Posts by a__d

Re: So how do "modern monitors" do it?

That would be an effective way to achieve the goal. For printed color, hexachrome added green and orange to the traditional cyan, magenta, yellow and black (kroma), in order to increase the possible gamut.

Re: Where is Clippy!

Be careful what you wish for... :)

https://www.smore.com/clippy-js

If it makes you feel any better, I've been slow discovering the horrors of my house wiring. Every socket has 3 pins, but opening them up shows them to have only 2 wires - live and neutral, with an additional wire joining the ground and neutral pins. We lost 2 TVs, numerous cable TV boxes and 2 computers to power surges before this became apparent. Also, I recently discovered that our lighting circuit was wired also to the dishwasher, fridge and microwave, meaning that the circuit breaker trips if you run the dishwasher and the microwave at the same time, and all the lights go out. I found one plug never worked, and when I traced the wire back, I found the wire to that circuit was covered in paint. Stripping the paint off and refitting the circuit got that working (so I can now move the .microwave to another circuit). Oh and the security light and sprinkler pump share a circuit, so if the sprinklers come on in the dark, and cat walks across the lawn making the light come on, the breaker trips and both cut out. But the electric is nothing to the horrors we found with the plumbing (such as the waste drain from the washing machine that was just a pipe that went into the ground- not a French drain, just a (blocked) pipe to nowhere...

Re: "Broadcast TV fee" has not existed for decades

I do think there should be some regulation on the local tv stations who are responsible for distributing network TV. In many cities, the signal is almost impossible to pick up, forcing many to be forced into the cable trap if they want just the basic channels. Out here in the suburbs, I get a great HD signal with an external antenna, but in the city, especially in an apartment, the signal is almost un-pick-up-able. Networks should be held to account: if the transmitter they provide cannot provide a signal that can be reasonable received using equipment appropriate to the type of residence (I.e. A portable antenna in an apartment), anywhere within the area they are responsible for broadcasting to, then the cost of basic cable should be paid for by the stations representing the networks.

Re: sounds familiar

Very true: I suspect that it was more a question of market size and demographic: mac office users are a much smaller test audience, but one that doesn't shy away from pointing out mistakes in an office implementation (Word 6 for Mac, was not well received): so MS have for years been testing out feature ideas in the mac version, which usually comes out about a year before it's windows counterpart. They're often just germs of ideas (the 2006 office v.X formatting palette was like a portrait prototype of the 2007 ribbon, for example: a fix was needed for the toolbar and "selective" menu insanity in 2006 which led to so many support incidents, and problems displaying the UK on small screens, but the collapsing vertical panel approach in v.X proved ungainly and took up too much horizontal space on screen: especially if you were using track changes - and the idea of making it fade was just distracting, it didn't allow you to see more screen, which makes the ribbon a good evolution to a best of both worlds approach by taking the categorized buttons idea but using the toolbar / menu area at the top of the screen, rather than the document canvas, which is so much more important to users in most of the key office apps). And, of course, if they have to pull back a feature in the mac version because it isn't well received, some fanboys will bitch, but it's not like you're upsetting millions of enterprise users, or causing a Windows vista / 8 style industry panic... (As has been seen in the OS: apple users soon came around to admin based application permissions (UAC) and losing their apple menu (start menu)) - and that's the risk of this approach: perhaps Apple users have a different degree of pragmatism to their windows counterparts, or perhaps like being told what to think by a not-1984-like-at-all computer manufacturer to a greater degree than the rest of the it using world...