Why we we have to hate. Its time to leave fat people alone. They are not the evil spawn of Satan. Go find some other class of people to hate like say Preppies.
Linux is a great OS to build things with. You know what goes into it. You can build one version that works just like you want it to and then clone it in your device.
But if you want to support Linux for the user, how can you guarantee they will have all the parts needed to make it run? What distro? What kernel? What packages? You have to maintain multiple distros of your product and hope to hit a zillions different variants for what is 1% of the users who want it.
Windows, well for 90% of the market, you can put in the energy to support XP and Vista. Even for 9% you can support OSX.
I love my linux, but I wouldn't want to produce commercial software for it and have to try and support it.
Most people I know have to go through hoops to keep the TWC technicians off their computers. I got lucky with my TWC install (which I got only because work is paying for it . . . I lothe TWC). I told the tech, I'd take care of everything on myside of the modem, and he went along with it, and actually stayed until I was up and running with my Ubuntu box going through my router. Good to know there are some reasonable types out there.
However for the rr.com local "Home Pages", those have so much active-X garbage going on them, you do miss a lot if your not running IE. However I have little use for their home page, so its not a big deal.
I suppose if you want to use their popup blocker, or their email notification tools, you probably would need "their IE". I just say no to such drivel.
I've been in the computer industry for 20+ years. I've pretty much used every flavor of Unix and several different linux distros. Needless to say I'm in the "command line friendly" crowd. I enjoy tinkering with thing and yet I chose Ubuntu.
My main job, day today needs solid email, web browsing and office apps world. So as long as I have a good text editor for code, and those apps, I'm happy.
Fedora was too much work. I had to think about it as I'm trying to do my job. It was bloated, way too much stuff running, different tools trying to update/install software that didn't work together (update manager - yum - rpm), one could run while the other was running and hose your database, etc. I need to reinstall the OS and after 4 hours and 5 CD's of Fedora I was quite unhappy. So the next time I installed, it was one disk, 30 minutes, minimal bloat and I've never had my software package management fail to work together.
With Ubuntu, I don't have to think about the OS and the apps. I can think about my work. And there is still plenty of tinker room with Ubuntu!
I'm just sitting here thinking about all the photos they took from Flickr and you can bet they didn't get permission to use them or pay for the rights to use them and I'd be willing to bet, they are all not "creative commons!" Talk about abuse of the DCMA.
Someone below I think summed this up best, you don't need the whole creative suite for everyone. Just get the parts you need.
As for alternatives, you can't use The GIMP for a lot of professional work. Its text layers (and complete lack of layer options), CMYK support, Color Management, etc. are just not there or good enough. Now I get on The GIMP's case a lot. But we have to keep in mind that its version 2 of the software and being done for free vs. Photoshop which is at version 10 and has paid R&D. Given that, The GIMP is pretty good, but its got its limits.
As for using FrontPage, do your web site readers a favor, and have your staff learn HTML and use a text editor. No "WYSIWYG" editor, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, or FrontPage produces HTML that is solid. All of them produce excessive markup. They don't separate the content from the markup (presentational markup vs. semantic markup). For example, if your site uses semantic markup, then people with disabilities can easily scale the fonts or use readers, pages are much lighter weight, work with a wider range of browsers, makes it easier for a site like google to index the pages etc. There is a very good book, called "Bulletproof Web Design" that goes over all of these issues. And the visual page designers are all bad.
FrontPage is by far the worse offender. There is an HTML tag called that Microsoft's IE ignores. FrontPage fills a document with these tags since compliant browsers pay attention to them. The result is the page only views correctly in IE and is rendered pretty much completely unusable in other browsers. If you have to use a WYSIWYG editor, go with either Dreamweaver or GoLive, but bring an end to the intentional evilness that is FrontPage.
I've been both a computer geek and photojournalist for over 25 years and the profession of photojournalist has been on the demise the whole time and guess what, we are still going strong. What does suck though is that the media buyer is actively looking for people they can get to do lowball work for them. But this isn't nothing news. An ad agency called me about a stock photo, but wanted to reshoot with a different twist and they were very interested when they thought I was a "dad with a camera" that they could get for $50. When I mentioned creative fee's they bolted. Ironically, they were billing their client full cost on the photography and pocketing the difference. So the lowball phenomena isn't new.
At the end of the day, the top professionals will still command top dollar. The wannabe's will sell for cheap and those who don't understand the business will give away their art for "The thrill" of being published. In the end, us middle of the road shooters have to work harder to secure the good jobs.
How do you create a market for a product, and make money of a product that has a huge initial creative investment, but then no manufacturing cost, and is in infinite supply?
I personally am not bothered by the concept of an artist in the electronic media being able to control sales of their product. Paying $0.99 a song is fair. If the artists don't get paid, they won't continue to produce work. A good example is compare the quality of paid television to YouTube. Sure there are enjoyable clips on YouTube, but they don't have the production value that our TV and Movies have.
Where DRM fails is it doesn't protect the creative, it protects the device the creative is played on. I don't have a solution, but as a collective intellegence, we should be able to come up with a non-commerical standard of encrypting files that ties the unencryption to the user not to the device.
I recently had the exact same experience. About 2 weeks ago, I went through almost the same dialog. I kept saying, I wasn't interested in any offers, just cancel the account. Finally after 20 minutes or so and them trying to read me something they legally have to, which started out like a retention offer, I stopped the person and she eventually gave me a confirmation number.
Monday before I fly out on a business trip, my wife said "I thought you said you cancelled AOL?", so I got back on the phone. There was no record of my past call even though I had a confirmation number. I called back and got another person, who was being equally difficult, after 7 or 8 requests for her manager, I finally upgraded to her boss (probably a senior retention person) who went on to say we were still using a lot of hours. I finally had her change the passwords on all the screen names, note that no one could call back in and reneable the account, refund the money, etc. She kept trying to retain me, but eventually said she cancelled the account.
One thing she threw out that was interesting was that well you're already paid up until the 18th of next month, so you can continue to use it and call back and cancel it then. You've already paid for it so we have to leave it open.
If the refund doesn't show up in the next couple of days, I'll take other measures. They are just aweful!
Given the make up of our current group (3 programmers, a game level designer, and an accountant (who used to work for a computer gaming company), there is most certainly a correlation. I got hooked on RPG's in College by a programmer, though the group I gamed with the most consisted of accountants, paramedics, engineers, and other non-programmer types.
After college, our gaming group was highly programmer oriented or people who worked in the computer field.
But given the various people I've gamed with over the past 25 years, lack of confidence in ones self seems to be the best description of the people I've gamed with. It gives the "shy nerds" a chance to be around people they are comfortable with and provides them an outlet for their natural creativity. Programmers tend to be "shy nerds" too.
Since programming requires a similar mental creativity to gaming (creating intangable functionality out of nothingness), its only logical that the two should co-exist..
In other words, it takes imagination to program. Its a quality that almost every good programmer I've met has. Playing RPG's requires imagination.
Its pretty simple. Windows has 95% of the desktop market. They include their version of everything, even when it isn't the best. When someone comes up with something cool, Microsoft either clones it in such a way that you no longer need the 3rd party item, or comes out with a different format to make standard that only their software uses.
Lets look at each one. IE vs other Browers. NCSA Mosaic was one of the first web browsers. It was the basis for Netscape, which once was the most popular browser. Microsoft, instead of working out a deal to include Netscape, wrote IE, made it free (putting Netscape pretty much out of business with regards to browsers), and imbedded it into the OS. Every computer has IE, why do you need something else? Thats the MS philosophy. The fact is there are other things you might like better. I for one, can't stand Outlook or any variation. I prefer Eudora. But all anyone knows (of that huge MS user base) is Outlook because thats what they were given.
The second way, where Microsoft comes out with their own standard is just as snotty. Adobe PDF files are pretty much a well documented standard. Many people use them and they make peoples lives easy. However, Microsoft doesn't like that Adobe gets the limelight for this so they are coming out with their own PDF like format and will call it the standard, give the tools in the OS to use it, and suddenly Adobe's PDF will fall by the wayside (and their income stream from their PDF authoring tools, etc.).
Why do we need.WMF (windows media files)?.MP3's were perfectly good.
People know they have a choice in cars. They have a choice in TV's and toaster ovens. They have a choice in computers, OS's and software too, but Microsoft's monopolistic policies does a very good job of hiding choices from the consumer.
If no other reason, thats the reason to push Open Source solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
it does sometimes after a brown out or very short blackout. But beyond that it runs and runs and runs.
Well I'm in the fat class currently being discriminated against.
Why we we have to hate. Its time to leave fat people alone. They are not the evil spawn of Satan. Go find some other class of people to hate like say Preppies.
Linux is a great OS to build things with. You know what goes into it. You can build one version that works just like you want it to and then clone it in your device. But if you want to support Linux for the user, how can you guarantee they will have all the parts needed to make it run? What distro? What kernel? What packages? You have to maintain multiple distros of your product and hope to hit a zillions different variants for what is 1% of the users who want it. Windows, well for 90% of the market, you can put in the energy to support XP and Vista. Even for 9% you can support OSX. I love my linux, but I wouldn't want to produce commercial software for it and have to try and support it.
Most people I know have to go through hoops to keep the TWC technicians off their computers. I got lucky with my TWC install (which I got only because work is paying for it . . . I lothe TWC). I told the tech, I'd take care of everything on myside of the modem, and he went along with it, and actually stayed until I was up and running with my Ubuntu box going through my router. Good to know there are some reasonable types out there. However for the rr.com local "Home Pages", those have so much active-X garbage going on them, you do miss a lot if your not running IE. However I have little use for their home page, so its not a big deal. I suppose if you want to use their popup blocker, or their email notification tools, you probably would need "their IE". I just say no to such drivel.
I've been in the computer industry for 20+ years. I've pretty much used every flavor of Unix and several different linux distros. Needless to say I'm in the "command line friendly" crowd. I enjoy tinkering with thing and yet I chose Ubuntu. My main job, day today needs solid email, web browsing and office apps world. So as long as I have a good text editor for code, and those apps, I'm happy. Fedora was too much work. I had to think about it as I'm trying to do my job. It was bloated, way too much stuff running, different tools trying to update/install software that didn't work together (update manager - yum - rpm), one could run while the other was running and hose your database, etc. I need to reinstall the OS and after 4 hours and 5 CD's of Fedora I was quite unhappy. So the next time I installed, it was one disk, 30 minutes, minimal bloat and I've never had my software package management fail to work together. With Ubuntu, I don't have to think about the OS and the apps. I can think about my work. And there is still plenty of tinker room with Ubuntu!
I'm just sitting here thinking about all the photos they took from Flickr and you can bet they didn't get permission to use them or pay for the rights to use them and I'd be willing to bet, they are all not "creative commons!" Talk about abuse of the DCMA.
Someone below I think summed this up best, you don't need the whole creative suite for everyone. Just get the parts you need. As for alternatives, you can't use The GIMP for a lot of professional work. Its text layers (and complete lack of layer options), CMYK support, Color Management, etc. are just not there or good enough. Now I get on The GIMP's case a lot. But we have to keep in mind that its version 2 of the software and being done for free vs. Photoshop which is at version 10 and has paid R&D. Given that, The GIMP is pretty good, but its got its limits. As for using FrontPage, do your web site readers a favor, and have your staff learn HTML and use a text editor. No "WYSIWYG" editor, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, or FrontPage produces HTML that is solid. All of them produce excessive markup. They don't separate the content from the markup (presentational markup vs. semantic markup). For example, if your site uses semantic markup, then people with disabilities can easily scale the fonts or use readers, pages are much lighter weight, work with a wider range of browsers, makes it easier for a site like google to index the pages etc. There is a very good book, called "Bulletproof Web Design" that goes over all of these issues. And the visual page designers are all bad. FrontPage is by far the worse offender. There is an HTML tag called that Microsoft's IE ignores. FrontPage fills a document with these tags since compliant browsers pay attention to them. The result is the page only views correctly in IE and is rendered pretty much completely unusable in other browsers. If you have to use a WYSIWYG editor, go with either Dreamweaver or GoLive, but bring an end to the intentional evilness that is FrontPage.
I've been both a computer geek and photojournalist for over 25 years and the profession of photojournalist has been on the demise the whole time and guess what, we are still going strong. What does suck though is that the media buyer is actively looking for people they can get to do lowball work for them. But this isn't nothing news. An ad agency called me about a stock photo, but wanted to reshoot with a different twist and they were very interested when they thought I was a "dad with a camera" that they could get for $50. When I mentioned creative fee's they bolted. Ironically, they were billing their client full cost on the photography and pocketing the difference. So the lowball phenomena isn't new. At the end of the day, the top professionals will still command top dollar. The wannabe's will sell for cheap and those who don't understand the business will give away their art for "The thrill" of being published. In the end, us middle of the road shooters have to work harder to secure the good jobs.
How do you create a market for a product, and make money of a product that has a huge initial creative investment, but then no manufacturing cost, and is in infinite supply? I personally am not bothered by the concept of an artist in the electronic media being able to control sales of their product. Paying $0.99 a song is fair. If the artists don't get paid, they won't continue to produce work. A good example is compare the quality of paid television to YouTube. Sure there are enjoyable clips on YouTube, but they don't have the production value that our TV and Movies have. Where DRM fails is it doesn't protect the creative, it protects the device the creative is played on. I don't have a solution, but as a collective intellegence, we should be able to come up with a non-commerical standard of encrypting files that ties the unencryption to the user not to the device.
I recently had the exact same experience. About 2 weeks ago, I went through almost the same dialog. I kept saying, I wasn't interested in any offers, just cancel the account. Finally after 20 minutes or so and them trying to read me something they legally have to, which started out like a retention offer, I stopped the person and she eventually gave me a confirmation number.
Monday before I fly out on a business trip, my wife said "I thought you said you cancelled AOL?", so I got back on the phone. There was no record of my past call even though I had a confirmation number. I called back and got another person, who was being equally difficult, after 7 or 8 requests for her manager, I finally upgraded to her boss (probably a senior retention person) who went on to say we were still using a lot of hours. I finally had her change the passwords on all the screen names, note that no one could call back in and reneable the account, refund the money, etc. She kept trying to retain me, but eventually said she cancelled the account.
One thing she threw out that was interesting was that well you're already paid up until the 18th of next month, so you can continue to use it and call back and cancel it then. You've already paid for it so we have to leave it open.
If the refund doesn't show up in the next couple of days, I'll take other measures. They are just aweful!
Given the make up of our current group (3 programmers, a game level designer, and an accountant (who used to work for a computer gaming company), there is most certainly a correlation. I got hooked on RPG's in College by a programmer, though the group I gamed with the most consisted of accountants, paramedics, engineers, and other non-programmer types. After college, our gaming group was highly programmer oriented or people who worked in the computer field. But given the various people I've gamed with over the past 25 years, lack of confidence in ones self seems to be the best description of the people I've gamed with. It gives the "shy nerds" a chance to be around people they are comfortable with and provides them an outlet for their natural creativity. Programmers tend to be "shy nerds" too. Since programming requires a similar mental creativity to gaming (creating intangable functionality out of nothingness), its only logical that the two should co-exist.. In other words, it takes imagination to program. Its a quality that almost every good programmer I've met has. Playing RPG's requires imagination.
Its pretty simple. Windows has 95% of the desktop market. They include their version of everything, even when it isn't the best. When someone comes up with something cool, Microsoft either clones it in such a way that you no longer need the 3rd party item, or comes out with a different format to make standard that only their software uses. Lets look at each one. IE vs other Browers. NCSA Mosaic was one of the first web browsers. It was the basis for Netscape, which once was the most popular browser. Microsoft, instead of working out a deal to include Netscape, wrote IE, made it free (putting Netscape pretty much out of business with regards to browsers), and imbedded it into the OS. Every computer has IE, why do you need something else? Thats the MS philosophy. The fact is there are other things you might like better. I for one, can't stand Outlook or any variation. I prefer Eudora. But all anyone knows (of that huge MS user base) is Outlook because thats what they were given. The second way, where Microsoft comes out with their own standard is just as snotty. Adobe PDF files are pretty much a well documented standard. Many people use them and they make peoples lives easy. However, Microsoft doesn't like that Adobe gets the limelight for this so they are coming out with their own PDF like format and will call it the standard, give the tools in the OS to use it, and suddenly Adobe's PDF will fall by the wayside (and their income stream from their PDF authoring tools, etc.). Why do we need .WMF (windows media files)? .MP3's were perfectly good.
People know they have a choice in cars. They have a choice in TV's and toaster ovens. They have a choice in computers, OS's and software too, but Microsoft's monopolistic policies does a very good job of hiding choices from the consumer.
If no other reason, thats the reason to push Open Source solutions.