I don't think it was quite like that. The way I interpreted the article was that the utility was broken into two separate programs. The second one didn't get uploaded.
Anyway, I think the problem was that the utility didn't get run, and the resulting problems occurred because the filesystem didn't get cleaned up. I really doubt that NASA would be so stupid as to have the rover blindly execute whatever they sent it without some form of verification (at least a CRC32 or something).
And yes, for the last time, the DID do a test mission in the desert with a rover prototype. For the life of me, I can't find the link, but if you Google for it (I think the prototype rover was called Fido), I'm sure you'll find something.
Just because they did a test mission doesn't mean the bug would've been discovered. According to the article, most of the junk clogging up the filesystem was leftovers from software upgrades.
Actually, for any normal exposure, there's going to be overrange data. You'd have to heavily overexpose in order to crush the highlights so badly that there's no extra information in them.
And while you are correct that a 16-bit floating-point format can't hold any more data than a 16-bit integer format, that's beside the point. As you've stated, for what will eventually end up in the print (or JPEG, or whatever), about 10 bits would probably be sufficient. The rest of that 16-bit floating-point format is for storing the overrange data (and the overhead for the floating-point format).
But they aren't overkill for archival purposes. If all you're interested in is preserving a print, then yes, they probably are. But for preserving a negative, no, they're quite useful. You'd want to archive as much information on the negative as possible, even though some of it will be clipped when a print is made.
Suppose you decide at a later date that you don't like the "print" exposure values you originally chose. If you've archived your negative in a format that keeps the overrange data, it's as simple as selecting new ones and saving the "print" as a.png or.jpg or whatever. If you just kept the archive of the negative as a.png, tough. Now you have to rescan the negative.
The point of digital archiving, to me, is to keep a digital copy that is as close the the original negative as possible. This includes keeping the overrange data, at least in my mind, even if it never gets used.
No, they would not have stored each of those 100000 images in an actual rover filesystem, because the rover is not meant to hold hundreds of thousands of images, and the test cameras were probably not attached to a rover. And yes, the point was to test the cameras themselves; to see how they'd respond under different conditions.
And they did a test mission with a test rover out in the desert. Basically, the put a test rover out in the desert somewhere and had the team go through it as though it were a real mission.
Lastly, you don't seem to realize that there's a limited launch window for going to Mars. If they had missed it, they'd have to wait two years before they could launch again.
Whether or not they knew about the problem before launch is kind of irrelevant. They'd have 6 or 7 months to work out the kinks in the on-site mission software while the rover was in transit to Mars. They knew about the problem before it actually became a problem, and had implemented a plan to fix it, but due to the weather at the Australia (IIRC) Deep Space Network site they weren't able to fully upload the utility meant to fix it.
And yes, according to the article it had occurred to them that the utility might not get completely uploaded due to weather.
WindRiver may give JPL large discounts, but I doubt that's the only reason VxWorks is running on the MERs.
Years ago, when JPL was designing the Mars Pathfinder mission, they asked Wind River to do an "affordable" port of VxWorks to the RAD6000 (a radiation-hardened RS6000), and they agreed. Since the computers on the two MERs are very similar to the computer on the Mars Pathfinder lander, it makes sense that they'd use the same OS that they used on the MPF lander.
I would think the fact that JPL knows VxWorks very well by now would be a major factor in deciding to use VxWorks for the MERs.
Actually, they used VxWorks because it was the same OS used for the lander on the Mars Pathfinder mission. Since they were using the same CPU and same basic computer design as the Mars Pathfinder lander, they probably figured, "Why not use the same OS?"
You realize that the onboard computer is basically the same one as used on the Mars Pathfinder lander, right? Same CPU, same amount of RAM, even the same OS. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same (or similar) circuit diagrams for certain things.
The point is to use well known and well tested hardware. The whole point of Mars Pathfinder was to develop a system whose design could be re-used for other Mars landers and rovers.
Lastly, what exactly are you going to do with greater flash capacity? The point of having any flash memory on the rovers at all is not for long term storage, but rather just to hold onto data until it can be transmitted to Earth, after which it gets deleted.
Despite what some idiot posted a few posts up, they did NOT run out of room on the flash drive. Rather, the problem is more akin to running out of i-nodes. Mounting the flash filesystem, reading all its metadata and whatnot, took up more RAM than was allocated for it, due to the high number of files it had to deal with (most of which were accumulated on the way to Mars, and were going to be deleted).
You realize that missions to Mars can only be launched once every two years, right? If they miss their launch window, they've got to wait two years before they can launch again.
You also realize that NASA did do a test mission, right? They built a test rover and put it out in a desert somewhere. They used the mission to test the hardware, test the software, and to help train the team.
The rovers were extensively tested before launch. For example, NASA took about 100000 pictures with the test panoramic cameras under varying conditions to see how they would react. NASA put a test rover on a tilting platform to see how far over the rover tilt before it capsized, to find out at what angle the electric motors could no longer drive the rover up a hill, etc.
This limitation of the filesystem was known about ahead of time. If you had read the article, you'd have known that. They had a utility to clean out the rover's filesystem, but a storm at the Deep Space Network site that was supposed to transmit it prevented the second half of the utility from being uploaded to the rover. And before you say anything else, the article also mentioned that the people involved had thought of this possibility ahead of time.
As I said, you can't really do that. If the sunlight reaching the Martian surface is even slightly tinted a different color than the sunlight here on Earth, adjusting the MER images so that the color calibration devices on the rovers look like they do here on Earth will produce images with incorrect coloration.
Really, we won't be able to tell beyond a shadow of a doubt what it would look like to humans on the Martian surface until we've actually got humans on the Martian surface.
Yes, grain is a side effect of the mechanism. However, it's still important that it be preserved. I'm not talking about recording the value of every single grain on the negative; that'd be ridiculous. Rather, I'm talking about preserving the same amount of grain one would see in an 8x10" print.
When it comes to those "extra bits", you're missing the point. Color accuracy is only part of it. The negative carries more image data than is seen in the print. Those extra bits are for holding that data.
For an example, just look at this page on the OpenEXR website.
Basically, while on the print a certain area might appear to be totally white or totally black, on the negative there's more image information in that area. If you're trying to do a true archive, you'd want to preserve that information, at which point you need an image format that can store overrange data. Although.png can store 16 bits per channel, none of that is overrange, so it can't be used for this purpose. You'd have to go with Cineon or a floating-point format.
Also, if you think 16 bits per channel is overkill, then I guess everyone at those Hollywood VFX studios just doesn't know as much about the subject as you. ILM developed OpenEXR, a 16-bit floating-point per channel, high dynamic range image format. Just think of the time they'd have saved if they had only known that 16 bits was overkill. Or think of the effort Rythm & Hues could've saved by not starting Film Gimp, which eventually became CinePaint. And what about Digital Domain? If they knew as much as you, then their in-house compositing program Nuke wouldn't internally represent image data with floating-point numbers. The evil Kodak would never have developed Cineon and convinced so many studios to use it and virtually every compositing and 3D rendering program to support it.
In all fairness, Cineon only uses 10 bits per channel, but the data is logarithmic rather than linear. To linearize a Cineon image without having to throw out any data would take about 14 bits per channel.
Hooray for not knowing what you're talking about. He's talking about archival quality, not "Send to Grandma" quality. Never mind that you'd need that kind of resolution to do a high-quality print.
Look right below the line you quoted. It says:
Other disc formats offer higher resolutions for applications such as professional photography and color prepress operations.
And yes, capturing the grain is important. It's part of the character of the image.
PhotoCDs are meant for consumer-level point-and-shoot crap. Not digital archiving.
No, if you really want to archive your images, preserving as much of the information that's on the film as possible, you'd need to scan them at the highest resolution your scanning device could manage and store them in either RAW or a floating-point high dynamic range format.
Let's say you scanned your negatives at 6000x4000, which is decent. That's 24 million pixels. Now, since we're archiving the negative, and are therefor trying to preserve all the information on the film, we want to get as much of the image information as possible into the digital copy. To accomplish this, we're going to use a 32-bit-per-channel floating-point HDR file format. For 24 million pixels, that brings our image size up to 288 megabytes prior to compression (and, of course you would use a lossless format). If you didn't want to store it in a 32-bit-per-channel floating-point HDR format (mostly for space reasons), but still wanted to preserve as much of the information on the negative as possible, you've got two choices. Either a 16-bit-per-channel floating-point HDR format like ILM's own OpenEXR format (which would result in varying sizes, due to lossless compression, but probably in the 20-80 megabyte range), or 10-bit-per-channel non-linear format like Kodak's Cineon format (96 megabytes for a 6000x4000 image, since Cineon doesn't use any compression).
Now, you must understand that a negative holds a lot more image information that what ends up on the print. In any given film image, there is almost always still information in both the dark areas and the highlights that, while clipped for the print (and thus appearing as either being totally white or totally black on said print), is still on the negative. When archiving an film image digitally, it'd probably be a good idea to preserve this extra data. Yes, it will eventually get thrown away when you do a print (or when you do the.PNG or.JPG that you show to people), but while we're manipulating the image it's nice to have the overrange data (since we can adjust things like brightness without ugly clipping problems). This is why standard 8-bit-per-channel formats won't do for archival purposes (or serious digital photography, really); there's not enough room in 8 bits to preserve all the data for each channel. You'll get ugly color banding if you try to preserve the overrange information in 8 bits, or you'll have to throw out the overrange data.
So, wait, they should leave everybody who still uses film out in the cold?
What if I don't want to use digital?
Or what if I'm shooting a movie? 95% of movies are still shot on film, and it'll probably stay that way for at least the next 5-10 years.
At any rate, I wouldn't write off Kodak. While the consumer market is nice, consumer cameras haven't been Kodak's main business in a long time, even before digital started getting big. And Kodak has a large presence in the motion picture world. It's too bad they neutered Cinesite L.A. by closing its VFX department, leaving only the digital color correction and restoration department.
Lastly, remember the source of this article. Wired. I don't recall Wired ever being anything other than the sensationalizing tabloid of the computer world.
While we can always hope for smarter urban growth strategies, their widespread adoption isn't likely, at least not in the near term.
Every year, all throughout the Southeastern United States, there are people who live in a town built on the Mississippi River flood plain who, when the river floods (as it does every year), instead of moving to a better place, decide to try to control the river's flooding by building levies. The levies, of course, are preventing the Mississippi from carrying as much silt as it used to, which is causing erosion. Never mind that the land is more useful for irrigation farming.
There are people in the midwest who, despite living on land so unbelievably flat that you can't see a single hill or Mountain, and despite the area being known as "Tornado Alley", act surprised and heartbroken when their towns are ripped apart by tornadoes year after year.
All throughout American history, people just built their towns on the first, most immediately convenient place they came across, with little or no regard as to whether or not it was actually a good place for a town. A great many years later, despite the technology for advanced climatological and ecological studies being available (that would tell these cities' current inhabitants that their town is situated in the worst possible place), people continue to live in these places. After each disaster, people keep coming back.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but no. No.
First of all, the calibration strip: yeah, the MERs each have something similar as well.
You can't rely solely on them, though. If the light that filters down to the surface is tinted any color other than whitish-blue (like her on Earth), trying to match the calibration device to the one back here on Earth is going to produce the wrong coloration.
Secondly, it's widely known that the Viking lander images showing the Martian sky as blue were colored incorrectly.
Thirdly, the Martian atmosphere is mostly CO2, which doesn't scatter blue light all that much AFAIK. Throw in a surprising amount of reddish-orange dust that's almost always there, and the probability that the Martian atmosphere is usually reddish (or butterscotch) is pretty good. Now, it isn't always reddish, or so I've read. Hubble took a photo of Mars, IIRC, and near the edges the atmosphere looks bluish. This is probably because the light has much more atmosphere to go through at sunrise and sunset than it does during the day, and so what little oxygen is in the Martian atmosphere has a chance to scatter the blue light. There's even a Mars Pathfinder image to back this up right here.
The image doesn't prove that the Martian atmosphere is blue, but it does show that there is a lot of dust in the atmosphere over there, and that under the right conditions it can be a little bit blue in some places.
While Mars' atmosphere is thinner than Earth's, it's far dustier AFAIK.
At no point did I say that the dust was sufficient to block sunlight from reaching the Martian surface. Rather, I just said that Mars' atmosphere tints the sunlight a little bit red, just like Earth's atmosphere tints the sunlight a little bit blue (though our eyes have adapted to correct for the minor blue tint, and the tint isn't nearly as severe on Earth as it is on Mars).
If the Martian atmosphere didn't contain an amount of dust sufficient to tint the light at least a little bit reddish, why doesn't the Martian sky look blue?
And when it comes to wind, Mars occasionally has sandstorms that cover the entire planet. Even when planet-wide sandstorms aren't raging, atmospheric measurements taken by the various spacecraft we've landed on Mars have indicated that the Martian atmosphere is constantly full of dust.
Lastly, the Mars Pathfinder image that I referred to in my original post (the one that wasn't obviously tinted red) can be found here. Yes, the soil composition is probably different than the soil at the Spirit and Opportunity sites, but look at the rocks. See how the parts of them that aren't covered in dust are gray? They wouldn't look that way if NASA had simply tinted the whole image reddish orange.
I think people are also forgetting that, on Mars, white light is probably not reaching the surface. The dust in Mars' atmosphere is probably tinting the sunlight a little bit red, which certainly doesn't make getting the "correct" color easy.
But a comparison of the Mars Pathfinder images against the MER images shows that the colors in the MER images are too red. In the MPF images the rocks aren't all the same color.
It's pretty obvious that NASA's been doing a lot of Photoshopping on these images. While some Photoshop'ing is necessary (to merge the 3 grayscale images and to eliminate the seams in the panoramic images), I think they're overdoing it this time. I can't find the link right now, but there's one image in particular where it's blatantly obvious that they've replaced the sky with a single, solid color (you can see jaggies along the horizon in the high-resolution version).
I'm not trying to be all conspiracy theorist or anything. I certainly don't think they're faking the landings, nor do I think the Martian sky is bright blue as some have suggested.
I hate to be the one to inform you of this, but 90% of all HOA's require you to take care of your house's appearance. Can you paint it blue? No. But you are contractually bound to take care of the outside of the house (mow the lawn, repaint when it starts peeling off, not keep a junky non-running car in your front yard, etc.).
Also, I was unaware that calling something silly was being a dickwad. The general consensus among people whose sole preoccupation is [b]not[/b] the value of their property and keeping out non-whites is that HOA's are lame. I should also point out that just because the resale value of your house isn't your sole preoccupation doesn't mean you don't care about it.
Actually, it's fairly trivial to learn how to read an analog watch, at least it was for me. When I was in 2nd grade, the entire class learned it in just a few minutes.
The teacher's method was probably the reason. She told us to ignore the actual number on the face of the watch when it came to the minutes hand, and just count by fives to it. So when it was at the first tick, we knew it was 5 past the hour. Second tick was 10 past the hour, and so on. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to learn, and by the end of it only the dumb kids still had to count the ticks ("Ok, let's see. It's at 1, 2, 3 ticks, so that's 5, 10, umm, 15 minutes.").
Or, you could just not be an idiot and realize that when the minutes hand had gone halfway around then the time must be half past the hour.
Everybody who is all "OMG dude why pay that much for a watch?" is missing the point.
Will you be able to pass your digital watch down to your children? No.
For everyday use, I've got a cheapo digital watch. But when I have to dress up nicely, I've got a nice analog watch. In a few years, when the digital watch is sitting in a land fill somewhere, my analog watch will still work.
I highly doubt it. The vast majority of movies are still shot on film, and that isn't going to change within then next few years, so Kodak would basically be slitting their own throats by getting out of the film business.
Considering that Kodak's website says nothing about this, the probability of you being wrong is immense.
Exactly. I think that chemical photography will never go away completely. Like using vacuum tubes and analog tapes for recording sound, chemical photography will be for the artist who cares more about the feel of their work.
There's just something about developing the film yourself and then printing the photos by hand that you can't get from sitting in front of a computer and doing it in Photoshop.
The great thing about analog watches is that if you're ever lost in the wilderness, but your watch still works, you can use it like a compass.
I don't remember exactly how, but assuming that your watch is set to the correct local time, it'll work. It has something to do with the angle of the hour and minutes hand compared to the sun's distance over the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it was quite like that. The way I interpreted the article was that the utility was broken into two separate programs. The second one didn't get uploaded.
Anyway, I think the problem was that the utility didn't get run, and the resulting problems occurred because the filesystem didn't get cleaned up. I really doubt that NASA would be so stupid as to have the rover blindly execute whatever they sent it without some form of verification (at least a CRC32 or something).
And yes, for the last time, the DID do a test mission in the desert with a rover prototype. For the life of me, I can't find the link, but if you Google for it (I think the prototype rover was called Fido), I'm sure you'll find something.
Just because they did a test mission doesn't mean the bug would've been discovered. According to the article, most of the junk clogging up the filesystem was leftovers from software upgrades.
There is video on the MER website of them putting a test rover through its paces, including the tilt testing I mentioned.
You lose.
Actually, for any normal exposure, there's going to be overrange data. You'd have to heavily overexpose in order to crush the highlights so badly that there's no extra information in them.
.png or .jpg or whatever. If you just kept the archive of the negative as a .png, tough. Now you have to rescan the negative.
And while you are correct that a 16-bit floating-point format can't hold any more data than a 16-bit integer format, that's beside the point. As you've stated, for what will eventually end up in the print (or JPEG, or whatever), about 10 bits would probably be sufficient. The rest of that 16-bit floating-point format is for storing the overrange data (and the overhead for the floating-point format).
But they aren't overkill for archival purposes. If all you're interested in is preserving a print, then yes, they probably are. But for preserving a negative, no, they're quite useful. You'd want to archive as much information on the negative as possible, even though some of it will be clipped when a print is made.
Suppose you decide at a later date that you don't like the "print" exposure values you originally chose. If you've archived your negative in a format that keeps the overrange data, it's as simple as selecting new ones and saving the "print" as a
The point of digital archiving, to me, is to keep a digital copy that is as close the the original negative as possible. This includes keeping the overrange data, at least in my mind, even if it never gets used.
No, they would not have stored each of those 100000 images in an actual rover filesystem, because the rover is not meant to hold hundreds of thousands of images, and the test cameras were probably not attached to a rover. And yes, the point was to test the cameras themselves; to see how they'd respond under different conditions.
And they did a test mission with a test rover out in the desert. Basically, the put a test rover out in the desert somewhere and had the team go through it as though it were a real mission.
Lastly, you don't seem to realize that there's a limited launch window for going to Mars. If they had missed it, they'd have to wait two years before they could launch again.
Whether or not they knew about the problem before launch is kind of irrelevant. They'd have 6 or 7 months to work out the kinks in the on-site mission software while the rover was in transit to Mars. They knew about the problem before it actually became a problem, and had implemented a plan to fix it, but due to the weather at the Australia (IIRC) Deep Space Network site they weren't able to fully upload the utility meant to fix it.
And yes, according to the article it had occurred to them that the utility might not get completely uploaded due to weather.
WindRiver may give JPL large discounts, but I doubt that's the only reason VxWorks is running on the MERs.
Years ago, when JPL was designing the Mars Pathfinder mission, they asked Wind River to do an "affordable" port of VxWorks to the RAD6000 (a radiation-hardened RS6000), and they agreed. Since the computers on the two MERs are very similar to the computer on the Mars Pathfinder lander, it makes sense that they'd use the same OS that they used on the MPF lander.
I would think the fact that JPL knows VxWorks very well by now would be a major factor in deciding to use VxWorks for the MERs.
Actually, they used VxWorks because it was the same OS used for the lander on the Mars Pathfinder mission. Since they were using the same CPU and same basic computer design as the Mars Pathfinder lander, they probably figured, "Why not use the same OS?"
You realize that the onboard computer is basically the same one as used on the Mars Pathfinder lander, right? Same CPU, same amount of RAM, even the same OS. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same (or similar) circuit diagrams for certain things.
The point is to use well known and well tested hardware. The whole point of Mars Pathfinder was to develop a system whose design could be re-used for other Mars landers and rovers.
Lastly, what exactly are you going to do with greater flash capacity? The point of having any flash memory on the rovers at all is not for long term storage, but rather just to hold onto data until it can be transmitted to Earth, after which it gets deleted.
Despite what some idiot posted a few posts up, they did NOT run out of room on the flash drive. Rather, the problem is more akin to running out of i-nodes. Mounting the flash filesystem, reading all its metadata and whatnot, took up more RAM than was allocated for it, due to the high number of files it had to deal with (most of which were accumulated on the way to Mars, and were going to be deleted).
You realize that missions to Mars can only be launched once every two years, right? If they miss their launch window, they've got to wait two years before they can launch again.
You also realize that NASA did do a test mission, right? They built a test rover and put it out in a desert somewhere. They used the mission to test the hardware, test the software, and to help train the team.
Score: -1, Didn't Read Article
The rovers were extensively tested before launch. For example, NASA took about 100000 pictures with the test panoramic cameras under varying conditions to see how they would react. NASA put a test rover on a tilting platform to see how far over the rover tilt before it capsized, to find out at what angle the electric motors could no longer drive the rover up a hill, etc.
This limitation of the filesystem was known about ahead of time. If you had read the article, you'd have known that. They had a utility to clean out the rover's filesystem, but a storm at the Deep Space Network site that was supposed to transmit it prevented the second half of the utility from being uploaded to the rover. And before you say anything else, the article also mentioned that the people involved had thought of this possibility ahead of time.
As I said, you can't really do that. If the sunlight reaching the Martian surface is even slightly tinted a different color than the sunlight here on Earth, adjusting the MER images so that the color calibration devices on the rovers look like they do here on Earth will produce images with incorrect coloration.
Really, we won't be able to tell beyond a shadow of a doubt what it would look like to humans on the Martian surface until we've actually got humans on the Martian surface.
Yes, grain is a side effect of the mechanism. However, it's still important that it be preserved. I'm not talking about recording the value of every single grain on the negative; that'd be ridiculous. Rather, I'm talking about preserving the same amount of grain one would see in an 8x10" print.
.png can store 16 bits per channel, none of that is overrange, so it can't be used for this purpose. You'd have to go with Cineon or a floating-point format.
When it comes to those "extra bits", you're missing the point. Color accuracy is only part of it. The negative carries more image data than is seen in the print. Those extra bits are for holding that data.
For an example, just look at this page on the OpenEXR website.
Basically, while on the print a certain area might appear to be totally white or totally black, on the negative there's more image information in that area. If you're trying to do a true archive, you'd want to preserve that information, at which point you need an image format that can store overrange data. Although
Also, if you think 16 bits per channel is overkill, then I guess everyone at those Hollywood VFX studios just doesn't know as much about the subject as you. ILM developed OpenEXR, a 16-bit floating-point per channel, high dynamic range image format. Just think of the time they'd have saved if they had only known that 16 bits was overkill. Or think of the effort Rythm & Hues could've saved by not starting Film Gimp, which eventually became CinePaint. And what about Digital Domain? If they knew as much as you, then their in-house compositing program Nuke wouldn't internally represent image data with floating-point numbers. The evil Kodak would never have developed Cineon and convinced so many studios to use it and virtually every compositing and 3D rendering program to support it.
In all fairness, Cineon only uses 10 bits per channel, but the data is logarithmic rather than linear. To linearize a Cineon image without having to throw out any data would take about 14 bits per channel.
Look right below the line you quoted. It says:
And yes, capturing the grain is important. It's part of the character of the image.
PhotoCDs are meant for consumer-level point-and-shoot crap. Not digital archiving.
No, if you really want to archive your images, preserving as much of the information that's on the film as possible, you'd need to scan them at the highest resolution your scanning device could manage and store them in either RAW or a floating-point high dynamic range format.
Let's say you scanned your negatives at 6000x4000, which is decent. That's 24 million pixels. Now, since we're archiving the negative, and are therefor trying to preserve all the information on the film, we want to get as much of the image information as possible into the digital copy. To accomplish this, we're going to use a 32-bit-per-channel floating-point HDR file format. For 24 million pixels, that brings our image size up to 288 megabytes prior to compression (and, of course you would use a lossless format). If you didn't want to store it in a 32-bit-per-channel floating-point HDR format (mostly for space reasons), but still wanted to preserve as much of the information on the negative as possible, you've got two choices. Either a 16-bit-per-channel floating-point HDR format like ILM's own OpenEXR format (which would result in varying sizes, due to lossless compression, but probably in the 20-80 megabyte range), or 10-bit-per-channel non-linear format like Kodak's Cineon format (96 megabytes for a 6000x4000 image, since Cineon doesn't use any compression).
Now, you must understand that a negative holds a lot more image information that what ends up on the print. In any given film image, there is almost always still information in both the dark areas and the highlights that, while clipped for the print (and thus appearing as either being totally white or totally black on said print), is still on the negative. When archiving an film image digitally, it'd probably be a good idea to preserve this extra data. Yes, it will eventually get thrown away when you do a print (or when you do the
So, wait, they should leave everybody who still uses film out in the cold?
What if I don't want to use digital?
Or what if I'm shooting a movie? 95% of movies are still shot on film, and it'll probably stay that way for at least the next 5-10 years.
At any rate, I wouldn't write off Kodak. While the consumer market is nice, consumer cameras haven't been Kodak's main business in a long time, even before digital started getting big. And Kodak has a large presence in the motion picture world. It's too bad they neutered Cinesite L.A. by closing its VFX department, leaving only the digital color correction and restoration department.
Lastly, remember the source of this article. Wired. I don't recall Wired ever being anything other than the sensationalizing tabloid of the computer world.
While we can always hope for smarter urban growth strategies, their widespread adoption isn't likely, at least not in the near term.
Every year, all throughout the Southeastern United States, there are people who live in a town built on the Mississippi River flood plain who, when the river floods (as it does every year), instead of moving to a better place, decide to try to control the river's flooding by building levies. The levies, of course, are preventing the Mississippi from carrying as much silt as it used to, which is causing erosion. Never mind that the land is more useful for irrigation farming.
There are people in the midwest who, despite living on land so unbelievably flat that you can't see a single hill or Mountain, and despite the area being known as "Tornado Alley", act surprised and heartbroken when their towns are ripped apart by tornadoes year after year.
All throughout American history, people just built their towns on the first, most immediately convenient place they came across, with little or no regard as to whether or not it was actually a good place for a town. A great many years later, despite the technology for advanced climatological and ecological studies being available (that would tell these cities' current inhabitants that their town is situated in the worst possible place), people continue to live in these places. After each disaster, people keep coming back.
Idiots.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but no. No.
First of all, the calibration strip: yeah, the MERs each have something similar as well.
You can't rely solely on them, though. If the light that filters down to the surface is tinted any color other than whitish-blue (like her on Earth), trying to match the calibration device to the one back here on Earth is going to produce the wrong coloration.
Secondly, it's widely known that the Viking lander images showing the Martian sky as blue were colored incorrectly.
Thirdly, the Martian atmosphere is mostly CO2, which doesn't scatter blue light all that much AFAIK. Throw in a surprising amount of reddish-orange dust that's almost always there, and the probability that the Martian atmosphere is usually reddish (or butterscotch) is pretty good. Now, it isn't always reddish, or so I've read. Hubble took a photo of Mars, IIRC, and near the edges the atmosphere looks bluish. This is probably because the light has much more atmosphere to go through at sunrise and sunset than it does during the day, and so what little oxygen is in the Martian atmosphere has a chance to scatter the blue light. There's even a Mars Pathfinder image to back this up right here.
The image doesn't prove that the Martian atmosphere is blue, but it does show that there is a lot of dust in the atmosphere over there, and that under the right conditions it can be a little bit blue in some places.
While Mars' atmosphere is thinner than Earth's, it's far dustier AFAIK.
At no point did I say that the dust was sufficient to block sunlight from reaching the Martian surface. Rather, I just said that Mars' atmosphere tints the sunlight a little bit red, just like Earth's atmosphere tints the sunlight a little bit blue (though our eyes have adapted to correct for the minor blue tint, and the tint isn't nearly as severe on Earth as it is on Mars).
If the Martian atmosphere didn't contain an amount of dust sufficient to tint the light at least a little bit reddish, why doesn't the Martian sky look blue?
And when it comes to wind, Mars occasionally has sandstorms that cover the entire planet. Even when planet-wide sandstorms aren't raging, atmospheric measurements taken by the various spacecraft we've landed on Mars have indicated that the Martian atmosphere is constantly full of dust.
Lastly, the Mars Pathfinder image that I referred to in my original post (the one that wasn't obviously tinted red) can be found here. Yes, the soil composition is probably different than the soil at the Spirit and Opportunity sites, but look at the rocks. See how the parts of them that aren't covered in dust are gray? They wouldn't look that way if NASA had simply tinted the whole image reddish orange.
I think people are also forgetting that, on Mars, white light is probably not reaching the surface. The dust in Mars' atmosphere is probably tinting the sunlight a little bit red, which certainly doesn't make getting the "correct" color easy.
But a comparison of the Mars Pathfinder images against the MER images shows that the colors in the MER images are too red. In the MPF images the rocks aren't all the same color.
It's pretty obvious that NASA's been doing a lot of Photoshopping on these images. While some Photoshop'ing is necessary (to merge the 3 grayscale images and to eliminate the seams in the panoramic images), I think they're overdoing it this time. I can't find the link right now, but there's one image in particular where it's blatantly obvious that they've replaced the sky with a single, solid color (you can see jaggies along the horizon in the high-resolution version).
I'm not trying to be all conspiracy theorist or anything. I certainly don't think they're faking the landings, nor do I think the Martian sky is bright blue as some have suggested.
Whoops. Those should be < >'s, not [ ]'s.
I hate to be the one to inform you of this, but 90% of all HOA's require you to take care of your house's appearance. Can you paint it blue? No. But you are contractually bound to take care of the outside of the house (mow the lawn, repaint when it starts peeling off, not keep a junky non-running car in your front yard, etc.).
Also, I was unaware that calling something silly was being a dickwad. The general consensus among people whose sole preoccupation is [b]not[/b] the value of their property and keeping out non-whites is that HOA's are lame. I should also point out that just because the resale value of your house isn't your sole preoccupation doesn't mean you don't care about it.
Actually, it's fairly trivial to learn how to read an analog watch, at least it was for me. When I was in 2nd grade, the entire class learned it in just a few minutes.
The teacher's method was probably the reason. She told us to ignore the actual number on the face of the watch when it came to the minutes hand, and just count by fives to it. So when it was at the first tick, we knew it was 5 past the hour. Second tick was 10 past the hour, and so on. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to learn, and by the end of it only the dumb kids still had to count the ticks ("Ok, let's see. It's at 1, 2, 3 ticks, so that's 5, 10, umm, 15 minutes.").
Or, you could just not be an idiot and realize that when the minutes hand had gone halfway around then the time must be half past the hour.
Sure, you can get an approximation by doing that, but the watch method is more accurate (though not as accurate as using a compass).
Everybody who is all "OMG dude why pay that much for a watch?" is missing the point.
Will you be able to pass your digital watch down to your children? No.
For everyday use, I've got a cheapo digital watch. But when I have to dress up nicely, I've got a nice analog watch. In a few years, when the digital watch is sitting in a land fill somewhere, my analog watch will still work.
I highly doubt it. The vast majority of movies are still shot on film, and that isn't going to change within then next few years, so Kodak would basically be slitting their own throats by getting out of the film business.
Considering that Kodak's website says nothing about this, the probability of you being wrong is immense.
Exactly. I think that chemical photography will never go away completely. Like using vacuum tubes and analog tapes for recording sound, chemical photography will be for the artist who cares more about the feel of their work.
There's just something about developing the film yourself and then printing the photos by hand that you can't get from sitting in front of a computer and doing it in Photoshop.
The great thing about analog watches is that if you're ever lost in the wilderness, but your watch still works, you can use it like a compass.
I don't remember exactly how, but assuming that your watch is set to the correct local time, it'll work. It has something to do with the angle of the hour and minutes hand compared to the sun's distance over the horizon.