In terms of resolution and low noise at high ISO settings, DSLR sensors beat film years ago. As for dynamic range, they're usually in between slide and negative film. It's no big deal in real life situations, one just has to be a little more careful to get the exposure right and not blow out the highlights, just as with slides. The histogram (the greatest idea since the light meter!) helps.
Compact digital sensors are another story entirely. The short version is, if it's an SLR, the sensor will be excellent. If it's not an SLR, try before you buy so you know what you're getting into.
Film still has a few advantages. If one shoots medium or large format as an amateur, good quality film is far cheaper than a digital back. Digital sucks for hours-long exposures due to battery issues, unless you've got the camera plugged into an AC adaptor. Also, any t-grain black and white film easily matches the resolution and far exceeds the dynamic range of any digital sensor. (I think B&W film is going to survive longer than negative film. Developing and printing B&W film is an art in itself.)
As for my previous rants on raw formats, I'm just baffled that anyone would spends thousands of dollars on bodies and lenses just to use their equipment like a $200 point-and-shoot. It's like watching someone buy a stratocaster and then hanging it on their living room wall.
HD Photo is not an "incremental improvement"! JPEG is fine for display, but is worthless as a high end capture and editing format. 3 channels, 8 bits per channel in a fixed colourspace and profile, with no option for lossless compression? That's just begging for artifacts, posterization problems, and combing in the histogram when editing.
Digital camera sensors are capable of much more depth and dynamic range than JPEG can deliver. I spend a lot of time and effort shooting, and believe in squeezing every bit of quality and detail I can get from my photos. Raw is imperfect, but does the job for now. HD Photo looks to save me a lot of headaches in the future, if the patent issues can be sorted out and a legal LGPL, GPL or BSD implementation can be written.
Ken Rockwell is the photography world's equivalent of John Dvorak. He's in it for the page hits, ad dollars, name dropping, and ego boost. He's also on a private little crusade against using any format other than JPEG for image capture. He's just a kook, but a kook that too many unwary amateurs might take seriously.
In that utterly content-free article you linked to, he goes on a diatribe about format wars that have absolutely nothing to do with photography (AM stereo in the 70's doesn't have much to do with photos formats, Ken), and when he finally comes to the 1/6th of the article in which he actually talks about HD Photo, he talks about it strictly as a display format, and not as the capture plus editing plus display format that it's meant to be.
Photographers with DSLRs who don't use raw (or at the least, whatever their camera's raw+jpeg mode is) are not serious about their art. Using only JPEG as a capture format is exactly like destroying your film negatives after you get your prints.
That's what I was thinking as well. I was also thinking that this would make a nice light take-anywhere "beater". Something inexpensive and replaceable, without any moving parts, that I could throw in a backpack for use at wifi hotspots. It's also not too badly spec'd considering the price. If I can boot from a USB drive and replace the stock distro with slackware, I'd definitely consider picking one up.
I used to have one of those. I had to powercycle that wretched piece of crap two or three times a day. Now I'm using my ISP-supplied Siemens 6520, a pretty typical consumer modem/router combo, and it's far more reliable. I haven't had to powercycle it in eight months. Taking a hammer to that Linksys BEFSR41 was the second most satisfying way I've ever disposed of hardware. (The most satisfying end was using that same hammer on a Handspring Visor.)
I feel like an idiot. I've been using Slackware for ten years and KDE for five, and I'd never even heard of Krita. At first glance, this looks really, really good. Real adjustment layers, 8, 16, and 32 bit support for all kinds of colorspaces, a plugin that uses dcraw for raw images, and has all of the usual useful day-to-day filters. This looks to be a great photography app.
Now my question is why isn't this more well known? The Gimp seems to have all the name recognition, but does barely half of what Krita can do.
I know I am. The Gimp is decent, but will continue to be almost unusable for me until it has 16 bit support and adjustment layers. Cinepaint and GEGL are both supposed to take care of the former, but I've never been able to get Cinepaint to compile and GEGL is fast becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of libraries.
That said, I love the Gimp's interface. It's far more usable than the wretched stoneage MDI crap that Photoshop is still stuck with.
Lucky Star stopped being funny when it turned into the "Let's worship Aya Hirano!" show. Sure, she's talented, but the Konata-is-a-Haruhi-fan gags are getting real old, real fast.
I think every self-described hardcore gamer who dismisses the potential of the wiimote should sit down with a copy of Twilight Princess and a savegame with the hero's bow already acquired. If they can't have fun shooting things for half an hour and still still complain about how the wiimote doesn't add anything to the game, then they've obviously suffered severe brain damage and any other opinions they hold can thus be appropriately gaged.
If you want lightsaber fighting, take a look at No More Heroes. If the control scheme can live up to the promises of the developers, it's going to be amazing.
It seems like the opposite to me; an easy way for malware writers to not have to bypass the barriers between the browser and the desktop in the first place.
Remember when 95 was released, and we all made those jokes about 95 meaning the minimum recommended memory in MB, or the amount of disk space in MB it would use? Sometimes I think "If we only knew."
I'd like to plug Password Maker. It's under the LGPL license. It creates a per-site password using the site's domain name and a passphrase of your choosing as seeds. All the advantages of a password manager, strong passwords, and different passwords for different accounts without actually having to store anything on disk or remembering more than one passphrase. Since by default there's no password stored on disk (and the extension will specifically warn against doing this if you change that setting), there's nothing for password-stealing javascript exploits to get.
Because of the hash that's used, it doesn't work on sites that require alphanumeric passwords, but any site with that idiotic requirement has serious security issues anyway.
That pretty much matches what I've heard from a Zune owner. His gripe isn't with the player's interface or the hardware itself, but rather the deliberate crippling of the wifi and the horrible PC-side software.
Yes, but when saying (for example) "the 80GB model" in a discussion about the PS3, I highly doubt there's going to be confusion as to whether someone is talking about a 3D mesh, a woman or a game console.
Slashdot Mirror
Is one records a conversation in a one-party-consent state, but broadcasts that conversation in a two-party-consent state, is that legal?
That's the eternal debate, isn't it? :)
In terms of resolution and low noise at high ISO settings, DSLR sensors beat film years ago. As for dynamic range, they're usually in between slide and negative film. It's no big deal in real life situations, one just has to be a little more careful to get the exposure right and not blow out the highlights, just as with slides. The histogram (the greatest idea since the light meter!) helps.
Compact digital sensors are another story entirely. The short version is, if it's an SLR, the sensor will be excellent. If it's not an SLR, try before you buy so you know what you're getting into.
Film still has a few advantages. If one shoots medium or large format as an amateur, good quality film is far cheaper than a digital back. Digital sucks for hours-long exposures due to battery issues, unless you've got the camera plugged into an AC adaptor. Also, any t-grain black and white film easily matches the resolution and far exceeds the dynamic range of any digital sensor. (I think B&W film is going to survive longer than negative film. Developing and printing B&W film is an art in itself.)
As for my previous rants on raw formats, I'm just baffled that anyone would spends thousands of dollars on bodies and lenses just to use their equipment like a $200 point-and-shoot. It's like watching someone buy a stratocaster and then hanging it on their living room wall.
HD Photo is not an "incremental improvement"! JPEG is fine for display, but is worthless as a high end capture and editing format. 3 channels, 8 bits per channel in a fixed colourspace and profile, with no option for lossless compression? That's just begging for artifacts, posterization problems, and combing in the histogram when editing.
Digital camera sensors are capable of much more depth and dynamic range than JPEG can deliver. I spend a lot of time and effort shooting, and believe in squeezing every bit of quality and detail I can get from my photos. Raw is imperfect, but does the job for now. HD Photo looks to save me a lot of headaches in the future, if the patent issues can be sorted out and a legal LGPL, GPL or BSD implementation can be written.
Ken Rockwell is the photography world's equivalent of John Dvorak. He's in it for the page hits, ad dollars, name dropping, and ego boost. He's also on a private little crusade against using any format other than JPEG for image capture. He's just a kook, but a kook that too many unwary amateurs might take seriously.
In that utterly content-free article you linked to, he goes on a diatribe about format wars that have absolutely nothing to do with photography (AM stereo in the 70's doesn't have much to do with photos formats, Ken), and when he finally comes to the 1/6th of the article in which he actually talks about HD Photo, he talks about it strictly as a display format, and not as the capture plus editing plus display format that it's meant to be.
Photographers with DSLRs who don't use raw (or at the least, whatever their camera's raw+jpeg mode is) are not serious about their art. Using only JPEG as a capture format is exactly like destroying your film negatives after you get your prints.
Perhaps E3 is just making sure its customers get their money's worth?
That's what I was thinking as well. I was also thinking that this would make a nice light take-anywhere "beater". Something inexpensive and replaceable, without any moving parts, that I could throw in a backpack for use at wifi hotspots. It's also not too badly spec'd considering the price. If I can boot from a USB drive and replace the stock distro with slackware, I'd definitely consider picking one up.
I used to have one of those. I had to powercycle that wretched piece of crap two or three times a day. Now I'm using my ISP-supplied Siemens 6520, a pretty typical consumer modem/router combo, and it's far more reliable. I haven't had to powercycle it in eight months. Taking a hammer to that Linksys BEFSR41 was the second most satisfying way I've ever disposed of hardware. (The most satisfying end was using that same hammer on a Handspring Visor.)
Lasting image/quote: "DUPE!"
In other words, a standard-issue Commonwealth Parliament.
I feel like an idiot. I've been using Slackware for ten years and KDE for five, and I'd never even heard of Krita. At first glance, this looks really, really good. Real adjustment layers, 8, 16, and 32 bit support for all kinds of colorspaces, a plugin that uses dcraw for raw images, and has all of the usual useful day-to-day filters. This looks to be a great photography app.
Now my question is why isn't this more well known? The Gimp seems to have all the name recognition, but does barely half of what Krita can do.
I know I am. The Gimp is decent, but will continue to be almost unusable for me until it has 16 bit support and adjustment layers. Cinepaint and GEGL are both supposed to take care of the former, but I've never been able to get Cinepaint to compile and GEGL is fast becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of libraries.
That said, I love the Gimp's interface. It's far more usable than the wretched stoneage MDI crap that Photoshop is still stuck with.
If you have speed issues then try using the XP desktop that is there in Vista.
So your solution for Vista speed issues is to make it look and act just like XP. Gotcha.
Lucky Star stopped being funny when it turned into the "Let's worship Aya Hirano!" show. Sure, she's talented, but the Konata-is-a-Haruhi-fan gags are getting real old, real fast.
Err, not that I watch either show. Cough.
Don't you need two formats for a format war?
UMD vs what? NDS Carts? Flash drives?
AVIs on a hard drive.
I think every self-described hardcore gamer who dismisses the potential of the wiimote should sit down with a copy of Twilight Princess and a savegame with the hero's bow already acquired. If they can't have fun shooting things for half an hour and still still complain about how the wiimote doesn't add anything to the game, then they've obviously suffered severe brain damage and any other opinions they hold can thus be appropriately gaged.
If you want lightsaber fighting, take a look at No More Heroes. If the control scheme can live up to the promises of the developers, it's going to be amazing.
A million times yes! The very first thing I ever do upon installing Firefox is installing Noscript. I can't imagine living without it.
It seems like the opposite to me; an easy way for malware writers to not have to bypass the barriers between the browser and the desktop in the first place.
Remember when 95 was released, and we all made those jokes about 95 meaning the minimum recommended memory in MB, or the amount of disk space in MB it would use? Sometimes I think "If we only knew."
How many football fields per volkswagen is that?
"Prepare to fast forward!"
"Preparing to fast forward, sir!"
"Fast forward!"
"Fast forwarding, sir!"
I'd like to plug Password Maker. It's under the LGPL license. It creates a per-site password using the site's domain name and a passphrase of your choosing as seeds. All the advantages of a password manager, strong passwords, and different passwords for different accounts without actually having to store anything on disk or remembering more than one passphrase. Since by default there's no password stored on disk (and the extension will specifically warn against doing this if you change that setting), there's nothing for password-stealing javascript exploits to get.
Because of the hash that's used, it doesn't work on sites that require alphanumeric passwords, but any site with that idiotic requirement has serious security issues anyway.
That was a funny show. The SSA was hilariously incompetent at times.
That pretty much matches what I've heard from a Zune owner. His gripe isn't with the player's interface or the hardware itself, but rather the deliberate crippling of the wifi and the horrible PC-side software.
Yes, but when saying (for example) "the 80GB model" in a discussion about the PS3, I highly doubt there's going to be confusion as to whether someone is talking about a 3D mesh, a woman or a game console.