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Finally, and most bizarrely, SPPF is also suing SourceForge, which is just a hosting platform for open source developers. The problem there (according to SPPF) is that SourceForge hosts the open source Shareaza file sharing app. It would appear that SPPF did so little research in figuring out who to sue, that it seems to think SourceForge is somehow responsible for Shareaza, rather than just hosting it.

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Ability to Pan Beyond Image Border Scroll Beyond Border illustration

It is now possible to pan beyond the image border, making image window navigation much less constrained. It is no longer a problem to use the edge of a brush on the edge of an image while being zoomed in, and one can adapt the canvas to any utility windows covering parts of the image window.

Scroll Beyond Border Feature

Improved Free Select Tool

The freehand select tool has been enhanced to support polygonal selections. It also allows mixing free hand segments with polygonal segments, editing of existing segments, applying angle-constraints to segments, and of course the normal selection tool operations like add and subtract. Altoghether this ends up making the Free Select Tool a very versatile, powerful and easy-to-use selection tool.

Free Select Tool

Brush Dynamics

Brush dynamics let you map different brush parameters, commonly at least size and opacity, to one or more of three input dynamics: pressure, velocity and random. Velocity and random are usable with a mouse. The Ink tool, that supported velocity before, has been overhauled and now handles velocity-dependent painting much better.

Brush dynamics have enabled a new feature in stroking paths. There is now a check box under the "paint tool" option, for emulating brush dynamics if you stroke using a paint tool. What this means is that when your stroke is being painted by GIMP, it tells the brush that its pressure and velocity are varying along the length of the stroke. Pressure starts with zero, ramps up to full pressure and then ramps down again to no pressure. Velocity starts from zero and ramps up to full speed by the end of the stroke.

Brush Dynamics

Under the Hood - GEGL

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.

In addition to porting color operations to GEGL, an experimental GEGL Operation tool has been added, found in the Tools menu. It enables applying GEGL operations to an image and it gives on-canvas previews of the results. The screenshot to the right shows this for a Gaussian Blur.

GEGL Tool

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GIMP still lacks many niceties offered by commercial programs. There's no image or album organizer, which is a real strength in Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 (beta) and is also included in the Serif and Corel editors. There's no tool for quickly stitching panoramas together, either, nor are there built-in printing modules for rapidly creating greeting cards and the like. And the application contains no quick links, like the ones on Shutterfly or Flickr, for sharing photos on popular Web services. All these features are pretty much standard these days, and all are available in competing programs from Adobe, Corel, and Serif.

blueMarine foundation is very similar to existing applications such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture: a photo browser, which can be explored in different ways (by folder, by calendar, by tags, by galleries). This is just a core upon which different modules can be plugged in. The aim of blueMarine is to fully support the photographic workflow, even before the photo shoot (for instance, trip planning supported by maps) and beyond print or archival. For instance, an ornithologist usually manages field notes about the bird observed and photographed: directly binding them to photos and maybe GPS positioning data is much better than keeping a separate Excel sheet.

blueMarine Screenshot - Click for Fullsize

Performance, too, can lag that of the competition. Some filters didn't process as quickly as I would have liked. And few respond in real time—so you don't see the effect on an image until you release the mouse button. As a result, you usually have to make multiple attempts until you get just the effect you want. Modern, for-pay applications such as Elements and Paint Shop Pro usually preview changes in real time. You'll find the lack of preview a real annoyance if you plan to use GIMP for a lot of fiddly edits.

GIMP is a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced user or developer, and it delivers broad support for building graphics and images (it can even open and save Vista icons!). But despite the progress the developers have made in making the program more intuitive, neophytes will still find the learning process arduous. So GIMP is essentially for those who enjoy poking around a program and primarily want to do fine-tuning on photos (although the lack of a preview makes this somewhat hit-or-miss). It's not for the weekend shutterbug who wants to quickly edit, share, and organize shots (programs from Adobe, Serif, and Corel are much better at that). On the other hand, given the irresistible price, many may find the extra effort worthwhile.

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IDC Site

Apple executes its market strategy better than any other company. It's consistent in its message, that message is always out there, and it markets to the niches that are most relevant to it, particularly people with disposable income who can afford to buy its products.

That audience will help Apple weather the U.S. economic slowdown better than most computer makers. It's catering to folks with money who are immune to the downturn, so that's good in the short term, maybe even in the medium term.

In the longer term, their global share is still small, around 3%, so the opportunity to take that higher is enormous. Apple's brand is highly recognizable around the world, and now that you have growing middle classes and growing disposable incomes in places like China and India, there will be huge opportunities for Apple.

Total PCs shipped in the first quarter reached 280,000 units due to strong consumer demand especially for laptops, according to IDC.

PC shipment grew 30 percent year-on-year and about 15 percent higher than IDC's initial forecast, according to a copy of IDC's Quarterly PC tracker obtained by INQUIRER.net.

IDC noted strongest growth in the notebook market, with the entry of more affordable models and small form-factor laptops like the Asus eePC.

The majority of average company revenue (63 percent) is from software products, with 30 percent from services; revenue from hardware and the resale of third-party products and services is negligible. These vendors are truly software vendors.
The majority of revenue from OSS (59 percent on average) is from subscriptions. In fact, 10 of 21 respondents generated 100 percent of their OSS revenue from subscriptions.

The average OSS revenue from Windows-based products (35 percent) is less than OSS revenue from Linux-based products (54 percent), which is not reflective of the installed base in mainstream enterprises.

On average, revenue from North America represents 62 percent of total OSS revenue, while Europe represents 23 percent.

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Microsoft's technology for identity-management on the Internet in the form of Passport took another major beating today when eBay announced that they are discontinuing their support for it. Users of eBay would not be able to use their Passport Ids to login to eBay starting late January. This news comes just after a few months another major online portal in Monster.com dropped support for Passport from their online job website.

as OpenSim continues to gain traction, tying Microsoft technology into OpenSim’s code increases the pool of developers allied with Redmond. And if OpenSim takes off, a Windows Live ID-based avatar identity gives Microsoft a leg up against the identity management tools offered by Google, Yahoo, and OpenID.

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"Imagine if you could...

- Edit with flexibility and speed
- Create Effects in real time
- Animate with unlimited features
- Paint and design on moving video
- Create music with all the tools the pros use
- Work in any format at any resolution


...all while sharing files, projects and clips with users on your network or around the world, and all using a single, open source application where the code is yours… that runs on practically any workstation…

Jahshaka v3.0 will let you do this, and much more. Jahshaka was written from the ground-up to work in different environments, and lets you use the tools you need to get the job done in real time. Thanks to the power of OpenGl and OpenMl you can do this on anything from PC's to Mac's to high-powered Sgi workstations and not have to worry about mixing video, audio and graphics card, installing custom hardware and drivers, or spending millions of dollars for high end speed, power and functionality"

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