His choices were more like "turn it in to the police and get a pat on the head (if that), or give it to Gizmodo and get a fat check". Gee, I wonder why he chose Gizmodo.
The problem with that reasoning is that he was required by law to turn it in to the police. So his choices were more like "do what the law requires you to do and turn it in to the police, or commit a felony by selling it for $5,000." In which case, well, you really do have to wonder why the hell he chose Gizmodo.
It was either a very valuable Apple prototype, or a worthless knockoff that didn't even work. When the finder tried to call Apple to return it, the person he spoke to naturally assumed it was the latter and told him it was probably just a knock-off and not to worry about it.
So if they believed the phone was a cheap knockoff, why was it worth to pay $5,000 to have it change hands?
Whatever the Apple call center rep told them, the phone finder and Gizmodo correctly concluded that he was wrong, and that this truly was a very valuable Apple prototype phone, and acted according to that belief. You don't get to claim Joe's cell phone just because you asked some dude who works for Joe and he didn't think that was Joe's phone.
Gizmodo was able to confirm that one way or the other and they were going to pay him $5k for the story and promised to return the phone for him. That's a win/win for the guy.
Except that by California law he's required to turn it in to the police if he can't return it to the owner. So accepting money in exchange for the phone is a crime, which you're not supposed to do.
Yes, turning it into the police gets it back to Apple too -- but not necessarily any faster (since they hadn't reported it missing). So why turn down the money?
Look up the relevant California Civil Code sections. When he turns it in to the police, he makes an affidavit describing the circumstances whereby he found it, and his reasons for believing that this phone belongs to Apple. The police then contact Apple to tell them that they have received an item that may be their property.
Contrary to your implicit assumption, Apple doesn't have to go to the police and report the item missing or stolen. The process doesn't even require them to know that they lost anything. The finder must make a reasonable attempt to return it to the owner, or else, turn it to the police in a reasonable amount of time. The police then contacts the likely owner(s). And you can be sure that by getting the police involved, Apple's going to respond.
Taking the money obfuscates his true motive.
No, the money in this case reveals the two parties' true motives:
The guy who found the phone correctly concluded that it was very valuable, so of all the things he could have done to get the phone to Apple (including some that he was required by law to do), he chose to profit by selling it for a substantial sum to a tech rumors site, who he concluded had an business interest in publicizing it (which is the damn reason he could get them to pay $5,000 for it in the first place).
Gizmodo's willingness to pay him $5,000 demonstrates that they were interested in getting this device on their hands to do precisely what they ended up doing: disassembling it, examining it and publicizing their findings as part of furthering their business.
Heck, I'll be sure never to attempt to return a lost phone to its owner in CA if you get pegged for being a thief when the owner refuses to claim it unless it hits the press...
The guy who found the phone supposedly called the Apple tech support line, whose operators didn't know anything about this supposed phone, and could reasonably assume he was a prank caller or a crazy. You can't reasonably conclude that Apple refused to claim the phone, because the people inside Apple that knew about it were not contacted.
But in any case, if you find a lost cell phone in California, and you can't contact the correct person to return it to, you can simply give it to the police. More than that, actually, you must turn it in to the police. From the California Civil Code:
2080.1. Delivery to police or sheriff; affidavit; charges
(a) If the owner is unknown or has not claimed the property, the person saving or finding the property shall, if the property is of the value of one hundred dollars ($100) or more, within a reasonable time turn the property over to the police department of the city or city and county, if found therein, or to the sheriff's department of the county if found outside of city limits, and shall make an affidavit, stating when and where he or she found or saved the property, particularly describing it. If the property was saved, the affidavit shall state:
(1) From what and how it was saved.
(2) Whether the owner of the property is known to the affiant.
(3) That the affiant has not secreted, withheld, or disposed of any part of the property.
(b) The police department or the sheriff's department shall notify the owner, if his or her identity is reasonably ascertainable, that it possesses the property and where it may be claimed. The police department or sheriff's department may require payment by the owner of a reasonable charge to defray costs of storage and care of the property.
Note that in the case of the iPhone prototype, this process of turning over the phone to the police would have created a public record of the existence of the prototype, and a detailed description of it. This is really, really bad for Gizmodo, because they could have gotten their story simply by helping the guy to turn the phone in to the police and getting the first scoop on the contents of the affidavit describing the phone and the circumstances of its finding. But instead they bought the phone from him. At that point they're already not on good ground, but instead of then returning it to Apple or turning it in to the police, they disassemble it for personal gain.
They didn't buy the phone itself. They bought the story. The finder wanted to return the phone to its rightful owner and couldn't confirm it was Apple and didn't trust that the bartender wouldn't just sell it once he realized it was valuable. When Gizmodo bought the story, he asked them to take on the task of returning the phone to it's rightful owner -- which they did. The phone was returned before the police were involved.
Rather than entrusting the phone to a 3rd party such as the bartender at the bar where the phone was found, the finder believed a 3rd party like Gizmodo was more likely to be trustworthy and more likely to be able to ascertain the true owner. It's not an unreasonable assumption to have made.
Suuuure. And Gizmodo were so altruistic in their desire to give the phone back to Apple that they gave the guy $5,000. And to make sure that they guy hadn't messed with the phone, they disassembled and inspected it. And to make sure that they weren't wrong in their assumption that the phone was Apple's, they published an article describing it in thorough detail, so that if it was actually owned by somebody other than Apple, the true owner could then come forward.
Now here's your challenge as a prosecutor. Prove thats not true.
California law requires the finder of lost property of substantial value to turn it over to the police. Both parties understood that Apple was the legitimate owner of the phone, and that they had lost it. So instead, Gizmodo agreed to give the guy $5,000 in exchange for the phone. That's prima facie a sale of the phone, because money changed hands along with the phone.
Some information or a "story" may also have been part of the deal, but you don't get to claim that Gizmodo paid $5,000 only for the story and that the guy entrusted the phone to them for free, because a big part of the stories they published involved disassembling the device and showing photos of it.
Then there's also the rumor that the guy who "entrusted" the phone to them was shopping around with other news sites (e.g., Engadget) for the best deal. Dunno if that is true, but if it is, then Gizmodo actually outbid the other potential buyers (likely by being the only one to be dumb enough to bid).
I think pretty much everything you said is true, but,
a) nobody forces you to use a low-end camera;
I used to use a Nikon D70, which didn't have this problem. My remark about low-end cameras came about because the GGP was clearly relating his experience with one.
b) you can change the focus screen if you want to;
Which is going to make the viewfinder dimmer. The autofocus beam splitter is still eating up light.
c) even on (new) low-end cameras, live view addresses the manual focus problem quite nicely.
Yes. This is the future. New full-time live view mirrorless systems like Micro Four Thirds are going to kill DLSRs at least at the low and mid range. I already have a Micro Four Thirds camera, which I partly bought because it's much better than DSLRs for putting old manual focus lenses to use.
You know there's nothing stopping you using manual lenses on a DSLR if you prefer them so much.
Did you even read my comment? I mentioned one key problem with that: small, dim viewfinders with bad microcontrast which make it hard to judge critical focus.
There are a bunch of other problems, too:
The SLR systems that still support old manual-focus lenses often have terribly reduced functionality when using such lenses. For example, most Nikon bodies won't meter with a manual-focus lens. Many old Pentax lenses require the use of stop-down metering on newer bodies, too.
If your SLR system doesn't support old lenses (Canon, Sony), then you have to use a mechanical mount adapter that does not operate the aperture diaphragm in the lens. This means stopping the lens down to shooting aperture manually, as if you were using a 1950's SLR. The viewfinders, which are usually small and dim already, only get worse when you do this.
And as for your snarky suggestion, I actually already use old manual lenses all the time on a digital camera, thank you. However, my choice for this is not a DSLR, but rather a Micro Four Thirds system camera. These cameras, with their all-electronic viewing system, don't have the disadvantages I just mentioned. They will meter with any old lens at shooting aperture without the viewfinder getting dimmer, and you can magnify the viewfinder up to 10x for really accurate manual focus.
The reason Hasselblads (and pro level Leicas, Nikons, and Canons) are expensive is because the shutter and film advance were designed to work reliably for tens of thousands of pictures, and they could be refurbished when necessary.
You're missing one of the big reasons those cameras are expensive, which is that they are niche products and don't benefit from the economies of scale in mass-market cameras.
High-end amateur cameras are capable of taking just as high quality pictures.
Not if the sensor is smaller. All else being equal, larger sensor or film means higher quality pictures. And need I remind you that the Hasselblad is a medium format camera?
The lenses are every bit as good as pro lenses [...]
This is very often demonstrably false, but granted, there are some truly excellent non-pro lenses.
But once more, one of the reasons larger sensors lead to better image quality is because it's less demanding of the lenses. Even if you use the exact same lens on two cameras with different sized sensor, you'll get higher resolution with the same lens from the larger sensor.
Kidding aside, try a Nikon. Once you set up the camera to your shooting preferences, on a Nikon if you want to change anything you use one button and either of the control wheels. No menu needed.
Sure. You've got the camera up against your eye and the shot lined up, and just need to change the white balance. It's as simple as prying a fat finger between your face and the camera to hold down one of all of those buttons that are all next to each other and feel the same with next to no tactile feedback, and then turning the wheel and praying you pressed the right button, because if you didn't, then you're going to have to undo what you just changed and try again.
My mother has one of their cameras. It is, quite simply, the only way to shoot landscapes if you're doing professional work.
Not at all. The preferred cameras for professional landscape shooting are large-format view cameras (the seemingly old-fashioned kind with the bellows and the black cloth). They can also be had for cheaper.
A medium format camera like the Hasselblad can take fine landscapes, though.
The Panasonic DMC-L1, which is identical to the Leica Digilux 3 except for firmware tweaks, has a shutter speed dial on top and has several lenses with aperture dial.
And the viewfinder is god-awful. Pass.
Panasonic did spend a few years making pretty unique prosumer cameras like the L1, but they only really broke into the market recently with their all-electronic Micro Four Thirds cameras. These don't address GP's problems, but as somebody who's found himself in the same situation (feeling really unhappy with Nikon DSLRs compared to my old Minolta manual focus cameras), they are very much worth looking into.
I like my Panasonic G1 much better than I liked any DSLR--smaller, lighter, smaller lenses, relatively large and bright electronic viewfinder with good resolution, very accurate autofocus (not prone to the front/back focus problems that plague SLR systems), live histogram on the viewfinder for perfect exposure every time, tilt-swivel LCD for odd angle shooting and use on tripods, magnified live view for really accurate manual focus, ability to take most legacy manual focus lenses through mount adapters. The smaller 4/3 sensor means that you're shooting at a relatively narrow aperture range all the time, so there's actually less need to control the aperture: with a kit zoom, you nearly always just want to shoot wide open, and work the exposure compensation with the live histogram; with a prime lens, I just set an aperture from 2.0 to 5.6 according to the situation, and mostly worry about composition.
I've only used 1 DSLR and the shutter speed and f-stop/aperture were both settable, using a dial (the same dial, with some sort of mode button to switch between them or whatever, I wasn't really doing anything dynamic, so I don't remember very well).
Having to control all camera options with the same dial is a big deal, because it leads to mode errors: you turn the dial thinking that you're going to change the aperture, but instead it changes the shutter speed, so then you have to turn it back to the aperture you were at, change the mode to shutter speed mode, and do it again. In the meantime, you missed your shot.
The higher-end DSLRs have more than one control dial and are therefore less prone to this issue. However, the problem is that DSLRs allow per-shot ISO changes, so they really should have three control dials: one for shutter speed, one for aperture, and one for ISO (or in P mode, one for exposure compensation, one for program shift and one for ISO shift).
Manual focus was an option, by turning the lens.
The problem there is that the low-end DSLRs have really bad, small, dim viewfinders that don't allow good judgement of critical focus. The viewfinders are small and dim compared to old manual focus 35mm film SLRs because the frame size on common DSLRs is smaller, which means that there's less light compared to a 35mm frame. Also, because of the autofocus systems use a significant fraction of the light, they have to use a focus screen that's not as good for manual focus as what existed on old manual-focus only DSLRs.
To make it worse, the manual focus rings on autofocus lenses tend to be bad compared to old manual focus lenses. This is usually because autofocus systems work best if the lens focus system has a very short travel from infinity to closest focus, but that makes it very bad for precise manual focus. Newer lenses with electronic focus rings can probably be made to have nicer focus action than the old manual lenses, though.
I know you were aiming for a "funny" mod but in my experience macs tend to be some of the most stable consumer computers (short of custom-built machines where the person who built it spent a lot of time researching the parts and then testing that everything worked satisfactory before beginning to actually use the machine).
True, but saying that the Mac is the stablest, easiest-to-use computer is like saying that Joe is the gentlest murderer.
I use Macs, and good lord I ain't going back to Windows, but they do cause trouble, just not as much. Some issues I've run into:
Back when I had a Powerbook G4 and 10.3, I had trouble all the time getting it to wake up from sleep; 10.4 solved this.
Safari used to be a rock-solid browser in version 2.x, but then with 3.x and 4.x it beachballs and crashes all the time.
10.4 never managed to autoconnect to my work WiFi network (I think 10.5 fixed it, but I skipped that version; I do know it works in 10.6).
I bought an Airport Extreme because Apple said that the AirDisk NAS feature would work with Time Machine. It never did so in the end.
My MacBook Pro's graphics adapter has hardware acceleration of h.264... in Windows only, because Apple simply don't care enough to provide driver support for it in my model.
There are lots of common software applications on the Mac that are frustrating as hell. Firefox on the Mac is my nemesis: I can hardly ever start up the browser without having it pop up a dialog box asking me to update my user extensions. The damn dialog is always on top of all other windows, as is the progress window when you do choose to update.
And so on. Macs, however much better they are, just aren't exceptions to the rule that computers are brittle, over-complex devices that demand that you pay attention to them.
There are perfectly reasonable people who have no problem with children seeing Venus de Milo, breastfeeding mothers, or people sunbathing nude, but want to prevent children from seeing pornography.
I don't understand that reasoning. Perhaps you can explain it?
These people tend to object to the way that pornography depicts women and gender relations. Nearly all hardcore porn bottoms down to paid actors acting out various forms of misogyny for the benefit of a male audience that wants to see women degraded on screen. It's not an accident that hardcore porn routinely labels its actresses as "sluts" or "whores," and that the women in the screen will accept any sort of treatment that the actors will put them through (or worse: they will not accept it, and the guy will do it anyway). The objection to the softcore stuff is more subtle; the problem there is that it depicts women as interchangeable objects that serve simply to please the men who look at them.
I especially don't understand that reasoning among people who have no problem with their kids viewing violence. Perhaps you'd care to explain that reasoning as well?
But the sort of people who object to children watching porn on those grounds usually also object to kids viewing violence. In fact, they object to a lot of media that has no nudity in it for the same reasons they object to porn. The point is that nudity doesn't damage children, but uncritical portrayals of bad attitudes toward sexuality does, and porn is the #1 cultural expression of really nasty, unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality.
There's also the issue that younger children's critical thinking skills are very much not up to par. A child that sees stylized depictions of violence and sex over and over will come to believe that those depictions are realistic, leading to a lot of very wrong ideas about both. There's lots of misconceptions about violence that come from the fact that most people see most of their "violence" in movies and TV:
Shooting somebody with a gun will push them backwards.
Hitting somebody in the head with a lead pipe will only stun them, not kill them.
Fights are usually long, protracted affairs, and even if you get hit a lot at first, there's a good chance you can recover.
And so on. Likewise, if your kids learn sexuality from porn, they'll end up with a lot of wrong, unrealistic notions about sex. If you want children to grow into sexually healthy adults, you probably don't want to make a big deal out of nudity or masturbation taboos, but you probably also want to shield them from porn.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would just hand these things out without keeping track of who had them. It probably didn't take too long to figure out whose phone was missing once the first photos were published.
If the story is correct, the phone was lost a month ago, and wiped less than 24 hours after it was lost. So it seems like Apple knew the phone was lost because the guy who lost it reported it himself.
Maybe my English is bad but when I read the comment it is the rich white man being stereotyped as a corrupt thief and the Latino kid depicted as less likely to steal.
The comments portrays them like that as an inversion of the stereotypes of each.
Do predictive analytics work for other demographics as well, e.g. middle aged white man from prominent Ivy League university running an energy company more likely to steal billions of dollars over young Latino kid living in downtown Miami?
Um, why are you stereotyping young Latino kids from Miami as criminals? Miami's 65% Latino, so it's no surprise that the middle class there is largely Latino.
I have a revolutionary idea: Let's put only the necessary primitives into syscalls and let rest of the rich APIs be served by user-space libraries. Chances are the applications won't give a damn.
And I have an even better idea: let's just specify what the interface between applications and their runtime environment is, and let the OS writers worry about the implementation details of what goes into the kernel and what goes into an userspace standard library.
Or in other words, just don't let shortsighted kernel hackers like Linus decide what the system API should based on their ideas of what belongs in the kernel and what doesn't. Application programmers really shouldn't have to care whether a piece of standard functionality lives.
Google's been getting more loose in its interpretation of query strings in an effort to provide better search results. For example, now they routinely return matches with a different form of the same verb as your query.
One kind of looseness that bit me in the ass recently was when I was doing a search for something like "X puerto rico" (I forget what the X was). Google somehow decided that since the postal 2-letter code for Puerto Rico is "PR," pages with the terms "X" and "PR" hit. But of course "PR" is also short for "public relations," leading to a mass of completely irrelevant hits.
The problem is that transit on a packet switched network isn't like renting a house, so the analogy is off-base to start with. In terms of communications services, renting a house is more analogous to buying a dedicated point-to-point circuit; you get exclusive, 24/7 usage of that house for the term of the lease.
However, the Internet simply isn't a point-to-point network, and there is no way any ISP can give anybody point-to-point circuit guarantees to "the Internet" at large. You can only really get such guarantees to specific nodes that you name in advance.
I expect to be able to transfer that much, because I purchased a 15mbps connection, not a 200gb/month connection.
Suppose a popular toll road has a 70mph speed limit. If you pay the toll, do you actually expect that this comes with a guarantee that you can drive 210 miles in 3 hours?
It's all about what the average person expects, not what they find reasonable.
Here in the USA, the average person who has running water at their residence expects to be able to run water at full pressure at any time they want. The average electric subscriber expects to be able to plug in any device at any time they want and get enough juice. The average landline phone subscriber expects to be able to place phone calls at any time they want, for any length of time they wish. Yet none of those utilities can guarantee that, even if all their gear is working correctly. If instantaneous demand on the utility goes too high, pressure drops, brownouts occur, or calls fail to go through. The systems work because people don't all run their faucets, dryers or phones 24/7; they use them intermittently. And if they use them intermittently, the most efficient way to provide the service is to share infrastructure.
It's completely unreasonable to expect a communications network to provide the behavior that you demand. This is because it would be a crassly inefficient use of resources to give everybody a dedicated line with a 24/7 guaranteed full bandwidth to all the destinations they want. You may complain all you want about how the ISPs market their services, but the fact remains that it is completely unreasonable (if not impossible) to demand that they live up to your interpretation of what they're selling.
I was talking about the content and different types of technology to deliver that content. Youtube, Netflix, VPN services, etc. etc. You start limiting how much a person can download, or give them less incentives to use bandwidth because you decide to charge on a per data unit rate, you will be negatively affecting those types of services.
If those services use extra bandwidth, then those services have extra costs. Those extra costs have to be paid for somehow. Either the customers who use those services more heavily pay more for their connectivity, or the content providers themselves subsidize the extra bandwidth. The alternative is to have the ISP bear the costs of a service that they do not provide, for no revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that reasoning is that he was required by law to turn it in to the police. So his choices were more like "do what the law requires you to do and turn it in to the police, or commit a felony by selling it for $5,000." In which case, well, you really do have to wonder why the hell he chose Gizmodo.
So if they believed the phone was a cheap knockoff, why was it worth to pay $5,000 to have it change hands?
Whatever the Apple call center rep told them, the phone finder and Gizmodo correctly concluded that he was wrong, and that this truly was a very valuable Apple prototype phone, and acted according to that belief. You don't get to claim Joe's cell phone just because you asked some dude who works for Joe and he didn't think that was Joe's phone.
Except that by California law he's required to turn it in to the police if he can't return it to the owner. So accepting money in exchange for the phone is a crime, which you're not supposed to do.
Look up the relevant California Civil Code sections. When he turns it in to the police, he makes an affidavit describing the circumstances whereby he found it, and his reasons for believing that this phone belongs to Apple. The police then contact Apple to tell them that they have received an item that may be their property.
Contrary to your implicit assumption, Apple doesn't have to go to the police and report the item missing or stolen. The process doesn't even require them to know that they lost anything. The finder must make a reasonable attempt to return it to the owner, or else, turn it to the police in a reasonable amount of time. The police then contacts the likely owner(s). And you can be sure that by getting the police involved, Apple's going to respond.
No, the money in this case reveals the two parties' true motives:
The guy who found the phone supposedly called the Apple tech support line, whose operators didn't know anything about this supposed phone, and could reasonably assume he was a prank caller or a crazy. You can't reasonably conclude that Apple refused to claim the phone, because the people inside Apple that knew about it were not contacted.
But in any case, if you find a lost cell phone in California, and you can't contact the correct person to return it to, you can simply give it to the police. More than that, actually, you must turn it in to the police. From the California Civil Code:
Note that in the case of the iPhone prototype, this process of turning over the phone to the police would have created a public record of the existence of the prototype, and a detailed description of it. This is really, really bad for Gizmodo, because they could have gotten their story simply by helping the guy to turn the phone in to the police and getting the first scoop on the contents of the affidavit describing the phone and the circumstances of its finding. But instead they bought the phone from him. At that point they're already not on good ground, but instead of then returning it to Apple or turning it in to the police, they disassemble it for personal gain.
Suuuure. And Gizmodo were so altruistic in their desire to give the phone back to Apple that they gave the guy $5,000. And to make sure that they guy hadn't messed with the phone, they disassembled and inspected it. And to make sure that they weren't wrong in their assumption that the phone was Apple's, they published an article describing it in thorough detail, so that if it was actually owned by somebody other than Apple, the true owner could then come forward.
California law requires the finder of lost property of substantial value to turn it over to the police. Both parties understood that Apple was the legitimate owner of the phone, and that they had lost it. So instead, Gizmodo agreed to give the guy $5,000 in exchange for the phone. That's prima facie a sale of the phone, because money changed hands along with the phone.
Some information or a "story" may also have been part of the deal, but you don't get to claim that Gizmodo paid $5,000 only for the story and that the guy entrusted the phone to them for free, because a big part of the stories they published involved disassembling the device and showing photos of it.
Then there's also the rumor that the guy who "entrusted" the phone to them was shopping around with other news sites (e.g., Engadget) for the best deal. Dunno if that is true, but if it is, then Gizmodo actually outbid the other potential buyers (likely by being the only one to be dumb enough to bid).
I used to use a Nikon D70, which didn't have this problem. My remark about low-end cameras came about because the GGP was clearly relating his experience with one.
Did you even read my comment? I mentioned one key problem with that: small, dim viewfinders with bad microcontrast which make it hard to judge critical focus.
There are a bunch of other problems, too:
And as for your snarky suggestion, I actually already use old manual lenses all the time on a digital camera, thank you. However, my choice for this is not a DSLR, but rather a Micro Four Thirds system camera. These cameras, with their all-electronic viewing system, don't have the disadvantages I just mentioned. They will meter with any old lens at shooting aperture without the viewfinder getting dimmer, and you can magnify the viewfinder up to 10x for really accurate manual focus.
You're missing one of the big reasons those cameras are expensive, which is that they are niche products and don't benefit from the economies of scale in mass-market cameras.
Not if the sensor is smaller. All else being equal, larger sensor or film means higher quality pictures. And need I remind you that the Hasselblad is a medium format camera?
This is very often demonstrably false, but granted, there are some truly excellent non-pro lenses.
But once more, one of the reasons larger sensors lead to better image quality is because it's less demanding of the lenses. Even if you use the exact same lens on two cameras with different sized sensor, you'll get higher resolution with the same lens from the larger sensor.
Sure. You've got the camera up against your eye and the shot lined up, and just need to change the white balance. It's as simple as prying a fat finger between your face and the camera to hold down one of all of those buttons that are all next to each other and feel the same with next to no tactile feedback, and then turning the wheel and praying you pressed the right button, because if you didn't, then you're going to have to undo what you just changed and try again.
Not at all. The preferred cameras for professional landscape shooting are large-format view cameras (the seemingly old-fashioned kind with the bellows and the black cloth). They can also be had for cheaper.
A medium format camera like the Hasselblad can take fine landscapes, though.
After very visibly refusing to name the guy who lost the prototype, why is Slashdot now doing so?
And the viewfinder is god-awful. Pass.
Panasonic did spend a few years making pretty unique prosumer cameras like the L1, but they only really broke into the market recently with their all-electronic Micro Four Thirds cameras. These don't address GP's problems, but as somebody who's found himself in the same situation (feeling really unhappy with Nikon DSLRs compared to my old Minolta manual focus cameras), they are very much worth looking into.
I like my Panasonic G1 much better than I liked any DSLR--smaller, lighter, smaller lenses, relatively large and bright electronic viewfinder with good resolution, very accurate autofocus (not prone to the front/back focus problems that plague SLR systems), live histogram on the viewfinder for perfect exposure every time, tilt-swivel LCD for odd angle shooting and use on tripods, magnified live view for really accurate manual focus, ability to take most legacy manual focus lenses through mount adapters. The smaller 4/3 sensor means that you're shooting at a relatively narrow aperture range all the time, so there's actually less need to control the aperture: with a kit zoom, you nearly always just want to shoot wide open, and work the exposure compensation with the live histogram; with a prime lens, I just set an aperture from 2.0 to 5.6 according to the situation, and mostly worry about composition.
Having to control all camera options with the same dial is a big deal, because it leads to mode errors: you turn the dial thinking that you're going to change the aperture, but instead it changes the shutter speed, so then you have to turn it back to the aperture you were at, change the mode to shutter speed mode, and do it again. In the meantime, you missed your shot.
The higher-end DSLRs have more than one control dial and are therefore less prone to this issue. However, the problem is that DSLRs allow per-shot ISO changes, so they really should have three control dials: one for shutter speed, one for aperture, and one for ISO (or in P mode, one for exposure compensation, one for program shift and one for ISO shift).
The problem there is that the low-end DSLRs have really bad, small, dim viewfinders that don't allow good judgement of critical focus. The viewfinders are small and dim compared to old manual focus 35mm film SLRs because the frame size on common DSLRs is smaller, which means that there's less light compared to a 35mm frame. Also, because of the autofocus systems use a significant fraction of the light, they have to use a focus screen that's not as good for manual focus as what existed on old manual-focus only DSLRs.
To make it worse, the manual focus rings on autofocus lenses tend to be bad compared to old manual focus lenses. This is usually because autofocus systems work best if the lens focus system has a very short travel from infinity to closest focus, but that makes it very bad for precise manual focus. Newer lenses with electronic focus rings can probably be made to have nicer focus action than the old manual lenses, though.
True, but saying that the Mac is the stablest, easiest-to-use computer is like saying that Joe is the gentlest murderer.
I use Macs, and good lord I ain't going back to Windows, but they do cause trouble, just not as much. Some issues I've run into:
And so on. Macs, however much better they are, just aren't exceptions to the rule that computers are brittle, over-complex devices that demand that you pay attention to them.
You know, I really have wonder if the "pixels" that this guy sees are blocky artifacts in excessively-compressed video.
These people tend to object to the way that pornography depicts women and gender relations. Nearly all hardcore porn bottoms down to paid actors acting out various forms of misogyny for the benefit of a male audience that wants to see women degraded on screen. It's not an accident that hardcore porn routinely labels its actresses as "sluts" or "whores," and that the women in the screen will accept any sort of treatment that the actors will put them through (or worse: they will not accept it, and the guy will do it anyway). The objection to the softcore stuff is more subtle; the problem there is that it depicts women as interchangeable objects that serve simply to please the men who look at them.
But the sort of people who object to children watching porn on those grounds usually also object to kids viewing violence. In fact, they object to a lot of media that has no nudity in it for the same reasons they object to porn. The point is that nudity doesn't damage children, but uncritical portrayals of bad attitudes toward sexuality does, and porn is the #1 cultural expression of really nasty, unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality.
There's also the issue that younger children's critical thinking skills are very much not up to par. A child that sees stylized depictions of violence and sex over and over will come to believe that those depictions are realistic, leading to a lot of very wrong ideas about both. There's lots of misconceptions about violence that come from the fact that most people see most of their "violence" in movies and TV:
And so on. Likewise, if your kids learn sexuality from porn, they'll end up with a lot of wrong, unrealistic notions about sex. If you want children to grow into sexually healthy adults, you probably don't want to make a big deal out of nudity or masturbation taboos, but you probably also want to shield them from porn.
If the story is correct, the phone was lost a month ago, and wiped less than 24 hours after it was lost. So it seems like Apple knew the phone was lost because the guy who lost it reported it himself.
The comments portrays them like that as an inversion of the stereotypes of each.
Um, why are you stereotyping young Latino kids from Miami as criminals? Miami's 65% Latino, so it's no surprise that the middle class there is largely Latino.
IBM already has tech to run Linux as a VM. It might be easier to put the OS/2 API and ABI on Linux than to add that stuff to OS/2.
And I have an even better idea: let's just specify what the interface between applications and their runtime environment is, and let the OS writers worry about the implementation details of what goes into the kernel and what goes into an userspace standard library.
Or in other words, just don't let shortsighted kernel hackers like Linus decide what the system API should based on their ideas of what belongs in the kernel and what doesn't. Application programmers really shouldn't have to care whether a piece of standard functionality lives.
Google's been getting more loose in its interpretation of query strings in an effort to provide better search results. For example, now they routinely return matches with a different form of the same verb as your query.
One kind of looseness that bit me in the ass recently was when I was doing a search for something like "X puerto rico" (I forget what the X was). Google somehow decided that since the postal 2-letter code for Puerto Rico is "PR," pages with the terms "X" and "PR" hit. But of course "PR" is also short for "public relations," leading to a mass of completely irrelevant hits.
The problem is that transit on a packet switched network isn't like renting a house, so the analogy is off-base to start with. In terms of communications services, renting a house is more analogous to buying a dedicated point-to-point circuit; you get exclusive, 24/7 usage of that house for the term of the lease.
However, the Internet simply isn't a point-to-point network, and there is no way any ISP can give anybody point-to-point circuit guarantees to "the Internet" at large. You can only really get such guarantees to specific nodes that you name in advance.
Suppose a popular toll road has a 70mph speed limit. If you pay the toll, do you actually expect that this comes with a guarantee that you can drive 210 miles in 3 hours?
Here in the USA, the average person who has running water at their residence expects to be able to run water at full pressure at any time they want. The average electric subscriber expects to be able to plug in any device at any time they want and get enough juice. The average landline phone subscriber expects to be able to place phone calls at any time they want, for any length of time they wish. Yet none of those utilities can guarantee that, even if all their gear is working correctly. If instantaneous demand on the utility goes too high, pressure drops, brownouts occur, or calls fail to go through. The systems work because people don't all run their faucets, dryers or phones 24/7; they use them intermittently. And if they use them intermittently, the most efficient way to provide the service is to share infrastructure.
It's completely unreasonable to expect a communications network to provide the behavior that you demand. This is because it would be a crassly inefficient use of resources to give everybody a dedicated line with a 24/7 guaranteed full bandwidth to all the destinations they want. You may complain all you want about how the ISPs market their services, but the fact remains that it is completely unreasonable (if not impossible) to demand that they live up to your interpretation of what they're selling.
If those services use extra bandwidth, then those services have extra costs. Those extra costs have to be paid for somehow. Either the customers who use those services more heavily pay more for their connectivity, or the content providers themselves subsidize the extra bandwidth. The alternative is to have the ISP bear the costs of a service that they do not provide, for no revenue.