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Eastman Kodak Co. on Tuesday said it will stop selling traditional film cameras in the United States, Canada and Western Europe, another move by the troubled photography company to cut lines with declining appeal in favor of fast-growing digital products.
Wow, this is interesting. The new version of Adobe Photoshop can detect images of currency, and will not allow those files to open. Here's the +5 slashdot discussion which includes a post explaining the tech which supposedly appeared in the Adobe support forums:
...The algorithm looks in the blue channel of a color image for little circles and most likely examines the distance distribution encountered. I have discovered a small constellation of just five circles (a bit like Orion with the belt starts merged) that will be rejected by a Xerox color photocopier installed next door from here as a banknote. Black on white circles do not work.
These little yellow, green or orange 1 mm large circles have been on European banknotes for many years. I found them on German marks, British pounds and the euro notes. In the US, they showed up only very recently on the new 20$ bill. On some notes like the euro, the circles are blatantly obvious, whereas on others the artists carefully integrated them into their design. On the 20 pound note, they appear as "notes" in an unlikely short music score, in the old German 50 mark note, they are neatly embedded into the background pattern, and in the new 20 dollar bill, they are used as the 0 of all the yellow 20 number printed across the note. The constellation are probably detected by the fact that the squares of the distances of the circles are integer multiples of the smallest one.
I have later been told that this scheme was invented by Omron and that the circle patter also encodes the issuing bank.
Too cold for ice. That's right, all the restaurant ice machines stopped working last night. It was too cold. Apparently the thermostat systems go out of whack and never report the machines as being empty because, well, they are full of ice cold air I guess.
Spotted on the block was the Diamond Ice truck making stops at all the usual suspects. Not exactly the market cycle an industry outsider would predict.
Audiovox releases the first 1 megapixel camera/phone for North America, the CDM-8910.
P800 gets video recording capability.
The Mac rumor world is unusually silent on this eve of MacWorld San Fransisco 2004. Maybe too quiet. Live stream of the keynote will be found here. 12:00 pm eastern time tomorrow.
After many failed attempts NASA has a perfect landing on the red planet with their latest rover, Spirit.
NASA science chief Ed Weiler promised to stop calling Mars the "death planet."
J. P. Barlow has an ah-ha moment with VoIP.
Google 2003 year end zeitgeist.
What percentage of computers connected to the internet are under the control of remote operators (crackers)? Last night during drunken conversation I was speculating it was over 70%. Of course I really have no idea, but it *could* be that high. Any guesses?