He is right that the eye has a logarithmic response. Unfortunately, most digital sensors have a linear response. In this sense he is wrong. If you scale sensor data, the linear scaling is right. I suspect his anomaly is due to overflow in the linear calculation and the fact that the logarithmic calculation won't overflow.
If you have a camera that can output a raw data file then, yes, the values will be linear, but for standard JPEG (or video) output, the camera will have mapped the linear data to non-linear.
But the file formats don't specify this. The image from a camera will set gray 127 to pretty much half the number of photons hitting the sensor as white 255, won't it?
No. Your camera will (probably) assume sRGB for 8bit/channel data in which case halfway between black and white will be about 186 (don't have time to get the correct value), not 128.
The human visual system is non-linear - in dark areas it can distinguish finer changes in brightness than in brighter areas - and so to get the best "bang-for-the-bit", the encoding used by display systems is also non-linear. For more information see Poynton's Gamma FAQ.
And its not like I would feel guilty about ripping the company that decided 1kB worth of sms should be priced the same as 1MB worth of raw data.
That sounds quite fair - surely you can't expect to pay the same for highly refined, clean, SMS data as you would for unprocessed, dirty, raw data, can you?:-)
America got the Religious Nuts. Australia got the Criminals.
Sadly they got the better end of the bargain.
Not sure who you mean by "they" but many of the "Criminals" who were sent to Australia were sent for utterly trivial things. For example this site states:
Many of the Convicts were sent to Australia for quite odd crimes. For example, Irish catholics were transported for simply looking suspicious. Likewise, political reformers were transported to trying to form unions, suggesting politicians get paid and promoting the French revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.
By today's standards, all of the Convicts sent to Australia had only committed trivial crimes.
There are already shutterless cameras. They're called video cameras...
Some stills cameras, e.g. on phones, are shutterless as well, but often have some interestingartefacts.
In this case it is probably due to the high level of correlation between pixel position and "shutter" time. I'm guessing that, in the paper, (judging only by the abstract) they are using a pseudo-random pattern for the pixel sampling which would trade these weird effects for 'noise' which would be less obvious.
Yea that's the first thing I thought as well; the principle is similar to video interlacing from back in the day, except that this is more sophisticated, and could conceivably be used to capture extremely high definition, extremely high framerate footage.
Hell, I'd even take GIMPY (the GNU Image Manipulation Program for You), since that evokes a different, albeit still negative, emotional response.
I wonder how the citizens of Gympie would feel about that assertion!
Anyway, I'd rather that time were spent so that Gimp worked in linear colour space (~ 16 bits per channel) rather than botching all the operations in 8bit/channel sRGB. As it currently stands, filtering operations etc are wrong.
For example (at least in 2.6) it still thinks that the average of sRGB black and white is 0x808080, which is far too dark. It should be something more like (doing a back of the envelope calculation) 0xBABABABA.
I've always thought that every car should come with exactly one missile. Since you only have one missile, you wouldn't just launch it willy-nilly. I bet the roads would get a lot safer really quickly.
Unfortunately, I think that would only lead to an increase in car sales.
Because of the anger among the cyclists, Critical Mass was started which generally only pisses off the drivers but also is a lot of fun.
And you wonder why so many drivers get pissed off to the point of violence? Golly gee, I can't imagine how that could happen.
And do you, in turn, ever imagine why cyclists get annoyed with car drivers? There is a simple reason - some are appalling bad. With the exception of Winter months, I try to commute by bicycle and the number of idiots behind the wheel is astounding. Drivers will try to overtake you on narrow roads even when there is a traffic jam in the next 100 yards and so you have to then squeeze past them 5 seconds later.
Even if a 1.5 light second long cable were feasible you'd still have to deal with the fact that, as far as I understand, the anchor would have to be in geosynchronous orbit. Since the Moon isn't in geosynchronous orbit, the surface moves relative to the Moon you'd end up winding the cable around the planet.
Yup. So shove that in the face of the next Arab who starts waxing rhapsodic on their great culture. Everything that bears their name came from India, and India, after a rough patch, is still a center of technical brilliance, and the Arab states are still sandy hellholes.
Actually, IIRC the Arabic number system had it's origin in India. There was an excellent BBC program on the history of mathematics which showed some early examples.
I wonder if we will see NVidia in 5 years at all in the PC market they might end up being a second PowerVR still healthy in the embedded sector but not at all present on the PC side of things.
Ironically, if the folks on Beyond3D are right PowerVR are still in the PC market in the Intel Lincroft chipset with dedicated 3D, video decode and video encode IP.
I'm guessing the executives / board / owners of the BBC know people in the right places and are able to intercept initiatives to change the legislation.
I think you'll find that the current system actually has quite a lot of public support and that a lot of the BBC-bashing comes from newspapers owned by certain large media groups.
Surely you jest. A large media conglomerate that owns newspapers wouldn't also own commercial satellite TV stations that would be in competition with the BBC, would it? How would one get fair views?;-)
Now, the U.S., at least in WWI, really had no legitimate beef with Germany & Co., and thus no reason to get into the war except out of friendship for France..
Not entirely. IIRC, Germany at time were encouraging Mexico to invade the US. This was discovered by the decryption of the "Zimmerman Telegram" by the Brits in London and passed on to the US - itself an interesting story.
Altough the FAQ doesn't mention Plan 9 anywhere; the "channels", the C-like syntax and the logo all let me think about this nice OS with his concurrent programming language called Alef, designed by Phil Winterbottom. (Rob Pike and Ken Thompson were very involved in the Plan 9 design). Well, the comparison ends here I guess.
Parallel processing, channels and array slices made me think of Occam.
Because it was needed during the war, it was shown to a US pharmaceutical(?) company who did patent the process, which meant that the original inventors would have to pay for their own invention.
What should have happened: You can't patent something you didn't invent. The patent issued to the "US pharmaceutical(?) company" should have been declared invalid under 35 USC 102(f) because the "inventor" named in the U.S. patent application "did not himself invent the subject matter sought to be patented". (himself/herself: the U.S. laws are not written with politically correct wording.)
AFAIU, although the USPTO has a "first to invent" policy (though just how you establish that - especially if you have otherwise kept it secret - is another problem entirely), other countries have a "first to patent" policy.
Perhaps not quite Antarctica, but according to the BBC's Click program Iceland is bidding for server business based on the low temperatures and lots of cheap geothermal power.
I had an IP lawyer tell me that the provisional patent is completely pointless. You don't have to file a provisional patent to get this protection. You can publish, then patent up to a year later and your idea is still protected.
...but only in the US. If you do as suggested above you will have screwed up your protection for the rest of the world (or at least the majority of it:-) ). Get your patent filed first, to get a "priority date" and you then have, something like, a year to file in other countries. In the mean time you can publish if you want.
Slashdot Mirror
They summary already names a fix for Gimp (GEGL), but the posters only seem interested in whining instead of RTFS. Sigh.
I just selected "Use GEGL" from the "colours" menu in gimp, downscaled an RGB black&White chequerboard and got a uniform, and incorrect, grey of 128.
I dug a bit deeper and, if you read the Gimp help, it tells you that it's not working.
He is right that the eye has a logarithmic response. Unfortunately, most digital sensors have a linear response. In this sense he is wrong. If you scale sensor data, the linear scaling is right. I suspect his anomaly is due to overflow in the linear calculation and the fact that the logarithmic calculation won't overflow.
If you have a camera that can output a raw data file then, yes, the values will be linear, but for standard JPEG (or video) output, the camera will have mapped the linear data to non-linear.
But the file formats don't specify this. The image from a camera will set gray 127 to pretty much half the number of photons hitting the sensor as white 255, won't it?
No. Your camera will (probably) assume sRGB for 8bit/channel data in which case halfway between black and white will be about 186 (don't have time to get the correct value), not 128.
The human visual system is non-linear - in dark areas it can distinguish finer changes in brightness than in brighter areas - and so to get the best "bang-for-the-bit", the encoding used by display systems is also non-linear. For more information see Poynton's Gamma FAQ.
Photographs scaled with the affected software are degraded, because of incorrect algorithmic accounting for monitor gamma.
Seriously!
I have a theory on why this has gone unnoticed for so long, but I'll keep it to myself...
It's already been discussed here in relation to the Gimp, but the maintainers only seem interested in fiddling with the interface. Sigh.
And its not like I would feel guilty about ripping the company that decided 1kB worth of sms should be priced the same as 1MB worth of raw data.
That sounds quite fair - surely you can't expect to pay the same for highly refined, clean, SMS data as you would for unprocessed, dirty, raw data, can you? :-)
America got the Religious Nuts.
Australia got the Criminals.
Sadly they got the better end of the bargain.
Not sure who you mean by "they" but many of the "Criminals" who were sent to Australia were sent for utterly trivial things. For example this site states:
Many of the Convicts were sent to Australia for quite odd crimes. For example, Irish catholics were transported for simply looking suspicious. Likewise, political reformers were transported to trying to form unions, suggesting politicians get paid and promoting the French revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.
By today's standards, all of the Convicts sent to Australia had only committed trivial crimes.
It's an interesting read.
There are already shutterless cameras. They're called video cameras...
Some stills cameras, e.g. on phones, are shutterless as well, but often have some interesting artefacts.
In this case it is probably due to the high level of correlation between pixel position and "shutter" time. I'm guessing that, in the paper, (judging only by the abstract) they are using a pseudo-random pattern for the pixel sampling which would trade these weird effects for 'noise' which would be less obvious.
Yea that's the first thing I thought as well; the principle is similar to video interlacing from back in the day, except that this is more sophisticated, and could conceivably be used to capture extremely high definition, extremely high framerate footage.
I could only read the abstract, but this just seems to be the reverse of Frameless Rendering: Double Buffering Considered Harmful which relates to rendering 3D graphics in scattered sets of pixels.
From what I've heard http://www.agorum.com/ is what you're looking for.
Do they have a page in English? I couldn't see one.
Hell, I'd even take GIMPY (the GNU Image Manipulation Program for You), since that evokes a different, albeit still negative, emotional response.
I wonder how the citizens of Gympie would feel about that assertion!
Anyway, I'd rather that time were spent so that Gimp worked in linear colour space (~ 16 bits per channel) rather than botching all the operations in 8bit/channel sRGB. As it currently stands, filtering operations etc are wrong.
For example (at least in 2.6) it still thinks that the average of sRGB black and white is 0x808080, which is far too dark. It should be something more like (doing a back of the envelope calculation) 0xBABABABA.
I've always thought that every car should come with exactly one missile. Since you only have one missile, you wouldn't just launch it willy-nilly. I bet the roads would get a lot safer really quickly.
Unfortunately, I think that would only lead to an increase in car sales.
but its low powered and has quick half-lives. additionally, there are no geopolitical overtones concerning fuel sources: you just need sea water.
Except somewhere in the article (or perhaps a related one) it said they use deuterium and tritium, and, IIRC, the latter they obtained from lithium.
Because of the anger among the cyclists, Critical Mass was started which generally only pisses off the drivers but also is a lot of fun.
And you wonder why so many drivers get pissed off to the point of violence? Golly gee, I can't imagine how that could happen.
And do you, in turn, ever imagine why cyclists get annoyed with car drivers? There is a simple reason - some are appalling bad. With the exception of Winter months, I try to commute by bicycle and the number of idiots behind the wheel is astounding. Drivers will try to overtake you on narrow roads even when there is a traffic jam in the next 100 yards and so you have to then squeeze past them 5 seconds later.
In most cases, "Don't make Admin look stupid, especially if they are." is implied policy #0..
Sounds like they can manage that by themselves.
Even if a 1.5 light second long cable were feasible you'd still have to deal with the fact that, as far as I understand, the anchor would have to be in geosynchronous orbit. Since the Moon isn't in geosynchronous orbit, the surface moves relative to the Moon you'd end up winding the cable around the planet.
That would be one phenomenal yo-yo. :-)
Yup. So shove that in the face of the next Arab who starts waxing rhapsodic on their great culture. Everything that bears their name came from India, and India, after a rough patch, is still a center of technical brilliance, and the Arab states are still sandy hellholes.
You are sounding a bit like the father in a certain BBC comedy program.
FWIW that history of maths program does discuss the evolution of algebra and its origins in the middle east.
Actually, IIRC the Arabic number system had it's origin in India. There was an excellent BBC program on the history of mathematics which showed some early examples.
In most countries which have copyright laws it extends only 50 or so years after the author dies.
Perhaps that's the point. No one has produced the Aztec death certificate of the original artist so he/she might still be alive :-)
I wonder if we will see NVidia in 5 years at all in the PC market they might end up being a second PowerVR still healthy in the embedded sector but not at all present on the PC side of things.
Ironically, if the folks on Beyond3D are right PowerVR are still in the PC market in the Intel Lincroft chipset with dedicated 3D, video decode and video encode IP.
I'm guessing the executives / board / owners of the BBC know people in the right places and are able to intercept initiatives to change the legislation.
I think you'll find that the current system actually has quite a lot of public support and that a lot of the BBC-bashing comes from newspapers owned by certain large media groups.
Surely you jest. A large media conglomerate that owns newspapers wouldn't also own commercial satellite TV stations that would be in competition with the BBC, would it? How would one get fair views? ;-)
Now, the U.S., at least in WWI, really had no legitimate beef with Germany & Co., and thus no reason to get into the war except out of friendship for France..
Not entirely. IIRC, Germany at time were encouraging Mexico to invade the US. This was discovered by the decryption of the "Zimmerman Telegram" by the Brits in London and passed on to the US - itself an interesting story.
Altough the FAQ doesn't mention Plan 9 anywhere; the "channels", the C-like syntax and the logo all let me think about this nice OS with his concurrent programming language called Alef, designed by Phil Winterbottom. (Rob Pike and Ken Thompson were very involved in the Plan 9 design). Well, the comparison ends here I guess.
Parallel processing, channels and array slices made me think of Occam.
Because it was needed during the war, it was shown to a US pharmaceutical(?) company who did patent the process, which meant that the original inventors would have to pay for their own invention.
What should have happened: You can't patent something you didn't invent. The patent issued to the "US pharmaceutical(?) company" should have been declared invalid under 35 USC 102(f) because the "inventor" named in the U.S. patent application "did not himself invent the subject matter sought to be patented". (himself/herself: the U.S. laws are not written with politically correct wording.)
AFAIU, although the USPTO has a "first to invent" policy (though just how you establish that - especially if you have otherwise kept it secret - is another problem entirely), other countries have a "first to patent" policy.
Locate the server farm in Antarctica!
Perhaps not quite Antarctica, but according to the BBC's Click program Iceland is bidding for server business based on the low temperatures and lots of cheap geothermal power.
I had an IP lawyer tell me that the provisional patent is completely pointless. You don't have to file a provisional patent to get this protection. You can publish, then patent up to a year later and your idea is still protected.
...but only in the US. If you do as suggested above you will have screwed up your protection for the rest of the world (or at least the majority of it :-) ). Get your patent filed first, to get a "priority date" and you then have, something like, a year to file in other countries. In the mean time you can publish if you want.