Just as Americans are often puzzled by how highly esteemed Jerry Lewis is in France (I am French, and I don't understand it either), the French are bemused by how Derrida has become central to discourse in American humanities departments.
When I was in college, I had never even heard of the guy before I started reading US scientific publications, where physics professors would bemoan him in terms very similar to the original article.
In French humanities classes, Derrida's theory is mentioned as a clever prank, which the understanding ultimately deconstruction has to deconstruct itself and self-destruct.
Most network access servers send Caller-ID information in the RADIUS authentication request. AOL would have that in their logs, and if the thief used caller ID blocking, the FBI could ask the phone company for their call detail records for the ISP number.
A thief that had even the modicum of clue to use Caller ID blocking, let alone spoof his telephone number, would not have been dumb enough to use an AOL account on a stolen machine.
You get the most energy efficiency from a machine when it works in a thermodynamically reversible way, for instance the most efficient thermal motor possible is one that uses a Carnot cycle. Most real-world engines use different, less efficient cycles like the Otto or Stirling cycle because they yield higher speeds or torque.
Losing the ability to reverse computations means increasing entropy and thus lower efficiency. Interestingly, there is a whole class of functional programming methods that is intrinsically reversible (because evaluating expressions without side effects is reversible).
The best explanations of the issues involved is in Richard Feynman's "Lectures on Computation", that show how thermodynamics constrain what is ultimately possible with a computer.
A small nit to pick: Ken Thompson is the father of Unix. Dennis Ritchie is "merely" the father of C (although he did code a significant chunk of the original Unix, of course).
I splurged for a Montblanc Meisterstuck LaGrande (extra fat barrel) in silver, and I love it. My other fountain pen is a Waterman Edson, which has an absolutely striking design, as far from the conservative Montblanc design as conceivable. Pelikan also have a line of highly respected thick-barreled pens.
A base Montblanc with a resin (i.e. plastic) barrel will be about $300. Special editions, precious metal models and the like can easily rise above $1000. That is the same price as a mid-range PC or digital camera that will be obsolete within a couple of years. You should be able to bequeath your Montblanc to your children, on the other hand. Sure, they are expensive, but to put it in perspective, as far as luxury items go, they are relatively inexpensive.
That said, the thickness of a pen barrel is really a question of personal preference. Some people like them thin like Cross or some ST Dupont pens. There is no universal rule.
Actually, Mercedes-Benz cars are famous for their durability and reliability. That's why so many taxi drivers use them in Europe. A Mercedes will easily last 30 years without turning into an eyesore, and until recently, the highest mileage car was a Mercedes (it was superseded recently by a Volvo).
Power48 is a straight HP48 emulator PalmOS. Works quite well on my Tungsten T. The on-screen keyboard makes for a very cramped display, however, so for practical use I use powerOne Graph, which now has RPN mode.
I don't think specialized calculator hardware makes any sense nowadays, not with 200MHz+ CPUs and more user-friendly user interfaces in PDAs. I do have a 49G gathering dust (the 48 series has much better keyboards), and my trusty HP-15C from 11th grade that actually sees service every now and then.
Our databases are Oracle running on 4-way Sun boxes. But when we add capacity, we will go for SuSE Enterprise Linux running on IBM dual-Opteron boxes (that version of Oracle is still a developer's preview). We use Solaris/x86 for our web and app servers, and it is every bit as reliable as Solaris/Sparc (actually, among enterprise vendors, Sun historically has a reputation for poor quality compared to HP, IBM and DEC). One of our machines we had forgoten about, and had been running for over 600 days before we decommissioned it.
I prefer Solaris/x86 by far to Linux, but Sun shot itself in the foot by signalling its imminent demise (they are working on reversing that, but I doubt they will have much credibility). There is still no version of Oracle 9 for Solaris/x86, they stopped at 8.1.7, which is EOL-ed. Solaris/Sparc is simply too expensive for me to justify for my company, and is not competitive on low-end configurations (4 CPUs or less) with not only with Linux, but even Mac OS X.
Moore's law whittles away at the number of applications that can only be run on large SMP systems, and now that Oracle's reference platform is Linux and no longer Solaris, the Linux version will no longer lag in having the latest patches and fixes. In fact, Oracle's whole "grid" push with Oracle 10g is a transparent nudge towards an architecture with many small Linux servers rather than a single SMP system.
I for one don't believe all applications can be parallelized so easily, and there will still be a need for large SMP systems, but that will become a niche and the interesting thing is Oracle is putting its marketing muscle behind an architecture that is antithetical to all the big iron manfacturers (Sun, IBM, HP).
Anybody who uses an E15K to host web servers or application servers "because it's more scalable" rather than a farm of cheap uniprocessors with load balancers is wasting their company's money and deserves to be fired in my book. Only databases justify heavy iron.
Part of the reason this problem is so hard is that it has been approached mostly from a technological perspective, rather than finding out how humans think and organizing the system around that.
There is a significant body of knowledge around this subject that was developed by librarians. See this article for an introduction.
Another example: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat information appliance eschewed files completely. You located a document by typing words that are in it, in efect making the whole document its own filename.
The approach I find most powerful is set-oriented. I use an app called IMatch to manage my digital photos. Its sophisticated set-oriented category system makes it very easy to locate an image. That is what Microsoft is attempting with Longhorn's unified data store, or in more forward-looking projects like MyLifeBits.
"defacto standard" is a bit of hyperbole. I like the PostgreSQL team's insistance on transactions and integrity, unlike MySQL's original denial that these mattered (which pretty much destroys any credibility they might have had in my mind, even if they now support transactions with InnoDB). But PostgreSQL is surprisingly primitive in some respects.
I was trying to write an OLTP application with 7.3.4 and the current API does not support bind variables. Most OLTP queries will use the same SQL repeatedly, with some variables changing for each transaction.
The difference between sending:
('insert into table foo values (:1)', 42) ('insert into table foo values (:1)', 137) ('insert into table foo values (:1)', 69)
and
'insert into table foo values (42)' 'insert into table foo values (137)' 'insert into table foo values (69)'
is that in the second case, as the SQL text varies for each request, it has to be reparsed and a new optimizer plan recomputed for each query, adding tremendous overhead.
PostgreSQL 7.4 (currently in beta) fixes this,but to me it shows a certain level of immaturity in the product for high-performance applications.
I am sure PostgreSQL will get there eventually, but it will take a while. UNIX did not become an enteprise-class OS overnight either.
You are right, of course - this is strictly true only only for identical processes. The pixels on the Canon 10D are half the size of those on the Canon D30 (two generations older), yet it still manages to have slightly lower noise. We will only know for sure when the camera is out and reviewed.
That said, Sony makes both CCD chips mentioned, and I find it hard to believe they can manage even a 2x improvement in a consumer-oriented chip over a semi-pro chip that came out a mere 6 months ago.
The 14-bit ADC seems more like specmanship for marketing purposes than anything else, just like the 8MP. This is reminiscent of the HiFi market, where some cheap audio amplifiers have high watt output ratings to lure naive shoppers, but terrible distortion.
I hope I am wrong, and that Sony turns out a great product, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The lens is probably excellent, but wasted on a 2/3" sensor (the term 2/3" is an artefact from cathode ray tubes, the sensor is actually 8.8 mm x 6.6 mm for 8MP, or the 22.7 mm x 15.1 mm sensor of a 6MP Canon EOS-10D (compare to conventional 35 mm film at 36 mm x 24 mm).
The end result is each pixel on the Sony is only 1/8 the area of the pixel on one of the $1500 advanced amateur digital cameras (Canon EOS 10D, Nikon D100, Fuji S2, Pentax *ist D).
This means each pixel will receive very little light (and thus a low signal to noise ratio) and have images with a lot of electronic noise even at ISO 100. Noise manifests itself as colored dots that pepper smooth areas like skies.
If this camera had used one of the ICX413AQ 6MP APS-size sensors Sony sells Nikon and Pentax rather than the ICX456 used on this camera, it could have been a winner.
Cardinal Richelieu was the powerful prime minister of Louis XIII. He was instrumental in bringing the noblemen to heel and centralizing power in the hands of the king. His privately stated objective in founding the Academie Francaise in 1635 (keep in mind French, rather than Latin, only became the official language in 1539) was to "harness the idle talkers into the crown's service".
Their first mission was to produce a dictionary, which took them a long time as the first edition was only published in 1694. That said, their multi-volume dictionary was never commonly used, and the equivalents of Webster in France is Emile Littre (his dictionary was published from 1859 to 1872).
Standardization of French
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, the Academie Francaise was started by Richelieu under Louis XIII, two centuries before Napoleon. (unfortunately, Slashdot is stripping my properly spelled acute accents and cedillas).
An important feature PalmOS 5.2.x added over 5.0.x is SSL support in the OS and in the VersaMail 2.5 app. I have a Tungsten T and it cannot access the SSL-only POP3 server we have at work. The T2 should.
I don't think I will upgrade to the T2, however, probably to the new Sony Clie UX50 instead.
Re:20 years old, never once in the black
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
·
· Score: 1
Minitel was originally started in the early 1980s as a tool of industrial policy.
The idea was to create demand for a domestic semiconductor industry, which had previously enjoyed big contracts from the transition to digital telephone exchanges but had to find new outlets because the switch upgrades were starting to taper off.
The break-even point depends on how you account for the costs of the project (when it was started, it was a government agency), but by 1993 the project was widely considered to have reached break-even within France Telecom. Keep in mind it generated over $1.2Bn in turnover a year, 30% for FT, 70% for around 30,000 or so content providers.
When I was in university in France around 1991-1994, I would sometimes use a Minitel 1b in 80x24 vt100 emulation mode to log on to the school's vax (they didn't have Ethernet in dorm rooms yet, but the PBX offered serial line logins).
Believe me, you don't want to run Emacs at 1200 bps downstream...
This article in the SF Weekly gives the other side of the story, and how Segway's high-priced PR effort backfired when a demo smashed into a wall.
I've seen two yuppies (the financial kind) whiz by on the sidewalk in front of my office in downtown San Francisco (so much for "a device that hasn't arrived yet"), and I wholly agree with the ban - these contraptions are a serious hazard to pedestrians. They are wide, have a high center of gravity and are very fast. They will also probably be driven by the same heedless people who burn red lights in their SUVs (I see that happen at least twice a week in SF).
There is an implicit premise that one should be running only one OS. I don't agree. At home, I have: - a PC running Windows 2000 (Photo, games) - an iMac G4 running OS X (video, MP3, casual surfing) - a PC running Solaris/x86 (home server) - an iPaq handheld running Linux (toy) Any geek worth his salt should be reasonably at ease (not necessarily wizard-level) with the major platforms. Anything else is blinkered.
My personal favorite is Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software by Victor Wickerhauser. Victor wrote the fast wavelet routines I used in my tool XWPL, and he contributes practical coder's experience, not just theory. One of the examples he gives from his own personal experience is the FBI's fingerprint compression algorithm, developed in 1993 or so.
PC Power & Cooling have an off the shelf P4 model called the Sleekline that is now running at 39-40dB with the new motherboard rev.
The Compaq EVO D510 ultra-small desktop is rated at 19 dB. The mini-tower model with expansion capabilities is 22 dB.
The Signum Data FutureClient does away with fans altogether and uses fluid cooling for the ultimat ein silence. Unfortunately, it isn't available in the US (yet).
Apparently, interest for silent PCs is greater in Europe, probably because of more stringent workplace ergonomics laws in countries such as Sweden.
one of the competing standards wins in the marketplace by knock-out (e.g. VHS vs. Beta)
there is a stalemate, followed by negotations and the development of a third "fusion" standard that is incompatible with either side so neither side can get an advantage over the other. This is what happened to the original DVD standard, or for 56K modems between USR's x2 (leading in modems) and Lucent/Rockwell's K56flex (leading in ISP dial-up ports), leading to V.90 which was incompatible with either.
You have two less frequent variants:
One company introduces a ground-breaking product but cannot impose it in the marketplace because everybody else gangs up to stymie them. This happened to IBM with GML (before SGML).
One of the competing standards dies out and the other one is so badly wounded that it limps on to quasi-irrelevance. This is what happened to Sony's MiniDisc after its fight against Philips' DCC (Digital Compact Cassette)
This leads me to think neither DVD-R nor DVD+R will win, and they will be replaced by yet another standard that will force users to upgrade yet again. The manufacturers are obviously OK with this, as this makes more profits for them, at the expense of slowing the initial acceptance of the technology. Consumers aren't complete idiots either, apart from a fringe of early adopters who are used to being shafted anyways, myself included (I own an Apple iMac with a Pioneer DVD-R drive)
When you first start tinkering with digital imaging, you do things by the seat of the pants, and after a while you realize you need a more disciplined approach to have a manageable setup. The result is called a workflow. Each person's workflow is slightly different, but the following rough steps are common to everyone:
Acquisition: getting the pictures in, whether from a flatbed scanner, a slide/negative scanner, PhotoCD or digital cameras. This also encompasses automated primary cleanup done from within a scanner driver
Reviewing: deleting dud pictures, and if you have duplicates, selecting only the best one. Getting rid of the chaff early is a major step in improving your productivity, but it is difficult to be objective about one's own photos
Asset management:Cataloguing your pictures in a database, with categories, captions and all. Professional organizations like photo agencies go to a very high level of detail as this is the key to their business, but this is also essential for anyone contemplating building an imae collection of more than 1000 pictures or so.
Editing:You can go hog-wild with Photoshop or the GIMP, although since this is a very labor-intensive process, it is usually done to a small minority of pictures
Output:getting prints made, but also publishing to the Web
What hardware you use for acquisition controls the final quality of your results, so don't skimp on a cheap scanner, use slide or negative scanners rather than flatbed scans from prints, and use digital cameras like the Canon D60 or Nikon D100 that have larger sensors with less thermal noise rather than point and shoots. Using a alide/negative scanner is a very slow and laborious process, and a better option is to have scans made by a photo lab. Avoid the low quality Kodak PictureCD and opt instead for PhotoCD, which has higher resolution and scans made more carefully.
For most of the other phases, the choice of software does not matter very much and will indeed change over time. It is essential to get asset management right up-front, however. The solution you use must be
scalable to accomodate an expanding collection of photgraphs
open: you don't want to be locked in a proprietary database format, at the very least you should have the ability to export the database to some kind of text format
flexible, allowing you to enter as much or as little metadata as you require for any given photo
Offer powerful retrieval capabilities: you should be able to run queries like "find all the photos of me and my grandma in front of the Golden Gate bridge", or full-text caption search (if you use captions, not very common because of the amount of work involved)
standards compliant, the key standards being EXIF (picture metadata like aperture and exposure) and IPTC (the press photographers' standard for captions)
The best program I've found so far is IMatch (Windows only, I'm afraid), mostly because of its incredibly flexible category system, that works like set theory with multiple inclusion relationships and boolean operators.
Finally, the most comprehensive description of a Photoshop editing workflow is available here on Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape site.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as Americans are often puzzled by how highly esteemed Jerry Lewis is in France (I am French, and I don't understand it either), the French are bemused by how Derrida has become central to discourse in American humanities departments.
When I was in college, I had never even heard of the guy before I started reading US scientific publications, where physics professors would bemoan him in terms very similar to the original article.
In French humanities classes, Derrida's theory is mentioned as a clever prank, which the understanding ultimately deconstruction has to deconstruct itself and self-destruct.
Most network access servers send Caller-ID information in the RADIUS authentication request. AOL would have that in their logs, and if the thief used caller ID blocking, the FBI could ask the phone company for their call detail records for the ISP number.
A thief that had even the modicum of clue to use Caller ID blocking, let alone spoof his telephone number, would not have been dumb enough to use an AOL account on a stolen machine.
You get the most energy efficiency from a machine when it works in a thermodynamically reversible way, for instance the most efficient thermal motor possible is one that uses a Carnot cycle. Most real-world engines use different, less efficient cycles like the Otto or Stirling cycle because they yield higher speeds or torque.
Losing the ability to reverse computations means increasing entropy and thus lower efficiency. Interestingly, there is a whole class of functional programming methods that is intrinsically reversible (because evaluating expressions without side effects is reversible).
The best explanations of the issues involved is in Richard Feynman's "Lectures on Computation", that show how thermodynamics constrain what is ultimately possible with a computer.
A small nit to pick: Ken Thompson is the father of Unix. Dennis Ritchie is "merely" the father of C (although he did code a significant chunk of the original Unix, of course).
I splurged for a Montblanc Meisterstuck LaGrande (extra fat barrel) in silver, and I love it. My other fountain pen is a Waterman Edson, which has an absolutely striking design, as far from the conservative Montblanc design as conceivable. Pelikan also have a line of highly respected thick-barreled pens.
A base Montblanc with a resin (i.e. plastic) barrel will be about $300. Special editions, precious metal models and the like can easily rise above $1000. That is the same price as a mid-range PC or digital camera that will be obsolete within a couple of years. You should be able to bequeath your Montblanc to your children, on the other hand. Sure, they are expensive, but to put it in perspective, as far as luxury items go, they are relatively inexpensive.
That said, the thickness of a pen barrel is really a question of personal preference. Some people like them thin like Cross or some ST Dupont pens. There is no universal rule.
Actually, Mercedes-Benz cars are famous for their durability and reliability. That's why so many taxi drivers use them in Europe. A Mercedes will easily last 30 years without turning into an eyesore, and until recently, the highest mileage car was a Mercedes (it was superseded recently by a Volvo).
I don't think specialized calculator hardware makes any sense nowadays, not with 200MHz+ CPUs and more user-friendly user interfaces in PDAs. I do have a 49G gathering dust (the 48 series has much better keyboards), and my trusty HP-15C from 11th grade that actually sees service every now and then.
Our databases are Oracle running on 4-way Sun boxes. But when we add capacity, we will go for SuSE Enterprise Linux running on IBM dual-Opteron boxes (that version of Oracle is still a developer's preview). We use Solaris/x86 for our web and app servers, and it is every bit as reliable as Solaris/Sparc (actually, among enterprise vendors, Sun historically has a reputation for poor quality compared to HP, IBM and DEC). One of our machines we had forgoten about, and had been running for over 600 days before we decommissioned it.
I prefer Solaris/x86 by far to Linux, but Sun shot itself in the foot by signalling its imminent demise (they are working on reversing that, but I doubt they will have much credibility). There is still no version of Oracle 9 for Solaris/x86, they stopped at 8.1.7, which is EOL-ed. Solaris/Sparc is simply too expensive for me to justify for my company, and is not competitive on low-end configurations (4 CPUs or less) with not only with Linux, but even Mac OS X.
Moore's law whittles away at the number of applications that can only be run on large SMP systems, and now that Oracle's reference platform is Linux and no longer Solaris, the Linux version will no longer lag in having the latest patches and fixes. In fact, Oracle's whole "grid" push with Oracle 10g is a transparent nudge towards an architecture with many small Linux servers rather than a single SMP system.
I for one don't believe all applications can be parallelized so easily, and there will still be a need for large SMP systems, but that will become a niche and the interesting thing is Oracle is putting its marketing muscle behind an architecture that is antithetical to all the big iron manfacturers (Sun, IBM, HP).
Anybody who uses an E15K to host web servers or application servers "because it's more scalable" rather than a farm of cheap uniprocessors with load balancers is wasting their company's money and deserves to be fired in my book. Only databases justify heavy iron.
There is a significant body of knowledge around this subject that was developed by librarians. See this article for an introduction.
Another example: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat information appliance eschewed files completely. You located a document by typing words that are in it, in efect making the whole document its own filename.
The approach I find most powerful is set-oriented. I use an app called IMatch to manage my digital photos. Its sophisticated set-oriented category system makes it very easy to locate an image. That is what Microsoft is attempting with Longhorn's unified data store, or in more forward-looking projects like MyLifeBits.
"defacto standard" is a bit of hyperbole. I like the PostgreSQL team's insistance on transactions and integrity, unlike MySQL's original denial that these mattered (which pretty much destroys any credibility they might have had in my mind, even if they now support transactions with InnoDB). But PostgreSQL is surprisingly primitive in some respects.
I was trying to write an OLTP application with 7.3.4 and the current API does not support bind variables. Most OLTP queries will use the same SQL repeatedly, with some variables changing for each transaction.
The difference between sending:
('insert into table foo values (:1)', 42)
('insert into table foo values (:1)', 137)
('insert into table foo values (:1)', 69)
and
'insert into table foo values (42)'
'insert into table foo values (137)'
'insert into table foo values (69)'
is that in the second case, as the SQL text varies for each request, it has to be reparsed and a new optimizer plan recomputed for each query, adding tremendous overhead.
PostgreSQL 7.4 (currently in beta) fixes this,but to me it shows a certain level of immaturity in the product for high-performance applications.
I am sure PostgreSQL will get there eventually, but it will take a while. UNIX did not become an enteprise-class OS overnight either.
You are right, of course - this is strictly true only only for identical processes. The pixels on the Canon 10D are half the size of those on the Canon D30 (two generations older), yet it still manages to have slightly lower noise. We will only know for sure when the camera is out and reviewed.
That said, Sony makes both CCD chips mentioned, and I find it hard to believe they can manage even a 2x improvement in a consumer-oriented chip over a semi-pro chip that came out a mere 6 months ago.
The 14-bit ADC seems more like specmanship for marketing purposes than anything else, just like the 8MP. This is reminiscent of the HiFi market, where some cheap audio amplifiers have high watt output ratings to lure naive shoppers, but terrible distortion.
I hope I am wrong, and that Sony turns out a great product, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The end result is each pixel on the Sony is only 1/8 the area of the pixel on one of the $1500 advanced amateur digital cameras (Canon EOS 10D, Nikon D100, Fuji S2, Pentax *ist D).
This means each pixel will receive very little light (and thus a low signal to noise ratio) and have images with a lot of electronic noise even at ISO 100. Noise manifests itself as colored dots that pepper smooth areas like skies.
If this camera had used one of the ICX413AQ 6MP APS-size sensors Sony sells Nikon and Pentax rather than the ICX456 used on this camera, it could have been a winner.
Cardinal Richelieu was the powerful prime minister of Louis XIII. He was instrumental in bringing the noblemen to heel and centralizing power in the hands of the king. His privately stated objective in founding the Academie Francaise in 1635 (keep in mind French, rather than Latin, only became the official language in 1539) was to "harness the idle talkers into the crown's service".
Their first mission was to produce a dictionary, which took them a long time as the first edition was only published in 1694. That said, their multi-volume dictionary was never commonly used, and the equivalents of Webster in France is Emile Littre (his dictionary was published from 1859 to 1872).
Actually, the Academie Francaise was started by Richelieu under Louis XIII, two centuries before Napoleon. (unfortunately, Slashdot is stripping my properly spelled acute accents and cedillas).
I don't think I will upgrade to the T2, however, probably to the new Sony Clie UX50 instead.
Minitel was originally started in the early 1980s as a tool of industrial policy.
The idea was to create demand for a domestic semiconductor industry, which had previously enjoyed big contracts from the transition to digital telephone exchanges but had to find new outlets because the switch upgrades were starting to taper off.
The break-even point depends on how you account for the costs of the project (when it was started, it was a government agency), but by 1993 the project was widely considered to have reached break-even within France Telecom. Keep in mind it generated over $1.2Bn in turnover a year, 30% for FT, 70% for around 30,000 or so content providers.
When I was in university in France around 1991-1994, I would sometimes use a Minitel 1b in 80x24 vt100 emulation mode to log on to the school's vax (they didn't have Ethernet in dorm rooms yet, but the PBX offered serial line logins).
Believe me, you don't want to run Emacs at 1200 bps downstream...
I've seen two yuppies (the financial kind) whiz by on the sidewalk in front of my office in downtown San Francisco (so much for "a device that hasn't arrived yet"), and I wholly agree with the ban - these contraptions are a serious hazard to pedestrians. They are wide, have a high center of gravity and are very fast. They will also probably be driven by the same heedless people who burn red lights in their SUVs (I see that happen at least twice a week in SF).
There is an implicit premise that one should be running only one OS. I don't agree.
At home, I have:
- a PC running Windows 2000 (Photo, games)
- an iMac G4 running OS X (video, MP3, casual surfing)
- a PC running Solaris/x86 (home server)
- an iPaq handheld running Linux (toy)
Any geek worth his salt should be reasonably at ease (not necessarily wizard-level) with the major platforms. Anything else is blinkered.
My personal favorite is Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software by Victor Wickerhauser. Victor wrote the fast wavelet routines I used in my tool XWPL, and he contributes practical coder's experience, not just theory. One of the examples he gives from his own personal experience is the FBI's fingerprint compression algorithm, developed in 1993 or so.
PC Power & Cooling have an off the shelf P4 model called the Sleekline that is now running at 39-40dB with the new motherboard rev.
The Compaq EVO D510 ultra-small desktop is rated at 19 dB. The mini-tower model with expansion capabilities is 22 dB.
The Signum Data FutureClient does away with fans altogether and uses fluid cooling for the ultimat ein silence. Unfortunately, it isn't available in the US (yet).
Apparently, interest for silent PCs is greater in Europe, probably because of more stringent workplace ergonomics laws in countries such as Sweden.
A few other links for Silent PCs:
Camille Jenatzy's "La Jamais Contente", powered by 2 Fulmen batteries, in 1899 at Achres, France. (picture)
According to Basic Photographic Materials and Processes, there are 7MP cones (color-sensitive cells)
That said, the eye is a scanning device (most of this scanning is unconscious and you don't always realize you are doing it
Usually, what happens is either:
You have two less frequent variants:
This leads me to think neither DVD-R nor DVD+R will win, and they will be replaced by yet another standard that will force users to upgrade yet again. The manufacturers are obviously OK with this, as this makes more profits for them, at the expense of slowing the initial acceptance of the technology. Consumers aren't complete idiots either, apart from a fringe of early adopters who are used to being shafted anyways, myself included (I own an Apple iMac with a Pioneer DVD-R drive)
What hardware you use for acquisition controls the final quality of your results, so don't skimp on a cheap scanner, use slide or negative scanners rather than flatbed scans from prints, and use digital cameras like the Canon D60 or Nikon D100 that have larger sensors with less thermal noise rather than point and shoots. Using a alide/negative scanner is a very slow and laborious process, and a better option is to have scans made by a photo lab. Avoid the low quality Kodak PictureCD and opt instead for PhotoCD, which has higher resolution and scans made more carefully.
For most of the other phases, the choice of software does not matter very much and will indeed change over time. It is essential to get asset management right up-front, however. The solution you use must be
The best program I've found so far is IMatch (Windows only, I'm afraid), mostly because of its incredibly flexible category system, that works like set theory with multiple inclusion relationships and boolean operators.
Finally, the most comprehensive description of a Photoshop editing workflow is available here on Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape site.