The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management - <AUTHOR> http://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/sad-state-of-high-bit-depth-gimp-color-management.html <comment><USER2> I had been waiting for a Photoshop / GIMP replacement for years, it seems that the GIMP developers dug themselves in a hole a while back with babl and GEGL and a number of good alternatives have cropped up in the meantime. My first problem with GEGL is that it seems to be the only way to reliably crash GIMP, and my second problem is that it doesn't serve to make any discernible workflow easier.

A nice workflow for photo editing involves conversion to 16-bit Lab, layers with various blending modes, and transfer curves. Due to the size of Lab, 8 bits are not enough and cause noticeable banding. Photoshop could do this back in the late 90s. According to this article, GIMP developers think the workflow is "wrong".

It's a good thing that we have Krita.

<comment><USER3> Krita is awesome. But, and I know this will sound weird to many people, I am now so familiar with GIMP's UI and workflow, that I find changing difficult.

<comment><USER4> Not weird at all, same here. I find it difficult to use other programs after 10+ years using GIMP!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a great deal of historical fondness for GIMP, dating back to the Spencer Kimball/Peter Mattis Gimp 0.5x. One of their last contributions to GIMP before moving on was to develop GTK as a part of the non-Motif GIMP 0.9x series. Gimp thus acted as a natural rallying point for would-be Gnome developers as they reacted to KDE's choice of the non-open-source-at-the-time QT toolkit. Gimp really has been very important to the open source GUI landscape....

That makes it all the more sad that Gimp development seems to have stalled, relative to other open source imaging packages. Gimp was 8bpp in 1995 and 19 years later Gimp is still 8bpp. I had had a great deal of hope for the GEGL architecture, but these days I get the distinct impression that the project picked an architecture that was beyond the ability of the available developers to complete in a reasonable amount of time. Krita, Paint.NET, and the GIMP- based Cinepaint are all existance proofs that it's possible to implement high color depth image editing in open source in less than 20 years.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for that. I'm a fairly casual user of GIMP, using it just to tweak graphics for web pages rather than "serious" creative design work. I use GIMP simply because I wasn't aware that any other acceptable open-source Photoshop- alternatives even exist.

How would you compare Krita, Paint.NET, and the Cinepaint fork for untrained web graphic users?

<comment><USER5> If all you're doing is tweaking icon-style graphics for web pages then Gimp is still a good choice. Where Gimp really starts to fall short is when you need color management, alternative color spaces, and bit-depths beyond 8bpp.

For me personally this means that I don't use Gimp for photo editing; For that, I switched to Adobe Lightroom a few years ago. It's not open source, but it's inexpensive, it works very well, and has a feature set that's closely aligned to a photographic workflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time people defend the GIMP for having a terrible user experience (just take it as a lemma; it's been debated to death elsewhere and would just clutter up the joint), they seem to inevitably trot out "But but but the GIMP is for _serious image manipulation_ and photo work!".

You had one job, GIMP. _One job._

:(

<comment><USER8> Who are all these people that you are talking about? :)

Because yeah, I can see how random folks on the interwebz should be listened to :)

FYI, the core GIMP team admitted long ago that GIMP's UI/UX sucks _and_ started dealing with that. See gui.gimp.org for reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For some context and differing opinions, see the rather long discussion thread on gimp-devel that prompted this article:

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26058](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26058)

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26068](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26068)

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26078](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26078)

From glancing over it, it seems to me like Elle Stone wants GIMP to make a rather radical shift to Do The Right Thing, while Øyvind Kolås (Pippin) values making small improvements one step at a time to avoid breaking current functionality.

<comment><USER9> Although reading [http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26257](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26257) , maybe it's all just one big misunderstanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is primarly a strawman argument, the 'architecture' which is so adamantly argued against has already been abandoned (much thanks to arguments from OP). [https://git.gnome.org/browse/babl/tree/docs/roadmap.txt#n74](https://git.gnome.org/browse/babl/tree/docs/roadmap.txt#n74) It has however not magically implemented itself yet.

This is somewhat recognized in the article section which starts "There is a ray of hope". The implication that the issues demonstrated will go away as a consequence of this has somehow been lost, possibly due to miscommunication.

Disclosure: I am a GEGL dev.

<comment><USER11> And this is the mail that Elle should respond to: [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer- list/2014-Nov...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer- list/2014-November/msg00006.html)

In general, many people in the GIMP community found Elle's mails puzzling.

There have been suggestions to take the discussions to a more interactive environment - for example IRC, where most discussion happen anyway, or to the next Libre Graphics Meeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm afraid that this rather sounds like a bunch of developers who cannot take valid criticism. This is rather sad. It's sad when I see this in other projects, like Gnome.

<comment><USER4> I agree, the only time I tried to submit a bug report to them I got a snarky response from one dev and a ban from another.

<comment><USER13> If you're going to claim something like that, best to link to the issue in question.

(Like, 99% of the time someone complaining about being unfairly banned was being a total asshole.)

<comment><USER4> What I did was take the snarky response and use it as a template for my response, in which case my being an asshole would've been a direct ressult of the other person being one in the first place.

If its going to change something, I have found the link. But I'm not thrilled about it, I gave up on GIMP devs a long while ago and I really don't care about them.

<comment><USER11> It would help others to evaluate your claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Only tangetially related, but is there any good way of working with color profiles and different color spaces at all in open-source software? I recently had to prepare a PDF with playing cards for printing. I was supposed to ship a PDF in CMYK with ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI). Source images from which the PDF was generated were SVG, thus sRGB. I tried using ghostscript to convert to CMYK and apply the color profile. The conversion to CMYK apparently worked, however, they told me that there are some places that have more than 300 % color. I searched all weekend for something that could use the color profile, work in CMYK and maybe something else that could actually show me where colors went out of gamut.

Somehow all that seems to only be possible using Adobe software, which makes it quite hard to supply printers with good input when restricting yourself to open-source software. Or maybe I missed a lot of things and didn't search hard enough; also possible.

<comment><USER8> Import SVG to Scribus using this workflow:

[http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/getting-cmyk- colors...](http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/getting-cmyk-colors-from- inkscape-to-scribus)

Then setup CMS in Scribus and validate your output in the output preview dialog which can check for e.g. totalink coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While not a substitute for GIMP (because it does different things), if you're looking for "pure" photography software on linux and shoot RAW, go check out darktable. [0]

Lens corrections, advanced colourspace manipulations and all kinds of usually- applied-by-default photography tricks, in one neat package. Just don't even think about using the equalizer plugin without OpenCL enabled drivers...

[0]: [http://www.darktable.org](http://www.darktable.org)

<comment><USER16> I wish there were a good alternative to Lightroom for Windows. Not a priority for Darktable, unfortunately. If anybody reading this is a photographer and has the expertise to pitch in, you'd have my eternal gratitude!

> What about a Windows port?

> None of the developers use Windows, so a port of darktable to that operating > system is very, very unlikely to happen.

> That being said, many things should already work, so the actual porting > should be relatively straight forward. It's just that we won't do it. > However, there is the "win" branch which kind of cross compiles using MinGW > to generate a Windows version. It's still really buggy and might crash, kill > kittens and eat your baby. You have been warned. You should read this blog > post before starting any work on a port; it has an extensive discussion > about this topic as well.

[http://www.darktable.org/about/faq/](http://www.darktable.org/about/faq/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's been _how_ many years? And it's _still_ 8-bit?

Maybe the GIMP needs a fork. I like it, but it's a bit crap.

<comment><USER18> That's what the CinePaint fork (originally Film Gimp) is, support for high- resolution, high-bit-depth images for "deep painting" of film assets.

<comment><USER4> Is CinePaint still under development? From the sourceforge site it seems as if it was abandoned. Also, CinePaint doesn't run on Windows, which in my case is a deal breaker...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I came to love Pixelmator [0], though unfortunately it's Mac-only. It's dirt cheap, but satisfies all my image-editing needs, and even has a vector mode.

[0] [http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/](http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/)

</comment><comment><USER20> GIMP still doesn't have adjustment layers which would be the first lesson in a Photoshop 201 class on serious photography workflows. They are very far from being a Photoshop replacement.

<comment><USER21> The issue with adjustment layers is that GIMP does not yet have a mechanism for continuous filter/plugin evaluation and it may not yet be fully thought out: so what does the layer mask do in this case, just a wet/dry mix, some other plugin-specific parameter per pixel? Also, if we're going this route it might make sense to have adjustment layers attached to a parent layer where they apply (as descendants), and then be able to reorder them within. And if we're going that route, they need to get the full hierarchy model for layers in there first.

<comment><USER11> And that route is paved by GEGL.

I guess many consider this as obvious, but I suspect that some people in this thread might not know what GEGL actually is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Elle Stone's reply to a thread (that was started as a third party's attempt to rekindle that looong discussion):

"I agree with Alexandre. If I really do understand what Jon Nordby is saying (see [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer- list/2014-Nov...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer- list/2014-November/msg00018.html) and [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp- developer-list/2014-Nov...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer- list/2014-November/msg00023.html)), and if the other babl/GEGL/GIMP developers really are in agreement with Jon Nordby (the babl roadmap leaves room for differing interpretations), then there is no reason whatsoever for further discussion of forking babl and GEGL to benefit GIMP."

</comment><comment><USER22> I had some interesting email conversations with GIMP developers in the 1990s. I can't speak for now, but at the time it was a "classical" open source project. AKA, it existed to scratch the developer's itch. It was never intended to compete with another product like Photoshop or any other product.</comment>


The Long Buy - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2020/02/the-long-buy/ <comment><USER2> > 2/ You get to build a blended purchase price which is less dependent on the > circumstances of a particular moment in time.

This is essentially Dollar Cost Averaging... which is a recommended approach when you psychologically fear the risk of lump sum investments (though, lump sum investments are expected to have a higher return than DCA, at least in the case of index fund investing)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging)

<comment><USER3> The underlying logic for Lump Sum in an index is that the index is tracking the broader economy, which "always" goes up over the long haul. That same logic doesn't apply for a single company, where idiosyncratic risk will quite likely swamp the effects of the slowly rising tide of the broader economy.

I would guess you probably get better valuations in the early rounds, but have less risk of loss in the later rounds. If nothing else, survivorship bias is playing in your favor for the later rounds (ie, the company has at least survived long enough to reach a Series B, C, D, etc round).

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is always true. You could believe that something like Bitcoin is a good investment over a 10-year term, but recognize that it's volatile in the short-term, and so want to dollar-cost-average for that reason, regardless of what you think the broader economy might do. Some might even see it as a hedge against the rest of the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> There are not that many asset classes where the manager has a pool of long term locked up capital and the opportunity (and the right) to invest again and again in a company._

This is something that you can do easily in your private portfolio. "Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own". This, of course, requires a decent reserve of cash/high quality bonds.

Not many asset managers are willing (or rather able, due to client pressure) to hold un-invested assets.

<comment><USER6> It's not smarts, but disciplined will-power and clear-sightedness, that's the determinant of any game played for long enough to span enough crises. Many ambitious startups in that category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm dreaming, but it would be nice to see some numbers.

What would Union Square's performance have been if they just invested a max of once in each company? Twice? Instead of this N times strategy? I wonder the same about YC.

I think the strategy he's talk about is simply called Dollar Cost Averaging ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging)) in the public markets. I do it. It works and because there's data available it's easy to see.

I haven't seen anyone put out numbers yet on how important it is in angel/seed/VC investing.

My back of the envelope guess is that unless you follow this strategy (doubling down on your winners 3-5 times before liquidity) it's not worth it to do early stage investing, but I'm not sure. Would love to see some data.

Edit: Actually, looking up DCA its meaning is a bit more specific than I realized and not quite a strategy that I follow. I meant more about doubling down on your (expected) winners particularly when their price falls irrationally. Half-baked analogy.

<comment><USER8> > I meant more about doubling down on your (expected) winners particularly > when their price falls irrationally

You can't really know if the price fell irrationally. Maybe its just you misinterpreting the available data.

The data is pretty clear, holding cash in case the market drops costs you more than a possible crash.

"Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves"

This is an iconic quote that captures that sentiment.

<comment><USER7> I agree that it's a worse strategy if you hold capital back.

I was looking for a comparable in public equities where you keep buying more of the same thing, doubling down on the bets you know and like. I guess in private markets you are limited by the available supply. In Public markets you are limited by your capital.

For me when I get more capital I will deploy generally in things I already own, which has the affect of lowering average price if the price has fallen(that's why I made a mistake calling this DCA).

<comment><USER8> I mean today it is very easy to hold the whole market, so why take on idiosyncratic risk that doesn't have a positive expected return when you can just the whole market and maybe some factor premiums?

The price you bought it is irrelevant, all that matters is the current value of the security. If you have capital, it is always the best decision to put it in the market as soon as possible.

<comment><USER7> For passive investing that's the Way to go. But I am an active investor And put time into helping my companies whether big or small. I like to have a thesis And invest on that. I also would be willing to underperform a Certain percentage if it Was in service of companies that I think are building a better world. Though FWIW have beaten vfinx easily past 5 years.

<comment><USER9> During the last years one could easily have outperformed it with spxl

<comment><USER7> Wow I get the risk of that but still cool to see that performance :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess "long buy" is a great strategy for the government's "long spend", "long debt", "long bonds", and "long whatever just blew out".

Where does all this wind up?

So #2 doesn't seem valid. Your purchase price is a direct reflection of global central bank's policies, meaning... it's only going up as currencies go down.

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a dangerous justification for the sunk cost fallacy. If you get in early on an investment, you become partial to the company based on the relationships you have created and your understanding of the market. Although that might allow you to have a better investment criteria for a following round, you could posit the question of whether another investment opportunity is the more sound choice.

On the topic of dollar cost averaging, you are reducing your risk within the investment based on timing but that is too much of a micro level view of the power and value of the investment dollar.

</comment><comment><USER12> The host is down, here is the page on the Wayback Machine:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200203194541/https://avc.com/2...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200203194541/https://avc.com/2020/02/the- long-buy/)</comment>


Should error messages apologize? - <AUTHOR> http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/31359/should-error-messages-apologize <comment><USER2> I once pulled up to a parking ramp gate. A recorded voice asked me to "please take the ticket." I was fumbling for something in my car and no one was behind me, so I just sat there for a minute. The voice repeated, "please take the ticket." I continued to fumble. The third time the recorded voice came on, the tone had changed to stern and authoritarian. It barked, "take the ticket." I jumped to attention and grabbed for the ticket.

It's fascinating how powerful the change in tone and dropping the formalities affected my behavior. There's a case for pleasantries in some situations. There's a case for pithy authoritarian messages in others.

<comment><USER3> That's brilliant. Reminds me of trials with different voices and tones for GPS voice navigation where. Personally the snoop dogg voice is most appealing

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pet peeve of mine. I honestly think we should reserve politeness for human-human interactions only.

When the self-checkout machine at the supermarket says things like " _Please_ scan your item, _Please_ place your item in the bag, _Please_ scan your credit card, _Please_ take your receipt" it devalues the word _Please_. The machine does not give a shit about you, so it should not be using that word.

Edit: I just jumped on a conference call. " _Please_ enter your access code followed by the pound or hash sign. _Please_ say your name and press the pound or hash sign. _Thank you._ You will now be connected to your conference." UGH!

(Yes I know I have unusually strong feelings about this issue).

<comment><USER5> Traditionally 'please' is way of affirming lower status, the asking party accepts that they are lower status than you but would like you to consider taking an action their behalf. Since the machine cannot scan your items itself (yet) it has to ask you to do that, it can't really order you to do that.

I suppose it could say, "The process will begin when you start scanning items." but it's simpler to use the honorific.

In error messages apologizing is present perhaps because the service requested could normally be performed but due to circumstances it cannot.

<comment><USER4> The machine does not need to affirm its lower status. _It 's a machine._

When it becomes sentient, then it earns the right to talk to me like human would. Until then, don't pretend to be something that you are not.

Edit: Maybe I'm weird, but I would prefer it to say something like "SCAN NOW", in a robot voice. Maybe add an "OK" if you want to soften it up a bit.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. A machine affirms its lower status by simply doing what it is supposed to do. Machines that incorrectly second-guess the user, or offer apologies often make people feel as though the machine is being condescending, or trying to control them instead.

<comment><USER7> Stallman said that non free software controls the users. Such software & its developers must be made to apologise, unless the software is made free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The idea, I think, is that the error is apologizing on behalf of the people who run the website, who can't be expected to be there in person to say sorry. You get "sorry" messages from other-than-humans all the time: "Sorry, we're closed" or "Sorry, this machine is out of order."

In each case I've always thought of it as shorthand for "The management is sorry to inform you that..." or something like that. It's mean to be a sort of humanity surrogate, and I don't see much of a problem with that.

Of course, it can easily go overboard. Over-"please"-ing and "thank you" after every single step can be wearying - on phone support, it's always "thank you for giving me that information. I'm sorry for the wait while I put it in. We thank you for your patience."

<comment><USER9> I think I only find apologies strange when they come from devices I consider to be an extension of my own agency, rather than an emissary for someone else's. If a vending machine apologizes for being out of stock, that's the vending-machine company doing the apologizing. But if my Windows PC says sorry, that's not Microsoft apologizing to me; that's effectively me apologizing to myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A slight tangent: never ever use a passive aggressive tone in UX.

"I'm sorry you're having trouble." <\-- not ok

"I'm sorry, I didn't get that." <\-- ok

I'm surprised how common this is becoming. Machines shouldn't talk down to humans until they're clearly our superiors.

<comment><USER11> "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen." <\-- Not O.K.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop [1] shows that if you asked a person if they view a computer they have iteration with it view it as a person to person engagement they would say no, experiments show otherwise. There is a base emotional impact from these things that people don't obviously notice. Sure the user would not think that message seems impolite they will notice it at least subconsciously. A good example is when rating a piece of software via a electronic survey the group that took the survey on the same computer they used the software on consistently gave it better scores. Its a very interesting book.

[1] [http://smile.amazon.com/Man-Who-Lied-His- Laptop/dp/161723004...](http://smile.amazon.com/Man-Who-Lied-His- Laptop/dp/1617230049)

</comment><comment><USER13> As always, write to your audience. If your product is used by techies, 'please' and 'sorry' are chaff. If it's the non-technical public, the same words can make concepts easier to digest, along with writing the error in a more general tone. "Sorry" clearly means something wrong has happened. "Please" clearly means something needs the user to do something.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Although in general, I like my error messages terse and to-the-point; for example, I'd definitely prefer "file %s not found." over something like "Sorry, but we regret to inform you that the specified file cannot be found. Please try again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some years back, I was going through withdrawal from medication and just could not keep my feet out of my mouth on an email list. I wrote a number of sincere, heartfelt apologies, clarifying what I meant without backing down from what I was trying to say but taking full responsibility for any abrasiveness of offensiveness.

The result: I soon became the list scapegoat. I became everyone's bitch. Having a bad day and just want to go apeshit on someone? Hey, kick the crap out of Michele and demand that she apologize. The entire list with back you and say "there she goes again!"

I also worked for an insurance company for over five years. Things in insurance are strongly driven by "can they sue us?" and "will that sound guilty in a court of law?" So I don't care if it is a machine saying it. The machine represents some company and many people will, like the linked xkcd comic in the above piece, conclude you are admitting guilt if you say "sorry."

So I think: No. Do not apologize. You just convince people you are in the wrong and that leads to bad things.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's funny that #2 on the list uses negative words to say "Don't use negative words." It's almost like negative words can be valuable.

<comment><USER17> That's not the point. No one here is claiming that negative words can never be valuable. The question is about time appropriate to the situation. People take lots of subconscious cues from time. A developer asking for technical advice can be expected to look past the tone. With paying, non technical customers, you take nothing for granted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Depends on the situation and the audience.

"Sorry, our engineers didn't allocate enough resources or our programmers didn't account for your specific inputs, so we can't process your request." sounds reasonable to me.

An error message because of a blank input field should not apologize and should simply say, "Your email address was left blank, please enter a valid email address below." Saying "sorry" would be like saying, "sorry you messed up, dummy".

For a 404 message, it's difficult to tell whether or not the link came from a 3rd party or your own website, so I'd argue that simply saying, "page not found" is sufficient.

"Sorry, our systems are overwhelmed at the moment, please try again later." is better than "Our systems can't handle this much traffic, come back later."

[http://imgur.com/asdfasdf](http://imgur.com/asdfasdf)

[https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfb](https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfb)

</comment><comment><USER19> A long time ago, a friend of mine had a computer made by Atari with a GUI shell of some sort. When an error message popped up, the button you had to click said: Sorry.

I was pretty indignant about having to apologize to a machine.

</comment><comment><USER20> If the error is caused by the user, the message should not apologize.

 _Sorry, the email address you entered appears to be invalid._

That just sounds condescending; you know they're not really sorry.

However, if the error is caused by your system, including any third party dependencies, then an apology is in order.

 _Sorry, the requested service appears to be inaccessible at the moment. Please try again later._

</comment><comment><USER21> "Sorry for inconvenience" is pretty much a norm in Japan, be it software or not. You go to a construction site and you'll see tons of signs with manga characters bowing. Also in Japanese it's pretty common to say "excuse me" instead of "thank you."

</comment><comment><USER22> People love to be pampered. People are confused by computers. It's free to be apologetic to make them feel better. I 'll add as many apologies as needed to make my users feel good.

</comment><comment><USER23> What would be the point of that? you might as well write something like "Error 0x000332, program aborted" that's as helpful as an apology to the normal user

<comment><USER24> Actually, this is very useful message for me. I can google the error and fix the problem on the spot.

Desktop software trained people to parse it.

<comment><USER9> If that's the sole use-case of having an error ID, then the error dialog should probably just embed a web browser with search results, to save you a step.

<comment><USER25> I would rather use my own browser than whatever half-assed kludge someone was forced to throw into the help system at the last minute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its about time users are humiliated by the computers for making mistakes. Perhaps punish them in some form.

</comment><comment><USER26> If written by a Canadian, yes they should.</comment>


The colour BLUE is trending worldwide. Here's why - <AUTHOR> http://formforthought.com/rise-of-blue-in-web-graphic-design/ <comment><USER2> Sutter Cane's favourite colour.</comment>


Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_could_soon_augment_old_billboards_in_street.php <comment><USER2> Wow. I have to think that once this goes live, the lawsuits will start flowing.

My prediction is that some of the billboard companies will freak out and demand revenue sharing, claiming misappropriation of their advertising assets.

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine any legal basis for such a claim. Then again, I never went to law school. If you're _covering up_ the ad and any branding the billboard company has framing the ad, there's no intellectual property there to defend.

<comment><USER2> Claims actually need a legal basis? If only it were that simple...

But seriously, you're absolutely right. It is not the content of the billboards that is at issue. It is the use of the virtual billboard that corresponds to an actual billboard that will almost certainly p-off some billboard owners. Remember, in most cases billboard owners are not the same as the billboard advertisers.

It goes back to something that came up often in Second Life's heyday: If you create a virtual representation of a real-life property, does the real-life property owner have any claim on its use? I would argue absolutely not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to suspect that this sort of manipulation would reduce the value of Street View for a lot of people - those who use it to see what somewhere _actually looks like_ (or at least did when the Google cars drove by).

Further, considering all the cases where driving directions or identification of addresses has gone wrong, I imagine that there could be a lot of ads ending up on walls, in the air, or otherwise not superimposed on a billboard.

</comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft did something similar in 2006, but with virtual billboards.

[http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-mapping- goes-3D/2100-1032_3-6...](http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-mapping- goes-3D/2100-1032_3-6132967.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> At least in southern California, most to nearly all billboard ads are positioned along freeways. LA being an exception where you can throw an ad onto just about _anything_ anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> I doubt that people use Google Street View a lot to view billboard ads. Cool concept though.

<comment><USER8> they wont go for the ads, but they will def see them...

<comment><USER7> What I meant was: I doubt that advertisers can be talked into buying swap-in advertising on Google Street view. The number of impressions is just way too small. The value of these ads will be very hard to quantify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Google Plans to" and "Google filed a patent to" are very different things.</comment>


LulzSec versus FBI (We Challenge You, NATO) - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/MQG0a130

<comment><USER2> > Karim, a member of an FBI-related website, was willing to give us money and > inside info in order to destroy his opponents in the whitehat world.

It is worth highlighting that there is a whole ecosystem of bottom feeders in the world of government contracted 'whitehat hackers' & 'consultants'. They know as much about security as one can pick from 'Hacking Exposed IV' kind of book from your local book store. Some of them are just fakes who just have the right connection within the agencies (many are just ex-employees, friends of friends, college buddies and cousins). Then they need to know how to navigate the red tape of proposals and bids. So this all amounts to a lot of waste, stupidity (at best) and down-right maliciousness (at worst). We saw some of this with HBGary and this Karim guy, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you have the right connections and know how to handle the red-tape (you might have to hire a full-time professional for it), you can make quite a bit of money bullshitting the govt and selling them crap.

<comment><USER3> This is one of the reasons I don't want the government to increase the control over the internet. We sometimes get the illusion that it's all pure and butterflies, when in fact even whitehats/government agencies conduct illegal activities on the web abusing their powers. Better leave it to the people; we can handle it just the way it is.

<comment><USER4> yeah but the fundamental problem here is not whether the government is doing something or not. The issue is transparency and accountability.

There are corporate entities who are wasting their money on nepotism, graft, and efforts that are doomed to fail in the "planning" stages too. The difference is that the way that consumers pay for it is hidden in the cost of whatever products the company produces.

We can make government behavior suck less if we actually provide better transparency and metrics for success.

<comment><USER5> But private companies are constrained by the need to turn a profit and outmaneuver their competitors. Governments aren't. To keep them from being wasteful, people have to watch them closely and make a big fuss when something is wrong, trying to get enough people to care. That's difficult, time- consuming, often demoralizing work.

<comment><USER4> that's just not true. There are many stable oligopolies which can either resist, tamp down on, or co-opt new upstarts and maintain a status quo for themselves.

And there are people who have to do the same difficult, time-consuming and demoralizing work acting as gadflies against the egregious abuses of multi- national corporations.

And the notion that Governments don't compete is always either false or double speak. It either is the case that governments compete with the private sector (e.g. government backed plans for health insurance can operate more cost efficiently than the private sector, so they're a problem), or they don't (as you've just claimed).

And there are opportunities where people have successfully competed against governments as well. Governments collect mapping data and you can pay for access to that content. And yet there are _tons_ of mapping companies out in the world, many of whom have better services and capabilities.

Lastly, for people who might wish to claim that government can wield undue influence over free markets when they get involved in industry, nothing has stopped them from getting involved in industries they're _not_ directly involved in. The federal laws banning online poker are a great example.

Industry lobbying is such a powerful and distorting force, again enabled by a lack of transparency, that it seems laughable to be worried about undue government influence.

<comment><USER6> > There are many stable oligopolies which can either resist, tamp down on, or > co-opt new upstarts and maintain a status quo for themselves.

Can you please point out some of this many oligopolies that somehow force me to do business with them? I can not buy from pretty much anyone I don't like, if I avoid paying taxes I will probably end up in jail.

<comment><USER4> That's a red herring.

Your participation in government and society is still contingent. If you don't want to pay taxes, go become a monk and take a vow of poverty (yeah you will still have to file returns, but whatever).

If you participate in society, you are going to have to pay taxes. Just the same way that if you want to get access to the internet, you will have to pay a company like comcast.

And, when it comes down to it, the oil and automobile companies, as a practical matter, have done a pretty good job of ensuring that Americans have to have cars, and have to pay for gas in order to live in society. That is for all intents and purposes the same thing.

<comment><USER7> From your logic I can only draw the conclusion that government owns society. You may believe that it is so, and that it's even rightfully so. I choose to disagree. I was born free, and the soil that I was born on can in no way be owned by the government. The government never homesteaded it. Since the government can't have greater powers than those of individuals who choose to delegate their powers to the government some individual has to have homesteaded the soil and explicitly signed it away to the government. Of course, this never happened, we all know how our governments came to claim sovereignty over huge land areas. I say that might does not necessarily make right, I say you own what you mix your labor with. Although government claims to be the highest authority and backs that up with the threat of violence, you can't assume that their claim is rightful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the IRC log: <http://pastebay.com/125179>

and a phone conversation: [http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/Unveillance_Secret_Conferen...](http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/Unveillance_Secret_Conference.mp3)

Very interesting conversations.

They also had a "warmup" with the Nintendo servers: <http://pastebay.com/125180>

The emails consist of LinkedIn confirmations and "secret data" (PowerPoints w/ PDFs) about various smallish tech/data companies.

Sample PDFs in case anyone is interested:

 _Apptap_ (formerly Mplayit): [http://www.2shared.com/document/1Q_QkBxY/apptap- execsummary_...](http://www.2shared.com/document/1Q_QkBxY/apptap- execsummary_final_22nov.html)

 _BlackRridge Technology_ : [http://www.2shared.com/document/csuHua1e/Blackbridge_Investo...](http://www.2shared.com/document/csuHua1e/Blackbridge_Investor_Deck_-_11.html)

 _CloudFusion Cconnect_ Business Plan: [http://www.2shared.com/document/yi6bYjDC/cConnect_Business_P...](http://www.2shared.com/document/yi6bYjDC/cConnect_Business_Plan_- _Prese.html)

 _Gatekeeper Security_ Investor Presentation: [http://www.2shared.com/document/Ec3FaP0p/Gatekeeper_Investor...](http://www.2shared.com/document/Ec3FaP0p/Gatekeeper_Investor_Presentati.html)

 _videoNEXT Network Solutions Inc._ Corporate Qualifications and Capabilities: [http://www.2shared.com/document/9OSbAgDM/videoNEXT_Investor_...](http://www.2shared.com/document/9OSbAgDM/videoNEXT_Investor_Briefing_2-.html)

<comment><USER8> Two more interesting PDFs:

 _DHS Proposal/Comprehensive Understanding of Malicious Overlay Networks_ : [http://www.2shared.com/document/5tCGtYKK/Lee_DHS1102_TTA6.ht...](http://www.2shared.com/document/5tCGtYKK/Lee_DHS1102_TTA6.html)

 _Unveillance Federal Report_ : [http://www.2shared.com/document/7SJljKpc/Unveillance_- _Fed_1...](http://www.2shared.com/document/7SJljKpc/Unveillance_- _Fed_10-2-10.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a tangent-- the PBS NewsHour's bemused reaction to LulzSec hacking them (which they discussed in a segment on hacking) is the best I've ever seen an organization take something like that. The FBI is a much worthier target.

<comment><USER10> The video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrH92TjV4ZM>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mirror of the smaller file, (17 KiB) for when mediafire takes it down:

<http://bbot.org/Fuck%20FBI%20Friday%20(FFF).rar>

The IRC log is _really_ damaging... assuming, of course, that Lulzsec hasn't embellished it.

EDIT: The archive is actually a ZIP file, with a RAR extension, which makes some decompressors unhappy. A copy with the correct extension:

<http://bbot.org/fff.zip>

<comment><USER12> I'm getting a corrupted archive error... is there a password?

<comment><USER11> I didn't add one, so nope.

I just downloaded it again from myself and the new copy worked fine.

EDIT: Lulzsec created a ZIP file, but changed the file extension to RAR. Doh ho ho, those wacky guys. Your unrar tool is apparently more fragile than WinRAR, which decompressed it without even throwing an error.

Since I want to preserve the filename, I made a copy:

<http://bbot.org/fff.zip>

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I appreciate it. UnRarX does appear to be fragile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kind of funny that they have a bitcoin donation address, and have recieved about $300USD worth of donations already.

</comment><comment><USER14> When, or if, any LulzSec member get caught. Well, I don't want to think about it.

It's also interesting that they are using BitCoin. Say they try to cash out a block chain donated/given to them that was mined by a known IP; honeypot. Then whom ever sits in wait and watches the log waiting for that chain to get cashed out via a fiat exchange. Records are subpoenaed and it is determined who cashed out that block at what IP/PayPal/ect? I don't know if thats possible so don't trust me.

<comment><USER15> IP is probably useless; these people know what they're doing, and Tor, proxies, and public wifi plus a cantenna can make you pretty anonymous.

As for the bitcoins themselves, I believe that they'd be instantly anonymized by putting them through one or more bitcoin transaction before they reach real life. The FBI would have a very, very difficult time following the real-life "oh, I got them from person X" tree back to lulzsec, especially if lulzsec transactioned the bitcoins to the right person the first time around.

<comment><USER16> Additionally, people can always create new wallet IDs and self-launder the money, assuming they aren't using the Bitcoin Laundry (<http://bitcoinlaundry.com/>) to do it for them.

<comment><USER14> That is interesting, but the trail is still there; i.e. the block chain we are following as it never changes. It's not the transferring them from BC wallet to BC wallet that I'm worried about, but the cashing out for fiat.

<comment><USER17> no its not. you put your 'marked' 100$ in the laundry service and you get 100$ that came from some random dude. Assuming the laundry service doesn't keep logs (very big assumption though) the money that came through such a service can't be used to identify anyone

<comment><USER14> Logs are critical for this tracing to work, without them the trail ends. I was looking over Bitcoin Faucet and it does appear that, at least, they log all ip address. Then I made my way to <http://blockexplorer.com> and was able to trace all those block.

In the end, BitCoin is only as anonymous as you make it.

<https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/recent_sends>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lulzsec.com registered at Dreamhost (check whois). Stupid mistake? Diversion? Domain squatters?

</comment><comment><USER19> Ok. The internet is getting interesting.

We have Julian Assange leaking secrets from nearly every country and major organisation. National governments are toppling left and right, with the internet as the tool to gather and convene. We have Anonymous who generally wreaks havoc on whomever pokes that hornets nest. We have Chinese hackers (or hackers using Chinese servers) that are whittling away on European and US servers. And we now have LulzSec hacking and publicly insulting the FBI.

What a weird world we live in.

<comment><USER20> We should civilize this internet thing before life gets any weirder.

Nah:

1\. Not so much 'leaking' as 'hoarding'... the dripfeed of leaks is mainly from the single cables dump (a non-renewable resource). Nearly every major organisation? I don't think so.

2\. I'm guessing you mean Egypt, where the military has indeed appointed a new cabinet. Not sure that counts as 'toppling' but we'll see, come September. That accounts for the 'right', who's left?

3\. Yes we have an organised collective of vigilante hckers exposing the hypocrisy and corruption of other hckers, much as has always been done. Two differences now: (a) national governments have started outsourcing to the second group more and also hyping the word 'cyber', leading to (b) the public has started to become mildly amused by these skirmishes.

4\. Interesting configuration of actors there. For those in Europe or America, the interesting part of alleged Chinese hacking is the unwanted free transfer of lucrative IP, which is to say trade secrets. But the US government already has behind-the-scenes access to a vast amount of global internet traffic so any large scale spying effort on its part wouldn't need to be so overt as would that of, say, China. And China is certainly not alone in facing these allegations.[1]

5\. Aaand back to 3.

[1] [http://www.dbune.com/news/business/3370-france-accused-of- be...](http://www.dbune.com/news/business/3370-france-accused-of-being- europes-worst-industrial-spy.html)

<comment><USER12> 2\. Don't forget Tunisia, whose revolution was sparked at least in part by the revelations about Ben Ali in the State Dept cables, or the swing in election results in Kenya back in the stone ages from one of WikiLeaks' first releases, or the "Twitter Revolutions" (overblown though that title may be) throughout the rest of the middle east...

4\. The NSA has taps on the major telecom hubs, and is actively sorting through reams of data to gather intelligence. I can't find the links right now, but the story was on HN about the project's creator and his misgivings about how it was eventually used. Yeah, China's bad, but just wait until the US finds itself toppled from economic primacy and see what information they start pulling out then.

<comment><USER21> I really dread what is going to happen, by the time Anonymous or someone else start setting their sights in Israel/Palestine. It can only be a matter of time before it happens.

<comment><USER12> Dread it how? What outcome do you fear?

<comment><USER22> Well, thats a hornest nests with some bad queen bees armed with more dangerous stuff than stingers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is hilarious.

The main important point is that it makes a mockery of the security snake-oil salesmen and the government sponsored investigation agencies.

It also demonstrates that legislation is powerless over the internet (something I think everyone quietly realises but doesn't want to admit). They've let the cat out of the bag and now it won't go back in.

The Internet is an uncontrollable, resiliant, self-aware monster with a good self-preservation instinct. It's fighting back against those who wish to control it.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure it really proves any of those things at all, but it does prove that no matter how good you are at something, chances are you will come across someone better than you at some point in your life.

When you thing is security and the other person is feeling malicious I guess it can be an ugly outcome.

<comment><USER23> It's not about being quantifiably better - it's about perception. Security is wholly percieved. It doesn't actually exist.

<comment><USER25> okay, I'll bite, would you care to explain how security does not exist?

<comment><USER26> Secure vs who? With what budget? Are you content with achieving 'security' by shredding the server or do you plan to hook it up to a network?

<comment><USER25> So security is relative compared to a threat. That's a assumption that any thoughtful person can make. Yes, the resources available to you will greatly affect your ability to achieve a particular level of security. Just because you connect your server to a network does not mean that the security of your server disappears. Whatever level of security you've managed to achieve is still there. It just may be that the attackers you face are able to overcome your security measures.

If by security one means absolute security against all threats present and future, then yes security is not only illusory but also meaningless.

<comment><USER26> So you do a lot of work and achieve what you might call "near-perfect real- world security" and are not hacked, are you secure?

When you later find out you were vulnerable. Were you secure?

Does knowing that an undetectable root-kit could have been installed during this time, change your perception of the state of your current security?

Would it matter if the newly-released insecurity was a one-in-a-billion thing?

For instance when's the last time you actually took measures to guard against a trojaned compiler?

If you did get hacked because of a one-in-a-billion thing which nobody could have predicted did it happen because you weren't secure or did it happen despite your security? It's a subtle difference in perceptions.

Does your perception of your security level change if you realize the crooked CEO conspired with the security consultant to arrange a back door and that the one-in-a-billion thing was a virtual certainty?

It goes deeper than simply being all relative, you always make some assumptions - even incredibly large ones. Even a tiny mistake can totally scupper system robustness. In crypto and security a system is often weaker than its weakest link and that includes designer assumptions, operator errors, and customer specifications as well as expected issues such as programming errors. Speaking of security as a thing that can be achieved is mostly wrong and confuses many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Lets see :

1\. Wiretaps 2\. Taping Telecoms 3\. Taping satellites

and yet that still does not educate the FBI, CIA, NSA into having better computer specialists? That is the disadvantage of relying upon political back deals to do real work in that you get an illusion rather than reality.

Note, US military for years has been advocating taking service men and women and retraining them for a counter computer security role to replace the independent whitehats.

Would it be too much to assume that the profits might be great enough at risk that some whitehats might be involved with this LulzSec effort?

<comment><USER14> >Note, US military for years has been advocating taking service men and women and retraining them for a counter computer security role to replace the independent whitehats.

That is already an MOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Holy Crap! Yes, these guys have done it now.

Goodbye anonymous internet - as we know it today.

As much as I love freedom of speech and 'David' taking on 'Goliath' as the next guy, this is seriously bordering on Terrorism. This seems so unprovoked.

All this is doing is challenging the government to regulate the internet. This does nobody any good.

Now it seems Anon has gone too far, and has crossed over into 'psycho' territory. Once you start attacking the state, there is no coming back from that.

I am sorry, but this isn't a war that Anonymous can win.

<comment><USER29> > This seems so unprovoked.

Constant citizens' surveillance and infringing of their rights by "righteous" Governments is also unprovoked.

<comment><USER30> Exactly:). And in my mind criminals are those that plot killings, and break basic constitutional right( haha - and citizens let them... In fact they are by mean of real democracy not an citizens but idiots-> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_(Athenian_democracy)> ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a huge challenge for the FBI and it will be interesting to see how they handle and crack this case. I do hope they can find these bastards and put them behind bars for a very long time indeed.

The FBI should start with the a court order and to get the domain registrar to reveal the identity of the person/organization, that registered the domain name lulzsecurity.com which happens to be registered in the Bahamas and can be viewed at : (<http://whois.domaintools.com/lulzsecurity.com>) as

        c/o lulzsecurity.com
        N4892 Nassau
        Bahamas

Tel: +852.81720004

Of course, most likely they used an alias/fake identity. But the hackers had to have left a financial trail when they purchased and registered that domain name, or that phone number, PO Box.

<comment><USER32> Not if they were smart.

<comment><USER31> Probably too smart for their own good - all super-smart criminals make the fatal mistake of assuming that others are too dumb to catch them. They also do not have access to the combined resources of the NSA, FBI, CIA.

<comment><USER33> Do you have experience dealing with super-smart criminals other than noticing how they are generally portrayed in movies / tv ?

<comment><USER34> The thing about super-smart criminals is that you don't hear about them ;)

<comment><USER30> Or they are called defenders of freedom;]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I have 9 days off for the holidays. I want to write/submit an iOS app. - <AUTHOR>

I don't care how simple it is. Maybe Tic-Tac-Toe? I've played with Cocos-2D before. Think that might be the best route? <comment><USER2> Just go with Cocos2d. There is certainly not a dearth of Tic-Tac-Toe games in the app store however when I was first learning iOS development I built one of these for a client and it did not take much longer than the two weeks you describe. (Though I had a little help with the art and the Ad integration)

I'd recommend you collect the art and sounds you think you will need from iStock photo ahead of time and I'd push you to leave room for some ads in the app to give yourself an idea of what putting together a complete app that can generate some sandwich money takes. (Or figure out what you could sell via in app purchase) Make it universal if you can as well - anything to get it in more categories on the store. Also go look at existing games that do well to see what they are doing well and poorly. Writing the code is only part of publishing apps and Id say probably not the most important part.

Also, for fun google "Tick Tack Toe in lisp" I found these to be neat little programs to read though not especially relevant to the production of the game :)

</comment><comment><USER3> You want to release an app or a game? Cocos2D would be your fastest route for an ios game with moving sprites and all that. You don't NECESSARILY need to have all that for a game. You'll lose a half day with provisioning and a half day with submission. Anyhow, there's any level of things in between. You could take an open source game like cloudjump and customize it, or create your own utility.

</comment><comment><USER4> I too am planning to set "my first iOS app" as a christmas holiday goal. debating between learning objective-c and doing it in ruby using RubyMotion. better decide quick, my holidays start friday!

Learning objective-c shouldn't be difficult as I have some (though quite dated) experience with c/c++ (as well as java, javascript, ruby, python).

resources i am considering:

<http://pragprog.com/book/carubym/rubymotion>

[http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/ios_programming_the_big_ner...](http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/ios_programming_the_big_nerd_ranch_guide_rd_edition_)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ipad-iphone-app- development...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ipad-iphone-app- development/id571023793?mt=13)

</comment><comment><USER5> Look at the Corona SDK for developing iOS and Android apps in Lua. This is fantastic tool. A friend has used this to crank out a number of book apps for iOS using this SDK and the Kwiksher add-on. One note, last time I looked this SDK wasn't using the native UI components, maybe that's changed recently.

</comment><comment><USER6> Shameless plug: makegameswith.us. Drop me a line at email@example.com if you want help making this happen.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stick with cocos2d. You can get free art at <http://www.vickiwenderlich.com> and some good tutorials at <http://www.raywenderlich.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> I've always wondered how Apple approaches learning projects like this. I thought one of the reasons for having an app rejected was its redundancy with existing apps.

Is Apple likely to approve your app as long as it works like its supposed to?

<comment><USER9> Yes, they are rejecting similar apps right now. And apps that look like it only took a few days to develop.

You'll need to register to see the guidelines: [https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guid...](https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.html)

Also, put in now for the apple developer account, that could take weeks to get approved to publish on the app store.

And, during the holidays the app store shuts down for approving apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It depends on what you are trying to achieve: do you want to learn? do you want to raise your profile in the market? do you want to make money through the app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Only looking to learn. If I enjoy the process, then making I'd like to make some cash but, it's unrealistic of me to want to make money off my first application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What are you good at? Probably Lua or Javascript will be faster to get going if you are not experienced in Objective C.

<comment><USER2> Two weeks is plenty of time for a novice iOS developer with a bit of programming experience to publish tic-tac-toe. I think struggling to learn the existing well used tools would be the best use of his two weeks. Try something outside the normal path on the next one once you get something out there.</comment></comment>


Britain Police Arrest Twitter/Facebook Users If They Make Anti-Muslim Statements - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/in-britain-police-arrest-twitter-and-facebook-users-if-they-make-anti-muslim-statements-2013-5 <comment><USER2> This article is sensationalizing a very inflammatory issue. For example, the article claims the arrests are "at the behest" of one group, but the citation used doesn't say that. The arrests seem to be at the behest of the law enforcement enforcing the laws as passed by the government.

There are serious issues of free speech and incitement involved, but this article is not the way to address them.</comment>


Show HN: My Microsoft internship project went open source - <AUTHOR> http://winphonewebdriver.codeplex.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> During summer I was working on Selenium support for the Windows Phone platform, the implementation was successful enough to be released under an open source license. I'd be really happy to answer your questions, since I know that many of you folks are using Selenium in your day-to-day jobs.

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the release of a successful project. Under limitations you have "no touch automation", does this mean this project doesn't support XAML based apps? Is it's primary focus on testing WebView based apps or am I misunderstanding its capabilities?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. You cannot automate Windows Phone application with this tool, sorry. Our goal was to automate web interface. You can simply navigate to any page, and automate typing, clicking, etc. By no support for touching we understand no possibility to generate touching events (swiping, pinch for zoom, etc.). You can simulate more generic ones like clicking though . Lack of this feature is caused pretty closed sandbox in which applications are running, since this driver is just regular windows phone app (no hacks included) I cannot do anything more than other apps.

Thank you for kind words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft? Open-source? Are you sure you worked for Microsoft? /s

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm sure :-) It's quite unusual, though.</comment></comment>


WeWork value plunges to $8B as it hemorrhages cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/wework-value-8-billion-c65ba7d7-32d8-4748-a33f-c0c159d2fd84.html <comment><USER2> Good riddance to the highest dishonour towards the tech industry.</comment>


Just F**king Ship - <AUTHOR> http://commoncog.com/blog/just-f-cking-ship/ <comment><USER2> Unless you're Windows 10, then please QA your stuff.</comment>


Evolving Our Rust with Milksnake - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sentry.io/2017/11/14/evolving-our-rust-with-milksnake <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, that's the generalization of a use case we solved for a very specific case (nicely embedding V8 into a Python wheel): [https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2017/jean-baptiste-aviat- writin...](https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2017/jean-baptiste-aviat-writing-a-c- python-extension-in-2017?slide=11)</comment>


TiddlyWiki: personal wiki designed for the next 25 years (running on Node.js) - <AUTHOR> http://tiddlywiki.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> this is a great open source alternative to EverNote.

p.s. TiddlyWiki 5; has undergone a complete re-design/development; so please give it a try.

and if you want to contribute: [http://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/](http://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/)</comment>


Bahmni – Open-source Electronic Medical Records and Hospital System - <AUTHOR> http://www.bahmni.org/ <comment><USER2> Epic and the other big medical software providers have this market on lockdown. I do not see a path to this seriously challenging the major players any time soon in the US, even though it could be done.

Additionally, the software dependencies (CentOS v6.7 & Java 7) that say breakage occurs with newer versions is very sketchy IMO, ignoring the HIPPA & PCI compliance work that needs to be done (the latter costs $40k a year to maintain).

<comment><USER3> I am curious why so much needs to be done for HIPPA compliance anytime something is held in electronic form.

What if you have a computer, unconnected to the internet, simply sitting in a doctors office with billing information on it.... does this system need more 'protection' and regulation than the one it replaced of paper files, and sticky notes?

<comment><USER4> There are many layers of HIPAA outside of of just electronic data security. You must train your staff on security protocols (e.g not sniffing for celebrity records, etc).

I am pretty sure even if your office is all paper charts you still fall under certain HIPAA guidelines such as notifying patients if there was a breach (e.g physically stealing records from the office). This happened in Rocklin, CA a few years ago.

[http://www.cda.org/news-events/burglary-leads-to-lengthy- hip...](http://www.cda.org/news-events/burglary-leads-to-lengthy-hipaa- investigation-for-cda-dentist)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the major EHR systems used in the United States, VISTa, was developed by the Veteran's Administration and is open source. It's sufficiently successful that it's been adopted not just by other government agencies but a number of private hospitals. Most instances still seem to be based on a commercial M implementation, but some use the fully free GT.M stack

It's M based and in general not on the cutting edge of technology, but it's long service life has shown that it fits the need. I've worked with it once at the Indian Health Service and while not exactly Web 2.0 it is quite powerful and familiar to the staff there.

<comment><USER6> M / Mumps is a terrible language / datastore to deal with however.

<comment><USER7> As a language user, it is really just a semi-structured assembly-style everything-is-string and global-memory as a hierarchical tree map.

The language comes with transaction support, though one can use mutexes instead for performance reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Earlier this year I made an list of interesting/active open health software projects. Available here [https://github.com/kakoni/awesome- health](https://github.com/kakoni/awesome-health)

</comment><comment><USER9> How does this compare with HospitalRun ([http://hospitalrun.io](http://hospitalrun.io)), which also targets the developing world/resource-constrained market?

</comment><comment><USER10> Getting US hospitals to use your software is super hard. Majority of them are using Epic, and won't entertain you much if you don't provide Epic integration. And Epic is almost a closed system, they've done their best to make sure that integration with them is almost impossible for small companies.

</comment><comment><USER4> The thing that pisses me off about HIPAA and startups is the cost of being HIPAA compliant! You must run on dedicated instances. So your AWS bill is minimal thousands of dollars and that's just the start!

Sure there are starts doing HIPAA compliant IaaS but Paying $99 for 1 GB container is still pricey.

<comment><USER11> Pull on your big kid pants and maybe admin your own servers?

<comment><USER12> So much this

Get the actual machine and plug it. It will be much cheaper than AWS

And no you don't need 5 machines to run hundreds of "microservices" on a handful of VMs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://hospitalrun.io/](http://hospitalrun.io/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Naming matters. I can't see this without instantly thinking it is about delicious sandwiches.

<comment><USER15> Why the name Bahmni?

The first implementation of Bahmni took place at Jan Swasthya Sahyog (JSS), a hospital that has been instrumental in pioneering this open source work. Bahmni is named after a village 70km north of the small town of Bilaspur, India where one of three village health centers of JSS hospital is located. The work being done by JSS at Bahmni village is very inspirational to us and hence the name was chosen.

Ref: [http://www.bahmni.org/faq/](http://www.bahmni.org/faq/)

<comment><USER16> As a Medical Doc and a health tech entrepreneur current living in Bilaspur. I find this fascinating. But I think the village where JSS is located is called as Ganiyari ??

<comment><USER17> Yes, JSS is in Ganiyari. About 15 kms from Bilaspur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is one of the great products I have friends working on. ThoughtWorks has a big team working on this product. It's amazing to see it working well in so many countries.

<comment><USER19> Please give examples of how this is working well in other countries with case studies. It does not appear to be a technically innovative product, just bundling of some open-source products together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very proud of this product. The target is not the US domestic market, but developing areas that have no resources for electronic health records. I have seen this being implemented places where the traditional software would be cost prohibitive. Good for humanity. Please contribute patches!

<comment><USER21> Why did you rip off Epic's UI? This is only going to make them more paranoid going forward.

<comment><USER17> Which screens in Bahmni made you feel like they look similar to Epic? Here are the Bahmni screenshots: [http://www.bahmni.org/screenshots/](http://www.bahmni.org/screenshots/)

It would be pretty amazing if anything looks similar to Epic. Maybe the login screen? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is no way this will be successful in the US specifically because it's based in India which hospitals in the US are extremely resistant to. Also, it looks exactly like Epic and now I understand why they are so careful with their Intellectual Property.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for that bit. We are working on an integration project with Epic, but I've never really even seen it.

(Epic throws some SOAP data at us, then we pop up a sub-view of a web app with a form to complete which Epic puts in a frame or something like a frame)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did anyone else read this and think of _bánh mì_ (Vietnamese baguette?)... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A1nh_m%C3%AC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A1nh_m%C3%AC)

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if a hospital can really use an open source hospital information system for several years without the need to change much of the workflow to the point where modifying it will make it impossible to update from the its original source.

<comment><USER17> One of the key things about Bahmni that differentiates it is that most of the EMR screens / fields in Bahmni are configurable via JSON / Administrator UI. You don't need to fork / code / branch to make these changes. In some places you can also change the order in which screens get rendered via configuration. So, your Bahmni config stays separate from the "product", which allows you to upgrade and get new features without having to manage your own version of Bahmni. All you need to manage is the metadata.

The plan is to integrate with OCL in the future, so that even metadata management can happen via a github like terminology system: [https://talk.openmrs.org/t/introducing-open-concept-lab- for-...](https://talk.openmrs.org/t/introducing-open-concept-lab-for- distributions/4842)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Indivo. Too much promises too little results

<comment><USER18> Bahmni has got good response from some developing countries. I didn't get your 'Little Results' jibe.</comment></comment>


Open Master's Community - <AUTHOR> http://www.openmasters.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> From their about page:

 _The Open Master's is both a self-declared master 's degree and a grassroots community._

 _It 's an unconventional education you design for yourself around a vision of the person you want to become. We use it to bring focus and structure to our long-term goals, and to weave together all of the different things we want to do to get there, such as reading, courses, work, travel, apprenticeships, and dream projects._

 _Just like college, learning is more fun with others. We organize our own small, informal learning communities to learn together and to hold each other accountable to our visions. Because we do not organize formal courses or confer degrees, some say that we are like a homeschooling network for adults._</comment>


Why does Slack not detect if the user is away? - <AUTHOR> Slack does not detect if the user is away of the computer is it intentional? <comment><USER2> Sounds like they haven't figured out event driven architecture yet ^.^</comment>


James Cameron champions faster film projection rates (from 24 to 60 fps) - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/03/james-cameron-champions-faster-film-projection-rates.html <comment><USER2> > The filmmaker said that when he begins shooting the "Avatar" sequel in about > 18 months, he will be shooting at a higher frame rate, though he has yet to > decide if that will be 48 fps or 60 fps. He said George Lucas was "gung-ho" > to make the conversion, and also called Peter Jackson one of his allies. > Jackson, he said, had at one point been heavily weighing shooting "The > Hobbit" at 48 fps.

Awesome!

It's finally happening. The 24 fps speed is a relic from the stone age of cinema, back when technology simply could not cope with higher frame rates. So all they could do was shoot at 24.

Then something odd happened. Everyone was shooting at 24, including the grand masters of the art. All the procedures, techniques, all the clever things they devised, took that frame rate as a given. They were not simply shooting AT 24 fps, they were shooting FOR 24 fps.

Thus the "film look", which is the way a motion picture looks if it's shot at 24 fps using the standard cinema techniques. From a technical limitation, it became a cultural given. Because Bunuel and Eisenstein and Bergman all shot at 24 fps, everyone simply assumed this is how cinema is supposed to look like. Higher speed video ended up being seen as "cheaper looking, made for TV".

But it's exclusively a habit, a purely conventional thing, imposed by culture.

I remember thinking a while ago that, what it would take to break the mold is a few big names in cinema to start purposefully shoot at higher frame rates, and at the same time try and figure out new ways to express the same things at the new speed. Some geniuses need to reinvent the art to break free from the old stereotype.

Cameron filming at 48 or even (please, please, please) at 60 fps cannot do the same things that Cecil DeMille did at 24. Or, rather, is free to not do the same things, because the lower frame rate is limiting in many ways.

And now finally it happens. This is great. I hope 24 fps finds its true place - in the history books. It's time to move on.

<comment><USER3> I'm not a cinematographer but having gone to USC I met and talked with some (both aspiring and those who came back to give guest lectures). There was a digital projection system back in the 80's which had 60fps video, the output was much more 'real' in the sense of looking at the screen seemed more like you were looking at real life, and it jarred folks. One of the directors who was giving a lecture on the future of film felt it was the future but acknowledged the following counterpoint.

24FPS celluloid, with its known gamut limitations and temporal resolution creates an ambiance for the film. This is not unlike the way that canvas and oils create a certain ambiance about an oil painting. Now is the future of 'art' digital printers that can reproduce what an artist might have painted in oils, something they can paint using a Wacom tablet and Illustrator? No, not really. The medium is part of the art, its part of the palette.

Do digital films at high FPS have a place? Of course they do (art is pretty liberal in what it will accept as a medium :-) but will 24fps celluloid be consigned to the history books? Answering that question is less obvious.

The change from hand cranked to mechanically operated shutters was a clear win for cinematographers because it took some randomness out of what the audience would see, talking pictures did the same. The change from celluloid to video is however a medium change not a technique change.

I believe the comment at the particular talk I attended was "If Leonardo could have taken a picture of Mona Lisa instead of painting her, would it be in the Louvre today?" Can't easily answer that.

<comment><USER4> This sounds like an argument similar to the one lamenting the advent of digital photography because the grain of the film no longer provided the same effect in photos. But although the grain effect is available for digital photos, it is seldom seen.

<comment><USER3> Your claim "But although the grain effect is available for digital photos, it is seldom seen." is a fallacy. I'm sure if someone wanted a grain effect in their photograph they would be more likely to actually use film rather than use a digital simulation of what film would have looked like had they chosen to do that. I don't see wide spread use of the 'water color' effect either but people still make water color pictures. It is just that they start out with water colors.

I was rebutting the claim that shooting film on celluloid would 'go away' because there were higher frame rate technologies available. I don't believe that conclusion is supported by either current or past experience the art world. It was not a 'lament', it merely challenged the reasoning that 24 fps celluloid movies would be replaced in their entirety by higher frame rate ones.

<comment><USER2> > Your claim "But although the grain effect is available for digital photos, > it is seldom seen." is a fallacy.

Yet it's factually true.

> I was rebutting the claim that shooting film on celluloid would 'go away'

Perhaps I did not choose the best words.

It will not disappear from the face of the Earth, of course. But it will be relegated to "retro" or nostalgic movies, etc.

It depends on how quickly the new, less limited technologies are adopted by the big names in cinema, and of course by how quickly the old generation, accustomed to the old way a film "is supposed to look", will retrain their taste or die off. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that 24 FPS is now part of the Hollywood "look". 24 FPS is associated with high quality high budget productions in people's minds; 60 FPS looks like a home movie or low-budget TV sitcom. It may take a while to change people's perceptions.

<comment><USER6> Sitcoms and soap operas look the way they do because of lighting. I won't disagree that 24 fps has something to do with the 'film' look, but I think camera lens, filters, and lighting affect the look of the movie more then the framerate.

<comment><USER7> I'm just a layperson when it comes to film but I want to respectfully disagree with the assertion that it's all about lighting.

A friend recently picked-up an LED "3D" tv. Now, I always thought the 3D is a BS gimmick, and I still do, though I will conceed that it does work far better than I ever thought it would. Which is, not at all.

But the TV -- a samsung -- had a feature that reminds me a bit of up- converting, however it's used on every input, even 1080P from the blu ray. I googled it at the time but the gist is that it, on 2D mode, it computes deltas between frames and inserts new ones to make the image seem more fluid.

IT LOOKED LIKE TRASH!

It made everything look soap-opera or like a documentary. It messed up the depth of field. Sure, things were hyper-crisp but alarmingly so. It made it look cheap. Now, there's a setting buried in the control panel to tweak or disable that, but this is how it came from the factory, and i thought it was un-watchable.

So it's not merely lighting.

One last thought which is I actually think the perception of higher quality shots in films has a lot to do with stedicam which of course will be the same at 60fps. But that's just a guess.

<comment><USER8> This is a straw man. Interpolated tweening frames are not the same as actual frames with new content.

It may look like trash, but--then again--so do upscaled images.

<comment><USER7> A "straw man" ? I didn't know this was a debate. Besides, I think you missed my point: That it's not just about lighting.

<comment><USER9> But seanalltogether never said it was just about lighting. He mentioned, "camera lens, filters, and lighting."

Your dissection of what is wrong with Samsung's interpolation had nothing whatsoever to do with seanalltogether's comment.

<comment><USER7> Does Saturday bring out the debaters? What is this? "Sitcoms and soap operas look the way they do because of lighting."

Now come back at me with some word-by-word, point-by-point dissection, but i'm done, this isn't worth it.

<comment><USER10> "It messed up the depth of field."

Absolutely preposterous. Depth of field is a function of lens focal length, aperture, and sensor size. There is no way that Samsung's TV could in any way effect the depth of field of the original recording. If it could, then it would be a magical motherfucking TV.

<comment><USER7> You ought to watch the TV before wetting the bed over it. Go to a Best Buy and have a look.

Because as much as you clearly know about film tech more than I do, you seem to be lacking a slight amount of common sense: What's happening there is processing of a digital signal. Specifically, the TV is creating frames for you to create the illusion of smoother video. And what this effect does, is it appears to flatten the shot.

What your slashdot-worthy post overlooks is that you're speaking from your limited knowledge of film. However, in this TV, there's a feature that lets you apply this setting to just half the screen, so you can see them both, side by side, and tweak as you wish.

Just like in life, there's no amount of theoretical education than can make-up for actually being there, for actually having hands-on.

So really, save the hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are some televisions that have the ability to interpolate a 24fps format and produce an apparent higher frame rate. Watching sports on these televisions is great, but I tried watching Iron Man on one and it made it look like an after school special. I believe this is colloquially know as the 'soap opera effect'.

Google for 'samsung soap opera effect'.

<comment><USER12> My new TV does that - it came with the mode enabled, and when I watched an HD movie off Netflix, it seemed very odd and low-budget - this soap opera effect - until I realized what was going on with a second movie doing the same thing. It's definitely jarring and everything looks, ironically, like it was shot with cheap cameras.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried getting used to it? Does the effect go away with time or is it forever burned in your brain?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Notice he's leaning towards 48p as opposed to 60p, which is an already standardized framerate that your modern TV likely supports.

I do not think that is an accident. After all, once we all buy our new 3D TVs, something will have to happen for people to buy new TVs again in 3-4 years.

And before you mention bandwidth considerations, I do not have actual data, but I suspect that when using H.264 High Profile, the difference in bandwidth between 48fps and 60fps won't be that large. There is a limit to how much you can change visually in a single second: human perception.

<comment><USER15> Assuming the bitrates are the same, 48fps will require 80% of the bandwidth needed to handle 60.

To the best of my knowledge, H.264 only supports two GOP structures (short = 6 frames / long = 15 frames), both of which operate independently from the playback speed.

In other words, a short GOP setting produces 8 blocks per second running at 48, and 10 per second running at 60. Assuming a constant bitrate (I know, I know), the throughput of the entire system needs to increase by an additional 20% to handle 60. And that's where things fall apart.

Consider the iTunes store, where I believe HD rentals top out at 720p. Or most HD broadcasters, who skew away from the 19.39 Mbps ceiling on the ATSC MPEG-2 spec in favor of programs encoded at 13.something Mbps (the legal floor) thereby allowing an SD channel encoded at ~6Mbps to be delivered in parallel. Does this exercise in bandwidth maximization impact the quality of the HD component? You bet. Do the networks care? If an additional SD means they can dramatically increase the number of ads served, then no, absolutely not.

So regardless of how great the acquisition setup, and how awesome the playback system, there's always the network in between them to consider. And with providers moving toward bandwidth caps, I see picture quality going down, not up. So, streaming 1080p60 H.264 encoded at (say) 7-9 Mbps? Choice, yes, but total fantasy for the time being.

Of course, Cameron is talking about making theaters competitive, so maybe that's his point. Given that BluRay has effectively failed as a universal home standard, and that instant-availability is hugely favored over order-and-wait programs, image quality of filmed entertainment at home is now tied to network limits.

The real question, then, is "are there enough cinephiles who actually care?"

<comment><USER16> _"Assuming the bitrates are the same, 48fps will require 80% of the bandwidth needed to handle 60."_

Not exactly - while your 80% approximation is true for uncompressed footage, h.264 encoded video and essentially every modern day video compression schema will inherit data from the frame(s) before it. The higher the framerate, the less (generally speaking) the images will change between frames - leading to a reduction in data per frame.

Here's an example:

File 1: <http://files.jjcm.org/60fps.mp4> \- 127KB

File 2: <http://files.jjcm.org/48fps.mp4> \- 119KB

As seen here, the 48fps video 94% of the size of the 60 fps video. Granted, this is a singular example, but at least it supports the concepts that I described above.

<comment><USER15> Wow, you're absolutely right about the (minor) file size differences. That's really interesting. H.264 FTW.

I have to admit, I couldn't see any difference in the quality of the motion between the two clips, but thanks for posting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is more exciting for me than 3d. I remember thinking this when I first noticed that counterstrike didn't feel right at <60fps while watching action films with 24fps

<comment><USER18> That is because a game's frame is rendered at one absolute time point, while a movie's frame is like a photograph taken with a shutter speed of 1/24th: it includes the motion data of that whole time interval, it contains motion blur, and it's smooth from one frame to the next.

That's why a game at 24fps looks bad, but an (action) movie at 24fps looks good.

<comment><USER19> That doesn't seem like it could be true. The film is rolling through the camera, and if the shutter were open continuously, the entire film would be a vertical blur of light. The shutter would open and close once per frame, so the film can be advanced. The actual shutter speed of a camera shooting 24 fps would be much faster than 1/24 s.

<comment><USER20> Correct. There's a simple formula for that: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_speed#Cinematographic_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_speed#Cinematographic_shutter_formula)

<comment><USER19> Oh, cool. The linked article about the rotary shutter also has a great animation showing how the camera works:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Douglas Trumbull's 'Showscan' fprmat shot and projected 70mm film at 60 fps. The huge cost kept it from succeeding, though the visual impact was supposed to be amazing.

Cameron's proposal will introduce similar perceptual problems to HD video - fake stuff will look more fake, every tiny detail of a performer's face will be apparent, and scenes that play a certain way at 24fps might fall flat at 60. One study showed that physical comedy was funnier in low res/low frame rate, and the same action looked painful to the audience in greater definition and detail.

I'll watch a good story in any format, thanks.

<comment><USER22> Wasn't Showscan also projected with more lumens? A quick search didn't reveal this, but I am sure I remember that Showscan was much brighter.

<comment><USER23> If you're ramping up the shutter speed on the projector, you gotta compensate with more light coming through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Film geeks in here will eat up the story of MaxVision48 - it's an equally inexpensive upgrade to existing film capture and projection that results in a much higher picture quality, way higher than even the Red camera.

Check out this infographic on Roger Ebert's blog comparing the different formats:

[http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/assets_c/2011/01/resolution%...](http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/assets_c/2011/01/resolution%20chart-30908.html)

The full blog post is well worth a read, especially given the story of a single passionate entrepreneur trying to change Hollywood and his story of trying to get Christopher Nolan to champion the format:

[http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/more_than_ever_the_f...](http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/more_than_ever_the_future_of_f.html)

<comment><USER25> That chart is seriously misleading. They wanted to represent the 2x increase in framerate, so they showed that as a 4x increase in resolution, which doesn't make any sense.

And they seem to suggest that RED made the entire chart, which they didn't. RED made the accurate part of the chart, but MaxiVision48 added their own nonsense.

The impression I get about this company is that they tried to sell a product to a bunch of people who didn't want or need it. The reason RED is so successful is that they actually made a camera directors wanted to use. Directors want to be able to do long takes, they want to see instant footage, they want to be able to go directly into the editing room after shooting, and they want a cheap medium. MaxiVision doesn't offer any of those advantages. In fact, if it ends up being harder to process, it's actually worse on all those points.

MaxiVision48 seems a little like BluRay. It's the next generation of a dead technology. Film will always be useful for certain films, but the benefits of digital go way beyond high resolution.

Anyway, interesting story, thanks for the link. Gives me some food for thought about my own business.

<comment><USER15> "BluRay. It's the next generation of a dead technology."

Slightly off topic, but you just nailed it, sir. Upvoted accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wish that the sample footage he shot at 24,48 and 60 fps was available somewhere I could download it =(.

</comment><comment><USER27> A video comparing 24 fps to 60 fps (In video games, where the difference is higher)

<http://mckack.tumblr.com/post/3535190601/60fps-vs-24fps>

<comment><USER28> I really must be "blind". I can see the difference side-by-side (especially the moving ball) but the difference is so slight. Even 15fps looked fine to me. If you showed them to me back-to-back, I don't think I could tell the difference. Which is frustrating to me, because I know the difference but I wish I could _see_ the difference. I feel like my eyes are failing me.

This is watching the downloaded avi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hm, I was still stuck into the "above 30 FPS the eye cannot notice the difference" mindset. What's going on?

<comment><USER30> That was never correct. The eye is not a camera, it doesn't work at frames per second.

<http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm>

Humans can notice stuff that hapens in 1/200th of a second.

<comment><USER17> Excellent link, thanks.

His other pages are worth a look too, you can find them in the upper-left corner under FAQ.

It is nice to see that I'm not the only hacker with an interest in video technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm a big fan of 60fps video. It takes a bit of getting used to because it looks so different, but after you watch 60fps content for a while, 30fps content looks like a slideshow -- almost unwatchable.

(And there's plenty of content that's 60fps, just not a lot of American content that's 60fps.)

<comment><USER32> Could you give some examples?

<comment><USER31> Visit your favorite torrent site that has Japanese TV shows and search for 60fps. (Sometimes the video is encoded as 30fps and is interlaced, in which case you need to turn on bob deinterlacing to get 60fps. But this seems to be rather rare these days.)

<comment><USER33> All the Japanese animation that I seen has been animated at a much lower frame rate than American animation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why not adaptive framerate? Project the film at 60fps but gradually switch (this is the tricky part) between low and high framerate as the scene demands?

</comment><comment><USER35> I assume that higher fps = higher digital payload = higher bandwidth load for ISP's, considering services like Netflix Since this will place a bigger burden on ISP's, they will use it as added ammunition when lobbying Washington re Net Neutrality, and the whole thing will become a political clusterf*ck. Ain't life in the US grand? But other than that, it sounds like a good idea.

<comment><USER21> ISP's don't enter into it. The goal is to have exclusive tech in movie theaters only.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. It's all about doing what your ISP can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> People are used to 24fps for movies now, however.

In my opinion, higher framerates just end up making everything look like a sitcom.

<comment><USER37> We're at a local maxima. It will look better after it looks worse.

<comment><USER36> Well I certainly have never been one to complain about current film standards.

I suppose I am just wary of change simply for the sake of change. I would like to be able to see the same 24fps and 60fps scene side by side and evaluate the advantages myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Recent movies filmed on digital video have the problem that the exposure time is much less than the frame gap. So action scenes look like flick-books. Gladiator had this issue, as well as most of Michael Mann's recent output. A higher framerate will make action really flow.

</comment><comment><USER39> What would be the impact on movie theaters? I am looking at this from the perspective of the simple 2D (non 3D) projection system.

I assume if they have a modern digital 2D playback system this may not be a problem. However, what if they have just good ol' projectors that require film reels?

Questions on my mind:

\- Can we roll film at a higher speed on the projector? Can we double the reel intake rate it if we go with 48 fps? Is it tougher to do fractional speed increases (like 60 which is 2.5 x 24)

\- Are there any refresh issues - I assume no since the light is always turned on.

\- How about sound? [The assumption here is sound is on the same reel - but I could be wrong]

If there are any projectionists in the HN house, I would appreciate you filling us in...

<comment><USER40> I'm not a projectionist, but:

\- sound is either on the same reel or on a DTS disc synced to the reel. \- I was surprised that a rather small theater in my metro area (no stadium seating, out in the boonies) has digital projectors in all of its screening auditoriums.

For modern movies, I would imagine that in 10 years or less there will be no more acetate prints and all distribution will be digital. For digital prints framerate is solely limited by the response rate of the projector and the throughput available in the playback system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'd guess our brain fills in data when the frame rate is only a few per second. When it's much higher we have to directly absorb what we see without mental filtering. This is why 24fps is more "cinematic".

<comment><USER42> Well, you see at barely 1 megapixel, in the sense that that's how many photoreceptors there are in your eyes. But you don't notice this because by the time it reaches your level of actual perception, lots of scenes from every small movement of your eyes have been stitched together. Your brain has a _ton_ of hardware for doing interpolation. 24fps seems to mesh well with that hardware. But we're not machines... Higher numbers in the lab don't necessarily translate into better human experience.

Another case in point: people still shoot and love photos on Tri-X, a grainy B&W film, even tho' you can buy cameras that do a dozen or more full-colour megapixels off the shelf...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> My idea of great film tech? 8K, 60fps, and true 3-D (not the hokey 2-level thing)

It'd be awesome, but it's a long, long way away.

As Jim says, this is low-hanging fruit. Easily done with most everything that's on the shelf today.

<comment><USER40> It may be low hanging fruit, but imagine rotoscope work on a 24fps feature vs a 60fps feature. The work has just increased 2.5x for the same shot.

For fully rendered content, there is likely no additional man hour time, but for any frame by frame work involving humans, post processing could take a lot longer.

<comment><USER17> Is this kind of thing really done frame-by-frame though? I think with smart interpolation techniques you shouldn't have to do single frames anymore.

<comment><USER40> Rotoscoping[0] is by definition frame by frame. Keyframed animation would largely remain unchanged, though rendering would take 2.5x as long.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping>

<comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure large budget animations are already rendered with higher frame rate for proper motion blur. You can't add proper motion blur with post- effects, like in video games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> going to 48 would be fine, but I really want digital theaters at minimum of 4K and keeping the brightness on the bulb turned up to where it is supposed to be (not lower to same money)

<comment><USER45> Apparently we have someone who believes that 2k projectors are good enough or has never experienced cheap theater operators who turn down the brightness on the projector bulbs to make them last longer / save money.

48 fps might be a fine thing, but there are other factors to enjoyment that should be looked at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> He seems to think higher frame rate will make his movies suck less.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's about damn time. I've never understood the rush to increase resolution and 'dimensions' when simple camera pans fundamentally do not work, and never have.

<comment><USER48> And the increased dimensions merely make it _more obvious_. I generally prefer to watch things on my laptop / slightly larger screen, things look better than at the theater where a moderate-speed pan means things are jumping foot or so at a time.</comment></comment>