...and StackExchange.

The Express editions have a bunch of arbitrary limitations in them.

The two that bit me were:

1. You can't install plugins. I don't currently use any I can't live without, but several features in VS2013 -- e.g. NuGET, the thumbnail view replacing the scroll bar, better refactoring, visual indent level indication -- started out as plugins. Even if you take the view that eventually, all third-party plugin features eventually make it into the retail version, you're opting into being years behind the current state of the art.

2. The Express editions are artificially siloed into several versions, none of which has all of the features. If you need two features that are in different versions, at best you have to keep bouncing between the editions. If you need both features simultaneously, you're stuffed.

For me, the two features I needed simultaneously were the ability to create a mixed C# and F# program that ran on the desktop. To make a C# desktop app, you naturally need the desktop edition, but that edition doesn't include any F# support. For some demented reason, that's off in the Web edition, where it seems focused on ASP.NET development, not desktop development.

(And if you ask me why F#, well, this is Slashdot, isn't it? If I'd said Haskell instead, you'd just be nodding now. :) )

Take a look at Forks::Super. It's still a bit on the beta side, but useful enough for you to get real work done while you bang on the author to fix the remaining bugs. :)

I might have some sympathy with your position if I hadn't seen a technically savvy person like yourself bitten just a few months ago by the belief that RAID is a backup.

Did he get a virus? No.

Did he delete some file he had no other backup of? Nope, guess again.

Did a hard drive fail? No again. All four drives in the RAID-5 were A-OK.

What happened is a power outage in a thunderstorm. The RAID subsystem disappeared while the OS was writing something to the disk. When power came back, THE FILESYSTEM WAS GONE. Not corrupted, gone. MIA. Poof.

The RAID monitor saw all the disks, but the OS wouldn't even acknowledge that there was a mountable filesystem there any more. The victim had to resort to one of those data recovery programs that just scans the disk for file-like objects and saves them off one by one without metadata to an external hard drive.

He had no backup because he thought this 4-disk external RAID was expensive as-is. To back it up, he would have had to double his hardware costs. Now he's looking at the cost of recreating the home movies he had stored on that RAID and realizing that a thousand dollars or so for an offline backup RAID is actually cheap.

That is a lame-ass cop-out.

All it would take to figure some of these things out is some reverse engineering. Similar feats have been accomplished by the FLOSS community for less return many times.

I suspect what the GP ran into is a lack of support for layer styles, a feature Adobe added to Photoshop about a dozen years ago. No one's been able to figure this addition to PSD out in a dozen years? Really?

No: the truth is that everything you can do with Layer Styles, you can do by hand, so the Gimp culture's knee-jerk reaction is "Why bother?"

I'll tell you why: Layer Styles greatly speed up one's workflow. You can apply an effect with a few clicks, change it dynamically, save it, and keep editing it when you open the file again later. That's powerful stuff. But because it only amounts to smoothing out a workflow, and we all know how much the Gimp project cares about workflow issues, the feature never gets any attention.

Stone knives and bearskins, I tell you. That's all you really need!

Valid Photoshop license holder speaking here.

Yes, it's great that Gimp exists and that it's free in both senses of the word.

The problem is that Gimp keeps getting compared to Photoshop, as though it's any kind of contest.

If this were a racing event, the only way you'd get Gimp up against Photoshop is to do away with the class system. They call it an outlaw race, in automotive racing.

If you want to compare Gimp to something in the commercial world, compare it to Photoshop Elements, or Pixelmator.

...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.