Brett Colvin
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Hey thanks everyone – I had a great time chasing these things in a driftboat.
DB: When we huckin’ meat?
What type of photography do you prefer?
On a limited budget, I think the best thing going is still the Nikon D40, with a few lenses that fit your style.
Try to slant your funds towards lenses, and ensure that you get the glass that supports the intended purposes.
A sincere thanks for all the kind words guys, it definitely means a lot with all the talent and experience on this board.
Here is a higher res version of the scales image.
JM, Corey, and Doug – thank you. The Daily Dozen always has an interesting mix of humanitarian, nature, and out-of-the-ordinary images. Nice to have a ‘poon in the rotation.
I probably should have packed it up with the conditions, but I got myself up early, and thought I would shoot anyway and see what I came up with.
Lots of great advice here and I don’t have much to add.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Some of the “lessons” I value the most have stemmed from a disappointing result.
when i say female i am referring to a female harrier hawk, not a human female lol…
Before you clarified this, I thought I’d accidently gone to the Itinerant Voyeur.
Here’s a gratuitous female I saw this weekend:
Tim: Epic comparison!
I think the law of diminishing returns applies to most things. IT companies always talk about the 80/20 Rule. Usually you can get 80% of the value for around 20% of the cost that a “perfect” solution would require.
In almost any industry there’s a “sweet spot” where 80% of the value can be purchased for a reasonable price. In fly rods that seems to be the $200-$300 range. In computers, the $500-$700 range.
Look at the performance stats on a Mitsubishi Evo X or a Subaru WRX STi, both around $30,000. You don’t get significant performance superiority in other sports cars until about the $100,000 mark.
$70 Slik tripod or $600 Gitzo?
$500 300mm f/5.6, or $5000 300mm f/2.8?
In the hands of the maestro, the Stratovarius sings. Excellent capper to the conversation.
Is there way to measure things like how fast menus open, reaction time to clicks, load times and pauses in the OS as it crunches? Has anyone ever reduced that to a figure in PC expert circles? And if so, is it actually any faster today?
A couple of things Zach:
There are quite a few PC performance benchmark tests, some free on the Internet, which are available. These throw a range of tests at your machine, checking CPU, GPU, BUS, NIC, memory/storage performance, and so forth. Afterwards they will issue a score, which can be used to compare machines.
Passmark Performance Test is one I’ve used for Windows, and I think it costs about $25 for a license. Software like this should give you a good idea of how a machine will run local software, like games or Photoshop. It will also show you the bottlenecks, like insufficient memory or CPU capacity. You can see a mock up here:
http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm
Geekbench is another that is cross platform for Mac/Windows/Linux.
There is another paradigm called “end user experience testing.” This is a bit more complicated. Let’s look at an example of clicking on a web application:
Your computer runs a browser locally, but once you perform a click a whole variety of things could take place. You click, the local machine then sends a data packet across your LAN via ethernet/switch/router to the Internet circuit. The packet then traverses your ISP, routes to the destination, and enters a firewall via the host’s Internet circuit where it lands on a web server. That machine queries a database and serves the content. The path is then reversed, arriving back at your computer.
At work, if you pull resources like files or data from shared storage, databases, or servers then you would need an end user experience toolset to understand each hop and the networks in between.
With our equipment, we see relatively minor differences in local computer performance between the brands. With end user experience testing, desktops are rarely the bottleneck. If they are, performance tests usually show why.
I’ve never compared end user experience data between old and new platforms. I suspect that as images, sound, video, and graphics have increasingly become a part of the user interface, that perceived response times probably haven’t improved too much.
Brett, I am curious… what are the main causes of the failure rate? Is it because of poor quality, overheating, worn out parts, or what?
We don’t attempt to isolate the engineering reasons for the failures since we don’t make the equipment and get replacement parts under warranty.
We do track which components fail, and with the Macs it is predominantly hard drives and motherboards.
It’s safe to say that heat issues are more likely with an all-in-one like an iMac due to the form factor, as opposed to a tower style PC where more air circulates.
