We're always amused as The Next Big Game looms on the horizon.... Did you know that DAoC was going to kill EverQuest's role as the #1 MMORPG? No? Perhaps that's because you were waiting for Neverwinter Nights? Star Wars Galaxies? PlanetSide? Anarchy Online?
Perhaps you have not learned your lesson and are waiting for WoW?
It amazes me that each new game comes out and again misses the point. It's not the graphics (most long-term EQ players turn off all the bells and whistles they can); it's not the storyline (the EQ storyline reads like Christopher Tolkein on quayludes); it's not the marketing (when is the last time you saw an add for SWG, NWN or DAoc? Now what about EQ? I think EQ gets less press than the Slash engine;-)
So what is it? It's the fact that the game is large enough and growing to absorb enough user-base that there is a community that has real staying power... somehow, THAT is what another game needs to replicate, and it emphasizes all of the things that most game companies do not want to spend money on... Perhaps Sigil will get it right. they did once before....
There are a lot of reasons to love Perl, but the biggest for me has always been that in a language where the tight binding of many languages' features was commonplace, usability had to be built on the back of convention. This has lead to GOOD Perl code being far more usable, maintainable and, yes, beautiful than the good code I see in all but C (not C++).
Every other language I've seen has a far worse ratio of features to elegance. Even python, which is close in terms of both lacks that essential last mile of usability because ultimately it's a language that imposed a style and a set of conventional constraints early on (design) and never allowed the community to discover its best practices. Perl will continue to improve, but for the first time in language design, that improvement is truly a community effort, with nearly every change made for perl 6 having come from the community as RFCs, and only the bent through the crooked lens of Larry's vision for Perl.
In other news, Perl was recently added to the OED... somehow that really made me feel good. I dunno why;-)
Re:Kind of emphasizes a major point.
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Humans have impacted the planet. That much is clear. What is not clear is how much. For example, the temperature of the planet is on the rise... then again, when you look at data for the last 10,000 years, it would seem that we're just coming off of a 1-200 year low in temperature with a peak 1500 years ago that was far worse than anything we have seen in this century. We certainly have only limited ways to measure light hitting the earth's surface, and prior to the 50's, no way to know how much reached the earth.
The sun, which is by several orders of magnitude the largest impact on our climate, is still a mystery in almost every way (witness its recent surge in sunspot and flare activity during a period in its 11-year cycle that should be relatively quiescent).
I'm a great supporter of the idea of not deffocating in one's own back yard, but environmentalism needs to be based on what we know, not what we think will scare people into cleaning up their mess.
Your post is a melange of incherent sound-bites. I'm honestly wondering if someone just wrote a program to harvest blocks of text and re-post them when it saw a keyword. I can't buy that there was any thought behind that post.
I'm a die-hard perl programmer, and I'm honestly offended by your defense of the language.
I want to get email that someone sends me, even if I don't know them and even if my mail system might (for whatever reason) not be able to reach them to confirm the message. If that is not possible, I can think of a handful of cases where I would have been personally set back in terms of money or job opportunities.
Mail as it exists today has all of the components for developing a reputation based infrastructure, but so far, the pain of spam has not been sufficient to make everyone get behind the move to such a system.
SMTP, the protocol used to transfer electronic mail, has extensions (which every major mail server software package supports) to send and recieve mail in a digitally signed way. As long as we exclude non-signed mail, a simple reputation system does the rest. You can even have a sophisticated reputation system if you like (aging certs, basing reputation on who signed your cert, etc).
So why don't we do this? Inertia. spam is annoying, but so far, not SO annoying that the many thousands of schools, businesses and savvy home users that run mail servers are willing to Throw away mis-configured mailers (that have no certs or that don't default to signing their transmissions).
If we did that, there would be 1000 software and hardware-based reputation-based filters out there tomorrow that would END spam overnight.
When you give up on actual logic and fall back on repetition of your (flawed) premise, you pretty much lose any serious political debate. Thanks for trying.
Bottom line: IRV works in practice. It has one flaw. That flaw is that it does raise the bar of complexity for voting. IMHO it does not raise it unduly, but certainly this must be taken into account. I think a simpler IRV ballot than the Vermont one should be possible.
I think the case you describe is exactly the same as in the article. You (that is, the copyright holder of the original work) would have the right to sue for damages, and could possibly halt distribution of the derived work.
However, you would have no means of forcing the release of the source code. Worse, for you: the company seems to have already addressed the problem, on their own, so your claim to damages will be limited. Of course you can always ask. You could sue and offer source release as a term of settlement, but I don't think that would be very likely.
It's wonderful to hear someone speaking of the enjoyment of these films rather than the nature of their link to the books. Jackson has created something worth enjoying, IMHO, and it is sad that some people never will be able to.
So you don't like that part of the story, or closeups of orcs. Got it. But folks who go into xyz film expecting what they recall from xyz book, and then come out ranting about how the movie doesn't measure up to the book seem to me to be defeating their own interests. NO movie has ever, or will ever be as "good" as the book that it was based on.
You may hate Jackson for the rest of your life for what he did to the "film" you saw in your mind's eye when you read these books, but guess what: this isn't that film. This is what he saw, and I have to say that I look at scenes like the ones you mention and I see a fluid grace to this film that I don't see in The Great Gasby. I see a translation of the sense of wonder in Frodo that I didn't get from Dune (either version).
These are flawed movies, but I would take them, blemishes and all, to hear Gandalf speak once more and to journy with Frodo again. In a way I wish these films had been done years from now because I'm sure Jackson will only get better, but in the spectrum of possible LotR movies, do you really think that this is THAT far down on the list?
As for the whole silly, "I don't know why he had to change anything" mantra that I hear from everyone, that's the penultimate foolishness. Of course, he didn't have to change anything. He could have filmed Ian McKellen reading all three books, but no one would have come. In order to a) get the money to film it b) get people to watch it and c) get people to walk out happy enough with it to get their friends to watch it, you have to do more than just read Tolkein's book. There are characters that need to be consolidated for time. There are motivations that are too complex to portray without resorting to droning naration (though I swear I see more in McKellen's eyes of Gandalf than I dared hope).
These are the realities of making movies. If you feel you could do better, go for it, but in 50 years, Jackson is the only one who has done it at all (live-action) and certainly he deserves some credit for making thousands of viewers go read Tolkien's wonderful books.
In the example, the voter (who's preference is Libertarian, Republican, Democrat) will actually get a result he likes more if he indicates his vote as Rep., Lib., Dem. instead of Lib., Rep., Dem. In other words, when he falsifies his true preference, voting Rep. above Lib. even though he prefers the Lib. candidate, he gets a more favorable result than if he had indicated his true preference.
Yes, that was the premise of the site. It's still illogical.
IRV is not about protecting voting from dishonesty. IRV is about accurately tabulating preferences, and it does that. If you want to lie in order to swing particular votes, good luck, but I doubt you can get an accurate enough poll to figure out how to do that, and I guarantee that you won't be the only person trying, so you have to take that into account. Heck, you would be better off just lying to a pollster!
This misrepresentation of what IRV is for, and ignoring the fact that it works well in practice is just political, and I guess I should not be surprised that voting is a highly politicized debate....
The point is that it's NOT screwed up, it's just not the novels. If you expect to go into the theater and see what you saw in your head when you read the novels, then I suggest that you have no possible recourse (no matter who makes the movie) but dissapointment.
On the other hand, if you look at it as a movie that finally allows millions to understand a little bit of what the genre CAN be, and makes thousands read the books for the first time, while setting the bar a few notches higher for making fantasy films, then I think you might have a chance of enjoying the LoTR movies.
Can we all just get over the idea that movies are not going to be the same as books? I mean it's been, what 100 years, and we're still shocked? If we look at LoTR as just a movie, which is bringing some of Tolkein's characters and stories to life (though not all of them, and not in the form that Tolkien wrote them... OF COURSE) -- I think you will find that these movies measure up well against just about any other movie out there. Certainly compared to the absolute CRAP we've been treated to this year (with very, very few exceptions), RoTK has to do very little to rise above the crowd. The first two movies were better by far, IMHO, than Ladyhawke, Krull, Legend, Willow, and a host of other fanstasy movies that we've seen in the last few decades. I have a soft spot in my heart for some of the Jim Henson work from the 80s, but even those are at best no better than LoTR.
I even enjoyed them more than the Sinbad movies of old, and that's saying something.
So if you must compare LoTR to something, compare them to other movies. There have been better, and will be again, but I think these movies will prove to be as memorable 20 years from now as any other fantasy (original or adaptation) has been.
Your assertion boils down to: the US government only works because it assumes a two-party system, anything else would destroy it.
I could turn that around and say that it only assumes a two-party system because that is the reality, and would adapt if it were not.
Both assertions are likely wrong. The reality will be somewhere in the middle, and the change could well be very turbulent.
This is also true of the change that would come if we made PAC contributions illegal or if we adopted any other sort of voting reform. That's because we've let the situation get wildly out of hand. However, we are rapidly approaching the point where we need to do SOMETHING in order to get OUR government back, here in the US. It will not be pleasant, but just like surgery, you have to weigh the risks against the harm the disease is doing NOW.
IRV does NOT help anyone win. It helps voting be more accurate, and it does that admirably. Check out the results in the places where it has been used.
As for the site you point at, it's an amazing maze of illogic. I'm frankly stunned by it.
This for example, in their comparison of IRV and Condorcet:
Suppose my true preference is for the Libertarian first and the Republican second. Suppose further that the Libertarians are the strongest "minor" party. At some round of the IRV counting process, all the candidates will be eliminated except the Republican, the Democrat, and the Libertarian. If the Libertarian then has the fewest first-choice votes, he or she will be eliminated and my vote will transfer to the Republican, just as I wanted. But what if the Republican is eliminated before the Libertarian? Unless all the Republican votes transfer to the Libertarian, which is extremely unlikely, the Democrat might then beat the Libertarian. If so, I will have helped the Democrat win by not strategically ranking the Republican first. But that's the same situation I'm in now if I vote my true preference for the Libertarian!
This, in case you don't get IRV yet, is a gross distortion, on par with saying "do you still beat your wife?"
To re-state their premise, the Democrat is going to win because a majority of people prefer Democrats over all other parties... But that means that I've "wasted" my vote. Well no, Timmy, you have not wasted your vote, you've voted for the two least popular candidates... that's called democracy, and if you think its wasting your vote to vote for a loser, then you're going to "waste" your vote about 50% of the time on average, even if there are only two candidates. IRV just makes voting as fair for n>2 candidates as it is for n=2 candidates.
The idea behind IRV is that no one wins until you have a runoff vote in which a candidate gets a TRUE majority. Even if I vote for two minor parties first and a major party next, I will still end up giving my vote to the major party, unless the minor party has a chance to win. If I prefer a republican for office, but feel that a Libertarian should win, but a Republican would be preferable to a Democrat, I can vote that way, and it certainly DOES work.
If you don't agree, just write up a solution matrix for 11 voters and 3 candidates. Try any combinatin of votes and you'll find that no one ever wins until they have a TRUE majority.
First off, 10MP in the pro digital arena is considered entry level, not high-end. Digital backs that do upwards of 16MP are common, though wildly expensive (15k or so, last I checked, here's a review).
If you take a good, low-noise 10MP camera, though, and shoot the same shot as a film camera, you're going to find that modern printers who have modern software scaling capabilities will give you 8x10 prints that are arguably better than you would get from film. Certainly no worse. The key is in the scaling techniques used. Film scaling has progressed over the decades from simple magnification to an imensely sophisticated process. Only recently have digitial scaling processes begun to become this sophisticated.
With capabilities like this, you would still need a great deal of work before, during and after shooting and patience along with it, to get a shot comparable to an Adams... interestingly, so did he.
I do take some exception to the article's implication that digital photography means digital trickery. One can use a digital camera to take pictures honestly.
Why do people assume that because an image is on analog film, it has not been tampered with? Conversly, why do they assume that a digital picture HAS?
Perhaps the time has come for some digital camera vendor to produce a camera that digitally signs pictures so that we can verify that they have not been modified....
Still it was true that Adams himself considered the majority of the art of photography to be done in the darkroom. I think his primary interest in digital photography (esp. as someone else pointed out, a system like Kodac's digital backs) would have been in being able to more flexibly "develop" photographs using tools such as Photoshop (or the Gimp;)
I'm not suggesting that his photos would be altered (though the amount of dodging and burning he did came pretty close to that) but that he could experiment with different ways of "developing" a single shot.
Apathy mostly stems from the sense that the individual has no impact. I firmly feel that if we addopted instand runnoff voting (IRV), that would be overcome. First off, it would revitalize the third parties by allowing people to vote for whoever they wanted without any chance of hurting their second-favorite choice's chance of winning (should their favorite not win). This, for example, would have allowed a democratic voter to say that they wanted Ralph Nader to be President, but still vote for Al Gore if Nader didn't get the popular vote.
Second, given IRV, you have a good deal more incentive to remove the electoral college, which again makes voters feel empowered, and incents voting.
Well, this weather in N.E. is having fun with me;-) I'm "stranded" in sunny Las Vegas for two more days... sigh. I guess I'll have to go find some more desert to explore.... If you come to this area, I recommend Lake Mead. This is the lake created by the Hoover Dam, and is currently at drought levels, but still cool to explore. The area is filled with amazingly cool rocks and some stunning scenery.
Since they sell Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the desktop, I think you're confused or misinformed
Not at all, though I should have been clearer about my statement. When I say "the desktop" I mean the entire segment. That that includes so many different niches that Red Hat was being drowned by conflicting support needs. Gamers want the latest everything, business desktop users want stable MS-compatible office productivity tools, developers want a mix of latest tools and stable general purpose desktop, etc.
But now Red Hat only has to support the engterprise user. This is a group who can afford to pay for what they want and whose needs are more realistically limited. Read my original post. When I said "in a fragmented way" this is what I meant. RH has neatly cut the Gordian knot, and has made way for those who have more resources focus on the desktop as a whole.
The RedHat SRPM is a totally vanilla kernel tar ball with patch files for all of their changes (and the ones that they apply from other sources).
Just "rpm -i kernel*.src.rpm" and then look in/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES for your kernel tar ball and patch files. The order in which the patches are applied is all laid out in/usr/src/redhat/SPEC/kernel.spec, and you can apply them with "rpm -bp/usr/src/redhat/SPEC/kernel.spec"
I would expect that you will see Novell start to get traction in the desktop space in the next several years. But it will be a long and hard road for them. I think that RedHat got out of the desktop biz because they were starting to feel the pain of supporting hundreds of applications in such a fragmented way.
In the server space things are much more uniform. No one is really looking for RedHat to support the latest and greatest gaming libraries, sound stacks, 3D screensavers, etc. for server platforms.
Novell may have to partner with/be purchased by IBM before it's all over in order to get the programmer hours available to them to make this work.
Slashdot Mirror
We're always amused as The Next Big Game looms on the horizon.... Did you know that DAoC was going to kill EverQuest's role as the #1 MMORPG? No? Perhaps that's because you were waiting for Neverwinter Nights? Star Wars Galaxies? PlanetSide? Anarchy Online?
;-)
Perhaps you have not learned your lesson and are waiting for WoW?
It amazes me that each new game comes out and again misses the point. It's not the graphics (most long-term EQ players turn off all the bells and whistles they can); it's not the storyline (the EQ storyline reads like Christopher Tolkein on quayludes); it's not the marketing (when is the last time you saw an add for SWG, NWN or DAoc? Now what about EQ? I think EQ gets less press than the Slash engine
So what is it? It's the fact that the game is large enough and growing to absorb enough user-base that there is a community that has real staying power... somehow, THAT is what another game needs to replicate, and it emphasizes all of the things that most game companies do not want to spend money on... Perhaps Sigil will get it right. they did once before....
There are a lot of reasons to love Perl, but the biggest for me has always been that in a language where the tight binding of many languages' features was commonplace, usability had to be built on the back of convention. This has lead to GOOD Perl code being far more usable, maintainable and, yes, beautiful than the good code I see in all but C (not C++).
Every other language I've seen has a far worse ratio of features to elegance. Even python, which is close in terms of both lacks that essential last mile of usability because ultimately it's a language that imposed a style and a set of conventional constraints early on (design) and never allowed the community to discover its best practices. Perl will continue to improve, but for the first time in language design, that improvement is truly a community effort, with nearly every change made for perl 6 having come from the community as RFCs, and only the bent through the crooked lens of Larry's vision for Perl.
In other news, Perl was recently added to the OED... somehow that really made me feel good. I dunno why
Humans have impacted the planet. That much is clear. What is not clear is how much. For example, the temperature of the planet is on the rise... then again, when you look at data for the last 10,000 years, it would seem that we're just coming off of a 1-200 year low in temperature with a peak 1500 years ago that was far worse than anything we have seen in this century. We certainly have only limited ways to measure light hitting the earth's surface, and prior to the 50's, no way to know how much reached the earth.
The sun, which is by several orders of magnitude the largest impact on our climate, is still a mystery in almost every way (witness its recent surge in sunspot and flare activity during a period in its 11-year cycle that should be relatively quiescent).
I'm a great supporter of the idea of not deffocating in one's own back yard, but environmentalism needs to be based on what we know, not what we think will scare people into cleaning up their mess.
Thought it was:
;-)
Linux on Time Releases:
First of the Regressions
The Thrird Testbuild
Result of the Keeper
or some such...
Uh... What?
Your post is a melange of incherent sound-bites. I'm honestly wondering if someone just wrote a program to harvest blocks of text and re-post them when it saw a keyword. I can't buy that there was any thought behind that post.
I'm a die-hard perl programmer, and I'm honestly offended by your defense of the language.
I want to get email that someone sends me, even if I don't know them and even if my mail system might (for whatever reason) not be able to reach them to confirm the message. If that is not possible, I can think of a handful of cases where I would have been personally set back in terms of money or job opportunities.
Mail as it exists today has all of the components for developing a reputation based infrastructure, but so far, the pain of spam has not been sufficient to make everyone get behind the move to such a system.
SMTP, the protocol used to transfer electronic mail, has extensions (which every major mail server software package supports) to send and recieve mail in a digitally signed way. As long as we exclude non-signed mail, a simple reputation system does the rest. You can even have a sophisticated reputation system if you like (aging certs, basing reputation on who signed your cert, etc).
So why don't we do this? Inertia. spam is annoying, but so far, not SO annoying that the many thousands of schools, businesses and savvy home users that run mail servers are willing to Throw away mis-configured mailers (that have no certs or that don't default to signing their transmissions).
If we did that, there would be 1000 software and hardware-based reputation-based filters out there tomorrow that would END spam overnight.
When you give up on actual logic and fall back on repetition of your (flawed) premise, you pretty much lose any serious political debate. Thanks for trying.
Bottom line: IRV works in practice. It has one flaw. That flaw is that it does raise the bar of complexity for voting. IMHO it does not raise it unduly, but certainly this must be taken into account. I think a simpler IRV ballot than the Vermont one should be possible.
I think the case you describe is exactly the same as in the article. You (that is, the copyright holder of the original work) would have the right to sue for damages, and could possibly halt distribution of the derived work.
However, you would have no means of forcing the release of the source code. Worse, for you: the company seems to have already addressed the problem, on their own, so your claim to damages will be limited. Of course you can always ask. You could sue and offer source release as a term of settlement, but I don't think that would be very likely.
The GPL is not a club, it's a license.
IANAL
Bravo!
It's wonderful to hear someone speaking of the enjoyment of these films rather than the nature of their link to the books. Jackson has created something worth enjoying, IMHO, and it is sad that some people never will be able to.
So you don't like that part of the story, or closeups of orcs. Got it. But folks who go into xyz film expecting what they recall from xyz book, and then come out ranting about how the movie doesn't measure up to the book seem to me to be defeating their own interests. NO movie has ever, or will ever be as "good" as the book that it was based on.
You may hate Jackson for the rest of your life for what he did to the "film" you saw in your mind's eye when you read these books, but guess what: this isn't that film. This is what he saw, and I have to say that I look at scenes like the ones you mention and I see a fluid grace to this film that I don't see in The Great Gasby. I see a translation of the sense of wonder in Frodo that I didn't get from Dune (either version).
These are flawed movies, but I would take them, blemishes and all, to hear Gandalf speak once more and to journy with Frodo again. In a way I wish these films had been done years from now because
I'm sure Jackson will only get better, but in the spectrum of possible LotR movies, do you really think that this is THAT far down on the list?
As for the whole silly, "I don't know why he had to change anything" mantra that I hear from everyone, that's the penultimate foolishness. Of course, he didn't have to change anything. He could have filmed Ian McKellen reading all three books, but no one would have come. In order to a) get the money to film it b) get people to watch it and c) get people to walk out happy enough with it to get their friends to watch it, you have to do more than just read Tolkein's book. There are characters that need to be consolidated for time. There are motivations that are too complex to portray without resorting to droning naration (though I swear I see more in McKellen's eyes of Gandalf than I dared hope).
These are the realities of making movies. If you feel you could do better, go for it, but in 50 years, Jackson is the only one who has done it at all (live-action) and certainly he deserves some credit for making thousands of viewers go read Tolkien's wonderful books.
Yes, that was the premise of the site. It's still illogical.
IRV is not about protecting voting from dishonesty. IRV is about accurately tabulating preferences, and it does that. If you want to lie in order to swing particular votes, good luck, but I doubt you can get an accurate enough poll to figure out how to do that, and I guarantee that you won't be the only person trying, so you have to take that into account. Heck, you would be better off just lying to a pollster!
This misrepresentation of what IRV is for, and ignoring the fact that it works well in practice is just political, and I guess I should not be surprised that voting is a highly politicized debate....
The point is that it's NOT screwed up, it's just not the novels. If you expect to go into the theater and see what you saw in your head when you read the novels, then I suggest that you have no possible recourse (no matter who makes the movie) but dissapointment.
On the other hand, if you look at it as a movie that finally allows millions to understand a little bit of what the genre CAN be, and makes thousands read the books for the first time, while setting the bar a few notches higher for making fantasy films, then I think you might have a chance of enjoying the LoTR movies.
Can we all just get over the idea that movies are not going to be the same as books? I mean it's been, what 100 years, and we're still shocked?
If we look at LoTR as just a movie, which is bringing some of Tolkein's characters and stories to life (though not all of them, and not in the form that Tolkien wrote them... OF COURSE) -- I think you will find that these movies measure up well against just about any other movie out there. Certainly compared to the absolute CRAP we've been treated to this year (with very, very few exceptions), RoTK has to do very little to rise above the crowd. The first two movies were better by far, IMHO, than Ladyhawke, Krull, Legend, Willow, and a host of other fanstasy movies that we've seen in the last few decades. I have a soft spot in my heart for some of the Jim Henson work from the 80s, but even those are at best no better than LoTR.
I even enjoyed them more than the Sinbad movies of old, and that's saying something.
So if you must compare LoTR to something, compare them to other movies. There have been better, and will be again, but I think these movies will prove to be as memorable 20 years from now as any other fantasy (original or adaptation) has been.
Your assertion boils down to: the US government only works because it assumes a two-party system, anything else would destroy it.
I could turn that around and say that it only assumes a two-party system because that is the reality, and would adapt if it were not.
Both assertions are likely wrong. The reality will be somewhere in the middle, and the change could well be very turbulent.
This is also true of the change that would come if we made PAC contributions illegal or if we adopted any other sort of voting reform. That's because we've let the situation get wildly out of hand. However, we are rapidly approaching the point where we need to do SOMETHING in order to get OUR government back, here in the US. It will not be pleasant, but just like surgery, you have to weigh the risks against the harm the disease is doing NOW.
As for the site you point at, it's an amazing maze of illogic. I'm frankly stunned by it.
This for example, in their comparison of IRV and Condorcet:This, in case you don't get IRV yet, is a gross distortion, on par with saying "do you still beat your wife?"
To re-state their premise, the Democrat is going to win because a majority of people prefer Democrats over all other parties... But that means that I've "wasted" my vote. Well no, Timmy, you have not wasted your vote, you've voted for the two least popular candidates... that's called democracy, and if you think its wasting your vote to vote for a loser, then you're going to "waste" your vote about 50% of the time on average, even if there are only two candidates. IRV just makes voting as fair for n>2 candidates as it is for n=2 candidates.
The idea behind IRV is that no one wins until you have a runoff vote in which a candidate gets a TRUE majority. Even if I vote for two minor parties first and a major party next, I will still end up giving my vote to the major party, unless the minor party has a chance to win. If I prefer a republican for office, but feel that a Libertarian should win, but a Republican would be preferable to a Democrat, I can vote that way, and it certainly DOES work.
If you don't agree, just write up a solution matrix for 11 voters and 3 candidates. Try any combinatin of votes and you'll find that no one ever wins until they have a TRUE majority.
First off, 10MP in the pro digital arena is considered entry level, not high-end. Digital backs that do upwards of 16MP are common, though wildly expensive (15k or so, last I checked, here's a review).
If you take a good, low-noise 10MP camera, though, and shoot the same shot as a film camera, you're going to find that modern printers who have modern software scaling capabilities will give you 8x10 prints that are arguably better than you would get from film. Certainly no worse. The key is in the scaling techniques used. Film scaling has progressed over the decades from simple magnification to an imensely sophisticated process. Only recently have digitial scaling processes begun to become this sophisticated.
With capabilities like this, you would still need a great deal of work before, during and after shooting and patience along with it, to get a shot comparable to an Adams... interestingly, so did he.
As it turns out, there are two-party people who support IRV
Not all politicians are motivated solely by party power politics....
I do take some exception to the article's implication that digital photography means digital trickery. One can use a digital camera to take pictures honestly.
Why do people assume that because an image is on analog film, it has not been tampered with? Conversly, why do they assume that a digital picture HAS?
Perhaps the time has come for some digital camera vendor to produce a camera that digitally signs pictures so that we can verify that they have not been modified....
Still it was true that Adams himself considered the majority of the art of photography to be done in the darkroom. I think his primary interest in digital photography (esp. as someone else pointed out, a system like Kodac's digital backs) would have been in being able to more flexibly "develop" photographs using tools such as Photoshop (or the Gimp ;)
I'm not suggesting that his photos would be altered (though the amount of dodging and burning he did came pretty close to that) but that he could experiment with different ways of "developing" a single shot.
Apathy mostly stems from the sense that the individual has no impact. I firmly feel that if we addopted instand runnoff voting (IRV), that would be overcome. First off, it would revitalize the third parties by allowing people to vote for whoever they wanted without any chance of hurting their second-favorite choice's chance of winning (should their favorite not win). This, for example, would have allowed a democratic voter to say that they wanted Ralph Nader to be President, but still vote for Al Gore if Nader didn't get the popular vote.
Second, given IRV, you have a good deal more incentive to remove the electoral college, which again makes voters feel empowered, and incents voting.
Well, this weather in N.E. is having fun with me ;-) I'm "stranded" in sunny Las Vegas for two more days... sigh. I guess I'll have to go find some more desert to explore.... If you come to this area, I recommend Lake Mead. This is the lake created by the Hoover Dam, and is currently at drought levels, but still cool to explore. The area is filled with amazingly cool rocks and some stunning scenery.
Since they sell Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the desktop, I think you're confused or misinformed
Not at all, though I should have been clearer about my statement. When I say "the desktop" I mean the entire segment. That that includes so many different niches that Red Hat was being drowned by conflicting support needs. Gamers want the latest everything, business desktop users want stable MS-compatible office productivity tools, developers want a mix of latest tools and stable general purpose desktop, etc.
But now Red Hat only has to support the engterprise user. This is a group who can afford to pay for what they want and whose needs are more realistically limited. Read my original post. When I said "in a fragmented way" this is what I meant. RH has neatly cut the Gordian knot, and has made way for those who have more resources focus on the desktop as a whole.
The RedHat SRPM is a totally vanilla kernel tar ball with patch files for all of their changes (and the ones that they apply from other sources).
/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES for your kernel tar ball and patch files. The order in which the patches are applied is all laid out in /usr/src/redhat/SPEC/kernel.spec, and you can apply them with "rpm -bp /usr/src/redhat/SPEC/kernel.spec"
Just "rpm -i kernel*.src.rpm" and then look in
I would expect that you will see Novell start to get traction in the desktop space in the next several years. But it will be a long and hard road for them. I think that RedHat got out of the desktop biz because they were starting to feel the pain of supporting hundreds of applications in such a fragmented way.
In the server space things are much more uniform. No one is really looking for RedHat to support the latest and greatest gaming libraries, sound stacks, 3D screensavers, etc. for server platforms.
Novell may have to partner with/be purchased by IBM before it's all over in order to get the programmer hours available to them to make this work.
Screamers was indeed a decent adaptation of Second Variety.
The ending got shredded and turned "Hollywood", but overall, it had more of the original in it than any other adaptation of his work that I've seen.