.. and it was probably licence terms for DPS that sent Apple off in the direction of using PDF instead. Adobe's terms were much more friendly for embedding.
Windows succeeded because it was a whole lot easier for application developers to code for one interface - the Windows GDI rather than a whole host of graphical device drivers for this or that video adapter, each with their own extensions to the standard devices. IBM had launched the VGA and standardised a 256 color display of reasonable resolution, but there were many flavors of extensions - line drawing engines, BLT, area fill, alpha overlays, hardware cursors, video overlays, multiple resolutions and color depths. Since the device manufacturers were given the task of writing a device driver for their hardware to present a DDI to Windows, that took away from the app developers the need to write bunches of code to exploit unique features. Windows 3.1 was successful because of the 32-bit API, and avoiding having to write two lots of device drivers, one for 286 and one for 386.
They can travel only on flat surfaces and could malfunction if they get wet going outside to annex buildings," the paper reported. "They were really slow and noisy, and would get stuck trying to go past each other," lamented one guest.
I love repairing vintage electronics precisely because you can repair it. When I was unemployed a few years ago, I started up a small electronics repair business, and if I stuck to professional music stuff - amps, combos, effects units and keyboards I could make a small profit at it. Professional musicians love their old kit! Unfortunately integration meant that for younger kit, often the spare was more than a pre-owned replacement from That Auction Site. So, I often got stuck with stuff from the 90s and later, where I would take something apart, find out what the spare would cost and couldn't persuade the owner to part with the funds to have it fixed. I recall when we used to have TV repair shops (those in Southampton might remember S&L TV) they used to charge customers up front before the repair would even be assessed. They couldn't sustain the business model even with that. I've repaired laptops and LCD TVs, but I despaired at repairing iPods and iPads with their layers of glue and too-easily-broken plastic latches. Aside from a not-for-profit venture, or as I do for my own benefit buying stuff that needs a cap job, or power transistors or broken connectors replacing, it's far too often that electronics falls in to the Beyond Economic Repair box.
I recall when due to some trademark claim we had to stop calling PLAs by their sensible name derived from being Programmable Logic Arrays. I had a tree of stuff to change to make them PALs instead. Actually I just went to look up via Google when that all happened, and history seems to have been rewritten the other way around. I will now go and have a quick lie down.
.. or other words where in one region the term has a colloquial meaning (Fanny being a slightly more polite version of Pussy in English Mark 1) and in another a more benign meaning? I could wax lyrical about the differences between English Mark 1 and the language of our colonial brethren in the US.
And then there are other languages in the world, after all. I remember my German colleagues giggling at an American stand at CeBIT in Hannover, whose company name was "Blast, Inc". Something to do with blowing, I understand. Quite childish really, but then a chunk of the comedy in the world relates to the naughty parts of human bodies and behaviours.
At IBM Havant many moons ago, the online expense claim program identified key words in claims, and flagged amounts that exceeded thresholds. If I came back from the States with a meal receipt for more than 34 bucks, I quickly found that identifying the expense as 'a healthy repast' avoided the word filter quite nicely.
I'm not allowed to have 'FSCK" as my team name for CoD since it is clearly derived from a rude word. Most annoying, since we here all know from where it really comes.
There's a whole bunch of silver surfers who live on Hayling Island, who currently name and shame motorists who drive in less than thoughtful, considerate ways. They currently just take photos on their smart phones (let's not wonder how they manage to take a picture of someone else's driving legally) and post them to the Hayling group on Facebook..
This is going to give them a whole new, potentially litigious way of abusing visitors to the island. Wow.
The police have obviously latched on to rate-driver.co.uk as a Good Idea.
Anyone who has ever used Voice Recognition knows that heuristics can foul up. The quality of your AI experience, as it absorbs new data may go down as well as up. Wasn't there a recent experience with some Microsoft social media software where its neural net became more and more racist over a period of 24 hours thanks to it gleaning data from Twitter?
As a technical architect, I'd like to know how often I am going to have to back up the state of a neural net doing Computer Aided Diagnosis on CT and MR datasets so I can restore it when it starts to get worse at finding lung nodules and not better..
We have some countries like Sweden giving tax benefits to small companies for repairing appliances. We have a huge push to replace incandescent lighting with solid state lighting, with an attendant increase in lifetime as well as efficiency. (so much so, I have trouble finding a bulb that works for my lava lamp). We are now looking to reverse the global trend away from reusable containers to PET plastic bottles. Is this not a very badly timed initiative to help manufacturers sell the same products to the same customers, forcing them to dispose of the old ones?
As the founder of the Association of Home Equipment Modifiers ( AHEM ) I'd like to object to their use of a very similar acronym for a much darker purpose.
The Design Authority lead I used to work for in IBM pinged me on Sametime one sunny morning. Hi, says he, as anon, another young architect was invited to join the chat.. I've decided to make anon the lead architect on the next release of CRM.. OK?
I ran round to his office and barged in - why would you sidestep me for the role? I do all the work, I have proved myself on this programme etc etc. And how DARE you tell me in that way? Well, he says, this is an excellent career opportunity for anon, and let's face it at the age of 44 your career is over .. So glad to be an ex-IBMer. It's been 13 years since I left them, after 27 years of employment. I don't miss them one bit. Except the big, wonderful AIX machines.
And when you need mod points to up someone, there are none around. Exactly - a fingerprint waiver to say you understand the terms and conditions of the ride,
We've had ambulances called in our local district because the patient had run out of paracetamol. Couldn't be arsed to call a neighbour or friend to go to the local Tesco Extra.
... aaaand you will still find yourself parked up outside A&E since there is nowhere to admit you to. That's where all the ambulances are parked, rather than picking you up. At least in the ambo you have a chance of getting some life-saving treatment, a bit of oxygen and defibrillators. Hospitals don't have enough staff, or beds to admit patients in A&E to, since they can't discharge bed-blockers back to the community; so patients who have been seen, and need admitting are stuck in a cubicle. Meanwhile, all of the corridors are full of patients on trolleys - and they are the ones who have been triaged in the car park as being the ones who need the most urgent care. The rest have to wait in the ambo - or in your case the Uber car. Mayhap you got to the hospital in ten minutes, but you may well wait an hour to get inside.
The real trick would be to stop people coming in for being off their heads on skunk or falling down drunk and incapable, or having got into a fight; or equally having some money going into social care so the elderly can be discharged out of the acute setting. But that would involve the Government spending money on the NHS.
I see Jeremy Hunt was given a 'Humanitarian Award' this week for his work in patient safety. At least there are some people around with a sense of humour.
I have a pair of KEF 104 which were manufactured in 1978, and they are my go-to speakers. They've had the bass/midrange units replaced with some Peerless drivers about 15 years ago; still love them. I have yet to get Amazon Echo to play through them, but about to move house so that will be part of the new setup. I want Echo to play through external speakers when the amp is switched to that input, but otherwise use its internal speaker - so I might have to fit a small relay inside Echo to switch the output without having to unplug the 3.5mm jack.
Its usability is improved dramatically once you start to adopt keyboard shortcuts.. and you need lots of CPU and memory (though more modern machines are probably a lot better than my AMD Phenom), since the effects are small and simple-ish so you need to stack lots together. But it is really, really good. I am a fan of MIDI controllers and button-LED matrix, and it really excels.
I run Renoise (yup, paid for that one), Ardour, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, ZynAddSubFX, SooperLooper, Audacity, Qsynth, LMMS; I use Clementine as a music player.
It could be that before, they were in blissful ignorance of how people felt about them; with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.
Slashdot Mirror
.. and it was probably licence terms for DPS that sent Apple off in the direction of using PDF instead. Adobe's terms were much more friendly for embedding.
Windows succeeded because it was a whole lot easier for application developers to code for one interface - the Windows GDI rather than a whole host of graphical device drivers for this or that video adapter, each with their own extensions to the standard devices. IBM had launched the VGA and standardised a 256 color display of reasonable resolution, but there were many flavors of extensions - line drawing engines, BLT, area fill, alpha overlays, hardware cursors, video overlays, multiple resolutions and color depths. Since the device manufacturers were given the task of writing a device driver for their hardware to present a DDI to Windows, that took away from the app developers the need to write bunches of code to exploit unique features. Windows 3.1 was successful because of the 32-bit API, and avoiding having to write two lots of device drivers, one for 286 and one for 386.
They can travel only on flat surfaces and could malfunction if they get wet going outside to annex buildings," the paper reported. "They were really slow and noisy, and would get stuck trying to go past each other," lamented one guest.
..
Serves them right for hiring Daleks
... but I might be tempted to spend some of my Christmas money on one all the same ;-) ... very excited by it. And love the colour.
Except Kate Winslet would have ended up on the iceberg. Oh, wait .. now there's a plot twist.
I love repairing vintage electronics precisely because you can repair it. When I was unemployed a few years ago, I started up a small electronics repair business, and if I stuck to professional music stuff - amps, combos, effects units and keyboards I could make a small profit at it. Professional musicians love their old kit! Unfortunately integration meant that for younger kit, often the spare was more than a pre-owned replacement from That Auction Site. So, I often got stuck with stuff from the 90s and later, where I would take something apart, find out what the spare would cost and couldn't persuade the owner to part with the funds to have it fixed. I recall when we used to have TV repair shops (those in Southampton might remember S&L TV) they used to charge customers up front before the repair would even be assessed. They couldn't sustain the business model even with that. I've repaired laptops and LCD TVs, but I despaired at repairing iPods and iPads with their layers of glue and too-easily-broken plastic latches. Aside from a not-for-profit venture, or as I do for my own benefit buying stuff that needs a cap job, or power transistors or broken connectors replacing, it's far too often that electronics falls in to the Beyond Economic Repair box.
Dark Mode lasted about three minutes. It's garbage and hurt my eyes.
Give me proper skins like Gnome.
I recall when due to some trademark claim we had to stop calling PLAs by their sensible name derived from being Programmable Logic Arrays. I had a tree of stuff to change to make them PALs instead. Actually I just went to look up via Google when that all happened, and history seems to have been rewritten the other way around. I will now go and have a quick lie down.
My favourite was when PowerGen opened a web site for their Italian operation, called powergenitalia.com ..
.. or other words where in one region the term has a colloquial meaning (Fanny being a slightly more polite version of Pussy in English Mark 1) and in another a more benign meaning? I could wax lyrical about the differences between English Mark 1 and the language of our colonial brethren in the US.
And then there are other languages in the world, after all. I remember my German colleagues giggling at an American stand at CeBIT in Hannover, whose company name was "Blast, Inc". Something to do with blowing, I understand. Quite childish really, but then a chunk of the comedy in the world relates to the naughty parts of human bodies and behaviours.
At IBM Havant many moons ago, the online expense claim program identified key words in claims, and flagged amounts that exceeded thresholds. If I came back from the States with a meal receipt for more than 34 bucks, I quickly found that identifying the expense as 'a healthy repast' avoided the word filter quite nicely.
I'm not allowed to have 'FSCK" as my team name for CoD since it is clearly derived from a rude word. Most annoying, since we here all know from where it really comes.
Bunch of pussies.
There's a whole bunch of silver surfers who live on Hayling Island, who currently name and shame motorists who drive in less than thoughtful, considerate ways. They currently just take photos on their smart phones (let's not wonder how they manage to take a picture of someone else's driving legally) and post them to the Hayling group on Facebook ..
This is going to give them a whole new, potentially litigious way of abusing visitors to the island. Wow.
The police have obviously latched on to rate-driver.co.uk as a Good Idea.
There will be unexpected, unhelpful consequences.
Anyone who has ever used Voice Recognition knows that heuristics can foul up. The quality of your AI experience, as it absorbs new data may go down as well as up. Wasn't there a recent experience with some Microsoft social media software where its neural net became more and more racist over a period of 24 hours thanks to it gleaning data from Twitter?
..
As a technical architect, I'd like to know how often I am going to have to back up the state of a neural net doing Computer Aided Diagnosis on CT and MR datasets so I can restore it when it starts to get worse at finding lung nodules and not better
We have some countries like Sweden giving tax benefits to small companies for repairing appliances. We have a huge push to replace incandescent lighting with solid state lighting, with an attendant increase in lifetime as well as efficiency. (so much so, I have trouble finding a bulb that works for my lava lamp). We are now looking to reverse the global trend away from reusable containers to PET plastic bottles. Is this not a very badly timed initiative to help manufacturers sell the same products to the same customers, forcing them to dispose of the old ones?
As the founder of the Association of Home Equipment Modifiers ( AHEM ) I'd like to object to their use of a very similar acronym for a much darker purpose.
The Design Authority lead I used to work for in IBM pinged me on Sametime one sunny morning. Hi, says he, as anon, another young architect was invited to join the chat .. I've decided to make anon the lead architect on the next release of CRM .. OK?
.. So glad to be an ex-IBMer. It's been 13 years since I left them, after 27 years of employment. I don't miss them one bit. Except the big, wonderful AIX machines.
I ran round to his office and barged in - why would you sidestep me for the role? I do all the work, I have proved myself on this programme etc etc. And how DARE you tell me in that way? Well, he says, this is an excellent career opportunity for anon, and let's face it at the age of 44 your career is over
And when you need mod points to up someone, there are none around. Exactly - a fingerprint waiver to say you understand the terms and conditions of the ride,
We've had ambulances called in our local district because the patient had run out of paracetamol. Couldn't be arsed to call a neighbour or friend to go to the local Tesco Extra.
... aaaand you will still find yourself parked up outside A&E since there is nowhere to admit you to. That's where all the ambulances are parked, rather than picking you up. At least in the ambo you have a chance of getting some life-saving treatment, a bit of oxygen and defibrillators. Hospitals don't have enough staff, or beds to admit patients in A&E to, since they can't discharge bed-blockers back to the community; so patients who have been seen, and need admitting are stuck in a cubicle. Meanwhile, all of the corridors are full of patients on trolleys - and they are the ones who have been triaged in the car park as being the ones who need the most urgent care. The rest have to wait in the ambo - or in your case the Uber car. Mayhap you got to the hospital in ten minutes, but you may well wait an hour to get inside.
The real trick would be to stop people coming in for being off their heads on skunk or falling down drunk and incapable, or having got into a fight; or equally having some money going into social care so the elderly can be discharged out of the acute setting. But that would involve the Government spending money on the NHS.
I see Jeremy Hunt was given a 'Humanitarian Award' this week for his work in patient safety. At least there are some people around with a sense of humour.
The Maybot is a paragon of good sense by comparison. Scary thought.
I have a pair of KEF 104 which were manufactured in 1978, and they are my go-to speakers. They've had the bass/midrange units replaced with some Peerless drivers about 15 years ago; still love them. I have yet to get Amazon Echo to play through them, but about to move house so that will be part of the new setup. I want Echo to play through external speakers when the amp is switched to that input, but otherwise use its internal speaker - so I might have to fit a small relay inside Echo to switch the output without having to unplug the 3.5mm jack.
Its usability is improved dramatically once you start to adopt keyboard shortcuts .. and you need lots of CPU and memory (though more modern machines are probably a lot better than my AMD Phenom), since the effects are small and simple-ish so you need to stack lots together. But it is really, really good. I am a fan of MIDI controllers and button-LED matrix, and it really excels.
I run Renoise (yup, paid for that one), Ardour, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, ZynAddSubFX, SooperLooper, Audacity, Qsynth, LMMS; I use Clementine as a music player.
It could be that before, they were in blissful ignorance of how people felt about them; with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.