- Yes it is $1600 and 4MP. Do you know how much the first DSLRs were with only 1MP? Technology evolves.

The problem is that physics get in the way of resolution increases, and the best modern DSLRs already have a sensor that can out-resolve most lenses.

Which means that a Lytro style camera is going to necessarily sacrifice quality.

You can make a larger sensor, but that costs serious $$$. This thing is in the price range of a full frame camera. If I'm guessing right, to compete in quality with a normal one it'd have to go with a medium format sensor, and those start at around $10K.

- Why do you need interchangeable lenses when you can focus on or apply lens effects on whatever you want after the fact? You would not care about lenses with this kind of technology at all - in fact, the elimination of lenses means this technology could result in large cost savings over the long haul.

Because lenses have nothing to do with focusing? All lenses can focus at all ranges. You can't put a f/1.4 on this for shallower depth of field and better low light performance, or a 10mm wide angle, or a fish eye, or a better telephoto lens, or a tilt/shift for architecture.

It could however be very cool for macro, but oddly enough they don't seem to be hurrying to demonstrate that. Which is a pity -- extreme macro is a huge pain to focus, and that's the one area where this thing could show some promise.

It's mostly a solution in search of a problem.

Photographers choose what to focus on very intentionally, it rarely makes sense to focus on anything else. Of course it's possible to misfocus, but in that case it makes no sense to let the user play with it.

It's still going to be low res, because you get a small fraction of the "megarays" the sensor provides. The spec for this camera was 40, IIRC, so it might get around 4MP, which can't really compete with a modern DSLR. While resolution isn't everything, having some margin for cropping and large prints is a very good thing.

The control for the interactive photos is still clunky. I can't find a way to for instance get the whole image in focus, though that should be possible. It does it while changing perspective.

It doesn't fix the other problem that leads to blurriness -- camera shake. It's all well and good to be able to refocus, but most people learn to focus right pretty fast. The problem is with low light environments, and this isn't going to save you if you handhold and shoot at 1/10.

The sample images still looks low res and blurry.

It costs $1600 and doesn't seem to have interchangeable lenses -- what, are they insane?

Overall interesting toy, but doesn't seem to have a practical use.

The Linus/systemd controvery is long over btw. People had a conflict, yelled a bit at each other, then came up with patches, and everything went back to normal.

Personally I like at least the idea of systemd. It means I can make a single startup script, and have most of the work done by the system, instead of having to muck around with the minor differences of the ubuntu/debian/etc scripts.

Let me translate. They were fucking off by diverging from the core project into recreational political activities unrelated to their mission.

But that seems to be what a lot of people on Slashdot want. Look at the Mozilla and DropBox controversies. Lots of people posting and moderating support those.

No, I'd say what people here want in general is for an organization to be apolitical. Being against LGBT is bad, but doing activities related to LGBT is also bad. A software company is supposed to be a bunch of people coding and nothing else, ideally.

Deviations are allowed only for subjects related to the core mission: patents, copyright, open source, etc.

I have DK1 and ordered DK2.

DK1 is cool as a prototype, but the lack of positioning gets annoying at times, and the resolution is horrible.

DK2 fixes that, but it sounds like the resolution still needs improving.

This is the kind of thing I'd love to have in there. The Rift as it stands right now won't work well with many UIs, as it's too low res to render the details, and it seriously breaks immersion to see things pixellated.

So the more the better I say, if it's overkill for a phone then there are other uses for it.

Obviously. I didn't claim otherwise

Google has their own CA. Of course the NSA may demand certs from them, but Google will have to know, so the NSA can't do it secretly anymore

Spying on this level isn't needed for when secret services "take an interest in somebody". There already are mechanisms for the authorities to wiretap you if they're concerned with you directly. There's no need to wiretap the entire net for that.

No, the purpose of such things is to assemble large databases of things like who talks to who, and for those purposes, you are of interest to secret services, as is everybody else. Let's say a friend of yours participates in some sort of environmental activism. Well, you both communicate, and that automatically makes you a person of interest.

Anybody with a recent DSLR can test that this can be done. I recently took a portrait if myself in my cat's eye.

The trick to this though is that you need a DSLR with fairly high resolution, a good sharp lens, and have the photo be a closeup of the subject. None of which are features of the vast majority of security camera footage.

If somebody was willing to spend amounts in the range of $1000 per camera, yes, this might be a possibility. Provided the person stared right into the camera while standing at a meter or so from it.

Also, it'll probably stay this way. There are limitations to the useful resolution that can be achieved, so it's not possible to simply put a 1000 MP sensor into a security camera and suddenly be able to perform the tricks shown in CSI.

This reads like: This bunch of corporate press releases haven't been getting as much attention as we'd like, so we'll mention Snowden, which is what seems to get attention these days, and then proceed to dump a list of the stuff we do care about.

It doesn't seem to be anything that exciting. Yeah, technology marches on. Somebody figuring out a way to get more bandwidth out of a cell tower is normal and expected. And I can't say I care that much since all this would do is to allow me to consume my tiny quota faster.

The more interesting bits about balloons and IETF proposing Tor already got discussed, so not like they got overlooked either..

As far as I can tell, he lives off ramen because he has no money., not because he's into martyrdom.

Which does nothing to disprove Snowden's point. One can use a computer and still go outside, you know.

Unlike Americans, I don't have anything to celebrate on this day. I keep celebrating the way I did in the days of the Soviet Union, on December 31st. The Russian Orthodox Church sticks to the Julian calendar and celebrates on January 7, anyway.

Yes, easy answer: if you don't like the government sticking their nose in your private life, just become a hermit!

You should take that advice too, are you being paid overtime for this, by chance?

"Many queries that I write are simpler than TPC-H, so what's holding them back?" -- simple queries don't need acceleration.

A "SELECT * FROM users WHERE user_id = 12", or a "SELECT SUM(price) FROM products" doesn't need a GPU, it's IO bound and would benefit much more from having plenty cache memory, and a SSD. A lot of what things like MySQL get used for is forums and similar, where queries are simple. The current tendency seems to be to use the database as an object store, which results in a lack of gnarly queries that could be optimized.

I do think such features will eventually make it in, but this isn't going to benefit uses like forums much.

Sure, if it makes you happy.

According to the updates and comments of the project you linked, it shipped. Tsk.

Well, when 5000 people buy something in the ~$100 and above dollar range, yes, the result is a lot of money.

What are you whining about, are you jealous?