It's the absolute best way to prove that you took the pictures in any copyright accusation. Even when I take along the semi-crappy/semi-decent Fuji S5000 and use it, I'll take at least one photo of something potentially useful for sale or let with my little Maxxum Qt-si, so that I have a negative to prove incontrovertably that I did it.
It's too easy to edit EXIF data, and it's way too easy for someone to claim that a digital photograph is his, even if he didn't take it. BUT - if you have a 35mm negative of the same scene, same lighting conditions, nearly the same angle, etc... there's no way someone can credibly (and especially legally) claim that your work is theirs, unless the person can prove that he or she was standing right next to you at that moment in time when the photo was taken. This is especially true in such things as landscape phtography, where clouds and individual plant life characteristics are too unique.
With widespread image pirating (of film, art, you-name-it) a constant on the Internet, sometimes a bit of old-fashioned technology is your best defense (and an ISP will listen to you much more attentively if you let them know that you have a negative of the stolen image in your possession - otherwise it's your word against the pirate's).
I have waaaay too many Minolta lenses for my film cameras to not buy a new DSLR. Even if they stop making them, I'm quite sure that there are way too many silver nitrate addicts like myself who have lots of Minolta bodies, lenses, and accessories to simply ignore as a potential customer base.
And if they decide to cut us all off? Oh well - I'll still be using my shiny new Maxxum 5D (picking it up Saturday) until it finally dies and Sony decides to not support it anymore. This will likely be quite a long time, because in my experience almost every SLR I've owned was built to last. My old Maxxum 7, Maxxum 5, and Maxxum Qt-si are still cranking away after literal years of abuse (the old Maxxum 7 most of all - it's been beaten to within an inch of its life on my trips to the backcountry throughout the US West, and it still happily comes to life whenever I want it to).
Sad to see them go, though - it's kind of cool to have image stabilization without the need to buy image-stabilized lenses.
"Because installing OpenBSD/SPARC32 on one of those old systems is a complete slam-dunk."
That I can agree to, on most BSD's (I have 5.2 humming along on an old Netra t1 105 sitting next to my elbow - testing is a breeze on it). --BUT-- That said, FreeBSD 6 on an old Sparc sure is cranky when it smacks right into an old school HME interface...
Would this mean that BSD support is slipping too? dunno.
Yep - prolly as quiet as a corpse. The G5 Powermacs have way more than three fans (nine --yes, NINE fans-- in mine, counting the vidcards), and aside from a momentary "whoosh" when you cold-boot it (or remove the plastic inner-case panel, which causes all of 'em to go turbo-speed), the thing is far, far quieter than the P4-based PC next to it (which has the P/S Fan, the CPU fan, and the vidcard fan).
Noise is the last thing you'll ever have to worry about in a Mac desktop (laptops may be a different story, but the current Powerbooks are whisper quiet too...)
LOL! True - I forgot international differences. Over here it lurks alllllllll the way to the RH side; far enough away to be a pain in the butt, but not quite far enough away to justify letting one's fingers leave the home keys (like Backspace).
From TFA: " While this makes for an entertaining narrative, there is quantitative evidence to the contrary. The reality is that placing too much emphasis on individual players in the open source movement ignores overarching economic trends that drove open source development and adoption."
...most projects are run by a core of developers and (at least) maintainers who are individually reponsible for the care and feeding of a project. And while TFA goes on to say that "Furthermore, taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological "believers" is necessary for the continued success of open source software.", I submit that the beauty of Open Source is that if said individuals all gave up, evaporated, ran off to Tahiti, whatever, others can take the existing code and still develop/improve on it. A closed-source project is hosed once whoever owns it decides to not do anything about it anymore (e.g. the decision by MSFT to let WMP for Mac dry up and blow away)...
"What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project." ...that seems like a problem common to all software though, doesn't it? Even further, it seems like a problem endemic to large corporate structures in general (I suspect that, for instance, the Graphic artists wanting to modify XYZ artwork and photography for corporate use would also run into a similar brick wall as regards royalties, licensing, etc).
/P
BSD boxen, yes. I think they still do, but I'm not sure. I do recall they tried migrating to Exchange once, and had to switch back for a bit, but I think(?) that they've finally switched over to Exchange by now.
They've gone back to the command line? I wonder if it's SFU (Services for UNIX) where they at least have bash, or if they're having to wear out the "\" key and give their right pinky-finger carpal tunnel?/P
I agree when it comes to government, on the lower to middle levels at the very least.
However, I'm not basing my opinion on movies and fantasy, I'm basing it on news - Pravda and the BBC aren't exactly US propaganda outlets. (IMHO, FoxNews or CNN only get the story half-right when the story subject concerns anything outside the Western Hemisphere, so I tend not to rely on them for much outside of that arena.)
I'm not gratuitously bashing anyone per se, just telling it as I see it. Russia has a good chance of cleaning things up to the point where one doesn't have to bribe local officials and the local protection rackets just to avoid calamity, and in many areas it is possible to get a relative level of safety. OTOH, there are still too many other areas where such things are S.O.P.
See above response... it's (not by too much, but still) harder to actually attack a single "US Interest" that sits among many other larger ones, than to expose oneself as low-hanging fruit for the picking, as you would by placing a company office out in the middle of a semi-stable environment.
/P
Re:...Israel?
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My dear trolling AC - I've travelled quite a bit, even going to Saudi Arabia for business on occasion. (and I have two passports for that very reason. Can't get into KSA with an Israeli stamp on the critter, so you carry a second one.) So please, the 'yer just an ignorant provincial!' angle simply isn't going to cut it. Yes there is corruption on an ungodly scale in Russia. India is marginally safer (at least outside of Bollywood, where the mob is actually worse than the Russian Mafiya), but tends to have nasty bouts with industrial espionage all the same.
I won't claim the US or EU as pure by any means, but by comparison they're far safer places to store your company's future... it's a simple matter of record.
HTH a little,/P
...Israel?
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Politics aside, one would think that storing company trade secrets and/or data in a place that sees way too many explosives going off wouldn't be an obvious first choice.
Nothing against Israel (I personally support their efforts as one of the only democracies in the region, and they do have the toughest military on the planet), but one would think that the Middle East would be fairly low on the list of places to put one's IT future.
(Then again, considering the fights over the Kashmir in India, and the Mafia in Russia, etc etc... maybe it wouldn't be nearly as risky? As a guy in the US, The more one looks at it, the less one would sanely want to put their property at risk outside of US or EU borders in the first place...)
If the answer is "gamers", then consider this: If 20% more of my time is less than the profit from that additional 2%, then it would certainly be worth it.
If the answer is "desktop users", then the percentage is far higher than 2% for the combined users of Macs and Linux (something approaching 20% by now, I believe.) So yes, it would be worth the 20% extra time there as well.
To top it off, consider this as well, if you would: Who saays that you cannot expand the market by simply making the effort? This isn't a zero-sum game, after all.
I've always wondered about that... DirectX is pretty and all, but it's rather limiting (if only in a technical vs. marketing sort of way.)
While making broad "everybody should do it this way!" pronouncements are kinda silly, it does bear wondering why a company wouldn't want to grab all of a given market instead of just settling for a majority portion.
One would think that a software company would want to spread as far and wide as humanly possible...
Representative jargon of the typical 13-year-old aimbot jockey in FPS games... c'mon, I know you've had to have at least played CS or Quake2 at least once...
Slashdot Mirror
It's too easy to edit EXIF data, and it's way too easy for someone to claim that a digital photograph is his, even if he didn't take it. BUT - if you have a 35mm negative of the same scene, same lighting conditions, nearly the same angle, etc... there's no way someone can credibly (and especially legally) claim that your work is theirs, unless the person can prove that he or she was standing right next to you at that moment in time when the photo was taken. This is especially true in such things as landscape phtography, where clouds and individual plant life characteristics are too unique.
With widespread image pirating (of film, art, you-name-it) a constant on the Internet, sometimes a bit of old-fashioned technology is your best defense (and an ISP will listen to you much more attentively if you let them know that you have a negative of the stolen image in your possession - otherwise it's your word against the pirate's).
And if they decide to cut us all off? Oh well - I'll still be using my shiny new Maxxum 5D (picking it up Saturday) until it finally dies and Sony decides to not support it anymore. This will likely be quite a long time, because in my experience almost every SLR I've owned was built to last. My old Maxxum 7, Maxxum 5, and Maxxum Qt-si are still cranking away after literal years of abuse (the old Maxxum 7 most of all - it's been beaten to within an inch of its life on my trips to the backcountry throughout the US West, and it still happily comes to life whenever I want it to).
Sad to see them go, though - it's kind of cool to have image stabilization without the need to buy image-stabilized lenses.
That I can agree to, on most BSD's (I have 5.2 humming along on an old Netra t1 105 sitting next to my elbow - testing is a breeze on it). --BUT-- That said, FreeBSD 6 on an old Sparc sure is cranky when it smacks right into an old school HME interface...
Would this mean that BSD support is slipping too? dunno.
/P
Noise is the last thing you'll ever have to worry about in a Mac desktop (laptops may be a different story, but the current Powerbooks are whisper quiet too...)
/P
"What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project."
...that seems like a problem common to all software though, doesn't it? Even further, it seems like a problem endemic to large corporate structures in general (I suspect that, for instance, the Graphic artists wanting to modify XYZ artwork and photography for corporate use would also run into a similar brick wall as regards royalties, licensing, etc).
/P
BSD boxen, yes. I think they still do, but I'm not sure. I do recall they tried migrating to Exchange once, and had to switch back for a bit, but I think(?) that they've finally switched over to Exchange by now.
They've gone back to the command line? I wonder if it's SFU (Services for UNIX) where they at least have bash, or if they're having to wear out the "\" key and give their right pinky-finger carpal tunnel? /P
Small matter of potential vs. actualization, really :)
Here you go!
/P
(Oh, wait... you wanted 'em in a game...)
Population density?
So, aside from simple political polemic, what was the point you were trying to make? ;)
However, I'm not basing my opinion on movies and fantasy, I'm basing it on news - Pravda and the BBC aren't exactly US propaganda outlets. (IMHO, FoxNews or CNN only get the story half-right when the story subject concerns anything outside the Western Hemisphere, so I tend not to rely on them for much outside of that arena.)
I'm not gratuitously bashing anyone per se, just telling it as I see it. Russia has a good chance of cleaning things up to the point where one doesn't have to bribe local officials and the local protection rackets just to avoid calamity, and in many areas it is possible to get a relative level of safety. OTOH, there are still too many other areas where such things are S.O.P.
I won't claim the US or EU as pure by any means, but by comparison they're far safer places to store your company's future... it's a simple matter of record.
HTH a little, /P
Nothing against Israel (I personally support their efforts as one of the only democracies in the region, and they do have the toughest military on the planet), but one would think that the Middle East would be fairly low on the list of places to put one's IT future.
(Then again, considering the fights over the Kashmir in India, and the Mafia in Russia, etc etc... maybe it wouldn't be nearly as risky? As a guy in the US, The more one looks at it, the less one would sanely want to put their property at risk outside of US or EU borders in the first place...)
At home, they're TOYS!
If the answer is "gamers", then consider this: If 20% more of my time is less than the profit from that additional 2%, then it would certainly be worth it.
If the answer is "desktop users", then the percentage is far higher than 2% for the combined users of Macs and Linux (something approaching 20% by now, I believe.) So yes, it would be worth the 20% extra time there as well.
To top it off, consider this as well, if you would: Who saays that you cannot expand the market by simply making the effort? This isn't a zero-sum game, after all.
While making broad "everybody should do it this way!" pronouncements are kinda silly, it does bear wondering why a company wouldn't want to grab all of a given market instead of just settling for a majority portion.
One would think that a software company would want to spread as far and wide as humanly possible...