I wouldn't say that they suck, they just don't offer the glossy, bells-and-whistles experience that the iPhone has.
Case in point: My current phone is the aging Hitachi G1000 (http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=246). It runs Windows mobile 2002, though I could have it updated to 2003. It's big as hell to most people, yet fits nicely in my hand. Out of the box I have a wmv, wma, and mp3 player, camera (VGA, not nearly as nice as the iPhone's 2GP camera), web browser (yes, I get the "real" internet too), and assorted sundries that the iPhone has. I don't get WiFi or Bluetooth, but that functionality can be added. I use it on the job thanks to the pocket Excel and Word apps included, the 4GB SD card I have holds plenty of pics, movies, and mp3's, and the built-in keyboard makes doing ANYTHING requiring text a breeze. There's apps galore for this thing too. TCPMP gives me a neat little ogg, avi (divx and xvid), and mpg player. Pocket PuTTY will make the idea of accessing shell accounts from this thing a reality, and then there's the list of pocket pc games I can play.
It looks like a freakin' Tricorder, but it's worth more than the $80 I paid for it on ebay for it's functionality.
Wow... It's 2007 and some people still don't get it.
Many people (myself included) would love nothing more than to move away from M$ products but, sadly, are trapped in them because of the applications we use. I can't use linux for music production and the particular apps I use don't exist under MacOS (Sonar 6 and FL Studio). While I can certainly do Flash authoring under OSX, I can't under Linux. One of my PC's has an old Matrox Mystique220 with Rainbow Runner Studio in it. There are no Linux drivers for it. That PC runs Win98SE and servers as my video editing box (TBird 1.3GHz/512MB RAM). The RR Studio has a feature that makes it quite unique; it ignores Macrovision encoding on VHS. Because of this, I have a nice little niche business of transferring old VHS tapes to DVD or VCD. Won't work anywhere else but Win98SE, so I stick with it.
My programming/scripting machine runs Linux (Mandriva 2007 Spring) and my tinkering machine runs FreeBSD 6.0, so I'm partially M$ free.
Sounds a bit similar to Atari in the late 70's early 80's. They didn't credit their developers, so several of them left and formed Activision, which credited their devs quite a bit (commercials, print ads, etc).
... Much like an AIDS patient. John Doe weighed a gelatinous 350lbs when he contracted the virus, 5 years later and on his deathbed, I doubt he would weigh much more than 90lbs.
Crackheads and meth addicts also lose weight rapidly. I've seen people addicted to crack, women especially, who were once chunky or fat that were completely unrecognizable as the person in the picture due to dramatic weight loss. When/if they die, they would be skin and bones.
Apple bought Emagic back in July of '02 and promptly killed all support for Win32 for Logic Audio Pro and their audio interfaces. My assumption was that they somehow figured that all the guys using it under Windows would naturally migrate over to the Mac to continue using it. They were dead wrong and lost a lot of customers, myself being one of them. Though I had a couple of Macs at that time, I didn't have a copy of Logic for MacOS, I had a Windows version.
Yeeeeeah... Ok... Tha machine is a touch on the wimpy side, but Enlightnement is, honestly, the only mistake being made here. Gnome or KDE should run reasonably well on this machine. I have a P3-700/512MB desktop at home with FC7 and Win XP installed and it runs well. I'm usually in KDE when I'm working in Linux and I find it quite responsive. Not as fast as XP, but by no means is it slow.
Enlightenment, however, is not the GUI to sell to people used to Windows. I LOVE the old Enlightenment wm (E16) (http://www.geocities.com/subject28/screenshot.txt is a pic of one of my old desktops) and I have high hopes for E17, but I don't think either is a good bet for a machine sold at WalMart.
Without divulging the industry I work in, let's just say that the company has to keep a tight lid on things. Company and customer info can leave by someone simply emailing it out via personal email. Since all corespondance is monitored, the likelyhood of someone getting away with emailing information out through our exchange servers is slim (note - I said getting away with it, not that you can't do it, but you would be flagged and caught). It's also a monumental waste of time and with everyone on tight deadlines, we don't need wasted time.
IT/Customer regulation does not allow USB drives of any sort unless company issued AND those drives may never leave the campus. Thsi helps to prevent people from bringing a virus in from their home pc's.
We have areas where pagers, cellphones, and any other communications devices are prohibited.
For the longest, cellphones with cameras were not permitted anywhere inside the buildings. Once it became nearly impossible to buy a phone without a camera, we had to get that condition lifted.
Checking personal email from sites like yahoo, hotmail, etc can all allow virii to get onto the network and allow proprietary company or customer information to leak unchecked. That last point is the driving force behind our rules. My employer, and pretty much every other company in this particular industry, does not allow the use of personal web mail. The sites are actively blocked, and attempts to access them are noted and stored.
again, old-school ghetto tactics can be used to copy it. I could set up a video camera on a tripod directly in front of the TV (my Hitachi 57F510 has an HDMI input on it) and the stereo mic will record the audio.
Low budget and ghetto as hell, but it's no different than the guys in the wal-mart parking lot peddling hidden camcorder versions of "30 Days of Night" for $10, in fact... It's better 'cause there's no one talking or getting up to go get popcorn in the middle of the movie.
It's the methods of deterance that makes them similar. That, along with the fact that you can never make either go away. They both broadcast their busts, campaign against said illegal activity, shows how both hurt the economy and neither accomplishes the intended goal. The war on drugs also serves to keep useful substances off of the market for fear that their proliferation would harm major industries (large scale Hemp production alone could threaten pretty much every major industry in the US from cotton to pharmaceuticals to oil).
"I don't remember the last time Piracy altered somebody's life, caused physical distress or even death, or even contributed to a fatal car accident."... You've never seen "Soul Plane"... Have you?
This "War On Piracy" does nothing more than keep people in jobs, much like the "War On Drugs". Like the drug war, piracy cannot be stopped unless it's made legal, but to do that you would put those in charge of fighting said illegal activity out of a job.
It's stupid...
Any digital content that can be seen or heard can be duplicated with some form of analog technology. Copy protected CD's can be recorded with near perfect quality simply by flying the audio from a CD player into a PC equipped with a $100 pro-level audio card (like the Emu 0404 or M-Audio Audiophile 2496). DRM protected mp3/wma/etc files can be duplicated through two pc's in exactly the same fashion as a CD. Copy protected DVD's can be duplicated by recording it's content from a DVD player into a PC with a decent video capture card.
And that's just the tip of it.
Nothing they do keeps DVD's off the streets. Every trip to the grocery store I make, I get a guy or gal coming up to me selling the latest movie for $10 on DVD (3 for $25!) or the latest yet-to-be-released CD for $5.
It's not going to stop. No amount of copy protection will help, no law passed will deter, it's a useless waste of money, but it keeps a few folks in a job.
Because doing so would prevent you from going into an Apple store and having your eyes glaze over from staring at everything they have to go along with that Mac (iPod, iPhone, iTouch, etc...). My assumption would be that Apple wants to present you with a lifestyle centered around the Mac and it's accessories. They can't do that very well if you never venture into the store.
I worked in retail for a number of years (no longer thank God/Allah/Yaweh/etc) and saw this type of thing happen a lot.
While Sega was selling the Genesis, guys would buy a complete system, take it home, remove the motherboard from the machine, reassemble it, and return it for a full refund. I would imagine that having to buy a pair of cheapo controllers, power supply, and a used copy of Sonic all for $30 beats buying the whole system for $119+ tax.
Sega, SNES, and Gameboy game carts were easily opened with tools you could buy from Parts Express. I worked at a second hand game store and we found a number of carts that had been returned had their innards pulled and replaced with "undesirable" roms like various Barbie and Jesus games.
While working at a Best Buy, we were finding that a series of open box hard drives were being returned because the capacity didn't match what was bought. 4.3GB hard drives were reporting 850MB or less, though their labels said otherwise.
72 pin and SDRAM were also being hijacked in a similar fashion. People were returning RAM saying that they had bought a 32MB stick but it was reporting only 4 or 8MB.
Then there was stuff like the aforementioned scam. We got all kinds of returns only to find bricks, tiles, rocks, and anything else you can imagine in place of radios, VCR's, speakers, etc (one CSR got stung by a guy who returned a set of "White Van" speakers in place of the Infinity's he bought). Most of my stores instituted a policy where items had to be inspected before they were accepted for returned, but they were really slow to do so with PC parts.
... but a resurgance in vinyl would be a good thing. For DJ's like myself, it never left. I can still usually buy the latest dance and hip hop on vinyl, and software like Serato Scratch and Traktor Scratch allow one to manipulate mp3's just like vinyl through the use of a special interface and timecoded records. Buying pop is a CD only affair. Sucks, but record companies make the bulk of their money from CD sales.
Sure, most of your top-40 DJ's use CD's, and that's not a bad thing, but DJ purists still prefer vinyl.
1. The Religious Right will physically beat, tar, and feather a Republican candidate for answering any scientific question with an answer other than "God made it that way".
2. The Theorist Left will bore everyone to death with long-winded theories and graphic models which, although scientifically sound, don't spark the kind of emotions that "Messicans are taking our jobs and raping our women", "Gays can't marry 'cause they ain't man and woman", and "You ain't a patriot if you don't support the war" does.
Seriously, I wasn't trolling. As I've said several times before, I'm a former Mac owner. From my 840AV to my B&W G3, I've supported Apple for a number of years (even longer if you go all the way back to my Apple ][+ in '82 and ][c some years later).
It appeared that some of you guys took it that way, I've already tried to correct that position and get you guys to understand where I'm coming from. You, apparently, are one of those that simply didn't get it.
I've had a PS2 since '02 and haven't bought a single game for it. Maybe it was simply the wrong time for me to have bought into yet another console because back then I was in my 6th year of online PC gaming (starting with dwango/doom) and hadn't bought a title for my PSX in years.
So... it's the DVD/CD player in our bedroom. Once in a blue my kids play an old PSX game on it, but that's about it.
The update from 10.0 to 10.1 was FREE (as in beer). But going from 10.1 to 10.2 was not, nor any of the releases that follows. Since 10.0 to 10.1 was free, why wasn't 10.1 to 10.2 on up??? That's the reason I finally left MacOS alone. It was bad enough that OSX ran like crap on my 400MHz B&W G3, but now I've got to pay for what appeared to be yet another update.
The rationale I had at the time was that 10.0 was the major release. If 10.1 was not mugh more than a buch of bug fixes and some much needed functionality (like DVD playback) and was released for free, why is Apple now wanting to charge me for yet another bug fix release with 10.2?
It appears that there's more to 10.2+ than just bug fixes and shiny new toys. That's become apparent to me since AppleFront layed the mod hammer down and struck down yet another dissident voice.
Linux Users: Because the apps I use most frequently don't exist under Linux and have no true equivalents, therefore I buy Windows.
They are ProTools, Cubase SX3, FL Studio, SoundForge8, Reason 3, Rebirth 2, Flash MX, Illustrator, Vegas, and more.
The apps I use infrequently, has linux equivalents or exists natively like Eclipse, NetBeans, and assorted FPGA dev apps. I keep both Win32 and Linux machines at home.
When I think of major point releases I think of Win NT4.0, Win2000, WinXP, WinVista. Minor releases are NT4 SP3, 2000 SP4, XP SP2, or Vista SP1.
Hell, we can go to Mandrake 7, 8, 9, 10, 2006, 2007, 2008 and under that are minor point releases like 7.2, 8.2, 9.2, 10.2, etc.
Major software revisions should get major point releases.
Major MacOS point releases are new, fully updated OS's (i.e. System7, OS8, OS9, OS10/X), minor point releases are bugfixes wit a few goodies, i.e. System7.6, OS8.6, OS9.2.2, OS10.5.
Mac users: Why are you guys so quick to buy minor point releases (ie. bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in) of your OS rather than demand that they be freely available like Windows? OSX was a major point release for MacOS, like XP was for Windows, yet, you've had to pay for what amounts to "service packs" in the world of Windows. Every time Apple fixes stuff with their minor point releases, you purchase it (with the lone exception of 10.1, which Apple gave away free of charge). When M$ fixes stuff, we download it (after going through the WGA crap), install it, and are on our merry way without dropping so much as a nickel on it.
I'm not trying to start a fight here, I really want to know the rationale behind purchasing bug fixes. Yeah, they slip a few goodies in for you (which M$ did for us with XP SP2), but is it really worth yet another $129???
I must wholeheartedly agree with this. I've been using Photoshop for about 14 years (first few years were on IRIX, then moved to Win32 in '97) and must say that it has a very functional interface where I can get things done quickly. The basics of the interface haven't changed much over the years, so I'm just as comfortable on, say, 4.0 as I am on 8/CS (which was the last version I upgraded to).
Using The Gimp, however, always ends up with me scratching my head wondering "why did they do it like this???". I use it on Linux and Windows, but limit my time in it if I need to do more than a quick resize or something like that. Stuff like a simple copy and paste is frustrating in The Gimp. In PS, I can select a random sized area, copy it, and hit new, and it will have populated the dimensions of the image I have on the clipboard to the dialogue. Not so with The Gimp.
I really hope they can get the UI issues worked out, I can see The Gimp being a powerful tool, but it needs to be made for artists, not techies.
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I wouldn't say that they suck, they just don't offer the glossy, bells-and-whistles experience that the iPhone has.
Case in point: My current phone is the aging Hitachi G1000 (http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=246). It runs Windows mobile 2002, though I could have it updated to 2003. It's big as hell to most people, yet fits nicely in my hand. Out of the box I have a wmv, wma, and mp3 player, camera (VGA, not nearly as nice as the iPhone's 2GP camera), web browser (yes, I get the "real" internet too), and assorted sundries that the iPhone has. I don't get WiFi or Bluetooth, but that functionality can be added. I use it on the job thanks to the pocket Excel and Word apps included, the 4GB SD card I have holds plenty of pics, movies, and mp3's, and the built-in keyboard makes doing ANYTHING requiring text a breeze. There's apps galore for this thing too. TCPMP gives me a neat little ogg, avi (divx and xvid), and mpg player. Pocket PuTTY will make the idea of accessing shell accounts from this thing a reality, and then there's the list of pocket pc games I can play.
It looks like a freakin' Tricorder, but it's worth more than the $80 I paid for it on ebay for it's functionality.
Wow... It's 2007 and some people still don't get it.
Many people (myself included) would love nothing more than to move away from M$ products but, sadly, are trapped in them because of the applications we use. I can't use linux for music production and the particular apps I use don't exist under MacOS (Sonar 6 and FL Studio). While I can certainly do Flash authoring under OSX, I can't under Linux. One of my PC's has an old Matrox Mystique220 with Rainbow Runner Studio in it. There are no Linux drivers for it. That PC runs Win98SE and servers as my video editing box (TBird 1.3GHz/512MB RAM). The RR Studio has a feature that makes it quite unique; it ignores Macrovision encoding on VHS. Because of this, I have a nice little niche business of transferring old VHS tapes to DVD or VCD. Won't work anywhere else but Win98SE, so I stick with it.
My programming/scripting machine runs Linux (Mandriva 2007 Spring) and my tinkering machine runs FreeBSD 6.0, so I'm partially M$ free.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision
Sounds a bit similar to Atari in the late 70's early 80's. They didn't credit their developers, so several of them left and formed Activision, which credited their devs quite a bit (commercials, print ads, etc).
nah, it'll take 6 years or more for your heart to explode.
http://www.wftv.com/news/3643877/detail.html
... Much like an AIDS patient. John Doe weighed a gelatinous 350lbs when he contracted the virus, 5 years later and on his deathbed, I doubt he would weigh much more than 90lbs.
Crackheads and meth addicts also lose weight rapidly. I've seen people addicted to crack, women especially, who were once chunky or fat that were completely unrecognizable as the person in the picture due to dramatic weight loss. When/if they die, they would be skin and bones.
Apple bought Emagic back in July of '02 and promptly killed all support for Win32 for Logic Audio Pro and their audio interfaces. My assumption was that they somehow figured that all the guys using it under Windows would naturally migrate over to the Mac to continue using it. They were dead wrong and lost a lot of customers, myself being one of them. Though I had a couple of Macs at that time, I didn't have a copy of Logic for MacOS, I had a Windows version.
Yeeeeeah... Ok... Tha machine is a touch on the wimpy side, but Enlightnement is, honestly, the only mistake being made here. Gnome or KDE should run reasonably well on this machine. I have a P3-700/512MB desktop at home with FC7 and Win XP installed and it runs well. I'm usually in KDE when I'm working in Linux and I find it quite responsive. Not as fast as XP, but by no means is it slow.
Enlightenment, however, is not the GUI to sell to people used to Windows. I LOVE the old Enlightenment wm (E16) (http://www.geocities.com/subject28/screenshot.txt is a pic of one of my old desktops) and I have high hopes for E17, but I don't think either is a good bet for a machine sold at WalMart.
Without divulging the industry I work in, let's just say that the company has to keep a tight lid on things. Company and customer info can leave by someone simply emailing it out via personal email. Since all corespondance is monitored, the likelyhood of someone getting away with emailing information out through our exchange servers is slim (note - I said getting away with it, not that you can't do it, but you would be flagged and caught). It's also a monumental waste of time and with everyone on tight deadlines, we don't need wasted time.
IT/Customer regulation does not allow USB drives of any sort unless company issued AND those drives may never leave the campus. Thsi helps to prevent people from bringing a virus in from their home pc's.
We have areas where pagers, cellphones, and any other communications devices are prohibited.
For the longest, cellphones with cameras were not permitted anywhere inside the buildings. Once it became nearly impossible to buy a phone without a camera, we had to get that condition lifted.
Checking personal email from sites like yahoo, hotmail, etc can all allow virii to get onto the network and allow proprietary company or customer information to leak unchecked. That last point is the driving force behind our rules. My employer, and pretty much every other company in this particular industry, does not allow the use of personal web mail. The sites are actively blocked, and attempts to access them are noted and stored.
again, old-school ghetto tactics can be used to copy it. I could set up a video camera on a tripod directly in front of the TV (my Hitachi 57F510 has an HDMI input on it) and the stereo mic will record the audio.
Low budget and ghetto as hell, but it's no different than the guys in the wal-mart parking lot peddling hidden camcorder versions of "30 Days of Night" for $10, in fact... It's better 'cause there's no one talking or getting up to go get popcorn in the middle of the movie.
It's the methods of deterance that makes them similar. That, along with the fact that you can never make either go away. They both broadcast their busts, campaign against said illegal activity, shows how both hurt the economy and neither accomplishes the intended goal. The war on drugs also serves to keep useful substances off of the market for fear that their proliferation would harm major industries (large scale Hemp production alone could threaten pretty much every major industry in the US from cotton to pharmaceuticals to oil).
... You've never seen "Soul Plane"... Have you?
"I don't remember the last time Piracy altered somebody's life, caused physical distress or even death, or even contributed to a fatal car accident."
This "War On Piracy" does nothing more than keep people in jobs, much like the "War On Drugs". Like the drug war, piracy cannot be stopped unless it's made legal, but to do that you would put those in charge of fighting said illegal activity out of a job.
It's stupid...
Any digital content that can be seen or heard can be duplicated with some form of analog technology. Copy protected CD's can be recorded with near perfect quality simply by flying the audio from a CD player into a PC equipped with a $100 pro-level audio card (like the Emu 0404 or M-Audio Audiophile 2496). DRM protected mp3/wma/etc files can be duplicated through two pc's in exactly the same fashion as a CD. Copy protected DVD's can be duplicated by recording it's content from a DVD player into a PC with a decent video capture card.
And that's just the tip of it.
Nothing they do keeps DVD's off the streets. Every trip to the grocery store I make, I get a guy or gal coming up to me selling the latest movie for $10 on DVD (3 for $25!) or the latest yet-to-be-released CD for $5.
It's not going to stop. No amount of copy protection will help, no law passed will deter, it's a useless waste of money, but it keeps a few folks in a job.
Because doing so would prevent you from going into an Apple store and having your eyes glaze over from staring at everything they have to go along with that Mac (iPod, iPhone, iTouch, etc...). My assumption would be that Apple wants to present you with a lifestyle centered around the Mac and it's accessories. They can't do that very well if you never venture into the store.
good god that made me laugh!
A bag of dirt that declared you to be less than manly for being foolish enough to buy this product.
Classic.
I have tears rolling down my face and my cube neighbors probably think I'm over here having a seizure.
I worked in retail for a number of years (no longer thank God/Allah/Yaweh/etc) and saw this type of thing happen a lot.
While Sega was selling the Genesis, guys would buy a complete system, take it home, remove the motherboard from the machine, reassemble it, and return it for a full refund. I would imagine that having to buy a pair of cheapo controllers, power supply, and a used copy of Sonic all for $30 beats buying the whole system for $119+ tax.
Sega, SNES, and Gameboy game carts were easily opened with tools you could buy from Parts Express. I worked at a second hand game store and we found a number of carts that had been returned had their innards pulled and replaced with "undesirable" roms like various Barbie and Jesus games.
While working at a Best Buy, we were finding that a series of open box hard drives were being returned because the capacity didn't match what was bought. 4.3GB hard drives were reporting 850MB or less, though their labels said otherwise.
72 pin and SDRAM were also being hijacked in a similar fashion. People were returning RAM saying that they had bought a 32MB stick but it was reporting only 4 or 8MB.
Then there was stuff like the aforementioned scam. We got all kinds of returns only to find bricks, tiles, rocks, and anything else you can imagine in place of radios, VCR's, speakers, etc (one CSR got stung by a guy who returned a set of "White Van" speakers in place of the Infinity's he bought). Most of my stores instituted a policy where items had to be inspected before they were accepted for returned, but they were really slow to do so with PC parts.
... but a resurgance in vinyl would be a good thing. For DJ's like myself, it never left. I can still usually buy the latest dance and hip hop on vinyl, and software like Serato Scratch and Traktor Scratch allow one to manipulate mp3's just like vinyl through the use of a special interface and timecoded records. Buying pop is a CD only affair. Sucks, but record companies make the bulk of their money from CD sales.
Sure, most of your top-40 DJ's use CD's, and that's not a bad thing, but DJ purists still prefer vinyl.
Two reason's it'll never happen:
1. The Religious Right will physically beat, tar, and feather a Republican candidate for answering any scientific question with an answer other than "God made it that way".
2. The Theorist Left will bore everyone to death with long-winded theories and graphic models which, although scientifically sound, don't spark the kind of emotions that "Messicans are taking our jobs and raping our women", "Gays can't marry 'cause they ain't man and woman", and "You ain't a patriot if you don't support the war" does.
Seriously, I wasn't trolling. As I've said several times before, I'm a former Mac owner. From my 840AV to my B&W G3, I've supported Apple for a number of years (even longer if you go all the way back to my Apple ][+ in '82 and ][c some years later).
It appeared that some of you guys took it that way, I've already tried to correct that position and get you guys to understand where I'm coming from. You, apparently, are one of those that simply didn't get it.
I've had a PS2 since '02 and haven't bought a single game for it. Maybe it was simply the wrong time for me to have bought into yet another console because back then I was in my 6th year of online PC gaming (starting with dwango/doom) and hadn't bought a title for my PSX in years.
So... it's the DVD/CD player in our bedroom. Once in a blue my kids play an old PSX game on it, but that's about it.
Apparently you lack reading skills:
The update from 10.0 to 10.1 was FREE (as in beer). But going from 10.1 to 10.2 was not, nor any of the releases that follows. Since 10.0 to 10.1 was free, why wasn't 10.1 to 10.2 on up??? That's the reason I finally left MacOS alone. It was bad enough that OSX ran like crap on my 400MHz B&W G3, but now I've got to pay for what appeared to be yet another update.
The rationale I had at the time was that 10.0 was the major release. If 10.1 was not mugh more than a buch of bug fixes and some much needed functionality (like DVD playback) and was released for free, why is Apple now wanting to charge me for yet another bug fix release with 10.2?
It appears that there's more to 10.2+ than just bug fixes and shiny new toys. That's become apparent to me since AppleFront layed the mod hammer down and struck down yet another dissident voice.
For daring to have a real question that challenged the way of thinking of the Mac user, I get modded -1...
screw the fact that I was a mac user from '93 to 2003, screw the fact that I ran OSX (10.0 and 10.1) on my final Mac, a 400MHz B&W G3.
Nah... I'm obviously a troll.
I'm used to it tho, got modded troll for daring to say that updating linux can break apps (which did happen to me quite a few times)
Linux Users: Because the apps I use most frequently don't exist under Linux and have no true equivalents, therefore I buy Windows.
They are ProTools, Cubase SX3, FL Studio, SoundForge8, Reason 3, Rebirth 2, Flash MX, Illustrator, Vegas, and more.
The apps I use infrequently, has linux equivalents or exists natively like Eclipse, NetBeans, and assorted FPGA dev apps. I keep both Win32 and Linux machines at home.
When I think of major point releases I think of Win NT4.0, Win2000, WinXP, WinVista. Minor releases are NT4 SP3, 2000 SP4, XP SP2, or Vista SP1.
Hell, we can go to Mandrake 7, 8, 9, 10, 2006, 2007, 2008 and under that are minor point releases like 7.2, 8.2, 9.2, 10.2, etc.
Major software revisions should get major point releases.
Major MacOS point releases are new, fully updated OS's (i.e. System7, OS8, OS9, OS10/X), minor point releases are bugfixes wit a few goodies, i.e. System7.6, OS8.6, OS9.2.2, OS10.5.
Mac users: Why are you guys so quick to buy minor point releases (ie. bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in) of your OS rather than demand that they be freely available like Windows? OSX was a major point release for MacOS, like XP was for Windows, yet, you've had to pay for what amounts to "service packs" in the world of Windows. Every time Apple fixes stuff with their minor point releases, you purchase it (with the lone exception of 10.1, which Apple gave away free of charge). When M$ fixes stuff, we download it (after going through the WGA crap), install it, and are on our merry way without dropping so much as a nickel on it.
I'm not trying to start a fight here, I really want to know the rationale behind purchasing bug fixes. Yeah, they slip a few goodies in for you (which M$ did for us with XP SP2), but is it really worth yet another $129???
I must wholeheartedly agree with this. I've been using Photoshop for about 14 years (first few years were on IRIX, then moved to Win32 in '97) and must say that it has a very functional interface where I can get things done quickly. The basics of the interface haven't changed much over the years, so I'm just as comfortable on, say, 4.0 as I am on 8/CS (which was the last version I upgraded to).
Using The Gimp, however, always ends up with me scratching my head wondering "why did they do it like this???". I use it on Linux and Windows, but limit my time in it if I need to do more than a quick resize or something like that. Stuff like a simple copy and paste is frustrating in The Gimp. In PS, I can select a random sized area, copy it, and hit new, and it will have populated the dimensions of the image I have on the clipboard to the dialogue. Not so with The Gimp.
I really hope they can get the UI issues worked out, I can see The Gimp being a powerful tool, but it needs to be made for artists, not techies.