Auto isn't so bad. It can sometimes outdo an experienced photographer because the more experienced you are the more you're going to want to tweak your settings and sometimes the camera's more conservative one size fits all approach does better.
I would like to see smarter auto modes with more control though....something like a rules based setup. For example being able to instruct the camera something like as follows. 1. Don't over/under-expose by more than 1 stop. 2. Don't increase ISO beyond 400 3. And if you can don't drop shutter below 1/focal length 4....and if you can keep aperture above f/8
So 2 and 3 you could almost do today with shutter priority (if you manually work out focal length), but you can't also request 4. Or you could do 3 and 4 with aperture but 3 is ignored Or you could do all 2, 3, 4 with manual (and auto ISO) except the "if you can" part would be ignored and it would blow highlights if you over-exposed.
Go grab a copy of "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson and the rest will fall into place. (Unless you intend to use external lighting, in which case you've got plenty of time to learn that too.)
That long winded over-rated piece of crap has probably put more people off photography than most, but it seems to have a cult following.
There is a LOT more to photography than those 3 variables you mention, but they are a good start. However don't over-simplify by saying that's all there is to it. For instance focal length matters on a lot of levels (it affects scene compression and depth of field for a start), exposure modes, continuous vs single shot, automatic exposure compensation like auto ISO, and there is a WHOLE WORLD of new stuff to learn when you embark on properly using the flash, because now you are
the mirror is outdated - QED. that technology is simply extra parts when you think about how a digital camera works. there really is zero reason to have a mirror in the camera, all it does is make the device bigger and heavier. look into the micro 4/3rds line of camera, i love the G1 that i have. camera + 3 lenses comes to ~$1200 total, giving me everything from 16mm to 400mm. and it doesnt hurt my back when im walking around with the kit
EVF and other compromises are atrocious for low light. Until they get better it won't be outdated. I look forward to that day.
I'm an ex professional newspaper and sports photographer... and my main camera is the LX5 too... quality is amazing, leica lens, 24mm wide angle, HD video, low noise, good screen.
DSLR is great, but it's a pain in the butt to carry around. Unless you go out SPECIFICALLY to take pictures, something like the Lumix LX5 is more than enough. There's a great blog post on this:
Well if you use to shoot sports you should know better than advocating that a point and shoot is more than enough. Try shooting sports one sometime - very limiting.
I wouldn't recommend Firefox to anyone anymore. Mozilla really screwed the pooch. Unwillingness to fix long standing bugs. Blaming extensions for bugs when they created the extension system that allowed them. Forced changes with no option to configure sensible defaults (AWFUL bar, status bar changes etc). UI constantly changing for the sake of change. Lack of willingness to listen to users. Version numbering madness. Extensions breaking with every release. Screw that. I'm writing this on Firefox 3.6. I've tried 4, 5, and 7 and they aren't worth the effort so I'm ditching the browser the moment I can't use 3.6.
To Mozilla: Thank you for providing such a wonderful browser. FUCK YOU for fucking it up so badly. Yes, it's free, but that doesn't mean you can get me hooked on a good product then ruin it without me having strong feelings about it.
Yes I'm aware of that, but a fuzzy blob of light is not "Direct imaging ala popular sci-fi" that I was speaking of. Very impressive, but not what I'm talking about.
Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Advanced Server has deduplication (licensed addon) and runs on Linux. At roughly $2000 it ain't cheap. I've never used it so can't comment on how well it does.
Man, this stuff used to be practically sci-fi, now it seems to happen all the time.
Not to belittle these achievements but the state of the tech has developed. Direct imaging ala popular sci-fi is still a way off if it will ever be achieved but we have several good methods for determining the existence of exoplanets and a couple allow confirmation, so these discoveries will continue for the foreseeable future (or at least until all the big budget astronomy is culled due to the "economic crisis").
and two weeks later the psu blows killing the pc.. never skimp on a power supply.
I've owned a lot of PCs and in the last 2 decades and usually have at least one running 24x7 when I'm not away on holiday. I've had exactly 4 PSUs blow. 4 were cheap, 1 was very expensive, and none of them took out the system attached. Perhaps I've just been lucky.
Movies are popular attractions for dates*. You can take a date to a bad movie, and won't necessarily reflect poorly upon you. But if you take a date to a bad movie because happened to be cheaper than a putative good movie, you're just not getting laid**.
You've just run afoul of syousef's law, also known as the first rule of slashdot club: Anyone who posts advice on how to get laid on slashdot is the sort of person that shouldn't be giving advice on how to get laid to anyone, let alone the repressed predominately male population that comprises slashdot.
If you put down PA to Steven Hawking on your resume, a lot of future employers will just read PA.
That really depends on which future employers you're applying to, now doesn't it? Seems to me the ones that would read "PA" and miss "to Stephen Hawking" wouldn't be the ones that people applying for this job would be applying to in the future.
Seems to me that the employers that care that it was Steven Hawking would see that all you were was his PA and you still wouldn't get a look in.
I see you're still trying to distill everything into dollars. That is not at all what I am talking about.
No I'm trying to distill everything into tangible benefit. That doesn't necessarily mean a high paying job, but if people only see the PA part, you won't make any contacts or get any other kind of recognition that may lead to opportunities - well paid or otherwise.
In a civilized society everyone is subsidized (otherwise it's law of the jungle). Also most people have vices of one kind or another.
Where do I sign up for subsidized motorcycle insurance for my crotch rocket?!
Here I was riding a regular motorcycle like an idiot when I could apparently ride a far more powerful and fun cycle for no additional cost!
[ I should also inquire with my insurance company why it would cost thousands more to insure the sportbike given that apparently I'm entitled to the same rate no matter what risk I take! ]
Reductio ad absurdum is a pissweak way to argue. You already are subsidized. Motorcycles are tolerated and legal even though the accident rate and the medical burden on society is much higher than for cars.
Strawman is an even weaker way to argue. At no stage did I say no matter what choices you made you should be charged "the same rate". Obese people are charged higher rates for medical, income and life insurance, find it more difficult to get work because they are seen as a medical risk etc.
Try making an actual argument that is logically defensible.
Your theory collapses when the baby comes out with features that make it obvious the woman has cheated - ethnicity being one obvious one. If a wife husband are European and the baby comes out with black or Asian features that's going to be hard to explain away. There is always the threat that if indisgression is discovered either sex will withdraw support and dissolve the union. If you take a look at happiness I guarantee you that once a certain age is reached it's not the playboys or cheats that are happiest. A happy stable home is the best way to improve your children's prospects of flourishing. Children of unhappy, broken, and multiple marriages tend to have more issues.
Also wet wiring does not evolve to adjust so easily.
Genetic diversity considered good by biologists, but bad by social standards... Guess which is wrong? (Hint: It's not evolution.)
Good luck finding a girl so dumb that she believes your twisted and unscientific views. Genetic diversity does not mean fucking everything that moves. The offspring you have has to survive to adulthood if you are to pass on your genes, and pissing off to chase down and impregnate another woman puts your current offspring at a disadvantage. You can play the numbers all you like but a single good bet is a lot better than a few dozen bad ones. Nature uses both approaches of course but you really need to have litters if you're going to play numbers games that way.
My 2 year old isn't quite so disciplined. I prefer not to teach him about danger by letting him roam free amongst 1500kg child flatteners. When I was a child drivers could see out their back windows when they reverse out of a carpark without the need for an optional reversing camera in their 2 metre tall SUV.
Then don't let him roam free. That is the point. If my son didn't have his head screwed on right, he'd be in my hand the whole time.,,,and don't kid yourself - old cars were MUCH less safe than new ones. It's just that every kid injured wasn't reported on the news as a tragedy and a reason for new laws/fines, gadgets to be bought and taxes to be collected.
Turing0, how much were you paying for your Google Health? what service guarantee did you get for your paid contract with them? Oh, $0 and nothing. Quit your whining, so a free trial balloon was cancelled, pony up some bucks for an equivalent service with a vendor and then you'll have a right to complain about service or lack thereof.
If free is justification for ****ing over your customer, that is a good reason to never use or trust a free service, or free software etc. let alone allow yourself to become reliant on it. Also most companies who offer products and services for free wish them to become popular so that they can be profitable in other ways. Turing0 has already paid for his use by providing his information to be onsold to advertisers and by consuming ads. Further even if Turing0 had paid, exactly how much is enough in order for you to allow him to "whine"? Surely to make any sense he must not just be sole customer paying 10s or 100s of dollars - rather he must fund the service in large part in order to "count". Well what you're describing is a twisted situation where customers fail to hold service providers accountable therefore service providers have no incentive to provide reliable service. Pretty soon all service is horrible.
It's free, therefore they cancel it is a fallacy. Paid services also get cancelled.
It's free, so they get to encourage you to rely on it then pull the rug from under you and you have to say "thank you" is also a fallacy. My lack of payment does not mean that the provider can't do me harm.
The message is clear. Cloud services are for suckers. If you can't independently access your data and run your code, it's integrity, security and accessibility are at the whim of the hosting company.
Slashdot Mirror
s/put it in auto/trust to Allah (PBUH)/
Sorry but I'm an atheist.
Auto isn't so bad. It can sometimes outdo an experienced photographer because the more experienced you are the more you're going to want to tweak your settings and sometimes the camera's more conservative one size fits all approach does better.
I would like to see smarter auto modes with more control though....something like a rules based setup. For example being able to instruct the camera something like as follows. ...and if you can keep aperture above f/8
1. Don't over/under-expose by more than 1 stop.
2. Don't increase ISO beyond 400
3. And if you can don't drop shutter below 1/focal length
4.
So 2 and 3 you could almost do today with shutter priority (if you manually work out focal length), but you can't also request 4.
Or you could do 3 and 4 with aperture but 3 is ignored
Or you could do all 2, 3, 4 with manual (and auto ISO) except the "if you can" part would be ignored and it would blow highlights if you over-exposed.
...now taking 2 exposures simulatenously - 1 flash and 1 ambient
Go grab a copy of "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson and the rest will fall into place. (Unless you intend to use external lighting, in which case you've got plenty of time to learn that too.)
That long winded over-rated piece of crap has probably put more people off photography than most, but it seems to have a cult following.
There is a LOT more to photography than those 3 variables you mention, but they are a good start. However don't over-simplify by saying that's all there is to it. For instance focal length matters on a lot of levels (it affects scene compression and depth of field for a start), exposure modes, continuous vs single shot, automatic exposure compensation like auto ISO, and there is a WHOLE WORLD of new stuff to learn when you embark on properly using the flash, because now you are
the mirror is outdated - QED. that technology is simply extra parts when you think about how a digital camera works. there really is zero reason to have a mirror in the camera, all it does is make the device bigger and heavier. look into the micro 4/3rds line of camera, i love the G1 that i have. camera + 3 lenses comes to ~$1200 total, giving me everything from 16mm to 400mm. and it doesnt hurt my back when im walking around with the kit
EVF and other compromises are atrocious for low light. Until they get better it won't be outdated. I look forward to that day.
You don't have the full technical knowledge to fully appreciate a DSLR?
Learn it.
Trust me, the basics are a lot easier than you think. The rest is experimentation, play and frankly, photography.
You'll thank me in the long run when you're not stuck with a million lenses for a camera you've outgrown.
Or failing that put it in auto until you can be bothered learning it.
I'm an ex professional newspaper and sports photographer... and my main camera is the LX5 too... quality is amazing, leica lens, 24mm wide angle, HD video, low noise, good screen.
DSLR is great, but it's a pain in the butt to carry around. Unless you go out SPECIFICALLY to take pictures, something like the Lumix LX5 is more than enough. There's a great blog post on this:
http://1000words.kodak.com/thousandwords/post/?ID=7136485015460840984
MadCow
Well if you use to shoot sports you should know better than advocating that a point and shoot is more than enough. Try shooting sports one sometime - very limiting.
It all depends on what you want to shoot.
I wouldn't recommend Firefox to anyone anymore. Mozilla really screwed the pooch. Unwillingness to fix long standing bugs. Blaming extensions for bugs when they created the extension system that allowed them. Forced changes with no option to configure sensible defaults (AWFUL bar, status bar changes etc). UI constantly changing for the sake of change. Lack of willingness to listen to users. Version numbering madness. Extensions breaking with every release. Screw that. I'm writing this on Firefox 3.6. I've tried 4, 5, and 7 and they aren't worth the effort so I'm ditching the browser the moment I can't use 3.6.
To Mozilla: Thank you for providing such a wonderful browser. FUCK YOU for fucking it up so badly. Yes, it's free, but that doesn't mean you can get me hooked on a good product then ruin it without me having strong feelings about it.
Direct optical imaging *has* been achieved with Beta Pictoris: http://www.futurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/beta-Pictoris_1.jpg . Also see the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Pictoris
Yes I'm aware of that, but a fuzzy blob of light is not "Direct imaging ala popular sci-fi" that I was speaking of. Very impressive, but not what I'm talking about.
Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Advanced Server has deduplication (licensed addon) and runs on Linux. At roughly $2000 it ain't cheap. I've never used it so can't comment on how well it does.
Man, this stuff used to be practically sci-fi, now it seems to happen all the time.
Not to belittle these achievements but the state of the tech has developed. Direct imaging ala popular sci-fi is still a way off if it will ever be achieved but we have several good methods for determining the existence of exoplanets and a couple allow confirmation, so these discoveries will continue for the foreseeable future (or at least until all the big budget astronomy is culled due to the "economic crisis").
That should be 3 were cheap, 1 expensive
and two weeks later the psu blows killing the pc.. never skimp on a power supply.
I've owned a lot of PCs and in the last 2 decades and usually have at least one running 24x7 when I'm not away on holiday. I've had exactly 4 PSUs blow. 4 were cheap, 1 was very expensive, and none of them took out the system attached. Perhaps I've just been lucky.
Sounds just like the occasional pearl of wisdom that my brother might offer.
Sounds like slashdot karma.
Movies are popular attractions for dates*. You can take a date to a bad movie, and won't necessarily reflect poorly upon you. But if you take a date to a bad movie because happened to be cheaper than a putative good movie, you're just not getting laid**.
You've just run afoul of syousef's law, also known as the first rule of slashdot club: Anyone who posts advice on how to get laid on slashdot is the sort of person that shouldn't be giving advice on how to get laid to anyone, let alone the repressed predominately male population that comprises slashdot.
If you put down PA to Steven Hawking on your resume, a lot of future employers will just read PA.
That really depends on which future employers you're applying to, now doesn't it? Seems to me the ones that would read "PA" and miss "to Stephen Hawking" wouldn't be the ones that people applying for this job would be applying to in the future.
Seems to me that the employers that care that it was Steven Hawking would see that all you were was his PA and you still wouldn't get a look in.
Maybe you want to skip the employers that can't even understand your fine resume?
That's fine. You'll be standing on the welfare line before you know it. Enjoy.
I see you're still trying to distill everything into dollars. That is not at all what I am talking about.
No I'm trying to distill everything into tangible benefit. That doesn't necessarily mean a high paying job, but if people only see the PA part, you won't make any contacts or get any other kind of recognition that may lead to opportunities - well paid or otherwise.
In a civilized society everyone is subsidized (otherwise it's law of the jungle). Also most people have vices of one kind or another.
Where do I sign up for subsidized motorcycle insurance for my crotch rocket?!
Here I was riding a regular motorcycle like an idiot when I could apparently ride a far more powerful and fun cycle for no additional cost!
[ I should also inquire with my insurance company why it would cost thousands more to insure the sportbike given that apparently I'm entitled to the same rate no matter what risk I take! ]
Reductio ad absurdum is a pissweak way to argue. You already are subsidized. Motorcycles are tolerated and legal even though the accident rate and the medical burden on society is much higher than for cars.
Strawman is an even weaker way to argue. At no stage did I say no matter what choices you made you should be charged "the same rate". Obese people are charged higher rates for medical, income and life insurance, find it more difficult to get work because they are seen as a medical risk etc.
Try making an actual argument that is logically defensible.
Your theory collapses when the baby comes out with features that make it obvious the woman has cheated - ethnicity being one obvious one. If a wife husband are European and the baby comes out with black or Asian features that's going to be hard to explain away. There is always the threat that if indisgression is discovered either sex will withdraw support and dissolve the union. If you take a look at happiness I guarantee you that once a certain age is reached it's not the playboys or cheats that are happiest. A happy stable home is the best way to improve your children's prospects of flourishing. Children of unhappy, broken, and multiple marriages tend to have more issues.
Also wet wiring does not evolve to adjust so easily.
Just the usual meme, "People behave like dicks!"
...in an effort to get more pussy.
Genetic diversity considered good by biologists, but bad by social standards... Guess which is wrong? (Hint: It's not evolution.)
Good luck finding a girl so dumb that she believes your twisted and unscientific views. Genetic diversity does not mean fucking everything that moves. The offspring you have has to survive to adulthood if you are to pass on your genes, and pissing off to chase down and impregnate another woman puts your current offspring at a disadvantage. You can play the numbers all you like but a single good bet is a lot better than a few dozen bad ones. Nature uses both approaches of course but you really need to have litters if you're going to play numbers games that way.
If my chances of divorce are higher having Facebook, count me in.
Why don't you just save yourself the effort and give half your shit away and stop talking to your wife and kids?
My 2 year old isn't quite so disciplined. I prefer not to teach him about danger by letting him roam free amongst 1500kg child flatteners. When I was a child drivers could see out their back windows when they reverse out of a carpark without the need for an optional reversing camera in their 2 metre tall SUV.
Then don't let him roam free. That is the point. If my son didn't have his head screwed on right, he'd be in my hand the whole time. ,,,and don't kid yourself - old cars were MUCH less safe than new ones. It's just that every kid injured wasn't reported on the news as a tragedy and a reason for new laws/fines, gadgets to be bought and taxes to be collected.
Turing0, how much were you paying for your Google Health? what service guarantee did you get for your paid contract with them? Oh, $0 and nothing. Quit your whining, so a free trial balloon was cancelled, pony up some bucks for an equivalent service with a vendor and then you'll have a right to complain about service or lack thereof.
If free is justification for ****ing over your customer, that is a good reason to never use or trust a free service, or free software etc. let alone allow yourself to become reliant on it. Also most companies who offer products and services for free wish them to become popular so that they can be profitable in other ways. Turing0 has already paid for his use by providing his information to be onsold to advertisers and by consuming ads. Further even if Turing0 had paid, exactly how much is enough in order for you to allow him to "whine"? Surely to make any sense he must not just be sole customer paying 10s or 100s of dollars - rather he must fund the service in large part in order to "count". Well what you're describing is a twisted situation where customers fail to hold service providers accountable therefore service providers have no incentive to provide reliable service. Pretty soon all service is horrible.
It's free, therefore they cancel it is a fallacy. Paid services also get cancelled.
It's free, so they get to encourage you to rely on it then pull the rug from under you and you have to say "thank you" is also a fallacy. My lack of payment does not mean that the provider can't do me harm.
The message is clear. Cloud services are for suckers. If you can't independently access your data and run your code, it's integrity, security and accessibility are at the whim of the hosting company.
Since when is it OK to desecrate the flag by wearing it as a shirt, cupcake?
--
BMO
I'm confused. Are you saying you prefer wearing the flag as a cupcake? :P~~~~~
Reminds me of another joke based on nationality: What do you call a greek parachutist? Con descending.