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The New York Times Digitizes Millions of Photos Going Back To 19th Century (betanews.com)
The New York Times is digitizing millions of historical photos dating back to 1896. From a report: The NYT has a massive collection of photos dating back decades, and the plan is to digitize millions of images -- some dating back to the late nineteenth century -- to ensure they can be accessed by generations to come. The digitization process will also prove useful for journalists who will be able to delve into the archives far more easily in future. Until now, historic news articles and photos have been stored on microfilm and in other physical forms. This is not only difficult to catalog and navigate, but also prone to deterioration over time and through use. The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.
This will come in handy for catching time-travelers and immortals.
My open letter to the cereal companies:
To Whom It May Concern (other than myself):
Hi. I have been a huge fan of cereals of all kinds for my whole life. Sometimes I eat it for all three meals of the day, or live on it exclusively for weeks, or put it in my underpants to keep me feeling fresh (and also as an emergency back-up snack). I cereasly love it.
I am especially fond of a lot of your cereals like Boo Berry and Trix and Chex and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp. My absolute favorite is Fruity Pebbles though, which I believe is a Post cereal. Maybe you guys should make something that tastes like Fruity Pebbles except manages not to have Fred Flintstone's ugly mug all over the box. Yabba Dabba Eww. Anyway, my point is that I like a lot of your cereals and so I am personally concerned with their condition. And, quite frankly, lately I've been a bit worried.
Let's start with my favorite cereal of yours - Boo Berry. I love Boo Berry... at least I think I do... actually, I know it used to be my favorite cereal but I haven't had any in years so I've kind of forgotten what it tastes like - because it's not in any stores! No stores in my area carry it. I checked on your website and apparently you still make it; you even offer it for sale. Unfortunately I can't justify buying it for the $6.74 for a twelve ounce box price. You do offer buying it in a case instead of a four pack, which would drop the price to $4.71 a box, but that is still unreasonable and would also require me to spend an entire week's pay on a large shipment of haunted cereal. My girlfriend would kill me (if I didn't overdose on blue food coloring first).
I think I have a solution to this dilemma. I know you can't force any businesses to carry your cereals and I know that you can't afford to sell them direct for less than $4.71 and still have money left over to pay for upkeep on Count Chocula's castle, hiring someone to build 400 mind-numbing advertisements disguised as crappy kids games for youruleschool.com, and keep your CEOs rolling in golden Kix. So here's what you should do - open up your own stores all across the country. You've already got one in Mall-of-America, now put one in every mall in America. Even if you don't sell much cereal (and you'd sell a lot, trust me) it would be great advertising. You can sell t-shirts with nifty slogans like "Frosted Wheaties: When You're Too Damn Lazy To Put Sugar On Your Own Wheaties!" or "Honey Nut Chex: It Rhymes With 'Funny Butt Sex' For A Reason!" and other stuff which is even more great advertising plus it makes money up front.
Hey, Trix is too sweet and pointy now. I remember it being tasty and pleasantly round at one point. Fix my Trix you dix.
And lastly, I feel I have to bring up a subject that may be hard for you to discuss. We need to talk about what happened to some of your spokespeople.
For instance, the current spokesman for Cinnamon Toast Crunch is Wendell the baker (why making cinnamon toast requires a baker is a question I won't even bring up right now). I clearly remember two other bakers, Bob and a chap with the unfortunate name of Quello, helping Wendell out (why making cinnamon toast required three bakers is another question I won't even bring up right now). Now they are gone. What happened to them? My theory is that Wendell collaborated with someone in your company to have them rubbed out so he could get a large raise and be given the chance to market his inferior French Toast Crunch. But maybe it's something more innocent than that, like they were run over by an out of control cookie cop truck, ground up, and made into delicious cinnamon-sugary sprinkles.
Speaking of cookie cop trucks, Cookie Crisp was once sold by a crafty crook, his canine companion, and a cookie cop who never failed to capture the chocolate chip crazed criminals. Now only Chip the cookie dog remains, and he has apparently given up his life of crime and become a big silly wussbag. I am disturbed by the lack of information about what happened to the other two. Was the cr
i wonder how many of these are doctored to make history seem more libtard-ian than it really is?
> The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.
But what I would like to know is what brand of hard drive the images are stored on. Also the favorite coffee brand of the main developer.
Who on earth is interested in what cloud provider they used except for Google's marketing department?
New York Times?
You think your better than us?
US?
U.S?
U.S.A?
No way!
how many of the images are considered to be in public domain?
Just because you digitize something doesn't mean you own the rights to the image.
Sounds like a combination of cash grab and physical space savings.
Hope they're using a lossless/high res algorithm to preserve the images.
Which is, uh, great to know, But is there any information about whether and where we can see the collection? Or how they've decided to actually do the archival photographs/scans or whatever it is?
If their algorithms don't like the images, they're likely to lock the NYT out or delete the contents of the drive.
I'm not sure there are any vendors out there I'd trust. I'd suggest buying a large number of commodity drives (they don't have to be perfect) and place them in groups of six to make a RAID 6 drive. It's not that expensive, especially compared to rebuilding the archive if/when things go wrong.
If this is a do-once sort of thing, once it's done it's done and if it crashes it is lost forever, then the financial industry often uses mirrored RAID 6. It's not impossible for that to die, but it's very, very unlikely.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Which is, uh, great to know, But is there any information about whether and where we can see the collection?
The article didn't say anything at all about making the collection available to the public.
It only said that they were digitizing it. They may be doing this for their own use.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Most towns have historical societies, many of which have boxes full of fading photographs. Digitizing those photos is something they should be doing. As a bonus, a lot of fading can be undone with free software.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Remember folks, these are "ennemies of the people". That's what your beloved President of the United States said. Repeatedly.
I'm pretty sure all those photos will be photoshoped to picture conservatives in a bad light.
Not really backed up unless they are stored in 3 places on different continents.
One in North America, One in Europe and one in Oceania possibly New Zealand.
If it ain't film it ain't real
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
After all, given the NYT's ownership, who wouldn't be surprised by a bit of digital historical revisionism?