I used to work for a moderately sized ski resort in Vermont, when I was in high school back in the 80's. This was back when credit card impressions were made on multi-part carbon paper receipts. Customer got one copy, merchant got another.
At the end of the day on a busy weekend, there would be thousands of credit card swipes, and the receipts locked in a vault in the offices. Part of my job was doing data entry at night during downtime. I'd check out a box of credit card receipts and enter the last name (from the signature) and the phone number (written by the customer on the slip) into a terminal. That was sent to a company in Ohio in batches of 50-60 thousand names. They matched name with phone number and sent back full addresses for our marketing department.
In 1989.
So, it's not at all surprising that they were able to piece this info together, and like others have pointed out, it's very possible they're matching your info to past purchases, returns or warranty information.
It's not that hard to do - credit card companies make big money selling lists of customers. they probably got it from your card issuer.
So are all those people walking down the street with phones to their heads using some kind of new wireless protocol to download direct-to-brain? I think it's a bit of a stretch to assert that "Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones," without some serious numbers as back up. VOIP penetration on mobile phones just isn't that high yet.
...then again, I'm one of those curmudgeons who thinks that a phone's primary purpose should be, well, a phone. Occasional text messaging is ok, as is the odd flight tracking or score checking session, but other than that i just want to be able to talk on my phone with a minimum of fuss. that's harder and harder to do these days.
It depends on what you mean by improvement... if you're talking about Han shooting second, well, that's just idiocy and ego at work.
but there are instances where the only available copies of a film that are in workable shape need to be cleaned up. Films are physical objects - they get dirty, broken, scratched, cut, stepped on, spliced, spilled on, etc.
Restoration is something that's done on new films, too, like when shooting is done and someone discovered that there was a hair in the gate or a speck on the lens.
for release on televisions, 1080 line HD is considered by the industry to be high enough quality. at this point, anything bigger than that [2k or 4k, for instance] i used only for material going back out to film, or for insanely high-budget work. it's rapidly moving towards 2k and 4k, but for now, they're still primarily used for digital intermediates, where the target medium is film.
Actually, in older film stock its not, and thats why we have the whole noise reduction process... to eliminate the "grain" caused by the crystals in the film being noticably large.
The point of NR is not to eliminate grain at all - in fact, grain is part of the image, and ideally is not removed or damaged when doing noise reduction. NR was designed for the removal of *noise* in a video image. as in, random noise on analog tapes. used properly [and lightly], a DVNR unit is an invaluable tool in DVD production. unfortunately, it's usually not used properly....and it has the unfortunate side effect of decimating the grain structure of the original film.
My company offers digital restoration services for feature films. We recently completed the restoration of the animated film "Rock & Rule," which is due out on DVD in a couple weeks. this was a restoration done by hand on an MTI CORRECT system, which allows you to manually correct each frame. It does automate some processes, and some of the cleanup is done by pulling data from surrounding frames, which has the effect of erasing defects while leaving the grain structure intact [at least, perceptually - you are actually changing the grain a little].
But again, done right this means someone has to be sitting at the machine looking at every frame. It took our restoration artist a full month - about 180 hours - to go through all 112,000 frames of that film, and that was somewhat of a budget job, were we were simply removing defects [deep scratches, dirt, chemical stains, splice marks] on a release print, not defects that existed in the original cells and were permanently printed into all release prints.
We use a DigitalVision DVNR for some analog material that goes to DVD because there's more random noise in analog, and the DVNR is dangerous if not used correctly. It's a box that's designed for broadcast applications, a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal. but we've found that it's most useful when used sparingly, and only on select scenes rather than the whole movie. I mean, just take a look at most digital cable or satellite broadcasts to see heavy noise reduction artifacting.
the tools are not perfect, and it's going to be a long time before they are. So lots of manual work is involved in this kind of restoration, at least for the forseeable future...
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for a moderately sized ski resort in Vermont, when I was in high school back in the 80's. This was back when credit card impressions were made on multi-part carbon paper receipts. Customer got one copy, merchant got another.
At the end of the day on a busy weekend, there would be thousands of credit card swipes, and the receipts locked in a vault in the offices. Part of my job was doing data entry at night during downtime. I'd check out a box of credit card receipts and enter the last name (from the signature) and the phone number (written by the customer on the slip) into a terminal. That was sent to a company in Ohio in batches of 50-60 thousand names. They matched name with phone number and sent back full addresses for our marketing department.
In 1989.
So, it's not at all surprising that they were able to piece this info together, and like others have pointed out, it's very possible they're matching your info to past purchases, returns or warranty information.
It's not that hard to do - credit card companies make big money selling lists of customers. they probably got it from your card issuer.
So are all those people walking down the street with phones to their heads using some kind of new wireless protocol to download direct-to-brain? I think it's a bit of a stretch to assert that "Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones," without some serious numbers as back up. VOIP penetration on mobile phones just isn't that high yet.
It depends on what you mean by improvement... if you're talking about Han shooting second, well, that's just idiocy and ego at work.
but there are instances where the only available copies of a film that are in workable shape need to be cleaned up. Films are physical objects - they get dirty, broken, scratched, cut, stepped on, spliced, spilled on, etc.
Restoration is something that's done on new films, too, like when shooting is done and someone discovered that there was a hair in the gate or a speck on the lens.
-perry
Actually, in older film stock its not, and thats why we have the whole noise reduction process... to eliminate the "grain" caused by the crystals in the film being noticably large.
The point of NR is not to eliminate grain at all - in fact, grain is part of the image, and ideally is not removed or damaged when doing noise reduction. NR was designed for the removal of *noise* in a video image. as in, random noise on analog tapes. used properly [and lightly], a DVNR unit is an invaluable tool in DVD production. unfortunately, it's usually not used properly. ...and it has the unfortunate side effect of decimating the grain structure of the original film.
My company offers digital restoration services for feature films. We recently completed the restoration of the animated film "Rock & Rule," which is due out on DVD in a couple weeks. this was a restoration done by hand on an MTI CORRECT system, which allows you to manually correct each frame. It does automate some processes, and some of the cleanup is done by pulling data from surrounding frames, which has the effect of erasing defects while leaving the grain structure intact [at least, perceptually - you are actually changing the grain a little].
But again, done right this means someone has to be sitting at the machine looking at every frame. It took our restoration artist a full month - about 180 hours - to go through all 112,000 frames of that film, and that was somewhat of a budget job, were we were simply removing defects [deep scratches, dirt, chemical stains, splice marks] on a release print, not defects that existed in the original cells and were permanently printed into all release prints.
We use a DigitalVision DVNR for some analog material that goes to DVD because there's more random noise in analog, and the DVNR is dangerous if not used correctly. It's a box that's designed for broadcast applications, a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal. but we've found that it's most useful when used sparingly, and only on select scenes rather than the whole movie. I mean, just take a look at most digital cable or satellite broadcasts to see heavy noise reduction artifacting.
the tools are not perfect, and it's going to be a long time before they are. So lots of manual work is involved in this kind of restoration, at least for the forseeable future...
-perry
Now, would somebody puleeze build a decent web browser?