That's because you're looking at them on a computer monitor. Try seeing the actual output on a 40" print.
The required resolution doesn't depend on how large you print it, it depends on perspective.
If you think you can get an image equivalent to a 6x9 film using a digital camera, you're on crack.
I can trivially get something better with a digital Betterlight back. And using panoramic software, I can get higher quality images than from a 6x9 film camera even using a $300 point-and-shoot.
A 50x40 doesn't require any more resolution than a 20x16 because a 50x40 simply requires a larger viewing distance to give the viewer the same perception as a 20x16.
It sounds like you are making huge enlargements of photos and then having viewers stand very close to them. That's either poor technique, or a photographic gimmick. It certainly isn't anything that matters much to maintstream commercial or artistic photography.
In any case, if you want very high resolution, digital panoramas or MF/LF digital back beat any film solution hands down.
Even the digital SLR is a transitional technology--as digital sensor technologies are maturing, the SLR form factor (optical through the lens viewfinder) makes less and less sense. In about 5-10 years, cameras with interchangeable lenses and high quality digital viewfinders will replace dSLRs for professional users. And in about 20 years, digital cameras will start to look completely differently from any of the form factors we have today.
I see no reason why you couldn't have taken the same photographs with the same or better quality using digital, and spending less money and lugging around less weight in the process.
Yes, digital is faster, and the wave of the future, etc., etc., but there are some areas where film cameras still have an edge. In particular, range of sensitivity: you can load ISO 50 slide film, or ISO 1600 negative film (but of course it's a bit grainier as you go up in ISO).
Modern digital SLRs have ISO ranges from 50-3200, and they beat 35mm film in terms of quality no matter what ISO you choose across that range. In particular, digital is a lot better than 35mm film at high ISO settings.
My favorite has to be shooting with Velvia slide film.
Look at these Velvia sky images scanned at 3200 dpi (about 15 Mpixel); if I saw that degree of noise in my digital camera at ISO 50 or 100, I'd send it to the repair shop.
Yes, digital could do it too, but the body alone would've been above $1300; I'd rather spend that on a lens.
If you use your camera seriously, the cost of film and development alone will quickly negate any cost advantage of the film camera. Film has become an expensive oddity compared to digital. And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
1) Film STILL offers better resolution, although this won't last for long. I believe its close to 22 megapixels, although this is not for sure.
Under completely unrealistic conditions and if you make a naive calculation relating lines and pixels, you get values like that. But even then, resolution is only one of many factors affecting image quality.
In real life, 35mm film is roughly the equivalent of a 3-5 Mpixel digital camera.
2) Some photographers just love the grain of B&W developed on Tri-X or T-Max film, which doesn't use the C-41 process used for Walmart shit.
All of that can be simulated in software.
Film forces you to think in artistic terms BEFORE you click, and there's a definite cost associated with clicking the shutter release. I believe it makes better photographers.
35mm is repackaged movie film. It's whole raison d'etre is that it's cheap, at the expense of quality. If you miss the days of film and deliberation, then at least use a MF camera (it's why I have kept a MF film camera that I use occasionally). But there is nothing to be missed about 35mm--digital does what 35mm was supposed to do better in every single respect.
No, it's the fault of the people distributing it. Since GPH is distributing the hardware, which contains the binaries, GPH is responsible for making available the sources that correspond to the binaries they are distributing.
The copyright holders should a preliminary injunction halting the distribution of the device in the US. That will get their attention. I suspect that once they have been served, they will comply quickly.
I would prefer that their be an open/free filesystem for all removable devices, but there is no hope for this unless Apple gets behind it. Apple is turning into one of OSS's biggest allies.
An "ally" implies deliberate aid; I think while Apple has been using and shipping open source software for a while, Apple's record on helping open source is at best mixed.
In any case, I don't see switching away from FAT for manufacturers as a big problem. Most devices could simply be shipped unformatted. And for those cases where a file system is required, if everybody standardizes on the same thing, only one driver would need to be installed ever, and PC manufacturers could preinstall even that (they do so for Flash and other stuff).
At 25 cents? Vendors will just jack the price up and move on.
You're missing the point. Of course vendors will pass on this cost to consumers, but they will not just "move on", they'll be pissed and they'll be more careful next time.
Not only do we have to put up with the miserable P.O.S. that is the FAT/VFAT file system, now we are also supposed to pay for the privilege. Unfortunately, this is the Microsoft story: first, they monopolize the market with bad technology, and then they try to make people pay for it.
Hopefully, sooner or later, through efforts like these, it will become obvious even to the most clueless of CEOs that adopting any kind of Microsoft technology is a bad idea.
I had thought of and wanted a magnetic power connector like this for many years. I'm curious: what's the prior art on them? Are there any other companies that use them? Are there patents on them? I found a few patents, but nothing that looks like a fundamental patent, either by Apple or by anybody else. Can we expect to see these power connectors in other laptops as well?
I like Apple hardware, but I don't particularly care for OS X--it's better than Windows, but I'd rather be running Linux. Unfortunately, PPC Linux has always been way behind on packages.
Having x86-based Macs means that I can run all mainstream Linux distributions at native speed, either under something like Xen, or dual-boot. Furthermore, I can also run Windows at native speeds at least under an emulator.
It's funny how the ruby community seems to very quickly settle on "the one true thing" and pour their efforts into that while the python community suffers from having dozens of equally popular (and meritorious) frameworks to choose from.
Maybe ther reason is simply that the Ruby community is still smaller. Note that Perl also has half a dozen modules for many common tasks.
is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?
Digital photo editing is as hard as it ever was: you still need to understand color, composition, etc.
It just seems like things are getting easier because Photoshop's UI sucked so badly that it got in the way. Finally, Adobe may (!) be getting around to designing less stupid UIs than they have in the past.
I have never had much luck with optical mice for gaming; they seem to be "glued" to the desk--you need to lift them much further in order to keep them from tracking. Do other people actually use and like optical mice for gaming?
It's a well-known fact that wearing corrective lenses causes the eye to learn to depend on the lense, causing the eye to weeken and need a higher perscription.
Most vision problems (myopia, astigmatism, etc.) are caused by incorrectly shaped corneas and/or eyeballs. Those are unaffected by visual experience in adults, so you can't fix them by not wearing glasses.
There can be small improvements in myopia if someone chooses not to wear glasses due to secondary effects (flattening of the lens if it's not used over its whole range; learned deblurring in the brain). Whether that's worth it is for you to decide, but even if it works for you, it doesn't fix what's wrong with your eyes.
If you want a permanent treatment for myopia or astigmatism, you can get laser eye surgery. But even that is only a symptomatic treatment in most people (the underlying causes and consequences of myopia remain), and it has significant risks.
Altogether, in adults, correcting vision fully with glasses is the most sensible choice: it's low-risk, flexible, and highly effective. And in your 40's, reading glasses become inevitable anyway.
The 770 hardware is great. The fact that it's Linux-based is great. The connectivity is great. The fact that it uses X11 is great. The UI is pretty good.
What is not so good is that the device is sluggish: a 250MHz processor ought to feel zippy, yet the 770 does not. I suspect the culprit is the Gtk+ toolkit. Nokia needs to do more work on pruning it down, maybe throwing out some functionality and visual features.
Okay, seeing how Burst was founded probably years before you got the Internet spells out great
Actually, I have been using the Internet since long before Burst was founded.
Turn off OSX and get Steve Job's dick out of your ass. The funny part here, if it was Microsoft attempting this, it would be a totally opposite argument on your end.
Your assumption is wrong. In fact, I think Apple has abused the patent system many times and keeps ripping off other people's ideas. But my dislike of Apple's intellectual property policies doesn't change the fact that Burst's patent is bogus. If it is Apple that spends the money to kill Burst's patent, all the better--let them do some good for a change.
It might be a "obvious engineering solution" now, but it wasn't an "obvious engineering solution" ten years ago.
It was an obvious engineering solution even 20 years ago. Well, except perhaps to technical know-nothings like you.
The fact that all life on earth is based on the exact same biochemistry is itself enough to prove common descent [...] we still know that all life on earth descended from a single ancestor, because there are a tremendous number of potential variables which would distinguish alien life.
You're operating under the mistaken assumption that microorganisms arriving from space would be "alien"; quite to the contrary: if panspermia is true, then the stellar neighborhood is likely filled with life forms with a consistent and common biochemistry.
We know that the earth can support life, whereas we do not know of any other location in the universe that can
Our theories about what environments can and cannot support life are so limited and have been proven wrong so often that, at this point, we can't draw any conclusions from them.
and it's doubtful that any terrestrial organisms could have survived the traumatic journey between the stars.
Quite to the contrary: experimental data suggests that organisms might well survive interplanetary and even interstellar travel.
I'm not arguing for panspermia, I'm just saying that, at this point, nobody has a clue about where life originated--let alone any kind of scientific evidence.
Yes, it's sad, but modern Linux desktops and applications (Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.) have become as bloated and inefficient as Windows desktops. On the other hand, modern Linux desktops have also equalized in terms of usability and familiarity: Windows has no advantage anymore over Linux in terms of mainstream usability or functionality.
There are many reasons for that. One is that the generation of programmers working on Linux desktop apps these days often come from a Windows world and bring their bad habits with them. Another is that a lot of those applications are written on cross-platform toolkits that are most optimized for Windows.
However, given that both Linux and Windows are now, on the one hand, equally bloated, and on the other hand, equally usable, the free and open source solution is obviously the better choice.
Those are useful features, but the most important thing C++ needs is a notion of safe modules, analogous to what C# has.
But, frankly, to me, C# is what C++ should be anyway. The only thing that is annoying about C# is its Microsoft connection and the concerns that causes.
While it doesn't prove anything, Occam would probably tell you that life starting in a place friendly to tons of kinds of life is more likely than it germinating someplace more harsh and then traveling millions of miles to get here.
And where would that be? Most of the biomass on earth appears to be in rocks and ocean floors, thriving under conditions that likely exist in lots of other bodies in the solar system and that only 20 years ago, we would have considered hostile. It appears increasingly likely that that's where life actually started. And for organisms encased in rocks to travel between planets seems to be commonplace and easy; it would be amazing indeed if it didn't happen.
The fact that life is on earth, and nowhere else we can see so far, seems like a reasonable reason to favour earth as our working assumption for the origin of earthly life.
We had missed most of the biomass on earth itself until a decade ago, as well as huge branches of the phylogenetic tree.
Given what we now know, many bodies in the solar system may contain life, including Mars, Europa, Callisto, Ceres, Venus, Jupiter, Charon, and even many comets. Given the conditions under which we now know life can exist, if rest of the solar system turned out to be completely sterile, that would be more suprising and difficult to explain than if it were full of bacterial life.
If this were related to panspermia, one would expect to find DNA or RNA and they didn't. But their experiments were pretty poor to begin with: it's easy to test for lipids, proteins, sugars, amino acids as well and they didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you're looking at them on a computer monitor. Try seeing the actual output on a 40" print.
The required resolution doesn't depend on how large you print it, it depends on perspective.
If you think you can get an image equivalent to a 6x9 film using a digital camera, you're on crack.
I can trivially get something better with a digital Betterlight back. And using panoramic software, I can get higher quality images than from a 6x9 film camera even using a $300 point-and-shoot.
A 50x40 doesn't require any more resolution than a 20x16 because a 50x40 simply requires a larger viewing distance to give the viewer the same perception as a 20x16.
It sounds like you are making huge enlargements of photos and then having viewers stand very close to them. That's either poor technique, or a photographic gimmick. It certainly isn't anything that matters much to maintstream commercial or artistic photography.
In any case, if you want very high resolution, digital panoramas or MF/LF digital back beat any film solution hands down.
Even the digital SLR is a transitional technology--as digital sensor technologies are maturing, the SLR form factor (optical through the lens viewfinder) makes less and less sense. In about 5-10 years, cameras with interchangeable lenses and high quality digital viewfinders will replace dSLRs for professional users. And in about 20 years, digital cameras will start to look completely differently from any of the form factors we have today.
I see no reason why you couldn't have taken the same photographs with the same or better quality using digital, and spending less money and lugging around less weight in the process.
Yes, digital is faster, and the wave of the future, etc., etc., but there are some areas where film cameras still have an edge. In particular, range of sensitivity: you can load ISO 50 slide film, or ISO 1600 negative film (but of course it's a bit grainier as you go up in ISO).
Modern digital SLRs have ISO ranges from 50-3200, and they beat 35mm film in terms of quality no matter what ISO you choose across that range. In particular, digital is a lot better than 35mm film at high ISO settings.
My favorite has to be shooting with Velvia slide film.
Look at these Velvia sky images scanned at 3200 dpi (about 15 Mpixel); if I saw that degree of noise in my digital camera at ISO 50 or 100, I'd send it to the repair shop.
Yes, digital could do it too, but the body alone would've been above $1300; I'd rather spend that on a lens.
If you use your camera seriously, the cost of film and development alone will quickly negate any cost advantage of the film camera. Film has become an expensive oddity compared to digital. And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
1) Film STILL offers better resolution, although this won't last for long. I believe its close to 22 megapixels, although this is not for sure.
Under completely unrealistic conditions and if you make a naive calculation relating lines and pixels, you get values like that. But even then, resolution is only one of many factors affecting image quality.
In real life, 35mm film is roughly the equivalent of a 3-5 Mpixel digital camera.
2) Some photographers just love the grain of B&W developed on Tri-X or T-Max film, which doesn't use the C-41 process used for Walmart shit.
All of that can be simulated in software.
Film forces you to think in artistic terms BEFORE you click, and there's a definite cost associated with clicking the shutter release. I believe it makes better photographers.
35mm is repackaged movie film. It's whole raison d'etre is that it's cheap, at the expense of quality. If you miss the days of film and deliberation, then at least use a MF camera (it's why I have kept a MF film camera that I use occasionally). But there is nothing to be missed about 35mm--digital does what 35mm was supposed to do better in every single respect.
No, it's the fault of the people distributing it. Since GPH is distributing the hardware, which contains the binaries, GPH is responsible for making available the sources that correspond to the binaries they are distributing.
The copyright holders should a preliminary injunction halting the distribution of the device in the US. That will get their attention. I suspect that once they have been served, they will comply quickly.
I would prefer that their be an open/free filesystem for all removable devices, but there is no hope for this unless Apple gets behind it. Apple is turning into one of OSS's biggest allies.
An "ally" implies deliberate aid; I think while Apple has been using and shipping open source software for a while, Apple's record on helping open source is at best mixed.
In any case, I don't see switching away from FAT for manufacturers as a big problem. Most devices could simply be shipped unformatted. And for those cases where a file system is required, if everybody standardizes on the same thing, only one driver would need to be installed ever, and PC manufacturers could preinstall even that (they do so for Flash and other stuff).
At 25 cents? Vendors will just jack the price up and move on.
You're missing the point. Of course vendors will pass on this cost to consumers, but they will not just "move on", they'll be pissed and they'll be more careful next time.
Not only do we have to put up with the miserable P.O.S. that is the FAT/VFAT file system, now we are also supposed to pay for the privilege. Unfortunately, this is the Microsoft story: first, they monopolize the market with bad technology, and then they try to make people pay for it.
Hopefully, sooner or later, through efforts like these, it will become obvious even to the most clueless of CEOs that adopting any kind of Microsoft technology is a bad idea.
I had thought of and wanted a magnetic power connector like this for many years. I'm curious: what's the prior art on them? Are there any other companies that use them? Are there patents on them? I found a few patents, but nothing that looks like a fundamental patent, either by Apple or by anybody else. Can we expect to see these power connectors in other laptops as well?
I like Apple hardware, but I don't particularly care for OS X--it's better than Windows, but I'd rather be running Linux. Unfortunately, PPC Linux has always been way behind on packages.
Having x86-based Macs means that I can run all mainstream Linux distributions at native speed, either under something like Xen, or dual-boot. Furthermore, I can also run Windows at native speeds at least under an emulator.
It's funny how the ruby community seems to very quickly settle on "the one true thing" and pour their efforts into that while the python community suffers from having dozens of equally popular (and meritorious) frameworks to choose from.
Maybe ther reason is simply that the Ruby community is still smaller. Note that Perl also has half a dozen modules for many common tasks.
is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?
Digital photo editing is as hard as it ever was: you still need to understand color, composition, etc.
It just seems like things are getting easier because Photoshop's UI sucked so badly that it got in the way. Finally, Adobe may (!) be getting around to designing less stupid UIs than they have in the past.
I have never had much luck with optical mice for gaming; they seem to be "glued" to the desk--you need to lift them much further in order to keep them from tracking. Do other people actually use and like optical mice for gaming?
It's a well-known fact that wearing corrective lenses causes the eye to learn to depend on the lense, causing the eye to weeken and need a higher perscription.
Most vision problems (myopia, astigmatism, etc.) are caused by incorrectly shaped corneas and/or eyeballs. Those are unaffected by visual experience in adults, so you can't fix them by not wearing glasses.
There can be small improvements in myopia if someone chooses not to wear glasses due to secondary effects (flattening of the lens if it's not used over its whole range; learned deblurring in the brain). Whether that's worth it is for you to decide, but even if it works for you, it doesn't fix what's wrong with your eyes.
If you want a permanent treatment for myopia or astigmatism, you can get laser eye surgery. But even that is only a symptomatic treatment in most people (the underlying causes and consequences of myopia remain), and it has significant risks.
Altogether, in adults, correcting vision fully with glasses is the most sensible choice: it's low-risk, flexible, and highly effective. And in your 40's, reading glasses become inevitable anyway.
Internet pundits have been a rather self-satisfied and well-paid class for over a decade and a half
Yeah, he should know, given that punditry is all Lanier does.
The 770 hardware is great. The fact that it's Linux-based is great. The connectivity is great. The fact that it uses X11 is great. The UI is pretty good.
What is not so good is that the device is sluggish: a 250MHz processor ought to feel zippy, yet the 770 does not. I suspect the culprit is the Gtk+ toolkit. Nokia needs to do more work on pruning it down, maybe throwing out some functionality and visual features.
Okay, seeing how Burst was founded probably years before you got the Internet spells out great
Actually, I have been using the Internet since long before Burst was founded.
Turn off OSX and get Steve Job's dick out of your ass. The funny part here, if it was Microsoft attempting this, it would be a totally opposite argument on your end.
Your assumption is wrong. In fact, I think Apple has abused the patent system many times and keeps ripping off other people's ideas. But my dislike of Apple's intellectual property policies doesn't change the fact that Burst's patent is bogus. If it is Apple that spends the money to kill Burst's patent, all the better--let them do some good for a change.
It might be a "obvious engineering solution" now, but it wasn't an "obvious engineering solution" ten years ago.
It was an obvious engineering solution even 20 years ago. Well, except perhaps to technical know-nothings like you.
The fact that all life on earth is based on the exact same biochemistry is itself enough to prove common descent [...] we still know that all life on earth descended from a single ancestor, because there are a tremendous number of potential variables which would distinguish alien life.
You're operating under the mistaken assumption that microorganisms arriving from space would be "alien"; quite to the contrary: if panspermia is true, then the stellar neighborhood is likely filled with life forms with a consistent and common biochemistry.
We know that the earth can support life, whereas we do not know of any other location in the universe that can
Our theories about what environments can and cannot support life are so limited and have been proven wrong so often that, at this point, we can't draw any conclusions from them.
and it's doubtful that any terrestrial organisms could have survived the traumatic journey between the stars.
Quite to the contrary: experimental data suggests that organisms might well survive interplanetary and even interstellar travel.
I'm not arguing for panspermia, I'm just saying that, at this point, nobody has a clue about where life originated--let alone any kind of scientific evidence.
Yes, it's sad, but modern Linux desktops and applications (Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.) have become as bloated and inefficient as Windows desktops. On the other hand, modern Linux desktops have also equalized in terms of usability and familiarity: Windows has no advantage anymore over Linux in terms of mainstream usability or functionality.
There are many reasons for that. One is that the generation of programmers working on Linux desktop apps these days often come from a Windows world and bring their bad habits with them. Another is that a lot of those applications are written on cross-platform toolkits that are most optimized for Windows.
However, given that both Linux and Windows are now, on the one hand, equally bloated, and on the other hand, equally usable, the free and open source solution is obviously the better choice.
Those are useful features, but the most important thing C++ needs is a notion of safe modules, analogous to what C# has.
But, frankly, to me, C# is what C++ should be anyway. The only thing that is annoying about C# is its Microsoft connection and the concerns that causes.
While it doesn't prove anything, Occam would probably tell you that life starting in a place friendly to tons of kinds of life is more likely than it germinating someplace more harsh and then traveling millions of miles to get here.
And where would that be? Most of the biomass on earth appears to be in rocks and ocean floors, thriving under conditions that likely exist in lots of other bodies in the solar system and that only 20 years ago, we would have considered hostile. It appears increasingly likely that that's where life actually started. And for organisms encased in rocks to travel between planets seems to be commonplace and easy; it would be amazing indeed if it didn't happen.
The fact that life is on earth, and nowhere else we can see so far, seems like a reasonable reason to favour earth as our working assumption for the origin of earthly life.
We had missed most of the biomass on earth itself until a decade ago, as well as huge branches of the phylogenetic tree.
Given what we now know, many bodies in the solar system may contain life, including Mars, Europa, Callisto, Ceres, Venus, Jupiter, Charon, and even many comets. Given the conditions under which we now know life can exist, if rest of the solar system turned out to be completely sterile, that would be more suprising and difficult to explain than if it were full of bacterial life.
If this were related to panspermia, one would expect to find DNA or RNA and they didn't. But their experiments were pretty poor to begin with: it's easy to test for lipids, proteins, sugars, amino acids as well and they didn't.