I'm another one who thinks Gandhi was a great guy, drinks lattes, despises Bush, drives a small fuel-efficient car, voted for Obama, uses Apple products... and is a veteran.
I don't mean to insult or trivialize your service to your country, but the image of 'the soldier' I always see is a very Conservative, right-wing man. even documentaries like 'the war tapes' that were filmed by by the soldiers themselves portray soldiers as right-wingers.
Were your political view very much an exception to the norm? was it a much more even mix than the media portrays? or is politics something soldiers just don't talk about.
on topic: as much as I make myself out to be an apple hater, the ipod touch and iphone are both very well-built, well-designed products. if they can save resources or more importantly, lives, it is a great investment. I imagine having a standardized interface for many different kinds of equipment would also be a great advantage for training.
because the 99% of artists who don't manage to sell enough to make a living would now be on equal footing with the 1% who have major advertising dollars behind them. throw on a Slashdot style moderation system to bury the crap and promote the gems, and you've got a viable system for promoting your ideas.
your failure to monetize content in a digital marketplace is not my problem. if media can be copied perfectly, and for free, no artificial limitations will be successful. content creators will be forced to make money on things that are not infinitely reproducible.
record sales are crashing, yet i can still go to nearly any bar and see a local band play. TV ratings are down, I can still go on youtube and find some great content (ted talks come to mind)
So its back to the CD days. You couldn't really listen to the music and were forced to buy the cd so now instead of being able to download, listen and then reject all the crap people are now forced to download/buy crap.
It's not my intention to troll, but this is a little sensationalist. Many bands will allow you to listen to their entire album before purchase via free streaming. It's inconvenient, the quality ranges from poor to mediocre, but it does address the 'try before you buy' concern. Saying that we are now forced to buy our music before listening to it is false.
Usually, Koreans can only pronounce an 'R' if it comes at the beginning of a syllable.
eg. they can say "rock" just fine, but 'hear' usually comes out like 'heal', so when Koreans use English words ending in an 'er' sound, it is usually replaced with an 'aw' sound. eg. 'com-pu-taw' 'key-baw-d'
and that $35 fee is exactly why artists don't register their images. on average, only about 1% of artists actually make a living on their art. the rest break even, or make art at a loss. (and no, those people who paint as a hobby are not included in this 99%. I'm talking about working artists, who spend 50+ hours a week making art)
Financially, I believe I am doing better off that most artists my age.
supplies cost me $2000 a year. frames cost about $5000 a year, since I make them myself. they are much more if I were to have them made by a shop.
I make about 150 images per year. at $35 each, that would be over $5200 per year!
I maybe sell 6-8 images per year, for about $1000 each.
so, as it is, I am just breaking even. if I had to spend $5200 registering each image, I would be in the red. Artists simply can not afford to register each image.
I am fortunate that I am primarily a painter, it is easy for me to prove ownership of an image when I hold the original painting, but to protect my photography, I keep it off line, and limit any uploads to extremely low-rez versions.
Heh, we'll let anyone speak English, any way they want. Make up new words, take words from other languages, whatever.
Maybe that is one reason why English is "winning".
I'm not able to come up with a car analogy to add to your post, I hope this will suffice:
English seems to follow a Wikipedia format, where anyone can contribute anything, and thanks to it's flexibility and openness, it grows and adapts at an astonishing pace.
French is more like a traditional Encyclopedia. All the prestige associated with it belongs to the past, and by the time a select few get around to updating it, those changes are already irrelevant.
If the French language is so great, why does it need protection?
because English people are physically incapable of chain smoking, drinking wine, being obnoxiously rude and highly insecure of their culture, all at the same time.
am i missing something, or is the answer to this 'crisis' painfully obvious to everyone?
stop making these huge, expensive games. go back to making small, experimental fun games.
it seems so simple.
every game should be a new experience, or at least bring something new to the table. adding a few more polygons, and some better shading algorithms does not make a game more fun.
...A few feet of water and a few degrees and perhaps some rain pattern changes *worst case*. How the hell is that going to even get close to end of the world bunk?
if you happen to live on one of those low areas, you will be flooded out and lose your home. if you live on one of those areas that will see a massive increase in storm activity, you could lose your home. if your food is grown in areas that become deserts, you will lose your food. tropical diseases will move into temperate areas, and you will have to fend off new illnesses to which you have no immunities.
and, if none of these hardships happen to you directly, you will have to deal with a few hundred million people who have lost their homeland and have to move into yours.
I really don't care about an extra 2-3 years of nursing home hell where I'm fed through a tube and can't remember my own name...What I do care about is QUALITY of life. I bet the last few years those people who live in a more polutted place spend are not happy healthy years. Show me stats on the last 10 years of life and how sick people were.
but clean air isn't giving you 2-3 extra years in a nursing home. With better air quality, you should stay healthier longer, and will be moving in to that nursing home 2-3 years later.
so the big question becomes: Is Shell an oil company, or an energy company?
while oil is currently very cheep, it's supply is limited to hundreds of years. Renewable energy is expensive now, but it will not run out for a very long time. (billions of years)
to use a car analogy, Shell has gotten off the future express way and is driving down a dead end street. it may be a very long road, but it will come to an end.
I apologize for coming off as condescending, It was not my intention to imply that you were an unskilled photographer needing features like this. I meant the unspecified third person type of 'you'.
From my experience as a semi-professional photographer, (weddings and rock shows) and a general user of many different point and shoot models, I have noticed that point and shoots seem to focus more on software-based gimmicky features that make it easy to take quick snapshots, and the occasional 'artsy thing' like autostitch, emphasizing certain colours, face tracking, etc. you have to fight your way through menus of useless features to get what you want. While a good DSLR just gets out of my way and lets me focus on taking photos, without thinking about the camera.
I have not yet used a D3x, and I didn't notice that feature on a D700 the few times I have used one. I will have to look for it next time. But, you stated that this feature doesn't really work, so they may advertise that it, but that doesn't mean they've actually got it.
As for making my own lenses, yes, actually, I DO make my own. (well, sort of...a friend of mine grinds the lenses for me), I just build the lens case, usually a simple tilt-shift sort of lens out of flexible tubing or something I find laying around. I like the low-fi look in my images.
my newest point-and-shoot is a canon SD1100 (mainly so I can mess around with CDHK) and after looking through the 225 page manual, I have made 1 page of notes that are actually worth while. the vast majority of these features are completely useless.
I agree with you fully on your final paragraph. 90% of the features are just brochure padding, something to advertise, rather than actually be useful. It would be very useful, IF it worked. but it would have to work faster than manual focus, and that is something I have not yet experienced.
yes, building a board to program a picaxe chip requires little more than a 7805 and a single 2.2K resistor.
it runs a lot slower than a conventional pic chip, (but how often do you really need full speed for a microcontroller?) Best of all, you can write your code entirely in BASIC, no need for messy assembly. (my sig should make it clear why this is a plus for me)
and, if you do need the extra speed, and you are all out of pic chips, you can put a picaxe chip in a standard pic programmer, and it will over-write everything (permanently).
I don't do too much electronics work these days, so simple is good. for the micro-controller stuff i do, the picaxe system is the best I've come across. I got rid of all my basic-stamp stuff after finding this system.
note: i do NOT work for picaxe, or any company that deals with them, i am just a very satisfied customer who has used this system for 3 years.
...I recently acquired a professional-grade digital SLR and was astonished to find that the "3d matrix motion sensitive autofocus tracking" or whatever it's called, wouldn't accurately track a dog chasing a ball.
it's called 'manual focus' and in the right hands, it is much faster than any auto-focus system out there.
I admit, your system of tracking a subject in motion would be very useful, but the DSLR market is geared towards professionals who are expected to know how to use manual controls. tracking objects in motion to establish focus is more likely a feature for the point and shoot market, where the user is assumed to be unskilled, needing software to hold their hand and do all the hard work.
Imagine, if you will, Linux and Gnome in its current form had hit the marketplace, and become widely available, before MS Windows 3.1 had emerged.
The opportunity for success, before the Windows hegemony had been firmly in place, would have been much wider.
yes, i can imagine it now....trying to boot a current release of a linux live CD on my 386.
wait....where can i put this CD? i dont have a CD-rom. I'd better use the USB thingy instead...no...damn!
I'm sorry, but i really can't imagine that linux and gnome in it's current form would stand any chance against windows 3.1. it wouldn't load on anything.
for every Metallica that you hear on the radio, there are 100 other bands out there who are just as good that you have never heard of, and they are the majority of artists that I am talking about.
they don't make millions sucking the corporate tit, they do what they do, (often at a great financial expense) for the love of creating and performing and expressing themselves. to these artists, local recognition and applause at the end of the night are a concern, not busting fans for making unauthorized recordings.
Seriously, artists are not all automatically on the side of big media.
you have no idea how right you are.
I have noticed that the 'artists' who produce schlock and hope someone will hand them a paycheck haven't even looked into copyright.
Serious artists who are making a serious effort to comment on contemporary culture are usually very much against copyright. my next show requires a camera to view the images (photographing a painting is a violation, technically). I know a few bands who encourage people to film their shows, post them to youtube, then they make copyright claims and post ads on that video page. ( no idea how that works out). they no longer want to be 'picked up my a major' now, they talk about 'making it somehow without signing...by using teh internets or something...'
i have yet to find a serious artist who supports strict copyright laws. (and I know a lot of artists; being one myself, and associating mainly with other artists, and I work with musicians fairly often.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm another one who thinks Gandhi was a great guy, drinks lattes, despises Bush, drives a small fuel-efficient car, voted for Obama, uses Apple products ... and is a veteran.
I don't mean to insult or trivialize your service to your country, but the image of 'the soldier' I always see is a very Conservative, right-wing man. even documentaries like 'the war tapes' that were filmed by by the soldiers themselves portray soldiers as right-wingers.
Were your political view very much an exception to the norm? was it a much more even mix than the media portrays? or is politics something soldiers just don't talk about.
on topic:
as much as I make myself out to be an apple hater, the ipod touch and iphone are both very well-built, well-designed products. if they can save resources or more importantly, lives, it is a great investment. I imagine having a standardized interface for many different kinds of equipment would also be a great advantage for training.
OMFG people will stop buying bottled water!!!!
you think bottled is good, I've got the stuff on tap...
seriously though, wasn't FM radio supposed to be the death of recording industry, and VHS the death of movies?
oh my god! humanity is progressing!
Tweets would be limited to 80 characters or less instead of 140...
Claude Shannon would be so proud
because the 99% of artists who don't manage to sell enough to make a living would now be on equal footing with the 1% who have major advertising dollars behind them. throw on a Slashdot style moderation system to bury the crap and promote the gems, and you've got a viable system for promoting your ideas.
your failure to monetize content in a digital marketplace is not my problem. if media can be copied perfectly, and for free, no artificial limitations will be successful. content creators will be forced to make money on things that are not infinitely reproducible.
record sales are crashing, yet i can still go to nearly any bar and see a local band play.
TV ratings are down, I can still go on youtube and find some great content (ted talks come to mind)
So its back to the CD days. You couldn't really listen to the music and were forced to buy the cd so now instead of being able to download, listen and then reject all the crap people are now forced to download/buy crap.
It's not my intention to troll, but this is a little sensationalist.
Many bands will allow you to listen to their entire album before purchase via free streaming.
It's inconvenient, the quality ranges from poor to mediocre, but it does address the 'try before you buy' concern. Saying that we are now forced to buy our music before listening to it is false.
You think Koreans are Japanese?
Koreans can pronounce 'r' just fine.
Usually, Koreans can only pronounce an 'R' if it comes at the beginning of a syllable.
eg. they can say "rock" just fine, but 'hear' usually comes out like 'heal', so when Koreans use English words ending in an 'er' sound, it is usually replaced with an 'aw' sound. eg. 'com-pu-taw' 'key-baw-d'
Disclaimer: I lived in Korea.
and that $35 fee is exactly why artists don't register their images.
on average, only about 1% of artists actually make a living on their art. the rest break even, or make art at a loss. (and no, those people who paint as a hobby are not included in this 99%. I'm talking about working artists, who spend 50+ hours a week making art)
Financially, I believe I am doing better off that most artists my age.
supplies cost me $2000 a year.
frames cost about $5000 a year, since I make them myself. they are much more if I were to have them made by a shop.
I make about 150 images per year.
at $35 each, that would be over $5200 per year!
I maybe sell 6-8 images per year, for about $1000 each.
so, as it is, I am just breaking even. if I had to spend $5200 registering each image, I would be in the red. Artists simply can not afford to register each image.
I am fortunate that I am primarily a painter, it is easy for me to prove ownership of an image when I hold the original painting, but to protect my photography, I keep it off line, and limit any uploads to extremely low-rez versions.
Heh, we'll let anyone speak English, any way they want. Make up new words, take words from other languages, whatever.
Maybe that is one reason why English is "winning".
I'm not able to come up with a car analogy to add to your post, I hope this will suffice:
English seems to follow a Wikipedia format, where anyone can contribute anything, and thanks to it's flexibility and openness, it grows and adapts at an astonishing pace.
French is more like a traditional Encyclopedia. All the prestige associated with it belongs to the past, and by the time a select few get around to updating it, those changes are already irrelevant.
If the French language is so great, why does it need protection?
because English people are physically incapable of chain smoking, drinking wine, being obnoxiously rude and highly insecure of their culture, all at the same time.
"This is a ridiculous rule, as game companies can simply arret creating French versions of games to bypass the restriction."
there, fixed that for you.
Well, continuing with my auto analogy, if Microsoft is the GM of the operating systems, that makes FOSS the VW microbus.
but I thought FOSS was sort of like M1 tanks, made of space-age materials, and packed full of sophisticated technology, modified to never break down.
are you mixing up your analogies?
how about a compromise: we all use Canadian English
colour keeps its 'u', but tire is spelled with an 'i'
that should eliminate all confusion, eh.
there we go, I have tabled my suggestion.
am i missing something, or is the answer to this 'crisis' painfully obvious to everyone?
stop making these huge, expensive games.
go back to making small, experimental fun games.
it seems so simple.
every game should be a new experience, or at least bring something new to the table. adding a few more polygons, and some better shading algorithms does not make a game more fun.
...A few feet of water and a few degrees and perhaps some rain pattern changes *worst case*. How the hell is that going to even get close to end of the world bunk?
if you happen to live on one of those low areas, you will be flooded out and lose your home.
if you live on one of those areas that will see a massive increase in storm activity, you could lose your home.
if your food is grown in areas that become deserts, you will lose your food.
tropical diseases will move into temperate areas, and you will have to fend off new illnesses to which you have no immunities.
and, if none of these hardships happen to you directly, you will have to deal with a few hundred million people who have lost their homeland and have to move into yours.
I really don't care about an extra 2-3 years of nursing home hell where I'm fed through a tube and can't remember my own name...What I do care about is QUALITY of life. I bet the last few years those people who live in a more polutted place spend are not happy healthy years. Show me stats on the last 10 years of life and how sick people were.
but clean air isn't giving you 2-3 extra years in a nursing home.
With better air quality, you should stay healthier longer, and will be moving in to that nursing home 2-3 years later.
Cleaner air could give you 2-3 more good years.
agreed. your analogy is MUCH better than mine.
so the big question becomes: Is Shell an oil company, or an energy company?
while oil is currently very cheep, it's supply is limited to hundreds of years. Renewable energy is expensive now, but it will not run out for a very long time. (billions of years)
to use a car analogy, Shell has gotten off the future express way and is driving down a dead end street. it may be a very long road, but it will come to an end.
I apologize for coming off as condescending, It was not my intention to imply that you were an unskilled photographer needing features like this. I meant the unspecified third person type of 'you'.
From my experience as a semi-professional photographer, (weddings and rock shows) and a general user of many different point and shoot models, I have noticed that point and shoots seem to focus more on software-based gimmicky features that make it easy to take quick snapshots, and the occasional 'artsy thing' like autostitch, emphasizing certain colours, face tracking, etc. you have to fight your way through menus of useless features to get what you want. While a good DSLR just gets out of my way and lets me focus on taking photos, without thinking about the camera.
I have not yet used a D3x, and I didn't notice that feature on a D700 the few times I have used one. I will have to look for it next time. But, you stated that this feature doesn't really work, so they may advertise that it, but that doesn't mean they've actually got it.
As for making my own lenses, yes, actually, I DO make my own. (well, sort of...a friend of mine grinds the lenses for me), I just build the lens case, usually a simple tilt-shift sort of lens out of flexible tubing or something I find laying around. I like the low-fi look in my images.
my newest point-and-shoot is a canon SD1100 (mainly so I can mess around with CDHK)
and after looking through the 225 page manual, I have made 1 page of notes that are actually worth while. the vast majority of these features are completely useless.
I agree with you fully on your final paragraph. 90% of the features are just brochure padding, something to advertise, rather than actually be useful.
It would be very useful, IF it worked. but it would have to work faster than manual focus, and that is something I have not yet experienced.
yes, building a board to program a picaxe chip requires little more than a 7805 and a single 2.2K resistor.
it runs a lot slower than a conventional pic chip, (but how often do you really need full speed for a microcontroller?)
Best of all, you can write your code entirely in BASIC, no need for messy assembly. (my sig should make it clear why this is a plus for me)
and, if you do need the extra speed, and you are all out of pic chips, you can put a picaxe chip in a standard pic programmer, and it will over-write everything (permanently).
I don't do too much electronics work these days, so simple is good. for the micro-controller stuff i do, the picaxe system is the best I've come across. I got rid of all my basic-stamp stuff after finding this system.
note: i do NOT work for picaxe, or any company that deals with them, i am just a very satisfied customer who has used this system for 3 years.
it's called 'manual focus' and in the right hands, it is much faster than any auto-focus system out there.
I admit, your system of tracking a subject in motion would be very useful, but the DSLR market is geared towards professionals who are expected to know how to use manual controls.
tracking objects in motion to establish focus is more likely a feature for the point and shoot market, where the user is assumed to be unskilled, needing software to hold their hand and do all the hard work.
Imagine, if you will, Linux and Gnome in its current form had hit the marketplace, and become widely available, before MS Windows 3.1 had emerged.
The opportunity for success, before the Windows hegemony had been firmly in place, would have been much wider.
yes, i can imagine it now....trying to boot a current release of a linux live CD on my 386.
wait....where can i put this CD? i dont have a CD-rom.
I'd better use the USB thingy instead...no...damn!
I'm sorry, but i really can't imagine that linux and gnome in it's current form would stand any chance against windows 3.1. it wouldn't load on anything.
while that is true for most of Canada (and the US), in Quebec, you DO require consent to film people in a public place.
problems arise when you record sound, not images/video. he should be fine in most cases.
this research is actually very old.
Their department failed to pay any kickback to Rogers, so this news was put in one of the internet's slow tubes, and is only reaching slashdot today.
damn lack of Canadian net nutrality!
thank you.
for every Metallica that you hear on the radio, there are 100 other bands out there who are just as good that you have never heard of, and they are the majority of artists that I am talking about.
they don't make millions sucking the corporate tit, they do what they do, (often at a great financial expense) for the love of creating and performing and expressing themselves. to these artists, local recognition and applause at the end of the night are a concern, not busting fans for making unauthorized recordings.
Seriously, artists are not all automatically on the side of big media.
you have no idea how right you are.
I have noticed that the 'artists' who produce schlock and hope someone will hand them a paycheck haven't even looked into copyright.
Serious artists who are making a serious effort to comment on contemporary culture are usually very much against copyright. my next show requires a camera to view the images (photographing a painting is a violation, technically).
I know a few bands who encourage people to film their shows, post them to youtube, then they make copyright claims and post ads on that video page. ( no idea how that works out).
they no longer want to be 'picked up my a major'
now, they talk about 'making it somehow without signing...by using teh internets or something...'
i have yet to find a serious artist who supports strict copyright laws. (and I know a lot of artists; being one myself, and associating mainly with other artists, and I work with musicians fairly often.)