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And obviously bigger sensors have much, much better low light/high ISO performance ... but there is something to be said for being able to carry a camera in your pocket.

Almost. The primary thing that you gain with a bigger sensor and removable lenses is control over the depth of field. You just can't fake that (very well anyways) with a compact camera. As far as low light sensitivity, Fuji has released some superb sensors with their F10/F11/F30/F20/F31fd models. Of course, DSLRs also come with much more manual control, but that's a very artificial limitation.

I've got an F30, and there's less noise (and less heavy handed noise reduction) at ISO 800 than you'll see on some more full featured cameras at ISO 400. I took these two at ISO 800, with no flash: Graffiti on the beach, San Francisco Mayor Newsom, Burlesque (ISO 800+flash). ISO 1600 on this camera can still yield usable prints, and ISO 3200 is good for an emergency shot.

Sure, I miss some things about an SLR with this camera. For instance, I miss having manual control over the focus. I dislike that the 3:2 aspect ratio can only be chosen at the lower of the 6MP quality settings. Sure, sometimes I miss being able to use a better zoom lens, but then I realize that this thing fits into my pocket.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/471137550_26b80 88a8e_o.jpg Windows has tabs everywhere too.

"You'll be surprised how many people, making millions on the Internet, have no clue what it is.

Check out this set of pictures (or here) of people finding out exactly what goatse.cx is, while some nice person photographs the expression on their face.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yatpay/464385875/

The reason output from all those photos looks different isn't because of how the programs read the data, but rather how they go about image processing.

For one, raw files don't contain RGB pixels. They contain pixels that consist of a single color. The entire image is a mosaic of red,green, and blue...sort of light looking at a TV screen up close ( http://farm1.static.flickr.com/9/68984572_93b0b72f 71.jpg?v=0 ). It's up to the program to demosaic it, and for that, there is no official way. There isn't even a "correct" way to do it. Then each program has to apply white balance, and again, there is variation here.

After that, it's a free for all of what each program chooses to do & how it does it, in terms of levels/curves, color toning, saturation, adjusting for lens distortion and chromatic aberrations, etc. Finally, each program has to apply sharpening, which is a huge field on it's own.

They forgot to mention the sliding ads prevalent on their site in their list.
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=462047358& size=m

I saw a Panasonic 103" 1080P TV when I was in Japan in the end of March. According to the price tag it was named TH-103PZ600, and cost 5,600,000 Yen, which would be about 47000 USD. I have a photo of the price tag right here if you want to look for yourself. With that kind of outrageous difference in price, I'd go get it from Japan if I were in the market for that TV.

Can I just edit that slightly for you?

As if a hundred million anti-evolutionists screamed in error (yet again).

Although I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the "suddenly silenced" part--that never seems to happen, they just get more shrill and more stupid.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elrous0/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elrous0/ -Eric

If this guy was the President of the United States he'd probably have decalred martial law and then used the Secret Service and the National Guard to conduct a manhunt for the guy who made fun of him.

Beaten to the punch.

The design with the Cray 2 was a bit excessive. They just had the heat reach fluorinert's boiling point and there was a vapor collector and a condensor tower. As you'll recall, the temperature of a liquid will not never exceed the boiling point until it all turned to vapor. That's why car are water cooled. If you have insufficient heat transfer from the radiator, the vapor pressure blows the cap and you have a really visual feedback that it's time to stop. You won't damage anything if you stop before you evaporate all your coolant. Fluorinert boiled at 56 C, a convenient temperature that makes it safe to work around the computer. Oil boils at 175 C. If you have a few boiling racks you will not want humans in your server room and you'll probably burn down your air cooled servers. Oil cooled system will not used the clever technique used by Cray: no pump or other circulatory system was needed and working temperature was ultra stable. Fluorinert and oil cooling are completely different things and I don't think you can compare them.

If they really wanted good captchas, they need to start using problems that are very easy for humans to solve, but very hard for computers to solve. For example, picking the one photo of a puppy out of a matrix of photos of full-grown dogs.

Image identification raises it's own set of problems. If you're working with photos, what is your source of photos? You're going to need a lot, if you've only got a thousand or so images, spammers will scrape them from your site and flag them by hand (possibly outsourcing the work, say through Amazon's Mechanical Turk). If you use a shared resource so you get get mind boggling numbers of photographs ("Bob's Puppy Captcha Service") you just create more incentive for attackers to index all of the service's images. (Yes, the service will try to make it hard, but armed with a botnet you can make large numbers of requests every day by visiting actual sites using the authentication system.) You won't want to go with free, publicly available images (say, pulling from Flickr's Creative Commons licensed images, since an attacker can easily scrape those images and pull the tags and description to automatically generate identification information. The only practical way to limit access to the database is to charge for it with a price high enough to discourage spammers, suddenly making the proposal fairly expensive.

Once you've got your system, you have to assume spammers are building up counter-databases that identify images they've seen before. You could try to fight back with simple distortions of the image to make them harder for a computer to identify, but you can't do much without making it hard for humans. And while having a computer identify objects in photographs is hard, having a computer identify highly similar images is pretty easy.

Ultimately a spammer or similar attacker interested in defeating Captchas doesn't need a 100% success rate. 50% is probably plenty; they're typically going for volume. Assuming a typical "three tries before we block your IP for a while or the exponential back off gets too long" system you can get a 50% success rate on those three attempts if you have a mere 21% success rate on each attempt. If the attacker wants a 90% success rate over those three tries, you only need a 55% success rate on each attempt.

Not as bullet proof though

I can vouch for the fact that among the startup crowd, it's quite rare to see Microsoft software. Take this for example. Even when I'm just hanging out at startup-heavy user groups, Microsoft is a rare sight. Even my website only gets maybe 40% of the visitors running Windows, with only about 9% market share for IE, and that's not including spiders. There's still a lot of Windows users out there, but in my experience, they fall into three main categories: gamers, business software users, and home users that have never tried anything else. The vast majority of people doing genuinely interesting things with their computers aren't using Windows to do it.

I guess that when your government starts to commemorate the hero of the nation during the "youth and sports day" using means only found in USSR (only pictures I found that partially describe what I've seen when I was there, think times 100 for a more accurate representation), if you think a bit about it: you're worried... Or you could just celebrate by going to the nearest stadium to see one of the many big shows the state organize with all the kids of the schools parading in matching colors. Only word that came to my mind all day long : "Big Brother is watching you"...

I guess that when your government starts to commemorate the hero of the nation during the "youth and sports day" using means only found in USSR (only pictures I found that partially describe what I've seen when I was there, think times 100 for a more accurate representation), if you think a bit about it: you're worried... Or you could just celebrate by going to the nearest stadium to see one of the many big shows the state organize with all the kids of the schools parading in matching colors. Only word that came to my mind all day long : "Big Brother is watching you"...

You want to talk about floundering in Europe... The 360 isn't the console on clearance already...

I took some decent shots of the event, here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/linux-works/sets/7215 7594333338018/

some photos I shot of the sun blackbox thing:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/linux-works/sets/7215 7594333338018/

its really cool to see in person. the equipment is very tightly placed inside. the water input and output valves are equally impressive.

SpeakEasy terminated me after six months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo. They were total assholes about it, violating my contract with them and telling me that they would charge me the $300 early termination fee (THEY were the ones who terminated!) if I blogged about it. You are very lucky. SpeakEasy is NOT honorable. This happened a year ago. I even pre-sale chatted to make sure it was okay; that was a lie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331380/in/ photostream/

SpeakEasy terminated me after six months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo. They were total assholes about it, violating my contract with them and telling me that they would charge me the $300 early termination fee (THEY were the ones who terminated!) if I blogged about it. You are very lucky. SpeakEasy is NOT honorable. This happened a year ago. I even pre-sale chatted to make sure it was okay; that was a lie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331380/in/ photostream/

SpeakEasy terminated me after six months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo. They were total assholes about it, violating my contract with them and telling me that they would charge me the $300 early termination fee (THEY were the ones who terminated!) if I blogged about it. You are very lucky. SpeakEasy is NOT honorable. This happened a year ago. I even pre-sale chatted to make sure it was okay; that was a lie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331380/in/ photostream/

SpeakEasy terminated me after 6 months -- only after harassing me for 3 months and saying I can't exceed 100G/mo. They were total assholes about it, violating my contract with them and telling me that they would charge me the $300 early termination fee (THEY were the ones who terminated!) if I blogged about it. You are lucky. SpeakEasy is NOT honorable. This happened a year ago. I even pre-sale chatted to make sure it was okay; that was a lie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331380/in/ photostream/

Forget the iPod and iPhone! There's a whole new frontier in home entertainment: the new iProne. Man, you gotta love them apples! Here it is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7706408@N08/445138582 Enjoy!

A couple of people took pictures: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=alex+john+pax

I'm glad someone said it so I didn't have too. My flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdguero

The map thing is still kinda annoying to setup though...

There is a form on the bottom that takes in the URL of a Picasa Web RSS feed that it will try and parse.

Picture of the app:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7639541@N07/445440913 /

This was done by Flickr about a year ago:

http://www.flickr.com/map/

Take a quick look at this picture : http://flickr.com/photos/orbitrix/445285479/... Check out the benefits of owning a "Windows Vista Capable" machine. Pretty sweet, unless you want to, umm, use an application.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/128627013_d4622a d3fa_m.jpg Screenshot of an article that foreshadows the effects that internet regulation laws could have on Canadian citizens.

If you don't know what GPL and GNU are for, GTFO.
If you think Firefox is a decent GNU/Linux application, GTFO.
If you're still looking for the Control Panel, GTFO.
If you don't know Tux from SCO, GTFO.

Bandwagon jumpers are not welcome among real GNU/Linux users. Keep your filthy Windows fingers to yourself.

If you don't know what GPL and GNU are for, GTFO.
If you think Firefox is a decent GNU/Linux application, GTFO.
If you're still looking for the Control Panel, GTFO.
If you don't know Tux from SCO, GTFO.

Bandwagon jumpers are not welcome among real GNU/Linux users. Keep your filthy Windows fingers to yourself.

Ah! You finally gave me a reason to dig that old toy out from the closet of abandoned gadgets. My grandfather, who was a journalist, used it in the 80's, and since I was the family computer geek, I hung on to it when he passed away. In 4th and 5th grade I could nerd away coding games in BASIC during the lunch breaks. Since then, once every five years or so, I've plugged it in and booted it up just to see if it works. And this time, too, it booted! It runs on 6 AA batteries for quite a while, as far as I recall. Now I'll just have to find a serial cable and see if I can transfer stuff between it and my Mac or PC. Unfortunately the storage on the T200 is battery-backed RAM, so all my old BASIC programs are long gone since it's been without battery for many years.

Here's how it looks: http://flickr.com/photos/pajp/439822054/ - quite a beauty, eh?

Thanks for getting me to play with it again! :-)

It doesn't even have 16 bit colour channels whereas Photoshop has 24 bit channels. And I've hear CS3 will have 32 bit channels.

There's just no way GIMP comes close to being a dropin replacement for Photoshop!

Fuck Best Buy, and Fuck Speakeasy. They will make excellent bedfellows ... in hell.

Here's my pre-sales chat to SpeakEasy where they specifically said I can download as much as I want, every day: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/tags/speakea sy (click on the last one, not the first one)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331315/ - This is my pre-sales chat. Later the fucked me over. Cancelled my contract. Explicitly told me I am not allowed to transfer (download) more than 100G/mo. SPECIFICALLY, this is why they cancelled my contract. So -- don't believe all the people who say SpeakEasy is great, they don't have limits, they don't enforce things. They DO. They ABSOLUTELY DO.

Anyone know if this is legit? New iMac or a fake?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7459616@N06/429872676 /

There's a Flickr Pool: Public Windows Crashes for anyone looking for more pics.

http://static.flickr.com/2/3704348_8ceda601f9.jpg

This isn't a very clear picture but this was a huge screen in a square in Spain driven by some windows PC constantly running scandisk.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/33120294 /in/set-534829/

It is fairly obvious from the quote, that either Ballmer is spot on in his criticism, or else Google is one to something really great, and Ballmer has a blind spot the size of an exploding Death Star hiding on the far side of the moon.

As seen here, Google does actually have a master plan, and it includes far more than what they are doing now. Note, if you will, that it seems that things really don't take off until they goes inter-stellar.

I specifically asked pre-sales people if I could use 100% of my connection 100% of the time. They said yes. They lied. I lost hundreds in setup fees and having to buy ANOTHER dsl modem (they all insist on using THEIRS).

Fuck speakeasy. Don't listen to the parent post.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/tags/speakea sy There's my pre-sales chat. They told me they would waive my $300 termination fee (even though they terminated) if I didn't blog about it. Fuck them. They were the evilest of all ISPs I've ever had -- a total of at least 10.

...this be enough to keep them away?

I do this now, albeit in software. Set your camera to autobracket (keep the aperture the same and change shutter speed if possible, to avoid changes to depth of field) and use something like Photomatix http://www.hdrsoft.com/ or Photoshop CS2 to combine the images.
These are usually known as High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos and can vary from the subtle to the hyperealistic.

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hdr/interesting/ for some well-known examples.

Your OS choice does not make you cool or special. You are no more artsy or enlightened than anyone else. In fact, you specifically are a pathetic and shallow creature, and these rants you keep shitting all over the place tend to give all Mac users a bad name more than anything else. Mac users are just as normal - or "dweebish" if you must - as anybody else.

So, please, shut the fuck up troll, at least until you are old enough to understand that being 21 and smoking pot with your friends at a poetry jam does not make you a cultural authority. The real world - the really, real world - happens to be business oriented and as sad as it may be, eventually you'll have to trade in your goth fishnet and Doc Martens and dress just like drab old mommy and daddy.

It happens to the best of us. It'll happen to you, too.

Your OS choice does not make you cool or special. You are no more artsy or enlightened than anyone else. In fact, you specifically are a pathetic and shallow creature, and these rants you keep shitting all over the place tend to give all Mac users a bad name more than anything else. Mac users are just as normal - or "dweebish" if you must - as anybody else.

So, please, shut the fuck up troll, at least until you are old enough to understand that being 21 and smoking pot with your friends at a poetry jam does not make you a cultural authority. The real world - the really, real world - happens to be business oriented and as sad as it may be, eventually you'll have to trade in your goth fishnet and Doc Martens and dress just like drab old mommy and daddy.

It happens to the best of us. It'll happen to you, too.

...as adults want to be forced to be tagged?

http://static.flickr.com/13/18213106_c940ade091_m. jpg

I didn't think so.

iTunes already has flags next to songs to indicate explicit content, podcast availability, and so on. Something like this wouldn't be a big problem. Those who cared would know what it meant, those who didn't know what it meant probably wouldn't even notice it.