It edits PDFs in a way that FOSS doesn't begin to touch. It permits you to turn forms into fillable forms which automatically calculate sums, validate input, and even embed OCR fonts, in a format which requires no enabling of potentially damaging Office macro scripts and guarantees consistent printouts. To the average user, this is useless.
To a business that thinks in terms of volume, it's a lifesaver and worth the cost of the tool, especially since it uses a familiar scripting language. Interactive Word forms are a fucking nightmare to work with comparatively.
Acrobat Pro also has excellent tools for recompressing and filtering existing PDFs regardless of their origin. PDFcreator has good features for controlling bloat but it's more helpful to do this after export.
While I think its website conversion tools are woefully CSS-ignorant, it remains the only app I know of that archives websites while preserving hotlinks. It can be invaluable for archiving multiple websites addressing a topic into one document. I have archives of at least two websites that don't exist any more stored this way.
Factor in, also, that most liveCDs *require* 192Mb RAM to run but won't tell you this.
Ubuntu Breezy's install CD (curses, not GUI) spent three hours attempting to install itself to a G3 PowerBook, and left it in an unusable state upon reboot. The Win9x kernel is not wonderful, but like OS 9 it *is* designed to run inside a frighteningly small amount of memory. Gnome/KDE based distros fail this miserably.
"Also in the pipe is 'Titanic II: 28 Days Later,' where the doomed crew and passengers return to New York only to eat the Big Apple's brains. Uwe Boll is set to box Michael Bay over directing rights to it."
I've had one of these for about five months and while it was a PITA to install, it definitely increased my e-penis with the local LUG. It looks great and is popular in the household.
Is it easy to install? No. Myth isn't an application, it's a platform inside Linux relying on MySQL, Apache, PHP, tuner drivers, lirc drivers, and the willingness to tweak the things which aren't guaranteed to work correctly out of the box (e.g. PHP5 not registering itself as a MIME type with Apache 2, streaming requiring not only hardcoding your box's IP in Myth's settings but having to run a SQL query to update all references to 'localhost').
Daniel Hyams' advice for installing Myth under Ubuntu makes it clear that there's some room for improvement in terms of startup and housecleaning -- creating a system that automatically logs in without passwords, that backs up its own databases, etc. -- and structure (putting/home in a separate XFS partition for faster disc access on large files than ext* can do, resetting Myth's own pointers to this location). It's frustrating to try to rip your own DVDs only to find that this requires opening a terminal and starting a service which isn't normally running. Users of bttv based tuner cards received a nasty shock when the L4TV kernel module maintainers inadvertently wrecked audio support with recent kernel updates.
And yet, even with all the negatives mentioned above, the end result is hella impressive. Your rules for recording can be simple, complex or even regex based. With a Hauppauge card with MPEG2 encoding chips, you can run it on a 450MHz P3.
However, what it needs most is a wrapper installation program which installs the AMP stack, requests a master AM password and configures it into Apache, MySQL and Myth, manages dependencies, establishes services at startup, bypasses login, sets a database backup schedule, ties DVD ripping to the necessary background services, and runs checks to see that Apache and MySQL are behaving themselves.
For example, a friend came home last weekend to find his live-in elderly mother, already incapacitated by a stroke, had been lying on the floor for 3 hours after a bad fall. If a house system had been able to identify someone was unmoving in a non-stationary part of the house it could have informed him, supplied images to his cellphone, tied into his intercom system to communicate with her.
Or, say, recorded it to video, set it to "Yakety Sax" and uploaded it to YouTube before submitting it to Fark.
Read my lips: no new CSS property support.
on
A Browser War Preview
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· Score: 2, Informative
Seriously. They corrected box model miscalculations dating back to IE 5.5 and added support for + and > operators. And then they added PNG support.
There are no CSS properties supported in IE7 beta 2/3 which were not supported in prior versions. I ran them through the entire CSS2 test suite.
That's it. No corrections to mistakes like text-align:center aligning block elements instead of their child inline elements, and ZERO behavior change between DOCTYPEs. Still absolutely no recognition for the XHTML MIMEtype.
90% of what went into making IE7 was adding widgets, security features and reordering the interface. As far as standards support goes, it would be generous to call it IE 6.5.
"We're amazed ourselves at the innovation we've pioneered here," Barr said when demonstrating the "Talking Pirate Skull" mounted on a wall plaque. When the reporter mentioned "Billy the Talking Bigmouth Bass," Barr let loose a stream of profanity unheard of outside a Tourette's ward.
Don't forget the article's mention of the cutting edge RS-232 technology it employs.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple here, the XP updates, features, and security fixes are and always have been free. Microsoft doesn't slap a new name on XP and try to scam $99 out of their users every year. This is where I do have a bit of proble with the Apple business model.
Microsoft has most of its costs subsidized by its near-guaranteed bundling with every PC sold by someone else's effort. Even at $50 a pop (the average bundled cost of XP to a vendor) the sheer volume makes it immensely profitable for them.
Apple doesn't have this kind of a business model, so it really isn't fair to critique them for not doing exactly the same thing when their distribution system is different.
Because one computer software company profitably engages in a particular practice does not mean it defines a norm for the industry when all other things remain equal. And in this case, all other things aren't even close.
As far as the "new free things" while "waiting for Vista" are concerned, most of the things in Vista are in the OS I paid for, just like you'll have to pay for them in Vista. I can't honestly remember what I've gotten in SP1 and SP2 that vastly defines it from the XP I installed. It doesn't seem as comparable to the differences between Ubuntu Breezy 5 and Ubuntu Dapper 6, for example.
If you read up on the internals of Windows and blogs like Raymond Chens you can see the ways in which the Windows team often bent over backwards to speed things up. Some of the weirdest and worst hacks inside Windows are there for performance reasons in fact.
Meanwhile OS X usually gets its ass handed to it on a plate in any kind of serious benchmark.
With those hacks usually come problems.
Apple is further worsening its reputation for smug arrogance with this tack; OS X is not significantly more secure in its architecture than Windows
The evidence would suggest otherwise. Hacking UNIX != hacking Windows.
They are sloppy with security updates.
Compared to Microsoft?
Meanwhile their advertising is increasingly a repeat of the "PowerPC supercomputer" type claims; lots of hyperbole about their merits with no solid engineering underlying it.
Solid engineering doesn't sell anything. I hate their advertising more than you do and yet it seems to work.
Who will trust Apple marketing about security when right up until the Intel transition they were telling the world how wonderful PowerPC was?
No more egregious than every set of promises Microsoft made about every successive version of Windows. All forgotten by the public, sadly.
There is a hurdle to be crossed if Apple implements Win32, and that's that it's a huge PITA to implement. The Wine people have been trying to get this running for decades.
Without access to internal APIs, doing it entirely through blackboxes.
They'll get close, and then Windows will move forward again.
XP is done. There may be tweaks, but the API is frozen.
Some features, (DirectX, hard to implement as you point out, is one of them), have never been properly implemented.
I mentioned DX because of firmware differences between Mac/PC video cards from the same vendor.
Even once implemented, a Windows application will need to be installed (not the case for a Mac app), it will require some massaging of the APIs to get something that even vaguely fits into the same desktop as traditional Macintosh applications,
You're assuming it has to live in the same partition/filesystem as OS X. Bootcamp shows it doesn't. Moreover, Classic and X11 have given their dev team upwards of five years' experience dealing with sandboxes.
it will, in short, be half-arsed. Imagine what the WINE people have had to go through.
With considerably fewer years to do it. If we assume Red Box dates back to 1997, that means XP in 2001 was an incremental change for them, not a sea change. Codeweavers, in contrast, did everything through reverse engineering.
Now apply Steve Job's perfectionism,
Have you SEEN the Finder?
and Apple's lack of time and resources,
Cite references to either imaginary factor?
and ask how Apple can possibly come up with code by themselves that will work.
Assuming Red Box exists in a workable form, it's been in the works since 1997. Rhapsody was all about getting Classic/Win apps to run natively inside it on the processor-relevant platform, as well as creating a framework to run natively inside Windows itself. Do some homework.
If what was proposed earlier functionally builds a monopoly, the SEC might not get involved but it would catch the stockholders' attention. My earlier point was that this story sounds and smells like bullshit (Jobs calls Gates, suggests MS make dramatic, possibly vulnerable business decision and within minutes all three MS top dogs are behaving like bobbleheads).
I can imagine the idea, but not the way it's played out in one act--hell, one scene. Points for the drama, negative points for credibility (compared with the other insider's story ACed here).
No, no they don't. Were Apple to implement the Windows API, they'd be doing so with more legal grounds than Microsoft had when they pulled the same trick on Apple, and the courts were pretty clear they were permitted to do so.
Moreover, the '95 agreement between Apple and Microsoft forbids either party from suing each other for this sort of thing again. One could speculate that this is the largest reason Microsoft's been pushing Vista, because now that Apple's an x86 platform there's no substantial hurdle left to make OS X compatible with the Win32 API (excepting possibly DirectX).
I find your post both intriguing and an excellent source of fertilizer for my garden. Somehow, I don't think either company would agree to this on a phone call without asking their counsel how loudly the SEC would howl.
Seriously, 5th Element was shot on film, and the other two I don't know about, but aren't there any well-known digital productions which would transfer cleanly? How pristine are the masters for 5th Element by now?
And to agree with the earlier poster: Whoever's greenlighting chick films like "50 first dates" and "Phantom of the Opera" for testdriving a new medium needs a new job, preferably selling hot dogs on a street corner, to get an idea of what a market actually asks for.
I actually read this article last week, unlike most of the people who've responded so far. The principle behind this concept is reasonably sound, except that the example they've given in it (seating Montagues and Capulets at Romeo & Juliet's reception) requires you to understand every unspoken assumption to make the tester work properly.
Jackson doesn't claim it'll find everything. What he says is that it carefully synthesizes the two previous approaches to software testing, reducing the amount of time-expensive calculation in the process thereby making it a more viable method.
I wonder if this has influenced their backpedaling on initially referring to it as open source software. Perhaps they purchased commercial licenses and now cannot release their code without violating their Qt license.
"Outraged chavs complained that it would take saving two or three welfare payments to afford the PS3, and that being unfamiliar with how banks worked they were being unfairly discriminated against."
Slashdot Mirror
Me neither, because Weird Al is funny.
"It hardly does anything!"
It edits PDFs in a way that FOSS doesn't begin to touch. It permits you to turn forms into fillable forms which automatically calculate sums, validate input, and even embed OCR fonts, in a format which requires no enabling of potentially damaging Office macro scripts and guarantees consistent printouts. To the average user, this is useless.
To a business that thinks in terms of volume, it's a lifesaver and worth the cost of the tool, especially since it uses a familiar scripting language. Interactive Word forms are a fucking nightmare to work with comparatively.
Acrobat Pro also has excellent tools for recompressing and filtering existing PDFs regardless of their origin. PDFcreator has good features for controlling bloat but it's more helpful to do this after export.
While I think its website conversion tools are woefully CSS-ignorant, it remains the only app I know of that archives websites while preserving hotlinks. It can be invaluable for archiving multiple websites addressing a topic into one document. I have archives of at least two websites that don't exist any more stored this way.
Show me a comparable FOSS PDF development tool.
Sell crazy next door, sister, we're full up here.
Factor in, also, that most liveCDs *require* 192Mb RAM to run but won't tell you this.
Ubuntu Breezy's install CD (curses, not GUI) spent three hours attempting to install itself to a G3 PowerBook, and left it in an unusable state upon reboot. The Win9x kernel is not wonderful, but like OS 9 it *is* designed to run inside a frighteningly small amount of memory. Gnome/KDE based distros fail this miserably.
"Also in the pipe is 'Titanic II: 28 Days Later,' where the doomed crew and passengers return to New York only to eat the Big Apple's brains. Uwe Boll is set to box Michael Bay over directing rights to it."
I've had one of these for about five months and while it was a PITA to install, it definitely increased my e-penis with the local LUG. It looks great and is popular in the household.
/home in a separate XFS partition for faster disc access on large files than ext* can do, resetting Myth's own pointers to this location). It's frustrating to try to rip your own DVDs only to find that this requires opening a terminal and starting a service which isn't normally running. Users of bttv based tuner cards received a nasty shock when the L4TV kernel module maintainers inadvertently wrecked audio support with recent kernel updates.
Is it easy to install? No. Myth isn't an application, it's a platform inside Linux relying on MySQL, Apache, PHP, tuner drivers, lirc drivers, and the willingness to tweak the things which aren't guaranteed to work correctly out of the box (e.g. PHP5 not registering itself as a MIME type with Apache 2, streaming requiring not only hardcoding your box's IP in Myth's settings but having to run a SQL query to update all references to 'localhost').
Daniel Hyams' advice for installing Myth under Ubuntu makes it clear that there's some room for improvement in terms of startup and housecleaning -- creating a system that automatically logs in without passwords, that backs up its own databases, etc. -- and structure (putting
And yet, even with all the negatives mentioned above, the end result is hella impressive. Your rules for recording can be simple, complex or even regex based. With a Hauppauge card with MPEG2 encoding chips, you can run it on a 450MHz P3.
However, what it needs most is a wrapper installation program which installs the AMP stack, requests a master AM password and configures it into Apache, MySQL and Myth, manages dependencies, establishes services at startup, bypasses login, sets a database backup schedule, ties DVD ripping to the necessary background services, and runs checks to see that Apache and MySQL are behaving themselves.
Seriously. They corrected box model miscalculations dating back to IE 5.5 and added support for + and > operators. And then they added PNG support.
There are no CSS properties supported in IE7 beta 2/3 which were not supported in prior versions. I ran them through the entire CSS2 test suite.
That's it. No corrections to mistakes like text-align:center aligning block elements instead of their child inline elements, and ZERO behavior change between DOCTYPEs. Still absolutely no recognition for the XHTML MIMEtype.
90% of what went into making IE7 was adding widgets, security features and reordering the interface. As far as standards support goes, it would be generous to call it IE 6.5.
Though, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple switched to an L4 kernel
Funny you should mention that...Microsoft has most of its costs subsidized by its near-guaranteed bundling with every PC sold by someone else's effort. Even at $50 a pop (the average bundled cost of XP to a vendor) the sheer volume makes it immensely profitable for them.
Apple doesn't have this kind of a business model, so it really isn't fair to critique them for not doing exactly the same thing when their distribution system is different.
Because one computer software company profitably engages in a particular practice does not mean it defines a norm for the industry when all other things remain equal. And in this case, all other things aren't even close.
As far as the "new free things" while "waiting for Vista" are concerned, most of the things in Vista are in the OS I paid for, just like you'll have to pay for them in Vista. I can't honestly remember what I've gotten in SP1 and SP2 that vastly defines it from the XP I installed. It doesn't seem as comparable to the differences between Ubuntu Breezy 5 and Ubuntu Dapper 6, for example.
With those hacks usually come problems.
The evidence would suggest otherwise. Hacking UNIX != hacking Windows.
Compared to Microsoft?
Solid engineering doesn't sell anything. I hate their advertising more than you do and yet it seems to work.
No more egregious than every set of promises Microsoft made about every successive version of Windows. All forgotten by the public, sadly.
Without access to internal APIs, doing it entirely through blackboxes.
XP is done. There may be tweaks, but the API is frozen.
I mentioned DX because of firmware differences between Mac/PC video cards from the same vendor.
You're assuming it has to live in the same partition/filesystem as OS X. Bootcamp shows it doesn't. Moreover, Classic and X11 have given their dev team upwards of five years' experience dealing with sandboxes.
With considerably fewer years to do it. If we assume Red Box dates back to 1997, that means XP in 2001 was an incremental change for them, not a sea change. Codeweavers, in contrast, did everything through reverse engineering.
Have you SEEN the Finder?
Cite references to either imaginary factor?
Assuming Red Box exists in a workable form, it's been in the works since 1997. Rhapsody was all about getting Classic/Win apps to run natively inside it on the processor-relevant platform, as well as creating a framework to run natively inside Windows itself. Do some homework.
If what was proposed earlier functionally builds a monopoly, the SEC might not get involved but it would catch the stockholders' attention. My earlier point was that this story sounds and smells like bullshit (Jobs calls Gates, suggests MS make dramatic, possibly vulnerable business decision and within minutes all three MS top dogs are behaving like bobbleheads).
I can imagine the idea, but not the way it's played out in one act--hell, one scene. Points for the drama, negative points for credibility (compared with the other insider's story ACed here).
No, no they don't. Were Apple to implement the Windows API, they'd be doing so with more legal grounds than Microsoft had when they pulled the same trick on Apple, and the courts were pretty clear they were permitted to do so.
Moreover, the '95 agreement between Apple and Microsoft forbids either party from suing each other for this sort of thing again. One could speculate that this is the largest reason Microsoft's been pushing Vista, because now that Apple's an x86 platform there's no substantial hurdle left to make OS X compatible with the Win32 API (excepting possibly DirectX).
I find your post both intriguing and an excellent source of fertilizer for my garden. Somehow, I don't think either company would agree to this on a phone call without asking their counsel how loudly the SEC would howl.
Seriously, 5th Element was shot on film, and the other two I don't know about, but aren't there any well-known digital productions which would transfer cleanly? How pristine are the masters for 5th Element by now?
And to agree with the earlier poster: Whoever's greenlighting chick films like "50 first dates" and "Phantom of the Opera" for testdriving a new medium needs a new job, preferably selling hot dogs on a street corner, to get an idea of what a market actually asks for.
...and get to puppetteer your own US foreign policy today!
MPAA: get Heathrow drug dogs sniffing DVDs!
RIAA: get Swedish police shutting down torrents!
GNAA: get chocolate buttsecks!
I actually read this article last week, unlike most of the people who've responded so far. The principle behind this concept is reasonably sound, except that the example they've given in it (seating Montagues and Capulets at Romeo & Juliet's reception) requires you to understand every unspoken assumption to make the tester work properly.
Jackson doesn't claim it'll find everything. What he says is that it carefully synthesizes the two previous approaches to software testing, reducing the amount of time-expensive calculation in the process thereby making it a more viable method.
I wonder if this has influenced their backpedaling on initially referring to it as open source software. Perhaps they purchased commercial licenses and now cannot release their code without violating their Qt license.
Not to be confused with http://o.noes/
GNAA's going to foul their drawers over this.
"The original location for the player holster had to be moved when testers kept referring to it as the 'iPud.' "
"Outraged chavs complained that it would take saving two or three welfare payments to afford the PS3, and that being unfamiliar with how banks worked they were being unfairly discriminated against."
"Law enforcement officials in Moscow who wished to remain anonymous admitted that a large purple gorilla was still at large."