ViSta is the trademark for Visual Statistics, a sort-of-FOSS (free, but source access is "moderated") numerical analysis/visualization package for windows, macintosh, and unix.
By the time any of this technology could ship we'd probably have thought controlled car locks. No need for keys then. Presumably we'd still have tangible friends and enemies (as opposed to the virtual kind). Being able to find them by Google Earth would be useful. Of course, that could lead to a whole new twist on privacy & related issues (stalking, for instance).
All sugars promote tooth decay. Nearly all. Not Xylitol, which inhibits growth of caries (the major agent of tooth decay). Xylitol chewing gum is actively promoted for dental health by Nordic dentists and is given to children in kindergarten the Nordic countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol
But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture. You should look into the noise characteristics of digital imaging. There are differences between CMOS and CCD with regards to readout noise and pattern noise (and these are areas in which great improvements have been made), but they are not necessarily the worst noise sources.
Photon noise (also called "shot noise") is intrinsic to the physics of photon arrival. The number of photoelectrons generated in a pixel is proportional to the number of photons incident on the pixel. The maximum number of photoelectrons (termed "well depth") which a pixel can contain depends on the size of the pixel. Bigger pixels means more photons and more photoelectrons for a given intensity of illumination. In a given time with constant illumination, a certain number of photons is expected per pixel, but the actual number in successive time intervals or in neighbouring pixels will differ. The standard deviation of this distribution is the square root of its mean value (photon arrival is governed by Poisson statistics).
In a DSLR image detector, the well depth is at least 40000 photoelectrons (often much more) representing the saturation level. In a digicam, the well depth is typically 10000 or so, and is often less than this in cameraphones. At equivalent fraction of saturation, the shot noise in a 10000 electron well is half that of a 40000 electron well, but the signal is only one quarter as large. So the signal-to-noise ratio is twice as bad in the 10000 electron detector as in the 40000 electron detector.
So, even with enough light, detectors with small pixels will produce noisier images, since their electron wells are small. It's a consequence of physics.
The situation is often worse than that, since the cameraphones and small digicams typically have tiny optics. Even though their detectors are small, the lenses don't illuminate them very well (the Nokia N series is less bad than most cameraphones), and they must resort to boosing the readout gain. This amplifies shot noise directly. So, cameraphone and small digicams either need more light to reach "enough" than larger digicams or DSLRs, or they must amplify their noise even more to operate at the same light levels as DSLRs.
Denoising in-camera or as postprocessing may make the image look better, but at the cost of losing image details with the noise artefacts. Heavy denoising produces a "watercolor" effect seen in many digicams.
All of the subjects were motionless, so the test is useless for real-world situations, where shutter speed must be fast enough. I saw people trying to use camera phones at a sports event. The light was fairly good, but the results were pathetic blurs.
And then there's the "vibrant colour" thing, which is seen to some extent in many digicams. Basically, the chroma has been excessively boosted, producing what photographers refer to as "Disney colour". It's a form of image distortion which can mask other flaws (especially combined with heavy denoising). As a deliberately chosen distortion, it has its place in artistic composition, but should not be the default.
I have a Nokia "camera" phone, and after laughing at a couple of test images, I stopped trying to take pictures with it. If the target moves, the image is a blur. If the light is poor, the image is so noisy that denoising produces a watercolor. The tiny aperture means that the background is in focus, even at infinity. The only thing I can't complain about is bad bokeh, because it has no bokeh (and certainly not good bokeh!).
For an always-in-pocket camera, I use the Sanyo C6, which has many compromises due to its compactness. However, in any lighting situation it will produce far better images than the Nokia, and does passable MPEG4 video also. For real photography, I have a Pentax DSLR with three flashes (wireless) and a dozen lenses.
We're moving from a small city to the countryside this summer. Access to the new house is by dirt roads, in an area of farms & forest. The internet connection is fiber to the house. Apparently, the phone company lays in fiber instead of copper whenever new circuits are needed nowadays, even in the boonies.
A package for 100/10 data is eur 79/month (of which about eur 14-15 is tax). This package includes numerous IP-TV channels, which I could live without.
apes, especially monkeys, are very genetically related to humans Just to clarify. Apes are closely related to humans.
Monkeys are more closely related to a certain dancing executive.
How does this law apply to punctuation and multi-part characters like i and j? Does the area to left of the space between the dot and stroke of the i count towards the 'volume'? There is often special handling for letters such as i, j, f. In essence, some combinations are not kerned, but combined into ligatures. A ligature is a single glyph of two or more joined characters. Take a look for combinations "fi", "fl", "ff", "ffl", "ffi", "ij" in properly typeset books (or even in your web browser). You may notice that the letters are joined, and not exactly the same shape as just cramming two single letters together. In fact, the "i" is often undotted.
The "ij" combination is uncommon in English, but occurs often in some other languages, such as Dutch and Finnish. Arguably, the word "Fiji" deserves its own special ligature or special kerning.
Since ligatures are themselves glyphs, kerning of ligatures with other letters needs to be defined for proper typesetting. For instance the space between "fi" and the following letter is not necessarily the same in "field" as in "fill".
Don't read too much into the result of that Google search. The terms "opera" and "safari" are not used only in searching for the Opera and Safari browsers. People who search for Internet Explorer might use IE7 or IE6 as their search terms.
The "firefox" search results are probably less misleading, although there are a few non-browser uses for that term also (name for a MiG-25 jet fighter, and for a movie).
There also appears to be an obvious short-term fix to this, which is to breed the bees intentionally, either in captivity, or for the agriculturalists to hire an apiary to raise the bees near them, and harvest honey from the same crop. That's what beekeepers do: breed bees intentionally. Management of queen and drone production is an important job for spring and early summer, when the bee-keeper has decided how many hives to operate. The queens mate (lethally) with multiple drones all by themselves. Farmers, especially those raising fruits or other insect-pollinated crops, hire hives to be placed in their orchards or fields at the appropriate times. However, the bee-keeper is the one who gets to keep the honey; the farmer's benefit is a pollinated crop.
The problem is for a healthy hive to lose its workers en masse. The queen is still producing eggs, but without mature workers the hive is doomed. It appears to be unrelated to the varroa pestilence which spread from Europe into North America in the 1970s and 1980s, and devastated many bee-keepers' livelihoods.
Well, in the collating sequence used by Swedish, the letter after Z is Å. The character Å is a word in Swedish meaning "small stream", and is also used to denote the Angstrom (0.1 nm).
So, the Ubuntu following Zany Zebra would be "Å Å", for a 1 Angstrom sized stream. It is pronounced, approximately, "oh, oh" with a Swedish accent.
"Error: the operation completed successfully"
I kid you not! This was common in Win98 and observed also in Win2k - if an app crashed, causing DrWatson to pop up and offer to save some kind of crash log, just click the save as button, and then cancel the save. Voila.
No, it was nothing to do with databases, it was a serial communication package in the days of the modem. However, it flopped so badly, they eventually re-used the name to bury all traces of the failure.
Doubleplusgood if big screens are placed near the CCTV cameras. Enjoy perpetual good news, motivational Ingsoc/Labour messages, and the 2 minutes hate of named thought criminals.
Remember one technically unnecessary but business-mandated criterion in developing MS-DOS 2: "DOS isn't done 'till Lotus won't run" Microsoft does not merely control its APIs, it has a history of abusing that control for anticompetitive purposes.
Insert a blank slide (preferably black, so it looks as if the projector were turned off) where you intent to talk. No bullets, graphics or special effects. The audience will focus on the speaker, and actually listen to what is said.
When you have a message to impart, this method works.
I pay eur43 per month for a bundle including basic cable TV, a package of premium channels, and a 2Mb/s internet link with email accounts and suchlike. With this deal they limit me to 2Mb/s download, which would be almost 650GB per month if I saturated it all of the time. I have not come close to that, but have definitely downloaded 15+GB (multiple DVD ISOs) in a single week. They don't seem to care how many GB per month I actually use; the only limit is 2 megabits per second. For a few euro more, I could get 8Mb/s, but 2Mb/s seems adequate (for data rates above 8Mb/s, I'd need to replace my el-cheapo cable modem).
Do the people who pushed Dell to preload Linux even intend to purchase Liux loaded Dells, or was all the fuss only for the sake of someone making Linux availible in such a way? Can't answer for "people", but I have 2 Dell desktops (10 year old XPS-T450, 2 year old GX260) and a Sony laptop (VGN-A117S) at home. All came unavoidably inflicted with MS Windows (Win98, Win2k, WinXP), but all are now running Linux. None are dual boot, but the Dell GX occasionally runs Win2k in a VM for the kids' games.
For a clean (and simple) instruction set architecture, I fondly remember the PDP-11. If you have to program in assembly language, then the PDP-11 made it almost easy. Orthogonal instruction set, nice addressing modes, and so forth; hard to find those qualities nowadays. The Intel 8080 instruction set was non-orthogonal, but bearable. From the 8088 onwards, it became increasingly convoluted and nasty.
If the pyramids were built by super-intelligent aliens, wouldn't they have Linux installed? They did; it's in one of the concealed chambers. Did you also fall for the hoax that Linux was made by humans?
For large motors, it's hard to incorporate discrete gears. On a gear change where the ratios are significantly different, the clutch/transmission would not be able to absorb the energy dissipated unless it's very large. So either the diameter of the clutch plate must be enormous, or the ratios must be very close. Continuously variable gearing is also problematic due to heat dissipation, unless the power conversion is _very_ efficient. Diesel-electric coupling is a pretty good solution for large motors, since no gear changes are needed.
Perhaps a PC could be given three prices, so the purchaser has a proper choice:
1. Windows, without promotional crapplets 2. Windows, with promotional crapplets 3. Linux, with drivers
Clearly, options 2 and 3 would be lower cost than option 1. I expect that options 2 and 3 would be similar in cost, even if the Linux option included a DVD with the distribution, drivers, and a collection of FOSS packages. The trade-offs in pricing would be visible in a way that customers might understand, although the crapplet collection would probably be described as "bonus enhanced-value mega-cool selected premium packages" to mask its negative value. People who truly want Windows might opt for the reduced-crap option, even if its price is higher (especially if they experienced the crapplet search & destroy obstacle course after an earlier purchase).
With luck, we will never see the fourth pricing option which lurks malevolently in the background: 4. Linux, with bonus enhanced-value mega-cool selected premium packages
Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited? How about a bank draft for an unlimited number of Ostmarks, or its equivalent in dollars?
An unlimited amount of nothing is nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
ViSta is the trademark for Visual Statistics, a sort-of-FOSS (free, but source access is "moderated") numerical analysis/visualization package for windows, macintosh, and unix.
http://forrest.psych.unc.edu/research/index.html
Photon noise (also called "shot noise") is intrinsic to the physics of photon arrival. The number of photoelectrons generated in a pixel is proportional to the number of photons incident on the pixel. The maximum number of photoelectrons (termed "well depth") which a pixel can contain depends on the size of the pixel. Bigger pixels means more photons and more photoelectrons for a given intensity of illumination. In a given time with constant illumination, a certain number of photons is expected per pixel, but the actual number in successive time intervals or in neighbouring pixels will differ. The standard deviation of this distribution is the square root of its mean value (photon arrival is governed by Poisson statistics).
In a DSLR image detector, the well depth is at least 40000 photoelectrons (often much more) representing the saturation level. In a digicam, the well depth is typically 10000 or so, and is often less than this in cameraphones. At equivalent fraction of saturation, the shot noise in a 10000 electron well is half that of a 40000 electron well, but the signal is only one quarter as large. So the signal-to-noise ratio is twice as bad in the 10000 electron detector as in the 40000 electron detector.
So, even with enough light, detectors with small pixels will produce noisier images, since their electron wells are small. It's a consequence of physics.
The situation is often worse than that, since the cameraphones and small digicams typically have tiny optics. Even though their detectors are small, the lenses don't illuminate them very well (the Nokia N series is less bad than most cameraphones), and they must resort to boosing the readout gain. This amplifies shot noise directly. So, cameraphone and small digicams either need more light to reach "enough" than larger digicams or DSLRs, or they must amplify their noise even more to operate at the same light levels as DSLRs.
Denoising in-camera or as postprocessing may make the image look better, but at the cost of losing image details with the noise artefacts. Heavy denoising produces a "watercolor" effect seen in many digicams.
All of the subjects were motionless, so the test is useless for real-world situations, where shutter speed must be fast enough. I saw people trying to use camera phones at a sports event. The light was fairly good, but the results were pathetic blurs.
And then there's the "vibrant colour" thing, which is seen to some extent in many digicams. Basically, the chroma has been excessively boosted, producing what photographers refer to as "Disney colour". It's a form of image distortion which can mask other flaws (especially combined with heavy denoising). As a deliberately chosen distortion, it has its place in artistic composition, but should not be the default.
I have a Nokia "camera" phone, and after laughing at a couple of test images, I stopped trying to take pictures with it. If the target moves, the image is a blur. If the light is poor, the image is so noisy that denoising produces a watercolor. The tiny aperture means that the background is in focus, even at infinity. The only thing I can't complain about is bad bokeh, because it has no bokeh (and certainly not good bokeh!).
For an always-in-pocket camera, I use the Sanyo C6, which has many compromises due to its compactness. However, in any lighting situation it will produce far better images than the Nokia, and does passable MPEG4 video also. For real photography, I have a Pentax DSLR with three flashes (wireless) and a dozen lenses.
We're moving from a small city to the countryside this summer. Access to the new house is by dirt roads, in an area of farms & forest. The internet connection is fiber to the house. Apparently, the phone company lays in fiber instead of copper whenever new circuits are needed nowadays, even in the boonies.
A package for 100/10 data is eur 79/month (of which about eur 14-15 is tax). This package includes numerous IP-TV channels, which I could live without.
Monkeys are more closely related to a certain dancing executive.
The "ij" combination is uncommon in English, but occurs often in some other languages, such as Dutch and Finnish. Arguably, the word "Fiji" deserves its own special ligature or special kerning.
Since ligatures are themselves glyphs, kerning of ligatures with other letters needs to be defined for proper typesetting. For instance the space between "fi" and the following letter is not necessarily the same in "field" as in "fill".
Don't read too much into the result of that Google search. The terms "opera" and "safari" are not used only in searching for the Opera and Safari browsers. People who search for Internet Explorer might use IE7 or IE6 as their search terms.
The "firefox" search results are probably less misleading, although there are a few non-browser uses for that term also (name for a MiG-25 jet fighter, and for a movie).
The problem is for a healthy hive to lose its workers en masse. The queen is still producing eggs, but without mature workers the hive is doomed. It appears to be unrelated to the varroa pestilence which spread from Europe into North America in the 1970s and 1980s, and devastated many bee-keepers' livelihoods.
Well, in the collating sequence used by Swedish, the letter after Z is Å. The character Å is a word in Swedish meaning "small stream", and is also used to denote the Angstrom (0.1 nm).
So, the Ubuntu following Zany Zebra would be "Å Å", for a 1 Angstrom sized stream. It is pronounced, approximately, "oh, oh" with a Swedish accent.
"Error: the operation completed successfully"
I kid you not! This was common in Win98 and observed also in Win2k - if an app crashed, causing DrWatson to pop up and offer to save some kind of crash log, just click the save as button, and then cancel the save. Voila.
Which is worse, Republicans or the RIAA?
It's a question mostly for Democrats in the US.
What about the original Microsoft Access?
s &action=Search
No, it was nothing to do with databases, it was a serial communication package in the days of the modem. However, it flopped so badly, they eventually re-used the name to bury all traces of the failure.
It's the second entry at http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?query=microsoft+acces
Doubleplusgood if big screens are placed near the CCTV cameras. Enjoy perpetual good news, motivational Ingsoc/Labour messages, and the 2 minutes hate of named thought criminals.
Remember one technically unnecessary but business-mandated criterion in developing MS-DOS 2:
"DOS isn't done 'till Lotus won't run"
Microsoft does not merely control its APIs, it has a history of abusing that control for anticompetitive purposes.
Insert a blank slide (preferably black, so it looks as if the projector were turned off) where you intent to talk. No bullets, graphics or special effects. The audience will focus on the speaker, and actually listen to what is said.
When you have a message to impart, this method works.
I pay eur43 per month for a bundle including basic cable TV, a package of premium channels, and a 2Mb/s internet link with email accounts and suchlike. With this deal they limit me to 2Mb/s download, which would be almost 650GB per month if I saturated it all of the time. I have not come close to that, but have definitely downloaded 15+GB (multiple DVD ISOs) in a single week. They don't seem to care how many GB per month I actually use; the only limit is 2 megabits per second. For a few euro more, I could get 8Mb/s, but 2Mb/s seems adequate (for data rates above 8Mb/s, I'd need to replace my el-cheapo cable modem).
For large motors, it's hard to incorporate discrete gears. On a gear change where the ratios are significantly different, the clutch/transmission would not be able to absorb the energy dissipated unless it's very large. So either the diameter of the clutch plate must be enormous, or the ratios must be very close. Continuously variable gearing is also problematic due to heat dissipation, unless the power conversion is _very_ efficient. Diesel-electric coupling is a pretty good solution for large motors, since no gear changes are needed.
Perhaps a PC could be given three prices, so the purchaser has a proper choice:
1. Windows, without promotional crapplets
2. Windows, with promotional crapplets
3. Linux, with drivers
Clearly, options 2 and 3 would be lower cost than option 1. I expect that options 2 and 3 would be similar in cost, even if the Linux option included a DVD with the distribution, drivers, and a collection of FOSS packages. The trade-offs in pricing would be visible in a way that customers might understand, although the crapplet collection would probably be described as "bonus enhanced-value mega-cool selected premium packages" to mask its negative value. People who truly want Windows might opt for the reduced-crap option, even if its price is higher (especially if they experienced the crapplet search & destroy obstacle course after an earlier purchase).
With luck, we will never see the fourth pricing option which lurks malevolently in the background:
4. Linux, with bonus enhanced-value mega-cool selected premium packages