I am infuriated that the plaintiffs are limited to Windows users. The description of the lawsuit says the state is suing on behalf of anyone who purchased Windows during a certain time period. However, the damages go way beyond that limited set of people. I've never purchased or used Windows, but I see the damage from the illegal Windows monopoly every single day. Every time I check my email, I am flooded with spam from compromised Windows zombies. Every time I try to purchase new MacOS X software, I am limited in my selection due to Windows monopolization driving competing developers out of business. I could go on and on. I'm a resident of Iowa, and I want recompense for MY damages. But it looks like I won't get a dime if they win. I wouldn't care if it was a token, even $10, but I want damages.
On the continuing monopoly issue, note that Bill Gates is plowing his personal fortune into major stock purchases of other monopolies like energy and pharmaceuticals. I would love to see an investigation of Gates' personal financial activities, separate from the MSFT case.
I remember discussing this online before, some guy said that someday there will be hard drives big enough to store every song he owns. I said I already have a hard drive that stores every song I own, and my music library is only about 160Gb. I retorted that someday there will be hard drives big enough to store every song ever [I]recorded,[/I] it would be like someone delivering an iPod with the entire iTunes music library already on it, and you'd just need keys to unlock any song you want. But there's a problem, of course. Music fans hate low bitrate encodings. And it's the same way with video. I remember the days of Video Discs, it was great picture quality, and it started off the era of drastically improved video display systems, big screens, etc. And then just as the TV equipment started to get really good, Video Discs were discontinued, and they started delivering the content in compressed format. There's no DVD that can compare with the image quality of an uncompressed Laser Disc, DVDs are usually 6:1 compression. Satellite is the same way, it started out as enthusiasts with big dishes receiving the uncompressed signals, then as it became mainstream, systems like DirecTV used compression, usually 8:1 or worse. Cable is doing the same thing now with digital cable. And YouTube is even worse, the basic storage format is 320x240, even though it's displayed in their web pages upscaled at a higher rez. Sure it's a compromise in quality to save bandwidth. But every single one of these compromises sucks, it's set during the early adoption phase when bandwidth is inadequate or expensive, then as bandwidth becomes more available or cheaper, everyone bemoans the lack of quality due to the high compression. Some systems upgrade, like the iTunes movies that are now in 640x480 instead of 320x240, but they're still heavily compressed, it isn't practical to deliver DVD quality compression, let alone uncompressed video. So I am dissatisfied with these compromises. The video industry has spent billions developing the latest and greatest display technology, but the content delivery systems are just not delivering anything close to the quality these systems can display. What is wrong with this picture? Sure we can make a video iPod that could hold almost unlimited quantities of video. It's just going to be so compressed that it won't be worth watching. Hell, I'll deliver a highly compressed video stream right here in this message: 1001010110001001 That was 800 hours of video compressed down to two bytes. Sorry if the compression was a bit severe.
The Apple Store just came back online, and yep, it looks like it was excessive traffic that killed it. It came back online with the one-day sale still in place. Usually they only go offline to add or remove content like this. Usually WebObjects is pretty robust under heavy loads.
And whoever moderated the parent as offtopic, please RTFSubmission, it talked about Amazon AND WalMart AND Disney going offline due to heavy traffic. These online stores are the big guns and if they go down on Black Friday, it's news, and relevant to this topic.
I haven't been able to get into the Apple Store tonight, it's been down all evening. They had a big one-day sale today, I bought a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse ($11 off, yay!) this afternoon and now I can't back get in to check the order status.
I've never heard of the Apple Store going down under a high load, but it often goes down briefly when product or price changes are made. I figure it didn't go down due to high traffic, but this is a rather long outage, compared to most updates. But still, it should be giving a "down for updates" err msg instead of a generic WebObjects error page.
I taught a course in BASIC programming back in 1980 at a small computer store, I spent the first few weeks of the course teaching the associative and distributive laws, so the students could understand how to write simple equations that parsed correctly. A couple of the students went on to take night school college courses in programming and said that my instruction in simple math was more valuable than anything taught in those classes. I don't recall just when I learned the associative and distributive laws, but it must have been when I was a sophomore in high school. So never underestimate the importance of teaching the absolute basics of math, and never overestimate the knowledge of students.
The only conceivable long term solution is free culture. Society will still find ways to reward authors for their contributions without the current licensing nightmare. That is the only way culture will be able to keep evolving. The mix-ups, mash-downs, movies and cultural references in the future depend on having unencumbered source material.
Our society is at stake, it cannot evolve without free and unencumbered rights for some 73 year old Japanese guy to wheeze out Beatles songs on a harmonica in his bar. This is the high water mark of thousands of years of human civilization, the ascent of Man cannot continue without the intellectual leadership of old barflies playing their favorite songs.
I have posted links to Doug Jones' website on numerous occasions here on Slashdot and this seems like another good time to post them. His reports on the history and theory of voting are excellent.
Remember I said I was a little kid when my family drove through the FL checkpoint. Little 5 year old kids have lower thresholds for perception of fascism. I had an orange and a uniformed guy with a gun took it away from me. I thought we were being arrested.
BTW, I frequently drove in and out of CA via the Interstate highways back during the time when the Medfly checkpoints were supposedly set up but I never saw any mandatory checkpoints. I did see some signs requesting people to voluntarily stop and discard fresh fruits. Hmm.. how long ago was that, the mid 1980s?
Ha.. I remember when I was a kid, there were highway checkpoints at the Florida border, everyone had to submit to a mandatory search to make sure they weren't carrying fruit, for fear of carrying disease. I thought this was pretty fascistic. I don't know of any other barriers to interstate travel that have occurred within my lifetime.
I will await a ruling from Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Handbook, and other stylebooks, as to acceptable methods for accurately citing web pages that are constantly changing. It took them long enough to establish rules for plain old static URLs. Of course even an accurate time-stamped cite won't help establish any specific point in the history as any more or less accurate than any other point.
Wikipedia can never be used in research work with an authoritative citation, since it is constantly changing. If I use a wikipedia article in a research paper's footnotes or bibliography, the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references. Sure you could go back through the history file and try to reconstruct the article as it existed when the citation was taken, but that just adds a whole new level of difficulty to citations, now the author must cite the date and exact time when the research was taken. And then, the changes to the article before and after that time, are they more or less accurate than the citation? Furthermore, wikipedia articles are full of "citation needed" footnotes, and may also contain huge sections of plagiarized text. Sources are hugely problematic, it can be impossible to trace a basic fact back to its source from a wikipedia article.
Scholarship is a system where we build on the work of others, if the chain is broken, there can be no progress. If scholars cannot work with authoritative citations, their work may not just be useless, it may be damaging. Look at some of the recent scandals over scientists who faked research, they got away with it because nobody could check their sources, and millions of dollars of research funding were wasted following up on the faked research. Wikipedia is just going to make this problem worse. I hope that scientists with PhDs know better than to use wikipedia for research, but then, your average 7 year old kid in elementary school might end up as a PhD or M.D. one day, do your really want the surgeon who might operate on YOU someday, to have learned his basic science from possibly-vandalized articles in wikipedia?
The original work may be in the public domain, it may even predate the existence of copyright laws by thousands of years. But a new translation can be copyrighted by the translator, and modern copyright laws would apply.
OK. First of all, Galactica is a drama set in space. It's not a scifi kill-fest. The awesome explosions and Viper vs. Raider battles are incidental to the plot. The show gets all its acclaim and awards (and most of its audience) from the script and acting. Without that, the show won't have lasted into season 2.
I've been pondering this issue, especially considering the decline of SciFi Channel's signature show SG-1.
First, SF Channel discovered its ratings boost was largely coming from women, who have traditionally not been part of the SF demographic. So we get story lines about mommies and babies. Spare me. Second, the new season of BSG suffers from the same problem that ruined SG-1, they're losing. Nobody wants to watch a bunch of losers, it isn't very inspiring. It is even worse watching your formerly-glorious heroes get defeated over and over, without even the slightest foreshadowing of an eventual victory.
IMHO the BSG writers totally jumped off the deep end in this season, I can hardly watch it anymore. Character development is all fine and good, but I don't want to watch a soap opera, I want to watch an action show.
Seems to me as much creative energy went into creating those webisodes as did the full TV episodes (albeit 3 minutes at a time). It's not like the webisodes are just clips of scenes from other episodes all strung together into a 30 second commercial... they are all unique content, things you can't get from just watching TV episodes.
Did you actually watch the webisodes? The new content is about 30 seconds per webisode, the rest is titles and a commercial made from clips of the upcoming series. They ran the same 2 clip commercials over and over, across the 10 webisodes. So this whole fuss is over 5min of original made-for-the-web content. There are other obvious problems with this new season's shows. Apparently they got tired of spending so much money on computer graphics, so almost all of the new shows are set in a muddy field, with some tents and some junk. It's turned into a freaking soap opera about mommies and babies. Fuck that shit, I want to see some nuclear explosions in space!
So pardon me for being testy when someone with no experience in my profession tells me that one of my primary job functions is "an illusion."
Visual perception is far more complex than auditory perception. If we see a face that is too red, we have a built in mental database of faces to compare it with. Some psychologists believe our memories are hardwired to make subtle discriminations of the qualities of faces like color (a red face might be a sign of anger, and thus risk) so it could be an evolutionary trait. But audio is not wired the same way. Sure we've all heard a piano or guitar before, but each performer can strive for a different sound, so unless we are intimately acquainted with that performer's sound, we might not notice much degradation in quality.
But moving from subjective psychological factors to color science.. "close" isn't often close enough. Using the example of a face again, paler tones like skin color may have only light values in each CMY or K plate, so a 1% shift in density can represent a huge shift in overall color. Pale tones are affected more than dark, saturated tones when the color is wrong. That's why I can look at imagesetter films, look at a face in just the magenta film, and judge pretty accurately if the color is going to turn out wrong when I do a Matchprint proof. Usually a small error in color settings causes a visible shift in the magenta density, which causes the faces to turn out way too pale or too pink.
That's just one case. More to the general issue, prepress clients spend big bucks trying to get their images to look as good as possible. They know the limits of CMYK printing, and that isn't the fixed upper limit of visual quality. Just because CMYK has a limited gamut, doesn't mean it's like CDs with a fixed limit of audio range. If you want a bigger dynamic range of color, you merely have to use more inks. I used to spend a lot of time doing "touch plates," like for example, using my previous example of Pantone Orange 21 being outside the gamut of CMYK, if you had a pic of some oranges and you were trying to make them look as intense and delicious as possible, maybe you'd want to use CMYK+Pantone Orange 21, the 5th color is a "touch plate" to add extra orange just to the areas where it is needed. And there is no limit to the amount of inks, I know fine art printers who do lithographs with as more than 100 colors of ink, that's an insane amount of work, but the results are incredibly vivid.
So printing is not like listening to compressed audio, it's like listening to the live performance of a symphony with their full dynamic range. But getting back to your question, what difference does it make if your color is perfect when viewed under perfect color-temperature lighting, when the end user is just going to look at it under tungsten lamps, or with colored sunglasses, or other suboptimal conditions? Well, to start, if your color is shifted or flat, it's just going to look worse under suboptimal viewing conditions. Garbage in, garbage out, so to speak. But also there is the perceptual factor. Color is not perceived as a quality of its own, it is viewed as simultaneous contrasts against other colors. This is a complex neurological phenomenon related to how the rods and cones in the retina sense color, but suffice to say, a limited color gamut like CMYK is perceived as "full color" even though it is not as big a gamut as our eyes can perceive in a real world sunlit scene, the CMYK print looks normal because the colors as printed are all correct RELATIVE to the other printed colors. So if, for example, we look at a CMYK printed image in darkened conditions, it will still look like a full color range. Our eyes are quite adaptable. Say for example you wear some rose-tinted glasses. After a few minutes, your eyes adapt to the tint, and you forget you're even wearing them, you don't see the color shift anymore, unless you look for it. Even if we look at a CMYK image with our tinted glasses, if the image is color shifted, the colors will be wrong relative to
You obviously don't work in the prepress industry. Color Management is the fundamental issue in prepress, if your color looks wrong under optimal conditions, it looks wrong when viewed under any other lighting conditions.
Your comment is a classic example of why GIMP is a failure. Linux geeks think they know more about color theory than the prepress professionals, so they implement their software without listening to the people who have practical experience in the trade. You know, color printing existed long before computers were even invented.
The latest GPS models still have the one big issue: price.
You don't need Nike shoes to use the Nike+ sensor. I made a little holder out of gaffer's tape and attached it to the shoelaces on the top of my New Balance shoes, it works great. Some third party vendors sell nice little velcro pouches, I copied their design for my cheapo version.
actually the problem is that PANTONE exploits loopholes in trademark law to make money selling a list of colors
No.
The Pantone Color System is a system of ink formulas, based on about 12 Pantone inks with patented chemical formulas. You can mix any Pantone color with the Pantone primary colors plus CMYK. But you cannot mix any Pantone color with CMYK. For example, there is no way to achieve an intense orange like Pantone Orange 21 with CMYK, because it is beyond the gamut of CMYK inks. That's why Pantone Orange 21 is a primary color in their ink set. There are clones of the Pantone inks, but they aren't quite the same formula, so they don't always mix to the same colors. Nobody's going to risk an expensive print campaign with hundreds of thousands of dollars of printing on imitation Pantone inks.
But if you want to use a system that is solely based on CMYK, you can use a non-Pantone scheme. Guess what? Most pro designers that don't use the Pantone CMYK specs use TruMatch, and they buy the TruMatch swatch books, oh my god, another licensed color scheme, they're making money selling a list of colors! Yes, designers prefer using a commercially licensed color system like TruMatch because it is a standard, every designer either has the swatch book, or can walk into any art store and buy one if they need one.
These are the realities of professional design and print work. If GIMP cannot pay for licenses for the standard tools of the trade, they will never gain acceptance. Professional designers use Photoshop because it uses the conventional, widely accepted systems like Pantone and TruMatch. Professionals lead the market, and if you can't gain acceptance with professionals, you have only amateurs as your market. Good luck with that.
until the USA stops travelling down the copyright/patent path of infofascism, the gimp team can't _legally_ implement certain features.
No.
GIMP can implement any feature they like, but they might be required to LICENSE the underlying technology from the inventor, and PAY royalties on it.
Oh what a horror, a software developer wants to get PAID when other people want to develop products built from his hard work! What is this world coming to, when the GIMP team can't steal^H^H^H^H^H use other software developers' ideas for free?!?
Is the value of a $100 bill the same, if it is visually identical to one issued by the US Treasury, but was printed by a counterfeiter? The value is in the authenticity. Only the signature assures authenticity. Some printmakers now sign their works with a special ink containing their extracted DNA, to assure a unique authentication to one human being.
These ridiculous restrictions on chemicals sounds familiar, I've run into the same thing in my trade, photographic printing.
I work in antique photochemistry processes, and the chemicals I've used are now subject to regulation by the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Just last month, I was checking prices at the same supplier I've used for 30 years, and to reorder the same old chemicals, now I have to file DHS forms with the vendor, including a copy of my photo ID, the location where I will store the chemicals, a detailed description of the chemical formula I use, and a waiver allowing the DHS and DEA to inspect the records at will. I phoned the supplier and asked about these forms, and they said, "oh don't worry about it, we've only had DHS inspect the records 2 or 3 times." Oh I feel so much better after hearing that.
So now I know why the processes I use have almost completely disappeared in the last few years. Nobody wants to subject themselves to scrutiny by the DHS just to make a few prints. The really stupid thing about this is, the chemicals on the restricted list aren't really the most dangerous ones, you can buy stuff from the same supplier that's way more hazardous without filing any paperwork.
You haven't quite got a handle on the situation here, I think. When an artist produces a run of limited edition prints, he is entering into a contract with the art market, an old established contract that every honest artist and atelier operates by. He is declaring that his edition of, say 100 prints, means that ONLY 100 prints will ever be made (plus a few artists proofs made during testing runs). The atelier is breaking the contract with both the artist and the market when they produce these illegitimate prints, they're clearly forgeries because they bear forged signatures. The atelier is flagrantly violating their contracts when they retain rather than destroy the plates. Most print runs end with a "cancellation print" which is a print of the plate with a big scratch through it, proving the plate has been destroyed, and the artist signs it to show he's convinced the plates are destroyed. I've heard of those cancellation prints being forged, they trick the artist into believing the plates are ruined and no more prints can be made. But the atelier can continue to secretly produce prints using the same plates the artist made (with assistance from the atelier's printmakers), and the prints are made on the same paper as the originals, using the same inks, and sometimes even by the same printmakers that made the legit editions. But without a real signature, the print is really worthless.
Surely some of the value of a limited edition comes from its scarcity, creating more prints dilutes the value of the original. Essentially this is like counterfeiting, printing fake money with no backing by the Treasury undermines the value of real money, since we might be duped into accepting fake money with no real value.
You're right about the moving target. Apple is constantly expanding the iPod in unpredictable directions, the competitors are left eating dust. Case in point: the article describes a Sony player with a pedometer, this is obviously designed to compete with the Nike+ gadget. But the Sony device is just a pedometer, not an accelerometer like the Nike+, so it couldn't possibly be as accurate. Apple has all the best patents on the accelerometer anyway, so nobody can compete. I showed my Nike+ to my podiatrist, he runs marathons, and you should have seen his eyes bug out. I described how it records your speed continuously throughout your run and you can review it on the computer, and how it's accurate to about 1% once you calibrate it by running a measured distance. He said, "holy crap, I already have a nano, and I can add a gadget that does ALL THAT for only $29?!? That sounds better than my Garmin ForeRunner GPS that cost $250, and it weighs a ton, and if I run underneath trees it loses the satellite signal and my running distance gets corrupted, it totally sucks!" I've tried running with a GPS, and he's right, they totally suck, the Nike+ is everything a runner could ever want except for a heart rate monitor (and those are only for fanatics). But I expect that within a year or so, Apple will have a Nike+ + that has a heart rate monitor or something equally revolutionary. The point is, nobody saw the Nike+ coming at all, and now everyone has to race to get similar features. I am equally sure that Apple has other surprises up their sleeve. Even if they DON'T have any surprises coming Real Soon Now, there's always a chance they MIGHT, and you'll lose out if you don't have an iPod. Nobody can compete with that.
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I am infuriated that the plaintiffs are limited to Windows users. The description of the lawsuit says the state is suing on behalf of anyone who purchased Windows during a certain time period. However, the damages go way beyond that limited set of people. I've never purchased or used Windows, but I see the damage from the illegal Windows monopoly every single day. Every time I check my email, I am flooded with spam from compromised Windows zombies. Every time I try to purchase new MacOS X software, I am limited in my selection due to Windows monopolization driving competing developers out of business. I could go on and on.
I'm a resident of Iowa, and I want recompense for MY damages. But it looks like I won't get a dime if they win. I wouldn't care if it was a token, even $10, but I want damages.
On the continuing monopoly issue, note that Bill Gates is plowing his personal fortune into major stock purchases of other monopolies like energy and pharmaceuticals. I would love to see an investigation of Gates' personal financial activities, separate from the MSFT case.
I remember the olden days when we called that "getting an education."
I remember discussing this online before, some guy said that someday there will be hard drives big enough to store every song he owns. I said I already have a hard drive that stores every song I own, and my music library is only about 160Gb. I retorted that someday there will be hard drives big enough to store every song ever [I]recorded,[/I] it would be like someone delivering an iPod with the entire iTunes music library already on it, and you'd just need keys to unlock any song you want.
But there's a problem, of course. Music fans hate low bitrate encodings. And it's the same way with video. I remember the days of Video Discs, it was great picture quality, and it started off the era of drastically improved video display systems, big screens, etc. And then just as the TV equipment started to get really good, Video Discs were discontinued, and they started delivering the content in compressed format. There's no DVD that can compare with the image quality of an uncompressed Laser Disc, DVDs are usually 6:1 compression. Satellite is the same way, it started out as enthusiasts with big dishes receiving the uncompressed signals, then as it became mainstream, systems like DirecTV used compression, usually 8:1 or worse. Cable is doing the same thing now with digital cable.
And YouTube is even worse, the basic storage format is 320x240, even though it's displayed in their web pages upscaled at a higher rez. Sure it's a compromise in quality to save bandwidth. But every single one of these compromises sucks, it's set during the early adoption phase when bandwidth is inadequate or expensive, then as bandwidth becomes more available or cheaper, everyone bemoans the lack of quality due to the high compression. Some systems upgrade, like the iTunes movies that are now in 640x480 instead of 320x240, but they're still heavily compressed, it isn't practical to deliver DVD quality compression, let alone uncompressed video.
So I am dissatisfied with these compromises. The video industry has spent billions developing the latest and greatest display technology, but the content delivery systems are just not delivering anything close to the quality these systems can display. What is wrong with this picture?
Sure we can make a video iPod that could hold almost unlimited quantities of video. It's just going to be so compressed that it won't be worth watching. Hell, I'll deliver a highly compressed video stream right here in this message:
1001010110001001
That was 800 hours of video compressed down to two bytes. Sorry if the compression was a bit severe.
The Apple Store just came back online, and yep, it looks like it was excessive traffic that killed it. It came back online with the one-day sale still in place. Usually they only go offline to add or remove content like this. Usually WebObjects is pretty robust under heavy loads.
And whoever moderated the parent as offtopic, please RTFSubmission, it talked about Amazon AND WalMart AND Disney going offline due to heavy traffic. These online stores are the big guns and if they go down on Black Friday, it's news, and relevant to this topic.
I haven't been able to get into the Apple Store tonight, it's been down all evening. They had a big one-day sale today, I bought a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse ($11 off, yay!) this afternoon and now I can't back get in to check the order status.
I've never heard of the Apple Store going down under a high load, but it often goes down briefly when product or price changes are made. I figure it didn't go down due to high traffic, but this is a rather long outage, compared to most updates. But still, it should be giving a "down for updates" err msg instead of a generic WebObjects error page.
I taught a course in BASIC programming back in 1980 at a small computer store, I spent the first few weeks of the course teaching the associative and distributive laws, so the students could understand how to write simple equations that parsed correctly. A couple of the students went on to take night school college courses in programming and said that my instruction in simple math was more valuable than anything taught in those classes. I don't recall just when I learned the associative and distributive laws, but it must have been when I was a sophomore in high school.
So never underestimate the importance of teaching the absolute basics of math, and never overestimate the knowledge of students.
Our society is at stake, it cannot evolve without free and unencumbered rights for some 73 year old Japanese guy to wheeze out Beatles songs on a harmonica in his bar. This is the high water mark of thousands of years of human civilization, the ascent of Man cannot continue without the intellectual leadership of old barflies playing their favorite songs.
I have posted links to Doug Jones' website on numerous occasions here on Slashdot and this seems like another good time to post them. His reports on the history and theory of voting are excellent.
In particular, I recommend his essay on Paper Ballots.
A Brief Illustrated History of Voting is another excellent essay.
There are dozens of technical essays on voting systems on Jones' main Voting and Elections site.
Remember I said I was a little kid when my family drove through the FL checkpoint. Little 5 year old kids have lower thresholds for perception of fascism. I had an orange and a uniformed guy with a gun took it away from me. I thought we were being arrested.
BTW, I frequently drove in and out of CA via the Interstate highways back during the time when the Medfly checkpoints were supposedly set up but I never saw any mandatory checkpoints. I did see some signs requesting people to voluntarily stop and discard fresh fruits. Hmm.. how long ago was that, the mid 1980s?
Ha.. I remember when I was a kid, there were highway checkpoints at the Florida border, everyone had to submit to a mandatory search to make sure they weren't carrying fruit, for fear of carrying disease. I thought this was pretty fascistic. I don't know of any other barriers to interstate travel that have occurred within my lifetime.
I will await a ruling from Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Handbook, and other stylebooks, as to acceptable methods for accurately citing web pages that are constantly changing. It took them long enough to establish rules for plain old static URLs. Of course even an accurate time-stamped cite won't help establish any specific point in the history as any more or less accurate than any other point.
Wikipedia can never be used in research work with an authoritative citation, since it is constantly changing. If I use a wikipedia article in a research paper's footnotes or bibliography, the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references. Sure you could go back through the history file and try to reconstruct the article as it existed when the citation was taken, but that just adds a whole new level of difficulty to citations, now the author must cite the date and exact time when the research was taken. And then, the changes to the article before and after that time, are they more or less accurate than the citation? Furthermore, wikipedia articles are full of "citation needed" footnotes, and may also contain huge sections of plagiarized text. Sources are hugely problematic, it can be impossible to trace a basic fact back to its source from a wikipedia article.
Scholarship is a system where we build on the work of others, if the chain is broken, there can be no progress. If scholars cannot work with authoritative citations, their work may not just be useless, it may be damaging. Look at some of the recent scandals over scientists who faked research, they got away with it because nobody could check their sources, and millions of dollars of research funding were wasted following up on the faked research. Wikipedia is just going to make this problem worse. I hope that scientists with PhDs know better than to use wikipedia for research, but then, your average 7 year old kid in elementary school might end up as a PhD or M.D. one day, do your really want the surgeon who might operate on YOU someday, to have learned his basic science from possibly-vandalized articles in wikipedia?
Please don't make the first link in a post a blind link to a Windows executable.
Not necessarily.
The original work may be in the public domain, it may even predate the existence of copyright laws by thousands of years. But a new translation can be copyrighted by the translator, and modern copyright laws would apply.
I've been pondering this issue, especially considering the decline of SciFi Channel's signature show SG-1.
First, SF Channel discovered its ratings boost was largely coming from women, who have traditionally not been part of the SF demographic. So we get story lines about mommies and babies. Spare me.
Second, the new season of BSG suffers from the same problem that ruined SG-1, they're losing. Nobody wants to watch a bunch of losers, it isn't very inspiring. It is even worse watching your formerly-glorious heroes get defeated over and over, without even the slightest foreshadowing of an eventual victory.
IMHO the BSG writers totally jumped off the deep end in this season, I can hardly watch it anymore. Character development is all fine and good, but I don't want to watch a soap opera, I want to watch an action show.
Did you actually watch the webisodes? The new content is about 30 seconds per webisode, the rest is titles and a commercial made from clips of the upcoming series. They ran the same 2 clip commercials over and over, across the 10 webisodes. So this whole fuss is over 5min of original made-for-the-web content.
There are other obvious problems with this new season's shows. Apparently they got tired of spending so much money on computer graphics, so almost all of the new shows are set in a muddy field, with some tents and some junk. It's turned into a freaking soap opera about mommies and babies. Fuck that shit, I want to see some nuclear explosions in space!
So pardon me for being testy when someone with no experience in my profession tells me that one of my primary job functions is "an illusion."
Visual perception is far more complex than auditory perception. If we see a face that is too red, we have a built in mental database of faces to compare it with. Some psychologists believe our memories are hardwired to make subtle discriminations of the qualities of faces like color (a red face might be a sign of anger, and thus risk) so it could be an evolutionary trait.
But audio is not wired the same way. Sure we've all heard a piano or guitar before, but each performer can strive for a different sound, so unless we are intimately acquainted with that performer's sound, we might not notice much degradation in quality.
But moving from subjective psychological factors to color science.. "close" isn't often close enough. Using the example of a face again, paler tones like skin color may have only light values in each CMY or K plate, so a 1% shift in density can represent a huge shift in overall color. Pale tones are affected more than dark, saturated tones when the color is wrong. That's why I can look at imagesetter films, look at a face in just the magenta film, and judge pretty accurately if the color is going to turn out wrong when I do a Matchprint proof. Usually a small error in color settings causes a visible shift in the magenta density, which causes the faces to turn out way too pale or too pink.
That's just one case. More to the general issue, prepress clients spend big bucks trying to get their images to look as good as possible. They know the limits of CMYK printing, and that isn't the fixed upper limit of visual quality. Just because CMYK has a limited gamut, doesn't mean it's like CDs with a fixed limit of audio range. If you want a bigger dynamic range of color, you merely have to use more inks. I used to spend a lot of time doing "touch plates," like for example, using my previous example of Pantone Orange 21 being outside the gamut of CMYK, if you had a pic of some oranges and you were trying to make them look as intense and delicious as possible, maybe you'd want to use CMYK+Pantone Orange 21, the 5th color is a "touch plate" to add extra orange just to the areas where it is needed. And there is no limit to the amount of inks, I know fine art printers who do lithographs with as more than 100 colors of ink, that's an insane amount of work, but the results are incredibly vivid.
So printing is not like listening to compressed audio, it's like listening to the live performance of a symphony with their full dynamic range. But getting back to your question, what difference does it make if your color is perfect when viewed under perfect color-temperature lighting, when the end user is just going to look at it under tungsten lamps, or with colored sunglasses, or other suboptimal conditions? Well, to start, if your color is shifted or flat, it's just going to look worse under suboptimal viewing conditions. Garbage in, garbage out, so to speak. But also there is the perceptual factor. Color is not perceived as a quality of its own, it is viewed as simultaneous contrasts against other colors. This is a complex neurological phenomenon related to how the rods and cones in the retina sense color, but suffice to say, a limited color gamut like CMYK is perceived as "full color" even though it is not as big a gamut as our eyes can perceive in a real world sunlit scene, the CMYK print looks normal because the colors as printed are all correct RELATIVE to the other printed colors. So if, for example, we look at a CMYK printed image in darkened conditions, it will still look like a full color range. Our eyes are quite adaptable. Say for example you wear some rose-tinted glasses. After a few minutes, your eyes adapt to the tint, and you forget you're even wearing them, you don't see the color shift anymore, unless you look for it. Even if we look at a CMYK image with our tinted glasses, if the image is color shifted, the colors will be wrong relative to
You obviously don't work in the prepress industry. Color Management is the fundamental issue in prepress, if your color looks wrong under optimal conditions, it looks wrong when viewed under any other lighting conditions.
Your comment is a classic example of why GIMP is a failure. Linux geeks think they know more about color theory than the prepress professionals, so they implement their software without listening to the people who have practical experience in the trade. You know, color printing existed long before computers were even invented.
The latest GPS models still have the one big issue: price.
You don't need Nike shoes to use the Nike+ sensor. I made a little holder out of gaffer's tape and attached it to the shoelaces on the top of my New Balance shoes, it works great. Some third party vendors sell nice little velcro pouches, I copied their design for my cheapo version.
No.
The Pantone Color System is a system of ink formulas, based on about 12 Pantone inks with patented chemical formulas. You can mix any Pantone color with the Pantone primary colors plus CMYK. But you cannot mix any Pantone color with CMYK. For example, there is no way to achieve an intense orange like Pantone Orange 21 with CMYK, because it is beyond the gamut of CMYK inks. That's why Pantone Orange 21 is a primary color in their ink set. There are clones of the Pantone inks, but they aren't quite the same formula, so they don't always mix to the same colors. Nobody's going to risk an expensive print campaign with hundreds of thousands of dollars of printing on imitation Pantone inks.
But if you want to use a system that is solely based on CMYK, you can use a non-Pantone scheme. Guess what? Most pro designers that don't use the Pantone CMYK specs use TruMatch, and they buy the TruMatch swatch books, oh my god, another licensed color scheme, they're making money selling a list of colors! Yes, designers prefer using a commercially licensed color system like TruMatch because it is a standard, every designer either has the swatch book, or can walk into any art store and buy one if they need one.
These are the realities of professional design and print work. If GIMP cannot pay for licenses for the standard tools of the trade, they will never gain acceptance. Professional designers use Photoshop because it uses the conventional, widely accepted systems like Pantone and TruMatch. Professionals lead the market, and if you can't gain acceptance with professionals, you have only amateurs as your market. Good luck with that.
No.
GIMP can implement any feature they like, but they might be required to LICENSE the underlying technology from the inventor, and PAY royalties on it.
Oh what a horror, a software developer wants to get PAID when other people want to develop products built from his hard work! What is this world coming to, when the GIMP team can't steal^H^H^H^H^H use other software developers' ideas for free?!?
Is the value of a $100 bill the same, if it is visually identical to one issued by the US Treasury, but was printed by a counterfeiter? The value is in the authenticity. Only the signature assures authenticity. Some printmakers now sign their works with a special ink containing their extracted DNA, to assure a unique authentication to one human being.
These ridiculous restrictions on chemicals sounds familiar, I've run into the same thing in my trade, photographic printing.
I work in antique photochemistry processes, and the chemicals I've used are now subject to regulation by the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Just last month, I was checking prices at the same supplier I've used for 30 years, and to reorder the same old chemicals, now I have to file DHS forms with the vendor, including a copy of my photo ID, the location where I will store the chemicals, a detailed description of the chemical formula I use, and a waiver allowing the DHS and DEA to inspect the records at will. I phoned the supplier and asked about these forms, and they said, "oh don't worry about it, we've only had DHS inspect the records 2 or 3 times." Oh I feel so much better after hearing that.
So now I know why the processes I use have almost completely disappeared in the last few years. Nobody wants to subject themselves to scrutiny by the DHS just to make a few prints. The really stupid thing about this is, the chemicals on the restricted list aren't really the most dangerous ones, you can buy stuff from the same supplier that's way more hazardous without filing any paperwork.
You haven't quite got a handle on the situation here, I think.
When an artist produces a run of limited edition prints, he is entering into a contract with the art market, an old established contract that every honest artist and atelier operates by. He is declaring that his edition of, say 100 prints, means that ONLY 100 prints will ever be made (plus a few artists proofs made during testing runs). The atelier is breaking the contract with both the artist and the market when they produce these illegitimate prints, they're clearly forgeries because they bear forged signatures. The atelier is flagrantly violating their contracts when they retain rather than destroy the plates. Most print runs end with a "cancellation print" which is a print of the plate with a big scratch through it, proving the plate has been destroyed, and the artist signs it to show he's convinced the plates are destroyed. I've heard of those cancellation prints being forged, they trick the artist into believing the plates are ruined and no more prints can be made. But the atelier can continue to secretly produce prints using the same plates the artist made (with assistance from the atelier's printmakers), and the prints are made on the same paper as the originals, using the same inks, and sometimes even by the same printmakers that made the legit editions. But without a real signature, the print is really worthless.
Surely some of the value of a limited edition comes from its scarcity, creating more prints dilutes the value of the original. Essentially this is like counterfeiting, printing fake money with no backing by the Treasury undermines the value of real money, since we might be duped into accepting fake money with no real value.
You're right about the moving target. Apple is constantly expanding the iPod in unpredictable directions, the competitors are left eating dust. Case in point: the article describes a Sony player with a pedometer, this is obviously designed to compete with the Nike+ gadget. But the Sony device is just a pedometer, not an accelerometer like the Nike+, so it couldn't possibly be as accurate. Apple has all the best patents on the accelerometer anyway, so nobody can compete.
I showed my Nike+ to my podiatrist, he runs marathons, and you should have seen his eyes bug out. I described how it records your speed continuously throughout your run and you can review it on the computer, and how it's accurate to about 1% once you calibrate it by running a measured distance. He said, "holy crap, I already have a nano, and I can add a gadget that does ALL THAT for only $29?!? That sounds better than my Garmin ForeRunner GPS that cost $250, and it weighs a ton, and if I run underneath trees it loses the satellite signal and my running distance gets corrupted, it totally sucks!" I've tried running with a GPS, and he's right, they totally suck, the Nike+ is everything a runner could ever want except for a heart rate monitor (and those are only for fanatics). But I expect that within a year or so, Apple will have a Nike+ + that has a heart rate monitor or something equally revolutionary.
The point is, nobody saw the Nike+ coming at all, and now everyone has to race to get similar features. I am equally sure that Apple has other surprises up their sleeve. Even if they DON'T have any surprises coming Real Soon Now, there's always a chance they MIGHT, and you'll lose out if you don't have an iPod. Nobody can compete with that.