Check your dictionary. Lots of things have two or more meanings.

Among readers here, the preferred IT meaning is roughly "an expert who uses his knowledge to do things requiring extraordinary skills." It's not "the kid who tricked you into giving him your Facebook password."

I'm curious, are you just a confused child, or a troll?

Well.. I count myself as one of the manual focus crowd, as well as anyone who uses anything but a point & shoot camera. As you said, it's the focus point gets you. The "bird in flight" photo you describe is a great example. Are you managing to keep the bird on the auto-focus point (or the majority of points for multipoint focus)? While you're tracking it? Including when you press the shutter?

I've seen a lot of photos like that, and they do a wonderful job of some very pretty well focused cloud photos, with a blurry spot in the foreground.

Most people will mangle the bird in flight on an auto camera because the shutter speed was too long and the photographer's tracking wasn't perfect (and the bird did something silly like flap it's wings). Most of the point and shoot I've used refocus when you actually shoot, so there's an extra second while it adjusts, while the bird disappears from your view. Most of those either focus on the clouds, some tree on the horizon, or tall grass in the foreground.

Manual focus, you can set the focus with the bird on the ground. Your effective ISO (for most decent DSLR) and shutter speed were already set. If you use manual focus cameras, you intuitively readjust while you're shooting, so a change in distance isn't a big deal.

This camera actually looks pretty cool, since it will compensate for that. "damned close" becomes "perfect +- a good bit". Did I want the birds wingtip or his eye to be focused? I can look at the options later. :)

I'm annoyed more than anything, when I only have a point & shoot (like at an amusement park, or other places that I don't want to carry gear), and the perfectly framed snapshot (heh) ends up focusing on the wrong thing, is hopelessly blurred, or just took too long to auto-adjust before actually taking the shot.

Like, if you're taking a photo of your kids on a roller coaster. You snap when they come into view. It adjusts and takes the photo either as a blur of the last car, or a perfectly focused and exposed shot of the tracks. "Ya kids, I saw you rolling down *those* tracks!".

I'll admit, sometimes I do get lazy, and leave everything on auto. When I want the good picture, I switch to manual.

In your "bird in flight" example, sure, if the camera is set to all auto, I'll track and shoot, and hope it comes out. If I see the bird getting ready to fly, I'll take the time to get the good shot.

Focus is a horrible problem to solve.

"real" photographers don't use auto-focus, because you're almost guaranteed that it will focus on the wrong thing. When I'm taking point-and-shoot pictures with pocket camera, I have to be careful, and hope that nothing distracts the camera. When I'm doing serious photography with my nicer cameras, it stays in manual mode.

Unfortunately, this camera looks cool, but it would be relegated to use like my nice DSLRs are. I bring them with me when I'm doing a shoot. It's silly to carry it with me everywhere. I did for quite a while, but eventually it became too much trouble, and I realized i was taking snapshots with my phone more than the DSLR. Eventually, it was more like thief bait, because it just sat in the back seat of my car waiting to be used.

I'd love to give this iiium (lllum? lilum? ilium?) a test drive. I'll let my friends know, if they happen to win the lottery, I'd like one to be delivered in my new Bugatti Veyron (I hope my newly rich friends will be generous).

An African or European Volkswagen Beetle?

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I just meant viruses or bacteria in general. Not anything passed from the urine.

Nah, that's too thin, even by Budweiser standards. Maybe for Bud DietXTRAlite(tm).

1,505,144.03 cubic cubits. 57.575 nominal volume "Olympic size" swimming pools. 4,750,000 bushels. 25,313,380 imperial pints. 0.00000000000020300 Pacific Oceans. I hope that clarifies things. :)

... and just like urine in the water, it would take a lot of poison to have any impact on the supply.

Viruses or bacteria that are chlorine resistant, on the other hand, could be a nasty problem.

Ok, lets play the "whose resume is longer and thicker". You start.

Oh... your AC. So yours is nil.

Ya, I pretty much wrote off the story when I saw "hydroponic lights". Unless someone has invented a lightbulb that spews water from it, they're just writing a news story with keywords to try to make a buck.

I've gone through this at a few places now. Besides resistance from the users ("we only know how to use Outlook!"), is migrating from Outlook to another solution ranges somewhere between unlikely to impossible. For someone like me, I only have 3 or 4 appointments scheduled, and the other few hundred are meetings I was invited to. :)

You can have the best plan, with the best business reasons, but when a senior executive tells the CEO that he can't switch, you'll frequently find that it will veto the migration.

Here's a real-world example. I was Director of IT for the company. The CEO told me specifically to get rid of Exchange, because the upgrade costs were too high. We were literally a couple weeks from switching. The Director of Sales went to the CEO and demanded that we keep Exchange, or he would walk.

Funny thing about the sales department. He didn't manage to sell anything, and he couldn't retain the customers. The accounting staff ended up doing all the customer retention. That guy cost us more money than he made. IT, on the other hand, brought costs down, and improved the customer experience.

The only thing that sales brought to us were headaches, and very pretty forward looking reports, that pretty much consisted of a graph showing our sales history, and a line going up at a 45 degree angle showing our future revenue. Every few months, he had to update the graph, so it showed our revenue losses, and had a new starting point for his upward line. I don't think he had a grasp of the concept of forecasting.

Funny, I've tried MS Office a few times over the years. I usually go back to OpenOffice. If for nothing else, I install OpenOffice when I set up a new computer, since it's too much trouble to find an unused MS license outside of normal business hours. :)

Microsoft is probably counting every OEM that ships with the trial version of Office, and all the bundled licenses, even if they aren't used.

Most companies buy too many licenses, so they can be sure they have enough. So if we buy 50, and use 30, but only 10 use it on any sort of regular basis, MS will still count it as 50.

For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.

The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.

There are enough users who refuse to even try OpenOffice for the word processor. "I can't because...". I've tricked some users into switching, by just giving them shortcuts on their desktop with the MS names instead of the OO names, and changing the default save types to the MS counterpart. When they ask about why it looks different, I just tell them "oh, this is the newer version.", and they're fine.

... and since you said teleportation, your future prediction would be completely ruined by the sudden realization that you can safely establish stable wormholes with stuff that's already in most homes.

I don't trust any forward looking statement. Business people throw those around all the time, which always equates to "I hope we stay in business". They never make the forward looking statement of "In the next 6 to 9 months, I hope we go bankrupt, and the shareholders murder us."