7 pennies per kiloWatt hour? 7x10^6 pennies per gigaWatt hour?
I wanna live next to your fusion-reactor driven electrical source, matey. I'm paying just a smidge over 23 cents per kWh currently, and back in the enron-electrical-hijack debacle of 2002, I was paying over 56 cents per kWh in La Jolla.
Take a look at ALL of your bill: they like to unbundle the charges and charge the 7 cents maybe for the generation cost, but they've added on transmission costs, facilities maintenance, and many tax-sounding-like-items-which-are-not-taxes onto that bill.
umm, I started university at the age of fifteen, rather too young to be eligible to vote, much less even donate blood, and I got quite a ribbing when my friends founf out I couldn not donate blood at the school's blood drive without my parents' permission, but the bonus was that I got credit for my group for showing up to donate even if I couldn't donate yet. Ah yes, the silent minority of student minors.
On the bad goof side, I didn't realize until later that I could have joined ROTC, rec'd the money and attended classes, and still have been able to opt out of the military option at the end, being a minor and being unable to sign contracts etc. Strangely, I had bank accounts and such withOUT any parental signatures on them.
yeah, the path of uncertainty around it is pretty large. Take a look at the cone o' possibilities at hurricanealley.net and note, whoops they've subscribe-blocked the computer model spaghetti images of the individual models' paths, but you can still see the big picture.
interesting comments, I'll have to look back at the complexity issues on this and that damn kolmogorov complexity book that's lying around somewhere. and let's not forget about shamir and adelman, eh?
Thanks for the pointer. I hadn't thought seriously about this stuff in quite a few years.
But even if someone finds a technique to pad junk-bytes on a malicious code package so that the malicious package's MD5 hash is equivalent to the actual code that this doppelganger is claiming to be, a quick workaround would be to publish BOTH an md5sum hash and another hash-function identifier for the package. Now even if supervillian Alice could mask Trojan-ribbed to appear to be Trojan-regular to Bob under the MD5sum, the other hash function would show it to be not the case.
In fact, that's also the reason that having a PGP-signed message which exclaims what the md5sum of a package is good for: double-wrapped-goodness double-happiness security. Someone trying to pass off the bad Trojan to Bob would not only have to create the md5sum collision of the bad Trojan to match the purported good program, but would have to present a... whoops, I see the error in my own argument. Yeah, stick with publishing multiple hash values with multiple hash algorithms.
The probability of being able to create a doppelganger which can cause a collision in BOTH hash functions simultaneously is multiplicatively harder. Right?
Actually, the movie theaters already make more than enough money with the ticket prices I pay. I agree with Ebert on this. I paid to see a movie. I'll put up with and enjoy the previews of coming attractions, but I do NOT want to see commercials up on the cinema screen for twenty minutes prior to the film starting. I've actually gone to theater managers and complained about being subjected to advertisements when I've paid to see a movie.
It's not the ADS that are new, it's the fact that the statistic-bots at Nielsen-VNU are attempting to sell compiled packages of market demographics of who exactly VIEWS these ads to the purveyors of advertisements. Nielsen-VNU does this so that the purveyors of ads can charge more for these ads by claiming that more of those key 18-36 males actually view these ads. Nielsen also competes with soundscan and arbitron for radio ad penetration, also partners with TiVo to sell those kewl demographics that TiVo can collect, and sells the key information about those "nielsen t.v. log" viewers such as income, race, age, and buying habits for large chunks of money. Nielsen recently had to re-readjust their amazingly skewed statistics when their N.Y. ratings showed a HUGE drop in young hispanic males viewing certain channels. Turns out that they had modified their sampling formulas and ratios and, as a result of that, the "viewing" numbers that they extrapolated from that (and which the big networks broadcast and cable and satellite use to calculate the charges for their ads) changed lots of money changing hands. Univision protested loudly.
Fox station in San Diego got in trouble (dropped off the Nielsen results tracker for x period of time for having an advert saying "hey nielsen viewers, write down our station now!", and you know a lot of those radio give-away gimmicks that say "listen at 1:30 this afternoon for such and such a song and CALL IN TO WIN!" are often temporally correlated with Nielsen logging times for radio listenership.
I was out on a field visit and my CD wasn't with me, so I hunted down a putty client 'cause they would let me run knoppix on their machines. One that I downloaded let me connect but gave me the wrong key number (I remember the first 4 and the last four digits form seeing it so often) so I gave it a fake password. Downloaded another putty client, gave me the right key, so I put in the right passkey and connected. LAter investigated and re-downloaded the two putty clients at my "wrok-home" and didn't even have to md5sum it, they differed in size by 20k. I'm still investigating the innards to see what kind of man-in-the-middle attack it was trying.
Yeah, my sysadmin was pissed when I called her on the phone veryifying that the ssh-key had changed. She wondered why I was even bothering her. Idiot. And the last time she did a re-do of the system, she actually sent everyone an email telling them to come to her to get their new passwords: idiot, how do i log in to see THAT email if I don't have my new password.
I also caught her when she changed a back-up client and the read-time-stamp on my mail file got touched daily when it NEVER had been before. She's a loon: she was sure I was hacking something ('cause how else could I have known?) when it turned out Iwas the only used to run "finger" on my login religiously with each login and noted that my mailbox had been accessed without me logging in. She just finally disallowed telnet last year but still let's her wacky windows-windiots use plain-text pop-mail to check mail and allows ftp.
And the Macintosh 68040LC chip did away with the floating point processor of the 68040 to save some electricity consumption. You had to install a floating point emulator (freeware versions existed) so that you could run programs like Matlab that needed the math coprocessor.
I was at a place (up Chuck river) that was supposed to be reknowned for it's information processing savvy, Python and CORBA and other soupy-acronyms abounded everywhere. The sysadmin had the wacky idea of everyones' passwords on multiple machines being :
First Initial + last Initial + initials of Research Program + last two numerals of year.
Yes, I kid you not. Everyone had accounts on, oh about eight to ten unix machines, with all passwords immediately known by all fellow users.
And before you get misty-eyed and say oh it was so long ago a trusting time, it was 1995. (which
was a long time ago in internet time.)
and the base material is federal law, which isn't copyrighted
Luckily, you are talking about federal law. Unfortunately, a lot of housing codes and building codes in many counties are boilerplated from a book which is copyrighted and you're not allowed to just go down to County Hall / City Hall and look at the laws, they want you to pay to buy a copy of the book. This is a strange case of making laws by reference and then making the ludicrous claim that the source of the laws is under copyright and you're not allowed to copy these laws and republish.
Amen. I fear for the sanctity of our medical records and the sanity of our medical providers (oh so politically correct HMO way of being weaselly about whether you'll actually be seen by a doctor, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, or a physician's assistant: we employ 1984-speak and we equate all four thus, thus it is so) once the wacky concept of CENTRALIZING all of our health records ever takes place. Does President Bush's New Mandate Give HHS Authority to Link Everyone's Medical Records to a National Computerized System? at www.forhealthfreedom.org/Publications/Privacy/Lo si ngPrivacy.html
If they can't fix the debacle at the Veteran's Administration Hospitals transitioning from MUMPS-based transaction and cost accounting to the COREFLS system, why should we expect the government to be any good at doing this on a country-wide wholesale populace scale?
wow, I'd mod you up if I had the points. You're about the first person to touch on the concept of reaching out to the other individual. Diplomacy works, and if you can take the time to understand their motivations rather than just reacting angrily back at their outbursts, you've got a better chance of getting ahead.
I remember getting an invite over to V.P.L. (Virtual Propulsion Laboratories) back when I had a friend who was working at nearby Oracle. The demo: they had a virtual reality glove, something which you put your hand in and moved in free space to manipulate objects in virtual reality. Yeah, yeah, I know SUNYAB has made some incremental changes and added some haptic feedback, but please, VPL had started this in the pre-boom days of Silicon Valley back in the early 1990's.
Actually, almost everyone is creative. You just need access to tools and the clay, and a place to play in safely (where no one laughs at you building a six-legged elephant or painting a green sky). AI "experts" like to peddle LOGO and smalltalk, forgetting that these languages have a difficult to grasp interface to a limited repertoire of actions. But look at what a simple and elegant interface to a deep set of tools can provide: Hypercard back in the Macintosh SE30 days was the creative sandbox for a lot of people.
Hypercard was a simple set of tools that allowed users to create stacks of cards and to share these customized programs/stacks with other users. It is one of the few cases I can think of (beyond the initial VisiCalc, which was astounding a leap as has been made in the last few decades; don't tell me people weren't creative in programming VisiCalc worksheets; I actually remember running it on an Apple ][+ back in the day) where the END-USER actually supplied or added the key functionality to the program which they wanted to add. And building up from the provided "address book" card stacks was a great way to start learning. You could add hyperlinks, you could add commands, you could run scripted calls to other programs, every item on the "Card"/screen was an object which could handle actions and messages and pass on unhandled actions to the next layer up. It was an astounding set of tools to allow access to the Macintosh programmer's toolbox of tools to the most unadvanced mac users.
Apple sadly realized it was a useful program and unbundled it into Hypercard "Reader" and the professional Hypercard creator bull****, destroying the base of users who could customize their own stacks. This is sadly reminiscent of what is happening with the Comcasts of the internet who want us all to be "consumers" while they provide the content and Nielsen-VNU monitors us all and provides our demographics for money. Wikipedia is a great example of the use of the web and the internet for a colloborative data set. Yay Wikipedia. Okay, I'm tired of ranting and I've lost my train of thought./. go on.
Hmm... If I wanted to be like Len Adelman, I could encode each Starbuck's location into a short oligonucleotide sequence, create matched-pair of DNA oligos each representing a travel-step from starbu_x to starbu_y, create a DNA soup (watch your filthy mind!) of these oligo-pairs, do the appropriate restrictions and selections by weight and publish an article in Science or Nature, have the journalists and flacks mis-represent it as being a DNA computer capable of solving the "Travelling Salesman" problem when every mathematician and theorist knows it to be the Directed Hamiltonian Graph problem, not worry about it, and move on.
Oh, and please insert "profit" and the appropriate "/item" tags around the list above, and let LaTeX number it for me. Thanx.
Yeah, I've gotten burned by other customer's returns at Fry's in Palo Alto/MtView, LA/Topanga, and Mission Valley San Diego. I've gotten to the point that even when I'm buying a motherboard in a plastic-wrapped case, I MAKE the cashier open the box in front of me and I inspect the contents before I even deign to sign the credit card receipt.
Most likely very true that the image has been color corrected. It is very difficult to take a photograph of self-luminous displays alongside a human being illuminated by a different light source, particularly self-luminous displays using primary colors which do not reproduce accurately on film or CCD.
Accurately reproducing color is tough enough under daylight (sunny or cloudy) conditions, but the reason that indoor photographs without flash look so different is that the radiant spectra of incandescent bulbs and fluorescent fixtures and even tungsten or halogen bulbs is sufficiently different from the spectrum of sunlight that our eyes see it as different. It's only the illusion of color constancy along with our memories that makes us think these colors are the same.
Other problems are that the receptors (whether it's AGFA film, Kodak film, Fuji film, slide film, CCDs with filters in front of them) are not perfect matches for the receptor sensitivies of our (human) eyes' opsin photoreceptors. [In fact, there are even individual differences between different human beings in how they see color. Color-blindness is the most extreme of these.] Then when the image is either displayed, there is no guarantee that the displays primary colors (phosphors, fluorescent backlit filters, plasma displays, or organic LEDS) will have spectra that will correctly display the images. That's why there's a big market in doing color correction and color calibration.
If you're printing photographs, then you've also got the transfer functions of the light source used to project the image from the negative onto the film paper AND the "receptor" sensitivities of the dyes used on the film paper. Just for a photograph alone you've gone through multiple non-linear transfer functions, and some are non-reversible.
It is also possible that they were unable to get the OLEDs primaries up to snuff OR unable to get their hardware device driver to convert their video source colors to the right balance for displaying on the OLEDs so they cheated by adding a superimposed surround color (with colored spotlights for example) to make the display LOOK balanced.
Or it could just be a poorly color corrected image as you suggest.
I've got a friend with an opportunity to work at NCTU in Hsin-chu, Taiwan, as a tenure-track faculty member. What about the other side of the equation. How is life as a faculty member outside of the United States? And has someone who's worked in Taiwan (Taipei or Hsinchu) got any information about it?
The same is true for software for medical devices. It used to be that almost all ICU hardware had embedded operating systems; HP changed some of that. (HP is very big in ICU and anesthesia monitors and ECG/EKG machines) I cringe when I see medical hardware running MicroSoft windows based software.
A similar thing is happening with the CoreFLS system for ordering supplies and paying vendors at the VA Hospital system. A large software project was set up with one contractor in mind. Training wasn't put in place to let the end-users become familiarized with the actual software, instead they were "web-trained" over the internet on a dummy system that does not correspond to the actual software delivered. Early problems with starting up the new system were ignored, and the whole project was started up despite these problems, leading to a massive melt-down:
surgical cases were delayed and stopped because supplies couldn't be ordered and located in a timely fashion,
the Bay Pines V.A. Hospital manager stepped down...[ibid]
they can't find any paperwork to show the process by which the contractor was selected for the job...
And they still haven't got the system up and running...
Oh for the days when MUMPS was the dominant in-house software approach, eh? Currently, they have until May of this year to fix it or come up with an exit strategy. So maybe sometimes, even if it is very difficult, when lives are at stake software projects can be scrapped and restarted from scratch.
Hmmm... I remembered something about that too, and found a link from 1999 on a site not related to the Dave Matthews Band. Don't know if XP is doing it too. Haven't cared since I've been MS free since 1999.
Here's a scenario that a friend's company ran into. This friend's company has a few SBIR and STTR contracts with the government with the Missile Defense Agency and the Air Force. One of the requirements for being a government contractor is complying with the F.A.R. regulations, one of which involves keeping time logs of work for all employees. (Not just all employees on the gov't contract, ALL employees. Your company must treat the gov't contract in the same way it does all of its work). One of the other requirements is that you must accept being audited by the government.
There are a few different levels of audits, but when they come on site the auditors are to be allowed access to all work areas and employees. They can ask questions about hours, work habits, whatever. And if there is any paraphernalia lying about, such as a cell phone (which may have time records of phone calls), blackberries (which may have time records and emails), or PDAs (which may have emails, schedules, appointments such as "see dentist", "have lunch", etc), these materiel can be scrutinized. Guess what: if they find a journal/log/diary/electronic PDA/cell phone record/email entry which contradicts an entry on the official time-log, your company's going to undergo a SEVERE audit right away.
This happened to the friend, and she was forced to immediately make it a requirement that absolutely NO personal cell phones, PDA's, blackberries, journals, diaries, or independent time logs were to be brought into the workplace. All employees had to leave their personal electronics stowed in their vehicles or at home, presumably beyond the reach of government auditors in the workplace.
So this may be what happened at your workplace. They might have gotten dinged for a time-log discrepancy. And if you get a bad F.A.R. violation, you can be barred from doing further government work, you can be required to reimburse Uncle Sam for all of the money the company has received thus far, you can be required to pay DAMAGES to the US govt for attempting to perpetrate a fraud.
banking on nanotechnology having progressed enough . ..
Agreed. Ted Williams' son just died recently and it's not clear whether he's also going to have his body at ALCOR. I believe there were a lot of issues like he never really paid the full bill for his dad's cryonics, and they possibly separated the head. I didn't know that Ted Wms' son had leukemia. Maybe he was banking on a cure for that or even using his dad's tissue to help with that.
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7 pennies per kiloWatt hour?
7x10^6 pennies per gigaWatt hour?
I wanna live next to your fusion-reactor driven electrical source, matey. I'm paying just a smidge over 23 cents per kWh currently, and back in the enron-electrical-hijack debacle of 2002, I was paying over 56 cents per kWh in La Jolla.
Take a look at ALL of your bill: they like to unbundle the charges and charge the 7 cents maybe for the generation cost, but they've added on transmission costs, facilities maintenance, and many tax-sounding-like-items-which-are-not-taxes onto that bill.
Or maybe I need to move...
umm, I started university at the age of fifteen, rather too young to be eligible to vote, much less even donate blood, and I got quite a ribbing when my friends founf out I couldn not donate blood at the school's blood drive without my parents' permission, but the bonus was that I got credit for my group for showing up to donate even if I couldn't donate yet. Ah yes, the silent minority of student minors.
On the bad goof side, I didn't realize until later that I could have joined ROTC, rec'd the money and attended classes, and still have been able to opt out of the military option at the end, being a minor and being unable to sign contracts etc. Strangely, I had bank accounts and such withOUT any parental signatures on them.
yeah, the path of uncertainty around it is pretty large. Take a look at the cone o' possibilities at hurricanealley.net and note, whoops they've subscribe-blocked the computer model spaghetti images of the individual models' paths, but you can still see the big picture.
interesting comments, I'll have to look back at the complexity issues on this and that damn kolmogorov complexity book that's lying around somewhere. and let's not forget about shamir and adelman, eh?
Thanks for the pointer. I hadn't thought seriously about this stuff in quite a few years.
In fact, that's also the reason that having a PGP-signed message which exclaims what the md5sum of a package is good for: double-wrapped-goodness double-happiness security. Someone trying to pass off the bad Trojan to Bob would not only have to create the md5sum collision of the bad Trojan to match the purported good program, but would have to present a... whoops, I see the error in my own argument. Yeah, stick with publishing multiple hash values with multiple hash algorithms.
The probability of being able to create a doppelganger which can cause a collision in BOTH hash functions simultaneously is multiplicatively harder. Right?
Actually, the movie theaters already make more than enough money with the ticket prices I pay. I agree with Ebert on this. I paid to see a movie. I'll put up with and enjoy the previews of coming attractions, but I do NOT want to see commercials up on the cinema screen for twenty minutes prior to the film starting. I've actually gone to theater managers and complained about being subjected to advertisements when I've paid to see a movie.
It's not the ADS that are new, it's the fact that the statistic-bots at Nielsen-VNU are attempting to sell compiled packages of market demographics of who exactly VIEWS these ads to the purveyors of advertisements. Nielsen-VNU does this so that the purveyors of ads can charge more for these ads by claiming that more of those key 18-36 males actually view these ads. Nielsen also competes with soundscan and arbitron for radio ad penetration, also partners with TiVo to sell those kewl demographics that TiVo can collect, and sells the key information about those "nielsen t.v. log" viewers such as income, race, age, and buying habits for large chunks of money. Nielsen recently had to re-readjust their amazingly skewed statistics when their N.Y. ratings showed a HUGE drop in young hispanic males viewing certain channels. Turns out that they had modified their sampling formulas and ratios and, as a result of that, the "viewing" numbers that they extrapolated from that (and which the big networks broadcast and cable and satellite use to calculate the charges for their ads) changed lots of money changing hands. Univision protested loudly.
Fox station in San Diego got in trouble (dropped off the Nielsen results tracker for x period of time for having an advert saying "hey nielsen viewers, write down our station now!", and you know a lot of those radio give-away gimmicks that say "listen at 1:30 this afternoon for such and such a song and CALL IN TO WIN!" are often temporally correlated with Nielsen logging times for radio listenership.
I agree with you, this is front page stuff.
I was out on a field visit and my CD wasn't with me, so I hunted down a putty client 'cause they would let me run knoppix on their machines. One that I downloaded let me connect but gave me the wrong key number (I remember the first 4 and the last four digits form seeing it so often) so I gave it a fake password. Downloaded another putty client, gave me the right key, so I put in the right passkey and connected. LAter investigated and re-downloaded the two putty clients at my "wrok-home" and didn't even have to md5sum it, they differed in size by 20k. I'm still investigating the innards to see what kind of man-in-the-middle attack it was trying.
Yeah, my sysadmin was pissed when I called her on the phone veryifying that the ssh-key had changed.
She wondered why I was even bothering her. Idiot.
And the last time she did a re-do of the system, she actually sent everyone an email telling them to come to her to get their new passwords: idiot, how do i log in to see THAT email if I don't have my new password.
I also caught her when she changed a back-up client and the read-time-stamp on my mail file got touched daily when it NEVER had been before. She's a loon: she was sure I was hacking something ('cause how else could I have known?) when it turned out Iwas the only used to run "finger" on my login religiously with each login and noted that my mailbox had been accessed without me logging in.
She just finally disallowed telnet last year but still let's her wacky windows-windiots use plain-text pop-mail to check mail and allows ftp.
And the Macintosh 68040LC chip did away with the floating point processor of the 68040 to save some electricity consumption. You had to install a floating point emulator (freeware versions existed) so that you could run programs like Matlab that needed the math coprocessor.
No speed up though.
I was at a place (up Chuck river) that was supposed to be reknowned for it's information processing savvy, Python and CORBA and other soupy-acronyms abounded everywhere. The sysadmin had the wacky idea of everyones' passwords on multiple machines being :
First Initial + last Initial + initials of Research Program + last two numerals of year.
Yes, I kid you not. Everyone had accounts on, oh about eight to ten unix machines, with all passwords immediately known by all fellow users. And before you get misty-eyed and say oh it was so long ago a trusting time, it was 1995. (which was a long time ago in internet time.)
and the base material is federal law, which isn't copyrighted
Luckily, you are talking about federal law. Unfortunately, a lot of housing codes and building codes in many counties are boilerplated from a book which is copyrighted and you're not allowed to just go down to County Hall / City Hall and look at the laws, they want you to pay to buy a copy of the book. This is a strange case of making laws by reference and then making the ludicrous claim that the source of the laws is under copyright and you're not allowed to copy these laws and republish.
Amen. I fear for the sanctity of our medical records and the sanity of our medical providers (oh so politically correct HMO way of being weaselly about whether you'll actually be seen by a doctor, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, or a physician's assistant: we employ 1984-speak and we equate all four thus, thus it is so) once the wacky concept of CENTRALIZING all of our health records ever takes place. Does President Bush's New Mandate Give HHS Authority to Link Everyone's Medical Records to a National Computerized System? ato si ngPrivacy.html
www.forhealthfreedom.org/Publications/Privacy/L
If they can't fix the debacle at the Veteran's Administration Hospitals transitioning from MUMPS-based transaction and cost accounting to the COREFLS system, why should we expect the government to be any good at doing this on a country-wide wholesale populace scale?
wow, I'd mod you up if I had the points. You're about the first person to touch on the concept of reaching out to the other individual. Diplomacy works, and if you can take the time to understand their motivations rather than just reacting angrily back at their outbursts, you've got a better chance of getting ahead.
Boy oh boy.
I remember getting an invite over to V.P.L. (Virtual Propulsion Laboratories) back when I had a friend who was working at nearby Oracle.
The demo: they had a virtual reality glove, something which you put your hand in and moved in free space to manipulate objects in virtual reality. Yeah, yeah, I know SUNYAB has made some incremental changes and added some haptic feedback, but please, VPL had started this in the pre-boom days of Silicon Valley back in the early 1990's.
Actually, almost everyone is creative. You just need access to tools and the clay, and a place to play in safely (where no one laughs at you building a six-legged elephant or painting a green sky). AI "experts" like to peddle LOGO and smalltalk, forgetting that these languages have a difficult to grasp interface to a limited repertoire of actions. But look at what a simple and elegant interface to a deep set of tools can provide: Hypercard back in the Macintosh SE30 days was the creative sandbox for a lot of people.
/. go on.
Hypercard was a simple set of tools that allowed users to create stacks of cards and to share these customized programs/stacks with other users. It is one of the few cases I can think of (beyond the initial VisiCalc, which was astounding a leap as has been made in the last few decades; don't tell me people weren't creative in programming VisiCalc worksheets; I actually remember running it on an Apple ][+ back in the day) where the END-USER actually supplied or added the key functionality to the program which they wanted to add. And building up from the provided "address book" card stacks was a great way to start learning. You could add hyperlinks, you could add commands, you could run scripted calls to other programs, every item on the "Card"/screen was an object which could handle actions and messages and pass on unhandled actions to the next layer up. It was an astounding set of tools to allow access to the Macintosh programmer's toolbox of tools to the most unadvanced mac users.
Apple sadly realized it was a useful program and unbundled it into Hypercard "Reader" and the professional Hypercard creator bull****, destroying the base of users who could customize their own stacks. This is sadly reminiscent of what is happening with the Comcasts of the internet who want us all to be "consumers" while they provide the content and Nielsen-VNU monitors us all and provides our demographics for money. Wikipedia is a great example of the use of the web and the internet for a colloborative data set. Yay Wikipedia. Okay, I'm tired of ranting and I've lost my train of thought.
Hmm... If I wanted to be like Len Adelman, I could encode each Starbuck's location into a short oligonucleotide sequence, create matched-pair of DNA oligos each representing a travel-step from starbu_x to starbu_y, create a DNA soup (watch your filthy mind!) of these oligo-pairs, do the appropriate restrictions and selections by weight and publish an article in Science or Nature, have the journalists and flacks mis-represent it as being a DNA computer capable of solving the "Travelling Salesman" problem when every mathematician and theorist knows it to be the Directed Hamiltonian Graph problem, not worry about it, and move on.
Oh, and please insert "profit" and the appropriate "/item" tags around the list above, and let LaTeX number it for me. Thanx.
Yeah, I've gotten burned by other customer's returns at Fry's in Palo Alto/MtView, LA/Topanga, and Mission Valley San Diego. I've gotten to the point that even when I'm buying a motherboard in a plastic-wrapped case, I MAKE the cashier open the box in front of me and I inspect the contents before I even deign to sign the credit card receipt.
Most likely very true that the image has been color corrected. It is very difficult to take a photograph of self-luminous displays alongside a human being illuminated by a different light source, particularly self-luminous displays using primary colors which do not reproduce accurately on film or CCD.
Accurately reproducing color is tough enough under daylight (sunny or cloudy) conditions, but the reason that indoor photographs without flash look so different is that the radiant spectra of incandescent bulbs and fluorescent fixtures and even tungsten or halogen bulbs is sufficiently different from the spectrum of sunlight that our eyes see it as different. It's only the illusion of color constancy along with our memories that makes us think these colors are the same.
Other problems are that the receptors (whether it's AGFA film, Kodak film, Fuji film,
slide film, CCDs with filters in front of them) are not perfect matches for the receptor sensitivies of our (human) eyes' opsin photoreceptors. [In fact, there are even individual differences between different human beings in how they see color. Color-blindness is the most extreme of these.] Then when the image is either displayed, there is no guarantee that the displays primary colors (phosphors, fluorescent backlit filters, plasma displays, or organic LEDS) will have spectra that will correctly display the images. That's why there's a big market in doing color correction and color calibration.
If you're printing photographs, then you've also got the transfer functions of the light source used to project the image from the negative onto the film paper AND the "receptor" sensitivities of the dyes used on the film paper. Just for a photograph alone you've gone through multiple non-linear transfer functions, and some are non-reversible.
It is also possible that they were unable to get the OLEDs primaries up to snuff OR unable to get their hardware device driver to convert their video source colors to the right balance for displaying on the OLEDs so they cheated by adding a superimposed surround color (with colored spotlights for example) to make the display LOOK balanced.
Or it could just be a poorly color corrected image as you suggest.
I've got a friend with an opportunity to work at NCTU in Hsin-chu, Taiwan, as a tenure-track faculty member. What about the other side of the equation. How is life as a faculty member outside of the United States? And has someone who's worked in Taiwan (Taipei or Hsinchu) got any information about it?
The same is true for software for medical devices. It used to be that almost all ICU hardware had embedded operating systems; HP changed some of that. (HP is very big in ICU and anesthesia monitors and ECG/EKG machines) I cringe when I see medical hardware running MicroSoft windows based software.
A similar thing is happening with the CoreFLS system for ordering supplies and paying vendors at the VA Hospital system. A large software project was set up with one contractor in mind. Training wasn't put in place to let the end-users become familiarized with the actual software, instead they were "web-trained" over the internet on a dummy system that does not correspond to the actual software delivered. Early problems with starting up the new system were ignored, and the whole project was started up despite these problems, leading to a massive melt-down:
surgical cases were delayed and stopped because supplies couldn't be ordered and located in a timely fashion,
floor supplies were not available or ordered because people couldn't be sure of what was where and what needed to be reordered.
a congressional inquiry was started [ibid]
the Bay Pines V.A. Hospital manager stepped down...[ibid]
they can't find any paperwork to show the process by which the contractor was selected for the job...
And they still haven't got the system up and running...
Oh for the days when MUMPS was the dominant in-house software approach, eh?
Currently, they have until May of this year to fix it or come up with an exit strategy.
So maybe sometimes, even if it is very difficult, when lives are at stake software projects can be scrapped and restarted from scratch.
Hmmm... I remembered something about that too, and found a link from 1999 on a site not related to the Dave Matthews Band. Don't know if XP is doing it too. Haven't cared since I've been MS free since 1999.
Here's a scenario that a friend's company ran into. This friend's company has a few SBIR and STTR contracts with the government with the Missile Defense Agency and the Air Force. One of the requirements for being a government contractor is complying with the F.A.R. regulations, one of which involves keeping time logs of work for all employees. (Not just all employees on the gov't contract, ALL employees. Your company must treat the gov't contract in the same way it does all of its work). One of the other requirements is that you must accept being audited by the government.
There are a few different levels of audits, but when they come on site the auditors are to be allowed access to all work areas and employees. They can ask questions about hours, work habits, whatever. And if there is any paraphernalia lying about, such as a cell phone (which may have time records of phone calls), blackberries (which may have time records and emails), or PDAs (which may have emails, schedules, appointments such as "see dentist", "have lunch", etc), these materiel can be scrutinized. Guess what: if they find a journal/log/diary/electronic PDA/cell phone record/email entry which contradicts an entry on the official time-log, your company's going to undergo a SEVERE audit right away.
This happened to the friend, and she was forced to immediately make it a requirement that absolutely NO personal cell phones, PDA's, blackberries, journals, diaries, or independent time logs were to be brought into the workplace. All employees had to leave their personal electronics stowed in their vehicles or at home, presumably beyond the reach of government auditors in the workplace.
So this may be what happened at your workplace. They might have gotten dinged for a time-log discrepancy. And if you get a bad F.A.R. violation, you can be barred from doing further government work, you can be required to reimburse Uncle Sam for all of the money the company has received thus far, you can be required to pay DAMAGES to the US govt for attempting to perpetrate a fraud.
banking on nanotechnology having progressed enough . . .
Agreed. Ted Williams' son just died recently and it's not clear whether he's also going to have his body at ALCOR. I believe there were a lot of issues like he never really paid the full bill for his dad's cryonics, and they possibly separated the head. I didn't know that Ted Wms' son had leukemia. Maybe he was banking on a cure for that or even using his dad's tissue to help with that.