papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) (12/17/87)
It has come to our attention that a picture appearing on the front cover of one of the latest issues of MacWeek, was not correctly attributed to the source. This involves an article about current and forthcoming products for the Mac II by Aegis Development of Santa Monica, CA. The picture is a broadcast-quality satellite color picture of the same type one can see on the local evening news weather report. Bearing no attribution, the reader is lead to believe that the image was either produced or downloaded to the Mac II with proper software from one of the many commercial databases that obtain these images from the National Weather Service. Very far from the truth. The image was produced by Accu-Weather, Inc., decoded and downloaded to an Amiga 2000 computer with Felsina Software's Digi-Weather software. Somehow Aegis got hold of this and other pictures from a third party and did not care to either ask for permission for publishing or attributed to the real source. As far as we know, there is no software for the Mac II that allows downloading of broadcast-quality weather images. While Accu-Weather was reasonably pissed off at not having their product, Accu-Data, credited as the source of the image, we were not surprised. How many people know that the original "mandrill" was produced at the USC Image Processing Institute? While MacWeek and Aegis Development gave no credit to the source, both Amazing Computing and Info Magazine did credit both Accu-Weather and Felsina Software as the source of the images they published in their recent reviews of Felsina Software's A-Talk Plus and Digi-Weather. Just to set the record straight. -- Marco Papa Felsina Software