We need to approach the US in the same way we approach other rogue states, but more urgently.
We (Europeans) are, at the time of writing, being dragged into a global crisis. It is not hyperbolic to fear WW3.
This is happening because the US has chosen to undertake an assault on a sovereign country, during negotiations, against the advice of its own planners. This has happened suspiciously in line with the desires of a third country, during a major kompromat scandal involving the President.
This will continue to happen unless we demonstrate, as we did with Russia, that no state can act unilaterally like this.
We need a commercial and cultural boycott, divestment from US projects, and sanctions on senior US official and the oligarchs that have enabled this catastrophe.
The Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization.
(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
The cartridge-style packaging of the Pentium II/III’s was also peak for the lineup.
My favorite PC I ever built was a dual-CPU Tyan motherboard that eventually held two screaming fast Coppermines. Needed a university copy of Windows 2000 to really make them sing—the Windows 95 series never supported SMP—and it was glorious.
I remember 1999/2000-ish I had both a Pentium III/Intel motherboard and Athlon PC. The Pentium III system was rock solid, and performed fantasic. Even the CPU and motherboard looked amazing.
The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.
A lot of that probably came down to the motherboard chipset. IIRC Intel made their own chipsets for the Pentium III and they were good and reliable. Athlons were coupled with chipsets from VIA and whatnot.
Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.
Jesus Christ finally. I'm not joking when I say that the old text tool wasn't simply bad, it was THE WORST text tool I ever used. If you had a dark theme and made the text black, you literally couldn't see the text you were editing!
I believe the last feature Krita needs to become a decent design tool would be fixing the layer styles so you can add the same style multiple times to the same layer (and if possible better bevel and 3D text tools). An immense number of designs are not much more than multiple strokes or "slightly" 3D text. Multiple strokes can be done in Krita in a very complicated and impractical way (you can do it by adding the layer style to a group, but with too many strokes the rounding errors make the outer strokes "flat," so the "correct" way would be to add the largest stroke first and then use clones to add the inner strokes). Photopea (a free online editor) supports both of these.
My opinion is that Krita has a tremendous amount of potential to serve a free and open source application for several niche use cases, but it's routinely held back by lacking "that one feature the user will need." Probably because everyone still thinks it's just an application for illustration and can't be used for image editing or design.
Animation is probably the most obvious one. Krita has an entire curves-based timeline editor, but the integration is so poor that it can only be used to animate opacity and the simplest type of transforms (translate, rotate, scale). That's an incredible waste considering it has cage transform, perspective transform, etc. All the non-destructive filters already have the code to serialize their settings to XML and back, but somehow those settings can't be animated? The liquefy transform, by far the most powerful, can't be animated. If transform masks had opacity and you could animate that, even that could be extremely useful, but they don't so they can't be animated in general.
Layer styles are another integration problem. Many users don't know they exist because they're hidden in the context menu. Krita already has filter masks. It doesn't even need a separate UI for layer styles, the styles could just be filters instead, then they would be able to get drag-n-dropped around and you could add multiple of the same to a single layer. Apparently this is because they want compatibility with Photoshop, but you could just convert Krita filter masks into Photoshop styles in the save step, so I don't really understand the problem. Naturally if the filter settings ever became animatable, that would mean layer styles would NOT be animatable in virtue of them not being filters, which would suck a lot.
By the way, I haven't tested the new version yet but Krita ALREADY has a color overlay layer style. So it looks like they simply... duplicated a feature they already had? Also the UI looks very similar to Clip Studio Paint, but a key difference in CSP is that single-color layers use 8 bit pixels instead of full 32 bit RGBA. I'm afraid this UI I'm seeing in the video is going to mislead some users into creating dozens of 32 bit layers with color overlay for easy color management and then end up with much worse performance than they would have in similar software. It also seems the color overlay "mask" behaves in a way that is completely different from literally every other mask in the software. I guess I'll have to download it to know for sure.
Edit: by "3d text" I sincerely don't mean more than WordArt level stuff. A lot of text for mobile games is very basic "curved text + vanishing point 3D + multiple strokes." Krita also lacks a "long shadow" style (i.e. infinite shadow instead of a drop shadow), which is common in a lot of designs and that GIMP has.
Most of the transfors you describe are still unfortunately destructive (ie the only way to go back is to undo). I'm not an expert on this, but I think the only way this could be key framed would be to take snapshots of the pixels and insert the modified raster data as keyframes? I'm not sure there's a good/correct/obviously way to interpolate betweens say a before and after liquefy operation the way it currently works. Maybe some of them coul store brush+inputs (pressure, cursor movement, etc) but that seems difficult to work with as an artist. Again, not done much animation (as a dev or artist) so maybe I'm just out of the loop completely
But yeah I agree with you in principle though, it would be nice if these were non-destructive and could be keyframed.
They are all non-destructive in Krita. Just use a transform mask and go to tool options, select liquefy and after you liquefy however you want you can just hide the transform mask and it stops liquefying the layer.
Yes, Krita has had this feature for years. Non-destructive filters (adjustment layers), too.
GIMP still doesn't have it. Only in 3.0 it got adjustment layers for filters.
Oh, this is news to me! I've used Krita to pain (recreational noob, not on a professional level) and I never realised this. I'll play with this tomorrow
I've just moved to a new town, and my social life is kicking.
Found a local computer club, crew of lads tinkering and using open source software. Really nice, smart bunch. I'm learning loads and appreciating their company.
OP found this lacking, because it's not working fast enough and he's not getting enough time with people.
I totally agree putting in time with old friends is always worth it (maybe not through surprise calls) but on a local level, I'd encourage patience.
Things take time, friendship isn't something you can just switch on. It takes years, and that's the point. It's a journey, not a destination.
Last time I checked, only the US and Israel. Europeans don't want anything to do with this war, and the USA's East Asian allies also like it not even a little bit.
As a Brit, I'm disgusted that Starmer is allowing UK bases to be used by the US for launching attacks. I can see it being just a matter of time before Starmer drags us into another war of lies. (Last time it was Tony Blair, also a Labour leader and he still hasn't been tried for his war crimes).
That attack looks like a false flag operation to me. Also, as already stated, Iran is not the aggressor - that would be Trump with his Fifa Peace Prize.
Fallacious comparison, two entirely different situations. For a start, whatever the Iranian response, the aggressor at the root of this particular episode is the other side: the U.S.
Yes, I'm sure Iran is completely honest and knows what it's doing at all times. It's not like there's no central command and someone surely knows what everyone else, including proxies are doing, right?
It never ceases to amaze me that demonstrating such a weapon on civilian targets somehow made it past the entire chain of command. One of those things that I just can't wrap my head around no matter how many times I come back to it.
They weren't exclusively civilian targets, they were considered "mixed" targets. Hirohito's home wasn't considered strategically-important enough and therefore didn't make the cut.
The sites in question were also specifically selected because they hadn't previously faced conventional attack, enabling a more accurate damage assessment.
> they hadn't previously faced conventional attack
Which, by the way, illustrates a related point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki had stiff competition. WWII was devastating, to cities and civilians all over the map. More people died in the conventional bombing of Tokyo than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I think the atomic bombs represented some 2 weeks worth of casualties in a war that lasted 300.
No sir that's not a school we're proposing to bomb, it's a complex containing both a school and a vehicle maintenance facility. So it's mixed, meaning there's valid logistical reasons to attack it. Yes, hundreds of children will perish in the attack, but the action will also provide us with legitimate benefits. Just try not to think about the former and focus on the latter. I'm sure no one in the future will judge us too harshly for the decision.
Is that what the Japanese were doing? (Bit of a pointless diversion though because this is a nuclear bomb we're talking about here. Not exactly a surgical strike.)
Yes and no. They were doing that, but AFAIK they did so because it was deemed more efficient, not to use people as human shields. Also, at the time, there was no such thing as a surgical strike.
I personally think that the lifetime of the author is a bit odd, since it reduces the rewards towards those who are old or infirm. I agree the length is way too long though.
Remember that Disney was a major factor in lobbying for the longer copyright terms, and their 1959 film Sleeping Beauty was made 80 years after Tchaikovsky's ballet (a major source for the Film's soundtrack).
If we thus take 79 years as our measuring stick (And I still think that's a bit too long) 18 more books from the list would be in the public domain.
Maybe if we take 25 as a typical beginning of career and 80 as a typical date of death for someone who lives to 25 we could settle on 55 years? That would leave only 13 items on the list as still under copyright, and I believe that includes all works by living authors too.
We (Europeans) are, at the time of writing, being dragged into a global crisis. It is not hyperbolic to fear WW3.
This is happening because the US has chosen to undertake an assault on a sovereign country, during negotiations, against the advice of its own planners. This has happened suspiciously in line with the desires of a third country, during a major kompromat scandal involving the President.
This will continue to happen unless we demonstrate, as we did with Russia, that no state can act unilaterally like this.
We need a commercial and cultural boycott, divestment from US projects, and sanctions on senior US official and the oligarchs that have enabled this catastrophe.