If you count the cost of photo paper (necessary to get acceptable results) and the cost of the ink, a letter-size inkjet print comes out to around $1.50 for a letter-size sheet or roughly 50 cents for a 4x6 if you squeeze 3 of them onto a 8.5x11 sheet.
Wal-Mart's online photo center charges 26 cents for a 4x6 print, and $3 for a 8x10. These prints are made on Fuji Frontier digital minilabs which use solid-state red green and blue lasers to expose conventional photo paper (Fuji Crystal archive). The end result is a laminated print that is significantly better than any inkjet print (just look at one with a 10x loupe, you will see what I mean), and that is also guaranteed to last at least 25 years.
If you are shooting primarily to produce 4x6 prints as most people beginning digital photography are, inkjets simply aren't cost effective, mostly because of the obscene profit margins of makers of ink and photo paper. Inkjet printers are best reserved for printing documents (where you can use cheaper paper, and since the ink covers only 5% of the page, the ink cartridges don't go out as quickly), or when you need a quick proof.
It is shareware, not open source, and only runs on Windows, but it is the best photo asset management software I've tried out, significantly better in many respects than Extensis Portfolio or Canto Cumulus.
The problem we have with DRM is that the technology is used to selectively enforce copyright owners' rights, but not the public's rights to fair use.
If fair use rights were also enshrined in DRM software (and any copyright owner's attempts to restrict fair use rights punishable under the same provisions as the DMCA), you would see less opposition to DRM.
Editres is not Motif-specific, it was actually originated with Athena widgets. Programs such as XEmacs respond to the Editres protocol, and there is no reason why Qt or GTK+ wouldn't be able to work with it, except that Corba-based protocols such as Bonobo allow much higher levels of functionality beyond simple getting and setting properties.
Disclaimer: I used to work for FT, but no longer. My comments in no way indicate any official position of the company.
First of all, you need to realize that FT is an extremely large company, where the right hand usually doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and where $7M is pocket change.
They do have very smart people in their R&D centers, and Patrick Puges, who is mentioned in the press release, used to be the CTO of Transpac, their Enterprise data networks division. This can suggest an enterprise slant to this story, or alternatively, a tie-in with their equivalent of Bell Labs, i.e. an upstream hedge-your-bets kind of investment.
One can only conjecture, but the real-time directory and presence service that are the base for an IM product have a strong chance of being core infrastructure for future communication services.
Most of the people who work at FT have a strong suspicion of proprietary solutions and do not want to kiss Steve Case or Bill Gates' rings. FT thus has a motive in nurturing an open alternative.
You can see this as poisoning potential competitors' wells, just as Sun's investment in StarOffice makes sense as a way to starve Microsoft's Office revenue stream in the long term.
I've worked in the past with Isocor (now Critical Path) N-Plex Ultra, a high-end mail server product for ISPs.
One of the ways they reached very high performance (200 messages/second on a Sun E450, when a good conventional Unix mailer like Postfix or Qmail will more typically be running at 20 messages per second on equivalent hardware) was their proprietary message store organized as an object database.
Using this database and a multi-threaded server architecture, they could batch multiple email commits in a single disk write before acknowledging a SMTP transaction. The one file per message in the queue architecture of sendmail, postfix, qmail and the like means each email will require at least two disk writes (one for the file itself, one for the directory entry).
Obviously, using the standard Unix format has benefits in terms of ease of customizability, but there is a performance tradeoff to openness.
This is less of an issue than it appears, as there aren't that many companies or even ISPs that require such as high volume of email handling capacity in a relay, and those who do can easily expand capacity using a load-balanced server farm of cheap machines for much less than the licensing costs of proprietary software alone.
Translation for the French-impaired, with my notes in italics:
Computers will not be taxed, according to Catherine Tasca(the minister of Culture)
Read also "Catherine Tasca's proposal to tax computers embarasses Lionel Jospin"(the prime minister).
Updated Tuesday January 16, 2001
Catherine Tasca was forced Tuesday, under pressure from the prime minister's office and the economy and finance ministry, to distance herself from a tax on computers, less than 24 hours after calling for its creation. "The government does not tax computers and has no intention of doing so.", declared the minister of Culture to the National Assembly, after having pled to the contrary in an interview given to the newspaper Le Figaro.(conservative, Mrs. Tasca is a Socialist)
Mrs Tasca had explained that taxing decoders, enhanced VCRs and computers, in short any media capable of recording works is a logical next step after year-long negotiations within the Brun-Buisson commission on private copies.
This declaration caused an immediate outcry from the right-wing opposition who denounced the creation of a new tax and pointing at the risk of widening the "digital divide", according to Christian Estrosi (RPR). (a conservative party)
"Aberration", judged François Goulard (DL) (a centre-right party), as industry groups irked by the coming tax on blank CD, DVD and MiniDisc protested anew.
On the Left and in the government, the dominant impression was one of surprise. "Our jaws dropped", commented the prime minister's office and the finance ministry. Surprise was total, all the more since the subject had not been raised, according to government sources, during previous interministerial meetings.
joint article with Agence France Presse
Comment:
This seems to be a publicity stunt from Mrs Tasca, who used to be Television commissionner, and thus more receptive to the arguments of producers, specially since in France the ministry of Culture (note the capital C) is hostage to well-organized special interest groups of publicly subsidized artists.
Slashdot Mirror
If you count the cost of photo paper (necessary to get acceptable results) and the cost of the ink, a letter-size inkjet print comes out to around $1.50 for a letter-size sheet or roughly 50 cents for a 4x6 if you squeeze 3 of them onto a 8.5x11 sheet.
Wal-Mart's online photo center charges 26 cents for a 4x6 print, and $3 for a 8x10. These prints are made on Fuji Frontier digital minilabs which use solid-state red green and blue lasers to expose conventional photo paper (Fuji Crystal archive). The end result is a laminated print that is significantly better than any inkjet print (just look at one with a 10x loupe, you will see what I mean), and that is also guaranteed to last at least 25 years.
If you are shooting primarily to produce 4x6 prints as most people beginning digital photography are, inkjets simply aren't cost effective, mostly because of the obscene profit margins of makers of ink and photo paper. Inkjet printers are best reserved for printing documents (where you can use cheaper paper, and since the ink covers only 5% of the page, the ink cartridges don't go out as quickly), or when you need a quick proof.
It is shareware, not open source, and only runs on Windows, but it is the best photo asset management software I've tried out, significantly better in many respects than Extensis Portfolio or Canto Cumulus.
www.photools.com
The problem we have with DRM is that the technology is used to selectively enforce copyright owners' rights, but not the public's rights to fair use.
If fair use rights were also enshrined in DRM software (and any copyright owner's attempts to restrict fair use rights punishable under the same provisions as the DMCA), you would see less opposition to DRM.
Editres is not Motif-specific, it was actually originated with Athena widgets. Programs such as XEmacs respond to the Editres protocol, and there is no reason why Qt or GTK+ wouldn't be able to work with it, except that Corba-based protocols such as Bonobo allow much higher levels of functionality beyond simple getting and setting properties.
Disclaimer: I used to work for FT, but no longer. My comments in no way indicate any official position of the company.
First of all, you need to realize that FT is an extremely large company, where the right hand usually doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and where $7M is pocket change.
They do have very smart people in their R&D centers, and Patrick Puges, who is mentioned in the press release, used to be the CTO of Transpac, their Enterprise data networks division. This can suggest an enterprise slant to this story, or alternatively, a tie-in with their equivalent of Bell Labs, i.e. an upstream hedge-your-bets kind of investment.
One can only conjecture, but the real-time directory and presence service that are the base for an IM product have a strong chance of being core infrastructure for future communication services.
Most of the people who work at FT have a strong suspicion of proprietary solutions and do not want to kiss Steve Case or Bill Gates' rings. FT thus has a motive in nurturing an open alternative.
You can see this as poisoning potential competitors' wells, just as Sun's investment in StarOffice makes sense as a way to starve Microsoft's Office revenue stream in the long term.
I've worked in the past with Isocor (now Critical Path) N-Plex Ultra, a high-end mail server product for ISPs.
One of the ways they reached very high performance (200 messages/second on a Sun E450, when a good conventional Unix mailer like Postfix or Qmail will more typically be running at 20 messages per second on equivalent hardware) was their proprietary message store organized as an object database.
Using this database and a multi-threaded server architecture, they could batch multiple email commits in a single disk write before acknowledging a SMTP transaction. The one file per message in the queue architecture of sendmail, postfix, qmail and the like means each email will require at least two disk writes (one for the file itself, one for the directory entry).
Obviously, using the standard Unix format has benefits in terms of ease of customizability, but there is a performance tradeoff to openness.
This is less of an issue than it appears, as there aren't that many companies or even ISPs that require such as high volume of email handling capacity in a relay, and those who do can easily expand capacity using a load-balanced server farm of cheap machines for much less than the licensing costs of proprietary software alone.
Translation for the French-impaired, with my notes in italics:
Comment:This seems to be a publicity stunt from Mrs Tasca, who used to be Television commissionner, and thus more receptive to the arguments of producers, specially since in France the ministry of Culture (note the capital C) is hostage to well-organized special interest groups of publicly subsidized artists.