ASSEN – The Grand Prix of Assen will be a special occasion for Romano Fenati. On Saturday, the Dutch circuit, the pilot of the Sky Team Racing VR46 crosses the finish line of the 60 Grands Prix in his career played in the World Championship. Since his debut in Qatar in 2012, Fenati has established itself as the most successful Italian rider of the Moto3 class with 6 wins (5 by the Sky Team Racing VR46) and six other podium finishes. In career, the pilot Ascoli scored so far 107 laps in the lead during the race, 460 points and five fastest laps, including the official record achieved in 2014 right on the TT Circuit Assen in 1’42 “914. After ‘ eighth-place finish in Catalonia (sixth consecutive race in points), the number 5 is ready to return to fight with the front group. THAT CHALLENGE FOR Migno Even for Andrea Migno, the TT Circuit in Assen is a major challenge. After the unfortunate setback in the race in Montmelo, caused by a contact with Karel Hanika, Holland Migno continue its path of growth on a track known to him. In 2011, in fact, the rider from Romagna finished 10th in the second race of the Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup, on a KTM brand that joins the European Championship in the main round, realizing a great comeback from the twenty-first on the grid.
I’m definitely seeing some F30 BMW 3-Series mixed in with Alfa 4C, Maserati and maybe even a little Dodge Viper. In short, I like it!
Check back soon for more official details. What do you think so far?
Alfa Romeo says the car was developed by their own Skunkworks program and uses a brand new rear-wheel drive platform with available all-wheel drive. They say it boasts 50/50 weight distribution and a range of engines.
But the only one they have details on at the moment is the top shelf Giulia Quadrifoglio version, which is an all-aluminum 510 HP 3.0-liter twin turbo V6 tuned by Ferrari engineers. It can propel the sedan from zero to 60 mph in just 3.9 seconds.
Other goodies include electronically-controlled adaptive dampers, torque vectoring, active aerodynamics and lightweight materials throughout. No word yet on gearboxes, release date or pricing.
As always, preparation for 2014′s Festival began not long after the Rolling Stones left site in June the year before. Infrastructure’s ambitious plans included more than 20 new long drop sites and a much needed new million litre on site water reservoir, as well as a trial of the revolutionary new compost toilets provided for most crew areas for the first time. Roads were improved, bridges strengthened and work continued on the Pilton village social housing project, with over 20 houses completed by May.
Hundreds of protesters on a Hawaii mountain road erupted in cheers Wednesday after construction crews turned around and retreated from the site for what would be one of the world’s largest telescopes.
The billion-dollar project has drawn intense opposition from Native Hawaiians who say the 18-story observatory on the Big Island’s Mauna Kea would desecrate land they consider sacred.
Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope has been stalled for months after a large group blocked access to the mountaintop in April, a demonstration that led to 31 arrests.
Protesters said they were ready to adopt similar tactics and go to jail if necessary to make their point Wednesday.
Hawaii County police arrested one man, while state Department of Land and Natural Resources police arrested 11 others, officials said.
Several hundred gathered more than 9,000 feet up Mauna Kea, blocking workers who intended to install fencing around the construction site near the summit. The protesters blocked the road, then let workers pass, and different groups repeated the pattern several times at higher points on the mountain.
McCartney said crews will work to clear the roadway on Thursday and that construction was put on hold.
A telescope spokeswoman, Caroline Witherspoon, confirmed that construction workers had turned away.
“For the safety of our team, we made the decision to bring them off the mountain and we are planning to resume when the issue is resolved,” the chair of the TMT International Observatory Board, Henry Yang, said in a statement.
Jodi Leong, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said she didn’t have details on the 11 arrests.
Hawaii County police made the first arrest, Assistant Chief Henry Tavares said. A 44-year-old man was arrested and charged with obstructing, a misdemeanour, and released after posting $250 bail, police said.
For the protesters, many of whom had been camping near the visitor centre despite 30-degree nights, it was a victory.
“For today at least, we did really good at keeping our lines strong until arrest,” said protester Kuuipo Freitas.
Astronomers are interested in the site because its summit is nearly 14,000 feet high, well above the clouds and able to provide a clear view of the sky 300 days a year. There’s also very little air and light pollution.
Thirteen other large telescopes occupy Mauna Kea.
Ige has responded to the protests, saying Hawaii must do a better job of caring for the mountain but that construction crews have the right to proceed.
“The state and Hawaii County are working together to uphold the law and ensure safety on roadways and on Mauna Kea, while allowing the people their right to peacefully and lawfully protest,” the governor’s office said in a statement late Tuesday.
Protesters Wednesday ranged from toddlers to the elderly. Stafford said they were emotional but peaceful. “People were yelling, but no one got violent though,” he said.
The non-profit company Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory LLC intends to build and operate the $1.4 billion telescope.
Its partners include India, China, Canada, Japan and the Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corp., formed by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology.
The partners, along with University of Hawaii scientists, would receive a share of observing time.
But protesters vow to remain vigilant.
The former basketball player is one of the most successful business leaders in America and a great get for Square’s board. He is not only an NBA Hall of Fame legend but also a formidable business leader, running the multi-billion-dollar Magic Johnson Enterprises, as well as the Magic Johnson Foundation – a well-recognized philanthropic organization for its work with urban communities.
“I am ready to get to work as a member of Square’s Board of Directors so that any business, in any community, can compete and win,” said Johnson in a Square company release.
Johnson is also a strong advocate of HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention through his foundation, a mission he picked up after announcing he had been diagnosed with HIV in 1991.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Johnson’s appointment is expected to help Square reach out to a more diverse audience that goes beyond Silicon Valley and New York and into more urban and underserved small business areas.
The month-long Muslim holiday of Ramadan runs from this evening, June 17th, and ends in the evening of July 17th, and Google has launched a website that takes advantage of the company’s vast offerings to provide a helpful dashboard through which to get the most out of the month.
The website, called My Ramadan Companion, includes the sunset and sunrise times in your area each day, traffic information, listings for the nearest mosque or charity Iftar, Ramdan recipes, related YouTube videos, and a bunch more.
Google will also use Now on mobile to present this information in cards when it feels right, taking into account your location and the time of day. So you may, for example, wake up in the morning to a card showing the Ramadan hours of your favorite shops and restaurants. Now may also recommend third-party apps that it thinks you may enjoy, like ones that help you wake up for Suhur or create greeting cards to share with your family. There’s a whole collection of essential Ramadan 2015 apps on the Play Store, too.
After adding Italian and Chinese support a couple of months ago, Microsoft is now bringing French and German to its Skype Translator app. That brings the total number of languages to six, with English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, and Spanish all supported, nearly 30 percent of the world’s native speakers. Skype Translator works by using a modified version of the Skype Windows 8 app to translate spoken words into text or audio.
While Skype Translator is primarily used for real-time translation between two people who speak and listen to the results, Microsoft is now turning its attention to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Microsoft researcher Ted Hart has helped the company modify Skype Translator so it allows deaf people to experience a Skype call for the first time. Microsoft recently opened up Skype Translator for anyone to try, and with French and German support there’s now an even bigger audience for its translation magic. Microsoft’s Skype Translator app is only available on Windows right now, and you’ll need a Windows 8 or Windows 10 PC to download the app from the Windows Store.
We haven’t connected cutting edge TV tech to golf much since 3D met the Masters, but Fox is promising a live streaming virtual reality setup this weekend during the US Open tournament. It’s working with NextVR — the same company that brought a Malibu beach sunrise streaming live in 180-degree VR to my house in Michigan — so that viewers can pop into any of five camera rigs around the course and peek around like they were really there. According to Fox, this is believed to be the “first live multi-camera VR broadcast experience in history.” This is still in the demo phase so the easiest way to watch is to actually be at the event in one of the properly equipped hospitality areas, or at a Fox Sports location in New York, Vancouver or LA. Even if you can’t catch the live feed, NextVR will have the video ready for its portal that is coming to the Oculus Rift and Gear VR headsets.
Other than virtual reality, Fox will also make use of flying drone cams to cover the event, cameras around the tee box, and microphones embedded in the bottom of every hole around the course. There’s a camera-equipped RC car to provide ground level shots, as well as high frame rate cameras and 4K cameras to provide a better look at each swing.
Having experienced it myself, the virtual reality stream in 3D and high-res video should provide a feeling of being at the course like no other broadcast can. We’re still not to the point where this kind of thing is widely available, but if you need a reason other than gaming to keep an eye on what the likes of Oculus, Samsung, Google and Valve are working on, events like sports are definitely a good one.
For years, developers have had to build specific workarounds for Internet Explorer to make their websites work properly in the browser. Microsoft’s browsers were infamous for breaking code that worked everywhere else.
Now, the company is re-emphasising that Web developers shouldn’t be specifically targeting the Edge browser in their code, saying that it identifies itself as a Webkit browser and should be thought of as such.
The company goes as far as saying that “any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing,” further cementing the angle that developers shouldn’t be writing Edge-specific code or workarounds.
Edge will also allow for certain cases where what Web developers do in practice doesn’t actually match the standard. One example Microsoft provides is the prevalent use of malformed “meta refresh” tags that allow a page to redirect the user to another page.
Instead of simply ignoring such malformed tags, like Internet Explorer would have in the past, Edge handles the code the correct way.
Microsoft says that the new browser is more permissive of such differences between the standard and code, particularly as many of these differences are widespread practices.
Another change adopts the Webkit practice of ignoring cross-site headers in order to allow custom fonts to load from content distribution networks, despite what the standard actually defines.
The new Microsoft shines through in this blog post — instead of strictly sticking to its own standards and ideas about the way the Web should be rendered, the company is finally willing to compromise and accept the reality of developing for the Web.
As a Web developer myself, the changes in Edge are exciting. I’m hopeful that the future of building for the Web means no more strange hacks for users of Microsoft browsers and much smoother development with Edge.
Instead of grabbing the remote or poking at your smartphone, the BBC thinks the future of TV navigation could lie in mind control. For its latest experiment, the broadcaster is testing a brainwave reading headset developed by This Place that lets you launch iPlayer and choose programmes with your thoughts.
The device uses two sensors, one on your forehead and one on your ear, to interpret electrical activity as “concentration” or “meditation.” Depending on your preference, focusing your mind will trigger a contextual command, such as launching the app or selecting from one of five programmes on a scrolling carousel. Once the app lands on your chosen TV show, you simply have to “think” until a pink volume bar fills on the left-hand side of the screen. The functionality is basic, but the BBC hopes it can be adapted to assist viewers with disabilities.
For now it’s just a proof of concept, but maybe in the future we’ll all be using brainwaves to tune into BBC Two.
In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil with that of a deity who is, in either absolute or relative terms, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. An argument from evil attempts to show that the co-existence of evil and such a deity is unlikely or impossible if placed in absolute terms.
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
One greater good that has been proposed is that of free will, famously argued for by Alvin Plantinga in his free will defense. The first part of this defense accounts for moral evil as the result of free human action. The second part of this defense argues for the logical possibility of “a mighty nonhuman spirit” such as Satan who is responsible for so-called “natural evils”, including earthquakes, tidal waves, and virulent diseases. Some philosophers agree that Plantinga successfully solves the logical problem of evil, by showing that God and evil are logically compatible though others explicitly dissent. The second part of Plantinga’s defense, though, concedes God’s omnipotence by claiming the possibility of “a mighty nonhuman spirit” capable of causing evil in spite of God’s desire for evil not to exist (a necessary consequence of His benevolence), effectively “overpowering” God.
Canon 5DS and 5DSR – Which one is better?
It’d be easy to dismiss the new Canon 5DS and 5DS R as 5D Mark III DSLRs with 50 megapixel sensors, but that’s exactly what they are.
But there are some minor, and yet fundamental, differences that separate the three versions of the 5D, to position each model for different photographers. I’ve had the opportunity to handle pre-production units of the two new models to compare with my 5D Markk III to see how well they perform. The two new models are virtually identical in external appearance to the 5D Mk III — it’s part of Canon’s strategy to use economies of scale to bring down production cost. Other than the nameplate, the only visible difference is the slightly coarser texture of the mode dial.
The key difference lies in the heart of the camera: a brand new 50-megapixel CMOS Canon sensor powers the 5DS and 5DS R. After lagging for the past few years behind Nikon and Sony in the resolution war, Canon has fired a powerful salvo (no pun intended) as a response in the form of the ultra-high resolution sensor, doubling the resolution of the 5D Mk III. It’s uncharacteristic of Canon, which has always been conservative in the resolution department.
With the unparalleled resolving power, the 5DS and R-variant deliver files measuring 8688×5792 pixels, compared to the 5760×3840 pixels of the Mk III. The level of detail is staggering, to say the least, and retouching fine details in Photoshop takes on a whole new level when you can pixel-peep that much. While my Macbook Pro (2.7 GHz Core i7 with 16GB RAM) breezes through the files from my 5D Mk III, I had to wait for the machine to catch up when applying some filters to the 5DS and 5DS R. A powerful editing machine is definitely a pre-requisite when working with files from the new Canon duo.
If the new 5DS and 5DS R are the Mk III with 50MP sensors tacked on, it would really be groovy – but they are not. In creating these two resolution monsters, Canon had cleverly positioned each of these cameras in such a way that you can have some — but not all — of the features in a camera.
While the 5D Mk III is the very capable all-rounder camera popular with photographers and videographers alike, the newer cousins are targeted specifically at a niche – photographers who require high-resolution images at the expense of low light performance. The 5DS and 5DS R packs 50MP of resolution, but sacrifices the maximum ISO speed to just ISO 6400 (although an “extended ISO” of 12,800 is available).
Speculation has been rife that the high pixel count probably affected the signal to noise ratio, which in turn restricted the maximum ISO speed. And conspiracy theorists believe Canon crippled the maximum ISO speeds of the two new models to avoid cannibalization of the 5D Mk III. Without any official explanation from Canon, it’s anybody’s guess.
For videographers, the three versions of the 5D series are merely Hobson’s choice. Even though the new brethren feature a new Movie Servo AF function that allows for continuous autofocus function in video shooting, they do not allow for uncompressed HDMI output, and Canon has done away with the headphone jack in favour of freeing up space for a USB 3 port. Add the limited maximum ISO speed to the equation, and you can see why the 5D Mk III remains the best choice for videographers.
Motoring enthusiasts know that “R” suffix is typically used to denote the meanest and most powerful version of a motor vehicle, such as the Honda Civic Type R or Kawasaki Ninja H2R. In this case, Canon has chosen the R suffix for the 5DS that has its anti-aliasing (AA) filter disabled.
So what is the function of the AA filter? A simple explanation is that the AA filter helps reduce moiré pattern artifacts, which appears as circular swirls in the image when the natural grid pattern in the subject matter overlaps with the grid pattern of the sensors. By implementing an AA filter in front of the sensor, the output is slightly softened to reduce the chances of moiré pattern affecting the image.
You can see moire patterns and false patterns when photographing certain fabrics, or when you point your camera at a computer or television screen.
In the quest for ever sharper images, manufacturers have been experimenting with weaker AA filters or doing away with it totally. In this case, Canon has opted to cancel out the AA filter effect for a good reason – economies of scale. Designing a sensor without any AA filter requires a totally new design of the sensor, AF mechanism and mirror box assembly. By negating the AA filter effect in the 5DS R, it allows the camera to share the exact same components as the 5DS for cost savings, which explains why the “R” variant does not cost prohibitively more.
The Canon 5D Mk III has been my daily go-to camera for my shoots, so I’m definitely excited to see how the new cameras stack up against my workhorse with twice the resolution.
With 50MP of resolution on tap, the sensor delivers details and sharpness in truckloads. My Photoshop became the equivalent of Google Earth — keep zooming into the image and you’d discover details you never imagine existed. You see television detectives screaming “enhance!” to get their lab technicians to reveal the vehicle registration number from surveillance footages? That’s exactly how I felt as I kept zooming in to unravel more details from the 5DS images, except I didn’t have a beautiful blond lab tech working the computer.
For this review, there’s little point in prose since the key difference lies in the image quality, so I shall let the images do the talking. I’ve uploaded the high-resolution images to this Flickr set so you readers can appreciate the image quality for yourselves.
As the manufacturers keep pushing up the sensor resolutions, they have discovered a key barrier in achieving sharper images – vibrations. With every jump in pixel count, it becomes more critical to dampen vibrations to optimize the resolution increment. Just like how longer focal lengths exaggerate the effects of camera movements, higher resolutions require more refined techniques and technology to prevent vibration from negating the resolution gain.
Canon has redesigned the mirror mechanism of the 5DS and 5DS R to reduce the amount of vibration, using motors to swing the reflex mirror instead of springs. My preliminary findings suggest that slow shutter speeds (1/25th sec and below) require the mirror delay function to be turned on to reduce the effects of any vibration, even when a tripod is used. Users can choose a timed delay of 1/8th second to 2 seconds, between the time the shutter button is depressed to the moment the shutter fires, to reduce any mirror-induced vibration. Unfortunately, neither camera allow for electronic first curtain shutter, which would have even further reduced vibration from the shutter action.
In terms of dynamic range, Canon has indicated that the new cameras deliver similar performance to the 5D Mk III. No surprises there then, although some photographers would have preferred Canon to catch up with Sony and Nikon in terms of dynamic range performance. Would increasing both resolution and dynamic range simultaneously be an engineering challenge? I’m not sure, but I’m not unsatisfied with the 5D Mk III’s dynamic range per se.
Based on my limited testing, the 5DS R barely edges out the 5DS in terms of sharpness. You’d have to be peeping at the pixel level to discern any increment in sharpness from the R model, and those differences only occur in super-micro details such as fur. For Canon to produce the 5DS R variant, I’m sure there are discernable advantages in certain scenarios. But given the 5DS images are already sharp enough to cut one’s eyeballs with the details rendered, I’m hard pressed to spot the additional details rendered by the 5DS R.
How about moiré patterning? Moiré is a strange creature like the Loch Ness monster – you won’t find it if you go specifically looking for it. I’ve tried inducing moiré with shots of some fabric, but the 5DS R managed the shot perfectly. Moiré pattern artifacts occur when the frequency of the fabric matches with the sensor pixel, and some speculate the high pixel count of the 5DS R reduces the chance of subjects having the same high frequency to cause moiré. But I’m sure Canon has discovered it is possible to induce moiré with the 5DS R under certain situations, or it wouldn’t have produced another version with AA filter enabled.
In summary, the 5D series is a lot like Goldilocks and the three bears. There isn’t a best porridge or best bed, but rather the most appropriate one to suit your needs. If you are a videographer, the 5D Mk III remains the most suitable choice, with its uncompressed HDMI output and microphone jack, which the newer models lack.
For general photography, I prefer the 5D Mk III as well. With its lower resolution, it writes faster to CF card (although the two new models support UHS-I standards for much faster SD card writing) and the smaller files are easier to handle in post-processing. It also delivers two more stops in terms of maximum ISO speed, which can come in handy in darker situations.
But for photographers who demand nothing but the highest resolution, you will love the newer 5DS and 5DS R. Landscape, bridal and studio photography are just some applications which I can see where the new models will shine with their 50-megapixel sensor. Based on the already competent 5D Mk III body, what you have is an amazing megapixel machine designed to delight every pixel peeper out there. The new 5DS and 5DS R shine brilliantly in a slow and deliberate photography workflow for which lighting level is not a concern.