Modding a non-SLR to an SLR
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Something that I have done with webcams on a couple of occasions is modifying them to support telephoto SLR lenses, which then allows it to be screwed into the mount on a telescope for webcam astronomy.
Basically you replace the film plane for the lens with the CCD sensor.
The same applies for a normal non SLR camera. You have to *sacrifice* the digital lens and either get a mount from an old manual body, or get a sacrifice the manual body.
I haven't done it, but with 3-4 Megapixel cameras the norm, it should be cheap enough to have a good attempt at hacking it.
Having just coming from Australia to Canada, I found the job market was hard. I have found a job. I have just 10 minutes ago come out from interviewing for a new IT person.
There is difficulty in finding people skilled at what they say. In a hard market, there are people who throw everything on their resume to get through the door, and immeadiately have problems in an interviewed when asked questions relating to technologies that they are skilled.
Another observation, in a market with lots of people, networking is the easiest way to get a job. Job boards, newsgroups et al, are the last place to get a position. Finding the balance between bugging friends and keeping friends is the key.
Most employers will be considering the market as 'We can look through the market for the rough cut diamond', and end up waiting a lot longer then when they felt that they had to snap people up.
Finally, as always, the vocalists are the majority. The employed people won't make noise, but the unemployed will make a lot of noise. (I bet there will be people looking for jobs who respond to this in a higher ratio than those who have jobs - Flame away:)
Now forgive me if my understanding of what Microsoft are saying is incorrect. Let me start with some assertions.
Windows is an operating system.
An operating system consists of a kernel and some libraries that expose the api of the kernel.
IE is a an application
An application consists of a core executable (IEXPLORE.EXE)
A set of libraries that provide re-usable components - (one of these may be the IE control - that doesn't matter though as the user can't run a library.
So what is the prime difficulty of doing a piecewise removal of the core applications (the EXE's) and the libraries (DLLs) that support those applications alone?
Of course you will not be able to remove the core dll's that may contain the IE control, but other applications depnd on that, but you still can't kick up IE and maintain your cookies, URLs and so on.
The end result is what is required. The users get a system that they have to go through a second step to get a browser, IM client, or anything else installed, thereby giving the user a choice.
I would expect that an addition to the 'click here
to install the Microsoft Application' that Windows would have, there would have to be a 'view Non-Microsoft alternatives' that would have to
be at that decision point.
Having worked recently on adding P3P support to a proxy application, I feel I have a solid understanding about P3P. Some of the higher moderated sites have complained about the little guys getting hurt, and the big commercial sites not getting hurt.
P3P is about ensuring that users can match their preferences to the policies that a web site has. If the web site shares the data without a users explicit permission then a user can indicate with their user-agent that their identifying information shouldn't be allowed. The current protocol is fairly basic, not allowing for negotiation, and so it is trivial to implement.
The next point to make is about lying about the privacy policies. A statement about privacy with out a company following up with a way to ensure the policy is adhered to makes the policy a throw away statement. It is trivial to say to a browser that a site does nothing with the data, and still will. This is where third party verification with remedies becomes appropriate.
As you can see, there is no distinction between a big site or a little site. As long as the policies conflict with what the users want, the sites will be blocked.
The MS Update page downloads a CSV dataset and renders it. The MS javascript on that page would get confused by the fact that the CSV data that I was downloading and was marked as text/html would be modified (validly) by our application. Since we added HTML to the CSV data since we treated it as text/html it would get confused.
I have an outstanding support request with MS, but they tried to convince me that since under IE it works normally it was not a bug.
Although this doesn't directly help your situation, one suggestion would be to look at contributing to an Open Source project.
Actively working on a project does give you experience. I know that in a few companies they won't consider Open Source experience of any value, but in a lot of others, having actively contributed to a couple of big projects (and being able to show what code did what) should help you considerably.
The other option that might help you is that you can look for admin jobs in a place that has a lot of development. Again, adding development as a skill that you work part time on in the work-place should add a lot of value.
I too have moved from a Admin background to Development. (The admin background helps immensly in understanding what is going on sometimes). The first step I found is always take the admin job with development as a useful second skill.
I know that before my resume was even presented, there was already the hint of interest. I merely presented what my skill-set was and how I though they would get benefit for my skills.
So I could have been 35, I could have been 15. It was as far as I can see my skill-set and my value
proposition. I am 25, and I will Not be willing to work more that 9 hours a day on a regular basis.
To me it sounded like the resume was just to confirm my previous emails as a step before the interview.
I am currently looking at coming to the US on
a H1-B. I recently had a phone interview. Although I consider my skills modest, the commment that was made is that I would be one of the more senior people that they had interviewed. This surprised me no-end.
As indicated by other posters the market is flooded by people who have precious little idea outside a narrow range of subjects. It is become
a market full of par people, and then a smaller
percentage of multi-skilled IT professionals.
I have seen the same situation in Australia. We are looking at hiring people, and although there tends to be a few responses to the job ads, 95% of them would add value in a very narrow situations.
So we are left in a situation where we are understaffed, but don't want to take on someone
who can not handle themselves in the range of situations that we are exposed to.
I have heard it said by quite a few people, that unless you have had 2 or more very different jobs in IT in the last few years, you are placed in a basket of 'narrow specialist'. In most organisations, particularly with the rapid leap-frogging of technology, it is almost imperitive that it's employees can roll with the changes.
The crux of the situation isn't so much that there a shortage of trained IT people - there are plenty, it is that there is a severe shortage of Skilled people.
If successful, I know that I will not be paid a lower than average wage, I also know that I will not be working in an environment where I will be a second class worker.
Multi-skill and really understand what is going on, and there will be less of a shortage. I know that the company I am at at the moment would be in a lot better position if there where more people who where truly skilled.
One thing that hasn't been looked at is how we are going view these files online. Has any mention of how the naming convention of these files is going to be discussed?
Logically foo.c# would be the logical extension from the name of the language. Now let's see what
happens if we have foo.c and foo.c# in the same directory? Click the link and unless we *escape* the # into the appropraite % number, we have broken browsing.
So since it is commercial (read: based around a business that must make money) you need to maintain your commercial advantage in some way. As has been outlined in many other articles scattered around the web, you can maintain your advantage in many ways (programs, marketing, etc).
My suggestion for building a commercial Open Source project are...
Create a roadmap - provide focus to developers that is aligned in the correct direction
Build a base - Give the developers something that they can download (./configure && make && make install)
Allow early access to technology for those who nock - a lot of Open Source developers do not mind working under NDA (or similar) as long as the source will be Opened at a later date. In fact a number of developers will consider early access a priveledge.
If the commercial or competitive advantage (read: The stuff that keeps the money rolling in) needs to be proprietary for the time being to establish a stable business then do so. Once there is no advantage held within the proprietary code, release it.
Build a community as the code is released. Your Open Source community will be the life-blood of your project. You must provide a focal point for communication and sharing of ideas.
If there is a commitment to going Open Source, work out where the opportunities exist to begin to build the community around the project. This MUST be balanced by the business aspects of what you are doing.
Going step by step is not bad. Plan, balance it against good business sense and do it as early as the Openness of the code begins to balance against other aspects of the business.
Best of luck, and welcome to your company to the commercial realm of Open Source!!!
FWIW, most of the methodologies try to package
experience and best practice into a procedure. T
If you ever try to get any skilled task quantified you end up generalising or over emphasing aspects that don't really matter for Your project.
What it comes down to in the end is repeatability of consistent results. The project managers can estimate more accurately what is going to how long. The customer will know roughly what sort of end result they will have. The account managers will be able to be up front about where the projects are at. The end user will have consistent documentation.
In some cases (like for various defence or high risk projects) it is a requirement to operate under a methodology for the above reasons.
Although they give good results on large projects they tend to bog down smaller projects. So what I have seen work well is that you look at what harmonises with your projects and organisational structure and focus on that. You will find that most seasoned professionals will do large swathes of what is captured in the methodology anyway.
Methodologies move beyond doing it Joe's way and capture what Joe does and insulates the organisation from Joe being bought out by the cool new start up that just opened it's doors in the office downstairs.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I am involved in the Linux Development at ATI. We have drivers which will be released shortly that will support XOrg 6.8, AMD64 and GLSL.
We have worked with the guys at Livna for drivers for FC2 - and are ready to go with FC3, once the new drivers are released.
Some links for those who care...
http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308
http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=296
And through Fedorafaq.org
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#radeon
All I can say, is watch this space.
Something that I have done with webcams on a couple of occasions is modifying them to support telephoto SLR lenses, which then allows it to be screwed into the mount on a telescope for webcam astronomy.
Basically you replace the film plane for the lens with the CCD sensor.
The same applies for a normal non SLR camera. You have to *sacrifice* the digital lens and either get a mount from an old manual body, or get a sacrifice the manual body.
I haven't done it, but with 3-4 Megapixel cameras the norm, it should be cheap enough to have a good attempt at hacking it.
Having just coming from Australia to Canada, I found the job market was hard. I have found a job. I have just 10 minutes ago come out from interviewing for a new IT person.
There is difficulty in finding people skilled at what they say. In a hard market, there are people who throw everything on their resume to get through the door, and immeadiately have problems in an interviewed when asked questions relating to technologies that they are skilled.
Another observation, in a market with lots of people, networking is the easiest way to get a job. Job boards, newsgroups et al, are the last place to get a position. Finding the balance between bugging friends and keeping friends is the key.
Most employers will be considering the market as 'We can look through the market for the rough cut diamond', and end up waiting a lot longer then when they felt that they had to snap people up.
Finally, as always, the vocalists are the majority. The employed people won't make noise, but the unemployed will make a lot of noise. (I bet there will be people looking for jobs who respond to this in a higher ratio than those who have jobs - Flame away :)
Flame me away
Now forgive me if my understanding of what Microsoft are saying is incorrect. Let me start with some assertions.
So what is the prime difficulty of doing a piecewise removal of the core applications (the EXE's) and the libraries (DLLs) that support those applications alone?
Of course you will not be able to remove the core dll's that may contain the IE control, but other applications depnd on that, but you still can't kick up IE and maintain your cookies, URLs and so on.
The end result is what is required. The users get a system that they have to go through a second step to get a browser, IM client, or anything else installed, thereby giving the user a choice.
I would expect that an addition to the 'click here to install the Microsoft Application' that Windows would have, there would have to be a 'view Non-Microsoft alternatives' that would have to be at that decision point.
Having worked recently on adding P3P support to a proxy application, I feel I have a solid understanding about P3P. Some of the higher moderated sites have complained about the little guys getting hurt, and the big commercial sites not getting hurt.
P3P is about ensuring that users can match their preferences to the policies that a web site has. If the web site shares the data without a users explicit permission then a user can indicate with their user-agent that their identifying information shouldn't be allowed. The current protocol is fairly basic, not allowing for negotiation, and so it is trivial to implement.
The next point to make is about lying about the privacy policies. A statement about privacy with out a company following up with a way to ensure the policy is adhered to makes the policy a throw away statement. It is trivial to say to a browser that a site does nothing with the data, and still will. This is where third party verification with remedies becomes appropriate.
As you can see, there is no distinction between a big site or a little site. As long as the policies conflict with what the users want, the sites will be blocked.
I have been stung by this too.
The MS Update page downloads a CSV dataset and renders it. The MS javascript on that page would get confused by the fact that the CSV data that I was downloading and was marked as text/html would be modified (validly) by our application. Since we added HTML to the CSV data since we treated it as text/html it would get confused.
I have an outstanding support request with MS, but they tried to convince me that since under IE it works normally it was not a bug.
I have a write up at http://www.ticons.com.au/~mtippett/msdownload.txt if anyone wants to annoy microsoft with their own bugs!
We lost a customer because of it, so give them hell!
Although this doesn't directly help your situation, one suggestion would be to look at contributing to an Open Source project.
Actively working on a project does give you experience. I know that in a few companies they won't consider Open Source experience of any value, but in a lot of others, having actively contributed to a couple of big projects (and being able to show what code did what) should help you considerably.
The other option that might help you is that you can look for admin jobs in a place that has a lot of development. Again, adding development as a skill that you work part time on in the work-place should add a lot of value.
I too have moved from a Admin background to Development. (The admin background helps immensly in understanding what is going on sometimes). The first step I found is always take the admin job with development as a useful second skill.
Good luck none the less
Maybe, maybe not.
I know that before my resume was even presented, there was already the hint of interest. I merely presented what my skill-set was and how I though they would get benefit for my skills.
So I could have been 35, I could have been 15. It was as far as I can see my skill-set and my value proposition. I am 25, and I will Not be willing to work more that 9 hours a day on a regular basis.
To me it sounded like the resume was just to confirm my previous emails as a step before the interview.
Shrug... Time will tell.
I am currently looking at coming to the US on a H1-B. I recently had a phone interview. Although I consider my skills modest, the commment that was made is that I would be one of the more senior people that they had interviewed. This surprised me no-end.
As indicated by other posters the market is flooded by people who have precious little idea outside a narrow range of subjects. It is become a market full of par people, and then a smaller percentage of multi-skilled IT professionals.
I have seen the same situation in Australia. We are looking at hiring people, and although there tends to be a few responses to the job ads, 95% of them would add value in a very narrow situations. So we are left in a situation where we are understaffed, but don't want to take on someone who can not handle themselves in the range of situations that we are exposed to.
I have heard it said by quite a few people, that unless you have had 2 or more very different jobs in IT in the last few years, you are placed in a basket of 'narrow specialist'. In most organisations, particularly with the rapid leap-frogging of technology, it is almost imperitive that it's employees can roll with the changes.
The crux of the situation isn't so much that there a shortage of trained IT people - there are plenty, it is that there is a severe shortage of Skilled people.
If successful, I know that I will not be paid a lower than average wage, I also know that I will not be working in an environment where I will be a second class worker.
Multi-skill and really understand what is going on, and there will be less of a shortage. I know that the company I am at at the moment would be in a lot better position if there where more people who where truly skilled.
One thing that hasn't been looked at is how we are going view these files online. Has any mention of how the naming convention of these files is going to be discussed?
Logically foo.c# would be the logical extension from the name of the language. Now let's see what happens if we have foo.c and foo.c# in the same directory? Click the link and unless we *escape* the # into the appropraite % number, we have broken browsing.
*sigh*.
Interestingly, MS looks like they have already run into this problem. http://msdn.mi crosoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/technology/csharpintro .asp should ideally have the c#intro.asp as the name.
Snigger
Hmm... Default score of 5. I guess I won't be seeing my own posting.
This is a commercial Open Source project.
So since it is commercial (read: based around a business that must make money) you need to maintain your commercial advantage in some way. As has been outlined in many other articles scattered around the web, you can maintain your advantage in many ways (programs, marketing, etc).
My suggestion for building a commercial Open Source project are ...
If there is a commitment to going Open Source, work out where the opportunities exist to begin to build the community around the project. This MUST be balanced by the business aspects of what you are doing.
Going step by step is not bad. Plan, balance it against good business sense and do it as early as the Openness of the code begins to balance against other aspects of the business.
Best of luck, and welcome to your company to the commercial realm of Open Source!!!
FWIW, most of the methodologies try to package experience and best practice into a procedure. T If you ever try to get any skilled task quantified you end up generalising or over emphasing aspects that don't really matter for Your project.
What it comes down to in the end is repeatability of consistent results. The project managers can estimate more accurately what is going to how long. The customer will know roughly what sort of end result they will have. The account managers will be able to be up front about where the projects are at. The end user will have consistent documentation.
In some cases (like for various defence or high risk projects) it is a requirement to operate under a methodology for the above reasons.
Although they give good results on large projects they tend to bog down smaller projects. So what I have seen work well is that you look at what harmonises with your projects and organisational structure and focus on that. You will find that most seasoned professionals will do large swathes of what is captured in the methodology anyway.
Methodologies move beyond doing it Joe's way and capture what Joe does and insulates the organisation from Joe being bought out by the cool new start up that just opened it's doors in the office downstairs.