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Comment: the best camera (Score 5, Insightful) 569

by Imabug (#38169356) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Camera For Getting Into Photography?

is the one that you carry with you.

for a photography newbie, i'm of the opinion that the specific camera doesn't really matter. They're all more or less the same anyway. what's most important is finding one that you'll want to carry around with you and use. the more you use it the less newb you'll become over time. you'll learn things and by the time you're ready to upgrade you'll know what to look for.

Comment: Re:You've taken the idea and got it backwards (Score 1) 199

by Imabug (#35468424) Attached to: TSA To Retest Full Body Scanners For Radiation

This has been known for decades. The more time at altitude the LESS you should be exposed to other forms of radiation. That's why they ask you questions about flying before any medical procedure involving radiation.
I'll bet the pilots are incredibly pissed about all these scans because for one thing it can reduce their legal flight time.

In the US, medical exposures are not counted against occupational exposure.

To make things worse these things are not just your normal transmission x-ray where you just want to see what photons make it to the sensor and the dark spots tell you where the dense stuff is. What these scanners are doing is providing far more radiation with the aim of getting atoms to absorb and re-emit photons - effectively making you radioactive while the scanner is on. The idea behind that is the wavelengths of the re-emitted photons can be used to determine what elements are present, find metal and perhaps find explosives. Because that really adds up to a shitload of radiation if it's going to scan all the way through you the dose is cut back and you just end up with the skin being exposed to quite a lot and no ability to sense internally hidden explosives.

No. The x-rays being detected are those that scatter off the person being scanned. They are *not* making anybody radioactive in any way. There is no way scattered x-rays are going to tell you the elemental composition of anything. Density, but not composition.

It is also not a "shitload of radiation". If these machines were detecting transmitted radiation instead, that would actually require *more* radiation exposure and would operate more like x-ray units found in hospitals.

Six Atari 2600 "vaporware" games from 1983 found!->

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes "Six previously unreleased Atari VCS/2600 games that were developed by Jerry Lawson’s company, Video Soft, are at last being released! The games were mentioned in press releases from the early 1980s and were long thought to have been just one of the many vaporware titles that never materialized. Not only do they exist in prototype form, but all were far enough along in development to be playable, with half of them considered to be complete!

Thanks to Jerry Lawson and the efforts of a few, dedicated Atari fans, the prototypes were archived, new artwork was created, and cartridges were produced. Each includes both a box and manual, and production is limited to 100 numbered copies of each title. Only 100 of each will ever be produced. This is the single-largest cache of unreleased Atari VCS/2600 prototypes to ever be released at one time!"

Link to Original Source
Google

Tech Expertise Not Important in Google Managers 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "For much of its 13-year history, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone but if employees become stuck, they should ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place. Now the NY Times reports that statisticians at Google looking for characteristics that define good managers have gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports and found that technical expertise ranks dead last among Google’s eight most important characteristics of good managers (reg. may be required). What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”"

Comment: extract every bit out of my stuff (Score 1) 507

by Imabug (#35330100) Attached to: Consumers Buy Less Tech Stuff, Keep It Longer

I tend to hang onto all of my stuff until it breaks beyond repair or is no longer functional for me. I hung on to my Dell Dimension 8100 and kept it going with upgrades and replacements for almost 10 years. It's still usable, but I needed more computing power for number crunching so I got a new computer.

I used my Tungsten T3 for 4 years until it accidentally got washed in the laundry. Replaced it with another one and still using it 3 years later.

still watch tv on a 10 year old 23" CRT

You can't carve your way to success without cutting remarks.

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