I haven't tested it lately because I tend to stay away from IE, but a couple of years ago it was quite easy to slow a user's system down while viewing a page in IE by using Javascript to scroll text across the browser's status bar. Many Websites that had tools and toys for Web developers would warn of the danger of using Javascript for scrolling text effects. The effects would be noticeable in minutes rather than days.
* * * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
Yep, have perused these folks' adventures and it makes for an interesting study in group dynamics/social psychology/retail paranoia. Although, you have to admit that it's not quite the same thing for a group to suddenly invade your retail establishment and stand around quietly not demanding nor purchasing anything.
It would be interesting to, say, grab 200 of your closest friends and march over to the local Fry's and tell them you'll clean out all their Athlon 64's and ECS motherboards if you give the whole mob 25% off. Of all the retailers I can thing of, Fry's might actually do it.
The People's Glorious Struggle Against the Opressive Running Dog Capitalists Bargain Barn offers 25% OFF to YOU AND EVERYBODY IN YOUR CADRE!!! So stop on by TODAY!!!
* * * * * * *
So, this capitalist lackey and his bourgeoisie imperialist masters walk into this bar looking to oppress the proletariat, see, and there's a frog on this one guy's head, see? And the bartender says, "Hey...what the heck is THAT?!" And the frog replies, "Well, it started as a wart on my ass..." --Comrade Henny Youngman
First, try opening the CorelDraw file directly in Illustrator. I know that some versions of Illustrator (9, for instance) will open old CorelDraw 5 through 8 files. You're probably not that lucky and it's probably in 9 or newer. In that case, you'll have to get the originating artist to export to Illustrator 7 format (which later versions of CorelDraw can do) or PDF format (Acrobat version 1.4 is better if color; 1.3 if black-and-white) or EPS format (Postscript Level 2 works swell for color or black-and-white; avoid Level 3 because Corel has "issues" with Adobe over what constitutes valid Level 3 code). Remember to tell the originating person to make sure all fonts are broken to outlines in the files he sends to you (fonts are the number one headache in file exchange cross-platform). I'd say PDF is probably the least problematic route, although your mileage may vary.
Good luck and remember: suicide is NOT an option.
* * * * *
A child of five would understand this...send someone to fetch a child of five! --Groucho Marx
My Inkscape files get pulled into Scribus (which does an outstanding job of inporting Inkscape files and rendering them as native Scribus vector objects; you can even edit the vectors). I can then assign colors to my original Inkscape objects. Neither app offers Pantone swatch libraries yet; you've got to create a spot color in Scribus and name it the same as your desired PMS spot (that's more for the pressman's convenience; the imagesetter could care less what name you give a spot color). Not an ideal solution I'll admit, but I do a lot of print work and for the past year since I switched to Linux this is how I've been handling things. On the plus side: Scribus' PDF export is world class. As a former imagesetter operator who has tried its output on several of my buddies still doing prepress, I can vouch that it's very, very good. And if you do publication work (i.e., newspapers or magazines), its PDF X/3 output is sterling. Again, this is perhaps a hurdle for folks trying to get away from CorelDraw or Illustrator on Linux, but I forced myself to find solutions and to me it's no more hassle than having to use CorelDraw or Illustrator to create a spot graphic or logo then import the resulting EPS files into Quark (which is how I mainly used CorelDraw).
Now, if you're doing duotones with Pantone colors, neither CorelDraw nor Inkscape is much use. I love CorelDraw and used it professionally from verion 5 up to 11 (when I then dumped Windows/Mac for Linux), but I've never been able to successfully get CorelDraw duotone output (where at least one color was a PMS spec) to go through an Adobe Postscript imagesetter. I've always had to go back and change, say, my PMS 193C and spec it as a magenta to get it to go, or import into Illustrator/Photoshop and fix it there.
The very, very latest Inkscape (0.44) supposedly offers color profiling and color management (through lcms) and (at last!) image clipping paths and masks. I just compiled it today so I unfortunately can't report to you on how well these new features work.
However, I can tell you that Inkscape can be used for print work, but it's really only useful currently when used in conjunction with Scribus. However, as a long-time CorelDraw and Windows/Mac guy, I can tell you that I've had plenty of nightmares over those 8 years when CorelDraw would happily create EPS/PDF files that were pure junk and that had to be fixed in Illustrator/Acrobat/other tools before they spit out a neg on the other side of that imagesetter that didn't have "LIMITCHECK"* written all over it.
* * * * *
* For those who have never run an imagesetter, "limitcheck" is a very common error message printed instead of your desired output when you try to feed the imagesetter's Postscript Raster Image Processor some bad code in a graphics file.
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
I've moved my ad agency/design studio almost completely away from Windows and Mac and now Corel's missing out on 8 seat licenses for the next CorelDraw Suite because the company lacked the chutzpah/foresight/persistance to keep developing and offering their flagship graphics suite on Linux.
The horrible, awful truth is that Corel has never really made much of a profit trying to aim graphics apps at the Windows market (recall that Corel was the lone "major" graphics app publisher to buck the trend and develop with its focus on Windows rather than the Mac). From what I recall, it took 110 million of Microsoft's money to keep the company afloat around the time that their Linux distro was being offered, and today Corel is more or less just a nice suit with an empty briefcase (Dr. Michael Cowpland, the Poor Man's Steve Jobs, is long gone and although a tyrant to work for was still a lesser genius according to the story), offering a buggy suite that is semi-affectionately called "shovelware"* by graphic arts professionals. Don't get me wrong...I've loved the flagship suite's user interface over Adobe and Macromedia's competing products, but you just won't get anywhere trying to market to folks in the creative biz with a Windows-only lineup.
You know where Corel's big industry presense is now? It's in the Quick Sign biz, where margins are razor-thin and shop owners grimmace at spending more than $50 on their vinyl-cutter design/driver suite. Corel is slowly devolving to become just another IMSI or Harvard Graphics; I fully expect CorelDraw Graphics Suite 14 will be most commonly had for $15 in the closeout bin at Circuit City.
Here's another former Corel property that is doing interesting stuff and filling a void in Linux that Corel didn't have the cajones to exploit (and providing yet another reason why my CorelDraw-Windows/Mac licenses will never get upgraded): http://xaralx.org/
*Shovelware because Corel would shovel in all these very interesting (sometimes even industry-leading) features by the dump-truck-full in every CorelDraw/PhotoPaint release. Only about 66% of the astounding new features would actually work reliably under Windows.
* * * * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx
I've really enjoyed watching the progress of this app, along with Scribus and the GIMP. Inkscape has become one of the tools I use day in and day out (especially in conjunction with Scribus) and even though I can run older versions of CorelDraw and Illustrator on my FC5 box, I've really come to value Inkscape even though it doesn't have the collection of power tools that the Windows vector apps have (in all honesty, some of the "power tools" in those other guys are just imagesetter-chokers and you're better off leaving them be).
Now that Krita supports CMYK tiff files (with color management) the day has pretty much dawned in which I no longer have to jump over to my lone remaining Windows box to do some sort of previously-necessary file format conversion.
XPS is the designer's dream. Even if he'll have to go through hell to get his work to print in massive quantities...
Bingo. Show-stopper. 98% of most designers' work is print-oriented.
Until Adobe starts shipping RIPs that support XPS for the 6-trillion-dollar-plus annual worldwide commercial printing/graphics market (my estimate gathering data from here and there; to put this in perspective, IBM estimates the worldwide annual IT market at 1.2 trillion), XPS doesn't stand much chance of gaining the kind of vendor interest that Postscript/PDF enjoys.
Remember that this isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to take on Adobe in the graphics market. Their TrueImage flopped in the market in the early 90's.
You must also realize that most designers (and I'm one of the very, very few exceptions) are on Macs because Windows is far too fragile a platform for serious, mission-critical print/design work (and I can give you plenty of reasons to back that up, starting with Microsoft's absolutely balled-up Postscript drivers in WinXP and lack of a uniform, vendor-agreed-upon color management system like Kodak's ColorSync on the Mac). Unless XPS finds its way to folks on Apple's platforms, it is going to end up like TrueImage.
Here's a tally of the graphics workstations in my community (a small community on the edge of a large metropolitan area, but typical of what I experienced in big cities as well like Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas):
1. Newspaper: 8 workstations, all Mac (there are five Windows boxes, but are all used in accounting functions)
2. Newspaper: 5 workstations, all Mac
3. Print shop: 3 workstations, all Mac
4. Print shop: 1 workstation, Mac
5. Print shop: 2 workstations, both Macs
6. Magazine: 3 workstations, both Macs
7. Newspaper: 20+ workstations, all but 2 are Macs (last time I talked to their Production chief)
8. Print shop: 1 workstation, Mac
I can tell you that my experience working in ad agencies, pre-press houses and print shops in several large cities is pretty much the same as this: Macs outnumber non-Mac platforms easily 9 to 1.
Is reading Slashdot while compiling the CVS version of Scribus slacking off or working? Is it even good practice to have a Web browser open on the same machine you're using to compile? Why do I ask so many questions?
* * * * * * I'm sure I put the Python libraries around here somewhere...
--Me
This TLD (Top Level Domain) will be attractive to those pushing the envelope developing cutting-edge Web-enabled technologies. O'Reilly's site, for example, will become:
www.oreillynet.OMG!!!PONIES!!!LOL!!!
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
If it is please show me where i can find a tool to remove the drm from music purcahsed from itunes.
Google around for QtFairUse, PlayFair, Hymn, JHymn, iOpen, DeDRMS. There are a couple more, I believe. Not that I would ever use such tools.:)
Although many of these tools were broken by subsequent versions of FairPlay, Apple is still fighting a battle with the folks behind Hymn, JHymn and DeDRMS. I don't think MS and MTV are going to fare much better.
* * * * * *
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." --Groucho Marx
What is interesting is that Top Producer gave up on the LAN-based Outlook-syncing model (with the main database tables residing on the Broker's PC in the office) after every Patch Tuesday broke their suite. I had the pleasure of watching one of their poor field techs struggle for four hours trying to set up one of my clients. He failed. His comment: "Every time Microsoft does any patching on Outlook, this thing breaks."
They're not having nearly as many problems now that it's Internet-based and off of the Broker's PC. And real estate agents just won't, by and large, carry a laptop around with them. When you spend all day in a car, even a small laptop is a PITA. The Palm fits the bill. Cell phones, PDAs and digital cameras are the tools of choice.
Also have had clients in the insurance industry who live and die by a PDA. Those who sell homeowner's policies have to be on the road constantly inspecting roofs and such. Laptops don't cut it there, either. Farmer's Insurance (U.S) has had a PDA (in the form of an ancient Texas Instruments advanced calculator of some sort, as I recall) since the late 80's/early 90's for its agents to generate quotes on the road. I'm not sure what they're using currently, but I'll bet they have something that runs on a modern PDA or 3G cell phone.
I recently took the $300/year I would have probably spent on commercial music this year and spent it on a new guitar instead, and started playing again in earnest (after about 10 years of on-again, off-again).
I've been extremely disappointed with 90% of the albums I've purchased over the past decade. One half-way decent song and 7 to 9 other Contractual Obligatory Offerings for $13.95 is just way too out of line with market realities. I guess I'm the last person on the planet who doesn't own an iPod (actually, I've been told there's another person in Mauritania who also doesn't own one), so I'm not buying my music alacarte. I'm not sure that even if I could purchase by the song I would find enough good stuff to be satisified with the Standard Product coming out of the music industry these days.
On the plus side: playing music makes you smarter (pretty sure I've read that research has indicated this; back in the 70's, IBM used to use programming aptitude tests that looked closely at musical skills as an indicator of possible programming aptitude in non-programmers), it's a great stress-reliever and no matter how bad you are as a musician, you'll never be as bad as The White Stripes.
Seriously, though, several friends have told me that an hour of me for free is a better deal than 42:30 of Beck at any price. I tell them to bring the beer and everybody's happy.
And among many needs, one particularly strong one I have is for my platform to not expose me to completely unnecessary security threats simply because of Bill Gate's egotistic need to kick Netscape or Google (or whomever) to the curb.
Listen, we business people are, on the whole, very conservative folks. And Microsoft did something you should never, ever, ever do: ignore your customers' safety to pursue an ego trip. This is an unpardonable sin and good business people will pick up their briefcases and go do business elsewhere.
At least, smart business people will do so. As many have, already.
But it proves my point; are you, as a company, going to go with the vendor that gives you what you want, or something you didn't ask for?
I own a business, in fact. And I'm going to go with the vendor who has my best interests at heart--not the vendor who says "screw the customers...we'll throw in dangerous, unsecured technology to make our stockholders happy and gain market share against those damned Netscape people."
I'm pretty sure that that gigantic market share of Windows is the main reason that it's got so many viruses.
Right. The fact that Gates, Ballmer & Company decided to ignore practically every reputable security expert on the planet and release ActiveX, a completely unsandboxed tool for crackers, had nothing to do with it. Right-o, Matey.
First ActiveX exploit released: 1993. Latest ActiveX exploit: in the wild currently and unpatched. That's 13 years that Microsoft has ignored your security and refused to correct a huge, gaping security hole.
We won't even talk about the RPC processes (accessible through ports left open by default) that have traditionally been running in Windows (up until just a few months ago), with full Admin privileges, every time you log in, no matter how you log in.
The real reason Windows has more security problems: the head-in-the-sand, we'll-bend-over-and-take-more-of-this-same-old-cra p attitude of Microsoft customers.
But here, I'll let the Microsoft folks themselves tell you: "Our products just aren't engineered for security," said Brian Valentine, Microsoft senior vice president for Windows development. Another Microsoft executive recently explained they never paid attention to security "Because customers wouldn't pay for it until recently."
I'm exporting the same shares with Samba and NFS from a cheap FC3 box and having few, if any, problems.
Now, let's see you do the opposite...export NFS and SMB shares from a Windows box and not spend $5,000 on the task. And keep your server up for more than 7 or 8 days at a time.
I'm not meaning to blast you, but I notice that a lot of the criticism of *NIX is that folks are having trouble setting up services that are damned near impossible or prohibitively expensive (or even completely unavailable) on Windows.
By the way, I'm a graphic artist who also does video/audio production and I'm finding, after 8 years of struggling to massage Windows into a usable system in my multi-platform workflow, that it just doesn't have the beans that Mac and *NIX have for doing serious publishing work or serious audio/video production. My partner, for example, can't play.wmv content on her Win2K box (and WinXP will not help here, it's even worse) because two or more of the numerous codecs we need to do production conflict with each other under Windows and the audio portion is screwed up. Ironicially, I have to play.wmv content on my Linux workstation for her to view. Our main publishing tools for Windows, QuarkXPress and InDesign, are warmed-over ports of their Mac versions and lack a couple of key features that would make Windows publishing just as easy as it is on the Mac. Even my Mac and Linux workstations have system-wide color management that most all software vendors agree upon and utilize, rather than the Balkanized mess that characterizes what Windows currently throws at the hapless user trying to do pro-level work.
Things Just Work...
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Amusingly, from TFA:
The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block.
Naturally, that was a Viiv component.
So, the Mighty Microsoft "Media Juggernaut" (as David Berlind over at ZDNet likes to call it) mixes genes with the Invincible Intel Viiv and we get: errors left and right and the anti-malware proggy telling you that a Viiv content delivery component is dangerous!
Priceless.
Say, I have a suggestion: Why doesn't Intel just worry about making better CPUs, Microsoft worry about getting an operating system out the door that your average 14-year-old can't crack from 7,000 miles away, and the both of them leaving cheap home entertainment devices to the Chinese manufacturers like Apex? Or would that be asking too much?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Javascript can cause memory leaks in IE as well:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/ie_leak_patterns .asp
I haven't tested it lately because I tend to stay away from IE, but a couple of years ago it was quite easy to slow a user's system down while viewing a page in IE by using Javascript to scroll text across the browser's status bar. Many Websites that had tools and toys for Web developers would warn of the danger of using Javascript for scrolling text effects. The effects would be noticeable in minutes rather than days.
* * * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
Yep, have perused these folks' adventures and it makes for an interesting study in group dynamics/social psychology/retail paranoia. Although, you have to admit that it's not quite the same thing for a group to suddenly invade your retail establishment and stand around quietly not demanding nor purchasing anything.
It would be interesting to, say, grab 200 of your closest friends and march over to the local Fry's and tell them you'll clean out all their Athlon 64's and ECS motherboards if you give the whole mob 25% off. Of all the retailers I can thing of, Fry's might actually do it.
The People's Glorious Struggle Against the Opressive Running Dog Capitalists Bargain Barn offers 25% OFF to YOU AND EVERYBODY IN YOUR CADRE!!! So stop on by TODAY!!!
* * * * * * *
So, this capitalist lackey and his bourgeoisie imperialist masters walk into this bar looking to oppress the proletariat, see, and there's a frog on this one guy's head, see? And the bartender says, "Hey...what the heck is THAT?!" And the frog replies, "Well, it started as a wart on my ass..."
--Comrade Henny Youngman
First, try opening the CorelDraw file directly in Illustrator. I know that some versions of Illustrator (9, for instance) will open old CorelDraw 5 through 8 files. You're probably not that lucky and it's probably in 9 or newer. In that case, you'll have to get the originating artist to export to Illustrator 7 format (which later versions of CorelDraw can do) or PDF format (Acrobat version 1.4 is better if color; 1.3 if black-and-white) or EPS format (Postscript Level 2 works swell for color or black-and-white; avoid Level 3 because Corel has "issues" with Adobe over what constitutes valid Level 3 code). Remember to tell the originating person to make sure all fonts are broken to outlines in the files he sends to you (fonts are the number one headache in file exchange cross-platform). I'd say PDF is probably the least problematic route, although your mileage may vary.
Good luck and remember: suicide is NOT an option.
* * * * *
A child of five would understand this...send someone to fetch a child of five!
--Groucho Marx
My Inkscape files get pulled into Scribus (which does an outstanding job of inporting Inkscape files and rendering them as native Scribus vector objects; you can even edit the vectors). I can then assign colors to my original Inkscape objects. Neither app offers Pantone swatch libraries yet; you've got to create a spot color in Scribus and name it the same as your desired PMS spot (that's more for the pressman's convenience; the imagesetter could care less what name you give a spot color). Not an ideal solution I'll admit, but I do a lot of print work and for the past year since I switched to Linux this is how I've been handling things. On the plus side: Scribus' PDF export is world class. As a former imagesetter operator who has tried its output on several of my buddies still doing prepress, I can vouch that it's very, very good. And if you do publication work (i.e., newspapers or magazines), its PDF X/3 output is sterling. Again, this is perhaps a hurdle for folks trying to get away from CorelDraw or Illustrator on Linux, but I forced myself to find solutions and to me it's no more hassle than having to use CorelDraw or Illustrator to create a spot graphic or logo then import the resulting EPS files into Quark (which is how I mainly used CorelDraw).
Now, if you're doing duotones with Pantone colors, neither CorelDraw nor Inkscape is much use. I love CorelDraw and used it professionally from verion 5 up to 11 (when I then dumped Windows/Mac for Linux), but I've never been able to successfully get CorelDraw duotone output (where at least one color was a PMS spec) to go through an Adobe Postscript imagesetter. I've always had to go back and change, say, my PMS 193C and spec it as a magenta to get it to go, or import into Illustrator/Photoshop and fix it there.
The very, very latest Inkscape (0.44) supposedly offers color profiling and color management (through lcms) and (at last!) image clipping paths and masks. I just compiled it today so I unfortunately can't report to you on how well these new features work.
However, I can tell you that Inkscape can be used for print work, but it's really only useful currently when used in conjunction with Scribus. However, as a long-time CorelDraw and Windows/Mac guy, I can tell you that I've had plenty of nightmares over those 8 years when CorelDraw would happily create EPS/PDF files that were pure junk and that had to be fixed in Illustrator/Acrobat/other tools before they spit out a neg on the other side of that imagesetter that didn't have "LIMITCHECK"* written all over it.
* * * * *
* For those who have never run an imagesetter, "limitcheck" is a very common error message printed instead of your desired output when you try to feed the imagesetter's Postscript Raster Image Processor some bad code in a graphics file.
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.--Groucho Marx
The horrible, awful truth is that Corel has never really made much of a profit trying to aim graphics apps at the Windows market (recall that Corel was the lone "major" graphics app publisher to buck the trend and develop with its focus on Windows rather than the Mac). From what I recall, it took 110 million of Microsoft's money to keep the company afloat around the time that their Linux distro was being offered, and today Corel is more or less just a nice suit with an empty briefcase (Dr. Michael Cowpland, the Poor Man's Steve Jobs, is long gone and although a tyrant to work for was still a lesser genius according to the story), offering a buggy suite that is semi-affectionately called "shovelware"* by graphic arts professionals. Don't get me wrong...I've loved the flagship suite's user interface over Adobe and Macromedia's competing products, but you just won't get anywhere trying to market to folks in the creative biz with a Windows-only lineup.
You know where Corel's big industry presense is now? It's in the Quick Sign biz, where margins are razor-thin and shop owners grimmace at spending more than $50 on their vinyl-cutter design/driver suite. Corel is slowly devolving to become just another IMSI or Harvard Graphics; I fully expect CorelDraw Graphics Suite 14 will be most commonly had for $15 in the closeout bin at Circuit City.
Here's another former Corel property that is doing interesting stuff and filling a void in Linux that Corel didn't have the cajones to exploit (and providing yet another reason why my CorelDraw-Windows/Mac licenses will never get upgraded):
http://xaralx.org/
*Shovelware because Corel would shovel in all these very interesting (sometimes even industry-leading) features by the dump-truck-full in every CorelDraw/PhotoPaint release. Only about 66% of the astounding new features would actually work reliably under Windows.
* * * * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
I've really enjoyed watching the progress of this app, along with Scribus and the GIMP. Inkscape has become one of the tools I use day in and day out (especially in conjunction with Scribus) and even though I can run older versions of CorelDraw and Illustrator on my FC5 box, I've really come to value Inkscape even though it doesn't have the collection of power tools that the Windows vector apps have (in all honesty, some of the "power tools" in those other guys are just imagesetter-chokers and you're better off leaving them be).
Now that Krita supports CMYK tiff files (with color management) the day has pretty much dawned in which I no longer have to jump over to my lone remaining Windows box to do some sort of previously-necessary file format conversion.
Bingo. Show-stopper. 98% of most designers' work is print-oriented.
Until Adobe starts shipping RIPs that support XPS for the 6-trillion-dollar-plus annual worldwide commercial printing/graphics market (my estimate gathering data from here and there; to put this in perspective, IBM estimates the worldwide annual IT market at 1.2 trillion), XPS doesn't stand much chance of gaining the kind of vendor interest that Postscript/PDF enjoys.
Remember that this isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to take on Adobe in the graphics market. Their TrueImage flopped in the market in the early 90's.
You must also realize that most designers (and I'm one of the very, very few exceptions) are on Macs because Windows is far too fragile a platform for serious, mission-critical print/design work (and I can give you plenty of reasons to back that up, starting with Microsoft's absolutely balled-up Postscript drivers in WinXP and lack of a uniform, vendor-agreed-upon color management system like Kodak's ColorSync on the Mac). Unless XPS finds its way to folks on Apple's platforms, it is going to end up like TrueImage.
Here's a tally of the graphics workstations in my community (a small community on the edge of a large metropolitan area, but typical of what I experienced in big cities as well like Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas):
1. Newspaper: 8 workstations, all Mac (there are five Windows boxes, but are all used in accounting functions)
2. Newspaper: 5 workstations, all Mac
3. Print shop: 3 workstations, all Mac
4. Print shop: 1 workstation, Mac
5. Print shop: 2 workstations, both Macs
6. Magazine: 3 workstations, both Macs
7. Newspaper: 20+ workstations, all but 2 are Macs (last time I talked to their Production chief)
8. Print shop: 1 workstation, Mac
I can tell you that my experience working in ad agencies, pre-press houses and print shops in several large cities is pretty much the same as this: Macs outnumber non-Mac platforms easily 9 to 1.
You'll PAY to know what you REALLY think!!!
--J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
* * * * * *
I'm sure I put the Python libraries around here somewhere...
--Me
When you walk, just walk...when you run, just run...but above all, don't wobble.
--Some old Zen guy whose name I've forgotten
www.oreillynet.OMG!!!PONIES!!!LOL!!!
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
I've heard that there is also going to be an Iconoclastic Demagogue version for the folks who don't fit into any of the other catagories.
* * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
Google around for QtFairUse, PlayFair, Hymn, JHymn, iOpen, DeDRMS. There are a couple more, I believe. Not that I would ever use such tools. :)
Although many of these tools were broken by subsequent versions of FairPlay, Apple is still fighting a battle with the folks behind Hymn, JHymn and DeDRMS. I don't think MS and MTV are going to fare much better.
* * * * * *
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
--Groucho Marx
This is hot in the real estate industry:
http://www.topproducer.com/products/Palmhandhelds/
What is interesting is that Top Producer gave up on the LAN-based Outlook-syncing model (with the main database tables residing on the Broker's PC in the office) after every Patch Tuesday broke their suite. I had the pleasure of watching one of their poor field techs struggle for four hours trying to set up one of my clients. He failed. His comment: "Every time Microsoft does any patching on Outlook, this thing breaks."
They're not having nearly as many problems now that it's Internet-based and off of the Broker's PC. And real estate agents just won't, by and large, carry a laptop around with them. When you spend all day in a car, even a small laptop is a PITA. The Palm fits the bill. Cell phones, PDAs and digital cameras are the tools of choice.
Also have had clients in the insurance industry who live and die by a PDA. Those who sell homeowner's policies have to be on the road constantly inspecting roofs and such. Laptops don't cut it there, either. Farmer's Insurance (U.S) has had a PDA (in the form of an ancient Texas Instruments advanced calculator of some sort, as I recall) since the late 80's/early 90's for its agents to generate quotes on the road. I'm not sure what they're using currently, but I'll bet they have something that runs on a modern PDA or 3G cell phone.
I've been extremely disappointed with 90% of the albums I've purchased over the past decade. One half-way decent song and 7 to 9 other Contractual Obligatory Offerings for $13.95 is just way too out of line with market realities. I guess I'm the last person on the planet who doesn't own an iPod (actually, I've been told there's another person in Mauritania who also doesn't own one), so I'm not buying my music alacarte. I'm not sure that even if I could purchase by the song I would find enough good stuff to be satisified with the Standard Product coming out of the music industry these days.
On the plus side: playing music makes you smarter (pretty sure I've read that research has indicated this; back in the 70's, IBM used to use programming aptitude tests that looked closely at musical skills as an indicator of possible programming aptitude in non-programmers), it's a great stress-reliever and no matter how bad you are as a musician, you'll never be as bad as The White Stripes.
Seriously, though, several friends have told me that an hour of me for free is a better deal than 42:30 of Beck at any price. I tell them to bring the beer and everybody's happy.
Listen, we business people are, on the whole, very conservative folks. And Microsoft did something you should never, ever, ever do: ignore your customers' safety to pursue an ego trip. This is an unpardonable sin and good business people will pick up their briefcases and go do business elsewhere.
At least, smart business people will do so. As many have, already.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/27/ 021127hnerniball.html?s=IDGNS
In fact, no one on the entire planet has been able to "write a pretty good Linux worm" as of yet.
Are you so naive as to think that a few thousand folks haven't already tried?
That ought to point to a considerable truth right there.
Right. The fact that Gates, Ballmer & Company decided to ignore practically every reputable security expert on the planet and release ActiveX, a completely unsandboxed tool for crackers, had nothing to do with it. Right-o, Matey.
First ActiveX exploit released: 1993. Latest ActiveX exploit: in the wild currently and unpatched. That's 13 years that Microsoft has ignored your security and refused to correct a huge, gaping security hole.
We won't even talk about the RPC processes (accessible through ports left open by default) that have traditionally been running in Windows (up until just a few months ago), with full Admin privileges, every time you log in, no matter how you log in.
The real reason Windows has more security problems: the head-in-the-sand, we'll-bend-over-and-take-more-of-this-same-old-cra p attitude of Microsoft customers.
But here, I'll let the Microsoft folks themselves tell you:
"Our products just aren't engineered for security," said Brian Valentine, Microsoft senior vice president for Windows development. Another Microsoft executive recently explained they never paid attention to security "Because customers wouldn't pay for it until recently."
Article (2003) quote from http://archive.corporatewatch.org/profiles/microso ft/microsoft1.htm#Crapsoftware
It's kinda slow, though.
* * * * * *
You'll pay to know what you really think!
--Bob
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/
Hmmm. Scratch that.
* * * * * *
You'll pay to know what you really think!
--Bob
Now, let's see you do the opposite...export NFS and SMB shares from a Windows box and not spend $5,000 on the task. And keep your server up for more than 7 or 8 days at a time.
I'm not meaning to blast you, but I notice that a lot of the criticism of *NIX is that folks are having trouble setting up services that are damned near impossible or prohibitively expensive (or even completely unavailable) on Windows.
By the way, I'm a graphic artist who also does video/audio production and I'm finding, after 8 years of struggling to massage Windows into a usable system in my multi-platform workflow, that it just doesn't have the beans that Mac and *NIX have for doing serious publishing work or serious audio/video production. My partner, for example, can't play .wmv content on her Win2K box (and WinXP will not help here, it's even worse) because two or more of the numerous codecs we need to do production conflict with each other under Windows and the audio portion is screwed up. Ironicially, I have to play .wmv content on my Linux workstation for her to view. Our main publishing tools for Windows, QuarkXPress and InDesign, are warmed-over ports of their Mac versions and lack a couple of key features that would make Windows publishing just as easy as it is on the Mac. Even my Mac and Linux workstations have system-wide color management that most all software vendors agree upon and utilize, rather than the Balkanized mess that characterizes what Windows currently throws at the hapless user trying to do pro-level work.
The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block.
Naturally, that was a Viiv component.
So, the Mighty Microsoft "Media Juggernaut" (as David Berlind over at ZDNet likes to call it) mixes genes with the Invincible Intel Viiv and we get: errors left and right and the anti-malware proggy telling you that a Viiv content delivery component is dangerous!
Priceless.
Say, I have a suggestion: Why doesn't Intel just worry about making better CPUs, Microsoft worry about getting an operating system out the door that your average 14-year-old can't crack from 7,000 miles away, and the both of them leaving cheap home entertainment devices to the Chinese manufacturers like Apex? Or would that be asking too much?
...of the Ken Burns Effect?