Don't forget about the person that asked Apple's Siri voice activated search engine, "what's the best place to hide a dead body"?

Can't send this before I remind others here of the Slashdot comment to that piece, clarifying that the person who did this was Florida college student who failed to understand how many alligators and crocodiles live in the area.

The example just seems so classic I had to add this comment.

And since you AC care to challenge my career in publishing production let me give you some advice, that I realized and adopted for myself years ago.

There's the difference between print publishing and electronic publishing. You know it for what it is, but I'll elaborate, and to make my point, I'd have to say your photoshop work falls into the Print Category (for this example anyway), and there's nothing wrong with that. I've spent my time with the CLUTs and calibrations, before the technology of Lithography matured to what we know today. To clarify the difference between Print and Digital Publishing, (and you can figure out for yourself where you fit in), I'll define Print being dead tree, deadline then go to press stuff, *and* a Typo Stays(!).

Of course everyone did the best they could, including the proofreader, but it is impossible to remove the typo, or whatever error is that hypothetically just slipped past, and the cost of the print run to the client is huge. Jobs could be lost as a result of a typo. But typos can and do happen, every day. Some are just more important than others. The fact remains, typos and any other kind of error cause a lot of stress and risk. And life is short.

Now in Digital Media, we have all kinds of cool technology to solve our evolving problems, such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery. We have things like typos too! Except the Digital Publishing business model is so much better, because typos are totally excepted and are in-fact known as 'bugs', and we get paid to come back every day to fix them. And on Fridays everyone goofs off and drinks beer and goes home early.

Get off my lawn.

Here's a quote from my post you replied to:

Sure, pros will want Photoshop for the hours they spend time with it

Not everyone has requirements like yours while many others are still working professionally with graphics and require good tools. Meanwhile GIMP keeps improving and fixing its faults.

I'm a website developer. I crop images. Work on logos a bit. Try to improve the colors. I have also sold my work as a graphics professional for many years already; and I have an extensive portfolio. And I take pride in the fact that when I service a contract for a client, there's no need to add the cost of the Adobe CC suite to the budget, although on a short term contract basis this argument has been greatly diminished due to monthly cloud pricing. Mostly I get paid to code.

Glad things are working out for you. Have a nice day. I dunno, enjoy a beer and chill or whatever it is you enjoy. I'd buy one for you, but you know.

Have you seen the new interface since, I dunno, the last few weeks (using Ubuntu 12.04)? It is radically different than before, and much more along the lines of something that a typical Photoshop/Elements user could adapt to as being similar without much hassle. All those past critisizms of GIMP that I've read here on /. no longer seem to apply. Sure, pros will want Photoshop for the hours they spend time with it, but if you've just got a handful of graphics to manage for the website or whatever, GIMP all the way baby. (And Inkscape too!)

No one is buying me a Mac with the Adobe suite, and then upgrading it next year, and then the year after that, and then...

And times change.

Google announced in August (I believe) that page rank will now include SSL scoring. So if those ad networks want to remain relevant, by not breaking all the pages they want to get published on, then those web devs and admins better step up their game. Let me rephrase that, the ad networks need to budget for, and pay for web devs and admins, or train the ones they have already.

+5 informative

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...

Military Grade LEGO, of course.

But what would the U.S. Government do with all that money anyway? Surely Apple could put that huge amount of cash to better use, either by innovating more, or by creating new jobs and growing the economy that way. Apple could then rise above the scenario that forced them into conditons that has now lead to a class-action lawsuit, alleging collusion and conspiracy to pay their workers less income by means of a non-poaching agreement Apple should at a minimum negotiate a better tax repatriation deal! /sarcasm

Of course, you or I are not allowed to negotiate squat with the government, because we're just people.

I'll see your Drupal and raise you one better: how about using Drupal/OpenAtrium?

You may recall the previous Presidential administration made headlines by replacing the Clinton administration's IBM/Lotus Notes Domino email/groupware servers with MicrosoftExchange (and presumably SharePoint also, but I'm not gonna go there).

The current Presidential administration of course had to ditch that Microsoft crap as fast as it possibly could. Obviously, continuing to use it would become a political and legal liability. They chose to use Drupal/OpenAtrium. Using OpenAtrium2 on Drupal 7, you too can enjoy a smartphone-enabled responsive intranet, with a minimum of development and budget.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a Drupal OpenAtrium developer (and am looking for my next project, so am available for private discussions). In fact at the same time it went public that The White House uses OpenAtrium for their project management and collaboration requirements, I delivered a similar collaborative project management intranet to NYSE Euronext. It was used by teams at the Amsterdam, Paris, and New York Exchanges while I was there. Before others also realized, I ascertained my assignment put my development efforts (and bug-tracking/feature requirements) in direct competition with Atlassian JIRA, so I took JIRA head-on. Just before Christmas a meeting was held, and I was told a Sr. VP at NYSE had decided my OpenAtrium development of a few weeks was superior and thus more desirable than JIRA, and I won(!) the competition. I was told then NYSE would use my OpenAtrium, and ditch JIRA, because my OpenAtrium Atrium development after only a few weeks could clearly beat JIRA requirement per requirement, while being much more user-friendly, and with a (dare I say) sexier GUI.

Alas, it was not to be (for me), and ultimately JIRA won, and I lost, and was soon out of a contract also. But still! I was a contender, dammit! All I got to work with was a bunch of Microsoft Office tools, Windows, and we were graced to also use FireFox. I delivered a Drupal application to NYSE overnight using my own VPS at Linode, with zero budget out of fear of job-loss. Previously, NYSE loved their 2-D spreadsheets and email, for project management. I requested early-on to be allowed to import their spreadsheets into a 3-D relational MySQL (drupal) database early on and was told "No". After several weeks passed, of no progress made by me to answer the report-requirements/questions posed of me by NYSE bean counters despite my best efforts with Microsoft Excel and %$#@! pivot tables, I asked my boss again, can I import the data into MySQL? I was then told yes, because that info was due weeks ago, was very late, and I was otherwise about to be fired. I worked all night and less than 24 hours later, all was imported into Drupal and I was able to report on and answer every question posed upon me. A week later, that Drupal database became a Drupal/IOpenAtrium intranet, and evolved into a very popular project management and collaborative tool. The #1 feature was: MULTITASKING. No longer did all my colleagues have to take turns updating the single spreadsheet, one at a time, with their totals at 5 o'clock, before they could go home! This was a huge hit from the staff. Meanwhile NY loved the spreadsheet import/export feature I implemented for them (HAD to have that to get approval). The Drupal (spreadsheet) sheetnode module is better (and sexier) than Google Docs IMHO. NYSE thought so too. For awhile there, I beat JIRA at NYSE using Opentrium, and I'm very proud of that.

FWIW, I have code for responsive video content-types about 85% finished, based upon the video.js open-source player.

There is some exploration that has to be done in person. There are some questions that cannot be answered without sending people to answer them. Questions like "are we stuck on this planet"?

May I respectfully disagree with this point of yours? I prefer the outlook to be more along the lines of, yes, *all* of us are stuck on this planet, so let's make this work for all of us, (...case in-point is Global Warming). And, I think instruments alone are yielding far more actual science per dollar than factoring human survival, and safe return, from someplace like Mars, into the equation. But that's just me, and I totally respect where you are coming from.

I appreciate your taking the time to comment, and your ideas which are worthy of serious consideration, which I plan to do as time passes. Especially your final point (why aren't we investing more?)

What is the difference between sending humans, with all their implications, vs. instruments and engines to get them there? Why is the human part so important to science? And at what cost, to everyone who must pay real money for the expedition, (...never minding the folks who volunteered their 'free time'/lives to go up first)?