That's what I'd put into the picture. People. Remember, technology is nothing but an enabler. From the receptionist who answers your phone (can be in a call center, sure, but they should be breathing) to the monkey on the keyboard getting the job done, people are what will make the difference. Everything else is an end to a means, and besides - there's nothing like dealing with people to cut through some of the crap that we get day in and day out with this stuff.
Another reason not to eat beef! Let 'em live and generate shit...err energy.(Just kidding, it's a joke, laugh).
All kidding aside, that has to be about the least efficient way of converting biomass to electricity. But I will grant you that it has the added bonus of using an awful lot of water, too.
Microsoft seems to have made decent inroads, doubling Ninendo's market share. I know they have the marketing bucks, but my question is why would anyone buy an xBox instead of a PS? PS has more games and better overall quality and reliability.
Easy - or it was when I bought mine. Widescreen support. I only have a 16:9 TV. Every XBOX game that I have supports both the widescreen aspect ratio and 480p output. When I bought it, the PS2 offered neither. Made the decision easy, especially considering the "eye candy" effect of the games. 480i with sidebars is just fugly on a 65" screen.
Of course, there's another side to that as well. Even ignoring the point that they could have made a shortcut.
Let's say that they want to play the other version of pacman (you said that they had to look for the right one, after all). In the GUI, its exactly the same. With the command line, its:
$xmame pacman2
error: no such game
$xmame pac-man
error: no such game
$xmame pm2
error: no such game [muttering: "Screw it, I'll play the old one."]
$xmame pacman
So the command line can be good for people who don't know what they're doing - if they always want to do what they've done before. It doesn't encourage exploration - without progressing beyond the "newbie friendliness" you talk about.
You now want to make a change to bar, and then print it.
GUI: double click "bar"
make changes
either:
File->Print
Clicky the printer icon
(if you've closed the app):
right-click on "bar" and pick "print"
Now do the same on the command line:
$....wait a second...
(Yelling) "What type of file is 'bar'?"
$gqed bar
(Thinking) "Now how do I modify this file?"...
$enscript "bar" | lp -dlocalps
Its always easy to find things that are easier in one method or the other. But for things that you don't do very often, the GUI can be much simpler.
The difference is discoverability, which for something that you change very rarely can be a very good thing.
For example, we got a co-loc Windows server using a PPTP VPN for security. I needed to set it up as a router for access to a customer site who only wanted one point of contact. It took me something like 15 minutes to do outbound VPN on demand, and set up the necessary static routes, and its worked ever since. Got walked through the whole process.
And not once did I have to read a newsgroup, or dig through cryptic commands, or anything, to try to set it up.
Now, I have no doubt that I could have made it work on Linux too. I've admin'd networks of FreeBSD and AIX machines (years ago). I'm familiar with routing. But you know what? I'm rusty at it. I know the concepts, but not the specific commands. And I don't want to know them. I just want it to work.
Now, a lot of times I prefer UNIX servers. In this case though, the Windows server was much more useful for me.
Your example is the same. The Linux way is much easier - if and only if you know what resolv.conf does. If you don't, its much easier to clicky-clicky through the Windows dialog than it is to try to figure it out. I mean, where do you start? What do you "man"? Or are you googling for the answer (by which point the Windows way is faster).
For newbies, the GUI is easier. For experts, both systems provide command line equivs. For that matter, Linux provides a GUI equiv. Many of them. But they're not as consistent or intuitive. And since they're aimed at newbies (or possibly experts who are just newbies at a particular task), consistency is important.
Well, after reading all the way through the article:
Commodities are things that can be exchanged for one another. They are able to be sourced by and consumed by multiple entities.
UNIX programs are commodities in a way due to the standardization of the core POSIX APIs.
Document formats, such as the Microsoft.DOC format, are going to change to allow documents to be used more as commodities.
This is both good and inevitable.
It really didn't say a whole lot else. I mean, it was an interesting introduction, but I found myself looking for a page 2 on which the point would be made. Hrmph.
Although I do have to confess that I love this one from their website:
Is one of your mates a chronic talker that just doesn't know when to stop? Use the Phone Ring 15s background and your friend will hear a phone ring 6 times, 15 seconds into the call. Tell him that your other phone is ringing and that you have to go.
Especially since you can start the background noise at any point during the conversation. Oh, so tempting...
And the historical average return before inflation is 11%. And you can apply this as an average because you're not doing any withdrawls and its over a 40 year period. Historically, a 4% inflation adjusted withdrawl will last for about 40 years, and that's starting at the peak of the market before the depression. Check out resources like this one for more information on things like sustainable withdrawls.
Of course, Outlook 2003 includes bayesian filtering as well. Pity that he decided not to review it because ~"many people don't have it ~". As if many people are running on alphas of the other stuff.
Ya know, its funny. Why do a lot of people go to college? To make money. Dumb. Take the amount of money it costs to go to a "good" school. Call it a minimum $50,000 over four years, probably much higher. Now look at that as an investment.
Assuming that you started when you were 18, made a post-inflation rate of return of 8% (historical average, which is applicable because we're not withdrawing), and invested $12,500 each year for four years. Now, when you were 65 you'd have approximately $1.5mm. Yup, do the math.
Now that your retirement is taken care of, you could be a lot freer to play around, do something you really loved. If you want to go to med school because you really want to be a doctor, that's fine. If you want to go because you think you'll make money... there are other ways. Besides, call med school $25,000 a year over six years (being really conservative here) and the retirement total hits $4.3mm. Just from what would have been your tuition (probably much higher, since I'm guessing way low on the tuition side of things). Of course, this says nothing about the lifestyle you have during that time, but the idea is to have fun, right?
I should add that I love what I do. Started my own company about a year ago, and we're making it in the enterprise software field. But that's the only real alternative. Either do what you love, for yourself or others it doesn't matter, Or stop worrying about it and find something that pays the bills and lets you have some fun.
Seriously - its okay to work at a job you don't particularly enjoy. But if you don't love it, then look at it as a purely income-generating exercise. Work the least hours for the most money with the least stress. Then do something you do love with the rest of your time, and never worry about what's going on at the office. In other words, if you're just a wage slave, then by god be a wage slave. The problem is when you start caring too much about your (in reality) wage slave position.
Consider the car. Early cars... well, you had to be a mechanic to drive them. Even in the '60s and '70s, you needed a certain amount of skill - car won't start? Is it cold outside? Did you pump the gas pedal (but not too much)? Did you have the choke engaged? Then you have cars these days. Car won't start? WTF? That never happens...
Just as most people don't want to "drive cars", they want to go somewhere, most computer users don't want to "use your program", they want to create an invoice (or whatever). Personally, I think that a lot of the problems are ego-driven. Its hard for most developers to strive to reach invisibility. That's why we have so many garish products - like anything using skins - that strive to be noticed.
Makes me glad I'm in the enterprise software business, where UI-invisibiltiy is a Good Thing (and, frankly, where the usability bar is often really low).
Not the case. First, this type of exposure is a standard way to convince users who don't want to spend two days of time playing with a product to use it. Second, if I can find so many things in a simple screenshot that just scream "usability issues," why should I assume that the article praising the product picked the worst stuff to show? Besides, it doesn't cost me nothing to try. I know that a solution that works cost me $90 (PSP) and was very intuitive to use - almost no time to learn enough to do what I wanted to do with it. I'm pretty sure from reading about it that GIMP would take me at least a couple of days to get up to the same level of familiarity, and that would still leave some of the other issues (like the ALT-TAB unfriendliness) that I noticed and that many others have talked about.
And yes, it doesn't take much of my time to add up to $90. Like I said in the post, I'm not a graphics designer. I'm a lightweight user. I also spend most of my day job worrying about usability and technology, which doesn't help the GIMP very much in this case, I'm afraid.
By the way, how do you feel my comments would have been different had I written them while looking at the application on my screen, rather than while looking at the application on the reviewer's screen? I guess I could have answered my question about mouseovers, but that's about all.
for the price you can't really complain if it takes a day or two to get used to them
And this is where we differ. PSP cost me $89 and I was productive in it immediately. I've used PhotoShop before with similar ease. The GIMP costs me $0 and, as you say, two days worth of time. That's worth more to me than $89, by a long shot.
Well, you could do that. Of course, then you'd lose the ability to use the menu that they decided to put on top of that (already barely big enough for the menu) window. Whoops!
Half? No, actually just two. First, let's look at the window title (visible in the second screenshot. "Brushes, Patterns, Gradients, Channels, Paths, Undo, Layers, Fonts, Navigation, Buffers" (there may be more). Yeah, great title. And that window is stretched out to show it, yielding more whitespace than anything else on the screen. Some improvement.
The idea of stretching out the other windows is... interesting. Take a look at that second screenshot again. Notice that there's more than one image window open. Now imagine that there are many open. Should all of them be stretched out to accomodate the menu? The new menu adds "Layers, Tools, Dialogs, Filters." Still no Help, and since there is a File I assume that there will also be a help... somewhere. Pity that there's no indication of more options anywhere...
So we have two very minor problems solved - and more problems caused by the wasted real estate - and you still haven't hit on any of the other, more serious points that I made. By the way, I don't think that resizing the window would have had any effect on "Xtns" if that was something that you were responding to.
And, since Paint Shop Pro doesn't put its menus on its subwindows, sizing them to fit their content really doesn't effect its usability as you claim that it will.
You know, you can tell a lot about a product from its screenshots. So let's take a look at this one. First, I should say that I am not a graphics artist, nor do I play one on TV. I do some mild photo retouching, web art, icon design, stuff like that. I've used Photoshop and Illustrator, and currently use Paint Shop Pro (hey, its only $89 and it works).
What's the first thing that I see? Well, we have a bunch of little windows with a terminal manager peeking through. Annyoing, but I can deal with it. Hmm - they're all showing up on the taskbar, too. More annoying, but lets move on.
Looking at what I presume is the "new" Gimp interface, on the left, the colored icons are much easier to understand at a glance. The menus, however, leave a lot to be desired. One problem with small windows is that, unless you're using Mac style menus, you have small menu labels. Like these ones. File: fair enough. Help: likewise. Xtns:...? Xtns? I have no idea.
Looking at the bottom of the docked options window, I can see some buttons. I'd guess that the first one is Save, the second (greyed out) is undo/back, the third is delete (delete my ink options?) and the fourth is... erm... undo again? You've got me. Hope that they have mouseovers, but they really shouldn't have needed them.
Looking at the "Brushes, Patterns, Gra" window. Ooh, nice title. Anyway, these seem pretty reasonable, although the weird icons at the bottom are back, and different. I guess the first one is... no idea, actually, since I assume that the second one is new. The third is probably copy (why can't I copy a circle(11) by the way?), the fourth is delete, and the fifth is - refresh? How often do you need to refresh your brushes that it gets the bottom-right corner of the window all to itself? That's prime real estate!
Okay, now onto the main window. Heh - they can't seem to draw their rulers correctly so that you can see the stops and read the numbers. Oh, well. Again, we have the problem of the window size - this time the menus are readable, but one of them seems to be "La" - possibly "Lay" - and who knows how many are inaccessible off to the right? Its good to know that I can cancel my picture, however - or could in some situations whenever the button is enabled.
All in all, from a first glance (which is all many prospective users will ever give it), I'll stick with Paint Shop Pro, thankyouverymuch.
Does this work as transparently as Exceed does? What I really want is a little daemon, preferably just running down in my task tray, that provides an X server. Nothing else. Let Windows handle the windowmanager aspect of it, and don't do anything with the desktop by default. Basically, just allowing me to run X programs side-by-side with my Windows ones. Oh - and share my X clipboard with my Windows one.
The last time I looked around (which was several years ago), Exceed was the only product that came close to this. If Cygwin/XFree has a package that does the same thing, I'd be very interested in finding out.
Take the UK for example. You have the Prime Minister, who doesn't have to be terribly photogenic but does have to be able to get some serious work done. Then, surrounding their role, you have the monarchy. On the one hand, the royals can handle the ribbon-cutting type of ceremonies that in other countries (such as the US) create some of the movie-star requirements of the presidency. On the other hand, they handle the very-long-range planning and provide valuable continuity for the nation as a whole.
The US Senate was supposed to do the same sort of thing, which is why they have longer terms, but when they went from a (slightly like) "house of lords" appointment system to the popular vote system like the Congress had, that idea got dropped. The original theory was that there should be some representative body whose people did have a vested interest in the country itself, not the administration or a particular company.
Of course, that's just a theory based on poor recollections...
Trouble is, if you can't count on 20 Nobel laureate scientists to make an honest, apolitical assessment of the state of science in our government, who on earth can you trust?
Why, the policymakers, of course! Silly question...
Now for the sanity issue...time definitely has a value that nobody seems to take into account here. Same with sanity. For instance, with the PC you're constantly looking for drivers and DLLs that you need, that break, that disappear, that need to be updated, etc. With the Mac...it just WORKS.
Er, with a PC these days it just works too. At least, with a modern PC (Windows XP).
Look, all you gotta do is plug in your digital camera, and it works.
Yup. Get the "Microsoft Camera Wizard" right off...
And now you can view the pictures with no additional software.
Yup, same here...
And check this out...you can burn them onto a CD now with no additional software..."). It really is that easy.
Same with XP as well. Look, I like Mac OS X. I gave a powerbook to my in-laws as a Christmas present. I enjoy the heck out of the G5 powermac. But XP can, and does, do just about everything that OSX does. And vice versa, of course.
Sure, Windows ME/2000/whatever didn't do things as well. Then again, neither did 9. Times have changed, and things have improved - on all fronts.
Because not all documents are finished products. We do use PDF wherever possible, but when collaborating towards a final draft of anything, a modifiable format is much more useful. Saves having to retype the document every time, and having features such as "Track Changes" helps a bunch too.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I'd put into the picture. People. Remember, technology is nothing but an enabler. From the receptionist who answers your phone (can be in a call center, sure, but they should be breathing) to the monkey on the keyboard getting the job done, people are what will make the difference. Everything else is an end to a means, and besides - there's nothing like dealing with people to cut through some of the crap that we get day in and day out with this stuff.
Another reason not to eat beef! Let 'em live and generate shit...err energy.(Just kidding, it's a joke, laugh).
All kidding aside, that has to be about the least efficient way of converting biomass to electricity. But I will grant you that it has the added bonus of using an awful lot of water, too.
Microsoft seems to have made decent inroads, doubling Ninendo's market share. I know they have the marketing bucks, but my question is why would anyone buy an xBox instead of a PS? PS has more games and better overall quality and reliability.
Easy - or it was when I bought mine. Widescreen support. I only have a 16:9 TV. Every XBOX game that I have supports both the widescreen aspect ratio and 480p output. When I bought it, the PS2 offered neither. Made the decision easy, especially considering the "eye candy" effect of the games. 480i with sidebars is just fugly on a 65" screen.
Of course, there's another side to that as well. Even ignoring the point that they could have made a shortcut.
Let's say that they want to play the other version of pacman (you said that they had to look for the right one, after all). In the GUI, its exactly the same. With the command line, its:
$xmame pacman2
error: no such game
$xmame pac-man
error: no such game
$xmame pm2
error: no such game
[muttering: "Screw it, I'll play the old one."]
$xmame pacman
So the command line can be good for people who don't know what they're doing - if they always want to do what they've done before. It doesn't encourage exploration - without progressing beyond the "newbie friendliness" you talk about.
You now want to make a change to bar, and then print it.
...
GUI: double click "bar"
make changes
either:
File->Print
Clicky the printer icon
(if you've closed the app):
right-click on "bar" and pick "print"
Now do the same on the command line:
$....wait a second...
(Yelling) "What type of file is 'bar'?"
$gqed bar
(Thinking) "Now how do I modify this file?"
$enscript "bar" | lp -dlocalps
Its always easy to find things that are easier in one method or the other. But for things that you don't do very often, the GUI can be much simpler.
The difference is discoverability, which for something that you change very rarely can be a very good thing.
For example, we got a co-loc Windows server using a PPTP VPN for security. I needed to set it up as a router for access to a customer site who only wanted one point of contact. It took me something like 15 minutes to do outbound VPN on demand, and set up the necessary static routes, and its worked ever since. Got walked through the whole process.
And not once did I have to read a newsgroup, or dig through cryptic commands, or anything, to try to set it up.
Now, I have no doubt that I could have made it work on Linux too. I've admin'd networks of FreeBSD and AIX machines (years ago). I'm familiar with routing. But you know what? I'm rusty at it. I know the concepts, but not the specific commands. And I don't want to know them. I just want it to work.
Now, a lot of times I prefer UNIX servers. In this case though, the Windows server was much more useful for me.
Your example is the same. The Linux way is much easier - if and only if you know what resolv.conf does. If you don't, its much easier to clicky-clicky through the Windows dialog than it is to try to figure it out. I mean, where do you start? What do you "man"? Or are you googling for the answer (by which point the Windows way is faster).
For newbies, the GUI is easier. For experts, both systems provide command line equivs. For that matter, Linux provides a GUI equiv. Many of them. But they're not as consistent or intuitive. And since they're aimed at newbies (or possibly experts who are just newbies at a particular task), consistency is important.
- Commodities are things that can be exchanged for one another. They are able to be sourced by and consumed by multiple entities.
- UNIX programs are commodities in a way due to the standardization of the core POSIX APIs.
- Document formats, such as the Microsoft
.DOC format, are going to change to allow documents to be used more as commodities.
- This is both good and inevitable.
It really didn't say a whole lot else. I mean, it was an interesting introduction, but I found myself looking for a page 2 on which the point would be made. Hrmph.Which page is this? Link please...
And the historical average return before inflation is 11%. And you can apply this as an average because you're not doing any withdrawls and its over a 40 year period. Historically, a 4% inflation adjusted withdrawl will last for about 40 years, and that's starting at the peak of the market before the depression. Check out resources like this one for more information on things like sustainable withdrawls.
Of course, Outlook 2003 includes bayesian filtering as well. Pity that he decided not to review it because ~"many people don't have it ~". As if many people are running on alphas of the other stuff.
Ya know, its funny. Why do a lot of people go to college? To make money. Dumb. Take the amount of money it costs to go to a "good" school. Call it a minimum $50,000 over four years, probably much higher. Now look at that as an investment.
... there are other ways. Besides, call med school $25,000 a year over six years (being really conservative here) and the retirement total hits $4.3mm. Just from what would have been your tuition (probably much higher, since I'm guessing way low on the tuition side of things). Of course, this says nothing about the lifestyle you have during that time, but the idea is to have fun, right?
Assuming that you started when you were 18, made a post-inflation rate of return of 8% (historical average, which is applicable because we're not withdrawing), and invested $12,500 each year for four years. Now, when you were 65 you'd have approximately $1.5mm. Yup, do the math.
Now that your retirement is taken care of, you could be a lot freer to play around, do something you really loved. If you want to go to med school because you really want to be a doctor, that's fine. If you want to go because you think you'll make money
Just my (inflation adjusted) 2 cents.
I should add that I love what I do. Started my own company about a year ago, and we're making it in the enterprise software field. But that's the only real alternative. Either do what you love, for yourself or others it doesn't matter, Or stop worrying about it and find something that pays the bills and lets you have some fun.
Seriously - its okay to work at a job you don't particularly enjoy. But if you don't love it, then look at it as a purely income-generating exercise. Work the least hours for the most money with the least stress. Then do something you do love with the rest of your time, and never worry about what's going on at the office. In other words, if you're just a wage slave, then by god be a wage slave. The problem is when you start caring too much about your (in reality) wage slave position.
Consider the car. Early cars... well, you had to be a mechanic to drive them. Even in the '60s and '70s, you needed a certain amount of skill - car won't start? Is it cold outside? Did you pump the gas pedal (but not too much)? Did you have the choke engaged? Then you have cars these days. Car won't start? WTF? That never happens...
Just as most people don't want to "drive cars", they want to go somewhere, most computer users don't want to "use your program", they want to create an invoice (or whatever). Personally, I think that a lot of the problems are ego-driven. Its hard for most developers to strive to reach invisibility. That's why we have so many garish products - like anything using skins - that strive to be noticed.
Makes me glad I'm in the enterprise software business, where UI-invisibiltiy is a Good Thing (and, frankly, where the usability bar is often really low).
Not the case. First, this type of exposure is a standard way to convince users who don't want to spend two days of time playing with a product to use it. Second, if I can find so many things in a simple screenshot that just scream "usability issues," why should I assume that the article praising the product picked the worst stuff to show? Besides, it doesn't cost me nothing to try. I know that a solution that works cost me $90 (PSP) and was very intuitive to use - almost no time to learn enough to do what I wanted to do with it. I'm pretty sure from reading about it that GIMP would take me at least a couple of days to get up to the same level of familiarity, and that would still leave some of the other issues (like the ALT-TAB unfriendliness) that I noticed and that many others have talked about.
And yes, it doesn't take much of my time to add up to $90. Like I said in the post, I'm not a graphics designer. I'm a lightweight user. I also spend most of my day job worrying about usability and technology, which doesn't help the GIMP very much in this case, I'm afraid.
By the way, how do you feel my comments would have been different had I written them while looking at the application on my screen, rather than while looking at the application on the reviewer's screen? I guess I could have answered my question about mouseovers, but that's about all.
for the price you can't really complain if it takes a day or two to get used to them
And this is where we differ. PSP cost me $89 and I was productive in it immediately. I've used PhotoShop before with similar ease. The GIMP costs me $0 and, as you say, two days worth of time. That's worth more to me than $89, by a long shot.
-Richard
Well, you could do that. Of course, then you'd lose the ability to use the menu that they decided to put on top of that (already barely big enough for the menu) window. Whoops!
Half? No, actually just two. First, let's look at the window title (visible in the second screenshot. "Brushes, Patterns, Gradients, Channels, Paths, Undo, Layers, Fonts, Navigation, Buffers" (there may be more). Yeah, great title. And that window is stretched out to show it, yielding more whitespace than anything else on the screen. Some improvement.
... interesting. Take a look at that second screenshot again. Notice that there's more than one image window open. Now imagine that there are many open. Should all of them be stretched out to accomodate the menu? The new menu adds "Layers, Tools, Dialogs, Filters." Still no Help, and since there is a File I assume that there will also be a help... somewhere. Pity that there's no indication of more options anywhere...
The idea of stretching out the other windows is
So we have two very minor problems solved - and more problems caused by the wasted real estate - and you still haven't hit on any of the other, more serious points that I made. By the way, I don't think that resizing the window would have had any effect on "Xtns" if that was something that you were responding to.
And, since Paint Shop Pro doesn't put its menus on its subwindows, sizing them to fit their content really doesn't effect its usability as you claim that it will.
Sorry... you fail to convince.
You know, you can tell a lot about a product from its screenshots. So let's take a look at this one. First, I should say that I am not a graphics artist, nor do I play one on TV. I do some mild photo retouching, web art, icon design, stuff like that. I've used Photoshop and Illustrator, and currently use Paint Shop Pro (hey, its only $89 and it works).
...? Xtns? I have no idea.
... no idea, actually, since I assume that the second one is new. The third is probably copy (why can't I copy a circle(11) by the way?), the fourth is delete, and the fifth is - refresh? How often do you need to refresh your brushes that it gets the bottom-right corner of the window all to itself? That's prime real estate!
What's the first thing that I see? Well, we have a bunch of little windows with a terminal manager peeking through. Annyoing, but I can deal with it. Hmm - they're all showing up on the taskbar, too. More annoying, but lets move on.
Looking at what I presume is the "new" Gimp interface, on the left, the colored icons are much easier to understand at a glance. The menus, however, leave a lot to be desired. One problem with small windows is that, unless you're using Mac style menus, you have small menu labels. Like these ones. File: fair enough. Help: likewise. Xtns:
Looking at the bottom of the docked options window, I can see some buttons. I'd guess that the first one is Save, the second (greyed out) is undo/back, the third is delete (delete my ink options?) and the fourth is... erm... undo again? You've got me. Hope that they have mouseovers, but they really shouldn't have needed them.
Looking at the "Brushes, Patterns, Gra" window. Ooh, nice title. Anyway, these seem pretty reasonable, although the weird icons at the bottom are back, and different. I guess the first one is
Okay, now onto the main window. Heh - they can't seem to draw their rulers correctly so that you can see the stops and read the numbers. Oh, well. Again, we have the problem of the window size - this time the menus are readable, but one of them seems to be "La" - possibly "Lay" - and who knows how many are inaccessible off to the right? Its good to know that I can cancel my picture, however - or could in some situations whenever the button is enabled.
All in all, from a first glance (which is all many prospective users will ever give it), I'll stick with Paint Shop Pro, thankyouverymuch.
Does this work as transparently as Exceed does? What I really want is a little daemon, preferably just running down in my task tray, that provides an X server. Nothing else. Let Windows handle the windowmanager aspect of it, and don't do anything with the desktop by default. Basically, just allowing me to run X programs side-by-side with my Windows ones. Oh - and share my X clipboard with my Windows one.
The last time I looked around (which was several years ago), Exceed was the only product that came close to this. If Cygwin/XFree has a package that does the same thing, I'd be very interested in finding out.
All information welcomed!
Take the UK for example. You have the Prime Minister, who doesn't have to be terribly photogenic but does have to be able to get some serious work done. Then, surrounding their role, you have the monarchy. On the one hand, the royals can handle the ribbon-cutting type of ceremonies that in other countries (such as the US) create some of the movie-star requirements of the presidency. On the other hand, they handle the very-long-range planning and provide valuable continuity for the nation as a whole.
The US Senate was supposed to do the same sort of thing, which is why they have longer terms, but when they went from a (slightly like) "house of lords" appointment system to the popular vote system like the Congress had, that idea got dropped. The original theory was that there should be some representative body whose people did have a vested interest in the country itself, not the administration or a particular company.
Of course, that's just a theory based on poor recollections...
Trouble is, if you can't count on 20 Nobel laureate scientists to make an honest, apolitical assessment of the state of science in our government, who on earth can you trust?
Why, the policymakers, of course! Silly question...
Now for the sanity issue...time definitely has a value that nobody seems to take into account here. Same with sanity. For instance, with the PC you're constantly looking for drivers and DLLs that you need, that break, that disappear, that need to be updated, etc. With the Mac...it just WORKS.
Er, with a PC these days it just works too. At least, with a modern PC (Windows XP).
Look, all you gotta do is plug in your digital camera, and it works.
Yup. Get the "Microsoft Camera Wizard" right off...
And now you can view the pictures with no additional software.
Yup, same here...
And check this out...you can burn them onto a CD now with no additional software..."). It really is that easy.
Same with XP as well. Look, I like Mac OS X. I gave a powerbook to my in-laws as a Christmas present. I enjoy the heck out of the G5 powermac. But XP can, and does, do just about everything that OSX does. And vice versa, of course.
Sure, Windows ME/2000/whatever didn't do things as well. Then again, neither did 9. Times have changed, and things have improved - on all fronts.
Because not all documents are finished products. We do use PDF wherever possible, but when collaborating towards a final draft of anything, a modifiable format is much more useful. Saves having to retype the document every time, and having features such as "Track Changes" helps a bunch too.