mjallison - Slashdot User

World's First 3D Webcam Tested 124

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 16, 2009 @06:50PM from the didn't-like-the-others-they-were-all-too-flat dept.

CNETNate writes "The world's first 3D webcam not only takes anaglyphic images, but will let you have a stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It's the work of a unique camera called 'Minoru,' which has been tested and documented in a feature today. Be warned though: anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable videos."

Choosing Better-Quality JPEG Images With Software? 291

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 16, 2009 @06:02PM from the on-the-tip-of-my-script dept.

kpoole55 writes "I've been googling for an answer to a question and I'm not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I'm looking for a next step in the process. It's known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I've been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those 'Well, of course, how else would you do it? It's so simple.' moments."

Comment Future preservation plans? (Score 5, Interesting) 256

by mjallison on Monday July 13, 2009 @09:21PM (#28685169) Attached to: NASA Has the Lost Tapes

NASA is under orders to retain all data from planetary missions, including lunar missions. Once the data as been recovered, what are NASA's plans to archive and prevent the data from being lost over the next 40, or 400 years? How will they plan on making the data available to general public?

Ancient Books Go Online 198

Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 22, 2009 @01:41AM from the on-the-internet-no-one-knows-you're-a-clay-tablet dept.

jd writes "The BBC is reporting that the United Nations' World Digital Library has gone online with an initial offering of 1,200 ancient manuscripts, parchments and documents. To no great surprise, Europe comes in first with 380 items. South America comes in second with 320, with a very distant third place being given to the Middle East at a paltry 157 texts. This is only the initial round, so the leader board can be expected to change. There are, for example, a lot of Sumerian and Babylonian tablets, many of which are already online elsewhere. Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page. Use of material from a given country is subject to whatever restrictions that country places, in addition to any local and international copyright laws. With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered. There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however."

Comment Re:iPhone (Score 1) 776

by mjallison on Monday March 09, 2009 @07:13PM (#27128077) Attached to: Favorite on-screen calculator?

The best thing about the iphone for calculators is that you use your fingers again, not a mouse.

Submission + - Google building Artificial Intelligence

Submitted by kegger64 on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @12:51AM

kegger64 writes: Larry Page announced that Google is looking into building an AI system. "We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," the Google co-founder declared. "It's not as far off as people think." http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/02/19/larry -page-google-look-into-ai

Submission + - Tesla to produce a standard electric

Submitted by WindBourne on Monday February 19, 2007 @08:17PM

WindBourne writes: Apparently, Elon Musk is going to sell Electric cars to the middle class masses, not just the wealthy.Musk's Tesla Motors, based out of San Carlos, California, will use the plant to produce its "WhiteStar" car — a four door, five passenger sports sedan which is 100 percent electric. I will be be nice to see this encourage GM/Ford/Toyota/Honda/etc to get the true hybrids and electrics out the door sooner, rather than later.

Submission + - Firefox 3 to support offline apps

Submitted by thinkingpen on Monday February 19, 2007 @11:41AM

thinkingpen writes: Read/Write web is carrying an interesting story about Firefox 3. From the article — "An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn't able to attend). Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you'll be able to use your web apps — like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc — in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google's hands." Now thats web 3.0 ?

Submission + - Where's Java 6 for Mac

Submitted by Jari Mustonen on Saturday February 17, 2007 @08:58AM

Jari Mustonen writes: Time to hide your Mac-fanboy hat. Or maybe you are beliver enough to defend Apple even on this one. The question is simple: Where is the Java 6 for OS X? Let the gossips fly and let the slashdot do what it is best at: to summon an anonymous coward from Apple to tell us what is happening and where is my Java? But in the mean time, let's hear your theory.

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