If this ISN'T what they're developing..... it makes me wonder what they WOULD be. To my understanding, the holding company with the rights had been working on just this idea for quite awhile now!
... but awhile back, both Terry Nation (who created B7) and Paul Darrow (who played Avon) talked about the idea of a revival. Not a remake a la BSG but a continuation a la the new Doctor Who. The premise I've heard talked about by both was to be that Avon - and only Avon - had survived the final scene, and, years later (20-30, I'd say!) escapes from a Federation prison and takes one last can't-win-but-try-anyway shot at it.
Think Napoleon escaping Elba and the battle of Waterloo, only hopefully without the hemorrhoids.
If this is what Sky is commissioning, and if it's done well (and with Paul Darrow and hopefully Jacqueline Pearce reprising Servalan), then it'll be the fitting finale to Blake's 7 that fans have been waiting for since the series wrapped decades ago.
The series doesn't need a remake or a reboot - what it does need is for the loose ends to be tied up.
Unless they have something really, really specific in mind that the market can't provide.
Remember, macs had SCSI despite the expense because the market had nothing that did anything similar available at the time. They had SCSI until peripheral busses like Firewire and USB arrived, at which point they dumped it like a dead rat. See also their long string of proprietary monitor connectors - the 25-pin mac standard, Applevision, ACD - the latter two of which provide essentially the same functionality for two different generations of technology.
In my experience, Apple's the kind of company who's willing to let other companies make the bits (including software), if the bits do what they need. If they can't get anything useful from third parties, they will make it themselves. The best example there (after the Mac itself) would be software - MP3 players on MacOS were unstable, crash-prone winamp clones until Apple bought an audio software company and then iTunes came along.... and entry level through prosumer (and even pro, depending on who you talk to) video editing on the mac SUCKED ASS until Apple bought a chunk of video editing software and twisted it into the awesome that is Final Cut Pro.
Agreed re: the focus on radio waves. Think of how much effort it takes to track signals from our own probes - and NONE of them have even made it to the next star system over, let alone into serious "interstellar space." And let's not forget that a good amount of the static you hear on conventional radio is kicked out by - guess what - stars. When you consider just how powerful a noise generator that is and just how many of the danged things there are, it's incredibly likely that anything out there using radio would simply get lost in the background noise.
You're stuck with non-upgradeable video in EVERY Apple product except for the powermac, which starts at around 2,800$.
That being the ONLY feature I really care about (no use for dolby-whatever, bluetooth, wiffy, etc), I find it to be one hell of a steep entry point.
The most irritating thing about their transition to intel is that it brought the craptastic intel mobo video across the bottom line - the old PPC minis had built-in ATI graphics. Crappy ATI graphics, mind you, but discreet video ram. None of this "eating your system ram" crap. Screw that- I need that RAM. I need it for PORN, DAMMIT.
Actually, I need it for applications, but still - a crap video chipset that eats system memory doesn't exactly give me a case of the warm fuzzies when browsing the Apple store.:(
Mod parent troll, please. Battle Angel is a Cameron project, not a Bay project.
Which is good. With Bay we would have gotten decent pacing, top-knotch effects, good cinematography, massive continuity errors and zero rewatchability.
With Cameron, we'll get great pacing, excellent visual effects, killer cinematography.... and Celine Dion.
Apparently something is in development for a 2010 release, but I'll be damned if I'm going to bother to get an imdb account to find out more.
I agree, Robotech would probably sell better over here... though Macross Plus seems to have done a hell of a lot better than The Shadow Chronicles is doing.
Having watched subtitled versions of Macross and Mospeada (and having suffered through The Horrors Of Minmei in two languages), I'm weighing in with the (doubtless smaller) pro-Robotech crowd. The core story is pretty good, and it's a formative part of my childhood.
From 1984 through 1997. Quality of Apple kit has rocketed straight downhill since The Second Coming Of Jobs. I have a few Quadras (one with an A/UX install) and a 9600 that still work perfectly fine. I'm still using a beige G3 on a daily basis - 187+ days of uptime at the last reboot and that's only because the OS (debian) pooped on me.
The post-Beige era brought cheaper (still decent for the most part, but cheaper nevertheless) quality components - noteably Apple's passion for Maxtor hard drives (less of an issue these days, but the stigma remains). In my subjective experience, the quality of Apple desktops has been in steady decline since the iMac and the quality of their laptops has been dropping since the Powerbook G4. The G4 at work had a power supply replaced and a logic board replaced (seperate incidents). All four of our G5s have been serviced at least once - two or three times in at least one case. We had a closet of dead iMacs (before we just threw 'em out). Yet we have 68k machines that have been running hypercard stacks since the very early 90s - six to seven days a week, getting pounded on by the public - and they're still chugging along.
Conversely, spending a few hours dealing with the complete retards that staff the Apple store tech support booth once every year or so beats the hell out of troubleshooting a pile of whitebox PC kit that may or may not sanely work together. When it came time to upgrade my work PC, rather than dick around with the staggering list of options - all of which had sixty more things than I needed, none of which had exactly every feature I wanted - I just PO'ed an intel imac and installed Windows XP on it.
Given how incredibly painless that was (haven't been back into OS X since the install - it feels like a bad KDE theme compared to the minimalism of XP with the tonka toys turned off) - I think that hardware quality issues aside, Apple still gets props for producing the tightest PC kit on the market. An XP install on a "real" PC - and I've done several, under a few different configurations, though I'm by no means an expert - is orders of magnitude more painful than it is on a mac.
Google and Apple are both much-much loved by slashdotters. Apple makes sexy kit that (for the most part) works very well. Google makes a search engines (and other software) that (for the most part) works very well. In a world dominated by shitty computers that don't work very well loaded with operating systems that don't work very well, products that Suck Less are going to get noticed. It "helps" that Apple has a Geek Chic image, and that Google employees have extensively evangelized what an incredibly AWESUM place Google is to work.
Yay.
At the of the day, Apple charges lamorghini prices for chevette parts in cadillac boxes* and Google promises "don't be evil" while collecting and tracking data at a volume that probably makes the NSA green with envy. I personally find this to be irritating (on the part of apple) and heinously evil shit (on the part of google), but both companies are Best Of Breed, and as long as their products Suck Less than everything else on the market, they'll be loved by the slashdot crowd - and any questionable activity will be rationalized or ignored by the fanbase.
* Yes, an equivalent PC that has every last one of the features a Mac packs will cost more. But I can upgrade the video card on a 400$ Dell. The entry level for upgradeable video in the Apple world is currently 2,799$, and the starting point for a useable (non-intel) video chipset (non-upgradeable) is currently ~1,200$. Oh, and the Intel minis cost more than the PPC minis did, with arguably worse video. Mention any of this in an Apple thread and you'll be modded troll or flamebait.
A quarter a game - a game with three or four LIVES? Sweet deal.
A dollar or two to start playing, another dollar to KEEP playing, another dollar if you miss that goddamned checkpoint by a fortieth of a second? I don't care of Cruisin' USA has a nice huge sit-down cabinet. I'll play it on the N64 with a hell of a lot less of a monetary burn.
The cost-per-minute to play modern arcade games has put me off completely. I'll drop a few quarters on Q*Bert at the bar, but beyond that.... I really enjoy my Nintendo DS.
Get real. Whatever this thing turns out to be, you can bet your monkey it won't be as pretty as the iPhone. As easy to use, maybe. But it sounds like it's aimed at a different market - a market that won't blindly pay out the ass for the kind of experience Apple offers. Which means it's not an iPhone competitor. Much the same way anything-that-plays-music is not an iPod competitor, though pundits continue to insist that IT IS OMG!!! to drive up their page views.:P
You could argue that the Sega CD and the Turbografx CD (and the 3DO) brought ridiculous load times and boring cutscenes (and loads of FMV) to the console space well before the Playstation popularized it.
Me, I'm happy that some game studios are starting to wise up and insert the ability to skip the damned cut scenes - if you like the game (oppose story) enough to want to play it again after you're done, having to stop every ten minutes for an HD1080i closeup of Captain Emo Protagonist shedding a tear over the loss of his $whatever really, really poops all over the replay value.
I have a 13" powerbook G4 with 802.11g, bluetooth, firewire, and a lot of other buzzword-compliant googaws on board. It's small. Sure, it's only 867mhz with 640 ram, but it does everything I need a laptop to do when I need a laptop (which is almost never) - media playback, web browsing, wireless, terminal/ssh.
I can get all that in an Asus EEE PC for 300-500$, or approximately 0.16-0.27 the price of the Macbook Air.
And the EEE has rj45.
Sure, it doesn't (easily) run OS X or Photoshop, but that's what my desktop is for. Sure, it's not as pretty. But it's small, it's functional, it has more features I need/want than the Macbook Air (which I'm sure could be added to said for more money on top of its already grotesque price point), and it's much more reasonably priced.
The Macbook Air reminds me of the Apple Cube from a few years back - Pro priced, lacking a bunch of the features that mac the Pro pricing tolerable, pushing size/formfactor as the makeup feature... and with an initial MSRP of $1,799.
Maybe in five or six years, when I can get one used for what I paid for my (also used) powerbook. Until then, the featureset and the price point are way too out of whack for my wallet.
I'm done trolling and troll-feeding. Let's talk about something useful.
So, what does this mean? Blender is fine as it is?
As far as I know, it is. Like anything else, it could probably stand anything from some to huge amount of improvement. I personally find the interface unuseable, but I also find Maya and Rhino to be a real pain to use. It can import and export a variety of fairly common formats, which means it's relatively easy to interoperate between Blender and other applications. So long as it doesn't do anything "special" to the files it exports, this means it's possible to - if it suits your needs - integrate Blender into a production toolchain. I don't do (much) animation, so I really can't speak about its effectiveness in that regard.
Yep, there is no FOSS alternative to creating a proprietary file format used for animation. But that would be a really ironic piece of software if it did come into existence.
Right, because proprietary formats are WHY people keep using proprietary software.
Stop focusing on the format. Start looking at what people are getting out of the prosoft that they aren't getting out of the FOSS.
which is the only issues I ever hear about when it comes to the Gimp compared to Photoshop
You don't hear them bitching about gimp's lack of.psd support? Apparently.doc's proformat is worth reverse engineering with open office, but if you're a creative professional then you're an asshole for using.psd and deserve to be berated.
As for Blender.... some people find it moderately useful. However, most people I've talked to that have gotten anything done with various forms of prosoft can't stand the thing. The most frequent hangup is the interface - which, to be fair, is the most frequent hangup with every 3d application, regardless of price. All the powerful ones have high learning curves, and they all function in different and often counter-intuitive ways from each other.
As for "what features exactly," don't be an asshole.:P You're probably the kind of guy who'd insist on a complete point-by-point list of every single difference between Word and Emacs, then piss on any of Word's hypothetical advantages because it uses a proformat. Which the FOSS community has already gone to great hassle to "support" Both Word and Emacs are fully capable of spitting out text files, and when you need a text file, that's all that really matters.
... is for there to actually BE FOSS alternatives.
Currently these exist for Office, web browsers, IRC clients, and a wealth of programming language, server functionality, networking tools, etc.
Where FOSS fails and fails hard is in the creative space - and I don't mean grammar checking or forty different ways to parse text. I mean, ultimately, FOSS alternatives for applications like the Macrodobe MX and CS suites, the Final Cut Studio suite, 3d Studio MAX, etc. The areas where the major ISVs are still raking in buckets of money.
The natural response to that statement would be to extoll the virtues of The GIMP, Blender, etc - which is ultimately missing the point. I'm not talking about basic funtionality (for which both apps are perfectly useful!), I'm talking about the hard, nasty, horrifying shit that nobody wants to program without a fat salary and plenty of fringe benefits. The kind of functionality that keeps creative art nerds who can't program paying thousands - or tens of thousands - of dollars a year for the aforementioned applications.
Beyond that...
Your grandmother will care when it's as easy to use as the Mac you insisted she get.
Your 3d modeling geek friend will care when something MAX or Maya compatible comes around. Fortunately,.obj seems to be pretty useable, and interchanges between Blender and Max, so (for modelling, anyway) it's down to learning curve and individual application features.
Your video editing friend will be a real challenge to convince. FOSS is not renowned for being user-friendly, and it's really, really hard to top Final Cut Pro and its interaction with the Quicktime API. For what it does and the users it's aimed at, the Final Cut Studio is cheap.
Your gamer geek friend wouldn't care either way, so long as it runs all of his games.
Joe Average - who doesn't play games, doesn't use photoshop or big 3d suites, doesn't use AutoCAD.... if it looks like and functions like whatever he's used to, you could probably switch his computer, change the desktop wallpaper on the new box to whatever he's using.... and see how long it takes him to notice.
I use Photoshop because for my needs it Sucks Less than the alternatives. I'll switch to the GIMP when it Sucks Less than Photoshop. The fact that one is free and the other costs hundreds of dollars isn't a factor here. Neither is the "ethics" of free software and open formats. The fact is that FOSS has yet to produce an image editor that Sucks Less than commercial equivalents for my needs. My needs are not simple basic image editing. My needs are industrial strength heavy lifting and a replacement needs to be a drop-in solution with a minimal learning curve. File format compatibility is the one thing I have to have - not some argument about why I made a wrong choice in 1997 when I'd never even heard of the GIMP and Photoshop was The Only Image Editor at my school*.:P
Artists are, by and large, not programmers. I can tell perl from c (on a good day) - just don't ask me to write any. Or compile it. Photoshop is worth the money for me - unlike Knuth, I don't have the time or ability to spend years and years and years developing a "better" FOSS equivalent that does what I need.
Until FOSS advocates realize that people are still buying horribly proprietary software because it does what they need better than FOSS, and until those same advocates stop blaming those users, Linux will never be truly "ready for the desktop" in the Windows or MacOS sense of the term. Be, IRIX, OS/2, sure - but how many grandmothers use OS/2?
* My Pile Of Files doesn't go back that far, fortunately. Only to '98 or so.
I used Photoshop 5.5 since its release. OS X 10.5 and Apple's move to Intel processors has forced me to upgrade - if it wasn't for that, I'd still be slogging along running Classic on top of OS X. PSCS has added a couple of things I like, but overall most of the bullet-point features are largely unused. I haven't heard anything "bad" about CS3, but I haven't heard anything good, either - this is the first point in favor of NOT ugprading.
(and for those who are all OMFG WHY U NOT PHOTOSHIP IN QUAD XEON MAC, well... doing computer graphics legally costs money. A frightful, disgustingly MASSIVE amount of money. A few hundred dollars buys PSCS3 or a good deal of food. And food doesn't ping a webserver. Yet.)
I haven't used it, to be honest. But I've talked to people who have and from our discussions I came to the conclusion that the GIMP is closer in functionality to PSP than it is to Photoshop - regardless of how close it gets to either.:)
Slashdot Mirror
If this ISN'T what they're developing..... it makes me wonder what they WOULD be. To my understanding, the holding company with the rights had been working on just this idea for quite awhile now!
... but awhile back, both Terry Nation (who created B7) and Paul Darrow (who played Avon) talked about the idea of a revival. Not a remake a la BSG but a continuation a la the new Doctor Who. The premise I've heard talked about by both was to be that Avon - and only Avon - had survived the final scene, and, years later (20-30, I'd say!) escapes from a Federation prison and takes one last can't-win-but-try-anyway shot at it.
Think Napoleon escaping Elba and the battle of Waterloo, only hopefully without the hemorrhoids.
If this is what Sky is commissioning, and if it's done well (and with Paul Darrow and hopefully Jacqueline Pearce reprising Servalan), then it'll be the fitting finale to Blake's 7 that fans have been waiting for since the series wrapped decades ago.
The series doesn't need a remake or a reboot - what it does need is for the loose ends to be tied up.
That's what it was called. I couldn't remember - it's been years and years since I switched over.
This was stupid.
Unless they have something really, really specific in mind that the market can't provide.
Remember, macs had SCSI despite the expense because the market had nothing that did anything similar available at the time. They had SCSI until peripheral busses like Firewire and USB arrived, at which point they dumped it like a dead rat. See also their long string of proprietary monitor connectors - the 25-pin mac standard, Applevision, ACD - the latter two of which provide essentially the same functionality for two different generations of technology.
In my experience, Apple's the kind of company who's willing to let other companies make the bits (including software), if the bits do what they need. If they can't get anything useful from third parties, they will make it themselves. The best example there (after the Mac itself) would be software - MP3 players on MacOS were unstable, crash-prone winamp clones until Apple bought an audio software company and then iTunes came along.... and entry level through prosumer (and even pro, depending on who you talk to) video editing on the mac SUCKED ASS until Apple bought a chunk of video editing software and twisted it into the awesome that is Final Cut Pro.
Agreed re: the focus on radio waves. Think of how much effort it takes to track signals from our own probes - and NONE of them have even made it to the next star system over, let alone into serious "interstellar space." And let's not forget that a good amount of the static you hear on conventional radio is kicked out by - guess what - stars. When you consider just how powerful a noise generator that is and just how many of the danged things there are, it's incredibly likely that anything out there using radio would simply get lost in the background noise.
You're stuck with non-upgradeable video in EVERY Apple product except for the powermac, which starts at around 2,800$.
:(
That being the ONLY feature I really care about (no use for dolby-whatever, bluetooth, wiffy, etc), I find it to be one hell of a steep entry point.
The most irritating thing about their transition to intel is that it brought the craptastic intel mobo video across the bottom line - the old PPC minis had built-in ATI graphics. Crappy ATI graphics, mind you, but discreet video ram. None of this "eating your system ram" crap. Screw that- I need that RAM. I need it for PORN, DAMMIT.
Actually, I need it for applications, but still - a crap video chipset that eats system memory doesn't exactly give me a case of the warm fuzzies when browsing the Apple store.
Mod parent troll, please. Battle Angel is a Cameron project, not a Bay project.
Which is good. With Bay we would have gotten decent pacing, top-knotch effects, good cinematography, massive continuity errors and zero rewatchability.
With Cameron, we'll get great pacing, excellent visual effects, killer cinematography.... and Celine Dion.
Apparently something is in development for a 2010 release, but I'll be damned if I'm going to bother to get an imdb account to find out more.
I agree, Robotech would probably sell better over here... though Macross Plus seems to have done a hell of a lot better than The Shadow Chronicles is doing.
Having watched subtitled versions of Macross and Mospeada (and having suffered through The Horrors Of Minmei in two languages), I'm weighing in with the (doubtless smaller) pro-Robotech crowd. The core story is pretty good, and it's a formative part of my childhood.
If you haven't seen the original version of the first ghost in the shell then you should find a copy of it and watch it.
Or better, find a copy of the manga and read that. It's so much better that there's no effective basis for comparison.
Apple makes great hardware? Since when?
From 1984 through 1997. Quality of Apple kit has rocketed straight downhill since The Second Coming Of Jobs. I have a few Quadras (one with an A/UX install) and a 9600 that still work perfectly fine. I'm still using a beige G3 on a daily basis - 187+ days of uptime at the last reboot and that's only because the OS (debian) pooped on me.
The post-Beige era brought cheaper (still decent for the most part, but cheaper nevertheless) quality components - noteably Apple's passion for Maxtor hard drives (less of an issue these days, but the stigma remains). In my subjective experience, the quality of Apple desktops has been in steady decline since the iMac and the quality of their laptops has been dropping since the Powerbook G4. The G4 at work had a power supply replaced and a logic board replaced (seperate incidents). All four of our G5s have been serviced at least once - two or three times in at least one case. We had a closet of dead iMacs (before we just threw 'em out). Yet we have 68k machines that have been running hypercard stacks since the very early 90s - six to seven days a week, getting pounded on by the public - and they're still chugging along.
Conversely, spending a few hours dealing with the complete retards that staff the Apple store tech support booth once every year or so beats the hell out of troubleshooting a pile of whitebox PC kit that may or may not sanely work together. When it came time to upgrade my work PC, rather than dick around with the staggering list of options - all of which had sixty more things than I needed, none of which had exactly every feature I wanted - I just PO'ed an intel imac and installed Windows XP on it.
Given how incredibly painless that was (haven't been back into OS X since the install - it feels like a bad KDE theme compared to the minimalism of XP with the tonka toys turned off) - I think that hardware quality issues aside, Apple still gets props for producing the tightest PC kit on the market. An XP install on a "real" PC - and I've done several, under a few different configurations, though I'm by no means an expert - is orders of magnitude more painful than it is on a mac.
Google and Apple are both much-much loved by slashdotters. Apple makes sexy kit that (for the most part) works very well. Google makes a search engines (and other software) that (for the most part) works very well. In a world dominated by shitty computers that don't work very well loaded with operating systems that don't work very well, products that Suck Less are going to get noticed. It "helps" that Apple has a Geek Chic image, and that Google employees have extensively evangelized what an incredibly AWESUM place Google is to work.
Yay.
At the of the day, Apple charges lamorghini prices for chevette parts in cadillac boxes* and Google promises "don't be evil" while collecting and tracking data at a volume that probably makes the NSA green with envy. I personally find this to be irritating (on the part of apple) and heinously evil shit (on the part of google), but both companies are Best Of Breed, and as long as their products Suck Less than everything else on the market, they'll be loved by the slashdot crowd - and any questionable activity will be rationalized or ignored by the fanbase.
* Yes, an equivalent PC that has every last one of the features a Mac packs will cost more. But I can upgrade the video card on a 400$ Dell. The entry level for upgradeable video in the Apple world is currently 2,799$, and the starting point for a useable (non-intel) video chipset (non-upgradeable) is currently ~1,200$. Oh, and the Intel minis cost more than the PPC minis did, with arguably worse video. Mention any of this in an Apple thread and you'll be modded troll or flamebait.
So in what way is the iphone 'considerably more open'.
:P
Because it's cool to own one.
Developing an app for a phone that runs symbian won't get you laid, I'm sorry to say.
A quarter a game - a game with three or four LIVES? Sweet deal.
A dollar or two to start playing, another dollar to KEEP playing, another dollar if you miss that goddamned checkpoint by a fortieth of a second? I don't care of Cruisin' USA has a nice huge sit-down cabinet. I'll play it on the N64 with a hell of a lot less of a monetary burn.
The cost-per-minute to play modern arcade games has put me off completely. I'll drop a few quarters on Q*Bert at the bar, but beyond that.... I really enjoy my Nintendo DS.
Get real. Whatever this thing turns out to be, you can bet your monkey it won't be as pretty as the iPhone. As easy to use, maybe. But it sounds like it's aimed at a different market - a market that won't blindly pay out the ass for the kind of experience Apple offers. Which means it's not an iPhone competitor. Much the same way anything-that-plays-music is not an iPod competitor, though pundits continue to insist that IT IS OMG!!! to drive up their page views. :P
You could argue that the Sega CD and the Turbografx CD (and the 3DO) brought ridiculous load times and boring cutscenes (and loads of FMV) to the console space well before the Playstation popularized it.
Me, I'm happy that some game studios are starting to wise up and insert the ability to skip the damned cut scenes - if you like the game (oppose story) enough to want to play it again after you're done, having to stop every ten minutes for an HD1080i closeup of Captain Emo Protagonist shedding a tear over the loss of his $whatever really, really poops all over the replay value.
This is true. Less wires == more better.
However, you'd think that by gutting all of those bits out of a Macbook the end result would be cheaper, not nearly twice the price.
I have a 13" powerbook G4 with 802.11g, bluetooth, firewire, and a lot of other buzzword-compliant googaws on board. It's small. Sure, it's only 867mhz with 640 ram, but it does everything I need a laptop to do when I need a laptop (which is almost never) - media playback, web browsing, wireless, terminal/ssh.
I can get all that in an Asus EEE PC for 300-500$, or approximately 0.16-0.27 the price of the Macbook Air.
And the EEE has rj45.
Sure, it doesn't (easily) run OS X or Photoshop, but that's what my desktop is for. Sure, it's not as pretty. But it's small, it's functional, it has more features I need/want than the Macbook Air (which I'm sure could be added to said for more money on top of its already grotesque price point), and it's much more reasonably priced.
The Macbook Air reminds me of the Apple Cube from a few years back - Pro priced, lacking a bunch of the features that mac the Pro pricing tolerable, pushing size/formfactor as the makeup feature... and with an initial MSRP of $1,799.
Maybe in five or six years, when I can get one used for what I paid for my (also used) powerbook. Until then, the featureset and the price point are way too out of whack for my wallet.
I'm done trolling and troll-feeding. Let's talk about something useful.
So, what does this mean? Blender is fine as it is?
As far as I know, it is. Like anything else, it could probably stand anything from some to huge amount of improvement. I personally find the interface unuseable, but I also find Maya and Rhino to be a real pain to use. It can import and export a variety of fairly common formats, which means it's relatively easy to interoperate between Blender and other applications. So long as it doesn't do anything "special" to the files it exports, this means it's possible to - if it suits your needs - integrate Blender into a production toolchain. I don't do (much) animation, so I really can't speak about its effectiveness in that regard.
Yep, there is no FOSS alternative to creating a proprietary file format used for animation. But that would be a really ironic piece of software if it did come into existence.
.psd support? Apparently .doc's proformat is worth reverse engineering with open office, but if you're a creative professional then you're an asshole for using .psd and deserve to be berated.
:P You're probably the kind of guy who'd insist on a complete point-by-point list of every single difference between Word and Emacs, then piss on any of Word's hypothetical advantages because it uses a proformat. Which the FOSS community has already gone to great hassle to "support" Both Word and Emacs are fully capable of spitting out text files, and when you need a text file, that's all that really matters.
Right, because proprietary formats are WHY people keep using proprietary software.
Stop focusing on the format. Start looking at what people are getting out of the prosoft that they aren't getting out of the FOSS.
which is the only issues I ever hear about when it comes to the Gimp compared to Photoshop
You don't hear them bitching about gimp's lack of
As for Blender.... some people find it moderately useful. However, most people I've talked to that have gotten anything done with various forms of prosoft can't stand the thing. The most frequent hangup is the interface - which, to be fair, is the most frequent hangup with every 3d application, regardless of price. All the powerful ones have high learning curves, and they all function in different and often counter-intuitive ways from each other.
As for "what features exactly," don't be an asshole.
... is for there to actually BE FOSS alternatives.
.obj seems to be pretty useable, and interchanges between Blender and Max, so (for modelling, anyway) it's down to learning curve and individual application features.
Currently these exist for Office, web browsers, IRC clients, and a wealth of programming language, server functionality, networking tools, etc.
Where FOSS fails and fails hard is in the creative space - and I don't mean grammar checking or forty different ways to parse text. I mean, ultimately, FOSS alternatives for applications like the Macrodobe MX and CS suites, the Final Cut Studio suite, 3d Studio MAX, etc. The areas where the major ISVs are still raking in buckets of money.
The natural response to that statement would be to extoll the virtues of The GIMP, Blender, etc - which is ultimately missing the point. I'm not talking about basic funtionality (for which both apps are perfectly useful!), I'm talking about the hard, nasty, horrifying shit that nobody wants to program without a fat salary and plenty of fringe benefits. The kind of functionality that keeps creative art nerds who can't program paying thousands - or tens of thousands - of dollars a year for the aforementioned applications.
Beyond that...
Your grandmother will care when it's as easy to use as the Mac you insisted she get.
Your 3d modeling geek friend will care when something MAX or Maya compatible comes around. Fortunately,
Your video editing friend will be a real challenge to convince. FOSS is not renowned for being user-friendly, and it's really, really hard to top Final Cut Pro and its interaction with the Quicktime API. For what it does and the users it's aimed at, the Final Cut Studio is cheap.
Your gamer geek friend wouldn't care either way, so long as it runs all of his games.
Joe Average - who doesn't play games, doesn't use photoshop or big 3d suites, doesn't use AutoCAD.... if it looks like and functions like whatever he's used to, you could probably switch his computer, change the desktop wallpaper on the new box to whatever he's using.... and see how long it takes him to notice.
Precisely.
:P
I use Photoshop because for my needs it Sucks Less than the alternatives. I'll switch to the GIMP when it Sucks Less than Photoshop. The fact that one is free and the other costs hundreds of dollars isn't a factor here. Neither is the "ethics" of free software and open formats. The fact is that FOSS has yet to produce an image editor that Sucks Less than commercial equivalents for my needs. My needs are not simple basic image editing. My needs are industrial strength heavy lifting and a replacement needs to be a drop-in solution with a minimal learning curve. File format compatibility is the one thing I have to have - not some argument about why I made a wrong choice in 1997 when I'd never even heard of the GIMP and Photoshop was The Only Image Editor at my school*.
Artists are, by and large, not programmers. I can tell perl from c (on a good day) - just don't ask me to write any. Or compile it. Photoshop is worth the money for me - unlike Knuth, I don't have the time or ability to spend years and years and years developing a "better" FOSS equivalent that does what I need.
Until FOSS advocates realize that people are still buying horribly proprietary software because it does what they need better than FOSS, and until those same advocates stop blaming those users, Linux will never be truly "ready for the desktop" in the Windows or MacOS sense of the term. Be, IRIX, OS/2, sure - but how many grandmothers use OS/2?
* My Pile Of Files doesn't go back that far, fortunately. Only to '98 or so.
If they didn't "embrace" it then *.doc compatibility wouldn't be such a highly touted bullet point of open office, now would it? :|
I hear that.
I used Photoshop 5.5 since its release. OS X 10.5 and Apple's move to Intel processors has forced me to upgrade - if it wasn't for that, I'd still be slogging along running Classic on top of OS X. PSCS has added a couple of things I like, but overall most of the bullet-point features are largely unused. I haven't heard anything "bad" about CS3, but I haven't heard anything good, either - this is the first point in favor of NOT ugprading.
(and for those who are all OMFG WHY U NOT PHOTOSHIP IN QUAD XEON MAC, well... doing computer graphics legally costs money. A frightful, disgustingly MASSIVE amount of money. A few hundred dollars buys PSCS3 or a good deal of food. And food doesn't ping a webserver. Yet.)
I haven't used it, to be honest. But I've talked to people who have and from our discussions I came to the conclusion that the GIMP is closer in functionality to PSP than it is to Photoshop - regardless of how close it gets to either. :)
Indeed.
.doc as a Necessary Evil, but totally froths at the mouth with .psd. Bit of a double standard if you ask me. :)
Pity those who have material locked up in SCITEX and other deceased formats.
I love how the FOSS community embraces