That is all assuming these boards come from a 3rd party that has nothing in common with the manufacturer of the originals.
The boards don't have to be sub-par. They might be substandard, as in 'failed to pass one of Q/A tests'. Or they may be run-off-the-mill standard devices, made at night on the same line as the originals.
They will run on exactly the same drivers as the originals.
You will replace your $150 motherboard in 2-3 years. That's about as long as your $30 one would serve you.
We're not in an era where guys with microscopes and diamond grinders would rub a layer by layer off a chip to copy the design, then manufacture a copy. They have the plans, they have the technology, they have all they need to produce exactly the same stuff as the originals, except of the management's consent (and even that sometimes they do... just in secret).
BTW, there are brand cameras at a local market. Official throw-away Q/A failures from major manufacturers. The faults may be like a scratch on the case, the battery hinges loose, dead pixels on the screen or such. You can get these for like 10% of the originals. The seller got them for free. You just bring your batteries, a memory card and test till you find one that is satisfactory.
But in the business place my time is a finite resource, and it costs money. If your time is too limited to provide a reasonably accessible and nonfascist systems, then your company is just a cheapsake. Of course you can cut down costs by employing one admin to support 50000 users, then the admin will be barely able to get the work done by having 50000 exactly identical maximum-lockdown systems. But one admin for 50000 users means the company will be out of business the next year and it's a good idea to run while you can. There's no need for 1 admin: 1 user, because users don't need the admin all the time. Two admins can very well support 1000 users without being a fascist though. 940 of them will take less than a hour a day off their schedule, the remaining 60 may take up to 6 hours a day. Of course you can cut costs and fire one of the admins, then the remaining one will have to lock down systems of the employees. Then most of the 60, usually most creative and productive people will quit and take jobs at the competition, and the one admin, sweating day by day will support 960 always complaining drones.
You have to make a business case for why the software you want on there is worth the additional effort, infrastructure, training, development time and licensing costs.
There you go, you're the kind of admin who rises barriers instead of allowing for opportunities.
So I have to write a 60-page report stating the additional effort will be fully carried by me myself, that the infrastructure is in place because there's still 75GB free on my 80GB drive and the CPU is running idle most of the time, that I got the training at school, that development is covered by open-source volunteers and licensing costs are zero. Then you run the report through three middle-level managers, five lawyers, let it rest on your desk for three months, get CEO's signature and then log in and toggle a checkbox in 'permissions' tab of my account.
If, by a slim chance, I broke my computer by installing the app without your approval, you'd need 15 minutes to restore it from backup. But by requiring me to make a business case you wasted 8 workdays of various people on making decisions and hindered my productivity for three months. It means instead of providing value by your work, you create losses. The company would be better off firing you.
If that guy built a system with a ton of unsupported software, who are you to say he doesn't need it? Why sticking head up your ass, "it's unsupported, I refuse to help you with that". Why won't you provide a generic backup to the users, so if they have a ton of custom software, they can just recover it from backup? If you see users facing problem, the answer is not "don't do this then". Move your ass and look for a solution of "one size fits most", they exist. Then once you have 95% of the user base covered by that solution, you have enough time to approach the remaining 5% on individual basis and take time solving their problems? Sure the 5% will occupy 80% of your time, but the 95% will occupy less than 20% of your time. And sure you'd like to work less than 20% of your time and slack for 80% of your time, but that's not what you're paid for.
And why do you believe your time is worth more than time of that guy? Your job is to make it possible for that guy to work. It's money earned for his work that pay your salary. If you don't enable him to work, you're not earning your salary. No, you don't get paid for fixing things, you're paid for things not being broken. If they break and you let them stay broken, you're not doing your job. Why they broke or who broke them is entirely moot.
I'm in a company where all the users have admin rights on their computers. There's a nightly backup program running, the IT applies centralized updates, there's obligatory antivirus and we're behind a good firewall, but the users are free to install whatever they wish as long as it's legal. If you break stuff, the IT staff will help you. If it's non-standard, you're queued low-priority, but not ignored. If you screw up bad, everything is recoverable. Your desktop has nightlies. All development and production servers have hourlies. They are accessible as easily as cd.snapshot from any directory anywhere, ever, and 99% of times you can fix things yourself using these. If you screw up bad, say DROP DATABASE TYPO; then you call IT and they fix it for you. If you break your desktop, you recover it from backup yourself. It's easy.
the Gutenpring dialog, while clunky...no such thing under Windows. Bare system "print" dialog with just as many options as the printer driver provides. Unfortunately due to certain custom software requirements here I can't switch to Linux, so I'm stuck with the Windows port.
You can save a window layout in the preferences Not quite where I'd look for this kind of option. And I can save only one (I'd prefer some different, say, for B&W editing, for editing for web, for animation etc). Your window setup will reset to default values the next time you start GIMP. Oh, and remember to uncheck "save window positions on exit" or you'll have to rebuild from defaults again... Interesting adventure, to try to add Undo History -between- layers and brushes.
lots of applications have annoying UI quirks though. Can we go with "some specific areas that could definitely use significant improvment"?
Actually, no. Beyond the traditional (CMYK etc) that's just 'UI Quirks'. Thing is I didn't exhaust the list here, by far. I just threw a couple off top of my head. If you really wanted all my gripes I could go on for hours and hours.
Sure there are apps that have interface quirks. This is normal. There are apps that have many or weird interface quirks. That's annoying. There are apps that have many and weird interface quirks. That's very unusable. GIMP's interface is ALL quirks, and many of them very weird.
Want a run off the mill on just HOW quirky the interface is? Start-to-end, upper left to lower right. Click the icon. Startup window appears but no cancel/close button. If I doubleclick it by a chance, I have to wait till both mill through the fonts and extensions dirs, only when loading is finished I can kill one. No idea why anyone would want two instances but oh well.
Now I have the two default windows. Upper left is the gadget on the title bar. 'Restore' and 'Move' are non-quirky, size and maximize work as intended except maximize is utterly useless, the window fills the screen but you can't really make it horizontal because some elements are fixed at "below the rest". 'Minimize' minimizes current GIMP window. If you have 10 pics open, you have to click 12 different minimizes to hide all GIMP windows. 'Close' works as expected, the other buttons on the title bar repeat the function.
Next row: File. Starting with the top, the ------------------ bar which is a quirk I actually like but it took me some time to find it, because it's entirely non-intuitive. Besides, dialogs created with it can only be closed, not minimized, so they tend to get lost. Also if you pick the same entry the second time, it closes the window even if you picked it in context of a different window (so you can't have two 'colors-info' dialogs open for two images to check histograms periodically. Another quirk. And yet another, these are missing from the image top bar menu. No '-----------' there. *shrug*. Quirk.
New. Somewhat too simplistic... Templates - oh, too deep subject to get into their quirks... there are some and heavy, next image size, with chain icon missing (if you want to get twice as much as 1024x768, calculate in your head how much is 768*2).
Next portrait/landscape. Nothing in common with print orientation which might seem non-quirky but MS Word's quirk here seems to be the defacto standard.
Advanced options... they change (per Template) but remain invisible if you pick one. Template quirk.
X, Y resolution. The 'more' option opens a dialog that might just be the same as 'units' from the menu, but isn't. It displays just 6 more units to pick from.
Colorspace - distinctly without Indexed.
Fill with: Picking 'transparent' will add alpha channel and anything else won't. Maybe logical, but a quirk.
Comment: Needs to be set to empty in defaults, otherwise it will haunt you forever.
Help, none found. Reset, to 420x300, what kind of default is that? OK and Cancel not quirky. Next, Open. Interestingl
Let's start with File>Print... which opens the same dialog you'd see with Notepad. The ability to set up a printout are nearly null (if you dig into it, you'll spot Image>Print Size which allows you to set DPI, but about nothing more than that. If your printer driver doesn't provide 'center', 'landscape', 'multi-page', 'position' etc, you're out in the cold. Print preview? Dream on! And interestingly, GIMP had a pretty rich (though batshit insane) print setup dialog somewhere in 1.x times.
There's no way to save a set of dialogs. I can't count the times where I was painstakingly rebuilding the second pane of layers/channels/paths, undo history, brushes/gradients after clicking 'close' and then 'OK' on wrong window.
Tools in the main window are laid out in a multi-line row, changes to the width of the window change the tool layout completely. And changing the width is useful, some tool properties are invisible/cut off in the narrow window. So I know I can expect selection tools in the first row in the beginning, but an airbrush? Fourth row, left? Third row, right? Fifth row, left? Never the same.
Confirm, set, change, etc dialogs pop up in such a way as to obscure most of your current area. You pick a "crop" tool, start cropping the pic in upper right and the dialog with the values pops up right where you'd finish it in lower left. If you pause to move it, you can't drag lower left corner to resize the selection any more, it moves the whole selection.
The translations are plain hopeless. People who translate tool and filter names are bound on translating every single word, have no trace of computer graphics background, and no trace of understanding how a given tool works, often picking the translation out of their ass, missing the point completely. Oh, and there's no prefs option to change the language. You need to edit obscure text files to change environmental variables to change to English.
Font preview. Aa, Aa, Aa, Aa, that's about as far as it goes to seeing what given font looks like.
Brush editor: if you want to create a brush that is a variant of an existing brush: -Click existing brush, click 'edit', write down the values on a sheet of paper (they can't be changed), click 'close', click 'new', set the values by hand. There are three base brushes, round, square and square. The other 'square' differs by the 'Angle' slider offset changed by 45 degrees.
If you want to paint with alpha/transparency: pick eraser tool, select brush and whatever the tool allows. Sometimes it won't have '100% opacity' no matter what, hard to guess why. If you want to paint 'erase' with a different tool, either play with Layer Mask (confusing and slow) or you're out of luck.
You want to apply the same filter effect to all 600 frames of GIF animation. Well, good luck, pick them one by one.
No, you can't zoom in a playback preview of a GIF animation.
Yes, you can't change playback speed of a GIF animation. Just rename each layer from "Frame #431 (14ms)" to "Frame #431 (13ms)" by hand.
If you place guides close enough, you won't be able to drag a selection between them. Guide 'snap' zone is zoom-dependent. You'll drag the guides. (sure you can hide guides. But if you want to move to a different set of guides, you need to switch them back on.
Part of my work for a living is using GIMP (only 'designers' are entitled to photoshop in the company, 'developers' need to use open-source apps, and if a designer sends in gfx with an error, you need to use GIMP to fix it or send it back and wait another day while deadlines fly over your head.) I use it more than I'd like to and I got used to most of its pains. And after some 4 years of getting used to its interface and learning it really well, I still say it's batshit insane.
Not really, patents lifespan is some 20 years from being granted, as opposed to copyright which is 70+ after author's death.
When it comes to copyright, you copyright what you make and you profit from selling this. Anyone can compete with you copyrighting something else, because alternatives are countless and you can't practically cover them all.
When it comes from patents, you patent your own tech and all (2-3) competing ones, then you produce your own.
It isn't like with creative works, Disney grabs 30%, Spielberg grabs 20%, everyone can grab a share of the market. It's "the winner takes it all". If you can get 20% efficiency margin above the second best solution, you don't have 20% more of the market - you have it all and the competition never takes off. If you snuff the alternative power, if you don't allow electric cars to have better TCO than gasoline cars, they will not take off. All you need is the 20 years of edge before the competition and the competition will never endanger you.
Sure nowadays best electric cars, beating the fuel-based competition by far, and impossible to produce because of patents, will be possible to produce in 20 years. But by then the fuel-based cars will be better than the nowadays electric cars, and electric cars of the 20 years ahead, better than fuel-based cars of that period, will be covered by patents held by oil industry.
Just keep the the bleeding edge of your technology less than 20 years behind the bleeding edge of the competition and you're safe.
This is why, e.g. oil companies collect patents on solar power [snip] Not so that they alone can make money off of solar power once the oil runs out? By then the patents will be expired.
But currently you can't improve the technology basing on patents they hold, so you can't create competition worth speaking of.
Patents have a relatively short lifespan. But it's not 'I can't produce X because it's patented' that hurts worst. It's 'I can't design, produce and manufacture a far superior Y of which X is a part'.
After introducing fees for their auctions, they dropped from their 3rd place with a good chance to become 2nd to being somewhere along with the two last places - auction sites that are subject-specific, collector auctions. Very few desperate sellers use it, and over 90% offers 'from Poland' are listed as 'e-book, electronic delivery only, free shipping world-wide', foreign auctions.
Photoreceptors are in 'transmitting' state in the dark, but what is most chemically and energetically exhausting is the -change- (both ways).
Possibly reading a black writing on a white surface in an entirely white, featureless room would be less taxing than reading bright letters in the dark (though my personal experience suggests otherwise), but reading black on a white screen in mostly darkish surroundings is more tiring than reading bright on black in such a place.
High contrast is a must, okay, that's obvious - muscle fatigue.
But then comes in retina fatigue - which occurs from bright light[1]. And to minimize that you want to minimize the amount of light falling on the retina. So dark background, bright letters and dark surroundings.
Now one thing more, if you make the letters white, they hit your retina with full power, tiring/hurting it. If you make them less white, grey, your primary source of vision data, the rod cells (monochrome) are underused, and all cones are still used. So better switch to a single color, other than blue (at which we suck). Anything from green, through yellow, to red (though red is not preferred for psychological reasons - 'alarming'.)
Thus: green or amber monitors.
[1] actually retina DOES tire, and does it VERY fast - some 2 seconds... but eyes make micro-movements rapidly so no point of your eye is lit with the same light as the remainder. That's where a trick comes from, to make objects appear brighter than they are. Make a square of #FFFFFF, okay, it's white. Overlay it with 10% opacity 50px range gaussian blur of self, you added a corona, it still looks fake, you'd understand the 'metaphor' in a comic book, but you perceive it just as bright. But add some 5-10px radial gradient groove down to #F5F5F5 just inside its edges, and suddenly you perceive it as an incadescent, blinding source of light.
First, what is more tiring, some glow, when most of the retina remains inactive picking 'dark', or a full blast from a CRT tube against your eyes? There are these who prefer bright background with dark letters over the opposite, but I assure you you'll find few of these amongst CRT screen users, and the choice of white on black for office applications was to make it all resemble paper, the old known metaphor for 'surface for writing'. Not because it's easier on eyes.
Then - did you ever use a monochrome monitor? Do you maybe remember why it took so long to get them replaced with color, even when color monitors were getting cheaper? It's because monochromatic monitors - green and amber especially, had far superior sharpness and contrast. I DID use them quite a bit, and I use one to this day, for long, long reading where normal screen would make my eyes water. It still beats LCD in means of eye comfort (black is REALLY black, as dark as the room, not backlight filtered through dimmed liquid crystal, and the brightness is widely tunable, so I can make the pixels just bright enough to be VERY visible without hurting my eyes.
Cost aside, green monitors give the sweetest reading experience out there.
RepRap currently can do little more than create copies of its own plastic parts.
Thing is it's built of parts that are mostly readily available or possible to manufacture by well developed and widely available processes. Currently the focus of what it can do is on parts that are hardest to obtain - custom plastic elements of the mechanism etc.
Since it's open-source, it's intended to be extended, to gain functionalities. Do NOT expect it to leave it running for a night and pick a new rep-rap in the morning. 'Some assembly required' as they call it. Still it should be able to mill, drill and solder circuit boards rather soon, place elements in some time, create some more metal parts and so on. You still need to buy a bunch of electronic parts, a couple of steppers, some metal pipes for the construction, then likely make by hand or buy parts like the plastic injector.
Not worth it. I mean, who will make a GOOD movie based on Dungeon Siege, if two years ago a BAD one was already made?
A sequel is one thing, it can and should follow closely. A remake is entirely different, it requires at least a decade of delay.
It's the same crime as that of a domain-squatter. He takes a title and fills it with hopeless content, so and nobody can take the same title and fill it with good content.
The keyloggers would then just log the correct password and be done with it, rhythm be damned. As I said - type the -right- password at the right rhythm and you're in.
If you can't assure physical security of the machine, you don't have -any- security.
As for repeating the rhythm - you can train it, and it might take 10-15 minutes maybe, unless you're locked out for 5 minutes after each 3 wrong attempts. That's a pretty standard feature.
With videotape they could write down the key sequence, they might even write down the typing rhythm, but then they'd either need a pretty difficult to make device to plug in instead of the keyboard and replay the sequence (at least quite a bit more difficult than a plain keylogger plug which they could use instead), or hours of training to get the human to replay the keys at exactly the same rhythm as I did.
The idea is not 'ignore typos'. The idea is 'ignore typos if timing is perfect'. The camera may record the timing but replaying it will NOT be easy.
Sorry but you aren't representative to the population.
I have at least three spam filters (ISP, home mail server, POP client) on my email. I have ISP and personal spam filters on my Usenet feed. I have multiple regex blocks applicable to my browsers, 99% targetted at in-page advertising.
Imagine a kid whose father got him a computer at walmart for birthsday. The kid installs a few games and starts playing. Then he thinks he could do better in some of them and checks teh Intarwebz for help.
This is the average user of a computer, and this is the average customer of such services. Not us.
I don't know about you, but if I play a game which allows for immersion into a variant of nowadays or soon future world, and an in-game location is a natural one for a commercial billboard, I see no reason why the billboard can't be an actual ad. If I shuffle through a desk drawer of a virtual office at night, why besides the hint can't I find a leaflet for an actual pizza place? Why a TV at a bar can't display real commercials?
I don't even see any reason why you should be able to switch these off. They are an essential part of the game immersion, and removing them will decrease the immersive factor.
If a blatant ad cuts in between scene loads, it's not really worse than a splash screen with "loading" but only if the ad corresponds to the local atmosphere of the game. Please, no washing powder in a fantasy game. If the ads happen to actually disrupt the gameplay, say, you need to watch an advertising cutscene to proceed, then these should be strictly optional... but not necessarily as 'off switch for everyone'. If they are a source of revenue for the game publisher, just share a part of their profit with the player: 'game version contains non-skippable ads. Special discount -5% on the game price."
I wouldn't be surprised if it produced less false negatives than standard login/password pair. By false negatives I mean typos in username/password.
I mean, I don't know about you but I make typing mistakes at my login and password about as often as not, though I type them always in a consistent rhythm. The system could very neatly ignore the typos resulting from pressing a neighbor key or even typing with your hand a whole line of keys away, meaning you got half of what you typed wrong. "Timing is right, he pressed 'o' instead of 'p', we can accept it."
It should not replace password-based authentication but it can neatly suplement it - you either type your password 100% correctly (say, with one hand, holding earphone in the other so the "rhythm" is none), or you type it fast, you make a mistake, but the way you type it, and the kind of mistake says it's you and the password gets accepted.
I wonder if this method could be applied to hiding messages in executables, too.
Yes, a similar method has been employed by Microsoft to all the executables it ever released, ever since the times of MS-DOS. After compilation they run the program through a special utility that modifies a few bits in the executable at random. Then they run the resulting executable through some tests and if it passes, they release it, if it crashes, they try with a different random bits.
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That is all assuming these boards come from a 3rd party that has nothing in common with the manufacturer of the originals.
The boards don't have to be sub-par. They might be substandard, as in 'failed to pass one of Q/A tests'. Or they may be run-off-the-mill standard devices, made at night on the same line as the originals.
They will run on exactly the same drivers as the originals.
You will replace your $150 motherboard in 2-3 years. That's about as long as your $30 one would serve you.
We're not in an era where guys with microscopes and diamond grinders would rub a layer by layer off a chip to copy the design, then manufacture a copy. They have the plans, they have the technology, they have all they need to produce exactly the same stuff as the originals, except of the management's consent (and even that sometimes they do... just in secret).
BTW, there are brand cameras at a local market. Official throw-away Q/A failures from major manufacturers. The faults may be like a scratch on the case, the battery hinges loose, dead pixels on the screen or such. You can get these for like 10% of the originals. The seller got them for free. You just bring your batteries, a memory card and test till you find one that is satisfactory.
10-15% profit?
More like 100-150%.
In case of designer clothes and perfumes, 1000-1500%. Often much more.
But in the business place my time is a finite resource, and it costs money.
If your time is too limited to provide a reasonably accessible and nonfascist systems, then your company is just a cheapsake. Of course you can cut down costs by employing one admin to support 50000 users, then the admin will be barely able to get the work done by having 50000 exactly identical maximum-lockdown systems. But one admin for 50000 users means the company will be out of business the next year and it's a good idea to run while you can. There's no need for 1 admin: 1 user, because users don't need the admin all the time. Two admins can very well support 1000 users without being a fascist though. 940 of them will take less than a hour a day off their schedule, the remaining 60 may take up to 6 hours a day. Of course you can cut costs and fire one of the admins, then the remaining one will have to lock down systems of the employees. Then most of the 60, usually most creative and productive people will quit and take jobs at the competition, and the one admin, sweating day by day will support 960 always complaining drones.
You have to make a business case for why the software you want on there is worth the additional effort, infrastructure, training, development time and licensing costs.
There you go, you're the kind of admin who rises barriers instead of allowing for opportunities.
So I have to write a 60-page report stating the additional effort will be fully carried by me myself, that the infrastructure is in place because there's still 75GB free on my 80GB drive and the CPU is running idle most of the time, that I got the training at school, that development is covered by open-source volunteers and licensing costs are zero. Then you run the report through three middle-level managers, five lawyers, let it rest on your desk for three months, get CEO's signature and then log in and toggle a checkbox in 'permissions' tab of my account.
If, by a slim chance, I broke my computer by installing the app without your approval, you'd need 15 minutes to restore it from backup. But by requiring me to make a business case you wasted 8 workdays of various people on making decisions and hindered my productivity for three months. It means instead of providing value by your work, you create losses. The company would be better off firing you.
If that guy built a system with a ton of unsupported software, who are you to say he doesn't need it? Why sticking head up your ass, "it's unsupported, I refuse to help you with that". Why won't you provide a generic backup to the users, so if they have a ton of custom software, they can just recover it from backup? If you see users facing problem, the answer is not "don't do this then". Move your ass and look for a solution of "one size fits most", they exist. Then once you have 95% of the user base covered by that solution, you have enough time to approach the remaining 5% on individual basis and take time solving their problems? Sure the 5% will occupy 80% of your time, but the 95% will occupy less than 20% of your time. And sure you'd like to work less than 20% of your time and slack for 80% of your time, but that's not what you're paid for.
.snapshot from any directory anywhere, ever, and 99% of times you can fix things yourself using these. If you screw up bad, say DROP DATABASE TYPO; then you call IT and they fix it for you. If you break your desktop, you recover it from backup yourself. It's easy.
And why do you believe your time is worth more than time of that guy? Your job is to make it possible for that guy to work. It's money earned for his work that pay your salary. If you don't enable him to work, you're not earning your salary. No, you don't get paid for fixing things, you're paid for things not being broken. If they break and you let them stay broken, you're not doing your job. Why they broke or who broke them is entirely moot.
I'm in a company where all the users have admin rights on their computers. There's a nightly backup program running, the IT applies centralized updates, there's obligatory antivirus and we're behind a good firewall, but the users are free to install whatever they wish as long as it's legal. If you break stuff, the IT staff will help you. If it's non-standard, you're queued low-priority, but not ignored. If you screw up bad, everything is recoverable. Your desktop has nightlies. All development and production servers have hourlies. They are accessible as easily as cd
Here's the floppy, your nightly is available from this address.
clean-up done.
If it takes more than that, IT was slacking on their job.
the Gutenpring dialog, while clunky ...no such thing under Windows. Bare system "print" dialog with just as many options as the printer driver provides. Unfortunately due to certain custom software requirements here I can't switch to Linux, so I'm stuck with the Windows port.
You can save a window layout in the preferences
Not quite where I'd look for this kind of option. And I can save only one (I'd prefer some different, say, for B&W editing, for editing for web, for animation etc).
Your window setup will reset to default values the next time you start GIMP. Oh, and remember to uncheck "save window positions on exit" or you'll have to rebuild from defaults again...
Interesting adventure, to try to add Undo History -between- layers and brushes.
lots of applications have annoying UI quirks though. Can we go with "some specific areas that could definitely use significant improvment"?
Actually, no. Beyond the traditional (CMYK etc) that's just 'UI Quirks'. Thing is I didn't exhaust the list here, by far. I just threw a couple off top of my head. If you really wanted all my gripes I could go on for hours and hours.
Sure there are apps that have interface quirks. This is normal. There are apps that have many or weird interface quirks. That's annoying. There are apps that have many and weird interface quirks. That's very unusable. GIMP's interface is ALL quirks, and many of them very weird.
Want a run off the mill on just HOW quirky the interface is? Start-to-end, upper left to lower right.
Click the icon. Startup window appears but no cancel/close button. If I doubleclick it by a chance, I have to wait till both mill through the fonts and extensions dirs, only when loading is finished I can kill one. No idea why anyone would want two instances but oh well.
Now I have the two default windows. Upper left is the gadget on the title bar. 'Restore' and 'Move' are non-quirky, size and maximize work as intended except maximize is utterly useless, the window fills the screen but you can't really make it horizontal because some elements are fixed at "below the rest". 'Minimize' minimizes current GIMP window. If you have 10 pics open, you have to click 12 different minimizes to hide all GIMP windows. 'Close' works as expected, the other buttons on the title bar repeat the function.
Next row: File. Starting with the top, the ------------------ bar which is a quirk I actually like but it took me some time to find it, because it's entirely non-intuitive. Besides, dialogs created with it can only be closed, not minimized, so they tend to get lost. Also if you pick the same entry the second time, it closes the window even if you picked it in context of a different window (so you can't have two 'colors-info' dialogs open for two images to check histograms periodically. Another quirk. And yet another, these are missing from the image top bar menu. No '-----------' there. *shrug*. Quirk.
New. Somewhat too simplistic... Templates - oh, too deep subject to get into their quirks... there are some and heavy, next image size, with chain icon missing (if you want to get twice as much as 1024x768, calculate in your head how much is 768*2).
Next portrait/landscape. Nothing in common with print orientation which might seem non-quirky but MS Word's quirk here seems to be the defacto standard.
Advanced options... they change (per Template) but remain invisible if you pick one. Template quirk.
X, Y resolution. The 'more' option opens a dialog that might just be the same as 'units' from the menu, but isn't. It displays just 6 more units to pick from.
Colorspace - distinctly without Indexed.
Fill with: Picking 'transparent' will add alpha channel and anything else won't. Maybe logical, but a quirk.
Comment: Needs to be set to empty in defaults, otherwise it will haunt you forever.
Help, none found. Reset, to 420x300, what kind of default is that? OK and Cancel not quirky.
Next, Open. Interestingl
Let's start with File>Print... which opens the same dialog you'd see with Notepad. The ability to set up a printout are nearly null (if you dig into it, you'll spot Image>Print Size which allows you to set DPI, but about nothing more than that. If your printer driver doesn't provide 'center', 'landscape', 'multi-page', 'position' etc, you're out in the cold. Print preview? Dream on! And interestingly, GIMP had a pretty rich (though batshit insane) print setup dialog somewhere in 1.x times.
There's no way to save a set of dialogs. I can't count the times where I was painstakingly rebuilding the second pane of layers/channels/paths, undo history, brushes/gradients after clicking 'close' and then 'OK' on wrong window.
Tools in the main window are laid out in a multi-line row, changes to the width of the window change the tool layout completely. And changing the width is useful, some tool properties are invisible/cut off in the narrow window. So I know I can expect selection tools in the first row in the beginning, but an airbrush? Fourth row, left? Third row, right? Fifth row, left? Never the same.
Confirm, set, change, etc dialogs pop up in such a way as to obscure most of your current area. You pick a "crop" tool, start cropping the pic in upper right and the dialog with the values pops up right where you'd finish it in lower left. If you pause to move it, you can't drag lower left corner to resize the selection any more, it moves the whole selection.
The translations are plain hopeless. People who translate tool and filter names are bound on translating every single word, have no trace of computer graphics background, and no trace of understanding how a given tool works, often picking the translation out of their ass, missing the point completely. Oh, and there's no prefs option to change the language. You need to edit obscure text files to change environmental variables to change to English.
Font preview. Aa, Aa, Aa, Aa, that's about as far as it goes to seeing what given font looks like.
Brush editor: if you want to create a brush that is a variant of an existing brush: -Click existing brush, click 'edit', write down the values on a sheet of paper (they can't be changed), click 'close', click 'new', set the values by hand. There are three base brushes, round, square and square. The other 'square' differs by the 'Angle' slider offset changed by 45 degrees.
If you want to paint with alpha/transparency: pick eraser tool, select brush and whatever the tool allows. Sometimes it won't have '100% opacity' no matter what, hard to guess why. If you want to paint 'erase' with a different tool, either play with Layer Mask (confusing and slow) or you're out of luck.
You want to apply the same filter effect to all 600 frames of GIF animation. Well, good luck, pick them one by one.
No, you can't zoom in a playback preview of a GIF animation.
Yes, you can't change playback speed of a GIF animation. Just rename each layer from "Frame #431 (14ms)" to "Frame #431 (13ms)" by hand.
If you place guides close enough, you won't be able to drag a selection between them. Guide 'snap' zone is zoom-dependent. You'll drag the guides. (sure you can hide guides. But if you want to move to a different set of guides, you need to switch them back on.
Part of my work for a living is using GIMP (only 'designers' are entitled to photoshop in the company, 'developers' need to use open-source apps, and if a designer sends in gfx with an error, you need to use GIMP to fix it or send it back and wait another day while deadlines fly over your head.) I use it more than I'd like to and I got used to most of its pains. And after some 4 years of getting used to its interface and learning it really well, I still say it's batshit insane.
Not really, patents lifespan is some 20 years from being granted, as opposed to copyright which is 70+ after author's death.
When it comes to copyright, you copyright what you make and you profit from selling this. Anyone can compete with you copyrighting something else, because alternatives are countless and you can't practically cover them all.
When it comes from patents, you patent your own tech and all (2-3) competing ones, then you produce your own.
It isn't like with creative works, Disney grabs 30%, Spielberg grabs 20%, everyone can grab a share of the market. It's "the winner takes it all". If you can get 20% efficiency margin above the second best solution, you don't have 20% more of the market - you have it all and the competition never takes off. If you snuff the alternative power, if you don't allow electric cars to have better TCO than gasoline cars, they will not take off. All you need is the 20 years of edge before the competition and the competition will never endanger you.
Sure nowadays best electric cars, beating the fuel-based competition by far, and impossible to produce because of patents, will be possible to produce in 20 years. But by then the fuel-based cars will be better than the nowadays electric cars, and electric cars of the 20 years ahead, better than fuel-based cars of that period, will be covered by patents held by oil industry.
Just keep the the bleeding edge of your technology less than 20 years behind the bleeding edge of the competition and you're safe.
But currently you can't improve the technology basing on patents they hold, so you can't create competition worth speaking of.
Patents have a relatively short lifespan. But it's not 'I can't produce X because it's patented' that hurts worst. It's 'I can't design, produce and manufacture a far superior Y of which X is a part'.
Wouldn't Tarzan be a prior art?
over 4,200,000 auctions on Allegro.pl
eBay Poland is still dead.
After introducing fees for their auctions, they dropped from their 3rd place with a good chance to become 2nd to being somewhere along with the two last places - auction sites that are subject-specific, collector auctions. Very few desperate sellers use it, and over 90% offers 'from Poland' are listed as 'e-book, electronic delivery only, free shipping world-wide', foreign auctions.
GOAT
Not anecdote. Experience and first-hand opinions of many people of that era - including me. Not managers. Users.
Photoreceptors are in 'transmitting' state in the dark, but what is most chemically and energetically exhausting is the -change- (both ways).
Possibly reading a black writing on a white surface in an entirely white, featureless room would be less taxing than reading bright letters in the dark (though my personal experience suggests otherwise), but reading black on a white screen in mostly darkish surroundings is more tiring than reading bright on black in such a place.
High contrast is a must, okay, that's obvious - muscle fatigue.
But then comes in retina fatigue - which occurs from bright light[1]. And to minimize that you want to minimize the amount of light falling on the retina. So dark background, bright letters and dark surroundings.
Now one thing more, if you make the letters white, they hit your retina with full power, tiring/hurting it. If you make them less white, grey, your primary source of vision data, the rod cells (monochrome) are underused, and all cones are still used. So better switch to a single color, other than blue (at which we suck). Anything from green, through yellow, to red (though red is not preferred for psychological reasons - 'alarming'.)
Thus: green or amber monitors.
[1] actually retina DOES tire, and does it VERY fast - some 2 seconds... but eyes make micro-movements rapidly so no point of your eye is lit with the same light as the remainder. That's where a trick comes from, to make objects appear brighter than they are. Make a square of #FFFFFF, okay, it's white. Overlay it with 10% opacity 50px range gaussian blur of self, you added a corona, it still looks fake, you'd understand the 'metaphor' in a comic book, but you perceive it just as bright. But add some 5-10px radial gradient groove down to #F5F5F5 just inside its edges, and suddenly you perceive it as an incadescent, blinding source of light.
Bullshit.
Double bullshit.
First, what is more tiring, some glow, when most of the retina remains inactive picking 'dark', or a full blast from a CRT tube against your eyes?
There are these who prefer bright background with dark letters over the opposite, but I assure you you'll find few of these amongst CRT screen users, and the choice of white on black for office applications was to make it all resemble paper, the old known metaphor for 'surface for writing'. Not because it's easier on eyes.
Then - did you ever use a monochrome monitor? Do you maybe remember why it took so long to get them replaced with color, even when color monitors were getting cheaper? It's because monochromatic monitors - green and amber especially, had far superior sharpness and contrast. I DID use them quite a bit, and I use one to this day, for long, long reading where normal screen would make my eyes water. It still beats LCD in means of eye comfort (black is REALLY black, as dark as the room, not backlight filtered through dimmed liquid crystal, and the brightness is widely tunable, so I can make the pixels just bright enough to be VERY visible without hurting my eyes.
Cost aside, green monitors give the sweetest reading experience out there.
RepRap currently can do little more than create copies of its own plastic parts.
Thing is it's built of parts that are mostly readily available or possible to manufacture by well developed and widely available processes. Currently the focus of what it can do is on parts that are hardest to obtain - custom plastic elements of the mechanism etc.
Since it's open-source, it's intended to be extended, to gain functionalities. Do NOT expect it to leave it running for a night and pick a new rep-rap in the morning. 'Some assembly required' as they call it. Still it should be able to mill, drill and solder circuit boards rather soon, place elements in some time, create some more metal parts and so on. You still need to buy a bunch of electronic parts, a couple of steppers, some metal pipes for the construction, then likely make by hand or buy parts like the plastic injector.
Not worth it. I mean, who will make a GOOD movie based on Dungeon Siege, if two years ago a BAD one was already made?
A sequel is one thing, it can and should follow closely. A remake is entirely different, it requires at least a decade of delay.
It's the same crime as that of a domain-squatter. He takes a title and fills it with hopeless content, so and nobody can take the same title and fill it with good content.
The keyloggers would then just log the correct password and be done with it, rhythm be damned. As I said - type the -right- password at the right rhythm and you're in.
If you can't assure physical security of the machine, you don't have -any- security.
As for repeating the rhythm - you can train it, and it might take 10-15 minutes maybe, unless you're locked out for 5 minutes after each 3 wrong attempts. That's a pretty standard feature.
Oh, no, not at all.
With videotape they could write down the key sequence, they might even write down the typing rhythm, but then they'd either need a pretty difficult to make device to plug in instead of the keyboard and replay the sequence (at least quite a bit more difficult than a plain keylogger plug which they could use instead), or hours of training to get the human to replay the keys at exactly the same rhythm as I did.
The idea is not 'ignore typos'. The idea is 'ignore typos if timing is perfect'. The camera may record the timing but replaying it will NOT be easy.
Sorry but you aren't representative to the population.
I have at least three spam filters (ISP, home mail server, POP client) on my email.
I have ISP and personal spam filters on my Usenet feed.
I have multiple regex blocks applicable to my browsers, 99% targetted at in-page advertising.
Imagine a kid whose father got him a computer at walmart for birthsday. The kid installs a few games and starts playing. Then he thinks he could do better in some of them and checks teh Intarwebz for help.
This is the average user of a computer, and this is the average customer of such services. Not us.
I don't know about you, but if I play a game which allows for immersion into a variant of nowadays or soon future world, and an in-game location is a natural one for a commercial billboard, I see no reason why the billboard can't be an actual ad. If I shuffle through a desk drawer of a virtual office at night, why besides the hint can't I find a leaflet for an actual pizza place? Why a TV at a bar can't display real commercials?
I don't even see any reason why you should be able to switch these off. They are an essential part of the game immersion, and removing them will decrease the immersive factor.
If a blatant ad cuts in between scene loads, it's not really worse than a splash screen with "loading" but only if the ad corresponds to the local atmosphere of the game. Please, no washing powder in a fantasy game. If the ads happen to actually disrupt the gameplay, say, you need to watch an advertising cutscene to proceed, then these should be strictly optional... but not necessarily as 'off switch for everyone'. If they are a source of revenue for the game publisher, just share a part of their profit with the player: 'game version contains non-skippable ads. Special discount -5% on the game price."
I wouldn't be surprised if it produced less false negatives than standard login/password pair. By false negatives I mean typos in username/password.
I mean, I don't know about you but I make typing mistakes at my login and password about as often as not, though I type them always in a consistent rhythm. The system could very neatly ignore the typos resulting from pressing a neighbor key or even typing with your hand a whole line of keys away, meaning you got half of what you typed wrong. "Timing is right, he pressed 'o' instead of 'p', we can accept it."
It should not replace password-based authentication but it can neatly suplement it - you either type your password 100% correctly (say, with one hand, holding earphone in the other so the "rhythm" is none), or you type it fast, you make a mistake, but the way you type it, and the kind of mistake says it's you and the password gets accepted.
WTF is Shift Music, and how does one format it?
I wonder if this method could be applied to hiding messages in executables, too.
Yes, a similar method has been employed by Microsoft to all the executables it ever released, ever since the times of MS-DOS.
After compilation they run the program through a special utility that modifies a few bits in the executable at random. Then they run the resulting executable through some tests and if it passes, they release it, if it crashes, they try with a different random bits.