You shoot in black and white, that's going to account for some of the differences in our beliefs.
You're right; sometimes in B&W the grain is part of the image, if I want an "old fashioned" feel. For example, I might shoot TRI-X at ISO 1600 and push process it two stops to bring the grain out more. In that case, if I neg scan, I will have several pixels per grain, but that's intentional because I want the grain represented in the final image. There are films like Ilford Delta 100 that have much more pixel-like grains (T-grain), but I rarely use them. All my colour shooting I do with an EOS D30 which prints just fine at 12"x8".
Of course one of the great things about digital is it can handle variations in colour temperature and mixed lighting much better without messing around with filters and stuff. I don't really need to even think about that shooting B&W but if I did, digital would be the winner. That's not related to the resolution of the image, of course, but it is a definite advantage for digital.
I did a quick "review of the 1Ds for film photographers", it still needs some work, but you're welcome to read it.
Interesting, thanks. Great portfolio! What did you do in tech before you went pro?
Re:Tell that to the average person...
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 1
But that's only for 4"x6" though... what about printing bigger, such as at 8"x10" for the especially sentimental shots? Need more pixels to keep close to 300 DPI.
Yeah, but getting large prints done is pretty rare in the consumer space. Pretty much every larger print I've seen displayed by a non-serious-photographer was done professionally (for example, graduation or wedding photos). That's why Kodak et al introduced APS, which for its intended purpose is a great format - that purpose being ease of handling for casual users. Also remember that 4x6 prints are handed around and looked at closely, whereas large prints are mounted on the wall and looked at from a distance of a few feet. You can drop to 200 or even 150 DPI and no-one will notice.
I hate holding down the button and waiting for the camera to decide if it will take the picture or not. I want a digital camera that will take the picture when I press down the button not 1/2 to 3 seconds later.
Then you want a Canon EOS 1Ds or maybe a Nikon D2H. Problem is these cost three or four times as much as their film equivalents.
Digital has a long way to go yet. My EOS3 can shoot 6-7 focussed, metered frames per second, and sustain that for up to 36 frames. Those are 12MP images with my usual films (HP5+ or TRI-X) if I scan the negatives. Or I can just get enlargements done. If there's enough ambient light that I can use a fine grained film like Ilford FP4+ or Kodak T-MAX, and I pay for a pro scan, I can get a 6000x4000 image, 24MP. A digital camera that can do that costs more than the average car and isn't really usable outside of a studio.
Ah, but digital is catching up, you might think. Well, I can upgrade the "sensor" in my film camera just by changing my film, and film technology isn't standing still. Digital wins for turnaround time, but it will be a very very long time before it wins on image quality. You gotta think about which matters more for you.
Re:Tell that to the average person...
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
they proceed to tell me it's going to make their 4x6 prints really nice...
If you get a lab to print your JPEGs, they're probably going to use something like a Fuji Frontier, which uses lasers to print onto photographic paper like Fuji Crystal Archive. This is professional-quality printing, and side by side is noticeably better than what even a good home inkjet can do. A Frontier prints at 300 DPI. Tell 'em that anything above 1800x1200 pixels is wasted anyway!
The article seems to be making the argument that a smaller format sensor won't be as sensitive as a larger sensor, but I'm not sure I buy this.
A smaller sensor is more noisy and more prone to chromatic abberation. Which is why my old EOS D30 with a large 3MP CMOS sensor produces better pictures than Sony's F828, which crams 8MP onto a tiny CCD. 3MP prints great up to 9x6" and is uable at 12x8". It's difficult to get a good print off a CCD camera above 7x5". Larger images don't need to be distorted as much by the lens to be focussed down onto a larger sensor, and that matters. More photons per unit area matters for faithful colour reproduction.
But like another poster said, most of these images are destined to be viewed only on screen, so most of the resolution is wasted. About the only thing it's useful for is giving the freedom to crop.
You CANNOT patent an idea. You can only patent the IMPLEMENTATION of an idea. You're only looking at the title of the patent, which will be something generic like "A method for doing X". That's only to make them easy to search, the thing that matters is the text of the patent. In this case, MS doesn't have a patent on the idea of a filesystem, they have a patent on one specific filesystem, FAT. That's all.
Patent discussions on Slashdot at meaningless, because 99% of the Slashbots think that the title of a patent is the entirety of the patent.
If you look in Oracle's "shared pool", the memory it uses to manage internal operations, you will see something called DIANA - Descriptive Intermediate Annotated Notation for Ada.
France and Germany both seem to have much more liberal hours-of-work and vacation policies.
France* and Germany* have taken it too far, tho'. They have unemployment stuck in the double-digits for years now - their laid-back attitude to work means that their economies simply aren't creating new jobs. That's if anything worse than the US*. Sure you might hate your job there, but at least you have one and can therefore afford the things you do love.
Nations that get it right are the UK*, Holland*, Ireland and possibly Sweden.
(* indicates countries I have worked in).
Hire more people and pay a lower pay rate.
France tried this, by introducing a 35-hour working week. Unfortunately, they assumed that workers are more interchangeable than they actually are. If you're short of say architects and civil engineers anyway, and you restrict their hours artificially, then the knock-on effect is unemployed builders. In the UK, employees who wish to can simply opt out of the working time limit, and as a result the UK economy is strong and unemployment hovers around 2%.
Ask any taxpayer, they'll tell you "yes indeed". Why should government employees have jobs for life, with generous benefits and retirement packages when real workers - you know, the people who actually foot the bill - don't?
As long as profit is the ONLY motive for business, things are going to be bad for employees.
I think you are missing the point somewhat. A corporation is a technology. It's a machine - comprising equipment and human operators - for making money.
What you've said is like saying "so long as moving earth is the only motive for owning a bulldozer, things are going to be bad for builders". Well, no-one wants to move earth just for the sake of it. They want to build something, like houses or a stadium or a school or whatever. A bulldozer is a tool, and a corporation is a tool.
A corporation is a means to an end. It will make money for you, as a shareholder or as an employee - but it cannot tell you how to spend that money to make you happy. YOU have to decide that for yourself.
Me, I work my job, I get paid, I go home at the end of the day and in the evenings and at the weekends and on vacation I spend the money I've earned on doing the stuff I want to do. Ask yourself - are you living to work, or working to live?
there are more powerful and yet less expensive solutions which should be hitting the market soon.
It is unreasonable to compare technologies which aren't even available yet to one that has existed, and been relied on for very serious applications, for decades.
Guess what's the language of choice for HPC? Why, FORTRAN of course. When Oracle wanted a scripting language, did they adapt shell script? No, they picked Ada, merged it with SQL to create PL/SQL. For serious computation or data processing, maturity matters more than buzzword-compliance.
You notice that Wilson Riker has a habit of sitting on control panels when he wants to chat to someone? Yeah, he'd get some feedback if his ass fired the photon torpedoes, wouldn't he?:-)
This new Inuit name represents one of those poor, marginalized, powerless indigenous tribe types. It's like affirmative action for planets
Exactly. We use Greek and Roman names because the Greeks and Romans made huge advances in astronomy. Many of their discoveries and theories, even the names of the individual astronomers, are still commonplace 2000 years later! How many cultures - even our own - can/will still be relevant in 2000 years?
I have a copy of "Inuit Scientific Discoveries" on my bookshelf - it's right next to "French Military Victories"...
How long before people start having a backlash against LOTRs?
It's already started. No Oscars for the cast, and pretty much everyone I've spoken to thinks the third was a huge anticlimax - by the time it finally ends, you're past caring. Same thing happened with the Matrix sequels. Movie trilogies work when they're spread over years, like the original Star Wars, but not when they're forced together.
The movies were OK... but in 20 years time they'll be remade and everyone will have forgotten Jackson's version... Don't believe me? It happened before.
Black billing (I'm not sure what the real term is) is when you fund stuff off-budget by inflating other parts of your budget.
I used to work as a management consultant at a subsidiary of a holding company that owned many media and advertising business. It's called the "champagne and flowers" account, since, as every knows, "creative" people get through a lot of champagne and flowers, and how're you going to audit that? But if you needed funding for pretty much anything, that was where to get it. Other companies call it the "investor relations" account.
Computing simply hasn't reached that point. When people choose web hosting, they don't choose on the basis of how many dollars each GB of bandwidth costs; they choose on the basis of security, reliability, customer service, and generally reputation
It's not quite analogous. Utility computing means that management of capacity is transparent to the end user. Need more power? Just use it, and the datacentre's infrastructure management software will add resources from its reserve pool to your application automatically, and reclaim them when the spike in demand is over. Maybe you need more bandwidth for a couple of hours to cope with a slashdotting, or you need a burst of I/O capacity for a few days at the end of the quarter while you close all your accounts and run reports.
Obviously, your application has to be smart enough to scale as more resource becomes available. Oracle 10g database and app server are capable of this, and IBM have had it for years in their mainframes. It's a lot simpler to do with bandwidth than it is with cpu time.
Think about it like this: you're setting up a workgroup and you get to choose: 10 1-cpu workstations or 1 10-cpu server and 10 X terminals. In the former, everyone gets a full cpu to themselves, but no more than one. In the latter, anyone can, for brief periods, use all 10 cpus, but there is a risk that one user can impact on others if it's not carefully managed. The "careful management" bit is where a utility provider like IBM expects to make its money. It will buy less hardware, but try to run that hardware at close to 100% load all the time, rather than buying lots of hardware and only running it at 100% some of the time.
to donate my dual 2GHz G5's night-time spare cpu cycles to producing the next Pixar movie. That would be cool.
Donate? Pixar is a successful corporation. If you're going to "donate" CPU cycles, give them to a non-profit like protein folding. If Pixar wants your CPU, then let them pay for it, or at least give you free tickets or merchandise for the movie you "helped" with.
Perhaps that anyone claiming `my whatzits encryption can't be broken' they are either idiots or crooks.
No cryptosystem is perfect, but that's not what milspec crypto means. All it does mean is that the military have judged that it is sufficiently difficult to break to suit their purposes. At the moment, that's AES, you can download several implementations of it in several languages if you want to study it.
All "impossible" has ever meant in any context is "technologically/economically unfeasable at the present time".
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Milspec is commonly used to mean that a system is as robust and performant as it can reasonably be made. If I'm going to be spending the night in the wilderness then I want a milspec sleeping bag, a milspec torch, etc, because I know that if it's been tested and approved by the Marines then it's something I can trust with my life - and yes, I am often in situations where your gear failing can get you killed (by freezing or falling or starving or simply getting lost).
Only mankind would be self-centered enough to think of creating something so valuable with the intent to throw it away.
In the camera world, some people call 'em "disposable" and some people call 'em "single use". The former people are wrong; you don't throw it away, you use it once then return it to the manufacturer (I use Ilford) who break it down into its component parts, sends the film back to you and reuses as much of the rest of it as it can. Single use cameras are great; if I'm going out with friends, I don't want to have to lug an SLR around or worry about getting it lost/stolen/broken - all I need to risk is one evening's snaps. In this case, being single-use is a positive advantage over being built to last. So it is with these - now computing power can be deployed in situations where the risk/reward calculation simply didn't permit it before. And it's built by Swedes not Americans, so it'll be environmentally friendly to manufacture and recycleable.
Slashdot Mirror
You shoot in black and white, that's going to account for some of the differences in our beliefs.
You're right; sometimes in B&W the grain is part of the image, if I want an "old fashioned" feel. For example, I might shoot TRI-X at ISO 1600 and push process it two stops to bring the grain out more. In that case, if I neg scan, I will have several pixels per grain, but that's intentional because I want the grain represented in the final image. There are films like Ilford Delta 100 that have much more pixel-like grains (T-grain), but I rarely use them. All my colour shooting I do with an EOS D30 which prints just fine at 12"x8".
Of course one of the great things about digital is it can handle variations in colour temperature and mixed lighting much better without messing around with filters and stuff. I don't really need to even think about that shooting B&W but if I did, digital would be the winner. That's not related to the resolution of the image, of course, but it is a definite advantage for digital.
I did a quick "review of the 1Ds for film photographers", it still needs some work, but you're welcome to read it.
Interesting, thanks. Great portfolio! What did you do in tech before you went pro?
But that's only for 4"x6" though... what about printing bigger, such as at 8"x10" for the especially sentimental shots? Need more pixels to keep close to 300 DPI.
Yeah, but getting large prints done is pretty rare in the consumer space. Pretty much every larger print I've seen displayed by a non-serious-photographer was done professionally (for example, graduation or wedding photos). That's why Kodak et al introduced APS, which for its intended purpose is a great format - that purpose being ease of handling for casual users. Also remember that 4x6 prints are handed around and looked at closely, whereas large prints are mounted on the wall and looked at from a distance of a few feet. You can drop to 200 or even 150 DPI and no-one will notice.
I hate holding down the button and waiting for the camera to decide if it will take the picture or not. I want a digital camera that will take the picture when I press down the button not 1/2 to 3 seconds later.
Then you want a Canon EOS 1Ds or maybe a Nikon D2H. Problem is these cost three or four times as much as their film equivalents.
Digital has a long way to go yet. My EOS3 can shoot 6-7 focussed, metered frames per second, and sustain that for up to 36 frames. Those are 12MP images with my usual films (HP5+ or TRI-X) if I scan the negatives. Or I can just get enlargements done. If there's enough ambient light that I can use a fine grained film like Ilford FP4+ or Kodak T-MAX, and I pay for a pro scan, I can get a 6000x4000 image, 24MP. A digital camera that can do that costs more than the average car and isn't really usable outside of a studio.
Ah, but digital is catching up, you might think. Well, I can upgrade the "sensor" in my film camera just by changing my film, and film technology isn't standing still. Digital wins for turnaround time, but it will be a very very long time before it wins on image quality. You gotta think about which matters more for you.
they proceed to tell me it's going to make their 4x6 prints really nice...
If you get a lab to print your JPEGs, they're probably going to use something like a Fuji Frontier, which uses lasers to print onto photographic paper like Fuji Crystal Archive. This is professional-quality printing, and side by side is noticeably better than what even a good home inkjet can do. A Frontier prints at 300 DPI. Tell 'em that anything above 1800x1200 pixels is wasted anyway!
The article seems to be making the argument that a smaller format sensor won't be as sensitive as a larger sensor, but I'm not sure I buy this.
A smaller sensor is more noisy and more prone to chromatic abberation. Which is why my old EOS D30 with a large 3MP CMOS sensor produces better pictures than Sony's F828, which crams 8MP onto a tiny CCD. 3MP prints great up to 9x6" and is uable at 12x8". It's difficult to get a good print off a CCD camera above 7x5". Larger images don't need to be distorted as much by the lens to be focussed down onto a larger sensor, and that matters. More photons per unit area matters for faithful colour reproduction.
But like another poster said, most of these images are destined to be viewed only on screen, so most of the resolution is wasted. About the only thing it's useful for is giving the freedom to crop.
1. Patent random, generic idea
You CANNOT patent an idea. You can only patent the IMPLEMENTATION of an idea. You're only looking at the title of the patent, which will be something generic like "A method for doing X". That's only to make them easy to search, the thing that matters is the text of the patent. In this case, MS doesn't have a patent on the idea of a filesystem, they have a patent on one specific filesystem, FAT. That's all.
Patent discussions on Slashdot at meaningless, because 99% of the Slashbots think that the title of a patent is the entirety of the patent.
I'd heard PL/SQL was from IBM's PL/1, not Ada.
If you look in Oracle's "shared pool", the memory it uses to manage internal operations, you will see something called DIANA - Descriptive Intermediate Annotated Notation for Ada.
France and Germany both seem to have much more liberal hours-of-work and vacation policies.
France* and Germany* have taken it too far, tho'. They have unemployment stuck in the double-digits for years now - their laid-back attitude to work means that their economies simply aren't creating new jobs. That's if anything worse than the US*. Sure you might hate your job there, but at least you have one and can therefore afford the things you do love.
Nations that get it right are the UK*, Holland*, Ireland and possibly Sweden.
(* indicates countries I have worked in).
Hire more people and pay a lower pay rate.
France tried this, by introducing a 35-hour working week. Unfortunately, they assumed that workers are more interchangeable than they actually are. If you're short of say architects and civil engineers anyway, and you restrict their hours artificially, then the knock-on effect is unemployed builders. In the UK, employees who wish to can simply opt out of the working time limit, and as a result the UK economy is strong and unemployment hovers around 2%.
doesn't that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling?
Ask any taxpayer, they'll tell you "yes indeed". Why should government employees have jobs for life, with generous benefits and retirement packages when real workers - you know, the people who actually foot the bill - don't?
You call us lusers. I can see the smile on your faces when you think about that word.
:-P
I keep telling people, it's an abbreviation of "local user"
As long as profit is the ONLY motive for business, things are going to be bad for employees.
I think you are missing the point somewhat. A corporation is a technology. It's a machine - comprising equipment and human operators - for making money.
What you've said is like saying "so long as moving earth is the only motive for owning a bulldozer, things are going to be bad for builders". Well, no-one wants to move earth just for the sake of it. They want to build something, like houses or a stadium or a school or whatever. A bulldozer is a tool, and a corporation is a tool.
A corporation is a means to an end. It will make money for you, as a shareholder or as an employee - but it cannot tell you how to spend that money to make you happy. YOU have to decide that for yourself.
Me, I work my job, I get paid, I go home at the end of the day and in the evenings and at the weekends and on vacation I spend the money I've earned on doing the stuff I want to do. Ask yourself - are you living to work, or working to live?
there are more powerful and yet less expensive solutions which should be hitting the market soon.
It is unreasonable to compare technologies which aren't even available yet to one that has existed, and been relied on for very serious applications, for decades.
Guess what's the language of choice for HPC? Why, FORTRAN of course. When Oracle wanted a scripting language, did they adapt shell script? No, they picked Ada, merged it with SQL to create PL/SQL. For serious computation or data processing, maturity matters more than buzzword-compliance.
not staring at the keyboard there was no feedback
:-)
You notice that Wilson Riker has a habit of sitting on control panels when he wants to chat to someone? Yeah, he'd get some feedback if his ass fired the photon torpedoes, wouldn't he?
This new Inuit name represents one of those poor, marginalized, powerless indigenous tribe types. It's like affirmative action for planets
Exactly. We use Greek and Roman names because the Greeks and Romans made huge advances in astronomy. Many of their discoveries and theories, even the names of the individual astronomers, are still commonplace 2000 years later! How many cultures - even our own - can/will still be relevant in 2000 years?
I have a copy of "Inuit Scientific Discoveries" on my bookshelf - it's right next to "French Military Victories"...
How long before people start having a backlash against LOTRs?
It's already started. No Oscars for the cast, and pretty much everyone I've spoken to thinks the third was a huge anticlimax - by the time it finally ends, you're past caring. Same thing happened with the Matrix sequels. Movie trilogies work when they're spread over years, like the original Star Wars, but not when they're forced together.
The movies were OK... but in 20 years time they'll be remade and everyone will have forgotten Jackson's version... Don't believe me? It happened before.
What brilliant insight allowed you to interpret an accusation as proof that "a little fraud" took place?
Journalistic integrity... NOT!
Black billing (I'm not sure what the real term is) is when you fund stuff off-budget by inflating other parts of your budget.
I used to work as a management consultant at a subsidiary of a holding company that owned many media and advertising business. It's called the "champagne and flowers" account, since, as every knows, "creative" people get through a lot of champagne and flowers, and how're you going to audit that? But if you needed funding for pretty much anything, that was where to get it. Other companies call it the "investor relations" account.
Computing simply hasn't reached that point. When people choose web hosting, they don't choose on the basis of how many dollars each GB of bandwidth costs; they choose on the basis of security, reliability, customer service, and generally reputation
It's not quite analogous. Utility computing means that management of capacity is transparent to the end user. Need more power? Just use it, and the datacentre's infrastructure management software will add resources from its reserve pool to your application automatically, and reclaim them when the spike in demand is over. Maybe you need more bandwidth for a couple of hours to cope with a slashdotting, or you need a burst of I/O capacity for a few days at the end of the quarter while you close all your accounts and run reports.
Obviously, your application has to be smart enough to scale as more resource becomes available. Oracle 10g database and app server are capable of this, and IBM have had it for years in their mainframes. It's a lot simpler to do with bandwidth than it is with cpu time.
Think about it like this: you're setting up a workgroup and you get to choose: 10 1-cpu workstations or 1 10-cpu server and 10 X terminals. In the former, everyone gets a full cpu to themselves, but no more than one. In the latter, anyone can, for brief periods, use all 10 cpus, but there is a risk that one user can impact on others if it's not carefully managed. The "careful management" bit is where a utility provider like IBM expects to make its money. It will buy less hardware, but try to run that hardware at close to 100% load all the time, rather than buying lots of hardware and only running it at 100% some of the time.
to donate my dual 2GHz G5's night-time spare cpu cycles to producing the next Pixar movie. That would be cool.
Donate? Pixar is a successful corporation. If you're going to "donate" CPU cycles, give them to a non-profit like protein folding. If Pixar wants your CPU, then let them pay for it, or at least give you free tickets or merchandise for the movie you "helped" with.
Perhaps that anyone claiming `my whatzits encryption can't be broken' they are either idiots or crooks.
No cryptosystem is perfect, but that's not what milspec crypto means. All it does mean is that the military have judged that it is sufficiently difficult to break to suit their purposes. At the moment, that's AES, you can download several implementations of it in several languages if you want to study it.
All "impossible" has ever meant in any context is "technologically/economically unfeasable at the present time".
GET /...shellcode.../bin/passwd HTTP/1.0
Yeah, good point. 'Course if you can do that on a box, it's got more fundamental problems to worry about...
Where is this stated?
/bin/passwd without having already logged in. Perhaps you are thinking of /bin/login?
I can't think of a case in which one can run
sigh.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Milspec is commonly used to mean that a system is as robust and performant as it can reasonably be made. If I'm going to be spending the night in the wilderness then I want a milspec sleeping bag, a milspec torch, etc, because I know that if it's been tested and approved by the Marines then it's something I can trust with my life - and yes, I am often in situations where your gear failing can get you killed (by freezing or falling or starving or simply getting lost).
Only mankind would be self-centered enough to think of creating something so valuable with the intent to throw it away.
In the camera world, some people call 'em "disposable" and some people call 'em "single use". The former people are wrong; you don't throw it away, you use it once then return it to the manufacturer (I use Ilford) who break it down into its component parts, sends the film back to you and reuses as much of the rest of it as it can. Single use cameras are great; if I'm going out with friends, I don't want to have to lug an SLR around or worry about getting it lost/stolen/broken - all I need to risk is one evening's snaps. In this case, being single-use is a positive advantage over being built to last. So it is with these - now computing power can be deployed in situations where the risk/reward calculation simply didn't permit it before. And it's built by Swedes not Americans, so it'll be environmentally friendly to manufacture and recycleable.
seriously doubt he'll be making over $100K USD after 5 years as a plumber.
At present exchange rates, a good plumber with 10 or so years experience in the UK makes over USD 100k/year.