The Buran is essentially an aerodynamic copy of the shuttle and was test launched, orbited, and landed by either remote control or automation, I forget which.
Soviets figured the thing was worthless so they stuck with Soyuz.
Took us, what, ~110 launches to start to figure that out?:)
Farscape was good stuff, imo- the Scorpius / John bits were a lot of fun, but on a re-watch, the crap part wasn't that aspect of the show, it was all of the filler that leaked in with seasons 2-4. Quite a few one-off throwaway episodes, with the result being something in between Trek and BSG for continuity, leaning much closer to the Trek end of the spectrum.
Farscape compares favorably against the likes of SG:A, Lexx and what I've seen of the current Doctor Who season (wish they'd spent as much effort on the SCRIPT as they have on the PRODUCTION), but the sheer number of fluff/throway eps and the plot pacing leave a bad taste in my mouth. Great characters, for the most part - more than I can say for most television these days.
It wasn't just rancid scripts... it was the scrotum-liquifingly HORRIBLE THEME MUSIC.
That was strike one for me. Strikes two and three were reading the words "temporal cold war" in a synopsis of an upcoming episode. After the shitsmear that was First Contact, and after movies like Butterfly Effect and Twelve Monkeys, I'm absolutely finished with Trek time travel.
"Fortunately" Enterprise dropped the ball before I wasted any of my time on it.
Seeing as how the Pismo came out after the blue G3s, has new world roms, comes with a DVD drive and meets the sysreqs in all other ways, there's no reason it shouldn't be supported.
Though in the words of a rich-bitch upper class queen who encountered me in 2003 : "Oh gawd, I didn't know anyone was still USING anything that OLD!". Apple seems to have a very short memory w/r/t their portables, though they'd have to do something pretty drastic to drop the pismo out of elligible system requirements (I could see them nudging out early iMacs and blue g3s by requiring AGP-only, but the pismo has that...).
Yeah, but Core Data doesn't require video hardware that still has the new car smell to do anything useful. Which means it's of use to everyone who can run 10.4... which is a hell of a lot more people than those who are capable of running 10.4 and Core Video.
Pretty much ANY developer love would improve iCal a LOT.
Mail already runs circles around Thunderbird for not-sucking in pretty much every way save the fricking interface. I use Thunderbird because it's the only freeware mail app that (a) doesn't use the goddamned drawer interface and (b) displays in three-column mode. I 3 three column mode.
Aside from that, the massive lack of keyboard shortcuts, irregular behaviour and extreme sluggishness are... uh... features, I guess- since the Thunderbird OS X team hasn't made any obvious efforts to fix 'em.:-|
TV exists for the sheep who really DON'T have anything else they could be doing. The people that aren't smart enough or interested enough to be into reading, programming, video games (as big of a time-waste but INTERACTIVE so SOME part of the brain is engaged, etc), or otherwise learning.
It is, in short, everythign Marx pegged religion for back in the day. It keeps the fucktarts passive. Take WCW and reality TV away from these people and they aren't going to write The Ilead - they're going to sit on the porch and bullshit with the neighbors.
Admittedly, I do watch a few shows. But they're time-shifted, ad-scrubbed, platform-dislocated and I'm either browsing porn, playing Civ3 or sitting on IRC while it's going on- and it's very much a "wind down before bed" thing as opposed to "DOOD I JUST GOT OFF WORK LETS WATCH WRESTLING".
Yeah, but can you do realtime video editing on that Dell, without a hardware board? Or a metric fuckload of RAM?
Altivec has its advantages.
Hardware accelleration aside, I've used video soft on Windows, tried to use it on Linux, and I've "grown up" with it on MacOS and OS X. There's no contest to speak of - OS X is currently as good as it gets for a video editing OS / hardware coupling. The fact I can run Final Cut Pro (and run it startlingly well) on five year old hardware is an added bonus.:)
The problem isn't cable, the problem is having a Nielsen or other ratings-relvant "family" in an area where reception is limited. For example- due to several factors, the ONLY channel you could get in via antenna in the area I grew up in (northcentral PA) was the CBS affiliate out of Binghampton, NY. The only game in town, as it were - if you wanted to tube out, you watched WBNG TV12 or you watched Off.
It being CBS, they're broadcasting bullshit like Survivor to what's more or less a captive audience.
I did learn about demographics indirectly through growing up with that station - their target market was apparently over sixty. Golden Girls in syndication, and shitloads of commercials for preparation H, Depends, and Cadillacs.
Made my stint through a college filled with kids who'd been able to watch stuff that hit their demographic head-on fairly... weird.
Boeing built the 7x7s with service contracts and years and years of supplying spare parts in mind as part of the design. Commercialism at its finest - the units are a source of revenue even after they're out of production.
Russian aerospace, conversely, was designed to Work And Work Well, not to Work And Turn A Profit. So they were Built To Last, not built to be replaced in 10-15 years max.
If we're ever going to get off this frigging rock, we need man-rated vehicles, we need efficient launch solutions, we need fast turnaround and we need sustainable habitats.
NASA has one man rated vehicle that is grossly expensive to launch, has a turnaround that is at best seasonal, and is currently used to service a barely sustainable habitat that is essentially a badly under-crewed garbage barge orbiting too low to avoid reentry without constant readjustment.
NASA, assuming they have ANY interest in the future of manned spaceflight, just isn't getting the job done. Competition is good. It took getting our ass handed to us by the Russians with Sputnik, etc. for us to even start giving a shit about space- if China or Japan puts a man on the moon, you can bet we'll be busting ass to beat them to mars.
500 years ago you probably would have been insisting on a land route to china, since it's Safe And Proven and Doesn't Risk Equipment Or Lives, etc, etc.
In my home skool district, they cut everything ELSE in order to keep the sports and music programs alive. If you didn't play basketball or sing in chorus, you were NOTHING, and it didn't matter what your interests were - there was no funding to cover them. Funding for art was cut year after year after year - to the point where the single art teacher was split between the high school and the elementary school. Art wasn't offered as an option after 9th grade - if you were, gods forbid, good at art and not much else, you had to fight tooth and nail to get any kind of classes after 9th.
Of course, this is also the same district with a teacher that kept me on the demerit (disqualifies you from ALL after-school activities, including sports) list for six months because she thought I "wasn't trying hard enough"... nevermind my C average in the class or the fact you had to be D or lower to get listed.
Doesn't the gubment recommend 128 bit encryption specifically BECAUSE it can be brute-forced in a heartbeat?
I remember reading something about that somewhere when MacOS 9 came out with Finder-Level encryption (128-bit, naturally)... and something OS X still doesn't have.:P
Thousands of jobs lost? As long as they're not AMERICAN jobs, why should the US government give a shit?
Seriously. Above and beyond anything else, senators and congressman care about getting reelected. They'll say or do whatever it takes to keep their jobs, and if that means fucking over rednecks in another country so their rednecks vote for them, they'll do it.
Personally, I have a solid idea as to how the rest of the world "feels" and couldn't give a shit- if they're really that bent, they should do something about it, rather than sit around and whine about how much the US sucks. Peer pressure works, but for some reason other countries are afraid to apply it to us.
These 'funky blending modes' are exactly the kind of shit they started adding to photoshop after version 4 that made it become
Nuh. All of the blending modes in 5.5 are in 4. The big thing that got added to 5 was layer effects. They added MORE shit with those in 6 and up and you can bet that that is where the bloat is coming from. Funny thing is, once you know how to do said effects yourself, you'll get better results doing them manually nine times out of ten - layer effects are a lot like Poser and Bryce : easily discernable unless you do a hell of a lot of "blending" and cleanup work after they're applied.
The G means GNU. See also Gnome, see also, I believe, HURD.
Gnome is reported to have similar problems w/r/t developers (from what I've heard- I list the linux desktop under "comedy" and follow it accordingly), and HURD.... whoboy.
Nevermind how notoriously strong-willed Stallman is.:)
Photoshop isn't a DRAWING PROGRAM. It's a graphics editing program. You want to "draw a circle", use Illustrator or Freehand.
You want to make a circle-shaped are of pixels....
Marquee tool -> flyout -> circle shape -> shift-drag -> paint bucket w/ color of choice (or Fill w/ foreground or background color, or Stroke ((width of choice)) or convert the selection to a path and distorty, etc, etc, etc.)
Photoshop was designed for editing photographs and other detailed image data. Using it to draw primitives is like using a flamethrower to swat a mosquito.
(but people do all the time anyway- once you've got the workflow, it's easy. It's just not the application's Primary Function.)
Photoshop isn't a Drawing Program, and it isn't a Paint Program. Microsoft Paint, Painter, Shi Painter, Open Canvas and The GIMP are Paint Programs. Illustrator, Freehand and Inkscape are Drawing Programs. Photoshop is Photoshop.:P
Complex transforms, full photoshop backward compatability (at least of 5.5- I could care less for CS), support for photoshop text (CS doesn't even support 5.5 text. >:|) and anti-aliasing, system fonts, alpha channels and masking workalikes, etc, etc.
You've been using vim for eight years. On a Mac, which you've also been using for eight years. Vim has warts, but you know it and know how to use it. Since this is an analogy, let's assume a new version of Vim comes out every few years, and it's not all that cheap. In fact, it's getting about +100-150$ more expensive with every version.
Oh look, here's the BIG PROJECT with a deadline of FRIDAY.
And it's Tuesday afternoon.
Oh, and IT just replaced your workhorse Vim Mac with an HP/UX machine running emacs. Because they got sick of paying for Vim licenses. They didn't bother with training, 'cuz emacs users are too leet to need it or offer it. And hey, it's a graphics app... they're all the same, aren't they?
You've got a short deadline to get a lot of shit done NOW and you have enough spare change for a vim license (you've been saving nickles for a decade or so). Do you.......
A. Buy the license, get the job done NOW and lump it onto the bill to the client?
B. Lose the contract and impale yourself on the spire of Mental Anguish that is trying to learn something you've never used in your life to do something you already know how to do in another application?
There's no decision, really.
======
Yeah, the gimp is nice, but the pros aren't going to use it. Cinepaint maybe, since you're dealing with a slightly different medium... but for graphics? People will pay for something they KNOW. It takes about eight months or more of constant use before the photoshop learning curve evens out and the experience becomes more organic and less of a "having to pick the lock on the handcuffs the app puts on you" sort of thing.
So yeah, people are going to whine that it doesn't act like photoshop*. Their brains are trained for photoshop just the way your brain is trained for vim in the above example. Interface is half the battle, but it isn't the entire battle and it definitely isn't the war.
* Take any graphics designer who wears photoshop like a pair of well broken-in briefs, sit 'em down in front of GIMP, and tell 'em to do whatever it is they do. If they're mac users, they'll repeatedly stab the wrong meta key. There'll be issues with the file browser. They'll continue to expect the thing to behave like photoshop and will balk and get frustrated when large chunks of their workflow are either GONE or restructured and rerouted in such a fashion as to be something completely Different. It's like giving a soldier in the Russian army a traditional Scottish tartan, telling them the tartan is their new pants, and expecting them to know exactly what to do with it.
It's the only piece of pay software I use, and it's been UNuseable for my needs since v.6 came out- and it keeps getting more bloated, slower, and less useable as time goes by. It really burns my ass that they changed a lot of the key bindings (FOR NO REASON) with v.6 and give the user NO way to actually edit a key config for themselves. Games have been doing this for years and MS Office is extensively customizeable... you'd think Adobe would get on board but NOOOOOO.
I absolutely hate Adobe The Company, and I absolutely cannot use anything that doesn't open at least ps5.5 documents- GIMP'll do it, but kill your blending modes, masks, and fonts goodbye. Guess what I use a lot of.
So I'm stuck getting humped in the ass by Adobe's PCP-laced view of What Photoshop Should Be. Programmers- picture your text editor changing keybinds and workflow with every revision, and you CAN'T CHANGE IT. You either wouldn't upgrade or you'd switch, wouldn't you?
Anyway. I want a drop-in replacement for Photoshop. I don't care if it's slightly different so long as the interface remains the same- six years of using Photoshop 5.x has given me the ability to weild the program without even thinking about it, and one of the things that frustrates artists (aside from being forced to use shitty software) is having to learn NEW software. We just want to make art. You can't expect us to learn perl or ruby or whateverthefuck GIMP script-fu uses instead of making actions, document compatability is a must (if I'm to get rid of photoshop, GIMP needs to be able to handle a few thousand photoshop files with all kinds of funky blending modes and layer effects and so forth and it needs to be able to handle it all perfectly (especially text).... and it's a long way from doing so.).
There's also the meta key thing. Using control as a meta for a longtime mac user is like trying to answer the phone with your foot- it Does Not Work. That's gotta be my biggest complaint about these so-called X windows "ports" to MacOS X - it ain't a port if it ain't localized as much as you can make it.... and OS X (and MacOS) apps use the apple key as the meta key, dammit. It's right next to the space bar- makes it real easy to hit both with the thumb, etc, etc.
I could keep going, but I just came off an Enemy Terrirory server that got swarmed by a dorm full of teamkilling assholes, so now's a good time to stop.:P
Revelation 13:17 - And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Well, we're still working on the implants; but credit cards, debit cards, the whole PIN interface-to-money thing definitely covers the rest.
Of course, we're still in the "BUT IT MAKES MY LIFE EASIER!!!" stage. It'll be quite awhile before we're a completely cashless society.... at which point implants will start to seem like a good idea.
(RFID locks would be INCREDIBLY handy for some people- I had a roommate who forgot her keys at least once a week, often twice- even more when she was stressed out.)
You need Valid Current Photo ID to open a bank account, RIDE THE GREYHOUND, fly, get into bars, etc, etc. The banks USED to accept bills or a social security card (or both) as proof of ID; Greyhound was even easier to deal with.
I let my license expire in '99 and had to get a fresh state ID in mid 2k4- not having Valid ID had become such massive inconvenience that it was more hassle to not have one than it was to just Get It Over With.
Slashdot Mirror
If not, it damned well should.
:)
The Buran is essentially an aerodynamic copy of the shuttle and was test launched, orbited, and landed by either remote control or automation, I forget which.
Soviets figured the thing was worthless so they stuck with Soyuz.
Took us, what, ~110 launches to start to figure that out?
Farscape was good stuff, imo- the Scorpius / John bits were a lot of fun, but on a re-watch, the crap part wasn't that aspect of the show, it was all of the filler that leaked in with seasons 2-4. Quite a few one-off throwaway episodes, with the result being something in between Trek and BSG for continuity, leaning much closer to the Trek end of the spectrum.
Farscape compares favorably against the likes of SG:A, Lexx and what I've seen of the current Doctor Who season (wish they'd spent as much effort on the SCRIPT as they have on the PRODUCTION), but the sheer number of fluff/throway eps and the plot pacing leave a bad taste in my mouth. Great characters, for the most part - more than I can say for most television these days.
It wasn't just rancid scripts... it was the scrotum-liquifingly HORRIBLE THEME MUSIC.
That was strike one for me. Strikes two and three were reading the words "temporal cold war" in a synopsis of an upcoming episode. After the shitsmear that was First Contact, and after movies like Butterfly Effect and Twelve Monkeys, I'm absolutely finished with Trek time travel.
"Fortunately" Enterprise dropped the ball before I wasted any of my time on it.
Seeing as how the Pismo came out after the blue G3s, has new world roms, comes with a DVD drive and meets the sysreqs in all other ways, there's no reason it shouldn't be supported.
Though in the words of a rich-bitch upper class queen who encountered me in 2003 : "Oh gawd, I didn't know anyone was still USING anything that OLD!". Apple seems to have a very short memory w/r/t their portables, though they'd have to do something pretty drastic to drop the pismo out of elligible system requirements (I could see them nudging out early iMacs and blue g3s by requiring AGP-only, but the pismo has that...).
Yeah, but Core Data doesn't require video hardware that still has the new car smell to do anything useful. Which means it's of use to everyone who can run 10.4... which is a hell of a lot more people than those who are capable of running 10.4 and Core Video.
Pretty much ANY developer love would improve iCal a LOT.
:-|
Mail already runs circles around Thunderbird for not-sucking in pretty much every way save the fricking interface. I use Thunderbird because it's the only freeware mail app that (a) doesn't use the goddamned drawer interface and (b) displays in three-column mode. I 3 three column mode.
Aside from that, the massive lack of keyboard shortcuts, irregular behaviour and extreme sluggishness are... uh... features, I guess- since the Thunderbird OS X team hasn't made any obvious efforts to fix 'em.
As discussed in this Drunkenblog interview. Of the Core fillintheblanks, it's easily the spiffiest.
The other feejurs, imo, are just fluff. Unless they've sunk some serious improvements into mail, ical and iphoto.
I don't want MORE features, I want the features they're shipping to be developed beyond vestigial buzzwords (re: OpenDoc in the OS 8 era).
TV exists for the sheep who really DON'T have anything else they could be doing. The people that aren't smart enough or interested enough to be into reading, programming, video games (as big of a time-waste but INTERACTIVE so SOME part of the brain is engaged, etc), or otherwise learning.
It is, in short, everythign Marx pegged religion for back in the day. It keeps the fucktarts passive. Take WCW and reality TV away from these people and they aren't going to write The Ilead - they're going to sit on the porch and bullshit with the neighbors.
Admittedly, I do watch a few shows. But they're time-shifted, ad-scrubbed, platform-dislocated and I'm either browsing porn, playing Civ3 or sitting on IRC while it's going on- and it's very much a "wind down before bed" thing as opposed to "DOOD I JUST GOT OFF WORK LETS WATCH WRESTLING".
Yeah, but can you do realtime video editing on that Dell, without a hardware board? Or a metric fuckload of RAM?
:)
Altivec has its advantages.
Hardware accelleration aside, I've used video soft on Windows, tried to use it on Linux, and I've "grown up" with it on MacOS and OS X. There's no contest to speak of - OS X is currently as good as it gets for a video editing OS / hardware coupling. The fact I can run Final Cut Pro (and run it startlingly well) on five year old hardware is an added bonus.
The problem isn't cable, the problem is having a Nielsen or other ratings-relvant "family" in an area where reception is limited. For example- due to several factors, the ONLY channel you could get in via antenna in the area I grew up in (northcentral PA) was the CBS affiliate out of Binghampton, NY. The only game in town, as it were - if you wanted to tube out, you watched WBNG TV12 or you watched Off.
It being CBS, they're broadcasting bullshit like Survivor to what's more or less a captive audience.
I did learn about demographics indirectly through growing up with that station - their target market was apparently over sixty. Golden Girls in syndication, and shitloads of commercials for preparation H, Depends, and Cadillacs.
Made my stint through a college filled with kids who'd been able to watch stuff that hit their demographic head-on fairly... weird.
Yeah, but everything you're talkin' has happened with Russia, not the Soviet Union. Excepting the possiblity of the satellite thing. :P
Boeing built the 7x7s with service contracts and years and years of supplying spare parts in mind as part of the design. Commercialism at its finest - the units are a source of revenue even after they're out of production.
Russian aerospace, conversely, was designed to Work And Work Well, not to Work And Turn A Profit. So they were Built To Last, not built to be replaced in 10-15 years max.
If we're ever going to get off this frigging rock, we need man-rated vehicles, we need efficient launch solutions, we need fast turnaround and we need sustainable habitats.
NASA has one man rated vehicle that is grossly expensive to launch, has a turnaround that is at best seasonal, and is currently used to service a barely sustainable habitat that is essentially a badly under-crewed garbage barge orbiting too low to avoid reentry without constant readjustment.
NASA, assuming they have ANY interest in the future of manned spaceflight, just isn't getting the job done. Competition is good. It took getting our ass handed to us by the Russians with Sputnik, etc. for us to even start giving a shit about space- if China or Japan puts a man on the moon, you can bet we'll be busting ass to beat them to mars.
500 years ago you probably would have been insisting on a land route to china, since it's Safe And Proven and Doesn't Risk Equipment Or Lives, etc, etc.
In my home skool district, they cut everything ELSE in order to keep the sports and music programs alive. If you didn't play basketball or sing in chorus, you were NOTHING, and it didn't matter what your interests were - there was no funding to cover them. Funding for art was cut year after year after year - to the point where the single art teacher was split between the high school and the elementary school. Art wasn't offered as an option after 9th grade - if you were, gods forbid, good at art and not much else, you had to fight tooth and nail to get any kind of classes after 9th.
Of course, this is also the same district with a teacher that kept me on the demerit (disqualifies you from ALL after-school activities, including sports) list for six months because she thought I "wasn't trying hard enough"... nevermind my C average in the class or the fact you had to be D or lower to get listed.
Doesn't the gubment recommend 128 bit encryption specifically BECAUSE it can be brute-forced in a heartbeat?
:P
I remember reading something about that somewhere when MacOS 9 came out with Finder-Level encryption (128-bit, naturally)... and something OS X still doesn't have.
(semi-intentionally flamish)
Thousands of jobs lost? As long as they're not AMERICAN jobs, why should the US government give a shit?
Seriously. Above and beyond anything else, senators and congressman care about getting reelected. They'll say or do whatever it takes to keep their jobs, and if that means fucking over rednecks in another country so their rednecks vote for them, they'll do it.
Personally, I have a solid idea as to how the rest of the world "feels" and couldn't give a shit- if they're really that bent, they should do something about it, rather than sit around and whine about how much the US sucks. Peer pressure works, but for some reason other countries are afraid to apply it to us.
These 'funky blending modes' are exactly the kind of shit they started adding to photoshop after version 4 that made it become
Nuh. All of the blending modes in 5.5 are in 4. The big thing that got added to 5 was layer effects. They added MORE shit with those in 6 and up and you can bet that that is where the bloat is coming from. Funny thing is, once you know how to do said effects yourself, you'll get better results doing them manually nine times out of ten - layer effects are a lot like Poser and Bryce : easily discernable unless you do a hell of a lot of "blending" and cleanup work after they're applied.
Mod me flamebait, BUT....
:)
The G means GNU. See also Gnome, see also, I believe, HURD.
Gnome is reported to have similar problems w/r/t developers (from what I've heard- I list the linux desktop under "comedy" and follow it accordingly), and HURD.... whoboy.
Nevermind how notoriously strong-willed Stallman is.
Photoshop isn't a DRAWING PROGRAM. It's a graphics editing program. You want to "draw a circle", use Illustrator or Freehand.
:P
You want to make a circle-shaped are of pixels....
Marquee tool -> flyout -> circle shape -> shift-drag -> paint bucket w/ color of choice (or Fill w/ foreground or background color, or Stroke ((width of choice)) or convert the selection to a path and distorty, etc, etc, etc.)
Photoshop was designed for editing photographs and other detailed image data. Using it to draw primitives is like using a flamethrower to swat a mosquito.
(but people do all the time anyway- once you've got the workflow, it's easy. It's just not the application's Primary Function.)
Photoshop isn't a Drawing Program, and it isn't a Paint Program. Microsoft Paint, Painter, Shi Painter, Open Canvas and The GIMP are Paint Programs. Illustrator, Freehand and Inkscape are Drawing Programs. Photoshop is Photoshop.
Man, I wish my needs were that simple.
Complex transforms, full photoshop backward compatability (at least of 5.5- I could care less for CS), support for photoshop text (CS doesn't even support 5.5 text. >:|) and anti-aliasing, system fonts, alpha channels and masking workalikes, etc, etc.
Lemme use an analogy here.
You've been using vim for eight years. On a Mac, which you've also been using for eight years. Vim has warts, but you know it and know how to use it. Since this is an analogy, let's assume a new version of Vim comes out every few years, and it's not all that cheap. In fact, it's getting about +100-150$ more expensive with every version.
Oh look, here's the BIG PROJECT with a deadline of FRIDAY.
And it's Tuesday afternoon.
Oh, and IT just replaced your workhorse Vim Mac with an HP/UX machine running emacs. Because they got sick of paying for Vim licenses. They didn't bother with training, 'cuz emacs users are too leet to need it or offer it. And hey, it's a graphics app... they're all the same, aren't they?
You've got a short deadline to get a lot of shit done NOW and you have enough spare change for a vim license (you've been saving nickles for a decade or so). Do you.......
A. Buy the license, get the job done NOW and lump it onto the bill to the client?
B. Lose the contract and impale yourself on the spire of Mental Anguish that is trying to learn something you've never used in your life to do something you already know how to do in another application?
There's no decision, really.
======
Yeah, the gimp is nice, but the pros aren't going to use it. Cinepaint maybe, since you're dealing with a slightly different medium... but for graphics? People will pay for something they KNOW. It takes about eight months or more of constant use before the photoshop learning curve evens out and the experience becomes more organic and less of a "having to pick the lock on the handcuffs the app puts on you" sort of thing.
So yeah, people are going to whine that it doesn't act like photoshop*. Their brains are trained for photoshop just the way your brain is trained for vim in the above example. Interface is half the battle, but it isn't the entire battle and it definitely isn't the war.
* Take any graphics designer who wears photoshop like a pair of well broken-in briefs, sit 'em down in front of GIMP, and tell 'em to do whatever it is they do. If they're mac users, they'll repeatedly stab the wrong meta key. There'll be issues with the file browser. They'll continue to expect the thing to behave like photoshop and will balk and get frustrated when large chunks of their workflow are either GONE or restructured and rerouted in such a fashion as to be something completely Different. It's like giving a soldier in the Russian army a traditional Scottish tartan, telling them the tartan is their new pants, and expecting them to know exactly what to do with it.
.... I WANT A GODDAMNED FOSS PHOTOSHOP CLONE. >:|
:P
It's the only piece of pay software I use, and it's been UNuseable for my needs since v.6 came out- and it keeps getting more bloated, slower, and less useable as time goes by. It really burns my ass that they changed a lot of the key bindings (FOR NO REASON) with v.6 and give the user NO way to actually edit a key config for themselves. Games have been doing this for years and MS Office is extensively customizeable... you'd think Adobe would get on board but NOOOOOO.
I absolutely hate Adobe The Company, and I absolutely cannot use anything that doesn't open at least ps5.5 documents- GIMP'll do it, but kill your blending modes, masks, and fonts goodbye. Guess what I use a lot of.
So I'm stuck getting humped in the ass by Adobe's PCP-laced view of What Photoshop Should Be. Programmers- picture your text editor changing keybinds and workflow with every revision, and you CAN'T CHANGE IT. You either wouldn't upgrade or you'd switch, wouldn't you?
Anyway. I want a drop-in replacement for Photoshop. I don't care if it's slightly different so long as the interface remains the same- six years of using Photoshop 5.x has given me the ability to weild the program without even thinking about it, and one of the things that frustrates artists (aside from being forced to use shitty software) is having to learn NEW software. We just want to make art. You can't expect us to learn perl or ruby or whateverthefuck GIMP script-fu uses instead of making actions, document compatability is a must (if I'm to get rid of photoshop, GIMP needs to be able to handle a few thousand photoshop files with all kinds of funky blending modes and layer effects and so forth and it needs to be able to handle it all perfectly (especially text).... and it's a long way from doing so.).
There's also the meta key thing. Using control as a meta for a longtime mac user is like trying to answer the phone with your foot- it Does Not Work. That's gotta be my biggest complaint about these so-called X windows "ports" to MacOS X - it ain't a port if it ain't localized as much as you can make it.... and OS X (and MacOS) apps use the apple key as the meta key, dammit. It's right next to the space bar- makes it real easy to hit both with the thumb, etc, etc.
I could keep going, but I just came off an Enemy Terrirory server that got swarmed by a dorm full of teamkilling assholes, so now's a good time to stop.
... the blue G3s have ADB, and they run 10.3.
:-)
Oh, and {i|power}book keyboards are ADB.
Revelation 13:17 - And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Well, we're still working on the implants; but credit cards, debit cards, the whole PIN interface-to-money thing definitely covers the rest.
Of course, we're still in the "BUT IT MAKES MY LIFE EASIER!!!" stage. It'll be quite awhile before we're a completely cashless society.... at which point implants will start to seem like a good idea.
(RFID locks would be INCREDIBLY handy for some people- I had a roommate who forgot her keys at least once a week, often twice- even more when she was stressed out.)
You need Valid Current Photo ID to open a bank account, RIDE THE GREYHOUND, fly, get into bars, etc, etc. The banks USED to accept bills or a social security card (or both) as proof of ID; Greyhound was even easier to deal with.
I let my license expire in '99 and had to get a fresh state ID in mid 2k4- not having Valid ID had become such massive inconvenience that it was more hassle to not have one than it was to just Get It Over With.