Crap! Of corse I was talking about recording two things. The TiVo does (and always has) allowed you to record something and watch any other pre-recorded thing (or the currently recording thing...from the start if you like).
Re:Hmm, more questions than answers for me
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TiVo Introduces Series2
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· Score: 3, Informative
What kind of bitrates does it support, what does it really save, what kind of quality, and why should I ever want to see anytyhing compressed with anything from real.*?\?
About the same as the older standalone TiVo (which I think is around 6Mbit/sec for "best" quality, and much lower like 1.5Mbit for "standard"). It is variable bit rate MPEG2 (with an option for CBR). "Best" and "High" both look fine for anything that doesn't have a lot of strobes or super quick cuts one after another. "Standard" works fine for cartoons most of the time. I don't think I ever use medimum.
And why can't I connect it to my computer and won't all nice satelite recievers have this from the beginning anyways?
Ask the MPAA...or head off to the TiVo underground and slap on an Ethernet, just don't let the MPAA know:-)
After reading this article [privacyfoundation.org] i think ill stick to alternative devices, im not into paying someone to sell my viewing habits to advertisers if they are strapped for cash,
Note you can opt-out, and it has been confirmed (via tcpdump) that once you do your TiVo sends your account number and date of last call, and nothing about your viewing, how much stuff is on the drive, or anything else.
Opt-out is free (toll-free call, and no monthly service charge or anything). It's described in chapter 7 of my manual (which is all about privacy) in the same size print everything else is. I don't think TiVo is trying to pull a "fast one" which is how the privacyfoundation spins it. Which is a real shame because I think they have done a lot to hurt the only one of the 3 PVR companies that even lets you opt-out!
I'll also note that both ReplayTV and UltimateTV sell your data, don't make claims about washing it first (that I know of), and don't have an opt-out number (that I know of).
I have two Tivo's currently, and have a 10MBit ethernet card in my SA (Standalone Tivo) and it is honestly slow as ass to transfer a show over to my desktop.
The amazing kludge of an ethernet that people have put in the SA TiVo can't push 3Mbits. USB ethernets suck a lot too, but they push more like 6 to 8Mbits. That is more then enough to do a "best quality" stream at slightly faster then real time.
I have a strange feeling that something is going on behind the scenes here
Maybe, or maybe it was a choice between $10 for an ethernet that is only an ethernet, or $10 for USB that could be a (kinda lame) ethernet, talke to CD drives, MP3 players, and a bunch of other crap...
Maybe the choice was even more lopsided, the USB might have been on the chipset that connects the CPU up to the memory and other crud anyway, so it was all but free (traces and connectors), while the ethernet would have been $10.
have no doubt that within weeks of these things hitting the stores all sorts of cool unintended uses for these USB ports will be thought up
AT&T has been selling them for about a month. As of a week ago nobody on the underground had done much with the USB, but they did strings the kernel and find which ethernets were supported, so maybe over the last week...
My main gripe about Tivo right now is that I can't record one program and watch another at the same time. UltimateTV and even DirecTivo have this capability, or alternately the ability to record two shows at the same time.
That would require duplications almost every item the stand alone TiVo has. You need another set of IR blasters to go to another cable box. Another coax in, another antenna in, another RCA in set. You need another tuner (for the antenna in), another NTSC decoder. Another MPEG encoder.
In other words you more or less double the SA TiVo's cost (er, except for the hard disk, and the rather inexpensive CPU).
I would rather see a way to network multiple TiVos and have them seemlessly act as one big TiVo. Need a second tuner? Buy a second TiVo. Need more disk space? Get yet another. All three networks have their one best show at the same time, plus HBO's new series airs then too? Get four TiVos.
That would be a lot more general, and not cost significantly more....
(Why does the DTiVo and UTV have two tuners then? Well they only have one extra sat input, and no extra MPEG encoder, in fact they have zero mpeg encoders. So the extra cost was pretty small.)
With DirecTV, if I want to record a movie on HBO, well, I have to *watch* the movie, or go find another TV.
With TiVo (Direct, or not) you can record that HBOP movie and watch anything else you have on the box at the same time, which is a significant improvement over video tape (you can also watch the start of the movie if you happen to get home, say, 45 min after the recording has started).
That ain't as nice as having two tuners (so you can record two things at once that the networks carefully scheduled to be on at the same time...), but it is pretty nice...
I'd love to know the percentage of people who own DirecTiVo units who are actually using the dual tuners.
100% of the people I know with DTiVo use both tuners, since it is free (but does require the extra cable run). I expect less then 100% of DTiVo ownsers use it though since many just buy DTiVo because it costs a lot less then the stand alone TiVo. You could go somewhere with lots of DTiVo users and post a poll. They don't seem to have one there already...
I think Tivo is moving away from its friendly relations with the Tivo hacker community.
Is that baised on any actions taken by TiVo, or anything they have said?
Last I visited the TiVo "underground" forum they were busy finding the AT&T TiVo (the first Series2 TiVo) just as hackable as the old ones. Sure the old tools for the most part didn't "just work", but that is because the CPU in the new one (some MIPS varient, I think at 200Mhz or so vs. the 50Mhz PPC in the old one) was running byte swapped (I assume to make talking to x86 byte order peripherials simpler).
They had adding an extra drive working, and were pretty sure they could get the rest of the stuff working as well. The serial port still give access to a root shell. Nothing blows away your changes (except during an upgrade).
They also had a list of which USB ethernet drivers were compiled in, but oddly nobody had acquired one to see if it "just worked".
If TiVo was going to cut off the hackers why didn't they do it a month ago when they brought out the new hardware?
USB ports are great and everything, but if it still requires a modem line to get guide data and uses the USB network adapter for its "extended services"... Yuck.
Well since the people who have hacked an ethernet into the older TiVos (or just used ppp over the serial port) have successfully used their own network connection to download schedule info (on subscribed TiVos), I don't see why TiVo would go to lengths to make it not work here.
I'm also a bit put out that Tivo isn't doing anything to announce improvements in the following areas:
I would guess they don't want to announce them until they have them working, a UI for them, and maybe even have them in beta testing. Plus of corse, they may not want to do some/all of those things.
Re:If this was a regular PC company...
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
I disagree: the DVD makes a dandy backup device.
One the one hand more convent getting around 4G (4.7G?) on one disc, you can have more crap before you need to figure out how to split it up. Nice.
On the other hand it is $5/disc for DVD vs. $0.05 or less (I have 200 free CD-Rs so far) for CD-Rs. That's $0.001/M vs. $0.00007/M (assuming 4.7G for DVD, and a mere 640M on a $0.05 CD-R).
I donno, I'll stick to CD for my backup for now. I'll be happy to let others drive down the DVD-R prices.
(Ok, I'm off to write a perl script to help me back up my pictures...)
Apple has fallen back on a single Photoshop benchmark for YEARS. Back in reality, PC photoshop is now faster than G4 photoshop for MOST tasks
Actually at every MacWorld I have watched (missed this one, had to work) it has been a different PhotoShop benchmark. They have all be a save of actions done by a real artist to design a real movie poster (I'm pretty sure they were all movie posters) for a recent or soon to be released movie. They all had the Mac vs. the PC running live.
So you can bitch that pretty much all they benchmark is PhotoShop (and VideoCleaner and a few other apps) you can't really say it is always the same old benchmark. I don't think you can even really assert that PC PhotoShop is faster "in the real world" since they were not a canned benchmark of a single operation done again and again, but use of all the tools needed to go from a blank page to a finished poster...
Re:Inevitably underwhelming thanks to the hype
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
(And claiming that they were going to announce something 'way beyond the rumors sites' was surely a mistake. These are the same rumors sites, after all, that were expecting LCD iMacs many months ago. This expo's predictions included the iWalk PDA, much faster pro-line desktop machines, and even a G5 Dodecahedron or two.)
Plus the suggestion that Jobs was going to unveil a whole new planet just for Mac users... (MacNN I think, but it could have been MacSLASH)
Right now, this digital hub strategy has the hub but not the accessories. Until far more peripherals have Macintosh drivers available (written either by Apple through reverse- engineering or licensing of IP; or by the makers of the hardware, possibly with some persuasion from Apple), Jobs' concept is going to fail
Well iMovie supports every DV cam (you may need to buy different cables though), so that's not bad.
iPhoto has a pretty impressive list of supported cameras. I expect it will also support all new cameras (except the high end DSLRs that use FireWire) since Microsoft managed to convince the camera makers to get all future cameras to look a specific way on USB so they are all "zero work", except to maybe supply a picture of the specific camera. Plus it works with plain old CF cards or images on a CD.
iDVD supports the only DVD-RW drives Apple sells, but that is an easy target to hit. It apparently now supports a bunch of FireWire DVD-RW drives as well, which is nice.
That leaves us iTunes which does not have stellar support for portable MP3 players. Well it does have great support for the iPod, and support for maybe 12 or 20 or so other players, but that's not the whole market. It's interesting to note that is the one market where Apple decided to make their own device...
(unless you count the 1995ish QuickTake 100 still camera)
Are they really doing as bad as you think? Or even bad at all?
Do you open up your receiver to add a better DSP, or a bigger amp?
Actually I own an upgradable amp ("The Little HeadRoom") and light (AlienBees B400). Granted they are both factory upgrades, but still...
Hmmm, come to think of it, it would be nice if Apple had a factory upgrade program...I wonder if they could make money on it and still have it priced cheap enough for people to buy...
GM and Ford do not make money on those cheap cars. They only produce them to bring their average MPG rating down as required by law.
GM's Saturn use to only make cheap cars, and they turned a profit (well would have if you ignored the start-up costs, and did do quite well for a start-up car company). I can't say about the others because they don't really publish seporate numbers.
I do think it is better for a car company to produce a mix, but not because the cheap cars make no money. I think it is a good idea because people tend to have brand loyalty (even though they shouldn't in most cases), so as people become more successful (or at least have more cash to burn on cars) it is good to have something to sell them rather then offering two of the old ones:-)
Yugo was the only company to make nothing but cheap cars. They are out of business.
Lots of companys go out of bisness, Avanti went under but it doesn't mean "making 300 or fewer really fine cars per year" is unworkable.
nobody makes money from making cheap cars or cheap computers
Some companies do, Hundai seems to be doing OK with cheap cars. Some of GM's cars are cheap. So are (or at least were) Ford's. VW did in the '70s, I think Honda use to make cheap cars as well. Many of the PC lines are cheap, and making some money.
That isn't the only way to make money. There is room in the car market for BMW and the like. Hopefully there is room in the computer market for Apple as well.
I'm not saying that MacOS X couldn't be hacked to do the same thing, it is just harder because there's a bit more to doing under X.
Maybe, the graphics system supports rotations (and paths and the like). Maybe you can rotate to coordinate system for the root window and the rest will "just work", if you can get access to the root window.
Failing that you might be able to sneak in a shared library and rotate each window's system just after it is made (you will have to call through to the real library, easy with ELF.so's, and I think OSX uses them). Of corse it may not work for classic, unless it makes normal window calls...
Or you could do it with a KEXT like you suggested.
Correction, it supports the telnet and ssh clients, and the ssh server... well a GUI to turn the ssh server on and off, both sshd and telnetd are on the Mac. You have to edit/etc/inetd.conf yourself to get telnet. It's in/usr/libexec/telnetd in case you are lame enough to want it...
anyone have any advice on a good digital camera in the $300-$400 range?
Yep, and for most other price ranges. Visit DP Review, and browse the reviews (you will need to get current prices for the cameras though, since I doubt the Canon PS100 is still $600!).
If you can afford it the Nikon CoolPix is an extreamly nice camera (the 900 series is nicer then the 700/800 series, but still...). I did buy the PS100 for the small size though, and there are a few others that are now that small. Of corse if you can afford it the Canon D30 or 1D are very nice, but not as small:-)
So basically, film is still better for highres posters and panaramic shots and such, unless you pay out the ass for a digital equiv.
Pretty much, except I'm not sure you can get digital for moving subjects that beats medimum and large format film. For still shots BetterLight makes a lot of scanning backs (for normal MF film cameras!) that are wonderful, and "only" $70,000 to $120,000 or so. Very affordable:-)
Also panos can be done pretty well with digitals by stitching together multiple images, but that is more time conuming then buying a panno film camera, and the panno film camera will have less distortion from subject movment.
But 99.9% of the time... well... you know.
Yep, 99.9% of the time a $2200 digital SLR can makes results as good as a $200 film SLR (unless you use slide film in the SLR), and 99.9% of the time a $200 to $900 point and shoot digital can beat disposable to $200 point and shoot film cameras on image quality. There are other things the digital wind on 100% of the time. Working with flash (studio strobes, monolights, etc.) is one of them. As is being able to take way more shots without having an expensave and inconvient bulk load back. As is lower per shot cost once you take at least 300 shots a day:-) Oh, and also it does...
Unfortunitly the $2200 DSLR has pretty bad autofocus (low light it sucks without a focus assist from one of the speedlights), probbably because it took the focus system from a several year old APS film design (because the APS film frame and the D30 imager are almost the same size, so the light path works out...). That's not a "digital problem" though, just a problem for that one camera. the one affordable DSLR...well, the one not made by Fuji at least. The Nikon D1 (D1X, D1H) and the Canon EOS-1D all have wonderful AF systems, the 1D's is the same as the 1V film camera has, which is frequently claimed to be the best in the world (by Canon, Nikon and Contax have other ideas).
I'd prefer those cameras that roll the film out first, then roll them back in as you take pictures. This means that shots with pictures in them will be safe in the canister.
Lots of entry level cameras (Rebel 2000 for example) are doing that now. No pro cameras do.
Why isn't this more common tho?
They make mid-roll change outs take much longer then they should (cost of a part wind plus a full wind vs. just a part wind), that happens a lot when a Pro sees a shot that may show up better on another type of film (normally a different speed, sometimes a switch from slide to print because the lighting is too uneven, sometimes just a change for color effect, but that is rare).
It also slows down how long it really takes to change a roll of film. Sure you still get one full rewind, or prewind, but it really does take longer. With a "normal" camera you hit the end of the roll, the rewind starts. You grab the next roll out of your belt pocket (if you are a real photo geek), or you shirt/pants pocket, pop open the tube, pull out the film can, make sure it is the right kind of film, and not a roll that you already shot on, as you get done with all that the camera should be about done rewinding you swap the two film cans and are ready to shoot. With a "prewind" camera you hit the end of the roll and the film is ready to come out, you have to get the next roll of film make sure it is the right one and so on, then swap the two cans and wait for the prewind. No overlaping work between you and the camera.
That's important because the best shots always happen when you are fiddling with the film:-) Even for a pro with two (or more) cameras this is a problem because they tend to keep diffrent lenses on the cameras, and sometimes diffrent film. So if they were taking a few telephotos of football players close to them with a 70-200mm zoom the other camera is likely to have a 300mm+ lens on it for the other end of the field, or a wide angle for crowd shots.
So the pro cameras are designed to work well for normal use where a Pro won't forget to rewind a roll, or open the back too soon (some open it just as the film leaves the take up spool, many wait until it lands in the can). They are not designed for ones that have a building fall on them at the expense of the ones that "Just shoot Football and concerts".
Even with my digital camera the best shots are the ones just after I take 300 on my Compact Flash, and I assume once my Microdrive shows up (from the D30 rebate) they will wait for me to take 1000 or so shots...
Do you photography geeks still insist that traditional film is somehow better than digital?
The ones that hang out on dpreview sure don't. Nor do most PJs. Other shooters have other opinions.
I'm pretty happy with the output of $2000 cameras at about 8x10, but I would not want to do a multi foot print with one if it is to be viewed close up (I have one on my wall from my DSLR, and from across the room it looks great, up close it is way soft -- it was also only $20 so it's a great deal compared to medium format processing and enlarging). Of corse for that even normal 35mm film seldom works (you can do it with techpan, but you need a ton of light to get an ISO 12 film to capture anything that is alive, and a tripod for stills), you need medium format for that.
There are, of corse, some people who think any camera with batteries is evil, or at least any that needs batteries. They won't ever like digital. Most of them are a bunch of posers. Some of them have a real need for a camera that works well in sub zero tempatures. Other people just object to digital's cost (when a $120 Stylus Epic can produce images better then a $1000 CoolPix 995, and weights almost nothing, they do have a point -- even if it leaves out all the stuff the 995 does better).
(If you need to make your photo "grainy" or otherwise "shitty looking", photoshop can do that.
I don't, but I will admit sometimes it makes black and white pictures look better. It really doesn't do anything for me with color.
Well, there are a few exceptions. The really expensive film recorders use ISO3 film that is pretty much grainless so you can scan in 35mm movie footage, process it, and spit it back out and have the grain match un processed frames. They way you can't tell which sequences have digital effects just by noticing a change int he film grain. That's a pretty good use, but only because the original film had grain.
Though there's some other lens artifacts, like bokeh(sp?), that are just best forgotten.)
That shows a pretty serious lack of understanding of the term. Bokeh (no, I'm not sure if it is spelled right) is the quality of the out of focus highlights (bright points). There can be bad bokeh, like Canon's otherwise fine 50mm f/1.8 lens produces, in that case what should be points of light or small circles show up as hexagons (look at the far eye). There is also good bokeh, which I fail to really be able to tell from "Ok bokeh" which is just plain old round out of focus high lights.
It is a good idea to make sure you don't have bad bokeh, otherwise you have to be extremely careful to avoid highlights when you try to use selective focus. This is a problem for both digital and film cameras (the example I showed was from my digital camera), it comes from the lens, not the imager. It is not much of a problem for all of the current digital point and shoots because their imagers are so physically small that you can't selective focus except when doing macro (extreme close ups) shots. Which is a shame because selective focus is great for isolating the interesting part of your picture and turning a bunch of random bad looking crap int he background into a blue of pleasing color, or at least no longer distracting color, unless it is full of hexagons of light or little donuts of light.
Other then macro shots the only way to do selective focus like effects is to carefully select the non subject parts of your image and blur them. It is a giant pain because it takes quite some time to select everything (maybe 5 to 10 min with a good tablet, an hour with a mouse/trackpad) and do a half decent blur (and it still looks wrong since the amount of blur doesn't change with distance, unless you spend way way too much time on it -- most people won't notice this though, so it only screws things up if you try to submit the photo to a competition or a stock agent). That is a lot longer then it takes to click the f-stop a little to the right or a little to the left (way way way under a second). On the plus side it lets you fiddle until you have it "just so" even for real-life events which is something you normally only get to do with still life style photography. You can also get away with less light since you can use f/2 or larger openings on things that my require f/5.6 or f/8 in 35mm to get enough depth of field.
Ah, found it, as an added bonus if you read the rest of the thread you get to see me be beaten up for not knowing the difference between a PCB in the camera and one in the lens.
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Crap! Of corse I was talking about recording two things. The TiVo does (and always has) allowed you to record something and watch any other pre-recorded thing (or the currently recording thing...from the start if you like).
About the same as the older standalone TiVo (which I think is around 6Mbit/sec for "best" quality, and much lower like 1.5Mbit for "standard"). It is variable bit rate MPEG2 (with an option for CBR). "Best" and "High" both look fine for anything that doesn't have a lot of strobes or super quick cuts one after another. "Standard" works fine for cartoons most of the time. I don't think I ever use medimum.
Ask the MPAA...or head off to the TiVo underground and slap on an Ethernet, just don't let the MPAA know :-)
Note you can opt-out, and it has been confirmed (via tcpdump) that once you do your TiVo sends your account number and date of last call, and nothing about your viewing, how much stuff is on the drive, or anything else.
Opt-out is free (toll-free call, and no monthly service charge or anything). It's described in chapter 7 of my manual (which is all about privacy) in the same size print everything else is. I don't think TiVo is trying to pull a "fast one" which is how the privacyfoundation spins it. Which is a real shame because I think they have done a lot to hurt the only one of the 3 PVR companies that even lets you opt-out!
I'll also note that both ReplayTV and UltimateTV sell your data, don't make claims about washing it first (that I know of), and don't have an opt-out number (that I know of).
The amazing kludge of an ethernet that people have put in the SA TiVo can't push 3Mbits. USB ethernets suck a lot too, but they push more like 6 to 8Mbits. That is more then enough to do a "best quality" stream at slightly faster then real time.
Maybe, or maybe it was a choice between $10 for an ethernet that is only an ethernet, or $10 for USB that could be a (kinda lame) ethernet, talke to CD drives, MP3 players, and a bunch of other crap...
Maybe the choice was even more lopsided, the USB might have been on the chipset that connects the CPU up to the memory and other crud anyway, so it was all but free (traces and connectors), while the ethernet would have been $10.
AT&T has been selling them for about a month. As of a week ago nobody on the underground had done much with the USB, but they did strings the kernel and find which ethernets were supported, so maybe over the last week...
That would require duplications almost every item the stand alone TiVo has. You need another set of IR blasters to go to another cable box. Another coax in, another antenna in, another RCA in set. You need another tuner (for the antenna in), another NTSC decoder. Another MPEG encoder.
In other words you more or less double the SA TiVo's cost (er, except for the hard disk, and the rather inexpensive CPU).
I would rather see a way to network multiple TiVos and have them seemlessly act as one big TiVo. Need a second tuner? Buy a second TiVo. Need more disk space? Get yet another. All three networks have their one best show at the same time, plus HBO's new series airs then too? Get four TiVos.
That would be a lot more general, and not cost significantly more....
(Why does the DTiVo and UTV have two tuners then? Well they only have one extra sat input, and no extra MPEG encoder, in fact they have zero mpeg encoders. So the extra cost was pretty small.)
With TiVo (Direct, or not) you can record that HBOP movie and watch anything else you have on the box at the same time, which is a significant improvement over video tape (you can also watch the start of the movie if you happen to get home, say, 45 min after the recording has started).
That ain't as nice as having two tuners (so you can record two things at once that the networks carefully scheduled to be on at the same time...), but it is pretty nice...
100% of the people I know with DTiVo use both tuners, since it is free (but does require the extra cable run). I expect less then 100% of DTiVo ownsers use it though since many just buy DTiVo because it costs a lot less then the stand alone TiVo. You could go somewhere with lots of DTiVo users and post a poll. They don't seem to have one there already...
Is that baised on any actions taken by TiVo, or anything they have said?
Last I visited the TiVo "underground" forum they were busy finding the AT&T TiVo (the first Series2 TiVo) just as hackable as the old ones. Sure the old tools for the most part didn't "just work", but that is because the CPU in the new one (some MIPS varient, I think at 200Mhz or so vs. the 50Mhz PPC in the old one) was running byte swapped (I assume to make talking to x86 byte order peripherials simpler).
They had adding an extra drive working, and were pretty sure they could get the rest of the stuff working as well. The serial port still give access to a root shell. Nothing blows away your changes (except during an upgrade).
They also had a list of which USB ethernet drivers were compiled in, but oddly nobody had acquired one to see if it "just worked".
If TiVo was going to cut off the hackers why didn't they do it a month ago when they brought out the new hardware?
Er, which ones are gone?
Well since the people who have hacked an ethernet into the older TiVos (or just used ppp over the serial port) have successfully used their own network connection to download schedule info (on subscribed TiVos), I don't see why TiVo would go to lengths to make it not work here.
I would guess they don't want to announce them until they have them working, a UI for them, and maybe even have them in beta testing. Plus of corse, they may not want to do some/all of those things.
One the one hand more convent getting around 4G (4.7G?) on one disc, you can have more crap before you need to figure out how to split it up. Nice.
On the other hand it is $5/disc for DVD vs. $0.05 or less (I have 200 free CD-Rs so far) for CD-Rs. That's $0.001/M vs. $0.00007/M (assuming 4.7G for DVD, and a mere 640M on a $0.05 CD-R).
I donno, I'll stick to CD for my backup for now. I'll be happy to let others drive down the DVD-R prices.
(Ok, I'm off to write a perl script to help me back up my pictures...)
Actually at every MacWorld I have watched (missed this one, had to work) it has been a different PhotoShop benchmark. They have all be a save of actions done by a real artist to design a real movie poster (I'm pretty sure they were all movie posters) for a recent or soon to be released movie. They all had the Mac vs. the PC running live.
So you can bitch that pretty much all they benchmark is PhotoShop (and VideoCleaner and a few other apps) you can't really say it is always the same old benchmark. I don't think you can even really assert that PC PhotoShop is faster "in the real world" since they were not a canned benchmark of a single operation done again and again, but use of all the tools needed to go from a blank page to a finished poster...
Plus the suggestion that Jobs was going to unveil a whole new planet just for Mac users... (MacNN I think, but it could have been MacSLASH)
Well iMovie supports every DV cam (you may need to buy different cables though), so that's not bad.
iPhoto has a pretty impressive list of supported cameras. I expect it will also support all new cameras (except the high end DSLRs that use FireWire) since Microsoft managed to convince the camera makers to get all future cameras to look a specific way on USB so they are all "zero work", except to maybe supply a picture of the specific camera. Plus it works with plain old CF cards or images on a CD.
iDVD supports the only DVD-RW drives Apple sells, but that is an easy target to hit. It apparently now supports a bunch of FireWire DVD-RW drives as well, which is nice.
That leaves us iTunes which does not have stellar support for portable MP3 players. Well it does have great support for the iPod, and support for maybe 12 or 20 or so other players, but that's not the whole market. It's interesting to note that is the one market where Apple decided to make their own device...
(unless you count the 1995ish QuickTake 100 still camera)
Are they really doing as bad as you think? Or even bad at all?
Actually I own an upgradable amp ("The Little HeadRoom") and light (AlienBees B400). Granted they are both factory upgrades, but still...
Hmmm, come to think of it, it would be nice if Apple had a factory upgrade program...I wonder if they could make money on it and still have it priced cheap enough for people to buy...
GM's Saturn use to only make cheap cars, and they turned a profit (well would have if you ignored the start-up costs, and did do quite well for a start-up car company). I can't say about the others because they don't really publish seporate numbers.
I do think it is better for a car company to produce a mix, but not because the cheap cars make no money. I think it is a good idea because people tend to have brand loyalty (even though they shouldn't in most cases), so as people become more successful (or at least have more cash to burn on cars) it is good to have something to sell them rather then offering two of the old ones :-)
Lots of companys go out of bisness, Avanti went under but it doesn't mean "making 300 or fewer really fine cars per year" is unworkable.
Some companies do, Hundai seems to be doing OK with cheap cars. Some of GM's cars are cheap. So are (or at least were) Ford's. VW did in the '70s, I think Honda use to make cheap cars as well. Many of the PC lines are cheap, and making some money.
That isn't the only way to make money. There is room in the car market for BMW and the like. Hopefully there is room in the computer market for Apple as well.
Maybe, the graphics system supports rotations (and paths and the like). Maybe you can rotate to coordinate system for the root window and the rest will "just work", if you can get access to the root window.
Failing that you might be able to sneak in a shared library and rotate each window's system just after it is made (you will have to call through to the real library, easy with ELF .so's, and I think OSX uses them). Of corse it may not work for classic, unless it makes normal window calls...
Or you could do it with a KEXT like you suggested.
Correction, it supports the telnet and ssh clients, and the ssh server... well a GUI to turn the ssh server on and off, both sshd and telnetd are on the Mac. You have to edit /etc/inetd.conf yourself to get telnet. It's in /usr/libexec/telnetd in case you are lame enough to want it...
They could use a mecury switch, as long as there was an overide it would be right almost all the time...
Um, all their laptops. I rotate mine for reading PDF'ed books, since the reader will rotate the book and many PDFs work better that way.
It's amazingly useful. There were even CRTs at one time that would rotate, the display driver would handle the rotation for you though...
Yep, and for most other price ranges. Visit DP Review, and browse the reviews (you will need to get current prices for the cameras though, since I doubt the Canon PS100 is still $600!).
If you can afford it the Nikon CoolPix is an extreamly nice camera (the 900 series is nicer then the 700/800 series, but still...). I did buy the PS100 for the small size though, and there are a few others that are now that small. Of corse if you can afford it the Canon D30 or 1D are very nice, but not as small :-)
Ah, music to my ears :-)
Pretty much, except I'm not sure you can get digital for moving subjects that beats medimum and large format film. For still shots BetterLight makes a lot of scanning backs (for normal MF film cameras!) that are wonderful, and "only" $70,000 to $120,000 or so. Very affordable :-)
Also panos can be done pretty well with digitals by stitching together multiple images, but that is more time conuming then buying a panno film camera, and the panno film camera will have less distortion from subject movment.
Yep, 99.9% of the time a $2200 digital SLR can makes results as good as a $200 film SLR (unless you use slide film in the SLR), and 99.9% of the time a $200 to $900 point and shoot digital can beat disposable to $200 point and shoot film cameras on image quality. There are other things the digital wind on 100% of the time. Working with flash (studio strobes, monolights, etc.) is one of them. As is being able to take way more shots without having an expensave and inconvient bulk load back. As is lower per shot cost once you take at least 300 shots a day :-) Oh, and also it does...
Unfortunitly the $2200 DSLR has pretty bad autofocus (low light it sucks without a focus assist from one of the speedlights), probbably because it took the focus system from a several year old APS film design (because the APS film frame and the D30 imager are almost the same size, so the light path works out...). That's not a "digital problem" though, just a problem for that one camera. the one affordable DSLR...well, the one not made by Fuji at least. The Nikon D1 (D1X, D1H) and the Canon EOS-1D all have wonderful AF systems, the 1D's is the same as the 1V film camera has, which is frequently claimed to be the best in the world (by Canon, Nikon and Contax have other ideas).
Lots of entry level cameras (Rebel 2000 for example) are doing that now. No pro cameras do.
They make mid-roll change outs take much longer then they should (cost of a part wind plus a full wind vs. just a part wind), that happens a lot when a Pro sees a shot that may show up better on another type of film (normally a different speed, sometimes a switch from slide to print because the lighting is too uneven, sometimes just a change for color effect, but that is rare).
It also slows down how long it really takes to change a roll of film. Sure you still get one full rewind, or prewind, but it really does take longer. With a "normal" camera you hit the end of the roll, the rewind starts. You grab the next roll out of your belt pocket (if you are a real photo geek), or you shirt/pants pocket, pop open the tube, pull out the film can, make sure it is the right kind of film, and not a roll that you already shot on, as you get done with all that the camera should be about done rewinding you swap the two film cans and are ready to shoot. With a "prewind" camera you hit the end of the roll and the film is ready to come out, you have to get the next roll of film make sure it is the right one and so on, then swap the two cans and wait for the prewind. No overlaping work between you and the camera.
That's important because the best shots always happen when you are fiddling with the film :-) Even for a pro with two (or more) cameras this is a problem because they tend to keep diffrent lenses on the cameras, and sometimes diffrent film. So if they were taking a few telephotos of football players close to them with a 70-200mm zoom the other camera is likely to have a 300mm+ lens on it for the other end of the field, or a wide angle for crowd shots.
So the pro cameras are designed to work well for normal use where a Pro won't forget to rewind a roll, or open the back too soon (some open it just as the film leaves the take up spool, many wait until it lands in the can). They are not designed for ones that have a building fall on them at the expense of the ones that "Just shoot Football and concerts".
Even with my digital camera the best shots are the ones just after I take 300 on my Compact Flash, and I assume once my Microdrive shows up (from the D30 rebate) they will wait for me to take 1000 or so shots...
The ones that hang out on dpreview sure don't. Nor do most PJs. Other shooters have other opinions.
I'm pretty happy with the output of $2000 cameras at about 8x10, but I would not want to do a multi foot print with one if it is to be viewed close up (I have one on my wall from my DSLR, and from across the room it looks great, up close it is way soft -- it was also only $20 so it's a great deal compared to medium format processing and enlarging). Of corse for that even normal 35mm film seldom works (you can do it with techpan, but you need a ton of light to get an ISO 12 film to capture anything that is alive, and a tripod for stills), you need medium format for that.
There are, of corse, some people who think any camera with batteries is evil, or at least any that needs batteries. They won't ever like digital. Most of them are a bunch of posers. Some of them have a real need for a camera that works well in sub zero tempatures. Other people just object to digital's cost (when a $120 Stylus Epic can produce images better then a $1000 CoolPix 995, and weights almost nothing, they do have a point -- even if it leaves out all the stuff the 995 does better).
I don't, but I will admit sometimes it makes black and white pictures look better. It really doesn't do anything for me with color.
Well, there are a few exceptions. The really expensive film recorders use ISO3 film that is pretty much grainless so you can scan in 35mm movie footage, process it, and spit it back out and have the grain match un processed frames. They way you can't tell which sequences have digital effects just by noticing a change int he film grain. That's a pretty good use, but only because the original film had grain.
That shows a pretty serious lack of understanding of the term. Bokeh (no, I'm not sure if it is spelled right) is the quality of the out of focus highlights (bright points). There can be bad bokeh, like Canon's otherwise fine 50mm f/1.8 lens produces, in that case what should be points of light or small circles show up as hexagons (look at the far eye). There is also good bokeh, which I fail to really be able to tell from "Ok bokeh" which is just plain old round out of focus high lights.
It is a good idea to make sure you don't have bad bokeh, otherwise you have to be extremely careful to avoid highlights when you try to use selective focus. This is a problem for both digital and film cameras (the example I showed was from my digital camera), it comes from the lens, not the imager. It is not much of a problem for all of the current digital point and shoots because their imagers are so physically small that you can't selective focus except when doing macro (extreme close ups) shots. Which is a shame because selective focus is great for isolating the interesting part of your picture and turning a bunch of random bad looking crap int he background into a blue of pleasing color, or at least no longer distracting color, unless it is full of hexagons of light or little donuts of light.
Other then macro shots the only way to do selective focus like effects is to carefully select the non subject parts of your image and blur them. It is a giant pain because it takes quite some time to select everything (maybe 5 to 10 min with a good tablet, an hour with a mouse/trackpad) and do a half decent blur (and it still looks wrong since the amount of blur doesn't change with distance, unless you spend way way too much time on it -- most people won't notice this though, so it only screws things up if you try to submit the photo to a competition or a stock agent). That is a lot longer then it takes to click the f-stop a little to the right or a little to the left (way way way under a second). On the plus side it lets you fiddle until you have it "just so" even for real-life events which is something you normally only get to do with still life style photography. You can also get away with less light since you can use f/2 or larger openings on things that my require f/5.6 or f/8 in 35mm to get enough depth of field.
Ah, found it, as an added bonus if you read the rest of the thread you get to see me be beaten up for not knowing the difference between a PCB in the camera and one in the lens.