alge

Hey, don't drag ARM into this discussion! How typical of Qualcommites, blame it on the ARMs. What else should they choose anyway? MIPS?! (:

To get the thread back on track: Rebel T1i / EOS 500D. One of my geekier friends dismissed the Rebels as "plastic toys". Can anyone comment on the general quality of these cameras? (Will they stand up to the hard life of a skydiving accessory?)

Oh, oh, oh, can I try to explain it? Then DSE can comment if I'm on to something or completely off.. Also, IANAL and other disclaimers. The people behind the MPEG formats have spent an amount of money on developing it. The codecs are protected by patents. You can check out the guys who have h264/AVC patents on http://www.mpegla.com/avc/ - all of these guys wants to get their money back through licensing. (AVCHD uses h264/AVC for video.) If you sell a product which can decode or encode h264, you'll have to pay royalties to all these guys to keep them off your back, which varies with what the end user is doing with the codec. Apple gives away QuickTime, for example, which can decode MPEG4. But only for non-commercial use. They don't want to pay the extra bucks per product sold for full MPEG4 support. By the way - the guys behind VLC and other free players obviously can't pay MPEGLA for each free download of the application, so in a country that cares about software patents, you're breaking the MPEG4 license by using VLC. MPEGLA does not sell licenses to individuals so there's no way you can do it legally. See http://www.videolan.org/doc/faq/en/index.html#id404342

Century .55 is selling for $115 at b&h (link). Don't know how you managed to round $115 to $500. (=

Yup, the Century .55 is really low profile. With the step-up right I'd say it sticks about 1cm out from the cam lengthwise, and not all all height/width-wise. Century .3 on the other hand.. (=

I notice some mod changed the title from CX105 to CX100/105. Maybe CX100/CX105 would make it easier to search for by Europeans in the future. Just a thought.

So while everyone was talking about the Comp Velo, Aerodyne's ninjas sneakily snook behind them all and released Brian Germain's Sensei(?!). See 2:40 into http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrANff1CwOc&feature=channel_page (from the VASST channel @ PIA 2009 interviewing Bill from Aerodyne). Interesting stuff: New honey comb ripstop material instead of the normal square thing, "packs about 15% smaller than traditional fabrics". Not very clear if they only use this for the Sensei or if it will be standard for the Pilots and Mambas etc. as well. No mention of the Sensei on Aerodyne's website, though. Maybe Brian or someone from Aerodyne could comment on when it will be possible to order it in this thread? ^^ (Relax, I'm not getting a Sensei anytime soon.)

Good example … especially w/r/t illustrating differences, imo. How does the homogeneity of Norway’s population compare to the US? Ethnically, religiously, and economically? [For the record - I'm pretty far out on the left/liberal side, even for Norwegians. (See here.) I've tried to separate my opinions from fact, but I'm sure some will interpret it as communist propaganda or w/e.] Compared to the US we are very homogenous - quoting the CIA factbook, we're 94.4% ethnically Norwegians, 3.4% Europeans and 2% others. (Most immigrants by far are from Sweden.) On the religious side we're kind of opposite of the US. We do (unfortunately imho) have a pretty strong tie between the church and the state, with the State Church having 82% of the population listed as members. But most people registered in the church hardly ever go to church. It seems to me like most people are agnostics. The political debate tends to avoid religion as well; I have no idea what the religious beliefs of the individuals from the current administration are. This "in theory religious, in practice very secular" as opposed to your "in theory secular, in practice religious" is the same strange difference as our government type. As a constitutional monarchy, you would think that we're less democratic than the US republic. In practice we seem to have a more democratic (imho: healthy) political system, with multiple parties, no political commercials on TV, and you can actually get to the top without being a millionaire. The king has next to no real power, acting more like a moral / spiritual leader. It's spelled "dugnad". (= Our skydiving club is a good example: Everything's based on voluntary work. The only monetary compensation is for the tandem instructors and vidiots. I wouldn't say people are rushing around trying to find new ways to help eachother, but most members seem to be willing to sacrifice some amount of time make the club prosper. The traditional "dugnad" where people living in a particular neighourhood gets together to clean and fix stuff seems to be in a decline. However, the total amount of voluntary work is actually increasing. It just happens in sports clubs and similar instead of in the neighbourhood. Stimulating voluntary work is also mentioned in the current administration's political platform declaration. Oh by the way - the Swedish dropzones really kick our asses when it comes to "dugnad". When it comes to everyone helping out to make stuff happen they seem to be in a different league than the rest of the world. Hats off to 'em. (: We certainly do recognize exceptionality when it occurs. Take Magnus Carlsen, the guy who became Grandmaster in Chess at 13 years of age. We're fiercly proud of the Norwegians who are recognized abroad. Other examples include Nansen, or in our particular sub-culture, the Skywalkers freefly team. But in normal life the focus is more on the society than the individual - compared to the States, at least. While most people aren't too enthusiastic about paying our rather high taxes, they also seem pretty content with the system that favours the society above the individual. Most people will use the public health care system, even if there are longer queues there than for the private clinics. The biggest downside to this society over individual mentality, imho, is the Jante Law. (That article is an interesting read, even if it lacks any good sources.) In some communities it's quite a challenge to get along if you don't fit in with the norm. But that's probably true for most rural communites throughout the world..

So, I'm both a liberal in the correct and your seriously misunderstood "left==liberal" sense.. My government payed for free education from I was 6 to 25, student loans + subsidies payed for my housing when I moved away to study at 19. Summer jobs payed for my skydiving career. (: Note that my family is not poor by any measure, so I probably could have made it through the US system to get a similar grade relying on my parents instead of the government. I'm also (happily) paying a fuckload of taxes at the moment so I'd say it's more of an investment by the government than welfare. Now, why did you ask?

No surprise there, then. ^^ Anyway, I beat you on far out-ness hands down. Looks like there's not many northerners in SC.

INTP ftw.

That's exactly what mine looked like except I'm .12 right of economic center. Damn, you make the graph hard to read! (shameless plug) (=

Maybe one axis (conservative / liberal) is just not enough. Have you tried the political compass?

-8.25, -8. Moved ever so slightly down to the right since last time, a couple of years ago. I've plotted me and lawrocket in a chart - anyone else want to go in there?

Pretty sure it was HA-VOC - or one of the other Dorniers at Skydive Spain. 15k feet - nice way to start the year. On Friday it's back to the good old ASS.

No offense, but maybe you should fix your existing stuff before looking for the next product.. From realdropzone.com: Exactly the thing I would not like to see in my manifest. (:

Didn't your mother tell you never to calculate how much $$$ you spend on skydiving?!

Found this via Google: http://www.cheapelectricals.co.uk/acatalog/Sony_HDRCX105E_Hi_def_digital_camcorder__sony_hdr_cx105e_sony_hdr_cx_105_hdrcx105e_hdr_cx105e_hdr_cx105_.html Not that I would order from that website, but the price and delivery date is interesting: £587, March 09. That's £50 more than the CX11 on the same site.. \=

In that case I don't see why you mention it at all. (Or give it a whole paragraph.) The thought was to make it easier to understand for the consumer. If I could edit the article as I wanted, I'd split it in three: - Image aquisition -- Tiny bit on optics -- Imagers -- Resolutions -- Color format (if at all) - Codecs -- Compression -- Bitrates - Storage -- AVCHD -- MXF -- Blu-ray .. i.e. just rearranging the paragraphs into three sections. Just my 2 øre.

It's a good article, but some parts of it can be a bit confusing. And at least one part (HD-DVD) is irrelevant today. The various names could be explained the first time they're used, such explaining that AVCHD is an MPEG-4 container format for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. MPEG-2 being both a container format and a codec doesn't help alot, of course. Mentioning AVCHD under "Compression" adds to the confusion, I think that should mention the actual codec AVCHD uses instead. What I would like in there is a sort of pipeline diagram in the start which shows how the different terms relate to each other. Color Sampling Codec Format YCC 4:4:4 Uncompressed MPEG YCC 4:2:2 => AVC/H264 => MPEG2 YCC 4:2:0 MPEG2 AVCHD Or something. Maybe throw in the XviD codec and AVI format to make it easier to understand for us piratebay kids. But I guess that's not your target audience.. just a thought.

You can keep your filthy CX-6. Just convert to belly and it'll be perfect for you. Moahaha.

I've seen gas prices as low as $6.4 here lately. It's really nice compared to the prices this summer where they nearly hit $9. (With today's exchange rate.) (:

Nope.

Schweeet, and just in time for bonus payments! Who will be first with a CX105 sidemount camera box - 2kc, tonfly, cookie, others?

Say what? The Discovery Channel has become quite un-scientific lately. Look at the mythbusters.. at least they try, but their "scientific methods" are dubious at best. The rest of Discovery is just bike building, car building and mindless infotainment. Maybe Discovery Science is a bit better, but I don't get that on my cable.. ): Anyway, regarding the topic. I think it's just some poor documentarist who's desperately trying to appeal to the average Joe. NatGeo does a lot of the same in their "Mysteries of the Bible" shit, trying to find Noahs Ark and what not. They usually got materials for 5 minutes and stretch it out to 30. .. But I don't really think there's a big creationist hidden agenda thing here. Just bad TV.