Slashdot Mirror

$67 billion

I'm in the same boat as you (4000 impressions paid for, 60 or so used up) and I agree completely. I keep hitting subscribe.pl and watching that little counter tick up, and I get annoyed if I "waste" a page view by reloading /.before an interesting story shows up. Yes, I am fully aware that 30 cents for a week's slashdotting isn't much, but with metered access the fun factor is a lot less than it used to be.

And while I'm at it, I'll cast another vote for Kuro5hin's text ad system -- in retrospect, I would rather have spent those same $20 on redirecting random people to my site or my pictures or something. Access to Slashdot stories and comments via NNTP would also be amazingly cool (after all these years I still hate the Slash comment interface!), but that would require a lot of work and it ain't gonna work on a pay-per-view basis.

Cheers,
-j.

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

Wow, that's enormous ...... (bet it sounds good!)

That is not Eve, it is from this pjoto collection

Double woohoo!

What a babe

...Phil was widely known to be a bastard ...

Well, I don't know the guy, but I've read a lot of what he has written (see here ). It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk. There's this story about how he paid MIT students their tuition money (for one class) back, out of his own pocket . Amounted to more than $2000, if my calculations were correct. How many people would do that? Also, he seemed genuinely devastated by the death of his dog. People who are that civilized are usually 'good' people in my experience.

...Phil was widely known to be a bastard ...

Well, I don't know the guy, but I've read a lot of what he has written (see here ). It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk. There's this story about how he paid MIT students their tuition money (for one class) back, out of his own pocket . Amounted to more than $2000, if my calculations were correct. How many people would do that? Also, he seemed genuinely devastated by the death of his dog. People who are that civilized are usually 'good' people in my experience.

Also being covered in photo.net (which is interested in the photographer's point of view on copyright.)

Interestingly no-one there thinks linking is illegal. YMMV & IANAL!

photo.net discussion

Case law have some info here (pdf)

There's nothing wrong with being concerned with money. But being so nakedly concerned with money and then making smug comments about how it isn't foremost in one's life is a tad hypocritical. (See Chapter 1 of "Travels With Samantha" for an example.)

First, obviously any minimally decent relational-like, even SQL database is better than any non-relational (object, hierarchical) one &ndash& before proceeding please read Database Debunkings. So substituting MS SQL Server for NTFS should be A Good Thing(tm).

Second, SQL isn't a good implementation of the relational model... so it doesn't matter what's the management system behind it (MS SQL, DB/2, Oracle), if it's SQL it's not ideal -- a really relational system should be faster, have less arbitrary restrictions, and do everything a hierarchical or OO database management system could possibly do. But still SQL would be far better than any hierarchical or OO filesystem.

Third, as a SQL implementation MS SQL isn't quite ideal, and Jet (Access, Exchange, the registry) is simply horrible. So while this will probably improve Windows feature-wise, it will make Windows even more bloated, perhaps even less stable and slower. But if they manage to fix the database engine, it could even make Windows faster and more stable.

Fourth, this has already been done. By Oracle. It's called iFS (sorry but I couldn't access Oracle site to get a better page), and exports SMB and other filesystems. As Oracle is too big, proprietary and isn't even SQL compliant, and iFS does not support NFS, I didn't care much about it, but I may have an opportunity to use it as a kind of version control for binaries very shortly.

Last but not least, this idea should be adopted by the Free Software comunity ASAP. We should create a really relational implementation, ideally based on Tutorial D -- there's already a SourceForge project, but nothing has been done up to now. Then this would became a Hurd filesystem (because of Hurd's flexibility) to be ported to Linux. That would blow Longhorn out of water.

If we don't do it better than Microsoft, and if computers continue to get faster and Windows less unreliable, we could have serious competition, say some two or three generations after Longhorn.

Do you photography geeks still insist that traditional film is somehow better than digital?

The ones that hang out on dpreview sure don't. Nor do most PJs. Other shooters have other opinions.

I'm pretty happy with the output of $2000 cameras at about 8x10, but I would not want to do a multi foot print with one if it is to be viewed close up (I have one on my wall from my DSLR, and from across the room it looks great, up close it is way soft -- it was also only $20 so it's a great deal compared to medium format processing and enlarging). Of corse for that even normal 35mm film seldom works (you can do it with techpan, but you need a ton of light to get an ISO 12 film to capture anything that is alive, and a tripod for stills), you need medium format for that.

There are, of corse, some people who think any camera with batteries is evil, or at least any that needs batteries. They won't ever like digital. Most of them are a bunch of posers. Some of them have a real need for a camera that works well in sub zero tempatures. Other people just object to digital's cost (when a $120 Stylus Epic can produce images better then a $1000 CoolPix 995, and weights almost nothing, they do have a point -- even if it leaves out all the stuff the 995 does better).

(If you need to make your photo "grainy" or otherwise "shitty looking", photoshop can do that.

I don't, but I will admit sometimes it makes black and white pictures look better. It really doesn't do anything for me with color.

Well, there are a few exceptions. The really expensive film recorders use ISO3 film that is pretty much grainless so you can scan in 35mm movie footage, process it, and spit it back out and have the grain match un processed frames. They way you can't tell which sequences have digital effects just by noticing a change int he film grain. That's a pretty good use, but only because the original film had grain.

Though there's some other lens artifacts, like bokeh(sp?), that are just best forgotten.)

That shows a pretty serious lack of understanding of the term. Bokeh (no, I'm not sure if it is spelled right) is the quality of the out of focus highlights (bright points). There can be bad bokeh, like Canon's otherwise fine 50mm f/1.8 lens produces, in that case what should be points of light or small circles show up as hexagons (look at the far eye). There is also good bokeh, which I fail to really be able to tell from "Ok bokeh" which is just plain old round out of focus high lights.

It is a good idea to make sure you don't have bad bokeh, otherwise you have to be extremely careful to avoid highlights when you try to use selective focus. This is a problem for both digital and film cameras (the example I showed was from my digital camera), it comes from the lens, not the imager. It is not much of a problem for all of the current digital point and shoots because their imagers are so physically small that you can't selective focus except when doing macro (extreme close ups) shots. Which is a shame because selective focus is great for isolating the interesting part of your picture and turning a bunch of random bad looking crap int he background into a blue of pleasing color, or at least no longer distracting color, unless it is full of hexagons of light or little donuts of light.

Other then macro shots the only way to do selective focus like effects is to carefully select the non subject parts of your image and blur them. It is a giant pain because it takes quite some time to select everything (maybe 5 to 10 min with a good tablet, an hour with a mouse/trackpad) and do a half decent blur (and it still looks wrong since the amount of blur doesn't change with distance, unless you spend way way too much time on it -- most people won't notice this though, so it only screws things up if you try to submit the photo to a competition or a stock agent). That is a lot longer then it takes to click the f-stop a little to the right or a little to the left (way way way under a second). On the plus side it lets you fiddle until you have it "just so" even for real-life events which is something you normally only get to do with still life style photography. You can also get away with less light since you can use f/2 or larger openings on things that my require f/5.6 or f/8 in 35mm to get enough depth of field.

From a recent trawl of photo.net, looking for some sort of SLR-like digital camera(don't bother, they're too expensive :( ), I found that it's more like: It's only art if it involves silver halides. It's OK to use darkroom techniques to 'fiddle' with a print, but unspeakably evil to scan a print and do the same with Photoshop, or god forbid, use CCDs to capture the original image.

Part of the reasoning is technical (most CCDs don't have the range of tone that film can deal with), but most of it is pure superstition.

[can anyone recommend a decent sub-$1000 digital camera for playing with manual-SLR-like photography - manual focus, macro, long exposure...?]

Check out the pretty graphs here and here. Both show that red and green sensitivities are similar and different from blue. The two graphs seem to contradict each other - the first has blue the lowest, and the second has blue the highest, but they are graphing two things: the first shows sensitivity (excitability per # of photons) and the second shows the reciprical (# of photons to excite).

Check out OpenACS, continuing development of ArsDigita's Arsgitia Community System. They've had discussion, commenting and other community/collaboration features for years and there are people working on adding more wiki and weblog-like functionality.

The operative term is was.

He's actually built successful community sites, not just written generalizations

Before IBM told them to take a powder, few people knew about M$. IBM is the company that set the architecture because IBM is the company that people knew and trusted. The Bill Gates influence on that company was nothing but negative, but he leveraged his association with them to grow. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, M$ will return from where they came as IBM focuses on being a computer and equipment maker.

As you can never construct the truth from untrusted sources and trying is a waste of effort, let me point you to some useful sites:
Bill Gates Howto
Bill Gates wealth
Prediction of M$ hardware "openness"

Is it the burrowing owl? Their owl looks very similar to yours...though they look different enough that I'm tempted to say that it's a coincidence...but I could have found totally the wrong picture, and if so, sorry...

Harry Potter's Owl (Hedwig?)
Don's Owl

Firstly, photo.net's search engine returns a few results:

1. The search results

2. This article is a good pick from the above search.

This site is supposed to have a very good article about meteor photography, but I haven't found the link yet. In any case it has a reasonable amount of information on meteors in general and how to best observe them. You'll find this information on this link.

Of course, if any body else has other links to similar information I'd love to see them. I haven't gone out myself to take these types of shots before, so any help I can get is good.

Finally, for a bit of inspiration - here is a photo (although not of a meteor shower, just star trails) that is just amazing.

Firstly, photo.net's search engine returns a few results:

1. The search results

2. This article is a good pick from the above search.

This site is supposed to have a very good article about meteor photography, but I haven't found the link yet. In any case it has a reasonable amount of information on meteors in general and how to best observe them. You'll find this information on this link.

Of course, if any body else has other links to similar information I'd love to see them. I haven't gone out myself to take these types of shots before, so any help I can get is good.

Finally, for a bit of inspiration - here is a photo (although not of a meteor shower, just star trails) that is just amazing.

Firstly, photo.net's search engine returns a few results:

1. The search results

2. This article is a good pick from the above search.

This site is supposed to have a very good article about meteor photography, but I haven't found the link yet. In any case it has a reasonable amount of information on meteors in general and how to best observe them. You'll find this information on this link.

Of course, if any body else has other links to similar information I'd love to see them. I haven't gone out myself to take these types of shots before, so any help I can get is good.

Finally, for a bit of inspiration - here is a photo (although not of a meteor shower, just star trails) that is just amazing.

Firstly, photo.net's search engine returns a few results:

1. The search results

2. This article is a good pick from the above search.

This site is supposed to have a very good article about meteor photography, but I haven't found the link yet. In any case it has a reasonable amount of information on meteors in general and how to best observe them. You'll find this information on this link.

Of course, if any body else has other links to similar information I'd love to see them. I haven't gone out myself to take these types of shots before, so any help I can get is good.

Finally, for a bit of inspiration - here is a photo (although not of a meteor shower, just star trails) that is just amazing.

If you go to Photo.net, there's a member folder with more photos from the Linux10 picnic, mostly of Linux t-shirts worn by attendees.

If you go to Photo.net, there's a member folder with more photos from the Linux10 picnic, mostly of Linux t-shirts worn by attendees.

On the contrary, AOLServer is really quite good. It's tight binding with Tcl makes it possible to pull of some incredibly elegant things in just a few short lines of code. If you want to see some good examples of AOLServer (which is OSS, by the way) in use, check out photo.net, arsdigita.com, or anything else done by Philip Greenspun/ArsDigita. He swears by it, and for good reason. The original poster's page doesn't do it much (any?) justice.

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing by Philip Greenspun

This volume is named "Web Publishing", but can be read as a more general textbook on online publishing, communities and information exchange. The book has lots of concrete technical information (AOLserver, Oracle, SQL, Unix) which may be expected to go out of date in some years, but it is still general enough to make it a lasting source of information. Of course, you have to hack through Greenspun's egomaniac style, but if you don't take him too seriously, it works...

Plus, it has nice pictures. And you can read it on the web, in its newest, updated edition.

I look through photo.net to find random images for websites. Although most of the photos on there are not free (in the GNU sense), they do store copyright permissions for each image so you can check. (I haven't yet found a way to filter searches so only free images show up.)

Need help with fill flash

The attached photo, while dramatic (IMHO) could benefit from some fill flash on the right. The strong sidelighting causes a sharply defined cutoff from full light to shadow, and lack of shadow detail probably prevents this photo from being a Photo of the Week candidate.

So, does anyone have any workable ideas on how to get some fill flash on the right side of the frame? I'm only getting one more shot at this. As you might imagine, travel expenses are horrendous. I'd really like to make sure this shot works next time.

TIA.

-- Darron Spohn, April 01, 2001; 12:48 P.M. Eastern
Attachment: Jupiter_full2.jpg

One of the funniest things I'd seen on the web in a loooong time. Check out the comments, they're very helpful.

• In a case like this, you need a good lighting source. Even a 2400 W strobe won't do. I suggest renting a star from you local photography dealer.
• A really large reflector. Just make sure you get it out of the view of the image because you will only get one shot at it. Start saving your money; maybe your grandchildren's too.
• Duh! Take two steps to the right and position the sunlight on the face at a right angle. And use a tripod next time, we need to be sharp!

Etc... :)

Need help with fill flash

The attached photo, while dramatic (IMHO) could benefit from some fill flash on the right. The strong sidelighting causes a sharply defined cutoff from full light to shadow, and lack of shadow detail probably prevents this photo from being a Photo of the Week candidate.

So, does anyone have any workable ideas on how to get some fill flash on the right side of the frame? I'm only getting one more shot at this. As you might imagine, travel expenses are horrendous. I'd really like to make sure this shot works next time.

TIA.

-- Darron Spohn, April 01, 2001; 12:48 P.M. Eastern
Attachment: Jupiter_full2.jpg

One of the funniest things I'd seen on the web in a loooong time. Check out the comments, they're very helpful.

• In a case like this, you need a good lighting source. Even a 2400 W strobe won't do. I suggest renting a star from you local photography dealer.
• A really large reflector. Just make sure you get it out of the view of the image because you will only get one shot at it. Start saving your money; maybe your grandchildren's too.
• Duh! Take two steps to the right and position the sunlight on the face at a right angle. And use a tripod next time, we need to be sharp!

Etc... :)

Need help with fill flash

The attached photo, while dramatic (IMHO) could benefit from some fill flash on the right. The strong sidelighting causes a sharply defined cutoff from full light to shadow, and lack of shadow detail probably prevents this photo from being a Photo of the Week candidate.

So, does anyone have any workable ideas on how to get some fill flash on the right side of the frame? I'm only getting one more shot at this. As you might imagine, travel expenses are horrendous. I'd really like to make sure this shot works next time.

TIA.

-- Darron Spohn, April 01, 2001; 12:48 P.M. Eastern
Attachment: Jupiter_full2.jpg

One of the funniest things I'd seen on the web in a loooong time. Check out the comments, they're very helpful.

• In a case like this, you need a good lighting source. Even a 2400 W strobe won't do. I suggest renting a star from you local photography dealer.
• A really large reflector. Just make sure you get it out of the view of the image because you will only get one shot at it. Start saving your money; maybe your grandchildren's too.
• Duh! Take two steps to the right and position the sunlight on the face at a right angle. And use a tripod next time, we need to be sharp!

Etc... :)

Get your water really cold with ice and then get a PCB etchant heater from Mouser. They're a good price and will heat up to 100F I believe. Which, also, happens to be the temp you'll need if you ever decide to do color processing (which coincidentally, isnt as hard as you may think). Also, check out photo.net which is a community for photography.

why this shouldn't be used too much

that forcing a surfer through an entry-tunnel to access a website is Bad Practice (tm)

and that most sites are actually being visited for their content, rather than their flashy look (no pun intended)

A very interesting point of view on this subject can be found in Phillip Greenspun's Guide to web publishing. Phillip even practices what he preaches on photo.net.

But as you can see, they don't really have claws (they seem to have nails, just like we do).

They are the only so-called "great ape" from Asia, living in Borneo and Indonesia. They are endangered (duh) and if clear-cutting continues, you may live longer than this species does.

All about orangutans.

Jamie McCarthy

Photo.Net was Philip Greenspun's baby, and as far as I can tell, funded by him. What will happen to it now?

Will it:

• Continue as is?
• Close down?
• Start running Ads?
• Become a pay-site?
• Something else...

Thad

I first saw Phil on the net at his popular "Bill Gates Wealth" website. Besides website development he does a fair amount with photography and travelogues.

Hopefully he comes out Ok. I mean I have never met him, but anyone that makes something as cool as photo.net is allright in my book. Plus he seems pretty cool from what I can tell by reading his tutorials and such...

As I have hinted, I think that companies such as GE will start to put Internet interfaces into their appliances as soon as about 20 percent of American households are wired for full-time Internet, for example with cable modems (see Chapter 6). But they won't do it because they think it is cool for your GE fridge to talk to your Whirlpool dishwasher. They'll do it because it will cut the cost of tech support for them. Instead of paying someone to wait on the 800 line while you poke around with your head underneath the fridge looking for the serial number, they'll want to ping your fridge across the Internet and find out the model, its current temperature, and whether there are any compressor failures.

pi using photos through eve through ars digita.
Go there now...

(Do it. Do it now. It is what Einstein's Brain would want you to do!)

WebWord.com -- Industrial Strength Usability

Comments? Questions?

Thad

The only independent claim states:
1. A method performed by a marketplace computer for facilitating electronic commerce over a network between a plurality of seller and buyer computers, the method comprising the steps of:
presenting a registration web page to a remote first seller computer over the network;
receiving a first registration for a first product from the first seller computer over the network, the first registration including a first product description and a first Universal Resource Locator (URL) indicating a first location of a first image of the first product, the first location referencing the first seller computer or a third computer on the network, and the first image being in one of a plurality of predetermined source image formats;
presenting a registration web page to a remote second seller computer over the network;
receiving a second registration for a second product from the second seller computer over the network the second registration including a second product description and a second URL indicating a second location of a second image of the second product, the second location referencing the second seller computer or a fourth computer on the network, and the second image being in one of a plurality of predetermined source image formats;
retrieving the first image based on the received first URL;
manipulating the first image to produce a first thumbnail image of a first predetermined size and format;
retrieving the second image based on the received second URL;
manipulating the second image to produce a second thumbnail image of a second predetermined size and format;
creating a customized web page including the first and second thumbnail images; and
presenting the customized web page to a buyer computer.

Nowthen, in order to infringe this patent (i.e. potentially be sued by EBay) there has to be at least 2 seller computers and a buyer computer involved, in an ecommerce situation. The images must be referenced from a third location.

This claim (although not particularly deep) certainly overcomes most of the "prior art" that has been tossed around. For example, all individual photo galleries, like the one shown here reference larger images on the same site. Furthermore, they are not in the context of ecommerce. Most sites generally have thumbnails of other images on the same site. This is not the case that is protected by EBay.

Seriously, read the claim FIRST, then bitch about the scope of the patent.

Thalia

Having worked so much on my personal pages, and having seen others that are really great, it's a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all of the best of the Internet ... NO porn or personal websites".

There certainly are a lot of cases of personal sites that are arguably better than a good portion of their commercial counterparts. Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.

So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes a personal website, well, a personal site that they're above indexing?

• Contact info for the author, instead of a generic webmaster@ ??
• Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
• Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
• Not selling any products?
• Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
• A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
• Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?

Still, the attitude expressed about personal websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks building an index of the net would know a bit more about some the truely great personal sites.

I would in half a heartbeat be happy to not allow porn sites on my system unless they ended in .porn/.xxx.

This is the real problem I have with .xxx. It would quickly become a quasi-legal standard, like the atrocious movie ratings system here in the United States, or those "voluntary" Parental Advisory labels that Tipper Gore made so incredibly important in in the sale and distribution of records here.

Unfortunately, I don't think most people who would like to filter porn have ever spent any time trying to figure out what pornography really is. I certainly have no idea what is "pornographic." Just about everyone would agree that a site like www.whitehouse.com definitely falls under the common definition of pornography. But what about the disgusting site rotten.com? Certainly, it contains a great deal of disgusting stuff that certainly isn't pornography, and some stuff that might be. Where it go?

Or, for a more difficult distinction, what about a site like photo.net? Certainly, there are plenty of photos of naked people there (or, at least, there were the last time I looked, about 5 years ago). Is it pornography? What about a document describing all sorts of disgusting perversions, like The Starr Report? Is that porn? Do we have to protect kids from that?

On an even more omininous tone, how about a totally serious political activism site, that just happens to be a political activism site for disgusting sexual perverts, like The North American Man-Boy Love Association? Where on earth do we put constitutionally protected political speech when that speech is considered the worse form of pornography available by many people?

Filtering already opens a big enough can of worms, even when the criteria for the filtering is (nominally) in the hands of the reciever of the information -- each person browsing theoretically has some chance to decide for themselves what criteria to use for "bad" sites. But to pre-apply the "pornography" criteria to a huge number of sites, and to apply it based on the discretion of people who are neither the content providers or the content consumers, is asking for a system rife with abuses and problems.

And if you believe your narrow definition of pornography is going to be the definition used by all sides when it comes time to start segregating the sites, you should spend some time really listening to what people are saying. No-one is going to be happy with the definition of porn, escpecially in a world where movies like Eyes Wide Cut can be defined as "Adult Only Pornography" by the American standards.

Of course it's been going on for years. That doesn't make it right.

You mentioned porn being an unethical/unpleasent activity. What happens when someone desides that Philip Greenspun is a pornographer because of these photos (which I definately consider art) in the photo.net gallery? Don't give me the line that nobody would consider those porn. I know people who would be livid at them.

This isn't about vice. It isn't about taxation. It isn't even about the redistribution of wealth. It's about personal liberty... the freedom to be soverign of myself. The right to make decisions, and yes, even mistakes without coersion from the majority.

Remember, Mr. Bill wasn't rich back then.

Yes, he was.

And remember that quote about how he used to pinch source code listings, without asking the authors, out of University rubbish bins. One wonder how much of Altair BASIC was actually written by Bill, and why it was so buggy.

Thad