The more potential focal points you want, the less resolution you can have for any particular one of them. You have to record information for all possible focal points on the CCD. Conceptually it's no different from, say, dividing the CCD into four parts and recording an image with a different focal point on each of the quarters, then post processing to combine them as required. I think. So photographically speaking the image is degraded compared to just getting the focal point right in the first place. Which isn't to say there aren't cool things you can do with it.
Yeah, the hardware support is the killer, and why they won't do it. Where would all the drivers for all the obsolete hardware out there come from? Just getting it to boot on most 3-year old systems would mean having to write tens of thousands of drivers. Not gonna happen.
The way ahead is simultaneous release in all formats in all territories. Mark Cuban is doing just this with his 2929 Productions and HDNet Films. The first releases will be a bunch of stuff by Steven Soderbergh.
Here is the [cough] official [cough] statement of the Electric Universe Model, which appears to have been thought up by an electrical engineer during his lunchtime:
Nobody knows anything. My guess is, in ten years time, there will still be a current version of the Mac OS, a current version of Windows, and a current version of Linux.
The only one there's a real question about is Mac OS.
In 20 years? Who knows. I'd put money on Linux, even if only maintained by a few hobbyists. I'd wager that there *won't* be a version of Windows that has much in common with the current Windows. And if there is a Mac OS it will probably still be running on top of something like Darwin.
The only way to solve this is to attach a cost to personal data. As soon as you do this, companies will instead of trying to collect as much data as they can, treat it (rightly) as something they should collect as little as possible. Lost data should have a cost to it which sends shudders down the spine of Chief Financial Officers.
I expect this will take a big class action lawsuit, but if I were a company of any size which handled confidential client data, I would be scrambling for a way to reduce my liability.
... is not the specific case, which is troubling but relatively trivial, but the fact that it represents another step in creeping fingerprintization. I suspect that five years from now fingerprints will be the defacto form of ID in the US, like drivers licenses and SSIDs are now.
Why is it a problem (especially for me, a Canadian resident and British citizen)? Well, simply because I do not trust your government. I currently have *no choice* but to be fingerprinted if I wish to enter the USA. I need to do that for my work, so I just assume the position.
However, it literally makes me think twice about expressing my opinion freely on the net. Anyone who's had to deal with US immigration as a non-US Citizen knows exactly what the attitude is. It would come as no surprise whatever for me to be taken aside at immigration and questioned about opinions I had expressed.
I and many people of my acquaintance have deliberately avoided going the the US since 9/11 simply because of the strange feeling of entering an authoritarian state. The 'new normal' is not normal.
I expect to see a severe downgrading of the reliability of whatever brand it is they use in the next Consumer Reports, or at least the addition of a column for 'Slashdot survivability'.
Perhaps someone should post a helpful article on their site, when it finally comes back up.
A Bolshevik was talking to a Priest. "Your religion is dying. Marxism is the way of the future. Look at your churches! They are full of old ladies. What are you going to do when they all die?"
Priest: "There will always be more old ladies"
Dvorak is an ass. There will always be more kids who want to play shoot 'em ups.
It's like complaining that the movies are going to die because there are only six genres: horror, comedy, family, action, thriller and drama.
I run a heavy traffic photo mailing list (http://www.topica.com/lists/streetphoto) and the overwhelming response has been "Stuff Nikon".
Photogs tend to have well established workflows with a few choice tools (eg Capture One + PSCS) and do not enjoy having to use Nikon's frequently b0rked software.
There is no reason whatever to encrypt this data except to screw more $$ out of the customer.
If Nikon had a conspicuously superior product then this might conceivably make some kind of bean-counting sense but these days they don't. Canon's DP stuff is arguably superior and the only real effect of this on anyone will be to drive up Canon sales and drive down Nikon, amplifying an already-existing trend.
Thomas Knoll, who blew the whistle on this, is regarded with great affection within the DP community. Nikon is not.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of Nikon flushing itself down the toilet.
If they really are starting to increase market share there is actually an enormous amount of headroom for them. They could very easily be back at 15% in a couple of years if the trend continues and they don't fuck it up.
As a notorious mac user I have never had so many people asking me about macs and in many cases going out and buying them to replace PCs (eg brother in law, mother, nanny). The biggest single reason is not how nice they look but the fact that they are spyware free and don't have the BSOD (still a bit issue for many people despite XP).
One reason the MPAA is dragging its feet is because of the nightmarish contractual issues. They have yet to resolve all of this stuff satisfactorily with the SAG, WGA, DGA and so on. Look at the hoops Apple had to jump through to get iTunes up and running... and they still have to do it on a case by case basis, slogging through country by country... now imagine that multiplied a thousandfold. If any of their contractual partners figure they've given away something they shouldn't have, the whole industry could be shut down for one of the periodic strikes. It's a snake's nest. Worse, the members of the DGA, SAG and WGA (I'm one) have vanishingly little idea of what all this internet stuff means and are liable to vote in ridiculous ways. Worse still, the vast majority of members of SAG and the WGA are only marginally employed within the industry and have little incentive to make anything work... they are more likely to express their resentment at the industry as a whole by voting awkwardly. Humph.
I don't think 'token minority' means what you think it means.
Legitimate users may be a minority -- maybe even a tiny minority -- but they are not a 'token minority' by any means, in the sense of only there for symbolic purposes to legitimize the non-legitimate use.
I use BitTorrent *all the time* legitimately. Whether it's for some student movie or a big whopping disc image (like X-Plane). I might be in the minority but my uses are not token.
I just read the LGPL and it still seems too restrictive. This is from the POV of a one-man part-time developer. I have steered away from any GPL stuff just because it's a can of worms if at any point you think your app might become the basis of something commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't debunked, it was denied. There's a difference you know. Unless you're a fan of the White House.
Oh, for God's sake. They pissed off one whiner who couldn't decide whether he wanted to associate his Yahoo ID with his Flickr ID. Oh noes!!111!!
The acquisition of Flickr has been handled surprisingly well.
The more potential focal points you want, the less resolution you can have for any particular one of them. You have to record information for all possible focal points on the CCD. Conceptually it's no different from, say, dividing the CCD into four parts and recording an image with a different focal point on each of the quarters, then post processing to combine them as required. I think. So photographically speaking the image is degraded compared to just getting the focal point right in the first place. Which isn't to say there aren't cool things you can do with it.
Fuck 'em. Really. In the ass. With a chili pepper.
In the past I've made a point of buying stuff I liked, either on CD or from an online retailer (iTunes).
Well, Sony just lost my business. And fuck them if they think I am going to subsidize this bullshit.
Goodbye Sony. Hello allofmp3.com.
If you walk the corridors of Sony Music right now all you can hear is the sound of a toilet flushing.
Yeah, the hardware support is the killer, and why they won't do it. Where would all the drivers for all the obsolete hardware out there come from? Just getting it to boot on most 3-year old systems would mean having to write tens of thousands of drivers. Not gonna happen.
Jeesh. Is that a disgusting window layout or what?
The way ahead is simultaneous release in all formats in all territories. Mark Cuban is doing just this with his 2929 Productions and HDNet Films. The first releases will be a bunch of stuff by Steven Soderbergh.
Here is the [cough] official [cough] statement of the Electric Universe Model, which appears to have been thought up by an electrical engineer during his lunchtime:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/
I for one welcome our new web-based OS overlor... oh, shit, look at that, it's slashdotted.
PS You do know that in Soviet Russia, your browser runs your OS, right?
Hmmm.
... nope, right first time.
You're either an ass or...
Nobody knows anything. My guess is, in ten years time, there will still be a current version of the Mac OS, a current version of Windows, and a current version of Linux.
The only one there's a real question about is Mac OS.
In 20 years? Who knows. I'd put money on Linux, even if only maintained by a few hobbyists. I'd wager that there *won't* be a version of Windows that has much in common with the current Windows. And if there is a Mac OS it will probably still be running on top of something like Darwin.
Thanks for that image.
About the gloating, anyway.
Check out his PC World column , which is full of obnoxious gloating.
The only way to solve this is to attach a cost to personal data. As soon as you do this, companies will instead of trying to collect as much data as they can, treat it (rightly) as something they should collect as little as possible. Lost data should have a cost to it which sends shudders down the spine of Chief Financial Officers.
I expect this will take a big class action lawsuit, but if I were a company of any size which handled confidential client data, I would be scrambling for a way to reduce my liability.
... is not the specific case, which is troubling but relatively trivial, but the fact that it represents another step in creeping fingerprintization. I suspect that five years from now fingerprints will be the defacto form of ID in the US, like drivers licenses and SSIDs are now.
Why is it a problem (especially for me, a Canadian resident and British citizen)? Well, simply because I do not trust your government. I currently have *no choice* but to be fingerprinted if I wish to enter the USA. I need to do that for my work, so I just assume the position.
However, it literally makes me think twice about expressing my opinion freely on the net. Anyone who's had to deal with US immigration as a non-US Citizen knows exactly what the attitude is. It would come as no surprise whatever for me to be taken aside at immigration and questioned about opinions I had expressed.
I and many people of my acquaintance have deliberately avoided going the the US since 9/11 simply because of the strange feeling of entering an authoritarian state. The 'new normal' is not normal.
Oh no! It's their servers igniting!
I expect to see a severe downgrading of the reliability of whatever brand it is they use in the next Consumer Reports, or at least the addition of a column for 'Slashdot survivability'.
Perhaps someone should post a helpful article on their site, when it finally comes back up.
A Bolshevik was talking to a Priest. "Your religion is dying. Marxism is the way of the future. Look at your churches! They are full of old ladies. What are you going to do when they all die?"
Priest: "There will always be more old ladies"
Dvorak is an ass. There will always be more kids who want to play shoot 'em ups.
It's like complaining that the movies are going to die because there are only six genres: horror, comedy, family, action, thriller and drama.
He's such an ass.
Nikon are free to do this.
We are free not to buy their products.
I run a heavy traffic photo mailing list (http://www.topica.com/lists/streetphoto) and the overwhelming response has been "Stuff Nikon".
Photogs tend to have well established workflows with a few choice tools (eg Capture One + PSCS) and do not enjoy having to use Nikon's frequently b0rked software.
There is no reason whatever to encrypt this data except to screw more $$ out of the customer.
If Nikon had a conspicuously superior product then this might conceivably make some kind of bean-counting sense but these days they don't. Canon's DP stuff is arguably superior and the only real effect of this on anyone will be to drive up Canon sales and drive down Nikon, amplifying an already-existing trend.
Thomas Knoll, who blew the whistle on this, is regarded with great affection within the DP community. Nikon is not.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of Nikon flushing itself down the toilet.
That's 5% *this year*.
If they really are starting to increase market share there is actually an enormous amount of headroom for them. They could very easily be back at 15% in a couple of years if the trend continues and they don't fuck it up.
As a notorious mac user I have never had so many people asking me about macs and in many cases going out and buying them to replace PCs (eg brother in law, mother, nanny). The biggest single reason is not how nice they look but the fact that they are spyware free and don't have the BSOD (still a bit issue for many people despite XP).
One reason the MPAA is dragging its feet is because of the nightmarish contractual issues. They have yet to resolve all of this stuff satisfactorily with the SAG, WGA, DGA and so on. Look at the hoops Apple had to jump through to get iTunes up and running... and they still have to do it on a case by case basis, slogging through country by country... now imagine that multiplied a thousandfold. If any of their contractual partners figure they've given away something they shouldn't have, the whole industry could be shut down for one of the periodic strikes. It's a snake's nest. Worse, the members of the DGA, SAG and WGA (I'm one) have vanishingly little idea of what all this internet stuff means and are liable to vote in ridiculous ways. Worse still, the vast majority of members of SAG and the WGA are only marginally employed within the industry and have little incentive to make anything work... they are more likely to express their resentment at the industry as a whole by voting awkwardly. Humph.
How hard can it be for BT to spoof its packets? Can't it just put them inside some kind of bulk data wrapper?
I don't think 'token minority' means what you think it means.
Legitimate users may be a minority -- maybe even a tiny minority -- but they are not a 'token minority' by any means, in the sense of only there for symbolic purposes to legitimize the non-legitimate use.
I use BitTorrent *all the time* legitimately. Whether it's for some student movie or a big whopping disc image (like X-Plane). I might be in the minority but my uses are not token.
I just read the LGPL and it still seems too restrictive. This is from the POV of a one-man part-time developer. I have steered away from any GPL stuff just because it's a can of worms if at any point you think your app might become the basis of something commercial.
... for him to serve one to SCO.