So, did you actually read the article, where he came off as way more intelligent than the thin lines that you're portraying him through, or are you coming out with the tired "OMG OMG HATE REPUBLICANS" argument again?
I may not like some (actually, most) of the stuff he's done, but I do have a little more respect for him after actually taking the time to see that he's candid about his views and has honest, principled reasons for his feelings.
And no, I'm not Republican, nor do I subscribe to their newsletter, so please don't play that card.
Why is it that everyone's obsessed with outdoing Apple? The reason why what they're doing works is because they're NOT concerned about competing with everyone else. They let a good idea come to them and run with it.
If I see another post on Slashdot about an "Apple Killer", I'm going to throw my hands up in the air, and cry like a little baby, because I'm pathetic like that.
Re:Unfortunately the Industry Dictates the Standar
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
If you're talking the little buttons on the corners of the small boxes in Photoshop, there are other things to be concerned about than that. GiMP needs major intensive surgery in comparision.
Re:Unfortunately the Industry Dictates the Standar
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Face it, dude.
The reason why Adobe is so far ahead of everyone else is not that it's the market leader, though like anything, I'm sure it helps.
Instead, it's the quality of the interface that dictates the software we use. It has nothing to do with it being ingrained into our skulls.
One thing to keep in mind: In the business of graphic design, we MAKE interfaces. They come in many forms: print, web, animation, etc. We have to be able to use our tools. If we can't hold a pen in our hands because the gloves we're wearing are too big, how the hell are we supposed to draw? Simple: we take off the shackles, we take off the gloves. We don't use horribly-designed programs like GiMP.
It doesn't matter what GiMP can do as a piece of software; it won't even compare to anything else on the market until it gets an interface that doesn't suck. Unfortunately, open-sourcers are geeks who don't realize that most of the people who use design software are NOT geeks.
Designers are people who know how to design, people who want intuitiveness in their programs. What makes you think that a designer is going to want to use a poorly-designed program like GiMP over a program like Photoshop?
People in this industry pay millions of dollars a year for good computers, good software and good interfaces. They're not going to cut corners and go for the cheaper product if it's not up to snuff. An open-source word processor is different from an open-source desktop publisher. There's a learning curve in any graphics software that isn't in a word processor.
As a response to your reasoning that Adobe products are simply about what people are used to, I'd like to make this point. Although Adobe has the highest marketshare and mindshare, they aren't the only leader here: Macromedia has Fireworks, Flash and Freehand, three programs that get heavy use in many corners of the graphic design business. Quark has QuarkXpress, which is still the most widely-used desktop publishing program (though InDesign is catching up thanks to Quark's inept early handling of OSX). Finally, many designers have to create professional presentations using PowerPoint. Adobe has plenty of competiton, and all of these producs do one thing that GiMP doesn't: Take the usability concerns of designers into account. GiMP has proven itself to be an open-source program that does not take its user concerns to heart.
I do graphic design for a living, so I'm not talking out of my ass here. Simply put, until GiMP gets a solid interface of its own, GiMP is just not ready for prime time in an industry that is built on the creation of interface.
The fact of the matter is, sure, he was a respected tech writer and working for one of the best papers in the country, but there's a huge field growing out there, and I think journalism needs a slight kick in the head to a degree.
Don't get me wrong. I think we put together a great product day in and day out. However, we're bound by the same rigid corporate standards that other large entities are held to.
That's the thing that's so exciting about citizen journalism. You're not worried about a single use of the F-word, or if you forgot to lay out Dilbert on the page (yes, Virginia, people do call about that) -- you're taking it down to the basic elements, what journalism is all about. You don't have to dumb it down. Wonkette is an exciting blog because of its gossipy nature, and the fact that it doesn't give a crap about offending anyone.
Even though, I still think newspapers are an essential resource, but I think blogs and citizen journalism need breathing room, too.
I'm personally waiting for the flying Segway so that we can play a real-life version of the game Joust with beach balls (or broken bones) taking place of the eggs.
...do these former Apple folks tend to see themselves as relevant far longer than most of the rest of us do? So, your personal quibbles didn't make it into a modern OS. Fine. But don't bitch at us about it.
Example: There's not nine distinct design flaws in the Dock. There's one guy who doesn't like it, though. It's not shareware, it's not a demo. It's a far more elegant solution than what was originally available, however.
I *enjoy* the fact that Apple won't let me remove my iPod if I have a photoshop document opened from it.
Sorry man, you, like Vanilla Ice, passed your point of relevance, and you just can't handle it.
...but they disappeared just this week when I walked in. Strangest thing. Now I know why.
Having a little knowledge about pirated Nintendo systems, I'd say they were pieces of generic crap. I'm surprised they survived on the market as long as they did, seeing as they're no doubt illegal.
I envision a bunch of Google employees shooting themselves in the foot right now.
Then again, maybe they realize that a large portion of their audience probably won't take advantage of this. Just a bunch of geeks like you and me who visit/. on a daily basis.
I can feel the pain of advertisers to a degree.. their most important target audience no longer gives them the time of day.
However, this is by far one of the most deceptive solutions to that problem. You play on the consumer's idea of trust and take advantage of it, instead of working within its bounds. Granted, this is how a lot of advertising works, but pretending to be a "news source" is downright immoral and really makes me think twice as a consumer.
You know, Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" campaign featured a lot of the benefits of these campaigns without going to the depths of pretending to be a reliable source. I would hate to think our potential trust of blogs could disappear because we can't trust the messenger to be what they say they are.
You're advertisers; tell us that's what you are, and if you don't plan on doing that, don't pretend that you're something you're not.
I for some reason can't believe that this man is a power user when he still considers IE a solid application.
I also think the bullshit with him timing load times of sites on Safari and IE was nothing short of pathetic. Two seconds is nothing.
You could tell, even in his prissy glam-metal heyday, that he was a smart one. He went from VJ to dot-com genius. I mean shit, you don't see Jesse Camp coming up with great ideas like this.
I mean, Matt Pinfield knew a lot about music, but there's a difference between trivia and usefulness. Way to go Adam.
I just recently designed a compliant site with HTML 4.01 and CSS 2; I had more problems with Safari and IE 5 Mac than I ever did with Firefox.
Methinks you're doing something wrong or haven't tried recent versions of Firefox.
...the price of chocolate has suddenly skyrocketed to $100 a pound due to its newfound usage as printer ink. Lexmark has patented the new chocolate-printing technology, and their lawyers plan to sue Nestlé for patent infringement for selling chocolate that works on its system under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
http://www.sealiecomputing.com/retrozone/superadva ntage.html
This is four bucks more. You're scamming yourself if you go for the NES controller over this.
But dude, it gave you the ability to laser-pinpoint your rage at the dog at duck hunt! All you had to say was FUCK YOU DOG, and the dog rolled over to his death, right in the middle of a laugh.
Konami was years ahead of the curve. If the new headset allowed me the ability to walk around and shoot people that I don't like just by saying something, they would have a murder machine that would beat the shit out of any handgun.
#2 was honestly the first thing that struck me. It seemed like a lot of extra space that could've been used by a monitor real estate. I think the most surprising thing to me is that the 20 inch model is the same way.
Either way, I was pretty impressed. The footprint on this thing is nothing compared to even the old iMac model, which had a small one itself. And the insides of it looked like pornography to a mac zealot:)
That's ten percent of a growing market that would get slaughtered if that happened, man. I think the outcry would be a lot louder than during the netscape fiasco because of that.
They could always say no. Google has enough power right now that if they linked to Firefox on their front page and said, "This is better than IE, which we will no longer be supporting because it breaks every other browser", IE gets shot down. I don't think developers are nearly the lapdogs you expect them to be by this argument. It's 2004, not 1997, and standards of conduct are fully fleshed out.
Directly, you're correct, but it strengthens the overall product for MS to keep it strong. It makes Windows look worse for IE to be in a state of disarray, because it reflects on the OS as a whole.
This is why it's now biting them in the ass. You think that the entire industry is going to stifle until you release another version of your browser? Good luck.
And you're telling me that the RIAA would be quicker to shovel off albums that actually sell and have huge fanbases (Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was hardly the cultural phenomenon Speakerboxx/The Love Below was and currently is) than obscure parts of Lou Reed's catalog that haven't sold in twenty years?
Remember that thing I said about checking your personal tastes at the door? Personal taste is in the eye of the beholder. I think we could all agree that Willennium was probably a shoveling, but the fact that Stankonia was among those distributed, and it currently holds the third-hightest score ever on Metacritic suggests that it would probably be best for the recording industry to distribute that as a high watermark for their art, rather than your personal favorite.
I had a chance to look at the excel file that was linked in an earlier story, and they've been distributing Aquemini and Stankonia in both their edited and non-edited forms. They may not be your personal faves, but in a general sense they're the ones that should've been sent out as an artistic representation of the group.
Remember, these are going to libraries, not your record collection, so it's best if they pick stuff that's palatable to the general public as well as to the growth of culture, which is why I think you used the wrong example.
To make my point clear, here's a review of a Lou Reed album, Metal Machine Music from Allmusic, and I've bolded some essentials to make my point clear:
Review by Mark Deming
One would be hard-pressed to name a major artist who ever released an album as thoroughly alienating as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music; at a time when noise rock and punk had yet to make their presence known, Reed released this 64-minute aural assault that offered up a densely layered soundscape constructed from feedback, distortion, and atonal guitar runs sped up or slowed down until they were all but unrecognizable. Metal Machine Music seems a bit less startling today, now that bands like Sonic Youth and the Boredoms have created some sort of context for it, but it hasn't gotten any more user friendly with time -- while Thurston Moore may go nuts on his guitar like this for three or four minutes at a stretch, Metal Machine Music goes on and on and on for over an hour, pausing only for side breaks with no rhythms, melodies, or formal structures to buffer the onslaught. If you're brave enough to listen to the whole thing, it's hard not to marvel at the scope of Reed's obsession; it's obvious he spent a lot of time on these layered sheets of noise, and enthusiasts of the violent guitar freakout may find it pleasing in short bursts. But confronting Metal Machine Music from front to back in one sitting is an experience that's both brutal and numbing. It's hard to say what Lou Reed had in mind when he made Metal Machine Music, and Reed has done little to clarify the issue over the years, though he summed it up quite pointedly in an interview in which he said, "Well, anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am." For the record, I did get to side four. But I got paid for it.
I think you could get away with saying that Lou Reed has released a little more crap than Outkast.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for actually replying to my point. Did you read the article yet?
So, did you actually read the article, where he came off as way more intelligent than the thin lines that you're portraying him through, or are you coming out with the tired "OMG OMG HATE REPUBLICANS" argument again? I may not like some (actually, most) of the stuff he's done, but I do have a little more respect for him after actually taking the time to see that he's candid about his views and has honest, principled reasons for his feelings. And no, I'm not Republican, nor do I subscribe to their newsletter, so please don't play that card.
Why is it that everyone's obsessed with outdoing Apple? The reason why what they're doing works is because they're NOT concerned about competing with everyone else. They let a good idea come to them and run with it.
If I see another post on Slashdot about an "Apple Killer", I'm going to throw my hands up in the air, and cry like a little baby, because I'm pathetic like that.
If you're talking the little buttons on the corners of the small boxes in Photoshop, there are other things to be concerned about than that. GiMP needs major intensive surgery in comparision.
Face it, dude.
The reason why Adobe is so far ahead of everyone else is not that it's the market leader, though like anything, I'm sure it helps.
Instead, it's the quality of the interface that dictates the software we use. It has nothing to do with it being ingrained into our skulls.
One thing to keep in mind: In the business of graphic design, we MAKE interfaces. They come in many forms: print, web, animation, etc. We have to be able to use our tools. If we can't hold a pen in our hands because the gloves we're wearing are too big, how the hell are we supposed to draw? Simple: we take off the shackles, we take off the gloves. We don't use horribly-designed programs like GiMP.
It doesn't matter what GiMP can do as a piece of software; it won't even compare to anything else on the market until it gets an interface that doesn't suck. Unfortunately, open-sourcers are geeks who don't realize that most of the people who use design software are NOT geeks.
Designers are people who know how to design, people who want intuitiveness in their programs. What makes you think that a designer is going to want to use a poorly-designed program like GiMP over a program like Photoshop?
People in this industry pay millions of dollars a year for good computers, good software and good interfaces. They're not going to cut corners and go for the cheaper product if it's not up to snuff. An open-source word processor is different from an open-source desktop publisher. There's a learning curve in any graphics software that isn't in a word processor.
As a response to your reasoning that Adobe products are simply about what people are used to, I'd like to make this point. Although Adobe has the highest marketshare and mindshare, they aren't the only leader here: Macromedia has Fireworks, Flash and Freehand, three programs that get heavy use in many corners of the graphic design business. Quark has QuarkXpress, which is still the most widely-used desktop publishing program (though InDesign is catching up thanks to Quark's inept early handling of OSX). Finally, many designers have to create professional presentations using PowerPoint. Adobe has plenty of competiton, and all of these producs do one thing that GiMP doesn't: Take the usability concerns of designers into account. GiMP has proven itself to be an open-source program that does not take its user concerns to heart.
I do graphic design for a living, so I'm not talking out of my ass here. Simply put, until GiMP gets a solid interface of its own, GiMP is just not ready for prime time in an industry that is built on the creation of interface.
The fact of the matter is, sure, he was a respected tech writer and working for one of the best papers in the country, but there's a huge field growing out there, and I think journalism needs a slight kick in the head to a degree.
Don't get me wrong. I think we put together a great product day in and day out. However, we're bound by the same rigid corporate standards that other large entities are held to.
That's the thing that's so exciting about citizen journalism. You're not worried about a single use of the F-word, or if you forgot to lay out Dilbert on the page (yes, Virginia, people do call about that) -- you're taking it down to the basic elements, what journalism is all about. You don't have to dumb it down. Wonkette is an exciting blog because of its gossipy nature, and the fact that it doesn't give a crap about offending anyone.
Even though, I still think newspapers are an essential resource, but I think blogs and citizen journalism need breathing room, too.
They did. It was called Mozilla.
I'm personally waiting for the flying Segway so that we can play a real-life version of the game Joust with beach balls (or broken bones) taking place of the eggs.
Example: There's not nine distinct design flaws in the Dock. There's one guy who doesn't like it, though. It's not shareware, it's not a demo. It's a far more elegant solution than what was originally available, however.
I *enjoy* the fact that Apple won't let me remove my iPod if I have a photoshop document opened from it.
Sorry man, you, like Vanilla Ice, passed your point of relevance, and you just can't handle it.
...but they disappeared just this week when I walked in. Strangest thing. Now I know why. Having a little knowledge about pirated Nintendo systems, I'd say they were pieces of generic crap. I'm surprised they survived on the market as long as they did, seeing as they're no doubt illegal.
Then again, maybe they realize that a large portion of their audience probably won't take advantage of this. Just a bunch of geeks like you and me who visit /. on a daily basis.
I can feel the pain of advertisers to a degree.. their most important target audience no longer gives them the time of day.
However, this is by far one of the most deceptive solutions to that problem. You play on the consumer's idea of trust and take advantage of it, instead of working within its bounds. Granted, this is how a lot of advertising works, but pretending to be a "news source" is downright immoral and really makes me think twice as a consumer.
You know, Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" campaign featured a lot of the benefits of these campaigns without going to the depths of pretending to be a reliable source. I would hate to think our potential trust of blogs could disappear because we can't trust the messenger to be what they say they are.
You're advertisers; tell us that's what you are, and if you don't plan on doing that, don't pretend that you're something you're not.
I for some reason can't believe that this man is a power user when he still considers IE a solid application. I also think the bullshit with him timing load times of sites on Safari and IE was nothing short of pathetic. Two seconds is nothing.
You could tell, even in his prissy glam-metal heyday, that he was a smart one. He went from VJ to dot-com genius. I mean shit, you don't see Jesse Camp coming up with great ideas like this.
I mean, Matt Pinfield knew a lot about music, but there's a difference between trivia and usefulness. Way to go Adam.
I just recently designed a compliant site with HTML 4.01 and CSS 2; I had more problems with Safari and IE 5 Mac than I ever did with Firefox. Methinks you're doing something wrong or haven't tried recent versions of Firefox.
...the price of chocolate has suddenly skyrocketed to $100 a pound due to its newfound usage as printer ink. Lexmark has patented the new chocolate-printing technology, and their lawyers plan to sue Nestlé for patent infringement for selling chocolate that works on its system under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
I read in Wired that you own the PBA with two Microsoft employees. How does it feel to be the Mark Cuban of fat, balding men?
http://www.sealiecomputing.com/retrozone/superadva ntage.html
This is four bucks more. You're scamming yourself if you go for the NES controller over this.
But dude, it gave you the ability to laser-pinpoint your rage at the dog at duck hunt! All you had to say was FUCK YOU DOG, and the dog rolled over to his death, right in the middle of a laugh.
Konami was years ahead of the curve. If the new headset allowed me the ability to walk around and shoot people that I don't like just by saying something, they would have a murder machine that would beat the shit out of any handgun.
#2 was honestly the first thing that struck me. It seemed like a lot of extra space that could've been used by a monitor real estate. I think the most surprising thing to me is that the 20 inch model is the same way.
:)
Either way, I was pretty impressed. The footprint on this thing is nothing compared to even the old iMac model, which had a small one itself. And the insides of it looked like pornography to a mac zealot
They could always say no. Google has enough power right now that if they linked to Firefox on their front page and said, "This is better than IE, which we will no longer be supporting because it breaks every other browser", IE gets shot down. I don't think developers are nearly the lapdogs you expect them to be by this argument. It's 2004, not 1997, and standards of conduct are fully fleshed out.
This is why it's now biting them in the ass. You think that the entire industry is going to stifle until you release another version of your browser? Good luck.
Remember that thing I said about checking your personal tastes at the door? Personal taste is in the eye of the beholder. I think we could all agree that Willennium was probably a shoveling, but the fact that Stankonia was among those distributed, and it currently holds the third-hightest score ever on Metacritic suggests that it would probably be best for the recording industry to distribute that as a high watermark for their art, rather than your personal favorite.
I had a chance to look at the excel file that was linked in an earlier story, and they've been distributing Aquemini and Stankonia in both their edited and non-edited forms. They may not be your personal faves, but in a general sense they're the ones that should've been sent out as an artistic representation of the group.
Remember, these are going to libraries, not your record collection, so it's best if they pick stuff that's palatable to the general public as well as to the growth of culture, which is why I think you used the wrong example.
Nowhere, but the state made the decision as to what was proper for the community, not the community itself.
Review by Mark Deming
One would be hard-pressed to name a major artist who ever released an album as thoroughly alienating as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music; at a time when noise rock and punk had yet to make their presence known, Reed released this 64-minute aural assault that offered up a densely layered soundscape constructed from feedback, distortion, and atonal guitar runs sped up or slowed down until they were all but unrecognizable. Metal Machine Music seems a bit less startling today, now that bands like Sonic Youth and the Boredoms have created some sort of context for it, but it hasn't gotten any more user friendly with time -- while Thurston Moore may go nuts on his guitar like this for three or four minutes at a stretch, Metal Machine Music goes on and on and on for over an hour, pausing only for side breaks with no rhythms, melodies, or formal structures to buffer the onslaught. If you're brave enough to listen to the whole thing, it's hard not to marvel at the scope of Reed's obsession; it's obvious he spent a lot of time on these layered sheets of noise, and enthusiasts of the violent guitar freakout may find it pleasing in short bursts. But confronting Metal Machine Music from front to back in one sitting is an experience that's both brutal and numbing. It's hard to say what Lou Reed had in mind when he made Metal Machine Music, and Reed has done little to clarify the issue over the years, though he summed it up quite pointedly in an interview in which he said, "Well, anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am." For the record, I did get to side four. But I got paid for it.
I think you could get away with saying that Lou Reed has released a little more crap than Outkast.