When I read Bruce's message this evening,  I was so surprised, I quickly
checked the weather report to see if they where calling for snow in Hell.
 Bruce disagrees with me.  I am shocked!  I just had to reply.

The bit about Adobe's port of PhotoShop to Windows, well, I didn't make
that up.  I read about this somewhere some months ago.  Seeing as I read
6-7 computer, about 5 digital photography and several airplane magazines a
month, exactly where and when I read this has long been forgotten.  I
believe it was late last year, but I can't remember where.  If and when I
do find it again, I will surely pass it on to Bruce.

I have had PhotoShop on my system for almost a year, and let me assure you
that whilst the Mac version may be great, the Windows version sucks.  Big
time.  Every time I start it, all my network connections are knocked off.
 I can't seem to get any reliable printing done to my USB-connected Epson
printer and the response time is very slow on many operations.  Further,
the longer I stay in it, the slower it gets.  I suspect a memory leak.  So
when I read that piece about how PhotoShop was enhanced for MacOS but
crippled for Windows, it all fell into place.

I had been using PaintShopPro 6.0 for my printing since I couldn't get
PhotoShop to do it and when in the fall of 2000, JASC came out with version
7.0 of PaintShopPro,  I upgraded after reading several photography magazine
glowing reviews about the new version.

Bruce is very correct when he states that "PhotoShop does assume a high
level user sophistication."  PhotoShop has a very steep learning curve.
 Then again, so does PaintShopPro.  PSP is easily able to do everything
that PS 5.5 LE can do and almost everything that the full version of PS can
do, for a lot less money.  PSP also has a very steep learning curve.  Face
it, if you are going to have unlimited control over graphics files, such as
digital pictures, you are just going to have to learn to use the tool.
 After several months of fighting with the bugs in PS, I totally switched
over to PSP.  All that I had learned on PS, I could use on PSP, and it was
far more reliable and much faster in its operations.

I have found over the last year that I can spend hours working on a
photograph to adjust, touch up, fix, change, enhance etc... and it is much
better to use a piece of software that will not crap out on me (sorry for
the technical term.)

When I end up with a 25 MB file ready for the printer, I want the software
it to print not kill my network connections and then refuse to see the
printer.  I'm funny like that.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Bruce Toback [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Thursday, April 19, 2001 11:19 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: OT: more on Itanium

Denys writes:

>Back to PhotoShop.  PhotoShop...
>definitely was written for MacOS and the port to Windows was less than
>good.  This is also the reason Apple marketing misleads when they only
>refer to a very specific PhotoShop function to "prove" MacOS to be so much
>faster than Windows.  PhotoShop was optimized for MacOS and was fairly
>crippled when brought over to Windows.  It uses none of the multimedia
>capabilities of Windows and Intel.

This hasn't been true for, oh, about seven years. Photoshop was
completely rewritten for the Win32 platform (that is, Win95). The program
has a platform-neutral core, and uses plug-ins to access all of the Intel
processor's various attempts at multimedia extensions, as well as x86
workalikes' proprietary extensions such as AMD's 3DNow!.

Photoshop does assume a high level user sophistication; it's definitely
not for beginning or casual use. It can appear very unfriendly if you
don't know what you want to do.

>I can have all of them running simultaneously, run
>some games, be connected to the Internet, have a mail client running,
>develop in Visual Studio, be watching a DVD movie, and still have room for
>more stuff.

I'm not sure I want to use any of the software Denys is developing using
Visual Studio while he's watching a DVD movie and playing computer games.

>Since the late 1990s, there has been no
>reason, no software reason to buy a faster processor, because there is
>simply no software that demands higher performance than late 20th century
>computers.

Well, there ought to be.

Now that the users don't need all the cycles, developers should take
some. Use Java or other language systems that do real-time assumption
checking and have usable exception architectures. Write code that
monitors data structures for corruption. Make the OS start validating all
parameters to all system calls. Bring back Pascal's range declarations,
and put in some run-time checking this time. Force bounds checking on
array accesses. Use garbage collection rather than manual memory
allocation/deallocation.

Those cheap cycles can be used to make systems more robust and reliable.
Of course, then your programs won't benchmark very well against programs
that don't put in all that extra work. If your program scrolls from top
to bottom of a thousand-page document in 1.5 seconds and a competitor's
does it on 0.75 seconds, you bar is going to look pretty wimpy in the bar
chart. Maybe we need better benchmarks.

The MacOS has (or had) something called "the monkey" in its developer
kit. This was a little routine that ran at random times (based on
hardware interrupts) and queued random events for the system to process.
Ideally, your program could run for days with the monkey running. Maybe
something similar could be used in software reviews: a random-event
stress test with a nice bar chart of time-until-crash, "longer bars are
better."

-- Bruce


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Bruce Toback    Tel: (602) 996-8601| My candle burns at both ends;
OPT, Inc.            (800) 858-4507| It will not last the night;
11801 N. Tatum Blvd. Ste. 142      | But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
Phoenix AZ 85028                   | It gives a lovely light.
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