I'm someone who doesn't mind being oncall; however, I simply cannot stand to get paged on something I can't do anything about or on a system I'm unfamiliar with. Both happen a lot at Amazon. You get stuck maintaining systems you did not design and did not write. Nor were you around when it was built, so you have no solid frame of reference. Oh, and good luck finding any accurate docs. When you do come to the conclusion you need to refactor something, 9 times out of 10 your request to fix it is vetoed.
Btw, HDR software might not be the the right solution because it seems to be more about averaging different exposures. There's got to be software that will combine and add multiple exposures. It also wouldn't be too hard to write a simplified algorithm to do it.
Step 11 is lower quality because he applied a tone mapping texture for artistic purposes. The center one in the 3 panel is the HDR one. Also, rotation is taken care with the software, however it's not ideal. Rotating image data (at angles other than 90,180,270,360) destroys a little bit of pixel information even with very high res images (not usually noticeable to the eye but it happens).
The number of photons over a fixed amount of time isn't going to change whether exposure time is sliced into a single exposure or multiple exposures. It's basic math.
I think there is a mod community for The Sims. There's also a lot of official content updates. I still play games derived from Quake2 and Quake3 open source.
Why worry about smooth equatorial tracking? Rig your camera using the cheapest tracking solution you have or move it by hand if you have to. Who cares if it jitters. It just can't jitter during the exposure. Merge the photos into 1 frame by removing the jitter and combining exposures.
A 100 second exposure pic is equal to 100 one second exposure pics. The problem is in finding software to stitch the photos into 1 frame. The easiest to try is to just get PhotoShop. Stitch the photos into 1 with Photo Merge. You can also experiment with PhotoShop HDR merge. You may have to tweak the contrast/brightness and light levels before or after.
2nd option is using video stabilization software to remove the jitter. There are tons of software options for that but you want one will accept very large resolution pics with large dimensions. You want apps that will work on frames as individual photos instead of enforcing video formats on import and export. Off the shell software might be tuned for pics with normal daylight exposure, so look for options to fine tune the algorithm to work on dimly exposed pics.
If the software won't work on dimly exposed pics, perhaps you can experiment with batch processing the files to increase contrast and brightness or tweak the lighting levels. (Lots of software options.) Feed the result into the stabilization software. Batch process again to reverse the contrast/brightness increase.
The post-process step is to stitch and merge the photos into one as before. Plain stitching used to create panorama shots won't work. It needs to sum the exposure data. Photo apps solve these types of problems so there's a good chance it would work with PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro (with "HDR Photo Merge). You could shoot a series of fast exposures for the raw data and 1 long blurry exposure to use as a reference point for the HDR merge. Example.
Faraday cages impedes electric fields and thus lightening transfers between positive and negative fields. EMP is burst of radiation like flipping on a lamp. Two different things.
Here's some helpful advice. Before you criticize someone else's English, you ought to run your post through a grammar and spell checker first.
Are you seriously arguing eighteen and nineteen year olds are not teenagers? Wow. That's bold. You should correct Wikipedia's article because it seems they got it wrong!
The flash probably did not have a stop() in the final frame (the only frame if it's a vector graphic) so it's looping at 12fps continously redrawing. The flash author goofed up.
While you were unfairly modded down, I could not disagree more with your comment. Employees already share in profits by way of salary and benefits. Your compensation is determined by the level of risk you've assumed or the skills you bring to the company. Employees assume zero risk so that's why they are paid fixed salary or hourly wages that do not necessarily scale with the quarterly profits.
Let's say you come up with a brilliant idea for a new product. You spend $100,000 of your personal money to file a patent, build prototypes, find a manufacturer, locate an investor, order a production batch, pay for storage and shipping, convince a handful of businesses to carry your product, and finally the profits start rolling in. 2 years later you have an office, 100 employees, and you're paying yourself a hefty salary. Joe Blow walks in off the street and you hire him to man the front desk. What has he sacrificed to deserve a percentage cut of profits above his salary? How valuable is he? Is he hard to replace? Are there 100 applicants waiting to assume his job? Will profits go down if he quits? What risk had he assumed for merely showing up and collecting a paycheck?
You seem to hold a belief that corporations have deep pockets and huge profit margins. That is not the typical case. The majority of the time margins are quite slim: 1 to 5% range. Even when margins are high, profits are used to invest in technology, perform research, acquire businesses, build-out new stores, and expand market reach. It is these activities that secures the future stability of the business. If they don't reinvest, they piss away their profits and they eventually fail. With the exception of a handful of monopolies and recent government bailouts, competition applies pressure on businesses to be efficient. If you're not efficient, someone else will be and drive prices below your cost to manufacture. Capitalism works only if government doesn't intercede to prop business up, dictate how it divides profits, and allows irresponsible businesses to fail.
I run a couple of sites that, among other things, has links to return the "content" in a list of different formats (GIF, PNG, PS, PDF,...). Periodically, the servers get bogged down by search sites hitting them many times per second, trying to get every file in every format.
I don't understand why you exposed them as links in your html, which crawlers will easily pickup. If bandwidth/CPU is a concern (it almost always is) one shouldn't serve plain links to large data files; files with many duplicate formats; or files meant only for human consumption. Is there a reason you don't serve them from CGI with mandatory POST arguments? You turn off indexing on the data file directory to lock out crawlers and use the CGI to validate POST arguments, which serves a 302 redirect link to the actual data file. It can be done with GET and mandatory args but going with POST is gives you an extra layer because convention is crawlers don't do form POSTs. You can also throw in a CAPTCHA on the form page.
Inserting a form POST does throw up an extra page, but it's become a sort of status quo for user initiated downloads. Some nanny HTTP purists might bitch about misusing POST, but it's simple way to do it and can execute very fast with caching compiled CGIs because there's little CPU overhead with parsing CGI args and sending back a few headers.
As for automated downloads (invoked from installer programs), they should be using file manifests to locate files inside the non-indexable data directory.
Maybe the story here is this is an exercise of freedom made possible by community access to open source, documentation, and the right of redistribution.
I have Wii Fit and board. When you do the balance test and balance games you can tell it's a very sensitive and accurate board. It's also an accurate weight scale. It's also very heavy and dense for its dimensions. Much stronger than you think a chunk of plastic would be.
It seems the system OS is minimal, runs off the ARM CPU on the GPU, and controls access to the Wii hardware not present in the Gamecube architecture (such as the Wii controller). The system OS and firmware on the DVD drive guard against loading arbitrary software off the DVD disk, so any Wii mode executable would have to be blessed and recognized as legitimate by the system OS. Any OS running on the PowerPC gets loaded off the DVD. Now, this part is me guessing but either the PowerPC OS is packaged as a separately distinct executable(s) or it would be statically linked in with the game executable. I don't know because I'm not a Wii developer who builds Wii games. If Netflix needed back-door access to the hardware, it would probably have to negotiate that somehow with the system OS on the ARM CPU.
If all my assumptions are false, and Wii software coming from the DVD or SD Card (thus Wii Shop) naturally has full access to hardware, then I don't know why the Netflix app would require loading off a DVD. Privileged execution or hardware access is the only valid technical reason I can think of.
The CPU is not magically faster in kernel mode! You must be a girl, or a suit, because you're clueless about computers
Kernel thread context switching versus user space thread context switching. Spin locks versus mutex locks. Functional overhead of user space library calls. Zero copy buffers. Kernel tuning of buffer sizes, descriptors, threading, scheduler algorithm, networking, memory map, memory allocation. Direct access of the graphics chipset and other co-processors in ways not permitted by library APIs.
Maybe you should take a college level course in operating systems design sometime...
Also, every Wii has a unique ID in firmware, so they can already track users with Netflix account ID and Wii console ID. The Neflix DRM scheme could validate both IDs against Netflix and Nintendo, so using unique IDs in the DVD doesn't buy anything. It's possible hard drive space is an issue, but I suspect it's more likely due to the Wii's boot procedure. Since the Wii is so underpowered, it probably requires loading drivers in kernel space in order to decode streaming video faster. Loading kernel drivers from the Wii channel or an SD card wouldn't be possible because they are restricted in what they can load, so that leaves Netflix with booting a signed app from the DVD. Of course, this is all guesswork and can't be confirmed until the Netflix DVD is available for analysis.
When being singled out and abused for being transsexual is institutionalized, you tend to get a bit nervous when technology is installed that would expose you as a transsexual to individuals with great power. Nearly every transsexual person has had bad experiences with police, clerks behind a counter, and those expecting your identification papers to fit within a narrow set of parameters. http://www.wmctv.com/global/story.asp?s=8515744
Also, a fat man with man boobs will not look the same on the image as a pre-op transwoman of normal weight. It will be very obvious who is transsexual with that scanner. Remember these scanners will be installed in airports around the world in countries having despicable records for abusing if not killing LGBT people.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm someone who doesn't mind being oncall; however, I simply cannot stand to get paged on something I can't do anything about or on a system I'm unfamiliar with. Both happen a lot at Amazon. You get stuck maintaining systems you did not design and did not write. Nor were you around when it was built, so you have no solid frame of reference. Oh, and good luck finding any accurate docs. When you do come to the conclusion you need to refactor something, 9 times out of 10 your request to fix it is vetoed.
Amazon is great if you love treadmills.
Btw, HDR software might not be the the right solution because it seems to be more about averaging different exposures. There's got to be software that will combine and add multiple exposures. It also wouldn't be too hard to write a simplified algorithm to do it.
Step 11 is lower quality because he applied a tone mapping texture for artistic purposes. The center one in the 3 panel is the HDR one. Also, rotation is taken care with the software, however it's not ideal. Rotating image data (at angles other than 90,180,270,360) destroys a little bit of pixel information even with very high res images (not usually noticeable to the eye but it happens).
The number of photons over a fixed amount of time isn't going to change whether exposure time is sliced into a single exposure or multiple exposures. It's basic math.
I think there is a mod community for The Sims. There's also a lot of official content updates. I still play games derived from Quake2 and Quake3 open source.
Why worry about smooth equatorial tracking? Rig your camera using the cheapest tracking solution you have or move it by hand if you have to. Who cares if it jitters. It just can't jitter during the exposure. Merge the photos into 1 frame by removing the jitter and combining exposures.
A 100 second exposure pic is equal to 100 one second exposure pics. The problem is in finding software to stitch the photos into 1 frame. The easiest to try is to just get PhotoShop. Stitch the photos into 1 with Photo Merge. You can also experiment with PhotoShop HDR merge. You may have to tweak the contrast/brightness and light levels before or after.
2nd option is using video stabilization software to remove the jitter. There are tons of software options for that but you want one will accept very large resolution pics with large dimensions. You want apps that will work on frames as individual photos instead of enforcing video formats on import and export. Off the shell software might be tuned for pics with normal daylight exposure, so look for options to fine tune the algorithm to work on dimly exposed pics.
If the software won't work on dimly exposed pics, perhaps you can experiment with batch processing the files to increase contrast and brightness or tweak the lighting levels. (Lots of software options.) Feed the result into the stabilization software. Batch process again to reverse the contrast/brightness increase.
The post-process step is to stitch and merge the photos into one as before. Plain stitching used to create panorama shots won't work. It needs to sum the exposure data. Photo apps solve these types of problems so there's a good chance it would work with PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro (with "HDR Photo Merge). You could shoot a series of fast exposures for the raw data and 1 long blurry exposure to use as a reference point for the HDR merge. Example.
Faraday cages impedes electric fields and thus lightening transfers between positive and negative fields. EMP is burst of radiation like flipping on a lamp. Two different things.
Here's some helpful advice. Before you criticize someone else's English, you ought to run your post through a grammar and spell checker first.
Are you seriously arguing eighteen and nineteen year olds are not teenagers? Wow. That's bold. You should correct Wikipedia's article because it seems they got it wrong!
Bah... How did you know my password? My password is 7 stars.
Facebook is not NASA, a bank, or NSA. Security requirements for a database of profiles are not as stringent.
The flash probably did not have a stop() in the final frame (the only frame if it's a vector graphic) so it's looping at 12fps continously redrawing. The flash author goofed up.
That's all fine and dandy, but too bad it doesn't work out later in court.
While you were unfairly modded down, I could not disagree more with your comment. Employees already share in profits by way of salary and benefits. Your compensation is determined by the level of risk you've assumed or the skills you bring to the company. Employees assume zero risk so that's why they are paid fixed salary or hourly wages that do not necessarily scale with the quarterly profits.
Let's say you come up with a brilliant idea for a new product. You spend $100,000 of your personal money to file a patent, build prototypes, find a manufacturer, locate an investor, order a production batch, pay for storage and shipping, convince a handful of businesses to carry your product, and finally the profits start rolling in. 2 years later you have an office, 100 employees, and you're paying yourself a hefty salary. Joe Blow walks in off the street and you hire him to man the front desk. What has he sacrificed to deserve a percentage cut of profits above his salary? How valuable is he? Is he hard to replace? Are there 100 applicants waiting to assume his job? Will profits go down if he quits? What risk had he assumed for merely showing up and collecting a paycheck?
You seem to hold a belief that corporations have deep pockets and huge profit margins. That is not the typical case. The majority of the time margins are quite slim: 1 to 5% range. Even when margins are high, profits are used to invest in technology, perform research, acquire businesses, build-out new stores, and expand market reach. It is these activities that secures the future stability of the business. If they don't reinvest, they piss away their profits and they eventually fail. With the exception of a handful of monopolies and recent government bailouts, competition applies pressure on businesses to be efficient. If you're not efficient, someone else will be and drive prices below your cost to manufacture. Capitalism works only if government doesn't intercede to prop business up, dictate how it divides profits, and allows irresponsible businesses to fail.
I don't understand why you exposed them as links in your html, which crawlers will easily pickup. If bandwidth/CPU is a concern (it almost always is) one shouldn't serve plain links to large data files; files with many duplicate formats; or files meant only for human consumption. Is there a reason you don't serve them from CGI with mandatory POST arguments? You turn off indexing on the data file directory to lock out crawlers and use the CGI to validate POST arguments, which serves a 302 redirect link to the actual data file. It can be done with GET and mandatory args but going with POST is gives you an extra layer because convention is crawlers don't do form POSTs. You can also throw in a CAPTCHA on the form page.
Inserting a form POST does throw up an extra page, but it's become a sort of status quo for user initiated downloads. Some nanny HTTP purists might bitch about misusing POST, but it's simple way to do it and can execute very fast with caching compiled CGIs because there's little CPU overhead with parsing CGI args and sending back a few headers.
As for automated downloads (invoked from installer programs), they should be using file manifests to locate files inside the non-indexable data directory.
A question for your question. Must every conversation be about Linux?
Maybe the story here is this is an exercise of freedom made possible by community access to open source, documentation, and the right of redistribution.
.... is the most awesomist console ever. :D
I have Wii Fit and board. When you do the balance test and balance games you can tell it's a very sensitive and accurate board. It's also an accurate weight scale. It's also very heavy and dense for its dimensions. Much stronger than you think a chunk of plastic would be.
It seems the system OS is minimal, runs off the ARM CPU on the GPU, and controls access to the Wii hardware not present in the Gamecube architecture (such as the Wii controller). The system OS and firmware on the DVD drive guard against loading arbitrary software off the DVD disk, so any Wii mode executable would have to be blessed and recognized as legitimate by the system OS. Any OS running on the PowerPC gets loaded off the DVD. Now, this part is me guessing but either the PowerPC OS is packaged as a separately distinct executable(s) or it would be statically linked in with the game executable. I don't know because I'm not a Wii developer who builds Wii games. If Netflix needed back-door access to the hardware, it would probably have to negotiate that somehow with the system OS on the ARM CPU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_system_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_homebrew
If all my assumptions are false, and Wii software coming from the DVD or SD Card (thus Wii Shop) naturally has full access to hardware, then I don't know why the Netflix app would require loading off a DVD. Privileged execution or hardware access is the only valid technical reason I can think of.
Kernel thread context switching versus user space thread context switching. Spin locks versus mutex locks. Functional overhead of user space library calls. Zero copy buffers. Kernel tuning of buffer sizes, descriptors, threading, scheduler algorithm, networking, memory map, memory allocation. Direct access of the graphics chipset and other co-processors in ways not permitted by library APIs.
Maybe you should take a college level course in operating systems design sometime...
Also, every Wii has a unique ID in firmware, so they can already track users with Netflix account ID and Wii console ID. The Neflix DRM scheme could validate both IDs against Netflix and Nintendo, so using unique IDs in the DVD doesn't buy anything. It's possible hard drive space is an issue, but I suspect it's more likely due to the Wii's boot procedure. Since the Wii is so underpowered, it probably requires loading drivers in kernel space in order to decode streaming video faster. Loading kernel drivers from the Wii channel or an SD card wouldn't be possible because they are restricted in what they can load, so that leaves Netflix with booting a signed app from the DVD. Of course, this is all guesswork and can't be confirmed until the Netflix DVD is available for analysis.
Really. Hmmm... $1.92 million verdict against Jammie Thomas-Rasset. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-retrial-verdict.ars
When being singled out and abused for being transsexual is institutionalized, you tend to get a bit nervous when technology is installed that would expose you as a transsexual to individuals with great power. Nearly every transsexual person has had bad experiences with police, clerks behind a counter, and those expecting your identification papers to fit within a narrow set of parameters. http://www.wmctv.com/global/story.asp?s=8515744
Also, a fat man with man boobs will not look the same on the image as a pre-op transwoman of normal weight. It will be very obvious who is transsexual with that scanner. Remember these scanners will be installed in airports around the world in countries having despicable records for abusing if not killing LGBT people.