On the Camera Front there are a few dcraw based products that I would give a chance... That do give very decent configurability.... I have compared quality between Canons Software and these on an EOS5D and the results are very decent.
1) Ufraw works both as a standalone product and as an importer for the gimp. It gives you excellent and very detailed control.
2) Rawstudio - gives you some management capability, Fairly decent colour correction, Rotation, Cropping & Batch Processing. This has got to be the most usuable piece of software - too bad it doesn't yet support my Fuji F810.
3) Kipi plugins work accross several KDE Apps. The raw converter plugin does give access to all the newer dcraw options including noise reduction and highlight recovery, supports batch processing- Is nowhere near as usable as the other two...
4) Lightroom is another commercial product - it offers a free linux (java based) version. Haven't done any serious testing....
On the Network adapter front... Give everything a month or two for the drivers to trickle down to ubuntu... Next release happens in April... I imagine it will be working by then.
For wireless the Ralink chipset seems to be the best supported under linux at the moment (has open source drivers). I have a usb ralink based adapter and it is plug and play on ubuntu edgy.
Yes the monitor thing is a PITA... Ubuntu uses very conservative settings here... Fixing it means editing a config file... Grrr this really needs to be fixed
This might shock you but Blender has actually been around longer than Maya. Blender 1.0 was created in 1996, Maya 1.0 1998.... At that time there was very little standardisation in the 3d field...
The original version was an inhouse tool for an animation company... it was written largely by one person - this was true to some extent up until the period where blender went opensource. A lot of the UI concepts are really good (I would argue that it does many things better than Maya does)... Which for the existing userbase means that a wholesale replacement of blender interface with a Maya style interface would be a backwards step in terms of productivity.
Currently Blender is being rewritten section by section... The UI's overhaul time will come in the near future with most of the prerequisite work being done. Those looking for a Maya clone will probably be a little disapointed however
Re:How odes it compare to Bryce, Vue, and Poser?
on
New Blender Released
·
· Score: 1
Thats a bit like comparing a hamburger a milkshake and fries with a kitchen
Of the former I would say the following...
+ artist centric UI - looks good if not as practical as it could be. + highly specialised - Bryce and vue for generating landscapes, poser for figures. + large amounts of pregenerated content (good for not so artistic users) - limited or no tools for creating from assets from scratch, or resorting to non portable methods.
Of Blender I would say... + fast, compact somewhat technical interface. Think of a car that is missing 2nd and 3rd gears - works great once you get into 4th and 5th gear but is a real bitch getting there. + Usually used for creating "from scratch" content, you will have to hunt for content online... If you don't want to start from scratch. + Can be extended using python.
Concider Blender if you...
1) Can deal with a slightly technical interface.
2) Prefer Open Source Software...
3) Don't have a lot of cash and want
a) fluid simulation
b) Digital Clay
c) a compositor
d) basic 3d paint
e) A game engine for Rapid Development.
I have to say that my experience is somewhat opposite.... with one qualifier - the cases where windows is superior it is because of more featured, polished and mature applications being available not the desktop itself.
Hardware support I currently find 50/50 Some configurations that Just work under Windows take a lot of work under Linux and Vise Versa... My current Setup (Kubuntu) has been through three systems without requiring a reinstall (that is three completely new systems).
KDE as far as a productive desktop is the best I have used... I feel naked without being able to pin windows above other windows ( I frequently do this for reference material)... Unix Copy and Paste... Apt-get style software management, Multiple Desktops, Built in Hotkey and Gesture support etc.
I guess It comes down to what you are used to and if you have a couple of Grand to spend on the best productivity software available for windows I can see how that would end up being smoother than Linux.
Yes some of the softwares listed above are only available for Windows - does every 3D professional need to use Maya, XSI and Max of those only max is not available on Linux... Maya and XSI are natively supported.
Both Fusion and Nuke do run natively under linux. Combustion is not supported but its brother smoke is. Shake is available under Linux but not Windows (due to very dubious involvement from Apple)... which leaves Avid in your list of compositors...
Zbrush is a bit of a sticky one... Mudbox is available for Linux but not yet commercially. They have the code it is just pending demand. Lets hope that happens soon.
And that leaves Photoshop ahhh photoshop. Adobe is probably the biggest thing keeping Media professionals from Linux. Disney and ILM get around the problem using Crossover Office. Its not as fun as having a native copy given but it does work.
How much professional media goodness does Windows give you out of the Box... windows paint, the movie editor & windows media player... You have to buy all those apps and it will put you back many many thousands of dollars. Unless you are the sort of person who steals other peoples work to make money for yourself - and you are not one of those sorts of people are you?
So what will Ubuntu Studio realistically give you.... It will give you a
reasonable image editor the Gimp (its somewhere between photoshop and MS Paint)...
a reasonable illustration program (Inkscape)
A not completely horrible DTP app that people are using to make actual books (scribus)
A rapidly improving somewhat difficult to learn 3d package that people are using to make actual short films (blender)
A Powerful if somewhat tempermental video editor (Cinelerra)
A powerful DAW digital audio workstation
A reasonable Midi editing environment
With any luck all of these should be configured and ready to go out of the box. (particularly the audio/video stuff
which is a PITA to set up). If you are already married to Adobe et al I can't see this being a step up in the world. But it might be just the thing to put on that spare box you happen to have floating around.
Well thats pretty much it... By new operating system what is actually meant is creating and maintaining a bunch of new applications -- probably promoting a lot of stuff from universe into the official repositories... Creating a new artwork scheme and loading it onto an installation disk... Similar to what happens with edubuntu... It will be easy to crossgrade from any other ubuntu flavour... If we are really lucky we might see a pretweaked kernel too.
I have a WRT-54G and I got to say I am having absolutely no problems with it....
two things (with the wireless) though... 1) I did have lots of problems with it and windows XP Clients in the beginning...
I am not sure where the problem is here as the other clients (PSP, Linux Boxes) mostly didn't exibit the same behaviour, I have had similar problems with other network configurations windows XP and unencrypted networks...
2) The HyperWRT firmware does a much better job than Linksys's you should definately upgrade to that. Even my XP boxes are not giving any grief at the moment.
Actually the K naming scheme is dead as of version 4.... All new components are given decidedly unKish names like oxygen and solid and plasma and many of the older components will be renamed....
Personally I don't think much of somebody who is put off by something who is put off by something as petty as a name... a lot of the software is good and that is the best reason to use or not use it
My understanding is that there are only two versions of Windows vista which are allowed to run inside a virtual machine. A special addition for large corperations and the most expensive version available to home users.... Not that this restriction does not apply to using windows as the host OS....
I believe that the reason for doing this is quite simple... A lot of companies are moving towards virtualisation - Microsoft will make sure that the cheapest option is to use an MS Operating system as the host OS. I think that this tactic is an abuse of their monopoly powers. As the restriction really does not make sense in the amount of work that needs to go into their product.
Me when I upgrade to a capable processor might consider buying a cheap copy of windows to run windows software I occasionally come accross... But if they stick to this stupid rule they are not going to see a red cent from me..... I don't want or need the bells and whistles
I think that generalising across the entire FOSS Community is not entirely useful.... I also think what the author is trying to put forwards happens in micro as a natural part of the development cycle.... preparation for release... Features get frozen and all the work goes into debugging and getting out a solid release.
I think that a lot of developers are there to solve problems which they benefit directly from solving. I am one of those little developers releasing my own mini FOSS App.... I created my project because I wanted a tool that does X. While there might be Commercial tool M I may not have the money to purchase M anyways M does X Y and Z and I only really need to do X. So The benefit to me is that once I have created the tool I can do X. This is how I benefit...
Now since I have gained a lot from the FOSS Community.. I don't mind releasing my code so that other users who want to do X will be able to do so without going through the effort that I did. Also another individual with coding skills might need to be able to do X and Y. In which case my code might be a starting point... If people come to me saying your program is useless unless it does Z well let me remind you I needed a program that does X, I am using my program that does X. Unless you can convince me that adding Z to my program would make my life easier I am probably not going to spend my time coding Z...
If this means that my project sits in Sourceforge and festers like so many other projects then so be it I am still quite happily using it and it is doing what I need it to. If there are one or two other happy users for whom it makes their life better then it was probably worth making the code public.
True but.... You think that mac would include previews on JPEG images like every other F**King major desktop platform... There was an incident earlier this year where I had to load off a card of pictures that contained one or two sensitive photos. There is no way I wanted to go through iPhoto or any other photodatabase app for this..... On a sane Platform I could just load the camera into File Manager, switch on Image Previews (since the names are not going to help) find the non sensitive photos and copy them to the computer. needless to say I couldn't do this on the mac and after an hour or so f**king around with a third party tool I was not impressed. It should have been a 5 minute job.
You do not have to release changes to the kernel unless you are distributing them in some fashion. And assuming that you are in fact distributing binary code... only the code that goes into the kernel must be distributed. (See NVidia's Linux Drivers for an example of this). You are using somebody elses product and the only stipulation is that you must past on the rights that they have afforded you. This gives you protection in that anybody else who uses your sourcecode must abide by the same rules. This keeps the system fair for everbody. Ultimately if your changes are useful this means that getting those changes upstream will mean less work for you.
The second assertion makes me think you should fire your legal team (they have already cost you a lot of time and effort)... The GPL only covers use of the code in a product not use of the product itself. You certainly can use gcc to produce proprietory code. You can also use any of the libraries licensed with a BSD license or the LGPL license. Even if this assertion were true, there are a number of proprietory compilers which can be used with linux - Intels compilers immediately spring to mind.
The GPL is not draconian. It is there to protect the creator of a product from loosing access to that product while allowing others to use and extend that product. If you are the original creator of a product you can choose to license it under the GPL and other licenses. If you don't wish to abide by the GPL then regular copyright law applies.
The gimp has a few raw plugins - ufraw being my favourite... You get to make adjustments before it becomes 8bit per channel image
The current Version of Digikam (0.82) will convert Raw to 8 bits per pixel for editing. The soon to be released version (0.90) will convert raw files to 16bits per channel. Digikam is an image management tool for linux along the lines of iPhoto or Picassa... It has basic editing features but if anything is a bit slow. also will do batch conversions
Speaking of which Picassa is a available for linux (beta) - I am only guessing that it also supports raw images.
Thats just what I know about off the top of my head - most of the solutions I know of appart from Bibble labs use DCRaw a command line application to do the dirty work... and as such you are converting the Raw file to something else to work with. I believe that upsampling raw to 16 bits per channel will preserve quality (at the cost of some disk space) - generally I archive the originals in their raw format anyways... Even the workflow with the gimp is not to bad - (You get to do all the important adjustments before you downsample to 8 bits)
Amarok - I believe the collection Tab is what you are looking for. Rather than the Playlist tab...
(Look at the left side of Amarok there should be a bunch of vertical tabs running down the side of the screen... These are pretty central to running amarok...
Almost but I can see a 2 subtle destinctions...
1) On Unix the user ID is a number and may not correspond to the user ID on another computer. So there must be another mechanism for identifying the user.
2) There seems to be an auto syncronisation between the Local Account and the Portable Account. IE changed settings and added data are written in both places.
Personally I hate that stuff like this can be patented.
Yeah I fell fowl of that first one as well - well sort of - Ubuntu set my screen refresh too conservatively and I couldn't get my full 1440x900 res happening. So yeah there is still the occasional rough edge.
I believe that Xorgs autoconfiguration has gotten good enough in recent developments to do away with configuration files all together. If for one will be quite happy if that turns out to be the case
The folks that hold the IP for MP3... Ask for a fee of ~70 cents for every copy of an mp3 enabled system you ship. That means in order to ship this in a free system SuSE would either have to charge per copy or take that hit themselves. This fee can be avoided by paying a once up amount I think it approaches the $50,000 mark I am not sure but it certainly is in the tens of thousands. It is up to each distro whether they want to take the legal risk of distributing mp3 support without paying. This is all stuff that the consumer perhaps shouldn't have to worry about - but there you have it. There are usually 3rd party packages which allow you to add mp3 support but you have to do it yourself.
What makes this a further kick in the teeth is that Linux already has access to an open format that is superior to MP3 in everyway except market penetration (and purhaps CPU usage)...
Corel Draw 10 was a disaster. There where lots of misfeatures and I could not even get through designing a single page of text without it crashing hard. Even that was forgivable. What was not forgivable was that Corels support boards were full of customers with problems similar to my own and Corel would not own up to the problem blaming it on "faulty graphics" drivers. I installed CorelDraw 10 on 3 different computers with three different video cards (two matrox, 1 nvidia) and had the same problem with Corel Draw and none of the other 10 or so applications I had on the systems. They finally admitted to some of the issues with the first service pack and by the second service pack the program was barely usable. I can stand a crappy product but I can not stand being lied to. So I like many others left Corel to die.
Kubuntu Dapper works quite well with my Asus 167g (wireless usb) using the native ralink driver not ndis wrapper...
Its not quite plug and play. I do have to enable it in network settings after I plug it in. Adapters using the Ralink chipset generally work quite well. I would specifically recommend Minitar (instrumental in the creation of gpled ralink drivers) and Asus (usb driver)...
Hey there - hows your design going.... Been looking at designs with my friend... Yours looks very promising... Got friends keeping their eyes out for dead weighing machines... Looking forwards to seeing your finished design...
On the Article - Can I just say that the finished product looked quite good and had some interesting approaches I haven't seen anyone else do. It definately looks an improvement from the cheep foam pads I have at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Camera Front there are a few dcraw based products that I would give a chance... That do give very decent configurability.... I have compared quality between Canons Software and these on an EOS5D and the results are very decent.
1) Ufraw works both as a standalone product and as an importer for the gimp. It gives you excellent and very detailed control.
2) Rawstudio - gives you some management capability, Fairly decent colour correction, Rotation, Cropping & Batch Processing. This has got to be the most usuable piece of software - too bad it doesn't yet support my Fuji F810.
3) Kipi plugins work accross several KDE Apps. The raw converter plugin does give access to all the newer dcraw options including noise reduction and highlight recovery, supports batch processing- Is nowhere near as usable as the other two...
4) Lightroom is another commercial product - it offers a free linux (java based) version. Haven't done any serious testing....
On the Network adapter front... Give everything a month or two for the drivers to trickle down to ubuntu... Next release happens in April... I imagine it will be working by then.
For wireless the Ralink chipset seems to be the best supported under linux at the moment (has open source drivers). I have a usb ralink based adapter and it is plug and play on ubuntu edgy.
Yes the monitor thing is a PITA... Ubuntu uses very conservative settings here... Fixing it means editing a config file... Grrr this really needs to be fixed
This might shock you but Blender has actually been around longer than Maya. Blender 1.0 was created in 1996, Maya 1.0 1998....
At that time there was very little standardisation in the 3d field...
The original version was an inhouse tool for an animation company... it was written largely by one person - this was true to some extent up until the period where blender went opensource. A lot of the UI concepts are really good (I would argue that it does many things better than Maya does)... Which for the existing userbase means that a wholesale replacement of blender interface with a Maya style interface would be a backwards step in terms of productivity.
Currently Blender is being rewritten section by section... The UI's overhaul time will come in the near future with most of the prerequisite work being done. Those looking for a Maya clone will probably be a little disapointed however
Thats a bit like comparing a hamburger a milkshake and fries with a kitchen
Of the former I would say the following...
+ artist centric UI - looks good if not as practical as it could be.
+ highly specialised - Bryce and vue for generating landscapes, poser for figures.
+ large amounts of pregenerated content (good for not so artistic users)
- limited or no tools for creating from assets from scratch, or resorting to non portable methods.
Of Blender I would say...
+ fast, compact somewhat technical interface. Think of a car that is missing 2nd and 3rd gears - works great once you get into 4th and 5th gear but is a real bitch getting there.
+ Usually used for creating "from scratch" content, you will have to hunt for content online... If you don't want to start from scratch.
+ Can be extended using python.
Concider Blender if you...
1) Can deal with a slightly technical interface.
2) Prefer Open Source Software...
3) Don't have a lot of cash and want
a) fluid simulation
b) Digital Clay
c) a compositor
d) basic 3d paint
e) A game engine for Rapid Development.
One Word klik http://klik.atekon.de/ you have to install and set it up initially but after that it is easier than an OSX install
I have to say that my experience is somewhat opposite.... with one qualifier - the cases where windows is superior it is because of more featured, polished and mature applications being available not the desktop itself.
Hardware support I currently find 50/50 Some configurations that Just work under Windows take a lot of work under Linux and Vise Versa... My current Setup (Kubuntu) has been through three systems without requiring a reinstall (that is three completely new systems).
KDE as far as a productive desktop is the best I have used... I feel naked without being able to pin windows above other windows ( I frequently do this for reference material)... Unix Copy and Paste... Apt-get style software management, Multiple Desktops, Built in Hotkey and Gesture support etc.
I guess It comes down to what you are used to and if you have a couple of Grand to spend on the best productivity software available for windows I can see how that would end up being smoother than Linux.
Yes some of the softwares listed above are only available for Windows -
does every 3D professional need to use Maya, XSI and Max
of those only max is not available on Linux... Maya and XSI are natively supported.
Both Fusion and Nuke do run natively under linux. Combustion is not supported but
its brother smoke is. Shake is available under Linux but not Windows (due to very
dubious involvement from Apple)... which leaves Avid in your list of compositors...
Zbrush is a bit of a sticky one... Mudbox is available for Linux but not yet
commercially. They have the code it is just pending demand. Lets hope that happens soon.
And that leaves Photoshop ahhh photoshop. Adobe is probably the biggest thing keeping
Media professionals from Linux. Disney and ILM get around the problem using Crossover
Office. Its not as fun as having a native copy given but it does work.
How much professional media goodness does Windows give you out of the Box...
windows paint, the movie editor & windows media player...
You have to buy all those apps and it will put you back many many thousands of dollars.
Unless you are the sort of person who steals other peoples work to make money for yourself - and
you are not one of those sorts of people are you?
So what will Ubuntu Studio realistically give you....
It will give you a
reasonable image editor the Gimp (its somewhere between photoshop and MS Paint)...
a reasonable illustration program (Inkscape)
A not completely horrible DTP app that people are using to make actual books (scribus)
A rapidly improving somewhat difficult to learn 3d package that people are using to make actual short films (blender)
A Powerful if somewhat tempermental video editor (Cinelerra)
A powerful DAW digital audio workstation
A reasonable Midi editing environment
With any luck all of these should be configured and ready to go out of the box. (particularly the audio/video stuff
which is a PITA to set up). If you are already married to Adobe et al I can't see this being a step up in the world.
But it might be just the thing to put on that spare box you happen to have floating around.
Well thats pretty much it... By new operating system what is actually meant is creating and maintaining a bunch of new applications -- probably promoting a lot of stuff from universe into the official repositories... Creating a new artwork scheme and loading it onto an installation disk... Similar to what happens with edubuntu... It will be easy to crossgrade from any other ubuntu flavour... If we are really lucky we might see a pretweaked kernel too.
I have a WRT-54G and I got to say I am having absolutely no problems with it....
two things (with the wireless) though...
1) I did have lots of problems with it and windows XP Clients in the beginning...
I am not sure where the problem is here as the other clients (PSP, Linux Boxes) mostly didn't exibit the same behaviour, I have had similar problems with other network configurations windows XP and unencrypted networks...
2) The HyperWRT firmware does a much better job than Linksys's you should definately upgrade to that. Even my XP boxes are not giving any grief at the moment.
Actually the K naming scheme is dead as of version 4.... All new components are given decidedly unKish names like oxygen and solid and plasma and many of the older components will be renamed....
Personally I don't think much of somebody who is put off by something who is put off by something as petty as a name... a lot of the software is good and that is the best reason to use or not use it
My understanding is that there are only two versions of Windows vista which are allowed to run inside a virtual machine. A special addition for large corperations and the most expensive version available to home users.... Not that this restriction does not apply to using windows as the host OS....
I believe that the reason for doing this is quite simple... A lot of companies are moving towards virtualisation - Microsoft will make sure that the cheapest option is to use an MS Operating system as the host OS. I think that this tactic is an abuse of their monopoly powers. As the restriction really does not make sense in the amount of work that needs to go into their product.
Me when I upgrade to a capable processor might consider buying a cheap copy of windows to run windows software I occasionally come accross... But if they stick to this stupid rule they are not going to see a red cent from me..... I don't want or need the bells and whistles
I think that generalising across the entire FOSS Community is not entirely useful....
I also think what the author is trying to put forwards happens in micro as a natural part of the development cycle.... preparation for release... Features get frozen and all the work goes into debugging and getting out a solid release.
I think that a lot of developers are there to solve problems which they benefit directly from solving. I am one of those little developers releasing my own mini FOSS App.... I created my project because I wanted a tool that does X. While there might be Commercial tool M I may not have the money to purchase M anyways M does X Y and Z and I only really need to do X. So The benefit to me is that once I have created the tool I can do X. This is how I benefit...
Now since I have gained a lot from the FOSS Community.. I don't mind releasing my code so that other users who want to do X will be able to do so without going through the effort that I did. Also another individual with coding skills might need to be able to do X and Y. In which case my code might be a starting point... If people come to me saying your program is useless unless it does Z well let me remind you I needed a program that does X, I am using my program that does X. Unless you can convince me that adding Z to my program would make my life easier I am probably not going to spend my time coding Z...
If this means that my project sits in Sourceforge and festers like so many other projects then so be it I am still quite happily using it and it is doing what I need it to. If there are one or two other happy users for whom it makes their life better then it was probably worth making the code public.
True but.... You think that mac would include previews on JPEG images like every other F**King major desktop platform... There was an incident earlier this year where I had to load off a card of pictures that contained one or two sensitive photos. There is no way I wanted to go through iPhoto or any other photodatabase app for this..... On a sane Platform I could just load the camera into File Manager, switch on Image Previews (since the names are not going to help) find the non sensitive photos and copy them to the computer. needless to say I couldn't do this on the mac and after an hour or so f**king around with a third party tool I was not impressed. It should have been a 5 minute job.
Please Please Please, Actually read the GPL.....
You do not have to release changes to the kernel unless you are distributing them in some fashion. And assuming that you are in fact distributing binary code... only the code that goes into the kernel must be distributed. (See NVidia's Linux Drivers for an example of this). You are using somebody elses product and the only stipulation is that you must past on the rights that they have afforded you. This gives you protection in that anybody else who uses your sourcecode must abide by the same rules. This keeps the system fair for everbody. Ultimately if your changes are useful this means that getting those changes upstream will mean less work for you.
The second assertion makes me think you should fire your legal team (they have already cost you a lot of time and effort)... The GPL only covers use of the code in a product not use of the product itself. You certainly can use gcc to produce proprietory code. You can also use any of the libraries licensed with a BSD license or the LGPL license. Even if this assertion were true, there are a number of proprietory compilers which can be used with linux - Intels compilers immediately spring to mind.
The GPL is not draconian. It is there to protect the creator of a product from loosing access to that product while allowing others to use and extend that product. If you are the original creator of a product you can choose to license it under the GPL and other licenses. If you don't wish to abide by the GPL then regular copyright law applies.
It is as simple as that.
Theres actually a few options around.
l (they make noise ninja - I don't know much else)
The gimp has a few raw plugins - ufraw being my favourite... You get to make adjustments before it becomes 8bit per channel image
The current Version of Digikam (0.82) will convert Raw to 8 bits per pixel for editing. The soon to be released version (0.90) will convert raw files to 16bits per channel.
Digikam is an image management tool for linux along the lines of iPhoto or Picassa... It has basic editing features but if anything is a bit slow. also will do batch conversions
Speaking of which Picassa is a available for linux (beta) - I am only guessing that it also supports raw images.
On the commercial side there is support from Bibble labs http://www.bibblelabs.com/press/pr20060224-46.htm
Thats just what I know about off the top of my head - most of the solutions I know of appart from Bibble labs use DCRaw a command line application to do the dirty work... and as such you are converting the Raw file to something else to work with. I believe that upsampling raw to 16 bits per channel will preserve quality (at the cost of some disk space) - generally I archive the originals in their raw format anyways... Even the workflow with the gimp is not to bad - (You get to do all the important adjustments before you downsample to 8 bits)
Amarok - I believe the collection Tab is what you are looking for. Rather than the Playlist tab... (Look at the left side of Amarok there should be a bunch of vertical tabs running down the side of the screen... These are pretty central to running amarok...
Almost but I can see a 2 subtle destinctions... 1) On Unix the user ID is a number and may not correspond to the user ID on another computer. So there must be another mechanism for identifying the user. 2) There seems to be an auto syncronisation between the Local Account and the Portable Account. IE changed settings and added data are written in both places. Personally I hate that stuff like this can be patented.
Yeah I fell fowl of that first one as well - well sort of - Ubuntu set my screen refresh too conservatively and I couldn't get my full 1440x900 res happening. So yeah there is still the occasional rough edge. I believe that Xorgs autoconfiguration has gotten good enough in recent developments to do away with configuration files all together. If for one will be quite happy if that turns out to be the case
My favourite was "upgrading" my geforce II to a quadro II using a soldering Iron :)
The folks that hold the IP for MP3... Ask for a fee of ~70 cents for every copy of an mp3 enabled system you ship. That means in order to ship this in a free system SuSE would either have to charge per copy or take that hit themselves. This fee can be avoided by paying a once up amount I think it approaches the $50,000 mark I am not sure but it certainly is in the tens of thousands. It is up to each distro whether they want to take the legal risk of distributing mp3 support without paying. This is all stuff that the consumer perhaps shouldn't have to worry about - but there you have it. There are usually 3rd party packages which allow you to add mp3 support but you have to do it yourself. What makes this a further kick in the teeth is that Linux already has access to an open format that is superior to MP3 in everyway except market penetration (and purhaps CPU usage)...
To my way of thinking I would much prefer it if they just banned Big Brother. Now thats legislation would like to see down under ;)
Corels near death - had nothing to do with Linux.
Corel Draw 10 was a disaster. There where lots of misfeatures and I could not even get through designing a single page of text without it crashing hard. Even that was forgivable. What was not forgivable was that Corels support boards were full of customers with problems similar to my own and Corel would not own up to the problem blaming it on "faulty graphics" drivers. I installed CorelDraw 10 on 3 different computers with three different video cards (two matrox, 1 nvidia) and had the same problem with Corel Draw and none of the other 10 or so applications I had on the systems. They finally admitted to some of the issues with the first service pack and by the second service pack the program was barely usable. I can stand a crappy product but I can not stand being lied to. So I like many others left Corel to die.
In the OS corner there is Cinelerra, Kino & Lives
For home use (commercial) there is MainActor.
For compositing there is just about all of the major apps including smoke,shake,nuke3.
Also Blender makes a fairly decent Compositor (more so in the soon to be released version).
Kubuntu Dapper works quite well with my Asus 167g (wireless usb) using the native ralink driver not ndis wrapper...
Its not quite plug and play. I do have to enable it in network settings after I plug it in.
Adapters using the Ralink chipset generally work quite well. I would specifically recommend Minitar (instrumental in the creation of gpled ralink drivers) and Asus (usb driver)...
Hey there - hows your design going.... Been looking at designs with my friend... Yours looks very promising... Got friends keeping their eyes out for dead weighing machines... Looking forwards to seeing your finished design... On the Article - Can I just say that the finished product looked quite good and had some interesting approaches I haven't seen anyone else do. It definately looks an improvement from the cheep foam pads I have at the moment.
Taa Thanks - he is wearing the Ubuntu colour theme and all