I like Capture One as an alternative to lightroom for a fujifilm camera, it has great integrations with the camera’s film styles feature. It doesn’t offer the more powerful image manipulation features of photoshop though. It can be one-time purchased for the yearly release or subscribed for continual updates
can anyone recommend a sci-fi book that investigates this line of thought (what happens when AI can learn without human intervention, for benefit and detriment of society)?
Yes! I primarily develop on Linux, but lately have been working on Windows porting. In many ways the WSL has been a massive savior. It makes developing on Windows at least possible for Linux users. But it's sooo slooow.
The performance bottlenecks I hit seem to be disk i/o related. Things from path tab completion on the command line, to Vim's YouCompleteMe compiling code in the background, to a plain "git status", are just painfully slow right now.
If Microsoft can fix these performance issues, and someone ships a better terminal replacement (currently using ConEmu, also has issues), developing on Windows would be almost painless for Linux users (after learning how to integrate projects with Visual Studio...though I've read VS 2017 has better cmake integration).
I'd say you pin can pin it down mostly to those reasons:
* Do you have active snapshots (vssadmin list shadows)? Halves random writes to disk in the worst case.
* Do you have USN journaling enabled (fsutil usn queryjournal c:)? Adds extra IO to meta-data operations.
* NTFS/FAT is optimized for fast directory listing speed so modifying files also modifies directory entries. Nothing one can do about that (except being aware of that and designing programs with this in mind).
* Windows doesn't keep as much dirty fs data in fs-cache. I know of no way to change that. One can probably, if one uses a Windows Server OS.
* Is a on-access Virus scanner active? If yes, one cannot compare performance to Linux. It's a massive bottleneck.
The WinBtrfs project is very promising. I tried it a few days ago. I mounted my btrfs partition with it, and it appeared in /mnt under WSL. I chrooted into it from WSL, and it felt faster than the ntfs-backed linux fs. WinBtrfs has plans for implementing WSL permission pass-through. I look forward to that.
Tried https://mremoteng.org/ before? IIRC it wraps putty/kitty for ssh. But was the most useful terminal replacement options for me when I was on Microsoft Land.
> The performance bottlenecks I hit seem to be disk i/o related.
Would it be possible to mount the folders with the code on RAM? They aren't, usually, very heavy. May be a small-ish 500mb volume on RAM could help? Is this even possible on WSL/Windows?
It's possible, but it wouldn't help. The problem is all the metadata lookups, which generally take several orders of magnitude more time on Windows than they do on Linux. The Windows implementation of NTFS just really isn't optimized to act as an unix filesystem.
Do you know what exactly the fundamental barrier to this is? I've always wondered. What's so different about Linux and Windows that Windows has to do so much more work for file creation/deletion? It seems to be half an NTFS issue and half a Windows issue, because even on Linux I'm pretty sure NTFS is noticeably slower than ext[234], but not as slow as on Windows.
I doubt there is any actual fundamental barrier, rather the reason is simply that the primary workload that Linus himself runs benefits greatly from faster metadata lookups, and therefore every nook and cranny of it has been optimized to as fast as possible.
In contrast, while metadata performance is sluggish in NTFS, at least a few years ago there were ways to get better large transaction async file performance than ext4 if you knew what you were doing -- clearly that workload was something that customers had asked for.
Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect:
"Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? I ask because the logic for every startup is do market research (now called validation) in some fashion - even if it is the landing page approach.
I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?
Well, it's half bull. Apple _did_ have market data as they had already launched the Lisa and had seen what worked (and what didn't). People did like the bitmap display and mouse interface, but couldn't stand the cost or lack of applications (note that mac development was well under way when the Lisa launched).
In addition, they made a lot of changes post launch due to market acceptance, e.g. size of storage, cost etc. The Mac benefited from the fact that Apple was willing to stick with it even though the Apple II was still the cash cow and the Mac struggled.
So it's bull in the sense that they were quite attuned to what the market had to say.
There's an important difference between market data--which comes from actual sales--and market research, which is done prior to the launch (and sometimes even prior to the development) of a product.
Apple pays very close attention to market data, and it obviously informs their product development (see the big iPhones now, for example). What they tend not to do is market research: surveys, polls, focus groups, etc.
> So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better?
How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac? Okay, it may help indicate there is an opportunity, but this is the easy part, anyone can do that. It does nothing to indicate how to fulfill that opportunity, it's not the client's job to give a blueprint, and that's the hard part.
Imagine starting a restaurant business by asking people on the street what they like or what they think you should have on the menu... let's just say it's not going to star on Michelin.
> I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?
There's a quote often attributed to Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
I can think of plenty of prior successes that I doubt having started with a survey.
> How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac?
I guess you could get a bunch of different people to come in and try to use it, and do different stuff? See how they react to it, survey them afterwards?
Coming up with products is a bit like coming up with songs or paintings. Market research won't get you Van Gogh's Starry Night or any of the Beatles' songs. Instead it gives you autotune as music and photo filters as art. If you need to come with a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime product, music, painting or anything creative, it has to come from satisficing a basic need in a unique way (often with a personal touch i.e., "soul"). Current startup landscape dominated by validation is basically the autotune model built for quick iterations and easy profits as opposed to the old-school "soul" model which is more of a personal endeavour that transforms into a mass-movement of sorts. Bitcoin would be a modern example of something coming out of the "soul" model.
edit: One place where Market Research does have value in the "soul" model is for refining the product to fit the market better. The germ of the idea is still intensely personal to the founder.
Do you mean this? I can see you might or might not. To satisfice would mean stopping at the first minimally acceptable solution to save time and effort. To invoke art and once-in-a-life-time product seems to suggest you want the opposite concept - optimising i.e. to strive relentlessly towards the maximal solution despite the extra time and effort it takes.
> Market research won't get you...any of the Beatles' songs.
That's exactly how we got most of the Beatles' songs. The Beatles' function in the music industry was to repeat and popularize the ideas of other artists and to follow nascent trends, the same as any pop artist.
How many successful businesses have actually be built by using landing page tests as the primary mechanism to evolve the product idea? I feel like the lean startup fashion is overplayed. The most important thing for a startup is to have a lead customer - a person that passionately wants the idea to exist so they can use it, and knows what it should do. That lead user needs to be either the founders or someone the founders can work very, very closely with.
I think it's less a quote meant to be taken literally about doing market research and more a quote demonstrating about the values Apple was working with when building this. I think approaching designing a computer for mass production the way a craftsman or artist would approach their work is the really insightful thing to be pulled from this quote.
That approach may have been viable early in the category's life, but seems unsustainable as new entrants drive down prices. I wonder if Cook, being the ops guy he is, would allow the same expenditures.
Also, it would be unfortunate if the takeaway was "market research has no value". Indeed, later in the interview, when discussing "Why the mouse?" he says:
'We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.'
Clearly, in this case, they didn't trust that they could create "the best thing we could build".
