Below is an excerpt from a Slashdot comment on a July 18 thread about Comcast:

The key to working with Comcast is to have some basic technical knowledge of cable internet. Once you show you know the lingo and you know the basic technical aspects, you'll either get the support person to "talk up" to your level immediately or switch you to someone that knows. Most support people have at least heard some of the terminology, usually enough to know if they're in over their head and need to route you to someone else.

For example, if you buy your own modem, NEVER say "I need my new modem INSTALLED." Say "I need my new modem PROVISIONED". 95% of the support people will know right away what you need and won't bother asking you about Windows and you'll be online 15 minutes later.

[…]

(from ACM TechNews, July 11 2007)

Carnegie Mellon University computer graphics researchers have developed systems for editing and altering photographs that automatically find images that fit with the original photo. The systems create well-blended images with minimal user skills, unlike traditional photo editing that can require a significant amount of skill. "We are able to leverage the huge amounts of visual information available on the Internet to find images that make the best fit," says assistant professor of computer science and robotics Alexei A. Efros. "It's not applicable for all photo editing, such as when an image of a specific object or person is added to a photo. But it's good enough in many cases." One system, called Photo Clip Art, uses images from the Web site LabelMe, which has thousands of labeled images, to add images to photos. For example, a picture of an empty street may be filled with images of people, vehicles, and even parking meters. To make the resulting picture as realistic as possible, the image analyzes the original photo to determine camera angle and lighting conditions. Then the system looks in the clip art library for appropriate images that fit the dimensions. The other system, called Scene Completion, uses millions of photos from the Web site Flickr to fill in holes in photos. Frequently, photo editors try to fill in the hole with a section from the same picture, but Efros says a better match can be found in a different photo. Efros and his colleagues will present papers on the two systems at the ACM SIGGRAPH annual conference, Aug. 5-9 in San Diego.

MapJack.com is a street-level image viewer mashed-up with Google Maps.  The image quality is much better than Google's Streetview, but the 3D feel is not quite as immersive.  Personally, I'll trade better image quality for 3D immersiveness.  Try "driving" down the famous Lombard Street in San Francisco using MapJack — this is the crookedest street in the US.  Currently MapJack only offers views in the heart of San Francisco.

Earthmine also plans to offer high-resolution images at a street-view, but their focus seems to be more on selling this data to companies, governments, etc.  They may put a web front-end on the data, but that does not seem to be their focus.

Google Map's "Street View" seems to have unleashed a flood of similar offerings.  To be fair, I'm sure that they've all been under development for a while, it's just that the buzz around Google Street View has made them more visible.

Of the three primary colors, people (homo sapiens) see green best, followed by red, but we really suck at seeing blue.  This page:

http://nfggames.com/games/ntsc/visual.shtm

is a nice demonstration of just how much we suck at seeing blue, especially compared to green.  Most image and video compression takes advantage of this fact, and sacrifices a ton of bits devoted to transmitting the blue portion of an image.

Cable Card Goes Mainstream on July 1 (crave.cnet.com)

The article above summarizes the current situation with CableCard — it's just barely starting to become availble. 

Some background on CableCard … 

CableCard is a small standardized electronic card that you plug into a cable set-top box (or DVR) of your choice.  The idea was that consumers would be able to buy their own set-top box or DVR (e.g. at BestBuy), and the cable company would send the consumer a CableCard which contains the security/access-control hardware to prevent cable theft.

CableCard is a hardware solution to the cable companies security/access-control concerns — you have to get a physical CableCard from your cable company.  The article also mentions a software solution under development, known as Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS).  As a software solution, you would not need to get a physical piece of hardware (like a CableCard) to plug into the cable box you just purchased from BestBuy.  Rather, the cable company would electronically send "keys" to the software in your cable box.

After years of little activity on the CableCard front, much of the recent activity is due to a March 2005 FCC ruling (pdf) requiring cable companies to stop shipping "integrated" cable boxes (including DVRs) by July 2007 (in 2 months).  To avoid fines, the only solution available to cable companies today is to ship boxes that support CableCard.

The Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design (GUIDe) project at Stanford has a nice video demonstration of their EyePoint system for "pointing" in GUIs (see below).

Eye-tracking technology has been around for a while, so that's not the interesting part.  The interesting part is how they deal with the "Midas problem".  The advantage of a mouse is that you can let go of the mouse when you don't want to move the pointer, but with eye-tracking your eyes are always moving.  It's called the "Midas problem" in reference to the legend of King Midas, who wished for the power to turn things into gold at his touch;  this backfired because everything he touched immediately turned into gold, including his food, his drink, and even his daughter.

EyePoint deals with this problem by still requiring some other action to indicate that pointing is desired, but without totally eliminating the speed of eye-tracking.

Suppose you have a lot of photos all with the same object in them, or photos from the same area.  Navigating the photos as thumbnails doesn't work very well when you have more than a handful of photos.

A Univ of Washington team has a demonstration of a system for navigating the photos in 3D.  The system computes the relationship between the camera position among all the photos, then allows you to "zoom in" on the object by finding another photo that is closer.  Or it allows you to "circle around" an object by finding photos to the left and right.

This system does not attempt to stitch photos into seamless panorama, nor does it attempt to build a complete virtual 3D world.  But the effect is almost that good.

They've produced a 5 minute video demonstrating their system (Flash).  Scroll down on the page for a description of the system.  You You can also get all the details on the team's main project page.   Microsoft Research has some beta software based on the UW research (I haven't tried it out yet).

There's lots of discussion about whether DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is a good thing or a bad thing.  But most of the debate assumes that the idea of DRM is actually possible.  In this Slashdot posting, Eustace Tilly summarized the fundamental fallacy of DRM (my emphasis added):

[DRM relies on cryptography, and] cryptography is designed so that a message from A can be read by B but not by C. With DRM, B and C are the same person.  The message from A (the publisher) must be readable by B (the consumer) but not by C (the consumer).

I hope you understand now why DRM is a concept flawed in its fundamentals.

DRM would be useful. So would a perpetual motion machine. It is wishful thinking to believe that the sheer utility of a function means it is capable of being produced.

If you're shopping for an HDTV, is it worth it to pay more money for a set that supports higher resolution (at the same screen size)?

The latest digital TVs support different maximum resolutions: 480p (853×480), 720p (1280×720), & 1080p (1920×1080). The first resolution (480p) is typically referred to has "enhanced definition", while the last two (720 & 1080) are referred to as "high definition" (HDTV).

Digital TVs will down-convert higher resolution signals to the resolution that the TVs support. So a 480 set can still display a 1080 signal by down-converting the signal to display fewer pixels.

For the same screen size, higher resolution sets cost more money. Most people would assume that for a given screen size (say 40 inches), a 1080p set would be better than a 720p set. But depending on how far away you are sitting from the screen, you may not be able to see the difference in quality because the pixels will be too small. In that case you're wasting your money. So at what point are you wasting your money on pixels you won't be able to see?

Carlton Bale blogged on this question, and created a chart (see below). For a 40 inch TV, and sitting 8 feet away, most people will see the benefit of 720p over 480p. But most people will not see any additional benefit going to 1080p. So if you're buying a 40 inch TV and watching from 8 feet, it's a waste of money to pay more for a 1080p set.

Try Chris Spurgeon's solution:  A flash drive embedded in a regulation 16 pound bowling ball.  Seriously.

http://www.spurgeonworld.com/blog/archives/2006/11/no_more_misplac.html 

[Via Engadget]