Amen! I actually have that very same player. The best part (for a Linux user such as myself) is that this player is a generic USB mass storage device, with no dependence on iTunes-style databases to be built. It's dead simple to get working under any OS you care to name; true drag and drop.
I'm hoping for Juk (my music software of choice) to include some way to handle transfers to USB storage devices, but in the meantime I've hacked up a Perl script that uses DCOP to transfer my playlists.
Of course firmware won't stop me from laughing at someone who paid $1000 for a piece of plastic with some 10D guts.
It's elitist pricks like you that make me avoid other photographers. I love the hobby, but the "oh my goodness, look at the little plebians with their clearly inferior toys!" attitude of you and your ilk pisses me off.
This would actually be a more teen focused show. Not quite as adult. Would be for 4 yrs only. The crew would actually "age" from Freshmen "plebe" cadet to a 1/Class cadet and finally a feature film for their graduation.
Star Trek: 90210? Please god, anything but this!
What I want to see are stories from the darker side of the Trek universe. Smugglers, bounty hunters, mercenaries, crimelords, terrorists. I want to see the seamy, dark, gritty side of the otherwise clean happy shiny Federation. I want to see desperate people not having access to the newest technology, trying to scrape a living on barely-functional third-rate ships.
All well and good for someone on broadband, but it's a little hard to download updates in the background when one's dialup connection isn't actually connected.
Maybe because his medium format film gear costs a small fraction of what a 1Ds Mk 2 and a decent selection of Canon primes or L lenses does? Yes, digital has surpassed film, but only at many times the cost! In the future, it'll come down, but right now, film still has the price-for-the-quality advantage.
I'm as much a computer geek as anyone else here, but for the cost of even just a 300D or D70, and a quality lens or two, you can put together a professional studio-quality Hasselblad system.
And that's not even mentioning the millions of Yashica or Rollei TLRs that can be had for peanuts these days! Even the most basic Yashicamat, totalling maybe $200 on Ebay, will beat or match any digital camera ever made, even that 1Ds Mk 2.
Hell, I just use a 35mm Rebel 2000, a pair of primes (50mm/f1.8, and 28mm/f2.8), a low-end Manfrotto tripod, and a cable release. Total cost, about $500, and if I toss in a roll of Portra the results will utterly destroy any similar digital setup costing less than five times that.
It depends on the specific bulb. Color temperature is measured in Kelvin. A home incandescent tungsten bulb is usually around 3200K. The higher the color temperature, the "colder" it appears. Daylight is around 5000K, plus or minute 200 depending on the situation.
For some people, colder light is the best kind one can get. In photography, most films are designed to work with daylight and flashes (which are themselves designed to mimic daylight) and you end up with really ugly red-orange tones on everything if your only light sources are regular incandescent bulbs. For 35mm photography, the closer the light source is to 5000K, the better.
I'm eager to get my hands on a couple of the cold-white bulbs this place is selling. These 50000-life-hour 4800K cold-white bulbs will make a great replacement for the 3-life-hour, $5-per-bulb 4800K photofloods I currently use for close-ups and portraits. In my case, these LED floods will pay for themselves after only 48 hours of use!
Just to piss off people who want to be oh-so-edgy and omg-starwars-sucks-lol!
Hear that, you whiny little oh-my-god-my-childhood-is-ruined freaks? I'm going to watch it! And probably a few times! And I'll buy overpriced popcorn, too, and I'll bring friends to drive up ticket sales!
Why?
Because it's just fucking entertainment. It's not the bible. Lighten up.
I am going in, fully expecting an epic battle of good versus evil with lots of special effects and lots of bad acting. I know what's coming, so I'm going to enjoy it for what it is.
Arthur C. Clarke described a similar system in "Fountains of Paradise". A president was randomly chosen from the general population, and everytime someone showed interest in the job, the system disqualified them. The better the job the president does, the quicker they're let go and are free to go back to their normal life.
A character in the book said something along the lines of "We want a president who'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into office, and then do the best job they can so that they get time off for good behaviour."
Also, I'm never again going to repeat what a Nikon sales rep. tells me without checking it out myself. Sorry, my mistake. You're right, it doesn't play MP3s. I don't know why not, it would make this a killer unit...
Wifi for transferring photos? There's no point. There's a grand total of two digital cameras on the market that have Wifi capabilities (Nikon's D2H, and Canon's 1Ds Mk. II), and both are very high-end professional grade cameras. Not exactly mass-market items, and their wireless modules are mostly intended for photojournalists or sports photographers who have no time to swap out CF cards at critical moments.
Bluetooth on the other hand would be more useful, as many cellphones have built-in cameras and bluetooth. The problem is that the average cellphone camera takes very low resolution images that take up very little space. There isn't the pressing need to dump the phone's memory as often as with a standalone camera.
What's needed are either built-in, or clipped-on, card slots for Secure Digital and Compactflash, the most popular types of memory cards. Belkin makes one such adaptor, but it's enormous and terrible to operate. Something that clips along the back of the iPod, keeping the same height and width and only slightly increasing thickness, would be a far better solution. Ideally it should have exactly one button, which would dump the contents of the inserted card to a time-labelled folder.
Bingo. At first I was excited about this, thinking that it might be a perfect compact companion to a digital camera, but it's merely the 21st century version of a slide projecter. If you're not going to be plugging it into a TV to bore friends and annoy family, and instead just using it to cart a big archive of images from one computer to another, the original iPod will do just as good a job.
Something like Nikon's Coolwalker, on the other hand, is far more handy. All the best features of image tanks (simple mass storage, plug and dump) and the iPod Photo (music, display photos on-screen or on a TV out) in one unit.
Re:XBox less than 200 units? Is that really accura
on
DS Preorders Outsell PS2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's more a matter of there being few Xbox-exclusive titles that get translated to Japanese. In your average Japanese home, space matters. Why have an Xbox and PS2 when the PS2 already has most of the best games in one's native language?
It's an interesting idea, and might lead to something high-quality, but current implementations just plain suck. The Sigma SD9 and SD10 DSLR bodies are interesting prototypes (that for some bizarre reason are commercially sold), but the sensors inside them are certainly nowhere near the quality of a homemade Canon CMOS or Sony-manufactured Nikon/Pentax CCD sensors.
PS: you're asking for somewhat of a weird camera. I think it would be hard to market a P&S that has a prime lens on it.
Yeah, I know. I do love my Rebel 2000 and 50mm prime (and the Digital Rebel I'll be getting soon!), but SLRs are a bit too big for my pocket. Sometimes I'll go somewhere where a even a small shoulder bag would be inconvenient.
Basically, what I want is a digital version of those old 60's and 70's 35mm manual rangefinders, but without the ridiculous prices that the current luxury rangefinder makers charge, and without the lack of quality that the bargain-basement $100 digicam makers put into their fixed-focal-length cameras. You're definitely right about marketing; there's really no demand for that sort of camera, unfortunately. I'm just in that weird 0.001% group that needs a fast lens. Even the f2.8 of a typical digicam isn't fast enough for me. Canon's Powershot G's are close to what I need, but are too big, bulky, and pricey.
In the meantime, I'll have to make do with my Canonet and my film scanner. It'd be nice to cut out the developing step, though.
Oh, it'll most certainly suck. But one bonus of these tiny, tiny focal length cameras is that one barely needs to focus at all. Hell, it probably doesn't even have an AF system and is set to it's hyperfocal distance in the factory. There would be none of that painful shutter lag so prevalent in digicams.
Sure, no-one with a deep interest in photography will ever use this toy, but for someone who's only ever used a cheap 35mm P&S it'll do the job.
Oh, and offtopic, but if anyone from a camera company is reading this, I want a fixed-focal length P&S with a high-quality 35mm/f1.8 lens with a filter thread, a big low-noise sensor in the 4MP range, a hotshoe, and manual focus/shutter/aperture overrides. Give me that for under $400, in a body small enough to slip into a jacket pocket, and I'll happily buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh boy! Now we can all be redshirts!
Amen! I actually have that very same player. The best part (for a Linux user such as myself) is that this player is a generic USB mass storage device, with no dependence on iTunes-style databases to be built. It's dead simple to get working under any OS you care to name; true drag and drop.
I'm hoping for Juk (my music software of choice) to include some way to handle transfers to USB storage devices, but in the meantime I've hacked up a Perl script that uses DCOP to transfer my playlists.
Comfy headphones, too.
Weep for the future, weep for us all...
KDE may not be Free, but at least it Works, and Doesn't Take Away Options From Users, and Isn't A Massive Pain In The Ass To Compile From Scratch.
Of course firmware won't stop me from laughing at someone who paid $1000 for a piece of plastic with some 10D guts.
It's elitist pricks like you that make me avoid other photographers. I love the hobby, but the "oh my goodness, look at the little plebians with their clearly inferior toys!" attitude of you and your ilk pisses me off.
Star Trek: Academy
This would actually be a more teen focused show. Not quite as adult. Would be for 4 yrs only. The crew would actually "age" from Freshmen "plebe" cadet to a 1/Class cadet and finally a feature film for their graduation.
Star Trek: 90210? Please god, anything but this!
What I want to see are stories from the darker side of the Trek universe. Smugglers, bounty hunters, mercenaries, crimelords, terrorists. I want to see the seamy, dark, gritty side of the otherwise clean happy shiny Federation. I want to see desperate people not having access to the newest technology, trying to scrape a living on barely-functional third-rate ships.
It's the same reason that there are no Open Source computer games that compare to commercial games.
Cough.
Now, amend that to "very few Open Source computer games" and I'll agree 100% with you, sadly...
Z-95's only have a single wing on either side. The look sort of like an X-wing when the s-foils are folded up. This is something new.
All well and good for someone on broadband, but it's a little hard to download updates in the background when one's dialup connection isn't actually connected.
Maybe because his medium format film gear costs a small fraction of what a 1Ds Mk 2 and a decent selection of Canon primes or L lenses does? Yes, digital has surpassed film, but only at many times the cost! In the future, it'll come down, but right now, film still has the price-for-the-quality advantage.
I'm as much a computer geek as anyone else here, but for the cost of even just a 300D or D70, and a quality lens or two, you can put together a professional studio-quality Hasselblad system.
And that's not even mentioning the millions of Yashica or Rollei TLRs that can be had for peanuts these days! Even the most basic Yashicamat, totalling maybe $200 on Ebay, will beat or match any digital camera ever made, even that 1Ds Mk 2.
Hell, I just use a 35mm Rebel 2000, a pair of primes (50mm/f1.8, and 28mm/f2.8), a low-end Manfrotto tripod, and a cable release. Total cost, about $500, and if I toss in a roll of Portra the results will utterly destroy any similar digital setup costing less than five times that.
I'm no luddite, but I'm not rich either.
I remember when anarchy-online.com was a telnet BBS. I got my first email address there.
Here.
It's a simple idea, but works well. The FAQ there will explain it all.
It depends on the specific bulb. Color temperature is measured in Kelvin. A home incandescent tungsten bulb is usually around 3200K. The higher the color temperature, the "colder" it appears. Daylight is around 5000K, plus or minute 200 depending on the situation.
For some people, colder light is the best kind one can get. In photography, most films are designed to work with daylight and flashes (which are themselves designed to mimic daylight) and you end up with really ugly red-orange tones on everything if your only light sources are regular incandescent bulbs. For 35mm photography, the closer the light source is to 5000K, the better.
I'm eager to get my hands on a couple of the cold-white bulbs this place is selling. These 50000-life-hour 4800K cold-white bulbs will make a great replacement for the 3-life-hour, $5-per-bulb 4800K photofloods I currently use for close-ups and portraits. In my case, these LED floods will pay for themselves after only 48 hours of use!
Do you hear a lot of bad luggage combination jokes?
No, but I just stole it form some other slashdotter's sig. They had both the latin and english.
Just to piss off people who want to be oh-so-edgy and omg-starwars-sucks-lol!
Hear that, you whiny little oh-my-god-my-childhood-is-ruined freaks? I'm going to watch it! And probably a few times! And I'll buy overpriced popcorn, too, and I'll bring friends to drive up ticket sales!
Why?
Because it's just fucking entertainment. It's not the bible. Lighten up.
I am going in, fully expecting an epic battle of good versus evil with lots of special effects and lots of bad acting. I know what's coming, so I'm going to enjoy it for what it is.
Arthur C. Clarke described a similar system in "Fountains of Paradise". A president was randomly chosen from the general population, and everytime someone showed interest in the job, the system disqualified them. The better the job the president does, the quicker they're let go and are free to go back to their normal life.
A character in the book said something along the lines of "We want a president who'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into office, and then do the best job they can so that they get time off for good behaviour."
Troll? Oh, come on, you humourless moderator. I'm a lifelong Slackware fan and this is pretty dead-on accurate.
Also, I'm never again going to repeat what a Nikon sales rep. tells me without checking it out myself. Sorry, my mistake. You're right, it doesn't play MP3s. I don't know why not, it would make this a killer unit...
Wifi for transferring photos? There's no point. There's a grand total of two digital cameras on the market that have Wifi capabilities (Nikon's D2H, and Canon's 1Ds Mk. II), and both are very high-end professional grade cameras. Not exactly mass-market items, and their wireless modules are mostly intended for photojournalists or sports photographers who have no time to swap out CF cards at critical moments.
Bluetooth on the other hand would be more useful, as many cellphones have built-in cameras and bluetooth. The problem is that the average cellphone camera takes very low resolution images that take up very little space. There isn't the pressing need to dump the phone's memory as often as with a standalone camera.
What's needed are either built-in, or clipped-on, card slots for Secure Digital and Compactflash, the most popular types of memory cards. Belkin makes one such adaptor, but it's enormous and terrible to operate. Something that clips along the back of the iPod, keeping the same height and width and only slightly increasing thickness, would be a far better solution. Ideally it should have exactly one button, which would dump the contents of the inserted card to a time-labelled folder.
Anyway, that's just my own personal wish list.
Bingo. At first I was excited about this, thinking that it might be a perfect compact companion to a digital camera, but it's merely the 21st century version of a slide projecter. If you're not going to be plugging it into a TV to bore friends and annoy family, and instead just using it to cart a big archive of images from one computer to another, the original iPod will do just as good a job.
Something like Nikon's Coolwalker, on the other hand, is far more handy. All the best features of image tanks (simple mass storage, plug and dump) and the iPod Photo (music, display photos on-screen or on a TV out) in one unit.
It's more a matter of there being few Xbox-exclusive titles that get translated to Japanese. In your average Japanese home, space matters. Why have an Xbox and PS2 when the PS2 already has most of the best games in one's native language?
It's an interesting idea, and might lead to something high-quality, but current implementations just plain suck. The Sigma SD9 and SD10 DSLR bodies are interesting prototypes (that for some bizarre reason are commercially sold), but the sensors inside them are certainly nowhere near the quality of a homemade Canon CMOS or Sony-manufactured Nikon/Pentax CCD sensors.
PS: you're asking for somewhat of a weird camera. I think it would be hard to market a P&S that has a prime lens on it.
Yeah, I know. I do love my Rebel 2000 and 50mm prime (and the Digital Rebel I'll be getting soon!), but SLRs are a bit too big for my pocket. Sometimes I'll go somewhere where a even a small shoulder bag would be inconvenient.
Basically, what I want is a digital version of those old 60's and 70's 35mm manual rangefinders, but without the ridiculous prices that the current luxury rangefinder makers charge, and without the lack of quality that the bargain-basement $100 digicam makers put into their fixed-focal-length cameras. You're definitely right about marketing; there's really no demand for that sort of camera, unfortunately. I'm just in that weird 0.001% group that needs a fast lens. Even the f2.8 of a typical digicam isn't fast enough for me. Canon's Powershot G's are close to what I need, but are too big, bulky, and pricey.
In the meantime, I'll have to make do with my Canonet and my film scanner. It'd be nice to cut out the developing step, though.
Oh, it'll most certainly suck. But one bonus of these tiny, tiny focal length cameras is that one barely needs to focus at all. Hell, it probably doesn't even have an AF system and is set to it's hyperfocal distance in the factory. There would be none of that painful shutter lag so prevalent in digicams.
Sure, no-one with a deep interest in photography will ever use this toy, but for someone who's only ever used a cheap 35mm P&S it'll do the job.
Oh, and offtopic, but if anyone from a camera company is reading this, I want a fixed-focal length P&S with a high-quality 35mm/f1.8 lens with a filter thread, a big low-noise sensor in the 4MP range, a hotshoe, and manual focus/shutter/aperture overrides. Give me that for under $400, in a body small enough to slip into a jacket pocket, and I'll happily buy it.