A camera is just a tool, and just like any tool, the results will depend on the skill of the person who weilds it, not on the cost/quality of the tool itself.
Right. So if I buy a power drill, it's going to offer me no actual benefit over the hand drill I've been using all these years.
To say there's no difference between an SLR and a consumer point-and-shoot camera, and that you'll be able to get the same pictures out of both, is just... dumb.
The tablet PC is partly driven by the same misguided notion that has driven many failed PC hardware and software developments: the belief, on the part of an older generation of CEO's, that there is something demeaning about using a keyboard.
Really? I thought the main idea was portability. Have you ever tried to walk from room to room with an open notebook, or do any kind of work on one when there's no flat surface in the room?
They need it to support older versions of Windows.
Ummm... I thought their whole upgrade-marketing strategy of late was that they don't support older versions of Windows?
Re:Digital Photography Review
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
be prepared...photograph is an expensive hobby!
Well, that's the ultimate question the poster is asking, isn't it?
Historically, traditional photography has been a "rich kid's pastime," too. Just ask anybody who goes to art school for illustration what they think of the photo majors.
The question is whether we've got to the point where, in terms of TCO, you will come up even whether you use a traditional camera or a digital one.
Sure, digital cameras are expensive. But they have advantages:
No film costs. Sure, you might have to buy CompactFlash, but those are completely re-usable.
No darkroom costs
Making hard copies of digital photographs can be expensive, but if you don't actually need hard copies (say, you're shooting for print publication), then you've got no costs there, either
Digital cameras are more versatile than traditional cameras. You don't need to change film to change light or speed settings, for instance. This might mean you really only need one camera, while a serious traditional photographer might feel the need to buy and keep several
Bear in mind that I'm not much of a photographer at all, so I'm sort of pulling this list out of my ass. But I've been wondering, lately, whether a nice camera like a digital SLR might allow me to take better pictures, which might in turn inspire me to take more pictures. I really don't think I want to fool around with all the darkrooms, developing, etc... I'm much more comfortable with Photoshop. So digital is definitely the way to go, for me.
But is an expensive digital camera really worth it yet?
OK, OK, obviously the market for this is companies that are tired of internal emails being leaked to sources outside the company... competitors, journalists, analysts, etc...
Hearsay like you describe is a lot less damning than having an actual copy of the email.
If you look good in a suit, and are comfortable wearing them, then by all means wear one to the meeting with the CEO, but if your not, don't
I agree to an extent. Somebody else brought up the argument about whether one should wear a suit to a job interview, and I indeed would not. If nothing else, I can't afford to buy a new wardrobe just to fit in at the workplace. My habit for interviews is to dress nicely, but not to dress "up" from how I'd dress on a normal workday.
But this seems to be an entirely different argument from the "making a presentation to a CEO" case. I'd argue that, if you can't handle wearing a suit to a meeting with a CEO, even for the (fairly valid) reasons you mention, then you're the wrong person to be talking to a CEO.
(Unless, that is, the CEO isn't the type to wear a suit either.)
At that point you're left arguing against euphoria from the obviously puritanical moral position that really does underlie many people's attitude's towards drug use. But, while those people will remain, by getting separating off the social evils of bad hygeine, dangerous paraphenalia and the medical compications of overdose, it should be much easier to win the majority over to the side of free choice.
Sure, I'll bite. I'm all for free choice.
If you came up with a way that you could spend your days sitting around your apartment doing heroin without any threat of spreading disease, without harming yourself such that you became a burden on the health system, without supporting underground economies that funnel money into much worse things than drugs, then I guess I might run out of reasons why such drugs should be regulated.
But you'd still be a loser. And the worst kind of arch-materialist, I might add. True "euphoria" does not come from a product you buy.
(I once attended a delightful talk he gave where, among other things, he gave sartorial advice to open source developers, urging them to avoid formal suits at presentations to CEO's as a way to give off the auras of foreign dignitaries unused to local customs).
Buh? How is sending the message to CEOs that you don't share their values/priorities (not to mention that you have no experience in making line-item purchasing decisions, even to the extent of getting yourself a decent suit) supposed to convince them that you're worth listening to? Seems to me that they've taken the time to develop the business plans... it's up to you to convince them how your product will fit into those plans, not that it hovers around in some everything-is-dandy fantasy land, ignorant of how 90 percent of the world does business.
Seriously, can somebody explain his rationale on this one?
I noticed the same behavior on my mom's iMac as well, so it's not necessarily a port-specific problem. I think Apple needs to figure out a way to optimize that part of their code...
Or rewrite it to run better on machines that aren't Macs. If I'm not mistaken, on Mac OS X they optimize it by offloading a lot of the graphics work to the video card (provided it's an AGP card from one of a couple of different vendors, that meets certain specifications). On Mac OS 9 they never had to optimize it, because holding down the mouse button in Mac OS 9 (as when dragging anything) halts all other background tasks anyway.
The thing is, though, that Microsoft's driver APIs have to remain stable if they're going to get hardware manufacturers to write drivers for them. If they start making changes that break this driver compatibility layer, then they also break current drivers.
Well, Apple has done this regularly, so I don't see why Microsoft wouldn't. I think it was the release of Mac OS X 10.2 ("Jaguar") that broke everybody's printer drivers... printers that used to work with the earlier versions. Apple works with the major inket manufacturers (Epson, HP) to get drivers on the OS distro discs, but vendors who were on the fence about supporting the Mac OS anyway (Brother) were left in the cold.
Yeah, well, you guys -- go figure. Like I said, I live in a studio apartment. It's something like 500 square feet. I don't need a lot of lights to light the place. I don't have an electric heater, and living in California, the weather's more "put on a sweater" than "get some heat going in here" (at least it seems that way to me, having been born in Halifax). Fortunately, my fridge seems to be fairly energy-efficient.
Other things I don't have: an electric stove (mine's a gas range). A dishwasher. A washer/dryer (yup, it's time to hump it down to the laundromat). A girlfriend who uses a hair dryer. Grow lamps. Etc.
Maybe my 50 percent figure was exaggerated on the year-round scale, but in the summer there's no reason why my electric bill won't be about USD16.50.
Well, if that's true, then let me put a word in for my recently-purchased Fujitsu laptop. It not only goes in and out of Standby without a hitch, but it also seems to support Hibernate mode with no problems whatsoever. (Hibernate is like a Sleep mode where it writes all the system memory to the hard drive and powers down. You can still drain your battery on Standby/Sleep, but a Hibernated computer is drawing no power. It restarts in about 6 seconds.) And this is with a stock Windows XP Pro install, overwriting the XP Home that came pre-installed on the drive.
'Well, we didn't hire him because his additude didn't seem right for our team... And we wish him the best of luck with his imminent bout with cancer.'
You kiddin'? If anything, in the tech economy this would be a bonus. I mean, who wants to have to keep 'em around when they're in their fifties, starting to carp about crap like better hours, healthcare and pensions?
I know I'm a crazy lunatic for saying this, but I still either switch my Mac off or (most often) put it to Sleep when I'm not actively using it. Why? For a while, I left it on and used DynDNS to run a server off it. When I got my electric bill for that month, it was roughly 50 percent more than what it had been the month before. Yikes!
Now, I live in a studio apartment, which means (I think) my rates are adjusted differently than are those for family dwellings. I also never use electric heaters, don't really switch on the lights during the day, etc. So yeah, my electric bill is always pretty low.
Still, it seemed to me that running a server out of my house was going to cost me something like $6-10 a month. For that price, it seemed like I may as well go out and get shared hosting somewhere, and spare myself the constant hum of the fan...
My favorite quote: 'At the end of the day, I still wish we had a viable alternative. There isn't one -- yet. We'll keep looking.' - Sure.
You liked that bit, did you? Did you read the part where he said this:
We use Linux on Web/DNS/DHCP servers and on our archive system. We've looked at Linux as a replacement desktop for our 165+ users. What we've found is roughly 5% of our users would be good candidates for Linux, requiring very little handholding after initial training. The rest, well, we don't have enough staff to handle the workload it would take to train and hold hands for the rest.
Once again, another case where a four-page rant is used when a simple, two-paragraph response -- or better still, conspicuous silence -- would have sufficed. If anything, you should have had a lawyer draft a formal acknowledgment and refusal of the C&D letter.
By sending a letter like this one, written by yourself, complete with atrocious grammar, it seems to me that all you're doing is sending Roland the message that you feel you're legally in the right but have not contacted an attorney. In other words, you're just chumming the waters.
... time zones, demand, and communications barriers will make India less attractive to outsource to.
Only if they get complacent. So long as you can ship a task to coders in India at 5pm on a Friday night and have it on your desk like clockwork by Monday morning -- if not Sunday afternoon -- there will be a place for offshore development.
Microsoft's abundance of patches indicates poor design and methodology, period.
Oh, for Pete's sake. And I suppose you've never patched anything on your Linux box, right? You just installed Mandrake 8 and hummed merrily along until Mandrake 9 came out, and your toes have been tapping ever since? Please. I mean, I agree Microsoft software kinda sucks, but this kind of argument isn't about to win any converts.
Ok, so rather than design the apps safely out of the box, we need to handcuff the users and do the dirty work ourselves. I guess all those Outlook viruses were our fault.
Yeah, I'm sure glad they got email right on Unix for the start. That Sendmail, whew! Microsoft can only dream of a design as robust as that.
Lately I've been noticing a lot of posts that contain URLs with unnecessary spaces in them. The parent of this post is an example. You have to remove the space for it to work. What's going on here? Is this something the Slash code is doing for some reason, or do otherwise intelligent people really randomly hit the space bar when typing in URLs?
Slashdot Mirror
To say there's no difference between an SLR and a consumer point-and-shoot camera, and that you'll be able to get the same pictures out of both, is just ... dumb.
I'll buy that they want to incorporate server virtualization into a future release, but "kill VMWare"? How could that possibly be the motive?
Ummm... I thought their whole upgrade-marketing strategy of late was that they don't support older versions of Windows?
Well, that's the ultimate question the poster is asking, isn't it?
Historically, traditional photography has been a "rich kid's pastime," too. Just ask anybody who goes to art school for illustration what they think of the photo majors.
The question is whether we've got to the point where, in terms of TCO, you will come up even whether you use a traditional camera or a digital one.
Sure, digital cameras are expensive. But they have advantages:
- No film costs. Sure, you might have to buy CompactFlash, but those are completely re-usable.
- No darkroom costs
- Making hard copies of digital photographs can be expensive, but if you don't actually need hard copies (say, you're shooting for print publication), then you've got no costs there, either
- Digital cameras are more versatile than traditional cameras. You don't need to change film to change light or speed settings, for instance. This might mean you really only need one camera, while a serious traditional photographer might feel the need to buy and keep several
Bear in mind that I'm not much of a photographer at all, so I'm sort of pulling this list out of my ass. But I've been wondering, lately, whether a nice camera like a digital SLR might allow me to take better pictures, which might in turn inspire me to take more pictures. I really don't think I want to fool around with all the darkrooms, developing, etc... I'm much more comfortable with Photoshop. So digital is definitely the way to go, for me.But is an expensive digital camera really worth it yet?
Not true! There was an Office 98 for Mac, an Office 2001 for Mac, and then we got Office X.
But there's no Office 2000 for Mac. Oh, the confusion!
OK, OK, obviously the market for this is companies that are tired of internal emails being leaked to sources outside the company ... competitors, journalists, analysts, etc...
Hearsay like you describe is a lot less damning than having an actual copy of the email.
I agree to an extent. Somebody else brought up the argument about whether one should wear a suit to a job interview, and I indeed would not. If nothing else, I can't afford to buy a new wardrobe just to fit in at the workplace. My habit for interviews is to dress nicely, but not to dress "up" from how I'd dress on a normal workday.
But this seems to be an entirely different argument from the "making a presentation to a CEO" case. I'd argue that, if you can't handle wearing a suit to a meeting with a CEO, even for the (fairly valid) reasons you mention, then you're the wrong person to be talking to a CEO.
(Unless, that is, the CEO isn't the type to wear a suit either.)
Sure, I'll bite. I'm all for free choice.
If you came up with a way that you could spend your days sitting around your apartment doing heroin without any threat of spreading disease, without harming yourself such that you became a burden on the health system, without supporting underground economies that funnel money into much worse things than drugs, then I guess I might run out of reasons why such drugs should be regulated.
But you'd still be a loser. And the worst kind of arch-materialist, I might add. True "euphoria" does not come from a product you buy.
Buh? How is sending the message to CEOs that you don't share their values/priorities (not to mention that you have no experience in making line-item purchasing decisions, even to the extent of getting yourself a decent suit) supposed to convince them that you're worth listening to? Seems to me that they've taken the time to develop the business plans ... it's up to you to convince them how your product will fit into those plans, not that it hovers around in some everything-is-dandy fantasy land, ignorant of how 90 percent of the world does business.
Seriously, can somebody explain his rationale on this one?
Or rewrite it to run better on machines that aren't Macs. If I'm not mistaken, on Mac OS X they optimize it by offloading a lot of the graphics work to the video card (provided it's an AGP card from one of a couple of different vendors, that meets certain specifications). On Mac OS 9 they never had to optimize it, because holding down the mouse button in Mac OS 9 (as when dragging anything) halts all other background tasks anyway.
Well, Apple has done this regularly, so I don't see why Microsoft wouldn't. I think it was the release of Mac OS X 10.2 ("Jaguar") that broke everybody's printer drivers ... printers that used to work with the earlier versions. Apple works with the major inket manufacturers (Epson, HP) to get drivers on the OS distro discs, but vendors who were on the fence about supporting the Mac OS anyway (Brother) were left in the cold.
Yeah, well, you guys -- go figure. Like I said, I live in a studio apartment. It's something like 500 square feet. I don't need a lot of lights to light the place. I don't have an electric heater, and living in California, the weather's more "put on a sweater" than "get some heat going in here" (at least it seems that way to me, having been born in Halifax). Fortunately, my fridge seems to be fairly energy-efficient.
Other things I don't have: an electric stove (mine's a gas range). A dishwasher. A washer/dryer (yup, it's time to hump it down to the laundromat). A girlfriend who uses a hair dryer. Grow lamps. Etc.
Maybe my 50 percent figure was exaggerated on the year-round scale, but in the summer there's no reason why my electric bill won't be about USD16.50.
Well, if that's true, then let me put a word in for my recently-purchased Fujitsu laptop. It not only goes in and out of Standby without a hitch, but it also seems to support Hibernate mode with no problems whatsoever. (Hibernate is like a Sleep mode where it writes all the system memory to the hard drive and powers down. You can still drain your battery on Standby/Sleep, but a Hibernated computer is drawing no power. It restarts in about 6 seconds.) And this is with a stock Windows XP Pro install, overwriting the XP Home that came pre-installed on the drive.
Now, I live in a studio apartment, which means (I think) my rates are adjusted differently than are those for family dwellings. I also never use electric heaters, don't really switch on the lights during the day, etc. So yeah, my electric bill is always pretty low.
Still, it seemed to me that running a server out of my house was going to cost me something like $6-10 a month. For that price, it seemed like I may as well go out and get shared hosting somewhere, and spare myself the constant hum of the fan...
Pedants typically read.
Once again, another case where a four-page rant is used when a simple, two-paragraph response -- or better still, conspicuous silence -- would have sufficed. If anything, you should have had a lawyer draft a formal acknowledgment and refusal of the C&D letter.
By sending a letter like this one, written by yourself, complete with atrocious grammar, it seems to me that all you're doing is sending Roland the message that you feel you're legally in the right but have not contacted an attorney. In other words, you're just chumming the waters.
Lately I've been noticing a lot of posts that contain URLs with unnecessary spaces in them. The parent of this post is an example. You have to remove the space for it to work. What's going on here? Is this something the Slash code is doing for some reason, or do otherwise intelligent people really randomly hit the space bar when typing in URLs?
Q: What would Isaac Newton be doing, if he were alive today?
A: Clawing at the lid of his coffin.
If I were drinking for the taste, I wouldn't pour all that Coke in it.