censorship |?sens?r? sh ip| noun the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts : details of the visit were subject to military censorship.
You're not very bright, are you? Either that or logic isn't your strong suit. If any random changes were allowed to stand (in Wikipedia or anywhere else) without a process to delete things that didn't meet certain standards, it would make the source LESS credible, not more. Having a transparent system that allows questionable things to be deleted INCREASES TRUST, not lessens it.
You don't seem to understand the definition of the word "censored." If the administrator makes a decision that something isn't worth fighting and changes it himself, it is editing. Just like when an editor of a newspaper or magazine makes a change because someone threatens to sue. Censorship is when there is a legal requirement to change something.
If you don't like the system you're working with (or if you think it's a good idea for an organization to fight EVERY threatened lawsuit), start your own Wikipedia-like project. Good luck with the lawsuits. I know from experience as a newspaper editor that you have to decide which threats are worth fighting and which are not. Sometimes, the people threatening lawsuits are actually correct on a factual level. I have no idea in this case, so I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that someone has to exercise reasonable editorial control. There will always be disagreements about where to draw the line. But it's easier to cry "censorship" and want to fight lawsuits to the death when you're not the one who's going to be facing the consequences.
Just because a system allows for changes by anyone doesn't make those changes valid. I don't have any idea about the specific content of the entries, because those are subjects I know nothing about. But SOMEONE has to ultimately make a decision about what is appropriate or legitimate in a piece of written material. It sounds as though the people with ultimate authority at Wikipedia are exercising their functions as editors. It MIGHT be that they're being overly aggressive about editing changes. I don't have an opinion about that. But to say that they're censoring is silly. They're just being editors. Censorship is when someone outside of a publication or organization requires changes. This is NOT censorship.
As far as I'm concerned, you can have both Detroit AND the White House back. Would you mind taking Congress while you're at it, too? We would be most obliged.:-)
Hmmmm. I'm American. I think of Canada every now and then. I know people around me who think of 'em every now and then. So what's your point? You're either being amazingly obscure or else you're suffering from the delusion that you're insulting a Canadian.
You seem to be missing the point. It's perfectly legitimate to criticize, but what the heck does it have to do with anything to quote the U.S. Constitution about a Canadian issue?
I know that a lot of Americans sometimes think of Canada as the 51st state, but they're a separate country with their own laws and everything. I know this is hard to believe, but the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has NO validity there. I guess it's time to invade 'em, huh?;-)
If you buy a computer because you're impressed that it has custom chips and whatnot inside -- instead of because of what it's able to DO for you -- you have way more money than brains. I love Macs (and have both a PowerBook and an iMac), but I couldn't care less what's inside the box. Who cares whether the processor comes from IBM or Intel? Do you also care whether the hard drive is Western Digital or Seagate? Who built the power supply? Who made the wires that connect the components? Who the heck cares? The user experience is what matters. If it does what you want, great. If not, find another tool. If you just want to obsess about the technology inside, study it to your heart's content, but don't pretend that it matters when you buy a tool to get work done with.
I don't know enough about either of them to comment. All I know is that GIMP by itself isn't ready to be used for what I need. I have actually looked up both of what you mention (because I've seen them referenced elsewhere) and there's nothing about them that makes sense to an end user, insofar as how they'd be useful in getting real work done with GIMP. The things I've been able to find are heavily oriented toward developers, NOT end users, so they're useless to a normal user, as far as I can tell.
You also don't seem to understand real-world workflow in printing, at least based on the ludicrous suggestion that a job be sent to a printing company and let the printing company do all of the conversion. A normal printing company expects you to be bright enough to convert your own RGBs to CMYKs. If you want them converting RGBs for you, they're going to charge you extra for this useless work on their part. I've dealt with at least a dozen printing companies with lots of jobs over the last 15 years. If you can regularly send clean files that are ready to be sent to an imagesetter with minimal prep, you're going to get a better price on your work.
If you think lack of CMYK support isn't enough to keep GIMP from being used by people in the printing industry, you're either ignorant or just too stubborn to see that GIMP isn't ready to replace Photoshop in the real world. I honestly don't know which it is.
I routinely have Linux advocates tell me that GIMP is a complete substitute for everything Photoshop does. I realize that these are just armchair experts, but there certainly are a lot of them. Even many of those who have used GIMP don't understand why it's not correct for use in the printing industry. They might have played with it enough to know that you can edit photos or whatever, but they don't understand what's neceesary for professional printing. I don't really blame people for not understanding such a narrow specialty, but it gets tiring having them tell me with certainty that I'm wrong about GIMP not being a perfect replacement for Photoshop for MY uses.
I'm sure that some of the developers of GIMP at least have an understanding of some of the limitations of their product, but I also doubt that they really see the limitations from the viewpoint of an end user in the print industry.
I think the title at the top of the page you're referencing makes it clear why this isn't really ready for serious use in a production environment. Note the word "rudimentary" in the following sub-head.
"A plugin providing rudimentary CMYK support for The GIMP"
You really don't seem to understand. I can produce an entire ad or publication or whatever without EVER using Pantone colors. The Pantone Matching System is only used when a) an ink manufacturer produces a specific ink that matches a shade that Pantone defines, OR b) someone needs to produce a specific color match with CMYK, such as for backgrounds or type color or something similar. Pantone colors NEVER have anything to do with converting RGB to CMYK.
David
You are correct, but I think anybody understood what I meant. I don't see any reason to get into a discussion of the difference between addictive and subtractive color. This didn't seem like the place to try to explain that, and it wasn't necessary to the point.
If Photoshop is ported to Linux, it won't be an OSS application, so my criticism won't apply to it. Photoshop on Linux would be a mature piece of software that has years of knowledge of how graphic artists work built into it. GIMP just doesn't have that, at least not to the extent that many professional users MUST have.
As an aside, though, I DO think there is a lot of arrogance involved. Time after time, I see geeks confidently assert things about software which I know isn't true, simply because I understand the subject matter of the application better than he does. He understands software development better than I ever will, maybe, but he doesn't understand the needs of the end user, in too many cases. I'm afraid this tends to be more true in the OSS world than in the commercial software world, simply because of the financial incentive that the commercial people have to produce a product that people are willing to pay for.
I certainly don't want to live in a monopoly software world. I'm not trying to argue that choice is bad. (I'm a Mac user, so I obviously don't mind being a part of a minority.) I'm not arguing that one or two vendors in ANY area is a good thing. I'm just pointing out why it's difficult for the OSS world to get things right in areas outside of geekdom.
Try sending an RGB photo placed in a QuarkXPress document to a printing company and tell them that it doesn't need to be converted to CMYK. For all practical purposes, CMYK IS still an absolute must.:-)
You're right that you don't want to convert back and forth between the two color spaces, which is why I edit and save an RGB before I save a different file as a CMYK. There are so many possible uses for the picture (even as CMYK) that I prefer to keep something as close to the original as possible. But when it goes to print, it's CMYK and converted to the proper size and resolution.
David
You've apparently never met some of the aggressive OSS advocates that I have. They don't listen. They just insist that a tool does something that it won't do, because they're ignorant of what the actual NEED is. Those sorts of people try desperately to shove something onto you. You might not understand this little thing called a metaphor. Look it up sometime.
I don't think a reasonable person could come to the conclusion that I'm a moron from anything I've written here, so I'll conclude that you have a problem with either reading comprehension or basic logic.
David
Honestly, I don't much care whether either Linux or GIMP is successful. OSS isn't a religious thing to me, so I don't have any emotional investment in it. The free/open source model works for some things, but I have serious doubts about whether it'll ever work for everything. If it does, that's great. I get free software that's as good as what I'm using now. If it doesn't, I already have tools that work and a commercial software market that understands how to supply better tools in the future.
As for your first comment, you lead me to believe that you just don't "get" what this "missing feature" is. It's not just another item on a checklist. There is a chain of tasks that has to happen in order to get a graphic to an imagesetter. Converting a graphic from RGB to CMYK MUST happen for the job to be done. Otherwise, the file is useless to someone doing print work. No matter how good the rest of the software is, it is worthless for professional printing purposes without being able to do this.
And, yes, the fact that people keep saying that GIMP is perfectly good enough for something -- when I KNOW that it just won't work for this purpose -- tells me a lot about the credibility of the development model. Too many of its proponents spew ignorant puffery that would put MS to shame. There are some very good developers doing good work in OSS, but there are way too many people who are willing to pontificate about things they know nothing about.
You're illustrating my point far better than you realize. Converting RGB to CMYK in a digital graphic has NOTHING to do with the Pantone Matching System. That's an entirely different issue.
The very fact that this question has to be asked says a lot about why Linux (and other OSS) has trouble making it in fields with established software. I presume that the people who wrote GIMP wrote it to meet their own needs, because they certainly haven't taken the time and effort to meet the needs of print graphics professionals. Even if you ignore the interface and a number of other shortcomings, the lack of CMYK support makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be used in a graphic arts environment for printed products.
The primary colors of light (and therefore monitors) are red, green and blue (RGB). The primary colors of printing are cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). A digital image starts out as an RGB and is edited that way, but it must be converted to CMYK before it can be sent to an imagesetter for four-color printing. This isn't a "good thing to have." This is a showstopper not to have. It's like having a car without wheels.
I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves. It has not done well in areas where the geeks don't "get" what professionals in other areas must have. A commercial company has a serious incentive to make software that fits the needs of those other people. The people who write OSS tend to just want to write things that are fun and useful to them -- and that severly limits adoption of Linux in non-technical areas. Of course, it also doesn't help that so many Linux people seem to take the attitude that the Linux desktop is fine, but artists and other non-technical types are just too stupid to use it.
That's like saying that if you don't drive a car, you won't have as many accidents as you would if you just ride a horse-drawn wagon and stay off of any road where cars might be. It's true that you're much less likely to be hurt that way, but you miss out on the benefits that make having a car (or some form of faster transportation) worthwhile. In the same way, you might not be "always on" to be attacked through your broadband connection, but you lose all of the benefits that come with having a high-speed connection. So unless you do nothing except text e-mail, the benefits of broadband should outweigh the risks, especially if you're smart enough to take simple precautions. Just nothing except my Mac's built-in firewall, I've never had any issues, and I've been on broadband for years.
Thanks. You saved me the trouble of writing an explanation about the words. Of course, since this is Slashdot, you might be flamed for caring about word usage.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
censorship |?sens?r? sh ip|
noun
the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts : details of the visit were subject to military censorship.
You're not very bright, are you? Either that or logic isn't your strong suit. If any random changes were allowed to stand (in Wikipedia or anywhere else) without a process to delete things that didn't meet certain standards, it would make the source LESS credible, not more. Having a transparent system that allows questionable things to be deleted INCREASES TRUST, not lessens it.
David
You don't seem to understand the definition of the word "censored." If the administrator makes a decision that something isn't worth fighting and changes it himself, it is editing. Just like when an editor of a newspaper or magazine makes a change because someone threatens to sue. Censorship is when there is a legal requirement to change something.
If you don't like the system you're working with (or if you think it's a good idea for an organization to fight EVERY threatened lawsuit), start your own Wikipedia-like project. Good luck with the lawsuits. I know from experience as a newspaper editor that you have to decide which threats are worth fighting and which are not. Sometimes, the people threatening lawsuits are actually correct on a factual level. I have no idea in this case, so I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that someone has to exercise reasonable editorial control. There will always be disagreements about where to draw the line. But it's easier to cry "censorship" and want to fight lawsuits to the death when you're not the one who's going to be facing the consequences.
David
Just because a system allows for changes by anyone doesn't make those changes valid. I don't have any idea about the specific content of the entries, because those are subjects I know nothing about. But SOMEONE has to ultimately make a decision about what is appropriate or legitimate in a piece of written material. It sounds as though the people with ultimate authority at Wikipedia are exercising their functions as editors. It MIGHT be that they're being overly aggressive about editing changes. I don't have an opinion about that. But to say that they're censoring is silly. They're just being editors. Censorship is when someone outside of a publication or organization requires changes. This is NOT censorship.
David
As far as I'm concerned, you can have both Detroit AND the White House back. Would you mind taking Congress while you're at it, too? We would be most obliged. :-)
David
Hmmmm. I'm American. I think of Canada every now and then. I know people around me who think of 'em every now and then. So what's your point? You're either being amazingly obscure or else you're suffering from the delusion that you're insulting a Canadian.
David
You seem to be missing the point. It's perfectly legitimate to criticize, but what the heck does it have to do with anything to quote the U.S. Constitution about a Canadian issue?
David
I know that a lot of Americans sometimes think of Canada as the 51st state, but they're a separate country with their own laws and everything. I know this is hard to believe, but the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has NO validity there. I guess it's time to invade 'em, huh? ;-)
David
If you buy a computer because you're impressed that it has custom chips and whatnot inside -- instead of because of what it's able to DO for you -- you have way more money than brains. I love Macs (and have both a PowerBook and an iMac), but I couldn't care less what's inside the box. Who cares whether the processor comes from IBM or Intel? Do you also care whether the hard drive is Western Digital or Seagate? Who built the power supply? Who made the wires that connect the components? Who the heck cares? The user experience is what matters. If it does what you want, great. If not, find another tool. If you just want to obsess about the technology inside, study it to your heart's content, but don't pretend that it matters when you buy a tool to get work done with.
David
I don't know enough about either of them to comment. All I know is that GIMP by itself isn't ready to be used for what I need. I have actually looked up both of what you mention (because I've seen them referenced elsewhere) and there's nothing about them that makes sense to an end user, insofar as how they'd be useful in getting real work done with GIMP. The things I've been able to find are heavily oriented toward developers, NOT end users, so they're useless to a normal user, as far as I can tell.
David
You don't have a clue what spamming is, do you?
You also don't seem to understand real-world workflow in printing, at least based on the ludicrous suggestion that a job be sent to a printing company and let the printing company do all of the conversion. A normal printing company expects you to be bright enough to convert your own RGBs to CMYKs. If you want them converting RGBs for you, they're going to charge you extra for this useless work on their part. I've dealt with at least a dozen printing companies with lots of jobs over the last 15 years. If you can regularly send clean files that are ready to be sent to an imagesetter with minimal prep, you're going to get a better price on your work.
If you think lack of CMYK support isn't enough to keep GIMP from being used by people in the printing industry, you're either ignorant or just too stubborn to see that GIMP isn't ready to replace Photoshop in the real world. I honestly don't know which it is.
David
Ah, so it IS reading comprehension that's your problem. Too bad. I can't help you there.
David
I routinely have Linux advocates tell me that GIMP is a complete substitute for everything Photoshop does. I realize that these are just armchair experts, but there certainly are a lot of them. Even many of those who have used GIMP don't understand why it's not correct for use in the printing industry. They might have played with it enough to know that you can edit photos or whatever, but they don't understand what's neceesary for professional printing. I don't really blame people for not understanding such a narrow specialty, but it gets tiring having them tell me with certainty that I'm wrong about GIMP not being a perfect replacement for Photoshop for MY uses.
I'm sure that some of the developers of GIMP at least have an understanding of some of the limitations of their product, but I also doubt that they really see the limitations from the viewpoint of an end user in the print industry.
David
I think the title at the top of the page you're referencing makes it clear why this isn't really ready for serious use in a production environment. Note the word "rudimentary" in the following sub-head.
"A plugin providing rudimentary CMYK support for The GIMP"
David
I believe I made it clear that I was talking about using GIMP for graphic arts in the printing industry.
You really don't seem to understand. I can produce an entire ad or publication or whatever without EVER using Pantone colors. The Pantone Matching System is only used when a) an ink manufacturer produces a specific ink that matches a shade that Pantone defines, OR b) someone needs to produce a specific color match with CMYK, such as for backgrounds or type color or something similar. Pantone colors NEVER have anything to do with converting RGB to CMYK. David
You are correct, but I think anybody understood what I meant. I don't see any reason to get into a discussion of the difference between addictive and subtractive color. This didn't seem like the place to try to explain that, and it wasn't necessary to the point.
David
If Photoshop is ported to Linux, it won't be an OSS application, so my criticism won't apply to it. Photoshop on Linux would be a mature piece of software that has years of knowledge of how graphic artists work built into it. GIMP just doesn't have that, at least not to the extent that many professional users MUST have.
As an aside, though, I DO think there is a lot of arrogance involved. Time after time, I see geeks confidently assert things about software which I know isn't true, simply because I understand the subject matter of the application better than he does. He understands software development better than I ever will, maybe, but he doesn't understand the needs of the end user, in too many cases. I'm afraid this tends to be more true in the OSS world than in the commercial software world, simply because of the financial incentive that the commercial people have to produce a product that people are willing to pay for.
I certainly don't want to live in a monopoly software world. I'm not trying to argue that choice is bad. (I'm a Mac user, so I obviously don't mind being a part of a minority.) I'm not arguing that one or two vendors in ANY area is a good thing. I'm just pointing out why it's difficult for the OSS world to get things right in areas outside of geekdom.
David
Try sending an RGB photo placed in a QuarkXPress document to a printing company and tell them that it doesn't need to be converted to CMYK. For all practical purposes, CMYK IS still an absolute must. :-)
You're right that you don't want to convert back and forth between the two color spaces, which is why I edit and save an RGB before I save a different file as a CMYK. There are so many possible uses for the picture (even as CMYK) that I prefer to keep something as close to the original as possible. But when it goes to print, it's CMYK and converted to the proper size and resolution.
David
You've apparently never met some of the aggressive OSS advocates that I have. They don't listen. They just insist that a tool does something that it won't do, because they're ignorant of what the actual NEED is. Those sorts of people try desperately to shove something onto you. You might not understand this little thing called a metaphor. Look it up sometime. I don't think a reasonable person could come to the conclusion that I'm a moron from anything I've written here, so I'll conclude that you have a problem with either reading comprehension or basic logic. David
Honestly, I don't much care whether either Linux or GIMP is successful. OSS isn't a religious thing to me, so I don't have any emotional investment in it. The free/open source model works for some things, but I have serious doubts about whether it'll ever work for everything. If it does, that's great. I get free software that's as good as what I'm using now. If it doesn't, I already have tools that work and a commercial software market that understands how to supply better tools in the future.
As for your first comment, you lead me to believe that you just don't "get" what this "missing feature" is. It's not just another item on a checklist. There is a chain of tasks that has to happen in order to get a graphic to an imagesetter. Converting a graphic from RGB to CMYK MUST happen for the job to be done. Otherwise, the file is useless to someone doing print work. No matter how good the rest of the software is, it is worthless for professional printing purposes without being able to do this.
And, yes, the fact that people keep saying that GIMP is perfectly good enough for something -- when I KNOW that it just won't work for this purpose -- tells me a lot about the credibility of the development model. Too many of its proponents spew ignorant puffery that would put MS to shame. There are some very good developers doing good work in OSS, but there are way too many people who are willing to pontificate about things they know nothing about.
David
You're illustrating my point far better than you realize. Converting RGB to CMYK in a digital graphic has NOTHING to do with the Pantone Matching System. That's an entirely different issue.
The very fact that this question has to be asked says a lot about why Linux (and other OSS) has trouble making it in fields with established software. I presume that the people who wrote GIMP wrote it to meet their own needs, because they certainly haven't taken the time and effort to meet the needs of print graphics professionals. Even if you ignore the interface and a number of other shortcomings, the lack of CMYK support makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be used in a graphic arts environment for printed products.
The primary colors of light (and therefore monitors) are red, green and blue (RGB). The primary colors of printing are cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). A digital image starts out as an RGB and is edited that way, but it must be converted to CMYK before it can be sent to an imagesetter for four-color printing. This isn't a "good thing to have." This is a showstopper not to have. It's like having a car without wheels.
I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves. It has not done well in areas where the geeks don't "get" what professionals in other areas must have. A commercial company has a serious incentive to make software that fits the needs of those other people. The people who write OSS tend to just want to write things that are fun and useful to them -- and that severly limits adoption of Linux in non-technical areas. Of course, it also doesn't help that so many Linux people seem to take the attitude that the Linux desktop is fine, but artists and other non-technical types are just too stupid to use it.
David
That's like saying that if you don't drive a car, you won't have as many accidents as you would if you just ride a horse-drawn wagon and stay off of any road where cars might be. It's true that you're much less likely to be hurt that way, but you miss out on the benefits that make having a car (or some form of faster transportation) worthwhile. In the same way, you might not be "always on" to be attacked through your broadband connection, but you lose all of the benefits that come with having a high-speed connection. So unless you do nothing except text e-mail, the benefits of broadband should outweigh the risks, especially if you're smart enough to take simple precautions. Just nothing except my Mac's built-in firewall, I've never had any issues, and I've been on broadband for years.
David
Thanks. You saved me the trouble of writing an explanation about the words. Of course, since this is Slashdot, you might be flamed for caring about word usage. :-)
David