* Posts by JMcL

76 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2007

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Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF3 MFT compact unveiled

JMcL
Unhappy

Re: Target market

Agreed. The big attraction of the GF1 when it appeared was that it had a fair degree of manual control - not ideal, and felt a bit retarded coming from a Canon DSLR, but good enough once you get used to it. The main thing is that it's pocketable, especially with the lovely Panny 20mm lens, and easy to have always on hand.

Unfortunately the trend with the GF2 and now the GF3 seems to be increasingly to dumb them down. No thumb wheel for exposure adjustment, no mode dial, no exposure lock button, and unlike its two predecessors, it would appear no ability to add on the (ridiculously expensive) Panasonic EVF.

I'd been hoping Panasonic were going to develop this range to have an appeal to the serious photographer, but I'll have to hope that this is in their future game plan, or I'm going to be a bit hosed when upgrade time comes a few years down the road, or sooner if one of the kids bounces it off the floor!

JMcL

Bokeh

I don't find that to be the case. I use a GF1 with the 20mm f1.7 lense, and even at that focal length can get decent bokeh at wide enough apertures. The slightly longer, not to mention brighter, Leica lens should fit the bill even better, and I'd imagine is a lovely bit of glass.

Admittedly, the range is (natively) a bit lacking yet in a prime in the short telephoto length (e.g. 40mm) which would hit the sweet spot for portraits

Acer to dump 3 million laptops onto European market

JMcL

Quality

I've had an 1810tz for about 18 months at this stage and like it a lot. Build quality is good - it feels solid. It's got the portability of a netbook but a lot more grunt, and is easily capable of running Photoshop, Lightroom, and OpenOffice side by side without breaking into too much of a sweat.

My only bugbear would be the trackpad, which is frankly awful, but I prefer to use a cordless mouse anyway

Amazon to sell Kindle through Currys, PC World

JMcL

Ehh???

Quote:

"YOU DO NOT PAY FOR THE PAPER WHEN YOU BUY A BOOK!!!!!!!!!!! I hate the "oh it's electronic so it should be free/5p instead of £14" school of thought. When you buy a book/film/song you are paying for the artistic input and the temporal nature of it, not the freaking trees/plastic that went into making a copy of it."

Oh yes you do. Do you really think the paper mill donates the paper stock for free because it's "art"? Or for that matter do you imagine the man in the truck that delivers it does it for egalitarian motives. Then add the printer, the local branch of Waterstones that has to make space available, pay high street rent, leccy, etc., and allowing for the possibility of ending up with a turkey on your hands that has to be remaindered and eventually pulped.

All these and more are material costs of producing a (physical) book. All have to be paid for, and all make up part of the price paid by the consumer. If you factor in the fact that the author has already written the text anyway, the production costs for an ebook amount to somebody laying it out and publishing it in the appropriate DRM ridden format. A similar process will happen for a print edition, but probably at a higher cost as, for instance, physical proofs have to be produced along the way.

I don't know whether authors will receive substantially more royalties from ebooks - my guess is they won't. And before I get labelled "freetard", I'm not exactly a disinterested spectator as I'll be delivering a book for publication within the next month if all goes to plan.

When one oligopoly screws another

JMcL

The great red herring

Transport costs are the great red herring. We get this guff trotted out constantly in Ireland as being the reason we're even more ripped off in general than the UK. It is of course sooo much cheaper to ship the same goods to Belfast.

Ingram Micro or Ireland - who would you bet on?

JMcL
Paris Hilton

Ehh???

Quite: "3. Are the good users and staff of Ingram being rewarded as well as the Irish? The Irish government and people lived by the principles of fiscal prudence and saving for the rainy day (much like the Japanese, the Germans and the Swiss) and now have a good infrastructure in place to handle metaphorical and real bad weather."

Did I miss something? The only way the members of the Irish government have been "fiscally prudent" is with regard to themselves. I.e. making sure that they personally have become pretty much the best paid politicians in the western world, with superb pension entitlements, and making sure they get their retirement in en-masse *before* the upcoming general election whereby should they by some miracle get re-elected, they'd see those pension entitlements slashed come 2012.

Paris because she couldn't make more of an arse of running the country than this shower

Frenchman cuffed for naughty lip-slip email to MEP

JMcL

Contempt towards public servants

I'm full of contempt for Sarko, but then so is every French person I know. Does this mean I'm going to get locked up next time I'm through Charles de Gaulle?

Pictures of Ubuntu: Linux's best photo shots at Windows and Mac

JMcL

Actually no..

You say for "most people, the idea of using Photoshop or other Adobe applications is absurd and excessively expensive". While I'd agree with the "excessively expensive" bit, I don't really see why it'd be absurd.

Now back to the point. Since the article is talking about raw processing, it isn't really directed at "most people", rather it's aimed at people who are serious enought about their photography that they're willing to add the additional step of having to process the images from raw. For anything other than the most minor of adjustments, 8 bit colour depth falls flat on its face. DSLRs have a depth of at least 12 bits in general, so you're chucking away over 90% of the tonal information available to you by editing in an 8 bit application (12 bits/channel=4096 levels, 8 bits=256). GEGL will eventually solve these problems, but it's been in gestation for almost a decade.

Gimp also has other limitations compared to even PS Elements (which mostly operates in 16 bit mode now). No adjustment layers for one.

Like another poster I DO actually use GIMP, and it is quite capable, but I typically only use it for stuff bound for the web, but as a serious photography tool - sorry.

Researcher spies new Adobe code execution bug

JMcL
FAIL

Piece of cr@p

Download manager completely failed to update Reader on at least 3 separate systems giving a completely unhelpful error non-message each time. After much searching, it appears to be due to some files in the Reader installation directory that were locked by Windows indexing service, but do you think Adobe would tell you that?

I've now disabled all Adobe update checks and manually update their bloatware by downloading the not very easy to find standalone installer.

Apple bets on Mac-only photo land grab with Aperture 3

JMcL

Photographer or IT specialist?

"Every single one that had a PC was far less professional, they pretty much just "took and cropped photos" instead of "managing and editing" photos."

If I were hiring a photographer, I'd judge them on what the final photos were like rather than their workflow. Maybe those that "took and cropped" got it right in camera rather than spent hours trying to rescue each image in software later

UK e-Borders scheme thrown into confusion by EU rules

JMcL
Big Brother

Schengen

I think we (Ireland) should join now Schengen, as we should have from the start, then let HMG take the responsibiliy of sticking passport controls on every piddling boreen between us and N. Ireland to see what their level of enthusiasm is.

Oracle sees future in Sun's GlassFish

JMcL

Glassfish/OSGi

The Glassfish v3 preview is currently shipping with an Apache Felix runtime, so OSGi is already very much a reality in the Glassfish world.

John

Darling's budget targets small business

JMcL

Wouldn't hold your breath waiting for price falls

The VAT rate was dropped by 1% here in Ireland a few years ago in some sort of half arsed misguided attempt to control inflation which had been allowed to go out of control after the Euro was introduced with no control on how the "exchange rate" was applied (hey, we were rich back then - we didn't care). Prices in shops changed not one jot. They did of course move upwards a year later when the same dumb government, went "ah well, that didn't work, sure we'll just restore the VAT rate to what it was" to the usual bleating of "cost of doing business, yadda, yadda, yadda" by the retail lobbyists

I just hope your consumer legislation is a bit more robust than ours - wouldn't be hard :(

John

Secret Service camera bought on eBay

JMcL

"Intelligence services"

Title wise, does this qualify as one of the greatest contradiction in terms in history?

Doctor Who fans told to lay off Hamlet

JMcL

@The Mighty Sprang

"though i reckon David Thewlis would be bloody brilliant at it. and he can act"

Hmmmm David Thewlis doing Doctor Who in the guise of his Johnny character from Mike Leigh's "Naked", now there'd be something!

Dutch ban voting computers over eavesdropping fear

JMcL

While Ireland soldiers on

You lot think the Tony and Gordon show has been a joke?

Our shower over here wasted €50m in buying these self same voting machines which were used in a limited trial in a 2002 election. Nobody trusted them, and there were serious questions about their security. The response? Buy/lease a bunch of warehouses around the country (one has a 25 year lease, the life span of the machine is 10 or 15 years max) at a cost to the taxpayer of around €300k per year.

And since, unlike the UK, the page with the word "resign" has mysteriously been ripped from the Irish parliamentary dictionary, the clowns responsible for this carry on in their highly paid jobs.

IBM shadow looms over next Eclipse

JMcL

Have to agree on Netbeans

I've used both off and on over the past number of years, and until recently I'd have had a preference for Eclipse in terms of performance, flexibility etc. In version 6.0 however, Netbeans have produced a far better, more complete, IDE.

Adobe throws weight behind SQLite

JMcL

@Paul Coen

"Lightroom (hardly bloatware, it's actually pretty efficient) uses SQLite for its database"

It's probably a bit of exaggeration to describe it as "efficient". It needed a beast of a machine spec to run at all when it was in beta stage, though it's probably been streamlined a bit since - I now have a decent machine to run it on anyway, as I had to upgrade to run it. I find the Lightroom DB searches very sluggish, though this is probably not SQLites fault.

As a comparison, I previously used RawShooter from Pixmantec which Adobe swallowed and killed (hence my need to move to Lightroom). At the core, this did pretty much the same thing as Lightroom (metadata based image alterations applied on the fly), but did it faster and this on my ageing W2k desktop with 384Mb RAM (ok, ok, so I did need to upgrade anyway!)

I'm not knocking Lightroom, I use it a lot, and am very happy with what it does for the most part, but I do think it's resource heavy in the same way as pretty much the rest of the Adobe stable.

Gilligan's bomb: Is it time to panic yet?

JMcL

Interesting piece, but....

"Even if one does form, competent and hundreds strong like PIRA, it will tend to be riddled with informers and in the end old Blighty will grind it down."

While it would appear the IRA was full of informers, the only reason they stopped doing what they were doing was that BOTH sides developed a dose of common sense, and had some pragmatic individuals that could see that the bombs could keep going off, and the security services keep digging their heels in, ad-infinitum, and that sitting down and talking was the only viable way forward. Spain/ETA will realise this eventually.

There's also the fear factor of what will happen to you as an informer when your erstwhile compadres find out. The republican movement was particularly trigger happy in this regard, even as recently as 2006 when Denis Donaldson was outed and murdered in no short order. I've no reason to think that the jihadis would behave any differently in this regard, and that even if the entire cell were bagged, other like minded loonies would feel it their duty to avenge the betrayal

Sarko Killer and Bruni sue Ryanair

JMcL

And the winner is....

Ryanair. Given that newspapers are not widely read in France (by comparison to the UK/Ireland at any rate), the ad probably wouldn't have been seen by that many people. Go to court and all of a sudden it's splashed all over the 8 o'clock news, and captain Mick O'Leary smiles all the way to the bank with the cheap publicity. Bravo Sarko!

Remembering the Commodore SX-64

JMcL

It's a mere stripling...

...compared to it's contemporary Osborne 1 http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

When Commodore ruled the world

JMcL

What no Spectrum owners

...or did their C5s break down on the way?

B3ta served DMCA notice for Photoshop Prince challenge

JMcL

Prince?

Hmmm.... name rings a bell. Is he the weird little guy that used to go out with Sheena Easton years ago?

Fatten or strip - the great Java debate

JMcL

There's always some one

While I'd agree that there is a degree of bloat in Java, and that there's a whole swath of APIs I've never personally used, if any particular API is removed, it'll always impact someone.

AWT being an example. We recently had a project which involved embedding ActiveX controls in a Swing app (don't ask). As Swing popup menus are lightweight, the AX controls trampled all over them. Our solution was to use the heavyweight AWT popup menus.

So by all means remove AWT or others from the core API, but they must remain available as plugins to ensure legacy code continues to work, preferably transparently (eg some sort of Maven like dependency downloads)

Kiwi boffins prove that booze makes you clever

JMcL

Hmmm...

Is it a mere coincidence that while I was reading this and being generally enthusiastic about the results that Winamp on random launched into the Pogues?

Adobe exec updates open source group think

JMcL

Adobe's feeble grasp of exchange rates

And god knows, Adobe like to charge. You'd think somewhere in all that overpriced swarm of software they'd have some bit of code that could multiply a dollar price by an exchange rate and come up with something reasonably resembling a Sterling/Euro price (and woe betide the wallet of anybody that might dare to speak a different language)

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