Catadoptric, or mirror lenses, are almost universally regarded as having abominablebokeh, which is why they're virtually never used. It's a subjective concept to be sure, but I'd say at leat 99% of pros and serious amateurs, people with an eye for these things, find the "donuts" of light to be nothing but horribly harsh, jarring, and distracting.
It seems to me that a pro photographer (if you aren't a pro and you dropped five grand on a camera body that does practically nothing more than my D70 for 99.98% of the populace INCLUDING pros...can I have some money?) should be tech-savvy enough to know that non-camera phones are very easy to come by; a quick check at the Verizon store shows at least five phones with no cameras.
Make calls and send text messages, maybe a speakerphone and Bluetooth. If you want all the other bells and whistles (mobile web, media players, so forth and so on), you'll probably have to settle for a camera, but if you just want a no-frills wireless telephone, they aren't very hard to find at all. (Cheap and durable, too!)
..in terms of specific fuel consumption - the amount of fuel needed to produce a given amount of power and consequently drive the ship a given distance. This is much more important that the power-to-weight ratio of the engine in the intended market; the weight of the engine pales in comparison to the weight of the fuel and every last bit of "fuel efficency" is key. Gas engine, regardless of design, run at around 0.3kg/Kw-h (takes 0.3kg of gas to produce 1 Kw for 1 hour)...the RTA96 runs at 0.163kg/Kw-h. Put another way, an auto engine runs at ~25% thermal efficency versus ~52% for the diesel.
Ganging together 109,000 hp of auto-design gasoline engines would require _doubling_ the fuel capacity (and consequently the exhaust emissions) for the same range...efficency comes in many forms.
...to mention this: my cousin came up for Xmas today. He works for the USGS, which as was reported here and other places, has to now "clear" their publications with the administration prior to release. He's a primary research PhD, plus a super-anti-Bush ultra-liberal, so I'll go with what he says. I straight up asked him if he has to "censor" his work...suprisingly he answered that it's NOTHING like that. Apparently, the government has a long standing policy of requesting that info that may go against current administration policy be released internally for a period before it's released to the public, to allow the administration to prepare news releases tempering or even downright contradicting the USGS et al. info. It may not be fair, but it's far from censorship - his words not mine, and he's quite a bit more left-leaning than I so I will take his words at face value.
Don't know how it relates to this exactly but I wouldn't be surprised if it's much the same story - not censorship, but sort of pre-publication.
It should be pointed out this isn't just Microsoft Flight Simulator they are playing. These are motion-controlled capsules that simulate the realities of an aircraft's movement.
They're playing X-Plane! Seriously - you do need full-motion sim hardware, but the software is $50 OTS.
Seriously, I didn't even get halfway through the sample mp3. I blanch at the thought of the Well-Tempered Clavier on this.. It's an _awesome_ (in every sense of the word) piece of work to be sure, but it's better off just on display.
I don't worry about it, routinely sending double, triple, or even quadruple messages - about 85% of my contacts are in-network which I get free unlimited calls, texts, and picture/video messages to. The 500 out-of-net texts I'm allowed per month is fine for me eleven months of the year and the ~$10 overage I'll run up in a busy month isn't worth the cost to upgrade. It's a gimmick to be sure, but it DOES work nicely for me.
That said, one of my friends has a GSM razr (mine is CDMA), and it has an amazingly different interface on it.. so I'm not sure if the text input is the same. I watched a friend fastball his Cingular Razr into a wall because of the predictive input; I know neither if Cingular is CDMA or GSM, nor how the input works seeing as the Razr is apparently not a very durable phone. My first phone was a Motorola and I never did get the hang of the "T9Eng"...as well as a very limited and usually incorrect vocabulary which may very likely have improved since 2003, it had the arrow-around features that you mention. I just can't get the hang of those, taking my fingers off the numeric pad (it's become a muscle-memory thing for me I think); with the LG predictive input you type the entire word, if it's not the word you want you press 0 to scroll through all the words the phone knows with the same letters (e.g. house/good, have/hate/gate). I agree 100% though, why people so stubbornly resist using it is a mystery to me as well.
The predictive text input on LG phones is fast and complete enough that I can send proper English texts faster than abbreviating with conventional ABC input. It's different for different manufacturers, I know Motorola's is next to unusable and I hear Samsung's is iffy, but mine is great.
PATRIOT passed the House 357-66 and the Senate 98 to ONE...I know it's fashionable to call Reps the Root Of All Evil Through All History and Dems the One True Path To Enlightenment And Peace, but get your facts straight. Evil/rubberstamp politics is hardly confined to Reps...
Bah, if you're willing to lug around an SLR with two speedies and extra lenses, what's a 30-pound powerpack and a huge duffel bag full of strobes extra?;)
I'm currently trying to figure out a way to securely mount one of my lightstands in my internal-frame pack so I can walk around with an 800ws brolly box...that should do the trick at weddings.
like it's a bad thing, and then hit it on the head in your next sentence. "The photographer" DEFINITELY makes girls do veeeery interesting things, especially if you go with the "why yes, I AM a photographer..but I'm here on my own so the host|ess will never see the pictures" line.
Hell. You should see what happens when they get back to your place and see the strobes in the bedroom:D
I have a D70s and SB-800 and I absolutely LOVE the wireless stuff, if you want to get really serious about your lighting you'd be MUCH better off picking up some inexpensive monoblock strobes. A Nikon SB-800 is in the neighborhood of $300, actually MORE expensive than an AB400 or AB800 strobe and only marginally cheaper than an AB1600, which is close to ten times the light output of a an SB800. I have a 400 and an 800 and I've taken fashion photos at night over a thirty-foot-square area. That's a hell of a lot of illumnaton. The big strobes are also wireless, triggered be a light sensor, and they're future-proof - Nikon could someday change the wireless system so it no longer works with the current generation of speedlights and you have a pile of expensive paperweights or a rats nest of sync cords.
Of course, with the strobes you lose i-TTL functionality, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. TTL gives you great evenly-balanced exposures for snapshots and simple portraiture, but for more creative and professional lighting effects you want and need the additional control that you get by doing things manually. Come to think of it, that's one of the reasons people buy SLRs in the first place...I guess that makes them a winning combination!
Martin suggested that white people should celebrate the murder, that Anthony's family should be burned and made references to slavery and a "banana boat".
That's incitement to murder, hardly a category of protected speech.
Just calling for violence doesn't automatically exempt speech from protection - SCOTUS ruled in 1969 that "[f]reedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
One can hardly argue that a posting on a web forum is an incitement to imminent lawless action - if he had been speaking at a rally of armed white supremacists who were already whipped into a race-hate frenzy, his ass would be hanging out in the breeze, but in this situation he would be untouched in the US. I doubt there would even be an investigation. One of the few good things left about this country - I don't agree with his beliefs; I find them downright repugnant, but I believe he has every right to express them and certainly don't think he's crossed the line in this case.
...of all the piercing jokes, but (and I'm sure a lot of you probably already know this), any halfway decent body jewelry is completely nonmagnetic: stainless steel, titanium, or niobium. I know for sure - I have a headful of all three metals and never had any problems with a 400MHz NMR; the red line on the floor with the little flying wrench icon was like 20 feet from that sucker.
a Nikon D70 has enough buffer for something like 40 full resolution JPEG shots!
Just to be a nitpicky SOB, my D70s shows 9 shots remaining for Large/Fine JPEGS, 19 Large/Basic...Small/Basic there's 49. Moot point though, with the 80x write-accelerated CF card the shooting speed barely drops once it starts writing out. Worth every penny.
If it's your right of way, go. Nice in theory, but in practice I'm not playing tag with a 2-ton pickup...right-of-way might win me a Big Cash Settlement but it's not going to stop the idiot in the truck from turning right into me. Last time I tried that, I had to turn and brake hard to keep from getting hit and I got not only screamed at but had a can of beer thrown at me. This area, it just doesn't work to be assertive...alert and taking nothing for granted, yeah, but I pretty much just have to stay out of the way. Sucks, but them's the breaks.
34 miles on country roads for somebody who's a fast rider is no problem at all...I have an 8.5 mile commute which I rode once on my day off, just to see...it takes me ~25 minutes by car, a little over an hour by bike. Why? Of the eight&a half miles, about seven is on city streets, block-by-block, and NOBODY around here even SEES bikes, let alone gives them the right-of-way. When I was growing up, school was about two miles away, took me about seven minutes ride, and if I lived in the country it would be great (gf lives out of town, takes me ~10 minutes to ride the three miles and change from her house to work but she refuses...), but for us urbanites it just doesn't work. Whew...rant over.
Shoot two stops slow with digital...your pictures initially look unpleasantly dark, but the sensors in digis are optimized for shadow detail - you can lighten them tremendously in Photoshop without making them look "artificial", and you get a lot more highlight detail. Example here. It's not as pretty as messing around with manual multiple-image HDR merging (Photoshop's automation SUCKS at this), but it's a lot simpler.
Or at least so I hear...somebody over at Luminous Landscapes ran a comparison of a PhaseOne P45 39-megapixel back against drum-scanned 4x5 Velvia 50. These are guys whose standard print size is 30"x40", so fine detail is pretty crucial to them, as is color accuracy. Bottom line? The film had a slight edge, but not enough to offset the huge increase in convenience and versatility of digital. Granted, the P45 alone lists for $32,990 at Calumet, plus another $6-10,000 or more for the camera and lenses, but apparently over the 3-year warranty period it works out to ~80% the cost of a view camera, lens, film, lab fees, and drum scanner maintenance.
Well...I never saw that bouncer at any local bars after that night, probably got blacklisted like he deserved. Idiot. I'm willing to bet NY law reads like NH, he was just a tool.
I'm willing to bet that there's a limit to what you can export, even in book form. Going to extremes, if I tried to export plans for the W80 nuclear warhead in book form (or print it on a T-shirt), I'd guess not only would export of that book be banned, but I'd be taking a nice long vacation at Club Fed..
..with an aging stockpile; in the absence of periodic full-on testing we have no way to be sure that if the weapons are ever needed they will work. Given the amount of money we spend on figuring out ways to test them without setting them off, new designs might actually be a fiscally sensible idea.
Personally, I'm ambivalent - I agree "the safest nuke is no nuke", but practically that's just not in the cards, so we might as well at least do it right.
A buddy in college lost his license one night, so he grabbed his passport...the bouncer flat-out refused to let him in, "This isn't in my ID book and I can't scan it. I think it's fake and I'm keeping it." On my grandmother's grave, he tried to confiscate a freakin' Federal ID document. A quick chat with the manager got things straightened out, but still...ridiculous.
I used my Brookhaven Lab ID at the same bar a few years later and it went without a hitch, I guess they had better bouncers.
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Catadoptric, or mirror lenses, are almost universally regarded as having abominable bokeh, which is why they're virtually never used. It's a subjective concept to be sure, but I'd say at leat 99% of pros and serious amateurs, people with an eye for these things, find the "donuts" of light to be nothing but horribly harsh, jarring, and distracting.
It seems to me that a pro photographer (if you aren't a pro and you dropped five grand on a camera body that does practically nothing more than my D70 for 99.98% of the populace INCLUDING pros...can I have some money?) should be tech-savvy enough to know that non-camera phones are very easy to come by; a quick check at the Verizon store shows at least five phones with no cameras.
Make calls and send text messages, maybe a speakerphone and Bluetooth. If you want all the other bells and whistles (mobile web, media players, so forth and so on), you'll probably have to settle for a camera, but if you just want a no-frills wireless telephone, they aren't very hard to find at all. (Cheap and durable, too!)
..in terms of specific fuel consumption - the amount of fuel needed to produce a given amount of power and consequently drive the ship a given distance. This is much more important that the power-to-weight ratio of the engine in the intended market; the weight of the engine pales in comparison to the weight of the fuel and every last bit of "fuel efficency" is key. Gas engine, regardless of design, run at around 0.3kg/Kw-h (takes 0.3kg of gas to produce 1 Kw for 1 hour)...the RTA96 runs at 0.163kg/Kw-h. Put another way, an auto engine runs at ~25% thermal efficency versus ~52% for the diesel.
Ganging together 109,000 hp of auto-design gasoline engines would require _doubling_ the fuel capacity (and consequently the exhaust emissions) for the same range...efficency comes in many forms.
...to mention this: my cousin came up for Xmas today. He works for the USGS, which as was reported here and other places, has to now "clear" their publications with the administration prior to release. He's a primary research PhD, plus a super-anti-Bush ultra-liberal, so I'll go with what he says. I straight up asked him if he has to "censor" his work...suprisingly he answered that it's NOTHING like that. Apparently, the government has a long standing policy of requesting that info that may go against current administration policy be released internally for a period before it's released to the public, to allow the administration to prepare news releases tempering or even downright contradicting the USGS et al. info. It may not be fair, but it's far from censorship - his words not mine, and he's quite a bit more left-leaning than I so I will take his words at face value.
Don't know how it relates to this exactly but I wouldn't be surprised if it's much the same story - not censorship, but sort of pre-publication.
It should be pointed out this isn't just Microsoft Flight Simulator they are playing. These are motion-controlled capsules that simulate the realities of an aircraft's movement.
They're playing X-Plane! Seriously - you do need full-motion sim hardware, but the software is $50 OTS.
Disclaimer, yes, I do own a copy.
...but minus several million for sound quality.
Seriously, I didn't even get halfway through the sample mp3. I blanch at the thought of the Well-Tempered Clavier on this..
It's an _awesome_ (in every sense of the word) piece of work to be sure, but it's better off just on display.
I don't worry about it, routinely sending double, triple, or even quadruple messages - about 85% of my contacts are in-network which I get free unlimited calls, texts, and picture/video messages to. The 500 out-of-net texts I'm allowed per month is fine for me eleven months of the year and the ~$10 overage I'll run up in a busy month isn't worth the cost to upgrade. It's a gimmick to be sure, but it DOES work nicely for me.
That said, one of my friends has a GSM razr (mine is CDMA), and it has an amazingly different interface on it .. so I'm not sure if the text input is the same.
I watched a friend fastball his Cingular Razr into a wall because of the predictive input; I know neither if Cingular is CDMA or GSM, nor how the input works seeing as the Razr is apparently not a very durable phone. My first phone was a Motorola and I never did get the hang of the "T9Eng"...as well as a very limited and usually incorrect vocabulary which may very likely have improved since 2003, it had the arrow-around features that you mention. I just can't get the hang of those, taking my fingers off the numeric pad (it's become a muscle-memory thing for me I think); with the LG predictive input you type the entire word, if it's not the word you want you press 0 to scroll through all the words the phone knows with the same letters (e.g. house/good, have/hate/gate). I agree 100% though, why people so stubbornly resist using it is a mystery to me as well.
The predictive text input on LG phones is fast and complete enough that I can send proper English texts faster than abbreviating with conventional ABC input. It's different for different manufacturers, I know Motorola's is next to unusable and I hear Samsung's is iffy, but mine is great.
PATRIOT passed the House 357-66 and the Senate 98 to ONE...I know it's fashionable to call Reps the Root Of All Evil Through All History and Dems the One True Path To Enlightenment And Peace, but get your facts straight. Evil/rubberstamp politics is hardly confined to Reps...
Bah, if you're willing to lug around an SLR with two speedies and extra lenses, what's a 30-pound powerpack and a huge duffel bag full of strobes extra? ;)
I'm currently trying to figure out a way to securely mount one of my lightstands in my internal-frame pack so I can walk around with an 800ws brolly box...that should do the trick at weddings.
*I* voted for Kodos!
C'mon, SOMEBODY had to say it.
like it's a bad thing, and then hit it on the head in your next sentence. "The photographer" DEFINITELY makes girls do veeeery interesting things, especially if you go with the "why yes, I AM a photographer..but I'm here on my own so the host|ess will never see the pictures" line.
:D
Hell. You should see what happens when they get back to your place and see the strobes in the bedroom
I have a D70s and SB-800 and I absolutely LOVE the wireless stuff, if you want to get really serious about your lighting you'd be MUCH better off picking up some inexpensive monoblock strobes. A Nikon SB-800 is in the neighborhood of $300, actually MORE expensive than an AB400 or AB800 strobe and only marginally cheaper than an AB1600, which is close to ten times the light output of a an SB800. I have a 400 and an 800 and I've taken fashion photos at night over a thirty-foot-square area. That's a hell of a lot of illumnaton. The big strobes are also wireless, triggered be a light sensor, and they're future-proof - Nikon could someday change the wireless system so it no longer works with the current generation of speedlights and you have a pile of expensive paperweights or a rats nest of sync cords.
Of course, with the strobes you lose i-TTL functionality, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. TTL gives you great evenly-balanced exposures for snapshots and simple portraiture, but for more creative and professional lighting effects you want and need the additional control that you get by doing things manually. Come to think of it, that's one of the reasons people buy SLRs in the first place...I guess that makes them a winning combination!
That's incitement to murder, hardly a category of protected speech.
Just calling for violence doesn't automatically exempt speech from protection - SCOTUS ruled in 1969 that "[f]reedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
One can hardly argue that a posting on a web forum is an incitement to imminent lawless action - if he had been speaking at a rally of armed white supremacists who were already whipped into a race-hate frenzy, his ass would be hanging out in the breeze, but in this situation he would be untouched in the US. I doubt there would even be an investigation. One of the few good things left about this country - I don't agree with his beliefs; I find them downright repugnant, but I believe he has every right to express them and certainly don't think he's crossed the line in this case.
...of all the piercing jokes, but (and I'm sure a lot of you probably already know this), any halfway decent body jewelry is completely nonmagnetic: stainless steel, titanium, or niobium. I know for sure - I have a headful of all three metals and never had any problems with a 400MHz NMR; the red line on the floor with the little flying wrench icon was like 20 feet from that sucker.
a Nikon D70 has enough buffer for something like 40 full resolution JPEG shots!
Just to be a nitpicky SOB, my D70s shows 9 shots remaining for Large/Fine JPEGS, 19 Large/Basic...Small/Basic there's 49. Moot point though, with the 80x write-accelerated CF card the shooting speed barely drops once it starts writing out. Worth every penny.
If it's your right of way, go.
Nice in theory, but in practice I'm not playing tag with a 2-ton pickup...right-of-way might win me a Big Cash Settlement but it's not going to stop the idiot in the truck from turning right into me. Last time I tried that, I had to turn and brake hard to keep from getting hit and I got not only screamed at but had a can of beer thrown at me. This area, it just doesn't work to be assertive...alert and taking nothing for granted, yeah, but I pretty much just have to stay out of the way. Sucks, but them's the breaks.
..much of it out on country roads.
34 miles on country roads for somebody who's a fast rider is no problem at all...I have an 8.5 mile commute which I rode once on my day off, just to see...it takes me ~25 minutes by car, a little over an hour by bike. Why? Of the eight&a half miles, about seven is on city streets, block-by-block, and NOBODY around here even SEES bikes, let alone gives them the right-of-way. When I was growing up, school was about two miles away, took me about seven minutes ride, and if I lived in the country it would be great (gf lives out of town, takes me ~10 minutes to ride the three miles and change from her house to work but she refuses...), but for us urbanites it just doesn't work. Whew...rant over.
Shoot two stops slow with digital...your pictures initially look unpleasantly dark, but the sensors in digis are optimized for shadow detail - you can lighten them tremendously in Photoshop without making them look "artificial", and you get a lot more highlight detail. Example here. It's not as pretty as messing around with manual multiple-image HDR merging (Photoshop's automation SUCKS at this), but it's a lot simpler.
Or at least so I hear...somebody over at Luminous Landscapes ran a comparison of a PhaseOne P45 39-megapixel back against drum-scanned 4x5 Velvia 50. These are guys whose standard print size is 30"x40", so fine detail is pretty crucial to them, as is color accuracy. Bottom line? The film had a slight edge, but not enough to offset the huge increase in convenience and versatility of digital. Granted, the P45 alone lists for $32,990 at Calumet, plus another $6-10,000 or more for the camera and lenses, but apparently over the 3-year warranty period it works out to ~80% the cost of a view camera, lens, film, lab fees, and drum scanner maintenance.
:)
I know what I want for Christmas this year
Well...I never saw that bouncer at any local bars after that night, probably got blacklisted like he deserved. Idiot. I'm willing to bet NY law reads like NH, he was just a tool.
I'm willing to bet that there's a limit to what you can export, even in book form. Going to extremes, if I tried to export plans for the W80 nuclear warhead in book form (or print it on a T-shirt), I'd guess not only would export of that book be banned, but I'd be taking a nice long vacation at Club Fed..
..with an aging stockpile; in the absence of periodic full-on testing we have no way to be sure that if the weapons are ever needed they will work. Given the amount of money we spend on figuring out ways to test them without setting them off, new designs might actually be a fiscally sensible idea.
Personally, I'm ambivalent - I agree "the safest nuke is no nuke", but practically that's just not in the cards, so we might as well at least do it right.
A buddy in college lost his license one night, so he grabbed his passport...the bouncer flat-out refused to let him in, "This isn't in my ID book and I can't scan it. I think it's fake and I'm keeping it." On my grandmother's grave, he tried to confiscate a freakin' Federal ID document. A quick chat with the manager got things straightened out, but still...ridiculous.
I used my Brookhaven Lab ID at the same bar a few years later and it went without a hitch, I guess they had better bouncers.