Sensor technology and image processing is still in a state where sensor size matters
It always will be. The size of the photosite (and sensor) determines how many photons hits "each pixel". This is physics and can't change. Every single improvement on the phone side, will be mirrored by the SLR guys, which means they will always have an advantage of several orders of magnitude. A camera phone can get "good enough" but they will always be orders of magnitude worse than SLRs.
Example: There are a number of phones out there with more than 12 Mpix sensors. The Sony A7s has a 12 Mpix sensor. There is not a single smart phone in the world that can compete in the same league as the Sony. Even with shitty optics.
Really, the only thing my SLR does better than my phone is Optics
Nonsense. The sensor in your SLR blows the sensor of your phone out of the water. It's plain physics, and it will never change. Larger photosites collect more photons. You simply can not, in any possible way, create the same quality of images with a phone chip as you can with an SLR chip. Now, the optics are important too.
Now own a Samsung S5 specifiably because it has a 16.9 Mpix camera
If you are saying that your S5 takes pictures of comparable quality to a DSLR (or a mirrorless camera) with a similar pixel count you are astonishingly clueless. The Sony A7s has 12 Mpix sensor. It images blows any picture taken by the S5 out of the water. The phone can not play in the same league, not in the same game, in reality, not in the same universe, and the Sony has fewer pixels than the phone.
A personal computer can be used to do work on. That means it needs to have available the apps I need. I do photography (as most people), video, office docs and programming, mostly.
My PC needs a good photo management package, can't get one for a Chromebook. Equivalent of Lightroom or onOne. It needs a quality editing package as well, Photoshop is the only real competitor, it must have a decent office package (partly check) and video editing software (none exists).
Since Windows NT 3.51 Windows has been, by some margin, the best desktop operating system out there. Nobody else has come close. So, what lack of merit is this you are speaking of?
Most people are blind (and morons too, but that's another discussion). I'm not. Neither is anyone with a mild interest in photography or art. The fact that morons will buy snake oil, believe in astrology or Jesus and feel better when taking homeopathic medicines doesn't mean that peddling BS and charging for it is OK, nor does it mean that people that do not buy into BS like 42" UHD screens are snobs.
In reality there is a significant difference between up-scaled content and native HD. It's there, it is not only measurable, but it is easily visible. If the blind morons don't see it, they need to be educated. Same as with Jesus and astrology.
to untrained eye, a good upscaler will typically look almost as good or just as good as source material
No, it will not. That's not even theoretically possible. An upscaler simply can not add information that isn't there. I have worked with both real-time upscaling and non-real-time, which is significantly better since it can spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to add detail. I have never seen any upscaler able to come close to the original material. Not from SD to HD nor from HD to 4K.
Notably a lot of "native HD" content out there is in fact upscaled in production.
That depends. If the material is of recent production it is not, it is downscaled either from 4K or 8K. If the images were available in decent quality on film, it is probably scanned at 4K and downscaled to HD. To see the difference, get the Blue Planet series, watch the Seas of Life part. Most of the Blu-Ray is filmed on film, scanned at high quality and down-sampled to 1080p. Most of the under-water scenes are shot in SD. To me, the transitions from HD to up-scaled SD material is jarring. Very jarring. Others do not notice.
Get a modern DVD player with a good upscaler
I own several of the very, very best ones. They can not touch "native" HD material. Not even close. I also shoot quite a bit in 4K and down-sample that to 1080P. 4K down-sampled to 1080P blows material that is shot in 1080P out of the water. The quality difference is staggering. At 1080P.
I was in the same boat as Anonymous Coward GP. My company paid me the same as regular workers, the lawyers were working hard to get me a Green Card (and I did get one too) etc. The H1B scare on/. always surprises me. A couple of questions:
Is there a high level of unemployment in the sector that uses the most H1Bs?
I left the US a handful of years back, but when I was there, that was not the case. I worked for a start-up growing from four to forty employees when I was there, hiring engineers was always an issue, we simply could not get enough qualified applicants from the US and was regularly forced (by our needs) to get H1Bs.
Are typical H1B workers in the US paid worse than others with a similar level of education?
Again, when I lived in the US, paying for a house, a cleaner, a nanny and a decent car on my salary was not an issue. My wife got a work permit and worked in a non-stem field, her salary was less than half of mine, but her job also required at least a bachelor.
Are US engineers seeing their salaries going below people with an equivalent education level or lower?
I'd love to see numbers indicating this. I hear from "Silicon Valley" about over-paid people driving people with "normal" pay out of the city and way out of the region due to property price increases. Are these stories untrue? The number of CEOs in these companies are not enough to make property prices sky-rocket, that phenomenon must be caused by lots and lots of "regular Joe's" in the tech companies having significantly higher salaries than the average in the area.
Given the rate we are reproducing we will run out of resources as well as overpopulate ourselves into a corner well before we are done in by global warming
Seriously. You still believe the population explosion myth? You need to read a publication on the issue that is newer than about 1970.
Note that usage of "floor/story count" for buildings varies from place to place
Nope. The naming does, but the count doesn't. In my end of the world the first floor is the lowest you can get (unless there is a basement) but in the UK, the first floor is my second floor. We'd not disagree on the number of floors though.
As someone else said, C#, for example, also fits those criteria, is open source etc. Once you have done a bit of work in C#, going back to Java is kinda painful. Design by Committee, which is what Java is now, is certainly a less efficient way of killing something than a bullet to the head, but it is also more painful.
First, I'd recommend (futile, I know) you RTFA. Or at least what was posted here. The "Now your boss" isn't particularly relevant to a high-school student.
wants you to get your program running on a Mac. Or a Unix box. Or a Linux box. Or anywhere that isn't Windows....
You haven't been paying attention..Net (VB is.Net) is officially open source and available for the platforms you mention. The C# compiler is even open source. No possibility of Embrace Extend Extinguish (if you don't understand why I can't help). Also, the language used in High School to teach kids the fundamentals of programming has no relevance to anything done for work. Ever.
I totally disagree with you. I strive to learn a new programming language at least once a year. I also re-visit an old "friend" at least once a year. I have no need to "ditch" anything to learn something new.
For my daily work I do Java, C# and JavaScript mostly, and just because I have done some pet projects in Ruby doesn't mean I had to "ditch" C#. I can fit more than one programming language into my brain, but I can not be an expert in too many, obviously. Since C# and Java are syntactically more alike than different, and Google has all the standard Framework questions, I consider those two a single language, so switching between them is basically a noop.
So, if I only program in Java/C#/JS, why learn Ruby, Python or D? Simple. Every time I do a project in Ruby, I become a better Java/C# developer. If I brand into F#, I become a better JavaScript/Java/C# developer.
If I am in the process of hiring someone, if they have programmed in a single language for an extended period of time and do not have enough information to talk more or less intelligently about at least two other programming languages, I will recommend against hiring them. To me that is a far, far, far more important test than having them solve some retarded made-up programming related problem that they could find the solution to on Google in less than 30 seconds.
They can't add what is not there. Upscaling is never going to match a 1080p source. I have a fantastic upscaler and it gives terrible results on my 65" screen.
The difference in definition was very easy to see from even ten feet away
Probably not. Not from 10ft away. What you probably saw was the increased color space in UHD, which is certainly discernible at 10ft, and has the effect of appearing a little like increased resolution. In addition the UHD content was probably over-sharpened, which looks like higher resolution but which is only a nasty, nasty, nasty trick. If you want to see the nasty trick, watch the Netflix "House of Cards" series. The editor of those should be locked up for creating disgusting over-sharpened junk.
Oh, and no, Netflix does not broadcast 4K anywhere in the world (perhaps inside the Netflix offices). The bitrate is abysmal and the content is so over-sharpened it is ridiculous. Any 1080p Blu-Ray out-resolves any "4K" broadcast from Netflix. Sadly, Average Joe is never going to know and he is going to think he can actually see 4K content from Netflix on his 50" UHD TV. Anything below 70" is a scam. Netflix 4K is a scam.
either force you by threatening to damage your... your MS-dependent business... threatening to sue unless you pay them for stuff they don't really have valid rights to
And all of this relates to the patent-free open sourcing that MS is doing right now, being the topic of discussion here? You do know that all patents related to this stuff is also covered in this push towards FOSS, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe photographers are passing media with snapshots here where I live in Europe.
There is no way they can do that and survive as photogs. They'd be bankrupt in a month.
Sensor technology and image processing is still in a state where sensor size matters
It always will be. The size of the photosite (and sensor) determines how many photons hits "each pixel". This is physics and can't change. Every single improvement on the phone side, will be mirrored by the SLR guys, which means they will always have an advantage of several orders of magnitude. A camera phone can get "good enough" but they will always be orders of magnitude worse than SLRs.
Example: There are a number of phones out there with more than 12 Mpix sensors. The Sony A7s has a 12 Mpix sensor. There is not a single smart phone in the world that can compete in the same league as the Sony. Even with shitty optics.
Really, the only thing my SLR does better than my phone is Optics
Nonsense. The sensor in your SLR blows the sensor of your phone out of the water. It's plain physics, and it will never change. Larger photosites collect more photons. You simply can not, in any possible way, create the same quality of images with a phone chip as you can with an SLR chip. Now, the optics are important too.
Now own a Samsung S5 specifiably because it has a 16.9 Mpix camera
If you are saying that your S5 takes pictures of comparable quality to a DSLR (or a mirrorless camera) with a similar pixel count you are astonishingly clueless. The Sony A7s has 12 Mpix sensor. It images blows any picture taken by the S5 out of the water. The phone can not play in the same league, not in the same game, in reality, not in the same universe, and the Sony has fewer pixels than the phone.
A personal computer can be used to do work on. That means it needs to have available the apps I need. I do photography (as most people), video, office docs and programming, mostly.
My PC needs a good photo management package, can't get one for a Chromebook. Equivalent of Lightroom or onOne. It needs a quality editing package as well, Photoshop is the only real competitor, it must have a decent office package (partly check) and video editing software (none exists).
Put Linux on that PC and enjoy a fresh new computer experience
Yeah, right. Give me Darkroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro on that "fresh new computer experience". perhaps you meant "frustrating new computer..."
No
Show me the PCs running anything but Windows
Show me a PC customer who wants anything but Windows or OSX on their desktop/laptop.
Microsoft never made it on merit..
Since Windows NT 3.51 Windows has been, by some margin, the best desktop operating system out there. Nobody else has come close. So, what lack of merit is this you are speaking of?
Most people are blind (and morons too, but that's another discussion). I'm not. Neither is anyone with a mild interest in photography or art. The fact that morons will buy snake oil, believe in astrology or Jesus and feel better when taking homeopathic medicines doesn't mean that peddling BS and charging for it is OK, nor does it mean that people that do not buy into BS like 42" UHD screens are snobs.
In reality there is a significant difference between up-scaled content and native HD. It's there, it is not only measurable, but it is easily visible. If the blind morons don't see it, they need to be educated. Same as with Jesus and astrology.
to untrained eye, a good upscaler will typically look almost as good or just as good as source material
No, it will not. That's not even theoretically possible. An upscaler simply can not add information that isn't there. I have worked with both real-time upscaling and non-real-time, which is significantly better since it can spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to add detail. I have never seen any upscaler able to come close to the original material. Not from SD to HD nor from HD to 4K.
Notably a lot of "native HD" content out there is in fact upscaled in production.
That depends. If the material is of recent production it is not, it is downscaled either from 4K or 8K. If the images were available in decent quality on film, it is probably scanned at 4K and downscaled to HD. To see the difference, get the Blue Planet series, watch the Seas of Life part. Most of the Blu-Ray is filmed on film, scanned at high quality and down-sampled to 1080p. Most of the under-water scenes are shot in SD. To me, the transitions from HD to up-scaled SD material is jarring. Very jarring. Others do not notice.
Get a modern DVD player with a good upscaler
I own several of the very, very best ones. They can not touch "native" HD material. Not even close. I also shoot quite a bit in 4K and down-sample that to 1080P. 4K down-sampled to 1080P blows material that is shot in 1080P out of the water. The quality difference is staggering. At 1080P.
I was in the same boat as Anonymous Coward GP. My company paid me the same as regular workers, the lawyers were working hard to get me a Green Card (and I did get one too) etc. The H1B scare on /. always surprises me. A couple of questions:
I left the US a handful of years back, but when I was there, that was not the case. I worked for a start-up growing from four to forty employees when I was there, hiring engineers was always an issue, we simply could not get enough qualified applicants from the US and was regularly forced (by our needs) to get H1Bs.
Again, when I lived in the US, paying for a house, a cleaner, a nanny and a decent car on my salary was not an issue. My wife got a work permit and worked in a non-stem field, her salary was less than half of mine, but her job also required at least a bachelor.
I'd love to see numbers indicating this. I hear from "Silicon Valley" about over-paid people driving people with "normal" pay out of the city and way out of the region due to property price increases. Are these stories untrue? The number of CEOs in these companies are not enough to make property prices sky-rocket, that phenomenon must be caused by lots and lots of "regular Joe's" in the tech companies having significantly higher salaries than the average in the area.
Wooosh
Given the rate we are reproducing we will run out of resources as well as overpopulate ourselves into a corner well before we are done in by global warming
Seriously. You still believe the population explosion myth? You need to read a publication on the issue that is newer than about 1970.
Note that usage of "floor/story count" for buildings varies from place to place
Nope. The naming does, but the count doesn't. In my end of the world the first floor is the lowest you can get (unless there is a basement) but in the UK, the first floor is my second floor. We'd not disagree on the number of floors though.
As someone else said, C#, for example, also fits those criteria, is open source etc. Once you have done a bit of work in C#, going back to Java is kinda painful. Design by Committee, which is what Java is now, is certainly a less efficient way of killing something than a bullet to the head, but it is also more painful.
Perl
Now your boss
First, I'd recommend (futile, I know) you RTFA. Or at least what was posted here. The "Now your boss" isn't particularly relevant to a high-school student.
wants you to get your program running on a Mac. Or a Unix box. Or a Linux box. Or anywhere that isn't Windows....
You haven't been paying attention. .Net (VB is .Net) is officially open source and available for the platforms you mention. The C# compiler is even open source. No possibility of Embrace Extend Extinguish (if you don't understand why I can't help). Also, the language used in High School to teach kids the fundamentals of programming has no relevance to anything done for work. Ever.
BZZZT! WRONG!
I totally disagree with you. I strive to learn a new programming language at least once a year. I also re-visit an old "friend" at least once a year. I have no need to "ditch" anything to learn something new.
For my daily work I do Java, C# and JavaScript mostly, and just because I have done some pet projects in Ruby doesn't mean I had to "ditch" C#. I can fit more than one programming language into my brain, but I can not be an expert in too many, obviously. Since C# and Java are syntactically more alike than different, and Google has all the standard Framework questions, I consider those two a single language, so switching between them is basically a noop.
So, if I only program in Java/C#/JS, why learn Ruby, Python or D? Simple. Every time I do a project in Ruby, I become a better Java/C# developer. If I brand into F#, I become a better JavaScript/Java/C# developer.
If I am in the process of hiring someone, if they have programmed in a single language for an extended period of time and do not have enough information to talk more or less intelligently about at least two other programming languages, I will recommend against hiring them. To me that is a far, far, far more important test than having them solve some retarded made-up programming related problem that they could find the solution to on Google in less than 30 seconds.
Sorry, if your IT department still has a significant amount of 2003 servers, they should be fired. You should be on 2008R2 by now.
I've purchased and watched UHD format shows and movies.
Where? On Netflix? Netflix has never aired anything that resembles 4K. It's a scam.
They can't add what is not there. Upscaling is never going to match a 1080p source. I have a fantastic upscaler and it gives terrible results on my 65" screen.
The difference in definition was very easy to see from even ten feet away
Probably not. Not from 10ft away. What you probably saw was the increased color space in UHD, which is certainly discernible at 10ft, and has the effect of appearing a little like increased resolution. In addition the UHD content was probably over-sharpened, which looks like higher resolution but which is only a nasty, nasty, nasty trick. If you want to see the nasty trick, watch the Netflix "House of Cards" series. The editor of those should be locked up for creating disgusting over-sharpened junk.
Oh, and no, Netflix does not broadcast 4K anywhere in the world (perhaps inside the Netflix offices). The bitrate is abysmal and the content is so over-sharpened it is ridiculous. Any 1080p Blu-Ray out-resolves any "4K" broadcast from Netflix. Sadly, Average Joe is never going to know and he is going to think he can actually see 4K content from Netflix on his 50" UHD TV. Anything below 70" is a scam. Netflix 4K is a scam.
either force you by threatening to damage your ... your MS-dependent business ... threatening to sue unless you pay them for stuff they don't really have valid rights to
And all of this relates to the patent-free open sourcing that MS is doing right now, being the topic of discussion here? You do know that all patents related to this stuff is also covered in this push towards FOSS, right?