It is, but not for the reason you say. Racism is a problem precisely because of the automatic disgust-reaction you mention. Anyone now can "play the race card". If a "minority" is passed over for promotion, he howls "racism", and he'll probably win his case, even if he wasn't promoted 'cos he was utterly incompetent. It's almost impossible to criticize extremist Moslems now, because you run the risk of getting called "racist". Me I don't care about race, if you oppress and mutilate women and call for the murder of Jews you're a psycho, what's the colour of your skin got to do with it?
The fact is, "racist" no longer means "biased on grounds of race". It means "anyone who is winning an argument with a minority". The concept of racism does need to be stamped out, aye, but not for the benefit of its supposed "victims".
The number one reason the Arab world hates the U.S. is because it has for more than a half century backed Israel at every turn, against the Palastinians, an arab people suffering under a brutal occupation if they are still in their homeland or who are scattered around the middle east and the world, often in squalid refugee camps, in a diaspora like that inflicted on the Jews so long ago.
Ermm, bollocks. Why doesn't the average Arab hate the Jordanians then? They've slaughtered Palestinians wholesale, what they've done makes anything Israel has pale into insignificance.
America is hated because Arab governments have to direct the rage of the disenfranchised citizens somewhere. The Arab leaders live in luxury while their people live in squalor and say "America made it this way" and the people believe them. As for Arafat, he just wants to kill Jews, there's no reason to what he wants.
The reality is that the techie community has never offered anything beyond "You're rich and I hate you and computers should be outside the law and anyway I'm helping the artists by not paying them."
You are exactly right. There are some compelling anti-DRM arguments - personally I'm annoyed that one particular anti-copy-protection technique used by CD manufacturers to prevent playing in CD-ROM drives also means they won't play in my stereo. Another is the technique that uses autoplay to install some obnoxious software without your consent. But the fact of the matter is, if it wasn't for all the college kids running Napster in their dorms, these technieus would never have been used in the first place - and the arguments of those people do just boil down to "I want professional musicians to record music without being paid" (just as the GNU camp wants professional software engineers to work without pay).
In other words, flash photography can lead to deterioration of an artefact, not to mention changes to the pigment.
But I've visited places where they didn't want you to photograph the stained glass windows! Sacreligious, some might say? Sure, says I, just point me to "thou shalt not photograph in the house of the Lord" in the Bible.
Banning flashes, OK, no problem. In the V&A, there are exhibits in near dark rooms, they're so worried about light damage to priceless art. But banning photography outright is purely a revenue protection measure for postcards and posters.
The more you come back, the more he can shaft you for at the inevitable gift shop.
You're almost right. The reason that many museums, churches, etc forbid photography is that it cuts into postcard and poster sales.
It's a funny balancing act; make the museum unfriendly to photographers and you discourage them from visiting again, after all you can't photograph a whole museum in a day, maybe a better business model is to be photo-friendly and make your money on photographers coming back to complete shoots.
It was an alternate memory management library thing that came with Sun's "Workbench" their (expensive) C/C++ SPARC compiler suite.
Interesting, I have SPARCworks or SunPro or Forte (whatever it's called this week:-) ) but I'd never heard of this. I will investigate. Thanks for the tip!
I was looking at the photos linked on your website -- great work. Do you do B&W only on conventional print film, or do you use the D30?
Thanks! Most of the stuff there was shot on film, but some on the D30 and converted to B&W in Capture One.
For draft prints I use an inkjet (Canon i475), just so I can hold them up on the wall and see how they'd look. For "real" prints, I upload a maximum quality JPEG to Photobox and they do the print on a Fuji Frontier on Crystal Archive paper.
aren't worried about the 0.05% of the population that are geeks using Bittorrent
You're missing the point that busting the early-adopters is a powerful technique for keeping the rest of the population in line. Especially since they're so easy to find, they post about it on/.!
OK then, I am going to trust this guy with my life in a hostile environment. Right.
Why not? It's basic scientific method: cattle are being mutilated, no-one knows who's doing it, let's watch and see if it happens again. It's not like he bought the ranch and turned it into a landing field for UFOs is it?
come on, an f of 2.8 is not that great, unless you live in a really sunny country
Actually, 2.8 is fine on a camera that gives acceptable quality at ISO 400. The lens I use most on my Canon D30 is a Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 and it's fine for available-light shooting indoors. In fact I don't recall when I last used the flash on that camera. Outdoors I drop to ISO 100 or 200.
But what do paid users get that free users don't? What is it that drives a free user to upgrade? That's what needs to be studied to improve your conversion rate.
Some of Livejournal's stuff is seemingly trivial - for example, paid users can upload a bigger selection of icons to attach to each post. But, it turns out that a lot of Livejournal users are willing to pay in order to have the "perfect" icon on hand for whatever they're posting about. This doesn't even increase the bandwidth bill, since an icon would be attached anyway, and it only modestly increases the storage bill (they're only 100x100 JPEGs). Things like this mean they don't have to bother with banner ads at all.
More is always better when it comes to optical zoom.
Any lens that has more than 3x optical zoom will be making some heavy compromises to do so. You're up against the laws of physics here, if you want to fit such a lens into a portable package. You really would be much better off carrying several lenses (that's what SLRs are for) or two bodies with a different lens on each.
Canon makes a 28-300 lens for people who absolutely cannot change lenses in the field (for example, photojournalists in the middle of a rapidly changing situation) but almost all of its top-quality zoom lenses - the L series - are 2x or 3x. Its consumer zooms are mostly 4x or 5x.
But you may not be as happy to see that quality picture on a sports illustrated double spread for instance.
Sports Illustrated accepts pictures from the Canon 1D (4MP) and the Nikon D1H (2.6MP). Nowadays its staff photographes are mostly using the Canon 1D-II (8MP).
But, the truth is, number of MP doesn't matter. What matters is the size of the photosites on the sensor. A digicam has little photosites 2x2 microns. To get a picture, you need high amplification, so you get noise in the shadows. You've got a cheap lens, so you get chromatic abberation in the highlights. On top of that, you get low overall contrast. A DSLR on the other hand has photosites 7x7 microns or 9x9 microns. No noise in the shadows at "low" ISOs (which are still higher than most digicams), no abberation in the highlights from those nice lenses, faithful colours overall.
I've recently got into SLR digital with a 10D. Along with that I got some 'L' series lenses
I've a D30 with L glass. It's simply not worth me ugrading to a 10D - the photos I get from my 3MP look beautiful printed at 12x8" (using Photoshop to interpolate as necessary). The way the human visual system works, contrast and faithful colour matters more than resolution. All the lamers who bought the Sony F828 have no idea what a mistake that was, they just want more megapixels to boast about - that 2.6MP Nikon completely blows it away.
Emphasis mine. In that case, you're entitled to whatever your contract with the storage provider entitles you to. Not the same thing at all as a free service.
Anyway, your example doesn't work, because how would you get terabytes of data from A to B over a cheap connection? Answer, you wouldn't, you'd put it on tape and ship the crate of tapes to the storage facility.
If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off
It depends on how much effort was involved, not just to export the data and import it somewhere (performing whatever conversion is required) but to communicate the new URL to everyone.
A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.
Or, indeed, GMail. A gigabyte is a lot. I have all my personal mail (apart from some things like mailing lists which aren't worth archiving) going back to '99 in a half-dozen.pst files (adding one almost-anually) including attachments such as PDFs, JPEGS etc, and it comes to about 600M. So I could probably fit 10 years of email into GMail, with only a minor amount of pruning. That's a lot of stuff to be completely at the whim of a publicly-traded corporation whose #1 priority by law is shareholder value.
Sure web users like stuff for free, but I make it a rule never to depend on anything free. Once money's changed hands, now you have some leverage.
How amusing that Asimov thought that we'd have interstellar travel before we had a smaller replacement for the transistor! But I don't know whether that makes him an optimist or a pessimist.
Does anyone know why it was called the 8086, 80386, etc?
'Cos back in the day there was the Intel 4004, then there was the 8008 (which was twice as good!), then there was the 8086. So the 80 comes from there, the next number is just the version, the real question is where the 86 comes from, and I dunno.
But Big Brother WOULD be imaging you, and the law states that you MAY NOT be imaged. The exact opposite of Big Brother, in fact.
As an unrelated aside, isn't it tragic that now the average Brit's idea of Big Brother is some stupid TV game show, not a reference to the all-time classic novel?
Dude, everyone in the world is enthusiastic about doing things they enjoy.
If I'm uninterested or bored with it, I can't even force myself to do it.
That's the difference, see. Other people do things they don't enjoy because they can see the big picture. "Sure I don't like this bit of my job", the reasoning goes, "but if I do it I get paid and I can spend the money on doing what I want to do". Those who can't do things they don't enjoy are the ones who can't see the big picture and as such, they'll fail at whatever they try - there is no worthwhile activity on earth that's fun all the time.
"Ok. We know they're here. And we know that they think we're here. So...their software is going to tell them to take this route..."
Consider GPS - for a long time, the US military alone could use the system to its full precision, third parties received less precise locations. Not less accurate, true, but still not as good as the military. That's what could happen here - any "export version" of the software would be more predictable than the version that the US military itself uses. 'Course, they'd have to be careful that they didn't provide the tech now to a friend who becomes an enemy later...
As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to free speech were taken away
But the right to free speech does not create an obligation for the provision of a soapbox. ClearChannel owns the equipment and says who uses it, as is their right to do so. If the entire radio system were owned by the US gov't, then Stern would have a point, but it doesn't so he doesn't.
Would you agree that all religious propaganda should be banned from public discourse?
I'd certainly like to see some consistency. If a white man were to call for the murder of non-whites, he'd be branded a racist and hounded by the state for "hate crimes". But a moslem calls for the death of Jews and the forces of the state rally to protect his "rights".
Slashdot Mirror
Racism is the Great Satan of our age
It is, but not for the reason you say. Racism is a problem precisely because of the automatic disgust-reaction you mention. Anyone now can "play the race card". If a "minority" is passed over for promotion, he howls "racism", and he'll probably win his case, even if he wasn't promoted 'cos he was utterly incompetent. It's almost impossible to criticize extremist Moslems now, because you run the risk of getting called "racist". Me I don't care about race, if you oppress and mutilate women and call for the murder of Jews you're a psycho, what's the colour of your skin got to do with it?
The fact is, "racist" no longer means "biased on grounds of race". It means "anyone who is winning an argument with a minority". The concept of racism does need to be stamped out, aye, but not for the benefit of its supposed "victims".
The number one reason the Arab world hates the U.S. is because it has for more than a half century backed Israel at every turn, against the Palastinians, an arab people suffering under a brutal occupation if they are still in their homeland or who are scattered around the middle east and the world, often in squalid refugee camps, in a diaspora like that inflicted on the Jews so long ago.
Ermm, bollocks. Why doesn't the average Arab hate the Jordanians then? They've slaughtered Palestinians wholesale, what they've done makes anything Israel has pale into insignificance.
America is hated because Arab governments have to direct the rage of the disenfranchised citizens somewhere. The Arab leaders live in luxury while their people live in squalor and say "America made it this way" and the people believe them. As for Arafat, he just wants to kill Jews, there's no reason to what he wants.
The reality is that the techie community has never offered anything beyond "You're rich and I hate you and computers should be outside the law and anyway I'm helping the artists by not paying them."
You are exactly right. There are some compelling anti-DRM arguments - personally I'm annoyed that one particular anti-copy-protection technique used by CD manufacturers to prevent playing in CD-ROM drives also means they won't play in my stereo. Another is the technique that uses autoplay to install some obnoxious software without your consent. But the fact of the matter is, if it wasn't for all the college kids running Napster in their dorms, these technieus would never have been used in the first place - and the arguments of those people do just boil down to "I want professional musicians to record music without being paid" (just as the GNU camp wants professional software engineers to work without pay).
In other words, flash photography can lead to deterioration of an artefact, not to mention changes to the pigment.
But I've visited places where they didn't want you to photograph the stained glass windows! Sacreligious, some might say? Sure, says I, just point me to "thou shalt not photograph in the house of the Lord" in the Bible.
Banning flashes, OK, no problem. In the V&A, there are exhibits in near dark rooms, they're so worried about light damage to priceless art. But banning photography outright is purely a revenue protection measure for postcards and posters.
The more you come back, the more he can shaft you for at the inevitable gift shop.
You're almost right. The reason that many museums, churches, etc forbid photography is that it cuts into postcard and poster sales.
It's a funny balancing act; make the museum unfriendly to photographers and you discourage them from visiting again, after all you can't photograph a whole museum in a day, maybe a better business model is to be photo-friendly and make your money on photographers coming back to complete shoots.
It was an alternate memory management library thing that came with Sun's "Workbench" their (expensive) C/C++ SPARC compiler suite.
:-) ) but I'd never heard of this. I will investigate. Thanks for the tip!
Interesting, I have SPARCworks or SunPro or Forte (whatever it's called this week
Sparc garbage collection shared object library that you could LD_PRELOAD with any C program to make it self healing
Sounds interesting, got a URL for it?
I was looking at the photos linked on your website -- great work. Do you do B&W only on conventional print film, or do you use the D30?
Thanks! Most of the stuff there was shot on film, but some on the D30 and converted to B&W in Capture One.
For draft prints I use an inkjet (Canon i475), just so I can hold them up on the wall and see how they'd look. For "real" prints, I upload a maximum quality JPEG to Photobox and they do the print on a Fuji Frontier on Crystal Archive paper.
aren't worried about the 0.05% of the population that are geeks using Bittorrent
/.!
You're missing the point that busting the early-adopters is a powerful technique for keeping the rest of the population in line. Especially since they're so easy to find, they post about it on
OK then, I am going to trust this guy with my life in a hostile environment. Right.
Why not? It's basic scientific method: cattle are being mutilated, no-one knows who's doing it, let's watch and see if it happens again. It's not like he bought the ranch and turned it into a landing field for UFOs is it?
come on, an f of 2.8 is not that great, unless you live in a really sunny country
Actually, 2.8 is fine on a camera that gives acceptable quality at ISO 400. The lens I use most on my Canon D30 is a Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 and it's fine for available-light shooting indoors. In fact I don't recall when I last used the flash on that camera. Outdoors I drop to ISO 100 or 200.
People are cheap.
But what do paid users get that free users don't? What is it that drives a free user to upgrade? That's what needs to be studied to improve your conversion rate.
Some of Livejournal's stuff is seemingly trivial - for example, paid users can upload a bigger selection of icons to attach to each post. But, it turns out that a lot of Livejournal users are willing to pay in order to have the "perfect" icon on hand for whatever they're posting about. This doesn't even increase the bandwidth bill, since an icon would be attached anyway, and it only modestly increases the storage bill (they're only 100x100 JPEGs). Things like this mean they don't have to bother with banner ads at all.
More is always better when it comes to optical zoom.
Any lens that has more than 3x optical zoom will be making some heavy compromises to do so. You're up against the laws of physics here, if you want to fit such a lens into a portable package. You really would be much better off carrying several lenses (that's what SLRs are for) or two bodies with a different lens on each.
Canon makes a 28-300 lens for people who absolutely cannot change lenses in the field (for example, photojournalists in the middle of a rapidly changing situation) but almost all of its top-quality zoom lenses - the L series - are 2x or 3x. Its consumer zooms are mostly 4x or 5x.
But you may not be as happy to see that quality picture on a sports illustrated double spread for instance.
Sports Illustrated accepts pictures from the Canon 1D (4MP) and the Nikon D1H (2.6MP). Nowadays its staff photographes are mostly using the Canon 1D-II (8MP).
But, the truth is, number of MP doesn't matter. What matters is the size of the photosites on the sensor. A digicam has little photosites 2x2 microns. To get a picture, you need high amplification, so you get noise in the shadows. You've got a cheap lens, so you get chromatic abberation in the highlights. On top of that, you get low overall contrast. A DSLR on the other hand has photosites 7x7 microns or 9x9 microns. No noise in the shadows at "low" ISOs (which are still higher than most digicams), no abberation in the highlights from those nice lenses, faithful colours overall.
I've recently got into SLR digital with a 10D. Along with that I got some 'L' series lenses
I've a D30 with L glass. It's simply not worth me ugrading to a 10D - the photos I get from my 3MP look beautiful printed at 12x8" (using Photoshop to interpolate as necessary). The way the human visual system works, contrast and faithful colour matters more than resolution. All the lamers who bought the Sony F828 have no idea what a mistake that was, they just want more megapixels to boast about - that 2.6MP Nikon completely blows it away.
In general, suppose I'm renting storage space?
Emphasis mine. In that case, you're entitled to whatever your contract with the storage provider entitles you to. Not the same thing at all as a free service.
Anyway, your example doesn't work, because how would you get terabytes of data from A to B over a cheap connection? Answer, you wouldn't, you'd put it on tape and ship the crate of tapes to the storage facility.
If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off
It depends on how much effort was involved, not just to export the data and import it somewhere (performing whatever conversion is required) but to communicate the new URL to everyone.
A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.
Now imagine this was SourceForge...
.pst files (adding one almost-anually) including attachments such as PDFs, JPEGS etc, and it comes to about 600M. So I could probably fit 10 years of email into GMail, with only a minor amount of pruning. That's a lot of stuff to be completely at the whim of a publicly-traded corporation whose #1 priority by law is shareholder value.
Or, indeed, GMail. A gigabyte is a lot. I have all my personal mail (apart from some things like mailing lists which aren't worth archiving) going back to '99 in a half-dozen
Sure web users like stuff for free, but I make it a rule never to depend on anything free. Once money's changed hands, now you have some leverage.
was Isaac Asimov's The Last Question
How amusing that Asimov thought that we'd have interstellar travel before we had a smaller replacement for the transistor! But I don't know whether that makes him an optimist or a pessimist.
Gee, so let's say we poor foreigners get the "export" version of the software, that would really limit us, wouldn't it?
You could always develop your own - which is exactly what ESA is doing with Galileo.
Does anyone know why it was called the 8086, 80386, etc?
'Cos back in the day there was the Intel 4004, then there was the 8008 (which was twice as good!), then there was the 8086. So the 80 comes from there, the next number is just the version, the real question is where the 86 comes from, and I dunno.
Talk about living under big brother's nose!
But Big Brother WOULD be imaging you, and the law states that you MAY NOT be imaged. The exact opposite of Big Brother, in fact.
As an unrelated aside, isn't it tragic that now the average Brit's idea of Big Brother is some stupid TV game show, not a reference to the all-time classic novel?
If a topic interests me, I eat it up with vigour.
Dude, everyone in the world is enthusiastic about doing things they enjoy.
If I'm uninterested or bored with it, I can't even force myself to do it.
That's the difference, see. Other people do things they don't enjoy because they can see the big picture. "Sure I don't like this bit of my job", the reasoning goes, "but if I do it I get paid and I can spend the money on doing what I want to do". Those who can't do things they don't enjoy are the ones who can't see the big picture and as such, they'll fail at whatever they try - there is no worthwhile activity on earth that's fun all the time.
"Ok. We know they're here. And we know that they think we're here. So...their software is going to tell them to take this route..."
Consider GPS - for a long time, the US military alone could use the system to its full precision, third parties received less precise locations. Not less accurate, true, but still not as good as the military. That's what could happen here - any "export version" of the software would be more predictable than the version that the US military itself uses. 'Course, they'd have to be careful that they didn't provide the tech now to a friend who becomes an enemy later...
As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to free speech were taken away
But the right to free speech does not create an obligation for the provision of a soapbox. ClearChannel owns the equipment and says who uses it, as is their right to do so. If the entire radio system were owned by the US gov't, then Stern would have a point, but it doesn't so he doesn't.
Would you agree that all religious propaganda should be banned from public discourse?
I'd certainly like to see some consistency. If a white man were to call for the murder of non-whites, he'd be branded a racist and hounded by the state for "hate crimes". But a moslem calls for the death of Jews and the forces of the state rally to protect his "rights".