I don't want much. My need is common. I write and deliver presentations at many conferences. Often, they are the same or variations on the same sessions with just updates and tweaks. Conferences often require specific background templates and masters.
1. Application of a new background master (with it's own color, font, bullet, background graphic logos, etc.) should be a two click change.
2. Making a "global" change on the master to how bullets, fonts, indentation, colors, etc. are applied to sections should be a few clicks at most, and easily re-applied to all slides.
I find these two most basic functions entirely painful and barely workable in Open Office Depress.
I find it crashtastic when doing something as simple as reformatting, and there are times when font layouts for text areas become "confused to the extent that you're better off deleting them entirely and re-entering the text than trying to figure out what got screwed up.
In short, the product doesn't do what it needs to do for me, as a presenter.
My mac-geek friends all swear by Keynote. I'm quite used to Powerpoint. I don't know anyone who prefers depress.
...and yeah, no shock that some find that trollsome, but it's truly based on hours of use.
Unfortunately, for my needs, just having a good presentation isn't quite enough. It needs to be compatible and re-usable for different conferences -- often where a specific background template is required.
Open office's word processor isn't bad. I've been forced to use the powerpoint replacement (called "Impress") recently and the word "SUCK" doesn't even begin to cover just how badly unworkable it is. In fact, I've renamed it "Repress" because that's a more accurate description of what it does.
I'm not trying to do fancy transitions or stupid animations either. Just basic slideware for hour or 90 minute long technical presentations. It can't even do a fsking "replace template" or "master" properly. It just sucks. Totally and completely sucks.
By the way, in case I wasn't clear -- I don't care for it.
When it meets even close to parity, I'll jump all over it. Until then, I'll pay my Microsoft tax (or switch and pay my Apple tax).
Well, sort of. It depends on your point of reference. An orbit describes a straight line through space/time which appears curved due to the influence of gravity -- when in fact it's space/time that is itself curved. (I think I've got that mostly right). In that way, the link of an orbit is a straight line drawn on a curved fabric.
Have to admit, my mind went the same place -- though in that case if memory serves, it was a Ford 351 Cleveland engine. I may be mistaken, as I'm old and it's early.
Initially, these made sense for my application. Today, it makes much more sense to pay 30-40% less for a netbook that has faster processing, better graphics, twice the ram, much more storage, and doesn't need it's own keyboard and monitor. On top of that, power consumption is very similar and reliability is much higher.
Nobody seems to see a netbook without the screen and keyboard for less money. Seems stupid, but for that kind of hardware that isn't in a netbook configuration, you pay over $500, while the netbook runs $300.
....even as much as I am apposed to nearly everything that administration did, I can't go along with your assumption.
If you're deleting data, then you're breaking the law. That, by definition, means you can't just call up DARPA and ask for their top data deletion boffins to come up and clean the place out. You have to do it yourself or rely on as few people as possible what their own level of expertise, and do it in a way that looks accidental.
I, like many people, welcome the idea of living as long as I can be productive and maybe a bit beyond -- but I have no wish to live indefinitely if that life is one of immobility, pain, and humiliating dependence both physically and financially.
If this, or any, treatment results in an increased healthy lifespan by somehow allowing my body to repair itself as it did when I was in my twenties or even my early thirties then I'm I'm for it. Of course, that goes hand in hand with my ability and continued willingness to earn my keep within society. If, on the other hand, we're talking about a prolonged geriatric dependency and pain cycle than no. I am not interested in burdening my children and their children with my crotchety, miserable self for the bulk of their adult lives.
I'm 42 and while I try to stay in reasonable shape, working out pretty hard on both cardio/aerobics and strength/flexibility with Shotokan Karate two or three times a week, the difference in being over forty is profound in how much harder is is to avoid or recover from injury, to gain back lost strength or fitness, and all manner of other small health details that we completely ignore in our twenties and thirties.
So scientist friends; learn to restore the length of tolemeres if that's the magic, or how to rehydrate the collagen and cartilage that loose density and elasticity over time, or how to teach the rest of my organs and joints how to regenerate as my liver does. Learn to filter the toxins and free radicals that build up over decades and damage my dna, and to repair that dna that gets damaged by radiation and transcription errors. These things will extend my healthy lifespan and let me contribute to world with youthful energy, a quick mind, and extra decades of learning and wisdom. If we can do that for people, we'll make the worlds we live in better places.
The goal must be living better, longer; not just living longer.
I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband. -- Thurgood Marshall (1908 - 1993)
Give the old one to the Salvation Army, and go get one after doing some research into longevity and ink replacement costs.
For what it's worth, I've got to the HP Photosmart line and been very happy with reliability, ink costs, and overall quality (except the driver, which blows).
....the fact that you can't freaking READ by the damn lights. CFL == Crappy Fscking Light. I wish it weren't true, but I've tried dozens of brands, and even the ones that make me most happy are only good for general purpose hallway lights and such. I hate putting them in anywhere I have to read. For as bright as they seem to be, they are so narrow in spectrum as to be sort of lacking in their ability to illuminate.
I do this kind of work for a living, as a consultant who provides support for the work I've done.
In one case, a client of mine relies pretty heavily on my work and has for many years. She knows that if she calls with an urgent problem, I'll do everything I reasonably can to get back to her as quickly as possible -- day or night. In return, she knows not to raise the panic flag on little stuff during off hours. That's good enough in most cases.
We've talked about going to an SLA with, for example, a 4 hour response time on critical issues. My answer to that, is that when we move from "best reasonable effort" to a contracted response time -- even though I am nearly always inside that window already -- the cost goes from being covered by our regular work to several thousand dollars a month. Once it's a contracted promise like that, I have to keep backup people trained on the systems in case I'm on a long flight or get sick (or whatever) and I have to wear a pager, and get no time off without paying someone to cover for me.
There are ABSOLUTELY times when it makes sense to pay for that kind of coverage. I could even argue that this system is important enough that she should do it, but I also have to be clear that for 99% of the time -- and has always been the case for the last ehemteen years -- it will be money that doesn't buy any new results.
My limited understanding of FIPS compliance is such that I thing the likelihood is much higher that the involvement of the NSA is to work with Microsoft (as they have others) to make sure the right libraries are used and so on for FIPS compliance. If you want to sell software to the US Government, it must be FIPS compliant.
The following is my understanding (which is likely flawed in some ways, but I think is fairly close to accurate) of how FIPS works (Taken from a response I wrote to someone else about this).
In all likelihood, this is all about their encryption being FIPS compliant and has nothing to do with backdoors.
The way I understand FIPS (because I got a mini-lesson on it during an SDR as they were doing it for [another software product I work with alot]) you have to use very specific encryption protocols that not only meet the standard for the encryption routine (e.g. RSA, or whatever) and the bit-size, but you have to use one of a specific set of approved implementation libraries.
That means you can use the exact same encrypting schema and key size as FIPS specifies, but if you don't do the encryption with an approved library, you're not compliant.
The rules get weirder from there. If you are required to be FIPS compliant at work, and must send something encrypted, you have to send it to someone who is also FIPS compliant. -- follow this logic now -- if you have to send it to someone who is NOT compliant, even though they use compatible encryption/decryption code and have exchanged keys with you, you CANNOT send them the encrypted file because their libraries are not FIPS compliant. You can, however, send them the file IN THE CLEAR if you decide it's safe to do so.
In other words, FIPS says it is better to send something in the clear if you cannot be sure the other end is FIPS compliant, even if they can decrypt what you're sending.
That's your government at work.
BTW: The routines which ARE certified have been fully vetted by many government and non-government people, and do not contain any special code in them that would lead to making decryption by the NSA any easier than it would otherwise be. Since the routines are by nature just implementation of well know encryption standards, the only way to do that would be to interrupt the key pair creation process and use "less random" seeds. I don't believe FIPS specifies the random number generation routine used.
The very idea of undoing your own powerful moderation use -- even if (especially if) you used it mistakenly is very un-slashdot of you. You're supposed to stay completely anonymous in your abusive mistake, and use those points to call all opinions you don't agree with either redundant or flamebait. Didn't you read the destructions the first time you got mod points?
I've done my share of expert witness work (usually on the security side) so no, not surprised. But usually pleading ignorance doesn't necessarily mean there was actual ignorance.
I don't buy that excuse. I write code. I don't have to understand the intricate licensing law to know when I've included code that I didn't write. It doesn't take a genius level IQ to know that when I do that (use code I didn't write) I need to tell the person who hired me to write code. Once that happens, it is the responsibility of a manager to find out the licensing issues.
This is as bogus as the whole "clean" concept of the Toyota Pious. These cars are dirty as hell to make, dirty as hell to recycle, and only provide real benefit for city driving. VW and Audi have done much more important work with their "clean diesel" engines that get mileage similar to that of the hybrids without massive dirty batteries, and those cars get high mileage on long haul trips and long country roads like we have here in the US.
....I believe the aerobatic maneuver you describe is called the "Lawn Dart", and while it has been done many times in aviation history, few pilots have ever succeeded in doing it twice.
Here in Maine, it is against the law to do anything which distracts you from driving. Essentially, this would include texting or talking on the phone if those things are distracting you. I would imagine that this will allow the cop to ticket you if you cause an accident and thus properly assign liability for the accident. It's like getting a ticket for "failure to control you vehicle to avoid a collision" (a typical wording for any time you rear-end the car in front of you).
I think I'll wait for version 2.1 on this particular tech. First, because I don't want 800x600 on a 10cm screen a meter away. That's not useful to me. I want 1080p visible as a 52" 16x9 screen about 10 feet away. NOW we're talking.
Aside from that, I think we'll wait and see just how much eye strain these things cause first -- and how well they travel. COOL would be if they'd sit at the hinges of fully functional sunglasses so the display could be a heads-up while you do other things (maybe not driving).
Someone enlighten me here. I'm trying to figure out the business reason why HP would care about this, and would not want people to buy more of it's calculators.
I've never complained about bad moderating on one of my posts before, but damn-- whoever marked that is an ass. There's no flamebait in it. There are just informed, practical and detailed opinions in response to the question asked.
...and often very badly managed. The biggest problem it has on the desktop is that it's big and powerful, but cumbersome and heavy as well. If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.
People don't like it. Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downtime, the exchange servers are down for a LONG time as databases have to be rebuilt.
The biggest thing that Notes users suffer from, is that Notes is a very different kind of tool and they (users) get stuck with bad in-house applications that are ugly, poorly performing, and not well matched to business processes. No wonder people are frustrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, in layman's terms --- Does this mean my flying car and anti-gravity jetpack are finally going to be on sale at wal-mart any time soon?
I don't want much. My need is common. I write and deliver presentations at many conferences. Often, they are the same or variations on the same sessions with just updates and tweaks. Conferences often require specific background templates and masters.
1. Application of a new background master (with it's own color, font, bullet, background graphic logos, etc.) should be a two click change.
2. Making a "global" change on the master to how bullets, fonts, indentation, colors, etc. are applied to sections should be a few clicks at most, and easily re-applied to all slides.
I find these two most basic functions entirely painful and barely workable in Open Office Depress.
I find it crashtastic when doing something as simple as reformatting, and there are times when font layouts for text areas become "confused to the extent that you're better off deleting them entirely and re-entering the text than trying to figure out what got screwed up.
In short, the product doesn't do what it needs to do for me, as a presenter.
My mac-geek friends all swear by Keynote. I'm quite used to Powerpoint. I don't know anyone who prefers depress.
...and yeah, no shock that some find that trollsome, but it's truly based on hours of use.
Unfortunately, for my needs, just having a good presentation isn't quite enough. It needs to be compatible and re-usable for different conferences -- often where a specific background template is required.
Open office's word processor isn't bad. I've been forced to use the powerpoint replacement (called "Impress") recently and the word "SUCK" doesn't even begin to cover just how badly unworkable it is. In fact, I've renamed it "Repress" because that's a more accurate description of what it does.
I'm not trying to do fancy transitions or stupid animations either. Just basic slideware for hour or 90 minute long technical presentations. It can't even do a fsking "replace template" or "master" properly. It just sucks. Totally and completely sucks.
By the way, in case I wasn't clear -- I don't care for it.
When it meets even close to parity, I'll jump all over it. Until then, I'll pay my Microsoft tax (or switch and pay my Apple tax).
Well, sort of. It depends on your point of reference. An orbit describes a straight line through space/time which appears curved due to the influence of gravity -- when in fact it's space/time that is itself curved. (I think I've got that mostly right). In that way, the link of an orbit is a straight line drawn on a curved fabric.
Have to admit, my mind went the same place -- though in that case if memory serves, it was a Ford 351 Cleveland engine. I may be mistaken, as I'm old and it's early.
Initially, these made sense for my application. Today, it makes much more sense to pay 30-40% less for a netbook that has faster processing, better graphics, twice the ram, much more storage, and doesn't need it's own keyboard and monitor. On top of that, power consumption is very similar and reliability is much higher.
Nobody seems to see a netbook without the screen and keyboard for less money. Seems stupid, but for that kind of hardware that isn't in a netbook configuration, you pay over $500, while the netbook runs $300.
....even as much as I am apposed to nearly everything that administration did, I can't go along with your assumption.
If you're deleting data, then you're breaking the law. That, by definition, means you can't just call up DARPA and ask for their top data deletion boffins to come up and clean the place out. You have to do it yourself or rely on as few people as possible what their own level of expertise, and do it in a way that looks accidental.
Plenty of room to screw the pooch on that one.
I, like many people, welcome the idea of living as long as I can be productive and maybe a bit beyond -- but I have no wish to live indefinitely if that life is one of immobility, pain, and humiliating dependence both physically and financially.
If this, or any, treatment results in an increased healthy lifespan by somehow allowing my body to repair itself as it did when I was in my twenties or even my early thirties then I'm I'm for it. Of course, that goes hand in hand with my ability and continued willingness to earn my keep within society. If, on the other hand, we're talking about a prolonged geriatric dependency and pain cycle than no. I am not interested in burdening my children and their children with my crotchety, miserable self for the bulk of their adult lives.
I'm 42 and while I try to stay in reasonable shape, working out pretty hard on both cardio/aerobics and strength/flexibility with Shotokan Karate two or three times a week, the difference in being over forty is profound in how much harder is is to avoid or recover from injury, to gain back lost strength or fitness, and all manner of other small health details that we completely ignore in our twenties and thirties.
So scientist friends; learn to restore the length of tolemeres if that's the magic, or how to rehydrate the collagen and cartilage that loose density and elasticity over time, or how to teach the rest of my organs and joints how to regenerate as my liver does. Learn to filter the toxins and free radicals that build up over decades and damage my dna, and to repair that dna that gets damaged by radiation and transcription errors. These things will extend my healthy lifespan and let me contribute to world with youthful energy, a quick mind, and extra decades of learning and wisdom. If we can do that for people, we'll make the worlds we live in better places.
The goal must be living better, longer; not just living longer.
Give the old one to the Salvation Army, and go get one after doing some research into longevity and ink replacement costs.
For what it's worth, I've got to the HP Photosmart line and been very happy with reliability, ink costs, and overall quality (except the driver, which blows).
....the fact that you can't freaking READ by the damn lights. CFL == Crappy Fscking Light. I wish it weren't true, but I've tried dozens of brands, and even the ones that make me most happy are only good for general purpose hallway lights and such. I hate putting them in anywhere I have to read. For as bright as they seem to be, they are so narrow in spectrum as to be sort of lacking in their ability to illuminate.
So far, no experience with LED's on this subject.
I do this kind of work for a living, as a consultant who provides support for the work I've done.
In one case, a client of mine relies pretty heavily on my work and has for many years. She knows that if she calls with an urgent problem, I'll do everything I reasonably can to get back to her as quickly as possible -- day or night. In return, she knows not to raise the panic flag on little stuff during off hours. That's good enough in most cases.
We've talked about going to an SLA with, for example, a 4 hour response time on critical issues. My answer to that, is that when we move from "best reasonable effort" to a contracted response time -- even though I am nearly always inside that window already -- the cost goes from being covered by our regular work to several thousand dollars a month. Once it's a contracted promise like that, I have to keep backup people trained on the systems in case I'm on a long flight or get sick (or whatever) and I have to wear a pager, and get no time off without paying someone to cover for me.
There are ABSOLUTELY times when it makes sense to pay for that kind of coverage. I could even argue that this system is important enough that she should do it, but I also have to be clear that for 99% of the time -- and has always been the case for the last ehemteen years -- it will be money that doesn't buy any new results.
Yep. All the good ideas are used up. Go home.
Damn, I wish I could use mod points on TFA instead of just comments.
My limited understanding of FIPS compliance is such that I thing the likelihood is much higher that the involvement of the NSA is to work with Microsoft (as they have others) to make sure the right libraries are used and so on for FIPS compliance. If you want to sell software to the US Government, it must be FIPS compliant.
The following is my understanding (which is likely flawed in some ways, but I think is fairly close to accurate) of how FIPS works (Taken from a response I wrote to someone else about this).
In all likelihood, this is all about their encryption being FIPS compliant and has nothing to do with backdoors.
The way I understand FIPS (because I got a mini-lesson on it during an SDR as they were doing it for [another software product I work with alot]) you have to use very specific encryption protocols that not only meet the standard for the encryption routine (e.g. RSA, or whatever) and the bit-size, but you have to use one of a specific set of approved implementation libraries.
That means you can use the exact same encrypting schema and key size as FIPS specifies, but if you don't do the encryption with an approved library, you're not compliant.
The rules get weirder from there. If you are required to be FIPS compliant at work, and must send something encrypted, you have to send it to someone who is also FIPS compliant. -- follow this logic now -- if you have to send it to someone who is NOT compliant, even though they use compatible encryption/decryption code and have exchanged keys with you, you CANNOT send them the encrypted file because their libraries are not FIPS compliant. You can, however, send them the file IN THE CLEAR if you decide it's safe to do so.
In other words, FIPS says it is better to send something in the clear if you cannot be sure the other end is FIPS compliant, even if they can decrypt what you're sending.
That's your government at work.
BTW: The routines which ARE certified have been fully vetted by many government and non-government people, and do not contain any special code in them that would lead to making decryption by the NSA any easier than it would otherwise be. Since the routines are by nature just implementation of well know encryption standards, the only way to do that would be to interrupt the key pair creation process and use "less random" seeds. I don't believe FIPS specifies the random number generation routine used.
Hope this helps.
The very idea of undoing your own powerful moderation use -- even if (especially if) you used it mistakenly is very un-slashdot of you. You're supposed to stay completely anonymous in your abusive mistake, and use those points to call all opinions you don't agree with either redundant or flamebait. Didn't you read the destructions the first time you got mod points?
I've done my share of expert witness work (usually on the security side) so no, not surprised. But usually pleading ignorance doesn't necessarily mean there was actual ignorance.
A programmer knows when he didn't write the code.
I don't buy that excuse. I write code. I don't have to understand the intricate licensing law to know when I've included code that I didn't write. It doesn't take a genius level IQ to know that when I do that (use code I didn't write) I need to tell the person who hired me to write code. Once that happens, it is the responsibility of a manager to find out the licensing issues.
This is as bogus as the whole "clean" concept of the Toyota Pious. These cars are dirty as hell to make, dirty as hell to recycle, and only provide real benefit for city driving. VW and Audi have done much more important work with their "clean diesel" engines that get mileage similar to that of the hybrids without massive dirty batteries, and those cars get high mileage on long haul trips and long country roads like we have here in the US.
Here in Maine, it is against the law to do anything which distracts you from driving. Essentially, this would include texting or talking on the phone if those things are distracting you. I would imagine that this will allow the cop to ticket you if you cause an accident and thus properly assign liability for the accident. It's like getting a ticket for "failure to control you vehicle to avoid a collision" (a typical wording for any time you rear-end the car in front of you).
what could go wrong?
I think I'll wait for version 2.1 on this particular tech. First, because I don't want 800x600 on a 10cm screen a meter away. That's not useful to me. I want 1080p visible as a 52" 16x9 screen about 10 feet away. NOW we're talking.
Aside from that, I think we'll wait and see just how much eye strain these things cause first -- and how well they travel. COOL would be if they'd sit at the hinges of fully functional sunglasses so the display could be a heads-up while you do other things (maybe not driving).
Wish I had mod points today. I wonder how many people will get just how funny this fantastically sarcastic and totally on target comment was. Bravo.
Someone enlighten me here. I'm trying to figure out the business reason why HP would care about this, and would not want people to buy more of it's calculators.
I've never complained about bad moderating on one of my posts before, but damn-- whoever marked that is an ass. There's no flamebait in it. There are just informed, practical and detailed opinions in response to the question asked.
Hey, whoever moderated this.....GFYS.
...and often very badly managed. The biggest problem it has on the desktop is that it's big and powerful, but cumbersome and heavy as well. If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.
People don't like it. Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downtime, the exchange servers are down for a LONG time as databases have to be rebuilt.
The biggest thing that Notes users suffer from, is that Notes is a very different kind of tool and they (users) get stuck with bad in-house applications that are ugly, poorly performing, and not well matched to business processes. No wonder people are frustrated.