Tell that to the people of Washington state who are likely going to pass I-594 whose supporters more or less claim it will do just that... While ignoring all of the accidental and nonviolent felons it will create.

Better yet, you can look at the porn you steal, so long as you don't -

The recursive expansion will keep it tied up in court forever.

Windows, nein!

You beat me to it.

who's to say the supposed built-in would perform any better?

Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!

Thank you! You've given me reason to sit up and pay attention when 3 rolls around, I appreciate that.

I would recommend against showing the more diehard Photoshop fans that link, though. It won't get you anywhere because what it really needs to be is a list like this:

- GIMP has a plugin/feature for automatically generating normal maps from elevation data.

- GIMP has a perspective correction feature that is superior to Photoshops in that it...

- GIMP's 'save all layers' button saves all of the layers in your file into seperate files.

.. or something like that. In the list you gave me, points 1 through 4, and 7, are irrelevant if somebody already has Photoshop. Given its de-facto marketshare, that is likely.

5 is horribly overrated. Lots of artists can script, but few (if any) can make actual plugins or modify the source code. (Even if they do dig in to the code how do they maintain those features when a new version of GIMP comes along?) I do want to mention, though, that there's another reply to my original post that seems to have covered the scripting point. I haven't checked it out yet but given that scripting is something I do, I'm certainly interested in trying that out.

6 needs an extra line, something like: "its better than Photoshop's Batch feature because...."

10... actually this is a really good one. In fact, just before this thread started, I went and found the portable version and downloaded in. Why? Welp, if the scripting that Culture20 posted a link to turns out to be worthwhile for me, coupling that with a portable version of GIMP is *awesome*. What that means is I will be able to automate certain tasks AND keep a fresh install on my DropBox account so I can even use it off-site. This is 1 out of 9.5 (I gave partial credit to the source-code bit) and, as you can already see from other replies you've gotten, most are refutable.

I'm a little worried you might read my post and think that I'm trying to perpetuate the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate. I'm not, instead I'm trying to explain what needs to happen explanation-wise to get more Photoshop people to try GIMP out. I think there's this mentality that people should switch to GIMP and that's simply not true. If you got the professional Photoshop users to start using GIMP for certain tasks, you may find that some studios may find it worth their time to invest some development time into improving it. Given how Adobe has been dicking around with the licensing, this would be a good time to get that ball rolling. Start touting the unique features it has that shave man-hours off a project. If those features don't exist, then the team needs to start talking to people like me and finding out what else they need.

If they didn't forsee the possibility of discovery down the road then their legal team wasn't doing it's job (assuming they had one).

YouTube responds to takedown requests thus helping it stay within the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. The emails from Grooveshark do seem to suggest they activly participated in infringement rather than just being a medium which infringers happened to use.

Clearly the management of Grooveshark didn't have the forethought of those at the IRS did to ensure that hard drives containing potentially incriminating emails disappear.

Care to run off a list of ways that "GIMP doesn't come close"? If it's really so bad, it shouldn't be that difficult to name at least a dozen or so... In actuality, I expect that enumerating the shortcomings of GIMP will not be in quantity, but in terms of a relatively small number of particularly desirable features that many may perceive as critically important in such software.

Hi, professional artist here. Your latter point, at least from my perspective, is correct. I know Photoshop really well, but since I make my living doing this work I am not biased in a way that'd prevent me from using a free tool. Let me be extra clear: It would hurt me to be fanboyishly loyal to be any particular app. I do pick up and mess with GIMP from time to time, but it has two critical omissions from Photoshop that make it unusable in my field. First, it lacks adjustment layers. Second, it lacks Smart Objects.

These are both features intended to do non-destructive editing of imagery. Let's say you have a tree with green leaves. You can create a Hue/Saturation 'adjustment layer' that will turn all the green pixels beneath it blue. If you put a picture of a different tree below that layer, its leaves would turn blue, too. If you took that tree and made it a 'smart object', you'd effectively be snapshotting that image and every operation you do causes it to regenerate itself. In other words, if you shrank a Smart Object down, then scaled it back up again, you'd get all its original detail back.

If you're creating imagery it doesn't take long for these two features to change your workflow in such a way that you gain a HUGE time savings. In fact I have created several templates to speed up the generation of images I do that I just plain cannot do in GIMP. Realistically speaking that is enough man-hours lost that I'd actually make a greater profit paying for Photoshop than I would saving the cost of the license in favor of GIMP.

With that said, I'd be *very* happy if you told me that version 3 would add these features. I'd also be very happy if somebody could tell me what GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. It's free. if it shaves man-hours off my work, then load me up with the tips. I ain't gonna switch, but I ain't above using both.

Disclosure:

I work extensively with Microsoft customer usage data (although on Visual Studio, not Windows)

Odds are, unless you've been very intentional about ticking the checkboxes the right way, Microsoft is already collecting usage data from you -- for a variety of products. Never without your consent, of course.

The issues around anonymizing your data and removing PII are taken very seriously. It's damn frustrating, because I often look over the data for user 234209342349 and think, "I wish I could email this guy and ask why the hell he is doing that". But there is no way for me to recover PII for VS client customers.

For the Visual Studio products, a typical approach is that data that might have a PII impact is one-way hashed on your local machine, so that PII never goes over the wire and never gets to Microsoft to begin with.

You can use tools like filemon to see where VS dumps the usage data files it generates. I don't remember if these look like binary mess on disk or not, but they get written to disk, and then you can see them go over the wire some time later. You could of course use a packet sniffer to see the on-the-wire format, and if it differs from what is stored on disk.

The data we scrub in VS covers the obvious things -- account names or email addresses -- but also some more subtle things -- like file paths (because these could contain your username, or a company name, or anything else), and even thing like VS Project Type names (because Company Foo can create their own Project Type, and might put their company name in the Project Type Name)

So anyway, there's actually not much of a story here. I can't comment on the truth or accuracy of what MJF is saying. However, what she is saying is that, in effect, the latency between usage data being locally captured/calculated, and that data being sent to Microsoft (assuming the user has allowed usage data to be sent), is now much lower than it was in the past.

For VS, at least, I know what data we have available to us. I opt-in to all of the MS data collection stuff, because I see no evidence of it being used inappropriately, and, because I know that we use it to try and understand what users are doing and why they are doing it.

Opting into the data collection stuff effectively gives you "a vote" in how we do things in future releases.

*banging head on wall with everybody calling these things 'drones'*

Not just any aeriel photography... manned vs not.

This is simply a modern and more cost effective way of doing what has been done for ages.

It used to be you'd pay someone (for their time & fuel) to fly a manned helicopter or airplane over a given area and have to deal with possibly remote takeoff/landing locations as well as noise over your target... now you simply pay a guy with a van to park on a public street, launch a UAV and fly it over the target area.

Far easier & far cheaper.

And you know this how?

You may be right.... but unless you've got some specific evidence you are speculating just as much as any explicit pointing to this vulnerability as the exploit used in the hack.

IMO our whole monetary system has evolved to promote convenience so much that we're losing basic security.

I just now cancelled a debit card because I'm tired of cleaning up after fraudulent transactions. The world is full of criminal organizations working full time to defraud anybody and everybody. I just can't see it as sustainable.