Actually, building warehouses was one of the strengths of Webvan, believe it or not. Because they only did home delivery, they could find the cheapest land in the area to service the entire city. I guarantee that Safeway has a whole heck of a lot more invested in real estate in the markets where it competed with Webvan.
Only having to buy cheap real-estate is still
not a strength, it's just a smaller weakness.
Safeway already has the real estate
purchased. So there's no additional investment
in real estate (at least while the delivery
remains a small part of their business.) And
they already have their distribution system
in place. It's a lot less of a business to
get up and running, it will cost Safeway a lot
less additional captial to get going than
Webvan burnt through. It's all about return
on invested capital, man.
It's not even clear what's meant by a 'pure'
red filter, filters pass some range of
colors with different transmission characteristics. But being pedantic aside...
So, lets assume that you have colored filters
(sure) that act additionally as a polarizer
and a partial-wave plate (pretty much science
fiction stuff for the era we're talking about).
As a photographer you'd be sad about that, by
the way, you can't afford the 50% light
lossage you'd pay in terms of even longer
exposures. But let's just take that as an
asumption. Okay, so we're out on a limb, but
if we buy into all those assumptions, do you
actually get the water effect shown?
Nope.:)
If you had simulatanious polarized pictures
of the same scene through the same lens
(did I forget to mention the amazing work
with at least four prisms that would be
required to make this work?), you would not
get the same effect. The areas that were
brighter and darker between the different
planes would be correlated in a different
way than they are, the visual effect would
be quite different. You'd have color fringes
surrounding water highlights instead of
the softer flowing effect.
Still, it's fun to try and think these
things out.
It's a moving object, I can't tell what
it is, though. Could be an animal.
There are several reasons to believe that
it's not lens flare, but the simplest one is
that the sun is in back of the camera in
the shot you indicate, and you need direct
sunlight on the camera lens to get lens
flare.
Right result, but I think you have
the wrong reason.
The grass is green, but the previous author
is right, there are non-green wavelengths
coming from the grass, and there would
be color fringing of the grass, particularly
in the bright highlights, if the blurring
of the grass was due to movement.
However, I believe the grass is less than
perfectly sharp because it's just out of
focus from being too close to the camera.
You missed my comment about parallax. If you
have multiple lenses, each has a different
perspective on the scene, and when you try
to align the images you end up in a world of
hurt in terms of color fringes on everything.
We don't see that, so the images must have
been taken through a single lens.
I am quite aware of what polarization is.
True polarization filters (called "linear
polarizers" in the photo biz) align different
frequencies of light in the same direction.
To get any color-dependent effects you need
the modern marriage of a polarization filter
with a quarter-wave plate or such, what is
normally referred to in the photo biz as
a "circular polarizer". These are pretty
complicated pieces of technology, but I use
them in my photography business, I photograph
water all the time, and they don't introduce
those artifacts in one-lens cameras. If you
insist on a three-lens camera as an explanation
for what's happening, then you have yet to
answer the issue of parallax.
I agree that there is a loss of sharpness
in the grass. I do not agree that that is
a time-exposure effect. The grass in that
photo is much closer than the rest of the
picture, it is my belief that the grass is
close enough to the camera to be very
slightly out of focus. This is totally
consistent with my experience (I have
a second business doing nature/landscape
photography.)
You could. You'd want a prism to separate
the images, then enough of a light path
to get the 'red' picture physically away
form the 'green' and that away from th
'blue' (actually each covering a range of
hues), then another set of mirrors and
prisms to realign them.
It'd be difficult to do, not sure if it
would have been possible at the time even
in the best of conditions. For the reasons
I stated earlier, I'm pretty clear that
that is not what was done.
If you look at the pole, which is not shiny,
the artifact that an earlier poster pointed
to has color fringing. Since the pole is
not shiny, your explanation doesn't explain
that behavior. Since other nearby objects
are not fringed, it can't be a parallax
thing or poor registration of the color layers.
That suggests movement. If that were true,
and the pole were planted, you'ld expect the
fringe to grow as you approach the top of the
pole, which it does if you examine the picture
closely.
The sharpness of the pictures suggest that
they were taken through the same lens. Were
they not, parallax fringes would be apparent
all over the place, and there'd be no good
way to correct that. So the light for the
three image planes came in through the same
lens.
But we know that each film section was exposed
through a different filter. So either the
filter was changed (automatically or manually)
between each frame, or he invented complex
third-silvered mirror appartuses. The former
is a lot more technologically believable.
Finally, people can be still with practice
for long exposures. B&W photographs from
the mid-19th century demonstrate this on
a regular basis.
I stick by my original belief that the
color fringes are related to small differences
in the time of exposure between the different
color layers. (On the order or a fraction
of a second to a couple of seconds.)
It is a sad state of affairs that in a
capitalist economy the best isn't winning...
I sense, perhaps incorrectly, that you are
still using Verizon. Capitalism will only
work to improve that market to the extent
that people are willing to avoid carriers
that they dislike.
Some folks expect capitalism to
turn the lowest-cost provider into the
highest-quality and most-featured provider.
That's ain't necessarily how it'll work in a
system where providing decent service is
part of the providers costs. You don't
get to have it both ways.
I'm not using PacBell here in California for
DSL because of my incredibly poor past experiences
with them (with ISDN). I'll stick with
Speakeasy.net and Covad, and pay more, for
superior service and features, until there
is no other choice. (And that will be a while,
services like cable modems and Sprint
wireless will give me options for quite some
time to come. Your availability may vary.)
Like you, I do think I sense a
slightly higher percentage
of geeks in the bi and poly
communities I hang in.
I've noticed something more striking.
While I've taken relatively little crap about
my sexuality and my relationship style,
things have been even more positive for me
in the geek community, both in terms of
understanding (not having to explain poly)
and acceptance.
(Of course, that's just my own experience,
and a generalization at that.)
This type of coursework should really become part of highschool and college programs.
Absolutely. BTW, a lot of their donations go
toward providing instruction for teens.
And even for folks who aren't survivors, I notice
a remarkable difference in attitude and personal
responsiblility from the graduates.
For folks in the Bay Area, BAMM will be having
a
Mug-A-Thon this weekend, it's a fun way
to get introduced to what BAMM actually does.
BTW, I'll be taking their Men's Course
January 12-14.
The sad thing is, people are pretty stupid.
They give donations to charities which
advertise on TV or which seem hip or trendy
(thereby paying for the salaries of
marketing execs who make a living off
starving kids).
Without arguing the 'stupid' comment, I do
strongly believe in 'efficient' charities.
When 90% of the donations to an organization
go towards advertising and administrative costs,
I have to ask if I can do more good with
my money.
On the other hand, precise quantification can
be hard. AIDSride is often decried as
inefficient, but often by folks who miss the
benefit of the awareness raising that group
has done. We could debate how important that
is today, but it's certainly a factor in any
discussion of efficiency.
Moreover, if you pushed for absolute highest
efficiency, you'd probably end up only dontating
to very small grass-roots organizations. While
I don't think there's anything wrong with that,
certain types of chartitable organizations,
such as medical research organizations, aren't
very effective unless they reach a critical mass.
That doesn't a priori make them a bad
choice.
That having been said, the vast majority of my
charitable giving currently goes to
BAMM: Bay Area Model
Mugging, which is an excellent example of
an efficient and effective small organization.
Ignoring the inevitable jokes about mugging
models, I've seen BAMM make a significant,
positive difference in the lives of several folks
around me, and believe that the difference it's
made on those people have had a positive effect
on my own life as well.
Which brings us back to why I do it, why I give.
I give becaue it makes me feel good. I'm
not religous, I don't expect repayment, I
simply do it because, in the end, it feels good.
Sure they do. You go "oops", you take your
ballot, you go to an election worker, you say
"Oops, I need a new ballot.", you take it back
to the machine, you correct your mistake.
(rant on)
While I have sympathy for the folks who were
confused, I see the double-punched ballots as
being from people who knew they double punched,
and were either too lazy or irresponsible to
correct the situation. We're not talking about
brains, we're talking about responsiblity.
I have great sympathy
for folks who were confused (or worse, misled),
I have little if any sympathy
for people who abdicate responsiblity and then
make it my job (or the states job) to fix it.
I'm not sure what the eye's "maximum refresh rate" might be, but I know this is a stupid way to measure it. They should at least do it
outside in full sunshine.
Not precisely, full darkness turns out to
be better, which makes sense if you think
about it.
But your point about interference with 60 Hz.
(US) rates is dead-on correct. Working in
the interactive TV biz I often have to deal
with PAL monitors in the US, and there's a
noticable worsening of quality of the PAL
TVs (50 Hz. refresh) when they're illuminated
by florescent lighting (I'm in the US, where
the lighting flickers at 60 Hz.) So I turn
the lights off, and work from the daylight
from the window.
(In my case, even then there may also
be electrical interference yanking on the
signal, I haven't figured out how to prove if
that contibutes much to my perception of
flicker on PAL TVs in the US--yet.
That article really oversimplifies
a lot of the issues around visual processing.
First, in very contrived circumstances, some
individuals have been shown to percieve flicker
around 100, maybe even 120 FPS. The numbers
vary widely
with different people, you can test this pretty
easily with a bunch of friends and a multisync
monitor.
Second, motion won't be percieved correctly
if you have a number of sharp frames moving
across the field quickly--even if you're updating
at a higher rate of speed. If you took a 1/150th
of a second, averaged a bunch of evenly spaced
images from that into a single frame (to create
motion blur), then used those resulting frames
for your movie you'd do fine, but without that
you end up with visual artifacts. Since, I
believe (and please correct me on this if I'm wrong) this generally isn't done, higher
frame rates create a more visually realistic
rendition than lower ones, even above 72 FPS.
I've had excellent service from Speakeasy as
well. They quoted me 13 days from order to
working DSL, and delivered, despite a change
in what I requested as far as IP addresses
during mid-order. I have 608/128 ADSL.
There was apparently one
glitch in the installation, the Covad installer
placed a phone call and cleared it up in about
four minutes, too fast for me to actually know
what the issue was. During the 13 days their
status page gave me complete visibility into
what was happening behind the scenes. A nice
touch.
I've also only called customer service
once (for a service change, not for a problem)
and someone actually answered the phone
promptly.
Finally, they did a POP migration on me
a while back, which did require an IP addr.
change. In their defense, they gave me
lots of warning and a choice of transition
times, and the transition was smooth and
problem-free.
That's correct. Carver's work on silicon
retinas started at Caltech, then was followed
up on for several years by a company he
co-founded with Federico Fagin (founder of
Zilog) called Synaptics. Synaptics later
got into the business of making touchpad
pointing devices, and split of Foveon as
sort of a joint project with National Semi.
Take a look at the web site, it's
http://www.foveon.net
For the record, I used to work for Synaptics,
and was also a TA for Carver at Caltech in
the early 1980s.
My company released a new handbook. That we had to sign a piece of paper that said we read it and understood it. Well it was a 10 minute meeting and you didn't have time to read it when they wanted you to sign that piece of paper.
Actually, since it sounds like you'd have
witnesses to how that document was signed,
you'd have an
excellent case that the contract was invalid.
Of course, IANAL.
The company could just ask about what you've done...
On the contrary. Where I work, the interviewee being
excited about what we're doing behind the scenes,
"getting" the value and the point of it,
is a real indication of whether we want to
hire them. It is perfectly reasonable for a
company to want to disclose secrets to interviewees to get their reaction, and still
maintain a desire to not have that information
given to their competitors.
Again, this is w/regard to NDAs in general
for interviewees. There are bad ones, good
ones, I've signed some I probably could've
avoided signing because both the intent of
the interviewers and the wording of the agreement
were clear and reasonable, I've turned down
signing some that were (to my mind) unreasonable.
I run into a lot more of the former than the
latter, your mileage may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
Only having to buy cheap real-estate is still not a strength, it's just a smaller weakness. Safeway already has the real estate purchased. So there's no additional investment in real estate (at least while the delivery remains a small part of their business.) And they already have their distribution system in place. It's a lot less of a business to get up and running, it will cost Safeway a lot less additional captial to get going than Webvan burnt through. It's all about return on invested capital, man.
--Joe
** spoiler **
Zorn's Lemon.
--j
(Cruising via pseudo-maths since 1997...)
Hey baby, what's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? :)
--j
It's not even clear what's meant by a 'pure' red filter, filters pass some range of colors with different transmission characteristics. But being pedantic aside...
So, lets assume that you have colored filters (sure) that act additionally as a polarizer and a partial-wave plate (pretty much science fiction stuff for the era we're talking about). As a photographer you'd be sad about that, by the way, you can't afford the 50% light lossage you'd pay in terms of even longer exposures. But let's just take that as an asumption. Okay, so we're out on a limb, but if we buy into all those assumptions, do you actually get the water effect shown?
Nope. :)
If you had simulatanious polarized pictures of the same scene through the same lens (did I forget to mention the amazing work with at least four prisms that would be required to make this work?), you would not get the same effect. The areas that were brighter and darker between the different planes would be correlated in a different way than they are, the visual effect would be quite different. You'd have color fringes surrounding water highlights instead of the softer flowing effect.
Still, it's fun to try and think these things out.
--Joe
--Joe
There are several reasons to believe that it's not lens flare, but the simplest one is that the sun is in back of the camera in the shot you indicate, and you need direct sunlight on the camera lens to get lens flare.
--Joe
Right result, but I think you have the wrong reason.
The grass is green, but the previous author is right, there are non-green wavelengths coming from the grass, and there would be color fringing of the grass, particularly in the bright highlights, if the blurring of the grass was due to movement.
However, I believe the grass is less than perfectly sharp because it's just out of focus from being too close to the camera.
--Joe
You missed my comment about parallax. If you have multiple lenses, each has a different perspective on the scene, and when you try to align the images you end up in a world of hurt in terms of color fringes on everything. We don't see that, so the images must have been taken through a single lens.
I am quite aware of what polarization is. True polarization filters (called "linear polarizers" in the photo biz) align different frequencies of light in the same direction. To get any color-dependent effects you need the modern marriage of a polarization filter with a quarter-wave plate or such, what is normally referred to in the photo biz as a "circular polarizer". These are pretty complicated pieces of technology, but I use them in my photography business, I photograph water all the time, and they don't introduce those artifacts in one-lens cameras. If you insist on a three-lens camera as an explanation for what's happening, then you have yet to answer the issue of parallax.
I agree that there is a loss of sharpness in the grass. I do not agree that that is a time-exposure effect. The grass in that photo is much closer than the rest of the picture, it is my belief that the grass is close enough to the camera to be very slightly out of focus. This is totally consistent with my experience (I have a second business doing nature/landscape photography.)
--Joe
It'd be difficult to do, not sure if it would have been possible at the time even in the best of conditions. For the reasons I stated earlier, I'm pretty clear that that is not what was done.
--Joe
If you look at the pole, which is not shiny, the artifact that an earlier poster pointed to has color fringing. Since the pole is not shiny, your explanation doesn't explain that behavior. Since other nearby objects are not fringed, it can't be a parallax thing or poor registration of the color layers.
That suggests movement. If that were true, and the pole were planted, you'ld expect the fringe to grow as you approach the top of the pole, which it does if you examine the picture closely.
The sharpness of the pictures suggest that they were taken through the same lens. Were they not, parallax fringes would be apparent all over the place, and there'd be no good way to correct that. So the light for the three image planes came in through the same lens.
But we know that each film section was exposed through a different filter. So either the filter was changed (automatically or manually) between each frame, or he invented complex third-silvered mirror appartuses. The former is a lot more technologically believable.
Finally, people can be still with practice for long exposures. B&W photographs from the mid-19th century demonstrate this on a regular basis.
I stick by my original belief that the color fringes are related to small differences in the time of exposure between the different color layers. (On the order or a fraction of a second to a couple of seconds.)
--Joe
Which is funny, since the GPL, which is used to enforce software freedom in that sense, is in fact a form of copyright, legally speaking.
--j
I sense, perhaps incorrectly, that you are still using Verizon. Capitalism will only work to improve that market to the extent that people are willing to avoid carriers that they dislike.
Some folks expect capitalism to turn the lowest-cost provider into the highest-quality and most-featured provider. That's ain't necessarily how it'll work in a system where providing decent service is part of the providers costs. You don't get to have it both ways.
I'm not using PacBell here in California for DSL because of my incredibly poor past experiences with them (with ISDN). I'll stick with Speakeasy.net and Covad, and pay more, for superior service and features, until there is no other choice. (And that will be a while, services like cable modems and Sprint wireless will give me options for quite some time to come. Your availability may vary.)
--JoeCount another poly geek here.
Like you, I do think I sense a slightly higher percentage of geeks in the bi and poly communities I hang in.
I've noticed something more striking. While I've taken relatively little crap about my sexuality and my relationship style, things have been even more positive for me in the geek community, both in terms of understanding (not having to explain poly) and acceptance. (Of course, that's just my own experience, and a generalization at that.)
--j
Just cool the chip.
</hhos>
Absolutely. BTW, a lot of their donations go toward providing instruction for teens. And even for folks who aren't survivors, I notice a remarkable difference in attitude and personal responsiblility from the graduates.
For folks in the Bay Area, BAMM will be having a Mug-A-Thon this weekend, it's a fun way to get introduced to what BAMM actually does.
BTW, I'll be taking their Men's Course January 12-14.
--j
Without arguing the 'stupid' comment, I do strongly believe in 'efficient' charities. When 90% of the donations to an organization go towards advertising and administrative costs, I have to ask if I can do more good with my money.
On the other hand, precise quantification can be hard. AIDSride is often decried as inefficient, but often by folks who miss the benefit of the awareness raising that group has done. We could debate how important that is today, but it's certainly a factor in any discussion of efficiency.
Moreover, if you pushed for absolute highest efficiency, you'd probably end up only dontating to very small grass-roots organizations. While I don't think there's anything wrong with that, certain types of chartitable organizations, such as medical research organizations, aren't very effective unless they reach a critical mass. That doesn't a priori make them a bad choice.
That having been said, the vast majority of my charitable giving currently goes to BAMM: Bay Area Model Mugging, which is an excellent example of an efficient and effective small organization. Ignoring the inevitable jokes about mugging models, I've seen BAMM make a significant, positive difference in the lives of several folks around me, and believe that the difference it's made on those people have had a positive effect on my own life as well.
Which brings us back to why I do it, why I give. I give becaue it makes me feel good. I'm not religous, I don't expect repayment, I simply do it because, in the end, it feels good.
--Joe
http://www.polychromatic.com/fiction.html
--j
Punch ballots don't come with erasers.
Sure they do. You go "oops", you take your ballot, you go to an election worker, you say "Oops, I need a new ballot.", you take it back to the machine, you correct your mistake.
(rant on)
While I have sympathy for the folks who were confused, I see the double-punched ballots as being from people who knew they double punched, and were either too lazy or irresponsible to correct the situation. We're not talking about brains, we're talking about responsiblity. I have great sympathy for folks who were confused (or worse, misled), I have little if any sympathy for people who abdicate responsiblity and then make it my job (or the states job) to fix it.
(rant off)
--Joe
I'm not sure what the eye's "maximum refresh rate" might be, but I know this is a stupid way to measure it. They should at least do it outside in full sunshine.
Not precisely, full darkness turns out to be better, which makes sense if you think about it.
But your point about interference with 60 Hz. (US) rates is dead-on correct. Working in the interactive TV biz I often have to deal with PAL monitors in the US, and there's a noticable worsening of quality of the PAL TVs (50 Hz. refresh) when they're illuminated by florescent lighting (I'm in the US, where the lighting flickers at 60 Hz.) So I turn the lights off, and work from the daylight from the window. (In my case, even then there may also be electrical interference yanking on the signal, I haven't figured out how to prove if that contibutes much to my perception of flicker on PAL TVs in the US--yet.
--j
That article really oversimplifies a lot of the issues around visual processing.
First, in very contrived circumstances, some individuals have been shown to percieve flicker around 100, maybe even 120 FPS. The numbers vary widely with different people, you can test this pretty easily with a bunch of friends and a multisync monitor.
Second, motion won't be percieved correctly if you have a number of sharp frames moving across the field quickly--even if you're updating at a higher rate of speed. If you took a 1/150th of a second, averaged a bunch of evenly spaced images from that into a single frame (to create motion blur), then used those resulting frames for your movie you'd do fine, but without that you end up with visual artifacts. Since, I believe (and please correct me on this if I'm wrong) this generally isn't done, higher frame rates create a more visually realistic rendition than lower ones, even above 72 FPS.
--j
I've had excellent service from Speakeasy as well. They quoted me 13 days from order to working DSL, and delivered, despite a change in what I requested as far as IP addresses during mid-order. I have 608/128 ADSL. There was apparently one glitch in the installation, the Covad installer placed a phone call and cleared it up in about four minutes, too fast for me to actually know what the issue was. During the 13 days their status page gave me complete visibility into what was happening behind the scenes. A nice touch.
I've also only called customer service once (for a service change, not for a problem) and someone actually answered the phone promptly.
Finally, they did a POP migration on me a while back, which did require an IP addr. change. In their defense, they gave me lots of warning and a choice of transition times, and the transition was smooth and problem-free.
Contrast this with my experiences getting ISDN installed by PacBell.
I'd pay money to never deal with PacBell again.--j
Take a look at the web site, it's http://www.foveon.net
For the record, I used to work for Synaptics, and was also a TA for Carver at Caltech in the early 1980s.
--j
--j
My company released a new handbook. That we had to sign a piece of paper that said we read it and understood it. Well it was a 10 minute meeting and you didn't have time to read it when they wanted you to sign that piece of paper.
Actually, since it sounds like you'd have witnesses to how that document was signed, you'd have an excellent case that the contract was invalid. Of course, IANAL.
--j
On the contrary. Where I work, the interviewee being excited about what we're doing behind the scenes, "getting" the value and the point of it, is a real indication of whether we want to hire them. It is perfectly reasonable for a company to want to disclose secrets to interviewees to get their reaction, and still maintain a desire to not have that information given to their competitors.
Again, this is w/regard to NDAs in general for interviewees. There are bad ones, good ones, I've signed some I probably could've avoided signing because both the intent of the interviewers and the wording of the agreement were clear and reasonable, I've turned down signing some that were (to my mind) unreasonable. I run into a lot more of the former than the latter, your mileage may vary.
--j