Get a Fuji S602, $600 at buydig.com, and stop strutting your 35mm. For all but the most purity minded artists, it's a dying medium.
I didn't enter this discussion to declare my allegiance to the Royal (Gold) 35mm. Indeed, all I care about is what works best in the circumstances, and is most economically viable. What I do know is that of the $1000 CDN digital cameras that I've had the opportunity to experiment with, they could best be described as toys: Horrible (HORRIBLE) auto-focus, a light range that requires a flash in all but open sunlight (while it isn't something I normally do, I can put a roll of 3200 film and a f1.0 50mm lens and shoot in candle light), yet with a flash control and interfacing mechanism that is incapable of using anything but the direct flash horrific onboard flash, among other problems. SLR, or a reasonable approximation of it, is very important to me (Olympus has a couple of digitals that are SLRs, or at least they did, and I was reasonably impressed with those): An LCD screen is not a reasonable approximation of an SLR unless it provided a half decent number of pixels, which most don't, to at least be able to reasonably focus/etc.
I've been eyeballing some of the higher end "35mm style" Canons (with interchangable lenses et. all. I'd rather have a f1.4 50mm when that's what's called for than a f2.8-f4.5 28-105, for example), and while they're extremely impressive, they push the financial boundaries (the D60 runs ~$3500).
I've seen several advertise that, but everytime I dug deeper there were conditions to that sort of speed: Shooting ultra low resolution with high compression, for instance. A 35mm, on the other hand, is doing the same process, only faster: There is no sacrifice to the quality of the image.
I don't want to give the impression that I don't think there is a place for digitals: Being able to shoot 100s of images and immediately cull them gives you a lot more liberty to take risks with photos, and increases the likelihood of getting a great shot. However I still have never seen, even on a super whooper HP, a printout from a digital camera that approaches even a marginal 35mm.
Film is dead. As a semi-pro photographer, and someone who has been doing it for a VERY long time, I can say: film is dead.
What a foolish extremist assertion. There is no doubt that digitals have some benefits, but they have some downsides as well:
It is not a myth: Most digital cameras have a very slow reaction time, including fairly higher end cameras.
Most digital cameras spend a hefty amount of time writing each image to memory. My amateur 35MM shoots 4 frames per second if I want, whereas most digitals can at best shoot a frame every 6 seconds or so.
Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity.
Most digitals aren't SLR. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
Most digitals have fixed lenses. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
I'm hoping to find a digital camera that convinces me to dump my film habit, but so far it hasn't happened, at least not until looking in the $2000+ range.
Why is it that so many of here either use dictionary distinctions to clarify whether something is theft/stealing, but when that fails they switch to legal definitions?
"Stealing" and "theft" are generic terms that apply to anything that deprives someone of something that is rightfully theres, directly or indirectly. Copyright violations deprive the copyright holder or agents of the payment that is rightfully due to them, just as the GPL requires copyright "payment" in the form of derived works being under the GPL, openly distributed, etc. (I presume that every single person who yaps about software theft not being theft has no problem with Microsoft taking GPL code and copy out with Microsoft Winux?). Copyright violations are _theft_, and dictionary distinctions ring a little ridiculous.
Counterfeiting, like copyright violations, is easy to justify: I mean, where's the victim if you print off $100? Of course the victim is society as a whole, but that is hard to comprehend for the simpleton thought process of "Theft is stealing my bike" that we see on Slashdot.
It looks like you did get first post. Sidenote: Is it just my imagination, or did this story appear in the archives before even appearing on the front page?
This sort of "certificates more valuable than what they supposedly represent" situation is common in educational certifications, and it's ridiculous because many people pursue "further education" (ex. MBA) not for additional knowledge, skill and abilities, but rather purely for the end certificate. i.e. Instead of further education giving you the skills that allow you to excel, instead it gives you a certificate which allows you to excel. There are countless examples that follow this pattern. The tail is wagging the dog.
On the other hand, ISO certification (ex. ISO9001) is a great example of an overstated certificate that certifies, in many cases, no more than that a company wanted some ISO marketing fodder. i.e. Do something consistently, even consistently bad and you're ISO-worthy. ISO certification, rather than being a process of improving organizational skills and management, becomes more of a zero sum gain: For every person who gains one, the marketing value of it decreases.
"31% of consumers download music and burn CDs often. These frequent digital music users buy 36% of all CDs."
Wow, that's some profound research. Of the people who are "into music", they are responsible for 36% of music purchases. Sorry, but if anything you've proven that P2P users don't buy music, because I would expect that 31% to be responsible for about 90% of all music purchases.
I was pretty disappointed that Fanning replied "It may be hurting the music industry at this point..." instead of pointing out that six months is not a large enough amount of time to gauge the real effect of p2p networks. That may be obvious to Slashdotters but Average Joes (and Janes, don't want to be sexiest now...) might be tempted to take the RIAA's word that p2p is obviously to blame.
Ironyalert. When music sales were peaking, Slashdotters were lining up in droves to proclaim that P2P "exposes" them to new music, and encouraged them to buy more CDs, and this led to quite a few articles and comments by "Slashdotters" proclaiming "evidence" that P2P was responsible for an increase in CD sales. In the grand tradition of Slashdotter hypocrisy.
Having said, I'll offer my own completely unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence: Among friends and family it seems to me that it's obvious that P2P hurts CD sales-> People rush to Limewire now to grab that song they like, not to HMV to buy the CD. There may very well be people exploring alternative music who are exposed to new libraries that they then acquire, but I'd guesstimate that for every one of them, there's about 50 popsters that just want the latest Pop Idol song or Britney release.
Power consumption doesn't directly relate to heat, since the use and dispersion patterns internal to the drive could make a world of difference.
I may very well be wrong, but I respectfully disagree. i.e. If the platters are spun by a high friction mechanism (i.e. dry bearings) then the electricity required to overcome the friction, basically converting electricity to heat, will be measurable. i.e. all electricity consumed by the drive are degrading to heat (or vibrations such as sounds, though sound is usually extremely low power), and any heat generation consumes electricity.
Although it would take longer to accelerate the platter up to speed with 7200rpm, it would not nesisarrily require more power (amps). The bearing losses would be higher, but possibly not as much as you would expect.
I'd wager that the real world energy usage of a 7200rpm is significantly higher than a 5400rpm (which meshes with the fact that 7200rpm drives are generally quite a bit hotter, again correlating with energy draw). Indeed, one of the big conclusions of this article is that the extra power and heat of a 7200 might be unncessary.
The better approach is to actually measure the heat gain in a controlled environment over time for a variety of different usages. That is a little more complicated than just using a DC ammeter...
I'm not quite sure if you're dismissing the idea of measuring current, however in reality truly measuring the current over time is far from the trivial task that you make it out to be. One would have to actually measure many samples (the tighter the interval the more accurate the total draw) as surely no drive is going to be consistent in its energy draw: I would imagine it would constantly fluctuate by 100% or more as the drive does different access patterns, etc, not just hooking up a radio shack multimeter and eyeballing the draw. The net result though would be an extremely accurate gauge of the true power draw, and hence energy discharge, of the hard drive (easily as accurate as putting the draw in a controlled environment: It isn't generating heat magically).
It sounds like you really know your stuff, however I still question the accuracy of a measurement on an irregular surface. Have you ever put an irregular surfaced heatsink on a processor? Indeed, not only do both surfaces have to be absolutely perfectly smooth, but usually a thermal grease is used in addition to ensure that heat carries over (because no surface is perfectly smooth). Without doubt heat leaching wouldn't be as much of a problem where the delta is dramatic (i.e. 4000 degrees), but on something like a hard drive, where it's tops about 22 degrees different from the room ambient temperature, it is a very big deal. (BTW: Notice how you don't take your own temperature by pressing the probe against your forehead. There are probes that can work externally nowadays, but they generally work on infrared which makes moot my point anyways) On top of all of that is the fact that hard drives exhibit irregular heat patterns anyways, making the point where one puts the probe critically important.
I doubt more than mW of the energy discharge of the hard drive is going to sound or vibration.
It will effect heat transfer, and that will make it take longer to reach the temperature, but heat will transfer until the temps are the same, it's HS level physics.
Maybe in your HS physics class (was it served by the short bus?) the world was simplified to "everything in a vacuum with no radiant heat", but in the real world there is the desire of all items to become the ambient temperature of the room, and in the case of a heat probe it will gladly relieve any gained temperature to the air around it, especially if >99% of the surface of the probe is open to the air, and 1% touches the surface to be measured (which is an entirely reasonable possibility if the surface is irregular, etc). You see, the hard drive would heat up for ever itself if it weren't for the fact that it was doing the same thing (equalizing with the air around it).
That's a programming issue, not a storage issue (i.e. because the programmers decided to do blocking I/O, it's just throughput that matters, and SCSI won't give any advantage there). The hard drive has no idea what the game is going to want to look up soon, but rather the programmers should know and should thread out the background loading of the elements (Windows has offered non-blocking IO for years, and it doesn't even require the programmers to create a thread to do the work). i.e. "User is moving towards sector B, so maybe start pre-loading sector B in a cache in the background...". Of course, it's easier to simply wait until you hit a wall and then launch off to a blocking call, so that's what most programmers do.
One thing that could be improved on many of these quantitative reviews is if they quit relying upon surface temperature probes (which is HORRIBLY unreliable. A slightly grainy texture would make the drive appear much cooler because of reduced heat transfer), and instead go right to the source: Power consumption. Is it so hard to measure the current on the 5 and 12V inputs, and deriving an actual power consumption metric for the drive? Not only is this valuable as it absolutely directly relates to heat, but it additionally is useful for those building low power rigs.
I presume that it's all about the youth market where such a useless feature might get a good response for a short while. Personally I wouldn't buy a phone with a digital camera, or other unnecessary featuers, even if the premium was $0, as it makes the phone larger, consume more power, more things to break, etc. Waste of space.
Now an integrated PDA&Cell phone I can see being useful, and I do look forward to that. If the Toshiba e740 has cell phone functionality, that would be fantastic as I always carry both a cell and a PDA around.
It does? How did this score 5, because really it isn't all that funny. Indeed, I'd say a more apt observation would be that berating those owning this is a dead give away that you have a very, very tiny penis. You know the type: The jealous, envious type that is green (probably because of the previously mentioned tiny penis) over every success of someone else, so they ironically proclaim that everything that person does is compensating for a small penis, etc. Got a new car? Tiny penis. Physically fit by keeping active or working out? Tiny penis. Good computer? Tiny penis. Beautiful wife/gf? Tiny penis. You get the picture.
Yeah, too many programmers do that kind of crap. Sometimes it can be beneficial, but for the most part they are just wasting their time.
You'll get no disagreement from me. I've personally witnessed the "throw it out" mentality by people with grand visions of how superb their implementation will be, and invariably the projects are massive failures. However in this case we're talking about enthusiasts who are working on these projects for free, and it'd be a lot more fun, one would think, working on the core of the new SuperOS with features X, Y, Z, than it would be to be a slog maintaining some tiny little part of a big project like Linux. I'm not advocating that people do that, or that it's a smart thing to do, but rather I'm saying that I'm surprized that it isn't more rampant.
The problem, I think, is that people really haven't taken a whole lot of interest in it so far, because in general it doesn't really do anything that Linux doesn't already do better.
One thing that perplexes me is that there aren't people rushing to it simply out of the desire to rebuild: i.e. Mankind, as a general trait, loves to build things "bigger and better", and it surprizes me that those who've worked on Linux in the past don't get the urge to "throw it all out" and start anew with everything they learned. While Linux came to the game quite late, and hence had the luxury of learning from so many mistakes others made in the OS arena, I have absolutely zero doubt that it could be done better, and starting over is often the easiest way to free a project of compatability, politics, etc.
Having said that, most "start over" projects are massive failures, or that end up just as ugly when they implement all the same kludges to work around issues they thought they wouldn't have, but given that you're talking about volunteers that are looking to do stuff new and fun, I'd expect there to be a burgeoning industry of "Super Duper OS" type projects.
Don't forget the incredible importance of C, and hence Kerningham and Ritchie, in the development of POSIX/GNU/Hurd. Perhaps it should be GNU/POSIX/K&R=C/Hurd.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a Fuji S602, $600 at buydig.com, and stop strutting your 35mm. For all but the most purity minded artists, it's a dying medium.
I didn't enter this discussion to declare my allegiance to the Royal (Gold) 35mm. Indeed, all I care about is what works best in the circumstances, and is most economically viable. What I do know is that of the $1000 CDN digital cameras that I've had the opportunity to experiment with, they could best be described as toys: Horrible (HORRIBLE) auto-focus, a light range that requires a flash in all but open sunlight (while it isn't something I normally do, I can put a roll of 3200 film and a f1.0 50mm lens and shoot in candle light), yet with a flash control and interfacing mechanism that is incapable of using anything but the direct flash horrific onboard flash, among other problems. SLR, or a reasonable approximation of it, is very important to me (Olympus has a couple of digitals that are SLRs, or at least they did, and I was reasonably impressed with those): An LCD screen is not a reasonable approximation of an SLR unless it provided a half decent number of pixels, which most don't, to at least be able to reasonably focus/etc.
I've been eyeballing some of the higher end "35mm style" Canons (with interchangable lenses et. all. I'd rather have a f1.4 50mm when that's what's called for than a f2.8-f4.5 28-105, for example), and while they're extremely impressive, they push the financial boundaries (the D60 runs ~$3500).
Who would know how to disable AV/Firewall software better than AV/Firewall software makers??? Hrm... job security eh?
How is it job security when their product fails to stop it?
I've seen several advertise that, but everytime I dug deeper there were conditions to that sort of speed: Shooting ultra low resolution with high compression, for instance. A 35mm, on the other hand, is doing the same process, only faster: There is no sacrifice to the quality of the image.
I don't want to give the impression that I don't think there is a place for digitals: Being able to shoot 100s of images and immediately cull them gives you a lot more liberty to take risks with photos, and increases the likelihood of getting a great shot. However I still have never seen, even on a super whooper HP, a printout from a digital camera that approaches even a marginal 35mm.
What a foolish extremist assertion. There is no doubt that digitals have some benefits, but they have some downsides as well:
I'm hoping to find a digital camera that convinces me to dump my film habit, but so far it hasn't happened, at least not until looking in the $2000+ range.
Why is it that so many of here either use dictionary distinctions to clarify whether something is theft/stealing, but when that fails they switch to legal definitions?
"Stealing" and "theft" are generic terms that apply to anything that deprives someone of something that is rightfully theres, directly or indirectly. Copyright violations deprive the copyright holder or agents of the payment that is rightfully due to them, just as the GPL requires copyright "payment" in the form of derived works being under the GPL, openly distributed, etc. (I presume that every single person who yaps about software theft not being theft has no problem with Microsoft taking GPL code and copy out with Microsoft Winux?). Copyright violations are _theft_, and dictionary distinctions ring a little ridiculous.
Counterfeiting, like copyright violations, is easy to justify: I mean, where's the victim if you print off $100? Of course the victim is society as a whole, but that is hard to comprehend for the simpleton thought process of "Theft is stealing my bike" that we see on Slashdot.
Plus, copying software IS NOT THE SAME THING as stealing software.
Uh huh. He's a parallel for you: Is counterfeiting money stealing?
It looks like you did get first post. Sidenote: Is it just my imagination, or did this story appear in the archives before even appearing on the front page?
This sort of "certificates more valuable than what they supposedly represent" situation is common in educational certifications, and it's ridiculous because many people pursue "further education" (ex. MBA) not for additional knowledge, skill and abilities, but rather purely for the end certificate. i.e. Instead of further education giving you the skills that allow you to excel, instead it gives you a certificate which allows you to excel. There are countless examples that follow this pattern. The tail is wagging the dog.
On the other hand, ISO certification (ex. ISO9001) is a great example of an overstated certificate that certifies, in many cases, no more than that a company wanted some ISO marketing fodder. i.e. Do something consistently, even consistently bad and you're ISO-worthy. ISO certification, rather than being a process of improving organizational skills and management, becomes more of a zero sum gain: For every person who gains one, the marketing value of it decreases.
"31% of consumers download music and burn CDs often. These frequent digital music users buy 36% of all CDs."
Wow, that's some profound research. Of the people who are "into music", they are responsible for 36% of music purchases. Sorry, but if anything you've proven that P2P users don't buy music, because I would expect that 31% to be responsible for about 90% of all music purchases.
I was pretty disappointed that Fanning replied "It may be hurting the music industry at this point ..." instead of pointing out that six months is not a large enough amount of time to gauge the real effect of p2p networks. That may be obvious to Slashdotters but Average Joes (and Janes, don't want to be sexiest now...) might be tempted to take the RIAA's word that p2p is obviously to blame.
Irony alert . When music sales were peaking, Slashdotters were lining up in droves to proclaim that P2P "exposes" them to new music, and encouraged them to buy more CDs, and this led to quite a few articles and comments by "Slashdotters" proclaiming "evidence" that P2P was responsible for an increase in CD sales. In the grand tradition of Slashdotter hypocrisy.
Having said, I'll offer my own completely unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence: Among friends and family it seems to me that it's obvious that P2P hurts CD sales-> People rush to Limewire now to grab that song they like, not to HMV to buy the CD. There may very well be people exploring alternative music who are exposed to new libraries that they then acquire, but I'd guesstimate that for every one of them, there's about 50 popsters that just want the latest Pop Idol song or Britney release.
Power consumption doesn't directly relate to heat, since the use and dispersion patterns internal to the drive could make a world of difference.
I may very well be wrong, but I respectfully disagree. i.e. If the platters are spun by a high friction mechanism (i.e. dry bearings) then the electricity required to overcome the friction, basically converting electricity to heat, will be measurable. i.e. all electricity consumed by the drive are degrading to heat (or vibrations such as sounds, though sound is usually extremely low power), and any heat generation consumes electricity.
Note: I'm not a Mac guy.
Often people feel that systems different than what they are used to are "pieces of shit". Joel On Software has a very good article regarding this.
Although it would take longer to accelerate the platter up to speed with 7200rpm, it would not nesisarrily require more power (amps). The bearing losses would be higher, but possibly not as much as you would expect.
I'd wager that the real world energy usage of a 7200rpm is significantly higher than a 5400rpm (which meshes with the fact that 7200rpm drives are generally quite a bit hotter, again correlating with energy draw). Indeed, one of the big conclusions of this article is that the extra power and heat of a 7200 might be unncessary.
The better approach is to actually measure the heat gain in a controlled environment over time for a variety of different usages. That is a little more complicated than just using a DC ammeter...
I'm not quite sure if you're dismissing the idea of measuring current, however in reality truly measuring the current over time is far from the trivial task that you make it out to be. One would have to actually measure many samples (the tighter the interval the more accurate the total draw) as surely no drive is going to be consistent in its energy draw: I would imagine it would constantly fluctuate by 100% or more as the drive does different access patterns, etc, not just hooking up a radio shack multimeter and eyeballing the draw. The net result though would be an extremely accurate gauge of the true power draw, and hence energy discharge, of the hard drive (easily as accurate as putting the draw in a controlled environment: It isn't generating heat magically).
It sounds like you really know your stuff, however I still question the accuracy of a measurement on an irregular surface. Have you ever put an irregular surfaced heatsink on a processor? Indeed, not only do both surfaces have to be absolutely perfectly smooth, but usually a thermal grease is used in addition to ensure that heat carries over (because no surface is perfectly smooth). Without doubt heat leaching wouldn't be as much of a problem where the delta is dramatic (i.e. 4000 degrees), but on something like a hard drive, where it's tops about 22 degrees different from the room ambient temperature, it is a very big deal. (BTW: Notice how you don't take your own temperature by pressing the probe against your forehead. There are probes that can work externally nowadays, but they generally work on infrared which makes moot my point anyways) On top of all of that is the fact that hard drives exhibit irregular heat patterns anyways, making the point where one puts the probe critically important.
I doubt more than mW of the energy discharge of the hard drive is going to sound or vibration.
Drive manufacturers already provide this kind of information on the data sheets for their products
Those numbers, as another poster pointed out, are horribly unreliable, and they usually don't mesh with real world usage.
It will effect heat transfer, and that will make it take longer to reach the temperature, but heat will transfer until the temps are the same, it's HS level physics.
Maybe in your HS physics class (was it served by the short bus?) the world was simplified to "everything in a vacuum with no radiant heat", but in the real world there is the desire of all items to become the ambient temperature of the room, and in the case of a heat probe it will gladly relieve any gained temperature to the air around it, especially if >99% of the surface of the probe is open to the air, and 1% touches the surface to be measured (which is an entirely reasonable possibility if the surface is irregular, etc). You see, the hard drive would heat up for ever itself if it weren't for the fact that it was doing the same thing (equalizing with the air around it).
That's a programming issue, not a storage issue (i.e. because the programmers decided to do blocking I/O, it's just throughput that matters, and SCSI won't give any advantage there). The hard drive has no idea what the game is going to want to look up soon, but rather the programmers should know and should thread out the background loading of the elements (Windows has offered non-blocking IO for years, and it doesn't even require the programmers to create a thread to do the work). i.e. "User is moving towards sector B, so maybe start pre-loading sector B in a cache in the background...". Of course, it's easier to simply wait until you hit a wall and then launch off to a blocking call, so that's what most programmers do.
One thing that could be improved on many of these quantitative reviews is if they quit relying upon surface temperature probes (which is HORRIBLY unreliable. A slightly grainy texture would make the drive appear much cooler because of reduced heat transfer), and instead go right to the source: Power consumption. Is it so hard to measure the current on the 5 and 12V inputs, and deriving an actual power consumption metric for the drive? Not only is this valuable as it absolutely directly relates to heat, but it additionally is useful for those building low power rigs.
Anyways, just a thought.
People should skip that USB crap, and go to the source, where it is proven technology with years behind it.
Hehe, this is the whole SCSI versus IDE debate playing out (with almost all of the same point/counterpoints!). You might as well have said
People should skip that EIDE crap, and go with SCSI, a proven technology with years behind it.
I presume that it's all about the youth market where such a useless feature might get a good response for a short while. Personally I wouldn't buy a phone with a digital camera, or other unnecessary featuers, even if the premium was $0, as it makes the phone larger, consume more power, more things to break, etc. Waste of space.
Now an integrated PDA&Cell phone I can see being useful, and I do look forward to that. If the Toshiba e740 has cell phone functionality, that would be fantastic as I always carry both a cell and a PDA around.
So we must presume that you had 612835 HTTP GETs worth of free time?
It does? How did this score 5, because really it isn't all that funny. Indeed, I'd say a more apt observation would be that berating those owning this is a dead give away that you have a very, very tiny penis. You know the type: The jealous, envious type that is green (probably because of the previously mentioned tiny penis) over every success of someone else, so they ironically proclaim that everything that person does is compensating for a small penis, etc. Got a new car? Tiny penis. Physically fit by keeping active or working out? Tiny penis. Good computer? Tiny penis. Beautiful wife/gf? Tiny penis. You get the picture.
Yeah, too many programmers do that kind of crap. Sometimes it can be beneficial, but for the most part they are just wasting their time.
You'll get no disagreement from me. I've personally witnessed the "throw it out" mentality by people with grand visions of how superb their implementation will be, and invariably the projects are massive failures. However in this case we're talking about enthusiasts who are working on these projects for free, and it'd be a lot more fun, one would think, working on the core of the new SuperOS with features X, Y, Z, than it would be to be a slog maintaining some tiny little part of a big project like Linux. I'm not advocating that people do that, or that it's a smart thing to do, but rather I'm saying that I'm surprized that it isn't more rampant.
The problem, I think, is that people really haven't taken a whole lot of interest in it so far, because in general it doesn't really do anything that Linux doesn't already do better.
One thing that perplexes me is that there aren't people rushing to it simply out of the desire to rebuild: i.e. Mankind, as a general trait, loves to build things "bigger and better", and it surprizes me that those who've worked on Linux in the past don't get the urge to "throw it all out" and start anew with everything they learned. While Linux came to the game quite late, and hence had the luxury of learning from so many mistakes others made in the OS arena, I have absolutely zero doubt that it could be done better, and starting over is often the easiest way to free a project of compatability, politics, etc.
Having said that, most "start over" projects are massive failures, or that end up just as ugly when they implement all the same kludges to work around issues they thought they wouldn't have, but given that you're talking about volunteers that are looking to do stuff new and fun, I'd expect there to be a burgeoning industry of "Super Duper OS" type projects.
Don't forget the incredible importance of C, and hence Kerningham and Ritchie, in the development of POSIX/GNU/Hurd. Perhaps it should be GNU/POSIX/K&R=C/Hurd.