And this is At SxSW, written Mar 11, 2006, and concerning Conferences

Here I am at SxSW. Austin's nicer than I was expecting, I have to say. We went down by the river yesterday and saw turtles sunbathing on the rocks. Wasn't imagining that a scene like that would be in a city in Texas. There's beauty in all sorts of odd places if you look for it. I'm sitting in the day cafe in the Austin Convention Centre, and a chap here was singing a country song about his poodle. He's now singing a song called "I wish I had a beer sponsorship". Madness. Although I do now have wireless working. I have been subject to much puzzlement from Mac people here (that is, everyone here) who do not understand why I spend time fucking about with Linux when Macs just work. It's a pretty compelling argument; I did try explaining about open source, but I was quite drunk. I'm debating putting together an argument around Adobe's declaration of not bringing current Photoshop to the MacBook Pro (so you have to run it in emulation slow mode). The Gimp will work on both, I shall say. I'm not convinced that this argument is any good, but it may help to illustrate the point. Right, off to see if I can find some of the rest of the gang.

Comments

Steel

one question - are these blogs crawled by google well. I have a similar blog designed by beccary of wordpress.

Thanks

Rob

If you see someone called Matt Web, tell him Rob says hello. Think he's going, not sure.

Aquarion

Okay, so the argument in favour of using the Gimp relies upon something demonstratably not true, which is that the Gimp is actually a valid replacement for Photoshop.

It isn't. And this isn't just me, whose design skills aren't wonderful. We tried an experiment.

We hired three new developers. We put all of them on Ubuntu. One is doing pure code, and is happy on Ubuntu, one is doing flash type things, and is moving to windows. The third moved to Mac after two weeks of trying to learn the Gimp enough to do what he needed to do in Photoshop. Him (And me, I'm support contact one in this) tried to get Gimp to do what he could do in Photoshop in a couple of minutes and it took *hours*.

Plus, getting Photoshop to save to GIF? iTunes to encode to MP3? Playing DVDs? Out of the box. I realise this is mostly *because* OS X has a large company behind it, but still.

I look forward to ripping your recent discussion on LR about OS X's percieved evilness to tiny little pieces as well. Have fun at SXSW. Git.

sil

And I quote, "I’m not convinced that this argument is any good, but it may help to illustrate the point." The point I was illustrating is that if you want Photoshop on an Intel Mac, and you don't want to run in emulation mode, you are shit out of luck because Adobe don't want to compile it and you don't have the source. With the Gimp, you do. Whether the two things are identical is irrelevant to this discussion. In practice, it probably means that if you're an artist you shouldn't buy a MacBook Pro at all yet.

Go buy Fluendo's MP3 licence and Linux stuff will work with MP3s too, just as happily. DVDs: hassle Fluendo to come up with a licence. Then again, how many people will pay for it?

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[...] Steve and the gang are at South by Southwest and I’m not. However, they bought a beer and kept my place free anyway. What a bunch of heroes. Nice one. Sorry I can’t be there with you. [...]