I find that people from generations who didn't grow up with computers and GUIs are remarkably sensitive to the purely visual aspects of a user interface, (e.g. the placement of the desktop). They become confused and disoriented when things look "all different". I take one look at Firefox and it is completely transparent to me. This might not be true with somebody not as technically adept.
There are also other things, such as antialiased fonts, font size and icon size, that make native widgets attractive. For example, before I started using 1.3-kde, everything was tiny, and if I tried to enlarge it icons fell off the edge of the save dialog. This annoys the shit out of me.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Seriously, do you think a perponderence of people even use the features that Photoshop has over Gimp? My department, for instance, bought two licenses for CS so that we could crop and size some photos, and do some very basic web graphics.
The boss turned down my suggestion, I think, because of the usual suspicion and fear that surrounds GNU software: "What? It can't be free. There must be some catch. It might even be illegal." The only downside that Gimp has is the annoyance of, "Oooh I don't like it the interface is all different" from my coworkers. But like they say, nobody ever got fired for buying (insert your favorite 800-lb gorilla corporation here).
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It runs on Linux, and it doesn't cost $650.
Adobe really is an 800 lb gorilla. Even their educational prices for Photoshop are $300. By comparison, Macromedia Director Pro is $100 (educational), with the full suite for only 150. Even if you factor in the base price of Director, it's a helluva better deal. The only reason Adobe charges so damn much is because they know a certain number of people will buy it regardless.
For the most part, the only people who read it are a few close friends and my girlfriend. I mostly use it as a design testbed and a place to rant.
However, there's nothing preventing you from giving your password out to some of your friends, or even putting it on the webpage itself. In a gif, better yet. The scripts that run these things aren't that smart, and clearly the 1000 odd posts on my website weren't done by a human. I'm not important enough..
I live in the urbs, I drink cappuccinos, and I work for an academic research unit. My computer is not an iMac, but a PC with XP and Slackware. I'm a euromutt of catholic derivation, and I have pretty broad interests.
But that's pretty damn funny, I'll admit. They forgot, though, that they're all writing dark fantasy novels which will never be published.
There are far too many weblog addicts out there who are excessively vain, and are under some kind of bizarre pretense that they matter, and they seem to exist solely by jacking each other off. Hrmph. But you have to admit, MT users are a little less likely to be whiny baby-bats than, say, livejournal users.
That looks a lot more robost than MT (mind you I'm still using 2.65). When this whole comments thing started getting out of hand, I actually edited every damn post since last year to be comments-closed.
Maybe I'll switch too. I was planning to do a redesign during the break. Does it have pretty versatile templating?
If your case is like mine, where mt is stored in a directory just off of your public web site, do this: use a.htaccess to put a password on your whole MT directory. They can't access comments.cgi (assuming it's just a bot doing the spamming), they can't post comments. I don't really like the idea of people touching my CGIs anyway. Make sure your robots.txt excludes the MT directory as well.
That is, assuming you don't give a damn about people's comments.
Your argument was so convincing that I'm going to pick up right now from my comfortable Bay Area apartment where I am very lucratively compensated by an University for my skills and move to the hills of the Ozarks and live off of berries and trapped rabbits with a hair shirt infested with more lice than are present in the entirety of Calcutta.
If you're so unhappy with the state of American business, go out and start a business of your own instead of trolling Slashdot. If you don't like the world, I elect you a committee of one to change it. People ranting about how the 1% is screwing them never changed the world, and very frequently, people with the crazy notion that it could be better actually did, and the vast majority of them weren't fighting things like anti-competitive statues and patent lawyers, but people with guns, clubs and knives.
One thing I'm sure that most people can agree on is that there aren't enough MBA holders who are really in the know about technology: either they know next to nothing, or what they know is the happy lie that they tell to high school kids. My boss could've saved something like $6000 in the past few months if she'd known squat about good, well-structured web design. In this and other cases I've further observed that people who are extremely technically illiterate rarely hire tech consultants, because admitting their deficient knowledge would diminish their authority.
Actually, I've found this in retail too - I've looked at too many memos and wondered if these punks had ever seen a latte, let alone made one. Practical experience actually makes companies better.
I graduated about three years ago. My friends, who were a pretty nerdy bunch, got very excited about chemistry and robotics tinkering, but this may have just been a product of our excellent, very charismatic chemistry teacher/tinker. Robotics stuff will always draw big crowds, especially since it requires a synthesis skills. However, it also requires a lot of capital.
If you're looking for something a little more computer oriented, I found that the schools in my area, the bleeding heart of silicon valley, very impoverished in terms of even beginning computer science. I knew a bunch of people who would have been interested in a club or something which taught programming principles under the auspices of building games.
It's focused on putting otherwise one-of-a-kind materials online for preservation and ease of access, rather than Byron: The Critical Anthology or Cather on the Rye. It's kind of a mammoth, innefficient beaurocracy, though; I don't agree with some of the practices (such as sending texts off to India to be scrivened, rather than just using OCR software), they're very, very slow to incorporate data, and there are a lot of other problems which stem from the fact that most of them are not computer people, but MIMS holders (librarians).
The fact that Google is doing it gives me hope. Hell, maybe I can jump ship.
I really like some of the games that EA produces. I'm not too into their sports division, never have been, but they have a track record of making some badass software. As for the hours, that's the games industry; love it or get out.
And you know, regarding EA Wife, I've never known a worker who got taken advantage of who didn't consent to it, either by their silence or their signiture. The manager who won't let you take a few days off because you're suffering from a nervous breakdown or your marriage is falling apart is a pretty piss-poor manager, and you should go over their head and explain that to their bosses. Hell, even Starbucks, which I assure you is a far greater evil than EA, has an anonymous whistleblower hotline. A lot of people expect their bosses to read their minds - if you work an 80 hour week without giving "feedback," they assume you're OK with working 80 hour weeks.
My organization, a university, isn't quite as draconian as that - we don't have local admin access, yes, but we have write access and as such I've been able to install a few extra apps without electing to inform my boss, such as emacs - but listen to this man, he has a big point.
The way you get things done in a big organization is you submit proposals when your boss is confronted with a problem. You can only influence your immediate superior (and maybe a few admins if they like you well enough), and that's it. If they don't have the power, you're basically out of luck - either get into a position where you can have influence, or leave. You can only change things from the top down by rising in the ranks, or from the ground up by starting your own company.
The latter is probably what would do the most good, because this large multinational company would say, "Hey, our competitor is undercutting us! How?" Well, because they're running free software, dumbass. We need open-source entrepeneurs, not just evangelists.
That's more of a problem with the Corporate/NeoCon climate: everything for me, right now, damn the future and damn the consequences. Boot the NeoCons, and hell, you might see environmental reform too. Most Americans, SUVs and Atkins aside, wouldn't wilfully screw other countries, and would like to see our domestic businesses thrive on its own accord so that somebody can eat besides Joe Millionaire. They've just fallen for the NeoCon's trap of hiding behind God.
Maybe they just want RedHat to charge an easy per-unit price. Doesn't RedHat charge companies primarily for support subscriptions, based on the number of incidents? I know Microsoft charges up front by the number of processors that its operating system is running on, in addition to the support incidents.
Dell likes to sell users the whole enchilada: hardware, software, and support, as one tightly integrated package, which works better with the MS model from a pricing perspective. If they were reselling the support pacakge, they would have to track companies more closely, which makes sales a bitch.
And RedHat is kind of pricy. However, if I were firing ideas to The Boss, I'd probably mention RedHat or Solaris, the latter only because my employer's server guys have a Sun fetish.
I read an article a few days ago by Ted Turner of all people. He openly deplored the oligopoly that's strangling America's business while discouraging competition and innovation.
The companies which seem to have made it big in the past year or so (like google have done so probably in large part because they didn't turn into a big wad of shellac like Yahoo - that is, because they're not evil. It's funny that the business innovation which is turning out to be strong enough to trounce the big boys even in this environment is Good. You see it in other places too, like In & Out Burger, where the workers are fast, happy, efficient, and very well compensated (general managers make like $80k+, so I'm told). Sheesh, this almost makes a man optimistic.
That said, beating Yahoo isn't as big as beating IBM. Yahoo only had a couple of years to get established, IBM's been pushing out tills since before World War II. And because I know there are trolls out there, I don't think even the USPO would let somebody patent Good.
None of them are very viable. Imagine approaching a boss, and saying, "I want to get a server with Red Hat, it's only x dollars, and they give us support, they have this gui, it's the industry standard," etc. They would probably shoot it down because that's what bosses do, but they'd listen.
Now imagine, "I'd like to install Gentoo, this super-hacker linux distro with a bsd-like ports system and cutting edge kernel hacks."
Yeah. Well, I know that Red Hat has some odd hacks on its kernel, nonstandard utils, and I really prefer the 2.6, but let's just remember that the people who make the decisions are MBA and MIMS holders. They look at brands and important-sounding statistics, not source or ttys.
As a student of English Literature (both capitalized, yes) I have to say that I disagree. This is a great basic idea, if a bit facist. One skill anyone can benefit from is being able to write and speak very good Standard English.
Standard American English isn't exactly what most, say, white middle class Americans use. What any kind of interactive tool would be useful for is people further from this sanskrit we're calling SAE, like immigrants and ethnic minorities, who get shit on for not speaking it well enough. I'm not saying, "level all cultural distinctions," I'm pointing out some facts which aren't likely to change any time soon whether we like them or not.
Re:But what's the objection to hell?
on
Doom Movie Update
·
· Score: 1
Well yeah, I agree with you on that point. Literalist interpreters would love it. I'd love it for many of the same reasons. But:
A) The mentalities of hollywood and most huge businesses stress minimizing negatives and risks, rather than maximizing potential gains with the possibility of failure. That's why they would rather, for instance, put out more mediocre Britney Spears albums than one by an innovative artist who some people might dislike, and why many films are described as simpy, derivative and morally easy. And
B) The portrayal of demons and hell would offend some people. Imagine: Parent's groups would come out against it saying it's trying to indoctrinate computer game fans, and the same "values-oriented" ones who got video games banned after Colombine, would say it's causing kids to shoot one another on the pretense of being demons. Those people have a disproportionate amount of media sway.
Mutated super viruses are safe. We know viruses exist. We all fear them. They're a universal. Put it through a focus group and see what people are more afraid of, hell or smallpox, and you'll probably get the latter. Movies are made by corporations, and corporations are risk-averse by nature.
And you bet your ass Hell is taboo. Hell would alienate many Christians, crazy parent special interest groups, and, for that matter, athiests. Hollywood is an unholy amalgaman of hedonists, Scientologists, orthodox types and coked-out actors who think that they make a difference by supporting charities. This smattering of fringe groups wants to think they speak for America, red states and blue states alike, and for that matter, the whole goddamn world. They are mortally afraid of anything anybody would object to (except, of course, Muslim stereotypes). They probably have consulting firms set up to drain stories of controversial religious content.
6.2. If You assert a patent infringement claim . . . alleging that the Participant Software . . . directly or indirectly infringes any patent, then any and all rights granted directly or indirectly by such Participant to You under Sections 2.1 and/or 2.2 of this License shall, upon 60 days notice from Participant terminate prospectively . ..
Well, that makes me happy. It seems to say that if you hold the Sun license, you can't patent-shakedown anybody in the Sun community. I'll buy that; getting this kind of license adopted by many people is probably the only way to end the horror. I'd be interested to see whether Microsoft gets all ornery about this license.
Of course, I'm also interested to see how much I'll get flamed by even implying support for a license besides the GNU GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that people from generations who didn't grow up with computers and GUIs are remarkably sensitive to the purely visual aspects of a user interface, (e.g. the placement of the desktop). They become confused and disoriented when things look "all different". I take one look at Firefox and it is completely transparent to me. This might not be true with somebody not as technically adept.
There are also other things, such as antialiased fonts, font size and icon size, that make native widgets attractive. For example, before I started using 1.3-kde, everything was tiny, and if I tried to enlarge it icons fell off the edge of the save dialog. This annoys the shit out of me.
See http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html.
Seriously, do you think a perponderence of people even use the features that Photoshop has over Gimp? My department, for instance, bought two licenses for CS so that we could crop and size some photos, and do some very basic web graphics.
The boss turned down my suggestion, I think, because of the usual suspicion and fear that surrounds GNU software: "What? It can't be free. There must be some catch. It might even be illegal." The only downside that Gimp has is the annoyance of, "Oooh I don't like it the interface is all different" from my coworkers. But like they say, nobody ever got fired for buying (insert your favorite 800-lb gorilla corporation here).
It runs on Linux, and it doesn't cost $650.
Adobe really is an 800 lb gorilla. Even their educational prices for Photoshop are $300. By comparison, Macromedia Director Pro is $100 (educational), with the full suite for only 150. Even if you factor in the base price of Director, it's a helluva better deal. The only reason Adobe charges so damn much is because they know a certain number of people will buy it regardless.
For the most part, the only people who read it are a few close friends and my girlfriend. I mostly use it as a design testbed and a place to rant.
However, there's nothing preventing you from giving your password out to some of your friends, or even putting it on the webpage itself. In a gif, better yet. The scripts that run these things aren't that smart, and clearly the 1000 odd posts on my website weren't done by a human. I'm not important enough..
I live in the urbs, I drink cappuccinos, and I work for an academic research unit. My computer is not an iMac, but a PC with XP and Slackware. I'm a euromutt of catholic derivation, and I have pretty broad interests.
But that's pretty damn funny, I'll admit. They forgot, though, that they're all writing dark fantasy novels which will never be published.
There are far too many weblog addicts out there who are excessively vain, and are under some kind of bizarre pretense that they matter, and they seem to exist solely by jacking each other off. Hrmph. But you have to admit, MT users are a little less likely to be whiny baby-bats than, say, livejournal users.
That looks a lot more robost than MT (mind you I'm still using 2.65). When this whole comments thing started getting out of hand, I actually edited every damn post since last year to be comments-closed.
Maybe I'll switch too. I was planning to do a redesign during the break. Does it have pretty versatile templating?
If your case is like mine, where mt is stored in a directory just off of your public web site, do this: use a .htaccess to put a password on your whole MT directory. They can't access comments.cgi (assuming it's just a bot doing the spamming), they can't post comments. I don't really like the idea of people touching my CGIs anyway. Make sure your robots.txt excludes the MT directory as well.
That is, assuming you don't give a damn about people's comments.
Your argument was so convincing that I'm going to pick up right now from my comfortable Bay Area apartment where I am very lucratively compensated by an University for my skills and move to the hills of the Ozarks and live off of berries and trapped rabbits with a hair shirt infested with more lice than are present in the entirety of Calcutta.
If you're so unhappy with the state of American business, go out and start a business of your own instead of trolling Slashdot. If you don't like the world, I elect you a committee of one to change it. People ranting about how the 1% is screwing them never changed the world, and very frequently, people with the crazy notion that it could be better actually did, and the vast majority of them weren't fighting things like anti-competitive statues and patent lawyers, but people with guns, clubs and knives.
One thing I'm sure that most people can agree on is that there aren't enough MBA holders who are really in the know about technology: either they know next to nothing, or what they know is the happy lie that they tell to high school kids. My boss could've saved something like $6000 in the past few months if she'd known squat about good, well-structured web design. In this and other cases I've further observed that people who are extremely technically illiterate rarely hire tech consultants, because admitting their deficient knowledge would diminish their authority.
Actually, I've found this in retail too - I've looked at too many memos and wondered if these punks had ever seen a latte, let alone made one. Practical experience actually makes companies better.
I graduated about three years ago. My friends, who were a pretty nerdy bunch, got very excited about chemistry and robotics tinkering, but this may have just been a product of our excellent, very charismatic chemistry teacher/tinker. Robotics stuff will always draw big crowds, especially since it requires a synthesis skills. However, it also requires a lot of capital.
If you're looking for something a little more computer oriented, I found that the schools in my area, the bleeding heart of silicon valley, very impoverished in terms of even beginning computer science. I knew a bunch of people who would have been interested in a club or something which taught programming principles under the auspices of building games.
You're right, dictionary.com has a pretty interesting excerpt on that. Hmm. I guess I've never used it in a professional context. My bad.
He was still being a troll though:)
Awkward use of the vocative. Should be, "Hey, science boy . . ."
OK is not a word; should be "okay."
Need a semicolon (;) after "wait." "Oh, wait" is more of an imperative than a preposition.
Improper style: ellipses should be . . .
A spellchecker plugin would save me so many flames.
I happen to work for one.
It's focused on putting otherwise one-of-a-kind materials online for preservation and ease of access, rather than Byron: The Critical Anthology or Cather on the Rye. It's kind of a mammoth, innefficient beaurocracy, though; I don't agree with some of the practices (such as sending texts off to India to be scrivened, rather than just using OCR software), they're very, very slow to incorporate data, and there are a lot of other problems which stem from the fact that most of them are not computer people, but MIMS holders (librarians).
The fact that Google is doing it gives me hope. Hell, maybe I can jump ship.
I really like some of the games that EA produces. I'm not too into their sports division, never have been, but they have a track record of making some badass software. As for the hours, that's the games industry; love it or get out.
And you know, regarding EA Wife, I've never known a worker who got taken advantage of who didn't consent to it, either by their silence or their signiture. The manager who won't let you take a few days off because you're suffering from a nervous breakdown or your marriage is falling apart is a pretty piss-poor manager, and you should go over their head and explain that to their bosses. Hell, even Starbucks, which I assure you is a far greater evil than EA, has an anonymous whistleblower hotline. A lot of people expect their bosses to read their minds - if you work an 80 hour week without giving "feedback," they assume you're OK with working 80 hour weeks.
My organization, a university, isn't quite as draconian as that - we don't have local admin access, yes, but we have write access and as such I've been able to install a few extra apps without electing to inform my boss, such as emacs - but listen to this man, he has a big point.
The way you get things done in a big organization is you submit proposals when your boss is confronted with a problem. You can only influence your immediate superior (and maybe a few admins if they like you well enough), and that's it. If they don't have the power, you're basically out of luck - either get into a position where you can have influence, or leave. You can only change things from the top down by rising in the ranks, or from the ground up by starting your own company.
The latter is probably what would do the most good, because this large multinational company would say, "Hey, our competitor is undercutting us! How?" Well, because they're running free software, dumbass. We need open-source entrepeneurs, not just evangelists.
That's more of a problem with the Corporate/NeoCon climate: everything for me, right now, damn the future and damn the consequences. Boot the NeoCons, and hell, you might see environmental reform too. Most Americans, SUVs and Atkins aside, wouldn't wilfully screw other countries, and would like to see our domestic businesses thrive on its own accord so that somebody can eat besides Joe Millionaire. They've just fallen for the NeoCon's trap of hiding behind God.
KDE and 1 gig of ram to run it smoothly?
Maybe they just want RedHat to charge an easy per-unit price. Doesn't RedHat charge companies primarily for support subscriptions, based on the number of incidents? I know Microsoft charges up front by the number of processors that its operating system is running on, in addition to the support incidents.
Dell likes to sell users the whole enchilada: hardware, software, and support, as one tightly integrated package, which works better with the MS model from a pricing perspective. If they were reselling the support pacakge, they would have to track companies more closely, which makes sales a bitch.
And RedHat is kind of pricy. However, if I were firing ideas to The Boss, I'd probably mention RedHat or Solaris, the latter only because my employer's server guys have a Sun fetish.
I read an article a few days ago by Ted Turner of all people. He openly deplored the oligopoly that's strangling America's business while discouraging competition and innovation.
The companies which seem to have made it big in the past year or so (like google have done so probably in large part because they didn't turn into a big wad of shellac like Yahoo - that is, because they're not evil. It's funny that the business innovation which is turning out to be strong enough to trounce the big boys even in this environment is Good. You see it in other places too, like In & Out Burger, where the workers are fast, happy, efficient, and very well compensated (general managers make like $80k+, so I'm told). Sheesh, this almost makes a man optimistic.
That said, beating Yahoo isn't as big as beating IBM. Yahoo only had a couple of years to get established, IBM's been pushing out tills since before World War II. And because I know there are trolls out there, I don't think even the USPO would let somebody patent Good.
None of them are very viable. Imagine approaching a boss, and saying, "I want to get a server with Red Hat, it's only x dollars, and they give us support, they have this gui, it's the industry standard," etc. They would probably shoot it down because that's what bosses do, but they'd listen.
Now imagine, "I'd like to install Gentoo, this super-hacker linux distro with a bsd-like ports system and cutting edge kernel hacks."
Yeah. Well, I know that Red Hat has some odd hacks on its kernel, nonstandard utils, and I really prefer the 2.6, but let's just remember that the people who make the decisions are MBA and MIMS holders. They look at brands and important-sounding statistics, not source or ttys.
As a student of English Literature (both capitalized, yes) I have to say that I disagree. This is a great basic idea, if a bit facist. One skill anyone can benefit from is being able to write and speak very good Standard English.
Standard American English isn't exactly what most, say, white middle class Americans use. What any kind of interactive tool would be useful for is people further from this sanskrit we're calling SAE, like immigrants and ethnic minorities, who get shit on for not speaking it well enough. I'm not saying, "level all cultural distinctions," I'm pointing out some facts which aren't likely to change any time soon whether we like them or not.
Well yeah, I agree with you on that point. Literalist interpreters would love it. I'd love it for many of the same reasons. But:
A) The mentalities of hollywood and most huge businesses stress minimizing negatives and risks, rather than maximizing potential gains with the possibility of failure. That's why they would rather, for instance, put out more mediocre Britney Spears albums than one by an innovative artist who some people might dislike, and why many films are described as simpy, derivative and morally easy. And
B) The portrayal of demons and hell would offend some people. Imagine: Parent's groups would come out against it saying it's trying to indoctrinate computer game fans, and the same "values-oriented" ones who got video games banned after Colombine, would say it's causing kids to shoot one another on the pretense of being demons. Those people have a disproportionate amount of media sway.
Mutated super viruses are safe. We know viruses exist. We all fear them. They're a universal. Put it through a focus group and see what people are more afraid of, hell or smallpox, and you'll probably get the latter. Movies are made by corporations, and corporations are risk-averse by nature.
And you bet your ass Hell is taboo. Hell would alienate many Christians, crazy parent special interest groups, and, for that matter, athiests. Hollywood is an unholy amalgaman of hedonists, Scientologists, orthodox types and coked-out actors who think that they make a difference by supporting charities. This smattering of fringe groups wants to think they speak for America, red states and blue states alike, and for that matter, the whole goddamn world. They are mortally afraid of anything anybody would object to (except, of course, Muslim stereotypes). They probably have consulting firms set up to drain stories of controversial religious content.
Well, that makes me happy. It seems to say that if you hold the Sun license, you can't patent-shakedown anybody in the Sun community. I'll buy that; getting this kind of license adopted by many people is probably the only way to end the horror. I'd be interested to see whether Microsoft gets all ornery about this license.
Of course, I'm also interested to see how much I'll get flamed by even implying support for a license besides the GNU GPL.