Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards 115
An anonymous reader dropped a note in to say that the Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards have been announced. No real surprises in the list, except maybe giving RSS the award for best game.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. -- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Freeciv? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freeciv? (Score:3, Insightful)
About GIMP2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Is anybody else unhappy with some of the changes in GIMP2? For me, several useful things have disappeared (like ctrl-T to hide the layer's borders, now it's something else and I have to go in the menu), of the fact that the "anti" tool key modifier is now ALT and not SHIFT anymore (apart for the magnifier, go figure...) and so it creates problems with KDE, it doesn't save the tablet's device status,... the list is endless.
All in all, I wonder why they voted GIMP. It's become less good and less usable than GIMP1, and certainly less than Photoshop overall anyway.
Best Game: Unreal Tourniment 2004 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IBM Thinkpad T41 (Score:1, Insightful)
Project of the year--- How can you tell? (Score:4, Insightful)
a) No manual. No usable manual anyway. I know no one who uses it, so I have no 'live' manual to get me going either. Lots of apps don't have good manuals, but this goes along with b...
b) 'Angry fruit salad' user interface. Lots of functionality [apparently] brilliantly obfuscated by a million buttons in every imaginable color grouped randomly with no real UI intuitiveness to make up for the missing manual. I'm no newbie to pro audio; recording and mastering soundtrack CDs for local theatre groups is one of my pasttimes. But I cannot figure out how to even get started. I spend about an hour on step one every couple of months and have never succeeded in getting it to do anything with the 400G of raw digital audio sitting on my box.
The end result is that I've been unable to figure out how to find the most rudimentary starting-out functions. I already have all my audio; Ardour is too heavy to run on my portable recording boxes-- I have beaverphonic already doing my HD recording for the past several years-- so how do I do anything using Ardour with audio I already have? The manual's tutorials all begin with 'press the record button...' The FAQ says I can use it with my recordings, but the UI and manual conspire to convince me none of that functionality actually exists.
All this *is* a flame-- Ardour is supposedly good software but all it's done is waste my time and for that reason I'm annoyed-- but it's also a genuine request of the Ardour authors to help out all us poor folks that aren't Ardour hackers to get started. I'd love to see what this package can do and give it a fair shake.
Monty
Re:Freeciv? (Score:5, Insightful)
Game award is a disgrace. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Linux game developpers, that are fighting one of the most ungrateful tasks to make a Linux desktop a reality, should not be thrilled by being blantantly ignored by people that are suppossed to be knowledgable about Linux.
If the LJ editors do not use games, then the honorable choice would have been to either not to give an award or to delegate the selection on people knowledgable about this field.
Of all the possible choices they took the worst: to insult the intelligence of their readers and of Linux game developpers.
Re:Ardour and lack of originality? (Score:3, Insightful)
These are all things that, for the most part, people are no longer willing to pay money for. For that reason, you don't see big companies trying very hard to develop them (except for Windows/MS, and that's a special case for oh so many reasons. I expect the Mafia could make alot of money selling ice cubes to Eskimos too
DAWs have happened on commercial platforms first because there was money to be made on the hardware and there was money to be made on the software too. Open Source dogma aside, money *does* fuel innovation, and while a truly new and original application is working out the Right Way to do something for the first time, there's money to be made there... and while these software vendors are small and hungry, money does help the work get done faster.
With DAWs, Paul himself has said 'everyone has converged on the same feature set', an indication that all the innovation is more or less over, all the Big Problems mostly solved, and that this niche is about to commoditize. At that point the margins erode, the previously small fast hungry companies are now big, comfortable slow companies trying to hold onto what they've got and you see nothing really new appear--- although those big slow companies are desperately trying to cram new (mostly useless) 'features' into endless 'upgrades' to get people to keep spending money, be it on their software or their hardware.
Although OSS has driven and does drive innovation, don't overlook that one of its great roles is provide and maintain quality software in all those niches where Corporate America no longer feels like spending a great deal of its attention. Microsoft won the browser war, and hasn't released a new IE in years. Without Mozilla, we'd not have had a new browser in coming up on six years.
So accusing Ardour, or many other OSS workalikes of being clones isn't fair. They wouldn't exist if there was no need.
Monty