Your cynicism is developing, but not there yet.;-)
They're there to make money. They don't make money if you pay everything off timely. They make money if you pay late and start paying interest. Which do you think the answer is?
Actually, Boardwalk is one of the most commonly landed on properties because of the go to Boardwalk chance card. I'm pretty sure it's top five. Together the monopoly is second to last place though, to dark purple. This is due to both location and size. However, despite it's smaller footprint, I think it is still the third most powerful (behind green and yellow) on the board with hotels, and it costs less to develop on than the first two. (A LOT less than green. "Powerful" in this context means your average income per turn.)
I sort of agree that I don't understand the fawning over them either, but they are by no means poor properties to have.
There are times when each of film and digital have their place. I saw a rocket launch 3 or 4 weeks ago, and I decided to shoot it film, for two reasons. First, believe it or not, my film body (a Canon Elan 7) can shoot more rapidly than my digital body (Rebel XT) despite having the mechanical film advance. Second, film still has better dynamic range than digital, and the brightness difference between rocket exhaust and background had thrown off pictures I took of an earlier launch on the Rebel.
That said, every non-launch picture I took was on the Rebel, and I still haven't gotten around to dropping off the film shots. (I'm a bit worried that I abused the film too much in airport and customs x-rays, and don't want to get them back and see they're all fogged. Living in ignorance is better.;-) And yeah, this is a perfect example of how you can give a guy beautiful equipment but if he's a dumbass you'll still get crap for pictures...)
Might be better than your typical fan-made one of these, but there are other examples. One of which, I think the one I went looking for, was called DVD Tracks, but it seems to have went away... Here's a/. article about this though.
What sort of default application thing has been reset via a security update?
I suppose it's possible that they do it with WM Player, because I use that by default for a lot of stuff, but that's about the only thing that I have that's set at default. Certainly no IE security update has returned IE to being default (this is over the life of this computer, which is just about 4 years now).
installing the next version of messenger (or a MS download of any kind)
I'm sorry, I think you misspelled any.
Or do you really think that MS is the only one who makes media players and such ask "do you want to change the default options to me"? ESPECIALLY media players. It's rare to find one that doesn't, at least in the Windows world.
I'm an avid Linux user but do I care about when the next kernel release is? No, not particularly.
That's because a new revision (e.g. 2.6.16 to 2.6.17) is put out every few months, and minor patches (2.6.17.2 to 2.6.17.3) more frequently than that.
Even if you count SP2 as a new version (this is pretty reasonable; the changes there were more substantial than a Linux revision) it's been quite some time since Windows has been updated (close to 2 years). If you don't count SP2, it's been close to 5 years.
Windows too is a lot more visible than your Linux kernel, because it includes the shell. I dunno if you are looking forward to the next KDE/Gnome/whatever release either, but that's as much of a reason why Vista is significant as the core kernel.
Finally, there are a lot of long-overdue features of Vista, like separate user accounts that might actually work, for which a lot of people are waiting to see how well they work.
It makes sense if you know the cause, but I doubt that most users even know that things can appear in the start menu for just them (located in Documents an Settings\Start Menu) or everyone (in D&S\All Users). There's also, as the article says, no immediate indication of which is which for any given start menu entry. (In 2K wasn't all users above a separater bar and user-specific stuff below?) So if you don't know the root cause, it doesn't make sense: sometimes deleting stuff works, sometimes it doesn't.
It also doesn't HAVE to be that way. MS could set it up so that if you try to delete a start menu entry that isn't just yours, it doesn't remove it from All Users (of course! it can't) but just adds a little note somewhere that says "don't display this when the start menu is opened".
The same thing occurs for desktop stuff, only moreso; people are going to delete stuff from there more than they will the start menu probably.
(Of course, my suggestion introduces other problems. Like the desktop and start menu behaving differently than the rest of the system. If I go into a folder and delete something I don't have permissions to, it doesn't go away. I think this inconsistency is as bad as the problem we're trying to solve though.)
I always saw the slashbacks as something for followups. Story A has person B doing thing C, then the/back says that person B changed his mind and is no longer doing C, or said he was not doing C in the first place and the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. Or person B says thing C about person D, and person D responds to person B with rebuttal E. Stuff like that, but that wasn't important enough to make the main page.
a previous poster was wrong in implying that TIFF is necessarily lossy
This... is not really true. Digital sensor data can't be immediately used, even in something like a TIFF file that doesn't require compression. To get that TIFF file, you've got to run through the demosaicing algorithm. There are different algorithms that vary in speed, quality, and characteristics. An algorithm that is good for one situation isn't necessarily as good in another as a second algorithm. Demosaicing is also one place where different RAW processors have an opportunity to distinguish themselves. Now, these demosaicing algorithms are lossy, so to get your TIFF file you've got to go through a lossy algorithm.
Just because once you've got it in TIFF you can work on it losslessly doesn't necessarily mean that getting to that file was lossless.
(Also, there's a host of things you can do to camera RAW files either losslessly or close to it. For instance, white balance is applied after the sensor, so you can losslessly change the WB in post. You can also change the exposure a limited number of stops up or down with much better results than just changing the brightness in a JPEG file. I don't *THINK* these transformations can be done losslessly from a TIFF. I'm not sure about that; perhaps if anyone with more knowledge about graphics processing is still reading this thread they can comment.)
However, I don't know of any camera manufacturer who currently makes cameras which save to a truely open RAW format. Maybe Adobe's DNG will change that, but right now I don't know it being implemented anywhere. So it's not a choice of open or closed, it's a choice of closed or crappy. And I think that anyone but the most free software adherent who doesn't run anything on their computer they don't have the source code to* would go with closed given that choice.
And the "this is how things are" knife cuts both ways: it may be a choice on the person who buys the camera to get 'locked into' a format, but to the extent the Gimp needs to license stuff to read RAW it's also a choice by the developers not do so, so when the question DOES come up they don't get to pretend that the Gimp is at the level of Photoshop. (At least in that arena.) You may feel that the Gimp can be excused, or that not licensing it is a good decision to make because of openness, but that doesn't change the fact that Photoshop does something the Gimp doesn't.
(Now, that said, there are OSS programs that have reverse engineered** RAW formats. Most notably dcraw. Which seems to work fine, considering I used it for a couple weeks to convert roughly 1500 photos from Canon RAW to JPG***. So, a question to anyone with the proper experience: do you have any opinion on the quality differences of converting Canon RAW (350D) with dcraw compared to, say, Adobe Camera RAW or Canon Photo Professional (came with the camera)? Also, any differences in quality of HDR images between something like this CinePaint plugin and CS2?)
* I don't mean this to be derogatory by any means. I actually find it somewhat admirable, because it's a level of idealism I think I'll never be at.
** And by the programs have reverse engineered the formats, I mean of course that the authors of the programs (or maybe others!) have reverse engineered them.
*** And by Canon RAW to JPG, I mean I used dcraw to convert RAW to PPM, ppm2bmp to go PPM to BMP (duh), and then some other converter to go BMP to JPG. Yeah, my toolchain needed some help... but I didn't have much choice, because I couldn't install software.
Okay... I searched completed ebay auctions and there were three touchstreams that I found. One had a high bid of around $405, but reserve not met. One won at $600. One Dvorak TouchStream sold for 550 GB Pounds ~= 1000 USD.
Makes me really wish I had bought a few a couple years ago...
There are mice out there that are wireless and have gyroscopes in them. You hold them in the air, and by turning them you move the mouse cursor. Something like that might be worth a try, though I really have no clue if it would help with RSI.
The TouchStream keyboard/trackpad combos look pretty sweet if you ask me; back when they were in production I thought I might get one. But they weree horrendiously expensive, and are even more so now because they aren't made anymore. Ebay has a couple, but not for under $400 with 6 bids and 3+ days to go.
What you say is true. Actually, last night I arrived back home after spending about 3 weeks at Norway's Andoya Rocket Range where a little over a week ago there was the launch of a sounding rocket I helped build the payload for as a project at college. Our launch was in conjunction with another launch from actual scientists in Europe called HotPay1. The HotPay launch came 26 minutes after ours. Unfortunately, 7 to 8 seconds into flight either the payload broke off the motor or the motor broke in half. (As of last I heard, they weren't sure what happened.) So these things still do NOT always go well.
And that was just a single stage sounding rocket too; not even in the same category as an orbital flight.
P.S. I'd have started this post with "you might even say 'it IS rocket science" but another poster took that joke already...
The reason you are seeing excessive speeds is because Napster has a local caching server on the PSU network.
Actually, interestingly enough, the 2 MB/s speed was last summer when I was at an internship in NY and was connecting through Road Runner cable. I only things in that league once, but it was sustained for a few songs, so it wasn't just a momentary calculation glitch.
To this day I still have no idea how it managed it. There must have been something nearby.
If you're living in the dorms they have only 10Mbit network connections, so what you were seeing is the maximum network bandwidth (I know this is true in West Halls, not sure about the others).
I lived in South, and it's only 10 Mb there too.
They got a fairly big collection, although I'm starting to see a lot of more "pay only" tracks as time goes on.
They also don't have anything by The Beatles. Fortunately pretty much anything thereisn't hard to find on P2P.
Can't keep the music after graduation? Can't burn songs to CD? That's not free.
It's as free as any other "benefits" are. If I can call the ability to use the university's computer labs free, than (in my case) Napster is free. And if THAT'S not free, than having the university pay for a service where students can keep the music or burn it to CD still isn't free.
YOU'RE the one twisting words, by insisting on a definition that agrees more with "free as in speech" than "free as in beer", even though the latter definition is just as legitimate.
I just read your P.S. and now feel like a dumbass. Sorry.
(Though I'll also say that my PC is 4 years old, and wasn't top of the line even then, so your "if your PC and soundcard are fast enough" isn't the requirements I think you think it is.)
I can do it with just one PC. And no, this isn't with a loopback cord from headphone to mic jack either. I have an Audigy and just select the appropriate recording source ('what-u-hear' I think works, but I odn't know for sure if it's what I've used). I don't think it goes to analog first, and in any case I can't tell the difference.
Oh, and purely theoretically of course, if you record with Audacity while playing the tracks through Napster, you can compress the results to MP3s and obtain essentially the same result as if you downloaded from P2P without most of the hassles that come with doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Your cynicism is developing, but not there yet. ;-)
They're there to make money. They don't make money if you pay everything off timely. They make money if you pay late and start paying interest. Which do you think the answer is?
Actually, Boardwalk is one of the most commonly landed on properties because of the go to Boardwalk chance card. I'm pretty sure it's top five. Together the monopoly is second to last place though, to dark purple. This is due to both location and size. However, despite it's smaller footprint, I think it is still the third most powerful (behind green and yellow) on the board with hotels, and it costs less to develop on than the first two. (A LOT less than green. "Powerful" in this context means your average income per turn.)
I sort of agree that I don't understand the fawning over them either, but they are by no means poor properties to have.
But... but... Maxis says it will happen in 2050!
There are times when each of film and digital have their place. I saw a rocket launch 3 or 4 weeks ago, and I decided to shoot it film, for two reasons. First, believe it or not, my film body (a Canon Elan 7) can shoot more rapidly than my digital body (Rebel XT) despite having the mechanical film advance. Second, film still has better dynamic range than digital, and the brightness difference between rocket exhaust and background had thrown off pictures I took of an earlier launch on the Rebel.
;-) And yeah, this is a perfect example of how you can give a guy beautiful equipment but if he's a dumbass you'll still get crap for pictures...)
That said, every non-launch picture I took was on the Rebel, and I still haven't gotten around to dropping off the film shots. (I'm a bit worried that I abused the film too much in airport and customs x-rays, and don't want to get them back and see they're all fogged. Living in ignorance is better.
I don't use Messenger or their network, so I can't speak to that. I'll take your word.
Might be better than your typical fan-made one of these, but there are other examples. One of which, I think the one I went looking for, was called DVD Tracks, but it seems to have went away... Here's a /. article about this though.
What sort of default application thing has been reset via a security update?
I suppose it's possible that they do it with WM Player, because I use that by default for a lot of stuff, but that's about the only thing that I have that's set at default. Certainly no IE security update has returned IE to being default (this is over the life of this computer, which is just about 4 years now).
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/ WindowsPrinciples.mspx
installing the next version of messenger (or a MS download of any kind)
I'm sorry, I think you misspelled any.
Or do you really think that MS is the only one who makes media players and such ask "do you want to change the default options to me"? ESPECIALLY media players. It's rare to find one that doesn't, at least in the Windows world.
I'm an avid Linux user but do I care about when the next kernel release is? No, not particularly.
That's because a new revision (e.g. 2.6.16 to 2.6.17) is put out every few months, and minor patches (2.6.17.2 to 2.6.17.3) more frequently than that.
Even if you count SP2 as a new version (this is pretty reasonable; the changes there were more substantial than a Linux revision) it's been quite some time since Windows has been updated (close to 2 years). If you don't count SP2, it's been close to 5 years.
Windows too is a lot more visible than your Linux kernel, because it includes the shell. I dunno if you are looking forward to the next KDE/Gnome/whatever release either, but that's as much of a reason why Vista is significant as the core kernel.
Finally, there are a lot of long-overdue features of Vista, like separate user accounts that might actually work, for which a lot of people are waiting to see how well they work.
It makes sense if you know the cause, but I doubt that most users even know that things can appear in the start menu for just them (located in Documents an Settings\Start Menu) or everyone (in D&S\All Users). There's also, as the article says, no immediate indication of which is which for any given start menu entry. (In 2K wasn't all users above a separater bar and user-specific stuff below?) So if you don't know the root cause, it doesn't make sense: sometimes deleting stuff works, sometimes it doesn't.
It also doesn't HAVE to be that way. MS could set it up so that if you try to delete a start menu entry that isn't just yours, it doesn't remove it from All Users (of course! it can't) but just adds a little note somewhere that says "don't display this when the start menu is opened".
The same thing occurs for desktop stuff, only moreso; people are going to delete stuff from there more than they will the start menu probably.
(Of course, my suggestion introduces other problems. Like the desktop and start menu behaving differently than the rest of the system. If I go into a folder and delete something I don't have permissions to, it doesn't go away. I think this inconsistency is as bad as the problem we're trying to solve though.)
I read it as sarcasm against the newsworthyness of the story myself.
I always saw the slashbacks as something for followups. Story A has person B doing thing C, then the /back says that person B changed his mind and is no longer doing C, or said he was not doing C in the first place and the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. Or person B says thing C about person D, and person D responds to person B with rebuttal E. Stuff like that, but that wasn't important enough to make the main page.
a previous poster was wrong in implying that TIFF is necessarily lossy
This... is not really true. Digital sensor data can't be immediately used, even in something like a TIFF file that doesn't require compression. To get that TIFF file, you've got to run through the demosaicing algorithm. There are different algorithms that vary in speed, quality, and characteristics. An algorithm that is good for one situation isn't necessarily as good in another as a second algorithm. Demosaicing is also one place where different RAW processors have an opportunity to distinguish themselves. Now, these demosaicing algorithms are lossy, so to get your TIFF file you've got to go through a lossy algorithm.
Just because once you've got it in TIFF you can work on it losslessly doesn't necessarily mean that getting to that file was lossless.
(Also, there's a host of things you can do to camera RAW files either losslessly or close to it. For instance, white balance is applied after the sensor, so you can losslessly change the WB in post. You can also change the exposure a limited number of stops up or down with much better results than just changing the brightness in a JPEG file. I don't *THINK* these transformations can be done losslessly from a TIFF. I'm not sure about that; perhaps if anyone with more knowledge about graphics processing is still reading this thread they can comment.)
However, I don't know of any camera manufacturer who currently makes cameras which save to a truely open RAW format. Maybe Adobe's DNG will change that, but right now I don't know it being implemented anywhere. So it's not a choice of open or closed, it's a choice of closed or crappy. And I think that anyone but the most free software adherent who doesn't run anything on their computer they don't have the source code to* would go with closed given that choice.
And the "this is how things are" knife cuts both ways: it may be a choice on the person who buys the camera to get 'locked into' a format, but to the extent the Gimp needs to license stuff to read RAW it's also a choice by the developers not do so, so when the question DOES come up they don't get to pretend that the Gimp is at the level of Photoshop. (At least in that arena.) You may feel that the Gimp can be excused, or that not licensing it is a good decision to make because of openness, but that doesn't change the fact that Photoshop does something the Gimp doesn't.
(Now, that said, there are OSS programs that have reverse engineered** RAW formats. Most notably dcraw. Which seems to work fine, considering I used it for a couple weeks to convert roughly 1500 photos from Canon RAW to JPG***. So, a question to anyone with the proper experience: do you have any opinion on the quality differences of converting Canon RAW (350D) with dcraw compared to, say, Adobe Camera RAW or Canon Photo Professional (came with the camera)? Also, any differences in quality of HDR images between something like this CinePaint plugin and CS2?)
* I don't mean this to be derogatory by any means. I actually find it somewhat admirable, because it's a level of idealism I think I'll never be at.
** And by the programs have reverse engineered the formats, I mean of course that the authors of the programs (or maybe others!) have reverse engineered them.
*** And by Canon RAW to JPG, I mean I used dcraw to convert RAW to PPM, ppm2bmp to go PPM to BMP (duh), and then some other converter to go BMP to JPG. Yeah, my toolchain needed some help... but I didn't have much choice, because I couldn't install software.
Do YOU want to go through and tell the system what files each and every program you want to run may access?
Because I sure as hell don't...
I don't know whether this post (+ the knowledge of the reference) or the fact that it was modded 'insightful' is funnier...
Okay... I searched completed ebay auctions and there were three touchstreams that I found. One had a high bid of around $405, but reserve not met. One won at $600. One Dvorak TouchStream sold for 550 GB Pounds ~= 1000 USD.
Makes me really wish I had bought a few a couple years ago...
There are mice out there that are wireless and have gyroscopes in them. You hold them in the air, and by turning them you move the mouse cursor. Something like that might be worth a try, though I really have no clue if it would help with RSI.
The TouchStream keyboard/trackpad combos look pretty sweet if you ask me; back when they were in production I thought I might get one. But they weree horrendiously expensive, and are even more so now because they aren't made anymore. Ebay has a couple, but not for under $400 with 6 bids and 3+ days to go.
What you say is true. Actually, last night I arrived back home after spending about 3 weeks at Norway's Andoya Rocket Range where a little over a week ago there was the launch of a sounding rocket I helped build the payload for as a project at college. Our launch was in conjunction with another launch from actual scientists in Europe called HotPay1. The HotPay launch came 26 minutes after ours. Unfortunately, 7 to 8 seconds into flight either the payload broke off the motor or the motor broke in half. (As of last I heard, they weren't sure what happened.) So these things still do NOT always go well.
And that was just a single stage sounding rocket too; not even in the same category as an orbital flight.
P.S. I'd have started this post with "you might even say 'it IS rocket science" but another poster took that joke already...
The reason you are seeing excessive speeds is because Napster has a local caching server on the PSU network.
Actually, interestingly enough, the 2 MB/s speed was last summer when I was at an internship in NY and was connecting through Road Runner cable. I only things in that league once, but it was sustained for a few songs, so it wasn't just a momentary calculation glitch.
To this day I still have no idea how it managed it. There must have been something nearby.
If you're living in the dorms they have only 10Mbit network connections, so what you were seeing is the maximum network bandwidth (I know this is true in West Halls, not sure about the others).
I lived in South, and it's only 10 Mb there too.
They got a fairly big collection, although I'm starting to see a lot of more "pay only" tracks as time goes on.
They also don't have anything by The Beatles. Fortunately pretty much anything thereisn't hard to find on P2P.
Can't keep the music after graduation? Can't burn songs to CD? That's not free.
It's as free as any other "benefits" are. If I can call the ability to use the university's computer labs free, than (in my case) Napster is free. And if THAT'S not free, than having the university pay for a service where students can keep the music or burn it to CD still isn't free.
YOU'RE the one twisting words, by insisting on a definition that agrees more with "free as in speech" than "free as in beer", even though the latter definition is just as legitimate.
I just read your P.S. and now feel like a dumbass. Sorry.
(Though I'll also say that my PC is 4 years old, and wasn't top of the line even then, so your "if your PC and soundcard are fast enough" isn't the requirements I think you think it is.)
Huh? 2 PCs?
I can do it with just one PC. And no, this isn't with a loopback cord from headphone to mic jack either. I have an Audigy and just select the appropriate recording source ('what-u-hear' I think works, but I odn't know for sure if it's what I've used). I don't think it goes to analog first, and in any case I can't tell the difference.
Oh, and purely theoretically of course, if you record with Audacity while playing the tracks through Napster, you can compress the results to MP3s and obtain essentially the same result as if you downloaded from P2P without most of the hassles that come with doing so.