The thermal noise increase from slower shutter speeds isn't noticeable unless you get up to exposures that are several seconds long. The noise added from going to a higher ISO is always going to be significantly more than any extra noise from longer exposures. Long exposure noise is also fairly easy to deal with, either in-camera with built-in NR functions, or during post-processing. It tends to be stray hot pixels here and there, rather than consistent noise throughout the image.
The ISO gain can't be done in photo software later. Well, you can try, and you can certainly improve a photo that was too dark to some extent. But the difference is that by turning up the ISO in the camera and making the sensor more sensitive, you're recording light levels that you wouldn't have picked up previously, so they wouldn't have been there to adjust in Photoshop later. Or if they were, they're squashed down in the dark range of the image, so you don't have very many brightness levels to work with.
By the way, is this just one of the lamest articles to ever get approved here or what? I could have written this and gotten all those Slashdot clicks, and I've never even owned a cameraphone (work keeps buying my phones for me, currently it's a Blackberry).
It's not so much a solution in search of a problem, as it is a giant advertisement for BeyondTV in search of a lot of links (or a good Slashdotting) to try to sell some copies of BeyondTV.
At least they don't try to hide it, they put it out in the open by putting it on BeyondTV's official domain, but still.. it's all just an advertisement. Can I get Slashdot to link to my next ad for free if I do something a little bigger than anyone else?
By the way, I've had one recording conflict over the past 4 months with only 2 tuners, and that was just something that my girlfriend was "kind of interested in seeing but it's not a big deal."
really? gmail's spam filtering hasn't been great, in my experience. i get a fair amount of spam through to my inbox, and have already had one false positive where an innocent message was in my spam box. luckily i knew i was missing the e-mail and went looking for it...
If you use adsense on your site, you should have noticed that they've been offering graphical ads for a long time now. Even if you've just been a web browser and not a webmaster, you must have seen them by now.
I doubt they'll get rid of their adsense options that let you choose whether you want text-only ads or text and graphics ads.
If the demo site is currently overloaded, has it changed significantly from the way it was a month or so ago (when I first saw it posted in a/. comments thread)?
I didn't read the article (what kind of/. user would I be if I did that?), but SageTV plays the live show or recorded show in the background when you bring up the menu as well. Unless you want it to pause it automatically, in which case just set that option.
I'm currently building a PVR for myself also. So far I've only played with Sage, but I'll probably just stick with it. It's been working well, and after installing it Friday night I already have tons of shows in its database. Instant lock-in!
It doesn't even have their domain name in there, which is a good sign that they don't have their own server but are using shared web hosting or bought a dedicated server from a host. I doubt there's more than one server available.
Then note the occasional MySQL errors trying to get to their home page.
Then look at solostar.ca, the domain in the SMTP greeting, and all the weird spammy links on their home page.
My guess is this is a site set up by one teenager somewhere and won't last more than a few weeks. It's impressive that he got it up on here, though, so maybe he has a future in future plans that are thought out better than this one...
On a slight tangent, what's the best way to push out Firefox updates out to users? Our patch management software will push out Windows and IE updates, but doesn't have Firefox in there. Our Windows guy is a useless idiot, so I probably need to dive into learning how to do this stuff. I did some Googling but didn't find anything that looked straightforward (it was all about making your own.msi file and doing group policy stuff...)
Is that as easy as it gets, or is there an easier way?
Hmm. Of course, when I added code for an RSS feed to my non-blog site, I also added code to ping a ping service whenever something new was added as well. I figured that the more places that index my site and link to it (even temporarily in a "newly pinged" list), the more traffic I'd get.
If someone added RSS to a site, adding a ping seems like a natural step whether it's really a blog or not.
Based on my experiences working in government, my guess is it was more that they wanted to have control over what was on their internal web site more than they wanted to restrict information sharing. Of course, it might be that where you work is just a lot more dysfunctional than where I work.
I set up a search for our intranet at my govt agency (one part of a larger cabinet agency) many years ago. For some reason I never understood, the one guy who controls the intranet site decided that the search link should just be one of about 50 fairly random links on the main intranet page. And way at the bottom. Nobody ever uses it, I think because they have no idea its down there. I think that's his tendency to avoid change whenever possible rather than any interest in stifling information exchange.
I guess we're dysfunctional too, but just in a different way.
Slightly on-topic: you know, I don't know why I never realized it, but whenever I saw Google units in data centers, I always assumed that Google was using that DC for some of their servers. I never thought about them being Google's search appliances. I'm not very bright sometimes.
I guess you forgot the 2000 election in Florida? Everyone was up in arms about paper ballot vote fraud and how the electronic ballot would be a magic bullet that saves us. This is the classic outcome of a knee-jerk response. I knew something like this would happen as nobody stopped to look at the problem and potential issues before mandating changes in the voting laws.
The amazing this is not that nobody looked at the problem and issues of electronic voting, but that so many people talked almost non-stop about all the problems and issues that you get with electronic voting, and weren't able to stop anyone from going ahead with it.
It wasn't that people didn't think things through, it's that the people in charge refused to listen to the people that brought up all the issues. But oh well, there are so many things to be outraged about in this country, where are you going to start?
All a.torrent file is is a note saying "talk to to machines x,y,z to download this file" (or something like that anyway, I dont know the techincal details of bittorrent).
For the record, the.torrent file says "this file is in this many pieces, and here are their checksums, and here is the tracker you can connect to for the file". Once you connect to the tracker, it says "talk to machines x, y, z..."
You know, I was a victim of identity theft a year ago. Someone in another state ordered all his utility service using my name and SSN, and so I found out when I started getting letters from collection agencies. The thing is, I have no idea where he got that info from, so even if there was a way to punish people who let the info leak, it's not exactly easy to track it back (unless it's something as big and public as this case).
And to top it off, I use Wachovia, so this case might just be the start of some new identity-stealing adventures for me.
However I've been looking into it and it seems to me to be a sad, isolated, lonely world, there are no connections between the people producing these blogs. No community.
Really? I've always thought that bloggers were some of the most connected and communal people on the Internet. Your typical blog has a long blogroll of other bloggers that he/she links to, and they're constantly linking to and commenting on each others' posts. You have the whole trackback/pingback system that was developed just to strengthen the inter-blog nature of blogging.
Does this remind anyone else of stories from when Netscape went public years and years ago? I remember hearing things like a woman called up and said she had no idea what the Internet or Netscape was, but she wanted to buy some shares in it, because it sounded like a hot money-making ticket to GET RICH QUICK!!!11
"Perfectly" means what it says; you're either perfect, or you're not. BitTorrent isn't "perfectly" or even "mostly" legitimate; I'd venture to say it's MOSTLY illegitimate, byte and client-wise. Witness that most of the innovations- RSS feeds and decentralized trackers- are only mostly used or needed by illegitimate activities.
I'm sure that the majority of BitTorrent traffic is illegitimate. That doesn't make BitTorrent itself illegitimate. Since BT is the majority of traffic on the net these days, then by extension the Internet would be illegitimate.
I think we might just be arguing different semantics, though.
By the way, RSS feeds are important with legitimate torrents as well. Why wouldn't legit trackers benefit from an RSS feed? I know I like RSS feeds for both legitimate and illegitimate sites.
I almost downloaded this copy this morning, until I found out that even though it was a workprint, there wasn't anything different between it and the theatrical cut. I was very interested in seeing an early, alternate version, but have no interest in it otherwise.
But besides that, there are tons of people that would download a not-so-great copy to watch at home even if they also saw it in the theater. I know I downloaded that above-average cam of Attack of the Clones just so I could watch it at home once or twice after seeing it in the theater.
That STILL doesn't make her any less stupid for attempting to open her coffee in her lap. If the coffee had been one million degrees and radioactive, it still would have been idiotic to squeeze the cup with your legs while trying to rip the top off, and no amount of money or blame on McDonalds part changes this.
I'll go along with that. Both sides were stupid. I just hate seeing that case trotted out every few days from someone trying to point out how messed up the legal system is.
People claiming BitTorrent is "perfectly legitimate" (funniest example of this was a guy who blurred out the "legitimate" torrents and had torrentspy in a browser window behind the torrent client)
Of course BitTorrent is "perfectly legitimate." Are you trying to say that HTTP and FTP aren't legitimate because they can be used to transfer illegal copies of things? Is the US mail system not legitimate because you could mail someone a DVD-R of Star Wars?
Nobody's claiming that BitTorrent isn't used for illegal things (I hope), but that doesn't mean that it's not "perfectly legitimate."
I don't think people are watching these on their computer screens. At least, I hope not. I've always assumed that everyone else does what I do, which is burn it and watch it on my TV and surround system.
When I subscribed I had to have Vonage configure my 911 service. It took some time, but it ended up working out. The key is this though...if my Broadband connection goes down for any reason, so does my 911 service. SO...I have a stand-by cdll phone just in case.
See, this is why I just have no interest in home VOIP stuff at this point. I have Comcast for Internet (at least during the cheap promo period I'm still in) and my Internet connection goes down all the time. No matter how many times they come out and play with it, it's down a few times a week for a few hours at a time. There's no way I'm going to rely on that for emergency calls to save a few bucks.
1. You're saying she didn't have common sense for not going next door. Not only didn't you RTFA, but you didn't RT other F replies before yours to this same post.
2. Are you really trying to use that old McDonald's coffee cup lawsuit story as showing people don't have common sense? Did you not RTFA about that case either?
Am I missing something? On mirrordot, the link to the story is the link to the original (slashdotted) site. I can't find a mirror anywhere on mirrordot. Did they not get to it in time?
According to that quote from the bill, it doesn't matter. Just because no one's going to sue him doesn't mean that it's not illegal under this new law. He could still go to jail for 3 years if someone happened to discover that he'd broken this law (say, found a home movie posted on his web site) and reported him to the police.
Slashdot Mirror
The ISO gain can't be done in photo software later. Well, you can try, and you can certainly improve a photo that was too dark to some extent. But the difference is that by turning up the ISO in the camera and making the sensor more sensitive, you're recording light levels that you wouldn't have picked up previously, so they wouldn't have been there to adjust in Photoshop later. Or if they were, they're squashed down in the dark range of the image, so you don't have very many brightness levels to work with.
By the way, is this just one of the lamest articles to ever get approved here or what? I could have written this and gotten all those Slashdot clicks, and I've never even owned a cameraphone (work keeps buying my phones for me, currently it's a Blackberry).
It's not so much a solution in search of a problem, as it is a giant advertisement for BeyondTV in search of a lot of links (or a good Slashdotting) to try to sell some copies of BeyondTV. At least they don't try to hide it, they put it out in the open by putting it on BeyondTV's official domain, but still.. it's all just an advertisement. Can I get Slashdot to link to my next ad for free if I do something a little bigger than anyone else? By the way, I've had one recording conflict over the past 4 months with only 2 tuners, and that was just something that my girlfriend was "kind of interested in seeing but it's not a big deal."
really? gmail's spam filtering hasn't been great, in my experience. i get a fair amount of spam through to my inbox, and have already had one false positive where an innocent message was in my spam box. luckily i knew i was missing the e-mail and went looking for it...
If you use adsense on your site, you should have noticed that they've been offering graphical ads for a long time now. Even if you've just been a web browser and not a webmaster, you must have seen them by now.
I doubt they'll get rid of their adsense options that let you choose whether you want text-only ads or text and graphics ads.
If the demo site is currently overloaded, has it changed significantly from the way it was a month or so ago (when I first saw it posted in a /. comments thread)?
I didn't read the article (what kind of /. user would I be if I did that?), but SageTV plays the live show or recorded show in the background when you bring up the menu as well. Unless you want it to pause it automatically, in which case just set that option.
I'm currently building a PVR for myself also. So far I've only played with Sage, but I'll probably just stick with it. It's been working well, and after installing it Friday night I already have tons of shows in its database. Instant lock-in!
Note their SMTP banner:
220-server.solostar.ca ESMTP Exim 4.52 #1 Mon, 03 Oct 2005 09:23:15 -0400
It doesn't even have their domain name in there, which is a good sign that they don't have their own server but are using shared web hosting or bought a dedicated server from a host. I doubt there's more than one server available.
Then note the occasional MySQL errors trying to get to their home page.
Then look at solostar.ca, the domain in the SMTP greeting, and all the weird spammy links on their home page.
My guess is this is a site set up by one teenager somewhere and won't last more than a few weeks. It's impressive that he got it up on here, though, so maybe he has a future in future plans that are thought out better than this one...
On a slight tangent, what's the best way to push out Firefox updates out to users? Our patch management software will push out Windows and IE updates, but doesn't have Firefox in there. Our Windows guy is a useless idiot, so I probably need to dive into learning how to do this stuff. I did some Googling but didn't find anything that looked straightforward (it was all about making your own .msi file and doing group policy stuff...)
Is that as easy as it gets, or is there an easier way?
Hmm. Of course, when I added code for an RSS feed to my non-blog site, I also added code to ping a ping service whenever something new was added as well. I figured that the more places that index my site and link to it (even temporarily in a "newly pinged" list), the more traffic I'd get. If someone added RSS to a site, adding a ping seems like a natural step whether it's really a blog or not.
Based on my experiences working in government, my guess is it was more that they wanted to have control over what was on their internal web site more than they wanted to restrict information sharing. Of course, it might be that where you work is just a lot more dysfunctional than where I work.
I set up a search for our intranet at my govt agency (one part of a larger cabinet agency) many years ago. For some reason I never understood, the one guy who controls the intranet site decided that the search link should just be one of about 50 fairly random links on the main intranet page. And way at the bottom. Nobody ever uses it, I think because they have no idea its down there. I think that's his tendency to avoid change whenever possible rather than any interest in stifling information exchange.
I guess we're dysfunctional too, but just in a different way.
Slightly on-topic: you know, I don't know why I never realized it, but whenever I saw Google units in data centers, I always assumed that Google was using that DC for some of their servers. I never thought about them being Google's search appliances. I'm not very bright sometimes.
The amazing this is not that nobody looked at the problem and issues of electronic voting, but that so many people talked almost non-stop about all the problems and issues that you get with electronic voting, and weren't able to stop anyone from going ahead with it.
It wasn't that people didn't think things through, it's that the people in charge refused to listen to the people that brought up all the issues. But oh well, there are so many things to be outraged about in this country, where are you going to start?
For the record, the .torrent file says "this file is in this many pieces, and here are their checksums, and here is the tracker you can connect to for the file". Once you connect to the tracker, it says "talk to machines x, y, z..."
You know, I was a victim of identity theft a year ago. Someone in another state ordered all his utility service using my name and SSN, and so I found out when I started getting letters from collection agencies. The thing is, I have no idea where he got that info from, so even if there was a way to punish people who let the info leak, it's not exactly easy to track it back (unless it's something as big and public as this case).
And to top it off, I use Wachovia, so this case might just be the start of some new identity-stealing adventures for me.
Really? I've always thought that bloggers were some of the most connected and communal people on the Internet. Your typical blog has a long blogroll of other bloggers that he/she links to, and they're constantly linking to and commenting on each others' posts. You have the whole trackback/pingback system that was developed just to strengthen the inter-blog nature of blogging.
Does this remind anyone else of stories from when Netscape went public years and years ago? I remember hearing things like a woman called up and said she had no idea what the Internet or Netscape was, but she wanted to buy some shares in it, because it sounded like a hot money-making ticket to GET RICH QUICK!!!11
I'm sure that the majority of BitTorrent traffic is illegitimate. That doesn't make BitTorrent itself illegitimate. Since BT is the majority of traffic on the net these days, then by extension the Internet would be illegitimate.
I think we might just be arguing different semantics, though.
By the way, RSS feeds are important with legitimate torrents as well. Why wouldn't legit trackers benefit from an RSS feed? I know I like RSS feeds for both legitimate and illegitimate sites.
I almost downloaded this copy this morning, until I found out that even though it was a workprint, there wasn't anything different between it and the theatrical cut. I was very interested in seeing an early, alternate version, but have no interest in it otherwise. But besides that, there are tons of people that would download a not-so-great copy to watch at home even if they also saw it in the theater. I know I downloaded that above-average cam of Attack of the Clones just so I could watch it at home once or twice after seeing it in the theater.
Of course BitTorrent is "perfectly legitimate." Are you trying to say that HTTP and FTP aren't legitimate because they can be used to transfer illegal copies of things? Is the US mail system not legitimate because you could mail someone a DVD-R of Star Wars?
Nobody's claiming that BitTorrent isn't used for illegal things (I hope), but that doesn't mean that it's not "perfectly legitimate."
I don't think people are watching these on their computer screens. At least, I hope not. I've always assumed that everyone else does what I do, which is burn it and watch it on my TV and surround system.
See, this is why I just have no interest in home VOIP stuff at this point. I have Comcast for Internet (at least during the cheap promo period I'm still in) and my Internet connection goes down all the time. No matter how many times they come out and play with it, it's down a few times a week for a few hours at a time. There's no way I'm going to rely on that for emergency calls to save a few bucks.
1. You're saying she didn't have common sense for not going next door. Not only didn't you RTFA, but you didn't RT other F replies before yours to this same post.
2. Are you really trying to use that old McDonald's coffee cup lawsuit story as showing people don't have common sense? Did you not RTFA about that case either?
This isn't new, they've been doing this a small percentage of the time for a while now.
Am I missing something? On mirrordot, the link to the story is the link to the original (slashdotted) site. I can't find a mirror anywhere on mirrordot. Did they not get to it in time?
According to that quote from the bill, it doesn't matter. Just because no one's going to sue him doesn't mean that it's not illegal under this new law. He could still go to jail for 3 years if someone happened to discover that he'd broken this law (say, found a home movie posted on his web site) and reported him to the police.