If I may add to this a bit, even Canon consumer cameras are the best. Easy to use, competitive pricing and excellent picture quality. I think it's pretty much undisputed at the moment that Canon make the best digital cameras bar none.[/canonadvert]
Disclaimer: I deal with digital cameras for a living. I find that while canon does good cameras with great image quality, they are still highly overpriced, and excruciatingly SLOW (in the compacts). IMHO, 3 seconds for the camera to react to my pressing a button (the shutter button on the A520, A410) is absolutely shameful.
As for the Rebel, I find the post-processing the camera does to be terrible, specially in high-iso. Obviously, it works great to impress the guys at DPReview who take pictures of a uniform gray chart. But when it comes to picking out details, I find the Nikon dSLR's to give much more natural results, even though they give visible grain.
So, my point is, Canon makes decent cameras, but they're not the best at everything, not by a long shot. Other brands are out there to stimulate competition, as they all have their strong points. Sony have the fastest compact cameras, bar-none. Sure the image isn't as good as a Nikon or Canon, but it's certainly good enough, and it's much better being able to capture the picture _when_ you want it, than to have a great looking picture of something you didn't want because of shutter lag.
Well... Enough rambling. That was my 2 canadian cents worth;)
It's funny... I've noticed the complete opposite on my various iBooks and thinkpads/dells:
On my iBook, the trackpad is placed just right so that I can still lean my wrist on the base of the machine. When typing, OSX deactivates the trackpad. It's very accurate, and the two-finger omnidirectional-scrolling thing is nice:) As another poster said, as well, the one mouse button is an advantage here, as my wrist can be at a more naturally inclined angle, and wherever my thumb hits is the correct mouse button.
On the Dell (D800), the trackpad accuracy is laughable, and the buttons have a terrible ergonomy. To get to the first button, I have to stretch, and to get to the second button, I have to curl up my thumb. Either that, or I have to move my hand, and click using my index finger (since the buttons have such a hard feel to them anyway). On the thinkpad and dell, the nipple is absolutely painful to use. The acceleration is atrocious. To reach a corner quickly, I have to push real hard, and when I get there, I have to move really slow to catch what I want to click. I can't use the nipple more than 15 minutes without getting severe wrist cramps. The buttons on the thinkpad are easier to thumb-click, but they still need to go too far down to register.
Overall, I've found I'm much more comfortable using a mouse with the dell and thinkpad. I've also found that, even though it's connected at times, I rarely ever reach for the mouse on my iBook. My two hands are always near the keyboard, as I use many shortcuts, so control-clicking isn't a big deal. I save much more time control-space'ing my way to launching applications using Quicksilver or command-spacing for finding files through Spotlight.
All this to say that you can't say that the nipple system is clearly superior. Obviously it's a question of personal taste. I tend to agree with you that the non-apple laptops I've used suffered from bad trackpad implementations, but I'm sure one brand somewhere uses the same pad as Apple did (before they designed their own).
However, I still miss the built-in trackball of my Powerbook 150. Now _that_ was nice:)
Or how about microchip smart cards? You know, exactly like RFID, but you need to physically connect the contacts to read it? They've existed for over 20 years now, and are pretty darn reliable. They also aren't prone to demagnetizing.
Why be tagged like a pack of twizzlers at WalMart?
Yes but you see, if we stop buying their music, then they lose money and they blame rampant piracy. I would imagine that getting 10K$ from a 14 year old child is a LOT more profitable than selling her 2 CDs with her allowance money...
And the change from 3rd person to 1st person made it worse how? By your logic it would have simply been 'another third person shooter', after all.
No, it would've been "A third person shooter". Name me another 3rd person out there that doesn't suffer terribly from clipping and awkward camera angles...
Personally, I much prefer the 3rd person view. It gives a much more natural view of the environment (i.e. position of the body, and peripheral vision). Give Oni a try, and you'll see what I mean...
Actually the first time Halo was presented (at MacWorld Expo) it was as a 3rd person game. The graphics and physics were amazing (quite close to the actual shipping game) considering it was running on a 4xx MHz G4 with a lowly Radeon (the first generation, IIRC). People at the time were predicting great success for the game, since it was the first non-linear videogame that didn't require loading between every level, and where you could actually jump into a car and drive it.
Then the delays came. The buyout happened. The specs increased. The change from 3rd person to 1st person took place. And by the time the game actually shipped, it wasn't anything more than another First Person Shooter.
We keep hearing that it takes enormous amounts of energy to initiate fusion... Could lightning be a cost effective way to make fusion mainstream? I've seen videos of people "guiding" lightning by using small rockets... Could you use that energy in a meaningful way?
I get the idea that driver support is the only real negative to most Canon scanner products.... The hardware is good though.
I couldn't agree with you more... I've got a LiDE 30. Love the scanner. Unfortunately, I don't have a windoze box. Just OSX. Let me tell you that the software they shipped with it was a piece of shit. It's buggy, not twain compliant, is a memory hog, and is ugly as hell. At the time I bought it, they promised twain drivers "any day now". I've been waiting for 2 years. So in the meantime I've been using VueScan. Still not ideal (as it has its share of bugs as well) but better that the stuff canon has to offer. My next scanner will likely be an Epson. At least they can write TWAIN drivers.
I'm personally waiting for these half-terabyte disks to become cheap. I want to build the equivalent of my iPod/iTunes but for my DVDs.
You see, since iTunes came out, I never listen to CDs anymore. I rip them once, and store the discs someplace safe. The big advantage of this is that my discs aren't prone to scratching/heat/humidity, and thieves won't easily find them in the eventuality that they found their way into my home. For DVDs, now, the ideal would be a set-top box the size of my DVD player that has a DVD drive for ripping, and stores all my DVDs in their entirety. Last I checked, I had about 120 DVDs (counting the special features discs) which is fairly average by some people's standards. Ripping them all would still take over 500GB of data.
Some people complain about reliability for these drives... In this situation, since I have the original media, losing the 500GBs is not the end of the world.
So. All this to say: I for one welcome our increasingly capacious hard disk overlords;)
I've noticed a certain mentality in the US: It is everyone's right (or is that duty?) to sue the heck out of everyone else. Perhaps these medical companies selling their expensive equipment are only compensating for the cost of equipment failure? An endoscope that loses an o-ring in a patient might cost the company half a million in "Digestive discomfort compensation"... Just a thought...
I believe the ship in the trailer is one of the Destroyer-class starships, in Babylon 5. Check out "Babylon 5: Crusade" to see a picture. There is, though, a likeness between the Excalibur and the Kestrel (which came 3 years before the series). Mind you there are MANY similarities between EV and B5 that go the other way;)
Well, it's been an hour and a half since the story has been posted, and there still isn't a single comment... So I might as well pitch in...
This movie looks awesome. Production quality looks great for a no-budget fan film. From the article:
"The truth is, however, that In the Pirkinning will be the first movie produced in Finland to contain lots of high quality special effects, space combat and no-holds-barred action in a science fiction environment."
I also hope they'll be the first feature-length movie to be distributed legally using BitTorrent, as a burnable DVD image! It could serve as an example for online distribution, and perhaps encourage more independent filmmakers to make movies and show their work. I'm sick and tired of the remakes/formula-movies coming out of hollywood.
Off topic, but all the laptop drives I've seen fail (3 to date, on a sampling of about 12 laptops, owned personally or by close family) were IBM TravelStars. Thank god they sold their HD business because frankly they were terrible at it...
But assuming that they can test each layer independently before assembling them, there does come a BIG advantage: Since each layer is smaller (i.e. the chip is segmented) you can have more chips made per wafer. Since the number of impurities per wafer would likely stay the same, you'd have better yields. Today, one impurity on a processor scraps the whole CPU, whereas in a stacked design, an impurity in one of the execution units would only jeopardize the layer that unit is on.
This also opens the door to different processes in CPU designs... MMICs made on GaAs substrates are EXTREMELY fast and low-power, but expensive to make in large surfaces/quantities. Imagine being able to make your execution units on GaAs, but keeping the less critical units on the 'slower' Si substrates... Then you've got a CPU that computes at several tens of gigahertz with negligible heat output, and caches that can be clocked higher because a) memories don't consume nearly as much power as the CPU, and b) the interconnect-related speed issues are reduced...
What I will pay for is sun resistant ink with a shelf life of at least a 100 years. And I want it cheap. Enough of this disposable "they will pay and pay" model.
You mean like the toner in a laser printer?
Kidding aside, though: Where are our photo-quality color laser printers? I wish more companies would spend time developing this...
I've seen a VERY similar contraption at school... A couple of engineering students did this as their final-year project. Prior art anyone?:) RoboKeith More details here
Well, no... market share is a ratio, users is an absolute value... the 2 are rather related, though, wouldn't you say?
Your assumption would be correct if the lifespan of the product in question was the same. Bear with me for a second: - Market share means the number of macs sold vs. the number of PCs sold in the same timeframe. - Macs generally have a much longer time between upgrades than PCs (I still have a 4-year-old G4 running strong, with no need to upgrade yet, whereas a PC from 4 years ago can't even run _half_ the spyware that's installed on it;) ). Assuming, for this example, an average lifespan of 5 years for a mac and 3 years for a PC, the installed base of Macs in use would be 1.66 times greater.
"Sleep" mode on the Mac is the equivalent to a Suspend on a PC. It leaves the RAM contents where it is, and keeps the memory powered. Everything else goes in low power mode, drives turn off, fans spin down, etc.
Your average iBook on an almost-full charge will last over a week in sleep mode before the battery runs out, so power requirement is very low. In fact, it probably uses less power to leave the Mac in Sleep mode than to do a full boot every time you use it. It certainly saves a lot of my time.
So, they dump PPC because they can't get enough of the right kinds of chips, then they stop shipping single-CPU systems which would seemingly help make a limited supply last longer...
I believe they're dumping the PPC platform because IBM sees no reason to develop the chip further (i.e. increasing clock speeds). One way to counter the lack of speed is to add more CPUs in the same machine. They have a fairly abundant supply of lower-clocked chips.
That's odd. The benchmarks I've seen don't surpass my single G4/466 in overall score. Mind you the MacIntel (Rosetta) blows my G4 away in memory bandwidth.
Alternatively, we can kiss native OSX apps goodbye, because, hey, what's the use in coding for MacOSX if all you have to do is tell your clients to run WINE?
technically, all they'd have to do is patch the emulated directX calls to the native API. The other stuff should be light enough to emulate if it ran on a 700MHz celeron.
I'm thinking the new xbox has enough oomph to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that while canon does good cameras with great image quality, they are still highly overpriced, and excruciatingly SLOW (in the compacts). IMHO, 3 seconds for the camera to react to my pressing a button (the shutter button on the A520, A410) is absolutely shameful.
As for the Rebel, I find the post-processing the camera does to be terrible, specially in high-iso. Obviously, it works great to impress the guys at DPReview who take pictures of a uniform gray chart. But when it comes to picking out details, I find the Nikon dSLR's to give much more natural results, even though they give visible grain.
So, my point is, Canon makes decent cameras, but they're not the best at everything, not by a long shot. Other brands are out there to stimulate competition, as they all have their strong points. Sony have the fastest compact cameras, bar-none. Sure the image isn't as good as a Nikon or Canon, but it's certainly good enough, and it's much better being able to capture the picture _when_ you want it, than to have a great looking picture of something you didn't want because of shutter lag.
Well... Enough rambling. That was my 2 canadian cents worth
I think you're mixing up Walter Koenig and James Doohan.
It's funny... I've noticed the complete opposite on my various iBooks and thinkpads/dells:
:)
:)
On my iBook, the trackpad is placed just right so that I can still lean my wrist on the base of the machine. When typing, OSX deactivates the trackpad. It's very accurate, and the two-finger omnidirectional-scrolling thing is nice
As another poster said, as well, the one mouse button is an advantage here, as my wrist can be at a more naturally inclined angle, and wherever my thumb hits is the correct mouse button.
On the Dell (D800), the trackpad accuracy is laughable, and the buttons have a terrible ergonomy. To get to the first button, I have to stretch, and to get to the second button, I have to curl up my thumb. Either that, or I have to move my hand, and click using my index finger (since the buttons have such a hard feel to them anyway).
On the thinkpad and dell, the nipple is absolutely painful to use. The acceleration is atrocious. To reach a corner quickly, I have to push real hard, and when I get there, I have to move really slow to catch what I want to click. I can't use the nipple more than 15 minutes without getting severe wrist cramps. The buttons on the thinkpad are easier to thumb-click, but they still need to go too far down to register.
Overall, I've found I'm much more comfortable using a mouse with the dell and thinkpad. I've also found that, even though it's connected at times, I rarely ever reach for the mouse on my iBook. My two hands are always near the keyboard, as I use many shortcuts, so control-clicking isn't a big deal. I save much more time control-space'ing my way to launching applications using Quicksilver or command-spacing for finding files through Spotlight.
All this to say that you can't say that the nipple system is clearly superior. Obviously it's a question of personal taste. I tend to agree with you that the non-apple laptops I've used suffered from bad trackpad implementations, but I'm sure one brand somewhere uses the same pad as Apple did (before they designed their own).
However, I still miss the built-in trackball of my Powerbook 150. Now _that_ was nice
Or how about microchip smart cards? You know, exactly like RFID, but you need to physically connect the contacts to read it? They've existed for over 20 years now, and are pretty darn reliable. They also aren't prone to demagnetizing.
Why be tagged like a pack of twizzlers at WalMart?
Yes but you see, if we stop buying their music, then they lose money and they blame rampant piracy. I would imagine that getting 10K$ from a 14 year old child is a LOT more profitable than selling her 2 CDs with her allowance money...
Personally, I much prefer the 3rd person view. It gives a much more natural view of the environment (i.e. position of the body, and peripheral vision). Give Oni a try, and you'll see what I mean...
Actually the first time Halo was presented (at MacWorld Expo) it was as a 3rd person game. The graphics and physics were amazing (quite close to the actual shipping game) considering it was running on a 4xx MHz G4 with a lowly Radeon (the first generation, IIRC).
People at the time were predicting great success for the game, since it was the first non-linear videogame that didn't require loading between every level, and where you could actually jump into a car and drive it.
Then the delays came. The buyout happened. The specs increased. The change from 3rd person to 1st person took place. And by the time the game actually shipped, it wasn't anything more than another First Person Shooter.
We keep hearing that it takes enormous amounts of energy to initiate fusion... Could lightning be a cost effective way to make fusion mainstream? I've seen videos of people "guiding" lightning by using small rockets... Could you use that energy in a meaningful way?
I couldn't agree with you more... I've got a LiDE 30. Love the scanner. Unfortunately, I don't have a windoze box. Just OSX.
Let me tell you that the software they shipped with it was a piece of shit. It's buggy, not twain compliant, is a memory hog, and is ugly as hell. At the time I bought it, they promised twain drivers "any day now". I've been waiting for 2 years.
So in the meantime I've been using VueScan. Still not ideal (as it has its share of bugs as well) but better that the stuff canon has to offer. My next scanner will likely be an Epson. At least they can write TWAIN drivers.
I'm personally waiting for these half-terabyte disks to become cheap. I want to build the equivalent of my iPod/iTunes but for my DVDs.
;)
You see, since iTunes came out, I never listen to CDs anymore. I rip them once, and store the discs someplace safe.
The big advantage of this is that my discs aren't prone to scratching/heat/humidity, and thieves won't easily find them in the eventuality that they found their way into my home.
For DVDs, now, the ideal would be a set-top box the size of my DVD player that has a DVD drive for ripping, and stores all my DVDs in their entirety. Last I checked, I had about 120 DVDs (counting the special features discs) which is fairly average by some people's standards. Ripping them all would still take over 500GB of data.
Some people complain about reliability for these drives... In this situation, since I have the original media, losing the 500GBs is not the end of the world.
So. All this to say: I for one welcome our increasingly capacious hard disk overlords
I've noticed a certain mentality in the US: It is everyone's right (or is that duty?) to sue the heck out of everyone else.
Perhaps these medical companies selling their expensive equipment are only compensating for the cost of equipment failure? An endoscope that loses an o-ring in a patient might cost the company half a million in "Digestive discomfort compensation"...
Just a thought...
I believe the ship in the trailer is one of the Destroyer-class starships, in Babylon 5. Check out "Babylon 5: Crusade" to see a picture. There is, though, a likeness between the Excalibur and the Kestrel (which came 3 years before the series). Mind you there are MANY similarities between EV and B5 that go the other way ;)
This movie looks awesome. Production quality looks great for a no-budget fan film. From the article:
I also hope they'll be the first feature-length movie to be distributed legally using BitTorrent, as a burnable DVD image! It could serve as an example for online distribution, and perhaps encourage more independent filmmakers to make movies and show their work. I'm sick and tired of the remakes/formula-movies coming out of hollywood.
Off topic, but all the laptop drives I've seen fail (3 to date, on a sampling of about 12 laptops, owned personally or by close family) were IBM TravelStars. Thank god they sold their HD business because frankly they were terrible at it...
But assuming that they can test each layer independently before assembling them, there does come a BIG advantage: Since each layer is smaller (i.e. the chip is segmented) you can have more chips made per wafer. Since the number of impurities per wafer would likely stay the same, you'd have better yields. Today, one impurity on a processor scraps the whole CPU, whereas in a stacked design, an impurity in one of the execution units would only jeopardize the layer that unit is on.
This also opens the door to different processes in CPU designs... MMICs made on GaAs substrates are EXTREMELY fast and low-power, but expensive to make in large surfaces/quantities. Imagine being able to make your execution units on GaAs, but keeping the less critical units on the 'slower' Si substrates... Then you've got a CPU that computes at several tens of gigahertz with negligible heat output, and caches that can be clocked higher because a) memories don't consume nearly as much power as the CPU, and b) the interconnect-related speed issues are reduced...
Kidding aside, though: Where are our photo-quality color laser printers? I wish more companies would spend time developing this...
I've seen a VERY similar contraption at school... A couple of engineering students did this as their final-year project. Prior art anyone? :)
RoboKeith
More details here
- Market share means the number of macs sold vs. the number of PCs sold in the same timeframe.
- Macs generally have a much longer time between upgrades than PCs (I still have a 4-year-old G4 running strong, with no need to upgrade yet, whereas a PC from 4 years ago can't even run _half_ the spyware that's installed on it
Assuming, for this example, an average lifespan of 5 years for a mac and 3 years for a PC, the installed base of Macs in use would be 1.66 times greater.
"Sleep" mode on the Mac is the equivalent to a Suspend on a PC. It leaves the RAM contents where it is, and keeps the memory powered. Everything else goes in low power mode, drives turn off, fans spin down, etc.
Your average iBook on an almost-full charge will last over a week in sleep mode before the battery runs out, so power requirement is very low. In fact, it probably uses less power to leave the Mac in Sleep mode than to do a full boot every time you use it. It certainly saves a lot of my time.
I believe they're dumping the PPC platform because IBM sees no reason to develop the chip further (i.e. increasing clock speeds). One way to counter the lack of speed is to add more CPUs in the same machine. They have a fairly abundant supply of lower-clocked chips.
Let's not forget the 1966 classic featuring Adam West and Burt Ward ;)
link
That's odd. The benchmarks I've seen don't surpass my single G4/466 in overall score.
Mind you the MacIntel (Rosetta) blows my G4 away in memory bandwidth.
Alternatively, we can kiss native OSX apps goodbye, because, hey, what's the use in coding for MacOSX if all you have to do is tell your clients to run WINE?
I don't like this move at all.
So is QuickTime Streaming Server. Plus as a bonus, it's free, and sounds better...
technically, all they'd have to do is patch the emulated directX calls to the native API. The other stuff should be light enough to emulate if it ran on a 700MHz celeron.
I'm thinking the new xbox has enough oomph to do that.