Let me add on to that a little. My main objection, head and shoulders above any other, is how STUPID the characters were. There were just too many times when people ignored what was in the front of their own faces, or neglected to ask the one frakken question that any practical person would ask. These characters -- on both sides of the conflict -- were supposed to be the best and the brightest of their races, and they all, every single one of them, were a tragic waste of skin. It was infuriating. I kept yelling at the tv "Oh, so you're UNHAPPY? Well, you DESERVE IT. You're TOO STUPID TO LIVE." After awhile my voice got hoarse so I stopped watching the show. If you want to have drama, fine. No disagreements there -- I don't ever want to see a mechanical daggit again. But make it real. Show me characters who are actually using their brains, not just mouthing whatever misunderstanding is necessary to carry the plot forward.
This factor is what makes Battlestar Galactica bad science fiction. If it were instead a crime drama, it'd be a bad crime drama. If it were a medical show, it'd be a bad medical show. And if it were a soap opera, it'd be a standard soap opera because they're all like that.
And for God's sake, pick up the pace! Nobody talks like that.
"statement"
pause pause pause, look deep into the others eyes
"response"
pause pause pause mug for the camera wait wait
...it just sucks the air out of the room. You could eliminate a whole season just by editing conversations to the standard give-and-take of normal humans. GAAaaaah. Yeah, I'm not frustrated or anything.
So if you read that and still think what I really wanted was more lightsabers, well, fine. I'm sure you'll love Caprica. Maybe I'll go read a book instead.
> You -- and many others who prefer science fiction heavy on the technical and short on the human -- seem to have confused actual human drama with the shallow facsimile presented in soap operas, and therefore classify any attempt to portray and explore human behavior as "soap opera".
Except that I don't necessarily prefer "science fiction heavy on the technical and short on the human". The last three Star Wars movies just bored the living crap out of me, and I still want my money back for that stupid Clone Wars movie. There are many other choices besides (a) constant mindless space battles and (b) constant mindless maudlin emoting. Moving General Hospital to space doesn't make it science fiction.
> you are going to spend some real money if you intend to do much with VMWare (think $3K - $5K to get very serious).
Not sure I can agree with that. VMWare Server, Player, Converter and bare metal virtualizer are all free to download and use. It's the enterprise-class management tools that cost big bucks, and there's no way a hobbyist is going to need those. Unless, of course, it's the management tools he's actually studying, but in that case he can still download and play with the 30 day trial. If what you're trying to do is create and manage a few instances to actually use, the free tools are fine.
I completely agree with using a server class machine instead of a regular PC for serious work. I prototype on my desktop PC but my "production" instances are on server gear in the garage. However, it doesn't cost a lot -- check your local geek surplus store, or watch for failing businesses (lots of those right about now) and buy a server at a fire sale. Or there's always ebay. No need to pay list price, especially in this economic climate. Don't bother with hardware that's too old -- if you try to do virtualization on some ancient dual proc Pentium III, you're going to be disappointed.
You don't need quad cores to run ESXi. I manage ten publicly available websites on virtual instances under ESXi on a server class dual proc 3 Ghz Xeon. Performance is acceptable.
You can run virtual instances on practically anything. I use VMWare Workstation on an older AMD Athlon 3200+ (the machine on which I'm typing this) and get acceptable performance if I only have one instance booted at a time. You're not going to be playing video-intensive games on the instance, but it'll work find
I maintain a few websites (my blog, a gallery, couple other things) on an old server class machine in the garage. Companies often scrap servers after the 3 year warranty expires, or they've finished depreciating (depending on individual business rules) and they're often fast enough to make reasonable virtual servers. Often you can pick them up at a scrap sale or surplus store, or, if your company has an IT department, get permission to snag a machine that's about to be scrapped.
I recently brought up VMWare's free bare-metal hypervisor ESXi and was surprised at how easy it was to set up and create instances. VMWare has a free Physical-to-Virtual converter you might want to experiment with. It works great with Windows, but is kinda hit-and-miss with Linux.
I'm sorry, after somewhere around the second season, Battlestar just bored the living crap out of me. My wife time-shifts a collection of daytime soaps and watches them in the evening -- which is why she has her own TV in her own room where the rest of us can stay away. But I can't help noticing, as I pass through the room or bring her drinks or occasionally have to, you know, talk to her, that what was going on in her soaps was amazingly similar to the final season of Battlestar, minus the air-conditioning rumble and the occasional fleeting space shots. Arguably the acting in Battlestar was better. But what it shared with daytime soaps, as far as I could see, was the constant, relentless, inescapable sense of tragedy and depression, with scene after scene of people emoting at each other, invariably choosing to misunderstand what was right under their noses if it would carry the conflict on a little further. I mean, I get you, science fiction isn't only about spaceships. But when it became obvious that the show became only about maintaining a mood, and the story arch became completely unhinged, and even the writers admitted that they didn't really "have a plan" after all, the phrase just sounded cool, the show just wandered in whatever direction would maximize lugubrious drama.
But I'm one of those people who just don't understand the appeal of soap operas, who can't fathom why housewives love to cry into their hankies every weekday at 2:30, so your mileage may vary.
I am *not* suggesting that they needed a Boxy and Dagnabbit to lighten the mood. God, no. That would have made it unbearable. More unbearable.
You *need* a stylus to poke Start -> Programs -> Accessories (...) on that tiny screen. It's an exercise in fine motor control. It's a fine paradigm for a PC, but a poor paradigm for a phone.
"3G? We had cans and a string. And sometimes we didn't even have the string. Data service? We had to shout each byte value to a neighbor, who'd shout it to another neighbor, until it got to someone who had dial-up service, who had to enter it by hand. With wooden keys."
Seriously, I loved my bag phone back in the nineties. It had 5 genuine watts of transmitting power, not the paltry.3 or.1 watts or whatever you get now. And they were better watts too! I could make a high quality call in places where them-there fancy flipper phones would crackle and drop calls. I did a lot of traveling at the time, and reception along I5 was still a bit sketchy.
In all seriousness (did I say that already?) my measure of the usefulness of wireless service is exemplified by this little test: Say you and a friend are having dinner. You decide to see a movie. On the count of three, he looks up the local movie listings on a cell phone of his choice, and you go outside and buy a newspaper. The first one with access wins. I always choose the newspaper, and the only times I don't win is if there's local wifi, *and* said friend is already connected to it.
Let's face it; browsing over cellular services is still a novelty. Yes, if I'm *extremely* patient, I can check my bank balance from my cell phone, but it's a lot easier to arrange my life so that I don't have to do it in the first place.
I don't illegally download music. There are enough legal, inexpensive ways to get music that downloading has no appeal. But our purchase of new, mainstream CDs is sharply down from, say, 10 years ago. There are a few reasons for this.
Back in the old days you had to buy a mostly crap album for one or two good songs. Great for the record companies, bad for us. Being able to buy a la cart blows that paradigm right out of the water. Filler just sits on the server, unpurchased. I think this might be a significant reason CD sales are down. Sales will carry on due to inertia, but eventually as more people discover a la cart service, it's inevitable that sales would drop. What is my motivation for buying a CD which almost by definition has content that I don't want? Especially if I'm just going to rip it for my ipod? Sure, I might discover other songs I like, but I can accomplish that by previewing the track on Amazon or itunes or a dozen other places.
When we do buy a CD, I always look for a used version first, at the local Everyday Music store, or on Amazon. If I thought CDs were reasonably priced, it wouldn't be worth my time to do this, but the list price of the average CD is just too rich for my blood. CD resales usually don't count as sales. In an economic downturn, people will look for cheaper solutions.
Is it just me, or is most of the "mainstream" big-label stuff absolutely crap these days? Am I having a "get off my lawn" moment? Not just in content, but the sound quality is just abysmal. Not in all cases, of course, but it seems more and more likely that a new CD will be noise at a constant volume. I was an early adopter of the CD when it started coming out, and even to my elderly ears, older CDs generally play at a lower volume level but with much more detail. Too many brand new CDs just sound like crap. And buying the tracks off itunes doesn't help -- it still sounds like crap. The ability to preview tracks may make this situation even worse -- people don't just buy "The Boss"'s new album on name only, they preview first. If it sounds like crap, it's not a sale.
I don't have, like, hundreds of data points, but it seems to me that the music produced by indie groups is generally of better sound quality than the music produced by the big labels. Independent bands, some working out of converted spare bedrooms, are producing better sounding albums than the big labels. It's just amazing. I know, a lot of this has to do with the "loudness wars", (and it's partly due to sound recording technology becoming better and more affordable) but what it means is that when I *do* buy music, it's less likely to be from a major record label.
So let's see. I try to avoid filler, I by track-at-a-time from non-concept albums, I preview and reject crap both in content and sound quality, the CDs I do buy are generally used, and I'm more likely to listen to indie groups. And I'm sure I'm not alone. But I'm sure the drop in CD sales is all about piracy...
> Bio-fuels can be the form-and-fit replacement for petroleum products, thus a natural for Shell. Their failure to invest in other technology will allow the Slashdotters who obviously know better to fill the gap and grow rich.
And if that's the way it happens, great. That's the way the market is supposed to work.
> The problem is, the economic viability of biofuels is questionable, and carbon sequestration definitely isn't viable from physics.
Agreed! But they're on the government's "green" list, so involvement serves to keep up appearances. If the government stood up and said (for instance) "we were wrong; burning our food for fuel [1] doesn't make a lick o' sense", Shell would have to find something else, perhaps more legitimate, to do.
[1] Mind you, we should encourage turning waste into fuel where ever practical, but there isn't enough to go around.
There's no reason Shell couldn't jump back on the alternate energy bandwagon at a later time. I didn't read this announcement as "We are totally and exclusively committed to oil until the end of time". I read it as "The economy is down, and we can't afford to invest in less-mature technologies right now."
> In the end I feel you're nit-picking at a very specific issue: why high-end p&s's don't have larger buffers for continuous shooting.
I think we got side-tracked and the original point was lost. In the case of my friend's his/hers Coolpix(s) (or whatever they're called) there was significant write time after single shots. We're not even talking about continuous shots here -- take a shot (no flash) and then wait, wait, wait until you can take another shot. The wait until the camera was ready again was significant enough that he was missing shots in moderately dynamic scenes, like his kids playing on the beach. I couldn't believe that it was as long as he said, but after playing with the camera myself, I had to admit that the wait until the camera was ready again was past the point of pain. I agree, people don't have the right to expect 3 fps in a point-'n'-shooter, but in this case it was more like frames per minute. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
Off topic, you can really shoot a D200 raw+jpg at 5 fps continuously? My D700 won't do that set to raw only. The most I get is 10 -- 12. The 700 has 20% more pixels than the 200, but I wouldn't expect that much of a difference. I don't remember if the 200 has dual CF slots -- I'm thinking not. Maybe I have a defective CF.
I was not really speaking of digital SLRs, nor was I speaking of blister-pack sub-$100 point-'n'-shooters, but the ones in between. I guess you would call them high-end point-'n'-shooters. They usually have non-removable glass lenses, and may or may not be true SLRs. Price range a little less than a bottom-end DSLR. I personally wouldn't own one of these, but my friends and relatives do. The point was, memory is cheap, and only including adequate buffers in higher end models (higher than what I described above) seems contrived.
That said, I'm really surprised your D60 isn't running out of steam after 5 or 6 frames. Have you checked the jpg quality setting? I think it defaults to "medium". Also, if you're going to do any serious post-processing, you'll have to shoot raw, and that increases the file size dramatically. You can see the effect immediately -- switch to raw, hold the button down, notice that it runs out of steam after 3 or 4 shots. I personally don't think that's good enough, and it's going to get worse as future low-end models inherit more dense CCDs from today's high-end models.
We are going to see more of this in the next year or two. With money tight, funding for investments that promote good will and mindshare, but don't make money, will be cut or throttled back. Regardless of what we might think of that, it's an inescapable part of staying in business. Good will is important, but it doesn't help if you're bankrupt.
I suspect that the economy tanking is going to be the worst thing that could happen to the green movement. Immediate physiological needs trump self-actualization. It's difficult to be concerned about the weather 50 years from now when you're facing eviction in six months.
This, plus people observing with their own senses the weather getting colder (we've had more snow this year than any year since I moved to the PNW in 1989), global warming is becoming a very hard sell. It's going to be interesting to see how this progresses.
As others have opined, my last upgrade was not for megapixels either. Moving from a Nikon D50 to a D700, the real issue was not going from 6 megapixels to 12, but that the new camera would accept all my old but still very serviceable film camera lenses, and had a full size CCD so I could shoot exactly as I had with film without worrying about a "crop factor". These things were important enough to me to justify the price.
As someone else opined, the larger file size of a 12 megapixel shot in raw format really is a problem. I had to double the size of my hard disk (fortunately disks are cheap)
Curiously, if you put a lens designed for a digital camera (with smaller ccd) on the D700, it automatically switches to a cropping mode that gives you an effective resolution a little over 5 megapixels. I haven't verified this, as I don't see the point in buying a lens that I can't use on all my cameras, including the film bodies that are still in use. But it's interesting that a D700 with a "digital" lens has just a little less resolution than the low end D50.
Let's enlarge on this. Suppose when you trip the shutter the camera takes dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of photos while ratcheting through a focus range. (Focus bracketing on a large scale.) As I said previously, this gives you the opportunity to indicate the focus point in post-processing, and have the software tool fetch the frame that was taken with that particular object in focus (or as near as possible).
Let's go further. Why couldn't the software tool merge multiple frames together, so that you could specify a particular depth of field in post-processing? Or open it up completely and have everything in the frame in focus, ALA the "Speed Racer" effect?
Sure, the resources to do this is beyond the average photographer. Now. But five years from now? When you can't give away terabyte disks because they're too small, and you can no longer buy single core processors?
> I find the image of a poor family house in Africa equipped with moskitto-killing automated lasers while families in western countries are using flyswatters funny.
Well, if you consider that flies in California are an annoyance, but the mosquitoes in Mali can kill you, it makes better sense.
> btw don't talk to me about dial tone reability, i was born and raised in the ussr. every windows mobile phone is more reliable than a soviet land line.
Welcome to the US. Fair enough. It's all about expectations.
There are three people in my department who had company-issued windows mobile devices, including me. Two Treos and one HTC. We returned the Treos after a couple months because they (both of them) wouldn't go a full day without rebooting, and they had a tendency to not ring on the next incoming call if you'd previously run any application that used the sound driver. The forums would say something about not releasing the driver when the phone needed it -- I never figured out what it was, didn't care, got rid of it. The one person in our department who still has a Windows Mobile phone hangs onto it grimly because he likes the (HTC) hardware.
My daughter has had a Blackberry Curve for the last 15 months. She's a teenager and a geek, and is very hard on the phone, both physically and software. (Software-ly?) She's always installing and uninstalling third-party stuff and almost every feature is under regular use. During that 15 months, the phone has rebooted exactly once, last December when we replaced the battery. That's what I look for in a phone/PDA, and is why my next phone was a Blackberry.
In all fairness, since this is an Apple thread, she's also very hard on her iPod Touch. I allow her free reign to download any free application from the app store, but I monitor her account to see what's on the phone. I think she's downloaded every freakin' third party app you could get for free, and (with permission) quite a few 99 cent apps. The Touch has never, as in, never ever, hung, crashed or spontaneously rebooted. That's what I look for in an appliance. The iPhone and iPod Touch are fundamentally robust, as in, robust in their core operating system, an area in which Microsoft would have to spend too much money (completely re-writing a lot of their code) to compete. (And an area where no gui overlay can help.)
But again, it's all about expectations. If PC-level reliability is good enough for you, then more power to you. That certainly gives you a wider range of hardware to choose from. For the rest of us, there's Symbian, RIM and Apple. (And potentially Android, but it's too early to tell.)
> On one hand, we have the tired old story of a writer/creative not receiving due credit for his work. On the other hand, said creative is possibly the most obnoxious asshole still living that I've known of.
Yes, but he is a very eloquent asshole and his rants are high entertainment. Besides, being an asshole doesn't mean he's wrong.
> I have not yet used a D3x, and I didn't notice that feature on a D700 the few times I have used one. I will have to look for it next time. But, you stated that this feature doesn't really work, so they may advertise that it, but that doesn't mean they've actually got it.
Custom Settings -> a, autofocus -> a3, Dynamic AF area, last selection.
On tracking manually, I dunno. I think it depends a lot on what you're tracking. In most weddings your subject is not heading towards you at 20 MPH, unless it's circus midgets. In my case, the solution was to zoom out a bit, switch to spot tracking, keep the subject centered, which allows the AF half a chance to keep it in focus, and then crop as necessary for composition. With half a second to get the shot, and the subject traveling yards during that time, manual focus is a bit of a challenge. On must resorts to tricks like focus on a spot and trip the shutter when subject reaches spot. Which is no guarantee that the subject is doing anything interesting at that point.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me add on to that a little. My main objection, head and shoulders above any other, is how STUPID the characters were. There were just too many times when people ignored what was in the front of their own faces, or neglected to ask the one frakken question that any practical person would ask. These characters -- on both sides of the conflict -- were supposed to be the best and the brightest of their races, and they all, every single one of them, were a tragic waste of skin. It was infuriating. I kept yelling at the tv "Oh, so you're UNHAPPY? Well, you DESERVE IT. You're TOO STUPID TO LIVE." After awhile my voice got hoarse so I stopped watching the show. If you want to have drama, fine. No disagreements there -- I don't ever want to see a mechanical daggit again. But make it real. Show me characters who are actually using their brains, not just mouthing whatever misunderstanding is necessary to carry the plot forward.
This factor is what makes Battlestar Galactica bad science fiction. If it were instead a crime drama, it'd be a bad crime drama. If it were a medical show, it'd be a bad medical show. And if it were a soap opera, it'd be a standard soap opera because they're all like that.
And for God's sake, pick up the pace! Nobody talks like that.
"statement"
pause pause pause, look deep into the others eyes
"response"
pause pause pause mug for the camera wait wait
So if you read that and still think what I really wanted was more lightsabers, well, fine. I'm sure you'll love Caprica. Maybe I'll go read a book instead.
> You -- and many others who prefer science fiction heavy on the technical and short on the human -- seem to have confused actual human drama with the shallow facsimile presented in soap operas, and therefore classify any attempt to portray and explore human behavior as "soap opera".
Except that I don't necessarily prefer "science fiction heavy on the technical and short on the human". The last three Star Wars movies just bored the living crap out of me, and I still want my money back for that stupid Clone Wars movie. There are many other choices besides (a) constant mindless space battles and (b) constant mindless maudlin emoting. Moving General Hospital to space doesn't make it science fiction.
> you are going to spend some real money if you intend to do much with VMWare (think $3K - $5K to get very serious).
Not sure I can agree with that. VMWare Server, Player, Converter and bare metal virtualizer are all free to download and use. It's the enterprise-class management tools that cost big bucks, and there's no way a hobbyist is going to need those. Unless, of course, it's the management tools he's actually studying, but in that case he can still download and play with the 30 day trial. If what you're trying to do is create and manage a few instances to actually use, the free tools are fine.
I completely agree with using a server class machine instead of a regular PC for serious work. I prototype on my desktop PC but my "production" instances are on server gear in the garage. However, it doesn't cost a lot -- check your local geek surplus store, or watch for failing businesses (lots of those right about now) and buy a server at a fire sale. Or there's always ebay. No need to pay list price, especially in this economic climate. Don't bother with hardware that's too old -- if you try to do virtualization on some ancient dual proc Pentium III, you're going to be disappointed.
You don't need quad cores to run ESXi. I manage ten publicly available websites on virtual instances under ESXi on a server class dual proc 3 Ghz Xeon. Performance is acceptable.
You can run virtual instances on practically anything. I use VMWare Workstation on an older AMD Athlon 3200+ (the machine on which I'm typing this) and get acceptable performance if I only have one instance booted at a time. You're not going to be playing video-intensive games on the instance, but it'll work find
I maintain a few websites (my blog, a gallery, couple other things) on an old server class machine in the garage. Companies often scrap servers after the 3 year warranty expires, or they've finished depreciating (depending on individual business rules) and they're often fast enough to make reasonable virtual servers. Often you can pick them up at a scrap sale or surplus store, or, if your company has an IT department, get permission to snag a machine that's about to be scrapped.
I recently brought up VMWare's free bare-metal hypervisor ESXi and was surprised at how easy it was to set up and create instances. VMWare has a free Physical-to-Virtual converter you might want to experiment with. It works great with Windows, but is kinda hit-and-miss with Linux.
I'm sorry, after somewhere around the second season, Battlestar just bored the living crap out of me. My wife time-shifts a collection of daytime soaps and watches them in the evening -- which is why she has her own TV in her own room where the rest of us can stay away. But I can't help noticing, as I pass through the room or bring her drinks or occasionally have to, you know, talk to her, that what was going on in her soaps was amazingly similar to the final season of Battlestar, minus the air-conditioning rumble and the occasional fleeting space shots. Arguably the acting in Battlestar was better. But what it shared with daytime soaps, as far as I could see, was the constant, relentless, inescapable sense of tragedy and depression, with scene after scene of people emoting at each other, invariably choosing to misunderstand what was right under their noses if it would carry the conflict on a little further. I mean, I get you, science fiction isn't only about spaceships. But when it became obvious that the show became only about maintaining a mood, and the story arch became completely unhinged, and even the writers admitted that they didn't really "have a plan" after all, the phrase just sounded cool, the show just wandered in whatever direction would maximize lugubrious drama.
But I'm one of those people who just don't understand the appeal of soap operas, who can't fathom why housewives love to cry into their hankies every weekday at 2:30, so your mileage may vary.
I am *not* suggesting that they needed a Boxy and Dagnabbit to lighten the mood. God, no. That would have made it unbearable. More unbearable.
Now let's let Caprica die a quiet death and we'll finally be able to put this whole thing behind us.
You *need* a stylus to poke Start -> Programs -> Accessories (...) on that tiny screen. It's an exercise in fine motor control. It's a fine paradigm for a PC, but a poor paradigm for a phone.
Wouldn't it be cool if us regular people could sue to get our taxes back.
"3G? We had cans and a string. And sometimes we didn't even have the string. Data service? We had to shout each byte value to a neighbor, who'd shout it to another neighbor, until it got to someone who had dial-up service, who had to enter it by hand. With wooden keys."
Seriously, I loved my bag phone back in the nineties. It had 5 genuine watts of transmitting power, not the paltry .3 or .1 watts or whatever you get now. And they were better watts too! I could make a high quality call in places where them-there fancy flipper phones would crackle and drop calls. I did a lot of traveling at the time, and reception along I5 was still a bit sketchy.
In all seriousness (did I say that already?) my measure of the usefulness of wireless service is exemplified by this little test: Say you and a friend are having dinner. You decide to see a movie. On the count of three, he looks up the local movie listings on a cell phone of his choice, and you go outside and buy a newspaper. The first one with access wins. I always choose the newspaper, and the only times I don't win is if there's local wifi, *and* said friend is already connected to it.
Let's face it; browsing over cellular services is still a novelty. Yes, if I'm *extremely* patient, I can check my bank balance from my cell phone, but it's a lot easier to arrange my life so that I don't have to do it in the first place.
I don't illegally download music. There are enough legal, inexpensive ways to get music that downloading has no appeal. But our purchase of new, mainstream CDs is sharply down from, say, 10 years ago. There are a few reasons for this.
Back in the old days you had to buy a mostly crap album for one or two good songs. Great for the record companies, bad for us. Being able to buy a la cart blows that paradigm right out of the water. Filler just sits on the server, unpurchased. I think this might be a significant reason CD sales are down. Sales will carry on due to inertia, but eventually as more people discover a la cart service, it's inevitable that sales would drop. What is my motivation for buying a CD which almost by definition has content that I don't want? Especially if I'm just going to rip it for my ipod? Sure, I might discover other songs I like, but I can accomplish that by previewing the track on Amazon or itunes or a dozen other places.
When we do buy a CD, I always look for a used version first, at the local Everyday Music store, or on Amazon. If I thought CDs were reasonably priced, it wouldn't be worth my time to do this, but the list price of the average CD is just too rich for my blood. CD resales usually don't count as sales. In an economic downturn, people will look for cheaper solutions.
Is it just me, or is most of the "mainstream" big-label stuff absolutely crap these days? Am I having a "get off my lawn" moment? Not just in content, but the sound quality is just abysmal. Not in all cases, of course, but it seems more and more likely that a new CD will be noise at a constant volume. I was an early adopter of the CD when it started coming out, and even to my elderly ears, older CDs generally play at a lower volume level but with much more detail. Too many brand new CDs just sound like crap. And buying the tracks off itunes doesn't help -- it still sounds like crap. The ability to preview tracks may make this situation even worse -- people don't just buy "The Boss"'s new album on name only, they preview first. If it sounds like crap, it's not a sale.
I don't have, like, hundreds of data points, but it seems to me that the music produced by indie groups is generally of better sound quality than the music produced by the big labels. Independent bands, some working out of converted spare bedrooms, are producing better sounding albums than the big labels. It's just amazing. I know, a lot of this has to do with the "loudness wars", (and it's partly due to sound recording technology becoming better and more affordable) but what it means is that when I *do* buy music, it's less likely to be from a major record label.
So let's see. I try to avoid filler, I by track-at-a-time from non-concept albums, I preview and reject crap both in content and sound quality, the CDs I do buy are generally used, and I'm more likely to listen to indie groups. And I'm sure I'm not alone. But I'm sure the drop in CD sales is all about piracy...
> Bio-fuels can be the form-and-fit replacement for petroleum products, thus a natural for Shell. Their failure to invest in other technology will allow the Slashdotters who obviously know better to fill the gap and grow rich.
And if that's the way it happens, great. That's the way the market is supposed to work.
> The problem is, the economic viability of biofuels is questionable, and carbon sequestration definitely isn't viable from physics.
Agreed! But they're on the government's "green" list, so involvement serves to keep up appearances. If the government stood up and said (for instance) "we were wrong; burning our food for fuel [1] doesn't make a lick o' sense", Shell would have to find something else, perhaps more legitimate, to do.
[1] Mind you, we should encourage turning waste into fuel where ever practical, but there isn't enough to go around.
Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to drill our own oil, rather than manipulate an unstable region so we can buy it from them?
> Come on did anybody seriously believe shell was interested in alternative renewable energy beyond a cynical exercise in marketing.
You say that like you don't expect alternative renewable energy to ever be economically viable.
There's no reason Shell couldn't jump back on the alternate energy bandwagon at a later time. I didn't read this announcement as "We are totally and exclusively committed to oil until the end of time". I read it as "The economy is down, and we can't afford to invest in less-mature technologies right now."
> In the end I feel you're nit-picking at a very specific issue: why high-end p&s's don't have larger buffers for continuous shooting.
I think we got side-tracked and the original point was lost. In the case of my friend's his/hers Coolpix(s) (or whatever they're called) there was significant write time after single shots. We're not even talking about continuous shots here -- take a shot (no flash) and then wait, wait, wait until you can take another shot. The wait until the camera was ready again was significant enough that he was missing shots in moderately dynamic scenes, like his kids playing on the beach. I couldn't believe that it was as long as he said, but after playing with the camera myself, I had to admit that the wait until the camera was ready again was past the point of pain. I agree, people don't have the right to expect 3 fps in a point-'n'-shooter, but in this case it was more like frames per minute. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
Off topic, you can really shoot a D200 raw+jpg at 5 fps continuously? My D700 won't do that set to raw only. The most I get is 10 -- 12. The 700 has 20% more pixels than the 200, but I wouldn't expect that much of a difference. I don't remember if the 200 has dual CF slots -- I'm thinking not. Maybe I have a defective CF.
I was not really speaking of digital SLRs, nor was I speaking of blister-pack sub-$100 point-'n'-shooters, but the ones in between. I guess you would call them high-end point-'n'-shooters. They usually have non-removable glass lenses, and may or may not be true SLRs. Price range a little less than a bottom-end DSLR. I personally wouldn't own one of these, but my friends and relatives do. The point was, memory is cheap, and only including adequate buffers in higher end models (higher than what I described above) seems contrived.
That said, I'm really surprised your D60 isn't running out of steam after 5 or 6 frames. Have you checked the jpg quality setting? I think it defaults to "medium". Also, if you're going to do any serious post-processing, you'll have to shoot raw, and that increases the file size dramatically. You can see the effect immediately -- switch to raw, hold the button down, notice that it runs out of steam after 3 or 4 shots. I personally don't think that's good enough, and it's going to get worse as future low-end models inherit more dense CCDs from today's high-end models.
We are going to see more of this in the next year or two. With money tight, funding for investments that promote good will and mindshare, but don't make money, will be cut or throttled back. Regardless of what we might think of that, it's an inescapable part of staying in business. Good will is important, but it doesn't help if you're bankrupt.
I suspect that the economy tanking is going to be the worst thing that could happen to the green movement. Immediate physiological needs trump self-actualization. It's difficult to be concerned about the weather 50 years from now when you're facing eviction in six months.
This, plus people observing with their own senses the weather getting colder (we've had more snow this year than any year since I moved to the PNW in 1989), global warming is becoming a very hard sell. It's going to be interesting to see how this progresses.
As others have opined, my last upgrade was not for megapixels either. Moving from a Nikon D50 to a D700, the real issue was not going from 6 megapixels to 12, but that the new camera would accept all my old but still very serviceable film camera lenses, and had a full size CCD so I could shoot exactly as I had with film without worrying about a "crop factor". These things were important enough to me to justify the price.
As someone else opined, the larger file size of a 12 megapixel shot in raw format really is a problem. I had to double the size of my hard disk (fortunately disks are cheap)
Curiously, if you put a lens designed for a digital camera (with smaller ccd) on the D700, it automatically switches to a cropping mode that gives you an effective resolution a little over 5 megapixels. I haven't verified this, as I don't see the point in buying a lens that I can't use on all my cameras, including the film bodies that are still in use. But it's interesting that a D700 with a "digital" lens has just a little less resolution than the low end D50.
What do you get when you cross IBM and Sun?
IBM
Let's enlarge on this. Suppose when you trip the shutter the camera takes dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of photos while ratcheting through a focus range. (Focus bracketing on a large scale.) As I said previously, this gives you the opportunity to indicate the focus point in post-processing, and have the software tool fetch the frame that was taken with that particular object in focus (or as near as possible).
Let's go further. Why couldn't the software tool merge multiple frames together, so that you could specify a particular depth of field in post-processing? Or open it up completely and have everything in the frame in focus, ALA the "Speed Racer" effect?
Sure, the resources to do this is beyond the average photographer. Now. But five years from now? When you can't give away terabyte disks because they're too small, and you can no longer buy single core processors?
> I find the image of a poor family house in Africa equipped with moskitto-killing automated lasers while families in western countries are using flyswatters funny.
Well, if you consider that flies in California are an annoyance, but the mosquitoes in Mali can kill you, it makes better sense.
> btw don't talk to me about dial tone reability, i was born and raised in the ussr. every windows mobile phone is more reliable than a soviet land line.
Welcome to the US. Fair enough. It's all about expectations.
There are three people in my department who had company-issued windows mobile devices, including me. Two Treos and one HTC. We returned the Treos after a couple months because they (both of them) wouldn't go a full day without rebooting, and they had a tendency to not ring on the next incoming call if you'd previously run any application that used the sound driver. The forums would say something about not releasing the driver when the phone needed it -- I never figured out what it was, didn't care, got rid of it. The one person in our department who still has a Windows Mobile phone hangs onto it grimly because he likes the (HTC) hardware.
My daughter has had a Blackberry Curve for the last 15 months. She's a teenager and a geek, and is very hard on the phone, both physically and software. (Software-ly?) She's always installing and uninstalling third-party stuff and almost every feature is under regular use. During that 15 months, the phone has rebooted exactly once, last December when we replaced the battery. That's what I look for in a phone/PDA, and is why my next phone was a Blackberry.
In all fairness, since this is an Apple thread, she's also very hard on her iPod Touch. I allow her free reign to download any free application from the app store, but I monitor her account to see what's on the phone. I think she's downloaded every freakin' third party app you could get for free, and (with permission) quite a few 99 cent apps. The Touch has never, as in, never ever, hung, crashed or spontaneously rebooted. That's what I look for in an appliance. The iPhone and iPod Touch are fundamentally robust, as in, robust in their core operating system, an area in which Microsoft would have to spend too much money (completely re-writing a lot of their code) to compete. (And an area where no gui overlay can help.)
But again, it's all about expectations. If PC-level reliability is good enough for you, then more power to you. That certainly gives you a wider range of hardware to choose from. For the rest of us, there's Symbian, RIM and Apple. (And potentially Android, but it's too early to tell.)
> On one hand, we have the tired old story of a writer/creative not receiving due credit for his work. On the other hand, said creative is possibly the most obnoxious asshole still living that I've known of.
Yes, but he is a very eloquent asshole and his rants are high entertainment. Besides, being an asshole doesn't mean he's wrong.
> I have not yet used a D3x, and I didn't notice that feature on a D700 the few times I have used one. I will have to look for it next time. But, you stated that this feature doesn't really work, so they may advertise that it, but that doesn't mean they've actually got it.
Custom Settings -> a, autofocus -> a3, Dynamic AF area, last selection.
On tracking manually, I dunno. I think it depends a lot on what you're tracking. In most weddings your subject is not heading towards you at 20 MPH, unless it's circus midgets. In my case, the solution was to zoom out a bit, switch to spot tracking, keep the subject centered, which allows the AF half a chance to keep it in focus, and then crop as necessary for composition. With half a second to get the shot, and the subject traveling yards during that time, manual focus is a bit of a challenge. On must resorts to tricks like focus on a spot and trip the shutter when subject reaches spot. Which is no guarantee that the subject is doing anything interesting at that point.