You can get all sorts of old PLC hardware on Ebay for less than $200, for process control applications. I bought an entire Allen Bradley PLC5 setup, processor, a dozen IO cards analog and digital, power supply, chassis, all that, for $40 shipped to my house. Of course, having a copy of Logix 5 makes that viable but there are other controllers out there that work with freely available programming tools.
Someone industrious enough to cobble their own process control setup probably knows this, but who knows.
most of the sales staff have no idea what they hell they're talking about
This is true everywhere apart from small special purpose shops. The problem is the people who really know their stuff usually won't work for the kinds of wages the big box stores have to pay if they want to compete on price. If you shop at Circuit City or Wal-Mart or the like you are essentially trading lower prices for service.
Some companies prefer to side with knowledgeable sales people. Some don't. Given the relative success of Home-Depot compared with my brother's shop, where he sells Stihl, it appears that the masses are happy to be mumbled at by imbeciles if it means they can save $8 on their weed trimmer.
I was speaking with a marketing guy from Canon USA's camera unit the other day and they have big plans for selling consumer level digital SLRs in the big box electronic stores. Previously they didn't push them too hard because the feeling was that SLRs need to be 'sold' while Point & Shoots 'sell themselves'. Now they think that consumers are becoming educated enough before they ever get to the store that the selling is no longer needed, they can just put the things in flashy boxes and people will snatch them up.
In general, I think if you want to be an artist, then you want to have as many people as possible to have access to your material, and if can also make a buck, it's an extra.
I have an idea: Why don't you go ahead and do that with your art and stop trying to tell everyone else what to do with theirs. Lead us by example.
They do matter because people will follow them. If there is money raising to be done (and there always is) there are few better ways to do it than get a celebrity on board, look at Parkinsons or spinal injuries or ball cancer.
That is just slick marketing, like when Marilyn Manson's lyrics decry capitalism. It helps get a bigger share of the disaffected youth dollar.
Re:how about polarization
on
Smart Sunglasses
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The ones you describe are called "Circular Polarizers" or CPLs. Most decent camera stores will also have linear ones but those require the kind of head movement that some poeple seem to want to avoid. I suggest asking for the Kasemann type of CPL because they last longer.
As an aside, some people less familiar with technology think that CPLs are voodoo magic. Show them that their reflections in a window appear and disappear as they rotate the glass and their reactions can be pretty interesting. Children will usually stuff the CPL into their pocket and run away. Some adults will stand there and play with it for hours while others will drop it and threaten to kill you. You never know what you are going to get.
You imbecile, I've worked for Blackwater, so pretend to school me in proportion all you like while I stare out the window.
For the record, I don't think Google is evil. I don't think Microsoft is. Or even the recording industry. "You people", since you weren't paying attention during Ross Perot's campaign for President, means "everyone not like me".
And while I fully expect Google to further its business interests in any way it can inside the bounds of its attorney's interpretation of the law, many many Slashdotters seem to think that if a corporation doesn't stand up on its hind legs and fight for everyone's right to distribute copyrighted content as if it were their own, then they are evil.
The complaining annoys me as well. I liked buying Surefire E2s for $60, but I am not going to complaint too loudly about them being closer to $100 under the new policy, I'm not having to choose between food and flashlights either way.
My understanding of both Surefire and Oakley dealer policies is that they include a requirement to sell at a minimum price. Violate that and you're dealer status is revoked. That gets around the antitrust laws because the dealers agree to follow the policy 'independently'. Someone can buy up a bunch of flashlights and sell them below the price, and Surefire can not stop them, but they choose to stop selling that person lights.
And if he pays cash for a car and someone hits him he won't be able to collect from either insurance company. According to my insurance excec girlfriend they have to scan the list (or some similar list) for their payee's name before sending out checks.
Leaving aside whether or not anyone 'needs' a brand name, other producers will appear even for high end luxury items and even when the market is not particularly large.
Part of my geekiness manifests itself in the form of flashlights. I like nice ones. 10 years ago if you wanted a nice flashlight you bought a Surefire, the only decent alternative was a Mag light which is not even close to Surefire quality or functionality. Surefire's dealers used to compete with one another and a visit to CPF would usually reveal one of them running a sale or whatever.
Dealer A complained loudly that Dealer B was underselling him. Dealers with no web presence complained about dealers with one. And on and on. (I know this because I work for Surefire sometimes). So to stop the complaining Surefire started a pricing policy that prevents any dealer from offering a flashlight below a minimum price, it also prevents any dealer from selling a light on the internet and shipping it directly to a customer, the light has to ship from Surefire's warehouse. This scheme works and the price of their flashlights has steadily risen, even on Ebay. Their policies were modeled after Oakley's (who I also work for sometimes).
Today one can buy any number of very nice flashlights from any number of companies. Arc is back in business. Fenix. And Jetbeam. There are even more guys making lights in their garages now than there were before the policy change. They all compete directly with Surefire, and the offerings from indirect competitors like Inova and Pelican have diversified. There are even companies competing in the weaponlight market, where as little as 5 years ago Surefire was really the only choice at any price point.
So in the flashlight market Surefire's pricing policies seem to have enabled their competitors. Indeed, if you want a big SF stamped on your flashlightyou still have to buy from them, but if you just want a nearly indestrucible metal bodied light that fits in your shirt pocket yet packs 60 lumens into its artifact free LED beam...you have a lot of choices.
This is the first sensible comment I have read with regard to storing digital photos. The rest of this stuff is just shots in the dark, the guy didn't testify as to where he was going or how far from support he'd be, or for how long he'd be away from it.
I'm a pro photographer who spends a lot of time in the field and I have found no better way to store photos than just leaving them on the card. All of my DSLRs use SD cards, I've spent several weeks at a time in environments that are tough on electronics and never had a problem with a card outside of some corroded contacts. For assignments where I have more regular stops in towns I'll take a couple of 80GB iPods for backup. Almost never a laptop unless I can leave at a hotel I know is secure.
People here seem to love AA batteries. As above, what camera the guy is carrying is unknown. There are several consumer level DSLRs that will take thousands of photos from one fully charged battery. Stick a battery grip on a Canon 5D, which is a consumer level camera, put two BP511As in it, and you can snap a couple thousand. Two more charged up batteries in your bag and you're all set. With the grip the 5D will run off AAs but I can't imagine how long you'd have to be in the bush taking pictures before you'd run out of juice.
I'm not sure that I'd call it autopilot. According to the article specifics it controls the rudder servo, but it also mentions something about 'keeping the plane level', so maybe it does other things as well.
I'd also not say it is a drone. when activated the thing turns the plane 180 degrees from its current heading as measured by a magnetic compass.
Cool, but there is still a huge amount of work to be done.
As long as we're all being jerks on the internet I'll point out that the school graduates the students, so your question should have been "Are you sure you were really graduated?".
Obviously we aren't talking about some massive fakery here, no people have been edited in or out, no machine gun nets have been added. But the print is definitely different from the negative. what if this were done with smoke coming from a building, or blood on a sidewalk, or something else that could be emphasized or not in order elicit a certain emotional response?
This is certiantly an issue that will require social solution long before we can bring technology into it.
I like that you all are equating resolve, or general wellness of character, with a given country's wartime body count. As if we can determine whether an entire nation's heart is in the right place by tallying up the number their countrymen they sent marching toward death.
Next war, to prove all of France is worthy of our love, I suggest French soldiers strap women and children on as body armor. That will show everyone just how much atrocity their leaders are willing to unflichingly commit, since that appears to be how we are retrospectively judging things.
Suppressors for.22 rimfires have the best 'Hollywood sound', especially with a fixed bolt gun. They are quiet enough that my dog doesn't recognize the sound as a gun shot and go looking downrange for something to retrieve.
Most people are suprised by the high sound level of a suppressor with anything larger than a.22 rimfire, as they are nothing at all like Hollywood. More like a muffled shot, but you still recognize it as a shot.
With the US military using a lot of 5.56x45 rounds there has been a lot of effort into designing better suppressors for military applications. One of the companies I take pictures for, Surefire, started selling them over the last couple of years. I have been to some of their promo events and have seen their products withstand several hundred rounds of continous 5.56x45 firing without much change in sound levels, yet are small enough to mount on an M4 rifle intended for close quarters use. All of their products are 'dry', meaning they use baffles, rather than 'wet', indicating wipes.
To add even more convolutions to the topic, in a lot of the gangster movies you will see a guy pull out a silenced pistol and assassinate someone on the sly. Presumably a suppressed 22 rimfire would be quiet enough, if it weren't for first round pop, which plagues all dry suppressors.
They could use something exotic, like dentritic cobalt or one of the more wacky titanium alloys, for their fittings and end up with fittings that would resist corrosion long enough to make sense.
If they are indeed using something other than water they must be building quite a bit of this system from scratch, since every single commercially available hydraulic fitting design ever come up with leaks. Hydro salesmen will sell you a load of sunshine about leakproofness, but no one believes them.
Likewise it is purely your choice to install Vista or use any DRM'd file.
While it may dismay you the reason why most 'Vista writeups' you read don't mention DRM is because most normals don't care about DRM.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
For me Media Center was particularly unstable all the way through Vista RC1. Everything seemed to be fixed with RC2, so I assume the version for sale at the moment does well.
Unless you care about startup time. With Vista RC2 running on a dual core Pentium machine with 2GB of RAM you might as well go have lunch after clicking the Media Center icon.
While we are all waiting, did you, in this post you link to (I can't read it, it is a point by point rebuttal), explain why he hasn't used his power as a Disney board member to get Disney to release DRM free electronic material?
Slashdot Mirror
You can get all sorts of old PLC hardware on Ebay for less than $200, for process control applications. I bought an entire Allen Bradley PLC5 setup, processor, a dozen IO cards analog and digital, power supply, chassis, all that, for $40 shipped to my house. Of course, having a copy of Logix 5 makes that viable but there are other controllers out there that work with freely available programming tools.
Someone industrious enough to cobble their own process control setup probably knows this, but who knows.
This is true everywhere apart from small special purpose shops. The problem is the people who really know their stuff usually won't work for the kinds of wages the big box stores have to pay if they want to compete on price. If you shop at Circuit City or Wal-Mart or the like you are essentially trading lower prices for service.
Some companies prefer to side with knowledgeable sales people. Some don't. Given the relative success of Home-Depot compared with my brother's shop, where he sells Stihl, it appears that the masses are happy to be mumbled at by imbeciles if it means they can save $8 on their weed trimmer.
I was speaking with a marketing guy from Canon USA's camera unit the other day and they have big plans for selling consumer level digital SLRs in the big box electronic stores. Previously they didn't push them too hard because the feeling was that SLRs need to be 'sold' while Point & Shoots 'sell themselves'. Now they think that consumers are becoming educated enough before they ever get to the store that the selling is no longer needed, they can just put the things in flashy boxes and people will snatch them up.
I have an idea: Why don't you go ahead and do that with your art and stop trying to tell everyone else what to do with theirs. Lead us by example.
They do matter because people will follow them. If there is money raising to be done (and there always is) there are few better ways to do it than get a celebrity on board, look at Parkinsons or spinal injuries or ball cancer.
That is just slick marketing, like when Marilyn Manson's lyrics decry capitalism. It helps get a bigger share of the disaffected youth dollar.
The ones you describe are called "Circular Polarizers" or CPLs. Most decent camera stores will also have linear ones but those require the kind of head movement that some poeple seem to want to avoid. I suggest asking for the Kasemann type of CPL because they last longer.
As an aside, some people less familiar with technology think that CPLs are voodoo magic. Show them that their reflections in a window appear and disappear as they rotate the glass and their reactions can be pretty interesting. Children will usually stuff the CPL into their pocket and run away. Some adults will stand there and play with it for hours while others will drop it and threaten to kill you. You never know what you are going to get.
You imbecile, I've worked for Blackwater, so pretend to school me in proportion all you like while I stare out the window.
For the record, I don't think Google is evil. I don't think Microsoft is. Or even the recording industry. "You people", since you weren't paying attention during Ross Perot's campaign for President, means "everyone not like me".
And while I fully expect Google to further its business interests in any way it can inside the bounds of its attorney's interpretation of the law, many many Slashdotters seem to think that if a corporation doesn't stand up on its hind legs and fight for everyone's right to distribute copyrighted content as if it were their own, then they are evil.
Maybe, to assure everyone, Novell could adopt the slogan "Do No Evil". You people fell pretty hard for that one last time.
The complaining annoys me as well. I liked buying Surefire E2s for $60, but I am not going to complaint too loudly about them being closer to $100 under the new policy, I'm not having to choose between food and flashlights either way.
My understanding of both Surefire and Oakley dealer policies is that they include a requirement to sell at a minimum price. Violate that and you're dealer status is revoked. That gets around the antitrust laws because the dealers agree to follow the policy 'independently'. Someone can buy up a bunch of flashlights and sell them below the price, and Surefire can not stop them, but they choose to stop selling that person lights.
And if he pays cash for a car and someone hits him he won't be able to collect from either insurance company. According to my insurance excec girlfriend they have to scan the list (or some similar list) for their payee's name before sending out checks.
Leaving aside whether or not anyone 'needs' a brand name, other producers will appear even for high end luxury items and even when the market is not particularly large.
Part of my geekiness manifests itself in the form of flashlights. I like nice ones. 10 years ago if you wanted a nice flashlight you bought a Surefire, the only decent alternative was a Mag light which is not even close to Surefire quality or functionality. Surefire's dealers used to compete with one another and a visit to CPF would usually reveal one of them running a sale or whatever.
Dealer A complained loudly that Dealer B was underselling him. Dealers with no web presence complained about dealers with one. And on and on. (I know this because I work for Surefire sometimes). So to stop the complaining Surefire started a pricing policy that prevents any dealer from offering a flashlight below a minimum price, it also prevents any dealer from selling a light on the internet and shipping it directly to a customer, the light has to ship from Surefire's warehouse. This scheme works and the price of their flashlights has steadily risen, even on Ebay. Their policies were modeled after Oakley's (who I also work for sometimes).
Today one can buy any number of very nice flashlights from any number of companies. Arc is back in business. Fenix. And Jetbeam. There are even more guys making lights in their garages now than there were before the policy change. They all compete directly with Surefire, and the offerings from indirect competitors like Inova and Pelican have diversified. There are even companies competing in the weaponlight market, where as little as 5 years ago Surefire was really the only choice at any price point.
So in the flashlight market Surefire's pricing policies seem to have enabled their competitors. Indeed, if you want a big SF stamped on your flashlightyou still have to buy from them, but if you just want a nearly indestrucible metal bodied light that fits in your shirt pocket yet packs 60 lumens into its artifact free LED beam...you have a lot of choices.
This is the first sensible comment I have read with regard to storing digital photos. The rest of this stuff is just shots in the dark, the guy didn't testify as to where he was going or how far from support he'd be, or for how long he'd be away from it.
I'm a pro photographer who spends a lot of time in the field and I have found no better way to store photos than just leaving them on the card. All of my DSLRs use SD cards, I've spent several weeks at a time in environments that are tough on electronics and never had a problem with a card outside of some corroded contacts. For assignments where I have more regular stops in towns I'll take a couple of 80GB iPods for backup. Almost never a laptop unless I can leave at a hotel I know is secure.
People here seem to love AA batteries. As above, what camera the guy is carrying is unknown. There are several consumer level DSLRs that will take thousands of photos from one fully charged battery. Stick a battery grip on a Canon 5D, which is a consumer level camera, put two BP511As in it, and you can snap a couple thousand. Two more charged up batteries in your bag and you're all set. With the grip the 5D will run off AAs but I can't imagine how long you'd have to be in the bush taking pictures before you'd run out of juice.
I'm not sure that I'd call it autopilot. According to the article specifics it controls the rudder servo, but it also mentions something about 'keeping the plane level', so maybe it does other things as well.
I'd also not say it is a drone. when activated the thing turns the plane 180 degrees from its current heading as measured by a magnetic compass.
Cool, but there is still a huge amount of work to be done.
As long as we're all being jerks on the internet I'll point out that the school graduates the students, so your question should have been "Are you sure you were really graduated?".
And to an even greater extent the problem is that we aren't sure how much manipulation to allow before we call a particular shot a forgery.
Here is an original scan of a negative from the FSA photo project, a Jack Delano shot.
Here is the scan of the print.
Obviously we aren't talking about some massive fakery here, no people have been edited in or out, no machine gun nets have been added. But the print is definitely different from the negative. what if this were done with smoke coming from a building, or blood on a sidewalk, or something else that could be emphasized or not in order elicit a certain emotional response?
This is certiantly an issue that will require social solution long before we can bring technology into it.
All RAW formats I know of do as well, as do Adobe's various ones.
Regardless, EXIF is easily edited and tells us little to nothing about the original image's authenticity.
You know what I think?
I think only police officers should be allowed to have guns.
Just to get this thread back on topic.
I like that you all are equating resolve, or general wellness of character, with a given country's wartime body count. As if we can determine whether an entire nation's heart is in the right place by tallying up the number their countrymen they sent marching toward death.
Next war, to prove all of France is worthy of our love, I suggest French soldiers strap women and children on as body armor. That will show everyone just how much atrocity their leaders are willing to unflichingly commit, since that appears to be how we are retrospectively judging things.
You signature is a good place to start looking for an answer for that.
Suppressors for .22 rimfires have the best 'Hollywood sound', especially with a fixed bolt gun. They are quiet enough that my dog doesn't recognize the sound as a gun shot and go looking downrange for something to retrieve.
.22 rimfire, as they are nothing at all like Hollywood. More like a muffled shot, but you still recognize it as a shot.
Most people are suprised by the high sound level of a suppressor with anything larger than a
With the US military using a lot of 5.56x45 rounds there has been a lot of effort into designing better suppressors for military applications. One of the companies I take pictures for, Surefire, started selling them over the last couple of years. I have been to some of their promo events and have seen their products withstand several hundred rounds of continous 5.56x45 firing without much change in sound levels, yet are small enough to mount on an M4 rifle intended for close quarters use. All of their products are 'dry', meaning they use baffles, rather than 'wet', indicating wipes.
To add even more convolutions to the topic, in a lot of the gangster movies you will see a guy pull out a silenced pistol and assassinate someone on the sly. Presumably a suppressed 22 rimfire would be quiet enough, if it weren't for first round pop, which plagues all dry suppressors.
They could use something exotic, like dentritic cobalt or one of the more wacky titanium alloys, for their fittings and end up with fittings that would resist corrosion long enough to make sense.
If they are indeed using something other than water they must be building quite a bit of this system from scratch, since every single commercially available hydraulic fitting design ever come up with leaks. Hydro salesmen will sell you a load of sunshine about leakproofness, but no one believes them.
Likewise it is purely your choice to install Vista or use any DRM'd file. While it may dismay you the reason why most 'Vista writeups' you read don't mention DRM is because most normals don't care about DRM.
For me Media Center was particularly unstable all the way through Vista RC1. Everything seemed to be fixed with RC2, so I assume the version for sale at the moment does well.
Unless you care about startup time. With Vista RC2 running on a dual core Pentium machine with 2GB of RAM you might as well go have lunch after clicking the Media Center icon.
While we are all waiting, did you, in this post you link to (I can't read it, it is a point by point rebuttal), explain why he hasn't used his power as a Disney board member to get Disney to release DRM free electronic material?
Per the music industry, the problem isn't with the DRM itself, it is the fact that it is proprietary.