I've been saying that for a while... slashdot is dominated by a clique-ish groupthink that is absolutely unhealthy, and makes it hard to take much of the opinion here seriously. Too many people spend too much time saying things that they will make them look "cool" to other similarly insecure slashdotter, and not enough time actually critically reading the articles. So basically, you're pointing out that you agree with the +5-moderated GP post, and have been making the same "insightful" point for some time?
Looks like you're only doing this because you want to join in the groupthink and look cool!
That's nothing, I have ready for eBay the first four issues of Scientific American in the original plastic wrapping. They were sending them out in plastic wrappings in the 1840s? My God!!!
Aww, poor baby. I guess it would've broken the bank to buy one issue and see if you liked it. As the guy says elsewhere, Sys Admin was expensive. I don't know *how* expensive, but if it's anything like ".net" magazine, it's *expensive*. Last time I bought that (a year back) it was UK £5.99 with a single CD (US $12.00 at current exchange rates).
People think of magazines as semi-disposable purchases, but I can buy a decent book for £6!
At that price, a mag has to have a lot of value to me to justify buying it. You can bet I'm not going to take a chance if I have absolutely no idea what it's like; and why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? That's just rewarding an annoying (and possibly cynical) habit.
Lastly, I have a hard time finding film to be binary in nature for all kinds of film. It may be for certain kinds of black & white film, but I'm not convinced per color. Author has a good argument, but still misses, IMHO, as a single CCD sensor typically cannot pick up a whole lot either; digital really uses several individual sensors to build a single pixel, so his argument breaks down as well. True, and I agree that film vs. digital is a lot more complicated than it would first appear (which was partly my point). However, regarding "I have a hard time finding film to be binary in nature", the author was- to be fair- discussing *individual* grains vs. each sensor pixel, rather than the overall effect. His point being that a given pixel could hold a range of *grey* values, whereas each grain really is on or off.
Of course, grains come in all shapes and sizes, and may overlap each other in multiple layers with colour film (and possibly with black-and-white). And of course, colour films don't retain the grains themselves for the final image, but are replaced with less distinct dye clouds. And, and...
Yep, it's complicated. However, my point was that the author *did* successfully point out a fundamental flaw in the thinking used in a very large number of "film has more resolution" arguments.
Guess what, many kids thought the taste one gets by mixing aroma with flavour-enhancer was more natural, then just mixing some strawberry with joghurt. You know something? Strawberries "flavour" is strange in that- actually- it doesn't taste that much like the original fruit. With most of them, you can see where they're coming from, but I just don't see that strawberries and strawberry flavour are the same at all.
It's strange, because we all know what "strawberry" flavour is supposed to be, and yet it doesn't really occur to us that most strawberries taste nothing like that. I didn't think about it until I read this essay.
I'd say that strawberry flavour tastes like strawberry *jam*. Maybe it's just the sweetness that accounts for the difference. As the article says, real strawberries aren't actually that sweet, and can often be quite tart (admittedly this may be down to crappy modern strawberries).
First, 35mm film is equivalent to over 30 megapixels. So even that EOS 1-D is still over 10 megapixels short of the film for quality. By what measure? I'll admit to not being an expert in this area, but here's an interesting essay explaining why film's "resolution" is not directly comparable to that of digital sensors.
To summarise, film grains are binary (i.e. on or off), so you require a large number of them to generate the illusion of a given shade. By contrast, each pixel in a sensor array can measure a large number of grey levels. Therefore you can't directly compare grain and pixel counts.
But even disregarding this and measuring lines of resolution from a photo of a test card is misleading. Why? Remember that film grains are either "on" or "off"; so are the high-contrast lines in a test card. This plays to film's advantage, because (for this purpose) its resolving power is as fine as the film grain. Unfortunately, this is absolutely *not* representative of 99.9% of real life cases, which contain continuous shades.
I thought that was for beating the "copy protection"?:) I believe it was used for that later on, but I remember hearing about this "trick" sometime in the early 1990s, long before CD copying (and hence copy protection) was even an issue.
Re: OSI? Do you mean TCP/IP? ;-)
on
Network Warrior
·
· Score: 1
For example, in TCP/IP, there's only one layer above the transport layer, which makes OSI layers 5, 6, and 7 all the same. I was always under the impression that TCP/IP wasn't concerned with the upper layers anyway, corresponding (very roughly) to the OSI transport and network layers. And we can stick anything we like above TCP/IP, can't we?
Secret phone recordings suggest that Royksopp are also involved in some shady underhand negotiations for 700MHz
(Phone rings) "Hello?"
"Yeah it's me... I wanna give you some good frequencies; 1710, 2.6, 2245..."
"Yeah"
"3032, 700"
(Surprised) "Seven hundred?!"
"Yeah."
"I'm coming right over."
"Do that."
"I'll be there in two seconds"
(Later)
"You bastard! You sold me 700 Terahertz!"
"That'll teach you to be more careful with your units next time."
By closing my eyes I am circumventing the ad delivery mechanism. Umm... am I the only one thinking of *that* scene in "A Clockwork Orange"?
I sure as hell hope Google aren't, otherwise we'll be seeing a method of forced advertising that makes Tivo's "no skipping ads" look like a six-year-old's tea party.:-/
Remember those tape rewinders? That's nothing, I'm pissed off because I just bought a DVD rewinder... and now I'm going to have to buy a new one that supports HD-DVD and Blu Ray as well!
He would have been better off getting his face remodelled to look like Harison's. First thing I thought when I read the summary was that it could be interpreted the other way around: "So I called my other nerdy special effects pals, and they offered to replace Harrison Ford's face with mine."
It's like some horrid real-life version of Face/Off, where Harrison Ford wakes up one morning, looks in the mirror and realises with horror that he's been given the face of a nerdy Star Wars fanboy. The anguished screams are heard up to 15 miles away and continue to this day...
Mod parent down, he has altered the article to include things like "What do you think of penis?" Some of us want to know what Linus thinks of penis, you insensitive clod!
Mr Vain as a single from that album has apparently survived the online transition, but virtually nothing else from the album seems to have. It's a shame, and inexplicable...I was usually only a single track person, but that entire album is fantastic...there's nothing on it that I don't like. Yeah, but admit it... Mr Vain was a blatant (and second-rate) copy of SNAP's "Rhythm is a Dancer".
However, that's the nature of digital sampling. It is impossible to convert sound into a digital media and have it be 100% identical to the source And it's in the nature of analogue that it is also impossible to have a copy be 100% identical to the source. Not because of quantisation, but because analogue is by definition continuous.
And any continuous signal (i.e. one with effectively unlimited- or infinite- accuracy) can not be copied with infinite accuracy too. Even if by some miracle someone produced an analogue copy that was identical now matter how finely you measured it, that would be by luck rather than design; you couldn't guarantee that next time.
In practice, you're never going to even get that anyway; the question is whether the imperfect analogue copy is better than the digital copy (and will continue to be so through multiple generations).
I guess by 2002 cassettes were pretty dead. Don't know about the US, but in the UK I still recall seeing prerecorded cassettes on sale in (IIRC) late 2003 (it was the latest version of the "Now" series, and I was quite surprised that they were still selling it on tape *and* had it upfront with the CDs).
I'm pretty surprised that a kid that age had never *heard* of cassettes at that time; they were definitely on their way out in 2002, but not to have come across them- or at least heard of them- at all is strange, and possibly a little unusual.
I'd still be slightly surprised at a kid that age who's never heard of a tape or cassette nowadays (partly because of all those bloody "death of the cassette" things we've had in the past couple of years), but I can understand it. They've mostly disappeared from shops, the kids themselves almost certainly wouldn't ever have owned their own cassette player, and it's quite possible their parents have relegated theirs to the attic or bin.
Yes, I used to have one of these drives. This was yet another one of those brilliant proprietary devices that didn't catch on, from our favorite company, - Sony. The Commodore CDTV (a failed Amiga-based early multimedia device- a la Philips CD-I) and the A570 CD drive for the Amiga both used the same caddy.
It could be that it was a Sony mechanism, but I took my A570 apart (in a failed attempt to coax it back to life), and I don't recall it having a Sony inside.
I remember at the time one of the Amiga mags said something about protection for the relatively dense data on a CD (and that unlike audio CDs where gaps could be "filled", minor damage on a data CD was serious). Except that this was obviously bollocks, because I haven't seen those drives since the early 1990s; I reckon it just saved them money on ejecting drawers, personally.
I remember that our school (circa 1992) had an early CD-ROM-equipped computer that also had one of those drives...
Marketing for geeks is simple: don't try to market any product to geeks. On the contrary, ThinkGeek seem to do well by explicitly targeting a "geek" demographic, both in what they sell and how they sell it.
If something looks like advertising in any way, it leaves a bad impression automatically, as most geeks prefer to go and search for what they need rather than have a list of things shoved at them that they probably don't need. ThinkGeek mostly specialise in selling things that people "don't need". Perhaps that's what it is; the ThinkGeek demographic are *wannabe* geeks... they want to consider themselves part of the "smart masses". ThinkGeek have successfully exploited this desire by associating smartness and geekdom with the ownership of lots of these gadgets. In other words, it's just another form of consumerist lifestyle marketing. You too can be a smart geek simply by purchasing this stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like you're only doing this because you want to join in the groupthink and look cool!
Sorry, couldn't resist
People think of magazines as semi-disposable purchases, but I can buy a decent book for £6!
At that price, a mag has to have a lot of value to me to justify buying it. You can bet I'm not going to take a chance if I have absolutely no idea what it's like; and why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? That's just rewarding an annoying (and possibly cynical) habit.
Of course, grains come in all shapes and sizes, and may overlap each other in multiple layers with colour film (and possibly with black-and-white). And of course, colour films don't retain the grains themselves for the final image, but are replaced with less distinct dye clouds. And, and...
Yep, it's complicated. However, my point was that the author *did* successfully point out a fundamental flaw in the thinking used in a very large number of "film has more resolution" arguments.
It's strange, because we all know what "strawberry" flavour is supposed to be, and yet it doesn't really occur to us that most strawberries taste nothing like that. I didn't think about it until I read this essay.
I'd say that strawberry flavour tastes like strawberry *jam*. Maybe it's just the sweetness that accounts for the difference. As the article says, real strawberries aren't actually that sweet, and can often be quite tart (admittedly this may be down to crappy modern strawberries).
To summarise, film grains are binary (i.e. on or off), so you require a large number of them to generate the illusion of a given shade. By contrast, each pixel in a sensor array can measure a large number of grey levels. Therefore you can't directly compare grain and pixel counts.
But even disregarding this and measuring lines of resolution from a photo of a test card is misleading. Why? Remember that film grains are either "on" or "off"; so are the high-contrast lines in a test card. This plays to film's advantage, because (for this purpose) its resolving power is as fine as the film grain. Unfortunately, this is absolutely *not* representative of 99.9% of real life cases, which contain continuous shades.
"Yeah it's me... I wanna give you some good frequencies; 1710, 2.6, 2245..."
"Yeah"
"3032, 700"
(Surprised) "Seven hundred?!"
"Yeah."
"I'm coming right over."
"Do that."
"I'll be there in two seconds"
(Later)
"You bastard! You sold me 700 Terahertz!"
"That'll teach you to be more careful with your units next time."
I sure as hell hope Google aren't, otherwise we'll be seeing a method of forced advertising that makes Tivo's "no skipping ads" look like a six-year-old's tea party.
It's like some horrid real-life version of Face/Off, where Harrison Ford wakes up one morning, looks in the mirror and realises with horror that he's been given the face of a nerdy Star Wars fanboy. The anguished screams are heard up to 15 miles away and continue to this day...
...lots of dull-as-fuck clips of suburban 14-year-olds smashing up "fully working" pipettes and bunsen burners?
And any continuous signal (i.e. one with effectively unlimited- or infinite- accuracy) can not be copied with infinite accuracy too. Even if by some miracle someone produced an analogue copy that was identical now matter how finely you measured it, that would be by luck rather than design; you couldn't guarantee that next time.
In practice, you're never going to even get that anyway; the question is whether the imperfect analogue copy is better than the digital copy (and will continue to be so through multiple generations).
I'm pretty surprised that a kid that age had never *heard* of cassettes at that time; they were definitely on their way out in 2002, but not to have come across them- or at least heard of them- at all is strange, and possibly a little unusual.
I'd still be slightly surprised at a kid that age who's never heard of a tape or cassette nowadays (partly because of all those bloody "death of the cassette" things we've had in the past couple of years), but I can understand it. They've mostly disappeared from shops, the kids themselves almost certainly wouldn't ever have owned their own cassette player, and it's quite possible their parents have relegated theirs to the attic or bin.
But 2002 is not 2007...
It could be that it was a Sony mechanism, but I took my A570 apart (in a failed attempt to coax it back to life), and I don't recall it having a Sony inside.
I remember at the time one of the Amiga mags said something about protection for the relatively dense data on a CD (and that unlike audio CDs where gaps could be "filled", minor damage on a data CD was serious). Except that this was obviously bollocks, because I haven't seen those drives since the early 1990s; I reckon it just saved them money on ejecting drawers, personally.
I remember that our school (circa 1992) had an early CD-ROM-equipped computer that also had one of those drives...
Count me out of that one.
Ah, thanks.