Ah, but you forget about the power of TRON, my son.
(actually, TRON doesn't count; the movie was written before the video games, but the games were done before the movie was - that's why the grid bugs play a mildly significant role in the game, and appear for 1.3 seconds in the movie...)
Well, they only make money because it is assumed that music will be pirated from them (which doesn't make much sense if you're an independent musician who wants to copy his own music and has nothing to do with the RIAA)
Well if I'm paying for something, why can't that constitute a transaction giving me free license to copy stuff - it's not my fault that the RIAA tax is set very low.
Obviously I know that that doesn't hold much water, but I'd rather not have the tarriff at all than have a sufficiently large tarriff to repay them (and I somehow doubt that their figures are being independently appraised) and still violate perfectly honest uses of media.
I mean, at least NSI was utterly inconsistant with their conflict resolution policy. They weren't totally in the pockets of greedy octopus-like corporations. NSI just screwed everyone;)
Who would have ever thought that one day we'd be cursing the name 'Dyson'?
While I don't like Clinton, bear in mind that virtually no powerful politician or bureaucrat is any better.
(of course, the most recent bunch of Presidents whom I hold any respect for were Hayes and Cleveland, neither of whom were perfect, and to a lesser extent Teddy Roosevelt and Truman. This has been a crappy century for having good politicians)
...how the French revolution was plagiarised by the colonists in the Americas...
???
American Revolution - 1776
French Revolution - 1789
A lot the US political party system rose out of clubs that either supported or opposed the French Revolution however. Wish it hadn't. Before, they tended to duel each other, a la Hamilton vs. Burr. Seems to me that that would end up being a lot more fun for the rest of us;)
On the contrary - I think that it's essential to worry about it. Someone with some degree of power thinks that it would be a good idea. He's not likely to give up on the subject any time soon. Even if the proposal was written with no actual malice it's dangerous that someone would even consider it acceptable. Such a person is a loose cannon who could attack our liberties just because he doesn't deeply care about preserving them.
The government serves the people - it must always work only to preserve our freedoms, even at its' own expense. That's the point. It is very sad that people would forget this, and it has the potential for tragedy.
I'm also no expert, but I suspect that this could be bad when a machine claimed to disable the services that permit it to backtrack packets but actually didn't. Maybe we should see what the cocaine auction protocol guys have to say;)
Well #1 is nature as it regards the Earth. And I don't really enjoy having Skylab fall out of orbit either, although there are suprisingly few satellites that are likely to make it through the atmosphere, so it's not a *huge* deal.
But #2 has nothing to do with nature - only people who want to exploit space find it to be a problem. Please don't go claiming that congested orbits are pollution or anti-environmental or something.
I hate to break it to you, but there's nothing particularly nice about Nature outside of the Earth. Please don't say that you're worried about harming the environment on Venus or something. That's just ridiculous.
Now, now. There is IIRC a story about Oppenhimer which seems relevant here. Apparently during the early nuclear tests (probably the first - Trinity), just before the bomb went off, he espied a small parabolic reflector sitting around.
He positioned it so that it faced the bomb, placed the end of a cigarette at the focus and retreated to the shelter.
After the bomb was detonated, he came out and picked up the now-lit cigarette.
So it's kind of apocryphal, and impractical, but you too can light cigarettes with nuclear technology;)
I would hardly describe any point in the past as being a utopia. However, I understand what LeSwoosh means.
There was definately a time in which large businesses were very rare. Shipping concerns were the largest privately owned businesses, and corporations were quite rare and tied closely to the government (e.g. the East India Company)
So although the marketplace was smaller due to there being less trade and communication as there is today, virtually any individual could go into virtually any business easily and through dint of hard work, good prices and luck be just as successful as his competitors.
Nowadays though, while the market is larger, there are typically several large concerns which overshadow any market. Rather than accept the positive aspects of capitalism (you are likely to improve yourself by having someone to compete against; it's better for everyone in general to have competition all across the board) with the bad (if you can't actually have a better business than your competitor you're doomed; competition all across the board means for you too) the modern day corporation is usually anti-capitalist.
By this I mean that they do not wish for there to be a fair fight in the marketplace. They do not wish to risk their standing even if they will improve themselves. The number one goal of most modern corporations is to keep themselves at the forefront of their market, even if they don't deserve to be.
Basically capitalism works out well for everyone in the end, although any one business may find that its fortunes rise and fall drastically. Corporatism works out well for the large businesses on the top but poorly for everyone as a whole because things do not improve as well as they might have otherwise.
Note that in computing every advancement I can think of has come from research labs and academics unconcerned with making money, or from small startup companies and entrepreneurs. Large companies (outside of their pure research divisions - e.g. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) never come up with anything because it might disturb the status quo.
I guess the PS2 is nice and all, but I'm just really not all that excited.
At the moment I have a PSX. I don't use it much, and I typically like to save my money by only getting used CDs and selling them back when I'm done. (given as how I have a job these days, I can no longer beat most games within the span of a 5 day rental)
But honestly, I don't see that I'd be getting one of these until the price for the console drops to ~$100 and there's a large library of games and used games to choose from.
Call me boring, I guess. (heck - I didn't even get to fool with any console between 1988 - 1997 so I've never been all that wrapped up in it)
Well what bugs me is that many people who are ardent GIMP advocates (this is not a blanket statement against all, or even most GIMP advocates, mind you) have claimed that the GIMP can completely replace Photoshop when this is not currently true. I would like to see a strong competitor for Photoshop come along. But the GIMP isn't one yet, and it's ridiculous to claim that it is.
That's what I was complaining about. To draw a comparison, imagine my telling you that pico is easily as good (if not better) than emacs. While both are text editors (arguably) and both do that okay, emacs has a lot more stuff going for it which is so compelling to the twisted souls that use it that they would feel crippled if they gave it up. While a pico user might make this claim, any serious emacs user would recognize immediately that this is a silly argument which ignores the finer details of how the supposedly obselete program is used.
I wasn't laughing *at* the GIMP, though.
In some areas, the GIMP is definately Photoshop's equal (RGB 72ppi editing is its forte) and I'm more than willing to agree to that, but many graphics professionals frequently require more functions than are provided by the GIMP. Do you honestly believe that it's a practical solution to constantly reboot between GIMP on Linux and Photoshop on the Mac? (or Windows for the rare Windows-using graphic artist;) I don't, particularly given that Photoshop can match, more or less most of the nice things in the GIMP. The nice scripting that the GIMP has is probably one of the areas that it's superior in. Scripting though, is a small part of what I do and it's not impossible in Photoshop either. (though it's not amazing)
Printing, however, as one other poster noted, _is_ rocket science. There's a lot of fairly esoteric stuff you need to know to get started, much of which operates in an entirely different mindset than what you'd be used to with computers. There's a fair bit of voodoo, some math, chemistry and good old fashioned experience.
One interesting side note here - some of the posters who just muck around with color printing and who haven't done professional work in that field probably consider a generic HP color inkjet to be a valid output device. They've gotten a lot better, but at least at many of the places I've worked at we wanted higher quality stuff for our comps. (and it's a major strike against them that they're not postscript printers. who wants to bother with a RIP for comps? pita) My favorite two were the toy company that used a tektronix wax printer and the prepress division of a print house that had a very weird dupont dye-sublimation printer. color laser printers were also not uncommon, but I never liked them much. But I don't really know of anyplace that used an ink jet printer that didn't cost at least as much as a decent used car.
Black and white printouts were on a wide variety of laser printers though - as long as they had postscript and enough ram to not choke on a big file no one cared much. Just goes to show that color is tough;)
Anyway, I'm not saying that Linux or the GIMP are pointless, I'm just saying that they don't sufficiently provide the tools I need for my work right now. Therefore, while I'm the last person that's going to defend the Mac on a reliability basis (I *hate* the MacOS, I just like the UI and the software that runs on top of it - I *like* Unix, but I don't like the UI and it's missing a lot of the software that I need) I am still going to argue that for desktop uses like photo manipulation and dtp Linux is an unviable choice.
So to recap: *GIMP - not equal to Photoshop (yet) *Linux - not useful for many dtp needs; generalist approach of many graphic artists, designers, compositors, etc. requires virtually zero reboots just to switch programs *OSS - good idea, but not too many people involved in above fields can do anything other than complain about missing features due to lack of programming skills and lack of interest in switching professions
I am not a programmer. I am a user. (I like to think of myself as fairly technically literate, though)
But I would rather get work done with the best tool available to me than bang my head against a wall with one that's only half there. GIMP isn't even yet to the level where it's worth my time to play around with. There are lots of RGB bitmap editors - but I use the (currently) best one. Make GIMP better and I'm pretty likely to switch.
However, that likliness depends on a couple of other factors, too.
I do not need the headache of rebooting to switch from GIMP to Quark. I need a layout program that can read my existing PageMaker and Quark files. I understand that some work is being done on KIllustrator, but it too needs to be a total replacement for Illustrator. I need to move over my large collection of fonts without screwing them up. And I need the system to intelligently handle the fonts so that I don't have to reset every Mac/IBM generated file that comes my way.
And I don't have the ability to do that stuff for myself. While I've taken some programming classes in the past (Pascal a long time ago, C a few years ago) I am really not good at it. My strengths lie in the graphic arts.
You wouldn't consider moving to a setup where you have an IDE under Linux except for the linker, which required a reboot into Windows. A total solution is required _before_ the migration can seriously take place.
Then don't forget to factor in that most of my bretheren in my field are NOT as tech-friendly as I am. I know people who used a MicroPDP-11 for decades (until it exploded and the only people who could fix it were retired or dead) because they did not want the headache of learning stuff when they're already busy with their real job: getting stuff on paper. Computers are a means to an end for most of us. And if it only gets us partway there, it's just not going to get used.
Believe me, I'd love to see some competition for Adobe, and I'd love to see Quark (the company) crash and burn. I think that it's unhealthy for there to not be competition (back when there was no layer support in Photoshop, there was a competing product called Collage, which did stack stuff into layers - PShop quickly got layers, improving things for everyone but only because there was competition that forced them to do it). Sadly, the GIMP is not serious competition for most of us yet. When it is, I'll seriously look at it again.
Effects in Photoshop 5.5. are really nice compared to earlier versions. There's nothing _new_, but basically the idea is that you can apply certain effects (e.g. a drop shadow) to any layer, and then edit the particulars of the effect (like the angle of the drop shadow, or the color) at any time, and you can remove an effect and combine it with other effects just as easily.
Image slicing is useful for creating an image for a web page that's broken up into different parts of a table (handy if parts have rollover effects, are animated, etc) by drawing boxes over the regular image. It speeds things up, b/c you don't have to measure, crop, save as, undo crop, repeat
Adobe doesn't always add in great new features, but they are really good about improving things (I mean hey - Illustrator has the rulers on the correct sides of the window finally;)
Now hurry up and write a 'Do all my work for me, and do it in the background so I can play Quake' filter;) I'd pay $50 for one....
And don't forget a utility to properly convert and sanely manage the massive collection of postscript fonts that most prepress designers have acquired. Converting them to True Type isn't necessarily enough.
I still haven't gotten around to using it, but Adobe claims to have gotten a 99.44% accurate Quark -> Indesign file converter. That would be essential. I can't give up my files, and I sure can't remake all of the damn things. But I hate Quark (the company). They're just bastards.
well, it's been a while since i've taken a look at the gimp.
so i just poked around their site
annoying ass things: 1)72ppi is the only resolution. jobs for print output tend to be 300dpi+ (film is 1200dpi+ and that can be _way_ +). there's a workaround but what a pain in the ass for a common procedure. 2)still doesn't look like you can make cymk seperations from an image (unless you're a genius and can do it by hand in channels or are printing ultra-simplistic stuff)
seeing as how most of the important stuff for doing that reliably is patented (and the protections on pantone are pretty severe too) i really don't see any changes coming along in the near future.
Okay, now that that's out of my system, please allow me to explain about the GIMPs #1 and 2 shortcomings.
1. Color
There are two common ways in which we can create color. The first is Additive. This basically means that you are adding different types of light (that's what color is, after all) and you can eventually arrive at white by combining all colors. The three primary additive colors are Red, Green and Blue. Sunlight is additive, and so are computer monitors - they actually emit light.
The other method is subtractive. This means that instead of emitting, say, red light, you have an object which absorbs all light _except_ red. No light is created in this process. Instead, light is absorbed. If you combine the subtractive colors, you get black (ideally). Because of imperfections in the substances used to absorb color, it tends to get all muddy, and so the primary subtractive colors are Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black (which is denoted as K). (Cyan ~= Blue; Magenta ~= Red)
You'll surely have noticed that your color printer has either 4 ink cartridges/toners (CYMK) or 2 (CYM and K). NOT RGB. Besides, RGB can't create Black, so you'd need black paper and a whole lot more ink.
Clearly we haven't got paper yet that emits its own light. This means that while displayed pictures are additive, printed pictures are subtractive. A conversion has to be made between the two colorspaces (there are others, the most well-known being L*a*b). Furthermore, it is very important that the conversion process be highly accurate, and that the colors that are on screen closely match the color when it's printed (which ranges from impossible to really hard) so that you don't screw something up and only discover it when it's printed out.
Worse yet, the gamut of colors that we can see is bigger than the gamut of colors that can be generated by either one of these processes (try duplicating Day-Glo orange on your screen - it just won't ever look right, because that particular shade is out of your monitor's gamut)
At any rate, GIMP has absolutely no CYMK support at all. And since virtually all color printed material relies on CYMK, and accurate color matching and conversion, the GIMP is simply not going to make inroads. Why bother using the GIMP _and_ Photoshop, when you can just use Photoshop, and probably have better results to boot?
Plus, professionals in the printing world use a lot of esoteric hardware (you'd get a kick out of an imagesetter, i can tell) which all screw up ideal color in their own way, and need to communicate with your software to compensate for this. Scanners, monitors, printers - they all have to be calibrated carefully just depending local lighting conditions if nothing else. And there's always something else.
2. Pantones
The other common method is to use spot colors. You see, for each color you use, the price of printing it will go up - more ink will be needed, each color requires a seperate lithographic plate, more drying time may be needed, material may have to go through a press twice in order to get all of the colors (presses typically have 1-6 plates, so too many plates requires a 2nd pass all the way through again), more work has to be done to make the plates align properly so that colors don't look weird, etc.
One solution to this problem is to use spot colors. Say you want green and black. You could create green with C & Y, making it a 3 plate job (CYK), or you could just use a special green ink instead. Additionally, if there's a color that you can't reproduce with CYMK, or you want colors to be solid instead of halftoned (combining CYMK requires halftoning - the colors are not really overlapping solid regions, but lots of little dots side by side - you can see them with a magnifying glass), you might specify certain spot colors.
The Pantone system basically consists of *many* specific, standard inks. These inks have very specific colors, and behaviors, and you will want to know precisely which one you have. Most people in printing have a swatch book that can be used to compare colors, and Photoshop has a big Pantone color palette in it. But when someone wants you to print with Pantone 072 (a very commonplace blue) you have to be able to model it properly in the computer.
There's no Pantone support in GIMP either.
Besides all this, don't get me started on the finer, but essential details of printing (trapping, overprinting, having to manually adjust line screen angles - a giant pain in the ass if there ever was one) where there is a lot of support for Photoshop and the Mac, but not for GIMP or Linux.
Putting stuff on paper is hard. The GIMP might be good for web graphics, but it will not do the job if you need to deal with anyone else.
Sigh. GIMP is lacking functionality in a number of crucial areas. Without that, there's little chance that it's going to make a dent in Photoshop's market.
About the only thing that could make GIMP, as it stands, useful to me and most of the people I know that seriously use Photoshop, would be if you could invent a way of printing on paper with RGB inks. Good luck.
Well... the arrangement of data has a lot to do with how to use that data. If I go:
Name: | John Doe | Jane Doe ------+----------+--------- Age:| 23| 17
You know what I'm trying to accomplish. But a computer probably wouldn't.
I would guess that you'd need to tie into the handwriting recognition software some system whereby it can be told to attempt to format a certain set of data (which could be selected by drawing a box around it, or something *EXPLICIT* so it doesn't go off all the time) by some criteria that the user selects.
So I might scrawl that down, and then tell the computer to make a spreadsheet out of that by analyzing the location of the data, the lines that seperate it, etc.
The Newton had a lot of useful features that you'd want in this though - defered handwriting recognition (so that it didn't slow you down... you could store it as bitmaps or vectors and recognize it later), the ability sorely lacking in the palm to mix graphics and text, etc.
Using PostScript might not be the best idea in the world though - it can be pretty processor intensive. It takes a G3/G4 to have a fully prettified Aqua in MacOS X right now and it uses PDF, which is better in a lot of ways for display purposes than PS. Defaulting to vectors is probably the way to go, however.
You'd want to thoroughly explore alternative UI's though. A regular desktop GUI wouldn't cut it, and a CLI would be painful to use with a pen in a short amount of time. The Newt was good, better than the Palm or WinCE, but it could be a lot better, given how free-form your data might be.
Of course, as a designer, one of my main gripes is that while I can make interfaces for much stuff that's logical and consistant and not awfully hard to use (note that interfaces for anything that's really new are rarely easy because there's nothing for users to build upon) I don't often get the chance.
My superiors, who don't know a hell of a lot about design, override my reccomendations and very often tell me that I _have_ to put in stuff which will overcomplicate things.
The idea of a fast-loading page just doesn't get through to them, and they often dismiss other tools for no good reason (e.g. there is actually a time and a place for frames - not always, but sometimes they're the best way to do things).
Case in point: We want a javascript mouseover where, when you mouseover a link you see all the sublinks off of it, in a bulleted list. But the sublinks aren't supposed to work - they just appear there, thoroughly confusing the user.
God knows there are plenty of stupid people calling themselves designers, but even the good ones tend to get saddled with bosses that ignore design and just want pretty looking geegaws.
Not really. One of the things that it is felt that you are paying MS for when you get a copy of Word is that they will fix problems. (unfortunately they don't, and they are attempting to pass legislation which will absolve them of any legal responsibility to ship a working product)
With OSS you can get it for free, and while other people are likely to have the same problem you do, causing them to fix it, this is not at all a given. OSS relies on a distributed effort taking place to fix bugs and add features. If you alone have a bug, it is no one's problem but your own. Many other people are likely to fix it b/c they don't want any bugs, but if you absolutely want someone else to fix the problem, be prepared to pay $ for it.
No, no, no. The Mac game Bolo has nothing to do with the Apple II game Bolo, except that both involve tanks.
In the Apple II version, you've got a tank inside a very large maze. You could control both how hard the level was, as well as the density of walls within the maze (so you could go full speed at density 1, but very slowly and carefully at density 9). You died if you touched the walls.
Inside the maze were 6 bases, which looked like a square with a hollow center, and a dot in the center. The bases generated alien tanks (usually V shapes) periodically. While killing an alien tank got you (1 x the level) points, shooting through the wall of a base (takes a little while, and they regenerate too) to shoot the dot blew it up and was good for (100 x the level) points.
One thing exploding could spark an explosion in other things (like shooting an alien tank at the right time could blow up the base) but they could shoot and ram at you, and one shot killed. Touching the walls also killed you.
What was really tricky, was that you could rotate your turret independently of the tank, but there was no way to know which way the tank was pointing, and the controls were set up so that you really needed to know that.
On the higher levels, the game logic just became ruthless. The alien tanks shot a lot, and usually were right on target. Then they might just ram you. You had basically no chance on level 5 or above - they would immediately hunt you down, moving at top speed, and shoot or ram you. All you could do was run like hell.
I'd love to see something like Bolo crossed with Spectre... or even just a straight port of Bolo so that I don't have to dick around with an Apple IIe emulator.
Many moons ago, there were a whole bunch of interesting computers that had absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel.
Texas Instruments (they make a lot of chips and calculators) had a few personal computers in the 70's and 80's and one of the more popular was the TI-99/4a (which was not as popular as the stuff from Apple or Commodore... or Tandy... really, but was hardly unknown either)
It was also designed really weirdly (a 16bit chip with no registers to speak of and most ram only accessible through the video processor) and could be slow (the basic for the machine was slow 'cos it was interpreted twice)
Anywho, Parsec was one of those side-scrolling games where you fly a little ship and shoot at the aliens.
Personally, my favorite computer game of all time (aside from Lightspeed, a flight simulator that ran on an SGI Onyx) was Bolo for the Apple II. God help you if you tried to play on level 5 or above. You could at least have fun on level 9/density 9 by attempting to run away from the enemies. For about 15 seconds;)
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Ah, but you forget about the power of TRON, my son.
(actually, TRON doesn't count; the movie was written before the video games, but the games were done before the movie was - that's why the grid bugs play a mildly significant role in the game, and appear for 1.3 seconds in the movie...)
Well, they only make money because it is assumed that music will be pirated from them (which doesn't make much sense if you're an independent musician who wants to copy his own music and has nothing to do with the RIAA)
Well if I'm paying for something, why can't that constitute a transaction giving me free license to copy stuff - it's not my fault that the RIAA tax is set very low.
Obviously I know that that doesn't hold much water, but I'd rather not have the tarriff at all than have a sufficiently large tarriff to repay them (and I somehow doubt that their figures are being independently appraised) and still violate perfectly honest uses of media.
I mean, at least NSI was utterly inconsistant with their conflict resolution policy. They weren't totally in the pockets of greedy octopus-like corporations. NSI just screwed everyone ;)
Who would have ever thought that one day we'd be cursing the name 'Dyson'?
While I don't like Clinton, bear in mind that virtually no powerful politician or bureaucrat is any better.
(of course, the most recent bunch of Presidents whom I hold any respect for were Hayes and Cleveland, neither of whom were perfect, and to a lesser extent Teddy Roosevelt and Truman. This has been a crappy century for having good politicians)
???
American Revolution - 1776
French Revolution - 1789
A lot the US political party system rose out of clubs that either supported or opposed the French Revolution however. Wish it hadn't. Before, they tended to duel each other, a la Hamilton vs. Burr. Seems to me that that would end up being a lot more fun for the rest of us
(Gore vs. Bush - Fight!)
On the contrary - I think that it's essential to worry about it. Someone with some degree of power thinks that it would be a good idea. He's not likely to give up on the subject any time soon. Even if the proposal was written with no actual malice it's dangerous that someone would even consider it acceptable. Such a person is a loose cannon who could attack our liberties just because he doesn't deeply care about preserving them.
The government serves the people - it must always work only to preserve our freedoms, even at its' own expense. That's the point. It is very sad that people would forget this, and it has the potential for tragedy.
It's too bad that those guys have forgotten where it is that a road paved with good intentions leads to.
I'm also no expert, but I suspect that this could be bad when a machine claimed to disable the services that permit it to backtrack packets but actually didn't. Maybe we should see what the cocaine auction protocol guys have to say ;)
Well #1 is nature as it regards the Earth. And I don't really enjoy having Skylab fall out of orbit either, although there are suprisingly few satellites that are likely to make it through the atmosphere, so it's not a *huge* deal.
But #2 has nothing to do with nature - only people who want to exploit space find it to be a problem. Please don't go claiming that congested orbits are pollution or anti-environmental or something.
I hate to break it to you, but there's nothing particularly nice about Nature outside of the Earth. Please don't say that you're worried about harming the environment on Venus or something. That's just ridiculous.
Now, now. There is IIRC a story about Oppenhimer which seems relevant here. Apparently during the early nuclear tests (probably the first - Trinity), just before the bomb went off, he espied a small parabolic reflector sitting around.
;)
He positioned it so that it faced the bomb, placed the end of a cigarette at the focus and retreated to the shelter.
After the bomb was detonated, he came out and picked up the now-lit cigarette.
So it's kind of apocryphal, and impractical, but you too can light cigarettes with nuclear technology
I would hardly describe any point in the past as being a utopia. However, I understand what LeSwoosh means.
;)
There was definately a time in which large businesses were very rare. Shipping concerns were the largest privately owned businesses, and corporations were quite rare and tied closely to the government (e.g. the East India Company)
So although the marketplace was smaller due to there being less trade and communication as there is today, virtually any individual could go into virtually any business easily and through dint of hard work, good prices and luck be just as successful as his competitors.
Nowadays though, while the market is larger, there are typically several large concerns which overshadow any market. Rather than accept the positive aspects of capitalism (you are likely to improve yourself by having someone to compete against; it's better for everyone in general to have competition all across the board) with the bad (if you can't actually have a better business than your competitor you're doomed; competition all across the board means for you too) the modern day corporation is usually anti-capitalist.
By this I mean that they do not wish for there to be a fair fight in the marketplace. They do not wish to risk their standing even if they will improve themselves. The number one goal of most modern corporations is to keep themselves at the forefront of their market, even if they don't deserve to be.
Basically capitalism works out well for everyone in the end, although any one business may find that its fortunes rise and fall drastically. Corporatism works out well for the large businesses on the top but poorly for everyone as a whole because things do not improve as well as they might have otherwise.
Note that in computing every advancement I can think of has come from research labs and academics unconcerned with making money, or from small startup companies and entrepreneurs. Large companies (outside of their pure research divisions - e.g. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) never come up with anything because it might disturb the status quo.
(support the silver standard
I guess the PS2 is nice and all, but I'm just really not all that excited.
At the moment I have a PSX. I don't use it much, and I typically like to save my money by only getting used CDs and selling them back when I'm done. (given as how I have a job these days, I can no longer beat most games within the span of a 5 day rental)
But honestly, I don't see that I'd be getting one of these until the price for the console drops to ~$100 and there's a large library of games and used games to choose from.
Call me boring, I guess. (heck - I didn't even get to fool with any console between 1988 - 1997 so I've never been all that wrapped up in it)
Well what bugs me is that many people who are ardent GIMP advocates (this is not a blanket statement against all, or even most GIMP advocates, mind you) have claimed that the GIMP can completely replace Photoshop when this is not currently true. I would like to see a strong competitor for Photoshop come along. But the GIMP isn't one yet, and it's ridiculous to claim that it is.
;) I don't, particularly given that Photoshop can match, more or less most of the nice things in the GIMP. The nice scripting that the GIMP has is probably one of the areas that it's superior in. Scripting though, is a small part of what I do and it's not impossible in Photoshop either. (though it's not amazing)
;)
That's what I was complaining about. To draw a comparison, imagine my telling you that pico is easily as good (if not better) than emacs. While both are text editors (arguably) and both do that okay, emacs has a lot more stuff going for it which is so compelling to the twisted souls that use it that they would feel crippled if they gave it up. While a pico user might make this claim, any serious emacs user would recognize immediately that this is a silly argument which ignores the finer details of how the supposedly obselete program is used.
I wasn't laughing *at* the GIMP, though.
In some areas, the GIMP is definately Photoshop's equal (RGB 72ppi editing is its forte) and I'm more than willing to agree to that, but many graphics professionals frequently require more functions than are provided by the GIMP. Do you honestly believe that it's a practical solution to constantly reboot between GIMP on Linux and Photoshop on the Mac? (or Windows for the rare Windows-using graphic artist
Printing, however, as one other poster noted, _is_ rocket science. There's a lot of fairly esoteric stuff you need to know to get started, much of which operates in an entirely different mindset than what you'd be used to with computers. There's a fair bit of voodoo, some math, chemistry and good old fashioned experience.
One interesting side note here - some of the posters who just muck around with color printing and who haven't done professional work in that field probably consider a generic HP color inkjet to be a valid output device. They've gotten a lot better, but at least at many of the places I've worked at we wanted higher quality stuff for our comps. (and it's a major strike against them that they're not postscript printers. who wants to bother with a RIP for comps? pita) My favorite two were the toy company that used a tektronix wax printer and the prepress division of a print house that had a very weird dupont dye-sublimation printer. color laser printers were also not uncommon, but I never liked them much. But I don't really know of anyplace that used an ink jet printer that didn't cost at least as much as a decent used car.
Black and white printouts were on a wide variety of laser printers though - as long as they had postscript and enough ram to not choke on a big file no one cared much. Just goes to show that color is tough
Anyway, I'm not saying that Linux or the GIMP are pointless, I'm just saying that they don't sufficiently provide the tools I need for my work right now. Therefore, while I'm the last person that's going to defend the Mac on a reliability basis (I *hate* the MacOS, I just like the UI and the software that runs on top of it - I *like* Unix, but I don't like the UI and it's missing a lot of the software that I need) I am still going to argue that for desktop uses like photo manipulation and dtp Linux is an unviable choice.
So to recap:
*GIMP - not equal to Photoshop (yet)
*Linux - not useful for many dtp needs; generalist approach of many graphic artists, designers, compositors, etc. requires virtually zero reboots just to switch programs
*OSS - good idea, but not too many people involved in above fields can do anything other than complain about missing features due to lack of programming skills and lack of interest in switching professions
I am not a programmer. I am a user. (I like to think of myself as fairly technically literate, though)
But I would rather get work done with the best tool available to me than bang my head against a wall with one that's only half there. GIMP isn't even yet to the level where it's worth my time to play around with. There are lots of RGB bitmap editors - but I use the (currently) best one. Make GIMP better and I'm pretty likely to switch.
However, that likliness depends on a couple of other factors, too.
I do not need the headache of rebooting to switch from GIMP to Quark. I need a layout program that can read my existing PageMaker and Quark files. I understand that some work is being done on KIllustrator, but it too needs to be a total replacement for Illustrator. I need to move over my large collection of fonts without screwing them up. And I need the system to intelligently handle the fonts so that I don't have to reset every Mac/IBM generated file that comes my way.
And I don't have the ability to do that stuff for myself. While I've taken some programming classes in the past (Pascal a long time ago, C a few years ago) I am really not good at it. My strengths lie in the graphic arts.
You wouldn't consider moving to a setup where you have an IDE under Linux except for the linker, which required a reboot into Windows. A total solution is required _before_ the migration can seriously take place.
Then don't forget to factor in that most of my bretheren in my field are NOT as tech-friendly as I am. I know people who used a MicroPDP-11 for decades (until it exploded and the only people who could fix it were retired or dead) because they did not want the headache of learning stuff when they're already busy with their real job: getting stuff on paper. Computers are a means to an end for most of us. And if it only gets us partway there, it's just not going to get used.
Believe me, I'd love to see some competition for Adobe, and I'd love to see Quark (the company) crash and burn. I think that it's unhealthy for there to not be competition (back when there was no layer support in Photoshop, there was a competing product called Collage, which did stack stuff into layers - PShop quickly got layers, improving things for everyone but only because there was competition that forced them to do it). Sadly, the GIMP is not serious competition for most of us yet. When it is, I'll seriously look at it again.
Effects in Photoshop 5.5. are really nice compared to earlier versions. There's nothing _new_, but basically the idea is that you can apply certain effects (e.g. a drop shadow) to any layer, and then edit the particulars of the effect (like the angle of the drop shadow, or the color) at any time, and you can remove an effect and combine it with other effects just as easily.
;)
;) I'd pay $50 for one....
Image slicing is useful for creating an image for a web page that's broken up into different parts of a table (handy if parts have rollover effects, are animated, etc) by drawing boxes over the regular image. It speeds things up, b/c you don't have to measure, crop, save as, undo crop, repeat
Adobe doesn't always add in great new features, but they are really good about improving things (I mean hey - Illustrator has the rulers on the correct sides of the window finally
Now hurry up and write a 'Do all my work for me, and do it in the background so I can play Quake' filter
And don't forget a utility to properly convert and sanely manage the massive collection of postscript fonts that most prepress designers have acquired. Converting them to True Type isn't necessarily enough.
I still haven't gotten around to using it, but Adobe claims to have gotten a 99.44% accurate Quark -> Indesign file converter. That would be essential. I can't give up my files, and I sure can't remake all of the damn things. But I hate Quark (the company). They're just bastards.
well, it's been a while since i've taken a look at the gimp.
so i just poked around their site
annoying ass things:
1)72ppi is the only resolution. jobs for print output tend to be 300dpi+ (film is 1200dpi+ and that can be _way_ +). there's a workaround but what a pain in the ass for a common procedure.
2)still doesn't look like you can make cymk seperations from an image (unless you're a genius and can do it by hand in channels or are printing ultra-simplistic stuff)
seeing as how most of the important stuff for doing that reliably is patented (and the protections on pantone are pretty severe too) i really don't see any changes coming along in the near future.
Excuse me for just a moment.
Bwa ha ha ha ha
Okay, now that that's out of my system, please allow me to explain about the GIMPs #1 and 2 shortcomings.
1. Color
There are two common ways in which we can create color. The first is Additive. This basically means that you are adding different types of light (that's what color is, after all) and you can eventually arrive at white by combining all colors. The three primary additive colors are Red, Green and Blue. Sunlight is additive, and so are computer monitors - they actually emit light.
The other method is subtractive. This means that instead of emitting, say, red light, you have an object which absorbs all light _except_ red. No light is created in this process. Instead, light is absorbed. If you combine the subtractive colors, you get black (ideally). Because of imperfections in the substances used to absorb color, it tends to get all muddy, and so the primary subtractive colors are Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black (which is denoted as K). (Cyan ~= Blue; Magenta ~= Red)
You'll surely have noticed that your color printer has either 4 ink cartridges/toners (CYMK) or 2 (CYM and K). NOT RGB. Besides, RGB can't create Black, so you'd need black paper and a whole lot more ink.
Clearly we haven't got paper yet that emits its own light. This means that while displayed pictures are additive, printed pictures are subtractive. A conversion has to be made between the two colorspaces (there are others, the most well-known being L*a*b). Furthermore, it is very important that the conversion process be highly accurate, and that the colors that are on screen closely match the color when it's printed (which ranges from impossible to really hard) so that you don't screw something up and only discover it when it's printed out.
Worse yet, the gamut of colors that we can see is bigger than the gamut of colors that can be generated by either one of these processes (try duplicating Day-Glo orange on your screen - it just won't ever look right, because that particular shade is out of your monitor's gamut)
At any rate, GIMP has absolutely no CYMK support at all. And since virtually all color printed material relies on CYMK, and accurate color matching and conversion, the GIMP is simply not going to make inroads. Why bother using the GIMP _and_ Photoshop, when you can just use Photoshop, and probably have better results to boot?
Plus, professionals in the printing world use a lot of esoteric hardware (you'd get a kick out of an imagesetter, i can tell) which all screw up ideal color in their own way, and need to communicate with your software to compensate for this. Scanners, monitors, printers - they all have to be calibrated carefully just depending local lighting conditions if nothing else. And there's always something else.
2. Pantones
The other common method is to use spot colors. You see, for each color you use, the price of printing it will go up - more ink will be needed, each color requires a seperate lithographic plate, more drying time may be needed, material may have to go through a press twice in order to get all of the colors (presses typically have 1-6 plates, so too many plates requires a 2nd pass all the way through again), more work has to be done to make the plates align properly so that colors don't look weird, etc.
One solution to this problem is to use spot colors. Say you want green and black. You could create green with C & Y, making it a 3 plate job (CYK), or you could just use a special green ink instead. Additionally, if there's a color that you can't reproduce with CYMK, or you want colors to be solid instead of halftoned (combining CYMK requires halftoning - the colors are not really overlapping solid regions, but lots of little dots side by side - you can see them with a magnifying glass), you might specify certain spot colors.
The Pantone system basically consists of *many* specific, standard inks. These inks have very specific colors, and behaviors, and you will want to know precisely which one you have. Most people in printing have a swatch book that can be used to compare colors, and Photoshop has a big Pantone color palette in it. But when someone wants you to print with Pantone 072 (a very commonplace blue) you have to be able to model it properly in the computer.
There's no Pantone support in GIMP either.
Besides all this, don't get me started on the finer, but essential details of printing (trapping, overprinting, having to manually adjust line screen angles - a giant pain in the ass if there ever was one) where there is a lot of support for Photoshop and the Mac, but not for GIMP or Linux.
Putting stuff on paper is hard. The GIMP might be good for web graphics, but it will not do the job if you need to deal with anyone else.
Sigh. GIMP is lacking functionality in a number of crucial areas. Without that, there's little chance that it's going to make a dent in Photoshop's market.
About the only thing that could make GIMP, as it stands, useful to me and most of the people I know that seriously use Photoshop, would be if you could invent a way of printing on paper with RGB inks. Good luck.
Name: | John Doe | Jane Doe
------+----------+---------
Age:| 23| 17
You know what I'm trying to accomplish. But a computer probably wouldn't.
I would guess that you'd need to tie into the handwriting recognition software some system whereby it can be told to attempt to format a certain set of data (which could be selected by drawing a box around it, or something *EXPLICIT* so it doesn't go off all the time) by some criteria that the user selects.
So I might scrawl that down, and then tell the computer to make a spreadsheet out of that by analyzing the location of the data, the lines that seperate it, etc.
The Newton had a lot of useful features that you'd want in this though - defered handwriting recognition (so that it didn't slow you down... you could store it as bitmaps or vectors and recognize it later), the ability sorely lacking in the palm to mix graphics and text, etc.
Using PostScript might not be the best idea in the world though - it can be pretty processor intensive. It takes a G3/G4 to have a fully prettified Aqua in MacOS X right now and it uses PDF, which is better in a lot of ways for display purposes than PS. Defaulting to vectors is probably the way to go, however.
You'd want to thoroughly explore alternative UI's though. A regular desktop GUI wouldn't cut it, and a CLI would be painful to use with a pen in a short amount of time. The Newt was good, better than the Palm or WinCE, but it could be a lot better, given how free-form your data might be.
Of course, as a designer, one of my main gripes is that while I can make interfaces for much stuff that's logical and consistant and not awfully hard to use (note that interfaces for anything that's really new are rarely easy because there's nothing for users to build upon) I don't often get the chance.
My superiors, who don't know a hell of a lot about design, override my reccomendations and very often tell me that I _have_ to put in stuff which will overcomplicate things.
The idea of a fast-loading page just doesn't get through to them, and they often dismiss other tools for no good reason (e.g. there is actually a time and a place for frames - not always, but sometimes they're the best way to do things).
Case in point:
We want a javascript mouseover where, when you mouseover a link you see all the sublinks off of it, in a bulleted list. But the sublinks aren't supposed to work - they just appear there, thoroughly confusing the user.
God knows there are plenty of stupid people calling themselves designers, but even the good ones tend to get saddled with bosses that ignore design and just want pretty looking geegaws.
Not really. One of the things that it is felt that you are paying MS for when you get a copy of Word is that they will fix problems. (unfortunately they don't, and they are attempting to pass legislation which will absolve them of any legal responsibility to ship a working product)
With OSS you can get it for free, and while other people are likely to have the same problem you do, causing them to fix it, this is not at all a given. OSS relies on a distributed effort taking place to fix bugs and add features. If you alone have a bug, it is no one's problem but your own. Many other people are likely to fix it b/c they don't want any bugs, but if you absolutely want someone else to fix the problem, be prepared to pay $ for it.
TANSTAAFL
No, no, no. The Mac game Bolo has nothing to do with the Apple II game Bolo, except that both involve tanks.
In the Apple II version, you've got a tank inside a very large maze. You could control both how hard the level was, as well as the density of walls within the maze (so you could go full speed at density 1, but very slowly and carefully at density 9). You died if you touched the walls.
Inside the maze were 6 bases, which looked like a square with a hollow center, and a dot in the center. The bases generated alien tanks (usually V shapes) periodically. While killing an alien tank got you (1 x the level) points, shooting through the wall of a base (takes a little while, and they regenerate too) to shoot the dot blew it up and was good for (100 x the level) points.
One thing exploding could spark an explosion in other things (like shooting an alien tank at the right time could blow up the base) but they could shoot and ram at you, and one shot killed. Touching the walls also killed you.
What was really tricky, was that you could rotate your turret independently of the tank, but there was no way to know which way the tank was pointing, and the controls were set up so that you really needed to know that.
On the higher levels, the game logic just became ruthless. The alien tanks shot a lot, and usually were right on target. Then they might just ram you. You had basically no chance on level 5 or above - they would immediately hunt you down, moving at top speed, and shoot or ram you. All you could do was run like hell.
I'd love to see something like Bolo crossed with Spectre... or even just a straight port of Bolo so that I don't have to dick around with an Apple IIe emulator.
Many moons ago, there were a whole bunch of interesting computers that had absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel.
;)
Texas Instruments (they make a lot of chips and calculators) had a few personal computers in the 70's and 80's and one of the more popular was the TI-99/4a (which was not as popular as the stuff from Apple or Commodore... or Tandy... really, but was hardly unknown either)
It was also designed really weirdly (a 16bit chip with no registers to speak of and most ram only accessible through the video processor) and could be slow (the basic for the machine was slow 'cos it was interpreted twice)
Anywho, Parsec was one of those side-scrolling games where you fly a little ship and shoot at the aliens.
Personally, my favorite computer game of all time (aside from Lightspeed, a flight simulator that ran on an SGI Onyx) was Bolo for the Apple II. God help you if you tried to play on level 5 or above. You could at least have fun on level 9/density 9 by attempting to run away from the enemies. For about 15 seconds