I really enjoyed UF. In fact, I bought the first two UF books.
However, as you may remember, September 11 had User Friendly caught in a nuclear rocket silo. Sure, that was a coincidence, but it really displays how hideously out-of-touch UF has become. Not quite unlike a Michael Jackson album, UF has lost relevance. And not quite unlike an MJ album, individual ideas still shine...
Do not forget No. 7, which is color matching. Color matching is in its infancy under Linux and under GIMP in particular.
When doing serious image editing you want to make sure that the colors you see on your display correspond to those on your scanner, on your printer, etc. In my mind, color matching weighs even more heavily than 1-6. Unless GIMP offers this feature, I doubt you can work professionally with GIMP.
As a production platform for film, music, etc, the Amiga is quite obsolete. You do not want to run Deluxe Paint when you have access to Photo Shop, don't you? I cannot imagine a single reason why you would like to run productivity apps on an Amiga in 2002 besides nostalgy.
However, there were several games for the Amiga which were quite remarkable. UAE does a fantastic job at emulating them. But booting AmigaOS like you boot Linux or Windows is of no practical value for that. Another great proof of concept on./
The Net, it was originally believed, would be a "bridging" technology, one that would connect the planet. But the most interesting evolution in software in recent years has been code that permits people to narrow, not expand, their universes. Blocking and filtering software has become epidemic to product against flamers, crackers and spammers.
Right Jon, you sound like billg recalling the
good, old days when the average Joe Doe had no
computer security/privacy concerns whatsoever and
a firewall was the domain of a handful of Unix
enthusiasts.
Does blocking spam really make us feel alone?
Does the decent WebWasher filtering software make
me socially inapt? Do my packet filter and web proxies really narrow my universe? And is the reverse also true? I mean, would going back to Windows 95, diabling the firewalls, spam blockers, voluntarily installing BackOrifice make us more competent as a community? JonKatz' essay is complete nonsense. All technologies
quoted by him do not make me less accessible to
the people I care about.
After a while, I began to understand that the way to win in chess was to become "fluent" in the patterns of chess itself, and that those patterns didn't really have any important analog elsewhere.
I am an enthusiastic chess player myself and have just recently found a quotation on this topic by Benjamin Franklin (1779), expressing
the opposite of what you are writing:
"The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have points to gain, and competition or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or want of it."
This quote appeared on http://knights.sourceforge.net, the website of
a very promising chess interface for Qt2. KDE rules! Chess rules likewise.
Years ago, I've been into military simulations like Falcon 3.0 and F-15 Strike Eagle II. As years went by, simulations have become ever more realistic (take Jane's F-15, F/A-18, Longbow 2 or Hasbro's Falcon 4.0), though I haven't had time to play them. Unfortunately, the days of the ultra-realistic flight-sims are counted.
That's why I have bought Longbow 2 and Falcon 4.0 on e-Bay, have downloaded all the patches from the internet and very much look forward to playing these sims during my Christmas holidays. In addition, my computing power these days is much more appropriate for Falcon 4.0 than it was when this program appeared new on the market.
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I really enjoyed UF. In fact, I bought the first two UF books.
However, as you may remember, September 11 had User Friendly caught in a nuclear rocket silo. Sure, that was a coincidence, but it really displays how hideously out-of-touch UF has become. Not quite unlike a Michael Jackson album, UF has lost relevance. And not quite unlike an MJ album, individual ideas still shine...
Do not forget No. 7, which is color matching. Color matching is in its infancy under Linux and under GIMP in particular.
When doing serious image editing you want to make sure that the colors you see on your display correspond to those on your scanner, on your printer, etc. In my mind, color matching weighs even more heavily than 1-6. Unless GIMP offers this feature, I doubt you can work professionally with GIMP.
As a production platform for film, music, etc, the Amiga is quite obsolete. You do not want to run Deluxe Paint when you have access to Photo Shop, don't you? I cannot imagine a single reason why you would like to run productivity apps on an Amiga in 2002 besides nostalgy.
./
However, there were several games for the Amiga which were quite remarkable. UAE does a fantastic job at emulating them. But booting AmigaOS like you boot Linux or Windows is of no practical value for that. Another great proof of concept on
Right Jon, you sound like billg recalling the good, old days when the average Joe Doe had no computer security/privacy concerns whatsoever and a firewall was the domain of a handful of Unix enthusiasts.
Does blocking spam really make us feel alone? Does the decent WebWasher filtering software make me socially inapt? Do my packet filter and web proxies really narrow my universe? And is the reverse also true? I mean, would going back to Windows 95, diabling the firewalls, spam blockers, voluntarily installing BackOrifice make us more competent as a community? JonKatz' essay is complete nonsense. All technologies quoted by him do not make me less accessible to the people I care about.
I am an enthusiastic chess player myself and have just recently found a quotation on this topic by Benjamin Franklin (1779), expressing the opposite of what you are writing:
This quote appeared on http://knights.sourceforge.net, the website of a very promising chess interface for Qt2. KDE rules! Chess rules likewise.
Years ago, I've been into military simulations like Falcon 3.0 and F-15 Strike Eagle II. As years went by, simulations have become ever more realistic (take Jane's F-15, F/A-18, Longbow 2 or Hasbro's Falcon 4.0), though I haven't had time to play them. Unfortunately, the days of the ultra-realistic flight-sims are counted.
That's why I have bought Longbow 2 and Falcon 4.0 on e-Bay, have downloaded all the patches from the internet and very much look forward to playing these sims during my Christmas holidays. In addition, my computing power these days is much more appropriate for Falcon 4.0 than it was when this program appeared new on the market.