Originally posted by: ProviaFan
Interesting. Wow, I'm surprised that they have support for a colorimeter that one can actually buy (not to mention that it's USB, not serial!). Eyeballing it simply is not going to work for serious stuff, needless to say.
Not realy. Its just a huge pain in the rear. For instance you'd think that people who make movies using digital stuff would spend a lot of money on calibrating their monitors and such, but they don't. At least not until very recently anyways.
What makes it impossible is if you dealing with a dozen workstations. All with different monitors and different ages and usage patterns were the colors will change over time based on use and abuse. Now trying to eye ball that would be horrific.
I don't care about CMYK for my work, but I like to use larger color working spaces (Adobe RGB or even ProPhoto RGB if the image calls for it), and please don't try to compare my desire for 16 bit support (mainly for the large color spaces, to prevent banding in gradients, e.g. sky, after edits) to "serious" audiophiles who use $2000 power cords and custom wooden knobs for their potentiometers to "improve" audio quality. [/quote]
No, not you. And like I said I do understand why you need it.
Although when I see people going on and on about 'microdetails' and such in pixels I want to slap people.
It's just funny when you get one person complaining about lack of CYMK support and lack of 16bit color for doing their work when they don't quite realise yet that the color depth that your monitor presents, even at 8bit color, is much more then anything you'll get from any sort of reflective media. But people like to complain.
For Gimp I know the 8bit color is a limitation. Don't you think I don't.
It will be interesting to check back in a year or so to see how things are coming. Hopefully GIMP will have 16 bit support,
Gimp won't get deep color depths until "Gegl" is finished. Gimp is a very very old program and at it's core it's stretched out past it's limit. That's why you don't have 16bit color depths. It's not that the Gimp developers don't want it or don't think they need it (although they know the majority of photoshop users and gimp users that think they need it, don't). It's just that Gimp in it's current form could possibly support 16bit color, but performance would be bad and they couldn't ever possibly extend it beyond that. Gegl would be the next core image proccessing library that would allow Gimp to break out of it's current limitations in spades, but development had stalled for a long time.
Also you run into hard limitations with Gimp when your dealing with very large files. High cpu load and high memory usage. Also you miss some of the more fancy features like transformation layers and such. Gegl would fix that and make advanced graphical programming much easier. At least that is the theory.
and maybe there will even be some rudimentary support for XMP metadata in some sort of basic image viewer, that hopefully supports DNG raw files, because that's what I have 80GB+ of already (tagged with info by Bridge in XMP, of course).
UFraw has some nice RAW handling features (color management, exposure, white level, etc) and integrates into Gimp as a plugin. It has support for a veriaty of raw 'fomrats' such as Adobe's DNG.
Gimp development version currently has rudementary support for XMP, I beleive.
Sorry, I digress. Back to discussing MS's licensing practices...
I don't think there is realy much to discuss.
MS is going to do what they want and dispite people complaining about it they will end up getting it and Microsoft will profit from their moves non-the-less. I bet you that 90% of the people here complaining about Vista will definately own it and if they can't steal it they'll walk right down to Wallmart or CompUSA and buy a copy.
They could start a new licensing sceme were you had to stick a dongle in your ear to measure brainwaves or core tempurature or something to make sure it was realy you using your copy of Windows and people would bitch and complain about it, but I expect 3 years from now it would be a fasion accessory.
Anyways the vast majority of people here will never run into problems anyways. At most it's a phone call. This stuff is aimed at businesses and such that may want to try to figure out a way to get around paying for full retail licenses.
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The only thing that affects users is going to be the VM limitation. Although they'll never realise it because Microsoft is being pre-emptive here.
Both with Linux and OS X we have advanced VM stuff that is no were aviable in Windows. It's not easy to use or full of gui-goodness in Linux, but as far as technical stuff goes it's cutting edge as far as personal computers go. (IBM is cutting edge. The current status for all the Vmware stuff, and Xen, and Intel's VT, and MS virtual server is now were IBM was 10-20 years ago and I am not exagerating)
It'll affect users, but they won't know it. It's because in the next draft PCI Express specifications there are ways to allow operating systems running in a VM to bypass underlyning hypervisors and such and access certain types of devices directly.
Firstly this allows for higher level of isolation and performance between systems running in a VM.. But it would allow you to do things like run Vista with hardware acceleration in Xen/Linux for playing video games with full 3d acceleration and sound. Since this is a big reason why otherwise technically advanced users to stick with Windows rather then going full on to Linux or OS X this is Microsoft's way to help prevent this from happenning in large numbers.
I know it may not affect you or a lot of people, but if a lot of people would be able to play and access all their games with 100% performance and 100% of compatability by running Vista in a VM (which you can pause and save the state of at any moment so you don't have to leave it running or 'reboot' all the time) on their Linux/OS X desktop they would probably want to do it. Dual booting is realy a pain in the *ss.
It won't stop it completely, but it will require you to purchase the top of the line versions of Vista to be able to run games in a VM in Linux or OS X and most people are not willing to go and pay for that.
My only question is weither or not Microsoft is planing on using DRM/Trusted computing stuff to limit it. And seeing how all drivers will have to be signed (again another barrier to VM stuff for good or bad, intentional or not) for 64bit it seems very likely since only future 64bit machines will be able to do this.
Just my speculations.