Actually you don't as long as you design the library well in the first place. You can put placeholders in the original version of the libary and any updates that can be done by replacing the placeholders will not break binary compatibility with applications compiled against an earlier version of the library.
No the environmentalists didn't get us into this mess. We got ourselves into this mess by becoming addicted to and dependant on electrical energy.
The environmentalists have been pointing out that nuclear has a lot of issues surrounding it and humans + long time frame + nuclear = bad idea.
Environmentalists are now pointing out that for different reasons Coal might also be a bad Idea perhaps even worse than Nuclear in the short term.
This is like me saying that heroin is a bad idea and you saying but before you were saying that cocaine was a bad idea and those are the only two drugs that give me a big enough fix.
Why is everybody using the word Need. As in our energy needs.
As a human being you don't NEED much electrical energy in fact you don't need any at all. In fact for most of the time that humans have existed there has been no electrical energy. Having electricity is really nice.You can do a lot of cool stuff with electricity. Our society would be very very different if we didn't have electricity. I personally like having electricity in my life.
Talking about energy NEEDS highlights a very fundamental flaw in our way of thinking on these issues. At least part of the solution needs to be how can we lead satisfactory lives using less energy. Can we please say energy wishes or desires or something of that nature because that is what we are really talking about.
Or if you use the Ubuntu Studio Version of Ubuntu (or install the Ubuntu Studio packages)... you can use their helpful control panel to fix this for you. So not quite so bleak as it sounds.
Still I have a firewire soundcard that only talks to Jack my pet Ubuntu peeve is that all core apps have jack support removed meaning they won't work with my soundcard unless I recompile them.
and for you web designers out there - Some of us have web-browsers that respect system colours - so If you change the colour of the background change the colour of the text as well - it is not much fun looking at almost white grey text on a white background.
Well actually if you install drivers you can access ext3 on Mac. There is also a third party read write ntfs driver for Mac (but is slow) - But the point being that it would be nice to be able to use a filesystem out of the box on Mac/Windows/Linux that supports larger than 2GB file sizes
I run kubuntu - and while I think that nearly a minute is too long for a computer to be booting. I appreciate that kde does a pretty good job of setting up everything the way I had when I shut the computer down. Which basically means that I still go away and do something else while the computer is booting. but when I get back to the computer everything is set up and ready to go.
Actually OS Speeds count a lot at my work. We need every bit of performance we can eeek out of a machine. The previous engine we were using was windows only but the one we just moved too is cross platform. If we can get a few extra frames a second by running our finished product on a linux box we will do it. Of course a decent proportion of the development will stay on windows boxes (much of the staff is very skilled with 3DStudio Max) - I am already doing half my job on a linux box because I find it easier.
You seriously need winrar? so none of the native linux programs that read and write RAR files will work for you?
You need iTunes? so none of the native linux programs which play and organize your music files work for you and none of the other online music stores are any good either.
I happily read and create Rar files and Listen and organize music on my linux computer... need?
That's funny I am using a quite a bit of pro-audio hardware and software on linux. Admittedly I bought the hardware with linux compatibility in mind so no nasty suprises there.
I admit that getting jack set up can be painful initially but it is quite a nice system to use once you are used to it. The better pieces of software available are pretty good especially if you have a limited budget. Sure there is no protools but I wouldn't do protools on windows either.
It's not so much about censorship as control of information. Quite often governments have a vested interest in us not knowing certain things that are harmful to them. The measures needed for censorship also bring the mechanisms to control what information you can access - that is the danger. It's basically like giving the big guy in the room a gun so that he can kill the bad people - only you might not trust the big guy not to use the gun on you if you happen to disagree with something he is doing (what if he becomes the bad guy).
1) that's easy in konqueror in the location bar type in *.jpg at the end of the path name. This will filter everything down to just the folders and the jpg files. Press CTRL + A to select everthing and then deselect the folders. Press either CTRL + X to cut or CTRL + C to copy - navigate to where you want to go. (hint you can split the window into two panes to make things easier) finally press CTRL + V. repeat process for other file formats. Not as fast as the CLI but not that much slower either.
2) KDiff will do this graphically... I think Kate and KDevelop have built in tools or plugins too.
3) Good Point.
4) Once set up a ssh connection works just like local files for my graphical file manager making it trivial to send files there...
5) 6) & 7) I don't specifically have answers for.
So yeah life isn't so bad for the non command line using kde user after all
1) Yeah Ok I will give you that.... The single menu was a comprise from only offering items via a right click context menu.... Personally I don't mind having a right click context menu. But I guess I am just used to it.
2) Horay for a modeless interface. Yes It lets you shoot yourself in the foot but lets face it a moded interface sucks it makes your workflow a lot less flexible. No I can't do anything because I have the colour selection window open and other such brainless stuff.
3) The GIMP menus have a logic to there layout there is absolutely a strategy of what goes where. It is different to Photoshops I personally think that it is clearer (at least in the dev version).
4) The Gimp (on linux) absolutely kills Photoshop (on Windows) in terms of startup time. In terms of performance Photoshop is has a handy lead on just about everything out there and I would say that the gimp sits pretty well within that pack - though I do conceed that older versions of gimp needed a bit of tuning to perform well. I have in past used it to open images which were so large that photoshop absolutely choked. The trick was to zoom in the image so that the tile cache could hold all the visible chunks in memory which was fine in this case because we were editing fine details.
5) I will conceed that point. It is part of the fabled GeGL that is finally comming.
6) The gimp doesn't offer vector layers per say but it does offer drawing tools. One can create straight lines by holding down shift with any of the drawing tools. selections and curves can be filled and stroked and complex shapes can be created by means of a plugin. However if you are working on mainly geometric shapes you will get a lot more milage out of inkscape the GIMPs Sister program. you can even drag and drop svg files created by inkscape directly into the paths menu or import and render them.
It really depends on what you are doing and what your requirements are. Everybody will say that for serious prepress there are no alternatives. If you are really serious about prepress I want to see your hardware calibrated monitors otherwise you are just pissing in the wind.
There is no doubt that Adobes tools are good and that there is little in the way of serious competition. The reason for this either you earn enough money that the asking price doesn't really factor into things or you pirate it. Lets face it - piracy of this sort of thing is rampant. The effect of this is well little in the way of serious competition.
Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia also hurt competition quite a bit. Macromedia was leading Adobe in the web based field and was the most viable compeditor in a few other markets.
Anyways there are alternatives. First stop is to check out the Corel Suite - I personally don't recommend it, But I know plenty of businesses who use it to make real money and employ real people.
On the OSS side there is Scribus for DTP/PDF Creation. Its fairly fast moving - I recommend version 1.3.4 which was just released. It is capable of professional work and has been used to that end. It may or may not have everything you require for prepress - for me bleed setting is the one thing I need which hasn't been implemented yet. One thing to note is that scribus lets you create scripted pdf documents.
Inkscape is another very worthy tool - While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Illustrator.. I find it has all the functionality that I would use on a regular basis. Again this project is fast moving at the moment so try and get the latest version.
For photo editing there is Krita & the Gimp - you won't have access to krita yet unless you are running on free OS (I think) but it supports a lot of the things that the gimp does not including HDR and CMYK colour spaces. the main area it falls down is performance. The gimp is not so bad or good as people make out. It has a its own logic on how to do things (unfortunately this logic is typically alien to somebody who has spent years using photoshop)... When you are used to it can be quite smooth (I had this pointed out to me by somebody watching me work) - but this is all a moot point if the Gimp does not provide all the features you need. It may not.
The webdev I am sure has been covered elsewhere - In the OSS world there are good programmers editors and good basic WYSIWYG environments. Nothing that gives you the mix of power and convienience that Dreamweaver does. Still there are alternatives depending on your requirements.
Basically the OS market is one that is incredibly difficult to survive in. Microsoft pretty much owns the whole show and has entrenched itself in. Apple for a long time was the chosen token competitor but I doubt that they would survive if they hadn't built their niche Before Windows 95 came around and had not really cornered the DTP industry very early on. They are doing OK at the moment but I can remember a time when they were all but dead.
Apart from Apple there are no proprietory compeditors to Microsoft in the desktop operating system market. That in itself speaks volumes. Linux survives because for a long time Linux developers *were* the users - quite simply Linux did not and still does not need Support from Hardware Manufacturers, ISP and regular users. If it did it would be dead by now. It does however need them to grow beyond a certain point and find mainstream acceptance... This becomes a chicken and egg problem - Hardware manufacturers and ISPs are not going to want to support linux until there are a critical mass of users and the users are not going to want linux until it works on their hardware perfectly and all their favourite applications are available.
Actually I have seen this exact issue and it is a BIOS issue. If you install Linux onto a SATA drive and don't have that drive enabled in the BIOS you get that issue. Basically Grub cannot fit into the MBR of a disk. So it puts most of the information it needs on your/boot partition.
The fix thankfully is fairly straight forward... Go into the bios and set the SATA drive so that it can be booted from. This will typically add a few seconds onto your boot time but everything will just magically work again.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if you have to put up with Mac Users..
Actually you don't as long as you design the library well in the first place. You can put placeholders in the original version of the libary and any updates that can be done by replacing the placeholders will not break binary compatibility with applications compiled against an earlier version of the library.
No the environmentalists didn't get us into this mess. We got ourselves into this mess by becoming addicted to and dependant on electrical energy.
The environmentalists have been pointing out that nuclear has a lot of issues surrounding it and humans + long time frame + nuclear = bad idea.
Environmentalists are now pointing out that for different reasons Coal might also be a bad Idea perhaps even worse than Nuclear in the short term.
This is like me saying that heroin is a bad idea and you saying but before you were saying that cocaine was a bad idea and those are the only two drugs that give me a big enough fix.
Why is everybody using the word Need. As in our energy needs.
As a human being you don't NEED much electrical energy in fact you don't need any at all. In fact for most of the time that humans have existed there has been no electrical energy. Having electricity is really nice.You can do a lot of cool stuff with electricity. Our society would be very very different if we didn't have electricity. I personally like having electricity in my life.
Talking about energy NEEDS highlights a very fundamental flaw in our way of thinking on these issues. At least part of the solution needs to be how can we lead satisfactory lives using less energy. Can we please say energy wishes or desires or something of that nature because that is what we are really talking about.
Or if you use the Ubuntu Studio Version of Ubuntu (or install the Ubuntu Studio packages)... you can use their helpful control panel to fix this for you. So not quite so bleak as it sounds. Still I have a firewire soundcard that only talks to Jack my pet Ubuntu peeve is that all core apps have jack support removed meaning they won't work with my soundcard unless I recompile them.
for photography you don't want the sort of screen they have on a laptop..... not unless there are any laptops with PVA or sIPS panels out there...
Yoink... I am definitely using that as a quote.
and for you web designers out there - Some of us have web-browsers that respect system colours - so If you change the colour of the background change the colour of the text as well - it is not much fun looking at almost white grey text on a white background.
Well actually if you install drivers you can access ext3 on Mac. There is also a third party read write ntfs driver for Mac (but is slow) - But the point being that it would be nice to be able to use a filesystem out of the box on Mac/Windows/Linux that supports larger than 2GB file sizes
I think that comes down to taste. I personally find OSX more appealing than Vista and KDE 4 is definately up there too.
I run kubuntu - and while I think that nearly a minute is too long for a computer to be booting. I appreciate that kde does a pretty good job of setting up everything the way I had when I shut the computer down. Which basically means that I still go away and do something else while the computer is booting. but when I get back to the computer everything is set up and ready to go.
Actually OS Speeds count a lot at my work. We need every bit of performance we can eeek out of a machine. The previous engine we were using was windows only but the one we just moved too is cross platform. If we can get a few extra frames a second by running our finished product on a linux box we will do it. Of course a decent proportion of the development will stay on windows boxes (much of the staff is very skilled with 3DStudio Max) - I am already doing half my job on a linux box because I find it easier.
You seriously need winrar? so none of the native linux programs that read and write RAR files will work for you? You need iTunes? so none of the native linux programs which play and organize your music files work for you and none of the other online music stores are any good either. I happily read and create Rar files and Listen and organize music on my linux computer... need?
That's funny I am using a quite a bit of pro-audio hardware and software on linux. Admittedly I bought the hardware with linux compatibility in mind so no nasty suprises there. I admit that getting jack set up can be painful initially but it is quite a nice system to use once you are used to it. The better pieces of software available are pretty good especially if you have a limited budget. Sure there is no protools but I wouldn't do protools on windows either.
It's not so much about censorship as control of information. Quite often governments have a vested interest in us not knowing certain things that are harmful to them. The measures needed for censorship also bring the mechanisms to control what information you can access - that is the danger. It's basically like giving the big guy in the room a gun so that he can kill the bad people - only you might not trust the big guy not to use the gun on you if you happen to disagree with something he is doing (what if he becomes the bad guy).
1) that's easy in konqueror in the location bar type in *.jpg at the end of the path name. This will filter everything down to just the folders and the jpg files.
Press CTRL + A to select everthing and then deselect the folders. Press either CTRL + X to cut or CTRL + C to copy - navigate to where you want to go. (hint you can split the window into two panes to make things easier) finally press CTRL + V. repeat process for other file formats. Not as fast as the CLI but not that much slower either.
2) KDiff will do this graphically... I think Kate and KDevelop have built in tools or plugins too.
3) Good Point.
4) Once set up a ssh connection works just like local files for my graphical file manager making it trivial to send files there...
5) 6) & 7) I don't specifically have answers for.
So yeah life isn't so bad for the non command line using kde user after all
1) Yeah Ok I will give you that.... The single menu was a comprise from only offering items via a right click context menu.... Personally I don't mind having a right click context menu. But I guess I am just used to it.
2) Horay for a modeless interface. Yes It lets you shoot yourself in the foot but lets face it a moded interface sucks it makes your workflow a lot less flexible. No I can't do anything because I have the colour selection window open and other such brainless stuff.
3) The GIMP menus have a logic to there layout there is absolutely a strategy of what goes where. It is different to Photoshops I personally think that it is clearer (at least in the dev version).
4) The Gimp (on linux) absolutely kills Photoshop (on Windows) in terms of startup time. In terms of performance Photoshop is has a handy lead on just about everything out there and I would say that the gimp sits pretty well within that pack - though I do conceed that older versions of gimp needed a bit of tuning to perform well. I have in past used it to open images which were so large that photoshop absolutely choked. The trick was to zoom in the image so that the tile cache could hold all the visible chunks in memory which was fine in this case because we were editing fine details.
5) I will conceed that point. It is part of the fabled GeGL that is finally comming.
6) The gimp doesn't offer vector layers per say but it does offer drawing tools. One can create straight lines by holding down shift with any of the drawing tools. selections and curves can be filled and stroked and complex shapes can be created by means of a plugin. However if you are working on mainly geometric shapes you will get a lot more milage out of inkscape the GIMPs Sister program. you can even drag and drop svg files created by inkscape directly into the paths menu or import and render them.
7) I will give you that one
It really depends on what you are doing and what your requirements are. Everybody will say that for serious prepress there are no alternatives. If you are really serious about prepress I want to see your hardware calibrated monitors otherwise you are just pissing in the wind.
There is no doubt that Adobes tools are good and that there is little in the way of serious competition. The reason for this either you earn enough money that the asking price doesn't really factor into things or you pirate it. Lets face it - piracy of this sort of thing is rampant. The effect of this is well little in the way of serious competition.
Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia also hurt competition quite a bit. Macromedia was leading Adobe in the web based field and was the most viable compeditor in a few other markets.
Anyways there are alternatives. First stop is to check out the Corel Suite - I personally don't recommend it, But I know plenty of businesses who use it to make real money and employ real people.
On the OSS side there is Scribus for DTP/PDF Creation. Its fairly fast moving - I recommend version 1.3.4 which was just released. It is capable of professional work and has been used to that end. It may or may not have everything you require for prepress - for me bleed setting is the one thing I need which hasn't been implemented yet. One thing to note is that scribus lets you create scripted pdf documents.
Inkscape is another very worthy tool - While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Illustrator.. I find it has all the functionality that I would use on a regular basis. Again this project is fast moving at the moment
so try and get the latest version.
For photo editing there is Krita & the Gimp - you won't have access to krita yet unless you are running on free OS (I think) but it supports a lot of the things that the gimp does not including HDR and CMYK colour spaces. the main area it falls down is performance. The gimp is not so bad or good as people make out. It has a its own logic on how to do things (unfortunately this logic is typically alien to somebody who has spent years using photoshop)... When you are used to it can be quite smooth (I had this pointed out to me by somebody watching me work) - but this is all a moot point if the Gimp does not provide all the features you need. It may not.
The webdev I am sure has been covered elsewhere - In the OSS world there are good programmers editors and good basic WYSIWYG environments. Nothing that gives you the mix of power and convienience that Dreamweaver does. Still there are alternatives depending on your requirements.
Basically the OS market is one that is incredibly difficult to survive in. Microsoft pretty much owns the whole show and has entrenched itself in. Apple for a long time was the chosen token competitor but I doubt that they would survive if they hadn't built their niche Before Windows 95 came around and had not really cornered the DTP industry very early on. They are doing OK at the moment but I can remember a time when they were all but dead.
Apart from Apple there are no proprietory compeditors to Microsoft in the desktop operating system market. That in itself speaks volumes. Linux survives because for a long time Linux developers *were* the users - quite simply Linux did not and still does not need Support from Hardware Manufacturers, ISP and regular users. If it did it would be dead by now. It does however need them to grow beyond a certain point and find mainstream acceptance...
This becomes a chicken and egg problem - Hardware manufacturers and ISPs are not going to want to support linux until there are a critical mass of users and the users are not going to want linux until it works on their hardware perfectly and all their favourite applications are available.
Actually I have seen this exact issue and it is a BIOS issue. /boot partition.
If you install Linux onto a SATA drive and don't have that drive enabled in the BIOS you get that issue.
Basically Grub cannot fit into the MBR of a disk. So it puts most of the information it needs on your
The fix thankfully is fairly straight forward...
Go into the bios and set the SATA drive so that it can be booted from. This will typically add a few seconds onto your boot time but everything will just magically work again.