But I still really miss my PowerBook 150's trackball - built into the machine!:D
That particular version of the PB trackball assembly used to have a problem with the plastic welds coming apart. I don't want to think about how many of those suckers I've had to araldite back together again...
Yet another good reason to be a Mac/OSX user, given they can't even get the Tax Office (to facilitate the taking of my hard earned money) to recognise a Mac, the chances of the AFP or ASIO tapping one are pretty slim.
Whoot
Beside, as we know from the movies, Mac users are always the good guys.:)
1. Contractions - to indicate that one or more letters are missing.
2. Possesive - to indicate that something belongs to the subject. e.g. "The cat tripped over it's feet." or "The cat played with it's ball." or "The cat ate it's favourite food."
Given the choice, most fat people wouldn't be fat, all in all it sucks big time.
Certainly part of the problem is the steady increase in available foods with 'empty' calories, food is not the only part of the problem and I REALLY wish people would get the stereotype of "fat people are gluttons" out of their heads.
The bigger problem is activity levels for calorific intake, and that some people have more efficient metabolisms than others. The modern western world has virtually eliminated incidental exercise. If you've been blessed with a high metabolism then perhaps it won't have effected you quite so much, but for most of us it has led to an increase in average weight.
Body mass is an extremely complex problem which is frequently equated in the mass media with moral failure (lazy & gluttonous).
Acceptable community standards for body mass have declined while the average body mass ratio has increased. Many of the 'diseases' associated with being overweight are now being attributed to serial dieting.
Weight is not the problem, fitness is the problem. Fit fat people still have a better life expectancy than thin unfit people; and don't kid yourself that you can't be fat and fit. Western cultures are living increasingly sedentary lives, we give our children Playstations rather than let them play in the streets, we drive instead of walk. We need to collectively get up from our desks and lounge chairs and start moving around. Turn off the TV or your computer and take the dog for a walk.
Incidental exercise is steadily being eliminated from our lives, but few of us are able to find the time to explicitly exercise.
Fat people (especially fat chicks) are often publically discriminated against and derided - why would you go to the gym when you are treated like you might be contagious?
As for 'fat chicks' getting pregnant; current studies suggest that dieting during pregnancy increases the possibility that your children will be fat as it triggers the starvation gene in the womb. Carrying extra weight during pregnancy certainly increases the chances of maternal diabetes, but personally at a BMI of around 32 (clinically obese) my doctor is more worried about the fact that I need to increase my folate and iron intake than lose weight.
Sadly, our General Manager sent out a broadcast email yesterday afternoon chastising the division for the poor quality of a recently tender document that had gone out (we apparently lost the tender because the client's name was mis-spelt throughout), he was strongly promoting the proofreading of documents before distribution. His missive contained one obvious typo and a grammatical error.
There have been numerous reports released in Australia recently on how literacy and numeracy standards have been slipping in recent years. There was even an article yesterday commenting on how illeteracy is now being 'diagnosed' as ADHD, with children being taken to emergency rooms for treatment when what they really need is to be taught how to read.
The computer is simply a tool, it has no moral value, if the children are taught how to use it effectively as an educational aid, and are taught to value learning, the unfettered access to a computer will be beneficial. IF the children are taught to treat education as something to be endured and that computers are toys - then that is how they will treat them.
Quality is a subjective thing. I have worked in digital imaging for over a decade, and I would say that what people look for ina colour printer will vary enourmously depending on the type of output they are intending to produce.
HP is fine for PowerPoint presentations and Excel charts, but in my personal opinion their colour space sucks for photo printing or any type of realistic continuous tone images - they look murky. Comparitively speaking, the Epson and Canon colour profiles work much better, especially with regards to skin tones and things like food items (the HP profile tends to make food look slightly mouldy).
Dye sub printers also require that you use specialty papers - ones that will sublimate the dye into the coated surface.
Colour laser will print onto 'plain' paper.
While you may get more acurate colour on a due sub initially, the dyes are not colourfast and will fade - sometimes quite quickly. Colour laser pigments will hold their colour for much longer. Dye sub printers were traditionally used to emulate a chemical proof before getting plates made for offset printing. While more expensive than a laser printer print they are a fraction of the cost and turnaround time for getting a chem proof.
If I was mocking up a neat United Federation of Planets PAssport, I would use a GOOD quality colour laser engine with the correct colour profile loaded in my DTP software on quality paper. You'd get a much better artifact that way, and it will last longer.
Worse, this would have no effect on something subtle like line or character spacing, which could encode a serial number the same way a bar code does. Proper equipment can be set up to detect line spacing serial numbers despite scale and rotation distortion.
They are possibly using a varient on DataGlyphs, it uses a small line which is orientated in one of 4 directions \ / | - to express a piece of information. Xerox use DataGlyphs to intelligently route scanned documents in a number of their workflow solutions.
Print the document - then go get multiple copies done at Kinkos, or some other copy centre.
This serves two purposes - firstly you will have two sets of dots overlaid on each other - presumably this will 'confuse' anything trying to read the dots. Secondly, the dominate signature will be the public access device - if the dots are hard to see by the naked eye, they will be very difficult to copy.
For the tracking to work they need to match a serial number to a user - i.e. the device has to be registered. For small consumer devices (e.g. the HP CLJ 2500) it is simple for the user to simply not register the purchase with the manufacturer, however these sort of devices are unlikely to be capable of producing anything which could be remotely be considered a good forgery.
Large colour devices often come with maintenance contracts attached, so if you knew the serial number and had a cooperative manufacturer, tracking the owner would probably be relatively simple, however you would also find that these devices are typically in a shared user environment (offices, copy centres, student resource centres, etc...).
Having said that, I work for Xerox and conduct audits for large corporate clients regarding what equipment they have and how it's used - even with access to the sales records, client asset registers and physical identifcation of units we frequently have problems identifying every device on a site back to original point of sale. Errors in how SN's have been entered into billing systems or asset registers is not uncommon, chassis or logic boards get changed during maintenance changing the actual or apparent SNs (very common with HP or Lexmark equipment). This would only work with seriously large hardware with fully tracked service histories.
I recently replaced my handset and went through the exact same problems. Part of my role at work involves audits of physical plant for clients (as part of a larger cost of operation modelling exercise), we frequently enter places where cameras are not permitted, but ideally need to be contactable by the office or even other team members who are auditing other areas of the site.
Ultimately I was given the choice of 2 or 3 handsets to pick from, once I added the requirement of bluetooth for a wireless headset there were none available through our preferred supplier. I ended up wth a Nokia 5100, no bluetooth but no camera.
did anyone ever actually find Mickey Mouse funny? I always preferred Bugs and Daffy.
I have the theory that the difference between Disney and Warner cartoons is kinda like the difference between TSR and WW roleplaying games:
In Disney cartoons, the main protagonsists are sachrine sweet and always good. A bit like the old TSR dictate that player characters must always be of good alignment.
In Warner Bros. cartoons, the protagonists are always in some way evil or bad. They pull awful, dangerous pranks on each other, they try to kill each other (Bugs/Daffy/Elmer/Wile E Coyote/Roadrunner/Sylvester/Tweety Pie/etc...), sexually molest/rape (Pepe LePew, Foghorn Leghorn), financially ruin, or just plain brain-fuck with anyone within range (Michigan J Frog, Foghorn Leghorn). WW characters were typically monsters (Vampires, werewolves, etc...) that had to kill to survive.
Like most manufactured products, their are good and bad implementations of a product family, and professional and consumer grade products.
As a general rule I would be suspicious of any inkjet based or top feed device that claims to be a genuine MFD. All in one products need to be robust or you are at the mercy of the weakest component to bring down the whole device.
If you are looking at a device which scans (either to file or to print) look for something that scans off the glass unless it has a heavy duty document feeder, as those mechanisms have a high incidence of failure.
Paper trays that rely on top-down gravity feed frequently fail and start drawing multiple sheets of paper through at a time.
MFDs have two major market spaces:
1. High volume office environments where the main print engine is a heavy duty copier engine, which is both more reliable and more cost effective than desktop printers, and the total copy volume is probably less than 20% of the print volume. Fax, copy, scan, print should operate independantly of each other for true miltitasking and drivers are handled at an enterprise level.
2. Isolated workspaces where space is at a premium but multiple functions are required, generally still in a corporate environment. An example would be a nurses station in a hospital - most hospitals in service were designed before there were computerised patient tracking systems, everything was managed through card systems and cardboard folders of patient records, now every nurses station needs to fit a computer, a printer, a phone, a fax and a way of copying handover sheets. A small footprint laser MFD saves space and proves the required functions.
For most home offices, inkjet MFDs are a false economy.
Disclaimer: I work for Xerox - we develop, design, manufacture and sell MFDs.
But the freedom to do something that is sure to fail and have negative consequences is not freedom at all.
To quote from "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett:
'Exactly,' said Lord Vetinari. 'There is always a choice.'
'You mean... I could choose certain death?'
'A choice, nonetheless,' said Vetinari. 'Or, perhaps, an alternative. You see, I believe in freedom, Mr Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.'
Slashdot Mirror
But I still really miss my PowerBook 150's trackball - built into the machine! :D
That particular version of the PB trackball assembly used to have a problem with the plastic welds coming apart. I don't want to think about how many of those suckers I've had to araldite back together again...
Yet another good reason to be a Mac/OSX user, given they can't even get the Tax Office (to facilitate the taking of my hard earned money) to recognise a Mac, the chances of the AFP or ASIO tapping one are pretty slim.
Whoot
Beside, as we know from the movies, Mac users are always the good guys. :)
"its"
"it's"
Apostrophes are used for the following reasons:
1. Contractions - to indicate that one or more letters are missing.
2. Possesive - to indicate that something belongs to the subject. e.g. "The cat tripped over it's feet." or "The cat played with it's ball." or "The cat ate it's favourite food."
I agree with you and disagree with you.
Given the choice, most fat people wouldn't be fat, all in all it sucks big time.
Certainly part of the problem is the steady increase in available foods with 'empty' calories, food is not the only part of the problem and I REALLY wish people would get the stereotype of "fat people are gluttons" out of their heads.
The bigger problem is activity levels for calorific intake, and that some people have more efficient metabolisms than others. The modern western world has virtually eliminated incidental exercise. If you've been blessed with a high metabolism then perhaps it won't have effected you quite so much, but for most of us it has led to an increase in average weight.
Body mass is an extremely complex problem which is frequently equated in the mass media with moral failure (lazy & gluttonous).
Acceptable community standards for body mass have declined while the average body mass ratio has increased. Many of the 'diseases' associated with being overweight are now being attributed to serial dieting.
Weight is not the problem, fitness is the problem. Fit fat people still have a better life expectancy than thin unfit people; and don't kid yourself that you can't be fat and fit. Western cultures are living increasingly sedentary lives, we give our children Playstations rather than let them play in the streets, we drive instead of walk. We need to collectively get up from our desks and lounge chairs and start moving around. Turn off the TV or your computer and take the dog for a walk.
Incidental exercise is steadily being eliminated from our lives, but few of us are able to find the time to explicitly exercise.
Fat people (especially fat chicks) are often publically discriminated against and derided - why would you go to the gym when you are treated like you might be contagious?
As for 'fat chicks' getting pregnant; current studies suggest that dieting during pregnancy increases the possibility that your children will be fat as it triggers the starvation gene in the womb. Carrying extra weight during pregnancy certainly increases the chances of maternal diabetes, but personally at a BMI of around 32 (clinically obese) my doctor is more worried about the fact that I need to increase my folate and iron intake than lose weight.
Sadly, our General Manager sent out a broadcast email yesterday afternoon chastising the division for the poor quality of a recently tender document that had gone out (we apparently lost the tender because the client's name was mis-spelt throughout), he was strongly promoting the proofreading of documents before distribution. His missive contained one obvious typo and a grammatical error.
*sigh*
Computers can help or hurt, it all depends on the teachers.
More importantly, it depends on the Parents.
There have been numerous reports released in Australia recently on how literacy and numeracy standards have been slipping in recent years. There was even an article yesterday commenting on how illeteracy is now being 'diagnosed' as ADHD, with children being taken to emergency rooms for treatment when what they really need is to be taught how to read.
The computer is simply a tool, it has no moral value, if the children are taught how to use it effectively as an educational aid, and are taught to value learning, the unfettered access to a computer will be beneficial. IF the children are taught to treat education as something to be endured and that computers are toys - then that is how they will treat them.
Quality is a subjective thing. I have worked in digital imaging for over a decade, and I would say that what people look for ina colour printer will vary enourmously depending on the type of output they are intending to produce.
HP is fine for PowerPoint presentations and Excel charts, but in my personal opinion their colour space sucks for photo printing or any type of realistic continuous tone images - they look murky. Comparitively speaking, the Epson and Canon colour profiles work much better, especially with regards to skin tones and things like food items (the HP profile tends to make food look slightly mouldy).
Isn't that the old (pre-Bondi-iMac) logo?
Given the name, (Exeem), should we assume it is an exe file for running on Wintel platforms?
Suprnova used to have a significant collect of Macintosh resources listed.
Any game with a hovercraft mode is guarenteed to make me motion sick.
Beyond Good and Evil has been making a good attempt at it also.
I remeber getting woozy playing Descent years ago, could be one reason I don't play FPS much.
I'll be in my bunk.
*snork*
In case you hadn't realised, ".com" is not a US TLD, it is an international TLD.
Plenty of countries use ".net.(country code)" or ".com.(country code)". Get over it.
Dye sub printers also require that you use specialty papers - ones that will sublimate the dye into the coated surface.
Colour laser will print onto 'plain' paper.
While you may get more acurate colour on a due sub initially, the dyes are not colourfast and will fade - sometimes quite quickly. Colour laser pigments will hold their colour for much longer. Dye sub printers were traditionally used to emulate a chemical proof before getting plates made for offset printing. While more expensive than a laser printer print they are a fraction of the cost and turnaround time for getting a chem proof.
If I was mocking up a neat United Federation of Planets PAssport, I would use a GOOD quality colour laser engine with the correct colour profile loaded in my DTP software on quality paper. You'd get a much better artifact that way, and it will last longer.
Worse, this would have no effect on something subtle like line or character spacing, which could encode a serial number the same way a bar code does. Proper equipment can be set up to detect line spacing serial numbers despite scale and rotation distortion.
They are possibly using a varient on DataGlyphs, it uses a small line which is orientated in one of 4 directions \ / | - to express a piece of information. Xerox use DataGlyphs to intelligently route scanned documents in a number of their workflow solutions.
Print the document - then go get multiple copies done at Kinkos, or some other copy centre.
This serves two purposes - firstly you will have two sets of dots overlaid on each other - presumably this will 'confuse' anything trying to read the dots. Secondly, the dominate signature will be the public access device - if the dots are hard to see by the naked eye, they will be very difficult to copy.
For the tracking to work they need to match a serial number to a user - i.e. the device has to be registered. For small consumer devices (e.g. the HP CLJ 2500) it is simple for the user to simply not register the purchase with the manufacturer, however these sort of devices are unlikely to be capable of producing anything which could be remotely be considered a good forgery.
Large colour devices often come with maintenance contracts attached, so if you knew the serial number and had a cooperative manufacturer, tracking the owner would probably be relatively simple, however you would also find that these devices are typically in a shared user environment (offices, copy centres, student resource centres, etc...).
Having said that, I work for Xerox and conduct audits for large corporate clients regarding what equipment they have and how it's used - even with access to the sales records, client asset registers and physical identifcation of units we frequently have problems identifying every device on a site back to original point of sale. Errors in how SN's have been entered into billing systems or asset registers is not uncommon, chassis or logic boards get changed during maintenance changing the actual or apparent SNs (very common with HP or Lexmark equipment). This would only work with seriously large hardware with fully tracked service histories.
I suspect he just wants to watch...
I recently replaced my handset and went through the exact same problems. Part of my role at work involves audits of physical plant for clients (as part of a larger cost of operation modelling exercise), we frequently enter places where cameras are not permitted, but ideally need to be contactable by the office or even other team members who are auditing other areas of the site.
Ultimately I was given the choice of 2 or 3 handsets to pick from, once I added the requirement of bluetooth for a wireless headset there were none available through our preferred supplier. I ended up wth a Nokia 5100, no bluetooth but no camera.
According to my husband, all women are bi, so I'm looking for a girlfriend, just not very hard...
did anyone ever actually find Mickey Mouse funny? I always preferred Bugs and Daffy.
I have the theory that the difference between Disney and Warner cartoons is kinda like the difference between TSR and WW roleplaying games:
In Disney cartoons, the main protagonsists are sachrine sweet and always good. A bit like the old TSR dictate that player characters must always be of good alignment.
In Warner Bros. cartoons, the protagonists are always in some way evil or bad. They pull awful, dangerous pranks on each other, they try to kill each other (Bugs/Daffy/Elmer/Wile E Coyote/Roadrunner/Sylvester/Tweety Pie/etc...), sexually molest/rape (Pepe LePew, Foghorn Leghorn), financially ruin, or just plain brain-fuck with anyone within range (Michigan J Frog, Foghorn Leghorn). WW characters were typically monsters (Vampires, werewolves, etc...) that had to kill to survive.
For many people evil was just more fun to watch.
(BTW: Any female H2G2 fans here? I'm looking for a girlfriend!)
1. Yes
2. So am I
Like most manufactured products, their are good and bad implementations of a product family, and professional and consumer grade products.
As a general rule I would be suspicious of any inkjet based or top feed device that claims to be a genuine MFD. All in one products need to be robust or you are at the mercy of the weakest component to bring down the whole device.
If you are looking at a device which scans (either to file or to print) look for something that scans off the glass unless it has a heavy duty document feeder, as those mechanisms have a high incidence of failure.
Paper trays that rely on top-down gravity feed frequently fail and start drawing multiple sheets of paper through at a time.
MFDs have two major market spaces:
1. High volume office environments where the main print engine is a heavy duty copier engine, which is both more reliable and more cost effective than desktop printers, and the total copy volume is probably less than 20% of the print volume. Fax, copy, scan, print should operate independantly of each other for true miltitasking and drivers are handled at an enterprise level.
2. Isolated workspaces where space is at a premium but multiple functions are required, generally still in a corporate environment. An example would be a nurses station in a hospital - most hospitals in service were designed before there were computerised patient tracking systems, everything was managed through card systems and cardboard folders of patient records, now every nurses station needs to fit a computer, a printer, a phone, a fax and a way of copying handover sheets. A small footprint laser MFD saves space and proves the required functions.
For most home offices, inkjet MFDs are a false economy.
Disclaimer: I work for Xerox - we develop, design, manufacture and sell MFDs.
I recently collected up all the old Lego and Mechano from my parents house when they moved. I'm keeping them for when/if we decide to have kids.
But the freedom to do something that is sure to fail and have negative consequences is not freedom at all.
To quote from "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett:
'Exactly,' said Lord Vetinari. 'There is always a choice.'
'You mean ... I could choose certain death?'
'A choice, nonetheless,' said Vetinari. 'Or, perhaps, an alternative. You see, I believe in freedom, Mr Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.'