After a geologicially short time all the DNA of the seeds will break down.
DNA is very stable at low temperatures. Seeds generally lose viability because of ice crystal formation, which disrupts their cell membranes, not because of anything wrong with their DNA.
I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough...er... impossible to do my job without the JDK and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.
You're a perfect example of corporate incompetence: neither the JRE nor the JDK are "open source", and neither requires system administrator privileges to install. And if you actually were to download the JRE sources from Sun, your company would be in big trouble because the sources come with lots of strings attached.
Instead of whining about the fact that the legal department is trying to protect your company from your incompetence, do your fellow employees a favor and quit.
What ADVANTAGE does it have as a back door, that other more-convenient exploits can't offer?
The "advantage" would be that that's the piece of software the person who put in the backdoor had access to. It's also obscure enough that it might stay undiscovered for a long time (as it did).
There is just one story after another about Microsoft "going for quality" and "Microsoft running on machines just as small as those Linux runs on", "Microsoft having fewer vulnerabilities according to some web site", and "Microsoft this" and "Microsoft that". If you read carefully, most of those stories were actually initiated by Microsoft.
So, that makes me wonder: is this just the season for the Microsoft propaganda machine to become active? Or is Linux striking more fear than usual into their hearts?
"It's basically a business decision for Microsoft," Anderson said. "Like any other company, we like to leverage our strength in the market in such a way as to keep competitors out of the market. Call in 'monopolistic practices' if you like, but as long as we are going to get away with it, we are going to continue to do it."
Windows Media Player has been really important for the Mac because there are a lot of media out there that are WMF only.
However, we can hope that this will accelerate the move to open formats.
Well, many people who have come up with FOSS business models genuinely think they are doing good by doing well, but that doesn't mean that they are right.
A web page is not the proper place for this sort of thing. The place this needs to show up is the first time the user attempts to use the feature in the application: a big dialog box in which the user sets the policy initially, plus the ability to change it in the Preferences ("never send any information to Apple", "always require confirmation for information sent to Apple", "automatically transmit information related to music recommendations to Apple").
Programmers who think that putting up a notice on a web site aren't taking their professional responsibilities seriously.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
The difference is simple: people understand and expect that when they make a purchase, the merchant requires and obtains a specific set of personal information. For a music player, this sort of thing is not expected.
On your e-commerce site, just try to obtain and store information you don't require for the purchase--I guarantee you you'll get an earful from many customers, and many others will choose not to do business with you.
People have certain expectations about how business and personal transactions work, and you violate them at your own peril.
indeed: taking responsibility and not being lazy
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
You're absolving the end user from personal responsibility. The information was there, but the users were too lazy to bother reading anything about the product they were using.
People have certain assumptions about the products they are using, and those assumptions are justified. When I play a local piece of music and click on a button in the UI of a local application, I don't expect personal information to be transmitted anywhere without asking me.
The correct thing for an application to do is to pop up a dialog the first time that says "This feature transmits information about your listening habits to the Apple Music Store. Is that OK?".
The American public is used to being spoon fed everything and it's led us to being fat and lazy. Personal responsibility folks. It's not that difficult of a concept.
Yes, indeed, it's about personal responsibility and not being lazy. Software developers should take personal responsibility for the software they create, and that includes not transmitting personal information to a server without explicit notification to the user. People who can't grasp such a simple concept shouldn't be developing software.
Under certain circumstances if I integrate MySQL into my application itself (not just connect to a MySQL server)
Connecting to the MySQL server requires the MySQL client libraries, and the official client libraries are under GPL as well AFAIK. So, unless you want to mess around with potentially less compatible and less tested third party libraries, client software must be GPL'ed as well.
First of all, it can be important to permit linking and distribution of open source software to proprietary software, for example as a means of driving a proprietary standard out of the market. The GNU project itself has released many libraries in a form that permits proprietary, closed source software to use them that way because they know it's important.
Second, if there is a single commercial entity in control of the development of a piece of open source software, that entity will pursue its own ends with the development of the software. For example, they'll choose which features to include and support instead of being end user driven.
I think Troll Tech and MySQL are both doing more harm than good for free software and open source software because they are using open source merely as tool to increase their proprietary business. That's the kind of abuse of the open source and free software models that we really have to watch out for and defend against.
I think you are making a valid point: dynamic libraries do cause a lot of dependencies, and one ought to rethink the decision to use them. The use of C/C++ compounds this problem because it also requires an extremely tight coupling between libraries and applications (change one class and everything needs to be recompiled).
However, we aren't talking about "a little disk space"; the C/C++ libraries used by modern desktop software are enormous. People tend to underestimate the cost and bloat that goes along with C/C++ libraries because they don't see it either in ls or in ps.
I think a solution is to dump C/C++ altogether; in languages like Smalltalk and C#, most libraries are not shared, but the runtime still remains at a relatively modest size (by modern standards) because of dynamic typing and dynamic binding.
If using 3 of the same thing loaded into memory makes sense to you then have at it.
It makes sense because it means these apps can be tested and released separately, and because it means that when one of the crashes, the others don't.
As far as your last comment goes it's all a matter of opinion. I'm FORCING myself to use OO as it is barely useable (no exaggeration) when I do large presentations with fonts of multiple sizes.
That must be something specific to your setup or presentations; I use OOo all the time with big and complex presentations on less powerful hardware, and it works fine; the only thing that feels slow is startup.
So we'll have TBird, Firefox, and a Calendar all running off 3 instances of the same runtime engine - hey, that's SMART!
Yes, it is, because it means that they all can use different versions of the runtime engine.
For the life of me, I can't figure out:
Well, keep thinking about it, maybe eventually you will figure it out. It makes sense to me: Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo get the job done with a memory footprint, speed, and release dates that I can live with. That's what counts.
The worst thing of all is the built in obsolescence of the digi stuff.
The obsolescence is only in your mind. My 5 year old digital camera still yields the same quality pictures as it did the day I bought it; it's only "obsolete" if I want more resolution or dynamic range. A Betterlight back will still yield the same quality images in five years as it does today (meaning, excellent), the newer model will probably just be a bit lighter and thinner.
The 'compromise' of a digital MF doesn't approach LF in quality.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't matter: professional photography isn't about achieving the highest quality images in every instance, it's about getting the job done. That's why we got the 35mm format in the first place, which trades image quality for size and convenience.
A digital MF has sufficient quality for almost all purposes and is usable in a wider range of conditions than a film-based LF camera; that makes it the right choice for the job.
In any case, film-based LF isn't going away--LF cameras and film can be low-tech and don't require much up-front investment to produce. But 35mm film pushes the technology and a tiny market of enthusiasts isn't going to keep that alive when professionals and most amateurs have moved to digital--that's why 35mm film is doomed.
Digital sensors, however, do not operate as well (as film) when light is coming in at an angle.
Current digital sensors don't, but the problem is fixable and people have been busy working on it. That, together with the ability of high quality live previews, will mean that the SLR design just doesn't make much sense anymore.
It will still be a good idea to keep the sensor some distance back from the lens (not an issue except for rectilinear ultra wide angle lenses).
That's my point: this issue will be addressed over the next few years.
I think Sun and Apple merging would have been a horrible idea; the corporate cultures of the two companies are completely different. And instead of getting the best of both worlds, you probably would have ended up with products giving you the worst.
Yes, I agree with that. And that observation is exactly why people who compare lpmm for film with digital resolution are wrong: at high spatial frequencies, film has poor gradations and color, whereas digital images give you full 12 or 14bpp intensity resolution at every pixel regardless of spatial frequency.
When you want good gradations, then film resolution is actually quite poor, and that's why MF and large format are so important for high quality film photography--it's the only way to get reasonable resolution and good gradations out of film. For digital, however, increasing pixel size doesn't improve gradations much, it mostly just reduces noise.
The sky noise in those images is an artifact of the digital scanning process. Velvia viewed through a loupe on a light table does not look like that.
Oh, the noise is there; the "artifact" is that your eyes can't resolve that much detail on the light table.
And since we're on the subject, if I got a Velvia slide back with the weak colors you see in most digital pictures, I'd ask for my money back and tell the lab to refresh their chemicals.
The fact that high-end digital cameras yield what looks like weak colors and slightly blurry images is deliberate--it's the correct default. If you want something different, you are supposed to either configure it in the camera yourself or during the RAW conversion. Any digital camera that yielded Velvia-like images out of the box would be considered defective.
Something like a Betterlight back seems pretty reasonable price-wise and weight-wise.
For backpacking landscape photography, the best compromise is probably a digital medium format camera, or a high-end FF dSLR plus occasional stitching.
I've done a huge amount of stitching [...] I typically shoot around 80-100 6x9 images
Stitching isn't the equivalent of a 6x9 camera, it's closer to a view camera, only even slower and even more flexible.
I think your problem is that you are looking for a direct equivalent for each film camera type you know, but those don't exist. Digital has good (better!) solutions for pretty much every real-world photographic situation. In particular, I have seen no pictures on your site that couldn't have been taken at least as well with the appropriate choice of P&S, dSLR, digital back, or stitching.
You don't know what you're talking about. Go and look at some big 4x5 enlargements and then come back.
The fact that 4x5 negatives have more resolution than an APS or FF sensor digital camera isn't in question. The questions are (1) whether you need that resolution, and (2) if you need it, why you aren't comparing a 4x5 digital sensor with 4x5 film.
I've used both kinds of cameras. Have you?
Yes, I have. In what way do you think it's better than a 4x5 digital back?
Under your argument, when I buy a PC with Windows preloaded in a store I would be under no license obligation to Microsoft. That's not the way software licenses work; maybe they should, but they don't.
Theoretically, there could be a bug in the GPL that opens up such a loophole. If there were, it would be fixable in the same way that Microsoft ensures that end users are bound by their license terms even though there are intermediate vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
After a geologicially short time all the DNA of the seeds will break down.
DNA is very stable at low temperatures. Seeds generally lose viability because of ice crystal formation, which disrupts their cell membranes, not because of anything wrong with their DNA.
I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough ...er... impossible to do my job without the JDK and he refers me to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) division.
You're a perfect example of corporate incompetence: neither the JRE nor the JDK are "open source", and neither requires system administrator privileges to install. And if you actually were to download the JRE sources from Sun, your company would be in big trouble because the sources come with lots of strings attached.
Instead of whining about the fact that the legal department is trying to protect your company from your incompetence, do your fellow employees a favor and quit.
What ADVANTAGE does it have as a back door, that other more-convenient exploits can't offer?
The "advantage" would be that that's the piece of software the person who put in the backdoor had access to. It's also obscure enough that it might stay undiscovered for a long time (as it did).
True, but MySQL qualifies as one of the poster boys of the open source movement
It does? Not to me. If MySQL represents the future of FOSS, I think FOSS has failed. At best, one might argue that they are a transitional oddity.
There is just one story after another about Microsoft "going for quality" and "Microsoft running on machines just as small as those Linux runs on", "Microsoft having fewer vulnerabilities according to some web site", and "Microsoft this" and "Microsoft that". If you read carefully, most of those stories were actually initiated by Microsoft.
So, that makes me wonder: is this just the season for the Microsoft propaganda machine to become active? Or is Linux striking more fear than usual into their hearts?
Windows Media Player has been really important for the Mac because there are a lot of media out there that are WMF only.
However, we can hope that this will accelerate the move to open formats.
Well, many people who have come up with FOSS business models genuinely think they are doing good by doing well, but that doesn't mean that they are right.
A web page is not the proper place for this sort of thing. The place this needs to show up is the first time the user attempts to use the feature in the application: a big dialog box in which the user sets the policy initially, plus the ability to change it in the Preferences ("never send any information to Apple", "always require confirmation for information sent to Apple", "automatically transmit information related to music recommendations to Apple").
Programmers who think that putting up a notice on a web site aren't taking their professional responsibilities seriously.
The difference is simple: people understand and expect that when they make a purchase, the merchant requires and obtains a specific set of personal information. For a music player, this sort of thing is not expected.
On your e-commerce site, just try to obtain and store information you don't require for the purchase--I guarantee you you'll get an earful from many customers, and many others will choose not to do business with you.
People have certain expectations about how business and personal transactions work, and you violate them at your own peril.
You're absolving the end user from personal responsibility. The information was there, but the users were too lazy to bother reading anything about the product they were using.
People have certain assumptions about the products they are using, and those assumptions are justified. When I play a local piece of music and click on a button in the UI of a local application, I don't expect personal information to be transmitted anywhere without asking me.
The correct thing for an application to do is to pop up a dialog the first time that says "This feature transmits information about your listening habits to the Apple Music Store. Is that OK?".
The American public is used to being spoon fed everything and it's led us to being fat and lazy. Personal responsibility folks. It's not that difficult of a concept.
Yes, indeed, it's about personal responsibility and not being lazy. Software developers should take personal responsibility for the software they create, and that includes not transmitting personal information to a server without explicit notification to the user. People who can't grasp such a simple concept shouldn't be developing software.
Under certain circumstances if I integrate MySQL into my application itself (not just connect to a MySQL server)
Connecting to the MySQL server requires the MySQL client libraries, and the official client libraries are under GPL as well AFAIK. So, unless you want to mess around with potentially less compatible and less tested third party libraries, client software must be GPL'ed as well.
First of all, it can be important to permit linking and distribution of open source software to proprietary software, for example as a means of driving a proprietary standard out of the market. The GNU project itself has released many libraries in a form that permits proprietary, closed source software to use them that way because they know it's important.
Second, if there is a single commercial entity in control of the development of a piece of open source software, that entity will pursue its own ends with the development of the software. For example, they'll choose which features to include and support instead of being end user driven.
I think Troll Tech and MySQL are both doing more harm than good for free software and open source software because they are using open source merely as tool to increase their proprietary business. That's the kind of abuse of the open source and free software models that we really have to watch out for and defend against.
Troll Tech has basically the same "business model". I think it's a worrisome trend.
I think you are making a valid point: dynamic libraries do cause a lot of dependencies, and one ought to rethink the decision to use them. The use of C/C++ compounds this problem because it also requires an extremely tight coupling between libraries and applications (change one class and everything needs to be recompiled).
However, we aren't talking about "a little disk space"; the C/C++ libraries used by modern desktop software are enormous. People tend to underestimate the cost and bloat that goes along with C/C++ libraries because they don't see it either in ls or in ps.
I think a solution is to dump C/C++ altogether; in languages like Smalltalk and C#, most libraries are not shared, but the runtime still remains at a relatively modest size (by modern standards) because of dynamic typing and dynamic binding.
If using 3 of the same thing loaded into memory makes sense to you then have at it.
It makes sense because it means these apps can be tested and released separately, and because it means that when one of the crashes, the others don't.
As far as your last comment goes it's all a matter of opinion. I'm FORCING myself to use OO as it is barely useable (no exaggeration) when I do large presentations with fonts of multiple sizes.
That must be something specific to your setup or presentations; I use OOo all the time with big and complex presentations on less powerful hardware, and it works fine; the only thing that feels slow is startup.
So we'll have TBird, Firefox, and a Calendar all running off 3 instances of the same runtime engine - hey, that's SMART!
Yes, it is, because it means that they all can use different versions of the runtime engine.
For the life of me, I can't figure out:
Well, keep thinking about it, maybe eventually you will figure it out. It makes sense to me: Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo get the job done with a memory footprint, speed, and release dates that I can live with. That's what counts.
The worst thing of all is the built in obsolescence of the digi stuff.
The obsolescence is only in your mind. My 5 year old digital camera still yields the same quality pictures as it did the day I bought it; it's only "obsolete" if I want more resolution or dynamic range. A Betterlight back will still yield the same quality images in five years as it does today (meaning, excellent), the newer model will probably just be a bit lighter and thinner.
The 'compromise' of a digital MF doesn't approach LF in quality.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't matter: professional photography isn't about achieving the highest quality images in every instance, it's about getting the job done. That's why we got the 35mm format in the first place, which trades image quality for size and convenience.
A digital MF has sufficient quality for almost all purposes and is usable in a wider range of conditions than a film-based LF camera; that makes it the right choice for the job.
In any case, film-based LF isn't going away--LF cameras and film can be low-tech and don't require much up-front investment to produce. But 35mm film pushes the technology and a tiny market of enthusiasts isn't going to keep that alive when professionals and most amateurs have moved to digital--that's why 35mm film is doomed.
Digital sensors, however, do not operate as well (as film) when light is coming in at an angle.
Current digital sensors don't, but the problem is fixable and people have been busy working on it. That, together with the ability of high quality live previews, will mean that the SLR design just doesn't make much sense anymore.
It will still be a good idea to keep the sensor some distance back from the lens (not an issue except for rectilinear ultra wide angle lenses).
That's my point: this issue will be addressed over the next few years.
I think Sun and Apple merging would have been a horrible idea; the corporate cultures of the two companies are completely different. And instead of getting the best of both worlds, you probably would have ended up with products giving you the worst.
Yes, I agree with that. And that observation is exactly why people who compare lpmm for film with digital resolution are wrong: at high spatial frequencies, film has poor gradations and color, whereas digital images give you full 12 or 14bpp intensity resolution at every pixel regardless of spatial frequency.
When you want good gradations, then film resolution is actually quite poor, and that's why MF and large format are so important for high quality film photography--it's the only way to get reasonable resolution and good gradations out of film. For digital, however, increasing pixel size doesn't improve gradations much, it mostly just reduces noise.
The sky noise in those images is an artifact of the digital scanning process. Velvia viewed through a loupe on a light table does not look like that.
Oh, the noise is there; the "artifact" is that your eyes can't resolve that much detail on the light table.
And since we're on the subject, if I got a Velvia slide back with the weak colors you see in most digital pictures, I'd ask for my money back and tell the lab to refresh their chemicals.
The fact that high-end digital cameras yield what looks like weak colors and slightly blurry images is deliberate--it's the correct default. If you want something different, you are supposed to either configure it in the camera yourself or during the RAW conversion. Any digital camera that yielded Velvia-like images out of the box would be considered defective.
Something like a Betterlight back seems pretty reasonable price-wise and weight-wise.
For backpacking landscape photography, the best compromise is probably a digital medium format camera, or a high-end FF dSLR plus occasional stitching.
I've done a huge amount of stitching [...] I typically shoot around 80-100 6x9 images
Stitching isn't the equivalent of a 6x9 camera, it's closer to a view camera, only even slower and even more flexible.
I think your problem is that you are looking for a direct equivalent for each film camera type you know, but those don't exist. Digital has good (better!) solutions for pretty much every real-world photographic situation. In particular, I have seen no pictures on your site that couldn't have been taken at least as well with the appropriate choice of P&S, dSLR, digital back, or stitching.
You don't know what you're talking about. Go and look at some big 4x5 enlargements and then come back.
The fact that 4x5 negatives have more resolution than an APS or FF sensor digital camera isn't in question. The questions are (1) whether you need that resolution, and (2) if you need it, why you aren't comparing a 4x5 digital sensor with 4x5 film.
I've used both kinds of cameras. Have you?
Yes, I have. In what way do you think it's better than a 4x5 digital back?
Under your argument, when I buy a PC with Windows preloaded in a store I would be under no license obligation to Microsoft. That's not the way software licenses work; maybe they should, but they don't.
Theoretically, there could be a bug in the GPL that opens up such a loophole. If there were, it would be fixable in the same way that Microsoft ensures that end users are bound by their license terms even though there are intermediate vendors.