IRIX and Software

colin wrote: I'm amazed at how much "mindshare" Adobe Premeire has. It seems like the average semi-pro computer user assumes that Premeire is the gold standard of video apps... despite better products for the same price range (Final Cut, Sony Vegas, Avid DV, etc).

I'm amazed at how much "mindshare" Adobe has in general.

Premiere is nothing special

Framemaker was good but it wasn't theirs to begin with and hasn't been updated in ten years

Photoshop is no better than GIMP, the interface is straggly and a mess to use and it also hasn't really been updated in ten years. It also crashes frequently. On a Windows peecee, their main emphasis.

Illustrator has the same klugey interface that was fine in 1987 but really, c'mon now, all they did in the latest version was replace the old background graphics with some slightly nicer ones then called it a new version. Otherwise I can't see any differences and it STILL takes about a half hour to load. So does P-Shop, btw.

Acrobat and pdf were supposed to be THE cross-platform PORTABLE document format answers, but all that Acrobat has received in the past ten years is a bunch of NON-PORTABLE "enhancements' to the Windows and maybe Mac versions. Unix and OS/2 and anything else even slightly non-mainstream are stuck at version 4 which would be fine except lots of PORTABLE document format files are not backwards-compatible.

So all in all, imo Adobe is a pile of shit.

hamei wrote: Premiere is nothing special

Premiere Pro has some audio features we needed that other cheap windows programs didn't. Now if only I could remeber what they were. It had something to do with

hamei wrote: Photoshop is no better than GIMP, the interface is straggly and a mess to use and it also hasn't really been updated in ten years. It also crashes frequently. On a Windows peecee, their main emphasis.

The Gimp doesn't really do CMYK, which is important to some people. I think that it still doesn't do 16bit, even in 2.0, but I'm not positive. Of course, Cinepaint fixes the latter problem.

Personally, I'm not so thrilled with recent Gimp developments (nor with photoshop these past few years). I tend to use Gimp 1.2, but am generally moving to cinepaint.

hamei wrote: Illustrator has the same klugey interface that was fine in 1987 but really, c'mon now, all they did in the latest version was replace the old background graphics with some slightly nicer ones then called it a new version. Otherwise I can't see any differences and it STILL takes about a half hour to load. So does P-Shop, btw.

I have Illustrator. Freehand was much better. And Coral Draw was at least easier. I think the whole field has been stagnating though.

hamei wrote: So all in all, imo Adobe is a pile of shit.

Indeed.

Though, I note that you didn't mention anything about AE.

jdboyd wrote:
The Gimp doesn't really do CMYK, which is important to some people.

agreed, which is why we got stuck using P-shop and Illustrator both. The work is going to the printer so it's gotta color match. Then, who has time to learn six different programs ? so there ya have it, Pshop and Illustrator keep their monopolies.

Personally, I'm not so thrilled with recent Gimp developments (nor with photoshop these past few years). I tend to use Gimp 1.2, but am generally moving to cinepaint.

No, sadly most of what used to be interesting different open source stuff has become Yet Another Crappy Windows Clone. I mean, what's the fricking point if all they're going to do is *copy* Windows ? Sheesh. What you say about Cinepaint sounds interesting tho.

I have Illustrator. Freehand was much better. And Coral Draw was at least easier. I think the whole field has been stagnating though.

You ain't just whistlin' Dixie. At one time there were tons of interesting graphics programs, both vector and bitmap. CorelDraw was okay (at about v 3), True>Spectra, Embellish, Eclipse, stuff for NeXTStep, all kinds of different graphics apps. Now we have a monoculture.. Ptui.

Though, I note that you didn't mention anything about AE.

After Effects ? Never used it. I'm just bitching about the stuff I know and dislike

I like the Gimp; I hate Gimp 2.0--its over wrought and kludgy. The only thing Adobe I like is Framemaker--maybe they'll make a OS X version but I ain't holding my breath.

And Quark? is there is a better example of complete and utter disrespect for your user base?

Hmm, just some short comments I got when reading this:

1. About Java
I actively test and cooperate with a group creating a free, portable Java environment. It has a JVM, a compiler and a class library and lately works quite well. Ports that are not x86/linux are "on the way" and not perfectly working. But the interpreter should run on many systems and there is a JIT for many cpu's. And yes, irix/mips is "almost" there, I got it half working, but I have failures with strtod(). It just doesn't work here at my place, don't know why. It works mostly on solaris and on NetBSD too. OpenBSD is on the way; x86, ARM, MIPS, Sparc, PowerPC, PA_RISC are among the cpu's it runs off. I hope it will better to a true usability point and maybe see it in freeware...
http://www.kaffe.org

2. About a 2D graphics program. It would be nice to write one. Or better: TWO.
I researched the past two years in digital imaging and wrote some filter kernels, fourier-transform based filters, convolutions, edge-tracers. All aimed to be high-quality and mathematically correct.
http://price.sf.net
They are for cocoa/gnustep and obj-c but porting the cores around would be "easy", just tedious.

I envision two separate apps. Written in Motif. Aimed at SGI but portable to solaris, BSD, linux...
The two applications should share common traits in the interface and share the same filter architecture, so that they could be reused.

one should be a cross-pollination of imgwrks, imager editor and photoshop (in the 1.0/2.0 era) itself. That is a program aimed at the manipulation of digital images, slight retouching, mostly filters, color corrections etc. FOr the moment I see no problem with having 8bit/RGBA, but it should be expandable in the future to 16bit/RGBA at least.
A second program should do the "other" part photoshop is now widely used for. BUt which is not its vocation: painting, digital image creation or really heavy manipulation and editing. I think about Fractal Image painter, one of my ever favorites.

I would start coding the first app first. There is overlap between the two application and code should be shared, but I think that "one app fits all", the way photoshop is used now mostly, is wrong.

zizban wrote: I like the Gimp; I hate Gimp 2.0--its over wrought and kludgy. The only thing Adobe I like is Framemaker--maybe they'll make a OS X version but I ain't holding my breath.

And Quark? is there is a better example of complete and utter disrespect for your user base?

I hear now that Quark is doing a "dual liscence" deal for XPress, so that $700 you spend to get XPress 6 at least lets you use it on two computers for working away from home or office.

When XPress 6 first came out, they were discussing it in an Issue of Macworld (I somehow, here, got Macworld from London) and they were discussing how much cheaper it would be to fly over to New York, buy it at the big apple store in the US and have some starbucks cofffee, then fly back to London and install/use it.

MAN, XPress is that much more in the UK, I think to myself after that.

Personally, I enjoy Adobe's products. Maybe it is the mindshare thing, but in my experience there is a certain thing called "compatibility with x percent of people who also are using your program" when you load yourself up with CS Suite. It's all there and you don't have to go searching for a good alternative, yes there are good alternatives, but where? How much? What do I do in the program to achieve x function that I know exactly how to do in Illustrator and/or Photoshop.

etc etc.

As far as bloat and bad interface design goes, I think that Adobe is not the only company doing that. Anyone here actually seen MS Office lately? All I hear from some people is how Office itself hasn't changed much, but somehow the fileformat's changed again and the program is bulkier. Even so, people still keep a copy of word kicking around because it's what 90% of the computing world uses

Just as a couple of thoughts, anyway

Cory5412 wrote: Even so, people still keep a copy of word kicking around because it's what 90% of the computing world uses

if we wanted to be like 90% of the computing world, we could go out and buy a crappy all-in-one mommyboard with a 2 ghz celeron, cheap flaky memory, a 60 gig ide hard drive, realtek 8139 ethershit nic, AC97 onboard audio, a jaton 'video' card, cram the entire unsavory mess into a cheap plastic box, add a water pump, several holes and flashing neon lights then proclaim the entire ghastly mess "k00l for the l33t hackerz."

Many of us came here to get away from that sewage.

Cory5412 wrote: Even so, people still keep a copy of word kicking around because it's what 90% of the computing world uses :P

I don't keep a copy of Word around. Word in fact came with a Mac I bought (Quadra 660AV), and I made a point of tossing it, just so that people couldn't acuse me of keeping Word around. I don't even have Word where I work.

So far I haven't been sent any Word files that OpenOffice couldn't read correctly, and I do get sent Word files pretty frequently at work.

The IRIX OopenOffice 1.0.3 gets part of the word/power point documents sent to me in the office screwy (fonts & figures usually) about 50%.

squeen wrote: The IRIX OpenOffice 1.0.3 gets part of the word/power point documents sent to me in the office screwy (fonts & figures usually) about 50%.

I also have a problem with fonts in O-O. Version 1.1 is supposed to be a lot better. I wish we could get that running

LaLora wrote: Mathematica cannot match performance of matlab in almost any segment. I'm also too tied to tons of scripts I wrote in the past years in Matlab as part of a research study. I was prepearing to get something better for 3d visualisation and numerical methods, a sgi workstation for team presentation with rear screen projectors (geophysics and geology models) and now this...! No more Matlab for Irix... This just ruined my day today totally! I see only two options now:

Option 1:
Mathworks will come to sanity and will have next release for IRIX or will continue to sell r13

Option 2:
I will have to figure out how to transfer or even remake tons of my PC Matlab data and models to some other SGI visualisation program. Do you guys maby know something for SGI that could generate something like ''fog of particles'', dots or pixel size objects in various colors and transparencies in 3d from set of HUGE arrays and matrices (and would not take too long to learn)?

thanks

I'm not sure on importing Matlab scripts but one options for you might be R at http://www.r-project.org/


Cheers,

Shawn

hamei wrote: if we wanted to be like 90% of the computing world, we could go out and buy a crappy all-in-one mommyboard with a 2 ghz celeron, cheap flaky memory, a 60 gig ide hard drive, realtek 8139 ethershit nic, AC97 onboard audio, a jaton 'video' card

HA! I **wish** 90% of the computing world had a dedicated graphics card! You wouldn't believe how many PCs have "integrated" graphics. Sucks up a a bit of the RAM, but totally kills performance. Overtaxed hardware, not enough RAM to start with, some of that precious RAM unavailable for Windows to use, poor drivers, and you've got a WIN-WIN situation!

It's bad enough on the newer i865G chipset, it's very painful on the old i810 chipsets I see all over the place. Yeah, great idea, lets use the PC100 RAM for the frame buffer too! It's not much better with the new DDR6-9900 SUPER HAPPY OVERCLOX0R RAM either.

A $7 Jaton graphics card with 4 MB of framebuffer and a SiS graphics chip can literally double the performance of one of those older, nasty, all-in-one motherboards. Mix in some of that XP goodness with spyware, a fragmented IDE drive with a zippy 9.5ms seek, and just try to kill of that bizzare service or two! Fun fun fun! Ever look at the detailed specs of those bargain bin $500 Dell systems?

Actually, if you want to be like 90% of the computing world, get a 200 MHz Pentium and run Win95 like your dentist's secretary uses... or that PC in the back office of the local lumberyard.

how pretty or ugly is the R13 on Irix ?
anyone can tell me his/her experience ?

If you do a search for Irix on mathworks website you'll find plenty of people who will tell you of their experience! Or, have google do the search for you.

yep, but i'd also like to hear neckochan guys
(as Mathworks guys are too addicted for Matlab )

These days your best bet for IRIX would be to use and/or update the nekoware Octave package.

Cheers.

I know Octave, i am currently using it on Irix and … it's not 100% compatible with Matlab.

What a total blast from the past.

It's both entertaining and depressing to read my own writing from eleven years ago.

Back in 2004 was just before Intel's 900-series chipsets, which were a huge performance and usability increase. Although it's funny -- I ended up getting one of the $500 Dell bargain systems from 2003 a few years later. 2.0GHz Pentium 4, one or two gigs of RAM, and a fresh disk later meant that it worked really well with Windows XP. I might even still have that system in my storage locker. If I do, it would likely get Linux/FreeBSD or Windows 7/8.1U1/10 on it, these days.

It's interesting too because the Apple/Adobe dynamic has changed in the past eleven years, or the stuff that was being guessed based on observations eleven years ago (Premiere 6.5 being discontinued) has sort of started to become more true. Adobe and Apple are sort of throwing their weight in opposite directions in terms of Flash, and in 2006 and 2007 I started having pretty big problems with the stability of the Creative Suite applications on Mac OS X (then-current, both 10.4 and 10.5, I jumped ship to Windows when Vista and Mac OS X 10.6 were both launched, finding that Creative Suite was faster, more reliable, and more efficient on slower Windows hardware.

In general, these days I don't really use any "vintage" or "off the beaten path" platforms for anything productive. I do some dinking around in OpenSTEP on a Sparcstation Voyager and Mac SSW7 on a Power Mac 6100, but all of my "real work" is in Linux/Mac/Windows, all current versions that get patches. At the time (in 2004) I had some older Macs that I was using for productive work, because IE4 was basically the same on a Quadra as it was on an iMac G3. Classic Mac OS is another issue entirely though, these days at least.

I keep thinking about pulling out my Octane, but I'm not quite ready for that yet. Back when I first had it in like 2005/2006, I was planning on using it as a primary/active computer, but it never really advanced from that point, so even if I could deal with "the web" at the speed of MIPS (I mean my particular Octane was never super impressive, but even a much faster one would be a challenge in patience, even if a modern web rendering engine were available) you'd be unable to render most of it, and any local software that still runs on IRIX is unlikely to be really widely compatible with contemporary versions. Though, I don't know the state of nekoware, so things like GIMP and OpenOffice/LibreOffice may be up to date.