Since I came back from Arizona I've been quite busy. I've been going to sleep regularly at 4AM and waking up at about 8:40 in the morning. Busy at work but also busy at home, doing "the thing" with the computer.
Fiddling around.. watch a movie, fix a script and time flies.

Today I installed Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It took about 1 hour. All I had to do was starting it, no request for security codes, no crashes nor burns.
Mac OS X doesn't blow my mind, it's just generally nicer than Windows though admittedly at home I spend most of the time with Firefox 8P

It seems however that at work I'll have to install Vista pretty soon to run DirectX.. I mean, Direct3D, 10. Of DirectX, Microsoft only left Direct3D alive and now would like people to use the Direct3D name, but it just isn't going to work.
I generally don't like the idea of installing Vista because I think it's simply useless. Apple is constantly pulling out great hardware and great software while Microsoft is generally lagging behind.
The only recent Microsoft success I can remember of is the XBox 360 (though still behind Nintendo). Other than that, Microsoft's big business is based on good timing from 20 years ago.

I hate the idea that I need to install Vista just to use DirectX 10, that's so unfair and it's possibly the only reason why anyone would install Vista.

Hastalla la Vista
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

... However Usually It Does.

I just got inspired by comment of Davide San that Mathematica and MatLab are much superior to any open source or free tools. Recently more and more I get this feeling for all kinds of open source tools. It usually applies to big projects. The bigger project the more sure that it will really suck compared to paid counter part. I do not really say that the tools should be paid only because then they will be good. I personally use a lot of open source or free products and I am very happy with them. However when it comes to corporate level, it is harder and harder to accept compromises caused by open source.

Let's see for a while in different ranges of applications:

Bitmap graphics:

Gimp sucks compared to Photoshop. Gimp color management is one big hell. Try to be a photographer and do things without decent color management. Good luck...

Vector graphics:

Adobe Illustrator or even CorelDRAW are superior to anything open source. Inkscape is not bad. But it's going nowhere. Xara has been recently released as open source, but I have not seen it yet and I am not sure what stage it is. I believe Xara lost many years ago anyway.

Office:  read more »