What model camera did you get, and how did you get a 3MP for $80?
As you just said for $80 it has considerable lens distortion. A $30 P&S at target or costco will not have lens distortion. Sure, it won't be as sharp as a Nikon lens, but it won't have distortion.
Your cost is that might get that perfect shot of Grandma and find out it has distortion and poor color balance and saturation. Spoiling a dream shot by having a technically poor image is just too expensive a non-monetary cost.
For $110, I can get a P&S at target, and the extra $80 will buy me 16 rolls of film and processing at costco. If you're shooting more than that much with your digital, such a poor quality one is a mistake right from the start.
If you do want to print them for 29 cents each, that just increases your cost; my price includes a print of every single picture on those 16 rolls. Sure you don't want every one printed, but your way the price includes none printed; my way it includes every one printed for the same money.
I have a life that prevents me from reading every article posted to slashdot. I remember reading that summary but not finding it interesting enough to read the article or post about. If you really have the time to read everything on slashdot, I feel sorry for you.
If that back is $25,000 today and will be $5,000 in 3 years, that means if Adams bought it today he'd have to shoot $20,000 worth of pictures with it in the next 3 years. Black and White sheet film ranges from $2.50 to $5 per sheet, so let's say he's towards the high end where it costs $5 including processing. $20k is 4,000 pictures. Adams never took that many pictures over 3 years, so you're asking him to just throw money away to make his pictures no better (and I would argue worse).
8x10 film is 80 square inches, 35mm is 1.3 square inches, so the 8x10 gives you 60 times the "resolution" of 35mm film. So the quality improvement is the same as going from (140/60 = 2.3) megapixels to 140 megapixels. Even the digital advocates say 2.3MP is good for a 5"x7" print. Normal consumer 35mm film can be enlarged to 11x14 without noticable grain (and even larger if you use a fine grain film like Kodak Royal Gold 100).
It's the same difference for sheet film. If 35mm film is better than 2.3MP, 8x10 is better than 140MP.
Yes, long exposure is Adams signature style, that is because he used tiny apertures, and the light came through such a tiny hole, that it needed a good long time to make the impression on the film.
This is exactly why I said long exposures are common in Adams style of photography. Small arperture means larger depth of field, and for landscape you want the DoF to be maximized.
My point is that film has an inverse saturation curve that is somewhat unique for each kind of film. Adams was skilled to the point where he had an intuitive feel for how the films he used would react. How does a CCD react to a long (several minutes) exposure? Does the charge bleed off and it behaves sort of like film? Does it bleed into other pixels and fog the whole image? Is it perfectly stable and a 10 minute exposure is a 5 minute exposure + 1EV?
If even you're right about the pixel count (and I tend to believe you because of lack of trust of the hardware makers), you're only arguing that this special 50MP camera would be as good as Adams sheet film. Where is the advantage? Why should he abandon a simple (cheap) box that costs a few dollars (today's value) per exposure in favour of something that is arguable just as good, but costs more than he made in his lifetime? It's not like he needed to take lots of shots; his pictuers were well planned out and took a long time to take each one.
Maybe the digital would have made him take lots more pictures and spend less time on each. Then instead of hundreds of truly great works of art, he might have taken tens of thousands of mediocre snapshots.
I really don't understand this digital push. It's good for photojournalists who care more about getting the picture to their publisher as fast as possible than image quality or whether the picture will be useful in 50 years. It's also good for people learning to take pictures so they can get some instant feedback and take lots of pictures to experiment.
But for most people film is still better. A typical person who shoots 5-10 rolls a year on vacations and at parties will find that digital has a much higher per-shot cost over the lifetime of the camera; a $300 digital gives comperable features and feel to a $30 P&S film camera. At 5-10 rolls/year you will never recoup those costs over the life of the camera.
As far as quality, you might argue that a $3000 digital is comparable to film, but the $300 digital is definately inferior to film. So for the typical person, digital costs more per shot and gives inferior quality. Where is the advantage?
It sounds like your answers is no then because no such camera is likely to exist for the forseeable future and building one from scratch would cost orders of magnitude more than a lifetime of sheet film even for someone like Adams.
50 megapixel would also be pretty grainy at the large prints adams liked to make. A 2 megapixel doing a 4x6 print would be the same resolution as a 50 megapixel doing a 20x30 print. 20x30 is a typical size for adams, and a 2 megapixel is just barely tolerable at 4x6.
The other side is creative control over the chemicals. We're talking about digital manipulation but analog manipulation has existed as long as chemical photography has. Ansel Adams was a master of that and I doubt he'd give up the techniques he spent a lifetime learning.
Besides the obvious darkroom stuff, film has interesting quirks. A 1 minute exposure is not 60 times effective as a 1 second exposure on real film. How will a CCD behave; in Adams style of photography, long exposures are common.
Even that statement implies it exists in some sense where it can want or not want something. It's a few cells. How is that different than taking a sample of cells from the inside of someone's cheek and asking if it minds being scraped off?
What if they clone stem cells in a way that doesn't prevent the fetus from developing, store it for 10 years while the person grows up, and then ask them if they mind their cells being used that way. If it had been done to me, I sure wouldn't mind.
My reaction as I read the first few lines of the post was "zmodem is better". I'm glad the author added that comment, it gave me a good laugh at my own reaction.
The ease of use of zmodem automatically accepting the download and setting the file name did seem like a revolutionary idea to me back then.
Even considering the cheaper on you mentioned, $1500 buys a lot of film. At costco, it's about $5 total for 24 exp film and processing. That means for the $1500 you could buy a decent 35mm SLR kit for $300 and spend the remaining $1200 on 240 rolls of film and processing, or 5760 pictures.
How many people will shoot 5800 pictures even with a digital camera? There's also depreciation...I spent $450 on a 2.3MP camera in 2001. It's worth about $100 now on ebay. My nikon 4004s is still worth every cent I paid for it back in 1989. So not only do you have to take 5800 pictures, you have to take them in the first year before depreciation erodes your investment. Otherwise it would be better to shoot 1000 pictures on film in 1 year and buy that $1500 camera for $750 the next year.
Another thing, the film price I quoted includes printing. As soon as you starting printing some of those digital pictures the price goes up even more.
Do you think in 20 years you will be able to go
to a photo lab in any mall and hand them a roll of film.
Yes, actually I do. There may not be 6 1-hour photomats in every shopping mall anymore but the demand will definately be able to support the 10's of professional camera stores in every major city.
The stores like that (which is where I get my film processed even now) don't have 'poor kids' behind the counter. They have people who breathe photography; even the salesperson selling the cameras can develop film by hand blindfolded (it is done in a darkroom).
Lentricular 3D photographs were a passing fad that was around for a couple of years in the early 80's, but there's still enough people using the old cameras that even now you can find places to get them developed. 35mm film has been around for 70 years...It would be impossible for nobody to still be using and developing it in another 70.
A lot of what you say is very good. The metering and AF on the body is important too; it's not *just* a box anymore, but as you say, you should splurge on the lenses and cut corners on the body; just make sure you buy Nikon.
Your second last paragraph practically had me rolling on the floor in laughter. You dislike the small negative size (poor image quality) of 35mm so you switched to digital. I've taken pictures on 35mm film in a pin-hole camera I made out of a cardboard box, duct tape and tin foil that are better than any 6MP camera on the market can take.
Digital quality is crap compared to any film...The advantages are in the very low cost per picture and they're great for photojournalists where it's more important to be able to upload your pictures to the head office than have a high quality print.
On the other side of your coin, you complain about the annoying canister but like a sheet film canister. It takes a few minutes in the dark room to load each sheet of film into the frame, and then the frames are around $100 each. So if you spend $1000 on frames, then for a half hour spent in the darkroom loading film you're all set to take 10 pictures. How is that easier than 35mm canisters?
Your last sentence is the best possible photography advice. Film is cheap; a missed shot will never come again. Even after shooting 10 or 20 rolls in a day, when I get my pictures back, I never feel like I've wasted film; if I get a few truly good pictures per roll I'm happy. The only regrets I have in looking at my pictures are that I didn't take enough; I should have shot something from a different angle or bracketed a shot I didn't think was that important.
I have a Nikon N65. At $199.99 retail, It is absolutely the best camera on the market in the poster's price range. It's perfect for a newbie to the SLR world; it has auto-everything mode but it also lets you switch anything into manual mode. It also has most of the higher end features including 5-zone focus, 10-segmet matrix metering, multiple exposure and bracketing. It also uses Nikon lenses which are the best in the world beyond dispute; even the Hubble telescope uses Nikon glass.
An extra $60 buys a 28-80mm lens, a strap, and a set of batteries.
If the poster doesn't mind spending an extra $100, he should also consider the N80.
I really think you should re-consider selling yours. It really is an excellent camera and completely "going digital" is a bad idea. Even an expensive 6MP digital camera is orders of magnitude worse than a $2 roll of film. I've compared digital and film prints under a microscope; the digital has huge ink, and the photographic print has a light dusting of grain that's barely visable even under the microscope. The digital blobs also have no color variety, they're all in one of the primary colors.
Besides that, you have to store your digital pictures somehow. Do you think you'll be able to access your CD-R or Zip disk in 5 or 10 years? Negatives have been proven to last at least 100 years. Do you want your grandkids to be able to look at the pictures you take? Printer ink fades; I have 1 year old digutal pictures on my wall and the fading is already getting bad enough that they need to be replaced. I have photographs that have been on the same wall for 10 years and still don't show noticable fading.
Digital is very freeing; when take pictures now, I usually only shoot 20-30 frames of film and 10 times as many digital. I know I can waste as many digital shots as I want because there's no cost so I get a lot of good pictures I wouldn't otherwise, but I know I'll still be looking at the film ones in 50 years so anything important, I shoot with film.
Indirectly, that's why I do most of my gaming on a console machine. The quality of most PC based games is horrible. In Bridge Commander, it always freezes at exactly the same point near the end of the game (and that's on a few totally different machines since the game came out). I can't play Lords of the Realm at all anymore because for the past few years it detects my original CD as a pirate copy. Except for Blizzard's products (which always seem to be good quality), it seems like most of the PC games I've tried in the past few years just don't work. I've never had a problem with a console game.
To get bad code out of public hands, they have to replace it with better code. This will just replace bad code with even worse code (XP is worse because it has more DRM).
The "activation thing" is a cripping feature. I can't accept that EULA in good faith, so I can't use XP at all (imo pirating XP would be sinking to MS's level). This just pushes me one step closer to a mac. I'm currently running win98 and win2k. The security issue is the major concern; now I can't use win98 on an important machine anymore.
I was the parent poster. I agree that the Foundation series is one of the best works of Sci-Fi ever, and the way Asimov tied in the Robots and Empire series and stand-alone books like The End of Eternity as well as a bunch of short stories just adds to the richness.
That's why I was so ready to read the Second foundation trilogy by a trio of no-talent hacks. It's the second trilogy that's one of the worst works of sci-fi ever written.
I could go on for pages explaining exactly what's so horrible about those books but most people here are aware of it. There's the "super-seldon" in the first book that would make Jame Bond look like an out-of-shape couch potato. The constant implication that Asimov is an idiot who didn't know what he's talking about (explaining that hyperspatial travel is just a minor novelty and real travel is done by wormholes...the robots acting nothing like asimovs robots...generally they described in painful detail why most of Asimov's tech is BS and it's really done 'this way'). What were they trying to do with the Sim and Pan sub-plots. They went on for dozens of pages at a time and had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book.
Ender's Game was brilliant, but when you read the whole series through Shadow Puppets, it's almost 4000 pages of mostly boring, uninteresting parts. The only reason I kept reading is I figured it must have a great ending after the way it started, but it didn't really have an ending.
Re:$699 for that clunker?
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
I thought everyone here knew those freebie printers were worthless and just scams to get people to waste lots of money on ink that has the highest per page cost in the industry.
Because the purpose of the lawsuits are a public relations war, and every time they fuck up (sue a 12 year old, sue a Mac-owning granny) they shoot themselves in the foot.
Their public relations goal is to terrify the public to the point where they're afraid to do anything with their music except pay for it. Showing they're willing to sue anyone falls into this category.
Public relations typically implies they want the public to like them, but in this case they want the public to be afraid of them.
Why should any of those people (or things) be immune from legal action simply for the reasons listed.
Are you saying it's okay to pirate music if you register your account in the name of a man who's been in a coma since 1972?
I agree that the lawsuit's are stupid on the part of the RIAA, but why is suing a 12 year old file swapper any worse than suing a 32 year old geek who lives in his parents basement?
Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.
When light-through-air microscopes reached the physical limit, we came up with light-through-oil to get a greater magnification than was "physically possible". Then when that reached its limit we replaced the light with electrons....Even if this is a fundamental limit of electrons-through-solid, who says we're limited to that technology?
I bought a stack of Popular Electronics magazines from the 70's on ebay a few months ago. There's some great "upcoming technologies" articles.
In the days before the magnetic strip, they predicted credit cards would have a holographic image that optically stores the credit card number. The card projects the hologram onto a sensor which reads the number into the computer for processing.
In the letters to the editor section, someone was wondering if it was worth taking a course in TV repair because with the release of the Phillips Modular design it will be easy for anyone to fix their own TV so the repair industry would become obsolete.
For one who's on a hobby, a simple general-purpose PCB is more than enough. I've done 8255 based circuits with these.
What do you mean by "general-purpose PCB"? Do you mean perfboard? I've worked with it a lot, and I've wire-wrapped a few 6802 and 6809 based systems together. It is very slow, tedious work; if Dante were alive today, it would be one of the circles of hell:).
In school, we used speed-wiring which is sort of like wirewrap, takes about 1/5th as long to throw together the first time, but then 1 in 10 connections don't work, and by the time the time you track them all down with the continuity tester, it's taken 5 times as long as to have wire-wrapped it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
What model camera did you get, and how did you get a 3MP for $80?
As you just said for $80 it has considerable lens distortion. A $30 P&S at target or costco will not have lens distortion. Sure, it won't be as sharp as a Nikon lens, but it won't have distortion.
Your cost is that might get that perfect shot of Grandma and find out it has distortion and poor color balance and saturation. Spoiling a dream shot by having a technically poor image is just too expensive a non-monetary cost.
For $110, I can get a P&S at target, and the extra $80 will buy me 16 rolls of film and processing at costco. If you're shooting more than that much with your digital, such a poor quality one is a mistake right from the start.
If you do want to print them for 29 cents each, that just increases your cost; my price includes a print of every single picture on those 16 rolls. Sure you don't want every one printed, but your way the price includes none printed; my way it includes every one printed for the same money.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I have a life that prevents me from reading every article posted to slashdot. I remember reading that summary but not finding it interesting enough to read the article or post about. If you really have the time to read everything on slashdot, I feel sorry for you.
If that back is $25,000 today and will be $5,000 in 3 years, that means if Adams bought it today he'd have to shoot $20,000 worth of pictures with it in the next 3 years. Black and White sheet film ranges from $2.50 to $5 per sheet, so let's say he's towards the high end where it costs $5 including processing. $20k is 4,000 pictures. Adams never took that many pictures over 3 years, so you're asking him to just throw money away to make his pictures no better (and I would argue worse).
8x10 film is 80 square inches, 35mm is 1.3 square inches, so the 8x10 gives you 60 times the "resolution" of 35mm film. So the quality improvement is the same as going from (140/60 = 2.3) megapixels to 140 megapixels. Even the digital advocates say 2.3MP is good for a 5"x7" print. Normal consumer 35mm film can be enlarged to 11x14 without noticable grain (and even larger if you use a fine grain film like Kodak Royal Gold 100).
It's the same difference for sheet film. If 35mm film is better than 2.3MP, 8x10 is better than 140MP.
Yes, long exposure is Adams signature style, that is because he used tiny apertures, and the light came through such a tiny hole, that it needed a good long time to make the impression on the film.
This is exactly why I said long exposures are common in Adams style of photography. Small arperture means larger depth of field, and for landscape you want the DoF to be maximized.
My point is that film has an inverse saturation curve that is somewhat unique for each kind of film. Adams was skilled to the point where he had an intuitive feel for how the films he used would react. How does a CCD react to a long (several minutes) exposure? Does the charge bleed off and it behaves sort of like film? Does it bleed into other pixels and fog the whole image? Is it perfectly stable and a 10 minute exposure is a 5 minute exposure + 1EV?
If even you're right about the pixel count (and I tend to believe you because of lack of trust of the hardware makers), you're only arguing that this special 50MP camera would be as good as Adams sheet film. Where is the advantage? Why should he abandon a simple (cheap) box that costs a few dollars (today's value) per exposure in favour of something that is arguable just as good, but costs more than he made in his lifetime? It's not like he needed to take lots of shots; his pictuers were well planned out and took a long time to take each one.
Maybe the digital would have made him take lots more pictures and spend less time on each. Then instead of hundreds of truly great works of art, he might have taken tens of thousands of mediocre snapshots.
I really don't understand this digital push. It's good for photojournalists who care more about getting the picture to their publisher as fast as possible than image quality or whether the picture will be useful in 50 years. It's also good for people learning to take pictures so they can get some instant feedback and take lots of pictures to experiment.
But for most people film is still better. A typical person who shoots 5-10 rolls a year on vacations and at parties will find that digital has a much higher per-shot cost over the lifetime of the camera; a $300 digital gives comperable features and feel to a $30 P&S film camera. At 5-10 rolls/year you will never recoup those costs over the life of the camera.
As far as quality, you might argue that a $3000 digital is comparable to film, but the $300 digital is definately inferior to film. So for the typical person, digital costs more per shot and gives inferior quality. Where is the advantage?
Jason
ProfQuotes
It sounds like your answers is no then because no such camera is likely to exist for the forseeable future and building one from scratch would cost orders of magnitude more than a lifetime of sheet film even for someone like Adams.
50 megapixel would also be pretty grainy at the large prints adams liked to make. A 2 megapixel doing a 4x6 print would be the same resolution as a 50 megapixel doing a 20x30 print. 20x30 is a typical size for adams, and a 2 megapixel is just barely tolerable at 4x6.
The other side is creative control over the chemicals. We're talking about digital manipulation but analog manipulation has existed as long as chemical photography has. Ansel Adams was a master of that and I doubt he'd give up the techniques he spent a lifetime learning.
Besides the obvious darkroom stuff, film has interesting quirks. A 1 minute exposure is not 60 times effective as a 1 second exposure on real film. How will a CCD behave; in Adams style of photography, long exposures are common.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Even that statement implies it exists in some sense where it can want or not want something. It's a few cells. How is that different than taking a sample of cells from the inside of someone's cheek and asking if it minds being scraped off?
What if they clone stem cells in a way that doesn't prevent the fetus from developing, store it for 10 years while the person grows up, and then ask them if they mind their cells being used that way. If it had been done to me, I sure wouldn't mind.
Jason
ProfQuotes
..which was scorned in favor of Zmodem
My reaction as I read the first few lines of the post was "zmodem is better". I'm glad the author added that comment, it gave me a good laugh at my own reaction.
The ease of use of zmodem automatically accepting the download and setting the file name did seem like a revolutionary idea to me back then.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Even considering the cheaper on you mentioned, $1500 buys a lot of film. At costco, it's about $5 total for 24 exp film and processing. That means for the $1500 you could buy a decent 35mm SLR kit for $300 and spend the remaining $1200 on 240 rolls of film and processing, or 5760 pictures.
How many people will shoot 5800 pictures even with a digital camera? There's also depreciation...I spent $450 on a 2.3MP camera in 2001. It's worth about $100 now on ebay. My nikon 4004s is still worth every cent I paid for it back in 1989. So not only do you have to take 5800 pictures, you have to take them in the first year before depreciation erodes your investment. Otherwise it would be better to shoot 1000 pictures on film in 1 year and buy that $1500 camera for $750 the next year.
Another thing, the film price I quoted includes printing. As soon as you starting printing some of those digital pictures the price goes up even more.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Do you think in 20 years you will be able to go to a photo lab in any mall and hand them a roll of film.
Yes, actually I do. There may not be 6 1-hour photomats in every shopping mall anymore but the demand will definately be able to support the 10's of professional camera stores in every major city.
The stores like that (which is where I get my film processed even now) don't have 'poor kids' behind the counter. They have people who breathe photography; even the salesperson selling the cameras can develop film by hand blindfolded (it is done in a darkroom). Lentricular 3D photographs were a passing fad that was around for a couple of years in the early 80's, but there's still enough people using the old cameras that even now you can find places to get them developed. 35mm film has been around for 70 years...It would be impossible for nobody to still be using and developing it in another 70.
Jason
ProfQuotes
A lot of what you say is very good. The metering and AF on the body is important too; it's not *just* a box anymore, but as you say, you should splurge on the lenses and cut corners on the body; just make sure you buy Nikon.
Your second last paragraph practically had me rolling on the floor in laughter. You dislike the small negative size (poor image quality) of 35mm so you switched to digital. I've taken pictures on 35mm film in a pin-hole camera I made out of a cardboard box, duct tape and tin foil that are better than any 6MP camera on the market can take.
Digital quality is crap compared to any film...The advantages are in the very low cost per picture and they're great for photojournalists where it's more important to be able to upload your pictures to the head office than have a high quality print.
On the other side of your coin, you complain about the annoying canister but like a sheet film canister. It takes a few minutes in the dark room to load each sheet of film into the frame, and then the frames are around $100 each. So if you spend $1000 on frames, then for a half hour spent in the darkroom loading film you're all set to take 10 pictures. How is that easier than 35mm canisters?
Your last sentence is the best possible photography advice. Film is cheap; a missed shot will never come again. Even after shooting 10 or 20 rolls in a day, when I get my pictures back, I never feel like I've wasted film; if I get a few truly good pictures per roll I'm happy. The only regrets I have in looking at my pictures are that I didn't take enough; I should have shot something from a different angle or bracketed a shot I didn't think was that important.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I have a Nikon N65. At $199.99 retail, It is absolutely the best camera on the market in the poster's price range. It's perfect for a newbie to the SLR world; it has auto-everything mode but it also lets you switch anything into manual mode. It also has most of the higher end features including 5-zone focus, 10-segmet matrix metering, multiple exposure and bracketing. It also uses Nikon lenses which are the best in the world beyond dispute; even the Hubble telescope uses Nikon glass.
An extra $60 buys a 28-80mm lens, a strap, and a set of batteries.
If the poster doesn't mind spending an extra $100, he should also consider the N80.
I really think you should re-consider selling yours. It really is an excellent camera and completely "going digital" is a bad idea. Even an expensive 6MP digital camera is orders of magnitude worse than a $2 roll of film. I've compared digital and film prints under a microscope; the digital has huge ink, and the photographic print has a light dusting of grain that's barely visable even under the microscope. The digital blobs also have no color variety, they're all in one of the primary colors.
Besides that, you have to store your digital pictures somehow. Do you think you'll be able to access your CD-R or Zip disk in 5 or 10 years? Negatives have been proven to last at least 100 years. Do you want your grandkids to be able to look at the pictures you take? Printer ink fades; I have 1 year old digutal pictures on my wall and the fading is already getting bad enough that they need to be replaced. I have photographs that have been on the same wall for 10 years and still don't show noticable fading.
Digital is very freeing; when take pictures now, I usually only shoot 20-30 frames of film and 10 times as many digital. I know I can waste as many digital shots as I want because there's no cost so I get a lot of good pictures I wouldn't otherwise, but I know I'll still be looking at the film ones in 50 years so anything important, I shoot with film.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Indirectly, that's why I do most of my gaming on a console machine. The quality of most PC based games is horrible. In Bridge Commander, it always freezes at exactly the same point near the end of the game (and that's on a few totally different machines since the game came out). I can't play Lords of the Realm at all anymore because for the past few years it detects my original CD as a pirate copy. Except for Blizzard's products (which always seem to be good quality), it seems like most of the PC games I've tried in the past few years just don't work. I've never had a problem with a console game.
Jason
ProfQuotes
To get bad code out of public hands, they have to replace it with better code. This will just replace bad code with even worse code (XP is worse because it has more DRM).
The "activation thing" is a cripping feature. I can't accept that EULA in good faith, so I can't use XP at all (imo pirating XP would be sinking to MS's level). This just pushes me one step closer to a mac. I'm currently running win98 and win2k. The security issue is the major concern; now I can't use win98 on an important machine anymore.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Those new-fangled 32-bit address spaces with virtual mappings in the System/390 are a kids toy.
Real men use the System/360
Jason
ProfQuotes
I was the parent poster. I agree that the Foundation series is one of the best works of Sci-Fi ever, and the way Asimov tied in the Robots and Empire series and stand-alone books like The End of Eternity as well as a bunch of short stories just adds to the richness.
That's why I was so ready to read the Second foundation trilogy by a trio of no-talent hacks. It's the second trilogy that's one of the worst works of sci-fi ever written.
I could go on for pages explaining exactly what's so horrible about those books but most people here are aware of it. There's the "super-seldon" in the first book that would make Jame Bond look like an out-of-shape couch potato. The constant implication that Asimov is an idiot who didn't know what he's talking about (explaining that hyperspatial travel is just a minor novelty and real travel is done by wormholes...the robots acting nothing like asimovs robots...generally they described in painful detail why most of Asimov's tech is BS and it's really done 'this way'). What were they trying to do with the Sim and Pan sub-plots. They went on for dozens of pages at a time and had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Ender's Game was brilliant, but when you read the whole series through Shadow Puppets, it's almost 4000 pages of mostly boring, uninteresting parts. The only reason I kept reading is I figured it must have a great ending after the way it started, but it didn't really have an ending.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I thought everyone here knew those freebie printers were worthless and just scams to get people to waste lots of money on ink that has the highest per page cost in the industry.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Because the purpose of the lawsuits are a public relations war, and every time they fuck up (sue a 12 year old, sue a Mac-owning granny) they shoot themselves in the foot.
Their public relations goal is to terrify the public to the point where they're afraid to do anything with their music except pay for it. Showing they're willing to sue anyone falls into this category.
Public relations typically implies they want the public to like them, but in this case they want the public to be afraid of them.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Why should any of those people (or things) be immune from legal action simply for the reasons listed.
Are you saying it's okay to pirate music if you register your account in the name of a man who's been in a coma since 1972?
I agree that the lawsuit's are stupid on the part of the RIAA, but why is suing a 12 year old file swapper any worse than suing a 32 year old geek who lives in his parents basement?
Jason
ProfQuotes
I have a single-side die I'd be happy to show you, but I put it in my Klein bottle for safe-keeping and now I can't get it back out.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.
When light-through-air microscopes reached the physical limit, we came up with light-through-oil to get a greater magnification than was "physically possible". Then when that reached its limit we replaced the light with electrons....Even if this is a fundamental limit of electrons-through-solid, who says we're limited to that technology?
Jason
ProfQuotes
ProfQuotes started last December. The idea is from the math newspaper at the University of Waterloo, it's also the funniest part of the paper there.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
The article doesn't mention Star Wars at all. It's kind of pathetic that the poster thinks it has to be tied to SW to get a mention on slashdot.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I bought a stack of Popular Electronics magazines from the 70's on ebay a few months ago. There's some great "upcoming technologies" articles.
In the days before the magnetic strip, they predicted credit cards would have a holographic image that optically stores the credit card number. The card projects the hologram onto a sensor which reads the number into the computer for processing.
In the letters to the editor section, someone was wondering if it was worth taking a course in TV repair because with the release of the Phillips Modular design it will be easy for anyone to fix their own TV so the repair industry would become obsolete.
Jason
ProfQuotes
That's a good point. How much of that was spam?
ProfQuotes
For one who's on a hobby, a simple general-purpose PCB is more than enough. I've done 8255 based circuits with these.
:).
What do you mean by "general-purpose PCB"? Do you mean perfboard? I've worked with it a lot, and I've wire-wrapped a few 6802 and 6809 based systems together. It is very slow, tedious work; if Dante were alive today, it would be one of the circles of hell
In school, we used speed-wiring which is sort of like wirewrap, takes about 1/5th as long to throw together the first time, but then 1 in 10 connections don't work, and by the time the time you track them all down with the continuity tester, it's taken 5 times as long as to have wire-wrapped it in the first place.
Jason
ProfQuotes