sweasel.com

First! 🙂

Congrats on your new Photoshop!

I upgraded to Windows 8…unless you want to develop ‘Apps’ for it (like I do), stay away from it, buggy on older hardware, hard to find drivers, etc.

Hence my current use of open source shitmonkey as opposed to Major Brand Shitmonkey, now with smellier shit and extended throwing range!

Doesn’t mean I don’t slaver over M.B.S. and grumble about the smug self-satisfaction of open-source teams that are providing **up-twinkle**free**up-twinkle** tra-la-la software. My only consolation is that it would make them weep to know what Gaia-hating application I put it to.

Someday I’ll be able to justify the $10-15 grand and $2-5 grand for user licenses (rubs hands together greedily)in my pursuit of the Capitalist AgendaAmerican Dream

I just use a cracked copy from Malaysia!
Cheap as chips!

🙂

Been there with Intuit and the rental game. Easy answer – FOAD, software hippies.

You see, us badgers know we’re going to hell, wot wiv living under ground and all the killing and stuff, so we have a pretty good relationship with lord Santa (as well as family-wide dyselexia) and I can tell you that Old Nick has special place in hell all lined-up for software company execs.

In fact it’s just like the pit we’ve been busily digging for music industry types. Only deeper. So you can get more shit in it, apparently.

Oh, and lava, He’s big on lava is Santa.

Oh! So how shit IS Windows 8, Quasi? I don’t like anything I’ve heard about it.

I love Win7. Stable, intuitive. Like XP with most of the irritating bits fixed. I kind of wanted to stay here for a while.

Huh.

Uncle Badger,

Doesn’t the Lord of Flies have another moniker that uses “Nick” in it…and isn’t Santa an anagram for….Satan?

Your talk of the lava love caused a neuron to spazz out 😀

I love Win7. Stable, intuitive. Like XP with most of the irritating bits fixed. I kind of wanted to stay here for a while.

Aaaaaaa-men! I thought I’d hate it; I am an addict.

Windows 8 has a split personality now…good old 7 with a tablet interface grafted on…it really doesn’t suit anything but tablets and phones…you can always click on the ‘desktop’ tile and get your familiar interface, minus the start button and the desktop gadgets and the cool ‘Aero’ transparency (need my gadgets!)

Stick with 7 and see if they do any better with 9…you’re not missing anything.

A chicken story …

http://www.statesman.com/ap/ap/top-news/wis-couple-says-pet-chicken-alerted-them-to-blaze/nTg8J/

Yeah, recently built myself a new box – couldn’t bear to put up with hobbled OS and crapware from Dell anymore. Cost a few more bucks, but I am lord of my digital domain. Also recently went Lightroom 4 and Photoshop Elements 11. Couldn’t see the need for full blown Ps. Went Win7 instead of 8; got enough learning curves to deal with.

I think The Cloud could be great, but because it will be run by people it will turn into pure evil, perhaps sooner rather than later. Sauron will get The Precious from Gollum before Frodo even knows what hit him.

Well, Sauron can take his monthly bill and stick it.

Not more Lord of the Queers shit pleaaasssee!
This entire country is over-run with fucking tourists chasing sheep, bungy jumping, taking photos and having orgasms over the lord of the rings ….

Disgusting Perverts!

Ya, I think Adobe is trying to create their own Facebook only with graphics…probably will even have little ‘Like’ buttons everywhere.

Humpf. The typical software suite I use in a client’s office, be it the old Unix/Linux stuff, or the mostly crappy new PC-based stuff, normally runs about $ 250 K US per seat, with 20 % annual maintainence fee. Which is why I don’t own my own software. In general, the more “latest and greatest” it is, the less funtionality it has and the bigger a pain in the ass it is to get anything done in. My current clients uses THE top brand “latest and greatest”, and I would pay serious money to get my hands around the collective throat of the assholes who wrote it. Compered to the “old-fashioned” Unix/Linux software by the same vendor, it’s like trying to rebuild an F1 racing engine with a worn-out out screwdriver and a cheap pair of pliers.

The problem for software designers is that they -must- develop a new version. There are more sales to be made by forcing people to upgrade their old software than by conquest sales alone. Since electrons don’t wear out per se, and operating systems that are incompatible with older versions come along only every so often, and brilliant new innovations even less often, it’s function creep gone mad most years.

The attempt to get people to rent is a simple cash-flow equation. Without that it’s a boom-bust situation where sales surge with the release of a new version and then taper off to nothing as eventually everyone who would ever want it has laready bought it. Rentals would smooth that flow and take the pressure off the development team to develop the ‘next big thing’.

For me, an easy example of change for the sake of change is MS Word. Whenever I get a new version, my first week is spent figuring out the new organization of the controls, and the second is spent turning off the new automatic assists and features that make me insane.

What are these “apps” of which you speak? I program my unit record equipment with Fortran on punch cards created on a Hollerith tabulator I purchased from the the Computer Tabulating Recording Company.

Have I been missing something?

Nah, not much.

Nobody likes the rented software idea except for software companies. The problem with making programs is that once they are purchased, there’s no more money in them, just cost for upgrades, bug fixes, etc. That’s why games come out with sequels when they don’t need to, for example: once everyone who’s going to buy King’s Conquest III has, there’s no more profit.

With rentals, they can charge everyone who wants a copy forever. Its like the MMOG model, buying that initial copy of the game is a drop in the bucket, its the 16+ bucks a month that they get from millions of subscribers that’s the cash cow.

Plus rentals tend to destroy the pirated software issue: if you have to pay every month, it doesn’t matter if your copy is from the company or downloaded off Torrent.

Microsoft has been trying to get this for years, and it looks like they might get there soon. The problem with this whole model is UNIX. I can’t afford Photoshop, rented or not. But I can afford GIMP, because its free. And if companies start to rent instead of sell software, people will start using old copies they own and alternative UNIX-based freeware.

Remember, people used to try to charge for internet browsers, and they got slaughtered by IE and other free browsers because people just didn’t care to pay for something they could get for free – and often better.

Renting software is like paying for sex – not once, but over and over again for the SAME sex.

So I hear.

I hold no brief for software developers, and resent upgrades as much as anyone. And I am by no means immune to the lure of free stuff. However, I can’t help but wonder just how the folks who offer the free stuff support themselves. Maybe right now it is a matter of love of the game; but at some point, any enterprise that depends entirely on volunteer labor disappears, because there are no longer any volunteers. Carpenters and machinists and gardeners all have to pay for their tools, and bowlers and skiers and theater nuts all have to pay for their hobbies/entertainment. Why should software be different?

The Win 8 UI sux…I can see where they are going, but I don’t plan to buy a Windows tablet or phone.

First thing I did was to find the command line and created shortcuts to bypass the stupid, in real terms, not rhetorically, “Metro” UI…such as a shutdown button cuz all the too-ing & fro-ing is tedious with a mouse.

I have the same time restraint dilemma with CS3…I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just install it on an offline XP box and run it as is. Is CS6 worth the upgrade? I’m semi-retired and may not recoup the roi for the upgrade.

Can’t Hark,

We give a donation to the developers. If it’s a popular alternative, then I think it keeps the heat and the water bills paid. If it’s really good, then they can make money via tech support. For instance, I use something called Map Window GIS, which is an open source alternative to the ESRI ArcGIS mapping software. They are the Adobe or Microsoft of their particular niche.

I’ve always tried to donate something to a developer if I use their product. It keeps me from feeling guilty about using the product.

I think it all depends on the software, Can’t Hark. I may be wrong (heaven knows I’m no software expert!) but I gather the guys behind the (free) Firefox make money by using what they’ve developed in commercial applications, too. No doubt someone will drive me back down my sett if I’m wrong!

Beyond that there are some troubling aspects – like the mandatory upgrade paths, huge difference in regional pricing (we in the UK have always done very badly in that respect), issues with reliability and fitness for purpose that wouldn’t be acceptable in a motor car or a washing machine and above all the level of prices.

Whatever people’s motivation, when it works (like Open Office, which I use gratefully) it seems to work well.

Thanks, Feynmangroupie & Uncle Badger; and, yes, I can understand (and already knew about–yeah, I was being a bit of a /provacateur/, wanna make something of it?) those points. We are, at the moment, in a period of incredible change at a level we may not really be able to see, and I suspect this whole “software-development” question is part of it. But I am fast closing in on 60, and have lived my entire life in a world in which the dynamics of economics are pretty easy to limn and understand as general principles (and entirely impossible to chart as actual dynamics); I have a hard time imagining the model that is going to allow software developers to shift from the boom-or-bust model others have described in this thread, into a model that allows them to support themselves while making their brainchildren available to those who can’t afford premium prices. That doesn’t mean I don’t think that model exists–and may even be slowly working its way under the markets even as we badinage. Just, maybe I’m too old.

Hm. Well, if they are counting on the company I work for keeping them around, they are going to be in for a rude surprise. We have hundreds of licenses for Acrobat Pro as we do a lot of our client deliverables in PDF format. The licenses are expensive as holy hell. Recently our tech folks started to investigate Bluebeam. Does everything Acrobat does plus has the editing functionality of Word, will automatically tabulate, associate and spreadsheet-ize marks and comments, navigates a crapton more easily and allows use of 3d renderings within a pdf document. Makes ’em into a snapshot and yet keeps all the 3d nifty intact if you want to rotate 360 degrees around a rendered object.

You can still read them with the free version of Acrobat just like plain old pdfs so it doesn’t require clients to have Bluebeam. Plus, cheaper.

Not good for what you are using it for, but just saying that a portion of the market Adobe is charging tons of money to is likely to move on soon. I know my company – the idea that Bluebeam is a better software for what we do isn’t the key factor. The fact that it costs less than Adobe products is. We used to have Photoshop as well, now we use something else (dunno what, not my department). But I’m sure it was cheaper. 🙂

I remember all the contortions we had to go through to get the student price for my boy. I’m glad I won’t have to do that again.

Aren’t there some open-source applications out there that are as good?

Thanks for that, Nicole…. Yes, us badgers have been given and extra special deep hole to be dug for Adobe… 😉

Sadly, Bob, nothing is quite as good as Photoshop. That’s why they can behave this way.

Oh, I’m not sure what to tell you, BJM. Jumping three versions, about six years…yes, there are improvements, largely to the UI. But worth the money? Well, my income stream has dried to a trickle and my savings is almost gone, so I had to think long and hard about this. If they make the restrictions any tighter, I won’t do this again.

Ah, Nicole. I was the Acrobat maven at my old job. I didn’t want to be, it just happened. They sent me to Acrobat school and everything. I had the very expensive direct helpline to California (here’s the usual response I got: “whoa, dude! New bug! If you find a workaround, let us know.”)

Man, there was ALL KINDS of bullshit surrounding .pdf files. People who made specialist software tools for working with them charged thousands, just because they knew their customer base was almost entirely corporate.

I remember one .pdf editing tool I had…funny, I can’t remember what it did. Anyway, we bought it for a hundred bucks. Went to upgrade, and it was $700. Why? They’d figured out who their customers were.

I am holding on the XP for as long as I can. My daughter got a Vista machine and Vista coughs up hairballs on a regular basis. Win7 is supposedly just an upgraded Beta of Vista, from what I have heard. And here is my first exposure to Win8.

http://lonelyconservative.com/2012/12/watch-this-video-review-before-buying-a-windows-8-computer/

Scares the bejabbers out of me. Don’t know what I am going to do when this incarnation of MYCROFT dies. Apple ruled itself out with some of their policies, so maybe Linux.

Subotai Bahadur

Subtai Bahadur–I fully understand your position, and don’t expect you will pay much attention to someone who ADMITS to being a bit ignorant on this subject. All the same. I loved Windows 98, and did everything possible to avoid upgrading to Vista. With the result that I actually managed to avoid upgrading to Vista on ANY of the computers (home, laptop, 4 at office) over which I have dominion. But I ultimately did have to accept upgrades–to Windows 7. And, well, see, it really IS elegant. It lets me drag programs to the side of the screen, to allow 2 different screens to be displayed side-by-side without a whole lot of fiddling about. It lets me organize where programs appear in the taskbar, so that they are grouped in a way that allows me to find a program quickly based on my expectations. There are other functions–but the point is that I think 7 is actually awesome. I fully understand your point–but you might want to consider converting before conversion to anything other than 8 becomes inevitable. Just sayin’

Weas: Win7-64 has driver problems too. Notably, the laser mouse driver, which STILL isn’t fixed…

Can’t Hark,

LOL perhaps we should be asking you about open source software business models, but then I would not have the opportunity to hear my own beloved opinion 😀

I really liked XP and it worked fine for me, but Win7 is tolerable. Its less personal and controllable than XP, which is a mistake but predictable. Microsoft has long seemed to think they should be more like Apple, despite controlling the very large majority of the market. Its like Coca-Cola thinking they need to be more like.. I dunno, Fanta.

Aren’t there some open-source applications out there that are as good?

GIMP is just about the same thing, for free, with much less documentation. They aren’t going to start renting you anything.

I sometimes wonder what will be left of the Northern hemisphere civilisation. We’re detection plutonium in the urine of American citizens …. won’t be long now.

I’ve tried GIMP again and again. And I used to be a beta tester for Corel, so I’ve tried their various photo editing software (Painter comes closest, as an illustration platform, and has its loyal followers). Nothing comes close to P’shop, or I’d make the jump.

Won’t be long until what, Oceania? Until we all Hulk out and grow 30 feet tall and start stomping down whole city blocks? Because I’ve been waiting for that day a loooong time.

Years ago, my laptop died and I had to get a new one quick. I couldn’t find anything with XP and had to settle for Vista. What a piece of crap! It cost me a fortune, too, because I had to buy all new peripherals. When they say drivers are included – they lied! Worse, I spend weeks trying to configure them to work. I hate Vista. Win7 was a big improvement but my favorite was Win2k. It had a fax program that worked well which was great.

I’m a confirmed Microsoft hater, but I found the transition to Win7 really painless (from XP).

‘Windows is the worst operating system except for all those other operating systems that have been tried from time to time.’ – Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, 1999, after his PC crashed to BSD whilst he had been pwning n00bs on Q3DM17 map of Quake 3: Arena.

Hey, stoaty! How’s your painting coming along? I never understood why people choose smelly expensive oils over watercolor.

Funny you should ask, Redd. I haven’t done any traditional media in a long time, but I’ve just done a tiny watercolor of a chicken. Mapp, to be exact.

Now, all I have to do is stare at it until I work out how to turn it into money. Anybody have the Underpants Gnomes’ phone number?

Subotai Bahadur:

Look into VirtualBox by Oracle. It’s free, and as a long time user of VMWare, I have to admit I’m pretty darned impressed so far with this product, and the price is certainly right.

I built myself a brand new powerhouse workstation with Windows 7 Professional as the host operating system. I gave it _lots_ of memory (32 gigs) so running multiple virtual guest operating systems and giving them plenty of memory isn’t a hardship.

That might give you the best of both worlds. It’s working out fantastic over here. 🙂

Sweasel?

http://enenews.com/navy-sailors-tv-im-be-thyroids-be-after-311-degenerative-disks-all-healthy-before-all-video

Argentium G. Tiger
Time: December 30, 2012, 11:53 pm

Thanks! That does look interesting. I’ll check it out in more detail later, but I can see how that would take care of the Win8problem [all one word was deliberate].

Subotai Bahadur

Oh dear God …
I’ve always thought that the UK is a perverted fuck-fest for venereal disease … and now I know!

http://www.killingkittens.com/Home.php

Redd? regarding smelly oils vs. watercolors: I have my own tortured explanation. Oils let you work slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately, and you have time to fix your mistakes.

Watercolors, on the other hand, are the bitchy primadonnas of painting: the paper must be just right; the colors must be just right. You can’t go back, you can’t fix a mistake, and you can’t walk off and come back to it. It’s either good or it’s do it again. To be a good watercolorist, one needs a certain amount of recklessness combined with the skills of a surgeon. It is my favorite medium, but it leaves me wringing wet and exhausted. (I may be doing it wrong.)

Oh, NZ brain dead four leg sheep chaser sportsman chases brain dead blonde two leg English sheep instead
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/8131680/The-goss-mags-Richies-sexy-hook-up

She runs killing Kittens

Oils can produce some amazing stuff, and are supreme at blending, but I prefer quicker drying stuff like tempras. You can mix your own paint with oil paints and if you make a mistake its no big deal, like Deborah suggested. The drawback with oil is that it can make you super tight and meticulous where with watercolor you have to be really loose.

I’m a pretty indifferent painter though, so I guess you can take all that with a grain of salt. Pencil and ink is more my medium, with computer coloring.

Happy New Years! 2013 is here! 🙂

Hey, Sub? What you wrote over at Prof Jacobsen’s about the posting of gun owners’ personal info in the paper? First rate. Well done.

Oh, you can be anal retentive with watercolor. You surely can. I never got the hang of that fast, loose, splodgey sort of watercolor technique.

Hm. I wonder if I have any old paintings scanned on this machine.

Well, here’s the little watercolor I’ve just done:

Maybe two inches by three. It’s nothing special; I was just playing around. But you can see that it isn’t the big, wet wash approach to watercolor.

Oh, that’s fun!

It cracks me up just how butt ugly chickens are, yet how lovable they can be anyway. I think its just their odd, comical behavior, like Jimmy Durante or something.

They have grumpy, down-turned mouths and angry eyes, and what the heck is that all over their faces, scrotum skin? But they pop around and burble to themselves and generally have an enormously outsized sense of their own place in the scheme of things. I could watch chickens all day.

Beware of Watch Chicken!

(she would be lovely on little note cards—-“Whatcha been up to?” Or something with better grammar 🙂

If I could paint like that I wouldn’t do anything else. 🙂

Aw, Nina…t’weren’t nothing. It’s equal parts fun and pain in the ass, traditional media.

Well, duh. Of course that looks like scrotum skin… Chickens have their peckers on their faces.

PS. That watercolor is a sweet lil’ piece of work. Bravo!

Comment from Nina
Time: December 31, 2012, 1:54 pm

Thanks. I was mickle pissed [in the American sense, not the Brit one] when I wrote it. And it has gotten worse. I did a follow up. It seems that the New York Times has printed an editorial calling for the abandonment of the Constitution and its replacement with something more amenable to government supremacy. My happy camper level is not very high. It kind of puts everything the American Left has done in an open context.

Subotai Bahadur

I was having dinner with some erudite Oslo residents for New Years last night and they seemed quite surprised that I was not impressed with congress and especially the bozo in the White House–and that I am not at all optimistic for the next decade in the US. They think he’s great.

Yeah, you’ve got all that oil money to spend on all that crap, buster, and the government owns it. We don’t have that, until the gubmint manages to own it all too, which is when we’ll probably be able to drill as we should.

Happy new year, everyone!

Stoaty: I think that is a very good watercolor of Mapp. I am sort of surprised that you haven’t don’t full portraits of all your chickens.

To those of you who claim that chickens are ugly, have you really looked at the plumage on stoaty’s chickens? They are beautiful and unique.

Oh sure they have pretty feathers, especially some of the more exotic types. But that face wow.

Stoaty,

Beautiful job of capturing that murderous glint that makes them seem intent on avenging their brethren.

I do agree with all of the concepts you’ve presented
in your post. They’re very convincing and can certainly work.

Nonetheless, the posts are very quick for starters. May just
you please extend them a little from subsequent time?

Thank you for the post.