Nothing personal against you, but I've been programming since the age of 10, I've held the title of "Senior Network Engineer" at a research institution for 11 years. And right now I design simulations for the DOD out of bare metal, C, and Tcl/Tk.

And I use a Mac. And in fact, everyone I know who knows what the hell they are doing uses one too.

STFU. Please.

Ok... we just bought a macbook for our new developer. And, with all the fixings it came out to $1159.

Kindly STFU.

Actually, opening the case to replace the hard drive will not void your warranty. We used to do it all the time, at the blessing (and instruction) of our Apple Support reps when I was a network admin.

Same with RAM chips. Where it gets dicy are factory sealed items like iPods and iPhones where the only way to get them open is essentially with machine tools, and getting them back together involves industrial solvents and adhesive.

Depends on your definition of a "good OSS citizen." In the scary government research/mad scientist corporate research market BSD licensed code is ideal. We *can* use it, because releasing our source code would, in fact, violate either DMSO or corporate licensing arrangements.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and frankly when our company makes something that we see as useful, but not a core product, we do release it and/or submit patches back to whence it came. I just like not having some idiot ramrodding us for not giving proprietary information out to our competitors.

(And why Tcl/Tk is under the hood of many secret squirrel projects.)

Well when you use the adjective "best", you pretty much eliminate a claim to "cheap".

And at $1100, a 13" Macbook has been ideal for my purposes. It's usable on an airplane. Powerful enough to run all of my development kits. I can kick off Linux and Windows XP when I need to target those platforms (especially handy when the boss needs a new build and I'm 3 time zones away at a conference.)

But there is an important caveat. America always catches and releases. We invade, set up a new government, and for the most part *LEAVE*. (An odd air field or fueling spot of the Navy not withstanding.)

Find me an empire in the past that did that?

No, all we are saying is that if you are going to *publish* as an authority on the matter. I.E. *as* a scientist, that you know WTF you are talking about.
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Missing an important underlying correlation, and implying a causation where one does not exist is beyond irresponsible.

As a photojournalist -- and I don't mean this to be insulting -- you are obviously completely unaware of the publishing side of the equation, especially as it pertains to things like fashion magazines. It wouldn't be even remotely "interesting to see" how many photos in such magazines have been airbrushed/manipulated after the fact (presumably meaning after they've left the camera) because the answer is 100% of them. In fact, the only way that an unretouched photo is going to appear in a magazine like that is if they're making a specific point of showing their readers specifically what an unretouched photo looks like.

I ran a design shop specializing in advertising and package design for a bunch of years, and I can tell you from first hand experience that everything that came through the door was retouched. EVERYTHING. It could be as simple as adjusting the color balance, or removing undesirable elements like cold sores, blemishes, logos or objects (from uncontrolled locations), to taking the body/pose from one shot and adding it to a "better" head angle/facial expression from another one. (It's not unlike what they do in the movies if there are TV antennas in a shot of an 18th century cityscape.)

Instead of blaming Photoshop for people's image problems, maybe these people ought to work on addressing the utterly unrealistic assumption on the part of a vast segment of the public that everything they see in the media (print or broadcast) is appearing in some kind of pristine and natural state. (It's not just the French, there's apparently a growing push towards similar labeling in the US.) Do they not think that being able to inject regional ads into live broadcasts of TV events isn't destructively deceptive? C'mon...

If people don't get this concept on their own, then maybe the best solution is to forceably confront them with it. Make it mandatory that everyone work on their school newspapers or yearbook staff where they will be deliberately exposed to such practices (by dint of the curriculum). Like Robert Louis Stevenson said at the very beginning of The Art of Writing: "There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys."

Hmm. Well with iron and woods on the moon, throw in a putter...

Frank Miller adapting Will Eisner makes about as much sense as Sam Peckinpah adapting Jeeves and Wooster.

When Quentin Tarantino made Jackie Brown from Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, people were all "dazzled" by how brilliant it was, this fusing of two great dialogue masters. Personally, I found that Tarantino's choices, starting with moving the story out of Miami and working right on through the list, did nothing more than systematically eliminate everything that made the book charming and great. In the end, what you had was something that was Tarantino's flesh and fetishes hung over the barest mention of Leonard's skeleton.

I fully expect that's what we're going to have with this Spirit movie. Frank Miller is possibly the least qualified person to adapt Eisner (personally, I think Kevin Smith would do a better job), and I'm glad Will's not around to see this.

In our shop everything is either Bash or Tcl, dude.

Even the webservers.