Real diamonds can be pink too - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_color. In fact according to this article, pink is rare in natural diamonds and so it probably much more valuable (plus girls like pink.)
Indeed it is hard to determine exactly what year the album is from - the three or four sites that mention it in the first page of Google results all list different dates. But the point is that Guthrie stopped performing before that album was recorded (as far as we can tell from google results.)
I don't mean to call you a liar, I just respectfully don't think it's possible Guthrie is on that album based on the (albeit slight) evidence.
The reason I'm discussing this is because I enjoy Guthrie and The Weavers myself, and would have been interested in such a recording. I'm not really big into collecting bootlegs and rarities anymore, but that would have been something worth seeking out.
Both albums were recorded and released after Guthrie stopped performing, so I think you must be remembering incorrectly. It is possible and maybe even likely that Guthrie played with The Weavers, and though there are Weavers live recordings from as early as 1950-1951, he's obviously not on them if his own daughter and the researchers who worked on this restoration could not figure that out.
Also, while indeed the album you're referring to (The Weavers On Tour) is out of print, The Weavers Live at Carnegie Hall is available on CD: http://www.amazon.com/Weavers-at-Carnegie-Hall/dp/B000000EFX. There is a Guthrie-penned song on there, which might be the root of your mis-remembering.
People always mention that installing software in linux is easier, but for a lot of situations it isn't - especially if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for. As a disclaimer, I do like the ease of installing software in opensuse, and I agree with your points. But I also think in some ways the windows way is better.
In windows if you want to find software, you search in google for what you want to do and can usually find out pretty quickly what the popular choices are and what will work best for your purposes. Then you just download it directly from the site you read about it on - no need to try to find it in your package manager (where it might not even exist) which can be slow to browse.
In linux I have found it much harder to figure out what the best software for a particular task is, or to find software at all. You can search the web the same way to try to figure it out, but it's hit and miss. The worst is when you find the website of some software you think will be perfect, but then find that it's not in the repositories. So you download from the web site, often implying that you then have to figure out how to compile it yourself and all that. Then you find out that it's not at the point where it's usable for what you wanted.
With windows you can have the same problem - you download software and find out it doesn't work like you wanted. But it's much quicker to try several programs and remove the ones you don't want with windows. In linux, you read about software on a website, and then try to find it in the repository. If you don't like it, you go back into the package manager and find it again to uninstall it. It's not efficient - particularly in opensuse where the package manager is really slow. It is faster in other distributions I've tried, but not much better overall.
A solution for some of these problems could be to let the package managers read links from the developer's website. You click on the link, and it automatically opens the package manager and tells it exactly what packages to get, and it installs it for you. It also shouldn't bother updating the whole repository - you are not there to browse or search, just to install a package whose location is known from the link.
That basically describes the debian repository system, but too few developers seem to use it. Since a lot of software is in the other repositories already, they should all be able to work like that - just tell the package manager where to find it and in which repository.
All that said, when you browse through everything in the repositories just looking for cool stuff you can manage to find all kinds of things you would have never thought of. But the descriptions provided there are usually not enough to figure out exactly what it is - so you end up going to the program's website anyway.
If you're in the market for another one, I happen to have on hand a complete C64 with the TV monitor, the disk drive with disks (including some with games on them), the cassette drive with cassettes, joysticks, an adapter I made to connect the disk drive to a serial port, and some other stuff. All in the original boxes in excellent condition.
Now I am faced with the opposite problem as you - I want to be able to use ebay to sell this (and I do sell a fair amount of stuff on there every few months), but ebay is no longer the best place for this kind of thing.
I would love to be able to do that - the problem for me, unfortunately, is that my last name is Hacker. Pretty cool maybe, but though both hacker.com and hacker.net are both currently for sale, there's no way I'm paying for it - it's a bit different from paying $5 for grosskopf.com.
Some jerk took chrishacker.com years ago. If I use my middle initial, W, then it looks like I'm Chris Whacker.
By the way - while typing out your name I realized what it means (I know a bit of German) - that's a pretty cool last name. Does everyone in your family have big heads?
Stores haven't been having free after rebate stuff for at least a couple of years now. I miss that too. I always kept track of and got all my rebate checks.
Best thing I ever got at Comp USA - they had a midnight sale the day that Windows XP was first released, and I had no interest in Windows XP, but they had an Unreal Tournament collection that included the original Unreal, for free. No rebates, I just walked out with a free game, full-size box and everything. Other than that, I've not really been impressed with their store.
I like Newegg, but I don't like paying $5 shipping if all I need is one small cable. Rarely have the things they offer free shipping on been the things I actually need.
That's what local stores should be for, you can go and get some $2 cable and not have to wait to finish building/fixing your computer.
Of course there are no local stores that offer that... as a last resort I have purchased cables in the CompUSA in Rochester (Henrietta) myself and they charge so much it's ridiculous.
That said, if you need basic computer cables in the Rochester area fast, check out the RIT bookstore - they are subsidized for students and are really cheap. I am a student at the University of Rochester, not RIT, but I go to their store for stuff sometimes.
You're overly harsh on the low-end DSLRs - they are quite capable. The only one that has major things missing that the more expensive models have is maybe the Nikon D40. The original Digital Rebel had some limitations as well (some of which are improved by a firmware hack), but there are two newer models of that camera that are greatly improved. In any case, saying any of these cameras have "minimal functionality" is ridiculous. For 90-95% of uses, the lowest end DSLRs have all the functionality that the higher end models have. Most of the more expensive cameras use cropped sensors too (only in the past several years, as technology improves, have even the ones that cost several thousand dollars had full-frame sensors.) There's good reason for it, primarily cost-gain benefits. The quality of a cheap crop sensor is going to be much much better than a cheap full-frame sensor, at this point.
Additionally, the choice of lens makes more of an effect on the quality of the photograph than the body does, at least for general usage. Given comparable high quality lenses, the photographs taken with a low-end Rebel XT and a higher-end 40D or 5D will be indistinguishable in prints or on the web, again for general usage, particularly if the photographer knows what they're doing. Those with more expensive gear also tend to know what they're doing (usually), so their photos are generally better (usually).
That off topic argument aside, I think the whole comparison between the price of photoshop and a camera is ridiculous to begin with - even if your camera cost you a lot of money, $650 is... still a lot of money. For $650, you can get a VERY nice lens (or a helpful portion of one anyway) that could mean the difference between getting the shot or not, even with your brand new $2500 5D.
Also - when you upgrade, the potentially thousands of dollars you've spent on lenses were not wasted as you can use those with your new camera too.
I'm not sure how you can be a geek/nerd without liking Indiana Jones... nerds are not just into science fiction. The Indiana Jones series contains my favorite movies, trumping all of the nerdy science fiction that I also like, including Star Wars.
While Indiana Jones fans are not all nerds, a venn diagram would show circles that overlap quite heavily.
At the University of Rochester, where I am a student, these are on all doors a wheelchair-bound person might need to go through. Most of them actually work pretty well; they open quickly and are not too difficult to open manually. There are some bad ones, of course.
The real problem with these, though, is that since it is much easier to just press the button rather than manually open the door and hold it open for the person behind you, at least 80-90% of people hit the buttons every time. This means that on any given day at least 1/3 of the motors are not working because they are either broken or turned off. It would be pretty awful to try to go through the campus on a wheelchair when there aren't a lot of people around to help you out.
The funny thing, though, is that chivalry/common courtesy on this campus is hitting the button for the cute girl walking behind you rather than holding the door open for them.
OK, well this just shows that when referring to relatively obscure things like this, one must be specific and provide links or detailed information.
I knew of those marks as well but had no idea that's what was being referred to. You said they are black dots, while they are actually red/brown (as your wikipedia link explains). An easy mistake of course and I can't fault you, but that's where the confusion came from. What you said could just as well be referring to burn (cue) marks since you were so unspecific. The CAP dots aren't an the majority of prints, anyway, at least the ones that we end up with though I see them occasionally.
In large theaters today, the reels of film (~18-20 minutes each) are spliced together into one huge reel, and the whole thing is run through one projector. This involves an expensive "platter" system, and considerable time to assemble the film onto the platter to play and then to disassemble later.
In small theaters that play films for one or only a few nights (such as the on-campus theater here at the University of Rochester), to save the time of assembling and disassembling the film there are two projectors, and at the end of each reel there is a seamless transition to the other projector starting up the next reel. This is also how it was done in all theaters in the old days; I'm not sure when platter systems were invented but it was within the last couple decades I'd guess.
How is this seamless transition between two projectors achieved, considering that the length of each reel is often variable? The projectionist knows when to hit the button because there is a burn mark in the top right corner 5 seconds (or whatever) before the end of the reel.
It has nothing to do with watermarking and identifying theaters.
I am on the exec board of the University of Rochester Cinema Group. It's a surprise to most students who see films here that there are sometimes rough transitions between reels (because our projectors are ridiculously old and the student projectionists sometimes make mistakes), because no one these days realizes movies come on more than one reel because we're used to getting an entire film on one VHS tape, DVD disc, or Divx file or whatever. So I understand why some would think this was some sort of crazy thing the MPAA is doing to track theaters, but it's nothing of the sort. They are not different from copy to copy.
Sorry to have to tell you that this MPAA conspiracy you were so sure about isn't true. The burn marks are one of those things that for years you don't notice, and then one day you do, and then you always notice them after that. If you only recently started noticing them, that's why.
By the way, some films come to us without burn marks because the distributor didn't intend it to get distributed to smaller theaters with two projectors, and I guess they didn't want the unnecessary distraction for single-projector theaters. In these cases, the projectionists make their own burn marks with a marker.
I am from Buffalo, NY, which is right at the border with Canada, so this affects me as I go across the border somewhat frequently. Starting next year you "may" be required to have a passport to drive into the US from Canada. Currently, a driver's license is sufficient but they put you under much more scrutiny and it takes longer to get through the border check than it used to.
For as long as I remember (long before 2001), there has been this common myth around Buffalo that you need your birth certificate and SS card when you cross the border, but I've never ever seen anyone get asked for anything beyond a driver's license. For children, you don't even need ID.
Since I have a passport anyway I have just been using that since they started tightening the border after 2001, but those traveling with me who don't have passports have had no trouble, even a friend whose primary id recently was a resident alien green card.
On a related note, while they have certainly tightened it a bit, the level of security is really not much different than before 2001. It is lax enough that I'm sure plenty of illegal things get through. I know for certain that I could smuggle things across if I were so inclined.
I personally find that silly because technically it isn't necessary anymore to accept that loss.
This is the important point - dr. badass is trying to make a point about how losing quality is no longer acceptable yet everyone was fine with it for years, and while true, there's no point to be made beyond a statement of fact. It's no longer acceptable because it's no longer necessary, and with the coming of the internet and places like HydrogenAudio showing up in google searches more and more "regular" people are becoming aware of audio fidelity issues.
The only reason people accepted low fidelity recordings, as in cd, vinyl, or radio to cassette, or even cassette to cassette, is out of ignorance that there was anything better. Listening on the built-in speakers on your boombox or the cheap headphones that came with your walkman or the stock car radio or whatever, the difference wasn't even noticeable unless it was a really bad copy. True high fidelity affordable to regular people is a new concept.
Now, many are willing to part with hundreds of dollars for mp3 players, all of which are capable of excellent sound quality. Then they read reviews on amazon saying the included earbuds are crap and that they should buy something better, and they do. Then maybe they start to notice that the 128kbps or less mp3s they downloaded from Napster back in the day don't sound as good as the ones they ripped off of a cd themselves recently.
The point is many "regular" consumers these days are much more educated on technical matters than even ten years ago, and this is not a bad thing - it's called progress. It brings the price down for high-quality products so those of us who really appreciate the latest and greatest technologies can actually afford it too.
With this knowledge comes the realization that the old, easy ways of getting music, like copying to a cassette or burning and re-ripping your itunes, equal inferior sound quality that is finally noticeable with the most common music-listening device of the day, which is now ipods and mp3 players, with excellent headphones costing less than $100 or even $50. This drives people to want to be able to listen to what they want without having to sacrifice quality to get around DRM or whatever the problem is, because a drop in sound quality is noticeable and distracting.
That said, the vast majority of people are still fine with lossy copy methods, and most would probably be perfectly happy with cassettes if they weren't deemed un-cool these days. With the ripping, burning, and re-ripping of cds that happens in some groups, the quality can get as bad or worse than cassettes. Heck, a lot of people probably don't own any music themselves except maybe a couple of top 40 cds they got as a gift or something, and listen to everything on their radio with built-in low-fidelity speakers.
Getting Myspace to take down a fake profile isn't actually easy - a couple months ago my girlfriend found a fake myspace profile of herself complete with pictures taken from the angelfire site she made in 8th grade or so (7 or 8 years ago that is). I presume it was created by my ex-girlfriend or one of her cronies. They have a form specifically for this problem and it requires that you submit a picture of yourself holding a sign with your myspace ID number (if you don't have a myspace profile already, I guess you would just make one rather than trying to fight it some other way). This seems like a good way to verify your identity, and it shouldn't take much time for someone to look at the picture and take down the fake profile. She is clearly identifiable in the pictures taken from the old website and in the one we submitted with the removal request.
However, we never heard back from them and the fake profile is still there. I guess we have to try again. In the principal's case, considering what he did do, it seems likely enough that he DID ask to have it removed, but got no response and no action was taken. After a couple of weeks and repeated requests that went unanswered, he then decided to do what he did. Pure conjecture, but entirely possible based on my experience. Also, I didn't read the article so I don't know if it has details about exactly how it went.
Myspace is often too popular for its own good; every time you visit, no matter what time of day, some part of it breaks and doesn't work. It is always slow. They obviously need to work faster than they are to step up the site's capacity and probably hire more people. If they don't already have them, they probably need employees whose sole job is to investigate abuses like this and take care of them quickly. I'm sure they do their best to take care of these things, but I'm also sure they get a lot of these requests that take a good amount of time to investigate fairly.
While waiting for someone at myspace to hear your case, one or two weeks of false and demeaning words can be torturous for people who already have low self-esteem and have trouble making friends (like this principal?) When nothing happens as a result, it'd be even worse.
Thanks for the clarification - I still would say you're doing something wrong, though, because if you were setting the aperture with the lens ring on an older camera, then you weren't using P mode. P mode on older cameras works exactly the same way (on the A-1 anyway).
It does seem that there isn't a good way to have what you want with the newer system - to have each lens be set at one stop from max by default. That is an interesting (if uncommon) way of doing things, and it does make sense. I think, though, that if you use Av mode you can get the results you desire, though you have to get used to the change. Try it! You'll like it, and wish that you always had been using it with the XT.
I have the Rebel XT as well, and it remembers what f-stop I leave it at when powered off.
In fact, it saves whatever settings you last set for each mode separately (M, Av, and Tv). I just checked, and my camera still had the settings I used in manual mode last week. I have used it several times since then in Av mode, which is what I usually use, and I've changed lenses often.
You're doing something wrong, or perhaps there is a setting you can change (though I don't think there is).
I do wish there were separate controls for aperture and shutter speed, but controlling them both with the single dial is not difficult once you get used to it, and I usually shoot in Av mode anyway so it doesn't matter too much.
Overall I find it easier to use than having the aperture on the lens, as with my Canon A-1 from 1978. I love that camera over the XT for many other reasons, but it does not beat it in pure usability despite not having as many knobs, levers, and switches (I do love knobs and levers, I'm not going to lie).
Having an aperture ring on the lens is not the ideal solution. The XT implementation is far from ideal as well (and it is the same for most other digital SLRs). A knob on the top would probably be best, and many older cameras have that.
I started using Amarok to do this recently, but I've found that indexing only 40-50 Gb of my collection it chokes up my computer for ten minutes or more. It has completely frozen my computer several times doing this as well. Not just the first time, either, but obviously whenever it needs to re-build the database. It unnecessarily does this if you add an additional folder to the database, which is annoying. It recursively scans your folders if you want it to, and it adds things to the database quickly that way, so why does it have to rebuild the entire database if you add a folder?
Some annoying problems often occur when transferring music to my mp3 player (jetaudio X5L), which it does in a customizable and convenient way so I would like to keep doing it in the future. For now, though, I've gone back to just copying files from konquerer directly. Sometimes Amarok doesn't name the files correctly and album tracks end up out of order on the player, sometimes it claims to have transferred files but they are nowhere to be seen when I'm out somewhere and really want to listen to that new music I thought I just put on the player, and things like that.
Your mileage may vary of course. It's a great program, and I highly recommend it over anything else that I've tried. It's very possible that it's just my particular setup that causes problems with it, considering that the other comments indicate that it works well with much more data than I am using it with.
Of course you're asking about Mac software specifically; maybe this wasn't the best place to do that.
You must have a unique mutation that allows your two ears to only hear things coming from straight in front of you, and I pity you for it.
I personally have two ears as well, as I'm guessing most here do, and yet I can hear things coming from all directions and can easily distinguish which way a sound is coming from.
Your hearing is 2-channel stereo, yes, but your microphones ("ears") are not omni-directional.
My guess is you've never actually listened to a properly configured surround sound system, which is not too hard to believe since movie theaters are usually set up in a way that you don't get good directional audio (which doesn't make sense, but that's how they're built for some reason) and those silly displays at Best Buy or Circuit City with the speakers hanging from above you are set up in a way that you don't hear the rear channels there either.
I don't think that this guy is actually claiming they don't censor anything. He's specifically talking about the BBC, and I think what he's actually saying is that there are no restrictions on any BBC content. He can't say that outright without admitting that there are restrictions on other content, so he chose his words carefully to be somewhat ambiguous.
He's very good at evading an answer, and so we are going to draw our own conclusions about what he meant due to his ambiguity. That's his intention, I guess. Obviously they do censor the internet, and his cover-up comment about having trouble accessing some sites admits it (not counting the fact that there very well could be network infrastructure issues in less-developed parts of the country.)
Of course, many people report that the BBC site is in fact blocked (at least in central China), so maybe he's lying about that. Without a lot of people reporting if it is blocked and where they live (perhaps it is not blocked from the major modern cities in China, only in less-developed areas), though, it's only fair to give him some benefit of the doubt. A snaky government pawn, maybe, but let's not call him a liar for claims he didn't actually make.
Call him snaky and slimy for telling half-truths and being good at manipulating words, fine. I support that, and I wholly support the irrefutable truth that there is plenty of censorship in China.
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Real diamonds can be pink too - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_color. In fact according to this article, pink is rare in natural diamonds and so it probably much more valuable (plus girls like pink.)
Indeed it is hard to determine exactly what year the album is from - the three or four sites that mention it in the first page of Google results all list different dates. But the point is that Guthrie stopped performing before that album was recorded (as far as we can tell from google results.)
I don't mean to call you a liar, I just respectfully don't think it's possible Guthrie is on that album based on the (albeit slight) evidence.
The reason I'm discussing this is because I enjoy Guthrie and The Weavers myself, and would have been interested in such a recording. I'm not really big into collecting bootlegs and rarities anymore, but that would have been something worth seeking out.
Both albums were recorded and released after Guthrie stopped performing, so I think you must be remembering incorrectly. It is possible and maybe even likely that Guthrie played with The Weavers, and though there are Weavers live recordings from as early as 1950-1951, he's obviously not on them if his own daughter and the researchers who worked on this restoration could not figure that out.
Sources:
http://www.amrhome.net/contents/sepdsc.txt "The Weavers on Tour (1956-58)" "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (December, 1955)"
Guthrie stopped performing sometime before 1954 according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie#Deteriorating_health
Also, while indeed the album you're referring to (The Weavers On Tour) is out of print, The Weavers Live at Carnegie Hall is available on CD: http://www.amazon.com/Weavers-at-Carnegie-Hall/dp/B000000EFX. There is a Guthrie-penned song on there, which might be the root of your mis-remembering.
People always mention that installing software in linux is easier, but for a lot of situations it isn't - especially if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for. As a disclaimer, I do like the ease of installing software in opensuse, and I agree with your points. But I also think in some ways the windows way is better.
In windows if you want to find software, you search in google for what you want to do and can usually find out pretty quickly what the popular choices are and what will work best for your purposes. Then you just download it directly from the site you read about it on - no need to try to find it in your package manager (where it might not even exist) which can be slow to browse.
In linux I have found it much harder to figure out what the best software for a particular task is, or to find software at all. You can search the web the same way to try to figure it out, but it's hit and miss. The worst is when you find the website of some software you think will be perfect, but then find that it's not in the repositories. So you download from the web site, often implying that you then have to figure out how to compile it yourself and all that. Then you find out that it's not at the point where it's usable for what you wanted.
With windows you can have the same problem - you download software and find out it doesn't work like you wanted. But it's much quicker to try several programs and remove the ones you don't want with windows. In linux, you read about software on a website, and then try to find it in the repository. If you don't like it, you go back into the package manager and find it again to uninstall it. It's not efficient - particularly in opensuse where the package manager is really slow. It is faster in other distributions I've tried, but not much better overall.
A solution for some of these problems could be to let the package managers read links from the developer's website. You click on the link, and it automatically opens the package manager and tells it exactly what packages to get, and it installs it for you. It also shouldn't bother updating the whole repository - you are not there to browse or search, just to install a package whose location is known from the link.
That basically describes the debian repository system, but too few developers seem to use it. Since a lot of software is in the other repositories already, they should all be able to work like that - just tell the package manager where to find it and in which repository.
All that said, when you browse through everything in the repositories just looking for cool stuff you can manage to find all kinds of things you would have never thought of. But the descriptions provided there are usually not enough to figure out exactly what it is - so you end up going to the program's website anyway.
If you're in the market for another one, I happen to have on hand a complete C64 with the TV monitor, the disk drive with disks (including some with games on them), the cassette drive with cassettes, joysticks, an adapter I made to connect the disk drive to a serial port, and some other stuff. All in the original boxes in excellent condition.
Now I am faced with the opposite problem as you - I want to be able to use ebay to sell this (and I do sell a fair amount of stuff on there every few months), but ebay is no longer the best place for this kind of thing.
Point taken - I will now be more sensitive to Whackers.
Truthfully, I do sometimes use the W in the hopes of inciting a whacker comment. Only got it once or twice though.
I figured you must have gotten comments on your name more than a few times - that is a great response though, definitely made me smile.
I would love to be able to do that - the problem for me, unfortunately, is that my last name is Hacker. Pretty cool maybe, but though both hacker.com and hacker.net are both currently for sale, there's no way I'm paying for it - it's a bit different from paying $5 for grosskopf.com.
Some jerk took chrishacker.com years ago. If I use my middle initial, W, then it looks like I'm Chris Whacker.
By the way - while typing out your name I realized what it means (I know a bit of German) - that's a pretty cool last name. Does everyone in your family have big heads?
Stores haven't been having free after rebate stuff for at least a couple of years now. I miss that too. I always kept track of and got all my rebate checks.
Best thing I ever got at Comp USA - they had a midnight sale the day that Windows XP was first released, and I had no interest in Windows XP, but they had an Unreal Tournament collection that included the original Unreal, for free. No rebates, I just walked out with a free game, full-size box and everything. Other than that, I've not really been impressed with their store.
I like Newegg, but I don't like paying $5 shipping if all I need is one small cable. Rarely have the things they offer free shipping on been the things I actually need.
That's what local stores should be for, you can go and get some $2 cable and not have to wait to finish building/fixing your computer.
Of course there are no local stores that offer that... as a last resort I have purchased cables in the CompUSA in Rochester (Henrietta) myself and they charge so much it's ridiculous.
That said, if you need basic computer cables in the Rochester area fast, check out the RIT bookstore - they are subsidized for students and are really cheap. I am a student at the University of Rochester, not RIT, but I go to their store for stuff sometimes.
One of the pictures it gave me had a cat AND a dog, and I failed because I counted it as a cat.
You're overly harsh on the low-end DSLRs - they are quite capable. The only one that has major things missing that the more expensive models have is maybe the Nikon D40. The original Digital Rebel had some limitations as well (some of which are improved by a firmware hack), but there are two newer models of that camera that are greatly improved. In any case, saying any of these cameras have "minimal functionality" is ridiculous. For 90-95% of uses, the lowest end DSLRs have all the functionality that the higher end models have. Most of the more expensive cameras use cropped sensors too (only in the past several years, as technology improves, have even the ones that cost several thousand dollars had full-frame sensors.) There's good reason for it, primarily cost-gain benefits. The quality of a cheap crop sensor is going to be much much better than a cheap full-frame sensor, at this point.
Additionally, the choice of lens makes more of an effect on the quality of the photograph than the body does, at least for general usage. Given comparable high quality lenses, the photographs taken with a low-end Rebel XT and a higher-end 40D or 5D will be indistinguishable in prints or on the web, again for general usage, particularly if the photographer knows what they're doing. Those with more expensive gear also tend to know what they're doing (usually), so their photos are generally better (usually).
That off topic argument aside, I think the whole comparison between the price of photoshop and a camera is ridiculous to begin with - even if your camera cost you a lot of money, $650 is... still a lot of money. For $650, you can get a VERY nice lens (or a helpful portion of one anyway) that could mean the difference between getting the shot or not, even with your brand new $2500 5D.
Also - when you upgrade, the potentially thousands of dollars you've spent on lenses were not wasted as you can use those with your new camera too.
I'm not sure how you can be a geek/nerd without liking Indiana Jones... nerds are not just into science fiction. The Indiana Jones series contains my favorite movies, trumping all of the nerdy science fiction that I also like, including Star Wars. While Indiana Jones fans are not all nerds, a venn diagram would show circles that overlap quite heavily.
At the University of Rochester, where I am a student, these are on all doors a wheelchair-bound person might need to go through. Most of them actually work pretty well; they open quickly and are not too difficult to open manually. There are some bad ones, of course.
The real problem with these, though, is that since it is much easier to just press the button rather than manually open the door and hold it open for the person behind you, at least 80-90% of people hit the buttons every time. This means that on any given day at least 1/3 of the motors are not working because they are either broken or turned off. It would be pretty awful to try to go through the campus on a wheelchair when there aren't a lot of people around to help you out.
The funny thing, though, is that chivalry/common courtesy on this campus is hitting the button for the cute girl walking behind you rather than holding the door open for them.
OK, well this just shows that when referring to relatively obscure things like this, one must be specific and provide links or detailed information.
I knew of those marks as well but had no idea that's what was being referred to. You said they are black dots, while they are actually red/brown (as your wikipedia link explains). An easy mistake of course and I can't fault you, but that's where the confusion came from. What you said could just as well be referring to burn (cue) marks since you were so unspecific. The CAP dots aren't an the majority of prints, anyway, at least the ones that we end up with though I see them occasionally.
I was a bit "dickish" myself, by the way.
In large theaters today, the reels of film (~18-20 minutes each) are spliced together into one huge reel, and the whole thing is run through one projector. This involves an expensive "platter" system, and considerable time to assemble the film onto the platter to play and then to disassemble later.
In small theaters that play films for one or only a few nights (such as the on-campus theater here at the University of Rochester), to save the time of assembling and disassembling the film there are two projectors, and at the end of each reel there is a seamless transition to the other projector starting up the next reel. This is also how it was done in all theaters in the old days; I'm not sure when platter systems were invented but it was within the last couple decades I'd guess.
How is this seamless transition between two projectors achieved, considering that the length of each reel is often variable? The projectionist knows when to hit the button because there is a burn mark in the top right corner 5 seconds (or whatever) before the end of the reel.
It has nothing to do with watermarking and identifying theaters.
I am on the exec board of the University of Rochester Cinema Group. It's a surprise to most students who see films here that there are sometimes rough transitions between reels (because our projectors are ridiculously old and the student projectionists sometimes make mistakes), because no one these days realizes movies come on more than one reel because we're used to getting an entire film on one VHS tape, DVD disc, or Divx file or whatever. So I understand why some would think this was some sort of crazy thing the MPAA is doing to track theaters, but it's nothing of the sort. They are not different from copy to copy.
Sorry to have to tell you that this MPAA conspiracy you were so sure about isn't true. The burn marks are one of those things that for years you don't notice, and then one day you do, and then you always notice them after that. If you only recently started noticing them, that's why.
By the way, some films come to us without burn marks because the distributor didn't intend it to get distributed to smaller theaters with two projectors, and I guess they didn't want the unnecessary distraction for single-projector theaters. In these cases, the projectionists make their own burn marks with a marker.
I am from Buffalo, NY, which is right at the border with Canada, so this affects me as I go across the border somewhat frequently. Starting next year you "may" be required to have a passport to drive into the US from Canada. Currently, a driver's license is sufficient but they put you under much more scrutiny and it takes longer to get through the border check than it used to.
For as long as I remember (long before 2001), there has been this common myth around Buffalo that you need your birth certificate and SS card when you cross the border, but I've never ever seen anyone get asked for anything beyond a driver's license. For children, you don't even need ID.
Since I have a passport anyway I have just been using that since they started tightening the border after 2001, but those traveling with me who don't have passports have had no trouble, even a friend whose primary id recently was a resident alien green card.
On a related note, while they have certainly tightened it a bit, the level of security is really not much different than before 2001. It is lax enough that I'm sure plenty of illegal things get through. I know for certain that I could smuggle things across if I were so inclined.
This is the important point - dr. badass is trying to make a point about how losing quality is no longer acceptable yet everyone was fine with it for years, and while true, there's no point to be made beyond a statement of fact. It's no longer acceptable because it's no longer necessary, and with the coming of the internet and places like HydrogenAudio showing up in google searches more and more "regular" people are becoming aware of audio fidelity issues.
The only reason people accepted low fidelity recordings, as in cd, vinyl, or radio to cassette, or even cassette to cassette, is out of ignorance that there was anything better. Listening on the built-in speakers on your boombox or the cheap headphones that came with your walkman or the stock car radio or whatever, the difference wasn't even noticeable unless it was a really bad copy. True high fidelity affordable to regular people is a new concept.
Now, many are willing to part with hundreds of dollars for mp3 players, all of which are capable of excellent sound quality. Then they read reviews on amazon saying the included earbuds are crap and that they should buy something better, and they do. Then maybe they start to notice that the 128kbps or less mp3s they downloaded from Napster back in the day don't sound as good as the ones they ripped off of a cd themselves recently.
The point is many "regular" consumers these days are much more educated on technical matters than even ten years ago, and this is not a bad thing - it's called progress. It brings the price down for high-quality products so those of us who really appreciate the latest and greatest technologies can actually afford it too.
With this knowledge comes the realization that the old, easy ways of getting music, like copying to a cassette or burning and re-ripping your itunes, equal inferior sound quality that is finally noticeable with the most common music-listening device of the day, which is now ipods and mp3 players, with excellent headphones costing less than $100 or even $50. This drives people to want to be able to listen to what they want without having to sacrifice quality to get around DRM or whatever the problem is, because a drop in sound quality is noticeable and distracting.
That said, the vast majority of people are still fine with lossy copy methods, and most would probably be perfectly happy with cassettes if they weren't deemed un-cool these days. With the ripping, burning, and re-ripping of cds that happens in some groups, the quality can get as bad or worse than cassettes. Heck, a lot of people probably don't own any music themselves except maybe a couple of top 40 cds they got as a gift or something, and listen to everything on their radio with built-in low-fidelity speakers.
Getting Myspace to take down a fake profile isn't actually easy - a couple months ago my girlfriend found a fake myspace profile of herself complete with pictures taken from the angelfire site she made in 8th grade or so (7 or 8 years ago that is). I presume it was created by my ex-girlfriend or one of her cronies. They have a form specifically for this problem and it requires that you submit a picture of yourself holding a sign with your myspace ID number (if you don't have a myspace profile already, I guess you would just make one rather than trying to fight it some other way). This seems like a good way to verify your identity, and it shouldn't take much time for someone to look at the picture and take down the fake profile. She is clearly identifiable in the pictures taken from the old website and in the one we submitted with the removal request.
However, we never heard back from them and the fake profile is still there. I guess we have to try again. In the principal's case, considering what he did do, it seems likely enough that he DID ask to have it removed, but got no response and no action was taken. After a couple of weeks and repeated requests that went unanswered, he then decided to do what he did. Pure conjecture, but entirely possible based on my experience. Also, I didn't read the article so I don't know if it has details about exactly how it went.
Myspace is often too popular for its own good; every time you visit, no matter what time of day, some part of it breaks and doesn't work. It is always slow. They obviously need to work faster than they are to step up the site's capacity and probably hire more people. If they don't already have them, they probably need employees whose sole job is to investigate abuses like this and take care of them quickly. I'm sure they do their best to take care of these things, but I'm also sure they get a lot of these requests that take a good amount of time to investigate fairly.
While waiting for someone at myspace to hear your case, one or two weeks of false and demeaning words can be torturous for people who already have low self-esteem and have trouble making friends (like this principal?) When nothing happens as a result, it'd be even worse.
Thanks for the clarification - I still would say you're doing something wrong, though, because if you were setting the aperture with the lens ring on an older camera, then you weren't using P mode. P mode on older cameras works exactly the same way (on the A-1 anyway).
It does seem that there isn't a good way to have what you want with the newer system - to have each lens be set at one stop from max by default. That is an interesting (if uncommon) way of doing things, and it does make sense. I think, though, that if you use Av mode you can get the results you desire, though you have to get used to the change. Try it! You'll like it, and wish that you always had been using it with the XT.
We're getting pretty far off-topic now, though.
I have the Rebel XT as well, and it remembers what f-stop I leave it at when powered off.
In fact, it saves whatever settings you last set for each mode separately (M, Av, and Tv). I just checked, and my camera still had the settings I used in manual mode last week. I have used it several times since then in Av mode, which is what I usually use, and I've changed lenses often.
You're doing something wrong, or perhaps there is a setting you can change (though I don't think there is).
I do wish there were separate controls for aperture and shutter speed, but controlling them both with the single dial is not difficult once you get used to it, and I usually shoot in Av mode anyway so it doesn't matter too much.
Overall I find it easier to use than having the aperture on the lens, as with my Canon A-1 from 1978. I love that camera over the XT for many other reasons, but it does not beat it in pure usability despite not having as many knobs, levers, and switches (I do love knobs and levers, I'm not going to lie).
Having an aperture ring on the lens is not the ideal solution. The XT implementation is far from ideal as well (and it is the same for most other digital SLRs). A knob on the top would probably be best, and many older cameras have that.
I started using Amarok to do this recently, but I've found that indexing only 40-50 Gb of my collection it chokes up my computer for ten minutes or more. It has completely frozen my computer several times doing this as well. Not just the first time, either, but obviously whenever it needs to re-build the database. It unnecessarily does this if you add an additional folder to the database, which is annoying. It recursively scans your folders if you want it to, and it adds things to the database quickly that way, so why does it have to rebuild the entire database if you add a folder?
Some annoying problems often occur when transferring music to my mp3 player (jetaudio X5L), which it does in a customizable and convenient way so I would like to keep doing it in the future. For now, though, I've gone back to just copying files from konquerer directly. Sometimes Amarok doesn't name the files correctly and album tracks end up out of order on the player, sometimes it claims to have transferred files but they are nowhere to be seen when I'm out somewhere and really want to listen to that new music I thought I just put on the player, and things like that.
Your mileage may vary of course. It's a great program, and I highly recommend it over anything else that I've tried. It's very possible that it's just my particular setup that causes problems with it, considering that the other comments indicate that it works well with much more data than I am using it with.
Of course you're asking about Mac software specifically; maybe this wasn't the best place to do that.
You must have a unique mutation that allows your two ears to only hear things coming from straight in front of you, and I pity you for it.
I personally have two ears as well, as I'm guessing most here do, and yet I can hear things coming from all directions and can easily distinguish which way a sound is coming from.
Your hearing is 2-channel stereo, yes, but your microphones ("ears") are not omni-directional.
My guess is you've never actually listened to a properly configured surround sound system, which is not too hard to believe since movie theaters are usually set up in a way that you don't get good directional audio (which doesn't make sense, but that's how they're built for some reason) and those silly displays at Best Buy or Circuit City with the speakers hanging from above you are set up in a way that you don't hear the rear channels there either.
I don't think that this guy is actually claiming they don't censor anything. He's specifically talking about the BBC, and I think what he's actually saying is that there are no restrictions on any BBC content. He can't say that outright without admitting that there are restrictions on other content, so he chose his words carefully to be somewhat ambiguous.
He's very good at evading an answer, and so we are going to draw our own conclusions about what he meant due to his ambiguity. That's his intention, I guess. Obviously they do censor the internet, and his cover-up comment about having trouble accessing some sites admits it (not counting the fact that there very well could be network infrastructure issues in less-developed parts of the country.)
Of course, many people report that the BBC site is in fact blocked (at least in central China), so maybe he's lying about that.
Without a lot of people reporting if it is blocked and where they live (perhaps it is not blocked from the major modern cities in China, only in less-developed areas), though, it's only fair to give him some benefit of the doubt. A snaky government pawn, maybe, but let's not call him a liar for claims he didn't actually make.
Call him snaky and slimy for telling half-truths and being good at manipulating words, fine. I support that, and I wholly support the irrefutable truth that there is plenty of censorship in China.