The Register is compiling a lovely mash-up involving plotting sightings of Google’s Streetcams on Google Maps.
Daily Archives: July 16, 2008
50 megapixel sensors are here!
From Technology Review…
Last week, Kodak launched the first ever 50-megapixel camera sensor. While such high resolution goes beyond the needs of most consumers, for professional photographers the new sensor will enable photographs to be taken at an unprecedented level of detail.
For example, in a picture taken of a field one-and-a-half miles across, the sensor would make it possible for a viewer to detect an object measuring just one foot across.
This sort of resolution is only really essential for and targeted at high-end professional photography, in which high-quality images often need to be blown up large. But it could also be useful for some other applications, such as aerial photography as used for services like Google Earth. “The ability to have more pixels lets the plane fly higher, so you don’t need as many pictures,” says Mike DeLuca, marketing manager for Kodak’s Image Sensor Solutions, based in Rochester, NY.
The sensor, which produces an array of 8,176-by-6,132 pixels, further closes the gap between traditional film and digital photography. “We’re really close to how film was operated,” DeLuca says. “It’s very close.” Now, he says, it’s just a matter of the photographer’s personal preference.
I want one! But just think of the RAM, storage and processing power we’ll need downstream of such a sensor.
UPDATE: Richard Earney emailed to say that Phase One have released a 60 megapixel 645 back for medium-format cameras.
Wonder who’ll be first to 100 MP?
Good advice
Spotted by Tom on an Art trip to London.
On this day…
… in 1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.
The photograph (from the Library of Congress) shows the family outside a house in Tobolsk where they were kept prior to their murder. The picture was discovered as part of a 1921 copyright deposit.
Obama on US foreign policy
Very interesting and thoughtful speech. Transcript here.
Later: Dave Winer is not impressed. (And he’s an Obama supporter).
Imagine Obama looking into the camera saying “Fuck it, we all know why Bush and McCain want to stay in Iraq. All this talk about waiting for this or that to happen — it’s all bullshit, they know it, I know it, the press knows it, and if you think about it you know it too.”
We’re not going to leave Iraq because if we did, it would become a province of Iran. It’s pretty close to being that now, even with 150K American troops camped out in bases spread through the country. The President, Maliki, is Iranian (for all practical purposes). Al Sadr is Iranian. The only guys who aren’t Iranians are the remnants of Saddam’s government and the guys we call evildoers who call themselves Al Qaeda. They’re all equally evil, and we’re no better. We fucked that country, hard, killed huge numbers of Iraqis, wrecked the country. The Arab world will be cursing us for a long time for what we did to Iraq, and we’ll deserve it.
If we pull out, Iraq and Iran will merge, combine the countries with the 2nd and 3rd largest oil reserves, and a huge army, run by people who are serious and they’re not the idiots the Republicans keep portraying them as. They’re astute politicians, much more sophisticated than Bush or McCain. In the game of chess they’re playing with the US, a country that’s many times its size, they’re pretty close to taking our queen.
The American president who leaves Iraq is going to be blamed for the oil debacle that’s coming (even so, it’ll be unrelated to Iran taking over Iraq). $4.50 a gallon is nothing. It’s going to get a lot worse. Everyone knows it, that’s why the stock market is tanking, why there are runs on the banks, why the govt is furiously printing money to shore them up, which only feeds more inflation.
The lines at banks with people waiting to draw out all their money aren’t being shown on TV, cause if everyone knew what was going on the panic would likely turn into a 1929-like collapse.
Outside the US no one wants to call us on our bullshit because we have this huge army, navy, air force, with aircraft carriers, bases all over the world, and an unbelievably huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. If we get scared enough we might just use em. That’s the only reason the Saudis are willing to still meet with Cheney, and why they keep sending us oil which we pay for with dollars that they all know are a joke.
Obama knows this. He can’t leave Iraq and he won’t. Of course McCain won’t either. He was actually telling the truth when he said we’d be there for 100 years. We will, if we can. Obama can’t and won’t change that.
First European Privacy Seal awarded
Here’s an interesting development — a search engine that really takes privacy seriously.
The first European privacy seal was presented today to search engine ixquick.com by the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of data protection legislation in Schleswig-Holstein.
According to the citation:
Ixquick is a meta-search engine which forwards search requests of its users to several search engines, gathers and combines their results and presents the results to the requesting users. Privacy is ensured by using several data-minimization techniques: personal data like IP addresses are deleted within 48 hours, after which they are no longer needed to prevent possible abuse of the servers. The remaining (non-personal) data are deleted within 14 days. Ixquick serves as a proxy, i.e. IP addresses of users are not disclosed to other search engines.
Hmmm… Bet that won’t appeal to the British Home Office.
Thanks to Gerard for the link.
The word on the street
In his Manitoba lecture, Mike Wesch mentioned a survey which suggested that 88% of the material on YouTube was original, not the copyrighted stuff the mainstream media (and Viacom) obsesses about. Here’s a great example of creative use of the platform. It’s the second of a series of four short movies about the creepier implications of Google Street View.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it.