This is ludicrous. I'm a little over halfway through my CS degree, and I've generally managed to avoid buying textbooks (picked up probably three or four the entire time I've been attending classes) because, well, pretty much anything I could possibly need to learn from a textbook is already available for free online anyways, and its saved me easily thousands of dollars. Now schools are talking about simultaneously taking away students' ability to seek out alternative sources of information and forcing intrusive DRM technologies on them? Thank God I'll be graduated before this gets a chance to become commonplace.
And before replies start pouring in about how I'm cheating myself and my grades will suffer...you're wrong. I'm consistently making 'A's in my classes, book or no book.
And what, exactly, am I supposed to be waking up to? It's not like I'm just now finding out that Linux doesn't hold a large market share on the desktop, and it's not like I'm going to start caring now. See, most of us measure the quality of an OS by its quality, not its market share...
That was a joke, right? You don't really think that all the millions of desktop Linux users just up and vanished because some idiot at PCWorld wanted a catchy headline?
The issue is that you could have your information set to private, but it will still be used by Facebook's advertising system to determine who to show ads to. So while a potential employer may not be able to look you up on Facebook and find out that you're gay, they could find out that you had clicked on an advertisement that had been served exclusively to gay users (although the ad may not have indicated in any way that it was only targeted at homosexuals). It's an awfully sneaky way to get around privacy settings, basically.
When the hard work in question is of an intellectual nature and takes no resources to reproduce, of course we should. I guess we should all have to start our lives with no technology at all, and only the lucky few of us who manage to independently discover such novel concepts as fire and agriculture should be allowed to make use of them? Or to use a more recent example, schoolchildren should only be taught algebra and left to do the hard work necessary to discover calculus themselves?
I would not be surprised if it is something related to motor control and short term memory similar to the well known phenomenon of "death by powerpoint".
I believe the phenomenon you're describing is called "The Internet," or increasingly just "Facebook."
Joking aside, though, you're right. I've basically never used a computer productively in class, aside from occasionally implementing an algorithm while the teacher is explaining it. If I need to pay attention in a class, I'll have a sheet of paper and a pencil out working through what the teacher is doing on the board. If I could ace the class in my sleep and I'm only showing up on the offchance that there's a pop quiz, then I'll have a computer out...
Disclaimer: I haven't used Photoshop for years. I've been using Free Software exclusively for probably four years now, and in the time since then I've done a little bit of professional photo work, but for the most part I'm what you'd call an advanced amateur, or something like that.
For basically anything you'll need to do, yes, GIMP is completely adequate. It does, however, miss some key features that I would REALLY love to see from even older versions of Photoshop. Others have mentioned most of them...layer effects would be absolutely wonderful to have back, as well as grouping layers and being able to select and move multiple layers at a time. In theory, 16 bit color would be nice, although I've honestly never been able to tell the difference in the finished product, and GEGL should take care of that. Photoshop's interface behaves a little bit nicer than GIMP's (for instance, GIMP's layer panel will grab keyboard focus so that I have to click back over to the image window if I want to keep on using keyboard shortcuts) as well.
In general, though, none of that matters to the end product. They're inconveniences that I've learned to work around, and I'm okay with that for the sake of avoiding proprietary software. When it comes down to it, there's never come a time when I've thought "Oh darn, I wish I could do that, but I can't because GIMP won't let me do it."
...this one is easy enough to crack just by shoulder-looking. And of course there's the issue of needing to load a ton of map data just for a simple password entry, and if the map provider is out you're screwed. Plus the hassle of zooming down from a world-map to some specific point every time you want to get into a site. Need I go on?
The reason the "digital segment of society" refuses to recognize that "intellectual property" isn't the same as regular property is that it is not, in fact, even remotely the same. You can make all the flawed analogies you want (heck, you can't even get in line with the normal trolls who want to analogize software as property, you seem to think that the thing you're trying to rationalize as if it were tangible property is best analogized as a service), but the bottom line is that software is not a physical product, and it is not a service in any conventional sense. It is completely and utterly different from any other economic product that mankind has ever produced. If you start your argument by trying to treat it as such, you're just showing your ignorance from the very start.
You do realize, don't you, that copyright infringement, theft, and theft of service are completely different, and that copyright infringement in most cases is not a criminal offense but a civil matter? If software is exactly the same as goods and services, then why is it subject to a completely separate set of rules and regulations? Do you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you can't demonstrate even a basic understanding of the way the law considers "intellectual property"?
Now, if you want to be sensible about this, you should try making some reasonable arguments about economic incentives to justify crippling the ability of society at large to copy data freely amongst themselves for the benefit of the smaller segment of society that produces that data in the first place. It helps if you refrain from making ridiculous analogies and calling everyone who disagrees with you an idiot...
Well you can't have it both ways! Either you accept the copyright or you don't.
Oh sorry, I didn't realize that I wasn't allowed to hold nuanced opinions:/
Now, if you'll return to reality with me for a moment, you'll find that there are very few people out there asserting that copyright should be abolished, and I'm certainly not one of them. What I stated was that I think private copying should be legal under any circumstances...that does not include commercial distribution or the creation of derivative works, which are the keys to the GPL. I'm not stupid. I use and write GPL software and I thoroughly understand how it works. I'm also in favor of drastically reduced copyright terms (five years seems reasonable enough), and of course that would mean that corporations would be free to incorporate my code (albeit from five years ago) into proprietary software. As far as I'm concerned, that's an acceptable compromise for the greater societal good that more realistic copyright terms would accomplish.
...but please, ignore everything I say, I'm just a jerk that makes the entire situation unbearable...
I find it difficult to believe that anyone has even stolen code from you...perhaps you mean copied? Lets be perfectly clear, so-called "piracy" is not stealing anything, it's violating a (theoretically) temporary monopoly that you've been granted by the government. Aside from that monopoly, you have absolutely nothing to do with two people copying data between their computers. You can argue that copyright protection is a necessary incentive to produce creative works in our society, but I don't believe---and a great many others agree with me---that those protections should extend to private copying in the digital era, and that stance does not make us "morally corrupt."
Consider this. I don't use proprietary software. I'll gladly pay for software, but not so long as the author is going to restrict what I'm allowed to do with it. So whatever software you may produce, am I not "stealing" just as much money from you by not using it as those who share it amongst themselves are by not paying you for it? Or are only some of the people who choose not to pay for your software "thieves," despite the fact that we all have exactly the same net effect on your pocketbook?
I opened this when the front page was telling me there were only five comments, wondering if anyone had made a Dune reference yet. Oh, how naive I was...
...except that you did buy an i7, it's just that they didn't tell you about it. Just because a feature wasn't advertised doesn't mean I didn't pay for it when I bought the hardware, or that the price I paid didn't include the cost of manufacturing that extra feature. You shouldn't be going around critiquing other peoples' analogies if you're going to liken activating hardware that you've already paid for to magically teleporting new hardware into your computer...
Why is this nonsense being modded up? The GPL very explicitly states that you must include the source code or an offer to produce source code on demand.
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
I wouldn't say hooray for freedom. If this is a win for freedom, it's only in the sense of breaking out of jail for as long as it takes them to catch you and toss you back in. The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests. There seems to be a really dominant mentality among people in the know about these things that it's alright to keep supporting this nonsense monetarily because we'll always find a way to break it. That's all fine and dandy for now, but what happens when they start to get really serious about "protecting their content," and start introducing devices that can't be so easily broken?
"Loosely," of course, meaning "blatantly ignoring context and treating obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact." I suppose the author would also assume that any poet or author through the centuries who has ever used the phrase "ends of the earth" also believes in their heart that the earth is not spherical?
Unfortunately, we live in a nation where everyone has been conditioned to believe that effectively-endless copyright protection is some kind of inalienable personal right, not a balance to be struck between society and authors for the greater good of society as a whole. So when ridiculous crap like self-deleting downloads come along, people don't think "Why am I letting these people seize control of my own computing devices away from me so that they can protect their artificial monopoly?", but rather "Oh, how nice of them to offer for free what we should be paying arbitrarily determined sums of money for...
I'm going to go ahead and hazard a guess that this isn't going to become a "commonplace technique," in the near future or otherwise. It's a lot easier to arrange a shoot with a reasonable dynamic range to start with than it is to rig up some ridiculous contraption with two separate cameras, and a lot less hassle in post.
I like how you picked two of the worst metrics to compare based on raw numbers, and then compared them based on the raw numbers. A 20% difference in CPU clock speed doesn't mean a slower processor, it depends on the architecture in use. I don't know the specifics here, but you can't fairly compare two completely different machines based solely on their clock speed.
Same for megapixels. When you're taking a photograph with an image sensor the size of a finger nail, just how many grainy pixels it can crank out really isn't an issue...
Maybe in carefully staged settings, but we already have super high-speed cameras for carefully staged settings. In real life, have fun trying to use a view camera to capture fast motion. The larger your sensor, the longer the lens you need to get the same field of view, and the shallower your depth of field. With a view camera shooting sports or what-have-you you'd need an absolutely ridiculously insanely long lens and it would be all but impossible to focus it on anything moving faster than a glacier.
Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.
Or, they could sidestep all that nonsense and just pass some common-sense laws that prevent individuals from obtaining a monopoly on friggin' mathematics. You talk about incentives for industry...what kind of incentive for the software industry do you think it is for the US to be one of the select few nations in the world where you can write some piece of software entirely out of your own effort, only to find that someone else "owns" the techniques that you've implemented and watch them destroy your livelihood without a single thing you can do about it? Who in their right mind would start a software company in that kind of legal atmosphere?
And even if we ignore the inanity of software patents for now...are you seriously suggesting that the government should just step in and use eminent domain to take "property" from smaller industries and just give it away to industries that "contribute far, far more to the US economy?" That would just be a great incentive not to start up any kind of business in the US, as the government could just step in and take it away from you to give to someone they deem more important at any time...
Because when your lens is already wide open, that isn't really an option. For instance, with a 28/2.8 lens on my 20D (appreciably smaller than 35mm sensor, but still much larger than a compact digital) I can get somewhat shallow depth of field at f/2.8 at close range. If I mount it on a 5D Mark II, I can get that shallowness at a much longer range (still wide open), and when you get in really close it's just remarkably shallow.
29 seconds? It's more along the lines of 12 minutes, iirc. If you're shooting something staged and controlled, 12 minutes continuous recording shouldn't be an issue. It's worthless for live video, since it can't even give you a clean video out signal, but for controlled recording it's really quite spectacular for the price.
That's because in serious cinema (and still), there's no such concept as "the lens." It's "whichever lens is best for this particular lighting situation/distance/position," and you have a bag full of them that you swap out at will. While you can buy some SLR (and possibly cinema, I'm not really familiar with that world) cameras in a package deal with a lens, experienced users generally won't, unless the package just happens to include a lens that they want to have at a discount for buying it with the camera. Shipping a single lens with every camera would just be foolish, and turn away buyers who either already own or just don't want whatever particular lens you chose.
Besides, at this point the entire camera has to be purchased piecemeal and assembled, so even if it were standard to include a lens with a camera purchase, it wouldn't exactly be the single issue standing between them and market dominance:/
They're not manufacturing their own sensors, or really even any hardware components as far as I can tell, apart from the support system which is ultimately optional, and probably a lot simpler to manufacture than electric components. The project is really more about shoe-horning various devices together into something that's more modular and extensible than the commercial alternatives, and aside from the weak imaging element (which is kind of critical), they're doing a great job. Stick a camera with a 35mm-sized sensor that can do HD at 30fps on the front of it, and it would be a really great camera to shoot a film with.
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This is ludicrous. I'm a little over halfway through my CS degree, and I've generally managed to avoid buying textbooks (picked up probably three or four the entire time I've been attending classes) because, well, pretty much anything I could possibly need to learn from a textbook is already available for free online anyways, and its saved me easily thousands of dollars. Now schools are talking about simultaneously taking away students' ability to seek out alternative sources of information and forcing intrusive DRM technologies on them? Thank God I'll be graduated before this gets a chance to become commonplace.
And before replies start pouring in about how I'm cheating myself and my grades will suffer...you're wrong. I'm consistently making 'A's in my classes, book or no book.
And what, exactly, am I supposed to be waking up to? It's not like I'm just now finding out that Linux doesn't hold a large market share on the desktop, and it's not like I'm going to start caring now. See, most of us measure the quality of an OS by its quality, not its market share...
That was a joke, right? You don't really think that all the millions of desktop Linux users just up and vanished because some idiot at PCWorld wanted a catchy headline?
The issue is that you could have your information set to private, but it will still be used by Facebook's advertising system to determine who to show ads to. So while a potential employer may not be able to look you up on Facebook and find out that you're gay, they could find out that you had clicked on an advertisement that had been served exclusively to gay users (although the ad may not have indicated in any way that it was only targeted at homosexuals). It's an awfully sneaky way to get around privacy settings, basically.
When the hard work in question is of an intellectual nature and takes no resources to reproduce, of course we should. I guess we should all have to start our lives with no technology at all, and only the lucky few of us who manage to independently discover such novel concepts as fire and agriculture should be allowed to make use of them? Or to use a more recent example, schoolchildren should only be taught algebra and left to do the hard work necessary to discover calculus themselves?
I would not be surprised if it is something related to motor control and short term memory similar to the well known phenomenon of "death by powerpoint".
I believe the phenomenon you're describing is called "The Internet," or increasingly just "Facebook."
Joking aside, though, you're right. I've basically never used a computer productively in class, aside from occasionally implementing an algorithm while the teacher is explaining it. If I need to pay attention in a class, I'll have a sheet of paper and a pencil out working through what the teacher is doing on the board. If I could ace the class in my sleep and I'm only showing up on the offchance that there's a pop quiz, then I'll have a computer out...
Disclaimer: I haven't used Photoshop for years. I've been using Free Software exclusively for probably four years now, and in the time since then I've done a little bit of professional photo work, but for the most part I'm what you'd call an advanced amateur, or something like that.
For basically anything you'll need to do, yes, GIMP is completely adequate. It does, however, miss some key features that I would REALLY love to see from even older versions of Photoshop. Others have mentioned most of them...layer effects would be absolutely wonderful to have back, as well as grouping layers and being able to select and move multiple layers at a time. In theory, 16 bit color would be nice, although I've honestly never been able to tell the difference in the finished product, and GEGL should take care of that. Photoshop's interface behaves a little bit nicer than GIMP's (for instance, GIMP's layer panel will grab keyboard focus so that I have to click back over to the image window if I want to keep on using keyboard shortcuts) as well.
In general, though, none of that matters to the end product. They're inconveniences that I've learned to work around, and I'm okay with that for the sake of avoiding proprietary software. When it comes down to it, there's never come a time when I've thought "Oh darn, I wish I could do that, but I can't because GIMP won't let me do it."
...this one is easy enough to crack just by shoulder-looking. And of course there's the issue of needing to load a ton of map data just for a simple password entry, and if the map provider is out you're screwed. Plus the hassle of zooming down from a world-map to some specific point every time you want to get into a site. Need I go on?
The reason the "digital segment of society" refuses to recognize that "intellectual property" isn't the same as regular property is that it is not, in fact, even remotely the same. You can make all the flawed analogies you want (heck, you can't even get in line with the normal trolls who want to analogize software as property, you seem to think that the thing you're trying to rationalize as if it were tangible property is best analogized as a service), but the bottom line is that software is not a physical product, and it is not a service in any conventional sense. It is completely and utterly different from any other economic product that mankind has ever produced. If you start your argument by trying to treat it as such, you're just showing your ignorance from the very start.
You do realize, don't you, that copyright infringement, theft, and theft of service are completely different, and that copyright infringement in most cases is not a criminal offense but a civil matter? If software is exactly the same as goods and services, then why is it subject to a completely separate set of rules and regulations? Do you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you can't demonstrate even a basic understanding of the way the law considers "intellectual property"?
Now, if you want to be sensible about this, you should try making some reasonable arguments about economic incentives to justify crippling the ability of society at large to copy data freely amongst themselves for the benefit of the smaller segment of society that produces that data in the first place. It helps if you refrain from making ridiculous analogies and calling everyone who disagrees with you an idiot...
Well you can't have it both ways! Either you accept the copyright or you don't.
Oh sorry, I didn't realize that I wasn't allowed to hold nuanced opinions :/
...but please, ignore everything I say, I'm just a jerk that makes the entire situation unbearable...
Now, if you'll return to reality with me for a moment, you'll find that there are very few people out there asserting that copyright should be abolished, and I'm certainly not one of them. What I stated was that I think private copying should be legal under any circumstances...that does not include commercial distribution or the creation of derivative works, which are the keys to the GPL. I'm not stupid. I use and write GPL software and I thoroughly understand how it works. I'm also in favor of drastically reduced copyright terms (five years seems reasonable enough), and of course that would mean that corporations would be free to incorporate my code (albeit from five years ago) into proprietary software. As far as I'm concerned, that's an acceptable compromise for the greater societal good that more realistic copyright terms would accomplish.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone has even stolen code from you...perhaps you mean copied? Lets be perfectly clear, so-called "piracy" is not stealing anything, it's violating a (theoretically) temporary monopoly that you've been granted by the government. Aside from that monopoly, you have absolutely nothing to do with two people copying data between their computers. You can argue that copyright protection is a necessary incentive to produce creative works in our society, but I don't believe---and a great many others agree with me---that those protections should extend to private copying in the digital era, and that stance does not make us "morally corrupt."
Consider this. I don't use proprietary software. I'll gladly pay for software, but not so long as the author is going to restrict what I'm allowed to do with it. So whatever software you may produce, am I not "stealing" just as much money from you by not using it as those who share it amongst themselves are by not paying you for it? Or are only some of the people who choose not to pay for your software "thieves," despite the fact that we all have exactly the same net effect on your pocketbook?
I opened this when the front page was telling me there were only five comments, wondering if anyone had made a Dune reference yet. Oh, how naive I was...
...except that you did buy an i7, it's just that they didn't tell you about it. Just because a feature wasn't advertised doesn't mean I didn't pay for it when I bought the hardware, or that the price I paid didn't include the cost of manufacturing that extra feature. You shouldn't be going around critiquing other peoples' analogies if you're going to liken activating hardware that you've already paid for to magically teleporting new hardware into your computer...
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
I wouldn't say hooray for freedom. If this is a win for freedom, it's only in the sense of breaking out of jail for as long as it takes them to catch you and toss you back in. The answer isn't to keep cracking these "protection" schemes, it's to stop buying into them at all until the companies behind them realize that customers are tired of paying for hardware that actively works against their interests. There seems to be a really dominant mentality among people in the know about these things that it's alright to keep supporting this nonsense monetarily because we'll always find a way to break it. That's all fine and dandy for now, but what happens when they start to get really serious about "protecting their content," and start introducing devices that can't be so easily broken?
"Loosely," of course, meaning "blatantly ignoring context and treating obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact." I suppose the author would also assume that any poet or author through the centuries who has ever used the phrase "ends of the earth" also believes in their heart that the earth is not spherical?
Unfortunately, we live in a nation where everyone has been conditioned to believe that effectively-endless copyright protection is some kind of inalienable personal right, not a balance to be struck between society and authors for the greater good of society as a whole. So when ridiculous crap like self-deleting downloads come along, people don't think "Why am I letting these people seize control of my own computing devices away from me so that they can protect their artificial monopoly?", but rather "Oh, how nice of them to offer for free what we should be paying arbitrarily determined sums of money for...
I'm going to go ahead and hazard a guess that this isn't going to become a "commonplace technique," in the near future or otherwise. It's a lot easier to arrange a shoot with a reasonable dynamic range to start with than it is to rig up some ridiculous contraption with two separate cameras, and a lot less hassle in post.
I like how you picked two of the worst metrics to compare based on raw numbers, and then compared them based on the raw numbers. A 20% difference in CPU clock speed doesn't mean a slower processor, it depends on the architecture in use. I don't know the specifics here, but you can't fairly compare two completely different machines based solely on their clock speed. Same for megapixels. When you're taking a photograph with an image sensor the size of a finger nail, just how many grainy pixels it can crank out really isn't an issue...
Maybe in carefully staged settings, but we already have super high-speed cameras for carefully staged settings. In real life, have fun trying to use a view camera to capture fast motion. The larger your sensor, the longer the lens you need to get the same field of view, and the shallower your depth of field. With a view camera shooting sports or what-have-you you'd need an absolutely ridiculously insanely long lens and it would be all but impossible to focus it on anything moving faster than a glacier.
Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.
Or, they could sidestep all that nonsense and just pass some common-sense laws that prevent individuals from obtaining a monopoly on friggin' mathematics. You talk about incentives for industry...what kind of incentive for the software industry do you think it is for the US to be one of the select few nations in the world where you can write some piece of software entirely out of your own effort, only to find that someone else "owns" the techniques that you've implemented and watch them destroy your livelihood without a single thing you can do about it? Who in their right mind would start a software company in that kind of legal atmosphere?
And even if we ignore the inanity of software patents for now...are you seriously suggesting that the government should just step in and use eminent domain to take "property" from smaller industries and just give it away to industries that "contribute far, far more to the US economy?" That would just be a great incentive not to start up any kind of business in the US, as the government could just step in and take it away from you to give to someone they deem more important at any time...
Because when your lens is already wide open, that isn't really an option. For instance, with a 28/2.8 lens on my 20D (appreciably smaller than 35mm sensor, but still much larger than a compact digital) I can get somewhat shallow depth of field at f/2.8 at close range. If I mount it on a 5D Mark II, I can get that shallowness at a much longer range (still wide open), and when you get in really close it's just remarkably shallow.
29 seconds? It's more along the lines of 12 minutes, iirc. If you're shooting something staged and controlled, 12 minutes continuous recording shouldn't be an issue. It's worthless for live video, since it can't even give you a clean video out signal, but for controlled recording it's really quite spectacular for the price.
That's because in serious cinema (and still), there's no such concept as "the lens." It's "whichever lens is best for this particular lighting situation/distance/position," and you have a bag full of them that you swap out at will. While you can buy some SLR (and possibly cinema, I'm not really familiar with that world) cameras in a package deal with a lens, experienced users generally won't, unless the package just happens to include a lens that they want to have at a discount for buying it with the camera. Shipping a single lens with every camera would just be foolish, and turn away buyers who either already own or just don't want whatever particular lens you chose. Besides, at this point the entire camera has to be purchased piecemeal and assembled, so even if it were standard to include a lens with a camera purchase, it wouldn't exactly be the single issue standing between them and market dominance :/
They're not manufacturing their own sensors, or really even any hardware components as far as I can tell, apart from the support system which is ultimately optional, and probably a lot simpler to manufacture than electric components. The project is really more about shoe-horning various devices together into something that's more modular and extensible than the commercial alternatives, and aside from the weak imaging element (which is kind of critical), they're doing a great job. Stick a camera with a 35mm-sized sensor that can do HD at 30fps on the front of it, and it would be a really great camera to shoot a film with.