I disagree. I know all about custom workflows, having devised a few in my day, and I don't think that's an adequate explanation. I was thinking about this on the walk to work:
I think Adobe thought the industry animus against Quark was deep enough to ensure their success without having to produce a superior product. This, to me, is another sign of Adobe's slow rot. ID1 and ID2 were not serious Quark competitors, and ID S is still not feature equal. Instead of creating a superior product, Adobe is putting lots of money into advertising, building hype and seemingly waiting for some magical time when people delete Quark and install ID.
Adobe's rep has been sliding for years, in my opinion and in the opinion of others I know. At some point they seem to have decided that their revenue stream was better served by ensuring constant upgrades rather than writing good software. To that end they have released version after version of Illustrator and Photoshop which seem to have a 10:1 ratio of bloat to useful features. I am seeing a serious lack of uptake for the CS suite - not a lot of places are buying, for the simple reason that there isn't much difference between PS 7 and PS CS, or Illustrator 10 and Illustrator CS. Beyond this, there are the expectations of the fatal Illustrator bugs which seem to have become the norm with new releases. There was a reason to go from PS6 to PS7, if for nothing other than (badly coded) OS X support. Similarly, there is a reason to go from Quark 4/5 to Quark 6. But, for the most part, there's no reason to go from PS7 to PS CS, or to Illustrator CS.
In short, Adobe is really no better than Quark, and I think people know it. I can't believe some of the shit Adobe pulled with ID, like initially making earlier versioned ID files not backwards compatible with ID CS. Maybe MS can pull this shit, but no shop with ten years worth of work on tape is going to take a fuck you like that. To me it's a sign that Adobe doesn't really care about its end users, but about its bottom line. Need that old ID 2 file suddenly? Better rebuild it in ID CS!
Unfortunately, I think the outcome of the Quark/ID battle will come down not to the best software but to which company takes the smallest dump on the industry base. In one corner you have Quark's legendary weirdness and seeming joy in staying one step away from disaster. In the other corner you have Adobe's steadily bloating apps and corporate arrogance. Neither one seems to be focused on the customer any more.
As an aside, I was given a copy of ID CS, but have yet to find a reason to install it. I hope it's better than the earlier versions, cause they felt like working with a glorified version of PageMaker to me. When I install ID CS, I will know that things are seriously changing.
I have heard a lot of hype about this, but haven't seen much proof. ID is still feature incomplete compared to Quark. The thing is, the missing features are the kinds of ultra-geeky pre-press shit which makes a big difference for high level work (custom kerning tables, etc.) They are the kind of features a casual user would miss. I haven't seen any big places switch to ID here (NYC) and I don't see it happening soon. I have seen some smaller places switch, but that's it.
Despite their best efforts, Adobe hasn't produced a superior product. I think this has more to do with the continuing rot at Adobe than with any superiority on Quark's part. Adobe is too busy making each release Illustrator suck worse than the last to get down to the dirty work.
More than balanced out by the iPod battery fiasco which necessitates Apple Care or over two thirds of the purchase price for a replacement
My iPod is two years old and still going strong. When the battery dies, I will replace it for $50. Considering I bought the thing for over $400, that doesn't sound bad to me.
People are abandoning Avid because Avid treats its endusers like pieces of shit: incredibly expensive software and hardware, ridiculous support, features added when Avid feels like it rather than when they're requested, etc. Everyone in the industry knew that the minute a real competitor appeared Avid would be in trouble. When FCP 2 appeared (not FCP 1.0, as it wasn't quite there) it was possible to purchase an Avid-equivalent system for 10% of the price Avid charges.
Avid dug their own grave on this one, and all Apple did was see an opportunity and fill it.
A truly desktop-ready operating system would never display an error like that. I mean, hell; is it so much to ask that if an error has to be cryptic, it should at least be grammatically correct?
I noticed that. I also noticed the plethora of information on the screen describing the resolution/bit-depth of the display settings. What immediately went through my head was, "too much information!"
One of the things I have done to make money in the past is provide tech support for Joe and Jane Computer User. Not power users. Not Photoshop geniuses. Not people who program for the fun of it or who have a favorite Linux distribution. The most important thing I learned from dealing with people like this is that they're not Slashdot readers. They're not MacNN or Windows site readers, either. They don't care about which OS is better than the other, or which graphics card gets the most FPS. They think of their computers as toys or tools, much in the same way they think about microwaves or TVs. And what they want, most of all, is for their machines to work, period. If they work - get email, surf the web, play games and display porn - interest ends.
Concerns about usability and GUI design aside, the greatest barrier to wider acceptance I see in the Linux community I see is a sense of elitism to which some members of the community seem to be attached. Now, I want to make it clear I am not talking about the Linux community as a whole, nor am I attempting to start some silly OS flamewar. I have, however, seen a consistent trend of elitism and a defense of elitism in posts here and elsewhere. The elitism takes the form of an attachment of importance to certain technical and/or obscure areas of understanding and an assumption that the understanding of these metrics and their concomitant languages implies the speaker is part of the Linux community, as opposed to a member of another group.
Fr'example, how many threads here evolve into minute discussions of thread scheduling, micro- versus monolithic-kernel structures, memory subsystems, etc.? And, more importantly, how many of these threads include comments which attach a larger importance to these topics - if you don't understand how much better the journaling capabilities of Linux are when compared to Windows or OS X then you're obviously an idiot and should go on using your stupid Windows box!
I bring this up because, in my opinion, this is the exact wrong focus needed to help Linux gain widespread home usage. My experience with Joe and Jane Computer User is that they don't care about any of this shit. And, more importantly, they are right not to care about any of this shit. This is the crux, because it is here that the idea that superior technical knowledge means one is correct runs headlong into the reality of the marketplace, which is that superior technical ability isn't nearly as important as the ability to gets one's message across to people who see their computer as just another home appliance. Mention the name of Steve Jobs here and you're asking for a fight, but one thing he understands possibly better than anyone else in the industry is that you have to give average people reasons to use a computer which have nothing to do with better journaling and everything to do with fitting the machine into their lives. Dell has done this by making the computer another commidity. Apple has done this by elevating the computer above the status of beige-box-tool. The Linux community, as a whole, can't seem to decide on a way to do this.
I know I am not describing the Linux community as a whole. I am describing a particular subset of the community, a subset which is extremely vocal. I also know that this zealot mentality exists the Mac and Windows world's as well. However, as both the Mac and Windows world's have significant market and mindshare penetration into the home market, the zealot communities are mediated by those who understand the need to present another front to the average user. I
I have known three women who were, at one point in their lives, strippers. Of the three, two had problems with drugs/alcohol, one had been raped and the other two were incested as a children.
Now, notice I didn't say anything about them as people, about their personalities, about their characters or whether they were nice to old people and pets. However, the circumstances of their lives had a definite impact on their choice of lifestyle. Just because I say someone has a drug problem does not mean I am judging them - I am describing a mechanism. Any judgment is that of the reader.
It depends on what you mean by "most publications". For that quick memo to your group, yes. For your weekly status report, maybe. For any sort of documentation, definitely not.
I mean magazines, newspapers, annual reports, brochures, etc. Quark handles all of this just fine. I avoid Word at all costs.
Iv found that the base filters that come with GIMP far out shine the ones that come with Photoshop but that's just my personal opinion.
Very little high end Photoshop work has anything to do with filters. It's all about multiple channels and masks, proper color profile support and things like channel mixing and calculations which no other program can do.
After taking a class back in college on using FrameMaker... I fell in love, the power and control it gives you over a document is... amazing. As an example... open up a magazine or catalog sometime... look in detail at the arrangement of the various pictures and text through out the page... now imagine how you might do that in something like Microsoft Word, or some other word processor... Even in Latex perhaps.
FYI: Any magazine or catalog you open will be produced either in Quark (most of them) or InDesign (a few). Framemaker has a very small, very select market, for which it is a superior product. For anything else it's a pain in the ass.
The biggest memory hog right now is Photoshop, and that's only taking 140MB of memory, even that is being pretty wastefull as I was only editing 32MB worth of pictures, and they are now all but closed except for the main program.
Photoshop keeps three copies of the current image in memory at the same time: one to work on, one for undo and one for the history palette. As Photoshop works solely with bitmapped images, this is the only way to have multiple undos or history.
Besides, if you think that's bad, try having two gigabyte-sized images open at the same time, copying multiple layers from one to the other.
370megs of RAM are being "used" by my machine right now. about 150megs of that is inactive. Because I have 1.25 gigs, my machine tends to stretch out and get comfortable. Nevertheless, OS X uses a shit load of RAM.
OS X will use as much RAM as it can - it caches apps and data you use a lot to cut down on time accessing the disk. I have a gig in my machine and OS X is using 892.8 megs, with 12 days of uptime and ten apps currently running. However, I bet that bits of apps I don't have launched right now, like Photoshop and Preview and Acquisition, are cached, because I tend to launch them a lot.
I'm not saying that modern OSes don't use a lot of RAM, cause they do. But the fact that the OS is using almost a gig of RAM on my machine is not a sign of inefficiency.
About five years ago I almost ran over Sarah Jessica Parker at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. I was coming down Fifth on my bike, moving quickly, taking the right onto 23rd. I looked around the turn and saw it was clear. I checked my left, which was clear, and then look right again to see a mass of blonde curls and boobs running in front me of. She realized I was there - I guess she hadn't checked before she crossed - and sped up. I leaned right and missed her by an inch or two.
I consider it one of the greatest missed opportunities of my life.
Once the Stingers got into hands of the Mujahadeen, the threat from Soviet helicopters was significantly reduced. The Hinds were forced to fly at 10,000+ feet in formation and drop bombs like airplanes.
I have seen some amazing footage of Chechnan's dropping Hinds out of the air with man-portable SAMs. Russians never knew what hit them.
Saying the Apache has had dismal performance in desert environments is hyperbole: they have performed extrememly well in a harsh environment for which they were definitely not designed. Blaming the Apache for the helicopters vulnerability to RPGs and ground fire is silly, too. If that is the metric, every Soviet helicopter failed miserably in Afghanistan.
No argument. I interpreted the "guts" of the parent post to refer to NeXTStep, which is the immedate predecessor of OS X. As we chase down the family tree, we find more and more kin.
Letting someone else build the guts of OSX was the smartest thing they ever did.
You, sir, are an idiot.
NeXTStep, the basis of OS X, was developed at NeXT while it was owned and run by Steve Jobs. "Someone else" didn't build the guts -Jobs oversaw it's deveoplment. When he moved back to Apple, Apple acquired NeXT, bring both his children together.
Linux has NOT surpassed Macs on the desktop. If you had read the most recent/. article you would have noticed two things:
1) Linux is projected to surpass he Mac on the desktop. Whether it does is not yet known; 2) The segment in question relates to corporations removing Windows and installing Linux in their work envoronments. It does not mean that average users are installing Linux at home. In the home arena, Linux is still unknown.
Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) Macintosh (news - web sites) software. And the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007.
"Expects". As is 'it ain't happened yet and we will have to wait and see if it does'. Linux's share may be growing by "laps and bounds," but wait until we have some figures before you go shouting it from the rooftops.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Adobe thought the industry animus against Quark was deep enough to ensure their success without having to produce a superior product. This, to me, is another sign of Adobe's slow rot. ID1 and ID2 were not serious Quark competitors, and ID S is still not feature equal. Instead of creating a superior product, Adobe is putting lots of money into advertising, building hype and seemingly waiting for some magical time when people delete Quark and install ID.
Adobe's rep has been sliding for years, in my opinion and in the opinion of others I know. At some point they seem to have decided that their revenue stream was better served by ensuring constant upgrades rather than writing good software. To that end they have released version after version of Illustrator and Photoshop which seem to have a 10:1 ratio of bloat to useful features. I am seeing a serious lack of uptake for the CS suite - not a lot of places are buying, for the simple reason that there isn't much difference between PS 7 and PS CS, or Illustrator 10 and Illustrator CS. Beyond this, there are the expectations of the fatal Illustrator bugs which seem to have become the norm with new releases. There was a reason to go from PS6 to PS7, if for nothing other than (badly coded) OS X support. Similarly, there is a reason to go from Quark 4/5 to Quark 6. But, for the most part, there's no reason to go from PS7 to PS CS, or to Illustrator CS.
In short, Adobe is really no better than Quark, and I think people know it. I can't believe some of the shit Adobe pulled with ID, like initially making earlier versioned ID files not backwards compatible with ID CS. Maybe MS can pull this shit, but no shop with ten years worth of work on tape is going to take a fuck you like that. To me it's a sign that Adobe doesn't really care about its end users, but about its bottom line. Need that old ID 2 file suddenly? Better rebuild it in ID CS!
Unfortunately, I think the outcome of the Quark/ID battle will come down not to the best software but to which company takes the smallest dump on the industry base. In one corner you have Quark's legendary weirdness and seeming joy in staying one step away from disaster. In the other corner you have Adobe's steadily bloating apps and corporate arrogance. Neither one seems to be focused on the customer any more.
As an aside, I was given a copy of ID CS, but have yet to find a reason to install it. I hope it's better than the earlier versions, cause they felt like working with a glorified version of PageMaker to me. When I install ID CS, I will know that things are seriously changing.
I have heard a lot of hype about this, but haven't seen much proof. ID is still feature incomplete compared to Quark. The thing is, the missing features are the kinds of ultra-geeky pre-press shit which makes a big difference for high level work (custom kerning tables, etc.) They are the kind of features a casual user would miss. I haven't seen any big places switch to ID here (NYC) and I don't see it happening soon. I have seen some smaller places switch, but that's it.
Despite their best efforts, Adobe hasn't produced a superior product. I think this has more to do with the continuing rot at Adobe than with any superiority on Quark's part. Adobe is too busy making each release Illustrator suck worse than the last to get down to the dirty work.
Avid dug their own grave on this one, and all Apple did was see an opportunity and fill it.
I noticed that. I also noticed the plethora of information on the screen describing the resolution/bit-depth of the display settings. What immediately went through my head was, "too much information!"
One of the things I have done to make money in the past is provide tech support for Joe and Jane Computer User. Not power users. Not Photoshop geniuses. Not people who program for the fun of it or who have a favorite Linux distribution. The most important thing I learned from dealing with people like this is that they're not Slashdot readers. They're not MacNN or Windows site readers, either. They don't care about which OS is better than the other, or which graphics card gets the most FPS. They think of their computers as toys or tools, much in the same way they think about microwaves or TVs. And what they want, most of all, is for their machines to work, period. If they work - get email, surf the web, play games and display porn - interest ends.
Concerns about usability and GUI design aside, the greatest barrier to wider acceptance I see in the Linux community I see is a sense of elitism to which some members of the community seem to be attached. Now, I want to make it clear I am not talking about the Linux community as a whole, nor am I attempting to start some silly OS flamewar. I have, however, seen a consistent trend of elitism and a defense of elitism in posts here and elsewhere. The elitism takes the form of an attachment of importance to certain technical and/or obscure areas of understanding and an assumption that the understanding of these metrics and their concomitant languages implies the speaker is part of the Linux community, as opposed to a member of another group.
Fr'example, how many threads here evolve into minute discussions of thread scheduling, micro- versus monolithic-kernel structures, memory subsystems, etc.? And, more importantly, how many of these threads include comments which attach a larger importance to these topics - if you don't understand how much better the journaling capabilities of Linux are when compared to Windows or OS X then you're obviously an idiot and should go on using your stupid Windows box!
I bring this up because, in my opinion, this is the exact wrong focus needed to help Linux gain widespread home usage. My experience with Joe and Jane Computer User is that they don't care about any of this shit. And, more importantly, they are right not to care about any of this shit. This is the crux, because it is here that the idea that superior technical knowledge means one is correct runs headlong into the reality of the marketplace, which is that superior technical ability isn't nearly as important as the ability to gets one's message across to people who see their computer as just another home appliance. Mention the name of Steve Jobs here and you're asking for a fight, but one thing he understands possibly better than anyone else in the industry is that you have to give average people reasons to use a computer which have nothing to do with better journaling and everything to do with fitting the machine into their lives. Dell has done this by making the computer another commidity. Apple has done this by elevating the computer above the status of beige-box-tool. The Linux community, as a whole, can't seem to decide on a way to do this.
I know I am not describing the Linux community as a whole. I am describing a particular subset of the community, a subset which is extremely vocal. I also know that this zealot mentality exists the Mac and Windows world's as well. However, as both the Mac and Windows world's have significant market and mindshare penetration into the home market, the zealot communities are mediated by those who understand the need to present another front to the average user. I
The winner, hands down.
Of the three, two had problems with drugs/alcohol. One had been raped and the other two were incested as children.
I have known three women who were, at one point in their lives, strippers. Of the three, two had problems with drugs/alcohol, one had been raped and the other two were incested as a children.
Now, notice I didn't say anything about them as people, about their personalities, about their characters or whether they were nice to old people and pets. However, the circumstances of their lives had a definite impact on their choice of lifestyle. Just because I say someone has a drug problem does not mean I am judging them - I am describing a mechanism. Any judgment is that of the reader.
I mean magazines, newspapers, annual reports, brochures, etc. Quark handles all of this just fine. I avoid Word at all costs.
I should have been more specific: it's overkill for most publications.
"InDesign is killing Quark!" Yeah, sure. In your basement.
As an aside, the OS X Fiery RIPs are the first decent RIPs I have ever seen for those machines.
I have been in production/pre-press since 1989, and in that time I have seen exactly one shop which was Windows-based.
Very little high end Photoshop work has anything to do with filters. It's all about multiple channels and masks, proper color profile support and things like channel mixing and calculations which no other program can do.
FYI: Any magazine or catalog you open will be produced either in Quark (most of them) or InDesign (a few). Framemaker has a very small, very select market, for which it is a superior product. For anything else it's a pain in the ass.
Photoshop keeps three copies of the current image in memory at the same time: one to work on, one for undo and one for the history palette. As Photoshop works solely with bitmapped images, this is the only way to have multiple undos or history.
Besides, if you think that's bad, try having two gigabyte-sized images open at the same time, copying multiple layers from one to the other.
OS X will use as much RAM as it can - it caches apps and data you use a lot to cut down on time accessing the disk. I have a gig in my machine and OS X is using 892.8 megs, with 12 days of uptime and ten apps currently running. However, I bet that bits of apps I don't have launched right now, like Photoshop and Preview and Acquisition, are cached, because I tend to launch them a lot.
I'm not saying that modern OSes don't use a lot of RAM, cause they do. But the fact that the OS is using almost a gig of RAM on my machine is not a sign of inefficiency.
IBM has never made G4s. If they had, we might have a G4 with a decent bus speed.
I consider it one of the greatest missed opportunities of my life.
I have seen some amazing footage of Chechnan's dropping Hinds out of the air with man-portable SAMs. Russians never knew what hit them.
Saying the Apache has had dismal performance in desert environments is hyperbole: they have performed extrememly well in a harsh environment for which they were definitely not designed. Blaming the Apache for the helicopters vulnerability to RPGs and ground fire is silly, too. If that is the metric, every Soviet helicopter failed miserably in Afghanistan.
No argument. I interpreted the "guts" of the parent post to refer to NeXTStep, which is the immedate predecessor of OS X. As we chase down the family tree, we find more and more kin.
1) Linux is projected to surpass he Mac on the desktop. Whether it does is not yet known;
2) The segment in question relates to corporations removing Windows and installing Linux in their work envoronments. It does not mean that average users are installing Linux at home. In the home arena, Linux is still unknown.
You can see El's name used in early Biblical names - Beth-El (house of El), etc.
Perhaps. The article here says:
Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) Macintosh (news - web sites) software. And the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007.
"Expects". As is 'it ain't happened yet and we will have to wait and see if it does'. Linux's share may be growing by "laps and bounds," but wait until we have some figures before you go shouting it from the rooftops.