Really? So when is Apple going to stop dicking around with Harmony [wikipedia.org] compatibility?
It said "anything that sells more iPods." Seeing as nobody uses Harmony, I don't see what this has to do with things that sells more iPods. When was the last time somebody bought an iPod so they could use Harmony?
Ummm, most of those "MP3 phones" already support AAC.
But it's somewhat besides the point. Very few people listen to music on their phone or a "music center." They listen on their iPods, even if they have an MP3 playing phone in their other pocket. The phone is for making phone calls and texting. The iPod is for music.
So, you think we should use Ogg Vorbis or FLAC on our portable music players? Sure, they work fine on desktop computers, but move to a portable device, and the situation is different.
Vorbis: Less efficient to decode than AAC. Even MP3 is less efficient than AAC. This means you get shorter battery life from your player. Battery life is very important in portable devices. Furthermore, unlike AAC, Vorbis is not widely supported "out of the box" on chips used to power these devices. So, a manufacturer would have to make extra effort to support a format that hardly anyone uses, and which degrades battery life.
FLAC: Again, larger file size means less battery life. More importantly, portable players have limited space. Users won't be keen on filling up their devices with a fraction of the amount of songs they are used to. Further, most people use crappy earbuds to listen to their portable music, therefore any quality advantage is lost. And users have to wait longer for their tracks to download.
AAC: It's an industry standard, very efficient, widely supported. Offers good quality at small filesizes, helps preserve battery life. Seems like a perfect fit for this particular application, doesn't it?
For some strange reason, it's become taboo to flat out say, "in my eyes, this culture is fucking insane".
It's not taboo - you are just attacking the wrong target. This is not the result of Thai culture - it's the result of the Thai government. Two very different things.
If (when) George Bush decides to ban something like YouTube, would it be correct to say that American culture is fucking insane? Or would it be more correct to say that the American government is fucking insane?
None are deal breakers, but it seems that you either need to change the interface slightly anyway or add complexity to the lens. Just out of curiosity, what does Nikon do?
The aperture is controlled by a lever coupling to the camera body. In automatic mode, the electronics push this lever to the correct setting. In automatic mode, the manual setting is used. Works fine. Specifically:
1. There needs to be a motor to rotate the ring so it remains in sync with what the electronics choose for the fstop, which adds an additional point of failure,
How does this add complexity? There already has to be a motor in the camera to set the aperture. Lenses for digital cameras don't have an aperture motor built in. And why do you have to rotate the aperture ring? The Nikon lenses in automatic mode adjust the aperture directly, not using the ring. And it doesn't "rotate" the aperture. It uses a lever, as I said. Just like other cameras without an aperture ring.
Also, I want to address one of your previous comments:
First, I don't think that the intuitiveness of how to adjust the fstop matters. If you want using a camera to be intuitive, you're probably shooting in an automatic mode.
That doesn't make any sense. If I want to adjust exposure, or set a different aperture - it's much more intuitive just to do it directly, than to find the right "exposure compensation" mode.
You are assuming that intuitiveness and ease of operation is only for snapshots or amateur photographers. In reality, professional photographers need this just as much, or more than amateurs. Because pros are often working in high-pressure, "make or break" situations where they have to get the shot quickly - and failing to get the shot costs money. It's far better to have direct control than to have to wrestle control away from the camera when making a creative or technical decision.
There's nothing unintuitive about manual control. A camera in the hands of an experienced photographer, just becomes an extension of the eye and hands, and they don't even have to think about the changes they are making. This is why shutter and aperture are calibrated in f-stops. This is why there are "click-stops" on an aperture ring.
This is one of the reasons that Nikons are so popular among seasoned professionals. They have always done a fantastic job of designing a camera's ergonomics, controls, physical balance and user interface. The cameras feel right. And they made an effort to bring this into the automatic age - when many other manufacturers changed the interfaces around when they moved from manual to automatic cameras.
And that's not limited to usability. Canon, for example, totally screwed photographers who had chosen to shoot with their cameras, when they made the shift from manual focus to AF. They totally changed the lens mount - so photographers who had invested thousands in lenses, couldn't use their old lenses on the new AF bodies. Nikon retained the lens mount, and made it backward-compatible. So, I can (and do!) use lenses made in the 1970s, on the latest digital SLRs.
Perhaps you make the comments about "having to change stuff" because you didn't use the older gear. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. With good engineering, you can retain the best of the old, and combine it with the best of the new. But many companies don't care for excellence, and would rather change everything so you have to buy all-new gear, rather than caring about long-term investement in a system, or the needs of users.
Whether the software implementations are actually written to do so, and to do it well, is a different question entirely.
So, I guess it's good that Apple's video and sudio applications are written to take advantage of multiple processors. Why do you think Apple emphasizes multiple processors in their hardware more than most companies? It's because the software is designed to work with them. I mean, duh.
Final Cut is an editing application, not an animation or graphics package. Of course, it will import still images or sequences of frames just fine - but you need something to create them with first.
Though not impossible, that becomes harder with electronic control of the focus.
How so? The aperture has nothing to do with focusing. Nikon AF lenses all had a manual/automatic aperture ring, until the digital cameras came along. The coupling for the focus motor goes to the focus ring, not the aperture.
It's the same on TV - they don't make anything like £1 per viewer on a show.
Are you sure about that? Advertisers pay millions of dollars during an hour's TV. And that doesn't even include other sources of income that are derived from the show.
Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight.
That's all well and good, but what about my sense of smission?
No, but there are people who say, "I want to buy a iMac because it's a nice package, all together, and takes up no more desk space than the display. No wires!
But if the iMac didn't exist, they'd just buy a conventional desktop or laptop. So it's not really a "market" as such. It's just an aspect of the general PC market.
And there are also people who say, "I don't want to buy an iMac because I might want to upgrade the computer and keep the monitor or upgrade the monitor and keep the computer."
And that's a miniscule "market," hence not worthy of being called a market. It's more of a "demographic." There is a much greater number of people who want a small form factor computer than those who care about having a separate monitor. Really, with displays being so cheap when bundled with systems these days, almost nobody cares about the ability to upgrade their monitor separately.
There are marketing reasons why Apple might not want to service that market, but I really don't see how you can believe that the market doesn't exist.
I never said that such people didn't exist. but going to the extreme of calling every single type of customer a "market" is a little absurd. Those people, lacking the choice, will usually compromise on their dream machine - rather than not purchasing a computer altogether. So they actually form a part of the genral market.
There are loads of people (especially businesses) who don't want to buy an all-in-one machine because they *do* buy the monitor and computer separately
Sure, but you wouldn't define a "market" that way. And businesses aren't a good metric for individual people's choices of platform, or their desires.
Or, more to the point, they upgrade them separately. The monitor is often the single most expensive component of your computer, and being able to replace/upgrade your computer and display independently makes good financial sense.
That's not really how most lasrge businesses these days work. Firstly, they don't buy equipment, they lease it. And in today's crazy world, the labor to track monitors and CPU components vs. systems, probably costs more than just replacing the whole system. typically these days, if there is a problem with a leased system, the whole thing just gets swapped out, whether the monitor is separate or not.
I can get fairly close to the OS X experience with Vista or various flavors of Linux.
Ahhh... but you can't. you might be able to make Linux or Vista "look like" MacOS X. but you can't get the real goodness that the Mac platform offers - superior applications. On the Mac, application software is consistently much better made and more user friendly than on the other platforms.
It's not like Mac users spend all their time using the Finder. The applications are what any user spends most of their time interacting with. And the applications on Linux and Windows generally suck. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, that's how it is. That's the biggest difference with being a Mac user - we expect excellence from our applications. Whenever I have to cross over to other platforms, I am always stunned by what users are willing to accept in terms of application software. "Why do they put up with this shit?" is what I am generally thinking.
It's most pronounced when I go to seminars about software for other platforms. People at these seminars are full of praise for software that appears to be utter junk by Mac standards. They are very happy when an application works without major troubleshooting. They are quite happy with minor troubleshooting, or poorly designed user interfaces. In the Mac world, even minor troubleshooting, or a slightly flawed interface is considered an unacceptable flaw.
You might remember the days when the original iMac (the colored things with the CRT monitors) was a hot seller. You may also remember that a lot of companies (like eMachines) tried to make knock-offs, and sell an "all in one" computer. They failed miserably, because of this assumption that "all in one" was the main selling point of the iMac. Others failed miserably because they thought "pretty colors" was the main selling point of the iMac.
This demonstrates the fallacy of this market segmentation. The primary reason that people bought iMacs was because it was a good, easy-to-use computer, for a reasonable price. The market wasn't for "form factor."
Likewise, the reasons that people buy Mac Pros and iMacs are not that different, when it comes down to it. Mac Pro buyers don't say "I want a huge metal tower that weighs approximately 3 tons." They want a machine that enhances their productivity, and is not a pain in the ass. This is the same reason that people buy iMacs - it's just that Mac Pro buyers want a more powerful machine, and are willing to pay for it, because they have more demanding needs and make more money from their machine than the iMac user. But the core reason is the same. Many of them would love an iMac sized machine that is as powerful as a Mac Pro.
The iMac is in the market of "all-in-one" computers, which is different from a standard mid-line desktop.
How so? Most people buy their Windows PCs as an "all-in-one package" that includes an LCD screen. They don't buy componenets separately. The iMac gives them basically the same thing, but saves a heap of desk space, and doesn't have a tangle of cables running everywhere. Advantage: iMac.
This "all-in-one" market you speak of seems to be a fiction. People say "I want a new computer that works well" - not "I want an all-in-one" computer or "I want a computer with a separate monitor." People who segment the market in that way might be deluding themselves. I'm not sure where this crazy-ass categorization of the market comes from. It doesn't reflect reality, rather it seems to be a fabrication dreamed up by corporate executives, who are quite used to being divorced from the reality of the market, even though they think they know how to define it.
It's a good sign that someone lacks credibility when they start speaking of markets in these terms.
Look at a DSLR. Focus is still on the lens. F-stop control moved to the camera body
Which is a massive inconvenience. It's much more intuitive to have the aperture control on the lens. It's where the aperture is located, and the movement of the aperture ring is directly analogous to the change in aperture setting. In fact, it's not just an analogy, the movement of the aperture ring is directly linked to the aperture. With the control on the camera body, the wheel moves in a different plane to the actual aperture and the lens barrel - not to mention it not being located anywhere near where the aperture is.
If you base your comparison to 80s and 90s film cameras instead of the pre-AF days, the situation is even better in favor of my argument. Many of the differences (film advance, where and how the fstop is controlled, self-timer) go away, and some of the other settings (ISO) move into menus that are much harder to navigate than on a DSLR because they are using very short abbreviations and icons instead of spelling things out.
What? The Nikon F3 has a manual film advance where it should be, or the option of making it disappear with a motordrive. Thes self-timer was in the usual place. The ISO setting is where it belongs. The aperture setting is where it belongs.
Same with the Nikon F4 and F90, which bring in more electronic controls, but they are not buried in menus. The aperture control is still on the lens. ISO setting and self-timer setting are a simple button-press and control-knob turn. The necessary buttons are very ergonomically placed, and don't require taking the eye away from the viewfinder. They offer more controls, but they don't bury stuff in a menu. It's mostly digital cameras which tend to do this. Of course, the better designed digial SLRs stick to this principle for the most part, but still have awkard menu systems that the pre-digital SLRs did not.
These were cameras from the 80s and 90s, and they still had a proper aperture ring, which didn't disappear on Nikons until the digital age. Even better, you can still get light metering with old lenses on these cameras, while with the digital versions, you don't get any TTL metering with old manual-focus lenses.
So tell me, what is the advantage of burying controls in menus, when you could get sophisticated electronic AF 35mm cameras that didn't do this - and still gave you more functionality than most digital cameras? Somehow Nikon managed to do without them until the digital age.
because everything you do on a film SLR you do in about the same way on digital.
How is using the camera body to change aperture "about the same way" as actually using the aperture directly? How is totally losing light metering with manual focus lenses "about the same way" as doing it on an AF 35mm SLR, where they worked just fine?
Because slashdot is "news for nerds," not "open source news." Many slashdot readers are programmers or web monkeys. Good tools matter for these users, and good documentation does, too. So, what's wrong with reviewing a book about a very useful tool? Why does a tool have to be revolutionary to be worthwhile?
for some reason scientist working for the oil industry aren't respectable, they are shills and scientist working against the oil industry aren't shills they are respectable.
Except I didn't say that. These people are shills. They aren't "working in the oil industry" - they are mercenaries who are willing to publish self-serving bullshit about climate change for political reasons, not scientific ones. And the "respectable scientists" in this field are working in the field of climatology - they aren't working "against the oil industry." Notice how most of the shills who post climate change denial articles and books aren't actually climatologists.
The association of a person doesn't discredit the science they are doing. If there is a problem with the science, point it out. It will speek for itself.
And the problems with the science have been pointed out constantly, by real climatologists. But it doesn't "speak for itself" because the media distorts these things, and doesn't look at the science, and instead treats it like a Fox News controversy.
And lets not forget the death threats. Who has more to lose when scientist denying anthropomorphic global warming have their lives threatend?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Personaly, I give more weight to a scientist who lost his job and had his life trashed because his reasearch supported something specific and he stuck with that result or someone who has had their life threatend but is still willing to tell it like it is then I would to some one playing it safe and repeating what they were told
I thought you said that a person's affiliation should not affect the scientific truth. Now you are saying that the science doesn't matter, but threats on someone's life does.
Also, you're "repeating what they are told" rubrick is more characteristic of the global warming deniers, who say what their corporate sponors want them to, rather than the real climatologists who report their scientific findings.
Historicly, the ones doing this in spite of everything working against them have emerged to be the heros in history!
Right. The climatologists who fearlessly report the truth, in the face of an industrialized sociaety which does not want to face the truth. Those are the heroes, not those who repeat bullshit for corporate dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
It said "anything that sells more iPods." Seeing as nobody uses Harmony, I don't see what this has to do with things that sells more iPods. When was the last time somebody bought an iPod so they could use Harmony?
Ummm, most of those "MP3 phones" already support AAC.
But it's somewhat besides the point. Very few people listen to music on their phone or a "music center." They listen on their iPods, even if they have an MP3 playing phone in their other pocket. The phone is for making phone calls and texting. The iPod is for music.
So, you think we should use Ogg Vorbis or FLAC on our portable music players? Sure, they work fine on desktop computers, but move to a portable device, and the situation is different.
Vorbis: Less efficient to decode than AAC. Even MP3 is less efficient than AAC. This means you get shorter battery life from your player. Battery life is very important in portable devices. Furthermore, unlike AAC, Vorbis is not widely supported "out of the box" on chips used to power these devices. So, a manufacturer would have to make extra effort to support a format that hardly anyone uses, and which degrades battery life.
FLAC: Again, larger file size means less battery life. More importantly, portable players have limited space. Users won't be keen on filling up their devices with a fraction of the amount of songs they are used to. Further, most people use crappy earbuds to listen to their portable music, therefore any quality advantage is lost. And users have to wait longer for their tracks to download.
AAC: It's an industry standard, very efficient, widely supported. Offers good quality at small filesizes, helps preserve battery life. Seems like a perfect fit for this particular application, doesn't it?
It's not taboo - you are just attacking the wrong target. This is not the result of Thai culture - it's the result of the Thai government. Two very different things.
If (when) George Bush decides to ban something like YouTube, would it be correct to say that American culture is fucking insane? Or would it be more correct to say that the American government is fucking insane?
The aperture is controlled by a lever coupling to the camera body. In automatic mode, the electronics push this lever to the correct setting. In automatic mode, the manual setting is used. Works fine. Specifically:
1. There needs to be a motor to rotate the ring so it remains in sync with what the electronics choose for the fstop, which adds an additional point of failure,How does this add complexity? There already has to be a motor in the camera to set the aperture. Lenses for digital cameras don't have an aperture motor built in. And why do you have to rotate the aperture ring? The Nikon lenses in automatic mode adjust the aperture directly, not using the ring. And it doesn't "rotate" the aperture. It uses a lever, as I said. Just like other cameras without an aperture ring.
Also, I want to address one of your previous comments:
First, I don't think that the intuitiveness of how to adjust the fstop matters. If you want using a camera to be intuitive, you're probably shooting in an automatic mode.That doesn't make any sense. If I want to adjust exposure, or set a different aperture - it's much more intuitive just to do it directly, than to find the right "exposure compensation" mode.
You are assuming that intuitiveness and ease of operation is only for snapshots or amateur photographers. In reality, professional photographers need this just as much, or more than amateurs. Because pros are often working in high-pressure, "make or break" situations where they have to get the shot quickly - and failing to get the shot costs money. It's far better to have direct control than to have to wrestle control away from the camera when making a creative or technical decision.
There's nothing unintuitive about manual control. A camera in the hands of an experienced photographer, just becomes an extension of the eye and hands, and they don't even have to think about the changes they are making. This is why shutter and aperture are calibrated in f-stops. This is why there are "click-stops" on an aperture ring.
This is one of the reasons that Nikons are so popular among seasoned professionals. They have always done a fantastic job of designing a camera's ergonomics, controls, physical balance and user interface. The cameras feel right. And they made an effort to bring this into the automatic age - when many other manufacturers changed the interfaces around when they moved from manual to automatic cameras.
And that's not limited to usability. Canon, for example, totally screwed photographers who had chosen to shoot with their cameras, when they made the shift from manual focus to AF. They totally changed the lens mount - so photographers who had invested thousands in lenses, couldn't use their old lenses on the new AF bodies. Nikon retained the lens mount, and made it backward-compatible. So, I can (and do!) use lenses made in the 1970s, on the latest digital SLRs.
Perhaps you make the comments about "having to change stuff" because you didn't use the older gear. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. With good engineering, you can retain the best of the old, and combine it with the best of the new. But many companies don't care for excellence, and would rather change everything so you have to buy all-new gear, rather than caring about long-term investement in a system, or the needs of users.
So, I guess it's good that Apple's video and sudio applications are written to take advantage of multiple processors. Why do you think Apple emphasizes multiple processors in their hardware more than most companies? It's because the software is designed to work with them. I mean, duh.
Final Cut is an editing application, not an animation or graphics package. Of course, it will import still images or sequences of frames just fine - but you need something to create them with first.
How so? The aperture has nothing to do with focusing. Nikon AF lenses all had a manual/automatic aperture ring, until the digital cameras came along. The coupling for the focus motor goes to the focus ring, not the aperture.
But how many pepole are actually watching the shows, and don't just have the TV on in the background?
Goog commercials? Sir, such a thing does not exist.
Are you sure about that? Advertisers pay millions of dollars during an hour's TV. And that doesn't even include other sources of income that are derived from the show.
No, it's just you. Everybody else loves ads. And telemarketers.
That's all well and good, but what about my sense of smission?
But if the iMac didn't exist, they'd just buy a conventional desktop or laptop. So it's not really a "market" as such. It's just an aspect of the general PC market.
And there are also people who say, "I don't want to buy an iMac because I might want to upgrade the computer and keep the monitor or upgrade the monitor and keep the computer."And that's a miniscule "market," hence not worthy of being called a market. It's more of a "demographic." There is a much greater number of people who want a small form factor computer than those who care about having a separate monitor. Really, with displays being so cheap when bundled with systems these days, almost nobody cares about the ability to upgrade their monitor separately.
There are marketing reasons why Apple might not want to service that market, but I really don't see how you can believe that the market doesn't exist.I never said that such people didn't exist. but going to the extreme of calling every single type of customer a "market" is a little absurd. Those people, lacking the choice, will usually compromise on their dream machine - rather than not purchasing a computer altogether. So they actually form a part of the genral market.
Sure, but you wouldn't define a "market" that way. And businesses aren't a good metric for individual people's choices of platform, or their desires.
Or, more to the point, they upgrade them separately. The monitor is often the single most expensive component of your computer, and being able to replace/upgrade your computer and display independently makes good financial sense.That's not really how most lasrge businesses these days work. Firstly, they don't buy equipment, they lease it. And in today's crazy world, the labor to track monitors and CPU components vs. systems, probably costs more than just replacing the whole system. typically these days, if there is a problem with a leased system, the whole thing just gets swapped out, whether the monitor is separate or not.
Uh... why would a "language geek" and writer use Word?
Don't you mean boxes?
Ahhh ... but you can't. you might be able to make Linux or Vista "look like" MacOS X. but you can't get the real goodness that the Mac platform offers - superior applications. On the Mac, application software is consistently much better made and more user friendly than on the other platforms.
It's not like Mac users spend all their time using the Finder. The applications are what any user spends most of their time interacting with. And the applications on Linux and Windows generally suck. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, that's how it is. That's the biggest difference with being a Mac user - we expect excellence from our applications. Whenever I have to cross over to other platforms, I am always stunned by what users are willing to accept in terms of application software. "Why do they put up with this shit?" is what I am generally thinking.
It's most pronounced when I go to seminars about software for other platforms. People at these seminars are full of praise for software that appears to be utter junk by Mac standards. They are very happy when an application works without major troubleshooting. They are quite happy with minor troubleshooting, or poorly designed user interfaces. In the Mac world, even minor troubleshooting, or a slightly flawed interface is considered an unacceptable flaw.
You might remember the days when the original iMac (the colored things with the CRT monitors) was a hot seller. You may also remember that a lot of companies (like eMachines) tried to make knock-offs, and sell an "all in one" computer. They failed miserably, because of this assumption that "all in one" was the main selling point of the iMac. Others failed miserably because they thought "pretty colors" was the main selling point of the iMac.
This demonstrates the fallacy of this market segmentation. The primary reason that people bought iMacs was because it was a good, easy-to-use computer, for a reasonable price. The market wasn't for "form factor."
Likewise, the reasons that people buy Mac Pros and iMacs are not that different, when it comes down to it. Mac Pro buyers don't say "I want a huge metal tower that weighs approximately 3 tons." They want a machine that enhances their productivity, and is not a pain in the ass. This is the same reason that people buy iMacs - it's just that Mac Pro buyers want a more powerful machine, and are willing to pay for it, because they have more demanding needs and make more money from their machine than the iMac user. But the core reason is the same. Many of them would love an iMac sized machine that is as powerful as a Mac Pro.
How so? Most people buy their Windows PCs as an "all-in-one package" that includes an LCD screen. They don't buy componenets separately. The iMac gives them basically the same thing, but saves a heap of desk space, and doesn't have a tangle of cables running everywhere. Advantage: iMac.
This "all-in-one" market you speak of seems to be a fiction. People say "I want a new computer that works well" - not "I want an all-in-one" computer or "I want a computer with a separate monitor." People who segment the market in that way might be deluding themselves. I'm not sure where this crazy-ass categorization of the market comes from. It doesn't reflect reality, rather it seems to be a fabrication dreamed up by corporate executives, who are quite used to being divorced from the reality of the market, even though they think they know how to define it.
It's a good sign that someone lacks credibility when they start speaking of markets in these terms.
Which is a massive inconvenience. It's much more intuitive to have the aperture control on the lens. It's where the aperture is located, and the movement of the aperture ring is directly analogous to the change in aperture setting. In fact, it's not just an analogy, the movement of the aperture ring is directly linked to the aperture. With the control on the camera body, the wheel moves in a different plane to the actual aperture and the lens barrel - not to mention it not being located anywhere near where the aperture is.
If you base your comparison to 80s and 90s film cameras instead of the pre-AF days, the situation is even better in favor of my argument. Many of the differences (film advance, where and how the fstop is controlled, self-timer) go away, and some of the other settings (ISO) move into menus that are much harder to navigate than on a DSLR because they are using very short abbreviations and icons instead of spelling things out.What? The Nikon F3 has a manual film advance where it should be, or the option of making it disappear with a motordrive. Thes self-timer was in the usual place. The ISO setting is where it belongs. The aperture setting is where it belongs.
Same with the Nikon F4 and F90, which bring in more electronic controls, but they are not buried in menus. The aperture control is still on the lens. ISO setting and self-timer setting are a simple button-press and control-knob turn. The necessary buttons are very ergonomically placed, and don't require taking the eye away from the viewfinder. They offer more controls, but they don't bury stuff in a menu. It's mostly digital cameras which tend to do this. Of course, the better designed digial SLRs stick to this principle for the most part, but still have awkard menu systems that the pre-digital SLRs did not.
These were cameras from the 80s and 90s, and they still had a proper aperture ring, which didn't disappear on Nikons until the digital age. Even better, you can still get light metering with old lenses on these cameras, while with the digital versions, you don't get any TTL metering with old manual-focus lenses.
So tell me, what is the advantage of burying controls in menus, when you could get sophisticated electronic AF 35mm cameras that didn't do this - and still gave you more functionality than most digital cameras? Somehow Nikon managed to do without them until the digital age.
because everything you do on a film SLR you do in about the same way on digital.How is using the camera body to change aperture "about the same way" as actually using the aperture directly? How is totally losing light metering with manual focus lenses "about the same way" as doing it on an AF 35mm SLR, where they worked just fine?
I tried the same thing on my Prius, but it replied "Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"
Because slashdot is "news for nerds," not "open source news." Many slashdot readers are programmers or web monkeys. Good tools matter for these users, and good documentation does, too. So, what's wrong with reviewing a book about a very useful tool? Why does a tool have to be revolutionary to be worthwhile?
Why?
Except I didn't say that. These people are shills. They aren't "working in the oil industry" - they are mercenaries who are willing to publish self-serving bullshit about climate change for political reasons, not scientific ones. And the "respectable scientists" in this field are working in the field of climatology - they aren't working "against the oil industry." Notice how most of the shills who post climate change denial articles and books aren't actually climatologists.
The association of a person doesn't discredit the science they are doing. If there is a problem with the science, point it out. It will speek for itself.And the problems with the science have been pointed out constantly, by real climatologists. But it doesn't "speak for itself" because the media distorts these things, and doesn't look at the science, and instead treats it like a Fox News controversy.
And lets not forget the death threats. Who has more to lose when scientist denying anthropomorphic global warming have their lives threatend?What the fuck are you talking about?
Personaly, I give more weight to a scientist who lost his job and had his life trashed because his reasearch supported something specific and he stuck with that result or someone who has had their life threatend but is still willing to tell it like it is then I would to some one playing it safe and repeating what they were toldI thought you said that a person's affiliation should not affect the scientific truth. Now you are saying that the science doesn't matter, but threats on someone's life does.
Also, you're "repeating what they are told" rubrick is more characteristic of the global warming deniers, who say what their corporate sponors want them to, rather than the real climatologists who report their scientific findings.
Historicly, the ones doing this in spite of everything working against them have emerged to be the heros in history!Right. The climatologists who fearlessly report the truth, in the face of an industrialized sociaety which does not want to face the truth. Those are the heroes, not those who repeat bullshit for corporate dollars.