With technology changing monthly, letting the market figure out what is needed is the best solution.
That sounds rather backwards. If stuff is changing rapidly, wouldn't an outside standard be much more important? If technology were changing more slowly, there would be much less need for deliberate standardization or intervention, because we wouldn't have a crazy array of incompatible technologies.
But seriously... I'm pretty sure whatever was going on there was illegal, but I can't prove it...
So what was your comment about? If there is criminal profit being made by individuals... how does that reflect badly on government subsidies? Doesn't it just mean that that there's criminal activity going on? maybe the government should crack down on the illegal activity, but I'm not sure what it has to do with social security or subsidized housing.
Note that those two are the verbal forms of the (literally translated) words multiwordcombination (flerordskombination) and singleconceptexpression (enkeltkonceptsudtryk), none of which are used at all, but are readily understandable.
Pismo (G3 Firewire) - built like TANKS. TANKS I SAY.
Truer words have not been spoken. I used a Pismo for in-the-field capture of huge digital images from Phaso One cameras. That thing went to the desert, in blistering heat and dust, and up Mt. Kilimanjaro without skipping a beat.
I doubt anything would convince you otherwise. Good grief - if you won't accept Marc as hard left, I wonder who you would?
Will you PLEASE explain to me WHY he is "hard left" as you claim. He's from that conservative rag The New Republic. They never had anyone left-of-center writing for them.
As for Marc and Roger's writing, they could write circles around you.
Difference is that I'm writing comments to idiots on slashdot - not being paid for my insight and writing skills.
As for the other Pajamas person - "neocon." this just shows the corruption. Neocons are alreaedy funded by the government, and the whole belief system is based around propaganda. So how can funding any necon be considered a good thing?
You also have a strange idea of balance. As if fairness is achieved by having "hard left" and a hard right
writer. That sucks. Why not fund people who are reasonable, can write well, and are not partisan?
What the fuck are you talking about? Instead of trying to attack me - why not give me factual reasoning.
Are you saying there's no distortion in modern zoom lenses? I've used them all the time. It just seems your standards aren't high enough to notice. No zoom lens is free of distortion. When you do high-resolution panorama stitching like I do, lens geometry is essential. You get to notice this stuff when most people just overlook it.
Are you saying that modern zoom lenses defy the laws of physics? How could they let as much light in as a similarly designed prime lens?
Yeah, thanks, but I'm a camera collector - and I have built my own unusual cameras before, including film-based stereo rigs. It's not really worth it to me unless it's a reasonably good set-up.
But I think that more people should experiment with this kind of thing, instead of just doing the same old thing with their cameras.
But I'm not talking about "blue collar life" - I'm talking about poor Americans. Happiness is a relative social and cultural thing. It's not like all Africans are suffering more than all Americans. This idea seems to be yet another myth perpetuated for propaganda to instill the idea that America is a lot better than it really is.
To hear some people talk, you'd think that American streets were paved with gold and chocolate, and that living in any other country is like being in a bad part of mexico or something.
No, it didn't start as a "blog" because the word wasn't around then. We didn't need to make up special words for publishing our words on the internets.
But the more alarming question is, why are you deliberatly tilting your drive while it's in operation? To test the theory??
Because I want to know if I have a badly designed system that won't tolerate normal use. There's nothing in the manual about not doing it. It's only an iBook, it's not like it's worth much.
But many of the poor aren't earning $10,000 a year. And it is a strange thing to say, because we are talking about America, where it is more expensive to live. So earning $10,000 in America is very different to earning $10,000 in Africa.
"Wealth" and "class" are more related to lifestyle, anyway. Some places are very expensive to live, but the quality of life is very low, and would not be admired by someone earning low wages in a pleasant place.
As I mentioned to the other poster, if your lens was designed the same way with the same materials and process - but it was not a zoom lens - it would have an even wider aperture. An equivalent prime lens would be more like f2.0 or f1.4.
I don't like sacrificing light gathering. It is essential under low light. f2.8 is not impressive to me - as I am used to working with f0.9 to f2.0 lenses. How do you ignore the rules of physics and say that a zoom lens is more efficient than an equivalent prime lens?
I donno, mine's pretty decent at f3.5, constant-aperture. Of course the drawback is that it weighs 3.5lbs.
You are just demonstrating my point. A similarly designed prime lens would have a wider aperture, like 2.8 or 1.4. There's no way around the fact that adding glass and complexity reduces efficiency.
Yes. I do. There are a few exceptions. But on the whole, most long-range zooms suck unless you pay the big bucks. I'll wager that even though you have constant aperture, you probably get quite a range of distortion, too. Most people don't notice this. Zooms are inherntly complex optics which are less efficient than an equivalent prime lens. I prefer to use prime lenses, because they have so much less distortion.
If they both worked together, that would be way cool. Take an overview shot, with a detail shot at the same time. Use stitching software to blend them, or just use on a website with "click to view detail" or automate one of those "picture in picture" technical illustrations with an arrow pointing to the srea the detail is taken from.
We've found that a minimum of 10x optical zoom is nice.
10x zooms are horribly ineffecient. They aren't good at gathering light, so the camera has to increase gain and noise. They also distort badly, in different ways over the range of the zoom.
What would be better would be compact cameras with interchangeable lenses. Like the Leica rangefinders. But that's expensive and impractical for most users - leave that to Leica.
There needs to be an external flash for many photos, and that requires an external flash connector. It's much better to bounce the flash off the ceiling than to aim it directly at the subject.
At this point, why not just get a real SLR camera, rather than trying to turn a point&shoot camera into a fully featured camera? Most of these compact cameras are ripoffs. You will get much better value out of an entry-level Nikon SLR that is built to last for years, and can take any kind of lens or attachment.
Why fuss trying to get good results out of a point&shoot. I reckon they should make "mini-SLRs" instead. With the tiny size of modern sensors, a Pro SLR could be made very small, yet still be comfortable to use.
Does anyone buy Sony Cybershot cameras for anything other than the "cyber" name and the "kewl" streamilined shape? I guess the Sony brand is important there too.
I tried using one of their "space age" looking cameras, and the space age look totally detracted from usability. It made no sense. It was almost impossible to hold the camera in a normal human way. It made the camera shake badly and it was unusable for handheld telephoto shots.
How do products like these even make it to market?
You poor thing. I like Kodak film and their pro imaging materials. But they make the worst point-and-shoot cameras on earth. When I worked at a camera shop they tried to get me to push those things because they get good deals with Kodak. But it turns my stomach to pick those horrid things up.
They're easy. You just Gaffa tape two cameras together and you're good to go. Well, if you're not into gaffa, you can always use, like mounting hardware and stuff. Or just a double-ended screw in the tripod mount, provided it is centred underneath the lens, and not offset. A high-end system will have adjustable spacing and adjustable toe-in among other features.
Then you use free software like Panorama Tools to process the image in a variety of ways.
Digital cameras are so cheap these days that it's very tempting to buy a couple of cheapies for a dedicated compact-size 3D snapshot camera.
Well, I should qualify the statement first. I meant "moderately" raising the minimum wage. If you raise it too much at once, then yes, it could.
The point is that if an employer is making so little money from an employee that paying them a decent wage is going to kill profits - then the business was never sustainable in the first place. The idea that companies are making profits solely because of the low minimum wage is absurd. It would mean that their business is actually about making razor thin margins off bad workplace conditions - rather than selling a product or service.
I'd like to see ANY real evidence for this rhetoric that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Seriously. Those are the people making bold claims that need to be proved.
The Xbox360 spins at crazy RPMs for speed -- at that point, the disc+drive is a gryoscope. You remember what it felt like to try to move a gyroscope as a kid, right? The damn thing generates its own gravity.
Gyroscopic force. Big deal. If rotational speed is the only issue, why is my laptop's DVD drive immune to scratching when I move it while it is spinning at full speed?
For a nice experiment try copying some Data from a DVD in your Laptop during which you start moving it from Horizontal to Vertical.
OK. I just tried this on my slot-loading iBook DVD drive. I felt some gyroscpoic force, but the disc was totally unscratched, and the copying unaffected. I even tried doing it rapidly and shaking the machine around. Not a single hitch.
Shouldn't a device aimed at a wide audience (including children) be designed to accomodate this usage, seeing as many people do it? Isn't it the job of an engineer to make things easier for people, rather than more difficult? Calling people stupid for a fairly normal use of the product isn't very productive.
Imagine if companies actually marketed their gear that way: Use our product! It's more difficult to use, less reliable - and we'll call you stupid if you use it!"
Kind of the opposite of the "everything's easy as ABC" way that this stuff is marketed. Does the company expect the consumer to disbelieve their advertising? "Oh, we told you it would be easy before you bought it, but now we have your money and you are stupid for believing us when we said it would be easy."
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds rather backwards. If stuff is changing rapidly, wouldn't an outside standard be much more important? If technology were changing more slowly, there would be much less need for deliberate standardization or intervention, because we wouldn't have a crazy array of incompatible technologies.
So what was your comment about? If there is criminal profit being made by individuals ... how does that reflect badly on government subsidies? Doesn't it just mean that that there's criminal activity going on? maybe the government should crack down on the illegal activity, but I'm not sure what it has to do with social security or subsidized housing.
Would sir like one's crack-pipe pre-warmed?
That's so hot.
Truer words have not been spoken. I used a Pismo for in-the-field capture of huge digital images from Phaso One cameras. That thing went to the desert, in blistering heat and dust, and up Mt. Kilimanjaro without skipping a beat.
They talk like Swedish pirates. Surely, the quickening approaches.
Will you PLEASE explain to me WHY he is "hard left" as you claim. He's from that conservative rag The New Republic. They never had anyone left-of-center writing for them.
As for Marc and Roger's writing, they could write circles around you.
Difference is that I'm writing comments to idiots on slashdot - not being paid for my insight and writing skills.
As for the other Pajamas person - "neocon." this just shows the corruption. Neocons are alreaedy funded by the government, and the whole belief system is based around propaganda. So how can funding any necon be considered a good thing?
You also have a strange idea of balance. As if fairness is achieved by having "hard left" and a hard right writer. That sucks. Why not fund people who are reasonable, can write well, and are not partisan?
Are you saying there's no distortion in modern zoom lenses? I've used them all the time. It just seems your standards aren't high enough to notice. No zoom lens is free of distortion. When you do high-resolution panorama stitching like I do, lens geometry is essential. You get to notice this stuff when most people just overlook it.
Are you saying that modern zoom lenses defy the laws of physics? How could they let as much light in as a similarly designed prime lens?
But I think that more people should experiment with this kind of thing, instead of just doing the same old thing with their cameras.
To hear some people talk, you'd think that American streets were paved with gold and chocolate, and that living in any other country is like being in a bad part of mexico or something.
No, it didn't start as a "blog" because the word wasn't around then. We didn't need to make up special words for publishing our words on the internets.
Because I want to know if I have a badly designed system that won't tolerate normal use. There's nothing in the manual about not doing it. It's only an iBook, it's not like it's worth much.
"Wealth" and "class" are more related to lifestyle, anyway. Some places are very expensive to live, but the quality of life is very low, and would not be admired by someone earning low wages in a pleasant place.
As I mentioned to the other poster, if your lens was designed the same way with the same materials and process - but it was not a zoom lens - it would have an even wider aperture. An equivalent prime lens would be more like f2.0 or f1.4.
I don't like sacrificing light gathering. It is essential under low light. f2.8 is not impressive to me - as I am used to working with f0.9 to f2.0 lenses. How do you ignore the rules of physics and say that a zoom lens is more efficient than an equivalent prime lens?
You are just demonstrating my point. A similarly designed prime lens would have a wider aperture, like 2.8 or 1.4. There's no way around the fact that adding glass and complexity reduces efficiency.
Yes. I do. There are a few exceptions. But on the whole, most long-range zooms suck unless you pay the big bucks. I'll wager that even though you have constant aperture, you probably get quite a range of distortion, too. Most people don't notice this. Zooms are inherntly complex optics which are less efficient than an equivalent prime lens. I prefer to use prime lenses, because they have so much less distortion.
If they both worked together, that would be way cool. Take an overview shot, with a detail shot at the same time. Use stitching software to blend them, or just use on a website with "click to view detail" or automate one of those "picture in picture" technical illustrations with an arrow pointing to the srea the detail is taken from.
10x zooms are horribly ineffecient. They aren't good at gathering light, so the camera has to increase gain and noise. They also distort badly, in different ways over the range of the zoom.
What would be better would be compact cameras with interchangeable lenses. Like the Leica rangefinders. But that's expensive and impractical for most users - leave that to Leica.
There needs to be an external flash for many photos, and that requires an external flash connector. It's much better to bounce the flash off the ceiling than to aim it directly at the subject.
At this point, why not just get a real SLR camera, rather than trying to turn a point&shoot camera into a fully featured camera? Most of these compact cameras are ripoffs. You will get much better value out of an entry-level Nikon SLR that is built to last for years, and can take any kind of lens or attachment.
Why fuss trying to get good results out of a point&shoot. I reckon they should make "mini-SLRs" instead. With the tiny size of modern sensors, a Pro SLR could be made very small, yet still be comfortable to use.
Does anyone buy Sony Cybershot cameras for anything other than the "cyber" name and the "kewl" streamilined shape? I guess the Sony brand is important there too.
I tried using one of their "space age" looking cameras, and the space age look totally detracted from usability. It made no sense. It was almost impossible to hold the camera in a normal human way. It made the camera shake badly and it was unusable for handheld telephoto shots.
How do products like these even make it to market?
You poor thing. I like Kodak film and their pro imaging materials. But they make the worst point-and-shoot cameras on earth. When I worked at a camera shop they tried to get me to push those things because they get good deals with Kodak. But it turns my stomach to pick those horrid things up.
Then you use free software like Panorama Tools to process the image in a variety of ways.
Digital cameras are so cheap these days that it's very tempting to buy a couple of cheapies for a dedicated compact-size 3D snapshot camera.
Well, I should qualify the statement first. I meant "moderately" raising the minimum wage. If you raise it too much at once, then yes, it could.
The point is that if an employer is making so little money from an employee that paying them a decent wage is going to kill profits - then the business was never sustainable in the first place. The idea that companies are making profits solely because of the low minimum wage is absurd. It would mean that their business is actually about making razor thin margins off bad workplace conditions - rather than selling a product or service.
I'd like to see ANY real evidence for this rhetoric that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Seriously. Those are the people making bold claims that need to be proved.
Gyroscopic force. Big deal. If rotational speed is the only issue, why is my laptop's DVD drive immune to scratching when I move it while it is spinning at full speed?
OK. I just tried this on my slot-loading iBook DVD drive. I felt some gyroscpoic force, but the disc was totally unscratched, and the copying unaffected. I even tried doing it rapidly and shaking the machine around. Not a single hitch.
So why can't the Xbox be made like the iBook?
Imagine if companies actually marketed their gear that way: Use our product! It's more difficult to use, less reliable - and we'll call you stupid if you use it!"
Kind of the opposite of the "everything's easy as ABC" way that this stuff is marketed. Does the company expect the consumer to disbelieve their advertising? "Oh, we told you it would be easy before you bought it, but now we have your money and you are stupid for believing us when we said it would be easy."