I think an interesting moderation system would be a third party website that has all the content submitted to the original site, but then applies some moderation system (whether staff moderators, or some public rating system, or whatever) to present a moderated view of the content. Any forms for feedback would send submissions directly back to the original website's servers, which the third party would then get along with everything else it moderates.
How could that third party moderator be responsible for the content of the site? It's not soliciting the content or running the community. It's just reporting what others are saying.
US law says that unmoderated Internet content confers no liability for that content on the publisher (though you might have to back that up on in some expensive, annoying court sessions if you got sued). But evidently there are other courts and laws that disagree with that policy. Maybe there's another structure that's more universally defensible.
This spar design minimizes the cross-section that interacts with waves that push around the vessel/building, and has adjustable ballasts that compensate for up/down motion with their own up/down compensation.
But what about some hydraulic lifts fitted under the foundation platform, with several meters of throw, that sense the ocean surface surging up and down below the foundation, and push/pull to compensate, in a feedback loop? Wouldn't that action let the lifts fill the distance between the stable foundation plane and the varying ocean surface with strong supports? Are there any existing seaborne platforms that do this?
These spar dwellings are designed to minimize the effects of normal wave action on the vessel/building's stability. But what about in a hurricane?
What's the wave action like a few meters below the surface during a hurricane? Could one of these spars just submerge for the day or so it takes a hurricane to pass, leaving just air pipes and sensors floating on the surface to get wracked by the storm? Or are the waters below also treacherously gyrating all around the storm's visible action above the surface?
The current patent system works like this: most claims are granted. Any initial challenge in court merely establishes the evidence, and is tried by judges without any expertise in either patents or the technology being patented. Only in the appeals court is any real judgement exercised. By which time the process has cost big money, usually millions of dollars, and years of uncertainty in collecting revenue from sales of the invention.
So only the rich, who can afford to pay their way through those risky years, get anything like their due process.
Patents are a monopoly. Obtaining one from the government should require the applicant to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their patent is necessary "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", the only Constitutional basis for these monopolies. That argument should require the applicant to produce evidence of an exhaustive search of prior art, not just launch a "submarine" claim and wait for it to torpedo some prior artist who then must go through the process at their expense. They should also produce similarly supported evidence of the other requirements, such as novelty and utility. If thatevidence is shown to be incomplete, the Patent Office should reject the application, with a fee that actually covers processing it, plus probably a fine for wasting the public's time and clogging its offices. If that evidence is shown to be fraudulent, like when the applicant is proven to have hidden ignored evidence of disqualifying facts, the applicant should be charged with attempting to create an illegitimate monopoly, as well as with practicing the fraud. The applicant should even have to prove the case that their specific invention promotes science or useful arts only with patent protection, and disprove the progress in science or the useful arts possible without the patent.
Getting a patent should be hard. It should be a cost of doing business. The upfront process should put the burden on the applicant. The patent should not be the asset, but should be only that occasional compromise with both free expression and modern economics that requires a temporary monopoly to protect progress (not necessarily the inventor) from predatory competition which doesn't invent, but simply outspends inventors to exploit a known invention. When that gotcha doesn't actually impede progress, the patent isn't necessary, and should never be granted.
Their process costs a net ~55KJ:mol CO2 recovered. CO2 is 44.0095 g:mol, so 1.24973017KJ:g energy:CO2. Gasoline contains ~14KJ:g. So this process would reduce gasoline's overall energy by about 9% to make it "carbon-neutral". Since gasoline's energy is not consumed 100% in any current machine, this process represents well over 10% reduction in gasoline's net power delivery.
Crude oil contains only ~12.31KJ:g, so 55KJ:mol is 9.85% of its energy content. Probably this process would reduce the net energy available for other work by over 15%.
Coal contains about 8.75KJ:g, so about 14.3% of its total energy, and probably over 20% of its currently recoverable energy, would be consumed in scrubbing its CO2 pollution waste out of the air.
Unlike crude oil (and the gasoline it contains), there is a whole lot of coal - especially in the United States. However, its pollution contains a lot more than just CO2, but also other Greenhouse gases, a large fraction in radioactive elements, and other toxic/harmful soot and gases. If those other waste products can be recycled with innovative processes like this one, we might be able to expend 20% or more of our coal's energy reinvested in keeping it clean. The alternative is Greenhouse catastrophe, that no amount of energy humans can control will clean up.
If I bought a Mac with a CD that installs the OS, and then installed it on my compatible machine that I bought with either Windows, no OS, or whatever, or that I built to be Mac compatible from parts, and then used my Mac OS CD to install it, then there's not a goddamn thing I'd let Apple tell me about what to do with my Macs.
I know Apple has gotten used to controlling every detail of every Mac and making money from every Mac on the planet. I know Apple has gotten used to telling us which machines the bits we buy from Apple are allowed to run on, whether Mac OS or iTunes.
So what? I'd like every Mac to have 2 mouse buttons, but they're not my Macs. Apple just has to get used to the idea that they're getting my money in exchange for what then becomes my Mac.
Is there really anyone left who believes that these privacy invasions are designed or expected to stop "terrorism", and not just give the government (and its corporate vendors) unlimited power through unlimited knowledge of its people?
If so, then what the hell is wrong with those people?
Is there as cheap device into which I can plug a half dozen or more SATA HDs that will power them and connect them to a single PC SATA port? A SATA hub that works like a USB hub, even if it doesn't have hotplug functions?
If the two lasers are very close in frequency, their beat frequency will be their difference, which will be a higher frequency than either of the two original frequencies. The THz frequencies make that beat frequency easier to be very high. I don't know why you think the beat frequency would be a low frequency.
In fact the THz laser we're discussing here is generated by the beat frequency of two IR (lower frequency) lasers, which is why they're called "Quantum Cascade Lasers":
To achieve the breakthrough and overcome the temperature limitations of current laser designs, the researchers engineered a room temperature mid-infrared Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) that emits light at two frequencies simultaneously. The generation of Terahertz radiation occurs via the process of difference-frequency generation inside the laser material at room temperature at a frequency of 5 THz (equal to the difference of the two mid-infrared QCL frequencies).
It all depends on whether the engineers can make an all-optical computer. But it will all require further silicon research, as did this THz source device.
This THz frequency laser was made by building cheap and efficient IR lasers differing from each other by only a tiny wavelength difference, then using them to excite the active lasing material at their "beat frequency". That technique might be usable to generate ever-higher frequency lasers.
For example, what about using two pairs of IR lasers, each pair resonating at a slightly different beat frequency? In fact a single "reference" IR laser could be split into two sources, with two different other sources each supplying their different frequencies into a THz laser of slightly different frequency. Then use those THz sources into an semiconductor active region which resonates at the beat frequency between the THz sources.
That higher frequency result could be used as one of yet another pair, generating an even higher beat frequency. And since these steps up are made from thin film deposition, they could have such a hierarchical structure all contained in a very tiny device. Perhaps in a device at a scale that offers extremely high frequency lasers, manufactured and operating cheaply, without extra HW to maintain a useful beam.
Perhaps a beam that could offer networks petabyte datarates. And perhaps, if the optical resonance junctions can be modulated by other photons, actual logic executing quickly, at low power.
How come Evolution still doesn't have a white/blacklist against the addressbook? How come it doesn't have a spam filter that traps even whitelisted spam that's bayesian-similar to marked spam?
How come big email servers like at ISPs don't flag as spam messages that have identical bodies but different senders and recipients?
How come ISPs don't pretend to be spammers in the market for spamming SW, then reverse engineer what the spam engineers sell them into filters, like virus honeypots have proven works?
Mostly we scanned photos printed from film, or directly scanned the film slides themselves (two different kinds of film, different scanning params). The scans were used to import the photos into magazines and newspapers. At the time (1990) there were no hirez portable digital cameras for direct digital photography of suitable quality for publishing. They used these $150K+ drum scanners, which were whirling cylinders with the photos taped on, scanned in successive lines with an A/D sensor head (like a printer in reverse), which we replaced with something that could be lit and positioned like a real camera, with real Nikon 35mm lenses, put on a tripod, direct digitization of a live scene (though its exposures took too long for anything but a "still life").
We did also sell some to some corporation that claimed to be using them to aerially map agriculture, because we had such excellent discrimination among minute shades of green ("Fuji mode" dedicated something like 16bits of 36 per pixel to green, not the 8bits of the standard 24bit color). I think they were monitoring drug farms, ID'ing different crops by their color signature, because we didn't market to that industry and we never heard from them again after they took delivery - not even for support or upgrades. But I was impressed that our engineering was so robust that the micropositioning of the sensor tested OK for stability even mounted in an aircraft, due to the laser/interferometer feedback DSP. And we got to write some early tile stitching 2D DSP algorithms, that I always wanted to port to the FPGA where they were a more natural fit. But I think that they just flew film cameras, possibly 70mm movie cameras for analog oversampling - our camera was uniquely qualified to use some simple optics to scan the 70mm frames into our 35mm image plane - then scanned the frames later. They should have bought the film recorder SW I made, because that device would have scanned a filmstrip, with colorspace conversions etc.
The main guy designing it was a true genius, the secondary guy working the nightshift was one of the cleverest and most enthusiastic hackers (in any engineering medium) I've ever met, and the engineer in charge was really a mathematician working with these brand-new DSPs which finally put linear algebra onto a cheap chip fast enough for realtime Fourier analyses. I was lucky to be the kid hired with few skills and no engineering "discipline", who these pros just sent careening around the lab cross-pollinating each of those main brains by asking dumb questions and trying to get the whole technical vision into my unimprinted brain from its various parts, which forced them to sync to each other without battling each other's egos. A lot of the projects we worked on were entirely new models for programming, especially in the multiproc interops and data distribution strategies far beyond the digital cameras that were 20 years ahead of their time, but all focused on delivering a working product, so they were reality-driven though visionary. Some new tech, like the IBM/Toshiba/Sony CellBE uP, puts on silicon what we breadboarded back then, but still lacks the SW platforms and tools to make it programmable. And also some of the HW integration we made work with discrete components at relatively slow (MHz, not GHz) clocks is still waiting to be either integrated in a single device or even just glued together on a single fast interconnect.
Maybe someday I'll start up my own version of that skunkworks, if there's still some of the old vision left to implement. But I'll need some kid who's willing to work the dayshift and the nightshift to keep up with the big brains they're keeping synced.
Sorry for the long brag, but the remembering the pictures released the whole movie.
Not really, though we did have a Lenna slide kicking around. We primarily used a Kodak test slide of color bars/wheels and greyscale gradients, and one image of a European/American looking blonde on Kodak slide and one image of a young Japanese looking woman on Fuji slide. We had different colorspaces for US/Europe and Japan, because Fuji film had a larger green dynamic range supposedly because Japanese people have more acute green-band vision (though I've never independently verified that).
Once the camera was initially calibrated we'd use a test target to test how well I'd calibrated the film recorder. We printed a slide of Lenna, then scanned and reprinted it a few times through our DSP convergence algorithm, adjusting the film recorder's colorspace instead of the camera. Then we doubled a Lenna scan/print over a purely photographic repro of Lenna and scanned that subtractive image, calibrating the camera until it converged.
Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable (though not as actually unreliable as either its reputation states, or probably as its corporate mass media competition). But at least its accuracy benefits from the long time in which people have to verify its content and correct it later. Most of Wikipedia's facts are about events that happened quite a while ago, so there's more time for both editing review and for other corroborative (or conflicting) sources to publish and get used in the process.
Wikinews suffers from the transient lifetime of "news". By the time the community has had a chance to verify some Wikinews content, it's probably not "news" anymore.
People probably realize this, or at least that the entire proposition of Wikinews is shaky. I've never seen a single link to a Wikinews article, or even a reference to anyone using Wikinews for anything. I've never heard anyone ever say they even read it.
Now, the corporate mass media news is awful, and of course censors (or, more usually, spins and preempts) news that's bad for its corporate owners and stakeholders. Perhaps even worse than Wikinews. But since Wikinews doesn't have the useful con of a "trustworthy anchor" staring into a camera, or just a long history of a brand name like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, more people (that is, more than 0) read and believe it.
Wikinews has probably now killed itself as a brand, and perhaps even as a model. Most people want their news stories to come from a single person or small group who they think is accountable for its accuracy (confused as its "truth"), not a collaborative effort. They want that person to persist, so they can hold their past failures against them until they're fired. News is ultimately mostly gossip, unless it's purely numerical - and practically no one wants to talk about numbers. We want something we can believe in, more than we want the facts about last night. Wikinews ain't giving us that. And since it's not even possible to wrap fish in it, its days are probably numbered.
I worked for a SF area startup in 1990 that produced and sold cameras for "digital prepress" (later called "desktop publishing", and now just "publishing";) that had the highest resolution around, to compete with drum scanners that were then the expensive industry standard equipment.
We took a 512x512 Hitachi video sensor with a 2x2 C-M/Y-K mask repeated over it, for initial 1Kx1Kx40bit images that we derived from DSP on the intensity of the color-masked pixels. Then we physically stepped the sensor through 8x8 subpixel shifts, subsampling each pixel 64x. We ran the resulting 320MB raw composite files through a bank of multiple 25MFLOPS DSPs (interconnected and logic-accelerated by a fat FPGA) to produce 4Kx4Kx36bit 72MB files. In 1990 that was an awesome achievement.
We poured dramatic engineering work into that platform, which replaced a $150K drum scanner with a $30K PC (on DOS or Win3.0, or plus optional $5K Mac with its GUI including Photoshop 1.0). We had to deal with DSP for micropositioning the video sensor quickly (using feedback data from a laser/interferometer), with new color spaces (I was part of the JPEG org that produced the image format), with custom interconnects at blazing bandwidth, with parallel multiprocessing at then-supercomputer speeds written in C on DOS, and even with the physics of the light variably distorted by turbulence in the air between the camera and scanned slides, heated by the hot lights necessary for exposures fast enough to allow 64 frames and rescan before the sensor wiggled.
All for a 16Mpxl camera that's now beaten by big sensors on handheld consumer devices for under $2K (in 2008, not 1990, dollars). But I can proudly say that we beat them by almost 20 years.
I explicitly pointed out that Shuttleworth's desire is supply side. I happen not to be on the supply side, but on the demand side, like most of us.
What stops me from using whatever calendar I want is that I don't test, release and support a distro. Your question doesn't really make sense.
And PS: Cathedral vs Bazaar is totally unrelated to the size of the project/org/corp, or to its profitmaking. It's entirely about the de/centralized open/closed nature of the development. You might want to read the essay before you start arguing with people about the model, especially in a condescending, sarcastic tone (by an Anonymous Coward). Knowing what you're talking about is a prerequisite for me taking you seriously.
They also support Stephen Hawking's reluctant admission that information couldn't be destroyed by black holes.
Which Hawking? Hawking reversed himself on black holes' one-way entropy. What's the current state of the art? Can I use a black hole to separate the entropy of a structured object from the matter of the object, then spray that entropy on some formless matter to clone it?
Don't be such a defenseless fool. The USAF is run by people many of whom favor a corporate theocracy. The USAF is violating the Constitution whenever convenient.
Enough with the demented Anonymous Coward ignorance. Just because you're a Republican doesn't mean we have to listen to you fools anymore.
Misguided by what, their tyrannical greed? Who cares what they consider themselves as. The prisons are full of "innocent" people, according to themselves.
I didn't say it's "malice". I said it's greed. It's certainly not "idiocy", unless you call "idiocy" the brilliant execution for decades a plan that has stolen $TRILLIONS from hundreds of millions of Americans for killing millions of people, to their exclusive benefit. Idiots don't pull that off. And it takes even smarter people to get people in the public to believe that it's stupidity, not a criminal enterprise, doing all the damage.
By any legitimate standard (not that you offered any at all), these people are evil. And "idiots" only because they're too stupid to accept how much better off we all could be if they turned their hands to actual patriotism, actual defense of our actual national interests. Rather than their own most narrow interests in profit, at the cost of wasting our entire republic.
Maybe they're stupid not to care. Who cares? They're stupid to hate people like me who are smart enough to recognize them destroying our country by attacking our rights, because we get in the way of their greed.
the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures, did not apply to "domestic military operations" against terrorist threats.
So the Air Force can do whatever the spooks (and their Bush crony masters) want, like fly surveillance drones, record and datamine us against satellite surveillance, and help the NSA filter every bit of our telecom.
Because these people hate the Constitution. They hate our freedoms and rights the Constitution instructs them to protect. They hate us. Because we get in the way of business, which is to spend on war the maximum amount Americans can make or borrow.
No, I don't, nor does anyone else worth considering as a requirement from the overall Linux community. But that's not what I said.
What I said was the frequency of opportunity to switch is important. Right now, if your distro doesn't do what you need, but another one issues a release that does do it, you can switch. Any one person might switch that way only once in 10 years. But overall, thousands of people probably switch that way every time a new distro is released with significant differences in version or inclusions from the last significant release of any distro.
Many more people probably do so at the even finer granularity of unofficial updates to existing installs, but that's not the same as getting an official release, with all its support, and even with support contracts (like with the distros Shuttleworth is talking about). Which is why we're talking about the actual release schedules, because unofficial updates are so frequent and self-organizing that they don't need to be synchronized. It's the value of the full, supported (and tested) releases that Shuttleworth and I are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I think an interesting moderation system would be a third party website that has all the content submitted to the original site, but then applies some moderation system (whether staff moderators, or some public rating system, or whatever) to present a moderated view of the content. Any forms for feedback would send submissions directly back to the original website's servers, which the third party would then get along with everything else it moderates.
How could that third party moderator be responsible for the content of the site? It's not soliciting the content or running the community. It's just reporting what others are saying.
US law says that unmoderated Internet content confers no liability for that content on the publisher (though you might have to back that up on in some expensive, annoying court sessions if you got sued). But evidently there are other courts and laws that disagree with that policy. Maybe there's another structure that's more universally defensible.
This spar design minimizes the cross-section that interacts with waves that push around the vessel/building, and has adjustable ballasts that compensate for up/down motion with their own up/down compensation.
But what about some hydraulic lifts fitted under the foundation platform, with several meters of throw, that sense the ocean surface surging up and down below the foundation, and push/pull to compensate, in a feedback loop? Wouldn't that action let the lifts fill the distance between the stable foundation plane and the varying ocean surface with strong supports? Are there any existing seaborne platforms that do this?
These spar dwellings are designed to minimize the effects of normal wave action on the vessel/building's stability. But what about in a hurricane?
What's the wave action like a few meters below the surface during a hurricane? Could one of these spars just submerge for the day or so it takes a hurricane to pass, leaving just air pipes and sensors floating on the surface to get wracked by the storm? Or are the waters below also treacherously gyrating all around the storm's visible action above the surface?
The current patent system works like this: most claims are granted. Any initial challenge in court merely establishes the evidence, and is tried by judges without any expertise in either patents or the technology being patented. Only in the appeals court is any real judgement exercised. By which time the process has cost big money, usually millions of dollars, and years of uncertainty in collecting revenue from sales of the invention.
So only the rich, who can afford to pay their way through those risky years, get anything like their due process.
Patents are a monopoly. Obtaining one from the government should require the applicant to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their patent is necessary "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", the only Constitutional basis for these monopolies. That argument should require the applicant to produce evidence of an exhaustive search of prior art, not just launch a "submarine" claim and wait for it to torpedo some prior artist who then must go through the process at their expense. They should also produce similarly supported evidence of the other requirements, such as novelty and utility. If thatevidence is shown to be incomplete, the Patent Office should reject the application, with a fee that actually covers processing it, plus probably a fine for wasting the public's time and clogging its offices. If that evidence is shown to be fraudulent, like when the applicant is proven to have hidden ignored evidence of disqualifying facts, the applicant should be charged with attempting to create an illegitimate monopoly, as well as with practicing the fraud. The applicant should even have to prove the case that their specific invention promotes science or useful arts only with patent protection, and disprove the progress in science or the useful arts possible without the patent.
Getting a patent should be hard. It should be a cost of doing business. The upfront process should put the burden on the applicant. The patent should not be the asset, but should be only that occasional compromise with both free expression and modern economics that requires a temporary monopoly to protect progress (not necessarily the inventor) from predatory competition which doesn't invent, but simply outspends inventors to exploit a known invention. When that gotcha doesn't actually impede progress, the patent isn't necessary, and should never be granted.
Interesting proposal.
Their process costs a net ~55KJ:mol CO2 recovered. CO2 is 44.0095 g:mol, so 1.24973017KJ:g energy:CO2. Gasoline contains ~14KJ:g. So this process would reduce gasoline's overall energy by about 9% to make it "carbon-neutral". Since gasoline's energy is not consumed 100% in any current machine, this process represents well over 10% reduction in gasoline's net power delivery.
Crude oil contains only ~12.31KJ:g, so 55KJ:mol is 9.85% of its energy content. Probably this process would reduce the net energy available for other work by over 15%.
Coal contains about 8.75KJ:g, so about 14.3% of its total energy, and probably over 20% of its currently recoverable energy, would be consumed in scrubbing its CO2 pollution waste out of the air.
Unlike crude oil (and the gasoline it contains), there is a whole lot of coal - especially in the United States. However, its pollution contains a lot more than just CO2, but also other Greenhouse gases, a large fraction in radioactive elements, and other toxic/harmful soot and gases. If those other waste products can be recycled with innovative processes like this one, we might be able to expend 20% or more of our coal's energy reinvested in keeping it clean. The alternative is Greenhouse catastrophe, that no amount of energy humans can control will clean up.
If I bought a Mac with a CD that installs the OS, and then installed it on my compatible machine that I bought with either Windows, no OS, or whatever, or that I built to be Mac compatible from parts, and then used my Mac OS CD to install it, then there's not a goddamn thing I'd let Apple tell me about what to do with my Macs.
I know Apple has gotten used to controlling every detail of every Mac and making money from every Mac on the planet. I know Apple has gotten used to telling us which machines the bits we buy from Apple are allowed to run on, whether Mac OS or iTunes.
So what? I'd like every Mac to have 2 mouse buttons, but they're not my Macs. Apple just has to get used to the idea that they're getting my money in exchange for what then becomes my Mac.
If only we had windmills that could pull excessive CO2 and other Greenhouse gases out of the air quickly and energy efficiently.
Is there really anyone left who believes that these privacy invasions are designed or expected to stop "terrorism", and not just give the government (and its corporate vendors) unlimited power through unlimited knowledge of its people?
If so, then what the hell is wrong with those people?
Is there as cheap device into which I can plug a half dozen or more SATA HDs that will power them and connect them to a single PC SATA port? A SATA hub that works like a USB hub, even if it doesn't have hotplug functions?
In fact the THz laser we're discussing here is generated by the beat frequency of two IR (lower frequency) lasers, which is why they're called "Quantum Cascade Lasers":
It all depends on whether the engineers can make an all-optical computer. But it will all require further silicon research, as did this THz source device.
This THz frequency laser was made by building cheap and efficient IR lasers differing from each other by only a tiny wavelength difference, then using them to excite the active lasing material at their "beat frequency". That technique might be usable to generate ever-higher frequency lasers.
For example, what about using two pairs of IR lasers, each pair resonating at a slightly different beat frequency? In fact a single "reference" IR laser could be split into two sources, with two different other sources each supplying their different frequencies into a THz laser of slightly different frequency. Then use those THz sources into an semiconductor active region which resonates at the beat frequency between the THz sources.
That higher frequency result could be used as one of yet another pair, generating an even higher beat frequency. And since these steps up are made from thin film deposition, they could have such a hierarchical structure all contained in a very tiny device. Perhaps in a device at a scale that offers extremely high frequency lasers, manufactured and operating cheaply, without extra HW to maintain a useful beam.
Perhaps a beam that could offer networks petabyte datarates. And perhaps, if the optical resonance junctions can be modulated by other photons, actual logic executing quickly, at low power.
How come Evolution still doesn't have a white/blacklist against the addressbook? How come it doesn't have a spam filter that traps even whitelisted spam that's bayesian-similar to marked spam?
How come big email servers like at ISPs don't flag as spam messages that have identical bodies but different senders and recipients?
How come ISPs don't pretend to be spammers in the market for spamming SW, then reverse engineer what the spam engineers sell them into filters, like virus honeypots have proven works?
Mostly we scanned photos printed from film, or directly scanned the film slides themselves (two different kinds of film, different scanning params). The scans were used to import the photos into magazines and newspapers. At the time (1990) there were no hirez portable digital cameras for direct digital photography of suitable quality for publishing. They used these $150K+ drum scanners, which were whirling cylinders with the photos taped on, scanned in successive lines with an A/D sensor head (like a printer in reverse), which we replaced with something that could be lit and positioned like a real camera, with real Nikon 35mm lenses, put on a tripod, direct digitization of a live scene (though its exposures took too long for anything but a "still life").
We did also sell some to some corporation that claimed to be using them to aerially map agriculture, because we had such excellent discrimination among minute shades of green ("Fuji mode" dedicated something like 16bits of 36 per pixel to green, not the 8bits of the standard 24bit color). I think they were monitoring drug farms, ID'ing different crops by their color signature, because we didn't market to that industry and we never heard from them again after they took delivery - not even for support or upgrades. But I was impressed that our engineering was so robust that the micropositioning of the sensor tested OK for stability even mounted in an aircraft, due to the laser/interferometer feedback DSP. And we got to write some early tile stitching 2D DSP algorithms, that I always wanted to port to the FPGA where they were a more natural fit. But I think that they just flew film cameras, possibly 70mm movie cameras for analog oversampling - our camera was uniquely qualified to use some simple optics to scan the 70mm frames into our 35mm image plane - then scanned the frames later. They should have bought the film recorder SW I made, because that device would have scanned a filmstrip, with colorspace conversions etc.
The main guy designing it was a true genius, the secondary guy working the nightshift was one of the cleverest and most enthusiastic hackers (in any engineering medium) I've ever met, and the engineer in charge was really a mathematician working with these brand-new DSPs which finally put linear algebra onto a cheap chip fast enough for realtime Fourier analyses. I was lucky to be the kid hired with few skills and no engineering "discipline", who these pros just sent careening around the lab cross-pollinating each of those main brains by asking dumb questions and trying to get the whole technical vision into my unimprinted brain from its various parts, which forced them to sync to each other without battling each other's egos. A lot of the projects we worked on were entirely new models for programming, especially in the multiproc interops and data distribution strategies far beyond the digital cameras that were 20 years ahead of their time, but all focused on delivering a working product, so they were reality-driven though visionary. Some new tech, like the IBM/Toshiba/Sony CellBE uP, puts on silicon what we breadboarded back then, but still lacks the SW platforms and tools to make it programmable. And also some of the HW integration we made work with discrete components at relatively slow (MHz, not GHz) clocks is still waiting to be either integrated in a single device or even just glued together on a single fast interconnect.
Maybe someday I'll start up my own version of that skunkworks, if there's still some of the old vision left to implement. But I'll need some kid who's willing to work the dayshift and the nightshift to keep up with the big brains they're keeping synced.
Sorry for the long brag, but the remembering the pictures released the whole movie.
Not really, though we did have a Lenna slide kicking around. We primarily used a Kodak test slide of color bars/wheels and greyscale gradients, and one image of a European/American looking blonde on Kodak slide and one image of a young Japanese looking woman on Fuji slide. We had different colorspaces for US/Europe and Japan, because Fuji film had a larger green dynamic range supposedly because Japanese people have more acute green-band vision (though I've never independently verified that).
Once the camera was initially calibrated we'd use a test target to test how well I'd calibrated the film recorder. We printed a slide of Lenna, then scanned and reprinted it a few times through our DSP convergence algorithm, adjusting the film recorder's colorspace instead of the camera. Then we doubled a Lenna scan/print over a purely photographic repro of Lenna and scanned that subtractive image, calibrating the camera until it converged.
Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable (though not as actually unreliable as either its reputation states, or probably as its corporate mass media competition). But at least its accuracy benefits from the long time in which people have to verify its content and correct it later. Most of Wikipedia's facts are about events that happened quite a while ago, so there's more time for both editing review and for other corroborative (or conflicting) sources to publish and get used in the process.
Wikinews suffers from the transient lifetime of "news". By the time the community has had a chance to verify some Wikinews content, it's probably not "news" anymore.
People probably realize this, or at least that the entire proposition of Wikinews is shaky. I've never seen a single link to a Wikinews article, or even a reference to anyone using Wikinews for anything. I've never heard anyone ever say they even read it.
Now, the corporate mass media news is awful, and of course censors (or, more usually, spins and preempts) news that's bad for its corporate owners and stakeholders. Perhaps even worse than Wikinews. But since Wikinews doesn't have the useful con of a "trustworthy anchor" staring into a camera, or just a long history of a brand name like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, more people (that is, more than 0) read and believe it.
Wikinews has probably now killed itself as a brand, and perhaps even as a model. Most people want their news stories to come from a single person or small group who they think is accountable for its accuracy (confused as its "truth"), not a collaborative effort. They want that person to persist, so they can hold their past failures against them until they're fired. News is ultimately mostly gossip, unless it's purely numerical - and practically no one wants to talk about numbers. We want something we can believe in, more than we want the facts about last night. Wikinews ain't giving us that. And since it's not even possible to wrap fish in it, its days are probably numbered.
I worked for a SF area startup in 1990 that produced and sold cameras for "digital prepress" (later called "desktop publishing", and now just "publishing" ;) that had the highest resolution around, to compete with drum scanners that were then the expensive industry standard equipment.
We took a 512x512 Hitachi video sensor with a 2x2 C-M/Y-K mask repeated over it, for initial 1Kx1Kx40bit images that we derived from DSP on the intensity of the color-masked pixels. Then we physically stepped the sensor through 8x8 subpixel shifts, subsampling each pixel 64x. We ran the resulting 320MB raw composite files through a bank of multiple 25MFLOPS DSPs (interconnected and logic-accelerated by a fat FPGA) to produce 4Kx4Kx36bit 72MB files. In 1990 that was an awesome achievement.
We poured dramatic engineering work into that platform, which replaced a $150K drum scanner with a $30K PC (on DOS or Win3.0, or plus optional $5K Mac with its GUI including Photoshop 1.0). We had to deal with DSP for micropositioning the video sensor quickly (using feedback data from a laser/interferometer), with new color spaces (I was part of the JPEG org that produced the image format), with custom interconnects at blazing bandwidth, with parallel multiprocessing at then-supercomputer speeds written in C on DOS, and even with the physics of the light variably distorted by turbulence in the air between the camera and scanned slides, heated by the hot lights necessary for exposures fast enough to allow 64 frames and rescan before the sensor wiggled.
All for a 16Mpxl camera that's now beaten by big sensors on handheld consumer devices for under $2K (in 2008, not 1990, dollars). But I can proudly say that we beat them by almost 20 years.
I explicitly pointed out that Shuttleworth's desire is supply side. I happen not to be on the supply side, but on the demand side, like most of us.
What stops me from using whatever calendar I want is that I don't test, release and support a distro. Your question doesn't really make sense.
And PS: Cathedral vs Bazaar is totally unrelated to the size of the project/org/corp, or to its profitmaking. It's entirely about the de/centralized open/closed nature of the development. You might want to read the essay before you start arguing with people about the model, especially in a condescending, sarcastic tone (by an Anonymous Coward). Knowing what you're talking about is a prerequisite for me taking you seriously.
Which Hawking? Hawking reversed himself on black holes' one-way entropy. What's the current state of the art? Can I use a black hole to separate the entropy of a structured object from the matter of the object, then spray that entropy on some formless matter to clone it?
Don't be such a defenseless fool. The USAF is run by people many of whom favor a corporate theocracy. The USAF is violating the Constitution whenever convenient.
Enough with the demented Anonymous Coward ignorance. Just because you're a Republican doesn't mean we have to listen to you fools anymore.
Excellent point. Finally Bush has violated the one Amendment in the Bill of Rights no one (AFAIK) expected he might.
Misguided by what, their tyrannical greed? Who cares what they consider themselves as. The prisons are full of "innocent" people, according to themselves.
I didn't say it's "malice". I said it's greed. It's certainly not "idiocy", unless you call "idiocy" the brilliant execution for decades a plan that has stolen $TRILLIONS from hundreds of millions of Americans for killing millions of people, to their exclusive benefit. Idiots don't pull that off. And it takes even smarter people to get people in the public to believe that it's stupidity, not a criminal enterprise, doing all the damage.
By any legitimate standard (not that you offered any at all), these people are evil. And "idiots" only because they're too stupid to accept how much better off we all could be if they turned their hands to actual patriotism, actual defense of our actual national interests. Rather than their own most narrow interests in profit, at the cost of wasting our entire republic.
Maybe they're stupid not to care. Who cares? They're stupid to hate people like me who are smart enough to recognize them destroying our country by attacking our rights, because we get in the way of their greed.
So the Air Force can do whatever the spooks (and their Bush crony masters) want, like fly surveillance drones, record and datamine us against satellite surveillance, and help the NSA filter every bit of our telecom.
Because these people hate the Constitution. They hate our freedoms and rights the Constitution instructs them to protect. They hate us. Because we get in the way of business, which is to spend on war the maximum amount Americans can make or borrow.
Feel safer?
No, I don't, nor does anyone else worth considering as a requirement from the overall Linux community. But that's not what I said.
What I said was the frequency of opportunity to switch is important. Right now, if your distro doesn't do what you need, but another one issues a release that does do it, you can switch. Any one person might switch that way only once in 10 years. But overall, thousands of people probably switch that way every time a new distro is released with significant differences in version or inclusions from the last significant release of any distro.
Many more people probably do so at the even finer granularity of unofficial updates to existing installs, but that's not the same as getting an official release, with all its support, and even with support contracts (like with the distros Shuttleworth is talking about). Which is why we're talking about the actual release schedules, because unofficial updates are so frequent and self-organizing that they don't need to be synchronized. It's the value of the full, supported (and tested) releases that Shuttleworth and I are talking about.
There are hacks to use the VRAM as malloc()'able RAM for the CellBE.
And there's the i-RAM I mentioned.