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Jon Pruente wrote: | Anyone ever wonder why banks still use magnetic ink to print the | characters on your checks? Because they print in a very specific font | and don't rely on a computer analyzing the picture of a character to | figure out what it is - magnetic ink is proven and reliable.
Er...without naming names, I know a company that used the (very expensive) magnetic toner cartridges to laser-print checks. This same laser printer was also used for normal printing, requiring swapping out of the magnetic toner with regular toner.
Needless to say, this didn't always work perfectly (typical PEBKAC :), and the bean-counting accountants stopped buying the expensive magnetic toner when they noticed none of their errantly printed checks were ever returned.
Then again, the MICR font they use for check numbers is pretty sub-optimal for human reading, but highly optimized for machine/OCR interpretation. Just like the FedEx/UPS scanners have no issues reading the 1 and 2 dimensional bar-codes printed on just about everything these days.
The real solution will come when you change the problem...instead of trying to get computers to deal with the messy, noisy, analog world of human communication, just augment the humans to be able to easily interface to the pristine, mathematical world of the machine. Hearing aids can begin to do this already. Wired directly into the brain, they allow people who have *NEVER* heard anything and have defective audio 'hardware' in their ears (due to genetics or whatever) to hear normally.
Similar feats for visual information are likely not far behind (at least in a long-term view of human history). I personally look forward to the day when I no longer have to lug around my limited resolution iPod, remembering to plug it in to charge, etc. It will be so much easier to just have it jacked straight into my brain...
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net