Nobody is "insisting" anything. Take it down a notch -- the whole topic of conversation is based on the fact that the GIMP devs WANT INPUT. To ask for criticism and then consider anyone who offers it to be ungrateful is, well, ungrateful.
You have the 800 window problem if you're using another type of MDI anyway
No, you don't. You don't have 800 items on your taskbar, you don't have 800 different items clogging your alt-tab hotswitch menu, you don't have multiple copies of the same basic OS menu, you don't have 800 different places for the focus to be. And most of all -- most insanely! -- you don't switch to another application, then switch back to the original app only to find that each window has to be brought to the foreground individually. Because after all, they are not windows of a single application, they're 800 separate applications!
Sensible applications, built by people with UI experience, make toolbars and palettes behave like toolbars and palettes, not like completely separate applications. There are a number of different ways to approach this problem, all of which are superior in almost every manner to what the GIMP team has implemented.
MS says they needed to do the update to continue to notify users of actual updates.
That's the craziest circular logic I've heard in a while. Is there some reason it can't "Notify Me" of the need to update windows updates? That's what happens when you reinstall an SP2 box -- first time it boots it says it needs to update windows update.
Bitching for no reason? -- someone is installing new executables to the system directory without even telling the administrator of the box!? You're right, nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong with that scenario.
Computer professionals are obviously just bored and trolling for blog traffic if they're talking about something as mundane as something that just spontaneously changes system files.::rolleyes::
They are not pushing out updates to critical system files without any user intervention.
If you read the post from Microsoft, you'll see that they admit, and justify, doing precisely that. I don't see any FUD happening, the Windows Update manager clearly stated that Windows Update will (and apparently has already multiple times in the past) install new system files without any user intervention, even if you've told it to notify you first, because the Windows Update group decided this was a better behavior than following the setting the user selected.
When a system needs a re-install is there a rolled up update one can get from MS? or is it still like the dark days of win98?
No, once you have SP2 (and most install disks of course are SP2), that's it for prepackaged updates. Everything else has to come in one at a time, either by Windows update or other means. I think last time I did it was about 4-6 reboots worth, spread over a couple dozen individual updates, to reinstall XP SP2.
But how much do usability experts charge for their services? And are they willing to allow their work to be distributed under a free license?
There are plenty of professional UI & usability folks happy to help. Developers, by and large, don't want to hear from us. We can't program and provide them with a neat patch to merge into CVS, so that means all we can do is give them more work to do, and in the process criticize what they think was a good design of their own making.
Also, many, many programmers have a clear disdain for anything as nontechnical and nonobvious as usability, since most usability research is experiential and similar to psychological research. I can't tell you the mathematical explanation for why people respond to particular elements or cues the way they do, all I know is that they do.
Part of the developer contempt for usability/UI folks (as can be seen on any UI thread on slashdot) is that programmers generally can't differentiate between mere aesthetics and taste and actual usability or UI mechanics. Changing the color of an icon or making something "pretty" has nothing to do with usability or UI design, but those sorts of things are generally used as a way to dismiss any criticism of an UI. "We just updated the icons, what do you mean our UI isn't modern!??" or "The program kicks ass, anyone who needs pretty buttons to use it is obviously too dumb to understand what it does"
There's no 16 or 32 bit channel support, no adjustment layers, no colorspaces aside from RGB and greyscale, no usable colour profile support. Those four things on their own eliminate Gimp as a usable high-end photography tool. The interface is not the problem. The underlying libraries are.
it's funny because even a year or two ago when a GIMP article would come up, people would ask why it hasn't replaced Photoshop and I'd say that the primitive (well, it would have been state of the art in 1993) color support just kills it out of the box for anyone doing anything more advanced than web graphics. Of course, everyone would reply and say I was just a luser artist who was obviously just too stupid to possibly learn anything other than the Photoshop UI and that's why I secretly hated the GIMP, and no regular user will ever need to use anything other than 8-bit untagged RGB.
And of course now consumer-level cameras -- point and shoot $500 models -- are shooting in RAW and saving 12-bit tagged images that the GIMP has no hope of dealing with in any usable way.
If the GIMP developers had listened to the professionals back in say, 1999, when we told them their fundamental assumptions about color were hopelessly naive, they might have been able to do something about it. As it is, I don't imagine anything short of a Mozilla-style "throw out all the code and start over" will keep the GIMP from eventually fading away as more modern open-source apps port the GIMP's features onto a better foundation.
Photoshop kills Gimp on performance for images greater than 3k x 3k pixels. I don't know what the deal is, but Gimp crawls when trying to touch up large images. Things like the airbrush seem relatively unaffected by size in Photoshop, but not in Gimp. And to say that Gimp's scissor tool is the same as the one in Photoshop would be a farce.
Yes, this is something that harder to explain or take a screenshot of, but it it 90% of the reason professionals who have tried GIMP won't use it. Adobe has spent almost 20 years refining the behavior of the tools, of the memory managment, of the behavior of the application. Yes, it's easy to make a tool that works "like" one of the tools in Photoshop, but that doesn't mean it will be just as good. Even something as "simple" as how to antialias a selection can (and has) filled several PhD theses.
You can find many, many large discussions online of the theoretical underpinnings and practical differences of different text antialiasing techniques used by Windows and Mac OSes, and that's a mere fraction of the decisionmaking that is made by the programmers of something like Photoshop.
Which is not to say that the GIMP can only succeed by making the same choices and duplicating the existing Photoshop tools, but in my repeated trials of the GIMP it has become clear that most of the tools have been developed by programmers who don't even know that there is a large body of work on these subjects, and that complex behavior is a necessity if you want the best quality possible.
My point is that an article that purports to use "science" to disprove pseudo-science
They weren't trying to "disprove" homeopothy through scientific means. They were showing that the journal articles which claimed to be scientific were not, in fact, based on science. That's a huge difference.
The goal was not to disprove anything, but to show readers how pseudo-sciences can make things SOUND scientific without actually following the scientific method.
Seriously -- taking birth control pills causes hormonal changes. This is not news. This is why people continue researching new methods of birth control -- because those changes aren't always just the ones you want. I'm thrilled that natural birth control methods are working fine for you. Nobody has claimed they don't work, they just don't have the same success rate over large populations as hormonal options do.
No offense, you seem to have such a huge chip on your shoulder about "science nazis" that you have completely lost track of what science is. Having an asshole for a doctor is not evidence that science is wrong.
science makes the claim that a single cause has a single effect, and that simply isn't true.
you're right, it isn't true, and that's why science makes no such claim.
isolating variables is not about assuming that "one cause=one effect", it is about reducing outside interference in an experiment. If the only way for something to work is to have two things happen to get an effect, or to have one thing happen and get two effects, then science has no problem accepting that. That's not to say plenty of folks won't be performing experiments to try and get it down even simpler, and prove that only one of the things is important, but that's the process of science trying to be as precise as possible and has nothing to do with simplistic assumptions.
You do realize that the iPod was the dominant player before the iTMS existed, Apple makes virtually no money off the iTMS, and only a small percentage of iPod users have ever bought music from the iTMS? And, of course, that iTMS is moving away from DRM on music anyways, so it's not like users are "locked in" to anything other than the usability of it.
As long as Apple sells iPods, they don't give a shit what people do. They make their money from iPods. iTunes and the iTMS are *features* of the iPod, not products themselves.
What they want to avoid is having to compete on the iPod-manager software front. They don't give a rat's whiskers about the Linux tools, but if Microsoft puts out their own tool that syncs the iPod up to the Zune Website and ships it with their OS... there goes Apple's user lock-in.
LOL. Worst slashdot conspiracy ever.
Yes, Apple is terrified that MS will make iPod sync software so fantastic that people will stop buying iPods!
The iPod became popular through clever marketing. Period. That is what Apple does well. Market.
Yes, most people preferred the 3.5" HD based players that were clunky, ugly and nerdy until Apple marketing SOMEHOW convinced them that small and easy to use was somehow good! People are such sheep sometimes.
I call BS on the usability arguement, sorry. My Creative Zen Nano is just as easy to use as my daughter's iPod if not easier. The only reason iPods sell as well as they do is name and hype.
Yes, but iPods became popular when Creative's interfaces were nerdy and unfriendly. Creative's current interfaces and design are certainly fine, but that's precisely because Apple raised the bar (and Creative had a nice model to copy *cough*).
Apple didn't have any name or hype in the personal audio market when the iPod came out. Creative did.
I have a massive CD collection ripped sitting on a shared drive, and everytime she wants something she has to let Itunes convert it and store another copy of the song.
...wha? If iTunes can open the file to convert it, it is perfectly capable of playing it without making a copy locally or converting it in any way. The ONLY file format that it will convert and not play is WMA on windows, where it uses the system to decompress the audio so it can save it is a useful format.
I'm really hoping you're not bitching about iTunes not natively supporting Microsoft's proprietary format.
More difficult, maybe, but definitely more fun! I love getting 137/138 chunks of a file and having to send a request for the last chunk and wait a couple weeks for it to be filled. More fun than watching grass dry... or paint grow... whatever...
How is the weather back there in 1997?
Re:fun yes; groundbreaking no
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
Finally, there were a lot of plot discrepancies
Would you kindly finish playing the game before criticizing the story?
Not sure about in the US but in Canada EVERYONE is legally required to report any child abuse they have evidence of.
The difference for "mandatory reporters" is that they are legally required to report even suspicions of abuse, not just cases where they have evidence or knowledge. Abuse is usually very hard to recognize with any certainty.
Something that people fail to understand is that government has no interest nor the resources to monitor the actions of those that mean no harm.
Something you fail to understand is that the "government" doesn't care, but the individual people, who are employed by the government, certainly do. Information is power, and people who want power tend to be in the position to have access to that information.
It took years for J. Edgar Hoover's files to become publicly known because he used them primarily to blackmail people for his own personal gain (though I'm sure he convinced himself he was doing it for the good of the country). Your fantasy that any abuse of power is immediately made public by some well-meaning worker is contradicted by countless historical examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody is "insisting" anything. Take it down a notch -- the whole topic of conversation is based on the fact that the GIMP devs WANT INPUT. To ask for criticism and then consider anyone who offers it to be ungrateful is, well, ungrateful.
No, you don't. You don't have 800 items on your taskbar, you don't have 800 different items clogging your alt-tab hotswitch menu, you don't have multiple copies of the same basic OS menu, you don't have 800 different places for the focus to be. And most of all -- most insanely! -- you don't switch to another application, then switch back to the original app only to find that each window has to be brought to the foreground individually. Because after all, they are not windows of a single application, they're 800 separate applications!
Sensible applications, built by people with UI experience, make toolbars and palettes behave like toolbars and palettes, not like completely separate applications. There are a number of different ways to approach this problem, all of which are superior in almost every manner to what the GIMP team has implemented.
That's the craziest circular logic I've heard in a while. Is there some reason it can't "Notify Me" of the need to update windows updates? That's what happens when you reinstall an SP2 box -- first time it boots it says it needs to update windows update.
Bitching for no reason? -- someone is installing new executables to the system directory without even telling the administrator of the box!? You're right, nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong with that scenario.
Computer professionals are obviously just bored and trolling for blog traffic if they're talking about something as mundane as something that just spontaneously changes system files.
If you read the post from Microsoft, you'll see that they admit, and justify, doing precisely that. I don't see any FUD happening, the Windows Update manager clearly stated that Windows Update will (and apparently has already multiple times in the past) install new system files without any user intervention, even if you've told it to notify you first, because the Windows Update group decided this was a better behavior than following the setting the user selected.
No, once you have SP2 (and most install disks of course are SP2), that's it for prepackaged updates. Everything else has to come in one at a time, either by Windows update or other means. I think last time I did it was about 4-6 reboots worth, spread over a couple dozen individual updates, to reinstall XP SP2.
You'd be onto something if it weren't for the fact that the GIMP is about the only major program on any platform with this crazy window behavior.
There are more options available than just the Windows MDI or spamming 800 independent windows.
There are plenty of professional UI & usability folks happy to help. Developers, by and large, don't want to hear from us. We can't program and provide them with a neat patch to merge into CVS, so that means all we can do is give them more work to do, and in the process criticize what they think was a good design of their own making.
Also, many, many programmers have a clear disdain for anything as nontechnical and nonobvious as usability, since most usability research is experiential and similar to psychological research. I can't tell you the mathematical explanation for why people respond to particular elements or cues the way they do, all I know is that they do.
Part of the developer contempt for usability/UI folks (as can be seen on any UI thread on slashdot) is that programmers generally can't differentiate between mere aesthetics and taste and actual usability or UI mechanics. Changing the color of an icon or making something "pretty" has nothing to do with usability or UI design, but those sorts of things are generally used as a way to dismiss any criticism of an UI. "We just updated the icons, what do you mean our UI isn't modern!??" or "The program kicks ass, anyone who needs pretty buttons to use it is obviously too dumb to understand what it does"
Sounds like you're using virtual desktops to get around the broken window behavior in the program.
it's funny because even a year or two ago when a GIMP article would come up, people would ask why it hasn't replaced Photoshop and I'd say that the primitive (well, it would have been state of the art in 1993) color support just kills it out of the box for anyone doing anything more advanced than web graphics. Of course, everyone would reply and say I was just a luser artist who was obviously just too stupid to possibly learn anything other than the Photoshop UI and that's why I secretly hated the GIMP, and no regular user will ever need to use anything other than 8-bit untagged RGB.
And of course now consumer-level cameras -- point and shoot $500 models -- are shooting in RAW and saving 12-bit tagged images that the GIMP has no hope of dealing with in any usable way.
If the GIMP developers had listened to the professionals back in say, 1999, when we told them their fundamental assumptions about color were hopelessly naive, they might have been able to do something about it. As it is, I don't imagine anything short of a Mozilla-style "throw out all the code and start over" will keep the GIMP from eventually fading away as more modern open-source apps port the GIMP's features onto a better foundation.
Yes, this is something that harder to explain or take a screenshot of, but it it 90% of the reason professionals who have tried GIMP won't use it. Adobe has spent almost 20 years refining the behavior of the tools, of the memory managment, of the behavior of the application. Yes, it's easy to make a tool that works "like" one of the tools in Photoshop, but that doesn't mean it will be just as good. Even something as "simple" as how to antialias a selection can (and has) filled several PhD theses.
You can find many, many large discussions online of the theoretical underpinnings and practical differences of different text antialiasing techniques used by Windows and Mac OSes, and that's a mere fraction of the decisionmaking that is made by the programmers of something like Photoshop.
Which is not to say that the GIMP can only succeed by making the same choices and duplicating the existing Photoshop tools, but in my repeated trials of the GIMP it has become clear that most of the tools have been developed by programmers who don't even know that there is a large body of work on these subjects, and that complex behavior is a necessity if you want the best quality possible.
Apple is suddenly panicking about losing DRM lock-in at the same time they themselves are eliminating DRM from what they sell? That makes sense.
They weren't trying to "disprove" homeopothy through scientific means. They were showing that the journal articles which claimed to be scientific were not, in fact, based on science. That's a huge difference.
The goal was not to disprove anything, but to show readers how pseudo-sciences can make things SOUND scientific without actually following the scientific method.
That your wife needs a new doctor?
Seriously -- taking birth control pills causes hormonal changes. This is not news. This is why people continue researching new methods of birth control -- because those changes aren't always just the ones you want. I'm thrilled that natural birth control methods are working fine for you. Nobody has claimed they don't work, they just don't have the same success rate over large populations as hormonal options do.
No offense, you seem to have such a huge chip on your shoulder about "science nazis" that you have completely lost track of what science is. Having an asshole for a doctor is not evidence that science is wrong.
you're right, it isn't true, and that's why science makes no such claim.
isolating variables is not about assuming that "one cause=one effect", it is about reducing outside interference in an experiment. If the only way for something to work is to have two things happen to get an effect, or to have one thing happen and get two effects, then science has no problem accepting that. That's not to say plenty of folks won't be performing experiments to try and get it down even simpler, and prove that only one of the things is important, but that's the process of science trying to be as precise as possible and has nothing to do with simplistic assumptions.
You do realize that the iPod was the dominant player before the iTMS existed, Apple makes virtually no money off the iTMS, and only a small percentage of iPod users have ever bought music from the iTMS? And, of course, that iTMS is moving away from DRM on music anyways, so it's not like users are "locked in" to anything other than the usability of it.
As long as Apple sells iPods, they don't give a shit what people do. They make their money from iPods. iTunes and the iTMS are *features* of the iPod, not products themselves.
...and?
Apple doesn't dominate the market because they were the first ones to ever use a hierarchical menu on an MP3 player.
LOL. Worst slashdot conspiracy ever.
Yes, Apple is terrified that MS will make iPod sync software so fantastic that people will stop buying iPods!
Yes, most people preferred the 3.5" HD based players that were clunky, ugly and nerdy until Apple marketing SOMEHOW convinced them that small and easy to use was somehow good! People are such sheep sometimes.
Yes, but iPods became popular when Creative's interfaces were nerdy and unfriendly. Creative's current interfaces and design are certainly fine, but that's precisely because Apple raised the bar (and Creative had a nice model to copy *cough*).
Apple didn't have any name or hype in the personal audio market when the iPod came out. Creative did.
I'm really hoping you're not bitching about iTunes not natively supporting Microsoft's proprietary format.
How is the weather back there in 1997?
Would you kindly finish playing the game before criticizing the story?
The difference for "mandatory reporters" is that they are legally required to report even suspicions of abuse, not just cases where they have evidence or knowledge. Abuse is usually very hard to recognize with any certainty.
Something you fail to understand is that the "government" doesn't care, but the individual people, who are employed by the government, certainly do. Information is power, and people who want power tend to be in the position to have access to that information.
It took years for J. Edgar Hoover's files to become publicly known because he used them primarily to blackmail people for his own personal gain (though I'm sure he convinced himself he was doing it for the good of the country). Your fantasy that any abuse of power is immediately made public by some well-meaning worker is contradicted by countless historical examples.
That's certainly true, which is why dating conservatives is so boring.