Ok let us compare, my Windows partition to my Linux partition;
Windows: I am working in some directory, I find I need to grab a utility, get some information on some file format, or whatever. WindowKey-E, Shift-Tab, Space, Shift-Tab, www.google.com, enter. Type in query. Alternatively, Windowkey-R, www.google.com type in query. The latter can take a bit longer since it loads a separate instance of iexplore.
Linux: I am working in some directory, yada yada yada. Windowkey-R (w00t, give it up for customizability!), firefox.com
fuck
wait
fuck
wait
30 seconds later I am at Google.
Lesson? If I have to wait 30 seconds for it, it is NOT INTEGRATED INTO MY OPERATING SYTEM, whenever I am waiting for something to load, it feels like a separate application.
I did NOT pay for broadband in order to use a separate app.
Heck, the overall SLOW-ASS-EDNESS of KDE is the ONE reason I am not using my Linux partition right now. Yah all my hotkeys are the same, but, umm, heh. Shit is slow. Booting takes 2-3 minutes, sometimes up to 5.
From what I can tell, even Linux beats MacOSX on terms of browser integration, on OSX I have to dig through tons of freaking menus trying to find a browser app to run, is safari integrated into the UI or not? (I only use a Mac computer about once every 2 years just to see what is going on so...)
Oh, and I'd use Konqueror, except loading up a new Konqueror window takes LONGER than loading up Firefox. That is WITH Konqueror preloading enabled.
I'd use xfce except that it doesn't like YaST2, or for that matter half a dozen other things. It is fast though! (Enlightenment R17, Enlightenment R17, Enlightenment R17, where are you??)
During the process of writing this message, I have done three Google queries for various bits and piece of information, each query and result reading took less either less time than starting up Firefox, or only a few seconds more.
In conclusion, yes, browser integration with the OS does make a difference.:)
Well the X closes crap, the start menu runs crap. Saving a file is under file save, opening a file is under file open, printing a file is under file print.:)
Oh, and help is under help.
The Edit thing is kind of irritating, but once someone clicks it, it is standard from program to program.
I should have clarified more though, things like the nifty folder animation thingy the Mac does is umm, weird. Sure it might be convienent and all, but there is no GUI hint that it exists!
Of course in Windows, opening a file up in an application from the Explorer GUI is equally odd, drag file down to representation of application on taskbar, wait a second, application will be restored in size and raised to top, drop file appropriately depending on the application.
Likely the weirdest part of the entire UI, well that and the irritating search dog.
Ok ok ok, times and arial are the only two fonts the average user cares about.
the 90% user base out there that isn't still treating their screen as an inane 80 column display. . .:)
(of course modern screens display far more than 80 columns of text, so what do we do? Draw a big line down at the 80 column mark just to make sure we are aware of it!)
Nice. Really nice. Without it using a GUI is insane. Broadband net access tends to do that to a person, if I want to look something up, open new window, go to dictionary, type in word.
All of a sudden, the net IS part of my desktop. Kick'in. You want to know what killed Desktop Push technology? No longer needed, the internet is now just one more data resource on my computer, albeit one connected over CAT5 rather than an IDE ribbon cable.
Sweet.
Oh, and they also brought us (or at least popularized the use of) the scroll wheel. Nice. Not having a Scroll Wheen (such as right now...) drives me nuts, scroll Wheels rock. Also don't forget that they have standardized on many previously "lost" GUI tid bits, yes there are MANY more that they need to bring back from the dead (*COUGH*largechunksofBeOS*COUGH*), but in general they have done an excellent job of making a thorough, complete, and SIMPLE GUI.
Most aspects of the Windows GUI are blatently obvious, with the main exception being the Window-Key shortcuts, which one of the most useful items about the GUI in general that allow for it to be easily used soley with a keyboard. (Yes without using the window-key shortcuts, Windows is useable without a keyboard, but they make things so much easier!)
Could things be better? Yah, sure, but you know what, things are already so damn good. Sure I may not be able to see a thumbnail of an image I am dragging around, but heck, I don't drag images around anyways.:) Dragging things is just so arbitrary, is it copies, moved, etc. With the massive amounts of storage available on a computer now days, the entire metaphore of a filing cabinent becomes questionable. Do I really want that file deleted from its original location? Hmm.
Now if MS would just implement symbolic links (sp?) into the GUI, wow, that'd ROCK so much. Make organizing photo albums much easier, so hard to decide where to put a picture, if I have a picture of my niece on a family vacation in 2004, do I put it under Vacation 2004, or Niece? Irritating, (yes Windows supports both symbolic links and hard links, but they are not integrated into the GUI yet!)
Corbel (I think that's the main sans-serif in these screenshots, look at the 'g's) and Calibri are gorgeous screen fonts. A significant improvement over the current XP Tahoma and Verdana fest.
Do you realize that 99.99% of all users, myself included, do not give a royal rats flying arse what fonts are used by the system
I hear graphics people always throwing around the names Tohoma and Verdana, so I know they are fonts. I have no idea WHAT they look like versus, say, Times New Roman, or Arial, which, by the way, are the ONLY TWO FONTS anybody cares about.
One has those little pointy things on the letters, the other one doesn't.
As a programmer I also care about which fixed width font I am using. Thankfully any decent IDE also installs three or four different fixed width fonts, and OSs typically come with at least a few, so I have a nice selection there. Wait, the font I am using for this text box is fixed width.
See, I just noticed that. I don't care. If it wasn't for the fact that variable width fonts let me shove more text on a single line of my resume, I would likely use fixed width fonts in my word processor as well.
And no, I do NOT notice the "shape of the 'g's". Unless the 'g's rendering is extremely messed up some how and it ends up overlapping what is on the line below it (heya if anybody has any good times on how to prevent that while writing stuff out by hand I am all ears, I have just resorted to writing g raised up onto the main text line), I really do not care.
Oh, I do wish Internet Explorer would get some proper font resizing in though. Actually I wish web designers would STOP using absolute layouts, so stupid stupid STUPID. Anyone who cannot imagine a flexible design and layout for their text needs to step back away from the presentation and reorientate themselves towards the content.
For example: the BathroomIdeas.doc document would be more appropriately named Ideas I Had About ________ Whilst Sitting On The Toilet Reading The Sunday Morning Paper.doc.
Maybe so, but, umm, heh.
See how long that name is? Ok now imagine having 1 icon per row.
Doh! You end up with a glorified DIR listing in a GUI window.
-Why is application launching only 15% faster than XP, despite requiring a 3GHz Pentium?
Becuase with the exception of run time generated data (which unless you are running a graphics demo is not going to be all that prevalent) application launching time is more or less independent from CPU speed.
Now your hard drive's speed and your RAM, those make a big difference. as do the overall power and flexability of the OS APIs, more powerful OS APIs preloaded into memory means the application has to load less code of its own when it launchs.
-Why can Microsoft only seem to get screen real estate back by shrinking existing controls?
A frequent complaint (at least in the circles I run in. ^_^ ) about XP is the huge bloat of their OS Widgets. 30 pixel (just a wild random guess here) window boarders are rather inane. Likewise so are huge "X"s. UI experts know how elements on the screen should be laid out, Microsoft has (more or less, with the exception of some of the Microsoft Office teams -_- ) traditionally done a very good job of listening to them. No itea what happened with the traditional Windows XP theme. This new theme looks a bit better, but mostly like someone just took the XP controls and did a vertical scale on them in Photoshop.
Hell no. People talk too freaking slow, video bites. I hate having to listen to people's slow moving lips as it is, after a good amount of experience, people type faster than they talk, and keep getting better with time. Not to mention written language has handy abbrevations (as discussed in the article) which, as the article talks about, do not translate over real well into real life. Video is more like real life, spoken communication, very irritating.
That and why the hell would I want to, say, maintain 5 video windows open at once?
Oh and let us not forget/., the forum will just be what, video clips of people's responses the the articles? No thanks.
All my CS instructors use PP for EVERYTHING they teach, the class learns nothing, and mass stupidity results.
Power Point != instructional tool.
Oh, and computers in the class room are generally a bad idea. Heck I have serious problems writing anything on a piece of paper without the muscles in my hands hurting like heck, but I STILL support using paper over a computer for English classes. Why? More time is spent THINKING about what is being written, rather than just typing crud out.
Yah but its like a owning a set of hammers, all with interchangable heads and handles. Different models of handles have various different attachments on their bottom end, including screw drivers, pliers, and fingernail clippers. The only problem is they all share the hammer interface and must be gripped with one hand.
guys, i try hard not to be pc, but as a gay man and a gay geek, it hurts when this kind of homophobic content is lauded. this post reenforces the stereotype that gay love-making is disgusting and that i am disgusting by association. gay love-making is not disgusting, it's beautiful just like straight love-making is, and i'd appreciate whatever support the geek community can muster in fighting against these kinds of hurtful jokes.
Actually on a modern machine most of the time is spent waiting for the programmers asstacular code to finish loading up.
Because odds are, some fucktard thought embedding all possible resolutions of images used by a program, into the program executable, uncompressed, was a good idea.....
Or some such stupid arsed thing.
Oh, and the server performance loss thing? That is why 10 year old software on 10 year old machines runs comparable to modern kit, or at least the speed difference is not proportional to the increases in overall system speed and specifications that have occurred over the years.
The free extractor for it has an interface that is reminencent of something I may have tolerated eight or nine years ago, but then again...
I also haven't checked it out for awhile, maybe it doesn't crash so often anymore?...
WinRAR has really nice shell integration with Windows, to the level that even WinZIP does not have yet. I do not know as to why WinZIP doesn't do things like "extract all of these files to this directory" but....
Stop thinking in terms of computers. You can't apply any notion of "processing power" to the human mind.
I would tend to disagree.:)
"I don't have a graphics card, would that make my CPU run faster because the machine isn't wasting processing power on the graphics card?"
No, it is like saying "I have no graphics card, so I'll ditch the stupid GUI I am using, free up the RAM that the GUI was taking up, and get rid of all those libraries the GUI depended on."
She just got a yahoo email account. I should send her an email- she'll be thrilled. Maybe it's possible to have an email conversation with her. I don't even know.
I'll throw my chips in with the above poster and agree that this is a great idea, many autistics light up when they have access to non-verbal communication, and for some strange reason computers have that glow about them that is attractive and addictive. I really think there needs to be some sort of standardized computer based learning system for autistics in this country, the (rather minor) set of programs instructors are able to collect together and get going now and then prove so beneficial, I can only imagine what further talents could lead to.
For possible career motivations, try product design, heck some form of engineering could be really good for her. Try to find a way to convince her that EE is basically just one big jigsaw puzzle! If she can apply a third of her brains to simplifying a circuit, Intel would want her in a second, they'd make any accommodations she needs!
What bank is that? More so, what the heck is the minimum account balance?
To register for online banking, my bank just requires a SSN# and for me to sign a slip of paper that they send me and drop it off at a local branch. I know of banks that require even less than that!
MSNBC, their entire (rather excellent!) hardware line (Keyboards and Mice and game controllers, a very small percent of their overall revenue but they excel in all three of those catagories), and don't forget the PDA market which they are year after year slowly leeching away from Palm.
Oh, don't forget various game studios MS has purchased as well.
Granted the vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows and Word, but they are diversified into a number of different catagories.
And you would be out of a job as well once the company went under. You don't get rich by giving people the absolute lowest rate you can. You get wiped out of the market.
So what you are saying is, you go to a "lunch meeting" and sit there and bullshit each other about the lowest possible price you can sell at? If the other guy is a better bullshiter than you, he/she gets closer to the "true" lowest price possible, if you are a better bullshitter you get to charge a higher price?....
Horrid.
Closed bid systems are better in this respect, bid, get it over with. Unfortunately corruption inevitably sets in, mostly in the form of lunch meetings...
That doesn't change the fact that Firefox requires you to run an installer first, to put all the files in place. That is something different from still working after an OS upgrade. Nearly all Linux apps are like Firefox: there is no registry, regular apps don't put anything in/etc, and they auto-create their dot-files under ~ the first time they run. So as long as you've got all the binaries and libraries (ie: you copy your/usr to a new drive), they will still work. But, like nearly all Windows programs, they require something like APT to get all the pieces laid out in the first place.
I could zip up my Firefox directory, move it to a separate computer that has never had Firefox installed on it before, and Firefox would still work just fine.
This isn't an OS upgrade, this is called I nuked the entire Windows directory and installed a fresh new copy, all shared libraries etc are gone.
While you think we're piddling around "doing lunch" and creating powerpoints, what you don't realize is that "doing lunch" lets us network and build relationships with sponsors and partners, which enables the company to get better prices, and get better deals with their marketing (saving money).
You know how programmers would do it?
Dude1: So whats the lowest you can sell us the product at in x bulk quantity?
Dude2: (lists a price)
End of conversation. Dude2 (or dudette, which ever) would honestly quote the lowest price that his/her company could make a profit selling at, Dude1 would mark it down on offers sheet and move on.
Money would be saved on lunch.
Bullshit would be avoided.
Work would get done.
And all you marketing types would be out of a job.
Together/J looks like a fancy overblown UML modeler that works across networks and can automatically scan through codebases to generate appropriate OOa diagrams of an application, as well as supporting Design Patterns, version control, and some other goodies.
Oddly enough their "Designer" edition does not support Design Patterns! Doh!
Slashdot Mirror
Ok let us compare, my Windows partition to my Linux partition;
:)
Windows: I am working in some directory, I find I need to grab a utility, get some information on some file format, or whatever. WindowKey-E, Shift-Tab, Space, Shift-Tab, www.google.com, enter. Type in query. Alternatively, Windowkey-R, www.google.com type in query. The latter can take a bit longer since it loads a separate instance of iexplore.
Linux: I am working in some directory, yada yada yada. Windowkey-R (w00t, give it up for customizability!), firefox.com
fuck
wait
fuck
wait
30 seconds later I am at Google.
Lesson? If I have to wait 30 seconds for it, it is NOT INTEGRATED INTO MY OPERATING SYTEM, whenever I am waiting for something to load, it feels like a separate application.
I did NOT pay for broadband in order to use a separate app.
Heck, the overall SLOW-ASS-EDNESS of KDE is the ONE reason I am not using my Linux partition right now. Yah all my hotkeys are the same, but, umm, heh. Shit is slow. Booting takes 2-3 minutes, sometimes up to 5.
From what I can tell, even Linux beats MacOSX on terms of browser integration, on OSX I have to dig through tons of freaking menus trying to find a browser app to run, is safari integrated into the UI or not? (I only use a Mac computer about once every 2 years just to see what is going on so...)
Oh, and I'd use Konqueror, except loading up a new Konqueror window takes LONGER than loading up Firefox. That is WITH Konqueror preloading enabled.
I'd use xfce except that it doesn't like YaST2, or for that matter half a dozen other things. It is fast though! (Enlightenment R17, Enlightenment R17, Enlightenment R17, where are you??)
During the process of writing this message, I have done three Google queries for various bits and piece of information, each query and result reading took less either less time than starting up Firefox, or only a few seconds more.
In conclusion, yes, browser integration with the OS does make a difference.
Well the X closes crap, the start menu runs crap. Saving a file is under file save, opening a file is under file open, printing a file is under file print. :)
Oh, and help is under help.
The Edit thing is kind of irritating, but once someone clicks it, it is standard from program to program.
I should have clarified more though, things like the nifty folder animation thingy the Mac does is umm, weird. Sure it might be convienent and all, but there is no GUI hint that it exists!
Of course in Windows, opening a file up in an application from the Explorer GUI is equally odd, drag file down to representation of application on taskbar, wait a second, application will be restored in size and raised to top, drop file appropriately depending on the application.
Likely the weirdest part of the entire UI, well that and the irritating search dog.
Ok ok ok, times and arial are the only two fonts the average user cares about.
:)
the 90% user base out there that isn't still treating their screen as an inane 80 column display. . .
(of course modern screens display far more than 80 columns of text, so what do we do? Draw a big line down at the 80 column mark just to make sure we are aware of it!)
Most of Microsoft's "Innovations" flop big time.
:) Dragging things is just so arbitrary, is it copies, moved, etc. With the massive amounts of storage available on a computer now days, the entire metaphore of a filing cabinent becomes questionable. Do I really want that file deleted from its original location? Hmm.
Let me tell ya one that DID catch on though;
Browser Integration into the primary GUI.
Nice. Really nice. Without it using a GUI is insane. Broadband net access tends to do that to a person, if I want to look something up, open new window, go to dictionary, type in word.
All of a sudden, the net IS part of my desktop. Kick'in. You want to know what killed Desktop Push technology? No longer needed, the internet is now just one more data resource on my computer, albeit one connected over CAT5 rather than an IDE ribbon cable.
Sweet.
Oh, and they also brought us (or at least popularized the use of) the scroll wheel. Nice. Not having a Scroll Wheen (such as right now...) drives me nuts, scroll Wheels rock. Also don't forget that they have standardized on many previously "lost" GUI tid bits, yes there are MANY more that they need to bring back from the dead (*COUGH*largechunksofBeOS*COUGH*), but in general they have done an excellent job of making a thorough, complete, and SIMPLE GUI.
Most aspects of the Windows GUI are blatently obvious, with the main exception being the Window-Key shortcuts, which one of the most useful items about the GUI in general that allow for it to be easily used soley with a keyboard. (Yes without using the window-key shortcuts, Windows is useable without a keyboard, but they make things so much easier!)
Could things be better? Yah, sure, but you know what, things are already so damn good. Sure I may not be able to see a thumbnail of an image I am dragging around, but heck, I don't drag images around anyways.
Now if MS would just implement symbolic links (sp?) into the GUI, wow, that'd ROCK so much. Make organizing photo albums much easier, so hard to decide where to put a picture, if I have a picture of my niece on a family vacation in 2004, do I put it under Vacation 2004, or Niece? Irritating, (yes Windows supports both symbolic links and hard links, but they are not integrated into the GUI yet!)
Do you realize that 99.99% of all users, myself included, do not give a royal rats flying arse what fonts are used by the system
I hear graphics people always throwing around the names Tohoma and Verdana, so I know they are fonts. I have no idea WHAT they look like versus, say, Times New Roman, or Arial, which, by the way, are the ONLY TWO FONTS anybody cares about.
One has those little pointy things on the letters, the other one doesn't.
As a programmer I also care about which fixed width font I am using. Thankfully any decent IDE also installs three or four different fixed width fonts, and OSs typically come with at least a few, so I have a nice selection there. Wait, the font I am using for this text box is fixed width.
See, I just noticed that. I don't care. If it wasn't for the fact that variable width fonts let me shove more text on a single line of my resume, I would likely use fixed width fonts in my word processor as well.
And no, I do NOT notice the "shape of the 'g's". Unless the 'g's rendering is extremely messed up some how and it ends up overlapping what is on the line below it (heya if anybody has any good times on how to prevent that while writing stuff out by hand I am all ears, I have just resorted to writing g raised up onto the main text line), I really do not care.
Oh, I do wish Internet Explorer would get some proper font resizing in though. Actually I wish web designers would STOP using absolute layouts, so stupid stupid STUPID. Anyone who cannot imagine a flexible design and layout for their text needs to step back away from the presentation and reorientate themselves towards the content.
Maybe so, but, umm, heh.
See how long that name is? Ok now imagine having 1 icon per row.
Doh! You end up with a glorified DIR listing in a GUI window.
Becuase with the exception of run time generated data (which unless you are running a graphics demo is not going to be all that prevalent) application launching time is more or less independent from CPU speed.
Now your hard drive's speed and your RAM, those make a big difference. as do the overall power and flexability of the OS APIs, more powerful OS APIs preloaded into memory means the application has to load less code of its own when it launchs.
A frequent complaint (at least in the circles I run in. ^_^ ) about XP is the huge bloat of their OS Widgets. 30 pixel (just a wild random guess here) window boarders are rather inane. Likewise so are huge "X"s. UI experts know how elements on the screen should be laid out, Microsoft has (more or less, with the exception of some of the Microsoft Office teams -_- ) traditionally done a very good job of listening to them. No itea what happened with the traditional Windows XP theme. This new theme looks a bit better, but mostly like someone just took the XP controls and did a vertical scale on them in Photoshop.
Hell no. People talk too freaking slow, video bites. I hate having to listen to people's slow moving lips as it is, after a good amount of experience, people type faster than they talk, and keep getting better with time. Not to mention written language has handy abbrevations (as discussed in the article) which, as the article talks about, do not translate over real well into real life. Video is more like real life, spoken communication, very irritating.
/., the forum will just be what, video clips of people's responses the the articles? No thanks.
That and why the hell would I want to, say, maintain 5 video windows open at once?
Oh and let us not forget
All my CS instructors use PP for EVERYTHING they teach, the class learns nothing, and mass stupidity results.
Power Point != instructional tool.
Oh, and computers in the class room are generally a bad idea. Heck I have serious problems writing anything on a piece of paper without the muscles in my hands hurting like heck, but I STILL support using paper over a computer for English classes. Why? More time is spent THINKING about what is being written, rather than just typing crud out.
Well it used to be, back in the Phoenix days.
Now it is bloated. ^_^ Rather ironic really.
Yah but its like a owning a set of hammers, all with interchangable heads and handles. Different models of handles have various different attachments on their bottom end, including screw drivers, pliers, and fingernail clippers. The only problem is they all share the hammer interface and must be gripped with one hand.
It'd be just as funny if the article was titled
"Coxs in Pamala"
Actually on a modern machine most of the time is spent waiting for the programmers asstacular code to finish loading up.
....
Because odds are, some fucktard thought embedding all possible resolutions of images used by a program, into the program executable, uncompressed, was a good idea.
Or some such stupid arsed thing.
Oh, and the server performance loss thing? That is why 10 year old software on 10 year old machines runs comparable to modern kit, or at least the speed difference is not proportional to the increases in overall system speed and specifications that have occurred over the years.
A lot.
1.25 to 1.50 depending on time of day.
Package is a more appropriate example, and for those I'd rather go with UPS Ground, even if it does cost an extra buck or two.
Now that satellite TV has become so competitive, not nearly as much as I used to.
Cell phones are cheap, land lines are relatively cheap, my land line company keeps outsourcing to India, bastards.
Yah but the toolset for 7-zip on Win32 blows.
...
The free extractor for it has an interface that is reminencent of something I may have tolerated eight or nine years ago, but then again...
I also haven't checked it out for awhile, maybe it doesn't crash so often anymore?
WinRAR has really nice shell integration with Windows, to the level that even WinZIP does not have yet. I do not know as to why WinZIP doesn't do things like "extract all of these files to this directory" but....
*BASH BASH BASH*
What the hell do you think slashdot is?
I would tend to disagree.
No, it is like saying "I have no graphics card, so I'll ditch the stupid GUI I am using, free up the RAM that the GUI was taking up, and get rid of all those libraries the GUI depended on."
Will your computer run faster? That it will!
I'll throw my chips in with the above poster and agree that this is a great idea, many autistics light up when they have access to non-verbal communication, and for some strange reason computers have that glow about them that is attractive and addictive. I really think there needs to be some sort of standardized computer based learning system for autistics in this country, the (rather minor) set of programs instructors are able to collect together and get going now and then prove so beneficial, I can only imagine what further talents could lead to.
For possible career motivations, try product design, heck some form of engineering could be really good for her. Try to find a way to convince her that EE is basically just one big jigsaw puzzle! If she can apply a third of her brains to simplifying a circuit, Intel would want her in a second, they'd make any accommodations she needs!
I forgot to mention, logon to most online banking sites I have seen is just username and password, nothing special.
What bank is that? More so, what the heck is the minimum account balance?
To register for online banking, my bank just requires a SSN# and for me to sign a slip of paper that they send me and drop it off at a local branch. I know of banks that require even less than that!
a major restaurant chain, or something.
MSNBC, their entire (rather excellent!) hardware line (Keyboards and Mice and game controllers, a very small percent of their overall revenue but they excel in all three of those catagories), and don't forget the PDA market which they are year after year slowly leeching away from Palm.
Oh, don't forget various game studios MS has purchased as well.
Granted the vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows and Word, but they are diversified into a number of different catagories.
So what you are saying is, you go to a "lunch meeting" and sit there and bullshit each other about the lowest possible price you can sell at? If the other guy is a better bullshiter than you, he/she gets closer to the "true" lowest price possible, if you are a better bullshitter you get to charge a higher price?
Horrid.
Closed bid systems are better in this respect, bid, get it over with. Unfortunately corruption inevitably sets in, mostly in the form of lunch meetings...
I could zip up my Firefox directory, move it to a separate computer that has never had Firefox installed on it before, and Firefox would still work just fine.
This isn't an OS upgrade, this is called I nuked the entire Windows directory and installed a fresh new copy, all shared libraries etc are gone.
You know how programmers would do it?
Dude1: So whats the lowest you can sell us the product at in x bulk quantity?
Dude2: (lists a price)
End of conversation. Dude2 (or dudette, which ever) would honestly quote the lowest price that his/her company could make a profit selling at, Dude1 would mark it down on offers sheet and move on.
Money would be saved on lunch.
Bullshit would be avoided.
Work would get done.
And all you marketing types would be out of a job.
*sigh*
Together/J looks like a fancy overblown UML modeler that works across networks and can automatically scan through codebases to generate appropriate OOa diagrams of an application, as well as supporting Design Patterns, version control, and some other goodies.
Oddly enough their "Designer" edition does not support Design Patterns! Doh!