Try Krita. Based on Qt, with all those new hyped features of GIMP (like 16bit channels) available since long time.
Been there, tried it, gave up because it was too immature. Far from having a sane UI, it had crazily mis-designed keyboard shortcuts (loads of cases where multiple tasks were assigned to the same key, even though there were plenty of keys available with no tasks assigned to them at all). Okay, no big deal, you might say: it has a handy interface for configuring your keyboard shortcuts however you like! Yeah, except that it doesn't save your settings. Close Krita, open it again, and it's back to the defaults across the board!
I did eventually manage to get it to use sane keyboard shortcuts by editing them in the source code and recompiling from scratch, but then I ran into some other irritation and gave up on the whole thing. Maybe in a year or two it'll have matured enough to be usable.
My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC.
Except that Photoshop on the Mac actually works well, whereas GIMP's multi-window interface is a royal PITA, with the windows constantly getting hidden behind one another and all jumbled up with other applications. If you comment on this you either get told that it's your window manager's fault (huh? how come every single other program I use works fine, then?), or that it's your fault for not devoting an entire separate virtual desktop to GIMP. (Thanks, but I kind of like to set up my work environment to suit me, not to work round UI deficiencies in the programs I use...)
It helps that OS X and Linux provide convenient facilities for window sizing: OS X's equivalent of "maximise" actually just makes the window the right size for its content, while Linux has a concept of "maximise vertically" that is ideal for widescreen use.
Windows, of course, has none of that; despite its name, the facilities it provides for managing windows are unbelievably primitive by comparison.
I don't know about Britain, but unfortunately Norway won't work out like you're hoping: while their technical committee has protested loudly and demanded that the decision be reversed, the technical committee is distinct from the standards body, and the standards body has sold its soul to Uncle Bill. That's kind of why it ignored the overwhelming technical opposition and voted to approve OOXML in the first place...
If you paid people more, maybe you'd have more people of the first type, no?
Does high pay get you better people? The evidence is doubtful at best. CEOs are paid more in a year than most of their employees will make in their entire working lives, but if you look at their performance records, you'll find they have exactly the same distribution: a handful of really good people who are genuinely worth paying a fortune to retain, plus a whole load of incompetent buffoons who manage -- at best -- to avoid actually destroying the companies they helm.
There's a saying: "If you don't pay peanuts, you get expensive monkeys."
How lucky we are that Nanny knows best, and won't let us risk damaging ourselves by giving us optional access to a useful feature that we have been enjoying for many years!
The very fact that you think "introvert" is somehow a negative word indicates the depth of the problem. It's a natural personality type, not a mental disorder. Saying that you want a more positive word than "introvert" is like saying that you want a more positive word than "woman".
I've tried using windows as something other than administrator, but 80% of programs coded for windows fail to understand how to manage this.
Which is why Vista goes to great lengths to fix this, and generally does a pretty good job.
Everything wants you to input the admin password, you can't even check the calendar !
You can on Vista.
And where is the "sudo" equivalent ?
Mixture of "Run As" and UAC.
Saying that not running as administrator will solve all your windows security problems is moronic.
Saying that it won't solve any problems is also moronic.
(I can't claim to be a great fan of Vista - it still has a long way to go before it will be as power-user-friendly as Linux or OS X - but it's a damn sight better than any previous version of Windows. Most of the things people complain about are PEBKAC issues; the only valid complaint I've seen is performance, and that's pretty much a non-issue on modern hardware.)
I would guess that you are a Sun OS fanboy, as it's the only one I can think of that doesn't have anti-virus for it. I'm probably wrong, and that one sucks as well.
Yup -- there are Solaris versions of F-PROT, Norton, and Sophos, to name but three. And no, these products aren't all just server programs for scanning passing email as Facetious might think... at least one of those (F-PROT) is advertised as being designed to protect Solaris workstations against viruses.
Wonder what OS doesn't have an anti-virus for it?
CTSS?:)
Re:Designate Windows OS as Terrorist Tool
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New Botnet Dwarfs Storm
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I could send you a bash script that says
rm -rf ~
and tell you "double click this for free porn!"
How is an OS supposed to stop that?
Go on, try it. You send me that script, and I promise I will double-click on it.
Nothing will happen; the OS will stop it. How? By the trivial means of not allowing downloaded files to be executed unless I explicitly edit their permissions to turn on the execute bit.
Yes, this really would help. Mere double-clicking can be done reflexively. But more complex instructions like "save this to your filesystem, then open a terminal window and type 'chmod +x free_porn.sh', and then double-click it for free porn!" gives your victim just that little bit longer to realise that they're being conned. Is it 100% secure? No, of course it isn't. Is it more secure than an OS that will blindly execute anything that has a filename ending.exe,.bat,.cmd, or any of half a dozen other extensions? You bet.
Games are supposed to be set in an alternative reality
They are? Is that a law or something? And all these games that claim to be hyper-realistic representations of genuine historical events, are those all really supposed to be in an alternative reality too? Damn, I really should read the fine print a bit better next time.
For example if you have a TV, rather than just having the TV displaying some image loop, it could display ads. Wouldn't be that different from a real TV.
You poor suffering American. In Britain you can watch TV all day and never see a single commercial...
Yes, using real-world ads and real-world products placed realistically would be, well, realistic, and would therefore make games more immersive. But that is very unlikely to happen.
See, in a real-life city, you have ads for Pepsi and Coke, for McDonald's and Burger King, etc. But in a game, the first company to get in will insist that the ads are exclusively for their own product; that every burger bar in the entire city be a McDonald's, that every single drinks dispenser in the entire game world dispense only Coca-Cola.
For the record, it looks awful in Konqueror as well.
Since when does the Slashdot-crowd support websites designing for specific browsers instead of writing standard-compliant code that is compatible with any sane browser? That it renders OK in Firefox is a lame excuse...
For the record, it looks identical in Konqueror to the way it looks in Firefox.
the Windows Guy could retaliate in one of those commercials.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Windows PCs (including pretty much every laptop ever made) also use these "inferior" screens, and nobody's tried to sue Dell yet.
The fact is that most people can't tell the difference, and aren't interested in paying four times as much to get a product that isn't noticably better unless you make your living working with colour.
When a competitor arrives, and it's compatible with all the Windows games so far, there won't be any incentive to buy the extra-expensive operating system. Why pay when you can have something better, for free?
Games? Games are irrelevant. Observe that not even DirectX 10 has made Vista take off overnight, while XP has (eventually) become wildly popular despite not running all kinds of older games that worked fine in Windows 98.
It's business that has given Windows its monopoly, and business is a much tougher proposition than the home user. The WINE developers can easily test home applications, but they can't so easily test all the hidden in-house monstrosities and "enterprise" nightmares that actually drive the world's economy, so even if WINE ran every consumer application perfectly, most large companies would still find it inadequate for their needs. Yeah, they could pay for WINE developers to fix the problems. Or they could just carry on buying Windows, which is written into their budgets, preauthorised, and guaranteed not to get anyone fired. Hmm, I wonder which they'll choose?
Don't get me wrong here; there's nothing I'd like more than to see a competitive market where the choice between Windows, OS X, Linux, and hopefully other platforms as well, was completely open, with all the standardisation, price cuts, and innovation that situation would imply. I really wish you were right. I just can't make myself believe it...
their Windows monopoly is crumbling down, thanks to the Vista fluke.
Sadly it isn't. The Windows monopoly would be crumbling if people were looking at Vista and choosing Linux or OS X instead. Unfortunately, people are looking at Vista and choosing XP instead, which - in case you hadn't noticed - is also Windows.
Well, yeah, but you could do that in C++ too: just use a vector class whose implementation used SSE primitives behind the scenes.
If what you were insinuating was true, then Python would be being used in preference to low-level languages for high-performance computing, but that doesn't actually happen, because in real life the low-level languages are still vastly faster.
(At this point the Python fanboys typically trot out the example of Google. Totally irrelevant; the kind of stuff Google does is going to be I/O-bound, so computational performance is of little importance.)
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a "protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor; and when was the last time you used one?"
It's an unlikely edge case thought up purely to try and make C++ sound overly complicated; and to the best of my knowledge I've never used one, because you don't need to use such things to write good, clean, efficient, and maintainable C++.
The fact that it's possible to write overly complicated code in C++ does not make C++ overly complicated. I could write incomprehensible spaghetti in (insert your language of choice) too, but unless that language is INTERCAL then it's highly unlikely that that would be the language's fault.
Although, again... PowerPC is the single largest embedded chip.
What's your source for this claim? I can't easily find any recent figures online, but from what I've seen I'd be very surprised if PowerPC is more popular than e.g. ARM. (Even the iPhone runs on ARM!)
Killing XP off finally, [...] will really hurt Microsoft. Since people hate Vista so much, they'll start being more open to other options.
A few years ago, weren't people saying things like "Killing Win98 off finally will really hurt Microsoft. Since people hate XP so much, they'll start being more open to other options"?
People hated XP. It was a resource hog, particularly the way it ate up memory just to display an ugly "fancy" theme. It didn't run all their programs. It didn't have enough drivers...
Which is why it never caught on, and 2003 was the year of Linux on the desktop.
May I make a modest prediction? A little down the line, people will be saying exactly the same thing about the move from Vista to whatever Microsoft end up calling the next version of Windows after that. "Waah, why can't I have good old Vista on my laptop? It's so much better than this new crap that's slow and doesn't have any drivers!"
(And I'm typing this on my Mac, so don't go mistaking me for an MS fanboy.)
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I did eventually manage to get it to use sane keyboard shortcuts by editing them in the source code and recompiling from scratch, but then I ran into some other irritation and gave up on the whole thing. Maybe in a year or two it'll have matured enough to be usable.
(I'm no GIMP fan. It's extremely frustrating to use in many ways. But that doesn't mean that every criticism of it is valid...)
It helps that OS X and Linux provide convenient facilities for window sizing: OS X's equivalent of "maximise" actually just makes the window the right size for its content, while Linux has a concept of "maximise vertically" that is ideal for widescreen use.
Windows, of course, has none of that; despite its name, the facilities it provides for managing windows are unbelievably primitive by comparison.
I don't know about Britain, but unfortunately Norway won't work out like you're hoping: while their technical committee has protested loudly and demanded that the decision be reversed, the technical committee is distinct from the standards body, and the standards body has sold its soul to Uncle Bill. That's kind of why it ignored the overwhelming technical opposition and voted to approve OOXML in the first place...
There's a saying: "If you don't pay peanuts, you get expensive monkeys."
I'm pretty sure the distribution of programming ability follows a power law, not a Gaussian distribution... ;)
How lucky we are that Nanny knows best, and won't let us risk damaging ourselves by giving us optional access to a useful feature that we have been enjoying for many years!
The very fact that you think "introvert" is somehow a negative word indicates the depth of the problem. It's a natural personality type, not a mental disorder. Saying that you want a more positive word than "introvert" is like saying that you want a more positive word than "woman".
(I can't claim to be a great fan of Vista - it still has a long way to go before it will be as power-user-friendly as Linux or OS X - but it's a damn sight better than any previous version of Windows. Most of the things people complain about are PEBKAC issues; the only valid complaint I've seen is performance, and that's pretty much a non-issue on modern hardware.)
Nothing will happen; the OS will stop it. How? By the trivial means of not allowing downloaded files to be executed unless I explicitly edit their permissions to turn on the execute bit.
Yes, this really would help. Mere double-clicking can be done reflexively. But more complex instructions like "save this to your filesystem, then open a terminal window and type 'chmod +x free_porn.sh', and then double-click it for free porn!" gives your victim just that little bit longer to realise that they're being conned. Is it 100% secure? No, of course it isn't. Is it more secure than an OS that will blindly execute anything that has a filename ending
Yes, using real-world ads and real-world products placed realistically would be, well, realistic, and would therefore make games more immersive. But that is very unlikely to happen.
See, in a real-life city, you have ads for Pepsi and Coke, for McDonald's and Burger King, etc. But in a game, the first company to get in will insist that the ads are exclusively for their own product; that every burger bar in the entire city be a McDonald's, that every single drinks dispenser in the entire game world dispense only Coca-Cola.
That's not realistic or unobtrusive at all.
Just thought you might like to know.
The fact is that most people can't tell the difference, and aren't interested in paying four times as much to get a product that isn't noticably better unless you make your living working with colour.
This is a storm in a teacup.
It's business that has given Windows its monopoly, and business is a much tougher proposition than the home user. The WINE developers can easily test home applications, but they can't so easily test all the hidden in-house monstrosities and "enterprise" nightmares that actually drive the world's economy, so even if WINE ran every consumer application perfectly, most large companies would still find it inadequate for their needs. Yeah, they could pay for WINE developers to fix the problems. Or they could just carry on buying Windows, which is written into their budgets, preauthorised, and guaranteed not to get anyone fired. Hmm, I wonder which they'll choose?
Don't get me wrong here; there's nothing I'd like more than to see a competitive market where the choice between Windows, OS X, Linux, and hopefully other platforms as well, was completely open, with all the standardisation, price cuts, and innovation that situation would imply. I really wish you were right. I just can't make myself believe it...
Well, yeah, but you could do that in C++ too: just use a vector class whose implementation used SSE primitives behind the scenes.
If what you were insinuating was true, then Python would be being used in preference to low-level languages for high-performance computing, but that doesn't actually happen, because in real life the low-level languages are still vastly faster.
(At this point the Python fanboys typically trot out the example of Google. Totally irrelevant; the kind of stuff Google does is going to be I/O-bound, so computational performance is of little importance.)
The fact that it's possible to write overly complicated code in C++ does not make C++ overly complicated. I could write incomprehensible spaghetti in (insert your language of choice) too, but unless that language is INTERCAL then it's highly unlikely that that would be the language's fault.
People hated XP. It was a resource hog, particularly the way it ate up memory just to display an ugly "fancy" theme. It didn't run all their programs. It didn't have enough drivers...
Which is why it never caught on, and 2003 was the year of Linux on the desktop.
May I make a modest prediction? A little down the line, people will be saying exactly the same thing about the move from Vista to whatever Microsoft end up calling the next version of Windows after that. "Waah, why can't I have good old Vista on my laptop? It's so much better than this new crap that's slow and doesn't have any drivers!"
(And I'm typing this on my Mac, so don't go mistaking me for an MS fanboy.)