...I chose the larger program, and found that all of those advanced resources were, in fact, available to me. I took a graduate class as a sophomore in solid state physics, and got to be co-author on a real paper in the field.
I was surrounded by people who were really interested in the field, and knew that the professors truly got it.
So, assuming that your program doesn't completely ignore undergrads, then going to a school with a bigger program can be a very good choice. Particularly if you're headed for grad school or are interested in research. Just make sure you do your homework -- some of those big name schools are the ones that ignore undergrads.
Amen. There's no one right answer. If you're the type that's self-motivated, you'll get a great experience at either size of school, and you'll have more resources at your disposal at the larger school. But at a smaller school, like Harvey Mudd, you'll get more interaction with the faculty automatically; undergrads doing research with faculty there is the norm, not the exception.
Re:2 things keeping market share down
on
G5s Start Shipping
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· Score: 1
well the educational price, is only $1800, but who says that you need a powermac for school? unless your doing high end science, i'd say that an iBook at $949 is probably what you want (based on the limited information you gave me);)
You can get the G5 for even less than that (about $1649 I think) if you replace the Superdrive with a Combo drive. (Educational price only.)
Please keep in mind when complaining about PB and XCode that while PB is free, and XCode will at a minimum come free with Panther, Visual Studio.NET can cost you anywhere from $549 to $2,499, depending on the package you choose
Exactly...and for OS X, if you need much more powerful debugging tools (and darn-fast compiles) you can always use CodeWarrior. I've been a CodeWarrior fan for years, and I think its debugger is better than VS's!
Scox isn't selling anything anyway. All scox earnings are fud money from msft and sunw. You need to boycott scox's controlling company: Canopy Group. I urge you to email these companies and explain that you will not do any business with them. I have included the letter that I sent to these companies as a sample.... info@trolltech.com...
Whoa...what's Trolltech (the makers of Qt) doing there? I can't believe that Trolltech would want to be associated with SCO in any way.
I beg to differ. I've given Intuem staff printouts to musicians to read plenty of times, and they've never had problems with it...
Anyway, Intuem does work for printing sheet music.
What if you need first and second endings? What if you need articulations on top of notes, or crescendos? What if you need grace notes?
These are not "power user" features, these are pretty basic formatting for sheet music, and Intuem is missing most (if not all) of them.
I'm not trying to dis Intuem. I think it's a pretty cool program. But it simply doesn't have even the most basic set of features for working with notation.
IANAL, but I wonder if this could be a potential victory for everyone opposed to software patents.
Note the wording of Microsoft's official statement: "the accused feature in our browser technology was developed by our own engineers based on preexisting Microsoft technology." From what I understand of patent law, whether the technology was developed independently by Microsoft's engineers was irrelevant.
If Microsoft wins on appeal, that could set a precedent in favor of everyone who gets hit with a patent lawsuit when they developed the technology independently. This could help to weaken software patents.
Then again, if Microsoft ultimately loses its appeal, they could end up helping to reform patent law. I may get modded down for this, but I honestly don't think Microsoft is evil - just greedy. And $521 Million is a serious chunk of change, even for Microsoft. They may be better off convincing a few congresscritters to invalidate stupid software patents, and that's good for all of us.
Finale - this is like the Microsoft Office of music notation - seems easy to use at first, really annoying once you try to do more complicated things, but has thousands of features. No other program has as many features as Finale, even though Finale implements many of them quite poorly. Totally unintuitive and not very Mac-like. Unfortunately, Finale files are the standard file format in the industry, so if you're going to be trading sheet music with other composers, you'll need to have Finale. See also their low-end versions, Finale Allegro and PrintMusic - there's nothing at all wrong with these if you don't need the features they leave out - mainly the ability to work with large scores and do part extraction.
Sibelius - intuitive, Mac-like. Easier to use than Finale, though some things take some getting used to. Not quite as powerful. Buggy - not more so than Finale, but in different ways. In theory it can open Finale files - not sure how well it really works.
Intuem is great for sequencing, but the original question was about sheet music software. Intuem does have a "staff" display, but this is not powerful enough for someone who wants to print out sheet music suitable for publication, or even suitable for distributing to someone else to sightread.
Finale is not yet supported under OSX. It will be soon.
They've been saying this ever since OS X first came out. Yes, I know, it really will be released soon this time, but I'm sick and tired of Coda's crappy programming.
Finale is the most un-Mac-like program ever, in every possible way you could imagine.
It's also incredibly powerful. No other notation tool gives you nearly as much control over every aspect of the score, formatting, weird time signatures and key signatures, floating measures, alternate spacings, etc. - but hardly anything about Finale is intuitive.
I've used both and I can attest to the fact that GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop...
The only people who think that Photoshop is better than GIMP are people with very little original creativity.
I love the Gimp. I use it all the time. It does everything I need and more. It does everything that many Photoshop users would ever need and more.
But your statements are still very wrong and misleading. The Gimp does not have support for 16-bit color channels. Period. This is not something that can just be hacked on; it would require rewriting major sections of the code. For anyone who needs to work with images that have more than 8 bits of precision per color channel, the Gimp is simply not an option.
It's great to spread the word about the Gimp. But it's counterproductive when you spread false claims about the Gimp and insult Photoshop users.
The key to really mastering these subjects is to have a good teacher.
By all means, get some of the books recommended by fellow Slashdot readers. I'm familiar with many of them and a lot of them are great.
But at some point, no matter how good the books are, you'll get stuck on some point - and that's where you need to find a good teacher you can turn to. It doesn't have to be someone you see in person - someone you correspond with via email or over the phone would be fine.
It doesn't have to be someone with any sort of credential - but ideally it should be someone who is either currently a student (studying math/science at a much higher level than you) or someone who uses these subjects in their work. The main key, though, is to find someone who really loves math/science, and someone who's really patient.
I love helping people who really want to understand math or science. It gets old fast if the person just wants to know how to get the right answer and doesn't care why. If they really care, and they're really patient enough to take the time to learn it really well, then I'm always more than happy to take the time to help. It's fun! I really love it when the light bulb comes on in somebody's head! (Feel free to email me - I'm great with Trig, Calc, & Discrete Math.)
How to tell a good student: The bad student asks, "how do you solve this problem?", but the good student asks, "I tried to solve it this way, but it didn't work...why?"
How to tell a good teacher: The bad teacher, in response to the good student's question above, responds, "that's the wrong way to solve it; here's the right way". The good teacher responds, "interesting approach - let's figure out why it didn't work".
Most math departments have a course somewhere after the introductory sequence which teaches basic proof techniques often by studying the definition of numerical systems from logical axioms.
This is usually called "Math Analysis". It usually covers all of the same topics as a calculus course, except now that instead of doing problems, you prove everything.
Fascinating course, though very difficult and not for everyone. I honestly believe that anyone can learn to pass Calculus, assuming they have good teachers - if you practice enough, you can learn to take derivatives and intergrals. But learning to come up with novel proofs is not for everyone.
Maybe if universities werent so strict and competitive on the GPA issue I could actually focus on learning but right now I have a goal, that goal is to get into Harvard, Tufts, Boston College,Boston University or North Eastern, all which are ELITE private universities which will NOT let you in with a sub 3.0 GPA...
Heck, you could get a 4.0 GPA and not transfer into any of those schools from a community college. Elite private universities take fewer than a hundred transfer students a year, and they usually get many thousands of qualified applicants - many of those from highly regarded 4-year schools. If your goal is to go to an Ivy League school, go right after high school or not at all. It's still hard, but you're probably 10x more likely to get in.
Not trying to discourage you, just being realistic. If you don't believe me, look up the statistics for transfer students at one of those schools and see how different they are from first-year acceptance rates.
I'll totally second that recommendation. Larry Gonick's "Cartoon Guide to Physics" is my number one recommendation for a high-school-level Physics book!
Here's my suggestion: wait 11 months and then decide. After all, you can purchase AppleCare anytime in the first year. Just be sure to put it on your iCal so you don't forget.
Get the machine now. If you find something wrong with it in the first 11 months, purchase AppleCare, and then have them fix it. It'll cost about the same (~$300 for a typical repair), but obviously you'll be getting a better deal with AppleCare, since that will cover future repairs for free.
After 11 months, if nothing has required repair yet, you'll have a better idea of how important it will be to you. If the optical drive broke in 6 months, would that be the end of the world? Or could you afford the $300 to fix it? How long do you think you'll keep the machine? Has it tended to be reliable, or flaky? Battery problems? Stuck pixels? It will be much easier to decide at that point.
Re:What about the postscript desktop?
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OpenGL 1.5
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· Score: 5, Informative
No doubt, my knowledge of 3D APIs and hardware is pathetic; however, what exactly do you mean by "fully OpenGL desktop"?
Quartz Extreme, Apple's name for the Mac OS 10.2 version of the Quartz Compositor, uses OpenGL to render what you see on the screen. Note that just because it uses OpenGL doesn't mean that it uses any 3D - all it takes advantage of is 2D bitmaps, special effects like shadows, and alpha transparency.
But that's a really big deal! It means that all of the bitmaps representing your windows and other screen objects are in your graphic card's RAM, and moving a window in OS X doesn't require computing of any pixels at all on the CPU. (Unfortunately, resizing is slower, because every redraw requires sending a new bitmap, of a different size, to the graphics card.) This also allows them to do the Genie effect, window scale effects, and Expose superfast without wasting any CPU cycles. Compare that to Windows or X - when you move a window, all of the windows underneath it get repaint events, which can take a while to trigger depending on the application.
Note that the Quartz Compositor is a totally different thing than Quartz, the new 2D graphics library in OS X that is designed to replace QuickDraw.
The Quartz Compositor is what makes it possible for QuickTime movies to keep playing when you minimize them to the dock, transparent overlays to smoothly fade in and out when you hit a volume control key on the keyboard, and 10.3's fast user switching to literally "rotate" the screen in 3D to show the other user's desktop.
Quartz Extreme - i.e. using OpenGL to implement Quartz Compositor - is what makes it fast.
The great thing about Quartz Extreme is that Apple has only begun to explore the possibilities. The fast user switching effect probably only took them a day to code up, because all of the underlying technology was there.
I just searched through their site a little (using Mozilla on Linux...just need to disable JavaScript). Well over 90% of the songs I found there are $0.99. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the songs that are $0.89, and I haven't found a single song that's $0.79 yet!
They probably talked one of the labels into selling a few thousand songs for less, just so that they could claim the $0.79 minimum price.
I think Apple has it right: keep it simple. People don't like deceptive advertising.
Still, I expect this to be moderately successful, at least until Apple's Windows store comes out later this year.
MP3 works. I don't have to worry about my player supporting MP3. I don't have to worry about other people being able to play my MP3s. And I don't worry about MP3 licensing terms either. To be honest, I don't anybody should.
Here's why you should care about MP3 licensing: the licensing terms make it impossible to legally ship a free MP3 encoder. That's why Audacity can't ship with an MP3 encoder built-in, but forces you to download it separately from out of the U.S.
A lot of people seem to be asking about how well Scribus imports Quark or InDesign files. First of all, there's almost no compatibility between commercial DTP file-formats. It's already been mentionned that InDesign doesn't do a very good job with PageMaker files, and there's almost no compatibility between Quark and InDesign. And it's not even worth discussing Publisher.
So why should Scribus be held to a higher standard? If Adobe and Quark decided not to waste their time reverse-engineering the other's file formats, why should the OSS community? DTP requires such precision that a less-than-perfect conversion is useless.
Scribus doesn't need to be held to a higher standard, but this is one area where open-source software has traditionally excelled. When it comes to reverse-engineering undocumented file formats, this is a true case where "many eyes makes all bugs shallow".
So if the developers are reading this, don't waste your time on import or export filters for other DTP file fomats!!!!!!
Thankfully I doubt many developers will pay attention to you. The great thing about open-source is that if even one developer has a need to import/export Quark files, they can implement that feature. Others can improve on it. If you don't need that feature, or don't think it should be used to compare Scribus to other programs, fine, but it's silly to tell open-source developers what NOT to work on.
Re:Just look at the gaming market
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Funding Open Source?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We complain about the lack of jobs available and then go on and on about how great FREE software is. Hypothetical situation Linux takes the desktop by storm, Windows goes down the tubes. Thousands of workers are out of jobs at Microsoft. Not only did thousands of job positions disappear but now you have thousands of people looking for new jobs.
1000+ more people out of work 1000+ less job positions to be filled.
You're forgetting that 90% of the software in the world is not shrinkwrapped, commercial software, it's custom software, usually for in-house use.
The article's idea of "Open Investment" doesn't seem to be about finding ways to fund open-source projects directly, but rather on educating developers on how to become personally wealthy so that they can donate their time to open-source. Or did I misunderstand it?
Anyway, I think Yaztromo just solved his problem #1 - by getting his question posted on Slashdot, I don't think he'll have any trouble marketing his project now, assuming it's any good. I'm interested in #2 as well, though - raising funds to accelerate development. I'm the lead developer of Audacity, and I've been thinking recently of various ways we might be able to raise money to pay a full-time developer:
1. Lots of small donations, targeted at specific features. Simple to set up, but how likely is it that any one particular feature would get enough funding to really pay for its development?
2. Corporate sponsorship - anyone out there successfully gotten a corporate sponsor for an open-source project before? How did you approach them? How much will they try to control how the money is used?
3. Non-profit grant - we could write a proposal to add a large, significant, but specialized feature, such as making Audacity optimized for blind users, or creating a version for kids, and then find an appropriate charityto fund it.
Anyone had luck with any of these approaches? Other ideas?
All I see it "contact a sales rep" crap. T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e, what's that? Fill out a form so you can get back with me if I'm a good enough customer?
What are the prices?
Why can't I just order up a couple machines off their web pages?
I was going to order 3 or 4 machines for a graphics project ohwell... Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines. Guess I'll stick with Dell or Apple.
(I'm being sarcastic, but I think I made my point)
SGI lost the battle for low-end machines long ago. Nobody in their right mind is purchasing low-end SGIs unless they already have a lab full of high-end ones and simply want compatibility - in which case they already have an established relationship with SGI.
The point is that if you want to render 3-D graphics on a wall of 36 LCD displays in a 6x6 grid, fed from a 2-TB server of image data, you can't buy Dell or Apple. You can't even put together a Linux box to do that. SGI is simply the only game in town that builds machines with graphics pipes that big.
No, he isn't. He's just progressive and speaks his mind and heart. He's offering a real difference to the boring business-as-usual old-boy networks in both parties. I for one favor someone who's going to go as strong and as long in the right direction as possible, given that Congress and The System will drag him down to making a merely moderate effect. Starting out with a moderate is saying "No, I don't really want things to change".
I totally agree with Kucinich's viewpoints on almost all issues and it'd be great to support someone like him, but unfortunately I've read too much about Kucinich that tells a different story. Try searching for articles about Kucinich outside of his website, and learn how he bungled his job as Cleveland mayor. He also flip-flopped on abortion recently because that was the only way he could get the Democratic nomination - that's made him a lot of enemies, on both sides of the abortion debate.
Dennis Kucinich seems to be one of the more clueful candidates.
Kucinich seems to be more liberal (in a good way) and I agree with more of his policies. But Kucinich has a lot of enemies - he made a horrible bungling mess as the major of Cleveland - and his views are too far to the left for mainstream America.
I don't agree with Dean on all issues, but he gives insightful, reasoned responses. He seems very practical - his health care plan is much less radical than Clinton's failed attempt.
So even though I'd like to see more people agree with Kucinich's viewpoints on paper, I'm supporting Dean because he's a better candidate as a whole.
Does this mean that Lawrence Lessig likes Howard Dean? If yes, why? What ideas? Are they friends? Does Lessig think Dean would be a good president?......
Educated guess: Lessig likes Dean. Lessig may not agree with all of Dean's ideas, but is very impressed with Dean's Internet presence and his willingness to speak frankly on a wide range of issues.
Slashdot Mirror
...I chose the larger program, and found that all of those advanced resources were, in fact, available to me. I took a graduate class as a sophomore in solid state physics, and got to be co-author on a real paper in the field.
I was surrounded by people who were really interested in the field, and knew that the professors truly got it.
So, assuming that your program doesn't completely ignore undergrads, then going to a school with a bigger program can be a very good choice. Particularly if you're headed for grad school or are interested in research. Just make sure you do your homework -- some of those big name schools are the ones that ignore undergrads.
Amen. There's no one right answer. If you're the type that's self-motivated, you'll get a great experience at either size of school, and you'll have more resources at your disposal at the larger school. But at a smaller school, like Harvey Mudd, you'll get more interaction with the faculty automatically; undergrads doing research with faculty there is the norm, not the exception.
well the educational price, is only $1800, but who says that you need a powermac for school? unless your doing high end science, i'd say that an iBook at $949 is probably what you want (based on the limited information you gave me) ;)
You can get the G5 for even less than that (about $1649 I think) if you replace the Superdrive with a Combo drive. (Educational price only.)
Please keep in mind when complaining about PB and XCode that while PB is free, and XCode will at a minimum come free with Panther, Visual Studio .NET can cost you anywhere from $549 to $2,499, depending on the package you choose
Exactly...and for OS X, if you need much more powerful debugging tools (and darn-fast compiles) you can always use CodeWarrior. I've been a CodeWarrior fan for years, and I think its debugger is better than VS's!
Scox isn't selling anything anyway. All scox earnings are fud money from msft and sunw. You need to boycott scox's controlling company: Canopy Group. I urge you to email these companies and explain that you will not do any business with them. I have included the letter that I sent to these companies as a sample. ... ...
info@trolltech.com
Whoa...what's Trolltech (the makers of Qt) doing there? I can't believe that Trolltech would want to be associated with SCO in any way.
Hmmm, just found this:
Myth: Trolltech is owned by Canopy Group which is the owner of SCO.
I beg to differ. I've given Intuem staff printouts to musicians to read plenty of times, and they've never had problems with it...
Anyway, Intuem does work for printing sheet music.
What if you need first and second endings? What if you need articulations on top of notes, or crescendos? What if you need grace notes?
These are not "power user" features, these are pretty basic formatting for sheet music, and Intuem is missing most (if not all) of them.
I'm not trying to dis Intuem. I think it's a pretty cool program. But it simply doesn't have even the most basic set of features for working with notation.
IANAL, but I wonder if this could be a potential victory for everyone opposed to software patents.
Note the wording of Microsoft's official statement: "the accused feature in our browser technology was developed by our own engineers based on preexisting Microsoft technology." From what I understand of patent law, whether the technology was developed independently by Microsoft's engineers was irrelevant.
If Microsoft wins on appeal, that could set a precedent in favor of everyone who gets hit with a patent lawsuit when they developed the technology independently. This could help to weaken software patents.
Then again, if Microsoft ultimately loses its appeal, they could end up helping to reform patent law. I may get modded down for this, but I honestly don't think Microsoft is evil - just greedy. And $521 Million is a serious chunk of change, even for Microsoft. They may be better off convincing a few congresscritters to invalidate stupid software patents, and that's good for all of us.
Full featured WYSIWYG notation software:
Finale - this is like the Microsoft Office of music notation - seems easy to use at first, really annoying once you try to do more complicated things, but has thousands of features. No other program has as many features as Finale, even though Finale implements many of them quite poorly. Totally unintuitive and not very Mac-like. Unfortunately, Finale files are the standard file format in the industry, so if you're going to be trading sheet music with other composers, you'll need to have Finale. See also their low-end versions, Finale Allegro and PrintMusic - there's nothing at all wrong with these if you don't need the features they leave out - mainly the ability to work with large scores and do part extraction.
Sibelius - intuitive, Mac-like. Easier to use than Finale, though some things take some getting used to. Not quite as powerful. Buggy - not more so than Finale, but in different ways. In theory it can open Finale files - not sure how well it really works.
Low-end WYSIWYG notation software:
Harmony Assistant
Lime Music Notation
Unix (may work on Mac OS X with Apple's X11):
Rosegarden
Text-based (no GUI, but renders nice output):
MusicTeX
Lilypond
Sequencers (may do a little bit of notation):
Intuem
Cubase et. al from Steinberg
Logic Audio
Please feel free to add and re-post. If someone wants to compile prices for all of these, that would be great.
It is OSX Native, and works very well:
http://www.intuem.com/
Intuem is great for sequencing, but the original question was about sheet music software. Intuem does have a "staff" display, but this is not powerful enough for someone who wants to print out sheet music suitable for publication, or even suitable for distributing to someone else to sightread.
Finale is not yet supported under OSX. It will be soon.
They've been saying this ever since OS X first came out. Yes, I know, it really will be released soon this time, but I'm sick and tired of Coda's crappy programming.
Finale is the most un-Mac-like program ever, in every possible way you could imagine.
It's also incredibly powerful. No other notation tool gives you nearly as much control over every aspect of the score, formatting, weird time signatures and key signatures, floating measures, alternate spacings, etc. - but hardly anything about Finale is intuitive.
I've used both and I can attest to the fact that GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop...
The only people who think that Photoshop is better than GIMP are people with very little original creativity.
I love the Gimp. I use it all the time. It does everything I need and more. It does everything that many Photoshop users would ever need and more.
But your statements are still very wrong and misleading. The Gimp does not have support for 16-bit color channels. Period. This is not something that can just be hacked on; it would require rewriting major sections of the code. For anyone who needs to work with images that have more than 8 bits of precision per color channel, the Gimp is simply not an option.
It's great to spread the word about the Gimp. But it's counterproductive when you spread false claims about the Gimp and insult Photoshop users.
The key to really mastering these subjects is to have a good teacher.
By all means, get some of the books recommended by fellow Slashdot readers. I'm familiar with many of them and a lot of them are great.
But at some point, no matter how good the books are, you'll get stuck on some point - and that's where you need to find a good teacher you can turn to. It doesn't have to be someone you see in person - someone you correspond with via email or over the phone would be fine.
It doesn't have to be someone with any sort of credential - but ideally it should be someone who is either currently a student (studying math/science at a much higher level than you) or someone who uses these subjects in their work. The main key, though, is to find someone who really loves math/science, and someone who's really patient.
I love helping people who really want to understand math or science. It gets old fast if the person just wants to know how to get the right answer and doesn't care why. If they really care, and they're really patient enough to take the time to learn it really well, then I'm always more than happy to take the time to help. It's fun! I really love it when the light bulb comes on in somebody's head! (Feel free to email me - I'm great with Trig, Calc, & Discrete Math.)
How to tell a good student: The bad student asks, "how do you solve this problem?", but the good student asks, "I tried to solve it this way, but it didn't work...why?"
How to tell a good teacher: The bad teacher, in response to the good student's question above, responds, "that's the wrong way to solve it; here's the right way". The good teacher responds, "interesting approach - let's figure out why it didn't work".
Most math departments have a course somewhere after the introductory sequence which teaches basic proof techniques often by studying the definition of numerical systems from logical axioms.
This is usually called "Math Analysis". It usually covers all of the same topics as a calculus course, except now that instead of doing problems, you prove everything.
Fascinating course, though very difficult and not for everyone. I honestly believe that anyone can learn to pass Calculus, assuming they have good teachers - if you practice enough, you can learn to take derivatives and intergrals. But learning to come up with novel proofs is not for everyone.
Maybe if universities werent so strict and competitive on the GPA issue I could actually focus on learning but right now I have a goal, that goal is to get into Harvard, Tufts, Boston College,Boston University or North Eastern, all which are ELITE private universities which will NOT let you in with a sub 3.0 GPA...
Heck, you could get a 4.0 GPA and not transfer into any of those schools from a community college. Elite private universities take fewer than a hundred transfer students a year, and they usually get many thousands of qualified applicants - many of those from highly regarded 4-year schools. If your goal is to go to an Ivy League school, go right after high school or not at all. It's still hard, but you're probably 10x more likely to get in.
Not trying to discourage you, just being realistic. If you don't believe me, look up the statistics for transfer students at one of those schools and see how different they are from first-year acceptance rates.
I'll totally second that recommendation. Larry Gonick's "Cartoon Guide to Physics" is my number one recommendation for a high-school-level Physics book!
Here's my suggestion: wait 11 months and then decide. After all, you can purchase AppleCare anytime in the first year. Just be sure to put it on your iCal so you don't forget.
Get the machine now. If you find something wrong with it in the first 11 months, purchase AppleCare, and then have them fix it. It'll cost about the same (~$300 for a typical repair), but obviously you'll be getting a better deal with AppleCare, since that will cover future repairs for free.
After 11 months, if nothing has required repair yet, you'll have a better idea of how important it will be to you. If the optical drive broke in 6 months, would that be the end of the world? Or could you afford the $300 to fix it? How long do you think you'll keep the machine? Has it tended to be reliable, or flaky? Battery problems? Stuck pixels? It will be much easier to decide at that point.
No doubt, my knowledge of 3D APIs and hardware is pathetic; however, what exactly do you mean by "fully OpenGL desktop"?
Quartz Extreme, Apple's name for the Mac OS 10.2 version of the Quartz Compositor, uses OpenGL to render what you see on the screen. Note that just because it uses OpenGL doesn't mean that it uses any 3D - all it takes advantage of is 2D bitmaps, special effects like shadows, and alpha transparency.
But that's a really big deal! It means that all of the bitmaps representing your windows and other screen objects are in your graphic card's RAM, and moving a window in OS X doesn't require computing of any pixels at all on the CPU. (Unfortunately, resizing is slower, because every redraw requires sending a new bitmap, of a different size, to the graphics card.) This also allows them to do the Genie effect, window scale effects, and Expose superfast without wasting any CPU cycles. Compare that to Windows or X - when you move a window, all of the windows underneath it get repaint events, which can take a while to trigger depending on the application.
Note that the Quartz Compositor is a totally different thing than Quartz, the new 2D graphics library in OS X that is designed to replace QuickDraw.
The Quartz Compositor is what makes it possible for QuickTime movies to keep playing when you minimize them to the dock, transparent overlays to smoothly fade in and out when you hit a volume control key on the keyboard, and 10.3's fast user switching to literally "rotate" the screen in 3D to show the other user's desktop.
Quartz Extreme - i.e. using OpenGL to implement Quartz Compositor - is what makes it fast.
The great thing about Quartz Extreme is that Apple has only begun to explore the possibilities. The fast user switching effect probably only took them a day to code up, because all of the underlying technology was there.
I just searched through their site a little (using Mozilla on Linux...just need to disable JavaScript). Well over 90% of the songs I found there are $0.99. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the songs that are $0.89, and I haven't found a single song that's $0.79 yet!
They probably talked one of the labels into selling a few thousand songs for less, just so that they could claim the $0.79 minimum price.
I think Apple has it right: keep it simple. People don't like deceptive advertising.
Still, I expect this to be moderately successful, at least until Apple's Windows store comes out later this year.
MP3 works. I don't have to worry about my player supporting MP3. I don't have to worry about other people being able to play my MP3s. And I don't worry about MP3 licensing terms either. To be honest, I don't anybody should.
Here's why you should care about MP3 licensing: the licensing terms make it impossible to legally ship a free MP3 encoder. That's why Audacity can't ship with an MP3 encoder built-in, but forces you to download it separately from out of the U.S.
A lot of people seem to be asking about how well Scribus imports Quark or InDesign files. First of all, there's almost no compatibility between commercial DTP file-formats. It's already been mentionned that InDesign doesn't do a very good job with PageMaker files, and there's almost no compatibility between Quark and InDesign. And it's not even worth discussing Publisher.
So why should Scribus be held to a higher standard? If Adobe and Quark decided not to waste their time reverse-engineering the other's file formats, why should the OSS community? DTP requires such precision that a less-than-perfect conversion is useless.
Scribus doesn't need to be held to a higher standard, but this is one area where open-source software has traditionally excelled. When it comes to reverse-engineering undocumented file formats, this is a true case where "many eyes makes all bugs shallow".
So if the developers are reading this, don't waste your time on import or export filters for other DTP file fomats!!!!!!
Thankfully I doubt many developers will pay attention to you. The great thing about open-source is that if even one developer has a need to import/export Quark files, they can implement that feature. Others can improve on it. If you don't need that feature, or don't think it should be used to compare Scribus to other programs, fine, but it's silly to tell open-source developers what NOT to work on.
We complain about the lack of jobs available and then go on and on about how great FREE software is. Hypothetical situation Linux takes the desktop by storm, Windows goes down the tubes. Thousands of workers are out of jobs at Microsoft. Not only did thousands of job positions disappear but now you have thousands of people looking for new jobs.
1000+ more people out of work 1000+ less job positions to be filled.
You're forgetting that 90% of the software in the world is not shrinkwrapped, commercial software, it's custom software, usually for in-house use.
The article's idea of "Open Investment" doesn't seem to be about finding ways to fund open-source projects directly, but rather on educating developers on how to become personally wealthy so that they can donate their time to open-source. Or did I misunderstand it?
Anyway, I think Yaztromo just solved his problem #1 - by getting his question posted on Slashdot, I don't think he'll have any trouble marketing his project now, assuming it's any good. I'm interested in #2 as well, though - raising funds to accelerate development. I'm the lead developer of Audacity, and I've been thinking recently of various ways we might be able to raise money to pay a full-time developer:
1. Lots of small donations, targeted at specific features. Simple to set up, but how likely is it that any one particular feature would get enough funding to really pay for its development?
2. Corporate sponsorship - anyone out there successfully gotten a corporate sponsor for an open-source project before? How did you approach them? How much will they try to control how the money is used?
3. Non-profit grant - we could write a proposal to add a large, significant, but specialized feature, such as making Audacity optimized for blind users, or creating a version for kids, and then find an appropriate charityto fund it.
Anyone had luck with any of these approaches? Other ideas?
All I see it "contact a sales rep" crap. T-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e, what's that? Fill out a form so you can get back with me if I'm a good enough customer?
What are the prices?
Why can't I just order up a couple machines off their web pages?
I was going to order 3 or 4 machines for a graphics project ohwell... Sorry SGI, you lose 'cause I couldn't get pricing information for even order the machines. Guess I'll stick with Dell or Apple.
(I'm being sarcastic, but I think I made my point)
SGI lost the battle for low-end machines long ago. Nobody in their right mind is purchasing low-end SGIs unless they already have a lab full of high-end ones and simply want compatibility - in which case they already have an established relationship with SGI.
The point is that if you want to render 3-D graphics on a wall of 36 LCD displays in a 6x6 grid, fed from a 2-TB server of image data, you can't buy Dell or Apple. You can't even put together a Linux box to do that. SGI is simply the only game in town that builds machines with graphics pipes that big.
No, he isn't. He's just progressive and speaks his mind and heart. He's offering a real difference to the boring business-as-usual old-boy networks in both parties. I for one favor someone who's going to go as strong and as long in the right direction as possible, given that Congress and The System will drag him down to making a merely moderate effect. Starting out with a moderate is saying "No, I don't really want things to change".
I totally agree with Kucinich's viewpoints on almost all issues and it'd be great to support someone like him, but unfortunately I've read too much about Kucinich that tells a different story. Try searching for articles about Kucinich outside of his website, and learn how he bungled his job as Cleveland mayor. He also flip-flopped on abortion recently because that was the only way he could get the Democratic nomination - that's made him a lot of enemies, on both sides of the abortion debate.
Dennis Kucinich seems to be one of the more clueful candidates.
Kucinich seems to be more liberal (in a good way) and I agree with more of his policies. But Kucinich has a lot of enemies - he made a horrible bungling mess as the major of Cleveland - and his views are too far to the left for mainstream America.
I don't agree with Dean on all issues, but he gives insightful, reasoned responses. He seems very practical - his health care plan is much less radical than Clinton's failed attempt.
So even though I'd like to see more people agree with Kucinich's viewpoints on paper, I'm supporting Dean because he's a better candidate as a whole.
Does this mean that Lawrence Lessig likes Howard Dean? If yes, why? What ideas? Are they friends? Does Lessig think Dean would be a good president? ......
Educated guess: Lessig likes Dean. Lessig may not agree with all of Dean's ideas, but is very impressed with Dean's Internet presence and his willingness to speak frankly on a wide range of issues.