It's a half-frame. Focal length issues.
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Surely the image array isn't 24x36mm? Click, click... no, it's 22.7x15 mm. Roughly comparable a half-frame 35 mm camera.
That means that no lens is going to have the same coverage on this camera as it does on a 35 mm camera.
Canon says "Focal length conversion factor: Equivalent to approx. 1.6x indicated focal length compared to 35mm format." Your 50 mm. lens will act like an 80 mm; your 35 mm like a 56... and if you like to use a 28 mm on your film camera, you'll have to shell out for an 18mm to use on this one.
It works in your favor for telephoto lenses, though.
It also means that for the equivalent angle of coverage, this camera will have a greater depth of field. Nice for some things. Not so nice for others, e.g. portraits.
A check on "the clocks were striking thirteen" yields seventeen hits, including the Cliff's Notes to Nineteen Eighty-Four and a reference in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations...
It's probably down the memory hole by now, but to the best of my recollection one of Microsoft's claims prior to the release of Windows NT 4.0 was that it would almost completely eliminate the need for reboots during installation.
It always amazes me how Microsoft is consistently able to deflect criticism by saying that the problem will be addressed in the next major release... and when it gets there and it is clear that the promise hasn't been kept, nobody--certainly not the people to drive IT purchasing decisions--seems to mind.
Telephone numbers are almost as long as numeric IP addresses. Why not get rid of DNS and key in the addresses? And issue paper "Internet books" where we could look up the IP addresses of sites we wanted to access?
I'm not sure what aspect of cognitive psychology explains this, but I and many of my middle-aged friends acknowledge having problems remembering local phone numbers now that in our state we are required to dial area codes on all calls.
I'm talking about short-term memory here. Forget long-term memory, I haven't stored telephone numbers in my brain in years; I have a Palm for that.
What I'm saying is that I can look in a telephone book, see the local number 762-####, and even though all local numbers have the area code 781, remembering to dial 781 (and dialing it) put enough extra strain on my enfeebled brain that by the time I've dialed the 781 and the 762, I can't remember the last four digits any more.
Actually I dial 1-781-762 because, for some unknown reason, the power that be have decided that a) you must dial a 1 if the call is a local toll call; b) there is no simple algorithm for determining whether or not an exchange in the 781 area code is a local toll call or not; c) if I don't dial the 1 some of my calls will not go through; d) if I always dial 1 all of them go through; e) dialling the 1 does not change the cost of the call, so... well, you get the idea.
Information theory says that the "1" carries no information, and the "781"--being the same on 95% of my calls--carries less than a single bit of information. That "1781" should only amount to a fraction of a digit's worth of memory strain.
Well, tell it to my brain, because it apparently doesn't know how to do data compression on the leading digits of telephone numbers.
Even if I keep the telephone book in my hand, by the time I've finished dialing the 1-781-762, my eyes have moved off the page and it takes me a good two or three seconds to reacquire the listing visually, scan carefully horizontally to make sure I'm picking up the number that's on the same line as the name, get those last four digits, and transfer my attention back to the the dial.
The phone system seems to be getting less and less patient even as telephone numbers get longer and longer. Even though the equipment must cost orders of magnitude less than it did twenty years ago, the engineers that set the timeouts apparently can't stand having their precious equipment tied up. The result is that sometimes the phone times out and abort the call before I can key in the last four digits.
Yes, I considered posting this as an Anonymous Coward. No, I don't have any memory-related mental diseases--and I'm not all that old.
But the prospect of tying websites to telephone numbers strikes me as the dumbest idea I've heard in a long time.
"It's time to take mathematics away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab," said a spokesperson for the Market. "It's been shown time and time again that the operation of the free market produces better evaluations than ivory-tower academics. If the Market says that two and two make five, then those carping engineers should step aside."
Following the news, the value of pi shot up to 3.815, the speed of light topped 400,000 km/second, but the fine structure constant dipped to 110.
Incidentally, there is a Project Gutenberg Australia which has quite a few works online which are still under copyright in the United States but not in Australia. Those seeking works more recent than 1923 or so might find it worthwhile taking a look there.
Keep in mind that if you don't reside in Australia you would be committing copyright infringement if you were to download anything from that site that is still under copyright in your country of residence.
Go to their site to see what they have, or use the invaluable U. Penn online books page to search for them.
For better or for worse--IMHO mostly for better--all of the characteristics of PG have been very carefully thought out and articulated. Things such as the emphasis on "plain vanilla ASCII text" are not simply historical accident, but a very conscious decision. PG has already outlived several changes in fashion on text formatting. (Can you imagine what would happened if they had adopted, say, Wordstar formatting? Or even TROFF?)
It is a strikingly original project. And it has some quasi-political overtones. Hart has some well-articulated reasons why he didn't and doesn't believe that, say, the Library of Congress will ever get around to systematically digitizing books.
With approimately 20,000 books online, it is no longer a sarcasm to call the Internet a library, even if it is still far less rich than a small-town public library. Half of those are Project Gutenberg's.
"with [regard to] "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
Java wasn't even the first C-like language that was "object-oriented from the ground up." Java can't to be said to have begun until 1995. Objective-C definitely antedates it.
And for the same reason, I'm not sure that you could call C++ was the first C-like OO language.
C++ and Objective-C began at very nearly the same point in time. I wouldn't want to swear in a court of law which came first, but both were "in the air" circa 1990 or '91. They were perceived as being in competition, and the outcome was perceived to be in doubt.
Objective-C indeed attempted to be truly object-oriented. At the expense of adding new syntax and breaking compatibility with C.
C++ tried to be an improved C, adding various features including OOP while retaining full backward compatibility with C.
The interview is interesting in that it confirms the impression I've had from using and/or struggling to use C++. When I try to do anything object-oriented, specifically anything involving polymorphism, it seems to be fighting me all the way. After some struggling I usually emerge triumphant, but it's almost always a battle.
What Stoustrup seems to be saying is that classes should be treated as a special big deal, and shouldn't be used unless you're sure they're necessary. He seems to be recommending that there be, um, a class of elite programmers who put in the intense work to develop good, usable, well-debugged classes, and that the rank and file should, by all means use those classes but should not aspire to write new ones.
And this is not unreasonable, given the effort of writing classes and getting the storage management right and so forth.
The thing is, it's not a big deal to use classes in a truly object-oriented language. I'm not just talking about Smalltalk. Heck, they're trivial to use in REALbasic.
Well, is that good? It certainly leads to overuse of OOP. To a man with a hammer everything is a nail, and every programming language tends to encourage overuse of the things that it facilitates. Every programming language has a tendency to induce brain-warp.
C++, for better or for worse, does not induce object-oriented brain-warp.
People who try to use OOP in C++ because it's cool or because of some article they read (or some instructor they had) find that C++ punishes such behavior. And Stoustrup is right: when you are programming in C++, OOP should be used sparingly and only when it's needed.
Again, I'm not saying whether that's bad or good. That will depend on the degree to which you think OOP ought to be encouraged. If you think OOP should be just as much a part of a programmer's mental toolbox as iteration, or recursion, then it's not good. If you think OOP was the overhyped IT fad of the nineties, then it's not bad.
What I'm saying is that it has always seemed to me that C++ is not a very object-oriented language, and Stoustrup's remarks seem to me to confirm the objective validity of that observation.
...and not getting it? There's a charge on my telephone bill every month for "phone number portability." When it appeared, I called my carrier (Verizon) to ask what it was. They said it was to pay for whatever the phone companies needed to do in order to enable me to change carriers without changing phone numbers.
But when I wanted to change my cell phone carriers they told me I couldn't keep my number.
Why not? What have I been paying for all these years?
My wife was student-teaching a biology in a senior high school some years back. Students were supposed to work independently and write up their lab notes individually.
To cut to the chase, here's what my wife said to a student:
"OK, so you copied your lab notes. That was bad enough. But a carbon copy? What were you thinking?
And then to put them in my in-basket with the original directly on top of the carbon?"
I used TurboTax, and its predecessors, all the way back to 1985. That was three or four companies ago. It was always very satisfactory, and there seemed to be no reason to change, so I didn't change.
All they had to do to keep me as a customer forever was to not screw up.
Well, last year they screwed up. So I switched.
And you know what? As you'd expect in a highly competitive environment... the differences between TurboTax and TaxCut hardly amount to a hill of beans. In fact the general design of the programs is pretty similar and I barely had to consult the online help. On balance, EXCEPT for the product activation nonsense, the two products are roughly on a par.
If there had been any doubt in my mind, a few bad experiences with Intuit's so-called customer support resolved them. (I don't know how H&R Block's compares... because I didn't need to use it).
I _did_ need to re-enter a lot of my basic information from last year.
Switch back? Why should I go to the effort? I am now a TaxCut customer. And there's no reason at all H&R Block shouldn't be able to keep me for life.
When you have a brand name that actually means something to the public, and you try to perform a "line extension" by applying that brand name to more or less unrelated products that do not share the characteristics with which the brand is associated, you don't enhance the value of the brand, you diminish it.
Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, by all means, but there's a good reason why Coca-Cola Corporation calls their orange juice "Minute Maid" and not "Orange Coke."
Sun's calling everything "Java" is almost as bad as Microsoft trying to appropriate the top-level-domain.net and apply it to some inchaote mass of technology.
Calling everything Sun does "Java" may please the ego of whatever manager is empowered to stick the name "Java" on stuff, but it won't do Sun, or Sun's customers, or the Java "brand" any good.
There's nothing innovative about having the network do centralized processing, and perform those specific functions that Ma Bell or Verisign or whomever thinks it can market and charge money for.
What was innovative was the concept of a network that just provided connectivity, and allowed the users at the network termini to provide the innovation.
To call SiteFinder innovative is like cutting the wings off an airplane and saying that you've created an innovative new form of ground transportation.
It's just a standard lock, but, you see, the thing is, you leave it unlocked, and it comes with a hook for you to hang the key next to the door, and a placard that says "To enter, insert key in lock and turn key counterclockwise."
"These sorts of software are mainly designed in Windows, which has created another data recovery problem. ANY Windows based product will try to write to the drive during the booting process. This means, Windows data recovery software can and will overwrite your data in certain circumstances."
At the very least it sounds overblown. During "the booting process" Windows isn't even running yet. And in any case, if you're running Windows at all, unless you disconnected that drive immediately after the data loss, it has already been exposed to whatever "the booting process" might do.
I had an MRI a couple of years ago, and one thing I was completely unprepared for was the humorous, Roadrunner-cartoon-like characteristics of the noises it makes. They did several sequences, and each had its own funny noise. Ba-doink, ba-doink, ba-doink... Frawnk, frawnk, frawnk... Galeep, galeep, galeep.
I even went online to read some technical explanations, but nothing explained why these noises have the humorous characteristics that they have.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the image array isn't 24x36mm?
Click, click... no, it's 22.7x15 mm. Roughly comparable a half-frame 35 mm camera.
That means that no lens is going to have the same coverage on this camera as it does on a 35 mm camera.
Canon says "Focal length conversion factor: Equivalent to approx. 1.6x indicated focal length compared to 35mm format." Your 50 mm. lens will act like an 80 mm; your 35 mm like a 56... and if you like to use a 28 mm on your film camera, you'll have to shell out for an 18mm to use on this one.
It works in your favor for telephoto lenses, though.
It also means that for the equivalent angle of coverage, this camera will have a greater depth of field. Nice for some things. Not so nice for others, e.g. portraits.
...one of the things that people marvelled at was that they would write under water.
...are included in the search?
A check on "the clocks were striking thirteen" yields seventeen hits, including the Cliff's Notes to Nineteen Eighty-Four and a reference in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations...
but none to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four itself.
We must conclude that the coverage is spotty.
In just about any other context, the use of liquid sodium would raise a couple of eyebrows.
Heck, the use of solid sodium would raise a couple of eyebrows.
In a nuclear reactor, it's just a detail. Not to worry, I'm sure that steel is very thick...
It's probably down the memory hole by now, but to the best of my recollection one of Microsoft's claims prior to the release of Windows NT 4.0 was that it would almost completely eliminate the need for reboots during installation.
It always amazes me how Microsoft is consistently able to deflect criticism by saying that the problem will be addressed in the next major release... and when it gets there and it is clear that the promise hasn't been kept, nobody--certainly not the people to drive IT purchasing decisions--seems to mind.
Subject line really says all... in the early nineties, IBM had a bit of a campaign on to caution managers about this danger.
I think it's interesting that the example I used was "781", but in your reply you used "718"... did you, yourself, have difficulty "chunking" the 781?
Telephone numbers are almost as long as numeric IP addresses. Why not get rid of DNS and key in the addresses? And issue paper "Internet books" where we could look up the IP addresses of sites we wanted to access?
I'm not sure what aspect of cognitive psychology explains this, but I and many of my middle-aged friends acknowledge having problems remembering local phone numbers now that in our state we are required to dial area codes on all calls.
I'm talking about short-term memory here. Forget long-term memory, I haven't stored telephone numbers in my brain in years; I have a Palm for that.
What I'm saying is that I can look in a telephone book, see the local number 762-####, and even though all local numbers have the area code 781, remembering to dial 781 (and dialing it) put enough extra strain on my enfeebled brain that by the time I've dialed the 781 and the 762, I can't remember the last four digits any more.
Actually I dial 1-781-762 because, for some unknown reason, the power that be have decided that a) you must dial a 1 if the call is a local toll call; b) there is no simple algorithm for determining whether or not an exchange in the 781 area code is a local toll call or not; c) if I don't dial the 1 some of my calls will not go through; d) if I always dial 1 all of them go through; e) dialling the 1 does not change the cost of the call, so... well, you get the idea.
Information theory says that the "1" carries no information, and the "781"--being the same on 95% of my calls--carries less than a single bit of information. That "1781" should only amount to a fraction of a digit's worth of memory strain.
Well, tell it to my brain, because it apparently doesn't know how to do data compression on the leading digits of telephone numbers.
Even if I keep the telephone book in my hand, by the time I've finished dialing the 1-781-762, my eyes have moved off the page and it takes me a good two or three seconds to reacquire the listing visually, scan carefully horizontally to make sure I'm picking up the number that's on the same line as the name, get those last four digits, and transfer my attention back to the the dial.
The phone system seems to be getting less and less patient even as telephone numbers get longer and longer. Even though the equipment must cost orders of magnitude less than it did twenty years ago, the engineers that set the timeouts apparently can't stand having their precious equipment tied up. The result is that sometimes the phone times out and abort the call before I can key in the last four digits.
Yes, I considered posting this as an Anonymous Coward. No, I don't have any memory-related mental diseases--and I'm not all that old.
But the prospect of tying websites to telephone numbers strikes me as the dumbest idea I've heard in a long time.
"It's time to take mathematics away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab," said a spokesperson for the Market. "It's been shown time and time again that the operation of the free market produces better evaluations than ivory-tower academics. If the Market says that two and two make five, then those carping engineers should step aside."
Following the news, the value of pi shot up to 3.815, the speed of light topped 400,000 km/second, but the fine structure constant dipped to 110.
Incidentally, there is a Project Gutenberg Australia which has quite a few works online which are still under copyright in the United States but not in Australia. Those seeking works more recent than 1923 or so might find it worthwhile taking a look there.
Keep in mind that if you don't reside in Australia you would be committing copyright infringement if you were to download anything from that site that is still under copyright in your country of residence.
Go to their site to see what they have, or use the invaluable U. Penn online books page to search for them.
For better or for worse--IMHO mostly for better--all of the characteristics of PG have been very carefully thought out and articulated. Things such as the emphasis on "plain vanilla ASCII text" are not simply historical accident, but a very conscious decision. PG has already outlived several changes in fashion on text formatting. (Can you imagine what would happened if they had adopted, say, Wordstar formatting? Or even TROFF?)
It is a strikingly original project. And it has some quasi-political overtones. Hart has some well-articulated reasons why he didn't and doesn't believe that, say, the Library of Congress will ever get around to systematically digitizing books.
With approimately 20,000 books online, it is no longer a sarcasm to call the Internet a library, even if it is still far less rich than a small-town public library. Half of those are Project Gutenberg's.
...the collective respect of his cohorts."
What a tenuous basis for power.
Why, that's almost like suggesting that government could derive its powers from the consent of the governed.
I believe there are some... and an increasing number that give you a certain number of (prepaid) incoming minutes that are included in the plan.
Don tinfoil hat: is it possible that the cellular companies instituted these plans precisely in order to be telemarketer-friendly?
Wow, what a world-changing revolution!
"with [regard to] "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
--Thoreau, "Walden"
Java wasn't even the first C-like language that was "object-oriented from the ground up." Java can't to be said to have begun until 1995. Objective-C definitely antedates it.
And for the same reason, I'm not sure that you could call C++ was the first C-like OO language.
C++ and Objective-C began at very nearly the same point in time. I wouldn't want to swear in a court of law which came first, but both were "in the air" circa 1990 or '91. They were perceived as being in competition, and the outcome was perceived to be in doubt.
Objective-C indeed attempted to be truly object-oriented. At the expense of adding new syntax and breaking compatibility with C.
C++ tried to be an improved C, adding various features including OOP while retaining full backward compatibility with C.
I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
The interview is interesting in that it confirms the impression I've had from using and/or struggling to use C++. When I try to do anything object-oriented, specifically anything involving polymorphism, it seems to be fighting me all the way. After some struggling I usually emerge triumphant, but it's almost always a battle.
What Stoustrup seems to be saying is that classes should be treated as a special big deal, and shouldn't be used unless you're sure they're necessary. He seems to be recommending that there be, um, a class of elite programmers who put in the intense work to develop good, usable, well-debugged classes, and that the rank and file should, by all means use those classes but should not aspire to write new ones.
And this is not unreasonable, given the effort of writing classes and getting the storage management right and so forth.
The thing is, it's not a big deal to use classes in a truly object-oriented language. I'm not just talking about Smalltalk. Heck, they're trivial to use in REALbasic.
Well, is that good? It certainly leads to overuse of OOP. To a man with a hammer everything is a nail, and every programming language tends to encourage overuse of the things that it facilitates. Every programming language has a tendency to induce brain-warp.
C++, for better or for worse, does not induce object-oriented brain-warp.
People who try to use OOP in C++ because it's cool or because of some article they read (or some instructor they had) find that C++ punishes such behavior. And Stoustrup is right: when you are programming in C++, OOP should be used sparingly and only when it's needed.
Again, I'm not saying whether that's bad or good. That will depend on the degree to which you think OOP ought to be encouraged. If you think OOP should be just as much a part of a programmer's mental toolbox as iteration, or recursion, then it's not good. If you think OOP was the overhyped IT fad of the nineties, then it's not bad.
What I'm saying is that it has always seemed to me that C++ is not a very object-oriented language, and Stoustrup's remarks seem to me to confirm the objective validity of that observation.
...and not getting it? There's a charge on my telephone bill every month for "phone number portability." When it appeared, I called my carrier (Verizon) to ask what it was. They said it was to pay for whatever the phone companies needed to do in order to enable me to change carriers without changing phone numbers.
But when I wanted to change my cell phone carriers they told me I couldn't keep my number.
Why not? What have I been paying for all these years?
True story:
My wife was student-teaching a biology in a senior high school some years back. Students were supposed to work independently and write up their lab notes individually.
To cut to the chase, here's what my wife said to a student:
"OK, so you copied your lab notes. That was bad enough. But a carbon copy? What were you thinking?
And then to put them in my in-basket with the original directly on top of the carbon?"
I used TurboTax, and its predecessors, all the way back to 1985. That was three or four companies ago. It was always very satisfactory, and there seemed to be no reason to change, so I didn't change.
All they had to do to keep me as a customer forever was to not screw up.
Well, last year they screwed up. So I switched.
And you know what? As you'd expect in a highly competitive environment... the differences between TurboTax and TaxCut hardly amount to a hill of beans. In fact the general design of the programs is pretty similar and I barely had to consult the online help. On balance, EXCEPT for the product activation nonsense, the two products are roughly on a par.
If there had been any doubt in my mind, a few bad experiences with Intuit's so-called customer support resolved them. (I don't know how H&R Block's compares... because I didn't need to use it).
I _did_ need to re-enter a lot of my basic information from last year.
Switch back? Why should I go to the effort? I am now a TaxCut customer. And there's no reason at all H&R Block shouldn't be able to keep me for life.
All they need to do is not screw up.
When you have a brand name that actually means something to the public, and you try to perform a "line extension" by applying that brand name to more or less unrelated products that do not share the characteristics with which the brand is associated, you don't enhance the value of the brand, you diminish it.
.net and apply it to some inchaote mass of technology.
Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, by all means, but there's a good reason why Coca-Cola Corporation calls their orange juice "Minute Maid" and not "Orange Coke."
Sun's calling everything "Java" is almost as bad as Microsoft trying to appropriate the top-level-domain
Calling everything Sun does "Java" may please the ego of whatever manager is empowered to stick the name "Java" on stuff, but it won't do Sun, or Sun's customers, or the Java "brand" any good.
There's nothing innovative about having the network do centralized processing, and perform those specific functions that Ma Bell or Verisign or whomever thinks it can market and charge money for.
What was innovative was the concept of a network that just provided connectivity, and allowed the users at the network termini to provide the innovation.
To call SiteFinder innovative is like cutting the wings off an airplane and saying that you've created an innovative new form of ground transportation.
...which provides incredible security.
It's just a standard lock, but, you see, the thing is, you leave it unlocked, and it comes with a hook for you to hang the key next to the door, and a placard that says "To enter, insert key in lock and turn key counterclockwise."
"These sorts of software are mainly designed in Windows, which has created another data recovery problem. ANY Windows based product will try to write to the drive during the booting process. This means, Windows data recovery software can and will overwrite your data in certain circumstances."
At the very least it sounds overblown. During "the booting process" Windows isn't even running yet. And in any case, if you're running Windows at all, unless you disconnected that drive immediately after the data loss, it has already been exposed to whatever "the booting process" might do.
I had an MRI a couple of years ago, and one thing I was completely unprepared for was the humorous, Roadrunner-cartoon-like characteristics of the noises it makes. They did several sequences, and each had its own funny noise. Ba-doink, ba-doink, ba-doink... Frawnk, frawnk, frawnk... Galeep, galeep, galeep.
I even went online to read some technical explanations, but nothing explained why these noises have the humorous characteristics that they have.