NzNz

Your point is valid, but also incredibly narrow, the type of tunnel vision that seems to affect all computer using professional artists, who somehow started thinking they were the majority of computer users. Not only is that not the case, but you're such a tiny minority that Apple didn't shy away from dropping you all, dropping software like Aperture, simplifying Final Cut and orienting it toward hobbyists and slashing its price down to a measly $300, and all those moves are coming from the company that used to be known as the friendliest toward artists. Your kind keeps harping about "ah, my firewire port" and so and so and Apple literally doesn't care. You're not the target audience anymore, you represent nothing. The quality of open source software is, by far, when you consider most needs, more than adequate and often superior to closed source.

Most of the examples you give aren't even close to being evidence of a superiority of closed source in a debate of closed vs open, they are examples of the superiority of a few specific graphic powerhouses like Adobe. Is there anything like Photoshop in the world of closed source software? It is the only one. Closed source doesn't magically make things better. There are plenty of closed source competitors to Photoshop that aren't even close to what GIMP achieves, even more so with that plugin : http://gmic.eu/ Which replicates almost all the most important functions of modern Photoshop. What GIMP misses, is not power, but productivity, by missing non destructive editing. On the other hand, with something like gmic, gimp is far, far more powerful than ANY other piece of software that isn't called Photoshop. Considering the extremely small amount of people who are actively working on GIMP and its plugins and that none of their are paid for it, I'd say they do an incredible job. Everything you can do in Photoshop, you absolutely can do with GIMP, for eg things like these : http://blog.patdavid.net/2014/02/getting-around-in-gimp-gmic... Work just as good. If you're not a professional working on deadline who truly needs a productivity boost through constant modification of something you're commissioned to produce (which is where Non Destructive Editing shines best), you don't really need anything other than the GIMP.

So I'll quote your first paragraph and throw it back at you:

>>This is only true in the very narrow segment of 'tools for geeks by geeks', 'tools that big software companies need but don't provide a competitive edge/need to be OSS for adoption so they opensource'

Your views are only true in the very narrow segment of 'tools for artists that cost big bucks which represent exactly 0.01% of the software used in the entire world'. If most people don't have a use for the things you mention, like code editors and compilers, they don't have a use for things like Photoshop either. And if we're going by % of software in use, there are far more web servers out there running open source programs that there will ever be photoshop installations. Much less packages like Maya which fill an even much smaller niche. Niche, a word you seem fond of using for talking about OSS. What is more niche between a web browser and maya?

AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and NeXTStep were not written by the original authors of Unix and its philosophy. Linux has always been closer to the philosophy than many of these, actually. So much so that it has imported concepts from the successor of Unix, Plan9. Linux's procfs which exposes sysinfo as files within the filesystem is a concept taken from Plan9, which was the OS people like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike envisioned as the future of OSes and replacement for Unix.

Those "traditions" you're speaking of not only are not outdated, but they never were fully realized to their ideal outside of Plan9, which attempted to make everything accessible through file APIs.

The suckless crowds are not about reproducing the original Unix. They are about carrying the torch of that philosophy, and the original unix was just the beginning, not an end in itself. Here's an example of software from suckless that follows Plan9 : http://tools.suckless.org/ii/

It isn't really ready for general use yet. It can't even run something as simple as an irc client without failing. https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/262

I uninstalled it and went back to cygwin, which is the only real option for now besides running a VM.

This is what it looked like before the iPhone: http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Scre... So, yes, it was "just another OS" in the grand scheme of things. A blackberry and symbian competitor. A footnote. An explorer of new frontiers it was not.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/04/14/exclusive-android-...

" The change log of the planning document conveys the rapid change that occured in April, when suddenly there was a "major update." Among the changes were section 3.11.2 Touchscreen, which now read, "a touch screen for finger-based navigation—including multitouch capabilities—is required. Stylus-based navigation is not supported."

The iPhone had the android team sweat bullets. They were working all this time on a Blackberry clone, and had to re-purpose their UI to become 100% multitouch friendly before releasing it.

Android might have been released earlier than it did if the iPhone hadn't been a thing. It had to be remade to not become a laughing stock. It still was a laughing stock at release though.

" When it was released, Android still lacked support for touchscreen typing by finger. And while the phone shipped with hardware support for multitouch, its software was patched to remove support for the feature. In late 2009, Google released Android 2.0, adding software support for multitouch. "

> Now I have an iPhone with a camera which can give an old SLR a run for its money

Absolutely not. Older DSLR had lower resolution, but level of detail is not all there is to image quality. Dynamic range, bokeh, control over perspective, the ability to take pictures of moving targets at higher iso without the picture becoming too grainy and the ergonomics are all things that even a 15 years old DSLR can do better than an iPhone 6s. You just can't get pictures like these out of a smartphone : http://i.imgur.com/kV2CfBE.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0jugE5B.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2bV1HJz.jpg

These all come from a Nikon D1h, samples from dpreview. The D1h was released in 2001. Nowadays, even the lowest end DSLR will outperform it in almost every single way, apart from build quality. Even so, that old top end camera still outperforms smartphones where it counts from the point of view of art photography. In 2001, I still used film cameras because good DSLR like the D1h were out of my reach, but these days, even a $300 DSLR will just obliterate anything you could do with a smartphone.

And then there's the fact that most casual photography is taking pictures of other humans, and that the wide angle lens of smartphones distort perspective and make people weird up close. The iPhone has a 30mm equivalent which is very unsuited to taking pictures of people. http://fotografeando.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/focal-len...

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/6a/10/3b/6a103beeaa37...

You can see here how even the 35mm is plainly inadequate compared to the 50mm focal length.

All those studies are as shady as the studies that used to promote cigarettes as healthy. There is enough evidence out there to the contrary, including recent studies : http://www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/S0021-9150(12...

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/25/6/589.abstract

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199112123252405#t=a...

The current rehabilitation of cholesterol is about politics : http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015-08-24-Ho... http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/102/2/235.extract

http://time.com/4225819/eggs-nutrition-egg-yolk/ ( 2016 )

It doesn't have to be either. Common breakfasts in france include eating 1 yogurt, or 1 croissant, or 1 toast with butter. Some people do eat 1 toast with jam, which might fit into your "sugar blasted" category.

In general, we're pretty light on breakfast and we don't have high diabete prevalence compared to countries like the US or even Germany.

The issue with eggs as an everyday breakfast is cholesterol, not everything in your diet is about measuring calories. A single egg provides 60% of the recommended daily intake which means you have to be extra careful with the rest of your diet if you don't want to increase your risks of heart disease. Sausage can also have a decent amount of cholesterol, although not as high as eggs.

By introducing both of these as your daily breakfast, you also limit the choices of food you can have for lunch and dinner. Sauces like mayonnaise have eggs, you probably shouldn't eat the occasional omelette, which is a tasty, occasional way of enjoying eggs (I particularly love them with ceps or asparagus), chinese fried rice, baked goods, tortilla, desserts like crepes, the list goes on. None of these are foods that should be eaten on a daily basis, but even less so if you introduced foods high in cholesterol right into your breakfast.

> I pity the provincial world you love in where nobody can tolerate a departure from slabs of meat. It's such a rural American perspective, alien to most of the world.

I am French, I live in France, and grew up in a large city. I can confirm what he said about kids in some cultures, and it's not limited to the "rural America" the sanfran crowds like to dismiss so much on the internet. I had Indians friends I grew up with as a kid, and they were made to eat meat every time we were going out with the other neighborhood kids because we liked to go to fast foods like Quick (a belgian fast food franchise that's a bit like the European McDo) and there was no decent vegetarian food there, at least when I was a kid, I wouldn't know if they changed their menus because I haven't gone to fast foods for a long time. He had to lie to his parents about not eating hamburgers, they were devout, religious vegetarian hinduists and I have no idea how they'd react if they knew their kids ate beef.

What would have happened if they refused to eat meat with us? They would either have to watch us eat at Quick while growing hungry, or just leave the group altogether. Seeing our food cultures, I would definitely have hated the very idea of growing in a vegetarian household. The indian kids could come at our places and order pizza with us, but we never, ever shared a meal at their home.

My parents loved sharing food with our indian neighbors though, despite the fact that my father loved meat, he also enjoyed the food they made and my grandmother often made vegetarian cooking to exchange with them. But that's a whole another story when it comes to kids.