Archive for July 16th, 2008
Vegan Zombie T-Shirt at Threadless
This awesome t-shirt is part of some contest at Threadless.
Tags: T-Shirts, Threadless, Zombies
Tom Weaver on ‘New’ X-Files DVD Set
In an incredibly lame marketing move, 20th Century Fox has released a new DVD collection of X-Files episodes, The X-Files: Revelation. Supposedly the 8 episodes on the $22.98 disc were selected because they are “essential viewing for fans who want to fully experience all the thrills, mysteries and nuances of the upcoming theatrical movie.”
Starlog’s Tom Weaver nicely sums up this idiocy in his monthly column on new DVD releases,
Explore the limits of your spending power when Fox releases the new compiliation The X-Files: Revelation ($22.98), eight episodes handpicked by Chris Carter. He does an introduction for each one, noting its relevance to the new film. Perhaps he’ll explain why he thinks we’ll re-buy these eight episodes just for his introductions!
Tags: Starlog, The X-Files, Tom Weaver
Study of JPEG 2000 Format for Long Term Preservation of Digital Images
Paolo Buonora and Franco Liberati have written an interesting study in D-Lib advocating for the use of the JPEG 2000 format as an archival tool for digital preservation of images. The abstract of their study says,
Digital preservation requires a strategy for the storage of large quantities of data, which increases dramatically when dealing with high resolution images. Typically, decision-makers must choose whether to keep terabytes of images in their original TIFF format or compress them. This can be a very difficult decision: to lose visual information though compression could be a waste of the money expended in the creation of the digital assets; however, by choosing to compress, the costs of storage will be reduced. Wavelet compression of JPEG 2000 produces a high quality image: it is an acceptable alternative to TIFF and a good strategy for the storage of large image assets.
Moreover, JPEG 2000 may be considered a format that can guarantee an efficient robustness to bit errors and offers a valid quality with transmission or physical errors: this point of view is confirmed by the case study results that we report in this article, concerning image quality after occurrence of random errors by a comparison among different file formats. Easy tools and freeware software can be used to improve format robustness by duplicating file headers inside or outside the image file format, enhancing the role of JPEG 2000 as a new archival format for high quality images.
Tags: D-Lib, Digital Preservation, Franco Liberati, JPEG 2000, Paolo Buonora