And this means what? Vista will run in some new, exciting way different from the way it runs on Dells? Interesting new _kinds_ of peripherals will come to market first on HP boxes, the way the Sony 3.5" diskette did?
Or does it just mean (yawn) that on the right day with the wind behind it, some HP models may offer incrementally more RAM or an incrementally faster processor than the equivalent Dell, especially for corporate purchasing agents purchasing them in quantities of a thousand?
How long has it been since HP tried anything like NewWave?
A participant (or non-participant, as it turned out), Alex Eckelberry, said "someone at Microsoft accidently sent out the LiveMeeting presentation invites as "presenter", which if you've ever used LiveMeeting, is an invitation to chaos. Realizing their error, the meeting was rescheduled for 30 minutes later, and that didn't all come together, because the meeting had been originally setup to end at 12:30, so we were promptly all kicked off."
So, the system design makes it easy to make a mistake that is an "invitation to chaos," and even though it was quickly caught, the system design either didn't have an easy way to change the end of the meeting, or made it easy to overlook the fact that everyone was going to get "promptly kicked off."
Even if it had been a typo in the URL, that would have said that something in the system design made it easier for a user to re-key a URL by hand than to copy it.
I certainly don't think this is a case of "accidentally-on-purpose." But I do think it is a symptom of a endemic problem in the PC industry, which is lack of attention to usability because computer people are intolerant of human fallibility. Even though they exhibit just as much human fallibility as anyone else, when they encounter a technical glitch they are reluctant to blame the design of the system.
Sure, "everyone has glitches from time to time," but when people at Microsoft can't get an important web meeting to work it suggests that there's something flawed about this "all-net-all-the-time" vision they've been touting for more than five years.
Computer technology reached a peak of usability in the early 1990s, when PC vendors still felt that they had to make things easy to use (and supply real support) in order to secure adoption. Once everyone was locked in--not so much to Microsoft, but to PC technology in general--usability was allowed to deteriorate.
The pretense that unreliable, hard-to-use unfinished technology is ready for release is so imbued into Microsoft's culture that Microsoft managers are evidently willing to use unreliable, hard-to-use, unfinished technology to conduct important Microsoft public business.
Stepto should _not_ blame "us" for the "glitch" and apologize. Instead, they should take a long hard look at what it was about the technology they were using that made it easy to "send out a messed-up link."
"Do not use intoxicants. Even beware of coffee. It is one of the most powerful nerve and brain stimulants. The coffee habit is as easily formed, and as remorseless, as the alcohol habit. After a while, if excessively used, it produces its sure result; your faculties have been sharpened by this intellectual emery-wheel until the edges begin to crumble. Your mind becomes dull..."
--Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, 1905, "The Young Man and the World"
The rule is very simple. Any pleasurable things I don't do are dangerous addictions.
"The first working cloak was in only two dimensions and did cast a small shadow, Smith acknowledged. The next step is to go for three dimensions and to eliminate any shadow."
Right, and my "overunity" (perpetual motion) device has an calculated energy output equal to 100.1% of its input. But due to a few minor engineering losses that reduce the output, the current working model only produces 99.9% of the input.
The next step is to go for that last 0.2%. I did this work very quickly... and that led to a device that is not optimal. I know how to make a much better one.
And if you'd like to be in on the ground floor, I am letting a very few people buy stock in my enterprise now.
No, but surely it can model the _cooperative_ aspects.
I wouldn't trust a computer to predict whether a robot hand is capable of cracking an egg and peeling off the shell without damaging the membrane underneath.
But I would trust a computer to model the effect of having robot A shine a blue light, robot B shine a red light, have robot A programmed to move toward a red light at 1 mph, and have robot B programmed to move away from a blue light at 2 mph. And I would trust it to model the effect of a twenty such robots.
The object was apparently to demonstrate something or other regarding cooperation strategies between robots with limited communication abilities and limited knowledge of the surroundings.
What, precisely, was gained by doing this with actual physical robots, rather than a computer simulation?
...has released a 49-page document entitled "The Big Bad Wolf's Guidelines for Protecting Little Red Riding Hood." In a prepared statement, the wolf said:
"We'd like others to join the conversation. A long, long time ago, several weeks ago in fact, we were a little insensitive about the way we implemented our last henhouse raid. Critics complained that wearing grandmother's clothing was deceptive, and that what we were doing posed a risk to Little Red Riding Hood. While we want to emphasize that Little Red Riding Hood was not harmed, that and other things have contributed to us thinking deeply with how we provide security and privacy, as well as respect for those we eat, for the use humane slaughtering practices. We also wish to assure the consumed that we target only henhouses, and that any collateral loss of innocent human life is accidental and deeply regretted."
"Our new guidelines protect the consumed by prohibiting the use of cloaks intended to resemble human beings. From now on, we will cloak ourselves only in the garb of sheep. We've devised technology in the form of a new chalk filter that guarantees that any traces of our individual voice identity will be erased, and that there is no possibility of causing psychological harm to our victims by the use of harsh vocalizations."
"We have asked our colleagues the Fox and the Coyote to join with us and to follow only best predatory practices."
"Because of this increased protection, we no longer recommend that home users build firewalls of brick. Instead, they should enjoy the economy, light, and airy comfort of porous straw walls, perforated by dozens of Windows."
...or "Bridge," or, heck, "Sheepshead..." set the calendar back a few decades... and most of this article would still be true.
When I was an undergraduate at MIT during the decade of the [mumble], I was fascinated by the guys I saw in the dorm in the game room, playing bridge. Almost any hour of the day, going to or from class, meals, whatever, you'd see these guys. The same guys. I'd see them at 2 a.m. in the morning as I was on my way to the PDP-1 room to place Spacewar (oops, let's not go there).
Of course, around the end of the semester, I wouldn't see them any more.
Next year, there'd be a new group of people playing bridge...
That USB scheme really expensive... and quite likely to damage the drive if the disk isn't manufactured perfectly. Heck, I have some perfectly round CD's that make my entire computer whine and vibrate in a rather anxiety-provoking way.
Why don't manufacturers take a look at the various systems deployed in the heyday of MS-DOS? Vault's PROLOK system involved a unique, laser-etched physical hole in the diskette. It was used by Ashton-Tate, IIRC. It would have to be a better idea than this one.
Of course, if manufacturers really took a look at the various systems deployed in the heyday of MS-DOS, they might notice that all of them added a burden to the cost-of-goods, none of them worked, all of them were cracked, all of them created ill-will among honest customers, and all of them were abandoned after a few years.
I'm haven't read the article yet. I'm going to list questions I have, which, if the answers are all "yes," would make this interesting to me.
1) Can I use this just like a standalone DVD recorder, i.e. can I record any program I'm watching on my TV, whether broadcast or cable, and then burn a DVD from it that will play in an ordinary DVD player?
2) Will it play (just play, not record) HD-DVDs, just in case the movies I want to buy aren't released in Blu-Ray format (or just in case the local video store happens to have the HD-DVD versions but not the Blu-Ray versions on the shelf on the day I happen to be in the store?)
3) Is there a list of certified Blu-Ray media that are guaranteed to work in the device, or is it going to be "a lot of them work most of the time, try them yourself and see" (as it is with DVD-RW, DL DVD+R, and that whole zoo).
Now, let's see if the article answers these questions and what the answers are.
1) Not answered. 2) Not answered. 3) Not answered, except in the sense that "so once dual-layer discs appear you also get the ability to burn up to 50GB of data to a single disc" (i.e. dual-layer media aren't even available yet).
It does not sound to me as if the reviewer even attempted to burn a video disk. It sounds as if the reviewer had his hands full just trying to get the thing to _play_ them.
!!!!! To play a Blu-ray disc you need to use dedicated software that can handle the HDCP part of the AACS encryption standard and Media Center can't do this at present.... For now though, to play the movie from the sofa... On first attempt we got a region code error message. I then went into the software and selected Region B. Restarting the software, the disc then played but with strange graphical corruption. Restarting the PC sorted this."
And the bottom line? Being a discerning person "I could still immediately discern the increased detail and resolution in the picture over DVD. It was as clear as day to me, but actually not everyone in the office could make this out or was impressed by it."
This has got to be a joke, right? An expensive PC that requires you to launch special software from the keyboard in order just to play a disk, with glitches, that worked after a few restarts, producing an image that was not enough better than a DVD to be obvious to everyone?
1) Most Americans... including ordinary consumers... feel that invasion of privacy is pretty much OK as long as it is done for the purpose of selling stuff. And the more closely the merchandise matches the consumer's tastes, the more it is tolerated. At one extreme, sure, people object to receiving spam for products that are claimed to enlarge body parts that they do not possess. At the other extreme, well, gosh, I don't really mind when Netflix shows me the titles of several other movies featuring the same director or actors as the movie I just selected.
2) Most Americans believe very deeply that "it can't happen here." That is, we don't really feel in our guts that there's any chance that "our" government would really use the data collected by merchandisers, health care providers, or government warrantless wiretaps, to go after people who really aren't bad guys, but just happen to be political opponents.
And, darn it, I fall in category 2 myself. Despite everything. I gripe about invasion of privacy, but despite the fact that my intellect tells me the problem is real, my gut tells me that I'm overdramatizing.
(And, yes, I can imagine myself... in a different time and place saying, "Let's not overreact, after all it is just broken glass.")
Oh, no, these sorts of press reports never go so far as to say they can actually be transmitted, let alone cause disease... they just say "the average serving of sauerkraut contains more bacteria than the average toilet bowl" and leave it to readers to make the obvious but incorrect inference.
If I were Ballmer, I would seek out an opportunity to comment on the doubtless many medical studies that have shown that ear wax, mites, bacteria, Avian flu virus, cooties, parasites, AIDS, those icky crayfish-like ear thingies from "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan," the gay gene, and terrist nucular WMD materials remain on ear bud surfaces, no matter how clean they seem to be.
I listen to Howard Stern all the time, commuting on route 128. All I do is tune my FM radio to 87.9.
Apparently many Sirius satellite radio receivers must be add-on units that work through FM modulators with the car's FM radio. And 87.9 is apparently the default FM conversion setting.
Based on my unscientific poll, during drive time something like 2/3 of Boston-area Sirius subscribers are tuned to Stern.
OK, to tell the truth, no, I don't get continuous, uninterrupted Stern that way, but, yes, I do keep one of my presets at 87.9 and I do check from time to time to see if anything is on there... and I get enough Stern to feel like I'm still "in touch" with him and his gang.
So, the question I have is, which is it? are jackbooted Sirius thugs going to sue me for theft of services? Or are jackbooted FCC thugs going to toss the converter operators in jail for operating pirate radio stations?
"I come up with a blank every time I search for one."
Me, too.
For reasons too complicated to explain, I would gladly pay much more than $15... let's say $150... for an HDTV downconverter, because we're perfectly happy with NTSC broadcast reception, but there's ONE channel with not-very-good reception... and it happens to be the local PBS affiliate, which we watch a lot... and they broadcast in HDTV too.
So in fact I've been shopping for converters, maybe they exist, but you sure can't prove it by the sales staff at Tweeter and Best Buy and Circuit City, who don't even seem to know what I'm talking about.
I would have thought that if there were going to be a wide selection of cheap converters available in 2009, there would be a narrow selection of expensive converters available today.
What exactly is meant by the statement that "The software also showed Van Gogh's use of complementary colours increased during his most active period from 1885 to 1890?"
Reading between the lines, I'm inclined to wonder whether, if the software had been "trained" on early Van Goghs, it would have recognized the later ones as authentic, or whether it would have rejected them because of the apparently uncharacteristic use of colors.
Actually this whole story bothers me. To begin with, human art experts not only are not 100% accurate, they are far from 100% agreement with each other in authenticating art. So, how can the software ever be tested for accuracy?
I could have sworn 2006 was the deadline for broadcasters to turn their analog VHF/UHF spectrum back to the FCC. After all, they've been "loaned" the DTV spectrum, and it's not possible that they'd be so dishonest as to just keep sitting on both of them, is it?
Of course, my old analog television receivers still seem to be receiving an image, so I guess the deadline must have slipped three years.
It always seems to be three years away.
I don't think I'd count any "vacant television channels" chickens until, or if, they hatch. And I don't think I'd want to put much of my personal wealth into anything that actually depends on that spectrum ever being returned.
Of course, the FCC could always enforce... no, I forgot. The FCC doesn't enforce anything any more. Except obscenity regulations. For some reason, the free market can be trusted to take care of everything else, but not that.
I can't seem to find a reference to it online... I'd appreciate one if someone has one... but circa 1960 the Polaroid company developed a film for recording nuclear tests, which was similar to three-layer color film except that the three layers, instead of being sensitized to different colors, were given emulsions with widely different sensitivities. The fastest emulation was similar to Kodak Royal-X Pan, ISO 1600, and the slowest was similar to Kodak Microfile, and if I recall correctly had an ISO speed of something like 0.1
The result was to extend the useful dynamic range of the film by a factor of 10000 or so--more than a dozen additional f-stops of latitude, or extra Ansel zones, if you like.
The film was processed in regular Kodacolor chemistry (IIRC), each layer coming out a different color. In color, the result was a "false color" image displaying a huge dynamic range of light intensity; or, it could be printed as black-and-white using different filters to select different intensity ranges.
In effect, the photographer was automatically bracketing every shot by a dozen F-stops, in a single shutter click.
It was an incredibly neat hack. I wonder whatever became of it?
n the first place, I seriously doubt that there's any meaningful way of measuring the "percentage coverage" of a gamut of colors, since the mapping of colors into a plane is somewhat arbitrary and there are two very different systems in wide use. I notice that this comparison of Adobe RGB vs. sRGB doesn't try to estimate any "percentages."
Second, if we're talking about something like "area included in the CIE xy plane by thus and such system of reproduction" as a percentage of "area included by the entire spectrum," I seriously doubt that you can get a number anything like 90% with only three primaries. You're still trying to approximate a blobby blunt shape with an inscribed triangle.
The article is so vague on details that it's not clear how many primary colors are used. If it uses six primaries instead of three, I'm prepared to believe it could give meaningfully better color than traditional systems. How important that is remains to be seen. HDTV gives obviously, dramatically better picture quality (in terms of resolution) than traditional TV, but it doesn't seem to be setting the world on fire.
The big question, of course, is where one would find program material encoded with more than three primaries; it would need to be specially recorded for this system (requiring new video, broadcast, and optical disk standards).
Slashdot Mirror
...instead of business news?
So, HP is now the top PC vendor.
And this means what? Vista will run in some new, exciting way different from the way it runs on Dells? Interesting new _kinds_ of peripherals will come to market first on HP boxes, the way the Sony 3.5" diskette did?
Or does it just mean (yawn) that on the right day with the wind behind it, some HP models may offer incrementally more RAM or an incrementally faster processor than the equivalent Dell, especially for corporate purchasing agents purchasing them in quantities of a thousand?
How long has it been since HP tried anything like NewWave?
A participant (or non-participant, as it turned out), Alex Eckelberry, said "someone at Microsoft accidently sent out the LiveMeeting presentation invites as "presenter", which if you've ever used LiveMeeting, is an invitation to chaos. Realizing their error, the meeting was rescheduled for 30 minutes later, and that didn't all come together, because the meeting had been originally setup to end at 12:30, so we were promptly all kicked off."
So, the system design makes it easy to make a mistake that is an "invitation to chaos," and even though it was quickly caught, the system design either didn't have an easy way to change the end of the meeting, or made it easy to overlook the fact that everyone was going to get "promptly kicked off."
Even if it had been a typo in the URL, that would have said that something in the system design made it easier for a user to re-key a URL by hand than to copy it.
I certainly don't think this is a case of "accidentally-on-purpose." But I do think it is a symptom of a endemic problem in the PC industry, which is lack of attention to usability because computer people are intolerant of human fallibility. Even though they exhibit just as much human fallibility as anyone else, when they encounter a technical glitch they are reluctant to blame the design of the system.
Sure, "everyone has glitches from time to time," but when people at Microsoft can't get an important web meeting to work it suggests that there's something flawed about this "all-net-all-the-time" vision they've been touting for more than five years.
Computer technology reached a peak of usability in the early 1990s, when PC vendors still felt that they had to make things easy to use (and supply real support) in order to secure adoption. Once everyone was locked in--not so much to Microsoft, but to PC technology in general--usability was allowed to deteriorate.
The pretense that unreliable, hard-to-use unfinished technology is ready for release is so imbued into Microsoft's culture that Microsoft managers are evidently willing to use unreliable, hard-to-use, unfinished technology to conduct important Microsoft public business.
Stepto should _not_ blame "us" for the "glitch" and apologize. Instead, they should take a long hard look at what it was about the technology they were using that made it easy to "send out a messed-up link."
"Do not use intoxicants. Even beware of coffee. It is one of the most powerful nerve and brain stimulants. The coffee habit is as easily formed, and as remorseless, as the alcohol habit. After a while, if excessively used, it produces its sure result; your faculties have been sharpened by this intellectual emery-wheel until the edges begin to crumble. Your mind becomes dull..."
--Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, 1905, "The Young Man and the World"
The rule is very simple. Any pleasurable things I don't do are dangerous addictions.
"The first working cloak was in only two dimensions and did cast a small shadow, Smith acknowledged. The next step is to go for three dimensions and to eliminate any shadow."
... and that led to a device that is not optimal. I know how to make a much better one.
Right, and my "overunity" (perpetual motion) device has an calculated energy output equal to 100.1% of its input. But due to a few minor engineering losses that reduce the output, the current working model only produces 99.9% of the input.
The next step is to go for that last 0.2%. I did this work very quickly
And if you'd like to be in on the ground floor, I am letting a very few people buy stock in my enterprise now.
...an article on coal gasification or something like that. By the way, how many calories do you get by burning coke?
No, but surely it can model the _cooperative_ aspects.
I wouldn't trust a computer to predict whether a robot hand is capable of cracking an egg and peeling off the shell without damaging the membrane underneath.
But I would trust a computer to model the effect of having robot A shine a blue light, robot B shine a red light, have robot A programmed to move toward a red light at 1 mph, and have robot B programmed to move away from a blue light at 2 mph. And I would trust it to model the effect of a twenty such robots.
The object was apparently to demonstrate something or other regarding cooperation strategies between robots with limited communication abilities and limited knowledge of the surroundings.
What, precisely, was gained by doing this with actual physical robots, rather than a computer simulation?
What he said.
...has released a 49-page document entitled "The Big Bad Wolf's Guidelines for Protecting Little Red Riding Hood." In a prepared statement, the wolf said:
"We'd like others to join the conversation. A long, long time ago, several weeks ago in fact, we were a little insensitive about the way we implemented our last henhouse raid. Critics complained that wearing grandmother's clothing was deceptive, and that what we were doing posed a risk to Little Red Riding Hood. While we want to emphasize that Little Red Riding Hood was not harmed, that and other things have contributed to us thinking deeply with how we provide security and privacy, as well as respect for those we eat, for the use humane slaughtering practices. We also wish to assure the consumed that we target only henhouses, and that any collateral loss of innocent human life is accidental and deeply regretted."
"Our new guidelines protect the consumed by prohibiting the use of cloaks intended to resemble human beings. From now on, we will cloak ourselves only in the garb of sheep. We've devised technology in the form of a new chalk filter that guarantees that any traces of our individual voice identity will be erased, and that there is no possibility of causing psychological harm to our victims by the use of harsh vocalizations."
"We have asked our colleagues the Fox and the Coyote to join with us and to follow only best predatory practices."
"Because of this increased protection, we no longer recommend that home users build firewalls of brick. Instead, they should enjoy the economy, light, and airy comfort of porous straw walls, perforated by dozens of Windows."
...or "Bridge," or, heck, "Sheepshead..." set the calendar back a few decades... and most of this article would still be true.
When I was an undergraduate at MIT during the decade of the [mumble], I was fascinated by the guys I saw in the dorm in the game room, playing bridge. Almost any hour of the day, going to or from class, meals, whatever, you'd see these guys. The same guys. I'd see them at 2 a.m. in the morning as I was on my way to the PDP-1 room to place Spacewar (oops, let's not go there).
Of course, around the end of the semester, I wouldn't see them any more.
Next year, there'd be a new group of people playing bridge...
That USB scheme really expensive... and quite likely to damage the drive if the disk isn't manufactured perfectly. Heck, I have some perfectly round CD's that make my entire computer whine and vibrate in a rather anxiety-provoking way.
Why don't manufacturers take a look at the various systems deployed in the heyday of MS-DOS? Vault's PROLOK system involved a unique, laser-etched physical hole in the diskette. It was used by Ashton-Tate, IIRC. It would have to be a better idea than this one.
Of course, if manufacturers really took a look at the various systems deployed in the heyday of MS-DOS, they might notice that all of them added a burden to the cost-of-goods, none of them worked, all of them were cracked, all of them created ill-will among honest customers, and all of them were abandoned after a few years.
I'm haven't read the article yet. I'm going to list questions I have, which, if the answers are all "yes," would make this interesting to me.
1) Can I use this just like a standalone DVD recorder, i.e. can I record any program I'm watching on my TV, whether broadcast or cable, and then burn a DVD from it that will play in an ordinary DVD player?
2) Will it play (just play, not record) HD-DVDs, just in case the movies I want to buy aren't released in Blu-Ray format (or just in case the local video store happens to have the HD-DVD versions but not the Blu-Ray versions on the shelf on the day I happen to be in the store?)
3) Is there a list of certified Blu-Ray media that are guaranteed to work in the device, or is it going to be "a lot of them work most of the time, try them yourself and see" (as it is with DVD-RW, DL DVD+R, and that whole zoo).
Now, let's see if the article answers these questions and what the answers are.
1) Not answered. 2) Not answered. 3) Not answered, except in the sense that "so once dual-layer discs appear you also get the ability to burn up to 50GB of data to a single disc" (i.e. dual-layer media aren't even available yet).
It does not sound to me as if the reviewer even attempted to burn a video disk. It sounds as if the reviewer had his hands full just trying to get the thing to _play_ them.
!!!!! To play a Blu-ray disc you need to use dedicated software that can handle the HDCP part of the AACS encryption standard and Media Center can't do this at present.... For now though, to play the movie from the sofa... On first attempt we got a region code error message. I then went into the software and selected Region B. Restarting the software, the disc then played but with strange graphical corruption. Restarting the PC sorted this."
And the bottom line? Being a discerning person "I could still immediately discern the increased detail and resolution in the picture over DVD. It was as clear as day to me, but actually not everyone in the office could make this out or was impressed by it."
This has got to be a joke, right? An expensive PC that requires you to launch special software from the keyboard in order just to play a disk, with glitches, that worked after a few restarts, producing an image that was not enough better than a DVD to be obvious to everyone?
...a Beowulf puddle of these.
"the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals."
Right. The "it's a free-market, vote-with-your-dollars" folks never explain how you can vote with your dollars if you can't tell what you're buying.
The current administration talks a good line about a "free market," but their application of the principle is very selective.
...which can't possibly infect your computer.
Oh, wait...
Here's what's going on:
1) Most Americans... including ordinary consumers... feel that invasion of privacy is pretty much OK as long as it is done for the purpose of selling stuff. And the more closely the merchandise matches the consumer's tastes, the more it is tolerated. At one extreme, sure, people object to receiving spam for products that are claimed to enlarge body parts that they do not possess. At the other extreme, well, gosh, I don't really mind when Netflix shows me the titles of several other movies featuring the same director or actors as the movie I just selected.
2) Most Americans believe very deeply that "it can't happen here." That is, we don't really feel in our guts that there's any chance that "our" government would really use the data collected by merchandisers, health care providers, or government warrantless wiretaps, to go after people who really aren't bad guys, but just happen to be political opponents.
And, darn it, I fall in category 2 myself. Despite everything. I gripe about invasion of privacy, but despite the fact that my intellect tells me the problem is real, my gut tells me that I'm overdramatizing.
(And, yes, I can imagine myself... in a different time and place saying, "Let's not overreact, after all it is just broken glass.")
Oh, no, these sorts of press reports never go so far as to say they can actually be transmitted, let alone cause disease... they just say "the average serving of sauerkraut contains more bacteria than the average toilet bowl" and leave it to readers to make the obvious but incorrect inference.
If I were Ballmer, I would seek out an opportunity to comment on the doubtless many medical studies that have shown that ear wax, mites, bacteria, Avian flu virus, cooties, parasites, AIDS, those icky crayfish-like ear thingies from "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan," the gay gene, and terrist nucular WMD materials remain on ear bud surfaces, no matter how clean they seem to be.
I listen to Howard Stern all the time, commuting on route 128. All I do is tune my FM radio to 87.9.
Apparently many Sirius satellite radio receivers must be add-on units that work through FM modulators with the car's FM radio. And 87.9 is apparently the default FM conversion setting.
Based on my unscientific poll, during drive time something like 2/3 of Boston-area Sirius subscribers are tuned to Stern.
OK, to tell the truth, no, I don't get continuous, uninterrupted Stern that way, but, yes, I do keep one of my presets at 87.9 and I do check from time to time to see if anything is on there... and I get enough Stern to feel like I'm still "in touch" with him and his gang.
So, the question I have is, which is it? are jackbooted Sirius thugs going to sue me for theft of services? Or are jackbooted FCC thugs going to toss the converter operators in jail for operating pirate radio stations?
"I come up with a blank every time I search for one."
Me, too.
For reasons too complicated to explain, I would gladly pay much more than $15... let's say $150... for an HDTV downconverter, because we're perfectly happy with NTSC broadcast reception, but there's ONE channel with not-very-good reception... and it happens to be the local PBS affiliate, which we watch a lot... and they broadcast in HDTV too.
So in fact I've been shopping for converters, maybe they exist, but you sure can't prove it by the sales staff at Tweeter and Best Buy and Circuit City, who don't even seem to know what I'm talking about.
I would have thought that if there were going to be a wide selection of cheap converters available in 2009, there would be a narrow selection of expensive converters available today.
What exactly is meant by the statement that "The software also showed Van Gogh's use of complementary colours increased during his most active period from 1885 to 1890?"
Reading between the lines, I'm inclined to wonder whether, if the software had been "trained" on early Van Goghs, it would have recognized the later ones as authentic, or whether it would have rejected them because of the apparently uncharacteristic use of colors.
Actually this whole story bothers me. To begin with, human art experts not only are not 100% accurate, they are far from 100% agreement with each other in authenticating art. So, how can the software ever be tested for accuracy?
I could have sworn 2006 was the deadline for broadcasters to turn their analog VHF/UHF spectrum back to the FCC. After all, they've been "loaned" the DTV spectrum, and it's not possible that they'd be so dishonest as to just keep sitting on both of them, is it?
Of course, my old analog television receivers still seem to be receiving an image, so I guess the deadline must have slipped three years.
It always seems to be three years away.
I don't think I'd count any "vacant television channels" chickens until, or if, they hatch. And I don't think I'd want to put much of my personal wealth into anything that actually depends on that spectrum ever being returned.
Of course, the FCC could always enforce... no, I forgot. The FCC doesn't enforce anything any more. Except obscenity regulations. For some reason, the free market can be trusted to take care of everything else, but not that.
I can't seem to find a reference to it online... I'd appreciate one if someone has one... but circa 1960 the Polaroid company developed a film for recording nuclear tests, which was similar to three-layer color film except that the three layers, instead of being sensitized to different colors, were given emulsions with widely different sensitivities. The fastest emulation was similar to Kodak Royal-X Pan, ISO 1600, and the slowest was similar to Kodak Microfile, and if I recall correctly had an ISO speed of something like 0.1
The result was to extend the useful dynamic range of the film by a factor of 10000 or so--more than a dozen additional f-stops of latitude, or extra Ansel zones, if you like.
The film was processed in regular Kodacolor chemistry (IIRC), each layer coming out a different color. In color, the result was a "false color" image displaying a huge dynamic range of light intensity; or, it could be printed as black-and-white using different filters to select different intensity ranges.
In effect, the photographer was automatically bracketing every shot by a dozen F-stops, in a single shutter click.
It was an incredibly neat hack. I wonder whatever became of it?
They sound crazy to me. I
n the first place, I seriously doubt that there's any meaningful way of measuring the "percentage coverage" of a gamut of colors, since the mapping of colors into a plane is somewhat arbitrary and there are two very different systems in wide use. I notice that this comparison of Adobe RGB vs. sRGB doesn't try to estimate any "percentages."
Neither does Poynton's invaluable Color FAQ.
Second, if we're talking about something like "area included in the CIE xy plane by thus and such system of reproduction" as a percentage of "area included by the entire spectrum," I seriously doubt that you can get a number anything like 90% with only three primaries. You're still trying to approximate a blobby blunt shape with an inscribed triangle.
The article is so vague on details that it's not clear how many primary colors are used. If it uses six primaries instead of three, I'm prepared to believe it could give meaningfully better color than traditional systems. How important that is remains to be seen. HDTV gives obviously, dramatically better picture quality (in terms of resolution) than traditional TV, but it doesn't seem to be setting the world on fire.
The big question, of course, is where one would find program material encoded with more than three primaries; it would need to be specially recorded for this system (requiring new video, broadcast, and optical disk standards).