When HDTVs came out there was already talk of needing some form of copy protection on the connectors, and that there would be a new standard "at some point in the future": that's the main reason why I, and others I know, decided to wait until the dust settled before making the switch to HD.
Early adopters are such a minority in this case that I strongly doubt there will be any concessions made: in any case, if you bought one of the first plasma screens that came out, probably now it's already nearly time to replace it due to the gas discharge etc. etc.
all the "free market" theories assume things that are in general not true in real life, where governments, corporations and special interest groups routinely engage in misinformation, protectionist practices, etc. and do their best to stack things in their favour.
You engaged in free trade. You both exchanged something of lesser value in exchange of something of greater value
yes, company A exchanged something of lesser value (a US employee) with something of greater value (an overseas, cheaper employee) with outsourcing company B: both companies are happy (company A saves money, company B generates money) but in the end the US employee gets the shaft.
"free" markets would be free only if there was as much mobility for employees as there is for jobs/capital: as things stand now jobs can move anywhere that is cheaper, however employees can't.
I do agree that eventually things will stabilize, where all of the world will enjoy the same standard of living and consequently outsourcing won't happen anymore, however I personaly really doubt that will happen any time soon.
Oh, and I personally wouldn't gloat too much about
That's why the US is able to have a trade deficit for most of the past century yet still be the wealthiest country in the world
besides the risks inherent in a huge trade deficit, being the wealthiest doesn't mean at all having the highest standard of living. I'd rather have 1000 people earning around 100,000 a year than 1 person earning 1,000,000,000 and 999 people earning 20,000: yeah, scenario B is "wealthier", but unless you were the lucky one you'd do a lot better in scenario A.
how do all the many privately owned companies manage so well without access to the stock market then? Google was doing extremely well even before they went public, and I don't buy that the reason they went public for was "for the good of the company". Maybe "for the good of the insiders" which saw a way to trade their "cool factor" for a pile of cash in their pocket, or maybe "for the good of the VC investors" which wanted a return on their investment *now*.
And if a company was not able "to grow large enough" maybe there would be some space for *another* company: yeah, the bogus "economic growth" numbers might be lower, but at least more people would have a job instead of what happens now where there's so much economic growth that people are laid off left right and center just because it happens to be cheaper to hire workers abroad.
My dad managed to keep his family going with a normal blue collar factory job and my mum being a housewife (put me through university, had vacations every year etc. etc.) with the cost of living nowadays, after all this "economic growth", it would take a high paying white collar job to enable somebody to achieve the same standard of living.
Economists say that things will adjust eventually (cost of living will increase in China/India/... which will make outsourcing less attractive) but I'm not so sure I buy their theoretical arguments when prices keep going up, salaries stagnate (do you honestly think you can live on "minimum wage" anywhere now?), and jobs get outsourced.
What they've effectively done is told their employees: We care about the company
actually what I gather is they told the employees "we care about Wall Street" which can be quite different from caring about the company (lay off half of your workforce and outsource and the stock will go up, be conservative with your numbers and projected earnings and the stock will go down).
I personally wish the stock market just disappeared, but fat chance of that happening.
I haven't been doing microelectronics since my university days (over 10 years ago) and the block named "testing/debug" intrigued me quite a bit: exactly what test/debug functions do you put on CPUs nowadays? do they contain burned in test cases? some sort of programmable logic to get access to internal CPU states? I'd definitely be interested in learning more about this.
I put in "shadows in the rain" (gorgeous jazzy song by Sting) and this thing gave me some sloppy sugary pop song saying it has in common "romantic lyrics" with "shadows in the rain" (who is about a guy affected by paranoia and seeing "shadows in the rain")
... you end up with a transcoded file, which is even worse than the straight 128k wmedia file you started from when you burn it (given that you get the WMA artifacts *and* the MP3/AAC ones). This of course unless I've misread their FAQs obviously.
... after being exposed to laser light this will make a DVD basically equal to a cable provider's PPV (only with obviously a lot better image quality) since you won't be able to rewind/pause/restart things.
With VOD being offered now by cable cos (where you can watch things as many times as you want for 24h, including rewind and so on) this doesn't sound that appealing, save for folks with HDTVs where they'll be able to get "quasi-HD-PPVs" for the price of "normal" ones.
If these were recylable this wouldn't be so bad, but having tons of extra non biodegradable stuff in our landfills doesn't sound too good.
I don't think I've heard more mixed reviews by my friends/acquaintances about this movie: the scifi crowd (who loved the TV show) thinks it's one of the best movies ever, the "other" crowd (gfs, etc.) says it's a total bomb; whom should I believe? My instinct is to go with the "other" crowd and think that this is a really lame movie that appeals only to folks who were totally into the TV show (not one of them, I saw half an episode and thought it was lame) but I'm kinda wondering...
OTOH most people were pretty unanimous in saying that "a history of violence" was quite good, I might check that out soon myself.
only if the car manufacturers wise up and start importing them: every time I go and visit my parents in Europe it's amazing just how many cheap and extremely fuel efficient diesel cars are available, while here in North America unless you want to overspend for a VW Passat for example, you're pretty much SOL.
separate music stores: I was born in Italy, and I'm sometimes interested in Italian music which, although present on the Italian iTunes site (obviously), is nowhere to be seen in the North American ones. I also like Queen, say I wanted to buy "hot space", no way, that's available only in the US store, but not in the Canadian one (why?). I sometimes also listen to world music, plenty of artists available from the Japanese, the UK, the Swedish stores are nowhere to be seen in the USA one.
As of now I can order an "import" CD from Amazon.ca whenever I want or heck, even order directly from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com, but for some reason I am not allowed to do that on the internet: where's the logic in this state of things? Just because I live here in Canada it doesn't mean I should be interested only in "approved for Canada" music/books and so on.
It's like the US customers not getting a lot of British fiction commonly sold here, and getting "translated" versions of Harry Potter without having a say in it: this is just ridiculous.
I ordered one direct so I could get it laser engraved, if I had bought it locally at least I could've taken it back to the store for an exchange. It's ridiculous how easily it scratches, heck, I can scratch it with my fingernail! I don't know what people at Apple were smoking when they chose this material for something that people will want to put in their pockets and so on.
I've recently ordered some covers from decalgirl.com, which although not an optimal solution at least might stop new scratches from appearing on my nano. I knew something was wrong when a bit of the plastic it was wrapped in "stuck" to it and left a bit of a residue, and buffing it out (with my glasses microfiber cloth!) caused tons of scratches already.
This is my first Apple product and it's definitely left a bad taste in my mouth: before getting the nano I was also thinking of getting a 60gig model as well: definitely won't be doing that now.
do you also think that catching money laundering is also as a simple matter as making a few SQL queries?
I'm sure that companies that sell gold in-game are a lot smarter than you make them to be and have *many* levels between the gold seller and the gold buyer (going through several AH trips buying/selling/diverting money around, going through things like crafting items for disenchant and reselling its profits, and so on and on and on).
If blizzard doesn't have tagging for every single gold/silver piece that exists on the server's economy I doubt you'd be able to "ban" a gold seller. On the other hand banning gold buyers *maybe* would work, because it'd be kinda easy to do a search for people that mysteriously acquired 100+ gold in one day and drill down to see where that gold came from.
Regarding Queen, is it 20 out of 29 what available? Queen have officially released 21 albums (including "best of"-s) and I'm _positive_ I searched for a few of my favorite songs ("The prophet's song", "Mustapha" among them) and they were not there. "Under pressure" was available but only in a David Bowie album.
This is the complete Queen discography for reference
no clue why Jamiroquai is not licensed for Canada.
BTW yes, you can switch the store with a click, but I don't think you're allowed to order from it if your c/c doesn't have a billing address in the relevant country.
What?! Are you smoking crack? There are 6 or 7 Queen albums there. And they didn't just get there. I bought a few of their albums over a year and half ago. How did I find these Queen songs? Well, I typed in "Queen" into the search field, and there they were!
hmmmmm, I wonder if iTunes Canada (which is what I'm using) has a different availability in this case.
... why is it that so many songs are missing from iTunes? I recently ordered an iPod nano and so installed iTunes to prepare for its arrival: I was browsing the store to buy some songs I've always wanted but for some reason I wasn't able to find basically anything I wanted:
= Nothing by George Harrison = Nothing by Queen = Jamiroquai albums are mostly missing as well
what's up with that? yeah, Jamiroquai might be a little niche, but don't tell me that Queen and George Harrison are.
Dozens of professional sites exist that use Gimp, POVray, and Blender in concert
we're not talking about POVray and Blender here
Pixar switched to Linux, I suppose they don't know squat about graphics, huh?
I seriously doubt Pixar put linux on their Photoshop-using artists' desktops, which are for sure all using CS2 on OS/X. Please stop being a mindless fanboy and actually talk to people who use PS for a living and ask them about what they think about switching to the Gimp to see what the Gimp shortcomings are.
If I can find out several huge shortcomings with the Gimp (and I'm not a pro at PS by any means) somebody who actually knows PS inside and out would probably be able to write a book about what the gimp is lacking.
when the developers will actually listen to what users want (a PS-like interface, adjustment layers, CYMK,...) instead of to themselves, my attitude towards Gimp will change.
Every single time I brought up a Gimp shortcoming I've been told that "why don't I code it if I want it", I want a graphic program that works, I already code all day for my job and extending the Gimp is not what I'm interested in, that's why I have given several hundred $ to Adobe for CS2 (and elements 3 before that).
You can see how the developers' minds work when they chewed out the guy that came out with the PS-like interface because it didn't fit with their vision which is "Gimp is not PS" even when that's what pretty much everybody would like.
I respect the fact that they aren't paid for their work, and that consequently I shouldn't expect too much, that's why I decided to actually buy what I need instead of continuing to gripe about the Gimp.
Pawn shops are always full of great deals on specialist items such as camera lenses, because even pawnbrokers don't know the value of things.
bs, pawn shops are full of great deals on lenses (and bikes, and DVDs/CDs) because of all the crooks that steal them and the pawn shop owners looking the other way.
You don't really think that a pawn shop owner sees a, say, Canon 300 f2.8L and can't figure out that it's worth a lot of money? Plausible deniability lets a lot of people get out of things even if they are dirty as sin.
I mean, with the (low) amount of money a pawnshop gives you on stuff, what honest person would sell their stuff through them vs selling on classifieds or at a garage sale or even at a specialist camera shop who a) would give you more money upfront and b) would give you even more if you give it to them for consignment.
Especially these days with google and everything where it takes 10 seconds to figure out the real value of an item there is no excuse (save theft or scams) from anything being offered at a fraction of its retail value.
And to all the people who say "it's not my duty to ascertain if it's stolen or not, if it's a good deal I'll buy it": you shall reap what you are sowing.
I just recently bought CS2 (after using elements for a while) so my list won't for sure be exhaustive.
= adjustment layers (this feature alone makes gimp a toy in my book) = healing brush/spot healing brush (use it all the time) = adobe bridge + adobe camera raw (and don't tell me there are other apps to do this, I know there are, but acr+bridge is amazing in CS2) = liquify = 16 and 32 bit/channel images (I do all my editing in 16 personally) = CYMK/LAB/... color spaces = color profiles (so I can soft-proof exactly what my print will look like when printed at the lab *AND* can use their profiles instead of having to limit myself to sRGB) = vanishing point (ok, gimmicky but it's quite useful sometimes) = multiple easily placeable color samplers = an actually good UI without 250000 extra windows: in PS I can just press 'tab' and work on the imace on an empty screen, 'tab' again and all my palettes are back where they were. = history brush = better support for my wacom tablet (although the gimp is not totally bad, it's still nowhere near as good) = meaningful keyboard shortcuts for everything.
and the list goes on and on and on. I am very much pro open source, but when it comes to the Gimp the people that say that it's as good as PS strike me the same way as the people that say that their webserver written in perl in a CS class is as good as Apache.
Sure, the gimp is fine for the 'resize the pic for the web and maybe correct some red eye' crowd, but as soon as you have to do something more involved even the humble (and cheap) PS Elements is light years ahead.
It would also be nicer if it was integrated directly into iTunes so when you select "downsample to aac128 before downloading to ipod" it would also do this automagically
... it also gets the market who wants a flash-based player so it doesn't skip when running: the nano is my first ipod and I basically ordered it 5 minutes after reading the 'how can we destroy it' article here on/.
I do plan to eventually get a 60gig one at some point, but right now the nano just hits the sweet spot for me in terms of durability, price, size and capacity.
I have heard many times the 'it's complicated' line on the official message boards, given the revenue you're getting from WoW it's ridiculous you haven't given serious thoughts to fixing this: on many servers AV starts maybe once a day, 2-3 hour waits for WSG are common as well, this makes 'casual' pvp-ing practically impossible for most of your subscribers.
I know you're probably worried about people trading items in WSG across servers due to the high abuse potential but if you disable trading in battlegrounds unless players are from the same server (which should be easy code-wise) cross-server BGs should enable us to actually get in in a reasonable amount of time. Right now my choices as a level 60 are:
= farm for gold while waiting for AV/WSG to open (boooooring)
= find a pickup group for some instance while waiting (which means waiting in IF for an hour for people wanting to do DM west/north or 5-man strath, which NOBODY ever wants to do) only to have the 'you are eligible to enter AV' pop up 30 min inside the instance run (argh)
= level up my alt(s) (gets boring after a while to do the same quests over and over and over and over and over again because there is no new content to be had at 60 really)
And btw, fix the code for the 'estimated waiting time' please, there have been way too many times where I've had the 'ETA 10 minutes, time elapsed in queue 3 hours 15 minutes'.
Slashdot Mirror
When HDTVs came out there was already talk of needing some form of copy protection on the connectors, and that there would be a new standard "at some point in the future": that's the main reason why I, and others I know, decided to wait until the dust settled before making the switch to HD.
Early adopters are such a minority in this case that I strongly doubt there will be any concessions made: in any case, if you bought one of the first plasma screens that came out, probably now it's already nearly time to replace it due to the gas discharge etc. etc.
all the "free market" theories assume things that are in general not true in real life, where governments, corporations and special interest groups routinely engage in misinformation, protectionist practices, etc. and do their best to stack things in their favour.
You engaged in free trade. You both exchanged something of lesser value in exchange of something of greater value
yes, company A exchanged something of lesser value (a US employee) with something of greater value (an overseas, cheaper employee) with outsourcing company B: both companies are happy (company A saves money, company B generates money) but in the end the US employee gets the shaft.
"free" markets would be free only if there was as much mobility for employees as there is for jobs/capital: as things stand now jobs can move anywhere that is cheaper, however employees can't.
I do agree that eventually things will stabilize, where all of the world will enjoy the same standard of living and consequently outsourcing won't happen anymore, however I personaly really doubt that will happen any time soon.
Oh, and I personally wouldn't gloat too much about
That's why the US is able to have a trade deficit for most of the past century yet still be the wealthiest country in the world
besides the risks inherent in a huge trade deficit, being the wealthiest doesn't mean at all having the highest standard of living. I'd rather have 1000 people earning around 100,000 a year than 1 person earning 1,000,000,000 and 999 people earning 20,000: yeah, scenario B is "wealthier", but unless you were the lucky one you'd do a lot better in scenario A.
how do all the many privately owned companies manage so well without access to the stock market then? Google was doing extremely well even before they went public, and I don't buy that the reason they went public for was "for the good of the company". Maybe "for the good of the insiders" which saw a way to trade their "cool factor" for a pile of cash in their pocket, or maybe "for the good of the VC investors" which wanted a return on their investment *now*.
And if a company was not able "to grow large enough" maybe there would be some space for *another* company: yeah, the bogus "economic growth" numbers might be lower, but at least more people would have a job instead of what happens now where there's so much economic growth that people are laid off left right and center just because it happens to be cheaper to hire workers abroad.
My dad managed to keep his family going with a normal blue collar factory job and my mum being a housewife (put me through university, had vacations every year etc. etc.) with the cost of living nowadays, after all this "economic growth", it would take a high paying white collar job to enable somebody to achieve the same standard of living.
Economists say that things will adjust eventually (cost of living will increase in China/India/... which will make outsourcing less attractive) but I'm not so sure I buy their theoretical arguments when prices keep going up, salaries stagnate (do you honestly think you can live on "minimum wage" anywhere now?), and jobs get outsourced.
What they've effectively done is told their employees: We care about the company
actually what I gather is they told the employees "we care about Wall Street" which can be quite different from caring about the company (lay off half of your workforce and outsource and the stock will go up, be conservative with your numbers and projected earnings and the stock will go down).
I personally wish the stock market just disappeared, but fat chance of that happening.
powertabs is currently down for example due to this whole incident, olga is still up but who knows for how long...
I haven't been doing microelectronics since my university days (over 10 years ago) and the block named "testing/debug" intrigued me quite a bit: exactly what test/debug functions do you put on CPUs nowadays? do they contain burned in test cases? some sort of programmable logic to get access to internal CPU states? I'd definitely be interested in learning more about this.
I put in "shadows in the rain" (gorgeous jazzy song by Sting) and this thing gave me some sloppy sugary pop song saying it has in common "romantic lyrics" with "shadows in the rain" (who is about a guy affected by paranoia and seeing "shadows in the rain")
lol, I think this needs a bit more work...
... you end up with a transcoded file, which is even worse than the straight 128k wmedia file you started from when you burn it (given that you get the WMA artifacts *and* the MP3/AAC ones). This of course unless I've misread their FAQs obviously.
... after being exposed to laser light this will make a DVD basically equal to a cable provider's PPV (only with obviously a lot better image quality) since you won't be able to rewind/pause/restart things.
With VOD being offered now by cable cos (where you can watch things as many times as you want for 24h, including rewind and so on) this doesn't sound that appealing, save for folks with HDTVs where they'll be able to get "quasi-HD-PPVs" for the price of "normal" ones.
If these were recylable this wouldn't be so bad, but having tons of extra non biodegradable stuff in our landfills doesn't sound too good.
I don't think I've heard more mixed reviews by my friends/acquaintances about this movie: the scifi crowd (who loved the TV show) thinks it's one of the best movies ever, the "other" crowd (gfs, etc.) says it's a total bomb; whom should I believe? My instinct is to go with the "other" crowd and think that this is a really lame movie that appeals only to folks who were totally into the TV show (not one of them, I saw half an episode and thought it was lame) but I'm kinda wondering...
OTOH most people were pretty unanimous in saying that "a history of violence" was quite good, I might check that out soon myself.
only if the car manufacturers wise up and start importing them: every time I go and visit my parents in Europe it's amazing just how many cheap and extremely fuel efficient diesel cars are available, while here in North America unless you want to overspend for a VW Passat for example, you're pretty much SOL.
separate music stores: I was born in Italy, and I'm sometimes interested in Italian music which, although present on the Italian iTunes site (obviously), is nowhere to be seen in the North American ones. I also like Queen, say I wanted to buy "hot space", no way, that's available only in the US store, but not in the Canadian one (why?). I sometimes also listen to world music, plenty of artists available from the Japanese, the UK, the Swedish stores are nowhere to be seen in the USA one.
As of now I can order an "import" CD from Amazon.ca whenever I want or heck, even order directly from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com, but for some reason I am not allowed to do that on the internet: where's the logic in this state of things? Just because I live here in Canada it doesn't mean I should be interested only in "approved for Canada" music/books and so on.
It's like the US customers not getting a lot of British fiction commonly sold here, and getting "translated" versions of Harry Potter without having a say in it: this is just ridiculous.
I ordered one direct so I could get it laser engraved, if I had bought it locally at least I could've taken it back to the store for an exchange. It's ridiculous how easily it scratches, heck, I can scratch it with my fingernail! I don't know what people at Apple were smoking when they chose this material for something that people will want to put in their pockets and so on.
I've recently ordered some covers from decalgirl.com, which although not an optimal solution at least might stop new scratches from appearing on my nano. I knew something was wrong when a bit of the plastic it was wrapped in "stuck" to it and left a bit of a residue, and buffing it out (with my glasses microfiber cloth!) caused tons of scratches already.
This is my first Apple product and it's definitely left a bad taste in my mouth: before getting the nano I was also thinking of getting a 60gig model as well: definitely won't be doing that now.
do you also think that catching money laundering is also as a simple matter as making a few SQL queries?
I'm sure that companies that sell gold in-game are a lot smarter than you make them to be and have *many* levels between the gold seller and the gold buyer (going through several AH trips buying/selling/diverting money around, going through things like crafting items for disenchant and reselling its profits, and so on and on and on).
If blizzard doesn't have tagging for every single gold/silver piece that exists on the server's economy I doubt you'd be able to "ban" a gold seller. On the other hand banning gold buyers *maybe* would work, because it'd be kinda easy to do a search for people that mysteriously acquired 100+ gold in one day and drill down to see where that gold came from.
Regarding Queen, is it 20 out of 29 what available? Queen have officially released 21 albums (including "best of"-s) and I'm _positive_ I searched for a few of my favorite songs ("The prophet's song", "Mustapha" among them) and they were not there. "Under pressure" was available but only in a David Bowie album.
This is the complete Queen discography for reference
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~choh/qdisc.htm
no clue why Jamiroquai is not licensed for Canada.
BTW yes, you can switch the store with a click, but I don't think you're allowed to order from it if your c/c doesn't have a billing address in the relevant country.
ummmm, I'll retry tonight and repost: I swear I tried both Jamiroquai and Queen and could find only half an album by Jamiroquai and none by Queen.
What?! Are you smoking crack? There are 6 or 7 Queen albums there. And they didn't just get there. I bought a few of their albums over a year and half ago. How did I find these Queen songs? Well, I typed in "Queen" into the search field, and there they were!
hmmmmm, I wonder if iTunes Canada (which is what I'm using) has a different availability in this case.
... why is it that so many songs are missing from iTunes? I recently ordered an iPod nano and so installed iTunes to prepare for its arrival: I was browsing the store to buy some songs I've always wanted but for some reason I wasn't able to find basically anything I wanted:
= Nothing by George Harrison
= Nothing by Queen
= Jamiroquai albums are mostly missing as well
what's up with that? yeah, Jamiroquai might be a little niche, but don't tell me that Queen and George Harrison are.
Dozens of professional sites exist that use Gimp, POVray, and Blender in concert
we're not talking about POVray and Blender here
Pixar switched to Linux, I suppose they don't know squat about graphics, huh?
I seriously doubt Pixar put linux on their Photoshop-using artists' desktops, which are for sure all using CS2 on OS/X. Please stop being a mindless fanboy and actually talk to people who use PS for a living and ask them about what they think about switching to the Gimp to see what the Gimp shortcomings are.
If I can find out several huge shortcomings with the Gimp (and I'm not a pro at PS by any means) somebody who actually knows PS inside and out would probably be able to write a book about what the gimp is lacking.
is an insult to the developers.
...) instead of to themselves, my attitude towards Gimp will change.
when the developers will actually listen to what users want (a PS-like interface, adjustment layers, CYMK,
Every single time I brought up a Gimp shortcoming I've been told that "why don't I code it if I want it", I want a graphic program that works, I already code all day for my job and extending the Gimp is not what I'm interested in, that's why I have given several hundred $ to Adobe for CS2 (and elements 3 before that).
You can see how the developers' minds work when they chewed out the guy that came out with the PS-like interface because it didn't fit with their vision which is "Gimp is not PS" even when that's what pretty much everybody would like.
I respect the fact that they aren't paid for their work, and that consequently I shouldn't expect too much, that's why I decided to actually buy what I need instead of continuing to gripe about the Gimp.
Pawn shops are always full of great deals on specialist items such as camera lenses, because even pawnbrokers don't know the value of things.
bs, pawn shops are full of great deals on lenses (and bikes, and DVDs/CDs) because of all the crooks that steal them and the pawn shop owners looking the other way.
You don't really think that a pawn shop owner sees a, say, Canon 300 f2.8L and can't figure out that it's worth a lot of money? Plausible deniability lets a lot of people get out of things even if they are dirty as sin.
I mean, with the (low) amount of money a pawnshop gives you on stuff, what honest person would sell their stuff through them vs selling on classifieds or at a garage sale or even at a specialist camera shop who a) would give you more money upfront and b) would give you even more if you give it to them for consignment.
Especially these days with google and everything where it takes 10 seconds to figure out the real value of an item there is no excuse (save theft or scams) from anything being offered at a fraction of its retail value.
And to all the people who say "it's not my duty to ascertain if it's stolen or not, if it's a good deal I'll buy it": you shall reap what you are sowing.
I just recently bought CS2 (after using elements for a while) so my list won't for sure be exhaustive.
= adjustment layers (this feature alone makes gimp a toy in my book)
= healing brush/spot healing brush (use it all the time)
= adobe bridge + adobe camera raw (and don't tell me there are other apps to do this, I know there are, but acr+bridge is amazing in CS2)
= liquify
= 16 and 32 bit/channel images (I do all my editing in 16 personally)
= CYMK/LAB/... color spaces
= color profiles (so I can soft-proof exactly what my print will look like when printed at the lab *AND* can use their profiles instead of having to limit myself to sRGB)
= vanishing point (ok, gimmicky but it's quite useful sometimes)
= multiple easily placeable color samplers
= an actually good UI without 250000 extra windows: in PS I can just press 'tab' and work on the imace on an empty screen, 'tab' again and all my palettes are back where they were.
= history brush
= better support for my wacom tablet (although the gimp is not totally bad, it's still nowhere near as good)
= meaningful keyboard shortcuts for everything.
and the list goes on and on and on. I am very much pro open source, but when it comes to the Gimp the people that say that it's as good as PS strike me the same way as the people that say that their webserver written in perl in a CS class is as good as Apache.
Sure, the gimp is fine for the 'resize the pic for the web and maybe correct some red eye' crowd, but as soon as you have to do something more involved even the humble (and cheap) PS Elements is light years ahead.
... if there was a way to do it on a PC.
It would also be nicer if it was integrated directly into iTunes so when you select "downsample to aac128 before downloading to ipod" it would also do this automagically
... it also gets the market who wants a flash-based player so it doesn't skip when running: the nano is my first ipod and I basically ordered it 5 minutes after reading the 'how can we destroy it' article here on /.
I do plan to eventually get a 60gig one at some point, but right now the nano just hits the sweet spot for me in terms of durability, price, size and capacity.
I have heard many times the 'it's complicated' line on the official message boards, given the revenue you're getting from WoW it's ridiculous you haven't given serious thoughts to fixing this: on many servers AV starts maybe once a day, 2-3 hour waits for WSG are common as well, this makes 'casual' pvp-ing practically impossible for most of your subscribers.
I know you're probably worried about people trading items in WSG across servers due to the high abuse potential but if you disable trading in battlegrounds unless players are from the same server (which should be easy code-wise) cross-server BGs should enable us to actually get in in a reasonable amount of time. Right now my choices as a level 60 are:
= farm for gold while waiting for AV/WSG to open (boooooring)
= find a pickup group for some instance while waiting (which means waiting in IF for an hour for people wanting to do DM west/north or 5-man strath, which NOBODY ever wants to do) only to have the 'you are eligible to enter AV' pop up 30 min inside the instance run (argh)
= level up my alt(s) (gets boring after a while to do the same quests over and over and over and over and over again because there is no new content to be had at 60 really)
And btw, fix the code for the 'estimated waiting time' please, there have been way too many times where I've had the 'ETA 10 minutes, time elapsed in queue 3 hours 15 minutes'.