Nothing in that statement prevents a merchant from accepting a card that contains a signature and also demands that the merchant further verify the user with an id card. From what I read in that passage, if you sign the card, and accompany your signature with "ask for ID", they can accept the card.
... If Con Edison could just consistely supply power to western queens without week long blackout or go a single month in the summer without having a manhole explode or electrocute some poor passer-by.
Yes! And when I get pulled over by a cop for speeding and hand him my license, I'll get a ticket for speeding, and then be arrested for attempted bribery! Brilliant!
Am I the only one that doesn't have a problem about going bald? Or having some deep complex about body hair in general? It's not hair or lack of it that makes people look good or bad. You tend to lose it during your early middle age, and frankly it's not the hair situation which makes you look over the hill. If you're like most Western guys it's things like your hanging belly, heavy jowls and plushy, coarse, unkempt complexion that makes you look old and pathetic, not the follicle density of your skull top. You could have a mane big enough to play in a hair band and you'd still look old and pathetic. I started going bald a few years ago, at the time I had a thick mane that was always tied back in a neat little ponytail, but I was getting a baldspot and occasionally, it was shining through the back. When I shaved off all my hair, I was *amazed* at how much *better* I looked than when I had the ponytail. I thought I was nuts at first but everyone I know agrees I should have cut it all of years ago. I think if I started growing back my hair, I would still shave it all off.
I had been *qute* preoccupied with my hairloss until I decided to give it the buzz, now I couldn't possibly care less, I had checked out a few forums online at one point where people were discussing various ways of treating their baldness and they all seemed so sad and unhappy, I didn't want to be like that so I just said, "fuck it, it is what it is" and just shaved it all off... But I'm also lucky to have a nicely shaped head.:-)
typeographers have been compensating for this for years, that's why it is much easier to read a block of text when there is sufficient leading to push the prior and next lines out of your paragraph beyond the scope of optical interference, and why a non-fussy serif face with a reasonable amount of differentiation betwen the x-height and ascender/descender height helps keep the mind focused on the current word, by making the word more (visually interesting) and the leters that make it up a bit more clearly separate. On a related note, one of the things that really contributes to the low-readability of online media is the consistent use of sans-seriff fonts. It's all about pushing irrelevant text out of focus while maintaining the rythmn of the words and lines in the readers "stream."
We have to use sans fonts online due to the relatively low-resolution screens that we use, which don't render all the features of seriff letterforms clearly or cleanly, (and the fact that there are very few (decent) serif faces that come on all os's). Web also tend to use minimal leading in order to pack as much content as possible in "above the fold". That and the type rendering technology in windows absolutely blows, and renders seriffs in a small point size absolutely hideously.
Higher resolution monitors would really contribute well the the readability of type on the web.
While it is debatable whether this is a crime carried out virtually, I would think that someone commiting these kinds of acts online has a higher probability of actually trying to commit them in the real world... so I would hope that police *would* look into them (probability of this seems pretty low here int he USA). In all probability our legal system is totally unprepared to deal with the implications of something like this (notably, prevention is not particularly high on the the PD's list of priorities).
The Mac Version of Firefox needs a *lot* of help. IMO, Firefox is one of the *worst* browser options on the mac. I use it for front end development work, because it has the best javascript console and dom imspector out there, in addition to many handy developer extensions, but for regular browsing just about any other mac browser is better IMHO.
The biggest problem with FF on a mac is that it is not a Coccoa app, which makes it feel like a shitty port of the Windows version of Firefox. Not making firefox a Coccoa app causes the application to feel incredibly wonky (sluggish, unresponsive, awkward) and not tie into various OS-level niceties that Mac Users expect in every app. FF on a mac, feels like a windows app, that just happens to run in Mac OS X, It takes the users OS away from them to a degree. I chose to use a mac, because I like the way macs work, and if your app violates the standard behaviour/feel of my OS of choice, I won't use it.
The chrome rendering sucks, often causing unsightly rendering artifacts when you have moving/resizing page elements with a scrollbar.
Javascript performance is pitiful, particuarly when it comes to time-based manipulation of css properties (css-based animation).
Its a non-cocoa app... WTF?. That means that firefox misses out on many system-wide capabilities (hooks to dictionary.app are lost, lost emacs key bindings, no applescript support, type rendering is not as good as Cocoa apps, etc... ).
The non-native form widgets suck. (this is another cocoa related problem, but it merits its own line item).
The chrome rendering sucks, often causing unsightly rendering artifacts when you have moving/resizing page elements with a scrollbar.
It takes a year and a day to launch on my Macbook Pro, even with 3gb of ram.
Page loads are slow.
No support for ICC/colorsync profiles
The default theme doesn't comply very closely to Apple's UI Guidelines
Many window positioning bugs (probably related to the fact that this is a non-cocoa app)
I'm a fairly advanced front-end web developer. Most of what I do is ui coding for websites, I write a lot of javascript, css and some HTML. Many of my clients have pretty unique needs and it seems like every project I end up working on has some particularly unique UI element that requires special handling. If I did not have to support IE, most of my projects would take significantly less time to complete. At one point, I was considering creating a blog wherein I would document every stupid bug and nonstandard implementation of otherwise standard technologies I ran into while developing for IE, but I quickly realized it would end eating up all my free time. I find it particularly annoying that MS has taken some half-hearted effort to make IE 7 slightly more standards compliant than IE 6, but ignored all of the really important bugs in the browser (FIX THE GODDAMNED BOX MODEL YOU RETARDED PACK OF MONGRELS!), so now you have to create workarounds for two slightly different versions of the browsers, that both share most of the same flaws but each one also has its own unique flaws to make stuff *really* interesting. My code contains a lot of comments along the lines of:
try {// for standards-based browsers
statements_that_make_ie_crap_its_pants_but_work_ev erywhere_else();
} catch (e) {// for standards-challenged browsers
special_handholding_for_retarded_browsers();
}
and if (client.engine == 'msie') { if (client.engine == 'msie') { document.writeln(''); } }
I used to try and make sites work perfectly in all browsers without relying on code forking and additional CSS docs for IE, but I no longer see the point. It's a shitty hack of a browser, so I code my sites so that they work perfectly in all the other browsers, and toss in IE support as an afterthought since IE users don't really care about their web-browsing experience. I support it because I have to, but if you browse my sites on another browser, you'll have a better experience.
My father once led a cow up several flights of steps into the principals office, at the top floor of his college's administrative building. This turned out to be a real prank, because although you can lead a cow upstairs, getting a cow to walk *down* a flight of stairs is another matter entirely. I believe the cow was up there for a week before they figured out how to get it down.
This would be great for ski/snowboard goggles
on
Smart Sunglasses
·
· Score: 1
This would be a fantastic technology for snowboarding goggles, where you often need to swap goggles for different lighting conditions.
I hate having to swap the lenses in my goggles between day/night riding, or having my sunshine lenses on on the sunny side of the mountain and then going into the glades or backside and wishing I had a tinted lens to help me see better.
The claim that the mac offers nothing special or unique in the field of digital arts today is very simply not true. I am a programmer now, but I was an art director for many years and I still work with art directors and designers every day. I can assure you that there are excellent reasons for the preference of Mac OS X in this field. Not the least of these is the fact that the Mac OS UI and windowing system is better designed for interoperability between different programs that must be used to cooperatively edit/create a single document. Mac OS X assumes that you want to see more than one thing at once, and work cooperatively between several documents concurrently to complete a single task. It is designed around showing you multiple documents simultaneously, in different applications. Windows is designed around the assumption that you will want to limit your concentration to one program at a time, and one document at a time (minimize/maximize), and although you can work with several documents at once in different applications, windows is not designed for that work style and makes it somewhat of a pain. here is an example.
Suppose I am working on some marketing collateral, I am going to be using inDesign (or Quark, if I live in the dark ages) for my paste up program. Lets say there is some EPS artwork in my indesign document, that must be edited with Illustrator, and lets say that this EPS artwork also uses some bitmaps that must be edited in Photoshop. Suppose that the collateral piece also contains a few bitmaps that have not been embedded in other EPS artwork.
I will need to use inDesign to edit the layout, illustrator to edit the EPSs and photoshop to edit bitmaps in the EPSs as well as the bitmaps directly in the indesign document. I will change my.eps and.psd docs in illustrator and EPS, observe their appearance within my layout in the inDesign program, make changes to my layout in indesign, and re-adjust in photoshop and illustrator until I have it right. I am working on one document, using three different programs and it is much easier to do this with an os that it designed to show you many documents at once.
Mac OS X puts a priority on document access, even though documents are being edited in a parent application, this is not the case in windows.
The point is: design work forces you to use multiple applications to work on one document, and the Mac OS windowing system is far superior for this type of work situation than windows. Why? Because windows has always been designed to show one document at a time time. You can run your programs in small windows that are next to each other but if you have more than one document open in a program, those documents are often restricted to occupying only the space of a parent "program" window... as with photoshop on windows. Any print designer will tell you what a horrific pain in the ass this is when you are working with multiple documents in photoshop that are going to be embedded in an indesign or illustrator document. This is, and has always been one of the reasons that (graphic) designers and art directors prefer Mac OS X (and Mac OS) over windows.
Some service bureaus use windows machines to cut costs on running certain operations, but the designers and art directors that I work with, all prefer macs with very few exceptions. A very few *web* designers prefer windows because they want to work in the same environment that most people surf in, and because (some) web designers (often) just use photoshop to comp up sites (which makes the windowing thing less of an issue).
Another reason that macs have always been the leader in the creative industries is it's superior type handling: windows type rendering flat out sucks. Windows has improved its colour handling, but it is still far inferior to what the mac come
I worked at a student assistant at a computer lab at my university. The lab I worked in was a little-known science-library lab that was full of NCD X-terms and Macs, I worked there through my four years of college and we usually had between 5 and 7 macs and about 15 of the X terms. There were many other labs on campus, few of which had apples. There were two other mac labs but you had to be in the art or architecture program to use them. Every single one of the macs at the lab I worked at was almost always occupied, and not just by art/design students. There were lots of scientists, and math people using them as well as journalism majors and lots of other students who just needed to write a paper. They were quite popular.
The size of a companys it department (and its budget, of course) is partially determined by the number of problems that need to be solved daily. The fewer problems there are to solve, the less work there is for your IT department to do. The less work there is to do, the smaller the budget, and the smaller the department.
Windows, with all of its regretable design flaws, inherent insecurity and constant need for patching and maintenence handholding, is good for IT budgets. Mac OS X, on the other hand, with it's relatively low TCO, and low maintenence nature, would result in a much smaller IT budget.
In my eyes, that has always been the largest hurdle for apple, in getting IT deparments interested in Apple.
I have three three windows boxes at work, one XP box for runnning ie 7, one Win2K box running ie6, and yet another that is on a virtual lan for development work (the other two are for testing my work). Having to switch between these boxes constantly is a pain in the ass, and on top of it, something always seems to be wrong with one of them. At no point in time have all three boxes been working correctly. I got sick of dealing with this and begain bringing my Mac to work, and running XP and Win2K via parallels on it for my two testing machines, and using the Mac OS for my development work. Since I started doing this, I rarely have cause to call the IT department to fix things. The three machines I used to have to switch between are not even plugged in, stacked beneath my desk, collecting dust--my trusty macbook pro replaced all three.
I've had very few reasons to call the IT helpdesk since I started doing this. I recently had to speak to them for a password-related problem and the fellow I spoke to commented that I havent opened a ticket up with them In quite some time. I felt sorely tempted to tell him that I've had very few problems ever since I started bringing my mac into work and using that instead of the three windows boxes under my desk.
I work at a large company and have a demanding, and somewhat technical job (since we are talking about macs in the enterirpse). From my experience, anyone denying macs are not enterprise-worthy is in denial.
While I don't doubt that there are many great photographers on slashdot, I'd be surprised if there was a single regular poster (or lurker) here who depends upon photography on a professional level, as his/her only source of income.
As someone who has spent much time working with pro photographers in my past life as an art director, I guarantee you that any *PRO* photographer will not think twice about plunking down some serious dough for a the latest and greatest mac, chock full of ram and sporting the best video card it will support. Computer hardware is among the *least* expensive financial commitment that a pro photographer will make:
Take a look at how much some decent digital backs for a hasselblaad will run you.
Add to that the many lenses that you need to have on hand as a pro. (Hint: this is the expensive part).
Add a bunch of fast, high-capacity memory cards.
Add a nice DSLR (or more likely, a few) and lenses for that/those camera(s) as well.
Add lighting equipment of various types to that.
Add a large studio space to that, in addition to mobile facilities.
Add makeup artists and assistants.
The costs involved in professional photography are high. A fast mac, chock full of ram with an excellent video card and a 30" cinema display costs *peanuts* in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the operating costs of a professional photographer. Aperture is a pro app, and that's why it makes the assumptions that it does about hardware. Lightroom is more accomodating for tinkerers and semi-professionals, the two occupy different segments of the market.
Along the same lines, it has always irked me that (the government) has never considered approaching Microsoft about the severe security flaws to which it's software is subject. Certainly if the most popular operating system in the world were less morbidly insecure, botnets and the like but be far fewer between. After all, these botnets aren't being built out of *NIX machines, so we're really talking about MS software.
I think a certain amount of responsibility lies on the endusers shoulders insofar as they should be expected not to compromise their own machines, but when you get your brand new windows PC it is vulnerable out of the box. It seems to me like microsoft is selling a consumer product that represents a great potential for illegal/malignant misuse, that most consumers are largely unaware of beyond "If I don't install virus-protection software I will get adware on my machine".
I've always found it wildly absurd that no real authority has ever stepped up to microsoft and made them do something about the woeful state of their OS in terms of security. It seems like one of the best responses that we could have to such attacks it to force Microsoft to mend its ways, if at all possible. If not, at the very least, produce some kind of government-issued label as used in cigarrete boxes to indicate to the consumer that "this product is wildly insecure and if you use it, small children will vomit on your shoes". At least in that case you could pass some of the responsibility on the end user.
I am surprised by the number of sites that still rely on simple user-agent tests, particularly given how many different browsers are sharing the same engines these days. There are much more accurate ways to target browser than user agent tests, object based detection is the way to go. Whenever I see a site that uses ua-string based detection, I pretty much consider whomever made the site a total hack. That said, a lot of people still use the ua to detect browsers, and in cases like this, where it is being used to lock out a browser, you can spoof the string to get in... not that I have any interest in giving walmart any of my business, you just can if you have to.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing in that statement prevents a merchant from accepting a card that contains a signature and also demands that the merchant further verify the user with an id card. From what I read in that passage, if you sign the card, and accompany your signature with "ask for ID", they can accept the card.
This is what I do.
... If Con Edison could just consistely supply power to western queens without week long blackout or go a single month in the summer without having a manhole explode or electrocute some poor passer-by.
Yes! And when I get pulled over by a cop for speeding and hand him my license, I'll get a ticket for speeding, and then be arrested for attempted bribery! Brilliant!
It's not hair or lack of it that makes people look good or bad. You tend to lose it during your early middle age, and frankly it's not the hair situation which makes you look over the hill. If you're like most Western guys it's things like your hanging belly, heavy jowls and plushy, coarse, unkempt complexion that makes you look old and pathetic, not the follicle density of your skull top. You could have a mane big enough to play in a hair band and you'd still look old and pathetic. I started going bald a few years ago, at the time I had a thick mane that was always tied back in a neat little ponytail, but I was getting a baldspot and occasionally, it was shining through the back. When I shaved off all my hair, I was *amazed* at how much *better* I looked than when I had the ponytail. I thought I was nuts at first but everyone I know agrees I should have cut it all of years ago. I think if I started growing back my hair, I would still shave it all off.
I had been *qute* preoccupied with my hairloss until I decided to give it the buzz, now I couldn't possibly care less, I had checked out a few forums online at one point where people were discussing various ways of treating their baldness and they all seemed so sad and unhappy, I didn't want to be like that so I just said, "fuck it, it is what it is" and just shaved it all off
typeographers have been compensating for this for years, that's why it is much easier to read a block of text when there is sufficient leading to push the prior and next lines out of your paragraph beyond the scope of optical interference, and why a non-fussy serif face with a reasonable amount of differentiation betwen the x-height and ascender/descender height helps keep the mind focused on the current word, by making the word more (visually interesting) and the leters that make it up a bit more clearly separate. On a related note, one of the things that really contributes to the low-readability of online media is the consistent use of sans-seriff fonts. It's all about pushing irrelevant text out of focus while maintaining the rythmn of the words and lines in the readers "stream."
We have to use sans fonts online due to the relatively low-resolution screens that we use, which don't render all the features of seriff letterforms clearly or cleanly, (and the fact that there are very few (decent) serif faces that come on all os's). Web also tend to use minimal leading in order to pack as much content as possible in "above the fold". That and the type rendering technology in windows absolutely blows, and renders seriffs in a small point size absolutely hideously.
Higher resolution monitors would really contribute well the the readability of type on the web.
While it is debatable whether this is a crime carried out virtually, I would think that someone commiting these kinds of acts online has a higher probability of actually trying to commit them in the real world ... so I would hope that police *would* look into them (probability of this seems pretty low here int he USA). In all probability our legal system is totally unprepared to deal with the implications of something like this (notably, prevention is not particularly high on the the PD's list of priorities).
The Mac Version of Firefox needs a *lot* of help. IMO, Firefox is one of the *worst* browser options on the mac. I use it for front end development work, because it has the best javascript console and dom imspector out there, in addition to many handy developer extensions, but for regular browsing just about any other mac browser is better IMHO.
The biggest problem with FF on a mac is that it is not a Coccoa app, which makes it feel like a shitty port of the Windows version of Firefox. Not making firefox a Coccoa app causes the application to feel incredibly wonky (sluggish, unresponsive, awkward) and not tie into various OS-level niceties that Mac Users expect in every app. FF on a mac, feels like a windows app, that just happens to run in Mac OS X, It takes the users OS away from them to a degree. I chose to use a mac, because I like the way macs work, and if your app violates the standard behaviour/feel of my OS of choice, I won't use it.
I'm a fairly advanced front-end web developer. Most of what I do is ui coding for websites, I write a lot of javascript, css and some HTML. Many of my clients have pretty unique needs and it seems like every project I end up working on has some particularly unique UI element that requires special handling. If I did not have to support IE, most of my projects would take significantly less time to complete. At one point, I was considering creating a blog wherein I would document every stupid bug and nonstandard implementation of otherwise standard technologies I ran into while developing for IE, but I quickly realized it would end eating up all my free time. I find it particularly annoying that MS has taken some half-hearted effort to make IE 7 slightly more standards compliant than IE 6, but ignored all of the really important bugs in the browser (FIX THE GODDAMNED BOX MODEL YOU RETARDED PACK OF MONGRELS!), so now you have to create workarounds for two slightly different versions of the browsers, that both share most of the same flaws but each one also has its own unique flaws to make stuff *really* interesting. My code contains a lot of comments along the lines of: try { // for standards-based browsers
statements_that_make_ie_crap_its_pants_but_work_ev erywhere_else();
} catch (e) { // for standards-challenged browsers
special_handholding_for_retarded_browsers();
}
and if (client.engine == 'msie') { if (client.engine == 'msie') { document.writeln(''); } }
I used to try and make sites work perfectly in all browsers without relying on code forking and additional CSS docs for IE, but I no longer see the point. It's a shitty hack of a browser, so I code my sites so that they work perfectly in all the other browsers, and toss in IE support as an afterthought since IE users don't really care about their web-browsing experience. I support it because I have to, but if you browse my sites on another browser, you'll have a better experience.
My father once led a cow up several flights of steps into the principals office, at the top floor of his college's administrative building. This turned out to be a real prank, because although you can lead a cow upstairs, getting a cow to walk *down* a flight of stairs is another matter entirely. I believe the cow was up there for a week before they figured out how to get it down.
This would be a fantastic technology for snowboarding goggles, where you often need to swap goggles for different lighting conditions. I hate having to swap the lenses in my goggles between day/night riding, or having my sunshine lenses on on the sunny side of the mountain and then going into the glades or backside and wishing I had a tinted lens to help me see better.
Is this a fact or an assumption?
.eps and .psd docs in illustrator and EPS, observe their appearance within my layout in the inDesign program, make changes to my layout in indesign, and re-adjust in photoshop and illustrator until I have it right. I am working on one document, using three different programs and it is much easier to do this with an os that it designed to show you many documents at once.
... as with photoshop on windows. Any print designer will tell you what a horrific pain in the ass this is when you are working with multiple documents in photoshop that are going to be embedded in an indesign or illustrator document. This is, and has always been one of the reasons that (graphic) designers and art directors prefer Mac OS X (and Mac OS) over windows.
Are you an art director?
A graphic designer?
A typeography expert?
I really doubt it.
The claim that the mac offers nothing special or unique in the field of digital arts today is very simply not true. I am a programmer now, but I was an art director for many years and I still work with art directors and designers every day. I can assure you that there are excellent reasons for the preference of Mac OS X in this field. Not the least of these is the fact that the Mac OS UI and windowing system is better designed for interoperability between different programs that must be used to cooperatively edit/create a single document. Mac OS X assumes that you want to see more than one thing at once, and work cooperatively between several documents concurrently to complete a single task. It is designed around showing you multiple documents simultaneously, in different applications. Windows is designed around the assumption that you will want to limit your concentration to one program at a time, and one document at a time (minimize/maximize), and although you can work with several documents at once in different applications, windows is not designed for that work style and makes it somewhat of a pain. here is an example.
Suppose I am working on some marketing collateral, I am going to be using inDesign (or Quark, if I live in the dark ages) for my paste up program. Lets say there is some EPS artwork in my indesign document, that must be edited with Illustrator, and lets say that this EPS artwork also uses some bitmaps that must be edited in Photoshop. Suppose that the collateral piece also contains a few bitmaps that have not been embedded in other EPS artwork. I will need to use inDesign to edit the layout, illustrator to edit the EPSs and photoshop to edit bitmaps in the EPSs as well as the bitmaps directly in the indesign document. I will change my
Mac OS X puts a priority on document access, even though documents are being edited in a parent application, this is not the case in windows.
The point is: design work forces you to use multiple applications to work on one document, and the Mac OS windowing system is far superior for this type of work situation than windows. Why? Because windows has always been designed to show one document at a time time. You can run your programs in small windows that are next to each other but if you have more than one document open in a program, those documents are often restricted to occupying only the space of a parent "program" window
Some service bureaus use windows machines to cut costs on running certain operations, but the designers and art directors that I work with, all prefer macs with very few exceptions. A very few *web* designers prefer windows because they want to work in the same environment that most people surf in, and because (some) web designers (often) just use photoshop to comp up sites (which makes the windowing thing less of an issue).
Another reason that macs have always been the leader in the creative industries is it's superior type handling: windows type rendering flat out sucks. Windows has improved its colour handling, but it is still far inferior to what the mac come
I worked at a student assistant at a computer lab at my university. The lab I worked in was a little-known science-library lab that was full of NCD X-terms and Macs, I worked there through my four years of college and we usually had between 5 and 7 macs and about 15 of the X terms. There were many other labs on campus, few of which had apples. There were two other mac labs but you had to be in the art or architecture program to use them. Every single one of the macs at the lab I worked at was almost always occupied, and not just by art/design students. There were lots of scientists, and math people using them as well as journalism majors and lots of other students who just needed to write a paper. They were quite popular.
The size of a companys it department (and its budget, of course) is partially determined by the number of problems that need to be solved daily. The fewer problems there are to solve, the less work there is for your IT department to do. The less work there is to do, the smaller the budget, and the smaller the department. Windows, with all of its regretable design flaws, inherent insecurity and constant need for patching and maintenence handholding, is good for IT budgets. Mac OS X, on the other hand, with it's relatively low TCO, and low maintenence nature, would result in a much smaller IT budget. In my eyes, that has always been the largest hurdle for apple, in getting IT deparments interested in Apple.
I have three three windows boxes at work, one XP box for runnning ie 7, one Win2K box running ie6, and yet another that is on a virtual lan for development work (the other two are for testing my work). Having to switch between these boxes constantly is a pain in the ass, and on top of it, something always seems to be wrong with one of them. At no point in time have all three boxes been working correctly. I got sick of dealing with this and begain bringing my Mac to work, and running XP and Win2K via parallels on it for my two testing machines, and using the Mac OS for my development work. Since I started doing this, I rarely have cause to call the IT department to fix things. The three machines I used to have to switch between are not even plugged in, stacked beneath my desk, collecting dust--my trusty macbook pro replaced all three.
I've had very few reasons to call the IT helpdesk since I started doing this. I recently had to speak to them for a password-related problem and the fellow I spoke to commented that I havent opened a ticket up with them In quite some time. I felt sorely tempted to tell him that I've had very few problems ever since I started bringing my mac into work and using that instead of the three windows boxes under my desk.
I work at a large company and have a demanding, and somewhat technical job (since we are talking about macs in the enterirpse). From my experience, anyone denying macs are not enterprise-worthy is in denial.
While I don't doubt that there are many great photographers on slashdot, I'd be surprised if there was a single regular poster (or lurker) here who depends upon photography on a professional level, as his/her only source of income.
As someone who has spent much time working with pro photographers in my past life as an art director, I guarantee you that any *PRO* photographer will not think twice about plunking down some serious dough for a the latest and greatest mac, chock full of ram and sporting the best video card it will support. Computer hardware is among the *least* expensive financial commitment that a pro photographer will make:
Take a look at how much some decent digital backs for a hasselblaad will run you.
Add to that the many lenses that you need to have on hand as a pro. (Hint: this is the expensive part).
Add a bunch of fast, high-capacity memory cards.
Add a nice DSLR (or more likely, a few) and lenses for that/those camera(s) as well.
Add lighting equipment of various types to that.
Add a large studio space to that, in addition to mobile facilities.
Add makeup artists and assistants.
The costs involved in professional photography are high. A fast mac, chock full of ram with an excellent video card and a 30" cinema display costs *peanuts* in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the operating costs of a professional photographer. Aperture is a pro app, and that's why it makes the assumptions that it does about hardware. Lightroom is more accomodating for tinkerers and semi-professionals, the two occupy different segments of the market.
Along the same lines, it has always irked me that (the government) has never considered approaching Microsoft about the severe security flaws to which it's software is subject. Certainly if the most popular operating system in the world were less morbidly insecure, botnets and the like but be far fewer between. After all, these botnets aren't being built out of *NIX machines, so we're really talking about MS software.
I think a certain amount of responsibility lies on the endusers shoulders insofar as they should be expected not to compromise their own machines, but when you get your brand new windows PC it is vulnerable out of the box. It seems to me like microsoft is selling a consumer product that represents a great potential for illegal/malignant misuse, that most consumers are largely unaware of beyond "If I don't install virus-protection software I will get adware on my machine".
I've always found it wildly absurd that no real authority has ever stepped up to microsoft and made them do something about the woeful state of their OS in terms of security. It seems like one of the best responses that we could have to such attacks it to force Microsoft to mend its ways, if at all possible. If not, at the very least, produce some kind of government-issued label as used in cigarrete boxes to indicate to the consumer that "this product is wildly insecure and if you use it, small children will vomit on your shoes". At least in that case you could pass some of the responsibility on the end user.
I am surprised by the number of sites that still rely on simple user-agent tests, particularly given how many different browsers are sharing the same engines these days. There are much more accurate ways to target browser than user agent tests, object based detection is the way to go. Whenever I see a site that uses ua-string based detection, I pretty much consider whomever made the site a total hack. That said, a lot of people still use the ua to detect browsers, and in cases like this, where it is being used to lock out a browser, you can spoof the string to get in ... not that I have any interest in giving walmart any of my business, you just can if you have to.