Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Outdoor viewable display? (Score 1) 316

Does anyone make one?

I still haven't found a replacement for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 (I use it as a map-reader when travelling, and to control my Shapeoko (hobby-level CNC mill) when I'm using it on my back porch) --- the transflective display seems the best option, but no one seems to be making units w/ it outside of ruggedized units for the police and military (which are heavier than I'd prefer).

Comment Loudest sound in the world (Score 1) 584

hearing ``click'' when you want to hear ``bang''.

How many instances will there be of a firearm refusing to fire and thus endangering the life of the user?

How many of those 4,000 children had firearms safety training?

Given that shooting is the only academic sport which has _never_ had an injury in the U.S., why not mandate that it be a part of the curriculum, and that all children receive firearms safety education appropriate to their age each year?

It's just like requiring backup cameras on cars --- it might prevent a handful of injuries statistically (and 4,000 incidents for over 300,000,000 firearms is rather a small handful, no?) --- but it will increase the expense for everyone.

Comment Re:Only Creative Cloud? (Score 2) 74

The problem is, Adobe has bought up so much of the industry that they have a huge warchest of patents.

They also aren't terribly nice about sharing information to competitors --- look at how poorly FreeHand handled .pdfs for one example --- the devs complained that Adobe was _not_ forthcoming about aspects of the format which were needed to improve it.

Comment Re:The best part... (Score 2) 164

It's nice that there are alternatives for some of the apps, but things don't look so good for other apps:

  - InDesign --- Quark still hasn't caught back up, and Scribus is painful to use, w/ bizarre feature limitations --- I use LyX and xelatex (and moving to lualatex) instead, but not many people are willing to do that
  - Illustrator --- I'd rather have FreeHand, but still find Illustrator more capable than Corel Draw and Inkscape
  - PhotoShop --- fortunately, these are just pixel files, so anything will work, but the blunt truth is, if one is billing by the hour, you're probably leaving money on the table if you're not using PhotoShop

&c.

Comment Re:The best part... (Score 1) 164

The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure that Adobe has had this in the works for over a decade now --- it's pretty obvious that for each application they identified a couple of killer features and set them aside to not be implemented for any version w/ perpetual licensing, implementing them only after the move to pay-as-you-go.

It also makes the ``release'' of CS2 when the activation servers were taken off-line look like an effort to take the wind out of the sails of competing products, incl. free and opensource ones.

Comment -2000 lines of code (was Re:Average) (Score 5, Interesting) 466

My favourite take on lines of code as a metric is from the early days of the Macintosh:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

Comment Re:In 3, 2, 1... (Score 4, Insightful) 224

``Pascal as defined was not suitable for large projects...''

Unless of course, one is Dr. Donald Knuth, then one creates a brand new programming paradigm: http://www.literateprogramming...

and writes programs such as TeX: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archiv...

Somewhere, I have a copy of the Oberon language manual printed out --- it's quite cool, and very concise.

Comment Makes superstition look good (Score 4, Interesting) 83

Pretty soon all criminals, insurgents, terrorists and revolutionaries will find themselves practicing the same sort of precautions people used to use to protect themselves against ``witchcraft'':

  - not allowing any hair (or skin cells) to be taken by another
  - not allowing any instance of bleeding to stain anywhere someone else might have access to it
  - not allowing their picture to be taken, lest it steal their soul

Slashdot Top Deals

<<<<< EVACUATION ROUTE <<<<<

Working...