News Humor Common PC Linux Mac CUCUG
The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, January 19th, at 7:00 pm, at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The Linux SIG convenes, of course, 45 minutes earlier, at 6:15 pm. Directions to the FBC-CS are at the end of this newsletter.
The January 19 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. For the PC SIG, Richard Rollins will show how to use Secure Internet Tunnelling so you can use computers (like your machine at home) remotely with the assurance of being totally secure. For the Macintosh SIG, Edwin Hadley will show one of his many sound tools.
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We'd like to welcome the newest members of our group, joining us in the last month: Allen Byrne (Linux), Keith Peregrine (Mac & PC), Joseph and Patritia Dewalt (PC Clone).
We'd also like to thank renewing members Jim Berger, Emil Cobb, Jerry Feltner, Michael Habermann, Rich Hall, Norris Hansel, George Krumins, Tom Purl, and Bill Zwicky.
We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Run across an interesting item or tidbit on the net? Just send the link to the editor. Have an article or review you'd like to submit? Send it in. Have a comment? Email any officer you like. Involvement is the driving force of any user group. Welcome to the group.
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The time has come for us to ask you to renew your CUCUG membership for 2006. If you have already renewed, thank you! If not, you'll want to join us for the January meeting and show your support for CUCUG's activities. If you cannot make it to the meeting on Thursday, the 19th, you can renew your membership by mail.
Membership is still only $20. You could save that easily with just one answer to a vexing computer question. That makes the fun free!
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In line with the December election results, the CUCUG officers for 2006 are:
President:
Richard Rollins
()
Vice-President:
Emil Cobb
(e-cobb@uiuc.edu)
Secretary:
Kevin Hopkins
(kh2@uiuc.edu)
Treasurer:
Richard Hall
(rjhall1@uiuc.edu)
Corporate Agent: Kevin Hisel (withheld by request)
Thanks to our returning officers.
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Posted by Daniel Terdiman
January 10, 2006 5:26 PM PST
URL: http://news.com.com/2061-10793_3-6025604.html
In a bit of unintended humor, Wall Street closed Apple's stock Tuesday, the day the company unveiled its first Intel processor-based computers at Macworld, at $80.86.
That may mean nothing to the average person, but techies will no doubt catch the accidental reference to Intel's 8086, the 1978 processor that spawned the x86 architecture that PC users are so familiar with.
Now, it's pretty unlikely that Wall Street was able to manipulate Apple's share price, given the thousands upon thousands of people who no doubt bought and sold the stock Tuesday. But it's little coincidences like this that make techies and geeks sit up and take notice. Or at least I and the friend who pointed this out to me did.
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Media Minutes: January 13, 2006
Written and produced by John Anderson (mediaminutes@freepress.net)
Media Minutes content is produced under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license; see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ for more information.
Audio: http://freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/mm011306.mp3
Text: http://freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/mm011306.pdf
The Commerce Committee of the United States Senate has an ambitious schedule of hearings on more than a dozen telecommunications policy issues over the next two months. The hearings begin this month on topics including decency, video franchising, convergence, and copy protection of digital broadcasts. In February the committee will hold hearings on network neutrality, public versus private broadband infrastructure, and FCC policy. March will see forums on spectrum reform, rural telecommunications, and more. Free Press policy director Ben Scott says these hearings will comprise the majority of public debate on these issues, and in reality, they're just formalities.
Ben Scott: "The Congress and particularly the Senate committees typically call the same stakeholders for the same issues. They like to see the same faces in front of them, they like to generally be able to predict what's going to be said. The debate is known in advance and they're just articulating the various positions in these hearings."
There are already several pieces of telecom-related legislation in play on many of these issues, and several drafts of wholesale revisions to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 are circulating on Capitol Hill. But Scott does not think 2006 is the year for large-scale changes to the law.
Ben Scott: "I have heard a lot of analysis in recent months that suggests that such a bill will never see the Rose Garden and a presidential signing ceremony. And so the various stakeholders who want those bits and pieces within the omnibus are going to press very hard to get those priorities taken care of one way or another, and a stand-alone bill may be the best vehicle."
Many of these issues pit major corporate interests against each other - for example, the concept of network neutrality puts cable and phone companies at odds with computer manufacturers and online firms. Scott says there's opportunity to be found when major special interests square off.
Ben Scott: "I much prefer to have Godzilla versus King Kong than I do having Godzilla and King Kong on the same team. Because typically what happens when two industry segments brawl over a policy disagreement, that's a scenario where the consumer and the citizen tends to do better. Because each side competes to prove that they have integrity riding alongside them, and the way they do that is they make concessions to the public interest."
All told, this national telecom debate is much more transparent than the one conducted in 1996, when the industry dominated the crafting and passage of the Telecommunications Act.
Ben Scott: "However, we cannot underestimate the power of pay-for-play money in politics in Washington. And it is very difficult to get things done - even if you're right - if you don't have big money on your side."
[Editor's Note: For elaboration on the issues involved here, I recommend listening to the January 15th "Media Matters" show, produced right here in Urbana at WILL AM radio, which has an interview/discussion with Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, and Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America.]
http://www.will.uiuc.edu/willmp3/mediamatters060115.mp3
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Paul Thurrott
URL: http://www.wininformant.com/
Although Microsoft will market several Vista product editions, or SKUs, the company will distribute one version of the product's DVD providing the code for all product editions on each disc. That way, users will be able to unlock functionality from higher-end Vista editions at a later date, after paying for the upgrade privilege. The change in plans, which was first reported by "CRN," means that Microsoft will need to maintain only a single Vista master disk image rather than the multiple images that would otherwise be required. Each time a Vista edition is upgraded, Microsoft will provide an updated product key, as each product edition requires different product key sequences. At that point, your old product key will be invalidated so it can't be used on a different system. Say what you will, but this new scheme makes a lot of sense, given the sheer number of email messages I get about upgrading one edition of XP to another. And with Vista, we'll see even more product editions, each with its own specific set of features.
For the past 2 weeks, the Windows community has been buzzing with news that Microsoft was scheduled to halt support for XP Home at the end of this year. (Apparently, Microsoft never expected that its next Windows release would take so long to ship.) Well, the crisis is over. Microsoft this week revealed that it has extended support for XP Home (and a few other XP editions whose support was also scheduled to be terminated this year) to "2 years after the next version of [Windows Vista] is released," according to the company. If Vista ships on schedule at the end of the year, that means that Microsoft will continue supporting XP Home through late 2008. That's not too shabby. Note that Microsoft's business-oriented Windows products have much lengthier support life cycles. Microsoft is supporting XP Professional, for example, through 2011.
This one is kind of interesting. An open-source community Web site called PortableApps.com has released a portable version of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite--including full versions of the desktop application's word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, database, and graphics packages--that will fit on a USB key, giving users a complete productivity solution on the go. The Portable OpenOffice.org suite takes up just 144MB, can run from USB memory keys and other storage devices, and can be used on shared PCs found in libraries, Internet cafes, coffee shops, and the like. It's a nifty idea; even if you regularly use Microsoft Office on your home and work machines, you might want something for those times when you're sans PC and yet need to churn out the next "War and Peace." If you were to combine the suite with portable versions of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client, you'd have a complete office in your pocket. Without the blithering idiot in the next cubicle, of course. For more information, check out the Portable OpenOffice.org Web site.
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/suites/portable_openoffice
Dinosaur rocker Robert Fripp, who cofounded the British progressive rock band King Crimson, recently spent time at Microsoft's Redmond campus, recording sounds that will be used in Vista. A guitarist by trade, Fripp reportedly recorded numerous futuristic sounds that will likely show up in various Vista sound schemes. However, one must question the Vista team's hip quotient. Couldn't Microsoft have gotten a musician more in touch with today's PC users? You know, someone like Frank Stallone? Of course, this isn't the first time Microsoft turned to an aging rocker to provide sounds for Windows. In 1995, the company hired electronic rock pioneer Brian Eno to provide sounds for Windows 95. And we all know how cool he is.
That PC giant Dell will soon offer a gaming PC with an Intel chip overclocked (and warranted) to 4.26GHz is a milestone, but the fact that Dell even has to modify an Intel microprocessor to make it perform at a high level hints that Dell isn't too happy these days about its Intel-only policy. Dell CEO Kevin Rollins said this week that the company is open to selling PCs that use AMD's microprocessors, which are widely acknowledged as being technically superior to Intel chips while offering better performance. "We're always open [to different microprocessors]," he said. "We want the very best technology for our customers." Performance and technical superiority aside, there's another reason to switch to AMD, and one that would surely warm the cockles of Dell's corporate heart: AMD chips are cheaper than Intel chips.
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Symantec has been forced to fix a "flaw" in Norton SystemWorks which could possibly allow malware authors to hide files from users. While the feature is designed to prevent SystemWorks users from accidentally deleting files vital to the software package's NProtect feature, weaknesses in the technology could be exploited by opportunistic developers of malicious software.
The hidden directory is also hidden from most antivirus scans, including Symantec's own. Malware/virus writers with knowledge of the directory can easily hide their files undetected. While no exploits have been made to this point, it did not take long for Sony's rootkit to become exploited and quickly spiral out of control in weeks past.
Users of 2005 and 2006 versions of SystemWorks and SystemWorks Premier are urged to run LiveUpdate to patch the flaw, which will then allow the directory to be seen and scanned by antivirus software.
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Vulnerability left PCs open to viruses, spyware
By Marsha Walton, CNN
URL: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/01/05/wmfflaw/index.html
(CNN) -- Microsoft has released a patch for a vulnerability in some Windows graphics files.
For more than a week, criminal hackers have been exploiting the flaw in Windows Meta File, or WMF.
There is a link to the fix on the Microsoft home page. The "Security Update for WMF Vulnerability" shows users how to download and install the patch, which should protect Windows users from being infected with the malicious code.
About 90 percent of computer users worldwide use some form of the Windows operating system.
The company became aware of the malicious attacks December 27.
What's especially dangerous about the attacks: Your computer could be infected with viruses, spyware or other malicious programs just by viewing a Web page, an e-mail message, or an Instant Message that contains one of the contaminated images.
Computer security experts have been dealing with scores of variations on the attack since it was discovered.
"Nobody knew it was coming," security expert Rick Howard of Counterpane Internet Security said. "There was no security intervention or mitigation for it."
Unlike infamous computer worms and viruses like Blaster, Code Red or I Love You, the WMF attack is not spreading like wildfire across the Internet.
Most of the malicious efforts fit the patterns of recent attacks. They are not designed to earn bragging rights for a brash programmer, but instead are likely tied to theft, fraud and organized crime.
Some of the exploits so far identified are designed to steal passwords. Others install computer code that turns machines into zombies, which can then be controlled remotely to spew spam and viruses.
Microsoft issued its first security advisory on the issue December 28, the day after it became aware of the attacks.
The company created and tested a patch for the problem, and until this morning said it would be released next week as part of its monthly security bulletin.
Although the Microsoft security advisory characterized the attacks as "not widespread," there was an intense focus on the attacks and malicious possibilities across tech Web sites.
In a somewhat unusual development, an unofficial, third-party patch was posted on the Web several days before Microsoft's official fix.
That patch was created by Russian engineer Ilfak Guilfanov, and is available through the SANS Internet Storm Center, http://isc.sans.org/external link, and other security-related Web sites.
Although Howard said Guilfanov's fix has been tested and is being released by the "good guys," there can be complications, even with official patches.
Something designed to fix one problem, like the WMF exploit, can sometimes wreak havoc on other computer components. Although tech-savvy home users who are aggressive about their security might download and install the unofficial patch with no problems, Howard said the average home user, and big companies with complex computer networks, would do better to use the official Microsoft fix.
Microsoft and computer security companies recommend several safe-computing practices. A few tips:
- Stay away from unfamiliar Web sites, as they are more likely to host malicious code
- Ignore links in e-mail messages from unknown sources
- Install a personal firewall
- Keep antivirus and antispyware software up to date.
"The good news for home users is that most standard antivirus vendors are keeping up to date, and as long as they download the right signature, they'll be OK," Howard said.
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from Tom Purl (tom@tompurl.com)
It's been a slow month in the world of Linux/BSD. Here are some of the bigger stories of the last 4 weeks.
Novell recently announced that they're releasing the AppArmor software suite under the GPL. AppArmor is a suite of software that can apply security policies to any application, and is similar to SELinux. For more information, please see the following links:
As most Linux users know, one of the big benefits of using Linux is that you have a wide selection of file systems at your disposal. Linux Gazette recently completed part two of their analysis of Linux file systems and published their results in an article titled, "Benchmarking The Filesystem Part II". If you're interested in how your favorite Linux file system stacks up against the competition, then please check the following link:
Please note that this comparison also includes ReiserFS v4.
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By John Borland
Story last modified Tue Jan 10 13:07:00 PST 2006
URL:
http://news.com.com/Jobs+New+Intel+Macs+are+screamers/2100-7354_3-6025409.html
The new machines both include Intel's Duo dual-core chip. The iMac will come in the same sizes and sell for the same prices as the current models, but the Intel chips make it two to three times faster, Jobs said. A new laptop computer, called the MacBook Pro, will be available in February, he said.
- Video: Debut of first Intel-based Mac <http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6025293.html?tag=ne.vid>
At Macworld, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils an updated, Intel-based iMac.
In addition to the crop of new Macs, Jobs announced a new version of the iLife suite that adds a tool--iWeb--designed to make it easy to create Web sites with video, audio and blogs, and new features meant to simplify the sharing of photos over the Web and the creation of podcasts.
Jobs said Apple would transition to an all-Intel lineup of Macintosh computers by the end of 2006.
"We're a little ahead of schedule," he said, with Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini joining him onstage dressed in a head-to-toe "bunny suit," the protective suits that workers wear in chipmaking facilities. "These things are screamers."
The release of the new Macs comes just seven months after Jobs shocked the computer world with an announcement that Apple would move to Intel chips, after years of using the PowerPC hardware made by IBM and Motorola.
Jobs said last June that Apple would have computers ready to ship by June of this year. Beating that mark by almost half a year will help ease a transition some feared would result in several quarters of diminished sales, analysts said.
"The critical thing they delivered on is what people, including analysts, were expecting," said Charlie Wolf, a financial analyst at Needham. "They have begun the Intel transition sooner rather than later."
Still, Jobs took pains to dispel any notion of a current slowdown in Apple sales. In an uncharacteristic announcement, he said the company had a record $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter that ended in December. Apple's retail stores alone accounted for $1 billion in revenue, he said.
That included sales of 14 million iPods in the holiday quarter, with more than 32 million of the music devices sold over the course of 2005. Those figures, at least as much as the new products, impressed analysts.
"They could have announced dog food and the stock would have been up five points," Wolf said.
The new iMac line will include a 17-inch, 1.83GHz version, selling for $1,299, and a 20-inch, 2GHz version for $1,699.
Once released in February, the MacBook Pro line of laptops will include a $1,999 model running at 1.67GHz and featuring a 15.4-inch screen. That version will also come with an 80GB hard drive and a new infrared sensor to use with the Apple Remote control device. A second version will feature a 1.83GHz processor and a 100GB hard drive and cost $2,499. The latter models will also have the 15.4-inch screen.
"The MacBook Pro is the fastest Mac notebook ever, obviously," Jobs said.
The company was light on the media announcements that have come to define Apple events in recent months. Jobs did say, however, that the iTunes store will begin selling clips from "Saturday Night Live" and that more than 8 million videos have been sold through the iTunes online store since October.
The iTunes Music Store has now sold about 850 million songs and is on track to pass the 1 billion mark in the next few months, selling about 3 million songs a day, he added.
He also introduced a new, $49 FM radio and remote control accessory for the iPod. Most rival MP3 players already offer FM radio as a standard feature.
Aside from those media tidbits, Tuesday's announcements were focused on the new generation of consumer software, much of which has been seemingly inspired by the success of podcasting and is designed to help Mac users distribute movies, photos and audio more easily over the Net.
Jobs spent considerable time demonstrating the new version of iPhoto, which includes a "photocasting" feature that lets people create online photo albums. Other people can subscribe to these albums, just as they do today with blogs or podcasts, and have new photos downloaded automatically to their own computers.
The new iPhoto is faster and can now handle up to 250,000 photos--10 times the prior limit, he added.
The GarageBand music-production software has also been updated to include a podcasting studio, which streamlines the process of making a radiolike show and posting it online.
As expected, the software suite's biggest addition was iWeb, which allows users to make their own Web sites, complete with audio, video and photos drawn from the company's other applications, in just a few minutes. The entire software suite will keep its $79 price tag and will come free on new Mac computers.
"It's a giant new release," Jobs said, talking about the new iLife '06 suite. "It's going to propel us even further ahead of anything else in the world.
The company's consumer applications, including iLife, will run natively on the new Intel processors starting immediately, as well as on the Power PC chip. Professional audio, video and photo applications will be updated in March, and customers will be able to buy a "crossgrade," or new version of the existing software, for $49, he said.
Most other applications will run smoothly by using the translation software called Rosetta, which will come with every new Intel-based Mac, he said. Microsoft's Office will be one of those applications.
Microsoft Mac Business Unit General Manager Roz Ho joined Jobs onstage to say that the software powerhouse is moving ahead to create an Intel-based version of Office. She announced a deal between Apple and Microsoft under which Microsoft will continue creating new versions of Office for Mac for a minimum of five years.
The "commitment should leave no doubt in your mind that we're here to stay, and we're in it for the long term," Ho said.
The quick release of the Intel-based products has left some developers, who expected a few more months before release, scrambling to transfer their own applications over to an Intel-compatible version. Code written specifically for that hardware will typically run faster than software written for the PowerPC chips, but using the Rosetta translation software.
Some of the largest developers have already done considerable work, and are nearly ready to release product. An Adobe spokesman said their Photoshop application would have to wait until the next scheduled update (which doesn't have a date attached yet), but their new Lightroom software will be released in Intel-compatible version sometime in the next few months.
"We think it's great that Apple was able to get this ahead of schedule," said Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of product management for digital imaging. "We've already got (Lightroom) running in house on Intel based Macs. We've been waiting until they ship to post it, and now this will let us get that out too."
Other developers are starting to release Intel-based versions of their products too, but they hadn't been warned of the change in the release schedule, Jobs said.
- Video: Jobs shows off the MacBook Pro <http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6025359.html?tag=ne.vid>
Apple CEO debuts an Intel-based laptop that he says is four to five times faster than the PowerBook G4.
Leaving no doubt that Apple would launch a marketing blitz around the Intel-based machines, Jobs showed off a new advertisement introducing the products. Reminiscent of the "1984" commercial that touted the first Macintosh computer, it painted the new line of products as a liberation for the Intel chip itself.
For years, the Intel chip has been "trapped inside PCs--dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks," the ad says. "Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free, and get to live life inside a Mac."
As is often the case, some of the wildest predictions about potential products turned out to be off the mark, including rumors that Apple would have a plasma television with a built-in Mac computer. The company also did not update the Mac Mini or iBook with Intel chips, as many enthusiast sites predicted.
[Editor's Note: Macworld San Francisco 2006 Keynote Address - http://macworld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/mw/index.html ]
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By John Borland
Story last modified Thu Jan 12 12:25:00 PST 2006
URL:
http://news.com.com/Apples+iTunes+raises+privacy+concerns/2100-1029_3-6026542.html
A new version of Apple Computer's popular iTunes software, released Tuesday, is drawing barbs from privacy advocates for sending information about computer users' playlists back to Apple.
The new music software includes a "MiniStore" window, which provides recommended links to Apple's music download service when a listener actively clicks on a song in their personal playlist, including songs that haven't been purchased from the iTunes store.
To provide those recommendations, the software sends information about the selected song, such as artist, title and genre, back to Apple. But the software also transmits a string of data that is linked to a computer user's unique iTunes account ID, computer experts have found.
Because iTunes users typically sign up for the music store with an e-mail address and a credit card number, the account ID number could in theory be linked to that information, as well as a user's purchase history, said Apple expert Kirk McElhearn, who has published several books on Macintosh computers. The same number is also used for other Apple products, such as the Apple Developer accounts and the online .Mac accounts, he added.
"I'm an Apple user and an Apple supporter, but this isn't what we expect Apple to do," said McElhearn, who published details about the iTunes data transfer on his Web site. "If this was Microsoft or RealNetworks, people would be screaming and calling for heads to roll."
<http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20060112175208864>
In a statement, an Apple representative said the company "does not save or store any information used to create recommendations for the MiniStore."
The issue has raised eyebrows particularly high in the community of Apple computer users, though the new feature is also included in the Windows-based iTunes. Macintosh users have typically not been exposed to many of the advertising-supported or adware programs that are common in the Windows world, and which routinely raise privacy concerns through poorly disclosed data exchanges.
Indeed, in 1999, RealNetworks was sued for releasing a version of its RealJukebox that included a "Global Unique Identifying Number," which identified a listener's specific copy of the player without initially disclosing this feature in a privacy policy. RealNetworks said it had added the identifying feature as a way to "offer valuable personalized services" but later removed it after lawsuits and customer criticism ensued.
As of Thursday morning, the license agreements distributed with iTunes did not disclose the exchange of any data tied to song information or users' personal accounts. Information included with the software said the new 6.0.2 version "includes stability and performance improvements" but does not mention the addition of the MiniStore.
The company has posted an article on the Apple Web site that discusses the MiniStore. It says data about the song selected in iTunes is sent to the iTunes Music Store in order to provide relevant recommendations. It provides instructions for turning this feature off and says no data is sent, once turned off.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303066>
The article does not mention the transfer of any uniquely identifying information about the user.
The exposure of the data transfer has been dismissed by some bloggers and online sources as a typical feature of music-playing software. However, some bloggers are calling for a more specific disclosure of exactly what data the iTunes software is sending back to Apple--and what it is being used for.
"I wish they had told me what they were doing before I installed it," said Marc Garrett, an independent programmer in Washington who was one of the first to identify the iTunes issues. "I think Apple should disclose that in their end-user agreement."
[Editor's note: Here's the relevant information from the Apple article.
"You can show or hide the MiniStore by choosing Show MiniStore or Hide MiniStore in the Edit menu or by clicking the "Show or Hide the MiniStore" button ... When the MiniStore is hidden, this data is not sent to the iTunes Music Store. ... You can disable the ability to show the MiniStore by disabling the iTunes Music Store in Parental Controls. Click here <http://docs.info. apple.com/article.html?artnum=302251> for steps to do that." ]
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By Ina Fried
Story last modified Thu Jan 12 16:28:00 PST 2006
URL:
http://news.com.com/Music+stops+for+Mac+Windows+Media+Player/2100-1047_3-6026715.html
Microsoft has officially halted development of its Windows Media Player for the Mac and plans no future Apple Computer versions of its music-playing software.
"We have no plans to provide future updates or product support for Windows Media Player for Mac," Adam Anderson, Microsoft public relations manager, said in an interview Thursday.
The company will continue to offer the current version for download. It also has announced a deal to offer for free the Flip4Mac plug-in from Telestream that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media video and audio directly from Apple's QuickTime Player software.
Microsoft has not released a significant update to Windows Media Player for Mac in some time. The current Mac OS X version, Windows Media Player 9, was released in November 2003. Microsoft also offers an even older Mac OS 9 version.
Anderson said the decision to halt work on Windows Media Player for the Mac was a matter of prioritizing for Microsoft's Windows Media unit.
"It's basically a business decision for Microsoft," Anderson said. "Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers."
The move comes just as Microsoft announced a pact with Apple that guarantees that the software maker will deliver new versions of Office for Mac for the next five years.
Despite the recent pact, Microsoft has scaled back the number of Mac products it offers over the past several years. The company has halted work on its Internet Explorer for Mac Web browser and also shelved an MSN for Mac Internet service.
Microsoft has said it will come out with new versions of Office and MSN Messenger. The company has not announced definitive plans for its other main Mac product, Virtual PC.
Word that Microsoft would stop development of its Windows Media Player for the Mac was earlier reported by BetaNews.
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by Geoff Duncan <geoff@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#811/09-Jan-06
Although Apple's introduction of Safari caused Microsoft to put the Mac version of its Internet Explorer Web browser into "maintenance mode" way back in June 2003 - ceasing development while pledging to make bug fixes or patch security loopholes in the even-then-aging browser - Internet Explorer on the Mac has now officially come to the end of its life cycle. Microsoft stopped supporting the Mac version of Internet Explorer on 31-Dec-05, and will remove it from its Mactopia Web site on 31-Jan-06. (So grab a copy now for your archival software collection or stable of programs for HTML testing!)
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/internetexplorer/internetexplorer.aspx>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07227>
Although Internet Explorer remains a dominant browser for Windows (where it's creeping toward a version 7 and served as a focus of Microsoft's long antitrust battles), Internet Explorer on the Mac was always a somewhat distant cousin, having been birthed back in 1996 by what would eventually become Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU), made up of genuine Macintosh programmers at a time when Apple seemed to be careening towards dissolution. Even its first beta release (version 2.0, which I reviewed back in TidBITS-311_ using my shiny 28.8 Kbps modem!) one could see Mac-centric design features, and its last major revision (which Adam reviewed in TidBITS-523_ back in March 2000) pushed to offer useful and powerful features for the time, like a scrapbook and auction tracker, plus a serious attempt at a platform-agnostic page rendering engine.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01169>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05872>
Internet Explorer made the jump to Mac OS X early on and, like a thorn in Apple's paw, remained the operating system's default Web browser until Apple shipped Safari in early 2003. Despite some longstanding, glaring issues (cookie management, anybody?) and never having been updated to offer features like tabbed browsing, pop-up window blocking, and RSS support, Internet Explorer's integrated scrapbook was a phenomenally good idea, and, to my knowledge, its auto-completion feature has been matched only by OmniWeb. Internet Explorer also provided the only built-in access to suffix and file-mapping settings in Mac OS X: now, as installed, Mac OS X enables users to configure only default email and Web applications, and you can't even do that within system- wide preferences but must instead adjust those settings within Mail and Safari. Users with more sophisticated needs must use programs like RCDefaultApp, MisFox, or More Internet.
<http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/>
<http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/>
<http://www.clauss-net.de/misfox/misfox.html>
<http://www.monkeyfood.com/software/moreInternet/>
So, it's hard to say we'll miss Internet Explorer: after all, like Netscape, it stopped coming to Macintosh parties a few years ago and hardly ever writes or calls anymore. But there was a long period - preceding and during the so-called Internet Boom - where Microsoft led the pack amongst Mac Web browsers and jauntily kept getting better, while Apple was struggling for air and Internet Explorer's main competitor, Netscape, publicly writhed in its own agonies and drifted further away from the Mac. I may not be speaking for everyone here, but Internet Explorer and the Mac walked a long way together, and some of it was uphill in the snow, both ways, on some very cold days. So, thanks, IE: ya did good.
ToC
TidBITS#810/19-Dec-05
The Web is a vast place now, and even with search engines like Google, it can be difficult to find something you know you've seen before. SmileOnMyMac has a new take on browsing through the history of your Web surfing with browseback 1.0, which creates PDF thumbnails (they look like playing cards to me) of every page you visit and displays them in animated stacks. It's an elegant presentation, and if you're a visual person, being able to see pictures of pages you've visited may work better than looking at textual lists of page titles and URLs, as St. Clair Software's HistoryHound 1.8 provides. You can still perform full-text searches of the contents of visited pages in browseback, as you can in HistoryHound and OmniWeb 5, and you can also eliminate specific sites from the index to avoid cluttering it with Web-based applications that load numerous nearly identical pages. Once you've found the page you're looking for, you can view it in your Web browser, view the PDF of the page in Preview, save the PDF as a separate file, send the PDF to someone else via email, or print it. To use browseback, you do need Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, but browseback can track your surfing in all the major Web browsers. It costs $30 and is a 2.4 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.smileonmymac.com/browseback/>
<http://www.stclairsw.com/HistoryHound/>
<http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/>
TidBITS#811/09-Jan-06
Hot on the heels of SmileOnMyMac's new browseback (covered in TidBITS-810_), St. Clair Software has released an update to HistoryHound, their utility for indexing and searching visited Web pages. Along with normal Web pages that you've viewed in Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, OmniWeb, Camino, Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, and Shiira, or in the built-in browsers of the NetNewsWire 2 and PulpFiction RSS readers, HistoryHound 1.9 now indexes and searches RSS feeds that you've visited or bookmarked in Safari. The update also includes fixes for troublesome URLs; resolves a launch-time crashing bug; and clears the search result list when you start a new search, rather than after the new search completes. Version 1.9 is a free update to registered users; new copies cost $20. It's a 2.2 MB download. [ACE]
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08369>
<http://www.stclairsw.com/HistoryHound/>
TidBITS#811/09-Jan-06
Apple releases new firmware for its AirPort Express and AirPort Extreme Base Stations every few weeks, which is testament to the difficulty of maintaining Wi-Fi and operating system compatibility while keeping the units stable. The latest firmware updates (5.7 for AirPort Extreme and 6.3 for AirPort Express) appeared last week. The issues addressed range from major - LAN performance with AirPort Extreme - to obscure, such as improved support for RADIUS authentication. RADIUS isn't obscure for those who use it, of course, and a bug I found in testing a server that used RADIUS for Wi-Fi logins may be fixed in this update.
<http://www.apple.com/support/ airport/>
As with previous base station firmware releases, I recommend waiting to install these upgrades for a few days or weeks unless you are experiencing a specific problem enumerated in the release details. There are routinely reports of firmware installation problems when upgrades are released, and Apple often ships a quick fix a few weeks later. [GF]
ToC
TidBITS#811/09-Jan-06
A store in Charleston, South Carolina, will accept good quality CDs in exchange for iPods. 130 used CDs that meet their quality criteria gets you a 30 GB iPod, for instance. That's under $3 a CD. The one variable is that if you live outside the area and ship them discs, you might have to pay for return shipping if they don't agree with their evaluation of your collection.
<http://www.millenniummusic.com/trades.html>
A quick tour of Half.com and Amazon.com's Marketplace section would probably help quite a bit. Many folks amassed enormous CD collections over the last two decades and listen to few of them now. I've tried to sell CDs in the past, but the peculiarities of the market supply now at Half.com et al. mean that popular CDs often have low prices because there are so many in circulation for resale. [GF]
ToC
by Charles Maurer
TidBITS#810/19-Dec-05
Photos on a computer may look nice, but they're hard to tape to a refrigerator door. Sooner or later, most people who buy a digital camera hanker for prints and a photo printer - and then for aspirin once they start trying to figure out which one to buy. Every model sounds wonderful and every article reviewing them says that different models are best. In this article I shall to try to sort out some of this confusion. I shall explain how photo printers work, what to look at and what to ignore, and how to get the most out of them. Toward the end I shall discuss my own purchasing decisions and review several printers. Along the way I'll mention some useful software as well.
Let's begin with some basic technology. Heat a transparent yellow ribbon until dye comes off and transfers to some paper, then heat a magenta ribbon, then a cyan ribbon, and finish off with a transparent one. The three dyes will form every colour and the transparent one will apply a protective film. Since the dyes are transparent, the colours will not be particularly dense, but no dots will be visible and the pictures will look like conventional photographs. This technology is called dye sublimation.
Dye-sublimation printers are the simplest to use and maintain. You merely snap in a cartridge containing a parti-coloured ribbon and replace the cartridge when the ribbon runs out. They cost more per print than ink-jet printers but only if you always print enough to use up your ink cartridges before they dry out. They cannot produce the ultimate in quality, but the prints resemble those from a commercial photofinisher and they are tough. They are ideal for snapshots and for 8" x 10" prints that will be handed around.
Although dye-sublimation prints can be very good, the highest quality possible comes from inks. Ink-jet printers use the same three colours but their inks are more opaque, so these printers do not superimpose the colours, they apply dots of colour adjacent to one another. This means that dark greys formed by three inks would have to incorporate yellow dots. Those yellow dots would limit contrast and soften edges, so ink-jet printers incorporate a fourth ink, black, into dark greys and blacks.
Cheap ink-jet photo printers use just those four inks: yellow, magenta, cyan and black. Those four are sufficient to form a complete range of colours and can be fine for snapshots, but if you look closely at light tones, you will see dots. That's because to make a light tone from a primary colour requires surrounding a brilliant dot with a lot of white. To avoid dots requires using light-coloured inks for light tones, so better photo printers add light magenta and light cyan to the other four.
Those six colours can be sufficient to produce colours approximating the state of the art, but to achieve this quality the inks must be formulated and applied with unusual subtlety and consistency. It is possible to do this. HP manages it with a line of printers that are self-calibrating for colour. However, it is more profitable to accept weaknesses in various colours and to design printers that incorporate additional inks to compensate. (The more colours required, the more ink will be wasted in cleaning and the greater the probability of waste from drying out. Printer companies' profits come primarily from the ink. According to The Economist, HP's profit margin on ink is 80 percent, a markup of five times the cost.) The most common extra colour is a light grey, which is used in lieu of any colours to avoid tints in black and white.
<http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3817267>
Inks can be made with either dyes or pigments. Dyes soak into the paper, pigments lay atop it. Both can be made comparably bright and durable, and for maximum durability, both require papers that are specially mated to the inks. This mating is not at any level we can see, it is intercourse at the level of physical chemistry. Dyes are more finicky about this than pigments, so pigment-based systems work with a wider range of papers, but pigments are more likely to clog printheads, so pigments tend to be more expensive to use.
All photo printers can print lines as fine as the human eye can see, and they can all produce a black that is reasonably black, so there is no physical reason for a difference among them in detail or in sharpness, assuming comparable paper and (more about this later) a comparable colour profile. However, whenever a printhead prints a line, it is following instructions from a printer driver. For large prints, the printer driver must tell the printhead to print more pixels than exist in the file. The driver interpolates those extra pixels by applying some form of running average. At a sharp transition - at the edge of a line - any form of averaging mixes the two sides of the transition, so a running average is guaranteed to blur edges. One averaging algorithm may suit one photo better than another, so one printer may appear to be sharper on any given test.
Extracting maximum sharpness from a printer requires using a more sophisticated interpolating algorithm than any printer driver is likely to employ. For the Mac, the best interpolator I know of is PhotoZoom Pro. (There is also a basic version of PhotoZoom, but its sharpening cannot be switched off, so it cannot be used with FocusMagic, FocusFixer or the "smart sharpen" feature of Photoshop CS2.)
<http://www.benvista.com/main/content/content.php?page=ourproducts& section=photozoompro_1>
To achieve maximum sharpness, you need to feed the printer files that have been interpolated to the resolution that it can handle best. For a dye-sub printer that resolution is the number that is advertised, typically 300 dpi (dots per inch) or 314 dpi. For an ink-jet printer it will be a similar number but there is no way to ascertain it from the printer's advertised specs. To determine the effective resolution of a printer, I prepared (and George Reis cleaned up) a set of test files (linked below). Follow the instructions on the image and print the files without scaling them to fit the paper. There is a good chance that 288 dpi or 300 dpi will look the best.
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/PrinterSharpnessTest.zip>
Note, by the way, that the finest resolution of a printer may not give the best photographs. Different resolutions are likely to produce different densities of ink on the page, which can have unpredictable effects. You'll need to try different settings on photos to see which you like the best.
At first blush it seems as though the first factor in choosing a photo printer ought to be its capability to reproduce colours. However, there is no practical way to determine this because there is no accurate way to measure colour, as I noted in "Colour & Computers" in TidBITS-749_. Moreover, even if there were a way to measure colours, different dyes and pigments produce different sets of colour, so accurate reproduction would still be a chimera.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07840>
To understand why, let's pretend that it is possible to measure colour accurately and invent some measurements. Let's say that the sensor in your camera can produce voltages in response to 95 units of red, 100 of green and 103 of blue, and let's say that the inks of your printer can generate 90 units of red, 101 of green and 122 of blue. How can do you translate accurately the camera's response into the printer's? How do you translate 95, 100 and 103 into 90, 101 and 122?
To generate the colours on a printer (or on a monitor), somebody sits down at a computer and draws up tables that try make that kind of equation. Somebody figures out what mixtures of colour look best overall - whether it's best to mute everything to the limit of the printer's red and keep all the colours proportional or whether it's best to keep some of them proportional but give the blues full rein. The process is not mathematical, it is cooking fudge or translating poetry from Greek to Portuguese. Inevitably the results will look better in one circumstance than another, depending upon the subject, the room light and - critically - the surroundings, for the context of an object is critical to the colour we perceive. Without contextual cues we would see red instead of brown.
Once somebody comes up with a scheme for equating these colours, he puts the tables into an application or the printer driver or the operating system, where menus enable you to access them. Usually, although not always, the colour-equating tables fit a standard format of the International Color Consortium and thus are called ICC profiles. Most companies selling hardware provide ICC profiles for their hardware, and so do third parties. The Macintosh also comes with some and Photoshop installs a lot of them. The multiplicity of profiles and their means of access is thoroughly confusing, but you need to sort it all out. You need to sort it out not only because you want to find the right one to use, but also because there is nothing to prevent you from instructing the computer to apply multiple profiles atop one another, which yields a mess. You need to determine the source of each profile that appeared on your drive and experiment to find the best ones for your purposes and the most convenient way to assign them. You will probably tear out some of your hair doing this - mine is decidedly thinner now - but at least in the future you will spend less time at the barbershop.
Whenever you compare prints from different printers, you are actually not comparing the printers so much as colour-equating tables. Moreover, since no colour-equating table can always be optimal, a printer that looks better with a landscape may look worse with a portrait. From what I have seen, every photo printer on the market is capable of good results if the colour-equating tables are appropriate, but no colour-equating table can always be appropriate. On top of that, printers are mechanical devices that inevitably differ slightly in ways that affect the application of ink. Because of these differences, any two printers of the same model, using the same colour profile, are likely to give different results (unless the printers calibrate themselves to a uniform standard, as a few HP printers do). For these reasons, when shopping for a printer, I can see no reason to compare the colouration of different prints.
To get the best results out of any printer you need to control the colours yourself. This requires making the monitor's colours resemble the printer's colours closely enough that by controlling the one you can control the other. To achieve the optimum resemblance between monitor and print requires custom-made colour profiles for your monitor and/or printer. Many people will be pleased to take your money to make these profiles or to sell you special hardware to help you make your own. If you have several employees running several machines, then you may want to pay them to achieve a consistent result, but for most people there is no need. I suggest that you make page-sized prints from the first link below using your print driver's built-in defaults and any additional ICC profile that may have come with the printer. If you have a choice, keep the nicest of them and use that profile for all your work. Next use the $19 SuperCal to calibrate your monitor. Eventually SuperCal will ask you to balance the colours on a portrait: when it does this, substitute the test file for the portrait and make that test file match your print as best you can. When you make the best match, your monitor will be calibrated as well as it can be - calibrated especially to your eye and to the colours that you deem the most important.
<http://www.drycreekphoto.com/tools/test_images/DCP-TestImage.zip>
<http://www.bergdesign.com/supercal/>
You must still learn how the pictures on the monitor translate into prints. This will vary with the qualities of your printer, your monitor, and your eye. It is not a physical match, it is a perceptual approximation that must be learned and that interacts with the size of the print. Also, to compare prints properly to the monitor, you must have a suitable lamp. Use either an old desk lamp that combines a circular fluorescent lamp with an ordinary 60-watt bulb, or buy a fluorescent tube that meets graphic-arts standards (like one in the Ott-Lite TrueColor line) and put it in a cheap fixture. Use this lamp when you calibrate your monitor.
<http://www.ottlite.com/productsview.asp?product_type=bulb& product_phosphor=truecolor&category=truecolor>
If all of this sounds less precise than advertisements promise - well, it is less precise. It is so imprecise that Photoshop and Preview offer two different matches of monitor to print, the ordinary way you use while editing and a soft proof. The colours on your screen look one way when you are concentrating on them alone and another way when you are comparing them directly to a sheet of paper. Conventional techniques for profiling monitors implicitly assume the former; soft proofing applies an alternative set of colour-matching tables geared to the latter. If you profile your monitor as I suggested, you will see soft proofs all the time.
One last parameter that causes confusion is colour space. Colour space is the gamut of colours "understood" by your computer. It is a theoretical range of colours denoted by numbers. If you want to match a particular colour, then if you could measure it accurately, you could denote it by a specific number, and if your printer could produce colours accurately, you could specify that number to reproduce it. This technique can be useful when trying to print a catalogue (although you know how useful if you have ever ordered clothing from one) but it bears no relevance to pictorial photography. As I explained last week in "Reality and Digital Pictures," the eye interprets contrasts, not absolutes. If your camera records a red of one-half its maximum, then it would sensibly be printed as approximately one-half of your printer's maximum, however red that happens to be.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08365>
If your printer offers profiles for different colour spaces and they give different results when used with the appropriate colour space, that is not because the colour space is different, it's because the different colour-matching tables match colours differently. This is likely to happen because different colour spaces are used in different markets. Most people tend to print small pictures and stick to their computer's built-in colour space of sRGB; professional photographers tend to print larger pictures and service the graphic-arts industry, which commonly uses Adobe RGB. Smaller pictures tend to benefit from more punch at the expense of subtle gradations in mid-tones; larger pictures tend to benefit from more gradual transitions across the tonal spectrum. In any case, what matters for prints is the colour profile, not the colour space. Use whatever combination of colour space and colour profile that gives the results you prefer. If in doubt, choose sRGB. It is the industry's standard so its use is likely to cause fewer complications.
Although most photos are in colour, many pictures are more effective in black and white. Most printers produce black-and-white prints in the same way they produce colour prints. The only difference is that the computer instructs the printer to print equal amounts of all three colours at each intensity. Unfortunately, since there is no way to measure colour, there is no way to generate equal amounts of three colours at every intensity, so the greys inevitably sport tints. Printing with black ink alone is not satisfactory because it looks spotty wherever it is applied thinly enough to form light greys.
The best and most expensive workaround is to print with several shades of black and grey. Some of the latest Epson and HP printers do this. Second-best is to use the normal inks but balance them differently, fudging the balance in a way that may produce bizarre colours but will produce greys that look more consistent to more people under more circumstances. This approach requires more consistency than is available from most printers but it can be done well with the models from HP with self-calibrating colour.
As I mentioned earlier, for maximum life expectancy, ink-jet paper needs to be mated to the ink at the level of physical chemistry. Tables you can find at the link below show whopping differences in longevity from one paper to another. Other important differences are physical toughness. For example, Epson's best glossy is easier to crease and rip than HP's, which is weaker still than the paper for the Olympus P-440 dye-sublimation printer. Also - this is usually less important - prints on some papers are highly soluble in water unless sprayed with lacquer. HP's paper is bad in this regard, Epson's is better, dye-sub paper is excellent.
<http://www.wilhelm-research.com/>
The most obvious attribute of photographic paper is its surface. If you want to maximize attention on the image, then you want no texture on the surface to distract the eye. If you want to maximize the density and saturation of colours, then you want no diffuse glare to wash them out, you want the glare localized enough that you can adjust your position to let your eyes can see around it. In short, to bring out the most from a photograph, the paper should be smooth and glossy, just diffuse enough to prevent it from looking like a mirror.
If this doesn't square with the notion that fine art requires a matte finish - well, walk around an art museum and look at the pictures on the walls. Every picture done on paper will show a glossy surface. The paper may be matte but at normal viewing distances, the surface you notice is the surface of glass, glass in a picture frame. Curators could use so-called non-glare glass, which has a matte finish, but they do not because diffuse glare detracts more than specular glare. For the same reason, oil paintings are coated with glossy or semigloss varnish, not matte.
Most people print photos on paper that's cut into sheets but if you print a lot, you might consider using paper that comes on a roll. Roll paper is half the price of sheets. The pictures come out curled, but the curl is easy to tame. Just let prints sit overnight rolled backwards around a tube sandwiched between two sheets of 10-mil polycarbonate.
When printing a lot of pictures I find the $50 application Portraits & Prints Pro to be invaluable. Like several other applications, it employs templates for printing pictures, but Portraits & Prints Pro differs in enabling a user to create a template of any size. If the template is for one picture filling one sheet of paper, then you don't need to set Page Layout for each picture, and large templates allow gang-printing pictures on roll paper. Unfortunately, Portraits & Prints is not particularly stable. I have learned to save my work after every change.
<http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/Portraits_Prints/pnp_overview.html>
Prints look surprisingly different when enlarged to different extents. To see an example of this, download the two files below to your hard disk, launch Preview, select them both, then drag them atop Preview's Dock icon. This opens them in two pages, so that you can flip between them to make an instantaneous comparison. Make sure Actual Size is selected in the View menu, switch to the larger image, and then click the green zoom button to make the window the same size as the image. Look at the larger picture with your eye as far from the screen as the diameter of the photo - that is the perspective I intended - and then, without moving or looking away, click to the smaller image. The spider suddenly becomes flatter in colour, flatter in contrast, and flatter in depth. In addition, you can no longer see many strands of the web and the background becomes more distracting.
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/00_03557_1200x800.jpg>
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/00_03557_600x400.jpg>
To the eye, the size of a photo is not centimetres or inches, it is the proportion of the visual field that it fills, the visual angle. Since angular size is what matters, I like to make my pictures large enough that people will usually view them from similar angles. Since I am now taking pictures for pleasure, not to fill holes in advertising layouts, I aim for the size that is optimal perceptually, which is about 45 degrees, the same distance as the picture's diameter. I have found this not to be practical with page-sized prints because unless I am showing them to a single person sitting at a desk, they end up being viewed from too far away. My normal size is now 11" x 17" (with broad borders). This is a standard size in North America, roughly equivalent to A3 elsewhere, the size of a tabloid newspaper. For this size the diagonal is close to 20" (50 cm) and the prints are large enough that two or three people can and will naturally arrange themselves to see them from reasonably close to that distance. It strikes me as the point of diminishing returns. Compared to the next larger size, usually 13" x 19" or A3+, 11" x 17" prints are more economical and less awkward to handle yet hardly different in effect.
Pictures larger than that must be hung on a wall, which introduces another factor: people sometimes walk up to them closely, to examine details. When they do, they will always come to a point where the detail breaks up. The natural result is disappointment. Oil paintings let down the viewer gently by breaking up into brush strokes that add nothing to the detail but suggest or complement it or provide some interest in their own right. In contrast, photographs usually become grainy and blurred. To make a very large photograph that does not disappoint up close requires the photographic equivalent of brush strokes - it requires concentrating the lowest level of detail into pieces that suggest the normal appearance. This can be done digitally.
You can see seven different approaches to this in the examples linked below. Each of these photos is blown up to show on your monitor approximately the detail that you would see in a 20" x 30" (50 cm x 75 cm) print. Reduced to 33 percent, they will show approximately the detail you would see at a normal viewing distance. For comparison, I preceded those seven with a picture scanned from film, from a 2-1/4" x 3-1/4" (6 cm x 9 cm) transparency. That one I took for a publicity poster with a small view camera (and supplied the sunrise with electronic flash).
Film
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/0_feedingchickens.jpg>Naturalistic portrait, coarse skin
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/1_02684.jpg>Naturalistic portrait, smooth skin
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/2_02742.jpg>Impressionistic portrait
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/3_04247.jpg>Naturalistic landscape
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/4_03816.jpg>Impressionistic landscape
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/5_03122.jpg>Motion
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/6_02626.jpg>Fine detail
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/7_03557.jpg>
One thing that is not required for large blow-ups is extreme resolution. Of these eight pictures, the scan from film blows up the least well yet it resolves finer lines than any of the others. The seven digital images are enlarged to double their original size, so the finest lines any of them can possibly resolve are two pixels thick, yet this URL shows the scanned image resolves one-pixel lines:
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/810/8_feedingchickensmagnified.jpg>
All of those digital images came from a Foveon sensor with black- and-white resolution comparable to a conventional Bayer sensor advertised as six megapixels. (Manufacturers' megapixel claims are grossly misleading. See "Sense & Sensors in Digital Photography" in TidBITS-751_ and the errata at the second link below for background on sensors and a realistic discussion of resolution.) The images enlarge well not because they have extreme resolution but because they lack noise, because minuscule details have clear contrast, and because lines remain distinct even where contrast is low. To minimize noise and to control local contrast I used Noise Ninja; to control edges I used "Smart Sharpening" in Photoshop CS2 or unsharp masking in PhotoZoom Pro, either with or without PhotoZoom Pro's anti-aliasing. Images from the Foveon sensor are particularly well suited to this treatment because their microstructure is uniquely sharp.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07860>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07906>
<http://www.picturecode.com/>
The first digital camera I bought was a pocket-sized point-and-shoot. From it, I could not see printing anything larger than a postcard. Since my usage would be occasional, I did not want an ink-jet printer with cartridges and heads that would dry out. Instead I bought a dye-sublimation printer. I could find no sensible way to compare the various offerings, except on price, so I bought the cheapest one that I could find in a local shop, both the cheapest to purchase and the cheapest to feed. It happened to be a Canon CP-200. It is simple to use, and it produces post-card sized prints with colouration that is appropriate for their size. I have no complaints with this printer and still keep it around because it does a nice job and because for the odd small print, I prefer to use it than to change the paper in a larger printer.
When I bought a digital SLR, I bought a larger printer. I still expected to use it erratically, so I still did not want an ink- jet, but this time I wanted the largest dye-sublimation printer that I could buy. Two were available that could print 8" x 10" prints. Again I could find no sensible way to compare them. Since both were used almost exclusively by professionals, I had to assume that either one would do, so I bought the cheaper, an Olympus P-440. I described this printer last year in "Colour & Computers" in TidBITS-749_. I shall not repeat myself here except to say that it also works well. It comes with a ColorSync profile that strikes me as mediocre under most circumstances, but the printer driver offers two good non-ColorSync presets, a normal one geared toward warm pictures of people and another one that intensifies greens and is better for scenery.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07840>
I did not expect to replace the Olympus printer but the law of unintended consequences prevailed. The better I got to know the Foveon sensor in my SLR, the more impressed I became with its capabilities. I found myself taking pictures that would have been inconceivable with film. So many photographic horizons opened up that for the first time in 30 years I began to haul along a camera bag while travelling on holiday. Since I happened to be visiting some unusual places, I ended up with a lot of photos that are not your brother-in-law's snapshots. I wanted to be able to print them large enough to share comfortably with other people and to be able to print big ones cheaply enough to feel comfortable giving them away to friends. In short, the Foveon sensor turned out to be so good that it led me to shop for a larger printer.
I also wanted a better printer for black-and-white images. One weakness of the Olympus, like most digital printers designed for colour, is its handling of black and white. I wanted to be able to print black-and-white enlargements like the ones I used to get from my enlarger. For this reason I looked first at printers that offer light grey ink, but I did not like any of them. HP's consumer models with grey ink are very attractive, especially the 13" x 19" Photosmart 8750. This supplies almost every feature that anybody could want, including an Ethernet port, at a remarkably reasonable price ($500). However, it is also slow, and I really did want something larger.
Epson offers larger and faster models with grey ink, but they can cost an outlandish amount to feed. Epson's printheads are notorious for drying out, cleaning them uses a significant amount of ink, changing one cartridge wastes a lot of ink from all of them, and Epson states the life expectancy of an opened cartridge to be only six months. If you make prints constantly, then an Epson's running costs might become reasonable, but if you print infrequently or erratically - well, for eight ink cartridges replaced twice annually at $70 each, the guaranteed minimum cost of ink is $1,120 per year. (Although those figures are for large printers used by pros, the same problems are likely to be evinced at a smaller scale by smaller models. I'll talk more about consumer printers below.)
Aside from those printers, the only ones well suited for black and white are three professional HP models that are self-calibrating for colour: the Designjets 30, 90 and 130 ($700, $1,000 and $1,300 without Ethernet ports or roll-paper feeds). These three are the same except for the maximum width of paper they will handle, which is 13", 18" and 24" (34 cm, 46 cm and 60 cm) respectively. Compared to Epson's equivalents, their ink costs slightly less per drop, changing a cartridge wastes no ink, the cartridges hold less ink so that intermittent use is less likely to see cartridges dry out, cleaning is rarely necessary and uses negligible amounts of ink, and the printheads are not guaranteed to dry out twice a year. On top of that, their purchase price is less. Epson's 17" (43 cm) Stylus Pro 4800 costs $2,000. The 18" Designjet 90 equipped similarly costs $1,500.
I was tempted by the 13" Designjet 30, because compared to the Photosmart 8750 it is much faster, it costs only $200 more to buy and, as we shall see below, it promised to save that in running costs in a few months. The Designjet 30 would have been the most sensible choice because I would only occasionally want to print larger pictures and it would be cheaper to send them out than to buy a larger printer. Indeed, I wouldn't even need to send them out because I have after-hours access to a 44" (1.1 m) Epson. However, whenever I have used that Epson, I have found it awkward to rebalance the colours to take full advantage of it. After a lot of dithering I decided to buy the largest Designjet with a roll-paper feeder and an Ethernet card (model 130nr, $1,900).
For my erratic usage at home, the difference in purchase price and running costs between HP Designjets and similarly sized Epsons promised to be so extreme that every other consideration paled by comparison. However, if I were printing daily in a business, then the running costs would be more similar and I would have considered other factors. The Epsons are more heavily built and can handle more kinds of paper (although I happen to like one of HP's papers better than any of Epson's), and HP's papers are more easily damaged by water. On the other hand, HP's best glossy and semi-gloss papers are stronger and stiffer than Epson's.
The Designjets come with two sets of colour-matching tables, a set of ICC profiles buried somewhere in /Library/Printers/hp/ and a set of proprietary profiles accessible only through the Print dialog. They appear in the Print dialog as ColorSmart/sRGB. The two sets give slightly different results. ColorSmart/sRGB seems more suited to snapshots but I prefer the ICC profiles for large prints. Both work well for sRGB and Adobe RGB alike. The printer also handles black-and-white images well using a different profile, a profile that fudges greys instead of colour. HP's Web site offers a broad choice of profiles for black and white free for the downloading. You can choose whatever tint that you like. Alternatively, Neil Snape sells profiles to produce prints on the Designjets 30/90/130 that are photometrically equivalent to black and whites from the 8750. I prefer his.
The weak part of the Designjet 130nr is the pair of paper feeds on the rear, the feed designed for rolls and a feed just above it that can be used for cut-offs from rolls or for paper too stiff to be fed in through the normal sheet-feeders in front. The printer grabs and feeds the paper automatically but this mechanism is fussier than a two-year-old child. There ought to be some manual way to get the paper started, but there is none. This is particularly problematic if you need to rip the paper to clear a jam, because the printer wants the end of the paper to be cut dead square. Indeed, sometimes it has deemed an end that it trimmed itself to be out of square.
For most people even the Designjet 30 will be too expensive but HP makes a range of consumer photo printers using similar technology that ought to give similar results. These are models with at least six colours that use cartridges from this list: 84, 85, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99 and 100. As I mentioned, the Photosmart 8750 Professional is particularly interesting. According to people who own both of these printers, their prints are not quite identical but are so close as to make no difference. Their speed and running costs are very different, however.
Although HP calls the Photosmart 8750 "Professional", anybody in business would happily pay $200 more for the Designjet 30, because the extra cost would rapidly be recouped in lower running costs. To print a colour photo on good photo paper with 90 percent coverage (which is probably representative of the real world), HP claims the cost of ink consumption and printhead wear on a Designjet to average $1.01 per square foot. That does not count wastage, but there is virtually no wastage with the Designjets. HP's numbers seem in line with others' measurements and with my own usage, so I am prepared to believe them. With a similar rate of ink consumption by volume, the equivalent figure for the Photosmart 8750 calculates to be $2.03, but the cost would in fact be even greater, because the Designjets use one colour per cartridge while the 8750 uses three: since the three colours will never be consumed at the same rate, a certain amount of waste is guaranteed with the Photosmart 8750.
<http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00238851>
I have been able to find no comparable information for any printers by Epson. Epson does provide some specifications, but they are highly misleading because they are based on 40 percent ink coverage and take no account of cleaning cycles. A realistic average coverage is double that, and cleaning cycles can waste more ink than printing. Depending upon how often you clean a consumer Epson printer - which can mean how often you switch it on - it may cost less for ink than HP's equivalent or it may cost a good deal more.
In sum, for most people and most purposes there is no valid way to compare print quality - obvious differences in quality come primarily from the photographer, not the printer - so I cannot see any reason to try to compare print quality when choosing a photo printer. Any modern ink-jet printer with at least six colours ought to be capable of excellent results, as should any dye-sublimation printer. I also have no idea how to tell what printer is likely to be more reliable and durable than another. I don't even know how to begin to find out, so I cannot see any reason to worry about that either. It seems to me that the only discernible differences among photo printers are (1) size and speed, (3) durability of the prints (as tested by Wilhelm Imaging) and (3) running costs.
Of these three, running costs are likely to be the most important criterion. It is not possible to learn how to make good prints without making a lot of bad ones. A print ought to be cheap enough that you won't mind throwing it away and trying again. Moreover, if you don't print a picture because the ink dried out and you don't want to buy another set of cartridges because you don't expect to use them up either - well, it does not matter how many centuries the photograph might have lasted if you never print the thing, and the printer's size and speed become immaterial as well. Good ink-jet photo printers can produce stunning results but they are not always practical. If you do not expect to print a lot, consider a dye-sublimation printer instead.
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reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)
December 15, 2005 -- President Richard Rollins called the meeting to order at 7:22 PM. At this time we had one new person so Richard did the traditional introduction of officers. New guy said the link to the meeting location map doesn't work. Kevin Hisel said he'd fix that.
Richard announced that he had added WEP key protection to meeting router, so there was a little housekeeping work to get everyone connected.
Richard then talked about Sony's rootkit legal problem and the problems it was causing. Richard chalked it up to Sheer arrogance of a large corporation. Kevin checked out "Sony sucks" on Google to everyone's amusement.
Rich Hall said he had switched from McAfree to AVG. He said he had initially experienced a crashing problem off of the version on Richard's CD, but by uninstalling and reinstalling he was able to fix that. The new version fixes the problem.
Our new guest (Joe Dewalt) asked a question about his sister's G4. She wants to install some new software but she can't. It's asking for the admin password and won't let her install anything because she doesn't remember it. Emil said that if she goes to the Upper lefthand menu option to reset password, it will allow here to just overwrite it with a new one. See
<http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_to_reset_my_mac_os_x_admin_root_password.html>
Mike Latinovich said wanted CUCUG magnets in the CUCUG store to fix bad memory. Inside joke there folks.
It was suggested that at the Mac Expo in January, Apple may release its new PC based Minis and Powerbooks. Apple has sold 1.5 million video iPods since September. NBC is now selling shows for it.
Harold Ravlin commented on the new version of Firefox 1.5. He said Ad Block doesn't. Mike Latinovich recommended Opera.
Harold has one of the new quad Macs.
Someone recommended the web site Grimthing.com.
Mike brought up the Xbox 360. A discussion followed. The 360 was launched in all three major territories at the same time. That's why there's been a shortage of units. Was this a sales ploy? Playing up pent up demand as marketing ploy? Probably. Microsoft is losing money on each hardware unit and is hoping to make it up on software and add-ons. Ed Sere, George Krumins, Mike Latinovich, Kevin Hisel, and Richard Rollins all contributed to this discussion. One of the final conclusions was, however, that in HD resolution, the graphics are amazing.
Another guest joined us, Keith Peregrin.
At this point in the meeting, the floor was opened for nominations for club officers. There being none, Edwin Hadley moved and Norris Hansell seconded contining with the current regime. The woted was by acclimation. Those elected as CUCUG officers for 2006 are:
President: Richard Rollins Vice-President: Emil Cobb Secretary: Kevin Hopkins Treasurer: Richard Hall Corporate Agent: Kevin Hisel
Treasurer Richard Hall concluded the formal portion of the December Annual Meeting by giving the Treasure's report. Bottom line, we finished the year down by $184 due to one unexpected corporate expense.
ToC
reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)
The December meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, December 20, 2005, at 7PM, at Kevin Hisel's house. (For anyone wishing to attend, which is encouraged, by the way - the address and phone number are both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Emil Cobb, Kevin Hisel, Kevin Hopkins, and Rich Hall.
Emil Cobb: Emil announced that Richard Rollins wouldn't be here tonight. He then reported that we had 22 attendees at the December General Meeting. We had two new guests show up.
Rich Hall: Rich said he gave the Treasure's Report at the General Meeting. Since then six people joined the group. We finished the the year down $104. The corporation refile fee of $200 was the only unexpected expense. Rich then talked about his updating of Quicken and the new reports it can generate. Rich gave a detailed report of our interest income over the years.
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin had nothing new to report.
Emil Cobb: Continuing, Emil said that Richard Rollins will do Secure Internet Tunneling at the next PC SIG. This is particularly useful if you do any wireless connecting at Internet cafes which are not secure. Emil said Edwin Hadley will be doing an audio program for the Mac SIG. Emil will have a labelling program available on CD. It uses Avery templates.
Kevin Hisel: Kevin said he needed authorization to renew our web hosting for another year. Kevin said our service has been reliable and our forums have "just worked." Vice President Cobb authorized the expenditure.
ToC
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The FBC-CS is located at 1602 N. Prospect Avenue in Savoy, on the NE corner of Burwash and Prospect. To get to the the First Baptist Church from Champaign or Urbana, take Prospect Avenue south. Setting the trip meter in your car to zero at the corner of Kirby/Florida and Prospect in Champaign (Marathon station on the SW corner), you only go 1.6 miles south. Windsor will be at the one mile mark. The Savoy village sign (on the right) will be at the 1.4 mile mark. Burwash is at the 1.6 mile mark. The Windsor of Savoy retirement community is just to the south; Burwash Park is to the east. Turn east (left) on Burwash. The FBC-CS parking lot entrance is on the north (left) side of Burwash. Enter by the double doors at the eastern end of the building's south side. A map can be found on the CUCUG website at http://www.cucug.org/meeting.html. The First Baptist Church of Champaign is also on the web at http://www.fbc-cs.org .
Membership dues for individuals are $20 annually; prorated to $10 at mid year.
Our monthly newsletter, the Status Register, is delivered by email. All recent editions are available on our WWW site. To initiate a user group exchange, just send us your newsletter or contact our editor via email. As a matter of CUCUG policy, an exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.
For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers (all at area code 217):
President/WinSIG: Richard Rollins 469-2616 Vice-Pres/MacSIG: Emil Cobb 398-0149 e-cobb@uiuc.edu Secretary/Editor: Kevin Hopkins 356-5026 kh2@uiuc.edu Treasurer: Richard Hall 344-8687 rjhall1@uiuc.edu Corp.Agent/Web: Kevin Hisel 352-1002 submitcomments.html Linux SIG: Phil Wall 352-5442 phil.wall@pobox.com
Email us at http://www.cucug.org/ submitcomments.html, visit our web site at http://www.cucug.org/, or join in our online forums at http://www.cucug.org/starship/ .
