people don't use it properly 95% of the time.
Funny story- I was one on the subway and let out a minor sneeze. I was exceptionally polite- I actually held my nose, leaned forwards and down, sneezed as little as possible, etc. The woman next to me BOLTS upright and zooms half a car length away to the door. The three people opposite me- who probably received more than she did, if anything- all burst out laughing.
Hypochondriacs do.
People with multiple chemical sensitivity are usually depressed, and reject suggestions by attending doctors that they see a psychologist, dismissing it as patronizing- they're truly offended and think the doctor is dismissing their claims, when the doctor is actually recognizing someone who's depressed and regardless of physical symptoms, needs to see a trained psychologist.
MCS also is almost always self-diagnosed; patients come to doctors claiming they have it. That is a hallmark of invented diseases and hypochondriacs.
The chemicals leeched off by plastics- and particularly vinyl in cars and the like- are very toxic, actually- but the simple solution is to air out the object in question. Put the keyboard on your porch or something for a few days or something, or for chrissakes, leave the window open.
You complained about bootup time. I told you it was irrelevant. Don't change the focus- it's not a pissing contest, it was an argument against your insinuation that bootup time is a major hassle. It's not even a concern.
I'll note that you totally ignored the HDD seek, power consumption, and cost arguments. How nice of you.
I ignored HDD seek because I've got a GB of ram and it doesn't really affect me that much; my HD doesn't seek in a blocking fashion when I'm surfing webpages, typing emails, etc.
Power consumption is maybe 50W -fully- loaded down(screen, processor, GPU, CDROM all operating at full power draw). Doing nothing but surfing the web or typing emails, it's cool enough to sit on my bed or rug and not even get past "lukewarm". Used lightly, I can make my battery last a full 8 hour workday. Sleep mode can be used extensively since it takes about 2 seconds to wake and become useable.
Cost? Well, that's like a Yugo owner telling a Bentley owner, "your car is inferior, mine costs less." I've got a 17" full color screen, full size keyboard(which glows in the dark, thank you very much!), 60GB hard drive, Wifi(802.11G, handy for accessing my 360GB fileserver from, say, the hammock) and a DVD burner.
I'd like to see you generate 60 GB of real text--or even 256 MB. You can even have a month to do it.
One word, 5 characters. Starts with V, ends with o. One word, 5 characters, starts with P, ends with o. You can do neither on your fruity little palm. Thank you for playing. Oh, and I have about 500MB of email, and another 200MB compressed in an archive.
(And we'll ignore that the main point of the WiFi card is to eliminate the Palm's native-memory standard. Want an archive of old documents? Just share with the harddrive
Or I could just walk over to the computer and use it- full size keyboard, nice pointing device, big screen that (gasp!) supports- get ready for it- color. Oooooooo.
I have a 486 that's been gathering dust for years, too.
I said 3 years- and 486's aren't 3 year old technology- yet more useless comparisons for theatrics. My newest PC is about 3 years old(athlon thunderbird) and my main server is a celeron the -original celeron-) 300. My router is a 6 year old laptop and my fileserver is a P3/500. All of it ancient technology, and still perfectly useable.
My Handspring failed at its only mission in life, to store my contacts, because the fucking thing didn't have nvram and thus every time I went to use it to look up a phone number, its batteries were dead and its memory erased. I'd have to find some AA's, dig out the cradle, sync it up. Wonderful, except when you're on the fucking side of the road and you need to call a friend, and you just put new batteries in the fucking thing two weeks ago.
Go play with your (heh) palms, okay?
A few years ago I worked at a place where we had two Cisco PIX (the 1U widgets, dunno what model, sorry) in a failover configuration. For those that don't know, you can run two kinds- stateful and non-stateful failover.
In stateful failover mode, the two units share their connection state info over a dedicated ethernet crossover cable- in theory, if one unit's hardware shits the bed, the other one immediately notices and takes over, and all users will notice is maybe a few seconds pause in everything, if that. It's all very clean and good, the slave even takes over the MAC address of the failed unit (something they've patented, and hence isn't useable in Linux HA; Linux has to force an ARP announcement, which is messier. Goooooo Cisco!)
Anyway, that's great, except when you have a software defect. Oh, say...where the PIX OS (PIXes didn't run IOS or whatever, they ran a separate OS unique to the PIX family) gets into a certain situation based on state and locks up hard.
Well, guess what happens to its twin, running the same PIX OS version, and sharing the same data? Yup, it crashes too.
The pair actually did it once right in front of us- one stopped blinking its lights...the master/slave light blipped on the backup unit, and then a few seconds later, it too crashed- and everything ground to a halt.
It was terribly amusing that Cisco was incompetent enough to not include a hardware watchdog in the PIX box so that if it hung it would reboot itself; my Sonicwall SOHO has this, why can't a PIX for chrissakes? The problem only happened every few days, and would have been manageable(ie ignorable ;-) if they had both simply rebooted themselves. Instead, someone had to trundle in and power cycle both of them, until we figured out that it was state-based, and disabled stateful failover. Then someone just had to check every day to make sure one of them hadn't kicked the bucket.
Um...I last rebooted my powerbook for the 10.3.5 system update. Prior to that, I had a 38 day uptime. Furthermore- I've rarely actually run out of battery time. I laugh when people talk about boot up times- they've clearly never used a powerbook if they make such an inane comment. You open the lid. 2 seconds later you've got your network connections and you can start work, unless you turned on password locking. Hell, half the time my SSH tunnels are still useable- even after the PB has been asleep for hours! Not like reboots take any more than a minute on a 1Ghz G4 anyway.
Comparing a laptop to a PDA is absurd. You can't watch video/DVDs, surf webpages with any decent speed or clarity, or write with anything approaching speed or easy of use(I guarantee I can type at least ten times faster than you can "grafiti"). I'd also like to see you fit 60GB of data onto your palm pilot. Even if it was possible- its OS couldn't efficiently handle that much storage.
A lot of people can use their palms as easily as a computer. For some folks, it's even easier.
Um, are you seriously suggesting people can just "pick up" grafiti? It took me weeks before I could stop looking at the cheat sheet.
With my iPod and phone (Siemens S56) both supporting full contact info and calendaring as well as text notes for things like directions, I sync them both to iCal and Address Book with two clicks. My Visor has been sitting in the closet gathering dust for 3 years.
GPS depends upon measuring the time it takes radio signals to travel less than a meter or two. That's not possible without very specialized electronics. Furthermore- GPS units, at least the kind -you- can buy for a few hundred dollars, don't do any of this bull. They just use WAAS- aka broadcast-via-satellite DGPS.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but not everything can be done in software.
Fair enough, even if the comment was trollish. The article aims to help make it less of a joke, but you really have to ask yourself this-
There are a lot of talented mac progammers working on all sorts of cute but worthless apps, like 5 billion "download songs off your iPod" programs. The OpenOffice team has repeatedly asked for volunteers to help with the port to Aqua. There are a lot of people who really don't like Microsoft.
So why is it that OpenOffice for Aqua is so far off? Come on people- stop bitching, step up to the plate!
Seems BorisFX has had all this nailed for quite some time, and at a variety of price points- ranging from the OEM bundles all the way up to stuff like Boris Red. A lot of their stuff is OpenGL accelerated, so it should be just as fast, and it works on both Mac and PC NLE platforms...almost two dozen of them? Nevermind that BorisFX gives away the Keyframer authoring program so you can diddle and learn the interface or even work on projects on laptops, home systems, workstations other than your production rig, etc.
So I have to ask- what's the big deal here? It's been a couple of years since I looked at any of this, so someone please lay it out for me.
"If you have recently published a paper and want to give it publicity or your company wants to publish a press release please click here to contact PhysOrg team."
Someone else mentioned the strong emphasis on patents and whatnot. There's also the genius sole inventor, who is president of the company- kinda sketchy. Lastly, outlandish claims- "bandwidth limits beyond 1000 GB/sec".
Um. Riiiiight. Call me when he has published results and a working prototype he's shown. Until then, he's just a "don't look under that large 40 gallon-sized compartment in my infinite motion car" scam artist.
It is more likely that King ripped off Killdozer with both Maximum Overdrive and that shitty movie about the pink caddilac killer car.
And now, for the dark side of Mr. Sarnoff, who did NOT invent the TV set:
http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profi le/farnsworth03.html
Sarnoff and RCA are the scum of the earth; they ruined a guy's life simply to not have to pay him royalties; thankfully, history has for the most part set the record straight for anyone who digs a little.
Pretty sad; Farnsworth never saw a dime and went into deep depression over the whole thing. Farnsworth saw the waste of his invention almost from the get-go; as the Time article says, his son said "I suppose you could say that he felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives."
Nothing's changed in 50 years- corporations still bully the "little guy" like this. Back in the 80's, a company my father started had technology stolen from them by NCR (National Cash Register Corporation). Despite a signed NDA, NCR ripped off technology they were demo'd. There was clear evidence NCR had stolen the design, they had the NDA in hand, etc- but NCR managed to drag it out in court for years. I believe the suit was abandoned due to lack of funds, but I don't recall- it was a subject that was not discussed often or pleasantly in our house.
I hope they rot in hell- they helped cripple the company, which was working on some really innovative touch screen technology. Much of the touchscreen technology, now in use by PDAs and whatnot, you can owe to DTI- Digital Techniques Inc- a tiny little Burlington, MA company nobody ever heard of. Probably their most "famous" product was the very early touchscreen system in Super Stop and Shop where you could enter a product name and get a map to where it was in the store; they also did some award winning videodisk based exhibits for the Museum Of Science. They were also bullied out of an air traffic control system project with the FAA...by Raytheon. DTI designed a system that, in the late 80's, would have allowed a controller to manage all his electronics(radios and whatnot) from one small touchscreen system. Decades ahead of its time.
Yeah. but among those- Killdozer was probably the worst.
Plot? A bunch of construction equipment becomes possessed thanks to a meteor. The worst(best?) part is that the good guys are getting chased by...um...bulldozers. Which, in case you never noticed, can be outrun by my grandmother- without her walker.