And you were doing so well. First, the pixel wells in the sensor record the information linearly. The A/DC reads those linear values out. The processor will typically run-length compress that data and save it out if raw, or run it through a ASIC that will demosaic the data, color balance it, apply a tone curve that digitially maps the high bit data to 8-bit, and then compresses the result to jpeg.
So a sensor can not, does not, and will not implement a tone curve in a "analog" way. When done in-camera it's a digital process, on digital data.
Finally, a good software-based raw converter can perform a great deal more processing on the available raw data than an in-camera chip, AND do so with your specific color balance, tone curve, highlight and shadow mapping, and other details in mind. The extra data is not thrown away as just "noise".
No, it comes down to the fact that the vast majority of graphic designers and artists don't work in a vacuum. Artwork gets sent to customers for approval. It gets sent to publishers and print shops for production. Those people have to be able to read those files with no hassle. They have to maintain color accuracy. They have to work.
If you're billing clients top dollar, and have print runs on the line that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, then risking that account just to keep from spending $600 on a professional-grade, industry-standard tool is... well... stupid.
"What Adobe sees is a platform that no graphics designers use, and only 10 million or so people use at all worldwide. What would be the point of porting photoshop?"
Not to mention the fact that it's a platform whose users, well, let's just say it's one whose users PREFER not to pay anything for software at all.
"Actually getting the 10 bits of information without any such mapping taking place would undo this effect but can produce better pictures, and gives you more control."
Rephrase this slightly and say, "...but can produce better pictures BY GIVING you more control," and I'll agree. All images need to undergo tone curve mapping from linear sensor data at some point in the process, whether it happens to jpegs in camera or in post from a raw image. We simply don't see images linearly the way camera sensors do.
In fact, this expansion of highlights and midtones and the corresponding compression of shadow detail is the primary reason for the often quoted "expose to the right" mantra.
"An increase in dynamic range would be nice, 12bits/color would be a good start really..."
If you're referring to dynamic range the same as one does in film, that is, seven "stops", then simply adding more bits to the A/DC doesn't get you there. You need better sensors, as a pixel well has characteristics too. Namely a noise floor and a ceiling that saturates with too much light.
Mess with the ceiling in an attempt to prevent early saturation, and you kill low-light sensitivity. Dive too deeply into the floor, and you have noise issues.
The standard analogy is a set of stairs five feet tall. I can have each stair be a foot high, or each stair be 6" high. With the later, I have more "bits", and be more accurate in terms of height (color), but the set of stairs will still only be five foot tall. In film terms, I will have captured only five "stops" of data, no matter how finely I divide them up.
That's why you see such oddball attempts at sensor design, like Fuji's SuperCCD, where one sensor in each matrix is harder to saturate, and as such is dedicated to pulling more detail out of the highlights.
Now in that case, you do need more bits to represent the data, but not in the way normally thought of. A 10-bit converter will still map the white point to 0xFFFF and the black point to 0x0000, and get the job done, but as range increases that leaves you with larger gaps (posterization) between individual points in the range. A 12-bit A/DC will fill in those gaps and give you smoother transitions.
"You can learn the basics of any language in less than a week."
And then you're a beginner, with little to no understanding of the complete feature set, libraries and functions available, best practices, common problems, bugs, 'gotchas, and workarounds.
And once you have all of those accessories, you're pretty much locked into iPod-land, otherwise you'd have to repurchase not only a new mp3 player, but also repurchase all new accessories to go with...
In case you haven't noticed, a virtual clickwheel doesn't give positive user feedback as to just when a button is pressed, and it's also prone to accidental inputs. That's why Apple switched to a physical "click" wheel starting with the 4G pods. Somehow I don't see them going backwards in useability.
"Ever copy a copyrighted work for a friend? Ever install software off someone else's CD (even a video game)? Ever sing "Happy Birthday" in public?"
Ever deliberately setup a server filled with thousands of titles so that thousands of unknown "friends" can download them? Ever attempted to profit from illegal distribution? Even should you consider your examples "fair use", there would seem to be a difference of... say... several orders of magnitude.
Of course not. Resorting to physical violence would require such thieves to actually RISK something. Civil disobedience encompasses the ACTIVE refusal to obey certain laws. Sit in the front of a bus, dare to walk into a formerly segregated school, march in protest in the face of police and the National Guard. That's civil disobedience.
Downloading music and software in your parent's basement simply because you want it, and in doing so you can aovid paying for it. Sorry, but that's an insult to the term.
It's not so much the release process, as the development process, which still requires the distinct build and compilation stages. Or making changes to a bean and needing to restart java. And I can't (as far as I know) make a separate bean class (component) as a jsp file that can be treated as a bean by the rest of the system.
Personally, I think JSP and Java web servers need to be more automatic. As the article states, if I create a Java Bean I have to make an Ant script, compile the bean, package it, deploy it, make sure it's in a class path, and so on. OTOH, ColdFusion is built on top of Java. All I have to do there is create my component (CFC) and save the text file to the server using RDS. CF notices the text file has changed, reloads it, does a JIT compilation, and runs it--all automatically.
What Java needs is less hassle, letting the computers do the grunt work.
Sigh. The only way to generate a good-sized portable EM pulse is from a nuclear explosion set off in the vicinity of the target. In which case your best bet is to get close enough to the target to zap it with the blast and not rely solely on the EMP.
And you speak of a "blast radius" as if you can stand one mile outside of it with no consequences whatsoever. And finally, I'm not entirely certain even military-grade radiation shielding is good enough to protect electronics from a blast a mile away...
"So you want to fight fire with fire? Please do include how your device creates an EMP without itself being a nuclear warhead."
Sure. I'll even give you a choice. One of our nukes detonated 50 miles up against an incoming missile.. or one of their nuclear missiles detonating at an altitude of 1,000 feet directly over your house.
Special case. More to the point, the guys who robbed my house last year apparently believed property laws were wrong, and needed breaking. And apparently that whole driving while intoxicated thing is overblown, as witnessed by the drunk driver who killed my cousin in a head-on collision.
As such, your "founding fathers" comment simply becomes a rationalization, an attempt to elevate one's particular brand of law-breaking as being equally noble and "right". When, in most cases, you're simply breaking the law to serve your own ends.
"What do they have to gain, materialistically, by suggesting this?"
Donations? Research grants? Their jobs? Provide a definitive answer to the question, and your pet project folds up.
Personally, I'd feel better about the research without all of the accompying sensationalism. As an example, another article on BBC from just a few days ago said that Australian researchers found that the rise in global sea levels is accelerating. While this may be "true", the article actually states, "Global sea levels could rise by about 30cm during this century if current trends continue, a study warns."
That's about one foot, or less than a third of a meter. By the end of the century. But the headline bypasses this inconvenient fact in favor of scare tactics. "Sea level rise 'is accelerating'".
Since they took several days to process the data, such training would be extremely difficult as you have no immediate feedback. This is the direct opposite to, say, biofeedback training, where you're trying to produce or eliminate an audible tone. There, you may not quite know what you're doing, but you do know you're doing it.
Never said the US was a strict democracy, though from a political standpoint it's more accurate to describe it as a representative democracy. Which has it's own issues, namely the possibility that said representitives, a distinct minority in and as of themselves, will decide to act against the wishes of the majority.
While such can act as a damper against shortsighted public opinion and outcry, it can also lead to things like the DCMA, Bankruptcy "reform", the National ID card, Iraq, copyright extension, etc..
And yes, you can vote the rascals out. But that usually just involves putting other rascal back in, and by which time the damage has already been done. (W)
Democracy is often termed the tyranny of the majority. If you don't like what you see, then you can change it... provided the majority of the people don't disagree with you. In which case you're SOL.
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So a sensor can not, does not, and will not implement a tone curve in a "analog" way. When done in-camera it's a digital process, on digital data.
Finally, a good software-based raw converter can perform a great deal more processing on the available raw data than an in-camera chip, AND do so with your specific color balance, tone curve, highlight and shadow mapping, and other details in mind. The extra data is not thrown away as just "noise".
No, it comes down to the fact that the vast majority of graphic designers and artists don't work in a vacuum. Artwork gets sent to customers for approval. It gets sent to publishers and print shops for production. Those people have to be able to read those files with no hassle. They have to maintain color accuracy. They have to work.
If you're billing clients top dollar, and have print runs on the line that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, then risking that account just to keep from spending $600 on a professional-grade, industry-standard tool is... well... stupid.
Not to mention the fact that it's a platform whose users, well, let's just say it's one whose users PREFER not to pay anything for software at all.
What's my incentive again?
Rephrase this slightly and say, "...but can produce better pictures BY GIVING you more control," and I'll agree. All images need to undergo tone curve mapping from linear sensor data at some point in the process, whether it happens to jpegs in camera or in post from a raw image. We simply don't see images linearly the way camera sensors do.
In fact, this expansion of highlights and midtones and the corresponding compression of shadow detail is the primary reason for the often quoted "expose to the right" mantra.
If you're referring to dynamic range the same as one does in film, that is, seven "stops", then simply adding more bits to the A/DC doesn't get you there. You need better sensors, as a pixel well has characteristics too. Namely a noise floor and a ceiling that saturates with too much light. Mess with the ceiling in an attempt to prevent early saturation, and you kill low-light sensitivity. Dive too deeply into the floor, and you have noise issues.
The standard analogy is a set of stairs five feet tall. I can have each stair be a foot high, or each stair be 6" high. With the later, I have more "bits", and be more accurate in terms of height (color), but the set of stairs will still only be five foot tall. In film terms, I will have captured only five "stops" of data, no matter how finely I divide them up.
That's why you see such oddball attempts at sensor design, like Fuji's SuperCCD, where one sensor in each matrix is harder to saturate, and as such is dedicated to pulling more detail out of the highlights.
Now in that case, you do need more bits to represent the data, but not in the way normally thought of. A 10-bit converter will still map the white point to 0xFFFF and the black point to 0x0000, and get the job done, but as range increases that leaves you with larger gaps (posterization) between individual points in the range. A 12-bit A/DC will fill in those gaps and give you smoother transitions.
And then you're a beginner, with little to no understanding of the complete feature set, libraries and functions available, best practices, common problems, bugs, 'gotchas, and workarounds.
With the flip side being, of course, that there seems to be a distinct lack of Bose SoundDocks and other cool accessories for Neuros...
And once you have all of those accessories, you're pretty much locked into iPod-land, otherwise you'd have to repurchase not only a new mp3 player, but also repurchase all new accessories to go with...
Especially if one were upgrading from a TiBook or early AlBook.
In case you haven't noticed, a virtual clickwheel doesn't give positive user feedback as to just when a button is pressed, and it's also prone to accidental inputs. That's why Apple switched to a physical "click" wheel starting with the 4G pods. Somehow I don't see them going backwards in useability.
Ever deliberately setup a server filled with thousands of titles so that thousands of unknown "friends" can download them? Ever attempted to profit from illegal distribution? Even should you consider your examples "fair use", there would seem to be a difference of... say... several orders of magnitude.
Thanks for the tips.
Of course not. Resorting to physical violence would require such thieves to actually RISK something. Civil disobedience encompasses the ACTIVE refusal to obey certain laws. Sit in the front of a bus, dare to walk into a formerly segregated school, march in protest in the face of police and the National Guard. That's civil disobedience.
Downloading music and software in your parent's basement simply because you want it, and in doing so you can aovid paying for it. Sorry, but that's an insult to the term.
You mean, as opposed to a simple Hello World cgi script that depends upon a quarter of a gigabyte of operating system code?
It's not so much the release process, as the development process, which still requires the distinct build and compilation stages. Or making changes to a bean and needing to restart java. And I can't (as far as I know) make a separate bean class (component) as a jsp file that can be treated as a bean by the rest of the system.
What Java needs is less hassle, letting the computers do the grunt work.
And you speak of a "blast radius" as if you can stand one mile outside of it with no consequences whatsoever. And finally, I'm not entirely certain even military-grade radiation shielding is good enough to protect electronics from a blast a mile away...
Sure. I'll even give you a choice. One of our nukes detonated 50 miles up against an incoming missile.. or one of their nuclear missiles detonating at an altitude of 1,000 feet directly over your house.
And your preference is?
So if I detonate a nuke a mile away from the incoming target it's shielded against the explosion?
Special case. More to the point, the guys who robbed my house last year apparently believed property laws were wrong, and needed breaking. And apparently that whole driving while intoxicated thing is overblown, as witnessed by the drunk driver who killed my cousin in a head-on collision.
As such, your "founding fathers" comment simply becomes a rationalization, an attempt to elevate one's particular brand of law-breaking as being equally noble and "right". When, in most cases, you're simply breaking the law to serve your own ends.
Ummm... you mean like millions of diabetics do each and every day? Or heart patients managing heart disease and cholesterol levels?
Managing and tracking your food intake may not be fun, but it can be done, especially if you have a vested interest in the results.
Donations? Research grants? Their jobs? Provide a definitive answer to the question, and your pet project folds up.
Personally, I'd feel better about the research without all of the accompying sensationalism. As an example, another article on BBC from just a few days ago said that Australian researchers found that the rise in global sea levels is accelerating. While this may be "true", the article actually states, "Global sea levels could rise by about 30cm during this century if current trends continue, a study warns."
That's about one foot, or less than a third of a meter. By the end of the century. But the headline bypasses this inconvenient fact in favor of scare tactics. "Sea level rise 'is accelerating'".
So which is it? A foot, or 6 meters?
Since they took several days to process the data, such training would be extremely difficult as you have no immediate feedback. This is the direct opposite to, say, biofeedback training, where you're trying to produce or eliminate an audible tone. There, you may not quite know what you're doing, but you do know you're doing it.
While such can act as a damper against shortsighted public opinion and outcry, it can also lead to things like the DCMA, Bankruptcy "reform", the National ID card, Iraq, copyright extension, etc..
And yes, you can vote the rascals out. But that usually just involves putting other rascal back in, and by which time the damage has already been done. (W)
Democracy is often termed the tyranny of the majority. If you don't like what you see, then you can change it... provided the majority of the people don't disagree with you. In which case you're SOL.