The various manufacturer-specific Perl modules in the ExifTool
package are also an excellent source of documentation for RAW file
metadata. Reading this (rather well-commented) code can help make the
more cryptic dcraw source much more comprehensible.
If you're talking about Lise Meitner, her interest was in the pure
science rather than its most terrible application. She fled to neutral
Sweden in 1938, but continued to communicate with former co-workers
Hahn and Strassmann in Berlin. In early 1939 she published this
classic paper in Nature, where
the term 'fission' (borrowed from biology by her co-author and nephew
Otto Frisch) was used for the first time. It explained the bizarre
results coming out of the lab in Berlin, and together with Hahn &
Strassman's paper, had a profound effect on many physicists, including
Leo Szilard. Szilard quickly realised the implications of the amount of
energy released in fission and, with Eugene Wigner, persuaded Einstein
to write to Roosevelt about the possibility of nuclear weapons.
There's a particularly sceptical article in Spiegel that makes the
whole thing sound a bit 'Da Vinci Code': http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spie gel/0,1518,346293,00.html
Also according to Spiegel, the Jonas Valley in Thuringia is turning
into a sort of German Area 51, attracting an army of crackpots looking
for everything from stolen art treasures to evidence of nuclear weapon
testing: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spie gel/0,1518,260784,00.html
("[Conspiracy theorist] Stade also believes that the Führer's
telephone system inside the tunnel network is still connected to the
public telephone system. In fact, he claims that it's buried deep in
the archives of the German Reichspost, and that he found Hitler's
number there. It's 03624-1200500... Although the Führer's number
is a working number, it's always busy.")
I wondered the same thing. Despite the claim about casualties, 'It is not clear how successful this design was and whether fission and fusion reactions were provoked.' It's also not stated if the supposed test site (in 'Thüringia, eastern Germany') has been located accurately. Elsewhere in the article it's noted that 'Industrial archaeology done at [a possible reactor site in Haigerloch] during 2002 and 2003 suggests that this reactor sustained a chain reaction - if only for a short period of time - and may have ended in an accident' - perhaps isotope measurements were used there? One of the authors has a whole (controversial!) book about this stuff ('Hitlers Bombe' - in German only?), which may have more details.
The fission/fusion device is actually a separate design (and was supposedly tested, according to the article). If true, there was some advanced thinking going on, but they clearly didn't have a workable full-scale nuclear weapon of any kind.
I think the point is that although this method is practical for Uranium bombs (the Hiroshima bomb used it), a much more complex 'implosion lens' design is required for Plutonium (or at least the grade of plutonium potentially available to the bomb makers, which had a relatively high rate of spontaneous neutron emission from 'contaminating' Pu-240). The latter design was used in the Trinity test and Nagasaki bombs.
Incidentally, the other German bomb design in the Physics World article (the one supposedly tested) was, if correct, a early attempt to exploit both fission and tritium/deuterium fusion in a weapon. Obviously they didn't manage to achieve even the yield of a small fission bomb, let alone a hydrogen bomb, but the (apparent) fact that they were thinking this way is itself remarkable (if true).
The original Physics
World article contains a lot more information, including a (modern)
schematic of 'some sort of a nuclear device' (not the same as the
drawing reproduced by the BBC, and not a full scale atomic bomb) that
one of the authors claims was actually tested by the Germans in 1945,
supposedly killing 'several hundred prisoners of war and
concentration-camp inmates'.
One key difference is that Nikon has not only left their file format
undocumented, they've actively encrypted a key image parameter,
allegedly as a spoiler tactic to prevent 3rd party developers fully
parsing the files without signing up as 'approved' developers. If Nikon
decides you are a 'bona fide' software company worthy of the honour,
you can get hold of an SDK (apparently Windows/Mac C++ only with binary
runtime libraries) but won't be given a full description of the file
format. This has serious implications for the use of Nikon NEF files as
an archival format (will Nikon's SDK components work on whatever OS you
are running in 20 years time?), for developers who want to use their
own algorithms (like Adobe), and for FOSS projects. Luckily, Dave
Coffin has already reverse
engineered the decryption algorithm in the current version of his
open source dcraw
RAW converter, so we're not yet locked out of the NEF format. What isn't
yet clear is whether Nikon will continue with this sort of tactic in
future NEF versions, and if Adobe will overcome their DMCA concerns to
fully support NEF in their ACR raw converter (assuming they're not just
grandstanding). Incidentally, there's a brief description by Tom
Christiansen of the white balance encryption algorithm here,
and a pointer by Thomas Knoll (of Photoshop fame) to the relevant
section of the dcraw code here.
Dave Coffin's open source dcraw RAW
converter has been mentioned here a couple of times, but it's worth
pointing out that the latest version already supports decryption of
Nikon D2X white balance data. There's a brief discussion of the
decryption algorithm here,
and Photoshop developer Thomas Knoll points to the relevant section of
code here.
As far as I know, Nikon has not threatened to invoke the DMCA over
decryption of the data - this looks more like a rather lame attempt to
obfuscate one of the key image parameters to make life difficult for
3rd party developers (who Nikon can then claim have 'incomplete'
support for the NEF format if the camera's white balance settings can't
be extracted). Of course this doesn't rule out the possibility that
Nikon is deliberately playing games with Adobe, since the Photoshop
developers have to choose between implementing decryption that might be
actionable under the DMCA, and leaving out support for 'as shot' white
balance (it seems like they've gone for the latter, for now). Smaller
fish like Bibble are already
including white balance decryption, which could leave Adobe at a
disadvantage if they continue to believe that this is a legal risk (and
who knows the details of the DMCA better than Adobe?!). Meanwhile,
Nikon presumably hopes to sell more copies of Nikon Capture (though to
be fair, Nikon
View, which even comes with a rudimentary Photoshop plugin, can
also handle these files and is a free download for Nikon users).
Killdozer is based on a classic Theodore Sturgeon short story from the 40s, which King might well have read (Sturgeon is apparently one of his literary influences).
Giving the card to a six year old kid to trash is all very well, but
what about a _really_
destructive force like a four year old? There's a good reason why the
nearly indestructible Pelican protective cases are guaranteed against
everything except shark
bite, bear attack and children under five.
This is actually a legal rather than a physical limitation. Use of
transluminal velocities by Linux kernel modules infringes a US
patent unless you have an appropriate license for this technology. I
believe a license is available for $299,792,458 per device, which
allows you to reset LIMIT_C_VELOC to zero and re-compile.
AvantSlash works well on a WAP browser if you access their WAP link via Google's
wmlproxy. The fizzl.net site references a URL that will work directly
in a WAP browser. Both make their source available.
(1) Get paper accepted by journal. (2) Sign over your copyright to the journal. (3) Pay extortionate page charges. (4) Pay extortionate extra page charges for colour figures. (5) Pay extortionate journal subscription so you can read your article in print. (6) Pay extortionate extra web subscription so you can read your article online. (7) Pay extortionate reprint fees so you can distribute your article to colleagues. (8) Act as regular unpaid reviewer for the journal now they know where you live. (9) Profit!
Looks like an excellent compilation. However, does the ActiveState license allow you to distribute ActivePerl in this way? My interpretation of their license (http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/li cense_agreement.plex) would be that it limits re-distribution of the CD even if you have permission from ActiveState to distribute the package yourself. You might want to look at an alternative binary distribution like SiePerl (http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html#win32) or build it yourself from source.
Worse than that. If necessary, they'll use a biometric scan to key you directly to the Big Brother Database without having to see a card (as confirmed by Blunkett in one of today's interviews). The cards will just be there for 'convenience'; it's the Database and its biometric keys that are the real issue. And won't it be fun if the biometrics are remotely measurable or required for common transactions (face recognition or 'Minority Report' style iris recognition) and there's a scanner on every street corner? 'Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes...'.
I can see it now - Mitchell Gates (Clint Eastwood), elite Microsoft coder and flashback-impaired veteran of the Browser Wars, is sent behind enemy lines to steal the only production prototype of the Firefox, with its revolutionary thought-controlled toolbar technology ("but remember, Mr Gates, you have to _think in XML_!"). The film ends rather abruptly when someone tells him he can download it for free.
'What happened to the Sony that was the
undisputed king of technology just a few short years ago??'
Basically, they acquired their own media 'content' empire, became
paranoid about copying, and imposed annoying (but ultimately futile)
DRM on just about every digital product they sell. Curiously enough,
they did produce a half-decent MD burner application ('Simple Burner')
without the bloat, instability and 'check in/check out' nonsense, but
only distribute it in certain markets - this may well solve your
problems with the widely-disliked OpenMG software:
Yes, that's pretty much what Gandalf says when her first explains the nature of the Ring to Frodo. Also, in 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' (a sort of epilogue to 'The Silmarillion') : "And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring; for the power of the Elven-rings was very great, and that which should govern them must be a thing of supassing potency". Being able to achieve a great creative act only once is a recurring theme in Tolkien (e.g. Yavanna & the Trees, Feanor and the Silmarils), as is loss of native power as a consequence of putting it into the physical world in an attempt to dominate - Morgoth (the first Dark Lord & Sauron's original boss) basically makes the same mistake on a much larger scale (he tries to control the entire created world by putting his power into _everything_ - see 'Morgoth's Ring' for details).
One consequence of the move to 'Fedora' seems to be that companies like
Cheapbytes may (if I'm interpreting this correctly) be allowed
to produce Fedora-branded CDs from the ISOs without having to jump
through hoops to avoid
calling them 'RedHat'.
The first edition was an essential purchase for me, but I find that I
refer to the HTML version on the 'Perl CD Bookshelf' much more often
than the paperback. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to Safari and wants to
read the electronic edition of Cookbook 2 will have to wait until
January, when it'll be included in the 4th edition of the
Bookshelf.
Slashdot Mirror
You might find these pages useful:
http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/vmcommands.php
http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/vmcmdset.php
http://dvdlab.wikicities.com/wiki/Commands
(brief descriptions of the current DVD VM commands).
The various manufacturer-specific Perl modules in the ExifTool package are also an excellent source of documentation for RAW file metadata. Reading this (rather well-commented) code can help make the more cryptic dcraw source much more comprehensible.
If you're talking about Lise Meitner, her interest was in the pure science rather than its most terrible application. She fled to neutral Sweden in 1938, but continued to communicate with former co-workers Hahn and Strassmann in Berlin. In early 1939 she published this classic paper in Nature, where the term 'fission' (borrowed from biology by her co-author and nephew Otto Frisch) was used for the first time. It explained the bizarre results coming out of the lab in Berlin, and together with Hahn & Strassman's paper, had a profound effect on many physicists, including Leo Szilard. Szilard quickly realised the implications of the amount of energy released in fission and, with Eugene Wigner, persuaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt about the possibility of nuclear weapons.
A little more digging finds a number of news articles (most rather sceptical) about the bomb test claims, some of which mention analysis of supposedly radioactive material from a site or sites in Thuringia:0 0.html , 00.html
e gel/0,1518,346293,00.html e gel/0,1518,260784,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4348497.stm
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1518173,
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7090178/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1511154
There's a particularly sceptical article in Spiegel that makes the whole thing sound a bit 'Da Vinci Code':
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spi
Also according to Spiegel, the Jonas Valley in Thuringia is turning into a sort of German Area 51, attracting an army of crackpots looking for everything from stolen art treasures to evidence of nuclear weapon testing:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spi
("[Conspiracy theorist] Stade also believes that the Führer's telephone system inside the tunnel network is still connected to the public telephone system. In fact, he claims that it's buried deep in the archives of the German Reichspost, and that he found Hitler's number there. It's 03624-1200500... Although the Führer's number is a working number, it's always busy.")
I wondered the same thing. Despite the claim about casualties, 'It is not clear how successful this design was and whether fission and fusion reactions were provoked.' It's also not stated if the supposed test site (in 'Thüringia, eastern Germany') has been located accurately. Elsewhere in the article it's noted that 'Industrial archaeology done at [a possible reactor site in Haigerloch] during 2002 and 2003 suggests that this reactor sustained a chain reaction - if only for a short period of time - and may have ended in an accident' - perhaps isotope measurements were used there? One of the authors has a whole (controversial!) book about this stuff ('Hitlers Bombe' - in German only?), which may have more details.
The fission/fusion device is actually a separate design (and was supposedly tested, according to the article). If true, there was some advanced thinking going on, but they clearly didn't have a workable full-scale nuclear weapon of any kind.
I think the point is that although this method is practical for Uranium bombs (the Hiroshima bomb used it), a much more complex 'implosion lens' design is required for Plutonium (or at least the grade of plutonium potentially available to the bomb makers, which had a relatively high rate of spontaneous neutron emission from 'contaminating' Pu-240). The latter design was used in the Trinity test and Nagasaki bombs.
Incidentally, the other German bomb design in the Physics World article (the one supposedly tested) was, if correct, a early attempt to exploit both fission and tritium/deuterium fusion in a weapon. Obviously they didn't manage to achieve even the yield of a small fission bomb, let alone a hydrogen bomb, but the (apparent) fact that they were thinking this way is itself remarkable (if true).
The original Physics World article contains a lot more information, including a (modern) schematic of 'some sort of a nuclear device' (not the same as the drawing reproduced by the BBC, and not a full scale atomic bomb) that one of the authors claims was actually tested by the Germans in 1945, supposedly killing 'several hundred prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates'.
One key difference is that Nikon has not only left their file format undocumented, they've actively encrypted a key image parameter, allegedly as a spoiler tactic to prevent 3rd party developers fully parsing the files without signing up as 'approved' developers. If Nikon decides you are a 'bona fide' software company worthy of the honour, you can get hold of an SDK (apparently Windows/Mac C++ only with binary runtime libraries) but won't be given a full description of the file format. This has serious implications for the use of Nikon NEF files as an archival format (will Nikon's SDK components work on whatever OS you are running in 20 years time?), for developers who want to use their own algorithms (like Adobe), and for FOSS projects. Luckily, Dave Coffin has already reverse engineered the decryption algorithm in the current version of his open source dcraw RAW converter, so we're not yet locked out of the NEF format. What isn't yet clear is whether Nikon will continue with this sort of tactic in future NEF versions, and if Adobe will overcome their DMCA concerns to fully support NEF in their ACR raw converter (assuming they're not just grandstanding). Incidentally, there's a brief description by Tom Christiansen of the white balance encryption algorithm here, and a pointer by Thomas Knoll (of Photoshop fame) to the relevant section of the dcraw code here.
Dave Coffin's open source dcraw RAW converter has been mentioned here a couple of times, but it's worth pointing out that the latest version already supports decryption of Nikon D2X white balance data. There's a brief discussion of the decryption algorithm here, and Photoshop developer Thomas Knoll points to the relevant section of code here.
As far as I know, Nikon has not threatened to invoke the DMCA over decryption of the data - this looks more like a rather lame attempt to obfuscate one of the key image parameters to make life difficult for 3rd party developers (who Nikon can then claim have 'incomplete' support for the NEF format if the camera's white balance settings can't be extracted). Of course this doesn't rule out the possibility that Nikon is deliberately playing games with Adobe, since the Photoshop developers have to choose between implementing decryption that might be actionable under the DMCA, and leaving out support for 'as shot' white balance (it seems like they've gone for the latter, for now). Smaller fish like Bibble are already including white balance decryption, which could leave Adobe at a disadvantage if they continue to believe that this is a legal risk (and who knows the details of the DMCA better than Adobe?!). Meanwhile, Nikon presumably hopes to sell more copies of Nikon Capture (though to be fair, Nikon View, which even comes with a rudimentary Photoshop plugin, can also handle these files and is a free download for Nikon users).
At one stage they even had a software download service for the BBC micro:t ware/index.shtml - 03/telesoftware.htm o ftware.html
http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesof
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/themicrouser/issues/05
http://www.pembers.freeserve.co.uk/Teletext/Teles
Who needs Tucows or Sourceforge when there's Ceefax?!
Killdozer is based on a classic Theodore Sturgeon short story from the 40s, which King might well have read (Sturgeon is apparently one of his literary influences).
Giving the card to a six year old kid to trash is all very well, but what about a _really_ destructive force like a four year old? There's a good reason why the nearly indestructible Pelican protective cases are guaranteed against everything except shark bite, bear attack and children under five.
This is actually a legal rather than a physical limitation. Use of transluminal velocities by Linux kernel modules infringes a US patent unless you have an appropriate license for this technology. I believe a license is available for $299,792,458 per device, which allows you to reset LIMIT_C_VELOC to zero and re-compile.
There are several other attempts to make Slashdot viewable on mobile devices, including:
http://slashdot.org/palm/
AvantSlash
http://www.fizzl.net/projects/sdwap.php
AvantSlash works well on a WAP browser if you access their WAP link via Google's wmlproxy. The fizzl.net site references a URL that will work directly in a WAP browser. Both make their source available.
Here's how it works at the moment:
(1) Get paper accepted by journal.
(2) Sign over your copyright to the journal.
(3) Pay extortionate page charges.
(4) Pay extortionate extra page charges for colour figures.
(5) Pay extortionate journal subscription so you can read your article in print.
(6) Pay extortionate extra web subscription so you can read your article online.
(7) Pay extortionate reprint fees so you can distribute your article to colleagues.
(8) Act as regular unpaid reviewer for the journal now they know where you live.
(9) Profit!
(10) Err, wait a minute...
Looks like an excellent compilation. However, does the ActiveState license allow you to distribute ActivePerl in this way? My interpretation of their license (http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/li cense_agreement.plex) would be that it limits re-distribution of the CD even if you have permission from ActiveState to distribute the package yourself. You might want to look at an alternative binary distribution like SiePerl (http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html#win32) or build it yourself from source.
Worse than that. If necessary, they'll use a biometric scan to key you directly to the Big Brother Database without having to see a card (as confirmed by Blunkett in one of today's interviews). The cards will just be there for 'convenience'; it's the Database and its biometric keys that are the real issue. And won't it be fun if the biometrics are remotely measurable or required for common transactions (face recognition or 'Minority Report' style iris recognition) and there's a scanner on every street corner? 'Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes...'.
A helpful summary of the logic behind the EV1 decision can be found here, and a historical perspective is here.
Though AFAIR Thomas dedicated the sequel to Eastwood, so he must have liked something about the film (possibly the cheque for the movie rights!).
Hopefully the Firefox's amazing stealth technology will not make it invisible to the target users' radar...
I can see it now - Mitchell Gates (Clint Eastwood), elite Microsoft coder and flashback-impaired veteran of the Browser Wars, is sent behind enemy lines to steal the only production prototype of the Firefox, with its revolutionary thought-controlled toolbar technology ("but remember, Mr Gates, you have to _think in XML_!"). The film ends rather abruptly when someone tells him he can download it for free.
'What happened to the Sony that was the undisputed king of technology just a few short years ago??'
a ction=download_en.html
Basically, they acquired their own media 'content' empire, became paranoid about copying, and imposed annoying (but ultimately futile) DRM on just about every digital product they sell. Curiously enough, they did produce a half-decent MD burner application ('Simple Burner') without the bloat, instability and 'check in/check out' nonsense, but only distribute it in certain markets - this may well solve your problems with the widely-disliked OpenMG software:
http://www.minidisc.org/NetMD_faq.html
http://www.minidisc.org/simple_burner.html
http://www.my-minidisc.com/index.php?language=en&
Yes, that's pretty much what Gandalf says when her first explains the nature of the Ring to Frodo. Also, in 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' (a sort of epilogue to 'The Silmarillion') : "And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring; for the power of the Elven-rings was very great, and that which should govern them must be a thing of supassing potency". Being able to achieve a great creative act only once is a recurring theme in Tolkien (e.g. Yavanna & the Trees, Feanor and the Silmarils), as is loss of native power as a consequence of putting it into the physical world in an attempt to dominate - Morgoth (the first Dark Lord & Sauron's original boss) basically makes the same mistake on a much larger scale (he tries to control the entire created world by putting his power into _everything_ - see 'Morgoth's Ring' for details).
One consequence of the move to 'Fedora' seems to be that companies like Cheapbytes may (if I'm interpreting this correctly) be allowed to produce Fedora-branded CDs from the ISOs without having to jump through hoops to avoid calling them 'RedHat' .
The first edition was an essential purchase for me, but I find that I refer to the HTML version on the 'Perl CD Bookshelf' much more often than the paperback. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to Safari and wants to read the electronic edition of Cookbook 2 will have to wait until January, when it'll be included in the 4th edition of the Bookshelf.