OntheRez
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Johnny Bravo wrote:
OntheRez wrote:
Johnny Bravo wrote:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10345557-1.html?tag=mncol;title
I thought this was interesting. Actual academicians creating a horrific mess of a camera while on the public dole.
At least they are not out on the streets dealing crack.
Well, JB, if you'd go to their web site you'd learn that they (1) are all doing basic work in imaging and computing; (2) are creating a standardized research platform for computational photography that will be open source and can be built for about $1k; (3) are funded by sleazy groups like Nokia, HP, etc., really on the dole there, I'm sure.
Of course, to come to these conclusions you'd have to do something other than have a spastic reaction to the words, "new, research, inventive, alternative," etc., which seem to cause you to start spewing words like "crack", "dole" "horrific". You do understand the concept of basic research, don't you?
For anyone who stumbles on to this thread and are interested, please follow the link suggested by EB-1 for a more balanced discussion of this interesting development. (It actually has some Canon content in it.)
Well, if you'd just abandon gullibility for a moment you might realize that an open source camera would have just about as much impact on photography as Linux has had on computers (hint: What operating system are you using?...don't lie now)
Just because they drop a couple of corporate names doesn't mean they are not on the dole, or that their efforts are anything more than justification for a grant/budget, etc.
Like I said, I'm glad that they aren't on the streets dealing crack.
Well, you certainly seem unable to carry on a reasoned discussion without resorting to words like "gullibility" and "crack" to sustain your point and you also have apparently no clue what BASIC research is nor how the quasi-magical device in your hands came into existence. It started with scrabbled together ugly bits and pieces of things and weird ideas. Someone "playing" with concepts of how to do the conversion of a fundamental force of Nature - Light. How it was bent, captured and converted into a digital pulse. It took an incredible amount of thought, diligence, creativity, and yes funding.
From there minds certainly more disciplined than yours and more focused than mine have labored to learn how to use this fundamental conversion to faithfully depict the original impulse of Light. It has probably never occurred to you just how difficult and how extraordinary this accomplishment is and how intensely focused and dedicated the people who developed it are.
As for being on the dole, well you probably think Michelangelo was on the "dole" as he lay on his back playing with paint doing something worthless while he was painting the ceiling of that church in Rome a few hundred years ago. If Julius hadn't been paying old Mike off, I'm sure a bum like him with no skills except chipping rock and smearing paint would have been out pushing cheap wine on the peasants keeping them from important work like raising grapes for the nobility.
Your further ignorance of Linux or more correctly FOSS - Free and Open Source Software - doesn't help your argument either. Apache, for example, a free program that actually makes websites happen runs, at my last check, over 56% of the websites worldwide. Microsoft's offering, IIS, is a distant third at last reckoning and only a fool (or someone with a lot of money to spend on support people) runs mission critical programs on MS's servers. Other programs in the deeper plumbing of the Internet like BIND, Sendmail, IMAP are all free. Some like BIND are virtually universal.
Me, I run Linux part of the time depending on what I'm doing. Most of the time I'm running Darwin a open source variant of freeBSD another FOSS operating system like Linux. I run the OS X shell on top of it. So to label me as "gullible" when my knowledge of computer operating systems is several orders of magnitude greater than yours hardly supports your argument. By the way, according to latest figures Linux now runs on 6-7% of the desktop worldwide certainly nothing compared to windows but that's a lot of computers and a far greater market share than say BMW.
As for the impact of an inexpensive open source cameras for people to experiment with? Over the next 3-5 years it is going to hugely change camera interfaces and massively pressure all manufacturers to standardize access and modes of use. It will also dramatically improve performance as more and more minds are brought to bear on the solving of some of the fundamental conundrums of A to D conversion (Analog to Digital).
Embedded systems (like those in the programming of a camera remain one of the last totally closed arenas. Manufactures keep it this way because they perceive it to be to their advantage (which is partially true). The disadvantage is it limits the number of minds that can work on the problem and even more important creates "group think" that produces the spectacular failures like the 1DIII AF problem we saw recently. This was clearly a software failure partially abetted by a hardware manufacturing problem. In an open source environment, many more minds and testers would have been working with the programming behind the Digic algorithms and likely it would have been spotted before it was released.
Are Canon, Nikon, Sony, et. al. going open source tomorrow? No, and not even next year, but they are going to start feeling the pressure and the more work that is done by bright hungry minds on A/D problems and the extremely complex mathematics behind them the more things are going to change starting with interfaces and with the big guys "borrowing" what these "academics on the dole" have learned and developed. (Aside: Mr. Bravo, just how good are your Fast Fourier Transformations? Mine sux. I'm not sure I can even set up the programming to make a computer calculate them anymore much less put the creative brainpower in to devise new ways to use the theory to solve a light transformation.)
Hell of deal really. A few corporations, some student fees, a pittance of tax dollars adding up to probably half a million bucks and corporations worldwide make hundreds of billions of dollars on hi-tech products as a result. Mr. Bravo calls that a "dole." Some people not nearly as wise as he call it "investment."
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