Surely your "partially right" as well;) - it's not quite that simple, though. Take monopolies - if you get big enough as an industrial player, and if there are enough people in a way forced to rely on your products, you can more and more sell them whatever you want and demand prices you like. No more really thinking about what people want/need, let alone being "generous". Moreover, there usually is no use for businesses to be generous especially to the poor, since there's no money to be made there. That's one of the reasons why even in the 21st century the poor tend to either stay poor or get even poorer - more and more also within in the industrialized, "rich" western countries.
If your research is really limited to press releases then I'm not surprised you are so ignorant. Sorry, but if your reading skills were more pronounced (or your reasoning less disingenuous), you would have seen that "limited to press releases" was referring to your suggestion for "research", not really allowing inferences to my actual research.
I'm citing what I kept in mind from going through lots of reports and discussions after Yunus being awarded. Even though most of the reports were overall praising, some of them showed some details about what the microcredit business is about. Yunus himself, BTW, pointed out he did not see himself as benefactor but rather as businessman, which I do not take to be meant as a show of modesty.
That's an unfair slur and you should be ashamed of yourself. Sorry, I forgot not properly worshipping the heroes of computer technology goes as sacrilege in some circles.
Go do some research. Like reading press releases of involved individuals and companies?
Interestingly, you didn't comment on the laptop != education part at all.
never thought I would see competition for supplying education to the poor You won't - unless there's some major profit in it. The whole OLPC thing - even if they'd really sell the pieces covering only production costs - is about developing new markets.
Moreover, supplying laptops does not really equal "supplying education". Millions of laptops won't do any good if no huge amounts are being invested in the concerned countries' educational systems at the same time, in order to even be able to make reasonable educational use of the equipment.
This whole thing is one of the prototypical cases of industry making big business while successfully showing a friendly face, pretending pure philanthropy at the same time.
Like Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank who even got the Nobel Prize for making money from copious adhesion contracts with the Indian poor, while using them to impose ridiculously far-reaching constrictions on their private life.
"Any criticism to mass immigration and non integrating cultures is branded as xenophobic and racist."
And you proved it for him, thanks. Your requirements for something to constitute proof are clearly deficient. It's a fine excuse for racists to support their racist claims by lamenting they'd always be "branded racist" - of course they'll be, since they bloody are. (Right, and then there's the problem that if one concrete alleged act of "criticism" was "branded racist", that'd actually be far from proof that "any criticism" was "branded"...)
Its the same in the U.S. - anyone who complains that their neighborhoods have deteriorated beyond recognition, crime has risen, and quality of life has plummeted due to unchecked illegal immigration, is branded "racist" and "xenophobic", regardless if the facts support their complaints. You might have simply overlooked, then, that critics of racism might not deny whatever "facts" there may be, but rather and correctly find that blaming the problem on immigration (if not immigrants) instead of how is dealt with it is indeed and unquestionably racist.
Most of the time, the people calling others these names are silly little youngsters, who have never worked 40 years for a home and a good life, only to see it destroyed by the doomed social experiments of wealthy government Utopians who don't have to live there. It is always interesting to see how well racism and social envy go along, and how complete social envy can even disturb a mind so thoroughly that it's unable to distinguish between an argument and the person uttering it or even his or her background. And it's similarly interesting that people still draw an utterly stupid and false notion of superiority out of the sole circumstance of their prolonged agreement to decades of their unquestioned submission to exploitation in a stupid job, making others rich. It's no coincidence though that it goes so well with an apologetic or even affirmative attitude towards racism and xenophobia.
So what you're saying is that people are programmable devices. You're improperly confusing 'programming' with 'influencing'. Moreover, what I'm also simply saying is, neo-nazis exist, and the more society lets them cultivate the impression that their life- and health-threatening ideological grounds are valid and acceptable, the more freely and openly they do go break bones of members of their victim groups. Call it what you will, it's a question of caring about effectively guarding these groups from such violence or not.
Wow. Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's not that depressing an ethos. It is quite interesting to see how militant advocacy of an extremistic notion of free speech can even arrive at such blatant trivialization, if not apology of National Socialism. Which somehow fits, though, to a pattern of thought that radically and extremistically holds individual freedoms of even the crappiest words above the psychic and physical health of people.
An exemplary racist rant, whining about the oh so poor nationalists' failure for democratic success, building a pathetic conspiracy theory by blaming laws supporting exactly those people who would right away fall victim to deportation or worse once there'd actually happen to be such success. Quite amusing that it's always supporters of the most aggressive and inhuman political movements acting up as if they were the poor, pitiable victims of some (purely delusional) malevolent intent.
those that thrive on it will go underground, out of the public eye, recruiting more members. An old, but moot point. If they can freely and openly publicize hate speech, they will go on working both underground and openly, recruiting more members not just underground, but also more and more openly. And the more members they recruit, the more victims will suffer actual violence. Which is one reason governments are getting more and more attentive towards the problem.
The point is that they should have the right to post their poorly researched essays which 'prove' that foreigners are unworthy on their own site. It doesn't cause violence. It's their opinion. It's not quite that simple. There is a straight correlation between the amount of publicized hate speech and actual violence against the targeted victims. Hate speech actually does cause violence. The more such speech gets publicized, the more those racist groups think that their ideas and actions were publicly accepted and the less individual racists restrain themselves in their real acts of violence. It's mainly a question of whether to attach more importance to free speech or to the health of the people belonging to victim groups psychically and physically targeted by daily racism. In the current state of mankind, you won't be able to fully get both.
By the way, when neo-nazis publicize such stuff, they're very careful to avoid persecutable acts like explicit invitations to violence, although that's clearly what it implicitly is. As long as there's no rule against hate speech as such, there usually is no legal means to ban such invitations. Does it necessarily have to come to the injury, sometimes to death, before society sees itself determined to act?
In reality, what we say is "La liberté des uns s'arrete ou commence celle des autres"
In America, what we say is "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." I don't know about America, but considering some European regions, like many parts of Germany with its increasing neo-nazi plague (alongside a newly strengthening nationalist-patriotic mainstream), you can be quite sure that the more neo-nazi propaganda is being published through open channels, the more bones of victims to neo-nazi hate will be broken. Which won't just be coincidence, but cause and effect.
It's indeed a very difficult matter of deciding where liberties of one have to stop in order not to jeopardize rights and liberties of others. European governments seem to get the idea that they have some kind of obligation especially towards those groups typically endangered by racist hate. The big question is, where does "hate speech" begin and where does it end, especially when it goes about religion. Religion should always be ok to get critized and even ridiculed.
The sticks and stones saying may serve well for an individual trying to immunize himself against verbal attacks, but it is not necessarily suited for being a principle for governments trying to set up equitable legal frameworks for whole populations.
No, the GP was correct. He isn't taking about processing to JPG, but the parameters used during. These are called "processing profiles", where a camera may increase sharpness/contrast/saturation before writing out the JPEG image.
Most consumer (and even some DSLR with "newbie" modes) tend to take the photo, then +1 or more to Saturation, Contrast and sharpness, to give a more punchy, ready to print image. I may be nitpicking, and of course you're both right if you're referring to 'many consumer cameras' as having a tendency to overdo contrast, sharpness, saturation in their processing. But, talking about processing, I was not referring to the simple act of JPEG encoding, but to what happens to the sensor readings after taking the picture and before encoding the viewable RGB bitmap into JPEG.
Of course it's a matter of 'profiles', but I think you're victim to the same error I was trying to point out. There is no such thing as a 'no' contrast, 'no' sharpness or 'no' saturation picture for any camera or sensor, and therefore talking of '+1' does not carry a reproducible meaning either. With little exception and regardless of adjustments made by the user, may they be zero, minus x or plus y, every camera does post-processing by applying more or less contrast adjustment and saturation correction as well as adding more or less sharpness. Some is always added, except for cameras offering a specific 'no sharpness at all' option (but such pictures necessarily have to get sharpness processing applied later, without they're virtually unusable).
The only question is, in doing its internal post-processing, how far does a specific camera go by default. A possibility to get unprocessed 'data from the sensor' in a JPEG does not exist.
What you're saying about sharpness is quite correct, of course. (Personally, I tend to shoot RAW+JPEG while setting JPEG sharpness to an amount that usually does not require further sharpening. Then, either I can use the JPEG out of the box, or I can losslessly apply sharpness etc. to the RAW just the way I like.)
It's possible that this "vibrancy" factor is due to the fact that most consumer cameras "enhance" the picture automagically. They fix contrast, add saturation, etc. It's a real PITA for those of us who just want the data off the sensor though TFA and you are in error if you think that was a specific feature of those lesser 'consumer cameras'. There simply is no other way to get a JPEG other than by bayer interpolation followed by creating contrast, sharpness, color balance and saturation through internal post-processing. Without it, the "data from the sensor" is nothing more but meaningless numbers. If you want in-camera post-processing minimized, though, you could use RAW instead of JPEG. Some compact class/'bridge' type camera provide RAW as well.
Then again, there's no reason a dSLR should not be a very good point-and-shoot camera in auto mode. Sure there is. First of all, because even in auto mode, a dSLR still isn't a point-and-shoot camera. It's still designed to adapt to a wide range of conditions automatically, not optimized for the most common conditions like a point-and-shoot. Too much generalization. There have been compact or 'bridge' cameras much more "designed to adapt to a wide range of conditions" than some of today's DSLRs. On the other hand, more and more of today's DSLRs are designed for beginners and amateurs, which would be expected to be more "optimized for the most common conditions" by default, while, at the same time, letting you optionally adjust many aspects to suit more specialized needs. The only thing a full-blown DSLR cannot emulate is the large-aperture ultra zoom lens to be found on some of the better point-and-shoots. Actually, a DSLR ought to be the better point-and-shoot camera for its much better responsiveness in many aspects, especially AF.
In this case the white balance on the dDSLR is wrong, and scaling down has nothing to do with that. It would be one thing if you simply couldn't tell the difference in scaled-down images; what makes it funny is that the cell cam image looks better, hands down. I agree; automatic white balance is one of the things even many current DSLRs don't do too well yet.
Its an apples-to-oranges comparison: the n95, as the article notes, processes the picture after its taken. Even in auto mode, dSLRs don't do that by default, and shouldn't. The article is completely ingenuous there -- every camera processes the picture quite massively after it's taken. There's simply no other way to get a JPEG from the analogue readings of the imager. The least post-processing you get in the RAW file, but that's not what all this is about.
For more typical photography (pictures of people, objects, etc.), you don't want a wide depth of field. You want your subject in focus and everything else out of focus. Well, you might want it for a particular purpose and that's fine, and it's clear that you won't get it with a camera phone or any other miniature imager device. The suggestion though that good photos (even considering the exception of landscapes) could only be made with small DOF is equally wrong as suggesting more DOF was always better than less. Relying on artifically blurring out the background is fine for special applications like artistic portrait, but sometimes it is just lack of imagination and ability to compose a picture with harmonious fore- and background. By the way, a completely blurred-out background is far from what the human eye sees when it focuses on a foreground object. So, for 'naturally' looking photos, for example, you would not want to do it at all.
No, it's called music (from beethoven to beatles to the circle jerks) No, there's more to it than that. Punk, thereby distinguishing itself from other genres, sounds and styles, was a lot more than just music, it was a significant (and by all means necessary) era in cultural history, carrying specific, clear and radical attitudes and messages towards authority, society and lifestyle, as well as to preceding musical genres which were failing to do so.
Truthfulness to cultural history actually requires one to refer to nowadays' pseudo punk by language clearly distinguishing it from the original.
Although Thomas Siebel [sic] might well have German ancestry (I myself, being German, have relatives bearing the name, though not the wealth...), he and his company are American.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it won't work, as it's simply a GUI frontend for the messenger service API, which isn't there anymore (which is what said apps are relying on as well)...
In my heterogeneous home LAN, Vista betas up to RC2 broke SMB sharing (unable to connect to shares of some non-windows machines, something in SMB authentication must have changed). While issues with those non-windows machines may well be having a hand in it, the case seems to be no singularity as there were quite a couple of similar problems reported in conjunction with NAS boxes. (I don't think there were big changes there for the release version, or were they?)
Another thing is that they simply and completely dropped the messenger service ("net send"). While relying on it may never have exactly been a brilliant idea for the app developer in the first place, I'm running at least two important apps relying on it with no easy way out. (They didn't put it back in for the final release, did they?)
I won't talk about the fact that Vista up to RC2 was unbearably slow on all machines I tried it on, all of them not really new, but none having any problems with other systems including but not restricted to XP and the latest flavors of Linux, or with any of the apps I run.
There were lots of other at-least-annoying compatibility issues with legacy apps I did not investigate into too much. I simply hope I'll find ways to get along without Vista for the foreseeable future.
Upgrade issues were never so severe before
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is it just me or does this move from Microsoft seem rather desperate? Was Microsofts older versions of Windows phased out this fast too? Yes, I'd think so, and no, I don't think they were. Or at least MS did not make such a strong point of it so early. But most of the earlier upgrade situations were a lot easier for the customer, and in most cases a real progress. With Vista, it's different.
New Windows versions always used to demand more computing power than their predecessors, but there never was as massive an increase in demands as with Vista compared to XP. New Windows versions always used to lay out their system applications, settings pages and management options less clearly than their predecessors, but they never came as badly arranged as within Vista. And I won't even start to talk about Vista's excessive confirmation dialogs.
I guess that most people's applications have a lot less demand for computing power than is needed just to run Vista, and that in many cases their applications will perform worse under Vista than they would under XP. And I didn't even say 'compatibility issues' yet.
The problem is, in many cases there are always a few important ones under the applications people are using regularly, for which there do not exist real alternatives under alternative operating systems. Right, I agree that probably a lot of people will think even more intensely about switching, but sad as it is, many will still come to the conclusion that they have to bite the bullet and continue to have their operating system imposed on them by the monopolist, as long as real-world application support does not get even better for alternative operating systems than it already is.
Misuse of a tool is not grounds for banning a tool. Are you the type of person who thinks that handguns should be banned? In a society with a significant percentage of irresponsible individuals not likely to be persuaded to refrain from misuse, yes, continuous misuse of a tool would very much be grounds for banning the tool. And yes, don't know what 'type of person' parent is, but that includes handguns, too.
You are either going to be a slave (employee) or you are going to be a free man. Right, but, in absence of great wealth, "free man" tends to come down to either being slave to oneself, to one's own entrepreneurship or freelance existence, or poverty.
In any society where property rights mean something You mean, in any society where property rights mean more than anything else, where civil liberties and even basic human rights must succumb to the property fetish?
The EU court decision mentioned in TFA strengthens what should be considered universal consensus. Although reality often looks different, at least employees themselves are not to be regarded as property, and they do not rid themselves of everything private by entering their workplace. Most EU courts accordingly and sensibly rule that a sensible amount of private communication is to be tolerated at the workplace, and that the use of the workplace computer is ok to be used for it, except when employer and workforce explicitly ruled that out by contract. Reason: the matter-of-courseness of using computers, wherever they are, for everyday personal communications.
It's the old question of property vs. people, how much power over (other) people should property (owners) be allowed to get. BTW, some constitutions actually contain the phrase "property obliges" (the owner). No property owner is ever absolutely free to do what he pleases with his property - only as long as his doings do not interfere with the rights of others.
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Surely your "partially right" as well ;) - it's not quite that simple, though. Take monopolies - if you get big enough as an industrial player, and if there are enough people in a way forced to rely on your products, you can more and more sell them whatever you want and demand prices you like. No more really thinking about what people want/need, let alone being "generous". Moreover, there usually is no use for businesses to be generous especially to the poor, since there's no money to be made there. That's one of the reasons why even in the 21st century the poor tend to either stay poor or get even poorer - more and more also within in the industrialized, "rich" western countries.
If your research is really limited to press releases then I'm not surprised you are so ignorant. Sorry, but if your reading skills were more pronounced (or your reasoning less disingenuous), you would have seen that "limited to press releases" was referring to your suggestion for "research", not really allowing inferences to my actual research.
I'm citing what I kept in mind from going through lots of reports and discussions after Yunus being awarded. Even though most of the reports were overall praising, some of them showed some details about what the microcredit business is about. Yunus himself, BTW, pointed out he did not see himself as benefactor but rather as businessman, which I do not take to be meant as a show of modesty.
Interestingly, you didn't comment on the laptop != education part at all.
Moreover, supplying laptops does not really equal "supplying education". Millions of laptops won't do any good if no huge amounts are being invested in the concerned countries' educational systems at the same time, in order to even be able to make reasonable educational use of the equipment.
This whole thing is one of the prototypical cases of industry making big business while successfully showing a friendly face, pretending pure philanthropy at the same time.
Like Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank who even got the Nobel Prize for making money from copious adhesion contracts with the Indian poor, while using them to impose ridiculously far-reaching constrictions on their private life.
And you proved it for him, thanks. Your requirements for something to constitute proof are clearly deficient. It's a fine excuse for racists to support their racist claims by lamenting they'd always be "branded racist" - of course they'll be, since they bloody are. (Right, and then there's the problem that if one concrete alleged act of "criticism" was "branded racist", that'd actually be far from proof that "any criticism" was "branded"...) Its the same in the U.S. - anyone who complains that their neighborhoods have deteriorated beyond recognition, crime has risen, and quality of life has plummeted due to unchecked illegal immigration, is branded "racist" and "xenophobic", regardless if the facts support their complaints. You might have simply overlooked, then, that critics of racism might not deny whatever "facts" there may be, but rather and correctly find that blaming the problem on immigration (if not immigrants) instead of how is dealt with it is indeed and unquestionably racist. Most of the time, the people calling others these names are silly little youngsters, who have never worked 40 years for a home and a good life, only to see it destroyed by the doomed social experiments of wealthy government Utopians who don't have to live there. It is always interesting to see how well racism and social envy go along, and how complete social envy can even disturb a mind so thoroughly that it's unable to distinguish between an argument and the person uttering it or even his or her background. And it's similarly interesting that people still draw an utterly stupid and false notion of superiority out of the sole circumstance of their prolonged agreement to decades of their unquestioned submission to exploitation in a stupid job, making others rich. It's no coincidence though that it goes so well with an apologetic or even affirmative attitude towards racism and xenophobia.
An exemplary racist rant, whining about the oh so poor nationalists' failure for democratic success, building a pathetic conspiracy theory by blaming laws supporting exactly those people who would right away fall victim to deportation or worse once there'd actually happen to be such success. Quite amusing that it's always supporters of the most aggressive and inhuman political movements acting up as if they were the poor, pitiable victims of some (purely delusional) malevolent intent.
By the way, when neo-nazis publicize such stuff, they're very careful to avoid persecutable acts like explicit invitations to violence, although that's clearly what it implicitly is. As long as there's no rule against hate speech as such, there usually is no legal means to ban such invitations. Does it necessarily have to come to the injury, sometimes to death, before society sees itself determined to act?
"La liberté des uns s'arrete ou commence celle des autres"
In America, what we say is
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." I don't know about America, but considering some European regions, like many parts of Germany with its increasing neo-nazi plague (alongside a newly strengthening nationalist-patriotic mainstream), you can be quite sure that the more neo-nazi propaganda is being published through open channels, the more bones of victims to neo-nazi hate will be broken. Which won't just be coincidence, but cause and effect.
It's indeed a very difficult matter of deciding where liberties of one have to stop in order not to jeopardize rights and liberties of others. European governments seem to get the idea that they have some kind of obligation especially towards those groups typically endangered by racist hate. The big question is, where does "hate speech" begin and where does it end, especially when it goes about religion. Religion should always be ok to get critized and even ridiculed.
The sticks and stones saying may serve well for an individual trying to immunize himself against verbal attacks, but it is not necessarily suited for being a principle for governments trying to set up equitable legal frameworks for whole populations.
Most consumer (and even some DSLR with "newbie" modes) tend to take the photo, then +1 or more to Saturation, Contrast and sharpness, to give a more punchy, ready to print image. I may be nitpicking, and of course you're both right if you're referring to 'many consumer cameras' as having a tendency to overdo contrast, sharpness, saturation in their processing. But, talking about processing, I was not referring to the simple act of JPEG encoding, but to what happens to the sensor readings after taking the picture and before encoding the viewable RGB bitmap into JPEG.
Of course it's a matter of 'profiles', but I think you're victim to the same error I was trying to point out. There is no such thing as a 'no' contrast, 'no' sharpness or 'no' saturation picture for any camera or sensor, and therefore talking of '+1' does not carry a reproducible meaning either. With little exception and regardless of adjustments made by the user, may they be zero, minus x or plus y, every camera does post-processing by applying more or less contrast adjustment and saturation correction as well as adding more or less sharpness. Some is always added, except for cameras offering a specific 'no sharpness at all' option (but such pictures necessarily have to get sharpness processing applied later, without they're virtually unusable).
The only question is, in doing its internal post-processing, how far does a specific camera go by default. A possibility to get unprocessed 'data from the sensor' in a JPEG does not exist.
What you're saying about sharpness is quite correct, of course. (Personally, I tend to shoot RAW+JPEG while setting JPEG sharpness to an amount that usually does not require further sharpening. Then, either I can use the JPEG out of the box, or I can losslessly apply sharpness etc. to the RAW just the way I like.)
Truthfulness to cultural history actually requires one to refer to nowadays' pseudo punk by language clearly distinguishing it from the original.
Although Thomas Siebel [sic] might well have German ancestry (I myself, being German, have relatives bearing the name, though not the wealth...), he and his company are American.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it won't work, as it's simply a GUI frontend for the messenger service API, which isn't there anymore (which is what said apps are relying on as well)...
Just two things.
In my heterogeneous home LAN, Vista betas up to RC2 broke SMB sharing (unable to connect to shares of some non-windows machines, something in SMB authentication must have changed). While issues with those non-windows machines may well be having a hand in it, the case seems to be no singularity as there were quite a couple of similar problems reported in conjunction with NAS boxes. (I don't think there were big changes there for the release version, or were they?)
Another thing is that they simply and completely dropped the messenger service ("net send"). While relying on it may never have exactly been a brilliant idea for the app developer in the first place, I'm running at least two important apps relying on it with no easy way out. (They didn't put it back in for the final release, did they?)
I won't talk about the fact that Vista up to RC2 was unbearably slow on all machines I tried it on, all of them not really new, but none having any problems with other systems including but not restricted to XP and the latest flavors of Linux, or with any of the apps I run.
There were lots of other at-least-annoying compatibility issues with legacy apps I did not investigate into too much. I simply hope I'll find ways to get along without Vista for the foreseeable future.
Was Microsofts older versions of Windows phased out this fast too? Yes, I'd think so, and no, I don't think they were. Or at least MS did not make such a strong point of it so early. But most of the earlier upgrade situations were a lot easier for the customer, and in most cases a real progress. With Vista, it's different.
New Windows versions always used to demand more computing power than their predecessors, but there never was as massive an increase in demands as with Vista compared to XP. New Windows versions always used to lay out their system applications, settings pages and management options less clearly than their predecessors, but they never came as badly arranged as within Vista. And I won't even start to talk about Vista's excessive confirmation dialogs.
I guess that most people's applications have a lot less demand for computing power than is needed just to run Vista, and that in many cases their applications will perform worse under Vista than they would under XP. And I didn't even say 'compatibility issues' yet.
The problem is, in many cases there are always a few important ones under the applications people are using regularly, for which there do not exist real alternatives under alternative operating systems. Right, I agree that probably a lot of people will think even more intensely about switching, but sad as it is, many will still come to the conclusion that they have to bite the bullet and continue to have their operating system imposed on them by the monopolist, as long as real-world application support does not get even better for alternative operating systems than it already is.
The EU court decision mentioned in TFA strengthens what should be considered universal consensus. Although reality often looks different, at least employees themselves are not to be regarded as property, and they do not rid themselves of everything private by entering their workplace. Most EU courts accordingly and sensibly rule that a sensible amount of private communication is to be tolerated at the workplace, and that the use of the workplace computer is ok to be used for it, except when employer and workforce explicitly ruled that out by contract. Reason: the matter-of-courseness of using computers, wherever they are, for everyday personal communications.
It's the old question of property vs. people, how much power over (other) people should property (owners) be allowed to get. BTW, some constitutions actually contain the phrase "property obliges" (the owner). No property owner is ever absolutely free to do what he pleases with his property - only as long as his doings do not interfere with the rights of others.