Argh, this is the kind of statment that really frustrates me because it's impossible to argue, especially with a technical crowd like slashdot. but there are really things that make this statment completely false.
First of all the cheapest digital SLR i know of, the digital rebel, is way out of his price range.
Second, there are a lot of good reasons that film is not obsolete. The misconception is that amatures should go digital because that's what professional photojournalists do. The problem with this statment is that photojournalists have completely different needs than art photographers, which is what most amatures are closer to. If you need to submit your photo to an editor from 1000 miles away, the photo is going to be printed in a magazine or newspaper (ie both film and digital files will in the end be overkill regardless), and you need to shoot a ton of shots without changing film then digital is obviously superior. If you take away the need for speed, and add the fact that any improvment in quality is a plus film still wins. This is NOT because 35mm film has better resolution than todays cameras which it doesnt. It is because there is no way to get print the very high resolution photos that does them justice. Now here's the tough part, there's no way for me to make you believe that without comparing prints. I can say that I have, which i have, Im a photo and CS major. But in the end you have to go out and look for yourself.
My goal isnt to bad mouth digital either, I love the technology, I scan all my negs (6x7) and i use photoshop when I have a negative which is just in too bad shape for me to save it with traditional dodge/burn/variable contrast/bleach/toneing darkroom techniques. Im just waiting for the day when I can start printing digitaly and make prints that are as atractive as i can get from traditional fiber papers.
Uhhhh wouldnt you want the break on the back wheel if youre only going to have one of them? I mean im all for stopping power but doing an endo isnt my favorite means of coming to a halt.
Lets make it clear that this is GNU-Darwin only. There are other darwin distributions which are... well... less retarded. It's only fair not to slander their collective good name.
The whole point of the belkin reader is that you dont need a computer (which the $14 flash reader requires) so if im shooting with my digital camera out somewhere where I dont have a laptop handy I dont have to stop taking pictures when my card fills up.
I had my address spoofed and therefore recieved about 100 to 200 responses. The normal ones were "mail undeliverable" mixed in with a few "Your system sent us a virus" but the ones I enjoyed the most were the autoreply messages "We have recieved your job application in the email titled 'Love You!' and will process it shortly. Thank you for applying your application is important to us. It is being reviewed now and you'll have a response in several weeks." Well thanks! I never knew my career could get such a boost from this virus.
i think one thing that people are missing here is that you can do more with a CS degree than just program.
Hell half the people hired on wallstreet dont have economics degrees, and im sure it would come in handy to know a thing or two about CS if you were working for a company that traded in the high tech sector.
Law is another area where a CS degree could be useful, software patents/copyrights are challenged in court all the time, if you graduate with a CS degree and good grades i bet you'd have as good a shot as anybody at getting into law school.
Or teaching, high schools around the country are working to improve their cs courses and Im sure well trained graduates are in demand.
The fact is that most colleges arent exactly supposed to be vocational schools so I think people should worry less about what degree they get than they do about how well they train themselves to learn.
We should _encourage_ them to listen to eminem. I mean if it gets popular enough theyll all start hateing gay people and women instead of all americans.
"The days of cramming bulky 2.5" disks into mp3 players may finally be over."
Theyve been over for a long time now, the ipod came out over a year ago. besides being a bit smaller what do these drives have over the toshiba drives used in the ipod?
But doesnt this mean that the standard will at least be able to import the office XML files? Otherwise who would use it? and if that's the case it means that at the very least the standard edition would be able to import files flawlessly from any office app that supports the format.
Given the success of compuserve in Compuserve vs Cyber promotions and intel in Intel Corporation vs Kourosh Hamidi, both cases in which corperations sued a third party for sending their users unsolicited email why hasnt litigation been more effective in slowing the tide of spam?
They just started something like this at princeton for the grad students, the new bus route which goes between the grad students appartments has a system designed by an undergrad and his prof to transmit real time gps information inorder to generate up to the minute schedules. There's more information here: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/home/hmcap.html
I think you should probably expand on those categories which are excluded from your statement. You cant underestimate the value of having a highly visible school when looking for jobs and internships. Two example i have seen are 1. when it was time for me to look for a summer internship which could hopefully lead to a job many large companies aggressively marketed themselves to CS undergrads in my department this was in stark contrast to some of my friends who went to larger schools but are doing the same work and are absolutely equally qualified. 2. One person I know at princeton was able to get in touch with senator Frist through the university because of his envolvment with our student government. That's the kind of access that can only help when trying to get your foot in the door in any field.
But before you call me elitist I should say that I dont think the name of your school should come into question when deciding where to apply in the long run picking the school that's right for you based on the environment you want and the fields you want to pursue is far more important.
With all the articles going around putting focus on the college admissions process at top schools and how flawed it is im glad someone finally realizes the truth. That the importance of the name of your school is a distant third in my opinion to first what you make of your experience there and second to whether it's the right school for you. I know people at my school who are throwing away their four years drinking and partying. I also know people at Dartmouth who are miserable because they really wanted the environment that a large city school would provide but they chose Dartmouth for the name value (not to say that there arent others for whom living two seconds from miles of hiking and skiing isnt heaven.)
I wish more parents would think about this when theyre pressuring their kids to do after school activities that they have no interest in and take AP classes which arent right for them.
That said you cant totally discount the advantages to going to a big name school. But these advantages have less to do with the curriculum than they do with the people you can come in contact with both while at the university and after you graduate. For example there arent many places where you can take a course from ed Felten on IT and the law, and a course on programing from Kernighan while at the same time studying photography with emmet gowin. But like I said before having a prestigious faculty to work with doesnt do you any good unless you put the time in to get to know them.
Im a lab TA for this course, which means that I have scheduled hours in one of the labs where students can come in and work on the projects with someone there to give them help. What Ive seen so far is that the original intentions of the people signing up for this course is to use it as a gut, but now at the half way point their learning alot and they all have a better grasp of how the computer, and their browser in particular, works to display what's on their screen. For example for the first couple weeks most questions were just confusion about things like where the files were supposed to go, and how to open and save documents. Now everyone seems to have a strong grasp on the basics and their questions really show that they understand what's being thrown at them.
No one is saying that he was first, but the article is missleading in that it makes it sound like this is the first time this course is offered. This is the courses' third year in it's current form, another similar course CS 111, was offered before this one, 109, took over. Im not sure how long 111 has been offered but it's been there for since 1998 at the latest.
first of all the QR requirment isnt the only one at princeton they are:
Epistemology & Cognition (EC) one course Ethical Thought & Moral Values (EM) one course Historical Analysis (HA) one course Quantitative Reasoning (QR) one course Literature and Arts (LA) two courses Social Analysis (SA) two courses Science and Technology (ST) two courses (one lab course)
thats for a libral arts degree the BSE degree is obviously much more science heavy.
Now for why I dont want to see MORE math science in the distribution requirments. I agree with you that it would be good for everyne to better understand programing but think about the other fields that could make a similar claim, anthro could just as easily say that you shouldnt leave campus without having studied a different culture so you can better understand your own. or the arts could demand that you take one course on painting so that youll be able to better appreciate the fine arts in your later life. The english department could demand that everyone at least learns basic grammer and spelling, which you can see from most of my posts im not the best at.
All of these are good ideas but if you throw too many of them in the idea of "Electives" and the possibility of getting a certificate (princeton version of a minor) beyond your field of major flies out the window. three courses is enough to introduce people if not toeverything at least to a variety of science and if something catches their attention there's nothing stopping them from exploring it further.
(oh and as a side note Princeton still is the greatest math school in the US!)*
*the above statment was completely unbiased and should be take as such,thereby mortaly insulting all memebers of other institutions.
It's important to note that this isnt against open source software just GPLed software. I see the GPL as a corperation, everything done to GPLed software is kept within the GPLed domain, just like anything a closed source company does is kept within their domain. If the government is going to put time and money into developing software I dont want to see it being trapped by the GPL anymore than I'd like it if they gave the code to microsoft.
Arguing that anyone can just use the GPL and this wouldnt be a problem isnt really consistant too, becuase that limits the freedom that most GPL advocates love to shout about so much.
"I got WinXP, Frontpage, OfficeXP, and Visual Studio from MS for being a college student, why didn't we hear about this?"
grabbing them over the network from your roommate doesnt count as microsoft giving them away. In fact im sure that they dont give them away to all colleges because i know for a fact we have an outrageously expensive site license.
errgh, this really strikes close to home and I cant really argue this with quantitative numbers, but the truth is that i just cant say that Ive ever seen a print done with digital technology that looks as beautiful as a simple 35mm film. Im not particularly attached to regular film as a matter of religion, i just like the results better. Its like with audio most audiophiles will agree that tube amps are the way to go for a sweet sound. yet tube amps are actualy LESS acurate at reproducing sound than conventional amps are. I see photography in the same way, you can get cameras that are more acurate and more acurate but until I see one that LOOKS better then youre going to have a hard time convincing me that digital cameras outperform 35mm.
that said... here's my adhock attempt at explaining in definite terms why i think film looks better. when you make a print every silver molecule on the film or on the paper caries one bit of information, it's one molecule wide to fit that much information in memory you'd need one transistor for each molecule. lets be generous and say that a transistor is 90 molecules by 90 molecules and they can be packed edge to edge. the simple physical size of the memory that would store the information that's in one 35mm negative is enormous and impracticle.
that said ive been convinced (in no small part by a comment on slashdot a couple weeks back sorry i forget who the poster was) that for the large majority of commercial tasks digital photographs are just fine and easier to use.
why not set up a server with phind or some varient running. I dont know how large UCI is but at my university of 4k students i can find any file i want on the network, it's just a matter of getting some way to search. I bet if you talked to your IT department they might even help you after you showed them how making network fileshares easy to search will cut down on the real culprit, off campus uploads/downloads.
then i would suggest you take your ibook and get it looked at right away, maybe one of your ram chips got unseated through some freak accident so youre only using it with 64MB or something. my experience with a 400MHz imac (G3 processor) was completely different. with 10.1 and 10.2 (which i used for only a week before upgrading to my new tower) performance was very respectable. playing dvds was hit or miss but asside from that i could do pretty much any consumer type work on it without problem, i never tried to say.. recompile mozilla, or use photoshop for anything over small images but. but for evertyhing else, no problem.
I find it really interesting and suprising that you use digital over film. But it's gotten me curious as to whether im just dismising the technology because of my own intrests and not realizing it satisfies most people's needs. sorry if my first comment sounded arogant, i just get sick of the bigger numbers means better product mentality.
So ive got a few questions.
How does the contrast and detail of prints compare to both enlargments and contact print of standard film?
do you see any differences in various areas of the photo or is the camera which you use able to match colors and light values across the entire photo?
do you find using software ie photoshop is sufficient to make up for not being able to control the development/printing process?
what kind of printer do you use for the final product?
since you take landscapes you probably wont be able to help me here but is there a way to get really fast exposures (equivalent to 1600 iso film or greater)?
And most importantly if you were given 10 prints would you be able to tell which ones are digital and which ones are from film?
Any thoughts from people who have used digital cameras for professional
Slashdot Mirror
Argh, this is the kind of statment that really frustrates me because it's impossible to argue, especially with a technical crowd like slashdot. but there are really things that make this statment completely false.
First of all the cheapest digital SLR i know of, the digital rebel, is way out of his price range.
Second, there are a lot of good reasons that film is not obsolete. The misconception is that amatures should go digital because that's what professional photojournalists do. The problem with this statment is that photojournalists have completely different needs than art photographers, which is what most amatures are closer to. If you need to submit your photo to an editor from 1000 miles away, the photo is going to be printed in a magazine or newspaper (ie both film and digital files will in the end be overkill regardless), and you need to shoot a ton of shots without changing film then digital is obviously superior. If you take away the need for speed, and add the fact that any improvment in quality is a plus film still wins. This is NOT because 35mm film has better resolution than todays cameras which it doesnt. It is because there is no way to get print the very high resolution photos that does them justice. Now here's the tough part, there's no way for me to make you believe that without comparing prints. I can say that I have, which i have, Im a photo and CS major. But in the end you have to go out and look for yourself.
My goal isnt to bad mouth digital either, I love the technology, I scan all my negs (6x7) and i use photoshop when I have a negative which is just in too bad shape for me to save it with traditional dodge/burn/variable contrast/bleach/toneing darkroom techniques. Im just waiting for the day when I can start printing digitaly and make prints that are as atractive as i can get from traditional fiber papers.
Uhhhh wouldnt you want the break on the back wheel if youre only going to have one of them? I mean im all for stopping power but doing an endo isnt my favorite means of coming to a halt.
Lets make it clear that this is GNU-Darwin only. There are other darwin distributions which are... well... less retarded. It's only fair not to slander their collective good name.
The whole point of the belkin reader is that you dont need a computer (which the $14 flash reader requires) so if im shooting with my digital camera out somewhere where I dont have a laptop handy I dont have to stop taking pictures when my card fills up.
I had my address spoofed and therefore recieved about 100 to 200 responses. The normal ones were "mail undeliverable" mixed in with a few "Your system sent us a virus" but the ones I enjoyed the most were the autoreply messages "We have recieved your job application in the email titled 'Love You!' and will process it shortly. Thank you for applying your application is important to us. It is being reviewed now and you'll have a response in several weeks." Well thanks! I never knew my career could get such a boost from this virus.
i think one thing that people are missing here is that you can do more with a CS degree than just program.
Hell half the people hired on wallstreet dont have economics degrees, and im sure it would come in handy to know a thing or two about CS if you were working for a company that traded in the high tech sector.
Law is another area where a CS degree could be useful, software patents/copyrights are challenged in court all the time, if you graduate with a CS degree and good grades i bet you'd have as good a shot as anybody at getting into law school.
Or teaching, high schools around the country are working to improve their cs courses and Im sure well trained graduates are in demand.
The fact is that most colleges arent exactly supposed to be vocational schools so I think people should worry less about what degree they get than they do about how well they train themselves to learn.
(note sarcasm)
"The days of cramming bulky 2.5" disks into mp3 players may finally be over."
Theyve been over for a long time now, the ipod came out over a year ago. besides being a bit smaller what do these drives have over the toshiba drives used in the ipod?
But doesnt this mean that the standard will at least be able to import the office XML files? Otherwise who would use it? and if that's the case it means that at the very least the standard edition would be able to import files flawlessly from any office app that supports the format.
This could be great for the laptop market where "average" multimedia speakers would sound alot better than those tin cans.
Given the success of compuserve in Compuserve vs Cyber promotions and intel in Intel Corporation vs Kourosh Hamidi, both cases in which corperations sued a third party for sending their users unsolicited email why hasnt litigation been more effective in slowing the tide of spam?
They just started something like this at princeton for the grad students, the new bus route which goes between the grad students appartments has a system designed by an undergrad and his prof to transmit real time gps information inorder to generate up to the minute schedules. There's more information here: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/home/hmcap.html
youve obviously never had a midterm project due in 8 hours with a sleeping roommate within 10 feet of you. :)
I think you should probably expand on those categories which are excluded from your statement. You cant underestimate the value of having a highly visible school when looking for jobs and internships. Two example i have seen are
1. when it was time for me to look for a summer internship which could hopefully lead to a job many large companies aggressively marketed themselves to CS undergrads in my department this was in stark contrast to some of my friends who went to larger schools but are doing the same work and are absolutely equally qualified.
2. One person I know at princeton was able to get in touch with senator Frist through the university because of his envolvment with our student government. That's the kind of access that can only help when trying to get your foot in the door in any field.
But before you call me elitist I should say that I dont think the name of your school should come into question when deciding where to apply in the long run picking the school that's right for you based on the environment you want and the fields you want to pursue is far more important.
With all the articles going around putting focus on the college admissions process at top schools and how flawed it is im glad someone finally realizes the truth. That the importance of the name of your school is a distant third in my opinion to first what you make of your experience there and second to whether it's the right school for you. I know people at my school who are throwing away their four years drinking and partying. I also know people at Dartmouth who are miserable because they really wanted the environment that a large city school would provide but they chose Dartmouth for the name value (not to say that there arent others for whom living two seconds from miles of hiking and skiing isnt heaven.)
I wish more parents would think about this when theyre pressuring their kids to do after school activities that they have no interest in and take AP classes which arent right for them.
That said you cant totally discount the advantages to going to a big name school. But these advantages have less to do with the curriculum than they do with the people you can come in contact with both while at the university and after you graduate. For example there arent many places where you can take a course from ed Felten on IT and the law, and a course on programing from Kernighan while at the same time studying photography with emmet gowin. But like I said before having a prestigious faculty to work with doesnt do you any good unless you put the time in to get to know them.
Im a lab TA for this course, which means that I have scheduled hours in one of the labs where students can come in and work on the projects with someone there to give them help. What Ive seen so far is that the original intentions of the people signing up for this course is to use it as a gut, but now at the half way point their learning alot and they all have a better grasp of how the computer, and their browser in particular, works to display what's on their screen. For example for the first couple weeks most questions were just confusion about things like where the files were supposed to go, and how to open and save documents. Now everyone seems to have a strong grasp on the basics and their questions really show that they understand what's being thrown at them.
No one is saying that he was first, but the article is missleading in that it makes it sound like this is the first time this course is offered. This is the courses' third year in it's current form, another similar course CS 111, was offered before this one, 109, took over. Im not sure how long 111 has been offered but it's been there for since 1998 at the latest.
first of all the QR requirment isnt the only one at princeton they are:
Epistemology & Cognition (EC) one course
Ethical Thought & Moral Values (EM) one course
Historical Analysis (HA) one course
Quantitative Reasoning (QR) one course
Literature and Arts (LA) two courses
Social Analysis (SA) two courses
Science and Technology (ST) two courses (one lab course)
thats for a libral arts degree the BSE degree is obviously much more science heavy.
Now for why I dont want to see MORE math science in the distribution requirments. I agree with you that it would be good for everyne to better understand programing but think about the other fields that could make a similar claim, anthro could just as easily say that you shouldnt leave campus without having studied a different culture so you can better understand your own. or the arts could demand that you take one course on painting so that youll be able to better appreciate the fine arts in your later life. The english department could demand that everyone at least learns basic grammer and spelling, which you can see from most of my posts im not the best at.
All of these are good ideas but if you throw too many of them in the idea of "Electives" and the possibility of getting a certificate (princeton version of a minor) beyond your field of major flies out the window. three courses is enough to introduce people if not toeverything at least to a variety of science and if something catches their attention there's nothing stopping them from exploring it further.
(oh and as a side note Princeton still is the greatest math school in the US!)*
*the above statment was completely unbiased and should be take as such,thereby mortaly insulting all memebers of other institutions.
It's important to note that this isnt against open source software just GPLed software. I see the GPL as a corperation, everything done to GPLed software is kept within the GPLed domain, just like anything a closed source company does is kept within their domain. If the government is going to put time and money into developing software I dont want to see it being trapped by the GPL anymore than I'd like it if they gave the code to microsoft.
Arguing that anyone can just use the GPL and this wouldnt be a problem isnt really consistant too, becuase that limits the freedom that most GPL advocates love to shout about so much.
grabbing them over the network from your roommate doesnt count as microsoft giving them away. In fact im sure that they dont give them away to all colleges because i know for a fact we have an outrageously expensive site license.
I think this pretty much defines putting the cart in front of the horse. still a fun read though.
errgh, this really strikes close to home and I cant really argue this with quantitative numbers, but the truth is that i just cant say that Ive ever seen a print done with digital technology that looks as beautiful as a simple 35mm film. Im not particularly attached to regular film as a matter of religion, i just like the results better. Its like with audio most audiophiles will agree that tube amps are the way to go for a sweet sound. yet tube amps are actualy LESS acurate at reproducing sound than conventional amps are. I see photography in the same way, you can get cameras that are more acurate and more acurate but until I see one that LOOKS better then youre going to have a hard time convincing me that digital cameras outperform 35mm.
that said... here's my adhock attempt at explaining in definite terms why i think film looks better. when you make a print every silver molecule on the film or on the paper caries one bit of information, it's one molecule wide to fit that much information in memory you'd need one transistor for each molecule. lets be generous and say that a transistor is 90 molecules by 90 molecules and they can be packed edge to edge. the simple physical size of the memory that would store the information that's in one 35mm negative is enormous and impracticle.
that said ive been convinced (in no small part by a comment on slashdot a couple weeks back sorry i forget who the poster was) that for the large majority of commercial tasks digital photographs are just fine and easier to use.
why not set up a server with phind or some varient running. I dont know how large UCI is but at my university of 4k students i can find any file i want on the network, it's just a matter of getting some way to search. I bet if you talked to your IT department they might even help you after you showed them how making network fileshares easy to search will cut down on the real culprit, off campus uploads/downloads.
then i would suggest you take your ibook and get it looked at right away, maybe one of your ram chips got unseated through some freak accident so youre only using it with 64MB or something. my experience with a 400MHz imac (G3 processor) was completely different. with 10.1 and 10.2 (which i used for only a week before upgrading to my new tower) performance was very respectable. playing dvds was hit or miss but asside from that i could do pretty much any consumer type work on it without problem, i never tried to say.. recompile mozilla, or use photoshop for anything over small images but. but for evertyhing else, no problem.
I find it really interesting and suprising that you use digital over film. But it's gotten me curious as to whether im just dismising the technology because of my own intrests and not realizing it satisfies most people's needs. sorry if my first comment sounded arogant, i just get sick of the bigger numbers means better product mentality.
So ive got a few questions.
How does the contrast and detail of prints compare to both enlargments and contact print of standard film?
do you see any differences in various areas of the photo or is the camera which you use able to match colors and light values across the entire photo?
do you find using software ie photoshop is sufficient to make up for not being able to control the development/printing process?
what kind of printer do you use for the final product?
since you take landscapes you probably wont be able to help me here but is there a way to get really fast exposures (equivalent to 1600 iso film or greater)?
And most importantly if you were given 10 prints would you be able to tell which ones are digital and which ones are from film?
Any thoughts from people who have used digital cameras for professional