I also don't want my photo library to depend on some secret file format that may end up being completely unsupported and unreadable in ten years' time. What if Linux takes over the desktop, but Nikon decide not to bother with a file format reader for Linux? What if Nikon go out of business, and Windows 2010 can't run the plugin to read your library of thousands of images?
And don't think this is some far-fetched scenario. I bought their LS-2000 film scanner a bunch of years ago, with a 50 slide batch feeder. It was an awesome piece of hardware, but the software always sucked. You couldn't use the batch feeder particularly usefully, because the software wouldn't allow you to do an autoexposure operation before each scan, the way you could when scanning negs or individual slides. (Yes, you had to expose the WHOLE set of slides at the same exposure. Mind-boggling.) I had to write a ridiculous AppleScript to simulate mouse clicks in particular locations to get it to work.
Anyway, that's not my point. The LS-2000 was connected to the computer via SCSI. About a year or two after I bought it, Nikon came out with the newer line of scanners that used FireWire or USB instead of SCSI. Almost immediately after that, they stopped supporting SCSI scanners in the new versions of their software. And THEN they fixed the software so that you could do the autoexposure operation before each scan.
So I got stuck with a scanner that could never perform it's main function well and that's no longer supported by their proprietary software. And now they want to tell me that they're going to encrypt the files coming out of their digital cameras? It's hard enough to get good information out of the NEF files coming out of my D70 as it is without using their slow, shoddy software. If you're not locked in by lens purchases, DON'T BUY from a company that's so hostile to its customers as this!
I'm so fed up with Nikon I'm about ready to sell all my lenses and cameras and film scanner and move to Canon entirely. Their approach to technology is so unbelievably inept it makes me sick. My only hope is that a company as large and public as Adobe can turn around Nikon's attitude by making people more aware of stupid policies like this.
Why do people even listen to these organizations? I suppose you know their bias from the outset, rather than having to 'read between the lines' of other organizations.
A better question is why people take articles like this, that obviously display no journalistic integrity, as legitimate sources of news. Come on, an article that's basically a press release from a group of companies, that's clearly selfishly motivated, with several quotes from the companies behind the statement but none from the Linux world? What kind of reporting is that?
Thanks Microsoft! Just your STATEMENTS make systems less secure (nevermind your engineering).
You know, funny though that statement may be, it's really pretty insightful. That Microsoft's public stance is like this reflects their lack of concern and realization about the real issues surrounding security. This may be simple marketing FUD, but a smart IT purchaser would take into account the lack of gravity implicit in Microsoft's statements when evaluating future purchases.
There's something fundamentally wrong with the way Microsoft thinks about security, as evidenced perhaps most dramatically by the fact that they made the long-time hoax of the email virus possible, followed by many similar gaffes since then.
Well, I'd like to see the results of the follow-up study that tests whether girl monkeys will pay to see boy monkey butts. That seems like it would be much more interesting, given the results of this study.
You know, wandernotlost, things like this make me realize that what the ruling majority in America seems to want is not freedom, but more restrictions on what people can do. Don't you think it's funny, in a grotesque, sort of depressing way, that this country was founded with the aim of escaping a dictator who tried to impose religious control (among lots of other things) on people, yet now the government, with the support of about half the people, seeks to impose restrictions on people, those restrictions having a largely religious basis?
I'm so SICK AND TIRED of being told what I can and can't watch/hear by other people. I wish there was someplace left on this earth I could go start my own nation./sigh
Uh, no need to start your own country. Just go to a country other than the US. When I was in Venezuela I saw the same show I had seen in the US (which was produced in the US) but it hadn't been edited and blurred to remove potentially arousing body parts (and boy, did I suffer some severe psychological damage from being exposed to those nipples). Most other countries that I've been to don't seem to have the same kind of puritanical restrictions on broadcast media that we do in the US.
I think it's both, really. I drove my good CRT at something like 85Hz, and it still drove me nuts. Now I have an LCD on a crappy analog card and it's not so great either, because the pixels aren't sharp and my eyes try to make them such.
My LCDs now are of the 12ms refresh variety, so they don't seem to have motion issues, but I also don't play games much, so I can't really speak to that. Probably 80% of what I do is text-editing or reading text, with the rest being filled by photo proofing and miscellaneous junk.
That's what I've used. I'm talking about high-end CRTs here. Can't stand 'em. I guess it doesn't hurt that I have 20/15 vision, so the blurry pixels make my eyes strain. Even the LCD I'm using that's (temporarily) hooked up to a VGA connector rather than DVI is too blurry for my taste, although it's still better than a CRT.
Say whaat? CRTs better picture quality who? Am I the only one who abhors CRT screens? Perhaps they're good for TV, but for computer use, to my eyes LCD screens win hands down in every respect. Since when are fuzzy pixels and flickering pictures "better picture quality?" Even for photo editing, I'd take a high-contrast quality LCD over a CRT in a heartbeat.
I'm glad someone's on this. The scariest thing about all these new voting technologies is the idea that if something were to go wrong, intentionally or otherwise, we wouldn't even find out about it.
I doubt it. This seems like a new trend. Microsoft says that their security holes are the fault of the users. Voting machine vendors say that problems are the fault of the users. People in this country are divided enough, and complacent enough, that the bad voting machines will get in anyway, and snippets like this will assuage people enough that they won't be outraged.
The scary part is that we'll probably never know whether or not it's been rigged.
It doesn't take a presidential candidate to answer that one, and I think Kerry's stated his position on that before. In order to support the Kyoto Protocol, you invest in the research and creation of technologies that reduce power consumption. You work to make America the leader in energy-efficient technologies, thereby creating/fueling a whole industry, and making it cheaper for other industries to do business.
Create jobs and save the environment in one shot. It could just be crazy enough to work!
That's just another chicken and egg problem. If it were easier to get addresses and host things, more people would do it, and new applications that took advantage of the capability would crop up. As it is, hosting is inaccessible to the average person because it's difficult, in part by the lack of addresses.
1. Get a dictionary. 2. Look up "decimate". Note the part about "to destroy a considerable part of." 3. Look up "metaphor". 4. If it is still bugging you, look up "pedant".
As I said in a previous post, when you're talking about Microsoft, which is really whom we're talking about, the trademark isn't as strong. Microsoft has enough money and clout to put out something that's close enough to draw people in but different enough to thwart Write Once, Run Anywhere, and to have it be adopted under a slightly different name. Take GNU (GNU's Not Unix), for example. Close, but not actually UNIX. GNU has an incentive to be compatible with UNIX. MS has a counterincentive to be compatible with Java. All MS has to do is call it MUNJ (Microsoft UN-Java) or J++ and say it's better than Java but not actually Java and bundle it with Windows and now you have a divided market, with half the Java software only working on Windows.
Instead, Sun needs to write something into the Open Source license which guarantees some level of compatibility to be permitted redistribution. So MS can create extensions, but you must be warned prominently and frequently that those extensions won't work with Java, and whatever MS puts out must be able to compile standard Java in a way that's compatible with a standard runtime environment.
They don't even need to do it in the license, they can do it just fine with trademarks.
I'm not so sure. Assuming that Microsoft is the one Sun's worried about, MS has enough clout and money to circumvent the trademark issue. They could just call it J++ or whatever and say that it's an improved form of Java (but not Java, in small print).
I'm not sure Unix is a great example either. Case in point: GNU/Linux (hint: GNU's Not UNIX). With enough following or market force (of which Microsoft has both), the trademark becomes of marginal importance. GNU/Linux maintain compatibility with UNIX because it's in their best interest to do so, for the most part. Microsoft would have the opposite interest, as all it would take is a major incompatible fork to fragment the market and ruin the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" promise.
Code forks because Microsoft wants to take over or fragment the market by creating an incompatible implementation, as it has done before. I think that's what Sun's primary concern is.
Anyway, why is this so difficult? Can't they just add a term to an open source license that says that compatibility has to be maintained in some form and to some degree, verifiable by third parties? Sure, this brings up the issue of how to test for that, but that's what the compatibility test set is for, right? If someone complains about incompatibility, they test the code in question and send of cease and desists for redistribution until the problem is solved. As long as it doesn't place an undue burden on people who are honestly trying to maintain compatibility, I don't see why this couldn't work. (Though I expect that someone else here will. Anyone?)
Slashdot Mirror
And don't think this is some far-fetched scenario. I bought their LS-2000 film scanner a bunch of years ago, with a 50 slide batch feeder. It was an awesome piece of hardware, but the software always sucked. You couldn't use the batch feeder particularly usefully, because the software wouldn't allow you to do an autoexposure operation before each scan, the way you could when scanning negs or individual slides. (Yes, you had to expose the WHOLE set of slides at the same exposure. Mind-boggling.) I had to write a ridiculous AppleScript to simulate mouse clicks in particular locations to get it to work.
Anyway, that's not my point. The LS-2000 was connected to the computer via SCSI. About a year or two after I bought it, Nikon came out with the newer line of scanners that used FireWire or USB instead of SCSI. Almost immediately after that, they stopped supporting SCSI scanners in the new versions of their software. And THEN they fixed the software so that you could do the autoexposure operation before each scan.
So I got stuck with a scanner that could never perform it's main function well and that's no longer supported by their proprietary software. And now they want to tell me that they're going to encrypt the files coming out of their digital cameras? It's hard enough to get good information out of the NEF files coming out of my D70 as it is without using their slow, shoddy software. If you're not locked in by lens purchases, DON'T BUY from a company that's so hostile to its customers as this!
I'm so fed up with Nikon I'm about ready to sell all my lenses and cameras and film scanner and move to Canon entirely. Their approach to technology is so unbelievably inept it makes me sick. My only hope is that a company as large and public as Adobe can turn around Nikon's attitude by making people more aware of stupid policies like this.
A better question is why people take articles like this, that obviously display no journalistic integrity, as legitimate sources of news. Come on, an article that's basically a press release from a group of companies, that's clearly selfishly motivated, with several quotes from the companies behind the statement but none from the Linux world? What kind of reporting is that?
They must have read my complaints in my away message.
You know, funny though that statement may be, it's really pretty insightful. That Microsoft's public stance is like this reflects their lack of concern and realization about the real issues surrounding security. This may be simple marketing FUD, but a smart IT purchaser would take into account the lack of gravity implicit in Microsoft's statements when evaluating future purchases.
There's something fundamentally wrong with the way Microsoft thinks about security, as evidenced perhaps most dramatically by the fact that they made the long-time hoax of the email virus possible, followed by many similar gaffes since then.
Well, I'd like to see the results of the follow-up study that tests whether girl monkeys will pay to see boy monkey butts. That seems like it would be much more interesting, given the results of this study.
I welcome the charity based wang measure-off. Much better than, say, using car size and/or inefficiency as a projection of wang dimensions.
Why yes, I rather think it is.
You know, wandernotlost, things like this make me realize that what the ruling majority in America seems to want is not freedom, but more restrictions on what people can do. Don't you think it's funny, in a grotesque, sort of depressing way, that this country was founded with the aim of escaping a dictator who tried to impose religious control (among lots of other things) on people, yet now the government, with the support of about half the people, seeks to impose restrictions on people, those restrictions having a largely religious basis?
Uh, no need to start your own country. Just go to a country other than the US. When I was in Venezuela I saw the same show I had seen in the US (which was produced in the US) but it hadn't been edited and blurred to remove potentially arousing body parts (and boy, did I suffer some severe psychological damage from being exposed to those nipples). Most other countries that I've been to don't seem to have the same kind of puritanical restrictions on broadcast media that we do in the US.
I think it's both, really. I drove my good CRT at something like 85Hz, and it still drove me nuts. Now I have an LCD on a crappy analog card and it's not so great either, because the pixels aren't sharp and my eyes try to make them such.
My LCDs now are of the 12ms refresh variety, so they don't seem to have motion issues, but I also don't play games much, so I can't really speak to that. Probably 80% of what I do is text-editing or reading text, with the rest being filled by photo proofing and miscellaneous junk.
That's what I've used. I'm talking about high-end CRTs here. Can't stand 'em. I guess it doesn't hurt that I have 20/15 vision, so the blurry pixels make my eyes strain. Even the LCD I'm using that's (temporarily) hooked up to a VGA connector rather than DVI is too blurry for my taste, although it's still better than a CRT.
Say whaat? CRTs better picture quality who? Am I the only one who abhors CRT screens? Perhaps they're good for TV, but for computer use, to my eyes LCD screens win hands down in every respect. Since when are fuzzy pixels and flickering pictures "better picture quality?" Even for photo editing, I'd take a high-contrast quality LCD over a CRT in a heartbeat.
I'm glad someone's on this. The scariest thing about all these new voting technologies is the idea that if something were to go wrong, intentionally or otherwise, we wouldn't even find out about it.
I doubt it. This seems like a new trend. Microsoft says that their security holes are the fault of the users. Voting machine vendors say that problems are the fault of the users. People in this country are divided enough, and complacent enough, that the bad voting machines will get in anyway, and snippets like this will assuage people enough that they won't be outraged.
The scary part is that we'll probably never know whether or not it's been rigged.
It doesn't take a presidential candidate to answer that one, and I think Kerry's stated his position on that before. In order to support the Kyoto Protocol, you invest in the research and creation of technologies that reduce power consumption. You work to make America the leader in energy-efficient technologies, thereby creating/fueling a whole industry, and making it cheaper for other industries to do business.
Create jobs and save the environment in one shot. It could just be crazy enough to work!
Digital Negative Specification...shouldn't that be DNS?
Hmmm.
Dude, I could be wrong, but I don't think that's French.
That's just another chicken and egg problem. If it were easier to get addresses and host things, more people would do it, and new applications that took advantage of the capability would crop up. As it is, hosting is inaccessible to the average person because it's difficult, in part by the lack of addresses.
Niice. Confronted with hard evidence that your points are faulty, you stop reading. Way to stand behind those convictions!
Maybe it's time to rethink some of those conclusions in light of the demonstrable truth.
I hope they do start charging for it. Perhaps then people will finally move to an open standard such as Jabber.
1. Get a dictionary.
2. Look up "decimate". Note the part about "to destroy a considerable part of."
3. Look up "metaphor".
4. If it is still bugging you, look up "pedant".
At the end of the page:
"It is not possible to react on this item."
As I said in a previous post, when you're talking about Microsoft, which is really whom we're talking about, the trademark isn't as strong. Microsoft has enough money and clout to put out something that's close enough to draw people in but different enough to thwart Write Once, Run Anywhere, and to have it be adopted under a slightly different name. Take GNU (GNU's Not Unix), for example. Close, but not actually UNIX. GNU has an incentive to be compatible with UNIX. MS has a counterincentive to be compatible with Java. All MS has to do is call it MUNJ (Microsoft UN-Java) or J++ and say it's better than Java but not actually Java and bundle it with Windows and now you have a divided market, with half the Java software only working on Windows.
Instead, Sun needs to write something into the Open Source license which guarantees some level of compatibility to be permitted redistribution. So MS can create extensions, but you must be warned prominently and frequently that those extensions won't work with Java, and whatever MS puts out must be able to compile standard Java in a way that's compatible with a standard runtime environment.
I'm not so sure. Assuming that Microsoft is the one Sun's worried about, MS has enough clout and money to circumvent the trademark issue. They could just call it J++ or whatever and say that it's an improved form of Java (but not Java, in small print).
I'm not sure Unix is a great example either. Case in point: GNU/Linux (hint: GNU's Not UNIX). With enough following or market force (of which Microsoft has both), the trademark becomes of marginal importance. GNU/Linux maintain compatibility with UNIX because it's in their best interest to do so, for the most part. Microsoft would have the opposite interest, as all it would take is a major incompatible fork to fragment the market and ruin the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" promise.
Code forks because Microsoft wants to take over or fragment the market by creating an incompatible implementation, as it has done before. I think that's what Sun's primary concern is.
Anyway, why is this so difficult? Can't they just add a term to an open source license that says that compatibility has to be maintained in some form and to some degree, verifiable by third parties? Sure, this brings up the issue of how to test for that, but that's what the compatibility test set is for, right? If someone complains about incompatibility, they test the code in question and send of cease and desists for redistribution until the problem is solved. As long as it doesn't place an undue burden on people who are honestly trying to maintain compatibility, I don't see why this couldn't work. (Though I expect that someone else here will. Anyone?)