While the increased usage of words that are not in the browser dictionaries is part of it, it is not just technical words. "Travois" (the ancient sleds pulled by horses or dogs) is a valid English word that my Ubuntu Firefox spell checker flagged this morning: it wanted me to use "travis" instead. We are running into an increasing number of such inappropriate substitutions by spell checkers as the range of breadth of Wikipedia expands, especially as it covers sports, hobbies, and other informal group activities that have extensive jargons of their own.
And then of course there is the fact that native users of English are now very much a minority. The written language of English is now completely dominated by users for which English is a second language. There are probably more exchanges on the Internet in English where none of the participants are native English speakers than there are where at least one of the participants grew up speaking English. If that is not yet true, it will be within a few years.
The rule on places like Slashdot and other Internet forums is that so long as the text can be understood, variations in spelling and grammar are acceptable, should not be corrected, and usually should not even be mentioned. Wikipedia is under the same kinds of pressures and should be adopting a similar tolerance to the stuff that would have given my high school English teacher fits.
English, through the Internet, is becoming the dominant world language. But it is also changing as it takes on this new role. In a few more years, it will not be recognizable to the English teachers of fifty years ago.
A religion is an irrational set of beliefs based on faith
So it is like the set of real numbers, where all the irrational numbers have been shown to outnumber the rational ones. Um.... okay.
Has it occurred to anyone here that mathematics is an example of a highly disciplined form of imagination? It is a study entirely independent of any kind of perception; there is absolutely no way for an outside observer to validate it. So all of mathematics is imaginary. It is constrained in some ways by our desire to keep it aligned in some fashion with the reality of our perceptions, but that is an external constraint and does not negate the truth that mathematics of itself is pure imagination.
The statement that the Universe is complex is true at so many levels. It has real components, and imaginary components. And some of those real components are irrational, and some are the results of transcendent functions.
To bring this full circle, any science based on mathematics is based on faith.
There has to be something wrong in the logic of parent post, as it implies that a person who lacks the basic skills expected of 10th grade students is still capable of functioning as a member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company, or as a legislator, or governor, or president. While there may be instances where this has indeed been the case, I think I can safely assert that there are very few people who would consider that to be a good idea in general, or something that should happen on a regular basis.
In short, while most atheists are pretty tolerant people, there is a minority of evangelical fundamentalist atheists who give the rest of that religion a bad name.
Pardon in advance for any meanderings. Several interruptions while composing this.
And yet the Moon might well be the cause of several other factors.
The Moon is massive enough in comparison to the Earth that it is reasonable to consider the two to be a binary planet system in many ways. While the barycenter of the binary revolves around the Sun in a highly predictable ellipse, the Earth itself does not; it meanders inside and outside that elliptical orbit due to the Moon's influence. As a consequence, the location of the Earth's perihelion can shift more than one degree from one year to the next (varies from Jan 2 to Jan 4). The barycenter of the binary system is displaced from the center of the Earth toward the Moon by 75% of the Earth's radius (quick reference here), which from the point of view of a flat Earth theorist means that the barycenter is rushing along 1,000 miles beneath our feet at about twice the speed of sound.
And of course there are the tides.
Not just the ocean tides, but also the much greater tidal bulge of the atmosphere. And a definite tendency to a tidal bulge in the liquid core. IANAGeologist so I don't have a clue how the tidal forces and the weight of the mantle would interact... but then I think that most geologists have never considered this either since they are always looking down into the Earth and the Moon is for them a whoosh in the finest Slashdot meaning.
As far as evolution of life goes wrt planet Earth, the Moon is at the very least a major, significant stirring rod. It is really hard to say how major, since we are in the position of being stirred so everything else that is also being stirred with us looks very normal. It could be that both meteorology and geology need their Copernican revolution and won't really make sense until they meet their Galileos.
If a school board member is incapable of passing the NAEP tests, how the hell can he function as a school board member? Would that not be like having a driver education instructor who cannot pass the drivers license examination? Yeah, lame, but at least it is a car analogy
Perhaps candidates for school board positions should be required to demonstrate a minimum level of competence in the subjects that high school graduates are supposed to have mastered.
Parent post inspires me to raise a couple of points. Here is the first one:
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
So the guy is highly educated. To which the following aphorism applies:
Education is what you have left after you have forgotten everything you learned. --anon.
I would not buy this book for myself but I can think of a couple of persons for whom it might be a good Christmas present. These are persons who have told me they are interested in learning how to make web pages but don't know what they are doing yet. One of them tried to take on managing a Joomla web site last year. I think she's still sane.
A hardcopy book like this can work well for this kind of newbie. They are going to be stretching their minds just to handle having a tab open on an HTML reference, another open on a CSS reference, and a third that shows the page they are building, while at the very same time having a text editor open to the page's source. They need the high level howto material in hardcopy. If they were doing that on line as well, they'd be mindswamped.
You say that as if anon isnt a bunch of teenagers with moderate sql injection skills.
Parent post assumes way too much. The level of sophistication in a cybernetic attack should never be greater than the minimum amount needed to make the attack successful. Do not show off how big your biggest gun is until you need to use it.
Not sure how Original Post proves parent post's point; the logic is unfathomable.
How hard would it be for Anonymous to filter the identity theft data and use only credit cards that belong to the 1%? Or to select corporations? I do not think that would be so hard. I doubt that the 99% have any reason to fear that Anonymous in that respect.
As to potential recipients of Robin Hood booty, these fall into two categories. One consists of "charities" like the RIAA, Church of Scientology, and white supremacist groups who are deserving of a multitude of $5 dollar donations that are sure to trigger "recipient pays expenses of reversal" rules. The other group contains charities like Doctors Without Borders, the EFF, child welfare support, and so on who would benefit from large contributions that fit the normal financial patterns of the "contributors" selected by Anonymous.
Com'on slashdotters, use yer noggins fer somepin more than hat racks. Anonymous has demonstrated that it has the skills to sort sheep from goats and to tailor their activities appropriately. More than likely, they have not made this public announcement without having first spent a few months in real world testing.
But there is a major difference between a "public" archive maintained by a third party using some generic form of categorizing the exchanges, and maintaining your own personal archive where you can set up folders or labels that make sense and provide you effective access to what you need when you need it.
FB and Twitter were not developed as business tools. At their core they were designed to be fun toys. There can be no question that they fulfill that core purpose quite well, but relying on them for interdepartmental correspondence?? Does this company pass out party favors at its board meetings?
Okay, that last bit was snarky. But it did need to be said.
Modes of communication that cannot be archived only benefit those who are too lazy to do their jobs properly and think that they can get away with delegating all the hard decisions to someone else.
All those kids who prefer tweeting and FB to email have another thing in common: they are not yet responsible adults willing to stand behind their words.
So the corporation in TFA is adopting a no email policy in favor of tweets and the like. Doing this because of documented "lost" time spent on email.
Sounds like a trade-off between between the documented time lost to managing emails and the impossible to measure productivity lost to the "But you said... No I did not..." arguments. Note that wrt those arguments, the hit to productivity is not just in the arguing, but also the losses incurred in correcting the mistakes.
I know I have been a pain in the butt to some managers when I have told them on the phone "hey, send me an email so I know exactly what you want done." Usually I did that not because I thought they were corrupt or were wanting to hang me out to twist in the wind, but because they were too lazy to think things through unless they were forced to by the archival nature of email.
The rest of this is addressed to all readers except poster of parent, an intellectual whose greasemonkey filters will hack the hell out of these words and leave them bleeding all over his viewing screen.
My favorite xkcd is number 312 which needs no apology (sorry xkcd, but R.Frost would have approved of it). Of course you have to know a bit about an American Poet Laureate, have at least a nodding acquaintance with Lisp, and understand the role that DWIMNWIS has played in the perlish philosophy. Just finding a way to connect all three of those different realms together is hilarious in and of itself; to do so in rhyme, meter, and parody is over the top.
Generally speaking an xkcd strip is not funny of itself, but provokes laughter by demonstrating some kind of weakness in one of the intricate mental structures of our day. So naturally it can only be appreciated by those who remain open to continuing their education. Which leads to another humorous gem:
Definition of an intellectual: someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence. -- A. C. Clarke.
Well, at least we agree that having some post processing tools and learning to use them is a good thing.
I have no religious attachment to any photographic or computer tools; my approach to both has been totally pragmatic. Figure out what will have the lowest cost in terms of both money and time lost in learning and maintaining the tools and go with that package. It is a broad spectrum approach. Which currently is Ubuntu v10.4 for the OS, the Gimp for all raster image work including photography, Inkscape for all vector graphics, and Blender for my experiments in 3D modeling and video compositing. Yes, this is a hobbyist's tool kit. But that is what I am, a hobbyist. I do not have a boss who requires me to use PhotoShop so that when he fires me, he can drag somebody off the street to take over the projects I had been working on. Which seems to be the main reason these days that PhotoShop remains so popular: managers want their commercial artists to be expendable.
I looked at Picasa a couple of years ago and I did not see anything in it that would make the bother of changing my workflow worthwhile. YMMV. The Gimp comes with the assurance that it will always be free, and the large community of developers contributing to it assure that it will just get better and better for the foreseeable future. Picasa on the other hand... well Google has shown that it can drop any of its products any time it is in their best interests to do so. Not knocking Google; I'm just saying.
Looks like that will be a long time coming. It was not easy for me to escape the clutches of Microsoft; I am not going to jump into Apple's walled garden.
I am confident that anything of momentous value in either the Apple or Microsoft ecosystems will be done in the land of FOSS sooner or later. Generally sooner, if the improvement is more than just another shiny.
If you did any of your own darkroom work back in the wet film days, then you remember making careful adjustments to the enlarger, deciding just which paper to use, and giving due consideration to how long to leave the paper in the developer bath before the fix. And so on.
Or you might have just sent your roll of film to the nearest Kodak shop where an automated machine did all that stuff for you, using the settings that are most often adequate for the thousands of snapshots it gets fed every week.
But either you or a machine was doing the post-processing that we now can do so much better in today's software. You should really look into what Gimp can do for you with its unsharp mask (the digital equivalent of focusing the enlarger), and its HSV settings (equivalent to choosing different papers and development timings). Not to mention using masks to process different parts of the image differently, and do not get me started on the wonder of layers.
The photo that comes straight out of the camera is an unfinished work. It might be adequate for some purposes, but it is never as good as it could be.
Why would you be faffing around with PS/Gimp for basics like that when Lightroom/iPhoto/Picasa all do most of that basic stuff faster, and much cheaper than PS?
I had many years of experience with the Gimp before Picasa, etc, showed up. There is no reason for me to change. Another point: the Gimp has a long history of continued improvements, and a community behind it that assures that it will keep getting better and better. Picasa cannot yet say that. Oh, a third point for those not in the know: Gimp is FOSS and you cannot find a lower cost high end digital darkroom.
I'm seriously eyeing up the Canon S100. Shoots RAW. Fairly decent interface for such a small camera with full manual controls. Very bloody small. Cheaper than an SLR.
I honestly don't really see the point of entry level SLRS with a kit lens. If you're going to have an SLR, spend the money on decent glass, and upgrade to the body from the most basic model. By then you have several kilos of gear that is inpractical at times. And BTW, I'm talking from experience as I normally haul around a backpack with an SLR, including four lenses, flash, small tripod, filters, etc, and I spend hours dealing with the GBs of RAW shots I've taken.
Back in the wet days, I had a Minolta 35 with 28mm, 55mm, 125mm lenses. Today my best camera is a Minolta A2 with a single lens that is the equivalent of a 28mm to 200mm, plus macro. The glass is good quality (since the actual focal lengths are a LOT shorter, it does not need to be as large or as fancy as the 35 had). The electronic image stabilization lets me get good handheld shots at its extreme telephoto: back in the day I would have had to use a tripod and cable release to get good shots with a 200mm.
So why would I want a camera with interchangeable lenses when this one will do everything I need and all I need to carry around is the camera, the flash, and the tripod? If I am reading parent post correctly, we are in agreement on this.
One thing I like about DSLRs that I have not seen mentioned here yet is that I can use the eyepiece to compose a shot when glare or bright sunlight get in the way of using the screen of a point and shoot. I don't know whether this applies to the Canon S100.
When I see an obvious amateur with a brand new big body Nikon, bigger than my old wet film 35, with a huge lens on it, carrying a case with half a dozen other lenses, I do wonder whether it would be appropriate to say "You're doing it wrong." I don't really know; I have not tried to keep up with the market. It just seems like keeping up with market would require shoveling a lot more BS out of the way than I really want to take on.
Parent post has wandered off the original topic by discussing the difference in quality between good and average photographers rather than the original request about the qualities of cameras.
The points about becoming a good photographer are valid. Basically if you want a few good photos, you need to click the shutter a few thousand times. And then learn to be really brutal in tossing out everything that is not quite perfect. That is now a lot easier to do with digital photography. Well, taking lots of photos is cheaper, being severely critical about your own art is still hard. In the process of taking those thousands of shots, if you are paying attention to what you are doing, handling the composition, lighting, and other aspects of the art properly will start to become habitual. At some point you become able to make good art consistently even with a disposable box camera, such as the photographers mentioned in parent post who were getting lots of excellent results with their P'n'Sers
The more expensive P'n'S cameras probably do have.tiff and.raw formats. But the big point of getting a P'n'S is to buy something cheap that you will be willing to risk on that rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Or carry in your pocket anywhere you go. Without feeling like you need to protect your investment by keeping it in a case that keeps you from getting it out and using it.... For me, that means something under $100, but then I am just one of the 99%.
On the lower cost P'n'S cameras,.tiff and.raw are out of the question. The processing needed to write these big files to permanent memory is more than the low power processor can reasonably handle. We are talking about 3 volt systems running on 2 AA batteries: not much to work with. The camera uses.jpg compression to reduce the overheads of writing the image file. A moderately good DSLR will be at least 6 volts. With this it can offer several levels of.jpg compression (image quality) and either a.raw or.tiff option.
Whether.tiff or.raw is the better format depends on several factors but in many forums is mostly a religious war. I have worked with both at one time or another. I recall that.tiff was easier to work with in layers in the old PSP and early Gimp, but now with the huge hard drives and 4 GB of ram to play with, I can work with huge image files directly in the Gimp's native format without having to load and unload separate layer files. If my interim image expands to 900 megabytes, so what?
My only disappointment with digital photography is that the cameras I have worked with have too much lag for his kind of candid photography. Using the multiple shot setting sort of works under some conditions on my fancy DSLR, but even with it I can only get a few frames before it has to do some internal housekeeping and I have to just sit back and cool my heels for about a minute. Nothing at all like the machine gun photos of a 35 mm wet film camera with auto advance. (Not that I could ever afford one of my own, but the few times I was able to borrow one were memorable.)
I object to the way nuclear power proponents compare one selected aspect of their favored industry to the entirety of the coal industry. If they want to make an honest comparison, it should be the number of persons directly killed by nuclear power accidents per TWH compared to the number directly killed by coal furnace accidents per TWH. I think coal might look safer in that respect. I cannot recall ever hearing about a coal fired generator blowing up, melting down, or killing anybody.
Or they can compare all the deaths from mining the coal to dealing with its waste products with all the deaths from uranium mining to dealing with its nuclear waste. But the only fair way to do that would involve recognizing that so far there is no final handling of nuclear waste so there is no way of knowing how many deaths might occur from that part of it in the next century, or a thousand years from now, as a direct result of the nuclear industry's failure to develop a closed waste disposal system.
The way these fanbois present the nuclear power industry is kind of like talking up all the advantages of an electric car that uses an extension cord rather than a battery. It sure sounds really, really good. As far as it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
So two billion Christians are abstaining from half of the Holy Eucharist?
Seems like the Church has changed since I went on to other things.
Why would anyone eat blood?
Mongolphilia: a recently recognized but surprisingly common condition of wanting ever so much to be a part of the horde.
LMFTFY:
Whushe!
While the increased usage of words that are not in the browser dictionaries is part of it, it is not just technical words. "Travois" (the ancient sleds pulled by horses or dogs) is a valid English word that my Ubuntu Firefox spell checker flagged this morning: it wanted me to use "travis" instead. We are running into an increasing number of such inappropriate substitutions by spell checkers as the range of breadth of Wikipedia expands, especially as it covers sports, hobbies, and other informal group activities that have extensive jargons of their own.
And then of course there is the fact that native users of English are now very much a minority. The written language of English is now completely dominated by users for which English is a second language. There are probably more exchanges on the Internet in English where none of the participants are native English speakers than there are where at least one of the participants grew up speaking English. If that is not yet true, it will be within a few years.
The rule on places like Slashdot and other Internet forums is that so long as the text can be understood, variations in spelling and grammar are acceptable, should not be corrected, and usually should not even be mentioned. Wikipedia is under the same kinds of pressures and should be adopting a similar tolerance to the stuff that would have given my high school English teacher fits.
English, through the Internet, is becoming the dominant world language. But it is also changing as it takes on this new role. In a few more years, it will not be recognizable to the English teachers of fifty years ago.
A religion is an irrational set of beliefs based on faith
So it is like the set of real numbers, where all the irrational numbers have been shown to outnumber the rational ones. Um.... okay.
Has it occurred to anyone here that mathematics is an example of a highly disciplined form of imagination? It is a study entirely independent of any kind of perception; there is absolutely no way for an outside observer to validate it. So all of mathematics is imaginary. It is constrained in some ways by our desire to keep it aligned in some fashion with the reality of our perceptions, but that is an external constraint and does not negate the truth that mathematics of itself is pure imagination.
The statement that the Universe is complex is true at so many levels. It has real components, and imaginary components. And some of those real components are irrational, and some are the results of transcendent functions.
To bring this full circle, any science based on mathematics is based on faith.
There has to be something wrong in the logic of parent post, as it implies that a person who lacks the basic skills expected of 10th grade students is still capable of functioning as a member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company, or as a legislator, or governor, or president. While there may be instances where this has indeed been the case, I think I can safely assert that there are very few people who would consider that to be a good idea in general, or something that should happen on a regular basis.
In short, while most atheists are pretty tolerant people, there is a minority of evangelical fundamentalist atheists who give the rest of that religion a bad name.
Pardon in advance for any meanderings. Several interruptions while composing this.
And yet the Moon might well be the cause of several other factors.
The Moon is massive enough in comparison to the Earth that it is reasonable to consider the two to be a binary planet system in many ways. While the barycenter of the binary revolves around the Sun in a highly predictable ellipse, the Earth itself does not; it meanders inside and outside that elliptical orbit due to the Moon's influence. As a consequence, the location of the Earth's perihelion can shift more than one degree from one year to the next (varies from Jan 2 to Jan 4). The barycenter of the binary system is displaced from the center of the Earth toward the Moon by 75% of the Earth's radius (quick reference here), which from the point of view of a flat Earth theorist means that the barycenter is rushing along 1,000 miles beneath our feet at about twice the speed of sound.
And of course there are the tides.
Not just the ocean tides, but also the much greater tidal bulge of the atmosphere. And a definite tendency to a tidal bulge in the liquid core. IANAGeologist so I don't have a clue how the tidal forces and the weight of the mantle would interact... but then I think that most geologists have never considered this either since they are always looking down into the Earth and the Moon is for them a whoosh in the finest Slashdot meaning.
As far as evolution of life goes wrt planet Earth, the Moon is at the very least a major, significant stirring rod. It is really hard to say how major, since we are in the position of being stirred so everything else that is also being stirred with us looks very normal. It could be that both meteorology and geology need their Copernican revolution and won't really make sense until they meet their Galileos.
Second of two points inspired by parent post:
If a school board member is incapable of passing the NAEP tests, how the hell can he function as a school board member? Would that not be like having a driver education instructor who cannot pass the drivers license examination? Yeah, lame, but at least it is a car analogy
Perhaps candidates for school board positions should be required to demonstrate a minimum level of competence in the subjects that high school graduates are supposed to have mastered.
Parent post inspires me to raise a couple of points. Here is the first one:
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
So the guy is highly educated. To which the following aphorism applies:
Education is what you have left after you have forgotten everything you learned. --anon.
I would not buy this book for myself but I can think of a couple of persons for whom it might be a good Christmas present. These are persons who have told me they are interested in learning how to make web pages but don't know what they are doing yet. One of them tried to take on managing a Joomla web site last year. I think she's still sane.
A hardcopy book like this can work well for this kind of newbie. They are going to be stretching their minds just to handle having a tab open on an HTML reference, another open on a CSS reference, and a third that shows the page they are building, while at the very same time having a text editor open to the page's source. They need the high level howto material in hardcopy. If they were doing that on line as well, they'd be mindswamped.
You say that as if anon isnt a bunch of teenagers with moderate sql injection skills.
Parent post assumes way too much. The level of sophistication in a cybernetic attack should never be greater than the minimum amount needed to make the attack successful. Do not show off how big your biggest gun is until you need to use it.
Not sure how Original Post proves parent post's point; the logic is unfathomable.
How hard would it be for Anonymous to filter the identity theft data and use only credit cards that belong to the 1%? Or to select corporations? I do not think that would be so hard. I doubt that the 99% have any reason to fear that Anonymous in that respect.
As to potential recipients of Robin Hood booty, these fall into two categories. One consists of "charities" like the RIAA, Church of Scientology, and white supremacist groups who are deserving of a multitude of $5 dollar donations that are sure to trigger "recipient pays expenses of reversal" rules. The other group contains charities like Doctors Without Borders, the EFF, child welfare support, and so on who would benefit from large contributions that fit the normal financial patterns of the "contributors" selected by Anonymous.
Com'on slashdotters, use yer noggins fer somepin more than hat racks. Anonymous has demonstrated that it has the skills to sort sheep from goats and to tailor their activities appropriately. More than likely, they have not made this public announcement without having first spent a few months in real world testing.
But there is a major difference between a "public" archive maintained by a third party using some generic form of categorizing the exchanges, and maintaining your own personal archive where you can set up folders or labels that make sense and provide you effective access to what you need when you need it.
FB and Twitter were not developed as business tools. At their core they were designed to be fun toys. There can be no question that they fulfill that core purpose quite well, but relying on them for interdepartmental correspondence?? Does this company pass out party favors at its board meetings?
Okay, that last bit was snarky. But it did need to be said.
Exactly.
Modes of communication that cannot be archived only benefit those who are too lazy to do their jobs properly and think that they can get away with delegating all the hard decisions to someone else.
All those kids who prefer tweeting and FB to email have another thing in common: they are not yet responsible adults willing to stand behind their words.
So the corporation in TFA is adopting a no email policy in favor of tweets and the like. Doing this because of documented "lost" time spent on email.
Sounds like a trade-off between between the documented time lost to managing emails and the impossible to measure productivity lost to the "But you said... No I did not..." arguments. Note that wrt those arguments, the hit to productivity is not just in the arguing, but also the losses incurred in correcting the mistakes.
I know I have been a pain in the butt to some managers when I have told them on the phone "hey, send me an email so I know exactly what you want done." Usually I did that not because I thought they were corrupt or were wanting to hang me out to twist in the wind, but because they were too lazy to think things through unless they were forced to by the archival nature of email.
So I guess you've never met any hard-core Discordians, huh?
Hail Eris! We bid Thee welcome to this crazy slashdot place!
Oh, You frequent these discussions often??
Ah, you're no fun. You are no fun at all.
The rest of this is addressed to all readers except poster of parent, an intellectual whose greasemonkey filters will hack the hell out of these words and leave them bleeding all over his viewing screen.
My favorite xkcd is number 312 which needs no apology (sorry xkcd, but R.Frost would have approved of it). Of course you have to know a bit about an American Poet Laureate, have at least a nodding acquaintance with Lisp, and understand the role that DWIMNWIS has played in the perlish philosophy. Just finding a way to connect all three of those different realms together is hilarious in and of itself; to do so in rhyme, meter, and parody is over the top.
Generally speaking an xkcd strip is not funny of itself, but provokes laughter by demonstrating some kind of weakness in one of the intricate mental structures of our day. So naturally it can only be appreciated by those who remain open to continuing their education. Which leads to another humorous gem:
Definition of an intellectual: someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence. -- A. C. Clarke.
Well, at least we agree that having some post processing tools and learning to use them is a good thing.
I have no religious attachment to any photographic or computer tools; my approach to both has been totally pragmatic. Figure out what will have the lowest cost in terms of both money and time lost in learning and maintaining the tools and go with that package. It is a broad spectrum approach. Which currently is Ubuntu v10.4 for the OS, the Gimp for all raster image work including photography, Inkscape for all vector graphics, and Blender for my experiments in 3D modeling and video compositing. Yes, this is a hobbyist's tool kit. But that is what I am, a hobbyist. I do not have a boss who requires me to use PhotoShop so that when he fires me, he can drag somebody off the street to take over the projects I had been working on. Which seems to be the main reason these days that PhotoShop remains so popular: managers want their commercial artists to be expendable.
I looked at Picasa a couple of years ago and I did not see anything in it that would make the bother of changing my workflow worthwhile. YMMV. The Gimp comes with the assurance that it will always be free, and the large community of developers contributing to it assure that it will just get better and better for the foreseeable future. Picasa on the other hand... well Google has shown that it can drop any of its products any time it is in their best interests to do so. Not knocking Google; I'm just saying.
Looks like that will be a long time coming. It was not easy for me to escape the clutches of Microsoft; I am not going to jump into Apple's walled garden.
I am confident that anything of momentous value in either the Apple or Microsoft ecosystems will be done in the land of FOSS sooner or later. Generally sooner, if the improvement is more than just another shiny.
If you did any of your own darkroom work back in the wet film days, then you remember making careful adjustments to the enlarger, deciding just which paper to use, and giving due consideration to how long to leave the paper in the developer bath before the fix. And so on.
Or you might have just sent your roll of film to the nearest Kodak shop where an automated machine did all that stuff for you, using the settings that are most often adequate for the thousands of snapshots it gets fed every week.
But either you or a machine was doing the post-processing that we now can do so much better in today's software. You should really look into what Gimp can do for you with its unsharp mask (the digital equivalent of focusing the enlarger), and its HSV settings (equivalent to choosing different papers and development timings). Not to mention using masks to process different parts of the image differently, and do not get me started on the wonder of layers.
The photo that comes straight out of the camera is an unfinished work. It might be adequate for some purposes, but it is never as good as it could be.
Why would you be faffing around with PS/Gimp for basics like that when Lightroom/iPhoto/Picasa all do most of that basic stuff faster, and much cheaper than PS?
I had many years of experience with the Gimp before Picasa, etc, showed up. There is no reason for me to change. Another point: the Gimp has a long history of continued improvements, and a community behind it that assures that it will keep getting better and better. Picasa cannot yet say that. Oh, a third point for those not in the know: Gimp is FOSS and you cannot find a lower cost high end digital darkroom.
I'm seriously eyeing up the Canon S100. Shoots RAW. Fairly decent interface for such a small camera with full manual controls. Very bloody small. Cheaper than an SLR.
I honestly don't really see the point of entry level SLRS with a kit lens. If you're going to have an SLR, spend the money on decent glass, and upgrade to the body from the most basic model. By then you have several kilos of gear that is inpractical at times. And BTW, I'm talking from experience as I normally haul around a backpack with an SLR, including four lenses, flash, small tripod, filters, etc, and I spend hours dealing with the GBs of RAW shots I've taken.
Back in the wet days, I had a Minolta 35 with 28mm, 55mm, 125mm lenses. Today my best camera is a Minolta A2 with a single lens that is the equivalent of a 28mm to 200mm, plus macro. The glass is good quality (since the actual focal lengths are a LOT shorter, it does not need to be as large or as fancy as the 35 had). The electronic image stabilization lets me get good handheld shots at its extreme telephoto: back in the day I would have had to use a tripod and cable release to get good shots with a 200mm.
So why would I want a camera with interchangeable lenses when this one will do everything I need and all I need to carry around is the camera, the flash, and the tripod? If I am reading parent post correctly, we are in agreement on this.
One thing I like about DSLRs that I have not seen mentioned here yet is that I can use the eyepiece to compose a shot when glare or bright sunlight get in the way of using the screen of a point and shoot. I don't know whether this applies to the Canon S100.
When I see an obvious amateur with a brand new big body Nikon, bigger than my old wet film 35, with a huge lens on it, carrying a case with half a dozen other lenses, I do wonder whether it would be appropriate to say "You're doing it wrong." I don't really know; I have not tried to keep up with the market. It just seems like keeping up with market would require shoveling a lot more BS out of the way than I really want to take on.
Parent post has wandered off the original topic by discussing the difference in quality between good and average photographers rather than the original request about the qualities of cameras.
The points about becoming a good photographer are valid. Basically if you want a few good photos, you need to click the shutter a few thousand times. And then learn to be really brutal in tossing out everything that is not quite perfect. That is now a lot easier to do with digital photography. Well, taking lots of photos is cheaper, being severely critical about your own art is still hard. In the process of taking those thousands of shots, if you are paying attention to what you are doing, handling the composition, lighting, and other aspects of the art properly will start to become habitual. At some point you become able to make good art consistently even with a disposable box camera, such as the photographers mentioned in parent post who were getting lots of excellent results with their P'n'Sers
The more expensive P'n'S cameras probably do have .tiff and .raw formats. But the big point of getting a P'n'S is to buy something cheap that you will be willing to risk on that rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Or carry in your pocket anywhere you go. Without feeling like you need to protect your investment by keeping it in a case that keeps you from getting it out and using it.... For me, that means something under $100, but then I am just one of the 99%.
On the lower cost P'n'S cameras, .tiff and .raw are out of the question. The processing needed to write these big files to permanent memory is more than the low power processor can reasonably handle. We are talking about 3 volt systems running on 2 AA batteries: not much to work with. The camera uses .jpg compression to reduce the overheads of writing the image file. A moderately good DSLR will be at least 6 volts. With this it can offer several levels of .jpg compression (image quality) and either a .raw or .tiff option.
Whether .tiff or .raw is the better format depends on several factors but in many forums is mostly a religious war. I have worked with both at one time or another. I recall that .tiff was easier to work with in layers in the old PSP and early Gimp, but now with the huge hard drives and 4 GB of ram to play with, I can work with huge image files directly in the Gimp's native format without having to load and unload separate layer files. If my interim image expands to 900 megabytes, so what?
He was fantastic.
My only disappointment with digital photography is that the cameras I have worked with have too much lag for his kind of candid photography. Using the multiple shot setting sort of works under some conditions on my fancy DSLR, but even with it I can only get a few frames before it has to do some internal housekeeping and I have to just sit back and cool my heels for about a minute. Nothing at all like the machine gun photos of a 35 mm wet film camera with auto advance. (Not that I could ever afford one of my own, but the few times I was able to borrow one were memorable.)
I object to the way nuclear power proponents compare one selected aspect of their favored industry to the entirety of the coal industry. If they want to make an honest comparison, it should be the number of persons directly killed by nuclear power accidents per TWH compared to the number directly killed by coal furnace accidents per TWH. I think coal might look safer in that respect. I cannot recall ever hearing about a coal fired generator blowing up, melting down, or killing anybody.
Or they can compare all the deaths from mining the coal to dealing with its waste products with all the deaths from uranium mining to dealing with its nuclear waste. But the only fair way to do that would involve recognizing that so far there is no final handling of nuclear waste so there is no way of knowing how many deaths might occur from that part of it in the next century, or a thousand years from now, as a direct result of the nuclear industry's failure to develop a closed waste disposal system.
The way these fanbois present the nuclear power industry is kind of like talking up all the advantages of an electric car that uses an extension cord rather than a battery. It sure sounds really, really good. As far as it goes.