Foreign Perspectives

Since online photos are generally only around, say, 300 pixels by 200 ie 60,000 pixels, you might think that it doesn’t really matter what camera you choose for taking photos intended exclusively for online use.

In theory, that might be correct but in reality it’s a theory that doesn’t hold much water.

First off, if you take photos of fast-moving objects such as in a car race you’ll soon find that a compact digital is very hard to use because there’s quite a delay between pressing the button and the photo actually being taken. Try the same thing with a digital SLR and you’ll find that the photo is taken almost instantly. The difference is very noticeable and makes taking images of cars in races and similar very easy vs virtually impossible.

The larger image size lets you crop out parts of the image without reducing the quality as displayed or printed. To be fair, the increasing resolution of even quite cheap cameras these days sometimes overtakes that of low end SLRs so this point is less of an issue than it was even last year and probably by next year both types of camera will have similar resolution.

There’s also the issue of accessories that are available for SLRs which you simply can’t get for compact cameras. The single thing that’ll make the most noticeable difference to your photos is probably the ability to use bounce flash on an SLR which eliminates red-eye but goes way beyond that.

Finally, even if the compact camera has the same resolution as the SLR, the larger lens on the SLR makes a considerable difference. So much so, that it’s quite noticeable even in images shrunk down for the Internet. Consider the two images here. The larger flash has obviously made quite a difference and the flat feel of the photo taken with the compact is replaced with a more 3D quality. However, look at the detail in the two photos: the door on the SLR photo is much clearer.

What about the cost though? Well, these days the increasing sophistication of the compacts is taking their price upwards whilst the SLRs are generally getting cheaper. Net effect is that, at the moment, you’re looking at paying around 50% more for an SLR vs a good compact.

The biggest plus point of the compacts is that they are small and therefore, in some cases, you may find that it’s much more practical for you to take photos on a regular basis with one as you’ll clearly not be carrying around an SLR everywhere.

Since we’re well into the 21st century, we should have at least some of the things that the fabled Popular Mechanics article promised us for the 21st century way back in 1950, shouldn’t we?

We have some, it’s true although in many cases they didn’t turn out to be as popular as you would have expected. The talking cars for instance have been and gone and, after several abortive starts, we have workable video phones now. However, in many respects we’ve gone back to basics as all the predicted plastic furniture and furnishings have largely been rejected in favour of natural products. Both the hovercraft and supersonic flight have both been consigned to history for the moment and those flying cars never came to pass, or at least not yet.

What about the predictions of the novels? Well, perhaps the most famous of those is 1984. We didn’t get the surveillance that was predicted by 1984 but we sure do now and all we’re missing is the totalitarian regime. Going back further to Brave New World from 1932 and we’re getting there on the designer baby front although the mood enhancing drugs have some way to go before they’d be accepted on a widespread basis by society.

Many predictions involved the use of automation would mean that adults would work only a few hours each week. Although you might laugh at that it actually has happened in the sense that many of the routine jobs of the 1930s and before are now automated: who would expect a person to copy documents by hand these days when there are photocopiers around? The problem is, of course, that we’ve started doing different jobs and ones that, so far, generally can’t be automated.

Some of the predictions seem silly to us now such as that from Julius Sextus Frontinus in AD10 that everything had already been invented and he saw no scope for further developments. In many ways he was right because the Roman Empire didn’t invent anything of consequence after that and it was over 1000 years before developments started moving beyond Roman hi-tech.

Of course we’re just on the leading edge of the 21st century and there’s much more to come. One thing that seems likely to cause a considerable impact on life in the future is the seemingly relentless increase in life expectancy. To put the figures into some context consider that in 1911 there were only 100 people over 100 years old whereas there are over 9,000 over 100 today. In fact the increase in lifespan is so significant that the pensions industry has been told to drop any assumptions they may have made about there being an upper limit on lifespan which is nice news if you’re planning on living forever but don’t forget that you’ll not be able to stop working at 65 and put your feet up!

I run a series of interlinked holiday accommodation listings sites which started as something of a sideline for me but which is slowly becoming a significant income generator for me.

Now, in the early days it was quite clearly a straight listing service. I typed up the entries as they came in and they were displayed on the site as a great big list. Nice and simple if somewhat time-consuming.

As it grew, I figured that a database was the way to go and in the second year that went live. By then the original 20 properties had grown to over 100. Mark 1 of that simply replicated the original hand-produced site and a version of that is still around to this day because the hand-produced format is much more effective in SEO terms than a written for database site is for various reasons.

With the dramatic reduction in the work required from me to actually add the information, I broadened the amount and variety of information that the property owners could add. That increased so much that I figured after a while that I should write a new-generation version of the original site to run alongside the original version but targeted at a different market. The increase in information meant that properties now had a little website each with several pages on it.

Interestingly though, I’ve recently come across a free accommodation property site that has come at the problem from the opposite direction. What they do is get the property owners to add a whole lot of information and they produce a little website for them which gets listed by them.

What’s clear is that we’ll both likely meet in the middle several years down the line as I’m in the process of souping up the mini website that my listing service generates and already some people are quoting that address as “their” website address which presumably will become more common as time goes on. In fact, it’ll become more and more of a website generation facility over the months to come as that’s my main area for development this year.

The question next year though will be: how do I promote it to the owners? The listing service aspect will clearly remain but there’ll also be the aspect of building almost custom websites for the owners (surprisingly easy to do). In fact, thanks to the recent change of hosting service I’ll even be able to let each owner use their own domain to point to their “mini” website (which will potentially be larger than many “proper” websites).

Everyone and their dog tends to look for aliens from outer space but the number of people looking for time travellers is very much smaller. There isn’t really a good reason for that on the whole. After all, absolute proof that time travel was possible would cause just as great a stir on earth as would absolute proof that aliens were out there.

It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors (on the assumption that at least the mark #1 time machine would be a fairly sizeable piece of equipment).

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

We were all assured just two months ago that we’d seen the last of the building society emergency takeovers with the demise of the Dunfermline but now it seems that we’re starting on yet another round of emergency takeovers as West Bromwich seems to be in its final days as an independent society.

The snag now is that Nationwide appears to have more than enough on its plate already and notably declined to take over all of Dunfermline which was a change to its previous approach of absorbing troubled societies in their entirety and merely took on the savings and regular mortgage parts of the society, leaving the part that caused the trouble well alone. Whatever society takes over the West Bromwich that seems likely to be the approach that they will take as otherwise those problems could well pull down the new owners as well.

Aside from the Nationwide which is probably too busy trying to integrate the societies that it has already picked up, the obvious choice would appear to be the Coventry although that seems likely to involve a number of branch closures over time given the similar geographic spread of the two businesses. The other problem is that the societies have a similar number of branches thus a takeover would pretty much double the number of branches to be looked after which could stretch the management a little bit too much in what are already difficult times. My bet is that, if it is a building society takeover, it will be a toss up between the Chelsea and the Yorkshire who will do it.

But what about the remaining building societies? Falling foul of the recent downgrade were West Bromwich, Chelsea, Britannia, Coventry, Nationwide, Newcastle, Norwich & Peterborough, Principality, Skipton and Yorkshire. Of these, only Chelsea appealed and Britannia is currently being taken over by the Co-Operative Bank.

As always, the safest place for your money remains National Savings.