The Poor Man's Triple Headed Display
ccs.neu.edu
ccs.neu.edu
In fact we had 4 monitors running off of the one Amiga. We had graphics cards that gave us a convenient byte-per-pixel display for polygons and scaled images on the main screen, and three small Mono monitors for instrument display. The instrument displays were each drawn into a single bitplane and a copper-list-of-doom mixed them with a noise bitmap and other failure modes to make a single rgb image which drove the three mono displays. The screens would then flicker, roll, and fade according to their damage status and all we had to worry about is drawing to the bitmap.
Back in the day, I got my hands on an old B&W workstation monitor. At the time, it was comparatively large, and very sharp, but it only had a single coax connection on the back, which accepted a signal with embedded timing information. I had to make an adapter with a couple of transistors (to do a timing pulldown) and resistors (to mix the colour channels) and write a custom X display mode line, but it enabled a random old second graphics card to drive it as a second monitor.
I just hope he's only a student, and not in a position of responsibility. (Not that that necessarily makes it OK, but at least it would reflect less on the institution).
edit: ok, not porn, "objectified female bodies". Because that makes it more appropriate?
The imagery is a statement, and it makes you ask yourself how the place is run. How would someone who isn't exactly like the rest of them fare, someone who is older, female, gay, or not a foosball-playing craft beer fanboy brogrammer? It's a common observation of foreigners that Americans have a very hard time with diversity. A walk around any college campus confirms this. Where are the punks, hippies, and queers? And what's with all the girls wearing hotpants? It's as if they were some kind of uniform.
Second, we "objectify mens/females bodies" all the time. It just means that we treat them as something nice to look at. That's 90% of Hollywood, pop music, advertisements, and tons of everyday interactions. An art nude, by Picasso or whoever, it's exactly that too.
This guy is not involved in sex trafficking or anything. He just likes how professional models, people paid to be photographed and wishing for a successful career in modeling photography, look on photographs.
Also, from my experience with similar discussions: if he had gay models on the monitors, nobody that speaks of "objectification" would have said anything. Some (stupid) people might have made fun of him for the gay pictures, but champions of non-objectification would not have mentioned anything about objectification.
I don't see any porn there. They may be images of models that participate in adult-themed photo shoots, but none of those images are 'porn'.
It's also not uncommon for images of women from magazines such as Playboy to be used in graphics research. One of the most famous images in computer graphics, 'henna', is a scan from a Playboy magazine.
Is it because some people have a magic ability to give dictums to what other people can and can not enjoy?
Or because the naked human form should never be considered pleasant to look at, and hang at walls, as wallpaper, etc?
That's marketing thinking though, not a real moral objection.
>Imagine if you wanted to go into a field such as nursing and all of the men in the text books were oiled up shirtless muscular dudes.
This is not text books though. It's a student page. If another student, a woman, has pictures of shirtless ripped-abs male actors in her page, I wouldn't bat an eye.
Would you prefer he used "objectified male bodies"? "objectified trans bodies"? Guro (don't look this up)? Scat? Cat macros?
Also, how does being in a position of responsibility somehow magically disallow you from expressing yourself honestly (and having to deal with those repercussions)?
Close-minded lot.
EDIT:
I would've used different source images had I been presenting in public, but this looks more like a little project page of some hobby stuff for him. The fact that he decides to use Asian pinups as his test cases is just a minor side-note to me.
I'm sure the OP is level headed enough to not prefer the author have used any image that objectified a human being, regardless of their sex or gender.
> Also, how does being in a position of responsibility somehow magically disallow you from expressing yourself honestly?
I agree that the level of imposed responsibility is meaningless, but the problem still remains that women are being objectified and it's a normal and casual part of our culture.
>Close-minded lot.
Unnecessary. This exact jab can just as easily be used to get a rise out of your ilk.
What makes that "level-headed" instead of "wrong in multiple directions"?
Define "objectification". Those are professional models, that specifically picked that line of work, and want to have a succesful career in it. And wanting to appreciate something not for its whole qualities but for some aspect of them is completely normal. When I watch basketball I only care for that guys athletic qualities, not his personality. When I go to a fast food joint, I only care for the persons ability to serve my order, not his/hers other qualities in general.
Heck, I'd consider a photo of McDonald workers flipping burgers far more objectificated, but since it's not "fashionable" enough topic, nobody bats an eye.
Admittedly, I do not know the extent of which this idea is true; I'm researching now.
If you'd like to make an argument about objectification, we really ought to broaden it to include things like objectification of programmers (rockstar ninja 90+ hr workerbees), of entrepreneurs (I can get 10x my money back if I invest in this person), or of anything else, really.
How would you go about showing that objectification is inherently a bad thing?
EDIT:
Sexual objectification as a particular subset of objectification would be a good starting point. Do be careful in your word choice, because words and phrases have specific connotations.
EDIT2:
Look, look, downvote away, but the deal is that objectification as an argument is so often used and abused in discussions that, unless you are careful, you end up casting a sort of vague "sexy pictures of people are wrong or undesirable" message out.
A lot of people (unfortunately, not always only the ones that are idiots) will tune out your point if you say "objectification" without supporting rhetoric and reasoning. If you want to claim the high-ground (which is not unreasonable), you have to form your arguments better.
So, instead of downvoting because you disagree, downvote and try to explain why sexual objectification is wrong (if it is indeed wrong), why it isn't (or shouldn't be, or should be) held to the same standard as normal objectification (a useful form of abstraction for doing business with people we all use every day), and/or how using any image of a human being without a lot of humanizing detail isn't also objectification.
Taken to its extreme, you end up with something similar to Islamic aniconism. I'm not sure this is a bad thing mind you, but depending on your arguments you may well arrive at a similar proscription.
A good question for students of psychology and sociology. I'm certainly not claiming authority, but here are a couple of relevant studies:
[1] http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/01/21/036168431038...
If someone posted an article with screen shots of actual porn, it would be distracting to the point that you would assume he had psychological problems.
The term you're looking for is "swimsuit models", "pin-up models", or "booth babes".
None of these are the "Lena" image. That image is defensible in an image compression context because it's standardized. It's unfortunate that a cropped photo out of Playboy became the standard for image compression, but someone could agree that it's an unfortunate choice, but continue to use it because it is relatively standard. Similarly, others may find its content distracting and unprofessional and use a different image.
And if you want to make a point and try to move people in the direction of realizing that using scantily clad women as a decorative touch is unacceptable in a professional context, you would do well to not exaggerate this and equate it with porn. By calling this "porn" you lump yourself in with the caricature of straw man feminists equating inappropriate remarks with rape.
You could've just said "yes".
(The operative part of that reply was "hours after it was amended". Your rant, and 90% of the other replies on this thread, added nothing at all to the conversation besides typical red pill douche-baggery.)
I'm frankly shocked that dang hasn't been here to state this for me.
It's a fun little project, if you're into electronics, but perhaps not all that useful.
When discussing things of a delicate nature, where precision matters and thoughtless wordchoice will easily derail any useful discussion, having such scruples is something to celebrate and not mock.
In the (extremely) unlikely event that I post here again, I'll be sure to stealth edit any changes instead.
I am glad so many people today are familiar with that particular reference image. Choosing Lenna (or the baboon or the Landsat picture of the Bay Area) simply shows that one knows one's history and one has some respect for the pioneers.
At the end of the day these images are arrangements of ones and zeroes yet so much more than that at the same time. Long live Lenna!
I was in Northeastern's CS program for a bit.
But maybe you're not seeing the same images as everyone else. Most of us see these on his page: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bchafy/test_rgb/testrgb.jpg http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bchafy/test_rgb/3girl_test3.JPG http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bchafy/test_rgb/3girl_test.JPG
In fact, all of his non-technical images are of scantily clad or posing women. That's fine in some contexts, but definitely not professional or welcoming to female students.
The professionalism of the photos on a university website is an entirely different issue. I was addressing the point of the photos objectifying the women.
There was a convention in my state this past weekend that had plenty of "cosplayers", men and women, who were dressed similarly to the women in these pictures. They were scantily clad as you mentioned. I'm sure many of these people wish they could dress that way on a day to day basis but it's not yet acceptable in today's society so they don't. Hardly anyone would say they were objectifying themselves, so how is this any different without making assumptions about the source of the photos? Maybe these women also choose to dress this way?
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If you really want to pursue this line of thinking, what if a female nurse had posted a hobby page wherein she documented all the ways nurses most often contaminate hospitals or traumatize children, and all the "example" nurses in the pictures were male.
But really, that's not a perfect analogy. Female bodies != male bodies in our culture, particularly in STEM careers. It is at best impolite (and at worst creating a hostile work/study environment) to use these images in a page on a university website.