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Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards
An anonymous reader dropped a note in to say that the Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards have been announced. No real surprises in the list, except maybe giving RSS the award for best game.
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Even for Windows, Firefox is awesome... I left Netscape at version 6.0 (you know, the one with a ton of AOL bloat), and now it's the first time that I feel that a browser can compete with Explorer. It's fast, customizable, cute, compatible... and the extensions thing is just a greaaaaaat idea! Tabbed browsing is also the best thing since sliced bread...
:)
GG for the win!
I didn't checked the other awards, not being a Linux guy... (at least, not for now!)
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I find that RSS is inconsistent and a constant challenge.
Yum, how many different implementations of RSS can YOU deal with? It is, in fact, a game.
[If you've never implemented a client, don't bother replying.]
RSS isn't a game. The best Linux game is Freeciv.. Period.
sure, i'm the primary author of ardour.
audacity is a soundfile editor, ardour is a digital audio workstation. you can do some of the same things in each - record audio, chop it up, apply FX and so forth - but they are not equivalent in a deeper sense.
ardour is modelled on proaudio apps like protools, nuendo and samplitude. its not intended to be used for simple editing tasks, but for complex multi-track, multi-channel audio work. we hope that its UI will evolve to make the simple stuff simple, but our initial goal has been to make sure we have an internal architecture that can do anything the high-end proprietary apps can do, and more.
if you don't know how the high-end tools work, ardour will seem very very complex (and the current lack of a manual won't help much with that). if you have used protools, ardour will seem relatively familiar to you, although we attempt to take best-of-breed features from all the other DAWs. otoh, DAWs have all pretty converged on the same core feature set, so the differences have more to do with GUI nuances than functionality.
Graphics Software: The GIMP
Is anybody else unhappy with some of the changes in GIMP2? For me, several useful things have disappeared (like ctrl-T to hide the layer's borders, now it's something else and I have to go in the menu), of the fact that the "anti" tool key modifier is now ALT and not SHIFT anymore (apart for the magnifier, go figure...) and so it creates problems with KDE, it doesn't save the tablet's device status,... the list is endless.
All in all, I wonder why they voted GIMP. It's become less good and less usable than GIMP1, and certainly less than Photoshop overall anyway.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Yes! I have a Thinkpad T41, and it's what dreams are made of. I will never own another brand of laptop again.
The box runs linux great, there is a great thinkpad linux mailing list, the battery life is amazing and it's fast as hell.
Good choice linux journal...
cuban
Bull. There's nothing older; a friend invited me to join friendster, and my first comment to her was:
"Jesus Christ, it's high school, all over again."
It's an electronic popularity contest, with a little bit of recruitment thrown in. Most of us sit on the sidelines and watch as the really popular people amass a huge collection of friends.
Not surprisingly, a huge number of these young 20-somethings were from NYC, and almost all of them were exactly the type I can't stand- drunk-every-night clubbers. My personal favorite was some rich-bitch french girl who was almost completely naked in all of her shots on some beach. Her profile was truly a piece of work. Example: "Things I enjoy: Not having to work. Ever."
Friendster attracts the biggest concentration of intellectual-stuck-ups, prisses, and vanity-obsessed people I've seen in my life. Given Orkut is higher profile and more exclusive, I would imagine it's even worse.
Please help metamoderate.
Congratulations to GnuCash on winning the "Desktop Software" category.
Nice to see some recognition for one of the most unglamorous and underappreciated of all the major free software projects. Originally a Quicken user, I started feeling disempowered by its mandatory activation/registration (in the Australian edition) and reports from other users that the next version displayed advertising (of Quicken's services). It made me angry enough to search for alternatives, and I was sufficently motivated to create a partition for GNU/Linux specifically so that I could use GnuCash once a week. Not something I'd expect Joe User to do, but experienced Windows tinkerers like myself can certainly handle it, and the experience will also make my eventual switch to Linux easier. I've seen where Windows and proprietary software is pushing the industry (toward DRM, software patents, more products needing activation, etc.) and I don't like it one bit. But I digress...
I would like to comment that GnuCash is frequently criticised as being too difficult for personal finances because of the "double-entry" system it uses. People who don't know better see the words "double entry" and the first thing they think (incorrectly) is "WTF, I have to enter each transaction TWICE?!". Please stop scaring people away with this FUD because, in a practical sense, GnuCash's double-entry foundation is of little consequence to former users of Quicken or similar programs. All it means is that everything that Quicken calls a "category" is an "account" instead. The power of the centuries old accounting practice is there if you need it, but in day to day use there's hardly a difference. Some people believe that GnuCash is more difficult to use than Quicken, but this has more to do with others things (perhaps its interface and the fact that it's also intended to cater to business users).
GPL instead of the BSD license
Funny how MySQL releases even the client libraries as GPL instead of LGPL.
That means you can't even ship your non-GPL product with MySQL support unless you buy a commercial license from MySQL AB. Commercial databases such as Oracle don't even have this restriction!
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
I'll offer this comment about Ardour; I'm the author of Postfish, Ogg and a regular contributor to Audacity. I've been hearing good thigns about Ardour for more than a year and have thus tried repeatedly to try it out.
a) No manual. No usable manual anyway. I know no one who uses it, so I have no 'live' manual to get me going either. Lots of apps don't have good manuals, but this goes along with b...
b) 'Angry fruit salad' user interface. Lots of functionality [apparently] brilliantly obfuscated by a million buttons in every imaginable color grouped randomly with no real UI intuitiveness to make up for the missing manual. I'm no newbie to pro audio; recording and mastering soundtrack CDs for local theatre groups is one of my pasttimes. But I cannot figure out how to even get started. I spend about an hour on step one every couple of months and have never succeeded in getting it to do anything with the 400G of raw digital audio sitting on my box.
The end result is that I've been unable to figure out how to find the most rudimentary starting-out functions. I already have all my audio; Ardour is too heavy to run on my portable recording boxes-- I have beaverphonic already doing my HD recording for the past several years-- so how do I do anything using Ardour with audio I already have? The manual's tutorials all begin with 'press the record button...' The FAQ says I can use it with my recordings, but the UI and manual conspire to convince me none of that functionality actually exists.
All this *is* a flame-- Ardour is supposedly good software but all it's done is waste my time and for that reason I'm annoyed-- but it's also a genuine request of the Ardour authors to help out all us poor folks that aren't Ardour hackers to get started. I'd love to see what this package can do and give it a fair shake.
Monty