Most of the artists I know are 3D artists, so no, I don't know much about the 2D packages. All of the 3D ones have scripting interfaces though, and I'm pretty sure Photoshop does (at least on the Mac, it exposes a lot to AppleScript, no idea about Windows).

There's a difference between hiring artists who are good programmers and hiring artists who understand the basics of programming. It amazes me how much time commercial artists waste doing grunt work that can be trivially automated. If you hire only the ones that know a tiny bit of programming then they'll spend a tiny bit of time writing some crappy code instead of a lot of time doing everything by hand.

The loan was for two years, with interest payments of £150 (so, £75/year) on a total of £450. That works out at about a 17% AER. On other words, you'd have been about as well off to get the first credit card offer that came through your door, buy the phone outright, and pay back the money at the same rate. You'd have been a lot better off if you could afford to pay back £50 on your credit card bill every money. A quick search tells me that the Sainsbury's credit card has a 7.8% APR, so if you got one of these, you'd be a lot better off to buy the phone on the card, and then paying back as much as you could afford.

If you're in a situation where £450 is an unaffordable expense, I'd imagine that you already have a credit card that you pay off every money, so you postpone paying for your regular expenses by 14-45 days, in which case just buying the phone on the card you already have would be cheaper and no more effort.

And it sounds like you actually got a comparatively good deal on your phone. Most 'subsidised' phones are equivalent to a loan with an APR of 20-50%. I'd love to see the regulator say that phone companies had to sell phones at the same price whether you had a contract or not, but could include a loan for phone purchasing with the contract as long as they stated the terms with the same detail required of other lenders.

If you only care about email and calendars, then something like SOGO is a much cheaper alternative than Exchange and removes the requirement to run Windows on the server. It's also mainly developed by a Canadian company, so should keep your government contracts very happy. If you're already employing system administrators for Exchange, then the costs shouldn't change much.

If I were an accountant, I'd want to use something like Quantrix Modeller, not a toy like Excel. Or possibly something a bit more tailored to my specific domain.

Ixian? Try again...

Photosynthesis isn't very efficient, but it is very convenient. If you want the maximum possible conversion rate from solar energy, it's a terrible choice. If, however, you want something that can be cheaply deployed, then something that can self-assemble from light, water, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a few trace nutrients is quite attractive in comparison to photovoltaics.

If you're telling your students that grades don't matter, then you're lying to them. Their grades are going to be important when they try to get their first job. The education is more of a long-term investment - it's something that will benefit them over their entire life. It's important to balance both at university. Make sure that you do enough work to get good grades but, as Mark Twain said, don't let it interfere with your education.

This usage is confined to the USA, so 50% (last published numbers) of the audience will have had to look it up. It's one confined to a traditionally non-geeky niche in the USA, so at least half of the remainder will have needed to look it up. When you are using a term that you would anticipate that 75% of your target audience will need to look up, it's generally a good idea to define it.

The problem is, we don't have good metrics for selecting students. If we did, university admittance would be much easier. We've found that there is very little correlation between students results in their last year at school and their final mark. We have a lot of data at Cambridge because each college has different admittance criteria: none of them consistently manages to pick the best students.

I didn't make stuff up, I simply read the linked page, from Adobe, which says:

It also says that it runs on:

No you don't. The buffer cache is indexed by inodes, not by file paths. Both copies of the library resolve to the same inode and so when you mmap() the library you get one (CoW) copy of it that is shared between all processes that map it.

No it doesn't. PC-BSD has had this model for application installs for ages. The installer hard links duplicate libraries and so on together. Hard links are already reference counted, and have been since the early days of UNIX, so you end up with one copy of each library. The logic in the installer is relatively complicated, but the uninstaller just has to delete the tree.

The way that the packages in the repository are built ensures that programs using the same library ship the same binary. If you upgrade just one program, then you'll have two copies of the library, until you upgrade all of them and then the old one's reference count will hit 0 and it will be gone from disk.

Does the same logic mean that the government can not reject FOI requests for emails and can not redact anything in emails?

It also only runs on XP, not on any newer version of Windows, so it's increasingly irrelevant for the Windows users too.