Can you imagine how much more that baby behind you is going to cry when it starts floating around?
I'd be more worried about leaky diapers.;-)
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As much as I like the gimp, it's seriously handicapped when it comes to even moderate digital camera photo processing, because it can only handle 8 bits per color channel (for the math-handicapped out there: "8 bits times 3 three color channels" is "24-bit color"). Good digital photo processing often needs at least 12 bits per channel (actually, to be "future proof", programs should probably suport at least 16-32 bits). In other words, moderate digital camera photo processing needs at least 48 bits per pixel, if not more.
(And, for the comprehension-impaired out there: "processing" is
not the same as "printing" or "displaying").
Unfortunately, this is one area where photoshop is significantly better than gimp. (And, yes, I do know about CinePaint, but it seems to be virtually dead.)
DVDs because the multiple languages and subtitles are a great way to learn a new language. Cartoons because animation has simpler phrases.
While this can be an excellent motivator, it can be a pretty hard way to learn, because the subtitles are often just vague paraphrases. I remember one DVD translating, "I want to grab your butt", into "I want to hug you" (and this was just a plain "kids" anime DVD). I can just imagine the poor student saying that to someone....;-)
Yes, DSLR's will get dust. If you shoot the sky or white walls (really any background that is light in color and relatively plain) you'll see small brown fuzzies, especially at higher apperatures.
Yup, I'll second this. Virtually all DSLRs will get dust on the sensor. This will be true of any camera that exposes the sensor compartment to the outside air (as in when changing lenses).
Now, whether or not you'll notice the dust, will depend on how picky/observant you are.
In any case, the pbase link gives an excellent description of how to clean the sensor (for Canon DSLRs, at least). If you have a steady hand and can follow directions, you shouldn't have any problems.
Please define "passable workflow". How is it missing from Linux?
Besides cinepaint (which hasn't been updated in quite a while), what other linux image editors support editing/processing of 12+ bits per color? The gimp doesn't cut it, as it only handles 8 bits per color (which is too bad, as I like the gimp).
(Note that I'm talking about processing, not printing. Unwashed zealots who complain about >8-bit printing will be gleefully ignored.)
All you people are freaking nuts. If you think you can tell the difference your deluding yourselves.
And, if you think people are asking for 16/24/32-bit support for printing (where, as you say, you can't tell the difference), you're deluding yourself.
More than 8-bit support is necessary in the image processing stage. And, since you posted as a coward, that's all I'll say. You can do your own research.
If you must use windows, the commercial software, notmad, is the way to go (I never liked Creative's software). Notmad makes the MP3 player accessible via windows explorer. The licensing is a bit funky, though (you buy licenses for particular models of Creative MP3 players, or you can buy a blanket license).
The UI can appear to be a bit weird, but that's largely caused by the Creative MP3 players, which do not implement a standard FAT32/etc. filesystem.
Well-intentioned, but uninformed, users often post misleading and/or conflicting answers.
Clueless newbies will ask questions in the wiki. (Nothing wrong with questions, but the question will either belong in a different part of the FAQ, or will have nothing to do with the subject of the FAQ.)
Wikis generally result in an ugly, minimally-useful FAQ. If you don't have the time to properly maintain a FAQ, or are lazy, wikis are better than nothing, but they'll often end up looking really cruddy.
However, as others have said, properly maintaining a good FAQ is nontrivial, and takes a lot of work (and, yes, I used to "maintain" one of the usenet FAQs many years ago).
Looking at the xulmaker web page, I don't have high hopes for it:
Last release (0.51) August 10, 2004 (good), but the previous release (0.50) was over a year earlier (June 25, 2003 -- bad).
No mailing lists (none that I can find).
From the project status:
The latest release of XULMaker is Version 0.51 which was released on August 10, 2004. XULMaker 0.51 is known to work with Mozilla 1.6 and Netscape 7.1 (and most likely with older versions - going back as far as Mozilla 1.0) It does not seem to work correctly with Mozilla 1.7.1 and later versions.
No mention of Firefox, and does not work with latest Mozilla. Given the past long delays between releases, I don't have high hopes for this project. (And I really would like a good graphical XUL designer.)
150 watts at the wall. Part of that is due to inefficiency in the power supply....
"150W at the wall" is probably on the low side for today's desktops. I've got an older Athlon XP 2100 box w/Nvidia GF4 Ti4200 video card, and that box sucks up ~170W, idle (at the wall, measured with a wattmeter, and not an ammeter). That doesn't include the monitor -- add that in, and the power goes up to ~290W. Ugh.
But GIMP is featurewise more than enough for millions of digital photographers.
Only if they don't care about getting the best possible results. The gimp is of minimal use for advanced amateur photographers (IMO), as it only supports 8-bit color depth. Until gimp gets support for 16-bit (or greater) color depth, it is, sadly, not good enough. At the moment, anyone wanting to do serious photographic processing on linux, has to use something like Cinepaint.
(For the unwashed, uninformed hordes: while 8-bits (24bpp) is fine for printing on inkjets, you NEED 16-bits (48bpp) or more to do decent image processing, such as bringing out detail in shadows. Of course, this assumes that you're using one of the camera output formats that use more than 8bits per color channel.)
Frankly, I find it rather difficult that they could put an entire Myth system together in little under 4 hours, especially since they seem to know little about Linux (for instance, it is practically impossible to compile MythTV in 20 minutes - it takes aaaaaggggggeeeeessss. Methinks they meant download and install rather than compile).
Probably. Knoppmyth makes it very easy to download and install. Installation can take well under an hour, although locating all of the tweaks that you need could take some time (hours, if you're unlucky).
("Tweaks", as in finding the instructions needed to get the PVR-250/350 functional under KnoppMyth, among possibly other things.)
However, once you know what to do, installing and configuring KnoppMyth from scratch could be done quite quickly (I'm guessing under an half hour).
I had actually considered not buying a floppy for the machine, but I did "just in case". If I hadn't, I wouldn't be able to get the machine working until I went out and bought one.
Out of curiousity, why couldn't a CD-R be used instead of a floppy? Yes, it does take slightly longer to write (burn), but you could save the cost of a floppy drive by using the CD/DVD drive.
And, I'd like to point out that bootable CDs are nothing more than glorified floppies: you use a bootable floppy disk image as the bootable part of the CD. So, if you have a bootable floppy disk image, it's a simple enough matter to create a bootable CD from it.
Never mind -- I was on the right page, but my ad blocker was killing the download link by somehow corrupting the download javascript. Bah. Maybe it's time to switch to AdBlock full time.
If you go to the main Firefox page (e.g., Products->Firefox), there is no download link. All the hype, and no download link (yes, it's so intuitive to click on "Release notes" to get to the actual download links...). Sheesh.;-) How are the Firefox zealots-in-training supposed to get their very first copy?
I'm sure they'll fix this, but you'd think they would have gotten the obvious stuff right....
Unless you're on a cable modem, 2MB/s is your home's download speed, and your upload speed is probably much smaller (I'm going to ignore college/work environments). For DSL users, the upload speed is going to be the limiting factor, and even sharing an high-quality non-HD mpeg takes a LOOOONG time at DSL upload speeds.
If cable modem users start sharing big files (legally), they will probably get killed by their cable company, either by being disconnected, or by being charged lots of $$$ for "high-bandwidth utilization".
Yes, we have gone from 1200baud to 6Mbits/sec for home usage, but I'd be surprised to see even a 20X improvement in the next ten years. Why? For most folks, 6Mbits/sec (down) is "plenty good enough", and they'll be reluctant to spend the extra $$$ on higher upload speeds (/. peons excepted, of course;-). Lots of people prefer "cheap, cheap, cheap" over "quality/performance". This means that the various transport companies will be reluctant to upgrade their equipment to handle still higher speeds, and so any rollout will be S L O W. Lots of people still don't have even DSL or cable modem access.
MythTV can do multi-channel recordings, either on the same PC (via multiple encoder cards) or via multiple PCs (each with one or more encoder cards). With multiple PCs, however, LAN bandwidth can be an issue. (For fairly high-quality recordings, say 600-700KB/sec per channel.) Your power bill can be an issue, too.;-)
Distributed, multi-channel recordings are very nice. If you have multiple PCs, you can also do distributed TV watching (watch a recorded program on a PC other than the one which recorded it).
MythTV also has the cool feature where, if all the encoder cards on your current PC are busy recording shows (which means that you can't watch something else), MythTV will transparently use another encoder on another PC, and stream that output to your current PC. Sehr cool.
Unfortunately, MythTV can be a royal pain to install and configure. The easiest approach is to use something canned like KnoppMyth, but the current version (R4V4.1) still needs a fair amount of hacking/tweaking to work with high-quality encoding cards like the Hauppauge PVR-250 or PVR-350. Still, it's better than starting from scratch.
For the soekris box, also check out m0n0wall, which is a FreeBSD-based firewall (wired or wireless). The latest beta version supports traffic shaping, captive portal, VPNs, etc.. The mailing list is very active, too.
This past weekend I also enabled spamassassin (without its bayes filter though), and its cut down the number of spam to maybe 5 a day, but its still too much for me.
You need to tweak your (user account's) spamassassin user_prefs, and tailor it for the kind of email you receive. (You should also enable the Bayes filter to help with spam detection.) I've done that, and I'm down to maybe 5 spams a week getting through (mostly on the weekend, strangely enough). I do, however, have to spend 5-10 minutes once or twice a month tweaking user_prefs. It's a small price to pay for a virtually spam-free inbox, though.
Also check out progect (no that's not misspelled). Progect is a simple, GPL'd project-manager-like application (you can think of it as a super-TODO list), with prorities, subtasks, % completion, etc.. Also, this is the old link, but it gives a good idea of what it's like.
While LCDs are wonderful, and do indeed save energy, they currently suck if you need any kind of color reproduction accuracy (for photo editing, etc.).
(As an aside, 350W sounds waaay too high, but I'm not going to mumble anything else on that topic.)
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I'd be more worried about leaky diapers. ;-)
As much as I like the gimp, it's seriously handicapped when it comes to even moderate digital camera photo processing, because it can only handle 8 bits per color channel (for the math-handicapped out there: "8 bits times 3 three color channels" is "24-bit color"). Good digital photo processing often needs at least 12 bits per channel (actually, to be "future proof", programs should probably suport at least 16-32 bits). In other words, moderate digital camera photo processing needs at least 48 bits per pixel, if not more.
Unfortunately, this is one area where photoshop is significantly better than gimp. (And, yes, I do know about CinePaint, but it seems to be virtually dead.)
While this can be an excellent motivator, it can be a pretty hard way to learn, because the subtitles are often just vague paraphrases. I remember one DVD translating, "I want to grab your butt", into "I want to hug you" (and this was just a plain "kids" anime DVD). I can just imagine the poor student saying that to someone .... ;-)
(Shades of Monty Python's Hungarian Phrasebook sketch ....)
Yup, I'll second this. Virtually all DSLRs will get dust on the sensor. This will be true of any camera that exposes the sensor compartment to the outside air (as in when changing lenses).
Now, whether or not you'll notice the dust, will depend on how picky/observant you are.
In any case, the pbase link gives an excellent description of how to clean the sensor (for Canon DSLRs, at least). If you have a steady hand and can follow directions, you shouldn't have any problems.
Besides cinepaint (which hasn't been updated in quite a while), what other linux image editors support editing/processing of 12+ bits per color? The gimp doesn't cut it, as it only handles 8 bits per color (which is too bad, as I like the gimp).
(Note that I'm talking about processing, not printing. Unwashed zealots who complain about >8-bit printing will be gleefully ignored.)
And, if you think people are asking for 16/24/32-bit support for printing (where, as you say, you can't tell the difference), you're deluding yourself.
More than 8-bit support is necessary in the image processing stage. And, since you posted as a coward, that's all I'll say. You can do your own research.
I'll second this.
If you must use windows, the commercial software, notmad, is the way to go (I never liked Creative's software). Notmad makes the MP3 player accessible via windows explorer. The licensing is a bit funky, though (you buy licenses for particular models of Creative MP3 players, or you can buy a blanket license).
The UI can appear to be a bit weird, but that's largely caused by the Creative MP3 players, which do not implement a standard FAT32/etc. filesystem.
How do you think the Heisenberg Uncertainty Priciple was developed???
- Well-intentioned, but uninformed, users often post misleading and/or conflicting answers.
- Clueless newbies will ask questions in the wiki. (Nothing wrong with questions, but the question will either belong in a different part of the FAQ, or will have nothing to do with the subject of the FAQ.)
Wikis generally result in an ugly, minimally-useful FAQ. If you don't have the time to properly maintain a FAQ, or are lazy, wikis are better than nothing, but they'll often end up looking really cruddy.However, as others have said, properly maintaining a good FAQ is nontrivial, and takes a lot of work (and, yes, I used to "maintain" one of the usenet FAQs many years ago).
Looking at the xulmaker web page, I don't have high hopes for it:
Only if they don't care about getting the best possible results. The gimp is of minimal use for advanced amateur photographers (IMO), as it only supports 8-bit color depth. Until gimp gets support for 16-bit (or greater) color depth, it is, sadly, not good enough. At the moment, anyone wanting to do serious photographic processing on linux, has to use something like Cinepaint.
(For the unwashed, uninformed hordes: while 8-bits (24bpp) is fine for printing on inkjets, you NEED 16-bits (48bpp) or more to do decent image processing, such as bringing out detail in shadows. Of course, this assumes that you're using one of the camera output formats that use more than 8bits per color channel.)
Probably. Knoppmyth makes it very easy to download and install. Installation can take well under an hour, although locating all of the tweaks that you need could take some time (hours, if you're unlucky).
However, once you know what to do, installing and configuring KnoppMyth from scratch could be done quite quickly (I'm guessing under an half hour).
Out of curiousity, why couldn't a CD-R be used instead of a floppy? Yes, it does take slightly longer to write (burn), but you could save the cost of a floppy drive by using the CD/DVD drive.
And, I'd like to point out that bootable CDs are nothing more than glorified floppies: you use a bootable floppy disk image as the bootable part of the CD. So, if you have a bootable floppy disk image, it's a simple enough matter to create a bootable CD from it.
(double bah -- can't edit posts)
Forgot to add: my apologies to the Firefox folks. They've done a great job.
(And I've just killed my ad blocker, and switched to Adblock, full-time.)
Never mind -- I was on the right page, but my ad blocker was killing the download link by somehow corrupting the download javascript. Bah. Maybe it's time to switch to AdBlock full time.
... but the current page fails Usability 101.
If you go to the main Firefox page (e.g., Products->Firefox), there is no download link. All the hype, and no download link (yes, it's so intuitive to click on "Release notes" to get to the actual download links ...). Sheesh. ;-) How are the Firefox zealots-in-training supposed to get their very first copy?
I'm sure they'll fix this, but you'd think they would have gotten the obvious stuff right ....
If cable modem users start sharing big files (legally), they will probably get killed by their cable company, either by being disconnected, or by being charged lots of $$$ for "high-bandwidth utilization".
Yes, we have gone from 1200baud to 6Mbits/sec for home usage, but I'd be surprised to see even a 20X improvement in the next ten years. Why? For most folks, 6Mbits/sec (down) is "plenty good enough", and they'll be reluctant to spend the extra $$$ on higher upload speeds (/. peons excepted, of course ;-). Lots of people prefer "cheap, cheap, cheap" over "quality/performance". This means that the various transport companies will be reluctant to upgrade their equipment to handle still higher speeds, and so any rollout will be S L O W. Lots of people still don't have even DSL or cable modem access.
Distributed, multi-channel recordings are very nice. If you have multiple PCs, you can also do distributed TV watching (watch a recorded program on a PC other than the one which recorded it).
MythTV also has the cool feature where, if all the encoder cards on your current PC are busy recording shows (which means that you can't watch something else), MythTV will transparently use another encoder on another PC, and stream that output to your current PC. Sehr cool.
Unfortunately, MythTV can be a royal pain to install and configure. The easiest approach is to use something canned like KnoppMyth, but the current version (R4V4.1) still needs a fair amount of hacking/tweaking to work with high-quality encoding cards like the Hauppauge PVR-250 or PVR-350. Still, it's better than starting from scratch.
For the soekris box, also check out m0n0wall, which is a FreeBSD-based firewall (wired or wireless). The latest beta version supports traffic shaping, captive portal, VPNs, etc.. The mailing list is very active, too.
You need to tweak your (user account's) spamassassin user_prefs, and tailor it for the kind of email you receive. (You should also enable the Bayes filter to help with spam detection.) I've done that, and I'm down to maybe 5 spams a week getting through (mostly on the weekend, strangely enough). I do, however, have to spend 5-10 minutes once or twice a month tweaking user_prefs. It's a small price to pay for a virtually spam-free inbox, though.
Also check out progect (no that's not misspelled). Progect is a simple, GPL'd project-manager-like application (you can think of it as a super-TODO list), with prorities, subtasks, % completion, etc.. Also, this is the old link, but it gives a good idea of what it's like.
It's very nice.
While LCDs are wonderful, and do indeed save energy, they currently suck if you need any kind of color reproduction accuracy (for photo editing, etc.).
(As an aside, 350W sounds waaay too high, but I'm not going to mumble anything else on that topic.)