I always find anime geeks fascinatingly hilarious. "Oh, Akira, that sucks... you should watch mymoviexyzaboutlotsofrapesandexplodingshit"... "Miyazaki? For poseurs!".
I don't pretend to know about anime, but every time I've watched a movie recommended by an anime geek:
1) It's been psuedo-porn, often featuring women being raped by tentacles or other such frankly pointless escapades. 2) The animation has been hilariously crap. Good animation goes a long way, and a lot of anime doesn't really cut it. 3) The dialogue was either incomprehensibly translated or crap to begin with. 4) It's been something akin to a crappy sci-fi novel in terms of plot, and usually ends with half of the world getting blown up or trashed by something. Either that or it's been a "character study" with characters with even less dimensions than the animation.
Guys, there's a reason that some anime movies get a bigger audience - often it's because they succeed as movies on a wider level beyond anime. A lot of anime is, while appealing to geeks, not that strong for the rest of us. Movies like Akira or Spirited Away have production values, writing standards and resonant themes that manage to trancend the "Oh god, another anime movie..." feeling that much of the rest of the world has about the form.
If something works as a movie outside of a "Scene", it has a chance. It's the same with any national culture - I'm sure the Spanish will argue that they have cinema beyond Pedro Almodovar, and as a New Zealander I would like to point out that we do have more directors than just Peter Jackson. However there are certain things which tend to bust out of a mould and reach mass appeal - that's not a bad thing!
I've seen a lot of his other stuff, but Visitor Q is actually banned in New Zealand. We have a wonderful lobby called something like The Society For The Protection of Community Standards who make it their business to fuck up every film festival they can by getting the brochure, figuring out which movies might be controvercial in any way and then lobbying the censors to get them banned.
One year they pretty much got their way and Visitor Q got taken out in the process. Screenings had to be cancelled... the movie was in the country, but it was never shown.
What a bunch of pricks, eh?
On the other hand, we did get to see The Happiness of the Katakuris and Dead or Alive, both of which are excellent value. I could live without the drowning-woman-in-pool-of-feces image in my head for the rest of my life though, along with the foot scene in Audition.
Ah, as warm and cuddly goes it doesn't get much better. Not what I'd watch all the time, but sufficiently well executed that it's worth getting excited about something new. And I reckon a lot of his stuff is a nice balance of mature themes with stuff that's interesting for kids. More food for thought than, say, a Disney movie.
But then, I'm not an anime geek. I tend more towards David Lynch and Atom Egoyan than most anime, so maybe I'm grossly misinformed.
I don't know about that "They must be guilty - they called the lawyer!" business. From the posting I read it looked like they got a call back from the lawyer because the lawyer would the one in the position to make the decision to call a tech. The suggestion here is more than MIT misunderstood the gravity of the situation rather than deliberately acted with malice. I know in the US (and UK - I'm English) things are a touch more fast-paced, but there's a couple of things that are a touch different over this side of the planet - at least in New Zealand. Firstly, a lot of companies are not open on the weekends. Even the ones that are typically run in a fairly "headless" manner - you might get some guys in the call centre, but you can bet the management have their phones turned off. Why? Well, one of the interesting features of this country is that people are quite horrifyingly overworked, at least compared to the UK. It's quite possible to get a job over here that pays below the British minimum wage that will attempt to get you to work above fifty hours - and we're not talking about a crap job here either, this could be a fairly interesting position at a mid-sized company. As a result of this, when the company finally lets people go home they tend to turn the damn phone off in the hope that nobody is going to call them.
I don't know if this is the case with MIT, but I wouldn't go assuming that they're a front for Al Qaeda/working for Michael Sims/Same-thing-we-do-every-night-Pinky just yet. It's a pretty safe bet they're all just drunk and have yet to figure out what the hell is going on. As for past incidents of a similar nature, you'd better believe there's companies that don't close their procedural loopholes in a hurry. Maybe the responsible parties have just managed to use the same exploit as last time via the same parties because, as mentioned above, everybody is too overworked in other areas to care? Domain registration is not exactly a high-margin business for many.
That's probably a bit extreme to accuse MelbourneIT of this, they're not a small company.
Bastards perhaps, but not quite on the deliberate hijacking/password logging scale. They're the primary "stabilising registrar" for New Zealand's top level domain for a start! Sure, there's only four million people here... but still...
The thread you are linking to is a little less sensational than you're being. There is a suggestion that the malicious attackers could be doing this, but not MelbourneIT. The main suggestion there is that MelbourneIT don't seem to realise the gravity of the situation and are sitting around down at the beach enjoying their summer. I can kind of understand, it's bloody hot over here at the moment and I'm having a bitch of a time concentrating on a magazine feature I'm supposed to be finished with by Tuesday.
I'm sure they'll get it eventually, but it's not really an excuse for not having a good 24/7 contact for expensive emergencies like this.
In a technical sense, you're obviously quite right. In terms of the actual effect of his actions it's pretty indistinguishable though, and if anything worse because the people hurt by the incident have no legal recourse. Unlike poor old Panix, who will hopefully survive long enough to get their domain back and working again. I wish them luck.
But hey, who cares about Mike and his morals? It's mostly interesting to watch the moderating fury at work, I've been watching thread this since it started and there's been a frantic burst of down-modding and up-modding on anything that's even slightly critical.
Two weeks? That sounds pretty good, it took months for me to get a dotcom transferred out of OneAndOne in the UK. After a while I took to emailing them virtually the same email every day, never getting an answer until I emailed a few other departments asking who the manager of the billing department was. Then I got a response in hours, claiming that I was "Harassing them". Ironically, at that point they actually relented and did what I'd been asking for months - releasing my domain for transfer.
One of the reasons I wanted to transfer it was that they had attempted to charge an expired credit card, failed, pulled the plug on the hosting package and then - hilariously - took a week to get it back online. Ringing them resulted in "We're too busy, goodbye" messages and a hangup from their automated systems. Emailing them was ignored. And although you can change credit card details manually in their admin system - get this - they have to manually action the charge. It took them a week.
You mean, aside from slashdot editors? Kidding, kidding.
Seriously though, MelbourneIT is a pretty big company in this part of the world. I'm in New Zealand, and they're one of the most important of a small bunch of companies able to offer.co.nz domains - which they do, like all the others, at price approximately equivilent to five times that of a dotcom on the international market. Considering a.co.uk costs around a fifth of that price with most registrars, that makes New Zealand domains worth approximately 25x that of a co.uk.
It's certainly ironic, I must say. But judging by most of my reading, the sole requirement of being an editor on a Linux or Open Source related news site is to be as insufferable an asshole as possible and refuse to resign, ever, regardless.
If it wasn't for the fact that I read Slashdot purely to be reminded of the fact that being a geek does not make you smart - something I feel it is good to remind oneself of on a regular basis - I would probably have stopped reading in horror.
But really, it would only matter if Michael had a good job. "He hijacked their domain! And now he's a success!" they cry. A success? Jesus, by what standards!? He reads hoax stories about fish washed up by tsunamis, doesn't bother to check any facts and just posts them regardless. And that doesn't even constitute doing a bad job, by Slashdot standards. So if that's the standards they require, I can't imagine it is too hard to get qualified "journalists" to work for them, and they doubtless pay a rate commensurate to his boundless skills.
Just get back to your Neal Stephenson books and consider him Andrew Loeb, everybody. He'll doubtless get shot in the end anyway...
You know, there are easier ways to make friends...
Re:The sequel was as good as the first . . .
on
Homemade Hypercube Case
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Character development was weak in comparison? Well, maybe. But When you consider how crapulent the first movie was in this respect, it's probably not even worth making any kind of comparison.
I saw the first Cube during the early arthouse circuit in 1997, and even sans any kind of underground "cult movie" hype it still sucked.
But at least the inexplicable popularity of the movie answered one question for me: Who the hell were the people responsible for continuing the drawn-out death of the X-Files after it became obvious that There Was No Big Vision? The answer: Cube fans! Dress a turd up in enough psuedo(x) (replace x with "Science" or "Philosophy" or indeed "Dialogue" as you see fit) and you're bound to convince some people that you're a genius...
Now, while we're here, I've got this religion I'm starting...
If they genuinely want FOSS to succeed as a mass-market movement, the slashdotters who keep pulling this line out of their posteriors will need to shut up. Not everybody who wants to use The GIMP is going to be a programmer, or a bored geek with the time free to do such things. For things like the GIMP to succeed, they need to attract graphics professionals - the majority of whom don't care in the slightest about the source code or programming. It's a stupid response, and I wish people would stop saying this every time that somebody has an issue with an open source package. It's called "User feedback", it comes from having "Users" who "Use" your software to "Do things". These strange people don't just sit around their bedrooms and scratch themselves all day, interspersed with the occasional porn download. They have jobs. They get paid to do work. They may go to their boss and say "Look, we can save $xyz by using this excellent free package instead of paying up for package ABC". They will not go to their boss and say "Look, there's this free package I like... can I spent a couple of months hacking it to make it usable for our needs?". Programmers do that. Creative professionals don't.
Nah, I'm not a regular photoshopper and I think think the GIMP has an awful interface. In terms of graphics packages I've been an occasional user (when required) of a variety of packages from the Amiga onwards.
The GIMP does have a bad interface. And what people don't seem to realise is that if you're going to attract professionals you can't have a bad interface. I use music software at a somewhat expert level, and packages with excellent features marred by a lousy interface get ditched rapidly just because it interrupts my ability to work without getting distracted by geek crap. The designers I know have the same tendency. If you're intending for people to use a piece of software in a professional creative environment, it needs to have as much attention given to its interface as its functionality.
The problem being that they don't really have a standard. At what stage do you need to check the veracity of something? Install time. Not at the download stage on a per-application basis, although hashing is nice here to make sure you've actually got the whole file. Checking that a file hash is valid should be a function of the system installer software, since that's the point where it matters. That happens on Linux, but it doesn't on Windows. The article is entitled "How can I trust Firefox". Microsoft likes to talk up its "Ecosystem" of Windows software. Surely the article should be "How can I trust the Microsoft software ecosystem". If the only answer they have is "Download using IE, only trust Versign" then they've just made that ecosystem a whole lot smaller.
IE has security zones because it is essential to the way the so-called "security model" is supposed to work. The problem is, it doesn't. In fact, it's the source of many of IE's problems. The Firefox approach now is good - trust nothing, keep it all isolated from the OS. What you're suggesting is extending trust to sites, rather than denying it. I don't think that's a very secure thing to do.
I don't really get this. The essence of the complaint is that Windows does not have a mechanism for checking any of the free, secure systems for verifying downloads like MD5, GPG etc. If I install Firefox on Linux the MD5sum is automatically checked by the package manager. So surely this ball goes back to Microsoft, as it doesn't just affect Firefox. The only "Trusted code" system they have in place is really too exclusive - half the device drivers on my Windows install are unsigned, for crying out loud. And we're not talking about cheap hardware, either.
If you're a Windows user, you get used to running unverified code fast. The nearest anybody gets to checking downloads is running them past a virus scanner before installing. That's not enough, but the reality is that this is a Microsoft failing, not a Firefox one. Where's the tool in SP2 that will check an MD5 sum in a downloaded file based on, say, content on a user-supplied URL? If there was one there it would be very easy for code to be verified by feeding the URL of the author's website into the utility and allowing Windows itself to check the file hash. But Microsoft haven't chosen to write that utility. So why is this particular Microsoft schill bitching about this as if it is a Firefox failing? It's a problem that affects virtually every downloaded application on the Windows platform, the odd thing like the Flash plugin excluded.
None of the big guys will port to Linux any time soon. Linux has no installed user base of musicians, and no differentiating advantage. Where's the return on investment in porting to a platform with no new users? The reality is that most people who're both serious musicians and interested in Linux probably have a Windows or Mac system for audio use anyway. If they port to Linux they won't make any more money, they'll just lose a sale on their existing platform. It's a shame, but it's true.
Linux needs a "Big idea" that kicks the arse out of anything on the PC or Mac platform in order to be able to get any major commercial support. I have my fingers crossed. And as for suggestions along the lines of "It's open source... you develop it!", I'd just like to point out that I'm a musician. That's what I do with my time. As it stands, there are tools which I can use to do the things I do on computers, and they run on Windows or OSX and I'm quite happy to pay for them. I would ideally like to be able to move my music work to Linux too (already done it with my home office), but I don't see that happening inside the decade at this rate.
That seems a little surreal. There'a a couple of APIs on Windows for low-latency audio, WDM/KS (which is the Microsoft driver API) or ASIO (... a Steinberg creation).
ASIO would maybe prove a problem, but if there was an issue with FOSS software calling Microsoft APIs then there would be absolutely nothing on the Windows platform at all, which is obviously not the case.
My real issue with both this and AGNULA is they're still too big, while failing to provide the weight of musical features to go with the installed size. I'm really just looking for a box that has as little as possible running on it.
If you have a look at things like hardware samplers, they're basically just PCs with a very minimal amount of operating system and enough software to drive a little bit of proprietary sampler hardware. There's very little to go wrong, and if it does go wrong then re-installing the OS is not an hour job (fatal on stage). The old AKAI samplers had their OS on a floppy, you could make a few backups and take them along to gigs in case something went wrong.
Computers are getting powerful enough now that it's quite realistic to envision a single box that can run an entire band inside five years. When I say "run", I mean handling:
Piano, keyboard and synth sounds
FX processors
Loops and samples
... all coming out of one programmable box. We've already got to the stage where sample sets sound better than the hardware alternatives (see: Drumkit From Hell Superior or BFD vs a recent drum brain from any major manufacturer), so I don't see why we shouldn't move as much as possible into the computer. Then maybe I can ditch my Yamaha A4000 sampler - hefty 8gb hard disk, 128mb of RAM and all.
I could do it now on Windows. but that would mean running mission-critical stuff on an OS that could potentially fail to boot and cost me the gig. Ideally we should be talking about something that can run off a live CD and have a boot time of less than a minute from there. Combine that with redundancy like RAID and multiple sound cards inside the box and all of a sudden we're looking at a much more realistic alternative to dedicated hardware... Linux would have an advantage here, but providing a whole new desktop OS which takes 2-3 minutes to boot into the GUI and insists on username/password login etc is just not going to cut it with musicians. That may sound daft, but it's not. Here's a list of the stuff I have to set up on a stage for a gig:
Drum Kit:
Rack
Cymbal arms on rack
Bass drum
Hi-hat and snare drum stands
Floor tom
Snare drum
Pedals
Hi-hats
Cymbals (x3)
Electronic pads (x3)
Triggers on acoustic drums (x2)
Drum brain
Leads (x5) to plug all the pads and triggers into the brain. Tidily.
Other stuff:
Hardware sampler. MIDI from drum brain, audio out.
Drum machine (for clicks)
Mixer to plug all the above into
Headphone amp for the stuff that only I should be hearing
If it's a small club, I own the PA as well.
... so the last thing I want to deal with is a complex OS on the scale of Fedora or Debian with Gnome or KDE booting up in the middle of all that. I just want machines that I can turn on and they work, there really isn't time for things that have such a high opinion of themselves that they want the user to wait:)
Hence the suggestion that we need a dedicated OS built for the purpose. I already have a dedicated music OS - it's called Windows XP. It doesn't connect to a network, it has all the fancy GUI options turned off... and I hate to say it, but it boots faster than Linux on my primary machine. I could maybe improve the Linux boot time if I installed Gentoo or somesuch, but really - I'm a musician, I don't do that kind of thing:D
Music on Linux is a chicken and egg situation. There's no way the majority of musicians are going to bother installing Fedora or Debian and then one of the add-on packages like AGNULA or CCRMA in order to get software that's inferior to what we already have on Windows. There has to be something that Linux does better. At the moment, there's really not anything apart from some geeky things like JACK whic
I don't think Linux has a realistic shot at beating down Apple (Logic), Steinberg (Nuendo, Cubase), Cakewalk (Sonar), Digidesign (Protools) and MOTU (Digital Performer) without any kind of differentiation. Basically, OSX and WinXP work for these kind of apps now, there's little gain to be had in moving to a new OS. Rosegarden is doing very well in that it has moved from totally impractical (a couple of years ago) to borderline usable (now) as regards actually doing anything musical. However look at what has happened over in the PC world in the same time and it really just serves to illustrate the fact that Rosegarden is not catching up, it's falling further behind. Not a nice thing to say about a worthy project, but true unfortunately.
However there is a reasonably open market that nobody seems to be going for - an open-standard "music computer" with a lightweight embedded OS that can be taken out live on stage, and used to run what are effectively server applications (MIDI or audio in, audio or MIDI out) in a stable manner. Running servers is a clear point where Linux can kick the bezeesus out of Windows, and I personally hate taking WinXP out on a stage for fear of something crashing mid-song. Linux is good for mission-critical applications like that, and I think development focussed on providing core live functions (multi-track recording, an effects and virtual instrument plugin architecture, a good soft-sampler) on a minimal embedded OS would do the trick much better than trying to fight the big boys without any resources would.
Slashdot Mirror
I always find anime geeks fascinatingly hilarious. "Oh, Akira, that sucks... you should watch mymoviexyzaboutlotsofrapesandexplodingshit"... "Miyazaki? For poseurs!".
I don't pretend to know about anime, but every time I've watched a movie recommended by an anime geek:
1) It's been psuedo-porn, often featuring women being raped by tentacles or other such frankly pointless escapades.
2) The animation has been hilariously crap. Good animation goes a long way, and a lot of anime doesn't really cut it.
3) The dialogue was either incomprehensibly translated or crap to begin with.
4) It's been something akin to a crappy sci-fi novel in terms of plot, and usually ends with half of the world getting blown up or trashed by something. Either that or it's been a "character study" with characters with even less dimensions than the animation.
Guys, there's a reason that some anime movies get a bigger audience - often it's because they succeed as movies on a wider level beyond anime. A lot of anime is, while appealing to geeks, not that strong for the rest of us. Movies like Akira or Spirited Away have production values, writing standards and resonant themes that manage to trancend the "Oh god, another anime movie..." feeling that much of the rest of the world has about the form.
If something works as a movie outside of a "Scene", it has a chance. It's the same with any national culture - I'm sure the Spanish will argue that they have cinema beyond Pedro Almodovar, and as a New Zealander I would like to point out that we do have more directors than just Peter Jackson. However there are certain things which tend to bust out of a mould and reach mass appeal - that's not a bad thing!
I've seen a lot of his other stuff, but Visitor Q is actually banned in New Zealand. We have a wonderful lobby called something like The Society For The Protection of Community Standards who make it their business to fuck up every film festival they can by getting the brochure, figuring out which movies might be controvercial in any way and then lobbying the censors to get them banned.
One year they pretty much got their way and Visitor Q got taken out in the process. Screenings had to be cancelled... the movie was in the country, but it was never shown.
What a bunch of pricks, eh?
On the other hand, we did get to see The Happiness of the Katakuris and Dead or Alive, both of which are excellent value. I could live without the drowning-woman-in-pool-of-feces image in my head for the rest of my life though, along with the foot scene in Audition.
Ah, as warm and cuddly goes it doesn't get much better. Not what I'd watch all the time, but sufficiently well executed that it's worth getting excited about something new. And I reckon a lot of his stuff is a nice balance of mature themes with stuff that's interesting for kids. More food for thought than, say, a Disney movie.
But then, I'm not an anime geek. I tend more towards David Lynch and Atom Egoyan than most anime, so maybe I'm grossly misinformed.
I don't know about that "They must be guilty - they called the lawyer!" business. From the posting I read it looked like they got a call back from the lawyer because the lawyer would the one in the position to make the decision to call a tech. The suggestion here is more than MIT misunderstood the gravity of the situation rather than deliberately acted with malice. I know in the US (and UK - I'm English) things are a touch more fast-paced, but there's a couple of things that are a touch different over this side of the planet - at least in New Zealand. Firstly, a lot of companies are not open on the weekends. Even the ones that are typically run in a fairly "headless" manner - you might get some guys in the call centre, but you can bet the management have their phones turned off. Why? Well, one of the interesting features of this country is that people are quite horrifyingly overworked, at least compared to the UK. It's quite possible to get a job over here that pays below the British minimum wage that will attempt to get you to work above fifty hours - and we're not talking about a crap job here either, this could be a fairly interesting position at a mid-sized company. As a result of this, when the company finally lets people go home they tend to turn the damn phone off in the hope that nobody is going to call them.
I don't know if this is the case with MIT, but I wouldn't go assuming that they're a front for Al Qaeda/working for Michael Sims/Same-thing-we-do-every-night-Pinky just yet. It's a pretty safe bet they're all just drunk and have yet to figure out what the hell is going on. As for past incidents of a similar nature, you'd better believe there's companies that don't close their procedural loopholes in a hurry. Maybe the responsible parties have just managed to use the same exploit as last time via the same parties because, as mentioned above, everybody is too overworked in other areas to care? Domain registration is not exactly a high-margin business for many.
That's probably a bit extreme to accuse MelbourneIT of this, they're not a small company.
Bastards perhaps, but not quite on the deliberate hijacking/password logging scale. They're the primary "stabilising registrar" for New Zealand's top level domain for a start! Sure, there's only four million people here... but still...
The thread you are linking to is a little less sensational than you're being. There is a suggestion that the malicious attackers could be doing this, but not MelbourneIT. The main suggestion there is that MelbourneIT don't seem to realise the gravity of the situation and are sitting around down at the beach enjoying their summer. I can kind of understand, it's bloody hot over here at the moment and I'm having a bitch of a time concentrating on a magazine feature I'm supposed to be finished with by Tuesday.
I'm sure they'll get it eventually, but it's not really an excuse for not having a good 24/7 contact for expensive emergencies like this.
In a technical sense, you're obviously quite right. In terms of the actual effect of his actions it's pretty indistinguishable though, and if anything worse because the people hurt by the incident have no legal recourse. Unlike poor old Panix, who will hopefully survive long enough to get their domain back and working again. I wish them luck.
But hey, who cares about Mike and his morals? It's mostly interesting to watch the moderating fury at work, I've been watching thread this since it started and there's been a frantic burst of down-modding and up-modding on anything that's even slightly critical.
Two weeks? That sounds pretty good, it took months for me to get a dotcom transferred out of OneAndOne in the UK. After a while I took to emailing them virtually the same email every day, never getting an answer until I emailed a few other departments asking who the manager of the billing department was. Then I got a response in hours, claiming that I was "Harassing them". Ironically, at that point they actually relented and did what I'd been asking for months - releasing my domain for transfer.
One of the reasons I wanted to transfer it was that they had attempted to charge an expired credit card, failed, pulled the plug on the hosting package and then - hilariously - took a week to get it back online. Ringing them resulted in "We're too busy, goodbye" messages and a hangup from their automated systems. Emailing them was ignored. And although you can change credit card details manually in their admin system - get this - they have to manually action the charge. It took them a week.
So, two weeks sounds good to me.
You mean, aside from slashdot editors? Kidding, kidding.
.co.nz domains - which they do, like all the others, at price approximately equivilent to five times that of a dotcom on the international market. Considering a .co.uk costs around a fifth of that price with most registrars, that makes New Zealand domains worth approximately 25x that of a co.uk.
Seriously though, MelbourneIT is a pretty big company in this part of the world. I'm in New Zealand, and they're one of the most important of a small bunch of companies able to offer
Go figure. Maybe that's why I'm a dotcom, eh?
It's certainly ironic, I must say. But judging by most of my reading, the sole requirement of being an editor on a Linux or Open Source related news site is to be as insufferable an asshole as possible and refuse to resign, ever, regardless.
If it wasn't for the fact that I read Slashdot purely to be reminded of the fact that being a geek does not make you smart - something I feel it is good to remind oneself of on a regular basis - I would probably have stopped reading in horror.
But really, it would only matter if Michael had a good job. "He hijacked their domain! And now he's a success!" they cry. A success? Jesus, by what standards!? He reads hoax stories about fish washed up by tsunamis, doesn't bother to check any facts and just posts them regardless. And that doesn't even constitute doing a bad job, by Slashdot standards. So if that's the standards they require, I can't imagine it is too hard to get qualified "journalists" to work for them, and they doubtless pay a rate commensurate to his boundless skills.
Just get back to your Neal Stephenson books and consider him Andrew Loeb, everybody. He'll doubtless get shot in the end anyway...
You know, there are easier ways to make friends...
Character development was weak in comparison? Well, maybe. But When you consider how crapulent the first movie was in this respect, it's probably not even worth making any kind of comparison.
I saw the first Cube during the early arthouse circuit in 1997, and even sans any kind of underground "cult movie" hype it still sucked.
But at least the inexplicable popularity of the movie answered one question for me: Who the hell were the people responsible for continuing the drawn-out death of the X-Files after it became obvious that There Was No Big Vision? The answer: Cube fans! Dress a turd up in enough psuedo(x) (replace x with "Science" or "Philosophy" or indeed "Dialogue" as you see fit) and you're bound to convince some people that you're a genius...
Now, while we're here, I've got this religion I'm starting...
It would be hard to have two dead branches of X. It's sort of essential these days. That can't be said for a lot of projects.
If they genuinely want FOSS to succeed as a mass-market movement, the slashdotters who keep pulling this line out of their posteriors will need to shut up. Not everybody who wants to use The GIMP is going to be a programmer, or a bored geek with the time free to do such things. For things like the GIMP to succeed, they need to attract graphics professionals - the majority of whom don't care in the slightest about the source code or programming. It's a stupid response, and I wish people would stop saying this every time that somebody has an issue with an open source package. It's called "User feedback", it comes from having "Users" who "Use" your software to "Do things". These strange people don't just sit around their bedrooms and scratch themselves all day, interspersed with the occasional porn download. They have jobs. They get paid to do work. They may go to their boss and say "Look, we can save $xyz by using this excellent free package instead of paying up for package ABC". They will not go to their boss and say "Look, there's this free package I like... can I spent a couple of months hacking it to make it usable for our needs?". Programmers do that. Creative professionals don't.
Nah, I'm not a regular photoshopper and I think think the GIMP has an awful interface. In terms of graphics packages I've been an occasional user (when required) of a variety of packages from the Amiga onwards.
The GIMP does have a bad interface. And what people don't seem to realise is that if you're going to attract professionals you can't have a bad interface. I use music software at a somewhat expert level, and packages with excellent features marred by a lousy interface get ditched rapidly just because it interrupts my ability to work without getting distracted by geek crap. The designers I know have the same tendency. If you're intending for people to use a piece of software in a professional creative environment, it needs to have as much attention given to its interface as its functionality.
The problem being that they don't really have a standard. At what stage do you need to check the veracity of something? Install time. Not at the download stage on a per-application basis, although hashing is nice here to make sure you've actually got the whole file. Checking that a file hash is valid should be a function of the system installer software, since that's the point where it matters. That happens on Linux, but it doesn't on Windows. The article is entitled "How can I trust Firefox". Microsoft likes to talk up its "Ecosystem" of Windows software. Surely the article should be "How can I trust the Microsoft software ecosystem". If the only answer they have is "Download using IE, only trust Versign" then they've just made that ecosystem a whole lot smaller.
IE has security zones because it is essential to the way the so-called "security model" is supposed to work. The problem is, it doesn't. In fact, it's the source of many of IE's problems. The Firefox approach now is good - trust nothing, keep it all isolated from the OS. What you're suggesting is extending trust to sites, rather than denying it. I don't think that's a very secure thing to do.
I don't really get this. The essence of the complaint is that Windows does not have a mechanism for checking any of the free, secure systems for verifying downloads like MD5, GPG etc. If I install Firefox on Linux the MD5sum is automatically checked by the package manager. So surely this ball goes back to Microsoft, as it doesn't just affect Firefox. The only "Trusted code" system they have in place is really too exclusive - half the device drivers on my Windows install are unsigned, for crying out loud. And we're not talking about cheap hardware, either.
If you're a Windows user, you get used to running unverified code fast. The nearest anybody gets to checking downloads is running them past a virus scanner before installing. That's not enough, but the reality is that this is a Microsoft failing, not a Firefox one. Where's the tool in SP2 that will check an MD5 sum in a downloaded file based on, say, content on a user-supplied URL? If there was one there it would be very easy for code to be verified by feeding the URL of the author's website into the utility and allowing Windows itself to check the file hash. But Microsoft haven't chosen to write that utility. So why is this particular Microsoft schill bitching about this as if it is a Firefox failing? It's a problem that affects virtually every downloaded application on the Windows platform, the odd thing like the Flash plugin excluded.
None of the big guys will port to Linux any time soon. Linux has no installed user base of musicians, and no differentiating advantage. Where's the return on investment in porting to a platform with no new users? The reality is that most people who're both serious musicians and interested in Linux probably have a Windows or Mac system for audio use anyway. If they port to Linux they won't make any more money, they'll just lose a sale on their existing platform. It's a shame, but it's true.
Linux needs a "Big idea" that kicks the arse out of anything on the PC or Mac platform in order to be able to get any major commercial support. I have my fingers crossed. And as for suggestions along the lines of "It's open source... you develop it!", I'd just like to point out that I'm a musician. That's what I do with my time. As it stands, there are tools which I can use to do the things I do on computers, and they run on Windows or OSX and I'm quite happy to pay for them. I would ideally like to be able to move my music work to Linux too (already done it with my home office), but I don't see that happening inside the decade at this rate.
That seems a little surreal. There'a a couple of APIs on Windows for low-latency audio, WDM/KS (which is the Microsoft driver API) or ASIO (... a Steinberg creation). ASIO would maybe prove a problem, but if there was an issue with FOSS software calling Microsoft APIs then there would be absolutely nothing on the Windows platform at all, which is obviously not the case.
My real issue with both this and AGNULA is they're still too big, while failing to provide the weight of musical features to go with the installed size. I'm really just looking for a box that has as little as possible running on it.
If you have a look at things like hardware samplers, they're basically just PCs with a very minimal amount of operating system and enough software to drive a little bit of proprietary sampler hardware. There's very little to go wrong, and if it does go wrong then re-installing the OS is not an hour job (fatal on stage). The old AKAI samplers had their OS on a floppy, you could make a few backups and take them along to gigs in case something went wrong.
Computers are getting powerful enough now that it's quite realistic to envision a single box that can run an entire band inside five years. When I say "run", I mean handling:
I could do it now on Windows. but that would mean running mission-critical stuff on an OS that could potentially fail to boot and cost me the gig. Ideally we should be talking about something that can run off a live CD and have a boot time of less than a minute from there. Combine that with redundancy like RAID and multiple sound cards inside the box and all of a sudden we're looking at a much more realistic alternative to dedicated hardware... Linux would have an advantage here, but providing a whole new desktop OS which takes 2-3 minutes to boot into the GUI and insists on username/password login etc is just not going to cut it with musicians. That may sound daft, but it's not. Here's a list of the stuff I have to set up on a stage for a gig:
Drum Kit:
Other stuff:
Hence the suggestion that we need a dedicated OS built for the purpose. I already have a dedicated music OS - it's called Windows XP. It doesn't connect to a network, it has all the fancy GUI options turned off... and I hate to say it, but it boots faster than Linux on my primary machine. I could maybe improve the Linux boot time if I installed Gentoo or somesuch, but really - I'm a musician, I don't do that kind of thing :D
Music on Linux is a chicken and egg situation. There's no way the majority of musicians are going to bother installing Fedora or Debian and then one of the add-on packages like AGNULA or CCRMA in order to get software that's inferior to what we already have on Windows. There has to be something that Linux does better. At the moment, there's really not anything apart from some geeky things like JACK whic
I don't think Linux has a realistic shot at beating down Apple (Logic), Steinberg (Nuendo, Cubase), Cakewalk (Sonar), Digidesign (Protools) and MOTU (Digital Performer) without any kind of differentiation. Basically, OSX and WinXP work for these kind of apps now, there's little gain to be had in moving to a new OS. Rosegarden is doing very well in that it has moved from totally impractical (a couple of years ago) to borderline usable (now) as regards actually doing anything musical. However look at what has happened over in the PC world in the same time and it really just serves to illustrate the fact that Rosegarden is not catching up, it's falling further behind. Not a nice thing to say about a worthy project, but true unfortunately.
However there is a reasonably open market that nobody seems to be going for - an open-standard "music computer" with a lightweight embedded OS that can be taken out live on stage, and used to run what are effectively server applications (MIDI or audio in, audio or MIDI out) in a stable manner. Running servers is a clear point where Linux can kick the bezeesus out of Windows, and I personally hate taking WinXP out on a stage for fear of something crashing mid-song. Linux is good for mission-critical applications like that, and I think development focussed on providing core live functions (multi-track recording, an effects and virtual instrument plugin architecture, a good soft-sampler) on a minimal embedded OS would do the trick much better than trying to fight the big boys without any resources would.