Boston moves 76 000 city employees police teachers and students to the cloud with Google Apps

Posted by Bill Oates, CIO, City of Boston

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Bill Oates, Chief Information Officer of the City of Boston. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In November, the City of Boston was named the #1 Digital City in America by the Center for Digital Government. While this recognition is based on a variety of measures, a key element is the city’s efforts to engage and connect with constituents using mobile technology and social media. As a tech-savvy city, we’re always looking for the best IT tools to help our government run smarter, innovate more effectively and provide better services for our citizens. Our most recent innovation was the successful migration of 76,000 email accounts from a collection of our premise based systems, mostly Microsoft Exchange, to Google Apps. Not only are all city departments, including the Boston Police Department, now on Google Apps, but every teacher and more than 50,000 public school students each has an individual Google Apps account.

Our new unified, cloud-based communication system is pretty big change from our old set-up. Our agencies worked together to manage their mail environments, with resources focused on mail administration and working across the group structures. Our largest department, the public school district, operated on a very separate environment that was in need of a major technical upgrade.

As the city evaluated an upgrade to communication and collaboration infrastructure, we clearly saw cloud services as the most cost effective, supportable platform to address our future needs. In 2013, following an extensive review of the market, the city initiated a rigorous RFP process that attracted an wide array of bids, including multiple Microsoft and Google cloud offerings. A selection committee composed of members from our City IT organization, Boston Police, and Boston Public Schools evaluated 10 proposals based on both cost and technical capabilities. The committee unanimously chose Google Apps based on its ability to meet the needs of a fast moving city while providing a secure cloud environment.

Going Google on such a large scale has many benefits. We gained reliability and security compared to our prior configuration of Microsoft Exchange servers, which required extensive upkeep, upgrades and patches. The Boston Police department, for example, now has a reliable, scalable system that supports its 24/7 operation with Gmail’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. More than 3,000 police employees, including 2,100 sworn officers, use Google Apps to communicate with one another as well as to streamline reporting processes.

All in all, we’ve securely moved more than twenty million email messages to the cloud. Every city employee — from police, to education, public works, transportation and beyond — has a Google account and a boston.gov email address accessible from any device, anywhere. We are confident Google’s secure, FISMA-compliant cloud environment ensures that city data is safe and private.

The Google Apps platform now sits at the center of our drive to infuse innovation in every aspect of city government and enhance collaboration. After 20 years in office, Mayor Thomas Menino is departing – making way for incoming Mayor Marty Walsh, and we’re proud to hand the new administration the country’s most advanced, fully-functioning, cloud-based communications system to keep our city at the forefront of technology innovation.

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VMware to Bring Traditional Windows Apps and Desktops to Chromebooks

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Chrome

Cloud applications allow flexibility, scalability and security and enable a work-anywhere environment, but many of our customers still use traditional desktop applications. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) helps bridge the gap between the cloud and a traditional desktop by allowing you to run your traditional software in the cloud and have applications appear on your Chromebook similarly to how they run today. An example might be your Windows based accounting application.

Chromebooks have continued to help more and more customers over the last year. According to NPD, Chromebooks made up 21% of U.S. commercial laptop sales in 2013. Customers prefer the low total cost of ownership, the central web-based management console and the fact that they dont need any additional security or anti-virus software. These are reasons why businesses large and small are adopting Chromebooks.

Today, customers can fully embrace the cloud with Chromebooks using VMware Horizon™ DaaS®. VMware and Google are working together to make the migration of legacy applications even easier, by using the HTML5/Blast experience from Chromebooks. This means you can work with Chromebooks and connect to a Windows experience running VMWare™ Horizon View.

As the countdown to Windows XP end of life continues, deploying Chromebooks and taking advantage of a DaaS environment ensures that security vulnerabilities, application compatibility and migration budgets will be a thing of the past.

VMware Horizon DaaS enables customers to centralize other desktop environments and manage these as a cloud service. Initially available to customers as an on-premise service or by VMWare vCloud Service Provider Partners (VSPPs) offering DaaS in the cloud or within hybrid deployments. Users will be able to access their Windows applications, data and desktops using VMware’s Blast HTML5 technology to their Chromebook.

This technology is available now by bringing together VMware Horizon View 5.3 and Chromebooks as an on-premise service and will be available soon as an application that can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. To find out more follow this link.

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Download Free MP3 Cutter and Editor 2 6 0 Build 2085 Final Setup Free PcSoftGuru

12 Oct 2013 - Cost-free MP3 Cutter and Editor 2.6. Create 2085 Final Download : With Totally free MP3 Cutter and Editor you will be able to cut audio files, join and edit it. The freeware offers simple tools for cutting MP3 and WAV files, and offers audio clips with simple effects.

In spite of its name Totally free MP3 Cutter and Editor opens not only MP3, but also WAV files and shops the outcome in one of two formats. Employing drag and drop you can pull the clips straight into the clear user interface. Employing markers to pick the range to be processed and deletes unwanted content material.

Free MP3 Cutter and Editor two.six. Create 2085 Download

Free of charge MP3 Cutter and Editor fulfilled their objective simple and easy to use and bring every thing you need to have for simple cut, join and edit audio files.

Software Informations:

Developer: musetips.com 

License: Freeware / Cost: $

Size: 1.0MB

OS: Windows 2K / XP / Vista / 7 / 2003 / 2008

Date Published: October 10, 2013 

Report Broken Link or Copyright Concern

Direct Download Free of charge MP3 Cutter and Editor 2.six. Build 2085 Setup

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Business NOT as usual WorkResolutions for 2014 and beyond

Posted by Chris Farinacci, Director, Google Enterprise

It’s easy to spot the signs of a new year: a renewed gym membership, a fresh budget spreadsheet shared with your spouse, or a silent promise to spend more time with family. We all have things in our lives we want to do better (or stop doing entirely), and the start of 2014 is a great time to think about what those things might be.

To that end, we asked you — our customers, colleagues and friends — to share your work resolutions for the year ahead. Amtrak resolves to hire more veterans, since their leadership, reliability and high-tech skills make them well suited to run America’s railroad. Techstars wants to focus on always giving first. And CustomMade is going to empower great people to do great things.

The common theme was a desire to create business NOT as usual, bringing more enjoyment and fulfillment to work. And if you work the way you live, your work goals should matter just as much as your personal goals.

In case you’re wondering what my own resolutions are, well, here you go: send less email, choose face-to-face work conversations; house-train the new family dog; and pick up my guitar at least once a week (I’ll save “playing it” for next year).

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2014. Let’s help each other accomplish great things!

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Don Bradman Cricket 14 for PC XBOX and PS3

Player endorsements are a big thing in cricket games – Allan Border, Brian Lara, Shane Warne and Ricky Ponting are just some of the players who have put their names to cricket games in the past – all greats of the game and all doing their bit to sell copies of games, but no one really worried about destroying Shane Warne’s reputation with a cricket game. Don Bradman – that’s different. The Don comes with a weight of history, a legendary status in the cricketing world and a name that defines cricket perfection. Putting that on a cricket game takes a lot of confidence, and developer Big Ant Studios think they have the game to live up to the biggest of names.

Releasing in 2014 on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, Don Bradman Cricket 14 has spent nearly five years in development, funded and supported by CEO Ross Symons’ passion for the sport. Only recently to get wider distribution of the game has a deal been made with publisher HES, but Big Ant’s logo sits proudly on the front cover, unlike their previous titles.

To make the game the revolution it needs to be to match up with the name, it has a long list of firsts and total changes from the past – becoming the first cricket game with a full career mode, a built in player creator and the first with the ability to save games in progress online – finally making it viable to play a test match online in a cricket game. There is also innovation in control schemes, with batting and bowling all totally different from previous titles, all adding up to the impression that Big Ant may succeed at the finer points that previous titles have failed at.

The Sydney Cricket Ground and Bradman Oval are the two licensed stadiums in the game with a further eleven unlicensed grounds included from around the world.

While the game is still awaiting a release date, you can practice batting in the nets of theCricket Academy Beta. As well as being able to bat in the nets, you can also create players, tours, tournaments and unique match types, showing off some of the huge flexibility included in the game. Players created in the editor are able to be shared, including across platforms. The career mode will allow you to take your created player through a 20 year career, go on tours, get endorsements and earn your way into the national team. Other features included in the game are the ‘Big Ant Review System’ implementation of DRS, manual appealing, stats tracking as well as stamina, fatigue, injuries, form, etc. as factors in player performances.

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Angry Birds Go! for iPhone and iPad

Because I’m a huge fan of Angry Birds Star Wars II, I downloaded Angry Bird Go! as soon as possible. It’s a free to play app, and considering it’s yet another Rovio release, I was expecting only excellence from my aviary friends.

One of my favorite aspects of the Angry Birds franchise lies in its seamless use of iOS control mechanics. With the series moving from a physics based platform to straight up racing, there is a slight change. You won’t be sliding your finger to create a target path for your birds, as most of the navigation deals with tapping the left and right directional arrows on your device to navigate your kart. Gamers who would rather tilt their device to move their vehicles also have that option.

The only true aiming comes at the race’s starting point, as you slingshot the driver once the competition begins. As Angry Birds vets know, a slide of a finger gets the bird in shooting motion, and once that digit is released, the winged warrior is sent flying off.

During this race, my poor slingshot skills ends up giving my driver an eighth place start. It’s a disadvantage that I just couldn’t overcome, even though this racing challenge required my car to finish in the top three spots. The free power boost, located on the right side of my device, helped me cover a bit of ground, but it still wasn’t enough.

The variety of challenges also brings a fresh feel to the proceedings, and even though this app isn’t the most complicated or nuanced app in town, its steak and potatoes approach doesn’t disappoint. If you want to go head to head against another racer, just click on the Versus mode. Want to ride solo and dodge obstacles on a track? Simply enter the Time Boom section and race against the clock. Since I’m slowly turning into an annoying, kale munching health nut, burning rubber isn’t the only thing that’s on my mind. To lessen my iOS caloric intake, I entered the Fruit Splat mode, which challenges me to run through as many fruits as possible during the race.

Those watermelons sure look tasty, and unfortunately Angry Bird Stella is simply gawking at the fruits instead of smashing them. If the fruit bar, which is featured on the top of the screen, isn’t fully erased by the finish line, Stella fails her mission. Since I’m not exactly the grace under pressure type, you can probably guess the outcome.

Since it’s free to play, Angry Birds Go! contains in-app purchases. Under the freemium model this is a necessary evil, but thankfully it doesn’t completely detract from the experience. Players who decide not to plunk down any cash won’t be able to play this game ad infinitum once they run out of gems to recharge the birds’ energy bar. The worst case scenario, however, is you will have to wait several minutes for Red to enter another race. If you’ve already unlocked Stella and her energy bar is still fresh, then simply enter matches using my favorite pink bird. She’s great in a pinch, even though she’s in her own little bubble.

Upgrading your kart is also a necessity, as certain races can’t be entered if you don’t meet the requirements. To increase your various skills, you thankfully don’t have to pay out of your own pocket, as the gold you accrue during your matches pays for the improvements. Although there are a healthy amount of coins available during the race, winning the challenges is the fastest way to fill your coffers. Red isn’t in the best of mood these days, but pimping out his ride might do the trick.

Angry Birds’ continued appeal has even transcended the video game genre with the release of its animated series and its successful line of toys. By placing an Angry Birds Go! telepod over your device’s camera, you can transport that respective character into the race. This extra feature, along with a charming and refreshingly catchy soundtrack, pushes this app over the edge – in a good way. It’s that rare freemium experience which offers gamers a ton of intriguing elements and game play without forcing us to spend a dime. It’s hard not to fall in love with this app.

Angry Birds Go! is a first rate kart racer which delivers the goods. There’s a good shot that one of these challenges will keep you glued to this app, and when it comes to replay value, Rovio knows how to hold our attention. Several weeks later I’m still playing Angry Birds Star Wars II, and I know that come Christmas time, my karts will still be crossing the finish line.

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How to Pick Your Default Apps and Reset Them

One of the great benefits of using an open operating system like Android is the ability to customize it the way you want. You can change the default font to your favorite one, use a third party launcher and even install a new skin on your device without much trouble.
Android also allows you to select the application that should complete an action for you. Indeed, if there are several applications that can, let’s say, play music files, Android will ask you which one you would rather use, be it for this time or all future files. In this post, we will show you how to select these applications and how to undo this selection to reset your default apps.

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Picking Your Default Apps
If you have more than just one application on your device that supports a specific file type, you will be prompted to select which one you would like to use to open your file. This choice can be set to be permanent, in which case your device won’t ask you about it anymore, or a one-time selection. The latter simply means you’ll be asked the same question next time you open the same file type.

When several apps can open a file, Android will ask you which one you’d like to use

Let’s take a concrete example: On my Galaxy Note II, Google’s Play Music, Samsung’s Touchwiz Music and ES Music Player can play music files. When I open an audio file, my phone lets me select which application I would rather use to play the file. I have personally chosen not to set a default application, because I manually open the music player when I want to listen to my music, and not the file directly.
Nevertheless, I particularly dislike Samsung’s default Gallery application, which I have replaced with QuickPic. In order to do so, I had to set QuickPic as my default application for photos. Thankfully, the process is particularly easy, as you simply have to select Always after you select the app to open your file, and your device will remember your choice and won’t ask you again.
Similarly, I’ve selected Google Chrome to be my default browser instead of Samsung’s and I also had to tell Android to open all web pages with Chrome. For browsers, you may be prompted several times, as Android will recognize protocols — https:// etc — in addition to file types, which is why you may have to confirm your selection more than just once.

Resetting Your Selection

What happens if you try a new app and end up liking it more than your current browser? You would need to reset the default application before setting the new one as your default browser. The process is fairly simple, but somehow different from the approach you may be used to on your computer. Indeed, while most people are used to having a specific file type being associated to an application, Android associates an application with a file type. In simpler terms, this means that if you want to reset your default browser, you would need to reset the application settings for your current browser. Here’s how to do it:

• Go to your Android Settings
• Select Applications
• Select the application that is currently set to open a file type — for example, Google Chrome
• Scroll down to Launch by default and tap Clear defaults
• You’re all set. Next time you open a web page or an HTML file, you’ll be asked to select your preferred browser.

Be careful, if your app is associated with several file types, they will all be reset. This holds particularly true for media players, as they can play audio and video files.

You can reset the Launch by default settings in the Application Manager

Wrapping Up

Thanks to Android, it’s easy to use several apps and select which one to use when opening a file. This allows for more flexibility, as some applications are more complete but take longer to load. Of course, if you’d like to stick to a single application, you can easily set your device to open a specific file type using that app. In both cases, you can truly customize your system and environment according to your preference and needs.

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Validate Email and Enable Button Example For Beginners

GTU :- Tutorial 1  Program 3:

Create login application where you will have to validate EmailID(UserName). Till the username and
password is not validated , login button should remain disabled.


Download Login Button Disable Application

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Top 7 Reasons and Benefits Of Rooting Android Device

 

Benefits Of Rooting Android Device

Android comes up with many features in itself, but sometime we see the company made specification are not good to support a mobile phone. We need to add some modification from our side to make the phone faster and smarter.

What is rooting of android device?

 

Rooting means gaining root access of your mobile phone. When you gain root access you can modify the device’s software to maximum level. You need to hack the voids of the warranty, and there’s a probability that you can kill your phone forever.
Somehow, it is sometimes recommended to root your android device to make it better. We are not pushing you people to root your android phone, but if you are thinking to root your phone do your android.

Reasons & Advantages Of Rooting Android

1. Gain More Memory: If the internal memory of your android is low, you should root your android phone. You can buy a new memory card and make that memory as your internal memory. That will speed up your phone and make the lag low.
2. Why pay, If you get it for free: You can get all the paid applications, games and much more to your device for free. Why shall you pay for thing you can get it for free.
3. Why miss the updates: Mostly android phone you buy supports foremost 1 upcoming updates. So you are surely missing the next updates. If you root your phone you will receive all the upcoming updates.
4. Improved performance: You can easily improve your battery life and speed of phone. Rooting helps you to improve all the aspects of the phone to the foremost performance.
5. Remove all the bloat ware: By rooting your android you can remove unnecessary application which eats up your phone memory. You can remove inbuilt application and make your phone much more personal.
6. Much More Safety: In the play store you have two paid android antivirus application, rooting makes your phone safer. You can use many antivirus that are provided by third party helping you to know more about your device safety.
7. Make Backups: Before rooting your android make sure you make good back up so, if you mess up and brick up your phone you have chance to get back to normal and have access to your old important data.

Final Verdict On Benefits Of Rooting Android

Rooting is necessary for those people who can’t afford a new android phone for sometimes. It is recommended to those people also you are likely not happy from the performance of their device. There are always risk of getting Bricked.
Bricked is a situation in the phone that you cannot go back to normal till you have any expert advice. You can loose your phone’s warranty. If you are thinking to Root your device, our advice do it under expert advice and proper guild.
If you find these benefits of rooting android helpful, please share this post on your social networks.

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WYD fast leveling guide and quests help

The first and main part – choose your class and careful study its skills. You won’t receive enough "skill points" and "skill mastery points" to learn all of them so you must decide which are appropriate for your race. Any mistake here will make your efforts in vain.

For this tutorial I’ll use the hunter.

WYD Leveling – part 1

The first quest – “Training Camp” is good enough to level up you to 40 level very fast. You can find full quest description here - http://wyd.gamenetworks.com/intro/quest_256.asp or in your quest window in game. There is a strong monster before every gate and near the Trainers. Kill the monster, talk with the trainer and you will get the key for the next part. The last monster is Orc Warrior. Stay there and kill the spawning monster until you reach level 35. You will get multiple quest items and then you will receive many rewards. You can get you reward only if you are under or 40 level so be careful not to miss it.

At level 40 go to the next quest – Spirit Guardian. Level up there till level 115. At the beginning fight mobs for the quest item. Auto fight can be very useful, just leave your character to collect quest items and do something else. When you are strong enough - go for the quest experience. Leveling up with this quest is pretty fast. The mobs give a lot of experience and the quest award items give +7500 experience – this would be something like one quarter for your character at this time.

At level 40 you can start one more quest – Orc Castle. It is not hard and very useful – the reward is a magic pill that gives you 9 skill points.
The monsters around the Orc Castle drop more Grave Keeper’s Candle – the quest items for Spirit Garden.

Orc Castle Quest – you must fight near the gates for the keys. After receiving the key – enter the Castle gate. I receive pretty good drop there. Orc Guard drops Orc Castle Final S.G Key. ChiefOrc drops Orc Castle Final E.G Key. Orc Lord drops the pill.

This is the end of part 1.

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Ten things killing and saving the video game industry

Just a very quick post for the moment. Two excellent articles on IGN on Ten trends that are destroying video games and Ten trends that are saving video games are well worth reading.

A lot of what they say I highly agree with. I think 2009 is going to be an interesting year. During Q4 of last year, despite the global depression, the video game industry as a whole grew. However, I think this year could be the crunch year. The economic crisis is going to force causal gamers to either pick more carefully to make their purchases more £/hour effective or quit video games and sell the Wii on Ebay. As a result, I can see shovelware to start to decrease. With any luck, because of the Wii Motion Plus, developers will be reinspired to create decent innovative Wii games all over again.

Anyway, Ill be posting more about my thoughts for the future of the industry soon, but I strongly reccommend reading the above articles.

Update, fixed link to things that are saving video games. Sorry!

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Wow Make Something Legal And People Do More Of It

Interesting article in the February 4, 2014 Philadelphia Inquirer:

"Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana," said co-author Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia. "If this trend continues, in five or six years non-alcohol drugs will overtake alcohol to become the most common substance involved in deaths related to impaired driving."

The research team drew its conclusions from crash statistics from six states that routinely perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car wrecks -- California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and West Virginia. The statistics included more than 23,500 drivers who died within one hour of a crash between 1999 and 2010.

Alcohol contributed to about the same percentage of traffic fatalities throughout the decade, about 40 percent, Li said.

But drugs played an increasingly prevalent role in fatal crashes, the researchers found. Drugged driving accounted for more than 28 percent of traffic deaths in 2010, up from more than 16 percent in 1999.

Marijuana proved to be the main drug involved in the increase, contributing to 12 percent of 2010 crashes compared with 4 percent in 1999.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/health/topics/HealthDay684515_20140204_Fatal_Car_Crashes_Involving_Pot_Use_Have_Tripled_in_U_S___Study_Finds.html#u0YOMBvQ1md5bt4r.99

The response of the marijuana apologists in the comments on an article summarizing this was that of course the number of fatal car crashes have increased, because more people are smoking pot.  I guess that they missed the point of the article: more marijuana users are driving under the influence, and while alcohol continues to be a likely factor in 40% of the fatal accidents, marijuana has tripled, up to 12%.  More importantly, the article goes on to point out that alcohol and marijuana combined are far more dangerous than either alone.  (Why would someone combine alcohol and pot?  One intoxicant isnt enough?)

How wonderful: we can take a situation that is bad with one legal intoxicant, and add another!

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DPReview has a new look … and new WYSIWYG editors … here’s how to edit and post with no pain …

The number of complaints that the new editors on DPReview’s forums are taking ten or even 100 times as long to format are pretty stunning. Each editor has its quirks, and this is yet another version 1 editor from a team that has shown a lack of grasp of GUI design fundamentals, so what exactly do you expect?

I actually find it quite easy to navigate the new editors … perhaps because I am used to lots of bad web-based editors around the web :-)

The key is to use very few techniques and to use them consistently. That way, you always know what you are going to get. For example, you have to remember that paragraphs in a typical WYSIWYG editor are marked by the carriage return. So if you mean to select the paragraph, but you don’t see the last line’s selection extend to the end of the windows, then you have failed to grab the paragraph marker, which means that you will grab only text and not formatting.

For example, if you want to grab text only, then this is what you should see …

Hitting “delete” there will leave you in the same paragraph with a change bar.

But if you had selected one more line and then backed it off with the left ctrl and left arrow key until you saw this …

Well, now you have selected fhe entire paragraph, and you can delete the whole thing with the delete key …

Another way to select the whole paragraph is to click at the beginning of the paragraph and the hold down shift and click before the first character of the next paragraph. Unlike the better editors, it is not enough to just move the mouse past the paragraph and click there with shift held down. You must go to the beginning of the next line. At least this makes it easy to grab just text, so that’s probably why it works that way.

The bottom line is that navigation is actually pretty quick in this editor, so long as you don’t stray too far from the fundamentals. I’ve put together a short video tutorial here for those who want to see external image embedding and some advanced techniques for cutting posts apart and responding to them. These are important tools in the forum warrior’s battle chest :-)

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HS50EXR and F900EXR – Review Part 12 – Bad light ISO Ladder Revisited and Film Mode Ladder

I have no idea what happened with that first ISO ladder … but I may be forced to remove it because it is completely misleading. The HS50 is performing remarkably well now, as you are about to see.

So the setup from the good light ISO ladder is retained but the bulb is replaced. Instead of a 42 watt Fluorescent daylight balanced bulb, I have a 7 watt warm white LED bulb. A totally different experience. The 100iso exposure is 2 seconds, so this is definitely low light. I set auto white balance at the beginning, so there is no exposure or color correction here. Just a tiny equalization of sharpness is all (and it must always be done to the M sized image, clearly indicating that Fuji have changed the AA filter’s bias to try to improve L sized images, a very good idea for competitive purposes in the market.)

Same drill otherwise, and same bill too

Rather than show you all the images again, I just cropped the middle fairly large and juxtapose them. I shot 100iso, 1600iso and 3200iso. The progression is always the same, but the truly interesting points are base ISO to show the very best possible image, and 1600 and 3200 ISOs to show the low light social images that are possible.

I continued shooting in M mode at the end and simply shot Velvia, Astia, B&W and Sepia at 3200 ISO. The settings for my new norm, which is 0,0,0,-2 … i.e. factory defaults with lowest noise reduction.

Please remember to click through to see the crops at full size (730px each across, so 1460 across total.)

What you will see:

• L is crushed, as always in bad light. It sometimes puts up a brave front in bright light at base ISO, but here M size is essentially identical. At 1700 and 3200 the difference is obvious and an easy win for M size. As I have said ad nauseum :-)
• You are better off shooting Velvia M size at high ISO than Provia L size, which is a surprise to me.
• Astia looks really nice when there is no excessive contrast in the light.
• The HS50 is pretty excellent even at these high ISOs. These images are equivalent to 33” prints!

Nice cam, beautiful base ISO images, even in crappy light.

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HS50EXR and F900EXR – Review Part 7 – RAW hack is an EPIC FAIL

So I hacked the RAW to see if the hawk a mile away in a tree image from part 6 could be improved upon. Hacking the RAW is trivial with a tool like ExifTool GUI … you click on the image, then click on “Workspace” and finally in the field at the bottom of the right hand pane, you change the name of the camera. You end up with this:

Lightroom is perfectly fooled by this one change, so the RAW file is suddenly importable. And import it I did.

But I noticed right away that the colors were wonky. The hack worked last year on the F770EXR because the camera whose name I used – the F550EXR – has basically the same sensor, despite the marketing hyperbole about a new and improved sensor. But the F800EXR sensor is of that same generation while the F900EXR and HS50EXR have the new sensor with phase detect pixels on them. And it appears that the color matrix is really different. The old demosaic algorithm has no ability to deal with this matrix. Case in point:

Note also the wonky right edge, as the HS50 lens has distortions that could not possibly match that in the F800EXR. So all in all an EPIC FAIL!

Help me Obiwan Adobe, you’re my only hope

Yes, that nerdy thought just came to me out of the blue.

Of course, a black and white image based on this set of colors is going to be equally weird. Almost infrared-like, it turns out.

Still, it was fun to try.

Adobe said on their forums today that the F900EXR and HS50EXR support was coming out really soon, so I am holding out hope that I can get Lightroom 4.5 beta before I have to give the camera back. We will revisit this image should that come to pass :-)

From the New York RAW kitchen. No RAW for you!

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HS50EXR and F900EXR – Review Part 4 – Processed 3200 ISO output at normal print and web sizes …

This is a follow on to Part 3, ISO ladder. I reused those files for this post.

First off, let’s remember that the 1/2” sensor is not typically a high ISO sensor. But since people enjoy the reach on these cameras, and since most people would probably prefer to own one compact rather than several, it makes sense to examine how these cameras look in social situations at normal print and web sizes.

Part 3 seems to have excited a lot of debate and the HS50 is in a real struggle to remain relevant through these tests at higher ISOs, but ultimately it is the compacts that are the more likely social cameras. So let’s look at what happens when you actually process the output in Lightroom at 3200 ISO. I choose 3200, by the way, because we need decent shutter speeds to capture people successfully. No matter what you want them to do, people shift and fidget all the time and you cannot capture them at low shutter speeds. 3200 is the maximum at which these do not look awful … 6400 is simply ugly. 1600 is just a little low, although if you have a fair amount of light, please try dropping ISO.

The F900EXR is the newest of the compacts, so let’s see that one first.

The F770EXR is the camera I own, and the difference in the older JPEG engine is that there is a tint that I find quite hard to remove in this sort of orange colored light. I don’t mind the warmer look, but some people will not be impressed. The detail, though, is surprisingly good. People will render quite adequately if you can get them near a light. In shadow, things will not be pretty, but with tiny sensors that’s just a given. It is the reason why the trend today is towards fast lenses and large sensors.

Remember that you can click on these to see the 1000px rendering, which is as large as anyone ever posts on Facebook. It also shows what a 5x7 print might look light.

In part 3, the F200EXR came off really poorly at high ISO. The saturation and white balance was way off and there was a huge amount of noise. Yet, when you tweak things in Lightroom, you find that the detail where there is any light at all is actually quite usable. The bill, for example, looks excellent here. Remember that this is the 1/1.7” sensor and is quite a bit larger than the 1/2” sensor in the compacts and the HS.

Now, the HS50 is not a social camera in any real sense, but if you choose to shoot it, you will not want to use default settings as I did for the ISO ladder. I will be testing various JPEG settings and I will try to get RAW processing working to really suss out the HS50’s strengths. But for now, I can say that this file is not adequate … I would never display it even as a snapshot.

And of course I will close with the G5. This camera is a joy to use, but I would not tend to carry it in social situations. For that, I generally carry the GX1 (also an excellent 16mp sensor) and either a 2.8 Sigma or a 1.8 Olympus lens, allowing me to shoot several stops lower with higher shutter speeds.  But for comparison, this is how it shoots 3200 ISO on the 14-140 kit lens.

So for shooting in social situations where you have at least some light, these tiny sensors do an adequate job for snap shots. The detail is decent and the new JPEG engines maintain excellent saturation. I always recommend that you shoot to get a good capture and tweak in Lightroom, but of course we saw in the ISO ladder that the newer JPEG engines don’t need that much work. Once downsized for web or small print, a lot of the noise vanishes.

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