and even better, colour. Most of the techical documentation (mostly component datasheets but some other stuff too) I see in PDF form is designed to be printed on mono laser printers, photocopied etc (some of the older stuff is clearly scans of low quality photocopies in the first place:( ) so black and white is the order of the day with maybe the occasional use of greyscale in a diagram.
I can't say i've encountered this myself though it doesn't surprise me.
iirc there are libraries for working with pdf ( the name itext springs to mind) so it should be possible to make an app that displays each typeface table and lets you specify how it should map to unicode then uses that info to convert the pdf to text.
abiword can get the text out. Some people say it can get more but whenever i've tried to open a pdf with it all i've got is the text. You can also copy and paste from acrobat.
for extracting diagrams (without turning them into bitmaps) the best tool i've found seems to be inkscape. Only annoying thing is it doesn't seem to have a concept of pages so you have to import one page at a time.
Our politicians rely on building the tax base by future population growth Afaict in developed countries there is very little population growth. Some countries are even in population decline!
immigration can help aleviate this to some degree but that has issues of it's own.
note: this hack does seem to be easilly reveresable, yes there is a soldering iron involved but you don't use it on any of the original parts of the mini or on anything valuable.
It's just that, as the "ease of use" brand in the industry, Apple's more famous machines are the all-in-one and laptop units that have the more cramped assembly and design. It's also the fact that they simply don't do a "normal desktop", they do a high end workstation, a 1U server an all in one, a small form factor box and a range of laptops.
This really pissess off a lot of geeks who like OS-X but want a normal desktop. Some of them build hackintoshishes but that route has issues of it's own (especially if you want to use it at work). Others of them try and hack improvements into the mini.
Unfortunately apple won't release a normal desktop because that would cut into many peoples excuse for getting thier employer to splash out on a mac pro.
Insulation tape has a nasty tendancy of either getting knocked off when moved arround or drying up and failing with age. I would strongly reccomend using heatshrink instead.
How does that differ from 3.5" floppies? Oh. That's right: it doesn't. well afaict it's a flying head system rather than a contact head system (much higher speeds and lower wear but also much more able to go wrong).
Also the data density is MUCH higher. the superfloppy products at 100 megs or so were bad enough and JAZ was an order of mangitude higher capacity than them.
I dunno if you would consider such people honest or not but there are certainly people who will happilly make copies for thier friends if it's easy to do so but won't use online pirate distribution networks or go looking for cracks (either because they are afraid of viruses, afraid of the authorities finding out, think it is morally worse or whatever).
and the DMCA and similar laws arround the world serve to keep tools that can copy protected media "underground".
Sure you can but afaict noone makes or uses mini-dvi or mini-displayport stuff except apple.
And (I was pretty sure of this before and I just checked a google image search to be sure) the apple mini-dvi to dvi adaptor is DVI-D only (as is the mini-displayport to dvi adaptor but thats irrelevent to this discussion). I dunno if there is any technical reason for this or if it is just a ploy to sell more overpriced adaptors but it is the current situation.
So if you want to use an old/cheap monitor with your new mini you have to buy a seperate adaptor from apple (which is a lot more expensive and harder to obtain than a generic DVI to VGA adaptor). Worse for some stupid reason they don't even list the adaptors as options when purchasing.
I know i'd be pretty pissed off if I bought a new computer and then realised I had to buy a seperate propietry adaptor (which would probablly require either mail order or tracking down a specialist apple store to obtain) to make it work with my monitor.
Retail stores pretty much are the only place to go when you want to buy the latest AAA titles (except Amazon, which is like digital distribution with very high latency). IIRC at least here in the UK the major online game vendors (amazon and the online branches of the retail stores) typically dispatch the day before release day so it turns up on the morning of release day.
With the PS3 however there is an interesting twist. Afaict most if not all titles are not region locked (presumablly to save money on blu-ray pressing costs). So you can often get import copies from small vendors before the official vendors have it.
and DVI-to-VGA adapters are easy to find IIRC apple mini dvi to dvi adaptors are DVI-D only so if you want VGA you need to buy a direct adaptor from apple:(
when Apple removed the firewire from low end macs, especially portables. Your post implies that they removed it from some desktop models as well. Afaict the only models that don't have firewire are the macbook air and the aluminium macbook.
Afaict the mini has always had exactly one firewire port. I do find it surprising though that they have followed the macbook pro range and imac in replacing the firewire 400 with a firewire 800 port rather than following the macbook and removing it completely.
I'm pretty sure in the UK you do have the right to a jury trial in a crown court. It gets in the papers occasionally when some minor offender costs the government a load of money by demanding one.
While that pic is pretty clearly a photoshop job things have actually improved ports wise. They have added mini-displayport (allowing dual monitor support and use of higher res monitors) and firewire 800.
On the downside they replaced the DVI with a mini-dvi so if you still use a VGA monitor you will need to buy an apple specific adaptor (afaict apple's mini-dvi to dvi adaptor is digital only) and if you have any firewire 400 devices they will need new cables to connect to the new mini's firewire 800 port.
IMO the smart move for intel would be to settle, buy the trademark and then use it to bully the chineese vendors who are bringing out non intel based netbooks;).
"just be glad you have a job" unfortunately for many people that is the reality at the moment.
Middle class people can no longer fund living above thier means through the housing bubble since it has popped.
That means less gets spent which means companies have less money to pay thier staff with which means layoffs or paycuts which means even less gets spent (both by those who have had them and by those who are afraid they will be next) and the cycle continues.
Or to put it another way if and when home renewable installations become common net metering is going to dissapear because if it didn't it would bankrupt the power companies. Some other pricing system that was less favorable to home generators and more closely linked to reality would have to replace it. The financial viability of such installations will depend heavilly on what this structure is
More importantly most renewable systems (whether small scale or large scale) rely heavilly on treating the grid as a battery. This works fine when such installations are a minority of generation but if we want renewables to cover a large proportion of our generation the grid will need to have actual storage attatched (which is not cheap) and/or demand side management will be needed (which is likely to face resistance from customers)
I don't have a citation for you but i am an electrical engineering student;)
It will definately not work if the PSU uses a mains frequency transformer as it's first stage (older wall warts)
It will probablly work (unless the manufacturer has done something stupid like put an inductor accross the input) if the PSU is a crappy SMPSU that uses a rectifier as it's first stage and takes no notice of what is going on on the mains side.
I'm not sure what will happen on more advanced SMPSUs with power factor correction. My guess is it will probablly work though.
Be aware that DC has a much higher risk of problems like arcing than AC at a similar voltage. This is why switches, plugs, sockets etc are often marked "AC only".
Standard pdf security is ignored by some viewers and rather easy to remove (there are loads of shareware tools arround to do it and at least one common free software tool that can do it if you know the right options). It's barely going to slow the pirates at all while possiblly (depending on what settings you choose) inconvinicancing your legitimate customers.
One big problem with DRM is that it all too often ends up in a situation where the legit copy has LESS utitlity than the pirate copy.
Of course even if you don't publish in ebook form at all there are still gillotines, sheet fed scanners and OCR software;).
Slashdot Mirror
and even better, colour. :( ) so black and white is the order of the day with maybe the occasional use of greyscale in a diagram.
Most of the techical documentation (mostly component datasheets but some other stuff too) I see in PDF form is designed to be printed on mono laser printers, photocopied etc (some of the older stuff is clearly scans of low quality photocopies in the first place
looks like ubuntu does indeed have a package called "fortunes-bofh-excuses"
I can't say i've encountered this myself though it doesn't surprise me.
iirc there are libraries for working with pdf ( the name itext springs to mind) so it should be possible to make an app that displays each typeface table and lets you specify how it should map to unicode then uses that info to convert the pdf to text.
abiword can get the text out. Some people say it can get more but whenever i've tried to open a pdf with it all i've got is the text. You can also copy and paste from acrobat.
for extracting diagrams (without turning them into bitmaps) the best tool i've found seems to be inkscape. Only annoying thing is it doesn't seem to have a concept of pages so you have to import one page at a time.
Our politicians rely on building the tax base by future population growth
Afaict in developed countries there is very little population growth. Some countries are even in population decline!
immigration can help aleviate this to some degree but that has issues of it's own.
note: this hack does seem to be easilly reveresable, yes there is a soldering iron involved but you don't use it on any of the original parts of the mini or on anything valuable.
It's just that, as the "ease of use" brand in the industry, Apple's more famous machines are the all-in-one and laptop units that have the more cramped assembly and design.
It's also the fact that they simply don't do a "normal desktop", they do a high end workstation, a 1U server an all in one, a small form factor box and a range of laptops.
This really pissess off a lot of geeks who like OS-X but want a normal desktop. Some of them build hackintoshishes but that route has issues of it's own (especially if you want to use it at work). Others of them try and hack improvements into the mini.
Unfortunately apple won't release a normal desktop because that would cut into many peoples excuse for getting thier employer to splash out on a mac pro.
no offense but if you are worried about a joint between two stranded leads of that size breaking then your soldering skills suck.
not really, it's just hacking up a cable. You aren't soldering to any part of either the mini or your hard drive.
Insulation tape has a nasty tendancy of either getting knocked off when moved arround or drying up and failing with age. I would strongly reccomend using heatshrink instead.
http://xkcd.com/123/
How does that differ from 3.5" floppies? Oh. That's right: it doesn't.
well afaict it's a flying head system rather than a contact head system (much higher speeds and lower wear but also much more able to go wrong).
Also the data density is MUCH higher. the superfloppy products at 100 megs or so were bad enough and JAZ was an order of mangitude higher capacity than them.
I dunno if you would consider such people honest or not but there are certainly people who will happilly make copies for thier friends if it's easy to do so but won't use online pirate distribution networks or go looking for cracks (either because they are afraid of viruses, afraid of the authorities finding out, think it is morally worse or whatever).
and the DMCA and similar laws arround the world serve to keep tools that can copy protected media "underground".
Sure you can but afaict noone makes or uses mini-dvi or mini-displayport stuff except apple.
And (I was pretty sure of this before and I just checked a google image search to be sure) the apple mini-dvi to dvi adaptor is DVI-D only (as is the mini-displayport to dvi adaptor but thats irrelevent to this discussion). I dunno if there is any technical reason for this or if it is just a ploy to sell more overpriced adaptors but it is the current situation.
So if you want to use an old/cheap monitor with your new mini you have to buy a seperate adaptor from apple (which is a lot more expensive and harder to obtain than a generic DVI to VGA adaptor). Worse for some stupid reason they don't even list the adaptors as options when purchasing.
I know i'd be pretty pissed off if I bought a new computer and then realised I had to buy a seperate propietry adaptor (which would probablly require either mail order or tracking down a specialist apple store to obtain) to make it work with my monitor.
Retail stores pretty much are the only place to go when you want to buy the latest AAA titles (except Amazon, which is like digital distribution with very high latency).
IIRC at least here in the UK the major online game vendors (amazon and the online branches of the retail stores) typically dispatch the day before release day so it turns up on the morning of release day.
With the PS3 however there is an interesting twist. Afaict most if not all titles are not region locked (presumablly to save money on blu-ray pressing costs). So you can often get import copies from small vendors before the official vendors have it.
and DVI-to-VGA adapters are easy to find :(
IIRC apple mini dvi to dvi adaptors are DVI-D only so if you want VGA you need to buy a direct adaptor from apple
when Apple removed the firewire from low end macs, especially portables.
Your post implies that they removed it from some desktop models as well. Afaict the only models that don't have firewire are the macbook air and the aluminium macbook.
Afaict the mini has always had exactly one firewire port. I do find it surprising though that they have followed the macbook pro range and imac in replacing the firewire 400 with a firewire 800 port rather than following the macbook and removing it completely.
I'm pretty sure in the UK you do have the right to a jury trial in a crown court. It gets in the papers occasionally when some minor offender costs the government a load of money by demanding one.
While that pic is pretty clearly a photoshop job things have actually improved ports wise. They have added mini-displayport (allowing dual monitor support and use of higher res monitors) and firewire 800.
On the downside they replaced the DVI with a mini-dvi so if you still use a VGA monitor you will need to buy an apple specific adaptor (afaict apple's mini-dvi to dvi adaptor is digital only) and if you have any firewire 400 devices they will need new cables to connect to the new mini's firewire 800 port.
IMO the smart move for intel would be to settle, buy the trademark and then use it to bully the chineese vendors who are bringing out non intel based netbooks ;).
On the other hand for solar power, the manufacturing costs $1
No, one manufacturer claims to have got the cost for the raw cells down to that level.
add on the panalising costs, the installation costs, the inverter costs and so on and I would expect the figure to increase dramatically.
Plus i'm pretty sure the rating of a solar panel is what it will generate under ideal conditions. Average output will be much lower.
"just be glad you have a job"
unfortunately for many people that is the reality at the moment.
Middle class people can no longer fund living above thier means through the housing bubble since it has popped.
That means less gets spent which means companies have less money to pay thier staff with which means layoffs or paycuts which means even less gets spent (both by those who have had them and by those who are afraid they will be next) and the cycle continues.
Or to put it another way if and when home renewable installations become common net metering is going to dissapear because if it didn't it would bankrupt the power companies. Some other pricing system that was less favorable to home generators and more closely linked to reality would have to replace it. The financial viability of such installations will depend heavilly on what this structure is
More importantly most renewable systems (whether small scale or large scale) rely heavilly on treating the grid as a battery. This works fine when such installations are a minority of generation but if we want renewables to cover a large proportion of our generation the grid will need to have actual storage attatched (which is not cheap) and/or demand side management will be needed (which is likely to face resistance from customers)
I don't have a citation for you but i am an electrical engineering student ;)
It will definately not work if the PSU uses a mains frequency transformer as it's first stage (older wall warts)
It will probablly work (unless the manufacturer has done something stupid like put an inductor accross the input) if the PSU is a crappy SMPSU that uses a rectifier as it's first stage and takes no notice of what is going on on the mains side.
I'm not sure what will happen on more advanced SMPSUs with power factor correction. My guess is it will probablly work though.
Be aware that DC has a much higher risk of problems like arcing than AC at a similar voltage. This is why switches, plugs, sockets etc are often marked "AC only".
Standard pdf security is ignored by some viewers and rather easy to remove (there are loads of shareware tools arround to do it and at least one common free software tool that can do it if you know the right options). It's barely going to slow the pirates at all while possiblly (depending on what settings you choose) inconvinicancing your legitimate customers.
One big problem with DRM is that it all too often ends up in a situation where the legit copy has LESS utitlity than the pirate copy.
Of course even if you don't publish in ebook form at all there are still gillotines, sheet fed scanners and OCR software ;).