Will pressure sensitivity work right out of the box? Or not at all?
Can it output to a seperate monitor? The viewscreen's a bit small for art purposes - sure you can zoom in for details but an artist also needs to see how the full image is going to look at its print dimensions.
I'd love to be free from wacom/adobe/microsoft, I don't know if the Lycoris tablet will do the trick but it's an exciting step in the right direction.
"These are political questions," Odrade said. "They demonstrate how motives of bureaucracy are directly opposed to the need for adapting to change. Adaptability is a prime requirement for life to survive."
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
All the political stuff is fascinating to the intellectual, but if it were your money on the line you'd make an action movie too.
The original movie wins on cast/acting, cinematography, costume design, (I can't accept Saudakar in foppish floppy French dandy hats), soundtrack, and overall brutality.
Note that I'm comparing Lynch's Dune to Sci-fi's Dune and not their Children of Dune, which was a huge improvement and actually had some of the best costume design I've seen, period.
If I'm not mistaken you're thinking of Alejandro Jordorowski's earlier failed attempt at a Dune movie, for which H.R. Giger produced a few production paintings of the Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime and the famous Harkonnen chairs. To the best of my knowledge Giger was not involved with David Lynch's version.
I boycott the RIAA, but I don't think boycotting is enough. I've added the statement "I boycott the RIAA" to all my.sigs in the various forums I post in. I use the no RIAA icon wherever I have the option for an avatar. I've put a banner at the top of my website which states "I boycott the RIAA" and links to a personal statement about the RIAA.
I'd like to see this practice spread to the extent that no RIAA or big 5 employee could go to any forum or non-corporate website on the net and not see an anti-RIAA statement. I'm sure that's wishful thinking on my part, but if anyone wants to help make this happen you can get the banner I made from my site (www.shizit.net/alpha) or go to boycott-riaa.com where they have several other (less aggressive) banners available.
The Shizit, who you can find at mp3.com or www.shizit.net, if you like it hard. Or Robert Rich, who is on the little known Hearts of Space and Fathom labels if you like dark, drifting ambient music (he's not hard though by any means). Aphex Twin is the great god of Electronica. AFX puts out wierd shit it will take you a long time to get used to. Watch out though, he's starting to play with DRM even though he owns his own label and doesn't have to do what the big 5 say. If you like sugary soundtrack stuff check out any of Yoko Kanno's anime soundtracks. Not all of her stuff is electronic, but plenty of it is and she is incredibly, incredibly talented.
IIRC Paul Oakenfield has been associated with older ambient new age stuff in the past, so you might want to check out the "new age" section of the music store. There's a lot of crap in that section but a few rare gems. Hearts of Space had/has a great radio program you can probably here on public radio. They also had/have a webcast stream but you have to sign up for it now (blah).
I've got to come down on the "yes, it does need a new interface" side of the argument.
If you want to see my qualifications for making this statement, you can download a game demo I made at www.shizit.net. I also made a tutorial on IKA which NaN published on their site. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.
It's true that the learning curve is too steep. The interface can be quick for experienced users since most commands are tied to hot keys, BUT, I found this was again a major disadvantage whenever I needed to use the program after a long period of not using it. There are/were only two ways to learn most of the hot keys, the book and the Blenderbase web site. Either way it can take a lot of digging to unearth a forgotten hot key command.
Solution: expand the menu system to contain ALL of the interface commands and display the hot key shortcut beside it. It would also be great if the hot keys could be reset by the user, ala GIMP.
The other big annoyance I found was tying up the left (for right handed users) mouse button with placement of the creation gizmo. The creation gizmo itself needs to be taken out and the left mouse button reassigned the normal selection duties it has in every other program I've ever used. New objects can either be spawned at coordinates 0 0 0 as in Maya or spawning can wait until the a point is selected with the mouse as in 3DS MAX.
This is great news for all Blender user's though. Good luck raising 90K, Ton!
I'm personally trying to help by supporting one of my favorite independent bands, The Shizit (www.shizit.net). We worked together to produce a Blender game demo for promotional purposes. We had released the alpha to the Blender community a few days ago and it was getting very positive responses before NaN went down (anyone who is interested can still get the demo at shizit.net, or if you want to talk Blender we've put up a forum at http://shizit.vectorstar.net/forum .)
So that's my answer, contributing my own unique skills to help support my favorite independent band.
"To give you an example: I listen to a lot of Heavy Metal. One of the more interesting bands I've come across over the past year or so has been "Children of Bodom" (for those who don't know them, they are a speed metal band from Finland and quite musically skilled; their live album puts most other bands to shame)."
May I recommend the Shizit to you? They're post-hardcore, not heavy metal, but plenty aggressive if you like it that way. Check them out at www.shizit.net
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
Geez, I'm amazed anyone would question that businesses eventually fail.
I'm not willing to write a paper to back up his argument, but I'll say it seems obvious to me any organization which becomes valuable will eventually be taken down by crony-ism, if nothing else. I imagine most dynamic new businesses are started by non-business oriented people who have the better-mousetrap vision. Then they lose the business to the schemes of their venture-capitalists (one example). Eventually the company is taken over by people who don't have the better-mousetrap vision, cronies who can count beans but not create a product the public wants.
It seems to me corporations have a natural life cycle. Birth-growth-senility-death. Corporations should not be saved from a free-market death, they should be allowed to die and fertilize the soil for the next bunch of visionaries (to continue the analogy).
Keep in mind that most of the people in the world aren't going to differentiate between "innocent" American civilians and the American corporations (or government) behaving unethically and destructively in their countries. When the quick-buck guys have pushed the third world people they are exploiting too far, the retaliation of those people will be on your doorstep, no matter how "innocent" you feel like you may be.
My p.o.v.,.kids isn't to protect the kids, it's to protect us from the people who want to protect the kids. Let them censor/patrol.kids all they want and leave the rest of the internet alone. Your kid found porn? If it came from a.kids domain, roast the f*cker. If it didn't, then it's the parents own fault for not knowing.kids is for kids, and everything else isn't.
"But, through intelligent thinking, compassion, and education people began to understand how slavery was wrong and changed and their "funadmental axioms" were changed."
Shoudn't you be using the word "indoctrination" instead of education? IANAFC (I Am Not A Fundamentalist Christian) but I do acknowledge that the public schools (in the U.S.) are used for two things: education (2+2=4, water consists of 2 Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom) and indoctrination (liberal values of tolerance, and the proper behaviour for a good employee/worker). Indoctrination should never, never be equated with education.
People here have not come to understand the "wrongness" of slavery through intelligence, compassion, or indoctrination. "Wrong" means 2+2=5, the incorrectness of slavery is a matter of opinion. I disagree with and oppose slavery, but not everyone agrees with me. I'm sure you can find slaveholders in New York or Los Angeles who, for all practical purposes, "own" illegal immigrants. I don't imagine they disagree with the practice. Recently I recall seeing a special on the news about Africans selling Africans again, and a black church group in America who arranged to purchase them and set them free. Although the Americans thought slavery was wrong, clearly the Africans did not. The idea of slavery being "wrong" comes from Liberal idealogy. We should be aware that other idealogies exist and are also considered perfectly valid, i.e. "right" by those who hold them, if we want to have a more accurate understanding of the world.
"The record companies can argue that you can still do all of the above -- hear a song someplace, but then isntead of downloading it, you can just go to the record store and listen in there. AFAIK, lots of record stores have things where you can listen to a CD before you buy it."
Like the rest of their arguments, this one would be complete bullsh*t as well. Where, for example, do you hear Native American music played on the radio, and how many cd's from that genre can be previewed at the store? Practically no where, and practically zero, and this is true for more genres then it isn't.
"In this case, mp3 definitely let me know that I didn't want to spend any cash on the cd."
And that is exactly how it should be. I've got more than a few cd's I took a chance on at the local record store which turned out not to be my thing. Yeah I could resell them at a used cd place but it's not much good to get a few bucks back on an $18 cd.
"People will stop buying music entirely before that. It just isnt worth the hassle."
True, and I don't. I don't even want cd's anymore. They take up too much space, are too much trouble to haul around, and manufacturing the cd and the associated packaging is an indecent waste of resources.
What this consumer wants: high-quality.mp3's, or even better the Ogg vorbis format, a dvd burner, and a capable personal dvd player.
"The only way I would buy music online would be if I could buy a permanent license to a piece of music. That is, I get a key . .."
Nope, not even then. No license, no transfer of demographic information, no key. The labels are skimming money off every cd-r purchase I make, it's time for them to shut up and go away.
Radio station's broadcast over the air have a unique copy protection feature called the "DJ," who uses his/her voice to watermark the first and last 60 seconds of each song.
He's got a good point, naming is too often overlooked in storytelling. "Blood" is a stupid obvious boring name, like a producer would come up with. "Escaflowne" however is brilliant. "Pod Race" is moronic, "Millenium Falcon" is excellent (don't know what happened there - Lucas did make up both names, didn't he?). It'd be good to see more effort put into naming, but as with everything else I'm sure it will always end up 90% crap.
If your pad doesn't work out of the box in 8.0, try shutting down X and starting it manually. Hopefully they will have this problem fixed in 8.1.
What I really want to know though is, has anyone ever gotten the pressure sensitivity to work in GIMP? And if so, how? I'm using a USB Graphire and I am having no luck.
"1) I think it's hypocritical to complain about giving someone your "private" information that you've already given out to someone else."
I haven't given my sex, zip code, or age to Slashdot, but I will and do gladly complain about everyone who does require demographic information. Thus, not a hypocrite.
"2) You don't have to lie. Just get an anonymous email address, which you probably already have if you really care about your privacy that much, so no time lost there."
What he was referring to was lieing about age, sex, and zipcode.
"4) There are ways (which have been pointed out before on this site) to get around their registration if it REALLY bothers you, so why the hell do we have to keep reading the fucking whining on this god damn site about the free fucking registration?"
Because not everyone agrees with the collection of demographic information or the existence of massive consumer databases. Those who don't are going to object and continue to object. This is why.
"Just get over it, please. It's really not that big a deal as to require complaining about it on every fucking link to the NYT. We KNOW already!"
I don't, but if I did, my answer would be "no," and cursing wouldn't change my mind.
Your point was that there is no difference between creating a NYT account and creating a Slashdot account, and also that anyone who has a Slashdot account and bitches about creating a NYT account is a hypocrite.
I disagreed, and having read your responses to doppleganger, still disagree. However, for the sake of brevity I'll move over to the aforementioned thread. See ya there.
"I find it extremely ironic that the people who
complain about signing up for accounts at the NYT
still have accounts here at Slashdot. I mean,
what's the damn difference?"
NYT: The nature of reading is such that it does not and should not require identification, demographic data, and a contact address. For the service the NYT provides, an account is not necessary or appropriate.
Slashdot: Reading and even anonymous posting can be done without an account. I repeat, you do not need an account to use Slashdot. The account is only necessary when you want extra features. If you want to create a persona (such as fizban, or The_Great_Satan, or Signal_11) and be recognized, it makes sense that you would have to create an account. Otherwise there would be 500 Morpheus's posting and you wouldn't know who was who.
"The uneducated hypocritical Slashdot reader rears
its ugly head again."
Because I tried Photoshop on the Mac and didn't find it to be any better than Pshop on Windows. Win 9* is not suitable for high-end professional work. It crashes, especially if you want to try something difficult like running two programs at once. I can't tell you how much work I've lost to the Windows operating system, but I can tell you that it is simply unacceptable and the madness must stop.
I tried upgrading to Win2K. I purchased 2K and Mandrake 8.0 on the same day. Mandrake went right on, the easiest install I've ever had. 2K is still not installed, a month later. It gives me some crap about not being able to access a drive. I had to unplug one of my hard drives before 98 would reinstall (busted registry), I imagine I will have to unplug every unnecessary cdrom, hard drive, etc. to get 2K to install. Ridiculous. God only knows how much more difficult Windows will become with all the extra "anti-piracy features," and I sure as hell know I will not be running Pshop over the internet and storing my files on M$'s servers.
Photoshop has its own problems. 6.0 is unusable for painting. 6.0 has the "upgrade" problem that's been mentioned here: improvements that aren't, but since you can't take the source to a programmer to have it fixed you're screwed. Specifically, they've changed the options dialogue box into a stupid bar across the top of the screen (it is moveable, at least). It now takes about 3-4 steps to toggle opacity/size for the Wacom, which can only be described as unreal stupid. It worked beautifully before, but in 6.0 it's worthless.
Same with the dodge layer. Before you could paint into the dodge layer and get wonderful highlight effects. But they've tweaked an algorithm somewhere and it's become total crap.
As it is, GIMP is also not usable for painting. It's dodge layer doesn't work right, you can't cycle through the brushes, define brushes on the fly, etc., etc. But it does have a stable OS behind it. Hopefully once 2.0 comes out and the code's been cleaned up the GIMP team will be able to address these other, relatively minor, problems.
Slashdot Mirror
???
Will pressure sensitivity work right out of the box? Or not at all?
Can it output to a seperate monitor? The viewscreen's a bit small for art purposes - sure you can zoom in for details but an artist also needs to see how the full image is going to look at its print dimensions.
I'd love to be free from wacom/adobe/microsoft, I don't know if the Lycoris tablet will do the trick but it's an exciting step in the right direction.
The point of the series, my opinion:
"These are political questions," Odrade said. "They demonstrate how motives of bureaucracy are directly opposed to the need for adapting to change. Adaptability is a prime requirement for life to survive."
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
All the political stuff is fascinating to the intellectual, but if it were your money on the line you'd make an action movie too.
The original movie wins on cast/acting, cinematography, costume design, (I can't accept Saudakar in foppish floppy French dandy hats), soundtrack, and overall brutality.
Note that I'm comparing Lynch's Dune to Sci-fi's Dune and not their Children of Dune, which was a huge improvement and actually had some of the best costume design I've seen, period.
If I'm not mistaken you're thinking of Alejandro Jordorowski's earlier failed attempt at a Dune movie, for which H.R. Giger produced a few production paintings of the Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime and the famous Harkonnen chairs. To the best of my knowledge Giger was not involved with David Lynch's version.
I boycott the RIAA, but I don't think boycotting is enough. I've added the statement "I boycott the RIAA" to all my .sigs in the various forums I post in. I use the no RIAA icon wherever I have the option for an avatar. I've put a banner at the top of my website which states "I boycott the RIAA" and links to a personal statement about the RIAA.
I'd like to see this practice spread to the extent that no RIAA or big 5 employee could go to any forum or non-corporate website on the net and not see an anti-RIAA statement. I'm sure that's wishful thinking on my part, but if anyone wants to help make this happen you can get the banner I made from my site (www.shizit.net/alpha) or go to boycott-riaa.com where they have several other (less aggressive) banners available.
The Shizit, who you can find at mp3.com or www.shizit.net, if you like it hard. Or Robert Rich, who is on the little known Hearts of Space and Fathom labels if you like dark, drifting ambient music (he's not hard though by any means). Aphex Twin is the great god of Electronica. AFX puts out wierd shit it will take you a long time to get used to. Watch out though, he's starting to play with DRM even though he owns his own label and doesn't have to do what the big 5 say. If you like sugary soundtrack stuff check out any of Yoko Kanno's anime soundtracks. Not all of her stuff is electronic, but plenty of it is and she is incredibly, incredibly talented.
IIRC Paul Oakenfield has been associated with older ambient new age stuff in the past, so you might want to check out the "new age" section of the music store. There's a lot of crap in that section but a few rare gems. Hearts of Space had/has a great radio program you can probably here on public radio. They also had/have a webcast stream but you have to sign up for it now (blah).
I've got to come down on the "yes, it does need a new interface" side of the argument.
If you want to see my qualifications for making this statement, you can download a game demo I made at www.shizit.net. I also made a tutorial on IKA which NaN published on their site. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.
It's true that the learning curve is too steep. The interface can be quick for experienced users since most commands are tied to hot keys, BUT, I found this was again a major disadvantage whenever I needed to use the program after a long period of not using it. There are/were only two ways to learn most of the hot keys, the book and the Blenderbase web site. Either way it can take a lot of digging to unearth a forgotten hot key command.
Solution: expand the menu system to contain ALL of the interface commands and display the hot key shortcut beside it. It would also be great if the hot keys could be reset by the user, ala GIMP.
The other big annoyance I found was tying up the left (for right handed users) mouse button with placement of the creation gizmo. The creation gizmo itself needs to be taken out and the left mouse button reassigned the normal selection duties it has in every other program I've ever used. New objects can either be spawned at coordinates 0 0 0 as in Maya or spawning can wait until the a point is selected with the mouse as in 3DS MAX.
This is great news for all Blender user's though. Good luck raising 90K, Ton!
I think maybe post-hardcore metal band The Shizit has the trademark on "Evil Inside." You can buy their second demo album, "Evil Inside," on MP3.com.
t ml
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/34/the_shizit.h
If you look at the picture of the album cover art you'll see a nice little parody of the "Intel Inside" logo with "Intel" replaced with "Evil."
I'm personally trying to help by supporting one of my favorite independent bands, The Shizit (www.shizit.net). We worked together to produce a Blender game demo for promotional purposes. We had released the alpha to the Blender community a few days ago and it was getting very positive responses before NaN went down (anyone who is interested can still get the demo at shizit.net, or if you want to talk Blender we've put up a forum at http://shizit.vectorstar.net/forum
.)
So that's my answer, contributing my own unique skills to help support my favorite independent band.
"To give you an example: I listen to a lot of Heavy Metal. One of the more interesting bands I've come across over the past year or so has been "Children of Bodom" (for those who don't know them, they are a speed metal band from Finland and quite musically skilled; their live album puts most other bands to shame)."
May I recommend the Shizit to you? They're post-hardcore, not heavy metal, but plenty aggressive if you like it that way. Check them out at www.shizit.net
Geez, I'm amazed anyone would question that businesses eventually fail.
I'm not willing to write a paper to back up his argument, but I'll say it seems obvious to me any organization which becomes valuable will eventually be taken down by crony-ism, if nothing else. I imagine most dynamic new businesses are started by non-business oriented people who have the better-mousetrap vision. Then they lose the business to the schemes of their venture-capitalists (one example). Eventually the company is taken over by people who don't have the better-mousetrap vision, cronies who can count beans but not create a product the public wants.
It seems to me corporations have a natural life cycle. Birth-growth-senility-death. Corporations should not be saved from a free-market death, they should be allowed to die and fertilize the soil for the next bunch of visionaries (to continue the analogy).
Keep in mind that most of the people in the world aren't going to differentiate between "innocent" American civilians and the American corporations (or government) behaving unethically and destructively in their countries. When the quick-buck guys have pushed the third world people they are exploiting too far, the retaliation of those people will be on your doorstep, no matter how "innocent" you feel like you may be.
My p.o.v., .kids isn't to protect the kids, it's to protect us from the people who want to protect the kids. Let them censor/patrol .kids all they want and leave the rest of the internet alone. Your kid found porn? If it came from a .kids domain, roast the f*cker. If it didn't, then it's the parents own fault for not knowing .kids is for kids, and everything else isn't.
"But, through intelligent thinking, compassion, and education people began to understand how slavery was wrong and changed and their "funadmental axioms" were changed."
Shoudn't you be using the word "indoctrination" instead of education? IANAFC (I Am Not A Fundamentalist Christian) but I do acknowledge that the public schools (in the U.S.) are used for two things: education (2+2=4, water consists of 2 Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom) and indoctrination (liberal values of tolerance, and the proper behaviour for a good employee/worker). Indoctrination should never, never be equated with education.
People here have not come to understand the "wrongness" of slavery through intelligence, compassion, or indoctrination. "Wrong" means 2+2=5, the incorrectness of slavery is a matter of opinion. I disagree with and oppose slavery, but not everyone agrees with me. I'm sure you can find slaveholders in New York or Los Angeles who, for all practical purposes, "own" illegal immigrants. I don't imagine they disagree with the practice. Recently I recall seeing a special on the news about Africans selling Africans again, and a black church group in America who arranged to purchase them and set them free. Although the Americans thought slavery was wrong, clearly the Africans did not. The idea of slavery being "wrong" comes from Liberal idealogy. We should be aware that other idealogies exist and are also considered perfectly valid, i.e. "right" by those who hold them, if we want to have a more accurate understanding of the world.
"The record companies can argue that you can still do all of the above -- hear a song someplace, but then isntead of downloading it, you can just go to the record store and listen in there. AFAIK, lots of record stores have things where you can listen to a CD before you buy it."
Like the rest of their arguments, this one would be complete bullsh*t as well. Where, for example, do you hear Native American music played on the radio, and how many cd's from that genre can be previewed at the store? Practically no where, and practically zero, and this is true for more genres then it isn't.
"In this case, mp3 definitely let me know that I didn't want to spend any cash on the cd."
And that is exactly how it should be. I've got more than a few cd's I took a chance on at the local record store which turned out not to be my thing. Yeah I could resell them at a used cd place but it's not much good to get a few bucks back on an $18 cd.
"People will stop buying music entirely before that. It just isnt worth the hassle."
.mp3's, or even better the Ogg vorbis format, a dvd burner, and a capable personal dvd player.
."
True, and I don't. I don't even want cd's anymore. They take up too much space, are too much trouble to haul around, and manufacturing the cd and the associated packaging is an indecent waste of resources.
What this consumer wants: high-quality
"The only way I would buy music online would be if I could buy a permanent license to a piece of music. That is, I get a key . .
Nope, not even then. No license, no transfer of demographic information, no key. The labels are skimming money off every cd-r purchase I make, it's time for them to shut up and go away.
Radio station's broadcast over the air have a unique copy protection feature called the "DJ," who uses his/her voice to watermark the first and last 60 seconds of each song.
He's got a good point, naming is too often overlooked in storytelling. "Blood" is a stupid obvious boring name, like a producer would come up with. "Escaflowne" however is brilliant. "Pod Race" is moronic, "Millenium Falcon" is excellent (don't know what happened there - Lucas did make up both names, didn't he?). It'd be good to see more effort put into naming, but as with everything else I'm sure it will always end up 90% crap.
If your pad doesn't work out of the box in 8.0, try shutting down X and starting it manually. Hopefully they will have this problem fixed in 8.1.
What I really want to know though is, has anyone ever gotten the pressure sensitivity to work in GIMP? And if so, how? I'm using a USB Graphire and I am having no luck.
"1) I think it's hypocritical to complain about giving someone your "private" information that you've already given out to someone else."
I haven't given my sex, zip code, or age to Slashdot, but I will and do gladly complain about everyone who does require demographic information. Thus, not a hypocrite.
"2) You don't have to lie. Just get an anonymous email address, which you probably already have if you really care about your privacy that much, so no time lost there."
What he was referring to was lieing about age, sex, and zipcode.
"4) There are ways (which have been pointed out before on this site) to get around their registration if it REALLY bothers you, so why the hell do we have to keep reading the fucking whining on this god damn site about the free fucking registration?"
Because not everyone agrees with the collection of demographic information or the existence of massive consumer databases. Those who don't are going to object and continue to object. This is why.
"Just get over it, please. It's really not that big a deal as to require complaining about it on every fucking link to the NYT. We KNOW already!"
I don't, but if I did, my answer would be "no," and cursing wouldn't change my mind.
Your point was that there is no difference between creating a NYT account and creating a Slashdot account, and also that anyone who has a Slashdot account and bitches about creating a NYT account is a hypocrite.
I disagreed, and having read your responses to doppleganger, still disagree. However, for the sake of brevity I'll move over to the aforementioned thread. See ya there.
"Not only is it not patented . . . "
Thanks for the tip, I'm on the phone with my patent lawyer now!
"I find it extremely ironic that the people who
complain about signing up for accounts at the NYT
still have accounts here at Slashdot. I mean,
what's the damn difference?"
NYT: The nature of reading is such that it does not and should not require identification, demographic data, and a contact address. For the service the NYT provides, an account is not necessary or appropriate.
Slashdot: Reading and even anonymous posting can be done without an account. I repeat, you do not need an account to use Slashdot. The account is only necessary when you want extra features. If you want to create a persona (such as fizban, or The_Great_Satan, or Signal_11) and be recognized, it makes sense that you would have to create an account. Otherwise there would be 500 Morpheus's posting and you wouldn't know who was who.
"The uneducated hypocritical Slashdot reader rears
its ugly head again."
Yeah, I guess so.
Because I tried Photoshop on the Mac and didn't find it to be any better than Pshop on Windows. Win 9* is not suitable for high-end professional work. It crashes, especially if you want to try something difficult like running two programs at once. I can't tell you how much work I've lost to the Windows operating system, but I can tell you that it is simply unacceptable and the madness must stop.
I tried upgrading to Win2K. I purchased 2K and Mandrake 8.0 on the same day. Mandrake went right on, the easiest install I've ever had. 2K is still not installed, a month later. It gives me some crap about not being able to access a drive. I had to unplug one of my hard drives before 98 would reinstall (busted registry), I imagine I will have to unplug every unnecessary cdrom, hard drive, etc. to get 2K to install. Ridiculous. God only knows how much more difficult Windows will become with all the extra "anti-piracy features," and I sure as hell know I will not be running Pshop over the internet and storing my files on M$'s servers.
Photoshop has its own problems. 6.0 is unusable for painting. 6.0 has the "upgrade" problem that's been mentioned here: improvements that aren't, but since you can't take the source to a programmer to have it fixed you're screwed. Specifically, they've changed the options dialogue box into a stupid bar across the top of the screen (it is moveable, at least). It now takes about 3-4 steps to toggle opacity/size for the Wacom, which can only be described as unreal stupid. It worked beautifully before, but in 6.0 it's worthless.
Same with the dodge layer. Before you could paint into the dodge layer and get wonderful highlight effects. But they've tweaked an algorithm somewhere and it's become total crap.
As it is, GIMP is also not usable for painting. It's dodge layer doesn't work right, you can't cycle through the brushes, define brushes on the fly, etc., etc. But it does have a stable OS behind it. Hopefully once 2.0 comes out and the code's been cleaned up the GIMP team will be able to address these other, relatively minor, problems.