Not only that, but the image in the linked article shows something that looks decidedly like a standard extension cord plugged into the car (possibly, at a stretch, a 440v 3-phase supply). I'm not an EE, but I would imagine that for a cable that thin to be charging the car as quickly as they claim, the voltage would have to be pretty high - high enough to require things like exotic looking connectors and insulation around the charge point.
Also, as other posters have pointed out, a car moving @ 55MPH will consume far more than 2kW of power - it's unlikely that would cover rolling resistance, let alone aerodynamic drag etc. Something has to be powering the accessories too (power steering pump, lights?, dashboard, control circuitry etc).
It may be true that nothing useful in the real-world changes in 126 microseconds... however...
The way I look at it is that 'the market' is like a big complicated electronic system which contains a lot of complex feedback loops (some of them more stable than others). Imagine tweaking a random knob on such an electronic circuit and watching the effects of that tweak ripple through the circuit until it (hopefully) reaches a steady state again.
Increasing the latency causes changes to ripple through the system in a way that a steady state may take a long time to occur (or may never occur) as market participants end up making decisions based on old data. Sure, it may be easier for a human to observe what's happening but it doesn't necessarily mean things will be any more stable.
Lowering the latency to trade is equivalent to increasing the bandwidth of the components in the system, helping the steady state to be reached sooner. Yes, in the worst case, this might allow the feedback loops to veer outside the stable region within the blink of an eye, but that's why there are things like safety cut-offs.
I agree that at first glance it seems that 126 microseconds should be fast enough for anyone, but when you consider the sheer volume of market participants, the mind-boggling number of trades that are executed, and the complex network of relationships between different stocks, I think that having a market that can reach a steady state as quickly as possible under various "tweaks" of input parameters is probably, on the balance, a good thing.
The simulation argument paper proposes a philosophical argument about this sort of thing. The consequences that they come up with are pretty interesting. Of course, there are argumentsagainst such a configuration of the universe as well...
Re:They didn't aim it at Sharepoint
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
Bingo! My thoughts exactly. I spent ages a while ago looking for a "server" component to download and install locally, and unfortunately it just didn't seem to exist at the time, so I gave up on it.
There's no way any reasonable company is going to willfully provide another party (even if that party is supposedly "trustworthy" like google) with access to all of their R&D notes and conversations etc.
If it were able to be firewalled off inside a corporate network, and used, like you say, as a sharepoint killer then I think it would have much more of a chance of success, but then I guess google's ability to monetise the service would disappear.
Oh well, if we're lucky we might see others take the ball and run with it - It appears that a few servers might actually be available (PyGoWave, StreamWork, Novell Pulse), so things must have moved on since I first looked, or maybe I didn't look hard enough the first time around.
I think I'd quite like to see it succeed. I think that given a bit more time, and more people who can see where it might really fit in and be useful, it might still have a chance.
It sounds like the job advertised just isn't for you In fact, it seems to me, with all the bitterness in your post, that you're probably not particularly well suited to software development as a profession.
If you want to really succeed as a developer, the best piece of advice I can give you is that you had better be prepared to be continuously learning. Get yourself a subscription to Safari Books, join the ACM or the IEEE, read blogs, download and listen to/watch pod-casts, subscribe to interesting people's twitter accounts, immerse yourself in what's happening in the free software world, try to learn a new language every year if you can.
If you're not prepared to keep up with what's going on, the sad fact is that you're probably not making good decisions for the company that you're working for. Sure you might be able to write basic run-of-the-mill widget-shifting code, but chances are you're not someone who's ever going to be writing really good, clean, maintainable, useful code. Job ads like the one above are trying to find people who are genuinely interested in keeping themselves up-to-date with technology, and who have a real passion for the field.
I'm sorry if I've offended you, but I've met a lot of people in the industry who got into it for the wrong reasons and subsequently struggle, and I'm afraid it sounds like you're one of them.
I know it's bad form replying to your own post, but I just read the article (sorry, I know I'll need to hand in my slashdot license now), and it seems that you were right; the idea is to actually warm the crops using the death ray. Apparently it's able to target the crops without heating the the air around them (as per a normal household microwave oven), hence preventing the frost from damaging them. Weird.
Oh well, I've never been a particularly motivated cook, so being able to buy freshly baked vegetables straight from the crop might be of benefit:)
I'm not sure whether you were joking or not, but I think it's probably more about not letting the frost settle in the first place. ie. disturbing the atmosphere enough that the water doesn't condense out/get a chance to fall on, and freeze on the crop, rather than trying to specifically target frost and melt it after the fact without cooking the crop too.
Ah, but what if they had been sniffing "encrypted" packets too? In the hope that one day their computing power would be sufficient to decrypt them. Or if they had been sniffing DECT packets, knowing that the encryption is weak?
What security measures are "good enough" that they convey an expectation of privacy?
I was often taught that education was an effective remedy for small-mindedness, and the uneducated are far more inclined to be closed-minded. Come to think of it, it was educated people who told me that.
That quote reminds me of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people have no idea how ignorant/closed-minded they are, until they are educated. Sadly, ignorant people have a tendency to think they already know everything that they need to know.
The original paper is an interesting read if you've got the time.
... which all seems incredibly complicated for something that replaces a piece of cable and a spring. Unfortunately, 'complicated' can lead to wierd boundary cases which can lead to potential failure. I'm afraid I just don't see the need.
It's also usual for cars these days to come equipped with ABS. ABS has the job of preventing the wheels from locking up while stopping, which may be going against the driver's wishes in these cases.
Also, while most cars should have brakes that can overpower the engine, that may not be the case if they are applied progressively and allowed to heat up excessively before they are fully applied. It can take surprisingly little work to trigger a case of brake fade in a road car, and it doesn't seem unreasonable that this could happen in the circumstances described.
I just read a little bit about the CAN protocol and it seems incredibly unlikely that there would be any way to accidentally inject a message onto the bus from a (random) noise source. I'm feeling a bit better about that now, but while digging for info I did read a completely unsubstantiated claim that the drive-by-wire setup in the toyotas at least uses a dual-rail potentiometer to sense the accelerators position.
If that's true, it sounds at least a little bit worrying. I know the dual-rail aspect provides some redundancy, but it probably wouldn't take much (a faulty air-con unit leaking a bit of dirty water onto the pot for example) to trigger a 100% reading.
I'm also wondering if there's a possibility of failure at the other end of the chain (eg. throttle butterfly mechanism sticking). If it happened on the actuator side rather than with the sensor, the ECU would probably have less of a chance of sensing (and correcting) the problem...
Anyway, who knows. It's all speculation without having access to the actual cars involved as well as their hardware and software specifications....
If these cars are drive-by-wire then I'd be suspecting that the potentiometers and/or positional encoders that are used to read the throttle position are failing (or starting to fail) as potentiometers and encoders do.
Can anybody in the know verify what sort of technology is used to actually read the throttle position in cars these-days (not for the TPS sensor so much - but for the drive-by-wire setup)? I'm hoping it's not potentiometers because the resistive layer can wear through on those with age causing unreliable behaviour. Even if they're using rotary or optical encoders, they can have dodgy reliability problems when they age (grease/lubricant starts to age) etc. Who hasn't had a stereo where the volume control has started getting flaky after a few years?
I'm sure that the manufacturers have thought of simple things like this, which makes me think that there's either people are making this stuff up, or there's something screwy with the car's control software or electronics. If it's a software error then, as another poster has already pointed out, no amount of pontificating is going to solve the problem without giving us access to the source code.
Of course, it could be something more sinister. Perhaps the CAN bus command to signal 100% throttle to the ECU happens to be easy to trigger with a particular type of noise? Again, nobody is going to be able to figure that sort of stuff out without some serious insider knowledge..
I hope they do figure this out though as my car happens to be a reasonably recent model and is drive-by-wire. Although I'd like to think I'd have the presence of mind to kill the engine or throw it in neutral if there were any problems, until you're put in that situation it's really hard to know how you'd react.
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
... as a driver who started driving utility vehicles shortly after getting his licence, I can attest to the fact that the side mirrors are invaluable for reversing a loaded ute (or car/truck for that matter) into tight spaces. Perhaps the intention is not to distort the field-of-view when they are used for this purpose?
I hate myself for doing this, but to carry your car analogy one step further, there would be NOTHING stopping me from setting up a company, buying your RemmeltCar engines, even if it is from one of your overpriced dealers, and selling kits to install those engines in another type of car - or even, to sell a kit-car with your RemmeltCar engines. I have never heard of a car dealership that would validate the expected end-use for a part before they would sell it to you.
That's what Apple are trying to do here. They're trying to restrict the way that you use a component that you have purchased even though there are no technical barriers to your goals, and even though you wouldn't be doing anybody any harm or breaking any other laws by doing so.
I think the key word here would be 'specialization'. You may never be in the all-time top 10% of software engineers. Most who fall into that category are probably working at google/sun/ms/ibm/redhat/nasa/etc or making a shitload of cash doing it for themselves.
That's not necessarily reason to despair though. You may still be able to make yourself valuable by being in the top 10% of software engineers who also understand some particular business domain well (finance/biomed/farming/basket weaving/whatever). The same applies to specific types of technology that one comes into contact with (SAP, Oracle, Lotus Notes, xxx obscure vendor product etc)...
I believe that there are an unlimited number of niches that people can fit into, and that as long as you're prepared to work hard to find a niche that someone is demanding, you will do well.
For example, your niche might be software engineers who can code in C & Java, understand basket weaving, have done embedded development on an ARM CPU, and have experience with Oracle. It's unlikely you'll be at the top of your field in any of those individual specializations, but getting in the top 10% of the intersection set might be achievable and profitable (at least in the industry of manufacture of industrial basket weaving equipment).
Of course, the downside is that niche markets have a habit of disappearing quickly as particular skills fall out of favor, so if you're going to play this game you need to be prepared to be constantly up-skilling, but that's what keeps life exciting, right?
I thought that the "novel" part of the invention was supposed to be the "gestures" used over-top of multi-touch (as others have pointed out, multi-touch has been around for a long time before Apple started using it). Surely, if nothing else, 'Minority Report' shows that such tech is 'obvious' to anyone with an inkling of UI imagination...
I don't mind protection of truly novel ideas, but multitouch seems to me like one of those things that would be pretty obvious to any half-decent geek who's been presented with a piece of hardware capable of accurately reading such things.. (witness Jeff Han et. al).. Hell - the movie 'Minority Report' was released before the patent was claimed - doesn't that count as prior presentation of the idea?
It seems to me that iPhone-esque multitouch is the sort of thing that has probably been discussed over beer & pizza by literally thousands of wannabe dreamers who lack only the [ materials science background / electrical engineering knowledge / financial backing / time / etc / etc ] to pull it off...
Can a physics boffin help me out here? What sort of a coefficient of drag would this need in order to be able to sustain the 80km/hr that it's makers claim it can achieve with the 300w that their fuel cell claims to achieve? IIRC when you start getting up to highway speeds a not insignificant amount of energy is spent just to overcome drag.
300 watts hardly seems like enough energy to power the headlights & radio on most cars these days.
First let me preface this by saying that I'm by no means a professional, but I too find myself coming up against GIMP's shortcomings when compared to the competition.
I guess I'm best described as an enthusiastic amateur photographer, who likes to mingle in digital photo editing. I shoot with a DSLR in RAW mode, and for a number of my requirements, GIMP just doesn't cut it. Examples of deficiencies that I've come across (in approximate order of importance to me) are:
Lack of good support for high bit depth images (as mentioned above, most of my photos are shot in RAW mode and I like being able to keep the full dynamic range available while editing)
Lack of adjustment layers (I live in these nowadays - until you've tried them you don't know what you're missing). I love the idea of non destructive editing and adjustment layers make this almost too easy.
Something simple like high pass filtering an image (to use as a non destructive sharpening layer -- hint: use hard-light blending) is dead easy in photoshop, but seems to require a lot of manual work or creation of a custom script in GIMP
Support for colour spaces other than sRGB (when I print an image, I like the colours to be accurate)
Things like scalable brushes have only recently been added to GIMP (and they feel like a poor cousin of the ps equivalents)
I don't want to downplay the amount of work that the GIMP guys have done - it's a great tool - amazing even - but it's fair to say it has some pretty amazing competition, and it has a fair way to go before it becomes the tool of choice for professionals (even given the fact that the competition is infinitely more expensive).
Of course, all that aside, I'm sure that it's more than adequate for teaching students the basics!
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if Dmitry Itskov has read Diaspora too..
Indeed. All the cool kids use Ruby...
Not only that, but the image in the linked article shows something that looks decidedly like a standard extension cord plugged into the car (possibly, at a stretch, a 440v 3-phase supply). I'm not an EE, but I would imagine that for a cable that thin to be charging the car as quickly as they claim, the voltage would have to be pretty high - high enough to require things like exotic looking connectors and insulation around the charge point.
Also, as other posters have pointed out, a car moving @ 55MPH will consume far more than 2kW of power - it's unlikely that would cover rolling resistance, let alone aerodynamic drag etc. Something has to be powering the accessories too (power steering pump, lights?, dashboard, control circuitry etc).
I get the feeling that someone got punk'd.
It may be true that nothing useful in the real-world changes in 126 microseconds... however...
The way I look at it is that 'the market' is like a big complicated electronic system which contains a lot of complex feedback loops (some of them more stable than others). Imagine tweaking a random knob on such an electronic circuit and watching the effects of that tweak ripple through the circuit until it (hopefully) reaches a steady state again.
Increasing the latency causes changes to ripple through the system in a way that a steady state may take a long time to occur (or may never occur) as market participants end up making decisions based on old data. Sure, it may be easier for a human to observe what's happening but it doesn't necessarily mean things will be any more stable.
Lowering the latency to trade is equivalent to increasing the bandwidth of the components in the system, helping the steady state to be reached sooner. Yes, in the worst case, this might allow the feedback loops to veer outside the stable region within the blink of an eye, but that's why there are things like safety cut-offs.
I agree that at first glance it seems that 126 microseconds should be fast enough for anyone, but when you consider the sheer volume of market participants, the mind-boggling number of trades that are executed, and the complex network of relationships between different stocks, I think that having a market that can reach a steady state as quickly as possible under various "tweaks" of input parameters is probably, on the balance, a good thing.
The simulation argument paper proposes a philosophical argument about this sort of thing. The consequences that they come up with are pretty interesting. Of course, there are arguments against such a configuration of the universe as well...
Bingo! My thoughts exactly. I spent ages a while ago looking for a "server" component to download and install locally, and unfortunately it just didn't seem to exist at the time, so I gave up on it.
There's no way any reasonable company is going to willfully provide another party (even if that party is supposedly "trustworthy" like google) with access to all of their R&D notes and conversations etc.
If it were able to be firewalled off inside a corporate network, and used, like you say, as a sharepoint killer then I think it would have much more of a chance of success, but then I guess google's ability to monetise the service would disappear.
Oh well, if we're lucky we might see others take the ball and run with it - It appears that a few servers might actually be available (PyGoWave, StreamWork, Novell Pulse), so things must have moved on since I first looked, or maybe I didn't look hard enough the first time around.
I think I'd quite like to see it succeed. I think that given a bit more time, and more people who can see where it might really fit in and be useful, it might still have a chance.
It sounds like the job advertised just isn't for you In fact, it seems to me, with all the bitterness in your post, that you're probably not particularly well suited to software development as a profession.
If you want to really succeed as a developer, the best piece of advice I can give you is that you had better be prepared to be continuously learning. Get yourself a subscription to Safari Books, join the ACM or the IEEE, read blogs, download and listen to/watch pod-casts, subscribe to interesting people's twitter accounts, immerse yourself in what's happening in the free software world, try to learn a new language every year if you can.
If you're not prepared to keep up with what's going on, the sad fact is that you're probably not making good decisions for the company that you're working for. Sure you might be able to write basic run-of-the-mill widget-shifting code, but chances are you're not someone who's ever going to be writing really good, clean, maintainable, useful code. Job ads like the one above are trying to find people who are genuinely interested in keeping themselves up-to-date with technology, and who have a real passion for the field.
I'm sorry if I've offended you, but I've met a lot of people in the industry who got into it for the wrong reasons and subsequently struggle, and I'm afraid it sounds like you're one of them.
This thread is beginning to get complex.
I know it's bad form replying to your own post, but I just read the article (sorry, I know I'll need to hand in my slashdot license now), and it seems that you were right; the idea is to actually warm the crops using the death ray. Apparently it's able to target the crops without heating the the air around them (as per a normal household microwave oven), hence preventing the frost from damaging them. Weird.
Oh well, I've never been a particularly motivated cook, so being able to buy freshly baked vegetables straight from the crop might be of benefit :)
I'm not sure whether you were joking or not, but I think it's probably more about not letting the frost settle in the first place. ie. disturbing the atmosphere enough that the water doesn't condense out/get a chance to fall on, and freeze on the crop, rather than trying to specifically target frost and melt it after the fact without cooking the crop too.
Ah, but what if they had been sniffing "encrypted" packets too? In the hope that one day their computing power would be sufficient to decrypt them. Or if they had been sniffing DECT packets, knowing that the encryption is weak?
What security measures are "good enough" that they convey an expectation of privacy?
I was often taught that education was an effective remedy for small-mindedness, and the uneducated are far more inclined to be closed-minded. Come to think of it, it was educated people who told me that.
That quote reminds me of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people have no idea how ignorant/closed-minded they are, until they are educated. Sadly, ignorant people have a tendency to think they already know everything that they need to know.
The original paper is an interesting read if you've got the time.
... which all seems incredibly complicated for something that replaces a piece of cable and a spring. Unfortunately, 'complicated' can lead to wierd boundary cases which can lead to potential failure. I'm afraid I just don't see the need.
It's also usual for cars these days to come equipped with ABS. ABS has the job of preventing the wheels from locking up while stopping, which may be going against the driver's wishes in these cases.
Also, while most cars should have brakes that can overpower the engine, that may not be the case if they are applied progressively and allowed to heat up excessively before they are fully applied. It can take surprisingly little work to trigger a case of brake fade in a road car, and it doesn't seem unreasonable that this could happen in the circumstances described.
I just read a little bit about the CAN protocol and it seems incredibly unlikely that there would be any way to accidentally inject a message onto the bus from a (random) noise source. I'm feeling a bit better about that now, but while digging for info I did read a completely unsubstantiated claim that the drive-by-wire setup in the toyotas at least uses a dual-rail potentiometer to sense the accelerators position.
If that's true, it sounds at least a little bit worrying. I know the dual-rail aspect provides some redundancy, but it probably wouldn't take much (a faulty air-con unit leaking a bit of dirty water onto the pot for example) to trigger a 100% reading.
I'm also wondering if there's a possibility of failure at the other end of the chain (eg. throttle butterfly mechanism sticking). If it happened on the actuator side rather than with the sensor, the ECU would probably have less of a chance of sensing (and correcting) the problem...
Anyway, who knows. It's all speculation without having access to the actual cars involved as well as their hardware and software specifications....
If these cars are drive-by-wire then I'd be suspecting that the potentiometers and/or positional encoders that are used to read the throttle position are failing (or starting to fail) as potentiometers and encoders do.
Can anybody in the know verify what sort of technology is used to actually read the throttle position in cars these-days (not for the TPS sensor so much - but for the drive-by-wire setup)? I'm hoping it's not potentiometers because the resistive layer can wear through on those with age causing unreliable behaviour. Even if they're using rotary or optical encoders, they can have dodgy reliability problems when they age (grease/lubricant starts to age) etc. Who hasn't had a stereo where the volume control has started getting flaky after a few years?
I'm sure that the manufacturers have thought of simple things like this, which makes me think that there's either people are making this stuff up, or there's something screwy with the car's control software or electronics. If it's a software error then, as another poster has already pointed out, no amount of pontificating is going to solve the problem without giving us access to the source code.
Of course, it could be something more sinister. Perhaps the CAN bus command to signal 100% throttle to the ECU happens to be easy to trigger with a particular type of noise? Again, nobody is going to be able to figure that sort of stuff out without some serious insider knowledge..
I hope they do figure this out though as my car happens to be a reasonably recent model and is drive-by-wire. Although I'd like to think I'd have the presence of mind to kill the engine or throw it in neutral if there were any problems, until you're put in that situation it's really hard to know how you'd react.
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
... as a driver who started driving utility vehicles shortly after getting his licence, I can attest to the fact that the side mirrors are invaluable for reversing a loaded ute (or car/truck for that matter) into tight spaces. Perhaps the intention is not to distort the field-of-view when they are used for this purpose?
Can you imagine what would happen if:
There would be blood on the streets. How is this any different? FFS - can someone please stop the madness?
I hate myself for doing this, but to carry your car analogy one step further, there would be NOTHING stopping me from setting up a company, buying your RemmeltCar engines, even if it is from one of your overpriced dealers, and selling kits to install those engines in another type of car - or even, to sell a kit-car with your RemmeltCar engines. I have never heard of a car dealership that would validate the expected end-use for a part before they would sell it to you.
That's what Apple are trying to do here. They're trying to restrict the way that you use a component that you have purchased even though there are no technical barriers to your goals, and even though you wouldn't be doing anybody any harm or breaking any other laws by doing so.
I think the key word here would be 'specialization'. You may never be in the all-time top 10% of software engineers. Most who fall into that category are probably working at google/sun/ms/ibm/redhat/nasa/etc or making a shitload of cash doing it for themselves.
That's not necessarily reason to despair though. You may still be able to make yourself valuable by being in the top 10% of software engineers who also understand some particular business domain well (finance/biomed/farming/basket weaving/whatever). The same applies to specific types of technology that one comes into contact with (SAP, Oracle, Lotus Notes, xxx obscure vendor product etc)...
I believe that there are an unlimited number of niches that people can fit into, and that as long as you're prepared to work hard to find a niche that someone is demanding, you will do well. For example, your niche might be software engineers who can code in C & Java, understand basket weaving, have done embedded development on an ARM CPU, and have experience with Oracle. It's unlikely you'll be at the top of your field in any of those individual specializations, but getting in the top 10% of the intersection set might be achievable and profitable (at least in the industry of manufacture of industrial basket weaving equipment).
Of course, the downside is that niche markets have a habit of disappearing quickly as particular skills fall out of favor, so if you're going to play this game you need to be prepared to be constantly up-skilling, but that's what keeps life exciting, right?
I thought that the "novel" part of the invention was supposed to be the "gestures" used over-top of multi-touch (as others have pointed out, multi-touch has been around for a long time before Apple started using it). Surely, if nothing else, 'Minority Report' shows that such tech is 'obvious' to anyone with an inkling of UI imagination...
Bill Buxton's multi touch history (in particular, check out 1992 onwards, starting with a system called "Starfire")..
I don't mind protection of truly novel ideas, but multitouch seems to me like one of those things that would be pretty obvious to any half-decent geek who's been presented with a piece of hardware capable of accurately reading such things.. (witness Jeff Han et. al).. Hell - the movie 'Minority Report' was released before the patent was claimed - doesn't that count as prior presentation of the idea?
It seems to me that iPhone-esque multitouch is the sort of thing that has probably been discussed over beer & pizza by literally thousands of wannabe dreamers who lack only the [ materials science background / electrical engineering knowledge / financial backing / time / etc / etc ] to pull it off...
*sigh*
Can a physics boffin help me out here? What sort of a coefficient of drag would this need in order to be able to sustain the 80km/hr that it's makers claim it can achieve with the 300w that their fuel cell claims to achieve? IIRC when you start getting up to highway speeds a not insignificant amount of energy is spent just to overcome drag.
300 watts hardly seems like enough energy to power the headlights & radio on most cars these days.
I call complete and utter bullshit.
First let me preface this by saying that I'm by no means a professional, but I too find myself coming up against GIMP's shortcomings when compared to the competition.
I guess I'm best described as an enthusiastic amateur photographer, who likes to mingle in digital photo editing. I shoot with a DSLR in RAW mode, and for a number of my requirements, GIMP just doesn't cut it. Examples of deficiencies that I've come across (in approximate order of importance to me) are:
I don't want to downplay the amount of work that the GIMP guys have done - it's a great tool - amazing even - but it's fair to say it has some pretty amazing competition, and it has a fair way to go before it becomes the tool of choice for professionals (even given the fact that the competition is infinitely more expensive).
Of course, all that aside, I'm sure that it's more than adequate for teaching students the basics!