No 48 bit support !!!
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There is still no 16 bit per channel support in Gimp. This is important if you want to do anything more than just playing with jpeg files. A (mostly dead) brach of Gimp called CinePaint supports 16 and 32 bit per channel images but it's very buggy.
There is talk about having gimp support it in the future, but it's a big undertaking. Sorry to sound like a troll, but in the meanwhile Gimp will be little more than a toy.
48 bit RGB is supported natively by the PNG and TIFF images formats and many RAW files created by almost every recent scanner or digital camera. It's a shame to have hardware which creates images you cannot fully use.
Although it was probably intended as funny, you rant has a simple answer: buy 2 HD and one USD to IDE connector/enclosure. Put one HD in your system and one external which you use only to do backup. A single rsync (linux) or robocopy.exe (windows) command line and your backup is done. Remember to not let it on top of your PC for when your overclocked machine catches fire.
When a new bigger HD comes out, I replace the old external one (which I add inside) with the new one since they are probably less reliable anyway.
Customs typically doesn't tax unregulated personal-use items up to a certain value
Bzzzt! Wrong! Depends a lot towards which country you ship, and even though it's usually only of pure luck if you don't get taxed. I've live in France, Italy and the US. Every single item I ordered from the US to France or Italy was taxed on arrival, even items marked as gift with 0 value. And several time I had to drive down to the customs office (great, 50km away with full traffic), including simple amazon.com books or even once to pick up a pissing device for women (a 5$ piece of plastic). Granted, I've been unlucky as many friends had no problem.
And the way the taxes are computed is revolting: they 'estimate' the price of the item, tax it 33% and apply a 'work tax' on the previous total. You end up paying about 50% tax.
The 'personal use' rule you talk about is different. I just used it after moving from the US to Europe and shipping all my personal possessions. It took a bit of paperwork: certificate of temporary exportation, attestation of residency change from a consulate and some more. Good luck trying to explain that one to the airport customs officer who's just asking about those 3 laptops and 5 digital cameras in your pack...!
I got a retrospective scare at an airport in souther Italy last month. While waiting for my luggage, all the screens suddenly showed an error Windows popup in the middle. I wanted to click the [OK] button so bad...
"There is unexpected beauty hidden everywhere in this world -- one just has to be open to seeing it. Remember that the next time you sneeze on your monitor." -- Nathan Walton.
Alexandre PUKALL published a free list of more than 10 thousand recipes about a decade ago. It's available in various forms on the Net. My take on it is an easy to search windows help file (.chm) (use xchm in Linux), but take it easy with my server as it's 7Mb (and it's all in French).
With all the scanners and digital cameras producing 16 bit monochrome or 48 bit RGB images, there's still no graphic editor that I know of that can handle those kind of images. Limited supprt in Photoshop, no support in PSP or any other app. Allegedly Cinepaint, a variant of Gimp, does support it but just reading the bug reports is depressing.
A true 48 bit support would be a great plus for such an app: no concurrent, great market. And if you optimize it for 64 bit AMD processors, you could potentially create the first killer app for 64 bit processors (remember, you need 64 bit registers to handle 48 bit colors simply).
That's what I wanted to submit to the Google programming contest, but it wasn't admittable:
Make a 2nd robot that retrieves a few full web pages (with graphics) per site claiming to be IE6 (or a normal Mozila), thus lying about it being from google.
Display the page in IE6 (or Mozilla), save the entire display as a bitmap image.
Run the bitmap image through an OCR program to extract the real text seen by the user
Compare this text with what the ordinary google robot sees.
If the text is completely different, lover the ranking
This gets rid of all the blue on blue keywords, display:none keywords and others. I think it will come to that.
Many other countries have been using cards with embedded chips for something like the last 20 years: you cannot copy them and they can contain their own hard wired algorithms to test for challenge/response from the reader.
It may sound like a troll, but why is the US so conservative in regard to their money: card with only a magnetic stripe that you can copy with a 80$ reader, money in 2 colors on plain paper that you can xerox (almost) easily...
I just moved back to Europe. Chose a random ADSL provider and ran into trouble installing it. (The install went great as I didn't touch their CD). The service was incredibly crappy, lines dropping every 10 minutes for 2~3 minutes, sometimes for several hours at less than 2kbps...
I call tech support and was greeted by the following message: "Thank you for your call, you will be charged 60 cents a minutes for your call". Including the 20 minutes I spent holding before I hung up fuming.
I guess that's the worse way to make money I've ever seen, but my parents were all surprised to hear about 800 free numbers in the US. Hell of a business plan: make a crappy product and charge customers for holding.
I wrote them by email and 45 days later got an very generic answer in the form: "Make sure your modem is plugged in properly". What a joke. Stay away from free.fr at all cost.
...I started using CVS yesterday. DOes that mean I need to forget everything already and start over with the new system ? Well, it looks slashdoted, so I guess I'll keep CVS for now. I'm only on page 3 of the manual anyway...
A couple years ago there was an anouncement by a major film company (I think it was Agfa) that they had achieved a tenfold increase in film sensitivity (or it's equivalent to say tenfold decrease in grain visibility) by using bore based chemicals instead of chromium based chemicals.
This anouncement came just at the begining of the digital photography era and seemed like a promise that digital would never reach the level of film.
I never heard about that again (nor have I the time to google for it now). Note that it would mean a change in the 2 main processing systems (C-41 and E-6).
More on topic, I think Kodak's spirit of innovation has been long dead. They killed their Kodachrmoe line without replacing it with quality E6 films -> Fuji took over. Every time I've found an equivalent film from another company (usually Fuji), the other has proved better. Instead of that, they started the Adventix/APS customer ripoff, starting a completely incompatible line of film/cameras (together with many other companies) claiming that it was 'better' while it was indeed half the quality at double the price.
Also their software is garbage (have you honestly ever used a Kodak software for more than 2 minutes without looking for a better solution ?).
I also briefly worked in quality control at a Kodak film production plant and, well... Let's skip it.
A single hard drive can hold MASSIVE numbers of pictures. Your basement would be full of "plastic can[s]" if you had the equivalent number of pictures on film negatives
Then the quality of your digital images must be really poor. I have several 250Gb HD inside my PC, and some external onto USB2IDE converters as backup just to store my images. A compressed lossless PNG/TIFF of a good 4000dpi image runs 20 to 40Mb each, so that's no more than a 10 000 images. The same quantity of unmounted slides fits a few shoeboxes in my basement once they are scanned.
I've been on the job search for more than a month now, mostly using Internet and finding nothing or 'NO' answers. After a month I got bored and decided to barge in some companies directly, resumes in hand. I expected to be ignored most times but was surprised to be rushed into HRs offices for immediate interviews 2 times out of 3. Hope to start a new good job in a week or so.
It took me a while to figure out that 'eyeglasses' actually meant the glasses I currently have on my nose. I'd never heard them called like that before.
Which reminded me of something. When reading Kim Stanley Robinson's there are some references to a character wearing a tootheye. I could never figure out what this was. Even google is no help.
Last week I tested some of those progs (freeware and shareware) and was pleasantly surprised by how well they worked. I have gone through 4 generations of slide scanners, so when I get a new one, I rescan all my best slides and want to give it the same name as the old file. We are talking thousands of png files at 4000dpi, typically 40Mb each. It took less than 30 minutes to search through 100Gb of images with only 10% false positives (okay, I got a fast machine with a fast drive). Can't remember the name of the app right now, sorry.
...when you see thousands of Fortran '66 lines of code, without any comments, without subroutine, where all the variables are inside dreaded Common blocks...
Yes, I did maintain legacy code at Nasa for a living.
Moved back to the countryside while I'm looking for a job. My parents feed the birds and about once an hour one of them runs into the window of the room where I'm typing this, knocks himself out and gets eaten by the cat / crow / hawk that happened to pass first.
But there are still plenty of those species. I'm more worried about some that have utterly disapeared in the 15 years I was away: no more swallows for instance. Global warming or excessive use of bug spray ?
I've been wrestling with the idea of writing an image modification detector. The idea is that when you modify an image, you copy one part into another part (using the clone brush of Photoshop or such).
By doing an autocorrelation of the image, you can detect parts that have been copied, but the mathematical part is not that easy, particularly if there are uniform noiseless areas (sky).
I can still deal with 1D autocorrelation, but in 2D my maths skills are rusty...
I never use the desktop icons for the simple reason they are behind all the windows (Yes, I know about [Win][D]). You should just reorganize you start menu this way:
delere useless stuff from the top of the start menu: just right click on it and do delete.
move stuff from [Start][Programs] directly to [Start]: click on it, and drag it where you want it. If it doesn't work, right-click on it, drag it and select [move] when you release the mouse. I only have [Startup] within the [Start][Programs] folder.
remove the apps from their folders and delete the folders: instead of having [Start][Programs][Jasc][Paint Shop Pro] I just have [Start][Paint Shop Pro]
use folders for categories of apps within [Start}: Graphics, Internet, (Open)Office, Multimedia, Accessories, Admin, Programming...
And set hotkeys for the most used ones: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-I for Internet browser...
I use knoppix a lot for testing hardware. In 2 minutes you can tell what's wrong with a PC, if it's worth keeping and more.
I also learnt about Quantian right after I finished building my 24 processor cluster
But how can you work with one of those ? You can surf the web but that's about all. You cannot write to NTFS partitions, so that precludes their use on a Windows machine as an alternate OS. If you can't save files it's useless as far as I can tell.
Was twice at Dome C in the center of Antarctica, living in a tent at -40deg temperatures (in summer) and doing hardware and software data acquisitions. Once they didn't give me the right kind of hardware and I ended up for an afternoon my a trusty HP Vectra outside to reprogram an eprom that couldn't be moved. Here's a picture.
For those not familiar with it, the multiple exposure they talk about in the article has been long used in the darkroom and can be done easily with modern scanners with good software. It brings out extreme details in parts of images that are normally burnt out.
Take a single slide that you scan. With a program like VueScan, you can set the exposure of the scanner, so you can do a dark scan (thus exposing properly the light part of the image), a normal scan and a light scan (exposing the dark part of the image).
Import all 3 into a graphic program, superimpose them and cancel the parts that you don't like (which is the creative part and not as easy as it seems).
Note that you can also do that taking 3 pictures with various exposure with the camera on a tripod, and it's the way the Mars rover does it.
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There is talk about having gimp support it in the future, but it's a big undertaking. Sorry to sound like a troll, but in the meanwhile Gimp will be little more than a toy.
48 bit RGB is supported natively by the PNG and TIFF images formats and many RAW files created by almost every recent scanner or digital camera. It's a shame to have hardware which creates images you cannot fully use.
When a new bigger HD comes out, I replace the old external one (which I add inside) with the new one since they are probably less reliable anyway.
And the way the taxes are computed is revolting: they 'estimate' the price of the item, tax it 33% and apply a 'work tax' on the previous total. You end up paying about 50% tax.
The 'personal use' rule you talk about is different. I just used it after moving from the US to Europe and shipping all my personal possessions. It took a bit of paperwork: certificate of temporary exportation, attestation of residency change from a consulate and some more. Good luck trying to explain that one to the airport customs officer who's just asking about those 3 laptops and 5 digital cameras in your pack...!
I got a retrospective scare at an airport in souther Italy last month. While waiting for my luggage, all the screens suddenly showed an error Windows popup in the middle. I wanted to click the [OK] button so bad...
Alexandre PUKALL published a free list of more than 10 thousand recipes about a decade ago. It's available in various forms on the Net. My take on it is an easy to search windows help file (.chm) (use xchm in Linux), but take it easy with my server as it's 7Mb (and it's all in French).
So now we can become a truly paperless society, once they come out with version 1.0 of WipeMe for this system...
A true 48 bit support would be a great plus for such an app: no concurrent, great market. And if you optimize it for 64 bit AMD processors, you could potentially create the first killer app for 64 bit processors (remember, you need 64 bit registers to handle 48 bit colors simply).
- Make a 2nd robot that retrieves a few full web pages (with graphics) per site claiming to be IE6 (or a normal Mozila), thus lying about it being from google.
- Display the page in IE6 (or Mozilla), save the entire display as a bitmap image.
- Run the bitmap image through an OCR program to extract the real text seen by the user
- Compare this text with what the ordinary google robot sees.
- If the text is completely different, lover the ranking
This gets rid of all the blue on blue keywords, display:none keywords and others. I think it will come to that.It may sound like a troll, but why is the US so conservative in regard to their money: card with only a magnetic stripe that you can copy with a 80$ reader, money in 2 colors on plain paper that you can xerox (almost) easily...
I call tech support and was greeted by the following message: "Thank you for your call, you will be charged 60 cents a minutes for your call". Including the 20 minutes I spent holding before I hung up fuming.
I guess that's the worse way to make money I've ever seen, but my parents were all surprised to hear about 800 free numbers in the US. Hell of a business plan: make a crappy product and charge customers for holding.
I wrote them by email and 45 days later got an very generic answer in the form: "Make sure your modem is plugged in properly". What a joke. Stay away from free.fr at all cost.
...I started using CVS yesterday. DOes that mean I need to forget everything already and start over with the new system ? Well, it looks slashdoted, so I guess I'll keep CVS for now. I'm only on page 3 of the manual anyway...
This anouncement came just at the begining of the digital photography era and seemed like a promise that digital would never reach the level of film.
I never heard about that again (nor have I the time to google for it now). Note that it would mean a change in the 2 main processing systems (C-41 and E-6).
More on topic, I think Kodak's spirit of innovation has been long dead. They killed their Kodachrmoe line without replacing it with quality E6 films -> Fuji took over. Every time I've found an equivalent film from another company (usually Fuji), the other has proved better. Instead of that, they started the Adventix/APS customer ripoff, starting a completely incompatible line of film/cameras (together with many other companies) claiming that it was 'better' while it was indeed half the quality at double the price.
Also their software is garbage (have you honestly ever used a Kodak software for more than 2 minutes without looking for a better solution ?).
I also briefly worked in quality control at a Kodak film production plant and, well... Let's skip it.
Then the quality of your digital images must be really poor. I have several 250Gb HD inside my PC, and some external onto USB2IDE converters as backup just to store my images. A compressed lossless PNG/TIFF of a good 4000dpi image runs 20 to 40Mb each, so that's no more than a 10 000 images. The same quantity of unmounted slides fits a few shoeboxes in my basement once they are scanned.
I've been on the job search for more than a month now, mostly using Internet and finding nothing or 'NO' answers. After a month I got bored and decided to barge in some companies directly, resumes in hand. I expected to be ignored most times but was surprised to be rushed into HRs offices for immediate interviews 2 times out of 3. Hope to start a new good job in a week or so.
Which reminded me of something. When reading Kim Stanley Robinson's there are some references to a character wearing a tootheye. I could never figure out what this was. Even google is no help.
Last week I tested some of those progs (freeware and shareware) and was pleasantly surprised by how well they worked. I have gone through 4 generations of slide scanners, so when I get a new one, I rescan all my best slides and want to give it the same name as the old file. We are talking thousands of png files at 4000dpi, typically 40Mb each. It took less than 30 minutes to search through 100Gb of images with only 10% false positives (okay, I got a fast machine with a fast drive). Can't remember the name of the app right now, sorry.
Yes, I did maintain legacy code at Nasa for a living.
But there are still plenty of those species. I'm more worried about some that have utterly disapeared in the 15 years I was away: no more swallows for instance. Global warming or excessive use of bug spray ?
By doing an autocorrelation of the image, you can detect parts that have been copied, but the mathematical part is not that easy, particularly if there are uniform noiseless areas (sky).
I can still deal with 1D autocorrelation, but in 2D my maths skills are rusty...
- delere useless stuff from the top of the start menu: just right click on it and do delete.
- move stuff from [Start][Programs] directly to [Start]: click on it, and drag it where you want it. If it doesn't work, right-click on it, drag it and select [move] when you release the mouse. I only have [Startup] within the [Start][Programs] folder.
- remove the apps from their folders and delete the folders: instead of having [Start][Programs][Jasc][Paint Shop Pro] I just have [Start][Paint Shop Pro]
- use folders for categories of apps within [Start}: Graphics, Internet, (Open)Office, Multimedia, Accessories, Admin, Programming...
And set hotkeys for the most used ones: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-I for Internet browser...I also learnt about Quantian right after I finished building my 24 processor cluster
But how can you work with one of those ? You can surf the web but that's about all. You cannot write to NTFS partitions, so that precludes their use on a Windows machine as an alternate OS. If you can't save files it's useless as far as I can tell.
Please, please, disprove me.
Was twice at Dome C in the center of Antarctica, living in a tent at -40deg temperatures (in summer) and doing hardware and software data acquisitions. Once they didn't give me the right kind of hardware and I ended up for an afternoon my a trusty HP Vectra outside to reprogram an eprom that couldn't be moved. Here's a picture.
For those not familiar with it, the multiple exposure they talk about in the article has been long used in the darkroom and can be done easily with modern scanners with good software. It brings out extreme details in parts of images that are normally burnt out.
Take a single slide that you scan. With a program like VueScan, you can set the exposure of the scanner, so you can do a dark scan (thus exposing properly the light part of the image), a normal scan and a light scan (exposing the dark part of the image).
Import all 3 into a graphic program, superimpose them and cancel the parts that you don't like (which is the creative part and not as easy as it seems).
Note that you can also do that taking 3 pictures with various exposure with the camera on a tripod, and it's the way the Mars rover does it.