Open concept floor plans don't help.

While they are popular for the visual openness and ability for light to be everywhere, they also make it so that sound anywhere makes it to you. There's a lot more competing audio than if you're viewing in a dedicated room with limited entry/exit that can be blocked to mute the other sounds.

Combine that with volume levels that are normalized for the explosions and music interludes, the scenes where the people are whispering to each other don't rise above the sound of someone in your own house running the sink around the corner in the kitchen.

There isn't even a HUGE initial cost difference. I have a related, smaller capacity model (3170CDW) that I got from Staples for around $200 a few years ago.

It happily accepts the off-brand toner I've put in it with no perceptible loss in quality, does both PCL and PS printing, connects with standard CUPS drivers (so it basically works on anything with no need to install special drivers and no fear of it becoming unsupported with new OS releases). It acceptably prints photos in the context of a report, but if I want a photo on real photo paper, I just order them online or print them at a kiosk for cheaper than getting the special photo paper anyway.

No, it doesn't have a scanner - which would be useful one or two times a year, maybe. It doesn't have a fax, so if I ever find myself trapped in the 1990's with it, I'm going to be totally out of luck, though.

I could see this going either way. It could be a conscious decision for a money grab, or it could just be a case of not having the features encapsulated enough. A fault from any one may create a blocking condition in their software until the fault is cleared.

Years ago, I got an all-in-one for free that was going to be thrown out because there was a problem with one of the print heads. I just wanted the paperport scanning functionality, but the print head fault completely blocked the device from doing anything, as the only way to get to the menus would have been to clear the fault. The cost of repair wasn't worth it, so more content to the electronic scrap heap.

It was typical for a coding book, to contain broken code?

There were a lot of issues in delivering code via print back in those days. It wasn't like today where you could easily just share digital source files, every system used their own storage formats, and there wasn't a (functional) "net" to transfer files over. Program source files were often re-typed into a word processor by the publishers to get them into their system of choice.

Even if you were to digitally transfer the file to the publisher (via modem), if they moved to a different system for typesetting, they still might not render properly. For example, Atari computers used ATASCII characters (mostly ASCII, but with special Atari charcters as well). Other systems didn't understand the ATASCII characters and would substitute from their local character set. So, if you had a source file with something like the ATASCII "clear screen" character in your original source, it most likely wouldn't print out in the book/magazine correctly, leaving you with code that either didn't work, or behaved differently than expected.

Some magazines would solve this by just taking native printouts and physically cutting/pasting them into the magazines. You'd see that source for each system came from a different printer (some dot-matrix, some daisy wheel, etc.), so that they could work around character issues by printing from each system natively.

They also started introducing a checksum system for entering code. Each line would have a 2-character code printed next to it, and if you entered code using their entry system, it would calculate the checksum of what you entered and you could compare checksums to see if you got it right. Though, sometimes there were errors in the checksums themselves, so you'd sometimes swear you got everything right, but it would still give you the wrong checksum.

When you entered code from a magazine, and it actually ran, you felt great - like you really accomplished something.

Well, for one thing, Blender isn't a parametric CAD application, it's a polygon modeler geared toward animation. So, for the types of things you'd make in OpenSCAD, I wouldn't pick Blender as my first choice. (Rendered images and animations are another story.)

If you want to stay within open source CAD apps, you'd be better off looking into FreeCAD or SolveSpace for designing 3D printed parts. (Though, if you are hindered by Blender's UI, I don't think you're going to love FreeCAD.)

Vinyl cutters have been around for quite a while in the sign industry. Cricut just puts a "friendly" face on them and markets them toward home crafters. They don't look "industrial" and fit in a "craft room."

Even supplies for them are outrageously overpriced. You can buy small rolls of vinyl at the craft store that measure about a foot by three feet for more than I pay for a 10 yard roll of 15" vinyl from sign supply stores.

You can get an entry-level industrial vinyl cutter for about $400. That's more than the entry-level Cricut, but about the same as the fancier models. But, this machine will cut material much larger, and not be locked down to single owner only.
https://signwarehouse.com/prod...
It just won't look as "cute" sitting in the corner of your dining room.

Let me get this straight. So, according to the author, the competition should have nothing to worry about ... when a conglomorate that manages some of the most successful food brands ... is in a partnership to produce a product, because it has a funny name ... even though they made their billions largely on the back of sales of sugar water named "Pepsi."

If you don't like the software, that's fine. You do you.

But one of them actually works correctly for the task I often do, the other doesn't. That's why I prefer one.

This import wizard only happens when you open from the file menu AND it detects the file as delimited (at least on my system - Excel 16/Mac) otherwise it seems to open the file using defaults.

It DOES NOT present options if:
- you open the file from the standard OS handling for the file type or launch it from another app (eg. open attachment in email)
- you open the file using a context-click "Open With" from the OS
- the file is incorrectly delimited for the extension (tab delimited but the extension is CSV instead of TSV)

Case 1 is the far more common issue, as if you send a CSV file, most people will either launch it directly from their email client, or save it and double-click from their desktop/downloads/etc. In that case they are never presented with any options and get the file mangled before they even get to the data.

This is actually why I prefer using LibreOffice over Excel, even though I have Excel provided for me. Libre does a much better job of handling CSV/TSV files - always bringing up the import dialog with options instead of just reading the file with defaults.

It makes it much easier and more reliable when I need to export subsets of data from the database and get it to "office workers" who need to use it.

I have Illustrator, but also use Inkscape. I like it specifically when I need to do graphics that will be delivered as SVG, as the ability to edit the document DOM directly is helpful. I also like some of the path tools for cleaning up paths that I will eventually cut on a vinyl cutter (blade).

However, one thing that neither Inkscape or Affinity Designer do that Illustrator DOES is handle spot color separations. They have CYMK separations, but not the ability to separate to spot color. This is absolutely required for applications that aren't using process color inks (like t-shirt screen printing) or when printing inks beyond the 4-ink CMYK palette (such as metallics or varnishes) as there is no way to specify the spot areas without doing some weird wrangling manually by doing things on separate layers and outputting them selectively yourself. But this means you need to manually manage things like knock-outs and overprints, so it isn't really all that feasible.

For people that don't need that functionality, however, both are great tools.

Given the abundance of freely available fonts ... for all tastes and purposes, I clearly see no reason to ever buy a commercial one.

This just means that you don't know what kerning is, probably don't need or use ligatures, don't reproduce the font at very large sizes, and don't need to ever convert the font to tool paths (such as a cutter, or router).

If you did, you would know that there is a WORLD of difference between most freebie fonts and ones that have been painstakingly worked over.

It's too bad the news sites you keep open don't "syndicate" their content. Then someone could devise a "really simple" way to aggregate this content. I think this "really simple syndication" would be an excellent way to get a "rich site summary" without needing a million tabs.

All of you (non-commercial) people on the tweetspaces ... you now need to start using those hashtags for all sorts of unsavory things. If they're going to be that way about it, make sure the tags are useless.

Did they learn nothing from the whole "Santorum" debacle?

We're all used to the summaries leaving out important information, but if you're going to write a whole article focusing on the "Long Term Support" you should be expected to at least mention what "long term" means for the project in question. (Apparently, 2 years.)

https://github.com/nodejs/LTS#...