The OLED flex demo video shows at least two dead pixel rows, and the display doesn't even flex all that much, carefully bending in only one direction. This is very similar performance to "flexible OLED" demos we've seen for the past five years: The tech is so far away from commercial reality it's hardly worth demo'ing on a tradeshow alongside with commercially available tech.
With Bluetooth or IrDA, you can transfer a vcard record directly from device to device, requiring no active internet connection, and you've been able to do this for the past umpteen years.
With QR codes, you can snap a vcard off someone else's screen (or business card, or poor photocopy or fax of same) and add it to your address book, requiring no active internet connection, and without the transaction being recorded anywhere outside your adddress book.
With Microsoft tag, a person can, using an internet connection and specially licensed software, rent a tag code in the microsoft namespace, and upload their vcard for hosting with microsoft, or a microsoft affiliated service partner on commercial terms designed to maximize the data re-sale worth in correlation with aggregate usage tracking statistics. You can then snap a photo of the presented tag and have your individualized tag parsing software connect to the microsoft service (using an active internet connection) and retrieve the tag referenced vcard from the hosting service, which along with Microsoft registers the marketable fact of the address book connection between you and the other person.
Cute example, but your scenario would in fact not be a problem. Since these dumb microsoft tag things are simply GUIDs indexing resources in a Microsoft managed namespace, Microsoft has the power to change or delete their corresponding payloads at any time.
There's bound to be all kinds of interesting fail situations on a monopolistic parsing service:
SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (service busy)
SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (anonymous access prohibited)
SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (invalid or expired client certificate)
SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (for reasons that shall remain forever unknown to you, we've decided not to let your client software query our service to retrieve tag payloads)
SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag expired)
SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag payload deleted for TOS violation)
SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag provider account suspended)
SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag payload not available in your country or region)
SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag payload not available to individuals in your worthless demographic)
etc, etc
Visually I think the garish colors of these microsoft codes are going to be hard to incorporate in many graphics designs. QR codes may look busy but given their longtime adoption in Japan they have become iconic and accepted in many contexts. At least QR codes are monochrome - goes with pretty near everything.
It is true that huge binary QR payloads makes for big tags, but that's also a rare application. QR codes are more often used for simply encoding URLs and email addresses, which is fine - achieves what these microsoft tags do, in roughly the same space, while remaining independent on any sole service provider acting as gate keeper for delivering the rereferenced payload, and the tag can be printed in monochrome on darn near everything.
When QR encoded URLs reference server-hosted payloads, the user has the power to choose how and on which terms the client technology parses and retrieves the referenced payload. The QR parser can for example decode a human-readable URL which can be manually transcribed to any web browser.
Aside from these observations, I think Microsoft tags would be almost acceptable if part of the encoded tag data was a URL for the payload decoding service, so as to permit non-microsoft entities to occupy the gatekeeper position. But overall, the net impression is that the Microsoft Tag is too proprietary, not robust enough, and of too little use to be considered a reasonable alternative to QR codes or other forms of payload-in-the-code tags.
Nikola Tesla demonstrated wirelessly powered fluorescent lights more than 100 years ago.
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see practical applications and commercial implementations for this old idea, and hopefully help us reduce cable clutter a bit. I just hope that accidentally resonant circuitry in the vicinity of transmitters won't suddenly fry itself and cause random fires.
Watching the roadkill feeding magpies cooly walk around just behind the white road lines, you can tell they have worked out a pretty solid theory for how cars move and that they understand how the cars are dangerous hazards but nevertheless predictable and avoidable. Other birds simply take flight in panic and some don't even recognize cars as a hazard - dumb turkeys and pheasants dumbly just obliviously waddle out in traffic.
In Tokyo crows - corvid relatives of magpies - have been observed figuring out how to exploit the traffic signal cycles. The crows drop nuts in the path of the cars, in the middle of the pedestrian crossings, and patiently sit overhead waiting for the light to change so they can go down and have a look and pick up the nuts crushed by the car tires. Maybe these crows developed a theory of cars as practical and dependable "thing crushers" - producing crispy roadkill and other delicious crush jobs.
Impressive breakthrough? If the article reporting is accurate, they have achieved very little. They may have over-simplified the setup in the article, but from what they write, it seems the silly little robot and its ultrasound proximity detector could be easily substituted with a pushbutton and a LED indicating that the neuron fires when stimulated by the ignal from the pushbutton. Big whoop de do. I simply don't see how this is significant.
Give the neural mesh something to process other than just a meaningless blip. Provide some context. Connect all the (8?) ultrasound sensors individually to different points in the mesh, and let the mesh control the robot motors directly, with some form of feedback that corresponds to the motion and an impact sensor that responds to actually hitting the wall by temporarily shutting down the motor system and triggering still other neurons to indicate an error state. Run in that configuration for a while and see what happens. Divorced from a proper brain context I don't know if it would be possible for the mesh to achieve any sort of motivation or goal seeking behavior, though.
Fair enough. So in order for this to work an attacker would have needed to subvert not just one tower but two towers in a row, and the towers must be situated such that the last un-subverted tower in line of the signal would not pick up on the failure of the first subverted tower to react to the obviously wrongly relayed message from the second corrupted tower.
Your telescope is trained at the next semaphore tower, yes. But can you tell whether the operator sitting hidden beneath and pulling the levers is the person it is supposed to be, or perhaps some impostor who by use of force or bribery took over the controls? Isn't this a plausible injection vector for a man in the middle attack?
Nikon is increasingly lagging behind Canon in terms of innovation. Just look at their respective current DSLR offerings, and Canon's stuff is better by any technical definition. Nikon's newest DSLR offerings are marginal improvements and little evidence of real innovation.
I see this as a clear indication that Nikon is top-heavy and full of staunch conservative bureaucrats unable to move with the times. Management sits in a high castle out of touch. The badly translated but clearly terse verbiage used in this press release further demonstrates Nikon management's mode of thinking sounding similar to what IBM's board was capable of in the 1970s.
The very notion of "bona fide" software developers is pretty ugly and necessarily implies that some software developers aren't good enough to be working with Nikon. While I'm not particularly worried about open source in this regard - although unlikely, Nikon could just make binary libraries and not share their proprietary algorithms.
No, my concern is that "non bona fide" developers likely include independent raw CCD photo processing software vendors like those making Bibble, Pixmantec Raw Shooter Essentials, D1SLR and other similar software packages. These applications are designed to decode the raw CCD data from digital cameras using algorithms and color science developed by their respective vendors independently of Nikon. With varied results, but in many cases producing better or at least equal results to Nikon's very expensive Nikon Capture software which is particularly awful in terms of workflow and cost.
Nikon Capture feels similar to Sony's proprietary software in terms of stability and design clarity. These japanese giants produce an incredibly poor grade of consumer software, light years behind the technical quality of their hardware and so obviously I'm interested in having 3rd party software support for their very good hardware.
The "official" Nikon mesage is that these measures exist to protect the quality of the decoded images. That's very nice of them. But the pictures belongs to the photographers and photographers should be free to choose the software they wish to use for processing those images even if that means the colors are decoded differently from what Nikon's own best lab technicians have come up with.
Just as an example, CaptureOne is one Nikon compatible application - it does a superior job of handling moire CCD color noise on Nikon D1x, far surpassing Nikon Capture. Bibble handles colors on Nikon D1 subjectively better than Nikon Capture. Locking out these competing products is simply an awful measure that will not benefit consumers at all.
There can be only one explanation for Nikon's decision, and that is to produce more orders for Nikon Capture and license revenues from libraries included in commercial products from vendors choosing to use Nikon's official way of doing things. That's purely selfish of Nikonand serves consumers interest in no way!
I don't know how those libraries work, but from this press release I'd at least assume that they essentially output RGB data processed the Nikon Way, so you'd have pretty much the same result as using Nikon Capture, even if the library is embedded in a different program. That just means you won't be getting a second opinion and photographers using Nikon hardware won't be enjoying much creative freedom.
Charbax' Rube Goldbergesque headcam cyber setup was pretty interesting - Terry Gilliam would surely approve of all the visible wiring - reminds me of early designs from Steve Mann. Now Charbax only needs to find a way to broadcast live! Thanks for sharing these.
I know what you mean. Golden times. Also there were many images converted from the nice Deluxe Paint IFF images on the Amiga.
A few sites on the net appears to collect these old files. I have a modest archive with the entire contents of some BBS image folders from 1989 to 1990. Try searching for yrose.gif, clown.gif, cheetah.gif, mouse.gif - they sometimes yield a cache of these things.
The image was definitely originally a GIF, evident from the dithering and banding artefacts.
JPEG macroblocks and artefacts were pretty obvious on the lo-res CRTs used at the time, so GIF was favored as the 'sharp' format used for illustrations and things not needing a lot of colors. Really not all that different from today's situation 15 years later.
JPEG = pr0n was pretty much the going assumption at the time, however, and GIF was almost 5 years old, well known from Compuserve and had a slightly better reputation at the time TBL was futzing with his novel web surfing thing which may have been the reason they focused on that format.
Another important issue was limited true color support on 8-bit terminals used on universities at the time (truecolor not common until several more years in the future)
The first several years I only saw NCSA MOSAIC in 8-bit with lots of dithering on JPEGs. I hated the X terminal way of handling 8-bit dithering with windows flickering in abnormal random colors when the mouse cursor hovered over them.
However, if you had a page with just one graphic with 128 colors or less, Mosaic had a way to adapt the application palette to match the image so it looked fine without dithering.
You're completely mistaken. The panel does not in any way darken light transmitted through the device. There's no contrast, nothing that would cause the solid blacks so fraudulently suggested by the article images.
The panel re-transmits light coming in from the projector angle, that's about all it does. Light from other directions pass through. There's presumably an anti-reflective coating reducing glare.
The device resembles nothing so much as a large free-standing pane of glass. You can see right through it. If you're displaying black video then there's no evidence that it's supposed to be a display device: Certainly no black rectangle hovers in mid-air suggesting the blackness of the video. When an image is showing, it's simply equivalent to the photoshop 'screen' layer composite method - a ghostly washed out apparation with no contrast.
The image has no opacity.
It's pretty much the crappiest looking image you'll ever get from a rear projection display except possibly an antique big box CRT type a decade overdue for a convergence tune-up.
As relevant and useful as Swatch Internet Time.
on
New Standard Keyboard
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· Score: 1
There exist absolutely no advantage to an alphabetical layout. It is insulting to suggest that the needs of beginner 'hunt and peck' typists in any way should have design relevance for a high speed text input device. The colors and similar design trappings have no application for skilled typists looking only on the screen.
DVORAK is a logical design with a layout derived from real-world statistical language analysis producing a very fast and efficient keyboard layout. QWERTY is good enough for most people, however.
Learn to live with it. We'll almost certainly only see more lights from future devices and gadgets. Besides indicating the standby state of a device, they'll become distinct, decorative features, integral to the industrial design.
Soon OLEDs will change the way our devices look to the point where a display or indicator need not be a point source or a recessed rectangle but instead detailed, luminescent, fludily animated color graphics that can be made to appear to emit from the very surface of the devices.
These types of designs will be blue LEDs of the late 00's and one can only shudder at the thought of the types of designs gamers and nerds would apply to their already vividly glowing PCs.
At night my entire apartment is softly aglow in many soft pastels at least twenty, sometimes thirty LEDs blinking, pulsing or glowing steady. I like that I don't need to turn on bright light to find my way to the bathroom at night. Only once has the light bothered me, so I put on a pair of sleep shades I kept from a Virgin Atlantic flight.
Re:Anamorphic laserdisc versions?
on
Star Wars on DVD
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· Score: 1
Untrue. They were rare, but they exist. Long before DVDs came out there was CRT home theater video projection systems. On these you could easily adjust the aspect ratio of the scanned video area. Even today I use a Barco system from 1992, it runs 16:9 720p content just fine.
I have several anamorphic laserdiscs. They look okay, though colors aren't nearly as good as DVD because it's an analog y/c system as opposed to a digital 3-component system. But it's roughly the same effective resolution, and you don't have MPEG2 compression artefacts to worry about.
If I did have access to an anamorphic CAV Star Wars LD set, it would be relatively simple to patch in the "good" scenes over a DVD rip from the new release.
I have a fairly nice THX laserdisc set of the original trilogy. The only problem is that they're NTSC widescreen versions with only slightly more than 200 picture scanlines due to the crap vertical resolution of the format. Did they ever release an anamorphic widescreen version? If so, I think I have another holy grail to look for. Because I sure as shit ain't buying the latest offering from George.
If the information isn't there then it's made up
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
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· Score: 1
While I won't dispute the wider gamut of the proposed 5- or 6-component color space, the system offers few benefits to already encoded content made for viewing on a narrow-gamut RGB device.
Sony made a 4-component digital camera a while back, it had two green channels. The gamut of this camera was really nice, a baseball diamond shaped area far exceeding that the typical sRGB consumer cams.
Combine 4-component recording technology with the 6-component display technology mentioned in the article, and we should start to see some nice color. Until then, I think I'll hang on to my antique 3-tube CRT projection system.:)
I was this close to buying a top of the line Clie a year ago, but I held off when I learned that Sony had intentionally crippled the mini-PCMCIA socket on the device so that it couldn't be used for compact flash cards, which would have been an obvious application for it.
Many digital photographers such as myself have large capacity inexpensive compact flash cards, and refuse to purchase stupid memory sticks which have less storage capacity for the same money.
This was such a glaringly obvious example of Sony regarding their own interests much more than the interests of their customers, and that ultimately made me not buy the otherwise fine product. (I'll probably buy a phone-PIM-PDA-gps-mp3 thing in a year or two anyways)
The pattern of Sony's schizophrenic boardroom screwing up their own products is becoming more and more obvious. Their DVD players initially didn't play home-burned discs, and I still haven't seen a Sony DVD player supporting SVCD, MPEG4 or MP3 content.
Their camcorders and digital video recorders have hyper-sensitive macrovision detection on their video inputs, and sometimes they "detect" macrovision falsely and accordingly refuse to record from a legit source.
The worst part is this ATRAC3 nonsense. Apple is showing the way by permitting the unprotected, popular what-the-people-want mp3 format to coexist with the house DRM brand. That's respecting their users and having business smarts.
If Sony tried the same, and perhaps included mp3 playback capability on all their products alongside ATRAC[3], people would have a choice.
For all I know, ATRAC3 is a better format, but I refuse to be forced to convert it to another lossy format in order to have the "privilege" of listening to it on a portable device. They must be out of their minds.
It doesn't have to be this way. Take Phillips. They have a music catalog (substantially smaller than Sony, granted), but they have repeatedly shown themselves as acting in the interest of people, such as when they refused Audio CD logo licensing to the crippled DRM-infested discs they sell in stores these days. Philips
... just get a momitsu or kiss player or anything else with a Sigma EM85xx chip driving it. There are usually firmwares floating around, unlocking and removing the macrovision shit. This also enables the pre-scaled high-res HD and SVGA output resolutions for DVD content on those players.
Fuck hollywood. Fuck macrovision. Fuck region codes.
You want good picture, theater-like quality, at a budget. Yes? Does your home theater feature a light controlled environment? Then you should buy a cheap antique 3-tube CRT projector on the used market. These babies can be had for the price you mention. (Ten years ago when they were new, they cost $50K easy.)
CRTs provide beautiful picture, some even do true HD resolutions. All razor sharp image without pixels.
Thing is, the picture is not as bright as that provided by modern DLP or LCD projectors, which is why you need the light controlled environment.
Also, CRT projectors weigh a ton... 140 lbs and above is not unheard of, and setting them up correctly is a bit of a science project. They're certainly not the kind of theater-in-a-briefcase things you just casually take with you to parties.
But the reward is amazing picture quality for your home theater with an amazing viewing experience for not a whole lot of money. Also, there's a healthy online community of CRT enthusiasts as nerdy and helpful as HAMs and vinyl freaks.
I have a 12 year old projector which paints a lovely 140" 720p 16x9 image on the screen which has the surface area of about nine 42" plasma TVs. I paid about $500 for it including all parts and peripherals. It weighs 135 lbs and I'm going to ceiling mount it directly above my viewing position in my home theater.:}
Slashdot Mirror
The OLED flex demo video shows at least two dead pixel rows, and the display doesn't even flex all that much, carefully bending in only one direction. This is very similar performance to "flexible OLED" demos we've seen for the past five years: The tech is so far away from commercial reality it's hardly worth demo'ing on a tradeshow alongside with commercially available tech.
With Bluetooth or IrDA, you can transfer a vcard record directly from device to device, requiring no active internet connection, and you've been able to do this for the past umpteen years.
With QR codes, you can snap a vcard off someone else's screen (or business card, or poor photocopy or fax of same) and add it to your address book, requiring no active internet connection, and without the transaction being recorded anywhere outside your adddress book.
With Microsoft tag, a person can, using an internet connection and specially licensed software, rent a tag code in the microsoft namespace, and upload their vcard for hosting with microsoft, or a microsoft affiliated service partner on commercial terms designed to maximize the data re-sale worth in correlation with aggregate usage tracking statistics. You can then snap a photo of the presented tag and have your individualized tag parsing software connect to the microsoft service (using an active internet connection) and retrieve the tag referenced vcard from the hosting service, which along with Microsoft registers the marketable fact of the address book connection between you and the other person.
There's bound to be all kinds of interesting fail situations on a monopolistic parsing service: SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (service busy) SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (anonymous access prohibited) SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (invalid or expired client certificate) SERVER ERROR: Access denied for client (for reasons that shall remain forever unknown to you, we've decided not to let your client software query our service to retrieve tag payloads) SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag expired) SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag payload deleted for TOS violation) SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag provider account suspended) SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag payload not available in your country or region) SERVER ERROR: Tag code returned no payload (tag payload not available to individuals in your worthless demographic) etc, etc
Visually I think the garish colors of these microsoft codes are going to be hard to incorporate in many graphics designs. QR codes may look busy but given their longtime adoption in Japan they have become iconic and accepted in many contexts. At least QR codes are monochrome - goes with pretty near everything.
It is true that huge binary QR payloads makes for big tags, but that's also a rare application. QR codes are more often used for simply encoding URLs and email addresses, which is fine - achieves what these microsoft tags do, in roughly the same space, while remaining independent on any sole service provider acting as gate keeper for delivering the rereferenced payload, and the tag can be printed in monochrome on darn near everything.
When QR encoded URLs reference server-hosted payloads, the user has the power to choose how and on which terms the client technology parses and retrieves the referenced payload. The QR parser can for example decode a human-readable URL which can be manually transcribed to any web browser.
Aside from these observations, I think Microsoft tags would be almost acceptable if part of the encoded tag data was a URL for the payload decoding service, so as to permit non-microsoft entities to occupy the gatekeeper position. But overall, the net impression is that the Microsoft Tag is too proprietary, not robust enough, and of too little use to be considered a reasonable alternative to QR codes or other forms of payload-in-the-code tags.
Nikola Tesla demonstrated wirelessly powered fluorescent lights more than 100 years ago.
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see practical applications and commercial implementations for this old idea, and hopefully help us reduce cable clutter a bit. I just hope that accidentally resonant circuitry in the vicinity of transmitters won't suddenly fry itself and cause random fires.
Watching the roadkill feeding magpies cooly walk around just behind the white road lines, you can tell they have worked out a pretty solid theory for how cars move and that they understand how the cars are dangerous hazards but nevertheless predictable and avoidable. Other birds simply take flight in panic and some don't even recognize cars as a hazard - dumb turkeys and pheasants dumbly just obliviously waddle out in traffic.
In Tokyo crows - corvid relatives of magpies - have been observed figuring out how to exploit the traffic signal cycles. The crows drop nuts in the path of the cars, in the middle of the pedestrian crossings, and patiently sit overhead waiting for the light to change so they can go down and have a look and pick up the nuts crushed by the car tires. Maybe these crows developed a theory of cars as practical and dependable "thing crushers" - producing crispy roadkill and other delicious crush jobs.
Fascinating birds.
Impressive breakthrough? If the article reporting is accurate, they have achieved very little. They may have over-simplified the setup in the article, but from what they write, it seems the silly little robot and its ultrasound proximity detector could be easily substituted with a pushbutton and a LED indicating that the neuron fires when stimulated by the ignal from the pushbutton. Big whoop de do. I simply don't see how this is significant.
Give the neural mesh something to process other than just a meaningless blip. Provide some context. Connect all the (8?) ultrasound sensors individually to different points in the mesh, and let the mesh control the robot motors directly, with some form of feedback that corresponds to the motion and an impact sensor that responds to actually hitting the wall by temporarily shutting down the motor system and triggering still other neurons to indicate an error state. Run in that configuration for a while and see what happens. Divorced from a proper brain context I don't know if it would be possible for the mesh to achieve any sort of motivation or goal seeking behavior, though.
Fair enough. So in order for this to work an attacker would have needed to subvert not just one tower but two towers in a row, and the towers must be situated such that the last un-subverted tower in line of the signal would not pick up on the failure of the first subverted tower to react to the obviously wrongly relayed message from the second corrupted tower.
Your telescope is trained at the next semaphore tower, yes. But can you tell whether the operator sitting hidden beneath and pulling the levers is the person it is supposed to be, or perhaps some impostor who by use of force or bribery took over the controls? Isn't this a plausible injection vector for a man in the middle attack?
I hope you're being funny. In any case you're providing a brilliant illustration of the present administration's special brand of "democracy".
Nikon is increasingly lagging behind Canon in terms of innovation. Just look at their respective current DSLR offerings, and Canon's stuff is better by any technical definition. Nikon's newest DSLR offerings are marginal improvements and little evidence of real innovation.
I see this as a clear indication that Nikon is top-heavy and full of staunch conservative bureaucrats unable to move with the times. Management sits in a high castle out of touch. The badly translated but clearly terse verbiage used in this press release further demonstrates Nikon management's mode of thinking sounding similar to what IBM's board was capable of in the 1970s.
The very notion of "bona fide" software developers is pretty ugly and necessarily implies that some software developers aren't good enough to be working with Nikon. While I'm not particularly worried about open source in this regard - although unlikely, Nikon could just make binary libraries and not share their proprietary algorithms.
No, my concern is that "non bona fide" developers likely include independent raw CCD photo processing software vendors like those making Bibble, Pixmantec Raw Shooter Essentials, D1SLR and other similar software packages. These applications are designed to decode the raw CCD data from digital cameras using algorithms and color science developed by their respective vendors independently of Nikon. With varied results, but in many cases producing better or at least equal results to Nikon's very expensive Nikon Capture software which is particularly awful in terms of workflow and cost.
Nikon Capture feels similar to Sony's proprietary software in terms of stability and design clarity. These japanese giants produce an incredibly poor grade of consumer software, light years behind the technical quality of their hardware and so obviously I'm interested in having 3rd party software support for their very good hardware.
The "official" Nikon mesage is that these measures exist to protect the quality of the decoded images. That's very nice of them. But the pictures belongs to the photographers and photographers should be free to choose the software they wish to use for processing those images even if that means the colors are decoded differently from what Nikon's own best lab technicians have come up with.
Just as an example, CaptureOne is one Nikon compatible application - it does a superior job of handling moire CCD color noise on Nikon D1x, far surpassing Nikon Capture. Bibble handles colors on Nikon D1 subjectively better than Nikon Capture. Locking out these competing products is simply an awful measure that will not benefit consumers at all.
There can be only one explanation for Nikon's decision, and that is to produce more orders for Nikon Capture and license revenues from libraries included in commercial products from vendors choosing to use Nikon's official way of doing things. That's purely selfish of Nikonand serves consumers interest in no way!
I don't know how those libraries work, but from this press release I'd at least assume that they essentially output RGB data processed the Nikon Way, so you'd have pretty much the same result as using Nikon Capture, even if the library is embedded in a different program. That just means you won't be getting a second opinion and photographers using Nikon hardware won't be enjoying much creative freedom.
Charbax' Rube Goldbergesque headcam cyber setup was pretty interesting - Terry Gilliam would surely approve of all the visible wiring - reminds me of early designs from Steve Mann. Now Charbax only needs to find a way to broadcast live! Thanks for sharing these.
I know what you mean. Golden times.
Also there were many images converted from the nice Deluxe Paint IFF images on the Amiga.
A few sites on the net appears to collect these old files. I have a modest archive with the entire contents of some BBS image folders from 1989 to 1990. Try searching for yrose.gif, clown.gif, cheetah.gif, mouse.gif - they sometimes yield a cache of these things.
http://www-vms.uoregon.edu/~sergiok/GIFS/
There's one...
The image was definitely originally a GIF, evident from the dithering and banding artefacts.
JPEG macroblocks and artefacts were pretty obvious on the lo-res CRTs used at the time, so GIF was favored as the 'sharp' format used for illustrations and things not needing a lot of colors. Really not all that different from today's situation 15 years later.
JPEG = pr0n was pretty much the going assumption at the time, however, and GIF was almost 5 years old, well known from Compuserve and had a slightly better reputation at the time TBL was futzing with his novel web surfing thing which may have been the reason they focused on that format.
Another important issue was limited true color support on 8-bit terminals used on universities at the time (truecolor not common until several more years in the future)
The first several years I only saw NCSA MOSAIC in 8-bit with lots of dithering on JPEGs. I hated the X terminal way of handling 8-bit dithering with windows flickering in abnormal random colors when the mouse cursor hovered over them.
However, if you had a page with just one graphic with 128 colors or less, Mosaic had a way to adapt the application palette to match the image so it looked fine without dithering.
You're completely mistaken. The panel does not in any way darken light transmitted through the device. There's no contrast, nothing that would cause the solid blacks so fraudulently suggested by the article images.
The panel re-transmits light coming in from the projector angle, that's about all it does. Light from other directions pass through. There's presumably an anti-reflective coating reducing glare.
The device resembles nothing so much as a large free-standing pane of glass. You can see right through it. If you're displaying black video then there's no evidence that it's supposed to be a display device: Certainly no black rectangle hovers in mid-air suggesting the blackness of the video. When an image is showing, it's simply equivalent to the photoshop 'screen' layer composite method - a ghostly washed out apparation with no contrast.
The image has no opacity.
It's pretty much the crappiest looking image you'll ever get from a rear projection display except possibly an antique big box CRT type a decade overdue for a convergence tune-up.
There exist absolutely no advantage to an alphabetical layout. It is insulting to suggest that the needs of beginner 'hunt and peck' typists in any way should have design relevance for a high speed text input device. The colors and similar design trappings have no application for skilled typists looking only on the screen.
DVORAK is a logical design with a layout derived from real-world statistical language analysis producing a very fast and efficient keyboard layout. QWERTY is good enough for most people, however.
"New Standard" indeed. I hate marketing people.
Learn to live with it. We'll almost certainly only see more lights from future devices and gadgets. Besides indicating the standby state of a device, they'll become distinct, decorative features, integral to the industrial design.
Soon OLEDs will change the way our devices look to the point where a display or indicator need not be a point source or a recessed rectangle but instead detailed, luminescent, fludily animated color graphics that can be made to appear to emit from the very surface of the devices.
These types of designs will be blue LEDs of the late 00's and one can only shudder at the thought of the types of designs gamers and nerds would apply to their already vividly glowing PCs.
At night my entire apartment is softly aglow in many soft pastels at least twenty, sometimes thirty LEDs blinking, pulsing or glowing steady. I like that I don't need to turn on bright light to find my way to the bathroom at night. Only once has the light bothered me, so I put on a pair of sleep shades I kept from a Virgin Atlantic flight.
Untrue. They were rare, but they exist. Long before DVDs came out there was CRT home theater video projection systems. On these you could easily adjust the aspect ratio of the scanned video area. Even today I use a Barco system from 1992, it runs 16:9 720p content just fine.
I have several anamorphic laserdiscs. They look okay, though colors aren't nearly as good as DVD because it's an analog y/c system as opposed to a digital 3-component system. But it's roughly the same effective resolution, and you don't have MPEG2 compression artefacts to worry about.
If I did have access to an anamorphic CAV Star Wars LD set, it would be relatively simple to patch in the "good" scenes over a DVD rip from the new release.
I have a fairly nice THX laserdisc set of the original trilogy. The only problem is that they're NTSC widescreen versions with only slightly more than 200 picture scanlines due to the crap vertical resolution of the format. Did they ever release an anamorphic widescreen version? If so, I think I have another holy grail to look for. Because I sure as shit ain't buying the latest offering from George.
While I won't dispute the wider gamut of the proposed 5- or 6-component color space, the system offers few benefits to already encoded content made for viewing on a narrow-gamut RGB device.
:)
Sony made a 4-component digital camera a while back, it had two green channels. The gamut of this camera was really nice, a baseball diamond shaped area far exceeding that the typical sRGB consumer cams.
Combine 4-component recording technology with the 6-component display technology mentioned in the article, and we should start to see some nice color. Until then, I think I'll hang on to my antique 3-tube CRT projection system.
I was this close to buying a top of the line Clie a year ago, but I held off when I learned that Sony had intentionally crippled the mini-PCMCIA socket on the device so that it couldn't be used for compact flash cards, which would have been an obvious application for it.
Many digital photographers such as myself have large capacity inexpensive compact flash cards, and refuse to purchase stupid memory sticks which have less storage capacity for the same money.
This was such a glaringly obvious example of Sony regarding their own interests much more than the interests of their customers, and that ultimately made me not buy the otherwise fine product. (I'll probably buy a phone-PIM-PDA-gps-mp3 thing in a year or two anyways)
The pattern of Sony's schizophrenic boardroom screwing up their own products is becoming more and more obvious. Their DVD players initially didn't play home-burned discs, and I still haven't seen a Sony DVD player supporting SVCD, MPEG4 or MP3 content.
Their camcorders and digital video recorders have hyper-sensitive macrovision detection on their video inputs, and sometimes they "detect" macrovision falsely and accordingly refuse to record from a legit source.
The worst part is this ATRAC3 nonsense. Apple is showing the way by permitting the unprotected, popular what-the-people-want mp3 format to coexist with the house DRM brand. That's respecting their users and having business smarts.
If Sony tried the same, and perhaps included mp3 playback capability on all their products alongside ATRAC[3], people would have a choice.
For all I know, ATRAC3 is a better format, but I refuse to be forced to convert it to another lossy format in order to have the "privilege" of listening to it on a portable device. They must be out of their minds.
It doesn't have to be this way. Take Phillips. They have a music catalog (substantially smaller than Sony, granted), but they have repeatedly shown themselves as acting in the interest of people, such as when they refused Audio CD logo licensing to the crippled DRM-infested discs they sell in stores these days. Philips
Great work, detective! The boys down in the crime lab will take it from here.
... just get a momitsu or kiss player or anything else with a Sigma EM85xx chip driving it. There are usually firmwares floating around, unlocking and removing the macrovision shit. This also enables the pre-scaled high-res HD and SVGA output resolutions for DVD content on those players.
Fuck hollywood. Fuck macrovision. Fuck region codes.
You want good picture, theater-like quality, at a budget. Yes? Does your home theater feature a light controlled environment? Then you should buy a cheap antique 3-tube CRT projector on the used market. These babies can be had for the price you mention. (Ten years ago when they were new, they cost $50K easy.)
... 140 lbs and above is not unheard of, and setting them up correctly is a bit of a science project. They're certainly not the kind of theater-in-a-briefcase things you just casually take with you to parties.
:}
CRTs provide beautiful picture, some even do true HD resolutions. All razor sharp image without pixels.
Thing is, the picture is not as bright as that provided by modern DLP or LCD projectors, which is why you need the light controlled environment.
Also, CRT projectors weigh a ton
But the reward is amazing picture quality for your home theater with an amazing viewing experience for not a whole lot of money. Also, there's a healthy online community of CRT enthusiasts as nerdy and helpful as HAMs and vinyl freaks.
I have a 12 year old projector which paints a lovely 140" 720p 16x9 image on the screen which has the surface area of about nine 42" plasma TVs. I paid about $500 for it including all parts and peripherals. It weighs 135 lbs and I'm going to ceiling mount it directly above my viewing position in my home theater.
My personal mail account stats for the preceding 3 days:
970 total messages
6 of which real emails
964 spam.
My SpamAssassin proxy needs a tweak or an upgrade, it only correctly tagged 750 of the spams.
I'm a good-natured sort, but this pisses me off. If I ever meet a spammer I'll fucking kill his ass dead with a 2x4.