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Comment Good enough for Knuth and TeX (Score 2) 492

The only software tools which I have found as reliable and pleasant to use as TeX (which is said to be so full of cutting edge techinique to have revealedbugs in every Pascal compiler used to compile it) were WriteNow (~100,000 lines of assembly) and Altsys Virtuoso (Objective-C w/ NeXTstep frameworks).

Comment Re:Why can't I buy an aftermarket chassis? (Score 1) 229

I was very sad when NeXT went under and I couldn't get a third (second upgrade) motherboard for my Cube.

Have you considered designing / machining the parts? There are replacement laptop hinges which are pretty affordable --- if you picked one from a recent model it'd probably still be available if you needed a replacement.

Comment We're supposed to be the good guys (Score 1) 181

We need to limit our actions to those which:

  - increase security
  - improve communications and transparency
  - improve access

Monitoring communications has to come after that --- the whole point to a society is to maintain and increase human dignity --- any action by a government which doesn't do this is an absolute travesty and should be prosecuted as a criminal act.

Comment It will empower the people who own/direct it (Score 1) 417

the people who are paying for the development and paying the power bills. Everyone else will be viewed as just a resource to be exploited.

Fictional take on this --- Marshall Brain's novella _Manna_ --- available free on-line: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

The first half seems all-too-likely, the second, likely impossible.

Comment I'd like to buy one (Score 1) 101

I've been a big believer in pen computing since reading Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ and using a Koala Pad graphics tablet attached to a Commodore 64 in high school.

Reasons I prefer tablets w/ a stylus:

  - drawing
  - note-taking
  - annotation
  - more efficient usage of some programs, esp. those which can be configured w/ pie menus or menu structures which can become gestural (Punch in Altsys Virtuoso was a gesture for me on my Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet attached to my NeXT Cube)
  - lighter weight / smaller --- currently trying to ``upgrade'' to a ThinkPad x61 Tablet (convertible) from a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 slate and the former won't fit in my old laptop bag.

Almost bought an Asus Vivotab Note 8, and would've bought the Microsoft Surface 2 from sales this past weekend, but didn't. Concerns I had:

  - poor build quality for the Asus --- there's a DIY fix posted for the digitizer ceasing to work
  - standard LCD, not daylight viewable
  - the Surface 2 which was on sale was the RT model, so can't run Macromedia Freehand --- the Pro 2 was out-of-stock

I'd be sleeping on the couch tonight if someone would make a pen slate which:

  - ran either Mac OS X or Windows --- or if there was a drawing program for Android as nice as Macromedia Freehand
  - was a pen slate w/ a Wacom digitizer
  - had a daylight-viewable display (transflective LCD or better) --- I use my machine as a map reader when traveling and to control my CNC mill on the back porch
  - had a resolution higher than 1024 x 768 and was not much larger than a letter-sized notepad

Comment Re:PDF? PDF??? (Score 1) 62

PDF was open enough from the beginning to have its specification available in print from the days of Acrobat 1.0: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pd...

Here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pd...

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/con... --- for some reason they don't have the first edition available (not that it's all that useful these days).

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