Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Gadget guys vs photographers (Score 4, Informative) 192

With respect the the Samsung:
Autofocus: good in bright light, passable in low light, it really is better than the old canons (5Dii) in mid-low light. Nowhere near the newest AF SLRs. There is no good way to control focus in C-AF mode.
Weight: Very nice! Even with the 16-50 f2-2.8.
Durability: Appears to be at or above the 5Diii level. Not quite as overbuilt as an D810. It feels basically like a 7D.
Usability: Complete garbage! Nice button placement but boneheaded firmware. In video mode, we let it slide because the video is so awesome.
Support: 2 Firmware updates already, new ones on the way (sadly these ones are video focused).
Weather Sealing: S lenses are gasketed, body appears robust. We won't know till someone tears one down though.
Lenses: 24-70 eq available and quite good. 70-230 eq reportedly of similar quality sharp and fast. Neither are landscape lenses. 85mm f1.4 (135mm eq) check, very sharp very corrected a bit high on CA but its a system of lenses that are supposed to be software corrected. 60mm macro check. 30mm pancake check. UWA zoom check minus.
Viewfinder Quality: A new standard as far as latency, good sharpness as compared to A7.
Lightroom support out of the box: It includes a copy of lightroom! Sadly no Capture One support other than through an included DNG converter.
At the moment it really is an astounding 4k video camera.
Stills are good enough for events, there are reports of sports working fine if you can fill the frame. Its a PITA for slow fine arts stuff because of wide open focusing and a nerfed AF-S mode.

Comment Re:Well. (Score 1) 195

I'm pretty sure the interesting metric is the fracture toughness.
Interestingly enough there is a NIST page on it:
http://www.ceramics.nist.gov/s...

which ranges from 1.89 to 4.45 MPam1/2

and a nice paper on anealed borosilicate glass fracture toughness:
                http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ph...
which ranges from 1.5 to 1.7 MPam1/2 depending on loading.
Of course Gorilla glass might have slightly higher values.

Comment Re:Well. (Score 1) 195

I think the OP is refering to plastic as in the adjective
plastic
1632, "capable of shaping or molding," from L. plasticus, from Gk. plastikos "able to be molded, pertaining to molding," from plastos "molded," from plassein "to mold" (see plasma). Surgical sense of "remedying a deficiency of structure" is first recorded 1839. The noun

Comment Re: How can the situation be improved? (Score 1) 513

Lol,
shouldn't it be an Otto-Bahn after the inventor/discoverator of the diesel cycle?
Also I laugh a little as the Autobahn (car track?!) here in Austria seems to be a toll road. I'm not sure since I don't own the cars I drive but we have to have a special sticker that costs a couple hundred euro a year to use them.

Comment Re:Copyright itself is problematic for technology (Score 1) 259

NO! I think he should be rewarded by those who can appreciate the mastery and wish to buy a signed print. Do prints of mainstream photography that have made it onto postcards deminish in value? They don't. The artificial scarcity is interacting with creator and recieving an individual product.

Free loaders are fine, people will find a way to show how bad-ass they are that they can afford to advocate art, not only generic art but art that fits their perception of good.

Comment Re:Monopolies in general (Score 1) 272

spoken like someone who has never tried to make a direct copy (even of software) that functions to the same extend as the original. Copying takes work and takes developement. Why do you think that science isn't dominated by the Chinese? They have the grad student populations to put a smart student to work trying to reproduce every interesting scientific paper (where they even give you the recipe most of the time), it doesn't really work out because by the time the student has "discovered" how to do the cutting edge stuff from 2-3 yrs ago; the entire field has moved on to something different.

Another fun example: there is a small korean motorcycle company that literally copies the suzuki SV650 as in the engine castings look nearly identical. They can therefore sell the bike for 20-30% less than the japanese do, however, the copy only makes 70% of the power of the original and has attrocious suspension and brakes.

Copying is not easy with tangible goods or technology

Comment Re:99.97% dropout rate (Score 1) 141

It also works in most American universities if you avoid the engineering prerequisite courses, just dropping your head in and asking to sit in on a course (as long as you are a student) works suprisingly well. Otherwise there is the option to sign up for many more courses than you plan to take and drop the ones you don't want before the drop date. I did that rather often in grad-school with math courses. The university won't tell you to do it but it is a legitimate use of the rules they design. It is really the only advantage to the all you can eat pricing that you get/have to pay as a full time student.

Comment Re:Here's the patent application (Score 1) 83

So why is this a game changer?
Well its not yet but it could be...
So basically we have to make small chips, this is because the parasitics decrease with size so we get more efficient as we get smaller (up to a point), we also get cheaper for simply geometric reasons (wafer/exposure area pretty much fixed cost) so yay more goodies from a chip.

Except...
Tooling up is expensive and HARD, dude what do you mean a .032m lithography mask costs $500,000+ and it probably won't work perfectly for at least a couple of revisions??! That sucks!

Why is this placement technique cool?
One of the neat uses for big chips today are graphics chips. They are huge but relatively simple, they have a bunch of repeated processing units and a buttload of cache and some neat front end or back end. The top generation GPUs are usually made about as big as one can physically make a chip (we normally expose wafers in chunks, and precision and field of view are competitive design goals when thinking about the optics for these systems), because they problem is embarrassingly parallel we can use all that performance and it even scales reasonably well across multiple cards/nodes. So imagine we could make a functional dice that contains a very small number of processing units, some cache and some glue logic that makes it easy to connect to some magical buss, now we can make a GPU as big as we want. If we are a GPU company we like this since we now have something like linear scaling for processing costs to go to MUCH bigger chips, which means we can sell a new super computer every few years without having to compromise our consumer line.

Other cool things:
Lab on a Chip, you can throw down MEMS and processing components on a small device, imagine a full digital assay built into the pricking needle.
Harry Potter Newspapers, if you can do alignment and finishing after the fact you can print your e-ink display and driver in whatever size you need. All thats needed is good yield on the sub-displays.
Disposable-lazy-electronics, we are getting here anyway with RFID, but how cool would it be to carry a roll of stickers that would act as line of sight GPS extenders but were solar or wifi powered. Add some sensors and you have a crowd-sourcable metro monitor that knows where every train is and what stops are crowded.

To summarize, this invention has to capability to possibly decrease the cost of sticking widgets together, thus we can have many little widgets instead of monolithic widgets.

Comment Re:Is access to those restricted (Score 1) 387

define blowtorch, in colloquial american english it seems to be a Propane or Oxy-Propane/MAPP torch. If thats what the parent is refering to I've used all 3 within the last year. My first date with my gf was introducing her to glass-working using the lab's Oxy-H torch and she started with fused quartz. I would argue if acess is available and some sort of guide or manual is near many people will pick up any old tool if they think it will help with the job.

Slashdot Top Deals

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

Working...