Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day 460
An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."
Re:Learning curve (Score:2, Funny)
>>>PC is short for Personal Computer
No actually it's short for "IBM PC" or "IBM PC compatible clone". It's been that way for about 15 years now, since all the other PCs (tandy, coleco, atari, commodore) died out leaving behind just the IBM PC clones and..... um, that other one. "Amiga" I think it's called. ;-)
(I'm just joking - I just bought a Mac myself but calling it a PC would be an insult.)
rename it (Score:4, Funny)
The name The GIMP is ridiculous. It should be called Ogg GIMP. That'll fix it right up.
Re:In honor of July 4th and Ben Franklin? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:For a day? (Score:5, Funny)
I've only used them on mac + gimp on linux, but from my perspective - which really is I wanted to cut and paste boobies onto a photo I had - I found both of them nearly impossible to use. With GIMP, I did load an image, but what followed that was a bit like an acid trip. Stuff would appear, disappear, change on its own. It was intriguing for a while, but like when that little bouncing ball reaches the corner of the TV, I lost interest.
Photoshop was different, at one point I'm pretty sure I had 50 copies of the image in little icons bordering the playing field, and a corresponding array of little tools that I could use to play with my images, if only I could convince it to let me actually do something with one of them. At one point, I thought I had, but it turned out I made the image my screensaver. It took me far less time to accomplish nothing in Photoshop than in GIMP, so Adobe deserve some credit for making it less trippy and more annoying.
Eventually, I printed both images, and with an x-acto knife, glue and a scanner, got the desired result. Didn't take nearly as long, and would have been much cheaper but for the gouges in the dining room table.