Interesting link. In regard to their mixed results:
I'd like to point out that "better" lighting does not necessarily mean "more" lighting. There have been studies that show that lights that produce large amounts of glare can actually INCREASE crime, because it makes it HARDER to see people lurking in shadows than if there were no light at all.
In cases where proper, full-cutoff downlights were installed to replace glaring lights, crime is generally reduced noticably.
For reference, a "bad light" is one which you can see the bulb directly when looking at it from an angle more oblique than 45 degrees. Light cast out on an oblique angle like that (some even cast light directly UP!) is completely wasted, and contributes to light pollution and light trespass into surrounding properties (ever had a street light shining straight into your bedroom?).
Bad lighting is almost a given in small towns; some people apparently think they're "quaint." I've even seen horribly glaring lights installed on high-speed highways; in some conditions they limit visibility badly, and we'd be better off without them.
Unfortunately, if you go to Home Depot/Lowes/whatever, **EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN LIGHT THEY HAVE** is a "bad light" - you can not buy a good full cutoff light without going to a specialty store, which most people don't do.
Very true, in the context of this article, we're probably talking about strictly beef cattle. But yes, they still need to be individually handled a few times a year anyway, so I'd guess they'd want the batteries to last at least as long as that interval.
The cows are coming in to the barn twice a day to get milked anyway. When the cow gets locked into the milking stall, the collar can notify the stall that it needs its battery changed out. I'd think the batteries would be modular, and would probably last at least a couple of weeks, so you'd need spare batteries and charging cradles for 1/14th the number of head in your herd.
Since they can carry a lot of weight, the batteries may even last longer than that. If they last 30 days, well, all the head need to get a health check and innoculations/etc fairly often anyway, and if the batteries just clip in, this is an extra 10-second step.
I can even see these collars having some RFID and LEDs on top of the collar to identify which head are due for health checks (LED lights) and a hand-held unit scans the collar and brings up the history. If (when) that happens, this becomes a great management tool.
Look out if your boss tries to give you a present though: http://www.ucomics.com/thefifthwave/2004/ 05/02/
Well, if you have an exposure compensation control, you can fake it a bit. If your camera's default ISO is 100, and you have a +/- 2 stop exposure correction control, you can fake ISO 400 by using the -2 stop setting, then "push" the exposure in the computer afterwards.
This is *basically* what the cameras are doing internally anyway, though usually there's some anti-noise algorithms that are run at higher ISO settings. Some people even shoot RAW mode so they can use aftermarket noise reduction filters, which can be even better.
Yes, but if you can take better pictures with just a little effort, why not? I mean, you can say the same thing about absolutely anything in life; you can do just good enough to get by, or you can try a little harder.
An example; some people think that their writing is "good enough" so why bother getting better. Some of these people's writing is so bad that I have to read their output 5 or 10 times and sometimes try to guess what they meant, or even write back and ask.
Everyone has things they care more about, or less. If photography isn't your bag, fine, but please admit the possibility that some people care about taking better photos and might like to learn about it.
I've had horrible problems with low light photography with the digital camera.
You need a camera with a higher ISO setting, or a more powerful flash. I was shooting at ISO 3200 over the weekend, and got some great results. (Canon digital EOS w/hacked firmware - a bit noisy but very good results anyway).
It's not unsafe, it's a gel cell. They can run upside down or any other position for years and will not leak. The only potential problem is that if you short it out it'll get damn hot, but any decent battery will do that. Try it with Lithium Ion (from a safe distance) - they will explode when shorted. By comparison, lead-acid gel cells are tame.
If by "we" you mean people who don't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, and/or will believe any scare that the media dreams up during slow news weeks, then maybe "we" are scared.
There have been numerous toys that do this; a waving wand thing, a frisbee with programmable message, etc. I built one with a hardcoded logo about 15 years ago.
The lack of a common, robust and flexible copy/paste system under Linux is one of the things that has driven me back to Windows several times. I can't even always get text copy/paste to work between different apps, and forget images, objects, cutting a table from a web page and pasting into a spreadsheet and expecting proper behavior, etc.
Between that and getting printing working in a reasonable fashion (IE not having to install 12 pseudo printers if I want to print 12 different ways, or figuring out CUPS, or whatever) are the things that keep driving me nuts and sending me back to Micro$oft.
No, the real professionals will be buying the 1D. They might buy a 10D *or* a 300D as a backup body.
Many of the pros I see posting on forums buy 300Ds because they're lighter. The plastic body actually holds up just fine; I have a friend who's been shooting with EOS film cameras, plastic bodies, semi pro (location shoots, etc) and he's middling-hard on his cameras (hitting stuff, occasionaldrops onto concrete, etc) and he's had no impact-related trouble.
This has been going on for a long, long time. My dad was a pattern maker for a castings company that made intake manifolds, among other things.
The venerable Oldsmobile Rocket 350 engine, when it was first released, could wreck any transmission they had in production at the time. Too much power.
Their solution? Fit intake manifolds with restrictions inside to lower the power.
As the years went by and they came out with better trannies, they were able to remove the restrictions year by year, and claim a "new more powerful engine." It was the same engine all along. My dad said they did this for several years.
Go on location, shoot all day, and tell me if carrying that extra pound on your neck strap was worth it. I have a friend who shoots semi-pro, and he's dropped his digital rebel onto concrete, no problem, and before that, similarly abused his plastic-bodied EOS film cameras for years, no problems.
The magnesium body is nice, but I wouldn't pay much more for it. I would rather have one less pound to haul around all day. I've heard the same from pros on various forums.
BTW, your $$ are obviously cheaper than my $$. I have to have a damn good reason to spend $500.
I think he's saying that software should always be free. The camera is a specialized computer, and he's saying the company should be forced by law to give away any feature they can possibly cram into the camera.
Givern the same logic, someone selling a PC with no software on it is just ripping you off; he could easily install every piece of software on the shelves at CompUSA; after all, the PC is capable of it, and it doesn't cost anything to set the bits on the hard drive.
I own a Digital Rebel. I made the conscious choice to buy it given the features it has, knowing full well that the main difference to the 10D was firmware. I still think it's a great camera.
That said, the first thing I did when I read this article was to go and install the hacked firmware on my camera. Works great! WOOHOO!
Yup, and it doesn't have to very new, either. My '97 Taurus has a lockup torque converter. I think they became pretty standard in the early to mid '90's. The combination of that and computer control and integrating power demands such as air conditioning compressor engaging has gotten it to the point that there's hardly any difference in mileage between an automatic and a manual transmission. In fact, unless the driver is pretty good and is shooting for economy, I bet in a lot of cases the automatic would get better mileage.
Well, they COULD build a hybrid this way, but nobody does right now AFAIK. The two systems out there are both electrically assisted gasoline cars.
Actually I think the Prius might be able to operate in pure electric mode; it has a complex transmission with both gas and electric power being fed in, and provisions for regenerative braking, etc via being able to feed power back through the transmission towards the motor. But even so, I don't think the engine starts on demand and runs at a constant RPM feeding a generator.
The Insight has a flat motor on the back of the engine, direct drive, so it uses a more conventional transmission.
These are hard drives with batteries and a flash card slot. You put the flash card in, you push a button, it copies the data from the flash card to the hard drive. No computer involved.
Yes. One of the pieces of advice I saw recently in a "cycling through bad neighborhoods" page was "if someone worries you, make eye contact, just long enough to make it obvious that you could identify him if it ever came up.
A friend of mine was in asia somewhere with his Tai Chi school, walking around sightseeing. He said he saw a handful of guys up above, in an ambush type layout. He made good, solid eye contact with the leader, looked confident and ready, and the leader waved off the group.
There are targets walking by all the time. They'd rather take on the one that won't cause trouble. You probably shouldn't actually cause trouble if confronted, nothing is worth getting hurt over, but if they think you might, they'll just wait for the next guy.
Or for those without iPods and no urge to get one, get a Tripper, or an Image Bank, or any of a number of such products. The Tripper is $130 or so, and just put in whatever 2.5" hard drive you want, and have a battery powered image storage box that's also a USB 2.0 hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting link.
In regard to their mixed results:
I'd like to point out that "better" lighting does not necessarily mean "more" lighting. There have been studies that show that lights that produce large amounts of glare can actually INCREASE crime, because it makes it HARDER to see people lurking in shadows than if there were no light at all.
In cases where proper, full-cutoff downlights were installed to replace glaring lights, crime is generally reduced noticably.
For reference, a "bad light" is one which you can see the bulb directly when looking at it from an angle more oblique than 45 degrees. Light cast out on an oblique angle like that (some even cast light directly UP!) is completely wasted, and contributes to light pollution and light trespass into surrounding properties (ever had a street light shining straight into your bedroom?).
Bad lighting is almost a given in small towns; some people apparently think they're "quaint." I've even seen horribly glaring lights installed on high-speed highways; in some conditions they limit visibility badly, and we'd be better off without them.
Unfortunately, if you go to Home Depot/Lowes/whatever, **EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN LIGHT THEY HAVE** is a "bad light" - you can not buy a good full cutoff light without going to a specialty store, which most people don't do.
Very true, in the context of this article, we're probably talking about strictly beef cattle. But yes, they still need to be individually handled a few times a year anyway, so I'd guess they'd want the batteries to last at least as long as that interval.
The cows are coming in to the barn twice a day to get milked anyway. When the cow gets locked into the milking stall, the collar can notify the stall that it needs its battery changed out. I'd think the batteries would be modular, and would probably last at least a couple of weeks, so you'd need spare batteries and charging cradles for 1/14th the number of head in your herd.
/ 05/02/
Since they can carry a lot of weight, the batteries may even last longer than that. If they last 30 days, well, all the head need to get a health check and innoculations/etc fairly often anyway, and if the batteries just clip in, this is an extra 10-second step.
I can even see these collars having some RFID and LEDs on top of the collar to identify which head are due for health checks (LED lights) and a hand-held unit scans the collar and brings up the history. If (when) that happens, this becomes a great management tool.
Look out if your boss tries to give you a present though:
http://www.ucomics.com/thefifthwave/2004
We were paying $20/mo for dialup, plus $25/mo for the dedicated phone line. We're now paying $40/mo for 1.5M/256K cable.
I'm assuming you mean for the "casual user" who doesn't currently have a dedicated line. RSN, I think.
Well, if you have an exposure compensation control, you can fake it a bit. If your camera's default ISO is 100, and you have a +/- 2 stop exposure correction control, you can fake ISO 400 by using the -2 stop setting, then "push" the exposure in the computer afterwards.
This is *basically* what the cameras are doing internally anyway, though usually there's some anti-noise algorithms that are run at higher ISO settings. Some people even shoot RAW mode so they can use aftermarket noise reduction filters, which can be even better.
I have had 4 digital cameras now. All but the first one, years ago, have ISO settings. I'm not sure I've seen one recently that doesn't have them.
Yet more proof that the moderators are nuts. How in the HECK is this a troll?
Yes, but if you can take better pictures with just a little effort, why not? I mean, you can say the same thing about absolutely anything in life; you can do just good enough to get by, or you can try a little harder.
An example; some people think that their writing is "good enough" so why bother getting better. Some of these people's writing is so bad that I have to read their output 5 or 10 times and sometimes try to guess what they meant, or even write back and ask.
Everyone has things they care more about, or less. If photography isn't your bag, fine, but please admit the possibility that some people care about taking better photos and might like to learn about it.
I've had horrible problems with low light photography with the digital camera.
You need a camera with a higher ISO setting, or a more powerful flash. I was shooting at ISO 3200 over the weekend, and got some great results. (Canon digital EOS w/hacked firmware - a bit noisy but very good results anyway).
Yes, but LiIon's will EXPLODE VIOLENTLY if overcharged or discharged too quickly.
It's not unsafe, it's a gel cell. They can run upside down or any other position for years and will not leak. The only potential problem is that if you short it out it'll get damn hot, but any decent battery will do that.
Try it with Lithium Ion (from a safe distance) - they will explode when shorted. By comparison, lead-acid gel cells are tame.
If by "we" you mean people who don't know the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, and/or will believe any scare that the media dreams up during slow news weeks, then maybe "we" are scared.
I have one, as do several of my friends.
Pretty much the first thing I did when I took mine out of the box was to try to access port 80 and 443. No go.
After seeing this, we tried again. None of us can access the box from the WAN port, only the LAN side.
I wonder if this guy got a refurb or one that had been returned to a store after a user screwed with it?
There have been numerous toys that do this; a waving wand thing, a frisbee with programmable message, etc. I built one with a hardcoded logo about 15 years ago.
Here's another example:
http://www.luberth.com/analog.htm
The lack of a common, robust and flexible copy/paste system under Linux is one of the things that has driven me back to Windows several times. I can't even always get text copy/paste to work between different apps, and forget images, objects, cutting a table from a web page and pasting into a spreadsheet and expecting proper behavior, etc.
Between that and getting printing working in a reasonable fashion (IE not having to install 12 pseudo printers if I want to print 12 different ways, or figuring out CUPS, or whatever) are the things that keep driving me nuts and sending me back to Micro$oft.
No, the real professionals will be buying the 1D. They might buy a 10D *or* a 300D as a backup body.
Many of the pros I see posting on forums buy 300Ds because they're lighter. The plastic body actually holds up just fine; I have a friend who's been shooting with EOS film cameras, plastic bodies, semi pro (location shoots, etc) and he's middling-hard on his cameras (hitting stuff, occasionaldrops onto concrete, etc) and he's had no impact-related trouble.
This has been going on for a long, long time. My dad was a pattern maker for a castings company that made intake manifolds, among other things.
The venerable Oldsmobile Rocket 350 engine, when it was first released, could wreck any transmission they had in production at the time. Too much power.
Their solution? Fit intake manifolds with restrictions inside to lower the power.
As the years went by and they came out with better trannies, they were able to remove the restrictions year by year, and claim a "new more powerful engine." It was the same engine all along. My dad said they did this for several years.
Go on location, shoot all day, and tell me if carrying that extra pound on your neck strap was worth it.
I have a friend who shoots semi-pro, and he's dropped his digital rebel onto concrete, no problem, and before that, similarly abused his plastic-bodied EOS film cameras for years, no problems.
The magnesium body is nice, but I wouldn't pay much more for it. I would rather have one less pound to haul around all day. I've heard the same from pros on various forums.
BTW, your $$ are obviously cheaper than my $$. I have to have a damn good reason to spend $500.
I think he's saying that software should always be free. The camera is a specialized computer, and he's saying the company should be forced by law to give away any feature they can possibly cram into the camera.
Givern the same logic, someone selling a PC with no software on it is just ripping you off; he could easily install every piece of software on the shelves at CompUSA; after all, the PC is capable of it, and it doesn't cost anything to set the bits on the hard drive.
I own a Digital Rebel. I made the conscious choice to buy it given the features it has, knowing full well that the main difference to the 10D was firmware. I still think it's a great camera.
That said, the first thing I did when I read this article was to go and install the hacked firmware on my camera. Works great! WOOHOO!
Yup, and it doesn't have to very new, either. My '97 Taurus has a lockup torque converter. I think they became pretty standard in the early to mid '90's. The combination of that and computer control and integrating power demands such as air conditioning compressor engaging has gotten it to the point that there's hardly any difference in mileage between an automatic and a manual transmission. In fact, unless the driver is pretty good and is shooting for economy, I bet in a lot of cases the automatic would get better mileage.
Well, they COULD build a hybrid this way, but nobody does right now AFAIK. The two systems out there are both electrically assisted gasoline cars.
Actually I think the Prius might be able to operate in pure electric mode; it has a complex transmission with both gas and electric power being fed in, and provisions for regenerative braking, etc via being able to feed power back through the transmission towards the motor. But even so, I don't think the engine starts on demand and runs at a constant RPM feeding a generator.
The Insight has a flat motor on the back of the engine, direct drive, so it uses a more conventional transmission.
Did you go and look at the product?
These are hard drives with batteries and a flash card slot. You put the flash card in, you push a button, it copies the data from the flash card to the hard drive. No computer involved.
These have been around for several years.
Maybe, maybe not. When I'm using my laptop, I check my mail with my ISP's web mail service, which operates over https.
Yes. One of the pieces of advice I saw recently in a "cycling through bad neighborhoods" page was "if someone worries you, make eye contact, just long enough to make it obvious that you could identify him if it ever came up.
A friend of mine was in asia somewhere with his Tai Chi school, walking around sightseeing. He said he saw a handful of guys up above, in an ambush type layout. He made good, solid eye contact with the leader, looked confident and ready, and the leader waved off the group.
There are targets walking by all the time. They'd rather take on the one that won't cause trouble. You probably shouldn't actually cause trouble if confronted, nothing is worth getting hurt over, but if they think you might, they'll just wait for the next guy.
Or for those without iPods and no urge to get one, get a Tripper, or an Image Bank, or any of a number of such products. The Tripper is $130 or so, and just put in whatever 2.5" hard drive you want, and have a battery powered image storage box that's also a USB 2.0 hard drive.