Also don't forget one of the promises of RAW: That RAW developers will continue to evolve, so that you'll be able to generate a better conversion down the line than now. Granted, given the maturity of developers the pace of innovation has slowed down a lot compared to 20 years ago, but there are still incremental improvements happening.
Another advantage of RAW is non-destructive editing, at least in developers that support it and are more than import plugins for traditional editors. I rarely have to touch Photoshop these days.
> ive said this before but we have min-maxed our economy to optimize for profit. We may be entering the reaping phase of that now.
Expanding the scope beyond the economy, one could certainly make the claim that the Age of Consequences is upon us, and that William Gibsons "Jackpot" isn't far off either. We're increasingly and collectively impacted by the fallout from decades of bad decisions.
Here a certified flight instructor compares his experience teaching MS Flight Sim users vs DCS users. Anecdotal as it might be, he notes a clear advantage to the DCS users in the areas of situational awareness, intuitive flying skills & energy management, instrument scan and communication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OztTnzPEyP4
What makes you say zvols are neglected? In fact the people that did most of the work porting ZFS to Linux, i.e. LLNL, use zvols for their HPC cluster and they still employ a number developers and the primary maintainer of ZoL. I also remember a quote from them stating that zvols were in fact more mature than vfs.
The movie is powerful enough and the subject relevant enough to still resonate with the younger generation. I do wonder, however, if the older the movie gets, the more distant the imagery from the seventies might intuitively appear to a young viewer. This led me to think about how the movie would look if (re)made today. I keep getting ideas for recent footage / subjects which would work in place of the original shots, whatever the merit of such an undertaking might be.
Former unimportant Eve player active 2008-2017, involved in most of the big wars of that time-frame. I met Mittens for the first time in meatspace in 2011, before he built much of his influence and infamy, but the impression I got back then mirrors your bias and was confirmed on many later occasions. Ironically he himself comes to the same conclusion, if a decade late: "... has resulted in [] my presence being a net negative for the wider tribe". For the record I think that Goons are still a net positive for Eve despite the many overstepped limits, but that is debatable.
There are many possible reasons for images not looking so sharp. From the top of my head:
- When not stopped down, most lenses are not that sharp, especially older ones.
- Most sensors employ an anti-aliasing (lowpass) filter that blurs the image.
- The smaller the photosites, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio.
- Bayer interpolation.
- Less then optimal post-processing, like aggressive denoising and sharpening with too large of a radius
- Compression artifacts and color sub-sampling.
- Analog outputs are usually bandwidth-limited (lowpass filtered) for EMI compliance reasons. Not an issue with an all-digital workflow of course.
No. Light is quantized (photons), as is analog film (emulsion crystals remain clear or turn dark, never in between). Virtually all modern DSLRs and DSLMs have 14 bit sensors, which results in quantization noise below the noise level of the rest of the system.
Indeed. A similar thing happened in the HiFi loudspeaker industry: If manufacturers simply pursued higher fidelity they'd converge on flat (on/off-axis) frequency response, near perfect impulse response etc. making them sound more similar. This is a big problem for branding so instead you'll find intentional imperfections in speakers above a certain price point to produce a certain signature sound.
Indeed, for the last two decades the first movement of Soil Festivities has been my go-to track to get me in the zone when I have to get any serious writing going. It just flows so nicely.
Yes, it is of course based on the Cyberpunk TTRPG IP, which sets many world building aspects. However if compare the content of the Cyberpunk 2020 TTRPG guidebook with what is in 2077 you'll quickly notice the monumental difference in scope and how much the latter drew of these other works in ways obvious and subtle.
Just as the Witcher games are basically fan fiction paying homage to Sapkowskis books, CP2077 needs to be seen as a homage to many classics of the cyberpunk genre. Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell to name a few obvious ones (I also see a lot of Elysium in it, FWIW). The story CD Projekt synthesized based on the concepts of these works is very fitting and surprisingly consistent, IMO. And because it's a homage, criticizing the lack of original ideas in the plot/world misses what the creators apparently set out to do. What _can_ be criticized is that they fell short of their technical ambitions. And despite its flaws, I found the game to offer quite a remarkable experience.
Indeed. At $currentJob with 1k employees we use Dell laptops (currently Latitude 74xx series, Precision 75xx and 55xx). The 55 series has been the most problematic by far. The earlier generations broke down so frequently that we had to have ~50% of mainboards replaced, being completely bricked or with having the CPU frequency locked to 800Mhz being the most common causes. This has improved, now we "only" have overheating and ballooned batteries as frequent problems. Other than that they have the downside of having few ports and no 4G/5G modem. Despite we (IT) warning our employees, many still pick the model because it looks sleeker and is lighter than the 75 series (which has been excellent).
I tend to agree.
But there is another aspect: Sadly the democratization of internet access has lowered the bar across the board in regards to both form and content of discussions in communities.
I've been a heavy forum user and occasional mod/admin in subject focused communities in the pre-Facebook era (~'98-2005) and I've seen many communities die down from an influx of barely literate (technical or otherwise), low effort, entitled and sometimes rude users. And I don't think this can entirely be explained by the "mainstream otters" concept, and neither have I seen many instances of new niche communities appearing to replace the former. At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I observe that the education level of the average internet user has been dropping.
Moving containers between hosts is not a use case that is well supported by docker. The tenor being that you should rather delete and recreate.
While not a replacement for docker, with LXD moving containers between hosts is a single command. In many aspects I find LXD's UX more polished and its capabilities more complete, so I often do recommend it to people. Even if just to containerize docker itself to gain some of the missing functionality...
Tangentially the same is true for mountain bikes to a degree, and for a reason not mentioned in the article: Wider tires (run with lower pressure) cope better with uneven or soft terrain. This can easily be verified by riding different tires on grass, sand or deep gravel. On the other hand, on smooth and hard ground wider MTB tires do indeed have higher resistance. This was experimentally documented by the German "Bike" magazine.
Consider that even before the sun-setting of Atlassians server editions price is one of the main reasons I see for customers wanting to migrate away from Jira (and Confluence for that matter). In 8 years of operation we saw a sixfold increase of the pricing of Confluence, for instance. And that's not considering the further increase caused by us being forced to upgrade to the data center edition to stay on premise.
How do you justify being more expensive than even Jira Cloud? IMO if you can't beat Jira on pricing while positioning yourself as an alternative to the market leader you've already lost, no matter how technically fancy your product is.
I've spent an afternoon testing zstd's custom dictionaries. It really only provides benefits on small data blocks. According to my tests, the largest blocks at which custom dictionaries could still provide a benefit is 8K, above that the compression ratio advantage compared to the default is definitely gone.
RAW naturally doesn't make you a better photographer, but there are clearly benefits that can result in better looking pictures than what the in-camera JPEG conversion is capable of. Not only that, I even see one of RAWs promises fulfilled: That over time, RAW development programs will improve, resulting in better looking images developed from the same RAW. If I develop a RAW taken 15 years ago with a current development program and compare the result to what I got back then, this is clearly the case.
I disagree with everything you said except your last paragraph.
Technology is nice but it has yet to lead to a net reduction of our ecological footprint.
The fact that we are unsustainably destroying our biosphere is supported by scientific research and data. If you don't concede that, I don't see a point in even discussing it.
No one is denying that, but that is missing my point. How is population growth a good thing in the context of sustainability? Improvements in efficiency have generally been more than offset by increased productivity and thus (unsustainable) resource consumption, which is the reason the deterioration of all ecological indicators is accelerating.
What I meant with "matter of priorities" is that we've had the means to stop that trajectory for some time, but it just wasn't and isn't a priority. We've already caused irreparable damage to much of our biosphere. There's positive glimpses here and there but nothing changed fundamentally. I don't see us escaping the Great Filter.
The behavior you describe is essentially inertia-driven, only producing change when it becomes inevitable. And it'll be the reason we won't manage to prevent most of the ecological collapse that is already happening.
If we don't behave in a way that's sustainable for an indefinite time, we're living on borrowed time. Sooner or later this debt will catch up. IMO the belief that technological progress will save us is naive. The problem is not technological, it never was, but a matter of priorities.
Yes, that didn't help of course. JPEG2000 was a bit more efficient than JPEG by virtue of being a newer, more computationally intensive format, not because of wavelets. A modern format like the h.265 derived HEIF still uses DCT/DST based transforms. For video the situation is worse, as AFAIK no-one has been able to come up with a decent wavelet based motion estimation algorithm.