Re:Yes, very clever. Now if you could explain...
on
Happy Darwin Day!
·
· Score: 1
There seems to be no way to add new and useful information
As with many creationists, you seem to apply magical thinking to the idea of "information", assuming it is something that can only be generated by an ineffable intelligence.
A genome is a bit stream. One can add information to it by inserting or flipping bits. Useful information is, in this context, changes that incrementally benefit reproduction.
That analogy may be your favourite, but it's also fairly silly, primarily because there is no selection feedback, and secondly because the rifle destroys blocks, rather than merely moving them.
A better example would be a blind man moving blocks around, and an observer saying whether they like the result or not. Certainly this would be a tedious way to build a model, but given uncounted trillions of iterations you could get there.
This doesn't require a leap of faith: it's a demonstrable fact that genetic algorithms can evolve complex systems. Maybe you should try programming some simple examples for yourself to get a feel for how it works.
The fact that evolution can work in principle or in simulations doesn't in itself prove that it led to life on earth. However, we do know that all the necessary preconditions were there (reproduction with variation and selection), there is post-hoc evidence, and no better theory is apparent.
Remember also that organisms have (of course) evolved meta-systems to give themselves an advantage over raw bit-flipping: redundancy, checks, faster variation of some genes than others, and so on. One of the largest boosts is sexual reproduction -- the most evolved organisms reproduce sexually, because that lets them evolve more efficiently/faster. If I understand correctly, random mutation is a rather unimportant mechanism.
nor to prevent any which somehow magically manages to get added from being drowned out by the "genetic burden" of otherwise universally destructive mutations.
Remember we're talking about a long-term trend. Certainly there will be many beneficial changes which happen to be lost because the carrier happens to get struck by lightning, or because they first occur in association with some destructive change. But eventually it will get sorted out. If only one in a hundred beneficial mutations survive the first generation the mechanism there is still a selective pressure -- a bit like statistical mechanics.
Iterated reproduction with variation plus selection produces solutions suited to the selection criteria. It is not so hard to understand.
I mean, Eric Raymond's a smart guy. I do not doubt his intelligence; I do not doubt his enthusiasm; I do not doubt his basic decency. He's said some smart stuff that's made me think, that's affected my politics, that I've recommended to others, here, read this, it's good. (Mostly what I'm talking about is "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," but that's one helluva mouthful, so.) But when you set aside software and hacking and privacy concerns and the consequences of intellectual property, you then have to pick over rants about arming all passengers on airplanes and how "pederasty has never been a marked or unusual behavior among homosexuals." One is left with the impression of an intelligent, enthusiastic, basically decent but almost touchingly naïve man rushing headlong down the most jack-assed of rabbit holes with the supreme confidence of logic gone horribly wrong; in short: a moron.
The rest of the essay is a bit interesting -- picking apart a particular garden-path excursion.
My biggest problem with esr was that he couldn't seem to keep his OSI work separate from his other opinions about the proper place of women, how to treat homosexuals, etc. I respect his right to have those opinions, but I wish he would tuck them away during his very visible tenure as leader of OSI.
Russ has a fairly extreme view on libertarian economics. ("Extreme" because few people believe there should be no public liability laws -- I'd link but the archives are broken.) Fair enough; I sympathize even if I wouldn't go quite as far as he does.
My big question is: will he manage to keep his personal opinions separate from his OSI work? I do not want to hear any more OSI-related statements alluding to gun control. It's not just unprofessional, it's also a bad idea in that you may alienate people who like open source but dislike Rand.
Right -- and bear in mind that Apple's recent resurgence is in part due to them adopting an open base and (somewhat) encouraging the open source community.
Apple also indicates the kind of limits we might see on cameras: some stuff you can touch, but there's still a lot of proprietary magic.
I suppose the key difference is whether there are an changes which could not have occurred through stepwise natural evolution and that therefore required a separate mechanism. ID insists there are such and calls them macroevolution while admitting microevolution; mainstream biology says they are only accumulations of smaller changes through reproduction with selection. (Is this a fair description?)
It seems reasonable to ask ID proponents what mechanism they think *was* responsible, if it was not regular evolution through genetics, etc.
On the evidence (and as far as I know) ID has not found any phenomenon for which they can offer a better explanation than mainstream biology. It is a rather barren theory. On the other hand, mainstream biology continues to make good progress. So Occam's razor excises ID's assertion of a special mechanism for which there is no evidence.
There was a tsumani a couple of weeks ago that killed more than 150000 people and harmed millions more. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that this is just a much larger version of a child drowning in a swimming pool.
What would a responsible and loving parent do? Firstly, they might prevent the hazard: gate the pool / supervise the child; not permit such a large earthquake. Note that this does not intrude on free will at all; it could be accomplished merely by manipulating the geology.
Human parents "can't be everywhere at once" and can perhaps be forgiven for not anticipating the hazard. This excuse is not available to an omnipotent/omniscient god. Whatever happened must have either been willed or at least permitted.
If the parent could have prevented the drowning but did not, then they are morally and legally culpable -- even if they say the kids were naughty.
Did the victims deserve it? There must, at least, have been many thousands of people killed who did not deserve an agonizing death, being under the age of reason or having lived blameless lives. Perhaps it was some form of collective punishment? How were the people killed supposed to know what they were supposed to do to avoid it? There was no clear ultimatum or warning.
Doubtless people are making the argument that unless Israel is removed from Palestine, similar disasters will happen. Multiply this by the thousands of different belief systems in the world. How do we know you are right and they are wrong?
To say "if you don't do X, bad things will happen" is mere superstition. One can always invent random X that happens to match events. I walked under a ladder and stubbed my toe; people didn't accept Christ and there was a tsumani.
Was this enormous tragedy with a purpose? I hold that no purpose could justify such a holocaust. I could not condone a parent drowning their child as punishment. What purpose could it serve that would not be served by, say, the appearance of angels above major cities?
Both professed atheists and professed christians lie on a scale from altruistic and selfish behaviour. In my experience there is not much correlation between religious belief and common decency. (And this is to say nothing of the many decent deists, agnostics, catholics, liberal christians, pagans, etc.)
This tsunami is but an apertif of disasters to follow, and an faint echo of disasters which have already been.
That is likely true, and evidence for my point: enormous human suffering is inconsistent with a omnipotent loving God. I would find it easier to accept a purely old-testament jealous vengeful god, or a good/evil balanced duality (as in some branches of Zoroastrianism and Wicca).
Predictions of the end of the world are a dime a dozen.
Tragedies happen, such as the recent tsumani. Any omnipotent being with a shred of decency would prevented them.
The options are: God exists and is cruel (or uncaring, or impotent, or asleep, etc); or God does not exist and it is mere senseless matter that is being cruel. I don't see how the second is any worse -- it removes only a false hope -- and it has the advantage of being true.
I am aware that an enormous number of theologians have tried to dance around the issue. Word games such as your wilful misconstrual of "bastard" are a favourite technique, and do you no credit.
I don't know of any specifically Atheist relief organizations, nor do I see why any organization would want to exclude people with religious beliefs who are otherwise suitable. There are *non-religious* organizations who do great work, such as MSF.
What you seem to miss is that disbelief in supernatural beings does not imply an absence of ethics.
The only logical ground I can see for being an Atheist
Wow, thanks for posting the ICR oath. It really gives an idea of the way these people operate.
Can you even conceive of a serious/mainstream scientific institute having an unchangeable statement of doctrine which must be sworn by all new hires? A medical school which asks students to swear that influenza is caused by unfortunate conjunctions of stars, and not to think of proposing any alternative?
The very idea of swearing a list of assertions of fact which cannot be altered is by definition antiscientific.
"Was everything designed - by God?" in half, so that each half can be dealt with separately and sensibly.
Fair enough -- if there are not too many disconnected wires dangling out of the middle.
ID assumes that there was a mysterious unspecified entity which through mysterious and unspecified means caused a whole chain of complex events to happen over a period of time. That may or may not be true, but such a theory comes off much the worse from Occam's razor.
You can see that supernatural explanations have gradually been sliced away in chemistry, physics, biology, etc. It is simply not necessary to believe in vitalism or phlogiston to get an adequate, indeed excellent, explanation.
Mainstream scientific explanations have holes in them: "we're not sure exactly how human vision works, but it's probably something like this...." That is the kind of question that in time can be answered. Theories with holes that can gradually be filled are more attractive/promising than those that leave whole swathes unanswerable.
It's all very well to say God created the species, but how? By what mechanism? In test tubes? With a star-trek replicator? By breathing on clay?
On top of that, who knows how much research has been self-censored or mis-reported for fear of charges of heresy and the consequent burning of a career at the academic stake?
The same conspiracy theory pattern is used by the "moon landings were faked" and flat-earth crowds. You may be right, maybe there is a lot of suppressed evidence out there, but -- Occam's razor -- until you produce some, don't expect to be believed.
Right, and person X didn't die because of being shot, but because his heart stopped beating. One can always draw meaningless distinctions of causality.
If Lisa McPherson (to pick one example) had not joined Scientology, she would probably be alive today. The people culpable for her death would not have treated her as they did were it not for their "religion". Therefore we can reasonably say that it killed her.
Right, because everybody knows you can have multiple fatal bugs in the alpha/beta release and then get up to military-level quality in the final release. That works all the time.
I wonder at what time that point was crossed: having more Linux non-developer users than developers? Certainly more than a few years, but when I started in about 95 probably more than half the people running Linux were programmers, if not actually developing the open source.
That would equate to AMD averaging 35% growth per year for the next ten years, and Intel declining. That probably won't happen but it's not impossible.
Indeed, look at the recent Olympus dSLRs: the low-end pro E-1 has no on-board flash; the prosumer E-300 has on-board flash. Serious photographers either avoid flash altogether, or use proper offboard flash.
Having said that, if you can carry only one camera and lens it's nice to have a popup flash for emergencies.
No, it's not impossible to focus manually with a compact (or non-SLR) camera. I have a Minolta DiMAGE and you can manually focus reasonably well, though the low resolution and time lag of the EVF makes it harder than on an SLR. But it is quite possible; I do it all the time.
If smaller cameras lack manual focus it is more about the target audience, use cases and lack of room for controls than any technical reason.
There's no technical reason why you couldn't make an interchangeable-lens digicam, and Olympus have made a fixed-lens dSLR (avoiding the dust problem). It just happens that people prepared to spend the money and take the size penalty of interchangeable lenses also want the responsiveness of an SLR.
Good question. There are several reasons, most of which come down to the difference between looking at something through a cheap low-res video display and looking at it directly with your eyes.
I say cheap and low-res because live display is much nastier than a snapshot on several factors.
The display on the back of the camera (or the electronic viewfinder) is typically 200kpixels, or in the recent models maybe as much as 640x480. This is not very high resolution; obviously your eyes can see much more detail. So it's harder when looking at a screen to manually focus, to see small details and the texture of the scene and so on. This is probably the most important factor for many photographers.
Secondly, there is a time lag from light hitting the sensor, going through the electronics and then getting painted onto the screen. This is at best probably 1/60s, but can be substantially higher. I've seen moderately new cameras chunk down to only a few frames per second on the live display. No such delay is present when it's just light moving a few centimeters. Your chance of picking the exact right moment of a moving target is much better through an SLR. (Try waving your hand in front of a point&shoot.)
Thirdly, your eyes may see better in low light than a small camera sensor. Or they may not; amplification of the viewfinder is a possible advantage of a non-SLR system. But at least your eyes see darkness in a way that feels natural, rather than a noisy low-light image.
There are arguably some more but these are the big ones, and they make dSLRs the best choice for most serious photography at the moment. That's not to say they're perfect:
Non-SLR cameras can have a screen that swivels so you can hold the camera on the ground or above your head or whatever; you don't need to hold the camera to your eye.
EVF cameras can give you a more accurate live preview of exposure, which is a nice way to learn to eyeball exposure values. They also give you a live view of color balance, histogram, and what have you.
EVF cameras can do autofocus from the sensor values, which can be more flexible and intelligent, but typically less fast and accurate.
EVF cameras have no moving mirror and can be a lot quieter than an SLR; of course you can make them with no camera phones at all. Great for peeping toms.
Good viewfinders are hard to design, relatively large and expensive. Even quite expensive cameras may have viewfinders that don't show the edges of the captured frame.
Not quite a workstation, but certainly not a supercomputer: an rx8620 can comfortably hold that in memory and kick it around fairly quickly. There are users (defense, oil/gas) who need to deal interactively with many-gigabyte datasets. I don't know if anyone would want a single bitmap of that size though.
Great post, thankyou. You make we want to go out and work on my (humble) nature photography.
If I liked to geek out instead of making pictures of the rapidly degrading and disappearing wildlands of the United States, I'd probably be all for this ridiculous gigapixel project.
Right, but beautiful pictures are offtopic for Slashdot. None of the artists doing beautiful work get mentioned here.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be no way to add new and useful information
As with many creationists, you seem to apply magical thinking to the idea of "information", assuming it is something that can only be generated by an ineffable intelligence.
A genome is a bit stream. One can add information to it by inserting or flipping bits. Useful information is, in this context, changes that incrementally benefit reproduction.
That analogy may be your favourite, but it's also fairly silly, primarily because there is no selection feedback, and secondly because the rifle destroys blocks, rather than merely moving them.
A better example would be a blind man moving blocks around, and an observer saying whether they like the result or not. Certainly this would be a tedious way to build a model, but given uncounted trillions of iterations you could get there.
This doesn't require a leap of faith: it's a demonstrable fact that genetic algorithms can evolve complex systems. Maybe you should try programming some simple examples for yourself to get a feel for how it works.
The fact that evolution can work in principle or in simulations doesn't in itself prove that it led to life on earth. However, we do know that all the necessary preconditions were there (reproduction with variation and selection), there is post-hoc evidence, and no better theory is apparent.
Remember also that organisms have (of course) evolved meta-systems to give themselves an advantage over raw bit-flipping: redundancy, checks, faster variation of some genes than others, and so on. One of the largest boosts is sexual reproduction -- the most evolved organisms reproduce sexually, because that lets them evolve more efficiently/faster. If I understand correctly, random mutation is a rather unimportant mechanism.
nor to prevent any which somehow magically manages to get added from being drowned out by the "genetic burden" of otherwise universally destructive mutations.
Remember we're talking about a long-term trend. Certainly there will be many beneficial changes which happen to be lost because the carrier happens to get struck by lightning, or because they first occur in association with some destructive change. But eventually it will get sorted out. If only one in a hundred beneficial mutations survive the first generation the mechanism there is still a selective pressure -- a bit like statistical mechanics.
Iterated reproduction with variation plus selection produces solutions suited to the selection criteria. It is not so hard to understand.
The rest of the essay is a bit interesting -- picking apart a particular garden-path excursion.
My biggest problem with esr was that he couldn't seem to keep his OSI work separate from his other opinions about the proper place of women, how to treat homosexuals, etc. I respect his right to have those opinions, but I wish he would tuck them away during his very visible tenure as leader of OSI.
Russ has a fairly extreme view on libertarian economics. ("Extreme" because few people believe there should be no public liability laws -- I'd link but the archives are broken.) Fair enough; I sympathize even if I wouldn't go quite as far as he does.
My big question is: will he manage to keep his personal opinions separate from his OSI work? I do not want to hear any more OSI-related statements alluding to gun control. It's not just unprofessional, it's also a bad idea in that you may alienate people who like open source but dislike Rand.
Digital cameras are like Macs - they 'just work'
Right -- and bear in mind that Apple's recent resurgence is in part due to them adopting an open base and (somewhat) encouraging the open source community.
Apple also indicates the kind of limits we might see on cameras: some stuff you can touch, but there's still a lot of proprietary magic.
I suppose the key difference is whether there are an changes which could not have occurred through stepwise natural evolution and that therefore required a separate mechanism. ID insists there are such and calls them macroevolution while admitting microevolution; mainstream biology says they are only accumulations of smaller changes through reproduction with selection. (Is this a fair description?)
It seems reasonable to ask ID proponents what mechanism they think *was* responsible, if it was not regular evolution through genetics, etc.
On the evidence (and as far as I know) ID has not found any phenomenon for which they can offer a better explanation than mainstream biology. It is a rather barren theory. On the other hand, mainstream biology continues to make good progress. So Occam's razor excises ID's assertion of a special mechanism for which there is no evidence.
There was a tsumani a couple of weeks ago that killed more than 150000 people and harmed millions more. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that this is just a much larger version of a child drowning in a swimming pool.
What would a responsible and loving parent do? Firstly, they might prevent the hazard: gate the pool / supervise the child; not permit such a large earthquake. Note that this does not intrude on free will at all; it could be accomplished merely by manipulating the geology.
Human parents "can't be everywhere at once" and can perhaps be forgiven for not anticipating the hazard. This excuse is not available to an omnipotent/omniscient god. Whatever happened must have either been willed or at least permitted.
If the parent could have prevented the drowning but did not, then they are morally and legally culpable -- even if they say the kids were naughty.
Did the victims deserve it? There must, at least, have been many thousands of people killed who did not deserve an agonizing death, being under the age of reason or having lived blameless lives. Perhaps it was some form of collective punishment? How were the people killed supposed to know what they were supposed to do to avoid it? There was no clear ultimatum or warning.
Doubtless people are making the argument that unless Israel is removed from Palestine, similar disasters will happen. Multiply this by the thousands of different belief systems in the world. How do we know you are right and they are wrong?
To say "if you don't do X, bad things will happen" is mere superstition. One can always invent random X that happens to match events. I walked under a ladder and stubbed my toe; people didn't accept Christ and there was a tsumani.
Was this enormous tragedy with a purpose? I hold that no purpose could justify such a holocaust. I could not condone a parent drowning their child as punishment. What purpose could it serve that would not be served by, say, the appearance of angels above major cities?
Both professed atheists and professed christians lie on a scale from altruistic and selfish behaviour. In my experience there is not much correlation between religious belief and common decency. (And this is to say nothing of the many decent deists, agnostics, catholics, liberal christians, pagans, etc.)
This tsunami is but an apertif of disasters to follow, and an faint echo of disasters which have already been.
That is likely true, and evidence for my point: enormous human suffering is inconsistent with a omnipotent loving God. I would find it easier to accept a purely old-testament jealous vengeful god, or a good/evil balanced duality (as in some branches of Zoroastrianism and Wicca).
Predictions of the end of the world are a dime a dozen.
Tragedies happen, such as the recent tsumani. Any omnipotent being with a shred of decency would prevented them.
The options are: God exists and is cruel (or uncaring, or impotent, or asleep, etc); or God does not exist and it is mere senseless matter that is being cruel. I don't see how the second is any worse -- it removes only a false hope -- and it has the advantage of being true.
I am aware that an enormous number of theologians have tried to dance around the issue. Word games such as your wilful misconstrual of "bastard" are a favourite technique, and do you no credit.
I don't know of any specifically Atheist relief organizations, nor do I see why any organization would want to exclude people with religious beliefs who are otherwise suitable. There are *non-religious* organizations who do great work, such as MSF.
What you seem to miss is that disbelief in supernatural beings does not imply an absence of ethics.
The only logical ground I can see for being an Atheist
Here's one: if God exists, he's a total bastard.
Wow, thanks for posting the ICR oath. It really gives an idea of the way these people operate.
Can you even conceive of a serious/mainstream scientific institute having an unchangeable statement of doctrine which must be sworn by all new hires? A medical school which asks students to swear that influenza is caused by unfortunate conjunctions of stars, and not to think of proposing any alternative?
The very idea of swearing a list of assertions of fact which cannot be altered is by definition antiscientific.
"Was everything designed - by God?" in half, so that each half can be dealt with separately and sensibly.
Fair enough -- if there are not too many disconnected wires dangling out of the middle.
ID assumes that there was a mysterious unspecified entity which through mysterious and unspecified means caused a whole chain of complex events to happen over a period of time. That may or may not be true, but such a theory comes off much the worse from Occam's razor.
You can see that supernatural explanations have gradually been sliced away in chemistry, physics, biology, etc. It is simply not necessary to believe in vitalism or phlogiston to get an adequate, indeed excellent, explanation.
Mainstream scientific explanations have holes in them: "we're not sure exactly how human vision works, but it's probably something like this...." That is the kind of question that in time can be answered. Theories with holes that can gradually be filled are more attractive/promising than those that leave whole swathes unanswerable.
It's all very well to say God created the species, but how? By what mechanism? In test tubes? With a star-trek replicator? By breathing on clay?
On top of that, who knows how much research has been self-censored or mis-reported for fear of charges of heresy and the consequent burning of a career at the academic stake?
The same conspiracy theory pattern is used by the "moon landings were faked" and flat-earth crowds. You may be right, maybe there is a lot of suppressed evidence out there, but -- Occam's razor -- until you produce some, don't expect to be believed.
Right, and person X didn't die because of being shot, but because his heart stopped beating. One can always draw meaningless distinctions of causality.
If Lisa McPherson (to pick one example) had not joined Scientology, she would probably be alive today. The people culpable for her death would not have treated her as they did were it not for their "religion". Therefore we can reasonably say that it killed her.
You can't prove it to the OP if he chooses to disbelieve your proof. So the situation is quite similar.
Right, because everybody knows you can have multiple fatal bugs in the alpha/beta release and then get up to military-level quality in the final release. That works all the time.
I wonder at what time that point was crossed: having more Linux non-developer users than developers? Certainly more than a few years, but when I started in about 95 probably more than half the people running Linux were programmers, if not actually developing the open source.
That would equate to AMD averaging 35% growth per year for the next ten years, and Intel declining. That probably won't happen but it's not impossible.
Being 'sexy' doesn't help much in the marketplace
Being sexy has saved Apple's shiny white ass over the last four years. But it's a good sexy: good customer experience, desirable products, good buzz.
You're my favourite Slashdot celebrity! I'm so glad to see you're still in business.
Indeed, look at the recent Olympus dSLRs: the low-end pro E-1 has no on-board flash; the prosumer E-300 has on-board flash. Serious photographers either avoid flash altogether, or use proper offboard flash.
Having said that, if you can carry only one camera and lens it's nice to have a popup flash for emergencies.
Oh, and tape a couple facial tissues over the flash's lens.
Or the camera's lens, or the subject's face. Anywhere will do.
No, it's not impossible to focus manually with a compact (or non-SLR) camera. I have a Minolta DiMAGE and you can manually focus reasonably well, though the low resolution and time lag of the EVF makes it harder than on an SLR. But it is quite possible; I do it all the time.
If smaller cameras lack manual focus it is more about the target audience, use cases and lack of room for controls than any technical reason.
There's no technical reason why you couldn't make an interchangeable-lens digicam, and Olympus have made a fixed-lens dSLR (avoiding the dust problem). It just happens that people prepared to spend the money and take the size penalty of interchangeable lenses also want the responsiveness of an SLR.
Good question. There are several reasons, most of which come down to the difference between looking at something through a cheap low-res video display and looking at it directly with your eyes.
I say cheap and low-res because live display is much nastier than a snapshot on several factors.
The display on the back of the camera (or the electronic viewfinder) is typically 200kpixels, or in the recent models maybe as much as 640x480. This is not very high resolution; obviously your eyes can see much more detail. So it's harder when looking at a screen to manually focus, to see small details and the texture of the scene and so on. This is probably the most important factor for many photographers.
Secondly, there is a time lag from light hitting the sensor, going through the electronics and then getting painted onto the screen. This is at best probably 1/60s, but can be substantially higher. I've seen moderately new cameras chunk down to only a few frames per second on the live display. No such delay is present when it's just light moving a few centimeters. Your chance of picking the exact right moment of a moving target is much better through an SLR. (Try waving your hand in front of a point&shoot.)
Thirdly, your eyes may see better in low light than a small camera sensor. Or they may not; amplification of the viewfinder is a possible advantage of a non-SLR system. But at least your eyes see darkness in a way that feels natural, rather than a noisy low-light image.
There are arguably some more but these are the big ones, and they make dSLRs the best choice for most serious photography at the moment. That's not to say they're perfect:
Non-SLR cameras can have a screen that swivels so you can hold the camera on the ground or above your head or whatever; you don't need to hold the camera to your eye.
EVF cameras can give you a more accurate live preview of exposure, which is a nice way to learn to eyeball exposure values. They also give you a live view of color balance, histogram, and what have you.
EVF cameras can do autofocus from the sensor values, which can be more flexible and intelligent, but typically less fast and accurate.
EVF cameras have no moving mirror and can be a lot quieter than an SLR; of course you can make them with no camera phones at all. Great for peeping toms.
Good viewfinders are hard to design, relatively large and expensive. Even quite expensive cameras may have viewfinders that don't show the edges of the captured frame.
That's all I can think of now. HTH.
I thought he was a dyslexic and goatographer.
I've been to Colorado. It smells like cowshit, at least if you're within 20 miles of the massive feedlots.
Not quite a workstation, but certainly not a supercomputer: an rx8620 can comfortably hold that in memory and kick it around fairly quickly. There are users (defense, oil/gas) who need to deal interactively with many-gigabyte datasets. I don't know if anyone would want a single bitmap of that size though.
Great post, thankyou. You make we want to go out and work on my (humble) nature photography.
If I liked to geek out instead of making pictures of the rapidly degrading and disappearing wildlands of the United States, I'd probably be all for this ridiculous gigapixel project.
Right, but beautiful pictures are offtopic for Slashdot. None of the artists doing beautiful work get mentioned here.