Actually, you'd could use this technology to give you amazing dynamic range. Let's say all you cared about was ~7.5 megapixels. Well, take the 120mp sensor and carve it up into 4x4 tiles. Assuming a Bayer array, 8 of these sensors will be green sensitive, 4 red and 4 blue. OK, now change the filters on these sensors so that they scale for different levels of light (not just wavelength). You now have four times the dynamic range in red and blue, and perhaps even more in green (you can trade off perceived resolution for dynamic range in the green sensors).
The chair was really expensive (the link is to one with all the bells and whistles), but has proven to really help. FWIW, I upgraded from the Aeron, and find the Bodybilt to be a lot more comfortable.
I agree completely with the post discussing the relative benefits of buying a great desk chair vs. buying an expensive car. My body spends a LOT more time in the chair!
You're confusing three different aspects of quality:
1. Resolution (the number of pixels in am image, here increased by stitching overlapping images) 2. Dynamic range, color fidelity, noise (the quality of a particular pixel). This can be somewhat ameliorated by HDR photography or just averaging identical shots (all with no moving subjects and a sturdy tripod). Google Photomatix for details. 3. Whether the shot is interesting, well composed, in focus, without motion blur, etc. Panorama photography is most interesting for its artistic potential; more pixels is just a delightful side effect.
#1 and #2 can be addressed by money and a willingness to prostrate yourself to the camera gods. #3 requires talent!
And to put a final nail in the megapixel coffin: check out http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Equivalent-Lenses.shtml (particularly Nathan Nyhrvold's comments) for a discussion of how sensor size and f-stop place an upper bound on resolution irrespective of sensor density. Physics can be a pain sometimes!
From a Sony E-reader user: they can be useful
on
The Cult of Kindle
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was given a Sony E-reader recently as part of an airline promotion. I was as skeptical as most in this thread about their utility, etc., but have become a bit of a convert:
1. On vacation they're absolutely brilliant. I was out of the country for two weeks. The reader plus charger took almost no space, especially compared to the space ten or eleven books would have taken. I had my notebook with me as well, and was able to buy additional books -- which let me keep going on a series I particularly liked.
2. The slow page refresh isn't terrible, and I gather the Kindle is faster than the Sony.
3. I like the feel of the Sony reader. I suspect the Kindle is clunkier, but I defer to Pogue in the NYTimes who said it was fine. The screen works well in open daylight, and I quickly enough was able to ignore the medium and get into the content.
4. It looks like Amazon is given customers a price break on e-books. Sony charges as much as a paper book.
Bottom line: they're more useful than would appear to a non-user -- especially during travel.
And to the cult thing: I suspect like most people, I am not particularly loyal to any online store. I am willing to pay *slightly* higher prices to Amazon for both the convenience and their excellent handling of (very rare) problems.
Pascal was defined after grammar generators (e.g. yacc) were around. Pascal was fun to compile because one could write a recursive descent parser for it straight off the "railroad diagrams" used to define the language. In fact, the ETH "P2" compiler (written by Urs Ammann) was such a compiler, and was the start of many other compilers. If I remember correctly, LL(1) is a proper subset of recursive-descent-able. Most everyone else uses LALR(1), which is not.
You probably should have said "easier and faster to parse" rather than say "takes one pass." It's mostly human-in-the-loop and optimization issues that make compilers slow (especially on modern hardware). Decomposed problems are easier problems to solve, and common intermediate languages (across a variety of languages) help leverage the human investment across multiple compilers. Also, "back in the day" things like caches were oh-so-new, and optimization requirements were laughably simplistic.
What you haven't taken into account is that the hypervisor ensures that the work partition can only see the intranet and the personal partition can only see the internet. The two partitions cannot see each other on a network, and have no file shares in common.
If one of the partition gets a virus, its effect is limited to what is visible from that guest OS. In this case, that's strictly controlled.
Bottom line: this really does give you significant protection. Government folks doing classified computing use somewhat similar techniques. (Or so I'm told; I have no clearances.)
VMs have been used to enforce cross-partition security for years. It is quite possible to configure file and network access to certain VMs.
Having Microsoft us VMs on internal desktops and notebooks would ensure that the OS, middleware and apps all play fair in such an environment. (Among other things, folks really have to work on software licensing in the face of VMs.)
I think this idea allows corporate IS to greatly improve the security, reliability and predictability of their infrastructure. It also allows users (including developers) the flexibility to escape this regime when desired. Allowing users a "personal" VM (and drive) is essential in the real world; road warrior types need casual personal access to e-mail, websites, etc.
Responding to a point you might have made, it would be harder for spyware to make it onto the corporate partition, and arguable easier for it to get onto the personal partition. Since the personal partition is restricted (it can't access the intranet, the user's work files, or any other VM), damage would be strictly limited.
Bottom line: I think what I've described deserves a more serious read.
Virtual Machines (e.g. Xen) can allow companies to have strictly controlled (e.g. no admin rights) corporate work environments while allowing considerable freedom for developers and personal apps, files, etc.
Imagine a world where you would have a host OS which is a company-standard image. No admin/su rights for the user, no weird apps, no spyware, etc. Guest OS images are used for development and personal stuff:
* There can be a strictly controlled corporate standard OS image, app set, etc. Access to the corporate network (VPNs, direct ethernet, etc.) can be restricted to only allow connections to this OS instance.
* Development can be done in sandboxes that restrict the fallout from any damage. Network connections (and mounted disk images) can be restricted to a subset of the corporate network.
* Folks can install their own junkware on a guest OS image. This partition can be proxied out to the internet (no visibility to the intranet), allowing instant messaging, etc., without putting internal systems at risk. This image would only have access to a single disk partition (which wouldn't be visible to any other image), and would have essentially no access to internal corporate resources.
If done right, the corporate image would be automatically and securely connected to the corporate infrastructure even when connected to an unsecure network. The personal image would be connected to the internet, even when running on the corporate intranet, and development sandboxes would be further restricted to a development network.
All the stuff that's needed to make this works exists today. If Microsoft insisted its own staff worked within such constraints, it would be seamless for the rest of us as well.
"In total use of analogue cellular telephones gave an increased risk with odds ratio (OR)=1.3, 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.04-1.6, whereas digital and cordless phones did not overall increase the risk significantly"
They go on to show some increased correlation for digital phones for "ipsilateral" (same side) use, as well an increased correlation as time of exposure increases.
A more interesting question: what is it about people who use cell phones (esp. early adopters who heavily used analog phones) that increases their chance of brain tumors? Do they fly more? Are they more likely to be exposed to other environmental agents?
A very similar set of results came out about living near power lines. After the dust settled, it became clear that there wasn't a direct correlation, but that other factors (economic, access to quality health care) was the cause of a weak indirect correlation: http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/cop/powerlines-cancer-FAQ/ toc.html#1
The best reason for 7.1 vs 6.1 is to minimize the effects of reflections from the (lone) rear speaker coming back at you from the front wall. These reflections are most prominent when the front wall is a projection screen.
The whole trick about 5.1 (or 7.1 for that matter) is that movie editors have a reference standard they use when mixing the sound. They have direct control over what goes to which speaker, and will make sure that voices that are on the left part of the screen are mixed between the left and center speakers appropriately, etc.
For analog sources run through systems like Dolby Pro-Logic (and its predecessor, Dolby Surround), the processor in your receiver does the mapping. But in no case will it put a signal that is supposed to be on one side of the screen or another *totally* on to the center speaker.
Yeah, more than one speaker is nice. But in practice there's more of a problem with speaker height. That's why you'll see people use micro-perf screens -- and put the center speaker(s) behind them. Of course, you'll have to get an equalizer to pump up the highs that the screen (slightly) muffles.
Bottom line: get a decent system (see my other post in this thread), set it up right, and stop worrying!
Gosh, folks need to figure out that one size doesn't fit all.
If you want to listen to music, you'll get a much better experience spending a reasonable budget on a stereo rig vs. a surround rig:
1. Until you get into the "golden ear" exotic price range, there's a HUGE difference in sound quality as the speaker price goes up. )
2. Subwoofers are great for movies, but not so great for classical music. There just isn't that much content in *most* music in the lower registers - and most folks don't have any idea how to set up a 2.1 (left, right, sub) system so that it sounds right.
3. Music just isn't mixed for surround. And, yes, I know about DVD Audio disks. The basic problem is that nobody knows what's right for music reproduction. Do you want to feel like you're in the middle of the orchestra? Do you really want to hear crowd noise? Exactly why do you need to reproduce the sounds bouncing off the rear wall of a concert venue? There are obvious exceptions - the Blue Man Group's DVD Audio disk is a lot of fun. But it ain't worth the money for the two or three surround disks that properly use multiple speakers.
4. You can get fantastic deals on stereo receivers on Ebay these days.
If you're into movies or TV, definitely get a surround system. It's an immersive environment, and just a heck of a lot of fun. The same things that worked against you for music work for you in movies or TV:
1. A subwoofer is your best friend. Not only does it give you the visceral feeling when helicopters fly overhead, etc., it also offloads much of the hard work from your amps. A properly configured sub removes almost all the heavy work from the rest of your system - everything will sound a lot better.
2. Previous comments about center speakers are exactly right. They're a big help when you have multiple listening positions in your room.
3. Make sure you "treat" your room. There's a lot more to this, but 90% of the battle can be won by making sure there's a carpet on the floor between you and the screen (deadening reflections coming off the floor), bookshelves or other "complicated" things to your left and right (scattering reflections off the side front walls), and lots of deadening materials behind you. Get a calibration disk (e.g. the Avia guide to home theater) and a Radio Shack meter (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?produ ctId=2103668) to balance your speakers. (Some new fangled receivers do this for you.)
And to directly address the topic at hand, 6.1 and 7.1 systems can be better than 5.1 systems, but by the point where they make sense, you've spent a LOT of money already on your system. Unless you plan on breaking through the $5K barrier for receivers and speakers, don't even think about it.
A 7.1 system, for example, makes sense in a large room with a projection screen. You do need room behind the last row of seats, however. The main reason for 7.1 over 6.1, by the way, is for exactly this setup - you're trying to eliminate sound from directly behind the listener (the 6.1's rear speaker) bouncing off the screen.
Anyway, hopefully you see that there's a lot more to this. Bottom line: it depends on what you plan on doing with your system, your room and your budget. And make sure you spend the right amount of attention and money on room treatment!
I didn't do a count, but there were a ton of folks for both the reunion talks and for the dinner event afterwards.
Highlights:
* Ken Bowles' talk about his five careers. Before his UCSD days, he was one of the builders of the Jicamarca Radar Observatory. * Bud Tribble (VP, Apple) talking about how UCSD Pascal (AKA Apple Pascal) influenced the Lisa and the Macintosh. Apple was extremely generous and presented KB with a shiny new iMac. * Mark Overgaard discussing one of the truly terrible product names of the era. UCSD P-System, indeed! * The chancellor of UCSD (Mary Anne Fox), the dean of engineering (Frieder Seible), and the chair of the CS department (Ramomohan Paturi) praising Bowles and the project. * Seeing almost all of my old project buddies make it back to campus. We also looked back at the social aspects of the project, including pictures that seemed to involve a lot more hair. (A combination of biology and the 70's. Shudder.) * A demonstration of a running UCSD Pascal system on my XP notebook. (Thanks John Fouts!)
There are a lot of artifacts from the day, including video (to be broadcast on UCSD-TV and available via webcast), as well as powerpoint. When I know the URLs for all this stuff, I'll post them here. John tells me he would also like to have them on his UCSD Pascal museum (http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/index.html).
Cheers,
Richard Kaufmann (author of the UCSD Pascal screen editor)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you'd could use this technology to give you amazing dynamic range. Let's say all you cared about was ~7.5 megapixels. Well, take the 120mp sensor and carve it up into 4x4 tiles. Assuming a Bayer array, 8 of these sensors will be green sensitive, 4 red and 4 blue. OK, now change the filters on these sensors so that they scale for different levels of light (not just wavelength). You now have four times the dynamic range in red and blue, and perhaps even more in green (you can trade off perceived resolution for dynamic range in the green sensors).
My company asked me to go through an ergonomic assessment. After getting someone to take pictures of myself at my desk, they recommended a keyboard stand (http://www.ultimatebackstore.com/product-exec/product_id/151?cid=11341%5EScooter+Stand%5EFRO) and a Bodybilt chair (http://www.amazon.com/Bodybilt-100053-400-0402-K3507-High-Back/dp/B000C9T40G). The scooter stand helps get the keyboard in the right position (especially difficult if you have a large monitor).
The chair was really expensive (the link is to one with all the bells and whistles), but has proven to really help. FWIW, I upgraded from the Aeron, and find the Bodybilt to be a lot more comfortable.
I agree completely with the post discussing the relative benefits of buying a great desk chair vs. buying an expensive car. My body spends a LOT more time in the chair!
(No affiliation with the stores I linked to.)
You're confusing three different aspects of quality:
1. Resolution (the number of pixels in am image, here increased by stitching overlapping images)
2. Dynamic range, color fidelity, noise (the quality of a particular pixel). This can be somewhat ameliorated by HDR photography or just averaging identical shots (all with no moving subjects and a sturdy tripod). Google Photomatix for details.
3. Whether the shot is interesting, well composed, in focus, without motion blur, etc. Panorama photography is most interesting for its artistic potential; more pixels is just a delightful side effect.
#1 and #2 can be addressed by money and a willingness to prostrate yourself to the camera gods. #3 requires talent!
And to put a final nail in the megapixel coffin: check out http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Equivalent-Lenses.shtml (particularly Nathan Nyhrvold's comments) for a discussion of how sensor size and f-stop place an upper bound on resolution irrespective of sensor density. Physics can be a pain sometimes!
I was given a Sony E-reader recently as part of an airline promotion. I was as skeptical as most in this thread about their utility, etc., but have become a bit of a convert:
1. On vacation they're absolutely brilliant. I was out of the country for two weeks. The reader plus charger took almost no space, especially compared to the space ten or eleven books would have taken. I had my notebook with me as well, and was able to buy additional books -- which let me keep going on a series I particularly liked.
2. The slow page refresh isn't terrible, and I gather the Kindle is faster than the Sony.
3. I like the feel of the Sony reader. I suspect the Kindle is clunkier, but I defer to Pogue in the NYTimes who said it was fine. The screen works well in open daylight, and I quickly enough was able to ignore the medium and get into the content.
4. It looks like Amazon is given customers a price break on e-books. Sony charges as much as a paper book.
Bottom line: they're more useful than would appear to a non-user -- especially during travel.
And to the cult thing: I suspect like most people, I am not particularly loyal to any online store. I am willing to pay *slightly* higher prices to Amazon for both the convenience and their excellent handling of (very rare) problems.
Pascal was defined after grammar generators (e.g. yacc) were around. Pascal was fun to compile because one could write a recursive descent parser for it straight off the "railroad diagrams" used to define the language. In fact, the ETH "P2" compiler (written by Urs Ammann) was such a compiler, and was the start of many other compilers. If I remember correctly, LL(1) is a proper subset of recursive-descent-able. Most everyone else uses LALR(1), which is not.
You probably should have said "easier and faster to parse" rather than say "takes one pass." It's mostly human-in-the-loop and optimization issues that make compilers slow (especially on modern hardware). Decomposed problems are easier problems to solve, and common intermediate languages (across a variety of languages) help leverage the human investment across multiple compilers. Also, "back in the day" things like caches were oh-so-new, and optimization requirements were laughably simplistic.
What you haven't taken into account is that the hypervisor ensures that the work partition can only see the intranet and the personal partition can only see the internet. The two partitions cannot see each other on a network, and have no file shares in common.
If one of the partition gets a virus, its effect is limited to what is visible from that guest OS. In this case, that's strictly controlled.
Bottom line: this really does give you significant protection. Government folks doing classified computing use somewhat similar techniques. (Or so I'm told; I have no clearances.)
That comment was too flip to understand.
VMs have been used to enforce cross-partition security for years. It is quite possible to configure file and network access to certain VMs.
Having Microsoft us VMs on internal desktops and notebooks would ensure that the OS, middleware and apps all play fair in such an environment. (Among other things, folks really have to work on software licensing in the face of VMs.)
I think this idea allows corporate IS to greatly improve the security, reliability and predictability of their infrastructure. It also allows users (including developers) the flexibility to escape this regime when desired. Allowing users a "personal" VM (and drive) is essential in the real world; road warrior types need casual personal access to e-mail, websites, etc.
Responding to a point you might have made, it would be harder for spyware to make it onto the corporate partition, and arguable easier for it to get onto the personal partition. Since the personal partition is restricted (it can't access the intranet, the user's work files, or any other VM), damage would be strictly limited.
Bottom line: I think what I've described deserves a more serious read.
Virtual Machines (e.g. Xen) can allow companies to have strictly controlled (e.g. no admin rights) corporate work environments while allowing considerable freedom for developers and personal apps, files, etc.
Imagine a world where you would have a host OS which is a company-standard image. No admin/su rights for the user, no weird apps, no spyware, etc. Guest OS images are used for development and personal stuff:
* There can be a strictly controlled corporate standard OS image, app set, etc. Access to the corporate network (VPNs, direct ethernet, etc.) can be restricted to only allow connections to this OS instance.
* Development can be done in sandboxes that restrict the fallout from any damage. Network connections (and mounted disk images) can be restricted to a subset of the corporate network.
* Folks can install their own junkware on a guest OS image. This partition can be proxied out to the internet (no visibility to the intranet), allowing instant messaging, etc., without putting internal systems at risk. This image would only have access to a single disk partition (which wouldn't be visible to any other image), and would have essentially no access to internal corporate resources.
If done right, the corporate image would be automatically and securely connected to the corporate infrastructure even when connected to an unsecure network. The personal image would be connected to the internet, even when running on the corporate intranet, and development sandboxes would be further restricted to a development network.
All the stuff that's needed to make this works exists today. If Microsoft insisted its own staff worked within such constraints, it would be seamless for the rest of us as well.
As noted earlier in this thread, the ipsilateral issue was thought to have more to do with how the respondents were eager to explain their tumors.
Sometimes it's really, really a good idea to go to the actual source: http://147.52.72.117/IJO/2003/volume22/number2/399 .pdf
/ toc.html#1
"In total use of analogue
cellular telephones gave an increased risk with odds ratio
(OR)=1.3, 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.04-1.6, whereas
digital and cordless phones did not overall increase the
risk significantly"
They go on to show some increased correlation for digital phones for "ipsilateral" (same side) use, as well an increased correlation as time of exposure increases.
A more interesting question: what is it about people who use cell phones (esp. early adopters who heavily used analog phones) that increases their chance of brain tumors? Do they fly more? Are they more likely to be exposed to other environmental agents?
A very similar set of results came out about living near power lines. After the dust settled, it became clear that there wasn't a direct correlation, but that other factors (economic, access to quality health care) was the cause of a weak indirect correlation: http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/cop/powerlines-cancer-FAQ
The best reason for 7.1 vs 6.1 is to minimize the effects of reflections from the (lone) rear speaker coming back at you from the front wall. These reflections are most prominent when the front wall is a projection screen.
The whole trick about 5.1 (or 7.1 for that matter) is that movie editors have a reference standard they use when mixing the sound. They have direct control over what goes to which speaker, and will make sure that voices that are on the left part of the screen are mixed between the left and center speakers appropriately, etc.
For analog sources run through systems like Dolby Pro-Logic (and its predecessor, Dolby Surround), the processor in your receiver does the mapping. But in no case will it put a signal that is supposed to be on one side of the screen or another *totally* on to the center speaker.
Yeah, more than one speaker is nice. But in practice there's more of a problem with speaker height. That's why you'll see people use micro-perf screens -- and put the center speaker(s) behind them. Of course, you'll have to get an equalizer to pump up the highs that the screen (slightly) muffles.
Bottom line: get a decent system (see my other post in this thread), set it up right, and stop worrying!
Gosh, folks need to figure out that one size doesn't fit all.
u ctId=2103668) to balance your speakers. (Some new fangled receivers do this for you.)
If you want to listen to music, you'll get a much better experience spending a reasonable budget on a stereo rig vs. a surround rig:
1. Until you get into the "golden ear" exotic price range, there's a HUGE difference in sound quality as the speaker price goes up. )
2. Subwoofers are great for movies, but not so great for classical music. There just isn't that much content in *most* music in the lower registers - and most folks don't have any idea how to set up a 2.1 (left, right, sub) system so that it sounds right.
3. Music just isn't mixed for surround. And, yes, I know about DVD Audio disks. The basic problem is that nobody knows what's right for music reproduction. Do you want to feel like you're in the middle of the orchestra? Do you really want to hear crowd noise? Exactly why do you need to reproduce the sounds bouncing off the rear wall of a concert venue? There are obvious exceptions - the Blue Man Group's DVD Audio disk is a lot of fun. But it ain't worth the money for the two or three surround disks that properly use multiple speakers.
4. You can get fantastic deals on stereo receivers on Ebay these days.
If you're into movies or TV, definitely get a surround system. It's an immersive environment, and just a heck of a lot of fun. The same things that worked against you for music work for you in movies or TV:
1. A subwoofer is your best friend. Not only does it give you the visceral feeling when helicopters fly overhead, etc., it also offloads much of the hard work from your amps. A properly configured sub removes almost all the heavy work from the rest of your system - everything will sound a lot better.
2. Previous comments about center speakers are exactly right. They're a big help when you have multiple listening positions in your room.
3. Make sure you "treat" your room. There's a lot more to this, but 90% of the battle can be won by making sure there's a carpet on the floor between you and the screen (deadening reflections coming off the floor), bookshelves or other "complicated" things to your left and right (scattering reflections off the side front walls), and lots of deadening materials behind you. Get a calibration disk (e.g. the Avia guide to home theater) and a Radio Shack meter (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?prod
And to directly address the topic at hand, 6.1 and 7.1 systems can be better than 5.1 systems, but by the point where they make sense, you've spent a LOT of money already on your system. Unless you plan on breaking through the $5K barrier for receivers and speakers, don't even think about it.
A 7.1 system, for example, makes sense in a large room with a projection screen. You do need room behind the last row of seats, however. The main reason for 7.1 over 6.1, by the way, is for exactly this setup - you're trying to eliminate sound from directly behind the listener (the 6.1's rear speaker) bouncing off the screen.
Anyway, hopefully you see that there's a lot more to this. Bottom line: it depends on what you plan on doing with your system, your room and your budget. And make sure you spend the right amount of attention and money on room treatment!
I didn't do a count, but there were a ton of folks for both the reunion talks and for the dinner event afterwards.
Highlights:
* Ken Bowles' talk about his five careers. Before his UCSD days, he was one of the builders of the Jicamarca Radar Observatory.
* Bud Tribble (VP, Apple) talking about how UCSD Pascal (AKA Apple Pascal) influenced the Lisa and the Macintosh. Apple was extremely generous and presented KB with a shiny new iMac.
* Mark Overgaard discussing one of the truly terrible product names of the era. UCSD P-System, indeed!
* The chancellor of UCSD (Mary Anne Fox), the dean of engineering (Frieder Seible), and the chair of the CS department (Ramomohan Paturi) praising Bowles and the project.
* Seeing almost all of my old project buddies make it back to campus. We also looked back at the social aspects of the project, including pictures that seemed to involve a lot more hair. (A combination of biology and the 70's. Shudder.)
* A demonstration of a running UCSD Pascal system on my XP notebook. (Thanks John Fouts!)
There are a lot of artifacts from the day, including video (to be broadcast on UCSD-TV and available via webcast), as well as powerpoint. When I know the URLs for all this stuff, I'll post them here. John tells me he would also like to have them on his UCSD Pascal museum (http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/index.html).
Cheers,
Richard Kaufmann (author of the UCSD Pascal screen editor)