Have you ever tried a Wacom Cintiq? Doodling on a monitor is like drawing on paper or painting on a canvas. Pretty intuitive to me. You'll get more control than doodling on a pen tablet. And for Photoshop, some sort of implement would seem more natural than no stylus, unless you're used to finger painting.;)
I do agree with the majority of posters that this device looks like a toy. If price were no issue, Cintiq all the way. Otherwise, an Intuos or Grapphire tablet would work just fine.
I admit that I haven't tried Blender in a while, but my impression at the time was that the developers treated this project like a checklist. Does it have particles? Check. does it have a scripting language? Check, etc.
IMHO it's bad form to treat any piece of software as a checklist, but in my experience software engineers tend to drift towards this routine. Maybe it's the way they're trained at school? Professors give you credit if your assignment works because that's easy to judge; it's much harder to justify a lower score to a student on the basis that the professor *feels* it's not intuitive.
Too bad for the Blender team that their past sins are haunting them. Maybe I'll try it again someday, but once you leave an impression it's tough to change that.
Hmmm. I don't know much about how long it takes to manufacture these things, but I wonder if the last few consoles and their unremarkable sales figures has made them cautious. Up until Christmas the buzz was all around PS3 until everybody saw how great the Wii is. Now they're probably scrambling to fill orders.
It seems like OpenGL is still the API of choice for content creation software like Maya and Direct3D is more popular for games. There is overlap of course, but in general it's true for the Windows platform.:D
Now that I think of it, 3D game assets are often created with OpenGL software like Maya, and the final game product is done with DirectX.
You can always find somebody else to do the graphics, but it doesn't sound like this guy is looking to do cutting edge, avantgarde graphics.
Speaking as both a coder (10 years) and an artist (Art Center grad), I know it's not that hard for a coder to do tasteful graphics. Practice RESTRAINT AND CONSISTENCY. Use 2-3 fonts max per page. Borrow or steal nice layouts and color schemes. Simplicity will usually get you further than overloading your work with elaborate graphics.
It really isn't difficult to do tasteful graphics- just don't go overboard.
Again, I can say I don't know what the average user thinks about Linux' readiness for the desktop; heck! I can't even say what my parents or my girlfriend think about Linux' readiness for the desktop. But I can say they are exclusively using it in such a role for the last five years without a claim.
Pfft. I'm sure having you there to conveniently answer any tech support questions has no bearing on the matter. I've done my share of interface research, and I have to say that as a whole the Linux platform is pathetic. I hold out hope because there are some bright spots, but in general there is a lack of guidelines and so many cooks doing their own thing that the consistency isn't even close to that of Windows or OSX (and their consistency isn't that good).
You know, opinions are like asses: everybody has one. I for me can say that I'm using Linux since last nineties and I find such crapware good enough for me, and I find myself in such a humble mood not to try to say the others what to use or what Linux needs to success or what average users want or need. On the other hand I can talk about *facts* either from me or from people I directly know
Exactly how many asses were you born with?;) "Windows is a best a memory hog of a contendor at this stage"? If you want to talk about "facts", let's look at numbers. At less than one percent, it's hard to call Linux even a "contender" in the desktop arena, and a default Ubuntu install isn't exactly "svelte". Sure you can tune it, but how many average users go under the hood?
You know, I actually use and *like* Linux for my purposes, but I think people like you are holding it back. It must be hard to be objective when all you've used recently is Linux. From my experience, Linux is great in many ways, but I just don't think it's great for the desktop.I know many smart people who have tried Linux because they were told that it was "desktop ready", but found it to be confusing beyond belief and ran back to what simply worked for them. Now instead of Linux supporters, they've become rather vocal detractors.
When people ask me if it's "desktop ready", I don't blindly tell them "yes" like some zealots (cough, cough). They're asking for my opinion, and if I don't think that it's reasonably close to the ease of use of either Windows or Macintosh in all aspects without somebody there to coach them (like you), I can't recommend it. Not everybody is lucky enough to have a boyfriend or son who is both well-versed in the way of Linux AND has the time and patience to help.
Come on... Arguing that Linux is better because you can just download any hobbyist programming package is completely meaningless to the typical user. Does that feature mean it's ready for the desktop? Hell no.
You're a programming hobbyist but can't figure out CD-burning software for Windows? I don't believe that for a second. The same goes for the wireless interface comment.
How much shit do you keep open? I don't know how many applications the average user keeps open, but judging from your comment, probably a lot less than you. I really wonder how useful virtual desktops are for the typical user.
And if the term "crapware" has anything to do with user interface design, I'd say that most of what is available for Linux is complete crapware. Open Source software *in general* (not all) is too pedantic. Interface guidelines seem to mean nothing in this realm which leads to an embarrassing lack of consistency and confusion for beginners. It isn't a problem of Linux per se, but it definitely poses a problem for the desktop readiness of Linux.
Linux is fast and nimble? Are you on crack? Definitely not the so-called "desktop-ready" distros. Paradoxically, it seems that the more the Linux desktop adopts Windows-isms and Mac-isms, the more it suffers the same problems as Windows and Mac. I remember when the Linux desktop was touted as being lightweight and fast (pre-KDE and GNOME).
Remember, this is about *desktop readiness", not how well Linux suits a programmer. It has its merits, but I really don't think it's even close to being ready for the desktop.
Until you get to the two grand range, it seems like Lenovo is adverse to using decent 3D videocards even in their regular laptops. I know you can still run Vista without the fancy 3D effects, but the lower-end 3D chipsets don't take that much power.
It's great that Sun is finally doing this, but can you imagine where Java could be if Sun would've done this a LONG time ago? With the rising popularity of.NET, it seems a little late.
Hmmm... I wonder if it's possible to gather data on what people are downloading. If the rate at which people are downloading 5-15 year old stuff is higher, that could at least indicate that today's music is less appealing in general.
It'd also be interesting to see how many of the songs downloaded are by unsigned bands that wouldn't be accounted for in total CD sales anyways.
It's like a Jap complaining about the Pacific War. Hey, buddy! if you don't want a war, DON'T START ONE !!
How is the parent modded "insightful"?
The racial slur is a nice touch. I love that it's posted anonymously. I'm sure that he or she hears complaints about the Pacific War all the time. Pfft. The AC probably wasn't even born before 1945.
I don't give a crap what Blender can do. If you really think that it's simply the capability of some free tool like Blender that'll make Pixar quake in their boots, "you're seriously deluded". Anybody could do traditional animation at home for years, but I don't think that ever worried Disney.
Let's look at it this way: Maya Unlimited costs what, $7000 per seat? Compare that to the cost of the person sitting in that seat. Pixar is about talent and creativity, and that doesn't "appear overnight" nor does it come cheap. When I first see a Pixar movie, I'm awed by the eye candy, but I leave the theatre appreciating the content even more.
I agree with most of what you say, but I think the real issue is that before students needed to learn only analog skills. Today, as a design student I'm responsible to learn twice as much technical skill (analog AND digital). We spend less time on classes like design theory. To me, this is a lot more alarming than the reduction of a technical skill that can easily be taught.
Anybody can learn a technical skill like drawing. Creativity and design theory is much harder to teach.
The UMD's sucked battery life, but sometimes it was more convenient to buy it ready to watch on UMD. Especially on business trips, I'd rather buy a few UMD's rather than going to the trouble of ripping to Memory Stick. Honestly, I'm torn because it was convenient at times to buy something ready to watch, but at the same time I disliked that it was so closed.
Here's my big question: Why didn't Sony just use the Hi-MD format that already existed? Aren't the discs the same? I don't have a Hi-MD here, but the size and capacity seem to be identical (or very, very similar).
Pagemaker? Who actually listed Pagemaker as an application they'd like to see on Linux? Quark or InDesign would make more sense. The shrinking pool of leftover Pagemaker users don't have the clout to have Adobe port it to Linux. Hell, all of the users begging Adobe to port Photoshop don't have the clout.:|
I'll tell you why I'm not very optimistic about this.
Motorola, one of the members of this new consortium, has a line of smartphones (A780, E680, E680i, etc.) that run a version of Linux from Montavista (also part of this new consortium) and uses Qt. Sounds good so far, right?
I own an A780, so the following is my experience with the device and Motorola. It was a bitch to get the kernel source. Thankfully, I found it at MotorolaFans.com (I think it originally came from a Chinese site). Motorola is keeping their platform very closed, and it's next to impossible to get a native SDK instead of the slow and not-so-featureful J2ME. And to add to that, the location API (for GPS) and other libraries are locked for only Motorola-blessed developers. The fun stuff is locked away. Their developer site, Motocoder.com, is equally useless with no community forums but just Motorola propaganda. Boo.
IF Motorola et al. actually open up the platform then I'm all for it. Otherwise, I don't think this will go anywhere. The "kiss of death" here is actually keeping things so closed that developers can't do anything great with the platform. I could kiss the Motorola management for releasing cool hardware... but I could piss on them for limiting it with shitty software and developer support (to clarify I'd really only piss on them).:|
I'd say that most software was created by programmers, and that it has nothing to do with the packaging. What are you trying to say here?
Dunno about the latter statement either, since I'm a design student, but I can program quite well.:D Programming is challenging, but I know quite a few designers who are competent programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Informative?
;)
Have you ever tried a Wacom Cintiq? Doodling on a monitor is like drawing on paper or painting on a canvas. Pretty intuitive to me. You'll get more control than doodling on a pen tablet. And for Photoshop, some sort of implement would seem more natural than no stylus, unless you're used to finger painting.
I do agree with the majority of posters that this device looks like a toy. If price were no issue, Cintiq all the way. Otherwise, an Intuos or Grapphire tablet would work just fine.
Wasn't ClearType a result of Microsoft Research?
I admit that I haven't tried Blender in a while, but my impression at the time was that the developers treated this project like a checklist. Does it have particles? Check. does it have a scripting language? Check, etc.
IMHO it's bad form to treat any piece of software as a checklist, but in my experience software engineers tend to drift towards this routine. Maybe it's the way they're trained at school? Professors give you credit if your assignment works because that's easy to judge; it's much harder to justify a lower score to a student on the basis that the professor *feels* it's not intuitive.
Too bad for the Blender team that their past sins are haunting them. Maybe I'll try it again someday, but once you leave an impression it's tough to change that.
Hmmm. I don't know much about how long it takes to manufacture these things, but I wonder if the last few consoles and their unremarkable sales figures has made them cautious. Up until Christmas the buzz was all around PS3 until everybody saw how great the Wii is. Now they're probably scrambling to fill orders.
It seems like OpenGL is still the API of choice for content creation software like Maya and Direct3D is more popular for games. There is overlap of course, but in general it's true for the Windows platform. :D
Now that I think of it, 3D game assets are often created with OpenGL software like Maya, and the final game product is done with DirectX.
Hell gasoline explodes (remember the exploding Chevy trucks?).
You can always find somebody else to do the graphics, but it doesn't sound like this guy is looking to do cutting edge, avantgarde graphics.
Speaking as both a coder (10 years) and an artist (Art Center grad), I know it's not that hard for a coder to do tasteful graphics. Practice RESTRAINT AND CONSISTENCY. Use 2-3 fonts max per page. Borrow or steal nice layouts and color schemes. Simplicity will usually get you further than overloading your work with elaborate graphics.
It really isn't difficult to do tasteful graphics- just don't go overboard.
Again, I can say I don't know what the average user thinks about Linux' readiness for the desktop; heck! I can't even say what my parents or my girlfriend think about Linux' readiness for the desktop. But I can say they are exclusively using it in such a role for the last five years without a claim.
;) "Windows is a best a memory hog of a contendor at this stage"? If you want to talk about "facts", let's look at numbers. At less than one percent, it's hard to call Linux even a "contender" in the desktop arena, and a default Ubuntu install isn't exactly "svelte". Sure you can tune it, but how many average users go under the hood?
Pfft. I'm sure having you there to conveniently answer any tech support questions has no bearing on the matter. I've done my share of interface research, and I have to say that as a whole the Linux platform is pathetic. I hold out hope because there are some bright spots, but in general there is a lack of guidelines and so many cooks doing their own thing that the consistency isn't even close to that of Windows or OSX (and their consistency isn't that good).
You know, opinions are like asses: everybody has one. I for me can say that I'm using Linux since last nineties and I find such crapware good enough for me, and I find myself in such a humble mood not to try to say the others what to use or what Linux needs to success or what average users want or need. On the other hand I can talk about *facts* either from me or from people I directly know
Exactly how many asses were you born with?
You know, I actually use and *like* Linux for my purposes, but I think people like you are holding it back. It must be hard to be objective when all you've used recently is Linux. From my experience, Linux is great in many ways, but I just don't think it's great for the desktop.I know many smart people who have tried Linux because they were told that it was "desktop ready", but found it to be confusing beyond belief and ran back to what simply worked for them. Now instead of Linux supporters, they've become rather vocal detractors.
When people ask me if it's "desktop ready", I don't blindly tell them "yes" like some zealots (cough, cough). They're asking for my opinion, and if I don't think that it's reasonably close to the ease of use of either Windows or Macintosh in all aspects without somebody there to coach them (like you), I can't recommend it. Not everybody is lucky enough to have a boyfriend or son who is both well-versed in the way of Linux AND has the time and patience to help.
Come on... Arguing that Linux is better because you can just download any hobbyist programming package is completely meaningless to the typical user. Does that feature mean it's ready for the desktop? Hell no.
You're a programming hobbyist but can't figure out CD-burning software for Windows? I don't believe that for a second. The same goes for the wireless interface comment.
How much shit do you keep open? I don't know how many applications the average user keeps open, but judging from your comment, probably a lot less than you. I really wonder how useful virtual desktops are for the typical user.
And if the term "crapware" has anything to do with user interface design, I'd say that most of what is available for Linux is complete crapware. Open Source software *in general* (not all) is too pedantic. Interface guidelines seem to mean nothing in this realm which leads to an embarrassing lack of consistency and confusion for beginners. It isn't a problem of Linux per se, but it definitely poses a problem for the desktop readiness of Linux.
Linux is fast and nimble? Are you on crack? Definitely not the so-called "desktop-ready" distros. Paradoxically, it seems that the more the Linux desktop adopts Windows-isms and Mac-isms, the more it suffers the same problems as Windows and Mac. I remember when the Linux desktop was touted as being lightweight and fast (pre-KDE and GNOME).
Remember, this is about *desktop readiness", not how well Linux suits a programmer. It has its merits, but I really don't think it's even close to being ready for the desktop.
What about Vista?
Until you get to the two grand range, it seems like Lenovo is adverse to using decent 3D videocards even in their regular laptops. I know you can still run Vista without the fancy 3D effects, but the lower-end 3D chipsets don't take that much power.
It's great that Sun is finally doing this, but can you imagine where Java could be if Sun would've done this a LONG time ago? With the rising popularity of .NET, it seems a little late.
"Judgment" not "judgEment".
Hmmm... I wonder if it's possible to gather data on what people are downloading. If the rate at which people are downloading 5-15 year old stuff is higher, that could at least indicate that today's music is less appealing in general.
It'd also be interesting to see how many of the songs downloaded are by unsigned bands that wouldn't be accounted for in total CD sales anyways.
It's like a Jap complaining about the Pacific War. Hey, buddy! if you don't want a war, DON'T START ONE !!
How is the parent modded "insightful"?
The racial slur is a nice touch. I love that it's posted anonymously. I'm sure that he or she hears complaints about the Pacific War all the time. Pfft. The AC probably wasn't even born before 1945.
I dunno, clearcutting rainforests to plant soybeans could be one problem:
7 114
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/6/27/9325/5
I second that. Especially after you see the in-game character, the name "Seaman" takes on a whole new meaning.
And it turned out to be one fo the most successful consoles ever.
That tends to happen when your basically the ONLY console. Not discounting Nintendo but its targeted a very different group of people than the PS3.
WTF? PS2 was far from the "ONLY console". Remember Gamecube and XBox?
I'm curious why the Slashdot crowd seems so obsessed with who has the most powerful console. Is that what it takes to make a game fun?
I don't give a crap what Blender can do. If you really think that it's simply the capability of some free tool like Blender that'll make Pixar quake in their boots, "you're seriously deluded". Anybody could do traditional animation at home for years, but I don't think that ever worried Disney.
Let's look at it this way: Maya Unlimited costs what, $7000 per seat? Compare that to the cost of the person sitting in that seat. Pixar is about talent and creativity, and that doesn't "appear overnight" nor does it come cheap. When I first see a Pixar movie, I'm awed by the eye candy, but I leave the theatre appreciating the content even more.
Worried? I think not. Maybe amused.
Uhhh... is this guy serious? $399 back in 1993 does NOT calculate to $450 with inflation. It'd be closer to $550 today.
I agree with most of what you say, but I think the real issue is that before students needed to learn only analog skills. Today, as a design student I'm responsible to learn twice as much technical skill (analog AND digital). We spend less time on classes like design theory. To me, this is a lot more alarming than the reduction of a technical skill that can easily be taught.
Anybody can learn a technical skill like drawing. Creativity and design theory is much harder to teach.
The UMD's sucked battery life, but sometimes it was more convenient to buy it ready to watch on UMD. Especially on business trips, I'd rather buy a few UMD's rather than going to the trouble of ripping to Memory Stick. Honestly, I'm torn because it was convenient at times to buy something ready to watch, but at the same time I disliked that it was so closed.
Here's my big question: Why didn't Sony just use the Hi-MD format that already existed? Aren't the discs the same? I don't have a Hi-MD here, but the size and capacity seem to be identical (or very, very similar).
Pagemaker? Who actually listed Pagemaker as an application they'd like to see on Linux? Quark or InDesign would make more sense. The shrinking pool of leftover Pagemaker users don't have the clout to have Adobe port it to Linux. Hell, all of the users begging Adobe to port Photoshop don't have the clout. :|
I'll tell you why I'm not very optimistic about this.
:|
Motorola, one of the members of this new consortium, has a line of smartphones (A780, E680, E680i, etc.) that run a version of Linux from Montavista (also part of this new consortium) and uses Qt. Sounds good so far, right?
I own an A780, so the following is my experience with the device and Motorola. It was a bitch to get the kernel source. Thankfully, I found it at MotorolaFans.com (I think it originally came from a Chinese site). Motorola is keeping their platform very closed, and it's next to impossible to get a native SDK instead of the slow and not-so-featureful J2ME. And to add to that, the location API (for GPS) and other libraries are locked for only Motorola-blessed developers. The fun stuff is locked away. Their developer site, Motocoder.com, is equally useless with no community forums but just Motorola propaganda. Boo.
IF Motorola et al. actually open up the platform then I'm all for it. Otherwise, I don't think this will go anywhere. The "kiss of death" here is actually keeping things so closed that developers can't do anything great with the platform. I could kiss the Motorola management for releasing cool hardware... but I could piss on them for limiting it with shitty software and developer support (to clarify I'd really only piss on them).
Hmmm. Maybe you're just getting cynical in your advancing age. ;)
Seriously though I like it. If you've ever watched someone playing Mario Kart with "body english", you'd see why this is brilliant.
I'd say that most software was created by programmers, and that it has nothing to do with the packaging. What are you trying to say here?
:D Programming is challenging, but I know quite a few designers who are competent programmers.
Dunno about the latter statement either, since I'm a design student, but I can program quite well.