While Facebook's motives are certainly not selfless and altruistic, they are talking about giving free connectivity to people who'd otherwise have nothing.
That's their argument, but it's based on false premises.
Zero-rated content is problematic because it supplants other means of getting universal access to the internet. We agree that the argument for zero-rating is: 'It's better than nothing.' But that's begging the question. Why does 'nothing' have to be the alternative?
Telco revenues in the developing world have nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Virtually all revenue growth in the telco sector is in the developing world. And yet... not only are we not keeping up with the rate of increase in bandwidth, subscription base and accessibility in the developed world, we're actually falling behind.
Service levels are improving by leaps and bounds in the developed world, in a sector with *stable* income. And yet they're not improving nearly as much in a part of the world that's seen 50% revenue growth in 10 years.
How is it that the only way we can get actual services—you know, the thing telcos are given partial monopolies to deliver—is when customers are commoditised and effectively sold on an exclusive basis to an information service operator?
It was the Swedish media who broke the story, genius. The police were the ones who wouldn't talk about it. Did you even read the fucking article you linked to?
Why did they do it? Well, to avoid giving the Swedish right (apparently they do exist) any proof that their opinions were backed up by facts.
Yeah, opinions that are not borne out by facts are shameful, aren't they? I mean you would know, right?
Laugh all you like—and rightly so. It seems that every single attempt to unify and simplify a platform, every single time someone tries to impose the One True Way on a technology, it ends in tears.
Tragically not so much developer tears as user tears.
No matter what the platform, no matter who the creator, every time someone decides that there should not be More Than One Way To Do It, they stuff it up for everybody else.
The reason why failure is inevitable is obvious, if you think about it. It's a bit like an ecosystem winnowing itself down to a single set of survival traits and then dying out in the face of the first change in circumstance. Monoculture has always been a negative survival trait, and it's no different in technology.
So anyone who uses the word 'fragmentation' in this conversation can bite my shiny metal ass.
The message was that while participation was voluntary, there would be consequences for failing to comply.
If there are consequences, I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of voluntary.
Er, I think the concept you need to consider here is opportunity cost. If failing to participate in a purely voluntary practice closes the door to important benefits, then that decision can absolutely have undesirable consequences.
This is a pretty standard tactic when national governments try to influence policies that are, strictly speaking, the purview of sub-national entities. Health and education, for example, are provincial responsibilities in Canada, but funding mechanisms, subsidies and tax breaks make it possible for the federal government to set minimum standards nationwide without explicitly overstepping its mandate.
I welcome Pacific Islanders. There is about 3 million people in Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia, and maybe half of them are living on these kinds of marginal atolls.
There are 7.3 million people in Papua New Guinea alone—almost 10 million in Melanesia altogether. Happily, most of them live on volcanic islands which won't be as severely affected by sea level rise. Although, for the record, Vanuatu (where I live) was hit by a record-setting cyclone in March, and is currently enduring drought induced by the worst El Niño in recorded history.
Anyway, far less than half of all Pacific islanders live on low-lying atolls. The population of Kiribati is just over 100,000. Tuvalu is a mere 10,000, Federated States of Micronesia is about 100,000, and the Marshalls are just 52,000.
If the measure of their importance is simply counting lives, these places don't matter much.
But if the measure of importance is that they're the proverbial canary in the coal mine (sorry), then yeah, they kind of matter. And how we treat them is going to set a precedent for how we treat the hundreds of millions who will quickly follow—most of whom are likely to be domestic climate refugees.
Your daily newspaper pales in comparison. We are talking about GLOBAL SPEED. They deliver pictures to clients all over the world. Tens of thousands of pictures every day. Clients expect pictures within an hour of the event. THEY DON'T WANT you to manage the image across multiple media and platforms. They just want the JPG from your camera. Fast. They don't want your 20 MB RAW image. They want 8MB JPG. Fast.
Newspapers have websites these days. Everyone works at, uh 'GLOBAL SPEED'. I've covered global news events and delivered scoops. I still shoot RAW, and if Reuters doesn't like it, I'm sure AFP will be happy to have my pics. Frankly, I think wire services in general are ripe for a tech invasion. Reuters' cranial anal insertion is just more evidence of the need for it.
Reuters doesn't want the hassle of dealing with RAW files. They're huge. The formats are many. They also require extra handling. They also don't need them for their uses.
No, that's wrong. Reuters doesn't want images generated from RAW files. That's something entirely different.
I wonder if the JPEG recommendation comes from size and archival requirements, plus lawsuits related to decoding all of the various RAW formats.
JPEG is a decent standard, and EXIF metadata makes archiving and retrieval more practicable. But I believe that RAW formats are pretty well understood and widely documented. It's in the camera manufacturer's interest to see these formats well and widely supported. Also, it's just sensor data, ultimately. The data structure is fairly straightforward. I really doubt that reverse engineering these formats would be terribly difficult. And I suspect that, if anything, it will get easier and faster over time, rather than the reverse.
"And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow."
You missed the entire point of the requirement: TO GET THE IMAGES FASTER TO THE CLIENT.
Did you miss the part where I say I run a daily newspaper? I know the argument for speed. I also know it's bogus, because I live with deadlines every day. And I like RAW better, because I save time when it comes to managing the image across multiple media and platforms.
In those rare cases when even minutes matter, any self-respecting photographer will shoot in RAW+JPEG. Heck, in rare cases, I'll just shoot from my phone and upload instantaneously. But those are exceptional cases, and don't constitute a compelling reason for a total ban on RAW.
The format requirement change really only does two things:
1) It cuts down storage requirements significantly. Full size 14-bit Raw image on my Nikon D4s is almost 20MB. Full size.jpg at the fine setting is 8MB.
( The D4s only has a 16mp sensor. Crank that up a bit and the file sizes get rather ludicrous. )
2) Separates the pros from the amateurs. A pro knows how to get a good shot without resorting to post to fix things they should have got right in the camera.
( like exposure and white balance )
The first point is reasonable. The RAW files for my D800 are BIG. I can't keep more than about six months' shooting on my computer at any given time, and have to hive the rest off to external RAID. And I'm just one photographer who might shoot a couple thousand shots on a busy week. Reuters has slightly greater storage and archival issues than that.:-)
BUT... when you insist on JPEG straight from the camera, you're also effectively discarding keyword tags, caption, title, and other key data about the file, because it's not easily input into the camera on a shot-by-shot basis. That means that archiving, searching and long-term storage is made way harder. And frankly, if Reuters isn't capable of maintaining a large-scale archive and storage service, then they need to make way for a service that can do it. Heck, Youtube's storage requirements make Reuters' concerns pale by comparison.
The second point is just luddite bullshit, says I. I'm media director for a news company in a small tropical nation. The majority of our population is dark-skinned, and because it's hot, they tend to stay in the shade. The difference between interior and exterior conditions—heck, the transition between one side of the room to another—makes manual metering a pain in the ass. I use the automatic metering on my camera because it fucking works. And I'm a pro. I know how to set my levels, but my levels change so wildly from one shot to the next that I can either cover the news or spend my time futzing with my camera. Which do you think I'll do?
If I have to throw a quick mask over one side of the photo because one subject is standing in sunlight, and the other in shade, then you can bet your bottom dollar I'll do it. And I'll do it in RAW because that's technically the best way to process the image data. This 'minimal editing' line is full of shit. And the assertion that 'real' photographers don't need RAW is full of shit as well. Just because we can in theory do something the hard way doesn't mean that we don't have better things to do when we're trying to cover the news.
While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news. [...] Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.
Which doesn't mean they're trying to prevent people from faking photos; as that line is clearly referring to the "minimal editing" part of the above guidelines, and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.
Yes, they're being euphemistic and mashing over-processing in with outright manipulation, because I doubt Reuters would win a lot of friends among the professional photography establishment if they implied that their contributors were a bunch of crooks.
But the point of the thing is that 'minimal editing' has nothing to do with the format you capture your images in. And furthermore, it's easier to track 'minimal editing' with RAW than it is in JPEG, because editing tools actually maintain an audit trail of sorts. The bottom line is that the measure does nothing to get them where they want to go, except in the minds of a few not-so-sophisticated editors.
Full disclosure: I'm media director of the newspaper of record in a small country, a news photographer who has contributed to wire services, and a geek. I also wrote this submission. And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow. In fact, JPEG is a pain the ass compared to RAW, especially when you're targeting multiple media with the same image. Because the shot you upload to your website is going to be significantly different in size, colour and compression from the one that goes to pre-press. If you take them both from the same canonical source (or Nikonical source, if that's your poison), then life is much, much easier.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet? There's a lot of great technology we have today due to government investment.
I certainly don't expect 100% perfection when bombing anything, which is why I always call bullshit when our politicians say we'll use "smart" bombs or "surgical air strikes" when trying to justify attacking someone.
I used to feel the same, until I visited Belgrade. The Ministry of Defence building was hit by three bombs, each of which penetrated about 4 floors and then exploded. Damage to adjacent buildings (i.e. within 20-50 metres of the blast) was limited to broken windows and surface chips and abrasions. I saw another dozen or so buildings—quite pointedly left unrepaired during negotiations to enter the EU—all around downtown Belgrade that were the same.
Likewise Slobodan Milosevic's residence in a nearby suburb, located where all the diplomatic compounds were. You pass by row upon row of pretty 18th and 19th Century houses, each on a nicely tended plot of land, then there's a gap where Milosevic's house used to be, then another house, and another.
After this, I changed my estimation of how precision such bombing efforts could be....
... And then... I found out that they left all the really precision attacks to the French, because the Americans had a reputation for missing.:-)
No, that gives me the right to question the motives of those, who attempt to shame me into helping them by portraying them all as helpless women, elderly, and children. Such portrayals are dishonest and thus any compassion they stir is based on a lie.
Well, I can't speak for the motives of those speaking in defence of refugees, but I suspect that the motivation for the large number of young men running away is that they don't want to be caught in the crossfire by groups that either enlist or kill every single military-age man just because.
You know, like what happened in that foreign outpost named Srebrenica—Oh, hang on... that was Europe.
Content producers think, "Ah, I don't want to front something like this. People won't pay for it, so I'll get nothing back". Then he doesn't hire actors, writers, secretaries, etc.
Your argument would have more weight if we weren't in the middle of a golden age of Video/TV/Film production. The quality & quantity of the content being created, and the economic activity surrounding these activities, are all reaching record highs. More people are employed in television, film and videography now than ever before.
Slashdot Mirror
While Facebook's motives are certainly not selfless and altruistic, they are talking about giving free connectivity to people who'd otherwise have nothing.
That's their argument, but it's based on false premises.
Zero-rated content is problematic because it supplants other means of getting universal access to the internet. We agree that the argument for zero-rating is: 'It's better than nothing.' But that's begging the question. Why does 'nothing' have to be the alternative?
Telco revenues in the developing world have nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Virtually all revenue growth in the telco sector is in the developing world. And yet... not only are we not keeping up with the rate of increase in bandwidth, subscription base and accessibility in the developed world, we're actually falling behind.
Service levels are improving by leaps and bounds in the developed world, in a sector with *stable* income. And yet they're not improving nearly as much in a part of the world that's seen 50% revenue growth in 10 years.
How is it that the only way we can get actual services—you know, the thing telcos are given partial monopolies to deliver—is when customers are commoditised and effectively sold on an exclusive basis to an information service operator?
Well, I for one am glad that the Swedish media is actively declining to report mass rapes by the Muslim immigrants that the Swedish left has imported.
It was the Swedish media who broke the story, genius. The police were the ones who wouldn't talk about it. Did you even read the fucking article you linked to?
Why did they do it? Well, to avoid giving the Swedish right (apparently they do exist) any proof that their opinions were backed up by facts.
Yeah, opinions that are not borne out by facts are shameful, aren't they? I mean you would know, right?
How the fuck do you interpret SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED?
That depends. How the fuck do you interpret A WELL REGULATED MILITIA?
SystemD will fix all of this.
Laugh all you like—and rightly so. It seems that every single attempt to unify and simplify a platform, every single time someone tries to impose the One True Way on a technology, it ends in tears.
Tragically not so much developer tears as user tears.
No matter what the platform, no matter who the creator, every time someone decides that there should not be More Than One Way To Do It, they stuff it up for everybody else.
The reason why failure is inevitable is obvious, if you think about it. It's a bit like an ecosystem winnowing itself down to a single set of survival traits and then dying out in the face of the first change in circumstance. Monoculture has always been a negative survival trait, and it's no different in technology.
So anyone who uses the word 'fragmentation' in this conversation can bite my shiny metal ass.
Set up a designated time of the week to swap cars.
Share? You want me to share?!?
Communist!
The message was that while participation was voluntary, there would be consequences for failing to comply.
If there are consequences, I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of voluntary.
Er, I think the concept you need to consider here is opportunity cost. If failing to participate in a purely voluntary practice closes the door to important benefits, then that decision can absolutely have undesirable consequences.
This is a pretty standard tactic when national governments try to influence policies that are, strictly speaking, the purview of sub-national entities. Health and education, for example, are provincial responsibilities in Canada, but funding mechanisms, subsidies and tax breaks make it possible for the federal government to set minimum standards nationwide without explicitly overstepping its mandate.
If they figure out how to shrink people, there has to be porn available.
It's actually a life-sized image of your dick.
Okay, not life-sized. But with hardly any magnification....
My word, these Sir Ian refugees get everywhere. Even Middle Earth, you say?
That was way too subtle and clever. Good god, man, have you forgotten where you are?
I welcome Pacific Islanders. There is about 3 million people in Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia, and maybe half of them are living on these kinds of marginal atolls.
There are 7.3 million people in Papua New Guinea alone—almost 10 million in Melanesia altogether. Happily, most of them live on volcanic islands which won't be as severely affected by sea level rise. Although, for the record, Vanuatu (where I live) was hit by a record-setting cyclone in March, and is currently enduring drought induced by the worst El Niño in recorded history.
Anyway, far less than half of all Pacific islanders live on low-lying atolls. The population of Kiribati is just over 100,000. Tuvalu is a mere 10,000, Federated States of Micronesia is about 100,000, and the Marshalls are just 52,000.
If the measure of their importance is simply counting lives, these places don't matter much.
But if the measure of importance is that they're the proverbial canary in the coal mine (sorry), then yeah, they kind of matter. And how we treat them is going to set a precedent for how we treat the hundreds of millions who will quickly follow—most of whom are likely to be domestic climate refugees.
Absolutely PHP was originally for for non-programmers. It was a CMS written in Perl, for people who couldn't use the Perl templating systems directly.
The first sentence is correct. But PHP was written in C, and calling CGI.pm a templating system is pretty generous. :-)
That was a long time ago, of course.
Clearly. :-)
Your daily newspaper pales in comparison. We are talking about GLOBAL SPEED. They deliver pictures to clients all over the world. Tens of thousands of pictures every day. Clients expect pictures within an hour of the event. THEY DON'T WANT you to manage the image across multiple media and platforms. They just want the JPG from your camera. Fast. They don't want your 20 MB RAW image. They want 8MB JPG. Fast.
Newspapers have websites these days. Everyone works at, uh 'GLOBAL SPEED'. I've covered global news events and delivered scoops. I still shoot RAW, and if Reuters doesn't like it, I'm sure AFP will be happy to have my pics. Frankly, I think wire services in general are ripe for a tech invasion. Reuters' cranial anal insertion is just more evidence of the need for it.
Reuters doesn't want the hassle of dealing with RAW files. They're huge. The formats are many. They also require extra handling. They also don't need them for their uses.
No, that's wrong. Reuters doesn't want images generated from RAW files. That's something entirely different.
I wonder if the JPEG recommendation comes from size and archival requirements, plus lawsuits related to decoding all of the various RAW formats.
JPEG is a decent standard, and EXIF metadata makes archiving and retrieval more practicable. But I believe that RAW formats are pretty well understood and widely documented. It's in the camera manufacturer's interest to see these formats well and widely supported. Also, it's just sensor data, ultimately. The data structure is fairly straightforward. I really doubt that reverse engineering these formats would be terribly difficult. And I suspect that, if anything, it will get easier and faster over time, rather than the reverse.
"And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow."
You missed the entire point of the requirement: TO GET THE IMAGES FASTER TO THE CLIENT.
Did you miss the part where I say I run a daily newspaper? I know the argument for speed. I also know it's bogus, because I live with deadlines every day. And I like RAW better, because I save time when it comes to managing the image across multiple media and platforms.
In those rare cases when even minutes matter, any self-respecting photographer will shoot in RAW+JPEG. Heck, in rare cases, I'll just shoot from my phone and upload instantaneously. But those are exceptional cases, and don't constitute a compelling reason for a total ban on RAW.
The format requirement change really only does two things:
1) It cuts down storage requirements significantly. Full size 14-bit Raw image on my Nikon D4s is almost 20MB. Full size .jpg at the fine setting is 8MB.
( The D4s only has a 16mp sensor. Crank that up a bit and the file sizes get rather ludicrous. )
2) Separates the pros from the amateurs. A pro knows how to get a good shot without resorting to post to fix things they should have got right in the camera. ( like exposure and white balance )
The first point is reasonable. The RAW files for my D800 are BIG. I can't keep more than about six months' shooting on my computer at any given time, and have to hive the rest off to external RAID. And I'm just one photographer who might shoot a couple thousand shots on a busy week. Reuters has slightly greater storage and archival issues than that. :-)
BUT... when you insist on JPEG straight from the camera, you're also effectively discarding keyword tags, caption, title, and other key data about the file, because it's not easily input into the camera on a shot-by-shot basis. That means that archiving, searching and long-term storage is made way harder. And frankly, if Reuters isn't capable of maintaining a large-scale archive and storage service, then they need to make way for a service that can do it. Heck, Youtube's storage requirements make Reuters' concerns pale by comparison.
The second point is just luddite bullshit, says I. I'm media director for a news company in a small tropical nation. The majority of our population is dark-skinned, and because it's hot, they tend to stay in the shade. The difference between interior and exterior conditions—heck, the transition between one side of the room to another—makes manual metering a pain in the ass. I use the automatic metering on my camera because it fucking works. And I'm a pro. I know how to set my levels, but my levels change so wildly from one shot to the next that I can either cover the news or spend my time futzing with my camera. Which do you think I'll do?
If I have to throw a quick mask over one side of the photo because one subject is standing in sunlight, and the other in shade, then you can bet your bottom dollar I'll do it. And I'll do it in RAW because that's technically the best way to process the image data. This 'minimal editing' line is full of shit. And the assertion that 'real' photographers don't need RAW is full of shit as well. Just because we can in theory do something the hard way doesn't mean that we don't have better things to do when we're trying to cover the news.
While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news. [...] Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.
Which doesn't mean they're trying to prevent people from faking photos; as that line is clearly referring to the "minimal editing" part of the above guidelines, and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.
Yes, they're being euphemistic and mashing over-processing in with outright manipulation, because I doubt Reuters would win a lot of friends among the professional photography establishment if they implied that their contributors were a bunch of crooks.
But the point of the thing is that 'minimal editing' has nothing to do with the format you capture your images in. And furthermore, it's easier to track 'minimal editing' with RAW than it is in JPEG, because editing tools actually maintain an audit trail of sorts. The bottom line is that the measure does nothing to get them where they want to go, except in the minds of a few not-so-sophisticated editors.
Full disclosure: I'm media director of the newspaper of record in a small country, a news photographer who has contributed to wire services, and a geek. I also wrote this submission. And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow. In fact, JPEG is a pain the ass compared to RAW, especially when you're targeting multiple media with the same image. Because the shot you upload to your website is going to be significantly different in size, colour and compression from the one that goes to pre-press. If you take them both from the same canonical source (or Nikonical source, if that's your poison), then life is much, much easier.
Rule of thumb: If you don't self-identify as a redneck, and wouldn't use the "N" word, don't use the "R" word.
'Self-important fuckwit' on the other hand, has no such restriction. :-)
Even better is having an "Undo" button (or in the case of a forum like this, an "Edit" button).
The reason for not having UNDO should be obvious:
Someone writes a post saying, 'Bieber is such a dick! Post below if you agree.' Hundreds do.
Then the OP edits the post to read, 'Dick tastes great! Post below if you agree.'
You need a whole class to explain Boolean Logic.
Booleans? You either get them or you don't.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet? There's a lot of great technology we have today due to government investment.
Yeah... the internet, for example. :-)
Released inmates from Eastern Correctional Facility quickly work their way up the chain of command in their respective gangs.
The Guardian had the best headline and sub-head on this story:
Harvard debate team beaten by prison inmates.
Maybe they lacked conviction?
I certainly don't expect 100% perfection when bombing anything, which is why I always call bullshit when our politicians say we'll use "smart" bombs or "surgical air strikes" when trying to justify attacking someone.
I used to feel the same, until I visited Belgrade. The Ministry of Defence building was hit by three bombs, each of which penetrated about 4 floors and then exploded. Damage to adjacent buildings (i.e. within 20-50 metres of the blast) was limited to broken windows and surface chips and abrasions. I saw another dozen or so buildings—quite pointedly left unrepaired during negotiations to enter the EU—all around downtown Belgrade that were the same.
Likewise Slobodan Milosevic's residence in a nearby suburb, located where all the diplomatic compounds were. You pass by row upon row of pretty 18th and 19th Century houses, each on a nicely tended plot of land, then there's a gap where Milosevic's house used to be, then another house, and another.
After this, I changed my estimation of how precision such bombing efforts could be....
... And then... I found out that they left all the really precision attacks to the French, because the Americans had a reputation for missing. :-)
No, that gives me the right to question the motives of those, who attempt to shame me into helping them by portraying them all as helpless women, elderly, and children. Such portrayals are dishonest and thus any compassion they stir is based on a lie.
Well, I can't speak for the motives of those speaking in defence of refugees, but I suspect that the motivation for the large number of young men running away is that they don't want to be caught in the crossfire by groups that either enlist or kill every single military-age man just because.
You know, like what happened in that foreign outpost named Srebrenica—Oh, hang on... that was Europe.
Content producers think, "Ah, I don't want to front something like this. People won't pay for it, so I'll get nothing back". Then he doesn't hire actors, writers, secretaries, etc.
Your argument would have more weight if we weren't in the middle of a golden age of Video/TV/Film production. The quality & quantity of the content being created, and the economic activity surrounding these activities, are all reaching record highs. More people are employed in television, film and videography now than ever before.
TFA makes no mention of what happens if you stop supplying the energy required to confine the plasma. This could be a weak spot in the system.
It explodes in a 40MT blast. Didn't you see Aliens?
Yes, but I watched it from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.