From their site, it doesn't look like Cinelerra is intended as an NLE for movie editing like Final Cut or Avid.
Reading their page, I notice a strong emphasis on effects and rendering, including the use of render farms, which seems completely unrelated to actual film editing.
At the same time, the essential basics of editing like import and export of EDLs, aren't mentioned anywhere. The words "time code" never appear, nor do key terms like DV, HD, SDI, 24p, 25p, 50 60 or other ingredients of the traditional acronym soup.
So I guess it's not really about editing, but rather about effects and rendering, for which it may indeed be very interesting. But I wouldn't know about these aspects which are not part of the editing process, and aren't normally done by the same people either, nor, obviously on the same tools.
If you are talking about a professional project (even on a low budget), there is not so much choice: it's either Avid or Final Cut Pro. I never heard of a film longer than a few minutes cut on anything else (not counting products which died long ago like Lightworks).
Avid has the advantage of better/easier integration with the other parts of post production like sound editing on Pro Tools, color correction on Symphony, etc. if you need these.
It's probabably your better bet for more demanding projects, and probably worth learning since it's the industry "standard". Another possible advantage is that it runs on both Mac and Windows.
Final Cut Pro tends to be easier to learn, and the editors I know tend to prefer it for small projects which don't need to be moved around to higher-end Avids for finishng, to Pro Tools, etc.
It only runs on Macs, but that also makes it potentially a lot cheaper, at least to start with: there is no dongle, and you can borrow a copy from someone else. Apple doesn't care so much: they have sold you a Mac anyway, and eventually you will pay for FCP too. Avid on the other hand relies on the software for it's revenue, so it is dongle-protected.
Whatever you get, if you buy rather than renting, you should realize that after a year you will probably have spent at least twice than what you planned, that there will always be stuff that you would need but cannot afford, and it has to pay for itself within 2 years, after which it's obsolete, you cannot rent it at any decent price, and you don't want to use it for yourself.
I don't mean it never makes sense buying. Sometimes it does. But I've also seen many cases where it didn't.
every time I... have to indicate whether I want... English or Spanish. Shouldn't that information be on the card?
You must be in the US, the same country where it seems that your account is only protected by a user name and a password, leading to all these phishing mails I get with some US bank in the From: header.
Maybe it's time for American slashdotters to educate their bank managers or go work for their bank.
(In CH, the language is on the cards, and is used everywhere: ATMs, shops, gas stations,... It seems all the machines provide at least 4 languages, maybe more for some. I guess it's the same across Europe)
It's not easy enough to deploy Firefox (or Thunderbird) in a corporate environment. And/or it's not documented well enough.
Next week, I would like to install both apps on 12 desktops running Win2K and XP.
12 is not 1000. I cannot spend 2 days finding how to do it, testing it, correcting, etc. I could install manually, but doing 12 times the same clicking around doesn't sound like fun (I'm not a mouse clicking fan either).
While I want settings to be in the user's profile, I need to make sure the web cache is elsewhere and isn't copied through the network at every logon/logoff.
I want to get rid of the moronic paths both apps use with "default" and "some-random-string".
I would like stuff in the Default Profile, so new users get it automatically.
This sort of thing doesn't look easy and straight-forward enough yet, and I'm sure that it is what is keeping many admins from deploying it on their desktops.
I will try it anyway, but I won't be able to bill the time I will have to spend researching how to do it right. Especially since the client didn't ask me to do that anyway. They are happy with MSIE. So I will spend time on my own cost, just to find how to install something that will hopefully generate less work for me in the future because I won't have to spend so much time cleaning infected machines because of MSIE.
I hope FFDeploy will help, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing for Thunderbird.
Last but not least: Firefox and Thunderbird are terrible memory hogs, with Firefox sometimes growing to insane memory usage levels (75 MB right now, but I've seen it go to 150!), and sometimes also crashing consuming 99% CPU. Fortunately, this last problem doesn't happen very often, but I will hate it when users on whom I forced Firefox call me on the phone because it crashed, so I can tell them to "press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Firefox, click End Task, restart Firefox but-you-know-it's-a-much-better-and-more-secure-br owser"
I do believe it's a much better browser, and it's my default browser since it was called Phoenix, but instead of contemplating statisics, I think there is still a lot work to do to make it even better, and to help administartors actually deploying it.
So every time something seems to go wrong, you pay a consultant who is able to find the source of the problem, and if he can prove it's Microsoft's fault, they pay for your data? And who pays the consultant's time?
Reminds me of my experience with hard disk warranties. Sure these 10 GB disks are still under warranty. But you have to - take it out of the computer to see it's brand, model and serial number. - find the manufacturer's website, and their RMA form. - Download their DOS program to check the disk - Put the damaged HD back into the computer - Make a floppy, and boot from it - Run the software and write down the error code it gives you - Go back to the website and fill in the RMA form - Take the HD out again and pack it for shiping - In Europe, ship to some other country which is not only expensive, but also requires filling in forms at the post office for customs. - When the drive comes back, you are somehow charged customs, VAT, and whatever else.
In the end, you lost a couple of hours and you paid, for that 10 GB drive under warranty, at least half the price or more of a new 80 GB drirve.
Conclusion: whatever it says on the package, there is NO (meaningful) WARRANTY on hard drives, nor on anything else worth less than several hundred dollars.
Wouldn't this be an advantage? Maybe it allows attaching ISDN phones, which allow the display of the caller number etc. and interfacing to your regular ISDN line.
I understand in the US, there are analog phones which can also display the caller ID, but that particular technology is not used in Europe. Here, anyone who needs more than a single plain analog phone line just gets an ISDN one.
What I would like to try one of these days is something attaching to both my broadband connection for SIP, and my ISDN line for regular phones, and doing the right routing automatically.
BUT EVERYTHING IS IN FRENCH! How the hell am I supposed to read it?
Funny. But hopefully not serious because you do know more than just one language, don't you? If French is not among the others, that's OK. But if you know nothing else than English, then I pity you.
Thanks, but that was some form of joke. Total Commander can split just fine, as can a Perl half-liner, and on Linux, of course, there is split with (I presume) a gazillion arcane options to make sure to please everyone. (In fact no, turns out to be just a handful of simple options). So I'm all set. But thanks anyway!
Yes, there is a command-line RAR. Unfortunately, to get the 300KB of rar.exe and the 200KB of unrar.exe. you have to download over 1 MB, and install the whole 3+MB of WinRAR. And then you get a share/whatever-ware, which you are supposed to pay for after a 40 days trial period.
I'm happy with zip and gzip, preferrably in the form of.tar.gz which Total Commander handles natively (and Midnight Commander handles too of course).
ClamAV did indeed catch my eicar.rar, but I'm not sure which program extracted eicar.com from eicar.rar. Maybe it was amavis, not clamd.
Makes me wonder what Adult Basic Education may be about. And what is the relation to the small chocolate-watches-banks-mountains country? All the "educators" are called Heidi?
I like it's simple layout. Used some previous version before, which was an extension to Firefox or Thunderbird, but that stopped working after an upgrade.
I could import my old calendar into this new Sunbird, which is nice. (The import was not difficult, but finding the files in the insane directory jungle all these Mozilla projects create was hard. Turned out to be buried in "C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\default\9gltk3bn.slt\Calenda r\". Why is it so hard to tell these programs to put their data files into "E:\Cal", "D:\Mail", or such?) The 2 bugs I encountered in the 10 first minutes are: - in print preview, changing the layout between Landscape and Portrait kicks you out of the preview and back into the main screen - The Alarm window doesn't close when clicking on either of the Aknowledge buttons. You have to close the window. So far, these are just annoyances which will hopefully quickly get fixed.
The installer also has the same problem as the other Mozilla apps: on Windows, it uses a moronic "Browse for Folder" dialog which I guess is what MS recommends. The problem is that it shows you a text box in which you think you can just type your directory and click OK, but that is not the case: whatever you type is ignored. You have to click your way to the directory, and if it doesn't exist, you have to click "Make New Folder", then change it's name so it isn't "New Folder", and then click OK. I guess that is Microsoft's idea of usability. But it's sad that many OSS projects seem to use this particularly stupid dialog during the install.
And in a hundred years, the world economy will be how many thousand times larger? [...] We'll have cities with thousands of times the populations, bustling with millions of times the economy.
I doubt it. Things cannot grow indefinitely. It's against basic principles of physics. I believe that in 100 years, the economy and the population will be much smaller than now. I won't be here to witness it, but I may see the beginning of the decline (if I quit smoking, maybe).
"If just the present world population of 5.8 billion people [that was in the 90'] were to live at current North American ecological standards (say 4.5 ha/person), a reasonable first approximation of the total productive land requirement would be 26 billion ha (assuming present technology). However, there are only just over 13 billion ha of land on Earth, of which only 8.8 billion are ecologically productive cropland, pasture, or forest (1.5 ha/person). In short, we would need an additional two planet Earths to accommodate the increased ecological load of people alive today. If the population were to stabilize at between 10 and 11 billion sometime in the next century, five additional Earths would be needed, all else being equal -- and this just to maintain the present rate of ecological decline (Rees & Wackernagel, 1994)."
While I can see the advantages of having every app isolated in it's own directory, I feel that one of the things I really like in Linux is to have all configuration in one, relatively small, pure text hierarchy:/etc.
I can grep it easily when I look for something, and easily edit the relevant file, which is usually well commented. I cannot grep the entire / tree. Well, I suppose I could, but I certainly don't want to.
For the rest, grouping all an applications's files together sounds attractive, but I would be happy enough if every app just clearly documented what it did at install time so it's easy to undo. (I don't believe much in "uninstall" programs/scripts, seeing how they (don't quite) work on Windows).
I'm sure there's a scheduling software package out there that can do all of the basic scheduling much faster than their current method
I seriously doubt it. This is one area where I can't imagine a computer beating a big board holding pieces of (colored) cardboard and a few whiteboard pens. If it needs to be viewable over the web, then set up a webcam in front of it!:-)
One reason why computers are so bad at it and the old way so good (aside from the mere ease of use and reliability aspects), is the size. You just cannot see and understand as much interrelated information in one glance on a computer scren as you can on a big board on the wall.
(How are these specialised boards for planning called in English, anyway?)
I'm still waiting to see this massive instability everyone says is present in Windows.
I wouldn't hold my breath. These everyone probably only know Win9x/ME.
Win2K/XP is indeed extremely stable. On the server side I still prefer Linux, but it's not because of stability which is probably just as good on Windows servers.
If their work is to warn about tsunamis in the Pacific basin, [...] why should they warn about tsunamis somewhere else?
Because they knew about it, and it could have saved lives?
In fact, the latest I read is that they actually did try to warn, so they are not total bureaucratic morons like you seem to be.
But they didn't know whom to call (!), they had no contact in their (Outlook?) address book. But they still tried, and apparently warned the US state department, which in turn didn't know whom to call. Not a surprise that the US state department has no clue on how to reach foreign officials, since it's the Pentagon which is now responsible for foreign relations...
The plagues of Egypt were not 7 but 10. (Sunday school didn't leave much in my brain, it seems)
The volcanic eruption was that of Santorini, one of the strongest since the beginning of civilisation. It was not around 3000 BC, but around 1620-50 BC. The collapse of the mountain certainly provoked a big tsunami, but of course, nobody knows if this was related to the Moses "parting the sea" during the Exodus. Some say it may explain it, and others dispute it.
Basically, it says "THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT.".
Yes, of course, there was no tsunami in the region this warning center is responsible for. But who writes these reports? Is it sensible to just write "no tsunami warning", without specifying that it's a different story on the other side, in the Indian ocean? Wouldn't people writing these reports be supposed to be aware of it?
Anyway, that report, while it may be technically correct for it's region, sounds really weird to me.
Since the link is for the "latest report", and will change over time, here is the complete text of that page:
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 002 PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS ISSUED AT 0204Z 26 DEC 2004
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL AREAS OF THE PACIFIC BASIN EXCEPT ALASKA - BRITISH COLUMBIA - WASHINGTON - OREGON - CALIFORNIA.
.................. TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN..................
ATTENTION: NOTE REVISED MAGNITUDE.
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0059Z 26 DEC 2004
COORDINATES - 3.4 NORTH 95.7 EAST
LOCATION - OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATERA
MAGNITUDE - 8.5
EVALUATION
REVISED MAGNITUDE BASED ON ANALYSIS OF MANTLE WAVES.
THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC. NO DESTRUCTIVE
TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS FOR THE PACIFIC BASIN BASED ON HISTORICAL
EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.
THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF A TSUNAMI NEAR THE EPICENTER.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE BULLETINS FOR ALASKA - BRITISH COLUMBIA - WASHINGTON - OREGON - CALIFORNIA.
I heard that in Krabi (Thailand) people notice the sea withdrawing uncharacteristically about 5 minutes before the first wave hit. Anyone can explain that?
In the attempts to link the stories of the Old Testament to historic events, a tsunami in the Mediterrenean sea is used to explain how the sea "opened". Indeed, right before a tsunami, the level would first drop, letting Moses and his people cross the "sea" there, and the wave would then have drowned the Egyptian army or whoever was after them.
In this hypothesis, Moses would have crossed from Egypt to Israel through a sort of swamp land near the mediterranean cost, where the tsunami effect wouldn't have been very brutal but rather slow. The level drop would have been enough to let people cross that swamp.
Unfortunately, I don't have any reference. I saw that in a documentary once. And I'm certainly no expert in Biblical stuff.
Maybe someone has some links? The part of the documentary which I saw was very interesting. It also explained the 7 plagues of Egypt, mainly with a strong volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean, which is believed to have taken place around 3000 BC if I remember correctly.
So how could you counter this very misleading advertizing?
With more advertizing, I would guess.
So you see, misleading advertizing is not only good for the product (and it may even end up backfiring on the product) but it is certainly good for the advertizing business. That is what counts for advertizers, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
From their site, it doesn't look like Cinelerra is intended as an NLE for movie editing like Final Cut or Avid.
Reading their page, I notice a strong emphasis on effects and rendering, including the use of render farms, which seems completely unrelated to actual film editing.
At the same time, the essential basics of editing like import and export of EDLs, aren't mentioned anywhere. The words "time code" never appear, nor do key terms like DV, HD, SDI, 24p, 25p, 50 60 or other ingredients of the traditional acronym soup.
So I guess it's not really about editing, but rather about effects and rendering, for which it may indeed be very interesting. But I wouldn't know about these aspects which are not part of the editing process, and aren't normally done by the same people either, nor, obviously on the same tools.
If you are talking about a professional project (even on a low budget), there is not so much choice: it's either Avid or Final Cut Pro. I never heard of a film longer than a few minutes cut on anything else (not counting products which died long ago like Lightworks).
Avid has the advantage of better/easier integration with the other parts of post production like sound editing on Pro Tools, color correction on Symphony, etc. if you need these.
It's probabably your better bet for more demanding projects, and probably worth learning since it's the industry "standard". Another possible advantage is that it runs on both Mac and Windows.
Final Cut Pro tends to be easier to learn, and the editors I know tend to prefer it for small projects which don't need to be moved around to higher-end Avids for finishng, to Pro Tools, etc.
It only runs on Macs, but that also makes it potentially a lot cheaper, at least to start with: there is no dongle, and you can borrow a copy from someone else. Apple doesn't care so much: they have sold you a Mac anyway, and eventually you will pay for FCP too. Avid on the other hand relies on the software for it's revenue, so it is dongle-protected.
Whatever you get, if you buy rather than renting, you should realize that after a year you will probably have spent at least twice than what you planned, that there will always be stuff that you would need but cannot afford, and it has to pay for itself within 2 years, after which it's obsolete, you cannot rent it at any decent price, and you don't want to use it for yourself.
I don't mean it never makes sense buying. Sometimes it does. But I've also seen many cases where it didn't.
every time I ... have to indicate whether I want ... English or Spanish. Shouldn't that information be on the card?
... It seems all the machines provide at least 4 languages, maybe more for some. I guess it's the same across Europe)
You must be in the US, the same country where it seems that your account is only protected by a user name and a password, leading to all these phishing mails I get with some US bank in the From: header.
Maybe it's time for American slashdotters to educate their bank managers or go work for their bank.
(In CH, the language is on the cards, and is used everywhere: ATMs, shops, gas stations,
It's not easy enough to deploy Firefox (or Thunderbird) in a corporate environment. And/or it's not documented well enough.
r owser"
Next week, I would like to install both apps on 12 desktops running Win2K and XP.
12 is not 1000. I cannot spend 2 days finding how to do it, testing it, correcting, etc. I could install manually, but doing 12 times the same clicking around doesn't sound like fun (I'm not a mouse clicking fan either).
While I want settings to be in the user's profile, I need to make sure the web cache is elsewhere and isn't copied through the network at every logon/logoff.
I want to get rid of the moronic paths both apps use with "default" and "some-random-string".
I would like stuff in the Default Profile, so new users get it automatically.
This sort of thing doesn't look easy and straight-forward enough yet, and I'm sure that it is what is keeping many admins from deploying it on their desktops.
I will try it anyway, but I won't be able to bill the time I will have to spend researching how to do it right. Especially since the client didn't ask me to do that anyway. They are happy with MSIE. So I will spend time on my own cost, just to find how to install something that will hopefully generate less work for me in the future because I won't have to spend so much time cleaning infected machines because of MSIE.
I hope FFDeploy will help, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing for Thunderbird.
Last but not least: Firefox and Thunderbird are terrible memory hogs, with Firefox sometimes growing to insane memory usage levels (75 MB right now, but I've seen it go to 150!), and sometimes also crashing consuming 99% CPU. Fortunately, this last problem doesn't happen very often, but I will hate it when users on whom I forced Firefox call me on the phone because it crashed, so I can tell them to "press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Firefox, click End Task, restart Firefox but-you-know-it's-a-much-better-and-more-secure-b
I do believe it's a much better browser, and it's my default browser since it was called Phoenix, but instead of contemplating statisics, I think there is still a lot work to do to make it even better, and to help administartors actually deploying it.
So every time something seems to go wrong, you pay a consultant who is able to find the source of the problem, and if he can prove it's Microsoft's fault, they pay for your data? And who pays the consultant's time?
Reminds me of my experience with hard disk warranties. Sure these 10 GB disks are still under warranty. But you have to
- take it out of the computer to see it's brand, model and serial number.
- find the manufacturer's website, and their RMA form.
- Download their DOS program to check the disk
- Put the damaged HD back into the computer
- Make a floppy, and boot from it
- Run the software and write down the error code it gives you
- Go back to the website and fill in the RMA form
- Take the HD out again and pack it for shiping
- In Europe, ship to some other country which is not only expensive, but also requires filling in forms at the post office for customs.
- When the drive comes back, you are somehow charged customs, VAT, and whatever else.
In the end, you lost a couple of hours and you paid, for that 10 GB drive under warranty, at least half the price or more of a new 80 GB drirve.
Conclusion: whatever it says on the package, there is NO (meaningful) WARRANTY on hard drives, nor on anything else worth less than several hundred dollars.
It's the same with this data loss "warranty".
but PBX4Linux is mostly an ISDN PBX with VoIP
Wouldn't this be an advantage? Maybe it allows attaching ISDN phones, which allow the display of the caller number etc. and interfacing to your regular ISDN line.
I understand in the US, there are analog phones which can also display the caller ID, but that particular technology is not used in Europe. Here, anyone who needs more than a single plain analog phone line just gets an ISDN one.
What I would like to try one of these days is something attaching to both my broadband connection for SIP, and my ISDN line for regular phones, and doing the right routing automatically.
RTFA and go to the link posted several times in the comments: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ (70'000 digitized works and over 80'000 pictures).
BUT EVERYTHING IS IN FRENCH! How the hell am I supposed to read it?
Funny. But hopefully not serious because you do know more than just one language, don't you? If French is not among the others, that's OK. But if you know nothing else than English, then I pity you.
Thank, but see my other reply. Looks like I won't gain more Karma by being moderated Funny, after all.
Thanks, but that was some form of joke. Total Commander can split just fine, as can a Perl half-liner, and on Linux, of course, there is split with (I presume) a gazillion arcane options to make sure to please everyone. (In fact no, turns out to be just a handful of simple options). So I'm all set. But thanks anyway!
Yes, there is a command-line RAR. Unfortunately, to get the 300KB of rar.exe and the 200KB of unrar.exe. you have to download over 1 MB, and install the whole 3+MB of WinRAR. And then you get a share/whatever-ware, which you are supposed to pay for after a 40 days trial period.
.tar.gz which Total Commander handles natively (and Midnight Commander handles too of course).
I'm happy with zip and gzip, preferrably in the form of
ClamAV did indeed catch my eicar.rar, but I'm not sure which program extracted eicar.com from eicar.rar. Maybe it was amavis, not clamd.
I searched for Switzerland, and was sent to ... (no, not to Sweden)
Icc Adult Basic Education
(620) 332-1420
200 Arco Pl
Independence, KS 67301
Makes me wonder what Adult Basic Education may be about. And what is the relation to the small chocolate-watches-banks-mountains country? All the "educators" are called Heidi?
I like it's simple layout. Used some previous version before, which was an extension to Firefox or Thunderbird, but that stopped working after an upgrade.
a r\". Why is it so hard to tell these programs to put their data files into "E:\Cal", "D:\Mail", or such?)
I could import my old calendar into this new Sunbird, which is nice. (The import was not difficult, but finding the files in the insane directory jungle all these Mozilla projects create was hard. Turned out to be buried in "C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\default\9gltk3bn.slt\Calend
The 2 bugs I encountered in the 10 first minutes are:
- in print preview, changing the layout between Landscape and Portrait kicks you out of the preview and back into the main screen
- The Alarm window doesn't close when clicking on either of the Aknowledge buttons. You have to close the window.
So far, these are just annoyances which will hopefully quickly get fixed.
The installer also has the same problem as the other Mozilla apps: on Windows, it uses a moronic "Browse for Folder" dialog which I guess is what MS recommends. The problem is that it shows you a text box in which you think you can just type your directory and click OK, but that is not the case: whatever you type is ignored. You have to click your way to the directory, and if it doesn't exist, you have to click "Make New Folder", then change it's name so it isn't "New Folder", and then click OK. I guess that is Microsoft's idea of usability. But it's sad that many OSS projects seem to use this particularly stupid dialog during the install.
And in a hundred years, the world economy will be how many thousand times larger? [...] We'll have cities with thousands of times the populations, bustling with millions of times the economy.
I doubt it. Things cannot grow indefinitely. It's against basic principles of physics. I believe that in 100 years, the economy and the population will be much smaller than now. I won't be here to witness it, but I may see the beginning of the decline (if I quit smoking, maybe).
"If just the present world population of 5.8 billion people [that was in the 90'] were to live at current North American ecological standards (say 4.5 ha/person), a reasonable first approximation of the total productive land requirement would be 26 billion ha (assuming present technology). However, there are only just over 13 billion ha of land on Earth, of which only 8.8 billion are ecologically productive cropland, pasture, or forest (1.5 ha/person). In short, we would need an additional two planet Earths to accommodate the increased ecological load of people alive today. If the population were to stabilize at between 10 and 11 billion sometime in the next century, five additional Earths would be needed, all else being equal -- and this just to maintain the present rate of ecological decline (Rees & Wackernagel, 1994)."
While I can see the advantages of having every app isolated in it's own directory, I feel that one of the things I really like in Linux is to have all configuration in one, relatively small, pure text hierarchy: /etc.
I can grep it easily when I look for something, and easily edit the relevant file, which is usually well commented. I cannot grep the entire / tree. Well, I suppose I could, but I certainly don't want to.
For the rest, grouping all an applications's files together sounds attractive, but I would be happy enough if every app just clearly documented what it did at install time so it's easy to undo. (I don't believe much in "uninstall" programs/scripts, seeing how they (don't quite) work on Windows).
I'm sure there's a scheduling software package out there that can do all of the basic scheduling much faster than their current method
:-)
I seriously doubt it. This is one area where I can't imagine a computer beating a big board holding pieces of (colored) cardboard and a few whiteboard pens. If it needs to be viewable over the web, then set up a webcam in front of it!
One reason why computers are so bad at it and the old way so good (aside from the mere ease of use and reliability aspects), is the size. You just cannot see and understand as much interrelated information in one glance on a computer scren as you can on a big board on the wall.
(How are these specialised boards for planning called in English, anyway?)
I'm still waiting to see this massive instability everyone says is present in Windows.
I wouldn't hold my breath. These everyone probably only know Win9x/ME.
Win2K/XP is indeed extremely stable. On the server side I still prefer Linux, but it's not because of stability which is probably just as good on Windows servers.
I agree with your subject line...
If their work is to warn about tsunamis in the Pacific basin, [...] why should they warn about tsunamis somewhere else?
Because they knew about it, and it could have saved lives?
In fact, the latest I read is that they actually did try to warn, so they are not total bureaucratic morons like you seem to be.
But they didn't know whom to call (!), they had no contact in their (Outlook?) address book. But they still tried, and apparently warned the US state department, which in turn didn't know whom to call. Not a surprise that the US state department has no clue on how to reach foreign officials, since it's the Pentagon which is now responsible for foreign relations...
Sad world...
Update of my previous post:
The plagues of Egypt were not 7 but 10. (Sunday school didn't leave much in my brain, it seems)
The volcanic eruption was that of Santorini, one of the strongest since the beginning of civilisation. It was not around 3000 BC, but around 1620-50 BC. The collapse of the mountain certainly provoked a big tsunami, but of course, nobody knows if this was related to the Moses "parting the sea" during the Exodus. Some say it may explain it, and others dispute it.
A Google search for 'Santorini plagues Egypt' seems effective for more information.
Basically, it says "THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT.".
Yes, of course, there was no tsunami in the region this warning center is responsible for. But who writes these reports? Is it sensible to just write "no tsunami warning", without specifying that it's a different story on the other side, in the Indian ocean? Wouldn't people writing these reports be supposed to be aware of it?
Anyway, that report, while it may be technically correct for it's region, sounds really weird to me.
Since the link is for the "latest report", and will change over time, here is the complete text of that page:
I heard that in Krabi (Thailand) people notice the sea withdrawing uncharacteristically about 5 minutes before the first wave hit. Anyone can explain that?
In the attempts to link the stories of the Old Testament to historic events, a tsunami in the Mediterrenean sea is used to explain how the sea "opened". Indeed, right before a tsunami, the level would first drop, letting Moses and his people cross the "sea" there, and the wave would then have drowned the Egyptian army or whoever was after them.
In this hypothesis, Moses would have crossed from Egypt to Israel through a sort of swamp land near the mediterranean cost, where the tsunami effect wouldn't have been very brutal but rather slow. The level drop would have been enough to let people cross that swamp.
Unfortunately, I don't have any reference. I saw that in a documentary once. And I'm certainly no expert in Biblical stuff.
Maybe someone has some links? The part of the documentary which I saw was very interesting. It also explained the 7 plagues of Egypt, mainly with a strong volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean, which is believed to have taken place around 3000 BC if I remember correctly.
"In trying to make programming predictable, computer scientists have mostly succeeded in making it boring"
-- Larry Wall, interview in The Perl Journal, vol. 1 issue 1.
So is this the list of a few who cannot be left out, complemented by the boring ones?
As others have already said:
Where is Ada Lovelace? Where's Larry Wall? etc.
Maybe someone needs to start another list...
So how could you counter this very misleading advertizing?
With more advertizing, I would guess.
So you see, misleading advertizing is not only good for the product (and it may even end up backfiring on the product) but it is certainly good for the advertizing business. That is what counts for advertizers, after all.