If you have root access and the kid does not then there are some kludges you can do. For example, write a launchdaemon that runs renice -n 20 -u kidsudername every 5 minutes.
that will squish the CPU activity more than the Disk activity, but it should improve things a lot.
if you want to be a little passive aggressive you could move the login port to another port then put another process on that port that pipes to the real one but with a small delay. It will make the whole connection mysteriously intolerable. Again it's the launch agents that do this port mapping. so you move ssh from port 22 to port 5022. then have a job running that runs on port 22 and sends it to port 5022. if you don't want bother writing that socket process then you can fake it with nice -20 ssh -C -L 5022:localhost:22 localhost to connect the two ports on the local host. toss in some compression on the SSH connection to slow it down a little. and renice this ssh tunnel to 20 so it bogs if you are busy.
N MOnkey, this is terribly important to me to understand so could you explain a bit further.
When you say JPEG, RAW and RGB it's not perfectly clear what is be said casually and what is being said specifically. The article itself and some other comments refer to RGB data as having either a specified gamma or an implied gamma of 2.2.
this is news to me and about 100 million other people.
I've never looked to see what is litterally written in a binary RGB file, but when you open one in any of a zillion different tools like python Image module or Matlab what you get are three integer arrays for R, G and B.
the assumption one makes is that these integer values are not photons ^( 1/gamma) but simple photon counts (scaled to the 0-255 range).
Now when you say JPEG, yopu might literally mean something special about a jpeg file. or you might simply be referring to some file format that is a container for an RGB image. so it's not really clear to me if you are saying that
1) the stored values in a Jpeg are photons^(1/gamma)
2) but this is well known and if you ask a program to give you the data in RGB it will correct the jpeg storged values back to linear photons (jpeg pixel)^Gamma --> RGB pixel.
or you might be saying that if I have a Jpeg and I extract the RGB image then indeed all the values are photons^(1/gamma).
or maybe you are saying something else. please be pedantic and help me understand this precisely.
I work with RGB for science purposes all the time. To me the RGB levels are directly proportional to the number of photons collected. If I fuse ccd pixels then the number of photons collected is just the sum of the pixels counts. If this were my eyeball and not a photon collector then the same logic applies. If you reduce the number of pixels it's like focusing the image to a smaller portion of your retina. Each rod will collect proportionally more photons.
thus if I reproduce this image on scree so that the number of photons leaving a pixel is proportional to the RGB level then this is reproducing the image as I would have seen it.
When I go to display this on a screen, then the graphics system will naturally apply a gamma correction. This correction is there to correct for the screen phosphor response NOT the eyeball's response. It is intended to make it so that 128 has twice the photons as 64.
Thus I think the analysis is wrong. You don't want to average in gamma space. you want to average in RGB space then apply a gamma just like is being done.
I think the real problem is that when you sum pixels their not only is the sum larger but the dynamic range of the image pixels is larger. Thus if you need to compress this back to 8 bit dynamic range you have a problem.
So my conclusion is the problem is NOT that you want to do pixel^gamma -> average regions -> pixel ^(1/gamma)
but instead average lineraly pixel^gamma -> sum regions -> ??? some how compress dynamic range ????
I don't know what the correct compression is. But it makes no sense to me to non-linearly sum things that correspond to actual photon counts.
SO either I misread the article (don't think so), or the article is right about there being an overall dynamic range compression issue but wrong about the solution, or I am not understanding some key concept here.
I do not understand, if they make it unlawful it still gives the same incentives, isn't it ?
No because the traditional way to enforce the ban on gambling has been to make all gambling debts unenforceable in court. You lose, you don't pay, the casino can't do anything.
If you legalize it, then it means the debts can be pursued in local courts, your wages garnished, your possessions seized.
Legal online gambling is a bad idea. When casino's open theft crimes go up. With the rise of indian gaming casino's we've done this experiment over and over. It's not arguable that casino's drain money out of a community in a way that is harmful. The only people who gain, are the big mecca casino's that get money from people outside of their local community.
If you legalize it on-line, it will flow over seas. Which direction will if flow? it doesn't matter. All it does is hurt most communities.
If backlash is the problem, perhaps there another underlying problem. The society is too intolerant. Annonymity may let one hide from backlash but it's not solving the problem.
What is true is that speech without the need for responsibility leads to untempered opinons but gains little in freedom of thought. I would assert that the origin of a lot of intolerance is this very anonymity that allows aggressive demography and disrespectful behavior.
One needs to ask, who is the one applying the backlash. Is it the gov't itself? or just vigilantes? If it's the gov't then perhaps there is some utility in anonymity. But if it's vigilante's then we have a societal problem much deeper.
The right to free speech is not the right to anonymous speech. The proverbial soapbox was never anonymous. Why should political speech be anonymous? I can see how it might make some folks happy, but I don't see why it has to be right. Just let me vote secretly.
Be sure to check out the one about real time communication an 1968 and think about how we don't even have that yet! we have the video ichat and we have some collaborative real time editors, but they had both working together with shared real-time mouses on screen in 1968.
One of the more amusing things to me is that they are demostrating other technologies no one in the audience had scene while barely remarking on it. For example the minature microphone head sets, the closed circuit microwave com links providing the video and audio connections. all in 1968.
the computer system had a whopping 4 banks of 16K and was shared by mulitple users. the screens were created by writing directly to vector graphic phosphors and raster video capture of that. That's how they can have things like characters combined with a moving mouse, overlayed on inset video.
it's mind bending how much of modern computing was anticipated by this small team in 1968.
Be sure to check out the one about real time communication an 1968 and think about how we don't even have that yet! we have the video ichat and we have some collaborative real time editors. But they had these working together.
I understand what you are saying. And for us power geeks it makes sense to go to something else while waiting. But for most folks it does not I think. Certainly not my mother. And oddly I have to admit that enforcing some discipline on me would help too.
By the latter what I mean is, my first encounter with a mac in 1984, was frustrating. I would get livid that I could not eject the disk. I had to wait for the app to quit, then the finder to eject the disk under computer control. Just let me push the button like on my PC.
But then after a while I noticed something. I never lost any unsaved data on the mac. I could do a lot more complex things on the mac because I could undo them. All that time I felt was wasted when it was caching undo or saving not just text but graphics and font info, and not letting me eject an inconsistent state floppy, let me actually do more.
SO I gained some respect for enforcing consistency because it became empowering rather than a limitation. I was freed to do more because of the computer took care of the things I really should not have to worry about but did. When I go to another computer, should I worry if my graphics are stored in the resource fork or some other place? The mac was bundling those while the windows machine was just a mess you had to manage yourself.
Consider the lowly one button mouse. I don't like them but I do appreciate what they gained me. They required application designers to desing apps that could use a one button mouse. that created a lot of consistency in the apple interface so that you could move from application to application and not have to re-learn the interface.
perhaps you are to young to remember the days of windows apps where some apps had menus that only could be reaced from certain buttons. Had different ways of cutting and pasting. It was nuts. That's no longer true of course in the windows world. but it was true till window 95.
So yes, I am of two minds. I like to have the ability to play conductor and tell each app to play when I want it to play. But I also appreciate what it gets you. the 1984 mac taught me that patience is a virtue.
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to
No, I really do. I want to upload a picture, listen to music, and chat with friends at the same time. I want to be able to start a long network action and not have to watch it finish because switching away will cause it to abort.
And just so you don't think I'm talking out my ass, these are things that annoy me about my iPhone today. Raskin's vision is interesting, but like all ideals, it needs tempering with reality.
Well dandy, then get a laptop. I'm not saying there is no place for laptops. I'm saying this device is the info appliance and on that kind of device it needs to be task focused.
I'm getting a good laugh out of all the folks damning the iPhone for it's lack of explicit multi-tasking.
Sigh. If one wants to oversimplify there have been two great visions presented in computing. One was eberharts classic video showing off mouse and button based editing, along with cellular communications. If you've never watched it, you have no idea what you have missed. Prepare to crap your pants.
The other is Raskin's dream of the info appliance. A device that has no specific function but morphs itself into the perfect dedicated human interaction device for whatever task is needed. It does not multi task. It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
The ipad is the closest (practical sized) realization of that to date. it's 1.5 times the width of your fingers so it balances perfectly in one hand. when you have a task it dedicated it's surface to becoming the perfect human perceptual interface you need just for that task.
The key here is that Even a 1 year old understands the iphone interface. It's task specificity is intuitive.
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to. Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device. The iphone os does most of the connections you want. The addressbook is ubiquitous, apps can send e-mail and get web pages. etc... In the future this conduit management will be handled more and more by the computer as it should be. Context switching will be transparent because the computer will anticipate your next move and have pre-warmed it. etc...
Multi-tasking is just the current way we approximate implement this metafore for the device that simply changes into what we need at that moment by itself. You don't really want multi-tasking you want that effect.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself, and because I multi-task a lot I do find the transistions annoying. But I have to admit it really does de clutter and improve how you interface with an app. I just find the implementation to clunky to tolerate and I miss my multi-tasking view. The iphone OS enforces this work mode and anyone who has used one can see how well it works in the small format device.
It's raskin's dream incarnate. This is why other devices that don't get what's being created here are going to fail.
THe problem I have with netflix streaming is that on Silverlight it's buffer is so shallow that on my crappy evening comcast connection the movie frequently chatters and stops to rebuffer and degrade resolution.
I asked comcast why they don't have a large buffer mode. I'd be happy to wait 20 minutes for a movie to start if I could get fluid high res playback. It's far more frustrating to watch for 20 minutes and then have to abandon a movie as unwatchable with all the interruptions.
Netflix told me this has to do with some agreement with the studios on what they can deliver, and also in part do yo what silverlight is able to do.
I've been wondering if Roku or now Boxee might have different buffer rules or if it sucks on Silverlight it will suck on Roku too.
Perhaps if they have some new DRM on a closed hardware system they might get concessions that would allow movies to be pre-downloaded at high res. I'd be pretty happy about that.
I run XP in a Sun Virtual box. Do you think I will be able to do netflix through that?
Also I wonder if the netflix engine is going to be any better or worse than using the Silverlight viewer that netflix offers. My main problem with the latter is that it has such shallow buffer that the playback often stops. I'd like to find a viewer with a deep buffer even if I had to wait 15 minutes for the movie to commence playing.
I take it that you don't pull over when the you hear the fire truck siren behind you?
City streets at rush hour are not compatible with the needs of emergency vehicles but we work around this rather than saying "streets are shit". One thing we don't do is deliberately prevent emergency vehicles from getting through despite the limits of the street.
Some kinds of jokes, like yelling fire in a theater, are irresponsible. I'm sure there will be many emergency 911 calls at noon that day and some of them will be on AT&T networks. Blocking those deliberately is irresponsible.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have root access and the kid does not then there are some kludges you can do. For example, write a launchdaemon that runs
renice -n 20 -u kidsudername
every 5 minutes.
that will squish the CPU activity more than the Disk activity, but it should improve things a lot.
if you want to be a little passive aggressive you could move the login port to another port then put another process on that port that pipes to the real one but with a small delay. It will make the whole connection mysteriously intolerable. Again it's the launch agents that do this port mapping. so you move ssh from port 22 to port 5022. then have a job running that runs on port 22 and sends it to port 5022. if you don't want bother writing that socket process then you can fake it with
nice -20 ssh -C -L 5022:localhost:22 localhost
to connect the two ports on the local host. toss in some compression on the SSH connection to slow it down a little. and renice this ssh tunnel to 20 so it bogs if you are busy.
ANd the hedge fund is secretly in cahoots with Daryll McBride. They plan to leverage "certain" IP that Novel owns.
N MOnkey, this is terribly important to me to understand so could you explain a bit further.
When you say JPEG, RAW and RGB it's not perfectly clear what is be said casually and what is being said specifically. The article itself and some other comments refer to RGB data as having either a specified gamma or an implied gamma of 2.2.
this is news to me and about 100 million other people.
I've never looked to see what is litterally written in a binary RGB file, but when you open one in any of a zillion different tools like python Image module or Matlab what you get are three integer arrays for R, G and B.
the assumption one makes is that these integer values are not photons ^( 1/gamma) but simple photon counts (scaled to the 0-255 range).
Now when you say JPEG, yopu might literally mean something special about a jpeg file. or you might simply be referring to some file format that is a container for an RGB image. so it's not really clear to me if you are saying that
1) the stored values in a Jpeg are photons^(1/gamma)
2) but this is well known and if you ask a program to give you the data in RGB it will correct the jpeg storged values back to linear photons (jpeg pixel)^Gamma --> RGB pixel.
or you might be saying that if I have a Jpeg and I extract the RGB image then indeed all the values are photons^(1/gamma).
or maybe you are saying something else. please be pedantic and help me understand this precisely.
thank you.
I work with RGB for science purposes all the time. To me the RGB levels are directly proportional to the number of photons collected. If I fuse ccd pixels then the number of photons collected is just the sum of the pixels counts. If this were my eyeball and not a photon collector then the same logic applies. If you reduce the number of pixels it's like focusing the image to a smaller portion of your retina. Each rod will collect proportionally more photons.
thus if I reproduce this image on scree so that the number of photons leaving a pixel is proportional to the RGB level then this is reproducing the image as I would have seen it.
When I go to display this on a screen, then the graphics system will naturally apply a gamma correction. This correction is there to correct for the screen phosphor response NOT the eyeball's response. It is intended to make it so that 128 has twice the photons as 64.
Thus I think the analysis is wrong. You don't want to average in gamma space. you want to average in RGB space then apply a gamma just like is being done.
I think the real problem is that when you sum pixels their not only is the sum larger but the dynamic range of the image pixels is larger. Thus if you need to compress this back to 8 bit dynamic range you have a problem.
So my conclusion is the problem is NOT that you want to do
pixel^gamma -> average regions -> pixel ^(1/gamma)
but instead average lineraly
pixel^gamma -> sum regions -> ??? some how compress dynamic range ????
I don't know what the correct compression is. But it makes no sense to me to non-linearly sum things that correspond to actual photon counts.
SO either I misread the article (don't think so), or the article is right about there being an overall dynamic range compression issue but wrong about the solution, or I am not understanding some key concept here.
can someone explain to me what I'm missing?
nicely played.
As everyone knows the more you dilute a Homeopatheic reagent the more powerful it becomes. Diluting their funding will only make them stronger.
In my community, reading anything about any language other than the one true language, perl, is illegal.
There are laws right now against proselytizing , and giving innformation about abortions to minors without parental consent.
thus all religiion, abortion and programming info must be removed from the internet (expect of course perl)
... as opposite to making them unlawful ?
I do not understand, if they make it unlawful it still gives the same incentives, isn't it ?
No because the traditional way to enforce the ban on gambling has been to make all gambling debts unenforceable in court. You lose, you don't pay, the casino can't do anything.
If you legalize it, then it means the debts can be pursued in local courts, your wages garnished, your possessions seized.
Legal online gambling is a bad idea. When casino's open theft crimes go up. With the rise of indian gaming casino's we've done this experiment over and over. It's not arguable that casino's drain money out of a community in a way that is harmful. The only people who gain, are the big mecca casino's that get money from people outside of their local community.
If you legalize it on-line, it will flow over seas. Which direction will if flow? it doesn't matter. All it does is hurt most communities.
If backlash is the problem, perhaps there another underlying problem. The society is too intolerant. Annonymity may let one hide from backlash but it's not solving the problem.
What is true is that speech without the need for responsibility leads to untempered opinons but gains little in freedom of thought. I would assert that the origin of a lot of intolerance is this very anonymity that allows aggressive demography and disrespectful behavior.
One needs to ask, who is the one applying the backlash. Is it the gov't itself? or just vigilantes? If it's the gov't then perhaps there is some utility in anonymity. But if it's vigilante's then we have a societal problem much deeper.
The right to free speech is not the right to anonymous speech. The proverbial soapbox was never anonymous. Why should political speech be anonymous? I can see how it might make some folks happy, but I don't see why it has to be right. Just let me vote secretly.
Here's a better link to the highligts or Engelbart's demo .
Be sure to check out the one about real time communication an 1968 and think about how we don't even have that yet! we have the video ichat and we have some collaborative real time editors, but they had both working together with shared real-time mouses on screen in 1968.
One of the more amusing things to me is that they are demostrating other technologies no one in the audience had scene while barely remarking on it. For example the minature microphone head sets, the closed circuit microwave com links providing the video and audio connections. all in 1968.
the computer system had a whopping 4 banks of 16K and was shared by mulitple users. the screens were created by writing directly to vector graphic phosphors and raster video capture of that. That's how they can have things like characters combined with a moving mouse, overlayed on inset video.
it's mind bending how much of modern computing was anticipated by this small team in 1968.
Here's a better link to the highligts or Engelbart's demo .
Be sure to check out the one about real time communication an 1968 and think about how we don't even have that yet! we have the video ichat and we have some collaborative real time editors. But they had these working together.
here you go
I understand what you are saying. And for us power geeks it makes sense to go to something else while waiting. But for most folks it does not I think. Certainly not my mother. And oddly I have to admit that enforcing some discipline on me would help too.
By the latter what I mean is, my first encounter with a mac in 1984, was frustrating. I would get livid that I could not eject the disk. I had to wait for the app to quit, then the finder to eject the disk under computer control. Just let me push the button like on my PC.
But then after a while I noticed something. I never lost any unsaved data on the mac. I could do a lot more complex things on the mac because I could undo them. All that time I felt was wasted when it was caching undo or saving not just text but graphics and font info, and not letting me eject an inconsistent state floppy, let me actually do more.
SO I gained some respect for enforcing consistency because it became empowering rather than a limitation. I was freed to do more because of the computer took care of the things I really should not have to worry about but did. When I go to another computer, should I worry if my graphics are stored in the resource fork or some other place? The mac was bundling those while the windows machine was just a mess you had to manage yourself.
Consider the lowly one button mouse. I don't like them but I do appreciate what they gained me. They required application designers to desing apps that could use a one button mouse. that created a lot of consistency in the apple interface so that you could move from application to application and not have to re-learn the interface.
perhaps you are to young to remember the days of windows apps where some apps had menus that only could be reaced from certain buttons. Had different ways of cutting and pasting. It was nuts. That's no longer true of course in the windows world. but it was true till window 95.
So yes, I am of two minds. I like to have the ability to play conductor and tell each app to play when I want it to play. But I also appreciate what it gets you. the 1984 mac taught me that patience is a virtue.
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to
No, I really do. I want to upload a picture, listen to music, and chat with friends at the same time. I want to be able to start a long network action and not have to watch it finish because switching away will cause it to abort.
And just so you don't think I'm talking out my ass, these are things that annoy me about my iPhone today. Raskin's vision is interesting, but like all ideals, it needs tempering with reality.
Well dandy, then get a laptop. I'm not saying there is no place for laptops. I'm saying this device is the info appliance and on that kind of device it needs to be task focused.
I'm getting a good laugh out of all the folks damning the iPhone for it's lack of explicit multi-tasking.
Sigh. If one wants to oversimplify there have been two great visions presented in computing. One was eberharts classic video showing off mouse and button based editing, along with cellular communications. If you've never watched it, you have no idea what you have missed. Prepare to crap your pants.
The other is Raskin's dream of the info appliance. A device that has no specific function but morphs itself into the perfect dedicated human interaction device for whatever task is needed. It does not multi task. It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
The ipad is the closest (practical sized) realization of that to date. it's 1.5 times the width of your fingers so it balances perfectly in one hand. when you have a task it dedicated it's surface to becoming the perfect human perceptual interface you need just for that task.
The key here is that Even a 1 year old understands the iphone interface. It's task specificity is intuitive.
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to. Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device. The iphone os does most of the connections you want. The addressbook is ubiquitous, apps can send e-mail and get web pages. etc... In the future this conduit management will be handled more and more by the computer as it should be. Context switching will be transparent because the computer will anticipate your next move and have pre-warmed it. etc...
Multi-tasking is just the current way we approximate implement this metafore for the device that simply changes into what we need at that moment by itself. You don't really want multi-tasking you want that effect.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself, and because I multi-task a lot I do find the transistions annoying. But I have to admit it really does de clutter and improve how you interface with an app. I just find the implementation to clunky to tolerate and I miss my multi-tasking view. The iphone OS enforces this work mode and anyone who has used one can see how well it works in the small format device.
It's raskin's dream incarnate. This is why other devices that don't get what's being created here are going to fail.
other options:
iPun
iPal
iPap
iPro
iPig
iPox
iPup
iPet
iDea latin for a female IDeity
iOta
No it will be called the iPax. because it brings world peace.
Verizon is going to get the ipad tablet not the iphone.
THe problem I have with netflix streaming is that on Silverlight it's buffer is so shallow that on my crappy evening comcast connection the movie frequently chatters and stops to rebuffer and degrade resolution.
I asked comcast why they don't have a large buffer mode. I'd be happy to wait 20 minutes for a movie to start if I could get fluid high res playback. It's far more frustrating to watch for 20 minutes and then have to abandon a movie as unwatchable with all the interruptions.
Netflix told me this has to do with some agreement with the studios on what they can deliver, and also in part do yo what silverlight is able to do.
I've been wondering if Roku or now Boxee might have different buffer rules or if it sucks on Silverlight it will suck on Roku too.
Perhaps if they have some new DRM on a closed hardware system they might get concessions that would allow movies to be pre-downloaded at high res. I'd be pretty happy about that.
I run XP in a Sun Virtual box. Do you think I will be able to do netflix through that?
Also I wonder if the netflix engine is going to be any better or worse than using the Silverlight viewer that netflix offers. My main problem with the latter is that it has such shallow buffer that the playback often stops. I'd like to find a viewer with a deep buffer even if I had to wait 15 minutes for the movie to commence playing.
I take it that you don't pull over when the you hear the fire truck siren behind you?
City streets at rush hour are not compatible with the needs of emergency vehicles but we work around this rather than saying "streets are shit". One thing we don't do is deliberately prevent emergency vehicles from getting through despite the limits of the street.
Sun computer's was thriving back then and there were seat-managed liscences regulated over ethernet.
No the liscenece servers ran on the local ethernet which might or might not have been attached to the internet.
Some kinds of jokes, like yelling fire in a theater, are irresponsible. I'm sure there will be many emergency 911 calls at noon that day and some of them will be on AT&T networks. Blocking those deliberately is irresponsible.