[Openicc] Drop size calibration

[edmund ronald]

 Robert,

 All the points you make are perfectly valid; whether you can live
with a given closed piece of equipment is a matter of point of view.

 My point of view regarding measuring equipment is that you are really
paying for the manufacturer's quality control and the trust you place
in that entity. Certification, and measurement repeatability  is where
the value lies,  and in the reputation of reduced inter-instrument
variation.

 I regularly get angry at not being able to hack the various items I
own easily - although like most of those on the list I have been known
to tamper with some of my stuff. However, the measurement instruments
I own I don't want to tamper with - as soon as I lose traceability
(certification) they are useless.

 There are analogous situations, I believe, in many embedded systems -
would you really trust the brakes in your car if they were dependent
on a Linux OS upgrade or patch ? I don't mean that I wouldn't prefer
open-source braking code, I do mean that I wouldn't want to entrust
the actual compilation of an upgrade to any entity outside the
engineers who are working at the company making the braking system and
who would be prepared to test the braking performance against their
own benchmarks.

Edmund







On Feb 6, 2008 1:09 AM, Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Well, maybe if you actually trust the manufacturer to maintain support
> for that long.  All that needs to happen is for Microsoft, or some
> Microsoft ally, to buy the company, and Linux support goes away.  And
> even if that doesn't happen, what happens if the company goes out of
> business?
>
> As far as embedded devices in cameras go, there was a Russian guy, I
> forget his name, who hacked the firmware of the Canon Digital Rebel to
> add a bunch of features from the 10D (Canon was trying to maintain
> price separation -- while the hardware of the 10D and Rebel wasn't
> identical, a lot of the missing features in the Rebel were simply
> software things).  Yup, I installed it.  Canon learned, and the Rebel
> XT was a lot more like the 20D in terms of software features.
>
> (As far as "communicate with me by means of image files" goes, one of
> the unlocked features allowed me to choose which size and quality of
> JPEG would be stored along with RAW files.  The standard Canon
> firmware stored a medium size standard quality JPEG.  Storing no JPEG
> at all, or storing a large fine JPEG, were two of the more useful
> settings of that particular feature.)
>
> You're surely also aware that the iPhone has been hacked, as has the
> iPod, and just about everything else under the sun.
>
> But then again, when I was in college I was one of the student system
> programmers at Project Athena.  Our nickname was the Watchmakers.
> Read _The Mote in God's Eye_, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, for
> that particular reference :-)  Hackito ergo sum!
>
>
> --
> Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>
>
> Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
> Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
> Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
>
> "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
> --Eric Crampton
>