Slashdot Mirror

Only when the Antibubbles encounter the bubbles.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Quick question...since personal shredders are only $30, why does your company use the shredding service at all? It would probably be cheaper to outfit every employee (or at least every department) with their own shredder than pay for 2 months of that service, when you empty your personal shredders, just use ordinary recycling for the shreds.

Jason
ProfQuotes

And that is why Apple has had its best year

I thought it was because of all the people so fed up with windows product activation jumping ship to apple. At least that's why I bought Apple stock 6 months ago.

Jason
ProfQuotes

• Order of magnitude cheaper
• Orders of magnitude better image quality
• Orders of magnitude longer lifespan for the images
• Possible to use specialized films (Infra-Red, Slide, Ultra-Fine grain, very high speed, special colour saturation curves like Kodak VC or XC, etc) with no need to spend a cent on special equipment.
• Batteries last for thousands of exposures vs dozens for digital.
• Virtually no depreciation on equipment value vs 50% year for digital.

• You can preview your images on a little 1.5" screen.
• No cost for pictures you screw up
• Images already in a digital format so you can transmit them without having to waste time scanning them or finishing a whole roll.

2) ... Well.. a lower end model (new) would be 2 to $4,000. A high end Sinar would run you over $10,000.

How much is a 20 year old 8x10 camera worth today used in optically perfect condtion? Well...a little more than it cost brand new because. Film cameras are a good investment; the price holds firm. When I bought my 2.3MP camera for $400, my 9 year old nikon was also worth $400, and I bought it brand new for $400. Today on ebay, I can get about $70 for my digital and $300 for my Nikon (digital has eroded the price of the used camera market a bit).

So even allowing for that $4000 large format camera, you're still taking a $20,000 depreciation hit with the digital camera that doesn't exist with the film camera. You can't say wait 3 years to buy the camera either; think about what the world would have lost if Adams had spent years waiting for the price of his camera to drop instead of taking pictures. Buying a $4000 digital camera instead of the $4000 film camera and planning to upgrade to a better digital in 3 years also isn't an answer; for this 3 years, his prints would have had an inferior quality which also would have been a great loss.

3) Quality: 140MP in an 8x10 format would be 10837x13546 pixels. That works out to be 1355 dpi. I think thats well above acceptable resolution.

This is a totally false arguement, if I'm comparing apples and oranges, you're comparing apples and elephants. You don't shoot 8x10 film to make an 8x10 print. You use it for poster or mural sized enlargements. Blowing up a 35mm negative to 8x10 is equivalent magnification to blowing up an 8x10 negative to 64x80. At that size, your 140MP gives you 170 DPI (assuming your numbers are correct). That's well below acceptable resolution. It certainly won't compare to a 35mm negative printed at 8x10.


Throughout all your BSing, you still haven't answered the key question. You're arguing that spending $25,000 on a digital camera will give results just as good as the $4000 film camera. I'm arguing that the film camera will take better pictures and they'll last a lot longer. Even if you're totally right and I'm totally wrong, why should anyone spend $25,000 to get something that will lose 80% of its value in 3 years and be just as good as they could get for $4,000? Jason
ProfQuotes

What model camera did you get, and how did you get a 3MP for $80?

As you just said for $80 it has considerable lens distortion. A $30 P&S at target or costco will not have lens distortion. Sure, it won't be as sharp as a Nikon lens, but it won't have distortion.

Your cost is that might get that perfect shot of Grandma and find out it has distortion and poor color balance and saturation. Spoiling a dream shot by having a technically poor image is just too expensive a non-monetary cost.

For $110, I can get a P&S at target, and the extra $80 will buy me 16 rolls of film and processing at costco. If you're shooting more than that much with your digital, such a poor quality one is a mistake right from the start.

If you do want to print them for 29 cents each, that just increases your cost; my price includes a print of every single picture on those 16 rolls. Sure you don't want every one printed, but your way the price includes none printed; my way it includes every one printed for the same money.

Jason

ProfQuotes

Yes, long exposure is Adams signature style, that is because he used tiny apertures, and the light came through such a tiny hole, that it needed a good long time to make the impression on the film.

This is exactly why I said long exposures are common in Adams style of photography. Small arperture means larger depth of field, and for landscape you want the DoF to be maximized.

My point is that film has an inverse saturation curve that is somewhat unique for each kind of film. Adams was skilled to the point where he had an intuitive feel for how the films he used would react. How does a CCD react to a long (several minutes) exposure? Does the charge bleed off and it behaves sort of like film? Does it bleed into other pixels and fog the whole image? Is it perfectly stable and a 10 minute exposure is a 5 minute exposure + 1EV?

If even you're right about the pixel count (and I tend to believe you because of lack of trust of the hardware makers), you're only arguing that this special 50MP camera would be as good as Adams sheet film. Where is the advantage? Why should he abandon a simple (cheap) box that costs a few dollars (today's value) per exposure in favour of something that is arguable just as good, but costs more than he made in his lifetime? It's not like he needed to take lots of shots; his pictuers were well planned out and took a long time to take each one.

Maybe the digital would have made him take lots more pictures and spend less time on each. Then instead of hundreds of truly great works of art, he might have taken tens of thousands of mediocre snapshots.

I really don't understand this digital push. It's good for photojournalists who care more about getting the picture to their publisher as fast as possible than image quality or whether the picture will be useful in 50 years. It's also good for people learning to take pictures so they can get some instant feedback and take lots of pictures to experiment.

But for most people film is still better. A typical person who shoots 5-10 rolls a year on vacations and at parties will find that digital has a much higher per-shot cost over the lifetime of the camera; a $300 digital gives comperable features and feel to a $30 P&S film camera. At 5-10 rolls/year you will never recoup those costs over the life of the camera.

As far as quality, you might argue that a $3000 digital is comparable to film, but the $300 digital is definately inferior to film. So for the typical person, digital costs more per shot and gives inferior quality. Where is the advantage?

Jason
ProfQuotes

It sounds like your answers is no then because no such camera is likely to exist for the forseeable future and building one from scratch would cost orders of magnitude more than a lifetime of sheet film even for someone like Adams.

50 megapixel would also be pretty grainy at the large prints adams liked to make. A 2 megapixel doing a 4x6 print would be the same resolution as a 50 megapixel doing a 20x30 print. 20x30 is a typical size for adams, and a 2 megapixel is just barely tolerable at 4x6.

The other side is creative control over the chemicals. We're talking about digital manipulation but analog manipulation has existed as long as chemical photography has. Ansel Adams was a master of that and I doubt he'd give up the techniques he spent a lifetime learning.

Besides the obvious darkroom stuff, film has interesting quirks. A 1 minute exposure is not 60 times effective as a 1 second exposure on real film. How will a CCD behave; in Adams style of photography, long exposures are common.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Even that statement implies it exists in some sense where it can want or not want something. It's a few cells. How is that different than taking a sample of cells from the inside of someone's cheek and asking if it minds being scraped off?

What if they clone stem cells in a way that doesn't prevent the fetus from developing, store it for 10 years while the person grows up, and then ask them if they mind their cells being used that way. If it had been done to me, I sure wouldn't mind.

Jason
ProfQuotes

..which was scorned in favor of Zmodem

My reaction as I read the first few lines of the post was "zmodem is better". I'm glad the author added that comment, it gave me a good laugh at my own reaction.

The ease of use of zmodem automatically accepting the download and setting the file name did seem like a revolutionary idea to me back then.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Even considering the cheaper on you mentioned, $1500 buys a lot of film. At costco, it's about $5 total for 24 exp film and processing. That means for the $1500 you could buy a decent 35mm SLR kit for $300 and spend the remaining $1200 on 240 rolls of film and processing, or 5760 pictures.

How many people will shoot 5800 pictures even with a digital camera? There's also depreciation...I spent $450 on a 2.3MP camera in 2001. It's worth about $100 now on ebay. My nikon 4004s is still worth every cent I paid for it back in 1989. So not only do you have to take 5800 pictures, you have to take them in the first year before depreciation erodes your investment. Otherwise it would be better to shoot 1000 pictures on film in 1 year and buy that $1500 camera for $750 the next year.

Another thing, the film price I quoted includes printing. As soon as you starting printing some of those digital pictures the price goes up even more.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Do you think in 20 years you will be able to go to a photo lab in any mall and hand them a roll of film.

Yes, actually I do. There may not be 6 1-hour photomats in every shopping mall anymore but the demand will definately be able to support the 10's of professional camera stores in every major city.

The stores like that (which is where I get my film processed even now) don't have 'poor kids' behind the counter. They have people who breathe photography; even the salesperson selling the cameras can develop film by hand blindfolded (it is done in a darkroom). Lentricular 3D photographs were a passing fad that was around for a couple of years in the early 80's, but there's still enough people using the old cameras that even now you can find places to get them developed. 35mm film has been around for 70 years...It would be impossible for nobody to still be using and developing it in another 70.

Jason
ProfQuotes

A lot of what you say is very good. The metering and AF on the body is important too; it's not *just* a box anymore, but as you say, you should splurge on the lenses and cut corners on the body; just make sure you buy Nikon.

Your second last paragraph practically had me rolling on the floor in laughter. You dislike the small negative size (poor image quality) of 35mm so you switched to digital. I've taken pictures on 35mm film in a pin-hole camera I made out of a cardboard box, duct tape and tin foil that are better than any 6MP camera on the market can take.

Digital quality is crap compared to any film...The advantages are in the very low cost per picture and they're great for photojournalists where it's more important to be able to upload your pictures to the head office than have a high quality print.

On the other side of your coin, you complain about the annoying canister but like a sheet film canister. It takes a few minutes in the dark room to load each sheet of film into the frame, and then the frames are around $100 each. So if you spend $1000 on frames, then for a half hour spent in the darkroom loading film you're all set to take 10 pictures. How is that easier than 35mm canisters?

Your last sentence is the best possible photography advice. Film is cheap; a missed shot will never come again. Even after shooting 10 or 20 rolls in a day, when I get my pictures back, I never feel like I've wasted film; if I get a few truly good pictures per roll I'm happy. The only regrets I have in looking at my pictures are that I didn't take enough; I should have shot something from a different angle or bracketed a shot I didn't think was that important.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I have a Nikon N65. At $199.99 retail, It is absolutely the best camera on the market in the poster's price range. It's perfect for a newbie to the SLR world; it has auto-everything mode but it also lets you switch anything into manual mode. It also has most of the higher end features including 5-zone focus, 10-segmet matrix metering, multiple exposure and bracketing. It also uses Nikon lenses which are the best in the world beyond dispute; even the Hubble telescope uses Nikon glass.

An extra $60 buys a 28-80mm lens, a strap, and a set of batteries.

If the poster doesn't mind spending an extra $100, he should also consider the N80.

I really think you should re-consider selling yours. It really is an excellent camera and completely "going digital" is a bad idea. Even an expensive 6MP digital camera is orders of magnitude worse than a $2 roll of film. I've compared digital and film prints under a microscope; the digital has huge ink, and the photographic print has a light dusting of grain that's barely visable even under the microscope. The digital blobs also have no color variety, they're all in one of the primary colors.

Besides that, you have to store your digital pictures somehow. Do you think you'll be able to access your CD-R or Zip disk in 5 or 10 years? Negatives have been proven to last at least 100 years. Do you want your grandkids to be able to look at the pictures you take? Printer ink fades; I have 1 year old digutal pictures on my wall and the fading is already getting bad enough that they need to be replaced. I have photographs that have been on the same wall for 10 years and still don't show noticable fading.

Digital is very freeing; when take pictures now, I usually only shoot 20-30 frames of film and 10 times as many digital. I know I can waste as many digital shots as I want because there's no cost so I get a lot of good pictures I wouldn't otherwise, but I know I'll still be looking at the film ones in 50 years so anything important, I shoot with film.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Indirectly, that's why I do most of my gaming on a console machine. The quality of most PC based games is horrible. In Bridge Commander, it always freezes at exactly the same point near the end of the game (and that's on a few totally different machines since the game came out). I can't play Lords of the Realm at all anymore because for the past few years it detects my original CD as a pirate copy. Except for Blizzard's products (which always seem to be good quality), it seems like most of the PC games I've tried in the past few years just don't work. I've never had a problem with a console game.

Jason
ProfQuotes

To get bad code out of public hands, they have to replace it with better code. This will just replace bad code with even worse code (XP is worse because it has more DRM).

The "activation thing" is a cripping feature. I can't accept that EULA in good faith, so I can't use XP at all (imo pirating XP would be sinking to MS's level). This just pushes me one step closer to a mac. I'm currently running win98 and win2k. The security issue is the major concern; now I can't use win98 on an important machine anymore.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Those new-fangled 32-bit address spaces with virtual mappings in the System/390 are a kids toy.

Real men use the System/360

Jason
ProfQuotes

I was the parent poster. I agree that the Foundation series is one of the best works of Sci-Fi ever, and the way Asimov tied in the Robots and Empire series and stand-alone books like The End of Eternity as well as a bunch of short stories just adds to the richness.

That's why I was so ready to read the Second foundation trilogy by a trio of no-talent hacks. It's the second trilogy that's one of the worst works of sci-fi ever written.

I could go on for pages explaining exactly what's so horrible about those books but most people here are aware of it. There's the "super-seldon" in the first book that would make Jame Bond look like an out-of-shape couch potato. The constant implication that Asimov is an idiot who didn't know what he's talking about (explaining that hyperspatial travel is just a minor novelty and real travel is done by wormholes...the robots acting nothing like asimovs robots...generally they described in painful detail why most of Asimov's tech is BS and it's really done 'this way'). What were they trying to do with the Sim and Pan sub-plots. They went on for dozens of pages at a time and had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Ender's Game was brilliant, but when you read the whole series through Shadow Puppets, it's almost 4000 pages of mostly boring, uninteresting parts. The only reason I kept reading is I figured it must have a great ending after the way it started, but it didn't really have an ending.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I thought everyone here knew those freebie printers were worthless and just scams to get people to waste lots of money on ink that has the highest per page cost in the industry.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The math ( (12*23.90)+299 ) seems to suggest that you can get a $699 computer for $585.80 plus any finance charges.

More like More like $399

$699 will buy a P4 3.0GHz that's better in most other respects too

What year is whoever submitted that in?

Jason
ProfQuotes

Because the purpose of the lawsuits are a public relations war, and every time they fuck up (sue a 12 year old, sue a Mac-owning granny) they shoot themselves in the foot.

Their public relations goal is to terrify the public to the point where they're afraid to do anything with their music except pay for it. Showing they're willing to sue anyone falls into this category.

Public relations typically implies they want the public to like them, but in this case they want the public to be afraid of them.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Why should any of those people (or things) be immune from legal action simply for the reasons listed.

Are you saying it's okay to pirate music if you register your account in the name of a man who's been in a coma since 1972?

I agree that the lawsuit's are stupid on the part of the RIAA, but why is suing a 12 year old file swapper any worse than suing a 32 year old geek who lives in his parents basement?

Jason
ProfQuotes

I have a single-side die I'd be happy to show you, but I put it in my Klein bottle for safe-keeping and now I can't get it back out.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.

When light-through-air microscopes reached the physical limit, we came up with light-through-oil to get a greater magnification than was "physically possible". Then when that reached its limit we replaced the light with electrons....Even if this is a fundamental limit of electrons-through-solid, who says we're limited to that technology?

Jason
ProfQuotes

ProfQuotes started last December. The idea is from the math newspaper at the University of Waterloo, it's also the funniest part of the paper there.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?

The article doesn't mention Star Wars at all. It's kind of pathetic that the poster thinks it has to be tied to SW to get a mention on slashdot.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I bought a stack of Popular Electronics magazines from the 70's on ebay a few months ago. There's some great "upcoming technologies" articles.

In the days before the magnetic strip, they predicted credit cards would have a holographic image that optically stores the credit card number. The card projects the hologram onto a sensor which reads the number into the computer for processing.

In the letters to the editor section, someone was wondering if it was worth taking a course in TV repair because with the release of the Phillips Modular design it will be easy for anyone to fix their own TV so the repair industry would become obsolete.

Jason
ProfQuotes

That's a good point. How much of that was spam?

ProfQuotes

For one who's on a hobby, a simple general-purpose PCB is more than enough. I've done 8255 based circuits with these.

What do you mean by "general-purpose PCB"? Do you mean perfboard? I've worked with it a lot, and I've wire-wrapped a few 6802 and 6809 based systems together. It is very slow, tedious work; if Dante were alive today, it would be one of the circles of hell :).

In school, we used speed-wiring which is sort of like wirewrap, takes about 1/5th as long to throw together the first time, but then 1 in 10 connections don't work, and by the time the time you track them all down with the continuity tester, it's taken 5 times as long as to have wire-wrapped it in the first place.

Jason
ProfQuotes

If you've ever prototyped a circuit board, you'd be excited about this tech. The photofabriction process can create professional-looking 1 or 2 layer boards if you know what you're doing, but it's a lot of work.

If this lets you make a prototyping board as easily as you brint the transparency for the photofab, it is a major innovation. Sure you can make perfect prototyping boards fairly easily with a CNC machine, but that's not available to someone who does it as a hobby.

Jason
ProfQuotes

It's called a "printed circuit board" because it was originally made by printing the metal on a substrate. The process of etching the copper clad boards was a later innovation, but the name stuck.

Jason
ProfQuotes

the games are generally of low enough actual quality that the company has to cover their costs up front as much as possible, in order to cover those who drop out after the first month - a large percentage of their inital player-base due to the aforementioned low quality.

So what you're basically saying is that the upfront cost means the game sucks because the company needs to recoup their costs right away. It's better to wait until a game does come out with no upfront costs because then they have faith that people will want to stick around.

People generally believe free things are of lower quality than things they pay for. ... and ... If it were free, then they might also start to wonder about how much they're really paying for it through that monthly fee.

These statements are contridictory. People will think if it's free it's of lower quality and they'll feel they're being charged for it in the monthly fee. If they think they're being charged in the monthly fee, they'll realize it's not free.

The truth is they *are* paying for it out of the monthly fee, but that's not a bad thing. AOL users not only pay for their own "free" CD, but also all the others that just get thrown out. They don't think because the CD is free the service sucks. Regardless of your opinion of AOL, they are a huge sucess because they give away their software so aggressively and make it up on the monthly fee.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Profitability: It's already nearly impossible to make money on a game given the up-front development costs, and losing the markup at the front end probably means higher monthly fees, which makes it less motivating to play in the long run.

I'm somewhat involved in the board game industry. I imagine the numbers would be similar for computer games. Retail and wholesale markups are each 50%, so out of the $50, the manufacturer only gets $12.50 (already less than the monthly fee for a lot of games). Out of that, they still have to pay for manufacturing costs which are probably around $5.

I really doubt the company would lose a cent if they made the game a free download. The issue is appearance. The game won't be taken as seriously if players don't see it in a shiny retail package. As a previous poster said, RoE doesn't have as much market, probably because players don't see it in store. The companies need to get something into retail stores at a cost of about 1 month's service and then include the first month free.

The trend is going that way anyway. In the early 90's, ISPs charged a big activation fee when the market was new. After a few years that went away, and now a lot of ISPs have promotions like first month free or first 6 months at half price. As the MMORPG industry matures, it will go through the same sort of changes.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Don't make me pay for the game twice:

If you charge a monthly fee to maintain your virtual world, that's okay. Just don't charge a second time for the game itself. The "game" in the box is just a client to connect to the real game on the server. It's as stupid as if AOL charged $50 for those CDs they give away and then charged their monthly fee.

By charging $50 just to get one's foot in the door, you chase of 90% of the people who would try the game if it just cost the first month's fee. At least some of those people would stick around.

Jason
ProfQuotes

You must be the dumbass. The symbols make a nice pronouncable string of sylables.

h-heli-beb-cnof-ne-na-mg-al-sips-clark-ca....

We only had to memorize the first 40, but the teacher demonstrated that he could still do the first 80.

It's important to memorize the periodic table if you want to do anything in chemistry, so if you can't handle it, you deserve to fail. Everyone knows chemistry is mostly memorization anyway.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Death to floppies. Please!

This still hasn't happened, and won't for a while yet. There is no viable replacement yet. Flash disks and CD/DVD are great for data storage, but that hasn't been the floppy's main niche for years.

These days the floppy is a lowest common denominator boot media. If your computer won't boot, you use a boot floppy, that alone is why it's still around.

I have floppies from my Apple 2 that still work after 20 years and not being used for years at a time. Most CDs I've burned over 2 years ago have already failed, and my USB notebook HD has already died on me once (taking a lot of data with it). Because of that, I store all my important documents on floppy as well as CD.

For digital camera pictures which I can't store on floppies, I use CDs, but I make a copy of each CD every 6 months...it's stupid to have to do that but modern media is just too unreliable. There have been a lot of articles on slashdot about how unreliable CDs and hard drives are.

Jason
ProfQuotes/A?

There where is 1 on this numberline?

Jason
ProfQuotes

By The Learning Channel do you mean TLC? They used to be The Learning Channel, but they changed years ago. Now they fill their schedule with reality TV shows that make survivor look high-brow. For example, a show where they get couples to let a stranger plan their wedding on a small budget, a show where the hosts spend an hour say how horrible the guests wardrobe is, and a lot of home makeover shows like Trading Spaces.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot...their answer to Fox's Magic Secrets Revealed was a series of shows showing the same tricks and pretending they're real. They're also big on shows on paranormal phenomena, also prentending it's real.

Jason
ProfQuotes

That will be a nightmare. Even when MS tries to issue what they think are legitimate security patches they do horrible things (like render Outlook Express unable to receive attachements that don't end in extensions MS approves - this is supposed to stop viruses but it doesn't have any override so I can't receive tarballs or stuffit files at all wihtout asking the sender to rename it to a .zip extension and resend it). Imagine what it will be like when they force you to install patches to break your DivX codec or stop you from running non MS software.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Have they made any progress on their other goal? They wanted to collect a $1 donation for each book from each of the 100 million people they expected to read it, so when they reached the 10,000 book milestone, they'd have raised $1 trillion.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Just use any PDA. I've read dozens of them on my Visor Deluxe.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I've bought stuff advertised in the commercials before hearing the commercials. 90% of commercials are so horrible they prevent me from buying the product.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Reading the article, I just kept thinking of the "if Microsoft made cars" joke.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Any OS is only as secure as the user. When an OS has as much market dominance as windows, it will have a lot of stupid users who do things like open email attachments and not install security patches.

That's why any dominant OS will be a prime target for virus writers.

Jason
ProfQuotes

This seems to be assuming "Trusted Computing" is intended to benefit users.

The real reason it exists is precisely to take control away from the computer owner and give it to the content owner. Given that, what is the point of the EFF proposing "fixes" to help keep the computer owner in control, when its primary design goal is the exact opposite?

Jason
ProfQuotes

Time for a lot of That sounds like the Matrix jokes

Jason
ProfQuotes

Don't forget you'll only be able to use MS certified bread in the toaster.

Jason
ProfQuotes

That argument makes no sense though. The first amendment makes it illegal for the government to pass laws preventing telemarketers from existing at all, but it doesn't prevent people from refusing to hear the messages in a legally binding way.

The same arguement can be used to say the right to make harassing phone calls is protected free speech. In that case, all restraining orders are invalid because they violate the first amendment.

The do not call registry can be taken as a set of restraining orders that individuals apply for to make it illegal for telemarketers to contact them.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The CNN article about the recall says it's kept upright by a computer. I was trying to explain to a friend that that's BS and it's kept upright by the same principle as a bicycle. He just wouldn't believe it. Anyway, nice post.

Jason
ProfQuotes