Just wait until wannabe designers in low-wage nations like India, China, Brazil, etc (using cracked copies of design software) start entering into the process. $269 will seem overpriced.
It's like rent-a-coder... no American can earn a living doing piecework for rent-a-coder. Most would be better off working at McDonalds. Same thing's going to happen for piecework design.
This happened about a decade ago in my field (translation) with sites like proz.com and later translatorscafe.com - there are other sites doing the same thing, but these are the two largest. It's a bidding race to the bottom with India and China.
And those of us who live in the US and Europe have been complaining about it ever since.
But then you get to a point where you realize that you don't want that kind of client anyway. And there are still many clients out there willing to pay the rate you want/deserve.
To me, Linux (1996-2010) is a sad story. Both Windows and MacOS have made huge leaps forward in terms of usability, stability and security, and Linux has hardly moved.
I don't know how you can honestly say that with a straight face if you've actually used Linux on the desktop since 1996.
We've come a LONG way in terms of the desktop since then. The first "usable" Linux desktop I used was Caldera's Looking Glass Desktop (I think that was the name of it) back in 98-99. And I put usable in quotes for a reason: It was absolutely laughable compared to either current Gnome or KDE desktops of today. I can't speak for KDE's stability - I settled on Gnome quite a while ago, but it's every bit as stable as any current Windows or OSX desktop I've recently used.
Out of curiosity, what huge leaps in security are missing in Linux that are present in either OSX or Windows? I'm asking honestly.
When I first visited Linux Hater, I thought I was dealing with extreme ignorance. But it quickly became apparent that he/she is actually an expert authority on software in general and Linux in particular
OK. If he could convey a thought without it coming across as a rant, I might take him more seriously. But it's nothing but rants.
I never had much exposure to Mac OSX until around Tiger. Before that, I'd used Windows for years (3.x through XP), and Linux full time for about a decade (Ubuntu since 2005, Suse and Redhat since 2000).
I suffered a power outage once with OSX and when I got the OS back, sound and network drivers were corrupted due to disk errors. I had absolutely no idea where to look. Since I was unfamiliar with the OS, there wasn't much I could do except reload the OS.
Maybe that's an extreme example, but probably not an uncommon one when faced with something unfamiliar.
That might all be true, but it does not really change my point.
Not trying to change your point but... do you know many people that have half a year's salary saved up and readily available? I don't. You may think that "readily available" are weasel words. They're not. It's an important point.
I don't know his parents' reason for visiting the relatives - and frankly, it's not my place to judge what's a valid reason or not.
Yes, air travel was ungodly expensive back then, but people still needed to do it for whatever reason. And a bank loan was often the only way to quickly gather the money needed.
Excuse me, a bank loan to pay for airfares??? I can see where the credit crisis originated. How hard is it to save money (and earn some interest) and then pay for the flight to England? It saves you a lot of money in interest on the loan...
He's talking about the 70s, when you could buy a very nice 4 bedroom house for $32,000USD (that's what my parents paid in 1974 for their brick colonial in a town of about 100,000 people - and that was expensive back then). The average yearly salary was less than 10 grand. And a ticket overseas would cost about 5-6 grand. I remember it well.
Fares might be lower in the states, but fares over the Atlantic are much higher due to the fuel charges (and the fact that fewer seats are available).
That probably depends on where and when you go overseas. I bought a round trip ticket from Chicago to Cape Town for just under a thousand bucks with close to two months advance purchase, United/South African Airways. That's cheap in my book, but it's much cheaper this time of year than it would be say, in February or March (their summer time).
The company's financial health is great, sure, but so is Microsoft's. Its health in terms of reputation, however, isn't so good, and it is likely to get worse over the next few years. Then we will see Apple dealing with whatever reputation it has built, that will be coming back to bite Apple in the ass.
Apple will *always* have its fans to prop the company up, at least marginally.
Back during the Scully era I had a co-worker that worked on a Quadra, and no matter how many times a day we'd all hear the "bunnng" restart sound coming from his cubicle (at least 4 times a day), he swore it was the best thing ever and that's all he was ever going to use.
Of course, now Apple has an entirely different demographic with their iPods, iPhones and now iPads, so who knows.
My bet's on the fans though. Apple would have to really mess up to drive them away. This latest iPhone trouble isn't going to phase them. Seriously, how many times have we read posts from users parroting "A fix is coming out, so no worries"?
This distribution should be basic knowledge by now anyway.
Basic knowledge for whom?
I'm not the most technical guy around, but I try to keep up on things (certainly WRT Linux, as it's my main OS), and I'd never heard of it. Of course, I'm not in school studying security concepts either, so there ya go.
I use both Wine and VirtualBox for very limited purposes. I have a very old Windows program (actually 2) that I use for translation purposes that I run in Wine. The original companies went out of business, but I'm fairly sure I could find a more up to date program to do what these programs do. But these old programs still suit my needs and really don't see a need to buy another program (there is no Linux version of either of these programs that would do, otherwise I'd be using them, I suppose). The other translation program I have won't run in Wine. I have to use a full VM for it (Trados, for the curious).
I really dislike having to fire up a full VM for that one program, but it's still sort of an industry standard. If I could get it running in Wine, I would rather do that than have to run a VM. Thankfully, I don't need it all that often.
The delay seems to me to be in getting everybody to update their fonts. That's what I was referring to when I said I didn't know how you could plan for it.
this kind of thing should have been coordinated *beforehand*
How so? This was a competition to come up with a new symbol. There were 5 designs that were on the final list and this symbol was the one that was just chosen.
I don't know how you can plan ahead for something like that.
How the hell is 'rosegarden' supposed to make me think about editing audio files?
As an aside, Rosegarden isn't really an "audio editor" as wound commonly be thought, a la Audacity. It's a full blown music studio, including, MIDI, audio and (somewhat) basic notation. It's actually pretty decent.
for an update compared to other distributions. Then again, Opensuse has always been super stable for my uses.
Glad to see Rosegarden gets a mention... it's great program. Spideroak... eh - at least for the free verison. Haven't played with it, but Dropbox had this covered long before Spideroak. And I can use Truecrypt with dropbox. That and the client is 75 megs. Rather large for my tastes.
I'll have to give this a try on one of my machines (currently have 11.2 installed on one).
I'm not sure if you can even get "dumb" phones that can only talk and text these days, but they'd be at the very cheapest end of the market.
Yes, of course you can still get these types of phones. I got one last year. I spent some time in a very rural area of northern Wisconsin that had no service for my ATT Blackberry. I went out and got a cheap Kyocera phone from Tracfone. Cost me about 15 bucks, I think. All it does it voice and SMS. It does them both fantastically though. And the battery lasts at least 5 days.
After using the Blackberry for so long, I had forgotten 1) how lightweight a simple phone is, 2) how long the battery lasts and 3) that when you don't have all the bluetoothing, web-browsing, emailing, picture-sending, Facebooking, Foresquaring, whatever else is popular application to hog up resources, the phone is much more stable.
That said, when I'm at the cabin, I do tend to use my Nokia N800 together with the Tracfone when I head into town, so I'm not saving anything when it comes to bulk. The N800 is getting old, but still serves its purpose. And when I get back to civilization, it's actually kind of disappointing going back to the Blackberry for web/email access.
I use Paypal to accept payment for work I've done with agencies/entities located abroad. I've received approx. 1/3 - 1/2 of my yearly income through them for the last 3 years or so.
I can truthfully say that I've never had any trouble with them as a way to collect payments.
Actually, I've also used them to make payments for some purchases, but only through their credit card (I have a business credit card issued by them). I imagine I would have no trouble recovering money if there were a dispute though, as the card carries the Mastercard logo.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Foxtab - somewhat similar, but really pretty useful on a netbook, since you can get rid of the actual tabs and call up the interface as needed.
And you couldn't get Ubuntu to do/act/feel just like your chosen version of Linux?
I wouldn't hire you either.
"Run As Administrator".
But his eyes would probably still glass over at that too.
I can't be the only one that's tired of hearing about them. And I'm willing to bet that the majority of them will never be in production.
Then again, I'm firmly in the netbook camp, so a tablet wouldn't appeal to me.
In San Francisco, it's known as the board of supervisors, also known as clusterfuck.
Absolutely nothing gets done.
This happened about a decade ago in my field (translation) with sites like proz.com and later translatorscafe.com - there are other sites doing the same thing, but these are the two largest. It's a bidding race to the bottom with India and China.
And those of us who live in the US and Europe have been complaining about it ever since.
But then you get to a point where you realize that you don't want that kind of client anyway. And there are still many clients out there willing to pay the rate you want/deserve.
I don't know that he ever said "fuck the users", but he certainly did refer to them as dumb fucks. It was all over the news not that long ago.
That's one reason I like Express Scribe.
I don't know how you can honestly say that with a straight face if you've actually used Linux on the desktop since 1996.
We've come a LONG way in terms of the desktop since then. The first "usable" Linux desktop I used was Caldera's Looking Glass Desktop (I think that was the name of it) back in 98-99. And I put usable in quotes for a reason: It was absolutely laughable compared to either current Gnome or KDE desktops of today. I can't speak for KDE's stability - I settled on Gnome quite a while ago, but it's every bit as stable as any current Windows or OSX desktop I've recently used.
Out of curiosity, what huge leaps in security are missing in Linux that are present in either OSX or Windows? I'm asking honestly.
OK. If he could convey a thought without it coming across as a rant, I might take him more seriously. But it's nothing but rants.
*shrug*
Depends where you're coming from.
I never had much exposure to Mac OSX until around Tiger. Before that, I'd used Windows for years (3.x through XP), and Linux full time for about a decade (Ubuntu since 2005, Suse and Redhat since 2000).
I suffered a power outage once with OSX and when I got the OS back, sound and network drivers were corrupted due to disk errors. I had absolutely no idea where to look. Since I was unfamiliar with the OS, there wasn't much I could do except reload the OS.
Maybe that's an extreme example, but probably not an uncommon one when faced with something unfamiliar.
Not trying to change your point but... do you know many people that have half a year's salary saved up and readily available? I don't. You may think that "readily available" are weasel words. They're not. It's an important point.
I don't know his parents' reason for visiting the relatives - and frankly, it's not my place to judge what's a valid reason or not.
Yes, air travel was ungodly expensive back then, but people still needed to do it for whatever reason. And a bank loan was often the only way to quickly gather the money needed.
He's talking about the 70s, when you could buy a very nice 4 bedroom house for $32,000USD (that's what my parents paid in 1974 for their brick colonial in a town of about 100,000 people - and that was expensive back then). The average yearly salary was less than 10 grand. And a ticket overseas would cost about 5-6 grand. I remember it well.
That probably depends on where and when you go overseas. I bought a round trip ticket from Chicago to Cape Town for just under a thousand bucks with close to two months advance purchase, United/South African Airways. That's cheap in my book, but it's much cheaper this time of year than it would be say, in February or March (their summer time).
Apple will *always* have its fans to prop the company up, at least marginally.
Back during the Scully era I had a co-worker that worked on a Quadra, and no matter how many times a day we'd all hear the "bunnng" restart sound coming from his cubicle (at least 4 times a day), he swore it was the best thing ever and that's all he was ever going to use.
Of course, now Apple has an entirely different demographic with their iPods, iPhones and now iPads, so who knows.
My bet's on the fans though. Apple would have to really mess up to drive them away. This latest iPhone trouble isn't going to phase them. Seriously, how many times have we read posts from users parroting "A fix is coming out, so no worries"?
Basic knowledge for whom?
I'm not the most technical guy around, but I try to keep up on things (certainly WRT Linux, as it's my main OS), and I'd never heard of it. Of course, I'm not in school studying security concepts either, so there ya go.
The first 4 comments show as much.
I use both Wine and VirtualBox for very limited purposes. I have a very old Windows program (actually 2) that I use for translation purposes that I run in Wine. The original companies went out of business, but I'm fairly sure I could find a more up to date program to do what these programs do. But these old programs still suit my needs and really don't see a need to buy another program (there is no Linux version of either of these programs that would do, otherwise I'd be using them, I suppose). The other translation program I have won't run in Wine. I have to use a full VM for it (Trados, for the curious).
I really dislike having to fire up a full VM for that one program, but it's still sort of an industry standard. If I could get it running in Wine, I would rather do that than have to run a VM. Thankfully, I don't need it all that often.
Unicode should already support it: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20a8/index.htm
The delay seems to me to be in getting everybody to update their fonts. That's what I was referring to when I said I didn't know how you could plan for it.
How so? This was a competition to come up with a new symbol. There were 5 designs that were on the final list and this symbol was the one that was just chosen.
I don't know how you can plan ahead for something like that.
As an aside, Rosegarden isn't really an "audio editor" as wound commonly be thought, a la Audacity. It's a full blown music studio, including, MIDI, audio and (somewhat) basic notation. It's actually pretty decent.
Glad to see Rosegarden gets a mention... it's great program. Spideroak... eh - at least for the free verison. Haven't played with it, but Dropbox had this covered long before Spideroak. And I can use Truecrypt with dropbox. That and the client is 75 megs. Rather large for my tastes.
I'll have to give this a try on one of my machines (currently have 11.2 installed on one).
Um, no you didn't.
Yes, of course you can still get these types of phones. I got one last year. I spent some time in a very rural area of northern Wisconsin that had no service for my ATT Blackberry. I went out and got a cheap Kyocera phone from Tracfone. Cost me about 15 bucks, I think. All it does it voice and SMS. It does them both fantastically though. And the battery lasts at least 5 days.
After using the Blackberry for so long, I had forgotten 1) how lightweight a simple phone is, 2) how long the battery lasts and 3) that when you don't have all the bluetoothing, web-browsing, emailing, picture-sending, Facebooking, Foresquaring, whatever else is popular application to hog up resources, the phone is much more stable.
That said, when I'm at the cabin, I do tend to use my Nokia N800 together with the Tracfone when I head into town, so I'm not saving anything when it comes to bulk. The N800 is getting old, but still serves its purpose. And when I get back to civilization, it's actually kind of disappointing going back to the Blackberry for web/email access.
I can truthfully say that I've never had any trouble with them as a way to collect payments.
Actually, I've also used them to make payments for some purchases, but only through their credit card (I have a business credit card issued by them). I imagine I would have no trouble recovering money if there were a dispute though, as the card carries the Mastercard logo.