As noted by others, self-service kiosks use dye-sublimation and dye-sublimation printers are fairly available as PC peripherals but have very high supplies costs. Minilabs and online services product true photographic prints.
What really frosts me is each new process claims print longevity comparable to each previous process. That is, dye-sub prints are claimed to be "virtually as durable" as true photographic color prints, ink-jets are "comparable to" dye-sub, and so forth. The claims, are of course, exaggerated; each new process is less durable than the one that proceeded it.
And, good grief, traditional photographic color prints are not durable by even ordinary lay standards. "Virtually as durable as a traditional color print" is like saying "virtually as fuel-efficient as a 1950 Cadillac."
Yes, I know that the color prints of the 2000's are better than those of the 1950s.
But. People used to keep black-and-white pictures of their families on desks near windows for decades without visible fading. I have century_ old black-and-white photos "stored" under highly non-archival conditions, in basements, attics, you name it, that look fine. I have 1950s Polaroid photos where someone didn't completely coat them with the Print-Kote and even the uncoated parts are viewable. I have prints I made in a contact printer when I was eleven years old, that didn't get the hypo rinsed out thoroughly, and they are perfectly viewable.
Meanwhile, the color prints held on our refrigerator with magnets have turned greenish in just a couple of years.
And it's not as if it were impossible to make durable color prints, either. As far as I know, carbro prints, available for decades, are very nearly as long-lasting as black-and-white.
Whenever I buy an "Audio CD-R" or "Music CD-R" the price includes a royalty payment. The royalty payment is set at 2% of the manufacturer's revenue (not profit, revenue) and deposited with the U. S. Copyright Office, which in turn pays it into other funds in a complicated way.
According to the RIAA's own frickin' website, two thirds of it goes into a "Sound Recordings Fund" administered by an entity called the AARC which distributes it to artists, and the rest gets distributed to copyright holders.
So how the *&$%&! is this piracy? What's their beef, anyway? They're not getting enough? It should all go to the RIAA instead of some it going to artists? Nothing should ever be copied by anyone, no way, no how?
Hah. I'm not surprised. I never believed this would really happen.
Remember Al Gore talking about digitizing the Library of Congress so that a little girl in Carthage Tennessee would have access to books? That never happened either.
Al Gore talks big and the Library of Congress never delivers.
Google talks big and doesn't deliver.
And meanwhile, eccentric Michael Hart and his wild, impractical idealists digitize book after book after book.
About half the books on the Net, as indexed by the UPenn online books page were digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Hart drives all the eBook mavens crazy. He does everything wrong. He doesn't use Open EBook markup. He doesn't worry about conforming PG texts to authoritative academic editions. He doesn't posture.
How, exactly, is having a central search engine like Yahoo that can locate interesting audio content on other people's machines, with copyright and licensing issues being a between you and the person providing the content and none of Yahoo's business......different from having a central search engine like the original Napster or Audiogalaxy or whatever, that can locate interesting audio content on other people's machines, with copyright and licensing issues being a between you and the person providing the content and none of their business?
The big problem with traditional stereoscopic 3D isn't the need for glasses. It's problems with geometrical distortion. Sitting in a theatre, everyone sees slightly different images with their left and right eyes. But a person sitting front left sees a VERY different PAIR of images than a person sitting in the back right.
With the traditional two-image processes--versions of Wheatstone's nineteenth century stereoscope--everyone in the house sees the SAME thing through their left eye and the SAME thing through their right eye.
This has serious intrinsic limitations.
The audience view appears geometrically distorted, except for a few lucky members sitting in a fairly small central "sweet spot."
3D tends to make every movie look like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
Suppose Ann Miller is twenty feet from the camera, and she chucks a handkerchief at the camera, and it lands ten feet away. In the theatre, EVERYONE sees the handkerchief chucked straight at them, and landing halfway between them and the screen. People near the front see a flattened version of the original space. People near the back get exaggerated depth. People at the sides see rectangular geometry as rhomboidal.
Even in the sweet spot, there is only one camera focal length that reproduces depth accurately. If the cinematographer chooses to use a long lens for a closeup, rather than physically moving the camera closer, the picture will look wrong.
These geometrical distortions actually apply to ordinary 2D films as well, but you do not notice them because the image is already so spatially distorted by being flat that you are not processing it as an accurate representation of reality.
(Warning: ageist/sexist alert): Another issue is that 3D is unflattering to actresses, as it reveals the true spatial contour of their faces regardless of makeup. A forty-year-old actress can be made up to look twenty-five in regular films, but not in 3D.
They struggled with all these things in the 1950s, both with stereoscopic 3D and with the ultra-wide-angle processes like Cinerama.
All of these problems suggest to me that 3D will be fine for fantasy, science-fiction, and generally surrealistic subject matter, but I don't see how it can ever be used for traditional mainstream cinematic drama.
It might be easier to find someone willing to pay that kind of money for a private, small but luxurious compartment, big enough for two, and a short, orbital or perhaps even suborbital trip with a couple of hours of weightlessness.
(I used to work for a company that made a product specifically intended for shiftwork environments, and I have a son-in-law who is a shiftworker, and I know that not everyone works "business hours.")
I can predict that the next time I weigh myself the scale will read between 160 and 170. This prediction would have been true far more than 85% of the time over the last five years and I will be very surprised if it is not true the next time I weigh myself.
Once I learn that someone works a full-time job and where they work, I can predict with greater than 85% accuracy where they will be between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Monday through Friday.
I've heard it said, whether or not correctly I do not know, that if you simply predict that tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's, you will be accurate more often than the weather service.
Predictions are only valuable when they are unlikely or surprising. Tabulating obvious patterns and predicting their continuation may be highly accurate yet low in value.
NASA should simply send an unmanned probe to Mars containing a well-sealed, well-protected capsule containing a check for $1,000,000,[insert your favorite number of zeroes here], payable to bearer.
The first person who manages to get there and collect it gets to keep it.
Cookies were intended to allow sites to serve users by providing a convenient method of preserving client-side state.
They're intended to do legitimate things like let a site remember who you are so you don't need to log in every time you visit it, or assign a transaction code to make it easy for things like shopping carts to work... and prevent you from double-ordering if you click the "Order" button twice.
They were never intended for the purposes to which marketers have misappropriated them.
It's just another example of information being ostensibly collected for a purpose the user approves of, and then being secretly used for purposes the user is unaware of and might not approve of, and it justifiably makes people angry.
Don't forget H. G. Wells and "World Brain"
on
Sixty Years of Memex
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· Score: 2, Informative
...and others.
Wells, perhaps influenced by microfilm technology demonstrations he had seen at Kodak, was writing in 1938 about a world in which "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."
Wells also wrote that "A World Encyclopedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.... This Encyclopedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but perhaps not physically..." Of course, he didn't envision anything like goatse... or if he did, he didn't write about it.
The bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944) also had visions of information-sharing networks.
How about an end-to-end experience in which I "buy" a video, I "own" it, it is then "mine" to use as I wish, I can "keep" it as long as I like, I can "play" it over and over again, I can "fast forward" or "rewind" to any portion of it it at any time, I can use any player I like from any manufacturer, and I can "lend" it to a friend......you know, just like VHS?
Doesn't seem hard to grasp or difficult to implement.
Unless (gasp!) he's lying about the end-to-end user experience really begin their main concern.
...the early adopters who back the wrong horse will be punished and will learn a life lesson that will make them reluctant to embrace new technology...
...the general public will sit back waiting for the dust to settle...
...it will take five years before you can walk into a video store and see which format is the "normal" one, and see a choice of models at low prices stacked up in the local K-Mart or Costco...
...and just as I buy one, they announce the next pair of competing, incompatible (or compatible-in-"many"-but-not-mine) standards.
As Theotocopulos says in the H. G. Wells movie Things to Come: "Stop this 'progress!' Stop it, I say!"
FALSE POSITIVE rate?
on
3D Face Cameras
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've seen half-a-dozen of these press releases by facial-recognition companies and they never say anything about false positives. In fact they rarely provide numbers at all.
"dramatic improvements in the accuracy and performance for facial recognition," yeah, well, how does "dramatic" translate to percentages?
The old familiar math... if there is one known terrorist per million people, and if the false positive rate is one in a thousand, then 999 out of 1000 people identified as "terrorists" will be innocent.
To tell the truth, for a couple of years, I've been trying to buy something that would convert HDTV signals to something my 27" CRT-based VHF-UHF-cable ready receiver can use.
So every time I drop into a place like Radio Shack or Tweeter I ask about HDTV converters.
So far: they don't have one, they've never heard one, they don't know what I'm talking about. I have no idea whether we're talking fifty bucks or two hundred bucks or... whatever.
My conspiracy theory is that the manufacturers simply won't make converters available, in hopes of forcing people to buy all-new television receivers
(If you must know why... when they put a new roof on my house, the roofers just chopped off the roof antenna and threw it away, figuring it couldn't possibly be in use. To make a long story short, I've been making do with an indoor antenna and as it happens it works acceptably on every channel EXCEPT our PBS outlet, channel 2--which also broadcasts in HDTV.
I've been figuring that, given that I get UHF beautifully with an indoor antenna, I could probably receive HDTV as well...)
"The vast majority of dollar DVD's start playing the moment they're loaded."
No wonder they're successful.
I've been asking for years and years why expensive DVDs can't do this. When you put the disk in the player, and the DEFAULT action should be... PLAY THE MOVIE.
This should at the very least be a user-preference option you can configure in the player.
I hate having to wait through a minute of non-skippable crap in order to be given the opportunity to tell my DVD player that what I want to do is (imagine!) play the movie.
Oh, yes, the S100 bus computers that came with sixteen slots and enough signal power to reliably drive about three of them were far superior.
To say nothing of the innumerable PCs with insufficient DC power to allow all slots to be filled, cards that did not say how much power they drew, and absolutely no way to tell that the system was overloaded other than intermittently unreliable operation.
...all the speakers were equipped with Bluetooth or some other wireless connectivity for the audio signal...and it were hi-enough-fi to satisfy anyone that wanted 13.1 speakers......how are you ever going to plug them in? Wiremold around your living room with continously outlets, one every foot?
Well, then, EVEN IF all but the subwoofer were battery-powered... would you like to go around replacing 52 AA batteries every time you wanted to sit down for a nice listening session?
Well, then, EVEN IF all the batteries were rechargeable... do you have a charger that can accept 13 batteries all at once? And do you feel like shelling out thirteen times whatever a good NiMH battery costs so that you can have a set to listen with while the first set is charging? After you go around the living room replacing thirteen batteries?
This is never going to fly unless they can power the things off fuel cells or microwave power beamed from a satellite or individual pellets of U235 in each speaker or something.
Slashdot Mirror
As noted by others, self-service kiosks use dye-sublimation and dye-sublimation printers are fairly available as PC peripherals but have very high supplies costs. Minilabs and online services product true photographic prints.
What really frosts me is each new process claims print longevity comparable to each previous process. That is, dye-sub prints are claimed to be "virtually as durable" as true photographic color prints, ink-jets are "comparable to" dye-sub, and so forth. The claims, are of course, exaggerated; each new process is less durable than the one that proceeded it.
And, good grief, traditional photographic color prints are not durable by even ordinary lay standards. "Virtually as durable as a traditional color print" is like saying "virtually as fuel-efficient as a 1950 Cadillac."
Yes, I know that the color prints of the 2000's are better than those of the 1950s.
But. People used to keep black-and-white pictures of their families on desks near windows for decades without visible fading. I have century_ old black-and-white photos "stored" under highly non-archival conditions, in basements, attics, you name it, that look fine. I have 1950s Polaroid photos where someone didn't completely coat them with the Print-Kote and even the uncoated parts are viewable. I have prints I made in a contact printer when I was eleven years old, that didn't get the hypo rinsed out thoroughly, and they are perfectly viewable.
Meanwhile, the color prints held on our refrigerator with magnets have turned greenish in just a couple of years.
And it's not as if it were impossible to make durable color prints, either. As far as I know, carbro prints, available for decades, are very nearly as long-lasting as black-and-white.
Hey, WTF?
Whenever I buy an "Audio CD-R" or "Music CD-R" the price includes a royalty payment. The royalty payment is set at 2% of the manufacturer's revenue (not profit, revenue) and deposited with the U. S. Copyright Office, which in turn pays it into other funds in a complicated way.
According to the RIAA's own frickin' website, two thirds of it goes into a "Sound Recordings Fund" administered by an entity called the AARC which distributes it to artists, and the rest gets distributed to copyright holders.
So how the *&$%&! is this piracy? What's their beef, anyway? They're not getting enough? It should all go to the RIAA instead of some it going to artists? Nothing should ever be copied by anyone, no way, no how?
I mean, just what is their problem?
Hah. I'm not surprised. I never believed this would really happen.
Remember Al Gore talking about digitizing the Library of Congress so that a little girl in Carthage Tennessee would have access to books? That never happened either.
Al Gore talks big and the Library of Congress never delivers.
Google talks big and doesn't deliver.
And meanwhile, eccentric Michael Hart and his wild, impractical idealists digitize book after book after book.
About half the books on the Net, as indexed by the UPenn online books page were digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Hart drives all the eBook mavens crazy. He does everything wrong. He doesn't use Open EBook markup. He doesn't worry about conforming PG texts to authoritative academic editions. He doesn't posture.
All he does is get the job done.
How, exactly, is having a central search engine like Yahoo that can locate interesting audio content on other people's machines, with copyright and licensing issues being a between you and the person providing the content and none of Yahoo's business... ...different from having a central search engine like the original Napster or Audiogalaxy or whatever, that can locate interesting audio content on other people's machines, with copyright and licensing issues being a between you and the person providing the content and none of their business?
1950s: TV threat -> Cinerama and Cinemascope and 3D.
2000s: HDTV threat -> revival of widescreen and 3D processes.
The big problem with traditional stereoscopic 3D isn't the need for glasses. It's problems with geometrical distortion. Sitting in a theatre, everyone sees slightly different images with their left and right eyes. But a person sitting front left sees a VERY different PAIR of images than a person sitting in the back right.
With the traditional two-image processes--versions of Wheatstone's nineteenth century stereoscope--everyone in the house sees the SAME thing through their left eye and the SAME thing through their right eye.
This has serious intrinsic limitations.
The audience view appears geometrically distorted, except for a few lucky members sitting in a fairly small central "sweet spot."
3D tends to make every movie look like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
Suppose Ann Miller is twenty feet from the camera, and she chucks a handkerchief at the camera, and it lands ten feet away. In the theatre, EVERYONE sees the handkerchief chucked straight at them, and landing halfway between them and the screen. People near the front see a flattened version of the original space. People near the back get exaggerated depth. People at the sides see rectangular geometry as rhomboidal.
Even in the sweet spot, there is only one camera focal length that reproduces depth accurately. If the cinematographer chooses to use a long lens for a closeup, rather than physically moving the camera closer, the picture will look wrong.
These geometrical distortions actually apply to ordinary 2D films as well, but you do not notice them because the image is already so spatially distorted by being flat that you are not processing it as an accurate representation of reality.
(Warning: ageist/sexist alert): Another issue is that 3D is unflattering to actresses, as it reveals the true spatial contour of their faces regardless of makeup. A forty-year-old actress can be made up to look twenty-five in regular films, but not in 3D.
They struggled with all these things in the 1950s, both with stereoscopic 3D and with the ultra-wide-angle processes like Cinerama.
All of these problems suggest to me that 3D will be fine for fantasy, science-fiction, and generally surrealistic subject matter, but I don't see how it can ever be used for traditional mainstream cinematic drama.
I hope the RFID chip gets implanted somewhere superficial and unimportant so that criminals don't need to hurt me too much to steal my RFID chip.
It might be easier to find someone willing to pay that kind of money for a private, small but luxurious compartment, big enough for two, and a short, orbital or perhaps even suborbital trip with a couple of hours of weightlessness.
RIght. You're in the 15%.
(I used to work for a company that made a product specifically intended for shiftwork environments, and I have a son-in-law who is a shiftworker, and I know that not everyone works "business hours.")
I can predict that the next time I weigh myself the scale will read between 160 and 170. This prediction would have been true far more than 85% of the time over the last five years and I will be very surprised if it is not true the next time I weigh myself.
Once I learn that someone works a full-time job and where they work, I can predict with greater than 85% accuracy where they will be between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Monday through Friday.
I've heard it said, whether or not correctly I do not know, that if you simply predict that tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's, you will be accurate more often than the weather service.
Predictions are only valuable when they are unlikely or surprising. Tabulating obvious patterns and predicting their continuation may be highly accurate yet low in value.
NASA should simply send an unmanned probe to Mars containing a well-sealed, well-protected capsule containing a check for $1,000,000,[insert your favorite number of zeroes here], payable to bearer.
The first person who manages to get there and collect it gets to keep it.
Cookies were intended to allow sites to serve users by providing a convenient method of preserving client-side state.
They're intended to do legitimate things like let a site remember who you are so you don't need to log in every time you visit it, or assign a transaction code to make it easy for things like shopping carts to work... and prevent you from double-ordering if you click the "Order" button twice.
They were never intended for the purposes to which marketers have misappropriated them.
It's just another example of information being ostensibly collected for a purpose the user approves of, and then being secretly used for purposes the user is unaware of and might not approve of, and it justifiably makes people angry.
...and others.
Wells, perhaps influenced by microfilm technology demonstrations he had seen at Kodak, was writing in 1938 about a world in which "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."
Wells also wrote that "A World Encyclopedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.... This Encyclopedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but perhaps not physically..." Of course, he didn't envision anything like goatse... or if he did, he didn't write about it.
The bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944) also had visions of information-sharing networks.
At the highest magnification, it is clear that the moon's surface looks just like the "test" (shell) of a sea urchin.
Imagine what it must have been like, aeons ago, when it was still alive and covered with spines.
How about an end-to-end experience in which I "buy" a video, I "own" it, it is then "mine" to use as I wish, I can "keep" it as long as I like, I can "play" it over and over again, I can "fast forward" or "rewind" to any portion of it it at any time, I can use any player I like from any manufacturer, and I can "lend" it to a friend... ...you know, just like VHS?
Doesn't seem hard to grasp or difficult to implement.
Unless (gasp!) he's lying about the end-to-end user experience really begin their main concern.
No, he used the word "carbonation." That was part of what made it so funny.
Funny you should mention that.
My son was about 7 years old when they were doing the Pepsi Challenge in a mall.
He took it very seriously. Tasted both and said that he preferred the one that turned out to be Pepsi.
When they foolishly asked him "why," he says very seriously, "It's colder, and it has more carbonation."
Sigh... not again...
...the early adopters who back the wrong horse will be punished and will learn a life lesson that will make them reluctant to embrace new technology...
...the general public will sit back waiting for the dust to settle...
...it will take five years before you can walk into a video store and see which format is the "normal" one, and see a choice of models at low prices stacked up in the local K-Mart or Costco...
...and just as I buy one, they announce the next pair of competing, incompatible (or compatible-in-"many"-but-not-mine) standards.
As Theotocopulos says in the H. G. Wells movie Things to Come: "Stop this 'progress!' Stop it, I say!"
I've seen half-a-dozen of these press releases by facial-recognition companies and they never say anything about false positives. In fact they rarely provide numbers at all.
"dramatic improvements in the accuracy and performance for facial recognition," yeah, well, how does "dramatic" translate to percentages?
The old familiar math... if there is one known terrorist per million people, and if the false positive rate is one in a thousand, then 999 out of 1000 people identified as "terrorists" will be innocent.
To tell the truth, for a couple of years, I've been trying to buy something that would convert HDTV signals to something my 27" CRT-based VHF-UHF-cable ready receiver can use.
So every time I drop into a place like Radio Shack or Tweeter I ask about HDTV converters.
So far: they don't have one, they've never heard one, they don't know what I'm talking about. I have no idea whether we're talking fifty bucks or two hundred bucks or... whatever.
My conspiracy theory is that the manufacturers simply won't make converters available, in hopes of forcing people to buy all-new television receivers
(If you must know why... when they put a new roof on my house, the roofers just chopped off the roof antenna and threw it away, figuring it couldn't possibly be in use. To make a long story short, I've been making do with an indoor antenna and as it happens it works acceptably on every channel EXCEPT our PBS outlet, channel 2--which also broadcasts in HDTV.
I've been figuring that, given that I get UHF beautifully with an indoor antenna, I could probably receive HDTV as well...)
"The vast majority of dollar DVD's start playing the moment they're loaded."
No wonder they're successful.
I've been asking for years and years why expensive DVDs can't do this. When you put the disk in the player, and the DEFAULT action should be... PLAY THE MOVIE.
This should at the very least be a user-preference option you can configure in the player.
I hate having to wait through a minute of non-skippable crap in order to be given the opportunity to tell my DVD player that what I want to do is (imagine!) play the movie.
(Of course, the original Mac had serious power supply problems of its own, too. And even less excuse for them).
Oh, yes, the S100 bus computers that came with sixteen slots and enough signal power to reliably drive about three of them were far superior.
To say nothing of the innumerable PCs with insufficient DC power to allow all slots to be filled, cards that did not say how much power they drew, and absolutely no way to tell that the system was overloaded other than intermittently unreliable operation.
And your point is?
It's OK to outsource everything else, but not this?
...all the speakers were equipped with Bluetooth or some other wireless connectivity for the audio signal...and it were hi-enough-fi to satisfy anyone that wanted 13.1 speakers... ...how are you ever going to plug them in? Wiremold around your living room with continously outlets, one every foot?
Well, then, EVEN IF all but the subwoofer were battery-powered... would you like to go around replacing 52 AA batteries every time you wanted to sit down for a nice listening session?
Well, then, EVEN IF all the batteries were rechargeable... do you have a charger that can accept 13 batteries all at once? And do you feel like shelling out thirteen times whatever a good NiMH battery costs so that you can have a set to listen with while the first set is charging? After you go around the living room replacing thirteen batteries?
This is never going to fly unless they can power the things off fuel cells or microwave power beamed from a satellite or individual pellets of U235 in each speaker or something.