Sure, it looks like they are classifying stuff just to classify it. But if you knew anything about how intelligence gathering works, you would know why they are doing it. Now that computers are as fast as they are, and the amount of data floating around out there, it's surprisingly easy to put two and two together, and gather intelligence that can be harmful. Here's a realworld example of exactly what I am talking about: Paul Graham on PR talks about how anyone can track down which companies are controlling what the press says, and making trends happen by causing people to believe they already are happening. Now imagine if you were trained to find little nuggets of info like that! That's what they are trying to prevent. It only takes one slip-up to create a critical vulnerability, exposing a position or future activity. So give 'em a break.
Ooh, let me take that one! This is gonna be long, though.
GIMP is powerful. What it is not is user-friendly. The interface is all wrong. They need to completely scrap the interface and have someone clueful in interface design come and perform some serious plastic surgery. If everything were in the right places, workflow with GIMP could be much better. The windows need to be stapled down, unless you tear them off. The only real reason to do this is if you have a metric ton of desktop real estate to spare, or better yet a second monitor. But for the average user, one window to rule them all. This is especially true for Windows GIMP users. There's a plugin for that, but it should be default. I could lay out more flaws, but suffice to say the interace is pathetic.
Sodipodi is good, from the limited amount that I have used it. I know several professionals who use it, but my own experience with it is lacking, so I won't comment much on it.
I've had a love/hate relationship with Blender for a long time. What it does, it does well. It seems very elegant from a minimalist viewpoint. The problem with Blender is that the learning curve is so high, who would want to learn it? There are tutorials for Maya and 3DS Max out the wazoo. But there are very few for Blender. To Blender fanatics: Produce a lot of tutorials. Not just text based, but some movies, and some websites with pictures. Really demonstrate how to do Cool Stuff. Again, the interface is not intuitive.
Figuring out how to get things to work in Blender is a pain, whether you have 3D modeling experience or not. Basically nothing seems to want to explain itself. It could be a great business model though: the program is free, but the wall poster explaining how to do stuff costs 30 bucks. Seriously, though. 3D modeling is complicated. Even if you know it well, you still need to figure out the particulars of a function occasionally.
I think the real problem, though is the complete and utter lack of anything that competes with the 800 lb. gorilla of the graphics industry. It used to be Macromedia, but Adobe just bought out Macromedia, or is about to do so. Nothing, and I mean nothing, that the Open Source world does what Director does. Or Flash. Or Dreamweaver, really. This is perplexing in a way, because it's kinda the killer app for OSS, yet no one will touch it. Do the needed libraries not exist? Is there no programming language available that can do it? Of course they exist. Almost everything macromedia^H^H^HAdobe has could be duplicated in Tcl/Tk or Java, given the interest. So what's the hold-up?
Ok, for film, Cinepaint has been used on some major films. The layout problems for GIMP still apply, but only for home users with one monitor, because you would have several in use for pro filmmaking, and the layout makes sense somewhat. The competition is either utterly awful, in the case of Adobe's Premier, or too expensive for anyone to seriously consider, in the case of Autodesk's offerings (Combustion,Flame,Inferno, etc.) I think Cinepaint has a chance. Having said that, take a look at the website. From the looks of things, while it got off to a good start, things are grinding to a halt on that project. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love to see development continue.
As for actual desktop publishing, Scribus is truly phenomenal. There are bugs, just a few, but the scribus team is on frikken fire. Their product is better than Quark by a very large margin in my opinion. It still has a bit to go to catch Indesign. They freely admit this and are very realistic about where they are. They produce better pdf files than Adobe does. No kidding. Scribus is easily one of the best production tools the open source community has produced. However, it's achilles' heel: it's not cross-platform. It's linux only. This is what is keeping it from totally dominating the printing world. It's ready, if you are willing to run linux. But if not, then go ahead and get Indesign.
So that's the status from a graphics perspective. There's a lot more to it than just, "can I make a cool button for my website." The programs professionals need, just aren't there as far as open source projects, with the delightful exception of Scribus. (Kudos, guys!)
Personally, as a veteran linux user, and as a graphic artist, I interpret user-friendly interface for graphics programs as, one main window from which you can tear off floating windows, menus that describe their functions, all plugins/scripts read the last used font and font size(unless it doesn't make sense to, which is rare) and all save functions point back to the last place something was saved.
GIMP has a lot going for it. It's pen tool beats Photoshop's pen tool bloody. And there is a plugin to make everything attach to one window. (I can't imagine why this didn't get put into GimpShop. wtf was he thinking?) But the rest is next to impossible, at least without a major rewrite, and likely a fork.
I'd love to see GIMP be a contender, but it has too many bad habits. It's a fantastic program. But to nudge out Photoshop, it must transcend it's current form. It'll have to fork and basically start over, using what code is salvageable and ditching the rest.
20 bucks is about the going rate for dialup in the US.
last I looked you could get it for $9.95, which is less than 20 bucks. It was 20 bucks a few years ago. SBC's rate for dialup is $10, as is Wal-Mart's butchered travesty they call dialup access. I'm sure you can find places that will charge you 20 bucks still. But it's not the "going rate."
The point is, we are getting gouged for broadband.
Way to not say much. But I'll retort anyway. It's not that "more Americans don't want high speed internet access," but that noone wants to pay more than about $20 for it. For most people, it's simply not worth more than that. Apparently Moore's Law doesn't apply to internet access, or we'd be paying much less. The main reason municipal wifi is getting roadblocked is because that would drive high-speed internet prices way down, and ruin the oligopoly that currently strangles internet access. Bottom line.
No need. Because your eye changes so much, retinal scan biometrics have to be fault tolerant. I recall someone reviewing retinal scan systems not too long ago and coming up with, get this: 1 in 10 people can fool basically anything on the market today into thinking they are you! And it concluded that that won't change anytime soon since the fault tolerance must be so high. So biometrics is officially SCREWED already.
Even if there is a link, it doesn't mean you're going to jail, it means that the nature of the link has to be analyzed, to determine if there's enough evidence to warrant further investigation and what kind of investigation. A match on the system won't put you in jail.
No, it doesn't mean you're going to jail, it just means that you are fired from your job for now being a suspected child pornographer. It just means you will be ostricized from your hometown. Very likely from anywhere close to it. It just means that your friends and family no longer trust you. Which is a good thing if the person really is a child pornographer. But it's a very bad thing if that is not the case. This isn't just about the criminal justice system. This can easily be used for evil. And as for myself, I've seen too much corruption in our government. to think it won't be.
Nah.
Just find some local computer geek who will take anything. He'll come pick it all up and it will be out of your hair. Then he'll turn around and sell it all on ebay. Everybody wins.
And THAT is why the claim has been retracted, you can bet on it. They like their Lauch the way it is, to the point I think they'd rather lose it than change it.
I've sent more than one email to yahoo about Launch being broken for Firefox, and have been told, basically, So what? It works fine in IE, and that's what everyone is using. Yahoo cares nothing about their users, IMHO.
IANAL, but as I understand it, a person could set up (with a lawyer's help) a trust. Then he could enter into an agreement with that trust which says all code/inventions/thoughts/whatever, past, present, and future, written by him were the property of the trust, and that property not transferable by him, only by the trust. This keeps his ideas and work available to him for use forever. Then he can enter into whatever contract he wants, ensuring that a clause states that said contract only applies to property he actually owns. Then his thoughts/code/whatever never actually gets owned by the company because it was not his to offer. Later, a dastardly person could have his trust sell the rights to that code for a chunk of cash, or sue for damages, or any number of things. But the value here, really, is that you don't get screwed by your employer. Well, not in the IP way.
Obviously, you would not reveal such a thing to your employer unless it was VERY benifical to do so. It would be an Ace in the hole that you kept extremely close to your chest. As my sig indicates, I am totally against signing away your freedom by signing NDA's and such IP agreements. But if you are going to do it, do it right, so you can have your cake, and eat it too.
...if someone sent you an executable to format your HD, and
you click and opened it from TBird this would become a security risk in TBird also.
You at least grazed the problem with Outlook. See, in outlook, you don't have to click on anything to make it blow your computer up. ActiveX does this for you. Thanks, Outlook developers.
Now, that's aside from the fact that Outlook is basically a web browser, prettied up to be an email client. Notice the browser bar? Yep, that does exactly what you think it does. Type in a URL, and bang, you're surfing the web from within your email client. I had some less than intelligent bosses a few years ago who decided too much surfing was going on, and set permissions such that noone but the administrator could use Internet Explorer. I was very amused. When they realized everyone could still use the internet, (about a month later!) they quietly restored the proper permissions to IE.
Anecdotes aside, Every time a new browser vulnerability comes out, do you see updates to Outlook? 'cause it's a browser... and any html email you receive could expose you to the same kinds of vulnerabilities IE has. Especially since the browser functionality in Outlook is from an older version of IE (I assume).
I'm sorry for that assumption. Your mastery of English is amazing. I've traveled around the world and only met a very small handful of non-native English speakers who speak it (or write it) at that level. Usually they were linguists.
Yes, actually there have been children who learned Esperanto as the primary language. This happens because the couple will meet at an Esperanto convention, and will speak Esperanto in the home because it is the language they have in common. There's some resistance to changing the language, true, but not as much as you would suspect. It happens. If it did not, it would be a dead language. But the level of change is slight, compared to English. I am convinced that American English is on the verge of a major change, and the only thing holding it back is television. Were it not for mass communication devices such as television and radio, I believe we would be seeing an entirely different language emerge here in the U.S. from English. It would end up eventually being as different as Spanish and Italian. Automobiles help retard that change, too. Of course, I am only speculating.
Ok, point conceded.
That does not make English better, only more popular. In comparison, was Bush a better candidate than McCain? No(far from it!), only better funded.
I try to promote Esperanto because I believe in it's purpose- to be a politically neutral language that's easy to learn which can be used for a common language for the world. Esperanto is so easy, it takes very little time to learn. It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them. English is a stomper. Don't agree? What languages have been spoken here in the U.S.? German, Spanish, French, various Native American languages, Italian, and several others. English has stomped them all into oblivion, mainly because it's so damn hard to learn, by the time you learn it as your native language, your brain is fried toward learning another. That's not just here. How many languages does the average (UK) Englishman speak? One? Hmmm, am I detecting a pattern?
Even if you could force the rest of the world to learn English, you shouldn't. It's terribly destructive to culture. Ask a non-American where the most un-cultured country in the world is. Any non-American. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The proof is in the pudding. English is bad. It's hard to learn and destructive to culture. It sounds awful. Even Klingon sounds more beautiful. And this is a native English speaker saying this.
By the way, slashdot coders, your italics code seems broken.
Your funny note is very indicative. Wet Pant. If English were not my native tongue, Would this ring any chord? Would I think someone may have urinated themselves at that spot? Aside from the misspelling, how many meanings could you attach to the word pant? It's a noun, its a verb. It's what you do if you are a dog, it's what you wear while playing with that dog. It's the breath the dog exhaled. This is a standard word. We haven't even gone into Eubonics, or the difference between the Queen's English and American English. English not only borrows words and phrases from other languages, it borrows grammar, and oddly. This is where all the exeptions come from. Would that be two, to, or too? Would you use there or their? Most Americans can't spell "their", without their word processor. These things make a language hard. Shall I talk about am/is/are/was/were? I mean, come on. How many different ways can you bastardize "to be?"
"To be, or not to be," was dead on. If English weren't your native tongue you'd be having troubles with it too. Come to think of it, how many times this week have I heard some stupid question like, "You be goin' to tha sto(re)? Pick me up some smokes, aight?" Explain that one to a non-native. Heck, explain it to your (failing) English teacher. He/She is baffled, too.
The primary value of human languages is communication, so as long as you can speak it and communicate, this primary function is satisfied.
Again, I must point to Eubonics. I've actually had to interpret English to another English speaker! I'd say the primary function is not satisfied by English in it's current (screwed up!) state.
Yeah, yeah. Of course I have heard that before. On the other hand, I also keep correspondance with people from around the world, meet with local esperantists for coffee or dinner at least weekly, read magazines and books in esperanto, and listen to esperanto radio(music and talk shows) fairly often. So the several million speakers of esperanto and I tend to disagree with you. Your opinion, while I agree with your right to have it, is uninformed.
The flaw I see is that English is used as the base language. That creates a severe problem. English is not neutral. It's severely screwed up, as languages go, and is very hard to learn. There are multiple meanings of most of the words in the english language. Oh, sure, it's easy to use english, if that's the language the developers speak. But I do not think it best. Esperanto would be a good choice. Each word has basically one meaning. It has few grammar exceptions. Lots of translations into esperanto end up being more accurate than translations into other languages for multiple reasons.
But definitely, English is the opposite of a good choice.
Beyond any real reasons why Congress won't let them, there is the fact that there are polititions who have made their name by actively combatting anything that furthers space exploration. Or, at least, used such lunacy (no pun intended) to help them advance.
I hate it right off the bat because it's too damn small. In a camcorder, I want something meaty. I have to be able to feel the thing in my hands. On the body of this camcorder, which needs to be at least as big as both my fists put together, I want a zoom-in, a zoom-out, a record/pause button, and a stop button. I want an eyepiece. LCD is fine, and all the extra buttonry can be hidden under it, no problem. But an eyepiece is a must. I'm hating just about every digital camcorder I've seen. 4 gigs of HD? bump that up to 30 and you've got something. slap a laptop drive in there. It needs the extra weight. Otherwise stay with the tapes. These camcorders nowadays must be designed by chimps. I want the casing to be damn near indestructable. Put some metal in it. I should be able to use the thing as a football, and afterwards the only thing that might need replacing is the hard drive. It ought to be water resistant. It might seem counter-intuitive for a manufacturer to actually put out quality, but the more people love your camcorder, the more you SELL. You want it to be cool to carry one around. You don't want people to be afraid to breath on them for fear of cracking the plastic shell. Wake up, O ye manufacturers of crappy camcorders.
Thunderbird can apparently read multiple e-mail addresses from one domain (userx@noddy.com, usery@noddy.com . ..) but only allows you to use one when sending messages. His family have one email address each.
No, it defaults to one. You can select from whichever ones you set up. Check it out for yourself - it's pretty cool. Better than any other mail client I've tried lately, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it looks like they are classifying stuff just to classify it. But if you knew anything about how intelligence gathering works, you would know why they are doing it. Now that computers are as fast as they are, and the amount of data floating around out there, it's surprisingly easy to put two and two together, and gather intelligence that can be harmful. Here's a realworld example of exactly what I am talking about: Paul Graham on PR talks about how anyone can track down which companies are controlling what the press says, and making trends happen by causing people to believe they already are happening. Now imagine if you were trained to find little nuggets of info like that! That's what they are trying to prevent. It only takes one slip-up to create a critical vulnerability, exposing a position or future activity. So give 'em a break.
It does if you are an earthquake.
It is news for aviators. It is not news for nerds. I'd say the story is off-topic.
GIMP is powerful. What it is not is user-friendly. The interface is all wrong. They need to completely scrap the interface and have someone clueful in interface design come and perform some serious plastic surgery. If everything were in the right places, workflow with GIMP could be much better. The windows need to be stapled down, unless you tear them off. The only real reason to do this is if you have a metric ton of desktop real estate to spare, or better yet a second monitor. But for the average user, one window to rule them all. This is especially true for Windows GIMP users. There's a plugin for that, but it should be default. I could lay out more flaws, but suffice to say the interace is pathetic.
Sodipodi is good, from the limited amount that I have used it. I know several professionals who use it, but my own experience with it is lacking, so I won't comment much on it.
I've had a love/hate relationship with Blender for a long time. What it does, it does well. It seems very elegant from a minimalist viewpoint. The problem with Blender is that the learning curve is so high, who would want to learn it? There are tutorials for Maya and 3DS Max out the wazoo. But there are very few for Blender. To Blender fanatics: Produce a lot of tutorials. Not just text based, but some movies, and some websites with pictures. Really demonstrate how to do Cool Stuff. Again, the interface is not intuitive. Figuring out how to get things to work in Blender is a pain, whether you have 3D modeling experience or not. Basically nothing seems to want to explain itself. It could be a great business model though: the program is free, but the wall poster explaining how to do stuff costs 30 bucks. Seriously, though. 3D modeling is complicated. Even if you know it well, you still need to figure out the particulars of a function occasionally.
I think the real problem, though is the complete and utter lack of anything that competes with the 800 lb. gorilla of the graphics industry. It used to be Macromedia, but Adobe just bought out Macromedia, or is about to do so. Nothing, and I mean nothing, that the Open Source world does what Director does. Or Flash. Or Dreamweaver, really. This is perplexing in a way, because it's kinda the killer app for OSS, yet no one will touch it. Do the needed libraries not exist? Is there no programming language available that can do it? Of course they exist. Almost everything macromedia^H^H^HAdobe has could be duplicated in Tcl/Tk or Java, given the interest. So what's the hold-up?
Ok, for film, Cinepaint has been used on some major films. The layout problems for GIMP still apply, but only for home users with one monitor, because you would have several in use for pro filmmaking, and the layout makes sense somewhat. The competition is either utterly awful, in the case of Adobe's Premier, or too expensive for anyone to seriously consider, in the case of Autodesk's offerings (Combustion,Flame,Inferno, etc.) I think Cinepaint has a chance. Having said that, take a look at the website. From the looks of things, while it got off to a good start, things are grinding to a halt on that project. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love to see development continue.
As for actual desktop publishing, Scribus is truly phenomenal. There are bugs, just a few, but the scribus team is on frikken fire. Their product is better than Quark by a very large margin in my opinion. It still has a bit to go to catch Indesign. They freely admit this and are very realistic about where they are. They produce better pdf files than Adobe does. No kidding. Scribus is easily one of the best production tools the open source community has produced. However, it's achilles' heel: it's not cross-platform. It's linux only. This is what is keeping it from totally dominating the printing world. It's ready, if you are willing to run linux. But if not, then go ahead and get Indesign.
So that's the status from a graphics perspective. There's a lot more to it than just, "can I make a cool button for my website." The programs professionals need, just aren't there as far as open source projects, with the delightful exception of Scribus. (Kudos, guys!)
GIMP has a lot going for it. It's pen tool beats Photoshop's pen tool bloody. And there is a plugin to make everything attach to one window. (I can't imagine why this didn't get put into GimpShop. wtf was he thinking?) But the rest is next to impossible, at least without a major rewrite, and likely a fork.
I'd love to see GIMP be a contender, but it has too many bad habits. It's a fantastic program. But to nudge out Photoshop, it must transcend it's current form. It'll have to fork and basically start over, using what code is salvageable and ditching the rest.
The point is, we are getting gouged for broadband.
Way to not say much. But I'll retort anyway. It's not that "more Americans don't want high speed internet access," but that noone wants to pay more than about $20 for it. For most people, it's simply not worth more than that. Apparently Moore's Law doesn't apply to internet access, or we'd be paying much less. The main reason municipal wifi is getting roadblocked is because that would drive high-speed internet prices way down, and ruin the oligopoly that currently strangles internet access. Bottom line.
No need. Because your eye changes so much, retinal scan biometrics have to be fault tolerant. I recall someone reviewing retinal scan systems not too long ago and coming up with, get this: 1 in 10 people can fool basically anything on the market today into thinking they are you! And it concluded that that won't change anytime soon since the fault tolerance must be so high. So biometrics is officially SCREWED already.
Nah. Just find some local computer geek who will take anything. He'll come pick it all up and it will be out of your hair. Then he'll turn around and sell it all on ebay. Everybody wins.
Or better yet, .odt files!
I've sent more than one email to yahoo about Launch being broken for Firefox, and have been told, basically, So what? It works fine in IE, and that's what everyone is using. Yahoo cares nothing about their users, IMHO.
Obviously, you would not reveal such a thing to your employer unless it was VERY benifical to do so. It would be an Ace in the hole that you kept extremely close to your chest. As my sig indicates, I am totally against signing away your freedom by signing NDA's and such IP agreements. But if you are going to do it, do it right, so you can have your cake, and eat it too.
Call me when Yahoo Launch! works on firefox. Till then, I'm pretty much not interested in Yahoo.
Now, that's aside from the fact that Outlook is basically a web browser, prettied up to be an email client. Notice the browser bar? Yep, that does exactly what you think it does. Type in a URL, and bang, you're surfing the web from within your email client. I had some less than intelligent bosses a few years ago who decided too much surfing was going on, and set permissions such that noone but the administrator could use Internet Explorer. I was very amused. When they realized everyone could still use the internet, (about a month later!) they quietly restored the proper permissions to IE.
Anecdotes aside, Every time a new browser vulnerability comes out, do you see updates to Outlook? 'cause it's a browser... and any html email you receive could expose you to the same kinds of vulnerabilities IE has. Especially since the browser functionality in Outlook is from an older version of IE (I assume).
Outlook is the Devil, Bobby Boucher!
I'm sorry for that assumption. Your mastery of English is amazing. I've traveled around the world and only met a very small handful of non-native English speakers who speak it (or write it) at that level. Usually they were linguists.
Yes, actually there have been children who learned Esperanto as the primary language. This happens because the couple will meet at an Esperanto convention, and will speak Esperanto in the home because it is the language they have in common. There's some resistance to changing the language, true, but not as much as you would suspect. It happens. If it did not, it would be a dead language. But the level of change is slight, compared to English. I am convinced that American English is on the verge of a major change, and the only thing holding it back is television. Were it not for mass communication devices such as television and radio, I believe we would be seeing an entirely different language emerge here in the U.S. from English. It would end up eventually being as different as Spanish and Italian. Automobiles help retard that change, too. Of course, I am only speculating.
Ok, point conceded.
That does not make English better, only more popular. In comparison, was Bush a better candidate than McCain? No(far from it!), only better funded. I try to promote Esperanto because I believe in it's purpose- to be a politically neutral language that's easy to learn which can be used for a common language for the world. Esperanto is so easy, it takes very little time to learn. It doesn't stomp out the very valuable native cultures of the world, it co-exists with them. English is a stomper. Don't agree? What languages have been spoken here in the U.S.? German, Spanish, French, various Native American languages, Italian, and several others. English has stomped them all into oblivion, mainly because it's so damn hard to learn, by the time you learn it as your native language, your brain is fried toward learning another. That's not just here. How many languages does the average (UK) Englishman speak? One? Hmmm, am I detecting a pattern?
Even if you could force the rest of the world to learn English, you shouldn't. It's terribly destructive to culture. Ask a non-American where the most un-cultured country in the world is. Any non-American. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The proof is in the pudding. English is bad. It's hard to learn and destructive to culture. It sounds awful. Even Klingon sounds more beautiful. And this is a native English speaker saying this.
By the way, slashdot coders, your italics code seems broken.
We haven't even gone into Eubonics, or the difference between the Queen's English and American English. English not only borrows words and phrases from other languages, it borrows grammar, and oddly. This is where all the exeptions come from.
Would that be two, to, or too? Would you use there or their? Most Americans can't spell "their", without their word processor. These things make a language hard. Shall I talk about am/is/are/was/were? I mean, come on. How many different ways can you bastardize "to be?" "To be, or not to be," was dead on. If English weren't your native tongue you'd be having troubles with it too.
Come to think of it, how many times this week have I heard some stupid question like, "You be goin' to tha sto(re)? Pick me up some smokes, aight?" Explain that one to a non-native. Heck, explain it to your (failing) English teacher. He/She is baffled, too. Again, I must point to Eubonics. I've actually had to interpret English to another English speaker! I'd say the primary function is not satisfied by English in it's current (screwed up!) state.
Yeah, yeah. Of course I have heard that before. On the other hand, I also keep correspondance with people from around the world, meet with local esperantists for coffee or dinner at least weekly, read magazines and books in esperanto, and listen to esperanto radio(music and talk shows) fairly often. So the several million speakers of esperanto and I tend to disagree with you. Your opinion, while I agree with your right to have it, is uninformed.
The flaw I see is that English is used as the base language. That creates a severe problem. English is not neutral. It's severely screwed up, as languages go, and is very hard to learn. There are multiple meanings of most of the words in the english language. Oh, sure, it's easy to use english, if that's the language the developers speak. But I do not think it best. Esperanto would be a good choice. Each word has basically one meaning. It has few grammar exceptions. Lots of translations into esperanto end up being more accurate than translations into other languages for multiple reasons.
But definitely, English is the opposite of a good choice.
I'd have modded you up funny if you didn't A/C.
Beyond any real reasons why Congress won't let them, there is the fact that there are polititions who have made their name by actively combatting anything that furthers space exploration. Or, at least, used such lunacy (no pun intended) to help them advance.
I hate it right off the bat because it's too damn small. In a camcorder, I want something meaty. I have to be able to feel the thing in my hands. On the body of this camcorder, which needs to be at least as big as both my fists put together, I want a zoom-in, a zoom-out, a record/pause button, and a stop button. I want an eyepiece. LCD is fine, and all the extra buttonry can be hidden under it, no problem. But an eyepiece is a must. I'm hating just about every digital camcorder I've seen. 4 gigs of HD? bump that up to 30 and you've got something. slap a laptop drive in there. It needs the extra weight. Otherwise stay with the tapes. These camcorders nowadays must be designed by chimps. I want the casing to be damn near indestructable. Put some metal in it. I should be able to use the thing as a football, and afterwards the only thing that might need replacing is the hard drive. It ought to be water resistant. It might seem counter-intuitive for a manufacturer to actually put out quality, but the more people love your camcorder, the more you SELL. You want it to be cool to carry one around. You don't want people to be afraid to breath on them for fear of cracking the plastic shell. Wake up, O ye manufacturers of crappy camcorders.