All of your friends have iPhones and you feel the need to have one as well.
You need to feel like you are part of an "in" crowd.
You genuinely like the hardware but want to load new software on the device.
You genuinely like the hardware AND software but want to run a forbidden application.
It works with your car/stereo/home automation system and you have no choice short of losing that functionality.
There are probably many other reasons. Personally I do not have any kind of smartphone - they are all too big for me. But I do have an iPod touch, and the software is very slick - though strangely it is not a great MP3 player:)
Concluding that a mark on a dinosaur bone was from butchering would be suspect without evidence of the tools themselves in the same strata, would it not?
I always assumed "quantum leap" meant a distinct, significant jump as opposed to referring to the size per se. Next time I hear it used I'll have to ask what they mean.
And as the others say, in the U.S., colleges typically reserve 1xx for the intro courses.
Yeah, I suppose... I think I'd notice that fairly quickly, though. It actually happened to my Dad, and when he deleted all the files the cracker actually had the nerve to send him an angry email!
To be truthful, most of my work is in fact done through a VPN - but I have ftp'd a thing or two in a completely unsafe fashion, fairly certain that no one in the vicinity was a master Russian cracker, and pretty sure that even if they were, my whopping 6GB ftp site wouldn't interest them much:)
The coffee shop I used in New York just yanked the router at peak times. They even had a sign on the door telling you exactly when free Wifi was available.
I see students use coffee shops like it was an annex to their dorm room--wearing pajamas, headphones on, textbooks sprawled everywhere. That's just beyond sad.
Not everyone works for the Pentagon. If someone intercepted my ftp uploads, they wouldn't know or care what the heck it was. No financial data, no personal data, just reams of oscilloscope data and such.
If you've ever worked from home in a small city apartment, a coffee shop can seem like a very pleasant place to work. You are right, though... not for the easily distracted.
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security.
Right, because it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that my Slashdot account not get hacked...
I like websites remembering my settings, thank you. And I like the "awesome bar" in Firefox. So they can go ahead and track me and try to get me to click on things. I hope they are also tracking my use of AdBlock.
A large percentage of people that have credit cards use them to buy more than they can afford to pay off at the end of the month (due in no small part to credit cards that keep raising spending limits far beyond what a lot of people can reasonably afford), ensuring that customers will pay financing fees for the rest of their lives.
That's a whole separate issue, though. For a responsible person, "check cards" make little sense.
I could see using one to "enforce" a budget, though. Create a separate account with your spending money in it and attach a check card to it... are there people who are super-anal-organized but have no self control?:)
True, but the same advantage applies to your credit card.
I'm old for around here, but I still won't get a "check card"... I just don't see the advantage vs. a credit card that you pay off every month or a debit card that requires a PIN.
Both Visa and Mastercard have a zero liability policy for unauthorized use of your card, provided you report a lost card within 24 hours
This is true, but doesn't help you when someone uses only your NUMBER fraudulently and you don't notice until your statement comes... or worse, when checks start bouncing. How many $35 bounce fees is it worth getting before you start to think that maybe tying a card to your bank account wasn't such a fantastic idea?:)
I'm not convinced that you understand how credit cards work, or for that matter, how money works.
In the US, Federal law limits you to $50 in exposure to theft of a credit card. With debit cards you are at the mercy of your bank, so I'm glad you are comfortable with yours!
I see that they changed from scavenging the hot exhaust to circulating the warm thermos water through the head.
You are right - Chevy could do that as well to improve warm-up time. This would of course add a couple of hundred bucks to the car, but it might be worth it (at least in CA).
It seems to me that they could try another method... the battery/electric motor must be pretty hot by the time you need to start the gasoline motor. You could use some of that waste heat to pre-heat the gasoline motor. Where's my consultant's fee?:)
I'm confused... the engine coolant is circulated BEHIND the catalytic converters any time the engine cools down in order to speed warm-up... you still have nasty emissions until the catalytic converters kick on. That's the whole design philosophy of the Prius - everything has to be all warmed-up and ready to start benefiting from the hybrid system... it's a gasoline car with electric assist for performance and recovery of braking losses.
Like all design decisions, this has benefits and drawbacks - short trips in a cold car are one of the drawbacks, as the system does what it can to get the catalytic converter heated up as quickly as possible.
This is in some ways the opposite philosophy of the Volt, which should do better than the Prius for short cold trips and worse in a number of other ways - especially when depending on gasoline power. It is, after all, primarily an electric car with gasoline backup.
A vacuum sealed container is necessary because the Prius is constantly starting and stopping its engine. IIRC, the Volt runs its battery until depletion, and then runs its engine continuously until the battery is again charged... even a Prius-style insulated converter would not stay hot enough for the large time between running the engine.
The difference is in philosophy... the Volt is essentially an electric car with a backup power source. The Prius is a gasoline car with electric assist - even though it will get a plug-in mode.
Incorrect engine timings? When is the last time you could adjust that?
To most Americans, cars aren't "machines". They are just little appliances that get you from here to there. When a little light comes on, you take it to get fixed. There is nothing inherently wrong with this - not everyone is a tinkerer.
You do realize that 35mm film at a DPI level is about equivalent to somewhere at or above 24-36 megapixels, not 10
Well, it's a very hard comparison to make... especially since it's a moving target and there are many grades of film. The estimates I've seen go with 10-20+.
But my point is that the higher megapixels number is mostly useless. Few people run into a resolution issue. The camera I bought most recently only has a 10 megapixel sensor, but this lets it take in a lot more light and so I'm glad that Canon "regressed". I'm fairly confident that I won't be making any wall-sized prints, so hauling around a real SLR seems kind of overkill. That, and most wall-sized prints are viewed from a distance so a bit of graininess won't be noticed by anyone except me:)
Now, multiply that by 100 photos - and you are now at 3600 MBs
10 years ago, I'd have agreed that this was a big number. Now, however, this is approaching 0.2% of a hard drive. A single DVD will store this, as will a $20 thumb drive. I have 8GB of storage on my cell phone:) Free online backup services give you 2TB - more than enough to store very high-quality versions of 100+ photos. Notice that you raised the bar here... the analog slides did not necessarily have any intermediate steps stored away.
If it had been today, the digital camera would not have produced anywhere near as good an photo.
Why do you say that? A 10 megapixel photo could do a 3'x4' print suitable for most purposes. With 10 megapixels you are at least in the realm of 35mm film - half at worst. A good pocket cam with real optics and a decent sensor (I'll plug my S90 again) will handle grandpa windsurfing just fine - it's even bright sunlight so you don't suffer from digital's annoying noise, and unless you are worried about capturing the detail in grandpa's teeth or the clouds, the limited dynamic range shouldn't be a problem.
A digital $35 Vivitar from Walgreens will give you horrendous pictures... but then so did the fixed-lens $35 film cameras of 20 years ago.
Besides, for every lost digital photo and every great picture of grandpa windsurfing, there is a story about the only surviving print getting stuck to the picture frame such that it tears when you try to remove it. Or a print lost in a flooded basement or fire. Or even just fade over the years.
and they've especially had issue as many people will just delete the photos instantaneously if they didn't like it, thereby loosing a lot of information
Has this happened recently? I can see 10 years ago when the cameras only stored like 14 pictures on the cheap 32MB card that came with them, but now you can go months before filling your card. I can't believe that people are still immediately deleting photos.:)
And yet there are a lot of Wedding photographers that use only DSLRs
Yeah, that's pretty weak. We picked a pair of photographers who shot with two cameras - a medium format and a DSLR. In most cases, the pictures were about the same - but we picked a lot of the medium format pics due to the ability to see the detail in my wife's dress. No question that medium format is superior to digital:)
I had pictures (scanned in.gifs) once on my Mac 512k (circa 1985) on floppies.
Well, I would not have been making this argument in the late 80s!:)
I'm arguing that any decent digital picture is more likely to be shared than any decent analog picture. More copies = greater chance of survival. Sure, your stacks of ho-hum pictures stored on CD won't survive... but so what?
However, how many family albums do you have that people have looked at in years or decades.
I'm a bad data-point... I scanned in many of our old family albums, and my dad scanned in the Kodachrome slides. I have them stored on two mirrored hard drives, as well as Mozy AND Crashplan. I also put them on DVD as slideshows and distribute them to relatives as gifts.
Previous to this, the pictures were all in my Mom's hot closet, where all of the color photos were quickly fading, or in my Dad's damp shed, where even the Kodachrome was getting moldy. I contend that my memories are a lot safer now... though I grant you that if I were to die suddenly, it is unlikely that my wife would continue to be as rigorous as I am. But in that case, who cares what happens to the photos? I'm dead!:)
I can easily go to an event and shoot up several gigabytes worth of photos.
Agreed. You are not the same use case as the OP's uncle with a "hundred" photos found in the attic. I'd wager that those old photos were shot with a compact, perhaps even fixed-focus, camera... not the pro or semi-pro gear you are talking about.
Yet all digital photos are not nearly as good as the ones from my SLR.
Agreed - but for snapshots it is "good enough". The main thing lacking from digital photos IMHO is color depth - you have to chose the highlights or the shadows, where with film a properly exposed photo could get both.
didn't matter if you used an SLR or a cheap throw-away camera. It still contains a lot of data
I'm going to call shenanigans on you here:) A cheap film camera will probably not get exposure right, so you loose the improved dynamic range advantage. It will have a tiny lens, maybe even plastic and fixed-focus - so your enlargement will look uneven and fuzzy. True, a properly-exposed 35mm film from a decent SLR or nice compact will have more blowup potential than a digital camera of the same spec - but what's the use case here? How often do you blow up beyond 8x10, even given some cropping? I get plenty of resolution and sharpness from my S90 for 8x10 - all I'm missing is a bit of dynamic range, which isn't usually an issue in snapshots.
But you still can't get even a top-grade professional camera that matches Film at the DPI level.
While this is true, it's not an issue for most people who are not doing poster-sized enlargements. I'd argue the bigger advantage of film is in dynamic range.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of a few reasons:
There are probably many other reasons. Personally I do not have any kind of smartphone - they are all too big for me. But I do have an iPod touch, and the software is very slick - though strangely it is not a great MP3 player :)
Concluding that a mark on a dinosaur bone was from butchering would be suspect without evidence of the tools themselves in the same strata, would it not?
I always assumed "quantum leap" meant a distinct, significant jump as opposed to referring to the size per se. Next time I hear it used I'll have to ask what they mean.
And as the others say, in the U.S., colleges typically reserve 1xx for the intro courses.
All I know is that bloody, sick, whatever - meat tastes good.
I've never killed a cow - but I regularly go fishing and then eat the fish... does that count?
Yeah, I suppose... I think I'd notice that fairly quickly, though. It actually happened to my Dad, and when he deleted all the files the cracker actually had the nerve to send him an angry email!
To be truthful, most of my work is in fact done through a VPN - but I have ftp'd a thing or two in a completely unsafe fashion, fairly certain that no one in the vicinity was a master Russian cracker, and pretty sure that even if they were, my whopping 6GB ftp site wouldn't interest them much :)
The coffee shop I used in New York just yanked the router at peak times. They even had a sign on the door telling you exactly when free Wifi was available.
I see students use coffee shops like it was an annex to their dorm room--wearing pajamas, headphones on, textbooks sprawled everywhere. That's just beyond sad.
A tad judgmental, are we?
Not everyone works for the Pentagon. If someone intercepted my ftp uploads, they wouldn't know or care what the heck it was. No financial data, no personal data, just reams of oscilloscope data and such.
If you've ever worked from home in a small city apartment, a coffee shop can seem like a very pleasant place to work. You are right, though... not for the easily distracted.
Safe to say she will be happier with your $1.50 in business taken across the street, freeing up a table.
It's not even particularly funny, since the phone isn't obviously different afterward. Now, change a display MacBook to, say, the Dvorak keyboard...
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security.
Right, because it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that my Slashdot account not get hacked...
I like websites remembering my settings, thank you. And I like the "awesome bar" in Firefox. So they can go ahead and track me and try to get me to click on things. I hope they are also tracking my use of AdBlock.
A large percentage of people that have credit cards use them to buy more than they can afford to pay off at the end of the month (due in no small part to credit cards that keep raising spending limits far beyond what a lot of people can reasonably afford), ensuring that customers will pay financing fees for the rest of their lives.
That's a whole separate issue, though. For a responsible person, "check cards" make little sense.
I could see using one to "enforce" a budget, though. Create a separate account with your spending money in it and attach a check card to it... are there people who are super-anal-organized but have no self control? :)
True, but the same advantage applies to your credit card.
I'm old for around here, but I still won't get a "check card"... I just don't see the advantage vs. a credit card that you pay off every month or a debit card that requires a PIN.
Both Visa and Mastercard have a zero liability policy for unauthorized use of your card, provided you report a lost card within 24 hours
This is true, but doesn't help you when someone uses only your NUMBER fraudulently and you don't notice until your statement comes... or worse, when checks start bouncing. How many $35 bounce fees is it worth getting before you start to think that maybe tying a card to your bank account wasn't such a fantastic idea? :)
I'm not convinced that you understand how credit cards work, or for that matter, how money works.
In the US, Federal law limits you to $50 in exposure to theft of a credit card. With debit cards you are at the mercy of your bank, so I'm glad you are comfortable with yours!
I see that they changed from scavenging the hot exhaust to circulating the warm thermos water through the head.
You are right - Chevy could do that as well to improve warm-up time. This would of course add a couple of hundred bucks to the car, but it might be worth it (at least in CA).
It seems to me that they could try another method... the battery/electric motor must be pretty hot by the time you need to start the gasoline motor. You could use some of that waste heat to pre-heat the gasoline motor. Where's my consultant's fee? :)
I'm confused... the engine coolant is circulated BEHIND the catalytic converters any time the engine cools down in order to speed warm-up... you still have nasty emissions until the catalytic converters kick on. That's the whole design philosophy of the Prius - everything has to be all warmed-up and ready to start benefiting from the hybrid system... it's a gasoline car with electric assist for performance and recovery of braking losses.
Like all design decisions, this has benefits and drawbacks - short trips in a cold car are one of the drawbacks, as the system does what it can to get the catalytic converter heated up as quickly as possible.
This is in some ways the opposite philosophy of the Volt, which should do better than the Prius for short cold trips and worse in a number of other ways - especially when depending on gasoline power. It is, after all, primarily an electric car with gasoline backup.
A vacuum sealed container is necessary because the Prius is constantly starting and stopping its engine. IIRC, the Volt runs its battery until depletion, and then runs its engine continuously until the battery is again charged... even a Prius-style insulated converter would not stay hot enough for the large time between running the engine.
The difference is in philosophy... the Volt is essentially an electric car with a backup power source. The Prius is a gasoline car with electric assist - even though it will get a plug-in mode.
Incorrect engine timings? When is the last time you could adjust that?
To most Americans, cars aren't "machines". They are just little appliances that get you from here to there. When a little light comes on, you take it to get fixed. There is nothing inherently wrong with this - not everyone is a tinkerer.
You do realize that 35mm film at a DPI level is about equivalent to somewhere at or above 24-36 megapixels, not 10
Well, it's a very hard comparison to make... especially since it's a moving target and there are many grades of film. The estimates I've seen go with 10-20+.
But my point is that the higher megapixels number is mostly useless. Few people run into a resolution issue. The camera I bought most recently only has a 10 megapixel sensor, but this lets it take in a lot more light and so I'm glad that Canon "regressed". I'm fairly confident that I won't be making any wall-sized prints, so hauling around a real SLR seems kind of overkill. That, and most wall-sized prints are viewed from a distance so a bit of graininess won't be noticed by anyone except me :)
Now, multiply that by 100 photos - and you are now at 3600 MBs
10 years ago, I'd have agreed that this was a big number. Now, however, this is approaching 0.2% of a hard drive. A single DVD will store this, as will a $20 thumb drive. I have 8GB of storage on my cell phone :) Free online backup services give you 2TB - more than enough to store very high-quality versions of 100+ photos. Notice that you raised the bar here... the analog slides did not necessarily have any intermediate steps stored away.
If it had been today, the digital camera would not have produced anywhere near as good an photo.
Why do you say that? A 10 megapixel photo could do a 3'x4' print suitable for most purposes. With 10 megapixels you are at least in the realm of 35mm film - half at worst. A good pocket cam with real optics and a decent sensor (I'll plug my S90 again) will handle grandpa windsurfing just fine - it's even bright sunlight so you don't suffer from digital's annoying noise, and unless you are worried about capturing the detail in grandpa's teeth or the clouds, the limited dynamic range shouldn't be a problem.
A digital $35 Vivitar from Walgreens will give you horrendous pictures... but then so did the fixed-lens $35 film cameras of 20 years ago.
Besides, for every lost digital photo and every great picture of grandpa windsurfing, there is a story about the only surviving print getting stuck to the picture frame such that it tears when you try to remove it. Or a print lost in a flooded basement or fire. Or even just fade over the years.
and they've especially had issue as many people will just delete the photos instantaneously if they didn't like it, thereby loosing a lot of information
Has this happened recently? I can see 10 years ago when the cameras only stored like 14 pictures on the cheap 32MB card that came with them, but now you can go months before filling your card. I can't believe that people are still immediately deleting photos. :)
And yet there are a lot of Wedding photographers that use only DSLRs
Yeah, that's pretty weak. We picked a pair of photographers who shot with two cameras - a medium format and a DSLR. In most cases, the pictures were about the same - but we picked a lot of the medium format pics due to the ability to see the detail in my wife's dress. No question that medium format is superior to digital :)
I had pictures (scanned in .gifs) once on my Mac 512k (circa 1985) on floppies.
Well, I would not have been making this argument in the late 80s! :)
I'm arguing that any decent digital picture is more likely to be shared than any decent analog picture. More copies = greater chance of survival. Sure, your stacks of ho-hum pictures stored on CD won't survive... but so what?
However, how many family albums do you have that people have looked at in years or decades.
I'm a bad data-point... I scanned in many of our old family albums, and my dad scanned in the Kodachrome slides. I have them stored on two mirrored hard drives, as well as Mozy AND Crashplan. I also put them on DVD as slideshows and distribute them to relatives as gifts.
Previous to this, the pictures were all in my Mom's hot closet, where all of the color photos were quickly fading, or in my Dad's damp shed, where even the Kodachrome was getting moldy. I contend that my memories are a lot safer now... though I grant you that if I were to die suddenly, it is unlikely that my wife would continue to be as rigorous as I am. But in that case, who cares what happens to the photos? I'm dead! :)
I can easily go to an event and shoot up several gigabytes worth of photos.
Agreed. You are not the same use case as the OP's uncle with a "hundred" photos found in the attic. I'd wager that those old photos were shot with a compact, perhaps even fixed-focus, camera... not the pro or semi-pro gear you are talking about.
Yet all digital photos are not nearly as good as the ones from my SLR.
Agreed - but for snapshots it is "good enough". The main thing lacking from digital photos IMHO is color depth - you have to chose the highlights or the shadows, where with film a properly exposed photo could get both.
didn't matter if you used an SLR or a cheap throw-away camera. It still contains a lot of data
I'm going to call shenanigans on you here :) A cheap film camera will probably not get exposure right, so you loose the improved dynamic range advantage. It will have a tiny lens, maybe even plastic and fixed-focus - so your enlargement will look uneven and fuzzy. True, a properly-exposed 35mm film from a decent SLR or nice compact will have more blowup potential than a digital camera of the same spec - but what's the use case here? How often do you blow up beyond 8x10, even given some cropping? I get plenty of resolution and sharpness from my S90 for 8x10 - all I'm missing is a bit of dynamic range, which isn't usually an issue in snapshots.
But you still can't get even a top-grade professional camera that matches Film at the DPI level.
While this is true, it's not an issue for most people who are not doing poster-sized enlargements. I'd argue the bigger advantage of film is in dynamic range.
Seriously, when is the last time MS came up with a new idea?
Some of their brutal business practices were pretty inspired.