Old Skool Cross-Platform Cosmopolitan
You lovingly maintain a 12-year-old Mac Quadra 950 whose only purpose is to run ResEdit and baffle all those young punks (i.e., anyone under 40) who think they know shit. You like to brag about the uptime on your Windows 2.0 box and how you've got better "lockdown" and a "more hardened system" than those BSD clowns; nobody you brag to is old enough to recall that networking wasn't an option on Windows 2.0 and no apps were available. Your Linux is Slackware 3.1 because deep down inside you're convinced that this new acpid crap is some sort of Commie plot, forgetting that the last card-carrying Commie gave up the ghost during the Reagan Administration. You're vaguely aware that Novell has something newer going than Netware. You routinely dual-boot into DOS 6 because, by God, 25 rows by 80 columns oughta be enough interface for anybody. Your dream is to one day also own a SparcStation I and a System/36 (but an early 36, none of that 90's junk) if your boss at the car wash ever gives you that raise he promised. You married the only date you ever had. She has the entire 1976 "Rising Stars at DEC" Collector Plates edition.
(Parent post is, indeed, funniest thing I've come across in quite a while. Cheers!)
* * * * *
Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything! --Steve Martin
http://amethyst-angel.com/bored_of_the_rings.html (WARNING: Stupid popup ads on a site paying homage to a timeless parody, one of whose themes is the effect of crass commercialism on the popular social psyche and mythology.)
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
We had punchcards but we didn't have keypunch machines. We had to take X-Acto knives and cut out perfect little tiny rectangles from each card by hand. Putting a simple 100-line program on cards could take over a year. I started my first programming class (Fortran 101) in 1974 and I'm on schedule to finish it next year. My first TA passed away seven years ago from old age.
* * * * *
Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed. --William Jennings Bryan
Interestingly, these statistics show that most of these cameras are solidly in the middle "pro-sumer" market...
I was very, very surprised to not see any members of the Nikon Coolpix or Fuji Finepix consumer lines
show up, as these seem to be quite popular among my acquaintances and small business clients. There's also a Kodak line (name escapes me now) that folks seem to be taking a liking to. The Finepix line in particular has been popular with my clients in real estate.
We can argue that the prosumer cameras are much more popular among the general population than I realized, or that Flickr "skews" to an audience that takes its photography much more seriously and has the bucks to scratch that itch. So, which is it?
* * * * *
I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. --Mark Twain
Yes. The last thing the government should be in the business of is making black-and-white issues where one person profits by hurting another into laws. Clearly another case of people asking big government to overstep its bounds.
Amen, brother! 'Cause we've all seen what a swell job the gov has done with just a few billion of our tax dollars annually with this War on Drugs thing. Why, you can't even buy any street drugs in any American city today. Unless you take off your badge first. Or stand on the corner of 6th and Jefferson (doesn't make any difference which city; they all have a 6th and Jefferson) and ask around for 30 seconds. Other than that, drugs have just completely disappeared thanks to the fear and loathing visited on those Columbian cocaine barrons by the thing they fear the most: a Senate Subcommittee recommending new, "tougher" laws.
Similarly, it'll be easy as pie to lower the boom on all those Chinese/Romanian/Kenyan/Palestinian/et al malware authors and the Chinese/Eastern European spam operators doing business with them. Just as soon as we get extradition treaties signed with those nations. Oughta happen in the next century or so. Personally, I'm holding my breath and hummin' 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' while I wait for the sudden, earth-shattering shift in international law enforcement cooperation that is surely soon to come. 'Cause let me tell ya, there's nothing that gets Romanian law enforcement all worked up into a fit of righteous indignation faster than the knowledge that young Romanian hackers are raising themselves above the poverty line off the gullibility of millions of clueless American Windows users. At least, that's what their ambassador keeps telling our ambassador.
Could I interest you in a dime of meth while we're waiting?
* * * * *
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth. --Dave Barry
3. Ruin the files by overlaying Cliff Richard music into it?
On behalf of the Cliff Richard International Fan Club and under the authority vested in me as Club President, I'd just like to state for the record that I've poured Motor Honey all over your collection of Bobby Sherman 8-track tapes.
Yes, I use Inkscape a lot also to do my initial visual design and will often generate graphic elements (custom buttons, for example, or logos) directly from the program in PNG then do the final touchups/format conversions in GIMP. I use Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html for the actual page coding.
I wish I could say that I've extensively tried other Linux graphic apps/code editors but I haven't. XaraLX is just now getting to the stage of usability for Web stuff; I'll have to spend more time with it. Other HTML/programmer's editors I've got but haven't explored yet: Screem and Quanta Plus. I know a lot of people use emacs and vi; I just don't seem to be able to find the time to learn all the key combinations to get really efficient in either.
Nvu is enjoyable simply because I used to do a lot of down-and-dirty page designs in the old Netscape Composer on Windows and Nvu seems very similar in the user interface and functionality (I think Nvu was derived from the Mozilla codebase), but I don't use it for much of anything important because I enjoy the brain stimulation of hand coding.
* * * * *
What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. --Dave Barry
Radio Shack used to be a place where the hobbyist/student/geek-in-training could go to get stuff that no other local retailer offered. Back in school (70's) the campus store got a ton of business from the EE's and even from us students in the Art and Communications schools building small audio/video projects.
Now my local store is trying to be Best Buy but with 1/20th the floor space, 1/20th the selection and prices that are 15% higher. Did not some MBA over at the Shack's Ft. Worth headquarters have the temerity to point this out to the PHB's?
* * * * *
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. --Dave Barry
OpenOffice.org is possibly the stupidest name ever. Why is the ".org" there?
Because extensive marketing studies conducted on North American consumers between the ages of 17-55 indicated strongly that "OpenOffice.bleh" lacked cross-gender name appeal and "OpenOffice.bling" made everyone want to go out and buy the latest Lil John and the East Side Boyz CD rather than do any serious office work.
* * * * * *
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. --Groucho Marx
the fact that they are resorting to an open source model is pretty good indicator that they failed commercially.
Chalk that up to the swift move of licensing it to Corel to "market" a Windows version from 1995 to 2000 (as CorelXara). Having Corel come anywhere near your product is the Kiss of Death. Compound that error by trying to sell a high-end product to graphic artists on Windows without first building a loyal following with a Mac version.
* * * * * * *
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. --Groucho Marx
Running the 0.7 version under Fedora (build 1560) and it looks good so far but haven't done a great deal with it. It's still missing a lot of the bells and whistles (animation, color management), but basic functionality is there. Xara EPS exports open right up in Ghostscript/Scribus so it's already useful on some level.
Apparently, the crew over at Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org/ are collaborating in some way with the Xara people so it will be interesting to see if/how this changes/improves either app.
* * * * * *
Adobe Illustrator is a software engineer's misconception of how an artist works.
CorelDraw is an artist's misconception of how a software engineer works.
Can you name something that you wanted to do to a document that you couldn't do in Office Or OpenOffice.org?
Sure! Set it up to print out on a commercial printing press. I need 250,000 copies to hit a targeted mailing to every consumer in a specific list of area codes in my county, and I need at least a 12.5% eyeball rate (meaning that at least 1 out of 8 people in the area codes I'm targeting will actually look at the piece).
By the way, let's see you do that on the Web...just to dispell those "you don't need a printing press any more" arguments. Not that you can get decent HTML out of an office suite, for that matter.
And no, neither Office nor OO.o have professional color management capabilities nor handle vector and raster images correctly in the same document. A Big Nope on Corel WordPerfect Office as well, although I like the product for other reasons.
So, for now, no "office suite" type product is suitable for professional document creation. The only thing they are truly useful for are raw keystroke capture and spell check.
OH...I almost forgot something ELSE you can't do in an office suite: create a document which actually looks nice. You know, with professional-looking typography (kerning, tracking, points-based leading) and complete positional control over how text blocks interact with each other and with graphic objects. In other words, the kind of stuff that would give your document enough eyeball appeal that another human being might actually want to pick it up and read it.
Microsoft tried to address the situation with the addition of Publisher to Office but so far it's been a complete failure (see my earliest blog on this site).
Last year approximately 25% of my income (I own an advertising agency) came from people paying me to take their Office documents and convert them to something that the print shop/newspaper/magazine/advertising medium could actually use. Usually that meant stripping the text out and rebuilding from scratch in a page layout or a vector drawing program. It would have been far more useful had they given me their stuff in Windows Wordpad format.
Personally, I feel any earlier than the third trimester is too young to have a cell phone. Although an iPod is fine if the fetus continually whines for one.
* * * * * *
I'd horsewhip you, if I only had a horse. --Groucho Marx
I do wonder though if any of this open source love is being pushed by the BBC?
Dirac. BBC's contribution to the Open Source world. I'll bet that at Real this surely got under their skin that the world's largest broadcaster/media archive would be developing its own open codec that would probably find its way into an open container and thence into open players and mess up their business model.
And notice on BBC's page that the alpha of Dirac has already found experimental support in players from two of Real's three main competitors (don't see anything about Quicktime Player). Ouch.
* * * * * *
When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot's hands. --George Carlin
...just over the past year, I've had 6 Clueless Windows Users bring their machines to me complaining that "something's wrong with the Web." After the typical malware uninstall and registry clean, I then ditched the IE icon from the desktop and replaced it with Firefox (with text below reading "Surf the Web!" so they'd know what it's for) and then sent them on their merry way (along with the free edition of AVG). Casual conversations with other folks in my position (not a pro tech; just the guy all the friends and family go to first when something breaks) indicates I'm not the only one doing this. Of course, to Microsoft's Marketing Department these folks will always be counted as Internet Explorer users because the program was used once and -- HEY! it's still installed, isn't it? -- so it must be because it's being used. And, of course, I've got three boxen which started life as Windows machines and which are now running various versions of Fedora Core. And they're still, I'm sure, showing up as part of the 890 million active Windows installs on Microsoft's Annual Report to Stockholders because neither Forrester nor Gartner nor IDC has a clue how to gather statistics on machines like mine, so they choose to simply ignore an entire statistically significant data category.
After all, they have native Farsi speakers on staff as they do Farsi broadcasting to Iran: http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/
Who are "Anneliese Fikentscher" and "Andreas Neumann" who supposedly did these translations and what are their qualifications for translating Farsi? I can find no vouchers for the authenticity of the translations presented or even that they are translating from primary Farsi source materials.
Starting from the highest to the lowest the IRQ priorities would be 2/9,10,11,12,15,3,4,5,6,7.
Well, that's kinda...logical...I guess.
* * * * * *
Clear? Huh! Why a four-year-old child could understand this report! Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail of it. --Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly
Bush the younger, who thinks that Al-Quada are "Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," - that's a direct quote from today.
What Mr. Bin Laden says:
"We should fully understand our religion. Fighting is a part of our religion and our Sharia [an Islamic legal code]. Those who love God and his Prophet and this religion cannot deny that. Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in Islam.
"Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God . . . . I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America." Time Magazine
"We--with God's help--call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson."Feb. 1998 - Bin Laden edict
"We love death. The US loves life. That is the difference between us two."
I would say that The Prez has pretty much got it nailed.
* * * * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
...the U.S. and the rest of the world is following Japan's lead?
(July 5, 2006 article at InfoWorld): The number of Internet users in Japan accessing from cell phones exceeded those using it from personal computers in 2005, according to a government report published Tuesday.
* * * * * *
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped. --Groucho Marx
Frankly speaking, in 30+ years of doing graphic design and pro document creation, I have never seen a document done in Word, with graphics, that looked "decent." Ever. Period. As someone pointed out, if presentation is important to your document, do it in a page layout program. Word processors are only useful for two things: capturing raw, unformatted keystrokes and spell checking (and dinner for 2 at the Taco Barn to the first person who spots a typo in this, as I don't spell-check before submitting.). Download Scribus, learn to use it, export to PDF and give your boss something that looks like you actually intended for another human being to read it.
Believe you me, I've got a extensive archive of Office-produced documents submitted to me that are a rogue's gallery of attrocities to typography, legibility, graphic design/layout and esthetic sensibility. Many from large companies whom you'd think would have a clue about projecting an image of abject incompetancy to the public. And most of the problems aren't the users' faults--it's in the inherent restrictions of a program that can't decide whether it wants to do page layout or simple text formatting--and winds up doing neither well. OH--and I forgot the best technical part about Word: apparently any graphic you embed is immediately downsampled to 72 dpi, making reading the type on your pie chart an exercise in eye strain. I won't bother paying any attention to a Word document with graphics in it. It's just going to be plain and simple horrible.
* * * * * *
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped. --Grouch Marx
On the other hand, my partner can't work with photos from her new Nikon D200 in Photoshop on her Win2K box because Photoshop (CS2) doesn't come out of the box with support for the digital camera raw format...it'll cost her another $100 to get the plugin. And if you read the photographer/designer forums, you find out that the plugin is very buggy and can mess up your other Photoshop plugins. Meanwhile, I downloaded the UFraw plugin for the Gimp and can open and edit her Nikon stuff straight from the camera on my Linux box. For free.
A full decade after I (and countless other folks) reported the problem to Microsoft, you still can't get a decent EPS file out of Publisher to send to that commercial print shop. Problem with Microsoft's Postscript drivers. This problem has existed since at least 1995 when I first encountered it.
Ahh...the power of Closed Source. Unless you're GM, Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about your problems using their software.
* * * * * *
A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five! --Groucho Marx
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hard of herring.
You lovingly maintain a 12-year-old Mac Quadra 950 whose only purpose is to run ResEdit and baffle all those young punks (i.e., anyone under 40) who think they know shit. You like to brag about the uptime on your Windows 2.0 box and how you've got better "lockdown" and a "more hardened system" than those BSD clowns; nobody you brag to is old enough to recall that networking wasn't an option on Windows 2.0 and no apps were available. Your Linux is Slackware 3.1 because deep down inside you're convinced that this new acpid crap is some sort of Commie plot, forgetting that the last card-carrying Commie gave up the ghost during the Reagan Administration. You're vaguely aware that Novell has something newer going than Netware. You routinely dual-boot into DOS 6 because, by God, 25 rows by 80 columns oughta be enough interface for anybody. Your dream is to one day also own a SparcStation I and a System/36 (but an early 36, none of that 90's junk) if your boss at the car wash ever gives you that raise he promised. You married the only date you ever had. She has the entire 1976 "Rising Stars at DEC" Collector Plates edition.
(Parent post is, indeed, funniest thing I've come across in quite a while. Cheers!)
* * * * *
Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!
--Steve Martin
http://amethyst-angel.com/bored_of_the_rings.html (WARNING: Stupid popup ads on a site paying homage to a timeless parody, one of whose themes is the effect of crass commercialism on the popular social psyche and mythology.)
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
huge honking boxes of punchcards
We had punchcards but we didn't have keypunch machines. We had to take X-Acto knives and cut out perfect little tiny rectangles from each card by hand. Putting a simple 100-line program on cards could take over a year. I started my first programming class (Fortran 101) in 1974 and I'm on schedule to finish it next year. My first TA passed away seven years ago from old age.
* * * * *
Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.
--William Jennings Bryan
Interestingly, these statistics show that most of these cameras are solidly in the middle "pro-sumer" market...
I was very, very surprised to not see any members of the Nikon Coolpix or Fuji Finepix consumer lines show up, as these seem to be quite popular among my acquaintances and small business clients. There's also a Kodak line (name escapes me now) that folks seem to be taking a liking to. The Finepix line in particular has been popular with my clients in real estate.
We can argue that the prosumer cameras are much more popular among the general population than I realized, or that Flickr "skews" to an audience that takes its photography much more seriously and has the bucks to scratch that itch. So, which is it?
* * * * *
I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
--Mark Twain
Peter Marshall: Paul, according to Redbook, what is "Plank's Constant?"
Paul Lynde: Well, if Plank were all that constant, he wouldn't be needing that Ex-Lax, would he?
(Uproarious laughter from the studio audience.)
http://www.classicsquares.com/lyndesquares.html
* * * * *
It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames.
--Harry Hill
Yes. The last thing the government should be in the business of is making black-and-white issues where one person profits by hurting another into laws. Clearly another case of people asking big government to overstep its bounds.
Amen, brother! 'Cause we've all seen what a swell job the gov has done with just a few billion of our tax dollars annually with this War on Drugs thing. Why, you can't even buy any street drugs in any American city today. Unless you take off your badge first. Or stand on the corner of 6th and Jefferson (doesn't make any difference which city; they all have a 6th and Jefferson) and ask around for 30 seconds. Other than that, drugs have just completely disappeared thanks to the fear and loathing visited on those Columbian cocaine barrons by the thing they fear the most: a Senate Subcommittee recommending new, "tougher" laws.
Similarly, it'll be easy as pie to lower the boom on all those Chinese/Romanian/Kenyan/Palestinian/et al malware authors and the Chinese/Eastern European spam operators doing business with them. Just as soon as we get extradition treaties signed with those nations. Oughta happen in the next century or so. Personally, I'm holding my breath and hummin' 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' while I wait for the sudden, earth-shattering shift in international law enforcement cooperation that is surely soon to come. 'Cause let me tell ya, there's nothing that gets Romanian law enforcement all worked up into a fit of righteous indignation faster than the knowledge that young Romanian hackers are raising themselves above the poverty line off the gullibility of millions of clueless American Windows users. At least, that's what their ambassador keeps telling our ambassador.
Could I interest you in a dime of meth while we're waiting?
* * * * *
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.
--Dave Barry
3. Ruin the files by overlaying Cliff Richard music into it?
On behalf of the Cliff Richard International Fan Club and under the authority vested in me as Club President, I'd just like to state for the record that I've poured Motor Honey all over your collection of Bobby Sherman 8-track tapes.
Do not, repeat, DO NOT follow this link: http://www.cliffrichard.org/
* * * * *
A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.
--W.C. Fields
I'll give it a try. "JavaScript-focused" sounds intriguing.
* * * * * *
Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!
--Steve Martin
Yes, I use Inkscape a lot also to do my initial visual design and will often generate graphic elements (custom buttons, for example, or logos) directly from the program in PNG then do the final touchups/format conversions in GIMP. I use Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html for the actual page coding.
I wish I could say that I've extensively tried other Linux graphic apps/code editors but I haven't. XaraLX is just now getting to the stage of usability for Web stuff; I'll have to spend more time with it. Other HTML/programmer's editors I've got but haven't explored yet: Screem and Quanta Plus. I know a lot of people use emacs and vi; I just don't seem to be able to find the time to learn all the key combinations to get really efficient in either.
Nvu is enjoyable simply because I used to do a lot of down-and-dirty page designs in the old Netscape Composer on Windows and Nvu seems very similar in the user interface and functionality (I think Nvu was derived from the Mozilla codebase), but I don't use it for much of anything important because I enjoy the brain stimulation of hand coding.
* * * * *
What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.
--Dave Barry
'the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'
I need to talk to that young man. I keep getting this error when trying to compile a PowerPoint presentation:
make: *** No rule to make target `mindblowingpresentation.powerpoint', needed by `pointyhairedboss.info'
* * * * *
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
--Jane Wagner
I'm right with you here.
Radio Shack used to be a place where the hobbyist/student/geek-in-training could go to get stuff that no other local retailer offered. Back in school (70's) the campus store got a ton of business from the EE's and even from us students in the Art and Communications schools building small audio/video projects.
Now my local store is trying to be Best Buy but with 1/20th the floor space, 1/20th the selection and prices that are 15% higher. Did not some MBA over at the Shack's Ft. Worth headquarters have the temerity to point this out to the PHB's?
* * * * *
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
--Dave Barry
OpenOffice.org is possibly the stupidest name ever. Why is the ".org" there?
Because extensive marketing studies conducted on North American consumers between the ages of 17-55 indicated strongly that "OpenOffice.bleh" lacked cross-gender name appeal and "OpenOffice.bling" made everyone want to go out and buy the latest Lil John and the East Side Boyz CD rather than do any serious office work.
* * * * * *
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
--Groucho Marx
the fact that they are resorting to an open source model is pretty good indicator that they failed commercially.
Chalk that up to the swift move of licensing it to Corel to "market" a Windows version from 1995 to 2000 (as CorelXara). Having Corel come anywhere near your product is the Kiss of Death. Compound that error by trying to sell a high-end product to graphic artists on Windows without first building a loyal following with a Mac version.
* * * * * * *
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
--Groucho Marx
Running the 0.7 version under Fedora (build 1560) and it looks good so far but haven't done a great deal with it. It's still missing a lot of the bells and whistles (animation, color management), but basic functionality is there. Xara EPS exports open right up in Ghostscript/Scribus so it's already useful on some level.
Apparently, the crew over at Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org/ are collaborating in some way with the Xara people so it will be interesting to see if/how this changes/improves either app.
* * * * * *
Adobe Illustrator is a software engineer's misconception of how an artist works.
CorelDraw is an artist's misconception of how a software engineer works.
Can you name something that you wanted to do to a document that you couldn't do in Office Or OpenOffice.org?
Sure! Set it up to print out on a commercial printing press. I need 250,000 copies to hit a targeted mailing to every consumer in a specific list of area codes in my county, and I need at least a 12.5% eyeball rate (meaning that at least 1 out of 8 people in the area codes I'm targeting will actually look at the piece).
By the way, let's see you do that on the Web...just to dispell those "you don't need a printing press any more" arguments. Not that you can get decent HTML out of an office suite, for that matter.
And no, neither Office nor OO.o have professional color management capabilities nor handle vector and raster images correctly in the same document. A Big Nope on Corel WordPerfect Office as well, although I like the product for other reasons.
So, for now, no "office suite" type product is suitable for professional document creation. The only thing they are truly useful for are raw keystroke capture and spell check.
OH...I almost forgot something ELSE you can't do in an office suite: create a document which actually looks nice. You know, with professional-looking typography (kerning, tracking, points-based leading) and complete positional control over how text blocks interact with each other and with graphic objects. In other words, the kind of stuff that would give your document enough eyeball appeal that another human being might actually want to pick it up and read it.
Microsoft tried to address the situation with the addition of Publisher to Office but so far it's been a complete failure (see my earliest blog on this site).
Last year approximately 25% of my income (I own an advertising agency) came from people paying me to take their Office documents and convert them to something that the print shop/newspaper/magazine/advertising medium could actually use. Usually that meant stripping the text out and rebuilding from scratch in a page layout or a vector drawing program. It would have been far more useful had they given me their stuff in Windows Wordpad format.
Personally, I feel any earlier than the third trimester is too young to have a cell phone. Although an iPod is fine if the fetus continually whines for one.
* * * * * *
I'd horsewhip you, if I only had a horse.
--Groucho Marx
I do wonder though if any of this open source love is being pushed by the BBC?
Dirac. BBC's contribution to the Open Source world. I'll bet that at Real this surely got under their skin that the world's largest broadcaster/media archive would be developing its own open codec that would probably find its way into an open container and thence into open players and mess up their business model.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/projects/dirac/
And notice on BBC's page that the alpha of Dirac has already found experimental support in players from two of Real's three main competitors (don't see anything about Quicktime Player). Ouch.
* * * * * *
When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot's hands.
--George Carlin
...just over the past year, I've had 6 Clueless Windows Users bring their machines to me complaining that "something's wrong with the Web." After the typical malware uninstall and registry clean, I then ditched the IE icon from the desktop and replaced it with Firefox (with text below reading "Surf the Web!" so they'd know what it's for) and then sent them on their merry way (along with the free edition of AVG). Casual conversations with other folks in my position (not a pro tech; just the guy all the friends and family go to first when something breaks) indicates I'm not the only one doing this. Of course, to Microsoft's Marketing Department these folks will always be counted as Internet Explorer users because the program was used once and -- HEY! it's still installed, isn't it? -- so it must be because it's being used. And, of course, I've got three boxen which started life as Windows machines and which are now running various versions of Fedora Core. And they're still, I'm sure, showing up as part of the 890 million active Windows installs on Microsoft's Annual Report to Stockholders because neither Forrester nor Gartner nor IDC has a clue how to gather statistics on machines like mine, so they choose to simply ignore an entire statistically significant data category.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/46163 36.stm
After all, they have native Farsi speakers on staff as they do Farsi broadcasting to Iran:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/
Who are "Anneliese Fikentscher" and "Andreas Neumann" who supposedly did these translations and what are their qualifications for translating Farsi? I can find no vouchers for the authenticity of the translations presented or even that they are translating from primary Farsi source materials.
From Intel's website:
Starting from the highest to the lowest the IRQ priorities would be 2/9,10,11,12,15,3,4,5,6,7.
Well, that's kinda...logical...I guess.
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Clear? Huh! Why a four-year-old child could understand this report! Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail of it.
--Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly
What The Prez says:
Bush the younger, who thinks that Al-Quada are "Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," - that's a direct quote from today.
What Mr. Bin Laden says:
"We should fully understand our religion. Fighting is a part of our religion and our Sharia [an Islamic legal code]. Those who love God and his Prophet and this religion cannot deny that. Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in Islam.
"Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God . . . . I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America." Time Magazine
"We--with God's help--call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson." Feb. 1998 - Bin Laden edict
"We love death. The US loves life. That is the difference between us two."
I would say that The Prez has pretty much got it nailed.
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I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
...the U.S. and the rest of the world is following Japan's lead?
(July 5, 2006 article at InfoWorld): The number of Internet users in Japan accessing from cell phones exceeded those using it from personal computers in 2005, according to a government report published Tuesday.
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Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
--Groucho Marx
Frankly speaking, in 30+ years of doing graphic design and pro document creation, I have never seen a document done in Word, with graphics, that looked "decent." Ever. Period. As someone pointed out, if presentation is important to your document, do it in a page layout program. Word processors are only useful for two things: capturing raw, unformatted keystrokes and spell checking (and dinner for 2 at the Taco Barn to the first person who spots a typo in this, as I don't spell-check before submitting.). Download Scribus, learn to use it, export to PDF and give your boss something that looks like you actually intended for another human being to read it.
Believe you me, I've got a extensive archive of Office-produced documents submitted to me that are a rogue's gallery of attrocities to typography, legibility, graphic design/layout and esthetic sensibility. Many from large companies whom you'd think would have a clue about projecting an image of abject incompetancy to the public. And most of the problems aren't the users' faults--it's in the inherent restrictions of a program that can't decide whether it wants to do page layout or simple text formatting--and winds up doing neither well. OH--and I forgot the best technical part about Word: apparently any graphic you embed is immediately downsampled to 72 dpi, making reading the type on your pie chart an exercise in eye strain. I won't bother paying any attention to a Word document with graphics in it. It's just going to be plain and simple horrible.
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Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.--Grouch Marx
On the other hand, my partner can't work with photos from her new Nikon D200 in Photoshop on her Win2K box because Photoshop (CS2) doesn't come out of the box with support for the digital camera raw format...it'll cost her another $100 to get the plugin. And if you read the photographer/designer forums, you find out that the plugin is very buggy and can mess up your other Photoshop plugins. Meanwhile, I downloaded the UFraw plugin for the Gimp and can open and edit her Nikon stuff straight from the camera on my Linux box. For free.
A full decade after I (and countless other folks) reported the problem to Microsoft, you still can't get a decent EPS file out of Publisher to send to that commercial print shop. Problem with Microsoft's Postscript drivers. This problem has existed since at least 1995 when I first encountered it.
Ahh...the power of Closed Source. Unless you're GM, Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about your problems using their software.
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A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five!
--Groucho Marx