Random Ramblings

Here's one that just trolling for some controversy ...

In the IEEE Spectrum, columnist Robert W. Lucky comments that "The trouble with digital photograpy begins with the mind-set that it's free, prompting us to take a multitude of thoughtless pictures ... and the few good pictures that should be left to posterity are lost in a glut of trivia."

What do you think? On the one hand, cheap and easy-to-use digital photos are great for capturing those candids ... but how do you sort out the good from the bad? How many of you delete the bad photos right away? How often do you just keep them all since hard-disk space is so cheap? Do you have any suggestions for indexing photos or otherwise selecting the "good" from the "bad"?

Enquiring minds want to know!!

From IEEE Spectrum: due to deregulation in the French telephone market, many new companies are starting to offer very cheap voice+internet packages ... free.fr offers 15Mbps with 112 digital TV channels and unlimited voice-over-IP phone calls for around $36 per month. In the US, you can get 10-15Mbps with 170 digital TV channels and unlimited phone calls for around $100 per month.

An interesting comparison in the article: the French version of the FCC has 7 members with 3 graduates of Ecole Polytechnique (equivalent to MIT), and a fourth who taught at Ecole; other gov't telecomm officials include a president of a engineering college, an "engineer in chief" of a telecomm company, another "general engineer" in telecomm, and a doctor of mathematics and economics. By comparison, the US' FCC has four members: two are lawyers and two are historians.

The article also notes that the French company, Alcatel, recently "merged" with Lucent (former Bell Labs) -- but everyone now assumes Alcatel will be the dominant partner. This effectively means that the French now control the venerable Bell Labs, what used to be one of the world's premier research organizations.

It's just kinda sad.