If only most photographers would be that rational.
Four out of the five I called when looking to get my wedding done wouldn't give me the 'negatives' (I wanted it done in digital) for any sum of money. I assume they would have a price somewhere, but it was well over ten times their fee for taking the pictures.
And one of them, no doubt realizing that someone emailing them wouldn't order a lot of prints anyways, was willing to simply figure out a price for their labour and give me what I wanted to pay for, for a price only double what everyone else charged just to take prints. In the end it's a huge savings and I'm supporting an honest business model.
Ok, so you're a pretentious artist and want to work on artsy things.
How does this relate to taking documentary photos of someone, on their dollar. And how does it negate the fact that you're working for them, they own your product like a factory owns what its employees create.
Go be artsy. I'll take a good digital camera, a fine yet non-artistic photographer, and personal ownership of pictures I paid for.
I have seen photographers berate someone for doing what to them appears to undercut the industry. On many photography forums people are incredibly rude to the photographers who sell the copyright on their pictures (or who don't withhold them) to their customers.
The luddites are afraid that any customer choice will collapse their dead business model.
Wedding Photography is a crooked business, like used-car sales.
It's expected that if someone creates a movie for you that you could get them to provide it in state-of-the-art formats. Would it be valid if they offered only reel-to-reel film without specifically telling the customer?
When you advertise a product there are a few (legal) assumptions you can make. One is that it's fit for the purpose it's advertised. If DVD is the most obvious technology then VHS probably isn't fit for the purpose advertised anymore.
But the WPs are a crooked bunch who know that they can be very unclear with the details and then when they have the customer over the barrel, get concessions they'd have never gotten up front.
Your only goal here is to get *all* the wedding pictures these people have access to and to bleed them white paying for access to them. It's a lousy business and frankly, an idiotic business model. It puts you at odds with your customers.
Just charge enough for your time taking the pictures to pay your costs. This way you're paid, and the customer gets the access they deserve.
If the photographer charged the prices that I imagine from reading the article, they were asking many hundreds of dollars per actual hour of work.
How could you justify charging a thousand or more dollars to take pictures, for people to then pay money for copies. This is gouging in the extreme.
Luckily there are a few ethical photographers who don't try to claim ownership of work-for-hire. They rest are scammers try to capitalize on the barriers-of-entry to their profession.
When I got married I simply wouldn't accept not getting the negatives. I told a few photographers to take a hike when they got uppity about 'artistic integrity' or some other bunk reason for not giving me the originals. (In this case, digital.)
After about five calls I found one who would shoot in digital (Canon 1D) and give me the originals. He was twice the price of anyone else, but cheaper (in the end) than it would have cost going with someone who expected to have a monopoly on producing my wedding prints.
One photographer in that group of five understood that business models could change and found a niche for himself. Will the rest of the industry go the way of the RIAA and MPAA, luddits keeping everyone in the dark ages?
It would be one thing if photographers kept partial copyright, the right to reproduce for a portfolio or something, but for them to claim full rights to a picture of you, that you paid for them to take? They're dreaming.
I paid extra for the original files because I wanted to support a better business model, and because I wanted higher quality than I could get by scanning them. But I'd have copied them without a moments thought if it were the only way I could get electronic copies. Copyright makes no sense in these circumstances and I refuse to play along.
Look at the results of a $500 inkjet, one of Canon's six-color ones, or a high-end Epson. With the picture behind glass (so the type of paper used is harder to see) you can't tell the difference. (Unless it's a big print and the source pic was down with MF film or something.)
There no justification for feeling proprietary over the way you've posed people. Some ideas just can't be seen except as free for everyone to use.
And what is the idea that there can only ever be one business model for photography? Why can't the photographer charge a real hourly wage and give the results to the employer, like all other contract employees?
If someone charges $500 to shoot a wedding but expects to make a profit off of the $500 in prints could just as easily charge $800 and give the people the 'negatives' and as many at-cost prints as they want. He'd make the same profit, but in the second scenario it'd be guaranteed. And he'd serve his customers who'd have a valid up-front cost and then access to cheap prints or the ability to scan the originals and make copies themselves.
Your idea that the poor photographer gets cheated is ridiculous. It's time that photographs were treated as works-for-hire like most everything else.
People already have to deposit their vote in a box under the watchful eye of a worker, to avoid people from dumping crap in the box to spoil a bunch of votes. People seem to manage this so far.
To avoid fake votes, where someone takes one home, prints up a bunch of dupes, and hands them to someone else to take in and drop in the box, you use some form of public-key encryption (likely PGP because it's well known) and the machine signs the vote, the time, and its serial number, with it's private key. If you duplicate the paper you're left with two identical votes which can't be valid because the machine can't generate votes that fast.
So the vote-tally machine makes SHA1 (or whatever) sums from the votes, checking to see if it's got a duplicate. If it does, it buzzes and people investigate. Perhaps it's the one-in-a-googleplex chance that it would really happen by chance, but likely it's attempted fraud.
Engineered assurance in this case needs to include opening the source code, at least for public viewing, if not public contribution.
This open process is how you ensure that what someone says is quality engineering really is.
You also need the tamper-proof mechanisms to make sure nobody removes the open source software, but these only work on a machine with open specs so you can see it's not designed with two flash-ROMs, for instance, one to hold the public code and one to hold the real, malicious code.
And then, you take the open specs, pass them to a third-party company for inspection and another third-party company to build the thing, making pretty sure that nobody designed in back doors, and trusting the designed in security to reveal backdoors put in by the manufacturer.
How do you expect to convince someone that a machine is secure if you don't show them details of the whole process and explain the procedures for them (or an expert) to come and examine it?
From what I've heard, some Linux distros aiming for the clueless-users market are implementing this sandbox mode with Wine to allow you to do things like open email attachments without hosing your other emulated programs.
The idea is that you install a bunch of applications and with each one, tell the system if it's a component of (ie, should share the filesystem and permissions of) another program, related to it (in which case they need or one two way access to the files of the other, though possibly read-only) or completely unrelated, where they can "scan the whole system" and not see each other. (Of course, the whole system would appear to be an empty windows install until you set otherwise.)
This way your virtual copy of Outlook (needed for calendaring in your company) would think it was the only thing installed, but your other apps could see Outlooks files, though in read-only mode to allow for importing of mail, or what-now. If you clicked on an email attachment it'd default to running it in a seperate filesystem unless told otherwise. If it's an.exe of the dancing baby, no harm done. If it's a virus, again, no harm done. (The exception being JS viruses where Outlook doesn't actually run an exe, where it is the security hole itself.)
With a system of hard-links you could make a "windows install" that you could have tons of copies of without taking more room, except for files modified by the program running in that particular partition.
This would also work in VMWare, if you could make it run from a Linux filesystem, but the overhead of running a new VM for each program is overkill.
I'm glad you've found Mozilla. I really like it. I went from having a task-bar cluttered with 10-15 browser windows to having two or three, each with a ton of tabs related to a particular subject. The clean interface helps me keep it all straight. Even better is the fact that Mozilla often lasts as long without a crash as Win2k does so when I'm in windows I can get a week or two of browsing without losing my place. Neither Netscape or IE were stable enough for that.
And as you say, it's nice to know that when it crashes, if you take a minute to fill in the form and report and bugs you've noticed, that you're helping to polish a product that'll be available for the community to use.
Thank you for your response, sometimes I wonder if people read my posts, especially because I often get to a thread when it's a little ways down the front page.
Use Photoshop, Select the subject with Magnetic Lasso, Inverse Selection, Feather Selection, Gaussian Blur it, and you've got mostly the same effect.:)
It works best with only two depths, the subject and the background. With a middle-ground you've got to do the blurring in two chunks and then make sure you didn't get any hard edges between selections. More of a pain.
The pixel counts are the same but the shot from the EOS 1D looks a lot better, imho. Especially if you blow them up. Unfortunately there's no direct comparison between a $5000 camera and the $800 Coolpix so the pictures aren't of identical stuff, but there's enough to give you an idea. I believe white-balance is set at automatic which explains the difference in overall cast.
Look at the gray of the poster, in the 1D picture it's smooth. In the CP990 picture it's rough and has other colors thrown in.
Not quite right. Some 35mm cameras can have the back removed, I'd imagine you could then put another on. Being as the back is what the film is pressed up against, this is where the sensor would go.
If you were to take an old film camera and design the back to hold a sensor at the precise place the film was you'd get a digital camera.
This is where the coverage comes in. If you did this with an existing film camera and a small sensor you'd need to tweak the internals to make the SLR viewfinder work, otherwise you'd get part of the view and it'd be out of focus.
Now people who have a lot invested in a film camera can get it modified and turn it into digital. Admittedly, digital without all the cool features, but it'd do the job.
Buy another 120+GB drive and use it for backup. Just copy your whole filesystem once every month or so and keep the drive in a safe-deposit box, or just at your friend's place if.
Nah. Most of the "users" I know who installed Mozilla did so because they heard friends mention it.
Many of them are into "blog"ing and LiveJournal supposedly works better in Mozilla and there's a pluggin for Mozilla to add extra functionality to it. I've been told by two of my less techie friends that I should install Mozilla/Netscape.:)
And even more powerful than that is the popup blocker. I told a guy I used to bus to work with about it back in the days of.9x and he switched, taking most of his friends with him. He hated pop-up windows and this was *the* killer feature.
Then tell people that IE is a security risk, they run the risk of getting a virus from a webpage (and they do, I've seen the concept-attack sites). They know about Outlook and how buggy it is but few of them know what the alternatives are (Eudora, Pegasus, etc) until you tell them that Mozilla/Netscape comes with a non-risky email reader.
These people aren't dumb. Behind the times, yes. Unmotivated to look for something better, often. But they read CNN's site and they hear about the continual MS holes. They hear about Linux, this "new" free Windows replacement that supposedly has better security... I get a few questions every now and then. I haven't tried to set anyone's grandma up with Linux, yet, but I will soon.
There are a few Linux distros in late beta right now that are so easy to use that Grandma would likely be happier there than elsewhere. She doesn't care what goes on behind the screens, she just doesn't want to lose a letter when the computer crashes, she wants a computer that won't die if she forgets to shut down (journalling FSs and tweaks to the cache to force it to always write to disk as soon as possible) and she wants to check email without worrying about Klez and the virus of the week. The fact she can do it for the price of hardware without the OS and Office price is just gravy.
Also, don't underestimate the anti-monopoly sentiment. Older people lived through the AT&T and IBM breakup and read the news at the time. They know the history of monopolies and they understand why Standard Oil (?) was broken up, etc. They might not hate MS like many people here but they certainly don't want any one company to control too much.
Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?
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Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
I'm curious as to why you think someone needs to "maintain the desktop"?
Do you mean the literal desktop, like the UI of your window manager, or do you mean the whole computer?
And what "managing" do you get from Ximian that you don't get from Mandrake, or SUSE, or Redhat, or whoever?
My old work (since gone except for the embedded-apps department) switched to Linux in an interesting way, they stopped forbidding people to run Linux... The two lead coders had it installed within a week, within a month *everyone* in the engineering wing had it installed, even the guys in S&H (using internal web-apps and Open Office.) This is with just default Red Hat, nothing special, nothing managed.
The only thing that would help them would be the Evolution pluggin. Occasionally management schedules them for a meeting and they wouldn't know, except that they run VMWare (for testing the apps from Windows) and they keep Outlook open in it. I imagine Evolution would work more quickly than VMWare so it'd be a win.
If IE was simply MS's branded browser, but otherwise identical to Netscape and Opera, there'd be no reason to switch. This isn't the case though, IE is quite the security risk and mangles standards.
It's the mangling of standards that's the real problem. MS is trying to lock everyone into using their product, not because it's better (and evidence often suggests it's not) but because much of the built-for-IE web won't work without it.
Ditto with Microsoft Office. If they were content to merely write a good office suite it wouldn't be bad. Many people (who have used others and have a valid opinion) like MS Office, there'd be a market for it. But no, like IE they can't compete, they have to lock people in. They're perfectly happy writing an import utility for Wordperfect files but they won't let anyone export properly, or let Wordperfect write a proper Word import utility. Then add to this all the vulnerabilities and you've got an office suite that people should avoid.
The OS is just an extension of this. There've been a ton of cases where a MS "patch" has broken their major competitor's software and nothing else, or where they've used undocumented routines to speed up their own applications and crippled the APIs used by the competition to make sure that they win in any review.
If they'd ever just competed, trying to get by on the honest merits of their products, I'd say that you should pick the best browser, be it IE of Mozilla/Netscape, and the best office suite, etc. Now however I think you should almost always pick the non-MS alternative if there is one. It's the only way you'll avoid things like Palladium, MS lock-in, security flaws, and other nasty suprises.
Luckily, Mozilla is a better browser, Open Office is as good an office suite (I don't use them enough to rate the advanced stuff), and Linux for most office purposes is a superior OS.
If we get enough people to switch (even to Apple if needs-be) we take away MS's power to dictate to the market, we reserve the power for the consumers.
Hell yes. Probably the only "religion" that doesn't deserve mocking is Buddhism, and that's only just possibly.
Christianity, Falun Gong, Scientology, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism. Whatever you've got, it's lame and we'll poke fun at it and you for being suckered by it.
You guys really have to get over your persecution complex. North Americans and Europeans poke fun at christianity more than any other established religion because there's more of you around. Now that people notice islam, it's a joke too. Falun Gong is rising from obscurity and you know? It's nuts too!
This is ignoring for a second things like scientology and such, ones that while no less true (how could that be?) are much more damaging in the short term, or are much more hostile, striking out at their "enemies".
Ahh. I was thinking you would just give each process the same quanta. A multi-thread process would get to pass its time-slice between threads as it saw fit. If it used less than the assigned time, it would benefit from a low-cost context switch, if it used more than its quanta, it would effectively lose the benefits of threads, except for the shared memory space which is either a benefit or a problem, depending on your view.
What I didn't see what the complexity that goes into this.
I guess it's like VM/Swap, easier to discuss strategy than to implement effeciently.
I'll look up the references you gave me.
Re:Mods aren't always good for gamers . . .
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XBox Linux HOWTOs
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· Score: 2
How about bashing them because they can't write a fundamentally secure system and instead they layer on ineffectual protection that ends up stifling legitimate uses while avoiding the real issues.
How about bashing them because they lie and say it's for our own good when really they couldn't be bothered to get it right.
How about bashing them for trying to blame mod chips, which exist for perfectly valid reasons, for their problems instead of doing the work necessary to make a system that isn't vulnerable to the same lying-client attacks that we've known about since network games were first created and which have been discussed in literature since the 80s?
There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to bash MS. I'm not making anything up and I'm intentionally staying just on this issue and I can get three.
All you need is for a single copy of a piece of media to get loose and for the "creator" of that copy to tell the system that it's got unlimited copying privs. After that, everyone can download this third-party copy of a movie and play it. Overlaying multiple copies of a sound or picture (including video) can let you come very close to the original copy, especially if you've got studio-quality equipment.
If it watermarked on the players won't play it, you simply write an application that doesn't say what the data is. Rather than asking the "trusted" video card to display video you take each from seperately, upload it as a texture, and display it on a full-screen, unshaded polygon...
If the operating system won't let you access video data at all without privs, you simply call it something else and encrypt it just enough that it doesn't look like video. Then the new players rot-13 it (essentially) before playing.
Further, any suggestion that these systems can keep data secret and insane. I've taken a good enough picture of my monitor at full resolution, full of fairly small text, that I could OCR it, let alone simply type the data in again. Digital cameras have very few moving parts and likely will outlive their owners (if you get a good one) so this "security hole" will be with us forever.
Palladium will be a huge pain in the ass but it'll kill the companies who push it, partly from lawsuits from companies who believed their promises, and partly from a complete consumer backlash.
Look how hard, or not as the case may be, it is to get a region-free DVD player, even in the USA. Imagine when every person who uses a computer runs into these issues every day and gets pissed off. Black-market, perhaps even outright illegal, Asian clones with just enough DRM to appear "trusted" to the servers will be available and people will buy them.
Perhaps you'll even get Palladium-killing proxies. They pretend to be a Palladium-supporting client PC and they strip protection off of all requested data before sending it to the real client PCs.
I might have believed Palladium would work at one point, but then I saw physical smart-card hacks and I realized that what a college student could do against a low-power, hardened, very expensive, chip would be an order of magnitude easier against something like a general purpose CPU that can't waste cycles on strong encryption, and that can't waste time or power passing data between units in an obfuscated way.
It'll be cracked, it'll piss people off though, they'll get around it in black-market ways, it's eventual failure will take with it all the companies who bet heavily on it. (Hey, I wonder if Intel is planning on this, make a half-assed try, let MS take the heat when it fails, and get behind alternative OSes to pick up the market now free from its once-powerful controller.)
If you don't want a topic to come up, don't mention it. Certainly, don't base your entire premise around that point and then ask that it not be questioned.
"Piracy", as in, unauthorized duplication, is *not* stealing. Stealing refers, specifically, to taking something tangible away from the owner.
It is many things, immoral often being one of them, but it isn't stealing.
Words have precise meanings; don't muddle them up to support your opinions, you rapist. (By which, of course, I mean someone who uses the words incorrectly.)
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If only most photographers would be that rational.
Four out of the five I called when looking to get my wedding done wouldn't give me the 'negatives' (I wanted it done in digital) for any sum of money. I assume they would have a price somewhere, but it was well over ten times their fee for taking the pictures.
And one of them, no doubt realizing that someone emailing them wouldn't order a lot of prints anyways, was willing to simply figure out a price for their labour and give me what I wanted to pay for, for a price only double what everyone else charged just to take prints. In the end it's a huge savings and I'm supporting an honest business model.
Ok, so you're a pretentious artist and want to work on artsy things.
How does this relate to taking documentary photos of someone, on their dollar. And how does it negate the fact that you're working for them, they own your product like a factory owns what its employees create.
Go be artsy. I'll take a good digital camera, a fine yet non-artistic photographer, and personal ownership of pictures I paid for.
I have seen photographers berate someone for doing what to them appears to undercut the industry. On many photography forums people are incredibly rude to the photographers who sell the copyright on their pictures (or who don't withhold them) to their customers.
The luddites are afraid that any customer choice will collapse their dead business model.
Wedding Photography is a crooked business, like used-car sales.
It's expected that if someone creates a movie for you that you could get them to provide it in state-of-the-art formats. Would it be valid if they offered only reel-to-reel film without specifically telling the customer?
When you advertise a product there are a few (legal) assumptions you can make. One is that it's fit for the purpose it's advertised. If DVD is the most obvious technology then VHS probably isn't fit for the purpose advertised anymore.
But the WPs are a crooked bunch who know that they can be very unclear with the details and then when they have the customer over the barrel, get concessions they'd have never gotten up front.
I'd sure as hell never hire you.
Your only goal here is to get *all* the wedding pictures these people have access to and to bleed them white paying for access to them. It's a lousy business and frankly, an idiotic business model. It puts you at odds with your customers.
Just charge enough for your time taking the pictures to pay your costs. This way you're paid, and the customer gets the access they deserve.
If the photographer charged the prices that I imagine from reading the article, they were asking many hundreds of dollars per actual hour of work.
How could you justify charging a thousand or more dollars to take pictures, for people to then pay money for copies. This is gouging in the extreme.
Luckily there are a few ethical photographers who don't try to claim ownership of work-for-hire. They rest are scammers try to capitalize on the barriers-of-entry to their profession.
When I got married I simply wouldn't accept not getting the negatives. I told a few photographers to take a hike when they got uppity about 'artistic integrity' or some other bunk reason for not giving me the originals. (In this case, digital.)
After about five calls I found one who would shoot in digital (Canon 1D) and give me the originals. He was twice the price of anyone else, but cheaper (in the end) than it would have cost going with someone who expected to have a monopoly on producing my wedding prints.
One photographer in that group of five understood that business models could change and found a niche for himself. Will the rest of the industry go the way of the RIAA and MPAA, luddits keeping everyone in the dark ages?
It would be one thing if photographers kept partial copyright, the right to reproduce for a portfolio or something, but for them to claim full rights to a picture of you, that you paid for them to take? They're dreaming.
I paid extra for the original files because I wanted to support a better business model, and because I wanted higher quality than I could get by scanning them. But I'd have copied them without a moments thought if it were the only way I could get electronic copies. Copyright makes no sense in these circumstances and I refuse to play along.
Look at the results of a $500 inkjet, one of Canon's six-color ones, or a high-end Epson. With the picture behind glass (so the type of paper used is harder to see) you can't tell the difference. (Unless it's a big print and the source pic was down with MF film or something.)
There no justification for feeling proprietary over the way you've posed people. Some ideas just can't be seen except as free for everyone to use.
And what is the idea that there can only ever be one business model for photography? Why can't the photographer charge a real hourly wage and give the results to the employer, like all other contract employees?
If someone charges $500 to shoot a wedding but expects to make a profit off of the $500 in prints could just as easily charge $800 and give the people the 'negatives' and as many at-cost prints as they want. He'd make the same profit, but in the second scenario it'd be guaranteed. And he'd serve his customers who'd have a valid up-front cost and then access to cheap prints or the ability to scan the originals and make copies themselves.
Your idea that the poor photographer gets cheated is ridiculous. It's time that photographs were treated as works-for-hire like most everything else.
People already have to deposit their vote in a box under the watchful eye of a worker, to avoid people from dumping crap in the box to spoil a bunch of votes. People seem to manage this so far.
To avoid fake votes, where someone takes one home, prints up a bunch of dupes, and hands them to someone else to take in and drop in the box, you use some form of public-key encryption (likely PGP because it's well known) and the machine signs the vote, the time, and its serial number, with it's private key. If you duplicate the paper you're left with two identical votes which can't be valid because the machine can't generate votes that fast.
So the vote-tally machine makes SHA1 (or whatever) sums from the votes, checking to see if it's got a duplicate. If it does, it buzzes and people investigate. Perhaps it's the one-in-a-googleplex chance that it would really happen by chance, but likely it's attempted fraud.
Engineered assurance in this case needs to include opening the source code, at least for public viewing, if not public contribution.
This open process is how you ensure that what someone says is quality engineering really is.
You also need the tamper-proof mechanisms to make sure nobody removes the open source software, but these only work on a machine with open specs so you can see it's not designed with two flash-ROMs, for instance, one to hold the public code and one to hold the real, malicious code.
And then, you take the open specs, pass them to a third-party company for inspection and another third-party company to build the thing, making pretty sure that nobody designed in back doors, and trusting the designed in security to reveal backdoors put in by the manufacturer.
How do you expect to convince someone that a machine is secure if you don't show them details of the whole process and explain the procedures for them (or an expert) to come and examine it?
From what I've heard, some Linux distros aiming for the clueless-users market are implementing this sandbox mode with Wine to allow you to do things like open email attachments without hosing your other emulated programs.
.exe of the dancing baby, no harm done. If it's a virus, again, no harm done. (The exception being JS viruses where Outlook doesn't actually run an exe, where it is the security hole itself.)
The idea is that you install a bunch of applications and with each one, tell the system if it's a component of (ie, should share the filesystem and permissions of) another program, related to it (in which case they need or one two way access to the files of the other, though possibly read-only) or completely unrelated, where they can "scan the whole system" and not see each other. (Of course, the whole system would appear to be an empty windows install until you set otherwise.)
This way your virtual copy of Outlook (needed for calendaring in your company) would think it was the only thing installed, but your other apps could see Outlooks files, though in read-only mode to allow for importing of mail, or what-now. If you clicked on an email attachment it'd default to running it in a seperate filesystem unless told otherwise. If it's an
With a system of hard-links you could make a "windows install" that you could have tons of copies of without taking more room, except for files modified by the program running in that particular partition.
This would also work in VMWare, if you could make it run from a Linux filesystem, but the overhead of running a new VM for each program is overkill.
I'm glad you've found Mozilla. I really like it. I went from having a task-bar cluttered with 10-15 browser windows to having two or three, each with a ton of tabs related to a particular subject. The clean interface helps me keep it all straight. Even better is the fact that Mozilla often lasts as long without a crash as Win2k does so when I'm in windows I can get a week or two of browsing without losing my place. Neither Netscape or IE were stable enough for that.
And as you say, it's nice to know that when it crashes, if you take a minute to fill in the form and report and bugs you've noticed, that you're helping to polish a product that'll be available for the community to use.
Thank you for your response, sometimes I wonder if people read my posts, especially because I often get to a thread when it's a little ways down the front page.
Use Photoshop, Select the subject with Magnetic Lasso, Inverse Selection, Feather Selection, Gaussian Blur it, and you've got mostly the same effect. :)
It works best with only two depths, the subject and the background. With a middle-ground you've got to do the blurring in two chunks and then make sure you didn't get any hard edges between selections. More of a pain.
Canon EOS 1D Sample Image
Nikon Coolpix 990
The pixel counts are the same but the shot from the EOS 1D looks a lot better, imho. Especially if you blow them up. Unfortunately there's no direct comparison between a $5000 camera and the $800 Coolpix so the pictures aren't of identical stuff, but there's enough to give you an idea. I believe white-balance is set at automatic which explains the difference in overall cast.
Look at the gray of the poster, in the 1D picture it's smooth. In the CP990 picture it's rough and has other colors thrown in.
Not quite right. Some 35mm cameras can have the back removed, I'd imagine you could then put another on. Being as the back is what the film is pressed up against, this is where the sensor would go.
If you were to take an old film camera and design the back to hold a sensor at the precise place the film was you'd get a digital camera.
This is where the coverage comes in. If you did this with an existing film camera and a small sensor you'd need to tweak the internals to make the SLR viewfinder work, otherwise you'd get part of the view and it'd be out of focus.
Now people who have a lot invested in a film camera can get it modified and turn it into digital. Admittedly, digital without all the cool features, but it'd do the job.
Buy another 120+GB drive and use it for backup. Just copy your whole filesystem once every month or so and keep the drive in a safe-deposit box, or just at your friend's place if.
Nah. Most of the "users" I know who installed Mozilla did so because they heard friends mention it.
:)
.9x and he switched, taking most of his friends with him. He hated pop-up windows and this was *the* killer feature.
Many of them are into "blog"ing and LiveJournal supposedly works better in Mozilla and there's a pluggin for Mozilla to add extra functionality to it. I've been told by two of my less techie friends that I should install Mozilla/Netscape.
And even more powerful than that is the popup blocker. I told a guy I used to bus to work with about it back in the days of
Then tell people that IE is a security risk, they run the risk of getting a virus from a webpage (and they do, I've seen the concept-attack sites). They know about Outlook and how buggy it is but few of them know what the alternatives are (Eudora, Pegasus, etc) until you tell them that Mozilla/Netscape comes with a non-risky email reader.
These people aren't dumb. Behind the times, yes. Unmotivated to look for something better, often. But they read CNN's site and they hear about the continual MS holes. They hear about Linux, this "new" free Windows replacement that supposedly has better security... I get a few questions every now and then. I haven't tried to set anyone's grandma up with Linux, yet, but I will soon.
There are a few Linux distros in late beta right now that are so easy to use that Grandma would likely be happier there than elsewhere. She doesn't care what goes on behind the screens, she just doesn't want to lose a letter when the computer crashes, she wants a computer that won't die if she forgets to shut down (journalling FSs and tweaks to the cache to force it to always write to disk as soon as possible) and she wants to check email without worrying about Klez and the virus of the week. The fact she can do it for the price of hardware without the OS and Office price is just gravy.
Also, don't underestimate the anti-monopoly sentiment. Older people lived through the AT&T and IBM breakup and read the news at the time. They know the history of monopolies and they understand why Standard Oil (?) was broken up, etc. They might not hate MS like many people here but they certainly don't want any one company to control too much.
I'm curious as to why you think someone needs to "maintain the desktop"?
Do you mean the literal desktop, like the UI of your window manager, or do you mean the whole computer?
And what "managing" do you get from Ximian that you don't get from Mandrake, or SUSE, or Redhat, or whoever?
My old work (since gone except for the embedded-apps department) switched to Linux in an interesting way, they stopped forbidding people to run Linux... The two lead coders had it installed within a week, within a month *everyone* in the engineering wing had it installed, even the guys in S&H (using internal web-apps and Open Office.) This is with just default Red Hat, nothing special, nothing managed.
The only thing that would help them would be the Evolution pluggin. Occasionally management schedules them for a meeting and they wouldn't know, except that they run VMWare (for testing the apps from Windows) and they keep Outlook open in it. I imagine Evolution would work more quickly than VMWare so it'd be a win.
You have.
If IE was simply MS's branded browser, but otherwise identical to Netscape and Opera, there'd be no reason to switch. This isn't the case though, IE is quite the security risk and mangles standards.
It's the mangling of standards that's the real problem. MS is trying to lock everyone into using their product, not because it's better (and evidence often suggests it's not) but because much of the built-for-IE web won't work without it.
Ditto with Microsoft Office. If they were content to merely write a good office suite it wouldn't be bad. Many people (who have used others and have a valid opinion) like MS Office, there'd be a market for it. But no, like IE they can't compete, they have to lock people in. They're perfectly happy writing an import utility for Wordperfect files but they won't let anyone export properly, or let Wordperfect write a proper Word import utility. Then add to this all the vulnerabilities and you've got an office suite that people should avoid.
The OS is just an extension of this. There've been a ton of cases where a MS "patch" has broken their major competitor's software and nothing else, or where they've used undocumented routines to speed up their own applications and crippled the APIs used by the competition to make sure that they win in any review.
If they'd ever just competed, trying to get by on the honest merits of their products, I'd say that you should pick the best browser, be it IE of Mozilla/Netscape, and the best office suite, etc. Now however I think you should almost always pick the non-MS alternative if there is one. It's the only way you'll avoid things like Palladium, MS lock-in, security flaws, and other nasty suprises.
Luckily, Mozilla is a better browser, Open Office is as good an office suite (I don't use them enough to rate the advanced stuff), and Linux for most office purposes is a superior OS.
If we get enough people to switch (even to Apple if needs-be) we take away MS's power to dictate to the market, we reserve the power for the consumers.
Hell yes. Probably the only "religion" that doesn't deserve mocking is Buddhism, and that's only just possibly.
Christianity, Falun Gong, Scientology, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism. Whatever you've got, it's lame and we'll poke fun at it and you for being suckered by it.
You guys really have to get over your persecution complex. North Americans and Europeans poke fun at christianity more than any other established religion because there's more of you around. Now that people notice islam, it's a joke too. Falun Gong is rising from obscurity and you know? It's nuts too!
This is ignoring for a second things like scientology and such, ones that while no less true (how could that be?) are much more damaging in the short term, or are much more hostile, striking out at their "enemies".
Ahh. I was thinking you would just give each process the same quanta. A multi-thread process would get to pass its time-slice between threads as it saw fit. If it used less than the assigned time, it would benefit from a low-cost context switch, if it used more than its quanta, it would effectively lose the benefits of threads, except for the shared memory space which is either a benefit or a problem, depending on your view.
What I didn't see what the complexity that goes into this.
I guess it's like VM/Swap, easier to discuss strategy than to implement effeciently.
I'll look up the references you gave me.
How about bashing them because they can't write a fundamentally secure system and instead they layer on ineffectual protection that ends up stifling legitimate uses while avoiding the real issues.
How about bashing them because they lie and say it's for our own good when really they couldn't be bothered to get it right.
How about bashing them for trying to blame mod chips, which exist for perfectly valid reasons, for their problems instead of doing the work necessary to make a system that isn't vulnerable to the same lying-client attacks that we've known about since network games were first created and which have been discussed in literature since the 80s?
There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to bash MS. I'm not making anything up and I'm intentionally staying just on this issue and I can get three.
It is really bad, but it'll fail horribly.
All you need is for a single copy of a piece of media to get loose and for the "creator" of that copy to tell the system that it's got unlimited copying privs. After that, everyone can download this third-party copy of a movie and play it. Overlaying multiple copies of a sound or picture (including video) can let you come very close to the original copy, especially if you've got studio-quality equipment.
If it watermarked on the players won't play it, you simply write an application that doesn't say what the data is. Rather than asking the "trusted" video card to display video you take each from seperately, upload it as a texture, and display it on a full-screen, unshaded polygon...
If the operating system won't let you access video data at all without privs, you simply call it something else and encrypt it just enough that it doesn't look like video. Then the new players rot-13 it (essentially) before playing.
Further, any suggestion that these systems can keep data secret and insane. I've taken a good enough picture of my monitor at full resolution, full of fairly small text, that I could OCR it, let alone simply type the data in again. Digital cameras have very few moving parts and likely will outlive their owners (if you get a good one) so this "security hole" will be with us forever.
Palladium will be a huge pain in the ass but it'll kill the companies who push it, partly from lawsuits from companies who believed their promises, and partly from a complete consumer backlash.
Look how hard, or not as the case may be, it is to get a region-free DVD player, even in the USA. Imagine when every person who uses a computer runs into these issues every day and gets pissed off. Black-market, perhaps even outright illegal, Asian clones with just enough DRM to appear "trusted" to the servers will be available and people will buy them.
Perhaps you'll even get Palladium-killing proxies. They pretend to be a Palladium-supporting client PC and they strip protection off of all requested data before sending it to the real client PCs.
I might have believed Palladium would work at one point, but then I saw physical smart-card hacks and I realized that what a college student could do against a low-power, hardened, very expensive, chip would be an order of magnitude easier against something like a general purpose CPU that can't waste cycles on strong encryption, and that can't waste time or power passing data between units in an obfuscated way.
It'll be cracked, it'll piss people off though, they'll get around it in black-market ways, it's eventual failure will take with it all the companies who bet heavily on it. (Hey, I wonder if Intel is planning on this, make a half-assed try, let MS take the heat when it fails, and get behind alternative OSes to pick up the market now free from its once-powerful controller.)
If you don't want a topic to come up, don't mention it. Certainly, don't base your entire premise around that point and then ask that it not be questioned.
"Piracy", as in, unauthorized duplication, is *not* stealing. Stealing refers, specifically, to taking something tangible away from the owner.
It is many things, immoral often being one of them, but it isn't stealing.
Words have precise meanings; don't muddle them up to support your opinions, you rapist. (By which, of course, I mean someone who uses the words incorrectly.)