I've heard, I haven't personally, that some pros do use GIMP and CinePaint in concert with other FOOS. When I mentioned that GIMP does not have 16 bits of colour channel never mind 24, one said he used GIMP for most of his work then switched to CinePaint or another program to work on deeper colours.
Great. Good for him. Everybody else uses a standardized workflow based on the industry standard Adobe toolkit.
I don't think the UI is that much a valid criticism. You may not like the UI some software has but others do. This can be seen here on/., some like Windows, some OS X, and some the various desktops of Linux. There are photogs who even like Linux [photo.net].
First: "photog" sounds retarded. You don't want to sound retarded, do you?
Second: You can think whatever you like, but if it isn't within throwing distance of the industry standard, somebody who has a workflow established based on those industry standard tools can't use it. There's no fucking reason whatsoever for me to go use CinePaint when it requires me to use a whole 'nother OS, or to use Blender when it doesn't integrate with the rest of my tools. "Well, some people like it" is not a good fucking point to make when you're talking about how the industry works. Come on now, you're obviously a smart guy. Use your head.
Actually I think it's stupid to teach whatever program instead of the principles. Teach the principles and a person should be able to use whatever without too much training, but when teaching a specific application even an upgrade to a new version will require more training. Depending what it is I don't think it's too difficult to switch software, or OSes. As I said in my previous post I use OS X Leopard, I upgraded from Tiger a couple of weeks ago. And I switched to Tiger From Windows, which I've used since 3.x.
In a perfect world, you'd be spot-on. As-is, grads from new media programs are generally expected to hit the ground at a full-on sprint with the industry standard tools--and it's what the grads want to be learning on. Sure, use whatever you want for the non-major electives--that's where using that stuff might make a lot of sense. But don't waste a major's time with crap tools that aren't industry standard.
It's like teaching a programming class in D--yeah, the language is nice, but it's not what people use.
Should it be their responsibility? Of course not. I wish it never was. Is it often the responsibility of some schmuck? Yes, it very often is. And the fact that Photoshop contains the approximations has saved my ass at least twice that I can think of.
It's just one off-the-top-of-my-head point making light of Mr. Belits' regularly retarded asshattery that he loves to spew. He's not really worth more than that.
I tried CinePaint back when they still called it Film Gimp. It was a lot better than the Gimp in its core features, but it inherited its predecessor's shit UI and shit workflow. I haven't heard anything to suggest that that's changed, so I haven't spent any time with it. If I were going to be using nothing but Film Gimp I might consider it, but I actually use my tools in a novel (to OSS, anyway): in concert. I expect my tools to benefit my workflow, not hinder it by switching up everything and anything when I jump from (say) Photoshop to Illustrator.
Inkscape - meh. Yes, it's the SVG reference implementation for all intents and purposes--good for it, I don't care about its features if it sucks at presenting them. It's a clunky tool with a poor UI and--surprise surprise!--little to speak of in terms of horizontal integration. It'd be fine if I could do everything in Inkscape without any other tools, but that's a very rare occurrence.
Blender - eew. Internally it's not bad. The feature set is nice and it's a solid program. But...again...shit UI, shit workflow. No horizontal integration to speak of. I mean, hell. For example: I can modify a texture in Photoshop and see its effects propagate right to my textured 3D model in Maya. It's easy there. Such integration needs to be the standard with open source apps if they want to be taken seriously and it simply is not.
The capabilities of these programs are fine (CinePaint is head-and-shoulders better than the GIMP, which is probably praising with faint damns), it's just that their workflows all suck enormous amounts of donkey cock and I don't see their workflows improving anytime soon. Don't get me wrong: it's not that I can't do what I want with the open source tools, it's that doing it sucks with the open source tools. It takes longer and is more of a hassle. And, for burgeoning professionals in a university environment, having them not use industry-standard tools is mindfuckingly stupid. People always trot out CinePaint as "oh, look, people are using this IN INDUSTRY!"--great, go CinePaint, may you someday have all the success there is. But a hell of a lot more professionals are using ProTools, Premiere, After Effects, and other proprietary software packages, so it's pretty stupid not to teach what's actually used.
If you assume that the needs of the users are being met, all open-source has *many* advantagess that closed-source doesn't (auditability, ease of maintenance, transparency, lack of vendor lock-in.)
Because I don't assume that the needs of the users are met. I do graphics work. I've used both the open and closed ecosystems' products. The open ecosystem's products, to be pretty frank, suck.
If they were as good, great, use it. But they are not, and realistically speaking, almost certainly never will be. Ignoring that in favor of ideology is stupid.
I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying that recommending Moodle isn't particularly good as it doesn't actually address the requirements of a lot of organizations.
It's like Exchange--if it's not a drop-in replacement, it's probably Not Good Enough.
Blackboard already contains that common set, though--that's why the extensions to provide site security (and other stuff, like identification for our dining halls) are so easily bolted right in.
And you can't just switch this stuff out once it's in place, either. There's a lot of hardware around my campus that's marked "Bb"...
We're stuck with PeopleSoft too. I feel your pain.
A lot of places are using Blackboard for what I described, though. It's pretty excellent lock-in, but on the other hand it actually works very, very well.
Oh, in that case I agree entirely, and you have an excellent point. It's amazing how few people here get it - they're treating open source software as an end in and of itself, when it's getting shit done that really matters.
A "nothing but open source" policy is as terrible as a "no open source" policy. Use what's best for the job, not what fits your ideologies.
New media departments, for example, aren't going to switch to whatever bullshit the OSS world flogs when they have Maya/3DS Max, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Blender's good but nonstandard and nobody really uses it, the GIMP sucks for all the reasons everybody already knows, and Inkscape simply does not step to Illustrator.
It seems like most of the posters here have missed the point. Open source software at a university is not an end in and of itself. Getting the job done is.
Then it can't replace Blackboard at a hell of a lot of schools. Most schools that use Blackboard use it for student authentication with swipe cards and the like. That's not exactly something you can just forego.
Nobody whose opinion matters actually gives a shit if it's OMG FREE-LIBRE.
(No, this isn't trolling. It's simply the truth. Free software is not a goal of a university's IT department, getting a quality system is. The two may intersect or they may not as the case may be. In this case, GMail is a poor solution, but not because it's not open source--it's a poor solution because it doesn't effectively allow for horizontal integration. But most open source solutions suck at this, too.)
This is huge and vastly underestimated. Your goal should not be to transition to open source--that's just as bad as an all closed-source ecosystem. Your goal should be to transition to infrastructural openness so people can use what they want. If they want to use Office, great--just make sure that their documents save in ODF so everybody can access them, etc. etc.
You'll need to organize training for everyone. Twice. And you'll need a kick-ass help desk for everything from copying files to equivalents of obscure Excel formulas.
He's never prying Excel out of the hands of his accounting professors and to try to do so is fucking retarded. They simply won't do it and will continue to mandate Excel, which shoots holes in this entire game that the submitter wants to play.
He's not going to be doing this. I get the feeling that he's a helpdesk monkey with delusions of competence, though, seeing as how he doesn't even know the cost of his Microsoft licenses...
Agreed on policy (and on TeX, that should be virtually required for science students), but if you think wasting graphics classes' time on open source is worth it given all the other stuff that has to be covered, you're a little bit nuts. The open-source graphics world can't step to the proprietary, and until it can it should not be in the discussion.
Moodle does not do the same think as Blackboard. Course management is a very small part of what Blackboard does. For example, Blackboard provides distributed student authentication and the ability to interface with devices that aren't computers.
My university uses the system to authenticate student identification cards when they're swiped through doors and other resources around campus.
Because Apple computers are preposterously popular in education and the choices of the students should damn well be respected? (And that choice is made for good reason, they're easier to use and more secure than Windows, even if I personally dislike the UI.)
Moodle isn't an alternative to Blackboard except in the same way that a bicycle replaces a pickup truck. A lot of universities use Blackboard for far more than just classes. My university, for example, uses Blackboard for anything related to student access--if you swipe your card to enter a building, it authenticates against the Blackboard database.
The open source alternatives do not do this, and you aren't going to replace Blackboard just by having a class replacement. (And Moodle isn't very good, unfortunately. Has potential, but isn't living up to it.)
Except that they have an enormous pile of evidence that says without question that the Earth is warming and a large amount of circumstantial evidence that has convinced the overwhelming majority of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is happening.
Use your head. How can the human race dump untold amounts of crap into the air and not be causing a problem?
And what are these magical algorithms that only work in Java and C# but don't work in C/C++?
Anything that's based on reflection is trivial in Java or C# and impossible, frustrating, and in some cases not practically possible in C/C++.
You have clearly never done any embedded work. You think a customer is going to want to pay the extra money for a device that runs Java instead of one that does the same thing and runs on a $1 micro running C/C++? Furthermore if you seel 100,000 pieces, every $1 of hardware is $100,000.
Seeing as how a ton of embedded is moving toward Java and Mono, yes, I do think they are. Yes, C has its niche writing code for elevator controllers. It's having its lunch eaten beyond that preposterously-bare-metal case.
Depends on the application. Write a CAD tool in Java and see if customers don't mind it when their compilations take an extra hour to finish
Use JNI or P/Invoke to marshal native code where speed and optimizations are important. That's not your GUI level. GUI = managed, math-grinding logic = native--although these days, an optimizing JVM like HotSpot or the new Linear IL engine in Mono are both competitive with C/C++ in terms of performance for many operations; it's really quite amazing how efficient Java and Mono are becoming.
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I've heard, I haven't personally, that some pros do use GIMP and CinePaint in concert with other FOOS. When I mentioned that GIMP does not have 16 bits of colour channel never mind 24, one said he used GIMP for most of his work then switched to CinePaint or another program to work on deeper colours.
Great. Good for him. Everybody else uses a standardized workflow based on the industry standard Adobe toolkit.
I don't think the UI is that much a valid criticism. You may not like the UI some software has but others do. This can be seen here on /., some like Windows, some OS X, and some the various desktops of Linux. There are photogs who even like Linux [photo.net].
First: "photog" sounds retarded. You don't want to sound retarded, do you?
Second: You can think whatever you like, but if it isn't within throwing distance of the industry standard, somebody who has a workflow established based on those industry standard tools can't use it. There's no fucking reason whatsoever for me to go use CinePaint when it requires me to use a whole 'nother OS, or to use Blender when it doesn't integrate with the rest of my tools. "Well, some people like it" is not a good fucking point to make when you're talking about how the industry works. Come on now, you're obviously a smart guy. Use your head.
Actually I think it's stupid to teach whatever program instead of the principles. Teach the principles and a person should be able to use whatever without too much training, but when teaching a specific application even an upgrade to a new version will require more training. Depending what it is I don't think it's too difficult to switch software, or OSes. As I said in my previous post I use OS X Leopard, I upgraded from Tiger a couple of weeks ago. And I switched to Tiger From Windows, which I've used since 3.x.
In a perfect world, you'd be spot-on. As-is, grads from new media programs are generally expected to hit the ground at a full-on sprint with the industry standard tools--and it's what the grads want to be learning on. Sure, use whatever you want for the non-major electives--that's where using that stuff might make a lot of sense. But don't waste a major's time with crap tools that aren't industry standard.
It's like teaching a programming class in D--yeah, the language is nice, but it's not what people use.
Should it be their responsibility? Of course not. I wish it never was. Is it often the responsibility of some schmuck? Yes, it very often is. And the fact that Photoshop contains the approximations has saved my ass at least twice that I can think of.
It's just one off-the-top-of-my-head point making light of Mr. Belits' regularly retarded asshattery that he loves to spew. He's not really worth more than that.
I tried CinePaint back when they still called it Film Gimp. It was a lot better than the Gimp in its core features, but it inherited its predecessor's shit UI and shit workflow. I haven't heard anything to suggest that that's changed, so I haven't spent any time with it. If I were going to be using nothing but Film Gimp I might consider it, but I actually use my tools in a novel (to OSS, anyway): in concert. I expect my tools to benefit my workflow, not hinder it by switching up everything and anything when I jump from (say) Photoshop to Illustrator.
Inkscape - meh. Yes, it's the SVG reference implementation for all intents and purposes--good for it, I don't care about its features if it sucks at presenting them. It's a clunky tool with a poor UI and--surprise surprise!--little to speak of in terms of horizontal integration. It'd be fine if I could do everything in Inkscape without any other tools, but that's a very rare occurrence.
Blender - eew. Internally it's not bad. The feature set is nice and it's a solid program. But...again...shit UI, shit workflow. No horizontal integration to speak of. I mean, hell. For example: I can modify a texture in Photoshop and see its effects propagate right to my textured 3D model in Maya. It's easy there. Such integration needs to be the standard with open source apps if they want to be taken seriously and it simply is not.
The capabilities of these programs are fine (CinePaint is head-and-shoulders better than the GIMP, which is probably praising with faint damns), it's just that their workflows all suck enormous amounts of donkey cock and I don't see their workflows improving anytime soon. Don't get me wrong: it's not that I can't do what I want with the open source tools, it's that doing it sucks with the open source tools. It takes longer and is more of a hassle. And, for burgeoning professionals in a university environment, having them not use industry-standard tools is mindfuckingly stupid. People always trot out CinePaint as "oh, look, people are using this IN INDUSTRY!"--great, go CinePaint, may you someday have all the success there is. But a hell of a lot more professionals are using ProTools, Premiere, After Effects, and other proprietary software packages, so it's pretty stupid not to teach what's actually used.
If you assume that the needs of the users are being met, all open-source has *many* advantagess that closed-source doesn't (auditability, ease of maintenance, transparency, lack of vendor lock-in.)
Because I don't assume that the needs of the users are met. I do graphics work. I've used both the open and closed ecosystems' products. The open ecosystem's products, to be pretty frank, suck.
If they were as good, great, use it. But they are not, and realistically speaking, almost certainly never will be. Ignoring that in favor of ideology is stupid.
I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying that recommending Moodle isn't particularly good as it doesn't actually address the requirements of a lot of organizations.
It's like Exchange--if it's not a drop-in replacement, it's probably Not Good Enough.
How's those Pantones working in GIMP, freetard?
Blackboard already contains that common set, though--that's why the extensions to provide site security (and other stuff, like identification for our dining halls) are so easily bolted right in.
And you can't just switch this stuff out once it's in place, either. There's a lot of hardware around my campus that's marked "Bb"...
We're stuck with PeopleSoft too. I feel your pain.
A lot of places are using Blackboard for what I described, though. It's pretty excellent lock-in, but on the other hand it actually works very, very well.
Oh, in that case I agree entirely, and you have an excellent point. It's amazing how few people here get it - they're treating open source software as an end in and of itself, when it's getting shit done that really matters.
A "nothing but open source" policy is as terrible as a "no open source" policy. Use what's best for the job, not what fits your ideologies.
New media departments, for example, aren't going to switch to whatever bullshit the OSS world flogs when they have Maya/3DS Max, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Blender's good but nonstandard and nobody really uses it, the GIMP sucks for all the reasons everybody already knows, and Inkscape simply does not step to Illustrator.
It seems like most of the posters here have missed the point. Open source software at a university is not an end in and of itself. Getting the job done is.
Moodle supports distributed device authentication now?
No?
Then it can't replace Blackboard at a hell of a lot of schools. Most schools that use Blackboard use it for student authentication with swipe cards and the like. That's not exactly something you can just forego.
But it is not free-libre.
Nobody whose opinion matters actually gives a shit if it's OMG FREE-LIBRE.
(No, this isn't trolling. It's simply the truth. Free software is not a goal of a university's IT department, getting a quality system is. The two may intersect or they may not as the case may be. In this case, GMail is a poor solution, but not because it's not open source--it's a poor solution because it doesn't effectively allow for horizontal integration. But most open source solutions suck at this, too.)
This is huge and vastly underestimated. Your goal should not be to transition to open source--that's just as bad as an all closed-source ecosystem. Your goal should be to transition to infrastructural openness so people can use what they want. If they want to use Office, great--just make sure that their documents save in ODF so everybody can access them, etc. etc.
You'll need to organize training for everyone. Twice. And you'll need a kick-ass help desk for everything from copying files to equivalents of obscure Excel formulas.
He's never prying Excel out of the hands of his accounting professors and to try to do so is fucking retarded. They simply won't do it and will continue to mandate Excel, which shoots holes in this entire game that the submitter wants to play.
He's not going to be doing this. I get the feeling that he's a helpdesk monkey with delusions of competence, though, seeing as how he doesn't even know the cost of his Microsoft licenses...
Agreed on policy (and on TeX, that should be virtually required for science students), but if you think wasting graphics classes' time on open source is worth it given all the other stuff that has to be covered, you're a little bit nuts. The open-source graphics world can't step to the proprietary, and until it can it should not be in the discussion.
Moodle does not do the same think as Blackboard. Course management is a very small part of what Blackboard does. For example, Blackboard provides distributed student authentication and the ability to interface with devices that aren't computers.
My university uses the system to authenticate student identification cards when they're swiped through doors and other resources around campus.
Moodle can't do anything similar to that.
Unis aren't votech schools.
These days? Like hell they're not.
Because Apple computers are preposterously popular in education and the choices of the students should damn well be respected? (And that choice is made for good reason, they're easier to use and more secure than Windows, even if I personally dislike the UI.)
Moodle isn't an alternative to Blackboard except in the same way that a bicycle replaces a pickup truck. A lot of universities use Blackboard for far more than just classes. My university, for example, uses Blackboard for anything related to student access--if you swipe your card to enter a building, it authenticates against the Blackboard database.
The open source alternatives do not do this, and you aren't going to replace Blackboard just by having a class replacement. (And Moodle isn't very good, unfortunately. Has potential, but isn't living up to it.)
Except that they have an enormous pile of evidence that says without question that the Earth is warming and a large amount of circumstantial evidence that has convinced the overwhelming majority of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is happening.
Use your head. How can the human race dump untold amounts of crap into the air and not be causing a problem?
What don't you get about "you can turn that off"?
When has there ever been a unanimous consensus in something like this, exactly?
Now you're forgetting one major thing.
How do we export when everybody else starts engaging in protectionism, too?
Except that protectionism has never fucking worked and was one of the biggest reasons the Great Depression lasted as long as it did, but that's OK.
And what are these magical algorithms that only work in Java and C# but don't work in C/C++?
Anything that's based on reflection is trivial in Java or C# and impossible, frustrating, and in some cases not practically possible in C/C++.
You have clearly never done any embedded work. You think a customer is going to want to pay the extra money for a device that runs Java instead of one that does the same thing and runs on a $1 micro running C/C++? Furthermore if you seel 100,000 pieces, every $1 of hardware is $100,000.
Seeing as how a ton of embedded is moving toward Java and Mono, yes, I do think they are. Yes, C has its niche writing code for elevator controllers. It's having its lunch eaten beyond that preposterously-bare-metal case.
Depends on the application. Write a CAD tool in Java and see if customers don't mind it when their compilations take an extra hour to finish
Use JNI or P/Invoke to marshal native code where speed and optimizations are important. That's not your GUI level. GUI = managed, math-grinding logic = native--although these days, an optimizing JVM like HotSpot or the new Linear IL engine in Mono are both competitive with C/C++ in terms of performance for many operations; it's really quite amazing how efficient Java and Mono are becoming.