Here's the problem: hurting the group you hate doesn't necessarily help you. When the stock market collapsed in 1929, sure, there were a couple famous cases of bankers who committed suicide, but most rich people were diversified in their assets and did fine. The bulk of the actual pain fell on working people and the poor, and suicide rates actually went up among those groups, not among the rich.

You can't assume what's bad for Wall Street is good for Main Street. It's not that simple. Shit rolls downhill, so any radical attempt to inflict pain on the wealthy classes will inevitably hurt working people more.

You can seem to want to intervene in the economy to produce a society that's better for the average person -- I applaud that sentiment. But I'm wary of half-baked attempts to turn back the clock, because you *can't*. Contrary to myth, the US actually manufactures more stuff than it did in 1990. What's collapsed is manufacturing employment. Back in 1990 you could, as a semi-illiterate high school drop out, get a job at a factory shoving pieces of metal into a machine, or running a sewing machine, and that job would pay a modest middle class wage. Those jobs are never coming back. If the tariffs ever get high enough to offset Vietnam's lower wages, we'll be buying sportswear made by robots rather than by armies of unskilled Americans running sewing machines.

In many cases the attempt to address trade "deficits" don't even try to turn the clock back. They're trying to correct trade "deficits". Take Cote d'Ivoire -- the country that supplies about half of our chocolate. Americans now are paying 21% tariffs on that chocolate. Why? Do you think Americans will suddenly find employment growing cacao beans? Do you think Cote d'Ivoirians, who earn on average 144 bucks a week, will start buying American aircraft and pharmaceuticals?

Worrying about the money flowing out of the country in a trade "deficit" is irrational, because goods of equal value are flowing in. The reason more money is going out than goods is that we're rich and can buy more things than our trading partners can. If we raise the price of chocolate, coffee, and bananas to the point where Americans can't afford to buy them anymore, do you really think that makes us better off?

... laughing madly, clutching my C-41 negatives.

I suppose that would depend on Australian law and exactly what sort of accounts these were. If it is some sort of trust account, where the pension fund holds the balances until the monthly checks go out, then it was actually the pension fund that got hit. Not 20,000 accounts.

On the other hand, if these are like demand accounts, where the retirees can draw funds, then each of them was robbed individually (sort of like someone stealing your debit card). There may be recourse, but that's up to Australian law concerning credit/debit protections.

Yeah, and that's a problem with standards in general unless they are backed by an official open source reference implementation under a permissive license.

An ideal standards body would have a policy whereby if you want to change or improve the standard, you start with a problem statement, followed by a proposed solution, folks debate whether the solution makes sense, and the process ends with you submitting a change to the reference implementation. And that means as soon as the standards change, any software that uses those standards can pull in the newest version of the library and get at least basic support for the format, even if they have to do extra integration work to fully support it.

For example, if Canon submitted their dual-pixel RAW changes to a standards body, the first thing that would have happened would have been someone pointing out that storing the second layer as a difference signal would result in only a minor change to the CPU overhead, but could result in an RLE reduction in file size by something like 40%. (I'm making this number up; it's just an educated guess.) And they would then make that change to their spec, and the result would have been better for everyone, including Canon.

And then, before shipping hardware with the modified format, they would have submitted changes to support it. Sure, apps wouldn't get the focus shifting capability without adding some additional integration and setting some additional field in a data structure or adding an extra parameter on a function call or whatever, but the basic functionality would immediately be available just by linking against the newer library. And because all of the focus shifting stuff would be implemented already in that library, it would be *almost* instant for app developers to add that additional functionality as well.

And this has no obvious downside for companies like Canon, other than having to apply for patents on their split pixel idea a little bit sooner. (I'm assuming they patented that, because otherwise we'd see every other manufacturer doing the same thing by now.)

Almost all do, they're all modeled after the 1931 London Underground diagram by Harry Beck. But when they tried that in New York back in 1972, people HATED IT because it didn't match the real geography of the city above.

Eventually, two years after any major format change. Until then, they are supported only by a handful of major players like Adobe who work with the camera manufacturer under an NDA to develop support for those formats, and it still takes additional years before they are fully supported even when you limit yourself to software by the major players.

I can't speak to the DNG format itself specifically, but there is no world in which the camera companies being forced to provide full open specifications for their data files is not better for you. Whether that is in the form of using the DNG format with full documentation of any extensions to that format well in advance of any hardware release, in some new format developed by a standards body under similar terms, or in a proprietary format with a fully functional C library for working with it that is provided by the camera vendor under a permissive open source license is an implementation detail.

This has nothing to do with DNG. This is because Lightroom is a nondestructive editor. It is nondestructive for JPEG images, too, BTW.

Same response.

There actually is. You export it as a JPEG and then delete the original and import the JPEG. The reason almost nobody does this is that you lose quality every time you compress an image, and if you start out with the modified image and want to make further changes, that quality loss is compounded. So if you might ever want to make any future edits, you're going to want to keep the original.

Secondarily, the DNG file format can't really handle cropping for the same reason that proprietary raw formats can't. They are representing subpixels at the hardware level, and the algorithms are designed to have a fixed layout of those subpixels that doesn't map 1:1 onto pixels in the output. Plus things like lens aberration correction don't work when you are working with a crop, so for some types of post-processing, you have to always start from the full-size original image.

Again, if you want to have a permanent rendering with a specific set of settings and crop, that's when you burn it to a JPEG or PNG or TIFF or whatever.

Adobe doesn't do anything very well anymore except sell subscriptions, IMO. I stopped caring about them when they stopped selling permanent licenses. You should, too.

Is there something wrong with TIFF that I don't know about? I mean yes, we could probably do better than LZW compression these days, but there's no reason someone can't extend that format with a new compression algorithm and propose it to the standards body as long as they don't modify the container structure itself, and let's face it, the container itself isn't a significant percentage of the size of the file. :-)

Eventually, yes. The real problem is that every time Canon or Nikon updates their file format, it takes almost two years for software like libraw to support it. For example, the CR3 file format came out in March of 2018. Libraw got support in October of 2019. So there was a 19 to 20 month period in which photographers were NOT able to use the software of their choice to work with that raw format.

On the flip side, having their own format means never having to say "I'm sorry". When Canon added support for dual-pixel sensors, they didn't have to get anyone to agree to their format. They just did it. And there are other advantages to that, particularly when it comes to not disclosing features like that to other companies ahead of the release date.

But back on the negative side, that means nobody outside of Canon got to look at that format ahead of time, and Canon's format absolutely sucks for efficiency. The dual-pixel images take up twice as much space as standard CR2 files. Had they gotten more eyes on it, someone would have pointed out that they could save the second slice as a difference signal relative to the original slice, and by doing so, turn most of the image into long runs of zeroes, then do run-length encoding, and massively reduce that overhead.

And that could mean as much as a 2x increase in the number of shots that their cameras can shoot at maximum speed before the RAM buffer runs out, so Canon's decision to use a proprietary standard didn't just hurt photographers' pocketbooks by making them buy more flash cards. It also hurt the usability of their cameras in a very direct way.

I don't mind if these companies want to have their own formats as long as they publish them under a BSD license on a regular basis. And ideally, they should do so a bit *before* the release of hardware that depends on them, so that the broader community can point out obvious flaws in their data format and push for improvements before it is permanently baked into hardware. But even if they don't, an open-source-licensed library would allow others to make backwards-compatible changes to enable a second, improved version of the format gated behind a flag so that they could flip the bit in a future revision of the firmware and get the benefits; that's the nice thing about being able to update the firmware. :-)

But the current situation absolutely sucks for photographers, and it is entirely because companies like Canon and Nikon do not support open standards AND do not provide permissively licensed open source libraries for their own proprietary standards. I really don't care which one they do, but I'm really disinclined to buy their hardware until it has broad support in the open source community, and I know other folks are as well, so not doing so absolutely does cost them sales.

Here's the flaw in your thinking. For every one professional photographer that buys these cameras, there are probably a hundred advanced hobbyists who want something better than an iPhone, and that might even be an underestimate. Yes, if Canon and Nikon want to lose a huge chunk of their sales for a couple of years after every major format change, then they can feel free to ignore the open source world, but if you think it doesn't have a real negative impact on the first two years of sales every time they make an incompatible change, you're kidding yourself.

Worse, that drop in sales is usually a permanent loss of sales. By the time the format is supported, they have usually released a new camera that uses it, and there's a decent chance that people will buy that instead of the previous camera, at which point someone has now skipped an entire generation of hardware, and Canon and Nikon will never get those lost sales back.

In other words, to be uncharacteristically blunt, not only is their decision to stick with proprietary formats idiotic from a technical perspective, but it is also idiotic from a business perspective, so if that was a deliberate decision, then whatever execs made that call should resign for the good of the companies involved. If it was just the result of momentum, then the best time for them to change was twenty years ago, but the second-best time to change is now.

If they don't like something about DNG, then they should create their own open standards body and produce something better. That's okay, too. But the status quo sucks, and they need to do better.

It sort of does. Think of attacks against exploitable bugs as a kind of rust. As more are discovered, your OS/apps start to "fall apart" at an increasing rate. You can put your systems behind more and more impenetrable firewalls. Sort of like parking an old pickup truck in the desert. But every once in a while, you've got to drive it into town.

A Windows system isn't of much use if you don't dare answer e-mail. Or turn on JavaScript to visit some ad bloated site.

Tax subsidies owners of ALL mineral deposits (or even timber) receive. Even lithium, nickel and rare earths (essential to renewable energy generation).

Found the trumptard.

First, the EU import tariff on vehicles made outside the EU is merely 10%, not 30, no matter what lies your orange deity spews. Second, the 2.5% import tariff is only on smaller cars, but not on the pickup trucks which is 25%, far higher than theEU tariffs.

Besides, that is not the reason the US cars don't sell in Europe. They don't sell because they are far too large.

The advantage to photographers is that they can use the software of their choice to work with the RAW files. There are a number of open source apps, my favourite being the awkwardly named Another Raw Threapee (ART), as well as commercial ones, which support the DNG format.

One thing TFA doesn't mention is that a lot of phones support it too. Google Pixel phones produce DNG files when told to save RAWs.

Definitely. Mark Carney said it yesterday, the US has abdicated its role as the holder of the reserve currency, financial stability, the rule of law, the global trader. The priority now is to isolate and contain it.

There is no such thing as Android hardware, there is just hardware for which there is Android support. Some of it is crap, some of it is great, and it all comes at a price point that you get to choose instead of being forced to buy functionality you may not need like you are with iDevices.

Your characterization is a mischaracterization.

This part is true. Only powerful devices can support new codecs without dedicated hardware, and it costs battery life in the case of mobile devices.