Underexposed

ScanCafe is showing off a new service in testing to digitize entire photo albums. Below is the original; above ScanCafe's version.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

LAS VEGAS--ScanCafe, a start-up that digitizes film images using relatively cheap labor in Bangalore, India, announced a new service on Tuesday to scan black-and-white negatives.

The Burlingame, Calif.-based company already scanned color slides and negatives as well as prints, but film scanners have trouble with black-and-white negatives. ScanCafe uses a "wet mount" process for which the company has applied for a patent, said Wade Lagrone, vice president of marketing, in an interview at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.

The process is more expensive but still competitive, Lagrone said. Color negatives cost 24 cents each, color slides 29 cents, prints 27 cents, and black-and-white negatives 69 cents apiece. The cost includes retouching and color correction.

I have proof from an expert that the iPhone interface really is better. Who's the expert? My 3-year-old son.

Over the years, I've seen countless newbies struggle to use the latest gadget, computer, or software. I like new technology, but it's been work hauling myself up learning curves.

But I'm convinced that after years stuck with only modest tweaks to the WIMP interface--windows, icons, menus, pointing device--real change is upon us. That's chiefly because the pointing devices now can be your own fingers.

Levi types random words on the iPhone's notepad application.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Within moments of his first crack at an iPhone, my son, Levi, had figured out how to flip from one photo to another by flicking his finger across the screen. He understood with no coaching how to steer the simulated steel ball around the holes in the Labyrinth game by tilting the phone. He loves to type nonsense words on the notepad application using the virtual keyboard, deleting them once they've been read. In the three months since I got the iPhone 3G, Levi has learned to take photos, browse them, change the phone's wallpaper, and, unfortunately, turn off Wi-Fi and switch on airplane mode.

My proudest moment came when Levi issued his first tweet, borrowing my account: "Eesfrrgjlphdvlksxnjjktwsdvnjmmkbvvnn." Though it was largely a matter of chance, of course, he could do it because he likes the cute bluebird icon of the Twitterific application, and touching it with his finger triggers entertaining interactions.

And I was intrigued when Levi tried unsuccessfully to use the phone's accelerometer to play JellyCar, trying to spur the car by tipping the iPhone so the car would "roll" downhill faster. Note to JellyCar developers: your user interface needs work.

Levi's first tweet

(Credit: CNET News)

As a parent, of course, it's tempting to assume that Levi's accomplishments are the result of his astounding intelligence. But of course much of the credit has to go to Apple and others who've advanced the state of the interface art.

"Human beings are a lot more programmed to manipulate things with our hands and fingers," said Dan Saffer, a founder of Kicker Studio and author of Designing Gestural Interfaces. "I was at a party with a Microsoft Surface table. There was an infant playing with it, not even a year old, pushing photos around and squealing. It's amazing how much it makes sophisticated computing power accessible to a hugely wide segment of the population."

Keyboards and mice aren't being replaced--they offer speed and precision for typing words, entering data, navigating documents, and issuing commands. But they are becoming just one of a host of mechanisms.

Touch screens, available on some Hewlett-Packard computers, are a big part of the revolution, letting people interact more directly rather than relying on a mouse, joystick, or other indirect pointing device. Multitouch sensors, which can detect multiple fingers simultaneously, add more sophistication, such as the ability to shrink a photo by making a pinching gesture on a trackpad. Newer Apple laptops offer more extensive use of multitouch, though at this stage only through the trackpad rather than a touch screen.

Levi took this picture of his feet with my iPhone while he was sitting in his car seat.

(Credit: Levi)

Computing devices also are getting ears and eyes. Speech recognition is available in rough form to power phone search on various phones with services from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Vlingo. FluidTunes lets you control your iTunes library by waving your hands in front of a Mac's video camera.

Intuitive, physical interfaces aren't just for kids. I was stunned to see my technophobic mother-in-law gleefully bowling with a Wii last year. Sure, she couldn't have installed Nintendo's still-popular gaming device if we'd paid her, but using it was as easy as tossing a pebble in a pond.

"There are Wii bowling tournaments now for elders. It takes a sport they love, but there's no weight of the ball anymore. They can play it in a wheelchair. It's a huge hit at nursing homes," Saffer said.

It's not just that devices are easier to use when you can touch the interface, he said. It's that it's easier to learn by watching others use them.

"One interesting thing about touch screens is there's this whole realm of observation you don't have with standard computer setups, where the icons are smaller, and it's hard to tell what people are doing by watching," he said. "You can learn how to use an iPhone by watching people flip through it for a second. You can get it in a way you can't with a standard phone, where you're watching people push buttons to get through menus."

Of course, immersion helps, too. Levi's parents spend altogether too much time punching at keyboards and staring at screens, so he's got plenty of examples to emulate his elders. As a camera buff, I'm delighted when Levi pretends to take pictures--he made a toy camera out of Lego once.

A view of Microsoft's Surface device at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel shows a list of entertainment options for hotel guests.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)

But I vacillate between pleasure that he's learning how to use technology and fear that he'll grow up ignorant of the non-electronic world. I'm prone to inordinate "screen time," a term heavily freighted with negative baggage in our household, and Levi's childhood will be far more digitally immersed than mine.

And perhaps worse, there's the prospect of losing my status as resident guru. There are plenty of more technically proficient people in my orbit, but none of them live in my house, and Levi doesn't ask any of them to read his typed nonsense words.

Most families come to some sort of reckoning when their son beats their dad in basketball. Ours will come when my wife asks Levi for technical support.

I picture it happening this way. The Roman alphabet is on the run, pursued by a much larger army of Arabic characters with long scimitar-like ligatures, Chinese characters that look like throwing stars, and European peasant letters bristling with umlauts, cedillas, and tildes.

Unicode now is the most common character encoding method on the Web.

(Credit: Google)

Unicode has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web, Mark Davis, Google's senior international software architect, said in a blog post. Also vanquished at almost exactly the same time was the Western European encoding.

Unicode is a character encoding standard that gracefully accommodates dozens of languages as well as Roman characters with diacritical marks. ASCII, a tried-and true, decades-old standard, is limited to 128 or 256 characters and has a hard time extending beyond the range of a century-old Remington typewriter.

Unicode vanquished ASCII and Western European within 10 days in December, Davis said.

"What's more impressive than simply overtaking them is the speed with which this happened," he added, pointing to a graph showing the meteoric rise of Unicode.

Google's a fan of Unicode Web sites. When it processes data from Web sites, it converts it into Unicode first if it's not already there. That improves international search abilities.

"The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover," he said.

Google just converted to Unicode 5.1, he added, "so people speaking languages such as Malayalam can now search for words containing the new characters," he said.

One disadvantage Unicode has over ASCII, though, is that it takes at least twice as much memory to store a Roman alphabet character because Unicode uses more bytes to enumerate its vastly larger range of alphabetic symbols.

• Nexenta Core Platform 1.0 is now available - OpenSolarix X Debian--Elatte release of Nexenta, which hybridizes OpenSolaris kernel code with higher-level tools from Debian and Ubuntu. Includes Xen, ZFS-compatible apt-clone, CIFS, zones, and live upgrade support.
• Fedora 9 alpha is out: "Sulphur"--New: (http://jkeating.livejournal.com/53326.html): "Disk resizing during install (incl. NTFS), encrypted block devices, simplified install method choosing, gnome 2.21 development release, KDE 4.0 builds, Firefox3 Beta2 builds, PackageKit, kernel 2.6.24"
• Barracuda Networks re. fight against Trend Micro re. open-source ClamAV patent issue--"Barracuda Networks believes that the patent is invalid due to prior art and further believes that neither its products nor the ClamAV software infringe the patent. "
• YouTube - 5000 Web Apps in 333 Seconds at SimpleSpark.com--A convulsion-inducing exercise in brand awareness.
• Neatorama » The Evolution of Tech Companies' Logos--Some nice tech history crossed with logo history. Alas, this post undermines my ability to wow people with the knowledge that LG once stood for Lucky Goldstar. I knew about Kwanon for Canon, but not what it meant.
• Canon offers encouragement for JPEG XR | Crave : CNET's gadget blog--My colleague Lori Grunin got the scoop on Canon's newly expressed fondness for JPEG XR, aka HD Photo, the file format Microsoft hopes will replace or at least augment conventional JPEG.
• Zooomr: Please hold while your online photos are shipped overseas--Apparently 10 terabytes of the 20 on the photo-sharing site were moved to the new data center in Japan. The other half is en route and should arrive by end of the month. "We regret the situation this has posed to our users and ask for forgiveness."
• Flickr sets, sets, sets, and more sets--What to do if you like to arrange your photos into endless little piles and have a gargantuan monitor. Also, it helps to be a good, prolific photographer like Thomas Hawk. If you have good metadata, you ought to be able to construct these sets on the fly.
• Embedded Linux company Wind River Systems reorganizes, cuts jobs, outsources--Four divisions: VxWorks, Linux, tools, device management. "Certain non-critical, redundant or administrative positions will be eliminated, and staffing of development resources in low-cost geographies will be accelerated."
• New Canon U.S.A. EVP of imaging--"Canon U.S.A., announced that Tamotsu 'Ted' Nakamura will become executive vice president and general manager of Canon USA's Imaging Systems Group."
• Flickr supports OpenID « Flickr Blog--"Yahoo launched its "OpenID Provider service" in beta... it includes Flickr support! You can now use your photostream URL to log into sites which support OpenID." Yahoo announcement: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/yahoo-openid-beta.h
• Canon EOS 40D underwater housing from Sealux--"Sealux CC40 has an aluminium housing, milled of monoblock CNC, hard-anodised and specially sealed for highest seawater resistance."
• Photoshop of horrors embarrasses Memphis weekly | www.tennessean.com--Don't believe everything you see on the blogosphere. That bumper sticker used to say "Tax 'n' spend," not "Confederate Values"
• B&H Photo Video selling a 1200mm Canon mongo lens--This is one gigantic telephoto. B&H said somewhere bewteen 13 and 19 were built since 1993. "The hard part is figuring out what you're focusing on because the angle of view is so narrow."
• Rick Lehrbaum, Ampro's co-founder returns as CTO - MarketWatch--Lehrbaum has kept tabs on use of embedded Linux over the years. Now he's going back into industry.
• K Desktop Environment - KDE 4.0.1 released--Fixes to Konqueror Web browser and other issues. Download site: http://download.kde.org/
• Scientists Say Mummies' Lice Show Pre-Columbian Origins - The New York Times--Columbus and other Euros apparently aren't to blame for the spread of lice to the New World. It was a pre-existing condition, as the insurance industry might say.

Correction 7:45 a.m. PST: I got the sensor bar and the Wiimote's duties mixed up. Names notwithstanding, the sensor bar has the infrared LEDs, and the Wiimote actually has the cameras that detect the signals.

I support the hardware-hacking philosophy on principle, but most of the movement's labors have left me uninspired. That all changed when I started seeing the uses that Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Chung Lee has found for the Nintendo Wii's infrared remote control.

In a collection of videos, notable for their lucid explanations, the Ph.D. graduate student from CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute shows exactly how versatile the "Wiimote" system can be. Among the uses he convincingly demonstrates: a virtual-reality head tracker; a virtual whiteboard on a wall, tabletop, and laptop screen; and a Minority Report-style arm-waving and finger-pointing multitouch user interface.

The Nintendo game device includes a bar-shaped device, ordinarily placed atop a TV screen, with two LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. It emits infrared light that the Wiimote can detect within a 45-degree field of view. Lee uses a computer to process data from those components and dramatically expand their utility.

By attaching the sensor bar to his head and the Wiimote to a TV, he was able to construct a system that knows where his head is located. That information is then fed into an algorithm that changes the perspective of an image on a monitor. The result is a very convincing 3D feel that looks like it would be a great fit for video games.

The whiteboard application relies on use of a pen with an infrared LED in its tip. After a quick calibration--the subject of Lee's thesis--a computer can track where Lee is "drawing" on a wall, tabletop, and laptop screen.

Perhaps the most mainstream potential comes with Lee's Wiimote-based multitouch user interface.

Lee attaches small reflectors to his fingertips, which the sensor bar can track. The result is a user interface that can respond to gestures such as pinching and swiping. And by tracking four points, it enables the "multitouch" abilities that are all the rage with Apple's iPhone and MacBook Air as well as the Microsoft Surface "Milan" project.

Lee's open-source work has traveled beyond his own domain. Cynergy Labs' Maestro project shows the Wiimote-based multitouch system in action. And his work has spawned a discussion site called Wiimote Project.

Lee also is notable for another practical design, a poor man's steadycam.

An overhead view of U2's drummer, Larry Mullen, from 'U2 3D.'

(Credit: 3ality Digital Productions)

Having now seen U2 3D, I can confidently say the era of three-dimensional movie-making is upon us. The movie shows what 3D can be if done right, and more important, it shows it works with real humans, not just computer-generated subjects.

I saw Beowulf in 3D three times to compare the three major 3D display technologies, Imax, Dolby 3D, and Real D. That movie was a great proof-of-concept for the projection technology, but Beowulf itself was hardly a cinema classic.

In addition, with computer graphics, a filmmaker can exert complete control over the virtual cameras. But Beowulf whetted my appetite, and I wanted to see what could be done with actual humans in a 3D movie.

U2 3D faced real-world challenges. In 3D movie-making, the two cameras must be correctly aligned, the right distance apart, and with proper convergence, in which the cameras point slightly toward each other. That's a lot of complication, but the 3ality Digital Production guys got it right.

The result is a film that achieves a new spaciousness and depth. It offered a spectacle without many spears-jumping-down-my-eyeballs gimmicks.

When the camera is peering down at drummer Larry Mullen from above, I felt like I was really hanging above him. When there's a sea of waving arms between the camera and Bono, you can sense each row of the crowd. Visually, my favorite moment, by far, was the seething crowd jumping in sync to "Where the Streets Have No Name."

Editing, too, is a challenge with 3D. When cutting from one scene to another, there has to be enough time for the audience's eyes to adjust to a new focus point--or somebody has to plan in advance to keep the focus point at the same distance.

Here, too, U2 3D fares well, though it felt a little too choppy in the opening scenes to me. Whatever the cause, though, I'm happy to bid adieu to the frenetic MTV jump-cut editing style, and U2 3D was easy on the eyes.

I found low-angle crowd shots immersive.

(Credit: 3ality Digital Productions)

There were plenty of flaws that I found distracting. The worst, ghosting, I blame on the Imax technology used during my screening. When Beowulf suffered ghosting, in which a bit of information intended for the right eye leaks over into your left eye and vice-versa, the Imax folks said it was something wrong with the theater, but it happened again in U2 3D. I also found shots directly at bright lights suffered distracting artifacts, which may or may not have been the fault of the 3D aspects of the movie.

I also thought subjects in fast motion were marred by flickering. The digital projection systems, which can take advantage of the higher frame rates possible with Texas Instruments' DLP chips, are better in this department, too.

The Imax show did have terrific sound and, of course, an all-encompassing screen that's effective in grabbing your attention all the way to its peripheral vision. And Imax will be going digital this year, so these issues should be only temporary.

U2 3D sticks fairly close to reality, but it's artfully laced with extra elements. I enjoyed the superimposition of images tremendously, with different views shown at different depths. For example, more than once a view of the band members on stage would be visible within the dark silhouette of Bono in the foreground. It was a new twist to multiple exposures.

Also well done were computer effects that usually complemented the giant display wall actually at the concert. Some purists might want a less adulterated representation of the band's "Vertigo" tour, but I for one wasn't fooled into thinking I had front-row seats, so the extras were fine by me.

Overall, the movie was immersive and entertaining. No doubt the novelty of 3D will wear off over the years, just as it did with color and sound in earlier years of cinema, but for now, my advice is to relish it.

Seagate's FreeAgent line offers eSATA connections.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If your power strips are as overloaded as mine with cords and bulky transformers, you'll be glad to hear that eSATA--a standard that gives external hard drives the data transfer speeds of internal drives--is untethering itself from its power cord.

eSATA is an external version of the Serial ATA technology used to hook up internal PCs, but today external eSATA drives need their own power supply. But on Monday, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced it's working on a version that will let external drives draw power over the cable that connects the drive to a computer.

The standard, called Power Over eSATA, is expected to be completed in the second half of 2008, and the first devices supporting the standard could arrive as soon as this year, too, the consortium said. The technology should be able to deliver enough power to run a single 2.5-inch drive, said Knut Grimsrud, the SATA-IO president and an Intel fellow, and likely will become a regular part of eSATA products.

"I would expect the powered eSATA (to) quickly become commonplace for applications where eSATA is used," Grimsrud said of the new technology.

The power link could help eSATA catch up to the two most common connection technologies, USB and IEEE 1394 "Firewire," which can power external hard drives. But the groups behind those standards aren't standing still--and of course those connections can link to many other devices besides hard drives.

Specifically, Intel and others are working on a new fiber-optic "SuperSpeed" version of USB that should make its transfer speed to at least 4.8Gb per second, 10 times faster than today's 480 megabits per second. And the 1394 Trade Association is preparing a 3.2Gb/sec specification that should be ratified by February. That should quadruple the current top-end 800Mb/sec IEEE 1394 speed.

Another weakness of eSATA today is hot-plug support, the ability to plug a drive into a running computer. "Some operating systems and/or device drivers might not yet have enabled full support for the hot-plug features that the SATA technology provides," Grimsrud said, and some legacy hardware configurations or product deficiencies can make it difficult.

The Power Over eSATA technology will use the same connectors as current eSATA, but will require new cables to carry the power, Grimsrud said. The current eSATA has data-transfer connections only on one side of the plug, so the Power Over eSATA technology likely will add the power connections on the reverse side, he said.

If market-leading VMware, open-source incumbent Xen, and Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V aren't enough choices, another one is on the way: Parallels Server.

SWsoft, which is in the process of renaming itself Parallels, released its first beta version of the server virtualization software Wednesday. SWsoft itself has chiefly focused on commercializing higher-level virtualization software called Virtuozzo that lets a single version of an operating system be subdivided into semi-independent containers. However, the company's Parallels division has come to prominence by letting a single computer--most notably an Intel-based Apple machine--run Windows.

That Parallels technology is now available as a hypervisor that runs on a computer's "bare metal," a contrast to the previous technology that runs on top of a host operating system such as Mac OS X. The hypervisor approach, also employed by VMware's ESX Server, Xen, and Hyper-V, is generally preferred for servers to the guest-host model.

Parallels Server's claim to fame over its rivals is its ability to run multiple versions of Mac OS X, and it's "the first to run multiple copies of Mac OS X Server on a single Apple computer," the company said. The server beta also is the first hypervisor to support Intel's second-generation VT-d virtualization hardware, though it's still at the experimental level, the company said.

Those are interesting accomplishments, but they don't seem to me to be the competitive breakthroughs that will dent VMware's prevailing dominance. Apple's Xserve machines account for only a tiny slice of that market compared with those running Windows and Linux, and support for the latest Intel hardware doubtless will spread to rival hypervisors.

So it's probably a good thing for SWsoft/Parallels that it also has its Parallels desktop, Virtuozzo, and virtualization management software lines up and running. Parallels Server could well appeal to the sizable number of customers who already have Virtuozzo and accompanying management tools installed. Those folks might want to expand into new virtualization territory. To take one niche where Virtuozzo found early success, Web site hosting companies could offer more independent partitions to customers who are sharing a server.

Those who wish to test the Parallels Server beta software can apply at SWsoft's Web site.

• Breakthrough of the Year 2007: Science magazine. Winner: human genetic variation. "Equipped with faster, cheaper technologies for sequencing DNA and assessing variation in genomes on scales ranging from one to millions of bases, researchers are finding out how truly different we are from one another."
• Vaporware 2007: Long Live the King. Wired's annual vaporware awards.
• Top 2007 tech flops--Fortune. I have a finite appetite for year-end lists, but schadenfreude never gets old.
• Fotolia announces "The Infinite Collection." Fotolia, a microstock, is getting a little macrostocky. Partnership with higher-end agencies; premium pricing for Fotolia but cheaper than the agency.
• Matthew Szulik's parting words as CEO. He doesn't give details on the personal reasons for his stepping down, but I love how he (mostly accurately) says Red Hat is different from the "cylons who have come to dominate the industry of technology."
• TED: Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (video). Larry Lessig's copyright stump speech, in case you haven't seen it several times like I have. Worth watching in any event.
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom--Who Needs It?--A Photographer's Perspective--Mark Galen. He argues "many among the photographic community have not been able to identify its primary task" and that it's basically a database. I think he undersells the fact that you can edit large groups of raw images, which is a tough photographic challenge.
• Copyright Basics. A copyright FAQ from the U.S. government.
• U.S. Copyright Office--Copyright Law. The horse's mouth when it comes to United States copyright law.
• Sony Alpha DSLR-A700 Review: Digital Photography Review. "Highly recommended," but states as a primary gripe the in-sensor noise reduction enabled by CMOS processors. "...RAW files already have noise reduction applied to them, this in effect means that the photographer can't treat RAW as the 'digital negative.'"
• Canon EOS 40D digital SLR: First impressions: Consumer Reports Electronics Blog. Consumer Reports looks at a high-end SLR. No sweeping conclusions, but a nice illustration of the field-of-view differences at the end of the piece. (No subscription required for this blog post.)
• Toshiba Joins IBM for 32nm chips--Dave Manners. Toshiba extends its research agreement with IBM et al. to production, too. "If 450mm wafers ever get to be used, the total number of advanced CMOS fabs in the world (will shrink) into single figures."