Not to fear. I'm 9eveloping my own open so4rce reverse-engineere9 implementation of the NotePa9 format, calle9 OpenPa9. I estimate that I've got abo4t 96% of the format fig4re9 o4t. As a matter of fact, my post here was compose9 originally in OpenPa9 then copie9 an9 paste9 into the Slash9ot comment s4bmission page.
tends to have a superiority complex and rather than answer questions they become overly sensitive, defensive and generally talk down to people
And how, exactly, is this different from the Windows user support sites? Having spent endless hours on both Linux and Windows help forums (and I'm on the Windows help forums because Microsoft or a Windows app vendor said "screw you, I've got your money already, no soup for you") I see little difference except that you eventually generally get a solution on the Linux forums, whereas on the Windows forums you're often dismissed with a "just wait for the Service Pack or app upgrade" kind of response, after being mocked for being on an older version of Windows than the respondee.
You know, this is going to come as an absolute shock to you, but many Mac users view Windows user attitudes from precisely the same perspective that you view Linux users. To them, Windows people are amazingly condescending and arrogant. I've experienced this myself aplenty from folks who apparently believe that their Microsoft Partner designation gets them the key to the same executive washroom that the Almighty uses.
You must not hang around the same Linux help forums I do, where fixes come relatively quickly and the community is very very helpful. How much would you care to bet that doing multi-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) multimedia production with multi-platform-supported network services, my support issues are a tad more extreme that this Mr. J. User you postulate? Yet, my experience with the Windows vs. Linux "hard core" community has been just exactly the opposite of yours.
* * * * *
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. —Benjamin Franklin
If even 50% of you guys actually put your money where your mouth is, Linux might matter.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that for each and every one of the 20,000 folks who flooded their online survey saying they wanted Linux, Dell has sold 2 systems by all accounts (Dell won't confirm publicly, but word is out). In the first 100 days.
You know what? Even the quality of the trolling has gone downhill since the Waggener Edstrom subcontractors started hanging around here. Why are they here? They must not be getting enough traction out of MySpace or Digg or something.
* * * * * *
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth. —Dave Barry
You have received this traffic citation, on this sol of 13 Smoogna, 1126, issued by the city of Oxia Palus in the county of Planitia, Mars, for the following indicated violations.
__ Following too closely to a boulder.
__ Failure to light headlamps within 5 sols of sundown.
__ Parallel parking on inside slope of crater.
__ Driving in planet-wide reduced visibility conditions without running lights.
__ Failure to signal turn to JPL.
You will find information on the back of this form concerning fees and places to pay your fine. Thank you, and remember: "Unsafe driving will make your fellow Martian motorists see red."
Could you put something up there that folks might actually want to watch? Oh, I don't know...something like a top ten hit show that isn't a game show or football game? Seriously, who's interested in a canned version of Monday Night Football? And sorry, as much as I love Howie Mandel, I'm not going to go hunt down a startup non-iTunes portal just to watch a silly game show. I'd watch a 40-year-old episode of The Gong Show or even Simon's Greatest Diss Hits from American Idol, but there's no way I'm getting excited about Deal or No Deal. Sorry.
_ _ _
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. —Josh Billings
Magazines are getting thinner, readership is dropping for everything from porn to popular science; why pay for month old news and views when you can get it tonight, for free, up to the second, on the web?
Except you can't. I'm desperately searching Google, MSN and Yahoo! for anything about my county's local bond election. Or that big, scandalous local meth bust. Nothin' doin'. Only place on the Web is, ironically enough, the local paper's Website. And then you only get a 2-paragraph teaser. To get the full story: subscribe to the print edition.
The Web is making a huge dent on national/international print publications. Newsweek is a pale shadow of its former self, for example. But locally, we've gone from two local papers to three and from no locally-oriented/published magazines to one and the page count is going up for everybody. Print-oriented graphic arts-related businesses are growing steadily (I've got more local competition for print-related work now than I had in '98 when I started my agency). All the Web-only designers I knew locally five years ago have dried up and blown away, like last year's tumbleweeds. In 2000, a skilled designer could make a decent living in my Web-starved, monied area doing only Web work for local merchants wanting an Internet presence. Not any more. After the Net bubble burst, things have never completely recovered.
Local merchants found that they still had to advertise in local print publications, radio stations and cable TV because the Web is really, really lousy at geographic targeting. Hardly a one of my clients needs to reach folks in Poland or Nigeria, but on the Web you really can't filter for that. They really want to reach 75% of everybody within a 10 mile radius of the ol' brick-and-mortar. The Web completely sucks at delivering that kind of audience. Especially considering that even by 2012 30% of US households still won't have broadband. Ever try doing YouTube over dialup? But everybody's got a mailbox. So, direct mail's also doing just swell, thanks for asking.
Hey, I've got no great stock in print. I do Web, TV, radio, print, signage, packaging, POP, whatever. But the Net's always been a problematic place for those folks who want to get an ad message out to a lot of people but restricted by geographic area. Google's doing great with online advertising, but they're pretty much the exception that proves the rule and they're feeding off the 3% of U.S. businesses who actually care about reaching the entire planet in one ad banner. For the overwhelming majority of my 150+ business clients, if somebody further away than 20 miles sees the ad, you've just wasted money.
I would suggest the reason your product might not be going gangbusters in the print-oriented market is that mature, robust products have existed for years and it's a real tough sell to peddle a product that doesn't have Adobe or Quark's logo on it. Or you're just trying to sell to the wrong segment of the print/publishing industry. Even the mighty Corel couldn't break into the market in a meaningful way, as technically advanced as CorelDraw was over Illustrator between '97 and '02 (and even Photopaint over Photoshop, IMHO). As a former imagesetter/prepress guy, the only new software product for the print industry I've seen since 1995 which got me excited is Quite's Quite A Box of Tricks. And it's been obsoleted by Acrobat Pro for a couple of years now.
Even email seems to be falling by the wayside. Last week, for the umpteenth time in the past year, another client told me to not bother trying to email them. "Too much spam to deal with. I don't have time for it. You've got my cell number." And so it goes.
Seriously, the cell phone is what's finally going to kill dead tree publishing. When you can get an e-read of the local paper, on the road, on something that will fit in your shirt pocket and doesn't weigh five pounds, then you've got something.
_ _ _
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move. —Benjamin Franklin
Here's a tally of my local graphic arts/publishing/advertising-related colleagues (within a 10 mile radius of my ad agency), off the top of my head, based on my personal familiarly with the shop setups. I'm in a small suburban community just outside Dallas/Ft. Worth. Where I just list "Mac" or "Windows" it means that all the creative/graphic arts production computers are of that platform. Note that many of these companies (especially the newspapers) run other departments (such as Accounting) on other platforms.
1. Daily newspaper: 5 workstations. Mac
2. Daily newspaper: 4 workstations. Mac
3. Weekly newspaper: 4 workstations. 3 Macs, 1 Windows
4. Monthly magazine: 2 workstations. Mac
5. Print shop: 3 workstations. 2 Macs, 1 Windows
6. Print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
7. Weekly newspaper: 7 workstations. Mac
8. Print shop: 2 workstations. Mac
9. Design studio: 2 workstations. Mac
10. Commercial print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
11. PR agency, 2 workstations. Windows
12. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
13. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
14. Advertising agency (me). 5 workstations: 1 Linux, 1 Windows, 3 Macs.
Just as a note, the PR agency which has two Windows machines vends almost all of their graphic design work to other shops, although they tried real hard the first year in business to do all their design work in-house. The weekly newspaper which has the one Windows machine is finding that the Windows PC is currently being unused, although this changes from time to time depending on whether they have any designers currently employed who feel.
I used to do a detailed survey of graphic arts-related businesses and their platform choices for the Dallas/Ft. Worth area many years ago, generated by laboriously calling all 900+ businesses listed in the phone directories. The tally was always 98%+ in favor of Mac, but I haven't done the survey in years now. Anecdotally, I interface with some 50 other pre-press shops and publishing houses (where I send the ads I design for clients) and I still get the impression that the industry is overwhelmingly Mac. One reason this may be is that Windows has had some well-documented flaws in Microsoft's Postscript drivers (starting with WindowsXP) and also in the way Windows handles ICC color profile files. Several of the pre-press houses I deal with have Windows machines solely for the purpose of handling CorelDraw files from customers; the front-end machines to the imagesetters are invariably Mac.
I'm not sure who in the graphic arts industry is keeping platform talleys these days. Used to be that the PIA (Printing Industries of America) was a good source of information, along with Seybold Reports. I've had a Seybold subscription in recent years but not seen any hard stats on graphic arts platform usage.
Page layout app of choice still seems to be QuarkXPress over InDesign with about 60% of the market for those folks who do complex page builds with lots of text (newspapers and magazines, for example). InDesign seems to be rapidly catching up, however. Most popular vector program still seems to be Illustrator and, as always, Photoshop is the preferred bitmap editor.
Now, for Web work, however, where no cross-media placement is involved, Windows machines seem to dominate. This is just a guess, but I'd say that Windows has 80%+ of the local Web designers' platforms that I'm familiar with.
_ _ _
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific. —Jane Wagner
I live in Texas now. From what I've read, the reason that patent trolls like to file in the Eastern Texas District Federal Court in Marshall is that juries have historically been very sympathetic to patent holding plaintiffs, for whatever reason. The first cases filed in Marshall IIRC involved Texas Instruments and of course TI was counting on the home court advantage (although why Marshall instead of a Federal court closer to Dallas is beyond me. Maybe it's the lure of the Annual Fire Ant Festival). Apparently after TI's win(s), Marshall became known as the place to file if you had a patent case.
Having also lived in California, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and Alabama, I'm pretty sure I could find several other Federal district courts in which to file in those states and get pretty much the same sort of jury, but Marshall was there first and got the reputation. Plus, they have the Fire Ant Festival and those other states don't. Never underestimate the draw of the Fire Ant Festival.
There's been a "separate" plugin available from the GIMP Plugin Registry for a couple of years now, which I've been using to convert my photos for professional high-end print jobs. Being a plugin, it's not as handy as built-in CMYK conversion but it's not difficult to use and gives decent results.
Mr Kirn: regarding DVD issues, I've already run into numerous issues under Vista. Recently when Re-tracking the audio to our bands most recent music-video DVD prior to issuing a final release for distribution, using Adobe Audition as the recording source, WMP refused to play the DVD whilst Audition was loaded. No real explanation was given, just a blank error box and a second one stating an error occurred in displaying the error. Ouch. I ASSUME this is a DRM issue, but the media was non-protected to begin with, and will be released without any protection, as we believe in fair market practice, which DRM of any kind violates.
I'm not sure how much detail is required in this explanation, or to get a comprehensive response back, but the audio was audio was being recorded from the DVDs optical-audio out, to the X-Fi's optical -in port, all in the same system. The goal was to split the already encoded audio track from the DVD source to attach it to the identical video pack in an MPEG4 container prior to creating an HDDVD to also be released. If I'm missing something, then I apologise, but this appears to be a real-world scenario for DRM issues under vista that are not specifically content-related. And I'm no engineer so If this is off a bit in terms, again, sorry.
February 10, 2007 @ 6:00 am
* * * * *
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
--Charles W. Eliot
Note: the following joke is subject to final script approval by Mr. Tom Cruise, in accordance with his production company's contract with United Artists.
OK, see, this Scientologist walks into a bar with a frog on his head. And the bartender says, "HEY...what the hell is THAT?!" And the frog says, "Well, I'm not sure exactly, but it started out as a wart on my ass."
* * * * *
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible. --David Ogilvy
And I ain't ever used it, but my friends here do their entire print magazine in it.
And, interestingly enough, to get at your friends' magazine, I have to download a: PDF. Say, think there's a reason for that? I'll give you a hint: fonts.
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
PDF's take MINUTES to open on some of our machines
Suggestion: Try upgrading those slow machines to the newer Intel 386 CPUs. You'll get much better performance. Or even go to the cutting edge and get some circa 2002 AMD Athlon 1200s (like my current workstation) with a rompin' stompin' 512 megs of RAM. I've never had a PDF take longer than 15 seconds to open with this thing, and even that PDF was an 11" x 17" poster with a CMYK TIFF image completely covering the background, another 15 CMYK 300dpi images embedded, 5 logos, and saved to PDF/X-3, one of least-squeezed subformats you can choose from. In fact, since I process PDFs for the publishing industry, virtually every PDF I deal with is somewhere between 5x-20x the size of the PDFs that you folks in Enterprise come across, yet I've never had a PDF take longer than about 15 seconds to open. I even run the older Acrobat 5 under WINE on Linux with a plugin or two that the average civilian would never have and it never takes longer than 15 seconds to open massive, CMYK-clogged PDFs.
Now, if you wanna talk about something that's slow and impossible to use, let's talk about Microsoft Office formats. I've got a Publisher file from last year that 3 different Publisher owners couldn't open for me. I couldn't open it in my Office 2000-era version of Publisher (even after the creator saved a supposedly 2000-compatible version). We know it didn't get mangled on transit, because I made a copy and shipped it back to the originator and she could open the copy just fine in her Publisher. But for me and two other colleagues who had various versions of Publisher installed, it might as well have been Martian cuneiform. The 4th guy finally did manage to crack it. How's that for portability? 3 out of 5 versions of Publisher can't even open Publisher files created on another system...even after you make up-versions and down-versions.
Here's a quote from the Submissions Spec Sheet of a national magazine I built an ad for recently that pretty much sums it up for the commercial printing/publishing industry. Minor variations on this can be found on the Submissions Guidelines pages of virtually every magazine and newspaper on the planet:
Unacceptable Formats: The following formats are not acceptable:
* Microsoft Word (except to provide text for ads that we are building)
My note: here they mean raw, completely unformatted text except for
line breaks separating paragraphs. You might as well use Notepad as Word.
* Microsoft Powerpoint
* Microsoft Publisher
* GIF files
* Film separations
* * * * *
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth. --Dave Barry
The current print edition of 'PC Magazine' (article apparently not on the Web edition) compared Vista to XP on eight common apps/tasks (Photoshop being one of them). IIRC, Vista was faster (significantly, if I recall) on two tasks and slower by anywhere from 7% to 23% on the other six.
I was just thumbing through the print edition at the local bookstore and don't have a copy with me. Perhaps someone else here has a subscription and can give us a recap, as I don't recall the exact apps/tasks tested, just that Photoshop was one app that was significantly slower on Vista, doing that particular task(s). Enough that pro graphic artists (such as myself) might think twice about it.
* * * * * *
A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink. --W.C. Fields
It will allow me to save the archive to disk, then extract the shell script and run it without altering permissions. What Thunderbird won't allow me to do is execute the embedded shell script directly; it will pass it off to the default archive manager but my manager will only allow me save the script or look at it in my default text editor. I could certainly configure the manager to run the script but that's not the default behavior out of the box.
This, however, is a far cry from the last few Windows malware cleanups I've had to do for clients, friends and families who insist that they did no active downloading/unzipping of anything to get hit (and most of them are smart enough not to click on attachments from unknown sources). I've seen Java "dropper"-type malware get past my AV on first install (merely surfing to a Web page), but get flagged on subsequent activity. You always wonder if there is more stuff getting by that the AV isn't noticing.
A surprising number of folks are still on Win98/Win2K and just refuse to upgrade (no matter what I tell them), so I figure I'll still be fielding requests to fix drive-by infections for a few years to come).
I tried pretty much the same thing (both with a tar'd shell script and an RPM package) under KDE 3.5.x (I forget which exact version, it's been a few weeks ago and I've upgraded to FC6 now) on Fedora Core 5, emailed to myself via Thunderbird. It appears that Thunderbird strips the executable flag coming back in, so I have to upgrade my privileges to be able to execute a shell script, even when sending and receiving under the same user account.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to fear. I'm 9eveloping my own open so4rce reverse-engineere9 implementation of the NotePa9 format, calle9 OpenPa9. I estimate that I've got abo4t 96% of the format fig4re9 o4t. As a matter of fact, my post here was compose9 originally in OpenPa9 then copie9 an9 paste9 into the Slash9ot comment s4bmission page.
* * * * *
Oh, squi9beaks!
Not only did they copy Windows 95's taskbar /start menu /system tray model, they did it in 1984. That's some f*ckin' nerve.
Yes, it's highly impressive. When it's working.
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2203101/lse-technical-glitch
* * * * *
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
—A. Whitney Brown
And how, exactly, is this different from the Windows user support sites? Having spent endless hours on both Linux and Windows help forums (and I'm on the Windows help forums because Microsoft or a Windows app vendor said "screw you, I've got your money already, no soup for you") I see little difference except that you eventually generally get a solution on the Linux forums, whereas on the Windows forums you're often dismissed with a "just wait for the Service Pack or app upgrade" kind of response, after being mocked for being on an older version of Windows than the respondee.
You know, this is going to come as an absolute shock to you, but many Mac users view Windows user attitudes from precisely the same perspective that you view Linux users. To them, Windows people are amazingly condescending and arrogant. I've experienced this myself aplenty from folks who apparently believe that their Microsoft Partner designation gets them the key to the same executive washroom that the Almighty uses.
You must not hang around the same Linux help forums I do, where fixes come relatively quickly and the community is very very helpful. How much would you care to bet that doing multi-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) multimedia production with multi-platform-supported network services, my support issues are a tad more extreme that this Mr. J. User you postulate? Yet, my experience with the Windows vs. Linux "hard core" community has been just exactly the opposite of yours.
* * * * *
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. —Benjamin Franklin
Conveniently ignoring the fact that for each and every one of the 20,000 folks who flooded their online survey saying they wanted Linux, Dell has sold 2 systems by all accounts (Dell won't confirm publicly, but word is out). In the first 100 days.
You know what? Even the quality of the trolling has gone downhill since the Waggener Edstrom subcontractors started hanging around here. Why are they here? They must not be getting enough traction out of MySpace or Digg or something.
* * * * * *
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth. —Dave Barry
Dear Motorist:
You have received this traffic citation, on this sol of 13 Smoogna, 1126, issued by the city of Oxia Palus in the county of Planitia, Mars, for the following indicated violations.
__ Following too closely to a boulder.
__ Failure to light headlamps within 5 sols of sundown.
__ Parallel parking on inside slope of crater.
__ Driving in planet-wide reduced visibility conditions without running lights.
__ Failure to signal turn to JPL.
You will find information on the back of this form concerning fees and places to pay your fine. Thank you, and remember: "Unsafe driving will make your fellow Martian motorists see red."
Could you put something up there that folks might actually want to watch? Oh, I don't know...something like a top ten hit show that isn't a game show or football game? Seriously, who's interested in a canned version of Monday Night Football? And sorry, as much as I love Howie Mandel, I'm not going to go hunt down a startup non-iTunes portal just to watch a silly game show. I'd watch a 40-year-old episode of The Gong Show or even Simon's Greatest Diss Hits from American Idol, but there's no way I'm getting excited about Deal or No Deal. Sorry.
_ _ _
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
—Josh Billings
Except you can't. I'm desperately searching Google, MSN and Yahoo! for anything about my county's local bond election. Or that big, scandalous local meth bust. Nothin' doin'. Only place on the Web is, ironically enough, the local paper's Website. And then you only get a 2-paragraph teaser. To get the full story: subscribe to the print edition.
The Web is making a huge dent on national/international print publications. Newsweek is a pale shadow of its former self, for example. But locally, we've gone from two local papers to three and from no locally-oriented/published magazines to one and the page count is going up for everybody. Print-oriented graphic arts-related businesses are growing steadily (I've got more local competition for print-related work now than I had in '98 when I started my agency). All the Web-only designers I knew locally five years ago have dried up and blown away, like last year's tumbleweeds. In 2000, a skilled designer could make a decent living in my Web-starved, monied area doing only Web work for local merchants wanting an Internet presence. Not any more. After the Net bubble burst, things have never completely recovered.
Local merchants found that they still had to advertise in local print publications, radio stations and cable TV because the Web is really, really lousy at geographic targeting. Hardly a one of my clients needs to reach folks in Poland or Nigeria, but on the Web you really can't filter for that. They really want to reach 75% of everybody within a 10 mile radius of the ol' brick-and-mortar. The Web completely sucks at delivering that kind of audience. Especially considering that even by 2012 30% of US households still won't have broadband. Ever try doing YouTube over dialup? But everybody's got a mailbox. So, direct mail's also doing just swell, thanks for asking.
Hey, I've got no great stock in print. I do Web, TV, radio, print, signage, packaging, POP, whatever. But the Net's always been a problematic place for those folks who want to get an ad message out to a lot of people but restricted by geographic area. Google's doing great with online advertising, but they're pretty much the exception that proves the rule and they're feeding off the 3% of U.S. businesses who actually care about reaching the entire planet in one ad banner. For the overwhelming majority of my 150+ business clients, if somebody further away than 20 miles sees the ad, you've just wasted money.
I would suggest the reason your product might not be going gangbusters in the print-oriented market is that mature, robust products have existed for years and it's a real tough sell to peddle a product that doesn't have Adobe or Quark's logo on it. Or you're just trying to sell to the wrong segment of the print/publishing industry. Even the mighty Corel couldn't break into the market in a meaningful way, as technically advanced as CorelDraw was over Illustrator between '97 and '02 (and even Photopaint over Photoshop, IMHO). As a former imagesetter/prepress guy, the only new software product for the print industry I've seen since 1995 which got me excited is Quite's Quite A Box of Tricks. And it's been obsoleted by Acrobat Pro for a couple of years now.
Even email seems to be falling by the wayside. Last week, for the umpteenth time in the past year, another client told me to not bother trying to email them. "Too much spam to deal with. I don't have time for it. You've got my cell number." And so it goes.
Seriously, the cell phone is what's finally going to kill dead tree publishing. When you can get an e-read of the local paper, on the road, on something that will fit in your shirt pocket and doesn't weigh five pounds, then you've got something.
_ _ _
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.
—Benjamin Franklin
Here's a tally of my local graphic arts/publishing/advertising-related colleagues (within a 10 mile radius of my ad agency), off the top of my head, based on my personal familiarly with the shop setups. I'm in a small suburban community just outside Dallas/Ft. Worth. Where I just list "Mac" or "Windows" it means that all the creative/graphic arts production computers are of that platform. Note that many of these companies (especially the newspapers) run other departments (such as Accounting) on other platforms.
1. Daily newspaper: 5 workstations. Mac
2. Daily newspaper: 4 workstations. Mac
3. Weekly newspaper: 4 workstations. 3 Macs, 1 Windows
4. Monthly magazine: 2 workstations. Mac
5. Print shop: 3 workstations. 2 Macs, 1 Windows
6. Print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
7. Weekly newspaper: 7 workstations. Mac
8. Print shop: 2 workstations. Mac
9. Design studio: 2 workstations. Mac
10. Commercial print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
11. PR agency, 2 workstations. Windows
12. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
13. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
14. Advertising agency (me). 5 workstations: 1 Linux, 1 Windows, 3 Macs.
Just as a note, the PR agency which has two Windows machines vends almost all of their graphic design work to other shops, although they tried real hard the first year in business to do all their design work in-house. The weekly newspaper which has the one Windows machine is finding that the Windows PC is currently being unused, although this changes from time to time depending on whether they have any designers currently employed who feel.
I used to do a detailed survey of graphic arts-related businesses and their platform choices for the Dallas/Ft. Worth area many years ago, generated by laboriously calling all 900+ businesses listed in the phone directories. The tally was always 98%+ in favor of Mac, but I haven't done the survey in years now. Anecdotally, I interface with some 50 other pre-press shops and publishing houses (where I send the ads I design for clients) and I still get the impression that the industry is overwhelmingly Mac. One reason this may be is that Windows has had some well-documented flaws in Microsoft's Postscript drivers (starting with WindowsXP) and also in the way Windows handles ICC color profile files. Several of the pre-press houses I deal with have Windows machines solely for the purpose of handling CorelDraw files from customers; the front-end machines to the imagesetters are invariably Mac.
I'm not sure who in the graphic arts industry is keeping platform talleys these days. Used to be that the PIA (Printing Industries of America) was a good source of information, along with Seybold Reports. I've had a Seybold subscription in recent years but not seen any hard stats on graphic arts platform usage.
Page layout app of choice still seems to be QuarkXPress over InDesign with about 60% of the market for those folks who do complex page builds with lots of text (newspapers and magazines, for example). InDesign seems to be rapidly catching up, however. Most popular vector program still seems to be Illustrator and, as always, Photoshop is the preferred bitmap editor.
Now, for Web work, however, where no cross-media placement is involved, Windows machines seem to dominate. This is just a guess, but I'd say that Windows has 80%+ of the local Web designers' platforms that I'm familiar with.
_ _ _
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
—Jane Wagner
I live in Texas now. From what I've read, the reason that patent trolls like to file in the Eastern Texas District Federal Court in Marshall is that juries have historically been very sympathetic to patent holding plaintiffs, for whatever reason. The first cases filed in Marshall IIRC involved Texas Instruments and of course TI was counting on the home court advantage (although why Marshall instead of a Federal court closer to Dallas is beyond me. Maybe it's the lure of the Annual Fire Ant Festival). Apparently after TI's win(s), Marshall became known as the place to file if you had a patent case.
Having also lived in California, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and Alabama, I'm pretty sure I could find several other Federal district courts in which to file in those states and get pretty much the same sort of jury, but Marshall was there first and got the reputation. Plus, they have the Fire Ant Festival and those other states don't. Never underestimate the draw of the Fire Ant Festival.
Interesting page here explaining the situation with Marshall:
http://www.marshall-chamber.com/pages/inthenews.php
_ _ _ _ _
A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths.
—Stephen Wright
There's been a "separate" plugin available from the GIMP Plugin Registry for a couple of years now, which I've been using to convert my photos for professional high-end print jobs. Being a plugin, it's not as handy as built-in CMYK conversion but it's not difficult to use and gives decent results.
"An idle Excel spreadsheet is the Devil's workshop."
Hey, I've walked from Australia to Austria and except for a couple of damp parts towards the middle it wasn't that bad.
* * * * * *
"Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!"
--Steve Martin
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=l h
I wouldn't be so quick on the draw there. I've heard many people on forums complain about Vista apparently throwing up a big, ugly hand into the middle of non-DRM content usage. Here's a typical post, from http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/01/25/vista-con tent-protection-drm-wont-impact-music-production-s ays-microsoft-and-you/ :
* * * * *
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
--Charles W. Eliot
Old article on Slashdot:
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/06/05/0548225.s html?tid=3
Summary: Software Publisher's Association and other groups estimated in 2005 that 16% of all computer users were on Macs.
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All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
--Jane Wagner
Note: the following joke is subject to final script approval by Mr. Tom Cruise, in accordance with his production company's contract with United Artists.
OK, see, this Scientologist walks into a bar with a frog on his head. And the bartender says, "HEY...what the hell is THAT?!" And the frog says, "Well, I'm not sure exactly, but it started out as a wart on my ass."
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The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
--David Ogilvy
In fact, you never really said anything at all.
In fact, it is the only one that meets the requirements discussed. No cookie for you.
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No man is an island, but many people are atolls.
--Unknown
And, interestingly enough, to get at your friends' magazine, I have to download a: PDF. Say, think there's a reason for that? I'll give you a hint: fonts.
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The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
Suggestion: Try upgrading those slow machines to the newer Intel 386 CPUs. You'll get much better performance. Or even go to the cutting edge and get some circa 2002 AMD Athlon 1200s (like my current workstation) with a rompin' stompin' 512 megs of RAM. I've never had a PDF take longer than 15 seconds to open with this thing, and even that PDF was an 11" x 17" poster with a CMYK TIFF image completely covering the background, another 15 CMYK 300dpi images embedded, 5 logos, and saved to PDF/X-3, one of least-squeezed subformats you can choose from. In fact, since I process PDFs for the publishing industry, virtually every PDF I deal with is somewhere between 5x-20x the size of the PDFs that you folks in Enterprise come across, yet I've never had a PDF take longer than about 15 seconds to open. I even run the older Acrobat 5 under WINE on Linux with a plugin or two that the average civilian would never have and it never takes longer than 15 seconds to open massive, CMYK-clogged PDFs.
Now, if you wanna talk about something that's slow and impossible to use, let's talk about Microsoft Office formats. I've got a Publisher file from last year that 3 different Publisher owners couldn't open for me. I couldn't open it in my Office 2000-era version of Publisher (even after the creator saved a supposedly 2000-compatible version). We know it didn't get mangled on transit, because I made a copy and shipped it back to the originator and she could open the copy just fine in her Publisher. But for me and two other colleagues who had various versions of Publisher installed, it might as well have been Martian cuneiform. The 4th guy finally did manage to crack it. How's that for portability? 3 out of 5 versions of Publisher can't even open Publisher files created on another system...even after you make up-versions and down-versions.
Here's a quote from the Submissions Spec Sheet of a national magazine I built an ad for recently that pretty much sums it up for the commercial printing/publishing industry. Minor variations on this can be found on the Submissions Guidelines pages of virtually every magazine and newspaper on the planet:
My note: here they mean raw, completely unformatted text except forline breaks separating paragraphs. You might as well use Notepad as Word.
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Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.
--Dave Barry
Apparently it's the current print edition of 'PC World' that ran the article. I still can't find an online version, but this blog references it:
http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/ t526459.html
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Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
--Josh Billings
The current print edition of 'PC Magazine' (article apparently not on the Web edition) compared Vista to XP on eight common apps/tasks (Photoshop being one of them). IIRC, Vista was faster (significantly, if I recall) on two tasks and slower by anywhere from 7% to 23% on the other six.
I was just thumbing through the print edition at the local bookstore and don't have a copy with me. Perhaps someone else here has a subscription and can give us a recap, as I don't recall the exact apps/tasks tested, just that Photoshop was one app that was significantly slower on Vista, doing that particular task(s). Enough that pro graphic artists (such as myself) might think twice about it.
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A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.
--W.C. Fields
It will allow me to save the archive to disk, then extract the shell script and run it without altering permissions. What Thunderbird won't allow me to do is execute the embedded shell script directly; it will pass it off to the default archive manager but my manager will only allow me save the script or look at it in my default text editor. I could certainly configure the manager to run the script but that's not the default behavior out of the box.
This, however, is a far cry from the last few Windows malware cleanups I've had to do for clients, friends and families who insist that they did no active downloading/unzipping of anything to get hit (and most of them are smart enough not to click on attachments from unknown sources). I've seen Java "dropper"-type malware get past my AV on first install (merely surfing to a Web page), but get flagged on subsequent activity. You always wonder if there is more stuff getting by that the AV isn't noticing.
A surprising number of folks are still on Win98/Win2K and just refuse to upgrade (no matter what I tell them), so I figure I'll still be fielding requests to fix drive-by infections for a few years to come).
I tried pretty much the same thing (both with a tar'd shell script and an RPM package) under KDE 3.5.x (I forget which exact version, it's been a few weeks ago and I've upgraded to FC6 now) on Fedora Core 5, emailed to myself via Thunderbird. It appears that Thunderbird strips the executable flag coming back in, so I have to upgrade my privileges to be able to execute a shell script, even when sending and receiving under the same user account.
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I am still learning.
--Michelangelo
The new look will be translucent fur.
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You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.
--Mark Twain