Indeed. And given that Mac users pay for more of their software than PC users, the Mac's share of the Office market is likely signficantly more than 3-4% by dollars instead of users.
Microsoft's problem is that Apple could fairly easily make a smoking, open, cross-platform office suite just by taking OOo and giving it a hot little Aqua outfit and applying some of that Apple secret sauce, just like they did with KHTML and Safari. In fact, I wouldn't be surpised if they've already done that as a back-up plan, just like their Intel port of OS X. If such a critter was ever released, it would probably just be bundled with the OS for free, since it's free software to start with. A quiet little demo of this project with the Microsoft rep would be all that it takes to ensure that MS keeps supporting Office-Mac until the end of time.
Specifications are just marketing babble for tech geeks, and fall into the same category as statistics on the truth scale. It's not difficult to produce two systems with the same specs (especially if the choice of specs is carefully selected), and have one be a cheap-ass collection of poorly integrated parts with a wobbly power supply and buggy mobo that will blow a few capacitors next year and fry half your components (your average discount no-name frankenpc), whereas the other is an over-engineered, fully integrated set of components that will run flawlessly for 15 years (such as anything from DEC).
Value includes all sorts of things that do not generally appear in specifications charts, not least of which are:
tactile quality
useful lifespan
durability
MTBF
depreciation rate
ergonomics
serviceability
frequency of service
warranty/support
Not to mention all sorts of things that *do* appear in specs charts of high-quality machines, but are selectively ignored in the specs charts of cheap machines, such as:
thickness
loudness
brightness
materials
mechanical parts/connectors (such as the magnetic power cords on the new MacBooks)
Well, they are about to release a fairly nice laptop, but for the past several years they have been selling dated and slow machines becuase they couldn't properly work their newer processor architecture into a laptop.
My office mate at the next desk has been complaining about her new Windows laptop, which "feels cheap" and is "way too slow", yet on paper it out-specs my older PowerBook by a fair margin.
So "niceness" in the sense that the GP meant has little to do with raw CPU specs. The tactile sense of speed has more to do with video processing, memory, disk speed, and UI/OS than CPU speed, which generally only gets noticed on things like photoshop filters and video processing. And then, of course, there is the tactile sense of quality, which no amount of horsepower will help with.
Good CPU speed can still give you a sucky computer, as my office mate will attest. Although to be fair, a nice computer with a fast CPU is a wonderful thing.
No, you pay your bills with money. Innovation is the usual way to (A) make more money, and (B) spend less money.
I can't sell "innovation".
Sure you can! Every marketing dweeb knows the best way to boost sales is to slap a "New and Improved!" label on it. In many fields it's the only thing you actually *can* sell, to the point where enforced obsolescence is part and parcel of how the industry operates.
If it's not blatently obvious why I need that product, then I generally don't need it.
That sounds like a reactive philosophy, which you may be content with. Some people, however, find that a proactive philosophy (heading off problems before they become "blatantly obvious") works better for the bottom line.
Explain to me in a sentence or two what the problem is that I'm apparently missing
Perl is one of the last ones I'd foist on someone else who's not a programming professional.
Physicists are programming professionals. They deal with data sets, analysis problems, and hardware configurations that are way beyond the cutting edge. They build their own supercomputing clusters, write their own grid processing systems, build advanced dataanalysisframeworks, and fork their own Linux distros. At the physics lab where I worked for 15 years, if a physics grad student was incapable of learning a little Perl (and C, C++, Fortran, Java, TeX, and a couple of shells, and maybe some Python and Ruby) they didn't get their degree.
When launching a new physics project, it was a very serious concern which programming languages you chose to do your software development in. If you were conservative and went with a legacy language like Fortran because of all the pre-existing analysis software available, you had trouble attracting grad students to the project, because they wanted more marketable languages on their resumes. The reason is because if they decided to get out of physics one day, their strongest job prospects are in computing and data analysis.
most people that are insecure enough that they would feel they need this to ensure their dog doesn't run away
I can say from personal experience that this device will ensure your dog will run away. It works like this: call the dog on the phone. Dog hears your voice, and thinks "hey, Master is here!" You say, "Come, Fido! Come!" Dog says "Whee! Must go to master! But where the hell is he? OMG, Master is calling, and I can hear him, so he must be nearby, but I CAN"T SEE HIM! HOLY SHIT THIS IS SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP!" At which point the dog bolts like a bat out of hell, madly searching behind every car, tree, and street corner for where you are obviously hiding.
Yes, I've tried this. It took half an hour to get the dog calmed down again, and thankfully the door was closed, because the dog went straight for the door as soon as she figured out that master wasn't inside.
My mother's dog attacks the TV whenever nature shows are on. Listen people, telecommunications and animals don't mix.
In my own experience, anybody who's serious about setting up Linux servers doesn't bother with commercial support because they are already spending a fortune on their own Unix gurus. Why waste time trying to get your support calls escalated up to a Redhat rent-a-guru, when you have the real thing (hopefully several of them) sequestered in cave-like offices near the server rooms? That's the thing about Linux - it's not hard to find people who know a hell of a lot more about the systems than anyone you could ever locate through a tech support number. What's more, they will happily demolish pesky problems like why your Redhat workstations won't print through your ancient Ultrix printserver, or why your hand-built hundred-node cluster regularly loses nodes 12 and 27, or forking Redhat Enterprise Edition because they don't feel like paying support fees that they'll never use.
Othello and King Lear were written around 1605, so Shakespeare is a full hundred years off the mark. What's more those hundred years involved some of the most serious and dramatic changes to the language of its entire history, given that the English Renaissance transpired in the late 1500s. English in 1505 was a pre-Renaissance vulgar tongue that was believed to be inadequate for serious writing. (But it had already come a long way; in 1405, English wasn't even the official language of England...)
No, I was the 2nd person to like the remake, and I've met the third, so it's well on its way to cult status. I liked Contact, too. Better than the book, actually. In fact, you can't even run a top ten list of intelligent sci-fi space movies, since there have been only 3: 2001, Contact, and Solaris.
Now if somebody were to make a decent film of William Gibson's Hinterlands, we could add a fourth.
I think that your average samurai, landesknecht, or Iroquios from 1505 would have trouble recognizing much of anything in today's society. Your average English speaker from 1505 wouldn't even be able to converse with someone.
If X and Y are commodities, you are correct. Any company can step in and provide an alternative source.
But for anything that has restrictive licensing or IP encumbrances, no way. Companies are free to limit their products for whatever reason they see fit, and simply not license any competitors to fill the gap. Everybody does it, including Apple.
As far as "intentionally crippling their devices to make them sucky", well nobody does that, because people don't buy "sucky" products. What you do is disable features that non-power users aren't going to miss, and then charge a premium for enabling those features on the "professional" product line. One iBook example I can think of is dual-head display, which is not enabled on iBooks for no real technical reason, but works nicely on the PowerBooks with no special setup. Your average iBook user isn't going to notice that or care, so they won't perceive the product as being sucky. The other example that comes to mind is the "prosumer" digital SLRs, which are often the same camera as the full pro models, just with features disabled in firmware. Basically, every manufacturer does this for as long as they can get away with it. If a competitor starts to succeed with something that fills the gap, it's easy to just start enabling your missing features to "keep up". But for the most part, the competitors don't do that, because they're busy doing the same thing in their own product lines, and the money to be made from professional premiums is more than that to be made from volume sales of discount consumer models.
So if you knew you were working on the Trans-Siberian pipeline, how exactly did the Soviets "steal" your software (in the words of the article)? Did you not get paid, or is this a case of Cold War FUD, and anything the Soviets bought was described as "stolen" for propaganda purposes?
Well, they do. It's just that most of them don't get beyond a handful of followers on some commune somewhere. Only a small handful per millenia manage to grow to full-blown religion status.
Not a whole lot different than tech startups, now that I think about it...
Um, governments are an active part of the marketplace, aren't they? They buy *lots* of software, at prices that are set by their suppliers. In other words, the proprietary software industry is already suckling at the government teat to the tune of billions/year, and this spending has questionable benefits for the government and the taxpayers.
Some people in this thread seem to think that if the government buys OSS software instead of proprietary software, this somehow implies a government takeover of OSS projects, formations of massive civil-service bureaucracies and government departments to control OSS code production, and a soviet-style monopoly of software packages. These peoples' brains have clearly been addled by 1960s-era propaganda and really bad comic books. Pay them no more attention than you would a child who asks what would happen if a dinosaur attacked your city. Smile, mention something about laser death rays, tuck them into bed, and wish them sweet dreams.
Anyway, this is not a welfare program for OSS, nor is it Big Brother trying to exert regulatory control over the software industry. It is nothing more than a way for government to buy its software at a better price. Except that it has the added benefit that *everyone* ultimately gets the software at a better price, so the benefit to citizens is doubled.
The problem is that the market they once had, being high-end graphics workstations, is being eaten up by cheap MS-Windows based systems.
The SGI market wasn't 1337 gamerz machines, and not even CAD visualization (which was more of a general Unix workstation market segment originally), which is where cheap Windows PCs took over. SGI had cornered high-end rendering, and that kind of work is now done on massively parallel Linux clusters.
Indeed. As a switcher from Linux to OS X, I'm starting to get pretty annoyed with the "Mac takes the low road" meme, since it is in every way the most sophisticated desktop OS on the market. The similar "Mac is easier for novices" meme is equally annoying, since historically the Mac has NOT succeeded among casual home users. The markets where Mac has consistently succeeded is among professionals who use very expensive and technical software suites to do their work. It didn't succeed for me in the past because the technical software suite where I do my work is the Unix CLI, a deficiency that Apple remedied in OS X.
Coming from the Linux world, Windows is so obviously the OS that has dumbed itself down for the novice, whereas the Mac is so obviously the OS that has invested effort into productivity for advanced users on the desktop. But "ease of productivity" for professionals is not the same as "ease of learning how to use a computer" for a novice. Windows has the novice market locked down tight, from the infamous start button, to the desktop populated with application launcher icons, to monolithic applications that want to work in full-screen mode; everything caters to the naive user. The Mac, on the other hand seems to presume that you are working on a large display, with numerous tool and working windows placed where they are convenient to you, and drag-and-drop interoperability between these windows that is reminiscent of using pipes to connect apps on a CLI. That's not novice stuff, and it takes a while to learn to use it. Once you've got the hang of it, though, it's really hard to go back. That's the real reason Mac users are fanatical and loyal, I've concluded, and it has nothing to do with novices. Indeed the whole idea of a fanatic novice is a bit of an oxymoron.
You still have a few hundred thousand feet of climbing in non-zero vacuum, and much, much farther than that in significant gravity, for a proper space elevator. Why not use these environments to advantage (eg. balloons and counter-weights, just off the top of my head)? It's the same idea behind a space plane - you'll likely need different engines for different stages of the journey, each one optimized to a particular operating regime. I'm sure the ideal climber in the low-atmosphere, low-G environment at 12,000 km is very different than the ideal climber at an altitude of 12 meters. Who says the climber has to use the same climbing mechanism at these different points, or even that it has to be the same climber at all? I could see different climbers passing their cargo off to each other at 30 km, 150km, 10,000 km, and so on, as you reach different operating regimes.
The non-techies (think English majors, graphic design artists, etc.) found the Mac systems easier and more intuitive to use,
I would disagree with this common belief. The early Mac systems were the *only* personal computers that could do difficult technical tasks like layout and typography. It wasn't a case of clueless artsy-fartsies not knowing how to operate a computer, it was a case of clued-in techies (eg. users of Compugraphic phototypesetting systems) latching on to systems that gave them more flexibility and power at a fraction of the price. That's how Apple dominated the graphic design market, and one of the reasons why to this day Apple's best work is at the "professional" end of the market. This is the opposite of what I'd expect from a company that catered to clueless users. And FWIW, professional packages in these fields can be exceptionally complicated, so we _are_ talking about techinical people, not English majors.
If non-techies are responsible for the rise of any system, it would be Windows. And if anyone claims that Windows is/was appealing to techies, I would respond by saying that computer techies love the *PC*. Windows just came along for the ride, and as soon as a more techie-oriented OS came along (namely Linux), the Windows world started hemmoraging geeks, who, it should be noted, never let go of their PCs.
The difference between a PC techie and a Mac techie is simply the tech itself. For a PC techie, the tech == the computer. For a Mac techie, the tech is something else (cameras, mixing board, editing studio, typesetting system,...) which the Mac simply augments as a component. In recent years computer technology has grown so that the PC itself is just a component of a larger, more exotic piece of technology (cluster, network, etc.), which means that the computer techie's mental model of the utility of their PC is converging with the creative techie's; ie. it's a tool that lets you play better with the "real" technology. Interestingly, the Mac has taken off among high-level computer techies for exactly this reason. So I'm skeptical about the whole "ease of use" myth surrounding the Mac. I switched after I saw the sysadmins at my previous job (at a nuclear physics lab) switch. Those guys don't give a damn about "ease of use" for newbies, but they sure do care about their productivity when messing around with computing grids and cyclotrons. Which is not a whole lot different than how a professional photoghrapher feels about his/her computer.
On the other hand, you could have crap like the man/elf love subplot tacked onto the original story which flies out and hits the audience like a ton of bricks because there is no continuity between it and the rest of the story.
OT, but you have it backwards. It was literally "tacked on" in the books, where the "man/elf love subplot" appears in the appendices. But parts of this subplot (especially Arwen's fate after the death of Aragorn) were adapted quite faithfully in the movie. The truly egregious deviations from the book (eg. Arwen fighting at Helm's Deep) were deleted from the final film cuts, thankfully.
It's annoying when people try to use the "GNU image MANIPULATION program" to create illustrations... Same with photoshop. To people who ask me simple things like how to draw basic shapes in photoshop, I ask why they don't use illustrator. And to people asking those questions in GIMP, I point them to Inkscape
Why is it annoying? Illustrations and photos are not mututally exclusive categories of images. There is lots of overlap, especially when dealing technical imagery such as maps, scientific imagery, screenshots, and annotated photos. Additionally, a large (very, very large) proportion of computer illustration work starts from raster images, finishes with raster images, and requires a substantial amount of raster image manipulation operations in the intermediate phases, so being forced to switch to a vector illustration program at any point in the process is a royal PITA. Even more so when you realize that basic shape drawing has been part of raster drawing programs since the earliest paint programs, and their disappearance from the "high end" applications is inexplicable.
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Indeed. And given that Mac users pay for more of their software than PC users, the Mac's share of the Office market is likely signficantly more than 3-4% by dollars instead of users.
Microsoft's problem is that Apple could fairly easily make a smoking, open, cross-platform office suite just by taking OOo and giving it a hot little Aqua outfit and applying some of that Apple secret sauce, just like they did with KHTML and Safari. In fact, I wouldn't be surpised if they've already done that as a back-up plan, just like their Intel port of OS X. If such a critter was ever released, it would probably just be bundled with the OS for free, since it's free software to start with. A quiet little demo of this project with the Microsoft rep would be all that it takes to ensure that MS keeps supporting Office-Mac until the end of time.
Value includes all sorts of things that do not generally appear in specifications charts, not least of which are:
Not to mention all sorts of things that *do* appear in specs charts of high-quality machines, but are selectively ignored in the specs charts of cheap machines, such as:
My office mate at the next desk has been complaining about her new Windows laptop, which "feels cheap" and is "way too slow", yet on paper it out-specs my older PowerBook by a fair margin. So "niceness" in the sense that the GP meant has little to do with raw CPU specs. The tactile sense of speed has more to do with video processing, memory, disk speed, and UI/OS than CPU speed, which generally only gets noticed on things like photoshop filters and video processing. And then, of course, there is the tactile sense of quality, which no amount of horsepower will help with. Good CPU speed can still give you a sucky computer, as my office mate will attest. Although to be fair, a nice computer with a fast CPU is a wonderful thing.
No, you pay your bills with money. Innovation is the usual way to (A) make more money, and (B) spend less money.
I can't sell "innovation".
Sure you can! Every marketing dweeb knows the best way to boost sales is to slap a "New and Improved!" label on it. In many fields it's the only thing you actually *can* sell, to the point where enforced obsolescence is part and parcel of how the industry operates.
If it's not blatently obvious why I need that product, then I generally don't need it.
That sounds like a reactive philosophy, which you may be content with. Some people, however, find that a proactive philosophy (heading off problems before they become "blatantly obvious") works better for the bottom line.
Explain to me in a sentence or two what the problem is that I'm apparently missing
You don't like change.
Perl is one of the last ones I'd foist on someone else who's not a programming professional.
Physicists are programming professionals. They deal with data sets, analysis problems, and hardware configurations that are way beyond the cutting edge. They build their own supercomputing clusters, write their own grid processing systems, build advanced data analysis frameworks, and fork their own Linux distros. At the physics lab where I worked for 15 years, if a physics grad student was incapable of learning a little Perl (and C, C++, Fortran, Java, TeX, and a couple of shells, and maybe some Python and Ruby) they didn't get their degree.
When launching a new physics project, it was a very serious concern which programming languages you chose to do your software development in. If you were conservative and went with a legacy language like Fortran because of all the pre-existing analysis software available, you had trouble attracting grad students to the project, because they wanted more marketable languages on their resumes. The reason is because if they decided to get out of physics one day, their strongest job prospects are in computing and data analysis.
most people that are insecure enough that they would feel they need this to ensure their dog doesn't run away
I can say from personal experience that this device will ensure your dog will run away. It works like this: call the dog on the phone. Dog hears your voice, and thinks "hey, Master is here!" You say, "Come, Fido! Come!" Dog says "Whee! Must go to master! But where the hell is he? OMG, Master is calling, and I can hear him, so he must be nearby, but I CAN"T SEE HIM! HOLY SHIT THIS IS SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP!" At which point the dog bolts like a bat out of hell, madly searching behind every car, tree, and street corner for where you are obviously hiding.
Yes, I've tried this. It took half an hour to get the dog calmed down again, and thankfully the door was closed, because the dog went straight for the door as soon as she figured out that master wasn't inside.
My mother's dog attacks the TV whenever nature shows are on. Listen people, telecommunications and animals don't mix.
In my own experience, anybody who's serious about setting up Linux servers doesn't bother with commercial support because they are already spending a fortune on their own Unix gurus. Why waste time trying to get your support calls escalated up to a Redhat rent-a-guru, when you have the real thing (hopefully several of them) sequestered in cave-like offices near the server rooms? That's the thing about Linux - it's not hard to find people who know a hell of a lot more about the systems than anyone you could ever locate through a tech support number. What's more, they will happily demolish pesky problems like why your Redhat workstations won't print through your ancient Ultrix printserver, or why your hand-built hundred-node cluster regularly loses nodes 12 and 27, or forking Redhat Enterprise Edition because they don't feel like paying support fees that they'll never use.
Powerbooks use both displays automatically. Just plug in the monitor and you're instanly dual-heading. It's iBooks that need the hack.
Othello and King Lear were written around 1605, so Shakespeare is a full hundred years off the mark. What's more those hundred years involved some of the most serious and dramatic changes to the language of its entire history, given that the English Renaissance transpired in the late 1500s. English in 1505 was a pre-Renaissance vulgar tongue that was believed to be inadequate for serious writing. (But it had already come a long way; in 1405, English wasn't even the official language of England...)
Now if somebody were to make a decent film of William Gibson's Hinterlands, we could add a fourth.
Jaws invented the summer blockbuster. Star Wars was the first movie to successfully repeat the formula.
I think that your average samurai, landesknecht, or Iroquios from 1505 would have trouble recognizing much of anything in today's society. Your average English speaker from 1505 wouldn't even be able to converse with someone.
But for anything that has restrictive licensing or IP encumbrances, no way. Companies are free to limit their products for whatever reason they see fit, and simply not license any competitors to fill the gap. Everybody does it, including Apple.
As far as "intentionally crippling their devices to make them sucky", well nobody does that, because people don't buy "sucky" products. What you do is disable features that non-power users aren't going to miss, and then charge a premium for enabling those features on the "professional" product line. One iBook example I can think of is dual-head display, which is not enabled on iBooks for no real technical reason, but works nicely on the PowerBooks with no special setup. Your average iBook user isn't going to notice that or care, so they won't perceive the product as being sucky. The other example that comes to mind is the "prosumer" digital SLRs, which are often the same camera as the full pro models, just with features disabled in firmware. Basically, every manufacturer does this for as long as they can get away with it. If a competitor starts to succeed with something that fills the gap, it's easy to just start enabling your missing features to "keep up". But for the most part, the competitors don't do that, because they're busy doing the same thing in their own product lines, and the money to be made from professional premiums is more than that to be made from volume sales of discount consumer models.
Will you be my CEO? Everyone else just whines about how hard it is to double revenues from $100M to $200M in 2 years.
Not a whole lot different than tech startups, now that I think about it...
Um, governments are an active part of the marketplace, aren't they? They buy *lots* of software, at prices that are set by their suppliers. In other words, the proprietary software industry is already suckling at the government teat to the tune of billions/year, and this spending has questionable benefits for the government and the taxpayers.
Some people in this thread seem to think that if the government buys OSS software instead of proprietary software, this somehow implies a government takeover of OSS projects, formations of massive civil-service bureaucracies and government departments to control OSS code production, and a soviet-style monopoly of software packages. These peoples' brains have clearly been addled by 1960s-era propaganda and really bad comic books. Pay them no more attention than you would a child who asks what would happen if a dinosaur attacked your city. Smile, mention something about laser death rays, tuck them into bed, and wish them sweet dreams.
Anyway, this is not a welfare program for OSS, nor is it Big Brother trying to exert regulatory control over the software industry. It is nothing more than a way for government to buy its software at a better price. Except that it has the added benefit that *everyone* ultimately gets the software at a better price, so the benefit to citizens is doubled.
The problem is that the market they once had, being high-end graphics workstations, is being eaten up by cheap MS-Windows based systems.
The SGI market wasn't 1337 gamerz machines, and not even CAD visualization (which was more of a general Unix workstation market segment originally), which is where cheap Windows PCs took over. SGI had cornered high-end rendering, and that kind of work is now done on massively parallel Linux clusters.
Coming from the Linux world, Windows is so obviously the OS that has dumbed itself down for the novice, whereas the Mac is so obviously the OS that has invested effort into productivity for advanced users on the desktop. But "ease of productivity" for professionals is not the same as "ease of learning how to use a computer" for a novice. Windows has the novice market locked down tight, from the infamous start button, to the desktop populated with application launcher icons, to monolithic applications that want to work in full-screen mode; everything caters to the naive user. The Mac, on the other hand seems to presume that you are working on a large display, with numerous tool and working windows placed where they are convenient to you, and drag-and-drop interoperability between these windows that is reminiscent of using pipes to connect apps on a CLI. That's not novice stuff, and it takes a while to learn to use it. Once you've got the hang of it, though, it's really hard to go back. That's the real reason Mac users are fanatical and loyal, I've concluded, and it has nothing to do with novices. Indeed the whole idea of a fanatic novice is a bit of an oxymoron.
You still have a few hundred thousand feet of climbing in non-zero vacuum, and much, much farther than that in significant gravity, for a proper space elevator. Why not use these environments to advantage (eg. balloons and counter-weights, just off the top of my head)? It's the same idea behind a space plane - you'll likely need different engines for different stages of the journey, each one optimized to a particular operating regime. I'm sure the ideal climber in the low-atmosphere, low-G environment at 12,000 km is very different than the ideal climber at an altitude of 12 meters. Who says the climber has to use the same climbing mechanism at these different points, or even that it has to be the same climber at all? I could see different climbers passing their cargo off to each other at 30 km, 150km, 10,000 km, and so on, as you reach different operating regimes.
The non-techies (think English majors, graphic design artists, etc.) found the Mac systems easier and more intuitive to use,
I would disagree with this common belief. The early Mac systems were the *only* personal computers that could do difficult technical tasks like layout and typography. It wasn't a case of clueless artsy-fartsies not knowing how to operate a computer, it was a case of clued-in techies (eg. users of Compugraphic phototypesetting systems) latching on to systems that gave them more flexibility and power at a fraction of the price. That's how Apple dominated the graphic design market, and one of the reasons why to this day Apple's best work is at the "professional" end of the market. This is the opposite of what I'd expect from a company that catered to clueless users. And FWIW, professional packages in these fields can be exceptionally complicated, so we _are_ talking about techinical people, not English majors.
If non-techies are responsible for the rise of any system, it would be Windows. And if anyone claims that Windows is/was appealing to techies, I would respond by saying that computer techies love the *PC*. Windows just came along for the ride, and as soon as a more techie-oriented OS came along (namely Linux), the Windows world started hemmoraging geeks, who, it should be noted, never let go of their PCs.
The difference between a PC techie and a Mac techie is simply the tech itself. For a PC techie, the tech == the computer. For a Mac techie, the tech is something else (cameras, mixing board, editing studio, typesetting system, ...) which the Mac simply augments as a component. In recent years computer technology has grown so that the PC itself is just a component of a larger, more exotic piece of technology (cluster, network, etc.), which means that the computer techie's mental model of the utility of their PC is converging with the creative techie's; ie. it's a tool that lets you play better with the "real" technology. Interestingly, the Mac has taken off among high-level computer techies for exactly this reason. So I'm skeptical about the whole "ease of use" myth surrounding the Mac. I switched after I saw the sysadmins at my previous job (at a nuclear physics lab) switch. Those guys don't give a damn about "ease of use" for newbies, but they sure do care about their productivity when messing around with computing grids and cyclotrons. Which is not a whole lot different than how a professional photoghrapher feels about his/her computer.
All the states listed are pretty socialist, compared to the US anyway.
This might be meaningful if I could think of some countries that are not "pretty socialist" compared to the U.S.
On the other hand, you could have crap like the man/elf love subplot tacked onto the original story which flies out and hits the audience like a ton of bricks because there is no continuity between it and the rest of the story.
OT, but you have it backwards. It was literally "tacked on" in the books, where the "man/elf love subplot" appears in the appendices. But parts of this subplot (especially Arwen's fate after the death of Aragorn) were adapted quite faithfully in the movie. The truly egregious deviations from the book (eg. Arwen fighting at Helm's Deep) were deleted from the final film cuts, thankfully.
It's annoying when people try to use the "GNU image MANIPULATION program" to create illustrations... Same with photoshop. To people who ask me simple things like how to draw basic shapes in photoshop, I ask why they don't use illustrator. And to people asking those questions in GIMP, I point them to Inkscape
Why is it annoying? Illustrations and photos are not mututally exclusive categories of images. There is lots of overlap, especially when dealing technical imagery such as maps, scientific imagery, screenshots, and annotated photos. Additionally, a large (very, very large) proportion of computer illustration work starts from raster images, finishes with raster images, and requires a substantial amount of raster image manipulation operations in the intermediate phases, so being forced to switch to a vector illustration program at any point in the process is a royal PITA. Even more so when you realize that basic shape drawing has been part of raster drawing programs since the earliest paint programs, and their disappearance from the "high end" applications is inexplicable.