Short of the DNA being fabricated, or having been contaminated in such a way that would be non-obvious and still lead to matching candidates X, Y and Z......are you saying it does lie?
Nobody worth a damn uses, or should use, "The DNA profile matches this random man we plucked off the streets, therefore he did it."
Put differently... say your DNA was on record for whatever reason or non-reason. Now they find some manner of DNA sample where its profile matches yours. Are you now saying that the hard facts that a DNA sample with a profile matching yours are a lie?
It either matches or it doesn't. There's no 'lying' involved there. You would be perfectly well to point out - perhaps citing the aforementioned data - that the DNA sample not only matches you, but a dozen other people as well. You could even suggest that the sample, if in fact a perfect match for yours if such were possible, could have gotten there by some other means - the wind carrying one of your hairs over there - including planting.
But there's no 'lie' in it matching or not - have a lab of your own choice run a DNA matching test. If they come up with a 'no match'.. *then* you can start pondering a lie.. but not a lie of the DNA but a lie of either of the labs / those who write up the official testing results / etc.
could possibly trump
In gross perversions of justice, yes. Do gross perversions of justice happen? Sure. It's a trade-off we make. We send homicidal maniacs back into society because there's some 'reasonable doubt', and we send innocent people off to the slammer because all sorts of evidence points to them, and for whatever reason they've got nothing to counter it with to -cause- a reasonable doubt.
But in any sane court case, just a "we found DNA, extracted a profile, and it matches this guy - we have no further evidence, we have no opportunity, no motive, no means, the guy lives 1500 miles away, he's on CCTV footage of an ATM machine by a bank just 30 minutes before the crime was committed and a bunch of coworkers and a bartender claiming he was in a bar having drinks there until at least 3 hours after the murder, but gosh darnit we have DNA!!!" isn't gonna cut it.
Now we could _totally_ frame the legitimate owners
Sure.. if you can also somehow magically make them disappear from their work and family who all swear that at the supposed time of the murders, the person in question was working/with their family.
If you can also somehow magically show that although their actual passports were used to re-enter country X, the fact that there are no records of anybody with that passport -leaving- country X for any other country is irrelevant entirely.
If you can also show that that the framed person knew the victim(s) or even had so much as a motive to kill them in the first place.
And so forth. And so on.
Of course there are mistakes being made - I wouldn't know if this is more so with DNA evidence than any other evidence - and that can have horrible ramifications when innocent people are put away or even put to death.. all the more reason to not let DNA evidence be the -only- evidence. But some people seem to be strongly advocating that DNA evidence should not be used -at all-.. and that, I think, is going off the deep end on the other side of the debate.
I can't speak for Javascript but in most C libraries - at least in the DOS era when I last made this mistake - the library would default to a static seed of its own during program initialisation, probably 0 or something.
A-ha... crystal clear - thanks for clarifying:)
Just to check - IE8 certainly seems to do this - whether it does it properly, I wouldn't know, but it's certainly not the same results each time I fire up IE8 with a test page (just printing out 10 random numbers).
This is what I was referring to, not using a static seed:P
Certainly not;) But if MS were to seed the number, they'd still have to get that seed out of somewhere.. though I suppose they could use javascript date/time functions for that.
To cover the first bit.. it's a webpage - if a potential problem has been found, it can be fixed. I.e. this random selection thing? They can implement a better one.
Though I do wish they would start by fixing the page's use of javascript to sort the results -after- their display. Turn off Javascript.. the order appears to always be: IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari.
In fact - if you have a slow machine like I do.. leave javascript on, and just refresh the page.. look closely, and you'll find that -that- is the order of display *before* it gets shuffled by the javascript.
On the down side... if they were to detect the user not using javascript, and would switch server side-shuffled results instead, people would wonder how fair -those- are.. and since they can't peek inside the server, there's no way to tell.
Which leads to another down side... it's on a server out of our control - it's entirely possible, albeit unlikely, that one out of N hits favors browser X by design.
note: I don't really care much.. I don't think this should have been pushed through at all. But if they -have- to do it, I'd rather they do it well, just because it would have prevented the flurry of articles on this and other issues (such as the rollout not being instant, but stretched out through April(?) - probably to keep media attention / panicked users calling their tech support to a minimum), even in times to come.
I thought it was originally going to be that they forgot to seed the random number generator or something.
Out of curiosity - why would they need to seed the random number generator?
Wouldn't -not- seeding it be better? That way MS don't have to include some seed number in their script and have everybody thinking they're manipulating the results by using seed numbers that they know would generate a certain ordering in various versions of IE.
I actually found this bit...
Repeating the same test on Firefox is also non-random, but in a different way:
...rather interesting. How are two browsers using the same script resulting in different ways of being non-random; presuming that, in itself, was not by chance?
That said.. odd method of getting random results out of an array.. I'm sure it's more efficient but KISS would dictate you grab one random result out of the array, delete the one you chose, pick a new one, delete, etc. until the array is down to 1 and you stick that last one at the end. Can't really go wrong with that unless the random number generator itself is hosed, and even non-mathematicians can understand how that one works. It's not like it's a high-performance application.
This is legislation basically saying a company has to conform to points 1, 2 and 3 if they want to install software X of a particular variant (in this case, P2P) on your machine.
This is not really much different from telling a contractor that they're free to install a bathroom into your home, but that they will have to abide by laws 1, 2 and 3 regarding things like the electrical wiring. ( although that's based on UK and NL law - I suppose maybe in the U.S. every contractor is free to install an outlet into the side of their client's bathtub if they so desire? )
Is that over-legislation in the case of P2P? probably. But mostly because it's a bit odd to target P2P specifically - it could apply to just about any program. Security programs would be an issue, though*
The points themselves -seem- sound enough, though...
prohibit peer-to-peer file-sharing programs from being installed without the informed consent of the authorized computer user.
no stealthy installs - I'm all for that. I'm looking at you, Apple with iTunes and Safari, and you MS for MSN's final installation screen suggesting IE should be my default browser and MSN be set my homepage, and a crapload of other apps that suggest that installing a Yahoo! toolbar is vital to the operation of the principle software.. give me a donate button instead, I'll happily part with some dosh if I'm using your app, more than you're getting from Yahoo for the toolbar install I'd imagine.
The legislation would also prohibit P2P software that would prevent the authorized user from blocking the installation of a P2P file-sharing program and/or disabling or removing any P2P file-sharing program.
So, bittorrent isn't allowed to block my installation of, say, utorrent, nor is would it be allowed to prevent me from uninstalling itself (or others). * just to get back to that security programs bit - obviously a security program -should- be allowed to block other software from being installed if that other software is malware. So that's where broader legislation could have problems.
Software developers would be required to clearly inform users when their files are made available to other peer-to-peer users
Given the "I didn't know!" defense-craptaculaire proferred by some people, I think that's sane, too. Heck, disable sharing by default, and if the user wants to share files warn them of the ramifications, and always make it clear -which- files you're sharing.. not via a configuration dialog that merely specifies the path - offer a screen where you can get an -actual list- of the files. Better yet would be not allowing the sharing of a directory 'as is' at all. Have the user confirm that any files added to a specified share folder should be shared - keep a simple database (flat text file would do) of the files the user actually wanted to share. That way you can't have business users dropping a random document(s) into the share folder, forgetting that they had it shared, and auto-sharing that/those document(s) with the world -unless- they also go to their P2P app to confirm that they want the added file(s) shared.
The thing -I- worry about is that IANAL. Moreover, IANAS(neaky)L - so I don't know just how these definitions (which I suspect are loosely phrased around the actual suggested legislation anyway) can be worked around, or twisted for abuse, etc.
I think the author specifically isn't stating whether the scaling is correct or not - it is; the whole story doesn't relate to scaling at all, but rather color space and how -it- affects, among other, scaling. Yes, with filtering - scaling without filtering can hardly be called scaling at all as you're just discarding data - and for anything but multiples of 2 (4x, 2x, 0.5x, 0.25x, etc.) that'd have a whole 'nother set of problems.
The author, I think, is suggesting, quite rightly so, that while...
The grey square shown is the correct result
...it is not the expected (by laymen) nor desired (by just about anybody) result.
The desired result for scaling down likely being that of the same visual image as when you simply stand further back. ( although at some point the resolution limit of a display and the image itself being presented on that display prevents that concept from being applied to "moving your eyeballs closer to the screen" for scaling up. )
If you're a *serious* amateur photographer, then you should already know about this and not be using those apps / using them in the color modes (to use Photoshop parlance, as I guess most serious amateur photographers will have a copy (legit or otherwise of that)).
I guess the argument would hinge on who is a serious amateur photographer and who is just a regular amateur photographer.
As for the actual examples - sure, you can see the difference.. especially since they're in before/after -style swappable pages. If I presented you a random image off of a random image gallery online, though, would you be able to tell the difference?
If I showed you an online photo album and pointed at an image's thumbnail, had you click the thumbnail, and open up the full size image.. would you notice that it was scaled to thumbnail incorrectly?
"Nobody really cares" may have been too broad a statement - but those who really care, already know.. or reasonably should know. imho.
Note that I'm not excusing the software programs from handling this better - certainly not Photoshop - but it's 1. not a new revelation and 2. certainly not a "scaling algorithm bug".
There's no factual error in the scaling algorithm, as the/. headline would like you to believe - it's a color space (linearity) issue; you have to do your calculations in linear space which means a typical photo off of a camera/scanner gets the inverse of an sRGB curve applied (a gamma of 0.454545 is 'close enough' if you can't do the proper color bits). Then scale. Then re-apply the curve.
And no - for real life imagery, nobody really cares - the JPEGs out of the cameras and subsequent re-compression to JPEG after scaling will have 'destroyed' far more data than the linearity issue.
They're nice example images in the story, but they should be called 'academic'.
Sorry - it's a type of volumetric display where a surface (an inclined disc, or a helix, etc.) is spinning rapidly and projected onto at the right point in time to essentially project a 3D volume.
The viewing angle isn't 5 degrees, though.. it's a good bit larger than that.
The major problem is that the overlay (lenticular lenses) don't direct individual images -to your eyes- - such systems would be vastly more expensive and have whole other issues - they simply direct underlying pixels into different directions. If your left eye happens to be in the area where the left image is being directed, and your right eye in the area where the right image is being directed.. congratulations! Now move your head an inch to the left/right. Now your right eye is seeing the left image and your left eye is seeing the right image. ouch. Try half an inch.. each eye gets a portion of both images. ungh. In other words.. there's sweet spots to sit in, and if you don't sit in one of those sweet spots, you're going to get conflicting sensory input.
So 1 user at a time isn't strictly true - if the person next to you sits in one of the other sweet spots, they'll be fine as well.
Half your resolution lost, however (they have to either alternate rows or columns.. 1920x1080 becoming 1920x540 or 960x1080). The human visual system can fill in the blanks from the other eye's perception, but that's just literally plugging holes.
There's far more disadvantages, including 2D quality (another display handles that partially by activating a liquid much like an LCD liquid in order to somewhat destroy the lenticular effect), but basically... Lenticular 3D is still crap.
Those who don't want to 'look ridiculous with one of those stupid glasses' on, though, should get Lenticular systems; it's their best bet for viewing stereographic 3D without glasses *right now* until we can perfect the whole realtime holographic plate thing and get some decent color reproduction off of those as well... -and- have it be affordable. ( barring any even more zany systems such as helical 3D displays which are more intended for volumetric displays than stereographic 3D etc. etc. )
Say you're witnessing a crime from your comfy couch and decide to take a picture and post it on the interwebs for... I dunno, "teh lulz" or because you want to become anonyfamous in some CNN iReport or who cares. Now, nothing in the picture itself identifies you or where it was shot.
But then the EXIF data comes in and gives the perp, or his buddies, the exact location from where the picture was taken. Next thing you know, your house/its occupants are a target.
Perhaps we should all be 'smart enough' to strip the EXIF data when it comes to such images - but when the users themselves might not even know that their phone (of all things) is including this data when they use the little twitpic app to quick-submit the thing...
I can certainly see reason, at least, for such utilities to strip this data by default / prompt the user / etc.
I'm just curious as the article summary and article don't mention (I guess the PDF might, but from the article's description, it isn't clear)...
Do they still need the card?
The article seems to describe the attack as a man-in-the-middle attack.. i.e. card -> their device -> the card reader/writer. So the card instigates all the important bits (which back account number, etc.), and then their device sends back an 'OK' to the card reader/writer, happily ignoring the PIN part.
But does that mean they do still need to have a card? Or could they easily make their own card with the details of whoever (let's say they grab the bank account # off of some business registry website), and then go ahead and perform transactions with it + their device?
Screw the sun and moon, The Blue Marble and dozens of infographics of the solar system with "you are here" labels.. that image - and subsequent direct viewing - instilled far more of a sense of being inside a solar system than any of those things.
That said - I'd go for the moon right afterward as well.. seeing the craters, especially on a waxing or warning moon, is great and can easily be done by kids.
The aforementioned image happens to have our moon -and- Jupiter + its 4 largest (well, most visible at the time) moons, which just makes it all the more awesome.
There's no 'flamebaiting' in saying that it would be a bad thing if judges had to worry about the repercussions (tar and feather, or maybe a little 'housecall', or hey.. just shoot their offspring.. that'll get the message across) of their decisions if they believe they are acting in accordance with the law; and anytime they aren't, that's what the higher courts are for.. and if they end up deciding that the lower court's judge didn't just make a boo-boo but royally screwed up, they can then take care of things from there.
Beyond that... what am I, too subtle with this one?
If every judge making a decision would have to fear being tarred and feathered just because *somebody* may disagree with the decision, wouldn't that be a Bad Thing(TM)?
Did you mods honestly miss the whole double-applicability of my rhetorical question there? I.e. "If every online business selling goods would have to fear getting sued just because *somebody* may disagree with the items for sale, wouldn't that be a Bad Thing(TM)?"
We need to bring back tar and feathering of stupid judges.
Who gets to decide which judges are stupid?
Not that I disagree on -this- decision being 'stupid' (on the face of it, I haven't read the judge's motivations and whatnot), but I can't help but disagree with your idea there.
If I simply disagree with a judge, deeming them 'stupid', does that mean I should be allowed (at least in the eye of the public) to tar and feather them?
Wouldn't that undermine one of the principles - however much they're ignored - of a legal system? If every judge making a decision would have to fear being tarred and feathered just because *somebody* may disagree with the decision, wouldn't that be a Bad Thing(TM)?
With the probably predictable type of 'input' they'll get for the most part, does anybody think it will be used for anything -other than- justification for the stipulations in ACTA and keeping the 'negotiations' secret?
GIMP is always compared to photoshop. There are some key features missing in GIMP
Agreed
adjustment layers (which GEGL is suppose to eventually bring about, but it's been a long wait)
Adjustment layers are a messed up paradigm from being stuck in a 1D compositing 'stack'. A node-based compositing workflow, however...
proper 16 and 32 bit image editing
cinepaint seems to have gone nowhere particular fast simply because not enough people (read: businesses) were/are interested in this. It's sad, but there you go.
and LAB and CYMK modes.
Seems pretty far off the priority list for most "serious artists".. unless the only serious artists are those who print their work and have it exhibited. Let's face it - most Photoshop users, and I admit I'm including all the warez kiddies and the family members they installed Photoshop for - will only ever used Photoshop to make images suitable for display on monitors; LCD ones at that.. they won't be bothering with even calibrating their display and making sure Photoshop uses that color profile information. By the time they do want a print - they'll either send it off to one of the many online printing services who have excellent staff who deal with RGB->CMYK(and then some) conversion if their machines flag out-of-gamut results, or they'll just send it to their own inkjet/color laser printer and not really care if the colors are a bit off.
I'm greatful for GIMP and thankful for the developer's efforts but I'd rather they focus on these things than dicking around with windowing. The truth is once you get use to it, GIMP's windowing isn't THAT bad.
You shouldn't have to 'get used to it' - although I agree that there's other areas that need love more than how one manages their windows; although 'losing' your layer window under some other non-GIMP-related because it's separate from everything else, or being fooled once again and trying to do a color adjustment in image A but ending up doing it in image B because you forgot that each window has its own little menu for doing these things.. can get quite annoying.
Now.. a unified transform tool and a macro recorder (not every artist wants to dive straight into script-fu.. which in itself isn't exactly the most human-readable of languages) - that's what I've been making donations for; although perhaps I should hire a programmer instead and pray to the OSS gods that they'll actually include the code, as I haven't seen any headway made into these areas.. just years and years of discussions. At least there's a bit of a push for GEGL so maybe it won't be so swaptastic to work on large images anymore.
Your selectors example can be used similarly for font detection. Set up CSS with a particular font - fall back to a standard font with known metrics. Once the page is rendered, use javascript to get the metrics of e.g. the block element you stuck the text in, and you can determine with fair certainty that the user either has that font, or doesn't. Obviously user CSS overriding things, scripting getting blocked, etc. thwart this - but that's not going to be the vast majority of users.
...as that's exactly what people seem to be missing here. The Wacom drawing/writing tablets aren't pressure-sensitive in the surface, but in the pen. Huge difference - unless you want to graft the little Wacom pen nibs and internals onto your bones and protruding from your fingertips.
Then again.. I've always thought the guy who's getting it on standing upright in his Corvette convertible is destined for a Darwin Award, so there might be something to this story
You'd be surprised how many people do - or have it set as their homepage in general, etc.
Besides - GP's post was referring to the menu fade-in which doesn't really appear on most of the other pages.. news.google, images.google, an already-performed search with google, etc. all have the menus in view right from the get-go.
Saying people just shouldn't go to the home page probably sounds to him like "Doctor, it hurts when I bend my arm" -"So don't bend your arm". Not much of an answer, thus.
Slashdot Mirror
Short of the DNA being fabricated, or having been contaminated in such a way that would be non-obvious and still lead to matching candidates X, Y and Z... ...are you saying it does lie?
Nobody worth a damn uses, or should use, "The DNA profile matches this random man we plucked off the streets, therefore he did it."
Put differently... say your DNA was on record for whatever reason or non-reason. Now they find some manner of DNA sample where its profile matches yours. Are you now saying that the hard facts that a DNA sample with a profile matching yours are a lie?
It either matches or it doesn't. There's no 'lying' involved there. You would be perfectly well to point out - perhaps citing the aforementioned data - that the DNA sample not only matches you, but a dozen other people as well. You could even suggest that the sample, if in fact a perfect match for yours if such were possible, could have gotten there by some other means - the wind carrying one of your hairs over there - including planting.
But there's no 'lie' in it matching or not - have a lab of your own choice run a DNA matching test. If they come up with a 'no match'.. *then* you can start pondering a lie.. but not a lie of the DNA but a lie of either of the labs / those who write up the official testing results / etc.
In gross perversions of justice, yes. Do gross perversions of justice happen? Sure. It's a trade-off we make. We send homicidal maniacs back into society because there's some 'reasonable doubt', and we send innocent people off to the slammer because all sorts of evidence points to them, and for whatever reason they've got nothing to counter it with to -cause- a reasonable doubt.
But in any sane court case, just a "we found DNA, extracted a profile, and it matches this guy - we have no further evidence, we have no opportunity, no motive, no means, the guy lives 1500 miles away, he's on CCTV footage of an ATM machine by a bank just 30 minutes before the crime was committed and a bunch of coworkers and a bartender claiming he was in a bar having drinks there until at least 3 hours after the murder, but gosh darnit we have DNA!!!" isn't gonna cut it.
Sure.. if you can also somehow magically make them disappear from their work and family who all swear that at the supposed time of the murders, the person in question was working/with their family.
If you can also somehow magically show that although their actual passports were used to re-enter country X, the fact that there are no records of anybody with that passport -leaving- country X for any other country is irrelevant entirely.
If you can also show that that the framed person knew the victim(s) or even had so much as a motive to kill them in the first place.
And so forth. And so on.
Of course there are mistakes being made - I wouldn't know if this is more so with DNA evidence than any other evidence - and that can have horrible ramifications when innocent people are put away or even put to death.. all the more reason to not let DNA evidence be the -only- evidence.
But some people seem to be strongly advocating that DNA evidence should not be used -at all-.. and that, I think, is going off the deep end on the other side of the debate.
A-ha... crystal clear - thanks for clarifying :)
Just to check - IE8 certainly seems to do this - whether it does it properly, I wouldn't know, but it's certainly not the same results each time I fire up IE8 with a test page (just printing out 10 random numbers).
Certainly not ;) But if MS were to seed the number, they'd still have to get that seed out of somewhere.. though I suppose they could use javascript date/time functions for that.
On the down side.. it's a webpage.
To cover the first bit.. it's a webpage - if a potential problem has been found, it can be fixed. I.e. this random selection thing? They can implement a better one.
Though I do wish they would start by fixing the page's use of javascript to sort the results -after- their display.
Turn off Javascript.. the order appears to always be: IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari.
In fact - if you have a slow machine like I do.. leave javascript on, and just refresh the page.. look closely, and you'll find that -that- is the order of display *before* it gets shuffled by the javascript.
On the down side... if they were to detect the user not using javascript, and would switch server side-shuffled results instead, people would wonder how fair -those- are.. and since they can't peek inside the server, there's no way to tell.
Which leads to another down side... it's on a server out of our control - it's entirely possible, albeit unlikely, that one out of N hits favors browser X by design.
note: I don't really care much.. I don't think this should have been pushed through at all. But if they -have- to do it, I'd rather they do it well, just because it would have prevented the flurry of articles on this and other issues (such as the rollout not being instant, but stretched out through April(?) - probably to keep media attention / panicked users calling their tech support to a minimum), even in times to come.
Out of curiosity - why would they need to seed the random number generator?
Wouldn't -not- seeding it be better? That way MS don't have to include some seed number in their script and have everybody thinking they're manipulating the results by using seed numbers that they know would generate a certain ordering in various versions of IE.
I actually found this bit...
Although I can't verify this, as the test page provided... http://www.robweir.com/blog/shuffle.html ...won't actually run in IE8 here :D
That said.. odd method of getting random results out of an array.. I'm sure it's more efficient but KISS would dictate you grab one random result out of the array, delete the one you chose, pick a new one, delete, etc. until the array is down to 1 and you stick that last one at the end. Can't really go wrong with that unless the random number generator itself is hosed, and even non-mathematicians can understand how that one works. It's not like it's a high-performance application.
This is legislation basically saying a company has to conform to points 1, 2 and 3 if they want to install software X of a particular variant (in this case, P2P) on your machine.
This is not really much different from telling a contractor that they're free to install a bathroom into your home, but that they will have to abide by laws 1, 2 and 3 regarding things like the electrical wiring.
( although that's based on UK and NL law - I suppose maybe in the U.S. every contractor is free to install an outlet into the side of their client's bathtub if they so desire? )
Is that over-legislation in the case of P2P? probably. But mostly because it's a bit odd to target P2P specifically - it could apply to just about any program. Security programs would be an issue, though*
The points themselves -seem- sound enough, though...
no stealthy installs - I'm all for that. I'm looking at you, Apple with iTunes and Safari, and you MS for MSN's final installation screen suggesting IE should be my default browser and MSN be set my homepage, and a crapload of other apps that suggest that installing a Yahoo! toolbar is vital to the operation of the principle software.. give me a donate button instead, I'll happily part with some dosh if I'm using your app, more than you're getting from Yahoo for the toolbar install I'd imagine.
So, bittorrent isn't allowed to block my installation of, say, utorrent, nor is would it be allowed to prevent me from uninstalling itself (or others).
* just to get back to that security programs bit - obviously a security program -should- be allowed to block other software from being installed if that other software is malware. So that's where broader legislation could have problems.
Given the "I didn't know!" defense-craptaculaire proferred by some people, I think that's sane, too. Heck, disable sharing by default, and if the user wants to share files warn them of the ramifications, and always make it clear -which- files you're sharing.. not via a configuration dialog that merely specifies the path - offer a screen where you can get an -actual list- of the files.
Better yet would be not allowing the sharing of a directory 'as is' at all. Have the user confirm that any files added to a specified share folder should be shared - keep a simple database (flat text file would do) of the files the user actually wanted to share.
That way you can't have business users dropping a random document(s) into the share folder, forgetting that they had it shared, and auto-sharing that/those document(s) with the world -unless- they also go to their P2P app to confirm that they want the added file(s) shared.
The thing -I- worry about is that IANAL. Moreover, IANAS(neaky)L - so I don't know just how these definitions (which I suspect are loosely phrased around the actual suggested legislation anyway) can be worked around, or twisted for abuse, etc.
I think the author specifically isn't stating whether the scaling is correct or not - it is; the whole story doesn't relate to scaling at all, but rather color space and how -it- affects, among other, scaling. Yes, with filtering - scaling without filtering can hardly be called scaling at all as you're just discarding data - and for anything but multiples of 2 (4x, 2x, 0.5x, 0.25x, etc.) that'd have a whole 'nother set of problems.
The author, I think, is suggesting, quite rightly so, that while...
The desired result for scaling down likely being that of the same visual image as when you simply stand further back.
( although at some point the resolution limit of a display and the image itself being presented on that display prevents that concept from being applied to "moving your eyeballs closer to the screen" for scaling up. )
If you're a *serious* amateur photographer, then you should already know about this and not be using those apps / using them in the color modes (to use Photoshop parlance, as I guess most serious amateur photographers will have a copy (legit or otherwise of that)).
I guess the argument would hinge on who is a serious amateur photographer and who is just a regular amateur photographer.
As for the actual examples - sure, you can see the difference.. especially since they're in before/after -style swappable pages. If I presented you a random image off of a random image gallery online, though, would you be able to tell the difference?
If I showed you an online photo album and pointed at an image's thumbnail, had you click the thumbnail, and open up the full size image.. would you notice that it was scaled to thumbnail incorrectly?
"Nobody really cares" may have been too broad a statement - but those who really care, already know.. or reasonably should know.
imho.
Note that I'm not excusing the software programs from handling this better - certainly not Photoshop - but it's 1. not a new revelation and 2. certainly not a "scaling algorithm bug".
Come on, this isn't news...
Helmut Dersch (of Panorama Tools fame) certainly posted about this before;
http://www.all-in-one.ee/~dersch/gamma/gamma.html - Interpolation and Gamma Correction
There's no factual error in the scaling algorithm, as the /. headline would like you to believe - it's a color space (linearity) issue; you have to do your calculations in linear space which means a typical photo off of a camera/scanner gets the inverse of an sRGB curve applied (a gamma of 0.454545 is 'close enough' if you can't do the proper color bits). Then scale. Then re-apply the curve.
And no - for real life imagery, nobody really cares - the JPEGs out of the cameras and subsequent re-compression to JPEG after scaling will have 'destroyed' far more data than the linearity issue.
They're nice example images in the story, but they should be called 'academic'.
Seriously, Slashdot.. until there's a revolutionary insight into this matter.. quick posting these stories ad nauseum.
For further commentary, see previous stories... here's one.. it's from september 2009 and -nothing has changed-.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/09/29/1646251/Archiving-Digital-Artwork-For-Museum-Purchase
They tried that - although probably as a bluff - and the EU denied MS that approach.
I stand corrected - it's worse! ;)
There's always applications for this and lenticular displays, but in general.. brrr.
nokarma
Sorry - it's a type of volumetric display where a surface (an inclined disc, or a helix, etc.) is spinning rapidly and projected onto at the right point in time to essentially project a 3D volume.
e.g.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KaQmn2VTzs - Actuality Systems Perspecta Volumetric 3D Display
The viewing angle isn't 5 degrees, though.. it's a good bit larger than that.
The major problem is that the overlay (lenticular lenses) don't direct individual images -to your eyes- - such systems would be vastly more expensive and have whole other issues - they simply direct underlying pixels into different directions. If your left eye happens to be in the area where the left image is being directed, and your right eye in the area where the right image is being directed.. congratulations!
Now move your head an inch to the left/right. Now your right eye is seeing the left image and your left eye is seeing the right image. ouch.
Try half an inch.. each eye gets a portion of both images. ungh.
In other words.. there's sweet spots to sit in, and if you don't sit in one of those sweet spots, you're going to get conflicting sensory input.
So 1 user at a time isn't strictly true - if the person next to you sits in one of the other sweet spots, they'll be fine as well.
Half your resolution lost, however (they have to either alternate rows or columns.. 1920x1080 becoming 1920x540 or 960x1080). The human visual system can fill in the blanks from the other eye's perception, but that's just literally plugging holes.
There's far more disadvantages, including 2D quality (another display handles that partially by activating a liquid much like an LCD liquid in order to somewhat destroy the lenticular effect), but basically... Lenticular 3D is still crap.
Those who don't want to 'look ridiculous with one of those stupid glasses' on, though, should get Lenticular systems; it's their best bet for viewing stereographic 3D without glasses *right now* until we can perfect the whole realtime holographic plate thing and get some decent color reproduction off of those as well... -and- have it be affordable.
( barring any even more zany systems such as helical 3D displays which are more intended for volumetric displays than stereographic 3D etc. etc. )
Say you're witnessing a crime from your comfy couch and decide to take a picture and post it on the interwebs for... I dunno, "teh lulz" or because you want to become anonyfamous in some CNN iReport or who cares.
Now, nothing in the picture itself identifies you or where it was shot.
But then the EXIF data comes in and gives the perp, or his buddies, the exact location from where the picture was taken. Next thing you know, your house/its occupants are a target.
Perhaps we should all be 'smart enough' to strip the EXIF data when it comes to such images - but when the users themselves might not even know that their phone (of all things) is including this data when they use the little twitpic app to quick-submit the thing...
I can certainly see reason, at least, for such utilities to strip this data by default / prompt the user / etc.
I'm just curious as the article summary and article don't mention (I guess the PDF might, but from the article's description, it isn't clear)...
Do they still need the card?
The article seems to describe the attack as a man-in-the-middle attack.. i.e. card -> their device -> the card reader/writer. So the card instigates all the important bits (which back account number, etc.), and then their device sends back an 'OK' to the card reader/writer, happily ignoring the PIN part.
But does that mean they do still need to have a card? Or could they easily make their own card with the details of whoever (let's say they grab the bank account # off of some business registry website), and then go ahead and perform transactions with it + their device?
I used my binoculars to go spotting at Jupiter a while back after this image... ...totally blew me away.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0907/lune-jupiter4_riou.jpg
Screw the sun and moon, The Blue Marble and dozens of infographics of the solar system with "you are here" labels.. that image - and subsequent direct viewing - instilled far more of a sense of being inside a solar system than any of those things.
That said - I'd go for the moon right afterward as well.. seeing the craters, especially on a waxing or warning moon, is great and can easily be done by kids.
The aforementioned image happens to have our moon -and- Jupiter + its 4 largest (well, most visible at the time) moons, which just makes it all the more awesome.
mods are on crack again, I guess.
There's no 'flamebaiting' in saying that it would be a bad thing if judges had to worry about the repercussions (tar and feather, or maybe a little 'housecall', or hey.. just shoot their offspring.. that'll get the message across) of their decisions if they believe they are acting in accordance with the law; and anytime they aren't, that's what the higher courts are for.. and if they end up deciding that the lower court's judge didn't just make a boo-boo but royally screwed up, they can then take care of things from there.
Beyond that... what am I, too subtle with this one?
Did you mods honestly miss the whole double-applicability of my rhetorical question there? I.e.
"If every online business selling goods would have to fear getting sued just because *somebody* may disagree with the items for sale, wouldn't that be a Bad Thing(TM)?"
Geeze. /rant and /nokarma.
Who gets to decide which judges are stupid?
Not that I disagree on -this- decision being 'stupid' (on the face of it, I haven't read the judge's motivations and whatnot), but I can't help but disagree with your idea there.
If I simply disagree with a judge, deeming them 'stupid', does that mean I should be allowed (at least in the eye of the public) to tar and feather them?
Wouldn't that undermine one of the principles - however much they're ignored - of a legal system? If every judge making a decision would have to fear being tarred and feathered just because *somebody* may disagree with the decision, wouldn't that be a Bad Thing(TM)?
With the probably predictable type of 'input' they'll get for the most part, does anybody think it will be used for anything -other than- justification for the stipulations in ACTA and keeping the 'negotiations' secret?
Agreed
Adjustment layers are a messed up paradigm from being stuck in a 1D compositing 'stack'. A node-based compositing workflow, however...
cinepaint seems to have gone nowhere particular fast simply because not enough people (read: businesses) were/are interested in this. It's sad, but there you go.
Seems pretty far off the priority list for most "serious artists".. unless the only serious artists are those who print their work and have it exhibited. Let's face it - most Photoshop users, and I admit I'm including all the warez kiddies and the family members they installed Photoshop for - will only ever used Photoshop to make images suitable for display on monitors; LCD ones at that.. they won't be bothering with even calibrating their display and making sure Photoshop uses that color profile information. By the time they do want a print - they'll either send it off to one of the many online printing services who have excellent staff who deal with RGB->CMYK(and then some) conversion if their machines flag out-of-gamut results, or they'll just send it to their own inkjet/color laser printer and not really care if the colors are a bit off.
You shouldn't have to 'get used to it' - although I agree that there's other areas that need love more than how one manages their windows; although 'losing' your layer window under some other non-GIMP-related because it's separate from everything else, or being fooled once again and trying to do a color adjustment in image A but ending up doing it in image B because you forgot that each window has its own little menu for doing these things.. can get quite annoying.
Now.. a unified transform tool and a macro recorder (not every artist wants to dive straight into script-fu.. which in itself isn't exactly the most human-readable of languages) - that's what I've been making donations for; although perhaps I should hire a programmer instead and pray to the OSS gods that they'll actually include the code, as I haven't seen any headway made into these areas.. just years and years of discussions.
At least there's a bit of a push for GEGL so maybe it won't be so swaptastic to work on large images anymore.
Your selectors example can be used similarly for font detection. Set up CSS with a particular font - fall back to a standard font with known metrics. Once the page is rendered, use javascript to get the metrics of e.g. the block element you stuck the text in, and you can determine with fair certainty that the user either has that font, or doesn't. Obviously user CSS overriding things, scripting getting blocked, etc. thwart this - but that's not going to be the vast majority of users.
...as that's exactly what people seem to be missing here. The Wacom drawing/writing tablets aren't pressure-sensitive in the surface, but in the pen. Huge difference - unless you want to graft the little Wacom pen nibs and internals onto your bones and protruding from your fingertips.
You're not nearly adventurous enough, young lad!
Then again.. I've always thought the guy who's getting it on standing upright in his Corvette convertible is destined for a Darwin Award, so there might be something to this story
You'd be surprised how many people do - or have it set as their homepage in general, etc.
Besides - GP's post was referring to the menu fade-in which doesn't really appear on most of the other pages.. news.google, images.google, an already-performed search with google, etc. all have the menus in view right from the get-go.
Saying people just shouldn't go to the home page probably sounds to him like "Doctor, it hurts when I bend my arm" -"So don't bend your arm". Not much of an answer, thus.