I don't have a dog in this fight, since I'm quite satisfied with the OS I've got and I don't much care what anyone else does.
But as I understand it, Win8 is a messed up dog and there seems to be consensus agreement that anyone running it NEEDS to upgrade to Win10. But those using Win7 can stay with it if they want. It won't bite them in the butt like Win8 will.
The thing about "upgrading" to Win10 is that it is an entirely different licensing scheme similar to paying annual rental fees. Which mount up if you are also using add-on utilities like an office suite, photo manager, etc. Then there is the separate licenses for the Adobe products, which iirc are now also time limited. This is good for the software vendors as it gives them a more stable revenue stream (and without having to do as much work for it) but for a school on a tight budget, not so good. One of those Linux distros must be looking pretty inviting about now.
If the.psd layout file refuses to open or will not display properly in GIMP, then there is something wrong with it and the designer needs to be told to get his act together and not play damnfool games with the all the neat adjustment layers. He needs to be reined in and kept at the task of making good layout templates. He can show off, or teach himself how to do something really kewl, on somebody else's dime.
Yes. Thank you for reminding me that PDF was their baby, and they had to nurse it through some hard times before it became accepted as the better way to transmit and archive documents.
Of course they were under tremendous pressure between Microsoft and Netscape and that gawdawefull browser war. They used the PDF to carve out a space for themselves. Still, they released it as a public standard, and it has held up over the years.
I just wish they had taken the same high road with image files. But I guess if they had done that, they would not be so profitable.
Yeah, but I always do my word processing with Inkscape. And I use LibreOffice Writer for my image manipulations.
If you choose the right tool for the job, the Linux distros are pretty good. If you insist on trying to drive screws with a hammer, then perhaps a well equipped Linux distro is not the most suitable thing for you. And if you want to play games, well, there is no question that Windows outshines every Linux distro when it comes to entertainment.
Good to know. I've looked briefly at Krita but found no reason to learn its ways as 99% of what I want to do I can do in GIMP. (The other 1% is probably a bunch of bad ideas anyway.)
WRT using image files as page templates in web development (the original context) would there ever be a need for the.pdf features that would not import well into GIMP?
A good template needs to be as simple as possible, so it can be used by older software that is still in production and is future proofed--- will not need to be revised when newer versions of the software are put in production. A properly designed template done in 1995 should still work today, and ideally will work in 2020, too. A well built template today should work on the old computer in the back corner whose software hasn't been upgraded since 2002. Templates that don't meet these tests are probably in use in some shops, but over the long haul, they will cost those shops more in maintenance than need be. You'll have graphic artists reworking them to make them work, when those artists should be working on stuff that brings in revenue.
Adobe has put a lot of time and effort into building its own little walled garden. Through student and school discounts and various party favors, Adobe products are taught to the exclusion of any alternatives in USA schools. The early graduates have been using Adobe in their businesses for a couple of decades now; they would not know how to manage a shop using any other graphics tools.
That is why to an increasing extent Brazil, the Netherlands, and a few other countries are now eating American graphics designer's lunch, in just about every market except North America.
This is an example of someone who has not explored the Linux alternatives thoroughly before deciding that since it is free it cannot possibly do the job. Or maybe he's going on what he heard a few years ago, and doesn't realize that major FOSS software like GIMP are undergoing quiet, continuous improvements and upgrades.
In either case, this is not an example of "a real problem with Linux, where some major and/or important products simply don't work and the open-source alternatives won't cut it." There are definitely still such examples out there, but this is not one of them.
It probably is not possible in all cases. But we're talking.psd files that are being used as page templates. That's pretty simple layering, even the old GIMP before they beefed up the layering capabilities would be able to handle that.
To put it another way, any.psd page template file that GIMP cannot handle is a bad template. Fancy adjustment layers make sense when doing Fine Art, but not in this context.
Parent should maybe be modded up. I mean, if Trump can get away with insulting an entire gender, pointing out that someone who claims to know what he's doing appears instead to be full of shit should be acceptable on slashdot.
As a possibly useful point of information: GIMP seems to handle.psd files perfectly well. I just saved a triple layer.xcf that used a mask and partial opacity as a.psd and then imported it back into GIMP with no discernible damage. YMMV of course. But page templates should not be using esoteric features. ( BTW, the.psd was 134% the size of the.xcf--- but Adobe never did understand the value of efficient data structures. Students who sometimes have to work with low capacity thumb drives do, though.)
Go back to the books and read up on conversion of matter to energy, energy to matter, and momentum as a type of energy.
In Einstein's model of the universe, the "law" is the conservation of matter and energy. In 7th grade physics there is talk about conservation of momentum in some instances (like billard table models, sans friction), but that is physics for babies. It is even ignoring the conversion of momentum to heat that always happens since billards is never played in a vacuum on a frictionless table.
Seems to me that at relativistic speeds, ship time slows down or stretches out. So the chances of still being alive at point of impact are higher than one might imagine.
I don't see any problem with this kind of reactionless drive. It can work without violating conservation of energy.
The apparent violation of conservation of momentum is due to a failure of the observer to recognize the true size of the system involved. If the mechanism is drawing on solar power, then some part of the continuing loss of mass of the Sun is part of the system, even though that is somewhat spatially distant. If it is powered by an on board fission reaction, then it is the reduction in mass of the fissioning material that is part of the system.
In all cases the energy of the universe is being conserved. The apparent breakage of the laws of conservation of energy, matter, and mass is all in the observer's head, through a failure to properly recognize the boundaries of the system.
There is a place for scientific skepticism, and what you are saying is all well and good. And pretty well articulated too-- that's unusual among the pure science worshippers.
But scientists do not advance our technologies. That is done by engineers. And engineers are grubby guys who don't care much about how a thing works, so long as it does work in a reliable way. That pragmatism is why we've got bicycles even though the physicists are still scratching their heads over the self-correcting stability of these elegantly simple machines. (Hint: it has very little to do with "gyroscopic forces", and seems to have a lot to do with the "trail" that has been engineered into the steering geometry).
If we attain a working deep space drive before we understand exactly how it works, then most of us will applaud. We need the Edisons as well as the Einsteins. Even though as Tesla said, "If he had thought smarter, he would not have had to sweat so much."
Yes. There are a couple of operators around here who are skirting the legal issues by selling their time on site and giving away the video files. This works fine for producing armchair tours of ranches, etc, for real estate offices. It can be very hard to arrange an adequate tour of a 640 acre ranch to the busy people who could afford to buy the place.
A lot of us know our limitations and understand the need to push them back through education and training. My complaint is not about that.
My plaint is that idiots who don't know what they are doing are flying drones where they should not be flown, and causing problems. And the only way to solve those problems is to regulate drone operators so that each one has a minimum level of proficiency. Which means getting into the game is going to cost probably a year of classes at a community college, then licensing fees, then operator's insurance. What might have been a nice hobby is going to be a cash sink instead. No thanks.
I had hoped it would be possible to study at home vs. a certified drone operator school, and get hands-on experience around the fields, forest, and hills of a 160 acre ranch. But now that kind of approach is not going to fly.
I'll let people with deeper pockets than I have do that fight. Especially since the need for regulating drones, and probably licensing drone operators, is so obvious.
I had been saving my pennies to buy a drone that would work as a good camera platform, prob'ly around $1100 including the videocam. It would be fun, and could pay for itself if I peddled my services to weddings, real estate offices, etc.
But now I've got to set that aside as an unrealistic fantasy, until the regulations on drones are written up, and I can know what will be allowed.
It is too bad, but a few total assholes are ruining things for all of us who are early adopters, or would like to be early adopters. Too many incidents of drones crashing into buildings, getting in the way of fire fighters, etc-- the need for regulations is now obvious.
Parent post has veered about 45 degrees off topic.
No one is saying the Georgia laws are under copyright. As with all government publications, those laws are in public domain.
Georgia is saying that a specific set of annotations is under copyright. That may or may not be true-- if the annotations were written by someone who was hired as an agent of Georgia's government, they were produced by that government and there is no copyright. They are public domain. Otherwise there is a copyright, but Georgia does not own it and has no standing to sue for copyright infringement.
However Georgia can file suit even knowing that it cannot win, but with the expectation that the defendant will fold out of court rather deal with the costs of a legal fight. This is an abuse of the courts but it is a very common one and unless some white knight jumps in, Georgia will win by bullying. Or if Georgia politicians get enough flack about this, they might muzzle their legal beagles.
My take-away from this is that the indexes and annotations may be subject to copyright by the private party that wrote them-- but from my experience working as a VA employer on policy and procedure manuals, with some indirect experience in handling material that was produced by contract workers, this would depend on the wording of the contract between the government and the private party. In most of those contracts the author is hired as an agent of the government and his relationship to his product is the same as that of any government worker to their assigned tasks, which means he cannot claim copyright and the work is in the public domain. There are major benefits to being an agent of the government and that is usually how this kind of thing is done.
That said, I don't see how Georgia could win this lawsuit, since if the material is copyrightable, the author, and not Georgia, would hold copyright and Georgia would have no standing in the matter. If the author was working as an agent of Georgia, then the work produced is in the public domain, and there is no valid copyright.
In either case the suit seems like a frivolous one, since if there is any copyright involved, Georgia cannot be the party that owns it.
Of course the defending party would be facing legal expenses to just get the case dismissed, and Georgia might be using that as a club to get an early out-of-court settlement. There is a term for legal battery but I don't recall it (coming up on my 10th year of retirement), and that is what Georgia might be attempting with this. Filing suit, even when you know that you cannot win in court but you think you could get an early out of court settlement, should be considered a breach of a lawyer's duty as an officer of the court. Lawyers who do this should be penalized, and in some cases disbarred. But that doesn't happen. That part of the legal system is totally broken.
I'm not sure that is the simplest hypothesis. It is based on the rather abstract notion that large populations will expand from one place to another. But the reality during recorded history is that lots of individuals move around a lot, but do so as individuals and not as groups large enough to sustain their own cultures. For every Irish or Scandinavian enclave in the USA, there have been a larger number of earlier individuals who welcomed (or at least accepted) cultural assimilation and contributed more to the mixing of gene pools than did the later Little Italies and other isolated enclaves.
I cannot see any reason to believe that this is a recent phenomenon that has only arisen since the beginning of the historical period. I think it much more likely that this is a species trait that was as strongly present in neolithic times as it is now. I think it likely that the idea of mass migrations is a theoretical construct that makes modelling neolithic times easier, but probably those mental models do not reflect what was really going on.
The research done on neolithic naval architecture is totally inadequate. The earliest boats we know of from the SE Pacific are already very sophisticated vessels; there must have been earlier boats that were less sophisticated but had trans-Pacific ranges (by island hopping or following coast lines).
That means that when, exactly, the austral. genetic traits were introduced into the proto Amer. gene pool probably cannot be established. It could have been somewhat later than the first Bering land bridge migrations. I am not saying that there could have been significant migrations by boats. Instead I'm saying there were probably parties of sailors that were too small to establish colonies but who did contribute to the gene pool of distant groups.
By the time of Columbus, there was certainly some small mixture of Viking and Basque genetics into the Amerindian gene pool, and on the Left Coast probably some additions from Polynesia. Humans are very sexy and very adventurist. An exotic adventurer from a distant land is going to leave some trace in the local gene pool.
I'm not keen on seeing guys in a helicopter trying to shoot down a drone with a gun. Every card carrying NRA nut knows damwell you should not shoot until you know what is within range behind your target. Shooting drones from a copter puts everyone in danger.
shooting them from the ground is no better. That bullet is going to come down somewhere and will have regained lethal energy in its descent. Even if you hit the drone, as lightweight as those things are you still have a lethal bullet wandering around in the wild blue yonder.
Now if there is a way to deploy some kind of frequency limited EMP or jamming signal that would cause all drones in the area to drop like flies, that would be good. And I think it would be possible. And the way current laws are, I think if the jammer was made reasonably directional, property owners who were getting tired of being buzzed by drones would have a way of exercising their God given property rights.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a dog in this fight, since I'm quite satisfied with the OS I've got and I don't much care what anyone else does.
But as I understand it, Win8 is a messed up dog and there seems to be consensus agreement that anyone running it NEEDS to upgrade to Win10. But those using Win7 can stay with it if they want. It won't bite them in the butt like Win8 will.
The thing about "upgrading" to Win10 is that it is an entirely different licensing scheme similar to paying annual rental fees. Which mount up if you are also using add-on utilities like an office suite, photo manager, etc. Then there is the separate licenses for the Adobe products, which iirc are now also time limited. This is good for the software vendors as it gives them a more stable revenue stream (and without having to do as much work for it) but for a school on a tight budget, not so good. One of those Linux distros must be looking pretty inviting about now.
If the .psd layout file refuses to open or will not display properly in GIMP, then there is something wrong with it and the designer needs to be told to get his act together and not play damnfool games with the all the neat adjustment layers. He needs to be reined in and kept at the task of making good layout templates. He can show off, or teach himself how to do something really kewl, on somebody else's dime.
that should be ".psd features"
Yes. Thank you for reminding me that PDF was their baby, and they had to nurse it through some hard times before it became accepted as the better way to transmit and archive documents.
Of course they were under tremendous pressure between Microsoft and Netscape and that gawdawefull browser war. They used the PDF to carve out a space for themselves. Still, they released it as a public standard, and it has held up over the years.
I just wish they had taken the same high road with image files. But I guess if they had done that, they would not be so profitable.
Yeah, but I always do my word processing with Inkscape. And I use LibreOffice Writer for my image manipulations.
If you choose the right tool for the job, the Linux distros are pretty good. If you insist on trying to drive screws with a hammer, then perhaps a well equipped Linux distro is not the most suitable thing for you. And if you want to play games, well, there is no question that Windows outshines every Linux distro when it comes to entertainment.
Good to know. I've looked briefly at Krita but found no reason to learn its ways as 99% of what I want to do I can do in GIMP. (The other 1% is probably a bunch of bad ideas anyway.)
WRT using image files as page templates in web development (the original context) would there ever be a need for the .pdf features that would not import well into GIMP?
A good template needs to be as simple as possible, so it can be used by older software that is still in production and is future proofed--- will not need to be revised when newer versions of the software are put in production. A properly designed template done in 1995 should still work today, and ideally will work in 2020, too. A well built template today should work on the old computer in the back corner whose software hasn't been upgraded since 2002. Templates that don't meet these tests are probably in use in some shops, but over the long haul, they will cost those shops more in maintenance than need be. You'll have graphic artists reworking them to make them work, when those artists should be working on stuff that brings in revenue.
Adobe has put a lot of time and effort into building its own little walled garden. Through student and school discounts and various party favors, Adobe products are taught to the exclusion of any alternatives in USA schools. The early graduates have been using Adobe in their businesses for a couple of decades now; they would not know how to manage a shop using any other graphics tools.
That is why to an increasing extent Brazil, the Netherlands, and a few other countries are now eating American graphics designer's lunch, in just about every market except North America.
WRONG.
This is an example of someone who has not explored the Linux alternatives thoroughly before deciding that since it is free it cannot possibly do the job. Or maybe he's going on what he heard a few years ago, and doesn't realize that major FOSS software like GIMP are undergoing quiet, continuous improvements and upgrades.
In either case, this is not an example of "a real problem with Linux, where some major and/or important products simply don't work and the open-source alternatives won't cut it." There are definitely still such examples out there, but this is not one of them.
It probably is not possible in all cases. But we're talking .psd files that are being used as page templates. That's pretty simple layering, even the old GIMP before they beefed up the layering capabilities would be able to handle that.
To put it another way, any .psd page template file that GIMP cannot handle is a bad template. Fancy adjustment layers make sense when doing Fine Art, but not in this context.
Parent should maybe be modded up. I mean, if Trump can get away with insulting an entire gender, pointing out that someone who claims to know what he's doing appears instead to be full of shit should be acceptable on slashdot.
As a possibly useful point of information: GIMP seems to handle .psd files perfectly well. I just saved a triple layer .xcf that used a mask and partial opacity as a .psd and then imported it back into GIMP with no discernible damage. YMMV of course. But page templates should not be using esoteric features. ( BTW, the .psd was 134% the size of the .xcf--- but Adobe never did understand the value of efficient data structures. Students who sometimes have to work with low capacity thumb drives do, though.)
Yet another reason to upgrade to Ubuntu.
Go back to the books and read up on conversion of matter to energy, energy to matter, and momentum as a type of energy.
In Einstein's model of the universe, the "law" is the conservation of matter and energy. In 7th grade physics there is talk about conservation of momentum in some instances (like billard table models, sans friction), but that is physics for babies. It is even ignoring the conversion of momentum to heat that always happens since billards is never played in a vacuum on a frictionless table.
Seems to me that at relativistic speeds, ship time slows down or stretches out. So the chances of still being alive at point of impact are higher than one might imagine.
I don't see any problem with this kind of reactionless drive. It can work without violating conservation of energy.
The apparent violation of conservation of momentum is due to a failure of the observer to recognize the true size of the system involved. If the mechanism is drawing on solar power, then some part of the continuing loss of mass of the Sun is part of the system, even though that is somewhat spatially distant. If it is powered by an on board fission reaction, then it is the reduction in mass of the fissioning material that is part of the system.
In all cases the energy of the universe is being conserved. The apparent breakage of the laws of conservation of energy, matter, and mass is all in the observer's head, through a failure to properly recognize the boundaries of the system.
There is a place for scientific skepticism, and what you are saying is all well and good. And pretty well articulated too-- that's unusual among the pure science worshippers.
But scientists do not advance our technologies. That is done by engineers. And engineers are grubby guys who don't care much about how a thing works, so long as it does work in a reliable way. That pragmatism is why we've got bicycles even though the physicists are still scratching their heads over the self-correcting stability of these elegantly simple machines. (Hint: it has very little to do with "gyroscopic forces", and seems to have a lot to do with the "trail" that has been engineered into the steering geometry).
If we attain a working deep space drive before we understand exactly how it works, then most of us will applaud. We need the Edisons as well as the Einsteins. Even though as Tesla said, "If he had thought smarter, he would not have had to sweat so much."
in response to anyone claiming this is "the only way to do it", you need only look at the many other states that provide the entire law in PDF form.
Oregon is a good example of how to do it right. A all of Oregon Revised Statutes published every two years.
Yes. There are a couple of operators around here who are skirting the legal issues by selling their time on site and giving away the video files. This works fine for producing armchair tours of ranches, etc, for real estate offices. It can be very hard to arrange an adequate tour of a 640 acre ranch to the busy people who could afford to buy the place.
Take your b.s. elsewhere.
A lot of us know our limitations and understand the need to push them back through education and training. My complaint is not about that.
My plaint is that idiots who don't know what they are doing are flying drones where they should not be flown, and causing problems. And the only way to solve those problems is to regulate drone operators so that each one has a minimum level of proficiency. Which means getting into the game is going to cost probably a year of classes at a community college, then licensing fees, then operator's insurance. What might have been a nice hobby is going to be a cash sink instead. No thanks.
I had hoped it would be possible to study at home vs. a certified drone operator school, and get hands-on experience around the fields, forest, and hills of a 160 acre ranch. But now that kind of approach is not going to fly.
I'll let people with deeper pockets than I have do that fight. Especially since the need for regulating drones, and probably licensing drone operators, is so obvious.
I had been saving my pennies to buy a drone that would work as a good camera platform, prob'ly around $1100 including the videocam. It would be fun, and could pay for itself if I peddled my services to weddings, real estate offices, etc.
But now I've got to set that aside as an unrealistic fantasy, until the regulations on drones are written up, and I can know what will be allowed.
It is too bad, but a few total assholes are ruining things for all of us who are early adopters, or would like to be early adopters. Too many incidents of drones crashing into buildings, getting in the way of fire fighters, etc-- the need for regulations is now obvious.
Thanks a lot, assholes.
Parent post has veered about 45 degrees off topic.
No one is saying the Georgia laws are under copyright. As with all government publications, those laws are in public domain.
Georgia is saying that a specific set of annotations is under copyright. That may or may not be true-- if the annotations were written by someone who was hired as an agent of Georgia's government, they were produced by that government and there is no copyright. They are public domain. Otherwise there is a copyright, but Georgia does not own it and has no standing to sue for copyright infringement.
However Georgia can file suit even knowing that it cannot win, but with the expectation that the defendant will fold out of court rather deal with the costs of a legal fight. This is an abuse of the courts but it is a very common one and unless some white knight jumps in, Georgia will win by bullying. Or if Georgia politicians get enough flack about this, they might muzzle their legal beagles.
My take-away from this is that the indexes and annotations may be subject to copyright by the private party that wrote them-- but from my experience working as a VA employer on policy and procedure manuals, with some indirect experience in handling material that was produced by contract workers, this would depend on the wording of the contract between the government and the private party. In most of those contracts the author is hired as an agent of the government and his relationship to his product is the same as that of any government worker to their assigned tasks, which means he cannot claim copyright and the work is in the public domain. There are major benefits to being an agent of the government and that is usually how this kind of thing is done.
That said, I don't see how Georgia could win this lawsuit, since if the material is copyrightable, the author, and not Georgia, would hold copyright and Georgia would have no standing in the matter. If the author was working as an agent of Georgia, then the work produced is in the public domain, and there is no valid copyright.
In either case the suit seems like a frivolous one, since if there is any copyright involved, Georgia cannot be the party that owns it.
Of course the defending party would be facing legal expenses to just get the case dismissed, and Georgia might be using that as a club to get an early out-of-court settlement. There is a term for legal battery but I don't recall it (coming up on my 10th year of retirement), and that is what Georgia might be attempting with this. Filing suit, even when you know that you cannot win in court but you think you could get an early out of court settlement, should be considered a breach of a lawyer's duty as an officer of the court. Lawyers who do this should be penalized, and in some cases disbarred. But that doesn't happen. That part of the legal system is totally broken.
I'm not sure that is the simplest hypothesis. It is based on the rather abstract notion that large populations will expand from one place to another. But the reality during recorded history is that lots of individuals move around a lot, but do so as individuals and not as groups large enough to sustain their own cultures. For every Irish or Scandinavian enclave in the USA, there have been a larger number of earlier individuals who welcomed (or at least accepted) cultural assimilation and contributed more to the mixing of gene pools than did the later Little Italies and other isolated enclaves.
I cannot see any reason to believe that this is a recent phenomenon that has only arisen since the beginning of the historical period. I think it much more likely that this is a species trait that was as strongly present in neolithic times as it is now. I think it likely that the idea of mass migrations is a theoretical construct that makes modelling neolithic times easier, but probably those mental models do not reflect what was really going on.
So we could use some of the USA excess nuclear weapons inventory to put out California fires? What's not to like about that?
The research done on neolithic naval architecture is totally inadequate. The earliest boats we know of from the SE Pacific are already very sophisticated vessels; there must have been earlier boats that were less sophisticated but had trans-Pacific ranges (by island hopping or following coast lines).
That means that when, exactly, the austral. genetic traits were introduced into the proto Amer. gene pool probably cannot be established. It could have been somewhat later than the first Bering land bridge migrations. I am not saying that there could have been significant migrations by boats. Instead I'm saying there were probably parties of sailors that were too small to establish colonies but who did contribute to the gene pool of distant groups.
By the time of Columbus, there was certainly some small mixture of Viking and Basque genetics into the Amerindian gene pool, and on the Left Coast probably some additions from Polynesia. Humans are very sexy and very adventurist. An exotic adventurer from a distant land is going to leave some trace in the local gene pool.
I'm not keen on seeing guys in a helicopter trying to shoot down a drone with a gun. Every card carrying NRA nut knows damwell you should not shoot until you know what is within range behind your target. Shooting drones from a copter puts everyone in danger.
shooting them from the ground is no better. That bullet is going to come down somewhere and will have regained lethal energy in its descent. Even if you hit the drone, as lightweight as those things are you still have a lethal bullet wandering around in the wild blue yonder.
Now if there is a way to deploy some kind of frequency limited EMP or jamming signal that would cause all drones in the area to drop like flies, that would be good. And I think it would be possible. And the way current laws are, I think if the jammer was made reasonably directional, property owners who were getting tired of being buzzed by drones would have a way of exercising their God given property rights.
Yeah, youbetcha. Bring on the jammers!