If you'd read my entire post you'd realize that it is not a 'computing cluster' it is a hierarchy of machines divided by jobs to represent a processing pipeline. It is similar to low-end renderfarming amongst workstations (thinking of a given scene to render as the equivalent of a frame from a given camera.)
I'm sorry you didn't find my description of the process informative.
...the phrase 15,000 faces per second is just an example of sensationalistic journalism.
There is a minimum input size for the identification of a 'face' dependent upon aspect and the focal length of the camera in question (amongst many other factors such as radial distortion due to the lens, whether the lens is shielded, lighting, et cetera); ergo, the camera in question, at a given focal length, could contain a field of view large enough and the resolution is high enough to meet 15,000 x the absolute mimimal pixel input for a 'face.' The processing for systems of this type (although I don't recall if it applies to this particular system) is tileable and accounts for boundary conditions (a 'face' falls on up to 4 tiles); therefore, the processing is highly parallel in nature. Most likely they meant that with the maximum cameras in place, given their proposed resolutions and fields of view, if they had unlimited computing power they'd theoretically be able to process 15,000 faces each second.
Solving a computer vision problem like this turns out to be highly hierarchical; i.e. a large number of computers process the incoming camera frames for optical flow, multigaussian motion detecxtion, edge detection, --insert motion map generating algorithm here--, these motion maps are shuttled to a second tier of systems who perform basic pattern recognition in order to discern probable aspect, reference points, and other forms of meta data. This tier can, if given a profile, apply discriminatory filters to sort the wehat from the 'chaff.' These 'probables' are then passed to the highest tier of systems who process this (hopefully) much smaller number of 'faces' using things such as color-space normalization from the original image, the motion map, and all the associated method data that has been generated along the way.
Luckily, most of the large companies working in these sorts of field are capable of producing crude prototypes; but, oddly enough, quality software engineers tend to be scarce amongst security companies. It is the startups and smaller companies (such as those found in Israel) that approach these types of problems with the flexibility to lead to some seriously scary big brother stuff.
..."So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, writing your enterprise applications correctly is your solution."
The poster slaps Microsoft for suggesting 'shims' and then pretends that there's nothing wrong with enterprise developers writing crap code that ASSumes priviledges that it should not...? Smells like Teen Hypocrisy.
...I mean, tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, drive swapping, mirror and swap, et cetera, ad nauseum.
I wouldn't think somebody with a useful website would be dumb enough to 'backup' a server to another machine connected to the internet (especially since they probably have the same OS, and configuration; ergo, the same exploit vulnerabilities...)
That's astonishing, really... Hell, even my Mom burns her personal website to DVD when she makes changes.
You didn't need textbooks, were you home schooled? 30 kids in a class would have had a hard time learning a foreign language without one, and good luck learning trig, geometry, or pre-calculus (much less calculus), geography, social studies, literature, biology, et cetera...
Maybe you're assuming that commercial books, handouts, and other school/teacher produced textbooks don't count, I am counting those. I don't think people realize just how poor some of the schools in rural South Carolina are. Some are suprisingly good, go figure, but many are literally falling apart much less able to provide text books to the kids.
...their textbooks as this is a prevalent problem in South Carolina. It's not dead last (usually) in education in the US because the kids don't have laptops, it's because they don't have the textbooks they need, enough teachers to go round, and half the schools are forced to use trailers for many of their classes due to the poor infrastructure; so, hurray, let's throw out 50,000 laptops to make things better. These are, of course, vast oversimplifications of the problems in education in South Carolina, but most assuredly the lack of 'laptops' per child is not an issue.
...we know that most people (sadly) are using some version of IE currently; ergo, if they install IE8 and it makes itself the default, this is good for a variety of reasons entirely related to security (and good for the rest of us as the last thing I need is more zombies out there spamming me night and day.)
Now, most people who have an alternative browser installed do so because they are 'aware' of the realities of modern web surfing and make an intelligent choice accordingly. These people are being inconvenienced by this because they've got to set their browser back to being the default (often this is simply a case, using Mozilla as an example, of starting up their favorite browser and it saying "Hey, don't you want to use me all the time" and they choose "yes, make yourself my default browser." Inconvenient, annoying, suspicious, yes - a real problem for these people? No...
The last group are the (imho) very small minority of web users who've been lucky enough to have an informed web user install an IE alternative for them, but they themselves do not know what the fuss is about. These are the people actually getting screwed by this. They may end up with IE8 until their good Samaritan revisits them to right this terrible wrong.
Ignoring whatever the actual motives for this decision at Micro$oft was, I personally think the good outweighs the bad. It would still be nice to smack the guy who green lighted this in the face though, wouldn't it?:)
Now I understand what you're trying to get across to ol' Lone Wolf, but people using PDAs in kid's movies is a real pain in the a** and it actually bothers a fair number of kids as well as parents. Sadly my rugrats love the movie going experience instead of the the home theater (go figure...)
Lol, I used to absolutely DREAD getting Irix updates from SGI. Every few months a batch of CDs with 5.x/6.x on them would show up and I'd be the poor bastard going through the Indys (we had one for testing purposes), O2s (testing), Octanes (work stations), and our IR2. Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
I'm sure they'll have a 'print on demand' option some day. Google is doing what it always tries to do. Cut out all the middle men, in this case 'publishers.' Now,there are services a publisher provides that will continue to be needed but the 'publishing' business will be changed forever.
"Independent producers can do it if there's a market for it." - Therein lies the primary fear. I, for one, worry that big production companies (who are talking about no more R rated superhero movies) will lock up all the options with the comics companies. Many of these 'properties' already have their rights licensed.
...lately, at least to me, is that they are elements of the fantastic that dovetail nicely into the hollywood version of 'the real world' that we live in. They are grittier, people are less 'cookie cutter/superficial bad guys.' In most of the non R rated superhero movies I've seen you could always walk away with the feeling that the main villain could have, at any moment, had a change of heart because he's not really evil - he's just made bad choices (lol.)
In the darker movies, the most definitely R rated movies, you can see struggle, ugliness, depravity, insanity (not the laughable kind), all things that give the villain and the unfolding events a sense of gravitas and immorality that you can't (imho) really get from a movie that HAS TO fit in some production company's ratings 'box.'
Personally, if there's a superhero movie where I'm not really interested in the super hero itself (for some reason), and it is R rated - there's a very good chance I'll go to see it because the director has obviously not pandered to the 13 year old boy market (although he may be pandering to me by throwing in R rated stuff.) If there's a superhero movie that I am interested in and then I find out that it is PG-13, it's unlikely that I'll see it. Perhaps on video.
Seriously, imagine if the Dark Knight movies were made PG-13? What a loss that would have been.
..particular language. Operating Systems, languages, APIs, these are tools in your toolbox.
What you need is the ability to identify potential problems early, to be able to work in a team, to think ahead and not 'design at the keyboard', to avoid taking shortcuts and avoid being 'clever' at the expense of clarity: basically - to be a software 'engineer' instead of a 'programmer.'
Which language to learn? All of the ones that are common in the fields/areas you're most interested in working in.:) You probably don't want to hear that, but it's important.
I've spent the majority of my career writing C++ code and doing things as twilight-zone as implementing DCOM on Irix, to my current product which is writing a very comprehensive software renderer that'll run under Java 1.1 (even though it's 2009 - LOL.) I've even found myself writing HTTP Tunneling code in ActionScript in the past year. I have several years Java EJB experience as well (back in the bad old days when it first came out - though some would argue the bad old days of EJB are still here;).) I've written several very powerful tools entirely in C#.
None of this is an impressive accomplishment, it will all happen (in some form) to you as well if you work in the industry, so be prepared to be a Software Engineer instead of a "'insert language here' programmer".
I mean, SOAP's entire purpose is to be a messaging mechanism over different mediums, protocols, architectures, and implementations; ergo, if I implement "Handling SOAP over " how on earth could that be patentable? Maybe they're referring to actual soap (like Lava, or Lever 2000, summat...)
As it turns out, when trying this again on a different machine with iTunes, and making sure to 'pay attention' for your sake, Apple is still trying to install new software on my machine with pre-checked installations, at the bottom of the dialog, for MobileMe Control Panel AND Safari 3.2.2. Not an update, "New Software." If you'd like to argue with Apple themselves over their inappropraitely named "New Software" which you'd like to contend is an update, feel free. BTW, The Safari install is listed as 22.39MB.
Not true, it was not an update. I have never installed Safari on any machine. If I had "actually paid attention"? LOL. Maybe if you'd "actually been here" you'd understand.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd read my entire post you'd realize that it is not a 'computing cluster' it is a hierarchy of machines divided by jobs to represent a processing pipeline. It is similar to low-end renderfarming amongst workstations (thinking of a given scene to render as the equivalent of a frame from a given camera.)
I'm sorry you didn't find my description of the process informative.
...the phrase 15,000 faces per second is just an example of sensationalistic journalism.
There is a minimum input size for the identification of a 'face' dependent upon aspect and the focal length of the camera in question (amongst many other factors such as radial distortion due to the lens, whether the lens is shielded, lighting, et cetera); ergo, the camera in question, at a given focal length, could contain a field of view large enough and the resolution is high enough to meet 15,000 x the absolute mimimal pixel input for a 'face.' The processing for systems of this type (although I don't recall if it applies to this particular system) is tileable and accounts for boundary conditions (a 'face' falls on up to 4 tiles); therefore, the processing is highly parallel in nature. Most likely they meant that with the maximum cameras in place, given their proposed resolutions and fields of view, if they had unlimited computing power they'd theoretically be able to process 15,000 faces each second.
Solving a computer vision problem like this turns out to be highly hierarchical; i.e. a large number of computers process the incoming camera frames for optical flow, multigaussian motion detecxtion, edge detection, --insert motion map generating algorithm here--, these motion maps are shuttled to a second tier of systems who perform basic pattern recognition in order to discern probable aspect, reference points, and other forms of meta data. This tier can, if given a profile, apply discriminatory filters to sort the wehat from the 'chaff.' These 'probables' are then passed to the highest tier of systems who process this (hopefully) much smaller number of 'faces' using things such as color-space normalization from the original image, the motion map, and all the associated method data that has been generated along the way.
Luckily, most of the large companies working in these sorts of field are capable of producing crude prototypes; but, oddly enough, quality software engineers tend to be scarce amongst security companies. It is the startups and smaller companies (such as those found in Israel) that approach these types of problems with the flexibility to lead to some seriously scary big brother stuff.
..."So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, writing your enterprise applications correctly is your solution."
The poster slaps Microsoft for suggesting 'shims' and then pretends that there's nothing wrong with enterprise developers writing crap code that ASSumes priviledges that it should not...? Smells like Teen Hypocrisy.
...I mean, tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, drive swapping, mirror and swap, et cetera, ad nauseum.
I wouldn't think somebody with a useful website would be dumb enough to 'backup' a server to another machine connected to the internet (especially since they probably have the same OS, and configuration; ergo, the same exploit vulnerabilities...)
That's astonishing, really... Hell, even my Mom burns her personal website to DVD when she makes changes.
You didn't need textbooks, were you home schooled? 30 kids in a class would have had a hard time learning a foreign language without one, and good luck learning trig, geometry, or pre-calculus (much less calculus), geography, social studies, literature, biology, et cetera...
Maybe you're assuming that commercial books, handouts, and other school/teacher produced textbooks don't count, I am counting those. I don't think people realize just how poor some of the schools in rural South Carolina are. Some are suprisingly good, go figure, but many are literally falling apart much less able to provide text books to the kids.
...their textbooks as this is a prevalent problem in South Carolina. It's not dead last (usually) in education in the US because the kids don't have laptops, it's because they don't have the textbooks they need, enough teachers to go round, and half the schools are forced to use trailers for many of their classes due to the poor infrastructure; so, hurray, let's throw out 50,000 laptops to make things better. These are, of course, vast oversimplifications of the problems in education in South Carolina, but most assuredly the lack of 'laptops' per child is not an issue.
You do realize that this is the default behavior of Firefox when installed with defaults? Yes?
Also, IE8 will supplant IE 6 and IE7, not earlier versions like 5.5, so what are you smoking? ;)
Note to self - never presume again that a slashdot article is fundamentally accurate...
...we know that most people (sadly) are using some version of IE currently; ergo, if they install IE8 and it makes itself the default, this is good for a variety of reasons entirely related to security (and good for the rest of us as the last thing I need is more zombies out there spamming me night and day.)
Now, most people who have an alternative browser installed do so because they are 'aware' of the realities of modern web surfing and make an intelligent choice accordingly. These people are being inconvenienced by this because they've got to set their browser back to being the default (often this is simply a case, using Mozilla as an example, of starting up their favorite browser and it saying "Hey, don't you want to use me all the time" and they choose "yes, make yourself my default browser." Inconvenient, annoying, suspicious, yes - a real problem for these people? No...
The last group are the (imho) very small minority of web users who've been lucky enough to have an informed web user install an IE alternative for them, but they themselves do not know what the fuss is about. These are the people actually getting screwed by this. They may end up with IE8 until their good Samaritan revisits them to right this terrible wrong.
Ignoring whatever the actual motives for this decision at Micro$oft was, I personally think the good outweighs the bad. It would still be nice to smack the guy who green lighted this in the face though, wouldn't it? :)
Now I understand what you're trying to get across to ol' Lone Wolf, but people using PDAs in kid's movies is a real pain in the a** and it actually bothers a fair number of kids as well as parents. Sadly my rugrats love the movie going experience instead of the the home theater (go figure...)
Genius. How great would it be if Slashdot changed 'Anonymous Coward' to Lone Wolf for a few weeks?
Lol, I used to absolutely DREAD getting Irix updates from SGI. Every few months a batch of CDs with 5.x/6.x on them would show up and I'd be the poor bastard going through the Indys (we had one for testing purposes), O2s (testing), Octanes (work stations), and our IR2. Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
Right up until you found out how bad Irix could be ;)...
Very sexy hardware, terrible *nix implementation. I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.
I'm sure they'll have a 'print on demand' option some day. Google is doing what it always tries to do. Cut out all the middle men, in this case 'publishers.' Now,there are services a publisher provides that will continue to be needed but the 'publishing' business will be changed forever.
I was referring to the comics when I used the term 'Dark Knight movies.' The Frank Miller approach.
Naw, I was just being an idiot. I am surprised though that The Dark Knight was not 'R'.
My apologies. I thought that both the Batman movies (which didn't suck) were rated R...
Well, if you can make The Dark Knight w/o an R rating, I'll be seeing PG-13 superhero movies in the future too.
Weird, if you think about The Dark Knight, you'd think there's no way that movie would be anything less than 'R'. Crazy. LOL.
"Independent producers can do it if there's a market for it." - Therein lies the primary fear. I, for one, worry that big production companies (who are talking about no more R rated superhero movies) will lock up all the options with the comics companies. Many of these 'properties' already have their rights licensed.
...lately, at least to me, is that they are elements of the fantastic that dovetail nicely into the hollywood version of 'the real world' that we live in. They are grittier, people are less 'cookie cutter/superficial bad guys.' In most of the non R rated superhero movies I've seen you could always walk away with the feeling that the main villain could have, at any moment, had a change of heart because he's not really evil - he's just made bad choices (lol.)
In the darker movies, the most definitely R rated movies, you can see struggle, ugliness, depravity, insanity (not the laughable kind), all things that give the villain and the unfolding events a sense of gravitas and immorality that you can't (imho) really get from a movie that HAS TO fit in some production company's ratings 'box.'
Personally, if there's a superhero movie where I'm not really interested in the super hero itself (for some reason), and it is R rated - there's a very good chance I'll go to see it because the director has obviously not pandered to the 13 year old boy market (although he may be pandering to me by throwing in R rated stuff.) If there's a superhero movie that I am interested in and then I find out that it is PG-13, it's unlikely that I'll see it. Perhaps on video.
Seriously, imagine if the Dark Knight movies were made PG-13? What a loss that would have been.
..particular language. Operating Systems, languages, APIs, these are tools in your toolbox.
What you need is the ability to identify potential problems early, to be able to work in a team, to think ahead and not 'design at the keyboard', to avoid taking shortcuts and avoid being 'clever' at the expense of clarity: basically - to be a software 'engineer' instead of a 'programmer.'
Which language to learn? All of the ones that are common in the fields/areas you're most interested in working in. :) You probably don't want to hear that, but it's important.
I've spent the majority of my career writing C++ code and doing things as twilight-zone as implementing DCOM on Irix, to my current product which is writing a very comprehensive software renderer that'll run under Java 1.1 (even though it's 2009 - LOL.) I've even found myself writing HTTP Tunneling code in ActionScript in the past year. I have several years Java EJB experience as well (back in the bad old days when it first came out - though some would argue the bad old days of EJB are still here ;).) I've written several very powerful tools entirely in C#.
None of this is an impressive accomplishment, it will all happen (in some form) to you as well if you work in the industry, so be prepared to be a Software Engineer instead of a "'insert language here' programmer".
Good luck, and I hope you like problem solving :).
I mean, SOAP's entire purpose is to be a messaging mechanism over different mediums, protocols, architectures, and implementations; ergo, if I implement "Handling SOAP over " how on earth could that be patentable? Maybe they're referring to actual soap (like Lava, or Lever 2000, summat...)
...when many people are finishing University and the decline seems to start just when you'd probably finish grad school. ;)
Now, if everyone tested had NOT attended a University in any fashion, it would be interesting to see the results.
Who said 'Safari 4' beta? I was pointing out that Apple tries to sneak software on your machine.
As it turns out, when trying this again on a different machine with iTunes, and making sure to 'pay attention' for your sake, Apple is still trying to install new software on my machine with pre-checked installations, at the bottom of the dialog, for MobileMe Control Panel AND Safari 3.2.2. Not an update, "New Software." If you'd like to argue with Apple themselves over their inappropraitely named "New Software" which you'd like to contend is an update, feel free. BTW, The Safari install is listed as 22.39MB.
Not true, it was not an update. I have never installed Safari on any machine. If I had "actually paid attention"? LOL. Maybe if you'd "actually been here" you'd understand.