... the biggest risk you face is showing off your capability to the locals.
My own experience and the opinion of those (business people) I spoke to is that the Chinese don't really care if you are using VPN of some sort, as long as they don't suspect you are involve in some kind of dissidence or other "subversive" activity.
For what it's worth, I have used SSH tunnelling to my own tinyproxy installation. I enjoyed moderately high speed from my hotel rooms and from Starbucks.
Incidentally, I didn't set this up to bypass censorship. I use the proxy any time I am at a wireless hotspot for obvious security reasons. It also enables me to use my credit card overseas without being flagged as a risk because as my IP address always jives with my credit card postal address.
But here's the problem: the very concept of "marginal cost of production" is nearly made obsolete by computers and the Internet. It used to be that the effort to produce the copies was proportional to the number of copies being made. Not any more.
Actually, marginal cost is not made obsolete. It is very much applicable. But a low marginal cost and the larger audience that the Internet affords should dictate a lowering of the selling price.
The RIAA and its ilk are interfering with this natural process by keeping prices artificially high. The ease at which you can pirate a book or CD today is an opportunity but the incentive to pirate should not be coupled to that.
(Why else would we have spam?)
Spam is not a product for sale and is only part of the cost of whatever is being sold, so I'm not sure why you think that is relevant.
In light of the current Drupal release being 6.3, I hope this review will prompt the developers to shift priorities to getting a v6 compatible module out for testing.
In the mean time, you might want to take a look at Ubercart, another Drupal module.
Alas, there are not enough antioxidants in coffee to offset even a fraction of the highly free-radical sugar that most people put in their coffee, never mind the rest of their diet.
Anyway, the gene in question is linked to caffeine metabolism not to coffee metabolism. But the "questionnaire revealed that quaffing coffee boosted the risk of a heart attack in those who had genes making them slow metabolizers."
So tell me.... were those coffee drinkers putting sugar in their coffee? Were they fat? In the absence of obesity, what was their daily carbohydrate intake?
My reasoning is sugar raises your insulin which has a stronger link to heart disease than either coffee or caffeine ever did. Other studies have linked high blood pressure to heart disease.
Other studies link caffeine to high blood pressure. But from what I can tell those studies only studied people with high blood pressure to start with. I have never seen a study that shows that, in the absences of high blood pressure, that caffeine raise it to "abnormal" levels.
Incidentally I used to have high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Now both are normal. I'm 50, my BP is 120/70 and I still drink 8 mugs (that's 16 cups) of coffee a day.
I'm not saying coffee is good for you.... just that the genetic link to heart disease should basically be ignored.
West argues that we could loose valuable pictorial records. I argue
that we are anyway. I am not a photojournalist but I have had this discussion
with news photographers in the past and the picture they paint is that most
newspapers are terrible with archive issues.
Start with film processing: In the rush to get things to press, they are neither
fixed nor washed for the recommended times. Then, if they are filed at all,
they will end up in some cabinet (where the file folders and news-clippings,
etc. are anything but acid free) filed under "miscellaneous". These
negatives will not have much usable image in 50 years, if they can find
them at all. All these issues apply for prints made from these negatives, too.
What digital is doing for the newspapers is taking the task of archiving and
indexing from the realm of impossible to plausible.
Regarding some of the/. comments:
I don't buy the arguments about running out of film. Running out of film is
simply unprofessional.
I don't buy the arguments about labs screwing up the film (unless the lab is
the newspapers' mentioned above). For Black & White (events coverage &
artistic), I process my own. For commercial work I choose my labs with care.
The problems have been no more frequent than mechanical failure of my equipment
and, fortunately, those problems have all been related to output (i.e., prints--not
transparencies or negs).
I don't buy the argument that memory is too expensive. Expense is not the issue
for a professional. The real issue here is capacity, speed and reliability.
Never mind changing cards in the middle of a shoot--it takes too bloody long!
Ditto for editing to save memory. Shoot now. Edit tomorrow. Just give me a 500GB
PCMCIA card and I'll be happy.;-)
As a photographer, I have confronted with these issues every time I consider
switching from conventional to digital cameras. More than half of my commercial
work gets digitized (either PhotoCD or drum scanner) because that's how the
customer wants it, but I still still keep the transparencies or negatives on
file. This is an improvement over when I had to send the original transparencies
to the customer. There was always the risk that I would never see my originals
again. Now, the originals seldom leave my personal control.
If I bought digital cameras and eliminated film altogether, how would things
change? Well, yeah, I would delete the rubbish (e.g. out of focus shots, etc.)
to save disk space and to make searches easier, but I would probably still archive
and index the rest. I have been doing photography long enough to know that the
shots I hate today are the ones I might love five years from now. This assumes
that any of these "commercial" shots have any redeeming value beyond
the purpose for which they were shot. So let's assume they haven't any. I would
still rather not delete them. You just never can tell what might come up in
the future, especially if you're supplying stock photos. Disk space is getting
cheap--Just keep them all, I say.
What about memory shortages in the camera itself? Well, so far, there isn't
a camera that meets my requirements, so the issue is moot. I'll just stick with
what I am doing now.
When I actually do "go digital", it will probably be the next
generation of professional digital SLR cameras (The Nikon
D1 is a nice toy but it does not have the storage capacity for field work
and doesn't have the resolution needed for studio work). For field work it will need to be 3 megapixels+,
and enough storage for a 500 shots on a single memory card (multi-gigabyte PCMCIA
hard disk or some such). After all, whose got time to edit when you are too
busy shooting?
The truth is, I would love to go completely digital for some of the very good
reasons already posted. My personal main reason is that cumbersome filing, indexing
and retrieval will become a thing of the past.
This story reminded me of Tesla's
Earthquake machine which, if you believe the stories, demonstrates
just how much damage you can inflict when you hit the resonant frequency
with a modest amount of power.
> If he told the cop "I'm recording this incident" then the
> cop would have specific knowledge and could base his
> further actions on
> Yes, the policeman could have smashed the recorder
> and destroyed the tape to add to his other crimes.
> That would really help.
Well, in my case he would be smashing the decoy recorder on the dash
board. Meanwhile another hidden recorder would record both the fact that
he was properly informed and his act of destroying private property.
Fortunately for me, all this is unnecessary: I'm not a member of a visiable
minority and I don't have an attitude problem so everything is pretty well "by
the book".
Firstly, I'd like to make sure the distinction between the medium and what is
produced is a clear one. Oil paint is a medium of expression. So is the silver
gelatin of the photograph. So is inkjet ink and the paper that supports it. But these are not art
in themselves. They are just mediums of expression.
Secondly, I have seen the gamut of "computer generated art" that
is nothing more than graphical representations of fractal or trigonometric patterns.
They may be very beautiful in some beholder's eye but I personally feel that
the word "art" is being used loosely here. Creativity was no doubt
involved in the program to produce the images (programming is indeed
an art). But where is the creativity in the images that the program itself produced?
I'm not saying it doesn't exist. But the program, in this case is just a recipe
for a kind of "canned" art. What I've seen to date is no better than
someone's first attempts at making wine. You follow the directions in the box,
and you get a wine-like result which you can drink. You can get a a pretty good
buzz off it, too! But good art, like good wine, starts with good craft. Computer
generated wine is like the mechanized wine kits that are designed to work at
all. Quality is beyond the scope of the kit manufacturer. It's something
that the wine maker has to pursue on their own.
Nothing computer generated has any redeeming value due if there is a limited involvement
or limited experience in the "artist" directing the
output. They're just following a recipe that comes in a box with a few premeasured
ingredients.
Next. I have seen some incredible images that where created using Adobe and
Corel products. (note the operative word is "created", not "generated".)
This is art. It is "graphic" art. Some of it is even "good" art. But
it is not "fine" art. It takes years of practice to achieve the kind
of maturity the the older wine masters can pull off with seemingly no effort.
And this goes for art too.
A few years ago I wrote this
about the photograph as fine art. I confess my views have changed somewhat and
it was written to apply to photographic art. But much of it applies to the
computer as an artistic medium as well. A slightly edited/updated version of
my definition of fine art:
It is "fine" art if:
* The output embodies the unique expressions of the ideas of the artist.
* The output has aesthetic merit, in terms of subject matter and composition.
* The prints are "archival" quality.
* Supporting materials (paper, matting, frame, etc.) are selected to meet
the same archival standards while taking into account the aesthetic and viewing
requirements of the subject matter. (This is "presentation".)
I think the operative meaning of the word "fine" is delicate,
refined or subtle. It is almost the opposite in meaning to "pop"
art. Pop art appeals to the masses, especially younger people. I liken it to
Beaujolais Nouveau ($15) as opposed to a grande cru chateau-bottled wine
that will cost a few hundred dollars a bottle. I'm not trying to invalidate
pop art. Just clarify the distinction. Each have their time and place. Computer
art still tends to be of the pop art variety, largely because most of the artists
are still young.
At any rate, there is not a huge market for "fine" art. "Commercial"
art, by and large, makes up the bulk of income-generating work. Not surprisingly,
much of it is now produced with commercially-available illustration software.
So I don't feel, as has been mentioned by other posters, that computers are
slow to be accepted. They are being used to produce some very good works of
art. Ultimately, whether commercial or fine art, the artist still has to have
a clear objective. What is it that you are trying to communicate to your
target audience?
As for longevity, no museum is going to be interested in a print that fades
to oblivion in 50 to 100 years. Right now, there is a lot of effort going into
making computer printout materials that approach the archival stability of colour
photographic prints. But even conventional colour photographs do not meet the
stringent requirements for being "archival" quality. So while few
would argue that photography is not an art form, colour prints are seldom sold
as "fine" art. Black and white photography doesn't suffer the same
fate as the colour photographic if care is taken to properly stabilize the prints.
There is hope, though, for the colour photographer and for the computer artist.
Some alternative-process colour exist that meet or exceed archival stability
requirements. Ultrastable , for example,
qualifies as a computer-outputed medium with archival (500 years+) stability.
If you think that this is too cumbersome to use then remind yourself that you
get out of something, whatever you put into it. Of course computers aren't limited
to just visual arts, but I've made the assumption that that is what you
are studying.
Finally I'd like to comment that I still consider myself a beginner as an artist.
And I have been creating visual images for about 35 years. Or trying to, anyway.
About the best that I have been able to achieve is the ability to recognize
the difference between good art and great art. Producing good art is a process
I am still trying to master. When I was in my 20s, I thought I was great. Now
I am embarrassed to even think about how naive I was.
In more recent years I have taught photography in an art college. I have had a few talented students (less than ten percent), a few more not-so-talented students
who merely thought they were talented and out of those, one or two who thought
that their "talent" exempted them from having to learn the crafts
that we were mandated to teach them. Some were just naive but a couple were
downright cocky. I hope you are not one of these types becuase if you are you
are going to have trouble getting through your course work.
If you really feel that the computer is an important artistic medium, then
study your courses hard, don't bore the teachers with stuff that is irrelevant
to what they have to teach and, after you graduate, prove to the world that
the computer can produce fine art not by talking about it but by doing
it. The ultimate test will be peoples acceptance of the end results. Contrary
to the views expressed in many of the postings here, a lot of art critics do know good computer
art when they've actually seen it. Alas, in the galleries, we just aren't seeing
that much quality yet.
So getting back to your questions, no you are not alone in your belief. It
is already being done. And while there will always be diehards that think that
only traditional materials can produce "art", the computer is already
proving indispensable for producing commercial art, at least. The word "fine"
will always be subject to arguments on semantics, I'm afraid. But keep in mind
that some of these diehards have simply grown tired of seeing half-assed attempts
at art by those who have naive views about what art is.
Okay, I agree that there are a lot of agricultural applications for this technology.
But a couple of things just don't jive when we are talking about coffee. The
article states:
NASA will send an unmanned solar-powered aircraft soaring above a Hawaiian
plantation so growers
know exactly when to pick the beans for the most flavorful brew.
First of all, the coffee cherries are not picked all at once, which is why coffee havesting is still done by hand. They ripen at different times and only the ripe ones are picked. Whether to pick or to leave a particular cherry
on the tree is a human judgement call that can not be done by machine.
The only way I could see this technology being applied is to determine the
optimal time to strip-harvest the entire plantation by machine. It might actually
save labour costs to sort the ripe beans from the unripe ones after they
are harvested. But isn't this a terrible waste of otherwise good coffee beens,
which, left on the tree longer, would produce good beans? Premature beans that get picked have to be composted to be of any use at all. Anyway, I think that such labour savings would only be significant in the US (i.e., Hawaii). In the countries where most of the worlds coffee is grown, stripping the unripe cherries from the trees would be more costly (through reduced yield) than by reducing the already cheap labour.
From a flavour point of view, all this is moot anyway, since most of the worlds
good coffee is a) improperly roasted, b) blended with inferior robusta beans
and/or c) stale by the time it reaches the consumer. Never mind that most people don't even brew it properly.
While I'm no great fan of the drug companies (they are culpable in the over-medication of seniors, for example), it's exactly this sort of pseudo-scientific activist FUD
that eventually leads to more deaths for those who contract the disease. The original sufferers weren't subject to these drugs (throughout most of the 80's) but
shitloads of them died from this allegedly mystery virus. This is pseudo-science at its best, denial of scientific findings through innuendo and rumour.
I have been taking an interest in HIV/AIDS issues for some years now and I am not convinced that all of it is FUD. Seriously, check out www.virusmyth.net and www.aids-statistics.com.
November 30, 2000 (TOKYO) -- A defect in a certain manufacturing batch of
U.S. Transmeta Corp.'s energy-saving "Crusoe" microprocessors has affected
major PC makers in Japan. Sony Corp. confirmed the defect after NEC Corp.
decided recall.
The defect was identified in the "TM5600" Crusoe microprocessor that
operates at a clock speed of 600MHz. When a certain set of conditions
(such as the operating voltage) are met, the Level 2 cache operates in
error.
Hitachi Ltd., which just launched its model with that version of
Transmeta's CPU on Nov. 27, said it is making utmost efforts to identify
the problem.
> From the article, it's unclear how deep in the network the fiber goes;
anyone have more information on that? I'd like some fiber to my apartment, but
it's rather far from Japan right now...
I live in a medium-sized (900,000 people) urban centre in central Japan and
I have about as much hope of getting fiber to my door in the next ten years
as I had getting Internet access in 1990. Which is nil. You'll get your fiber
long before I do!
The article is only talking about a pilot project in an urban centre. That
probably means less than 10,000 subscribers in Tokyo and Osaka with the rest
of the nation being rolled out about the year 3085.
Basically, Internet access sucks in this country--both in price and in lack
of bandwidth. And fiber just isn't going to happen any time soon!
True, NTT has one of the most advanced ISDN infrastructures in the world. Hell,
I can walk up to almost any payphone--even in between two rice paddies--and
"plug in".
But ISDN is part of the problem. NTT has invested giga-yen into it and
they will do their damnedest to milk it for all the revenue they can--including
delaying offering new services that would make ISDN obsolete.
You can get 128K ISDN dial-up connections to your ISP from anywhere in Japan
but if you want a 24-hour connection (that avoids the 3.3 yen/min toll charges
on local calls) you have to sign up for OCN
Economy. The name is ironic: They charge 32,000 yen (US$298
) per month for it. At least they throw in 8 IP addresses.
Never mind fiber, when they roll out ADSL they are only going to be able to
charge about 4500 yen, eroding their ISDN revenue base and pissing off a lot
of corporate customers who signed long-term (3 year) contracts for OCN Economy.
Watch: Before ADSL goes nation-wide, NTT will at least half the price
of OCN Economy.
NTT introduced another pilot in November 1999: a flat-rate ISDN service for
8000 yen per month. This one, aimed at non-corperate users, doesn't include
the cost of your ISP and I'm not even sure if it has a static IP address. In
May they expanded it to cover several more wards of Tokyo and also Osaka City
but this service is still a pilot (30,000 subscribers) and not outside of the
two urban centres. Walk into a local NTT in my city and ask about this or ADSL
and they hand you a pamphlet for OCN Economy saying that it is the lowest
priced service they offer.
Similar pilots are underway with ADSL with plans to roll out nation wide in
less than a year, but I've been hearing these kinds of announcements for years.
I've learned not to get my hopes up.
Looking on the bright side, even if I can't get ADSL before 2002, when NTT
lowers it's prices on OCN Economy this year, I will at least be able to get
it for less than I am paying now in dial-up charges: My current NTT local-call
toll charges to my ISP are between 15,000 to 25,000 yen a month!
On another front, I was supposed to get cable Internet access a year ago. I
went to my local cable company the other day to get a status report. They said
my area was pushed back--slated for 2002. They didn't seem to think there was
any need to hurry, the high cost of upgrading their equipment being the main
excuse for the delay. I talked directly to one of their technical staff and
explained to them how ADSL was going to beat them to the market. They hadn't
even heard of ADSL! I got the impression that they simply don't understand the
concept of competition, having been granted a monopoly on CATV services for
their region. Anyway, they charge about 80,000 yen for installation.
So what about fiber? NTT is talking about offering their "Medium/High-Speed
IP Service" this year, in areas where they already have FTTH (fiber to
the home). So what homes already have fiber? Not many even in Tokyo. And a year
ago NTT's projection on a nation-wide network of fiber feeder cables was 2010.
The first I saw of the MS "IntelliEye" (sounds like "Intel a Lie") was when a friend visited from Canada. Wierd feeling to fall in love with a product from a company you hate!
He said that MS had a patent on it so, if I wanted it, I would have to make a pact with the devil to get one. A month later they appeared on the shelves here in Japan and I did just that.
A week later I noticed essencially the same technology but from a Japanese maker. I plan to buy one just to compare, but what gives? Does Microsoft really have a patent on this?
Slashdot Mirror
... the biggest risk you face is showing off your capability to the locals.
My own experience and the opinion of those (business people) I spoke to is that the Chinese don't really care if you are using VPN of some sort, as long as they don't suspect you are involve in some kind of dissidence or other "subversive" activity.
For what it's worth, I have used SSH tunnelling to my own tinyproxy installation. I enjoyed moderately high speed from my hotel rooms and from Starbucks.
Incidentally, I didn't set this up to bypass censorship. I use the proxy any time I am at a wireless hotspot for obvious security reasons. It also enables me to use my credit card overseas without being flagged as a risk because as my IP address always jives with my credit card postal address.
Actually, marginal cost is not made obsolete. It is very much applicable. But a low marginal cost and the larger audience that the Internet affords should dictate a lowering of the selling price.
The RIAA and its ilk are interfering with this natural process by keeping prices artificially high. The ease at which you can pirate a book or CD today is an opportunity but the incentive to pirate should not be coupled to that.
Spam is not a product for sale and is only part of the cost of whatever is being sold, so I'm not sure why you think that is relevant.
In light of the current Drupal release being 6.3, I hope this review will prompt the developers to shift priorities to getting a v6 compatible module out for testing.
In the mean time, you might want to take a look at Ubercart, another Drupal module.
Alas, there are not enough antioxidants in coffee to offset even a fraction of the highly free-radical sugar that most people put in their coffee, never mind the rest of their diet.
Anyway, the gene in question is linked to caffeine metabolism not to coffee metabolism. But the "questionnaire revealed that quaffing coffee boosted the risk of a heart attack in those who had genes making them slow metabolizers."
So tell me.... were those coffee drinkers putting sugar in their coffee? Were they fat? In the absence of obesity, what was their daily carbohydrate intake?
My reasoning is sugar raises your insulin which has a stronger link to heart disease than either coffee or caffeine ever did. Other studies have linked high blood pressure to heart disease.
Other studies link caffeine to high blood pressure. But from what I can tell those studies only studied people with high blood pressure to start with. I have never seen a study that shows that, in the absences of high blood pressure, that caffeine raise it to "abnormal" levels.
Incidentally I used to have high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Now both are normal. I'm 50, my BP is 120/70 and I still drink 8 mugs (that's 16 cups) of coffee a day.
I'm not saying coffee is good for you.... just that the genetic link to heart disease should basically be ignored.
Actually, musenki only means "wireless device" without any reference -- explicit or implied -- to "small".
mu = not
sen = wire[ed]
ki = device/machine
--
West argues that we could loose valuable pictorial records. I argue
that we are anyway. I am not a photojournalist but I have had this discussion
with news photographers in the past and the picture they paint is that most
newspapers are terrible with archive issues.
Start with film processing: In the rush to get things to press, they are neither
fixed nor washed for the recommended times. Then, if they are filed at all,
they will end up in some cabinet (where the file folders and news-clippings,
etc. are anything but acid free) filed under "miscellaneous". These
negatives will not have much usable image in 50 years, if they can find
them at all. All these issues apply for prints made from these negatives, too.
What digital is doing for the newspapers is taking the task of archiving and
indexing from the realm of impossible to plausible.
Regarding some of the /. comments:
I don't buy the arguments about running out of film. Running out of film is
simply unprofessional.
I don't buy the arguments about labs screwing up the film (unless the lab is
the newspapers' mentioned above). For Black & White (events coverage &
artistic), I process my own. For commercial work I choose my labs with care.
The problems have been no more frequent than mechanical failure of my equipment
and, fortunately, those problems have all been related to output (i.e., prints--not
transparencies or negs).
I don't buy the argument that memory is too expensive. Expense is not the issue ;-)
for a professional. The real issue here is capacity, speed and reliability.
Never mind changing cards in the middle of a shoot--it takes too bloody long!
Ditto for editing to save memory. Shoot now. Edit tomorrow. Just give me a 500GB
PCMCIA card and I'll be happy.
As a photographer, I have confronted with these issues every time I consider switching from conventional to digital cameras. More than half of my commercial work gets digitized (either PhotoCD or drum scanner) because that's how the customer wants it, but I still still keep the transparencies or negatives on file. This is an improvement over when I had to send the original transparencies to the customer. There was always the risk that I would never see my originals again. Now, the originals seldom leave my personal control.
If I bought digital cameras and eliminated film altogether, how would things change? Well, yeah, I would delete the rubbish (e.g. out of focus shots, etc.) to save disk space and to make searches easier, but I would probably still archive and index the rest. I have been doing photography long enough to know that the shots I hate today are the ones I might love five years from now. This assumes that any of these "commercial" shots have any redeeming value beyond the purpose for which they were shot. So let's assume they haven't any. I would still rather not delete them. You just never can tell what might come up in the future, especially if you're supplying stock photos. Disk space is getting cheap--Just keep them all, I say.
What about memory shortages in the camera itself? Well, so far, there isn't a camera that meets my requirements, so the issue is moot. I'll just stick with what I am doing now.
When I actually do "go digital", it will probably be the next generation of professional digital SLR cameras (The Nikon D1 is a nice toy but it does not have the storage capacity for field work and doesn't have the resolution needed for studio work). For field work it will need to be 3 megapixels+, and enough storage for a 500 shots on a single memory card (multi-gigabyte PCMCIA hard disk or some such). After all, whose got time to edit when you are too busy shooting?
The truth is, I would love to go completely digital for some of the very good reasons already posted. My personal main reason is that cumbersome filing, indexing and retrieval will become a thing of the past.
This story reminded me of Tesla's Earthquake machine which, if you believe the stories, demonstrates just how much damage you can inflict when you hit the resonant frequency with a modest amount of power.
> If he told the cop "I'm recording this incident" then the
> cop would have specific knowledge and could base his
> further actions on
Well, in my case he would be smashing the decoy recorder on the dash board. Meanwhile another hidden recorder would record both the fact that he was properly informed and his act of destroying private property.
Fortunately for me, all this is unnecessary: I'm not a member of a visiable minority and I don't have an attitude problem so everything is pretty well "by the book".
@
@
In the previous posting I said:
> Ultrastable , for example, qualifies as a computer-outputed medium with archival (500 years+) stability.
I should clarify that I was refering to their Permanent Color Process, not their Inkjet Process.
 
Firstly, I'd like to make sure the distinction between the medium and what is produced is a clear one. Oil paint is a medium of expression. So is the silver gelatin of the photograph. So is inkjet ink and the paper that supports it. But these are not art in themselves. They are just mediums of expression.
Secondly, I have seen the gamut of "computer generated art" that is nothing more than graphical representations of fractal or trigonometric patterns. They may be very beautiful in some beholder's eye but I personally feel that the word "art" is being used loosely here. Creativity was no doubt involved in the program to produce the images (programming is indeed an art). But where is the creativity in the images that the program itself produced? I'm not saying it doesn't exist. But the program, in this case is just a recipe for a kind of "canned" art. What I've seen to date is no better than someone's first attempts at making wine. You follow the directions in the box, and you get a wine-like result which you can drink. You can get a a pretty good buzz off it, too! But good art, like good wine, starts with good craft. Computer generated wine is like the mechanized wine kits that are designed to work at all. Quality is beyond the scope of the kit manufacturer. It's something that the wine maker has to pursue on their own.
Nothing computer generated has any redeeming value due if there is a limited involvement or limited experience in the "artist" directing the output. They're just following a recipe that comes in a box with a few premeasured ingredients.
Next. I have seen some incredible images that where created using Adobe and Corel products. (note the operative word is "created", not "generated".) This is art. It is "graphic" art. Some of it is even "good" art. But it is not "fine" art. It takes years of practice to achieve the kind of maturity the the older wine masters can pull off with seemingly no effort. And this goes for art too.
A few years ago I wrote this about the photograph as fine art. I confess my views have changed somewhat and it was written to apply to photographic art. But much of it applies to the computer as an artistic medium as well. A slightly edited/updated version of my definition of fine art:
It is "fine" art if:
* The output embodies the unique expressions of the ideas of the artist.
* The output has aesthetic merit, in terms of subject matter and composition.
* The prints are "archival" quality.
* Supporting materials (paper, matting, frame, etc.) are selected to meet the same archival standards while taking into account the aesthetic and viewing requirements of the subject matter. (This is "presentation".)
I think the operative meaning of the word "fine" is delicate, refined or subtle. It is almost the opposite in meaning to "pop" art. Pop art appeals to the masses, especially younger people. I liken it to Beaujolais Nouveau ($15) as opposed to a grande cru chateau-bottled wine that will cost a few hundred dollars a bottle. I'm not trying to invalidate pop art. Just clarify the distinction. Each have their time and place. Computer art still tends to be of the pop art variety, largely because most of the artists are still young.
At any rate, there is not a huge market for "fine" art. "Commercial" art, by and large, makes up the bulk of income-generating work. Not surprisingly, much of it is now produced with commercially-available illustration software. So I don't feel, as has been mentioned by other posters, that computers are slow to be accepted. They are being used to produce some very good works of art. Ultimately, whether commercial or fine art, the artist still has to have a clear objective. What is it that you are trying to communicate to your target audience?
As for longevity, no museum is going to be interested in a print that fades to oblivion in 50 to 100 years. Right now, there is a lot of effort going into making computer printout materials that approach the archival stability of colour photographic prints. But even conventional colour photographs do not meet the stringent requirements for being "archival" quality. So while few would argue that photography is not an art form, colour prints are seldom sold as "fine" art. Black and white photography doesn't suffer the same fate as the colour photographic if care is taken to properly stabilize the prints.
There is hope, though, for the colour photographer and for the computer artist. Some alternative-process colour exist that meet or exceed archival stability requirements. Ultrastable , for example, qualifies as a computer-outputed medium with archival (500 years+) stability. If you think that this is too cumbersome to use then remind yourself that you get out of something, whatever you put into it. Of course computers aren't limited to just visual arts, but I've made the assumption that that is what you are studying.
Finally I'd like to comment that I still consider myself a beginner as an artist. And I have been creating visual images for about 35 years. Or trying to, anyway. About the best that I have been able to achieve is the ability to recognize the difference between good art and great art. Producing good art is a process I am still trying to master. When I was in my 20s, I thought I was great. Now I am embarrassed to even think about how naive I was.
In more recent years I have taught photography in an art college. I have had a few talented students (less than ten percent), a few more not-so-talented students who merely thought they were talented and out of those, one or two who thought that their "talent" exempted them from having to learn the crafts that we were mandated to teach them. Some were just naive but a couple were downright cocky. I hope you are not one of these types becuase if you are you are going to have trouble getting through your course work.
If you really feel that the computer is an important artistic medium, then study your courses hard, don't bore the teachers with stuff that is irrelevant to what they have to teach and, after you graduate, prove to the world that the computer can produce fine art not by talking about it but by doing it. The ultimate test will be peoples acceptance of the end results. Contrary to the views expressed in many of the postings here, a lot of art critics do know good computer art when they've actually seen it. Alas, in the galleries, we just aren't seeing that much quality yet.
So getting back to your questions, no you are not alone in your belief. It is already being done. And while there will always be diehards that think that only traditional materials can produce "art", the computer is already proving indispensable for producing commercial art, at least. The word "fine" will always be subject to arguments on semantics, I'm afraid. But keep in mind that some of these diehards have simply grown tired of seeing half-assed attempts at art by those who have naive views about what art is.
The medium is in the here and now. Go for it!
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..oops! There went my karma. :-(
Okay, I agree that there are a lot of agricultural applications for this technology. But a couple of things just don't jive when we are talking about coffee. The article states:
First of all, the coffee cherries are not picked all at once, which is why coffee havesting is still done by hand. They ripen at different times and only the ripe ones are picked. Whether to pick or to leave a particular cherry on the tree is a human judgement call that can not be done by machine.
The only way I could see this technology being applied is to determine the optimal time to strip-harvest the entire plantation by machine. It might actually save labour costs to sort the ripe beans from the unripe ones after they are harvested. But isn't this a terrible waste of otherwise good coffee beens, which, left on the tree longer, would produce good beans? Premature beans that get picked have to be composted to be of any use at all. Anyway, I think that such labour savings would only be significant in the US (i.e., Hawaii). In the countries where most of the worlds coffee is grown, stripping the unripe cherries from the trees would be more costly (through reduced yield) than by reducing the already cheap labour.
From a flavour point of view, all this is moot anyway, since most of the worlds good coffee is a) improperly roasted, b) blended with inferior robusta beans and/or c) stale by the time it reaches the consumer. Never mind that most people don't even brew it properly.
That's why I roast my own arabicas at home.
Confessions of a Coffee Snob
While I'm no great fan of the drug companies (they are culpable in the over-medication of seniors, for example), it's exactly this sort of pseudo-scientific activist FUD that eventually leads to more deaths for those who contract the disease. The original sufferers weren't subject to these drugs (throughout most of the 80's) but shitloads of them died from this allegedly mystery virus. This is pseudo-science at its best, denial of scientific findings through innuendo and rumour.
I have been taking an interest in HIV/AIDS issues for some years now and I am not convinced that all of it is FUD. Seriously, check out www.virusmyth.net and www.aids-statistics.com.
Sony Recalls Crusoe Notebooks after NEC
November 30, 2000 (TOKYO) -- A defect in a certain manufacturing batch of U.S. Transmeta Corp.'s energy-saving "Crusoe" microprocessors has affected major PC makers in Japan. Sony Corp. confirmed the defect after NEC Corp. decided recall.
The defect was identified in the "TM5600" Crusoe microprocessor that operates at a clock speed of 600MHz. When a certain set of conditions (such as the operating voltage) are met, the Level 2 cache operates in error.
Hitachi Ltd., which just launched its model with that version of Transmeta's CPU on Nov. 27, said it is making utmost efforts to identify the problem.
Full story at http://www.asiabiztech.com/wcs/frm/leaf?CID=onair/ asabt/cover/118386
> From the article, it's unclear how deep in the network the fiber goes; anyone have more information on that? I'd like some fiber to my apartment, but it's rather far from Japan right now ...
I live in a medium-sized (900,000 people) urban centre in central Japan and I have about as much hope of getting fiber to my door in the next ten years as I had getting Internet access in 1990. Which is nil. You'll get your fiber long before I do!
The article is only talking about a pilot project in an urban centre. That probably means less than 10,000 subscribers in Tokyo and Osaka with the rest of the nation being rolled out about the year 3085.
Basically, Internet access sucks in this country--both in price and in lack of bandwidth. And fiber just isn't going to happen any time soon!
True, NTT has one of the most advanced ISDN infrastructures in the world. Hell, I can walk up to almost any payphone--even in between two rice paddies--and "plug in".
But ISDN is part of the problem. NTT has invested giga-yen into it and they will do their damnedest to milk it for all the revenue they can--including delaying offering new services that would make ISDN obsolete.
You can get 128K ISDN dial-up connections to your ISP from anywhere in Japan but if you want a 24-hour connection (that avoids the 3.3 yen/min toll charges on local calls) you have to sign up for OCN Economy. The name is ironic: They charge 32,000 yen (US$298 ) per month for it. At least they throw in 8 IP addresses.
Never mind fiber, when they roll out ADSL they are only going to be able to charge about 4500 yen, eroding their ISDN revenue base and pissing off a lot of corporate customers who signed long-term (3 year) contracts for OCN Economy. Watch: Before ADSL goes nation-wide, NTT will at least half the price of OCN Economy.
NTT introduced another pilot in November 1999: a flat-rate ISDN service for 8000 yen per month. This one, aimed at non-corperate users, doesn't include the cost of your ISP and I'm not even sure if it has a static IP address. In May they expanded it to cover several more wards of Tokyo and also Osaka City but this service is still a pilot (30,000 subscribers) and not outside of the two urban centres. Walk into a local NTT in my city and ask about this or ADSL and they hand you a pamphlet for OCN Economy saying that it is the lowest priced service they offer.
Similar pilots are underway with ADSL with plans to roll out nation wide in less than a year, but I've been hearing these kinds of announcements for years. I've learned not to get my hopes up.
Looking on the bright side, even if I can't get ADSL before 2002, when NTT lowers it's prices on OCN Economy this year, I will at least be able to get it for less than I am paying now in dial-up charges: My current NTT local-call toll charges to my ISP are between 15,000 to 25,000 yen a month!
On another front, I was supposed to get cable Internet access a year ago. I went to my local cable company the other day to get a status report. They said my area was pushed back--slated for 2002. They didn't seem to think there was any need to hurry, the high cost of upgrading their equipment being the main excuse for the delay. I talked directly to one of their technical staff and explained to them how ADSL was going to beat them to the market. They hadn't even heard of ADSL! I got the impression that they simply don't understand the concept of competition, having been granted a monopoly on CATV services for their region. Anyway, they charge about 80,000 yen for installation.
So what about fiber? NTT is talking about offering their "Medium/High-Speed IP Service" this year, in areas where they already have FTTH (fiber to the home). So what homes already have fiber? Not many even in Tokyo. And a year ago NTT's projection on a nation-wide network of fiber feeder cables was 2010.
I say "Dream on...!".
The first I saw of the MS "IntelliEye" (sounds like "Intel a Lie") was when a friend visited from Canada. Wierd feeling to fall in love with a product from a company you hate!
He said that MS had a patent on it so, if I wanted it, I would have to make a pact with the devil to get one. A month later they appeared on the shelves here in Japan and I did just that.
A week later I noticed essencially the same technology but from a Japanese maker. I plan to buy one just to compare, but what gives? Does Microsoft really have a patent on this?