You're being a bit overly negative. This camera is nowhere near a RED competitor. This camera is going to be closer to a Blackmagic Production Camera competitor (which currently retails for $3k), at least in terms of hardware. In fact, their costs will likely be even lower than Blackmagic's, because they are concentrating on core features and openness, and will not include things like a video display, internal recording, etc.
While I agree with you that the goal of 100k Euro was a bit low (they actually ended up getting 175k Euro = 221k Dollars right now), the 350 Euro was just deposit/voucher that would allow you to buy a camera from the early batches for half the retail price. That means, you had to shell out another 2600 Euro to get the actual camera when they become available. Retail buyers will have to pay in the 5000-6000 Euro to get it.
I'm guessing that the money from this campaign will pay to build the prototype and get it ready for manufacturing, then they will probably finance the actual manufacturing run with the number of deposits/vouchers as an indicator of how much money they will actually get for selling the first batches of cameras. 175000/350 means something close to 500 deposits. 2600*500 means they're should expect to eventually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million Euro, or about 1.65 million Dollars.
But yeah, I feel like that's a bit over-simplified and over-optimistic, especially given the delays and other issues experienced by both Digital Bolex and Blackmagic Design. They will have to demonstrate that they have things under control and are making good progress to get people to go through with the final orders. Still, I want them to succeed, and donated what small amount I could afford to help make it happen.
I don't know if my VPN uses compression, but that's a good tip. I will check that out, thanks!
I had been noticing poor performance from Youtube when watching videos (buffering, dropping to low-res, etc). Then I noticed that youtube seemed to work much better while I was connected through VPN, which is the opposite of what you would expect, at least in theory. But I realize that ISPs have been playing throttling games with large video sites like Youtube and Netflix.
However, I did another test and the results of it were more surprising for me. I have 3mbps DSL service through Verizon. If I run a test through speedtest.net, it reports right around 3mbps. However, if I connect my VPN first and then do the same test, it reports around 5mbps! How is that even possible?
Unfortunately, I feel like the VPN slows normal browsing of other sites a little bit, but I haven't done a comparison yet to confirm my perception.
I heard this interesting interview over the weekend on NPR (transcript in link). In it, the interviewee has this gem:
I was meeting with the vice president of the Communist Party in Shanghai, and I said, well, you know, what's your plan, sir? And he said, well, our five-year plan is to ensure that every man, woman and child in China has, at the very least, five megs of connectivity. And in all the top 10 cities, everyone's going to have one gig a second of connectivity. So I said, you know, sir have you thought about, you know, the unexpected side effects of giving 1.3 or 1.4 billion people a gig a second? And he says OK, I know what you're saying, I know where you're going, but here's the thing - the future of the human race, at least in this century, is ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi everywhere all the time. And it's going to happen whether you or I don't want it to happen or not. And because it's inevitable, we might as well get there first.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, and my only viable choices for internet connectivity are 3mbps DSL or Cable internet which is supposedly much faster, but capped at 250GB/month. The cheapest option of the two is $50/month. There are no signs of this changing in the next few years. At the current rate we're going, the US is pretty much doomed to be at the back of the line when it comes to internet connectivity. Think of the effects this will have on our economy in the medium to long term and gnash your teeth.
Seriously. They prioritize form over function in many of their design decisions: thin aluminum cases that scratch and dent (and now frames that bend), chiclet keyboards with no tactile feedback for centering your fingertips, ultrasharp edges on laptop wrist-rest area that cuts into your wrist, glossy screens that have tons of glare, non-user-replaceable batteries that require you to send the device for service unnecessarily, etc.
How much do you want to bet that the answer is "management"?
I believe I heard that VMworld is now the largest IT infrastructure conference in the world. If you are already steeped in virtualization, it's a wonderful conference to learn stuff and meet people. If you're not already steeped in virtualization, it's a wonderful conference to learn where the IT world is moving, and in fact has largely already moved to.
I watched a documentary about movie art direction and production design, and they had an extended segment about the art design of Blade Runner, interviewing the people involved, etc. One thing that they said that was unusual about the film, and hard to replicate, is that there was some kind of a strike (perhaps writer's guild) around the time that they were pre-producing the film, so they had a much larger amount of time to design and plan the look of the movie than the usual, so they really went to town on it. I think the look of the film shows the extra attention to detail that was given.
You believe in Lord Vader, don't you?
What an interesting coincidence. I was having a conversation with my dad this last weekend about just this subject. He proposed his theory that people in, for example, countries like Russia and China were less ethical than in other countries because of the purging of religion that happened in those two examples, within recent history. This surprised me because he's a fairly liberal-thinking person, although he has become more religious as he gets older. I think of myself as agnostic for the most part, but after giving it some thought, I wonder if he might have a point.
What do you think? Did the suppression of religion in those countries reduce the level of ethics? Can ethics effectively spread and be maintained among a large population without a broad system of organized religion?
You forgot to add promoting comprehensive, real-world sex education from an early age, if you don't like abortions.
Although it has nothing to do with religion in general, but more with culture and what specific sub-type of religion people follow. Case in point being Scandinavian countries which are ostensibly Christian, but have the type of sex education I mentioned, a much healthier and natural attitude towards sex, and a much lower incidence of unwanted pregnancies as a result of both.
I had almost exactly the same experience as you did: $10 charges showed up on my t-mobile bill from some random bogus premium service. I called them up, they refunded me, and offered to put a block on those types of premium services on my account, which I accepted. Problem solved for me, but I feel bad for anyone who doesn't or didn't review their mobile phone bills. I would imagine that other carriers are subject to the same "premium" text service scams, by the way.
Jack Devine is the subject of the sentence, so the article is saying that Aldrich Ames was Devine's former colleague, not Snowden's:
Jack Devine, a former CIA director of operations, said he did not believe Snowden had been a spy, but that he shared many psychological characteristics of American traitors such as his former colleague Aldrich Ames, who spent years betraying secrets to Russia and is now serving life in prison.
Thanks for the idea, and I'll check if my bank offers something similar for my credit card. But I'm going to stick with credit cards from now on. I realize now that there's a reason why banks seem to try to push us to use debit cards every change they get.
Here's an article describing why:
http://www.consumerreports.org...
I say screw them, at least until they pull their heads out of their asses and give us secure cards (chip and pin).
PURGE COMPLETE.
