A lot of these vendors are locked into their own technologies.
I had interviewed at Epic once (didn't feel like moving to Wisconsin... sorry) and realized that they used M for most of what they did... not much interconnectivity there.
If you think about it, The Great Salt Lake is staring at the same issue (albeit on a longer timescale).
The old Soviet Union did enough ecological damage without having to hang that subject on it...
I don't think this particular story is a harbinger of that. Rather, I think it's a story of monumental stupidity caused by a totalitarian government that didn't bother looking forward, and was too eager by half to waggle their technological penises in front of the world.
The rivers feeding the Aral Sea haven't dried up - just that most of it got diverted to other uses, and the Aral Sea was the unfortunate loser in that bargain.
I don't disagree that yeah, potable water is going to eventually be a problem as climate slowly shifts and population grows. The climate and population growth are debatable and mostly unknown as to rate, direction and cause, but change they will.
Really, you think professional 3d modelers don't know what a vertex is? Really?
They have an idea as to what it might be ('a mathematical point in cartesian space' would be the description given if you're lucky), but, say, how it behaves under subdivision and which SubD algorithm produces the best results for a given use case is another story entirely. That's why I put the word "really" in the sentence you took your question off of.
Let me give a more concrete example: Raytracing. Sure, they'll know how it would (mostly) behave in their given suite (depending on which render engine(s) they send it to regularly), but knowing how light (and more importantly, shadows and occlusions thereof) behaves, so as to produce a better result, especially when shooting for realism? A pro photographer likely has a better idea of how light works than most of the schlubs who push mesh around.
...and it even carries through to this day
Why don't you do it?
Because it would involve asking DAZ or Smith Micro for the respective proprietary source codes first, then getting permission to release the results. Both applications are currently ongoing products (DS is at 4.6 now, and Poser at "Poser Pro 2013" last I checked.)
DAZ Studio is doable - I used to work for them as a dev back when 1.0 was released, and they IIRC still use C++ and Qt. Could likely pull it off the OSX branch with only a little effort.
Poser is not so doable; they use a wide variety of weird crap on top of C, including Adobe AIR and the nightmare libs spawned by Kai Krause if I remember right. Not even sure if Linux would accept half of it without a complete rewrite.
All that said, I don't really need to bother - both run just fine on OSX 10.9. I want to see them on Linux mostly for ideological reasons these days.
This, right here... and it ain't just Photoshop, either.
In the CG realm, you have people who learned "3DS Max", or "Poser", or "Modo", but few of them could tell you what a vertex really is, let alone half-edges, collision-detection, subdivision, and etc. A few folks do go out of their way to learn the fundamentals (which makes switching between tools less painful), but they're a distinct minority.
Part of the reason why you see so much of this is because every software house has their own oddball idea of what a user interface should do, and even how to approach a given task (NURBS modeling versus mesh extrusion for instance). It would positively scare you to learn one suite (say, 3DS Max) then get sat in front of another (e.g. Modo). The learning curve on each of them is astoundingly steep... Poser's ancient Kai Krause inspired interface, Blender's 48-mouse-button-inspired UI, Wings' (probably) EMACS-inspired sparse-as-hell interface... DAZ Studio's Qt-anchored one... they all approach most of the same things rather differently. It takes a lot of time to get comfortable with a given user interface, before you even take into consideration the behaviors and quirks.
Photoshop is no different in this regard, and that's why most folks who use it know Photoshop, but few of those users know the principles and concepts behind it.
...I went with GIMP years ago. I was able to use many of P-Shop's brushes and actions as-is, and I learned GIMP's actions and interface.
Mind you, I'm not a graphics pro by any means (though I am a heavy hobbyist in CG graphics, and GIMP is invaluable to me for postwork and touch-ups.) Even when I moved to using a Mac for most of my farting-around, the first thing I went for was GIMP for OSX. Just as most actual professionals stick with Photoshop (in spite of the brain-dead subscription model they have these days) because they learned on it, I do the same thing with GIMP... and it works just fine for me.
Now in the professional realm, PShop makes sense to have a Linux port. Strange thing though - a huge percentage of professional CG work is done in Linux nowadays, and has been for awhile, so I'm surprised that it's taken them this long to get around to it.
(now if only the hobbyist CG software shops (I'm looking at *you* Poser and DAZ|Studio!) would get off their asses and make a Linux port...
GP is speaking of global marketshare, not US. IIRC, Apple has a far higher marketshare in the US (not sure offhand what it is, but I think it's like 40% or so.)
Just note that the evil(tm) will be compounded by the crapware that some OEMs *and* carriers tend to slather onto the phones, on top of what Google is going to require.
At this rate, I hope that every new Android smartphone comes with at least 8GB of onboard storage... I say this as someone who tends to buy phones on the low-end (my little Huawei has maybe 512MB of internal storage + the 32GB micro-SD card that I cannot move the as-built apps onto...)
This is all well and good if you live in a city where one can rent a place with a shade-tree to practice your shade-tree mechanics, but many of us (like most of the of the country) live in areas with high populations and even less parking.
In that case, take public transit until you can save up and afford a more reliable car...
You're right in that a good $300 car would be damn tough to find nowadays, but factor in inflation, and $600 still isn't too hard to do in a couple of months for anyone who makes more than minimum wage, and the typical high-interest car loan will usually cost you around $150-200/mo.
Note that I haven't even touched on the required full coverage insurance of a vehicle under loan.
Owning my cars free and clear lets me keep just liability on the older Sunfire, and liability+a few useful additions (e.g. collision, glass) on the Soul. Insurance on both costs me a total of around $100/mo - full coverage on each under loan would likely cost way more...
They got rid of the "Buck Sgt." rank sometime at the end of 1991; I know this because I was in one of the very last classes @ Nellis AFB in the middle of that year (I was in what used to be the 37th FW up at TTR if that helps you figure out why and how that happened.) I did it with the intention of making a career out of it, but later events changed my mind; so no, that was not a typo.
I was recommended for it about a month after I made SrA.
...and this is why I have never made a car payment since the early 1990's, when I got a car repo'd while I was off serving in Desert Storm (once I pointed out that the bank broke the law by doing the repo, I discovered the costs of bringing the car back across two states --or a lawyer to fight that-- was way out of scope for an E-4 sergeant's budget.) It was then that I resolved to never, ever make payments on a car again... ever.
Since then, I've driven some outright piles of crap throughout the 1990s, but I've always owned my cars free and clear. I save up the money as best I can until I have enough to buy something newer in reasonably decent condition.
This has progressed from $300-400 hoopties, to a 1988 Mustang (in 1999) for $400, to a 1991 Jeep Wrangler (in 2001) for $4500, to a 2003 Pontiac Sunfire (in 2007) for $7200, to a brand-new 2013 Kia Soul for $14,200.
Each time, I saved my pennies and paid cash, which gave me a drastically lower pricetag, and I own the thing up-front. As a bennie, I still have both the Sunfire and the Soul (my wife drives the latter, and the former is still rolling along just fine at 150k miles), and the Soul is fully covered under warranty for the next 8 years. The Jeep finally died for good in 2013 (too much rust decayed the frame), prompting the new Kia. I gained the advantage of being very handy around a vehicle with tools and knowing junkyards very well, though most of that was self-taught over the years from turning outright shit-piles into decent running cars.
Long story short? Yeah it sucks that you can't drive some NewShiny that gathers all the babes, but start small and build up over time. Save, save, save... and always pay cash. You wind up paying less over the long run, the salesman suddenly wants to kiss your ass, and you get a better deal overall.
Oh, and in many of the cases up there, I managed to sell the older cars for more than I paid for them (though nowadays I figure I'll just drive the ones I have until they finally die for good.)
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
