Slashdot Mirror
Inside Microsoft's New Digital Photo Project
robyn217 writes "While Microsoft Research plays 'Big Brother' to a young hiker's trip across North America, it breaks new ground in digital photography by combining metadata, like location via GPS, with the image. Its online presence looks impressive as it displays digital photo albums on a map of the world, but it's slow and unwieldy for the most part and may not be better than a standard travelogue site. This week, I took a closer look at the project currently named the World-Wide Media eXchange (WWMX)."
Isn't it obvious... it is slow and unwieldy because it is taking a slashot'ing right now.
That's funny, 3 years ago when I bought a DigitaOS-equipped camera, I found programs that would let me connect an NMEA0183-compliant GPS receiver to the camera's serial port, and embed the coordinates in the JPEG's EXIF header. The concept certainly isn't new.
The problem with Flashpoint is that their SDK is expensive for personal use, and downright absurd for commercial use. The dev kit shouldn't exceed the cost of the device it's for, IMHO. I'd love to see an open OS for a prosumer-grade digital camera.
it breaks new ground in digital photography by combining metadata, like location via GPS, with the image
No, it doesn't. The idea of combining GPS data with photography is about as old as GPS, and as soon as digital cameras started coming out, people started using GPS and digital cameras, as well as putting the information on the web and place it on maps. Please, guys, look around a bit before hyping this sort of thing up.
It's nice that Microsoft is doing this as well, but it really is nothing new.
Site works fine for me.
Tons of Apache-powered sites get Slashdotted every day. I honestly believe there is virtually zero difference in performance between Server 2003 and Apache--it's all about the admins who set them up.