Programming languages? Unless it's a language (or programming paradigm) the programmer doesn't know (in which case it doesn't matter much whether it is Java, C, C++, Perl, Python or ruby) at all, the difference for the same programmer from one to another may exist (depending on how fluent they are), but likely more on the order of 10-20%.
When measuring such things as code quality, productivity and the number of bugs in programming projects, one of the few things that people agree on is that the number of bugs per line of code is fairly constant across languages. Because a program that accomplishes the same task is far shorter in a high level language like perl or python than in C or C++, the perl or python version also likely has far fewer bugs in it. So at least that way higher level languages have a large advantage over lower level ones.
I use mainly Linux, but have dabbled with OS X and its word processing and DTP applications as well. In comparison, fonts on Linux do suck.
Compared to the situation before gtk2 and the likes, the fonts in Linux are certainly good. It's a far cry from OS X's font support however. The first, practical problem with fonts and Linux is that Linux is shipped with a small selection of fonts. Installing more helps, but is tedious, and a major failing of the default desktop environment.
Once you have a decent font selection installed, you'll find that they are not rendered quite as intended. Frequently spacing between characters appears random; kerning doesn't work as intended. Or the bottoms of characters don't align, as in Helvetica on my system. In word, it doesn't look good.
Then there is the lack of support for advanced font features of OpenType fonts, for example. Forget ligatures, forget "stylistic alternatives", forget intuitive grouping of fonts with more than normal and bold weight variants. This, granted, is more issue of application support, but nonetheless a fact of life with Linux and fonts.
When I need good typography, I must go to OS X. (Windows might do, too, but not even good typography is reason enough to dabble with _that_ OS.)
I used to have Hauppage WinTV, until I recently got PVR 250. While the Hauppage card worked, the picture quality is _vastly_ superior with PVR 250. The large quality difference might be emphasized by the weak TV signal in my apartment.
Also recording a movie from TV was rather painful with the Hauppage card. My Celeron 1400 CPU was just barely able to encode in realtime to 640x480 mpeg4 using mencoder, but even then a second pass was required to do deinterlacing or whatever you needed for that particular grab. If during the grabbing you did anything cpu intensive, you started losing frames. The worst part however was that the audio started slowly drifting and the resulting grab was hence useless.
With PVR 250, it's a joy to grab high quality video without using almost any CPU, and you can be certain there are no surprising problems in the output.
PVR 250 isn't without its problems though. Mainly, the drivers require too much tweaking to make use of, and they don't offer v4l interface. Also at one point the recording sometimes suddenly stopped after an half an hour or so. The drivers appear to be actively worked on though, so there's hoping they will be in far better shape within a year.
PVR 350, I've been told, is worth the money if you want to watch interlaced video on TV. My friend has one, and says PVR 350 handles the interlaced video output very much visibly better than what he has managed before.
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When measuring such things as code quality, productivity and the number of bugs in programming projects, one of the few things that people agree on is that the number of bugs per line of code is fairly constant across languages. Because a program that accomplishes the same task is far shorter in a high level language like perl or python than in C or C++, the perl or python version also likely has far fewer bugs in it. So at least that way higher level languages have a large advantage over lower level ones.
I use mainly Linux, but have dabbled with OS X and its word processing and DTP applications as well. In comparison, fonts on Linux do suck.
Compared to the situation before gtk2 and the likes, the fonts in Linux are certainly good. It's a far cry from OS X's font support however. The first, practical problem with fonts and Linux is that Linux is shipped with a small selection of fonts. Installing more helps, but is tedious, and a major failing of the default desktop environment.
Once you have a decent font selection installed, you'll find that they are not rendered quite as intended. Frequently spacing between characters appears random; kerning doesn't work as intended. Or the bottoms of characters don't align, as in Helvetica on my system. In word, it doesn't look good.
Then there is the lack of support for advanced font features of OpenType fonts, for example. Forget ligatures, forget "stylistic alternatives", forget intuitive grouping of fonts with more than normal and bold weight variants. This, granted, is more issue of application support, but nonetheless a fact of life with Linux and fonts.
When I need good typography, I must go to OS X. (Windows might do, too, but not even good typography is reason enough to dabble with _that_ OS.)
I used to have Hauppage WinTV, until I recently got PVR 250. While the Hauppage card worked, the picture quality is _vastly_ superior with PVR 250. The large quality difference might be emphasized by the weak TV signal in my apartment.
Also recording a movie from TV was rather painful with the Hauppage card. My Celeron 1400 CPU was just barely able to encode in realtime to 640x480 mpeg4 using mencoder, but even then a second pass was required to do deinterlacing or whatever you needed for that particular grab. If during the grabbing you did anything cpu intensive, you started losing frames. The worst part however was that the audio started slowly drifting and the resulting grab was hence useless.
With PVR 250, it's a joy to grab high quality video without using almost any CPU, and you can be certain there are no surprising problems in the output.
PVR 250 isn't without its problems though. Mainly, the drivers require too much tweaking to make use of, and they don't offer v4l interface. Also at one point the recording sometimes suddenly stopped after an half an hour or so. The drivers appear to be actively worked on though, so there's hoping they will be in far better shape within a year.
PVR 350, I've been told, is worth the money if you want to watch interlaced video on TV. My friend has one, and says PVR 350 handles the interlaced video output very much visibly better than what he has managed before.