Have fun monetizing your project w/o being able to bill U.S. clients.

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.

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.

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.

The first CD I ever bought was Bob Dylan's _Real Live_ back in 1984 --- still plays fine.

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.

Contemporary industrial farming practices consume (via combustion or conversion into fertilizer) 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for every 1 calorie of food energy produced.

Why don't they require that ID be presented when showing up for the game, and that it match a name used to make the reservation?

You can sell firearms across state lines just fine --- the transaction just has to take place at an FFL in the state-of-residence of the purchaser and be legal in the destination state.

They were made of exceptionally high-quality paper and took fountain pen ink wonderfully --- I've exhausted my supply (which I use for note-taking) and am still looking for a (reasonably-priced) replacement.

``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.

There is a sensor (movement or IR I think) which allows it to determine that a house is occupied so that it can determine when to turn down the thermostat.

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

And can puzzle out all the magic combinations to make it work --- thus far I've managed to get my ThinkPad X61 Tablet:

  - booting OS X 10.6.8
  - sleeping on demand and waking when the lid is opened
  - keyboard and Trackpoint work

The one thing which isn't working is getting the Wacom stylus to work using TabletMagic (I have one of the stupid hybrid models which also has rudimentary touch input) --- I can see it as WACF008, and I've even got it allowing itself to be activated, but it won't allow the pen input to work.

The Japanese government actually contracts for the production of certain handmade saw blades which couldn't be sold profitably so as to ensure that the skills for producing the saws will be taught and passed down to succeeding generations of saw makers.