That's why I called them "point, shoot and wait". I just plan on taking a lot more shots when I'm shooting my kids. The Canon Powershot S45 I recently lost let you press the shutter button halfway to fix focus, then press the rest of the way for the shot; that made things tolerable. I have enough good shots that I don't think the extra $1000 is worth it...especially if the camera gets dropped after warranty or lost.
The cheapest listings are probably refurbished. People reading an article about whether to go with DSLR are not probably aren't starting with their own lens.
People who use the LCD all the time get a lot of fuzzy photos. You can't hold the camera nearly as still if you aren't pressing it against your face with both hands. Additionally, LCD resolution is vastly inferior to your eye's resolution looking through the viewfinder.
Even more important, you'll experience much less lag with SLR. Note that I called them "point, shoot and wait" cameras in my original post.
All this notwithstanding, I keep my film-based Pentax K-1000 around for those rare situations where I really need SLR. I bought it in 1991 for $135 at a used camera shop. I'm waiting for DSLR prices to drop more before I buy one. "Point, shoot and wait" will have to do for my casual photography until then.
One feature the dpreview buying guide doesn't ask you for is the orientation sensor. Not all new cameras have it; I know Canons generally do. The orientation sensor saves you the trouble of rotating from landscape to portrait because EXIF information is written that lets programs like jhead do it automatically. If you take photos in batches, I highly recommend buying a camera with this feature.
I do agree that dpreview is a great source of information overall, and I didn't have patience to work through much of the annoying flash presentation in this article.
Unless all your photos are landscape mode, you likely have to go through one by one and rotate appropriately. Many newer cameras have an orientation sensor that records EXIF info so that programs like jhead can automatically rotate them for you. This removed the biggest chore I used to do with my digital photos. Also, if you take group photos to enlarge more than 5x7" you'll notice that 1.3MP is not enough. I think 5MP is overkill, but 3 or 4 is good.
You got it! The only non-trivial software patents are the blatantly obvious patents on mathematical algorithms. Mathematical algorithms are not statutory material for patents. I've never seen a software patent that is valid under existing US law.
I notice that TrustCommerce has debian packages for their APIs. My impression from reading their web site is that they're clueful. So far I've only used paypal, but would be interested in peoples' experience with TrustCommerce. I'm thinking of adding them as a secondary payment option some time next year.
One of the reasons I shoot digital is so that my photos can be appreciated by far-flung relatives before either of us is long gone and pushing up the daisies. A few photos may be of value to future generations, but most of the benefit is for those alive now.
If you want traditional archiving, make prints and put them in albums.
Digital is great for being able to share pictures in a timely manner. It doesn't help a lot for photos to outlast the people you want to share them with.
I seriously doubt they would use only GPS data as an encryption key. Likely the dongle is doing challenge-response interactions with the wireless hub, and certain actions get triggered when the hub is no longer in wireless range.
Implicitly, you grant them license to display your photos the way you intend them to be displayed on their service. Read any "service agreement" before you agree to it to see if you're also granting them license to use photos in advertising, etc. I don't know about the other services out there, except my own ourdoings.com does not get rights to "steal" your work in any way.
Both ofoto and shutterfly have a business model where the money is made off of prints. If they provided really good sharing, customers would probably only order prints of the very best pictures. They'd be happy to just look at most of them on the web.
Nobody wants to sit through a slide show, so service providers save a lot of bandwidth by the user going elsewhere. I find it much more user-friendly to put a bunch of 640x480 shots on one page and let people scroll up and down to look at the ones they're interested in. At only 50kb or so per image, it isn't a ton of bandwidth either.
On ourdoings.com there is no use of flash, JavaScript is optional, and the client-side uploading software is supported on Linux. If you have a large pile of photos to put up, ourdoings.com handily beats all the "best" services out there, organizing them by the digital timestamps so that you can quickly put in entries for the appropriate dates.
On ourdoings.com I use SSL-encrypted authentication. Except for photo uploads where I use a one-time key sent after the upload. A large volume of data being encrypted would likely slow down the server, which is why most services out there do plaintext by default.
I use my own blogging site myself to keep family and friends updated. Thanks to User-Mode Linux hosting, I can keep it going even if I end up being the only user. Currently it's used by 5 households total, all people I know, but it's open to anyone who will pay $6/month. I'm not going to stop adding worthwhile features because I use it myself. Here are some of the worthwhile features already there:
Upload a zip file of digital photos, and the timestamps are used to sort them out by date and prompt you to put in entries for those dates.
Extended families can create a collaborative site -- same price as an individual site.
Crossposting is easy. E.g. if you belong to 3 communities of 20 people each, you could potentially follow only 3 blogs instead of 50.
You don't have to visit the blogs to see what's new. You can sign up for email updates and get HTML-formatted entries complete with image thumbnails.
I'm not done putting in features, and I'm not going away.
If you want to differentiate your blog, focus on content. Express your real-life experience as effectively as you can. When you start to run out of interesting content, that's when it's time to focus on skins.
You can use my creation, ourdoings.com, in this way by only saving drafts, not publishing. If you want to share drafts with a few others, you can authorize them as contributors to your blog.
Maybe if you took a job with an 8-hour day you could get your energy back sooner. Even if it's less pay, it might be worth it.
I have an 8-hour workday and a 40-minute commute. This gives me time with my kids, plus time to do chores and talk with my wife. A few nights a month I also get to work on ourdoings.com, my photoblog hosting site, and add features. I'm having fun with it.
People who choose to interpret "as a whole" to mean that any novel part makes the whole patentable are ignoring the majority's very explicit section IV, that addresses exactly this issue. They are also ignoring key parts of section III, where they affirm the "long-established principles" of the Benson and Flook cases.
After Diehr, patent examiners could not reject a patent as nonstatutory just because one element of a claim was nonstatutory. Nor could they remove that element and look at the novelty of what was left. The way elements are combined may be novel, even if the elements themselves are not. "The way elements are combined" is the only interpretation of "as a whole" that is consistent with the Diehr opinion.
Patents that claim "program A plus some computer memory to run it in" cannot be rejected as nonstatutory under Diehr. Instead, they must be rejected as non-novel. Program A is nonstatutory, computer memory is non-novel, and the way Program A and computer memory are combined is not novel. Having the program run in the memory is exactly how programs and memory are always combined. Thus the patent is invalid on the grounds of not being novel.
If the USPTO and courts would follow Diehr, we wouldn't have this big software patent mess.
There's bad enough with non-HTML based apps. On the web, if you have 13 choices there's little reason not to use radio or checkboxes for it. Eyes are always faster than scrollbars. Nonetheless, we see lots of unnecessary menus, etc. in web pages.
Except that that case was a was a PERFECT EXAMPLE of "where all the inventiveness is in software"
The key is that the majority thought that the patent claimed inventiveness in the system as a whole, not just in the software. They did not evaluate the veracity of that claim, they merely observed what was claimed and remanded. The dissent read the claims differently, and said THEY WOULD HAVE RULED THE SAME WAY if they read the claims the same. If the majority goofed, it was on the facts of the case, not the law. Unfortunately, many people were determined to mis-read the majority no matter how explicit they were about how they were not changing the law.
I've been lucky enough not to be in a car accident yet, but I always keep a single-use camera with flash in the car just in case. I suspect one of those would make much more credible pictures than a camera phone with a tiny lens and no flash. It's also less likely that the battery will be low at a critical time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I called them "point, shoot and wait". I just plan on taking a lot more shots when I'm shooting my kids. The Canon Powershot S45 I recently lost let you press the shutter button halfway to fix focus, then press the rest of the way for the shot; that made things tolerable. I have enough good shots that I don't think the extra $1000 is worth it...especially if the camera gets dropped after warranty or lost.
The cheapest listings are probably refurbished. People reading an article about whether to go with DSLR are not probably aren't starting with their own lens.
People who use the LCD all the time get a lot of fuzzy photos. You can't hold the camera nearly as still if you aren't pressing it against your face with both hands. Additionally, LCD resolution is vastly inferior to your eye's resolution looking through the viewfinder.
Even more important, you'll experience much less lag with SLR. Note that I called them "point, shoot and wait" cameras in my original post.
All this notwithstanding, I keep my film-based Pentax K-1000 around for those rare situations where I really need SLR. I bought it in 1991 for $135 at a used camera shop. I'm waiting for DSLR prices to drop more before I buy one. "Point, shoot and wait" will have to do for my casual photography until then.
One feature the dpreview buying guide doesn't ask you for is the orientation sensor. Not all new cameras have it; I know Canons generally do. The orientation sensor saves you the trouble of rotating from landscape to portrait because EXIF information is written that lets programs like jhead do it automatically. If you take photos in batches, I highly recommend buying a camera with this feature.
I do agree that dpreview is a great source of information overall, and I didn't have patience to work through much of the annoying flash presentation in this article.
Unless all your photos are landscape mode, you likely have to go through one by one and rotate appropriately. Many newer cameras have an orientation sensor that records EXIF info so that programs like jhead can automatically rotate them for you. This removed the biggest chore I used to do with my digital photos. Also, if you take group photos to enlarge more than 5x7" you'll notice that 1.3MP is not enough. I think 5MP is overkill, but 3 or 4 is good.
DSLR Cameras: $1200 and up
Point, shoot and wait cameras: $200-500
You got it! The only non-trivial software patents are the blatantly obvious patents on mathematical algorithms. Mathematical algorithms are not statutory material for patents. I've never seen a software patent that is valid under existing US law.
I notice that TrustCommerce has debian packages for their APIs. My impression from reading their web site is that they're clueful. So far I've only used paypal, but would be interested in peoples' experience with TrustCommerce. I'm thinking of adding them as a secondary payment option some time next year.
One of the reasons I shoot digital is so that my photos can be appreciated by far-flung relatives before either of us is long gone and pushing up the daisies. A few photos may be of value to future generations, but most of the benefit is for those alive now.
If you want traditional archiving, make prints and put them in albums. Digital is great for being able to share pictures in a timely manner. It doesn't help a lot for photos to outlast the people you want to share them with.
I seriously doubt they would use only GPS data as an encryption key. Likely the dongle is doing challenge-response interactions with the wireless hub, and certain actions get triggered when the hub is no longer in wireless range.
Implicitly, you grant them license to display your photos the way you intend them to be displayed on their service. Read any "service agreement" before you agree to it to see if you're also granting them license to use photos in advertising, etc. I don't know about the other services out there, except my own ourdoings.com does not get rights to "steal" your work in any way.
Both ofoto and shutterfly have a business model where the money is made off of prints. If they provided really good sharing, customers would probably only order prints of the very best pictures. They'd be happy to just look at most of them on the web.
Nobody wants to sit through a slide show, so service providers save a lot of bandwidth by the user going elsewhere. I find it much more user-friendly to put a bunch of 640x480 shots on one page and let people scroll up and down to look at the ones they're interested in. At only 50kb or so per image, it isn't a ton of bandwidth either.
On ourdoings.com there is no use of flash, JavaScript is optional, and the client-side uploading software is supported on Linux. If you have a large pile of photos to put up, ourdoings.com handily beats all the "best" services out there, organizing them by the digital timestamps so that you can quickly put in entries for the appropriate dates.
On ourdoings.com I use SSL-encrypted authentication. Except for photo uploads where I use a one-time key sent after the upload. A large volume of data being encrypted would likely slow down the server, which is why most services out there do plaintext by default.
You're doomed! Doomed! Soon they will also expect you to get an email subscription to receive their blog entries and photos every day.
I use my own blogging site myself to keep family and friends updated. Thanks to User-Mode Linux hosting, I can keep it going even if I end up being the only user. Currently it's used by 5 households total, all people I know, but it's open to anyone who will pay $6/month. I'm not going to stop adding worthwhile features because I use it myself. Here are some of the worthwhile features already there:
I'm not done putting in features, and I'm not going away.
If you want to differentiate your blog, focus on content. Express your real-life experience as effectively as you can. When you start to run out of interesting content, that's when it's time to focus on skins.
You can use my creation, ourdoings.com, in this way by only saving drafts, not publishing. If you want to share drafts with a few others, you can authorize them as contributors to your blog.
Maybe if you took a job with an 8-hour day you could get your energy back sooner. Even if it's less pay, it might be worth it.
I have an 8-hour workday and a 40-minute commute. This gives me time with my kids, plus time to do chores and talk with my wife. A few nights a month I also get to work on ourdoings.com, my photoblog hosting site, and add features. I'm having fun with it.
People who choose to interpret "as a whole" to mean that any novel part makes the whole patentable are ignoring the majority's very explicit section IV, that addresses exactly this issue. They are also ignoring key parts of section III, where they affirm the "long-established principles" of the Benson and Flook cases.
After Diehr, patent examiners could not reject a patent as nonstatutory just because one element of a claim was nonstatutory. Nor could they remove that element and look at the novelty of what was left. The way elements are combined may be novel, even if the elements themselves are not. "The way elements are combined" is the only interpretation of "as a whole" that is consistent with the Diehr opinion.
Patents that claim "program A plus some computer memory to run it in" cannot be rejected as nonstatutory under Diehr. Instead, they must be rejected as non-novel. Program A is nonstatutory, computer memory is non-novel, and the way Program A and computer memory are combined is not novel. Having the program run in the memory is exactly how programs and memory are always combined. Thus the patent is invalid on the grounds of not being novel.
If the USPTO and courts would follow Diehr, we wouldn't have this big software patent mess.
There's bad enough with non-HTML based apps. On the web, if you have 13 choices there's little reason not to use radio or checkboxes for it. Eyes are always faster than scrollbars. Nonetheless, we see lots of unnecessary menus, etc. in web pages.
The key is that the majority thought that the patent claimed inventiveness in the system as a whole, not just in the software. They did not evaluate the veracity of that claim, they merely observed what was claimed and remanded. The dissent read the claims differently, and said THEY WOULD HAVE RULED THE SAME WAY if they read the claims the same. If the majority goofed, it was on the facts of the case, not the law. Unfortunately, many people were determined to mis-read the majority no matter how explicit they were about how they were not changing the law.
I've been lucky enough not to be in a car accident yet, but I always keep a single-use camera with flash in the car just in case. I suspect one of those would make much more credible pictures than a camera phone with a tiny lens and no flash. It's also less likely that the battery will be low at a critical time.