Slashdot Mirror

Over at deviantART there is a regular stream of reports of 'ripping' - taking someone else's photos and passing them off as your own - in the forums and elsewhere. It's not just amateur photographers who are finding their work being ripped, a lot of professional photographers are being targetted as well. Unfortunately, the culprits are hard to trace down, and the sites that host them are often slow to take action, if they even bother. The only solution, it seems, is to put a large, visible watermark on your pictures, ALL of them - and even then some particularly boneheaded individuals still go and rip them...

-MT.

That is truly awesome!!

This http://www.deviantart.com/view/11794545/ (As I've pimped in another post) is what I was able to take from my balcony in Ottawa.

While it might not be that great, I took this picture(s) on my balcony in Ottawa. You might like it more.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/11794545/

Set the camera up on a tripod and let it do all the work. :)

'Betweening' works as long as you don't rely on big tweens, and you can make it look good, but it takes fooooorever. I think it'd be nice if someone sold small mannequins with joint sensors to make life easier.

But on that note I'd like to point out something: If you're not already familiar with designing characters, then 3d programs will NOT boost your ability much at all. Even with a program as simple as Poser, you'll find that posing a character realistically is half the battle, and waaay more complicated than the average layman notices. I can't even count how many pictures I've seen where the artist (who must have tried very hard in spite) put in a Poser character and it just came out looking like a statue.

I'm afraid that, chances are, if you can't sketch a decent character (a few times, consistently) on paper, then you won't get far using a 3d program. Not to say computers don't help by any means (heck, I do all my drawings with a tablet), but they're a tool just like a pencil and paper; it's easier than chiseling your work into a cave wall, but they're not going to hand you the right skills right up front.

These sorts of programs were never known to make pictures better or even easier because:

- If you can't model, using presets will make your picture look generic.
- If you can, it means you have to design the character from every angle anyway.
- Even after that, I find that point-and-clicking the pose, facial expression, camera and lights can be a lot more tedious than drawing in Photoshop or on paper.
- I was modeling things for a long time, and I find it way easier, faster, more precise and less mechanical to just draw the character myself.
- Rendering time.
- Getting the colors right and lighting those colors can really suck.
- It's also impossible to make it perfect. Why? Because the fundamental coloring system used by 3d programs is flawed. In real life, when you place a yellow glass in front of a blue glass, or mix blue and yellow paints and you get the color green. In a computer, when you place a virtual yellow glass or 50% transparent yellow in front of blue, what color do you get? Gray. The method computers are using to blend colors is incorrect as they blend the RGB, not the HSB, so all colors will be grayed. I delve further into phenomenon here: http://www.deviantart.com/view/11426654/
- Why do you want to use a 3d program nearly capable of photo-realism to make lines?!
- if you're doing a comic, you'll have a shitload of post-processing to do to get everything into panels.
- You're looking at a bunch of wire-frame (or OpenGL) previews as you go, not the real thing.

As it stands, 3d apps are ideal for animations, but I'll stick with Photoshop any day for comics or one-shot pictures. 3d apps just aren't sophisticated enough yet, and don't have the ease of use that 2d programs or a simple pencil, paper and scanner have.

The careful Slashdotter who actually follows links will immediately discover my two opinions on the matter.

no leash here... even those baby harnesses are pretty screwed up.

i have, however, given my two year old access to my powershot s400 (almost too big for her hands...) we're putting some of her photos up http://babystony.deviantart.com/.

we got her one of those El Cheapo brand digitals, but it had no os X support so... if anyone knows of a sub-$50 camera that works in os X... give me a shout :p

Your underwear is showing, prettyboy.

Actually, I'm one of those who'll swear by PaintShop Pro. I find Photoshop to be slow, bulky, and I can never find my way around it. Probably because I've been using PsP since version... 3?
It all depends on what exactly you do. My needs for a photo-editing program are mostly due to a devianthobby for photography, other than doing some small graphics for prototype applications (when I'm coding and there's noone else to do it, that is). For that, I find PsP more than enough. I've convinced our graphics designer to make the switch from PhotoShop too. As for GIMP, maybe one day. :)
As for 3D, there'd be those who'd swear by 3D-Studio for years, and for a long time, the rest were just alternatives. Nowadays, Maya is the new star in town, but at least that's a change. :)

Judge my Photography.

I judge your photos to be the high side of average, but they're still better then mine. :o)

http://wiwijumbo.deviantart.com/gallery/

Yes, it takes a while to learn the syntax, as in any other language... but with a little geometry notion you can do very nice things.

Here are a few of my POV experiments:
Cut glass
Dice
Three balls

Yes, it takes a while to learn the syntax, as in any other language... but with a little geometry notion you can do very nice things.

Here are a few of my POV experiments:
Cut glass
Dice
Three balls

Yes, it takes a while to learn the syntax, as in any other language... but with a little geometry notion you can do very nice things.

Here are a few of my POV experiments:
Cut glass
Dice
Three balls

There is so MUCH Sonic fan art on deviant art that it practically deserves its own category.

Since the only Nintendo fan art I've seen on DA is fetish pr0n, I guess that attests to the popularity of the Sonic series.

Me, I was more of a Mario fan.

But there is one player that still waits for its big success; open source games. There are lots of great projects out there that still needs to be finished.

Open source excels in one single area; the code, the software itself. There's a gazillon high quality 3d rendering engines, phisics engines, developement tools, audio codecs and assorted goodies that would make into a great game foundation. Still, the code is nowadays a fraction of all the work involved in a game; sadly we're far away from the days you could code an amazing game by yourself in a basement. Musicians, 3D modelers and artists are the major part.

Oh the other hand, there ARE a lot of very very talented unknown artists (http://www.deviantart.com/ , for example). It can be done, and i would *LOVE* to see someone coordinating an effort into a top notch game. Who knows... there's always room for surprise.

I can start off with The Gate by Endre Barath [Endi]

Walkthrough.

It has been done. Check out The Electrohome. It has no problems with heat or anything. I have been using it for two years now.

Speaking of Spooked, you can see more of Ross Campbell's art here.

How does THIS strike you as changed from explorer's bs ugly ass themed interface. Don't knock litestep untill you use it. (and it's not configured by gui... ooooo) but I agree about cygwin. clunky and hella slower on old machines. As much as I'd LOVE to have bash on my windows boxen, it just doesn't run snappy at ALL.

Deviant Art is a great website and resource for digital art. There are many gifted artist there that have the digital artist's equivalent of an open source community. They share their work and post tutorials. There are many people there that are willing to work for close to nothing just to help a good cause and to get more for their portfolio. Give it a look - Deviant Art

Think you are an artist, try DeviantArt for instance.

Think you can save the world with your engineering prowess than Think Cycle is for you.

Don't go to a brick and mortar universtiy if you are self-motivated it wastes transportation time and money just to begin with. Make sure you balance it with a semi-active social life. I for instance have not talked to another human in 7-10 days working on summer school classes online along with some of my own projects. I am morlock, here me roar.

Think you are an artist, try DeviantArt for instance.

Think you can save the world with your engineering prowess than Think Cycle is for you.

Don't go to a brick and mortar universtiy if you are self-motivated it wastes transportation time and money just to begin with. Make sure you balance it with a semi-active social life. I for instance have not talked to another human in 7-10 days working on summer school classes online along with some of my own projects. I am morlock, here me roar.

Actually, when it comes to computers, I often joke with my friends when I talk of eras past by saying "Those were the good old days... Wait a minute... those days sucked, nevermind."

My first computer (this is going to make me look like even more of a youngun to you) was an Acer with an AMD 486 at 66 MHz. Ohhh, ahhh! heh. 8 whole MB of ram, too. Quake made it hurt, but it actually ran the original Diablo pretty well.

Just for shits, here's a picture of the machine that started it all.

I hadn't hear of Evolvotron -- here's yet another such program and its gallery. It's in C using libsdl.

Here are some photos from Winchester College, UK: Here and one that I took, Here, and Here (colour corrected)

Here are some photos from Winchester College, UK: Here and one that I took, Here, and Here (colour corrected)

OK, I'm quite the avid photographer, and there is a supurb site for posting your pieces and getting critiqued, and you can end up selling them there too, it's www.deviantart.com Which is always amusing to me when I tell people my page there (spoco2.deviantart.com ) as they assume it's all about porn or other such 'deviant' behaviour... it's a great site, with digital and film photographers and all sorts of other artists as well... a great place to hone your skills

OK, I'm quite the avid photographer, and there is a supurb site for posting your pieces and getting critiqued, and you can end up selling them there too, it's www.deviantart.com Which is always amusing to me when I tell people my page there (spoco2.deviantart.com ) as they assume it's all about porn or other such 'deviant' behaviour... it's a great site, with digital and film photographers and all sorts of other artists as well... a great place to hone your skills

Qute was a great Default theme.

In your opinion. Personally I can't stand it, and it's the first thing I change when I install a new version of any Mozilla program. I prefer Noia and Mostly Crystal for Firefox and Thunderbird, and Pinball for Sunbird. They make much better use of toolbar space than Qute.

Also, the obsession with hierarchical tree lists? Is it really necessary to know that my music resides under the "All Music" node? This creates so much dead (not negative, that would mean it's useful) space and nasty horizontal scrollbars. Interface wise the Windows and Office teams at Microsoft have come leaps and bounds with XP and Office 2003, respectively. But the Windows Media Div. seems to be really hung up on the technical bits and providing a shitty user experience. I hope they redesign for the final release. I was really hoping that they'd shape up WMP interface wise with this version. It's the place the player is lacking most. WMP continues to be all geewhiz skinning with absolutely no design discipline. Save that crap for the hobbyists at Deviant Art.

deviantart

Thread over.

Speaking of cumbersome customizations. Takes the cookie as it were.

However, the one plug in I would like to see, is the ability to highlight sections of text and see related articles in a side box. Admittedly, I can do this at the moment through highlighting text, right clicking and then "searching the web", but it would be nice to have the process automated, with the searches linked to the websites raison d'etre.

In other words, if I'm on a science site and I highlight a set of words, the search engine only looks through sites designated as science sites, go to a sports site, the search only looks through sports sites. Basically a context search.

Difficult to program and get right, but I can see it as being another step along the road. After all, I find one of the more enjoyable sides of browsing to be going of at tangents to the actual article I'm reading and finding information, and learning things that I hadn't even considered before hand.

1. Trillian Pro - I use AIM, Y!, ICQ, IRC, and MSN chat clients. I use Trillian to notify me of updates to RSS feeds. I also use it to check POP3 e-mail accounts and Y! and HoTMaiL accounts. I also order my buddy list into Groups and Sub-Groups. Trillian also logs all chats which comes in handy on occasions. I also download the Aikon3 skin for Trillian. Trillian support secure profiles in case you have multiple people using the same install of Trillian.
Trillian website
Aikon 3 website w/Trilliain screenshots

2. Firefox - Light-weight, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing rocks. And the plugins are very useful. All web designers should use the "Web Development" extension for Firefox. It allows you to automatically resize any webpage, disable images, cookies, java, ..., validates, and so much more. Save a lot time for the web devs. The "EditCSS" extension is cool because you can run your own CSS on other people's websites (make Slashdot fit your blog theme). Oh, and the Mozilla Google Toolbar for Firefox is a "must install". (I also install the Google bar for IE).
Firefox website

3. Microsoft Powertoys for XP (TweakUI) - A Microsoft download that allows for extra and powerful control of XP. Basically, it allows you to make some neat changes to your Registry that allows for increased productivity and usability. Tweaking XP made easy.
Microsoft Powertoys website

4. Versaverter - a neat little units converter that came in very helpful during my Engineering education. It has virtually every unit imaginable.
Versaverter website

5. Winamp5 - Light-weight MP3 player. Also play other media formats both audio and video. Skinnable, scalable, dockable, and extendable. I use only this program to playback MP3's. I like docking my Winamp screen at the bottom of my monitor. It's only about 20 pixels high. I also like right-clicking an MP3 folder and selecting Play in Winamp.
Winamp website

6. BS Player - Light-weight Video player. Playback video in half-time, double-time, resizable video screen, skinnable, commandline support, and more. My favorite video media player as I haven't found a player that gives me more control of the video I am watching.
BS Player website

7. Colorpad - tiny little .exe and GUI eyedropper utility. Use the eyedropper to get the HEX or HTML value of any pixel on screen. I don't think there's any current support for this app. Still, it's very handy and takes up little screen area with the right skin.
Colorpad @ Deviant Art

8. Winzip - compress and decompress files. Duh.
Winzip website

9. TravelAxe - Find cheap hotels from around the world. Puts information from popular travel websites into a sortable spreadsheet. Sorts by price, 1,2,3,4,5 Star rating, and more.
TravelAxe website

10. Musicmatch Jukebox - The only reason I install this software is to convert my audio CDs into MP3 archives. That part of this software is powerful and flexible. Don't use it for anything else.
Musicmatch website

Foldershare is a Win32 "Document Management & Real-time File Mirroring Solution".

I read that "the development team hopes to start work on Mac OS X and Linux clients within the next six months" (Jan 27th 2004).

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

What I see are people trying to copy Mac OS X. What was that about Windows again?

Seriously, that's why people use Windows. It's UI is tight. All the apps work the same and look the same. After learning one application, you can use any of them. Unfortunately that's not the same on linux. Lots of various different ways to make graphical apps means not every app looks and behaves the same. That lack of consistency turns people away.

> People do create them, in fact there are thousands and thousands [themexp.org] of them out there.

Just a friendly warning, but themexp.org is filled with all kinds of lousy spyware. Their frontpage links to a javascript on http://webpdp.gator.com/4/placement/475/, which presumably tries to install GAIN under IE. They also have the audacity to wrap (!) all the themes that they offer in spyware. That's not nice.

Stay clear of this worthless site and get your themes on good sites like Neowin or DeviantART instead.

It's hard to express, but these themes are so well put together they change the entire feel of your OS, not just the look. And, they do it in such a way that they always look built-in to the OS itself, and not a bold-on afterthought.

After all, you can change your wallpaper in most OSs - this is just the natural progression. I'm sure it's a harder thing to do in Linux owing to the various differing methods for window construction, etc out there.

Deviant Art has a great library of visual styles, all for free. Absolutely stunning, some of those.

You can find themes for both LiteStep and DesktopX at DeviantArt and WinCustomize.

For an example of how the depth of customization you can get for Shell Enhancers, check out my DesktopX screenshot --ScottKin

Heck yeah! I am doing Art A-level at th moment, and I use The GIMP for everything, I switched from Corel Photo-Paint shortly before I switched from Win98 to GNU/Linux. I'v been using 2.0pre4 for a while and I love it! Can't wait to get home and d/l the release.

Take a look at my gallery, most of those were done in part or fully in The GIMP, this one only took me 5 minutes.

I cannot reccomend The GIMP highly enough, you will soon learn to love it.

Heck yeah! I am doing Art A-level at th moment, and I use The GIMP for everything, I switched from Corel Photo-Paint shortly before I switched from Win98 to GNU/Linux. I'v been using 2.0pre4 for a while and I love it! Can't wait to get home and d/l the release.

Take a look at my gallery, most of those were done in part or fully in The GIMP, this one only took me 5 minutes.

I cannot reccomend The GIMP highly enough, you will soon learn to love it.

Tails as Firefox. Meh.:)

Here are some alternative icons for Debian Freefox:
-Firefox Icon v3 by Jyrik (remade from scratch)
-Mozilla Firefox Final by auto-logic
-Firefox Experiment N3 by weboso
-Tails as Firefox by polimero

I am sure all of these people would be happy to open source their designs.:P

Here are some alternative icons for Debian Freefox:
-Firefox Icon v3 by Jyrik (remade from scratch)
-Mozilla Firefox Final by auto-logic
-Firefox Experiment N3 by weboso
-Tails as Firefox by polimero

I am sure all of these people would be happy to open source their designs.:P