Look, as a graphics professional, I have to tell you, GIMP is a nice idea, but is hardly a pro tool. This is not because of any lack of features, but because the work flow of it is slow, and clunky.
Photoshop is the bread and butter of the graphics industry. Unless you essentially duplicate the interface and workflow of Photoshop in GIMP, GIMP will have a puny fraction of a percentage point of the pro graphics market.
If you're aiming to replace Photoshop for pro users, than duplicate it in open source and get it over with. If, on the other hand, you're trying to provide a free, sensible alternative for the other 99.99% of the world that aren't graphics pros, you've got a shot with doing things your own way.
But even then, GIMP can't yet hold a candle to Photoshop in terms of workflow, or feel. I wish it did...I'm as tired of paying $500 for photoshop as the next guy, but Photoshop pays for itself eventually because of its quality, and low-irritation factor. It just works.
"If this article sounds somewhat like a paid advertisement, it's not intended to be so..."
"...because I just spent the last 2 and half fargin' hours sitting here typing and retyping it with Apple's PR people on the phone with me! I want a bigger check!"
I just downloaded Camino 0.7 and renamed it immediately to Chimera, so HA! Legal can take that and shove it up there copyrighted, restricted, internationally-patented asses!
"Oh, please, for the love of god, do not suggest any names either in comments on via email. I'll hunt you down and slaughter your family. That's a promise. The last thing I need to see is what you think a kewl name would be. Trust me, it probably won't make it through legal."
Hey, I've got one! Oh...wait...NO, PUT THE KNIFE DOWN! I DIDN'T MEAN IT, PINKERTON![gurgle][splat]
That has to be the single most claustrophobic underwater exploration experience ever. Period.
How many people do they actually expect will be able to ride in that thing without going spastic? The very thought of putting myself 100 feet underwater in that thing sends me into overload.
Product placement is everything:) Seriously though, if war is declared, I wonder how many soliders would take an iPod or other MP3 player with them? MP3 players seem ideal -- light, long battery life, rechargable, compact (dozens of hours of playback with no bulky jewel cases to lug, etc).
More importantly, what is allowable to take on a military operation according to regulations? Just curious...
Sporty new uniforms for our troops in Iraq, featuring graphite colored translucent plastics, and army jackets that all include a special pocket for an iPod, with buttons on the sleeves for when convenient control of your music is a matter of life and death!
I don't care how many rooms full of blurry, patheticly useless photos of Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, or UFOs you compile, these things will continue to be what they've always been -- unidentifiable anomolies, or hoaxes -- until there's unavoidably conclusive evidence.
Look, every Joe knows what UFO stands for. As long as these objects can possibly be considered "unidentifiable", they're not evidence at all, they're just freak anomolies. Inexplicable, or basically meaningless anomolies are a fact of life in every field of research, and life in general.
I think I speak for quite a few people when I really could care less, and tell me when something is conclusive. Otherwise it's just more whining about what we DON'T know and can't explain, rather than what we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
I seriously think Roswell sky-watchers are doing their cause more damage than good by constantly arguing utterly inconclusive anomolies. As long as it's even POSSIBLE to conceive of explaining them as "pixel faults", or whatever, that's not evidence. As such, they degrade their credibility one level further.
If you disagree, don't mod me down, just reply to this post.
In other news, Microsoft unveiled its new anti-piracy plan.
"It's simple," said founder Bill Gates, "All we do is have every American adult male do 6 months of mandatory hard time in Federal 'pound-me-in-the-ass' prison, and then give us $500 upon release. It's really the only way we can continue to produce high quality software products for our customers with all this dispeakable, rampant piracy!"
"We're all about social responsibility. Our senators in Washington are very excited," Gates noted appreciatively.
"I hope Gyford will deviate from Gutenberg's 1893 version to include some of Pepys's more outrageous sexual adventures, reduced by the 1893 version too."
You hot-blooded geek, you.
Great, now people want daily blogger smut...from the 17th century. Nothing like fantasizing about dead people. Gross, man, gross.
Apple is a hardware company. They make money from selling hardware, not software. OS X is great in part BECAUSE it's running on a unified Apple hardware architecture. Apple does NOT, however, make money by developing software that enhances their hardware, and then selling it to an unrelated platform. Sun is another example of this, I believe.
As a result, OS X for x86 is not going to happen. If, by some freak of an accident it does, it's going to be on proprietary, Apple-designed hardware, and it won't run on any old machine.
If you don't believe me, go to Apple.com's support or specs section and look at how much OS X depends on the concept of OpenFirmware. This, and speed, were two reasons why OS X was not installable on Macs older than the G3. Anything without OpenFirmware is out.
What I Say Afterwords: Yoink
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 1
"...as usual, the interesting part is what SlashDotters will say here afterward."
Ah yes, in that case...have a mentioned that Cringley is in fact made entirely of wood?
Am I the only one that is noticing the fact that id, in being on the forefront of pretty much every major 3D PC gaming advance in history, has consistently used their abilities to portray extremely violent, gruesome, and increasingly nauseating subject matter?
I'm looking at these screen shots, and for the first time in years, I'm actually genuinely impressed at the advances they've made in their rendering. But at the same time, I'm thinking "sheesh, how could people play this game without getting genuinely ill?" Photorealistic, dismembered bodies, blood and gore spread everywhere...it's becoming so texturally realistic so as to seemingly only be missing smell and taste.
How realistic does slaughter, grotesque gore, and violence have to become before people finally realize how nasty what they're doing really is?
Previous to this time, I considered the concept of violent video games being to blame for real-world acts of attrocity quite ridiculous. But at what point do the video games become so realistic, and simultaneous -- as in the case of id's latest -- irresponsible in the areas of how they use it, that video games actually DO become a catalyst for violent behavior?
One could argue that video games can only become as literal as, say, a photorealistic film. And violent films aren't proved to sponsor violent behavior, so what's the problem? The problem is that in video games, you're actually performing the act of killing. Your finger is thinking less of being on a mouse, and more of being on a trigger. How much of a jump is it between photorealistic fantasy -- identical in everyway in terms of how it represents light, shadow, physics, etc -- to a literal physical reality which isn't seemingly any different to the person now holding the gun instead of the mouse.
No media can possibly be blamed as being the sole cause of any kind of violence. That's a fear-driven, whipping-boy conclusion of the inexperienced masses. On the other hand, when "reality" isn't necessarily physical anymore, where do you draw the line?
Your post reminded me of something I once read by an author by the name of Calvin Miller:
"Hell's logic consists in preventing murder by murdering all murderers. Heaven's logic greets every murderer with grace, dying when the time comes with a beautiful face."
Man's logic of justice is inherently circular, and subsequently flawed. The concept of murdering murderers is somewhat rampant in American society, and if anyone stopped to think it out, they might notice a less than faint line somewhere between justice and self-perpetuating sin.
"anti-abortion, pro-Nazi, white supremacist or anti-semitic"
Why does that song "one of these things is not like the other" from Sesame Street keeping running through my mind?
Since when is being anti-abortion in the same category as being pro-nazi, a white supremacist, or anti-semitic? This is a scary bit of phraseology on the front page here!
"Help! Help! I'm being repressed! Come see the violence ineherent in the system!"
I don't know how Wired considers themselves to be a valid news source any more, but themes on Mac OS X are most definitely not dead. In fact, they're on the way to more and better themes than previous Mac OS ever had:
Just doing a search for "theme" on VersionTracker's OS X site, you'll find dozens of good apps for applying, building, or tweaking themes on OS X.
Let's face it, Xpress is archaic yet incredibly expensive, and better yet, is made by a company which has about as much appeal as seeing Janet Reno doing a strip tease at LinuxWorld.
The only reason that Quark is still considered the industry standard is because Adobe biffed InDesign's introduction and 1.0 release so badly.
I've hated Quark ever since they decided to ship XPress 4.0 on 1 floppy disk (with the 400K installer app) and 1 CD for years...thus making it impossible for new PowerMac owners (without floppy drives) to install without having to do backflips through Quark's flaming hoops of DOOM. Not only that, but it's extremely temperamental, and breaks all the time.
I hope this is the last nail in Quark's coffin. Industry standards are only a hinderance when they stagnate in badly managed software, archaic code, and gold-plated pricing.
Awww, how cute...3.9 GHz accomplished through extreme methods of cooling that last for maybe a minute or three before utterly destroying the hardware, and it's *almost* pushing 5 gigaflops.
Kind of sad that my out-of-the-box Dual-GHz G4 pulls 6.7 gigaflops on a bad day, huh? (/gloat)
No, really it feels good to troll every now and a lifetime;-)
"...a skin lotion spiked with caffeine can reduce by more than half the number of cancer tumors on the skin of hairless mice."
Man, can you imagine how horrible the lives of those lab assistants must be? Think about spending your whole day rubbing caffeine-spiked mango hand lotion all over the little squirming bodies of hairless mice and you'll see what I mean.
That must seriously mess with your love life, too.
Psychiatrist: "So tell me Mr. Johnson, what seems to be the problem?"
Patient: "OH GOD, Doctor, you have to help me!! Every time I try to make love to my wife, I keeping getting these flashes of RUBBING MANGO HAND LOTION ALL OVER HAIRLESS MICE!"
"This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media."
I disagree that the lack of a single unified standard has had a significant depressive influence on the sale of recordable DVD drives. I think that it's rather a lack of demand.
In other words, how many people actually have a driven requirement to burn DVDs? While most of us geeks would think that it's an immensely desirable thing, in actuality, the average PC user doesn't have a need for DVD-R technology.
While the media has been making it sound like all the rage, home-producing video DVDs is actually not yet widespread. It's great use of quality technology, but the average Joe doesn't do it...yet.
Storage space is extremely cheap -- $100 for 120 GB IDE drives. To the average user, that's an immense, almost dauntingly large amount of space which they'll probably never use. Why spend extra on a DVD recordable drive, and several bucks each on DVD media when you don't need that much space (4.7 GB per disc, usually) in a transportable form?
The fact is, most people don't need DVD-recordable drives. If they did, they'd purchase one regardless of the lack of a single unified standard, as long as the product does what it needs to. That's a fairly typical consumer mindset with computer technology recently -- "who cares about the standards, because they'll all be different in another month!"
On the Apple side, it's profitable for them to offer DVD-R technology as a standard, because their users are typically more multimedia-centric, and have suitable user-friendly tools for the most basic to the most advanced users to utilize the technology to its fullest. For most PC-users, it's merely purchasing a machine with superfluous technology.
"Hey, scientist guys...I'll do it for $100 and a penguin for each of my kids!"
That's an interesting idea -- perhaps the telecom guys will give the scientists a break for a share a share in the wealth of penguins available on the polar cap.
Look, it's simple marketing logic. The Newton was a failure in terms of a product line, although it was an extremely cool gadget with amazing technology. Apple doesn't want to associate a new product which they hope will succeed, to an old product that failed.
The last thing that people need to misguidedly think, is that Apple is short on ideas and is having to scrounge through past failures to find new technology ideas.
I think this is a wise decision on their part to give this technology a fresh image, seperate from the ridicule that the early-model Newtons got (i.e. The Simpsons with MessagePad 100, 110, etc), and well deserved.
The fact is, the Newton 2x00 handwriting recognition of 3 years ago is better than anything else on the market today, and I'm sure with some modernization, it'll be positively excellent.
Slashdot Mirror
Photoshop is the bread and butter of the graphics industry. Unless you essentially duplicate the interface and workflow of Photoshop in GIMP, GIMP will have a puny fraction of a percentage point of the pro graphics market.
If you're aiming to replace Photoshop for pro users, than duplicate it in open source and get it over with. If, on the other hand, you're trying to provide a free, sensible alternative for the other 99.99% of the world that aren't graphics pros, you've got a shot with doing things your own way.
But even then, GIMP can't yet hold a candle to Photoshop in terms of workflow, or feel. I wish it did...I'm as tired of paying $500 for photoshop as the next guy, but Photoshop pays for itself eventually because of its quality, and low-irritation factor. It just works.
We've got to get our troops as many of these new uniforms as we can. Do it for little Jimmy American on the front lines, darnit!
(Nothing like a little ruthless self-promotion to get a day started right!)
"...because I just spent the last 2 and half fargin' hours sitting here typing and retyping it with Apple's PR people on the phone with me! I want a bigger check!"
"It makes me feel powerful." ?Hamilton Morris
Fight the system!
Hey, I've got one! Oh...wait...NO, PUT THE KNIFE DOWN! I DIDN'T MEAN IT, PINKERTON![gurgle][splat]
How many people do they actually expect will be able to ride in that thing without going spastic? The very thought of putting myself 100 feet underwater in that thing sends me into overload.
iFatigues
Product placement is everything :) Seriously though, if war is declared, I wonder how many soliders would take an iPod or other MP3 player with them? MP3 players seem ideal -- light, long battery life, rechargable, compact (dozens of hours of playback with no bulky jewel cases to lug, etc).
More importantly, what is allowable to take on a military operation according to regulations? Just curious...
Sporty new uniforms for our troops in Iraq, featuring graphite colored translucent plastics, and army jackets that all include a special pocket for an iPod, with buttons on the sleeves for when convenient control of your music is a matter of life and death!
I sense a spoof coming on.
Look, every Joe knows what UFO stands for. As long as these objects can possibly be considered "unidentifiable", they're not evidence at all, they're just freak anomolies. Inexplicable, or basically meaningless anomolies are a fact of life in every field of research, and life in general.
I think I speak for quite a few people when I really could care less, and tell me when something is conclusive. Otherwise it's just more whining about what we DON'T know and can't explain, rather than what we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
I seriously think Roswell sky-watchers are doing their cause more damage than good by constantly arguing utterly inconclusive anomolies. As long as it's even POSSIBLE to conceive of explaining them as "pixel faults", or whatever, that's not evidence. As such, they degrade their credibility one level further.
If you disagree, don't mod me down, just reply to this post.
"It's simple," said founder Bill Gates, "All we do is have every American adult male do 6 months of mandatory hard time in Federal 'pound-me-in-the-ass' prison, and then give us $500 upon release. It's really the only way we can continue to produce high quality software products for our customers with all this dispeakable, rampant piracy!"
"We're all about social responsibility. Our senators in Washington are very excited," Gates noted appreciatively.
You hot-blooded geek, you.
Great, now people want daily blogger smut...from the 17th century. Nothing like fantasizing about dead people. Gross, man, gross.
For the last time...
Apple is a hardware company. They make money from selling hardware, not software. OS X is great in part BECAUSE it's running on a unified Apple hardware architecture. Apple does NOT, however, make money by developing software that enhances their hardware, and then selling it to an unrelated platform. Sun is another example of this, I believe.
As a result, OS X for x86 is not going to happen. If, by some freak of an accident it does, it's going to be on proprietary, Apple-designed hardware, and it won't run on any old machine.
If you don't believe me, go to Apple.com's support or specs section and look at how much OS X depends on the concept of OpenFirmware. This, and speed, were two reasons why OS X was not installable on Macs older than the G3. Anything without OpenFirmware is out.
Ah yes, in that case...have a mentioned that Cringley is in fact made entirely of wood?
(...and watch the moderations fly by...)
I'm looking at these screen shots, and for the first time in years, I'm actually genuinely impressed at the advances they've made in their rendering. But at the same time, I'm thinking "sheesh, how could people play this game without getting genuinely ill?" Photorealistic, dismembered bodies, blood and gore spread everywhere...it's becoming so texturally realistic so as to seemingly only be missing smell and taste.
How realistic does slaughter, grotesque gore, and violence have to become before people finally realize how nasty what they're doing really is?
Previous to this time, I considered the concept of violent video games being to blame for real-world acts of attrocity quite ridiculous. But at what point do the video games become so realistic, and simultaneous -- as in the case of id's latest -- irresponsible in the areas of how they use it, that video games actually DO become a catalyst for violent behavior?
One could argue that video games can only become as literal as, say, a photorealistic film. And violent films aren't proved to sponsor violent behavior, so what's the problem? The problem is that in video games, you're actually performing the act of killing. Your finger is thinking less of being on a mouse, and more of being on a trigger. How much of a jump is it between photorealistic fantasy -- identical in everyway in terms of how it represents light, shadow, physics, etc -- to a literal physical reality which isn't seemingly any different to the person now holding the gun instead of the mouse.
No media can possibly be blamed as being the sole cause of any kind of violence. That's a fear-driven, whipping-boy conclusion of the inexperienced masses. On the other hand, when "reality" isn't necessarily physical anymore, where do you draw the line?
"Hell's logic consists in preventing murder by murdering all murderers. Heaven's logic greets every murderer with grace, dying when the time comes with a beautiful face."
Man's logic of justice is inherently circular, and subsequently flawed. The concept of murdering murderers is somewhat rampant in American society, and if anyone stopped to think it out, they might notice a less than faint line somewhere between justice and self-perpetuating sin.
Why does that song "one of these things is not like the other" from Sesame Street keeping running through my mind?
Since when is being anti-abortion in the same category as being pro-nazi, a white supremacist, or anti-semitic? This is a scary bit of phraseology on the front page here!
"Help! Help! I'm being repressed! Come see the violence ineherent in the system!"
I don't know how Wired considers themselves to be a valid news source any more, but themes on Mac OS X are most definitely not dead. In fact, they're on the way to more and better themes than previous Mac OS ever had:
Just doing a search for "theme" on VersionTracker's OS X site, you'll find dozens of good apps for applying, building, or tweaking themes on OS X.
The only reason that Quark is still considered the industry standard is because Adobe biffed InDesign's introduction and 1.0 release so badly.
I've hated Quark ever since they decided to ship XPress 4.0 on 1 floppy disk (with the 400K installer app) and 1 CD for years...thus making it impossible for new PowerMac owners (without floppy drives) to install without having to do backflips through Quark's flaming hoops of DOOM. Not only that, but it's extremely temperamental, and breaks all the time.
I hope this is the last nail in Quark's coffin. Industry standards are only a hinderance when they stagnate in badly managed software, archaic code, and gold-plated pricing.
Kind of sad that my out-of-the-box Dual-GHz G4 pulls 6.7 gigaflops on a bad day, huh? (/gloat)
No, really it feels good to troll every now and a lifetime ;-)
Man, can you imagine how horrible the lives of those lab assistants must be? Think about spending your whole day rubbing caffeine-spiked mango hand lotion all over the little squirming bodies of hairless mice and you'll see what I mean.
That must seriously mess with your love life, too.
Psychiatrist: "So tell me Mr. Johnson, what seems to be the problem?"
Patient: "OH GOD, Doctor, you have to help me!! Every time I try to make love to my wife, I keeping getting these flashes of RUBBING MANGO HAND LOTION ALL OVER HAIRLESS MICE!"
In honor of the upcoming James Bond movie, it has to be said:
"Shocking, but more power too you."
(duck)
I disagree that the lack of a single unified standard has had a significant depressive influence on the sale of recordable DVD drives. I think that it's rather a lack of demand.
In other words, how many people actually have a driven requirement to burn DVDs? While most of us geeks would think that it's an immensely desirable thing, in actuality, the average PC user doesn't have a need for DVD-R technology.
While the media has been making it sound like all the rage, home-producing video DVDs is actually not yet widespread. It's great use of quality technology, but the average Joe doesn't do it...yet.
Storage space is extremely cheap -- $100 for 120 GB IDE drives. To the average user, that's an immense, almost dauntingly large amount of space which they'll probably never use. Why spend extra on a DVD recordable drive, and several bucks each on DVD media when you don't need that much space (4.7 GB per disc, usually) in a transportable form?
The fact is, most people don't need DVD-recordable drives. If they did, they'd purchase one regardless of the lack of a single unified standard, as long as the product does what it needs to. That's a fairly typical consumer mindset with computer technology recently -- "who cares about the standards, because they'll all be different in another month!"
On the Apple side, it's profitable for them to offer DVD-R technology as a standard, because their users are typically more multimedia-centric, and have suitable user-friendly tools for the most basic to the most advanced users to utilize the technology to its fullest. For most PC-users, it's merely purchasing a machine with superfluous technology.
"Hey, scientist guys...I'll do it for $100 and a penguin for each of my kids!"
That's an interesting idea -- perhaps the telecom guys will give the scientists a break for a share a share in the wealth of penguins available on the polar cap.
Look, it's simple marketing logic. The Newton was a failure in terms of a product line, although it was an extremely cool gadget with amazing technology. Apple doesn't want to associate a new product which they hope will succeed, to an old product that failed.
The last thing that people need to misguidedly think, is that Apple is short on ideas and is having to scrounge through past failures to find new technology ideas.
I think this is a wise decision on their part to give this technology a fresh image, seperate from the ridicule that the early-model Newtons got (i.e. The Simpsons with MessagePad 100, 110, etc), and well deserved.
The fact is, the Newton 2x00 handwriting recognition of 3 years ago is better than anything else on the market today, and I'm sure with some modernization, it'll be positively excellent.
Oh great, so now we can see the BSOD in nice vertex shading and excellent fill rates.
I can see the marketing scheme now...
"We may crash a lot, but by golly, we're working to make it the most fun you've EVER had whilst watching the smoking wreckage of your kernel burn!"
"El Pantalla azul de MUERTE"