People complaining about globalization/offshoring "stealing" their jobs is just plain odd to me. I assume what you want is for your job to be protected by law, so that those dirty foreigners can't take it - right? If so, you subscribe to one of two philosohies:
1. You believe that Americans are in some way more worthwhile as human beings, and thus deserve any given job more than someone of equal qualifications who lives in another country.
or
2. You believe that Americans are in some way lazier, dumber, or otherwise more incompetent than someone living in another country. Thus they cannot be expect to compete fairly for employment.
It can only reasonably be one of the two. So tell me, which is it?
> I guess if you want RAID, you pay more than $3,000.
Now that's just plain silly. A basic x86 1U server runs around $1100 with two hard drives configured in software RAID1, which works wonderfully other than not allowing hotswap and preventing boot if the first drive is the one that fails. For another $150 or so you can add a hardware RAID card to fix both of those things and get slightly better performance.
There is absolutely NO excuse for not running a raid on any modern server. Drives are the most likely component to fail, the most critical if they do (even if you replace it, you've still lost all your data), and are cheap as dirt. Any sysadmin still using single drive configs should have their head examined.
I've always hated every moment spent in the car - I see it as completely wasted time and energy. Recently I started listening to audio books and it completely changed my attitude. Now I actually look forward to getting into the car, much as I look forward to resuming reading whatever paper books I am reading.
There is plenty of great stuff on audio cd, but my two main sources have been Simply Audio Books (a sort of netflix for audio books) and Great Courses.
Simplyaudiobooks has a lot of fiction (including the first volume of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, if you can believe that) as well as semi-pop science books like Hawking's the Universe in a Nutshell. You can also get this stuff on Amazon if you prefer to buy.
The Great Courses are basically a bunch of recorded colledge lectures, but (unlike my actual colledge experience) they are mostly pretty interesting. Topics include science, history, math, economics, biographies, and philosophy.
A few years back I decided I was tired of hot, pressurized gas bulbs providing the lighting in my home and decided to step into the 21st century by upgrading to LEDs. Ultimately I settled on purchasing strands of LED christmas lights which I string up around the upper edge of every wall. It provides even, consistent lighting which I can leave on all the time in most of the house.
I recommend the white for functional lighting, and the blue for areas that you want to be more relaxing (living room, for example). The purple is nice too but they are quite dim compared to the other colors.
I'm a programmer but having worked in the game industry for many years I grew to know a lot about game art, both on paper (concept sketches and paintings) and on the computer.
First, it's a skill that can be learned like any other. Sure, some people have a natural talent, and others don't (like me). There are also people who are natural programmers, and they will always be the best at it; but anyone can learn to program if they really want to.
I've ended up doing tons of stand-in art for games, and a lot of it ended up going into the final game, because it was Good Enough. Usually it was character animations and interface elements, basically the easy stuff, but still - it goes to show you that there isn't as much of a line between the artistically talented and someone who can just learn to work the tools.
Here's a few random tips from my many years of hanging around with really talented artists as well as my own tinkering:
Tools - I'm pleased to say that the OSS art tools you can get today for photo art and 3D are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts for many tasks. I've used Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max (and the original 3D Studio, for that matter), and Lightwave in the course of my career, but I find that the Gimp (for 2D) and Blender (for 3D) are today better, or at least as good as, most of the commercial offerings. One thing about this may be that both of these programs are geared more towards programmers-become-artists than pure artists, which may be why I find them more intuative and powerful.
Color - Color is a huge element. Crappy shapes with a good color scheme actually look pretty good; nice shapes with a crappy color scheme always look bad. Typically you want to combine complimentary colors - purple and gold, for example - in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It can be tricky to get this right, but one trick you can do is use the color wheel in Gimp. Find the first color you are going to use, and then go to the exact opposite side - that's your complimentary color. Note that a muted color (tan, for example) should fill more, proportionately, of the image than its bright complimentary color (red, for example). When in doubt, go look at a nice-looking website and steal their colorscheme.
Compositing - You can do a LOT by compositing photographs and other existing graphic elements. For example I made the header image for this website by compositing shots I had taken in New Oreans, plus a couple photos from images.google.com eg, Stonehenge in the lower left corner). Using the Gimp's color adjustment tools, scale, resize, rotate, and opacity, you can collage together a bunch of unrelated images and end up with something that looks pretty cool.
Learn Blender - A great way to make a final image is to create a central element in 3D, and then paste it into an image and edit it up with the Gimp. That's how I did the graphics for this site, for example. Blender is surprisingly easy to learn; this excellent tutorial will have you up and running in no time. I was creating elements usable for compositing in my 2D images in a matter of hours after I started learning it. (Of course, I have a lot of experience using other modelers, so it may take a complete 3D novice longer.)
Last of all, I will suggest the tried-and-true method for self-teaching yourself almost anything: duplicate! Go find a piece of art that you think is attractive. Study it closely. Pick it apart. Now try to create your own version of the same thing using whatever tools you are trying to learn. The process of taking apart someone else's image will teach you a lot about the elements that experienced creators use.
I actually emailed a site (planetxusa.com) like this, mentioning that IE is not available for my platform and that the site works fine in my browser, except for the stupid warning box. Their webmaster wrote me back a detailed message - he had never heard of a platform where IE was unavailable (i.e., he only knew of Mac and Windows) and was really curious about it. I answered his questions, and he replied saying that they would take down the warning message. About a weak later it was gone.
I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:
1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!
2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!
As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.
I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)
I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.
Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.
But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.
Completely true - as far as it goes for a skilled user. If you post to a mailing list or a bug tracking system with a detailed breakdown of your system hardware and software, what you were attempting to do, what happened instead, and all relevant logs and stack traces - you can expect an expediant resolution. I myself have posted dozens of bugs to various project databases (mostly KDE), and in almost every single case they were fixed in the very next version, and in some cases they were able to propose a temporary workaround.
Compare this to Aunt Tillie, who tries to run a program she installed but nothing happens. She doesn't know where to find the bug database so she posts to a linux-newbies mailing list saying "Help! When I run this program nothing happens!" Then she is promptly ignored for not providing any relevant details.
When commercial software makers refer to support, then mean the second scenario. They've got legions of customer service reps who wait for phone calls and read off a script, giving generic answers to the generic problems that most people have. In many cases the "solution" provided is to delete all the configuration files, reinstall the software, or reinstall the OS. No analysis, no long-term fix to the core problem; but Aunt Tillie's software works now, so she's thrilled.
This kind of support is beyond worthless for the technically minded. Hence we think of free software as having better support while Aunt Tillie thinks of it as having no support at all. On the flip side, we think of commercial software as having worthless support (some customer service monkey who reads off a script and ignores us when we assure them that, yes, our computer is plugged in and yes, the monitor is turned on) and Aunt Tillie is glad that at least she can talk to a "real human" on the phone.
Funny you say that - I actually use my PDA (a Zaurus) as an alarm clock. It has a much better, more flexible interface, and is very easy to take with you traveling or wherever.
Even more ironic, though, is that almost everyone else I know uses their cell phone as their alarm clock! Since most phones have basic calendars and alarm functions, you get the same benefits of the PDA (though a slightly more obtuse interface) described above.
Seriously. I was looking at $3000 - $5000 flat TVs in the 40" range. I ended up going with a projector based on a friends recommendation, and now I will never go back to lame-o screen-based displays. $1000 for http://www.projectorpeople.com/hometheater/projdtl s.asp?itemid=1144&itmname=InFocus+X1low end projector and now I've got a home theater to die for. Screw plasma - I've now got a 120" TV which disappears when not in use! Plus it's smaller (about the size of a thick hardcover book) and lighter (~6 lbs).
Mount it on the ceiling and the thing takes up literraly no space in your living room (well, you do have to leave one wall blank of decorations). The picture is gorgeous and can be used for TV, DVDs, and video game consoles. Heck, it's got a VGA port too, I could bring out a laptop and plug it in to watch xmms visualization plugins.
The only downsides are that it has no sound built in (that's okay, I prefer running it through my stereo better), and doing the ceiling mount was a bit more effort than just plunking down a TV or hanging a flatscreen on the wall.
I highly recommend a projector - not this specific model, pretty much any one will do (though DLP seems like a better choice for watching TV than an LCD based projector, which most of the expensive ones are).
The debate on this topic is heated and there is definitely no consensus. On one hand you've got journalists who are mostly Democrats or otherwise self-identifying liberals. On the other hand the corporations which actually own the media networks are run by conservatives in most cases.
Larry Elder confronts this topic pretty well in his book "Showdown". One of the most interesting sets of statistics compared the adjectives attached to the words "liberal" and "conservative" in a number of newspapers around the country. He found that politicians were often identified as "hard-line conservatives", but never "hard-line liberals" (to take one example).
This is actually the opposite of the solution proposed in the article; it enables the merchant to handle micropayments, instead of allowing the customer to pay them.
Don't store your own credit cards, stash them someplace secure. You don't keep your money in a sock under your matress do you? You put it in a bank. Some deal here.
The thin clients mention is a key point. It's not one that's going to most situations: in a small or medium sized office, you're probably going to want full workstations for workers. But there are other situations - kiosks, point of sale, terminals in a factory or warehouse - where the demand on the individual terminals is low but the chance of failure is high (due to the environment).
A thought that has occured to me before but seems to be most demonstrated by the Farscape situation: does this indicate a failing of the content-distribution system we call TV? Or is this just an odd example, a deviation from the norm. Consider: what other industry has a company which choses to get rid of their #2 most popular product completely, despite huge support from a large fanbase?
Of course this is because they aren't selling the show directly; unlike a movie you aren't buying tickets to watch the thing. This reminds me of web services (Yahoo etc) - which also represent (to me) a failed approach, in terms of business model, to distributing content.
I spend a lot of time dealing with hiring for the IT staff at my company. These days, I pretty much instantly trash any resume doesn't include some sort of background with creating or maintaining an Open Source projust of reasonable size. It may be an unfair bias, but experience has shown me that OSS developers are almost always an order of magnitude more skilled and more responsible than applicants from other backgrounds.
The self-motivation, self-discipline, organizational skills, and willingness to write code that the author isnt ashamed to display to the whole world are exactly the sort of traits that employers look for (or should be, anyway).
Interesting: they aparently are abandoning their whole total-cost-of-ownership argument. Balmer states, "We cannot price at zero" and "We can't beat them [Linux] on price" - thus implying that Linux's price is zero. Quite the opposite from "it costs you more in the long run!"
My company began using it a few years ago as a replacement for a commercial JSP server that was a completely piece of crap. Compared to the commercial program it was okay, but it frequently (like once every couple of months) would lock up and require not only a complete restart, but in fact a "kill -9" of all java processes running as the Jakarta/Tomcat user.
Today we are using JDK 1.4 and Tomcat 3.x and are pretty happy. It doesn't lock up or do weird things anymore. Speed is okay; not blazing fast, but for our business, the compiling (or interpreting) of dynamic pages is not the slowdown. Database access is a hundred times as CPU intensive so speed of our dynamic content isn't really important. Our pages are fairly complex and usually compile in about 500ms.
All in all I vastly prefer coding web pages in PHP. Java is just plain clumsy for creating web content. But if you've got hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code (like us), Tomcat will do you just fine.
For people doing print work, CMYK is definitely important. For everyone else, it doesn't matter one bit. And people doing print work should be using a vector format anyway!
FYI, for non-professional use, creating RGB images and then converting them to CMYK works fine. I have created a number of flyers, folders, and other print materials in this fashion. The final colors come out looking a bit different from what was on the screen (paricularly the blues), but it certainly looks just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
People complaining about globalization/offshoring "stealing" their jobs is just plain odd to me. I assume what you want is for your job to be protected by law, so that those dirty foreigners can't take it - right? If so, you subscribe to one of two philosohies:
1. You believe that Americans are in some way more worthwhile as human beings, and thus deserve any given job more than someone of equal qualifications who lives in another country.
or
2. You believe that Americans are in some way lazier, dumber, or otherwise more incompetent than someone living in another country. Thus they cannot be expect to compete fairly for employment.
It can only reasonably be one of the two. So tell me, which is it?
http://www.maps.org/mdma/
> I guess if you want RAID, you pay more than $3,000.
Now that's just plain silly. A basic x86 1U server runs around $1100 with two hard drives configured in software RAID1, which works wonderfully other than not allowing hotswap and preventing boot if the first drive is the one that fails. For another $150 or so you can add a hardware RAID card to fix both of those things and get slightly better performance.
There is absolutely NO excuse for not running a raid on any modern server. Drives are the most likely component to fail, the most critical if they do (even if you replace it, you've still lost all your data), and are cheap as dirt. Any sysadmin still using single drive configs should have their head examined.
I've always hated every moment spent in the car - I see it as completely wasted time and energy. Recently I started listening to audio books and it completely changed my attitude. Now I actually look forward to getting into the car, much as I look forward to resuming reading whatever paper books I am reading.
There is plenty of great stuff on audio cd, but my two main sources have been Simply Audio Books (a sort of netflix for audio books) and Great Courses.
Simplyaudiobooks has a lot of fiction (including the first volume of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, if you can believe that) as well as semi-pop science books like Hawking's the Universe in a Nutshell. You can also get this stuff on Amazon if you prefer to buy.
The Great Courses are basically a bunch of recorded colledge lectures, but (unlike my actual colledge experience) they are mostly pretty interesting. Topics include science, history, math, economics, biographies, and philosophy.
This is a great product, but hardly a first. For example:
m asTree/ForeverBright/LED2004.htm
http://superbrightleds.com/MR16_specs.htm
A few years back I decided I was tired of hot, pressurized gas bulbs providing the lighting in my home and decided to step into the 21st century by upgrading to LEDs. Ultimately I settled on purchasing strands of LED christmas lights which I string up around the upper edge of every wall. It provides even, consistent lighting which I can leave on all the time in most of the house.
You can buy them from here, among other places:
http://www.christmas-treasures.com/AboutUs/Christ
I recommend the white for functional lighting, and the blue for areas that you want to be more relaxing (living room, for example). The purple is nice too but they are quite dim compared to the other colors.
I'm a programmer but having worked in the game industry for many years I grew to know a lot about game art, both on paper (concept sketches and paintings) and on the computer.
First, it's a skill that can be learned like any other. Sure, some people have a natural talent, and others don't (like me). There are also people who are natural programmers, and they will always be the best at it; but anyone can learn to program if they really want to.
I've ended up doing tons of stand-in art for games, and a lot of it ended up going into the final game, because it was Good Enough. Usually it was character animations and interface elements, basically the easy stuff, but still - it goes to show you that there isn't as much of a line between the artistically talented and someone who can just learn to work the tools.
Here's a few random tips from my many years of hanging around with really talented artists as well as my own tinkering:
Tools - I'm pleased to say that the OSS art tools you can get today for photo art and 3D are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts for many tasks. I've used Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max (and the original 3D Studio, for that matter), and Lightwave in the course of my career, but I find that the Gimp (for 2D) and Blender (for 3D) are today better, or at least as good as, most of the commercial offerings. One thing about this may be that both of these programs are geared more towards programmers-become-artists than pure artists, which may be why I find them more intuative and powerful.
Color - Color is a huge element. Crappy shapes with a good color scheme actually look pretty good; nice shapes with a crappy color scheme always look bad. Typically you want to combine complimentary colors - purple and gold, for example - in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It can be tricky to get this right, but one trick you can do is use the color wheel in Gimp. Find the first color you are going to use, and then go to the exact opposite side - that's your complimentary color. Note that a muted color (tan, for example) should fill more, proportionately, of the image than its bright complimentary color (red, for example). When in doubt, go look at a nice-looking website and steal their colorscheme.
Compositing - You can do a LOT by compositing photographs and other existing graphic elements. For example I made the header image for this website by compositing shots I had taken in New Oreans, plus a couple photos from images.google.com eg, Stonehenge in the lower left corner). Using the Gimp's color adjustment tools, scale, resize, rotate, and opacity, you can collage together a bunch of unrelated images and end up with something that looks pretty cool.
Learn Blender - A great way to make a final image is to create a central element in 3D, and then paste it into an image and edit it up with the Gimp. That's how I did the graphics for this site, for example. Blender is surprisingly easy to learn; this excellent tutorial will have you up and running in no time. I was creating elements usable for compositing in my 2D images in a matter of hours after I started learning it. (Of course, I have a lot of experience using other modelers, so it may take a complete 3D novice longer.)
Last of all, I will suggest the tried-and-true method for self-teaching yourself almost anything: duplicate! Go find a piece of art that you think is attractive. Study it closely. Pick it apart. Now try to create your own version of the same thing using whatever tools you are trying to learn. The process of taking apart someone else's image will teach you a lot about the elements that experienced creators use.
I actually emailed a site (planetxusa.com) like this, mentioning that IE is not available for my platform and that the site works fine in my browser, except for the stupid warning box. Their webmaster wrote me back a detailed message - he had never heard of a platform where IE was unavailable (i.e., he only knew of Mac and Windows) and was really curious about it. I answered his questions, and he replied saying that they would take down the warning message. About a weak later it was gone.
:)
So - sometimes it works!
I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:
1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!
2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!
As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.
I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)
I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.
Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.
But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.
Completely true - as far as it goes for a skilled user. If you post to a mailing list or a bug tracking system with a detailed breakdown of your system hardware and software, what you were attempting to do, what happened instead, and all relevant logs and stack traces - you can expect an expediant resolution. I myself have posted dozens of bugs to various project databases (mostly KDE), and in almost every single case they were fixed in the very next version, and in some cases they were able to propose a temporary workaround.
Compare this to Aunt Tillie, who tries to run a program she installed but nothing happens. She doesn't know where to find the bug database so she posts to a linux-newbies mailing list saying "Help! When I run this program nothing happens!" Then she is promptly ignored for not providing any relevant details.
When commercial software makers refer to support, then mean the second scenario. They've got legions of customer service reps who wait for phone calls and read off a script, giving generic answers to the generic problems that most people have. In many cases the "solution" provided is to delete all the configuration files, reinstall the software, or reinstall the OS. No analysis, no long-term fix to the core problem; but Aunt Tillie's software works now, so she's thrilled.
This kind of support is beyond worthless for the technically minded. Hence we think of free software as having better support while Aunt Tillie thinks of it as having no support at all. On the flip side, we think of commercial software as having worthless support (some customer service monkey who reads off a script and ignores us when we assure them that, yes, our computer is plugged in and yes, the monitor is turned on) and Aunt Tillie is glad that at least she can talk to a "real human" on the phone.
Funny you say that - I actually use my PDA (a Zaurus) as an alarm clock. It has a much better, more flexible interface, and is very easy to take with you traveling or wherever.
Even more ironic, though, is that almost everyone else I know uses their cell phone as their alarm clock! Since most phones have basic calendars and alarm functions, you get the same benefits of the PDA (though a slightly more obtuse interface) described above.
Crap, screwed up that URL. Here's the correct one:
InFocus X1
Seriously. I was looking at $3000 - $5000 flat TVs in the 40" range. I ended up going with a projector based on a friends recommendation, and now I will never go back to lame-o screen-based displays. $1000 for http://www.projectorpeople.com/hometheater/projdtl s.asp?itemid=1144&itmname=InFocus+X1low end projector and now I've got a home theater to die for. Screw plasma - I've now got a 120" TV which disappears when not in use! Plus it's smaller (about the size of a thick hardcover book) and lighter (~6 lbs).
Mount it on the ceiling and the thing takes up literraly no space in your living room (well, you do have to leave one wall blank of decorations). The picture is gorgeous and can be used for TV, DVDs, and video game consoles. Heck, it's got a VGA port too, I could bring out a laptop and plug it in to watch xmms visualization plugins.
The only downsides are that it has no sound built in (that's okay, I prefer running it through my stereo better), and doing the ceiling mount was a bit more effort than just plunking down a TV or hanging a flatscreen on the wall.
I highly recommend a projector - not this specific model, pretty much any one will do (though DLP seems like a better choice for watching TV than an LCD based projector, which most of the expensive ones are).
Bah, who needs clients? This one was designed to be completely playable with raw telnet:
:)
Blood Dusk MUD
'course it's mine, so I might be a little biased.
The debate on this topic is heated and there is definitely no consensus. On one hand you've got journalists who are mostly Democrats or otherwise self-identifying liberals. On the other hand the corporations which actually own the media networks are run by conservatives in most cases.
Larry Elder confronts this topic pretty well in his book "Showdown". One of the most interesting sets of statistics compared the adjectives attached to the words "liberal" and "conservative" in a number of newspapers around the country. He found that politicians were often identified as "hard-line conservatives", but never "hard-line liberals" (to take one example).
There's a brief snippet on his website:
http://www.larryelder.com/mediabias.html
(Hey, that's the second one this week!)
p m- 3.3.1/doc/TCDevGuide.html#wallet
Micropayments for retailers:
http://search.cpan.org/src/TRUSTCOM/Net_TCLink.
This is actually the opposite of the solution proposed in the article; it enables the merchant to handle micropayments, instead of allowing the customer to pay them.
Don't store your own credit cards, stash them someplace secure. You don't keep your money in a sock under your matress do you? You put it in a bank. Some deal here.
http://www.trustcommerce.com/opensource.php
1. Only takes a few hours to build a character to a decent "level"
2. Non-addictive
3. Free
4. Fun!
Blood Dusk
The thin clients mention is a key point. It's not one that's going to most situations: in a small or medium sized office, you're probably going to want full workstations for workers. But there are other situations - kiosks, point of sale, terminals in a factory or warehouse - where the demand on the individual terminals is low but the chance of failure is high (due to the environment).
A thought that has occured to me before but seems to be most demonstrated by the Farscape situation: does this indicate a failing of the content-distribution system we call TV? Or is this just an odd example, a deviation from the norm. Consider: what other industry has a company which choses to get rid of their #2 most popular product completely, despite huge support from a large fanbase?
Of course this is because they aren't selling the show directly; unlike a movie you aren't buying tickets to watch the thing. This reminds me of web services (Yahoo etc) - which also represent (to me) a failed approach, in terms of business model, to distributing content.
Just a random thought.
I spend a lot of time dealing with hiring for the IT staff at my company. These days, I pretty much instantly trash any resume doesn't include some sort of background with creating or maintaining an Open Source projust of reasonable size. It may be an unfair bias, but experience has shown me that OSS developers are almost always an order of magnitude more skilled and more responsible than applicants from other backgrounds.
The self-motivation, self-discipline, organizational skills, and willingness to write code that the author isnt ashamed to display to the whole world are exactly the sort of traits that employers look for (or should be, anyway).
Correct. You may also note that US Rep. Patsy Mink has introduced a bill to reinstate federal parole:
http://drcnet.org/wol/255.html#minkbill
Interesting: they aparently are abandoning their whole total-cost-of-ownership argument. Balmer states, "We cannot price at zero" and "We can't beat them [Linux] on price" - thus implying that Linux's price is zero. Quite the opposite from "it costs you more in the long run!"
My company began using it a few years ago as a replacement for a commercial JSP server that was a completely piece of crap. Compared to the commercial program it was okay, but it frequently (like once every couple of months) would lock up and require not only a complete restart, but in fact a "kill -9" of all java processes running as the Jakarta/Tomcat user.
Today we are using JDK 1.4 and Tomcat 3.x and are pretty happy. It doesn't lock up or do weird things anymore. Speed is okay; not blazing fast, but for our business, the compiling (or interpreting) of dynamic pages is not the slowdown. Database access is a hundred times as CPU intensive so speed of our dynamic content isn't really important. Our pages are fairly complex and usually compile in about 500ms.
All in all I vastly prefer coding web pages in PHP. Java is just plain clumsy for creating web content. But if you've got hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code (like us), Tomcat will do you just fine.
For people doing print work, CMYK is definitely important. For everyone else, it doesn't matter one bit. And people doing print work should be using a vector format anyway!
FYI, for non-professional use, creating RGB images and then converting them to CMYK works fine. I have created a number of flyers, folders, and other print materials in this fashion. The final colors come out looking a bit different from what was on the screen (paricularly the blues), but it certainly looks just fine.