Also I might be a bit slow today, but I don't understand the summary:
Apple's fiscal first quarter represents the most profitable quarter ever recorded. Only one U.S. company has ever posted a more profitable quarter — Exxon [...]
Seems like a contradiction to me. So is it the most profitable quarter in history or not? In the history of what? the US? the world?
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Assuming you like and use a certain OSS project to which 100 male & 2 female coders contribute, wouldn't it be *desirable* if that the ratio would be closer to 1:1? In the ideal case that would mean 200 coders working on better, almost-twice-as-feature-rich software for the community.
If, say, 2% of OSS developers are woman, it's not like bringing that figure up to 50% would mean there would be less developers, total. Quite the opposite: in an ideal case there would be almost twice as many contributors to open source, ergo, twice as much *working* code.
There is a lot of room for another smartphone platform, IMO. Can't speak for WP7, because I haven't tried it, but the others all suffer from some combination of: closedness, privacy/security issues, poor performance, poor build quality, poor battery life, being dead.
Tizen seems to approach at least some of these issues in a sensible manner.
Kodak was known primarily for it's film and related products. That of course is not an easy transition to digital as it negates the need for film. It's hard for a company to do away with their core business voluntarily.
Even so, they make (or just design?) the sensors for some of the most expensive cameras out there. Perhaps if they had managed to get their name associated with those brands, their low-level stuff would have sold better.
Last week I put together a one-hour implementation of Reversi & showed it to my little brother (he's 12). I expected his reaction to be "meh", since the board was represented by a boring 2D array of dots, Xs and Os representing the pieces, and the input was in numerical coordinates, and of course he's used to cinematic 3D games and mouse input. To my surprise, he not only had fun playing, he wanted to know how I had done it, what could be improved, pointed out bugs, and keeps nagging me to fix them.
Still don't know what the best way to start programming would be for him, but motivation is not the hard part.
Every dSLR has a pentaprism viewfinder and a reflex mirror. If you can find one that doesn't please list it.
Sorry for being pedantic, but not all SLRs have prisms in that shape. You were asking for an example? The DMC L1 has a "Porro prism". Of course, it is still basically the same idea.
Most systems only have 2-3 lenses available to them, and there's no guarantee you'll see more.
This is not true anymore. There is a really wide selection of 4/3 lenses (Dozens, at least, now that sigma is making them), NX & Sony E ain't bad either (around a dozen each), Q & Nikon 1 are a sill a bit behind.
Plus, you can use manual 35mm SLR (or DSLR) lenses through adapters with all of them, which is a big plus in my opinion.
I found Snapsort to be pretty useful, too. I wouldn't trust the (machine-generated) ratings & recommendations, but to compare hard specs, it is fine. Want to know which is the lightest 4/3 camera? The compact with the widest aperture? etc.
Great camera, but not interchangeable-lens, as the OP requested. If you are going to go the compact route, I can also recommend the Canon Powershot S90/95/100 series. Slightly longer and narrower lens than the LXs.
When it comes to mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, there aren't really that many choices. Either a four thids (Olympus, Panasonic) or an APS-C (NX or NEX). I made an unpopular choice opting for the Samsung NX100, which is deemed noisy (and ugly). But it is the only APS-C camera in that segment appart from the NEX line. And, like others in this topic I haven't made very good experiences with Sony. Later I compared the RAW noise at high ISOs with a friends NEX-5N (?), and found out the Samsung is actually better. The noise supression doesn't seem to be as good (or as agressive) though. And the ugly part is true, too.
A fun thing to do with any of these cameras is to buy a few inexpensive adapters on ebay and test them with all your old manual SLR lenses. I personally am impressed by how good shots with some old Pentax (F1.4!) and Zenit lenses are.
I'm genuinely curious, as I didn't realize they had non-Windows versions?
Being cross-platform is supposedly one of their major selling points. In practice, for many games, Linux (and probably mac) support comes as an afterthought.
Approximately half of the game simply don't work. Some run but are unresponsive (Flash stuff). Some work only using the windows versions through wine. The "Frozenbyte" bundle was the worst, ZERO of the games work, and they still haven't even released one of them, Splot.
Even in the better cases, like the excelent Dungeons of Dredmor, the game had to be patched to work and isn't updated as often as the windows version, despite promises to the contrary.
I almost always use precompiled FOSS. Why? Because in the event that something breaks, e.g. with a change of hardware or a software update, or if I need a new feature, I can then download the source and fix/improve it, without needing to look for and get used to a new program.
Games are an example of this for me. I hadn't played any propietary ones till the Humble Bundle came out-- decided to give indie games a try. A frustrating experience, quickly noticed how useful it is to have access to the source when something goes wrong, even if 95% of the time you don't need it.
This is just conjecture, but TFA says Tranquilliyite metamorphes readly to other minerals. The moon, not having plate tectonics, lacks a major source of metamorphism, hence is more likely to keep those minerals in their igneous state. On the earth, OTOH, by both a lot of metamorphic (tectonics, vulcanism,...) and sedimentary (wind, water, ice,...) agents, the rare Tranquillityite that formed was swiftly converted to other minerals.
As said, this is all just a guess. May be completely wrong.
Don't know about "everyone" or even "the youth", but it is my impression that there is indeed a significant group of people who are fed up with the iPhone. Problem is, they don't like Android, blackberries, Meego, or W7, either. They all suffer from some subset of these severe problems: closedness, privacy/security issues, poor performance, poor build quality, poor battery life, being dead.
All in all, I don't think any of the above systems has won the race. Even a completely new player still would have a chance in this market dominated by mediocre offerings.
Same experience here (debian). Have bought 6 bundles so far, only remember 3 games that ran well and where worth it. 0 (zero!) games of the frozenbyte bundle worked. And splot, which was supposed to be included, still hasn't been released.
That said, some games did work & are great. World of Goo, Frozen Synapse, Dungeons of Dredmor.
Slashdot Mirror
Suprisingly, that actually is the book. No goatse or cheap luxury handbags.
Also I might be a bit slow today, but I don't understand the summary:
Apple's fiscal first quarter represents the most profitable quarter ever recorded. Only one U.S. company has ever posted a more profitable quarter — Exxon [...]
Seems like a contradiction to me. So is it the most profitable quarter in history or not? In the history of what? the US? the world?
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Assuming you like and use a certain OSS project to which 100 male & 2 female coders contribute, wouldn't it be *desirable* if that the ratio would be closer to 1:1? In the ideal case that would mean 200 coders working on better, almost-twice-as-feature-rich software for the community.
Cool UID, but I didn't understand a word in that post. What is "Open Culture"? What has romance to do with OSS?
Please explain.
There are professions with fewer women --...
Yes, there are such "professions":
Free/libre/open source software community members: 1.5% women!
If, say, 2% of OSS developers are woman, it's not like bringing that figure up to 50% would mean there would be less developers, total. Quite the opposite: in an ideal case there would be almost twice as many contributors to open source, ergo, twice as much *working* code.
That is, get from this to this.
You forgot the most blatant example!
There is a lot of room for another smartphone platform, IMO. Can't speak for WP7, because I haven't tried it, but the others all suffer from some combination of: closedness, privacy/security issues, poor performance, poor build quality, poor battery life, being dead.
Tizen seems to approach at least some of these issues in a sensible manner.
Even before the flooding in Taiwan a 1 GB internal sATA drive was around $80 or so...
Could you please provide a link where you purchased your 1 GB drive for $80? please? ... this decade?
Kodak was known primarily for it's film and related products. That of course is not an easy transition to digital as it negates the need for film. It's hard for a company to do away with their core business voluntarily.
Even so, they make (or just design?) the sensors for some of the most expensive cameras out there. Perhaps if they had managed to get their name associated with those brands, their low-level stuff would have sold better.
Why?
Last week I put together a one-hour implementation of Reversi & showed it to my little brother (he's 12). I expected his reaction to be "meh", since the board was represented by a boring 2D array of dots, Xs and Os representing the pieces, and the input was in numerical coordinates, and of course he's used to cinematic 3D games and mouse input.
To my surprise, he not only had fun playing, he wanted to know how I had done it, what could be improved, pointed out bugs, and keeps nagging me to fix them.
Still don't know what the best way to start programming would be for him, but motivation is not the hard part.
Every dSLR has a pentaprism viewfinder and a reflex mirror. If you can find one that doesn't please list it.
Sorry for being pedantic, but not all SLRs have prisms in that shape. You were asking for an example? The DMC L1 has a "Porro prism". Of course, it is still basically the same idea.
In general I agree with your post, however:
Most systems only have 2-3 lenses available to them, and there's no guarantee you'll see more.
This is not true anymore. There is a really wide selection of 4/3 lenses (Dozens, at least, now that sigma is making them), NX & Sony E ain't bad either (around a dozen each), Q & Nikon 1 are a sill a bit behind.
Plus, you can use manual 35mm SLR (or DSLR) lenses through adapters with all of them, which is a big plus in my opinion.
The OP should visit http://www.dpreview.com/
I found Snapsort to be pretty useful, too. I wouldn't trust the (machine-generated) ratings & recommendations, but to compare hard specs, it is fine. Want to know which is the lightest 4/3 camera? The compact with the widest aperture? etc.
Great camera, but not interchangeable-lens, as the OP requested. If you are going to go the compact route, I can also recommend the Canon Powershot S90/95/100 series. Slightly longer and narrower lens than the LXs.
When it comes to mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, there aren't really that many choices. Either a four thids (Olympus, Panasonic) or an APS-C (NX or NEX).
I made an unpopular choice opting for the Samsung NX100, which is deemed noisy (and ugly). But it is the only APS-C camera in that segment appart from the NEX line. And, like others in this topic I haven't made very good experiences with Sony. Later I compared the RAW noise at high ISOs with a friends NEX-5N (?), and found out the Samsung is actually better. The noise supression doesn't seem to be as good (or as agressive) though. And the ugly part is true, too.
A fun thing to do with any of these cameras is to buy a few inexpensive adapters on ebay and test them with all your old manual SLR lenses. I personally am impressed by how good shots with some old Pentax (F1.4!) and Zenit lenses are.
Yes. A 2003 dual opteron machine. I would consider that relatively old, but YMMV.
Debian x86_64 on a relatively old PC.
I'm genuinely curious, as I didn't realize they had non-Windows versions?
Being cross-platform is supposedly one of their major selling points. In practice, for many games, Linux (and probably mac) support comes as an afterthought.
Approximately half of the game simply don't work. Some run but are unresponsive (Flash stuff). Some work only using the windows versions through wine. The "Frozenbyte" bundle was the worst, ZERO of the games work, and they still haven't even released one of them, Splot.
Even in the better cases, like the excelent Dungeons of Dredmor, the game had to be patched to work and isn't updated as often as the windows version, despite promises to the contrary.
I almost always use precompiled FOSS. Why? Because in the event that something breaks, e.g. with a change of hardware or a software update, or if I need a new feature, I can then download the source and fix/improve it, without needing to look for and get used to a new program.
Games are an example of this for me. I hadn't played any propietary ones till the Humble Bundle came out-- decided to give indie games a try. A frustrating experience, quickly noticed how useful it is to have access to the source when something goes wrong, even if 95% of the time you don't need it.
This is just conjecture, but TFA says Tranquilliyite metamorphes readly to other minerals. The moon, not having plate tectonics, lacks a major source of metamorphism, hence is more likely to keep those minerals in their igneous state.
On the earth, OTOH, by both a lot of metamorphic (tectonics, vulcanism,...) and sedimentary (wind, water, ice,...) agents, the rare Tranquillityite that formed was swiftly converted to other minerals.
As said, this is all just a guess. May be completely wrong.
This is news?
I live in Chile and thought this was standard procedure in the rest of the world. Ignorant me.
Once something is discovered, it's almost impossible to put the genie back in the lamp.
"Those things which were thought can never be unthought." There is a great satire on this topic by Duerrenmatt.
High pressure from all that mass, possibly? Just speculating here.
So what does "about to" mean in astronomical terms? Tomorrow? Next year? In a few million years?
If everyone wants something,...
Don't know about "everyone" or even "the youth", but it is my impression that there is indeed a significant group of people who are fed up with the iPhone. Problem is, they don't like Android, blackberries, Meego, or W7, either. They all suffer from some subset of these severe problems: closedness, privacy/security issues, poor performance, poor build quality, poor battery life, being dead.
All in all, I don't think any of the above systems has won the race. Even a completely new player still would have a chance in this market dominated by mediocre offerings.
Same experience here (debian). Have bought 6 bundles so far, only remember 3 games that ran well and where worth it.
0 (zero!) games of the frozenbyte bundle worked. And splot, which was supposed to be included, still hasn't been released.
That said, some games did work & are great. World of Goo, Frozen Synapse, Dungeons of Dredmor.