Perhaps this will be the death of POP and ROCK and all sort of teenager music groups as there will be no more musicians capable of playing an electric guitar.
pish - that happened years ago and didn't slow them down a bit!
Is it me or is the US getting to become more communistic...and China is 'becoming' more free?
well...the short answer is "yes," the long answer is "but such things tend to move cyclically, and it will take a whole heck of a long time for them to meet in the middle unless there's massive political upheaval leading to sudden democratization in China or a worldwide crisis (WWIII, mega-pandemic, or massive global intifada with attacks spreading all the way to rural Arkansas) leading to sudden draconian measures in the US (like McCarthyism with actual grassroots support)."
Bushie-style Constitution-breaking is bad, very bad, but not going to upend the country in the near future.
I have always wondered why image manipulation programs are pirated so much
simple: as far as i can tell, piracy was, until the release of Photoshop Elements, Adobe's main distribution method to general consumers. no normal person would shell out $500+ for photoshop...so apparently some idiot manager in the 90's really thought it was worth it to sell software at 4x its perceived value to 1/10 as many people, while 9/10 of their potential customers felt justified pirating it, even if they paid for every other piece of software on their drive.
1. Make great software 2. piss off client base 3. sell less software 4. ? 5. profit!
The prevalance and palatable pricing for Elements should drop the warezing of Photoshop.
"For Swank, the backyard cyclotron is a personal quest: He lost his father to cancer years ago..."
"'My father worked with me while I was building my first cyclotron...,' Swank said."
"Swank maintains the device is not dangerous for nearby residents."
wonderful...open-source domain checking to guarantee Americas can only watch short clips of female figure-skating and assorted athlete bios. my heart fluttereth with joy.
And you know this because...? How in the world can you make a claim like this?
well...his statement on the ethnicity of the major New York photo retailers is actually correct...but he seems to have missed the fact that the stores which are primarily run by Jewish New Yorkers (read: B&H, which has a sales staff that's 90% Hasidic) are the large, reliable and ethical ones that are considered the most trusted in the region. they have nothing whatsoever in common with the shady installations. So.....his population stats = decent; his wild allegations of impropriety = not so much.
Of course, froogle and similar listings may have removed the problem stores by now
many removed, the rest clearly identified. if you ever want to get back in the game, just start from resellerratings.com, bizrate.com, or shopper.cnet.com, and stick to highly-rated sites (a 3-second skim of user comments weeds out any bait-and-switch-fests). regularly saves me 15-30% -- although i do still hit brick-and-mortars for things i'm uncertain of -- since returning to the fly-by-night stores often entails a restocking fee.
froogle is less discerning. it's handy sometimes, but it spiders the scams and good people just the same. if you're cautious...i wouldn't use it.
it's also worth noting that most major brick-and-mortars all over the country now propogate their deals to resellerratings and the like. so if you prefer them, you can stick to ones with actual storefronts.
I don't buy from NYC area sellers. I include New Jersey, Rockland County, and Long Island in that zone.
geez...talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. so you're seriously telling us that the existence of fly-by-night bait-and-switch scams (which are clearly marked as such in very public seller watch sites) in a region makes you not willing do business with 2/3 of the nation's most affordable and reliable photography suppliers? i take it your Queens experience was less than stellar?
True...although considering that the mac mini isn't all that much bigger than a VHS tape, if all i wanted to do was tape something and bring it to a friend's house, even if they drm'd it to death i could conceivably just pick up my whole pvr and take it with me everywhere. intriguiging...
the concept of "engrish" isn't mocking non-native speaker's attempts to speak english, it's mocking the jaw-droppingly common practice of non-native-speaking *companies* thinking it's normal to have interns with no grasp whatsoever of the target language doing the translating for signs and boxes.
sure - my spanish is terrible - but when i'm preparing materials in spanish, i *ask a native speaker to proofread*
Boycotts don't work with companies as large as Sony.
economically true, but if your hope isn't economic but rather political -- that is, not to pressure them by the boycott itself, but rather to get one top-level executive (sony:worldwide) to notice that one mid-level executive (sony:USAmusic) has singlehandedly cost the company 0.2% of its profits and put its name in nasty news articles the world over...and to then mention that in the next board meeting when reviewing his salary and/or future employment -- then there's some hope.
Will sony give removal instructions? Their downloadable "patch" only updates their rootkit, but doesn't uninstall it.
yes, they will. but you have to ask and wait on customer service to get the uninstall program, and once you've run it your computer can no longer play the CD (without reinstalling the rootkit).
give me one, just ONE, good reason to switch to a Macintosh
for multitaskers: expose'. the f9/f10/f11 expose' functions make multiwindow multitasking much faster and more efficient than the alt+tab kludge. i regularly work with 10+ windows open (mail, calendar, internet, webedit x 3, graphic edit x 3+), and find my workflow is much much much faster on a mac - and that's for someone who just used a mac for the first time just a year and a half ago.
of course, if you're a one-program animal, then there's not much incentive - windows will actually give you more screen real-estate for single programs, on average, and the system operating speed is roughly equivalent.
ah! i see our confusion - i misinterpreted what you were saying. you're right in it not being AF, but i'm familiar with the convention that defines the "time it takes for the camera to save the picture" as shot-to-shot time; shutter lag usually refers to the time between AF lock and shutter swing; before the write cycle. as for card speed - MSpro, CF etc - they're all currently rated at or beyond the write speed of the cameras - my fastest CF card (sandisk extreme III) is ~133x, but my camera is somewhere between 60x and 80x. so the buffer size is starting to be more a factor than write speed when bursting multiple images...that and flash recycle...and sony is barely average in that department. you're prolly not their target audience.:-)
* How good are the pictures , straight off the camera ? I am not going to buy a 200$ camera and then go and spend 1000$ on photoshop,, just to get my snapshots have right whitebalance, sharping, saturation etc.
* How fast is the start up time, coz I expect to start and shut the camera often
* How much is the shutter lag, much important for me than AF speed. I don't want to click now and have the shutter go off after 2 secs , just to realise that my subject has moved.
* Does it have a movie mode, it's nice to record small clips now and then
* How small is it. I would like to carry it in my shirt pocket
* How easy is it to get the pictures from the camera to my PC. i.e. what is the quality of the s/w bundled with it
just for you to justify my statement, then:
*photo quality: most manufacturers are neck-and-neck; variation is stronger from model-to-model than brand-to-brand. *start-up time: sony is the pack leader in certain model lines (W), but all the top manufacturers are now neck and neck *what you call shutter lag is determined by AF speed; all good manufacturers now (since ~3 years ago) have their shutter lag after AF measured in small numbers of milliseconds. *movie mode: virtually all digicams now have very good movie modes. *size: all major manufacturers tied *s/w bundles: software bundles tend to be stinky, and many people prefer just to use finder/explorer (most cameras mount as drives for drag/drop) or iPhoto (*shudder*).
with all else being equal, you can perhaps see why i put such weight on AF at the moment - because there's such a difference in the 2005 models, and it's one of the most noticeable differences to consumers. that said - i regularly recommend canon, fuji, panasonic, etc to specific people who have specific needs; but for those who "just want a camera for their mother," i really do think sony had the best model line this year.
me too. quite a bit. but my camera system weighs 20+ pounds...my friends who use small devices, on the other hand, swear by MS/MSDuo. just saying...it aint goin' anywhere, even if we geeks dislike it.
i dont think anyone considers memorysticks to be anything but a useless dead format....
there's nothing wrong with memory sticks! sure they're proprietary - but sony's consumer-grade cameras are currently the best on the market,* simply because their AF system has made several advances in the past three years which make their cameras solidly faster in-use than the competition. canon's following closely; hopefully the situation will reverse in the next year or so (the market was even 3 years ago, such leads rarely last).....but all to say, memory stick, while a dead end, perhaps, is certainly not dead, as most of the best and most popular cameras still demand it. furthermore, with moore's law, EVERY format you buy is dead in two years. my first digicam (kodak) was given a 64 meg card (compact flash), my second (sony - memory stick) a 128, then later a 256, my third (canon - compact flash) a 512, and my fourth (canon) 1 gig. i anticipate a 4 gig card for my next camera.
all to say - people that waste time whining about proprietary memory that-they-can't-take-with-them need to realize that they can't take it with them *anyway*, at least until the megapixel war subsides. storage for serious photographers is more analogous to RAM than floppies - it's just part of the camera system. even if the format is compliant with subsequent models, they'll likely consider it prohibitively small, and they're better off selling it off to pay for half a new one.
ps: and before you say "b4t m1n3z d4 b0mbz!" realize i'm not dissing your camera, i'm just saying that, at this point in time, when you take a consumer down the line in a camera store that carries all brands of cameras, and make them play with each camera uninfluenced by sales rhetoric or concerns for proprietary formats or brand preference, a significant majority gravitate to the Sony's...not all, but most (like 5/6, among people that consult with me). doesn't mean the others aren't good, or don't have specific features that make them more desireable to other people, just means their user interface and general operation speed is slightly less eye-catching. natch?
pps: OT? sorry. just a pet peeve of mine. you can say it's proprietary and we should resist proprietary formats on principle, but don't mix "proprietary" with "technically bad," or underestimate Sony's ability to keep its CompactBetamax in very active use for years to come.
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Perhaps this will be the death of POP and ROCK and all sort of teenager music groups as there will be no more musicians capable of playing an electric guitar.
pish - that happened years ago and didn't slow them down a bit!
Can you really copyright grunts?
dude, you can copyright SILENCE..
Is it me or is the US getting to become more communistic...and China is 'becoming' more free?
well...the short answer is "yes," the long answer is "but such things tend to move cyclically, and it will take a whole heck of a long time for them to meet in the middle unless there's massive political upheaval leading to sudden democratization in China or a worldwide crisis (WWIII, mega-pandemic, or massive global intifada with attacks spreading all the way to rural Arkansas) leading to sudden draconian measures in the US (like McCarthyism with actual grassroots support)."
Bushie-style Constitution-breaking is bad, very bad, but not going to upend the country in the near future.
I prefer apple turnovers.
Don't you mean apple iTurns?
I have always wondered why image manipulation programs are pirated so much
simple: as far as i can tell, piracy was, until the release of Photoshop Elements, Adobe's main distribution method to general consumers. no normal person would shell out $500+ for photoshop...so apparently some idiot manager in the 90's really thought it was worth it to sell software at 4x its perceived value to 1/10 as many people, while 9/10 of their potential customers felt justified pirating it, even if they paid for every other piece of software on their drive.
1. Make great software
2. piss off client base
3. sell less software
4. ?
5. profit!
The prevalance and palatable pricing for Elements should drop the warezing of Photoshop.
interesting...
wonderful...open-source domain checking to guarantee Americas can only watch short clips of female figure-skating and assorted athlete bios. my heart fluttereth with joy.
a better explanation indeed. thanks for the correctingness.
And you know this because...? How in the world can you make a claim like this?
well...his statement on the ethnicity of the major New York photo retailers is actually correct...but he seems to have missed the fact that the stores which are primarily run by Jewish New Yorkers (read: B&H, which has a sales staff that's 90% Hasidic) are the large, reliable and ethical ones that are considered the most trusted in the region. they have nothing whatsoever in common with the shady installations. So.....his population stats = decent; his wild allegations of impropriety = not so much.
Of course, froogle and similar listings may have removed the problem stores by now
many removed, the rest clearly identified. if you ever want to get back in the game, just start from resellerratings.com, bizrate.com, or shopper.cnet.com, and stick to highly-rated sites (a 3-second skim of user comments weeds out any bait-and-switch-fests). regularly saves me 15-30% -- although i do still hit brick-and-mortars for things i'm uncertain of -- since returning to the fly-by-night stores often entails a restocking fee.
froogle is less discerning. it's handy sometimes, but it spiders the scams and good people just the same. if you're cautious...i wouldn't use it.
it's also worth noting that most major brick-and-mortars all over the country now propogate their deals to resellerratings and the like. so if you prefer them, you can stick to ones with actual storefronts.
cheers!
I don't buy from NYC area sellers. I include New Jersey, Rockland County, and Long Island in that zone.
geez...talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. so you're seriously telling us that the existence of fly-by-night bait-and-switch scams (which are clearly marked as such in very public seller watch sites) in a region makes you not willing do business with 2/3 of the nation's most affordable and reliable photography suppliers? i take it your Queens experience was less than stellar?
one wonders what irritating DRM Apple will put in
True...although considering that the mac mini isn't all that much bigger than a VHS tape, if all i wanted to do was tape something and bring it to a friend's house, even if they drm'd it to death i could conceivably just pick up my whole pvr and take it with me everywhere. intriguiging...
And how much Japanese or Korean do you know?
the concept of "engrish" isn't mocking non-native speaker's attempts to speak english, it's mocking the jaw-droppingly common practice of non-native-speaking *companies* thinking it's normal to have interns with no grasp whatsoever of the target language doing the translating for signs and boxes.
sure - my spanish is terrible - but when i'm preparing materials in spanish, i *ask a native speaker to proofread*
ergo: japanese =/= funny; engrish == funny.
Software solutions are great, but *be sure* to memorize (with your brain) "Where can I buy batteries?" in your target language...
A misconception bread from using windows.
;-)
i must say - nothing like a spot of tea with misconception bread and contraception jelly in the morning.
Boycotts don't work with companies as large as Sony.
economically true, but if your hope isn't economic but rather political -- that is, not to pressure them by the boycott itself, but rather to get one top-level executive (sony:worldwide) to notice that one mid-level executive (sony:USAmusic) has singlehandedly cost the company 0.2% of its profits and put its name in nasty news articles the world over...and to then mention that in the next board meeting when reviewing his salary and/or future employment -- then there's some hope.
Will sony give removal instructions? Their downloadable "patch" only updates their rootkit, but doesn't uninstall it.
yes, they will. but you have to ask and wait on customer service to get the uninstall program, and once you've run it your computer can no longer play the CD (without reinstalling the rootkit).
Nelson: "Ha ha!"
give me one, just ONE, good reason to switch to a Macintosh
for multitaskers: expose'. the f9/f10/f11 expose' functions make multiwindow multitasking much faster and more efficient than the alt+tab kludge. i regularly work with 10+ windows open (mail, calendar, internet, webedit x 3, graphic edit x 3+), and find my workflow is much much much faster on a mac - and that's for someone who just used a mac for the first time just a year and a half ago.
of course, if you're a one-program animal, then there's not much incentive - windows will actually give you more screen real-estate for single programs, on average, and the system operating speed is roughly equivalent.
That would be the equivilent of arresting you for owning a kitchen knife because someone else used a kitchen nife to murder someone.
i'd compare it more closely to barring someone from entering a middle school carrying a kitchen knife. have all the knives you want...just not here.
ah! i see our confusion - i misinterpreted what you were saying. you're right in it not being AF, but i'm familiar with the convention that defines the "time it takes for the camera to save the picture" as shot-to-shot time; shutter lag usually refers to the time between AF lock and shutter swing; before the write cycle. as for card speed - MSpro, CF etc - they're all currently rated at or beyond the write speed of the cameras - my fastest CF card (sandisk extreme III) is ~133x, but my camera is somewhere between 60x and 80x. so the buffer size is starting to be more a factor than write speed when bursting multiple images...that and flash recycle...and sony is barely average in that department. you're prolly not their target audience. :-)
* How good are the pictures , straight off the camera ? I am not going to buy a 200$ camera and then go and spend 1000$ on photoshop ,, just to get my snapshots have right whitebalance, sharping, saturation etc.
* How fast is the start up time, coz I expect to start and shut the camera often
* How much is the shutter lag, much important for me than AF speed. I don't want to click now and have the shutter go off after 2 secs , just to realise that my subject has moved.
* Does it have a movie mode, it's nice to record small clips now and then
* How small is it. I would like to carry it in my shirt pocket
* How easy is it to get the pictures from the camera to my PC. i.e. what is the quality of the s/w bundled with it
just for you to justify my statement, then:
*photo quality: most manufacturers are neck-and-neck; variation is stronger from model-to-model than brand-to-brand.
*start-up time: sony is the pack leader in certain model lines (W), but all the top manufacturers are now neck and neck
*what you call shutter lag is determined by AF speed; all good manufacturers now (since ~3 years ago) have their shutter lag after AF measured in small numbers of milliseconds.
*movie mode: virtually all digicams now have very good movie modes.
*size: all major manufacturers tied
*s/w bundles: software bundles tend to be stinky, and many people prefer just to use finder/explorer (most cameras mount as drives for drag/drop) or iPhoto (*shudder*).
with all else being equal, you can perhaps see why i put such weight on AF at the moment - because there's such a difference in the 2005 models, and it's one of the most noticeable differences to consumers. that said - i regularly recommend canon, fuji, panasonic, etc to specific people who have specific needs; but for those who "just want a camera for their mother," i really do think sony had the best model line this year.
me too. quite a bit. but my camera system weighs 20+ pounds...my friends who use small devices, on the other hand, swear by MS/MSDuo. just saying...it aint goin' anywhere, even if we geeks dislike it.
that would actually be Analog Rights Management.
lovely idea, though.
there's nothing wrong with memory sticks! sure they're proprietary - but sony's consumer-grade cameras are currently the best on the market,* simply because their AF system has made several advances in the past three years which make their cameras solidly faster in-use than the competition. canon's following closely; hopefully the situation will reverse in the next year or so (the market was even 3 years ago, such leads rarely last).....but all to say, memory stick, while a dead end, perhaps, is certainly not dead, as most of the best and most popular cameras still demand it. furthermore, with moore's law, EVERY format you buy is dead in two years. my first digicam (kodak) was given a 64 meg card (compact flash), my second (sony - memory stick) a 128, then later a 256, my third (canon - compact flash) a 512, and my fourth (canon) 1 gig. i anticipate a 4 gig card for my next camera.
all to say - people that waste time whining about proprietary memory that-they-can't-take-with-them need to realize that they can't take it with them *anyway*, at least until the megapixel war subsides. storage for serious photographers is more analogous to RAM than floppies - it's just part of the camera system. even if the format is compliant with subsequent models, they'll likely consider it prohibitively small, and they're better off selling it off to pay for half a new one.
ps: and before you say "b4t m1n3z d4 b0mbz!" realize i'm not dissing your camera, i'm just saying that, at this point in time, when you take a consumer down the line in a camera store that carries all brands of cameras, and make them play with each camera uninfluenced by sales rhetoric or concerns for proprietary formats or brand preference, a significant majority gravitate to the Sony's...not all, but most (like 5/6, among people that consult with me). doesn't mean the others aren't good, or don't have specific features that make them more desireable to other people, just means their user interface and general operation speed is slightly less eye-catching. natch?
pps: OT? sorry. just a pet peeve of mine. you can say it's proprietary and we should resist proprietary formats on principle, but don't mix "proprietary" with "technically bad," or underestimate Sony's ability to keep its CompactBetamax in very active use for years to come.