paulwomack - Slashdot User

Balloon and Duct Tape Deliver Great Space Photos 238

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 25, 2010 @02:55PM from the i-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.

krou writes "With a budget of £500, Robert Harrison used cheap parts, a weather balloon, some duct tape, a digital camera, and a GPS device to capture some great photos of the earth from space that resulted in NASA calling him to find out how he had done it. 'A guy phoned up who worked for NASA who was interested in how we took the pictures,' said Mr Harrison. 'He wanted to know how the hell we did it. He thought we used a rocket. They said it would have cost them millions of dollars.' The details of his balloon are as follows: he used 'an ordinary Canon camera mounted on a weather balloon,' 'free software' that 'reprogrammed the camera to wake up every five minutes and take eight photographs and a video before switching off for a rest.' He also ensured the camera was 'wrapped in loft insulation' to make sure it could operate at the cold temperatures. The GPS device allowed him to pinpoint the balloon's location, and retrieve the camera when it fell down to earth attached to a small parachute."

US Court Tells Microsoft To Stop Selling Word 403

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @08:13AM from the somebody's-not-having-a-good-day dept.

oranghutan writes "A judge in a Texas court has given Microsoft 60 days to comply with an order to stop selling Word products in their existing state as the result of a patent infringement suit filed by i4i. According to the injunction, Microsoft is forbidden from selling Word products that let people create XML documents, which both the 2003 and 2007 versions let you do. Michael Cherry, an analyst quoted in the article, said, 'It's going to take a long time for this kind of thing to get sorted out.' Few believe the injunction will actually stop Word from being sold because there are ways of working around it. In early 2009, a jury in the Texas court ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $200 million for infringing on the patent. ZDNet has a look at the patent itself, saying it 'sounds a bit generic.'"

Comment Re:16 bit RGB support is more important than CMYK (Score 1) 596

by paulwomack on Thursday October 25, 2007 @05:19AM (#21110779) Attached to: GIMP 2.4 Released

what you say is complete and correct for "natural" photographs.

However, for vector like work (e.g. text, lines, grads) CMYK (which is what the presses finally use) has interesting wrinkles with regards to choke, bleed and spread, which simply cannot be expressed in RGB.

For this reason "native" CMYK is most certainly important in vector tools (e.g. freehand, illustrator, inkscape) and fairly important in raster tools.

BugBear (aquainted with pre-press)

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