Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
If my "mirrored" you mean "RAID 1", I would say that barely counts as a backup. There are essentially three or four substantial threats for why you need a backup, and RAID 1 protects you against just one of them. (If you're counting, the four threats are (1) drive failure, (2) your power supply committing murder-suicide and taking out your drives, (3) your house burning down or computer being destroyed (you can combine 2&3 if you want), (4) software corruption.
The first rule of backups is "make backups". The second rule of backups is "make backups". But the third rule of backups, if you ask me, is "RAID isn't backups". (The fourth rule is perhaps "check your backups to make sure you can restore from them.")
(What you should do is buy in pairs, put one in an external enclosure, and periodically sync them. Keep the second drive unplugged from everything when it's not actually being synced.)
Static images are reaching that threshold, and we do already have lossless encodings that pass it.
I'm not going to comment on resolution, but in terms of dynamic range, I don't think we're anywhere near limits of human perception. Certainly not in anything that approaches a consumer-level device.
Granted, there are plenty with only one (including myself; I live alone), but at the same time, according to this, the most common number of cars to have is three, and 2/3 of the US has either two or three vehicles.
I slightly misstated that page -- what it says is that it's more common to have at least three cars than it is to have only two. If more than 10% or so of the people who have at least three cars actually have at least four, than what I said isn't quite true. That also changes my last statement a little: 2/3 of the use has at least two vehicles.
I'm also gonna guess motorcycles are in there as well.
This is the freedom that people have with gasoline cars today and it is nothing more than delusion to expect that, on a large scale, people would ever willingly give that up.
But I think it's also crazy to say that electric vehicles becoming popular means that we are give that up. How many households with two vehicles can you think of? Granted, there are plenty with only one (including myself; I live alone), but at the same time, according to this, the most common number of cars to have is three, and 2/3 of the US has either two or three vehicles.
That site puts the average number of cars per household at 2.28 (this may exclude households that have none); this 2001 DOT study puts the average number at 1.9. According to it, the average number of cars in households with only two people is still 2.0.
Does every one of those cars have to have the freedom to take substantial road trips? No way. Probably a majority of 2-car households could change one for an electric and basically never notice that they can't take long road trips using both cars at the same time. One electric car for going around town and one gas car for long distances would probably cover the usage needs of 2/3 of 2-car families. And that's not even considering ones with more cars. The only thing that gives me pause there is families with, say, a pickup truck for hauling around town and a standard sedan for longer trips -- neither of those roles would be easily taken by an electric vehicle.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it isn't of interest to camera folks. Maybe in some esoteric role... a spacecraft or something else with a tight power budget where stabilization can't be done for some reason (certainly measurement takes less power than actual stabilization)... but DSLRs and point-and-shoots... no.
Well, sort of, I disagree somewhat. For starters, take camera phones. What do they need to do this? I'm too lazy to read the paper, but seems like accelerometer data. How many phones come with accelerometers nowadays? Pretty much every smart phone does. So no extra hardware there. Second, think of an actual camera. Sure, a lot of P&S cameras now have IS, and a lot of SLR lenses have IS. Maybe that gets you an extra stop or two. But what if you *also* had accelerometer data to apply? If you were in a really low-light scenario and a tripod was impractical (for any number of completely realistic reasons), could this give you yet another stop?
I mean, you say that the results aren't great, and point out flaws. And the results definitely aren't great. Actually, if you look at the Coke image, the whole thing has a very substantial double image -- it looks like the image was translated a couple dozen pixels and added to itself. But in some sense, "does it look as good as a completely stable" is the wrong metric -- if you ask me, the revised images do look rather better than the version before processing. Low-light photography to me always is a huge game of tradeoffs between using a slow shutter and getting blurring, using a fast aperture setting and getting narrow DoF, and using a high ISO setting and getting high noise. And for that reason, I would welcome anything that gives more choices in that arena. (In my dream world Canon stops pushing the pixel count for a couple generations and just works on decreasing noise.)
Also, if you want working de-blurring, try turning the lens's image stabilization on. This is something better suited to the optics than the sensor, and Canon and Nikon both do a very good job with image stabilization.
The question, IMO, isn't so much "is this doing the same thing as in-lens IS?" (Or, IIRC and you've got a Minolta, in-body IS.) The question is whether you can get any additional benefit over what IS gives you. From what I've heard, present IS systems give you about an extra stop of exposure time over what you'd be able to do without it. Does this give you two extra stops over no IS? If so, it's worth having as an option.
Or on the other other hand you could just learn how to use your camera and not get such a shit load of blur in the first place.
That's what I always tell people. The raw light they spontaneously emit from knowing what they're doing will go and light up that dim scene, thus letting them use a faster shutter. It's really quite simple.
The Vienna Symphony Library is available today and can essentially replace an orchestra to all but the most discerning of ears. Here is an example of the E.T. theme. There are a couple of parts where I can tell it's a bit artificial sounding if I really listen, but it's approaching the flawless threshold.
To my ears it's not even close to what I get if I pop in the ET CD. That said, I suppose it could be YouTube compression and not source material.
Most of the apps were either sold by the developer themselves, in which case they had to pay for CC processing, hosting, bandwidth, etc.
I would be astonished if those came anywhere remotely close to 30%. My impression is CC charges are about 3%, and I bet that'd be by far the biggest chunk.
The main thing the app store does for developers is give one central repository for users to go to. It makes it easier for them to discover your programs. It doesn't matter how low your costs are if you're self-hosting but no one finds your program.
I hypothesize then that this model is a decent deal for the small guy, but would not be so attractive for a big player like MS if they started selling, say, Office for the iPad. If they choose to enter the market, their own ads and market pressures would do more than what the app store does.
Software is supposed to be Microsoft's main business, not hardware. Producing quality apps for the iPad as well as for various other portable devices that hopefully *other* people make, but which run Windows, would be their best bet, money wise.
There's a big difference between PC and iPad though, which is that the App Store takes a very substantial cut of the revenue. If you're looking at the risk/reward ratios of the options, that could swing the pendulum, especially if you're concerned about the MS-Apple spread (where that 30% not only hurts you but helps your competitor).
Apple's designs set the trend for knock-off electronics for years. How many phones since the iPhone have been made to "look like the iPhone?" How many MP3 players since the iPod? Now the tablet computer. Apple has a lot of weight on its shoulders because there's a giant knock-off industry just waiting to see what they'll do next.
To be fair, to the extent that "there's a giant knock-off industry" waiting to see what Apple does, Apple itself is a giant knock-off company.
How many smart phones and PDAs were around before the iPhone? How many MP3 players were around before the iPod?
Apple's successes in those areas are because they knocked off the previous products really well. The iPad is really the first arena they're entering where there really wasn't much of an existing market.
Mirrors. Learn to use them (they let you see around corners!). Flashlights. Learn to use them (they let you see things which otherwise would escape illumination!).
Mirrors and flashlights can be a bit of a pain to work together in such a way that you can use the mirror to both illuminate the subject and view what it's seeing. If you can't pull a component all the way out because a cable is too short, for example (& a situation that happens to me not terribly infrequently), that's more or less what you have to do.
Manuals. Learn to use them (they show you a map of the back side of the component!).
Right, because I want to go digging for a manual instead of just plugging the thing in.
Fingers. Learn to use them (they let you feel things that your eyes cannot see!).
Which is exactly my point. You can feel where an HDMI port is without looking. You can't feel which of the three or five RCA jacks is each color.
Have you ever actually tried to hook up a "D" shaped connector blind?
Are you talking about the sorts of D connectors you get on the back of a computer? If so, I have on several occasions. It's not easy, but it's usually not *that* hard either. If you're talking about some A/V D-shaped connector, I'm not sure what that would be, so I haven't.
I'm not arguing that it's a *huge* deal, especially in an A/V system where it's quite likely that you have to look at the back anyway to see which port to even use, but it is a benefit IMO.
Not easy, granted, but you can still try each direction and see if it works. That's what I wind up doing with USB most of the time anyway, even when I'm plugging into the front of my computer.
Depends. Do you have a nice setup, or are you reaching your arm in back of your A/V equipment trying to do things by feel? Avoiding the need to pull out the components to actually look at them (since you can't do color by feel, obviously), is a reasonably nice benefit.
Ah, I see what you're saying. No, the copyright owner must enforce their own copyrights.
However, with trademarks, it's easy to wind up in a situation where, if you don't enforce your trademark against party A, you will lose your ability to enforce it against anyone. That's not true of copyrights. If party A is infringing, you can ignore them completely; then a couple years later, you can go and sue party B because they're infringing too.
For one thing, the stylus requires pressure or conductive contact, while the finger requires capacitive contact.
I'm sort of nitpicking here, but neither of these are quite true. You can have active styluses that don't require any contact at all, and for fingers you can have non-capacitive touch screens that work by pressure. Indeed, such touch screens have a significant benefit: you can use them with gloves. (You can't do this with, say, the iPhone, unless you buy special gloves.) You can use them with simpler styluses.
Think about this, if it is all the same, how come phones are now including touch-screens instead of the old, tried-and-true stylus like the PDAs of yore? Perhaps it's because the technology has improved enough, and its cost lowered enough as to be practical.
To play devil's advocate, I would say it's not so much because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for image editing, but rather because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for most tasks you'd expect to do on a phone.
(In fact, my phone, the Nokia N900, actually comes with a stylus. It doesn't get much use, but it does get some. For instance, I've got a Boggle game on it -- if I use my fingers to select the squares, I block a lot of the view.)
To say that a finger-trackpack would not be good for editing images just because older tools did not do it, is as short-sighted as saying touch-sensitive screens on phones are useless because they didn't used occur in smartphones before.
But it's not really any more silly than saying that, because touch-sensitive screens on phones are now commonplace, that technology would be good for image editing.
If you want a more convincing argument you could see what people have to say about using the Macbook's touchpad for that sort of work -- I have no idea what you'd find.
There is a FEW games out there that handles this differently, but majority doesn't care about magazine count, it's all about ammo count.
I'm sure you know about the Rainbow Six series, but if not, give it a try. I suspect you'd like it. Rainbow Six 3 is on Steam for $10 with expansion for instance.
I would suggest "a circular apparatus that facilitates low friction locomotion" would have been an entirely worthy patent when it was first invented.
The problem (IMO) isn't that you had to wait out the 20 years, it's that patents are being filed for things that aren't novel or are obvious. Do the latter things apply to TTF? I dunno. But put the problem in the right place.
I am a full proponent of using something other than C or C++ for almost all development -- there are other languages that are comparable in terms of speed and are much "nicer" to develop in. That said... Python is emphatically not one of them. Comparison to Farmville? Someone needs to be hit by a cluebat.
You're off by an order of magnitude, but 120 developers on a title like SC2 is not hard to fathom at all for anyone who has sat through a big-budget VG credits screen recently.
Slashdot Mirror
Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
If my "mirrored" you mean "RAID 1", I would say that barely counts as a backup. There are essentially three or four substantial threats for why you need a backup, and RAID 1 protects you against just one of them. (If you're counting, the four threats are (1) drive failure, (2) your power supply committing murder-suicide and taking out your drives, (3) your house burning down or computer being destroyed (you can combine 2&3 if you want), (4) software corruption.
The first rule of backups is "make backups". The second rule of backups is "make backups". But the third rule of backups, if you ask me, is "RAID isn't backups". (The fourth rule is perhaps "check your backups to make sure you can restore from them.")
(What you should do is buy in pairs, put one in an external enclosure, and periodically sync them. Keep the second drive unplugged from everything when it's not actually being synced.)
And what OS, pray tell, would you recommend?
Static images are reaching that threshold, and we do already have lossless encodings that pass it.
I'm not going to comment on resolution, but in terms of dynamic range, I don't think we're anywhere near limits of human perception. Certainly not in anything that approaches a consumer-level device.
Granted, there are plenty with only one (including myself; I live alone), but at the same time, according to this, the most common number of cars to have is three, and 2/3 of the US has either two or three vehicles.
I slightly misstated that page -- what it says is that it's more common to have at least three cars than it is to have only two. If more than 10% or so of the people who have at least three cars actually have at least four, than what I said isn't quite true. That also changes my last statement a little: 2/3 of the use has at least two vehicles.
I'm also gonna guess motorcycles are in there as well.
I'm undoing some moderation, but whatever.
This is the freedom that people have with gasoline cars today and it is nothing more than delusion to expect that, on a large scale, people would ever willingly give that up.
But I think it's also crazy to say that electric vehicles becoming popular means that we are give that up. How many households with two vehicles can you think of? Granted, there are plenty with only one (including myself; I live alone), but at the same time, according to this, the most common number of cars to have is three, and 2/3 of the US has either two or three vehicles.
That site puts the average number of cars per household at 2.28 (this may exclude households that have none); this 2001 DOT study puts the average number at 1.9. According to it, the average number of cars in households with only two people is still 2.0.
Does every one of those cars have to have the freedom to take substantial road trips? No way. Probably a majority of 2-car households could change one for an electric and basically never notice that they can't take long road trips using both cars at the same time. One electric car for going around town and one gas car for long distances would probably cover the usage needs of 2/3 of 2-car families. And that's not even considering ones with more cars. The only thing that gives me pause there is families with, say, a pickup truck for hauling around town and a standard sedan for longer trips -- neither of those roles would be easily taken by an electric vehicle.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it isn't of interest to camera folks. Maybe in some esoteric role... a spacecraft or something else with a tight power budget where stabilization can't be done for some reason (certainly measurement takes less power than actual stabilization)... but DSLRs and point-and-shoots... no.
Well, sort of, I disagree somewhat. For starters, take camera phones. What do they need to do this? I'm too lazy to read the paper, but seems like accelerometer data. How many phones come with accelerometers nowadays? Pretty much every smart phone does. So no extra hardware there. Second, think of an actual camera. Sure, a lot of P&S cameras now have IS, and a lot of SLR lenses have IS. Maybe that gets you an extra stop or two. But what if you *also* had accelerometer data to apply? If you were in a really low-light scenario and a tripod was impractical (for any number of completely realistic reasons), could this give you yet another stop?
I mean, you say that the results aren't great, and point out flaws. And the results definitely aren't great. Actually, if you look at the Coke image, the whole thing has a very substantial double image -- it looks like the image was translated a couple dozen pixels and added to itself. But in some sense, "does it look as good as a completely stable" is the wrong metric -- if you ask me, the revised images do look rather better than the version before processing. Low-light photography to me always is a huge game of tradeoffs between using a slow shutter and getting blurring, using a fast aperture setting and getting narrow DoF, and using a high ISO setting and getting high noise. And for that reason, I would welcome anything that gives more choices in that arena. (In my dream world Canon stops pushing the pixel count for a couple generations and just works on decreasing noise.)
WARNING: This message may contain words known to the State of California to cause offense or other psychological harm.
This is OT, but that's an awesome sig.
The lack of auto mouse focus default really makes windows desktop suck, plus the lack of workspaces.
Says you. When I'm working in a text editor or whatever, I like to move the mouse entirely out of that window's area so the cursor isn't distracting.
Funnily enough, different people have different preferences. Who'd have thunk it?
Also, if you want working de-blurring, try turning the lens's image stabilization on. This is something better suited to the optics than the sensor, and Canon and Nikon both do a very good job with image stabilization.
The question, IMO, isn't so much "is this doing the same thing as in-lens IS?" (Or, IIRC and you've got a Minolta, in-body IS.) The question is whether you can get any additional benefit over what IS gives you. From what I've heard, present IS systems give you about an extra stop of exposure time over what you'd be able to do without it. Does this give you two extra stops over no IS? If so, it's worth having as an option.
Or on the other other hand you could just learn how to use your camera and not get such a shit load of blur in the first place.
That's what I always tell people. The raw light they spontaneously emit from knowing what they're doing will go and light up that dim scene, thus letting them use a faster shutter. It's really quite simple.
The Vienna Symphony Library is available today and can essentially replace an orchestra to all but the most discerning of ears. Here is an example of the E.T. theme. There are a couple of parts where I can tell it's a bit artificial sounding if I really listen, but it's approaching the flawless threshold.
To my ears it's not even close to what I get if I pop in the ET CD. That said, I suppose it could be YouTube compression and not source material.
Most of the apps were either sold by the developer themselves, in which case they had to pay for CC processing, hosting, bandwidth, etc.
I would be astonished if those came anywhere remotely close to 30%. My impression is CC charges are about 3%, and I bet that'd be by far the biggest chunk.
The main thing the app store does for developers is give one central repository for users to go to. It makes it easier for them to discover your programs. It doesn't matter how low your costs are if you're self-hosting but no one finds your program.
I hypothesize then that this model is a decent deal for the small guy, but would not be so attractive for a big player like MS if they started selling, say, Office for the iPad. If they choose to enter the market, their own ads and market pressures would do more than what the app store does.
Software is supposed to be Microsoft's main business, not hardware. Producing quality apps for the iPad as well as for various other portable devices that hopefully *other* people make, but which run Windows, would be their best bet, money wise.
There's a big difference between PC and iPad though, which is that the App Store takes a very substantial cut of the revenue. If you're looking at the risk/reward ratios of the options, that could swing the pendulum, especially if you're concerned about the MS-Apple spread (where that 30% not only hurts you but helps your competitor).
Apple's designs set the trend for knock-off electronics for years. How many phones since the iPhone have been made to "look like the iPhone?" How many MP3 players since the iPod? Now the tablet computer. Apple has a lot of weight on its shoulders because there's a giant knock-off industry just waiting to see what they'll do next.
To be fair, to the extent that "there's a giant knock-off industry" waiting to see what Apple does, Apple itself is a giant knock-off company.
How many smart phones and PDAs were around before the iPhone? How many MP3 players were around before the iPod?
Apple's successes in those areas are because they knocked off the previous products really well. The iPad is really the first arena they're entering where there really wasn't much of an existing market.
(Out of order:)
Mirrors. Learn to use them (they let you see around corners!).
Flashlights. Learn to use them (they let you see things which otherwise would escape illumination!).
Mirrors and flashlights can be a bit of a pain to work together in such a way that you can use the mirror to both illuminate the subject and view what it's seeing. If you can't pull a component all the way out because a cable is too short, for example (& a situation that happens to me not terribly infrequently), that's more or less what you have to do.
Manuals. Learn to use them (they show you a map of the back side of the component!).
Right, because I want to go digging for a manual instead of just plugging the thing in.
Fingers. Learn to use them (they let you feel things that your eyes cannot see!).
Which is exactly my point. You can feel where an HDMI port is without looking. You can't feel which of the three or five RCA jacks is each color.
Have you ever actually tried to hook up a "D" shaped connector blind?
Are you talking about the sorts of D connectors you get on the back of a computer? If so, I have on several occasions. It's not easy, but it's usually not *that* hard either. If you're talking about some A/V D-shaped connector, I'm not sure what that would be, so I haven't.
I'm not arguing that it's a *huge* deal, especially in an A/V system where it's quite likely that you have to look at the back anyway to see which port to even use, but it is a benefit IMO.
Not easy, granted, but you can still try each direction and see if it works. That's what I wind up doing with USB most of the time anyway, even when I'm plugging into the front of my computer.
Depends. Do you have a nice setup, or are you reaching your arm in back of your A/V equipment trying to do things by feel? Avoiding the need to pull out the components to actually look at them (since you can't do color by feel, obviously), is a reasonably nice benefit.
Ah, I see what you're saying. No, the copyright owner must enforce their own copyrights.
However, with trademarks, it's easy to wind up in a situation where, if you don't enforce your trademark against party A, you will lose your ability to enforce it against anyone. That's not true of copyrights. If party A is infringing, you can ignore them completely; then a couple years later, you can go and sue party B because they're infringing too.
IANAL, but isn't that how stuff like trademarks work?
Trademarks work that way, but copyright doesn't.
For one thing, the stylus requires pressure or conductive contact, while the finger requires capacitive contact.
I'm sort of nitpicking here, but neither of these are quite true. You can have active styluses that don't require any contact at all, and for fingers you can have non-capacitive touch screens that work by pressure. Indeed, such touch screens have a significant benefit: you can use them with gloves. (You can't do this with, say, the iPhone, unless you buy special gloves.) You can use them with simpler styluses.
Think about this, if it is all the same, how come phones are now including touch-screens instead of the old, tried-and-true stylus like the PDAs of yore? Perhaps it's because the technology has improved enough, and its cost lowered enough as to be practical.
To play devil's advocate, I would say it's not so much because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for image editing, but rather because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for most tasks you'd expect to do on a phone.
(In fact, my phone, the Nokia N900, actually comes with a stylus. It doesn't get much use, but it does get some. For instance, I've got a Boggle game on it -- if I use my fingers to select the squares, I block a lot of the view.)
To say that a finger-trackpack would not be good for editing images just because older tools did not do it, is as short-sighted as saying touch-sensitive screens on phones are useless because they didn't used occur in smartphones before.
But it's not really any more silly than saying that, because touch-sensitive screens on phones are now commonplace, that technology would be good for image editing.
If you want a more convincing argument you could see what people have to say about using the Macbook's touchpad for that sort of work -- I have no idea what you'd find.
There is a FEW games out there that handles this differently, but majority doesn't care about magazine count, it's all about ammo count.
I'm sure you know about the Rainbow Six series, but if not, give it a try. I suspect you'd like it. Rainbow Six 3 is on Steam for $10 with expansion for instance.
I would suggest "a circular apparatus that facilitates low friction locomotion" would have been an entirely worthy patent when it was first invented.
The problem (IMO) isn't that you had to wait out the 20 years, it's that patents are being filed for things that aren't novel or are obvious. Do the latter things apply to TTF? I dunno. But put the problem in the right place.
I am a full proponent of using something other than C or C++ for almost all development -- there are other languages that are comparable in terms of speed and are much "nicer" to develop in. That said... Python is emphatically not one of them. Comparison to Farmville? Someone needs to be hit by a cluebat.
You're off by an order of magnitude, but 120 developers on a title like SC2 is not hard to fathom at all for anyone who has sat through a big-budget VG credits screen recently.