I had a hard drive die on me, taking with it all of my data. It was a Micropolis 2GB SCSI drive, which I had bought very cheaply. I think I paid $100 for it in 1997 or so.
When it died, I actually tried to send it to a data recovery company. In the process of trying to find one, one of the companies had a page devoted to the 10 best drives and the 10 worst drives in history. Most of them were specific models of specific drives. However, at the very bottom of the 10 Worst was this line:
Any Micropolis hard drive.
To quote Adam Sandler: Information that would have been useful to me *yesterday*!:)
P.S.: At the top of the 10 best drives list was "Any IBM hard drive". Of course, this was before the DeathStar drives...
I nearly lost my biggest client for exactly the same problem.
They had (and theoretically still do have) an ISDN videoconferencing solution. However, they almost never used it. Then one day, the big boss (the actual owner of the 1,000-person international company) came and wanted to VC back to headquarters in Germany. Didn't work. The problem was the same as above: the LD service on the ISDN line was misconfiugred, and we could not make International calls. So not only was it a problem that prevented it from working, but it was a problem completely outside of my control. All I could do was wait for SBC to do their, ahem, magic...
He went ballistic. I was nearly terminated on the spot.
The great part of the story was that we knew he was coming over for a month before, and that there was a chance that he'd want to use it. I bugged the client a *number* of times to test the system all the way to Germany and make sure that it worked, but they didn't want to spend the time and money to do it. Due to some internal issues, they were way over on IT budget and didn't think it was important.
Fortunately, others (not the person I directly answered to, either) explained that I had tried to test the system, but was told not to. Within a year, there was a significant shakeup and a number of people were terminated, including the person I answered to. In fact, I've been part of that company at that location longer than anyone currently employed there!:)
The VC system is still in place, but it has not been used once since that event, over 3 years ago. However, every couple of months, I still test the system...
Traditionally, immediately post-split, most stocks go down: a split being seen as an indication that the board sees the current stock price as a bit of a high-water mark.
According to Table 6, Agriculture makes up over 20% of the process energy requirements (the energy poured into the sytesm) of biodiesel:
Stage Fossil Energy Percent Soybean Agriculture 0.0656 21.08% Soybean Transport 0.0034 1.09% Soybean Crushing 0.0796 25.61% Soy Oil Transport 0.0072 2.31% Soy Oil Conversion 0.1508 48.49% Biodiesel Transport 0.0044 1.41% Total 0.3110 100.00%
The summary states: "Biodiesel has a life cycle energy efficiency of 80.55%, compared to 83.28% for petroleum diesel."
Interesting article. They are assuming using methanol derived from natural gas for esterification. This makes this form of biodiesel not completely renewable (about 3/4 of the primary energy is renewable), but very competitive with petroleum diesel from an energy-efficiency standpoint.
That has got to be one of the least insightful comments I've ever seen.
Does it matter if we burn your house to the ground? After all, the matter's all still there: it's just in a different form. Or if you went to a restaurant and ordered a 16 oz. steak but got four quarter-pound hamburgers? Or how about we smash your car into a solid cubic foot of iron and plastic. After all, only the form varies, not the amount.
Also, you say that most of the cost is in plant processing and refining. What about the fuel used for planting, cultivating, irrigation, and transport? It seems to me that there would be quite a bit of opportunity for hidden energy costs.
For example, did anyone calculate the energy costs for the irrigation water? The water doesn't just appear magically: it's most likely pumped out of the ground, processed, transported to the fields and delivered to the plants. *ALL* of this requires energy: most likely, electricity that was generated by the burning of coal or oil. Are these items being sufficiently analyzed?
That's my biggest objection regarding biodiesel. If you review my comments in the last few days, I think you'll see that I'm pretty positive on the concept. But as they say, the devil's in the details. Is it truly an energy source? With all of the politics and special interests involved, it's *really* hard to say...
Your comment regarding aviation fuel doesn't make sense to me.
First off, avgas, kerosene or jet fuel have within a few percent (and it's usually actually a little bit *lower*) the same energy density as diesel. (Reference)
Each of these fuels may have slightly different properties (different ignition temperatures and pressures, for example), but their energy density is really pretty close.
Second, energy is energy. You can convert (with some loss, of course) any form of energy into any other. So, you want true avgas? No problem: synthesize it using biodiesel. You need kerosene? Synthesize it. Or, tune your biodiesel-production system to produce kerosene instead.
If an industry ever sprung up around biodiesel, you can *bet* that people will grow the most effective resource. If it's canola, they'll grow it. No way they'll turn down 3x the profits for exactly the same amount of work. That's the free market.
But right now, it's a research project. One funded heavily by government subsidies. So, they're using soybean. That's *not* the free market. But if this ever takes off, you can bet that the free market will take over...
C + H20 is an endothermic reaction. So where is the energy going to come from to make the reaction happen?
Again, say it with me: Hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is an energy vehicle. We have to *make* hydrogen, and that takes energy.
Gasoline is an energy vehicle, too. But it's an energy source: we don't have to make gasoline. It comes out of the ground, we heat it a bit to separate it from all the other gunk and we burn it. Yes, it takes energy to do that (like a sibling poster pointed out), but *far* less than it takes to make it. That's what makes it an energy source. That's why it's called refinement, not production!
You can't "refine" water and get syngas. You *can* refine coal, petroleum, methane and any other type of hydrocarbon and get syngas (or hydrogen or whatever you want). But then you might as well have used the coal or petroleum or methane directly. The only reason you would go the syngas route is for some other non-energy reason (lower pollution in the case of coal gassification, for example). Again, in that case, hydrogen is playing the role of energy *vehicle*, not *source*.
Hydrogen is never, ever, ever an energy source. Ever. Biodiesel is, or at least might be: at least there's an energy source involved (the sun, through the plant's oil). In the electrolysis of water (with or without the addtion of that Carbon atom), there is no energy source that we couldn't have used more directly without the sidestep through hydrogen. Unless the *vehicle* nature of hydrogen (such as its energy density) makes it useful.
Each of these is converting electricty (a form of energy) into a different form of energy (hydrogen). You still have to get the energy from somewhere. And you will never, ever, end up with more energy than it took you to get the hydrogen in the first place. There's no such thing as producing energy from hydrogen. Whatever energy you get from it you had to have gotten from some earlier source, with a guaranteed amount of energy loss.
The production of petrleum is different. It is truly producing energy: you pump it out of the ground and you've got tremendous energy for almost no energy spent. However, in the case of biodiesel, there is more work involved: you have to grow the crops, you have to process them into oil, and you have to convert the oil into a more useful substance, like biodiesel. So the amount of energy used to produce the crops must be factored in. However, unlike conversion of other power into hydrogen, there *is* a source of energy along the way: the oil produced by the plant. So what you're hoping is that more usable energy comes out of making biodiesel than went in. The fact that this is even possible puts it worlds ahead of hydrogen as an energy "source".
Hydrogen is not an energy source. Never ever. It is an energy *vehicle*. That energy had to come from somewhere. In the case of biodiesel (and petroleum, for that matter), it comes for "free" from plants and photosynthesis. For hydrogen, it comes from the production of electricity, which had to come from somewhere else, so why not use the original source directly, instead of wasting 40% of the energy in producing electricity, and then 40% of the power in producing hydrogen?
You are correct. I'm not saying that it *has* to come from oil. But, in the next 10 to 20 years, where is the energy for electrolysis going to come from? Solar? Nuclear? Or petroleum?
I'm not saying it can't be done. But which is easier: getting people to put biodiesel into their cars/houses/power plants *exactly* like they currently put diesel, or getting literally *everything* to convert to a completely new infrastructure, from power production to distribution to usage?
The original poster said something like "Why worry about biodiesel when there's hydrogen?" My question is: Where is the hydrogen? Show me hydrogen that didn't come from petroleum in the first place!
Again, hydrogen is a *vehicle*. It's a way of storing huge amounts of energy in a very small space: far better than batteries. It is not an energy *source*. Biodiesel is an energy *source*. There is a *huge* difference between these.
And for the record, they're not mutually exclusive. How about biodiesel-fired plants producing hydrogen? Solar-powered energy in conventional powerplants. Again: biodiesel as energy source, hydrogen as energy storage.
Ad-supported magazines can put you in a very uncomfortable spot.
I used to read a free, ad-supported magazine for a techie operating system back in the day (OS/2 Professional). They eventually went to a subscriber-paid model. The reason for this was that they published a negative review of a piece of software, one that was advertised in their magazine. They were significantly pressured by the advertiser to not publish the review, or to change their conclusions.
How often do you see eWeek totally trash a product? Sure, they point out downsides, but it seems that everything they write about is described in an overall positive light. Why? They too are an advertiser-paid magazine!
Unless that's the type of magazine you want to publish, it's hard to go advertiser-only...
Your post reminded me of the old joke: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
None: they just redefine Darkness as the standard...
What is their motiviation for this? My guess is that it's so that they're compliant with the Mass standard, and without using another format. That way, Office stays the industry standard. I'm not sure that documenting the format is going to allow OOo to be any more compatible than it is now. And that way Microsoft doesn't lose mindshare to a new format that is not intimately associated with them.
After all, we call it the Microsoft Office format. That alone is worth not moving to OASIS for them.
I understood that. I'm just, well, passionate...;)
I thoght it was an excellent point, and I felt the need to expound. The issue of "Intelligent people don't believe in God/the Bible/etc." is a personal one for me. I've found that those that say something like that have not spent any measurable time in their own research: rather, they argue from assupmtions and heresay.
I agree. But isn't that the logic that people were using about Goliath? "Boy, isn't it odd that we can't find his name *anywhere* in any type of archaeological evidence? With the *mountains* of archaeological remans we have, we can't find that name even once? Sure makes it sound like a made-up story to me..."
Never mind that the people who might have made up the story would have had the ability to select a common name (Bob of the Philistines!) just as easily as a completely fictional one.
And what about real people today with extremely uncommon (or outright made-up) names? Are they not allowed to do something famous because 3,000 years from now no one will belive they existed because their name was very rare? There's a few heads of the UN that might object!:)
Logically flawed? Of course: Abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence. But is this not the same logic that many skeptics use?
Happens all of the time. People say that key people mentioned in the Bible (Belshazzar or Pontius Pilate, for example) could *not* have existed because archaeological evidence did not exist for their presence. However, things change. Reference.
There are other items that still have very little archaeological backing: Darius the Mede as King of Babylon comes to mind. However, this is where real faith comes in. Faith is not beliving something is true in *spite* of evidence, or even beliving something with a *lack* of evidence. It's beliving something because all of the available evidence points to a solid track record of something being *true*. (See Hebrews 11:1 for a *Biblical* definition of faith that bears this out; or open your *own* Bible.) When you see people say, "That can't have happened because we have no evidence that it did." and then, later, see that archaeological evidence *does* support it, it makes it much harder to doubt items where the archaeological record is not against something, but just merely missing.
*ALL* passwords are security by obscurity. All of them. Without exception.
Where security through obscurity is a problem is when you depend on it for the *encryption*, not the key. You should always assume that the *means* of encryption are fully known and understood, but that the *key* is not.
My telephone accepts SD cards and plays MP3's. So, I have a couple of dozen MP3's on my SD, including a few MP3's made from recordings I've personally made of live music. Now, I choose *several* of these MP3's. The only place these MP3's exist is on my SD: I created them from live recordings and only I have them. I then combine these MP3's, separated by unique passwords, to generate a hash. Imagine something like this pseudeo-command-line:
That's very much like a book cipher. A book cipher can be *very* strong (almost like a one-time cipher) *if* the source text is sufficiently rare (or obscure).
Now, imagine that the police seize my notebook. They see that my hard drive is encrypted and needs a 256-bit key. Where are they going to get the key? Is it simply a password? Is there some sort of key file? Is the key on the notebook? Is it on the SD in my phone? Or the SD in my camera? Or the half-dozen floppies I have in my notebook bag? Or one of the dozen or more CD's that are in my notebook bag? In this case, it's the combination of 3 different MP3's and two passwords. It could have just as easily have come from any number of different pieces of media: a file on a floppy, CD and SD card, plus an arbitrary number of passwords kept *only* in my head.
Or how about selecting three graphics from popular websites? Imagine selecting three common topic icons on Slashdot such as the "Borg Bill", Broken Windows and the privacy binoculars. If you view Slashdot regularly, those files would appear in your cache: no big deal. But use *those* as keys! Just hope someone doesn't update the graphics!:) Even better: you're the webmaster for some website. Of course, you browse that website. Use graphics in your browser's cache from *there*: you know if the graphics will change! And the fact that these graphics are in your cache is perfectly natural. No one has the resources to hash every possible combination of three graphics in your browser's cache, especially with passwords between them.
At that point, I'm not worried about them getting my key without help from somewhere: they're sure not brute-forcing it like a simple passphrase. I'm not worried about them brute-forcing a full-strength modern encryption algorithm. However, there are at least two things about which I *do* need to be worried: 1) Was the encryption algorithm implemented properly, without unintentional weaknesses or even intentional back-doors? 2) Was my key somehow cached somewhere to be found? This area could be the biggest issue: the command line I used is in the history, pieces of the data used to make up my key (or the key itself!!) were swapped to disk at some point and could be used to help reconstruct the key, etc. Even if investigators only knew which files made up my key, that would be *devistating* to my security. Now I'm back to something only slightly more complex than a straightforward password!
Security is not simple. If large and powerful governments can't keep data secure from motivated enemies (and the entire history of the Cold War bears this out), I think that there is near zero chance for individuals to do the same.
Thank you for posting that link. The original article made zero sense to me. Even the Ars article doesn't explain it well. But at least the Ars article had pictures that demonstrated the effect.
I believe that they're using HDR to model the non-linear sensitivity of the eye (and of photographic film). What threw me off was the talk of over- or under-exposing film. As a photographer, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't change the amount of light present in a scene. It just captures more or less of it, and thereby over- or under-exposing the film. Sure, highlights would be better represented in an under-exposed picture: you're not clipping them. Same thing for shadow detail in over-exposed pictures. All you're doing is selecting a range of levels within the scene to have properly represented, at the sacrifice of everything outside of those levels.
What didn't make sense was why expanding the range of brightness levels would change anything. Tripling the range (so that all brightness levels go from 0-3) doesn't buy you *anything* (except increased "resolution" of brightness, which isn't relevant here). This is made obvious when you then *divide* the resolution by 3 in order to display the image on the screen! And like others have said, you ain't making white any whiter than #FFFFFF...
However, the difference is that photographic paper, film, and the human eye are non-linear, and HDR gives the engine information that allows it to mimic this non-linear nature in motion effects. This is shown clearly in the difference in motion blur between HDR and non-HDR. By increaing the *internal* level of white on the windows, you allow the software to shift the level of brightness of the different objects in a non-linear way. It's that non-linear mapping of the expanded brightness range into the screen brightness space that is different.
It also sounds like they are not doing this by simply increasing the range of brightness and using some non-linear function to map the expanded range into the "normal" range of the monitor, though it seems to me that this would be the most accurate way of doing this. According to the Ars article, it sounds like this is being done with a "radiosity channel" (kind of like an alpha channel). Of course, my guess is that this is more for performance than for effect: for those things that don't need the enhanced radiosity, you can skip the whole non-linear portion and just map it directly. I would assume that they would save a relatively small percentage of values at the top end only for highly radious (is that right? radial?) areas, and map the non-radious images into the rest of the range. However, I have no idea how this is actually done, or even if my guesses are correct. I'd love to know from someone who has a better understanding where I went wrong!:)
Interesting. It seems to me that HDR is kind of like motion blur for brightness. However, I wonder if, like motion blur, it's an exaggeration (or outright fabrication) of something we don't really see? For example, motion blur as seen by a camera is *way* greater than motion blur as seen by the eye. A runner, for example, running perpendicular to a photographer will blur with anything but a relatively high shutter speed, but they don't look blurry to the eye as they run by a spectator. I have a feeling that the effects generated by HDR may also be an over-exaggeration of what the human eye actually sees, rather than what film actually records. While it matches what a camera might see, it doesn't match what the eye would actually see in the camera's place. Or, for that matter, a different camera, with different film, and a different shutter speed!:)
But whatever. If people think it "looks" better, even if they're wrong, who cares? Go for it!:)
If you click on the Print button within the article, you get a single page that contains the *entire* article, with a single banner ad on the top. One click, the entire article, and minimal advertising. Try it sometime...
OS/2 used to be very well used in IBM POS machines. OS/2 was used for more than just ATM's. It could be stripped very small and put into all kinds of places!
It was also a popular OS for vertial applications such as bank terminals. NationsBank grew from a tiny bank to the 6th largest bank (before they were bought by Bank of America) on a plan of aggressive acquisition. A large part of this strategy was their computer infrastructure. It was heavily based on OS/2: Each branch had a single centrally-administered OS/2 Workspace on Demand server. All computers in a branch would actually boot from the server (LTSP-style), with all of its applications ready to go. If the bank wanted to update their software, they could push these changes from a central point to each branch overnight (or over time), and schedule the switchover. The next day, everyone came in and was completely updated.
You can do the same with Linux (I already mentioned LTSP, but this was almost 10 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
When it died, I actually tried to send it to a data recovery company. In the process of trying to find one, one of the companies had a page devoted to the 10 best drives and the 10 worst drives in history. Most of them were specific models of specific drives. However, at the very bottom of the 10 Worst was this line:
Any Micropolis hard drive.
To quote Adam Sandler: Information that would have been useful to me *yesterday*! :)
P.S.: At the top of the 10 best drives list was "Any IBM hard drive". Of course, this was before the DeathStar drives...
x=INT(RND(0)*6+.5)
For integers from 1 to 6 inclusive.
Given your signature, I figured you would have learned that *long* before college...
They had (and theoretically still do have) an ISDN videoconferencing solution. However, they almost never used it. Then one day, the big boss (the actual owner of the 1,000-person international company) came and wanted to VC back to headquarters in Germany. Didn't work. The problem was the same as above: the LD service on the ISDN line was misconfiugred, and we could not make International calls. So not only was it a problem that prevented it from working, but it was a problem completely outside of my control. All I could do was wait for SBC to do their, ahem, magic...
He went ballistic. I was nearly terminated on the spot.
The great part of the story was that we knew he was coming over for a month before, and that there was a chance that he'd want to use it. I bugged the client a *number* of times to test the system all the way to Germany and make sure that it worked, but they didn't want to spend the time and money to do it. Due to some internal issues, they were way over on IT budget and didn't think it was important.
Fortunately, others (not the person I directly answered to, either) explained that I had tried to test the system, but was told not to. Within a year, there was a significant shakeup and a number of people were terminated, including the person I answered to. In fact, I've been part of that company at that location longer than anyone currently employed there! :)
The VC system is still in place, but it has not been used once since that event, over 3 years ago. However, every couple of months, I still test the system...
Link to detailed summary.
According to Table 6, Agriculture makes up over 20% of the process energy requirements (the energy poured into the sytesm) of biodiesel:
The summary states: "Biodiesel has a life cycle energy efficiency of 80.55%, compared to 83.28% for petroleum diesel."
Interesting article. They are assuming using methanol derived from natural gas for esterification. This makes this form of biodiesel not completely renewable (about 3/4 of the primary energy is renewable), but very competitive with petroleum diesel from an energy-efficiency standpoint.
You gotta start somewhere...
Does it matter if we burn your house to the ground? After all, the matter's all still there: it's just in a different form. Or if you went to a restaurant and ordered a 16 oz. steak but got four quarter-pound hamburgers? Or how about we smash your car into a solid cubic foot of iron and plastic. After all, only the form varies, not the amount.
Also, you say that most of the cost is in plant processing and refining. What about the fuel used for planting, cultivating, irrigation, and transport? It seems to me that there would be quite a bit of opportunity for hidden energy costs.
For example, did anyone calculate the energy costs for the irrigation water? The water doesn't just appear magically: it's most likely pumped out of the ground, processed, transported to the fields and delivered to the plants. *ALL* of this requires energy: most likely, electricity that was generated by the burning of coal or oil. Are these items being sufficiently analyzed?
That's my biggest objection regarding biodiesel. If you review my comments in the last few days, I think you'll see that I'm pretty positive on the concept. But as they say, the devil's in the details. Is it truly an energy source? With all of the politics and special interests involved, it's *really* hard to say...
First off, avgas, kerosene or jet fuel have within a few percent (and it's usually actually a little bit *lower*) the same energy density as diesel. (Reference) Each of these fuels may have slightly different properties (different ignition temperatures and pressures, for example), but their energy density is really pretty close.
Second, energy is energy. You can convert (with some loss, of course) any form of energy into any other. So, you want true avgas? No problem: synthesize it using biodiesel. You need kerosene? Synthesize it. Or, tune your biodiesel-production system to produce kerosene instead.
If an industry ever sprung up around biodiesel, you can *bet* that people will grow the most effective resource. If it's canola, they'll grow it. No way they'll turn down 3x the profits for exactly the same amount of work. That's the free market. But right now, it's a research project. One funded heavily by government subsidies. So, they're using soybean. That's *not* the free market. But if this ever takes off, you can bet that the free market will take over...
Good luck getting it, though, with every special interest having their own hobby horse (and creative accountants!)...
Again, say it with me: Hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is an energy vehicle. We have to *make* hydrogen, and that takes energy.
Gasoline is an energy vehicle, too. But it's an energy source: we don't have to make gasoline. It comes out of the ground, we heat it a bit to separate it from all the other gunk and we burn it. Yes, it takes energy to do that (like a sibling poster pointed out), but *far* less than it takes to make it. That's what makes it an energy source. That's why it's called refinement, not production!
You can't "refine" water and get syngas. You *can* refine coal, petroleum, methane and any other type of hydrocarbon and get syngas (or hydrogen or whatever you want). But then you might as well have used the coal or petroleum or methane directly. The only reason you would go the syngas route is for some other non-energy reason (lower pollution in the case of coal gassification, for example). Again, in that case, hydrogen is playing the role of energy *vehicle*, not *source*.
Hydrogen is never, ever, ever an energy source. Ever. Biodiesel is, or at least might be: at least there's an energy source involved (the sun, through the plant's oil). In the electrolysis of water (with or without the addtion of that Carbon atom), there is no energy source that we couldn't have used more directly without the sidestep through hydrogen. Unless the *vehicle* nature of hydrogen (such as its energy density) makes it useful.
The production of petrleum is different. It is truly producing energy: you pump it out of the ground and you've got tremendous energy for almost no energy spent. However, in the case of biodiesel, there is more work involved: you have to grow the crops, you have to process them into oil, and you have to convert the oil into a more useful substance, like biodiesel. So the amount of energy used to produce the crops must be factored in. However, unlike conversion of other power into hydrogen, there *is* a source of energy along the way: the oil produced by the plant. So what you're hoping is that more usable energy comes out of making biodiesel than went in. The fact that this is even possible puts it worlds ahead of hydrogen as an energy "source".
Hydrogen is not an energy source. Never ever. It is an energy *vehicle*. That energy had to come from somewhere. In the case of biodiesel (and petroleum, for that matter), it comes for "free" from plants and photosynthesis. For hydrogen, it comes from the production of electricity, which had to come from somewhere else, so why not use the original source directly, instead of wasting 40% of the energy in producing electricity, and then 40% of the power in producing hydrogen?
I'm not saying it can't be done. But which is easier: getting people to put biodiesel into their cars/houses/power plants *exactly* like they currently put diesel, or getting literally *everything* to convert to a completely new infrastructure, from power production to distribution to usage?
The original poster said something like "Why worry about biodiesel when there's hydrogen?" My question is: Where is the hydrogen? Show me hydrogen that didn't come from petroleum in the first place!
Again, hydrogen is a *vehicle*. It's a way of storing huge amounts of energy in a very small space: far better than batteries. It is not an energy *source*. Biodiesel is an energy *source*. There is a *huge* difference between these.
And for the record, they're not mutually exclusive. How about biodiesel-fired plants producing hydrogen? Solar-powered energy in conventional powerplants. Again: biodiesel as energy source, hydrogen as energy storage.
Oil!
Hydrogen is a *vehicle* for energy. The energy has to come from *somewhere*...
I used to read a free, ad-supported magazine for a techie operating system back in the day (OS/2 Professional). They eventually went to a subscriber-paid model. The reason for this was that they published a negative review of a piece of software, one that was advertised in their magazine. They were significantly pressured by the advertiser to not publish the review, or to change their conclusions.
How often do you see eWeek totally trash a product? Sure, they point out downsides, but it seems that everything they write about is described in an overall positive light. Why? They too are an advertiser-paid magazine!
Unless that's the type of magazine you want to publish, it's hard to go advertiser-only...
None: they just redefine Darkness as the standard...
What is their motiviation for this? My guess is that it's so that they're compliant with the Mass standard, and without using another format. That way, Office stays the industry standard. I'm not sure that documenting the format is going to allow OOo to be any more compatible than it is now. And that way Microsoft doesn't lose mindshare to a new format that is not intimately associated with them.
After all, we call it the Microsoft Office format. That alone is worth not moving to OASIS for them.
I understood that. I'm just, well, passionate... ;)
I thoght it was an excellent point, and I felt the need to expound. The issue of "Intelligent people don't believe in God/the Bible/etc." is a personal one for me. I've found that those that say something like that have not spent any measurable time in their own research: rather, they argue from assupmtions and heresay.
I'm done now. Honest! :)
Never mind that the people who might have made up the story would have had the ability to select a common name (Bob of the Philistines!) just as easily as a completely fictional one.
And what about real people today with extremely uncommon (or outright made-up) names? Are they not allowed to do something famous because 3,000 years from now no one will belive they existed because their name was very rare? There's a few heads of the UN that might object! :)
Logically flawed? Of course: Abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence. But is this not the same logic that many skeptics use?
There are other items that still have very little archaeological backing: Darius the Mede as King of Babylon comes to mind. However, this is where real faith comes in. Faith is not beliving something is true in *spite* of evidence, or even beliving something with a *lack* of evidence. It's beliving something because all of the available evidence points to a solid track record of something being *true*. (See Hebrews 11:1 for a *Biblical* definition of faith that bears this out; or open your *own* Bible.) When you see people say, "That can't have happened because we have no evidence that it did." and then, later, see that archaeological evidence *does* support it, it makes it much harder to doubt items where the archaeological record is not against something, but just merely missing.
Where security through obscurity is a problem is when you depend on it for the *encryption*, not the key. You should always assume that the *means* of encryption are fully known and understood, but that the *key* is not.
cat Recording1.mp3 + echo "Password One" + cat Recording2.mp3 + echo "Password Two" + cat Recording3.mp3 | sha1sum | decrypt_my_hard_drive
That's very much like a book cipher. A book cipher can be *very* strong (almost like a one-time cipher) *if* the source text is sufficiently rare (or obscure).
Now, imagine that the police seize my notebook. They see that my hard drive is encrypted and needs a 256-bit key. Where are they going to get the key? Is it simply a password? Is there some sort of key file? Is the key on the notebook? Is it on the SD in my phone? Or the SD in my camera? Or the half-dozen floppies I have in my notebook bag? Or one of the dozen or more CD's that are in my notebook bag? In this case, it's the combination of 3 different MP3's and two passwords. It could have just as easily have come from any number of different pieces of media: a file on a floppy, CD and SD card, plus an arbitrary number of passwords kept *only* in my head.
Or how about selecting three graphics from popular websites? Imagine selecting three common topic icons on Slashdot such as the "Borg Bill", Broken Windows and the privacy binoculars. If you view Slashdot regularly, those files would appear in your cache: no big deal. But use *those* as keys! Just hope someone doesn't update the graphics! :) Even better: you're the webmaster for some website. Of course, you browse that website. Use graphics in your browser's cache from *there*: you know if the graphics will change! And the fact that these graphics are in your cache is perfectly natural. No one has the resources to hash every possible combination of three graphics in your browser's cache, especially with passwords between them.
At that point, I'm not worried about them getting my key without help from somewhere: they're sure not brute-forcing it like a simple passphrase. I'm not worried about them brute-forcing a full-strength modern encryption algorithm. However, there are at least two things about which I *do* need to be worried: 1) Was the encryption algorithm implemented properly, without unintentional weaknesses or even intentional back-doors? 2) Was my key somehow cached somewhere to be found? This area could be the biggest issue: the command line I used is in the history, pieces of the data used to make up my key (or the key itself!!) were swapped to disk at some point and could be used to help reconstruct the key, etc. Even if investigators only knew which files made up my key, that would be *devistating* to my security. Now I'm back to something only slightly more complex than a straightforward password!
Security is not simple. If large and powerful governments can't keep data secure from motivated enemies (and the entire history of the Cold War bears this out), I think that there is near zero chance for individuals to do the same.
I believe that they're using HDR to model the non-linear sensitivity of the eye (and of photographic film). What threw me off was the talk of over- or under-exposing film. As a photographer, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't change the amount of light present in a scene. It just captures more or less of it, and thereby over- or under-exposing the film. Sure, highlights would be better represented in an under-exposed picture: you're not clipping them. Same thing for shadow detail in over-exposed pictures. All you're doing is selecting a range of levels within the scene to have properly represented, at the sacrifice of everything outside of those levels.
What didn't make sense was why expanding the range of brightness levels would change anything. Tripling the range (so that all brightness levels go from 0-3) doesn't buy you *anything* (except increased "resolution" of brightness, which isn't relevant here). This is made obvious when you then *divide* the resolution by 3 in order to display the image on the screen! And like others have said, you ain't making white any whiter than #FFFFFF...
However, the difference is that photographic paper, film, and the human eye are non-linear, and HDR gives the engine information that allows it to mimic this non-linear nature in motion effects. This is shown clearly in the difference in motion blur between HDR and non-HDR. By increaing the *internal* level of white on the windows, you allow the software to shift the level of brightness of the different objects in a non-linear way. It's that non-linear mapping of the expanded brightness range into the screen brightness space that is different.
It also sounds like they are not doing this by simply increasing the range of brightness and using some non-linear function to map the expanded range into the "normal" range of the monitor, though it seems to me that this would be the most accurate way of doing this. According to the Ars article, it sounds like this is being done with a "radiosity channel" (kind of like an alpha channel). Of course, my guess is that this is more for performance than for effect: for those things that don't need the enhanced radiosity, you can skip the whole non-linear portion and just map it directly. I would assume that they would save a relatively small percentage of values at the top end only for highly radious (is that right? radial?) areas, and map the non-radious images into the rest of the range. However, I have no idea how this is actually done, or even if my guesses are correct. I'd love to know from someone who has a better understanding where I went wrong! :)
Interesting. It seems to me that HDR is kind of like motion blur for brightness. However, I wonder if, like motion blur, it's an exaggeration (or outright fabrication) of something we don't really see? For example, motion blur as seen by a camera is *way* greater than motion blur as seen by the eye. A runner, for example, running perpendicular to a photographer will blur with anything but a relatively high shutter speed, but they don't look blurry to the eye as they run by a spectator. I have a feeling that the effects generated by HDR may also be an over-exaggeration of what the human eye actually sees, rather than what film actually records. While it matches what a camera might see, it doesn't match what the eye would actually see in the camera's place. Or, for that matter, a different camera, with different film, and a different shutter speed! :)
But whatever. If people think it "looks" better, even if they're wrong, who cares? Go for it! :)
If you click on the Print button within the article, you get a single page that contains the *entire* article, with a single banner ad on the top. One click, the entire article, and minimal advertising. Try it sometime...
It was also a popular OS for vertial applications such as bank terminals. NationsBank grew from a tiny bank to the 6th largest bank (before they were bought by Bank of America) on a plan of aggressive acquisition. A large part of this strategy was their computer infrastructure. It was heavily based on OS/2: Each branch had a single centrally-administered OS/2 Workspace on Demand server. All computers in a branch would actually boot from the server (LTSP-style), with all of its applications ready to go. If the bank wanted to update their software, they could push these changes from a central point to each branch overnight (or over time), and schedule the switchover. The next day, everyone came in and was completely updated.
You can do the same with Linux (I already mentioned LTSP, but this was almost 10 years ago.
Like they say, what's old is new again.