Pardon my French, but how the FUCK did you relate my post to US military spending?
Well, since you brought up issues of government waste, national prestige, and spending, it seemed sensible to compare it to US spending and US government waste. And some of the biggest items in the US budget (and, arguably, some of the biggest waste) are military related, including the war in Iraq.
Furthermore, Morocco is a Muslim country and so it is interesting to compare how Europe and the US differ in how they interact with Muslim countries.
Did I mention US military spending once in my post? Did I even mention the US, or compare anything the US does to what Spain is doing?
No, you didn't: you simply failed to make the connection. That's why people have discussions: to gain new perspectives on existing problems.
For you, however, a "discussion" seems to consist of spouting insults and closing your mind to new ideas.
I hope this is not just a government waste program between the two nations, as it could potentially be a very expensive one.
No matter what the final cost is going to be, it's going to be a tiny fraction of what the US spent in Iraq. And dollar for dollar, it's going to be far more effective in promoting democracy, helping economic development, and stopping terrorism.
It seems like it would be a horrific waste of money if it is just being done for national prestige.
Funny, that's what I always think about most US military spending.
How nice for you. But it still doesn't make going through the effort of porting NetBSD to these machines rational.
(BTW, based on my experience, the notion that Sun hardware is "very reliable" is a myth. Many of the components are shared with PCs anyway, and Sun's quality control is variable.)
they're called "talks" and "speakers" for a reason
on
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading.
The purpose of the bullet items is to serve as a rough roadmap for the listener and to help the speaker not lose his thread; it is not to let the listener read what the speaker is saying anyway. And, of course, presentations don't just consist of bullet items, they also contain graphs, diagrams, and photos.
Yes, strange as that may seem, you are supposed to listen during a presentation. In fact, if you listen carefully and the talk is at all reasonable, you should be able to ignore the bullet items altogether. But if you doze off for a moment, then the bullet items will help you orient yourself again.
Frankly, I think this beats the alternative of the traditional presentation, which would have someone stand at a podium with no visual aids and reading from a prepared manuscript.
The question is not why you would install it, the question is why anybody would spend time making the port. The hardware has no future, and the only thing that makes it interesting from a geek point of view is that it is running JavaOS.
There can't be a lot of those machine around. And a new Mini ITX machine can be ahd for under $200, is more powerful, more featureful, and has far more software available for it.
Why don't you just read what a landscape photographer has to say about it? In his comparison, the Canon 1Ds full frame 35mm digital camera "blows away" 35mm film and comes close to MF. That shows you what digital sensors are capable of.
I doubt Adams would have been hung up on the specifics of black-and-white film; if he was, he just wouldn't be relevant today. He would probably be using the best technology for making spectacular images of nature, and that is clearly digital at this point. He'd probably be using cameras like this one, or he'd be compositing multiple DSLR images. He'd be dealing with the idiosyncracies of digital just like he was dealing with the idiosyncracies of black-and-white when that was the thing.
While you can turn relative shadows into highlights with photoshop, and this does work to some extent, it assumes the luxury of having the time to take multiple exposures.
No, it doesn't. As I was pointing out, there are plenty of alternative technologies available. Some sensors contain a mix of pixels, some tuned to highlights and some to shadows. Others use electronic means in the sensor to compensate for excessive contrast.
This only works for a subset of images.
Any photographic technology only works for a subset of images. There are many kinds of pictures you simply cannot take with a view camera or even film.
Some of Ansel's most famous pictures were taken with seconds to spare, such as the full moon over half dome. As the story goes, he saw it, screeched to a halt in his car and captured the image just before the moon went out of sight. Also, given that the moon moves fairly quickly across the sky, multiple images would have yielded a moon in slightly different places on each frame. That brings me to the next part:
Astrophotographers have almost universally switched to digital sensors and they cope with this every day: they overlay dozens of images of, say, planets as they move across they sky using automated, digital means.
They require you to bring a laptop around with you, hook it all up, and wait several minutes for the exposure to be taken.
Goodness--you have to carry a 4 pound laptop.
Its not practical for landscapes, where light changes, shadows move, things move in and out of the frame, the wind blows, etc.
Just like with film, you get artifacts for some subjects. Photographers have learned to deal with that for film, and they can learn to deal with that for digital.
Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.
There are plenty of ways in which you can capture huge dynamic ranges with digital sensors. One is to take multiple exposures with regular sensors and combine them digitally. Another is to use sensors designed for capturing larger dynamic ranges, using a variety of electronic tricks or using multiple different sensors on the same piece of silicon.
Of course, all of this ignores the use of view camera movements that Ansel employed (tilt, shift, rise, draw, etc). Correcting perspective with the lens is no match for what can be done in Photoshop, since the latter method forces you to sacrafice resolution.
Which is why there are plenty of digital backs for view cameras.
Your view of digital photography seems limited to what you see available as consumer gear.
But in addition to digital SLRs, you can get digital backs for medium and large format cameras. Those will give you hundreds of megapixels of data at bit depths and dynamic ranges far exceeding what you can get with film. You also get the same handling and control you would get with regular MF and LF cameras.
The current attack successfully blocked access to SCO web and ftp servers. A 50,000 packet-per-second SYN flood yields approximately 20 Mbits/second of Internet traffic in each direction, comparable to half the capacity of a DS3 line (roughly 45 MBits/second). The use of load balancers or proxies, SYN cookies, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can help distribute the load of a denial-of-service attack, making it more difficult to saturate the available network and server resources.
Translation: even without special measures, there was plenty of capacity left. Furthermore, SCO could have taken trivial steps to protect themselves but they didn't. In fact, the fact that CAIDA's backscatter technique for detecting the attack worked is in itself an indication that SCO wasn't protecting themselves properly.
Since January 2003, tension between SCO and the open source community has increased as SCO has asserted that other operating systems have misused their intellectual property.
And what the hell does that have to do with anything? The open source community didn't launch a DDoS on SCO.
The only result of this kind of attack will be tarnishing of the image of Open source developers.
Why should it? Most DDoS attacks are done by Windows users and Windows programmers but we don't come to the conclusion that Microsoft or the Windows community somehow endorses or stands behind those attacks.
Having monchrome would eliminate the need of heavy image processing, like interpolation: getting RGB pixels for each pixel which is either R, G or B.
Many high resolution digital imagers use monochrome sensors with a color wheel. So, not only can you avoid color interpolation, you can also get full resolution color. Of course, that's only useful for still images (some landscapes and inside the studio).
Ansel Adams is well known for large format very high resolution imagery; I doubut he would have achieved the same results with today's cutting edge equipment.
No, he would have achieved better results with today's cutting edge equipment. However, that means high-resolution large format camera backs, not Nikon digital snapshooters.
You overestimate the resolution of film camera systems. An 8x10 camera does not have proportionately more pixels than a 35mm camera. It does have higher resolution, but the main reason for using it is tonality (i.e., more silver grains available to represent one pixels--kind of the film equivalent of bits-per-pixel).
Velvia at 4x5 doesn't really give you 200 MPixel of resolution; outside a camera, it may give you 13000x16000 lines of resolution, but photographic lines are not like pixels--a pixel contains a lot more information than a line on a resolution chart. Furthermore, inside a real large format camera pointing at a real-world scene, you simply won't be able to get that kind of resolution out of the film.
You also underestimate the resolution of digital. Digital doesn't stop with 10 Mpixel SLR hacks, you can get digital backs for medium and large format cameras. Something like that gives you 140 Mpixels with 16 bits per channel, something that film doesn't even remotely get close to.
In fact, if it's resolution you want, you can even build one yourself: common letter sized scanners can be adapted to fit on the back of 8x10 view cameras.
Anybody who creates a successful open source project has demonstrated that they are capable of creating something people want.
I'd be much more worried about people like you, people who seem to think that by "writing software to user specifications" they can create useful software.
you'd also have to condemn actions like those of anti-slavery activists, working prior to the time when slavery was made illegal, who would illegally free other people's slaves. They refused to "accept the tenets of our democracy" too... but I don't think I would condemn them for it.
Well, there are some substantial differences between the two cases: the US wasn't much of a democracy back then and "freeing slaves" may refer to a non-violent crime, whereas bombing of abortion clinics and research labs is a violent crime. But most importantly, the abolition of slavery was something that was justified and demanded by many philosophies and religions--the justification for it wasn't the religious views of a few religions.
That happens to be your belief. My belief is that your religion is unethical and your beliefs are unfounded superstitions.
In a democracy, we settle those differences through voting. We seem to have settled it so far in favor of therapeutic cloning and legalized abortions. Sorry if you don't like that, but your legal options are limited to deciding what you do with your own body.
The question is whether nuts like you will accept that middle ground and accept the tenets of our democracy. Or will we see more Christian terrorism, bombing stem cell research labs in addition to woman's health clinics?
The US hangup is about non-reproductive cloning; none of those clones will ever contribute to population growth. The US could probably easily get a ban on reproductive cloning through the UN. But even reproductive cloning is so complex compared to the "natural" way that it just won't make any difference for population growth.
If reproductive cloning ever became widely available it would, if anything, probably lead to a reduction in growth rates: technologies that give people more reproductive freedom and choice tend to do that.
The current US administration acts as if they believe that the UN is an organization somewhere between the Three Stooges and the Devil Incarnate, and they usually ignore the UN's resolutions and dismiss its statements.
So, why are they taking this issue to the UN? Because they have been unable to get the Senate to agree to this ban. They hope that by using the UN, they can force through something that wouldn't be palatable to even US politicians.
Yes, and they were working as live musicians. They composed because they needed to do that as part of their job. Copyright wasn't required.
Music composition used to be a lot like open source development: people did it as part of their jobs, they didn't expect to sell it separately, and often, the project was commissioned and then went into the public domain after completion.
The point is: it worked. We got great music before copyright. If anything, arguably, copyright has hurt the production of quality art.
Abolishing copyright will very likely reduce the amount of quality art available quite drastically;
Quite to the contrary: it would probably greatly increase the amount of quality art available. In fact, most of the great art that has ever been created was created without copyrights.
What abolishing copyright would reduce is the commercial junk that passes for art these days. It would reduce the profits of busty pop stars, boy bands, and make big movie productions unprofitable. In different words, it would be a really good thing.
Well, and you are wrong in that regard, too. Taxes are not penalties. No court could impose a requirement on every citizen to pay money for blank media as compensation for illegal copying by some. It goes against everything the US and Canadian legal systems stand for. These taxes are the result of legislation--some lawmakers deciding that this is a good thing. They are no more penalties than car taxes or real estate taxes or income taxes.
And, in fact, previous taxes on blank media were the result of a legislative compromise that did give consumers more rights to the reproduction of coyrighted works in result for the blanket payment.
So, the question "given that we pay these taxes now, what additional rights to copy things do we get" is completely reasonable. If we don't get any additional rights, those taxes should be abolished.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon my French, but how the FUCK did you relate my post to US military spending?
Well, since you brought up issues of government waste, national prestige, and spending, it seemed sensible to compare it to US spending and US government waste. And some of the biggest items in the US budget (and, arguably, some of the biggest waste) are military related, including the war in Iraq.
Furthermore, Morocco is a Muslim country and so it is interesting to compare how Europe and the US differ in how they interact with Muslim countries.
Did I mention US military spending once in my post? Did I even mention the US, or compare anything the US does to what Spain is doing?
No, you didn't: you simply failed to make the connection. That's why people have discussions: to gain new perspectives on existing problems.
For you, however, a "discussion" seems to consist of spouting insults and closing your mind to new ideas.
I hope this is not just a government waste program between the two nations, as it could potentially be a very expensive one.
No matter what the final cost is going to be, it's going to be a tiny fraction of what the US spent in Iraq. And dollar for dollar, it's going to be far more effective in promoting democracy, helping economic development, and stopping terrorism.
It seems like it would be a horrific waste of money if it is just being done for national prestige.
Funny, that's what I always think about most US military spending.
How nice for you. But it still doesn't make going through the effort of porting NetBSD to these machines rational.
(BTW, based on my experience, the notion that Sun hardware is "very reliable" is a myth. Many of the components are shared with PCs anyway, and Sun's quality control is variable.)
Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading.
The purpose of the bullet items is to serve as a rough roadmap for the listener and to help the speaker not lose his thread; it is not to let the listener read what the speaker is saying anyway. And, of course, presentations don't just consist of bullet items, they also contain graphs, diagrams, and photos.
Yes, strange as that may seem, you are supposed to listen during a presentation. In fact, if you listen carefully and the talk is at all reasonable, you should be able to ignore the bullet items altogether. But if you doze off for a moment, then the bullet items will help you orient yourself again.
Frankly, I think this beats the alternative of the traditional presentation, which would have someone stand at a podium with no visual aids and reading from a prepared manuscript.
The question is not why you would install it, the question is why anybody would spend time making the port. The hardware has no future, and the only thing that makes it interesting from a geek point of view is that it is running JavaOS.
There can't be a lot of those machine around. And a new Mini ITX machine can be ahd for under $200, is more powerful, more featureful, and has far more software available for it.
Why don't you just read what a landscape photographer has to say about it? In his comparison, the Canon 1Ds full frame 35mm digital camera "blows away" 35mm film and comes close to MF. That shows you what digital sensors are capable of.
I doubt Adams would have been hung up on the specifics of black-and-white film; if he was, he just wouldn't be relevant today. He would probably be using the best technology for making spectacular images of nature, and that is clearly digital at this point. He'd probably be using cameras like this one, or he'd be compositing multiple DSLR images. He'd be dealing with the idiosyncracies of digital just like he was dealing with the idiosyncracies of black-and-white when that was the thing.
While you can turn relative shadows into highlights with photoshop, and this does work to some extent, it assumes the luxury of having the time to take multiple exposures.
No, it doesn't. As I was pointing out, there are plenty of alternative technologies available. Some sensors contain a mix of pixels, some tuned to highlights and some to shadows. Others use electronic means in the sensor to compensate for excessive contrast.
This only works for a subset of images.
Any photographic technology only works for a subset of images. There are many kinds of pictures you simply cannot take with a view camera or even film.
Some of Ansel's most famous pictures were taken with seconds to spare, such as the full moon over half dome. As the story goes, he saw it, screeched to a halt in his car and captured the image just before the moon went out of sight. Also, given that the moon moves fairly quickly across the sky, multiple images would have yielded a moon in slightly different places on each frame. That brings me to the next part:
Astrophotographers have almost universally switched to digital sensors and they cope with this every day: they overlay dozens of images of, say, planets as they move across they sky using automated, digital means.
They require you to bring a laptop around with you, hook it all up, and wait several minutes for the exposure to be taken.
Goodness--you have to carry a 4 pound laptop.
Its not practical for landscapes, where light changes, shadows move, things move in and out of the frame, the wind blows, etc.
Just like with film, you get artifacts for some subjects. Photographers have learned to deal with that for film, and they can learn to deal with that for digital.
You should upgrade to a 24bpp graphics card from your current 8bpp graphics card and the banding will go away. Really.
Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.
There are plenty of ways in which you can capture huge dynamic ranges with digital sensors. One is to take multiple exposures with regular sensors and combine them digitally. Another is to use sensors designed for capturing larger dynamic ranges, using a variety of electronic tricks or using multiple different sensors on the same piece of silicon.
Of course, all of this ignores the use of view camera movements that Ansel employed (tilt, shift, rise, draw, etc). Correcting perspective with the lens is no match for what can be done in Photoshop, since the latter method forces you to sacrafice resolution.
Which is why there are plenty of digital backs for view cameras.
Your view of digital photography seems limited to what you see available as consumer gear.
But in addition to digital SLRs, you can get digital backs for medium and large format cameras. Those will give you hundreds of megapixels of data at bit depths and dynamic ranges far exceeding what you can get with film. You also get the same handling and control you would get with regular MF and LF cameras.
By producing software that matches the needs of the client your software is inherently useful.
Yes. Where you are mistaken, however, is in thinking that following "user specifications" is going to result in software that is useful to clients.
Simply opening the source of your software does not make it useful.
Quite right. But I said that someone who creates a successful open source project has demonstrated that they can create something people want.
(Perhaps before going on about reading user specifications, perhaps you should read what you are responding to more carefully?)
The current attack successfully blocked access to SCO web and ftp servers. A 50,000 packet-per-second SYN flood yields approximately 20 Mbits/second of Internet traffic in each direction, comparable to half the capacity of a DS3 line (roughly 45 MBits/second). The use of load balancers or proxies, SYN cookies, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can help distribute the load of a denial-of-service attack, making it more difficult to saturate the available network and server resources.
Translation: even without special measures, there was plenty of capacity left. Furthermore, SCO could have taken trivial steps to protect themselves but they didn't. In fact, the fact that CAIDA's backscatter technique for detecting the attack worked is in itself an indication that SCO wasn't protecting themselves properly.
Since January 2003, tension between SCO and the open source community has increased as SCO has asserted that other operating systems have misused their intellectual property.
And what the hell does that have to do with anything? The open source community didn't launch a DDoS on SCO.
The only result of this kind of attack will be tarnishing of the image of Open source developers.
Why should it? Most DDoS attacks are done by Windows users and Windows programmers but we don't come to the conclusion that Microsoft or the Windows community somehow endorses or stands behind those attacks.
Having monchrome would eliminate the need of heavy image processing, like interpolation: getting RGB pixels for each pixel which is either R, G or B.
Many high resolution digital imagers use monochrome sensors with a color wheel. So, not only can you avoid color interpolation, you can also get full resolution color. Of course, that's only useful for still images (some landscapes and inside the studio).
Ansel Adams is well known for large format very high resolution imagery; I doubut he would have achieved the same results with today's cutting edge equipment.
No, he would have achieved better results with today's cutting edge equipment. However, that means high-resolution large format camera backs, not Nikon digital snapshooters.
You overestimate the resolution of film camera systems. An 8x10 camera does not have proportionately more pixels than a 35mm camera. It does have higher resolution, but the main reason for using it is tonality (i.e., more silver grains available to represent one pixels--kind of the film equivalent of bits-per-pixel).
Velvia at 4x5 doesn't really give you 200 MPixel of resolution; outside a camera, it may give you 13000x16000 lines of resolution, but photographic lines are not like pixels--a pixel contains a lot more information than a line on a resolution chart. Furthermore, inside a real large format camera pointing at a real-world scene, you simply won't be able to get that kind of resolution out of the film.
You also underestimate the resolution of digital. Digital doesn't stop with 10 Mpixel SLR hacks, you can get digital backs for medium and large format cameras. Something like that gives you 140 Mpixels with 16 bits per channel, something that film doesn't even remotely get close to.
In fact, if it's resolution you want, you can even build one yourself: common letter sized scanners can be adapted to fit on the back of 8x10 view cameras.
Anybody who creates a successful open source project has demonstrated that they are capable of creating something people want.
I'd be much more worried about people like you, people who seem to think that by "writing software to user specifications" they can create useful software.
you'd also have to condemn actions like those of anti-slavery activists, working prior to the time when slavery was made illegal, who would illegally free other people's slaves. They refused to "accept the tenets of our democracy" too... but I don't think I would condemn them for it.
Well, there are some substantial differences between the two cases: the US wasn't much of a democracy back then and "freeing slaves" may refer to a non-violent crime, whereas bombing of abortion clinics and research labs is a violent crime. But most importantly, the abolition of slavery was something that was justified and demanded by many philosophies and religions--the justification for it wasn't the religious views of a few religions.
That happens to be your belief. My belief is that your religion is unethical and your beliefs are unfounded superstitions.
In a democracy, we settle those differences through voting. We seem to have settled it so far in favor of therapeutic cloning and legalized abortions. Sorry if you don't like that, but your legal options are limited to deciding what you do with your own body.
The question is whether nuts like you will accept that middle ground and accept the tenets of our democracy. Or will we see more Christian terrorism, bombing stem cell research labs in addition to woman's health clinics?
The US hangup is about non-reproductive cloning; none of those clones will ever contribute to population growth. The US could probably easily get a ban on reproductive cloning through the UN. But even reproductive cloning is so complex compared to the "natural" way that it just won't make any difference for population growth.
If reproductive cloning ever became widely available it would, if anything, probably lead to a reduction in growth rates: technologies that give people more reproductive freedom and choice tend to do that.
The current US administration acts as if they believe that the UN is an organization somewhere between the Three Stooges and the Devil Incarnate, and they usually ignore the UN's resolutions and dismiss its statements.
So, why are they taking this issue to the UN? Because they have been unable to get the Senate to agree to this ban. They hope that by using the UN, they can force through something that wouldn't be palatable to even US politicians.
Yes, and they were working as live musicians. They composed because they needed to do that as part of their job. Copyright wasn't required.
Music composition used to be a lot like open source development: people did it as part of their jobs, they didn't expect to sell it separately, and often, the project was commissioned and then went into the public domain after completion.
The point is: it worked. We got great music before copyright. If anything, arguably, copyright has hurt the production of quality art.
Abolishing copyright will very likely reduce the amount of quality art available quite drastically;
Quite to the contrary: it would probably greatly increase the amount of quality art available. In fact, most of the great art that has ever been created was created without copyrights.
What abolishing copyright would reduce is the commercial junk that passes for art these days. It would reduce the profits of busty pop stars, boy bands, and make big movie productions unprofitable. In different words, it would be a really good thing.
Well, and you are wrong in that regard, too. Taxes are not penalties. No court could impose a requirement on every citizen to pay money for blank media as compensation for illegal copying by some. It goes against everything the US and Canadian legal systems stand for. These taxes are the result of legislation--some lawmakers deciding that this is a good thing. They are no more penalties than car taxes or real estate taxes or income taxes.
And, in fact, previous taxes on blank media were the result of a legislative compromise that did give consumers more rights to the reproduction of coyrighted works in result for the blanket payment.
So, the question "given that we pay these taxes now, what additional rights to copy things do we get" is completely reasonable. If we don't get any additional rights, those taxes should be abolished.