Slashdot Mirror

Anyone who feels like sending a message to Flickr, join my new down with the interestingness patent protest group.

(Not that anyone will listen, really, but...)

no one would ever take an SLR camera on a serious hike, out to a bar, mountain biking, skiing, etc.

Jesus, of course they would. What, you think Ansel Adams had some mutant teleport power that he used to just *poof* himself into position to take his shots? No, he had to *hike* out to those locations, and he did it with a lot more than an SLR, he was hauling along oodles of medium and large-format stuff. People take photos up on Everest, and they don't do it with point-and-shoots.

It is better to have some slightly less snazzy snapshots of you and your friends with a compact camera then to miss out on photographing the occasion altogether because the camera is too big to lug around.

There's a difference between snapshots and serious photography. And that's not, of course, to say that you can't produce good product with a P&S, it's more about the photographer than the tools. But the notion that SLRs are too big and bulky to take on a hike (where you've got, you know, a backpack) is silly.

(Obligatory bar photos)

This made me laugh out loud. "Give me a brand experience" ?? What utter BS! Find me one person who bought a media player on this criteria. I bought an iPod because it was cool and because it did what I wanted. Maybe this J. Allard can sell that steaming bowl of BS upwards to his bosses because he looks vaguely like Moby or Jonathan Ive, and maybe his line of reasoning holds water in the magical land of Whatthefuckia where he and the rest of Microsoft strategy planners clearly have taken up residence, but here in reality they're just condemning the Zine to the slice of the pie chart that doesn't look like Pac-Man with all the rest of the not-iPod music/media players out there.

A system designed for usability (which Apple machines claim to be) should consider this and not require third party hacks to be usable by a left-hander.

The worst thing is that there is a completely superfluous newline key right by the left arrow key (on the right hand side of the keyboard) which is very easy to accidentally hit, which could easily have been a second control key completely eliminating this problem.

What planet are you on? The number of American civilians killed by terrorists has gone up every year since 2001.

At that rate, it'll take 50-100 years to equal the number of US deaths from terrorism in 2001.

and pictures of his hairy ass.

What planet are you on? The number of American civilians killed by terrorists has gone up every year since 2001.

The makers of that chart need to get themselves a dictionary. A person attacking invading foreign nationals is not a terrorist. They are not attacking civilians, they are attacking war profiteers. It doesn't make what they do any more morally valid, but they are not terrorists. What is happening there has happened in every other war. Do you think the French Resistance surrendered when the Nazi's came through and started to own their industry? No, they commited insurgent acts aimed at preventing or restricting the rape of their countries resources that war is generally about.

Every time the US or the UK government use "the T word" in relation to Iraq, the are deliberately (and maliciously) making a connection between the events of 9/11 and their invasion of Iraq. That is absolutely discraceful and anyone who lost anyone they knew in 9/11 should be livid about it.

If you like the way things are, how your taxes are lower and how we have not lost any American lives to terror since 911, vote for Republicans.

What planet are you on? The number of American civilians killed by terrorists has gone up every year since 2001.

Pittsburgh (Allegheny country) had a public review of 4-5 voting systems (Unisys, Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold) that I attended. Of all the systems I saw, ALL of them had an option to produce a paper trail. Some were inherently better at paper trails than others - such as the bubble-fill versions, but they all had some sort of option.

Most of the salesmen there seemed to steer you away from the bubble-fill devices, stating that they were cheaper up front but would cost more in the long run with paper costs. I still liked them the best. They have multiple ways of recovering from problems - built in paper trail, still work under power outages, and anyone that can play the lottery can use them.

I took some pictures if you're really interested.

The closest I got to my image was a phalanx symbol... http://www.flickr.com/photos/13915774@N00/24319591

While it may be the biggest single incident in years, the number of US civilians killed by terrorism has been steadily increasing since 2001.

The CIA is often referred to as "The Company". You're simply wrong.

OK Geoff, you have stumbled into the long raging debate in some circles as to why it is referred to as The Agency or The Company. Each group has its preferences and the usage is based upon where you place your allegiances.

You're simply wrong. And dumb.

Watch who you call dumb. The face you put up on your Flicker stream does not look that smart to me.

Here's a screenshot of slashdot.org/firehose.pl which seems to be slashdot's take on digg and reddit (it seems you have to be a subscriber to view this page)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37157043@N00/28475070 3/

I just saw a pumpkin camera - which is probably a bit more cool (IMHO) than the other mechanical monstrosity. After all, cool electronics and a mac mini is no match for a cheap roll of film, a small hole and a good hour of taping ? :)

Weep with me now for the funeral of subtlety.

70 metric tons to orbit base
98 metric tons to orbit cargo vehicle

Ooooooh, color me completely unimpressed.

There've been some Project Orion documents declassified and published recently. Take a look.

Specifically, look at these numbers.

For the uninitiated, Orion's a nuclear pulse rocket. You have a big baseplate. You have your payload on top of the plate. You set atomic bombs off under the plate. Plate moves.

Their advanced interplanetary design had a deliverable payload the moon of 5700 tons; that's about the mass of a Los Angeles-class submarine, easily enough for a permanent manned lunar base. And not just in a single launch, in a single stage. Instead of putting men on the moon and returning them to earth by 1970, we'd have had a manned mission to Saturn (and back) by 1970.

"Oh, but you'd pollute the whole planet!" Feh. Again, look at the numbers. For the big interplanetary class, the bomb you set off at sea level is .35 kilotons. By the time you leave atmosphere, you've set off an in-atmosphere total yield of 250 kilotons.

250 kilotons is nothing. During the course of above-ground nuclear testing, the US set off a 15-megaton bomb, 60 times larger. The Soviets detonated a 50-megaton bomb. Hell, the US set off a one megaton pure fission bomb, purely to see if they could do it.

You'd launch this thing once, from a big barge in the middle of the Pacific. We'd be all over the solar system by now, instead of struggling to reinvent Apollo to go back to a place we abandoned over 30 years ago, instead of wasting hundreds of billions and too many years on a white-elephant shuttle design whose principal achievement (repairing the Hubble) would pale in comparison to the slightest thing you could do with a spacecraft capable of delivering 1300 tons to Saturn's orbit.

Feh. In the words of Old Man Murray, "It's not a lack of knowledge holding you people back, it's a lack of will."

That's going to be the epitaph for humanity.

70 metric tons to orbit base
98 metric tons to orbit cargo vehicle

Ooooooh, color me completely unimpressed.

There've been some Project Orion documents declassified and published recently. Take a look.

Specifically, look at these numbers.

For the uninitiated, Orion's a nuclear pulse rocket. You have a big baseplate. You have your payload on top of the plate. You set atomic bombs off under the plate. Plate moves.

Their advanced interplanetary design had a deliverable payload the moon of 5700 tons; that's about the mass of a Los Angeles-class submarine, easily enough for a permanent manned lunar base. And not just in a single launch, in a single stage. Instead of putting men on the moon and returning them to earth by 1970, we'd have had a manned mission to Saturn (and back) by 1970.

"Oh, but you'd pollute the whole planet!" Feh. Again, look at the numbers. For the big interplanetary class, the bomb you set off at sea level is .35 kilotons. By the time you leave atmosphere, you've set off an in-atmosphere total yield of 250 kilotons.

250 kilotons is nothing. During the course of above-ground nuclear testing, the US set off a 15-megaton bomb, 60 times larger. The Soviets detonated a 50-megaton bomb. Hell, the US set off a one megaton pure fission bomb, purely to see if they could do it.

You'd launch this thing once, from a big barge in the middle of the Pacific. We'd be all over the solar system by now, instead of struggling to reinvent Apollo to go back to a place we abandoned over 30 years ago, instead of wasting hundreds of billions and too many years on a white-elephant shuttle design whose principal achievement (repairing the Hubble) would pale in comparison to the slightest thing you could do with a spacecraft capable of delivering 1300 tons to Saturn's orbit.

Feh. In the words of Old Man Murray, "It's not a lack of knowledge holding you people back, it's a lack of will."

That's going to be the epitaph for humanity.

A mockup I'm sure, but interesting:

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=266824107&cont ext=photostream&size=o

I've done some benchmarks and measurements in the past which will never be made public (I work for Yahoo!). And the most important bits in those have been CSS and Scripts. A lot of performance has been squeezed out of the HTTP layers (akamai, Expires headers), but not enough attention has been paid to the render section of the experience. You could possibly reproduce the benchmarks with a php script which does a sleep() for a few seconds to introduce delays at various points and with a weekend to waste.

The page does not start rendering till the last CSS stream is completed, which means if your css has @import url() entries, the delay before render increases (until that file is pulled & parsed too). It really pays to have the quickest load for the css data over anything else - because without it, all you'll get it a blank page for a while.

Scripts marked defer do not always defer and a lot of inline code in <script> tags depend on such scripts that a lot of browsers just pull the scripts as and when they find it. There seems to be just two threads downloading data in parallel (from one hostname), which means a couple of large (but rarely used) scripts in the code will block the rest of the css/image fetches. See flickr's organizr for an example of that in action.

You should understand that these resources have different priorities in the render land and you should really only venture here after you've optimized the other bits (server and application).

All said and done, good tutorial by Aaron Hopkins - a lot of us have had to rediscover all that (& more) by ourselves.

You are missing the point guys! I don't know who she is or what she is selling but if she is a geek and looks like this
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image /13/0,1425,sz=1&i=135407,00.jpg
http://static.flickr.com/66/206241643_d48861f49c.j pg
I am subscribing to her newsletter. ;-)

A sheet cake!? . A budget the size of Kentucky and all they can muster up is a sheet cake!?

Yes, this link is http://static.flickr.com/118/278562314_14716c0232. jpg

Looks like it should have really been http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollyjake/278562314/ - their server is apparently better equipped to handle the load.

The picture is hosted on flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhys/260069248/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stasarama/245979951/
It's still a lab prototype of course, but a massively impressive one. I'm very pleased to see articulatory speech recognition (that's the main research area in this particular project, rather than the translation itself) get written up by the BBC.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhys/260069248/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stasarama/245979951/
It's still a lab prototype of course, but a massively impressive one. I'm very pleased to see articulatory speech recognition (that's the main research area in this particular project, rather than the translation itself) get written up by the BBC.

Thanks, Dynedain. I wasn't aware of that ad. Here's a link to the one I was refering to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kengz/198041571/

In the ad they use the term personal computer which at that time was abbreviated as PC. This was before Compaq made the first IBM clone. It was run in August of 1981.

*** mumbles about absent minded oldies....

Here's the text if you're running a non-gui computer ;-)

Welcome, IBM. Seriously. Welcome to the most exciting and important marketplace since the computer revolution began 35 years ago. And congratulations on your first personal computer. Putting real computer power in the hands of the individual is already improving the way people work, think, learn, communicate, and spend their leisure hours. Computer literacy is fast becoming as fundamental a skill as reading or writing. When we invented the first personal computer system, we estimated that over 140,000,000 people worldwide could justify the purchase of one, if only they understood its benefits. Next year alone, we project that well over 1,000,000 will come to that understanding. Over the next decade, the growth of the personal computer will continue in logarithmic leaps. We look forward to responsible competition in the massive effort to distribute this American technology to the world. And we appreciate the magnitude of your commitment. Because what we are doing is increasing social capital by enhancing individual productivity. Welcome to the task. Apple.

See for yourself :)

How do you define ... non-commercial use in this context?

This is the question I've always had with creative commons: just what counts as non-commercial? If I take a BY-NC image off flickr, and want to use it in my blog, is that OK? What if I have google ads on my blog? Is that still OK? Does it make any difference if I'm actually making a profit or not? I've gone so far as to email some of the CC lawyers about this issue, and there seems to be no clear answer.

-Grey

Hey, they don't seem to be starving...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryu2/49711541/in/set- 1070525/

I took a trip to the DPRK about a year ago, and had a chance to see a "computer lab" in one of the "showcase" high schools.

They are for the most part still using Win95, etc. As mentioned in the article, they have their own national intranet, but not Internet access. Sanctions probably make it difficult to get newer things.

Interestingly, for political reasons, they do not use the (South) Korean version of Windows, but rather they are working on their indigenous solution for entering text and displaying Korean script (hangul/chosongul).

Some pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryu2/49295211/in/set- 1070525/

I'm with the responder to the original article that wanted a http://www3.flickr.com/photos/saldana/234320198Leg ion Flight Ring instead. Yes, a Green Lantern ring is a superset of a Flight Ring functionalitywise, but I'd rather be a Legionnaire. DC sold one about 15 years ago but it was pretty crummy, alas.

Wouldn't the magnetic connector be a positive addition?

Hah! I got much closer!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11236481@N00/62537017
two beige circles with two pink dots in their center was my search.

whatever I draw, this picture at http://www.flickr.com/photos/96302514@N00/58916441 / is always in the list of results!

I tried to draw boobs and got this instead http://www.flickr.com/photos/19406332@N00/41144732

I think it needs some bugs worked out. It searches as well as a search engine.

Over the past six years I've been playing with gimp, people have written off the project as totally bass-ackwards enough times. But no matter what, the project seems to come back with a few surprises once in a while to prove those critics wrong (though it is debatable whether that would happen sans critics).

I'm not a graphics artist and in the rare occasions when I do have to draw something, these days I prefer Inkscape - there are days when I want the Macromedia Fireworks modes of bitmap-vector middle land, but not too many. But, I've been using gimp to post-process most of my photos and I've found that it is actually a really really powerful tool . So the part that really made sense for me in the GEGL docs is the following paragraph.

PNG, JPEG, SVG, EXR, RAW and other image sources.
Arithmetic operations, porter duff compositing operations, SVG blend modes, other blend modes, apply mask.
Basic color correction tools.
Most processing done with High Dynamic Range routines.

And the concept really scores some points because it stores transformation pipelines instead of the result bitmaps, from the looks of it. That should really revolutionize Undo for graphics.

I've heard enough photoshop graphics gurus say that Gimp is very accurately named. And probably for print media it still is - but for a hobbyist, it has started to really really kick ass.

I took my camera down into the bus tunnel shortly after some got busted for "terrorism". Then I did it again right before it closed for retrofitting. I had one driver comment on it the first time, but he didn't threaten me.

http://flickr.com/photos/sarekofvulcan/tags/bustun nel/

and where Microsoft [in good company] reign http://www.flickr.com/photos/17093805@N00/22370701 8/in/set-72157594260547553/

While the sum of 2+6+1+1+3=13 is mildly interesting, I never thought much about Friday the Thirteenth outside of Pogo strips. Walt kelly's character in the strip, Churchy LaFemme perhaps more than any other source kept the Friday the Thirteenth fear alive as the turtle fled in horror for decades, long before the series of films arrived. For those of us who remember (and in some cases still read) the strip, it's still a source of amusement.

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! It's Friday the thirteenth! Very unlucky to get shot on Friday the thirteenth!"

2+6+1+1+4=14, so there goes Saturday the 14th too.

How's this float yer boat? http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeskalinden/51683256/

That article at the Daily Kos to which I linked itself links, in it's third sentence, to the ABC News transcript of 5/24/99 documenting Brian Ross investigating Abramoff's slavery biz in Saipan. But the Daily Kos article was written by someone who's been covering the abuses in the islands for a long time. It includes copies of Preston, Gates lobbyist conspiracies to protect the Marianas abuses. And compiles lots of other cited evidence into a good picture of the racket Abramoff's Republicans, including Delay and Hastert, were running in their "Conservative Paradise", making a travesty of American borders, Chinese trade, and other "Conservative" values. Read it and judge for yourself. That's the power of the Web. Google the facts presented in DKos, and make your own decision.

So instead of seeing a Daily Kos link and caving in to Republican "shoot the messenger" copouts, just click it and see all the facts and logic painting this picture. Not that you are copping out, but others reading this thread have to fight off several layers of Republican media brainwashing. We're just here to help.

Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist (anyone know?), it can be faked, quite convincingly, I might add.
i.e.
"It's a feature in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix or FDRTools."

Even black and white can be support HDR. This is a great B&W example of why 8-bit greyscale just doesn't cut it.

--
"The difference between Religion and Philosophy, is that one is put into practise"

Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist (anyone know?), it can be faked, quite convincingly, I might add.
i.e.
"It's a feature in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix or FDRTools."

Even black and white can be support HDR. This is a great B&W example of why 8-bit greyscale just doesn't cut it.

--
"The difference between Religion and Philosophy, is that one is put into practise"

http://static.flickr.com/70/197762923_31a544a8b5.j pg

Internet tube to sell you...

That was more of a broader comment directed at the thread in general, but since you bit...

I have a 1080p native resolution 37" Westinghouse LCD, and she looks mighty good.

http://static.flickr.com/79/234576469_54bb688b73_o .jpg

(That was an experimental setup. My eyes couldn't take the 1000:1 contrast ratio)

Thanks bud, but I'll still use my eyes.

There's something especially gratifying about this graph flipping us all the bird.

W

On the off chance that you're serious, here's a quick refutation of your first statement:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meta404/252520628/

spelling maybe? I got the first two results for Parklane park as:

Tree at Parklane Park on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Parklane Park - Portland - Reviews of Parklane Park - TripAdvisor

Portland Parks & Recreation :: Parklane Park

And that is without any quotes or anything. Or were you looking for some other Parklane park?