Sony makes some nice stuff, especially their cameras, but on principle I won't buy any of their electronics anymore. Between their introduction of the smart stick and all the DRM they've been integrating into all their products I cannot bring myself to giving them any more buisness. The smart stick is particularly annoying since they try to lock you into their hardware and devices. I'll stick with CF thank you very much.
The peeping Tom mode (low light) is pretty cool. I've been able to take some interesting pictures of wildlife in the backyard. None of them are truly able to see in complete darkness, but they do quite well with moonlight or IR illumination.
I'll give artists that tour credit, they work their asses off, and should be paid well for what they do. Seeing what ticket prices are these days, they are bringing home a nice pay check. But to expect to be paid millions upon millions of dollars (the company and the artist) for what amounts to about 30-60 days worth of effort (ie an album) is completely unreal. Let's not forget being able to milk it for the next 70+ years.
Copyright has gotten out of hand. I say 50 years from date of creation is more than enough for the original recordings, but for the lyrics and the music 5-10 tops. As it goes now companies push for extensions for rights to the original recordings everytime they come close to expiring. 75 year copyright protection does nothing to put more money in the pockets of artists since too many of them sell their souls in their short carears to the recording industry.
Re:Who is a troll? Maybe you should look in a mirr
on
Who Owns The Facts?
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· Score: 1
Actually it's fast food in general. All the companies are so bent on capturing the market that they are everywhere even within sight of of the same resturant. Taco Bell and McDonalds are the worst at the moment. It was also a reference to the Demolish Man where all resturants in the future are Taco Bell.
In the town I grew up in there were two McDonalds within about 10 minutes drive. Now there are close to 15 with several being accross the street from one another.
Taco Bells are like that too. Seems like about every 4-5th cross street you'll find one.
While I love fast food, personally I see them as a plague on the world. It seems the bigger they get the worse and more generic the food becomes.
It really doesn't matter if there will ever be any WMD ever found. We were going to go back there sooner or later to finish business. Unfortunately it wasn't sooner, but we've had a distinct lack of leadership in this country for the last decade. One that would rather spend most of the time getting his ego amongst other things stroked.
I honestly don't think Bush lied, but I don't think he had all the facts either, more of an assumption based on past experience and facts. Saddam has been playing cat and mouse games with the world for years. It's kind of like getting mad after the cops shoot someone who was pretending they had a gun. If he had come clean the first time around it would have never have come to this.
Getting way of topic by continuing this thread if you want to continue this conversation drop me an email.
Congrats for you, though I don't see how you can complain about his international politics...especially since everything going on for the last 50 years has been to clean up Europe's big mess they made, unless of course you are not from Europe then well frankly I don't blame you for complaining.
I picked up a Minolta Dimage 7i last summer. It a 5mp camera. The nice thing is the 7x optical zoom. All the functions can be set manually or auto. The layout of everything is quite efficient and external so you don't have to go menu diving to get to all the settings. Basically it's a compact/SLR cross breed. What it can do it does fairly well.
I would suggest going for the newer 7hi version that has some it's own internal ram that makes the turn around time between shots much shorter as well as allow for some multishots. The 7hi can be had for around $600-700 take a look on pricewatch.
If you are trying to stay on the cheap Kodak and most of the others have dropped their entry 3mp compacts down to the $200 price range. If you are in the US go over to Target/BestBuy they've been on sale since Thanksgiving.
Well it would be more accurate to say it's a composite image. Reguardless it's still a 1gigapixel image. I get the impression that you are not a photographer and are expecting to somehow link this up with the marketing created numbers attached to digital cameras. In digital photography pixel ratings of photographs have nothing to do with the camera that created or contributed to the image.
To give you a better example would be a composite 360 panoramic I made last summer.
The thumb for it that I put on my website is 918x150 pixels and is a.14MP image.
The one I had for download is 6611x1080 and is a 7.14MP image.
The original fresh off of Photoshop is 13258x2166 is a 28.72 MP image.
For those of you interested I made it with a nice program called Panoramic Factory. (http://www.panoramafactory.com) Very easy to use and works quite well, that for under $50. The only downside with panoramics is trying to print them. The ones I have made have been about 6:1 length to height, so unless you have access to a printer that accepts rolled paper or very wide stock you will not be able to print them to any satisfactory size for viewing. On 8x10 sheets of paper the image will only be an inch or two tall and as long as the sheet of paper.
Optics makes or breaks what is a crappy camera verse a kick but camera. I tend to shy away from the cheaper camera, though I am very impressed what they offer for $200-300 these days. My first digital set me back $1000 and it wasn't even as nice as those.
I still get a chuckle out of the fact that digi manufactures still seem to think that digital zoom is worth half a poop to anyone other than the complete photo noob.
Note for all you photo noobi, digital zoom is done with software and can usually be done quicker and much better on your PC. Also stay away from cameras with less than a 3x OPTICAL zoom.
I've been drooling over Canon's latest, (Digital Rebel) since I can't afford the pro SLRs, just for the chance to have some much nicer lenses.
Right now I'm happy with my Minolta Dimage 7i, though I wish I had picked up the 7hi as it has interal RAM that allows for faster multiple shots. It has a descent lense and a high enough MP rating to make the size prints I want.
There was another game that came out later that fell into line with TA. Eidos released a game called Warzone 2100 that pretty much ripped off everything that was great about TA and even, believe or not, managed to add a few elements that really made it better.
The control method was identical to TA which goes to show you can't improve on perfection.
They added upgrades, not the pathetic level or two that most games have, but what seemed like hundreds. I boxed the computer into a corner one game then spent 4 1/2 hours upgrading to see how far it would go. I never came to the end of the tree. It sounds like it wouldn't work, but it really made the game. Armor, ammo, weapons, sensors, vehicle frames, and propulsion could be improved. It really just depended on your strategy determined which areas you would concentrate on. Vehicles were modular so you could further customize your army to your liking.
Command units were another wonderfull addition. They could be set as rally points for your factories so newly created vehicles would automatically join them in the field. As they gained experience they would be able to pick out targets for it's forces to concentrate on verses the shoot at whatever is closest method of TA
Sensor assignment was another good one, to save on the micro management. Put a airsupport sensor on a tower or on a mobile unit and aircraft assigned to it would auto attack anything in it's range. Other sensors worked for ground units and artilery.
Vehicle pilots could be managed by recycling old outdated vehicles. New vehicles would use those pilots and would deal more damage. If you were semi-careful with your units and pulled back badly damaged ones you could build up a strong force.
Of course they had off the screen ranged artilery so you could send out a scout to pick targets for your 30-40 rocket artilery units sitting back in the back.
They only real downside to the game was the main resource was oil, and it's locations were static. Unlike the build up from nothing anywhere aspect of TA, which on more than one occation allowed me to rise from the dead off in a quiet corner in a multiplayer match.
No its a real 1Gpixel image, it's just not a 1Gpixel image that was taken in one shot. The gigapixel rating is just simply the horizontal x verticle. Of course mind you it would be pretty cool to be able to take a 1Gpixel photo as you could do some wicked digital zooming with a photo that large or make a print for say the side of a rather large building that still retains alot of it's detail up close.
If you want to have some fun open up Adobe photoshop and make yourself a blank gigapixel photo it to give you a sense of scale of what this guy has done. The one I did to get up to a gig was 112 inches tall by 140 inches long at 150 dpi. Brings new meaning to 8x10 don't you think? When I tried to save it as a JPEG (level 12 compression) the white (blank) picture came in at a whopping 23mb (His picture was around 2gb).
Software interpolated or no you have to be at least a little impressed with what he has done.
The megapixel rating has everything to do with the actual number of pixels in the final picture. It would be less confusing to people if they just have the square centimeters/inches as the rating.
kudos200 just think of a higher MP rating as the ability to be able to zoom in or blow up a picture without as much loss of detail.
If you want to get into DPI ratings and such then you would be actually talking about the size of the CMOS/CDD chip relative to the megapixel rating which is not realy all that important unless you are building micro cameras.
Personally I would like to see more large format CCD/CMOS chips or mulit CCD/CMOS arrangements come out in order to give the megapixel ratings a big boost and push things up into the 20-30MP arena.
Free-market does not depend on scarcity, it depends on freedom from government interference in the various markets. The whole point of a free market is that the most efficient source of the product will be used rather than one dictated by, as in the case of state run industries, or influenced by, such as the US steel tariff, who ever is trying to control or influence the market. This leeds to politically motivated economic decisions which usually cost more than a free-market based approach.
I'll give you two examples of comodities that are absolutely free and are not in the least scarce yet large industries have grown up around them. Oxygen and sunlight. The two obvisous uses for them is breathing and not having the planet freeze. If you take it a step further then you get into metal fabrication and medical O2 as well as water heating and solar based electricity.
The true value of a product is not it's raw form, but what it can be made into. Companies would like everyone to believe information should be protected, but in reality what they are really after is the reduction or elimination of competition through the control of the raw materials, ie information. If all companies had to give up all their raw information then they would have to compete on the merit of the products they can produce from the raw material alone rather than their ability to collect and hoard information.
Anyway it may seem like I am saying that all information should be free, though I'm not. A companies ability to gather information is as important as how it uses it. Companies that cannot do this well will be driven out of the market in a free-market system. What I am saying is that something does not need to be scarce to be valuable or usefull, though I would question any entitiy or individual's motives for trying to make commodities more scarce than they really are. All they are trying to do is create a monopoly which they can control.
It was a supposed to be a funny comment not a statement of fact, so if you can't realize that then you need to check to see where you left your sense of humor.
I do agree with you on the moderation, how did it get moderated to Interesting-5?! Stupid or funny but interesting?
Who is a troll? Maybe you should look in a mirror
on
Who Owns The Facts?
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· Score: 1
Spelling Nazi? Hmmmm. My country is better than your country, cause we don't have Taco Bell. Hmmmm.
It's a signature not published scientific paper, accuracy is not important. You are actually about a year and a half short on noticing my signature being miss-speled.
As far as Taco Bell not being in your country, well whoop de do! If you had ever been out of you "narrow little world" then maybe you might have seen one and have gotten the joke.
So please go back under your bridge.
Well then Webster owns the world already then
on
Who Owns The Facts?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If it only has to be in a database somewhere then the dictionary would be considered a database so by that logic Webster ownes the rights to pretty much anything done in the English language.
Too bad guys (greedy corps and stupid politians) they beat you too it!
Ok I'm game how do you do that? As I recall we've been trying to do that for the last 40 years, but it seems all we end up doing is supporting terrorists/dictators/criminals who turn against us as soon as the money stops flowing. Until the world population growth gets under control, the whole tribal/religious us verses everyone else mentality is eliminated, equal rights for woman and children, and some form of real education is put into place we are forever going to have problems in the third world. Culture changes do not come easy and cannot simply be bought with money. Efforts will take decades more before we will see any real change, and yes those who resist the change will strike back and wars will be fought. That has been the way is has been since the first human bashed another over the head with a rock and that is the way it will always be.
As far as the fantasy of a mechanized weapons platform/robotic soldier. They would never be able to be truly autonomous, except for maybe general recon. Unless of course is some extremely narrow situations such as a designated kill zone, where anything that moves is a target. Off course there is still the danger of the robot leaving that area on its own and going on a rampage. Many anime and manga revolve around that theme. All of the things currently being developed require human observation, direction, and decisions.
They are not talking about downloading games. They are talking about stores sell bootleg copies. Not only does the consumer get in on piracy in China but retailers, distributers, and manufactures too.
The bathroom is a great place to talk to someone you especially despise. The owners of my rental hired a particularly annoy piece of crap to sell the house. She would call at all hours to give me twenty minutes notice that she wanted to show the house. I made it a point to answer her mid-stream when ever biologically possible. Pretty funny to hear her pause when she realized what I was doing.
No offense but then again the civilian side isn't very well known for it either, unless of course you are talking about nit-pick job descriptions and contract agreements (not my job) and making sure they get all their breaks and overtime. Guess that's why we've been dumping everyone but the contractors. It's much easier to get them to work.:)
We don't do to much software developement, but we have realized a great deal of space savings due to the switch. We used to have 3 project groups in our building, now we have 5 in the same amount of space. The civilians have resisted dumping the cubes but they have resigned to being put 2-3 per cube. It's pretty much just a matter of time before they make the switch.
We do have our own common area with a few offices attached to it but all the machines are available to at least nine different groups. Other than favorite hang out areas it's more or less fluid. We used to have the cubes but then we took up four times the space and had to scatter everyone out since no one area could hold us all. The other machines are scattered about the various work areas. The point being that you can do your work in places other than your office or section that are close to the action.
I work for the military and that's how we've been doing it all along. Computers are scattered throughout many of the buildings. It works fine, though some locations can be more popular than others, such as the machines in the break rooms. There are offices but they are shared by multiple people/shifts. When ever you need to do a little "one on one" (chew their ass) with someone you just find an empty one. For quiet undisturbed work, take a short walk out to one of the out buildings and you'll have the whole place to yourself.
Yes. Longer lasting batteries are out there, it's a question of the bastards putting them to use. It makes it tough to drive the technology forward when every other company has a special battery pack for their item, that tends to work just well enough that you need 2-3 of them to make your portable usefull, effectively adding $100 to the cost.
I try to stick with items that use AAA or AA so that I can buy my own NiMH's. In the last 5 years they have gone from about 800mah to over 2000mah. Not too shabby. They don't develope a memory and the put out a steady voltage compared to regular batteries. Only bad thing is they get pretty hot and self discharge pretty quick. So I end up having to charge them up every time before I can use them in my digital camera.
Someone here pointed out that the real solution is to reduce our need instead of increasing the battery life. That could not be more true. I have a 4-cell AAA 3-LED flash light. It's as bright as my 4-cell C Mag flash light, but I can leave it on for 100 hours before it dies, verses about 8 for the other. Only down side is you can't focus the beam nor can you bash someone over the head with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The peeping Tom mode (low light) is pretty cool. I've been able to take some interesting pictures of wildlife in the backyard. None of them are truly able to see in complete darkness, but they do quite well with moonlight or IR illumination.
Copyright has gotten out of hand. I say 50 years from date of creation is more than enough for the original recordings, but for the lyrics and the music 5-10 tops. As it goes now companies push for extensions for rights to the original recordings everytime they come close to expiring. 75 year copyright protection does nothing to put more money in the pockets of artists since too many of them sell their souls in their short carears to the recording industry.
In the town I grew up in there were two McDonalds within about 10 minutes drive. Now there are close to 15 with several being accross the street from one another.
Taco Bells are like that too. Seems like about every 4-5th cross street you'll find one.
While I love fast food, personally I see them as a plague on the world. It seems the bigger they get the worse and more generic the food becomes.
I honestly don't think Bush lied, but I don't think he had all the facts either, more of an assumption based on past experience and facts. Saddam has been playing cat and mouse games with the world for years. It's kind of like getting mad after the cops shoot someone who was pretending they had a gun. If he had come clean the first time around it would have never have come to this.
Getting way of topic by continuing this thread if you want to continue this conversation drop me an email.
"Cool how many pictures can you get on your 4 GoogolByte(1x10e100) Flash card that it came with?"
"On the highest setting?"
"Yeah sure"
"Only 15,000."
"Man companies are so cheap what they include with the camera these days!"
"You said it"
Congrats for you, though I don't see how you can complain about his international politics...especially since everything going on for the last 50 years has been to clean up Europe's big mess they made, unless of course you are not from Europe then well frankly I don't blame you for complaining.
I would suggest going for the newer 7hi version that has some it's own internal ram that makes the turn around time between shots much shorter as well as allow for some multishots. The 7hi can be had for around $600-700 take a look on pricewatch.
If you are trying to stay on the cheap Kodak and most of the others have dropped their entry 3mp compacts down to the $200 price range. If you are in the US go over to Target/BestBuy they've been on sale since Thanksgiving.
To give you a better example would be a composite 360 panoramic I made last summer.
The thumb for it that I put on my website is 918x150 pixels and is a .14MP image.
The one I had for download is 6611x1080 and is a 7.14MP image.
The original fresh off of Photoshop is 13258x2166 is a 28.72 MP image.
For those of you interested I made it with a nice program called Panoramic Factory. (http://www.panoramafactory.com) Very easy to use and works quite well, that for under $50. The only downside with panoramics is trying to print them. The ones I have made have been about 6:1 length to height, so unless you have access to a printer that accepts rolled paper or very wide stock you will not be able to print them to any satisfactory size for viewing. On 8x10 sheets of paper the image will only be an inch or two tall and as long as the sheet of paper.
I still get a chuckle out of the fact that digi manufactures still seem to think that digital zoom is worth half a poop to anyone other than the complete photo noob.
Note for all you photo noobi, digital zoom is done with software and can usually be done quicker and much better on your PC. Also stay away from cameras with less than a 3x OPTICAL zoom.
I've been drooling over Canon's latest, (Digital Rebel) since I can't afford the pro SLRs, just for the chance to have some much nicer lenses.
Right now I'm happy with my Minolta Dimage 7i, though I wish I had picked up the 7hi as it has interal RAM that allows for faster multiple shots. It has a descent lense and a high enough MP rating to make the size prints I want.
The control method was identical to TA which goes to show you can't improve on perfection.
They added upgrades, not the pathetic level or two that most games have, but what seemed like hundreds. I boxed the computer into a corner one game then spent 4 1/2 hours upgrading to see how far it would go. I never came to the end of the tree. It sounds like it wouldn't work, but it really made the game. Armor, ammo, weapons, sensors, vehicle frames, and propulsion could be improved. It really just depended on your strategy determined which areas you would concentrate on. Vehicles were modular so you could further customize your army to your liking.
Command units were another wonderfull addition. They could be set as rally points for your factories so newly created vehicles would automatically join them in the field. As they gained experience they would be able to pick out targets for it's forces to concentrate on verses the shoot at whatever is closest method of TA
Sensor assignment was another good one, to save on the micro management. Put a airsupport sensor on a tower or on a mobile unit and aircraft assigned to it would auto attack anything in it's range. Other sensors worked for ground units and artilery.
Vehicle pilots could be managed by recycling old outdated vehicles. New vehicles would use those pilots and would deal more damage. If you were semi-careful with your units and pulled back badly damaged ones you could build up a strong force.
Of course they had off the screen ranged artilery so you could send out a scout to pick targets for your 30-40 rocket artilery units sitting back in the back.
They only real downside to the game was the main resource was oil, and it's locations were static. Unlike the build up from nothing anywhere aspect of TA, which on more than one occation allowed me to rise from the dead off in a quiet corner in a multiplayer match.
"Wow look at my brand new gigapixel camera!"
"How many picture can you get on your $600 4gb compact flash card?"
"Hmmm on the lowest setting?"
"Yeah"
"Two"
If you want to have some fun open up Adobe photoshop and make yourself a blank gigapixel photo it to give you a sense of scale of what this guy has done. The one I did to get up to a gig was 112 inches tall by 140 inches long at 150 dpi. Brings new meaning to 8x10 don't you think? When I tried to save it as a JPEG (level 12 compression) the white (blank) picture came in at a whopping 23mb (His picture was around 2gb).
Software interpolated or no you have to be at least a little impressed with what he has done.
kudos200 just think of a higher MP rating as the ability to be able to zoom in or blow up a picture without as much loss of detail.
If you want to get into DPI ratings and such then you would be actually talking about the size of the CMOS/CDD chip relative to the megapixel rating which is not realy all that important unless you are building micro cameras.
Personally I would like to see more large format CCD/CMOS chips or mulit CCD/CMOS arrangements come out in order to give the megapixel ratings a big boost and push things up into the 20-30MP arena.
I'll give you two examples of comodities that are absolutely free and are not in the least scarce yet large industries have grown up around them. Oxygen and sunlight. The two obvisous uses for them is breathing and not having the planet freeze. If you take it a step further then you get into metal fabrication and medical O2 as well as water heating and solar based electricity.
The true value of a product is not it's raw form, but what it can be made into. Companies would like everyone to believe information should be protected, but in reality what they are really after is the reduction or elimination of competition through the control of the raw materials, ie information. If all companies had to give up all their raw information then they would have to compete on the merit of the products they can produce from the raw material alone rather than their ability to collect and hoard information.
Anyway it may seem like I am saying that all information should be free, though I'm not. A companies ability to gather information is as important as how it uses it. Companies that cannot do this well will be driven out of the market in a free-market system. What I am saying is that something does not need to be scarce to be valuable or usefull, though I would question any entitiy or individual's motives for trying to make commodities more scarce than they really are. All they are trying to do is create a monopoly which they can control.
I do agree with you on the moderation, how did it get moderated to Interesting-5?! Stupid or funny but interesting?
It's a signature not published scientific paper, accuracy is not important. You are actually about a year and a half short on noticing my signature being miss-speled.
As far as Taco Bell not being in your country, well whoop de do! If you had ever been out of you "narrow little world" then maybe you might have seen one and have gotten the joke.
So please go back under your bridge.
Too bad guys (greedy corps and stupid politians) they beat you too it!
As far as the fantasy of a mechanized weapons platform/robotic soldier. They would never be able to be truly autonomous, except for maybe general recon. Unless of course is some extremely narrow situations such as a designated kill zone, where anything that moves is a target. Off course there is still the danger of the robot leaving that area on its own and going on a rampage. Many anime and manga revolve around that theme. All of the things currently being developed require human observation, direction, and decisions.
They are not talking about downloading games. They are talking about stores sell bootleg copies. Not only does the consumer get in on piracy in China but retailers, distributers, and manufactures too.
The bathroom is a great place to talk to someone you especially despise. The owners of my rental hired a particularly annoy piece of crap to sell the house. She would call at all hours to give me twenty minutes notice that she wanted to show the house. I made it a point to answer her mid-stream when ever biologically possible. Pretty funny to hear her pause when she realized what I was doing.
We don't do to much software developement, but we have realized a great deal of space savings due to the switch. We used to have 3 project groups in our building, now we have 5 in the same amount of space. The civilians have resisted dumping the cubes but they have resigned to being put 2-3 per cube. It's pretty much just a matter of time before they make the switch.
We do have our own common area with a few offices attached to it but all the machines are available to at least nine different groups. Other than favorite hang out areas it's more or less fluid. We used to have the cubes but then we took up four times the space and had to scatter everyone out since no one area could hold us all. The other machines are scattered about the various work areas. The point being that you can do your work in places other than your office or section that are close to the action.
I work for the military and that's how we've been doing it all along. Computers are scattered throughout many of the buildings. It works fine, though some locations can be more popular than others, such as the machines in the break rooms. There are offices but they are shared by multiple people/shifts. When ever you need to do a little "one on one" (chew their ass) with someone you just find an empty one. For quiet undisturbed work, take a short walk out to one of the out buildings and you'll have the whole place to yourself.
I try to stick with items that use AAA or AA so that I can buy my own NiMH's. In the last 5 years they have gone from about 800mah to over 2000mah. Not too shabby. They don't develope a memory and the put out a steady voltage compared to regular batteries. Only bad thing is they get pretty hot and self discharge pretty quick. So I end up having to charge them up every time before I can use them in my digital camera.
Someone here pointed out that the real solution is to reduce our need instead of increasing the battery life. That could not be more true. I have a 4-cell AAA 3-LED flash light. It's as bright as my 4-cell C Mag flash light, but I can leave it on for 100 hours before it dies, verses about 8 for the other. Only down side is you can't focus the beam nor can you bash someone over the head with it.
So planned sequels it is then. I want trilogies, or better yet octilogies, for the story that keeps going and going and go.........