When I got a nook for christmas, I was looking forward for buying bunch of books from the country where I grew up. I would like to read some of the books that are being published there now, but shipping them across the ocean is pretty expensive. I was extremely disappointed by the small amount of ebooks that are available. In addition, when I tried to buy some, it turned out I would have to have a mobile phone number in that country. The only books that are available to me are either free out of copyright books that were digitized by libraries or volunteers, or pirated and illegally digitized books.
I agree with you on the difference between pdf and html. Thus the need for a format that is page oriented, allows us to deliver document in a typographical quality, but allows interactive content. Pdf tries to do that.
Javascript came to pdf in 2000, the same year as prepress support. Does it mean that pdf document were never meant to be seriously printed in high quality, since it took 7 years to introduce prepress support?
I cannot find pdf 1.0 specification online, but I did find pdf 1.2 from 1996, and it describes the purpose of the format as "to enable users to easily and reliably exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created." It says nothing about hardcopy, and it specifically talks about "electronic documents", without further specifying what these are. It also says that "PDF also includes objects, such as annotations and hypertext links, that are not part of the page itself but are useful for interactive viewing." According to the document, the version 1.1 "adds more types of annotations", which, if I read it correctly, implies that annotations were indeed part of the original 1.0 specification. Version 1.1 also "generalizes link and bookmark destination to 'actions', which include links to other pdf files and foreign files". Again, this seems to imply that version 1.0 had links and bookmarks, which imply interactive viewing. Pdf format was designed from the start for interactive viewing, and most features that were added later (forms, javascript, which was first added as a way to validate forms, embedded files, multimedia content and 3D content) were just logical continuation of this idea. The fact that adobe messed up and did not think about security when implementing those additions is a different problem.
That's a very popular excuse for the sorry state of linux pdf viewers. If all you need is just display text and images in the right font and on the correct place on the page, you are right, linux pdf viewers are fine. AFAIK there is nothing available for windows that can beat let's say zathura for that purpose. But contrary to the popular belief, pdf is much more than just static text and images on a page. Just because you have never needed certain features does not mean that these features are useless and should not be implemented. There is nothing inherently insecure about pdf forms, layers, annotations and 3D content, and javascript can also be implemented securely. Unfortunately, the only viewer that implements them and is available on linux seems to have been developed with no regard for security. There are basically only three choices when it comes to viewing pdfs on linux: adobe reader, which has all the features but is insecure ans has a sucky user interface, one of many poppler based viewers, that differ from each other only in their user interface and something called "desktop integration", and xpdf. Ironically, there are number of ways how to create functionally rich pdf files on linux using only free software, but to actually view these files, one has to use a nonfree close source viewer.
Ehm, can you please point out where on the page you link to does it say that the sole intent of pdf format was originally to produce printed documents? I don't seem to be able to find that.
Actually, there are many more powerful alternative pdf readers on windows than on linux. On linux, if you want anything besides just a document rendered to print (such as annotations, animations, forms, 3D content,...), you have to use adobe reader. I don't know what the situation is on osx, but state of linux pdf readers is abysmal. Linux is perfect environment for producing pdfs, but linux viewers are really quite primitive.
From what I have heard about Windows 7 on a tablet, these people are unfortunate enough to have to run Windows on their tablet. Surely you wouldn't want to make them even more miserable by making them pay a tax on it. I am glad that French lawmakers show some compassion with the unfortunate victims.
The way I understand it is that if the claim says "A & B & C & D", it is not even enough to find a prior art for each of A, B, C and D, you would have to find a prior art for the combination of A, B, C and D, unless that combination is "obvious".
Emh, please read again what the GP wrote: if you are only "infringing" on a specific part of a patent claim, you are in fact not infringing at all. So the situation you are describing cannot happen. A patent with an absurd number of parts will be harder to invalidate, but also less useful, since less people will infringe upon it.
You can ask exactly the same question about mathematics. What most high schools present as math has really nothing to do with the actual discipline. I suspect it is probably true about most subjects.
They have access to their local drive, there isn't a way to lock them out of that,
Well, that's the problem. In the setup I was describing, we did not have write access to the local disk (except dirs like/tmp and so on, that must be world writable.) Still, since most applications save files to some default location, say My Documents or whatnot, can't you mount that remotely?
Some 15 years ago, when I was in graduate school, everybody in the department (some 100 faculty members and few hundred graduate students) had all their home directories network mounted from a central location. A faculty member would have a Sun workstation on his or her desk, but all their files would be on a central server somewhere. A grad student could walk up to any public workstation or terminal and do their work from there. The admins took care of all the backups, we did not have to worry about that at all. That was 15 years ago. Why isn't something like that possible now? You can blame stupid users, but this is clearly a system failure. At home, I am responsible for my own backups. At work, I should not have to worry about it.
Yes, getting a decent kitchen scales in the US is a pain. In Europe, every reasonably equipped kitchen has a set of kitchen scales on the counter.
On the other hand, measuring certain ingredients by volume is better. For example, the specific weight of flour changes quite a bit with humidity, while volume stays pretty much the same.
And me, I'd just call the cops on all of you for violating the noise ordinance.
Hmm, may be interesting. Cops receive a complain that a bunch of people are making noise with their megaphones. They get there and find you standing on the corner with a megaphone in your hand. "No, officer, I was not making noise with my megaphone! *They* were making noise with their megaphones!"
They can't slug you if you are standing on the street corner exercising your free speech with a megaphone.
What does that have to do with freedom of speech? Let me correct the sentence for you:
They can't slug you if you are standing on the street corner.
That's it. Free speech has nothing to do with that.
What they can do is bring 200 friends with megaphones, and hoot, yell, make cat calls and blow raspberries every time you try to say something. And there is nothing you can do about it.
In my opinion, sentencing someone who breaks into a jewelry store, breaks all the display glass cases and steals nothing for 30 months is idiotic. I would expect them to have to pay for all the damage, and get 2 months or community work as a warning. Especially with all the jails crowded as they are.
I think that the bigger problem is that, in order to make the math teachable to masses, we often make it repulsive to those who have the potential to become specialists in math. They often reject math as boring, rote memorization with no creativity and insight.
I have no use for an office suite. I only use an office suite when I really have to, which is about twice a year. A browser I use daily, and faster, leaner browser with more features is quite important to me. It does not even begin to compare in importance to an office suite.
The only part of an office suite I am remotely interested in is a spreadsheet. If somebody wrote a decent spreadsheet, one that separates data from calculation and presentation, I may actually use it.
Well, every natural number n has a successor, n+1. It does not matter whether n is finite or infinite. So if I have "0." followed by n 9s, I can always have n+1 9s, which would be closer to 1.
Slashdot Mirror
When I got a nook for christmas, I was looking forward for buying bunch of books from the country where I grew up. I would like to read some of the books that are being published there now, but shipping them across the ocean is pretty expensive. I was extremely disappointed by the small amount of ebooks that are available. In addition, when I tried to buy some, it turned out I would have to have a mobile phone number in that country. The only books that are available to me are either free out of copyright books that were digitized by libraries or volunteers, or pirated and illegally digitized books.
I agree with you on the difference between pdf and html. Thus the need for a format that is page oriented, allows us to deliver document in a typographical quality, but allows interactive content. Pdf tries to do that.
Javascript came to pdf in 2000, the same year as prepress support. Does it mean that pdf document were never meant to be seriously printed in high quality, since it took 7 years to introduce prepress support?
I cannot find pdf 1.0 specification online, but I did find pdf 1.2 from 1996, and it describes the purpose of the format as "to enable users to easily and reliably exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created." It says nothing about hardcopy, and it specifically talks about "electronic documents", without further specifying what these are. It also says that "PDF also includes objects, such as annotations and hypertext links, that are not part of the page itself but are useful for interactive viewing." According to the document, the version 1.1 "adds more types of annotations", which, if I read it correctly, implies that annotations were indeed part of the original 1.0 specification. Version 1.1 also "generalizes link and bookmark destination to 'actions', which include links to other pdf files and foreign files". Again, this seems to imply that version 1.0 had links and bookmarks, which imply interactive viewing. Pdf format was designed from the start for interactive viewing, and most features that were added later (forms, javascript, which was first added as a way to validate forms, embedded files, multimedia content and 3D content) were just logical continuation of this idea. The fact that adobe messed up and did not think about security when implementing those additions is a different problem.
That's a very popular excuse for the sorry state of linux pdf viewers. If all you need is just display text and images in the right font and on the correct place on the page, you are right, linux pdf viewers are fine. AFAIK there is nothing available for windows that can beat let's say zathura for that purpose. But contrary to the popular belief, pdf is much more than just static text and images on a page. Just because you have never needed certain features does not mean that these features are useless and should not be implemented. There is nothing inherently insecure about pdf forms, layers, annotations and 3D content, and javascript can also be implemented securely. Unfortunately, the only viewer that implements them and is available on linux seems to have been developed with no regard for security. There are basically only three choices when it comes to viewing pdfs on linux: adobe reader, which has all the features but is insecure ans has a sucky user interface, one of many poppler based viewers, that differ from each other only in their user interface and something called "desktop integration", and xpdf. Ironically, there are number of ways how to create functionally rich pdf files on linux using only free software, but to actually view these files, one has to use a nonfree close source viewer.
Ehm, can you please point out where on the page you link to does it say that the sole intent of pdf format was originally to produce printed documents? I don't seem to be able to find that.
Actually, there are many more powerful alternative pdf readers on windows than on linux. On linux, if you want anything besides just a document rendered to print (such as annotations, animations, forms, 3D content, ...), you have to use adobe reader. I don't know what the situation is on osx, but state of linux pdf readers is abysmal. Linux is perfect environment for producing pdfs, but linux viewers are really quite primitive.
From what I have heard about Windows 7 on a tablet, these people are unfortunate enough to have to run Windows on their tablet. Surely you wouldn't want to make them even more miserable by making them pay a tax on it. I am glad that French lawmakers show some compassion with the unfortunate victims.
The way I understand it is that if the claim says "A & B & C & D", it is not even enough to find a prior art for each of A, B, C and D, you would have to find a prior art for the combination of A, B, C and D, unless that combination is "obvious".
Emh, please read again what the GP wrote: if you are only "infringing" on a specific part of a patent claim, you are in fact not infringing at all. So the situation you are describing cannot happen. A patent with an absurd number of parts will be harder to invalidate, but also less useful, since less people will infringe upon it.
You can ask exactly the same question about mathematics. What most high schools present as math has really nothing to do with the actual discipline. I suspect it is probably true about most subjects.
They have access to their local drive, there isn't a way to lock them out of that,
Well, that's the problem. In the setup I was describing, we did not have write access to the local disk (except dirs like /tmp and so on, that must be world writable.) Still, since most applications save files to some default location, say My Documents or whatnot, can't you mount that remotely?
Some 15 years ago, when I was in graduate school, everybody in the department (some 100 faculty members and few hundred graduate students) had all their home directories network mounted from a central location. A faculty member would have a Sun workstation on his or her desk, but all their files would be on a central server somewhere. A grad student could walk up to any public workstation or terminal and do their work from there. The admins took care of all the backups, we did not have to worry about that at all. That was 15 years ago. Why isn't something like that possible now? You can blame stupid users, but this is clearly a system failure. At home, I am responsible for my own backups. At work, I should not have to worry about it.
Yes, getting a decent kitchen scales in the US is a pain. In Europe, every reasonably equipped kitchen has a set of kitchen scales on the counter.
On the other hand, measuring certain ingredients by volume is better. For example, the specific weight of flour changes quite a bit with humidity, while volume stays pretty much the same.
Great idea! And then Cthulhu will rise from the water and eat them all up. Now someone just needs to figure out how will the FSM fit into all that.
Like recycles electrons?
but I am confused by the summary.
And me, I'd just call the cops on all of you for violating the noise ordinance.
Hmm, may be interesting. Cops receive a complain that a bunch of people are making noise with their megaphones. They get there and find you standing on the corner with a megaphone in your hand. "No, officer, I was not making noise with my megaphone! *They* were making noise with their megaphones!"
They can't slug you if you are standing on the street corner exercising your free speech with a megaphone.
What does that have to do with freedom of speech? Let me correct the sentence for you:
They can't slug you if you are standing on the street corner.
That's it. Free speech has nothing to do with that.
What they can do is bring 200 friends with megaphones, and hoot, yell, make cat calls and blow raspberries every time you try to say something. And there is nothing you can do about it.
In my opinion, sentencing someone who breaks into a jewelry store, breaks all the display glass cases and steals nothing for 30 months is idiotic. I would expect them to have to pay for all the damage, and get 2 months or community work as a warning. Especially with all the jails crowded as they are.
How in the heck did this get "5 insightful"? Are the moderators on Meth or what?
to drive people away from your website.
I think that the bigger problem is that, in order to make the math teachable to masses, we often make it repulsive to those who have the potential to become specialists in math. They often reject math as boring, rote memorization with no creativity and insight.
I have no use for an office suite. I only use an office suite when I really have to, which is about twice a year. A browser I use daily, and faster, leaner browser with more features is quite important to me. It does not even begin to compare in importance to an office suite.
The only part of an office suite I am remotely interested in is a spreadsheet. If somebody wrote a decent spreadsheet, one that separates data from calculation and presentation, I may actually use it.
Well, every natural number n has a successor, n+1. It does not matter whether n is finite or infinite. So if I have "0." followed by n 9s, I can always have n+1 9s, which would be closer to 1.
It's like creating a highly efficient piece of malware on accident.
You mean like the Morris worm?