I think you forgot about the huge list of tools that article listed that the GIMP lacks. Not to mention that CS3 added an incredible assortment of new tools and features that the GIMP is nowhere near.
CS3 now has brilliant photomerge and align layer features that intelligently examine the content of photos and stitch them together. And that's just one of the new CS3 features. There are a ton of things that Photoshop has that the GIMP does not have. Frankly though, I don't see that as a big deal because though those tools are awesome, if the GIMP did the basic stuff well then that'd be good enough since plugin guys could eventually duplicate some of CS3's stuff.
But the GIMP doesn't do basic stuff well. As some earlier posters pointed out, even the simplest function in photoshop is pretty amazingly done and has had all the rough edges sanded off. GIMP is almost nothing but rough edges. Of course, now we're off topic from the UI which has always been a total disaster. There are those who cling to it and claim there's no objective difference between Photoshop and GIMP's UI and that they're just different but one isn't inherently better. It's just not true; the Photoshop UI is better in almost every conceivable way and I think the GIMP's bizarre unwillingness to update itself to modern interface guidelines is a real shame and it's made the GIMP unusable for the casual crowd who don't need CS3's amenities and doodads.
"I mean who in god's name responds to being called unoriginal by saying they will do something unoriginal."
Maybe someone who's trying to be funny? Why does everyone think that Bungie was insulting Miyamoto? All this guy did was make some little off-hand joke in response to Miyamoto's quote; there's no story here; there's no fight here.
Your argument would make sense if youtube just had obscure and unknown copyrighted clips showing up. If it were just random BBC shows no one has heard of.
But when episodes of South Park, the Simpsons, Family Guy, etc etc show up, no, you do not need a set of lawyers to figure out what's going. And I'm not even talking about video mashups and parodies and other gray areas. The fact is that Youtube makes no effort to block completely obvious copyright infringement when they already clearly have the capability to do so based on the porn precedent.
Now if they stopped allowing full episodes of shows and movies to linger for weeks and the only things showing up were 2 minute clips or parodies or obscure shows, then I'd agree with you. But it's not like youtube users hide what they're doing. Most of the time they just link three ten minute clips together and label them "South Park 403 Part 1" "...Part 2" and so on.
He wrote something on his blog that stuck with me. Basically he asked, how is it that Google has no way to police and filter copyrighted content from getting onto their site, yet they somehow miraculously always manage to keep all nudity and pornography off the system?
Youtube may have plenty of teenage girls gyrating and dancing to music from the 80s, but you'll never see anything you couldn't see on basic cable. How is it that with hundreds of thousands of videos being posted, no pornography ever makes it through? The answer is obvious. They pay people and employ filters to keep such content out. The point of course is that this means they can filter out copyrighted content and even have a system in place for it, yet they don't do it because they know that's the backbone of the site.
I think Google/Youtube's protection under safe harbor might not hold up because they're basically encouraging and making no effort to prevent all that copyrighted material.
Where are you getting this 4.5 million number? That chart you link doesn't seem to have any listed sources.
All the other online counters seem to have the 360s worldwide number at 6 or 7 million. In fact Microsoft announced 6 million 360's "sold" as of October, not 4.5. link
The difference between 4.5 and 6 million is pretty huge.
I've read this same basic article for the last 5 years. Even right after Windows XP came out, Microsoft was making press releases and giving interviews all about "betting the company" and turning things on their head..NET, C sharp, everything gets one of these articles.
Frankly, they shouldn't keep running their mouth about these big grand ideas if they're never gonna actually follow through. Sure, they released.NET and have done small parts of what they said they'd do, but so far nothing has come close to completely changing the company the way they keep claiming.
I just received in the mail, 6 months late, my warranty I purchased the day I bought my 360.
If I get free repairs now then shouldn't they give me my money back on that warranty?
YouTube is probably hoping for the same thing every cash strapped financially unsound but very popular and cool company hopes for: Someone bigger to buy them and thus provide enough funds for 5 more years of "figuring out how to make money."
ATI Cards are at least usable in desktop linux, but for laptops it's awful.
I have two choices: The default OS driver that gives me stable but slow 2d support and absolutely no 3d support OR The proprietary fglrx driver that runs much faster but prevents me from putting my laptop into standby or hibernating.
Obviously the second option is basically an impossibility. You can't leave a laptop running all the time, especially modern laptops since they run so hot. Next time I'll get a NVIDIA card even if it's worse than the ATI one, just so I'm not locked into one OS.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
For the vast majority of people, the Gimp's interface is awkward. I would go so far as to say it's beyond subjective. It actually functions in ways that are simply inefficient and troublesome.
Having said that, I'm sure there are people who could prefer it, but let me quote an earlier post from someone else: "And it's nothing to do with the fact that the GIMP's UI isn't Photoshop's.
I had no trouble picking up Corel PhotoPaint and Corel Draw and using them. I had no trouble picking up Inkscape and using it. I had no trouble picking up PhotoStudio and using it. I had no trouble picking up Fireworks and using it."
The GIMP's UI is inconsistent. It's one thing to have a different way of doing things. It's another to have a different way of doing every single thing in the program. Elements have very little in common. Even if you prefer the bizarro Every Toolbar is a Window approach, simple functions don't act in rational ways. The way you use one tool tells you nothing about how to use another. The entire program feels like each segment was created by entirely different dev teams who never spoke to each other. Shortcuts make no sense either alphabetically or in relation to other shortcuts to do similar tasks.
Right clicking to bring up the file menu is also a waste. Why not let me right click on an object and get context sensitive options? GIMP on every platform now includes a basic file menu at the top, so why cling awkwardly to the lack of context-sensitivity?
Other programs have a coherent UI. The GIMP is a million different UIs jam packed together. I could imagine someone super skilled with the gimp having some trouble readjusting to photoshop, but I can't believe anyone would think the gimp is easier to learn then photoshop, or hell, any other photo manipulation program on the market. All of the other programs have their own scheme and concept and you learn it and you know the prorgram. The GIMP is just pure memorization, and often times will seem to fight you over the simplest matters.
In short, people are always crapping on the GIMP because it is an aggressively bad interface that doesn't make sense and is much harder to learn than almost any other program in the field.
It's missing too many basic features
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The GIMP has a very bad interface. I know there are many people who love its interface, but as someone who has used every graphics suite in a professional setting, the GIMP's interface is by far the worst. It's inconsistent, confusing, and almost nothing behaves in the expected way. There are plenty of good open source apps with decent interfaces (Inkscape is great for instance), but the gimp is a program you have to aggressively memorize every bizarre thing it does. It's not a program where you get used to a few early eccentricities and then everything else makes sense once you understand how it works. Every single app and control works in its own way that has nothing to do with the way anything else works.
However, even if you can get past that, it's missing a lot of basic features. The brush system is years behind Photoshop (making a new brush everytime I want to change brush size is not acceptable). You can't rotate a canvas easily, directly work in a CMYK color space, all sorts of basic things.
Now the next response is, it's free. And that's right. There are a lot of tools in this for free software and if you were comparing it to photoshop you could say that ends the debate right there. But that only works if you don't need the power of photoshop, and if you don't, then you should spend 50 bucks on Ulead Photoimpact or Jasc Paint Shop Pro, since each is much better than the GIMP for under 100 dollars. Granted they don't have every single tool photoshop does, but neither does the gimp, and they at least are usable as professional tools.
I don't think this is a game player. I think the news people are grabbing onto that because they've been expecting a portable Xbox, but I think this is really much more iPod focused. It's not necessarily competing with the PSP's gaming abilities but its portable media abilities. Maybe with an attachment it'd let you stream footage anywhere and all sorts of neat things like that.
I think it's unlikely they'd make a portable Xbox and not go really full bore with it. This sounds more like when their new tablet PC got confused with a portable xbox earlier in the year.
The overall conference was barely a passing grade, but Sony is the industry leader. All they had to do was put in a decent performance, and they did.
The big number was 4 million units by December 31st worldwide. Are they lying? We'll see. If they can pull that off, it'll really put Microsoft to shame. Huge early numbers could give them the beachhead they need to quickly seal up the next gen war, at least from a numbers perspective.
We'll know how realistic this is when we see if they're running things on actual PS3s or dev kits. So far Konami said they were running on a dev kit, so from dev kit to 4 million units in half a year would be quite a feat.
Sure, I've heard nothing but disappointment and annoyance when it comes to Vista, but I've yet to hear a bad word about Office 2007. Last I heard it was a really exciting release that was going to totally redo the interface and finally provide a worthwhile difference between old and new MS word versions.
We've been hearing about the death of the home desktop for the last 15 years it seems, and it never seems to get any closer.
I'm sure that EVENTUALLY with media centers and portable tablet/handhelds getting move advanced it might become a reasonable notion, but until we're all walking around with Star Trek-esque super computers the size of a notepad, I'm not sure I see any obvious reason for the desktop to disappear anytime soon.
The appeal of applications like this doesn't come from replacing word for your normal everyday word editing. To me, at least, as editor of a small magazine, it's in being able to easily and clearly share access among many writers to the same document and to be able to have one central copy online that can always be accessed. When you don't have a big physical location like an office but still need to collaborate, web suites like these would be a lot better than emailing multiple versions of documents back and forth.
I think the potential of these applications for distributed work are really interesting, but for a regular corporate office, I see no advantage over just running word in every cubicle and getting files over the network.
Thank you.
This stuff has been posted and known about for a while. Readers of windows enthusiast sites like http://www.winsupersite.com/ have known about these versions for a while.
I own a 360. I like the console a lot. There's definitely a dearth of good games right now, but there are at least two that I really want coming out next week, and I did really enjoy some of the ones I got at launch.
Having said that, I think your opinion of what's going to happen in this console race depends on your opinion of Sony. If you think they're gonna have a great launch with tons of titles lined up and in great shape and lots of available consoles and on time this year, then you have to think they're gonna cream Microsoft's anemic launch.
If you think Sony is gonna be in the same boat as the 360 with even more complicated components and an even tighter release schedule that might get pushed back, then you probably think it'll be a pretty even battle with maybe a slight edge going either way.
Personally, my bet is that Sony runs into the same problems Microsoft did. I think they sell more consoles, but by then the 360 has a decent amount of games and it's a fairly even race for a year or two till the 360 fades about 6 months earlier than the PS3 does. Then we get the next next gen, and so on, and so on.
How does this explain why firefox eats more and more and more memory when left alone.
If I leave my computer on and come back the next morning, with no new pages having been loaded, the browser is suddenly taking up like 400 megs of RAM.
I've noticed a lot of "Oh woopie, another photo organizing app!" talk in here.
I think more of you should try Picasa. It's a really excellent photo organizer. Is it the only one? No. But it's way better than iPhoto (lightyears faster and doesn't steal your images and store them in a bunch of terrible date labeled folders).
Not saying this is a huge deal for linux, but as a mac user, I certainly would love ot have Picasa instead of iphoto, so at the very least it's one more nice option for linux users.
I disagree.
Three years ago I owned a Dell Laptop with a Pentium M processor.
Last year I bought a PowerBook G4.
The two chips had the same processor speed (1.67 vs 1.7).
The PowerBook is significantly slower than the Dell laptop was. Noticeably slower. Now I like Mac OS X a lot, and it's hardly a terrible or slow computer, but I certainly do miss the sheer speed and efficiency of the other chip.
I know that you're talking about the G5 chip and not the G4 mobile chip, but come on, a big reason they made the change was that the G5 was too hot and too big to be used in a mobile or sleek form factor. I've used Macs and I've used PCs and very simple processor intensive tasks have always gone faster for me on the PC. I'm looking forward to the new Intel Macs to finally level the playing field so I can have my speed and my OS X too.
I don't see how 10 years can be considered "well into" a thousand years.
If I'm saving up a million dollars to buy a date with Charlize Theron and I save 100 dollars, I'm not really that close, am I?
Sigh, not very close at all.
From the bottom of the article:
But the bottom-line is that this is an exciting time to be developing next-generation high definition digital TV products that will take us well into the third millennium....Right. It's not like we all read news reports last week saying that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD would be replaced with HVDs within 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you forgot about the huge list of tools that article listed that the GIMP lacks. Not to mention that CS3 added an incredible assortment of new tools and features that the GIMP is nowhere near.
CS3 now has brilliant photomerge and align layer features that intelligently examine the content of photos and stitch them together. And that's just one of the new CS3 features. There are a ton of things that Photoshop has that the GIMP does not have. Frankly though, I don't see that as a big deal because though those tools are awesome, if the GIMP did the basic stuff well then that'd be good enough since plugin guys could eventually duplicate some of CS3's stuff.
But the GIMP doesn't do basic stuff well. As some earlier posters pointed out, even the simplest function in photoshop is pretty amazingly done and has had all the rough edges sanded off. GIMP is almost nothing but rough edges. Of course, now we're off topic from the UI which has always been a total disaster. There are those who cling to it and claim there's no objective difference between Photoshop and GIMP's UI and that they're just different but one isn't inherently better. It's just not true; the Photoshop UI is better in almost every conceivable way and I think the GIMP's bizarre unwillingness to update itself to modern interface guidelines is a real shame and it's made the GIMP unusable for the casual crowd who don't need CS3's amenities and doodads.
"I mean who in god's name responds to being called unoriginal by saying they will do something unoriginal."
Maybe someone who's trying to be funny? Why does everyone think that Bungie was insulting Miyamoto? All this guy did was make some little off-hand joke in response to Miyamoto's quote; there's no story here; there's no fight here.
Your argument would make sense if youtube just had obscure and unknown copyrighted clips showing up. If it were just random BBC shows no one has heard of. But when episodes of South Park, the Simpsons, Family Guy, etc etc show up, no, you do not need a set of lawyers to figure out what's going. And I'm not even talking about video mashups and parodies and other gray areas. The fact is that Youtube makes no effort to block completely obvious copyright infringement when they already clearly have the capability to do so based on the porn precedent. Now if they stopped allowing full episodes of shows and movies to linger for weeks and the only things showing up were 2 minute clips or parodies or obscure shows, then I'd agree with you. But it's not like youtube users hide what they're doing. Most of the time they just link three ten minute clips together and label them "South Park 403 Part 1" "...Part 2" and so on.
He wrote something on his blog that stuck with me. Basically he asked, how is it that Google has no way to police and filter copyrighted content from getting onto their site, yet they somehow miraculously always manage to keep all nudity and pornography off the system? Youtube may have plenty of teenage girls gyrating and dancing to music from the 80s, but you'll never see anything you couldn't see on basic cable. How is it that with hundreds of thousands of videos being posted, no pornography ever makes it through? The answer is obvious. They pay people and employ filters to keep such content out. The point of course is that this means they can filter out copyrighted content and even have a system in place for it, yet they don't do it because they know that's the backbone of the site. I think Google/Youtube's protection under safe harbor might not hold up because they're basically encouraging and making no effort to prevent all that copyrighted material.
Where are you getting this 4.5 million number? That chart you link doesn't seem to have any listed sources. All the other online counters seem to have the 360s worldwide number at 6 or 7 million. In fact Microsoft announced 6 million 360's "sold" as of October, not 4.5. link The difference between 4.5 and 6 million is pretty huge.
Frankly, they shouldn't keep running their mouth about these big grand ideas if they're never gonna actually follow through. Sure, they released .NET and have done small parts of what they said they'd do, but so far nothing has come close to completely changing the company the way they keep claiming.
I just received in the mail, 6 months late, my warranty I purchased the day I bought my 360. If I get free repairs now then shouldn't they give me my money back on that warranty?
YouTube is probably hoping for the same thing every cash strapped financially unsound but very popular and cool company hopes for: Someone bigger to buy them and thus provide enough funds for 5 more years of "figuring out how to make money."
...I can use my guinea pig as a router?
ATI Cards are at least usable in desktop linux, but for laptops it's awful.
I have two choices:
The default OS driver that gives me stable but slow 2d support and absolutely no 3d support OR
The proprietary fglrx driver that runs much faster but prevents me from putting my laptop into standby or hibernating.
Obviously the second option is basically an impossibility. You can't leave a laptop running all the time, especially modern laptops since they run so hot. Next time I'll get a NVIDIA card even if it's worse than the ATI one, just so I'm not locked into one OS.
For the vast majority of people, the Gimp's interface is awkward. I would go so far as to say it's beyond subjective. It actually functions in ways that are simply inefficient and troublesome.
Having said that, I'm sure there are people who could prefer it, but let me quote an earlier post from someone else:
"And it's nothing to do with the fact that the GIMP's UI isn't Photoshop's.
I had no trouble picking up Corel PhotoPaint and Corel Draw and using them.
I had no trouble picking up Inkscape and using it.
I had no trouble picking up PhotoStudio and using it.
I had no trouble picking up Fireworks and using it."
The GIMP's UI is inconsistent. It's one thing to have a different way of doing things. It's another to have a different way of doing every single thing in the program. Elements have very little in common. Even if you prefer the bizarro Every Toolbar is a Window approach, simple functions don't act in rational ways. The way you use one tool tells you nothing about how to use another. The entire program feels like each segment was created by entirely different dev teams who never spoke to each other. Shortcuts make no sense either alphabetically or in relation to other shortcuts to do similar tasks.
Right clicking to bring up the file menu is also a waste. Why not let me right click on an object and get context sensitive options? GIMP on every platform now includes a basic file menu at the top, so why cling awkwardly to the lack of context-sensitivity?
Other programs have a coherent UI. The GIMP is a million different UIs jam packed together. I could imagine someone super skilled with the gimp having some trouble readjusting to photoshop, but I can't believe anyone would think the gimp is easier to learn then photoshop, or hell, any other photo manipulation program on the market. All of the other programs have their own scheme and concept and you learn it and you know the prorgram. The GIMP is just pure memorization, and often times will seem to fight you over the simplest matters.
In short, people are always crapping on the GIMP because it is an aggressively bad interface that doesn't make sense and is much harder to learn than almost any other program in the field.
The GIMP has a very bad interface. I know there are many people who love its interface, but as someone who has used every graphics suite in a professional setting, the GIMP's interface is by far the worst. It's inconsistent, confusing, and almost nothing behaves in the expected way. There are plenty of good open source apps with decent interfaces (Inkscape is great for instance), but the gimp is a program you have to aggressively memorize every bizarre thing it does. It's not a program where you get used to a few early eccentricities and then everything else makes sense once you understand how it works. Every single app and control works in its own way that has nothing to do with the way anything else works.
However, even if you can get past that, it's missing a lot of basic features. The brush system is years behind Photoshop (making a new brush everytime I want to change brush size is not acceptable). You can't rotate a canvas easily, directly work in a CMYK color space, all sorts of basic things.
Now the next response is, it's free. And that's right. There are a lot of tools in this for free software and if you were comparing it to photoshop you could say that ends the debate right there. But that only works if you don't need the power of photoshop, and if you don't, then you should spend 50 bucks on Ulead Photoimpact or Jasc Paint Shop Pro, since each is much better than the GIMP for under 100 dollars. Granted they don't have every single tool photoshop does, but neither does the gimp, and they at least are usable as professional tools.
I think it's unlikely they'd make a portable Xbox and not go really full bore with it. This sounds more like when their new tablet PC got confused with a portable xbox earlier in the year.
The overall conference was barely a passing grade, but Sony is the industry leader. All they had to do was put in a decent performance, and they did. The big number was 4 million units by December 31st worldwide. Are they lying? We'll see. If they can pull that off, it'll really put Microsoft to shame. Huge early numbers could give them the beachhead they need to quickly seal up the next gen war, at least from a numbers perspective. We'll know how realistic this is when we see if they're running things on actual PS3s or dev kits. So far Konami said they were running on a dev kit, so from dev kit to 4 million units in half a year would be quite a feat.
Sure, I've heard nothing but disappointment and annoyance when it comes to Vista, but I've yet to hear a bad word about Office 2007. Last I heard it was a really exciting release that was going to totally redo the interface and finally provide a worthwhile difference between old and new MS word versions.
I'm sure that EVENTUALLY with media centers and portable tablet/handhelds getting move advanced it might become a reasonable notion, but until we're all walking around with Star Trek-esque super computers the size of a notepad, I'm not sure I see any obvious reason for the desktop to disappear anytime soon.
I think the potential of these applications for distributed work are really interesting, but for a regular corporate office, I see no advantage over just running word in every cubicle and getting files over the network.
Thank you. This stuff has been posted and known about for a while. Readers of windows enthusiast sites like http://www.winsupersite.com/ have known about these versions for a while.
Having said that, I think your opinion of what's going to happen in this console race depends on your opinion of Sony. If you think they're gonna have a great launch with tons of titles lined up and in great shape and lots of available consoles and on time this year, then you have to think they're gonna cream Microsoft's anemic launch. If you think Sony is gonna be in the same boat as the 360 with even more complicated components and an even tighter release schedule that might get pushed back, then you probably think it'll be a pretty even battle with maybe a slight edge going either way.
Personally, my bet is that Sony runs into the same problems Microsoft did. I think they sell more consoles, but by then the 360 has a decent amount of games and it's a fairly even race for a year or two till the 360 fades about 6 months earlier than the PS3 does. Then we get the next next gen, and so on, and so on.
How does this explain why firefox eats more and more and more memory when left alone.
If I leave my computer on and come back the next morning, with no new pages having been loaded, the browser is suddenly taking up like 400 megs of RAM.
That can't be explained by caching tabs.
I think more of you should try Picasa. It's a really excellent photo organizer. Is it the only one? No. But it's way better than iPhoto (lightyears faster and doesn't steal your images and store them in a bunch of terrible date labeled folders).
Not saying this is a huge deal for linux, but as a mac user, I certainly would love ot have Picasa instead of iphoto, so at the very least it's one more nice option for linux users.
I disagree. Three years ago I owned a Dell Laptop with a Pentium M processor. Last year I bought a PowerBook G4. The two chips had the same processor speed (1.67 vs 1.7). The PowerBook is significantly slower than the Dell laptop was. Noticeably slower. Now I like Mac OS X a lot, and it's hardly a terrible or slow computer, but I certainly do miss the sheer speed and efficiency of the other chip. I know that you're talking about the G5 chip and not the G4 mobile chip, but come on, a big reason they made the change was that the G5 was too hot and too big to be used in a mobile or sleek form factor. I've used Macs and I've used PCs and very simple processor intensive tasks have always gone faster for me on the PC. I'm looking forward to the new Intel Macs to finally level the playing field so I can have my speed and my OS X too.
But can we really say it's some amazing piece of good faith that they settled ONLY for 1.4 billion dollars in salary for the year?
If I'm saving up a million dollars to buy a date with Charlize Theron and I save 100 dollars, I'm not really that close, am I?
Sigh, not very close at all.
From the bottom of the article: But the bottom-line is that this is an exciting time to be developing next-generation high definition digital TV products that will take us well into the third millennium. ...Right. It's not like we all read news reports last week saying that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD would be replaced with HVDs within 10 years.