Parent is correct that FFVII is actually a low-point in graphics. The 2D games that came before it were at the peak of development, whereas FFVII was a very clunky attempt at the next generation, graphically. It's really obviously bad. It doesn't even really "work", graphically.
Nobody knew how to do 3D games at the time. FFVII field graphics used hand-drawn 2D backgrounds, with 3D animated characters overlaid on them. Other contemporary games did the exact opposite (like Xenogears), and had 3D environments but 2D characters running around on them--that worked out much better IMO, because 3D character animation was definitely not there yet. The FFVII battle graphics are totally different from the field graphics, because that was acceptable at the time, but FFVII itself should have convinced everyone that wasn't going to keep working out in the 3D era. And just to make things more jarring FFVII threw in lots of pre-rendered videos, which sometimes used models from the battle graphics and sometimes from the field graphics. It's really terrible.
The glass-half-empty view, FFVII was the worst of both eras. On the other hand, there were several things that still make people look at it and say it's good or better than modern games. Basically wherever FFVII retained things from the previous era it wins, so the glass-half-full view it is a "modern" game but one that isn't fully devolved.
--no voice acting. All dialog is text. This is a bonus because voice acting sucks in this type of game. --it used a full, explorable overworld map, the way previous 2D games did. This pretty much got dropped in later games. The overworld map was one of the good carry-overs before they realized they could cheap out and players would give them a pass. --it retained the use and the central importance of the score. The music score was extremely important in 2D games as a storytelling device. Modern games sometimes have very good scores, but they are situated in a role more similar to movie scores; as accompaniment. FFVII used theme music the "old" way. --The whole story/gameplay was not fully watered down. It was starting to show signs; since the difficulty is pretty easy and mechanics are fairly simple. But you still need to play it hard and get the special characters and the extra cut-scenes in order to fully play it. Modern games are much more hand-holdy.
This assertion itself illustrates the the disconnect in culture and assumptions.
You are arguing from the typical, venerable, valid-in-post-enlightenment-culture dynamic in which ideas propogate on their own merit. In such an environment, the adaptive strategy for dealing with bad ideas is to ignore them and let them die on their own lack of merit, or "burn out" as you put it. This has been known to work as long as the immunity mechanisms against bad ideas are intact, and are capable of dealing with the particular strain of ideological pathogen.
This strategy is not effective against ideologies not in that set, such as ones that spread themselves by the sword or by intimidation or in populations that believe ideas for reasons disconnected from the merit of the idea itself. The fact that said ideologies are bad or invalid or incompatible with civilization as we know it is not directly relevant to whether they will catch on or not. Such ideologies have spread themselves very effectively and they don't care that they are regression or that they are harmful. Effective disease agents dont care that they make the host organism sick, they are effective by definition if they propogate themselves, and just ignoring the symptoms and counting on typical immune mechanisms to make them go away doesn't always work.
Westerners think that ignoring ideas or debunking them is going to always work, but those techniques only work in certain contexts and against certain threats. Ghandi's techniques were only effective because he was operating against the British Empire and pushing their buttons, for example.
The West is not able to fight back bad ideas because, sometimes in an attempt to stop low level autoimmune problems, she has ingested massive doses of immune-suppression; immune mechanisms such as the nuclear family, shared but diverse Christian heritage, societal structures are weakened, made obsolete by technology, or dismantled, and ideological infections thought to be conquered are breaking back out in the unprepared populace, and getting some rest and drinking some fluids until it burns out may not work.
I am a different poster from gp. I was only responding to the preposterous statement that a digital back or a separate digital camera could replace Polaroid-type proofs. There is no real replacement. I personally shoot 4x5 and 6x7/6x9 and am quite upset about losing instant proofs. I am developing a scheme involving lightproof black plastic bag, xray film or RC paper, monobath developer, and a field changing-bag, but not looking forward to it.
Polaroid proofs allow a final check of everything, because they sit exactly where the "real" film does. Everything from exposure, including if you shutter is running slow or not opening, to composition, including hard to spot objects that intrude into the image, or bellows that might sag into the light path in the camera, or the aperture you forgot to stop down, or the shiny spot on the model's forehead that will ruin the shot but only appears at the specific angle of the camera lens...there is no substitute for Polaroid proofs, and there won't be until full-size digital sensors are impossibly cheap, and even then, they will not be as convenent as something that requires no batteries and gives an instant original that you can write notes on.
They are probably waiting for the price to go up. There are wells all over the Midwest that have been prepped for drilling but not drilled, or drilled but not fracked, or fracked but are being held idle, because the economics of their existence was calculated on $80+/barrel oil. The companies are letting them sit hoping the price goes up so they can make more. It's easy to project how long this is worth doing given a certain amount of volatility in the price and the fact that demand will always be there, in fact, the current glut of NG in North America means applications are being converted to run NG, possibly boosting the coming price upswing.
If you scan the pages in batches consistently, the crop and rotate parameters will be the same for all the pages in a batch. Then you just have to tweak the parameters once per batch. If you use a tripod and don't bump the camera, the batches can be big.
I wrote a script to do this exact thing. You put the crop, rotate, etc. parameters into a text file which you can save along with the batch of images. It also supports multicropping each image so that you can use it to build indexes of negative and slide pages, which is why I really wrote it. I can take pictures of dozens of Printfile pages of slides or negatives and auto-crop out the individual images to build an index of low-res images for browsing. I also use it for batch - scanning photo prints at full resolution and just trim the edges off,fix slight rotating etc.
https://github.com/Fasrad/photopticon
The IM crop command basically does all the work. It is a very powerful program.
I use LaTeX reports on a webserver instead of a paper lab notebook. One, I can't lose it. Two, paper is filthy and I work in a cleanroom. In the lab I am never far from a computer with putty or RDP. Plaintext means I can grep years worth of reports to query what is effectively my cyborg memory. I use hyperref to create pdf hyperlinks, images are no problem. Provenance concerns are handled by my build script which commits everything to a git repository multiple times per day. If I want to scribble stuff without publishing it I just comment it out. The documents are available on the webserver for anyone to see.
Which is exactly the outcome ACA was designed for: a broken system leads to future single-payer, since people will accept that when anything looks brilliant in comparison to ACA.
Cree (the LED company) also makes high power GaN RF chips. The power and RF chip division is about to be spun off into an unnamed company in a few months.
Interestingly, when I was going to UTD, wearing shorts in their little amateur hour cleanroom was a serious safety violation; of all the dozen or so commercial cleanrooms I have been in since then, shorts were allowed with no problem. Some of them even have low-crotch clean suits so you can wear full-length skirts....they remind me of those wing suits.
I worked at DMOS5 from 08 to '12, having contact with DFAB, DMOS6 and RFAB. On the fab side, jeans are normal up to the branch management level, easily, and business casual is normal even for VPs. I first started there I went out and bought BC clothes just in case but after I realized I would be out dressing my hypervisor went back to jeans and a button down. It's a big company though.
Selling and possessing chunks of aluminum (aluminium) is legal.
Selling/possessing chunks of aluminum in a certain shape will land you time in a FPMITA prison.
They have made an economical mini mill economical that makes the chunk of aluminum. In America, we believe that it's only illegal if you get caught, and so these folks fancy themselves as finding a great hack.
This is why ships still have gyros. GPS is too handy not to use, but I'm pretty sure most large oceangoing vessels also have navigation gyros. The question then is, what happens when GPS gets spoofed...does the system/crew assume the GPS is broken or the gyro broken?
Laws should be tracked, with dependencies, by an apt-like system. Anyone should be able to query what is illegal, without a lawyer. Automated systems can flag unfairness, conflicting laws, and obsolescence.
Lawyers and judges' jobs would be reduced to addressing bugs.
The whole lot should be committed to a git repository (git-blame anyone?). New laws should take the form of pull requests.
According to my "the cheapest thing is the best for the environment" theory, this was easily predictable.
Energy means fossil fuels. To a first approximation, other energy sources can be ignored. And in the modern economy, money ~ energy. When fuel (i.e. energy) prices go up, the effect ripples through the whole supply chain, touching absolutely everything that is manufactured and shipped. The costs associated with most products are dominated not by human labor costs but by energy costs. And since our modern agriculture essentially exchanges energy for food, even human labor comes down to energy costs.
Therefore, TO A FIRST APPROXIMATION, the cheaper of two alternatives is better for the environment.
Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies. If they were really more economical, they would already be popular. Ergo, per The Theory, they are worse for the environment.
I use Gvoice for my personal calls and messages on my work phone. This is a good system because I can keep my number when I change jobs, but still use my work phone which I have to carry anyway.
I'm honestly surprised how bad the user experience is when using the Voice app for iPhone 4. I seriously wonder if I got some kind of counterfeit app (if that would even be possible), the usability is THAT bad.
Gvoice text messages pop up on the lock screen instantly, but then when I go to view them, I have to open the Gvoice app (slow) then "refresh conversations" (very slow) in order to even read the full message again. There is no excuse for this since if the phone displayed the text on the lock screen, what could I possibly be waiting for? How long can it take to display a few kB of text that has already downloaded?
For texting, when in a "conversation view", new texts almost never update properly. The only way to update the conversation view is to scroll to the TOP of the conversation (even though the newest messages are at the _bottom_!) in order to trigger the "updating conversations..." function. Of course a single conversation can be many pages long. Which means the fastest way to refresh the conversation (which I shouldn't have to be doing, since the text already displayed on banner and the lock screen...) I still have to navigate back to inbox and refresh, and wait. WTF? This is such a usability bug that I can't believe anyone would ship it.
Text conversations are not threaded properly at all. I have to constantly delete old conversation branches.
For voice, there is NO proper call history. NO CALL HISTORY!!?? There is a "dialer" and a "quick dial" but no way to call someone back based on history. And you can't revert back to the iPhone's proper call history either, because the numbers that show up in the iPhone history are random numbers to google servers. I honestly never thought I would use a phone that did not have a usable call history.
That's the good thing about "money"...it solves the coincidence-of-wants problem, which is why people prefer to be paid in money instead of perks. However, with the government standing in the middle between your and your employer, you will never get a larger paycheck equal to the perks. Giving you the perks is more tax-efficient than paying you enough to buy the perks yourself.
Spending $30/(month*employee) on candy bars can simply be written off as an expense. If the company wanted to pay the employees enough to buy their own candy bars, they would actually have to pay all their people $50/(mo*employee) or so that they have $30 left after income tax. And you won't get a group rate on candy.
All things being equal, perks are a better value. Hope you like going to the gym that your employer uses for its gym membership program, hope you enjoy the coffee they buy, the healthcare plan that they offer, and the groceries at the company store (not quite, but we are getting there).
Perhaps more illustratively, you can buy 5-10 such guns for the price of a 3D printer, have a gun that works (better than a printed gun) and does not need assembled.
I have a fairly universal AVR firmware that I use for electric brewing. It's not fully automatic, just a way to do simple temperature and boil control. My brew setup is very KISS and this is the sweet spot for me.
After re-reading your post, I think that you may have been saying (when you emphasized that a PRINT is an object) that the physical photograph is objective/physical, but the image conveyed by the photograph is not an object. And if so, I agree with you completely; this is a point I have never wavered from. This is what causes people to think that photographs and information images are similar things--they both are typically used to convey visual information--but they are not similar, anymore than any other physical thing can be similar to information. In order for them to be similar things, they would first have to both be THINGS in the first place. Books and eBooks, for example, are not similar things, in fact, they both aren't even things.
If you think that only prints (Nth-generation photographs; N>1) are "photographs" then you are using a different definition of the word than I am. I am using the term "photograph(1)" to mean "an object onto which light has caused a physical change, forming a visible image". This means that photographic negatives, photographic prints, photograms, blueprints (the old kind) and color slides are all examples of "photographs(1)". An undeveloped negative or print is not yet a photograph, because the image is not yet visible until it's developed--you could call it a potential photograph, but if you admit that then everything is a potential photograph.
I agree that a print (assuming it's a photographic print i.e. made with light) is a photograph. I also agree that making a photograph is a process, but I don't see what point you are trying to make there, other than to state the obvious. We already agreed that the image formed by a photograph is subject to all kinds of interpretation by both the creator and the viewer, and that both photographs and "information images" are similar in that regard. It still seems like are trying to refute the argument that photographic images are somehow more veracious that informational ones, which is a point I never tried to make in the first place.
You are refuting a point I did not make. Please re-read the rest of the sentence you quoted: " The extent to which [they] can be said to represent reality is totally open (see Jerry Uelsmann) and I'm not talking about that kind of interpretation in the "viewing space" ".
So I specifically addressed the point you think you are refuting and agreed with you on that point--the point being that neither the images experienced when viewing photographs(1) or digital images(2) has any relation to reality apart from its presentation by the artist and reception and interpretation by the viewer. There is nothing about an image viewed by silver gelatin that makes it more veracious or reality-representing. I never said that and never will.
My central point is only that photographs(1) are objects, thus it is possible to apply the concept of an "original" to photograph(1)s, which can exist in objective reality as objects, however reality-representing their images may or may not be, and however useful or useless that "property of realness" may be (and I agree that it is of quite limited usefulness) in ascertaining the extent to which said photograph(1)'s image may be a representation of reality. That is all. Many people (yourself apparently included) do not observe this distinction, and I think this is a category error which leads to things like "unmanipulated photo(2) contests" which I think are comical in their not-even-wrongness.
That's exactly what I always do to digitize my darkroom prints...I use a Nikon D70 on a copy stand, which is much much easier for me than using a flatbed scanner. When I post images of my prints online, the images say "Nikon D70" in the EXIF data, even for an image of a cyanotype. That's just how I digitize my prints for posting on the web. So I can show you plenty of "raw files" "proving" that my images were "unmanipulated"...and I guess you are supposed to believe me that I found an alternate universe that is bluish monochrome.
When I see any modern "photo contests" that require images to be "unmanipulated", I just shake my head. Not because I don't think that manipulation is good or bad, but because I don't think the idea of "manipulation" or "unmanipulation" is even a coherent concept in the context of what I call "information images", colloquially called "photographs(2)", which by their nature are manipulated and interpreted, and the authenticity of such information images has no meaning apart from the manipulative choices of the artist/programmer(s). A digital image can be considered no more or less authentic than a painting. They must always be considered interpretations because that's what they are, by their very nature; they have no nature apart from such interpretive manipulation; they must be interpreted to even be experienced. The common man only clings to the idea of an "unmanipulated image" because he thinks digital images are some different type of photograph(1), when in reality an "information image" (photograph(2)) is actually a fundamentally different (no matter how superficially similar) thing to a physical photograph(1). This is an example of the kind of "counterproductive metaphor or analogy" that Dijkstra talks about in one of his EWDs about radical innovations. The shift from photography to digital imaging is actually what EWD considers a "radical innovation" not some kind of evolution, and failure to understand this, evidenced by the fact that the common man thinks that digital images and photograph(1)s are similar things, is a tragic, limiting and counterproductive semiotic "false friend" that is only the more inevitable because the two things are so superficially similar.
Photographs(1) can be manipulated, and the extent to which their image can be said to represent reality is totally open (see Jerry Uelsmann) and I'm not talking about that kind of interpretation in the "viewing space". I'm just saying that in the objective space, the ideas of an "authentic" or "original" photograph(1) at least is a concept that can be understood, that COULD make sense, however useful or useless it may be. With digital photographs(2), the concept does not philosophically exist (in my opinion) and only exists as some kind of mass illusion, where people declare an photograph(2) "unauthentic" because "I know it when I see it" (except they demonstrably do not).
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is correct that FFVII is actually a low-point in graphics. The 2D games that came before it were at the peak of development, whereas FFVII was a very clunky attempt at the next generation, graphically. It's really obviously bad. It doesn't even really "work", graphically.
Nobody knew how to do 3D games at the time. FFVII field graphics used hand-drawn 2D backgrounds, with 3D animated characters overlaid on them. Other contemporary games did the exact opposite (like Xenogears), and had 3D environments but 2D characters running around on them--that worked out much better IMO, because 3D character animation was definitely not there yet. The FFVII battle graphics are totally different from the field graphics, because that was acceptable at the time, but FFVII itself should have convinced everyone that wasn't going to keep working out in the 3D era. And just to make things more jarring FFVII threw in lots of pre-rendered videos, which sometimes used models from the battle graphics and sometimes from the field graphics. It's really terrible.
The glass-half-empty view, FFVII was the worst of both eras. On the other hand, there were several things that still make people look at it and say it's good or better than modern games. Basically wherever FFVII retained things from the previous era it wins, so the glass-half-full view it is a "modern" game but one that isn't fully devolved.
--no voice acting. All dialog is text. This is a bonus because voice acting sucks in this type of game.
--it used a full, explorable overworld map, the way previous 2D games did. This pretty much got dropped in later games. The overworld map was one of the good carry-overs before they realized they could cheap out and players would give them a pass.
--it retained the use and the central importance of the score. The music score was extremely important in 2D games as a storytelling device. Modern games sometimes have very good scores, but they are situated in a role more similar to movie scores; as accompaniment. FFVII used theme music the "old" way.
--The whole story/gameplay was not fully watered down. It was starting to show signs; since the difficulty is pretty easy and mechanics are fairly simple. But you still need to play it hard and get the special characters and the extra cut-scenes in order to fully play it. Modern games are much more hand-holdy.
obtw Aeris dies.
This assertion itself illustrates the the disconnect in culture and assumptions.
You are arguing from the typical, venerable, valid-in-post-enlightenment-culture dynamic in which ideas propogate on their own merit. In such an environment, the adaptive strategy for dealing with bad ideas is to ignore them and let them die on their own lack of merit, or "burn out" as you put it. This has been known to work as long as the immunity mechanisms against bad ideas are intact, and are capable of dealing with the particular strain of ideological pathogen.
This strategy is not effective against ideologies not in that set, such as ones that spread themselves by the sword or by intimidation or in populations that believe ideas for reasons disconnected from the merit of the idea itself. The fact that said ideologies are bad or invalid or incompatible with civilization as we know it is not directly relevant to whether they will catch on or not. Such ideologies have spread themselves very effectively and they don't care that they are regression or that they are harmful. Effective disease agents dont care that they make the host organism sick, they are effective by definition if they propogate themselves, and just ignoring the symptoms and counting on typical immune mechanisms to make them go away doesn't always work.
Westerners think that ignoring ideas or debunking them is going to always work, but those techniques only work in certain contexts and against certain threats. Ghandi's techniques were only effective because he was operating against the British Empire and pushing their buttons, for example.
The West is not able to fight back bad ideas because, sometimes in an attempt to stop low level autoimmune problems, she has ingested massive doses of immune-suppression; immune mechanisms such as the nuclear family, shared but diverse Christian heritage, societal structures are weakened, made obsolete by technology, or dismantled, and ideological infections thought to be conquered are breaking back out in the unprepared populace, and getting some rest and drinking some fluids until it burns out may not work.
The preferred nomenclature is "not even wrong".
I am a different poster from gp. I was only responding to the preposterous statement that a digital back or a separate digital camera could replace Polaroid-type proofs. There is no real replacement. I personally shoot 4x5 and 6x7/6x9 and am quite upset about losing instant proofs. I am developing a scheme involving lightproof black plastic bag, xray film or RC paper, monobath developer, and a field changing-bag, but not looking forward to it.
Spoken like a true non-photographer.
Polaroid proofs allow a final check of everything, because they sit exactly where the "real" film does. Everything from exposure, including if you shutter is running slow or not opening, to composition, including hard to spot objects that intrude into the image, or bellows that might sag into the light path in the camera, or the aperture you forgot to stop down, or the shiny spot on the model's forehead that will ruin the shot but only appears at the specific angle of the camera lens...there is no substitute for Polaroid proofs, and there won't be until full-size digital sensors are impossibly cheap, and even then, they will not be as convenent as something that requires no batteries and gives an instant original that you can write notes on.
"I don't understand it, so it must be worthless"
They are probably waiting for the price to go up. There are wells all over the Midwest that have been prepped for drilling but not drilled, or drilled but not fracked, or fracked but are being held idle, because the economics of their existence was calculated on $80+/barrel oil. The companies are letting them sit hoping the price goes up so they can make more. It's easy to project how long this is worth doing given a certain amount of volatility in the price and the fact that demand will always be there, in fact, the current glut of NG in North America means applications are being converted to run NG, possibly boosting the coming price upswing.
If you scan the pages in batches consistently, the crop and rotate parameters will be the same for all the pages in a batch. Then you just have to tweak the parameters once per batch. If you use a tripod and don't bump the camera, the batches can be big.
I wrote a script to do this exact thing. You put the crop, rotate, etc. parameters into a text file which you can save along with the batch of images. It also supports multicropping each image so that you can use it to build indexes of negative and slide pages, which is why I really wrote it. I can take pictures of dozens of Printfile pages of slides or negatives and auto-crop out the individual images to build an index of low-res images for browsing. I also use it for batch - scanning photo prints at full resolution and just trim the edges off,fix slight rotating etc.
https://github.com/Fasrad/photopticon
The IM crop command basically does all the work. It is a very powerful program.
Jury nullification?
I use LaTeX reports on a webserver instead of a paper lab notebook. One, I can't lose it. Two, paper is filthy and I work in a cleanroom. In the lab I am never far from a computer with putty or RDP.
Plaintext means I can grep years worth of reports to query what is effectively my cyborg memory. I use hyperref to create pdf hyperlinks, images are no problem. Provenance concerns are handled by my build script which commits everything to a git repository multiple times per day. If I want to scribble stuff without publishing it I just comment it out. The documents are available on the webserver for anyone to see.
Which is exactly the outcome ACA was designed for: a broken system leads to future single-payer, since people will accept that when anything looks brilliant in comparison to ACA.
Cree (the LED company) also makes high power GaN RF chips. The power and RF chip division is about to be spun off into an unnamed company in a few months.
Interestingly, when I was going to UTD, wearing shorts in their little amateur hour cleanroom was a serious safety violation; of all the dozen or so commercial cleanrooms I have been in since then, shorts were allowed with no problem. Some of them even have low-crotch clean suits so you can wear full-length skirts. ...they remind me of those wing suits.
I worked at DMOS5 from 08 to '12, having contact with DFAB, DMOS6 and RFAB. On the fab side, jeans are normal up to the branch management level, easily, and business casual is normal even for VPs. I first started there I went out and bought BC clothes just in case but after I realized I would be out dressing my hypervisor went back to jeans and a button down. It's a big company though.
Selling and possessing chunks of aluminum (aluminium) is legal.
Selling/possessing chunks of aluminum in a certain shape will land you time in a FPMITA prison.
They have made an economical mini mill economical that makes the chunk of aluminum. In America, we believe that it's only illegal if you get caught, and so these folks fancy themselves as finding a great hack.
This is why ships still have gyros. GPS is too handy not to use, but I'm pretty sure most large oceangoing vessels also have navigation gyros. The question then is, what happens when GPS gets spoofed...does the system/crew assume the GPS is broken or the gyro broken?
Laws should be tracked, with dependencies, by an apt-like system. Anyone should be able to query what is illegal, without a lawyer. Automated systems can flag unfairness, conflicting laws, and obsolescence.
Lawyers and judges' jobs would be reduced to addressing bugs.
The whole lot should be committed to a git repository (git-blame anyone?). New laws should take the form of pull requests.
According to my "the cheapest thing is the best for the environment" theory, this was easily predictable.
Energy means fossil fuels. To a first approximation, other energy sources can be ignored. And in the modern economy, money ~ energy. When fuel (i.e. energy) prices go up, the effect ripples through the whole supply chain, touching absolutely everything that is manufactured and shipped. The costs associated with most products are dominated not by human labor costs but by energy costs. And since our modern agriculture essentially exchanges energy for food, even human labor comes down to energy costs.
Therefore, TO A FIRST APPROXIMATION, the cheaper of two alternatives is better for the environment.
Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies. If they were really more economical, they would already be popular. Ergo, per The Theory, they are worse for the environment.
I use Gvoice for my personal calls and messages on my work phone. This is a good system because I can keep my number when I change jobs, but still use my work phone which I have to carry anyway.
I'm honestly surprised how bad the user experience is when using the Voice app for iPhone 4. I seriously wonder if I got some kind of counterfeit app (if that would even be possible), the usability is THAT bad.
Gvoice text messages pop up on the lock screen instantly, but then when I go to view them, I have to open the Gvoice app (slow) then "refresh conversations" (very slow) in order to even read the full message again. There is no excuse for this since if the phone displayed the text on the lock screen, what could I possibly be waiting for? How long can it take to display a few kB of text that has already downloaded?
For texting, when in a "conversation view", new texts almost never update properly. The only way to update the conversation view is to scroll to the TOP of the conversation (even though the newest messages are at the _bottom_!) in order to trigger the "updating conversations..." function. Of course a single conversation can be many pages long. Which means the fastest way to refresh the conversation (which I shouldn't have to be doing, since the text already displayed on banner and the lock screen...) I still have to navigate back to inbox and refresh, and wait. WTF? This is such a usability bug that I can't believe anyone would ship it.
Text conversations are not threaded properly at all. I have to constantly delete old conversation branches.
For voice, there is NO proper call history. NO CALL HISTORY!!?? There is a "dialer" and a "quick dial" but no way to call someone back based on history. And you can't revert back to the iPhone's proper call history either, because the numbers that show up in the iPhone history are random numbers to google servers. I honestly never thought I would use a phone that did not have a usable call history.
That's the good thing about "money"...it solves the coincidence-of-wants problem, which is why people prefer to be paid in money instead of perks. However, with the government standing in the middle between your and your employer, you will never get a larger paycheck equal to the perks. Giving you the perks is more tax-efficient than paying you enough to buy the perks yourself.
Spending $30/(month*employee) on candy bars can simply be written off as an expense. If the company wanted to pay the employees enough to buy their own candy bars, they would actually have to pay all their people $50/(mo*employee) or so that they have $30 left after income tax. And you won't get a group rate on candy.
All things being equal, perks are a better value. Hope you like going to the gym that your employer uses for its gym membership program, hope you enjoy the coffee they buy, the healthcare plan that they offer, and the groceries at the company store (not quite, but we are getting there).
Perhaps more illustratively, you can buy 5-10 such guns for the price of a 3D printer, have a gun that works (better than a printed gun) and does not need assembled.
I have a fairly universal AVR firmware that I use for electric brewing. It's not fully automatic, just a way to do simple temperature and boil control. My brew setup is very KISS and this is the sweet spot for me.
https://github.com/Fasrad/brewtroller/tree/fancy
GPL of course
After re-reading your post, I think that you may have been saying (when you emphasized that a PRINT is an object) that the physical photograph is objective/physical, but the image conveyed by the photograph is not an object. And if so, I agree with you completely; this is a point I have never wavered from. This is what causes people to think that photographs and information images are similar things--they both are typically used to convey visual information--but they are not similar, anymore than any other physical thing can be similar to information. In order for them to be similar things, they would first have to both be THINGS in the first place. Books and eBooks, for example, are not similar things, in fact, they both aren't even things.
If you think that only prints (Nth-generation photographs; N>1) are "photographs" then you are using a different definition of the word than I am. I am using the term "photograph(1)" to mean "an object onto which light has caused a physical change, forming a visible image". This means that photographic negatives, photographic prints, photograms, blueprints (the old kind) and color slides are all examples of "photographs(1)". An undeveloped negative or print is not yet a photograph, because the image is not yet visible until it's developed--you could call it a potential photograph, but if you admit that then everything is a potential photograph.
I agree that a print (assuming it's a photographic print i.e. made with light) is a photograph. I also agree that making a photograph is a process, but I don't see what point you are trying to make there, other than to state the obvious. We already agreed that the image formed by a photograph is subject to all kinds of interpretation by both the creator and the viewer, and that both photographs and "information images" are similar in that regard. It still seems like are trying to refute the argument that photographic images are somehow more veracious that informational ones, which is a point I never tried to make in the first place.
You are refuting a point I did not make. Please re-read the rest of the sentence you quoted: " The extent to which [they] can be said to represent reality is totally open (see Jerry Uelsmann) and I'm not talking about that kind of interpretation in the "viewing space" ".
So I specifically addressed the point you think you are refuting and agreed with you on that point--the point being that neither the images experienced when viewing photographs(1) or digital images(2) has any relation to reality apart from its presentation by the artist and reception and interpretation by the viewer. There is nothing about an image viewed by silver gelatin that makes it more veracious or reality-representing. I never said that and never will.
My central point is only that photographs(1) are objects, thus it is possible to apply the concept of an "original" to photograph(1)s, which can exist in objective reality as objects, however reality-representing their images may or may not be, and however useful or useless that "property of realness" may be (and I agree that it is of quite limited usefulness) in ascertaining the extent to which said photograph(1)'s image may be a representation of reality. That is all. Many people (yourself apparently included) do not observe this distinction, and I think this is a category error which leads to things like "unmanipulated photo(2) contests" which I think are comical in their not-even-wrongness.
That's exactly what I always do to digitize my darkroom prints...I use a Nikon D70 on a copy stand, which is much much easier for me than using a flatbed scanner. When I post images of my prints online, the images say "Nikon D70" in the EXIF data, even for an image of a cyanotype. That's just how I digitize my prints for posting on the web. So I can show you plenty of "raw files" "proving" that my images were "unmanipulated"...and I guess you are supposed to believe me that I found an alternate universe that is bluish monochrome.
When I see any modern "photo contests" that require images to be "unmanipulated", I just shake my head. Not because I don't think that manipulation is good or bad, but because I don't think the idea of "manipulation" or "unmanipulation" is even a coherent concept in the context of what I call "information images", colloquially called "photographs(2)", which by their nature are manipulated and interpreted, and the authenticity of such information images has no meaning apart from the manipulative choices of the artist/programmer(s). A digital image can be considered no more or less authentic than a painting. They must always be considered interpretations because that's what they are, by their very nature; they have no nature apart from such interpretive manipulation; they must be interpreted to even be experienced. The common man only clings to the idea of an "unmanipulated image" because he thinks digital images are some different type of photograph(1), when in reality an "information image" (photograph(2)) is actually a fundamentally different (no matter how superficially similar) thing to a physical photograph(1). This is an example of the kind of "counterproductive metaphor or analogy" that Dijkstra talks about in one of his EWDs about radical innovations. The shift from photography to digital imaging is actually what EWD considers a "radical innovation" not some kind of evolution, and failure to understand this, evidenced by the fact that the common man thinks that digital images and photograph(1)s are similar things, is a tragic, limiting and counterproductive semiotic "false friend" that is only the more inevitable because the two things are so superficially similar.
Photographs(1) can be manipulated, and the extent to which their image can be said to represent reality is totally open (see Jerry Uelsmann) and I'm not talking about that kind of interpretation in the "viewing space". I'm just saying that in the objective space, the ideas of an "authentic" or "original" photograph(1) at least is a concept that can be understood, that COULD make sense, however useful or useless it may be. With digital photographs(2), the concept does not philosophically exist (in my opinion) and only exists as some kind of mass illusion, where people declare an photograph(2) "unauthentic" because "I know it when I see it" (except they demonstrably do not).