One poster who said they were from London said that they counted twenty cameras during a seven minute walk. The area seemed to be one with high surveilance.
Do it twice a day and you have forty camera photo ops. If you go home for lunch, that ups it to eighty.
Now add shopping, socializing and other activities and you might hit two or three times that, especially if you are doing them in high surveilance areas.
Then add in the factor that many people may spend longer periods out in public, increasing the odds of encountering a photo op. Using the same figures, a twenty minute walk might mean encountering sixty cameras each way.
Of course, this is all conjecture. It would be interesting if the group that came up with the 300 photo count provided the data and statistics they used to derive the number. Then we could argue methods.
There are some interesting ethical situations here.
While the 'selfless' act helps the customer directly, it robs the producer of what is being 'selflessly' given away, whether it is Microsoft, or a small software company. The people doing the distributing may be gaining 'karma' points on one side but are losing them on the other side of the transaction.
The excuse of not being able to afford the 'real' product because of discrepancies in income between the United States and other countries has a lot of bearing here. In today's globalized world you need to keep up with current tech in order to succeed. If you can't afford it, then copying it can almost be rationalized.
The rationalization falls apart when you reach the point that you want your own products protected on the global market. It is hard to demand IP protection when you are not doing a good job of protecting other people's products.
To add another level of complexity to things, consider the fact that a lot of software businesses in the United States are creating service and research centers in places like India. While I trust that the businesses are buying legitimate copies of Windows and other software, are they keeping track of what their employees and subcontractors are doing? While these people may be making a lot more than the average citizen of India, the temptation of getting something 'free' might outweigh the ethically correct action of paying for it. (Of course there may be reduced cost programs that get hardware with legitimate software to this subgroup. But being in the United States, I don't hear of them.)
Ideally, everybody should be held to the same ethical standards, with allowances for all types of income discrepancies. Perhaps software, movies, music and other IP products should be priced based on personal income by country, with limits on what you can own based on what you earn. If you want more, you need to earn more, relative to the personal income ranges of your country.
It is something to think about that will continue to be a problem until all people world wide have similar income ranges.
Ah, the classic commercial software treadmill. You buy the software and have to pay the annual maintenance fee to stay operational. If that becomes too common in the PC side of things, it becomes very tempting to look for vendors that don't do license revocation.
Those software companies that do license revocation may end up cutting their throats if enough people decide to go for 'always available' software that may have fewer features. There aren't too many instances where the 'latest and greatest' features provide productivity enhancements that are worth the extra cost.
Heck, many people could go back to much older versions of their most heavily used software packages and not suffer any productivity loss. The 'latest and greatest' treadmill often promotes productivity gains but rarely mentions the productivity losses associated with the direct cost of upgrades and the retraining needed.
It would be interesting to do a survey aimed at determining why people do upgrades. What percentage are doing it because of specific added features? What percentage are doing it to 'remain compatible' with others in the field? What percentage are doing it because the old software is not available? What percentage are doing it because of OS issues?
The survey would need to handle situations where X percent of an organization is doing upgrades for one set of reasons and Y percent for a different set of reasons.
And once the survey is done, it would be interesting to do followup surveys to determine whether the reasons given are valid. (i.e. If a specific added feature is mentioned, is it actually being used?)
With pirated software you are not likely to get any updates that may be necessary to handle OS changes that might cause it to crash. So you have the option of keeping the OS static, with all the problems that can cause, or doing various OS upgrades and hoping that you don't crash your software. If your software crashes, you may lose track of information that is essential to the health of the patients.
Then there are the regulatory updates that may make your software obsolete. State and federal laws change, along with reporting requirements. While this may not be as life and death as a crash, it can bring the government down upon you. The recklessness would be more financial than physical.
Corporate feudalism does get a little bit scary, especially with computers and databases to track things.
On the other hand, there are work arounds. For example, if you want to sing 'Happy Birthday', use a different tune and different lyrics. Try "We wish you a Happy Birthday" with variations sung to the tune of "We wish you a Merry Christmas". (As far as I know, that isn't copyrighted yet. And the fact of writing it here gives ME the copyright, unless Slashdot claims it. If I own it, then I hereby give people the right to use it without payment.)
The problem of signing away rights to inventions, patents and copyrights is a serious one, especially if you work for a multinational that has fingers in all industries. Anything you do COULD be considered to be part of one of their core businesses, even if you work for a division that builds industrial equipment and you try to copyright a high fantasy story. (The publishing division could claim your writing IF the corporation was being VERY possessive and had a very restrictive 'IP rights' policy.)
If things get that bad, I can see a business model where 'independents' work with corporate 'serfs' under the table and claim credit for the items produced. They don't pay the 'serfs' directly, but they do pay all the taxes and such on the money earned. When the 'serfs' earn enough to leave their corporate lord, they get a low interest 'loan' from the 'independent' and start their own business. Or they become employees of the 'independent', who has a less restrictive 'IP rights' policy.
I don't think that things are that bad yet. But if they reach the point where a person can't have any part time business on the side without violating the 'IP rights' policy of their employer, then something will need to be done.
Whenever I hear people taking about alternative causes of global warming I sometimes wonder how many people realize that there can be multiple actions contributing to a trend.
Sunspots and cosmic rays may contribute X percent to what I would term 'global energy gain'. Human generated greenhouse gases may contribute Y percent. Urbanization, with the loss of greenery AND the increase in asphalt, may contribute Z percent. An unusually active year of volcanic eruptions may contribute a higher percent one year as opposed to another. Other factors, known and unknown, may contribute other percentages.
No matter which side of the debate you are on, if you ignore the possibility that there may be multiple causes for 'global energy gain' then you are not approaching the problem correctly. Saying that 'global energy gain' is hype because of non-human generated causes is just as bad as saying that 'global energy gain' is strictly a human problem.
Why do a lot of people equate 'warmer weather' with 'better weather'?
If you can't stand the cold, get out of the refrigerator and move to a warmer climate. Don't 'pray' that global warming will make things nicer for you.
There are those of us who like cooler weather and have moved hundreds of miles to get out of the heat of the 'kitchen'.
In one of the postings it is said that the kid in question made the map available for other students of the same school. He got into trouble because a couple of parents found out about it.
Given that situation, those students who downloaded the map could also be considered guilty. Heck, the children of the parents that complained might be able to be charged for having it on their machines. (Assuming, of course, that it was downloaded by anyone.)
Presumably, sanity will take hold and things will work out with the kid getting back to his original school. In his defense, it takes a lot of discipline to build a map like he did. THAT should get him some sort of a reward.
I hope that the kid doesn't 'learn' too much of the wrong stuff from 'Alternative Education'. That might do more damage than spending the time constructing the map.
If management is going to brag about cost savings, make sure that you get documentation on their comments and your warnings. That way, if/when things turn to slime, you can put it in your resume that you tried to warn them.
This may be needed for your personal recovery plan. It may also be needed if lawyers get involved and you end up facing charges.
Lots of people do backups because they are relatively easy. But doing a restore, especially with expensive hardware, can be a major pain because you may not have a test machine to restore it on.
Then you need to add in the time factor of the restore. I remember one case where the backup and restore worked perfectly, but the amount of time spent restoring things was eating into the time available for running payroll. We had to do a partial restore of essential payroll files, and let the rest hang, in order to get payroll out on a timely basis.
Oddly enough, the machine was going to be upgraded to RAID-5 a couple of months after the crash. There had been a little complaining about the costs of the upgrade before the crash. That complaining disappeared about half way through the restore process.
I suspect that, in the not too distant future, we'll be seeing instances where backup media gets destroyed by those battery free emergency flashlights that use simple shaking and a capacitor as a means of power. They usually have a warning saying not to have the things within a couple of feet of magnetic media.
If you DO have one of those flashlights in your desk or vehicle, check the instructions on them. You might be slowly killing any backup mag media you have around it.
They need to have an issue with "102 Dumbest Moments in Business" with a special award for themselves. And that cover should look like it came from a photocopied proof page.
If the laptop allows you to access information on ways of obtaining clean water, improving your health, keeping the population down and promoting peace, then it has the potential of being useful. Content, and accessibility, are the key benefits of the laptop.
If people act upon the information they get via the laptop, improving their quality of life, then the laptop IS useful.
Now children could get the same information from books and other traditional media. But a laptop, with networking, can be a substitute for a whole building full of books. Furthermore, with the right programs, the laptop can serve as a surrogate teacher, allowing children, and even their parents, to bootstrap themselves to better conditions.
When you are at the poor end of the economic spectrum, you build with whatever materials are available, with an eye toward weather conditions.
In some places, that may mean houses made of adobe or equivalent, covered over with some sort of waterproof substance. Not very stable in an earthquake though. That's one of the reasons some places have high death counts for relatively moderate earthquakes.
Other places may use a combination of wood/bamboo and sheet metal, especially if it is a tropical area. It is not fancy but it keeps most of the weather out.
In places where there are decent sized populations of moderately well off people, and large trash dumps, housing materials for the really poor can consist of cardboard, scrap plywood, hammered out metal cans, scrap plastic and anything that can work as a support or water resistant cover. They may not be mud huts, but they are likely to have mud floors.
Desktops assume that you have a reliable source of power, which many areas lack.
You also need to consider what happens when you have a large family, or perhaps an extended family. If all children have their own machine, they can spend more time learning.
Another thing to consider is how to deal with a nomadic or semi-nomadic population. A laptop is much easier to handle when you are moving sheep or goats from one grazing are to another.
You made a good point about camera availablity and photo accessibility. Why carry a dedicated camera of any type for spur of the moment photos when a camera phone is available?
This does mean that privacy goes out the door, for better or worse. With the right camera phone, even the bathroom is no longer a safe place for privacy.
The possibility of blackmail, intentional or otherwise, greatly increases, especially in nightclubs and bars. A few choice photos of a person who has had a few too many can instantly go around the world in a matter of minutes.
Then there is the inevitable increase in the sheer number of badly composed and poorly shot photos. As it becomes easier to create and distribute digital pictures, the quantity of bad ones increases. (Perhaps the next level of improvement will be in autocomposition and editing.)
Still, camera phones may have some positive impacts. Crimes might be solved or even prevented through camera phone surveilance.
Comparing megapixels works for marketing types and people who think that bigger is better. Plus it is something that advertisers can put in large red type to 'prove' that their product is 'superior' to others. And to the average casual point and shoot photographer, having more megapixels does allow the pictures to be improved when they are reduced to manageable size.
Those of us who go beyond point and shoot often consider the other factors and don't let megapixels have a major influence, except when we want to justify a new camera body.
My parents often tell the tale of showing slides I took with an Instamatic using Kodachrome when I was around ten. A family friend, who had a 35mm camera with additional lenses, exposure meter and equipment, asked what F-Stop and shutter speed was used for the shots because he was impressed with the results.
He was somewhat bemused to find out who had taken the pictures and what was used.
In the right hands, with the right topics, those point and click cameras could do very good pictures. Of course they were designed to take decent pictures in the hands of amateurs.
I would say that the rant comes because of the phrasing the poster used. For those of us that use dSLRs in something other than point and shoot mode, even a vague implication that a camera phone is 'better' than a dSLR is enough to raise our hackles.
If the poster had said that camera phones are reaching the point that they meet the needs of the average Joe, there would be less controversy.
I suspect that the article the poster referenced will create a lot of discussion outside SlashDot where the semi-average Joe, computer literate but not camera literate, will say that the Nokia did 'better' than the dSLR, based strictly on vibrancy.
Ah! Someone who also noticed the phrasing and potential correction.
I agree with the idea that point and shoot cameras sales may suffer as camera phones get better. I just wish that the poster had explicitly stated that. It would have avoided a lot of comments like yours and mine.
(With a camera phone like the Nokia, I might consider getting one so that I have a point and shoot with me at all times. But it will be as an accessory to my collection of dSLRs and associated equipment.)
Some of us read the article but object to the comments the poster of the article made.
For example, while the summary poster said that the Nokia takes more vibrant pictures than the dSLR, they didn't specifically mention where the dSLR does better. That seems a little bit biased.
Then they make the comment that we could see a decline in dedicated digital camera sales as camera phone sales increase.
I can see this happening for point and shoot cameras, especially if camera phones keep improving. But I don't see it taking much of a bite out of the dSLR market.
If the poster had mentioned that the dSLR camera did better in other areas and had suggested that high end camera phones might displace dedicated point and shoot digital cameras, I would not have a problem with the comments.
As a dSLR owner, I wonder whether the people doing the testing were skilled in the use of the dSLR. Taking a camera straight out of the box and using the automatic settings seems like a rather amateur method of testing. If you are going to get something with the ability of a good dSLR, you better spend some time practicing with it.
That said, if you are like a lot of people and just want the ability to take point and shoot pictures, you don't really need a dSLR. At 240 DPI, a 4x6 photo would require about 1.4 megapixels. Having more megapixels would allow you to do enlargements and cropping, both of which I would guess are relatively rare compared to the number of point and shoot pictures taken. (Are there any stats on this?)
An additional advantage of point and shoot devices, be they cameras or camera phones, is that they are a lot more portable than a dSLR. This means that you will have them available when you need them AND can use them discretely.
Still, there are those of us who have dSLRs because we are either skilled amateurs or professionals who desire and often need the abilities they offer. I suspect that it will be several years before camera phones will reach the point that you can take a closeup portrait from thirty feet away that is anywhere near the quality of what I can shoot with a tripod mounted dSLR.
We are also the people who want the higher megapixel cameras because we do lots of cropping and enlargements. But then, we know what we are talking about when it comes to megapixels.
Unfortunately, there are also those who, as mentioned by another poster, buy dSLRs for the brag factor. I suspect that a skilled photographer, with a good point and shoot camera, can get consistently better results than the bragging types who have all the equipment but never use anything other than the automatic settings.
Note that the article mentioned CDs and not DVDs. If you are going to talk about quantity of images stored, please read the article and get the media type correct.
Still, even if CDs were the media being used, that is still a lot of pictures of a subject that is reprehensible.
Slashdot Mirror
One poster who said they were from London said that they counted twenty cameras during a seven minute walk. The area seemed to be one with high surveilance.
Do it twice a day and you have forty camera photo ops. If you go home for lunch, that ups it to eighty.
Now add shopping, socializing and other activities and you might hit two or three times that, especially if you are doing them in high surveilance areas.
Then add in the factor that many people may spend longer periods out in public, increasing the odds of encountering a photo op. Using the same figures, a twenty minute walk might mean encountering sixty cameras each way.
Of course, this is all conjecture. It would be interesting if the group that came up with the 300 photo count provided the data and statistics they used to derive the number. Then we could argue methods.
There are some interesting ethical situations here.
While the 'selfless' act helps the customer directly, it robs the producer of what is being 'selflessly' given away, whether it is Microsoft, or a small software company. The people doing the distributing may be gaining 'karma' points on one side but are losing them on the other side of the transaction.
The excuse of not being able to afford the 'real' product because of discrepancies in income between the United States and other countries has a lot of bearing here. In today's globalized world you need to keep up with current tech in order to succeed. If you can't afford it, then copying it can almost be rationalized.
The rationalization falls apart when you reach the point that you want your own products protected on the global market. It is hard to demand IP protection when you are not doing a good job of protecting other people's products.
To add another level of complexity to things, consider the fact that a lot of software businesses in the United States are creating service and research centers in places like India. While I trust that the businesses are buying legitimate copies of Windows and other software, are they keeping track of what their employees and subcontractors are doing? While these people may be making a lot more than the average citizen of India, the temptation of getting something 'free' might outweigh the ethically correct action of paying for it. (Of course there may be reduced cost programs that get hardware with legitimate software to this subgroup. But being in the United States, I don't hear of them.)
Ideally, everybody should be held to the same ethical standards, with allowances for all types of income discrepancies. Perhaps software, movies, music and other IP products should be priced based on personal income by country, with limits on what you can own based on what you earn. If you want more, you need to earn more, relative to the personal income ranges of your country.
It is something to think about that will continue to be a problem until all people world wide have similar income ranges.
Ah, the classic commercial software treadmill. You buy the software and have to pay the annual maintenance fee to stay operational. If that becomes too common in the PC side of things, it becomes very tempting to look for vendors that don't do license revocation.
Those software companies that do license revocation may end up cutting their throats if enough people decide to go for 'always available' software that may have fewer features. There aren't too many instances where the 'latest and greatest' features provide productivity enhancements that are worth the extra cost.
Heck, many people could go back to much older versions of their most heavily used software packages and not suffer any productivity loss. The 'latest and greatest' treadmill often promotes productivity gains but rarely mentions the productivity losses associated with the direct cost of upgrades and the retraining needed.
It would be interesting to do a survey aimed at determining why people do upgrades. What percentage are doing it because of specific added features? What percentage are doing it to 'remain compatible' with others in the field? What percentage are doing it because the old software is not available? What percentage are doing it because of OS issues?
The survey would need to handle situations where X percent of an organization is doing upgrades for one set of reasons and Y percent for a different set of reasons.
And once the survey is done, it would be interesting to do followup surveys to determine whether the reasons given are valid. (i.e. If a specific added feature is mentioned, is it actually being used?)
Updates.
With pirated software you are not likely to get any updates that may be necessary to handle OS changes that might cause it to crash. So you have the option of keeping the OS static, with all the problems that can cause, or doing various OS upgrades and hoping that you don't crash your software. If your software crashes, you may lose track of information that is essential to the health of the patients.
Then there are the regulatory updates that may make your software obsolete. State and federal laws change, along with reporting requirements. While this may not be as life and death as a crash, it can bring the government down upon you. The recklessness would be more financial than physical.
Corporate feudalism does get a little bit scary, especially with computers and databases to track things.
On the other hand, there are work arounds. For example, if you want to sing 'Happy Birthday', use a different tune and different lyrics. Try "We wish you a Happy Birthday" with variations sung to the tune of "We wish you a Merry Christmas". (As far as I know, that isn't copyrighted yet. And the fact of writing it here gives ME the copyright, unless Slashdot claims it. If I own it, then I hereby give people the right to use it without payment.)
The problem of signing away rights to inventions, patents and copyrights is a serious one, especially if you work for a multinational that has fingers in all industries. Anything you do COULD be considered to be part of one of their core businesses, even if you work for a division that builds industrial equipment and you try to copyright a high fantasy story. (The publishing division could claim your writing IF the corporation was being VERY possessive and had a very restrictive 'IP rights' policy.)
If things get that bad, I can see a business model where 'independents' work with corporate 'serfs' under the table and claim credit for the items produced. They don't pay the 'serfs' directly, but they do pay all the taxes and such on the money earned. When the 'serfs' earn enough to leave their corporate lord, they get a low interest 'loan' from the 'independent' and start their own business. Or they become employees of the 'independent', who has a less restrictive 'IP rights' policy.
I don't think that things are that bad yet. But if they reach the point where a person can't have any part time business on the side without violating the 'IP rights' policy of their employer, then something will need to be done.
The conservative says "We like the status quo and don't want to rock the boat, especially since that would involve changing how we live."
The liberal says "We better start doing something because I think I hear some rapids ahead."
The average Joe says "Let's party for we're all going to die anyway. (Pass me another beer and watch how fast this boat can go.)"
The intelligent activist says "While the status quo is nice, we better scout ahead and be prepared to change our course."
Whenever I hear people taking about alternative causes of global warming I sometimes wonder how many people realize that there can be multiple actions contributing to a trend.
Sunspots and cosmic rays may contribute X percent to what I would term 'global energy gain'. Human generated greenhouse gases may contribute Y percent. Urbanization, with the loss of greenery AND the increase in asphalt, may contribute Z percent. An unusually active year of volcanic eruptions may contribute a higher percent one year as opposed to another. Other factors, known and unknown, may contribute other percentages.
No matter which side of the debate you are on, if you ignore the possibility that there may be multiple causes for 'global energy gain' then you are not approaching the problem correctly. Saying that 'global energy gain' is hype because of non-human generated causes is just as bad as saying that 'global energy gain' is strictly a human problem.
Why do a lot of people equate 'warmer weather' with 'better weather'?
If you can't stand the cold, get out of the refrigerator and move to a warmer climate. Don't 'pray' that global warming will make things nicer for you.
There are those of us who like cooler weather and have moved hundreds of miles to get out of the heat of the 'kitchen'.
In one of the postings it is said that the kid in question made the map available for other students of the same school. He got into trouble because a couple of parents found out about it.
Given that situation, those students who downloaded the map could also be considered guilty. Heck, the children of the parents that complained might be able to be charged for having it on their machines. (Assuming, of course, that it was downloaded by anyone.)
Presumably, sanity will take hold and things will work out with the kid getting back to his original school. In his defense, it takes a lot of discipline to build a map like he did. THAT should get him some sort of a reward.
I hope that the kid doesn't 'learn' too much of the wrong stuff from 'Alternative Education'. That might do more damage than spending the time constructing the map.
It is a little bit better, but it still doesn't say much about the types of systems involved, both at the primary level and the backup/restore level.
If you are running relatively low cost stand-alone servers, then practice restores can be relatively easy with test machines.
If you are running something that is closer to a mainframe, practice restores can be hard because you may not have a test machine.
If management is going to brag about cost savings, make sure that you get documentation on their comments and your warnings. That way, if/when things turn to slime, you can put it in your resume that you tried to warn them.
This may be needed for your personal recovery plan. It may also be needed if lawyers get involved and you end up facing charges.
Lots of people do backups because they are relatively easy. But doing a restore, especially with expensive hardware, can be a major pain because you may not have a test machine to restore it on.
Then you need to add in the time factor of the restore. I remember one case where the backup and restore worked perfectly, but the amount of time spent restoring things was eating into the time available for running payroll. We had to do a partial restore of essential payroll files, and let the rest hang, in order to get payroll out on a timely basis.
Oddly enough, the machine was going to be upgraded to RAID-5 a couple of months after the crash. There had been a little complaining about the costs of the upgrade before the crash. That complaining disappeared about half way through the restore process.
I suspect that, in the not too distant future, we'll be seeing instances where backup media gets destroyed by those battery free emergency flashlights that use simple shaking and a capacitor as a means of power. They usually have a warning saying not to have the things within a couple of feet of magnetic media.
If you DO have one of those flashlights in your desk or vehicle, check the instructions on them. You might be slowly killing any backup mag media you have around it.
They need to have an issue with "102 Dumbest Moments in Business" with a special award for themselves. And that cover should look like it came from a photocopied proof page.
If the laptop allows you to access information on ways of obtaining clean water, improving your health, keeping the population down and promoting peace, then it has the potential of being useful. Content, and accessibility, are the key benefits of the laptop.
If people act upon the information they get via the laptop, improving their quality of life, then the laptop IS useful.
Now children could get the same information from books and other traditional media. But a laptop, with networking, can be a substitute for a whole building full of books. Furthermore, with the right programs, the laptop can serve as a surrogate teacher, allowing children, and even their parents, to bootstrap themselves to better conditions.
When you are at the poor end of the economic spectrum, you build with whatever materials are available, with an eye toward weather conditions.
In some places, that may mean houses made of adobe or equivalent, covered over with some sort of waterproof substance. Not very stable in an earthquake though. That's one of the reasons some places have high death counts for relatively moderate earthquakes.
Other places may use a combination of wood/bamboo and sheet metal, especially if it is a tropical area. It is not fancy but it keeps most of the weather out.
In places where there are decent sized populations of moderately well off people, and large trash dumps, housing materials for the really poor can consist of cardboard, scrap plywood, hammered out metal cans, scrap plastic and anything that can work as a support or water resistant cover. They may not be mud huts, but they are likely to have mud floors.
Desktops assume that you have a reliable source of power, which many areas lack.
You also need to consider what happens when you have a large family, or perhaps an extended family. If all children have their own machine, they can spend more time learning.
Another thing to consider is how to deal with a nomadic or semi-nomadic population. A laptop is much easier to handle when you are moving sheep or goats from one grazing are to another.
You made a good point about camera availablity and photo accessibility. Why carry a dedicated camera of any type for spur of the moment photos when a camera phone is available?
This does mean that privacy goes out the door, for better or worse. With the right camera phone, even the bathroom is no longer a safe place for privacy.
The possibility of blackmail, intentional or otherwise, greatly increases, especially in nightclubs and bars. A few choice photos of a person who has had a few too many can instantly go around the world in a matter of minutes.
Then there is the inevitable increase in the sheer number of badly composed and poorly shot photos. As it becomes easier to create and distribute digital pictures, the quantity of bad ones increases. (Perhaps the next level of improvement will be in autocomposition and editing.)
Still, camera phones may have some positive impacts. Crimes might be solved or even prevented through camera phone surveilance.
It should be interesting.
Comparing megapixels works for marketing types and people who think that bigger is better. Plus it is something that advertisers can put in large red type to 'prove' that their product is 'superior' to others. And to the average casual point and shoot photographer, having more megapixels does allow the pictures to be improved when they are reduced to manageable size.
Those of us who go beyond point and shoot often consider the other factors and don't let megapixels have a major influence, except when we want to justify a new camera body.
My parents often tell the tale of showing slides I took with an Instamatic using Kodachrome when I was around ten. A family friend, who had a 35mm camera with additional lenses, exposure meter and equipment, asked what F-Stop and shutter speed was used for the shots because he was impressed with the results.
He was somewhat bemused to find out who had taken the pictures and what was used.
In the right hands, with the right topics, those point and click cameras could do very good pictures. Of course they were designed to take decent pictures in the hands of amateurs.
I would say that the rant comes because of the phrasing the poster used. For those of us that use dSLRs in something other than point and shoot mode, even a vague implication that a camera phone is 'better' than a dSLR is enough to raise our hackles.
If the poster had said that camera phones are reaching the point that they meet the needs of the average Joe, there would be less controversy.
I suspect that the article the poster referenced will create a lot of discussion outside SlashDot where the semi-average Joe, computer literate but not camera literate, will say that the Nokia did 'better' than the dSLR, based strictly on vibrancy.
Ah! Someone who also noticed the phrasing and potential correction.
I agree with the idea that point and shoot cameras sales may suffer as camera phones get better. I just wish that the poster had explicitly stated that. It would have avoided a lot of comments like yours and mine.
(With a camera phone like the Nokia, I might consider getting one so that I have a point and shoot with me at all times. But it will be as an accessory to my collection of dSLRs and associated equipment.)
Some of us read the article but object to the comments the poster of the article made.
For example, while the summary poster said that the Nokia takes more vibrant pictures than the dSLR, they didn't specifically mention where the dSLR does better. That seems a little bit biased.
Then they make the comment that we could see a decline in dedicated digital camera sales as camera phone sales increase.
I can see this happening for point and shoot cameras, especially if camera phones keep improving. But I don't see it taking much of a bite out of the dSLR market.
If the poster had mentioned that the dSLR camera did better in other areas and had suggested that high end camera phones might displace dedicated point and shoot digital cameras, I would not have a problem with the comments.
You're right about that.
As a dSLR owner, I wonder whether the people doing the testing were skilled in the use of the dSLR. Taking a camera straight out of the box and using the automatic settings seems like a rather amateur method of testing. If you are going to get something with the ability of a good dSLR, you better spend some time practicing with it.
That said, if you are like a lot of people and just want the ability to take point and shoot pictures, you don't really need a dSLR. At 240 DPI, a 4x6 photo would require about 1.4 megapixels. Having more megapixels would allow you to do enlargements and cropping, both of which I would guess are relatively rare compared to the number of point and shoot pictures taken. (Are there any stats on this?)
An additional advantage of point and shoot devices, be they cameras or camera phones, is that they are a lot more portable than a dSLR. This means that you will have them available when you need them AND can use them discretely.
Still, there are those of us who have dSLRs because we are either skilled amateurs or professionals who desire and often need the abilities they offer. I suspect that it will be several years before camera phones will reach the point that you can take a closeup portrait from thirty feet away that is anywhere near the quality of what I can shoot with a tripod mounted dSLR.
We are also the people who want the higher megapixel cameras because we do lots of cropping and enlargements. But then, we know what we are talking about when it comes to megapixels.
Unfortunately, there are also those who, as mentioned by another poster, buy dSLRs for the brag factor. I suspect that a skilled photographer, with a good point and shoot camera, can get consistently better results than the bragging types who have all the equipment but never use anything other than the automatic settings.
Note that the article mentioned CDs and not DVDs. If you are going to talk about quantity of images stored, please read the article and get the media type correct.
Still, even if CDs were the media being used, that is still a lot of pictures of a subject that is reprehensible.