Apple ahead of schedule 3143
Ah. This is the standard lock-in schtick. :D snip Hmm. I do not see any difference between Windows and OS X here; if you...
DOS is still supported after 25. snip Yes. But Apple simply doesn't care about compatibility as much as MS does. This is most dramatically seen...
It can, but there are some serious problems with that. One is that it obviously isn't available on the Mac, which is the standard platform in this industry, which can make it difficult to exchange files. The other is, well, see below. Microsoft almost actively discourages developers from using profile-based color workflows.
No, there are two steps to accurate on-screen color management. One is that you have to be using the right ICC profile for the screen. This doesn't requite application-level support, and Windows can do it, though I don't think it has calibration software included.
The second step is that, when displaying an individual image, you have to read its embedded ICC profile and have your color matching engine figure out how to most accurately convert between that profile and the screen's profile. This *does* require application-level support (or, in the case of OS X, requires using APIs which do it for you).
Microsoft's color management system supports ICC profiles, but is primarily focused around some silly notion that everything should just have good native display of sRGB. This makes it less complex for users, but also close to useless for serious color management.
It's being replaced in Vista. We'll see how that turns out.
-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005