Given that it's smack under the southeastern approach to LaGuardia airport (the "turn left really hard and dive at a steep angle to the runway that juts out into the water" or "Oh my god, we're all gonna die" approach), I wouldn't want to stick around long enough to find out.
I see your point, but once humans evolved language and writing, a single human could leverage the experience and intelligence of just about every human that ever lived. Intelligence at a sufficient level trumps most selective pressures (in your UV example, knowing to wear a hat, stay inside, and use sunscreen, as well as knowing how to make hats, sunscreen, and buildings).
Incidentally, this is what leads to humans' tendency to crap up ecosystems with inventions that bypass 'the natural order of things' by using exotic, nonobvious properties of the materials in their environment (like the difference between a bird building a nest and manufacturing Portland cement) and put intolerable selective pressure on other species.
This also means that once we're on this path, more intelligence is the trait most advantageous to advance, absent really extreme selective pressure on our ability to maintain homeostasis (e.g. asteroid impact, nuclear war, runaway Venus-like global warming, etc.). Even then, evolving the ability to colonize other planets seems like our DNA's best shot at continuing to propagate.
All your counterarguments may or may not be true (we seem to be talking past each other), but I based my impressions on:
Looking at the front page of your website (which is difficult to read)
looking at a few detail feature pages
checking out the first page of the sample images gallery
checking out the screenshots (which are a mess)
looking at the support options and skimming the FAQ
looking at a few random pages in the manual (including the layer modes to see the feature you tout in the tagline) to get a sense of the documentation (which included references to 'this is/isn't how it worked in the previous version' without elaboration)
If your best foot forward isn't to be found within all that, I think you're expecting too much of your potential customers.
Another thing I've discovered through bitter experience is that arrogant developers make for unpleasant experiences with software when something goes wrong or you need a hand.
You're totally happy with what you're offering, and that's cool, but I'm calling it how I see it, too.
I do understand the product (full-time 3D artist/compositor/TD), and I agree with the GP.
I even considered taking your product for a spin, but if you can't be arsed to hire a web designer to sell image manipulation software, I can't be arsed to take you seriously.
I hereby deduct one point from your diatribe's validity score for presuming that programmers are artists. Then hire an artist. If OSS applications can get volunteers to make great icons, and sometimes even a useable UI, your commercial software company has no excuse. In addition to the webpage, those Windows 3.1-esque giant icon buttons in the UI have got to go. Oh, and the shitty fractal terrain example images, too (it's 2007, and terragen 2 is coming. Hell, Terragen 1 from years ago looks loads better, and it's free/cheap.) You claim big clients, show big results.
I deduct another point for not addressing product issues. Production artists have to ramp up on lots of applications quickly. Showing off a cluttered mess of a UI on an unreadable webpage with horrible dayglo fractal sample images in the screenshots does not give me confidence in the production-worthiness or ease of use of your tool. If you want to reach people, consider explaining why your morpher is a better option than Combustion, Fusion, Shake, or even an ancient copy of Elastic Reality from the top shelf in the closet, for example. Another example is that when examining your 70+ layer modes, fully half of the first ten should really be composed of multiple operators, both to increase flexibility and to reduce clutter (why should I have to memorize, and pick from, a list of 70, if half of them are "inverted foo"? Why layers instead of nodes, for that matter, if you're touting a powerful procedural compositor with a robust scripting language?) Perhaps the most glaring red flag is the lack of a user-to-user forum. That suggests either that nobody is using the software, or that you don't want people talking to each other about it.
I deduct another point for characterizing your criticism as "constructive" when it was simply an opportunity to bluster about web pages. I just suggested some positive steps you can take. So did the GP, for that matter. Harsh criticism is a day-to-day reality of the industry you're serving, and people who take it personally wdon't tend to last long. Don't get mad, you're getting valuable feedback from your target market.
Finally, I deduct another point for being offtopic. Since I'm replying to your reply, it's on-topic now.
HAND.
Make a case that your software will make artists lives easier and more productive, with great sample images and clear feature examples, and you just might have a hit.
Likewise, if a sign says 'No right turn on red', you can conclude that not only that there must be other times, like yellow and green, you may turn right, but also that this must be some sort of unique rule and people would normally expect be able to turn right on red. (Because they wouldn't mention it if it was normal.)
One of the many reasons not to rent a car when visiting New York City, where it's illegal everywhere and hence there are no signs.
The process of human-use approval is so slow, though (and rightly!), that anything in its infancy now will be hitting shelves in 10-15 years, not 1-2 years from now like electronics innovations.
Well, at a certain point transmission losses and the cost of maintaining right-of-way for high-tension wires become a factor. Without the pollution, a by-neighborhood or by-town distribution makes sense.
But the timeline doesn't change until Dwight actually reads and comprehends the memo - perhaps the narration is in real time, and the narrator will vanish into an alternate timestream along with poisoned-Dwight on the next page.
Personally, I would prefer Spanish to become the lingua franca since it is probably the cleanest of the Romance languages (and doesn't have all the silent endings that make me want to claw my eyes out when studying English or French). But we are stuck with English for at least the next 30 years or so I'm guessing.
If English and French make you want to claw your eyes out, you'll need to spend the entirety of those thirty years learning the Chinese you'll need afterwards.
A number of my in-laws work in the New York City psychiatric hospital system. By law, any patient in that system is entitled to translation services to enable them to communicate with doctors and staff in their native language. Several years ago, a schizophrenic entered the system insisting that his native language was Klingon. They retained a Klingon-speaking translator to communicate with him.
A Swahili speaker in the Vermont government might save them some money down the road.
Except maybe the probability of getting caught and having your entire plans foiled. This is especial true in a dessert [sic].
Obligatory Firesign Theatre:
Pico: Surrounding them will be easy, Lieutenant! There's millions of them, all over the country. Alvarado: Yeah, they live here, Lieutenant! They got women and pigs and gardens and everything!
Actually, it's a wee bit of difference between the cold hard limitations of a 32-bit address space as implemented in win32 and a bug in the video card driver
a) Have a significantly elevated incidence of scratched,unusable discs. b) Have limited budgets for replacement discs. c) Are a significant market. d) Are likely to feel that their inability to make backups is intrusive.
If a Taliban slept in your house while holding you at gunpoint, would you be a Taliban supporter? Would you rather be a dead anti-Taliban or a live Taliban supporter at the price of a meal and a bed for the night?
Given the degree of oppression in NK, and having seen the footage and other materials smuggled out by the opposition, I can't fault the North Koreans who don't take the absolutely suicidal chances the dissidents do, while I have profound respect and admiration for those that do.
How about marketing infant formula to rural poor in developing countries who don't have access to the clean water they'd need to actually use the stuff responsibly. It's pretty clear cut that Nestle is doing significant overt harm to exactly those communities the foundation is trying to help.
They're being commoditized. Between JiffyLube for regular maintenance and increasing computerization making part-swapping rather than repair standard procedure, auto mechanic isn't the job it used to be. Much more so for other repair professions, e.g. appliance repair, TV/radio repair, handyman, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that it's smack under the southeastern approach to LaGuardia airport (the "turn left really hard and dive at a steep angle to the runway that juts out into the water" or "Oh my god, we're all gonna die" approach), I wouldn't want to stick around long enough to find out.
Wait, I thought monocultures were bad for security...
Actually, only 1943. They needed the copper to make shell casings.
You need Rayman. Trust me.
Incidentally, this is what leads to humans' tendency to crap up ecosystems with inventions that bypass 'the natural order of things' by using exotic, nonobvious properties of the materials in their environment (like the difference between a bird building a nest and manufacturing Portland cement) and put intolerable selective pressure on other species.
This also means that once we're on this path, more intelligence is the trait most advantageous to advance, absent really extreme selective pressure on our ability to maintain homeostasis (e.g. asteroid impact, nuclear war, runaway Venus-like global warming, etc.). Even then, evolving the ability to colonize other planets seems like our DNA's best shot at continuing to propagate.
- Looking at the front page of your website (which is difficult to read)
- looking at a few detail feature pages
- checking out the first page of the sample images gallery
- checking out the screenshots (which are a mess)
- looking at the support options and skimming the FAQ
- looking at a few random pages in the manual (including the layer modes to see the feature you tout in the tagline) to get a sense of the documentation (which included references to 'this is/isn't how it worked in the previous version' without elaboration)
If your best foot forward isn't to be found within all that, I think you're expecting too much of your potential customers.Another thing I've discovered through bitter experience is that arrogant developers make for unpleasant experiences with software when something goes wrong or you need a hand.
You're totally happy with what you're offering, and that's cool, but I'm calling it how I see it, too.
I even considered taking your product for a spin, but if you can't be arsed to hire a web designer to sell image manipulation software, I can't be arsed to take you seriously.
I hereby deduct one point from your diatribe's validity score for presuming that programmers are artists. Then hire an artist. If OSS applications can get volunteers to make great icons, and sometimes even a useable UI, your commercial software company has no excuse. In addition to the webpage, those Windows 3.1-esque giant icon buttons in the UI have got to go. Oh, and the shitty fractal terrain example images, too (it's 2007, and terragen 2 is coming. Hell, Terragen 1 from years ago looks loads better, and it's free/cheap.) You claim big clients, show big results.
I deduct another point for not addressing product issues. Production artists have to ramp up on lots of applications quickly. Showing off a cluttered mess of a UI on an unreadable webpage with horrible dayglo fractal sample images in the screenshots does not give me confidence in the production-worthiness or ease of use of your tool. If you want to reach people, consider explaining why your morpher is a better option than Combustion, Fusion, Shake, or even an ancient copy of Elastic Reality from the top shelf in the closet, for example. Another example is that when examining your 70+ layer modes, fully half of the first ten should really be composed of multiple operators, both to increase flexibility and to reduce clutter (why should I have to memorize, and pick from, a list of 70, if half of them are "inverted foo"? Why layers instead of nodes, for that matter, if you're touting a powerful procedural compositor with a robust scripting language?)
Perhaps the most glaring red flag is the lack of a user-to-user forum. That suggests either that nobody is using the software, or that you don't want people talking to each other about it.
I deduct another point for characterizing your criticism as "constructive" when it was simply an opportunity to bluster about web pages. I just suggested some positive steps you can take. So did the GP, for that matter. Harsh criticism is a day-to-day reality of the industry you're serving, and people who take it personally wdon't tend to last long. Don't get mad, you're getting valuable feedback from your target market.
Finally, I deduct another point for being offtopic. Since I'm replying to your reply, it's on-topic now.
HAND.
Make a case that your software will make artists lives easier and more productive, with great sample images and clear feature examples, and you just might have a hit.
One of the many reasons not to rent a car when visiting New York City, where it's illegal everywhere and hence there are no signs.
BTW, nothing's stopping them from impeaching Bush AND Cheney, if it came down to it.
The process of human-use approval is so slow, though (and rightly!), that anything in its infancy now will be hitting shelves in 10-15 years, not 1-2 years from now like electronics innovations.
No, but his cut of True Romance had the Christian Slater character dying among the falling feathers, and no coda on the beach in Mexico...
Legislate that the banks have to pay for fraud, and the security will take care of itself. Look at what happened to credit card fraud.
Well, at a certain point transmission losses and the cost of maintaining right-of-way for high-tension wires become a factor. Without the pollution, a by-neighborhood or by-town distribution makes sense.
But the timeline doesn't change until Dwight actually reads and comprehends the memo - perhaps the narration is in real time, and the narrator will vanish into an alternate timestream along with poisoned-Dwight on the next page.
Fixed that for you.
because it's Greenland, not Greenearth.
If English and French make you want to claw your eyes out, you'll need to spend the entirety of those thirty years learning the Chinese you'll need afterwards.
A Swahili speaker in the Vermont government might save them some money down the road.
Obligatory Firesign Theatre:
Pico: Surrounding them will be easy, Lieutenant! There's millions of them, all over the country.
Alvarado: Yeah, they live here, Lieutenant! They got women and pigs and gardens and everything!
Actually, it's a wee bit of difference between the cold hard limitations of a 32-bit address space as implemented in win32 and a bug in the video card driver
a) Have a significantly elevated incidence of scratched,unusable discs.
b) Have limited budgets for replacement discs.
c) Are a significant market.
d) Are likely to feel that their inability to make backups is intrusive.
Given the degree of oppression in NK, and having seen the footage and other materials smuggled out by the opposition, I can't fault the North Koreans who don't take the absolutely suicidal chances the dissidents do, while I have profound respect and admiration for those that do.
How about marketing infant formula to rural poor in developing countries who don't have access to the clean water they'd need to actually use the stuff responsibly. It's pretty clear cut that Nestle is doing significant overt harm to exactly those communities the foundation is trying to help.
Just because the Union army didn't occupy all of the south doesn't mean they weren't conquered.
They're being commoditized. Between JiffyLube for regular maintenance and increasing computerization making part-swapping rather than repair standard procedure, auto mechanic isn't the job it used to be. Much more so for other repair professions, e.g. appliance repair, TV/radio repair, handyman, etc.