"An eye for an eye" is a bit naïve, isn't it? Say I blew up some of the buildings housing Amazon's S3 service when no one was in any of the buildings (so it's just "property damage"). How does your "an eye for an eye" system punish me? What would that punishment accomplish? Punishment shouldn't just be about revenge; it needs to promote the kind of behavior fit for a civil society. Also, we need more rules than that, if only to define "harming". Is selling melamine as "Baby Formula" harming someone without their consent? It's all well and good that the constitution is a vague document, but laws need to be precise in their language, or they are likely to be abused.
Including an OS just so you can run binaries seems a bit overkill to me. Why not keep a list of hardware/software you need to use what's in the capsule in a drawer somewhere? There is no expectation that her parents should both vanish before she's 17, so it's not like they couldn't make sure they kept what they needed to access the data. That said, I think the following formats should still be around ASCII (possibly formatted into html or rich text), jpeg, mp3. For video, probably any of the mpeg4 codecs should be fine (divx, h264, etc). Put it all on a CD. Binaries are sure to change, so unless you want to include the whole OS, I don't think packing executables is a good idea.
Exactly my point. I mean, the fact that you carry your cell phone with you means that you'll have to silence it from time-to-time, sometimes unexpectedly. If you don't bring it with you, then why have a cell in the first place? (Obviously there's a middle ground here that I'm ignoring where you leave your phone behind when you know you'll have to go somewhere where it'll be silenced. I still don't think most people do this.)
Well, if you have problems remembering to unsilence your phone, leave it behind, as you say. This is a feature (ie, the fact it works outside your house), not a bug.
By contrast, I'm not sure how much it would cost me. I suspect that I can't do it with pay-as-you-go, which means a $5-10/mth increase in cell phone cost just to get to a plan before I might even be able to add an extra line. At the same time, I have DSL from a company that (at least said, without me prodding much) that I need to get a land-line with them to have DSL. Which means the land line is... free!
They don't charge you for the landline if you get DSL? Over here, if you want DSL you have to pay for a landline, and then also pay for DSL on top of that ($30 on top of whatever the landline costs). All told, it's more than the cost of cable, and it's slower (up and down), and I would have to buy a phone (or do they give those away for free with a contract?), and I would still have to use my cell phone if my wife were using the phone when I wanted to make a call (not an infrequent occurrence). That said, I make the vast majority of my calls outside of my home, so I've never considered pre-paid. If my usage were different, I might have a different opinion (though I doubt it).
Why?
Read posts farther down. Essentially, call quality is the same (infrastructure is the same, so this is not surprising), but VoIP tends to come with many more features.
I have better call quality going cell phone to cell phone than I do from my cell phone to my parents' landline. I'm not sure why their phones are so bad, but they are. The landline in my workplace is always going dead for lack of charging (it's wireless, and apparently its cradle is crap). I can't forget my landline at work because I can't bring my landline to work with me in the first place. No one forgets to unsilence their landline, because they don't silence them in the first place (if they did, they'd probably forget about it). I already have a cell phone plan; it would cost me $10 to add another line. I could get a phone basically for free, leave it plugged in at home, and have almost all of the landline advantages you mention for less than the cost of a landline. Besides, if you want something like a landline, VoIP is a better solution in any case.
Realistically, would-be burglers are probably already aware of the fact that the area is affluent (they've had 3 burglaries in that last 6 weeks, after all). I know all the affluent areas near where I live. And if I wanted to find out where the rich people live in Chicago, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out, even without asking anyone; housing prices are public information (at least, the last price paid for any particular house). I imagine that what they don't want is pictures of the area for would-be burglers to peruse in the comfort of their own home. It's not obvious to me that this provides any real protection, but I would not say that this is a clear case of the Streisand effect.
To each his own... but I use zsh with autocomplete and history, --help, and man pages to combat my failing memory. Also, the occasional shell script. Most shells have a searchable history, so if you set the history to something ridiculous like 100000 (I think I use 50000) you can usually find what you're looking for (unless you've never done it before). Zsh's autocomplete is nice because it can tab-complete command options for you. Of course, this requires that you remember to hit 'tab' to autocomplete, and Ctrl-r for a backwards search. I guess the other failure mode is if you're using someone else's computer.
Oh, and I would also like to mention here that this seems to be the primary purpose of man pages. When I first started using Linux, all but the best-written man pages were mostly useless to me. They're typically better at reminding you how to do things than teaching you how to use programs on the commandline.
I find your response kind of ironic, because if you couldn't find a job where you wanted to live, it seems you'd be the one benefiting from enjoy universal health care. As to your assertion that people don't choose their employment, just because you can't have everything you want doesn't mean that what you get isn't by your own choosing. Your employment is as much your choice as is your health. I'm done wasting time here. My point was that analogies are bad rhetorical device (particularly on slashdot), and now we're arguing about something entirely off-topic in a completely stupid venue for such a discussion.
Right, because all health care costs are lifestyle-related, but your employment isn't. Besides, the point remains: it's still a bad analogy that shouldn't have been made.
What a bad analogy. If you don't get your lexus, at worst you don't have a car. Your neighbor doesn't get the health care she needs, she dies. I wish people would stop making analogies on slashdot, as they're invariably awful. While I'm at it, an end to world hunger would be nice too.
Just because a particular program doesn't have a feature-equivalent replacement doesn't mean that it's a good program. Personally, I can't stand iTunes – I refuse to use it – but it does some very nice things that I couldn't figure out how to do with gtkpod/libgpod. I ended up getting rid of my ipod because (for me) all the things that made it superior to the competition were iTunes-based (and I refuse to boot into Windows just to use my DAP). The other thing is that some people actually like using it, and far be it from me to get into an argument over personal tastes.
I've said this before, I'll say it again, if all someone wants is an appliance (the so-called "grandma" user), then any modern operating system is fine. Anything will work. If it's an appliance, all you need is for supported hardware to exist. She doesn't have to find it, she doesn't have to worry about it, because the retailer figured that out for her. Is grandma going to install linux? No. She isn't. If she's going to run linux, it's because her grandson ordered a linux box for her from a retailer that sells Ubuntu pre-installed. And it will work like any other computer with a pre-installed OS.
Acceptance isn't a problem for "grandma" users. It's only a problem for "power users", by which I mean users that want something specific from their computers, be it video games or Photoshop. These are typically people for whom the software on linux is not comparable, perhaps sometimes because they are unwilling to learn new software, but just often because the "free" equivalent is, in fact, not quite equivalent (iTunes, Photoshop, TurboTax, etc). These people I can understand shying away from linux; "grandmas", not so much. My dad, for example, couldn't care less what OS was loaded on his computer (guess what? it's not windows!), but he only uses it to pay bills online.
I always see people saying this, but I don't really understand it. My wife has always had matte-screen laptop; my last three laptops have had glossy screens; and yet, we both agree that, especially in well lit areas (like, say, out in the sun), my laptops have always been easier to see. Others in my lab said the same thing in the field (literally, in a field). They had to put the base station in a box because it was impossible to see the screen otherwise (in case you were wondering, it had a matte screen).
Neat. I did a quick survey of pictures (just galleries off of that first page you linked), and every picture I tried was shot with a 20D (according to exif). In case you're not familiar with it, the Canon EOS 20D is a old 8Mp DSLR. I think most DSLRs have a "bulb" setting for exposures longer than 30s, though. At least, my D40 has it, and it's Nikon's bottom-of-the-line. Amp noise can be a problem, though, in those types of exposures (as you mention). Some cameras are better than others, but (on Nikon, anyway) it doesn't seem to correlate with cost so much as specific sensors that have issues.
But there is no way that a Canon 5D Mark II can compete with even medium format film, let alone 4x5 sheet film.
Of course a 5D MkII will never compete with MF. It doesn't compete with it now; I don't think anyone expects it to compete with MF film sometime in the future. That's not even a fair comparison, really, because the 5D sensor is 35mm on the long side, whereas MF is 60mm on each side. Apples to apples, right? Googling for information (and ignoring the ever-controversial Mr. Rockwell) suggests that a 10Mp DSLR is better than 35mm film. Also, modern digital MF backs are comparable to 4x5 film, at least when printed at 40"x60" or less.
If you're feeling lazy, I found this link to be the most helpful: http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1.html . There is also an interesting comparison between 4x5 and a P45 digital MF back here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml, which is in rough agreement with the other article. In my worthless opinion, large format is mostly good for using movements and making contact prints. Aside from that, digital is probably better in every way, including quality.
That said, I think this photographer should have used at least a 1Ds MkIII or D3x. On the other hand, the only other presidential portrait that's even a photograph is Bush Jr's, and I'm not really sure how you compare "image quality" between photographs and paintings.
You don't need the RAW. In fact, I would argue that it's not even desired. What I want is the end product from the photographer. I would hope that he would keep the RAW around (preferably in DNG, I guess?) for prosperity, but I don't see why he needs to archive it. All we need is the 16-bit TIFF. And if you think that we're somehow going to forget how to decode TIFFs any time soon, you're fooling yourself. Also, what purpose does copying the RAW serve? Are there actually RAW converters that edit the RAW file directly? If that's what yours does, you really need to find a new one.
For me it does. I never charged my friends for rides in high school, and when my car was in the shop, no one charged me for rides either. I never paid for a beer my first year in grad school 'cause the bar used tabs, and for whatever reason they always put my stuff on someone else's tab. When I tried to pay people back, they wouldn't take it. $5 here or there isn't going to make me poor, so I don't sweat it when someone's short. It makes me sad that there are people who would charge their friends for a favor.
The patent system was created to encourage people (or companies) to reveal their trade secrets. That is, in return for fully documenting your idea, the USPTO will grant you a temporary (say, 20 year) monopoly on that idea. The point of a trade secret is that no one else knows what it is. If you want to own an idea for longer than 20 years or so, then you can't patent it. If, on the other hand, you don't think you can keep an idea secret for that long, it's best to patent it. Ergo, I'm not entirely sure what the patent system is good for. If your idea is not patentable in the first place, then I guess you can hide your method's mediocrity by claiming it's a "trade secret", although I was under the impression that this did not happen all that often. That said, I could easily be wrong.
First of all, your example isn't true anymore. Before flash 9 was released on linux, no amount of forum trawling would have helped. The simple fact of the matter was that you needed flash 8 to play flash video, which was never released on linux. Now that flash 9 is out, you can install it and it just works.
Second of all, an appliance should ship with everything working. That is to say, with some kind of flash installed, or a script that runs on first bootup that will go and install things for you, if, for instance, they can't ship with the plugin for licensing or whatever reasons.
Look, I run linux on my laptop. It can be a pain. It was certainly a pain to get started. I can totally understand that 99.9% of computer users don't want to deal with that. However! That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an appliance—a toaster, if you will. Anything that wants to be an appliance needs to ship ready-to-go out of the box. If it isn't, then it's a failure, but that doesn't have anything to do with linux.
Let's be honest here, though. If all you want is an appliance, Linux isn't any more difficult than Windows. Realistically—and I say this as someone who uses both Windows and Linux—it isn't even that different. Unless, as people above have mentioned, someone has rote memorized how to do (a large number of) specific tasks, the differences aren't worth mentioning. Linux isn't harder than Windows, and it's only different if you're doing "complicated" things (where I've defined "complicated" as things that differ in Windows and Linux... ). People looking for an appliance—which, I thought, was the point of a netbook—shouldn't notice much of a difference.
That doesn't make her "as pro-life as one gets". That's what pro-life advocates have to do. Can you imagine a pro-life governer having an abortion? Who would vote for her after that? I'm not saying she doesn't believe firmly that pro-life is the Right Thing, but we wouldn't be talking about her if she'd aborted that pregnancy. To me, "as pro-life as one gets" is a mother of 4 that adopts a down-syndrome fetus that would otherwise have been aborted.
Off-shore drilling is pointless. Anyone with any right to talk about this says that it won't affect petrol prices. The fact that it's popular does not make it worth discussing, aside from educating those ignorant of the truth. What we need to do—what we should have done long ago—is invest in sustainable energy. I understand that most people couldn't care less about sustaining anything but their own lifestyle, but at the end of the day, sustainable consumption is the only maintainable lifestyle.
(he disowns like ALL his movie adaptations, doesn't he?)
Perhaps because they all suck big time? Nonetheless, I'm still somewhat excited about this. On the other hand, I was also excited about 300 but didn't care for the movie much (yeah, I know, I'm the only dude that didn't like it).
Depending on the autofeeder, I don't think the chance of damage is overwhelming, He's replying to do the dude asking about scanning photographs. I haven't seen many old photographs that have spines. Digitizing photographs is a significantly easier problem to solve than books or magazines.
To me, "packet" implies that you can break it open and there's something smaller inside, which for photons is not possible. So I don't really like that terminology ("quantum" of light is more precise, but also more confusing... ). In a practical sense, though, think of it however you want to, as long as it isn't wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"An eye for an eye" is a bit naïve, isn't it? Say I blew up some of the buildings housing Amazon's S3 service when no one was in any of the buildings (so it's just "property damage"). How does your "an eye for an eye" system punish me? What would that punishment accomplish? Punishment shouldn't just be about revenge; it needs to promote the kind of behavior fit for a civil society. Also, we need more rules than that, if only to define "harming". Is selling melamine as "Baby Formula" harming someone without their consent? It's all well and good that the constitution is a vague document, but laws need to be precise in their language, or they are likely to be abused.
Including an OS just so you can run binaries seems a bit overkill to me. Why not keep a list of hardware/software you need to use what's in the capsule in a drawer somewhere? There is no expectation that her parents should both vanish before she's 17, so it's not like they couldn't make sure they kept what they needed to access the data. That said, I think the following formats should still be around ASCII (possibly formatted into html or rich text), jpeg, mp3. For video, probably any of the mpeg4 codecs should be fine (divx, h264, etc). Put it all on a CD. Binaries are sure to change, so unless you want to include the whole OS, I don't think packing executables is a good idea.
Well, if you have problems remembering to unsilence your phone, leave it behind, as you say. This is a feature (ie, the fact it works outside your house), not a bug.
They don't charge you for the landline if you get DSL? Over here, if you want DSL you have to pay for a landline, and then also pay for DSL on top of that ($30 on top of whatever the landline costs). All told, it's more than the cost of cable, and it's slower (up and down), and I would have to buy a phone (or do they give those away for free with a contract?), and I would still have to use my cell phone if my wife were using the phone when I wanted to make a call (not an infrequent occurrence). That said, I make the vast majority of my calls outside of my home, so I've never considered pre-paid. If my usage were different, I might have a different opinion (though I doubt it).
Read posts farther down. Essentially, call quality is the same (infrastructure is the same, so this is not surprising), but VoIP tends to come with many more features.
I hate holding phones up to my head, so when I really want to talk and listen to someone I use a (BT) headset.
I have better call quality going cell phone to cell phone than I do from my cell phone to my parents' landline. I'm not sure why their phones are so bad, but they are. The landline in my workplace is always going dead for lack of charging (it's wireless, and apparently its cradle is crap). I can't forget my landline at work because I can't bring my landline to work with me in the first place. No one forgets to unsilence their landline, because they don't silence them in the first place (if they did, they'd probably forget about it). I already have a cell phone plan; it would cost me $10 to add another line. I could get a phone basically for free, leave it plugged in at home, and have almost all of the landline advantages you mention for less than the cost of a landline. Besides, if you want something like a landline, VoIP is a better solution in any case.
Realistically, would-be burglers are probably already aware of the fact that the area is affluent (they've had 3 burglaries in that last 6 weeks, after all). I know all the affluent areas near where I live. And if I wanted to find out where the rich people live in Chicago, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out, even without asking anyone; housing prices are public information (at least, the last price paid for any particular house). I imagine that what they don't want is pictures of the area for would-be burglers to peruse in the comfort of their own home. It's not obvious to me that this provides any real protection, but I would not say that this is a clear case of the Streisand effect.
To each his own ... but I use zsh with autocomplete and history, --help, and man pages to combat my failing memory. Also, the occasional shell script. Most shells have a searchable history, so if you set the history to something ridiculous like 100000 (I think I use 50000) you can usually find what you're looking for (unless you've never done it before). Zsh's autocomplete is nice because it can tab-complete command options for you. Of course, this requires that you remember to hit 'tab' to autocomplete, and Ctrl-r for a backwards search. I guess the other failure mode is if you're using someone else's computer.
Oh, and I would also like to mention here that this seems to be the primary purpose of man pages. When I first started using Linux, all but the best-written man pages were mostly useless to me. They're typically better at reminding you how to do things than teaching you how to use programs on the commandline.
I find your response kind of ironic, because if you couldn't find a job where you wanted to live, it seems you'd be the one benefiting from enjoy universal health care. As to your assertion that people don't choose their employment, just because you can't have everything you want doesn't mean that what you get isn't by your own choosing. Your employment is as much your choice as is your health. I'm done wasting time here. My point was that analogies are bad rhetorical device (particularly on slashdot), and now we're arguing about something entirely off-topic in a completely stupid venue for such a discussion.
Right, because all health care costs are lifestyle-related, but your employment isn't. Besides, the point remains: it's still a bad analogy that shouldn't have been made.
What a bad analogy. If you don't get your lexus, at worst you don't have a car. Your neighbor doesn't get the health care she needs, she dies. I wish people would stop making analogies on slashdot, as they're invariably awful. While I'm at it, an end to world hunger would be nice too.
Just because a particular program doesn't have a feature-equivalent replacement doesn't mean that it's a good program. Personally, I can't stand iTunes – I refuse to use it – but it does some very nice things that I couldn't figure out how to do with gtkpod/libgpod. I ended up getting rid of my ipod because (for me) all the things that made it superior to the competition were iTunes-based (and I refuse to boot into Windows just to use my DAP). The other thing is that some people actually like using it, and far be it from me to get into an argument over personal tastes.
I've said this before, I'll say it again, if all someone wants is an appliance (the so-called "grandma" user), then any modern operating system is fine. Anything will work. If it's an appliance, all you need is for supported hardware to exist. She doesn't have to find it, she doesn't have to worry about it, because the retailer figured that out for her. Is grandma going to install linux? No. She isn't. If she's going to run linux, it's because her grandson ordered a linux box for her from a retailer that sells Ubuntu pre-installed. And it will work like any other computer with a pre-installed OS.
Acceptance isn't a problem for "grandma" users. It's only a problem for "power users", by which I mean users that want something specific from their computers, be it video games or Photoshop. These are typically people for whom the software on linux is not comparable, perhaps sometimes because they are unwilling to learn new software, but just often because the "free" equivalent is, in fact, not quite equivalent (iTunes, Photoshop, TurboTax, etc). These people I can understand shying away from linux; "grandmas", not so much. My dad, for example, couldn't care less what OS was loaded on his computer (guess what? it's not windows!), but he only uses it to pay bills online.
I always see people saying this, but I don't really understand it. My wife has always had matte-screen laptop; my last three laptops have had glossy screens; and yet, we both agree that, especially in well lit areas (like, say, out in the sun), my laptops have always been easier to see. Others in my lab said the same thing in the field (literally, in a field). They had to put the base station in a box because it was impossible to see the screen otherwise (in case you were wondering, it had a matte screen).
Neat. I did a quick survey of pictures (just galleries off of that first page you linked), and every picture I tried was shot with a 20D (according to exif). In case you're not familiar with it, the Canon EOS 20D is a old 8Mp DSLR. I think most DSLRs have a "bulb" setting for exposures longer than 30s, though. At least, my D40 has it, and it's Nikon's bottom-of-the-line. Amp noise can be a problem, though, in those types of exposures (as you mention). Some cameras are better than others, but (on Nikon, anyway) it doesn't seem to correlate with cost so much as specific sensors that have issues.
But there is no way that a Canon 5D Mark II can compete with even medium format film, let alone 4x5 sheet film.
Of course a 5D MkII will never compete with MF. It doesn't compete with it now; I don't think anyone expects it to compete with MF film sometime in the future. That's not even a fair comparison, really, because the 5D sensor is 35mm on the long side, whereas MF is 60mm on each side. Apples to apples, right? Googling for information (and ignoring the ever-controversial Mr. Rockwell) suggests that a 10Mp DSLR is better than 35mm film. Also, modern digital MF backs are comparable to 4x5 film, at least when printed at 40"x60" or less.
If you're feeling lazy, I found this link to be the most helpful: http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1.html . There is also an interesting comparison between 4x5 and a P45 digital MF back here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml, which is in rough agreement with the other article. In my worthless opinion, large format is mostly good for using movements and making contact prints. Aside from that, digital is probably better in every way, including quality.
That said, I think this photographer should have used at least a 1Ds MkIII or D3x. On the other hand, the only other presidential portrait that's even a photograph is Bush Jr's, and I'm not really sure how you compare "image quality" between photographs and paintings.
You don't need the RAW. In fact, I would argue that it's not even desired. What I want is the end product from the photographer. I would hope that he would keep the RAW around (preferably in DNG, I guess?) for prosperity, but I don't see why he needs to archive it. All we need is the 16-bit TIFF. And if you think that we're somehow going to forget how to decode TIFFs any time soon, you're fooling yourself. Also, what purpose does copying the RAW serve? Are there actually RAW converters that edit the RAW file directly? If that's what yours does, you really need to find a new one.
Friendship doesn't overcome basic market forces.
For me it does. I never charged my friends for rides in high school, and when my car was in the shop, no one charged me for rides either. I never paid for a beer my first year in grad school 'cause the bar used tabs, and for whatever reason they always put my stuff on someone else's tab. When I tried to pay people back, they wouldn't take it. $5 here or there isn't going to make me poor, so I don't sweat it when someone's short. It makes me sad that there are people who would charge their friends for a favor.
The patent system was created to encourage people (or companies) to reveal their trade secrets. That is, in return for fully documenting your idea, the USPTO will grant you a temporary (say, 20 year) monopoly on that idea. The point of a trade secret is that no one else knows what it is. If you want to own an idea for longer than 20 years or so, then you can't patent it. If, on the other hand, you don't think you can keep an idea secret for that long, it's best to patent it. Ergo, I'm not entirely sure what the patent system is good for. If your idea is not patentable in the first place, then I guess you can hide your method's mediocrity by claiming it's a "trade secret", although I was under the impression that this did not happen all that often. That said, I could easily be wrong.
First of all, your example isn't true anymore. Before flash 9 was released on linux, no amount of forum trawling would have helped. The simple fact of the matter was that you needed flash 8 to play flash video, which was never released on linux. Now that flash 9 is out, you can install it and it just works.
Second of all, an appliance should ship with everything working. That is to say, with some kind of flash installed, or a script that runs on first bootup that will go and install things for you, if, for instance, they can't ship with the plugin for licensing or whatever reasons.
Look, I run linux on my laptop. It can be a pain. It was certainly a pain to get started. I can totally understand that 99.9% of computer users don't want to deal with that. However! That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an appliance—a toaster, if you will. Anything that wants to be an appliance needs to ship ready-to-go out of the box. If it isn't, then it's a failure, but that doesn't have anything to do with linux.
Let's be honest here, though. If all you want is an appliance, Linux isn't any more difficult than Windows. Realistically—and I say this as someone who uses both Windows and Linux—it isn't even that different. Unless, as people above have mentioned, someone has rote memorized how to do (a large number of) specific tasks, the differences aren't worth mentioning. Linux isn't harder than Windows, and it's only different if you're doing "complicated" things (where I've defined "complicated" as things that differ in Windows and Linux ... ). People looking for an appliance—which, I thought, was the point of a netbook—shouldn't notice much of a difference.
That doesn't make her "as pro-life as one gets". That's what pro-life advocates have to do. Can you imagine a pro-life governer having an abortion? Who would vote for her after that? I'm not saying she doesn't believe firmly that pro-life is the Right Thing, but we wouldn't be talking about her if she'd aborted that pregnancy. To me, "as pro-life as one gets" is a mother of 4 that adopts a down-syndrome fetus that would otherwise have been aborted.
Off-shore drilling is pointless. Anyone with any right to talk about this says that it won't affect petrol prices. The fact that it's popular does not make it worth discussing, aside from educating those ignorant of the truth. What we need to do—what we should have done long ago—is invest in sustainable energy. I understand that most people couldn't care less about sustaining anything but their own lifestyle, but at the end of the day, sustainable consumption is the only maintainable lifestyle.
Perhaps because they all suck big time? Nonetheless, I'm still somewhat excited about this. On the other hand, I was also excited about 300 but didn't care for the movie much (yeah, I know, I'm the only dude that didn't like it).
Depending on the autofeeder, I don't think the chance of damage is overwhelming, He's replying to do the dude asking about scanning photographs. I haven't seen many old photographs that have spines. Digitizing photographs is a significantly easier problem to solve than books or magazines.
To me, "packet" implies that you can break it open and there's something smaller inside, which for photons is not possible. So I don't really like that terminology ("quantum" of light is more precise, but also more confusing ... ). In a practical sense, though, think of it however you want to, as long as it isn't wrong.