LOL. Standards can't be "rival." They exist to level playing field and shift useless rivalry into other markets. In this case, it is to abolish file format locking to level playing field in productivity software market.
U.S. and its capitalism slowly degrades into weird Stalinism. The case reminds me of way Stalin and Brezhnev regimes had dealt with unwanted people.
The organization argued that it was the defendant's fault that the record companies sued the wrong person, because the defendant didn't tell them that his daughter was the file sharer they were looking for.
In Soviet times, if something happens, regime always looked for scapegoat. They'd took some guy they do not like off street and claim that he did it. When he tried to argue "there is no incriminating evidence!" response given was quite predictable - "hey! you are spy! capitalists have taught you how to hide your tracks!! that's why we can't find evidence!!!" So instead of ending up being simple criminal, the falsely accused person were ending up being a spy.
It is sad reality the people keep mixing up technology and products.
Linux (as kernel and piece of technology) is far ahead of most OSs in power management and especially in power saving.
But. Take fresh Windows XP installation - it would give you decent up-time from single battery charge. Take Mac OS X - it would give you excellent up-time from single battery charge. Now take Linux's distro with X.Org/GNOME/KDE/etc - and it would eat any battery in under two hours.
It is possible to optimize Linux to be extremely power efficient, yet lion share of applications written for PCs simply fail on portables.
From recent example. I'm reading lots of PDF ebooks - under Mac OS. Trick is to scroll document to the end and then go back to place were you stopped: Mac OS would cache the file and hard drive will not wake up for the whole time you read thru the PDF. Linux? - Ubuntu/Kubuntu/SUSE/YellowDog were tried - hard drive is always spinning. Always. Non-stop. I stopped even trying to investigate what keeps it spinning - just went back to Mac OS. Because battery lasts under Linux for about 2 hours - while Mac OS on the aging iBook easily does 6 hours. But honestly, even if battery charge set aside, the noise produced by constantly spinning hard drive me slowly crazy.
Conclusion: excellent power management of kernel != end-user application are designed with power efficiency in mind.
P.S. Most common offenders are X.Org with its ~/.xsession-errors (as if end-users cared about all the cruft in there - developers simply do not look there at all) and syslogd which periodically (by default every 20 minutes) write marker into logs.
Have you ever seen a PC notebook which runs perfectly for two years and hadn't seen single OS reinstallation nor were ever sent to service?
I use for my job laptops last two years. With Dells this is usual thing to send the lappie to service (and Dell handles it pretty quickly). HP and Toshiba are better: from personal experience they require half less attention what Dell or Acer or Fujutsi-Siemens brands require. But of course if you need to run up-to-date software, then reinstalling Windows every year is pretty normal routine.
I can't use for work Macs. I owned two privately. I had literally zero problems with them. I kept all software up-to-date. I was carrying the notebooks along with my office ones constantly. While my first Dell lasted something like 8 month (DVD drive died), heavier used iBook G4 lasted for two years until it was lost. Now in office I have new Fujitsu-Siemens and the stupid hardware in quality department really sucks - compared to 4 years old s/h PowerBook G4: VGA output on FS pretty useless for anything but 1024x768 projectors while PowerBook decently drives my 1680x1050 display; speakers of FS are crap; track pad on FS is crap; *newer* FS has no DVI output but 4yo PowerBook has (FS needs a dock for that); FS case started developing crack on case because of constant closing/opening of lid - something I couldn't even though is possible in notebooks and obviously PowerBook is lacking; etc.
One really need to read deep into "devil in details" when comparing $750 Dell and $1100 Mac notebooks. Devil in details. (I've seen that too many times with PC hardware...)
Macs in my experience worth their money. If you can afford them. Otherwise go with simpler brands: quality of notebooks slowly but steadily improves and they do not fail often now like they used to in past. Macs remain several steps ahead in quality and software/hardware integration part - but that's why they cost more. Saving few bucks but getting bit more problems to handle for many is good compromise.
What I find most staggering in the "discussion", that people dumbly say that "iPod's chip allows WMA decoding". That's *LAMEST* thing of century to say.
For Apple to be able to include WMA support into iTunes/iPod, they would have to (1) fork some money to M$ and (2) sign restrictive licensing agreements.
Have you noticed that WMA players rarely support anything but WMA and MP3? Right, only few companies (e.g. Sony for their Walkmans) managed to secure deal which allows them to support other audio formats. Semi-official info I had about SanDisk's Sansa and Philips's GoGear players is that they can *NOT* support MP4 nor OGG/Vorbis because licensing agreement with M$ prevents them to.
In all the heated IP discussion, everybody forgets that technical side of story != legal side of story. Apple cannot support WMA w/o M$ blessing.
On other side, I fully support Apple's brave decision to support standard audio format - and *NOT* invent/buy another proprietary format. On ironic side, one can always respond to dumb question "Apple doesn't support M$ audio format" with "But it does!! MPEG4 audio was developed in greater part by M$!!"
Then get yourself a Nintendo DS (140) and R4DS(50). That how God's intended portable gaming should be: you can download and play rips of official games - including ones not released in your region; you can download and play homebrew games; you can play MP3s and DPGs (DS's version of MPEG1 video).
More games, cheaper than Wii, easy to buy (compared to Wii in US) and best of all - it's portable ^_^
[...] everything between the application and the card has predictable latency.
Sorry to disappoint you, but "application" cannot be real-time. By definition: applications are subject to scheduling and would be preempted by interrupt handlers => not real-time. (And BTW "real-time" is not "predictable latency", but rather "worst case latency".)
This is classical simple H/W-supported best-effort low-latency implementation to workaround software problems. All proprietary hardware running 3rd party software is literally packed with such quirks.
That said, Linux builds such a system by combining realtime driver scheduling with the existing soundcard drivers, which is a way more awesome way to get that.
I'm not sure about which proprietary solution you are speaking of, but mainline kernel implementation is much simple - and obviously has no advanced features as "realtime driver scheduling". You schedule not "drivers" - but "access to hardware resources". Drivers kick in on interrupts - and that is not something one can schedule. In context of audio, it doesn't need to be real-time - because all involved parties are aware of length of track - and can buffer content beforehand. Linux doesn't do much: basically kernel is optimized to hold locks only for very short time what was implemented with series of latter (there were two such series) low latency patches which were building on top of preempt kernel patches (which made 2.6 kernel space preemptable). Linux now has generic latencies very low - so no additional effort generally is required. It can be even said, that Linux is "real-time" in "best effort" sense. Well, it is definitely much much more real-time than some proprietary mission critical solutions I have seen and worked on.
I don't agree. The MSDN is one huge example. It's great that it has such a vast knowledge base. Unfortunately a third of the documentation contains the wrong behavior and possibly the worst workarounds I have ever seen for a problem with lots of empty promises to fix issues in the future that haven't been fixed. That is how well Microsoft takes care of the developers.
+100.
Unfortunate reality is that M$ provides nearly complete (== always incomplete) solutions. Up side is that you can base your business on it. Down side - you are locked into M$ solutions. But you heard that hundred times already. But what everybody's missing is development side: developers working solely on M$ platforms turn slowly into agoraphobic drones who would claim that "M$ is best" just because they do not know anything better.
Many of my versity friends turned into such drones - even most reasonable ones. M$ keeps feeding them with new (presumably better) APIs and they just keep their minds piped directly into their beloved MSDN subscriptions. 5 (or 6?) data base APIs? And M$ still keep printing them. 6 IPC APIs? - OLE, OLE2, ActiveX, COM, DCOM, COM+ - but M$ doesn't stop the printing press.
"Windows is better because it has API [XXX] and [Linux/Mac OS X/etc] doesn't." Explaining people that API does solve Windows specific problem which doesn't exist on Linux nor Mac OS X just doesn't work - because they never touched them. And they will never touch them because they do not have the M$Windows' hundreds APIs. (Recent best example was ASIO - and fact that only Windows does support it.)
[sarcasm] What a load of B.S.!!! Next you would tell they aren't using ASCII!!??? We, all US software developers, know that 7 bit of ASCII are sufficient to represent any symbol!!! [/sarcasm]
To be perfectly honest, seeing often how many proper asian support bugs are literally sandbagged on bugzilla, I do not see Asia to go to Firefox any time soon.
Fact is simple: FireFox isn't native Unicode/UTF-8 application, it emulates that with best effort. But especially on Windows, since Windows knows that FireFox isn't Unicode, some things never worked and will never do. There are pile and piles of longstanding internationalization bugs nobody in Mozilla cares even to allow to fix...
FireFox/Mozilla is US program for US market. Not less, not more. We should be thankful that they support anything outside of ASCII anyway.
P.S. That's the real advantage of commercial software. Mozilla folks can say "nay, we do not do it. it's too complicated." But M-softies have no choice: Windows is sold in many markets and in all the markets IE/etc has to support all the peculiarities of internationalization.
NTFS block allocation starts badly fragmenting when free space reaches mark 25% percent.
NTFS block allocation starts *terribly* fragmenting when free space reaches mark 10% percent.
I had bunch of NT/2000/XP systems and observed the behavior with consistency. Just deleting some files to bring free space above 25% was making NTFS running notably faster. If you would keep running at higher disk space usage, NTFS would fragment more or less every (re)written file - including registry. That eventually brings system to its knees.
To summarize, NTFS works fine as long as you have plenty of free space on drive. But this is just preposterous.
P.S. Just recently I got a call from guy whose Windows "broke" and was not able to burn DVDs anymore. After some tinkering the cause was found: disk space was used up and system was heavily fragmented. Reading huge files worked somehow - but reading smaller files was literally brining system down. Defragmentation first didn't helped. Making 25+% of disk space free - magically did the job.
1st. There are really few desktop Java applications. Investments to port and support JDK/JRE/bindings are way too high.
2nd. Java on iPhone. Java on mobile phones happened not because it was some advantage of Java over other technologies. It happened because industry didn't managed to come up with standard for interfaces. Many efforts defaulted. And Sun had seen that as market opportunity.
3rd.
So does Apple perceive Java as moving into the also-ran category?
Absolutely. And who doesn't?
In last five or so years, I have seen Java used only and solely by Java software developers. Java secured its place in server room - as default integration technology. On desktop side it failed miserably and was forgotten many years ago. You can't expect Apple - a desktop hardware/software house - to care about such irrelevant stuff.
This is catch-22. Many failed to make better phone. It is really very easy to do better phone. But phones are not product per se - especially in US. As you have put it, it is a "a vehicle for selling more products."
Google initiative would fail if operators would decide to not support it. Many great mobile phones and platform died before never actually reaching hands of consumers - because cellcos have decided against them. IOW, it will not fail - you will simply not be able to buy one. Or if you will manage to get one, your operator will make sure that you will not be able to use features they do not approve of or have more expensive alternatives.
It all depends on how cellcos would react. They do all possible to avoid destiny of ISPs who became just "series of pipes". They will do all possible to block whatever would threaten their revenues. Google is in no better positions compared to those who tried to make better mobile phone/platform before.
Few Photoshop profis I knew in past were telling to work effectively in Photoshop (or any other similar application for that matter), you need to learn (1st) keyboard shortcuts and (2nd) plug-ins menu.
It always seemed to me that Photoshop professionals were unfased by the clutter of its GUI.
In many aspects, Photoshop is optimized for several workflows and most newcomers work solely within one of such workflows: steep learning isn't much of problem then.
But probably do-it-all freelancers would be happy with cleaner simpler interface...
Wind0ze as usually far behind Apple (and even Linux). Actually Apple was first to put vector graphics in OS with Quartz which is made after PDF and uses PDF as internal presentation.
Now Apple pumps incremental updates and improvements to its Quartz engine, while MSFT's WPS is largely beta technology.
Needless to add, that all output to screen from normal applications works thru Quartz. All Mac OS X applications are vector based. Most applications work thru backward compatible layer similar to Carbon which looks like raster, yet with few simple calls they can access all the power of Quartz.
I made the controller transition from 2001 to 2003 and haven't looked back. Seriously, I can't imagine using the mouse for look anymore. Unless you're playing an FPS where you are some kind of robot no human can make the radical shifts in orientation and direction possible with a mouse and still aim a gun.
Man, you ain't playing on-line? right?
Try playing with the dual-analogue thing against anybody with keyboard and mouse (even against me!) - you'd be literally wiped floor with. Classical controller is just not made for FPS.
Unless you're playing an FPS where you are some kind of robot no human can make the radical shifts in orientation and direction possible with a mouse and still aim a gun.
Yeah, console games are screwed in that aspect: monsters literally stop and wait for player to shoot them. No LoLs here: it'd be funny if it wasn't truth.
Classical controller is much much worse than keyboard+mouse. Period. Seeing people struggling with controls doing any kind of basic targeting just pains me. Seeing people in game not able to avoid being shot and shoot simultaneously - makes the classical controller moot.
Correction: "Microsoft still has >80% of the market."
Do not make such mistakes anymore!;)
N.B. fyi, Ubuntu is distributed freely so it is not part of market.
But the momentum of Microsoft Windows is so large that Linux will not become a widely-used desktop OS.
There is a huge difference between "momentum" and "inertia".
Today you use KUbuntu. You feel like a black sheep. Tomorrow you suddenly find that some other your friend uses . Then one more friend. Then one more. Then you just stop counting.
That's how it happens - w/o anyone really noticing. I'd place any Linux user over 10 Windows users simply because every Linux user made a choice. While more or less every Windows user have what he got with computer - preinstalled. Choice is a barrier. Choice is important. Choice is all the difference between Linux and Windows.
LoL. You should put lies in the end of message. That's tried and it works: few people read till end of message.
Reality of M$ iron grip on OEMs is that you have to ask many times before they will sell a computer without Windows preinstalled. You have real chances that will deny your request - or even send you to competitor - but will not sell w/o Windows.
M$ holds many OEMs accountant not to number of Windows licenses sold - but to number of computers sold and they pay M$ for every computer sold. Then, if computer was sold w/o Windows, OEM has to file a special request and M$ would return the money.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL. Standards can't be "rival." They exist to level playing field and shift useless rivalry into other markets. In this case, it is to abolish file format locking to level playing field in productivity software market.
LOL.
U.S. and its capitalism slowly degrades into weird Stalinism. The case reminds me of way Stalin and Brezhnev regimes had dealt with unwanted people.
In Soviet times, if something happens, regime always looked for scapegoat. They'd took some guy they do not like off street and claim that he did it. When he tried to argue "there is no incriminating evidence!" response given was quite predictable - "hey! you are spy! capitalists have taught you how to hide your tracks!! that's why we can't find evidence!!!" So instead of ending up being simple criminal, the falsely accused person were ending up being a spy.
It is sad reality the people keep mixing up technology and products.
Linux (as kernel and piece of technology) is far ahead of most OSs in power management and especially in power saving.
But. Take fresh Windows XP installation - it would give you decent up-time from single battery charge. Take Mac OS X - it would give you excellent up-time from single battery charge. Now take Linux's distro with X.Org/GNOME/KDE/etc - and it would eat any battery in under two hours.
It is possible to optimize Linux to be extremely power efficient, yet lion share of applications written for PCs simply fail on portables.
From recent example. I'm reading lots of PDF ebooks - under Mac OS. Trick is to scroll document to the end and then go back to place were you stopped: Mac OS would cache the file and hard drive will not wake up for the whole time you read thru the PDF. Linux? - Ubuntu/Kubuntu/SUSE/YellowDog were tried - hard drive is always spinning. Always. Non-stop. I stopped even trying to investigate what keeps it spinning - just went back to Mac OS. Because battery lasts under Linux for about 2 hours - while Mac OS on the aging iBook easily does 6 hours. But honestly, even if battery charge set aside, the noise produced by constantly spinning hard drive me slowly crazy.
Conclusion: excellent power management of kernel != end-user application are designed with power efficiency in mind.
P.S. Most common offenders are X.Org with its ~/.xsession-errors (as if end-users cared about all the cruft in there - developers simply do not look there at all) and syslogd which periodically (by default every 20 minutes) write marker into logs.
Have you ever seen a PC notebook which runs perfectly for two years and hadn't seen single OS reinstallation nor were ever sent to service?
I use for my job laptops last two years. With Dells this is usual thing to send the lappie to service (and Dell handles it pretty quickly). HP and Toshiba are better: from personal experience they require half less attention what Dell or Acer or Fujutsi-Siemens brands require. But of course if you need to run up-to-date software, then reinstalling Windows every year is pretty normal routine.
I can't use for work Macs. I owned two privately. I had literally zero problems with them. I kept all software up-to-date. I was carrying the notebooks along with my office ones constantly. While my first Dell lasted something like 8 month (DVD drive died), heavier used iBook G4 lasted for two years until it was lost. Now in office I have new Fujitsu-Siemens and the stupid hardware in quality department really sucks - compared to 4 years old s/h PowerBook G4: VGA output on FS pretty useless for anything but 1024x768 projectors while PowerBook decently drives my 1680x1050 display; speakers of FS are crap; track pad on FS is crap; *newer* FS has no DVI output but 4yo PowerBook has (FS needs a dock for that); FS case started developing crack on case because of constant closing/opening of lid - something I couldn't even though is possible in notebooks and obviously PowerBook is lacking; etc.
One really need to read deep into "devil in details" when comparing $750 Dell and $1100 Mac notebooks. Devil in details. (I've seen that too many times with PC hardware...)
Macs in my experience worth their money. If you can afford them. Otherwise go with simpler brands: quality of notebooks slowly but steadily improves and they do not fail often now like they used to in past. Macs remain several steps ahead in quality and software/hardware integration part - but that's why they cost more. Saving few bucks but getting bit more problems to handle for many is good compromise.
But how else can you carry dozen your favorite games without encumbering your pockets? DS itself is big enough. Game cartridges take even more space.
Downloadable games pwn.
I second.
What I find most staggering in the "discussion", that people dumbly say that "iPod's chip allows WMA decoding". That's *LAMEST* thing of century to say.
For Apple to be able to include WMA support into iTunes/iPod, they would have to (1) fork some money to M$ and (2) sign restrictive licensing agreements.
Have you noticed that WMA players rarely support anything but WMA and MP3? Right, only few companies (e.g. Sony for their Walkmans) managed to secure deal which allows them to support other audio formats. Semi-official info I had about SanDisk's Sansa and Philips's GoGear players is that they can *NOT* support MP4 nor OGG/Vorbis because licensing agreement with M$ prevents them to.
In all the heated IP discussion, everybody forgets that technical side of story != legal side of story. Apple cannot support WMA w/o M$ blessing.
On other side, I fully support Apple's brave decision to support standard audio format - and *NOT* invent/buy another proprietary format. On ironic side, one can always respond to dumb question "Apple doesn't support M$ audio format" with "But it does!! MPEG4 audio was developed in greater part by M$!!"
Then get yourself a Nintendo DS (140) and R4DS(50). That how God's intended portable gaming should be: you can download and play rips of official games - including ones not released in your region; you can download and play homebrew games; you can play MP3s and DPGs (DS's version of MPEG1 video).
More games, cheaper than Wii, easy to buy (compared to Wii in US) and best of all - it's portable ^_^
Sorry to disappoint you, but "application" cannot be real-time. By definition: applications are subject to scheduling and would be preempted by interrupt handlers => not real-time. (And BTW "real-time" is not "predictable latency", but rather "worst case latency".)
This is classical simple H/W-supported best-effort low-latency implementation to workaround software problems. All proprietary hardware running 3rd party software is literally packed with such quirks.
I'm not sure about which proprietary solution you are speaking of, but mainline kernel implementation is much simple - and obviously has no advanced features as "realtime driver scheduling". You schedule not "drivers" - but "access to hardware resources". Drivers kick in on interrupts - and that is not something one can schedule. In context of audio, it doesn't need to be real-time - because all involved parties are aware of length of track - and can buffer content beforehand. Linux doesn't do much: basically kernel is optimized to hold locks only for very short time what was implemented with series of latter (there were two such series) low latency patches which were building on top of preempt kernel patches (which made 2.6 kernel space preemptable). Linux now has generic latencies very low - so no additional effort generally is required. It can be even said, that Linux is "real-time" in "best effort" sense. Well, it is definitely much much more real-time than some proprietary mission critical solutions I have seen and worked on.
+100.
Unfortunate reality is that M$ provides nearly complete (== always incomplete) solutions. Up side is that you can base your business on it. Down side - you are locked into M$ solutions. But you heard that hundred times already. But what everybody's missing is development side: developers working solely on M$ platforms turn slowly into agoraphobic drones who would claim that "M$ is best" just because they do not know anything better.
Many of my versity friends turned into such drones - even most reasonable ones. M$ keeps feeding them with new (presumably better) APIs and they just keep their minds piped directly into their beloved MSDN subscriptions. 5 (or 6?) data base APIs? And M$ still keep printing them. 6 IPC APIs? - OLE, OLE2, ActiveX, COM, DCOM, COM+ - but M$ doesn't stop the printing press.
"Windows is better because it has API [XXX] and [Linux/Mac OS X/etc] doesn't." Explaining people that API does solve Windows specific problem which doesn't exist on Linux nor Mac OS X just doesn't work - because they never touched them. And they will never touch them because they do not have the M$Windows' hundreds APIs. (Recent best example was ASIO - and fact that only Windows does support it.)
That's actually what I had in mind (in context of switch/case):
That's how i usually do switch/case in Perl. That's very convenient, since Perl allow the subs to use variables in context.
Interesting.
But do they support dynamic number of untyped arguments? i.e. analog of Perl's @_ variable?
There is no other language where pointer to function can be used with such ease.
I see, it is now hardware problem that software crashed???
Though problem is stated incorrectly, I like your solution ^_^
[Off-topic] Check that. I was in similar situation with Windows + US keyboard layout vs. German umlauts. fyi.
[sarcasm] What a load of B.S.!!! Next you would tell they aren't using ASCII!!??? We, all US software developers, know that 7 bit of ASCII are sufficient to represent any symbol!!! [/sarcasm]
To be perfectly honest, seeing often how many proper asian support bugs are literally sandbagged on bugzilla, I do not see Asia to go to Firefox any time soon.
Fact is simple: FireFox isn't native Unicode/UTF-8 application, it emulates that with best effort. But especially on Windows, since Windows knows that FireFox isn't Unicode, some things never worked and will never do. There are pile and piles of longstanding internationalization bugs nobody in Mozilla cares even to allow to fix...
FireFox/Mozilla is US program for US market. Not less, not more. We should be thankful that they support anything outside of ASCII anyway.
P.S. That's the real advantage of commercial software. Mozilla folks can say "nay, we do not do it. it's too complicated." But M-softies have no choice: Windows is sold in many markets and in all the markets IE/etc has to support all the peculiarities of internationalization.
Normal Ubuntu installation uses about 120MB of RAM during booting. FYI. (For KDE IIRC it was about 200MB.)
"More resources is better" point is moot.
I second.
NTFS block allocation starts badly fragmenting when free space reaches mark 25% percent.
NTFS block allocation starts *terribly* fragmenting when free space reaches mark 10% percent.
I had bunch of NT/2000/XP systems and observed the behavior with consistency. Just deleting some files to bring free space above 25% was making NTFS running notably faster. If you would keep running at higher disk space usage, NTFS would fragment more or less every (re)written file - including registry. That eventually brings system to its knees.
To summarize, NTFS works fine as long as you have plenty of free space on drive. But this is just preposterous.
P.S. Just recently I got a call from guy whose Windows "broke" and was not able to burn DVDs anymore. After some tinkering the cause was found: disk space was used up and system was heavily fragmented. Reading huge files worked somehow - but reading smaller files was literally brining system down. Defragmentation first didn't helped. Making 25+% of disk space free - magically did the job.
1st. There are really few desktop Java applications. Investments to port and support JDK/JRE/bindings are way too high.
2nd. Java on iPhone. Java on mobile phones happened not because it was some advantage of Java over other technologies. It happened because industry didn't managed to come up with standard for interfaces. Many efforts defaulted. And Sun had seen that as market opportunity.
3rd.
Absolutely. And who doesn't?
In last five or so years, I have seen Java used only and solely by Java software developers. Java secured its place in server room - as default integration technology. On desktop side it failed miserably and was forgotten many years ago. You can't expect Apple - a desktop hardware/software house - to care about such irrelevant stuff.
Sounds more like Google after-effect...
This is catch-22. Many failed to make better phone. It is really very easy to do better phone. But phones are not product per se - especially in US. As you have put it, it is a "a vehicle for selling more products."
Google initiative would fail if operators would decide to not support it. Many great mobile phones and platform died before never actually reaching hands of consumers - because cellcos have decided against them. IOW, it will not fail - you will simply not be able to buy one. Or if you will manage to get one, your operator will make sure that you will not be able to use features they do not approve of or have more expensive alternatives.
It all depends on how cellcos would react. They do all possible to avoid destiny of ISPs who became just "series of pipes". They will do all possible to block whatever would threaten their revenues. Google is in no better positions compared to those who tried to make better mobile phone/platform before.
Few Photoshop profis I knew in past were telling to work effectively in Photoshop (or any other similar application for that matter), you need to learn (1st) keyboard shortcuts and (2nd) plug-ins menu.
It always seemed to me that Photoshop professionals were unfased by the clutter of its GUI.
In many aspects, Photoshop is optimized for several workflows and most newcomers work solely within one of such workflows: steep learning isn't much of problem then.
But probably do-it-all freelancers would be happy with cleaner simpler interface...
Quartz anyone??
Wind0ze as usually far behind Apple (and even Linux). Actually Apple was first to put vector graphics in OS with Quartz which is made after PDF and uses PDF as internal presentation.
Now Apple pumps incremental updates and improvements to its Quartz engine, while MSFT's WPS is largely beta technology.
Needless to add, that all output to screen from normal applications works thru Quartz. All Mac OS X applications are vector based. Most applications work thru backward compatible layer similar to Carbon which looks like raster, yet with few simple calls they can access all the power of Quartz.
Man, you ain't playing on-line? right?
Try playing with the dual-analogue thing against anybody with keyboard and mouse (even against me!) - you'd be literally wiped floor with. Classical controller is just not made for FPS.
Yeah, console games are screwed in that aspect: monsters literally stop and wait for player to shoot them. No LoLs here: it'd be funny if it wasn't truth.
Classical controller is much much worse than keyboard+mouse. Period. Seeing people struggling with controls doing any kind of basic targeting just pains me. Seeing people in game not able to avoid being shot and shoot simultaneously - makes the classical controller moot.
Correction: "Microsoft still has >80% of the market."
Do not make such mistakes anymore! ;)
N.B. fyi, Ubuntu is distributed freely so it is not part of market.
There is a huge difference between "momentum" and "inertia".
Today you use KUbuntu. You feel like a black sheep. Tomorrow you suddenly find that some other your friend uses . Then one more friend. Then one more. Then you just stop counting.
That's how it happens - w/o anyone really noticing. I'd place any Linux user over 10 Windows users simply because every Linux user made a choice. While more or less every Windows user have what he got with computer - preinstalled. Choice is a barrier. Choice is important. Choice is all the difference between Linux and Windows.
LoL. You should put lies in the end of message. That's tried and it works: few people read till end of message.
Reality of M$ iron grip on OEMs is that you have to ask many times before they will sell a computer without Windows preinstalled. You have real chances that will deny your request - or even send you to competitor - but will not sell w/o Windows.
M$ holds many OEMs accountant not to number of Windows licenses sold - but to number of computers sold and they pay M$ for every computer sold. Then, if computer was sold w/o Windows, OEM has to file a special request and M$ would return the money.