White Male, 30
I don't have anything to worry about right?
If you've got a beard, you're still on the "extra questions and special search before boarding every flight" list. Just like me, a white male over 50. Maybe they'll start adding questions on facial hair to the census as well, just for statistical purposes, of course...
Not necessarily, since the product may already be released, and the project to create it may be already completed.
You work at places where the software is released, and never touched again? That's amazing. You should probably patent your process for creating complete v1.0 software.
Perhaps that's why I said the project to create it is completed. Software maintenance (bug-fixes and interoperability enhancements) occurs sporadically, but involves effort which is orders of magnitude less than the initial development. In general, there is nobody assigned until an issue arises, and then only for as long as it takes to resolve the issue.
He made some assertions whose validity is questionable for small companies, and which are generally false for larger companies with deep pockets.
'If you've got one lot of damages for patent infringement, what would happen to the project? It's dead.
Not necessarily, since the product may already be released, and the project to create it may be already completed. The damages award is typically made after lengthy legal proceedings, and it's not likely that the development project is still active. Those involved have probably moved on to other projects, been promoted, or changed employer. Paying tens or hundreds of millions in damages is not fatal to large companies, but the risk of such a cost is definitely a risk to be minimized.
If it gets three lots of damages for patent infringement, what happens to the project? It's still dead.
Not necessarily, if the product has already been released, and the project to create it has already been completed. But the court's interpretation of a patent is often baffling to an engineer, who cannot therefore assess whether a risk of infringement really exists. However, by being aware of the patent, the potential cost of an infringement is tripled. This is why large corporations do not encourage their developers to do exhaustive patent searches.
I have not yet tried Lucid, but the "default" layout that we're used to is not necessarily the best. Actually, the most sensible layout I encountered was in OS/2 (using an add-on in v3 or v4, I forget), which had minimize & maximize in the upper right, and the close button on the upper left, inside from the application button. Whether I'll like the layout in Lucid is still to be determined.
Actually, the smaller and more sensitive quantum dots by themselves would be better for dark imaging, mainly because with so many more usable levels of sensitivity you could assign a noise level below a certain threshold to render as pure black and then work up from there.
That's not how image acquisition works. The shot noise is determined ONLY by the incident photon flux per pixel; it is unaffected by detector sensitivity etc. Following your suggestion would have three consequences: (i) the ratio of shot noise would increase in each pixel, since the pixel areas would be smaller and thus have fewer incident photons each; (ii) readout noise would increase for the image as a whole, since it would be divided into more pixels, each requiring A/D conversion; (iii) increasing the noise threshold would simply clip away image information in the lower end of the histogram, reducing the overall information content in the image. The third effect would be achieved more easily and flexibly in postprocessing, anyway.
What would matter would be the degree of sensitivity these quantum dots have, and then the subsequent software that processes the sensor data.
Sensitivity just amplifies the shot noise as well as the signal. It can help only by increasing the sum of signal plus shot noise, thus reducing the ratio of readout noise to signal plus shot noise. To get better pixels in an image, you need photons, photons, photons. Playing with the detector technology does not help, other than by changing the ratio of readout noise in the output. Please absorb that simple message.
The article says that in conventional CMOS sensors, three quarters of the incident photons are either absorbed by a metal layer or hit a spot between photo diodes, not contributing to photo diode charge and read-out signal.
You are referring to areal efficiency or "fill factor" of detectors. CMOS had low areal efficiency some years back, but no longer. Both CMOS and CCD detectors are almost always equipped with integrated microlenses nowadays, which direct almost all of the incident light on the whole detector onto the active photosites. Some light is still lost at boundaries between the lenses, and due to the efficiency of the lenses. The ineffective regions between photosites receive hardly any light at all. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on CCDs:
Microlenses can bring the fill factor back up to 90 percent or more depending on pixel size and the overall system's optical design.
Integration of microlenses onto the chip is a major reason why CMOS detectors have caught up with CCD detectors in image quality. Compared to CCDs, a smaller fraction of a CMOS detector consists of photosites. Both benefit from provision of microlenses, but CMOS benefits rather more, and reaches almost the same areal efficiency as a comparable CCD. With less than 10% of incident photons lost, there is only a limited scope for improvement, by quantum dots or other methods. Those claims in TFA were reminiscent of fresh bullshit.
Good CCDs can exceed 85% in quantum efficiency at some wavelengths, such as in the icx285 which is typically used in industrial devices. However, efficiencies are lower at other wavelengths, and CCD and CMOS detectors used in consumer devices often peak at below 60% quantum efficiency. So there is room for improvement here, but not nearly as spectacular as the claims of TFA.
Keep in mind, as I mentioned in the earlier post, that increases in detector sensitivity (through areal efficiency or quantum efficiency) will elevate the signal level, but will not affect the ratio of shot noise in the signal. For that, you need more incident photons though bigger pixels and/or better subject illumination and/or bigger lens apertures and/or longer exposure times. TFA smells a bit like marketing hype. Quantum dots may lead to improvements in detector fabrication & price, but not so much in image quality...
Image quality is limited by several factors. The sensitivity of the detector is only one, and is the only one that quantum dots can address. In this instance, the sensitivity increases only by a moderate amount, so the improvement in signal level (or reduction in pixel size preserving signal level) is also moderate.
Increasing the signal level will improve the S/N ratio for readout noise, assuming the readout is comparable to that available in today's cameras. Readout noise has been aggressively tacked by camera manufacturers, and is already very low. The principal source of noise in conventional images is shot noise (photon noise), and this is unrelated to the detector sensitivity. Shot noise depends ONLY on the number of photons arriving at each pixel, and is the reason that darker areas of digital images tend to be noisier, or require information-destroying denoising operations in postprocessing. Other forms of noise, such as dark current and dark noise, are relevant only in special applications, such as astrophotography.
Shot noise is intrinsic in the statistics of photon fluxes. The number of photons arriving at a pixel from a radiance which is "uniform" in time and space is Poissonian: the standard deviation is the square root of the mean. The signal to noise ratio is the mean divided by its square root, which is the square root of the number of photons which arrived in that sampling interval (exposure). If 10,000 photons are expected to arrive at a pixel in a given exposure time, then the shot noise will be about 1% when comparing multiple "identical" exposures of that pixel. Changing the detector sensitivity raises or lowers the readout signal level, but does not change the signal to noise ratio in the signal from shot noise.
Reducing the shot noise requires more photons arriving at each pixel. Getting more photons per pixel requires either (i) bigger pixels on the detector, (ii) better illumination of the subject, or (iii) better optics. This is why professional cameras have larger pixels than prosumer cameras, which tend to have larger pixels than pocket cameras, phone cameras, etc. Better lenses also help (but large apertures also affect depth of field). For given lighting conditions and optics, bigger pixels result in lower image noise, unless the readout circuitry really sucks.
So, quantum dots will result in a higher signal level than conventional CCD/CMOS/CID detectors under similar imaging circumstances. The improvement is probably limited to improving the ratio of signal to readout noise, which is already pretty good. Quantum dots will not magically increase the number of photons arriving at the detector, and if used to reduce pixel size, will result in worse signal to noise ratio for the shot noise (biggest noise problem in most photography). Result: not a dramatic improvement, although detectors giving horribly noisy images (needing heavy destructive denoising) may get even smaller.
Just send the bums some money, so they'll shut up. The potential of quantum dots in imaging sensors has been known for years.
Maybe they assumed that a fall from that height would usually kill the person anyway, so there isn't much point in hurrying.
That would be even stupider. A fall from 8 feet may inflict anything from minor bruising to serious or life-threatening injury, such as compound fracture or head/neck injuries. Only in a few cases would those injuries be untreatably mortal.
As one anecdote, I have fallen from more than 10 feet up, while traveling horizontally at about 30 km/h (the horse and I unexpectedly took different paths over a jump). I collected some bruises, but was able to re-mount and continue over the rest of the course. Medical attention was neither needed nor sought, and I was over 50 years old at the time. Had there been solid obstacles such as rocks in my unintended landing zone, the outcome might have been considerably worse.
In London, I heard a standard rule of thumb that it costs about £100 to get an enjoyable bottle of wine. This breaks down as about £10 for the bottle you actually enjoy, and the remaining £90 for the nine other bottles you bought. Really, there are a lot of nice wines in the £10 price bracket, but they are surrounded by many less nice ones, and it's a matter of taste as to which ones are nicest.
"A paperless office is as useful as a paperless toilet. Some things would be impractical..."
OK, it's not that old a saying, but it's valid in a number of ways.
I use "RemoveUnderwearToLogin" as the SSID.
Of course, removing clothing is not enough by itself. Access is also protected by WPA2/AES and a nontrivial password.
...the potential for evil. There is no guarantee that the replacement will be less clueless or less malevolent towards the pastimes of modern society. With a little good luck, some of Atkinson's stupider decisions and stances will be reversed. Politicians, however, are more adept at finding and deploying bad luck than good.
One interesting question is whether the $10 disks would be proper CDs, capable of having the trademarked Compact Disc Digital Audio logo, or whether they'd be bastardized pseudo CDs with weirdo copy protection (and ergo NOT authorized to have the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo), which don't play in lots of devices. The invisible cost of nonstandard disks would make them quite unattractive to many.
I'm actually at a scientific meeting and saw 7 presentations in which they "double dipped" on their statisitics before we broke for lunch.
Double-dipping is bad enough, but the medical field is rife with multiple-dipping. Each dataset is plumbed to test dozens of hypotheses, without appropriately adjusting the acceptance criteria. Even with separate datasets, if you test 20 hypotheses and discover that each one is just valid at the 95% confidence level, then there is a very good chance that there are some false positives. In the medical alleged-sciences, however, all 20 would be blindly proclaimed as truth.
And then there are the social nonsenses^W sciences... If practitioners of some discipline do not understand how to use quantitative methods, they should limit themselves to qualitative argument only. Unfortunately, in statistics as in other fields, those who are ignorant or incompetent are generally unaware of the extent of their ignorance and incompetence.
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Try telling that to Microsoft!
Recall that Windows did not become the de facto standard OS by being better - it was definitely not better than the alternatives in the period in which it became dominant. So there is another way: gain sufficient market share through fair means or foul, and you can win. Whether wikipedia would count as critical mass or not is an open question, but if they were sufficiently bloodyminded, then whichever codec they chose to standardize on would ipso facto become a necessary codec, even if it were not used widely elsewhere.
RT-11 needed a PDP-11 (16-bit cpu). The closest equivalent for the PDP-8 (12-bit) was RTS-8. I never used the PDP-8 for real-time stuff, but did "enjoy" booting it to TSS-8 for multi-user access. The procedure involved a lengthy sequence of messing with the front panel toggle switches accompanied by muttering of curses and magic incantations.
[adopts faux-Yorkshire accent] And you try to tell that to the young people today, and they won't believe it...
Lutefisk is indeed quite nasty, roughly on a par in nastiness with Finnish Mämmi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammi or Scottish haggis (I've tasted all of them, regrettably).
However, these are nothing on the Swedish "delicacy" Surströmming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstromming. Many apartment buildings in Sweden have rules preventing one from opening a can of the stuff anywhere in the building (which would become uninhabitable as the vapors spread through the ventilation system). My Swedish colleagues assert that it can only be consumed in tiny quantities, and then only after at least half a bottle of vodka, and potentially triggering an extended vomit.
It appears that EMI plans to continue selling single Pink Floyd tracks, effectively ignoring the ruling. Apparently, the judge merely said that what they were doing was against their contract, he did not explicitly tell EMI to stop doing it or that EMI would face any penalty for continuing.
From the BBC article:
An EMI statement said: "Today's judgment does not require EMI to cease making Pink Floyd's catalogue available as single track downloads, and EMI continues to sell Pink Floyd's music digitally and in other formats."
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a child for several decades, but for some reason, all those filters let me through!
Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot
A head shot would have been clearer. We all know .NET limps already.
Or is this just the usual Microsoft wobbling instead of making an actual decision?
White Male, 30
I don't have anything to worry about right?
If you've got a beard, you're still on the "extra questions and special search before boarding every flight" list. Just like me, a white male over 50. Maybe they'll start adding questions on facial hair to the census as well, just for statistical purposes, of course...
And World Wind existed before Google Earth...
As one bonus, World Wind does not limit the size of your local imagery cache; you can assign as many gigabytes as you want. World Wind (Windows version) and a selection of cache packs (Landsat and SRTM) can be downloaded from http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22world%20wind%22, while the Java version can be downloaded from http://builds.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.asp
Not necessarily, since the product may already be released, and the project to create it may be already completed.
You work at places where the software is released, and never touched again? That's amazing. You should probably patent your process for creating complete v1.0 software.
Perhaps that's why I said the project to create it is completed. Software maintenance (bug-fixes and interoperability enhancements) occurs sporadically, but involves effort which is orders of magnitude less than the initial development. In general, there is nobody assigned until an issue arises, and then only for as long as it takes to resolve the issue.
'If you've got one lot of damages for patent infringement, what would happen to the project? It's dead.
Not necessarily, since the product may already be released, and the project to create it may be already completed. The damages award is typically made after lengthy legal proceedings, and it's not likely that the development project is still active. Those involved have probably moved on to other projects, been promoted, or changed employer. Paying tens or hundreds of millions in damages is not fatal to large companies, but the risk of such a cost is definitely a risk to be minimized.
If it gets three lots of damages for patent infringement, what happens to the project? It's still dead.
Not necessarily, if the product has already been released, and the project to create it has already been completed. But the court's interpretation of a patent is often baffling to an engineer, who cannot therefore assess whether a risk of infringement really exists. However, by being aware of the patent, the potential cost of an infringement is tripled. This is why large corporations do not encourage their developers to do exhaustive patent searches.
I have not yet tried Lucid, but the "default" layout that we're used to is not necessarily the best. Actually, the most sensible layout I encountered was in OS/2 (using an add-on in v3 or v4, I forget), which had minimize & maximize in the upper right, and the close button on the upper left, inside from the application button. Whether I'll like the layout in Lucid is still to be determined.
Actually, the smaller and more sensitive quantum dots by themselves would be better for dark imaging, mainly because with so many more usable levels of sensitivity you could assign a noise level below a certain threshold to render as pure black and then work up from there.
That's not how image acquisition works. The shot noise is determined ONLY by the incident photon flux per pixel; it is unaffected by detector sensitivity etc. Following your suggestion would have three consequences: (i) the ratio of shot noise would increase in each pixel, since the pixel areas would be smaller and thus have fewer incident photons each; (ii) readout noise would increase for the image as a whole, since it would be divided into more pixels, each requiring A/D conversion; (iii) increasing the noise threshold would simply clip away image information in the lower end of the histogram, reducing the overall information content in the image. The third effect would be achieved more easily and flexibly in postprocessing, anyway.
What would matter would be the degree of sensitivity these quantum dots have, and then the subsequent software that processes the sensor data.
Sensitivity just amplifies the shot noise as well as the signal. It can help only by increasing the sum of signal plus shot noise, thus reducing the ratio of readout noise to signal plus shot noise. To get better pixels in an image, you need photons, photons, photons. Playing with the detector technology does not help, other than by changing the ratio of readout noise in the output. Please absorb that simple message.
The article says that in conventional CMOS sensors, three quarters of the incident photons are either absorbed by a metal layer or hit a spot between photo diodes, not contributing to photo diode charge and read-out signal.
You are referring to areal efficiency or "fill factor" of detectors. CMOS had low areal efficiency some years back, but no longer. Both CMOS and CCD detectors are almost always equipped with integrated microlenses nowadays, which direct almost all of the incident light on the whole detector onto the active photosites. Some light is still lost at boundaries between the lenses, and due to the efficiency of the lenses. The ineffective regions between photosites receive hardly any light at all. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on CCDs:
Microlenses can bring the fill factor back up to 90 percent or more depending on pixel size and the overall system's optical design.
Integration of microlenses onto the chip is a major reason why CMOS detectors have caught up with CCD detectors in image quality. Compared to CCDs, a smaller fraction of a CMOS detector consists of photosites. Both benefit from provision of microlenses, but CMOS benefits rather more, and reaches almost the same areal efficiency as a comparable CCD. With less than 10% of incident photons lost, there is only a limited scope for improvement, by quantum dots or other methods. Those claims in TFA were reminiscent of fresh bullshit.
Good CCDs can exceed 85% in quantum efficiency at some wavelengths, such as in the icx285 which is typically used in industrial devices. However, efficiencies are lower at other wavelengths, and CCD and CMOS detectors used in consumer devices often peak at below 60% quantum efficiency. So there is room for improvement here, but not nearly as spectacular as the claims of TFA.
Keep in mind, as I mentioned in the earlier post, that increases in detector sensitivity (through areal efficiency or quantum efficiency) will elevate the signal level, but will not affect the ratio of shot noise in the signal. For that, you need more incident photons though bigger pixels and/or better subject illumination and/or bigger lens apertures and/or longer exposure times. TFA smells a bit like marketing hype. Quantum dots may lead to improvements in detector fabrication & price, but not so much in image quality...
Image quality is limited by several factors. The sensitivity of the detector is only one, and is the only one that quantum dots can address. In this instance, the sensitivity increases only by a moderate amount, so the improvement in signal level (or reduction in pixel size preserving signal level) is also moderate.
Increasing the signal level will improve the S/N ratio for readout noise, assuming the readout is comparable to that available in today's cameras. Readout noise has been aggressively tacked by camera manufacturers, and is already very low. The principal source of noise in conventional images is shot noise (photon noise), and this is unrelated to the detector sensitivity. Shot noise depends ONLY on the number of photons arriving at each pixel, and is the reason that darker areas of digital images tend to be noisier, or require information-destroying denoising operations in postprocessing. Other forms of noise, such as dark current and dark noise, are relevant only in special applications, such as astrophotography.
Shot noise is intrinsic in the statistics of photon fluxes. The number of photons arriving at a pixel from a radiance which is "uniform" in time and space is Poissonian: the standard deviation is the square root of the mean. The signal to noise ratio is the mean divided by its square root, which is the square root of the number of photons which arrived in that sampling interval (exposure). If 10,000 photons are expected to arrive at a pixel in a given exposure time, then the shot noise will be about 1% when comparing multiple "identical" exposures of that pixel. Changing the detector sensitivity raises or lowers the readout signal level, but does not change the signal to noise ratio in the signal from shot noise.
Reducing the shot noise requires more photons arriving at each pixel. Getting more photons per pixel requires either (i) bigger pixels on the detector, (ii) better illumination of the subject, or (iii) better optics. This is why professional cameras have larger pixels than prosumer cameras, which tend to have larger pixels than pocket cameras, phone cameras, etc. Better lenses also help (but large apertures also affect depth of field). For given lighting conditions and optics, bigger pixels result in lower image noise, unless the readout circuitry really sucks.
So, quantum dots will result in a higher signal level than conventional CCD/CMOS/CID detectors under similar imaging circumstances. The improvement is probably limited to improving the ratio of signal to readout noise, which is already pretty good. Quantum dots will not magically increase the number of photons arriving at the detector, and if used to reduce pixel size, will result in worse signal to noise ratio for the shot noise (biggest noise problem in most photography). Result: not a dramatic improvement, although detectors giving horribly noisy images (needing heavy destructive denoising) may get even smaller.
Just send the bums some money, so they'll shut up. The potential of quantum dots in imaging sensors has been known for years.
Maybe they assumed that a fall from that height would usually kill the person anyway, so there isn't much point in hurrying.
That would be even stupider. A fall from 8 feet may inflict anything from minor bruising to serious or life-threatening injury, such as compound fracture or head/neck injuries. Only in a few cases would those injuries be untreatably mortal.
As one anecdote, I have fallen from more than 10 feet up, while traveling horizontally at about 30 km/h (the horse and I unexpectedly took different paths over a jump). I collected some bruises, but was able to re-mount and continue over the rest of the course. Medical attention was neither needed nor sought, and I was over 50 years old at the time. Had there been solid obstacles such as rocks in my unintended landing zone, the outcome might have been considerably worse.
In London, I heard a standard rule of thumb that it costs about £100 to get an enjoyable bottle of wine. This breaks down as about £10 for the bottle you actually enjoy, and the remaining £90 for the nine other bottles you bought. Really, there are a lot of nice wines in the £10 price bracket, but they are surrounded by many less nice ones, and it's a matter of taste as to which ones are nicest.
"A paperless office is as useful as a paperless toilet. Some things would be impractical..."
OK, it's not that old a saying, but it's valid in a number of ways.
I use "RemoveUnderwearToLogin" as the SSID.
Of course, removing clothing is not enough by itself. Access is also protected by WPA2/AES and a nontrivial password.
...the potential for evil. There is no guarantee that the replacement will be less clueless or less malevolent towards the pastimes of modern society. With a little good luck, some of Atkinson's stupider decisions and stances will be reversed. Politicians, however, are more adept at finding and deploying bad luck than good.
One interesting question is whether the $10 disks would be proper CDs, capable of having the trademarked Compact Disc Digital Audio logo, or whether they'd be bastardized pseudo CDs with weirdo copy protection (and ergo NOT authorized to have the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo), which don't play in lots of devices. The invisible cost of nonstandard disks would make them quite unattractive to many.
Try Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS or OpenSuse or Fedora or any of the others... unless your software (and wallet) already got locked into Microsoft...
I'm actually at a scientific meeting and saw 7 presentations in which they "double dipped" on their statisitics before we broke for lunch.
Double-dipping is bad enough, but the medical field is rife with multiple-dipping. Each dataset is plumbed to test dozens of hypotheses, without appropriately adjusting the acceptance criteria. Even with separate datasets, if you test 20 hypotheses and discover that each one is just valid at the 95% confidence level, then there is a very good chance that there are some false positives. In the medical alleged-sciences, however, all 20 would be blindly proclaimed as truth.
And then there are the social nonsenses^W sciences... If practitioners of some discipline do not understand how to use quantitative methods, they should limit themselves to qualitative argument only. Unfortunately, in statistics as in other fields, those who are ignorant or incompetent are generally unaware of the extent of their ignorance and incompetence.
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Try telling that to Microsoft!
Recall that Windows did not become the de facto standard OS by being better - it was definitely not better than the alternatives in the period in which it became dominant. So there is another way: gain sufficient market share through fair means or foul, and you can win. Whether wikipedia would count as critical mass or not is an open question, but if they were sufficiently bloodyminded, then whichever codec they chose to standardize on would ipso facto become a necessary codec, even if it were not used widely elsewhere.
RT-11 ??
RT-11 needed a PDP-11 (16-bit cpu). The closest equivalent for the PDP-8 (12-bit) was RTS-8. I never used the PDP-8 for real-time stuff, but did "enjoy" booting it to TSS-8 for multi-user access. The procedure involved a lengthy sequence of messing with the front panel toggle switches accompanied by muttering of curses and magic incantations.
[adopts faux-Yorkshire accent] And you try to tell that to the young people today, and they won't believe it...
And lutfisk *shudder*
Lutefisk is indeed quite nasty, roughly on a par in nastiness with Finnish Mämmi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammi or Scottish haggis (I've tasted all of them, regrettably).
However, these are nothing on the Swedish "delicacy" Surströmming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstromming. Many apartment buildings in Sweden have rules preventing one from opening a can of the stuff anywhere in the building (which would become uninhabitable as the vapors spread through the ventilation system). My Swedish colleagues assert that it can only be consumed in tiny quantities, and then only after at least half a bottle of vodka, and potentially triggering an extended vomit.
What's the story here? He blabbed on a security issue without approval, and got his ass roasted.
From the BBC article:
An EMI statement said: "Today's judgment does not require EMI to cease making Pink Floyd's catalogue available as single track downloads, and EMI continues to sell Pink Floyd's music digitally and in other formats."
Windows malware preinstalled on a Linux device?
Is it WINE-compatible, and can WINE even be installed on Android phones?
Yep, we got a result that's good for some headlines, so clearly the system is working well!
The "Headline of the month club"?
That's one giant leap below the "Publication of the month club". Less effort, too.