tomekk

Personally, I stick to non helium drives. Helium will simply escape at some point (even through seals), whereas air filled drives will always be fine. We're talking way past the warranty though. Ultrastar 7K6000 is the highest model from HGST/WD (WD owns HGST), 7th and probably last generation, with 2M MTBF, 5y warranty. Statistics from blackbaze @jonpais linked to confirm HGST drives perform very well and above other brands in general. I do have backups for everything but I don't really want any of my drives to fail anyway. Recovering all the data eats up time most people don't have in the first place!

On a side note to sharpness. Same thing goes for every new iteration of a camera. I've got a 5DIII and I'm yet to produce something which looks remotely close to what some folks have already produced with this camera or even worse cameras and much worse glass than I own. I've given up on upgrading until I actually use my camera to the full potential and definitely going to skip everything until canikon release their FF mirrorless cameras. Until that, I've got a ton of other things I must improve on... Once this is sorted I hope I'll find a product which has the following: 8K RAW (for cropping to 4k) + lighter options, 5-axis IS, usable ISO 25k, DPAF 2.0  

Can someone point me to data/studies about how much impact humans have on climate change vs natural changes that are occurring naturally? I'd love to see some statistics. 

On 01/10/2017 at 4:58 AM, rdouthit said:

If you want to be successful on YouTube you need to have a regular, unbroken, never-ending schedule of content that retains viewers more than other videos in the genre. That's all the algorithm cares about (currently). If you want to just post for fun, that's fine. But don't expect to make a dime or get more than 1000 views unless you tailor your content to the needs of the algorithm. (I've been a YouTube partner since 2006) If you post a single series and that's it, it will just sit there and be buried by the algorithm. Nobody but your friends and parents will ever see it.

Out of curiosity, what's currently considered optimal for how often you should post videos? Does the frequency change depending on how long videos are? 

10 hours ago, jcs said:

This is the real issue from that article:

I could see Amazon/PrimeVideo acquiring Netflix in the future. Amazon makes money in other ways which could help deal with the internet/media monopoly. Netflix is making original content for survival as the media companies own everything else. Most indie content isn't worth watching for most people. What's needed is better search/matching tools for 'long tail' indie content that could be efficiently matched with micro markets. Ultimately, 'good content will become popular virally'. If people aren't sharing your content, it's not good enough (or you need to find your market where they'll share with others of similar interest). Once again our old friend Artificial Intelligence could be leveraged to provide better content matching with long-tail micro markets.

Until we get our quantum entanglement people-owned wire-free and radio-free network (not communism/socialism, something else), these issues will persist.

What do you mean by "good content" and "popular" ? It seems these rarely coexist (if you lean towards "quality" by saying good content) unless you mean popular in micro markets but that's something very different to what people think "popular" means. 

11 hours ago, Fred Flohrschutz said:

You should not have to have a One Drive to see the pictures I posted.   Let me know if the link is not opening, I may have to share them differently.   They are in my Public folder.

Please let me know.

 

Hi @Fred Flohrschutz. I can't access the files. It's asking me to log in. I'd love to see them :).

Hasn't this been known for ages now? Couple years back black hat seo had AI generating whole articles on all kinds of topics which would pass as legit for a lot of people. Fake reviews seem like a piece of cake for an AI in comparison. It seems like it's an easy article spinning AI software for reviews https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning

It's tough, like a lot other things for other people. Getting them to pay up front or denying treatment if they didn't sounds definitely fair. Along with using donations from other people who decided to help. It's not only fair but more importantly it's about getting people to think before they do and making them responsible for their choices because nobody will bail them out if things go wrong. Unlike in the current system (banking as well ;))

5 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

The individual is always susceptible to crowd forces, cultures, peer pressure, society norms, and so on. It's completely unrealistic, sadly, for individuals to act as individuals, self determining the destiny of the planet from individualistic change.

The change should happen with the forces that shape the crowd.

You wouldn't do it on your own, would you? After all, you created this forum for a reason. That's how the change starts.

Please, no more taxes, otherwise, we're going back to taxing everything based on one ideas of what's good or bad according to their own ideology and again - designing how people should live their life ;)! Let them just smoke (slowly kill themselves in other words) but what about denying them treatment for other people's money as a fair incentive/feedback, unless we develop robots that can treat them for free? Is it wrong if that's their choice and they know about it? If the goal is to empower people, we have to abandon current trend of steering people and deciding for them, don't we?

1 hour ago, jcs said:

 We can experience orders of magnitude increases in resource management and utilization, providing the type of world Alan Watts described where the machines do all the work to allow us to survive and live a healthy life, so we can pursue other activities, such as spiritual development and the arts!

Is our goal designing how everyone should live their life? Not everyone wants to pursue spiritual development and the arts. I'm also fine with people who don't want to live healthy life but I don't want to be forced to pay for their choices, do you? If robots ever will, that'd be great but for now wouldn't it be fair to actually make people responsible for their choices/actions for a change (responsible empowering of people ;))?

8 hours ago, Ed_David said:

 I meant that politicians have power over corporations, not the other way around.

All politicians are, for me, are members of society chosen by us to represent us.  They get a salary so they can't be bought as easily.

Is it about salary? Where do people who want to buy them go in the first place? Don't they go to people in power who can change laws? How much they earn is secondary because it's not a problem for billionaires.

What about empowering people and reducing government's power. Weak government would, in reality, give power back to people. Corporations wouldn't even go to the government without any real power and would have much tougher time buying decentralised system. 

Could you post some footage from that wedding? I'm really interested in the quality of light when shooting this way. In general I prefer light that looks natural but if this looks high end/commercial I'd be fine with it too

27 minutes ago, Ed_David said:

Left or right politically, if we can turn America back into some sort of democratic system, where politicans have power, and are not beholden to corporations, that would be really good.

Couldn't this be the problem? I know it seems illogical but let's examine it because I think, that's how people are tricked in today's world into giving away their freedom. If politicians have total power that means people have no power at all. Logically, there is no third option, is there? So you can have strong government and weak people, the other way around or something in between. 

So should we really be giving more power to politicians or should we empower people? 

What you're saying would be ideal but historically oppressive regimes very rarely give up, if ever?

30 minutes ago, Neumann Films said:

Yup, I absolutely agree.  How do you tread that line?  How much metaphor is too much, do you risk your audience missing the point or do you risk turning them off by being too "preachy".

Still don't know which is the best approach.  Seems like each subject requires it's own criteria.  

 

My idea would be to create different channels for different audiences as a part of a decentralised system. This way one team could focus, for example, on a direct approach and another on a metaphorical one etc. It would help to target people better, split workload and maximise potential of each team.

The idea is one thing, but implementation of it is another. We should create a secret society of filmmakers dedicated to change the world and work as a decentralised system to avoid shutting down ;). Stories with metaphors are good, but some people need more direct stories. I wouldn't limit myself to metaphorical stuff only ;). We should be producing all kind of stories and work on a lot of different levels to maximise reach ;). 

22 hours ago, jcs said:

Crypto currency is seeing massive growth, and people are getting rich from it. While a friend recently boasted of buying a new home from cryptocurrency profits, I suspect crypto may have been developed by the Rulers. Why? Because it was released from a secret source, supposedly from a single person, Satoshi Nakamoto (not a real name). While it’s certainly possible that a single genius developed it and released it anonymously, it’s also possibly the result of a large group of people’s work, as a way to start transitioning away from the petrodollar and providing as-yet-unknown ways of maintaining control of a system which on the surface appears to be fully decentralized. Such a crypto system could contain unseen back doors, especially if NSA level folks worked to help develop it.

From a simulation and systems point of view, it would appear that developing many small systems of management and control, which loosely interact to form a larger system, would be a viable ‘better way’. Such as the original idea for the United States. Currently that system doesn’t work, and the Federal government controlled by the Rulers have ultimate authority and control everything, including mainstream media to shape the people’s thoughts through well understood psychology.

A peaceful solution would be to walk away from the system. Everyone leave the cities and live in smaller rural communities which are self-sufficient: making their own food, clean water, shelter, and anything else they need to live a good life. By using barter or some other system of energy accounting, no taxes would be paid other than minimal taxes as required by current law for land, etc. The Rulers realize this, and communes in the past which have tried this have been labeled cults and once large enough have been ended by the Rulers.

So What can We Do?

With a goal of minimizing global suffering, and to promote a good life for as many people as possible, the first step is education. For as many people as possible to understand how the global system currently works, and who’s doing what and why in terms of information exchange.

A financial system reset is needed: can we figure out a workable soft reset, so we can prevent war? The difference today vs. the past is the internet is a giant, intelligent being. With the combined intelligence of everyone online, along perhaps with artificial intelligence systems, we should be able to develop a stable, healthy, and sustainable system that has never existed before. For the so-called Age of Aquarius: a new way of living not based on consumption, which is unsustainable on a planetary scale.

As media creators, first and foremost our mission in education is healing division. Once we stop taking what’s going on in Washington as a real, functioning system, vs. the Theater for Division, we can collectively focus on what’s necessary to improve the system without collapse. Perhaps this starts with the FED and financial systems, including a restructuring of the tax system. Simplifying and streamlining the system to remove hidden wastes of energy (money) will result in massive improvements for the quality of millions of lives, all over the world.

In summary, we the people of Earth must develop a new way of living sustainably, which we can test via artificial intelligence and simulation systems before trying it out on the world. At the same time, these modeling systems can give us real-time feedback in ways never before possible to fine tune the system’s performance to more quickly reach working solutions.

Crypto currency is nice but, yeah, it's growth is a little bit suspicious. It's pretty easy to shut it down for the rich guys. Market cap is too small. 71 billion $ could be very easily manipulated (gold's is in trillions and they still keep it in place) . On top of it, even though it's decentralised, one change in law can send it down very quickly (what about - let's make it illegal now?)
I agree that as media creators our mission is education but do you think people have a chance vs big money and big power? I don't think they will ever give up so is there a point in thinking about how to fix FED for example? Historically, small guys won against big guys through creation of a completely new way of thinking and then through leadership uniting enough people to create a revolution. I think in modern age a little bit of this is happening now with ideas like crowdfunding small guys/shared economy. This certainly empowers people and eats into profits of big guys and it's just the beginning. Media creators/influencers can definitely empower small guys by spreading the word out and creating momentum for them on the Internet around the world. At least big corporations can somewhat be bypassed in today's world which is awesome.

On 24/08/2017 at 7:44 AM, Neumann Films said:

I applaud that.  Tempted to downgrade my phone back to a non smart version. Keypad for texting, no internet...mmmmmmm

8 hours ago, Tim Sewell said:

The problem you find is that the non-smartphones on sale currently are of very poor quality. I tried to get around this by buying older Nokias - of which there are many, brand new, still around - but none of them has lasted more than a few months and I'm not sure why.

21 hours ago, Bizz said:

You should really try it. In 10 years (and couting) i only had 2 mobile phones (and i only buy one when it stops working) and i never, ever, use internet on it. By choice. I dont want to be online all the time. I dont need it. So, for example, when im on the bus or subway i like to listen to some music or just think about stuff and do a lot of observation. PS: But thats me and my experience...i respect who likes to be online on their smartphone.

It's different for everyone but I think almost nobody wants to waste time (? ). I think smartphones are useful but I don't see any reason to upgrade because I find that my phone (oneplusone) very rarely uses all 4 cores @ max frequency (2.4GHz). It does, sometimes, but not enough to justify buying a new one every 6 months. It seems that developers are behind hardware for a lot of apps/web browsers etc. If you don't think it's the case it is because of all bloatware that is on your phone. Not sure if it's still the case but sure it was with samsung's older phones (after half a year to a year, they slowed down significantly). A phone with a clean android doesn't do it.
Keep in mind I don't play games and my main camera is 5D III. I shoot to edit @ high quality (for me high quality means top photos from 1X.com or 500px). Smartphones are not there yet so I don't waste time taking average photos which don't have 14 bit raws with a lot of information in them for editing (not that 5D III is very good compared to modern cameras, but still a lot better than smartphones ;)).

I use my smartphone to save time/read. The key for me was to block all distracting software and notifications (time wasters - got hundreds blocked notifications per day, lol). So if you can't get/don't want to have an old phone, just block all the apps you think are wasting your time and definitely block unnecessary notifications. 

15 minutes ago, Neumann Films said:

Being content, in a consumer ran system is one of the hardest things to achieve. Doesn't it feel like that these days?

Yeah, companies are working hard to keep you buying but it's definitely possible. I haven't replaced my mobile phone since 2013!  

I think I know what you mean, but don't people have different values and morals? Do you think, people choose morals and values themselves or they're external? In other words, don't they come from other people who shape their worldview from the youngest age? What about values and morals of the Al-Qaeda trained 5 year old kids - just thinking of an extreme example to illustrate my point. 

Couldn't it be consumers dollar but not exactly entirely their choice? We all know, half the stuff we own we don't really need, don't we? GAS syndrome anyone? ;). If their free will is based on their values and their values are based on whoever shapes their worldview then is it really their choice in the end? LOL, it's getting confusing so I'll stop here ;).  I'll end with a TED talk that touches on the issue a little bit:

<iframe src="https://embed.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention" width="854px" height="480px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

Are media in the US separated entities and nobody owns them? If someone owns them, isn't it logical that except money, they also follow (to some extent at least) core values of the owner(s)?

43 minutes ago, Neumann Films said:

Do you blame Disney for pushing out super hero films 24/7? At what point is it the consumers fault? I say...always.  Large entities like a Disney cannot (repeat...cannot) exist in a Capitilist society like ours AND have morals at the same time.  

Blame the consumers for the latest Transformers film and blame consumers for the media frenzy (no matter which way it's slanted...does it even matter?)

Is it consumers fault that they were born in a world where multi billion dollar companies know inside out human's psychology and know exactly how to shape their worldview/make them want to buy things etc. from the very young age? Is it a level playing field?

Yeah, this list is nice, but for a benchmark it would be nice to have F65 used as a main camera like in "The smurfs 2". Otherwise, we don't really know how much the F65 was used and in what scenes. In Oblivion, for example, it's listed as a second camera... so how much really was it filmed on the F65? I think, there is a little bit of marketing going on here. 

I think, I've found a good list of movies shot mainly on the F65. It's on Sony's website itself https://www.sony.co.uk/pro/products/digital-cinema-4k-movie-releases#find . All the ones with small sign "shot on sony 4k" at the bottom left corner of the title seem to be shot mainly on the F65!

There is not really much content we can use to enjoy true 4k resolution in ours beautiful 4k screens, is there? I mean, I know that "The Smurfs 2" used Sony F65 exclusively but that's not exactly my genre ;). What else is there guys? Usually it's F65 alongside something else. It would be nice to have a benchmark movie for 4k besides the smurfs ;).

Isn't wavelet decompose in GIMP called frequency separation technique in Photoshop?