These subscription models aren't bad for businesses which use these products. When you employ 100 artists, like at a major game studio, it's probably easier to simply rent your creative software. It's not like there's any question about using something else. Likewise, it's perhaps not bad for an individual who makes a living with that software. It's easier to pay a lower rental fee each month than worrying about bigger upgrade costs.
Where it really hurts is for people who want to learn, or dabble, or who are using it part-time for fun. Previously, you could just pick up a version and use it forever. The upfront cost was high, but you know you could use that from then on. Now, you're in it monthly, and when you stop paying, you can't use it. It's also harder for people who are fine with buying a version and then using that version for the next decade or so. For instance, I'm using MS Office 2010, and it's perfectly fine. I've go zero incentive to upgrade, and will probably wait until it's no longer supported by security patches.
Affinity Photo looks pretty nice, and for a great price. I've used Corel PhotoPaint for years, and as far as I can tell, it pretty much has feature parity with Photoshop. It has the benefit of coming with CorelDraw, a vector illustration program, which I find useful for some design work.
It doesn't really matter, though. The artists who have used PS for years will continue to use PS, because that's what they've been using forever. And new artists are trained on PS because "that's what everyone uses". Honestly, I'm not sure that the Adobe near-monopoly will ever be broken, or at least in the foreseeable future. Same with Autodesk software.
I feel fortunate that two software productsI rely on (first for my own projects, now professionally), Corel Suite (Draw, Paint) and Cakewalk Sonar are still available as regular purchased projects. They pretty much both have feature parity with the "big" tools, and really only suffer from not being "the standard that everyone uses." If you're able and willing to move away from that standard, there ARE good choices available.
For some commercial entities, I understand that's not a realistic option. When you hire experienced industry professional, it's likely they already know and are expecting to use Pro Tools or Photoshop. It would probably cost much more to retrain people, and you'd lose compatibility with a large amount of your history, which, because you rent your software, you could no longer access.
I own a copy of Adobe Audition for audio mixing, but I left it at the version just before everything went to a rental model. If I ever find a product as capable as Audition, I'll be switching, but there's very little competition in that space, unfortunately.
Sorry, but Adobe is the one that does the fucking in that relationship. The world's artists collectively decided that nothing Adobe does can ever drive them from Photoshop, so every month, bend over, pants down...
[...] far too many instances of the U.S. Army committing outrages against various Indian tribes can be documented. A number of these were explicitly genocidal in intent. It is not the intention of this author to deny that simple fact.
You are generalizing way beyond your cited paper's conclusions.
Hmm, yeah, the correction was worded poorly. I didn't mean to imply that atrocities didn't occur in general. But I was specifically referencing a well-known hoax story (which, looking now, I didn't mention specifically). Obviously, the US still has a very spotted history in terms of its treatment of native peoples.
Thanks for the information, DNS-and-BIND. Correction: US attacking Native Indians was apparently a complete hoax, deliberately fabricated by Ward Churchill. Why did I not know this?
I really do wonder, though... would the Old World folks have acted any differently if they'd understood that going to the New World would pretty much obliterate the locals through disease?
My feeling is that it would be unlikely to change their policy, at least by those in power.
Many people tended to view subjugation or even extermination of "lesser" peoples as their divine right. That attitude is pervasive even in relatively modern times, as with WW2-era Nazis or Japanese and their attitudes about races they viewed as inferior to their own. And I shouldn't give the Allied powers a pass either, such as with the British subjugation of India and the middle east, or the French and Dutch colonies in the Far East. And I believe there is historical evidence the US army deliberately used germ warfare against Native Americans in one case. Sadly, empathy for tribes outside of one's own has not historically been one of humanity's bright points.
In fairness, contact between long separated peoples was basically inevitable once global exploration and trade became a thing. There's really no way to effectively quarantine a large population like that, at least in the long term. A single shipwrecked sailor is probably all it takes to trigger an epidemic.
That doesn't take into account technologies which penetrate cloud cover, like infrared and high resolution terrain mapping radar. Your argument about "chunky" images may have been true a few decades ago, but I'd be willing to bet that modern military spy sats have excellent optics, given how good even civilian ones are these days. And since when do military services need to bribe each other with a briefcase full of cash to get up-to-date satellite intelligence? You just need to have enough stars on your uniform, or be placed highly enough in the government.
That being said, I think you hit on the correct answer, if not via the correct line of reasoning. The dominant feature of a spyplane is its flexibility in deployment. Any competent enemy will know exactly when spy satellites are passing overhead, being easily observed and predictable in motion. A spyplane can provide very focused reconnaissance whenever and however military planners want.
This is confusing to me. What exactly are you expecting your UI to do for you while the page is loading, make you a pizza?
I expect it to scroll up and down. I wouldn't turn down a pizza, though.
A little spinny icon indicating the page hasn't finished loading having a stutter is of no consequence compared to handling an input.
To be clearer, when a page is loading, Chrome was noticeably stuttering while scrolling the page as it loaded, while Firefox's scrolling remained silky smooth throughout. That's the "UI" I was talking about. The smoother scrolling action makes a huge perceptual difference to me in Firefox's performance, even if it didn't actually load the page faster.
"I actually tried out Chrome for a bit after Mozilla pulled it's Mr. Robot stunt..."
Wow that actually had an impact on you?
No it fucking didn't.
I actually just happened to spot the add-on in my browser shortly after this occurred, purely by chance. It's certainly not like I scan my add-ons regularly. My bad luck. I had no idea what it was, and thought I might have picked up some malware (the contributors were hidden due to a UI that didn't wrap). It was early enough that there was very little information about it. I don't watch Mr. Robot, so I didn't get the reference. I eventually tracked down some queries in a Mozilla bug listing, and later got more info via Reddit. So, yes, it actually caused me some concern, and forced me to waste time tracking down answers.
It was a stupid, childish stunt, and I was disturbed that Mozilla would install an add-on that looked like a damned piece of malware. In fact, I submitted a story to Slashdot about this before it hit the mainstream press, and naturally enough, the editors ignored it, not wanting to break a story on their own, I guess.
Fortunately, Mozilla apologized and promised a review of procedures. Even so, I've turned off Mozilla "experiments", or whatever they were called.
I actually tried out Chrome for a bit after Mozilla pulled it's Mr. Robot stunt, but came back to Firefox after noticing how much better it performed than Chrome, which was somewhat surprising to me. I had assumed they were at performance parity. At this point, I think Mozilla has the top performing browser by metrics that tend to matter in real life. The one I notice the most is that Firefox's UI rarely stutters when loading a page, while Chrome hitches and hangs in short bursts, making things feel sluggish. I think that makes a huge difference in the perception of speed and performance.
Tabs switch almost instantly for me, and that's on a nine year old PC with a moderately slow internet connection. So while I'm glad Mozilla is looking at important things like performance (instead of yet another pointless UI revamp), it almost seems unnecessary at this point. Has anyone else noticed any sort of delay when switching tabs?
You realize you need a lot of money to hire engineers for R&D, right? This is just a click-bait way to describe it. Obviously, we'll see what the results are, but it sounds like they're fairly serious about ramping up e-vehicle product lines.
So, Windows-based networks can cohabit with Mac and Linux devices just fine, but Linux-based networks can't do this? That seems a little hard to believe.
I think it depends on where you are in the USA as to whether solar makes economic sense. It works better to break those things down on a state-by-state level, given how geographically diverse the USA is. A number of states have vast tracts of desert country in which sizeable populations live. It would be hard to imagine why solar wouldn't be very practical in a typically sunny environment, as it corresponds with peak usage during the day to run all those air conditioners.
A ZIP code is just a bit of additional authentication that pre-dates a proper chip-and-pin system. It's a simple "what you know" test that a credit card thief may not know. Gas purchasing is apparently a very common use of stolen credit cards. As soon as chip readers are more ubiquitous, hopefully that stop-gap measure will go away.
The sooner we can get rid of the idiocy of signing as an authentication or verification, the better. It's just outdated and is nothing but security theatre at this point.
Also, apparently the rule for Canadians is this:
If prompted for your ZIP code, just enter the three digits of your postal code plus two zeros. So for example, if your postal code is A2B 3C4, the 5 digit number you should enter is 23400
Yep, I totally called this about a month or two ago. Too lazy to look it up though. And of course, it's not like I exactly needed to be Nostradamus to predict this either.
Brought to you by the same type of idiot who gave us "New Coke."
This question is one I've genuinely struggled with... should private companies refuse to do business with totalitarian regimes like China? I used to think "yes", but how well did that really work out for us with Cuba? Refusing to engage in commerce doesn't seem to meaningfully affect regime change any more than bombing cities won WWII (at least by itself) - it mostly just makes people even more miserable.
In the case of Apple, it's not like refusing to allow iCloud services to Chinese citizens will somehow make them immune from government surveillance. After all, you *already* are required to have a government-snooping app installed right on your phone. It's apparently the law in China that a Chinese-owned firm is required to operate any sort of service there. It would be more newsworthy if this was NOT happening.
Earlier Xbox games could have used some better guidance or standards regarding distribution of points. Some games, like Enchanted Arms or King Kong, basically just gave you 1000 points spread out over the course of the main story. A little too easy, unless you're collecting points for their own sake. Other games like Blue Dragon were notoriously stingy, only giving you a paltry 150 points or so after beating the game which may have taken dozens of hours. The rest of the points were locked away behind ridiculously grindy tasks that didn't seem much like fun to me.
I've been playing through the Halo Master Chief collection recently, and they seems to have struck a good balance in that game, with lots of small achievements you expect to get for normal playthrough, but also fun achievements for doing interesting things, beating mission par times, and so on.
Gamerscore is one of Microsoft's simpler but more brilliant ideas. It's a nice psychological payoff with minimal costs of development, and the fact that it's been copied by other platforms demonstrates how well such a simple concept works in practice. I don't fuss about it too much, but I admit I enjoy seeing achievements popping up, and knowing my gamerscore is going up. It's hard to explain why it's as rewarding as it is, but it just works.
I get charged a pretty reasonable rate for my utilities. I see no reason why a fiber optic network should be significantly harder or more expensive to maintain than a bunch of water or sewer pipes, or electric lines.
I see a reasonable case for eminent domain here. I think municipalities should be allowed to pay market price to the ISPs for the fiber they've laid and set up last mile connections in local communities if they want to do so.
Nice conspiracy theory, but it's not just reviewers. It's the general public as well. Many Slashdot geeks simply can't fathom why average people actually like Apple products. Almost every geek I know turns their nose up at it. The walled garden, the lack of customization, inability to root, and on and on and on. We buy Android for those particular features, and so we can trick out our phones however we want.
And every normal smartphone user I run across enjoys their iPhone. Seriously, they don't care about the missing headphone jack, or the inability to replace the battery themselves. They just don't. All their family and friends use iPhones, and they all use Facetime, etc.
It's sort of similar to Facebook. Geeks like us tend to hate it. Average people love it, because it's simple and convenient for them. .
Slashdot Mirror
These subscription models aren't bad for businesses which use these products. When you employ 100 artists, like at a major game studio, it's probably easier to simply rent your creative software. It's not like there's any question about using something else. Likewise, it's perhaps not bad for an individual who makes a living with that software. It's easier to pay a lower rental fee each month than worrying about bigger upgrade costs.
Where it really hurts is for people who want to learn, or dabble, or who are using it part-time for fun. Previously, you could just pick up a version and use it forever. The upfront cost was high, but you know you could use that from then on. Now, you're in it monthly, and when you stop paying, you can't use it. It's also harder for people who are fine with buying a version and then using that version for the next decade or so. For instance, I'm using MS Office 2010, and it's perfectly fine. I've go zero incentive to upgrade, and will probably wait until it's no longer supported by security patches.
Affinity Photo looks pretty nice, and for a great price. I've used Corel PhotoPaint for years, and as far as I can tell, it pretty much has feature parity with Photoshop. It has the benefit of coming with CorelDraw, a vector illustration program, which I find useful for some design work.
It doesn't really matter, though. The artists who have used PS for years will continue to use PS, because that's what they've been using forever. And new artists are trained on PS because "that's what everyone uses". Honestly, I'm not sure that the Adobe near-monopoly will ever be broken, or at least in the foreseeable future. Same with Autodesk software.
I feel fortunate that two software productsI rely on (first for my own projects, now professionally), Corel Suite (Draw, Paint) and Cakewalk Sonar are still available as regular purchased projects. They pretty much both have feature parity with the "big" tools, and really only suffer from not being "the standard that everyone uses." If you're able and willing to move away from that standard, there ARE good choices available.
For some commercial entities, I understand that's not a realistic option. When you hire experienced industry professional, it's likely they already know and are expecting to use Pro Tools or Photoshop. It would probably cost much more to retrain people, and you'd lose compatibility with a large amount of your history, which, because you rent your software, you could no longer access.
I own a copy of Adobe Audition for audio mixing, but I left it at the version just before everything went to a rental model. If I ever find a product as capable as Audition, I'll be switching, but there's very little competition in that space, unfortunately.
Sorry, but Adobe is the one that does the fucking in that relationship. The world's artists collectively decided that nothing Adobe does can ever drive them from Photoshop, so every month, bend over, pants down...
And in an ironic twist of fate, 50MB animated GIFs replaced 1MB MP4s for short silent video clips.
Thus proving that there are never a shortage of idiots who will insist on using the wrong tool for the job at hand.
Stop being reasonable. You're completely missing the point of the click-bait headlines.
Next, contract a new Fable title
Sure, why not?
https://www.gamespot.com/artic...
From the link you supplied:
You are generalizing way beyond your cited paper's conclusions.
Hmm, yeah, the correction was worded poorly. I didn't mean to imply that atrocities didn't occur in general. But I was specifically referencing a well-known hoax story (which, looking now, I didn't mention specifically). Obviously, the US still has a very spotted history in terms of its treatment of native peoples.
Thanks for the information, DNS-and-BIND. Correction: US attacking Native Indians was apparently a complete hoax, deliberately fabricated by Ward Churchill. Why did I not know this?
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/p...
Just goes to show that a compelling story spread much faster and farther than a subsequent retraction or correction.
I really do wonder, though... would the Old World folks have acted any differently if they'd understood that going to the New World would pretty much obliterate the locals through disease?
My feeling is that it would be unlikely to change their policy, at least by those in power.
Many people tended to view subjugation or even extermination of "lesser" peoples as their divine right. That attitude is pervasive even in relatively modern times, as with WW2-era Nazis or Japanese and their attitudes about races they viewed as inferior to their own. And I shouldn't give the Allied powers a pass either, such as with the British subjugation of India and the middle east, or the French and Dutch colonies in the Far East. And I believe there is historical evidence the US army deliberately used germ warfare against Native Americans in one case. Sadly, empathy for tribes outside of one's own has not historically been one of humanity's bright points.
In fairness, contact between long separated peoples was basically inevitable once global exploration and trade became a thing. There's really no way to effectively quarantine a large population like that, at least in the long term. A single shipwrecked sailor is probably all it takes to trigger an epidemic.
That doesn't take into account technologies which penetrate cloud cover, like infrared and high resolution terrain mapping radar. Your argument about "chunky" images may have been true a few decades ago, but I'd be willing to bet that modern military spy sats have excellent optics, given how good even civilian ones are these days. And since when do military services need to bribe each other with a briefcase full of cash to get up-to-date satellite intelligence? You just need to have enough stars on your uniform, or be placed highly enough in the government.
That being said, I think you hit on the correct answer, if not via the correct line of reasoning. The dominant feature of a spyplane is its flexibility in deployment. Any competent enemy will know exactly when spy satellites are passing overhead, being easily observed and predictable in motion. A spyplane can provide very focused reconnaissance whenever and however military planners want.
This is confusing to me. What exactly are you expecting your UI to do for you while the page is loading, make you a pizza?
I expect it to scroll up and down. I wouldn't turn down a pizza, though.
A little spinny icon indicating the page hasn't finished loading having a stutter is of no consequence compared to handling an input.
To be clearer, when a page is loading, Chrome was noticeably stuttering while scrolling the page as it loaded, while Firefox's scrolling remained silky smooth throughout. That's the "UI" I was talking about. The smoother scrolling action makes a huge perceptual difference to me in Firefox's performance, even if it didn't actually load the page faster.
"I actually tried out Chrome for a bit after Mozilla pulled it's Mr. Robot stunt..."
Wow that actually had an impact on you?
No it fucking didn't.
I actually just happened to spot the add-on in my browser shortly after this occurred, purely by chance. It's certainly not like I scan my add-ons regularly. My bad luck. I had no idea what it was, and thought I might have picked up some malware (the contributors were hidden due to a UI that didn't wrap). It was early enough that there was very little information about it. I don't watch Mr. Robot, so I didn't get the reference. I eventually tracked down some queries in a Mozilla bug listing, and later got more info via Reddit. So, yes, it actually caused me some concern, and forced me to waste time tracking down answers.
It was a stupid, childish stunt, and I was disturbed that Mozilla would install an add-on that looked like a damned piece of malware. In fact, I submitted a story to Slashdot about this before it hit the mainstream press, and naturally enough, the editors ignored it, not wanting to break a story on their own, I guess.
Fortunately, Mozilla apologized and promised a review of procedures. Even so, I've turned off Mozilla "experiments", or whatever they were called.
I actually tried out Chrome for a bit after Mozilla pulled it's Mr. Robot stunt, but came back to Firefox after noticing how much better it performed than Chrome, which was somewhat surprising to me. I had assumed they were at performance parity. At this point, I think Mozilla has the top performing browser by metrics that tend to matter in real life. The one I notice the most is that Firefox's UI rarely stutters when loading a page, while Chrome hitches and hangs in short bursts, making things feel sluggish. I think that makes a huge difference in the perception of speed and performance.
Tabs switch almost instantly for me, and that's on a nine year old PC with a moderately slow internet connection. So while I'm glad Mozilla is looking at important things like performance (instead of yet another pointless UI revamp), it almost seems unnecessary at this point. Has anyone else noticed any sort of delay when switching tabs?
You realize you need a lot of money to hire engineers for R&D, right? This is just a click-bait way to describe it. Obviously, we'll see what the results are, but it sounds like they're fairly serious about ramping up e-vehicle product lines.
So, Windows-based networks can cohabit with Mac and Linux devices just fine, but Linux-based networks can't do this? That seems a little hard to believe.
If I was in a gunfight I might think twice about killing another human. But a bot? No hesitation whatsoever.
I'm pretty sure the bot feels nothing about the prospect of killing you as well.
Why "replace" and not "retrain" IT?
I think it depends on where you are in the USA as to whether solar makes economic sense. It works better to break those things down on a state-by-state level, given how geographically diverse the USA is. A number of states have vast tracts of desert country in which sizeable populations live. It would be hard to imagine why solar wouldn't be very practical in a typically sunny environment, as it corresponds with peak usage during the day to run all those air conditioners.
A ZIP code is just a bit of additional authentication that pre-dates a proper chip-and-pin system. It's a simple "what you know" test that a credit card thief may not know. Gas purchasing is apparently a very common use of stolen credit cards. As soon as chip readers are more ubiquitous, hopefully that stop-gap measure will go away.
The sooner we can get rid of the idiocy of signing as an authentication or verification, the better. It's just outdated and is nothing but security theatre at this point.
Also, apparently the rule for Canadians is this:
If prompted for your ZIP code, just enter the three digits of your postal code plus two zeros. So for example, if your postal code is A2B 3C4, the 5 digit number you should enter is 23400
Yep, I totally called this about a month or two ago. Too lazy to look it up though. And of course, it's not like I exactly needed to be Nostradamus to predict this either.
Brought to you by the same type of idiot who gave us "New Coke."
This question is one I've genuinely struggled with... should private companies refuse to do business with totalitarian regimes like China? I used to think "yes", but how well did that really work out for us with Cuba? Refusing to engage in commerce doesn't seem to meaningfully affect regime change any more than bombing cities won WWII (at least by itself) - it mostly just makes people even more miserable.
In the case of Apple, it's not like refusing to allow iCloud services to Chinese citizens will somehow make them immune from government surveillance. After all, you *already* are required to have a government-snooping app installed right on your phone. It's apparently the law in China that a Chinese-owned firm is required to operate any sort of service there. It would be more newsworthy if this was NOT happening.
Earlier Xbox games could have used some better guidance or standards regarding distribution of points. Some games, like Enchanted Arms or King Kong, basically just gave you 1000 points spread out over the course of the main story. A little too easy, unless you're collecting points for their own sake. Other games like Blue Dragon were notoriously stingy, only giving you a paltry 150 points or so after beating the game which may have taken dozens of hours. The rest of the points were locked away behind ridiculously grindy tasks that didn't seem much like fun to me.
I've been playing through the Halo Master Chief collection recently, and they seems to have struck a good balance in that game, with lots of small achievements you expect to get for normal playthrough, but also fun achievements for doing interesting things, beating mission par times, and so on.
Gamerscore is one of Microsoft's simpler but more brilliant ideas. It's a nice psychological payoff with minimal costs of development, and the fact that it's been copied by other platforms demonstrates how well such a simple concept works in practice. I don't fuss about it too much, but I admit I enjoy seeing achievements popping up, and knowing my gamerscore is going up. It's hard to explain why it's as rewarding as it is, but it just works.
I get charged a pretty reasonable rate for my utilities. I see no reason why a fiber optic network should be significantly harder or more expensive to maintain than a bunch of water or sewer pipes, or electric lines.
I see a reasonable case for eminent domain here. I think municipalities should be allowed to pay market price to the ISPs for the fiber they've laid and set up last mile connections in local communities if they want to do so.
Nice conspiracy theory, but it's not just reviewers. It's the general public as well. Many Slashdot geeks simply can't fathom why average people actually like Apple products. Almost every geek I know turns their nose up at it. The walled garden, the lack of customization, inability to root, and on and on and on. We buy Android for those particular features, and so we can trick out our phones however we want.
And every normal smartphone user I run across enjoys their iPhone. Seriously, they don't care about the missing headphone jack, or the inability to replace the battery themselves. They just don't. All their family and friends use iPhones, and they all use Facetime, etc.
It's sort of similar to Facebook. Geeks like us tend to hate it. Average people love it, because it's simple and convenient for them.
.