... but the claim that there are only 600 UK Linux users visiting the BBC website is ludicrous. I almost feel like using the freedom of information act to find out.
What is stopping them to hire production companies as contractors for content whose copyright would belong to the BBC?
Unless there is something very specific on the BBC charter it seems to me like the buddies in the BBC do not want to harm the business of their buddies in the producing companies.
An institution mandated and paid to service all its audience can't griggle away of its responsibilities towards *all* the people paying money for those services.
There are widely available tools to make content available in all major computing platforms, Linux is a mainstream OS now, well understood and used by enough people in order to justify the effort. We are not talking about an arcane OS like OS2, Amiga or something of the sort. We are talking about Linux, which no matter how much you disparage about it, is perfectly supportable by any company willing to do so.
If a private company can't support my choice of computer then they will not charge me for their services and we will part ways. That is not an option for a public company. It is akin to the department in charge of roads to stop VW Beetles from driving on the streets after charing them all the relevant taxes.
You talk lots of rubbish about taking responsibility for our choices, you forget (or don't know) that the license fee that pays the BBC is *compulsory* and that people can go to jail for not paying. SO it is not entirely our choice to pay for a service which later on is not delivered for a mainstream computing platform, if it was solely a matter of choice I would never bother to go to the BBC iPlayer service, but I have paid and now I demand to be served as any other paying license fee payer.
No service? Fine, my license fee should be reduced then. If we are forced to pay then we should not be forced to pedal MS products in top of that, last time I checked the BBC is not an agent or distributor of MS software...
The amount of people from ethnic minorities in the UK is around 8%.
If you think any UK government institution could get away from servicing this people in the base of cost, then you would be deluded.
They can try ignore Linux users because it will not make any headlines and they believe they can get away with it, not because the size of the minority we represent and the cost of serving us Linux users (if they can't serve me then they should give me my license money back).
"Selling its software only with its hardware has been very successful for Apple. "
There are some of us around here that remember an era when Jobs was not around.
Apple was dying, literally. It was so bad that MS actually injected money on the company (oh the irony, they could have bought it at some point in time...).
The successful approach has been making of a PC an status symbol. You don't get all that blind fanboyism organically (in general), Apple has carved an image for their machines (since Jobs second coming) as the trendy item for the fashion conscious or the snob.
You don't agree? Deal with it fanboy, in your heart you know it is true.
This has applied to desktop computers (remember the iMacs? and now the laptops) and Music players (where inferior players that look nice are sold like hot cakes, this without demeriting the iPod user interface, which is a stroke of genius).
There is no coincidence that OSX is mostly about eye candy and less about performance (otherwise they would be widely deployed as number crunching machines or in other tasks suitable for powerful systems). Apple has identified his 5% niche market and they would be foolish to snob the snobs.
... until somebody abuses it in ways you did not think about.
I always throw this little cautionary tale in these situations: the way Augusto Pinochet found the most prominent communists in Chile after he took power was by going to the CP's headquarters and confiscating the party's membership lists (addresses, workplaces, even photographs, all was there).
The party's faithful clearly believed that providing all their private data was a non issue, what they failed to see is that information can be used in ways unthinkable when the information is given, so it is better to keep a close eye about how you disclose it, to whom and on which situation.
It is religious people, amongst which there are some that can put 2 + 2 together in spite of everything, that keep mixing them both.
It was patently obvious that the mechanism described by Darwin did not require a god to work. It could churn along quite nicely without the intervention of any directing entity.
Science did not set up to destroy religion. Darwin was a pious, religious man actually. But he was a scientist, and science lead him to the irrefutable conclusions that he reached.
Every time I listen to men of faith all sounds to me like silly unadulterated nonsense referring to spirits, gods, creators, and all kind of entities for which there is not a shred of evidence but that somehow affect the physical universe in which we live.
Life is what we see, what we measure, what we model. We don't understand all but that does not make the unknown the territory of comforting fairy tales.
From the point of view of any religious person Einstein was for most practical purposes an atheist.
The single fact that he ascribed more importance to observation than to belief when trying to understand the universe is anathema to any person belonging to any organized religion.
God, in all his wisdom (note the word his, some people get worked out it this entity in not ascribed the masculine gender) decided to send his son (which his himself if you know what I mean) to deliver the most important news in the history of mankind when the fastest communication means was a crazy burro and the known world resembled today's maps of European holiday resorts.
Now, maybe God's IQ is in the low 80s, but would it not have been better, you know, be in a worldwide live broadcast announcing the drowning of an entire country (you chose the Gomorrah closest to your hard, we all have one I suppose) and showing it on live TV. I know I would fall on knees then and there in repentance for my wicked ways.
But, nope, lets make it fucking difficult to document the facts, let unreliable witnesses and historians put contradictory accounts together (because you do know that the 4 evangelists are the ones accepted by the churches, not the only ones that claim to know about the facts of those days, if God was guiding all those guys to write the truth then he needs to take some courses on leadership) and in general lets send the message in a way that anybody with a healthy dose of skepticism would feel obliged to exclaim: WTF?
Great proofs you have there, Great incontrovertibly ones...
There where no trigger happy gangs. No matter which way you slice it, there weren't. Actually Iraq was one of the safest places to be (plenty of evidence of that). This is unsurprising, most dictatorships are like that, this is not necessarily a good thing, but what you are implying is factually incorrect.
In Hussein's times maybe people did not have all the services, but at least there was some infrastructures mantained (poorly if you want) by an organized government.
For the thousands unnecessarily dead in Iraq and their families, your wished improvement in 20 years time must be beyond a contemptuous reply (now think about that, you have one or more family members or friends dead, your way of life destroyed, and a supporter of the invaders tells you life will be better in 20 years time. If you think they will greet you and thank you for everything, well, you clearly are living in a parallel universe).
Maybe in your planet they design the hardware first and then they fit the OS, strange way of working but in planet Earth is not how things work (there are engineering reasons for this, but I would not burden an alien with this stuff).
I moved one tube (underground) station from my place of work.
When I factor the time saved, the savings on transport costs against the hassle of relocating, on balance I still obtain a benefit. And have regained a couple of hours daily to do whatever I want (while helping to save the World!).
The insistence of people doing long commutes thes do not necessarily need to make is madness (I know, there are some of you out there that must commute, but there are many people with relatively stable jobs that want to have the countriside house will working in town, that is ecological madness that may be also destroying their family and stressing them beyond what is really needed).
Nevertheless every time you pollute, you so oink, there is a tangible economic loss in the form of environmental damage.
Derided people like you don't want to make people accountable for this in the only possible way: taxing somebody.
It may be you, the oh so poor regular person sliding into poverty (if you will not have access to food, water, clothing and a roof on the top of your airy cranium then you will sliding into poverty, if you will not have money for gadgets or a car, well sorry but that is not poverty) or it may be a company, passing the cost to you, but polluting costs us all and it the cost of cleaning has to be met somehow.
The GUI is perfectly fine.....
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
.... and it only takes a UI expert 30 seconds to tell you so (I am telling you now).
The problem you are referring to is familiarity with another UI (in this case Photoshop's one), this problem is not intrinsic to the GIMP, the developers can't do much about people unwilling to try new things, nor should they.
People happy with other tools should keep using those tools, people trying to use a new tool (for whatever reason compelling them to do so, perhaps a different set of features, or in this case perhaps about legitimate concerns with openness of the source code, or the price) should at least make an effort to understand the idiosyncrasies of a new tool (sorry, but 10 minutes of biased assessment is not good enough).
This problem is normally overcomed by abundant, easy to understand documentation, you would have a point if you were highlighting this problem.
If what people want is a Photoshop clone, they should really go and get the real thing.
Usability reasons should point out why a procedure is clumsy and how to improve it, how to make an interface predictable and on ocasions how to make it simpler.
Pointing out about how another product does the same thing is completely pointless because it ignores the context in which each application is designed and intended to run.
The tool in question is improving with each iteration. Eventually it will get to a level when it is usable by professional people, as it is it is good enough for many people.
We had *nothing* 10 years ago.
Some people simply don't understand the dynamics of open software and how the cumulative improvements are not lost and will eventually get you where you need to be.
And you could not be bothered to provide some links to this information (hint: Greenpeace does not accept donations from corporations, only individuals).
Slashdot Mirror
... but the claim that there are only 600 UK Linux users visiting the BBC website is ludicrous. I almost feel like using the freedom of information act to find out.
What is stopping them to hire production companies as contractors for content whose copyright would belong to the BBC?
Unless there is something very specific on the BBC charter it seems to me like the buddies in the BBC do not want to harm the business of their buddies in the producing companies.
An institution mandated and paid to service all its audience can't griggle away of its responsibilities towards *all* the people paying money for those services.
There are widely available tools to make content available in all major computing platforms, Linux is a mainstream OS now, well understood and used by enough people in order to justify the effort. We are not talking about an arcane OS like OS2, Amiga or something of the sort. We are talking about Linux, which no matter how much you disparage about it, is perfectly supportable by any company willing to do so.
If a private company can't support my choice of computer then they will not charge me for their services and we will part ways. That is not an option for a public company. It is akin to the department in charge of roads to stop VW Beetles from driving on the streets after charing them all the relevant taxes.
You talk lots of rubbish about taking responsibility for our choices, you forget (or don't know) that the license fee that pays the BBC is *compulsory* and that people can go to jail for not paying. SO it is not entirely our choice to pay for a service which later on is not delivered for a mainstream computing platform, if it was solely a matter of choice I would never bother to go to the BBC iPlayer service, but I have paid and now I demand to be served as any other paying license fee payer.
No service? Fine, my license fee should be reduced then. If we are forced to pay then we should not be forced to pedal MS products in top of that, last time I checked the BBC is not an agent or distributor of MS software...
The amount of people from ethnic minorities in the UK is around 8%.
If you think any UK government institution could get away from servicing this people in the base of cost, then you would be deluded.
They can try ignore Linux users because it will not make any headlines and they believe they can get away with it, not because the size of the minority we represent and the cost of serving us Linux users (if they can't serve me then they should give me my license money back).
Where I work at least 10 people in my *department* use Linux regularly.
This is one department of around 100 people in a company that does not support Linux desktop (i.e. these people surf from home).
I simply do not believe those numbers.
Keep the logical fallacies coming.
Jobs is infallible.
The rest of the world is stupid.
Did your brain hurt?
"Selling its software only with its hardware has been very successful for Apple. "
...).
There are some of us around here that remember an era when Jobs was not around.
Apple was dying, literally. It was so bad that MS actually injected money on the company (oh the irony, they could have bought it at some point in time
The successful approach has been making of a PC an status symbol. You don't get all that blind fanboyism organically (in general), Apple has carved an image for their machines (since Jobs second coming) as the trendy item for the fashion conscious or the snob.
You don't agree? Deal with it fanboy, in your heart you know it is true.
This has applied to desktop computers (remember the iMacs? and now the laptops) and Music players (where inferior players that look nice are sold like hot cakes, this without demeriting the iPod user interface, which is a stroke of genius).
There is no coincidence that OSX is mostly about eye candy and less about performance (otherwise they would be widely deployed as number crunching machines or in other tasks suitable for powerful systems). Apple has identified his 5% niche market and they would be foolish to snob the snobs.
... until somebody abuses it in ways you did not think about.
I always throw this little cautionary tale in these situations: the way Augusto Pinochet found the most prominent communists in Chile after he took power was by going to the CP's headquarters and confiscating the party's membership lists (addresses, workplaces, even photographs, all was there).
The party's faithful clearly believed that providing all their private data was a non issue, what they failed to see is that information can be used in ways unthinkable when the information is given, so it is better to keep a close eye about how you disclose it, to whom and on which situation.
Schlock what Mercenary fame?
Hmmm....
From such shining examples of democracy like Burma, Vietnam, Singapore or Malaysia.
You jest, surely, you jest.
It is religious people, amongst which there are some that can put 2 + 2 together in spite of everything, that keep mixing them both.
It was patently obvious that the mechanism described by Darwin did not require a god to work. It could churn along quite nicely without the intervention of any directing entity.
Science did not set up to destroy religion. Darwin was a pious, religious man actually. But he was a scientist, and science lead him to the irrefutable conclusions that he reached.
Every time I listen to men of faith all sounds to me like silly unadulterated nonsense referring to spirits, gods, creators, and all kind of entities for which there is not a shred of evidence but that somehow affect the physical universe in which we live.
Life is what we see, what we measure, what we model. We don't understand all but that does not make the unknown the territory of comforting fairy tales.
From the point of view of any religious person Einstein was for most practical purposes an atheist.
The single fact that he ascribed more importance to observation than to belief when trying to understand the universe is anathema to any person belonging to any organized religion.
God, in all his wisdom (note the word his, some people get worked out it this entity in not ascribed the masculine gender) decided to send his son (which his himself if you know what I mean) to deliver the most important news in the history of mankind when the fastest communication means was a crazy burro and the known world resembled today's maps of European holiday resorts.
Now, maybe God's IQ is in the low 80s, but would it not have been better, you know, be in a worldwide live broadcast announcing the drowning of an entire country (you chose the Gomorrah closest to your hard, we all have one I suppose) and showing it on live TV. I know I would fall on knees then and there in repentance for my wicked ways.
But, nope, lets make it fucking difficult to document the facts, let unreliable witnesses and historians put contradictory accounts together (because you do know that the 4 evangelists are the ones accepted by the churches, not the only ones that claim to know about the facts of those days, if God was guiding all those guys to write the truth then he needs to take some courses on leadership) and in general lets send the message in a way that anybody with a healthy dose of skepticism would feel obliged to exclaim: WTF?
Great proofs you have there, Great incontrovertibly ones...
.... when you *really* need it?
There where no trigger happy gangs. No matter which way you slice it, there weren't. Actually Iraq was one of the safest places to be (plenty of evidence of that). This is unsurprising, most dictatorships are like that, this is not necessarily a good thing, but what you are implying is factually incorrect.
In Hussein's times maybe people did not have all the services, but at least there was some infrastructures mantained (poorly if you want) by an organized government.
For the thousands unnecessarily dead in Iraq and their families, your wished improvement in 20 years time must be beyond a contemptuous reply (now think about that, you have one or more family members or friends dead, your way of life destroyed, and a supporter of the invaders tells you life will be better in 20 years time. If you think they will greet you and thank you for everything, well, you clearly are living in a parallel universe).
Yes guys, don't let your guard down, otherwise we will invade you, and will declare enchiladas the national dish.
You don't want that. Specially if they are *mole* enchiladas....
.... OSes require certain supported hardware.
Maybe in your planet they design the hardware first and then they fit the OS, strange way of working but in planet Earth is not how things work (there are engineering reasons for this, but I would not burden an alien with this stuff).
I was commuting 1:20 each way every day.
What I did?
I moved one tube (underground) station from my place of work.
When I factor the time saved, the savings on transport costs against the hassle of relocating, on balance I still obtain a benefit. And have regained a couple of hours daily to do whatever I want (while helping to save the World!).
The insistence of people doing long commutes thes do not necessarily need to make is madness (I know, there are some of you out there that must commute, but there are many people with relatively stable jobs that want to have the countriside house will working in town, that is ecological madness that may be also destroying their family and stressing them beyond what is really needed).
Nevertheless every time you pollute, you so oink, there is a tangible economic loss in the form of environmental damage.
Derided people like you don't want to make people accountable for this in the only possible way: taxing somebody.
It may be you, the oh so poor regular person sliding into poverty (if you will not have access to food, water, clothing and a roof on the top of your airy cranium then you will sliding into poverty, if you will not have money for gadgets or a car, well sorry but that is not poverty) or it may be a company, passing the cost to you, but polluting costs us all and it the cost of cleaning has to be met somehow.
.... and it only takes a UI expert 30 seconds to tell you so (I am telling you now).
The problem you are referring to is familiarity with another UI (in this case Photoshop's one), this problem is not intrinsic to the GIMP, the developers can't do much about people unwilling to try new things, nor should they.
People happy with other tools should keep using those tools, people trying to use a new tool (for whatever reason compelling them to do so, perhaps a different set of features, or in this case perhaps about legitimate concerns with openness of the source code, or the price) should at least make an effort to understand the idiosyncrasies of a new tool (sorry, but 10 minutes of biased assessment is not good enough).
This problem is normally overcomed by abundant, easy to understand documentation, you would have a point if you were highlighting this problem.
If what people want is a Photoshop clone, they should really go and get the real thing.
Usability reasons should point out why a procedure is clumsy and how to improve it, how to make an interface predictable and on ocasions how to make it simpler.
Pointing out about how another product does the same thing is completely pointless because it ignores the context in which each application is designed and intended to run.
And the GIMP UI is perfectly adequate.
The problem is that people want the GIMP to mimic some other application they have already learned.
I call that the "Windows eye candy syndrome" where it is assumed that if something does not work as in MS Windows then it is badly designed.
The tool in question is improving with each iteration. Eventually it will get to a level when it is usable by professional people, as it is it is good enough for many people.
We had *nothing* 10 years ago.
Some people simply don't understand the dynamics of open software and how the cumulative improvements are not lost and will eventually get you where you need to be.
And you could not be bothered to provide some links to this information (hint: Greenpeace does not accept donations from corporations, only individuals).