I think you're missing my point. Allow me to illustrate, with an old Calvin & Hobbes comic I still have taped to my refrigerator. Calvin's dad is ranting about the frantic pace of modern life, and how we have all sorts of labor-saving machines that are supposed to make life easier, but instead, just make it faster paced, and more stressful. In the final frame, Calvin is holding a package of frozen food, screaming "SIX MINUTES in a microwave? I don't have TIME for this!" If I had 15-20 extra minutes to spend every time I go to the store, I'd probably be better off spending it cooking or cleaning the kitchen. If I had a hundred bucks to spend on a bar code printer, I'd probably be better off spending it on better quality food. This whole scenario is a classic example of "goal displacement," the goal of cooking is to provide a healthy diet of tasty food, it's not an inventory management problem or a time management problem. Peoples' diets are getting worse because they're treating cooking like a trip to a gas station, a task that must be taken care of and gotten out of the way. Slow down and smell the coffee (preferably not instant coffee). Food is a pleasurable thing, cooking is fun, not a chore to be turned into another computer algorithm. Some things don't benefit from computerization.
This is a recipe for eating only prepackaged foods produced by the Agribusiness industry. Maybe you should just skip all the trouble and take food pills.
I try to purchase food that does NOT have standardized corporate barcodes on it. My local butcher allows me to select cuts from a display case, he weighs it and puts a pricetag on it. I put vegetables in a plastic bag, and they get weighed at the checkout. I can buy pasta in bulk. I cook it myself from recipies I've developed, instead of reading the instructions on a label.
Nah, there's not much you can do with a list like that. Instead, how about a list of things that are really simple, but people persistently believe are terribly difficult? Now THAT would have some potential!
People can be fooled into thinking things are sophisticated apps when they're really not. I'm reminded of a famous anecdote from Danny Hillis. He was trying to sell his Connection Machine with WAIS software to a CEO for enterprise-level data mining. He gave the CEO a demo at his shop, the CM1 did its thing, and the CEO was totally unimpressed, and said, "hell, my IBM PC back at the office can do that!" Hillis couldn't believe a 286 could do something that requires a CM1 supercomputer, so he asked the CEO to take him back to his office and show him. So they get back to the CEO's office, and he uses his PC to dial up Dow Jones News Retrieval service and runs a monster WAIS search.. which used a CM1 that Hillis sold to Dow Jones.
No one ever says that about any of the countries in Europe. "Oh my goodness, that England is a small country."
In fact, I wrote exactly that, but removed it from my original remarks as it didn't quite fit in. The specific analogy I was making: In England, a Top 40 music hit can reach #1 with far fewer sales than in a larger country like the US, disproportionately smaller even considering the relative populations. The smaller country (geographically) has some effect I don't quite understand, it has that "pressure cooker" effect on the rise of trends, not quite as intense as Japan, but somewhat similar. I thought maybe England had this effect because the entire country is within reach of a single media broadcast monopoly, but they still have regional music scenes that reach out across the country.
And if you think Japan is a "hell of a lot more friendly then [sic] most of the US" then you're still living in the dreamworld of tatemae. Maybe someday you'll penetrate a bit deeper to the honne. Japan is still a third-world country with a veneer of high-tech pasted over it.
Yes, I was mostly speaking geographically, and I mentioned population density upthread. And even landmass is deceptive, as I mentioned upthread. The Japanese often describe their countrymens' mindset with the term "shimaguni konjou," which literally means "island country spirit," but also has two other aspects, primarily insularism and isolationism, but it also refers to the rapid way ideas propagate within Japan, and become the norm. This is one of the reasons fads and trends propagate so rapidly and intensely.
Washlets aren't smart toilets, that's a whole different thing. Smart toilets with sensors etc. are a relatively recent invention, and are still pretty rare.
Most metropolitan areas have sewer hookups, and if you go to touristy places like hotels, they have "normal" plumbing even on remote locations like Sado. But most suburban and rural private homes have tanks that have to be emptied by the honey wagon. And there's no real way for you to tell, unless you followed the pipes down to the tank, lots of these homes' toilets look perfectly normal, they just hook to a holding tank instead of a sewer pipe. I just happened to live in a horror-house that was obviously hooked to a tank, so I noticed it immediately and did some research. The owner was so cheap, they had a flapper toilet that wasn't even hooked up to water, most residents didn't even tote water to flush, they just used some disgusting sticks sitting in a can near the toilet, to prod the stuff past the flap. Eeww..
Vision isn't just optics. It's also brain mechanisms of perception. The eye doesn't just sit there looking straight ahead, it is constantly in motion, moving the fovea (the center of the retina with the highest density of receptors) past areas of interest, sweeping across the image and scrutinizing small areas of detail.
The "smart toilet" stories about Japan are mostly a myth. Yeah, they exist, for about.000001% of the population that owns one. When I lived in Japan, I was astonished to discover how primitive most toilet facilities are. I read an official government survey that said that about 40% of Japanese homes have NO hookup to a sanitary sewer, they don't have septic tanks either, they have "honey wagons" that come and suck out the shit from a holding tank once a month. An average home's toilet is more likely to be a "flapper," than a smart toilet. A flapper is not much more than an outhouse with a ceramic toilet on top, with a little flap on a spring that flaps shut once you take a dump down the hole into the holding tank. I lived in a house with a flapper, I had to take a bucket of water from the bathtub and dump it down the hole in order to flush. And let's not even get into the squat toilets.. Japan's infrastructure, even the sewer systems, look like a third world country. Sure, Japan has a few high-tech infrastructures like telecom, but that's only because of the power of monopolies like NTT to mandate a whole new infrastructure in one sweeping movement. More basic infrastructures, like sewerage, goes neglected, because nobody can make huge profits off it.
That may be so, but that point isn't actually in the article. I read the article a little closer, he didn't really mention disposable income except in the context of conspicuous consumption, which isn't really the stereotypical point we usually hear in this sort of article. But that doesn't prevent the writer from blundering ahead with other stereotypes. The conspicuous consumption era was over a long time ago. Perhaps the writer is unaware that consumer spending recently reached such lows that the Japanese government actually gave Y20000 coupons to every citizen, coupons that had to be spent immediately, to stimulate short-term consumption.
Anyway, I personally think it's a big myth, we always hear about how Japanese have high levels of disposable income compared to other countries, but I'm convinced they have about the same relative levels of disposable income, it's just spent on different things. My monthly car payment is about the same as a month's subway commuting expenses in Tokyo.
...the 3rd biggest market in the western industrialised world
Last time I visited, Japan was in Asia, not part of the "Western world."
Yes, Japan is a small country, in the sense of geography. Much of Japan is uninhabitable mountains, population density is highly compressed around the coastlines, most people live in metropolitan areas. Japan has one of the highest population densities in the world, if not the highest (depends on how they do the calculation). My point was that high population densities in a relatively small geographic area and a small population (compared to say, China or the US) lead to intense market competition.
The writer betrays his lack of understanding of the Japanese market, let alone culture. He blunders forward with the usual stereotypes, and totally fails to understand the fundamentals. The issue has nothing to do with "tribes," disposable income, or small housing.
Japan is a small country, where fads rise and fall much more rapidly than in a larger country like the US. This means products tend to compete over much smaller market sectors, with much shorter market lives. Think about the Tamagotchi. Bandai couldn't keep up with demand, they built new factories to keep up with demand, but by the time the factories were ready, the fad had died. Bandai went into bankruptcy. Japanese markets are like a pressure cooker, products have short lives, and incremental improvements are added to produce new products to replace the old ones. This philosophy of "continuous improvement" is known as kaizen. Products in Japan evolve more rapidly than in other countries. Japanese consumers are also better educated than other countries. There is a whole industry of magazines devoted to the most miniscule details of every product on the market. I remember seeing one fashion magazine that spent 20 pages just discussing the quality of stitching in men's dress shirts. And Japanese computer magazines are the same, they put US magazines to shame. Japanese consumers will not put up with anything less than the best products, driving the kaizen cycle even faster. Japanese corporations are quick to take advantage of the home market. There are thousands of consumer products released in Japan that never make it to the international market, and this is intentional. Japan is the test market. Sometimes a product will go through several improvements before it's ready for larger world markets. Products that flop in Japan aren't even considered for internationalization. Japanese consumers are the beta testers of the world.
Right, the droplets may be propelled by a different effect, but I've looked at the designs and they all use electrostatic effects to some degree or another, most commonly to direct the droplets straight so they don't stray all over the place and they hit the paper via a straight path. Consequently, the dyes must be ionized for the electrostatic effect to work. If you know of some injket technology that doesn't use electrostatics at ALL, let me see the design and I'll check it out. But there's an easier way to test my point. Get some of the piezo or bubblejet ink and a pH meter, and let me know how far from pH 7 it is. Iris inks are heavily saturated with sodium chloride, almost supersaturated, I know because I've tasted them myself. I used to run an Iris and the Scitex techs used to taste the dyes to show how nontoxic they were. Artists that want to use archival processes will go to great pains to use stable pigments with as neutral pH as possible, but this is never even considered for inkjets, because the physics won't work.
And none of this makes any difference, because ultimately there aren't any archival magenta pigments, so the whole fundamental issue of CMYK printing is screwed from the start.
You don't understand physics yourself. The color of hair comes from light refracting inside the hair itself. It is like oil paint, which has a thick body of binder with particles of pigment in suspension. The surface of the oil paint hardens to prevent air from penetrating and oxidizing the pigments deep in the layer. In the same way, the outer protein shell of the hair protects the pigment within the hair. Also, hair is coated with oils, which keeps oxygen from penetrating and oxidizing the color. Just go ask a woman what happens to her hair dye when it gets frizzy and dry from washing it without a conditioner.
And besides, black and brown pigments like those found in hair are generally not prone to fading, it's colors like magenta that are considered "fugitive pigments." You're comparing apples and oranges.
It doesn't matter if Epson calls them "microencapsulated pigments," the particles still just lie there on the surface of the paper, so they're still dyes, technically speaking. You need a binder to encapsulate the whole layer of pigments, in order to lay down a sufficient amount of pigment so that when they start to oxidize, there's still enough unoxidized pigments to be stable. Watercolor pigments use gum arabic as a binder. Oil paints use linseed oil as a binder. House paints use latex as a binder. No binder means it's a dye or a stain. And yes, I do have professional qualifications in these matters, I have professional training in archival printing, I have consulted with the field's top art conservators on these issues, and have worked at museums with professional conservators.
Remember what I said: if someone declares their inkjets are archival, they have a financial incentive to lie to you. Epson sells lots of inkjets by convincing people they produce archival prints. Since when did you rely on marketers for truthful technical advice?
This is a joke, right? 30 years life is NOT archival. I've seen photographs produced in REAL archival processes that are 150 years old and they look perfect, with no signs of fading. I even use some of those processes myself, and I expect the pigments I use will last longer than the paper, probably something around 400 years.
I have done a lot of research on this subject, and let me make one thing perfectly clear: There is no such thing as an archival inkjet ink. And there never will be, not unless the fundamental technology of inkjets changes radically.
Let me explain this to our presumably technically oriented slashdot audience. It requires some familiarity with the famous Milikan Oil Drop Experiment, which should be well known to anyone who studied physics. Perhaps some of you even performed the experiment in your high school physics class as I did. Fortunately we won't have to do any of the measurements, the analysis is strictly qualitative, not quantitative.
Milikan's experiment involves a vapor of oil drops suspended in an electric field between a cathode and an anode. The experiment had to use oil drops, because the surface of oil drops is ionized. If you do this with a neutral-pH substance, like distilled water, the droplets will not suspend in air inside the field. You would have to add significant amounts of salt or some other ionizing substance to the water to get it to interact with the electrostatic field.
And that's exactly how all inkjet systems work, from the fancy Iris to the lowliest piezoelectric inkjets. Small droplets of ink are propelled by electrostatic fields. The ink droplets must contain an ionizing agent or nothing will happen.
Unfortunately, ionization is the enemy of pigment. Ionization is the catalyst for oxidization, and causes fading. This is why some of the early Epson "archival" inks underperformed their rated lives. Testing was done by Wilhelm Research, in the clean air of Iowa, but when the inks were released, they were used in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, with high levels of ozone pollution. The ionized inks interacted with the ozone in the air, and the prints faded rapidly, sometimes in mere days or weeks, rather than the expected 80 years. The inkset was withdrawn, and obvious flaws in Wilhelm's accelerated testing methods were revealed.
If you look at any truly archival photographic process, the fundamental issue is neutralization of ionization. Adding salts is exactly the one thing you should NEVER do if you want to produce archival prints. But that is exactly what the inkjet printheads require for propelling the inks. Until a technology evolves that does not require electrostatic fields to propel ink droplets, inkjets cannot ever produce archival prints. It would contravene the laws of physics.
I won't even get into the chemical formulation of dyes, and let me make it clear, there are no inkjet "inks," they are all dyes. Inks have a binder, and dyes do not. Dyes cannot be deposited on a surface in sufficient quantities to provide a stable layer of pigment, they merely stain the surface of the substrate. An archival binder is just as essential to archivality as the composition of the pigments. And some pigments are particularly "fugitive," they fade rapidly while others do not, causing color shifts, especially in pale colors where a minor amount of oxidization and pigment loss causes major color shifts. There is no such thing as an archival CMYK dye set. Nobody has ever produced a full-color stable ink set, the magenta colors are particularly prone to fading. If you've ever seen a color poster hanging in a sunny shop window for years, you've seen the shift, the magenta fades away, leaving a sickly bluish-green image.
Well enough of that. Just realize that whenever "archival" is thrown around in the inkjet field, it's being used as a selling point. Every single person who makes an assertion that their ink is archival has a financial incentive to lie to you. Photographers and art curators have specific criterion for archival properties, and if you go to them and tell them you have a new dye that is archival, and it lasts 30 years without fading, they'll laugh in your face.
Unfortunately, USC made a huge investment in PC-based Avid workstations, just at the time the whole industry was moving to Apple's Final Cut Pro. But it proves something I've been saying for many years: college will only train you on the LAST generation's tools, which may or may not prepare you for the NEXT generation tools that you'll be working with for the rest of your career. Better to study theory and fundamentals than expect a college to equip you with actual skills, you have to develop those on the job anyway.
Oh yeah, I forgot, there's one other component that will fail under severely low temps: barrel capacitors. They're generally filled with a semi-liquid paste that can freeze at low temps, unless you've got mil-spec computers like the guy who described his aircraft maintenance computers that are rated for operating temps down to -70F. Look at some of the overclocker websites with experimental liquid nitrogen cooling, they take great pains to cool only the CPU chip, if they cool the whole motherboard, the capacitors freeze and fail.
Excluding the hard drive, the only thing that will be hurt by cold temperatures are the fans. Hook up a thermostat to the CPU fan and the case fan. Good. Now the fans will shut off when its cold (protecting their bearings) and turn on when its warm (protecting the computer from overheating).
Umm, you've got that a bit backwards. The fan bearings will also freeze up in very cold temps that are likely to be encountered in an unheated garage, so you'd have to keep the fans warmed too. You don't want to shut down the fans when it gets cold, or they'll sieze up when the lubricants get solidify. I should also note that hard drives usually have the fan integrated on the spindle, so when the rotor turns, there's a little turbine-like impeller that drives air through the drive case. So when the drive is spinning, it's always moving air with its own internal fan. But the impeller is designed to ventilate the drive under NORMAL operating temps, it's not designed for subzero temps.
It's not an issue of hard drives melting, it's an issue of thermal expansion of the platters. Hard drive platters go through a normal amount of expansion because solids expand when heated and contract when cooled. Drive controllers are designed to recalibrate occasionally to check for expansion, to insure the heads are positioned correctly, off-track positioning leads to errors. But I seriously doubt the calibration would work outside the range of temps designed into the controller. Another issue is lubrication viscosity. Lubricants become more viscous at low temps, if it got really cold, the lubricants in the drive spindle could actually become solid, freezing the bearings and burning out the motor.
Silica gel absorbs moisture rapidly until it's saturated, which happens very quickly in open air. Didn't you ever notice those dessicant bags are usually inside hermetically sealed containers of food? The usual process is to bake the moisture out in an oven. So you can't just toss in dessicant bags and forget about them, it would require constant maintenance.
I remember quite a few years back when I read about a similar system developed at Lawrence Livermore Labs, they used an array of microphones deployed across the city to triangulate the source of gunshots, and activate cameras pointing at the source. A few years back I even saw a demo on some science show about what LLL had cooked up for the military, a portable version for use against snipers in combat zones, it triangulates.. and SHOOTS BACK.
Jeebus, this is basic stuff that's been done in CAI for decades. The firmest prior art is probably IBM CourseWriter which dates back to 1968, maybe even farther. I worked porting some CourseWriter programs back in the early 70s, they did exactly what the MS patent describes. In fact, that was the whole POINT of CourseWriter, to branch to extended instructional material depending on user input. IBM even had a little "voice unit" for synthesized speech output from the old Coursewriter machines, but I forget the model number of the CPUs, I think they were 1401s. I have a nameplate from one of the old voice units somewhere, I found it lying on the floor when the old machines were decommissioned and the new DECs were installed.
I'll endorse the computer glasses. My optometrist prescribed glasses set specifically for the distance of my computer monitor, it makes a world of difference.
Titanic is the sort of movie that sweeps the Academy Awards. In other words, big budget movies with leaden plots, mega-stars that can barely act, megalomaniac producers with their posse of sycophants assuring him he can do no wrong, producing a film that substitutes spectacle for story. Cameron is now an institution, and like all hide-bound big-money institutions, now he couldn't make a decent product if he tried. He is the symbol of what is wrong with Hollywood. He's totally lost it since he split with the only person who could restrain his megalomania, Gale Ann Hurd. In fact, the only reason Cameron is doing an anime project is to show up his former partner, she's doing Aeon Flux now, so of course Cameron has to try to outdo her. Good luck, Hurd was always the talented half of the director/producer team.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're missing my point. Allow me to illustrate, with an old Calvin & Hobbes comic I still have taped to my refrigerator. Calvin's dad is ranting about the frantic pace of modern life, and how we have all sorts of labor-saving machines that are supposed to make life easier, but instead, just make it faster paced, and more stressful. In the final frame, Calvin is holding a package of frozen food, screaming "SIX MINUTES in a microwave? I don't have TIME for this!"
If I had 15-20 extra minutes to spend every time I go to the store, I'd probably be better off spending it cooking or cleaning the kitchen. If I had a hundred bucks to spend on a bar code printer, I'd probably be better off spending it on better quality food. This whole scenario is a classic example of "goal displacement," the goal of cooking is to provide a healthy diet of tasty food, it's not an inventory management problem or a time management problem. Peoples' diets are getting worse because they're treating cooking like a trip to a gas station, a task that must be taken care of and gotten out of the way. Slow down and smell the coffee (preferably not instant coffee). Food is a pleasurable thing, cooking is fun, not a chore to be turned into another computer algorithm. Some things don't benefit from computerization.
This is a recipe for eating only prepackaged foods produced by the Agribusiness industry. Maybe you should just skip all the trouble and take food pills.
I try to purchase food that does NOT have standardized corporate barcodes on it. My local butcher allows me to select cuts from a display case, he weighs it and puts a pricetag on it. I put vegetables in a plastic bag, and they get weighed at the checkout. I can buy pasta in bulk. I cook it myself from recipies I've developed, instead of reading the instructions on a label.
Nah, there's not much you can do with a list like that. Instead, how about a list of things that are really simple, but people persistently believe are terribly difficult? Now THAT would have some potential!
I'll start the list:
1. Counting votes.
People can be fooled into thinking things are sophisticated apps when they're really not. I'm reminded of a famous anecdote from Danny Hillis. He was trying to sell his Connection Machine with WAIS software to a CEO for enterprise-level data mining. He gave the CEO a demo at his shop, the CM1 did its thing, and the CEO was totally unimpressed, and said, "hell, my IBM PC back at the office can do that!" Hillis couldn't believe a 286 could do something that requires a CM1 supercomputer, so he asked the CEO to take him back to his office and show him.
So they get back to the CEO's office, and he uses his PC to dial up Dow Jones News Retrieval service and runs a monster WAIS search.. which used a CM1 that Hillis sold to Dow Jones.
In fact, I wrote exactly that, but removed it from my original remarks as it didn't quite fit in. The specific analogy I was making: In England, a Top 40 music hit can reach #1 with far fewer sales than in a larger country like the US, disproportionately smaller even considering the relative populations. The smaller country (geographically) has some effect I don't quite understand, it has that "pressure cooker" effect on the rise of trends, not quite as intense as Japan, but somewhat similar. I thought maybe England had this effect because the entire country is within reach of a single media broadcast monopoly, but they still have regional music scenes that reach out across the country.
And if you think Japan is a "hell of a lot more friendly then [sic] most of the US" then you're still living in the dreamworld of tatemae. Maybe someday you'll penetrate a bit deeper to the honne. Japan is still a third-world country with a veneer of high-tech pasted over it.
Yes, I was mostly speaking geographically, and I mentioned population density upthread. And even landmass is deceptive, as I mentioned upthread.
The Japanese often describe their countrymens' mindset with the term "shimaguni konjou," which literally means "island country spirit," but also has two other aspects, primarily insularism and isolationism, but it also refers to the rapid way ideas propagate within Japan, and become the norm. This is one of the reasons fads and trends propagate so rapidly and intensely.
Washlets aren't smart toilets, that's a whole different thing. Smart toilets with sensors etc. are a relatively recent invention, and are still pretty rare.
Most metropolitan areas have sewer hookups, and if you go to touristy places like hotels, they have "normal" plumbing even on remote locations like Sado. But most suburban and rural private homes have tanks that have to be emptied by the honey wagon. And there's no real way for you to tell, unless you followed the pipes down to the tank, lots of these homes' toilets look perfectly normal, they just hook to a holding tank instead of a sewer pipe.
I just happened to live in a horror-house that was obviously hooked to a tank, so I noticed it immediately and did some research. The owner was so cheap, they had a flapper toilet that wasn't even hooked up to water, most residents didn't even tote water to flush, they just used some disgusting sticks sitting in a can near the toilet, to prod the stuff past the flap. Eeww..
Vision isn't just optics. It's also brain mechanisms of perception. The eye doesn't just sit there looking straight ahead, it is constantly in motion, moving the fovea (the center of the retina with the highest density of receptors) past areas of interest, sweeping across the image and scrutinizing small areas of detail.
The "smart toilet" stories about Japan are mostly a myth. Yeah, they exist, for about .000001% of the population that owns one.
When I lived in Japan, I was astonished to discover how primitive most toilet facilities are. I read an official government survey that said that about 40% of Japanese homes have NO hookup to a sanitary sewer, they don't have septic tanks either, they have "honey wagons" that come and suck out the shit from a holding tank once a month. An average home's toilet is more likely to be a "flapper," than a smart toilet. A flapper is not much more than an outhouse with a ceramic toilet on top, with a little flap on a spring that flaps shut once you take a dump down the hole into the holding tank. I lived in a house with a flapper, I had to take a bucket of water from the bathtub and dump it down the hole in order to flush. And let's not even get into the squat toilets..
Japan's infrastructure, even the sewer systems, look like a third world country. Sure, Japan has a few high-tech infrastructures like telecom, but that's only because of the power of monopolies like NTT to mandate a whole new infrastructure in one sweeping movement. More basic infrastructures, like sewerage, goes neglected, because nobody can make huge profits off it.
That may be so, but that point isn't actually in the article. I read the article a little closer, he didn't really mention disposable income except in the context of conspicuous consumption, which isn't really the stereotypical point we usually hear in this sort of article. But that doesn't prevent the writer from blundering ahead with other stereotypes. The conspicuous consumption era was over a long time ago. Perhaps the writer is unaware that consumer spending recently reached such lows that the Japanese government actually gave Y20000 coupons to every citizen, coupons that had to be spent immediately, to stimulate short-term consumption.
Anyway, I personally think it's a big myth, we always hear about how Japanese have high levels of disposable income compared to other countries, but I'm convinced they have about the same relative levels of disposable income, it's just spent on different things. My monthly car payment is about the same as a month's subway commuting expenses in Tokyo.
Last time I visited, Japan was in Asia, not part of the "Western world."
Yes, Japan is a small country, in the sense of geography. Much of Japan is uninhabitable mountains, population density is highly compressed around the coastlines, most people live in metropolitan areas. Japan has one of the highest population densities in the world, if not the highest (depends on how they do the calculation).
My point was that high population densities in a relatively small geographic area and a small population (compared to say, China or the US) lead to intense market competition.
The writer betrays his lack of understanding of the Japanese market, let alone culture. He blunders forward with the usual stereotypes, and totally fails to understand the fundamentals. The issue has nothing to do with "tribes," disposable income, or small housing.
Japan is a small country, where fads rise and fall much more rapidly than in a larger country like the US. This means products tend to compete over much smaller market sectors, with much shorter market lives. Think about the Tamagotchi. Bandai couldn't keep up with demand, they built new factories to keep up with demand, but by the time the factories were ready, the fad had died. Bandai went into bankruptcy.
Japanese markets are like a pressure cooker, products have short lives, and incremental improvements are added to produce new products to replace the old ones. This philosophy of "continuous improvement" is known as kaizen. Products in Japan evolve more rapidly than in other countries.
Japanese consumers are also better educated than other countries. There is a whole industry of magazines devoted to the most miniscule details of every product on the market. I remember seeing one fashion magazine that spent 20 pages just discussing the quality of stitching in men's dress shirts. And Japanese computer magazines are the same, they put US magazines to shame. Japanese consumers will not put up with anything less than the best products, driving the kaizen cycle even faster.
Japanese corporations are quick to take advantage of the home market. There are thousands of consumer products released in Japan that never make it to the international market, and this is intentional. Japan is the test market. Sometimes a product will go through several improvements before it's ready for larger world markets. Products that flop in Japan aren't even considered for internationalization. Japanese consumers are the beta testers of the world.
Right, the droplets may be propelled by a different effect, but I've looked at the designs and they all use electrostatic effects to some degree or another, most commonly to direct the droplets straight so they don't stray all over the place and they hit the paper via a straight path. Consequently, the dyes must be ionized for the electrostatic effect to work. If you know of some injket technology that doesn't use electrostatics at ALL, let me see the design and I'll check it out.
But there's an easier way to test my point. Get some of the piezo or bubblejet ink and a pH meter, and let me know how far from pH 7 it is. Iris inks are heavily saturated with sodium chloride, almost supersaturated, I know because I've tasted them myself. I used to run an Iris and the Scitex techs used to taste the dyes to show how nontoxic they were. Artists that want to use archival processes will go to great pains to use stable pigments with as neutral pH as possible, but this is never even considered for inkjets, because the physics won't work.
And none of this makes any difference, because ultimately there aren't any archival magenta pigments, so the whole fundamental issue of CMYK printing is screwed from the start.
You don't understand physics yourself. The color of hair comes from light refracting inside the hair itself. It is like oil paint, which has a thick body of binder with particles of pigment in suspension. The surface of the oil paint hardens to prevent air from penetrating and oxidizing the pigments deep in the layer. In the same way, the outer protein shell of the hair protects the pigment within the hair. Also, hair is coated with oils, which keeps oxygen from penetrating and oxidizing the color. Just go ask a woman what happens to her hair dye when it gets frizzy and dry from washing it without a conditioner.
And besides, black and brown pigments like those found in hair are generally not prone to fading, it's colors like magenta that are considered "fugitive pigments." You're comparing apples and oranges.
It doesn't matter if Epson calls them "microencapsulated pigments," the particles still just lie there on the surface of the paper, so they're still dyes, technically speaking. You need a binder to encapsulate the whole layer of pigments, in order to lay down a sufficient amount of pigment so that when they start to oxidize, there's still enough unoxidized pigments to be stable.
Watercolor pigments use gum arabic as a binder. Oil paints use linseed oil as a binder. House paints use latex as a binder. No binder means it's a dye or a stain.
And yes, I do have professional qualifications in these matters, I have professional training in archival printing, I have consulted with the field's top art conservators on these issues, and have worked at museums with professional conservators.
Remember what I said: if someone declares their inkjets are archival, they have a financial incentive to lie to you. Epson sells lots of inkjets by convincing people they produce archival prints. Since when did you rely on marketers for truthful technical advice?
This is a joke, right? 30 years life is NOT archival. I've seen photographs produced in REAL archival processes that are 150 years old and they look perfect, with no signs of fading. I even use some of those processes myself, and I expect the pigments I use will last longer than the paper, probably something around 400 years.
I have done a lot of research on this subject, and let me make one thing perfectly clear: There is no such thing as an archival inkjet ink. And there never will be, not unless the fundamental technology of inkjets changes radically.
Let me explain this to our presumably technically oriented slashdot audience. It requires some familiarity with the famous Milikan Oil Drop Experiment, which should be well known to anyone who studied physics. Perhaps some of you even performed the experiment in your high school physics class as I did. Fortunately we won't have to do any of the measurements, the analysis is strictly qualitative, not quantitative.
Milikan's experiment involves a vapor of oil drops suspended in an electric field between a cathode and an anode. The experiment had to use oil drops, because the surface of oil drops is ionized. If you do this with a neutral-pH substance, like distilled water, the droplets will not suspend in air inside the field. You would have to add significant amounts of salt or some other ionizing substance to the water to get it to interact with the electrostatic field.
And that's exactly how all inkjet systems work, from the fancy Iris to the lowliest piezoelectric inkjets. Small droplets of ink are propelled by electrostatic fields. The ink droplets must contain an ionizing agent or nothing will happen.
Unfortunately, ionization is the enemy of pigment. Ionization is the catalyst for oxidization, and causes fading. This is why some of the early Epson "archival" inks underperformed their rated lives. Testing was done by Wilhelm Research, in the clean air of Iowa, but when the inks were released, they were used in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, with high levels of ozone pollution. The ionized inks interacted with the ozone in the air, and the prints faded rapidly, sometimes in mere days or weeks, rather than the expected 80 years. The inkset was withdrawn, and obvious flaws in Wilhelm's accelerated testing methods were revealed.
If you look at any truly archival photographic process, the fundamental issue is neutralization of ionization. Adding salts is exactly the one thing you should NEVER do if you want to produce archival prints. But that is exactly what the inkjet printheads require for propelling the inks. Until a technology evolves that does not require electrostatic fields to propel ink droplets, inkjets cannot ever produce archival prints. It would contravene the laws of physics.
I won't even get into the chemical formulation of dyes, and let me make it clear, there are no inkjet "inks," they are all dyes. Inks have a binder, and dyes do not. Dyes cannot be deposited on a surface in sufficient quantities to provide a stable layer of pigment, they merely stain the surface of the substrate. An archival binder is just as essential to archivality as the composition of the pigments. And some pigments are particularly "fugitive," they fade rapidly while others do not, causing color shifts, especially in pale colors where a minor amount of oxidization and pigment loss causes major color shifts. There is no such thing as an archival CMYK dye set. Nobody has ever produced a full-color stable ink set, the magenta colors are particularly prone to fading. If you've ever seen a color poster hanging in a sunny shop window for years, you've seen the shift, the magenta fades away, leaving a sickly bluish-green image.
Well enough of that. Just realize that whenever "archival" is thrown around in the inkjet field, it's being used as a selling point. Every single person who makes an assertion that their ink is archival has a financial incentive to lie to you. Photographers and art curators have specific criterion for archival properties, and if you go to them and tell them you have a new dye that is archival, and it lasts 30 years without fading, they'll laugh in your face.
Unfortunately, USC made a huge investment in PC-based Avid workstations, just at the time the whole industry was moving to Apple's Final Cut Pro. But it proves something I've been saying for many years: college will only train you on the LAST generation's tools, which may or may not prepare you for the NEXT generation tools that you'll be working with for the rest of your career. Better to study theory and fundamentals than expect a college to equip you with actual skills, you have to develop those on the job anyway.
Oh yeah, I forgot, there's one other component that will fail under severely low temps: barrel capacitors. They're generally filled with a semi-liquid paste that can freeze at low temps, unless you've got mil-spec computers like the guy who described his aircraft maintenance computers that are rated for operating temps down to -70F. Look at some of the overclocker websites with experimental liquid nitrogen cooling, they take great pains to cool only the CPU chip, if they cool the whole motherboard, the capacitors freeze and fail.
Umm, you've got that a bit backwards. The fan bearings will also freeze up in very cold temps that are likely to be encountered in an unheated garage, so you'd have to keep the fans warmed too. You don't want to shut down the fans when it gets cold, or they'll sieze up when the lubricants get solidify.
I should also note that hard drives usually have the fan integrated on the spindle, so when the rotor turns, there's a little turbine-like impeller that drives air through the drive case. So when the drive is spinning, it's always moving air with its own internal fan. But the impeller is designed to ventilate the drive under NORMAL operating temps, it's not designed for subzero temps.
It's not an issue of hard drives melting, it's an issue of thermal expansion of the platters. Hard drive platters go through a normal amount of expansion because solids expand when heated and contract when cooled. Drive controllers are designed to recalibrate occasionally to check for expansion, to insure the heads are positioned correctly, off-track positioning leads to errors. But I seriously doubt the calibration would work outside the range of temps designed into the controller.
Another issue is lubrication viscosity. Lubricants become more viscous at low temps, if it got really cold, the lubricants in the drive spindle could actually become solid, freezing the bearings and burning out the motor.
Silica gel absorbs moisture rapidly until it's saturated, which happens very quickly in open air. Didn't you ever notice those dessicant bags are usually inside hermetically sealed containers of food?
The usual process is to bake the moisture out in an oven. So you can't just toss in dessicant bags and forget about them, it would require constant maintenance.
I remember quite a few years back when I read about a similar system developed at Lawrence Livermore Labs, they used an array of microphones deployed across the city to triangulate the source of gunshots, and activate cameras pointing at the source. A few years back I even saw a demo on some science show about what LLL had cooked up for the military, a portable version for use against snipers in combat zones, it triangulates.. and SHOOTS BACK.
Jeebus, this is basic stuff that's been done in CAI for decades. The firmest prior art is probably IBM CourseWriter which dates back to 1968, maybe even farther. I worked porting some CourseWriter programs back in the early 70s, they did exactly what the MS patent describes. In fact, that was the whole POINT of CourseWriter, to branch to extended instructional material depending on user input.
IBM even had a little "voice unit" for synthesized speech output from the old Coursewriter machines, but I forget the model number of the CPUs, I think they were 1401s. I have a nameplate from one of the old voice units somewhere, I found it lying on the floor when the old machines were decommissioned and the new DECs were installed.
I'll endorse the computer glasses. My optometrist prescribed glasses set specifically for the distance of my computer monitor, it makes a world of difference.
Titanic is the sort of movie that sweeps the Academy Awards. In other words, big budget movies with leaden plots, mega-stars that can barely act, megalomaniac producers with their posse of sycophants assuring him he can do no wrong, producing a film that substitutes spectacle for story.
Cameron is now an institution, and like all hide-bound big-money institutions, now he couldn't make a decent product if he tried. He is the symbol of what is wrong with Hollywood. He's totally lost it since he split with the only person who could restrain his megalomania, Gale Ann Hurd. In fact, the only reason Cameron is doing an anime project is to show up his former partner, she's doing Aeon Flux now, so of course Cameron has to try to outdo her. Good luck, Hurd was always the talented half of the director/producer team.