If you want to buy sub 1-metre resolution satellite pics just go the SPOT consortium in France. Any interested parties will BUY their data at FAR greater resolution than what Google supplies.
Do they have Dick Cheney's house? Because a friend told me he has really nice roof tiles...and I, uh, can't quite make 'em out in Google Earth.
(Waves at the NSA.)
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O
on
Adobe Lightroom Review
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you want it done right, have it done by professionals.
Both are studios that employ long-time professional photographers who apply their knowledge of photography and digital printing to make the best prints possible from your photographs. Calypso also offers workshops taught by people like Bill Atkinson and Charlie Cramer, in case you want to edit your own images and simply output them on printers like the LIghtjet, Chromira, or lage format Epson 76/9600 or K3 printers.
Take a look at the client lists of each company - they are the top tier for this kind of work and it shows. Frankly, most working photographers hardly have time to print their own work, and the best photographers simply don't have time to fool with images once they're made in camera.
The biggest mistakes most photographers make when trying to become professionals is the failure to let someone else take responsibility for printing those images (while you stay in the feedback loop, of course) and the refusal of "tight" artists to belly up and pay for that service.
In other words, If you have a day job to pay for your photography habit, and provided you have the requisite talent to succeed at your chosen niche of photography, it will be nearly impossible to become a full-time professional photographer until and unless you hire an employee to do all the work you don't have time for, or hire a company to print your images for you. (No picture makes a straight print.) Otherwise, you will spend your whole life in a darkroom or behind a monitor instead of making new images - which is the lifeblood of a photographer.
How do I know all this? I am a large format photographer who prints digitally. And I have worked with all the companies linked above, either as an employee or consultant. Most photographers never have enough time to actually, you know, photograph and have a life and make prints and do the billing - you have to give up a couple of those things to be able to do the others successfully. And most photographers can't even manage that!
...while bashing Windows for messing up the demo, they also managed to tick off Mac and Linux users by noting that their video product is only available on Windows.
""And we know whose software this runs on," is one notable quote from the executives on stage.
Well if it's such a crappy OS, why don't you make your spiffy product available to people who choose not to use it?
When I read about Fripp doing the Windows sound earlier today, I was a little disaffected.
I mean, I thought he had better taste than that. I've been a Crimson fan for quite some time. I know folks who have studied under Fripp. He strikes me in the third person as very un-windows-user-ish.
But I guess everyone has their price.
I wonder if they'll use another one of Nathan Mhyrvold's shitty pictures for the background picture in Vista? He's a decent photographer, but the background picture for XP was badly interpreted. Freakishly over-saturated...you name it. Looked like crap.
Mr. Gates is bright enough (chances are he scored higher on the SAT than you, and I mean chances are... He scored a 1590, and the 99th percentile is a mere 1450...) to know HOW to do it. What he wonders is WHY they've done it. There is a big difference there: between how and why.
I think you're about 90 degrees away from the real reason. Gates and Company never design something like the Front Row remote the first time they set out to design an "easy-=to-use" product.
At Apple, products are not designed to look stylish, although they often end up stylish because of how they are designed. The aesthetic at Apple is clean but complex, a bit like the plastic engine covers that became popular with the German automakers in the early 1990s. The covers had little functional value beyond cosmetics and making the vital bits (dipstick, coolant level, washer fill) stick out more clearly. To a degree, the plastic engine covers made the car user's job easier and cleaned up what had for many years been a confusing wasteland of hoses, belts and wires by eliminating those items from sight.
Microsoft applies conventional controls to existing problems; Apple more often applies aesthetic improvements that also benefit the user by eliminating the surface complexity of a product.
One example on the iMac's remote control is the forward/back/up/down button.
Functionally and aesthetically, there's no good reason to have four separate buttons when a centered round four cornered button will serve just as well. Apple places a fifth "action" button inside the round button because it's a short jump when navigating by thumb - the natural digit for this work.
By placing the round button in the center of the remote control, it falls to hand easily for both right and left-handed folks, and provides equal-reach thumb/finger control of each function under the single button.
This isn't a matter of how Steve Jobs or Bill Gates thinks, or what they scored on their SATs, but a true measure of how each company approaches problems.
After a thoughtful look at Media Center PCs and a few days of using a 20" iMac, it's clear the Microsoft designs controls for feature sets while Apple feature sets include pleasing product design.
Apple's ability to create functional designs is not something Microsoft, Creative, or anyone else is going to be able to "figure out" easily. It's not a math problem or a supply chain issue that can be reasoned out in the Silicon-Valley meeting room culture.
While seasoned designers can create stunning enclosures or cases, they have not shown the kind of human-centered thoughtfulness Apple has always been good at. And it's not just the physical product design or OS "theme". Everything at Apple, down to the styrofoam in the box is _designed from the get-go, rather than being grafted to a marketing requirements document.
Apple writes their own rules (and succeeds in a style-sensitive market) because they've got their own language.
Obviously you have not developed the thick layer of technical callous that comes with twenty years of hearing "this will change the world!" fifty times a year.
3G cellphones were supposed to bring "broadband" capability to mobile users in 2001 - at least if you believed the handset makers and network builders in 1998. You may want to rethink your gigabit cellphone expectations and your trust of the "Fringely".
Pogue is talking about TVs that have all their connectors in the front, not just a set of A/V inputs, like your Sony and mine. He describes the HP TV in TFA.
In fact, the HP does appear to have some interesting ideas - the cables all slide under the TV and connect to a hidden, lighted panel at the front of the "set".
Sorry; my post was apparently a too-veiled attempt at irony for you. I didn't think Metallica was ever boycott-worthy.
I don't think people should download music or video witout paying for it either. The parent spoke favorably of Metallica; I was just revisiting the nutty "screw metallica!" mood around here circa 2000.
Seriously though, I'm really kinda scared. But I'm more sad that it'll take a near miracle for some more oversight to be required in US intelligence agencies. The worst part is that by speaking out, you are probably being targeted.
Next it will probably be impossible to use coins for a toll here unless you go through the single coin toll line that will be left, where you'll have to wait an hour in line, and they'll need to see an ID before they let you through.
Do "they" allow car rentals and Interstate travel in your state? It might be hard to eliminate cash tolls if so.
Possible, but certainly not probable. With Dell's design language, I just can't see them getting a license from Apple.
I think these moves are just Dell doing their level best to eke more money out of each machine sold in a market where the margins are thin and getting thinner.
How do you think Apple got from August 1998 to today?
Stock price? Product quality? Employee morale?
All far higher under Jobs. I won't claim he's perfect, but he has produced results during his tenure. I'd bet he knows what he talks about - and when he has a question, he finds the answer and takes the time to understand it, unlike many tech CEOs.
Walk away and cook dinner/weed the garden/go to work: ???
Return and change CD's: 2 minutes
My wife and I have about 1200 CDs and about $500.00 in iTunes between us. (Now that we're cohabitating, I'm anxious for the next version of jhymn, so I can strip her DRM and convert it to a single account.)
I can't afford any of these ripping services, but I normally keep a stack of discs next to my Rev. A Dual G5. When I'm working, so is the DV-104...it hasn't died yet, but I suppose that's a risk. At some point in my life, I know I'll finish up with all the discs, but it IS a significant investment in time to stop, switch discs, and babysit the occasional rare disc that isn't stored in CDDB.
Besides, I'd wear a path in the carpet if I took your approach; the G5's drive will rip as fast as the drive will spin, and I would wager that it'll work even faster given a faster CD drive. It takes all of 3-4 minutes to rip the average "clean" CD. Scratched (well-loved) ones take a little longer.
Now that the high end Macs have PCI-e, they can use the same 7800s or Quadros a PC can
Is this really true? I though Mac video cards (regarless of the interface) had to have big-endian support as well as the ability to enumerate on the Open Firmware device tree.
Macs have had "standard" (electrically, anyway) AGP cards since the Graphite G4, but I know I've never been able to run down to Fry's and stick any old 8X AGP card into my G5. This will probably change with Intel Macs, but as for now, I don't think any old PCIe card will work, will it?
It takes X programmers to make a program, and it is sold Y people. If you sell it to 2Y people, you can hire 2X programmers.
This also ignores the fact that 2X programmers do not produce software in half the time. In fact, adding more people into the loop like this can actually lengthen the time it takes to complete a project.
Actually, the US Dept of Agriculture does farm, albiet not commercially. It's all part of the Agricultural Research Service (http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modeco de=12-00-00-00 [usda.gov]) They plant fields and fields of crops, and reasearch things like fertilizers and pesticides and growing techniques that are then transferred to commercial uses on real farms....
Actually, I was aware of this; the thrust of my comment was meant to communicate that the DoA and FAA aren't primarily involved in research through outlay. These agencies are primarily involved with regulatory oversight, and some people feel NASA should take the same role.
I was hoping that people here on Slashdot with anything to say about Aperture might have read some of the articles and conjecture released about it before holding forth here...or maybe even TFA.
a) does Aperture support layers? b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching. c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)
Aperture is not an image-editing program. It is a workflow and organization tool with a few editing features, but it is not and is not marketed as a replacement for Photoshop. Aperture is not remotely meant to supplant Photoshop (or Picasa, for that matter) for professional photographers, but as anyone who shoots hundreds or even thousands of photographs a day professionally will tell you, Aperture does fill a pretty big hole in the market.
There isn't currently software that does what Aperture does - the light table layout, stacking, the rich data tagging and database structure.
Whether it does this well or not is the point of the Ars review, and clearly Apple has a lot of work to do on their version 1.0 product.
If your primary questions about Aperture are whether or not it supports layers, "does it do this Photoshop feature" etc, then you may not understand the point of the product. That's partially Apple's fault and partially the fact that most people don't understand how professional photographers using digital tools actually work.
From my experience as a professional photographer and from working in the digital imaging and printing industry, the outsider's view is that professional photographers do a bunch of shooting, some healing brush magic, playing with sliders, and then hit print. This ignores the massive amounts of data, the client's need for proofing, the organization and requirements to differentiate two vitually identical needles in a haystack of exposures.
Aperture was created in part to address the shortcomings of products which only address the 1990s world of digital photography. Now that digital cameras and imaging tools have grown beyond curiosities and exploded into the mainstream of professionals and amateurs alike, those professionals need better tools to organize and present the data. They'll still use Photoshop to edit their images, because that's not what Aperture is for.
Your itunes purchase is authorized to the machine you bought it on. You cannot copy it to another machine.. that's the whole *purpose* of DRM.
God damn. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Your itunes songs work on up to five CPUs...any of which can be deauthorized from any machine running iTunes.
Please, PLEASE try and do a little research before spouting ignorance. Yes, the files are DRMed. No, it's not the fucking end of the world odious DRM. In fact, it's pretty damned fair as far as I'm concerned. I have four machines, and they can all play the songs I bought from iTunes. If I buy a new computer, I can deauthorize one of the four authorized ones and authorize the new CPU all by myself.
You really believed that Apple would make you rebuy all your music when you get a new machine? Geez.
Slashdot Mirror
"What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A lot more than it's ever done in a PC"
No wonder Dell is moving to AMD...they don't want to be associated with the low-rent OS they sell to all their customer by association with Intel.
If you want to buy sub 1-metre resolution satellite pics just go the SPOT consortium in
France. Any interested parties will BUY their data at FAR greater resolution than what
Google supplies.
Do they have Dick Cheney's house? Because a friend told me he has really nice roof tiles...and I, uh, can't quite make 'em out in Google Earth.
(Waves at the NSA.)
If you want it done right, have it done by professionals.
Calypso Imagingin Santa Clara does what you want, as does West Coast Imaging in Oakhurst.
Both are studios that employ long-time professional photographers who apply their knowledge of photography and digital printing to make the best prints possible from your photographs. Calypso also offers workshops taught by people like Bill Atkinson and Charlie Cramer, in case you want to edit your own images and simply output them on printers like the LIghtjet, Chromira, or lage format Epson 76/9600 or K3 printers.
Take a look at the client lists of each company - they are the top tier for this kind of work and it shows. Frankly, most working photographers hardly have time to print their own work, and the best photographers simply don't have time to fool with images once they're made in camera.
The biggest mistakes most photographers make when trying to become professionals is the failure to let someone else take responsibility for printing those images (while you stay in the feedback loop, of course) and the refusal of "tight" artists to belly up and pay for that service.
In other words, If you have a day job to pay for your photography habit, and provided you have the requisite talent to succeed at your chosen niche of photography, it will be nearly impossible to become a full-time professional photographer until and unless you hire an employee to do all the work you don't have time for, or hire a company to print your images for you. (No picture makes a straight print.) Otherwise, you will spend your whole life in a darkroom or behind a monitor instead of making new images - which is the lifeblood of a photographer.
How do I know all this? I am a large format photographer who prints digitally. And I have worked with all the companies linked above, either as an employee or consultant. Most photographers never have enough time to actually, you know, photograph and have a life and make prints and do the billing - you have to give up a couple of those things to be able to do the others successfully. And most photographers can't even manage that!
...while bashing Windows for messing up the demo, they also managed to tick off Mac and Linux users by noting that their video product is only available on Windows.
""And we know whose software this runs on," is one notable quote from the executives on stage.
Well if it's such a crappy OS, why don't you make your spiffy product available to people who choose not to use it?
When I read about Fripp doing the Windows sound earlier today, I was a little disaffected.
I mean, I thought he had better taste than that. I've been a Crimson fan for quite some time. I know folks who have studied under Fripp. He strikes me in the third person as very un-windows-user-ish.
But I guess everyone has their price.
I wonder if they'll use another one of Nathan Mhyrvold's shitty pictures for the background picture in Vista? He's a decent photographer, but the background picture for XP was badly interpreted. Freakishly over-saturated...you name it. Looked like crap.
Mr. Gates is bright enough (chances are he scored higher on the SAT than you, and I mean chances are... He scored a 1590, and the 99th percentile is a mere 1450...) to know HOW to do it. What he wonders is WHY they've done it. There is a big difference there: between how and why.
I think you're about 90 degrees away from the real reason. Gates and Company never design something like the Front Row remote the first time they set out to design an "easy-=to-use" product.
At Apple, products are not designed to look stylish, although they often end up stylish because of how they are designed. The aesthetic at Apple is clean but complex, a bit like the plastic engine covers that became popular with the German automakers in the early 1990s. The covers had little functional value beyond cosmetics and making the vital bits (dipstick, coolant level, washer fill) stick out more clearly. To a degree, the plastic engine covers made the car user's job easier and cleaned up what had for many years been a confusing wasteland of hoses, belts and wires by eliminating those items from sight.
Microsoft applies conventional controls to existing problems; Apple more often applies aesthetic improvements that also benefit the user by eliminating the surface complexity of a product.
One example on the iMac's remote control is the forward/back/up/down button.
Functionally and aesthetically, there's no good reason to have four separate buttons when a centered round four cornered button will serve just as well. Apple places a fifth "action" button inside the round button because it's a short jump when navigating by thumb - the natural digit for this work.
By placing the round button in the center of the remote control, it falls to hand easily for both right and left-handed folks, and provides equal-reach thumb/finger control of each function under the single button.
This isn't a matter of how Steve Jobs or Bill Gates thinks, or what they scored on their SATs, but a true measure of how each company approaches problems.
After a thoughtful look at Media Center PCs and a few days of using a 20" iMac, it's clear the Microsoft designs controls for feature sets while Apple feature sets include pleasing product design.
Apple's ability to create functional designs is not something Microsoft, Creative, or anyone else is going to be able to "figure out" easily. It's not a math problem or a supply chain issue that can be reasoned out in the Silicon-Valley meeting room culture.
While seasoned designers can create stunning enclosures or cases, they have not shown the kind of human-centered thoughtfulness Apple has always been good at. And it's not just the physical product design or OS "theme". Everything at Apple, down to the styrofoam in the box is _designed from the get-go, rather than being grafted to a marketing requirements document.
Apple writes their own rules (and succeeds in a style-sensitive market) because they've got their own language.
Google's what is not Unix?
We have a learning opportunity here.
"Google is" is not a contraction.
The only other valid reason to use an apostrophe in this sentence is if Google somehow possesed the condition of "Not".
Although Google has indexed much, they still have not found a way to posess conditions.
Here's a great web reference for apostrophe usage.
Obviously you have not developed the thick layer of technical callous that comes with twenty years of hearing "this will change the world!" fifty times a year.
3G cellphones were supposed to bring "broadband" capability to mobile users in 2001 - at least if you believed the handset makers and network builders in 1998. You may want to rethink your gigabit cellphone expectations and your trust of the "Fringely".
Pogue is talking about TVs that have all their connectors in the front, not just a set of A/V inputs, like your Sony and mine. He describes the HP TV in TFA.
In fact, the HP does appear to have some interesting ideas - the cables all slide under the TV and connect to a hidden, lighted panel at the front of the "set".
Sorry; my post was apparently a too-veiled attempt at irony for you. I didn't think Metallica was ever boycott-worthy.
I don't think people should download music or video witout paying for it either. The parent spoke favorably of Metallica; I was just revisiting the nutty "screw metallica!" mood around here circa 2000.
Oh, come on now. I'm sure the Bush administration would never, ever ask a Federal agency to do something explicitly forbidden by law. Nor would they ever use secrets for political gain. To suggest otherwise would be blatantly partisan!
Oh - and as far as the FBI fast-tracking new hires to deal with sensitive information? Two words: Robert Hanssen.
Next it will probably be impossible to use coins for a toll here unless you go through the single coin toll line that will be left, where you'll have to wait an hour in line, and they'll need to see an ID before they let you through.
Do "they" allow car rentals and Interstate travel in your state? It might be hard to eliminate cash tolls if so.
I thought we were still boycotting Metallica?
Last I remember, the boycott starting during 2000 here on Slashdot. I don't recall an official "Metallica/Lars no longer sucks" campaign.
Fuck Metallica!
This is an interesting theory.
Possible, but certainly not probable. With Dell's design language, I just can't see them getting a license from Apple.
I think these moves are just Dell doing their level best to eke more money out of each machine sold in a market where the margins are thin and getting thinner.
Maybe he has good people working for him?
How do you think Apple got from August 1998 to today?
Stock price?
Product quality?
Employee morale?
All far higher under Jobs. I won't claim he's perfect, but he has produced results during his tenure. I'd bet he knows what he talks about - and when he has a question, he finds the answer and takes the time to understand it, unlike many tech CEOs.
My wife and I have about 1200 CDs and about $500.00 in iTunes between us. (Now that we're cohabitating, I'm anxious for the next version of jhymn, so I can strip her DRM and convert it to a single account.)
I can't afford any of these ripping services, but I normally keep a stack of discs next to my Rev. A Dual G5. When I'm working, so is the DV-104...it hasn't died yet, but I suppose that's a risk. At some point in my life, I know I'll finish up with all the discs, but it IS a significant investment in time to stop, switch discs, and babysit the occasional rare disc that isn't stored in CDDB.
Besides, I'd wear a path in the carpet if I took your approach; the G5's drive will rip as fast as the drive will spin, and I would wager that it'll work even faster given a faster CD drive. It takes all of 3-4 minutes to rip the average "clean" CD. Scratched (well-loved) ones take a little longer.
Now that the high end Macs have PCI-e, they can use the same 7800s or Quadros a PC can
Is this really true? I though Mac video cards (regarless of the interface) had to have big-endian support as well as the ability to enumerate on the Open Firmware device tree.
Macs have had "standard" (electrically, anyway) AGP cards since the Graphite G4, but I know I've never been able to run down to Fry's and stick any old 8X AGP card into my G5. This will probably change with Intel Macs, but as for now, I don't think any old PCIe card will work, will it?
It takes X programmers to make a program, and it is sold Y people. If you sell it to 2Y people, you can hire 2X programmers.
This also ignores the fact that 2X programmers do not produce software in half the time. In fact, adding more people into the loop like this can actually lengthen the time it takes to complete a project.
I have interoperability concerns, too.
Will this new "voip thong" work with my girlfriend's g-string and v-string underwear?
Why has Yahoo! begun selling these new underwear in a market already crowded with Frederick's and Victoria's secret?
Actually, the US Dept of Agriculture does farm, albiet not commercially. It's all part of the Agricultural Research Service (http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modeco de=12-00-00-00 [usda.gov]) They plant fields and fields of crops, and reasearch things like fertilizers and pesticides and growing techniques that are then transferred to commercial uses on real farms....
Actually, I was aware of this; the thrust of my comment was meant to communicate that the DoA and FAA aren't primarily involved in research through outlay. These agencies are primarily involved with regulatory oversight, and some people feel NASA should take the same role.
If this happens, what purpose would Nasa serve?
How about rulemaking and safety standards?
The Department of Agriculture doesn't farm, and the FAA doesn't fly airplanes.
Yeah great. First it was flying cockroaches, now we got flying rats.
Next thing you know, we'll have flying squirrels.
I was hoping that people here on Slashdot with anything to say about Aperture might have read some of the articles and conjecture released about it before holding forth here...or maybe even TFA.
a) does Aperture support layers?
b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.
c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)
Aperture is not an image-editing program. It is a workflow and organization tool with a few editing features, but it is not and is not marketed as a replacement for Photoshop. Aperture is not remotely meant to supplant Photoshop (or Picasa, for that matter) for professional photographers, but as anyone who shoots hundreds or even thousands of photographs a day professionally will tell you, Aperture does fill a pretty big hole in the market.
There isn't currently software that does what Aperture does - the light table layout, stacking, the rich data tagging and database structure.
Whether it does this well or not is the point of the Ars review, and clearly Apple has a lot of work to do on their version 1.0 product.
If your primary questions about Aperture are whether or not it supports layers, "does it do this Photoshop feature" etc, then you may not understand the point of the product. That's partially Apple's fault and partially the fact that most people don't understand how professional photographers using digital tools actually work.
From my experience as a professional photographer and from working in the digital imaging and printing industry, the outsider's view is that professional photographers do a bunch of shooting, some healing brush magic, playing with sliders, and then hit print. This ignores the massive amounts of data, the client's need for proofing, the organization and requirements to differentiate two vitually identical needles in a haystack of exposures.
Aperture was created in part to address the shortcomings of products which only address the 1990s world of digital photography. Now that digital cameras and imaging tools have grown beyond curiosities and exploded into the mainstream of professionals and amateurs alike, those professionals need better tools to organize and present the data. They'll still use Photoshop to edit their images, because that's not what Aperture is for.
Perhaps we can have Martin Fink tell them how it is.
Your itunes purchase is authorized to the machine you bought it on. You cannot copy it to another machine.. that's the whole *purpose* of DRM.
God damn. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Your itunes songs work on up to five CPUs...any of which can be deauthorized from any machine running iTunes.
Please, PLEASE try and do a little research before spouting ignorance. Yes, the files are DRMed. No, it's not the fucking end of the world odious DRM. In fact, it's pretty damned fair as far as I'm concerned. I have four machines, and they can all play the songs I bought from iTunes. If I buy a new computer, I can deauthorize one of the four authorized ones and authorize the new CPU all by myself.
You really believed that Apple would make you rebuy all your music when you get a new machine? Geez.