What, as opposed to belonging to an organization or having a nationality that would land me on Gitmo, or in Romania? I'm stating an observable comparison. Read Vasily Mitrokhin's absolutely fascinating book 'The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West' to see how a secret government spy agency really works. Here's a hint: it starts with erasing the records that don't portray your governance in a positive light.
If the President was afraid the FISA court wouldn't grant the NSA license to place long-term tripwires, why didn't he issue a secret executive order changing the rules regarding the taps? Sure, he knows the legislature wouldn't back him, nor did he want to announce this program to the handful of Senators who should be responsible for this thing. Fine, issue the secret XO. But why did he eliminate court oversight of these new monitoring techniques? Why exclude FISA? The court is quite adaptable to rule changes, and probably would have rubberstamped every one of these requests.
And frankly, I couldn't care less about the particular people being monitored here -- I still believe our government contains enough ethical people that it isn't going to completely abuse the powers of surveillance (yet.) But I'm livid that Bush ordered the bypass of the oversight process. With a stroke of his pen, he created a functioning police state. Think about that.
Oh, wait, you can't. You played a very Cheneyesque card of marking someone who disagrees with you a foe so you can't hear reasoned rebuttals. "La, la, la, I'm not listening because you dissed the president!" What a finely-tuned response to the situation.
That's the problem. This particular action is worthy of the worst of the Soviet Union. It's as unamerican as you can get -- secretly taking away "oversight" when the oversight mechanism itself was already as secretive as possible, and every bit as accessible as oversight can be. 72 hours AFTER the monitoring isn't enough? There can be no reason for dodging the FISA court, no excuse. If the court wasn't fast enough, he could have extended the FISA approval process to two weeks, or a month. But to remove oversight for the sake of executive secrecy? Is he implying that the FISA judges are leaking secrets to Al Qaeda? Are the oversight boards populated by "terrarists?" I don't even think any of the likely FISA judges are anything but Republicans!
I seriously believe this is treason. This action DEFINES treason. Not some weak "censure" or "impeachment." This is stand-before-a-judge-jury-and-firing-squad serious.
You're welcome. I basically wanted to encourage you to do it because the gift is appreciated like you just can't imagine. But there were some amazingly large learning and expense curves that went along with this project, and just saying "buy a Minolta scanner" is totally inadequate to prepare you for what you'll be doing. I figure if I can get you past the hard lessons (wasting time with a projector/copybox, fighting with scanning software, file name conventions, etc.,) that you'll be more likely to try it.
Oh, one more warning regarding assembling the slides into MPEGs for burning on a CD. I started by trying to burn VCDs (and SVCDs) because I didn't have a DVD burner at the time. I purchased the camera store's recommendation of Pinnacle Studio 6. What a buggy piece of crap! I struggled with weekly patches and constant crashing for the entire first year. It wasn't until the next year when I bought a DVD burner (they became affordable) that I got Arcsoft Showbiz for free with the burner, and it was truly a joy to have a piece of software that just worked. It's pretty simplistic, but it does the job and it doesn't leak memory! (Last year I ran out of time so I didn't bother making the MPEG movies and just gave him a DVD with the raw JPGs on it. But that's completely DVD-player dependent, and he's not technically inclined enough to navigate a slideshow. The compiled DVD is a much better choice.)
I do intend to write up the experience and post it on a web site, but that'll be an after-christmas project of its own. I'd also like to get the pictures up in some gallery software so friends and family can share them from whenever and wherever. But that'll be a lesson for another day.
But as far as running the TV goes, here's what to do: go buy a Harmony remote! You will not regret it. I have the Harmony 880, and it is like a magic wand for the TV.
First, it's all web based setup. I bet your daughter could set it up if it's too much bother for you. You type in the model numbers of each piece of equipment you own, answer a few simple questions, and it downloads and installs a new flash to your remote. The best part is that all of your components are probably already in their database, so you don't have to do any old-remote training.
It knows something like a dozen categories of equipment. TV, DVD, surround system, cable box, Tivos, amplifiers, phonographs, everything. You pick a category and type in the model you own. It already knows about inputs and outputs, and lets you create simple activiites, like "Watch TV". You are then asked small, simple questions like "Which input on your TV do you use to watch TV (HDMI, Video 1, Video 2, RGB, Tuner)?" It already KNOWS your TV set has these inputs, you just have to pick the right one. Little kids are very useful to help you out here, because they all know exactly how to drive the remotes.:-)
Anyway, once you've set it up there's a nice color screen that has your activity options: Watch TV, Watch a DVD, Listen to Radio, Listen to CD, etc. Push the Watch TV activity button and it macros out all the commands to turn on the TV, cable box and surround system, it switches the surround input to Audio 1, and it switches the TV to HDMI input. Finally, the screen on the remote becomes a listing of your favorite channels (you can even put little logos on the buttons.)
Furthermore, the hard buttons on the remote now "do the right thing" -- if you're watching TV, channel up/down switches the cable box, the mute button controls the surround system, pause controls the DVR. If you're watching a video tape, pause controls the VCR instead. And if a device misses the signal, there's a "help" button that asks you questions like "is the TV on?" and helps you get everything back in sync. It even has a tilt sensor that switches on the backlighting whenever you pick it up! Everything is done for you, and done well.
This is one of the best designed pieces of home theater equipment I've ever seen, and has the slickest user interface for both programming and operating. Even technophobes are immediately comfortable with it. It makes the complex very, very simple, and that's what good technology should do.
Wow, I could write a paper on the process (and I actually did write one for my workflow.)
I first tried a projector-based copybox, designed for videocamera recording a slideshow from your existing projector. It was about $120. I set up my digital camera at one end, and projected the slides onto a tiny 5" screen at the other end. Really crap quality, the lighting from the lamp and reflector was very uneven, and the focus was blurred due to the nature of the matte plastic screen. But it was really fast, I shot a dozen carousels in a weekend before I could no longer stand to see that crap picture quality. I deleted the pictures.
I returned the copybox to the camera store in partial exchange for a Minolta Dimage II scanner. (Minolta is selling Dimage IV scanners now, which are physically and mechanically very similar but have better optics and electronics.) Mine is USB 1.2 (USB hi-speed didn't come out till the Dimage III), and it takes about six minutes to scan a tray of four slides at half resolution. Scanning at full resolution added about 50 seconds per slide (on USB 1.2), so I decided half was acceptable. Apparently the Dimage IV is supposed to scan one slide every 30 seconds -- that I'd like to see.
My scanner came with two slide trays and a six-hole negative carrier. Having two trays really helps, you can be scanning one while you unload, load and clean the next set of four slides, so I'd say definitely buy an extra tray if you only get one. By the way, brush and blow each and every trayfull of slides before scanning. A cheap little rubber squeezy blower brush from the camera store will work fine. You'd be amazed at how much you can improve the pictures with this simple step.
Minolta also offers an APS film carrier option, which can scan a whole roll of APS film at one shot. If I had to deal with APS cameras, that'd definitely be the route I'd take.
The scanner is well designed and well built, very good for a heavy home user like myself. I think I paid about $250-$300 for the floor demo model. I would have preferred a scanner that would have accepted a carousel, or a stack feeder, but those start over $1000. I've also heard plenty of horror stories about misfeeds and jams with the lower end equipment, things like "I never got more than 7 slides between jams!" I'm mostly happy with the Minolta hardware, but would have loved something much faster.
Software wise, I found Minolta's program was not set up very well for batch scanning. I ended up buying the pro version of Vuescan from Hamrick software ($80?), and have been very happy with it. It supports a huge list of different scanners; I'd go so far as to say don't buy a scanner that's not on his list (that's very few, by the way.) Vuescan is much faster to focus than the Minolta software, it was about 20 seconds faster *per slide* on my box. Also, it supports batch scanning -- insert a tray, it will scan all four slides without user intervention.
The colors have been pretty good, but I think my lamp is starting to fade again. I've already burned out one $120 lamp, so I'd say don't leave them on overnight. Vuescan does supports scanning an ITF calibration target. I wish I had bought one, but they're about $145 and since Vuescan comes with a pre-scanned calibration file for most every supported scanner model I figured it was "close enough for my inlaws." I scanned each slide at about 2400 dpi resolution, the scanner supports 4800 dpi but the lack of USB 2.0 made that an extra 50 seconds per slide too slow. Besides, I'm mostly collecting the data in order to burn it to DVDs, I still have much higher resolution than the crappy NTSC signal.
While it was scanning, I kept busy in Paint Shop Pro rotating and straightening the images, enhancing colors, lightening underexposed pictures, trimming the images inside the frames, eliminating big scratches, fixing red-eyes, cropping out the divorced cousin-in-law whenever possible, etc. And I really don't know how my mother-in-law was able to take
I find the answer to hiring vs. doing usually comes down to "depends."
For example, my wife and I just scanned her parent's 35mm slides and are burning DVDs for them for Christmas. We scanned all of these old slides. All 36 carousels of them. All 3,407 slides of cousins, nieces, nephews, moms, dads, grandkids, vacations, cabins, lakes and mountains. (I am pretty sick of them now!) The reason is the local photo houses all gave me quotes around $3.00 per slide. For $10,000+ I'll do it myself, especially when it's something I know how to do and can have my wife help.
I had an accountant do our taxes when they were tricky and some of it was new to me, but now I use one of the tax packages and the stuff I learned from the CPA and do them myself. It really takes about the same overall time as scheduling an appointment and going over stuff with the guy for an hour.
Construction and home repairs? I'll do those myself simply because I enjoy them.
But ripping CDs? I probably have a couple hundred, and (not having a use for an iPod) I've never really felt the need to be bothered with it. If they were reasonably priced (perhaps a dollar a disc) I'd consider it. If I thought I would ever have use for an iPod, I'd probably do it myself.
Logic? This is purely a capitalist desire, not a socialist one. Normally, I prefer to make choices that benefit society over the individual. But in this one specific case I want what's best for my son, not what's best for the economy, industry, society, you or me. When it comes to their own offspring, I think most parents choose capitalism over socialism.
Besides, you're assuming that "more engineers causes a better society." All I can say to that is how much more gomi do we need? Some level of engineering is required for maintenance reasons, of course, but beyond that it's speculation at best. And what makes you think that there are suddenly three times the number of positions available for engineering graduates? If all other aspects of the economy are flat or in decline, it's not likely that a sudden upsurge in engineering positions will spring forth to correct it.
You should have picked the right state's university. The University of Minnesota offers studends a four-year guarantee. The idea is that if you follow their advisor's advice, they'll make the courses you need available to you when you need them, make substitute courses available, or pay the tuition. Whatever it takes to get you out in the four years. Of course, you still have to pass all your classes, fill out forms in a timely fashion, etc., but they are at least working on solving this particular problem.
At least that's what the four-color glossy marketing blurb promises. I think they also offer tooth fairy anatomy, easter bunny sightings and north pole tours guided by Santa himself.
TFA says there are 225,925 annual engineering graduates instead of the 70,000 figure typically quoted by the media.
Well, I hope this ISN'T true. My son is entering an engineering school next fall, and a glut of engineers can only make him less marketable. This basically says his chances of repaying his student loans just got 3 times worse!
TFA also says, The report's findings are meant to clear up misinformation about U.S. engineers and the U.S. education system, Mr. Wadhwa said. It's also intended to inspire more young Americans to take up engineering as a profession, he added.
I don't see how telling someone that he or she's got three times the expected competition is supposed to be an incentive or an inspiration.
Reminds me of the comment track from the recent DVD release of the movie Tron. Because the actors were shot in such low light on a black stage, the cameraman had to open his lenses wide to be able to film the scenes. And the wider you open the aperture, the thinner the depth of field. At one point the cameraman told the director "I can't hold focus on the whole actor any more, what do you want me to focus on?" The director responded "his face." The cameraman replied "No, I can't even get the whole face in focus, what part do you want to see?" The director said "his eyes."
"Screw the nano. What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs?" -- Motorola's Zander letting his real feelings show about Apple Computer (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc.'s music player, which overshadowed Motorola's new Rokr phone during a product launch. (Sept. 23.)
He's right! 640 songs ought to be enough for anyone!
That's a part of why I was hoping HD DVD would be the big player.
What bothers me is that the industry never announces WHY Sony is so consistently rejected by the marketplace. It's pretty obvious (to me anyway) that DRM has been damning them all along. Minidiscs sounded really cool, but the ATRAC encoding made them worthless. DAT tapes? They were never adopted anywhere outside of the audiophile community, but when Aiwa (Marantz?) refused to honor the "copy bit" they at least picked up a few supporters. Sony's Memory Sticks? They've been adopted industry wide, as long as you only limit your view of the industry to Sony factories. And I don't know who was responsible for the travesty we know as DIVX (the time-limited DVD format, not the codec) but that also flew like the Hindenburg.
Consumers do not want DRM. They do not want to be told what they can and can't do with their media. They begrudgingly accept it with DVDs, but even the DVD movie industry didn't wipe VHS off the shelves until after DeCSS hit the world.
Consumers have actively rejected DRM since its inception. I just wish the industry would learn the damn lesson once and for all!
Long ago I decided I was going to go with HD DVD when it came out, mostly because Sony was backing Blu-ray. I'm kind of worried that Microsoft is backing it, because they're slightly more likely than Sony to get the DRM right. Regardless, I know that I am "Mr. Betamax" when it comes to predicting future technologies. I have about a 100% track record when it comes to making early adopter choices, which means I've had to re-buy 100% of my stuff.
So, here's some free advice to everyone: when I buy my first HD DVD player, the rest of you should breathe a collective sigh of relief and buy the Blu-ray gear, because it'll be guaranteed that I chose incorrectly.:-(
There are several different kinds of tags, and different types of memory options available. You can get factory programmed read-only tags, or you can get tags with both a read/writeable segment and a read-only segment. The read/writeable tags are significantly more expensive because of the extra hardware required (both the individual tag is more expensive, as well as read/write hardware on each cash register's RFID reader.)
You also have options when you're dealing with the data that's encoded at the factory. You can choose to have an item identifier (for example 123456 might be "Gillette Mach 3 razor refills, 5 pack"), or you can get a unique serial number per tag, or you can have both an item ID and a serial number encoded on the tag. Finally, you can choose to have the tag be "permanent" or "deactivatable". As with the read/write tags, deactivatable tags are more expensive than the permanent kind because of the extra hardware costs.
The tags have the most value when they're inserted as early as possible into the manufacturing stream. If Nike molds the tags into the soles of their shoes, for example, then they can know when their left-sole-molding machine is running out of goop. They can tell which soles are 9-1/2D, and make sure they get assembled with the 9-1/2D leather uppers. They can also identify both the left and right shoes when put in the box, and the cash register can later make sure that the box contains both a left and right shoe and that they're the same style, color and size.
The unique serial number per item is actually a good choice for many economic reasons. It allows for perfect tracking from manufacture through the packaging and distribution networks. It ensures quality control is performed; defects can be quickly identified and isolated down to the operator and machine who made them and when, and the factory held liable. If they're put in a shipping container but not received at the destination, the shipping company is liable for exactly the missing items. When they are delivered to a store, they can be precisely inventoried. Out of date items (older fashions, expiring medicines) can be located and rotated to the front of a shelf, hopefully before they're so old they need to be put on clearance and sold at a loss.
And items that are found outside of a store can be used as evidence of stolen property. The manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor and retailer can all be identified by the police, and the merchandise returned to its rightful owner.
With unique serial numbers, the item ID is actually superfluous. The databases already have the unique serial numbers in them, and once you build a cross reference file for receiving there is no extra cost to maintain a copy for sales purposes. Unique serial numbers can also reduce help fraud by preventing "bought it at the dollar store, returned it at Target" situations -- Target would not need to incur the expense of a return if it wasn't bought at one of their stores.
Plus, if there is no "item ID" present then the merchandise cannot be identified by a third party. Imagine walking into Tony Soprano's bar and having a goon secretly scan everyone who comes in the door. If they see item IDs that indicate "Watch-Rolex" and "Wallet-Gucci" on one guy, and "Underwear-Target" and "Socks-Walmart" on another, guess which one gets followed to their car? (Of course it might also pay to keep a "Handgun-Desert Eagle-.45 cal" tag on your keyring, eh?) But if the tags are simply "123" and "456" there's no way of knowing what those values mean without some context.
Retailers are less inclined to want the deactivatable tags. First, they cost a lot more money. They don't want to slow the registers down to perform the deactivation function. Next, they want the RFID information to come back with the merchandise in case of a return or defective item. Finally, there are definitely marketing opportunities if they can scan tags that walk back in the door and start shopping. But privacy advocates are strongly resisting the idea, and want all tags deactivated at the point of sale for the reasons I mentioned above.
That said, people still have AV. There's still stinger. AOL might even be able to release an update that blocks where it's hooking into the main AIM program (which would, of course, be very stop gap)
I don't understand why AOL doesn't simply apply anti-bot filters when this crap is discovered. No IM protocols in use today are peer-to-peer based, they are all server based (otherwise firewalls would have prevented IM from taking off amongst the Joe Sixpack crowd.)
These bots all have distinctive signatures, how hard could it possibly be to pinch them off at the server side? They could do other things, too, such as IM'ing the infected client from Admin to say "Busted, O virus-laden one. Please update your antivirus software and only then will we allow you back onto our servers."
You'd simply have the reader in the scale, and the RFID chips would be embedded in the label stock that the scale prints on. Weigh the meat, stick it in a bag and seal it shut with the tagged label, just like they do with today's barcode stickers.
Yeah, helium balloons would give scale-based systems a serious fit. But you shouldn't need a scale at checkout if every item were RFID tagged, because you can't really "hide" a tagged item from a reader the way a thief might try. The readers see through most merchandise.
Another option is placing the RFID reader inside the cart itself. Drop an item in the basket, and it's read on the spot. Take it out, it's removed from the transaction. The display on the cart could contain a running total. Push the cart out the door and your credit/debit card is read and charged. That really ties the transaction to your cart!
There are a lot of cool possibilities with RFID, which is why industry is so excited about it. But there are huge issues with it once it's left the store, which is why consumers are so wary.
Good point; I do have a tendency to forget that smaller retailers are really at the mercy of the payment card industry. But trust me, even the big chains still bow to them when they flex their muscles.
Visa CISP really isn't a bad thing. It's basically an exercise in prudence -- if you protect their data in an appropriate fashion, you'll be less likely to be smeared over the front page of the Wall Street Journal as the latest victim of a data thief. That kind of negative publicity is hard to recover from, and expensive, too.
Anyway, here's what Visa expects of you: this page is instructions for small businesses and merchants on how to be CISP compliant. There's a link there to a PDF. But even here, it says "Maintain an Information Security Policy". It doesn't define the policy, it just says you have to have one and maintain it.
I hope you notified security in the store, and contacted your credit card company immediately. If they went on to try to use your card to commit ID theft, there's a chance that they left some of their own ID evidence at the grocery store (images on security cameras, used their own credit card, paid with a check, etc.)
If they did, and were successfully prosecuted because you raised the issue, the chances are good that you could receive a fat reward from Visa.
The actual PCI requirements are for your company to establish standards and then document following them. But the details aren't completely spelled out by the PCI. Visa CISP did add certain restrictions, such as "you must never write certain Visa card data (Discretionary data, CVV2) to a storage device," and "if you keep the account number and the related guest data together, you must encrypt it."
But they certainly made no such foolish rule as "YOU MUST STORE the data AND encrypt it." If anything, that was a misread at your company of "IFF you must store the data THEN you must encrypt it." Their guidelines are sound. The Visa cryptographers I've met with have been really sharp, and wouldn't allow a chump mistake like that to creep in.
Slashdot Mirror
If the President was afraid the FISA court wouldn't grant the NSA license to place long-term tripwires, why didn't he issue a secret executive order changing the rules regarding the taps? Sure, he knows the legislature wouldn't back him, nor did he want to announce this program to the handful of Senators who should be responsible for this thing. Fine, issue the secret XO. But why did he eliminate court oversight of these new monitoring techniques? Why exclude FISA? The court is quite adaptable to rule changes, and probably would have rubberstamped every one of these requests.
And frankly, I couldn't care less about the particular people being monitored here -- I still believe our government contains enough ethical people that it isn't going to completely abuse the powers of surveillance (yet.) But I'm livid that Bush ordered the bypass of the oversight process. With a stroke of his pen, he created a functioning police state. Think about that.
Oh, wait, you can't. You played a very Cheneyesque card of marking someone who disagrees with you a foe so you can't hear reasoned rebuttals. "La, la, la, I'm not listening because you dissed the president!" What a finely-tuned response to the situation.
That's the problem. This particular action is worthy of the worst of the Soviet Union. It's as unamerican as you can get -- secretly taking away "oversight" when the oversight mechanism itself was already as secretive as possible, and every bit as accessible as oversight can be. 72 hours AFTER the monitoring isn't enough? There can be no reason for dodging the FISA court, no excuse. If the court wasn't fast enough, he could have extended the FISA approval process to two weeks, or a month. But to remove oversight for the sake of executive secrecy? Is he implying that the FISA judges are leaking secrets to Al Qaeda? Are the oversight boards populated by "terrarists?" I don't even think any of the likely FISA judges are anything but Republicans!
I seriously believe this is treason. This action DEFINES treason. Not some weak "censure" or "impeachment." This is stand-before-a-judge-jury-and-firing-squad serious.
Oh, one more warning regarding assembling the slides into MPEGs for burning on a CD. I started by trying to burn VCDs (and SVCDs) because I didn't have a DVD burner at the time. I purchased the camera store's recommendation of Pinnacle Studio 6. What a buggy piece of crap! I struggled with weekly patches and constant crashing for the entire first year. It wasn't until the next year when I bought a DVD burner (they became affordable) that I got Arcsoft Showbiz for free with the burner, and it was truly a joy to have a piece of software that just worked. It's pretty simplistic, but it does the job and it doesn't leak memory! (Last year I ran out of time so I didn't bother making the MPEG movies and just gave him a DVD with the raw JPGs on it. But that's completely DVD-player dependent, and he's not technically inclined enough to navigate a slideshow. The compiled DVD is a much better choice.)
I do intend to write up the experience and post it on a web site, but that'll be an after-christmas project of its own. I'd also like to get the pictures up in some gallery software so friends and family can share them from whenever and wherever. But that'll be a lesson for another day.
Good luck!
But as far as running the TV goes, here's what to do: go buy a Harmony remote! You will not regret it. I have the Harmony 880, and it is like a magic wand for the TV.
First, it's all web based setup. I bet your daughter could set it up if it's too much bother for you. You type in the model numbers of each piece of equipment you own, answer a few simple questions, and it downloads and installs a new flash to your remote. The best part is that all of your components are probably already in their database, so you don't have to do any old-remote training.
It knows something like a dozen categories of equipment. TV, DVD, surround system, cable box, Tivos, amplifiers, phonographs, everything. You pick a category and type in the model you own. It already knows about inputs and outputs, and lets you create simple activiites, like "Watch TV". You are then asked small, simple questions like "Which input on your TV do you use to watch TV (HDMI, Video 1, Video 2, RGB, Tuner)?" It already KNOWS your TV set has these inputs, you just have to pick the right one. Little kids are very useful to help you out here, because they all know exactly how to drive the remotes. :-)
Anyway, once you've set it up there's a nice color screen that has your activity options: Watch TV, Watch a DVD, Listen to Radio, Listen to CD, etc. Push the Watch TV activity button and it macros out all the commands to turn on the TV, cable box and surround system, it switches the surround input to Audio 1, and it switches the TV to HDMI input. Finally, the screen on the remote becomes a listing of your favorite channels (you can even put little logos on the buttons.)
Furthermore, the hard buttons on the remote now "do the right thing" -- if you're watching TV, channel up/down switches the cable box, the mute button controls the surround system, pause controls the DVR. If you're watching a video tape, pause controls the VCR instead. And if a device misses the signal, there's a "help" button that asks you questions like "is the TV on?" and helps you get everything back in sync. It even has a tilt sensor that switches on the backlighting whenever you pick it up! Everything is done for you, and done well.
This is one of the best designed pieces of home theater equipment I've ever seen, and has the slickest user interface for both programming and operating. Even technophobes are immediately comfortable with it. It makes the complex very, very simple, and that's what good technology should do.
I first tried a projector-based copybox, designed for videocamera recording a slideshow from your existing projector. It was about $120. I set up my digital camera at one end, and projected the slides onto a tiny 5" screen at the other end. Really crap quality, the lighting from the lamp and reflector was very uneven, and the focus was blurred due to the nature of the matte plastic screen. But it was really fast, I shot a dozen carousels in a weekend before I could no longer stand to see that crap picture quality. I deleted the pictures.
I returned the copybox to the camera store in partial exchange for a Minolta Dimage II scanner. (Minolta is selling Dimage IV scanners now, which are physically and mechanically very similar but have better optics and electronics.) Mine is USB 1.2 (USB hi-speed didn't come out till the Dimage III), and it takes about six minutes to scan a tray of four slides at half resolution. Scanning at full resolution added about 50 seconds per slide (on USB 1.2), so I decided half was acceptable. Apparently the Dimage IV is supposed to scan one slide every 30 seconds -- that I'd like to see.
My scanner came with two slide trays and a six-hole negative carrier. Having two trays really helps, you can be scanning one while you unload, load and clean the next set of four slides, so I'd say definitely buy an extra tray if you only get one. By the way, brush and blow each and every trayfull of slides before scanning. A cheap little rubber squeezy blower brush from the camera store will work fine. You'd be amazed at how much you can improve the pictures with this simple step.
Minolta also offers an APS film carrier option, which can scan a whole roll of APS film at one shot. If I had to deal with APS cameras, that'd definitely be the route I'd take.
The scanner is well designed and well built, very good for a heavy home user like myself. I think I paid about $250-$300 for the floor demo model. I would have preferred a scanner that would have accepted a carousel, or a stack feeder, but those start over $1000. I've also heard plenty of horror stories about misfeeds and jams with the lower end equipment, things like "I never got more than 7 slides between jams!" I'm mostly happy with the Minolta hardware, but would have loved something much faster.
Software wise, I found Minolta's program was not set up very well for batch scanning. I ended up buying the pro version of Vuescan from Hamrick software ($80?), and have been very happy with it. It supports a huge list of different scanners; I'd go so far as to say don't buy a scanner that's not on his list (that's very few, by the way.) Vuescan is much faster to focus than the Minolta software, it was about 20 seconds faster *per slide* on my box. Also, it supports batch scanning -- insert a tray, it will scan all four slides without user intervention.
The colors have been pretty good, but I think my lamp is starting to fade again. I've already burned out one $120 lamp, so I'd say don't leave them on overnight. Vuescan does supports scanning an ITF calibration target. I wish I had bought one, but they're about $145 and since Vuescan comes with a pre-scanned calibration file for most every supported scanner model I figured it was "close enough for my inlaws." I scanned each slide at about 2400 dpi resolution, the scanner supports 4800 dpi but the lack of USB 2.0 made that an extra 50 seconds per slide too slow. Besides, I'm mostly collecting the data in order to burn it to DVDs, I still have much higher resolution than the crappy NTSC signal.
While it was scanning, I kept busy in Paint Shop Pro rotating and straightening the images, enhancing colors, lightening underexposed pictures, trimming the images inside the frames, eliminating big scratches, fixing red-eyes, cropping out the divorced cousin-in-law whenever possible, etc. And I really don't know how my mother-in-law was able to take
For example, my wife and I just scanned her parent's 35mm slides and are burning DVDs for them for Christmas. We scanned all of these old slides. All 36 carousels of them. All 3,407 slides of cousins, nieces, nephews, moms, dads, grandkids, vacations, cabins, lakes and mountains. (I am pretty sick of them now!) The reason is the local photo houses all gave me quotes around $3.00 per slide. For $10,000+ I'll do it myself, especially when it's something I know how to do and can have my wife help.
I had an accountant do our taxes when they were tricky and some of it was new to me, but now I use one of the tax packages and the stuff I learned from the CPA and do them myself. It really takes about the same overall time as scheduling an appointment and going over stuff with the guy for an hour.
Construction and home repairs? I'll do those myself simply because I enjoy them.
But ripping CDs? I probably have a couple hundred, and (not having a use for an iPod) I've never really felt the need to be bothered with it. If they were reasonably priced (perhaps a dollar a disc) I'd consider it. If I thought I would ever have use for an iPod, I'd probably do it myself.
Will you adopt me? :-)
Besides, you're assuming that "more engineers causes a better society." All I can say to that is how much more gomi do we need? Some level of engineering is required for maintenance reasons, of course, but beyond that it's speculation at best. And what makes you think that there are suddenly three times the number of positions available for engineering graduates? If all other aspects of the economy are flat or in decline, it's not likely that a sudden upsurge in engineering positions will spring forth to correct it.
At least that's what the four-color glossy marketing blurb promises. I think they also offer tooth fairy anatomy, easter bunny sightings and north pole tours guided by Santa himself.
Well, I hope this ISN'T true. My son is entering an engineering school next fall, and a glut of engineers can only make him less marketable. This basically says his chances of repaying his student loans just got 3 times worse!
TFA also says, The report's findings are meant to clear up misinformation about U.S. engineers and the U.S. education system, Mr. Wadhwa said. It's also intended to inspire more young Americans to take up engineering as a profession, he added.
I don't see how telling someone that he or she's got three times the expected competition is supposed to be an incentive or an inspiration.
The cameraman then asked "which eye?"
He's right! 640 songs ought to be enough for anyone!
What bothers me is that the industry never announces WHY Sony is so consistently rejected by the marketplace. It's pretty obvious (to me anyway) that DRM has been damning them all along. Minidiscs sounded really cool, but the ATRAC encoding made them worthless. DAT tapes? They were never adopted anywhere outside of the audiophile community, but when Aiwa (Marantz?) refused to honor the "copy bit" they at least picked up a few supporters. Sony's Memory Sticks? They've been adopted industry wide, as long as you only limit your view of the industry to Sony factories. And I don't know who was responsible for the travesty we know as DIVX (the time-limited DVD format, not the codec) but that also flew like the Hindenburg.
Consumers do not want DRM. They do not want to be told what they can and can't do with their media. They begrudgingly accept it with DVDs, but even the DVD movie industry didn't wipe VHS off the shelves until after DeCSS hit the world.
Consumers have actively rejected DRM since its inception. I just wish the industry would learn the damn lesson once and for all!
Long ago I decided I was going to go with HD DVD when it came out, mostly because Sony was backing Blu-ray. I'm kind of worried that Microsoft is backing it, because they're slightly more likely than Sony to get the DRM right. Regardless, I know that I am "Mr. Betamax" when it comes to predicting future technologies. I have about a 100% track record when it comes to making early adopter choices, which means I've had to re-buy 100% of my stuff.
So, here's some free advice to everyone: when I buy my first HD DVD player, the rest of you should breathe a collective sigh of relief and buy the Blu-ray gear, because it'll be guaranteed that I chose incorrectly. :-(
You also have options when you're dealing with the data that's encoded at the factory. You can choose to have an item identifier (for example 123456 might be "Gillette Mach 3 razor refills, 5 pack"), or you can get a unique serial number per tag, or you can have both an item ID and a serial number encoded on the tag. Finally, you can choose to have the tag be "permanent" or "deactivatable". As with the read/write tags, deactivatable tags are more expensive than the permanent kind because of the extra hardware costs.
The tags have the most value when they're inserted as early as possible into the manufacturing stream. If Nike molds the tags into the soles of their shoes, for example, then they can know when their left-sole-molding machine is running out of goop. They can tell which soles are 9-1/2D, and make sure they get assembled with the 9-1/2D leather uppers. They can also identify both the left and right shoes when put in the box, and the cash register can later make sure that the box contains both a left and right shoe and that they're the same style, color and size.
The unique serial number per item is actually a good choice for many economic reasons. It allows for perfect tracking from manufacture through the packaging and distribution networks. It ensures quality control is performed; defects can be quickly identified and isolated down to the operator and machine who made them and when, and the factory held liable. If they're put in a shipping container but not received at the destination, the shipping company is liable for exactly the missing items. When they are delivered to a store, they can be precisely inventoried. Out of date items (older fashions, expiring medicines) can be located and rotated to the front of a shelf, hopefully before they're so old they need to be put on clearance and sold at a loss.
And items that are found outside of a store can be used as evidence of stolen property. The manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor and retailer can all be identified by the police, and the merchandise returned to its rightful owner.
With unique serial numbers, the item ID is actually superfluous. The databases already have the unique serial numbers in them, and once you build a cross reference file for receiving there is no extra cost to maintain a copy for sales purposes. Unique serial numbers can also reduce help fraud by preventing "bought it at the dollar store, returned it at Target" situations -- Target would not need to incur the expense of a return if it wasn't bought at one of their stores.
Plus, if there is no "item ID" present then the merchandise cannot be identified by a third party. Imagine walking into Tony Soprano's bar and having a goon secretly scan everyone who comes in the door. If they see item IDs that indicate "Watch-Rolex" and "Wallet-Gucci" on one guy, and "Underwear-Target" and "Socks-Walmart" on another, guess which one gets followed to their car? (Of course it might also pay to keep a "Handgun-Desert Eagle-.45 cal" tag on your keyring, eh?) But if the tags are simply "123" and "456" there's no way of knowing what those values mean without some context.
Retailers are less inclined to want the deactivatable tags. First, they cost a lot more money. They don't want to slow the registers down to perform the deactivation function. Next, they want the RFID information to come back with the merchandise in case of a return or defective item. Finally, there are definitely marketing opportunities if they can scan tags that walk back in the door and start shopping. But privacy advocates are strongly resisting the idea, and want all tags deactivated at the point of sale for the reasons I mentioned above.
In this case, it would be called potcasting.
Isn't this just another case of the pot calling the kettle brown?
"No shit?"
They wouldn't have to block bots. I'm just asking them to kill the known viruses and/or worms as soon as they're discovered.
I don't understand why AOL doesn't simply apply anti-bot filters when this crap is discovered. No IM protocols in use today are peer-to-peer based, they are all server based (otherwise firewalls would have prevented IM from taking off amongst the Joe Sixpack crowd.)
These bots all have distinctive signatures, how hard could it possibly be to pinch them off at the server side? They could do other things, too, such as IM'ing the infected client from Admin to say "Busted, O virus-laden one. Please update your antivirus software and only then will we allow you back onto our servers."
Seems like an ounce of prevention to me ...
Yeah, helium balloons would give scale-based systems a serious fit. But you shouldn't need a scale at checkout if every item were RFID tagged, because you can't really "hide" a tagged item from a reader the way a thief might try. The readers see through most merchandise.
Another option is placing the RFID reader inside the cart itself. Drop an item in the basket, and it's read on the spot. Take it out, it's removed from the transaction. The display on the cart could contain a running total. Push the cart out the door and your credit/debit card is read and charged. That really ties the transaction to your cart!
There are a lot of cool possibilities with RFID, which is why industry is so excited about it. But there are huge issues with it once it's left the store, which is why consumers are so wary.
Visa CISP really isn't a bad thing. It's basically an exercise in prudence -- if you protect their data in an appropriate fashion, you'll be less likely to be smeared over the front page of the Wall Street Journal as the latest victim of a data thief. That kind of negative publicity is hard to recover from, and expensive, too.
Anyway, here's what Visa expects of you: this page is instructions for small businesses and merchants on how to be CISP compliant. There's a link there to a PDF. But even here, it says "Maintain an Information Security Policy". It doesn't define the policy, it just says you have to have one and maintain it.
If they did, and were successfully prosecuted because you raised the issue, the chances are good that you could receive a fat reward from Visa.
12345? Have the combination changed on my luggage immediately!
Here's the way we phrased that particular question in our doc:
"Is critical data (credit card numbers, passwords, etc.) encrypted before storage?"
You might want to talk to your PCI people. The idea is to secure your data, not create holes.
But they certainly made no such foolish rule as "YOU MUST STORE the data AND encrypt it." If anything, that was a misread at your company of "IFF you must store the data THEN you must encrypt it." Their guidelines are sound. The Visa cryptographers I've met with have been really sharp, and wouldn't allow a chump mistake like that to creep in.