1) If you are working in sRGB you have constrained yourself to a very small gamut. Yes, it looks better on the screen, but it will look clipped and posterized in print.
2) TIFF is not a good archival format. But if you work in JPEG, you end up getting a degraded image. Every time you close and reopen the image you are recompressing the file. With a TIFF, this is not a problem since the compression is lossless. Since JPEG is lossy, opening and resaving the file degrades the image.
3) You are correct in saying that CMYK is not device independent. However, most folks know the kind of press they are using. That being said, working in RGB is a much better call--you can always convert to CMYK at the end of the process.
Atario, you are mistaken about the use of the RAW extension.
Canon pro cameras store the raw captures with filenames of the form *.TIF, *.CRW, and *.CR2. The TIF file is actually a real, valid TIFF file. There is a thumbnail image stored in the TIFF, as well as the full raw data. CRW and CR2 files are proprietary to Canon.
Nikon pro cameras store the raw captures with filenames of the form *.NEF. These files are also real, valid TIFF files. Again, there is a thumbnail image stored in the TIFF, as well as the full raw data.
Don't believe me about the TIFF files? Get a couple and open them with tiffinfo from the libtiff package. You will get error messages like:
DSC_0001.NEF: Warning, unknown field with tag 34665 (0x8769) ignored. DSC_0001.NEF: Warning, unknown field with tag 36867 (0x9003) ignored. DSC_0001.NEF: Warning, unknown field with tag 37398 (0x9216) ignored.
You might wonder why RAW is generally capitalized. Beats me. It's not an acronym, and it's not a file extension used by most digital cameras. But your description of the "previously established use" of the RAW extension is bogus. There are at least 10 different file formats that use the RAW extension. (See File Extension Source.)
In addition, your original suggestion regarding PNG was not well thought out. Both the Canon and Nikon raw formats use compression.
Now, you could consider converting all of the raw camera files to 48-bit PNG images, but you would lose some data, and the tools to manipulate the PNGs aren't as good as some of the tools to manipulate the RAW images.
It's a bit ironic that you are lecturing someone on taking time "to think about the subject" before flaming them. Personally, I don't think your initial post showed common sense.
The modern pro cameras can store voice memos. This is quite useful for swimming, where you can't always tell who is in the water from the image.
Your idea of grouping the photos by play is interesting. Getting the play-by-play data is harder than you might think, but not impossible. Maybe I'll try to implement something like this for the Final Four.
Just to make matters more confusing, the NEF and TIF files created by the Nikon and Canon cameras are actually stored as TIFFs. But the raw data is stored in one of the TIFF segments. The CR2 and CRW files from the newer Canon cameras are not TIFFs.
By the end of the night, not counting the information we transmitted to New York, we had at least four copies of the data on various machines and hard drives.
The Canon files are named fairly nicely. They have four digits at the start of the file tied to the camera serial number. For example, an image taken with a Canon 1D might have the name ABCD0001.JPG and ABCD0001.TIF. My software actually uses the first four digits of the file to determine who owns that camera, and then it generates a rough IPTC caption for the JPEG.
Unfortunately, take a look at that file name. The Canon files repeat every 10,000 images. If we don't rename the files, we eventually end up with multiple images for the same filename. This is unfortunate. However, it is a heck of a lot better than the Nikon scheme.
A single image taken on any Nikon pro camera has the file name of DSC_0001.JPG and DSC_0001.NEF. This means that when you put the files in the same folder, they end up overwriting each other. This is unfortunate. On the newest camera (D2H), they added support for setting an EXIF field to identify the photographer. This means I can figure out who shot those photos as well. You cannot do this with the D1X or D1H.
So in all cases, we really want to rename the files.
We do keep the date information. Unfortunately, it is not always set correctly. But even if the date were set correctly, we still get the files out of order; we just get bags of digital cards as the game progresses. We would have to delay the edit of the files if we wanted to rename the files based on time.
But let's pretend ACDSee did sort the images by time. This is actually not really what the editor wants. Keep in mind we have 11 photographers shooting at once. The editor wants to be able to see the same sequence from the same photographer before seeing the other photos. In other words, if we have photographers A, B, C, and D, we want the order of photos for a specific play to be AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDD, not ABCDABCDABCDABCD.
We used to have an entire barcode system to track every roll of film as it was processed. After the film dried, it was mounted in slide mounts (even if it was color neg.) and then edited. It used to take 10-15 people to handle the film and four editors to do the edit. Then, we had to have two people to scan the images. Finally, at the end of the game, we only ended up with several hundred images rather than every photo that was shot.
Phil wasn't kidding here. We would definitely like an application that had the speed of ACDSee and the captioning features of MediaGrid. Throw in some good editing features and raw support and you have yourself a great product.
If anyone is serious in terms of skills and desire to do this kind of work, drop me a note and we can talk about specifications.
You have a journal online at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp. What kind of an impact has your journal had on your interactions with the public? What thoughts do you have regarding online journals (aka weblogs) in general?
This is an interesting news piece. It was even more interesting when I read about it this morning in Tuesday's New York Times Science Section in an article by Chris Dixon. Was this submission an original idea or just inspired by the NY Times article?
Color software availability wasn't the point of Galbraith's article. The article was more of a discussion of Apple versus MS performance on similar speed hardware. The results were simple: Apple hardware does not perform as quickly as MS hardware with similar software tasks. For pro photographers these are really important software tasks, and the amount of time adds up.
That being said, you can read more of the discussions on Galbraith's site for some interesting back-and-forth regarding color management. Windows has been gaining quite a bit of ground in color management. For most people, I would say that color management software between Apple and Microsoft products are equivalent. On the hardware side, there is quite a bit of color calibration equipment now available for both Macintosh and Windows.
I'm curious how many magazine and newspaper editors you have seen that are really judging color on screen. In my experience, most editorial folks have no good color viewing conditions in their personal offices, let alone even minimally calibrated monitors. If you look at an image on a screen in a very brightly lit office with a three year old 20" monitor while wearing a heavily saturated shirt, it really doesn't matter if you are on an Apple or MS machine--your color judgement will be impaired. In contrast, our imaging department has color-controlled lighting booth and regularly calibrates (and replaces) their monitors.
Professionals do not always go over their images on Macs. I work at a large national weekly sports magazine. All of our photo editors edit images on Windows machines. Of our 15 photographers, around half use Macs and the rest use Windows. Our imaging department uses macs for production work partially due to page design software requirements. Similarly, our editorial department also uses macs because of other software requirements. Because of software requirements, all of our Macs currently run MacOS 9, not MacOS X. (Let's not even get into the server side.)
I went to the Fiesta Bowl a week ago or so. Of the photographers I saw in the press tent, around half were using Macs and half were using PCs running Windows.
So do "professionals always go over their images on a mac, just to see if it looks 'right'"? No, not really. Are there other advantages to running on Apple hardware and software rather than using WIndows and Intel hardware and software? It is definitely a topic worth debating. Galbraith has done a great job of stimulating discussion.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Windows bigot. (The Unix people call me a Windows bigot. The Windows people call me a Unix bigot. No one really wants to keep running MacOS 9.) However, I hate it when assertions are made regarding platforms that simply aren't true.
aussersterne is correct for the most part. The Canon 1Ds is an amazing camera--its output looks like that of a 2 1/4 camera.
If you want to shoot really high quality images, make sure you shoot raw files. You can make a lot more color adjustments with raw files than with JPEGs. It also allows you to fix problems with the original images that you cannot do with JPEGs, like adjust the whitepoint.
You can still shoot more frames per second without stopping on a film camera, but this gap is closing quickly. For most people, this doesn't really matter, but it matter quite a bit in sports photography.
If you switch entirely from film to digital photography, you save a lot of money and time on film and processing.
As for Foveon, they have been promising great new digital cameras for several years now. There is only one consumer digital camera on the market using Foveon technology, and information about it is not available on Sigma's US web site. Foveon does not appear to have any pro cameras on the market right now.
I'm not sure that the article in question is really stating that EA is going to "surpass" Disney. It simply seems to say that EA wants to mimic Disney in terms of growth and management.
On a slightly different topic, I don't think it is necessarily accurate to call Disney the "#1 media company." There are good arguments that other companies, like AOL Time Warner, are the "#1 media company." Of course, it really depends on your criteria.
I wish the article had given some more concrete examples rather than just quoting a few disconentented webloggers. I use Google many times on a daily basis and have found no change in the quality of their results. I guess some people are just fixated on their own ranking rather than the quality of the first results. At least the article touched on that: "I was beating out Mark Twain before -- that's probably not fair."
I bought 18 just as it came out. Personally, while I like it, I don't think it is as good as Play. In addition, it certainly has not has as much marketing as Play did. I would recommend Play to friends if they never heard Moby, not 18. Perhaps this sort of behavior could account for declining sales.
For what it's worth, technology is one of the reasons why I was exposed to Moby. I bought Play after hearing it on my boss's computer. She was listening to her MP3 copy of the CD she bought.
No one should be surprised by the change in patent information. Look at the membership structure of the W3C. We can compare it to the membership structure of the IETF, a group I think everyone would consider open and "free."
First, in the W3C, membership is only offered to organizations. In the IETF, all individuals can participate in the Working Groups; any individual can generate a RFC.
Second, in the W3C, membership costs either $5000 or $50,000. IETF membership is free. It does cost money to attend an IETF meeting, but that cost is around $500; well within the reach of any serious developer.
Control of working groups in the IETF (and the IESG) is based on technical ability or desire. In theory, you don't really have to be a prior participant in the IETF to run a working group. (But it helps. A lot.) In the W3C, you must be a member (paying $5000 or $50,000), in order to run a WG.
In the IETF, decisions are made on rough consensus. In the W3C, decisions are also made based on consensus with elaborate procedural systems. It's interesting to compare and contrast the amount of procedural information on the W3C's web site versus the IETF's web site.
In general, all IETF working material is open and accessible to the public. You can read RFCs as they are being written; you can read, post, and comment on IETF mailing lists. W3C working material is not open to the public.
Companies may ask if the IETF is unfriendly towards business. I do not think this is the case. Look at Cisco. Cisco has certainly participated in the IETF; they are very involved in the development of several IETF standards. However, Cisco still has the ability to develop their own proprietary protocols and still has the ability to make secret agreements with other companies.
In short, membership in the W3C has always been primarily by businesses. In fact, there is no way for an individual to join the W3C. Anyone surprised by an extreme pro-business slant of the W3C is not really familiar with the W3C's nature.
[You might wonder why companies don't control the IETF as much as they control the W3C. My theory is that the W3C works on items much more relevant to the end user. A mass-market consumer is much more amazed by SVG than they are by packet switching. Companies have a strong interest in controlling what the mass-market consumer sees.]
One of the interesting things I've noticed about CS is where various programs began. At Carnegie Mellon University, where I went to school, CS developed as an offshoot of the Math program. At other schools, CS developed as an offshoot of the EE program. (Both of these are gross oversimplifications and may be inaccurate, but please bear with me.) As a result, programs grow with a different foci; these differences have affected the curriculum.
At schools where the CS program developed as part of an Engineering curriculum, the CS focus has been on the architectural and EE aspects of CS, rather than on the algorithms. At these sorts of schools, you can expect to see classes taught in lower-level languages like C and assembly. At schools where the CS program developed as part of the Math curriculum, the CS focus is more on algorithms and theory. At these schools, you see more classes in higher-level languages like Scheme, Lisp, and SML.
Which method is "right?" I think it depends on the class. For example, it would not make a ton of sense to teach an operating systems class in a language other than C. The best language for a graphics class is probably C++. SML is probably a suitable language for a class in computer languages, and Scheme or Lisp is probably a good language for a data structures class. Personally, I find Pascal and Java good languages for Intro CS classes. For someone just getting started with computers not in a classroom situation, an interpreted language like Basic is nice because of its shallow learning curve.
Ultimately, I consider the choice of language in CS to be a moot issue. I feel that CS and programming are two different things. Programming is a craft and important in it's own right, but with respect to computer science, programming languages are tools, not goals.
While MS does have a lot of influence in computer markets, it is foolish at best to assume that they are more powerful than the government. In fact, as companies go, there are certainly other companies that have more power and influence.
In computing, Microsoft certainly has some hefty competitors. Take IBM. While its market cap of ~$200B is less than Microsoft's market cap of ~$378B, it continues to dominate large sectors of computing. And at $21B, its revenues are certainly larger than Micorosft's revenues of $18B.
Looking outside of Microsoft, we can see that other companies are not to be ignored. GM, with a market cap of $32B and revenues of $42B, and Exxon Mobil, with a market cap of $306B and revenues of $57B, have a much larger day-to-day effect on people's lives than Microsoft.
Microsoft is just a company and not a world domination plot. IBM, GM, and Exxon Mobil are just companies and not world domination plots. They do bad things and they do good things. Microsoft is not the worst evil in the world by far.
JonKatz's diatribe is ranting and lacking substance.
I'm curious how xMach compares to Mach 3.0 from CMU. Is there any relation at all besides sharing a microkernel architecture and the word "Mach?" Does anyone have a summary of the interesting features of xMach? Is this doomed to be yet another operating system?
At the very least, JoeShmoe's approach seems unethical. I think it could even be considered fraud.
Basically, JoeShmoe was under contract to do a job for a company. In my opinion, while a company does not have a right to an employee's thoughts and ideas, they do have a right to get honest answers and ethical behavior. They also have a right to know when they are paying an employee twice for the same work. When asked a straightforward question, JoeShmoe chose to delude the company into thinking that they were getting a third party involved, when in reality they were double paying JoeShmoe.
I'm curious if JoeShmoe thought his behaviour was ethical. If he does, why did he bother using a pseudonym to perform business?
Personally, I would hate to be working with JoeShmoe on a professional basis. His actions seem duplicitous.
There has been some discussion about using nice monitors to get good
color calibration. Unfortunately, good monitors are not the only
issue. A good monitor may produce more precise color for a longer
amount of time, but it may not be accurate. (Very few monitors are
self-calibrating.) The idea behind color calibration is produce color
that is both accurate and precise across a variety of devices.
The idea behind color profiling is that each device you use, input
or output, has a profile. This profile allows you to take an image
from the device specific color space to a neutral color space, such as
XYZ or CIE Lab. Some devices come with profiles from the
manufacturer, but if you want to get serious about color profiling,
you must create your own profile.
One way to create a profile for a monitor is to buy a program that
profiles your monitor using a colorimeter that you attach to your
screen. For a printer, you can print out a series of color swatches
and then scan in all of the color swatches with a colorimeter. (In
short, a colorimeter is a very accurate color scanner.)
For example, say your monitor always has a bluish tint. When you
profile your monitor, the colorimeter will "see" that more blue is
always coming out of your monitor. The ICC profile that gets
generated will have values that de-emphasize blue. Thus, when you
install your ICC profile on Windows 98/2K or MacOS, the operating
system will apply this profile to all images and colors generated from
the screen and a more accurate color will be generated.
Printers are also interesting with respect to ICC profiles. Color
printers are generally CMYK devices--not RGB devices. CMYK stands for
the ink colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK. ICC profiles for
printers will convert to and from CMYK colors.
Color can be a tricky issue--I'm really glossing over a lot of
important details. If people are interested in this issue, then can
send me mail and I will try to dig up a reference or two.
Of course, what would a Slashdot posting be without some
unsolicited advice? Most monitors come from the shop with the
brightness all the way up and the color temperature at 9000 degrees
Kelvin. This "looks good" the same way loud music "sounds better."
Set your monitor to 6500 Kelvin or 5000 Kelvin and turn down the
brightness significantly. Your monitor may seem more brown or yellow,
but in reality it is a more neutral white. After time, your eyes will
adjust to the newer whites and you will be happier. Also, if you turn
down the brightness on your monitor, it will last longer!
Slashdot Mirror
1) If you are working in sRGB you have constrained yourself to a very small gamut. Yes, it looks better on the screen, but it will look clipped and posterized in print. 2) TIFF is not a good archival format. But if you work in JPEG, you end up getting a degraded image. Every time you close and reopen the image you are recompressing the file. With a TIFF, this is not a problem since the compression is lossless. Since JPEG is lossy, opening and resaving the file degrades the image. 3) You are correct in saying that CMYK is not device independent. However, most folks know the kind of press they are using. That being said, working in RGB is a much better call--you can always convert to CMYK at the end of the process.
Atario, you are mistaken about the use of the RAW extension.
Canon pro cameras store the raw captures with filenames of the form *.TIF, *.CRW, and *.CR2. The TIF file is actually a real, valid TIFF file. There is a thumbnail image stored in the TIFF, as well as the full raw data. CRW and CR2 files are proprietary to Canon.
Nikon pro cameras store the raw captures with filenames of the form *.NEF. These files are also real, valid TIFF files. Again, there is a thumbnail image stored in the TIFF, as well as the full raw data.
Don't believe me about the TIFF files? Get a couple and open them with tiffinfo from the libtiff package. You will get error messages like:
You might wonder why RAW is generally capitalized. Beats me. It's not an acronym, and it's not a file extension used by most digital cameras. But your description of the "previously established use" of the RAW extension is bogus. There are at least 10 different file formats that use the RAW extension. (See File Extension Source.)
In addition, your original suggestion regarding PNG was not well thought out. Both the Canon and Nikon raw formats use compression.
Now, you could consider converting all of the raw camera files to 48-bit PNG images, but you would lose some data, and the tools to manipulate the PNGs aren't as good as some of the tools to manipulate the RAW images.
It's a bit ironic that you are lecturing someone on taking time "to think about the subject" before flaming them. Personally, I don't think your initial post showed common sense.
Your idea of grouping the photos by play is interesting. Getting the play-by-play data is harder than you might think, but not impossible. Maybe I'll try to implement something like this for the Final Four.
Just to make matters more confusing, the NEF and TIF files created by the Nikon and Canon cameras are actually stored as TIFFs. But the raw data is stored in one of the TIFF segments. The CR2 and CRW files from the newer Canon cameras are not TIFFs.
By the end of the night, not counting the information we transmitted to New York, we had at least four copies of the data on various machines and hard drives.
Unfortunately, take a look at that file name. The Canon files repeat every 10,000 images. If we don't rename the files, we eventually end up with multiple images for the same filename. This is unfortunate. However, it is a heck of a lot better than the Nikon scheme.
A single image taken on any Nikon pro camera has the file name of DSC_0001.JPG and DSC_0001.NEF. This means that when you put the files in the same folder, they end up overwriting each other. This is unfortunate. On the newest camera (D2H), they added support for setting an EXIF field to identify the photographer. This means I can figure out who shot those photos as well. You cannot do this with the D1X or D1H.
So in all cases, we really want to rename the files.
We do keep the date information. Unfortunately, it is not always set correctly. But even if the date were set correctly, we still get the files out of order; we just get bags of digital cards as the game progresses. We would have to delay the edit of the files if we wanted to rename the files based on time.
But let's pretend ACDSee did sort the images by time. This is actually not really what the editor wants. Keep in mind we have 11 photographers shooting at once. The editor wants to be able to see the same sequence from the same photographer before seeing the other photos. In other words, if we have photographers A, B, C, and D, we want the order of photos for a specific play to be AAAAABBBBBCCCCCDDDDD, not ABCDABCDABCDABCD.
We used to have an entire barcode system to track every roll of film as it was processed. After the film dried, it was mounted in slide mounts (even if it was color neg.) and then edited. It used to take 10-15 people to handle the film and four editors to do the edit. Then, we had to have two people to scan the images. Finally, at the end of the game, we only ended up with several hundred images rather than every photo that was shot.
No. :-)
If anyone is serious in terms of skills and desire to do this kind of work, drop me a note and we can talk about specifications.
Actually, we use nice Ultra 160 SCSI Seagate drives. Our editor has high expectations. :-)
You have a journal online at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp. What kind of an impact has your journal had on your interactions with the public? What thoughts do you have regarding online journals (aka weblogs) in general?
This is an interesting news piece. It was even more interesting when I read about it this morning in Tuesday's New York Times Science Section in an article by Chris Dixon. Was this submission an original idea or just inspired by the NY Times article?
That being said, you can read more of the discussions on Galbraith's site for some interesting back-and-forth regarding color management. Windows has been gaining quite a bit of ground in color management. For most people, I would say that color management software between Apple and Microsoft products are equivalent. On the hardware side, there is quite a bit of color calibration equipment now available for both Macintosh and Windows.
I'm curious how many magazine and newspaper editors you have seen that are really judging color on screen. In my experience, most editorial folks have no good color viewing conditions in their personal offices, let alone even minimally calibrated monitors. If you look at an image on a screen in a very brightly lit office with a three year old 20" monitor while wearing a heavily saturated shirt, it really doesn't matter if you are on an Apple or MS machine--your color judgement will be impaired. In contrast, our imaging department has color-controlled lighting booth and regularly calibrates (and replaces) their monitors.
Professionals do not always go over their images on Macs. I work at a large national weekly sports magazine. All of our photo editors edit images on Windows machines. Of our 15 photographers, around half use Macs and the rest use Windows. Our imaging department uses macs for production work partially due to page design software requirements. Similarly, our editorial department also uses macs because of other software requirements. Because of software requirements, all of our Macs currently run MacOS 9, not MacOS X. (Let's not even get into the server side.)
I went to the Fiesta Bowl a week ago or so. Of the photographers I saw in the press tent, around half were using Macs and half were using PCs running Windows.
So do "professionals always go over their images on a mac, just to see if it looks 'right'"? No, not really. Are there other advantages to running on Apple hardware and software rather than using WIndows and Intel hardware and software? It is definitely a topic worth debating. Galbraith has done a great job of stimulating discussion.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Windows bigot. (The Unix people call me a Windows bigot. The Windows people call me a Unix bigot. No one really wants to keep running MacOS 9.) However, I hate it when assertions are made regarding platforms that simply aren't true.
aussersterne is correct for the most part. The Canon 1Ds is an amazing camera--its output looks like that of a 2 1/4 camera. If you want to shoot really high quality images, make sure you shoot raw files. You can make a lot more color adjustments with raw files than with JPEGs. It also allows you to fix problems with the original images that you cannot do with JPEGs, like adjust the whitepoint. You can still shoot more frames per second without stopping on a film camera, but this gap is closing quickly. For most people, this doesn't really matter, but it matter quite a bit in sports photography. If you switch entirely from film to digital photography, you save a lot of money and time on film and processing. As for Foveon, they have been promising great new digital cameras for several years now. There is only one consumer digital camera on the market using Foveon technology, and information about it is not available on Sigma's US web site. Foveon does not appear to have any pro cameras on the market right now.
On a slightly different topic, I don't think it is necessarily accurate to call Disney the "#1 media company." There are good arguments that other companies, like AOL Time Warner, are the "#1 media company." Of course, it really depends on your criteria.
When major news events occur, CNN will shut off banner ads on its home page in order to speed up page loading times.
I wish the article had given some more concrete examples rather than just quoting a few disconentented webloggers. I use Google many times on a daily basis and have found no change in the quality of their results. I guess some people are just fixated on their own ranking rather than the quality of the first results. At least the article touched on that: "I was beating out Mark Twain before -- that's probably not fair."
For what it's worth, technology is one of the reasons why I was exposed to Moby. I bought Play after hearing it on my boss's computer. She was listening to her MP3 copy of the CD she bought.
No one should be surprised by the change in patent information. Look at the membership structure of the W3C. We can compare it to the membership structure of the IETF, a group I think everyone would consider open and "free."
First, in the W3C, membership is only offered to organizations. In the IETF, all individuals can participate in the Working Groups; any individual can generate a RFC.
Second, in the W3C, membership costs either $5000 or $50,000. IETF membership is free. It does cost money to attend an IETF meeting, but that cost is around $500; well within the reach of any serious developer.
Control of working groups in the IETF (and the IESG) is based on technical ability or desire. In theory, you don't really have to be a prior participant in the IETF to run a working group. (But it helps. A lot.) In the W3C, you must be a member (paying $5000 or $50,000), in order to run a WG.
In the IETF, decisions are made on rough consensus. In the W3C, decisions are also made based on consensus with elaborate procedural systems. It's interesting to compare and contrast the amount of procedural information on the W3C's web site versus the IETF's web site.
In general, all IETF working material is open and accessible to the public. You can read RFCs as they are being written; you can read, post, and comment on IETF mailing lists. W3C working material is not open to the public.
Companies may ask if the IETF is unfriendly towards business. I do not think this is the case. Look at Cisco. Cisco has certainly participated in the IETF; they are very involved in the development of several IETF standards. However, Cisco still has the ability to develop their own proprietary protocols and still has the ability to make secret agreements with other companies.
In short, membership in the W3C has always been primarily by businesses. In fact, there is no way for an individual to join the W3C. Anyone surprised by an extreme pro-business slant of the W3C is not really familiar with the W3C's nature.
[You might wonder why companies don't control the IETF as much as they control the W3C. My theory is that the W3C works on items much more relevant to the end user. A mass-market consumer is much more amazed by SVG than they are by packet switching. Companies have a strong interest in controlling what the mass-market consumer sees.]
(Refs: W3C Membership, IETF Web site)
One of the interesting things I've noticed about CS is where various programs began. At Carnegie Mellon University, where I went to school, CS developed as an offshoot of the Math program. At other schools, CS developed as an offshoot of the EE program. (Both of these are gross oversimplifications and may be inaccurate, but please bear with me.) As a result, programs grow with a different foci; these differences have affected the curriculum.
At schools where the CS program developed as part of an Engineering curriculum, the CS focus has been on the architectural and EE aspects of CS, rather than on the algorithms. At these sorts of schools, you can expect to see classes taught in lower-level languages like C and assembly. At schools where the CS program developed as part of the Math curriculum, the CS focus is more on algorithms and theory. At these schools, you see more classes in higher-level languages like Scheme, Lisp, and SML.
Which method is "right?" I think it depends on the class. For example, it would not make a ton of sense to teach an operating systems class in a language other than C. The best language for a graphics class is probably C++. SML is probably a suitable language for a class in computer languages, and Scheme or Lisp is probably a good language for a data structures class. Personally, I find Pascal and Java good languages for Intro CS classes. For someone just getting started with computers not in a classroom situation, an interpreted language like Basic is nice because of its shallow learning curve.
Ultimately, I consider the choice of language in CS to be a moot issue. I feel that CS and programming are two different things. Programming is a craft and important in it's own right, but with respect to computer science, programming languages are tools, not goals.
While MS does have a lot of influence in computer markets, it is foolish at best to assume that they are more powerful than the government. In fact, as companies go, there are certainly other companies that have more power and influence.
In computing, Microsoft certainly has some hefty competitors. Take IBM. While its market cap of ~$200B is less than Microsoft's market cap of ~$378B, it continues to dominate large sectors of computing. And at $21B, its revenues are certainly larger than Micorosft's revenues of $18B.
Looking outside of Microsoft, we can see that other companies are not to be ignored. GM, with a market cap of $32B and revenues of $42B, and Exxon Mobil, with a market cap of $306B and revenues of $57B, have a much larger day-to-day effect on people's lives than Microsoft.
Microsoft is just a company and not a world domination plot. IBM, GM, and Exxon Mobil are just companies and not world domination plots. They do bad things and they do good things. Microsoft is not the worst evil in the world by far.
JonKatz's diatribe is ranting and lacking substance.
I'm curious how xMach compares to Mach 3.0 from CMU. Is there any relation at all besides sharing a microkernel architecture and the word "Mach?" Does anyone have a summary of the interesting features of xMach? Is this doomed to be yet another operating system?
Basically, JoeShmoe was under contract to do a job for a company. In my opinion, while a company does not have a right to an employee's thoughts and ideas, they do have a right to get honest answers and ethical behavior. They also have a right to know when they are paying an employee twice for the same work. When asked a straightforward question, JoeShmoe chose to delude the company into thinking that they were getting a third party involved, when in reality they were double paying JoeShmoe.
I'm curious if JoeShmoe thought his behaviour was ethical. If he does, why did he bother using a pseudonym to perform business?
Personally, I would hate to be working with JoeShmoe on a professional basis. His actions seem duplicitous.
The idea behind color profiling is that each device you use, input or output, has a profile. This profile allows you to take an image from the device specific color space to a neutral color space, such as XYZ or CIE Lab. Some devices come with profiles from the manufacturer, but if you want to get serious about color profiling, you must create your own profile.
One way to create a profile for a monitor is to buy a program that profiles your monitor using a colorimeter that you attach to your screen. For a printer, you can print out a series of color swatches and then scan in all of the color swatches with a colorimeter. (In short, a colorimeter is a very accurate color scanner.)
For example, say your monitor always has a bluish tint. When you profile your monitor, the colorimeter will "see" that more blue is always coming out of your monitor. The ICC profile that gets generated will have values that de-emphasize blue. Thus, when you install your ICC profile on Windows 98/2K or MacOS, the operating system will apply this profile to all images and colors generated from the screen and a more accurate color will be generated.
Printers are also interesting with respect to ICC profiles. Color printers are generally CMYK devices--not RGB devices. CMYK stands for the ink colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK. ICC profiles for printers will convert to and from CMYK colors.
Color can be a tricky issue--I'm really glossing over a lot of important details. If people are interested in this issue, then can send me mail and I will try to dig up a reference or two.
Of course, what would a Slashdot posting be without some unsolicited advice? Most monitors come from the shop with the brightness all the way up and the color temperature at 9000 degrees Kelvin. This "looks good" the same way loud music "sounds better." Set your monitor to 6500 Kelvin or 5000 Kelvin and turn down the brightness significantly. Your monitor may seem more brown or yellow, but in reality it is a more neutral white. After time, your eyes will adjust to the newer whites and you will be happier. Also, if you turn down the brightness on your monitor, it will last longer!
CMYK is not a subset of RGB _and_ RGB is not a subset of CMYK.