Interesting the sensationalist site you link to chopped out half the quotes from the Guardian. For those who missed it, the point was that due to corruption in Kenya, 40,000 kids a year die from malaria because foreign aid that's ear-tagged to be spent on vaccination is instead consumed by the government.
Pointing out this fact resulted in riots which killed 1,300 people, as the citizens tried to put in place a government which wouldn't be so corrupt. If the end result is a net benefit of 38,700 lives - it's a positive.
The point the article, and Julian, was trying to make is that it's always a difficult moral choice - deciding whether or not to release information that you know can cause widespread upset if you also know that it's information that is being kept from those very people to their detriment.
The British government? This is a majority American-owned company. It was founded, and is still currently headquartered in Britain, but has been a mostly American company since it merged with Amoco (and really, was majority US owned by investors before that). The British government is far less affected by the success or failure of this company than the American government - so no, it's unlikely Obama or his successor will let it go under any time soon. As the fourth largest company in the world, it has revenues that make companies like General Motors look like they're trading in junk bonds.
Also, what's called "Beyond"? BP isn't. It's called BP. "Beyond Petroleum" is a marketing slogan - a tagline, if you will, indicating they're investing in more than just gasoline. Up until the Deepwater Horizon debacle, BP was considered one of the greenest petroleum companies, and had been making the most scientific advances in cleaner fuels and alternative fuels. It's received many acknowledgements and awards for this; Although of course all that work has now been nullified by the Deepwater incident, and pundits will undoubtedly view any future advances BP makes in ecological technologies as "trying to make up for Deepwater", despite their history in working to that goal.
Sounds like the whimpering bleatings of a CRUSHED CONSOLE PLAYER!
But yeah, it's not much of a representation of, well - anything, besides one task in one specific game - as you say. It's probably just that a big deal was made about the competition (it being massively cross-platform and all) and PC gamers coming out ahead so very quickly. It's only a single button press for console gamers to drop a medkit as well! But it's cringe-worthy in the "news" despartment.:) If anything, it's just a nice reminder that PC gaming is still going strong and the community still cares. It's easy to miss that sometimes with all the fuss publishers make about consoles.
The big deal is strong democratic bias in the geek community, who equate "liberalism" with "freedom" and "freedom" with.. well, just about everything most Slashdot submitters stand for; Whom fail to realize that both political parties want exactly the same thing - and the only reason different parties exist is because different people have different psychological triggers. The end result in regards to social position, wealth, and rights of the individual, will always end up virtually the same in both cases. It just so happens that the triggers used by the Democrats - largely suggestions regarding intelligence and freedom, have a huge pull with geeks, who jealously guard both perceived attributes.
And how this relates to Fox News, is that it's a large right-wing, Republican TV network. Thus, if you're an "intelligent", "free thinker", you go along with the popular media opinion that anything they sprout must be a lie and you're actually an idiot if you believe. Conformity at its finest, all round.
You took that so very well! Rather than a degrading "Woosh!", you acknowledge the poster's literal assessment and even profer a self-deprecating explanation. With this degree of civility, you too could be British! If you're also patient and calm in queues, and enjoy tea and crumpets, I suspect you'd pass any residency testing with flying colors!
I hope that they're using the name Ericsson simply due to the fact it's Sony's own phone brand, rather than this device being comparative to any previous Ericsson devices. I have always found them lacking.:( However, like a sucker, I frequently end up with them due to the Sony association. Certainly - this will be no different. I MUST HAVE ONE!
GP > Steve Jobs' motto should be, "Compressed media, through earbuds, it's good enough."
OP > No no, it should be "640kb per sec should be enough for anybody"....
YOU > That was Bill Gates's version.
That reads as a Wooosh for you. It sounds like you didn't understand OP was joking and was trying to "correct" him. I tried to explain it rather than simply saying "Wooosh" because I'm not that rude.;) If you were joking too - awesome. It just didn't seem funny to me.
Naw, BillG's version wasn't "per second". OP is alluding to a bitrate - 640 kb/sec. Or roughly, twice the quality of high-quality mp3 audio, but clearly nowhere near enough for video.
BillG was just talking about kb of memory, but the quote is taken out of contect anyhow.
The term 1080p and HD get bandied about far too much. People confuse High Resolution with High Definition. I say "confuse" but the truth is that it's intentionally misleading on the part of the publishers.
Youtube is a great example of this, They go on about HD content and have labels such as 720p and 1080p. Yet the content is not high definition at all. I have yet to see ANY service provider offering high definition content streaming.
I'm not meaning to criticize you at all. A lot of people either can't tell or don't care for the difference between a compressed 1920x1080 video or an HD 1080p video. I just sincerely doubt you're streaming 40 MB/sec (video + 5.1 hd audio) from the internet. There's no provider offering such a service. You're not intentionally lying, just mistaken.
There are plenty however, offering high RESOLUTION videos that they call High Definition, although the image quality is nowhere near that of a Blu-ray.
Except we're not talking about iOS in the context of either of those markets. It all depends on your frame of reference. For instance, a Taurus may be "2% of the total car market", even though it's "14% of the Ford Market". (NB: Both these figures are made up, the point is illustrative).
In this article, we're talking about the website usage market. This is neither the "PC" market or the "Touchscreen" market. You're probably going to find some semantic point to argue, but you're barking up the wrong tree. This article is NOTHING to do with device market share. You're not getting it.
In your zealous rush, you've misunderstood him. You asked him a question, "Does that answer your question?". He replied "Yes it does".
You've then incorrectly presumed he was saying "Yes it does" as a contradiction to points in your post and in an angry mad rush, hammer out "Past (sic) the links, punk, or STFU." You don't appear to have made your choices on level-headed, balanced decisions. It's zealotry. You make his point admirably.
He didn't say "Yes it does [conform to published standards]." He was simply replying to the only question in your post - "Yes it does [answer your question]."
What is this elitist crap you're peddling? Four out of five of those are fine studios. I understand that you clearly think it's uncool to like anything popular, being a young, elitist idiot. "Real gamers" were playing games before you were born. Your entire appreciation of gaming is based on what OTHER PEOPLE think of your choices. Way to go, independent thinker.
Why is Bungie on that list? It's an awful studio which hasn't had an idea since the late 90s.
Halo isn't even a good game. Marketing made it popular, because there's a whole generation of console FPSers out there who don't even know what a real FPS plays like. If Halo had been released on PC, it would have bombed after the first game.
Indeed, if we're looking at different parts of an image, the eye is vastly superior. As you can probably tell by my context, I was simply referring to looking at the image as a whole, where there would not be much an improvement (or, only a marginal one, due to ambient lighting). HDR is an improvement on traditional imaging, but not an improvement on the eye.:)
Another poster linked to the Brightside screen, which is a great example of pretty much exactly what you're talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrightSide_Technologies Although the article is focused more on the contrast ratio, the dynamic range of that system is excellent.
Re:Here I was thinking HDR video was old hat
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HDR Video a Reality
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Oh, maybe I didn't explain the splicing correctly. In the 1800s they didn't merely take three different photos and expose three at once onto the same plate. There was no method of doing that. Yes, we have come a long way in 150 years.
They took different photographs and actually cut out from the negatives the different portions of the images which were at the various exposures they wanted to capture, and then arranged them on a plate to produce the resulting image.
Apologies Troge, "pendantic" was a harsh word and not waht I intended to convey. What I meant was, asking to see a range that your eyes cannot simultaneously distinguish anyway, isn't going to produce any results.
Although as hamiltondaniel has pointed out below, this particular video is using a fairly limited dynamic range anyway, which the eye would actually easily exceed. The rest of my discussion was around general HDR technology and not this video in particular.
And yes, I understand the range of the resulting image is only SDR.:) I thought I made that position clear, but obviously I didn't as I also had to reiterate this position to another. I was more talking about how details are visible in the new smaller range which before were imperceptible greater range of either the original recording, or in many cases, the eye.
And PS. Yes, this demo was pretty bad. Why use HDR on a scene which doesn't need it, which it necessarily degrades image quality? But these are early days yet.. don't be so hard on it!:)
Your post is based on a mis-reading. I said "detail", not range. In fact I made the point that I wasn't claiming HDR range to be as good as the eye. I did however say, that HDR images can produce more visible detail at once than the human eye can, particularly in scenes with greatly contrasting light and darkness. (Large areas, not black text on white or anything of the sort - which our eyes are particularly good at discerning).
The resulting image is SDR, independent of how it was recorded, as that's the tech we have. It's technologically impossible to get imaging "better" than real life, and I doubt it will ever get as good as real life. The point isn't that HDR recording produces images visible in HDR range - I never made that claim, and as OP and yourself both said - such displays do not exist.
I was making two points in my post - firstly, that the recording was HDR, in disagreement with OP. It is HDR *recording*. And secondly, that from HDR recording it is possible to produce SDR images which reveal more detail (now, in a much smaller range - it's SDR after all) than the eye would pick up itself. Details of an image which are at the range extremes are now visible clearly in a much smaller range. I think you thought I was claiming something else and are arguing against that.
I also never claimed that "HDR is currently limited by the eye itself". I said HDR imaging records a greater range than you can see at once. It does. Well - correction - it can. It all depends on the range being recorded. With the new Canon CMOS sensor, or at least that technology, I'm expecting even greater ranges to come along very shortly. As good as the human eye? No. Nobody's making that claim.
It's much easier to win an argument if you put words in your opponents mouth.
Re:Here I was thinking HDR video was old hat
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HDR Video a Reality
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· Score: 1
The term "HDR camera" implies that the camera simultaneously takes images at more than one exposure setting and then tone-maps them. This camera (well, camera setup) would be an example of that. The Pentax K7 is another.
Cameras which involve you taking separate photographs and then exposing different negatives onto a single plate are not an example of this, and such a device would never be referred to by anyone as an HDR camera. Except GP and yourself.
That's pretty much down to our mental training that a photograph is a realistic representation of lighting in a scene.
This is similar to the mental effect which makes high frame-rate 60-90fps video look "fake" and less true-to-life to us, who have been watching 25fps movies for decades, despite the opposite being true.
In truth, printed photographs are terrible representations of light and instead rely on our knowledge of the elements to trick our brain into viewing lit scenes in the context of previous experiences. Digital photographs, capable of being artificially lit are much better, but still not as good as real life.
However, the best true-to-life representations of digital photographs is SDR tone-mapped HDR images. Look at the lights around you - your eyes DO see those blooms around lights, etc. Years of looking at standard photographs has trained us to believe that they're a great representation of real life - when they're not. They're simply the best we've been able to generally do.
Besides, eventually HDR will be the norm, and this entire line of conversation will be moot. By that time, they will be "a normal photograph". In fact, HDR techniques have been practiced for a long time now - heavily since the 80s. Many of the "great" published photos of our times were taken with multiple exposure techniques - we might just not realize it because we only see the final result.
Incorrect, it's true HDR recording. The process of viewing it on LDR/SDR monitors is tone-mapping, which over the years has been tuned to represent the best known science of what the eyes actually see at once - our retinas already make us susceptible to only being able to view certain ranges of light at a time.
In other words, more information is being recorded than your eye can see at once, and you're complaining because when you see it, all that information isn't there? That's a pedantic, unsolvable contradiction.
A true HDR *display* (unfathomably difficult to imagine, I won't begin to go into the problems with the source for all the light being in one location, while other light is also hitting the eye from the real-world outside of the display, making visual processing of the HDR display massively erronous), would offer no advantage to a tone-mapped image, as your eye still can't see more than a certain range at any given time.
Tone-mapped SDR images actually produce images with more visible detail *at once* than the eye can distinguish *at once*. Sure, the eye can do things the still image can't, like focus somewhere else, shield out certain bright or dark parts, and readjust automatically to what you're now viewing - I'm not claiming tone-mapping will ever produce as much variance as the eye is capable of - but it DOES bring to light more detail in HDR recorded scenes than the eye could otherwise see at once looking at the same scene.
Re:Here I was thinking HDR video was old hat
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HDR Video a Reality
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· Score: 1
The techniques for HDR in the 1800s involved taking negatives with different exposures and splicing them to create a positive with varying degrees of exposure. ie, a standard camera, using dark-room techniques rather than a camera doing variable ranges at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting the sensationalist site you link to chopped out half the quotes from the Guardian. For those who missed it, the point was that due to corruption in Kenya, 40,000 kids a year die from malaria because foreign aid that's ear-tagged to be spent on vaccination is instead consumed by the government.
Pointing out this fact resulted in riots which killed 1,300 people, as the citizens tried to put in place a government which wouldn't be so corrupt. If the end result is a net benefit of 38,700 lives - it's a positive.
The point the article, and Julian, was trying to make is that it's always a difficult moral choice - deciding whether or not to release information that you know can cause widespread upset if you also know that it's information that is being kept from those very people to their detriment.
The British government? This is a majority American-owned company. It was founded, and is still currently headquartered in Britain, but has been a mostly American company since it merged with Amoco (and really, was majority US owned by investors before that). The British government is far less affected by the success or failure of this company than the American government - so no, it's unlikely Obama or his successor will let it go under any time soon. As the fourth largest company in the world, it has revenues that make companies like General Motors look like they're trading in junk bonds.
Also, what's called "Beyond"? BP isn't. It's called BP. "Beyond Petroleum" is a marketing slogan - a tagline, if you will, indicating they're investing in more than just gasoline. Up until the Deepwater Horizon debacle, BP was considered one of the greenest petroleum companies, and had been making the most scientific advances in cleaner fuels and alternative fuels. It's received many acknowledgements and awards for this; Although of course all that work has now been nullified by the Deepwater incident, and pundits will undoubtedly view any future advances BP makes in ecological technologies as "trying to make up for Deepwater", despite their history in working to that goal.
Sounds like the whimpering bleatings of a CRUSHED CONSOLE PLAYER!
But yeah, it's not much of a representation of, well - anything, besides one task in one specific game - as you say. It's probably just that a big deal was made about the competition (it being massively cross-platform and all) and PC gamers coming out ahead so very quickly. It's only a single button press for console gamers to drop a medkit as well! But it's cringe-worthy in the "news" despartment. :) If anything, it's just a nice reminder that PC gaming is still going strong and the community still cares. It's easy to miss that sometimes with all the fuss publishers make about consoles.
The big deal is strong democratic bias in the geek community, who equate "liberalism" with "freedom" and "freedom" with.. well, just about everything most Slashdot submitters stand for; Whom fail to realize that both political parties want exactly the same thing - and the only reason different parties exist is because different people have different psychological triggers. The end result in regards to social position, wealth, and rights of the individual, will always end up virtually the same in both cases. It just so happens that the triggers used by the Democrats - largely suggestions regarding intelligence and freedom, have a huge pull with geeks, who jealously guard both perceived attributes.
And how this relates to Fox News, is that it's a large right-wing, Republican TV network. Thus, if you're an "intelligent", "free thinker", you go along with the popular media opinion that anything they sprout must be a lie and you're actually an idiot if you believe. Conformity at its finest, all round.
You took that so very well! Rather than a degrading "Woosh!", you acknowledge the poster's literal assessment and even profer a self-deprecating explanation. With this degree of civility, you too could be British! If you're also patient and calm in queues, and enjoy tea and crumpets, I suspect you'd pass any residency testing with flying colors!
* Rather, colours. See - I'd need to re-sit.
I hope that they're using the name Ericsson simply due to the fact it's Sony's own phone brand, rather than this device being comparative to any previous Ericsson devices. I have always found them lacking. :( However, like a sucker, I frequently end up with them due to the Sony association. Certainly - this will be no different. I MUST HAVE ONE!
GP > Steve Jobs' motto should be, "Compressed media, through earbuds, it's good enough."
OP > No no, it should be "640kb per sec should be enough for anybody"....
YOU > That was Bill Gates's version.
That reads as a Wooosh for you. It sounds like you didn't understand OP was joking and was trying to "correct" him. I tried to explain it rather than simply saying "Wooosh" because I'm not that rude. ;) If you were joking too - awesome. It just didn't seem funny to me.
I play OMF 2097 all the time. It's a great game, and one of the few fighter-style games I can actually win. ;)
I also play all the old Sierra games I bought, and dozens of other DOS games. I play SkyRoads frequently, and have Warcraft 2 on my work PC.
I run Windows 7. Look up DosBox. DOS games aren't obsolete simply because we don't use DOS as an OS anymore.
Naw, BillG's version wasn't "per second". OP is alluding to a bitrate - 640 kb/sec. Or roughly, twice the quality of high-quality mp3 audio, but clearly nowhere near enough for video.
BillG was just talking about kb of memory, but the quote is taken out of contect anyhow.
The term 1080p and HD get bandied about far too much. People confuse High Resolution with High Definition. I say "confuse" but the truth is that it's intentionally misleading on the part of the publishers.
Youtube is a great example of this, They go on about HD content and have labels such as 720p and 1080p. Yet the content is not high definition at all. I have yet to see ANY service provider offering high definition content streaming.
I'm not meaning to criticize you at all. A lot of people either can't tell or don't care for the difference between a compressed 1920x1080 video or an HD 1080p video. I just sincerely doubt you're streaming 40 MB/sec (video + 5.1 hd audio) from the internet. There's no provider offering such a service. You're not intentionally lying, just mistaken.
There are plenty however, offering high RESOLUTION videos that they call High Definition, although the image quality is nowhere near that of a Blu-ray.
Except we're not talking about iOS in the context of either of those markets. It all depends on your frame of reference. For instance, a Taurus may be "2% of the total car market", even though it's "14% of the Ford Market". (NB: Both these figures are made up, the point is illustrative).
In this article, we're talking about the website usage market. This is neither the "PC" market or the "Touchscreen" market. You're probably going to find some semantic point to argue, but you're barking up the wrong tree. This article is NOTHING to do with device market share. You're not getting it.
In your zealous rush, you've misunderstood him. You asked him a question, "Does that answer your question?". He replied "Yes it does".
You've then incorrectly presumed he was saying "Yes it does" as a contradiction to points in your post and in an angry mad rush, hammer out "Past (sic) the links, punk, or STFU." You don't appear to have made your choices on level-headed, balanced decisions. It's zealotry. You make his point admirably.
He didn't say "Yes it does [conform to published standards]." He was simply replying to the only question in your post - "Yes it does [answer your question]."
What is this elitist crap you're peddling? Four out of five of those are fine studios. I understand that you clearly think it's uncool to like anything popular, being a young, elitist idiot. "Real gamers" were playing games before you were born. Your entire appreciation of gaming is based on what OTHER PEOPLE think of your choices. Way to go, independent thinker.
Why is Bungie on that list? It's an awful studio which hasn't had an idea since the late 90s.
Halo isn't even a good game. Marketing made it popular, because there's a whole generation of console FPSers out there who don't even know what a real FPS plays like. If Halo had been released on PC, it would have bombed after the first game.
That. is. awesome.
Indeed, if we're looking at different parts of an image, the eye is vastly superior. As you can probably tell by my context, I was simply referring to looking at the image as a whole, where there would not be much an improvement (or, only a marginal one, due to ambient lighting). HDR is an improvement on traditional imaging, but not an improvement on the eye. :)
Another poster linked to the Brightside screen, which is a great example of pretty much exactly what you're talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrightSide_Technologies Although the article is focused more on the contrast ratio, the dynamic range of that system is excellent.
Oh, maybe I didn't explain the splicing correctly. In the 1800s they didn't merely take three different photos and expose three at once onto the same plate. There was no method of doing that. Yes, we have come a long way in 150 years.
They took different photographs and actually cut out from the negatives the different portions of the images which were at the various exposures they wanted to capture, and then arranged them on a plate to produce the resulting image.
Apologies Troge, "pendantic" was a harsh word and not waht I intended to convey. What I meant was, asking to see a range that your eyes cannot simultaneously distinguish anyway, isn't going to produce any results.
Although as hamiltondaniel has pointed out below, this particular video is using a fairly limited dynamic range anyway, which the eye would actually easily exceed. The rest of my discussion was around general HDR technology and not this video in particular.
And yes, I understand the range of the resulting image is only SDR. :) I thought I made that position clear, but obviously I didn't as I also had to reiterate this position to another. I was more talking about how details are visible in the new smaller range which before were imperceptible greater range of either the original recording, or in many cases, the eye.
And PS. Yes, this demo was pretty bad. Why use HDR on a scene which doesn't need it, which it necessarily degrades image quality? But these are early days yet.. don't be so hard on it! :)
Your post is based on a mis-reading. I said "detail", not range. In fact I made the point that I wasn't claiming HDR range to be as good as the eye. I did however say, that HDR images can produce more visible detail at once than the human eye can, particularly in scenes with greatly contrasting light and darkness. (Large areas, not black text on white or anything of the sort - which our eyes are particularly good at discerning).
The resulting image is SDR, independent of how it was recorded, as that's the tech we have. It's technologically impossible to get imaging "better" than real life, and I doubt it will ever get as good as real life. The point isn't that HDR recording produces images visible in HDR range - I never made that claim, and as OP and yourself both said - such displays do not exist.
I was making two points in my post - firstly, that the recording was HDR, in disagreement with OP. It is HDR *recording*. And secondly, that from HDR recording it is possible to produce SDR images which reveal more detail (now, in a much smaller range - it's SDR after all) than the eye would pick up itself. Details of an image which are at the range extremes are now visible clearly in a much smaller range. I think you thought I was claiming something else and are arguing against that.
I also never claimed that "HDR is currently limited by the eye itself". I said HDR imaging records a greater range than you can see at once. It does. Well - correction - it can. It all depends on the range being recorded. With the new Canon CMOS sensor, or at least that technology, I'm expecting even greater ranges to come along very shortly. As good as the human eye? No. Nobody's making that claim.
It's much easier to win an argument if you put words in your opponents mouth.
The term "HDR camera" implies that the camera simultaneously takes images at more than one exposure setting and then tone-maps them. This camera (well, camera setup) would be an example of that. The Pentax K7 is another.
Cameras which involve you taking separate photographs and then exposing different negatives onto a single plate are not an example of this, and such a device would never be referred to by anyone as an HDR camera. Except GP and yourself.
That's pretty much down to our mental training that a photograph is a realistic representation of lighting in a scene.
This is similar to the mental effect which makes high frame-rate 60-90fps video look "fake" and less true-to-life to us, who have been watching 25fps movies for decades, despite the opposite being true.
In truth, printed photographs are terrible representations of light and instead rely on our knowledge of the elements to trick our brain into viewing lit scenes in the context of previous experiences. Digital photographs, capable of being artificially lit are much better, but still not as good as real life.
However, the best true-to-life representations of digital photographs is SDR tone-mapped HDR images. Look at the lights around you - your eyes DO see those blooms around lights, etc. Years of looking at standard photographs has trained us to believe that they're a great representation of real life - when they're not. They're simply the best we've been able to generally do.
Besides, eventually HDR will be the norm, and this entire line of conversation will be moot. By that time, they will be "a normal photograph". In fact, HDR techniques have been practiced for a long time now - heavily since the 80s. Many of the "great" published photos of our times were taken with multiple exposure techniques - we might just not realize it because we only see the final result.
Incorrect, it's true HDR recording. The process of viewing it on LDR/SDR monitors is tone-mapping, which over the years has been tuned to represent the best known science of what the eyes actually see at once - our retinas already make us susceptible to only being able to view certain ranges of light at a time.
In other words, more information is being recorded than your eye can see at once, and you're complaining because when you see it, all that information isn't there? That's a pedantic, unsolvable contradiction.
A true HDR *display* (unfathomably difficult to imagine, I won't begin to go into the problems with the source for all the light being in one location, while other light is also hitting the eye from the real-world outside of the display, making visual processing of the HDR display massively erronous), would offer no advantage to a tone-mapped image, as your eye still can't see more than a certain range at any given time.
Tone-mapped SDR images actually produce images with more visible detail *at once* than the eye can distinguish *at once*. Sure, the eye can do things the still image can't, like focus somewhere else, shield out certain bright or dark parts, and readjust automatically to what you're now viewing - I'm not claiming tone-mapping will ever produce as much variance as the eye is capable of - but it DOES bring to light more detail in HDR recorded scenes than the eye could otherwise see at once looking at the same scene.
The techniques for HDR in the 1800s involved taking negatives with different exposures and splicing them to create a positive with varying degrees of exposure. ie, a standard camera, using dark-room techniques rather than a camera doing variable ranges at all.
Woosh!