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CoffeeFiend

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Everything posted by CoffeeFiend

  1. Not to people who are locked into Windows-only everything (almost everybody), and will have to support that for the next 10+ years, that's for sure! If anything it'll drive people to drink. MS is lucky they didn't really have to worry too much about that, as nearly everything runs only on Windows. You need to run [insert almost anything here]? Then you're stuck with Windows, so people have to buy it, and in the end they make money no matter what. Either ways, I'll probably buy a Mac this year to run the Adobe Creative Suite, and for whatever other work that can be done on there for now. It's certainly going to take a lot of long, painful years to fully make the switch. I totally, completely 100% agree here.
  2. Sounds like I have to buy my first Mac then. Or perhaps they'll finally fire Ballmer and put someone in charge who has a clue, and give it a sane interface again (it's never going to sell, it'll make Vista, WinME, Zune, MS Bob, Clippy and Windows Phone look like amazing successes). Or someone's going to make serious coin selling a new shell replacement for Windows. There's still some hope left. A future with a metro-only Windows is essentially Microsoft committing suicide. Otherwise, they just handed the entire computing market over to Apple, and everybody will make porting their apps to OS X their topmost priority. At least we're still going to be able to buy Win7 PCs for a while, and it has years of support left to help make the transition.
  3. Seemingly, they're trying to pretend that desktops, laptops, tablets and phones are one and the same, and that they should work identically. Unifying the experience by making it suck for everybody. But, that's exactly how it is most of the time. Someone moved their cheese and they just can't adapt. Except that here, it's a bigger change than going from XP to Vista or Win7, or Win3.1 to Win95 even. They're basically killing multitasking (that's completely insane) and forcing a backwards touch-oriented phone UI on everyone. So it's more like a Win95 -> MS-DOS transition really (no more multitasking, poor UI). It's not the type of typical whining we've been hearing for years (which is more like "oh no, they changed the skin!") I don't think you'll see too many "fanboys" of the metro stuff (even among those of us that have stayed with the bleeding edge all these years). If anything, I see people spending the next 3 or 4 years about downgrade rights to Win7. And without a lot of Win8 tablets around, Metro won't really "take off" so not much people will waste time developing for it (nevermind that it would be Win8-only apps in the first place which sounds like a poor idea in the first place -- "Only runs on Windows 8" isn't a great selling point)
  4. Thread cleanup We're still around
  5. They might make sense on a mobile device, but on a traditional desktop? Totally agree there. I for one, won't be upgrading to Win 8 unless there's a way to disable the Metro stuff.
  6. CoffeeFiend

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    Pfft. You got them all wrong I'd show it to them on nice fuji crystal archive paper or perhaps even a giclée or canvas print
  7. CoffeeFiend

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    The question doesn't even make sense. They all have different purposes, they are for different needs. .PNG is a modern-day GIF, for indexed colors (GIF still being useful for animated pictures) .JPEG is a lossy format, for things with too much colors for an indexed format (photos mainly) .TIFF is a lossless format and you're missing .PSD, many other picture formats, and all the vector type stuff too. .TXT is raw text. .DOCX is simply a modern .DOC (which is best for antique versions of MS Office) i.e. formatted text .RTF is more of a niche format which very little people use (along with .ODF, .WPD and others) .avi is a ghetto but extremely common container (mainly used for older xvid and divx codecs) which says absolutely nothing of what's inside or its quality .wmv is Microsoft's proprietary format .MOV is Apple's proprietary Quicktime format and you're missing the modern-day avi replacement: .mkv and also .mp4 (both often used for H.264/AAC content) It makes absolutely no sense to pick just one option, and none are inherently better than the other two. They're all useful for different things, so you just use the one that works best for what you have to do. The question might as well have been: What's best? [ ] spoon [ ] fork [ ] knife [ ] car [ ] boat [ ] plane [ ] screwdriver [ ] hammer [ ] saw [ ] bed [ ] kitchen table [ ] chair [ ] refrigerator [ ] stove [ ] dishwasher and so on. You're choosing between dissimilar things, used for different purposes, so it makes no sense to pick one over another.
  8. It should help a lot. Look into UAC and junctions. If you actively look for information (Google is your friend) you'll find out it works a lot better than expecting to be spoon fed the information. And it's not like it's hard to find either, people have been talking about that stuff since Vista came out in 2007 (that'd be like 5 years ago)
  9. CoffeeFiend

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    I have yet to experience the kind of glitches you're talking about on Win 7, and I've been running it on several PCs (work and home), and since the betas too. It must be something with your setup or something you do. I've never seen this one on Win7, but it happened all the time on XP. Most likely it's your video drivers (Intel onboard video? no wonder...)
  10. 95% of the stuff on your list isn't "free", they're just trial versions. They have lots of free software though: Windows Live suite, Security Essentials, Visual C# Express, VB Express, Visual C++ Express, SQL Server Express (and SQL Server Compact too, and lots of extras), IIS 7.5 Express, Robotics Developer Studio Express, TONS of developer stuff their MVC stack/NuGet/SandCastle/lots of SDKs/all .NET compilers/etc, PowerShell, Hyper-V and Virtual PC, XNA studio, WM and Expression Encoders, XP PowerToys, the SysInternals suite, the Zune player (it's actually not bad), SteadyState, the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool, Virtual Earth, MSRT and Defender, the baseline security analyzer, ActiveSync, Skype, Office viewers, Mathematics, Small Basic (for kids to learn programming), WebMatrix (and the Platform Installer too), Sharepoint Designer, etc. And we're not talking about things like Media Player and IE version updates, DirectX, .NET frameworks, Service Packs, theme packs (even though it's not software), etc. Including FAR more online content & services than anyone else provides: hotmail, bing, msdn, channel9, skydrive, CodePlex, MSN, technet, etc.But that's all free as well. Most likely, you mean starter vs home premium. The starter version only has extra limitations and restrictions like not having a x64 version, 2GB of RAM max, no aero glass, no changing wallpaper or themes, etc. Comparison here.
  11. and probably not junctions either. So yeah, PEBCAK
  12. PEBCAK. You don't even need that account anyway.
  13. I'd hardly call this a "free" OS. It's not actually meant to run on a "production" PC like that (besides, it's way too buggy IMO), it's for developers to start testing their code on it early and to start developing metro apps, etc. Hence the "developer preview" name. The beta is what they'd expect early adopters to try first (it'll be similarly time-bombed). That version will be feature complete and reasonably stable, and after a few "late" bugfixes it'll be a RC, then RTM (probably late 2012). I for one, won't be developing for Metro (more like disabling it altogether)
  14. That is indeed when the developer preview expires. The beta is supposed to be out by the end of February.
  15. Me neither I mean, it does have LOADS of new features, but I don't see why anyone would use it
  16. Than the seam carving stuff? No. There is no way to selectively eliminate pixels based on their "frequency" (eliminating rows of the "least important" pixels, that aren't actually in a straight line), while keeping straight lines straight and so on (and simply resizing it will look horrible). I couldn't in a day's work accomplish something as nice as it can do in mere seconds. There were a siggraph presentation that explained the technology behind it if you're curious. But that's just a tiny, minuscule part of the new features anyway We got real 3D editing (like a typical CAD program), vector content, content-aware fill, smart objects and nested smart objects, smart filters, advanced typography, some new and useful/powerful filters like vanishing point and liquify, HDR merge, GPU acceleration, etc. It's from a different century indeed. Precisely. The older PS versions can't make sense of the new format, and the new information in it. Yes. They open just fine (much like your analogy that followed this).
  17. You should see the selection tools we've got now, like the the quick selection tool and refine edge which is much more magic than the magic wand tool (makes it easy to select things like hair). If you want actual magic, then you should see things like content-aware scaling. Or if you want black magic, check out this , specifically around the 30 second mark (the image recomposition part). That part didn't make it in time for CS5 though (but the seam carving bits you'll see did) Well, I'm not using such an old version of Photoshop, so I work in completely different ways. To scale something down like that, I typically use smart objects. It gives you the flexibility to scale down, and scale it back up without any loss whatsoever, and it looks great without any fancy tricks. You can literally take something that's like 1000x1000px, scale it down to one single pixel, then back up to 1000x1000 and you end up with the exact same pixels as you had before (it stores how big you want to see it and where instead of destroying the original pixels) As for Tripredacus, he's using a web designer's tool (Fireworks, not Photoshop) which works in different ways, and also from a different era, so that probably wouldn't really help that much either. But if you want to do some really fancy sharpening, then there's a LOT of possible tricks one can use. From sharpening in Lab mode (in the luminance channel), sharpening with a high pass filter, you can do selective sharpening with layer masks, there's newer filters that are better than unsharp mask like smart sharpen. Also, using such a filter on a smart object (i.e. using smart filters) lets you edit your sharpening settings later on (you sharpened too much or too little? just tweak the numbers again), there's several 3rd party tools and plugins for sharpening, etc. Also, the settings depend on the source material, what you're doing with it, which medium you're outputting to (i.e. you sharpen more for print than on screen), etc. Also, different programs (like Adobe Camera Raw) don't work quite the same when it comes to sharpening. Also, the amount of noise present in a picture can change your sharpening quite a bit. There's a lot more to discuss about sharpening alone than what one can share in a forum post unfortunately. But no, I don't do that "resize & sharpen a bunch of times" thing.
  18. CoffeeFiend

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    Before that, a lot of PCs were pretty much turning into consoles. I mean, they're both a computer that's able to do several tasks, there's no reason to cripple them. No. Not at all! Features like using them as a media extender are very welcome, and no, such things don't make a console overheat, much like installing MS Word on your PC won't make it overheat. It's just more software installed on a hard drive or flash, and it doesn't run at the same time. It doesn't cause any problems. Tell that to the 3 or 4 PS2's I've been through (mainly v12's with dying lasers). Again, it's definitely not being able to run a different program than a game that made them fail. I've happily given away my games, controllers and memory cards. Definitely NOT! The ONLY strength Nintendo has is games: they have a lot of fun games that nobody else has which appeals to a broad audience. But their hardware is complete JUNK! My kids have been through 3 DS or DSI's (including some where the back buttons failed in the first week, the old volume slider that wears out ridiculously fast and is overly loose -- same with the screen's hinge, cheap screens with dead pixels, etc) and the Wii ain't much better quality-wise (I've seen so many people with dead controllers too). It's no wonder the console doesn't overheat: its CPU/GPU are a dinosaur compared to the other consoles. It's sad that you need a SD card to store basic things on it too. Its software it's a bad joke as well. The online play might as well not be there. Also, even the newest versions of the DS can only connect to highly insecure WEP encrypted APs (there's simply no excuse for that in this day and age, WPA is like 10 years old!). I've even seen developers who ranted about how little the Wii SDK helps them compared to the other consoles.
  19. Meh. It's not a contest or anything. I know enough to make money from it (and pass the ACE exam). I can make the program give me the results clients want in no time flat (I use the keyboard shortcuts a LOT), but that unfortunately doesn't make me a better designer (then again, the whole design by committee thing...) or anything of the sort.
  20. It's the source material (on a proverbial silver platter), it should help a lot It's only a few simple layers (bottom to top): 1) layer with the cropped / scaled background pic, with a stroke layer fx (I wouldn't necessarily discard the cropped pixels though, just in case you wanna nudge it a bit later) 2) the roman head logo thing, perhaps with a linear gradient on its layer mask to fade its bottom part (although the white overlays from layers 3 to 5 may suffice) 3) the horizontal stroke (simple shape layer or even pixels, seemingly with a bit of a white outer glow) 4&5) layers for the signature and text, with a white outer glow on them as well That wouldn't do you any good as you're using a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY old version of Photoshop (I could post one though). A "modern" PSD won't open right (or perhaps not at all) in your Photoshop from 1998 (14 years ago). Especially if one works in modern ways, using modern features (e.g. smart objects). Edit: Same story for the source material I guess. All that stuff works out of the box with modern software... There's really nothing wrong with it. Although the svg file is a vector format. Using modern tools, you'd open it in Illustrator, select it then copy (ctrl-c), and then paste as a smart object in Photoshop (this way it stays a vector layer and not pixels) There are ways but it's entirely unnecessary (a pointless waste of time, even if it would only take a few seconds to do), thanks to layer blending modes. Just pick a layer style from the group that "darkens" i.e. darken, multiply, color burn, linear burn or darker color (use the one which looks best to you, you can also tweak the opacity/fill, or even use a layer mask for this purpose by painting on it with gray tones), then the white background just disappears automagically (it just takes 2 mouse clicks, or cycle through them with shift+alt and + or -) Oh, personally, the only real change I'd likely make is increase the tracking on GESELLCHAFT to align (it normally works really well on uppercase serif type like that -- it looks very classy, quite a classic), but I understand Tripredacus used a source image, not actual type on a layer, which makes it a pain (unless you happen to have the Bodoni Std typeface handy, from Adobe or similar)
  21. This, or manually uninstall the trial junk and other crap.
  22. Not bad at all! The design, the color you chose and everything work nicely together. I like it
  23. What, are we off-topic at all? I actually did consider splitting the topic. And while we're off-topic, well, the VS 11 preview is kind of deceiving too. Besides support for Metro stuff, it just doesn't bring what I wish for (particularly as someone who mainly writes C#). Yes, async will be nice to have (it has very little else, and for things that you'd use async for, we normally have other threads running anyway), but how about integrating things like the Windows API Code Pack 1.1 into the .NET framework, to access the core features of Windows? You know, things like TaskDialogs, Direct2D and Direct3D11 (then again we have SlimDX and SharpDX), control of the Win 7 taskbar stuff, etc. This basic stuff should be built-in really, along with equivalents to Resharper / CodeRush+Refactor! / VisualAssistX, and LINQPad too. I'm not convinced yet that VS 11 will be a worthwhile upgrade either, unless you're primarily a C++ person in which case C++11 support probably sounds nice.
  24. Call me naive, but I'd like to believe MS won't commit suicide like this. They'd either be handing the whole computing market over to Apple, or forcing people to stick to an outdated version of Windows for far too long, until they correct their stance (after that epic flop). But most likely it would be a bit of the former, and a lot of the latter. Oh, so yet another reason to stick to VMWare's products? Great. Along with the "only available on certain editions" thing, which only makes it available to the kind of people (IT guys basically) who already have a lot invested in their competitor's superior products? Well, some of the features seem nice still, but again, nothing really amazing. But it's possibly the first Windows version that doesn't really bring something I really care for. There's small things here and there (e.g. I believe it's going to get an AV built-in, but all that does is save me installing MSE by hand). It feels more of a Windows 7 R2 (very little changed) -- besides Metro obviously. Seemingly it's going to be the 2nd MS OS that I skip updating to (the first being WinME), in ~25 years of using their products. That's definitely not a good sign. As for work, with or without Metro, we definitely won't be migrating to that (we're not completely finished moving to Win 7 yet!) Honestly, this VERY much sounds like a knee-jerk reaction. I'd MUCH sooner keep using a very much outdated WinXP copy (*shudder*) for the next decade than Linux (and no, it's not because I didn't actually try it! Much the inverse actually). At least XP still runs today some of the most useful software, that are today far ahead of what Linux will have to offer in a decade. If you said a Mac then I'd agree it's slowly becoming a credible platform. They got a version of MS Office, they have the whole Adobe CS Suite, they recently got a version of AutoCAD, the SolidWorks folks have been working on a Mac version for a while, they have several popular apps (most of which are pretty high quality, relatively-speaking e.g. Aperture, Final Cut, iWork, VMWare Fusion, etc), they got Steam recently, etc. At least I could do some of my work on a Mac, whereas a PC with Linux would only serve me as a boat anchor or a door stop. It doesn't have the software that's required to get work done and it's not going to get it anytime soon due to its "philosophy" being incompatible with commercial software. Heck, I'd sooner stick to a Metro-only Windows!
  25. I'm not really reading the same thing as you in that sentence I guess. But his speech sure shows commitment to Metro overall. So long as there's a way to get rid of it, it'll be a decent OS (just not one upgrading to from Win 7). But if they make Windows Metro-only from now on, then I guess I have to ditch C# and start learning Objective C soon (and PowerShell -> BASH, etc)... That would be very sad, after being a user of MS products since MS-DOS 3.x! If they end up making it Metro-only, the sales will be non-existent (unless you count those making use of the downgrade rights), and one can only hope that the shareholders will want the CEO's head on a platter and have someone else make things right. No idea if it's any good, I've never actually used it. I don't use VMWare Player either, but we have years of expertise and investment in VMWare's solutions: we've been using Workstation since ~forever (and we have a large-ish library of disk images in this format), we've used GSX in the past, now we're using vShpere (ESXi hypervisor) which is also the only solution consultants around here recommend and support (all that I've talked to recommend against Hyper-V) which is important to us. Add to that some experience with PowerCLI and also having done automation using the old COM-based scripting API (I've even used VmPerl a couple of times)... We're not about to throw all that away anytime soon, for a less mature, less complete platform that seemingly offers no real advantages in any way.
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