He was pulling up a personal memory, not picking a carefully researched example.
I thought it was a nice metaphor: if the safety is provided by and reliant on the skill and intelligence of the user, rather than built-in idiot checks, you can get more done (of course, if you screw up...). How much time do you waste in Windows reading and checking confirmations, or doing things manually that you would script at the command line?
That's ridiculous, either it can read the bits or it can't. If it uses a cheap laser that doesn't work right, you don't get any sound at all.
The difference between a good CD player and a bad one (aside from reliability and toys like play-order memory) is in the mixer and amplifier.
However, since the DVD reader is more expensive than a plain CD reader, you can expect to pay more for equivalent sound quality while playing CDs (naturally implying that, for the same price, the plain CD player will sound better playing CDs). Of course, logic like this doesn't always work out in reality.
In a year and a half, the cheap PCs should be running at over the speed of a PIII at 1GHz. High-end ones should run twice to 4X as fast. We may not be running single-processor systems or
I remember when they were saying that the N64 would never be emulated, using a simple extrapolation from how slow the Super Nintendo emulation was at the time. Emulation techniques improved and now we have N64 emulators. You are not going to need an extra order of magnitude to emulate.
Of course, it will take a few months to a year for emulator-writers to do their stuff. I'm not expecting an emulator the moment the Ps2 is released. But those specs aren't ambitious enough for the timeframe. The PSX blew everyone away at the time of its release because nobody was really doing 3d accelerator cards for PCs; now PC hardware makers are unashamed when they make toys for gamers, and they don't take two years between hype and release.
If the Ps2 was released now, it would eat the market alive, at its scheduled release date it'll still probably sell well, but computer gamers won't be drooling over it and turning green in envy (except, perhaps, over the hit to their wallets; Ps2 will still probably be the best hardware for the buck).
This is not like viewscreen goggles: those just produce unfocused light a few inches away from the eyes, and your eyes have to focus on something nearby (incidentally, though it makes the display bigger and heavier, you can make it optically far away, so your eyes focus as if 20 feet away, or whatever distance you choose, practically eliminating eye strain; you can also buy such optical devices for use while reading or working with computers to protect your eyes).
This retinal laser display does not use a screen, it produces a virtual image with focused laser light, which is only a valid image at the point where the eye is. This virtual image can exactly simulate a screen 6 feet away, or one 3 miles away, or a 3-dimensional scene where you must refocus your eyes to bring different objects into focus.
Try closing one eye, facing out the window and holding your hand three inches from your eye. Look at your hand, then look at something outside (I'll say a tree). Notice how when you look at one, the other is blurry. With a little practice you can focus on either while keeping your eye aimed at only one.
This is why stereoscopic displays are only marginally more convincing than single flat screens. Your focus still follows that of the camera, not that of your eyes. However, with this new display, you could refocus on different objects like the hand and the tree (even in a static display; the machine doesn't need to detect and intelligently respond to the changes in your eye).
Basically, a high-res (I mean really high res, like 100,000 by 100,000) image from this machine would be indistinguishable from a real-life scene.
The really great thing is, most 3D games and other virtual environments already use Z-buffering, so they have depth information readily available. Nobody is going to have to make serious modifications to their software to take advantage of this feature.
Of course, it is important to note that this is not a real sci-fi hologram. The virtual image is, as I said, only valid from one point (the eye). Pixels can't hide behind each other; in real life, when you move your head to the side you can see around obstacles. To add this you naturally need a head mounted diplay with position tracking to create the new image when you move.
Excuse my pedantry, I wanted to cover everything (not my sig, but it should be).
I hardly think the PC industry will be staying put for the next year and a half!
I bet by the time the Ps2 comes out, it'll barely be keeping up to the cheapo boxes (it had better be as cheap as the PSX!). The high-enders should be able to keep up even while emulating.
Stuff gets radioactive if you bombard it with neutrons and other particles (i.e. fusion byproducts) for long enough.
Non-radioactive materials are generally just a neutron or two from being radioactive. When their nucleus gets hit with neutrons, they often absorb them and change into a radioactive isotope.
Eventually the thing glows in the dark.
Still, it's not even remotely comparable in general nastiness to the waste-products of fission. I'm not too worried about disposing of a few old reactors.
There's no doubt that world is basically run by morons. What do you propose? A revolt of the nerds?
"Sir the nerds are revolting!" "They can't help it, they don't get any sun or exercise."
^_^
But seriously, while many things can be improved, many others are the way they are for a reason.
I don't know about Scandinavia, but geothermal heating is common in Iceland, which has absurdly abundant easily accessable geothermal heat. It's an oddity of the region, not a valid plan.
As for nuclear energy, there's politics involved. For one thing, the power companies have businesses to protect, and nuclear energy could potentially make electricity so cheap as to make all other forms of generation instantly obsolete. For another, you can't burn up the waste in breeder reactors because of fear of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Dug-in homes are cheaper and could last practically forever, so nobody in the construction industry wants them around.
Sloped runways are more expensive, and all the pilots are used to landing on flat ones. Like all regenerative braking systems, it has considerable barriers to adoption. Note that your car doesn't save any of the energy from coming to a stop to get itself going again.
Cellular systems can't handle the same traffic as lines. They are not a substitute for a good wired-in phone system, never mind the household internet connection and cable TV.
Sometimes there is no short detour around a mountain range.
We live in a capitalist society. It has it's ups and downs. One of the biggest problems is that those who are best able to implement a change are the ones most likely to be hurt by it.
Much of the world is sensible; where it's not, somebody is probably making money off of the silliness.
...and CH4 is CH4, and these are the two major greenhouse gasses that everyone is whining about when they talk about global warming. Yet mankind's dumping of these is an insignificant drop in the bucket.
Anyone who thinks humans should cut back on these emmissions to avoid global warming hasn't looked at the numbers. We just aren't dumping enough of this stuff to make a difference.
Real poisons released into the air we are breathing are definitely a real concern, though. Anyone who's dealt with L.A. smog can tell you that. People really ought to push harder for cleaner-burning engines in their cars, there are some brilliant designs out there that just aren't being used. Coal-burners are still pretty dirty too.
BTW: the same people who complain about carbon dioxide emmisions often complain about stuff not rotting in landfills and non-biodegradable packaging. Think about it! When we put paper in a landfill, we're fixing carbon, like putting coal back in the ground.
Okay, so humans are part of nature, not it's guardians, not it's masters... but we're wrong for doing what we do?
It seems to me that the view that we are part of nature supports anything we do, even if we wipe out practically everything else, like the first oxygen-producers.
As for the rest of the ecosystem outliving humanity, consider the rate at which human capability for both construction and destruction is increasing. In a couple of centuries, once we're off this little rock, we might lose our fear of such things as nuclear weapons and start having fun with toys like antimatter bombs. I wouldn't casually dismiss the idea that people might use planetary crusts as shields, hiding deep under the surface as their enemies reduce the biosphere to a glass-floored parking lot, even cracking open the planet with unimagineably destructive weapons to get at the enemies within. And perhaps, when the fighting is over the survivors would emerge and casually terraform the surface over the course of a few months, populating it with inoffensive genetically engineered lifeforms for their own pleasure.
Our intelligence makes us different. If we don't wipe ourselves out, the survival of other lifeforms may be determined solely by our sentimental attachments. If we do wipe ourselves out, there's a pretty good chance we'll take the whole shootin' match with us.
Let's face it, we're reaching the point where life can be divided into humans and their toys. Some people have trouble with that notion; it is a failure of imagination. We're not quite there yet, but we're damn' close.
Get a grip, and quit spouting mystical nonsense. It's all about us from here on.
Bad move, especially the logo. The new name is like something out of a Dilbert comic.
They had a good thing going, being respected for making the best computers for graphics. Now they're alienating their old customers by telling them they're not the focus any more, just so they can become one more unspecialized computer company and compete in a crowded marketplace.
Even if they don't remember how to use printf to print an octal, but they know how to print a string, they should be able to write a routine to do it in.
Of course, this is about as ugly and hackish as it gets, but that's the kind of thing I'd write if given 2 minutes and no references (and I couldn't remember any codes for printf).
I concur that not memorizing the printf codes is a stupid reason not to hire someone. On the rare occasions that I use printf, I keep a reference handy. I don't remember ever printing an octal with it, plenty of hexidecimals, but no octal.
I lost all faith in university when one of the major hurdles to passing the C++ course exam was memorizing the intricacies of iostream.h!
I must admit that I've stretched myself out on a limb with this thread. I really can't support the position that Linux has equivalent tools. I can't even support the position that the average designer is capable of getting Linux running well enough to get anything done.
I don't really know about all of these issues; when I jumped onto this thread, it was in annoyance about somebody complaining about not having everything handed to him on a silver platter. I never wanted to start arguing over the presence, absence, or utility of certain features (though I ended up doing just that).
I still disagree that the GIMP should try to match something like Photoshop exactly feature-for-feature and identical interface. It's really not that hard to learn a new interface, and things like scripting really change all the rules when it comes to features. The GIMP isn't supposed to be Photoshop, it's supposed to be the best tool they can make for image processing, which just happens to mean that it will share a lot of features with Photoshop. If they come up with a better way of doing something, they shouldn't throw it away because it isn't the same way Photoshop does it.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't call the switch to computers an evolutionary change in printing or graphic design! Switching platforms isn't a revolution for the whole printing industry, but it would be for the graphic designers. My working definition of evolutionary vs. revolutionary is: it's evolutionary if your skills retain their value, it's revolutionary if your skills lose their value. Switching from Photoshop to the GIMP necessarily means learning a new interface and losing some of your old files; I'd rate this as more evolutionary, though, really. But switching to Linux and tools like TeX means learning a whole new mode of operation; that is a revolutionary change.
As for "relatively well informed" and all that, I wasn't arguing that a person needed to know about every tool on the market to be qualified for their job, I was arguing that a person needs to have thorough knowledge of both tools before making a critical comparison. A competent, or brilliant for that matter, graphic designer is not automatically qualified to dismiss the GIMP after a 2 minute glance at the web-site. That is the point I was originally trying to make.
As for CYMK support, what I had said is that it is not trivial to use in any current program. You can obviously still do CYMK stuff in the GIMP, it's just not supported with nice things like preview. You have to eyeball images and understand what colours are too bright to show up and know how things look different under different lighting conditions. Much of this guesswork can be taken out by certain features which GIMP doesn't have, but not all of it.
All that said, I still think the GIMP is pretty cool. The CYMK stuff I was referring to is here. It basically says that if you correctly calibrate your system and your printer takes EPS files, it shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not involved in graphic design at all (except minor dabbling), and I don't really understand the problems of moving to a CMYK colour model. To my uninformed mind, it sounds like it should be a pretty trivial problem (though I am assured it isn't): for each piece of printing hardware, establish a gamut and produce software for transforming from RGB to CMYK for that device (this should easily be automated with appropriate software and scanning devices), informing the operator of any illegal colours. Each paint program should be able to take gamut information and exclude the use of illegal colours. Calibration should be simple as well: an inexpensive light-pen type device should measure the colour of blocks of light on the screen (or special monitors could auto-calibrate), and a similar device should read the output-pattern of the printer.
A quick look at the GIMP manual suggests that something vaguely similar is in place already, minus the simple calibration schemes (which all seem to be ridiculously expensive and reliant on eye-balling). CYMK-preview & illegal colour detection should be easy to add with script-fu (if someone hasn't done it already)... Of course, no CYMK stuff is worth a damn if everything isn't perfectly calibrated. Is there an industry standard gamut format in which a g.d. can expect to have the necessary data for a job he is going to do? (perhaps we should continue this by email, I'm at variedinterests@hotmail.com)
People who are so caught up in the moment-to-moment world of deadlines that they stick to the most minimal evolutionary advances are doomed to be replaced by people who allow time for retraining.
Most of your arguments directly apply to any revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary) improvement.
BTW: The GIMP does not offer a mere subset of Photoshop's functionality. How can you even compare something with no scripting capability to something with full scripting?
As for your "extremely well informed" bit, what you really mean is relatively well informed for your industry. Being aware of a product in a field of people unaware of a product does not make you "extremely well informed".
ABTW: There's a section on CMYK in the GIMP manual. Have you read it?
Anyway, CMYK is far from trivial with any software package.
TeX is near-ideal typesetting software (and the least buggy piece of code you're ever likely to see). Add a good macro library like LaTeX and it's reasonably easy to use, too (about like hand-coding HTML). It scales well from a one-page document to an encyclopedia. Between TeX and another utility, you can produce postscript output.
Stuff like this is a bit of a change of philosophy from Mac/win95 applications: it has a fairly steep learning curve, but once you learn how to use it you can work far more efficiently than with point & click toys.
"the \"fire in crowded theater\" analogy covers destructive virii quite nicely"
Not really, as the damage caused by such utterances is all due to the reactions of humans who hear it. A virus can cause damage without ever being detected by humans. However, it does nicely cover the whole area of those email messages that yell "Virus!".
example: Topic:Fw: Good Morning Body:This is an urgent warning from the National Institute of Virus Control.
If you receive an email with the topic "Fw: Good Morning" do not, repeat: do not open it! It will install a virus on your computer, destroy all of your data, mark you for an IRS audit, and render you impotent!
As we cannot reach everyone on the internet, please forward this to all of your friends ASAP. You will be doing them, and your country, a great favour. God bless America!
Free software has nothing to do with free speech (except using "free" to mean nearly the same thing): free speech is a right protected by constitutional law; free software is a category of software.
What everyone else here is talking about is whether source code can be considered a human-to-human communication that is protected under U.S. law. Mostly re. the export of encryption programs (BTW, everyone, who says that free speech law protects the right to say things to people in other countries? Also, free speech doesn't protect you if you learn military secrets and repeat them). What you are talking about is the right to freely copy, use, and modify software.
Even if you consider source code to be speech, it would still fall under copyright law, so whether you're free to "say" it or not has no bearing on whether everyone can freely copy it and use it for other things.
"it is practically useless to profressional print designers"
Profressionals: people who want to be considered professional, but who 1) don't even pay enough attention to detail to correctly spell it and 2)would never learn about the potential of a tool like the GIMP because they are too lazy to try it. See "Week-course wonder" and "\/\/arez d00dz"
"Your free software is better than my commercial software, but still not good enough."
Linux has all the tools a graphic designer needs, all for free. If you don't want to reboot into Mac, learn to use them and stop throwing money away.
GIMP developers aren't interested in competing with Photoshop, they're interested in making the best image processing software for themselves and their friends. They and their friends run Linux. Don't complain that Linux users should port their stuff to Macs. If Mac users want the GIMP, they should port it themselves.
The GIMP is growing in popularity pretty damn' quickly, pal. People are using it professionally. Just because you're a professional doesn't mean your opinion is common among professionals, nor does it mean that you have a clue about which software is the best. I've heard professional programmers say that C is useless, and we should all be working in Visual Basic. Professional doesn't mean informed, or even competent.
Besides, Apple buyers are lemmings: they'll keep buying anything new from Apple, as long as it is from Apple, and especially if it's presented as a Big New Thing. It's pure novelty (retro-novelty, if you can buy that), and an excuse for Apple-users to make that overdue upgrade. If the monitor sat on top of the main box and was connected with a short cord it would have sold just as well.
This kind of nonsense never has and never will work in the PC market, where buyers have a choice between competing hardware vendors. The average PC user may not understand the value of L2 cache, but he sure knows that a pretty case isn't worth extra money or limited upgradability.
Yes, that 4' cord between the monitor and the main box sure is expensive and complex...
The monitor is just about the only piece of computer equipment you can keep for more than 2 years! It's also the easiest piece to upgrade. Never mind the ability to place it at a comfortable height and swivel it to show someone the screen.
A closed-box design with just a keyboard cord, a USB port, a phone jack and/or ethernet plug, and a monitor is a reasonably good idea. Cutting out one more cord by integrating the monitor is sub-moronic, I don't care how cute it looks.
A copyright does not equate to ownership of the underlying concepts. You can freely use any information contained in copyrighted materials (assuming, of course, that the information isn't protected by other I.P. laws).
"Derivative work" is very carefully defined under copyright law. It mostly applies to fiction, especially the re-use of characters and settings (this seems to be one of few examples where copyright protects anything but direct word-for-word quotes).
"Fair use" generally applies to small portions of directly quoted materials used for reasonable purposes (for use in reviews, rebuttals, and references) and the re-use of fictional characters and settings in parody (for some odd reason, parody is sacred under copyright law, but non-parody fanfic isn't; most fanfic is copyright violation). Note that "fair use" is different from merely using ideas expressed in a copyrighted document (which are not protected by copyright under any circumstances).
Slashdot Mirror
He was pulling up a personal memory, not picking a carefully researched example.
I thought it was a nice metaphor: if the safety is provided by and reliant on the skill and intelligence of the user, rather than built-in idiot checks, you can get more done (of course, if you screw up...). How much time do you waste in Windows reading and checking confirmations, or doing things manually that you would script at the command line?
Just as a mental exercise, replace MS with Apple.
Seriously.
That's ridiculous, either it can read the bits or it can't. If it uses a cheap laser that doesn't work right, you don't get any sound at all.
The difference between a good CD player and a bad one (aside from reliability and toys like play-order memory) is in the mixer and amplifier.
However, since the DVD reader is more expensive than a plain CD reader, you can expect to pay more for equivalent sound quality while playing CDs (naturally implying that, for the same price, the plain CD player will sound better playing CDs). Of course, logic like this doesn't always work out in reality.
In a year and a half, the cheap PCs should be running at over the speed of a PIII at 1GHz. High-end ones should run twice to 4X as fast. We may not be running single-processor systems or
I remember when they were saying that the N64 would never be emulated, using a simple extrapolation from how slow the Super Nintendo emulation was at the time. Emulation techniques improved and now we have N64 emulators. You are not going to need an extra order of magnitude to emulate.
Of course, it will take a few months to a year for emulator-writers to do their stuff. I'm not expecting an emulator the moment the Ps2 is released. But those specs aren't ambitious enough for the timeframe. The PSX blew everyone away at the time of its release because nobody was really doing 3d accelerator cards for PCs; now PC hardware makers are unashamed when they make toys for gamers, and they don't take two years between hype and release.
If the Ps2 was released now, it would eat the market alive, at its scheduled release date it'll still probably sell well, but computer gamers won't be drooling over it and turning green in envy (except, perhaps, over the hit to their wallets; Ps2 will still probably be the best hardware for the buck).
This is not like viewscreen goggles: those just produce unfocused light a few inches away from the eyes, and your eyes have to focus on something nearby (incidentally, though it makes the display bigger and heavier, you can make it optically far away, so your eyes focus as if 20 feet away, or whatever distance you choose, practically eliminating eye strain; you can also buy such optical devices for use while reading or working with computers to protect your eyes).
This retinal laser display does not use a screen, it produces a virtual image with focused laser light, which is only a valid image at the point where the eye is. This virtual image can exactly simulate a screen 6 feet away, or one 3 miles away, or a 3-dimensional scene where you must refocus your eyes to bring different objects into focus.
Try closing one eye, facing out the window and holding your hand three inches from your eye. Look at your hand, then look at something outside (I'll say a tree). Notice how when you look at one, the other is blurry. With a little practice you can focus on either while keeping your eye aimed at only one.
This is why stereoscopic displays are only marginally more convincing than single flat screens. Your focus still follows that of the camera, not that of your eyes. However, with this new display, you could refocus on different objects like the hand and the tree (even in a static display; the machine doesn't need to detect and intelligently respond to the changes in your eye).
Basically, a high-res (I mean really high res, like 100,000 by 100,000) image from this machine would be indistinguishable from a real-life scene.
The really great thing is, most 3D games and other virtual environments already use Z-buffering, so they have depth information readily available. Nobody is going to have to make serious modifications to their software to take advantage of this feature.
Of course, it is important to note that this is not a real sci-fi hologram. The virtual image is, as I said, only valid from one point (the eye). Pixels can't hide behind each other; in real life, when you move your head to the side you can see around obstacles. To add this you naturally need a head mounted diplay with position tracking to create the new image when you move.
Excuse my pedantry, I wanted to cover everything (not my sig, but it should be).
I hardly think the PC industry will be staying put for the next year and a half!
I bet by the time the Ps2 comes out, it'll barely be keeping up to the cheapo boxes (it had better be as cheap as the PSX!). The high-enders should be able to keep up even while emulating.
Stuff gets radioactive if you bombard it with neutrons and other particles (i.e. fusion byproducts) for long enough.
Non-radioactive materials are generally just a neutron or two from being radioactive. When their nucleus gets hit with neutrons, they often absorb them and change into a radioactive isotope.
Eventually the thing glows in the dark.
Still, it's not even remotely comparable in general nastiness to the waste-products of fission. I'm not too worried about disposing of a few old reactors.
There's no doubt that world is basically run by morons. What do you propose? A revolt of the nerds?
"Sir the nerds are revolting!"
"They can't help it, they don't get any sun or exercise."
^_^
But seriously, while many things can be improved, many others are the way they are for a reason.
I don't know about Scandinavia, but geothermal heating is common in Iceland, which has absurdly abundant easily accessable geothermal heat. It's an oddity of the region, not a valid plan.
As for nuclear energy, there's politics involved. For one thing, the power companies have businesses to protect, and nuclear energy could potentially make electricity so cheap as to make all other forms of generation instantly obsolete. For another, you can't burn up the waste in breeder reactors because of fear of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Dug-in homes are cheaper and could last practically forever, so nobody in the construction industry wants them around.
Sloped runways are more expensive, and all the pilots are used to landing on flat ones. Like all regenerative braking systems, it has considerable barriers to adoption. Note that your car doesn't save any of the energy from coming to a stop to get itself going again.
Cellular systems can't handle the same traffic as lines. They are not a substitute for a good wired-in phone system, never mind the household internet connection and cable TV.
Sometimes there is no short detour around a mountain range.
We live in a capitalist society. It has it's ups and downs. One of the biggest problems is that those who are best able to implement a change are the ones most likely to be hurt by it.
Much of the world is sensible; where it's not, somebody is probably making money off of the silliness.
There are no easy answers.
...and CH4 is CH4, and these are the two major greenhouse gasses that everyone is whining about when they talk about global warming. Yet mankind's dumping of these is an insignificant drop in the bucket.
Anyone who thinks humans should cut back on these emmissions to avoid global warming hasn't looked at the numbers. We just aren't dumping enough of this stuff to make a difference.
Real poisons released into the air we are breathing are definitely a real concern, though. Anyone who's dealt with L.A. smog can tell you that. People really ought to push harder for cleaner-burning engines in their cars, there are some brilliant designs out there that just aren't being used. Coal-burners are still pretty dirty too.
BTW: the same people who complain about carbon dioxide emmisions often complain about stuff not rotting in landfills and non-biodegradable packaging. Think about it! When we put paper in a landfill, we're fixing carbon, like putting coal back in the ground.
Okay, so humans are part of nature, not it's guardians, not it's masters... but we're wrong for doing what we do?
It seems to me that the view that we are part of nature supports anything we do, even if we wipe out practically everything else, like the first oxygen-producers.
As for the rest of the ecosystem outliving humanity, consider the rate at which human capability for both construction and destruction is increasing. In a couple of centuries, once we're off this little rock, we might lose our fear of such things as nuclear weapons and start having fun with toys like antimatter bombs. I wouldn't casually dismiss the idea that people might use planetary crusts as shields, hiding deep under the surface as their enemies reduce the biosphere to a glass-floored parking lot, even cracking open the planet with unimagineably destructive weapons to get at the enemies within. And perhaps, when the fighting is over the survivors would emerge and casually terraform the surface over the course of a few months, populating it with inoffensive genetically engineered lifeforms for their own pleasure.
Our intelligence makes us different. If we don't wipe ourselves out, the survival of other lifeforms may be determined solely by our sentimental attachments. If we do wipe ourselves out, there's a pretty good chance we'll take the whole shootin' match with us.
Let's face it, we're reaching the point where life can be divided into humans and their toys. Some people have trouble with that notion; it is a failure of imagination. We're not quite there yet, but we're damn' close.
Get a grip, and quit spouting mystical nonsense. It's all about us from here on.
Never mind about the new name thing. (For shame!)
Bad move, especially the logo. The new name is like something out of a Dilbert comic.
They had a good thing going, being respected for making the best computers for graphics. Now they're alienating their old customers by telling them they're not the focus any more, just so they can become one more unspecialized computer company and compete in a crowded marketplace.
They had their niche and they threw it out.
I tried anyway. It didn't work too well...
Nevermind.
Even if they don't remember how to use printf to print an octal, but they know how to print a string, they should be able to write a routine to do it in.
void printoct(int num){
char octdig[]="01234567";
char buffer[256]="";
int i=0,j=0;
for(i=0;num>>(i*3);i++){
for(j=0;j(i+1);j++){
buffer[j-i+1]=buffer[j-i];
}
buffer[0]=octdig[(num>>(i*3))&7];
}
printf(buffer);
}
Of course, this is about as ugly and hackish as it gets, but that's the kind of thing I'd write if given 2 minutes and no references (and I couldn't remember any codes for printf).
I concur that not memorizing the printf codes is a stupid reason not to hire someone. On the rare occasions that I use printf, I keep a reference handy. I don't remember ever printing an octal with it, plenty of hexidecimals, but no octal.
I lost all faith in university when one of the major hurdles to passing the C++ course exam was memorizing the intricacies of iostream.h!
I must admit that I've stretched myself out on a limb with this thread. I really can't support the position that Linux has equivalent tools. I can't even support the position that the average designer is capable of getting Linux running well enough to get anything done.
I don't really know about all of these issues; when I jumped onto this thread, it was in annoyance about somebody complaining about not having everything handed to him on a silver platter. I never wanted to start arguing over the presence, absence, or utility of certain features (though I ended up doing just that).
I still disagree that the GIMP should try to match something like Photoshop exactly feature-for-feature and identical interface. It's really not that hard to learn a new interface, and things like scripting really change all the rules when it comes to features. The GIMP isn't supposed to be Photoshop, it's supposed to be the best tool they can make for image processing, which just happens to mean that it will share a lot of features with Photoshop. If they come up with a better way of doing something, they shouldn't throw it away because it isn't the same way Photoshop does it.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't call the switch to computers an evolutionary change in printing or graphic design! Switching platforms isn't a revolution for the whole printing industry, but it would be for the graphic designers. My working definition of evolutionary vs. revolutionary is: it's evolutionary if your skills retain their value, it's revolutionary if your skills lose their value. Switching from Photoshop to the GIMP necessarily means learning a new interface and losing some of your old files; I'd rate this as more evolutionary, though, really. But switching to Linux and tools like TeX means learning a whole new mode of operation; that is a revolutionary change.
As for "relatively well informed" and all that, I wasn't arguing that a person needed to know about every tool on the market to be qualified for their job, I was arguing that a person needs to have thorough knowledge of both tools before making a critical comparison. A competent, or brilliant for that matter, graphic designer is not automatically qualified to dismiss the GIMP after a 2 minute glance at the web-site. That is the point I was originally trying to make.
As for CYMK support, what I had said is that it is not trivial to use in any current program. You can obviously still do CYMK stuff in the GIMP, it's just not supported with nice things like preview. You have to eyeball images and understand what colours are too bright to show up and know how things look different under different lighting conditions. Much of this guesswork can be taken out by certain features which GIMP doesn't have, but not all of it.
All that said, I still think the GIMP is pretty cool. The CYMK stuff I was referring to is here. It basically says that if you correctly calibrate your system and your printer takes EPS files, it shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not involved in graphic design at all (except minor dabbling), and I don't really understand the problems of moving to a CMYK colour model. To my uninformed mind, it sounds like it should be a pretty trivial problem (though I am assured it isn't): for each piece of printing hardware, establish a gamut and produce software for transforming from RGB to CMYK for that device (this should easily be automated with appropriate software and scanning devices), informing the operator of any illegal colours. Each paint program should be able to take gamut information and exclude the use of illegal colours. Calibration should be simple as well: an inexpensive light-pen type device should measure the colour of blocks of light on the screen (or special monitors could auto-calibrate), and a similar device should read the output-pattern of the printer.
A quick look at the GIMP manual suggests that something vaguely similar is in place already, minus the simple calibration schemes (which all seem to be ridiculously expensive and reliant on eye-balling). CYMK-preview & illegal colour detection should be easy to add with script-fu (if someone hasn't done it already)... Of course, no CYMK stuff is worth a damn if everything isn't perfectly calibrated. Is there an industry standard gamut format in which a g.d. can expect to have the necessary data for a job he is going to do? (perhaps we should continue this by email, I'm at variedinterests@hotmail.com)
People who are so caught up in the moment-to-moment world of deadlines that they stick to the most minimal evolutionary advances are doomed to be replaced by people who allow time for retraining.
Most of your arguments directly apply to any revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary) improvement.
BTW: The GIMP does not offer a mere subset of Photoshop's functionality. How can you even compare something with no scripting capability to something with full scripting?
As for your "extremely well informed" bit, what you really mean is relatively well informed for your industry. Being aware of a product in a field of people unaware of a product does not make you "extremely well informed".
ABTW: There's a section on CMYK in the GIMP manual. Have you read it?
Anyway, CMYK is far from trivial with any software package.
http://www.32bitsonline.com/article.php3?file=issu es/199903/lj-19990311&page=1
TeX is near-ideal typesetting software (and the least buggy piece of code you're ever likely to see). Add a good macro library like LaTeX and it's reasonably easy to use, too (about like hand-coding HTML). It scales well from a one-page document to an encyclopedia. Between TeX and another utility, you can produce postscript output.
Stuff like this is a bit of a change of philosophy from Mac/win95 applications: it has a fairly steep learning curve, but once you learn how to use it you can work far more efficiently than with point & click toys.
"the \"fire in crowded theater\" analogy covers destructive virii quite nicely"
Not really, as the damage caused by such utterances is all due to the reactions of humans who hear it. A virus can cause damage without ever being detected by humans. However, it does nicely cover the whole area of those email messages that yell "Virus!".
example:
Topic:Fw: Good Morning
Body:This is an urgent warning from the National Institute of Virus Control.
If you receive an email with the topic "Fw: Good Morning" do not, repeat: do not open it! It will install a virus on your computer, destroy all of your data, mark you for an IRS audit, and render you impotent!
As we cannot reach everyone on the internet, please forward this to all of your friends ASAP. You will be doing them, and your country, a great favour. God bless America!
Free software has nothing to do with free speech (except using "free" to mean nearly the same thing): free speech is a right protected by constitutional law; free software is a category of software.
What everyone else here is talking about is whether source code can be considered a human-to-human communication that is protected under U.S. law. Mostly re. the export of encryption programs (BTW, everyone, who says that free speech law protects the right to say things to people in other countries? Also, free speech doesn't protect you if you learn military secrets and repeat them). What you are talking about is the right to freely copy, use, and modify software.
Even if you consider source code to be speech, it would still fall under copyright law, so whether you're free to "say" it or not has no bearing on whether everyone can freely copy it and use it for other things.
"it is practically useless to profressional print designers"
Profressionals: people who want to be considered professional, but who 1) don't even pay enough attention to detail to correctly spell it and 2)would never learn about the potential of a tool like the GIMP because they are too lazy to try it. See "Week-course wonder" and "\/\/arez d00dz"
Brilliant, just brilliant.
"Your free software is better than my commercial software, but still not good enough."
Linux has all the tools a graphic designer needs, all for free. If you don't want to reboot into Mac, learn to use them and stop throwing money away.
GIMP developers aren't interested in competing with Photoshop, they're interested in making the best image processing software for themselves and their friends. They and their friends run Linux. Don't complain that Linux users should port their stuff to Macs. If Mac users want the GIMP, they should port it themselves.
The GIMP is growing in popularity pretty damn' quickly, pal. People are using it professionally. Just because you're a professional doesn't mean your opinion is common among professionals, nor does it mean that you have a clue about which software is the best. I've heard professional programmers say that C is useless, and we should all be working in Visual Basic. Professional doesn't mean informed, or even competent.
I was referring to merit, not marketability.
Besides, Apple buyers are lemmings: they'll keep buying anything new from Apple, as long as it is from Apple, and especially if it's presented as a Big New Thing. It's pure novelty (retro-novelty, if you can buy that), and an excuse for Apple-users to make that overdue upgrade. If the monitor sat on top of the main box and was connected with a short cord it would have sold just as well.
This kind of nonsense never has and never will work in the PC market, where buyers have a choice between competing hardware vendors. The average PC user may not understand the value of L2 cache, but he sure knows that a pretty case isn't worth extra money or limited upgradability.
Yes, that 4' cord between the monitor and the main box sure is expensive and complex...
The monitor is just about the only piece of computer equipment you can keep for more than 2 years! It's also the easiest piece to upgrade. Never mind the ability to place it at a comfortable height and swivel it to show someone the screen.
A closed-box design with just a keyboard cord, a USB port, a phone jack and/or ethernet plug, and a monitor is a reasonably good idea. Cutting out one more cord by integrating the monitor is sub-moronic, I don't care how cute it looks.
A copyright does not equate to ownership of the underlying concepts. You can freely use any information contained in copyrighted materials (assuming, of course, that the information isn't protected by other I.P. laws).
"Derivative work" is very carefully defined under copyright law. It mostly applies to fiction, especially the re-use of characters and settings (this seems to be one of few examples where copyright protects anything but direct word-for-word quotes).
"Fair use" generally applies to small portions of directly quoted materials used for reasonable purposes (for use in reviews, rebuttals, and references) and the re-use of fictional characters and settings in parody (for some odd reason, parody is sacred under copyright law, but non-parody fanfic isn't; most fanfic is copyright violation). Note that "fair use" is different from merely using ideas expressed in a copyrighted document (which are not protected by copyright under any circumstances).