Re:you're not counting quite right
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1
If you run OS X, you're going to spend 10 minutes installing fink or darwinports, then install the extra apps you want using their package mangler & precompiled packages.
Unfortunately, Fink does not seem to work as well as Linux-native package managers. In addition to problems with Fink itself, there is always the problem of figuring out what to do when there are both Mac native and Fink-based packages with similar functionality (Emacs, TeX, etc.).
So where's the advantage of running Linux for a laptop?
It provides a single, consistent, open environment and UI for the laptop. With OS X and Fink, I get a schizophrenic and wildly inconsistent UI (X11, Carbon, and Aqua), a schizophrenic command line environment (BSD, GNU), inconsistent toolkits, and inconsistent package mangement (drag-and-drop, Fink, installer, Java installer, etc.).
And for all that, I need to pay a premium for a slower machine. And I still have the hassle of upgrading and installing from CD when the next release comes out.
Sorry, that's a bad deal as far as I'm concerned. Ubuntu, SuSE, Debian, and Knoppix run fine on many laptops, and you can even get them preinstalled. With Linux, you get all the goodness of a UNIX-based laptop, with a great-looking and open UI, and without the inconsistencies and mess you get with an OS X/Fink machine.
hen was it? Apple's schtick isn't having cutting-edge hardware, it's having software that just works.
Repeating this over and over again doesn't make it true. I, too, embraced OS X enthusiastically when it came out, only to be disappointed. Plenty of things don't work well on OS X: CUPS, networking, and Netinfo, to name just a few. The proprietary window system and hokey programming language used for development are other minuses.
I went back to Linux and only use OS X occasionally anymore.
Preinstalled OS X machines may do 3D and wireless out of the box, but they are time sinks in other ways: it takes time to install Fink and all the commercial software you want. On balance, I think neither setup comes out ahead in terms of how much time it takes to set up--you are just spending your time differently.
If you want to save time, buy a Linux laptop with Linux preinstalled. That way, you get all the Linux software and it works out of the box.
The alternative, at least for laptops, is IBM... at twice the price.
There are plenty of very nice x86 laptops.
And yes, your brand new very pretty computer will work well with Linux just fine, so there seems to be little downside at all*.
As you point out yourself, you don't get 3D support and you don't get 802.11g. Well, guess what, there are plenty of x86 laptops on which all of that works under Linux.
convenient "conversion" on the part of Graham
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I was there when the Mac was introduced (we got to see a pre-release model). I was using it on-and-off during the 90's. It's not even worth disputing Graham's confused and erroneous ramblings point-by-point. Maybe Graham's view is warped by his Lisp view of things: the Macintosh has been a long-term haven for Lisp hackers, both because MCL was pretty good and because Lisp hackers didn't have much of an alternative when all the other commercial choices tanked.
But one point is important, and that's Graham's promotion of OSX as BSD-based and open. Graham is a long-term Lisp hacker, and until Lisp became commercially worthless, all good Lisp implementations were proprietary and commercial. Graham apparently hasn't cared about platforms being open in the past, and he has been part of a crowd that has been railing against UNIX/C for twenty years. When he promotes OSX because it has BSD underpinnings and is supposedly "open", I think he is just catering to the crowd and reiterating things people want to hear; he doesn't really care whether they are true as long as they promote his currently favorite pet platform.
Whether Graham is disingenuous or merely confused, it's important to be clear about OSX. While parts of OSX are "open" and Apple is smart enough to reuse useful open source software (they just don't have the resources to do everything themselves), crucial parts of OSX are not open, among them the GUI, the graphics subsystem, and the toolkits. Apple has been quite clear about the fact that they view these parts as the value proposition of their platform, and they have been defending it.
Use OSX if you like, but don't try to pretend that it's an "open" choice.
This is what started this thread: When it comes down to it, if you do professional graphics, you use photoshop whether you like it or not. And that's just bullshit. Most money-making uses of graphics (or digital imaging) do not involve Photoshop or even professional photographers.
I don't care about hobbyists taking digital photos of their kids or cars.
You are just demonstrating your arrogance all over again.
Yes, but those are the ones for which Photoshop was invented, and for which it is the tool of choice. [...] I have stated my opinion, based on fifteen years of professional experience, which includes working with numerous professional photographers.
Professional photographers don't generally have qualifications in physics, software development, or engineering--they are merely consumers of digital imaging products. They can tell us what products they like and find useful, but that's where their expertise ends.
Whereas before I only thought you a fool, you have opened your mouth and proved yourself one by assuming you know anything about my experience.
No, I just took you at your word when you wrote "As Photoshop's capabilities have expanded, so have the creative visions of designers. We're screwing with color and layout in ways that were impossible ten years ago [...]". You're right on the first point--Photoshop democratized digital imaging to the point where it reached people like you. You are wrong on the second point.
Dude, I'm beginning to think you're full of it. Every, and I mean EVERY picture you see in any magazine or newspaper has been modified in Photoshop, be it something as simple as adjusting colors for the heavier dot gain you get from newsprint to the two or three days of manipulation per image for the money shots in magazines like Maxim or National Geographic
Dude, your problem is that you think the tiny, narrow world of prepress and magazine cover represents all of professional photography or, even worse, all of digital imaging. Among the billions of analog and digital photographs taken every year professionally, only a tiny fraction ever gets printed and an even tinier fraction gets published on magazine covers. And even when you put things onto magazine covers, you should go lightly on manipulation (remember OJ?).
Use Photoshop if you like. It may or may not be the tool you personally happen to need. But it is extremely arrogant of you to think that the whole world of digital imaging revolves around your kind, and it is irresponsible of you to give advice based on your limited and narrow application.
As Photoshop's capabilities have expanded, so have the creative visions of designers. We're screwing with color and layout in ways that were impossible ten years ago. I've put one model's face on another model's body, changed the color of clothing, adding entirely new backgrounds, creating smoke and clouds where there were none, and I've done all of these things many, many times
Yes, and that's the problem with people like you: your entire experience with advanced digital imaging technologies is through Photoshop--you only learn about this stuff as Adobe adds it to Photoshop.
Because those are the things you do every day if you work in professional print production.
So, use it for that. But don't tell other people that because you find it useful for that niche application (and that's what it is compared to all the other uses of digital imaging) that it's the only "professional" tool for manipulating images.
For most professional users and uses of images these days, Photoshop is just too bloated and unnecessarily expensive. People buy it not because they need it or because it's the best tool for their job, but just because people like you tell them to.
All film photographers that have ever used a darkroom for anything other than processing suck.
That's not what I said. What I said was that the thing to aim for is to do a little adjustment after you take the shot as possible. When you do need to make adjustments (including everything Ansel Adams ever did), then you don't need a $600 program for that.
Sure would be nice to as talented as you and *never* touch any photo, digital or analog, that comes straight from the camera.
I actually touch a lot of images; it's part of my work. But I'm not a photographer, I work on digital imaging.
Of course, you are correct. I suck.
Yes, you do suck. You suck because you confuse gimmickry with functionality and tell people that they need to buy a specific product in order to be professionals. But, hey, it's not like that's a new thing with people like you.
If you don't have a darkroom to do your dodge/burn then guess what you get to use after you've scanned your negs - Photoshop.
I guess your analog technique is as poor as your digital technique.
Answer the question at hand.
I did: take your pictures correctly so that you don't need to fiddle with them after they leave the camera.
If you do need to fiddle, just about any image manipulation program should do: pretty much all of them support cropping, curves, cloning, and the handful of other standard operations one ever needs.
Most of these problems can be solved fairly simply: give them a copy of Knoppix or Ubuntu/Live and just have them use that. Data goes on USB sticks. There is little to screw up that way and it fulfills all the basic functions that people need: web, office, mail, graphics, etc.
Supposing you really have been editing digital images since before Feb 1990 (Photoshop 1.0 release), what was it that you were using at the time?
SGI and Symbolics.
What do you use now for your photo editing needs?
Much of it is batch processing using open source tools. Otherwise, I don't have a strong preference--there are lots of tools that get the job done. My point is that you don't need a $600 program to do digital imaging.
I DON'T see is what parent thinks is better. Please provide that information/opinion and un-troll if you will.
What is "better" is getting your framing, props, lighting, color balance, and makeup right from the start so that you don't have to do any kind of digital image manipulation of your photographs.
You are confusing the exceptional with the regular. For day-to-day work with digital images, if you need to fiddle in Photoshop, you are wasting your time: almost all product shots, portraits, landscapes, etc. should be usable straight out of the camera, and it shouldn't be an effort for a professional to accomplish that.
It's, of course, completely "valid" for people to manipulate images in whatever way they like, it's just that most people don't seem produce anything good when they try, and that the number of such images is tiny (although they receive lots of attention). Even in Adams' time, unmanipulated images was the bread and butter.
I can't really see where the problem with Quicktime is? Installing another Media Player takes two steps, download, drop into the Application folder, be done.
The problem with Quicktime is that it's proprietary nagware that is required to view a lot of content.
Basically, it's the same problem as with WMP, except that Quicktime nags more and that Apple thumbs their nose at other people's UI conventions when they "port" their software.
IT departments are concerned with many things, including networking, security policies, file servers, web servers, etc. What hardware and OS you buy makes little difference to most of those tasks.
Macs shine in small workgroups, where they have some advantages. Those advantages don't scale to large organizations: managing a large Mac network is as hard as managing a large Windows network--possibly harder, because there are fewer tools and fewer skilled people.
We all know how well spatial Nautilus was recieved.
Spatial Nautilus is fine: it's very straightforward. It really is what the Macintosh Finder ought to be, and it's actually more what the Macintosh finder used to be like.
I don't think you can win - there is no "better" only "different".
You can be better in specific markets. Spatial Nautilus is probably a better paradigm for Apple's user community than the OS X finder. On the other hand, for Gnome, something more powerful might be better.
reluctance of corporate America
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Corporate America is risk-averse. With Microsoft, they get their OS from a single company, but they have a wide range of hardware choices. Furthermore, it may be a single software company, the software company is a monopolist, is extraordinarily wealthy, and will hang around for a long time.
With Apple, they have only a single source for both their hardware and software. The hardware range is limited and prices are essentially fixed by Apple. The operating system is used by only a few percent of computer users, and the application programming interfaces are neither a de-facto standard nor are they open source or conform to other open standards.
If Apple wants to catch on more widely, they either have to make their entire software platform open (probably ditching at least Quartz), or they have to create a third party PPC market (which they can share with Linux). If they don't do either, they won't be growing much more.
You aren't getting into the spirit of this. You see, when Apple does anything, it's automatically OK. Apple may ship things they didn't invent and even incorrectly claim that they invented it, Apple may bundle hardware and software, Apple may bundle applications into the OS, Apple may make it hard to use any media player but theirs, Apple may violate GUI guidelines, Apple may create scripting vulnerabilities, etc. It's because Apple is the underdog, and because Apple fan boys don't see that #2 is just as evil as #1.
Now when you are a convicted monopolist who does it to crush your competition, that's when it becomes a problem.
No, it is already a problem because we don't have a free market in operating systems, we have an Apple/Microsoft duopoly. Apple's bundling practices make it unnecessarily hard for new operating systems and new applications to enter the market, and that's a problem.
Apple may be able to get away legally with what they are doing (if not for any other reason than that they are too small to bother with), just like they can get away with lying in the advertising, but that doesn't make it right or good for users or the market. And in the unlikely event that Apple should ever manage to grab a significant share of the market again, we are all in big trouble.
Photoshop is good. I may have a biasedness toward it, because I learned how to use it with Photoshop 2.0 in Computer Graphics/Advanced Comp Graphics AP in highschool, on a Mac.
Well, let me put it this way: I have been working with digital images for longer than Photoshop has even existed, and I don't think it's "good". I think most of it is useless gimmicks and the UI positively sucks.
Photoshop is quite analogous to Windows: the company was not the first to produce such a product, and their product absolutely sucked when it first came out. Then, they spent years incorporating suggestions from end users, adding features, and becoming a de-facto standard platform for plug-ins. Now, every Photoshop monkey incorrectly thinks that Adobe invented it all. Everybody gets trained on Photoshop and they think anything else is bad. And most of the alternatives have disappeared from the market.
Most people on the "intarweb" with bad photoshop opinions simply warez'd some version, and cant figure out how all of those artists make such pretty pictures
Most people who think that good photographs are created in Photoshop are simply lousy photographers. If you know your craft, you'll need to do very little work in a photo editor.
When it comes down to it, if you do professional graphics, you use photoshop whether you like it or not.
What it comes down to is that you can use for photo editing whatever you damned well want to because the only thing that counts is the result.
And I think you can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by going with a different package, even if Photoshop monkeys are trying to tell you otherwise.
Everything from flying to firing a machine gun. That was the technology that they made possible.
Quite wrong. They didn't make the technology possible--that was done in decades of research on control systems, robotics, and human perception, done by hundreds of researchers, often funded at taxpayer expense.
What that patent appears to attempt is to lock up an entire range of applications based on that research, without actually disclosing anything that is actually technically useful.
# MS worked with Immersion to develop FF into the Direct X API in 1997. # Apple similarly worked with Immersion to develop a FF API for OS X.
And what does that prove? Immersion seems to have had credibility in that they understood this technology and marketed it, but that's not the same as creating it.
Besides, both Microsoft and Apple have strong motivations to prop up patents, even questionable patents, that keep competitors from entering their markets. Both companies are likely to license patents, rather than litigate, if they are cheap enough to them.
If it was a scam, wouldn't you think that a good set of lawyers would be able to litigate out that point?
No, you wouldn't. The patent system has genuine holes in it that allow companies to abuse it, and there is not a damned thing even the smartest lawyer can do about it.
When a smaller business gets infringed by a global, unlimited funds company that is trying to stay ahead of innovation and still make a quarterly report that has enourmous expectations, then you call foul?
Well, I think what one calls it should depend on the details of the patent. I don't know the details of this patent, but I do know that this company did not invent force feedback, not even in game controllers. So, the question is: can you make a good argument for why their patent should be valid? What is the actual novelty contained in their patent? Those are, in fact, I think the first questions we should ask when a patent gets litigated; it's an unfortunate error in our patent system that patents are automatically presumed valid and enforceable when granted.
Slashdot Mirror
If you run OS X, you're going to spend 10 minutes installing fink or darwinports, then install the extra apps you want using their package mangler & precompiled packages.
Unfortunately, Fink does not seem to work as well as Linux-native package managers. In addition to problems with Fink itself, there is always the problem of figuring out what to do when there are both Mac native and Fink-based packages with similar functionality (Emacs, TeX, etc.).
So where's the advantage of running Linux for a laptop?
It provides a single, consistent, open environment and UI for the laptop. With OS X and Fink, I get a schizophrenic and wildly inconsistent UI (X11, Carbon, and Aqua), a schizophrenic command line environment (BSD, GNU), inconsistent toolkits, and inconsistent package mangement (drag-and-drop, Fink, installer, Java installer, etc.).
And for all that, I need to pay a premium for a slower machine. And I still have the hassle of upgrading and installing from CD when the next release comes out.
Sorry, that's a bad deal as far as I'm concerned. Ubuntu, SuSE, Debian, and Knoppix run fine on many laptops, and you can even get them preinstalled. With Linux, you get all the goodness of a UNIX-based laptop, with a great-looking and open UI, and without the inconsistencies and mess you get with an OS X/Fink machine.
hen was it? Apple's schtick isn't having cutting-edge hardware, it's having software that just works.
Repeating this over and over again doesn't make it true. I, too, embraced OS X enthusiastically when it came out, only to be disappointed. Plenty of things don't work well on OS X: CUPS, networking, and Netinfo, to name just a few. The proprietary window system and hokey programming language used for development are other minuses.
I went back to Linux and only use OS X occasionally anymore.
Preinstalled OS X machines may do 3D and wireless out of the box, but they are time sinks in other ways: it takes time to install Fink and all the commercial software you want. On balance, I think neither setup comes out ahead in terms of how much time it takes to set up--you are just spending your time differently.
If you want to save time, buy a Linux laptop with Linux preinstalled. That way, you get all the Linux software and it works out of the box.
The alternative, at least for laptops, is IBM... at twice the price.
There are plenty of very nice x86 laptops.
And yes, your brand new very pretty computer will work well with Linux just fine, so there seems to be little downside at all*.
As you point out yourself, you don't get 3D support and you don't get 802.11g. Well, guess what, there are plenty of x86 laptops on which all of that works under Linux.
I was there when the Mac was introduced (we got to see a pre-release model). I was using it on-and-off during the 90's. It's not even worth disputing Graham's confused and erroneous ramblings point-by-point. Maybe Graham's view is warped by his Lisp view of things: the Macintosh has been a long-term haven for Lisp hackers, both because MCL was pretty good and because Lisp hackers didn't have much of an alternative when all the other commercial choices tanked.
But one point is important, and that's Graham's promotion of OSX as BSD-based and open. Graham is a long-term Lisp hacker, and until Lisp became commercially worthless, all good Lisp implementations were proprietary and commercial. Graham apparently hasn't cared about platforms being open in the past, and he has been part of a crowd that has been railing against UNIX/C for twenty years. When he promotes OSX because it has BSD underpinnings and is supposedly "open", I think he is just catering to the crowd and reiterating things people want to hear; he doesn't really care whether they are true as long as they promote his currently favorite pet platform.
Whether Graham is disingenuous or merely confused, it's important to be clear about OSX. While parts of OSX are "open" and Apple is smart enough to reuse useful open source software (they just don't have the resources to do everything themselves), crucial parts of OSX are not open, among them the GUI, the graphics subsystem, and the toolkits. Apple has been quite clear about the fact that they view these parts as the value proposition of their platform, and they have been defending it.
Use OSX if you like, but don't try to pretend that it's an "open" choice.
It's 300k on Debian. That's dynamically linked against the core X11 libraries, but you need those anyway, so there is no harm in dynamic linking it.
Maybe your binary was accidentally linked statically.
This is what started this thread: When it comes down to it, if you do professional graphics, you use photoshop whether you like it or not. And that's just bullshit. Most money-making uses of graphics (or digital imaging) do not involve Photoshop or even professional photographers.
I don't care about hobbyists taking digital photos of their kids or cars.
You are just demonstrating your arrogance all over again.
Yes, but those are the ones for which Photoshop was invented, and for which it is the tool of choice. [...] I have stated my opinion, based on fifteen years of professional experience, which includes working with numerous professional photographers.
Professional photographers don't generally have qualifications in physics, software development, or engineering--they are merely consumers of digital imaging products. They can tell us what products they like and find useful, but that's where their expertise ends.
Whereas before I only thought you a fool, you have opened your mouth and proved yourself one by assuming you know anything about my experience.
No, I just took you at your word when you wrote "As Photoshop's capabilities have expanded, so have the creative visions of designers. We're screwing with color and layout in ways that were impossible ten years ago [...]". You're right on the first point--Photoshop democratized digital imaging to the point where it reached people like you. You are wrong on the second point.
Dude, I'm beginning to think you're full of it. Every, and I mean EVERY picture you see in any magazine or newspaper has been modified in Photoshop, be it something as simple as adjusting colors for the heavier dot gain you get from newsprint to the two or three days of manipulation per image for the money shots in magazines like Maxim or National Geographic
Dude, your problem is that you think the tiny, narrow world of prepress and magazine cover represents all of professional photography or, even worse, all of digital imaging. Among the billions of analog and digital photographs taken every year professionally, only a tiny fraction ever gets printed and an even tinier fraction gets published on magazine covers. And even when you put things onto magazine covers, you should go lightly on manipulation (remember OJ?).
Use Photoshop if you like. It may or may not be the tool you personally happen to need. But it is extremely arrogant of you to think that the whole world of digital imaging revolves around your kind, and it is irresponsible of you to give advice based on your limited and narrow application.
As Photoshop's capabilities have expanded, so have the creative visions of designers. We're screwing with color and layout in ways that were impossible ten years ago. I've put one model's face on another model's body, changed the color of clothing, adding entirely new backgrounds, creating smoke and clouds where there were none, and I've done all of these things many, many times
Yes, and that's the problem with people like you: your entire experience with advanced digital imaging technologies is through Photoshop--you only learn about this stuff as Adobe adds it to Photoshop.
Because those are the things you do every day if you work in professional print production.
So, use it for that. But don't tell other people that because you find it useful for that niche application (and that's what it is compared to all the other uses of digital imaging) that it's the only "professional" tool for manipulating images.
For most professional users and uses of images these days, Photoshop is just too bloated and unnecessarily expensive. People buy it not because they need it or because it's the best tool for their job, but just because people like you tell them to.
All film photographers that have ever used a darkroom for anything other than processing suck.
That's not what I said. What I said was that the thing to aim for is to do a little adjustment after you take the shot as possible. When you do need to make adjustments (including everything Ansel Adams ever did), then you don't need a $600 program for that.
Sure would be nice to as talented as you and *never* touch any photo, digital or analog, that comes straight from the camera.
I actually touch a lot of images; it's part of my work. But I'm not a photographer, I work on digital imaging.
Of course, you are correct. I suck.
Yes, you do suck. You suck because you confuse gimmickry with functionality and tell people that they need to buy a specific product in order to be professionals. But, hey, it's not like that's a new thing with people like you.
If you don't have a darkroom to do your dodge/burn then guess what you get to use after you've scanned your negs - Photoshop.
I guess your analog technique is as poor as your digital technique.
Answer the question at hand.
I did: take your pictures correctly so that you don't need to fiddle with them after they leave the camera.
If you do need to fiddle, just about any image manipulation program should do: pretty much all of them support cropping, curves, cloning, and the handful of other standard operations one ever needs.
Yes, quite right: "unless you need to do those things" and you need to do them on Windows.
The real questions are why you need to do those things in the first place and why you need to do them within a single application.
Most of these problems can be solved fairly simply: give them a copy of Knoppix or Ubuntu/Live and just have them use that. Data goes on USB sticks. There is little to screw up that way and it fulfills all the basic functions that people need: web, office, mail, graphics, etc.
Supposing you really have been editing digital images since before Feb 1990 (Photoshop 1.0 release), what was it that you were using at the time?
SGI and Symbolics.
What do you use now for your photo editing needs?
Much of it is batch processing using open source tools. Otherwise, I don't have a strong preference--there are lots of tools that get the job done. My point is that you don't need a $600 program to do digital imaging.
I DON'T see is what parent thinks is better. Please provide that information/opinion and un-troll if you will.
What is "better" is getting your framing, props, lighting, color balance, and makeup right from the start so that you don't have to do any kind of digital image manipulation of your photographs.
You are confusing the exceptional with the regular. For day-to-day work with digital images, if you need to fiddle in Photoshop, you are wasting your time: almost all product shots, portraits, landscapes, etc. should be usable straight out of the camera, and it shouldn't be an effort for a professional to accomplish that.
It's, of course, completely "valid" for people to manipulate images in whatever way they like, it's just that most people don't seem produce anything good when they try, and that the number of such images is tiny (although they receive lots of attention). Even in Adams' time, unmanipulated images was the bread and butter.
I can't really see where the problem with Quicktime is? Installing another Media Player takes two steps, download, drop into the Application folder, be done.
The problem with Quicktime is that it's proprietary nagware that is required to view a lot of content.
Basically, it's the same problem as with WMP, except that Quicktime nags more and that Apple thumbs their nose at other people's UI conventions when they "port" their software.
IT departments are concerned with many things, including networking, security policies, file servers, web servers, etc. What hardware and OS you buy makes little difference to most of those tasks.
Macs shine in small workgroups, where they have some advantages. Those advantages don't scale to large organizations: managing a large Mac network is as hard as managing a large Windows network--possibly harder, because there are fewer tools and fewer skilled people.
We all know how well spatial Nautilus was recieved.
Spatial Nautilus is fine: it's very straightforward. It really is what the Macintosh Finder ought to be, and it's actually more what the Macintosh finder used to be like.
I don't think you can win - there is no "better" only "different".
You can be better in specific markets. Spatial Nautilus is probably a better paradigm for Apple's user community than the OS X finder. On the other hand, for Gnome, something more powerful might be better.
Corporate America is risk-averse. With Microsoft, they get their OS from a single company, but they have a wide range of hardware choices. Furthermore, it may be a single software company, the software company is a monopolist, is extraordinarily wealthy, and will hang around for a long time.
With Apple, they have only a single source for both their hardware and software. The hardware range is limited and prices are essentially fixed by Apple. The operating system is used by only a few percent of computer users, and the application programming interfaces are neither a de-facto standard nor are they open source or conform to other open standards.
If Apple wants to catch on more widely, they either have to make their entire software platform open (probably ditching at least Quartz), or they have to create a third party PPC market (which they can share with Linux). If they don't do either, they won't be growing much more.
You aren't getting into the spirit of this. You see, when Apple does anything, it's automatically OK. Apple may ship things they didn't invent and even incorrectly claim that they invented it, Apple may bundle hardware and software, Apple may bundle applications into the OS, Apple may make it hard to use any media player but theirs, Apple may violate GUI guidelines, Apple may create scripting vulnerabilities, etc. It's because Apple is the underdog, and because Apple fan boys don't see that #2 is just as evil as #1.
Now when you are a convicted monopolist who does it to crush your competition, that's when it becomes a problem.
No, it is already a problem because we don't have a free market in operating systems, we have an Apple/Microsoft duopoly. Apple's bundling practices make it unnecessarily hard for new operating systems and new applications to enter the market, and that's a problem.
Apple may be able to get away legally with what they are doing (if not for any other reason than that they are too small to bother with), just like they can get away with lying in the advertising, but that doesn't make it right or good for users or the market. And in the unlikely event that Apple should ever manage to grab a significant share of the market again, we are all in big trouble.
Photoshop is good. I may have a biasedness toward it, because I learned how to use it with Photoshop 2.0 in Computer Graphics/Advanced Comp Graphics AP in highschool, on a Mac.
Well, let me put it this way: I have been working with digital images for longer than Photoshop has even existed, and I don't think it's "good". I think most of it is useless gimmicks and the UI positively sucks.
Photoshop is quite analogous to Windows: the company was not the first to produce such a product, and their product absolutely sucked when it first came out. Then, they spent years incorporating suggestions from end users, adding features, and becoming a de-facto standard platform for plug-ins. Now, every Photoshop monkey incorrectly thinks that Adobe invented it all. Everybody gets trained on Photoshop and they think anything else is bad. And most of the alternatives have disappeared from the market.
Most people on the "intarweb" with bad photoshop opinions simply warez'd some version, and cant figure out how all of those artists make such pretty pictures
Most people who think that good photographs are created in Photoshop are simply lousy photographers. If you know your craft, you'll need to do very little work in a photo editor.
When it comes down to it, if you do professional graphics, you use photoshop whether you like it or not.
What it comes down to is that you can use for photo editing whatever you damned well want to because the only thing that counts is the result.
And I think you can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by going with a different package, even if Photoshop monkeys are trying to tell you otherwise.
Everything from flying to firing a machine gun. That was the technology that they made possible.
Quite wrong. They didn't make the technology possible--that was done in decades of research on control systems, robotics, and human perception, done by hundreds of researchers, often funded at taxpayer expense.
What that patent appears to attempt is to lock up an entire range of applications based on that research, without actually disclosing anything that is actually technically useful.
# MS worked with Immersion to develop FF into the Direct X API in 1997. # Apple similarly worked with Immersion to develop a FF API for OS X.
And what does that prove? Immersion seems to have had credibility in that they understood this technology and marketed it, but that's not the same as creating it.
Besides, both Microsoft and Apple have strong motivations to prop up patents, even questionable patents, that keep competitors from entering their markets. Both companies are likely to license patents, rather than litigate, if they are cheap enough to them.
If it was a scam, wouldn't you think that a good set of lawyers would be able to litigate out that point?
No, you wouldn't. The patent system has genuine holes in it that allow companies to abuse it, and there is not a damned thing even the smartest lawyer can do about it.
When a smaller business gets infringed by a global, unlimited funds company that is trying to stay ahead of innovation and still make a quarterly report that has enourmous expectations, then you call foul?
Well, I think what one calls it should depend on the details of the patent. I don't know the details of this patent, but I do know that this company did not invent force feedback, not even in game controllers. So, the question is: can you make a good argument for why their patent should be valid? What is the actual novelty contained in their patent? Those are, in fact, I think the first questions we should ask when a patent gets litigated; it's an unfortunate error in our patent system that patents are automatically presumed valid and enforceable when granted.