Yeah, Art Students are a great way to get what you need on the cheap. I should know. Several of my friends - myself included- got fucked over right out of the gate because we believed what the contractor told us- that it would be "a good portfolio-building experience."
So's sitting in my bedroom jacking off into the GIMP, thank you.
"Portfolio Building Experience" means it pays a pittance if you're lucky, and you can totally forget about having any rights to your work. Oh, and PBEs are typically long hours with shit pay and no benefits. My first field experience was one of these- a contract job to do some multimedia work. After the dust settled, my hourly for the project was somewhere around eighty cents.
You get what you pay for- if you get into the habit of taking advantage of art students, don't be surprised if the talent pool suddenly dries up on you.
Well, it's != GPL, anyway. And everyone seems to think of Open Source as the GPL. So.:P
Vast chunks of early commercial unices integrated large amounts of BSD Unix, which used the BSD License. This license, summed up, is essentially "do whatever the hell you want with this code just so long as we're credited for writing it."
So yeah, Sun - SunOS/Solaris- is built on "Open Source". Open Source they don't have to give back.:P
ESB for the 2600 : Snow Speeder versus ATATs. ESB for SNES : Snow Speeder versus ATATs. Shadows of the Empire for N64 : Snow Speeder versus ATATs. And ATSTs. Rogue Squadron : Snow Speeder versus ATATs. And ATSTs.
Amusing how the movies can't seem to get off of Tattooine and the games can't seem to get rid of the snow speeder without changing format completely (the fighting game, for example, or the MMORPG)
Quake 1 : Sliders versus Cthulhu! I still love the nailgun. Grenade launcher rocks.
Quake 2 : NO WAIT WAIT FORGET ABOUT THAT IT'S DOOM BUT WITH BIOMECHANOID THINGS NOT DEMONS! DOOM WEAPONS! BOUNCY GRENADE LAUNCHER! Likely where iD got its reputation as making great engines with the game thrown in as a tech demo.
Quake 3 : UNREAL TOURNAMENT! Only it, like, runs on reasonable hardware. With a really difficult grenade launcher. And Doom weapons. And Rangers and the Doom marine. Lots of fun but don't read too much into the "plot".
Quake 4 : Farmed out to another studio. Looks to pick up where Quake 2 left off. Better some continuity than none, I guess.:P
Quake feels kind of like the Final Fantasy of FPS- some elements cross between games but no two are alike.
The Mac's a great productivity box and a shitty game platform, but for productivity it's lacking a few critical apps that Windows has in spades - namely 3dStudio MAX.
The biggest difference between the Mac and the PC worlds is that if you're lacking in one area on the sysreq for a game or a productivity applicatiobn, you can upgrade that part on the PC... whereas on the mac, you need to (often) buy an entirely new machine.
Consoles might be great for gaming, but I don't have a TV. If I had a TV, I'd use it for gaming and nothing else. And since I game an average of a few weeks every six months, that's a horrible waste of a TV. I'll get more all-around use out of the PC.
There's also the fact that due to fuckishness on the part of Adobe, I'm stuck using Photoshop 5.5. Which runs in an emulation layer on OS X, and runs natively on Windows 2000.
Quake 3 and Wolfenstein will both run SMP, which makes a HUGE difference when playing the games under OS X. Doom3 should be playable on a dual ghz G4 without problems.
I was saving for a processor upgrade for my aging G4, with gaming being further down on the list of reasons I wanted it.
I'll be buying a PC now, since I can get an entire x86 box with three times the horsepower for the same price as that upgrade.
This is exactly why Mac gaming sucks a fat load of donkey cock- current PC games that run on two year old PC hardware require top of the line macs in order to trundle along like a congested heiffer.
The one upside is that all shipping G5s have video that spanks an 8500.
The downside is that if you don't have a G5 but want to play Doom3, your choices are to pay two grand for a new Mac or six fifty for a new PC.
Don't forget the DOOD CHECK OUT MY SCHWEET BLOG ENTRY posts. Or the ads-masquerading-as-posts posts.
This used to be a nice "tip of the iceberg" place- it's where I got my feet wet with regards to linux. While the front page content is more buzzword/ad/blog centric than I care for, hey- there's filtering.
Fuck, I don't even know if Katz still posts columns or not. I got so sick of that shit that he's the only thing I locked out of my FP prefs.
So/. is getting better with age in at least one respect.
As cool as a portable IRIX box would be (the ones in Twister don't count... they were cabled to offscreen Indys.:P), and as much freeware as there is available for IRIX 6.5.X, uh.... what would you run on it these days that would really require serious portability?
Since it's a Real UNIX, all you need is a cheap PC or Mac and Putty or Terminal.app to connect to a Serious Machine elsewhere.:)
Of course, an SGI laptop would make a Panasonic Toughbook look like tissue paper. 30lbs of HIGH TENSILE STEEL, BABY.
Sort of. Basically, they invented 3d accelleration and put the fundamentals of modern graphics cards into silicon back when PCs were having trouble drawing more than 256 colors at once. Back when the SNES was sex on wheels.
Problem is that beyond what amount to minor improvements, they haven't done anything fundamentally NEW to evolve that technology in the last fifteen years.... so they've been lapped. My 2200$ 2000-era powerbook spanks the shit out of my 25000$ 1996-era Indigo2, and I didn't have to pay an extra ten grand for my graphics chipset to do texture mapping.:P
I still respect SGI for being 3d graphics pioneers. It's kind of depressing that they haven't been able to stay as far ahead of the game as they were in the eighties through mid nineties. The era when they were the only game in town.
We run a Mac shop, but we use PCs running linux on the server end.
Why?
Simple.
Dollar for dollar, for what we need and use the server for, the linux solution (while unsupported- debian running a couple of nice phat SATA RAIDs) is orders of magnitude cheaper. We're talking a terabtye of storage with the machine to run it for well under two grand.
We didn't need any of the fancy schmancy "features" of OS X Server, and everyone in the division lost interest in the XServe when they saw the price tag.
When you can get double the capabilities and/or capacity for the same price as a single solution, suddenly cost is a consideration- especially if you need, say... new monitors and RAM upgrades.
Yeah, Organizations can afford to buy Real Computers, but that doesn't mean Organizations can afford to waste money.:P
... is that Solaris runs on x86. You get some bang for your buck, as it were, and you have a reason to buy a Sun x86 box if you're in the market for UNIX on the cheap. Yeah, you can install Windows on it, but it runs other things and more importantly, you buy it from Sun and it comes with Solaris.
The SGI x86 boxes ran Windows, not IRIX. Their machines were Just Another Workstation/Server, running NT. Complete with assgasmic upgrade capabilities and RAM prices somewhere up in low earth orbit.
If you needed a PC workstation or a PC server, you could get one cheaper than the SGI equivalent from almost anybody. They lacked an OS to leverage, they lacked upgradeability, and they were generally more of a pain in the ass than any PC of similar horsepower, thanks to a wacked out SGI bootloader that won't take modern versions of Windows.
Best as I can tell, SGI (post ReBranding) completely lost sight of why anyone bought their gear to begin with. They've lost the consumer-visible High End Graphics market to commodity technology... and High End Graphics hasn't (in my experience) been a Sun Thing.
I've used them a couple of times- they hurt my ears. Painfully so. The only headphones I've found that I like are an old pair of Sony behind-the-heads with the prongs that sit between the ear and the head ripped off (I wear glasses, thank you).
The Apple iPod earbuds, regardless of their quality, absolutely SCREAM "MUG MY RICH ASS!" in large friendly letters.
DVD images out of DVD Studio Pro are typically in the 2.5-3.8 gig range for me. Raw video files of the projects I work on start around a gig and a half and have reached upwards of 19 gigs. If you use final cut pro and don't check off the little check box that tells it to auto-segment in 2g increments, you'll wind up with some extremely large files under certain circumstances.
Basically, anybody who deals with video has been dealing with Very Large Files for many years. Anybody who has to back the shit up from a Mac and can't afford an Apple server has been itching for something like this for quite awhile.
Aside from the !(> 2g) limit, I've had NO problems with NFS. None to speak of. Share the share, mount the share, copy shit over- no problems with Special Characters, no filename limitations... fuck, even the resource forks copy over.... and they move over CLEANER than they do with netatalk!
Netatalk 1.6.x was a pain in the ass with OS X, and I've had too many problems with Samba to make it worth my time anymore.
Which is great, as anyone who's moved off of OS 9 onto OS X has likely generated a few long file names, and anyone who does video gets to deal with Big Shit.
Previously, I had to use NFS for all of the files under two gigs and Samba for everything over (NFS version in Debian Stable doesn't do > 2g files), which made drag-and-drop backups extremely tedious.
Now, it just totally rules. I can drop a media drive onto a netatalk mount and walk away. No need to babysit anymore.
Since this has been a huge issue for me for years (work being too cheap to buy useable OS X server hardware), I'm extremely happy about this.
Between resource forks, HUGE files (16g+) and Special Characters SKULLFUCKERY- not to mention hideously incompetent Windows domain administration at the highest levels of corporate IT... around here, it's AFP or it's shuffled around on Firewire drives.
Our network sucks so goddamned bad that any OS X client with Samba enabled becomes the PDC inside of a few minutes. IT insists that their incompetent administration is somehow our fault. It rules.
Also, AFP is to Apple as SMB is to Windows. SMB isn't there for Windows boxes running WinME and older, is it? NO. It's the damned OS networking protocol. Apple didn't throw in samba support to replace AFP or NFS, they threw it in so macs can talk to PCs.
Ideally, you'd use AFP to talk to Macs, NFS to talk to Unices, and SMB to talk to Windows boxes.
But for some reason, every linux admin under the SUN seems to have a GIANT BONER for samba, despite its limitations.
Jebus. Try using the GIMP for color-correct PANTONE or LAB anything- just one of the areas it's lightyears behind in. Try opening a three hundred meg photoshop file with eighty or so layers, layer effects and several different blending modes.
Yeah, the GIMP is free. It's also completely fucking useless to me. I'm standardized on.psd the way the business world is standardized on.doc and the GIMP can't open my documents intact.
And I haven't upgraded from Photoshop 5.5, since the changes to the type tool they introduced with 6.0 have made it useless for how I do my job, so I'm saving money and time in the long run.
Adobe, Discreet and Macromedia products aren't going to stop being expensive until OSS apps get their useability issues worked out and evolve to a suitably professional level of fit and finish.
If the goal here is to supplant proprietary apps with free alternatives, the developers need to be chasing down the people that USE the proprietary apps and asking them what they need their free alternative to do. You can't fucking expect a graphics geek or a video editor to give enough of a shit about the GIMP to create a buzilla account and start filing reports- especially when so many of the issues with the GIMP that keep Professionals from using it are either walled off by patents (Pantone, etc) or considered "features" by the developers.
Figured MS had to have ripped it from somewhere.:D
About the only thing the Apple browser lets you diddle is A/V media- you can play the stuff in the window, but have fun scrubbing it (this actually causes problems with certain very shitty video capture hardware, whereby having a file of that codec selected in the browser flags the hardware as "in use" and preempts the editing appllication from accessing it.).
3dStudioMAX is around three grand. A single seat of Photoshop is 750$ or so, and Illustrator's in the same ballpark... Apple's video suite is around a grand and the MX Studio tracks around 500$ (much cheaper educational...).
Oh, and the price of creative software is going UP...:|
Right, but if memory serves (this being strictly from screen shots and my limited experience with OS X Server 1.0), you could "dock" more or less anywhere you wanted- move things around and sort them however- Windowmaker style. AND you could windowshade, so you really had the best of both worlds.
More importantly, how many times have we seen Windows features show up in MacOS?
1. Meta-Tab : a Windows first. Swiped by Apple for OS 8.5. 2. Windows that minimize to a dock/taskbar, rather than windowshade in place : a Windows first, and the Windows-like behaviour I hate the most about OS X. 9 Windowshades, goddammit. It's a third party hack on Windows and OS X.* 3. Preview-in-filebrowser : A feature that had been standard with Explorer and missing on the Mac until OS X.
There's others, but it's been awhile since I've been a regular Windows user, so I'd be hard pressed to recall others.
Raskin had almost nothing to do with the Mac as it's known now, or as it's been known for years- his own computer design concepts called for a command line interface, not a GUI. He gets a lot of credit for the Mac but the fact is that he left Apple long before it was ever released. MacOS System 1 was shaped much more by Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs and Burell Smith than it was by Raskin.
As for Windows useability.... ugh. Apple's ripped some features, but they're mostly good ones. Minus that whole "losing the windowshading" thing, which I'm still pissed about. If you want Windowshading without third party hacks, your only option these days is an X11 window manager.:|
Of course, that could lead me to ranting about the state of X11 "desktops" and how much of a letdown it is to see the big DMs turning into shit Win32 clones with bad implementations of all of the worst features of OS X jammed on top- and I've already strayed too far into troll territory, so I'll just stfu.:P
* You would think that with the zero-pixel borders around sides and bottom of non-Brushed Metal windows in OS X that they would have included windowshading or at least allowed applications to implement it on a per-app basis... but since ALL windows minimize to the dock, it's easy to make one hell of a mess out of it really, really fast in the process of working with Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks... not the cleanest solution in the world, thank you.
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Yeah, Art Students are a great way to get what you need on the cheap. I should know. Several of my friends - myself included- got fucked over right out of the gate because we believed what the contractor told us- that it would be "a good portfolio-building experience."
So's sitting in my bedroom jacking off into the GIMP, thank you.
"Portfolio Building Experience" means it pays a pittance if you're lucky, and you can totally forget about having any rights to your work. Oh, and PBEs are typically long hours with shit pay and no benefits. My first field experience was one of these- a contract job to do some multimedia work. After the dust settled, my hourly for the project was somewhere around eighty cents.
You get what you pay for- if you get into the habit of taking advantage of art students, don't be surprised if the talent pool suddenly dries up on you.
Well, it's != GPL, anyway. And everyone seems to think of Open Source as the GPL. So. :P
:P
Vast chunks of early commercial unices integrated large amounts of BSD Unix, which used the BSD License. This license, summed up, is essentially "do whatever the hell you want with this code just so long as we're credited for writing it."
So yeah, Sun - SunOS/Solaris- is built on "Open Source". Open Source they don't have to give back.
I'm really sick of flying snow speeders.
ESB for the 2600 : Snow Speeder versus ATATs.
ESB for SNES : Snow Speeder versus ATATs.
Shadows of the Empire for N64 : Snow Speeder versus ATATs. And ATSTs.
Rogue Squadron : Snow Speeder versus ATATs. And ATSTs.
Amusing how the movies can't seem to get off of Tattooine and the games can't seem to get rid of the snow speeder without changing format completely (the fighting game, for example, or the MMORPG)
Quake 1 : Sliders versus Cthulhu! I still love the nailgun. Grenade launcher rocks.
:P
Quake 2 : NO WAIT WAIT FORGET ABOUT THAT IT'S DOOM BUT WITH BIOMECHANOID THINGS NOT DEMONS! DOOM WEAPONS! BOUNCY GRENADE LAUNCHER! Likely where iD got its reputation as making great engines with the game thrown in as a tech demo.
Quake 3 : UNREAL TOURNAMENT! Only it, like, runs on reasonable hardware. With a really difficult grenade launcher. And Doom weapons. And Rangers and the Doom marine. Lots of fun but don't read too much into the "plot".
Quake 4 : Farmed out to another studio. Looks to pick up where Quake 2 left off. Better some continuity than none, I guess.
Quake feels kind of like the Final Fantasy of FPS- some elements cross between games but no two are alike.
You sure? It doesn't scream errors when the command is given on console and I swear it ran smoother afterwards...
The Mac's a great productivity box and a shitty game platform, but for productivity it's lacking a few critical apps that Windows has in spades - namely 3dStudio MAX.
:P
The biggest difference between the Mac and the PC worlds is that if you're lacking in one area on the sysreq for a game or a productivity applicatiobn, you can upgrade that part on the PC... whereas on the mac, you need to (often) buy an entirely new machine.
Consoles might be great for gaming, but I don't have a TV. If I had a TV, I'd use it for gaming and nothing else. And since I game an average of a few weeks every six months, that's a horrible waste of a TV. I'll get more all-around use out of the PC.
There's also the fact that due to fuckishness on the part of Adobe, I'm stuck using Photoshop 5.5. Which runs in an emulation layer on OS X, and runs natively on Windows 2000.
You do the math.
Quake 3 and Wolfenstein will both run SMP, which makes a HUGE difference when playing the games under OS X. Doom3 should be playable on a dual ghz G4 without problems.
I was saving for a processor upgrade for my aging G4, with gaming being further down on the list of reasons I wanted it.
I'll be buying a PC now, since I can get an entire x86 box with three times the horsepower for the same price as that upgrade.
>:|
This is exactly why Mac gaming sucks a fat load of donkey cock- current PC games that run on two year old PC hardware require top of the line macs in order to trundle along like a congested heiffer.
The one upside is that all shipping G5s have video that spanks an 8500.
The downside is that if you don't have a G5 but want to play Doom3, your choices are to pay two grand for a new Mac or six fifty for a new PC.
Hell of a fucking choice, isn't it?
Don't forget the DOOD CHECK OUT MY SCHWEET BLOG ENTRY posts. Or the ads-masquerading-as-posts posts.
/. is getting better with age in at least one respect.
This used to be a nice "tip of the iceberg" place- it's where I got my feet wet with regards to linux. While the front page content is more buzzword/ad/blog centric than I care for, hey- there's filtering.
Fuck, I don't even know if Katz still posts columns or not. I got so sick of that shit that he's the only thing I locked out of my FP prefs.
So
As cool as a portable IRIX box would be (the ones in Twister don't count... they were cabled to offscreen Indys. :P), and as much freeware as there is available for IRIX 6.5.X, uh.... what would you run on it these days that would really require serious portability?
:)
Since it's a Real UNIX, all you need is a cheap PC or Mac and Putty or Terminal.app to connect to a Serious Machine elsewhere.
Of course, an SGI laptop would make a Panasonic Toughbook look like tissue paper. 30lbs of HIGH TENSILE STEEL, BABY.
Man, the military would eat that shit up.
Sort of. Basically, they invented 3d accelleration and put the fundamentals of modern graphics cards into silicon back when PCs were having trouble drawing more than 256 colors at once. Back when the SNES was sex on wheels.
:P
Problem is that beyond what amount to minor improvements, they haven't done anything fundamentally NEW to evolve that technology in the last fifteen years.... so they've been lapped. My 2200$ 2000-era powerbook spanks the shit out of my 25000$ 1996-era Indigo2, and I didn't have to pay an extra ten grand for my graphics chipset to do texture mapping.
I still respect SGI for being 3d graphics pioneers. It's kind of depressing that they haven't been able to stay as far ahead of the game as they were in the eighties through mid nineties. The era when they were the only game in town.
SGI took a nosedive the second they rebranded. They started shipping x86 machines about five seconds after that, for all of about twenty minutes.
:|
When they ditched the cube for that stupidass g, that was it.
We run a Mac shop, but we use PCs running linux on the server end.
:P
Why?
Simple.
Dollar for dollar, for what we need and use the server for, the linux solution (while unsupported- debian running a couple of nice phat SATA RAIDs) is orders of magnitude cheaper. We're talking a terabtye of storage with the machine to run it for well under two grand.
We didn't need any of the fancy schmancy "features" of OS X Server, and everyone in the division lost interest in the XServe when they saw the price tag.
When you can get double the capabilities and/or capacity for the same price as a single solution, suddenly cost is a consideration- especially if you need, say... new monitors and RAM upgrades.
Yeah, Organizations can afford to buy Real Computers, but that doesn't mean Organizations can afford to waste money.
... is that Solaris runs on x86. You get some bang for your buck, as it were, and you have a reason to buy a Sun x86 box if you're in the market for UNIX on the cheap. Yeah, you can install Windows on it, but it runs other things and more importantly, you buy it from Sun and it comes with Solaris.
The SGI x86 boxes ran Windows, not IRIX. Their machines were Just Another Workstation/Server, running NT. Complete with assgasmic upgrade capabilities and RAM prices somewhere up in low earth orbit.
If you needed a PC workstation or a PC server, you could get one cheaper than the SGI equivalent from almost anybody. They lacked an OS to leverage, they lacked upgradeability, and they were generally more of a pain in the ass than any PC of similar horsepower, thanks to a wacked out SGI bootloader that won't take modern versions of Windows.
Best as I can tell, SGI (post ReBranding) completely lost sight of why anyone bought their gear to begin with. They've lost the consumer-visible High End Graphics market to commodity technology... and High End Graphics hasn't (in my experience) been a Sun Thing.
I've used them a couple of times- they hurt my ears. Painfully so. The only headphones I've found that I like are an old pair of Sony behind-the-heads with the prongs that sit between the ear and the head ripped off (I wear glasses, thank you).
The Apple iPod earbuds, regardless of their quality, absolutely SCREAM "MUG MY RICH ASS!" in large friendly letters.
DVD images out of DVD Studio Pro are typically in the 2.5-3.8 gig range for me. Raw video files of the projects I work on start around a gig and a half and have reached upwards of 19 gigs. If you use final cut pro and don't check off the little check box that tells it to auto-segment in 2g increments, you'll wind up with some extremely large files under certain circumstances.
Basically, anybody who deals with video has been dealing with Very Large Files for many years. Anybody who has to back the shit up from a Mac and can't afford an Apple server has been itching for something like this for quite awhile.
Aside from the !(> 2g) limit, I've had NO problems with NFS. None to speak of. Share the share, mount the share, copy shit over- no problems with Special Characters, no filename limitations... fuck, even the resource forks copy over.... and they move over CLEANER than they do with netatalk!
Netatalk 1.6.x was a pain in the ass with OS X, and I've had too many problems with Samba to make it worth my time anymore.
Which is great, as anyone who's moved off of OS 9 onto OS X has likely generated a few long file names, and anyone who does video gets to deal with Big Shit.
Previously, I had to use NFS for all of the files under two gigs and Samba for everything over (NFS version in Debian Stable doesn't do > 2g files), which made drag-and-drop backups extremely tedious.
Now, it just totally rules. I can drop a media drive onto a netatalk mount and walk away. No need to babysit anymore.
Since this has been a huge issue for me for years (work being too cheap to buy useable OS X server hardware), I'm extremely happy about this.
Because Samba Is Shit(tm).
Between resource forks, HUGE files (16g+) and Special Characters SKULLFUCKERY- not to mention hideously incompetent Windows domain administration at the highest levels of corporate IT... around here, it's AFP or it's shuffled around on Firewire drives.
Our network sucks so goddamned bad that any OS X client with Samba enabled becomes the PDC inside of a few minutes. IT insists that their incompetent administration is somehow our fault. It rules.
Also, AFP is to Apple as SMB is to Windows. SMB isn't there for Windows boxes running WinME and older, is it? NO. It's the damned OS networking protocol. Apple didn't throw in samba support to replace AFP or NFS, they threw it in so macs can talk to PCs.
Ideally, you'd use AFP to talk to Macs, NFS to talk to Unices, and SMB to talk to Windows boxes.
But for some reason, every linux admin under the SUN seems to have a GIANT BONER for samba, despite its limitations.
I just built from source LAST WEEK.
:D
On the upside, it was the first bit of anything I've had to build from source that actually Built and Worked. o.o
This FINALLY solves some SERIOUS data moving problems I've been having at work for the past couple of years.
Oh for fucks sake not the GIMP AGAIN.
.psd the way the business world is standardized on .doc and the GIMP can't open my documents intact.
Jebus. Try using the GIMP for color-correct PANTONE or LAB anything- just one of the areas it's lightyears behind in. Try opening a three hundred meg photoshop file with eighty or so layers, layer effects and several different blending modes.
Yeah, the GIMP is free. It's also completely fucking useless to me. I'm standardized on
And I haven't upgraded from Photoshop 5.5, since the changes to the type tool they introduced with 6.0 have made it useless for how I do my job, so I'm saving money and time in the long run.
Adobe, Discreet and Macromedia products aren't going to stop being expensive until OSS apps get their useability issues worked out and evolve to a suitably professional level of fit and finish.
If the goal here is to supplant proprietary apps with free alternatives, the developers need to be chasing down the people that USE the proprietary apps and asking them what they need their free alternative to do. You can't fucking expect a graphics geek or a video editor to give enough of a shit about the GIMP to create a buzilla account and start filing reports- especially when so many of the issues with the GIMP that keep Professionals from using it are either walled off by patents (Pantone, etc) or considered "features" by the developers.
Apparently it's still available!
:D
Figured MS had to have ripped it from somewhere.
About the only thing the Apple browser lets you diddle is A/V media- you can play the stuff in the window, but have fun scrubbing it (this actually causes problems with certain very shitty video capture hardware, whereby having a file of that codec selected in the browser flags the hardware as "in use" and preempts the editing appllication from accessing it.).
3dStudioMAX is around three grand. A single seat of Photoshop is 750$ or so, and Illustrator's in the same ballpark... Apple's video suite is around a grand and the MX Studio tracks around 500$ (much cheaper educational...).
:|
Oh, and the price of creative software is going UP...
Right, but if memory serves (this being strictly from screen shots and my limited experience with OS X Server 1.0), you could "dock" more or less anywhere you wanted- move things around and sort them however- Windowmaker style. AND you could windowshade, so you really had the best of both worlds.
More importantly, how many times have we seen Windows features show up in MacOS?
:|
:P
1. Meta-Tab : a Windows first. Swiped by Apple for OS 8.5.
2. Windows that minimize to a dock/taskbar, rather than windowshade in place : a Windows first, and the Windows-like behaviour I hate the most about OS X. 9 Windowshades, goddammit. It's a third party hack on Windows and OS X.*
3. Preview-in-filebrowser : A feature that had been standard with Explorer and missing on the Mac until OS X.
There's others, but it's been awhile since I've been a regular Windows user, so I'd be hard pressed to recall others.
Raskin had almost nothing to do with the Mac as it's known now, or as it's been known for years- his own computer design concepts called for a command line interface, not a GUI. He gets a lot of credit for the Mac but the fact is that he left Apple long before it was ever released. MacOS System 1 was shaped much more by Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs and Burell Smith than it was by Raskin.
As for Windows useability.... ugh. Apple's ripped some features, but they're mostly good ones. Minus that whole "losing the windowshading" thing, which I'm still pissed about. If you want Windowshading without third party hacks, your only option these days is an X11 window manager.
Of course, that could lead me to ranting about the state of X11 "desktops" and how much of a letdown it is to see the big DMs turning into shit Win32 clones with bad implementations of all of the worst features of OS X jammed on top- and I've already strayed too far into troll territory, so I'll just stfu.
* You would think that with the zero-pixel borders around sides and bottom of non-Brushed Metal windows in OS X that they would have included windowshading or at least allowed applications to implement it on a per-app basis... but since ALL windows minimize to the dock, it's easy to make one hell of a mess out of it really, really fast in the process of working with Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks... not the cleanest solution in the world, thank you.