Really? A comment on the page I linked said: > The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page, but they’ve done some work on preventing problems. Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed thesis is valid: with historical art…
Really? A comment on the page I linked said: > The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page, but they’ve done some work on preventing problems. Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed thesis is valid: with historical art…
I assure you, I hate that thing. It has dogged me and the Internet Archive for over a decade. It is not just vaporware, but dangerous.
In the late 1990's I was curating a project to scan in every LEGO instruction and catalog booklet. One big problem was Moiré patterns. 300dpi seemed to maximize the artifacts and higher dpi resulted in images that were too large to use on typical displays of the time (not to mention most users were on 28-56kbps modems!) I settled on recommending 100-150dpi which eliminated most of the artifacts but still gave usable image size/detail.
Then there were concerns about what LEGO (lawyers) would think about it. Because of this it originally didn't have thumbnails or any html on that part of the site. Just images in a directory structure exposed by mod_autoindex which give it a very utilitarian, non-commercial feel. Those fears were soon put to rest when I learned that LEGO customer service was referring people to the site when customers called in to request replacements for lost instructions.
This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…
The ads were much more than just "new version of the old thing" (motherboards, RAM, sound cards, video cards). About every issue, there would be something (or more than one) that I never even imagined you could do with a computer (or, usually, make into a computer peripheral). It was mind blowing to see, over and over, here was something completely new (or at least new to me). And there was something I'd seen before for less money, and something I'd seen before with better performance. Over and over, month after month. It was like watching the future on fast-forward.
I buy Computer Shopper for the articles - said no one ever.
That must be the Holy Grail of publishing. You're buying it for the ads. So nobody complains that it's packed absolutely full of ads. And they're selling it to you. That's amazing. (And it was true! We did want to see the ads!)
Every time I see an archival process like this I'm amazed at all the effort and wonder if we'll ever get something like the process described in "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge where a library is archived by essentially shredding the books and blowing that shredded material through a tube stuffed with high speed high quality cameras and just gluing them all back together in software. It's a very fun book that cranks up to a surprisingly exciting ending.
Sometime I feel sad that younger generations won’t have the excitements of early days of PC and sometimes I feel they might be better off spending their time on something that is more productive. One thing for sure, that era is gone and all The most of the enablers of that era are also history now. Amount of time I spend reading and researching which motherboard and RAM would best fit together makes me smile from tim…
1983: you can use it as a word processor
2023: give it a prompt and it will write it on demand