In my recent job as a salesman at a small camera store, we briefly had some Sony Cybershot digital cameras in stock. Then the fun started.
Half the Cybershots we sold came back. Literally. We had something like a 20:5:1 ratio of Sony problems to Kodak problems to every-other-company problems. (I'll save my Kodak rant for another day.)
Then, their warranty period dropped from a year, which is mostly standard with consumer-level cameras, to 90 days.
Then, when waiting for estimates, there were delays. And delays. And delays. When we finally got estimates back, a few months later, they would typically be for twice what the camera costs to buy new. If the estimate was refused, they charged an additional $50 to send the damaged camera back to us! These charges did not go over well with our customers, needless to say. I felt like crap; most of our customers were very nice people, and I hated giving them bad news.
I have no kind words about the hell those bastards put me through. I was behind the counter, taking crap for their shoddy products and awful customer service. We stopped offering Sony cameras very quickly, and we started refusing to send in Sony products for repair when they weren't bought from us.
Your best bet is to find someone who's not a pro, but has real skill. Someone who has another day job, but who loves to shoot as a hobby, has a pleasant personality, has years of real wedding experience, and who moonlights. These people will deliver quality results, but will gladly hand over the copyrights. Often, their only requirement is that they can use a few shots from the shoot for their own portfolio.
This type is harder to find than a regular pro since they don't advertise in the yellow pages, but it's worth looking into. Your best bet is to go to a high-quality local lab, the sort of place that us freaky amateur shutterbugs go to, and asking the employees there directly. You'd be surprised; some of the best wedding photography I've ever seen was done by a mining engineer and a building supply store's shipping clerk.
As with any photographer, ask to see a portfolio of previous wedding work, ask them for references, and shop around for several candidates first. This is a buyer's market, after all.
All this takes some legwork, but in the end you'll have professional-level results, and the legal right to make a copy of any shot for anyone you damn well please.
What the heck was an elephant statue with sharpened tusks doing at the same elevation as a 5-year-old? While I have no kids of my own, I have several dozen young cousins, and the first rule of watching 5-year-olds is to make sure that dangerous and fragile items are stuffed in a closet before they arrive.
I think grandma here is more interested in not being sued for negligence herself.
Aliens vs. Predator was a work of art. It's the only game to actually scare the crap out of me. I once ruined a set of headphones when I was playing a marine: a facehugger jumped me out of the darkness, I screamed and literally jumped over the back of my chair.
There are no limitations on what Canon lenses can work on the Digital Rebel. Every lens that Canon's made since 1987 (all EF lenses, as well as the oddball TS tilt-shift trio) will work on it, with the one catch that you end up with a cropping effect due to the smaller image sensor.
There is a limitation on the EF-S lens that's often bundled with the Digital Rebel; it's a physically different mount than EF lenses. No amount of software hacking will ever get it to work on any other body. However, if you're willing to perform surgery on the lens, it's possible to mount it on a 10D.
In other words:
EF-S mount = EF lenses, TS lenses and EF-S lenses
EF mount = EF lenses and TS lenses
So far, there is exactly one EF-S mount camera (the Digital Rebel) and exactly one EF-S mount lens (the 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens).
The compatibility problems you may be thinking of happen with older Sigma-brand Canon-mount lenses. To their credit, Sigma's offered to re-chip, for free, older lenses that are still in production to work with Canon's DSLRs. You'd just have to pay for shipping. No big deal.
L lenses are EF lenses. Besides, there are some pretty sweet non-L's out there, even though they're pretty much all traditional-length primes. The 28/2.8, 50/1.8 (best bang for the buck EVER), 85/1.8 and 135/2.8 softfocus come to mind.
Give Macross Zero a chance. It's an OVA prequel series, with 3 parts done and (I think) 3 more to go, so far just in fansub form. It's set just a few years after the SDF1 crashess on Earth, a few years before it's been repaired and relaunched. There's a huge world war. It's about an ex-F14 UN pilot joining the first prototype Valkyrie squadron under the command of Roy Fokker, and it finally fixes the whole miserable continuity mess regarding what Protoculture really is. Not really for kids, though. A few mildly gruesome deaths (red splashes on the inside of a canopy before the fighter explodes, that sort of thing) and the obligatory Macross leading-female-character-singing-naked scene. Some CGI is a little cheesy, but there's an awesome, highly detailed slow-motion fighter-to-battroid transformation of Fokker's fighter in the first episode.
The recent Gundam Seed is pretty good sci-fi, too. Not at an Asimov level, and the main character is conveniently a genius at reprogramming/piloting mobile suits, but it deals with some pretty neat subjects like the ethics of genetic engineering, and prejudice against those with genetic advantages. I can definitely see a "genetic purity" terrorist group like Blue Cosmos starting up in real life if human genetic engineering ever becomes common.
I'm not sure if Last Exile qualifies as sci-fi (seems more of the Star Wars style fantasy that happens to be set in a hi-tech world), but it's great drama. Scrapped Princess pretends to be swords-and-sorcery fantasy at first, but within a few episodes one starts to realize that it's definitely sci-fi.
Yup. I usually do the switch-defence bit myself, but with a panzer just around the corner. I hear that tug coming, wait a few seconds, and plant one rocket right in the cab and ride it back. You'd be surprised how many people fail to learn about that trick.
The name's misleading, but IHOP didn't have any different settings for panzers. They used the defaults. The fun part was how the admins told whiners to "get used to it" when they got blasted. They also set up funny messages flashing on the bottom of the screen every minute or so, things like "Famous last words: goddamn m*&#$%f%^#ing panzer whore!"
OUF low grav/fast, on the other hand, has ridiculously arcade-like settings. Low gravity, obvious from the name. Also, a special weapon recharge time of approximately three seconds. Ever rack up fifteen panzer kills in fifteen seconds? Truly beautiful. Field ops is fun for us sadists, too. I've had "insufficient fire support" messages before my first artillery strike has even gone off.:) The lack of FF there makes ridiculous overkill consequence-free.
The low grav actually helps defend against panzers. Most people die when the rocket goes off on the ground near their feet. If you're fifty feet in the air, moving fast, it takes a damn good eye to hit you with the panzer. Someone with decent reflexes, an accurate gun, and a tendency for staying in the air has a good chance to rack up a high frag count.
Just to let you know, that server has a tradition of not going for the objective on fueldump, battery, radar and oasis until the last five minutes. Low grav makes it ridiculously easy for allies on those. One medic with adrenaline can win radar in about 30 seconds, no joke.
Yeah, ET's usually pretty balanced against that sort of thing, but there's a few problems with the default maps. Ever see five ally field ops and five ally medics camping on Rail Gun? Not a pretty sight. Ammo, health, artillery and airstrikes thrown out like there's no tomorrow.
On an unrelated note, I miss the International House of Panzers. At least there's OUF's low-grav/fast xp server to satisfy my cheesing needs. I'm one of those aforementioned skilled panzerwhores, and low grav makes it even easier to set up nasty ambushes.:)
Re:VI is everywhere.
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your sysadmin dislikes users running unpriviliged programs from their own directory? Seems a tad paranoid to me. On any properly run system, the worst thing that it could do is wipe out one's own files. Is your sysadmin a fascist, or an idiot?
Retails about $160US, Waterproof up to about 20 feet. Load up some 400 or 800 iso film, or use a tripod and the ten-second timer, and you're good to go. Decent wide angle on it, too.
You mean like when Canada started fighting against Germany in 1939? And it took the US two years to get off it's collective cowardly ass and help out? Real noble, there.
Besides, this "time of crisis" is bullshit, just like Vietnam. Your borders are safe, and terrorism is a domestic job for police, not a foreign job for a military. This "time of crisis" is all about a few rich Americans looking out for number one.
Running away is not cowardice. The draft is slavery. A bunch of old bitter men trying to stay rich by sacrificing my friends' lives is a load of bullshit. I applaud the courage of some young man who is forced to drop everything and leave everyone he knows in order to deprive the military of one more human shield. You think it's easy to just up and leave? You're a callous piece of crap if you think that simple cowardice can make one leave one's family, friends, and career.
Fucking jingoistic twit. Grow up. WW2 was entirely different. There was a clear menace in Europe. No such thing exists now. The only menace is to some oil barons' pocketbooks. That's what this bullshit war is about.
Slashdot Mirror
...then maybe they should MAKE SOME.
In my recent job as a salesman at a small camera store, we briefly had some Sony Cybershot digital cameras in stock. Then the fun started.
Half the Cybershots we sold came back. Literally. We had something like a 20:5:1 ratio of Sony problems to Kodak problems to every-other-company problems. (I'll save my Kodak rant for another day.)
Then, their warranty period dropped from a year, which is mostly standard with consumer-level cameras, to 90 days.
Then, when waiting for estimates, there were delays. And delays. And delays. When we finally got estimates back, a few months later, they would typically be for twice what the camera costs to buy new. If the estimate was refused, they charged an additional $50 to send the damaged camera back to us! These charges did not go over well with our customers, needless to say. I felt like crap; most of our customers were very nice people, and I hated giving them bad news.
I have no kind words about the hell those bastards put me through. I was behind the counter, taking crap for their shoddy products and awful customer service. We stopped offering Sony cameras very quickly, and we started refusing to send in Sony products for repair when they weren't bought from us.
The laser was hoaxed! There was no laser, it was a flashlight. The ridiculous measurements were faked by the scientists involved.
If you want Redhat you know where to get it. Leave Slackware alone.
Your best bet is to find someone who's not a pro, but has real skill. Someone who has another day job, but who loves to shoot as a hobby, has a pleasant personality, has years of real wedding experience, and who moonlights. These people will deliver quality results, but will gladly hand over the copyrights. Often, their only requirement is that they can use a few shots from the shoot for their own portfolio.
This type is harder to find than a regular pro since they don't advertise in the yellow pages, but it's worth looking into. Your best bet is to go to a high-quality local lab, the sort of place that us freaky amateur shutterbugs go to, and asking the employees there directly. You'd be surprised; some of the best wedding photography I've ever seen was done by a mining engineer and a building supply store's shipping clerk.
As with any photographer, ask to see a portfolio of previous wedding work, ask them for references, and shop around for several candidates first. This is a buyer's market, after all.
All this takes some legwork, but in the end you'll have professional-level results, and the legal right to make a copy of any shot for anyone you damn well please.
What the heck was an elephant statue with sharpened tusks doing at the same elevation as a 5-year-old? While I have no kids of my own, I have several dozen young cousins, and the first rule of watching 5-year-olds is to make sure that dangerous and fragile items are stuffed in a closet before they arrive.
I think grandma here is more interested in not being sued for negligence herself.
AM I RIGHT, FOLKS?
On the other hand, Voyager, IMO, is the biggest peice of crap to ever become part of the trek genre.
Whoa, let's not say things we can't take back.
Aliens vs. Predator was a work of art. It's the only game to actually scare the crap out of me. I once ruined a set of headphones when I was playing a marine: a facehugger jumped me out of the darkness, I screamed and literally jumped over the back of my chair.
There are no limitations on what Canon lenses can work on the Digital Rebel. Every lens that Canon's made since 1987 (all EF lenses, as well as the oddball TS tilt-shift trio) will work on it, with the one catch that you end up with a cropping effect due to the smaller image sensor.
There is a limitation on the EF-S lens that's often bundled with the Digital Rebel; it's a physically different mount than EF lenses. No amount of software hacking will ever get it to work on any other body. However, if you're willing to perform surgery on the lens, it's possible to mount it on a 10D.
In other words:
EF-S mount = EF lenses, TS lenses and EF-S lenses
EF mount = EF lenses and TS lenses
So far, there is exactly one EF-S mount camera (the Digital Rebel) and exactly one EF-S mount lens (the 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens).
The compatibility problems you may be thinking of happen with older Sigma-brand Canon-mount lenses. To their credit, Sigma's offered to re-chip, for free, older lenses that are still in production to work with Canon's DSLRs. You'd just have to pay for shipping. No big deal.
Depends on the in-camera settings. If one is worried about unwanted sharpening, one can tone down the settings, or simply shoot raw files.
L lenses are EF lenses. Besides, there are some pretty sweet non-L's out there, even though they're pretty much all traditional-length primes. The 28/2.8, 50/1.8 (best bang for the buck EVER), 85/1.8 and 135/2.8 softfocus come to mind.
Done and done.
Give Macross Zero a chance. It's an OVA prequel series, with 3 parts done and (I think) 3 more to go, so far just in fansub form. It's set just a few years after the SDF1 crashess on Earth, a few years before it's been repaired and relaunched. There's a huge world war. It's about an ex-F14 UN pilot joining the first prototype Valkyrie squadron under the command of Roy Fokker, and it finally fixes the whole miserable continuity mess regarding what Protoculture really is. Not really for kids, though. A few mildly gruesome deaths (red splashes on the inside of a canopy before the fighter explodes, that sort of thing) and the obligatory Macross leading-female-character-singing-naked scene. Some CGI is a little cheesy, but there's an awesome, highly detailed slow-motion fighter-to-battroid transformation of Fokker's fighter in the first episode.
The recent Gundam Seed is pretty good sci-fi, too. Not at an Asimov level, and the main character is conveniently a genius at reprogramming/piloting mobile suits, but it deals with some pretty neat subjects like the ethics of genetic engineering, and prejudice against those with genetic advantages. I can definitely see a "genetic purity" terrorist group like Blue Cosmos starting up in real life if human genetic engineering ever becomes common.
I'm not sure if Last Exile qualifies as sci-fi (seems more of the Star Wars style fantasy that happens to be set in a hi-tech world), but it's great drama. Scrapped Princess pretends to be swords-and-sorcery fantasy at first, but within a few episodes one starts to realize that it's definitely sci-fi.
Sounds like you're talking about Lexx. What a great show. Cheesy as hell CGI, but I love a show that can out-weird anything else on TV.
Yup. I usually do the switch-defence bit myself, but with a panzer just around the corner. I hear that tug coming, wait a few seconds, and plant one rocket right in the cab and ride it back. You'd be surprised how many people fail to learn about that trick.
:) The lack of FF there makes ridiculous overkill consequence-free.
The name's misleading, but IHOP didn't have any different settings for panzers. They used the defaults. The fun part was how the admins told whiners to "get used to it" when they got blasted. They also set up funny messages flashing on the bottom of the screen every minute or so, things like "Famous last words: goddamn m*&#$%f%^#ing panzer whore!"
OUF low grav/fast, on the other hand, has ridiculously arcade-like settings. Low gravity, obvious from the name. Also, a special weapon recharge time of approximately three seconds. Ever rack up fifteen panzer kills in fifteen seconds? Truly beautiful. Field ops is fun for us sadists, too. I've had "insufficient fire support" messages before my first artillery strike has even gone off.
The low grav actually helps defend against panzers. Most people die when the rocket goes off on the ground near their feet. If you're fifty feet in the air, moving fast, it takes a damn good eye to hit you with the panzer. Someone with decent reflexes, an accurate gun, and a tendency for staying in the air has a good chance to rack up a high frag count.
Just to let you know, that server has a tradition of not going for the objective on fueldump, battery, radar and oasis until the last five minutes. Low grav makes it ridiculously easy for allies on those. One medic with adrenaline can win radar in about 30 seconds, no joke.
Yeah, ET's usually pretty balanced against that sort of thing, but there's a few problems with the default maps. Ever see five ally field ops and five ally medics camping on Rail Gun? Not a pretty sight. Ammo, health, artillery and airstrikes thrown out like there's no tomorrow.
:)
On an unrelated note, I miss the International House of Panzers. At least there's OUF's low-grav/fast xp server to satisfy my cheesing needs. I'm one of those aforementioned skilled panzerwhores, and low grav makes it even easier to set up nasty ambushes.
Your sysadmin dislikes users running unpriviliged programs from their own directory? Seems a tad paranoid to me. On any properly run system, the worst thing that it could do is wipe out one's own files. Is your sysadmin a fascist, or an idiot?
On my systems, vi is just a symlink to joe, due to numerous deeply irritating, badly-behaved programs that ignore $EDITOR.
Retails about $160US, Waterproof up to about 20 feet. Load up some 400 or 800 iso film, or use a tripod and the ten-second timer, and you're good to go. Decent wide angle on it, too.
Hiro didn't own his car, he was just the driver. The Mafia owned it. And he ended up owing the Mafia for his little accident with it.
Because Galeon has too many features. To the current Gnome leadership, features are evil.
'Course, this is coming from a Windowmaker-turned-KDE 3.2 convert.
Question: What were the prominent figures in Soviet politics outside of the 20th century?
You mean like when Canada started fighting against Germany in 1939? And it took the US two years to get off it's collective cowardly ass and help out? Real noble, there.
Besides, this "time of crisis" is bullshit, just like Vietnam. Your borders are safe, and terrorism is a domestic job for police, not a foreign job for a military. This "time of crisis" is all about a few rich Americans looking out for number one.
Running away is not cowardice. The draft is slavery. A bunch of old bitter men trying to stay rich by sacrificing my friends' lives is a load of bullshit. I applaud the courage of some young man who is forced to drop everything and leave everyone he knows in order to deprive the military of one more human shield. You think it's easy to just up and leave? You're a callous piece of crap if you think that simple cowardice can make one leave one's family, friends, and career.
Fucking jingoistic twit. Grow up. WW2 was entirely different. There was a clear menace in Europe. No such thing exists now. The only menace is to some oil barons' pocketbooks. That's what this bullshit war is about.
You give up huge portions of your taxes in the US anyway, without the benefit of decent health care.