1) A domain specific language X is less verbose than a general purpose language Y 2) A language X is significantly less verbose than Java
I think for any X and Y those statemets are true with a 97% probability. It's not really an advantage of this MUMM thing you are speaking of - it's more that if it weren't so, MUMPS would be a disaster of epic dimensions.
I don't think you realize how unstable these things are. Have you seen a kite surfer? No matter how many computers control it, I'd have to see it to believe it. It's not like flying airplanes: a gust can come and go in seconds, and the lengths of rope and tension involved in maneuvering such a thing are insane, so you need great power to keep it in control. You can't "pack and go" a 100m piece of heavy fabric that is 300m high when "the wind becomes unpredictable", mostly because the only way to know that the wind is unpredictable at a given time is that you failed to predict it correctly.
Honestly if these guys manage to actually pull it off without significant catastrophes in a few months of use, it would be a great achievement. It's really, really hard.
I get the American Point Of View (TM). I also get the Anti-American point of view.
Both are valid and end up in a chicken-or-egg reasoning, about who started it and whose fault it is.
The problem is most people don't seem to realize the other part has reasons too, which they feel are more important. Hence the need for discussion and agreement instead of annihilation.
I wasn't saying "OMG GET OUT OF IRAQ" or anything like it. It's a very complicated mess that can't be solved through slashdot ramblings. What I was complaining about (very effusively, I have to admit now) was the utter lack of perspective displayed by the parent poster. It's very easy to completely trivialize a problem to make a decision seem obvious, sadly, it's not. The stuff is hard to crack.
Except they are not 5 strong kids. You are the strong kid, and you keep bullying them day after day, taking away their lunch money and emprisoning them into lockers.
Of course, they are fed up with this, so they keep dreaming of the day where they will actually be able to harm you in some way. Some day, it happens. Then, you feel threatened and harm them some more, because in your group of cool kids, you can't let that stand.
Now that we are done with the analogy stupidity, think of this: your failure to see the other side's point of view is what perpetuates mankind's mediocrity. Your perspective is as flawed as humanly possible, yet you walk around convinced and lecturing people about "why those Iraqis had it coming". For fuck's sake, when having an argument, or a war, try and see the other point of view. There's usually some logic there too, where you don't want to look.
I have been reading comments about this on the discussion quite often, and I know I have thought of it myself MANY times. How about we do something about it? It's a reasonable project, with no real downsides. If we agree on a default name and awareness is raised on the matter people would start adopting it pretty fast, as it should be a trivial change in most apps.
I say we pick.settings, because it's shorter.
I will write to the FHS guys, they should know better about this kind of thing, and try and make some sort of publicity stunt about this.
"Classic" voting (aka paper ballot in cardboard box) has many, many problems. We just had elections, and I waited in line for 2:30 hours to vote. A big part of that time was devoted to wondering why the fuck don't they use some sort of electronic system for this.
Some problems that are typical with regular elections: - missing ballots for a given party make the thing go slooow - you waste time finding ballots when there are many options (most countries don't have a two-party thing going on but instead have tens of partys) - long time to cut ballots when you have elections for more than a single position (say, president and senators) - this factor also favors "block voting" for a party - the signed-envelope system has loopholes that allow people to buy votes anyway - you need people to supervise the whole thing, and no one wants to volunteer - the whole process is so troublesome and complicated that people just want to get it done instead of actually thinking about the election they are making
Of course, the electronic counterpart isn't easy to build. But it could be better, it's not really that hard. You need an easy consistent interface, solid machines that won't be easy to break, and some kind of receipt showing that you voted. That's it.
Re:Software freedom is better.
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 0, Troll
In my opinion, moral responsibility ends at your actions. If Microsoft does wrong, then they are the ones doing wrong, not me by proxy.
That's just a lame excuse for not caring about the outcome of your actions, because such an outcome doesn't matter to you ultimately. By your reasoning, voting for fascists or giving money to terrorists is just fine because, "hey, you didn't move from your house, it's not like it's *you* killing those guys". There is no line dividing your actions from their outcome. Where is the boundary? At your brain, at your fingers, at the barrel of the gun you are holding?
It's fine that you don't care about Photoshop and Gimp and whatnot, it's not like everyone has the time to care about every single detail in life. But for some people, free software is a really big deal. So just let others care without bitching about it.
Back to the topic, you might want to know that actually most Gimp users don't give a crap about CMYK, because the main use for Gimp is a) graphic design and b) photographic edition that is printed from RGB files. In this sense, the colour calibration and proofing options are much more of a deal than CMYK. And, down the line, so it 16-bit color depth. Yes, including CMYK would expand the user base, so it's coming along. But it's not like people will ditch serious publishing-oriented software for the Gimp just like that, because it is more of an integrated workflow. Until (and if) it goes mainstream, Gimp will remain a freelance guy kind of tool. Press printing isn't really handled by freelancers.
The target audience being people who find it funny. I think XKCD is the work of a genius, the accuracy achieved on identifying geek-type reasonings and thought-games is mind blowing. You may not share this type of thinking and thus it just isn't funny for you. "Ninjas" is not teh funney, I agree, but there are other comics that are just plain perfect.
Even then, maybe funny is not the right word. I'd say XKCD is most of the time "+5 Insightful", with a touch of cleverness and humor. It's not a traditional comic. I know at least one other comic that shares this spirit, it's in spanish and it's called Macanudo, and it is more related to feelings and people than it is to geeks, but they do share a big pattern.
As an "open source" photographer, I can attest that:
The killer differences are: 16 bits, layer groups and color management.
A really nice tool from PS that I would love to see added to the Gimp is the liquify tool.
There is a lens blur filter somewhere for the Gimp, but it's not included in the pack.
Vanishing point is nice but not too big of a deal IMO, it's a specialty tool.
Gimp has adjustment layers, it just doesn't have as many different types as PS does. Those would indeed be welcome additions.
Save for web is a useless overrated gimmick, Gimp has save compression preview since 1.x, but it has the decency of keeping the EXIF, unlike the dreaded PS tool.
Wacom support, I don't know but as far as photography is concerned I don't think there is much use for one of those.
As far as stuff better in Gimp than in PS, I for one like the perspective correction tool in the Gimp much better than PS's.
And that POP3 server of his is 100% trusted. And the server's router. And the server router's router. And the server router router...
PGP is about the only way to have safe communications. Not perfect, you have to be careful with keys and everything else, but at least you will never be vulnerable to a script-based attack. There is no automatic way of stealing your PGP keys and passphrases, simply because very few people use it and it's so unstandardized that no one cares.
No, apochromatic means solely that chromatic aberrations are corrected for (reducing dispersion as you stated above). I don't think transmission can be improved over whatever is specific to the glass in the lenses, but it sounds like you are describing a lens coating process in which flare and reflections are eliminated, thus producing better contrast and allowing you to see objects that are more faint, but not really improving transmission.
DOF is a function of magnification and aperture. Tele lenses don't reduce DOF per se. Of course there is an indirect relation between focal length and magnification (which also involves distance to the subject), but people tend to think that tele lenses give smaller DOF's because the larger background magnification creates smoother bokeh, and that is sometimes perceived as less DOF (in general, shorter DOF produces smoother bokeh).
If you take a shot at a given magnification and aperture, no matter whether you are using a 500mm or a 10mm fisheye, DOF is the same.
I can be tricky to understand, and english is not my native language so I have a bit of a hard time writing things in many different ways. If you google for this you will find many references in good English:)
Depth of field is a decreasing function of both magnification and aperture. Magnification I have defined in my previous post, and aperture you can google in case you don't know what it is. Basically it's the size of the opening where the light goes throug on a lens. For a given focal length and aperture that will not vary, a given framing ("i want the face to fill the whole photo") on a bigger sensor requires more magnification, since you want the image of the subject to take more space on the sensor plane (it has to fill a bigger sensor!) in order to achieve the same framing. Thus, you get reduced depth of field: you are effectively working at higher magnifications.
Of course the middle part of the bigger sensor, and a smaller sensor are the same thing. But the difference is you don't frame the same way (as in having the same focal length and distance to the subject) when you have the bigger sensor: you fill the whole sensor with the image, not just the middle part.
It's the same reason a 20mm lens on a point and shoot digital acts like a telephoto lens, whereas it's an ultra-wideangle on a 35mm camera. You don't frame the same, since the larger sensor area captures a different area.
If you still don't get it try to picture the example: you don't frame the same way (by the previous definition of framing) on a film SLR than you do with a pocket digital. Hence DOF is different.
They are equivalent indeed. The key is _magnification_: the relative size of the image in the real world, and its projection on the sensor plane. For a given framing (which is basically the relation between the size of the sensor and the size of the projection in it), differently sized sensors result in different magnifications, and thus different depth of field.
Say you want to shoot a picture of your niece. You want her face to fill the whole frame. So you zoom in/out or step forward/back to achieve the selected framing. If you use the "use large sensor and take the middle part" approach, you wouldn't fill the whole frame with her face: you would just fill the middle part so that after the crop, you get the framing you planned originally. Hence, lower magnification and higher depth of field.
There is also a related issue, which is the resolution of sensors. A 35mm sized sensor with 12MP has much lower spatial resolution (pixels/mm) than the 12MP sensor in, say, a Canon G9 pocket camera. Therefore the definition of "focused" (which is a perceptual measure) can change from one to the other. For comparison purposes between a sensor and another one typically tries to avoid getting into this detail by saying "I will compare focus on equally sized prints".
The 1st choice doesn't make sense. Perspective is one thing, depth of field is a completely different, only tangentially related one.
Using a telephoto lens does in fact increase the relative size of the background WRT to the foreground. The inverse effect is obtained by using a wideangle lens. But this does not increase depth of field, and it does not make the background any more focused than it would be with a different lens. It just makes it bigger.
2nd does work.
The 3rd, easier way to do this is use a frickin' camcorder. They have tiny sensors and increased depth of field as a consequence.
No it won't. It's not the telephoto lens, it's the magnification. If you pick a given framing and aperture, DOF will be the same. Of course, distance to the subject will not, and neither will the perspective, but telephoto lenses do not reduce depth of field per se. It's a common misconception.
Well DUH. The world we live in is material for a cynical science fiction book. If it were any different it just wouldn't click.
What can you expect of a system that is based on competition, and the law of the jungle? Don't you know how it works, if you give proper healthcare and education (and thus access to various goods to everyone) then "no one would care about it". It is competition that drives people's asses to work every morning. Also (don't forget this!) federalized health care takes your "freedom" away.
BTW, I live in Argentina, we have free health care and both elemental, high and college education for free. Guess what, things still suck around here. I have always wondered what the system would be like if we had lots of money. Maybe a crazy competitive education system such as France's. Who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
In mathematical terms:
1) A domain specific language X is less verbose than a general purpose language Y
2) A language X is significantly less verbose than Java
I think for any X and Y those statemets are true with a 97% probability. It's not really an advantage of this MUMM thing you are speaking of - it's more that if it weren't so, MUMPS would be a disaster of epic dimensions.
I think it has been that way since IQ started following a gaussian distribution, therefore making the median value the same as the average value.
I don't think you realize how unstable these things are. Have you seen a kite surfer? No matter how many computers control it, I'd have to see it to believe it. It's not like flying airplanes: a gust can come and go in seconds, and the lengths of rope and tension involved in maneuvering such a thing are insane, so you need great power to keep it in control. You can't "pack and go" a 100m piece of heavy fabric that is 300m high when "the wind becomes unpredictable", mostly because the only way to know that the wind is unpredictable at a given time is that you failed to predict it correctly.
Honestly if these guys manage to actually pull it off without significant catastrophes in a few months of use, it would be a great achievement. It's really, really hard.
Yes, that was me :) Glad you like'em. Feel free to post comments on the pictures whose text you'd like me to translate, I should be doing it anyway.
I get the American Point Of View (TM). I also get the Anti-American point of view.
Both are valid and end up in a chicken-or-egg reasoning, about who started it and whose fault it is.
The problem is most people don't seem to realize the other part has reasons too, which they feel are more important. Hence the need for discussion and agreement instead of annihilation.
I wasn't saying "OMG GET OUT OF IRAQ" or anything like it. It's a very complicated mess that can't be solved through slashdot ramblings. What I was complaining about (very effusively, I have to admit now) was the utter lack of perspective displayed by the parent poster. It's very easy to completely trivialize a problem to make a decision seem obvious, sadly, it's not. The stuff is hard to crack.
Except they are not 5 strong kids. You are the strong kid, and you keep bullying them day after day, taking away their lunch money and emprisoning them into lockers.
Of course, they are fed up with this, so they keep dreaming of the day where they will actually be able to harm you in some way. Some day, it happens. Then, you feel threatened and harm them some more, because in your group of cool kids, you can't let that stand.
Now that we are done with the analogy stupidity, think of this: your failure to see the other side's point of view is what perpetuates mankind's mediocrity. Your perspective is as flawed as humanly possible, yet you walk around convinced and lecturing people about "why those Iraqis had it coming". For fuck's sake, when having an argument, or a war, try and see the other point of view. There's usually some logic there too, where you don't want to look.
Sea breezes constantly change direction
That couldn't possibly be less true.
I have posted a comment on the FHS bugzilla on this. There was already a suggestion for using .etc.
http://bugs.freestandards.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75
Personally I couldn't care less about the name, but this should be adopted.
I have been reading comments about this on the discussion quite often, and I know I have thought of it myself MANY times. How about we do something about it? It's a reasonable project, with no real downsides. If we agree on a default name and awareness is raised on the matter people would start adopting it pretty fast, as it should be a trivial change in most apps.
.settings, because it's shorter.
I say we pick
I will write to the FHS guys, they should know better about this kind of thing, and try and make some sort of publicity stunt about this.
Someone else cares about this? Sign up.
"Classic" voting (aka paper ballot in cardboard box) has many, many problems. We just had elections, and I waited in line for 2:30 hours to vote. A big part of that time was devoted to wondering why the fuck don't they use some sort of electronic system for this.
Some problems that are typical with regular elections:
- missing ballots for a given party make the thing go slooow
- you waste time finding ballots when there are many options (most countries don't have a two-party thing going on but instead have tens of partys)
- long time to cut ballots when you have elections for more than a single position (say, president and senators) - this factor also favors "block voting" for a party
- the signed-envelope system has loopholes that allow people to buy votes anyway
- you need people to supervise the whole thing, and no one wants to volunteer
- the whole process is so troublesome and complicated that people just want to get it done instead of actually thinking about the election they are making
Of course, the electronic counterpart isn't easy to build. But it could be better, it's not really that hard. You need an easy consistent interface, solid machines that won't be easy to break, and some kind of receipt showing that you voted. That's it.
In my opinion, moral responsibility ends at your actions. If Microsoft does wrong, then they are the ones doing wrong, not me by proxy.
That's just a lame excuse for not caring about the outcome of your actions, because such an outcome doesn't matter to you ultimately. By your reasoning, voting for fascists or giving money to terrorists is just fine because, "hey, you didn't move from your house, it's not like it's *you* killing those guys". There is no line dividing your actions from their outcome. Where is the boundary? At your brain, at your fingers, at the barrel of the gun you are holding?
It's fine that you don't care about Photoshop and Gimp and whatnot, it's not like everyone has the time to care about every single detail in life. But for some people, free software is a really big deal. So just let others care without bitching about it.
Back to the topic, you might want to know that actually most Gimp users don't give a crap about CMYK, because the main use for Gimp is a) graphic design and b) photographic edition that is printed from RGB files. In this sense, the colour calibration and proofing options are much more of a deal than CMYK. And, down the line, so it 16-bit color depth. Yes, including CMYK would expand the user base, so it's coming along. But it's not like people will ditch serious publishing-oriented software for the Gimp just like that, because it is more of an integrated workflow. Until (and if) it goes mainstream, Gimp will remain a freelance guy kind of tool. Press printing isn't really handled by freelancers.
The target audience being people who find it funny. I think XKCD is the work of a genius, the accuracy achieved on identifying geek-type reasonings and thought-games is mind blowing. You may not share this type of thinking and thus it just isn't funny for you. "Ninjas" is not teh funney, I agree, but there are other comics that are just plain perfect.
Even then, maybe funny is not the right word. I'd say XKCD is most of the time "+5 Insightful", with a touch of cleverness and humor. It's not a traditional comic. I know at least one other comic that shares this spirit, it's in spanish and it's called Macanudo, and it is more related to feelings and people than it is to geeks, but they do share a big pattern.
As an "open source" photographer, I can attest that:
The killer differences are: 16 bits, layer groups and color management.
A really nice tool from PS that I would love to see added to the Gimp is the liquify tool.
There is a lens blur filter somewhere for the Gimp, but it's not included in the pack.
Vanishing point is nice but not too big of a deal IMO, it's a specialty tool.
Gimp has adjustment layers, it just doesn't have as many different types as PS does. Those would indeed be welcome additions.
Save for web is a useless overrated gimmick, Gimp has save compression preview since 1.x, but it has the decency of keeping the EXIF, unlike the dreaded PS tool.
Wacom support, I don't know but as far as photography is concerned I don't think there is much use for one of those.
As far as stuff better in Gimp than in PS, I for one like the perspective correction tool in the Gimp much better than PS's.
Some pictures from me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomox/ (all processed in Gimp)
And that POP3 server of his is 100% trusted. And the server's router. And the server router's router. And the server router router ...
PGP is about the only way to have safe communications. Not perfect, you have to be careful with keys and everything else, but at least you will never be vulnerable to a script-based attack. There is no automatic way of stealing your PGP keys and passphrases, simply because very few people use it and it's so unstandardized that no one cares.
No, apochromatic means solely that chromatic aberrations are corrected for (reducing dispersion as you stated above). I don't think transmission can be improved over whatever is specific to the glass in the lenses, but it sounds like you are describing a lens coating process in which flare and reflections are eliminated, thus producing better contrast and allowing you to see objects that are more faint, but not really improving transmission.
You don't get any power from the sun at high latitudes. It's not just about the sun being there, it's also about the angle of incidence its rays have.
I am not saying any of those, and they are both wrong :)
3 71813
:)
See my other comment on that matter:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=280251&cid=20
DOF is a function of magnification and aperture. Tele lenses don't reduce DOF per se. Of course there is an indirect relation between focal length and magnification (which also involves distance to the subject), but people tend to think that tele lenses give smaller DOF's because the larger background magnification creates smoother bokeh, and that is sometimes perceived as less DOF (in general, shorter DOF produces smoother bokeh).
If you take a shot at a given magnification and aperture, no matter whether you are using a 500mm or a 10mm fisheye, DOF is the same.
I can be tricky to understand, and english is not my native language so I have a bit of a hard time writing things in many different ways. If you google for this you will find many references in good English
I'll try to explain myself again.
Depth of field is a decreasing function of both magnification and aperture. Magnification I have defined in my previous post, and aperture you can google in case you don't know what it is. Basically it's the size of the opening where the light goes throug on a lens. For a given focal length and aperture that will not vary, a given framing ("i want the face to fill the whole photo") on a bigger sensor requires more magnification, since you want the image of the subject to take more space on the sensor plane (it has to fill a bigger sensor!) in order to achieve the same framing. Thus, you get reduced depth of field: you are effectively working at higher magnifications.
Of course the middle part of the bigger sensor, and a smaller sensor are the same thing. But the difference is you don't frame the same way (as in having the same focal length and distance to the subject) when you have the bigger sensor: you fill the whole sensor with the image, not just the middle part.
It's the same reason a 20mm lens on a point and shoot digital acts like a telephoto lens, whereas it's an ultra-wideangle on a 35mm camera. You don't frame the same, since the larger sensor area captures a different area.
If you still don't get it try to picture the example: you don't frame the same way (by the previous definition of framing) on a film SLR than you do with a pocket digital. Hence DOF is different.
For those who didn't see it, the parent comment contains sarcasm.
They are equivalent indeed. The key is _magnification_: the relative size of the image in the real world, and its projection on the sensor plane. For a given framing (which is basically the relation between the size of the sensor and the size of the projection in it), differently sized sensors result in different magnifications, and thus different depth of field.
Say you want to shoot a picture of your niece. You want her face to fill the whole frame. So you zoom in/out or step forward/back to achieve the selected framing. If you use the "use large sensor and take the middle part" approach, you wouldn't fill the whole frame with her face: you would just fill the middle part so that after the crop, you get the framing you planned originally. Hence, lower magnification and higher depth of field.
There is also a related issue, which is the resolution of sensors. A 35mm sized sensor with 12MP has much lower spatial resolution (pixels/mm) than the 12MP sensor in, say, a Canon G9 pocket camera. Therefore the definition of "focused" (which is a perceptual measure) can change from one to the other. For comparison purposes between a sensor and another one typically tries to avoid getting into this detail by saying "I will compare focus on equally sized prints".
Ha! Nicely caught. I had forgotten about that myself.
The 1st choice doesn't make sense. Perspective is one thing, depth of field is a completely different, only tangentially related one.
Using a telephoto lens does in fact increase the relative size of the background WRT to the foreground. The inverse effect is obtained by using a wideangle lens. But this does not increase depth of field, and it does not make the background any more focused than it would be with a different lens. It just makes it bigger.
2nd does work.
The 3rd, easier way to do this is use a frickin' camcorder. They have tiny sensors and increased depth of field as a consequence.
No it won't. It's not the telephoto lens, it's the magnification. If you pick a given framing and aperture, DOF will be the same. Of course, distance to the subject will not, and neither will the perspective, but telephoto lenses do not reduce depth of field per se. It's a common misconception.
Well DUH. The world we live in is material for a cynical science fiction book. If it were any different it just wouldn't click.
What can you expect of a system that is based on competition, and the law of the jungle? Don't you know how it works, if you give proper healthcare and education (and thus access to various goods to everyone) then "no one would care about it". It is competition that drives people's asses to work every morning. Also (don't forget this!) federalized health care takes your "freedom" away.
BTW, I live in Argentina, we have free health care and both elemental, high and college education for free. Guess what, things still suck around here. I have always wondered what the system would be like if we had lots of money. Maybe a crazy competitive education system such as France's. Who knows?
SR doesn't mind the Universe expanding faster than light. You just can't see it do it.