It's true - AF is a very selective creature and sometimes has a mind of its own. So, you have to learn how to work around its little quirks. When using a tripod, I would: aim the center-point at something exactly the same distance away like maybe another part of the subject, switch to AF, hold the trigger halfway down to set up the shot, switch to MF, confirm the focal point with the preview mode, re-point the camera and shoot. The order of this is important so you can go back to the beginning without any extra steps.
Don't forget about the depth of your focal plane, and how it increases with your aperture F# (as you make the aperture smaller). Sometimes this can save a picture.
Learn to use manual everything, and you will be able to creatively solve problems in the field. Age means nothing - I have worked with photographers well past the age of retirement who are better at this than I could have imagined.
Indeed. Some of my non-inclined friends are starting to notice this phenomenon as they upgrade their cell phones to new ones containing these horrendous 8+ megapixel cameras. Of course, as soon as I start talking about why that is, their eyes gloss over and I have to stop talking science...
Nice job! I applaud this effort to put wild claims into perspective.
Corporate accounting == magic, for some perverse value of magic. Every organization that touches that datacenter wants to claim some cost or another on their balance sheet, so they can be seen spending money in such an unarguably useful (and permanently reoccurring) way and ensure they get more next year. The money should only get spent once, but money circulates around from one department to another and might actually get "spent" several times before it moves to some other part of the corporate bloodstream. Meanwhile, the datacenter probably has no budget of its own.
This happens more often than not in corporations large enough to set up a 100 TB farm. I'd love to work at that fictional company, because $75k is a pretty nice salary... more than I make right now doing similar work! I don't have that sort of farm where I work, though.
Your biggest datacenter costs will probably come from networking hardware, software licensing and support contracts. Database servers are particularly odious in this respect. $25k per socket for MS SQL Server, for one - if you have two servers with dual CPUs, that's $100k right away just for the database software. Probably more for Oracle. Usually it's some proprietary software dependency that locks you into a specific DB vendor. Then there's the OS licensing. You can spend $2k or more on Windows Server, and adding seats for Terminal Services gets expensive fast. What if you want Exchange, which is a big reason for having lots of spindles? Blackberry? Nice Cisco routers? Telecom equipment and vendor support from the telco? Ka-ching!!! Then there's the applications your datacenter supports. Proprietary software from other vendors will have large support contract bills which can rise to the tune of $1M or more. When you have vendor lock-in because all the organizations who touch your datacenter use a certain brand of product, you're kinda stuck with that bill.
So, if you're running an all-Linux, all-open-source datacenter, there's no licensing/support fees. BUT, good luck selling that idea! Management wants a finger to point and someone at the other end of that finger to say "yes sir, we're sorry, we're fixing it right now and it will be done in the terms of our SLA", and the datacenter employees want that to be someone other than them!
Well, then you can use an addon to block content from there, or reroute it to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 via/etc/hosts or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
If it doesn't subside though? For example, if you have a front come through and a storm breaks before you can set the turbine appropriately? Exploding capacitors are no fun. I've seen them explode violently. Scale that up to the size of something on a wind turbine and you have a disaster.
Some excellent products that beat the competition hands down in every other way are only available with one screen type.
It's tough to ditch the vendor when they only sell the same five models of glossy screen notebooks from the same three brands at every brick-and-mortar store within any reasonable driving distance. (Usually HP, Compaq, and Dell. Sometimes Gateway sneaks one in.)
Some folks don't like to purchase computers online or via the telephone because you can't touch it before you buy it, and can't just walk in for customer service or a return, but apparently they will be forced to comply...
I don't have any problems with ATI drivers. I suspect some of the people complaining are doing some odd things, like overclocking various components past the limits of their particular hardware (some units perform better than others at this obviously) and/or using cheap components elsewhere in their systems - e.g. built-in sound, low cost "Value" RAM, factory seconds from a computer fair, etc... All of these things contribute to instability. It's also possible that yet others were using off-brand bargain ATI cards with drivers that lagged behind the manufacturer's driver, but the off-brand card had a special feature that made it impossible to use the plain drivers. Sometimes, those clearance sales at Best Circuit Fry Egg Mart USA or whatever are NOT THAT GOOD OF A DEAL. "Mega Voodoo Accelerator powered $100 off (KrudCo brand) total price after rebate LESS THAN HALF! VERY QUIET!" should trigger some critical thinking... Maybe this is not as good of a board as it would appear from the specs!
I've also heard from an uninformed nVidia fanboy that you have to pay for old ATI drivers. This is a load of utter crap - all you have to do is visit their website, and all the drivers are available there.
I do recall a patch for UT2004 that replaced the nVidia logo with an ATI one;)
Thank you for offering clarity in a subject that's frequently confusing to people who don't spend enormous amounts of effort learning the intricacies of the GFX card industry.
It was only a matter of time before the problem plaguing digital photography marketing came to digital videography.
Spatial resolution only matters so much, especially when overcompression starts to destroy it, and the glass and sensors aren't very good. Color resolution is the real loser when compression kicks in - it's quite enlightening to see what happens to the UV in YUV when the typical compression algorithms are employed.
I'd like to see some better color reproduction - how about xv.Color or Deep Color or the same product by any other name, that all these systems claim to support... What's the point if nothing produces that material?
That's actually kind of interesting. Your eyes only show you max detail in a limited circle, so if you had a big monitor that you sat fairly close to, you'd save a lot of bandwidth that way.
I would never expect to see such a solution implemented though, because the benefits would seem to be dwarfed by the cost of creating such a beast.
There's always another crackpot starving for attention, claiming he found the smoking gun that proves something new and sensational.
It appears after this exchange that I misinterpreted your original post as you earnestly claiming that a SS# is the mark of the beast. It has the hallmark style of a street corner "end is near" maniac with a sandwich board and bullhorn shouting out-of-context Bible verses at everyone, while missing the point entirely.
Apparently that's not what you were shooting for, but as it was written it's hard to interpret it otherwise.
Oh well, it happens every once in a while - cheers!
My point is that our current form of ID does not fit the idea of the mark of the beast. You can't take ALL of Revelation exactly literally, but the part about being marked on your hand or head appears to be quite purposefully written, as if it were a description intended to be taken literally.
There are a few parts of the Bible (I assume you refer to the Christian Bible) that aren't intended to be taken literally. It should be somewhat obvious when reading those parts if you find and start at the beginning of those parts, but scholars always seem to be around and willing to help you out if you want to study it in that depth. Don't trust anyone that is unwilling to look at the original text but still says "That's how it is."
I don't claim to avoid all usages of my SS number. I used to work in a store, and I was educated quite well by certain members of the tin-foil hat brigade that shopped there, on such things. By the way, a SS# is something you're assigned at birth or naturalization, not something you can opt out of as a citizen of the US. How else are they going to know you owe them taxes, right? The language in the text seems to imply that people could avoid getting one.
I don't see what you mean by the number of the beast as applied to "SS numbers, ID cards, Ect." Grammar parse exception, try again? Interested to understand your idea.
It's not too hard to imagine the idea being put forth convincingly at some point in the future, what with the pet-id and child-tracking implantable tags they have now. My cat actually has one, c/o the shelter. There have been proposals but all were shut down. It's only a matter of time, I'm sure, but it's not here yet.
Child tracking tags are real, as of 2003, and this might be something you want to monitor and fight on principle of it being mandated someday, even though they are not a visible mark: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/10/60771
I've *never* heard that any government accepts a physical mark as positive ID (or any other privilege-enabling ID) at this time.
Bikers, prison "societies", elite military units and gangs can be a different story though!:)
Actually, you can buy and sell with cash just fine... no SS# required for that. Which means, you can buy goods at the store, ride a bus/taxi/train/airplane, go to concerts/plays/carnivals, etc.
You can even coax credit card companies and banks to issue you an account without one. It's not easy, but they can do it.
Also: US Social Security numbers are issued by way of a piece of paper you're *not supposed to carry with you* (see http://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/ ), and they are certainly not marked on your body.
From the Social Security Administration via that link... "You need a Social Security number to get a job, collect Social Security benefits and receive some other government services. But you don't often need to show your Social Security card. Do not carry your card with you. Keep it in a safe place with your other important papers."
It's not hard to get a job that pays cash under the table, though.
It's possible that you're not from the US, but if you are... you really ought to learn how these things work.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true - AF is a very selective creature and sometimes has a mind of its own. So, you have to learn how to work around its little quirks. When using a tripod, I would: aim the center-point at something exactly the same distance away like maybe another part of the subject, switch to AF, hold the trigger halfway down to set up the shot, switch to MF, confirm the focal point with the preview mode, re-point the camera and shoot. The order of this is important so you can go back to the beginning without any extra steps.
Don't forget about the depth of your focal plane, and how it increases with your aperture F# (as you make the aperture smaller). Sometimes this can save a picture.
Learn to use manual everything, and you will be able to creatively solve problems in the field. Age means nothing - I have worked with photographers well past the age of retirement who are better at this than I could have imagined.
Indeed. Some of my non-inclined friends are starting to notice this phenomenon as they upgrade their cell phones to new ones containing these horrendous 8+ megapixel cameras. Of course, as soon as I start talking about why that is, their eyes gloss over and I have to stop talking science...
Ah, the good old days... I wasn't around for it, but I wish I was. I can see the Kodak plant that used to manufacture it from my office.
What are your favorite films that are still manufactured?
That's the nice thing about standard Linuxes. There are so many to choose from!
Final Fantasy 7 and 8 as well.
How about those games that came with QBASIC?
You know. GORILLA.BAS
I used to visit my friends to play that game... my computer only had GWBASIC.
Tell 'em we want more :)
Nice job! I applaud this effort to put wild claims into perspective.
Corporate accounting == magic, for some perverse value of magic. Every organization that touches that datacenter wants to claim some cost or another on their balance sheet, so they can be seen spending money in such an unarguably useful (and permanently reoccurring) way and ensure they get more next year. The money should only get spent once, but money circulates around from one department to another and might actually get "spent" several times before it moves to some other part of the corporate bloodstream. Meanwhile, the datacenter probably has no budget of its own.
This happens more often than not in corporations large enough to set up a 100 TB farm. I'd love to work at that fictional company, because $75k is a pretty nice salary... more than I make right now doing similar work! I don't have that sort of farm where I work, though.
Your biggest datacenter costs will probably come from networking hardware, software licensing and support contracts. Database servers are particularly odious in this respect. $25k per socket for MS SQL Server, for one - if you have two servers with dual CPUs, that's $100k right away just for the database software. Probably more for Oracle. Usually it's some proprietary software dependency that locks you into a specific DB vendor. Then there's the OS licensing. You can spend $2k or more on Windows Server, and adding seats for Terminal Services gets expensive fast. What if you want Exchange, which is a big reason for having lots of spindles? Blackberry? Nice Cisco routers? Telecom equipment and vendor support from the telco? Ka-ching!!! Then there's the applications your datacenter supports. Proprietary software from other vendors will have large support contract bills which can rise to the tune of $1M or more. When you have vendor lock-in because all the organizations who touch your datacenter use a certain brand of product, you're kinda stuck with that bill.
So, if you're running an all-Linux, all-open-source datacenter, there's no licensing/support fees. BUT, good luck selling that idea! Management wants a finger to point and someone at the other end of that finger to say "yes sir, we're sorry, we're fixing it right now and it will be done in the terms of our SLA", and the datacenter employees want that to be someone other than them!
Well, then you can use an addon to block content from there, or reroute it to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 via /etc/hosts or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
If it doesn't subside though? For example, if you have a front come through and a storm breaks before you can set the turbine appropriately? Exploding capacitors are no fun. I've seen them explode violently. Scale that up to the size of something on a wind turbine and you have a disaster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor#Hazards_and_safety
And since there aren't enough videos of explosions around on Slashdot right now... Small scale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WheLp0RdLQ
Large scale from a power substation (much like what would happen with a wind turbine): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkDCS8xeobg
That would be a very large, expensive capacitor. What do you do when it's fully charged and you still have an excess?
I agree!!
Some excellent products that beat the competition hands down in every other way are only available with one screen type.
It's tough to ditch the vendor when they only sell the same five models of glossy screen notebooks from the same three brands at every brick-and-mortar store within any reasonable driving distance. (Usually HP, Compaq, and Dell. Sometimes Gateway sneaks one in.)
Some folks don't like to purchase computers online or via the telephone because you can't touch it before you buy it, and can't just walk in for customer service or a return, but apparently they will be forced to comply...
You realize that was written in the 1990s, right?
No disassemble number five!
I don't have any problems with ATI drivers. I suspect some of the people complaining are doing some odd things, like overclocking various components past the limits of their particular hardware (some units perform better than others at this obviously) and/or using cheap components elsewhere in their systems - e.g. built-in sound, low cost "Value" RAM, factory seconds from a computer fair, etc... All of these things contribute to instability. It's also possible that yet others were using off-brand bargain ATI cards with drivers that lagged behind the manufacturer's driver, but the off-brand card had a special feature that made it impossible to use the plain drivers. Sometimes, those clearance sales at Best Circuit Fry Egg Mart USA or whatever are NOT THAT GOOD OF A DEAL. "Mega Voodoo Accelerator powered $100 off (KrudCo brand) total price after rebate LESS THAN HALF! VERY QUIET!" should trigger some critical thinking... Maybe this is not as good of a board as it would appear from the specs!
I've also heard from an uninformed nVidia fanboy that you have to pay for old ATI drivers. This is a load of utter crap - all you have to do is visit their website, and all the drivers are available there.
I do recall a patch for UT2004 that replaced the nVidia logo with an ATI one ;)
Thank you for offering clarity in a subject that's frequently confusing to people who don't spend enormous amounts of effort learning the intricacies of the GFX card industry.
It was only a matter of time before the problem plaguing digital photography marketing came to digital videography.
Spatial resolution only matters so much, especially when overcompression starts to destroy it, and the glass and sensors aren't very good. Color resolution is the real loser when compression kicks in - it's quite enlightening to see what happens to the UV in YUV when the typical compression algorithms are employed.
I'd like to see some better color reproduction - how about xv.Color or Deep Color or the same product by any other name, that all these systems claim to support... What's the point if nothing produces that material?
* except when DPI is actually used correctly, and the printer prints an individual pixel using multiple dots. Many printers use 8+ dots per pixel.
I'd agree with this rephrased version: "Print no higher than 400 PPI for prints intended to be viewed at 1m"
That's actually kind of interesting. Your eyes only show you max detail in a limited circle, so if you had a big monitor that you sat fairly close to, you'd save a lot of bandwidth that way.
I would never expect to see such a solution implemented though, because the benefits would seem to be dwarfed by the cost of creating such a beast.
There's always another crackpot starving for attention, claiming he found the smoking gun that proves something new and sensational.
It appears after this exchange that I misinterpreted your original post as you earnestly claiming that a SS# is the mark of the beast. It has the hallmark style of a street corner "end is near" maniac with a sandwich board and bullhorn shouting out-of-context Bible verses at everyone, while missing the point entirely.
Apparently that's not what you were shooting for, but as it was written it's hard to interpret it otherwise.
Oh well, it happens every once in a while - cheers!
My point is that our current form of ID does not fit the idea of the mark of the beast. You can't take ALL of Revelation exactly literally, but the part about being marked on your hand or head appears to be quite purposefully written, as if it were a description intended to be taken literally.
There are a few parts of the Bible (I assume you refer to the Christian Bible) that aren't intended to be taken literally. It should be somewhat obvious when reading those parts if you find and start at the beginning of those parts, but scholars always seem to be around and willing to help you out if you want to study it in that depth. Don't trust anyone that is unwilling to look at the original text but still says "That's how it is."
I don't claim to avoid all usages of my SS number. I used to work in a store, and I was educated quite well by certain members of the tin-foil hat brigade that shopped there, on such things. By the way, a SS# is something you're assigned at birth or naturalization, not something you can opt out of as a citizen of the US. How else are they going to know you owe them taxes, right? The language in the text seems to imply that people could avoid getting one.
I don't see what you mean by the number of the beast as applied to "SS numbers, ID cards, Ect." Grammar parse exception, try again? Interested to understand your idea.
It's not too hard to imagine the idea being put forth convincingly at some point in the future, what with the pet-id and child-tracking implantable tags they have now. My cat actually has one, c/o the shelter. There have been proposals but all were shut down. It's only a matter of time, I'm sure, but it's not here yet.
Child tracking tags are real, as of 2003, and this might be something you want to monitor and fight on principle of it being mandated someday, even though they are not a visible mark: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/10/60771
I've *never* heard that any government accepts a physical mark as positive ID (or any other privilege-enabling ID) at this time.
Bikers, prison "societies", elite military units and gangs can be a different story though! :)
Actually, you can buy and sell with cash just fine... no SS# required for that. Which means, you can buy goods at the store, ride a bus/taxi/train/airplane, go to concerts/plays/carnivals, etc.
You can even coax credit card companies and banks to issue you an account without one. It's not easy, but they can do it.
Also: US Social Security numbers are issued by way of a piece of paper you're *not supposed to carry with you* (see http://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/ ), and they are certainly not marked on your body.
From the Social Security Administration via that link... "You need a Social Security number to get a job, collect Social Security benefits and receive some other government services. But you don't often need to show your Social Security card. Do not carry your card with you. Keep it in a safe place with your other important papers."
It's not hard to get a job that pays cash under the table, though.
It's possible that you're not from the US, but if you are... you really ought to learn how these things work.
The 13th floor is a fairly central hub in my building! It's the one with all the vending machines and the cool coffee maker in the lobby :)
You mean Digg? ;)
"Oh No!"