I had a lawyer friend tell me once that the whole raison d'etre of a lawyer is to divide things into smaller, different things. The example he used was speed limits.. Why is the legal speed limit less on one road than another? We can all (I hope) agree that driving 100KM/H (60ish mph for our USian friends) through a school zone is not a good idea, but lawyers need to define the parameters where these exceptions take place.
Back on topic, I agree that software is too new and too different from anything around when patents were thought up to be put in the same class. I agree this is a rough patch in the history of innovation, and I personally don't think patents (and copyright for that matter) is relevant to what we want, as a society, to achieve. However, the solution is a lot more difficult than "shoot all the lawyers", or "banish all patents"*. There is a happy medium somewhere....
*Yes I know that is an extreme position, not held by many
So do you want to work for 5 cents an hour? didn't think so. Not the government's fault*
Our economy says it would be more worth your while to beg on a street corner than to work for 5 cents per hour. Yes I understand you are exaggerating to make a point, but even if you use the current minimum wage (whatever it is in your jurisdiction) That is still below the poverty level, and you create a downward pressure on all wages until you have a virtual slave class of working poor.... That is what is illegal (and should be)
*There are MANY other economic factors you can blame on them, but minimum wage, not so much...
Your prices are about 10 years old. Actually I print most of my portfolio images (13" x 19") on an older Epson 1400 I originally paid about $200 for (after rebaits). You can get a pro quality printer for a grand or two. A friend of mine bought a 60" Mimaki printer with contour cutting head (basically it can print, and then dye cut the image) for about 20K
From what I understand, a good inkjet (ie Epson pigment ink) on good paper will outlast an RA-4 type print by a significant margin. An inkjet printer is much slower per print though.... I haven't used dye subs since I sold my old Kodak 8600. Very good print quality, but I would be surprised if it was better than a decent modern inkjet though...
I will dissent. I have never had good prints from walmart, and only passable from costco. However, I am a very fussy fine art photographer, and I never print 4x6 prints (except for my annual Christmas card) The best printer I have found,( and I have looked from Vancouver to Toronto to Los Angeles to New York to a couple of places in Italy,) is Terry Zlot here in Victoria, BC. He is a small company (loupeimaging.com), which may be why he can give the extra care. Yet his prices are still pretty cheap.
For rrossman2, if you want pictures to hang on your wall, get them professionally printed by a good pro printer who can tweak them to get the best image quality* If you just want 4x6 prints, I would buy a decent photo printer (I do like Epsons, their ink does last quite well too) and some Epson brand photo paper (so you don't have to worry too much about colour casts or longevity)
I do wonder if the simplest fix to the system is to say that a company cannot own a patent, only a person. A company can license a patent from a person, but that is the limit.
I had this idea a while ago. and I really think it is the easiest way forward. The idea that corporations have the same rights as individuals (without the consequences...) has run its course, and it is proving to be a drain on society.
Disclaimer, I am studying for my business administration degree, but I do not always side with corporations...
Most countries have a frivolous lawsuit act. People trying to sue for dumb reasons get slapped. And dumb reasons are obvious. For example, in Canada if you give someone CPR to restart their heart, they cannot sue you because you broke one of their ribs.
* For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command.
What were you trying to do where you needed root? I hate to sound like a fan-boi, but something was wrong. I commonly copy files around multiple drives on multiple servers using Nautilus.... By the way, how can you use a file browser without split panes, can windows do this yet?
There was no GUI way to do some things (as far as I know). And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line. That got to really be annoying.
"most" things can be done with a gui, but I will admit that having to retype a whole command because of a mispelled (: word or a slight change in the command is a pain....
* I have a multifunction printer (print, copy, scan, fax) and the ONLY Linux driver that worked with it was from TurboLinux - $40 for the driver and it was only good for print. Couldn't use the driver over my home LAN like I can with my mfr's Windows driver.
Yeah, Canon printers suck, but I will say that the TurboPrint driver gave better results than the Canon driver on Windows...And then I found Epson for photos, Brother for laser, and never looked back... Oh, and Cups rocks the doors off of windows printer sharing
* OpenOffice messed up the formatting of some of my more intricate Word files.
Even worse, Word messed up some of the formatting on my LibreOffice files
* Couldn't stream videos on Netflix, as Netflix requires the Silverlight plugin.
Yeah, This is one of the few remaining reasons I even keep a Win7 partition, mind you, I can waste time with other pursuits...
* Some web applications require Internet Explorer to work (I know, I HATE proprietary web applications and extensions as much as the next person, but one doesn't always have a choice).
Then the site owner is stupid, especially with the prevalence of tablets etc...
* I still have to sometimes use local (non-Web) software on my PC, and that software is WINDOWS based. And so far WINE sucks; it crashed on every Windows program I tried to run in the Linux environment.
Yeah, this could be a problem. Fortunately for me, Photoshop (yes, Photoshop is better than Gimp) runs faster in WINE on my linux partition than natively on the Win7 partition
* Sure, I could set up a dual-boot with Windows, which I did. But very shortly I got tired of switching back and forth between OS's. I was tired of having a "schizophrenic" computer, and just decided the heck with it, I'm just going back to Windows.
Yes I have the same problem. I have to make myself boot into Windows every month or so to apply all the updates (and my gawd the reboot thing gets old fast...)
So there you go. And plus, so far Windows 7 is running very smoothly on my new machine I recently built, so why mess with success?
So there you go. And plus, so far MINT is running very smoothly on my new machines I recently built, so why mess with success?
By that argument, they should be going after public parks, because people may be spending their time playing in a park, not in front of their computers listening to "paid for" music....
On XP you could fix this by clearing the prefetch folder, then defragment the disk, then use pagedefrag to defragment the registry and, if you are not smart enough to have set it to a fixed size early on or turned it off, the paging file. If each of these actions has an equivalent on Windows 7 (which I have barely used) then I would take them.
yep, definitely not ready for Joe Sixpack on the desktop...
Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. Photoshop running in wine (on mint) runs faster than nativly in Windows on the same dual boot machine. I also find that from log in to finished desktop is MUCH faster with linux. Windows seems to come up, but then various programs keep popping up for attention.* I will admit that flash is better in windows than Linux woo hoo.....
* before you say uninstall a bunch of programs in windows, I have the same functionality in Linux without the slowdown at boot.
Why should ANYONE have to pay for movies, music, books or software?
obviously so money will be funnelled into making more movies, music, books or software.... and I will add other forms of art like photography, and other visual art....
Corollary: Why should only SOME people have to pay for movies, music, books or software?
Because only SOME people can afford it, or only SOME people will get use and/or enjoyment from it, but more to the point, we do not have a payment small enough for all people to pay for it. Lets say that one hundred million people in the world enjoy a particular song, it is pretty catchy..... If each person paid one penny (yes I know some currencies are worth a bit less, but let's move on) that would be a million dollars for one song. I think the problem is that, for some people, this seems like a reasonable amount of money. But if we want the artist to produce, for example, one work per year, the salary is ridiculous by an order of magnitude ($100,000 per year should be a reasonable salary for a successful artist). So now we want everyone to pay 1/10 of a cent for this work. This doesn't even touch the logistics of collecting that money (which, in part, is where distributors come in). But even if we triple the cost to account for the distribution overhead (you don't think the distributor deserves more than that do you?), we still don't have a small enough currency, unless you want to start paying for all music etc with bitcoin....
Or by another angle, why should only SOME people pay taxes to pay for the new bridge being built in Victoria? I mean tourists from all over the world come to our city, and many will use the bridge. Shouldn't everyone who uses the bridge pay for it? Or closer to (my) heart, I produce some photography, and I have been told I am pretty good. And yes I have sold images. I have also put up displays in coffee shops and other venues. I have not made money from most of these shows. SOME people have paid for my work, while many others have enjoyed my images. I just call it advertising, but that will start a whole new rant, so let's move on....
Corollary^2: Why should anyone get PAID for making movies, music, books or software?
because we (for some definition of we, and some subset of the movies, music, etc) find value in said art forms
Conclusion: Actors, musicians, authors and programmers are worthless, as are their works.
I don't follow this conclusion at all. I have shown that not all people will pay for all things. I can throw out more examples, who pays for shopping malls, or roads, or museum exhibits, or neighbourhood improvement programs.... a small subset of the people who gain direct advantage of said product, however, these products create a greater good for society. It has been argued that art* is good for society. As such it should be put in the same class as roads and schools. I am not saying that all artists should be supported by taxes, but I am saying that a few good artists (as defined by the society supporting them) should be supported by a few patrons. This system worked for almost all of human history. It is only recently when distributors got greedy, that artists of all kinds have not allowed everyone to enjoy their work. How much did Michelangelo charge for admission to the Sistine Chapel?
*and we are really talking about art with movies, music and books. Software is a new case, and it could also be argued that software is good for society as a whole....
How about the USA gives aid without strings attached? Or if that won't work, then don't give aid, but be aware that you will not get any advantages from that country, like oil or other trade items.
Anecdotal story: I had a single-mother friend whose daughter broke her arm in a playground accident. The next day at school a teacher asked what happened, and the child joked that her mom broke it. Social services all but broke down the mothers door, and my friend was a hair's breadth from losing her daughter completely. The worst part is that they (mother and daughter) had a great relationship up to that point, but that event pushed a wedge between them that never fully healed. Way to "think of the children"....
This single pain gets me every time I have to use any MS system... As mentioned below, KatMouse is a great utility that fixes this, except you have to turn it off for certain programs (like Photoshop) to get proper functionality of the scroll back (zooming). Even then it is a bit hit and miss.
I will get modded into oblivion for this, but I think people here have it completely backwards. Marketing* is just telling people what they want to hear. If most people found overweight (and equally unhealthy) people attractive, all our catwalks would be reinforced to handle the weight of the extremely beautiful people on display... I know people will pull out the fact that there are a lot of large, even obese people in classical art, so skinny people are a modern fiction pushed on us. Wrong. During medieval times, food was not always easy to come by, a sign of affluence (admit it or not, money is a subtle indicator of beauty, for both men and women). Large people were therefore more successful. Fast forward a few centuries, and food is much more plentiful, but leisure time is getting more scarce. Only the more affluent can afford to play sports, go to a gym or otherwise take time (and again money) to keep fit. For further proof of this, look at other cultures around the world. This is getting harder, due to the widespread influence of western culture, but typically, Indian or African men prefer less skinny women. Marketing beauty is all about taking the 1% who represent the extreme of what society finds attractive and exaggerating their traits. Note I am not saying this is a good thing, but it is an inevitable result of society....
*Disclaimer; I just finished a marketing course as part of my business degree...
Sensors use a strange measurement for size based on the size of a square in a circle with circumference x* from Wikipedia:
The sensor sizes of many compact digital cameras are expressed in terms of the non-standardized "inch" system, as approximately 1.5 times the length of the diagonal of the sensor. This goes back to the way image sizes of early video cameras were expressed in terms of the outside diameter of the glass envelope of the video camera tube
*This dates back to when we were showing square images on CRT screens
another clue this is a camera with a phone, rather than the inverse is the lens they chose. They spent the money on a Zeiss lens. Actually I am kind of surprised they put a fixed lens on it, but obviously they were building to a price. On that note, I wonder what it will cost? If it is around $100 to $150 it will do well. If they try to price it as a smartphone at $400 or more, It will flop
The early Kodak digital SLR's were built on Nikon bodies, and later Canon, but so what, Most current cameras use sensors from a different company. IIRC Canon is the only SLR manufacturer, including medium format, that makes it's own sensor. and IIRC again, most Canon point and shoots don't use a Canon sensor. As I said earlier, Kodak just fucked up. They had it all, and decided to throw it all away...
Slashdot Mirror
I had a lawyer friend tell me once that the whole raison d'etre of a lawyer is to divide things into smaller, different things. The example he used was speed limits.. Why is the legal speed limit less on one road than another? We can all (I hope) agree that driving 100KM/H (60ish mph for our USian friends) through a school zone is not a good idea, but lawyers need to define the parameters where these exceptions take place.
Back on topic, I agree that software is too new and too different from anything around when patents were thought up to be put in the same class. I agree this is a rough patch in the history of innovation, and I personally don't think patents (and copyright for that matter) is relevant to what we want, as a society, to achieve. However, the solution is a lot more difficult than "shoot all the lawyers", or "banish all patents"*. There is a happy medium somewhere....
*Yes I know that is an extreme position, not held by many
I recently took a business writing course, and the textbook said that cc meant "copy circulated".
If you don't like carbon copy you should say "computer copy" or something....
So do you want to work for 5 cents an hour? didn't think so. Not the government's fault*
Our economy says it would be more worth your while to beg on a street corner than to work for 5 cents per hour.
Yes I understand you are exaggerating to make a point, but even if you use the current minimum wage (whatever it is in your jurisdiction) That is still below the poverty level, and you create a downward pressure on all wages until you have a virtual slave class of working poor....
That is what is illegal (and should be)
*There are MANY other economic factors you can blame on them, but minimum wage, not so much...
^This^
Most people walk through life with their eyes closed. Good on the guy, immigrant or not, for seizing opportunities that came his way...
Your prices are about 10 years old.
Actually I print most of my portfolio images (13" x 19") on an older Epson 1400 I originally paid about $200 for (after rebaits).
You can get a pro quality printer for a grand or two.
A friend of mine bought a 60" Mimaki printer with contour cutting head (basically it can print, and then dye cut the image) for about 20K
Also be aware that colour laser prints will not last as long as Cosco or good inkjet prints.
There is a reason ALL fine art printers use inkjets....
Unless you know what you are doing (or are willing to learn)
From what I understand, a good inkjet (ie Epson pigment ink) on good paper will outlast an RA-4 type print by a significant margin. An inkjet printer is much slower per print though....
I haven't used dye subs since I sold my old Kodak 8600. Very good print quality, but I would be surprised if it was better than a decent modern inkjet though...
I will dissent. I have never had good prints from walmart, and only passable from costco. However, I am a very fussy fine art photographer, and I never print 4x6 prints (except for my annual Christmas card)
The best printer I have found,( and I have looked from Vancouver to Toronto to Los Angeles to New York to a couple of places in Italy,) is Terry Zlot here in Victoria, BC. He is a small company (loupeimaging.com), which may be why he can give the extra care. Yet his prices are still pretty cheap.
For rrossman2, if you want pictures to hang on your wall, get them professionally printed by a good pro printer who can tweak them to get the best image quality*
If you just want 4x6 prints, I would buy a decent photo printer (I do like Epsons, their ink does last quite well too) and some Epson brand photo paper (so you don't have to worry too much about colour casts or longevity)
* I have a couple of before/after examples on an old blog post of mine at alanklughammer.com/info/2011/11/retouching
I do wonder if the simplest fix to the system is to say that a company cannot own a patent, only a person.
A company can license a patent from a person, but that is the limit.
I had this idea a while ago. and I really think it is the easiest way forward. The idea that corporations have the same rights as individuals (without the consequences...) has run its course, and it is proving to be a drain on society.
Disclaimer, I am studying for my business administration degree, but I do not always side with corporations...
Most countries have a frivolous lawsuit act. People trying to sue for dumb reasons get slapped. And dumb reasons are obvious.
For example, in Canada if you give someone CPR to restart their heart, they cannot sue you because you broke one of their ribs.
* For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command.
What were you trying to do where you needed root? I hate to sound like a fan-boi, but something was wrong. I commonly copy files around multiple drives on multiple servers using Nautilus.... By the way, how can you use a file browser without split panes, can windows do this yet?
There was no GUI way to do some things (as far as I know). And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line. That got to really be annoying.
"most" things can be done with a gui, but I will admit that having to retype a whole command because of a mispelled (: word or a slight change in the command is a pain....
* I have a multifunction printer (print, copy, scan, fax) and the ONLY Linux driver that worked with it was from TurboLinux - $40 for the driver and it was only good for print. Couldn't use the driver over my home LAN like I can with my mfr's Windows driver.
Yeah, Canon printers suck, but I will say that the TurboPrint driver gave better results than the Canon driver on Windows...And then I found Epson for photos, Brother for laser, and never looked back...
Oh, and Cups rocks the doors off of windows printer sharing
* OpenOffice messed up the formatting of some of my more intricate Word files.
Even worse, Word messed up some of the formatting on my LibreOffice files
* Couldn't stream videos on Netflix, as Netflix requires the Silverlight plugin.
Yeah, This is one of the few remaining reasons I even keep a Win7 partition, mind you, I can waste time with other pursuits...
* Some web applications require Internet Explorer to work (I know, I HATE proprietary web applications and extensions as much as the next person, but one doesn't always have a choice).
Then the site owner is stupid, especially with the prevalence of tablets etc...
* I still have to sometimes use local (non-Web) software on my PC, and that software is WINDOWS based. And so far WINE sucks; it crashed on every Windows program I tried to run in the Linux environment.
Yeah, this could be a problem. Fortunately for me, Photoshop (yes, Photoshop is better than Gimp) runs faster in WINE on my linux partition than natively on the Win7 partition
* Sure, I could set up a dual-boot with Windows, which I did. But very shortly I got tired of switching back and forth between OS's. I was tired of having a "schizophrenic" computer, and just decided the heck with it, I'm just going back to Windows.
Yes I have the same problem. I have to make myself boot into Windows every month or so to apply all the updates (and my gawd the reboot thing gets old fast...)
So there you go. And plus, so far Windows 7 is running very smoothly on my new machine I recently built, so why mess with success?
So there you go. And plus, so far MINT is running very smoothly on my new machines I recently built, so why mess with success?
By that argument, they should be going after public parks, because people may be spending their time playing in a park, not in front of their computers listening to "paid for" music....
On XP you could fix this by clearing the prefetch folder, then defragment the disk, then use pagedefrag to defragment the registry and, if you are not smart enough to have set it to a fixed size early on or turned it off, the paging file. If each of these actions has an equivalent on Windows 7 (which I have barely used) then I would take them.
yep, definitely not ready for Joe Sixpack on the desktop...
Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. Photoshop running in wine (on mint) runs faster than nativly in Windows on the same dual boot machine. I also find that from log in to finished desktop is MUCH faster with linux. Windows seems to come up, but then various programs keep popping up for attention.*
I will admit that flash is better in windows than Linux woo hoo.....
* before you say uninstall a bunch of programs in windows, I have the same functionality in Linux without the slowdown at boot.
Why should ANYONE have to pay for movies, music, books or software?
obviously so money will be funnelled into making more movies, music, books or software.... and I will add other forms of art like photography, and other visual art....
Corollary: Why should only SOME people have to pay for movies, music, books or software?
Because only SOME people can afford it, or only SOME people will get use and/or enjoyment from it, but more to the point, we do not have a payment small enough for all people to pay for it. Lets say that one hundred million people in the world enjoy a particular song, it is pretty catchy..... If each person paid one penny (yes I know some currencies are worth a bit less, but let's move on) that would be a million dollars for one song. I think the problem is that, for some people, this seems like a reasonable amount of money. But if we want the artist to produce, for example, one work per year, the salary is ridiculous by an order of magnitude ($100,000 per year should be a reasonable salary for a successful artist). So now we want everyone to pay 1/10 of a cent for this work. This doesn't even touch the logistics of collecting that money (which, in part, is where distributors come in). But even if we triple the cost to account for the distribution overhead (you don't think the distributor deserves more than that do you?), we still don't have a small enough currency, unless you want to start paying for all music etc with bitcoin....
Or by another angle, why should only SOME people pay taxes to pay for the new bridge being built in Victoria? I mean tourists from all over the world come to our city, and many will use the bridge. Shouldn't everyone who uses the bridge pay for it?
Or closer to (my) heart, I produce some photography, and I have been told I am pretty good. And yes I have sold images. I have also put up displays in coffee shops and other venues. I have not made money from most of these shows. SOME people have paid for my work, while many others have enjoyed my images. I just call it advertising, but that will start a whole new rant, so let's move on....
Corollary^2: Why should anyone get PAID for making movies, music, books or software?
because we (for some definition of we, and some subset of the movies, music, etc) find value in said art forms
Conclusion: Actors, musicians, authors and programmers are worthless, as are their works.
I don't follow this conclusion at all. I have shown that not all people will pay for all things. I can throw out more examples, who pays for shopping malls, or roads, or museum exhibits, or neighbourhood improvement programs.... a small subset of the people who gain direct advantage of said product, however, these products create a greater good for society.
It has been argued that art* is good for society. As such it should be put in the same class as roads and schools. I am not saying that all artists should be supported by taxes, but I am saying that a few good artists (as defined by the society supporting them) should be supported by a few patrons. This system worked for almost all of human history. It is only recently when distributors got greedy, that artists of all kinds have not allowed everyone to enjoy their work. How much did Michelangelo charge for admission to the Sistine Chapel?
*and we are really talking about art with movies, music and books. Software is a new case, and it could also be argued that software is good for society as a whole....
How about the USA gives aid without strings attached? Or if that won't work, then don't give aid, but be aware that you will not get any advantages from that country, like oil or other trade items.
Anecdotal story: I had a single-mother friend whose daughter broke her arm in a playground accident. The next day at school a teacher asked what happened, and the child joked that her mom broke it. Social services all but broke down the mothers door, and my friend was a hair's breadth from losing her daughter completely. The worst part is that they (mother and daughter) had a great relationship up to that point, but that event pushed a wedge between them that never fully healed.
Way to "think of the children"....
You have to click on something to scroll it
This single pain gets me every time I have to use any MS system...
As mentioned below, KatMouse is a great utility that fixes this, except you have to turn it off for certain programs (like Photoshop) to get proper functionality of the scroll back (zooming). Even then it is a bit hit and miss.
I will get modded into oblivion for this, but I think people here have it completely backwards. Marketing* is just telling people what they want to hear. If most people found overweight (and equally unhealthy) people attractive, all our catwalks would be reinforced to handle the weight of the extremely beautiful people on display...
I know people will pull out the fact that there are a lot of large, even obese people in classical art, so skinny people are a modern fiction pushed on us. Wrong. During medieval times, food was not always easy to come by, a sign of affluence (admit it or not, money is a subtle indicator of beauty, for both men and women). Large people were therefore more successful.
Fast forward a few centuries, and food is much more plentiful, but leisure time is getting more scarce. Only the more affluent can afford to play sports, go to a gym or otherwise take time (and again money) to keep fit.
For further proof of this, look at other cultures around the world. This is getting harder, due to the widespread influence of western culture, but typically, Indian or African men prefer less skinny women.
Marketing beauty is all about taking the 1% who represent the extreme of what society finds attractive and exaggerating their traits. Note I am not saying this is a good thing, but it is an inevitable result of society....
*Disclaimer; I just finished a marketing course as part of my business degree...
man, someone has to use this as a sig....
Sensors use a strange measurement for size based on the size of a square in a circle with circumference x*
from Wikipedia:
The sensor sizes of many compact digital cameras are expressed in terms of the non-standardized "inch" system, as approximately 1.5 times the length of the diagonal of the sensor. This goes back to the way image sizes of early video cameras were expressed in terms of the outside diameter of the glass envelope of the video camera tube
*This dates back to when we were showing square images on CRT screens
another clue this is a camera with a phone, rather than the inverse is the lens they chose. They spent the money on a Zeiss lens.
Actually I am kind of surprised they put a fixed lens on it, but obviously they were building to a price. On that note, I wonder what it will cost? If it is around $100 to $150 it will do well. If they try to price it as a smartphone at $400 or more, It will flop
I seem to remember Ansel Adams (you may have heard of him) used to swear by Kodak Ektar lenses...
The early Kodak digital SLR's were built on Nikon bodies, and later Canon, but so what, Most current cameras use sensors from a different company. IIRC Canon is the only SLR manufacturer, including medium format, that makes it's own sensor. and IIRC again, most Canon point and shoots don't use a Canon sensor.
As I said earlier, Kodak just fucked up. They had it all, and decided to throw it all away...