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This is silly, but I found this gizmodo typo to be rather funny:
No photos, but Sprint PCS Info has some details on the Samsung A700, which they think might be the first Sprint phone to allow video phone calling (the phone is capable of it, whether Sprint will disable that future or not isn't clear yet).Damn that Sprint, always disabling our future!
Billy Kulver, 76, "whose collaborations with artists helped give birth to the multimedia art forms of the 1960's" died on Sunday (NYTimes obit, free reg required.)
In 1966 Mr. Kluver teamed up with Robert Rauschenberg to solve the knotty engineering problems posed by 10 artists (Mr. Rauschenberg among them) who wanted to stage their art as spectacle. Mr. Kluver invited some 30 scientists and engineers, most of them his colleagues at Bell Labs, to realize dreamy ideas like snowflakes that fell upward and tennis rackets that gave out sounds like huge temple bells.Here's an IEEE special report on Mr. Kluver for more background on this interesting man.
The outcome was "Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering," a performance series that drew 14,000 visitors when it opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan on Oct. 13, 1966, attracting worldwide attention and inaugurating a fusion of art and technology that prefigured the arrival of countless new art forms.
Experiments in Art and Technology — the organization devised in September 1966 by Mr. Rauschenberg, Mr. Kluver, the artist Bob Whitman and a Bell Labs engineer, Fred Waldhauer — quickly became an instrument of ongoing collaborations. E.A.T., as the organization is known, earned Mr. Kluver a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Royal Order of Vasa from Sweden. Mr. Kluver continued to match up artists and scientists as recently as last summer.
Hands on P900 review. If you don't need a keyboard, this is a phone/PDA/camera (mp3 player, video recorder...) mobile device to consider. Top of the line.
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."