Sometimes brands become so popular it becomes a social stigma not to have one. Take photography: you're not considered a 'pro' unless you use Nikon or Canon gear. I got into some arguments on dpreview about which camera is more professional. Same with cars: A top exec driving a Toyota? Never. It's Lexus (or Mercedes in Europe I guess).
Obviously, it's stupid. If you're a freelancer, your client isn't going to hire you depending on the CPU brand (hopefully) - "You're using AMD, you are not really professional; all pro's are using Intel".
I guess the iPod falls in the same category. If you have a music player,it has to be an iPod, otherwise you're uncool and too poor to afford one.
Finally - a sane attitude from someone who understands ads. Two things to have in mind:
People who block ads are less likely to click on ads anyway, so no revenue is lost;
It's better to have less impressions than a lower click-through ratio, so people who have no intentions of clicking do the advertisers a favour if they block ads.
If you have 1000 impressions and just 10 clicks, the CTR ratio is 1%. If you have 100 impressions and 10 clicks, CTR is 10% and - more importantly - you earn more for each click.
I think it's different from country to country. My European country is 100% Yahoo. No one is using MSN - no one. Skype is used for voice, but that's it.
UK on the other hand seems MSN to me. I have some friends over there and all of them are on MSN.
I actually love True Image too. I set up a hidden partition for it where it keeps its recovery image. At startup, if I press F11, it launches a mini-Linux and a nice little program for recovery.
It's extremely handy. Now, if anything happens to any of the computers I own/administer, I can go back to a working version in 10 minutes.
This whole "girls don't do math" mentality must a US thing. More than half of my maths teachers, from highschool to engineering have been women and in high school at least, girls were beating us boys at math (top 5 at maths were all girls). Most interesting of all, I don't recall us boys disconsidering them for that.
So girls don't need any special attention for math. It's not like their brain can't cope with it - rather, it's a cultural issue.
it is very heroic to stand up for your ideals and risk your life for what you believe. Just like in US when guys fed up with england fought for independence, etc
I may be jaded and plain cynical, but yes, I do think Pirate Bay and all other sites are in for the money. Risking lives and comparing them to those who really fought in the the US War of Independence is not only an overstatement, it's borderline troll (I'm not even an American).
I somehow fail to see this as a giant resistance and war against an oppressive Big Brother. Fact is, the torrent sites are used to distribute copyrighted materials. I don't agree with RIAA/MPAA/BSA tactics, but we are not ENTITLED to get anything for free - movies, songs or anything else. When you download Bourne Ultimatum, you're doing it because you're too lazy to go to a theater and feel better because you've spared 20 bucks - you're not fighting for freedom.
I've spent my childhood under communism and I'm kinda fed up with this attitude - oh they're so evil we can't get Evanescence for free. Where I come from, people were arrested for listening to Rolling Stones.
As a part-time photographer, I've had my work used without permission and let me tell you - it pisses me off. Making photos costs me money, even if it's only paying the model. I don't agree with copyrights for 70 years - 10 years would be enough for anything - but I have a hard time believing that those who took my photos did that to fight the system - they did that so they don't have to spend a dollar at iStockPhoto.
I wonder if that's true? The "from its advertising" part makes it sound like a load of bs fud.
It's hard to impossible to verify the accuracy of this claim - but it's not "bullshit" or "FUD".
I've disabled by AdBlock just to see their pages... they have FIVE ad areas (can't call them banners) as follows:
Top right - Auction Ads;
Top center - TargetPoint;
Left - AdultFriendFinder;
Right - AdBrite;
Bottom - Auction Ads.
I don't know about their daily impressions, click-through ratio, but they certainly get more than 1000 EUR/day from ads, and the 20,000 EUR figure doesn't seems far-fetched to me.
I won't get sucked into moral or political discussions, but anyone who thinks that they (and others) are in just for fun, are simply naïve.
I remember the time - but I fail to see the bubble.
It was the time CDs became popular and allowed for more content and interaction, in fact it was the only way to get rich content.
Take Encarta and other encyclopedias. They were the only alternatives to paper-based materials and with animations and video, they were really nice learing tools. Games started to add voice - I recall King's Quest V being the first adventure game I've played that had hi-res graphics and voice. How's that bad?
Sure, all those multimedia CDs have morphed into online content, but the CD-ROM period was a stage in evolution, not a hyper-inflated bubble.
It's like saying that radio was a bubble because TV came next.
In contrast, the dot-com bubble was like "attract venture capital to build a site that sells anything from confetti to pets online, don't worry about drafting a business plan, spend big on offices and fancy cars, then sell everything at a loss and go bankrupt." When the bubble was over, we were all back to square 1.
I used to have a cheap laptop - something manufactured and branded by a relatively small local company, I think it was based on a generic Toshiba. Anyway, it had a very simple and effective analog wheel on the front. Very easy to use and convenient.
Now I have the latest and greatest laptop and for sound I have two fancy +/- buttons that are not in the right place, that give me no clue on the current setting and that I must click repeatedly to set the correct sound, so more often than not I just right-click on the sound icon in the taskbar (yes I use XP; I'll switch to Linux the same day Adobe releases their creative suite for Linux).
Speaking of buttons (or the lack of them), I bought some years ago a fancy microwave owen with a touch-screen panel with lots of settings and presets. The damn thing is so difficult to use in the dark or when in a hurry, it's become annoying. I always need to be careful to press in the right place as there's zero feedback. By contrast, the cheapest owens have it right: two big knobs (time & power) that even a blind person could use, plus they provide instant visual feedback on their settings.
I think that most controls on an airplane are still analog (at least in their appearance) - and with good reason.
To be honest, this is only the second time a vulnerability has been discovered in Flash. The first time was about 7 years ago with the undocumented "save" fscommand, which allowed someone to make a proof-of-concept virus that could in theory propagate through locally-stored swf files.
they're still software rendering graphics in year of 2007
They've added some hardware-rendering for video, but it's granted that it's almost inexcusable not to have even an experimental, alpha-grade, hardware-rendering player. Hopefully, 3D libraries such as Papervision3d will put some pressure on them to add 3D features. I think that previously Macromedia was reluctant in adding 3D/hardware support in Flash because they didn't want Flash to completely eat Director's market (it happened anyway).
I once made a search for "serious magic" (it's a video editing app for chroma-keying).
The first result on Google (paid result) was:
Serious Magic www.FXhome.com/CompositeLab Special Effects On Your Desktop Simple Powerful Software. Try Now!
This kind of result implies that FXHome are the makers of Serious Magic, while in fact they are a competitor! (Serious Magic was bought by Adobe, btw).
This practice is unethical, to say the least.
Google is an ad agency in disguise, not a "common carrier". They check if the ad is for tobacco or gambling so they can - and should - check for illegal/unfair practices too.
Actually, although I am not a UK resident, I've worked for 8 years for a private health insurance provider in UK, and I've been observing the system.
Private insurance is not a fast growing sector in UK. Sorry, I don't have statistics available right now, but its growth rate is something like 3%, although the number of companies offering health insurance to the employees has more growth, probably around 10%.
Also, only about 15% of UK population has private health insurance.
NHS does indeed have its shares of problems (long waiting lists for non-emergencies, up to 6 months for cataract surgery) and the general efficiency is among the lowest in Western Europe (some papers I've studied compared cancer survival rates in UK vs. Poland).
Again, sorry for not providing citations; numbers may not be 100% accurate.
It's not about the rendering engine. That's very good actually.
The problems are: - very slow screen redraws - window resizing and scrolling are horrible; - can resize the window only through the lower-right corner - I mean, WTF? - horrible antialising; I've read several explanations/apologies for these, but the fact remains: text looks bad. I don't care about consistency with print, I want clear, crisp text on-screen. Acrobat, Photoshop, Flash 8, CorelDraw and others use their own antialiasing algorithms and the text looks great. If Apple doesn't want to use ClearType, that's fine, but make it look good. - no plugins? Heck, even IE7 has some very nice plugins on its site.
All versions of PS I've seen, including CS3, have "Thomas Knoll" listed right at the top of the credits, which is a nice thing really. Not many commercial programs (except games) list the creators, engineers and so on in the "About" box.
Re:A question for large print graphics designers..
on
The History of Photoshop
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually most graphic programs support PS plugins - at least Corel Photo-Paint, Paintshop Pro, Painter and Fireworks do, but I'm sure there are others.
Photoshop does a few things very well - much better than its competitors, that is manipulating photos in a way a photographer understands. In other areas, it falls behind PhotoPaint for example.
but you still need Microsoft's core (and proprietary) software to make them work
Ummm, no. It's not just the SDK they are giving away. It's the compiler and debugger too. The only thing that's missing is the IDE, which is Eclipse-based anyway. These guys have made a pretty good Eclipse plugin for editing actionscript classes, so I don't think replicating Flex Builder should be that hard. I'm not very fond of Adobe, but this is a very good move. If you haven't tried Flex, you should.
Living in Eastern Europe, we didn't have access to most western hardware/software. When I was 7, my father built a 48K Spectrum from scratch using smuggled components (the Z80 processor, the EEPROMs), parts from other computers (the case and keyboard); he made the PCB by himself as well as copying and programming the ROMs. I still remember the hardware debugging sessions.
Later we managed to make the Interface II (I think that was its name) addon board and get a floppy drive to work. It was an East-German Robotron 5.25" drive; we were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies (sorry, can't remember the brand).
It was a wonderful machine and it's the way I got into computers and learn assembler (Zeus ruled). At 12 I was busy cracking the games' copy protection to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Oh, btw, games had to be smuggled in too - one network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease. Don't get me started with books, it was hard even to photocopy one, as access to photocopiers was restricted.
I agree with parent poster. Until USA, as a nation, recognizes that there's something wrong going on with it regarding guns and violence, this will go on forever and it will be only worse.
In my country (20 mil.) in Europe, people can buy handguns for personal protection or rifles for hunting but the availability of the guns is restricted (you must undertake a medical exam, get a license, etc.) and they must be kept in a locked cabinet (out of children's reach). The result is that there was exactly one armed robbery in 10 years, and the perpetrator was a foreigner using a smuggled gun. There was one cop killed in mission by a gun in 20 years, the weapon was of Serbian origin. There were 2 or 3 persons killed by a gun last year, of which one was ruled as self-defense.
Because of your 'inalienable right', any idiot can get a powerful, sophisticated gun. An automatic rifle for self-protection? Give me a break.
Still, it's big money involved so I'm not surprised. Ask yourself who benefits from all of this.
In IE6 and later , you can mix CSS and javascript. I know, I know, IE is 'teh EViL' but the idea is pretty cool. I've written about it on my blog, the idea is that you can write #mydiv {
width:expression(... ) }
and it'll work.
Sometimes the layout can be very complex (especially with fluid layouts) and you need to mix relative dimensions (%) with fixed ones (px or em) so the more tools one can use, the better.
Someone has taken the time to compile the data into the database. It cost time and money to do so. Google chose to take the shortcut and use that db instead of making their own (which further hints that the work involved was not trivial at all - you really can't argue that Google made a mistake, that they didn't know what they were doing).
It's a little similar with the fonts: the Latin or Thai or whatever alphabet is (and shouldn't be) copyrightable. However, creating a font is not an easy task, especially one that works at small sizes. The creators should imho be protected one way or the other (actually font plagiarism is in the rage - fonts are not copyrightable, only their names)
Of course, this is Slashdot and it's Google we are talking about, so all their actions are justifiable - heaven forbid anyone to criticize their behavior.
It's really not in my intention to troll, but has the definition of the term 'Operation System' changed recently? Have I been living under a rock?
This OS is just as much as Windows 3.1 was an OS - a graphical environment maybe, but not an OS as I still need Windows, Linux, MacOS or BeOS installed on my HDD to get on the web or to open a file.
Not only that, but I usually take my laptop for on-location shots and start processing the RAWs right away. No matter how you put it, you just can't expect a 15" laptop to pack all the power of a server.
My laptop is a HP Turion with 1Gb RAM and LR works fine on it.
That's exactly what I've thought. American casualties (deaths) in this war are over 3000. Statistically, in any war, the number of wounded/disabled, exceed the number of deaths by a ratio of at least 2 to 1. I've read somewhere a number of about 10,000 American troops wounded. Now, considering that most attacks come via IEDs and RPGs, I'm willing to bet that the actual number of amputees is unfortunately a lot higher than 500. Frankly, 5000 is more like it.
Too bad we don't think more often of all those who had their lives destroyed because of wars.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes brands become so popular it becomes a social stigma not to have one.
Take photography: you're not considered a 'pro' unless you use Nikon or Canon gear. I got into some arguments on dpreview about which camera is more professional.
Same with cars: A top exec driving a Toyota? Never. It's Lexus (or Mercedes in Europe I guess).
Obviously, it's stupid. If you're a freelancer, your client isn't going to hire you depending on the CPU brand (hopefully) - "You're using AMD, you are not really professional; all pro's are using Intel".
I guess the iPod falls in the same category. If you have a music player,it has to be an iPod, otherwise you're uncool and too poor to afford one.
Two things to have in mind:
If you have 1000 impressions and just 10 clicks, the CTR ratio is 1%. If you have 100 impressions and 10 clicks, CTR is 10% and - more importantly - you earn more for each click.
I think it's different from country to country. My European country is 100% Yahoo. No one is using MSN - no one. Skype is used for voice, but that's it.
UK on the other hand seems MSN to me. I have some friends over there and all of them are on MSN.
I actually love True Image too. I set up a hidden partition for it where it keeps its recovery image. At startup, if I press F11, it launches a mini-Linux and a nice little program for recovery.
It's extremely handy. Now, if anything happens to any of the computers I own/administer, I can go back to a working version in 10 minutes.
RTFA, they've tried that, but the monkey can spot the differences even when women are wearing mens' clothes and basically just laugh at them.
This whole "girls don't do math" mentality must a US thing.
More than half of my maths teachers, from highschool to engineering have been women and in high school at least, girls were beating us boys at math (top 5 at maths were all girls). Most interesting of all, I don't recall us boys disconsidering them for that.
So girls don't need any special attention for math. It's not like their brain can't cope with it - rather, it's a cultural issue.
... like they would be the only ones.
Even Mythbusters, Braniac and Top Gear have rigged explosions and crashes to look good on TV.
Must be the reason I don't watch Discovery as often.
I may be jaded and plain cynical, but yes, I do think Pirate Bay and all other sites are in for the money. Risking lives and comparing them to those who really fought in the the US War of Independence is not only an overstatement, it's borderline troll (I'm not even an American).
I somehow fail to see this as a giant resistance and war against an oppressive Big Brother. Fact is, the torrent sites are used to distribute copyrighted materials. I don't agree with RIAA/MPAA/BSA tactics, but we are not ENTITLED to get anything for free - movies, songs or anything else. When you download Bourne Ultimatum, you're doing it because you're too lazy to go to a theater and feel better because you've spared 20 bucks - you're not fighting for freedom.
I've spent my childhood under communism and I'm kinda fed up with this attitude - oh they're so evil we can't get Evanescence for free. Where I come from, people were arrested for listening to Rolling Stones.
As a part-time photographer, I've had my work used without permission and let me tell you - it pisses me off. Making photos costs me money, even if it's only paying the model. I don't agree with copyrights for 70 years - 10 years would be enough for anything - but I have a hard time believing that those who took my photos did that to fight the system - they did that so they don't have to spend a dollar at iStockPhoto.
You can mod me down now.
It's hard to impossible to verify the accuracy of this claim - but it's not "bullshit" or "FUD".
I've disabled by AdBlock just to see their pages... they have FIVE ad areas (can't call them banners) as follows:
I don't know about their daily impressions, click-through ratio, but they certainly get more than 1000 EUR/day from ads, and the 20,000 EUR figure doesn't seems far-fetched to me.
I won't get sucked into moral or political discussions, but anyone who thinks that they (and others) are in just for fun, are simply naïve.
I remember the time - but I fail to see the bubble.
It was the time CDs became popular and allowed for more content and interaction, in fact it was the only way to get rich content.
Take Encarta and other encyclopedias. They were the only alternatives to paper-based materials and with animations and video, they were really nice learing tools. Games started to add voice - I recall King's Quest V being the first adventure game I've played that had hi-res graphics and voice. How's that bad?
Sure, all those multimedia CDs have morphed into online content, but the CD-ROM period was a stage in evolution, not a hyper-inflated bubble.
It's like saying that radio was a bubble because TV came next.
In contrast, the dot-com bubble was like "attract venture capital to build a site that sells anything from confetti to pets online, don't worry about drafting a business plan, spend big on offices and fancy cars, then sell everything at a loss and go bankrupt." When the bubble was over, we were all back to square 1.
This is a small pet peeve of mine.
I used to have a cheap laptop - something manufactured and branded by a relatively small local company, I think it was based on a generic Toshiba. Anyway, it had a very simple and effective analog wheel on the front. Very easy to use and convenient.
Now I have the latest and greatest laptop and for sound I have two fancy +/- buttons that are not in the right place, that give me no clue on the current setting and that I must click repeatedly to set the correct sound, so more often than not I just right-click on the sound icon in the taskbar (yes I use XP; I'll switch to Linux the same day Adobe releases their creative suite for Linux).
Speaking of buttons (or the lack of them), I bought some years ago a fancy microwave owen with a touch-screen panel with lots of settings and presets. The damn thing is so difficult to use in the dark or when in a hurry, it's become annoying. I always need to be careful to press in the right place as there's zero feedback. By contrast, the cheapest owens have it right: two big knobs (time & power) that even a blind person could use, plus they provide instant visual feedback on their settings.
I think that most controls on an airplane are still analog (at least in their appearance) - and with good reason.
To be honest, this is only the second time a vulnerability has been discovered in Flash. The first time was about 7 years ago with the undocumented "save" fscommand, which allowed someone to make a proof-of-concept virus that could in theory propagate through locally-stored swf files.
They've added some hardware-rendering for video, but it's granted that it's almost inexcusable not to have even an experimental, alpha-grade, hardware-rendering player. Hopefully, 3D libraries such as Papervision3d will put some pressure on them to add 3D features. I think that previously Macromedia was reluctant in adding 3D/hardware support in Flash because they didn't want Flash to completely eat Director's market (it happened anyway).
The first result on Google (paid result) was:
This kind of result implies that FXHome are the makers of Serious Magic, while in fact they are a competitor! (Serious Magic was bought by Adobe, btw).
This practice is unethical, to say the least.
Google is an ad agency in disguise, not a "common carrier". They check if the ad is for tobacco or gambling so they can - and should - check for illegal/unfair practices too.
Mod me down Google fanboys. See if I care.
Actually, although I am not a UK resident, I've worked for 8 years for a private health insurance provider in UK, and I've been observing the system.
Private insurance is not a fast growing sector in UK. Sorry, I don't have statistics available right now, but its growth rate is something like 3%, although the number of companies offering health insurance to the employees has more growth, probably around 10%.
Also, only about 15% of UK population has private health insurance.
NHS does indeed have its shares of problems (long waiting lists for non-emergencies, up to 6 months for cataract surgery) and the general efficiency is among the lowest in Western Europe (some papers I've studied compared cancer survival rates in UK vs. Poland).
Again, sorry for not providing citations; numbers may not be 100% accurate.
It's not about the rendering engine. That's very good actually.
The problems are:
- very slow screen redraws - window resizing and scrolling are horrible;
- can resize the window only through the lower-right corner - I mean, WTF?
- horrible antialising; I've read several explanations/apologies for these, but the fact remains: text looks bad. I don't care about consistency with print, I want clear, crisp text on-screen. Acrobat, Photoshop, Flash 8, CorelDraw and others use their own antialiasing algorithms and the text looks great. If Apple doesn't want to use ClearType, that's fine, but make it look good.
- no plugins? Heck, even IE7 has some very nice plugins on its site.
All versions of PS I've seen, including CS3, have "Thomas Knoll" listed right at the top of the credits, which is a nice thing really. Not many commercial programs (except games) list the creators, engineers and so on in the "About" box.
Actually most graphic programs support PS plugins - at least Corel Photo-Paint, Paintshop Pro, Painter and Fireworks do, but I'm sure there are others.
Photoshop does a few things very well - much better than its competitors, that is manipulating photos in a way a photographer understands. In other areas, it falls behind PhotoPaint for example.
Ummm, no.
It's not just the SDK they are giving away. It's the compiler and debugger too. The only thing that's missing is the IDE, which is Eclipse-based anyway. These guys have made a pretty good Eclipse plugin for editing actionscript classes, so I don't think replicating Flex Builder should be that hard.
I'm not very fond of Adobe, but this is a very good move. If you haven't tried Flex, you should.
Living in Eastern Europe, we didn't have access to most western hardware/software.
When I was 7, my father built a 48K Spectrum from scratch using smuggled components (the Z80 processor, the EEPROMs), parts from other computers (the case and keyboard); he made the PCB by himself as well as copying and programming the ROMs. I still remember the hardware debugging sessions.
Later we managed to make the Interface II (I think that was its name) addon board and get a floppy drive to work. It was an East-German Robotron 5.25" drive; we were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies (sorry, can't remember the brand).
It was a wonderful machine and it's the way I got into computers and learn assembler (Zeus ruled). At 12 I was busy cracking the games' copy protection to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Oh, btw, games had to be smuggled in too - one network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease. Don't get me started with books, it was hard even to photocopy one, as access to photocopiers was restricted.
I agree with parent poster. Until USA, as a nation, recognizes that there's something wrong going on with it regarding guns and violence, this will go on forever and it will be only worse.
In my country (20 mil.) in Europe, people can buy handguns for personal protection or rifles for hunting but the availability of the guns is restricted (you must undertake a medical exam, get a license, etc.) and they must be kept in a locked cabinet (out of children's reach).
The result is that there was exactly one armed robbery in 10 years, and the perpetrator was a foreigner using a smuggled gun. There was one cop killed in mission by a gun in 20 years, the weapon was of Serbian origin. There were 2 or 3 persons killed by a gun last year, of which one was ruled as self-defense.
Because of your 'inalienable right', any idiot can get a powerful, sophisticated gun. An automatic rifle for self-protection? Give me a break.
Still, it's big money involved so I'm not surprised. Ask yourself who benefits from all of this.
In IE6 and later , you can mix CSS and javascript. I know, I know, IE is 'teh EViL' but the idea is pretty cool.
... )
I've written about it on my blog, the idea is that you can write
#mydiv {
width:expression(
}
and it'll work.
Sometimes the layout can be very complex (especially with fluid layouts) and you need to mix relative dimensions (%) with fixed ones (px or em) so the more tools one can use, the better.
Someone has taken the time to compile the data into the database. It cost time and money to do so. Google chose to take the shortcut and use that db instead of making their own (which further hints that the work involved was not trivial at all - you really can't argue that Google made a mistake, that they didn't know what they were doing).
It's a little similar with the fonts: the Latin or Thai or whatever alphabet is (and shouldn't be) copyrightable. However, creating a font is not an easy task, especially one that works at small sizes. The creators should imho be protected one way or the other (actually font plagiarism is in the rage - fonts are not copyrightable, only their names)
Of course, this is Slashdot and it's Google we are talking about, so all their actions are justifiable - heaven forbid anyone to criticize their behavior.
It's really not in my intention to troll, but has the definition of the term 'Operation System' changed recently? Have I been living under a rock?
This OS is just as much as Windows 3.1 was an OS - a graphical environment maybe, but not an OS as I still need Windows, Linux, MacOS or BeOS installed on my HDD to get on the web or to open a file.
Not only that, but I usually take my laptop for on-location shots and start processing the RAWs right away. No matter how you put it, you just can't expect a 15" laptop to pack all the power of a server.
My laptop is a HP Turion with 1Gb RAM and LR works fine on it.
That's exactly what I've thought.
American casualties (deaths) in this war are over 3000. Statistically, in any war, the number of wounded/disabled, exceed the number of deaths by a ratio of at least 2 to 1. I've read somewhere a number of about 10,000 American troops wounded. Now, considering that most attacks come via IEDs and RPGs, I'm willing to bet that the actual number of amputees is unfortunately a lot higher than 500. Frankly, 5000 is more like it.
Too bad we don't think more often of all those who had their lives destroyed because of wars.