Can't say I share your experience... KDE has been solid for me since about 3.1 -
care to elaborate on what does not work for you ???
anyways My belief is that 3.5 is mostly a bugfix release anyways
Its not that problems happen its how you learn to deal with them that counts...
In this case the virus is piggybacking on something the users wants to install. Which circumvents Linux's User model protection...
There are several senarios that could lead to this this is a good time to think about how all of them can be preempted....
Senario 1): A malicious party plants virus code within a code repository, malicious code is unnoticed when a release is made...
Senario 2): Code is built on an Infected System
Senario 3): Infected packages are planted in a package repository
Senario 4): Knowingly infected code is distributed independently directly to user.
Well as other people have pointed out Senario 3) already has safeguarding measures against... Signing packages. As long as the malicious party does not have the power to make official packages this should hold up quite well.
Senario 2) sounds like it will be an uncommon issue - It will happen very occasionally... Hopefully the source of the issue will be easy to track down and damage will be minimised.
Senario 1) sounds like the least likely route but none the less possible. Most content systems log all transactions so it should be easy once offending code is found who submitted it.
Senario 4) Is by far the most worrying and likely of the four. This kind of attack happens a lot already in the windows world. However there is a nasty twist where Opensource software is involved. It is quite possible to build a compromised version of a popular and trusted program and distribute it independantly - damaging the good name of original product (which may in some cases be the intention of the excersize).
In all four senarios - this type of virus threat is not really contageous since it requires the user to bypass security for it. This is still worrying as it is potentially no less painful to those infected.
1) Open Office needs to reach the good enough mark. I think it is getting very close to that for a lot of people.
The whole tech support thing is a bit of a non issue - I only know of one person who has called Microsoft for tech support - they weren't very impressed. What mums and dads like better than somebody to ring its somebody they can take the computer to and have them fix it. As more IT professionals become familiar with OpenOffice this sort of support will become available.
Although I can't see OpenOffice in costco in the immediate future - I am willing to bet that you will be able to pick up a copy in most newsagents.
partly true - Openoffice needs to be compatible with the features that are frequently used and is likely to be experienced by that user. The Office compatibility thing only really works if you have everybody using the same version of office in the same environment. It might work that way in other parts of the world but it does not work that way in my area. People very quickly learn what they can and can't send to other people. As long as OpenOffice is as good or better than using a different version of office I think that will be good enough.
Open Office was the prefered name. But it turns out that name is intellectual property of somebody else.
2) Have you actually seen a mum and dad user with a windows installer for the first time. They freeze they get through two maybe three of the questions and give up. It is very intimidating. Essentually what should happen is the user should click once agree to the license (if absolutely necessary) and install (two clicks tops) (maybe with an option for advanced users to tweek the settings before install). The best installer I have used on linux is Synaptic. It is excellent for expert users. If somebody could create a polished version of this that would show only the applications that a normal user would be interested in (by default) and let them install them with a single click I think we might be onto a winner, I agree with the comments about the start menu however
3) There are installers that surpass the ease of use of the windows XP installer. Mepis Linux is my favourite. You put the CD in boot from it - You end up with a fully working desktop... There is an Icon on the desktop that says "Install me" You answer a couple of questions (things like language settings and location) Then the whole lot gets copied to your hardrive. The extra complexity comes from the fact that Mepis allows you to install itself along side other operating systems - which is something people generally want to do... To aid in this task it runs a program very simular to partition Magic - A very nice touch
4) a - these will come as the market matures and demand increases - There are things that nead to be done in order to make these systems popular enough for these chain outlets to stock it.
b -
Microsoft.... I think they will only move after everybody else does...
Apple - Quicktime would be nice but as long as most people can click on a quicktime movie and it runs they wont be too upset... iTunes - In IMHO Amorok has surpassed iTunes. Access to the music service and better iPod intergration would be nice.
Macromedia - now defunct - see Adobe.
Adobe - Those who really need to run adobe on linux can do so using middleware that can be purchased. This is how Disney uses Photoshop in there studios for instance. When the market of people doing things that way grows enough Adobe will probably see the value in supporting linux/BSD
This is where you really do show your ignorace - Maya is already very well supported under linux native.
Other Vendors... Will probably tread the same road as Adobe - They will port when they see it will bring them financial returns. Companies less tied to the MS Platform will generally find the going easier... Hopefully by the time most companies are ready to do this technologies which will make this easier eg Trolltechs QT will be ver
I think when people say as good as photoshop they mean for the people who maybe use 30% of photoshops functionality - there are a lot of them out-there... unfortunately they are same people who are easily put of by the gimps *different* interface
1) CMYK is only useful if you are outputting to a 4 colour printing system. if you print cmyk to a six colour printer you loose a lot of gamut.
CMYK like most of the other features has been waiting for an engine upgrade - but so far this has kept being put back.
2) Channel Math - could you explain what this is.
3) This is not going to happen - Unless somebody with an industry standard engine is going to license their engine open source. The licensing agreement under which the gimp is released strictly prohibits using IP encumbered components in their program.
Well I guess it could happen - We just have to wait for there to be an opensource industry standard colour engine. (might take some time though)...
4) AFAIK there is already one of these
5) I don't understand what you mean here
The difference is that photoshop on Mac handles utility windows a lot more intelligently than the current stable release of gimp. The good news is that the development release is going some ways to ironing out these places where people stub their toes....
I honestly think the issue is the fact that almost everyone is taught photoshop as their first graphics application. They assume any application that does not work the way photoshop does is unintuetive... Other paint packages suffer from the same problem. I have worked with enough photoshop users to be aware of this phenominon...
Having said that Gimp does have some serious usability problems. MDI or menu organisation are not them. The biggest sins are the pop up dialogs which happen with many of the tools - this is just plain evil and the lack of intelligence in the way the dock windows are handled. Fortunately Both are being worked on in 2.3 and open-usability guys are now in on the project...
I had difficulty building from source - I think it will only work with GCC-3.4 as GCC-4.0 did not like some of the semantics used. GCC-3.3 does not support the build target for some of the files....
Anyways I decided to give the redhat binaries a go... I converted them using alien. They installed without a hitch... And I haven't had any difficulties running them yet...
I have done a little work in both FinalCut and Cinelerra...
Both have a simular feel... the default layout is almost identical. To me at least Cinelerra feels a little more spartan - final cut is packed with a lot of functionality... Having said that Cinelerra does do pretty much everything I have needed to apart from progressively speeding up or slowing down footage.
Cinelerra is designed to be primarily used with HDTV footage and supports all HDTV formats
The areas where Cinelerra really shines are
Network rendering - you can use a hetrogenous network of computers to render your video in the background while you are working... Need more processing poweer - add more cpu's - I think Premiere will have something like this in its next version - other than that I don't know of anything else that does that this side of $40,000
Cinelerra attempts to do everything realtime - no need to render complex effects etc... though you can set it to render in the background.
support for 16bit per pixel and floating point colour spaces.... Including HDR footage.
Sound processing - Cinelerra grew out of an audio processing packages many many years ago and still has really good sound support
Basic compositing support - channel ops animating layered video tracks that sort of thing
Some areas where Cinelerra is a bit weak....
The UI demands that you spend a little time learning the finer points - Keybindings are non standard - settings take a little time to get your head around. If you are familar with 3 point editing the actual use of the program should be straight forwards
dv capture - being primarily HDformat targeted application MiniDV capture has not always worked to put it bluntly... I know that the linux kernel constantly changing the sementics of the firewire interface doesn't help. I have yet to test this version - but they have switched methods so I am hopeful.
export - there are not too many formats that can be exported that actually read properly in anything else - I think the current list is Mpeg1, Mpeg2 & Quicktime w/ mjpeg compression. And for me at least the mpeg conversion was broken for a little while now. With H.265 support being included and tested to work with Quicktime 7... I am happy to say that this situation has improved massively... Basically if the mpeg2 export works I will be happy - that means I can go to DVD authoring software and all my bases will be covered
Thats funny I found the whole thing remarkably simular to final cut...
What do you want to do?
Like I said before the "fruit salad" theme is gone - and now the app is a traditional compositor dark grey
The UI is essentially the same - It is very similar to most other 3 point editing suites in that respect... The keybindings are non standard which is a bit of a worry... I actually like the cinelerra key bindings better than the standard ones though.
Yes they use the same toolkit. It was designed specifically for cinelerra - They have however replaced the fruit salad theme with a nice dark grey one.
Cinelerra is designed to work best with uncompressed video... However most of the files I have thrown into it (2.0) have worked just fine...
I use Cinelerra with Blender (which I assume you are doing) - the best shot is to render out each frame as a different image.
You can easily load each image as a frame in your animation... Since cinelerra understands alpha channel information seamlessly. you can layer your animations - ie render your background independently of your character animation... Then if you need to adjust the animation you only need to re-render the character not the background
I have to say that I don't share your experience last year I was corresponding with various people on a community project. There were a lot of different versions of office being used. I was the only person who was able to read all of the correspondence in doc format. Sure the formating wasn't always 100% but it was at least readable.
OOo 1.1 won't format documents with nested tables. AFAIK 2.0 does... All the documents I have had difficulty with are because of this. Usually people distributing this type of document are using Word as a DTP program... I have had to try and fix formatting errors (in word) with people doing this sort of formatting - it is just painful. Still people persist with it - sigh...
Yeah so point me to the public schools here in australia that I can send my children to so they can learn something other than microsoft. This practice in this case is particularly on the nose because
1) Microsoft has a virtual monopoly in the desktop market and thus most schools basically perceive themselves as having to do what microsoft says. The coke/pepsi analogy just doesn't hold.
2) Schools are places were our children should go to learn to think not to become good little consumers for f**k sake. While these practices might be ok in say a fast food resteraunt. Lets keep our schools free of this...
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Can't say I share your experience... KDE has been solid for me since about 3.1 - care to elaborate on what does not work for you ??? anyways My belief is that 3.5 is mostly a bugfix release anyways
Its not that problems happen its how you learn to deal with them that counts... In this case the virus is piggybacking on something the users wants to install. Which circumvents Linux's User model protection... There are several senarios that could lead to this this is a good time to think about how all of them can be preempted.... Senario 1): A malicious party plants virus code within a code repository, malicious code is unnoticed when a release is made... Senario 2): Code is built on an Infected System Senario 3): Infected packages are planted in a package repository Senario 4): Knowingly infected code is distributed independently directly to user. Well as other people have pointed out Senario 3) already has safeguarding measures against... Signing packages. As long as the malicious party does not have the power to make official packages this should hold up quite well. Senario 2) sounds like it will be an uncommon issue - It will happen very occasionally... Hopefully the source of the issue will be easy to track down and damage will be minimised. Senario 1) sounds like the least likely route but none the less possible. Most content systems log all transactions so it should be easy once offending code is found who submitted it. Senario 4) Is by far the most worrying and likely of the four. This kind of attack happens a lot already in the windows world. However there is a nasty twist where Opensource software is involved. It is quite possible to build a compromised version of a popular and trusted program and distribute it independantly - damaging the good name of original product (which may in some cases be the intention of the excersize). In all four senarios - this type of virus threat is not really contageous since it requires the user to bypass security for it. This is still worrying as it is potentially no less painful to those infected.
1) Open Office needs to reach the good enough mark. I think it is getting very close to that for a lot of people.
The whole tech support thing is a bit of a non issue - I only know of one person who has called Microsoft for tech support - they weren't very impressed. What mums and dads like better than somebody to ring its somebody they can take the computer to and have them fix it. As more IT professionals become familiar with OpenOffice this sort of support will become available.
Although I can't see OpenOffice in costco in the immediate future - I am willing to bet that you will be able to pick up a copy in most newsagents.
partly true - Openoffice needs to be compatible with the features that are frequently used and is likely to be experienced by that user. The Office compatibility thing only really works if you have everybody using the same version of office in the same environment. It might work that way in other parts of the world but it does not work that way in my area. People very quickly learn what they can and can't send to other people. As long as OpenOffice is as good or better than using a different version of office I think that will be good enough.
Open Office was the prefered name. But it turns out that name is intellectual property of somebody else.
2) Have you actually seen a mum and dad user with a windows installer for the first time. They freeze they get through two maybe three of the questions and give up. It is very intimidating. Essentually what should happen is the user should click once agree to the license (if absolutely necessary) and install (two clicks tops) (maybe with an option for advanced users to tweek the settings before install). The best installer I have used on linux is Synaptic. It is excellent for expert users. If somebody could create a polished version of this that would show only the applications that a normal user would be interested in (by default) and let them install them with a single click I think we might be onto a winner, I agree with the comments about the start menu however
3) There are installers that surpass the ease of use of the windows XP installer. Mepis Linux is my favourite. You put the CD in boot from it - You end up with a fully working desktop... There is an Icon on the desktop that says "Install me" You answer a couple of questions (things like language settings and location) Then the whole lot gets copied to your hardrive. The extra complexity comes from the fact that Mepis allows you to install itself along side other operating systems - which is something people generally want to do... To aid in this task it runs a program very simular to partition Magic - A very nice touch
4) a - these will come as the market matures and demand increases - There are things that nead to be done in order to make these systems popular enough for these chain outlets to stock it.
b -
I think when people say as good as photoshop they mean for the people who maybe use 30% of photoshops functionality - there are a lot of them out-there... unfortunately they are same people who are easily put of by the gimps *different* interface 1) CMYK is only useful if you are outputting to a 4 colour printing system. if you print cmyk to a six colour printer you loose a lot of gamut. CMYK like most of the other features has been waiting for an engine upgrade - but so far this has kept being put back. 2) Channel Math - could you explain what this is. 3) This is not going to happen - Unless somebody with an industry standard engine is going to license their engine open source. The licensing agreement under which the gimp is released strictly prohibits using IP encumbered components in their program. Well I guess it could happen - We just have to wait for there to be an opensource industry standard colour engine. (might take some time though)... 4) AFAIK there is already one of these 5) I don't understand what you mean here
The difference is that photoshop on Mac handles utility windows a lot more intelligently than the current stable release of gimp. The good news is that the development release is going some ways to ironing out these places where people stub their toes.... I honestly think the issue is the fact that almost everyone is taught photoshop as their first graphics application. They assume any application that does not work the way photoshop does is unintuetive... Other paint packages suffer from the same problem. I have worked with enough photoshop users to be aware of this phenominon... Having said that Gimp does have some serious usability problems. MDI or menu organisation are not them. The biggest sins are the pop up dialogs which happen with many of the tools - this is just plain evil and the lack of intelligence in the way the dock windows are handled. Fortunately Both are being worked on in 2.3 and open-usability guys are now in on the project...
I had difficulty building from source - I think it will only work with GCC-3.4 as GCC-4.0 did not like some of the semantics used. GCC-3.3 does not support the build target for some of the files....
Anyways I decided to give the redhat binaries a go... I converted them using alien. They installed without a hitch... And I haven't had any difficulties running them yet...
I have done a little work in both FinalCut and Cinelerra...
Both have a simular feel... the default layout is almost identical. To me at least Cinelerra feels a little more spartan - final cut is packed with a lot of functionality... Having said that Cinelerra does do pretty much everything I have needed to apart from progressively speeding up or slowing down footage.
Cinelerra is designed to be primarily used with HDTV footage and supports all HDTV formats
The areas where Cinelerra really shines are
Some areas where Cinelerra is a bit weak....
Thats funny I found the whole thing remarkably simular to final cut... What do you want to do? Like I said before the "fruit salad" theme is gone - and now the app is a traditional compositor dark grey
The UI is essentially the same - It is very similar to most other 3 point editing suites in that respect... The keybindings are non standard which is a bit of a worry... I actually like the cinelerra key bindings better than the standard ones though. Yes they use the same toolkit. It was designed specifically for cinelerra - They have however replaced the fruit salad theme with a nice dark grey one. Cinelerra is designed to work best with uncompressed video... However most of the files I have thrown into it (2.0) have worked just fine... I use Cinelerra with Blender (which I assume you are doing) - the best shot is to render out each frame as a different image. You can easily load each image as a frame in your animation... Since cinelerra understands alpha channel information seamlessly. you can layer your animations - ie render your background independently of your character animation... Then if you need to adjust the animation you only need to re-render the character not the background
I have to say that I don't share your experience last year I was corresponding with various people on a community project. There were a lot of different versions of office being used. I was the only person who was able to read all of the correspondence in doc format. Sure the formating wasn't always 100% but it was at least readable. OOo 1.1 won't format documents with nested tables. AFAIK 2.0 does... All the documents I have had difficulty with are because of this. Usually people distributing this type of document are using Word as a DTP program... I have had to try and fix formatting errors (in word) with people doing this sort of formatting - it is just painful. Still people persist with it - sigh...
Yeah so point me to the public schools here in australia that I can send my children to so they can learn something other than microsoft. This practice in this case is particularly on the nose because 1) Microsoft has a virtual monopoly in the desktop market and thus most schools basically perceive themselves as having to do what microsoft says. The coke/pepsi analogy just doesn't hold. 2) Schools are places were our children should go to learn to think not to become good little consumers for f**k sake. While these practices might be ok in say a fast food resteraunt. Lets keep our schools free of this...
Does that mean the microsoft product will cost half as much ????