There's also the fact that the power consumption of my GPU goes up a lot when it's having to do processing -- Nvidia's got a PowerNow!-type frequency scaling thing that they use.
Do I want my computer chewing up battery when rendering shiny stuff? Not really.
Not sure how the Geode stacks up to the Athlon 64 clock-for-clock, but I have an Athlon 64 laptop with frequency scaling; it throttles down to 800 MHz to save power when not under load?
Mods are drunk today -- this post isn't offtopic, since it's about the sort of photographic technology that's around nowadays, which is relevant to the story. If somebody'd had a Z712 (or the equivalents made by Panasonic or Canon -- Sony's model is so plagued by chromatic aberration that trying to photograph something against the sky is futile) in their pocket we'd possibly have pictures of the mythical mind-control flying weasel, or whatever it was.
The Z712 is similar to the Panasonic superzoom camera that I use -- little box dominated by big honkin' lens, long zoom range, optical stabilization, yak yak yak. In the film days or with a digital SLR, you need multiple expensive heavy lenses to be able to do this -- these days you can buy something for $250 that fits in your pocket and does pretty much the same thing (except take pictures of moving subjects in low light).
Technology is pretty amazing. Kudos to the engineers that figured out how to make razor-sharp high-zoom-ratio stabilized lenses for cheap -- they give me something to do on the weekends.
Were they in flight? That's what we're talking about. Pictures of stationary dragonflies are pretty easy, as you noticed, since you've got all the time in the world to compose the picture and wait on autofocus. I've taken some too: see http://picasaweb.google.com/entropius/RandomPicturesOfStuff/photo#5077785492647280562 (with a 7MP $250 camera). This was a lucky situation -- the wind was high enough that the poor little fellow was hanging on to his plant for dear life, and let me stick a camera right in his face. In better conditions (for the insect) it's harder, but can still be done.
And, just since you apparently want to have a "who knows what they're talking about" fight (please don't flame people for being clueless on the internet until you confirm that they actually are; sometimes they're not):
The insects in your picture are damselflies, not dragonflies. They're in the same order (Odonata), so you get half credit for that one. They seem to be the same as these guys (with an old 3MP camera), and are doing the same thing.
Dragonflies (or mythical dragonfly-like spy robots with tinfoil hats and mind control beams, or whatever the article is about) in *flight* are another matter entirely. The only good picture of one that I know about is here, the photographer had to do the prefocus tricks I mentioned earlier, and everybody agrees that getting that picture took a lot of skill and luck.
By "prefocus tricks" I mean using some mechanism or another to set the focus to the correct distance before composing the picture. You can either autofocus on something the same distance away, keeping in mind that the more focal lengths something is away from your lens, the less picky focus needs to be; or you can use manual focus to set the distance.
Dragonflies do have lots of tricks like that -- they're among the most agile insect fliers in the world -- but somehow I doubt they track the eye movements of their prey.
Why?
Dragonflies are insectivorous, and insects have fixed eyes.
Camera: most commercial cameras are optimized for size, durability, and features, and aren't terribly concerned with mass. Even so they're fairly diminutive, and contain extraneous things like LCD's, viewfinders, flashes, a case that won't break when you drop it, etc. If your camera-bug's only going to run outdoors, you can make it a lot lighter and smaller by using a "slow" (small-aperture) lens, and that lens will be pretty small since you're matching it to a small CCD (which you can get away with because you have plenty of light).
I imagine a 10mm f/4 or f/5.6 lens (roughly equivalent to a human eye's field of view when matched with a 1/3.2"-type CCD) would be light enough to be roughly negligible.
Actually, an autonomous device about this size capable of storing energy for quite a lot of flight time has already been demonstrated, without devoting much body mass to storage. In addition to possessing quick-tracking wide-angle optics, the device is agile enough in the air to capture objects determined to be a threat in flight.
Well, good luck getting a photograph from a cell phone camera of a small moving object to work.
But decent digital cameras are small and cheap now; you can get an 8MP camera with a rather ludicrous zoom range of 28-504mm equivalent for about $350, and a 7MP camera with an only slightly less ludicrous zoom range of 35-420mm for about $270. (Panasonic FZ8 and FZ18, respectively. Canon/Olympus/Fuji/Sony/everyone else you might expect make similar products, but they're more expensive and not as good.) Both of these fit in a (largish) pocket.
If I were going somewhere where News might wind up happening like a protest, I'd be sure to take mine along.
Cell phone cameras are a wonderful thing for ensuring that things make it to the news: q.v. "Don't Tase me, bro", and think about what would have happened if there'd been a bunch of cell phone cameras at Tiananmen Square rather than a newsman standing in a window a quarter mile away with a 400mm lens, who had to hide his film in the toilet when the Chinese police showed up. Said cell phone cameras aren't going to do too well with snoop-bugs or whatever in flight, though.
Getting a decent photograph of a dragonfly is hard, especially so with a camera with contrast-detect autofocus (i.e. anything other than a SLR).
First you have to find the little fellow in the viewfinder/LCD This is hard, because at wide-angle you'll have trouble seeing it, and at tele you'll have trouble finding it (since your FOV is so limited). If you're good and have one of those little electronic viewfinders, you can track the bug with one eye and look through the viewfinder with the other while operating your zoom ring/switch/whatever you have.
Then you've got to keep the erratically-flying little fellow in the frame while waiting on your AF to lock on. Lots of digital cameras with long zooms have issues with slow focus at the long end. Panasonic's FZ series has much faster focus at the long end but, when using the "high-speed focus" mode, the viewfinder is frozen so you might have trouble tracking.
You're probably better off using one of a variety of prefocus tricks.
I imagine they'll send the guy a complimentary (or should that be "complementary"?;)) (K)Ubuntu disk in the mail, with the instruction "You'd probably be better off using this instead, but here's the Vista disk you bought."
A trial would put things quite solidly in the public record. Throwing a couple of people in jail doesn't matter, but getting corruption irrevocably documented in the public record is worth a whole lot.
Conducting research on stem cells derived from embryos which were going to be discarded anyway doesn't cause "the destruction of a human embryo."
If you believe that the death of a human embryo is a "sin", whatever that means, then stop having unprotected sex: many pregnancies spontaneously abort very early after fertilization.
... only if that deficit spending is spent on the Pentagon or contractors for the Pentagon.
*sigh* Maybe in this era of crushing credit-card debt among people who have no idea what "24% APR" means (because our schools suck too much for them to understand $(t)=$(0)*exp(kt)), the government is just going into debt to appeal to voters?
"Uncle Sam understands what you're going through, he's in debt too! Vote GOP!"
Sure, some stations carry blatantly left-wing programs like "Alternative Radio". But nearly every station carries "Marketplace", a financial news show that takes as an axiom "an unfettered free market is ultimately a public good". That's a center-right position. The news shows (All Things Considered, Morning Edition) tend to be fairly middle-of-the-road, since they mostly just give the news without a whole lot of spin. The few "opinion" segments, by people like Daniel Schorr, tend to be pretty nonpartisan.
The best counter to the "liberal media" tirade I've seen, shortly after Ronald Reagan died:
Someone linked to NPR (National Public Radio, for the non-American readers)'s story about Reagan's funeral, and said "When Clinton dies, if you can find me a Fox News anchor that describes him as a 'great American', then you can talk to me about the liberal media."
Funny that he'll veto (revenue-neutral) stem-cell research, but won't use his veto pen to enforce that wonderful Republican virtue of "fiscal responsibility"...
Slashdot Mirror
... pocket change, if you're Microsoft.
Or: use bittorrent.
Then have the customers pay for the disks/shipping or the bandwidth.
I think I have that much change in my pockets right now.
There's also the fact that the power consumption of my GPU goes up a lot when it's having to do processing -- Nvidia's got a PowerNow!-type frequency scaling thing that they use.
Do I want my computer chewing up battery when rendering shiny stuff? Not really.
500 MHz?
Not sure how the Geode stacks up to the Athlon 64 clock-for-clock, but I have an Athlon 64 laptop with frequency scaling; it throttles down to 800 MHz to save power when not under load?
Guess what?
800 MHz is enough for practically everything.
Mods are drunk today -- this post isn't offtopic, since it's about the sort of photographic technology that's around nowadays, which is relevant to the story. If somebody'd had a Z712 (or the equivalents made by Panasonic or Canon -- Sony's model is so plagued by chromatic aberration that trying to photograph something against the sky is futile) in their pocket we'd possibly have pictures of the mythical mind-control flying weasel, or whatever it was.
The Z712 is similar to the Panasonic superzoom camera that I use -- little box dominated by big honkin' lens, long zoom range, optical stabilization, yak yak yak. In the film days or with a digital SLR, you need multiple expensive heavy lenses to be able to do this -- these days you can buy something for $250 that fits in your pocket and does pretty much the same thing (except take pictures of moving subjects in low light).
Technology is pretty amazing. Kudos to the engineers that figured out how to make razor-sharp high-zoom-ratio stabilized lenses for cheap -- they give me something to do on the weekends.
Were they in flight? That's what we're talking about. Pictures of stationary dragonflies are pretty easy, as you noticed, since you've got all the time in the world to compose the picture and wait on autofocus. I've taken some too: see http://picasaweb.google.com/entropius/RandomPicturesOfStuff/photo#5077785492647280562 (with a 7MP $250 camera). This was a lucky situation -- the wind was high enough that the poor little fellow was hanging on to his plant for dear life, and let me stick a camera right in his face. In better conditions (for the insect) it's harder, but can still be done.
And, just since you apparently want to have a "who knows what they're talking about" fight (please don't flame people for being clueless on the internet until you confirm that they actually are; sometimes they're not):
The insects in your picture are damselflies, not dragonflies. They're in the same order (Odonata), so you get half credit for that one. They seem to be the same as these guys (with an old 3MP camera), and are doing the same thing.
Dragonflies (or mythical dragonfly-like spy robots with tinfoil hats and mind control beams, or whatever the article is about) in *flight* are another matter entirely. The only good picture of one that I know about is here, the photographer had to do the prefocus tricks I mentioned earlier, and everybody agrees that getting that picture took a lot of skill and luck.
HTH.
By "prefocus tricks" I mean using some mechanism or another to set the focus to the correct distance before composing the picture. You can either autofocus on something the same distance away, keeping in mind that the more focal lengths something is away from your lens, the less picky focus needs to be; or you can use manual focus to set the distance.
Dragonflies do have lots of tricks like that -- they're among the most agile insect fliers in the world -- but somehow I doubt they track the eye movements of their prey.
Why?
Dragonflies are insectivorous, and insects have fixed eyes.
Panasonic's had effective and miniaturized image stabilization technology for a few years now.
Storage: 8GB SD card, available from Newegg.
Camera: most commercial cameras are optimized for size, durability, and features, and aren't terribly concerned with mass. Even so they're fairly diminutive, and contain extraneous things like LCD's, viewfinders, flashes, a case that won't break when you drop it, etc. If your camera-bug's only going to run outdoors, you can make it a lot lighter and smaller by using a "slow" (small-aperture) lens, and that lens will be pretty small since you're matching it to a small CCD (which you can get away with because you have plenty of light).
I imagine a 10mm f/4 or f/5.6 lens (roughly equivalent to a human eye's field of view when matched with a 1/3.2"-type CCD) would be light enough to be roughly negligible.
For reference: I have a camera sitting on my table with a CCD that measures 4.5mm x 3.4mm.
Actually, an autonomous device about this size capable of storing energy for quite a lot of flight time has already been demonstrated, without devoting much body mass to storage. In addition to possessing quick-tracking wide-angle optics, the device is agile enough in the air to capture objects determined to be a threat in flight.
The device is, of course, a common dragonfly.
I'm one of the most strongly anti-war people you will find, am 25, and have never been drunk/stoned/high.
Well, good luck getting a photograph from a cell phone camera of a small moving object to work.
But decent digital cameras are small and cheap now; you can get an 8MP camera with a rather ludicrous zoom range of 28-504mm equivalent for about $350, and a 7MP camera with an only slightly less ludicrous zoom range of 35-420mm for about $270. (Panasonic FZ8 and FZ18, respectively. Canon/Olympus/Fuji/Sony/everyone else you might expect make similar products, but they're more expensive and not as good.) Both of these fit in a (largish) pocket.
If I were going somewhere where News might wind up happening like a protest, I'd be sure to take mine along.
Cell phone cameras are a wonderful thing for ensuring that things make it to the news: q.v. "Don't Tase me, bro", and think about what would have happened if there'd been a bunch of cell phone cameras at Tiananmen Square rather than a newsman standing in a window a quarter mile away with a 400mm lens, who had to hide his film in the toilet when the Chinese police showed up. Said cell phone cameras aren't going to do too well with snoop-bugs or whatever in flight, though.
Getting a decent photograph of a dragonfly is hard, especially so with a camera with contrast-detect autofocus (i.e. anything other than a SLR).
First you have to find the little fellow in the viewfinder/LCD This is hard, because at wide-angle you'll have trouble seeing it, and at tele you'll have trouble finding it (since your FOV is so limited). If you're good and have one of those little electronic viewfinders, you can track the bug with one eye and look through the viewfinder with the other while operating your zoom ring/switch/whatever you have.
Then you've got to keep the erratically-flying little fellow in the frame while waiting on your AF to lock on. Lots of digital cameras with long zooms have issues with slow focus at the long end. Panasonic's FZ series has much faster focus at the long end but, when using the "high-speed focus" mode, the viewfinder is frozen so you might have trouble tracking.
You're probably better off using one of a variety of prefocus tricks.
I imagine they'll send the guy a complimentary (or should that be "complementary"? ;)) (K)Ubuntu disk in the mail, with the instruction "You'd probably be better off using this instead, but here's the Vista disk you bought."
A trial would put things quite solidly in the public record. Throwing a couple of people in jail doesn't matter, but getting corruption irrevocably documented in the public record is worth a whole lot.
Conducting research on stem cells derived from embryos which were going to be discarded anyway doesn't cause "the destruction of a human embryo."
If you believe that the death of a human embryo is a "sin", whatever that means, then stop having unprotected sex: many pregnancies spontaneously abort very early after fertilization.
Come to think of it, if they really had a spine they'd cut funding for the Secret Service and let nature take its course.
If you have adequate testicular fortitude there are a lot of things a majority can do to rein in a president gone batty.
No, but they could have withheld war funding. Not doing that makes them spineless pussies.
There are no average joes in the Vatican.
The Vatican's main role is to screw over the average joes in the rest of the world.
... only if that deficit spending is spent on the Pentagon or contractors for the Pentagon.
*sigh* Maybe in this era of crushing credit-card debt among people who have no idea what "24% APR" means (because our schools suck too much for them to understand $(t)=$(0)*exp(kt)), the government is just going into debt to appeal to voters?
"Uncle Sam understands what you're going through, he's in debt too! Vote GOP!"
The bill didn't provide any additional funding, only stipulated that federal funding could now be used to fund stem-cell research.
And who gives a shit where the stem cells are from?
NPR isn't as turbo-liberal as you might believe.
Sure, some stations carry blatantly left-wing programs like "Alternative Radio". But nearly every station carries "Marketplace", a financial news show that takes as an axiom "an unfettered free market is ultimately a public good". That's a center-right position. The news shows (All Things Considered, Morning Edition) tend to be fairly middle-of-the-road, since they mostly just give the news without a whole lot of spin. The few "opinion" segments, by people like Daniel Schorr, tend to be pretty nonpartisan.
The best counter to the "liberal media" tirade I've seen, shortly after Ronald Reagan died:
Someone linked to NPR (National Public Radio, for the non-American readers)'s story about Reagan's funeral, and said "When Clinton dies, if you can find me a Fox News anchor that describes him as a 'great American', then you can talk to me about the liberal media."
Congress started spending.
Funny that he'll veto (revenue-neutral) stem-cell research, but won't use his veto pen to enforce that wonderful Republican virtue of "fiscal responsibility"...