It doesn't really matter if I was marked troll. The only sad thing about it is that Mac fans are often very loyal to the platform no matter what Apple does. It makes it very difficult to level any constructive criticism at Apple, as Apple fans will often deny the criticism.
Still, it's what kept Apple form going under in the 90s, so there must be something good about it.
What reaaly bothers me about Apple is that their support for anything that doesn't come out of Cupertino seems to be either designed to bait end users into moving to Macs than anything else.
When Apple brought out OS X in 2001, it was all smiles as the system came with free developer tools, a Java-Cocoa API that allowed you to use Java to write native Cocoa apps as well as a C/C++ API that also allowed you to write native Mac apps.
The problem was that the Java-Cocoa api was buggy from the start, apart from having very slow response on a, at the time, very slow user interface. Apple never fixed some of the worst bugs in critical objects (PDF objects for example), and finally, in 2005, dropped further development for the Java-Cocoa bridge altogether.
Last year, Apple dropped further development for the C/C++ API, which is having a major impact on big applications like Adobe's Creative Suite, which now have to move to Apple's in-house Objective-C api.
The overall impression that I get is that Apple is only paying lip service to anything that doesn't come from Apple itself. Apple was known for this in the 90s and there was an acronym for that: NIH -Not Invented Here. This is also Microsoft suffers from, in its Embrace and Extend strategy.
This had serious repurcussions for Apple in the 90s and I, as a long time Mac user worry if it won't happen again. Java6 was available for other platforms over two years ago, and now Java7 is even almost here.
Seriously, if you're a Java developer, is there any actual reason to use Mac OSX? You're far better off using Eclipse on Linux.
As Rob Malda once put it, in our world the extremes of whatever prediction (be it in Microsoft's or Apple's PR output or a Humanities Professor having a go with statitics) is seldom the true outcome. Much more often, as Rob would put it, "it's somewhere in between".
Translated to the possibility of intelligent civilisations in our universe (or galaxy) the most probable likleyhood is that there is neither an all encompassing galactic civilisation nor is there an utter dearth of intelligent civilisations. There are probably very few intelligent civilisations, most of whom are faced with the same laws of physics and daily trivia as we are, in some or other form.
In concrete terms, I would think that any civilisation would have to put an enormous amount of effort into exploring interstellar space, probably beyond the means (or the will, considering how many humans consider space exploration a waste of money and time) of all but a tiny few, and given the laws of physics, it would mean that maybe there are in fact a tiny number of interstellar civilisations, but that they are confined to small corners of whichever part of the universe/galaxy they come from.
I honestly don't see the difference. We're arguing about semantics now, which I don't think helps anyone. The fact is that because it is no longer being developed, people will stop using it to develop new applications over time, just like happened with Java. We can argue all we like about the meaning of the word deprecated, but that is what it amounts to.
If you see my first clarification above, you'll see that I know people who used the Java-Cocoa bridges. The reason that they had problems is that the bridge implementation had many serious bugs, some in the form of memory leaks. Apple was very unresponsive to them even back in that day when the bridge was supposedly going strong.
I don't want to invoke conspiracy theories, but it did sometimes seem as if Apple was not exactly behind the project wholeheartedly.
You can also not tell me that you can get better performance with the Python or Ruby bridges. Java has lots of problems, but it is a lot faster than either of those two or Applescript.
I specifically stated in my original post "major GUI applications". That means Carbon. Apple have stated that they will not develop it any further and it will not be ported to 64 bit. If that isn't deprecated, then I don't know what is. The fact that it hasn't been officially deprecated might have more to do with company developer politics than with documentary policies.
Being able to call freely from and to 32 and 64 bit code is useless if you want the extra speedup that 64 bit code gives you or you need the extra memory of the latest features of Cocoa.
I know people and companies who used the Java-Cocoa bridge. A friend of mine was developing an online custom PDF report generator for financial companies using it. There were many such uses of the Java-Cocoa bridge, just not much in the way of client side publicly available applications. The problems my friend ran into, long before Apple decided to drop the bridge, was that the Java-Cocoa bridge was very buggy and reported bugs to Apple by companies that had developer agreements with Apple were simply not given any priority. One of the bugs in the J-C bridge was that the a PDF renderer (IIRC) implementation in the bridge had a memory leak. It only became obvious on many hundreds of objects, which was precisely what my friend was using. Apple knew about the bug as far back as 2003, yet never fixed it, right up until they deprecated the API in 2005.
I am aware of CoreFoundation and Objective-C++. Since you mention it you are also aware that it is restricted in what it can do. Porting a large C++ application to ObjC++ is not that simple. You will need to rearchitect the entire GUI code and most of the backend.
I am not ignoring the Python and Ruby bridges, and not the AppleScript implementation either. But they are not suitable for major client side performance dependent native applications.
As for GNUStep, who uses it? Can you point out any major applications that make use of it? The best way to make cross platform applications has been though the Qt and WxWidgets toolkits. They both rely on the Carbon APIs.
Nah, according TFA, you don't need Mac tech skills:
After all, as Publicis' Plavin notes, Macs -- which cost the same as equivalently configured business-class PCs -- are cheaper to support because they are easier to support.
To which I might add, "Citation Needed".
I'm a Mac system admin. You're right and wrong. Macs tend to behave better under stress than Windows does, but there are many problems on OSX, a number of which are related to, very much as in Windows, legacy PPC stuff running under the Rosetta emulator. Apart from which, just as in Windows, if users are allowed to load their machines with crapware, they become unstable
I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always). Again, you're right and wrong. The Mac users in our company, which has become 80% Mac in the last two years, tend to manage the basic things much better than the Windows users, but they run into problems in the more complex things. I think the Mac is genuinely easier to use for beginners, but more advanced stuff, like LDAP binding, network homes etc are totally beyond their grasp, for the most part.
And finally, the cynic in me wonders how many of those Macs are really running XP / Vista under boot camp while at work... Not that there is anything wrong with that. You'll look cool and all, even if you're running the same dorky programs as everyone else. The only Mac users in our company who use Windows, are me, so that I can provide support, and the users who have apps that only run on Windows, like CAD stuff.
My thoughts exactly, and it doesn't have anything to do with elitism. This will be a long post, so please bare with me.
First, a Disclaimer: I am a sysadmin in a shop that uses mostly Macs, and a few Windows Machines, and I've been using Macs since 1990 and OSX since the first public beta in 2000.
Second, Apple, like anything or anyone else, is as vulnerable to the abuse of a powerful position as, say IBM was in the 70s and 80s, and Microsoft has been up until now. Apple has already started showing signs of that abuse, which I'll now point out.
Third, Apple originally touted OS X as a very open Unix like variant. They had all sorts of technologies that were there to draw developers and Windows users to the platform. Built in Java and C/C++ APIs as first class development language along with Objective-C. As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings) two years ago, and last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.
The net result of this is that if you want to develop a native 64 bit GUI application on OS X, you must use Objective-C. ObjC is a fine language, and now has Garbage collection, amongst other things, but it is very very difficult to port ObjC applications to other platforms. In a way, it's like Microsoft's.Net, except that there's not even an ObjC Mono to counter it.
This means huge costs of major software developers who have, for the most part, been developing in C/C++. Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Maxon Cinema 4D? They're all C/C++. There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux (with far less effort and far lower cost than porting to ObjC). Putting some of the money saved into a major marketing push for Linux would help the uptake.
It would also scare the living hell out of Steve Jobs (apart from making him go off on one of his major Ballmer-esque tirades again) and, it would force competition on Apple, which Apple seems to think is now unnecessary due to the major fuck up that is Windows Vista.
Fourth. Apple is almost wholly dependent on the final opinion of Steve Jobs. That is often very good, as the man has a sense of taste, unlike Steve Ballmer, who doesn't, but, because Steve Jobs is only human, that sometimes results in extremely poor decisions like the OSX 10.5 Leopard Desktop and GUI design. The default galactic image background is very bad for designers who need a neutral background to work on. The fact that Apple made the default Dock in 10.5 a weird faux 3D thing that is very difficult to use due to the changes, making it often very hard to see what applications are running. The new pop-up folders in the Dock are next to useless for most things, and the translucent Menu-bar could have only been a Steve Jobs decision, driven, like the 3D Dock by the perceived need to compete visually with Vista. Apple only offered changes to this when users rebelled in outrage.
Fifth. Apple's server offerings are to a large extent just wrappers around open source technologies. Their Open Directory is just a wrapper around OpenLDAP, SLAP, and a Berkley Database as data store. Their Email server is just Postfix for SMTP and Cyrus for IMAP. The problem is that due to the Apple GUI management bindings, it is next to impossible to customise these software packages. This is somewhat symptomatic of Apple's approach. They make some things very easy, but others very, very hard.
Apple needs competition. Without competition, Apple tends to lose their solid grounding and become a bit more like Microsoft, given to market lock-in and arbitrary decisions that make no sense.
Although I'm a die-hard Mac fan who owns three Macs and is a Mac system administrator, I have recently become to loath Apple, more and more, because, although the Mac experience is great, Apple is, in my eyes, becoming more and more like Microsoft in its policies, if not its products.
Witness the fact that Apple dropped Java as a core programming language on OSX two years ago, and has now stopped developing the C/C++ API known as Carbon, leaving you with exactly one native programming language to develop GUI applications on in OSX: Objective C, which, while it has many great features, is definitely slower than C or C++ (amongst other things, such as almost no compatibility). Apple is, in my eyes, trying to pull a Microsoft.
Microsoft is trying to do the same thing with Silverlight, the Flash competitor, and DirectX, having relegated OpenGL to second class citizen status on Vista. Microsoft's various web platforms, although they have been fairly good technically, have had the same driving policy. All the embrace and extend policies make many people despair.
But where does one go? On the one hand you have an balding manic prancing around a stage, who never shies from using aggression to threaten partners and employees, guided by an intellectually bright but totally out of touch nerd who has been wrong on so many occasions it's simply painful. On the other side, you have a nasty, money grabbing style fetishist with good ideas but a control obsession.
Linux is, in the world I live in, not (yet) an answer. There aren't enough high quality software packages out there. Period. There is no After Effects, there is no Illustrator.
My hope is that Ray Ozzie, who has a history of good and truly innovative products, eventually takes over from Ballmer and Gates, to bring back Windows from the depths of slow, crapware that it has become, to drive Apple into being more open again, instead of becoming ever more a second Microsoft.
This continual back and forth in the USA between Creationists, Intelligent Design proponents and Evolutionists is as utterly bizarre to a good many people elsewhere in the world as the religious bloodshed in the middle east is to Americans. It's as if the Americans, in some way, are the same as the "Towelheads" that they despise in Iraq, caught up in a struggle that neither side can really win, for the simple matter that it is very, if not extremely hard to convince any person that his or her beliefs are "wrong".
Belief may not be science, but the sheer number of religious adherents on this planet shows that the need to believe in something is very strong. Science will not win against Creationists or IDers. It's very similar to trying to convince a beautiful person with a terrible sense of inferiority that they are, in fact, totally ok. Their belief is that they are not, and telling them that they are will certainly not change it easily.
On the other side, the Creationists and IDers struggle to "win" can not succeed in the face of scientific evidence either. There is no scientific basis to either Creationism or ID. The irony of Creationism is that they take a bible litterally that wasn't even written in the language that they are reading it in, and claiming that the bible represents the word of God ignores the fact that the version that they read had gone through many translations over the centuries and even today Theologians argue over numerous points in the translation.
What is, however, very dangerous, is that this continual debate threatens to make the USA slip even further into the polarised society that it has become. American schools, rightly or wrongly, already have a terrible reputation outside the USA, and this debate is certainly not something that attracts potentially great scientific minds to come and study in the US, and this, added to the paranoid anti-terrorism laws in the US and the difficulty of foreign students and highly qualified workers to get Visas is not helping the USA when it really needs every chance it can get.
This is not 1960, nor is it 1990. The USA is not the world's only powerful economy anymore. There are many others who are willing and trying to take that position.
I'm an admin for a smallish company with four XServes that replaced our Linux/Irix combination and some 45 clients, most Mac, some Windows. We are in the middle of a cmopany wide upgrade to OSX 10.5 and Office 2008. I am a bit worried about Office 2008, as I've only heard really bad things about it, not only the VBA story, which is bad enough, but also that it is terribly slow and buggy.
Some of the VBA shortcomings can be overcome with Applescript (the whole object model in VBA is represented as an Applescript dictionary), and I've had some success converting some VBA macros to Applescript, but of course, this isn't realistic in large corporations.
If you run OSX Server with Open Directory, which is compatible with LDAP and AD, with network mounted home folders, you can do much of what you can do with AD in centrally setting clients' settings, doing centrally managed software upgrades, etc. In this case, if you have no tied in AD, it's the Windows clients that come up short in terms of management, ironically.
Stephen Baxter wrote a series of SF books on the far future and a lot of it has to do with a long war with a race of beings that own the center of the Milky Way and use its black hole for construction and computing.
I tried out the Paint.Net about 2 months ago. I was simply appalled at how slow it is. It makes the Photoshop start up time, which is nothing to write home about, look gracious and fast. It cannot handle large images well at all, slowing down to a crawl very rapidly as the images grow. That might be, because it's written in C#, which, to be fair, is not much of an improvement over Java in application performance.
It's fine for smaller tasks, but, to be honest, you can do those same tasks in the GIMP.
One thing that stands out in the spotlight every time the GIMP is mentioned is the way the generally Linux using developers see the GIMP and the way the generally Windows and Mac using Photoshop users see the GIMP. It is almost always the same flamefest where both sides don't talk to one another but past one another. That means that nothing much ever changes in their views.
The thing is, I own the Adobe CS3 Suite. I love Adobe's tools but yet, I se the GIMP ever so slowly actually starting to reach a point where it can do many of the tasks that Photoshop can do and this latest release, finally bringing to the GIMP the possibility of CMYK and 16-bit editing amongst others shows me that it will, sooner or later be "Good enough" for pre-press work (It is already good enough for web images). Eventually it WILL start to squeeze on Photoshop's territory, like it or not. There are already reasons to prefer it to Photoshop for certain applications.
It is far more scriptable than Photoshop, which makes it very useful for batch processing. It starts up in a tenth of the time (generally less than 10 seconds on a low end core 2 duo) which makes it nice for a quick image edit instead of waiting for Photoshop to load up its "Operating System". And, if a Photoshop user can get over their hoary attitudes, one can get used to the interface. I say this because the same people who hate the GIMP like Flash, which has, IMO, the worst interface I've ever seen. Those same people might be using Fireworks, which is also an ex-macromedia UI abortion to which even the GIMP compares favourably.
But the main reason I personally still much prefer Photoshop over the GIMP, is the fact that Adobe pays enormous attention to detail. Resizing of images is done with bicubic interpolation, the GIMP has only the far poorer cubic interpolation. There are many small details like this that will, when they are improved finally make the GIMP "Good enough".
One thing that has always bothered me is the question as to why Venus rotates in a retrograde manner (east to west) around its own axis. My personal idea, from the little amount of very inconclusive data available on this on the web, is that there must have been some cataclysmic collision early in Venus' history. One wonders if Venus had had a normal, and faster rotation, if it would have developed differently?
We'll do a deal with you: You stop bombing innocent people, torturing suspects and threatening others with war, and we'll stop giving people a place to hide their drug money.
I've been at a number of companies with totally opposite ways fo doing things. Currently, where I now work, we let users do mostly as they please. Surprisingly, the amount of support time isn't must greater than when one has to control the IT worker's every move. The greates part of support is still helping users with various software issues. Generally, it works quite well.
Take your fight to your politicians. That means in the EU, you should be sending in suspicion of corruption claims to the EU competition commissioner. Unless you do something now, we'll all be stuck with Microsoft's fairly obviously illegal practices for ever after. Do it, and do it now! I for my part will be looking into what can be done here where I live.
What blows me away is that it seems as if the US , currently in a recession, and the EU (but especially Germany, with mind boggling high taxes) are looknig for someone to lay the blame on for their own problems again. Yawn.
It's a lovely day, I think I'll go outside and wait for kdawson to find some other flaimbait article.
Here are my three main gripes about Photoshop's interface:
Why is undo (ctrl-Z) single-level by default? If I'm using a tablet, one pen stroke usually ends up as multiple steps. Why do I have to hold down ctrl-ALT-Z?
Why am I forced to select something before doing most operations? If nothing is selected, surely it's logical I want to do it on the whole image.
What is Photoshop's equivalent to "Alpha to Selection", which I use all the time? (I'm sure it has one but damned if I can find it)
Want me to go on? 1. I suppose it's a throwback to the days (Photoshop 4 and earlier) when there was no multiple undo. You can, however, just as in the GIMP, change it. Edit--Keyboard Shortcuts 2. I'm not too sure what you mean here. Most of the Filter operations that do not need a selection area will work without out one (Gaussian Blur, or Sharpen etc), but those that do (Tear, Ragged Edges etc) won't. 3. There are several ways of doing this. Q will switch from Quickmask to selection so that you can paint a selection. You can Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) click on an alpha channel in the channels palette to get a selection from it, or you can Cmd (or Ctrl) click on a layer and only the visible or non masked sections will become a selection. You can also Ctrl (or Cmd) click on a layer mask to get a selection. There are other tools too.
P.S. Photoshop and most of the other Adobe applications are all scriptable these days. They also come with an IDE to do the scripting (Javascript, Applescript or VBA)
If the UI were the only problem, the GIMP would have made more inroads into mainstream image manipulation a long time ago. The interface of the GIMP improved a lot with 2.0 and is no longer as terrible as it used to be with the very Unix style of doing with right clicks to find menus etc. Another thing is that the GIMP looks absolutely awful on Mac OSX. A good percentage of designers work on Mac, and the really bad UI on the Mac makes the GIMP a general non starter on OSX.
But for me, as someone who uses Photoshop on a daily basis at work, on Windows mostly, the thing that makes the GIMP useless is the fact that it doesn't support bicubic scaling. The GIMP's cubic scaling is really, really poor in comparison, and no one would accept images scaled with that algorithm where I work.
We, a design company, use different printing establishments. To keep quality more consistent, as not all modern printers support RGB workflows, we send all our bitmap images in CMYK format.
In Photoshop, no matter if you're working with an RGB or CMYK workflow, you can select this profile and get work in proof mode which gives you a very good approximation of what the final result will be.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't really matter if I was marked troll. The only sad thing about it is that Mac fans are often very loyal to the platform no matter what Apple does. It makes it very difficult to level any constructive criticism at Apple, as Apple fans will often deny the criticism.
Still, it's what kept Apple form going under in the 90s, so there must be something good about it.
What reaaly bothers me about Apple is that their support for anything that doesn't come out of Cupertino seems to be either designed to bait end users into moving to Macs than anything else.
When Apple brought out OS X in 2001, it was all smiles as the system came with free developer tools, a Java-Cocoa API that allowed you to use Java to write native Cocoa apps as well as a C/C++ API that also allowed you to write native Mac apps.
The problem was that the Java-Cocoa api was buggy from the start, apart from having very slow response on a, at the time, very slow user interface. Apple never fixed some of the worst bugs in critical objects (PDF objects for example), and finally, in 2005, dropped further development for the Java-Cocoa bridge altogether.
Last year, Apple dropped further development for the C/C++ API, which is having a major impact on big applications like Adobe's Creative Suite, which now have to move to Apple's in-house Objective-C api.
The overall impression that I get is that Apple is only paying lip service to anything that doesn't come from Apple itself. Apple was known for this in the 90s and there was an acronym for that: NIH -Not Invented Here. This is also Microsoft suffers from, in its Embrace and Extend strategy.
This had serious repurcussions for Apple in the 90s and I, as a long time Mac user worry if it won't happen again. Java6 was available for other platforms over two years ago, and now Java7 is even almost here.
Seriously, if you're a Java developer, is there any actual reason to use Mac OSX? You're far better off using Eclipse on Linux.
As Rob Malda once put it, in our world the extremes of whatever prediction (be it in Microsoft's or Apple's PR output or a Humanities Professor having a go with statitics) is seldom the true outcome. Much more often, as Rob would put it, "it's somewhere in between".
Translated to the possibility of intelligent civilisations in our universe (or galaxy) the most probable likleyhood is that there is neither an all encompassing galactic civilisation nor is there an utter dearth of intelligent civilisations. There are probably very few intelligent civilisations, most of whom are faced with the same laws of physics and daily trivia as we are, in some or other form.
In concrete terms, I would think that any civilisation would have to put an enormous amount of effort into exploring interstellar space, probably beyond the means (or the will, considering how many humans consider space exploration a waste of money and time) of all but a tiny few, and given the laws of physics, it would mean that maybe there are in fact a tiny number of interstellar civilisations, but that they are confined to small corners of whichever part of the universe/galaxy they come from.
I honestly don't see the difference. We're arguing about semantics now, which I don't think helps anyone. The fact is that because it is no longer being developed, people will stop using it to develop new applications over time, just like happened with Java. We can argue all we like about the meaning of the word deprecated, but that is what it amounts to.
And that is why I made my post.
If you see my first clarification above, you'll see that I know people who used the Java-Cocoa bridges. The reason that they had problems is that the bridge implementation had many serious bugs, some in the form of memory leaks. Apple was very unresponsive to them even back in that day when the bridge was supposedly going strong.
I don't want to invoke conspiracy theories, but it did sometimes seem as if Apple was not exactly behind the project wholeheartedly.
You can also not tell me that you can get better performance with the Python or Ruby bridges. Java has lots of problems, but it is a lot faster than either of those two or Applescript.
I specifically stated in my original post "major GUI applications". That means Carbon. Apple have stated that they will not develop it any further and it will not be ported to 64 bit. If that isn't deprecated, then I don't know what is. The fact that it hasn't been officially deprecated might have more to do with company developer politics than with documentary policies.
Being able to call freely from and to 32 and 64 bit code is useless if you want the extra speedup that 64 bit code gives you or you need the extra memory of the latest features of Cocoa.
I'm sorry, but I stand by my original post.
I know people and companies who used the Java-Cocoa bridge. A friend of mine was developing an online custom PDF report generator for financial companies using it. There were many such uses of the Java-Cocoa bridge, just not much in the way of client side publicly available applications. The problems my friend ran into, long before Apple decided to drop the bridge, was that the Java-Cocoa bridge was very buggy and reported bugs to Apple by companies that had developer agreements with Apple were simply not given any priority. One of the bugs in the J-C bridge was that the a PDF renderer (IIRC) implementation in the bridge had a memory leak. It only became obvious on many hundreds of objects, which was precisely what my friend was using. Apple knew about the bug as far back as 2003, yet never fixed it, right up until they deprecated the API in 2005.
I am aware of CoreFoundation and Objective-C++. Since you mention it you are also aware that it is restricted in what it can do. Porting a large C++ application to ObjC++ is not that simple. You will need to rearchitect the entire GUI code and most of the backend.
I am not ignoring the Python and Ruby bridges, and not the AppleScript implementation either. But they are not suitable for major client side performance dependent native applications.
As for GNUStep, who uses it? Can you point out any major applications that make use of it? The best way to make cross platform applications has been though the Qt and WxWidgets toolkits. They both rely on the Carbon APIs.
After all, as Publicis' Plavin notes, Macs -- which cost the same as equivalently configured business-class PCs -- are cheaper to support because they are easier to support.
I'm a Mac system admin. You're right and wrong. Macs tend to behave better under stress than Windows does, but there are many problems on OSX, a number of which are related to, very much as in Windows, legacy PPC stuff running under the Rosetta emulator. Apart from which, just as in Windows, if users are allowed to load their machines with crapware, they become unstable I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always). Again, you're right and wrong. The Mac users in our company, which has become 80% Mac in the last two years, tend to manage the basic things much better than the Windows users, but they run into problems in the more complex things. I think the Mac is genuinely easier to use for beginners, but more advanced stuff, like LDAP binding, network homes etc are totally beyond their grasp, for the most part. And finally, the cynic in me wonders how many of those Macs are really running XP / Vista under boot camp while at work... Not that there is anything wrong with that. You'll look cool and all, even if you're running the same dorky programs as everyone else. The only Mac users in our company who use Windows, are me, so that I can provide support, and the users who have apps that only run on Windows, like CAD stuff.To which I might add, "Citation Needed".
My thoughts exactly, and it doesn't have anything to do with elitism. This will be a long post, so please bare with me.
First, a Disclaimer: I am a sysadmin in a shop that uses mostly Macs, and a few Windows Machines, and I've been using Macs since 1990 and OSX since the first public beta in 2000.
Second, Apple, like anything or anyone else, is as vulnerable to the abuse of a powerful position as, say IBM was in the 70s and 80s, and Microsoft has been up until now. Apple has already started showing signs of that abuse, which I'll now point out.
Third, Apple originally touted OS X as a very open Unix like variant. They had all sorts of technologies that were there to draw developers and Windows users to the platform. Built in Java and C/C++ APIs as first class development language along with Objective-C. As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings) two years ago, and last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.
The net result of this is that if you want to develop a native 64 bit GUI application on OS X, you must use Objective-C. ObjC is a fine language, and now has Garbage collection, amongst other things, but it is very very difficult to port ObjC applications to other platforms. In a way, it's like Microsoft's
This means huge costs of major software developers who have, for the most part, been developing in C/C++. Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Maxon Cinema 4D? They're all C/C++. There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux (with far less effort and far lower cost than porting to ObjC). Putting some of the money saved into a major marketing push for Linux would help the uptake.
It would also scare the living hell out of Steve Jobs (apart from making him go off on one of his major Ballmer-esque tirades again) and, it would force competition on Apple, which Apple seems to think is now unnecessary due to the major fuck up that is Windows Vista.
Fourth. Apple is almost wholly dependent on the final opinion of Steve Jobs. That is often very good, as the man has a sense of taste, unlike Steve Ballmer, who doesn't, but, because Steve Jobs is only human, that sometimes results in extremely poor decisions like the OSX 10.5 Leopard Desktop and GUI design. The default galactic image background is very bad for designers who need a neutral background to work on. The fact that Apple made the default Dock in 10.5 a weird faux 3D thing that is very difficult to use due to the changes, making it often very hard to see what applications are running. The new pop-up folders in the Dock are next to useless for most things, and the translucent Menu-bar could have only been a Steve Jobs decision, driven, like the 3D Dock by the perceived need to compete visually with Vista. Apple only offered changes to this when users rebelled in outrage.
Fifth. Apple's server offerings are to a large extent just wrappers around open source technologies. Their Open Directory is just a wrapper around OpenLDAP, SLAP, and a Berkley Database as data store. Their Email server is just Postfix for SMTP and Cyrus for IMAP. The problem is that due to the Apple GUI management bindings, it is next to impossible to customise these software packages. This is somewhat symptomatic of Apple's approach. They make some things very easy, but others very, very hard.
Apple needs competition. Without competition, Apple tends to lose their solid grounding and become a bit more like Microsoft, given to market lock-in and arbitrary decisions that make no sense.
... have created a microbe capable of making cellulose, which can then be turned into ethanol.
Great. Now all we need is something to convert the carbon produced by burning the ethanol back into cellulose...
Hey, wait a second...
Although I'm a die-hard Mac fan who owns three Macs and is a Mac system administrator, I have recently become to loath Apple, more and more, because, although the Mac experience is great, Apple is, in my eyes, becoming more and more like Microsoft in its policies, if not its products.
Witness the fact that Apple dropped Java as a core programming language on OSX two years ago, and has now stopped developing the C/C++ API known as Carbon, leaving you with exactly one native programming language to develop GUI applications on in OSX: Objective C, which, while it has many great features, is definitely slower than C or C++ (amongst other things, such as almost no compatibility). Apple is, in my eyes, trying to pull a Microsoft.
Microsoft is trying to do the same thing with Silverlight, the Flash competitor, and DirectX, having relegated OpenGL to second class citizen status on Vista. Microsoft's various web platforms, although they have been fairly good technically, have had the same driving policy. All the embrace and extend policies make many people despair.
But where does one go? On the one hand you have an balding manic prancing around a stage, who never shies from using aggression to threaten partners and employees, guided by an intellectually bright but totally out of touch nerd who has been wrong on so many occasions it's simply painful. On the other side, you have a nasty, money grabbing style fetishist with good ideas but a control obsession.
Linux is, in the world I live in, not (yet) an answer. There aren't enough high quality software packages out there. Period. There is no After Effects, there is no Illustrator.
My hope is that Ray Ozzie, who has a history of good and truly innovative products, eventually takes over from Ballmer and Gates, to bring back Windows from the depths of slow, crapware that it has become, to drive Apple into being more open again, instead of becoming ever more a second Microsoft.
This continual back and forth in the USA between Creationists, Intelligent Design proponents and Evolutionists is as utterly bizarre to a good many people elsewhere in the world as the religious bloodshed in the middle east is to Americans. It's as if the Americans, in some way, are the same as the "Towelheads" that they despise in Iraq, caught up in a struggle that neither side can really win, for the simple matter that it is very, if not extremely hard to convince any person that his or her beliefs are "wrong".
Belief may not be science, but the sheer number of religious adherents on this planet shows that the need to believe in something is very strong. Science will not win against Creationists or IDers. It's very similar to trying to convince a beautiful person with a terrible sense of inferiority that they are, in fact, totally ok. Their belief is that they are not, and telling them that they are will certainly not change it easily.
On the other side, the Creationists and IDers struggle to "win" can not succeed in the face of scientific evidence either. There is no scientific basis to either Creationism or ID. The irony of Creationism is that they take a bible litterally that wasn't even written in the language that they are reading it in, and claiming that the bible represents the word of God ignores the fact that the version that they read had gone through many translations over the centuries and even today Theologians argue over numerous points in the translation.
What is, however, very dangerous, is that this continual debate threatens to make the USA slip even further into the polarised society that it has become. American schools, rightly or wrongly, already have a terrible reputation outside the USA, and this debate is certainly not something that attracts potentially great scientific minds to come and study in the US, and this, added to the paranoid anti-terrorism laws in the US and the difficulty of foreign students and highly qualified workers to get Visas is not helping the USA when it really needs every chance it can get.
This is not 1960, nor is it 1990. The USA is not the world's only powerful economy anymore. There are many others who are willing and trying to take that position.
This set of arguments only helps them.
Given the wildly unsuccessful way that people took to subscription music services, I can see this being as successful as, say, the Zune.
I'm an admin for a smallish company with four XServes that replaced our Linux/Irix combination and some 45 clients, most Mac, some Windows. We are in the middle of a cmopany wide upgrade to OSX 10.5 and Office 2008. I am a bit worried about Office 2008, as I've only heard really bad things about it, not only the VBA story, which is bad enough, but also that it is terribly slow and buggy.
Some of the VBA shortcomings can be overcome with Applescript (the whole object model in VBA is represented as an Applescript dictionary), and I've had some success converting some VBA macros to Applescript, but of course, this isn't realistic in large corporations.
If you run OSX Server with Open Directory, which is compatible with LDAP and AD, with network mounted home folders, you can do much of what you can do with AD in centrally setting clients' settings, doing centrally managed software upgrades, etc. In this case, if you have no tied in AD, it's the Windows clients that come up short in terms of management, ironically.
Stephen Baxter wrote a series of SF books on the far future and a lot of it has to do with a long war with a race of beings that own the center of the Milky Way and use its black hole for construction and computing.
From the Title:The Milky Way's Black Hole Is Not So Quiescent
;-)
If it's not so Quiescent, then perhaps it is Resplendent, or perhaps Exultant or maybe even Transcendent.
I tried out the Paint.Net about 2 months ago. I was simply appalled at how slow it is. It makes the Photoshop start up time, which is nothing to write home about, look gracious and fast. It cannot handle large images well at all, slowing down to a crawl very rapidly as the images grow. That might be, because it's written in C#, which, to be fair, is not much of an improvement over Java in application performance.
It's fine for smaller tasks, but, to be honest, you can do those same tasks in the GIMP.
One thing that stands out in the spotlight every time the GIMP is mentioned is the way the generally Linux using developers see the GIMP and the way the generally Windows and Mac using Photoshop users see the GIMP. It is almost always the same flamefest where both sides don't talk to one another but past one another. That means that nothing much ever changes in their views.
The thing is, I own the Adobe CS3 Suite. I love Adobe's tools but yet, I se the GIMP ever so slowly actually starting to reach a point where it can do many of the tasks that Photoshop can do and this latest release, finally bringing to the GIMP the possibility of CMYK and 16-bit editing amongst others shows me that it will, sooner or later be "Good enough" for pre-press work (It is already good enough for web images). Eventually it WILL start to squeeze on Photoshop's territory, like it or not. There are already reasons to prefer it to Photoshop for certain applications.
It is far more scriptable than Photoshop, which makes it very useful for batch processing. It starts up in a tenth of the time (generally less than 10 seconds on a low end core 2 duo) which makes it nice for a quick image edit instead of waiting for Photoshop to load up its "Operating System". And, if a Photoshop user can get over their hoary attitudes, one can get used to the interface. I say this because the same people who hate the GIMP like Flash, which has, IMO, the worst interface I've ever seen. Those same people might be using Fireworks, which is also an ex-macromedia UI abortion to which even the GIMP compares favourably.
But the main reason I personally still much prefer Photoshop over the GIMP, is the fact that Adobe pays enormous attention to detail. Resizing of images is done with bicubic interpolation, the GIMP has only the far poorer cubic interpolation. There are many small details like this that will, when they are improved finally make the GIMP "Good enough".
And, it costs a whole damn less.
One thing that has always bothered me is the question as to why Venus rotates in a retrograde manner (east to west) around its own axis. My personal idea, from the little amount of very inconclusive data available on this on the web, is that there must have been some cataclysmic collision early in Venus' history. One wonders if Venus had had a normal, and faster rotation, if it would have developed differently?
We'll do a deal with you: You stop bombing innocent people, torturing suspects and threatening others with war, and we'll stop giving people a place to hide their drug money.
I've been at a number of companies with totally opposite ways fo doing things. Currently, where I now work, we let users do mostly as they please. Surprisingly, the amount of support time isn't must greater than when one has to control the IT worker's every move. The greates part of support is still helping users with various software issues. Generally, it works quite well.
Take your fight to your politicians. That means in the EU, you should be sending in suspicion of corruption claims to the EU competition commissioner. Unless you do something now, we'll all be stuck with Microsoft's fairly obviously illegal practices for ever after. Do it, and do it now! I for my part will be looking into what can be done here where I live.
Disclaimer: I live and work in Switzerland.
What blows me away is that it seems as if the US , currently in a recession, and the EU (but especially Germany, with mind boggling high taxes) are looknig for someone to lay the blame on for their own problems again. Yawn.
It's a lovely day, I think I'll go outside and wait for kdawson to find some other flaimbait article.
Want me to go on? 1. I suppose it's a throwback to the days (Photoshop 4 and earlier) when there was no multiple undo. You can, however, just as in the GIMP, change it. Edit--Keyboard Shortcuts
2. I'm not too sure what you mean here. Most of the Filter operations that do not need a selection area will work without out one (Gaussian Blur, or Sharpen etc), but those that do (Tear, Ragged Edges etc) won't.
3. There are several ways of doing this. Q will switch from Quickmask to selection so that you can paint a selection. You can Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) click on an alpha channel in the channels palette to get a selection from it, or you can Cmd (or Ctrl) click on a layer and only the visible or non masked sections will become a selection. You can also Ctrl (or Cmd) click on a layer mask to get a selection. There are other tools too.
P.S. Photoshop and most of the other Adobe applications are all scriptable these days. They also come with an IDE to do the scripting (Javascript, Applescript or VBA)
If the UI were the only problem, the GIMP would have made more inroads into mainstream image manipulation a long time ago. The interface of the GIMP improved a lot with 2.0 and is no longer as terrible as it used to be with the very Unix style of doing with right clicks to find menus etc. Another thing is that the GIMP looks absolutely awful on Mac OSX. A good percentage of designers work on Mac, and the really bad UI on the Mac makes the GIMP a general non starter on OSX.
But for me, as someone who uses Photoshop on a daily basis at work, on Windows mostly, the thing that makes the GIMP useless is the fact that it doesn't support bicubic scaling. The GIMP's cubic scaling is really, really poor in comparison, and no one would accept images scaled with that algorithm where I work.
We, a design company, use different printing establishments. To keep quality more consistent, as not all modern printers support RGB workflows, we send all our bitmap images in CMYK format.
In Photoshop, no matter if you're working with an RGB or CMYK workflow, you can select this profile and get work in proof mode which gives you a very good approximation of what the final result will be.