Since you can submit post on Slashdot, I assume you can input text to a computer. As long as you maintain a portfolio of your coding that demonstrates your programming skill, I think any company that worths its salt should be more than happy to hire you. You may want to specifically look for positions that require you to produce less number lines of code but demand the code to be of higher quality.
Small companies are usually focused on growth, and they want to push for more lines of code, so they're less ideal for you. Of course at one point they'll eventually realize that they spend 90% of time debugging rather than writing code, but it will be too late for them. Fortunate for you, the best way to find bug is actually to read code and figure out what it is doing, all in your head. You could be an excellent code auditor.
If you ever came across an underground blackhat site where malware and crackware authors collaborate and exchange information about the internals of Windows and reverse engineering, it's actually pretty cult-like. These sites have the stereotypical white or phosphorous text over black background design.
You can find such site by Googling for keywords like softice OR disassembly tutorial. Search terms like dll hook tutorial also returns several underground sites because it's an essential technique used by spyware authors.
If she's out of the country, the U.S. customs would be able to find a departure record, and she probably would have bought a plane ticket, which reflects on either her credit card or airline's mileage membership card.
The 'real' solution is new system calls, new shells that know about them--a top to bottom extension of POSIX filesystems.
Tools augmented with snapshot support won't save you any typing. You would have to specify additional command line, which is likely going to be longer than namespace hacks. If you're concerned about number of characters to type, you should prefer namespace hack.
Why not use '?'? Perhaps you are not yourself a Unix/Linux user--that one's a shell wildcard
In Unix, you can escape both '*' and '?' using backslash and still have filenames containing these shell pattern characters; this is unlike Win32 that forbids these characters to appear in file names at all. So I don't see this a problem.
Unix philosophy, and it turns out to be true: the less typing a user has to do, the more useful the feature in practise.
The Unix philosophy is inspired by Huffman coding---frequently used features should be shorter to type. For this reason, I don't think a long, tedious snapshot prefix/suffix is a problem because you shouldn't need to hunt for snapshot too often. If you do, you should let someone else manage your files.
My department uses NetApp (also provides a versioning file system) which uses the '.snapshot/' prefix, and I've been pretty happy with that convention. I don't find myself digging.snapshot very often, possibly once every few months, and it's easy enough to navigate. Under '.snapshot' you find the various hourly, daily and weekly snapshots, and it's pretty self-explanatory.
I'm answering questions that people posted so far altogether.
Is it a file system or a file manager?
It is a file system. You access old snapshot by appending '@timestamp' to your file name. You have to first instruct ext3cow to take a snapshot first before you can retrieve old copies, otherwise it simply behaves like ext3. It appears that snapshot is always performed on a directory and applies to all inodes (files and subdirectories) under it.
My complaint is its use of '@' to access snapshot. Why not use '?' and make it look like a url query? Better yet, use a special prefix '.snapshot/' like NetApp file servers.
Does it store many copies of each file? or only the differences between the old and the new version?
How far off is it to use these filesystems as a revision control system replacement?
ext3cow takes it's name from "copy on write," and it does this on the block level. When you modify a file, it appears to the file system that you're modifying a block of e.g. 4096 bytes. COW preserves the old block while constructing a new file using the blocks you modified plus the blocks you didn't modify.
You can think about it as block-level version control. However, when you save a file, most programs simply write a whole new file (I'm only aware of mailbox programs that try to append or modify in-place). Block-level copy on write is unlikely to buy you anything in practical use.
Does it provide undelete?
Only when you remember to make a snapshot of your whole directory. An hourly cron-job would do, maybe. There is always the possibility you delete a file before a snapshot is made.
I don't endorse the view of this guy, but the summary is asking the question "why did it take 28 years?" and this short blog entry attempts to offer an explanation.
The fact MIT was tipped off by an anonymous person (why wouldn't MIT simply say it was an internal audit, even simply refuse to comment?) makes the story ripe for conspiracy theory.
Apple hasn't caught up yet. It's a third party drive, but it's nice to be able to retrofit old powerbook to Blu-ray, although I seriously doubt if these older systems (back to G3 Pismo) have enough juice to operate it practically.
You're right. The Chinese exam is designed to make you do more calculations. I believe it is necessary because students there are trained to memorize answers or step-by-step canned procedures to get an answer. If Chinese test makers only use a few canonical problems to test the principles, everyone would solve problems by reflex and do well. The only way they can create variety, avoiding reflex, is by making a problem complicated. It may also be intentional to make it more likely for students to make mistakes under time constraint.
As a result, solving Chinese exam problem from scratch is akin to untying a knot, which is kind of like reverse engineering (maybe that explains why so many software crackers come from China). After you straighten it out, it suffices to just apply the principles.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the procedure to solve that particular prism geometry problem has already been worked out, and that students are just taught to plug in the numbers. In China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, most students are sent to supplementary school after a whole day of school, on a day to day basis. They finish school at 5pm, stay in supplementary school until 9pm, finish homework at 1am if you're lucky, and wake up and go to school at 7am.
Supplementary schooling is a huge market. If you're a test maker who happens to be teaching supplementary school, and you devise a problem on the national exam that only a few people know how to solve, then this gives you a competitive edge.
I grew up in Taiwan, and am now doing computer science Ph.D. in the U.S.
Thanks to proliferation of media, you hear stories about someone getting into trouble for blogging about their work or posting nasty remarks about their teachers/principle. You never know when something you say (albeit being perfectly legal) will be used against you. I think most people, teens and adults alike, would now think twice against using identifiable information in online profiles.
Consider this scenario; you're just venting your distress about life, writing about someone that you aren't ready to confront. You're likely unwilling to defend yourself for what you wrote. If so, why not spear yourself the trouble by concealing your identity (and that person's, while you're at it) so that other person won't come around and confront you?
If your intent is communication, it is more effective to talk to the person and make sure he understand how you feel. If you're ready to confront him when he finds out what you wrote, you probably wouldn't be writing about it online in the first place.
Of course, another incentive to hide your identity is to avoid being stalked by someone. Nobody likes being stalked, and most are afraid of stalkers because not many of us know how to deal with them, legally and emotionally. However, somehow adults think they need to protect teens more then themselves, where in fact they don't know better.
If your intent is to meet people online, you would reveal enough about yourself so strangers get to know you and keep in touch with you.
Online privacy isn't just a teens issue. Adults also need to decide whether they want to bear the consequence of exposing themselves online. It depends on what you intend to do and what you're willing to take. This is the same for any ages, so rather than focusing on protecting the teens, we should treat this as common sense for everyone.
Buying companies isn't just a Microsoft thing. Why do you think many dot-com boomers have this startup dream that they want to start a company only to be later bought by bigger companies and become instantly rich?
What Microsoft practices this differently is that they often buy competitors and then dismantle it with no intention of acquisition of technology or talent, just so it no longer competes.
A number of years ago, I wrote a BASIC alarm clock program, running on DOS, that would only shut off if I answer a multiplication problem correctly, and these are two digit by two digit problems. Nowadays a program like that doesn't work because there are simpler ways to shut it off:
Most computer speakers are now amplified. They have an on/off switch and a volume control. You can also mute the sound card much more easily nowadays. My old speakers were not amplified---you have to yank it off---and my program made beeps through the internal speaker as well as playing sound from the sound card.
Modern operating systems are multitasking and preemptive, so you can just nuke the program from task manager. In DOS, you could Ctrl-C a program, but I used some tricks to inhibit that.
Modern file systems are journaled, so you can turn off your computer without corrupting the file system. I couldn't just turn off my computer back then without damaging the file system (FAT16)---somehow I was conscious enough even when I sleep to know I would regret that.
Nowadays my problems are slightly different. I have no problem waking up, but I start reading slashdot right away, and you know how it goes for the rest of the day...
The clock likes to crawl under the bed. It is annoying, even when you're awake, to have to duck under your bed in order to reach for the clock. Imagine the pain for a queen or king sized bed!
I'm afraid the decades-old Apple II and IBM PC is not prior art. Pixels are either on or off for Apple II and IBM PC's CGA displays, so they apparently don't (and can't) care too much about color fringing. Sub-pixel font rendering on LCD screen deals with 256 shades for each sub-pixel, and the emphasis is on how to adjust sub-pixel brightness to reduce color fringing.
This is explained in Steve Gibson's Turning Theory into Practice. Sub-pixel font rendering is not the same as sub-pixels on CGA displays. The ideas are related, but the plumbing is different.
Perhaps I'm misleading in saying that CGA is not prior art of ClearType. I haven't actually read the patents of ClearType, so I obviously cannot tell; I'm basing my claim solely on Steve's webpage alone.
I usually receive mod points the same day when I bother to spend time looking at deeply nested threads. This seems consistent with the idea that moderators should try to mod well-formulated yet obscure posts up, rather than to mod high-profile posts down. I can't otherwise find a correlation of meta-moderation and the likelihood I get mod points.
I'm sorry to say I also tend to let my mod points expire. The task of finding gem in a haystack takes too much time for me, and I think other moderators do a good job. The system always tell you to browse at -1 to watch out for abuses---I think they mean moderator abuses, since there is no point to mod down -1 posts. In practice, abuses only happen in highly controversial subjects, which rarely appear.
For those who want to comment on my sig, I put them there some time ago when I was in the middle of a heated controversial debate. However, I found the sig to be ineffective. It is like putting a bumper sticker saying you're a new driver and ask people to be nice. I'm keep it as a public service announcement to remind people they're participating in censorship whenever they decide to mod down a post.
My memory on this is already vague, so it's hard to say whether the Red Pill page is misinformed.
They're correct in saying that there is only one IDT register in the computer, and that SIDT instruction is non-privileged, so reading IDTR does not trap.
In addition, we need to remember that guest OS kernel is still unprivileged code, so it can never set IDTR; IDTR always points to host OS kernel. I think that's where the "relocation" bit is confusing.
Bear in mind that most VMM nowadays use dynamic code recompilation to avoid traps at all, converting privileged instructions and software interrupts to stub code, and they can surely disarm SIDT instruction too. I think Red Pill might just be discovering discrepancy in how VMware and Virtual PC simulate IDTR.
Not really. The hardware can do user/kernel context switch fast enough, costing about tens of cycles. It is costly when you have to emulate it in a virtual machine, because the interrupt first traps to the host OS kernel, then is dispatched to the VMM, then to the guest OS kernel. We're talking about thousands of cycles here.
Context switch can be costly in hardware as well. It happens when you have to change address space from one process to another, which requires reloading the page table.
User/kernel context switch does not involve reloading page table because the kernel is usually mapped to the same address space.
I don't know what the grandparent is having in mind, but he probably discovered in his horror that deep down ntdll.dll, it still uses interrupt to make system call to the kernel, just as Int 0x21 for DOS.
It is a standard system practice really, and it's one of the few ways that unprivileged code (user mode) can run privileged code (kernel mode). I think interrupt is preferred because it has a clear namespace in IDT compared to overloaded GDT and LDT namespace, which contain descriptions for code segment, data segment, stack, and call and task gates.
Even Linux on x86 uses a software interrupt for system call.
There is still segmentation in 32-bit x86, by the way. You just normally don't use it because your CS, DS, ES and SS are all pointing to the same flat 32-bit address space mapped and managed by page table. However, I think in Win32, FS and GS are used for thread local storage---global variable for threads.
Here are the prices I got today from HP's website. After you subtract the unit price by the cost of one black toner and three color tones, you get the hardware cost.
Clearly you haven't checked out what a good dP&S does these days.
If I have to choose between insulting the dP&S camera or the person using it, I'd rather insult the device. If you have to go through depths of the LCD menu to adjust shutter speed and other settings, of course you will miss the shot. That's why any decent camera has them on dials on the camera body that you can quickly access. Furthermore, my main bitching point about a dP&S is still the aperture. I don't care how many stops you can adjust it, but your largest is still too small.
And you don't get more blur by a 2 second exposure than a 1/15th?
You misread my words. Anyone doing 2 second exposure knows the picture will blur unless you use a tripod, but you don't usually think about it at 1/15. Sorry if my parenthesis is confusing.
Maybe if you're a pro, you can do it better on full manual but most of us would miss the target by a mile, taking pictures that aren't even salvagable.
I'm not a professional, but I can tell you that going on full manual takes practice, and it's not that hard. Maybe it's what differentiates me and professionals and amateurs---I can talk about it, but I don't practice this as a profession. I don't make a living as a photographer. For one thing, I've not learned yet how to synchronize flash with shutter.
Before digital photography, professionals lugged a number of cameras around their neck when they work in the field because these cameras are preset to take a certain kind of picture. Sometimes the cameras are stocked with film of different ISO rating too. They estimate the settings by experience beforehand, so they can shoot a picture quickly as it occurs.
By the way, their lenses can do auto-focus too, so a walking photographer is like a walking P&S. It is much like how you program your preset.
I have made a setting which is basicly "maximum quality, completely static scenes only."
Funny why you made a preset for a scene that you have the most time to adjust. If anything, you should have programmed several modes for fast-occuring scenes.
Curiously I still see professional photographers walking around with multiple, identical dSLRs around their neck. I guess accessing preset is not as fast as just grabbing a camera and shoot?
Has ISO rating being abused by digital photography so much that nobody concerns shutter speed, aperture, and lighting anymore?
What fundamentally matters for high motion scene is faster shutter speed. Higher ISO sensitivity makes sure the picture is more easily exposed. Bigger aperture, as well as the scene being well-lit, let more light into the lens, so these two factors also help with exposure.
It is probably best illustrated by shooting a night scene. With dSLR or SLR, you can program long exposure of 2 seconds or more, so you can film at ISO 200 or lower. However, dP&S cameras can't do long exposure, so usually what happens is that the camera adjusts shutter speed to its maximum at ~1/15 (at which point hand shaking can make it blur) but raise the amplification, i.e., ISO rating. As a result, you get a picture where bright areas appear washed out and colorless, compared to dSLR/SLR where the color and details are nicely preserved.
Another extreme is filming high-speed motion, where a common practice is to make a scene or object brightly lit to compensate for faster shutter speed.
What differentiates a photographer and an amateur is that a photographer has all the options and know their trade-offs, but an amateur talks about ISO all the times because, unfortunately, that's the only adjustable metric about dP&S cameras. Even worse, digital ISO rating only has to do with amplification of sensor signal and not actual sensor sensitivity at all. As a result, you lose dynamic range when you amplify more in higher ISO mode.
I'd rather buy a camera phone than point and shoot...
Slashdot Mirror
Since you can submit post on Slashdot, I assume you can input text to a computer. As long as you maintain a portfolio of your coding that demonstrates your programming skill, I think any company that worths its salt should be more than happy to hire you. You may want to specifically look for positions that require you to produce less number lines of code but demand the code to be of higher quality.
Small companies are usually focused on growth, and they want to push for more lines of code, so they're less ideal for you. Of course at one point they'll eventually realize that they spend 90% of time debugging rather than writing code, but it will be too late for them. Fortunate for you, the best way to find bug is actually to read code and figure out what it is doing, all in your head. You could be an excellent code auditor.
If you ever came across an underground blackhat site where malware and crackware authors collaborate and exchange information about the internals of Windows and reverse engineering, it's actually pretty cult-like. These sites have the stereotypical white or phosphorous text over black background design.
You can find such site by Googling for keywords like softice OR disassembly tutorial. Search terms like dll hook tutorial also returns several underground sites because it's an essential technique used by spyware authors.
...like Jack Sparrow the tribal king.
If she's out of the country, the U.S. customs would be able to find a departure record, and she probably would have bought a plane ticket, which reflects on either her credit card or airline's mileage membership card.
Tools augmented with snapshot support won't save you any typing. You would have to specify additional command line, which is likely going to be longer than namespace hacks. If you're concerned about number of characters to type, you should prefer namespace hack.
In Unix, you can escape both '*' and '?' using backslash and still have filenames containing these shell pattern characters; this is unlike Win32 that forbids these characters to appear in file names at all. So I don't see this a problem.
The Unix philosophy is inspired by Huffman coding---frequently used features should be shorter to type. For this reason, I don't think a long, tedious snapshot prefix/suffix is a problem because you shouldn't need to hunt for snapshot too often. If you do, you should let someone else manage your files.
My department uses NetApp (also provides a versioning file system) which uses the '.snapshot/' prefix, and I've been pretty happy with that convention. I don't find myself digging .snapshot very often, possibly once every few months, and it's easy enough to navigate. Under '.snapshot' you find the various hourly, daily and weekly snapshots, and it's pretty self-explanatory.
I'm answering questions that people posted so far altogether.
It is a file system. You access old snapshot by appending '@timestamp' to your file name. You have to first instruct ext3cow to take a snapshot first before you can retrieve old copies, otherwise it simply behaves like ext3. It appears that snapshot is always performed on a directory and applies to all inodes (files and subdirectories) under it.
My complaint is its use of '@' to access snapshot. Why not use '?' and make it look like a url query? Better yet, use a special prefix '.snapshot/' like NetApp file servers.
ext3cow takes it's name from "copy on write," and it does this on the block level. When you modify a file, it appears to the file system that you're modifying a block of e.g. 4096 bytes. COW preserves the old block while constructing a new file using the blocks you modified plus the blocks you didn't modify.
You can think about it as block-level version control. However, when you save a file, most programs simply write a whole new file (I'm only aware of mailbox programs that try to append or modify in-place). Block-level copy on write is unlikely to buy you anything in practical use.
Only when you remember to make a snapshot of your whole directory. An hourly cron-job would do, maybe. There is always the possibility you delete a file before a snapshot is made.
I don't endorse the view of this guy, but the summary is asking the question "why did it take 28 years?" and this short blog entry attempts to offer an explanation.
o n-why-mit-dean-marilee-jones-was-fired/
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/27/the-real-reas
The fact MIT was tipped off by an anonymous person (why wouldn't MIT simply say it was an internal audit, even simply refuse to comment?) makes the story ripe for conspiracy theory.
Apple hasn't caught up yet. It's a third party drive, but it's nice to be able to retrofit old powerbook to Blu-ray, although I seriously doubt if these older systems (back to G3 Pismo) have enough juice to operate it practically.
You're right. The Chinese exam is designed to make you do more calculations. I believe it is necessary because students there are trained to memorize answers or step-by-step canned procedures to get an answer. If Chinese test makers only use a few canonical problems to test the principles, everyone would solve problems by reflex and do well. The only way they can create variety, avoiding reflex, is by making a problem complicated. It may also be intentional to make it more likely for students to make mistakes under time constraint.
As a result, solving Chinese exam problem from scratch is akin to untying a knot, which is kind of like reverse engineering (maybe that explains why so many software crackers come from China). After you straighten it out, it suffices to just apply the principles.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the procedure to solve that particular prism geometry problem has already been worked out, and that students are just taught to plug in the numbers. In China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, most students are sent to supplementary school after a whole day of school, on a day to day basis. They finish school at 5pm, stay in supplementary school until 9pm, finish homework at 1am if you're lucky, and wake up and go to school at 7am.
Supplementary schooling is a huge market. If you're a test maker who happens to be teaching supplementary school, and you devise a problem on the national exam that only a few people know how to solve, then this gives you a competitive edge.
I grew up in Taiwan, and am now doing computer science Ph.D. in the U.S.
Thanks to proliferation of media, you hear stories about someone getting into trouble for blogging about their work or posting nasty remarks about their teachers/principle. You never know when something you say (albeit being perfectly legal) will be used against you. I think most people, teens and adults alike, would now think twice against using identifiable information in online profiles.
Consider this scenario; you're just venting your distress about life, writing about someone that you aren't ready to confront. You're likely unwilling to defend yourself for what you wrote. If so, why not spear yourself the trouble by concealing your identity (and that person's, while you're at it) so that other person won't come around and confront you?
If your intent is communication, it is more effective to talk to the person and make sure he understand how you feel. If you're ready to confront him when he finds out what you wrote, you probably wouldn't be writing about it online in the first place.
Of course, another incentive to hide your identity is to avoid being stalked by someone. Nobody likes being stalked, and most are afraid of stalkers because not many of us know how to deal with them, legally and emotionally. However, somehow adults think they need to protect teens more then themselves, where in fact they don't know better.
If your intent is to meet people online, you would reveal enough about yourself so strangers get to know you and keep in touch with you.
Online privacy isn't just a teens issue. Adults also need to decide whether they want to bear the consequence of exposing themselves online. It depends on what you intend to do and what you're willing to take. This is the same for any ages, so rather than focusing on protecting the teens, we should treat this as common sense for everyone.
Buying companies isn't just a Microsoft thing. Why do you think many dot-com boomers have this startup dream that they want to start a company only to be later bought by bigger companies and become instantly rich?
What Microsoft practices this differently is that they often buy competitors and then dismantle it with no intention of acquisition of technology or talent, just so it no longer competes.
A number of years ago, I wrote a BASIC alarm clock program, running on DOS, that would only shut off if I answer a multiplication problem correctly, and these are two digit by two digit problems. Nowadays a program like that doesn't work because there are simpler ways to shut it off:
Nowadays my problems are slightly different. I have no problem waking up, but I start reading slashdot right away, and you know how it goes for the rest of the day...
The clock likes to crawl under the bed. It is annoying, even when you're awake, to have to duck under your bed in order to reach for the clock. Imagine the pain for a queen or king sized bed!
I'm afraid the decades-old Apple II and IBM PC is not prior art. Pixels are either on or off for Apple II and IBM PC's CGA displays, so they apparently don't (and can't) care too much about color fringing. Sub-pixel font rendering on LCD screen deals with 256 shades for each sub-pixel, and the emphasis is on how to adjust sub-pixel brightness to reduce color fringing.
This is explained in Steve Gibson's Turning Theory into Practice. Sub-pixel font rendering is not the same as sub-pixels on CGA displays. The ideas are related, but the plumbing is different.
Perhaps I'm misleading in saying that CGA is not prior art of ClearType. I haven't actually read the patents of ClearType, so I obviously cannot tell; I'm basing my claim solely on Steve's webpage alone.
I usually receive mod points the same day when I bother to spend time looking at deeply nested threads. This seems consistent with the idea that moderators should try to mod well-formulated yet obscure posts up, rather than to mod high-profile posts down. I can't otherwise find a correlation of meta-moderation and the likelihood I get mod points.
I'm sorry to say I also tend to let my mod points expire. The task of finding gem in a haystack takes too much time for me, and I think other moderators do a good job. The system always tell you to browse at -1 to watch out for abuses---I think they mean moderator abuses, since there is no point to mod down -1 posts. In practice, abuses only happen in highly controversial subjects, which rarely appear.
For those who want to comment on my sig, I put them there some time ago when I was in the middle of a heated controversial debate. However, I found the sig to be ineffective. It is like putting a bumper sticker saying you're a new driver and ask people to be nice. I'm keep it as a public service announcement to remind people they're participating in censorship whenever they decide to mod down a post.
The grandparent post was plagiarized, so definitely trolling.
I guess China had already seen this coming!
My memory on this is already vague, so it's hard to say whether the Red Pill page is misinformed.
They're correct in saying that there is only one IDT register in the computer, and that SIDT instruction is non-privileged, so reading IDTR does not trap.
In addition, we need to remember that guest OS kernel is still unprivileged code, so it can never set IDTR; IDTR always points to host OS kernel. I think that's where the "relocation" bit is confusing.
Bear in mind that most VMM nowadays use dynamic code recompilation to avoid traps at all, converting privileged instructions and software interrupts to stub code, and they can surely disarm SIDT instruction too. I think Red Pill might just be discovering discrepancy in how VMware and Virtual PC simulate IDTR.
Not really. The hardware can do user/kernel context switch fast enough, costing about tens of cycles. It is costly when you have to emulate it in a virtual machine, because the interrupt first traps to the host OS kernel, then is dispatched to the VMM, then to the guest OS kernel. We're talking about thousands of cycles here.
Context switch can be costly in hardware as well. It happens when you have to change address space from one process to another, which requires reloading the page table.
User/kernel context switch does not involve reloading page table because the kernel is usually mapped to the same address space.
I don't know what the grandparent is having in mind, but he probably discovered in his horror that deep down ntdll.dll, it still uses interrupt to make system call to the kernel, just as Int 0x21 for DOS.
It is a standard system practice really, and it's one of the few ways that unprivileged code (user mode) can run privileged code (kernel mode). I think interrupt is preferred because it has a clear namespace in IDT compared to overloaded GDT and LDT namespace, which contain descriptions for code segment, data segment, stack, and call and task gates.
Even Linux on x86 uses a software interrupt for system call.
There is still segmentation in 32-bit x86, by the way. You just normally don't use it because your CS, DS, ES and SS are all pointing to the same flat 32-bit address space mapped and managed by page table. However, I think in Win32, FS and GS are used for thread local storage---global variable for threads.
You mean this? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-267736284 9377990424
We already beat this topic to death. See http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/0 2/04/2210200 for many insightful and informative comments people posted a month ago.
If I have to choose between insulting the dP&S camera or the person using it, I'd rather insult the device. If you have to go through depths of the LCD menu to adjust shutter speed and other settings, of course you will miss the shot. That's why any decent camera has them on dials on the camera body that you can quickly access. Furthermore, my main bitching point about a dP&S is still the aperture. I don't care how many stops you can adjust it, but your largest is still too small.
You misread my words. Anyone doing 2 second exposure knows the picture will blur unless you use a tripod, but you don't usually think about it at 1/15. Sorry if my parenthesis is confusing.
I'm not a professional, but I can tell you that going on full manual takes practice, and it's not that hard. Maybe it's what differentiates me and professionals and amateurs---I can talk about it, but I don't practice this as a profession. I don't make a living as a photographer. For one thing, I've not learned yet how to synchronize flash with shutter.
Before digital photography, professionals lugged a number of cameras around their neck when they work in the field because these cameras are preset to take a certain kind of picture. Sometimes the cameras are stocked with film of different ISO rating too. They estimate the settings by experience beforehand, so they can shoot a picture quickly as it occurs.
By the way, their lenses can do auto-focus too, so a walking photographer is like a walking P&S. It is much like how you program your preset.
Funny why you made a preset for a scene that you have the most time to adjust. If anything, you should have programmed several modes for fast-occuring scenes.
Curiously I still see professional photographers walking around with multiple, identical dSLRs around their neck. I guess accessing preset is not as fast as just grabbing a camera and shoot?
Has ISO rating being abused by digital photography so much that nobody concerns shutter speed, aperture, and lighting anymore?
What fundamentally matters for high motion scene is faster shutter speed. Higher ISO sensitivity makes sure the picture is more easily exposed. Bigger aperture, as well as the scene being well-lit, let more light into the lens, so these two factors also help with exposure.
It is probably best illustrated by shooting a night scene. With dSLR or SLR, you can program long exposure of 2 seconds or more, so you can film at ISO 200 or lower. However, dP&S cameras can't do long exposure, so usually what happens is that the camera adjusts shutter speed to its maximum at ~1/15 (at which point hand shaking can make it blur) but raise the amplification, i.e., ISO rating. As a result, you get a picture where bright areas appear washed out and colorless, compared to dSLR/SLR where the color and details are nicely preserved.
Another extreme is filming high-speed motion, where a common practice is to make a scene or object brightly lit to compensate for faster shutter speed.
What differentiates a photographer and an amateur is that a photographer has all the options and know their trade-offs, but an amateur talks about ISO all the times because, unfortunately, that's the only adjustable metric about dP&S cameras. Even worse, digital ISO rating only has to do with amplification of sensor signal and not actual sensor sensitivity at all. As a result, you lose dynamic range when you amplify more in higher ISO mode.
I'd rather buy a camera phone than point and shoot...