Actually there are often times where using dual monitors vs. one single large panel.
Take debugging for example; even on a large screen it's often hard to debug a program, especially if you have modal dialogs, and coding PHP or even plain HTML is just a lot easier when the screens are independent (you can be SURE that any debuggers you have will remain in view and that screen won't be taken over by a rogue window or dialogue), and ditto for working with graphics and video. I welcome the new DVI standard but only because I refuse to ditch my high-resolution CRTs for low-resolution (1920x1200) LCD monitors. When LCD resolutions match CRTs without tying up multiple monitor ports, I'll switch in a flash. I will STILL want to run two independent monitors in that case.
There are quite a few who are quite public about whom they are. Take the owner of thepiratebay for example - he's hardly anonymous and he's pretty blatent about taunting Microsoft, Sony, Apple, and the like. Even so only a tiny minority will turn to those sources - the vast masses of "consumers" will just buy whatever the media companies dish out, even if it is downsampled, and what's more, they'll LIKE it.
Well when you can't even get a majority to get out to vote, especially at the local level, there is not going to be much improvement. The "special interests" and those supporting them always seem to get out and vote but the average person often can't be bothered to. I expect DRM to infest all electronic devices in the next couple of years because the average "consumer" is lazy and won't care until Joe Sixpack discovers the Plasma television he bought for $7,000 a couple of years ago won't display the upcoming DVD format in Hi-Def. By then it will be far too late for Joe Sixpack to do anything about it. He can plunk down $3,000 for a new Plasma television (prices have obviously come way down) to view Hi-Def, or he can just stay pissed off, buy the media anyhow and watch it at NTSC resolution.
- the VCR had AGC (early models often didn't) and didn't know how to crack it open to adjust it manually
- you have not heard of Sima Copymaster or other notch filters or video processors
- don't buy a VCR with front inputs, which are often not negatively affected by Macrovision.
Also note:
- Editing VCRs (not consumer models with editing features, I'm talking professional VCRs, which often had RS-232 ports for control by other video devices or computers)
- Tape duplicators are unaffected by Macrovision
So in other words, Macrovision was a non-issue to "professional pirates." All Macrovision accomplished was ruining the customer's experience, especially if running it through a television which featured AGC on the video inputs, or ran it through a video receiver, unless those legitimate customers were aware of the options above.
That's why you're supposed to focus on modding really great posts up, and pass by the opinions you disagree with (if you are not mature enough to maintain objectivity while modding), and pass by posts you don't 'get' because sometimes there may be an obscure reference which may seem off topic or even hateful unless you know the context. If in doubt, pass it by. I know I for one would love to see a thread where if the threshold were set to 3 or higher, the thread would consist of more than just 10 worthwhile posts. The system is somewhat broken here because it doesn't show which user modified which post. I'd wager that if such a feature were added, folks would actually follow the stated guidelines because in addition to meta-moderation hopefully fixing the bad moderation, everyone would know who the jerks are who are trying to ruin this site.
Nice idea, but, how much money? If I create some new and cool that everyone loves, I can only make $1M? $10M? $100M? How much is too much? Is that profit or net? What if, like a movie, it cost me $100M to make, then how much before it goes PD?
If you make a big budget movie, you will make sure that all but the savvy established actors will be promised "net points" because big-studio movies never turn a profit. Salary and bonuses to the production studio are accounted as "cost" and by the time they extract all the gross profit, there IS No net profit. That's how movies generally work, so saying that a movie will profit is just silly. It's almost as bad of a scam (but not quite as bad) as how record labels treat artists.
OMG, the URLs are not Y2.1K compliant. Whatever will Slashdot users do in the 2099/2100 rollover and afterward? They'll be all confoozled when they can't tell whether a DMCA article was posted in 2006 or 2106! The sky will fall, cats will be sleeping with dogs, and men will be marrying men. Oh the horror!
No, my first account was a seven-digit number. *shrug* And as far as my complaint getting modded down, that would be well-deserved, but my comment about the article should not have been modded flamebait, because it was NOT flamebait.
Focus on modding up, not down. And don't mis-use the "Flamebait" tag. I thought my post was pretty darn insightful, if off topic, which might possibly be a better selection than flamebait.\
And, it's unlikely that Quickbooks will run as Limited User in Vista. See the URL in my sig (it is not my site, just conveniently appropriate for this thread)
Could they possibly make that "article" any more annoying? They'd have been better-served to turn it into a flash-animated slide show. I'm not going to click all the way through that thing.
Either put it all on one or two pages (interspersed with ads if you must), or put it into a slide show if the article is written as a slide show.
I hope this means that Ray-o-Vac will be bringing back their secondary alkaline "Renewal" line (Alkalines designed to be recharged). They can be recharged at LEAST 25 times (more usually hundreds of times if you don't deep cycle them) and cost about the same as conventional alkalines.
I haven't purchased any Ray-O-Vac products since they discontinued the Renewal line - since I HAVE to buy NiMH if I want a rechargable battery option, I buy Energizer instead.
Anyways, I can see where they got the idea of a wallpaper cleaner from, if anybody's ever kneeded dough when making bread your fingernails and any dirt on your fingers dissapears:)
I know about you now, and wouldn't eat anything you cook. You see, most people know to wash their hands before preparing food.;)
Damn it! And I wasted bandwidth downloading Laserdisc rips because Lucas insisted very emphatically that he will never, ever release the original unmolested films on DVD. Eh, I'll buy them anyhow.
Er, no. Have you ever read a textpad file in an editor? There is no real standard for margins, embedding images, padding, or anything else. It's also fugly as hell and a pain in the ass to write a proper parser to handle the various implementations of RTF, and if you open a document in an incomplete RTF implementation and save it back out, or copy & paste between two different richedit controls, you can run into some curious formatting glitches. XML is a heck of a lot more logical for a document format.
Pardon my disdain for RTF, I've had to edit "mission critical" documents in textpad for a past employer when M$ Word broke an RTF for which there was no backup (why was there no backup? The IT department at the time consisted of a paper MCSE who thought he was God. Need I say more?)
8. Preoccupation with Google. Microsoft is too easily distracted by successful companies who are not competitors. There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se. So the company obsesses on what Google is doing rather than concentrating on important Microsoft projects. Now Microsoft is about to do a deal with Yahoo to flank Google. This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size.
He just doesn't get it. He really doesn't. Google hired an engineer Microsoft did not want Google to hire. *throws chair* Steve Ballmer is going to fscking kill Google!!!111!!!
It sure would. Well, such things would be visible to thermal imaging cameras (chilled thermal imagnig cameras, to be precise, not the "cheap" $8,000 units), and as far as near-infrared (940nm-950nm cameras which use conventional CCDs and optics) are concerned, those rely on reflected IR in the close-to-visible spectrum rather than far-IR thermal radiation, so it would depend on a) how reflective is the surrounding surface (mud, sand, etc. are often not very reflective in that region, vegetation is extremely reflective - I get to play with IR cameras and emitters a LOT). Paints and the camoflauge/refractor substrate will have to be designed with both ambient IR (such as from starlight and atmospheric phenomena) and directed IR (such as ExtremeCCTV's special ops cameras which use IR lasers for active illumination) in mind - and it's tough to come up with a material which does not compromise in one of those three (visible, near-IR, far-IR) characteristics. What may be ideal for hiding visibility may stick out like a sore thumb for any IR range, even at a 20km range.
You'd be surprised at just how many "dark" shirts look white in IR conditions and how much "light" clothing appears dark, and you'd be surprised at all of the security features American bills incorporate, in IR and UV spectra as well as visible. The world looks very different in those spectra.
No, but a mosaic of microscopic convex mirrors might. The effect is such that you get the kind of "invisibility" that a chameleon does; the material would refract (or in the case of mirrors reflect) a blending of colours from surrounding objects, such that when an object is motionless it becomes very hard to pick out from the background due to the lack of contrast. It might be similar in appearance to the "invisibility" you see in the Predator movies. Not 100% invisible, but more of a shimmering, blended-in look, only it would not be transparent. If an object were to move behind the camoflauged object, you would immediately be able to pick it out from the background and target it. That's my guess, anyhow.
A single mirror wouldn't cut it - if a flat mirror, you'd see a singular object from elsewhere in the region, or if a convex mirror, you'd see yourself in the mirror, along with your background. It would stand right out from the background, like an AC troll in an otherwise-reasonable discussion.;)
Actually, although OOo may have some serious performance issues, it is superior to Microsoft Office in quite a few ways:
* OpenOffice.org's GUI is better in some respects
- text layouts in spreadsheet cells for example
- Conditional styling is slightly more intuitive in OOo
- Named styles is a beautiful thing
- Cropping is different than MS office's, but in some ways easier for novices to master
- I've found that novices find avery label templates in OOo easier than Microsoft's. I found it initially confusing, having been so accustomed to Microsoft's way of doing it for so long.
- Graphing in OOo has a slightly less steep learning curve than M$ Office
- External data sources are so easy even a moron can pull data from a database into an OOo document and interact with a database. "Dragondrops" (read it aloud) work really well there!:)
* OpenOffice compatibility with M$ Office may not be perfect, but it's darn good, especially if you compare it to OOo 1.x's dreadful MS Office filters. It allows most users a painless migration path by allowing them to import the vast majority of their legacy data seamlessly with little to no formatting loss.
Is OOo right for everyone? of course not. Just as a BFH is not the right tool for every job (sometimes a screwdriver or wrench is the best solution), Microsoft Office Pro just might be the ideal solution for a particular job, even in light of the $400 difference in price (Free vs. $400).
OOo's performance issues, though, requires at minimum a partial rearchitecture and rewrite to resolve. When dealing with moderate-sized formatted spreadsheets (multiple worksheets with 1200 hyperlinked rows for example) can take 42 minutes to a couple of HOURS to open, where Microsoft Office can open the same spreadsheets in 10 seconds (or 30 seconds for really large ones), and I've found that Office actually opens the spreadsheets FASTER under wine than under Windows, sometimes cutting the file open time by 1/3 or more than natively under Windows. I looked into addressing this issue at my company since the OOo team has repeatedly closed these defect reports as unimportant and their comments on the closing is essentially that adding more features is more interesting that addressing bugs. I looked at the project for a couple of hours and I was aghast at how disorganized the project is. I had my architect look at it and he just rolled his eyes at the code. Can you say spaghetti? Maybe it's improved a bit since then, but I doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there are often times where using dual monitors vs. one single large panel.
Take debugging for example; even on a large screen it's often hard to debug a program, especially if you have modal dialogs, and coding PHP or even plain HTML is just a lot easier when the screens are independent (you can be SURE that any debuggers you have will remain in view and that screen won't be taken over by a rogue window or dialogue), and ditto for working with graphics and video. I welcome the new DVI standard but only because I refuse to ditch my high-resolution CRTs for low-resolution (1920x1200) LCD monitors. When LCD resolutions match CRTs without tying up multiple monitor ports, I'll switch in a flash. I will STILL want to run two independent monitors in that case.
Actually, if you compare to the rest of the industry, Apple's DRM solution is by far the most reasonable.
There are quite a few who are quite public about whom they are. Take the owner of thepiratebay for example - he's hardly anonymous and he's pretty blatent about taunting Microsoft, Sony, Apple, and the like. Even so only a tiny minority will turn to those sources - the vast masses of "consumers" will just buy whatever the media companies dish out, even if it is downsampled, and what's more, they'll LIKE it.
Well when you can't even get a majority to get out to vote, especially at the local level, there is not going to be much improvement. The "special interests" and those supporting them always seem to get out and vote but the average person often can't be bothered to. I expect DRM to infest all electronic devices in the next couple of years because the average "consumer" is lazy and won't care until Joe Sixpack discovers the Plasma television he bought for $7,000 a couple of years ago won't display the upcoming DVD format in Hi-Def. By then it will be far too late for Joe Sixpack to do anything about it. He can plunk down $3,000 for a new Plasma television (prices have obviously come way down) to view Hi-Def, or he can just stay pissed off, buy the media anyhow and watch it at NTSC resolution.
Only if:
- the VCR had AGC (early models often didn't) and didn't know how to crack it open to adjust it manually
- you have not heard of Sima Copymaster or other notch filters or video processors
- don't buy a VCR with front inputs, which are often not negatively affected by Macrovision.
Also note:
- Editing VCRs (not consumer models with editing features, I'm talking professional VCRs, which often had RS-232 ports for control by other video devices or computers)
- Tape duplicators are unaffected by Macrovision
So in other words, Macrovision was a non-issue to "professional pirates." All Macrovision accomplished was ruining the customer's experience, especially if running it through a television which featured AGC on the video inputs, or ran it through a video receiver, unless those legitimate customers were aware of the options above.
That's why you're supposed to focus on modding really great posts up, and pass by the opinions you disagree with (if you are not mature enough to maintain objectivity while modding), and pass by posts you don't 'get' because sometimes there may be an obscure reference which may seem off topic or even hateful unless you know the context. If in doubt, pass it by. I know I for one would love to see a thread where if the threshold were set to 3 or higher, the thread would consist of more than just 10 worthwhile posts. The system is somewhat broken here because it doesn't show which user modified which post. I'd wager that if such a feature were added, folks would actually follow the stated guidelines because in addition to meta-moderation hopefully fixing the bad moderation, everyone would know who the jerks are who are trying to ruin this site.
If you make a big budget movie, you will make sure that all but the savvy established actors will be promised "net points" because big-studio movies never turn a profit. Salary and bonuses to the production studio are accounted as "cost" and by the time they extract all the gross profit, there IS No net profit. That's how movies generally work, so saying that a movie will profit is just silly. It's almost as bad of a scam (but not quite as bad) as how record labels treat artists.
OMG, the URLs are not Y2.1K compliant. Whatever will Slashdot users do in the 2099/2100 rollover and afterward? They'll be all confoozled when they can't tell whether a DMCA article was posted in 2006 or 2106! The sky will fall, cats will be sleeping with dogs, and men will be marrying men. Oh the horror!
That was not flamebait either, off-topic at worst. We can continue this until you run out of mod points.
No, my first account was a seven-digit number. *shrug* And as far as my complaint getting modded down, that would be well-deserved, but my comment about the article should not have been modded flamebait, because it was NOT flamebait.
How the FUCK is that flamebait?
Focus on modding up, not down. And don't mis-use the "Flamebait" tag. I thought my post was pretty darn insightful, if off topic, which might possibly be a better selection than flamebait.\
Don't throw away your mod points, n00b.
And, it's unlikely that Quickbooks will run as Limited User in Vista. See the URL in my sig (it is not my site, just conveniently appropriate for this thread)
Could they possibly make that "article" any more annoying? They'd have been better-served to turn it into a flash-animated slide show. I'm not going to click all the way through that thing.
Either put it all on one or two pages (interspersed with ads if you must), or put it into a slide show if the article is written as a slide show.
Bush and other proponents of the Patriot Act would have you believe otherwise.
The bright person would bring extra batteries regardless. :)
I hope this means that Ray-o-Vac will be bringing back their secondary alkaline "Renewal" line (Alkalines designed to be recharged). They can be recharged at LEAST 25 times (more usually hundreds of times if you don't deep cycle them) and cost about the same as conventional alkalines.
I haven't purchased any Ray-O-Vac products since they discontinued the Renewal line - since I HAVE to buy NiMH if I want a rechargable battery option, I buy Energizer instead.
I know about you now, and wouldn't eat anything you cook. You see, most people know to wash their hands before preparing food.
Sorry couldn't resist. . .
Damn it! And I wasted bandwidth downloading Laserdisc rips because Lucas insisted very emphatically that he will never, ever release the original unmolested films on DVD. Eh, I'll buy them anyhow.
Aside from addresses on envelopes, we massholes refer to Massachusetts as Mass. Thank you for playing though. ;)
Er, no. Have you ever read a textpad file in an editor? There is no real standard for margins, embedding images, padding, or anything else. It's also fugly as hell and a pain in the ass to write a proper parser to handle the various implementations of RTF, and if you open a document in an incomplete RTF implementation and save it back out, or copy & paste between two different richedit controls, you can run into some curious formatting glitches. XML is a heck of a lot more logical for a document format.
Pardon my disdain for RTF, I've had to edit "mission critical" documents in textpad for a past employer when M$ Word broke an RTF for which there was no backup (why was there no backup? The IT department at the time consisted of a paper MCSE who thought he was God. Need I say more?)
He just doesn't get it. He really doesn't. Google hired an engineer Microsoft did not want Google to hire. *throws chair* Steve Ballmer is going to fscking kill Google!!!111!!!
It sure would. Well, such things would be visible to thermal imaging cameras (chilled thermal imagnig cameras, to be precise, not the "cheap" $8,000 units), and as far as near-infrared (940nm-950nm cameras which use conventional CCDs and optics) are concerned, those rely on reflected IR in the close-to-visible spectrum rather than far-IR thermal radiation, so it would depend on a) how reflective is the surrounding surface (mud, sand, etc. are often not very reflective in that region, vegetation is extremely reflective - I get to play with IR cameras and emitters a LOT). Paints and the camoflauge/refractor substrate will have to be designed with both ambient IR (such as from starlight and atmospheric phenomena) and directed IR (such as ExtremeCCTV's special ops cameras which use IR lasers for active illumination) in mind - and it's tough to come up with a material which does not compromise in one of those three (visible, near-IR, far-IR) characteristics. What may be ideal for hiding visibility may stick out like a sore thumb for any IR range, even at a 20km range.
You'd be surprised at just how many "dark" shirts look white in IR conditions and how much "light" clothing appears dark, and you'd be surprised at all of the security features American bills incorporate, in IR and UV spectra as well as visible. The world looks very different in those spectra.
No, but a mosaic of microscopic convex mirrors might. The effect is such that you get the kind of "invisibility" that a chameleon does; the material would refract (or in the case of mirrors reflect) a blending of colours from surrounding objects, such that when an object is motionless it becomes very hard to pick out from the background due to the lack of contrast. It might be similar in appearance to the "invisibility" you see in the Predator movies. Not 100% invisible, but more of a shimmering, blended-in look, only it would not be transparent. If an object were to move behind the camoflauged object, you would immediately be able to pick it out from the background and target it. That's my guess, anyhow.
;)
A single mirror wouldn't cut it - if a flat mirror, you'd see a singular object from elsewhere in the region, or if a convex mirror, you'd see yourself in the mirror, along with your background. It would stand right out from the background, like an AC troll in an otherwise-reasonable discussion.
Slashdotters already have the power of invisibility. They can snipe other users with impunity via the Anonymous Coward feature. ;)
Actually, although OOo may have some serious performance issues, it is superior to Microsoft Office in quite a few ways:
:)
* OpenOffice.org's GUI is better in some respects
- text layouts in spreadsheet cells for example
- Conditional styling is slightly more intuitive in OOo
- Named styles is a beautiful thing
- Cropping is different than MS office's, but in some ways easier for novices to master
- I've found that novices find avery label templates in OOo easier than Microsoft's. I found it initially confusing, having been so accustomed to Microsoft's way of doing it for so long.
- Graphing in OOo has a slightly less steep learning curve than M$ Office
- External data sources are so easy even a moron can pull data from a database into an OOo document and interact with a database. "Dragondrops" (read it aloud) work really well there!
* OpenOffice compatibility with M$ Office may not be perfect, but it's darn good, especially if you compare it to OOo 1.x's dreadful MS Office filters. It allows most users a painless migration path by allowing them to import the vast majority of their legacy data seamlessly with little to no formatting loss.
Is OOo right for everyone? of course not. Just as a BFH is not the right tool for every job (sometimes a screwdriver or wrench is the best solution), Microsoft Office Pro just might be the ideal solution for a particular job, even in light of the $400 difference in price (Free vs. $400).
OOo's performance issues, though, requires at minimum a partial rearchitecture and rewrite to resolve. When dealing with moderate-sized formatted spreadsheets (multiple worksheets with 1200 hyperlinked rows for example) can take 42 minutes to a couple of HOURS to open, where Microsoft Office can open the same spreadsheets in 10 seconds (or 30 seconds for really large ones), and I've found that Office actually opens the spreadsheets FASTER under wine than under Windows, sometimes cutting the file open time by 1/3 or more than natively under Windows. I looked into addressing this issue at my company since the OOo team has repeatedly closed these defect reports as unimportant and their comments on the closing is essentially that adding more features is more interesting that addressing bugs. I looked at the project for a couple of hours and I was aghast at how disorganized the project is. I had my architect look at it and he just rolled his eyes at the code. Can you say spaghetti? Maybe it's improved a bit since then, but I doubt it.