Apple is luring us into a trap. Remember the Pleasure Island from the Pinocchio movie? (Steve Jobs is in the board of Disney, by the way)
From wikipedia:
The original take to the Land of Toys mixes the aspects of a morality tale with those of social critique. Boys are lured there by the promise of never having to go to school again and being able to spend their whole time having fun. Boys there play hide-and-seek, whistle, watch puppets in canvas theatres, play shuttlecock, bounce on balls, trundle hoops, and ride wooden horses. They never have to do any work or learn anything, and the graffiti on all the walls is proof of that. As a result, almost as a natural consequence, they become donkeys (in Italian culture, the donkey is symbolic of ignorance and stupidity).
You aren't expected to be up-to-date on software you don't use, but please get the facts straight before posting:)
True, I didn't download the latest inkscape before posting, and the last time I tried to use those features is like more than a month ago. So let me try them again...
O - Calligraphic pen: indeed it is there, but I cannot draw a path with that pen. I can only draw in freehand mode. This is not the same thing. In practical situations, you'll always want to create a path, adjust it, and only then convert it to a calligraphic stroke. Plus, the capping of the line is really weird in inkscape. A calligraphic pen should imho just be a rotated oval (ellipse), that you drag along the page. X - Indeed, the dynamic offset thing works. But note, it is not possible to numerically set the offset. So reproducing the same effect multiple times may be difficult. X - Okay thanks a lot. O - Not exactly the same thing. I want to zoom in on the pixels, so that I can see if the resulting image is exactly symmetric, for example.
Anyway, Inkscape goes a long way, kudos to the developers, but at least for me it is still not a replacement for illustrator in all situations. But the future seems bright.
Anybody who remembers the unix tool "xfig" will certainly agree that Inkscape goes a long way. However, illustrator is still a lot more powerful. Here's a list of what I think are major shortcomings of inkscape:
- basic path transformations like "round corners" are missing - calligraphic pens, and converting the outlines of those pens to paths - some path transformations, like offset do not always give proper results - automatic tracing - pixel preview mode (indispensible for creating icons)
Basically, you can use a retained-mode graphics system, like OpenGL, or like the Canvas of QT, or basically any scene-graph based system, perhaps extended with some means to play video. Using that alone, you can implement a complete browser using a virtual instruction set.
Thus, instead of porting your javascript code to N browsers, you would, using such technique, only need to support your own browser:)
What I'd like to see (or rather hear), is that we can have access to the individual tracks of each song, so that we can remix stuff. Kind of like the open-source of audio.
Can we have a similar certification for privacy protection,please?
Then we can finally have insight into what big companies like Google and Facebook are doing to our data, by letting them comply to OUR rules, instead of the other way around.
What I am really waiting for is for browsers to implement a mechanism that will allow websites to become "trusted" by the user, in a simple way.
Right now, if a website wants to obtain a level of trust, it should ask the user "pull down this menu, then click here and there, then type website name, etc. etc.". Much too complicated, and different per browser. And not even adequate in most cases.
With such a simple and user-friendly system in place, websites could be "untrusted" by default.
Just looked at that website. It looks great indeed. They really seem to value the open-source community, so this product should appeal to the average slashdotter. But I think they should translate their site to english completely. The video on the/en/ part of the site was in german, which is kind of a turn-off.
Ok, without a required connection during the game, it will be quite easy to crack this scheme: simply make a copy of the machine state just after starting the game. (For most people, this will be not so simple, but crackers can easily do this).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, is seems it is just a matter of time until Apple just blocks facebook and google altogether, and provides their own version.
Another strategy is to incrementally cripple the experience of facebook and google on their own hardware, luring users to their own services.
Apple is luring us into a trap. Remember the Pleasure Island from the Pinocchio movie? (Steve Jobs is in the board of Disney, by the way)
From wikipedia:
The original take to the Land of Toys mixes the aspects of a morality tale with those of social critique. Boys are lured there by the promise of never having to go to school again and being able to spend their whole time having fun. Boys there play hide-and-seek, whistle, watch puppets in canvas theatres, play shuttlecock, bounce on balls, trundle hoops, and ride wooden horses. They never have to do any work or learn anything, and the graffiti on all the walls is proof of that. As a result, almost as a natural consequence, they become donkeys (in Italian culture, the donkey is symbolic of ignorance and stupidity).
I think, however, that Apple is making the same mistakes now they made 30 years ago. They decided to tie their hardware and software together...
Depends on developers. What if Apple gets all (or nearly all) the apps?
So how about instead of pointing out who is Evil, we try to find someone who isn't evil? Any suggestions?
Richard Stallman?
I doubt that facebook will die
Just wait until apple gets serious about social networking.
Hell, even google might get into trouble if apple would go into the search direction.
How about parents just do their job?
Well, it looks like IBM just patented our jobs :(
So why didn't we read about this on slashdot before? Or did I miss something?
Thanks for the reply, check my comment elsewhere in this thread. (#35341412)
You aren't expected to be up-to-date on software you don't use, but please get the facts straight before posting :)
True, I didn't download the latest inkscape before posting, and the last time I tried to use those features is like more than a month ago.
So let me try them again...
O - Calligraphic pen: indeed it is there, but I cannot draw a path with that pen. I can only draw in freehand mode. This is not the same thing. In practical situations, you'll always want to create a path, adjust it, and only then convert it to a calligraphic stroke. Plus, the capping of the line is really weird in inkscape. A calligraphic pen should imho just be a rotated oval (ellipse), that you drag along the page.
X - Indeed, the dynamic offset thing works. But note, it is not possible to numerically set the offset. So reproducing the same effect multiple times may be difficult.
X - Okay thanks a lot.
O - Not exactly the same thing. I want to zoom in on the pixels, so that I can see if the resulting image is exactly symmetric, for example.
Anyway, Inkscape goes a long way, kudos to the developers, but at least for me it is still not a replacement for illustrator in all situations. But the future seems bright.
Anybody who remembers the unix tool "xfig" will certainly agree that Inkscape goes a long way.
However, illustrator is still a lot more powerful. Here's a list of what I think are major shortcomings of inkscape:
- basic path transformations like "round corners" are missing
- calligraphic pens, and converting the outlines of those pens to paths
- some path transformations, like offset do not always give proper results
- automatic tracing
- pixel preview mode (indispensible for creating icons)
This probably means that big companies get ranked higher, and the smaller guy will end up on the bottom of the list.
Basically, you can use a retained-mode graphics system, like OpenGL, or like the Canvas of QT, or basically any scene-graph based system, perhaps extended with some means to play video. Using that alone, you can implement a complete browser using a virtual instruction set.
Thus, instead of porting your javascript code to N browsers, you would, using such technique, only need to support your own browser :)
Very interesting. But comparing this to software, that would be a decompiler or a disassembler. Not exactly compatible with the idea of open-source.
What I'd like to see (or rather hear), is that we can have access to the individual tracks of each song, so that we can remix stuff. Kind of like the open-source of audio.
The problem is that it's already patented:
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080275938
Can we have a similar certification for privacy protection ,please?
Then we can finally have insight into what big companies like Google and Facebook are doing to our data, by letting them comply to OUR rules, instead of the other way around.
I love seeing the banks getting cut out of the loop. They should have given us a secure and simple micropayment system a decade ago.
1. Post it on the web, or run your own apache instance.
2. Use google to find back your data.
3. ?
4. Let others also profit from your data.
What I am really waiting for is for browsers to implement a mechanism that will allow websites to become "trusted" by the user, in a simple way.
Right now, if a website wants to obtain a level of trust, it should ask the user "pull down this menu, then click here and there, then type website name, etc. etc.". Much too complicated, and different per browser. And not even adequate in most cases.
With such a simple and user-friendly system in place, websites could be "untrusted" by default.
Now we can finally run native code in a mainstream browser?
Just looked at that website. It looks great indeed. They really seem to value the open-source community, so this product should appeal to the average slashdotter. But I think they should translate their site to english completely. The video on the /en/ part of the site was in german, which is kind of a turn-off.
Why not crowd-fund a completely open-source (thus nothing magical) tablet computer?
Ok, without a required connection during the game, it will be quite easy to crack this scheme: simply make a copy of the machine state just after starting the game. (For most people, this will be not so simple, but crackers can easily do this).
If the app requests a UDID for the device, iOS should generate a key that is unique for that device AND THAT DEVELOPER.
So, if my iPhone breaks and buy a new one, I will lose all the information implicitly stored? That sounds nasty.
Why not develop a test (perhaps a video game) which a surgeon should pass before entering the surgery room?