I've been doing it for years. I found that the best learning technique for me is to build something, blow it up, and then build it again, until the moving parts are second nature to me-- so it's handy to have a server/network I can blow up without getting fired.

A lot of the techniques and scripts I've developed on my network at home have ended up in use at client sites, and vice versa.

I need a version with smart objects if I'm running photoshop at all.

I know some people won't agree but I forced myself to create a few things in Scribus and it was an OK experience. It's got a few good points and some annoying points as well. It generated nice PDFs that viewed perfectly on multiple readers On Windows, you also have Xara Design Pro which is fantastic, but a lot of these alternatives depend on how strict your requirements of file sharing and print output formats and specifics too many to mention.

If I was drawing in the air with a pencil or something, how does it know when I'm drawing or not? is there an engage button we can assign to keyboard key?

>The number of people who still "specifically need" the Mac Pro aren't very different since Apple hasn't upgraded the expansion capacity of their other headless Macs.

Yes, I know. I thought that in the context of my statement, "the abilities of a Mac Pro" pretty clearly referred to its greater expandability.

IIRC, Tim Cook already publicly stated a redesigned Mac Pro would be released in 2013.

The other Macs in the lineup have grown more powerful over the years, so the number of people who still specifically need the abilities of a Mac Pro is relatively small. It would make no financial sense for Apple to address these regulations by changing the current Mac Pro design. The best move was what they did-- simply giving those people some warning so anyone who was planning future Mac Pro purchases could decide if they needed to buy the existing model or could afford to wait for the redesigned model to be announced.

The wiki is not really 95% complete.

On Black Friday, one of my coworkers bought a new laptop that came preloaded with Windows 8. Last week she brought it in and asked me to look at it because she couldn't get anything with Flash to work in IE.

I know Flash in the "metro" IE is supposed to be severely limited in what it can do, but even the desktop mode IE refused to run Flash. This despite the add-on being present and showing as enabled. After googling around and fucking with it for about 45 minutes, trying to get something to work that should have just worked right out of the box, I gave up and just installed Chrome for her so she'd have something that could run Flash stuff.

She later managed to find a Windows 7 laptop somewhere, bought it, and returned the Windows 8 laptop. When she returned it, the clerk asked her why, and she told him it was because Windows 8 was awful. He told her that Windows 8 machines were being returned to that store in droves, and every person he asked gave him the same reason.

Messing with her laptop was my first experience with Windows 8, and if I can help it, it will be my last. I found it to be a jumbled mishmash of confusing crap, and I've been doing IT for 20 years-- I can only imagine how hard non-techies are going to reject it. I am going to cling to Windows 7 for as long as I can.

Agreed, I would much rather read the transcripts to x-rated films than watch them. Way better.

Good call outs here. Every local news station has the worst video player mechanism. Rarely does my browser crash but it happens more than half the time I stumble on a local news site video. I try to exit those tabs as soon as I realize because those pages are loaded with shit. Local news sites are the absolute worst players and then they doubledown with 20 other concurrent flash apps playing at the same time. Idiots.

People abandon videos that don't play, big surprise. This has nothing to do with poor video quality. Experience tells users that if it's going to lag at the beginning it's probably going to lag the way through. Seems lke more short attention span than demanding quality expectations. It's surfing useless entertainment. These users aren't trying to watch something that their life depends on. Laggy video is not entertaining, so you switch it off. This isn't much of a scientific study. Anyone who publishes their video on a stats based player, such as brightcove are used to these abandonment stats.

Apple doesn't have a problem with competition, where other companies make original stuff and pit it against Apple's products. They have a problem with "copytition," where other companies just stamp out slavish knockoffs of Apple products and ride on their coattails.

I suggest you look at the 130+ page Samsung-produced document comparing features and appearance of elements of the iPhone to what Samsung was working on at the time. On pretty much every page, the suggestion is made to change the Samsung phone to make it more like the iPhone.

I'd say it's pretty damning evidence.