This thing forced you to use flash to relay simple text would have sufficed.
The content was practically non-existant to erroneous (DSLRs have Narrow DOF, pocket cameras wide DOF: The correct answer is both have control over DOF, both can do wide DOF, but The DSLR can do a much nicer narrow DOF).
In the end the info is not much better than if you want a camera to put in your pocket, don't get a DSLR.
Sensors are expensive. From a manufacturing perspective, smaller is cheaper and as all buisness is driven by the bottom line. The drive is to smaller sensors. I have seen 3mp sensor shrink about 3 times now.
SLRs using current lenses are exempt from this shrinkage as they have to mate with lenses designed for Film. So they have to be of similar size. It is more like SLRs force big sensors when using current lens systems.
"Are there professional grade cameras with interchangable lenses that don't depend on the optical viewfinder? Are there semi-compact digital cameras with high quality lenses and big sensors?"
There is a digital rangefinder with interchangeable lenses and a big sensor. Epson RD-1. $3000 for the body.
"Why does every digital camera have a crappy motor-driven zoom? Aren't there others out there that would prefer a normal (no-zoom) lens? Isn't a motor-driven zoom totally useless?"
Digital SLR take the same lenses as film counterparts and are manual zoom. Point and shoot digital mirror point and shoot film cameras that also have motorized zooms.
There are exceptions. Sony 828, Minolta A2 both have manual zooms. Obviously manual zoom is better, but there moto zooms still get the job done.
"Are there decent digital cameras with decent macro lenses?"
Macro is very good out of the box on many digitals (esp nikons) and add on lenses are available to make it even better.
Obviously you still don't understand how flashblock works, so I have made a more informative post that better explains why everyone should have flashblock:
Flashblock is great because it puts control back in the hands of us, the users. No longer will flash start running automatically, instead all the flash content is replaced with a play button, one click and you see the flash YOU want to see and are free from the the flash that someone ELSE want to force you to see.
Now who could possibly complain about a plugin that gives you this choice?
If you are an IE user, this may be the final reason to switch to firefox, to use this great extension.
Unfortunately, we are not likely to get flashblock on POS terminals.
Most people can't tell the difference between a good MP3 and CD. It will pretty hard to convince greater than 0.01 % of the population that there is a need for a better than CD quality audio standard. SACD were for the crowd that buy monster cables and put "tweak" on their connections. The "Golden ear" set.
When mp3 hit the scene, I noticed that most of my friend found nothing at all wrong with 128k mp3s while sound like crap to me.
I am into audio and have always tried to keep a decent stereo. Denon Rx, Paradigm speakers type thing. I did some ABX testing and discovered that by 160K mp3, I pretty much couldn't pick out the MP3 from the CD. So I definitely don't need a better format.
Video is another story Anyone with a big screen HDTV can readily spot the HiDef difference, moreso on a projector.
That being said. I agree overall. Adoption will be slow. There is no reason to upgrade unless you have a display device that delivers the missing quailty.
Though unlike SACD, I don't think next gen DVD will die. Big screens are growing all the time and I already think they are much more prevalent than golden ears.
...at Rationalizing. Giving credit where do (time to burn some Karma)
I have seen a ton of rationalization in this thread.
Mostly like, yeah, but some of these countries don't let the dumber kids going to school. Or Asian kids spend 16 hour a day in school and get 16 hours of homework every night. Or they teach the test.... Talk about grasping.
Then there was the rationalization that Math isn't important. Argh!
Wake up and smell the cofee. You were 28 out of 40 countries tested. You were whipped by Canada and Finland. Both western democracies with universal education.
I went to school in Canada, and frankly if you are that far behind us you are in trouble, because frankly I was not that impressed by our education system. It has a lot of room for improvement. It was pretty slack and most of weren't that serious about it (including the teachers). Yeah small sample, but Canada was also one of the countries where they claimed consistent quality among schools. So unless my experiences were anomolies, there was nothing special going on.
This should be a wake up call. Heck if I was in Canadian education system. I would be reading the report with a fine tooth comb to see where we could improve, with an eye on what the Fins do.
But the American attitude to doing much worse seems to be to blame the test, or other student habits, maybe this is something picked up in the American School system?
Not at all. I once read a study where the best software engineers consistently underated their skills, meanwhile the mediocre ones over-rated themselves.
It was believed that the better (doubters) worked harder on improving thier skills...
Wow. I read the comments here on/. and a hefty sample are saying math is not important. Geez I didn't expect that here.
The prevailing attitude seems to be that the US will just keep importing smart people from elsewhere because that is the way it has been since WW2.
I would say that is a pretty sad attitude. And is not prepared for the changes that are occurring today. Heck every gadget you own is likely built outside the USA. The rest of the world is modernizing at a much faster pace. They will need their own engineers. Not to mention the borders aren't quite as pourous they once were. Maybe a lot of folks just feel generally less welcome.
I look at North American culture today and see dominant forces being: Celebrity, Stupidity and Religion.
How long will a culture last when the majority want to be a celebrity (parasite movie star, pro athlete),or moron (homer simpson) or devote their life to God.
You have the "Intelligent Design" folks trying to undermine science in the schools.
Maybe the answer to the question, why can't Jonny Add? is because the Bible says 1+1 = 3.
I realize that Ads are important revenue stream for sites that I visit. So I "generally" don't block ads. I occasionally see something legit I am interested in.
But I do have pop-ups blocked and I have installed flashblock(great plugin), which stops all annoying flash from playing, and I have shut down animated gifs. So my screen doesn't look like the all singing all dancing crap of the universe.
After the above settings I do use adblock plugin, to block something crappy that does sneak through. I have about 3 lines in my adblock file. One of them is *newegg* after some hideous unkillable flash they had annoyed me. Newegg doesn't sell to Canada anyway.
Lately I see more Ads flowed in the middle of text I am trying to read. These I generally just use nuke anything to get out of my way. Bother me enough and I will adblock the server.
Simple Rule guys: keep your ads from ruining my experience or I will. If you want me to even see your adverts, you better play nice.
I looked at a couple of this years and previous years shows. This is strictly a group of shows approved by your local church.
I see little to do with "morality" and lots to to with propagating the faith. News flash people don't have to go to church to have morals.
The "best" show are littered with the "godly shows":
Seventh Heaven, touched by an angel. And shows so mind numbingly bland that your intestines would throttle your brain as a defence mechanism if you actually watched them and actually had a brain. Shows like Sue Thomos FBI.
The "Worst" list has many shows I actually enjoyed. Like Buffy, Angel, That 70's Show, Spin City, CSI, Cold Case, and NYPD Blue.
I din't actually see anything on the "Best" list that I could actually tolerate watching.
Pretty clear to me. A victory for the RIAA establishes a precedent which they use to go after other P2P networks.
Kazaa is something I never touched with a 10ft pole, but I dont' want to see them lose on principal, because this opens the door for more legitimate networks coming under fire.
If Kazaa wins, they remain the target...
Go Kazaa
For years I wanted individual channels, now I DL.
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
For years I kept asking my cable company to break their packages. I only wanted to pay for the few channels I watched. I didn't want to finance the Golf channel to get my motorsports channel. Just desserts I say.
Now I only download TV. My cable is gone.
Why don't I download Music?
Quality is variable, can't find what an old guy likes in a sea of Brit Spears wannabes. Otoh TV quality is better than my local cable used to be. Besides I bought all the Rush and BoC, so I am set for music.:-)
TV quality is better than cable, it is more convenient to watch. As it was I had given up watching many series because the network programming was so screwed, I could never find the damn show anymore (stargate starting aroudn season 6)
How about movies: Ok I have DL one or two really bad movies just to see how bad (Van Helsing). But for the most part I prefer to watch in theater or Rent the DVD. It is a good experience and convenient. Esp now with net renting services like Zip or netflix. I would much rather rent it than try to find the DVD version in full size and spend 2 days downloading it.
TV DL is something I would pay for if equitable...
Re:Sky 1 (f'n Logo) has new Battlestart Galatica.
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
It is on in the UK, but no due till January in the US.
PS I hate the Way Sky One sticks there damn logo in the upper central portion of the picture. I can't believe people who pay for this don't get annoyed and tell them to take a leap. I can handle the lower corner like everyone seems to be doing these days...
Slashdot Mirror
Than this mini-series.
Acting and story telling were below the average Xena/Hercules episode.
Standard fantasy plot that would fit on the back of a napkin, terribly simplistic story telling, with cookie cutter evil villans. No depth whatsoever.
IMO it was really quite a useless mess. I recommend if you haven't seen it, don't. I can't think of a redeeming feature.
You clipped of the next few words were I said they were of "similar" size.
I think there have been 3MP digicam sensor of 1/1.8" 1/2.5" 1/2.7" and 1/3.2" in recent years.
During the same time period DSLR sensors remain APS size. Thus it is free of this shrinkage issue. It is already at the smallest reasonable size.
This thing forced you to use flash to relay simple text would have sufficed.
The content was practically non-existant to erroneous (DSLRs have Narrow DOF, pocket cameras wide DOF: The correct answer is both have control over DOF, both can do wide DOF, but The DSLR can do a much nicer narrow DOF).
In the end the info is not much better than if you want a camera to put in your pocket, don't get a DSLR.
What the heck makes this merit billing here?
"why cameras with big sensors need to be SLR"
Sensors are expensive. From a manufacturing perspective, smaller is cheaper and as all buisness is driven by the bottom line. The drive is to smaller sensors. I have seen 3mp sensor shrink about 3 times now.
SLRs using current lenses are exempt from this shrinkage as they have to mate with lenses designed for Film. So they have to be of similar size. It is more like SLRs force big sensors when using current lens systems.
"Are there professional grade cameras with interchangable lenses that don't depend on the optical viewfinder? Are there semi-compact digital cameras with high quality lenses and big sensors?"
There is a digital rangefinder with interchangeable lenses and a big sensor. Epson RD-1. $3000 for the body.
"Why does every digital camera have a crappy motor-driven zoom? Aren't there others out there that would prefer a normal (no-zoom) lens? Isn't a motor-driven zoom totally useless?"
Digital SLR take the same lenses as film counterparts and are manual zoom. Point and shoot digital mirror point and shoot film cameras that also have motorized zooms.
There are exceptions. Sony 828, Minolta A2 both have manual zooms. Obviously manual zoom is better, but there moto zooms still get the job done.
"Are there decent digital cameras with decent macro lenses?"
Macro is very good out of the box on many digitals (esp nikons) and add on lenses are available to make it even better.
Obviously you still don't understand how flashblock works, so I have made a more informative post that better explains why everyone should have flashblock:
1 10 50515
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132241&cid=
I trust you will find this one more informative.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Flashblock is great because it puts control back in the hands of us, the users. No longer will flash start running automatically, instead all the flash content is replaced with a play button, one click and you see the flash YOU want to see and are free from the the flash that someone ELSE want to force you to see.
Now who could possibly complain about a plugin that gives you this choice?
If you are an IE user, this may be the final reason to switch to firefox, to use this great extension.
Unfortunately, we are not likely to get flashblock on POS terminals.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
A must have for firefox. I can't stand flash. I don't know why poeple put this crap on their pages.
Now it is a a good thing that they are cramming this into other devices?
Most people can't tell the difference between a good MP3 and CD. It will pretty hard to convince greater than 0.01 % of the population that there is a need for a better than CD quality audio standard. SACD were for the crowd that buy monster cables and put "tweak" on their connections. The "Golden ear" set.
When mp3 hit the scene, I noticed that most of my friend found nothing at all wrong with 128k mp3s while sound like crap to me.
I am into audio and have always tried to keep a decent stereo. Denon Rx, Paradigm speakers type thing. I did some ABX testing and discovered that by 160K mp3, I pretty much couldn't pick out the MP3 from the CD. So I definitely don't need a better format.
Video is another story Anyone with a big screen HDTV can readily spot the HiDef difference, moreso on a projector.
That being said. I agree overall. Adoption will be slow. There is no reason to upgrade unless you have a display device that delivers the missing quailty.
Though unlike SACD, I don't think next gen DVD will die. Big screens are growing all the time and I already think they are much more prevalent than golden ears.
...at Rationalizing. Giving credit where do (time to burn some Karma)
I have seen a ton of rationalization in this thread.
Mostly like, yeah, but some of these countries don't let the dumber kids going to school. Or Asian kids spend 16 hour a day in school and get 16 hours of homework every night. Or they teach
the test.... Talk about grasping.
Then there was the rationalization that Math isn't important. Argh!
Wake up and smell the cofee. You were 28 out of 40 countries tested. You were whipped by Canada and Finland. Both western democracies with universal education.
I went to school in Canada, and frankly if you are that far behind us you are in trouble, because frankly I was not that impressed by our education system. It has a lot of room for improvement. It was pretty slack and most of weren't that serious about it (including the teachers). Yeah small sample, but Canada was also one of the countries where they claimed consistent quality among schools. So unless my experiences were anomolies, there was nothing special going on.
This should be a wake up call. Heck if I was in Canadian education system. I would be reading the report with a fine tooth comb to see where we could improve, with an eye on what the Fins do.
But the American attitude to doing much worse seems to be to blame the test, or other student habits, maybe this is something picked up in the American School system?
I have read a host of lame rationalizations, but this is one of the lamest.
c tbook/geos/ ez.html
Czech Republic has Universal education, probably more universal than the USA. There Literacy rate is 99.9% vs the 97% of the USA.
Source CIA world factbook.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fa
And how do you rationalize Canada and Finland good results.
Not at all. I once read a study where the best software engineers consistently underated their skills, meanwhile the mediocre ones over-rated themselves.
It was believed that the better (doubters) worked harder on improving thier skills...
Wow. I read the comments here on /. and a hefty sample are saying math is not important. Geez I didn't expect that here.
The prevailing attitude seems to be that the US will just keep importing smart people from elsewhere because that is the way it has been since WW2.
I would say that is a pretty sad attitude. And is not prepared for the changes that are occurring today. Heck every gadget you own is likely built outside the USA. The rest of the world is modernizing at a much faster pace. They will need their own engineers. Not to mention the borders aren't quite as pourous they once were. Maybe a lot of folks just feel generally less welcome.
I look at North American culture today and see dominant forces being: Celebrity, Stupidity and Religion.
How long will a culture last when the majority want to be a celebrity (parasite movie star, pro athlete),or moron (homer simpson) or devote their life to God.
You have the "Intelligent Design" folks trying to undermine science in the schools.
Maybe the answer to the question, why can't Jonny Add? is because the Bible says 1+1 = 3.
"...this isnt the best way to do things..."
Well then tell us the best way to do things.
My list is small and likely to stay small so it works for me. I don't want to block ads.
Seldom does stuff get through my pop/flash/anim blocking.
I realize that Ads are important revenue stream for sites that I visit. So I "generally" don't block ads. I occasionally see something legit I am interested in.
But I do have pop-ups blocked and I have installed flashblock(great plugin), which stops all annoying flash from playing, and I have shut down animated gifs. So my screen doesn't look like the all singing all dancing crap of the universe.
After the above settings I do use adblock plugin, to block something crappy that does sneak through. I have about 3 lines in my adblock file. One of them is *newegg* after some hideous unkillable flash they had annoyed me. Newegg doesn't sell to Canada anyway.
Lately I see more Ads flowed in the middle of text I am trying to read. These I generally just use nuke anything to get out of my way. Bother me enough and I will adblock the server.
Simple Rule guys: keep your ads from ruining my experience or I will. If you want me to even see your adverts, you better play nice.
We Need to study South Korea, The most wired nation on earth, yet they have among the best performing students on the planet.
/ 20 04/12/08/200412080007.asp
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir
I apologize for following up my own post, but I always though spin city was a pretty clean fun comedy. So I had to see what the beef was Quoting:
"Crass and vulgar language abound, while casual sex and the homosexual lifestyle (one character is an openly homosexual male) "
Do you suppose that if there were no gay characters, they wouldn't have had enough to make the list?
I looked at a couple of this years and previous years shows. This is strictly a group of shows approved by your local church.
I see little to do with "morality" and lots to to with propagating the faith. News flash people don't have to go to church to have morals.
The "best" show are littered with the "godly shows":
Seventh Heaven, touched by an angel. And shows so mind numbingly bland that your intestines would throttle your brain as a defence mechanism if you actually watched them and actually had a brain. Shows like Sue Thomos FBI.
The "Worst" list has many shows I actually enjoyed. Like Buffy, Angel, That 70's Show, Spin City, CSI, Cold Case, and NYPD Blue.
I din't actually see anything on the "Best" list that I could actually tolerate watching.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl= en
No change on my end. I still enter a time range on searches.
" we don't need canadian business though, you need ours"
How often do you think you fill up on Canuck Gas?
Pretty clear to me. A victory for the RIAA establishes a precedent which they use to go after other P2P networks.
Kazaa is something I never touched with a 10ft pole, but I dont' want to see them lose on principal, because this opens the door for more legitimate networks coming under fire.
If Kazaa wins, they remain the target...
Go Kazaa
For years I kept asking my cable company to break their packages. I only wanted to pay for the few channels I watched. I didn't want to finance the Golf channel to get my motorsports channel. Just desserts I say.
:-)
Now I only download TV. My cable is gone.
Why don't I download Music?
Quality is variable, can't find what an old guy likes in a sea of Brit Spears wannabes. Otoh TV quality is better than my local cable used to be. Besides I bought all the Rush and BoC, so I am set for music.
TV quality is better than cable, it is more convenient to watch. As it was I had given up watching many series because the network programming was so screwed, I could never find the damn show anymore (stargate starting aroudn season 6)
How about movies:
Ok I have DL one or two really bad movies just to see how bad (Van Helsing). But for the most part I prefer to watch in theater or Rent the DVD. It is a good experience and convenient. Esp now with net renting services like Zip or netflix. I would much rather rent it than try to find the DVD version in full size and spend 2 days downloading it.
TV DL is something I would pay for if equitable...
It is on in the UK, but no due till January in the US.
PS I hate the Way Sky One sticks there damn logo in the upper central portion of the picture. I can't believe people who pay for this don't get annoyed and tell them to take a leap. I can handle the lower corner like everyone seems to be doing these days...
http://www.numion.com/Stopwatch/
Actual real world rendering from the web is a draw on this site for me.
Does anyone know if it is possible to get this working from local copies to take the internet connection out of the equation.
" Get Opera 7.6 Preview 3. GMail works great."
I installed this. It works. Then I tried news.google.com. It is busted in Opera. I love Operas interface and features, but am sick of broken pages.
Big issue with Opera. I still need anohter browser to handle my banking. If I need another browser anyway. I may as well just use Firefox full time.
So I gave it a try. Spoke to soon. It works with gmail, but when I went to http://news.google.com/ it screwed up repeatedly.
I give up... Again...