This is one really nice photo, indeed. I should look into getting a Digital Rebel, too - tell me, can I use the lenses from my Canon AE-1 (standard analog gear)?
The point is that the only way to go seems to be self-employment, which takes a lot of preparations. Having a family to feed while building up a new business isn't exactly easy and as long as my kids are still that young, I'll stick with the job, change in case I find something better (and I'm looking) educate myself in the evening and take a degree and then get the job I want or start my own business. I should have gone to university after taking my A-levels, but one is always wiser afterwards.
Very good reply. Actually I have thought about this part a lot even before I became a father and I decided that one important point I want to teach my children is not to despise everyone, but to remember that everyone has his own agenda, and the agenda of your boss usually isn't to make you happy, but to maximize profit. (Insert obligatory South Park joke here.) There might be exceptions from this rule, but I have yet to come across a management which, when in doubt, will make the employees happy instead of the shareholders.
As for our parents - as long as I can think my dad loved his jobs, and he is with his employer for about 25 years now with no intent to change. There is the occasional rant, but all in all I always felt my dad liked his job. But nowadays those jobs simply don't exist any more where you know you can stay for the rest of your work-life like it used to be for our elders. Every job is temporary by definition, and it shows in the motivation. I can't even resent my younger brother (23 years old) for viewing the whole IT industry as a fucking joke, because from the younger people's perspective it is just that. Work long hours for shitty pay, and if you don't like it or the shareholders think they don't earn enough, you get a kick and that's it. Economy won't get any better as long as people are treated like this. Our boss started this behaviour about three years ago and managed to turn our company from a 60-people-family to a 20-small-groups-mobfest, with some exceptions like the IT department (of which I am the group head) that refuses to take anything coming from management seriously and watching the fun instead.
To get back to the parenting part of all this: If I should summarize what I want to tell my kids then it is that if something looks like shit, smells like shit and smears like shit, it probably *is* shit, no matter what everyone else says. Remember the Emperor's clothes?
My workplace is more like a sitcom, plus the people are very hackable, so it's not as much dread as you assume. It is, however, a completely pointless job as you correcty assume.
Fact is that I want to change careers as soon as I can handle it but I have some trouble deciding what to do. I have no formal training in CS, just 25 years of experience plus 8 years of experience in my profession as a media designer. I want to leave advertising alone (I'm fed up with it big deal and gladly changed my tasks at work to coding and administration when I was offered the opportunity), but would need a university degree or other formal training to get a job which feeds my family's mouths.
What kind of organization do you have in mind? Doing something worthwhile would be *great*, but most NGOs don't even pay as much as I get now (which is not very much anyway) and working for less simply is no option because, as I wrote, the family wants to eat. What should I look for IYO? (I'm seriously interested, so please share your ideas.)
It's just a matter of whether you want to stay in denial over it, or whether you want to mitigate or heal the damage by changing the attitude and realizing your son needs to see his father, as a role model, as a guardian, and as a guide, as much as possible.
Calm down, I'm pretty sure my son is all right. You're reading too much into my post, I usually work 35 hours/week so I spend a lot of time with my family. What I was saying is that I'm sure he won't be damaged if I am around a bit less. Plus, I think that it's not the amount, but the quality of the time you spend with your family. Of course there are limits to what a kid can deal with, given its age and character, but within reasonable extent there definitely is no damage. I figure it's much worse when parents watch their children's every step because they will never develop autonomy. I see the trend of overparenting with serious concern because I see what happens to those supervised kids. And it's people like you who make people think they don't spend enough time with their kids. Most people have a bad conscience about it even though the criticism doesn't really apply to them, and it leads to behaviour which IMHO is much more damaging than a father only being at home once or twice a week like it has been in the last few centuries without creating generations of mentally crippled kids.
No offense, but you should ask yourself why you over-psychologize so much in this thread. It's rather striking if you read the complete thing with my post as the parent. Telling someone he's in denial about him being a horrible parent just because he wrote that he things his son could take him being around a bit less seems over the top to me. If you like, will you share how old you are as a former teacher without kids?
> Your children WILL suffer psychologically, emotionally > and developmentally by not having a father around.
It all depends. It depends on the amount of time the father's there, on how the mother deals with the situation, and how time is spent when the father *is* at home. If a father travels on weekdays and is only home on the weekends, this need not be any problem if he spends quality time with his children and they feel comfortable with their mother. It can actually make a great relationship as the kids can look forward to the weekend because they know Dad already has some nice ideas for the weekend.
Actually I find it a bit funny how people read into my post I'm never home just because I say I don't believe my son would suffer from me being around less. (This doesn't necessarily mean you, I'm speaking generally.) I usually work 35 hours/week (at the moment it's more like 60 hours but this will end in about two weeks when the project is finished), so I'm at home a lot which is what I like most about my job. But you are completely right about working to support your family. After all, it's one thing I consider important about being a father and husband.
Yes, that was my main point. I also think that (at least here in Germany) not that many fathers are away long enough on a daily basis to a point where it's damaging. Most people work 40 hours a week, which IMO hardly qualifies as a family-killer.
My son turns two today. If it's going to get worse, my wife and I will really have a good time. It's such fun watching this litte human being developing his personality and exploring the world (which grows faster every day), even if you could explode from time to time. That's how kids are, and getting angry about it won't help anyway.;)
Same here, except a serious bit of Matrix fades in, too - lots of laws to bend and break. The environment is *very* hackable and that's fun enough to make the experience tolerable more often than not. I need a new job, I'm just not sure where to heed.
I also thought about joining the police or some government agency and actually do something useful with my IT skills instead of restarting that server because the cheap-o developer on Ba-FUCKING-li refuses to test the code on his own machine instead of the production server. The pay must be quite good, too.
What other ideas did you have? Becoming a teacher came to mind too, there even is an initiative to turn professionals into teachers as there is a huge lack of teachers, but having no university degree I will be one of the first fired when the budgets get cut, and when that happens when I'm mid-thirty and with much less real-life experience, I won't have the options I have now.
> The point is that I think your kids won't mind you > occasionally staying late at work (so long as it > doesn't happen frequently/regularly).
I know you've written you don't have kids, but as a father whose son turns two just today and whose wife is pregnant, I can tell you that you're missing an aspect you can't know.
I don't want to be at home with my family because I think my son might be somehow "damaged" by me not being there. He'd be just fine, he's a strong personality. I want to be at home to be with my family - be with my wife and see my son and the soon-to-come grow up. Kids grow up only once, you know, and watching videos isn't the same thing. I thought I could imagine how intense it is, but I had no idea. If you plan on getting kids sometime in the future, look forward to it! It's great. Stressful most of the time, but *very* rewarding.
And there's something else. I personally don't need a job, I only need *money*. Working is a pointless waste of time if you look at it objectively. You only go there for the money, and overtime isn't usually paid for, at least where I work. So why spend more time there than necessary while the family has fun at home?
> Sounds like email. The back-end is, in fact, > important. Even if the end user doesn't realize it.
Of course it is, but that was not my point. The point was that you can easily change the underlying mechanisms without the user noticing, so as more and more people access their information via web browsers, plus the spam beast, we will get to a point which will allow the replacement of e-mail (SMTP) with something more robust, without having to console hordes of whining users.
While you might think you can justify your words by saying they were sarcastic, this won't fix the underlying problem that there are things one doesn't joke about unless there's a true ring to it.
I agree with adam.skinner in so far that the environment's expectations might be steep and it's generally viewed as unacceptable to even suggest that having a family is not heaven all the time. Yes, we could all freak out at times. But this is not what I was referring to.
My point is that even if I feel like this sometimes, I'd never even jokingly suggest that playing some dumb game (and they all are dumb, if we are honest) might be more worthwhile than spending time with the family. It's not about total devotion (which is BS), it's about priorities. I spend lots of time on my own, too. But I do so when the family's asleep.
Ask yourself if you are really happy with having a family. Not in this moment, but in general. If you are honest to yourself and the answer is no, you better leave. That was my point. Sometimes it's hard to get it across even though my English is not so bad.
Bull. The terrorists win if the counter-terrorists fail to free all hostages before the round time is over.;)
FWIW, Counter-Strike seems to be the only situation in which "eliminating all terrorists" or "eliminating all counter-terrorists" work. Maybe someone should tell Dubya and Osama. Might shell in a copy of "War Games" as well.
Yes he does. It's why he wrote "Let's not forget that some of the most useful new uses for e-mail are webbased; that the underlying technology is SMTP doesn't really matter to most people."
It doesn't matter whether that HTML form uses SMTP or whatever, it's the same form to the user. So for those, E-Mail can be easily replaced with something else.
I assume you don't sleep in your car, so why don't you just take the game with you? Being a married father, I find your attitude highly questionable. Don't you miss your family enough from monday to thursday to even bother interacting with them when you come home? Then you should consider being honest to yourself and spare your wife and kid(s) the experience of having a disinterested husband/dad.
The dupes keep coming. Keep up the good work, CowboyNeal!
If this were a "real" news site like, say, GoogleNews, you would call it "informing me from several sources", not "why does this $%& Google News thing post so many dupes!!1!". Talk about selective perception. Just a thought.
Now that you've found it, would you be so kind to post a.torrent? This would be a nice one for my "strange stuff" folder (and that of many readers here, I suppose).
BTW and completely off-topic, if you don't have a "strange stuff" folder, I suggest you try and save some of that wierd stuff you stumble upon. I like to concentrate on images, YMMV. Look at it in a few years. My stuff from the mid-nineties is a priceless laugh. Impresses chicks, too. (I thought I'd mention it, this is/. after all.)
I don't mind non-professionals building layouts, actually I encourage the people I know. The problem is not with the non-professionals. It's with the professionals and it's with extending the functionality of software beyond what I would call a "natural scope".
When Quark advertised the "web functionality" of XPress 5, the PHB was all excited about all those graphics designers being able to build websites directly from the XPress layouts. They did never understand why I dismissed without seeing it - because if it *were* possible to build robust, accessible cross-browser websites with all finesses offered by an application like XPress, someone else had probably done it first, Quark being the bunch of suckers they are.
And frankly, with all those features used in the typical layout, starting from kerning, zooming, warping, rotating, transparency and not ending with extensive usage of non-web fonts definitely not installed on the client's system and current browser support, I don't think it's doable at the moment. Especially not cross-browser and without excessive use of images (which would defeat all accessibility e.g. for blind people).
My point, however, is that focused applications are A Good Thing(TM). Giving an application too many things to accomplish will lead to the application being used for things that would have better been done with other tools.
Actually there is no English word for my profession, so I chose 'designer' for simplicity's sake. It's strange to see though, that you draw conclusions from my post which aren't in there just because of this.
I am a "Mediengestalter" for seven years now (can be roughly translated as "media designer"), but design really isn't that big part in there. I am more what you call the "press guy". I don't know what you guys in the US do, but here in Europe the (small to medium-sized) printing company will only *print* and most prepress work is done by specialized prepress companies. My job is to take the data you mentioned and transform it into something which will print nicely. This includes (but is not limited to) typesetting, image manipulation, trapping, setting documents up for different printing methods and paper sizes (think printing machines, not final size of the prints) and preparing final steps like bindings etc. which all need preparation to be carried out smoothly later at the printing company.
I don't see how it is relevant for the printing process that CMYK images will be transformed to RGB for viewing on-screen. We use ICC profiles for everything, so it doesn't matter where I view or print the file, it will look about the same. I see we could use the PCS, but profiles are being really used seriously among printing companies for about three or four years among our clients, and we don't feel like shelling out 250.000 EUR for an update to our production database which will support that while CMYK + profiles works just fine.
Not quite OT I think, yes I know that Epson inkjets take RGB input (we've got some 9600's and 7600's for digital proofing). However, we make no use of this because we have all data as CMYK anyway. We also use some special RIP software which can be easily calibrated (we have two people alone for keeping an eye on the machines concerning color) and AFAIK we print PostScript to the Epsons. (The inkjets aren't exactly my territory though, nowadays I only help out the print guys when I need to and hack web applications and maintain network and servers instead.)
Actually it's pretty pointless to reply to someone who misses my point as far as you do, but I'll try to help you see the light. I guess I'm just feeding a troll, so IHBT and HAND.
The point was that the PostScript generated by XPress is in fact so lousy that it won't read it itself, generating PS error after PS error on every RIP we and our contractors have (Agfa, Linotype, CreoScitex, Canon). I am well aware that EPS and PS are pretty much the same, I have hand-written PostScript ten years ago.
OK, I can't read the review as it is slashdotted, but actually I have no idea what a professional DTP application needs JPEG or PNG support for as you need CMYK output if you want to use this professionally. (Please spare me the "but Photoshop saves CMYK JPEGs". Thank you.)
Also, just "having" PostScript output doesn't mean it's useful. XPress has EPS export for ages, yet we are still waiting for USABLE PostScript files written by XPress, leave alone *syntactically correct* PostScript. XPress can't even properly import its own EPS files, 'nuff said.
I'd really like to see a nice DTP application for Linux, maybe this is it. Mind you, I'm a professional designer, so I've used most tools on the market at one time or another, and I've yet to come across something which is usable for all daily tasks. Every app so far is only good for some cases.
"The first and last categories are regrettable, but it's only becuase we respect our constitution and don't change it like dirty underwear as the French do."
D'oh, dude. You might want to look up on the French Constitution and find out you've just made yourself royally riculous. Or you might want to read up which parts of the U.S. Constitution have been altered in the last three years by GWB only.
Don't take it personally, it's not as if you actually elected him. I mean, hey, this is democracy? Someone can steal the elections and face no serious opposition of any kind? Impressive, really. Tell me, is that "democracy" thing you're "defending" everywehere around the globe the same democracy you practice? If it is, keep it for yourselves. Please.
Brighten up, people. Don't let them make you think we were separate. We're all human, and we've got serious problems to solve. I suggest we decide to ignore the media and start solving problems. If we don't, obviously nobody will. Remember Zen. Don't let the anger dissolve your power. You *can* make a change.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one really nice photo, indeed. I should look into getting a Digital Rebel, too - tell me, can I use the lenses from my Canon AE-1 (standard analog gear)?
You bet I do.
The point is that the only way to go seems to be self-employment, which takes a lot of preparations. Having a family to feed while building up a new business isn't exactly easy and as long as my kids are still that young, I'll stick with the job, change in case I find something better (and I'm looking) educate myself in the evening and take a degree and then get the job I want or start my own business. I should have gone to university after taking my A-levels, but one is always wiser afterwards.
Very good reply. Actually I have thought about this part a lot even before I became a father and I decided that one important point I want to teach my children is not to despise everyone, but to remember that everyone has his own agenda, and the agenda of your boss usually isn't to make you happy, but to maximize profit. (Insert obligatory South Park joke here.) There might be exceptions from this rule, but I have yet to come across a management which, when in doubt, will make the employees happy instead of the shareholders.
As for our parents - as long as I can think my dad loved his jobs, and he is with his employer for about 25 years now with no intent to change. There is the occasional rant, but all in all I always felt my dad liked his job. But nowadays those jobs simply don't exist any more where you know you can stay for the rest of your work-life like it used to be for our elders. Every job is temporary by definition, and it shows in the motivation. I can't even resent my younger brother (23 years old) for viewing the whole IT industry as a fucking joke, because from the younger people's perspective it is just that. Work long hours for shitty pay, and if you don't like it or the shareholders think they don't earn enough, you get a kick and that's it. Economy won't get any better as long as people are treated like this. Our boss started this behaviour about three years ago and managed to turn our company from a 60-people-family to a 20-small-groups-mobfest, with some exceptions like the IT department (of which I am the group head) that refuses to take anything coming from management seriously and watching the fun instead.
To get back to the parenting part of all this: If I should summarize what I want to tell my kids then it is that if something looks like shit, smells like shit and smears like shit, it probably *is* shit, no matter what everyone else says. Remember the Emperor's clothes?
My workplace is more like a sitcom, plus the people are very hackable, so it's not as much dread as you assume. It is, however, a completely pointless job as you correcty assume.
Fact is that I want to change careers as soon as I can handle it but I have some trouble deciding what to do. I have no formal training in CS, just 25 years of experience plus 8 years of experience in my profession as a media designer. I want to leave advertising alone (I'm fed up with it big deal and gladly changed my tasks at work to coding and administration when I was offered the opportunity), but would need a university degree or other formal training to get a job which feeds my family's mouths.
What kind of organization do you have in mind? Doing something worthwhile would be *great*, but most NGOs don't even pay as much as I get now (which is not very much anyway) and working for less simply is no option because, as I wrote, the family wants to eat. What should I look for IYO? (I'm seriously interested, so please share your ideas.)
Calm down, I'm pretty sure my son is all right. You're reading too much into my post, I usually work 35 hours/week so I spend a lot of time with my family. What I was saying is that I'm sure he won't be damaged if I am around a bit less. Plus, I think that it's not the amount, but the quality of the time you spend with your family. Of course there are limits to what a kid can deal with, given its age and character, but within reasonable extent there definitely is no damage. I figure it's much worse when parents watch their children's every step because they will never develop autonomy. I see the trend of overparenting with serious concern because I see what happens to those supervised kids. And it's people like you who make people think they don't spend enough time with their kids. Most people have a bad conscience about it even though the criticism doesn't really apply to them, and it leads to behaviour which IMHO is much more damaging than a father only being at home once or twice a week like it has been in the last few centuries without creating generations of mentally crippled kids.
No offense, but you should ask yourself why you over-psychologize so much in this thread. It's rather striking if you read the complete thing with my post as the parent. Telling someone he's in denial about him being a horrible parent just because he wrote that he things his son could take him being around a bit less seems over the top to me. If you like, will you share how old you are as a former teacher without kids?
> Your children WILL suffer psychologically, emotionally
> and developmentally by not having a father around.
It all depends. It depends on the amount of time the father's there, on how the mother deals with the situation, and how time is spent when the father *is* at home. If a father travels on weekdays and is only home on the weekends, this need not be any problem if he spends quality time with his children and they feel comfortable with their mother. It can actually make a great relationship as the kids can look forward to the weekend because they know Dad already has some nice ideas for the weekend.
Actually I find it a bit funny how people read into my post I'm never home just because I say I don't believe my son would suffer from me being around less. (This doesn't necessarily mean you, I'm speaking generally.) I usually work 35 hours/week (at the moment it's more like 60 hours but this will end in about two weeks when the project is finished), so I'm at home a lot which is what I like most about my job. But you are completely right about working to support your family. After all, it's one thing I consider important about being a father and husband.
Yes, that was my main point. I also think that (at least here in Germany) not that many fathers are away long enough on a daily basis to a point where it's damaging. Most people work 40 hours a week, which IMO hardly qualifies as a family-killer.
My son turns two today. If it's going to get worse, my wife and I will really have a good time. It's such fun watching this litte human being developing his personality and exploring the world (which grows faster every day), even if you could explode from time to time. That's how kids are, and getting angry about it won't help anyway. ;)
Same here, except a serious bit of Matrix fades in, too - lots of laws to bend and break. The environment is *very* hackable and that's fun enough to make the experience tolerable more often than not. I need a new job, I'm just not sure where to heed.
I also thought about joining the police or some government agency and actually do something useful with my IT skills instead of restarting that server because the cheap-o developer on Ba-FUCKING-li refuses to test the code on his own machine instead of the production server. The pay must be quite good, too.
What other ideas did you have? Becoming a teacher came to mind too, there even is an initiative to turn professionals into teachers as there is a huge lack of teachers, but having no university degree I will be one of the first fired when the budgets get cut, and when that happens when I'm mid-thirty and with much less real-life experience, I won't have the options I have now.
> The point is that I think your kids won't mind you
> occasionally staying late at work (so long as it
> doesn't happen frequently/regularly).
I know you've written you don't have kids, but as a father whose son turns two just today and whose wife is pregnant, I can tell you that you're missing an aspect you can't know.
I don't want to be at home with my family because I think my son might be somehow "damaged" by me not being there. He'd be just fine, he's a strong personality. I want to be at home to be with my family - be with my wife and see my son and the soon-to-come grow up. Kids grow up only once, you know, and watching videos isn't the same thing. I thought I could imagine how intense it is, but I had no idea. If you plan on getting kids sometime in the future, look forward to it! It's great. Stressful most of the time, but *very* rewarding.
And there's something else. I personally don't need a job, I only need *money*. Working is a pointless waste of time if you look at it objectively. You only go there for the money, and overtime isn't usually paid for, at least where I work. So why spend more time there than necessary while the family has fun at home?
No, you got it all wrong. Enigma was broken because this crypo guy fucked this spy chick. Haven't you seen that documentary?
> Sounds like email. The back-end is, in fact,
> important. Even if the end user doesn't realize it.
Of course it is, but that was not my point. The point was that you can easily change the underlying mechanisms without the user noticing, so as more and more people access their information via web browsers, plus the spam beast, we will get to a point which will allow the replacement of e-mail (SMTP) with something more robust, without having to console hordes of whining users.
While you might think you can justify your words by saying they were sarcastic, this won't fix the underlying problem that there are things one doesn't joke about unless there's a true ring to it.
I agree with adam.skinner in so far that the environment's expectations might be steep and it's generally viewed as unacceptable to even suggest that having a family is not heaven all the time. Yes, we could all freak out at times. But this is not what I was referring to.
My point is that even if I feel like this sometimes, I'd never even jokingly suggest that playing some dumb game (and they all are dumb, if we are honest) might be more worthwhile than spending time with the family. It's not about total devotion (which is BS), it's about priorities. I spend lots of time on my own, too. But I do so when the family's asleep.
Ask yourself if you are really happy with having a family. Not in this moment, but in general. If you are honest to yourself and the answer is no, you better leave. That was my point. Sometimes it's hard to get it across even though my English is not so bad.
Bull. The terrorists win if the counter-terrorists fail to free all hostages before the round time is over. ;)
FWIW, Counter-Strike seems to be the only situation in which "eliminating all terrorists" or "eliminating all counter-terrorists" work. Maybe someone should tell Dubya and Osama. Might shell in a copy of "War Games" as well.
Yes he does. It's why he wrote "Let's not forget that some of the most useful new uses for e-mail are webbased; that the underlying technology is SMTP doesn't really matter to most people."
It doesn't matter whether that HTML form uses SMTP or whatever, it's the same form to the user. So for those, E-Mail can be easily replaced with something else.
I assume you don't sleep in your car, so why don't you just take the game with you? Being a married father, I find your attitude highly questionable. Don't you miss your family enough from monday to thursday to even bother interacting with them when you come home? Then you should consider being honest to yourself and spare your wife and kid(s) the experience of having a disinterested husband/dad.
Actually I have more than one co-worker who'd say "ah yes, BSD, that's Blue Screen of Death, I know that".
The dupes keep coming. Keep up the good work, CowboyNeal!
If this were a "real" news site like, say, GoogleNews, you would call it "informing me from several sources", not "why does this $%& Google News thing post so many dupes!!1!". Talk about selective perception. Just a thought.
Now that you've found it, would you be so kind to post a .torrent? This would be a nice one for my "strange stuff" folder (and that of many readers here, I suppose).
/. after all.)
BTW and completely off-topic, if you don't have a "strange stuff" folder, I suggest you try and save some of that wierd stuff you stumble upon. I like to concentrate on images, YMMV. Look at it in a few years. My stuff from the mid-nineties is a priceless laugh. Impresses chicks, too. (I thought I'd mention it, this is
I don't mind non-professionals building layouts, actually I encourage the people I know. The problem is not with the non-professionals. It's with the professionals and it's with extending the functionality of software beyond what I would call a "natural scope".
When Quark advertised the "web functionality" of XPress 5, the PHB was all excited about all those graphics designers being able to build websites directly from the XPress layouts. They did never understand why I dismissed without seeing it - because if it *were* possible to build robust, accessible cross-browser websites with all finesses offered by an application like XPress, someone else had probably done it first, Quark being the bunch of suckers they are.
And frankly, with all those features used in the typical layout, starting from kerning, zooming, warping, rotating, transparency and not ending with extensive usage of non-web fonts definitely not installed on the client's system and current browser support, I don't think it's doable at the moment. Especially not cross-browser and without excessive use of images (which would defeat all accessibility e.g. for blind people).
My point, however, is that focused applications are A Good Thing(TM). Giving an application too many things to accomplish will lead to the application being used for things that would have better been done with other tools.
Actually there is no English word for my profession, so I chose 'designer' for simplicity's sake. It's strange to see though, that you draw conclusions from my post which aren't in there just because of this.
I am a "Mediengestalter" for seven years now (can be roughly translated as "media designer"), but design really isn't that big part in there. I am more what you call the "press guy". I don't know what you guys in the US do, but here in Europe the (small to medium-sized) printing company will only *print* and most prepress work is done by specialized prepress companies. My job is to take the data you mentioned and transform it into something which will print nicely. This includes (but is not limited to) typesetting, image manipulation, trapping, setting documents up for different printing methods and paper sizes (think printing machines, not final size of the prints) and preparing final steps like bindings etc. which all need preparation to be carried out smoothly later at the printing company.
I don't see how it is relevant for the printing process that CMYK images will be transformed to RGB for viewing on-screen. We use ICC profiles for everything, so it doesn't matter where I view or print the file, it will look about the same. I see we could use the PCS, but profiles are being really used seriously among printing companies for about three or four years among our clients, and we don't feel like shelling out 250.000 EUR for an update to our production database which will support that while CMYK + profiles works just fine.
Not quite OT I think, yes I know that Epson inkjets take RGB input (we've got some 9600's and 7600's for digital proofing). However, we make no use of this because we have all data as CMYK anyway. We also use some special RIP software which can be easily calibrated (we have two people alone for keeping an eye on the machines concerning color) and AFAIK we print PostScript to the Epsons. (The inkjets aren't exactly my territory though, nowadays I only help out the print guys when I need to and hack web applications and maintain network and servers instead.)
Actually it's pretty pointless to reply to someone who misses my point as far as you do, but I'll try to help you see the light. I guess I'm just feeding a troll, so IHBT and HAND.
The point was that the PostScript generated by XPress is in fact so lousy that it won't read it itself, generating PS error after PS error on every RIP we and our contractors have (Agfa, Linotype, CreoScitex, Canon). I am well aware that EPS and PS are pretty much the same, I have hand-written PostScript ten years ago.
OK, I can't read the review as it is slashdotted, but actually I have no idea what a professional DTP application needs JPEG or PNG support for as you need CMYK output if you want to use this professionally. (Please spare me the "but Photoshop saves CMYK JPEGs". Thank you.)
Also, just "having" PostScript output doesn't mean it's useful. XPress has EPS export for ages, yet we are still waiting for USABLE PostScript files written by XPress, leave alone *syntactically correct* PostScript. XPress can't even properly import its own EPS files, 'nuff said.
I'd really like to see a nice DTP application for Linux, maybe this is it. Mind you, I'm a professional designer, so I've used most tools on the market at one time or another, and I've yet to come across something which is usable for all daily tasks. Every app so far is only good for some cases.
Very. Nice. Thank
You
For
The
Laugh.
Can't
Type
I'm
stoned.
See
you.
DAMN YOU LAMENESS FILTER is this ENOUGH WORDS line NOW
Oh well. Amusing.
"The first and last categories are regrettable, but it's only becuase we respect our constitution and don't change it like dirty underwear as the French do."
D'oh, dude. You might want to look up on the French Constitution and find out you've just made yourself royally riculous. Or you might want to read up which parts of the U.S. Constitution have been altered in the last three years by GWB only.
Don't take it personally, it's not as if you actually elected him. I mean, hey, this is democracy? Someone can steal the elections and face no serious opposition of any kind? Impressive, really. Tell me, is that "democracy" thing you're "defending" everywehere around the globe the same democracy you practice? If it is, keep it for yourselves. Please.
Brighten up, people. Don't let them make you think we were separate. We're all human, and we've got serious problems to solve. I suggest we decide to ignore the media and start solving problems. If we don't, obviously nobody will. Remember Zen. Don't let the anger dissolve your power. You *can* make a change.