Most of Adams' great work comes from view cameras. If digital handhelds (i.e. 35mm-like) were available which gave him the same resolution and control as film, he'd definitely play with them. However, until someone comes up with a digital film backplate for a large format view camera, there are many things than can't be done in the digital arena.
Moreover, I suspect he'd look at digital in the same way he did colour. He spent much of his career in a love/hate relationship with colour film and printing, and a good part of that is that he never had the time to get as proficient with it as he wanted (or considered necessary).
For fine art, digital is still in its pre-infancy--Daguerrotypes were a more able medium in many ways. In fact, one of the major differences between film and digital is that from almost day one, film has been capable of capturing depth and detail on a level that digital isn't even close to.
Nonetheless, Adams would be carrying and using digital for some things right now, and mercilessly riding the manufacturers to improve the technology. For fine art though, I don't see it for at least another half decade.
"...apparently by hackers unhappy with the company's legal threats against users of the Linux operating system."
WHY is this apparent? The only thing that the 'unhappy hackers' have going is motive. IBM could have done it too. SCO could have done it to themselves, or just faked it entirely, as an excuse to go offline to recover from being rooted.
Motive != guilt, especially when there are many groups with equal motives.
First of all, your (lovely) pictures all look like they came from a digital camera. I would have picked them out blind 100% of the time. That's a drawback.
Secondly, you're suggesting that he spend FIVE TIMES his budget to go in a direction he's not interested in.
Third and most importantly: "Easy" isn't the same as "Good." Reading will explain the concepts to you better than screwing around, and careful experimentation (i.e. note taking) will reward you with a FAR better understanding than...screwing around. Furthermore, there is so much processing that goes on behind the scenes in digital that you are seldom sure how much of an image is your work, and how much is due to the electronics.
I think digitals are great, and probably an excellent tool for a strong intermediate photographer, but for really learning photography and composition, they're poor tools.
I notice though, that the new FM3a (which actually has fully automatic modes) has a shutter which operates either electronically or mechanically throughout its entire range.
...film is _dying_. It's not dead yet. Furthermore, when it dies, it'll end up in the same place as these other dead photographic technologies.
* B&W * Large format * Hand tinting * silver prints and even * daguerrotypes
Now the more astute readers may notice that EVERY ONE of those dead technologies are still in active use--by artists. Even if digital was clearly superior (which it isn't yet), there's no need to steer people away from what they WANT to use, i.e. film.
In other words, it's not about technological superiority--it's about art and expression.
There are about a 'zillion posts recommending a particular brand or model. Here are the things to consider.
Do you want: 1) Autofocus? 2) Auto exposure (i.e. point-and-click) ability? Or abilities? 3) Autowind? (and if so, do you want the ability to do double exposures--one often precludes the other) 4) Fully manual exposure (not always possible on autoexposure SLRs, sadly) 5) The ability to use almost any random lens from the company? (narrows you down to Nikon and maybe Contax) 6) Tanklike/batteryless/cold-weather abilities? (usually means an older one, although the Nikon FM3a seems to qualify)
That should be a start. Do NOT get an APS camera. Period.
As someone who used to sell (and use) the K-1000 and, and has owned an FE-2 (Very similar to the FM-2), I can comment on some of the differences.
1) Lenses. Nikon lenses are justifiably famous, although Pentax has always been a very highly regarded competitor. Regardless, the ancient Nikon will take brand-new autofocus lenses without a fuss (although of course without using the autofocus ability), whereas the Pentax won't.
2) Build quality. The FM2/FE2 was a TANK. This is still the camera that many Nikon-using professionals carry around as a backup body, given that it's bulletproof (in the very worst possible situation, 1/250sec shutterspeed is entirely mechanical and always works) and takes all of the current lenses. The K-1000 was an excellent little camera and built substantially stronger than many, but isn't designed for the same level of abuse.
3) Many minor features between them. Interchangable ground glass on the FM2, but I don't know about the K-1000. The FM2 is somewhat unfriendly to those of us who are left-eyed, as the wind lever has to be cocked (into your right eyeball:-) to shoot. Nikon accessories tend to be more expensive, I believe.
Both are really solid cameras. I might suggest an FE2 over an FM2, because having at least a semiautomatic mode (aperture-priority) encourages you to take more pictures.
Um...where in the word "slashdot" do you see "linux and only linux?"
Aside from a firewall, I don't use Linux much at all. I couldn't care less about every single dev. snapshot of the next minor revision of the Linux kernel. 2.6.0.pre6-through-10? WHO CARES?
But I can happily ignore it.
This, on the other hand, is more significant for a few reasons.
1) It's an actual release (not a beta or dev snapshot) 2) It affects people outside the Linux world (us Sun-using folks, for instance) 3) Applications are more relevant to most people than kernel revisions.
Heh. I have a friend living a D/s lifestyle, and believe me--she takes shit from NO ONE except her Master. If she were in LA, she'd be storming city council in a second.
1) How crackers view themselves Who cares. Criminal behaviour is criminal behaviour. Any decent sociopath will justify his or her actions as morally correct. Just ask a pedophile about how six year old kids can seduce them, or a rapist about how his victim was 'just asking for it.'
2) On cracker vs. hacker Yes, hacker was once used as a complimentary term. Then it was used (mostly by the media) as a derogatory term. Then a subset of the "good" hacker community came out with cracker to differentiate. Well guess what; it didn't catch on. Nobody except a small, vocal subset of the 'good' hackers uses the term, and it's just awkward. It doesn't flow well. Whingeing about "proper" terminology in this circumstance is a lost cause. Use whatever terms make you feel better (either cracker, black hat, malicious hacker, or whatever), but quit getting so bent out of shape over your new term not getting accepted.
3) On proper sample size. It's not statistics here, it's a series of interviews! She's not extrapolating numbers, and my reading was that it was the article author, not the PhD candidate who was extrapolating behaviour to the rest of the community.
First of all, you know nothing about me or my reasons for leaving chemistry, so feel free to fuck off on that point. I used to work with methyl mercury, and know a fair bit about it's toxicity and modes. What are your qualifications?
Secondly, there are a great many anecdotal cases of people recovering in a near-miraculous way by changing almost anything in their environment. Many of these 'cures' vanish under real scrutiny, and dental amalgam related health problems are definitely in that category.
Patients have had MS symptoms fade literally overnight after having their fillings removed. Amazing, eh? Especially amazing, since the process of removing the fillings actually temporarily raises the mercury levels in the patient. Maybe less amazing, when you consider that MS symptoms typically fluctuate in a very similar manner, all by themselves.
I'm not going to defend mercury as a safe compound--it's not. However, in metallic form, it's not as harmful as many people believe; and the levels that fillings present are VERY VERY low. Furthermore, there's not even a hint of causal evidence linking mercury in any amount to many of the diseases that are apparently caused by amalgam fillings.
Fundamentally, it boils down to exposure levels (both acute and chronic), and absorption. The exposure to mercury vapour from fillings is measurable, but far below environmental exposure levels. Furthermore, the amount of mercury from fillings that's actually absorbed is equally low. Mostly it's sensationalistic reporting trying to draw a connection where none exists.
I've got bad teeth (mostly hereditary) and a mouth full of metal. As they wear out, they're getting replaced with ceramic because that's the fashion these days, and I like having what looks like healthy teeth. I'm not worried about the evil mercury floating around in my system, though.
Now processing gold panning fines, that's another story altogether...
You and too many others are mistaking crappy PC-grade OSes for PC-level management. They're different things.
IE is full of holes. That's a given fact. That does NOT however, compromise the integrity of the OS if you don't let it.
Firewalls, backups, failover planning, change management, documentation, monitoring, and independent verification make are the things that lead to stable and predictable behaviour. NOT bug-free, but bug-tolerant.
Now doing this on Win95/98 is a deeply bad idea, because of the increased amount of work to implement it all. Doing it on patched Win2k or XP or Solaris or HP-UX or *BSD or Linux or whatever else is substantially easier, because those OSes have a much higher degree of stability and predictability to begin with. (effectively lower entropy.) Between them all, choose the best tool for the job.
Any carefully managed OS (inluding Windows) can be stable and predictable.
Any badly managed OS (including Unix) WILL be unstable and unpredictable.
Got it? Good.
Now as far as pointing fingers at the guilty parties, understand that the infrastructure is really at fault far more than any individual company. Look at this from a broader perspective: One company was able to take down how wide of an area? The whole system is too fragile, too interdependent, and maintained too close to full capacity. Worse, there's absolutely no incentive for a company to maintain a large reserve capacity, since it costs a lot, and brings in no extra income.
But of course when it happens the next time (and make no mistake--it will), we'll have another commission to once again figure out the single company that broke a rotten and unstable infrastructure, instead of fixing the root problem.
Different people in the US seem to be making a career of pointing fingers at Canada. Terrorists? They came in from Canada! Power outages? Must be the beavers!
I don't care about apologies anymore because they're not sincere, nor does anyone change from them.
Now if the mayor of NYC apologised and did something to improve relations across the border, I might be impressed. In the real world though, all we'll ever get is, "Sorry--it wasn't the Canadians THIS time."
"Take the [AOL] CD in one hand...and slash it across your wrist! Suicide will probably be a better alternative than connecting to that service."
Terrible advice here!
As every good systems admin knows, it's "down, not across."
Re:IT Doesn't Matter, Doesn't Matter
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
Very nicely put.
One other interesting effect is that as IT loses its cachet and IT workers become less idolised, there will be less and less room for idiots, incompetents, and prima donnas.
Proof that it DOESN'T matter!
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Steve Ballmer says it matters? Carly "Jet Babe" Fiorina says it matters?
All we need is Darl McBride to join with these two twits, and we've got a quorum of incorrect opinions!
(Well come on, it's not like they've got anything ELSE right so far)
Hmm. What would you rather have; a system that avoids displaying any ads for the competition on an article about a given company? I don't know what ads came up when I actually read the article, but the ones I saw when I went back and refreshed it were for Intel, Sybase, MS, Dell, and yes, IBM.
I didn't see anything wrong with the interview. The interviewer asked questions, and demanded straightforward answers. They also had the background to see that this isn't anything different than what Sun, IBM, MS (.NET), and for that matter SAP and TIBCO and the rest have been promising us for decades.
I'm not a huge fan of most technical columnists, but I didn't have any problems with this.
You're right, of course. The key here though, is that market share --> mind share --> sales --> $$$.
If Sun can really push this environment, then it will be the biggest breakthrough for Sun AND FOR LINUX we've seen in some time. Sun knows full well that this won't make them any money. Not yet, at least. It's all part of a larger and longer term plan, and it actually seems to be going well.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of Adams' great work comes from view cameras. If digital handhelds (i.e. 35mm-like) were available which gave him the same resolution and control as film, he'd definitely play with them. However, until someone comes up with a digital film backplate for a large format view camera, there are many things than can't be done in the digital arena.
Moreover, I suspect he'd look at digital in the same way he did colour. He spent much of his career in a love/hate relationship with colour film and printing, and a good part of that is that he never had the time to get as proficient with it as he wanted (or considered necessary).
For fine art, digital is still in its pre-infancy--Daguerrotypes were a more able medium in many ways. In fact, one of the major differences between film and digital is that from almost day one, film has been capable of capturing depth and detail on a level that digital isn't even close to.
Nonetheless, Adams would be carrying and using digital for some things right now, and mercilessly riding the manufacturers to improve the technology. For fine art though, I don't see it for at least another half decade.
Hey FreeLinux: Learn some basics here:
"...apparently by hackers unhappy with the company's legal threats against users of the Linux operating system."
WHY is this apparent? The only thing that the 'unhappy hackers' have going is motive. IBM could have done it too. SCO could have done it to themselves, or just faked it entirely, as an excuse to go offline to recover from being rooted.
Motive != guilt, especially when there are many groups with equal motives.
Bah!
First of all, your (lovely) pictures all look like they came from a digital camera. I would have picked them out blind 100% of the time. That's a drawback.
Secondly, you're suggesting that he spend FIVE TIMES his budget to go in a direction he's not interested in.
Third and most importantly: "Easy" isn't the same as "Good." Reading will explain the concepts to you better than screwing around, and careful experimentation (i.e. note taking) will reward you with a FAR better understanding than...screwing around. Furthermore, there is so much processing that goes on behind the scenes in digital that you are seldom sure how much of an image is your work, and how much is due to the electronics.
I think digitals are great, and probably an excellent tool for a strong intermediate photographer, but for really learning photography and composition, they're poor tools.
Whoops! Right you are. My memory is a bit old.
I notice though, that the new FM3a (which actually has fully automatic modes) has a shutter which operates either electronically or mechanically throughout its entire range.
...film is _dying_. It's not dead yet. Furthermore, when it dies, it'll end up in the same place as these other dead photographic technologies.
* B&W
* Large format
* Hand tinting
* silver prints
and even
* daguerrotypes
Now the more astute readers may notice that EVERY ONE of those dead technologies are still in active use--by artists. Even if digital was clearly superior (which it isn't yet), there's no need to steer people away from what they WANT to use, i.e. film.
In other words, it's not about technological superiority--it's about art and expression.
There are about a 'zillion posts recommending a particular brand or model. Here are the things to consider.
Do you want:
1) Autofocus?
2) Auto exposure (i.e. point-and-click) ability? Or abilities?
3) Autowind? (and if so, do you want the ability to do double exposures--one often precludes the other)
4) Fully manual exposure (not always possible on autoexposure SLRs, sadly)
5) The ability to use almost any random lens from the company? (narrows you down to Nikon and maybe Contax)
6) Tanklike/batteryless/cold-weather abilities? (usually means an older one, although the Nikon FM3a seems to qualify)
That should be a start. Do NOT get an APS camera. Period.
As someone who used to sell (and use) the K-1000 and, and has owned an FE-2 (Very similar to the FM-2), I can comment on some of the differences.
:-) to shoot. Nikon accessories tend to be more expensive, I believe.
1) Lenses. Nikon lenses are justifiably famous, although Pentax has always been a very highly regarded competitor. Regardless, the ancient Nikon will take brand-new autofocus lenses without a fuss (although of course without using the autofocus ability), whereas the Pentax won't.
2) Build quality. The FM2/FE2 was a TANK. This is still the camera that many Nikon-using professionals carry around as a backup body, given that it's bulletproof (in the very worst possible situation, 1/250sec shutterspeed is entirely mechanical and always works) and takes all of the current lenses. The K-1000 was an excellent little camera and built substantially stronger than many, but isn't designed for the same level of abuse.
3) Many minor features between them. Interchangable ground glass on the FM2, but I don't know about the K-1000. The FM2 is somewhat unfriendly to those of us who are left-eyed, as the wind lever has to be cocked (into your right eyeball
Both are really solid cameras. I might suggest an FE2 over an FM2, because having at least a semiautomatic mode (aperture-priority) encourages you to take more pictures.
Um...where in the word "slashdot" do you see "linux and only linux?"
Aside from a firewall, I don't use Linux much at all. I couldn't care less about every single dev. snapshot of the next minor revision of the Linux kernel. 2.6.0.pre6-through-10? WHO CARES?
But I can happily ignore it.
This, on the other hand, is more significant for a few reasons.
1) It's an actual release (not a beta or dev snapshot)
2) It affects people outside the Linux world (us Sun-using folks, for instance)
3) Applications are more relevant to most people than kernel revisions.
So...sigh.
For instance...
/. still can't figure out that the plural of virus is viruses.
20 years, and
Heh. I have a friend living a D/s lifestyle, and believe me--she takes shit from NO ONE except her Master. If she were in LA, she'd be storming city council in a second.
1) How crackers view themselves
Who cares. Criminal behaviour is criminal behaviour. Any decent sociopath will justify his or her actions as morally correct. Just ask a pedophile about how six year old kids can seduce them, or a rapist about how his victim was 'just asking for it.'
2) On cracker vs. hacker
Yes, hacker was once used as a complimentary term. Then it was used (mostly by the media) as a derogatory term. Then a subset of the "good" hacker community came out with cracker to differentiate. Well guess what; it didn't catch on. Nobody except a small, vocal subset of the 'good' hackers uses the term, and it's just awkward. It doesn't flow well. Whingeing about "proper" terminology in this circumstance is a lost cause. Use whatever terms make you feel better (either cracker, black hat, malicious hacker, or whatever), but quit getting so bent out of shape over your new term not getting accepted.
3) On proper sample size.
It's not statistics here, it's a series of interviews! She's not extrapolating numbers, and my reading was that it was the article author, not the PhD candidate who was extrapolating behaviour to the rest of the community.
First of all, you know nothing about me or my reasons for leaving chemistry, so feel free to fuck off on that point. I used to work with methyl mercury, and know a fair bit about it's toxicity and modes. What are your qualifications?
Secondly, there are a great many anecdotal cases of people recovering in a near-miraculous way by changing almost anything in their environment. Many of these 'cures' vanish under real scrutiny, and dental amalgam related health problems are definitely in that category.
Patients have had MS symptoms fade literally overnight after having their fillings removed. Amazing, eh? Especially amazing, since the process of removing the fillings actually temporarily raises the mercury levels in the patient. Maybe less amazing, when you consider that MS symptoms typically fluctuate in a very similar manner, all by themselves.
I'm not going to defend mercury as a safe compound--it's not. However, in metallic form, it's not as harmful as many people believe; and the levels that fillings present are VERY VERY low. Furthermore, there's not even a hint of causal evidence linking mercury in any amount to many of the diseases that are apparently caused by amalgam fillings.
I'd be happy if people could figure out that a meter is different than a metre.
Here's an extremely good rebuttal to the 'mercury fillings will kill you!' perspective.
Fundamentally, it boils down to exposure levels (both acute and chronic), and absorption. The exposure to mercury vapour from fillings is measurable, but far below environmental exposure levels. Furthermore, the amount of mercury from fillings that's actually absorbed is equally low. Mostly it's sensationalistic reporting trying to draw a connection where none exists.
I've got bad teeth (mostly hereditary) and a mouth full of metal. As they wear out, they're getting replaced with ceramic because that's the fashion these days, and I like having what looks like healthy teeth. I'm not worried about the evil mercury floating around in my system, though.
Now processing gold panning fines, that's another story altogether...
Well to be fair, many of us were screaming at IBM to market OS/2 properly at the time. It was tragic to watch them utterly blow it in real time.
Yeah, amalgam fillings are really metal. 50% mercury and the rest made up of copper, zinc, tin, and silver.
The mercury is the supposed cause for alarm in some circles. As a former chemist myself, I consider it all bullshit.
I weep for my sister, with pins in her knees.
You and too many others are mistaking crappy PC-grade OSes for PC-level management. They're different things.
IE is full of holes. That's a given fact. That does NOT however, compromise the integrity of the OS if you don't let it.
Firewalls, backups, failover planning, change management, documentation, monitoring, and independent verification make are the things that lead to stable and predictable behaviour. NOT bug-free, but bug-tolerant.
Now doing this on Win95/98 is a deeply bad idea, because of the increased amount of work to implement it all. Doing it on patched Win2k or XP or Solaris or HP-UX or *BSD or Linux or whatever else is substantially easier, because those OSes have a much higher degree of stability and predictability to begin with. (effectively lower entropy.) Between them all, choose the best tool for the job.
First of all, let's be perfectly clear on this.
Any carefully managed OS (inluding Windows) can be stable and predictable.
Any badly managed OS (including Unix) WILL be unstable and unpredictable.
Got it? Good.
Now as far as pointing fingers at the guilty parties, understand that the infrastructure is really at fault far more than any individual company. Look at this from a broader perspective: One company was able to take down how wide of an area? The whole system is too fragile, too interdependent, and maintained too close to full capacity. Worse, there's absolutely no incentive for a company to maintain a large reserve capacity, since it costs a lot, and brings in no extra income.
But of course when it happens the next time (and make no mistake--it will), we'll have another commission to once again figure out the single company that broke a rotten and unstable infrastructure, instead of fixing the root problem.
Bah.
Different people in the US seem to be making a career of pointing fingers at Canada. Terrorists? They came in from Canada! Power outages? Must be the beavers!
I don't care about apologies anymore because they're not sincere, nor does anyone change from them.
Now if the mayor of NYC apologised and did something to improve relations across the border, I might be impressed. In the real world though, all we'll ever get is, "Sorry--it wasn't the Canadians THIS time."
"Take the [AOL] CD in one hand...and slash it across your wrist! Suicide will probably be a better alternative than connecting to that service."
Terrible advice here!
As every good systems admin knows, it's "down, not across."
Very nicely put.
One other interesting effect is that as IT loses its cachet and IT workers become less idolised, there will be less and less room for idiots, incompetents, and prima donnas.
Steve Ballmer says it matters?
Carly "Jet Babe" Fiorina says it matters?
All we need is Darl McBride to join with these two twits, and we've got a quorum of incorrect opinions!
(Well come on, it's not like they've got anything ELSE right so far)
Hmm. What would you rather have; a system that avoids displaying any ads for the competition on an article about a given company? I don't know what ads came up when I actually read the article, but the ones I saw when I went back and refreshed it were for Intel, Sybase, MS, Dell, and yes, IBM.
I didn't see anything wrong with the interview. The interviewer asked questions, and demanded straightforward answers. They also had the background to see that this isn't anything different than what Sun, IBM, MS (.NET), and for that matter SAP and TIBCO and the rest have been promising us for decades.
I'm not a huge fan of most technical columnists, but I didn't have any problems with this.
You're right, of course. The key here though, is that market share --> mind share --> sales --> $$$.
If Sun can really push this environment, then it will be the biggest breakthrough for Sun AND FOR LINUX we've seen in some time. Sun knows full well that this won't make them any money. Not yet, at least. It's all part of a larger and longer term plan, and it actually seems to be going well.