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So I've used various drawing programs for years to make crappy little graphical schematics to post online. MS Paint is all I really need, although I've used Photoshop and similar programs as well.

I heard a lot about how powerful GIMP was, and my Mac didn't come with even a basic drawing tool, so I downloaded it. Lasted... oh, maybe 2 minutes.

The issue came when I wanted to draw a line. Now, every other graphics program I've used has a "line" tool, somewhere in plain sight. Observe:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Using-Paint
http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/photoshop/line_tool.html ...and so on. Such was not the case for GIMP. In GIMP, you use the Shift key with other tools to draw lines. Not an inherently bad way of doing things, I guess. But here's how you have to find out about it:

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/ (That's from the official GIMP site, mind you.)

Hey, GIMP guys. Screw you and your sarcastic screenshot telling me what the "Shift" button is. Your interface is the WEIRD one. People who use MS Paint or Photoshop or friggin' ClarisWorks - your potential customers - expect "line" to be a tool, not a key. And it's not like the key is entitled "Shift Or Draw Straight Lines In Some Linux Programs." It is NON-OBVIOUS that this would be the manner you draw lines. I don't care that I had to look up how to use a new interface, but don't act like I'm supposed to psychically fucking know ahead of time how your arbitrary interface works.

Note how both MS Paint and Photoshop are way MORE straightforward in this operation, and yet avoid sarcasm in their tutorials.

'Software resellers are moving headlong to Free Software? What is their business model supposed to be?'

'The open source business model relies on shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the 'Product Halo,' or ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation.)'

'Open Source as a Business Approach'

Which OS did they use? Microsoft DNA?

*rimshot*

Nobody ever said many to many relationships in XML were hard. The orginal comment said that mm relationships were hard in hierarchical databases, not hierarchical structures. a straightforward explanation of why many to many is hard in a hierarchical db can be found here.

Extropia has a detailed tutorial on databases of all types.XML:DB discusses the differences between object-oriented databases, hierarchical databases, and relational databases in detail. You may be interested in DBX a DBMS that is written completely in PHP, and works using XML style text files as its native format.

whoa... sorry... That came out wildly messy... I apologize. What I meant to get at was that Microsoft does infact dislike Open Source example 1, example 2. They dislike the GPL, and I'd imagine no matter how much you elitest shmucks like to disagree they dislike the BSD licences. The only license microsoft likes is its own... get that straight. This isn't a bad thing, hell Microsoft has always been more of a company than software maker.

...the rest of the numbers are free-for-all. If you calculate the number of digits a cc can hold, it works out to 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12) - only 12 digits to guess.

I'm afraid that's incorrect. One can conduct a 'Luhn Check' on the digits - you'll find that if you just make one up, there is a high chance you'll get it wrong. A possibly incorrect summary is: The algorithm multiplies each digit by a number (1 or 2), replaces the number by mod10 of that number, adds them up, and gets the mod again - if it is 0, it is valid.

You can a perl version of this algorithm on http://www.extropia.com/hacks/source/cc_valid_lib. txt. Alternatively, do a google search with terms like 'Luhn', 'validation', 'mod 10', 'credit card check', etc...

thenerd.