...such as??

Seriously. I'd like a list of features in the stock version of Gimp that have no equivalent in Photoshop, please.

I'm only aware of one: the Lanczos resampling mode in the image resize dialog.

I happen to know that one only because it's emblematic of the Gimp usability problem. Its naming says it's a good idea to give a creative app a feature named after a mathematician with an unpronounceable name. (Yes, I know, LUNT-shosh. A fact maybe 1% of the 1% Gimp community knows.) Why not name it after its effect, or after its raison d'etre? For all I know, Photoshop does have Lanczos resampling, but they've named it something sensible.

The closest you see Adobe coming to this problem is Gaussian blur, and the past several releases of Photoshop have been moving away from it. One of the banner features of Photoshop CS6, the blur gallery, should do wonders for sweeping plain old Gaussian blurs into the dustpan of history.

So is that it? Is there anything else Gimp can point to and call its own?

I guess you could point to the scripting languages. Yes, Photoshop doesn't have a Scheme or Python interpreter. But it does have JavaScript, and you have a choice of VBScript on Windows and AppleScript on OS X. This doesn't count in my book. These two feature sets are comparable. I'm asking for features Gimp has that actually make some difference to an artist. Artists don't care what language their scripts are written in.

Simple: this bill takes these rights away for all 300+ million Americans. At a pen stroke. Poof, gone.

I don't know how you do your crime calculus on this issue, but it would have to be a pretty strange method for any conceivable level of murder to exceed this level of violation of our rights.

What is the murder equivalent of the loss of 3e8 rights?

If this passes and doesn't get repealed, double that cost in lost rights every 74 years, because the crime continues while new Americans are born.

$500 is not expensive for 3D software, and it's more than fair for what you get:

• Additional 2D and 3D exporters and importers - Plugins for these tend to cost $50+ per format for other packages. (Examples: 1, 2.) And, that's without getting into CAD loaders which are often much more expensive.

• Dynamic component creation - If this were a plugin, I'd expect to pay $50-100 for it.

• LayOut - This addition to the package obsoleted a $300 Illustrator plugin I used to use to achieve the same end.

• Direct Support - This might justify the price for you all by itself. I have a support contract for one of SketchUp's competitors that runs me more than $500, and it's charged each year.

The past few upgrades have been cheap, too, at $95. 30-50% of the original cost per upgrade is more common.

As for your speculation on price reduction and increased package granularity, I don't see that happening. The only such change we've seen in the past 6 years was due to Google's purchase of @Last, which gave us the free version. Google subsidized that on the back of Google Earth subs and ad revenue from Maps. I'd be worried about the free version going away, if it weren't for reassurances in the press release saying they'll keep offering it. Instead, it makes me wonder where the subsidy will come from now. Maybe Trimble will also be purchasing Google Earth.

There's not much sense in your argument.

It's true that 100% of filters and such didn't always work with 16-bit+ images in Photoshop. It might even have been CS3 where that 100% mark was reached, I don't remember.

The thing is, the important things in Photoshop have been 16-bit+ capable for a very long time. Namely, things dealing with image dynamic range, like Levels and Curves. Once you're happy with the brightness of all the pixels, you can confidently smash it to 8 bpc and continue working with it, confident you're not likely to introduce banding and such, which you'd get starting with an 8 bpc image needing brightness adjustment.

Yes, it's nice that recent versions of Photoshop don't place a constraint on your workflow, so that you could apply a color filter before a levels filter. Does it matter much, though?

In any case, we're on the eve of both Photoshop CS6 and Gimp 2.8. Even if you insist on the CS3 benchmark, Gimp is still at least four major versions behind, maybe five.

People bitch about the cost of Photoshop, but somehow forget that waiting for improved features has a cost, too. It doesn't matter if Gimp eventually catches up. The Photoshop people will have been benefiting from years or decades of productivity in the meantime.

Gimp 2.6 came out three and a half years ago, and 2.8 isn't out yet, yet we're already hyping features that won't appear until the next major version?

Photoshop 2.5 had deep color support and CMYK. It was released in November 1992. Gimp = teh AAAWWEEEESOME.

Maybe we can get layer styles before the Y2K38 bug destroys the computing world.

If we figure on catching up one major Photoshop release per Gimp release, that means we can get to Photoshop 6.0 layer styles by Gimp 2.18, which should be out in another 16 years at the current schedule of ~4 years per. Whew...still time, then.

True. See the oscillograms in the eye diagram article on Wikipedia to get an idea of what happens to the signal at the speeds HDMI runs at.

A perfect square wave requires infinite bandwidth to reproduce. In practice, you want at least 5x the bandwidth of your fundamental frequency, and 10x is better, so that you get enough of the harmonics to approximate a true square wave.

I seem to recall that HDMI is currently running at up to 2 GHz, so HDMI would require 10-20 GHz cable drivers if the goal were to produce square waves. Somehow I don't think the $60 Bluray player I just bought for Christmas has a high-end microwave transmitter built into it.

Are you sure? I would have thought it would be

1 Forth-sightful +

I built my own PCs for about a decade. Then I switched to Macs. Since the switch, each time I get called on to build a PC for some reason, I make at least one basic newbie mistake on the build. Why? The tech keeps changing, and because I'm not personally interested in keeping up on it to upgrade or replace my existing home machines, I miss something I would have caught if I were still building my own PCs.

No, you most certainly are the product.

It's more like how a cattle rancher has to be careful not to let too many of his cows run off, or get kilt by rattlers.

The rancher's expressions of concern are by way of protecting his product, rather than protection of a client relationship.

I figured the next news logical item was a press release for new HideMyAss.com thongs. Because they both apparently hide your ass equivalently.

Updates to Safari always require an OS X restart, for the same reason IE updates on Windows do: the "browser" is really just a UI wrapper around a core system component.

Unlike Windows, OS X allows you to replace in-use files without restarting, so you may be able to get away with restarting only the affected apps, rather than the entire system, but I don't think I'd take that risk.

Computers run on DC. The big power supply unit in your PC is an AC-DC converter.

The speculation is that Google is doing a couple of different things in regards to power.

First, they are probably doing the AC to DC conversion at the building's power inlet, and distributing DC to the racks so that each piece of equipment doesn't have to have its own power supply. One big power supply is generally more efficient than lots of small power supplies, not just in conversion efficiency but also in hard equipment costs.

Second, Google has probably optimized their hardware to reduce the number of DC voltages they need. Your PC's power supply has to put out +/-12 Vdc, +/-5 Vdc, and +3.3 Vdc. Further, down on the motherboard, and sometimes on the peripherals, there are additional down-conversions to produce other needed voltages, such as ~1.2 Vdc for your CPU chip. Again, each conversion causes an efficiency loss, and they stack up. Some of these rails are all but unused in modern PCs — particularly the negative ones — but because of standardization, they have to be there anyway. Even sitting idle, these underutilized power rails waste energy. Overall, your computer probably consumes about 20% more AC power than it delivers in DC power to the parts in your PC.

You cannot do these things in your house today because 1) neither Newegg nor your local power company sells whole-house AC-DC converters; 2) even if they did, your house doesn't have separate DC power wiring to distribute it to the rooms; and 3) even if you put that in, there are no standard connectors to use for it. There's been hope for years that all of this would eventually be sorted out; the solution is obvious, it's just the logistics that's hard. I think that over time, we'll start seeing USB connectors with +5 Vdc appearing in houses, but it'll be a process of decades to make any real progress here. Google doesn't have to wait for all that.

The famous quote doesn't apply to unidentified security flaws.

The point of the quote is that when someone points out buggy behavior, the many eyeballs will quickly pierce to the heart of the bug and find a way to fix it. With fewer eyes, really nasty bugs often remain unfixed long past the time they are first identified because none of the brains behind the few eyeballs that have looked at it have figured out the fix yet.

The nature of most security bugs is that their existence is not obvious. Most software with security flaws performs its intended function as long as it is run within expected bounds. There is nothing for the many eyeballs to attack until someone tries pushing the software into its operational gray areas, then notices that it does something unwanted or unexpected. As soon as that happens, the quote applies: security holes in open source software are typically fixed soon after being identified.

Schneier hasn't written a "hard" CS book since that first one because it turns out that the crypto solves only a tiny part of the problem. People are a much bigger part. I think Schneier felt he had to write these later books because he kept seeing software developers ignore the people problem.

You may say you really get this problem. Maybe you are right. The evidence, though, tells us that most people really do not get it, and need to be beaten over the head with it several times before they do get it. Much better to receive that beating at the hands of a benevolent master, rather than watch your carefully-built perfectly-designed cryptosystem fall to social engineering, or to a kid peeking at a stickynote under a keyboard.

For more stories of this sort, read Mitnick's book. It is not an especially enjoyable book, and Mitnick is not an especially good hacker. That's exactly the point, though. These are real stories of how real systems get compromised. Mitnick describes your actual enemy, not the one so many people seem to imagine. (The NSA, et al.).

I've put serious learning time in on at least 5 different general-purpose 3D graphics packages, including Blender. Blender is, hands-down, the hardest to learn and use of any I've tried. It even beat out a hoary old beast from the late 90's I had to use for a course, which was chosen purely because it was ancient and therefore cheap.

There are those that use the excuse, "It's professional grade, and pros don't cry about difficult to use tools." Well, sorry, but that only flies when there are no alternatives. If there's only one tool that does Thing X and the tool sucks, well, a pro will grit his teeth and use it anyway. That's not the case in 3D modeling / animation / rendering software. We have an embarrassment of choices, and they span a wide range of cost, power, and ease of use. Unless "freeeeee" is your only important criterion, there are usually better options than Blender, at least as of 2.4x.

I will certainly be playing with this new 2.5 version. Maybe they're right. Maybe they've completely fixed it all, and I can get off the Cinema4D, modo and SketchUp upgrade treadmills.