I see no need to run a local mail server, nor host a VPN. It is residential service, and I have residential expectations. I VoIP without difficulty, I download a TON (part of my work as a web monkey). The P2P choking would be the biggest nuisance, but it doesn't affect me since I do all my torrenting remotely on a cheep cheep server with a fat fat pipe. Why fuss with crap upload bandwidth when I can do it all ten times faster in Europe and FTP the stuff down at line speed ?
Besides, if you really want to run "servers" on your residential cable, just change the port numbers. They only block 25 and 80, big deal! I stream music to the office from home, with just a basic AMP stack and a nonstandard port. It's not like you could host a public web site with any sort of traffic on a 512kbit line. If these things are so important to you, take that server and drop it off at your nearest datacenter, or lease a dedicated box online.
I bet you also whine to your landlord because your gated 7th floor apartment doesn't lend itself easily to the exploitation of a restaurant business ? Get a life.
Maybe then we can start having really GOOD films again. Star power is a load of bull. If I wanted to see a star, I'd Google the everloving crap out of them. If I'm watching a movie, I want to see a gripping story, wondrous scenery, sincere dialog and a satisfying conclusion... or maybe just guns blazing and fancy footwork. I'm more interested in the director than the actors, perhaps with the exception of Johnny Depp simply because I've yet to see him in anything less than spectacular. I see maybe 300+ movies in a year, I can only name one actor who I truly admire, the rest are just nameless puppets. Where they shop and who they're fucking matter not to me.
Really ? What do you have to say about how the average day of shooting involves between 20 to 40 minutes of acting, and a whole lot of waiting around for the grips to put up the sets and props, and the director to figure out where to place the cameras...
This whole paparazzi culture is a load of bull. Some of the most compelling actors live very private lives, just like you and I. The Lindsay Lohans and Angelina Jolies of the world have created their own hell over the last four decades. If they can't behave like normal citizens and keep the goddamned coke habit under control, well I say they deserve all the social abuse they have coming.
Sure. We've been having numerous American visitors since that poser stepped in. I know becuase I live about a half-mile from the Sanitarium... err I mean Parliament. I had never seen so many rent-a-cops until Harper came along and invited GeeDub over for tea and a blowjob.
They come, they whine, he slurps, they leave. Then new laws get passed, laws that aren't in the citizen's best interests. Most leaders slowly erode their nation's solidarity through fraud and negligence, but this guy's racing to the bottom like he's trying to prove something.
The biggest problem with law in the US is that courts don't know how to deal with online "crimes". This was fine until the **AA started buying up laws with which to abuse random scapegoats. If the same thing happens up here in Canada, they might as well paint a few stars on our flag, kick all the immigrants out of schools and deport us liberals/libertarians off to Switzerland. Or Harper could apply for U.S. citizenship and take a fucking hike. I'll even pay for his bus fare:P
Since all the previous airport hassles have FAILED at improving security, they need to resort to even more random bullshit.
Let's face it: there is no methodical screening process that can properly account for the fact that people hate your country. This has nothing to do with terrorism, at least not the kind that the WTC was blamed on. Hell, if I were pissed off enough and just happened to have the resources to blow shit up, I would be somewhat tempted to raise hell in Washington or Buckingham or any other fucked up nation. That's the kind of anger these totalitarian regimes trigger within my gut. It feels fundamentally wrong and people get extreme reactions.
I say reverse the trend, make the airlines normal again as they were in the 80s and 90s. Who cares if people are "smuggling" drugs, or if someone just happens to be second cousin once removed to the groundskeeper of a member of the Bin Laden family ? Who really fucking cares ? They're on a plane, and they're travelling. If the US Government hadn't been shitting on Iraq for the last two decades, maybe those folks wouldn't be so angry in the first place. Then again, maybe someone would have detonated the WTC anyway just to instigate this mess, it has been the single most powerful event of this decade, and its effects are still expanding six years later with no loss of momentum.
The way I see it, if this keeps up, soon enough it's going to be USA vs everyone else in the world. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. Americans don't want that, and the world doesn't want that, but keep shoving people around and eventually the nukes will fly.
People will tolerate discomfort if it yields tangible results. The metric isn't "We deported 20% more foreign nationals", the metric should be "Nationwide crime rates are down 20%". That's a goal worth making a few sacrifices.
The way things are today, these "security departments" are just spending a shitload of public money and delivering nothing but fear and disinformation. They haven't caught anyone that wasn't knocking on their front door in the first place. FBI / CIA is a joke.
Chip "piracy" is the direct result of greedy companies outsourcing the family jewels to low wage countries.
If the chips didn't have such a high resale value and profit margin, there would be little incentive to pirate them in the first place. Adding DRM at the hardware level only serves to increase manufacturing costs by some fractional amount, it doesn't do anything to address the filthy lucre that attracts pirate manufacturing in the first place. Same reason as people sell dope despite the (government-created) risks : there's a ton of money to be made, selling a product with huge margins and constant demand. It's a no-brainer, from a business perspective.
When the profit of a single item exceeds your weekly income tenfold, how can you fault these people for taking advantage of the situation ? I'd do it in a heartbeat if I were in their shoes!
If we truly want a global marketplace, we're going to need a level playing field... none of this modernized slave labor bullshit. Technological security measures are no match for human desperation.
1. Hot-shot long-tenured developer takes a hike for a higher-paying job (but that's not what he tells you) 2. Company goes headhunting for a turn-key hot-shot long-tenured developer to replace #1. 3. Months pass without any hopefuls, Company blames everything under the sun. 4. Company dies a slow torturous death.
The biggest problem is that most veteran developers aren't mobile. You used to have the one guy who knew and did everything under your roof. He's gone, and no one else has that same skill set, not until they've worked with you for a decade.
The other big mistake small businesses make is they think merely putting out job listings with all the staffing agencies will magically bring geniuses to their doorstep. Bzzt! Wrong! The one thing they will magically bring is more students, slackers and foreigners than you can count. There are lots of people looking for work, and lots of jobs looking for people to do them, but both parties tend to wait around expecting the other party to do all the legwork.
It's never easy to replace a veteran in any field, not just programmers. If you can't find the perfect candidate, maybe you'll have an easier time hiring two people with limited but complementary skill sets, e.g. a data guru and a code monkey. Depending on the business, maybe you could even do without a staff developer for a while by relaying some of the work to a consulting firm.
I wouldn't say mind-blowing, because it's not much of a 3D engine. You could not realistically develop a (non-sucky) game in plain old Excel, not unless you could somehow link to DirectX for some real graphics horsepower. This is just using the charting system with dynamic data, which has already been done and is really just a little VBA script sweeping a few cell values.
The first part where they use table cells as pixels, that is very much like the ghetto JS + HTML games that toggle colors on an HTML table. It would have to be one of the most roundabout ways to get graphics on a computer screen, but we're not exactly talking Crysis here.
Rogers, as much as I hate them, seem to offer a pretty stable service. I had no technical problems with them when I was in London, except for their silly torrent throttling, but that's what my overseas server is for:)
The hard part with Rogers is customer service - they suck at it. Once you can convince them to come connect you, as long as you're self-sufficient after that point, you likely won't have any issues. Well, until you want to disconnect of course.
Rogers could easily be the best ISP ever, if only they learned a thing or two about pleasing their customers. This is what the small guys do really well, and besides cost, customer service is the main reason why people switch away from Rogers.
I'm sure if we launched him into orbit, never to return, we could finally have global peace. At least for the 5 minutes while everyone is watching it on TV.
Yep I wish someone would explain to me, in plain terms that make business sense, why an actor should be paid 42 bazillion dollars for four half-days of work.
And once that's clarified, we'll talk about sports celebrities.
a. Standing around looking pretty, 10 million b. Hitting a ball with a stick, 7 million c. Designing the hardware, software and networks that bring it all to the consumers, 40k/yr
That shows you the power of the governator (or perhaps, the power of american influence)
Nah, it just shows how big of a sellout Stephen Harper really is. As bizarre as it may sound, I'd rather have the old farts and their sponsorship scams than this Conservative pushover. I value freedom far far above tax cuts.
Yep, seems the only people who hate Cuba are in the U.S. White House.
Canadians vacation in Cuba all the time, though their neighbors the Dominican Republic are usually more affordable.
The longer the U.S. Gov't holds on to these old grudges with Cuba, Iraq and whoever else they dislike, the more the rest of the world will route around U.S. goods and services to avoid all this bullshit.
Seriously, I have nothing to do with Cuba, at all. I've never been there, I don't know anyone in there or from there, and as far as I know none of them have visited any of my web sites. Nevertheless, after reading about this registrar nonsense, I'm very tempted to transfer all my domain names to a dutch registrar "just in case". Eventually nobody will want to do business with the Americans because it becomes too big a liability.
True, fans don't draw much power, but they do fail quite regularly due to the electric motor wearing out, or the motherboard's fan power going dead. As a system builder I see those problems all the time. A self-powered non-electric fan would get rid of both those failure scenarios. It's not like your PC is going to stop producing heat all of a sudden - at least not while its powered on and working.
Thank you, I was going to post that, but it's 8:30 in the morning and my brain is still warming up:)
There were actually a few of these Mindlink controllers on eBay a while back, and I snapped one up. It was a clumsy device, probably due to its sensors being too crude, but at a time when Nintendo was pimping the Power Glove, and Aura was trying really really hard to sell us chest-mounted subwoofers, the Mindlink fit right in.
If it weren't for that Tramiel monkey, things would probably have come out different. Part of the reason why testers got headaches was a lack of comfort because the headband didn't have enough flex, a simple design refinement would have solved it at minimal cost. Unfortunately for us, experimental gaming didn't fit in Tramiel's alternate reality, he bought Atari arguably to insult his former partners at Commodore, then drove it into the ground with the help of his son. Crash or no crash, the Mindlink didn't stand a chance in that hostile environment. What if Steve Jobs resigned from Apple, went to Microsoft and led the next Windows OS ? Do you honestly think he would put in any effort ?
I agree, the cost of development tools, or anything else that can create a small worthless product, is ridiculously inflated in North America. The moment your app allows other people to make money, marketing adds an extra digit to the price tag. If you add "enterprise" to the title, slap on another zero. If that enterprise product takes off, hire a bunch of hotshot salespeople and tack on a couple more zeroes. That's how you end up with Oracle and PeopleSoft.
Look at Photoshop, as a prime example. It's a graphic editor. It does a relatively simple job, does it fairly well (but nothing earth-shaking), and costs $1000. Why in god's name does it cost a thousand bucks ? Why not 100$ ? Someone deliberately chose that price point, just like that someone is choosing to ignore/accept the mass piracy as marketing. How's the ratio of legit to warezed copies ? My guess is 1:1000. For every thousand users, only one has paid... that's my theory. That's a dollar per user. If Photoshop were priced more down-to-earth, would it sell more copies ? Would Adobe make more money in the end ?
How many users of Visual Studio have paid for it ? The ratio is probably more favorable than Photoshop's, but that's only because of the niche. There are far more people with pictures and web sites, than there are programmers in the world. People end up using Visual Studio anyway, whether it's legit or not, partly because the price is wrong, and partly because there's really no moral justification not to. If your choices are to develop, or not to develop, it's easy to download that torrent.
My point is: even the ancient and ubiquitous ATI Rage 3D had basic hardware acceleration that could handle a significant portion of Windows' widget drawing workload. Microsoft never made use of those features, even today the most XP can do is advanced blitting. It doesn't do hardware alpha, which is why any non-square non-opaque object makes everything slow to a crawl on anything but the latest generation of processors.
So I don't get a hardware-accelerated blur effect in OS X, so what ? I get all the other stuff, the effects that define the overall identity of the Mac. If I run Vista on an underpowered PC, it no longer looks like Vista, it just looks like a palette-swapped XP.
As usual, I'm going to bash free software for a minute. Please chop along the dotted line on my neck.
Gnome, or more likely the various window managers and decorators within, probably call gettimeofday() to time their animations. To me, it's obvious that's the dumbest slowest way to get things done, but I was coding games back in the glory days of Dos and the 386, where every clock cycle mattered and it was painfully obvious when a piece of code was unoptimized (or just plain wrong).
Today, with very few coders having had that low-level experience, I think people just don't know any better. These are the same people who praise Ruby and find it perfectly normal that a "huge" site like Digg needs 75 servers to deliver the world's simplest link blog. Meanwhile us old-schoolers remember the day we tuned Apache and MySQL to churn out 1M pageviews per day on a dual Celeron 450, back in '00.
Back to Gnome though, gettimeofday() is an API call, which at best will use the CPU timestamp (a single non-stalling single-cycle instruction), at worst will use ticks (~20ms), and then will perform a few calculations upon that result before passing it back on the stack. Meanwhile, the animation just wanted a reliable timing source as a longint. What should have taken a single CPU cycle now winds up as a 300-cycle mutexed function call whose hard work is mostly discarded. On that old 386, your animation would have crawled, but today's PCs have lots of headroom to hide those inefficiencies. They're still wasteful, and that waste is what accumulates into UI lag when these same performance mistakes are repeated hundreds of times in each step of the rendering process.
There is always the argument that programmer time is more valuable than user time. That argument falls apart when you have a million users. 30 seconds of user time wasted, times one million, equals one year. One year wasted because someone didn't understand what actually happens after they write that lazy code.
How many years of humanity have been wasted by Vista ? I fear not even Google can calculate such a number.
Slashdot Mirror
Coward indeed.
I see no need to run a local mail server, nor host a VPN. It is residential service, and I have residential expectations. I VoIP without difficulty, I download a TON (part of my work as a web monkey). The P2P choking would be the biggest nuisance, but it doesn't affect me since I do all my torrenting remotely on a cheep cheep server with a fat fat pipe. Why fuss with crap upload bandwidth when I can do it all ten times faster in Europe and FTP the stuff down at line speed ?
Besides, if you really want to run "servers" on your residential cable, just change the port numbers. They only block 25 and 80, big deal! I stream music to the office from home, with just a basic AMP stack and a nonstandard port. It's not like you could host a public web site with any sort of traffic on a 512kbit line. If these things are so important to you, take that server and drop it off at your nearest datacenter, or lease a dedicated box online.
I bet you also whine to your landlord because your gated 7th floor apartment doesn't lend itself easily to the exploitation of a restaurant business ? Get a life.
I waiting for S1m0ne to become a reality.
Maybe then we can start having really GOOD films again. Star power is a load of bull. If I wanted to see a star, I'd Google the everloving crap out of them. If I'm watching a movie, I want to see a gripping story, wondrous scenery, sincere dialog and a satisfying conclusion... or maybe just guns blazing and fancy footwork. I'm more interested in the director than the actors, perhaps with the exception of Johnny Depp simply because I've yet to see him in anything less than spectacular. I see maybe 300+ movies in a year, I can only name one actor who I truly admire, the rest are just nameless puppets. Where they shop and who they're fucking matter not to me.
Really ? What do you have to say about how the average day of shooting involves between 20 to 40 minutes of acting, and a whole lot of waiting around for the grips to put up the sets and props, and the director to figure out where to place the cameras...
This whole paparazzi culture is a load of bull. Some of the most compelling actors live very private lives, just like you and I. The Lindsay Lohans and Angelina Jolies of the world have created their own hell over the last four decades. If they can't behave like normal citizens and keep the goddamned coke habit under control, well I say they deserve all the social abuse they have coming.
Sure. We've been having numerous American visitors since that poser stepped in. I know becuase I live about a half-mile from the Sanitarium... err I mean Parliament. I had never seen so many rent-a-cops until Harper came along and invited GeeDub over for tea and a blowjob.
:P
They come, they whine, he slurps, they leave. Then new laws get passed, laws that aren't in the citizen's best interests. Most leaders slowly erode their nation's solidarity through fraud and negligence, but this guy's racing to the bottom like he's trying to prove something.
The biggest problem with law in the US is that courts don't know how to deal with online "crimes". This was fine until the **AA started buying up laws with which to abuse random scapegoats. If the same thing happens up here in Canada, they might as well paint a few stars on our flag, kick all the immigrants out of schools and deport us liberals/libertarians off to Switzerland. Or Harper could apply for U.S. citizenship and take a fucking hike. I'll even pay for his bus fare
Since all the previous airport hassles have FAILED at improving security, they need to resort to even more random bullshit.
Let's face it: there is no methodical screening process that can properly account for the fact that people hate your country. This has nothing to do with terrorism, at least not the kind that the WTC was blamed on. Hell, if I were pissed off enough and just happened to have the resources to blow shit up, I would be somewhat tempted to raise hell in Washington or Buckingham or any other fucked up nation. That's the kind of anger these totalitarian regimes trigger within my gut. It feels fundamentally wrong and people get extreme reactions.
I say reverse the trend, make the airlines normal again as they were in the 80s and 90s. Who cares if people are "smuggling" drugs, or if someone just happens to be second cousin once removed to the groundskeeper of a member of the Bin Laden family ? Who really fucking cares ? They're on a plane, and they're travelling. If the US Government hadn't been shitting on Iraq for the last two decades, maybe those folks wouldn't be so angry in the first place. Then again, maybe someone would have detonated the WTC anyway just to instigate this mess, it has been the single most powerful event of this decade, and its effects are still expanding six years later with no loss of momentum.
The way I see it, if this keeps up, soon enough it's going to be USA vs everyone else in the world. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. Americans don't want that, and the world doesn't want that, but keep shoving people around and eventually the nukes will fly.
People will tolerate discomfort if it yields tangible results. The metric isn't "We deported 20% more foreign nationals", the metric should be "Nationwide crime rates are down 20%". That's a goal worth making a few sacrifices.
The way things are today, these "security departments" are just spending a shitload of public money and delivering nothing but fear and disinformation. They haven't caught anyone that wasn't knocking on their front door in the first place. FBI / CIA is a joke.
Chip "piracy" is the direct result of greedy companies outsourcing the family jewels to low wage countries.
If the chips didn't have such a high resale value and profit margin, there would be little incentive to pirate them in the first place. Adding DRM at the hardware level only serves to increase manufacturing costs by some fractional amount, it doesn't do anything to address the filthy lucre that attracts pirate manufacturing in the first place. Same reason as people sell dope despite the (government-created) risks : there's a ton of money to be made, selling a product with huge margins and constant demand. It's a no-brainer, from a business perspective.
When the profit of a single item exceeds your weekly income tenfold, how can you fault these people for taking advantage of the situation ? I'd do it in a heartbeat if I were in their shoes!
If we truly want a global marketplace, we're going to need a level playing field... none of this modernized slave labor bullshit. Technological security measures are no match for human desperation.
Here's a problem I've seen time and time again:
1. Hot-shot long-tenured developer takes a hike for a higher-paying job (but that's not what he tells you)
2. Company goes headhunting for a turn-key hot-shot long-tenured developer to replace #1.
3. Months pass without any hopefuls, Company blames everything under the sun.
4. Company dies a slow torturous death.
The biggest problem is that most veteran developers aren't mobile. You used to have the one guy who knew and did everything under your roof. He's gone, and no one else has that same skill set, not until they've worked with you for a decade.
The other big mistake small businesses make is they think merely putting out job listings with all the staffing agencies will magically bring geniuses to their doorstep. Bzzt! Wrong! The one thing they will magically bring is more students, slackers and foreigners than you can count. There are lots of people looking for work, and lots of jobs looking for people to do them, but both parties tend to wait around expecting the other party to do all the legwork.
It's never easy to replace a veteran in any field, not just programmers. If you can't find the perfect candidate, maybe you'll have an easier time hiring two people with limited but complementary skill sets, e.g. a data guru and a code monkey. Depending on the business, maybe you could even do without a staff developer for a while by relaying some of the work to a consulting firm.
have all the tourists from Canada hand out thumb drives as gratuities to their Cuban service people while there on holidays
We already do this, it's better than cash! You could literally trade a porn- or music-filled thumb drive for just about anything down there.
I wouldn't say mind-blowing, because it's not much of a 3D engine. You could not realistically develop a (non-sucky) game in plain old Excel, not unless you could somehow link to DirectX for some real graphics horsepower. This is just using the charting system with dynamic data, which has already been done and is really just a little VBA script sweeping a few cell values.
The first part where they use table cells as pixels, that is very much like the ghetto JS + HTML games that toggle colors on an HTML table. It would have to be one of the most roundabout ways to get graphics on a computer screen, but we're not exactly talking Crysis here.
Rogers, as much as I hate them, seem to offer a pretty stable service. I had no technical problems with them when I was in London, except for their silly torrent throttling, but that's what my overseas server is for :)
The hard part with Rogers is customer service - they suck at it. Once you can convince them to come connect you, as long as you're self-sufficient after that point, you likely won't have any issues. Well, until you want to disconnect of course.
Rogers could easily be the best ISP ever, if only they learned a thing or two about pleasing their customers. This is what the small guys do really well, and besides cost, customer service is the main reason why people switch away from Rogers.
Is the lone astronaut G.W. Bush ?
I'm sure if we launched him into orbit, never to return, we could finally have global peace. At least for the 5 minutes while everyone is watching it on TV.
Moderation is Web 1.0. Random is the new postfix!
Yep I wish someone would explain to me, in plain terms that make business sense, why an actor should be paid 42 bazillion dollars for four half-days of work.
And once that's clarified, we'll talk about sports celebrities.
a. Standing around looking pretty, 10 million
b. Hitting a ball with a stick, 7 million
c. Designing the hardware, software and networks that bring it all to the consumers, 40k/yr
Shit's upside down!
I'm not even going to qualify that with a Google.
That shows you the power of the governator (or perhaps, the power of american influence)
Nah, it just shows how big of a sellout Stephen Harper really is. As bizarre as it may sound, I'd rather have the old farts and their sponsorship scams than this Conservative pushover. I value freedom far far above tax cuts.
Yep, seems the only people who hate Cuba are in the U.S. White House.
Canadians vacation in Cuba all the time, though their neighbors the Dominican Republic are usually more affordable.
The longer the U.S. Gov't holds on to these old grudges with Cuba, Iraq and whoever else they dislike, the more the rest of the world will route around U.S. goods and services to avoid all this bullshit.
Seriously, I have nothing to do with Cuba, at all. I've never been there, I don't know anyone in there or from there, and as far as I know none of them have visited any of my web sites. Nevertheless, after reading about this registrar nonsense, I'm very tempted to transfer all my domain names to a dutch registrar "just in case". Eventually nobody will want to do business with the Americans because it becomes too big a liability.
How silly to post such a link to /.
We probably DDOS'ed the entirely NZ pipe because of this.
Yay us.
Just what we need: more people walking around playing Bejeweled on their cell phone, and _not_ paying attention to where they're going.
I still don't get the whole cell phone craze. Get a Game Boy for cryin' out loud!
Large scale practical sterling engines use a source of coolness
That's why every MSI board will be sold with a life-size poster of The Fonz.
True, fans don't draw much power, but they do fail quite regularly due to the electric motor wearing out, or the motherboard's fan power going dead. As a system builder I see those problems all the time. A self-powered non-electric fan would get rid of both those failure scenarios. It's not like your PC is going to stop producing heat all of a sudden - at least not while its powered on and working.
Thank you, I was going to post that, but it's 8:30 in the morning and my brain is still warming up :)
There were actually a few of these Mindlink controllers on eBay a while back, and I snapped one up. It was a clumsy device, probably due to its sensors being too crude, but at a time when Nintendo was pimping the Power Glove, and Aura was trying really really hard to sell us chest-mounted subwoofers, the Mindlink fit right in.
If it weren't for that Tramiel monkey, things would probably have come out different. Part of the reason why testers got headaches was a lack of comfort because the headband didn't have enough flex, a simple design refinement would have solved it at minimal cost. Unfortunately for us, experimental gaming didn't fit in Tramiel's alternate reality, he bought Atari arguably to insult his former partners at Commodore, then drove it into the ground with the help of his son. Crash or no crash, the Mindlink didn't stand a chance in that hostile environment. What if Steve Jobs resigned from Apple, went to Microsoft and led the next Windows OS ? Do you honestly think he would put in any effort ?
I agree, the cost of development tools, or anything else that can create a small worthless product, is ridiculously inflated in North America. The moment your app allows other people to make money, marketing adds an extra digit to the price tag. If you add "enterprise" to the title, slap on another zero. If that enterprise product takes off, hire a bunch of hotshot salespeople and tack on a couple more zeroes. That's how you end up with Oracle and PeopleSoft.
Look at Photoshop, as a prime example. It's a graphic editor. It does a relatively simple job, does it fairly well (but nothing earth-shaking), and costs $1000. Why in god's name does it cost a thousand bucks ? Why not 100$ ? Someone deliberately chose that price point, just like that someone is choosing to ignore/accept the mass piracy as marketing. How's the ratio of legit to warezed copies ? My guess is 1:1000. For every thousand users, only one has paid... that's my theory. That's a dollar per user. If Photoshop were priced more down-to-earth, would it sell more copies ? Would Adobe make more money in the end ?
How many users of Visual Studio have paid for it ? The ratio is probably more favorable than Photoshop's, but that's only because of the niche. There are far more people with pictures and web sites, than there are programmers in the world. People end up using Visual Studio anyway, whether it's legit or not, partly because the price is wrong, and partly because there's really no moral justification not to. If your choices are to develop, or not to develop, it's easy to download that torrent.
My point is: even the ancient and ubiquitous ATI Rage 3D had basic hardware acceleration that could handle a significant portion of Windows' widget drawing workload. Microsoft never made use of those features, even today the most XP can do is advanced blitting. It doesn't do hardware alpha, which is why any non-square non-opaque object makes everything slow to a crawl on anything but the latest generation of processors.
So I don't get a hardware-accelerated blur effect in OS X, so what ? I get all the other stuff, the effects that define the overall identity of the Mac. If I run Vista on an underpowered PC, it no longer looks like Vista, it just looks like a palette-swapped XP.
As usual, I'm going to bash free software for a minute. Please chop along the dotted line on my neck.
Gnome, or more likely the various window managers and decorators within, probably call gettimeofday() to time their animations. To me, it's obvious that's the dumbest slowest way to get things done, but I was coding games back in the glory days of Dos and the 386, where every clock cycle mattered and it was painfully obvious when a piece of code was unoptimized (or just plain wrong).
Today, with very few coders having had that low-level experience, I think people just don't know any better. These are the same people who praise Ruby and find it perfectly normal that a "huge" site like Digg needs 75 servers to deliver the world's simplest link blog. Meanwhile us old-schoolers remember the day we tuned Apache and MySQL to churn out 1M pageviews per day on a dual Celeron 450, back in '00.
Back to Gnome though, gettimeofday() is an API call, which at best will use the CPU timestamp (a single non-stalling single-cycle instruction), at worst will use ticks (~20ms), and then will perform a few calculations upon that result before passing it back on the stack. Meanwhile, the animation just wanted a reliable timing source as a longint. What should have taken a single CPU cycle now winds up as a 300-cycle mutexed function call whose hard work is mostly discarded. On that old 386, your animation would have crawled, but today's PCs have lots of headroom to hide those inefficiencies. They're still wasteful, and that waste is what accumulates into UI lag when these same performance mistakes are repeated hundreds of times in each step of the rendering process.
There is always the argument that programmer time is more valuable than user time. That argument falls apart when you have a million users. 30 seconds of user time wasted, times one million, equals one year. One year wasted because someone didn't understand what actually happens after they write that lazy code.
How many years of humanity have been wasted by Vista ? I fear not even Google can calculate such a number.