Basically, Myst was an adventure game -- wander around and solve puzzles. Only it had a much less satisfying user interface, and was terribly slow. Result -- boring game play. As I recall, and I didn't play it much (girlfriend was in love with it), the puzzles were rarely particularly visual, either. And the puzzles were often boring. It also had the problem of needing to spend endless boring hours clicking on everything to see what responded.
So -- kind of a pretty art gallery, could hold my attention for several minutes that way. Boring as a game.
Sorry, you're wrong. Gimp, which I have used at work for web work, doesn't have many of the basic capabilities I use heavily in Photoshop for photographic editing (I use Photoshop at home, legal copies, currently current at CS6).
Well...in absolutely literal terms, Gimp can of course do anything at all --- it can set any pixel of a canvas to any specified RGB color; thus in theory any 8-bit output you can imagine you can produce in Gimp.
However, this theoretical truth is irrelevant.
For any serious photo work, you need 16-bit-per-channel images. You don't need them really for the final result, but you need them for the original RAW conversion and the intermediate work. Back in the darkroom days, a print could hold about 5 stops of brightness range, a negative 10 -- and deciding how to map the one to the other was the essence of photo printing. If you can't represent the full camera file, you've been forced into a limited version of the work already.
Also, adjustment layers with layer masks are really really wonderful tools. It's like dodging and burning died and gone to heaven. You can do quick approximations, see if the approach will work, and refine them later. And maybe again when print samples show you were optimistic:-). (Adjustment layers are things like applying the curves tool as a layer to everything below it; you can go adjust that curve later without having to re-do anything else.)
Those are the particular areas I won't consider giving up. Other people may have others, also. Lots of professionals are much more committed to various plugins than I am; I've only really got three I can't live without, Noise Ninja and Color Mechanic and Focus Magic. And I could learn to do without Focus Magic.
No. PSP isn't even VAGUELY competitive with Photoshop, even for just the base task of preparing exhibition versions of photos. When you get into the more complex graphic design tasks it's even worse.
Unless...has PSP added adjustment layers for things like curves adjustments on 16-bit-per-channel data, with layer masks?
I don't open photoshop for simple stuff; when I *do*, I need the full toolbox.
I don't know who Gimp might look attractive to. It's missing two things that are absolute must-haves for me preparing images for high-quality printing (think "exhibition quality", not machine prints).
Specifically, support for 16-bit-per-channel images (as others have said, the final result can be reduced to 8-bit fairly safely; it's while you're working it that it needs the extra space), and support for adjustment layers with layer masks (also up through 16-bit). I will frequently end up with 4 separate curves adjustment layers with layer masks, plus a couple of content layers with unusual blending modes, for even a simple picture; a complex picture, or a restoration job, can easily go to twice that.
Also, there's the issue of integrated raw conversion in the workflow.
Beyond that, for professionals there are usually mandatory plugins, and if the Photoshop plugins don't run in Gimp (I don't know, I haven't checked that) and there isn't an equivalent plugin (there never is), it's hopeless. I need Noise Ninja and Focus Magic and Color Mechanic as my minimum; professionals need more (and usually need some of the high-end masking plugins).
However, the subscription model isn't that bad for professional users. Except for artists -- as usual, they get squeezed, because they tend to need the outer reaches of capabilities, and the vast majority of them have not nearly enough money. It's the serious amateur photographers who get hurt in this.
For me, trips have a large photographic component; often it's the primary purpose for the trip. So suggesting I not take my camera gear on a trip might as well be suggesting I don't *go* on the trip (which, admittedly, would be cheaper). And even if it's insured and the insurance doesn't find some way to not pay off, I've still lost the pictures in the camera, and probably several days (or even the rest of the trip) of photo opportunities (can't get instant insurance payout, in some locations can't buy a new camera locally). The laptop (and a good one, with enough disk and processor power and a good screen) is a necessary part of the photo kit too.
Then again, in my old world-traveling days (1958-1994, I guess), I guess I spent over 30 months outside North America, and never had anything stolen from me or anybody in my party. (Most of that time was in western Europe, but a couple of months were in Africa.) Of course, I wasn't carrying a laptop most of that time, and my early camera gear wasn't worth stealing. But later on I carried multiple SLRs and a big lens collection to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand for a total of several months; never lost anything. And my parents never lost gear on the early trips with them, either. Are things a LOT worse now?
The full nasty form of the proposed law bans possession, not sale, as I understand it. If so, then this doesn't "end-run" anything. It does of course make it easier for somebody wishing to possess illegal magazines (which would no longer refer to Hustler!) to do so.
I commented on Facebook a few months back that the work with 3D printers and firearms clearly marked the end of prohibition as any kind of rational, effective, approach to any firearms issues.
Well, yeah, saying some *group* is "all like" something-or-other is pretty much the definition of "bigoted". Most especially a group people are born into rather than self-selecting; at least MENSA people mostly *are* smart.
I definitely prefer to enjoy myself on vacation. Usually, I do that by taking pictures, which is one of the things I enjoy most, and often the reason I picked a particular place to go on vacation (the other is to see people I know who live there; I often take pictures of the people, too).
300 pictures in a day is off the bottom of the scale for me on vacation. I mean, I might have taken that many on film 20 years ago. Today it's more likely to see 3000 on an interesting vacation trip.
This also affects what backup schemes work on the road. Uploading 30 GB at 3G speeds (and plan limits) is generally not a winning strategy. Since tech gear is high-risk for theft, I really need to get the backup copies into something innocuous, or else into the cloud.
(If you don't enjoy taking pictures, by all means, don't, then!)
You're tilting at a straw windmill. The very first word of his subject line is "(NEAR)"; obviously he knows perfectly well he may not be able to reasonably achieve complete access.
On mass transit, I could read maybe. If not too crowded, maybe even get out a laptop and work, depending. While driving, the time is truly lost. Then again, I only drive 20 minutes or so to work. And often do errands on the way home, and sometimes during the day (at lunch or whatever).
Since the alternative for me is Microsoft, whose documentation is voluminous but horrid, I actually find the Open Office documentation a reason to use it.
That's why it "deters" hijackings rather than "preventing all" hijackings. The English language is infinitely subtle and yet precise, if only you're paying attention.
And Linux administrators periodically have problems because they didn't test a change to something that happens only on a reboot, so months and months later something weird happens:-).
In fact, I've run a separate open network, with bandwidth limits (it's currently down as part of debugging why the access point needs to be rebooted so often just at the moment, though). And I have a friend who uses a whole separate access point to run a public network for parties and such.
Yeah, sharing is nice. And frankly, if I can help my neighbor's children get past controlling parents, I'm in favor of it.
There are very valuable roles for anonymity, and I really have no business knowing much of anything about what you read on the web.
On the other hand, there's a role for real-world reputation on the web, too, and one that flows both directions, and I can see it being very valuable to Citizendium.
I am not the least little slightest bit convinced of this. I've never, ever, once seen this being a problem. If it becomes a bit of a problem, clear out the spurious links.
Meanwhile, I *do* see useful articles being marked for speedy deletion. Wikipedia is shooting itself in the foot, on full auto, with a large-caliber weapon.
Notability is a spurious criteria for Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't have the same limitation as paper encyclopedias -- the staff are unpaid (and specialized fandoms bring in their own contributors), and the pages don't cost much money (bandwidth costs money, but disk doesn't much at the level poeple can use with hand-typed articles). *Most* of the things I look at on Wikipedia aren't in the Britannica; this is one of the ways Wikipedia is *better* (there are also many ways, mostly fairly obvious, that it's worse, but let's focus on the positive!).
The advantages of using a common system across the globe are obvious. The metric system is good enough. We should use it.
BUT...there are significant advantages to our system in day-to-day life. Inches and feet are more useful than meters in daily life, the metric degree is too big for weather forecasting, and perhaps most important, powers of two are actually more useful on rulers than powers of 10 (1/64 of an inch is smaller than 1 mm, and 1/10mm can't be measured on an affordable ruler).
I'm sure these have been noticed by lots of the individuals who oppose switching to the metric system, and they help strengthen their resolve.
*I* am for the conversion; the disadvantages can be coped with, and it seems to me it's a net win to use the same thing as everybody else.
I don't see how they can patent full-text search in general. It's been around for decades. (Well, other than the usual way of some complete idiot in the patent office letting something nonsensical through.)
As for full-text search on books, we launched the book search on dragaera.info a couple of weeks ago. Of course US patent goes by invention rather than exploitation -- but we had an in-house beta well over a year ago, too.
The issue isn't whether the data is stored on the web server; it's whether the data is accessible through the web server. If you intend to make the data accessible for some users or some purposes, you need to implement your own security to prevent it being accessed by ALL users for ALL purposes.
I'd very much like to think that technology will solve the storage problem. I think something like your scenario is fairly possible.
Let's run some numbers (I expect the numbers to say "yes", but we'll see).
Let's imagine an information storage appliance. It sits on you network and serves disks, and it has internal redundancy, and it negotiates over the net the duplication of information (both directions) to provide redundancy for itself and others. So let's say it has 5x the storage you actually use, to allow for both local redundancy, and the paying-back in services of off-site backups.
Let's assume that digital photos are stored as about 5 megabytes each. That's bigger than jpegs of consumer-camera images, but much smaller than full-res files from professional cameras. A 2-megapixel file (6 megabytes raw) is entirely adequate for an 8x10 print, so 5 megabytes is reasonable for archiving with the latest (or next year's) super-wavelet compression techniques. Or if you disagree, double or triple the final numbers.
So, if a professional photographer shoots 1000 pictures a week (which is low for some weeks, of course, but maybe okay for a year-long average), that'll take about 5 gigabytes of storage. Which means 260 gigabytes a year. Times 5, to cover the redundancy and such.
That's about 1.5 terabytes per year. Today that would cost a few thousand dollars, and last on average 5 years or so. After a 20-year career, you'd be paying $20,000 per year just for archiving your pictures. However, another order-of-magnitude price drop may well be available, and $2,000 per year doesn't sound so bad. Maybe DVD-RAM jukeboxes will bring that price down considerably, partly by having the media last 20 years instead of 5.
Now think about archiving at a newspaper. Money goes way up.
Now imagine the photographer dying (or even just retiring), or the newspaper going broke. Is somebody reliably going to take on the job of archiving those photographs? Remember, they can't sit for 50 years in a box in the attic until somebody re-discovers them; they'll evaporate if treated that way.
I think what we're going to see is a very different sorting from what photos have had over the past 150 years. I'm not sure I know what it will be; it may be based on popularity (wide distribution and retention), plus the work of organizations and individuals dedicated to archiving them. I also think that photos will be discovered with much less provenance than they used to have, which will probably make them less useful.
I've been photographing fairly seriously since 1969 (when my first computer job allowed me to buy my first SLR camera).
In that time, I've discarded a lot of slides, but very few negatives, for the precise reasons people have mentioned—clipping strips of negatives doesn't help anything, and actually makes storage more difficult.
The last year and a bit, I've been doing a lot of my photography digitally. In that time, I make a lot of immediate deletions (when I see the exposure is all wrong, or the sharpness isn't there). But I have deleted fewer digital images after I took them home than I do with slides. In fact I've been thinking I probably should delete more. These deletions would be on technical grounds—unsharp photos, mostly (I'm using a lot of ridiculously low shutter speeds to get around the low sensitivity of the CCDs).
Another reason to avoid editing in the field is the user interface on most of these cameras. I really don't want to risk deleting the wrong thing. The immediate deletion of the shot I just took is safe on my camera—one button at the right time, and it can't accidentally delete some other photo. Going through them and deleting batches using the crazy array of buttons and tiny little screen on the camera isn't a very good idea IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole eugenics movement in the 50s
Basically, Myst was an adventure game -- wander around and solve puzzles. Only it had a much less satisfying user interface, and was terribly slow. Result -- boring game play. As I recall, and I didn't play it much (girlfriend was in love with it), the puzzles were rarely particularly visual, either. And the puzzles were often boring. It also had the problem of needing to spend endless boring hours clicking on everything to see what responded.
So -- kind of a pretty art gallery, could hold my attention for several minutes that way. Boring as a game.
Saw info on a book on this topic today, in fact: http://filesthatlast.com/about/ . Looks interesting so far.
Sorry, you're wrong. Gimp, which I have used at work for web work, doesn't have many of the basic capabilities I use heavily in Photoshop for photographic editing (I use Photoshop at home, legal copies, currently current at CS6).
Well...in absolutely literal terms, Gimp can of course do anything at all --- it can set any pixel of a canvas to any specified RGB color; thus in theory any 8-bit output you can imagine you can produce in Gimp.
However, this theoretical truth is irrelevant.
For any serious photo work, you need 16-bit-per-channel images. You don't need them really for the final result, but you need them for the original RAW conversion and the intermediate work. Back in the darkroom days, a print could hold about 5 stops of brightness range, a negative 10 -- and deciding how to map the one to the other was the essence of photo printing. If you can't represent the full camera file, you've been forced into a limited version of the work already.
Also, adjustment layers with layer masks are really really wonderful tools. It's like dodging and burning died and gone to heaven. You can do quick approximations, see if the approach will work, and refine them later. And maybe again when print samples show you were optimistic :-). (Adjustment layers are things like applying the curves tool as a layer to everything below it; you can go adjust that curve later without having to re-do anything else.)
Those are the particular areas I won't consider giving up. Other people may have others, also. Lots of professionals are much more committed to various plugins than I am; I've only really got three I can't live without, Noise Ninja and Color Mechanic and Focus Magic. And I could learn to do without Focus Magic.
No. PSP isn't even VAGUELY competitive with Photoshop, even for just the base task of preparing exhibition versions of photos. When you get into the more complex graphic design tasks it's even worse.
Unless...has PSP added adjustment layers for things like curves adjustments on 16-bit-per-channel data, with layer masks?
I don't open photoshop for simple stuff; when I *do*, I need the full toolbox.
I don't know who Gimp might look attractive to. It's missing two things that are absolute must-haves for me preparing images for high-quality printing (think "exhibition quality", not machine prints).
Specifically, support for 16-bit-per-channel images (as others have said, the final result can be reduced to 8-bit fairly safely; it's while you're working it that it needs the extra space), and support for adjustment layers with layer masks (also up through 16-bit). I will frequently end up with 4 separate curves adjustment layers with layer masks, plus a couple of content layers with unusual blending modes, for even a simple picture; a complex picture, or a restoration job, can easily go to twice that.
Also, there's the issue of integrated raw conversion in the workflow.
Beyond that, for professionals there are usually mandatory plugins, and if the Photoshop plugins don't run in Gimp (I don't know, I haven't checked that) and there isn't an equivalent plugin (there never is), it's hopeless. I need Noise Ninja and Focus Magic and Color Mechanic as my minimum; professionals need more (and usually need some of the high-end masking plugins).
However, the subscription model isn't that bad for professional users. Except for artists -- as usual, they get squeezed, because they tend to need the outer reaches of capabilities, and the vast majority of them have not nearly enough money. It's the serious amateur photographers who get hurt in this.
For me, trips have a large photographic component; often it's the primary purpose for the trip. So suggesting I not take my camera gear on a trip might as well be suggesting I don't *go* on the trip (which, admittedly, would be cheaper). And even if it's insured and the insurance doesn't find some way to not pay off, I've still lost the pictures in the camera, and probably several days (or even the rest of the trip) of photo opportunities (can't get instant insurance payout, in some locations can't buy a new camera locally). The laptop (and a good one, with enough disk and processor power and a good screen) is a necessary part of the photo kit too.
Then again, in my old world-traveling days (1958-1994, I guess), I guess I spent over 30 months outside North America, and never had anything stolen from me or anybody in my party. (Most of that time was in western Europe, but a couple of months were in Africa.) Of course, I wasn't carrying a laptop most of that time, and my early camera gear wasn't worth stealing. But later on I carried multiple SLRs and a big lens collection to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand for a total of several months; never lost anything. And my parents never lost gear on the early trips with them, either. Are things a LOT worse now?
I really don't care what tool is used in a homicide. Why do you?
The full nasty form of the proposed law bans possession, not sale, as I understand it. If so, then this doesn't "end-run" anything. It does of course make it easier for somebody wishing to possess illegal magazines (which would no longer refer to Hustler!) to do so.
I commented on Facebook a few months back that the work with 3D printers and firearms clearly marked the end of prohibition as any kind of rational, effective, approach to any firearms issues.
Well, yeah, saying some *group* is "all like" something-or-other is pretty much the definition of "bigoted". Most especially a group people are born into rather than self-selecting; at least MENSA people mostly *are* smart.
I definitely prefer to enjoy myself on vacation. Usually, I do that by taking pictures, which is one of the things I enjoy most, and often the reason I picked a particular place to go on vacation (the other is to see people I know who live there; I often take pictures of the people, too).
300 pictures in a day is off the bottom of the scale for me on vacation. I mean, I might have taken that many on film 20 years ago. Today it's more likely to see 3000 on an interesting vacation trip.
This also affects what backup schemes work on the road. Uploading 30 GB at 3G speeds (and plan limits) is generally not a winning strategy. Since tech gear is high-risk for theft, I really need to get the backup copies into something innocuous, or else into the cloud.
(If you don't enjoy taking pictures, by all means, don't, then!)
You're tilting at a straw windmill. The very first word of his subject line is "(NEAR)"; obviously he knows perfectly well he may not be able to reasonably achieve complete access.
On mass transit, I could read maybe. If not too crowded, maybe even get out a laptop and work, depending. While driving, the time is truly lost. Then again, I only drive 20 minutes or so to work. And often do errands on the way home, and sometimes during the day (at lunch or whatever).
Which? The documentation?
Since the alternative for me is Microsoft, whose documentation is voluminous but horrid, I actually find the Open Office documentation a reason to use it.
That's why it "deters" hijackings rather than "preventing all" hijackings. The English language is infinitely subtle and yet precise, if only you're paying attention.
And Linux administrators periodically have problems because they didn't test a change to something that happens only on a reboot, so months and months later something weird happens :-).
In fact, I've run a separate open network, with bandwidth limits (it's currently down as part of debugging why the access point needs to be rebooted so often just at the moment, though). And I have a friend who uses a whole separate access point to run a public network for parties and such.
Yeah, sharing is nice. And frankly, if I can help my neighbor's children get past controlling parents, I'm in favor of it.
There are very valuable roles for anonymity, and I really have no business knowing much of anything about what you read on the web.
On the other hand, there's a role for real-world reputation on the web, too, and one that flows both directions, and I can see it being very valuable to Citizendium.
I am not the least little slightest bit convinced of this. I've never, ever, once seen this being a problem. If it becomes a bit of a problem, clear out the spurious links.
Meanwhile, I *do* see useful articles being marked for speedy deletion. Wikipedia is shooting itself in the foot, on full auto, with a large-caliber weapon.
Notability is a spurious criteria for Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't have the same limitation as paper encyclopedias -- the staff are unpaid (and specialized fandoms bring in their own contributors), and the pages don't cost much money (bandwidth costs money, but disk doesn't much at the level poeple can use with hand-typed articles). *Most* of the things I look at on Wikipedia aren't in the Britannica; this is one of the ways Wikipedia is *better* (there are also many ways, mostly fairly obvious, that it's worse, but let's focus on the positive!).
The advantages of using a common system across the globe are obvious. The metric system is good enough. We should use it.
BUT...there are significant advantages to our system in day-to-day life. Inches and feet are more useful than meters in daily life, the metric degree is too big for weather forecasting, and perhaps most important, powers of two are actually more useful on rulers than powers of 10 (1/64 of an inch is smaller than 1 mm, and 1/10mm can't be measured on an affordable ruler).
I'm sure these have been noticed by lots of the individuals who oppose switching to the metric system, and they help strengthen their resolve.
*I* am for the conversion; the disadvantages can be coped with, and it seems to me it's a net win to use the same thing as everybody else.
I don't see how they can patent full-text search in general. It's been around for decades. (Well, other than the usual way of some complete idiot in the patent office letting something nonsensical through.)
As for full-text search on books, we launched the book search on dragaera.info a couple of weeks ago. Of course US patent goes by invention rather than exploitation -- but we had an in-house beta well over a year ago, too.
Yeah, yeah. That's the legal cover, and I suppose it's important for that purpose.
The DUL is recommending blocking email to the guy.
The issue isn't whether the data is stored on the web server; it's whether the data is accessible through the web server. If you intend to make the data accessible for some users or some purposes, you need to implement your own security to prevent it being accessed by ALL users for ALL purposes.
Let's run some numbers (I expect the numbers to say "yes", but we'll see).
Let's imagine an information storage appliance. It sits on you network and serves disks, and it has internal redundancy, and it negotiates over the net the duplication of information (both directions) to provide redundancy for itself and others. So let's say it has 5x the storage you actually use, to allow for both local redundancy, and the paying-back in services of off-site backups.
Let's assume that digital photos are stored as about 5 megabytes each. That's bigger than jpegs of consumer-camera images, but much smaller than full-res files from professional cameras. A 2-megapixel file (6 megabytes raw) is entirely adequate for an 8x10 print, so 5 megabytes is reasonable for archiving with the latest (or next year's) super-wavelet compression techniques. Or if you disagree, double or triple the final numbers.
So, if a professional photographer shoots 1000 pictures a week (which is low for some weeks, of course, but maybe okay for a year-long average), that'll take about 5 gigabytes of storage. Which means 260 gigabytes a year. Times 5, to cover the redundancy and such.
That's about 1.5 terabytes per year. Today that would cost a few thousand dollars, and last on average 5 years or so. After a 20-year career, you'd be paying $20,000 per year just for archiving your pictures. However, another order-of-magnitude price drop may well be available, and $2,000 per year doesn't sound so bad. Maybe DVD-RAM jukeboxes will bring that price down considerably, partly by having the media last 20 years instead of 5.
Now think about archiving at a newspaper. Money goes way up.
Now imagine the photographer dying (or even just retiring), or the newspaper going broke. Is somebody reliably going to take on the job of archiving those photographs? Remember, they can't sit for 50 years in a box in the attic until somebody re-discovers them; they'll evaporate if treated that way.
I think what we're going to see is a very different sorting from what photos have had over the past 150 years. I'm not sure I know what it will be; it may be based on popularity (wide distribution and retention), plus the work of organizations and individuals dedicated to archiving them. I also think that photos will be discovered with much less provenance than they used to have, which will probably make them less useful.
In that time, I've discarded a lot of slides, but very few negatives, for the precise reasons people have mentioned—clipping strips of negatives doesn't help anything, and actually makes storage more difficult.
The last year and a bit, I've been doing a lot of my photography digitally. In that time, I make a lot of immediate deletions (when I see the exposure is all wrong, or the sharpness isn't there). But I have deleted fewer digital images after I took them home than I do with slides. In fact I've been thinking I probably should delete more. These deletions would be on technical grounds—unsharp photos, mostly (I'm using a lot of ridiculously low shutter speeds to get around the low sensitivity of the CCDs).
Another reason to avoid editing in the field is the user interface on most of these cameras. I really don't want to risk deleting the wrong thing. The immediate deletion of the shot I just took is safe on my camera—one button at the right time, and it can't accidentally delete some other photo. Going through them and deleting batches using the crazy array of buttons and tiny little screen on the camera isn't a very good idea IMHO.