On digital cameras each pixel delivers only one color channel by using a Bayer filter (unless you have a 3-chip camera, of course). The colors are then interpolated into those pixels which measure different color channels. Therefore you have only 1 to 2 bytes per pixel in the raw format.
1) A bug in one of our products affects an important customer. Engineering works feverishly to release updated firmware to fix the problem. As soon as the fix is validated, we e-mail it to the customer, but they never get the attachment. Why? IT decided to block attachments for unknown file types. The director of my division calls IT and compains. The response: "Sorry, that's our new policy." Our solution: I fly to Germany to hand deliver the updated firmware on a CD. Cost to the company: about $4000 in travel, 2 days of my time, and a customer who thinks we're crazy.
Did the director tell the IT department about your specific file type, so they could just add that to the white list of allowed attachments instead of just allowing all sorts of attachments? If he did, and they refused to add that file type, it's their fault. If he didn't, then it's his fault. BTW, hand delivery is indeed crazy: If an email attachment had beed enough, surely mailing them a CD-R with the patches would have done it as well, and would surely have cost you less. But even for email, there might be solutions, like uuencode (which makes the file part of the mail text instead of an attachment, and therefore might not be detected/blocked by the automatic filters).
2) We are completing the timing analysis for a new ASIC. The simulations take about a week to complete, and if they are interrupted we have to start over. The only problem is that every time we start the tests, IT deploys a new security patch and forces a reboot of the PC before the testing can complete. This happens repeatedly and results in a 2 month delay in getting the chips made. We make up some of that lost time, but the project still slips by more than a month. As a result, we were contractually obligated to refund $200,000 of the NRE we got for doing the work since we missed our dates.
Did you talk to the IT department about this? Would it have been an option to take the PC from the net during the testing period, and then apply all securiy patches in one bulk before reconnecting it?
3) We use ClearCase for source code control. Everyone in the company with a unix account had access to the source code and could check in and check out files. Our IT department decided this was a security risk -- reasonable, I suppose. To correct the problem, without notice they disabled access for everyone. They then sent out an email saying that anyone who needed access had to fill out a form, get it signed by a manager, and fax it to their department. They were so bombarded with these requests that it took about 3 weeks to process them all and get everyone's access restored. It took them about 2 weeks to get to mine. During that time, my company paid me a fat salary to sit at my desk and learn how to work a rubik's cube. I can now work a rubik's cube in about 90 seconds, but this is of questionable value to my company.
Ok, this one is clearly a stupid action from your IT department.
4) To increase password security, our IT department implemented a new password policy. All passwords must be at least 8 characters long, contain at least one uppercase character, one lowercase character, and one number or symbol. All passwords must be changed every 30 days. When changing your password, you can't use any of the last 10 passwords you have used. Every system that requires a login must use a different password (I have a windows login, a unix login, a SAP login, and a login for an internal bug tracking tool). Ironically, all of these systems use LDAP authentication which was implemented about 2 years ago so that we could use the SAME password for all our accounts. If you enter the wrong password 5 times, your account gets locked out and you have to issue a ticket to the help desk to get your account restored. This usually takes about a day. The result of this new policy: people write their passwords on post-it notes and stick it on their monitor because they
After all, I'd prefer to get into contact with a million normal bacteria than with a few thousand plague bacteria. No, I'm not claiming there are plague bacteria on the toilet seat:-)
The discussion of the Hamburg-Berlin link is over. That one will not be built. AFAIK the only application in Germany which is still under discussion is the link from Munich to its airport.
Of course, after all, the internet is based on the Total Crime Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), as well as some other protocol building on that like the Hacker Tool Transfer Protocol (HTTP - remember, hackers are evil people who want to destroy your data), the Simple Malware Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or the Fraudulent Transaction Protocol (FTP). Also there are data formats used like the Porn Distribution Format (PDF). You see, the internet is EVIL!
in order to improve the working atmosphere, we have decided to avoid unnecessery meetings. To that end, before any scheduled meeting, there will a meeting to find out if the scheduled meeting is necessary. If the scheduled meeting is found not to be necessary, it will be cancelled. We are sure you welcome our decision.
No, we're adding complexity to our description of a complex system, which is pretty much what we have to do when it turns out to be more conplex than our previous description could account for.
Of course, often it also turns out that the complexity of the description isn't due to the complexity of the system, but due to the description not fitting the system well. The classical example for that are the epicycles. All that complexity vanished as soon as Kepler found his three laws. Now, of course looking closer, there was again additional complexity (the planets did not exactly follow those ellipses), which again were mostly resolved when Newton formulated his laws of motion and his law of gravitation (disclaimer: the deviations may have been observed only after Newton formulated his laws).
Of course that doesn't mean that better laws are always the answer; Uranus not following the predicted trajectory was resolved not by changing the law of gravitation, but by adding another, up to then unobserved mass in form of another planet, Neptune, which afterwards was indeed found at the expected place. Also irregularities in the Neptun orbit caused the finding of Pluto. So sometimes the correct solution is indeed to add complexity to the current description (an eight-planet solar system is more complex than a 7-planet one, and a 9-planet solar system is more complex than an 8-planet one).
Of course, the correct solution to Mercury precession again was not an additional mass, but a new Theorie: Einstein's General Relativity.
So indeed too much complexity can be a sign that a new, simpler theory has to be found. OTOH, it of course doesn't need to be.
Dark matter is needed to locally provide additional gravitation. Dark energy is needed to globally provide anti-gravitation.
Gravitons, if they exist (which we will not know for sure until we have a successful theory of quantum gravitation) don't have mass (if they had mass, gravitation would only act on a limited distance, just like the weak force). OTOH this is not really a counter-argument since gravitation isn't really generated by mass, but by energy and momentum (generation by mass is jsut a good approximation in the newtonian limit). Now, gravitational waves carry energy and momentum (after all, the proof of gravitational waves was from a binary system losing energy this way), therefore indeed it itself generates gravitation. However, that extra gravitation is much weaker than the original one, and (at least if I understood that part of the book by Misner, Thorne, Wheeler correctly) when one sums up that infinite sum, it converges and one recovers the full GR equations. Now, this is true for the classical field. If it can work in quantum gravitation is another question. Indeed, AFAIK one problem with quantum gravitation is that simply quantizing the GR leads to a non-renormalizable theory, which means exactly that you get infinities which you cannot get rid of. This might be seen as a sign that the graviton ansatz is not correct, but of course it might also just mean that direct quantization of GR is just not the right approach (I think I have heared somewhere that string theory avoids those infinities).
Of course, while I'm a physicist, I'm neither a gravitation/GR physicist, nor a quantum field theorist (although I took both GR and QFT lectures at university), let alone a quantum gravity or even string theory expert (where I didn't even attend a lecture or read a scientific book or paper about), so take all of the above with a big grain of salt.
There are two parts where I've found clearly unclear formulations:
Section 6.[3] b): "accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model"
Is that an and or an or? That is, does it mean if a company stops offering spare parts/support before the end of the three years, it doesn't need to give source code any more, despite the three years are not over, or does it mean that if after those three years, they still offer spare parts or support, they also need to provide the source, despite the three years have passed? I suspect the latter, in which case the appropriate formulation would IMHO be "valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, but at least for three years".
7. e): "The conditions must limit retaliation to a subset of these two cases: 1. Lawsuits that lack the justification of retaliating against other software patent lawsuits that lack such justification. 2. Lawsuits that target part of this work, or other code that was elsewhere released together with the parts you added, the whole being under the terms used here for those parts."
Same question: and or or? That is, has it to be a subset of the union of the two sets defined by the conditions given, or of the intersection?
BTW, I think the definition of the term "aggregate" in section 5.[2] would logically belong in the section 0. Definitions.
Fourty satellites in two systems are inherently more robust. Say the attacker finds a way to kick off GPS by sending some special signal to the satellites. If all fourty satellites belong to the same system, they will all react to the same signal. With two independent systems, Galileo satellites will likely be unaffected by GPS exploits (and vice versa).
"Apple realized that it's legacy code was no good years ago and succesfully ditched it in favor of something more modern"
No. Apple ditched their code in favor of something that predates Windows.
Those two statements don't contradict each other. Just because something was produced later doesn't mean it's more modern. A newly made horse carriage is less modern than a 50 years old car.
I think at that time, the typical protocols for those tasks on a PC were "walk to the computer you want to work on" and "floppy disk". Internet just wasn't that common outside academic institutions. And Windows 3.x was single-user anyway (i.e. as soon as you had physical access to a computer, you didn't need to play any tricks with WMF files, you just could put your code in a.COM or.EXE and start it directly).
With WMF we want to be very clear: the Windows 9x platform is not vulnerable to any "Critical" attack vector. The reason Windows 9x is not vulnerable to a "Critical" attack vector is because an additional step exists in the Win9x platform: When not printing to a printer, applications will simply never process the SetAbortProc record.
Which makes me wonder, why on earth did they remove that security measure in later versions of Windows?
Alternatively, to get the same momentum, you only need to send out 1/4 of the mass. Of course you need 4 times the energy to accelerate the ions (4 times the speed gives a factor of 4^2=16 for the energy, but 1/4 of the mass gives just the factor 1/4; or said differently, with E=p^2/2m, using 1/4 of the mass for the same momentum gives 4 times the energy). So while this new drive is more propellant efficient, it also is more energy hungry. OTOH, when looking at a real space probe, you'll also have to accelerate the yet-unused propellant as well, so if you need less propellant, you also need less momentum to get the desired spacecraft speed. In the extreme case where spacecraft mass is negligible to propellant mass, 1/4 propellant means 1/4 of the mass to accelerate, and therefore 1/4 momentum, i.e. 1/16 energy needed. Which more than offsets the factor 4 above (i.e. in that extreme case, you'd need just 1/4 of the energy). The real spacecrafts are most probably somewhere in between those two extremes (I don't know how much of the spacecraft mass typically goes to propellant initially; of course at the end if the propellant gets used up, the extreme case of factor 4 is reached), but I could well imagine that there's a net win in energy for real spacecrafts.
So, you definitely save propellant mass, but if you save energy or even need more of it depends on how much of the spacecraft mass goes to the propellant.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, indeed, sorry for missing that. Well, at least my post gave additional value by linking to the relevant Wikipedia article :-)
Note also that GPLv2 has the advantage that it already has been tested in (German) court and was found enforceable.
On digital cameras each pixel delivers only one color channel by using a Bayer filter (unless you have a 3-chip camera, of course). The colors are then interpolated into those pixels which measure different color channels. Therefore you have only 1 to 2 bytes per pixel in the raw format.
Well, following that link, I get:
... I guess that was not the intended effect! :-)
Please Visit my site on this cached mirror... scanner photography
where the link is again to exactly the same coral cache mirror page
Did the director tell the IT department about your specific file type, so they could just add that to the white list of allowed attachments instead of just allowing all sorts of attachments? If he did, and they refused to add that file type, it's their fault. If he didn't, then it's his fault. BTW, hand delivery is indeed crazy: If an email attachment had beed enough, surely mailing them a CD-R with the patches would have done it as well, and would surely have cost you less. But even for email, there might be solutions, like uuencode (which makes the file part of the mail text instead of an attachment, and therefore might not be detected/blocked by the automatic filters).
Did you talk to the IT department about this? Would it have been an option to take the PC from the net during the testing period, and then apply all securiy patches in one bulk before reconnecting it?
Ok, this one is clearly a stupid action from your IT department.
After all, I'd prefer to get into contact with a million normal bacteria than with a few thousand plague bacteria. :-)
No, I'm not claiming there are plague bacteria on the toilet seat
But AFAIK a maglev system can (mostly) regain that electricity when going down again.
Of course the whole dialog fits much better to yesterday's article.
The discussion of the Hamburg-Berlin link is over. That one will not be built. AFAIK the only application in Germany which is still under discussion is the link from Munich to its airport.
Oops, reminder to myself: Don't forget to review! Of course TCP/IP means Total Crime Protocol/Illegal Protocol!
Of course, after all, the internet is based on the Total Crime Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), as well as some other protocol building on that like the Hacker Tool Transfer Protocol (HTTP - remember, hackers are evil people who want to destroy your data), the Simple Malware Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or the Fraudulent Transaction Protocol (FTP). Also there are data formats used like the Porn Distribution Format (PDF). You see, the internet is EVIL!
I think I'll skip all those integers and directly jump to Web aleph-0.
Dear employees,
in order to improve the working atmosphere, we have decided to avoid unnecessery meetings. To that end, before any scheduled meeting, there will a meeting to find out if the scheduled meeting is necessary. If the scheduled meeting is found not to be necessary, it will be cancelled. We are sure you welcome our decision.
Your management.
Of course, often it also turns out that the complexity of the description isn't due to the complexity of the system, but due to the description not fitting the system well. The classical example for that are the epicycles. All that complexity vanished as soon as Kepler found his three laws. Now, of course looking closer, there was again additional complexity (the planets did not exactly follow those ellipses), which again were mostly resolved when Newton formulated his laws of motion and his law of gravitation (disclaimer: the deviations may have been observed only after Newton formulated his laws).
Of course that doesn't mean that better laws are always the answer; Uranus not following the predicted trajectory was resolved not by changing the law of gravitation, but by adding another, up to then unobserved mass in form of another planet, Neptune, which afterwards was indeed found at the expected place. Also irregularities in the Neptun orbit caused the finding of Pluto. So sometimes the correct solution is indeed to add complexity to the current description (an eight-planet solar system is more complex than a 7-planet one, and a 9-planet solar system is more complex than an 8-planet one).
Of course, the correct solution to Mercury precession again was not an additional mass, but a new Theorie: Einstein's General Relativity.
So indeed too much complexity can be a sign that a new, simpler theory has to be found. OTOH, it of course doesn't need to be.
In short:
Dark matter is needed to locally provide additional gravitation.
Dark energy is needed to globally provide anti-gravitation.
Gravitons, if they exist (which we will not know for sure until we have a successful theory of quantum gravitation) don't have mass (if they had mass, gravitation would only act on a limited distance, just like the weak force). OTOH this is not really a counter-argument since gravitation isn't really generated by mass, but by energy and momentum (generation by mass is jsut a good approximation in the newtonian limit). Now, gravitational waves carry energy and momentum (after all, the proof of gravitational waves was from a binary system losing energy this way), therefore indeed it itself generates gravitation. However, that extra gravitation is much weaker than the original one, and (at least if I understood that part of the book by Misner, Thorne, Wheeler correctly) when one sums up that infinite sum, it converges and one recovers the full GR equations. Now, this is true for the classical field. If it can work in quantum gravitation is another question. Indeed, AFAIK one problem with quantum gravitation is that simply quantizing the GR leads to a non-renormalizable theory, which means exactly that you get infinities which you cannot get rid of. This might be seen as a sign that the graviton ansatz is not correct, but of course it might also just mean that direct quantization of GR is just not the right approach (I think I have heared somewhere that string theory avoids those infinities).
Of course, while I'm a physicist, I'm neither a gravitation/GR physicist, nor a quantum field theorist (although I took both GR and QFT lectures at university), let alone a quantum gravity or even string theory expert (where I didn't even attend a lecture or read a scientific book or paper about), so take all of the above with a big grain of salt.
Well, that's the inventixibility of Perl programmers. :-)
There are two parts where I've found clearly unclear formulations:
Section 6.[3] b): "accompanied by a written offer, valid
for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts
or customer support for that product model"
Is that an and or an or? That is, does it mean if a company stops offering spare parts/support before the end of the three years, it doesn't need to give source code any more, despite the three years are not over, or does it mean that if after those three years, they still offer spare parts or support, they also need to provide the source, despite the three years have passed? I suspect the latter, in which case the appropriate formulation would IMHO be "valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, but at least for three years".
7. e): "The conditions must
limit retaliation to a subset of these two cases: 1. Lawsuits that lack
the justification of retaliating against other software patent lawsuits
that lack such justification. 2. Lawsuits that target part of this
work, or other code that was elsewhere released together with the parts
you added, the whole being under the terms used here for those parts."
Same question: and or or? That is, has it to be a subset of the union of the two sets defined by the conditions given, or of the intersection?
BTW, I think the definition of the term "aggregate" in section 5.[2] would logically belong in the section 0. Definitions.
Have you ever read an EULA for proprietary software? Compared with that, it's easy reading!
Fourty satellites in two systems are inherently more robust. Say the attacker finds a way to kick off GPS by sending some special signal to the satellites. If all fourty satellites belong to the same system, they will all react to the same signal. With two independent systems, Galileo satellites will likely be unaffected by GPS exploits (and vice versa).
And of course calling their server processors "Opteron" instead of the existing name "Athlon" didn't hurt them as well.
Those two statements don't contradict each other. Just because something was produced later doesn't mean it's more modern. A newly made horse carriage is less modern than a 50 years old car.
I think at that time, the typical protocols for those tasks on a PC were "walk to the computer you want to work on" and "floppy disk". Internet just wasn't that common outside academic institutions.
And Windows 3.x was single-user anyway (i.e. as soon as you had physical access to a computer, you didn't need to play any tricks with WMF files, you just could put your code in a
An interesting quote from the first link:
With WMF we want to be very clear: the Windows 9x platform is not vulnerable to any "Critical" attack vector. The reason Windows 9x is not vulnerable to a "Critical" attack vector is because an additional step exists in the Win9x platform: When not printing to a printer, applications will simply never process the SetAbortProc record.
Which makes me wonder, why on earth did they remove that security measure in later versions of Windows?
Alternatively, to get the same momentum, you only need to send out 1/4 of the mass. Of course you need 4 times the energy to accelerate the ions (4 times the speed gives a factor of 4^2=16 for the energy, but 1/4 of the mass gives just the factor 1/4; or said differently, with E=p^2/2m, using 1/4 of the mass for the same momentum gives 4 times the energy). So while this new drive is more propellant efficient, it also is more energy hungry. OTOH, when looking at a real space probe, you'll also have to accelerate the yet-unused propellant as well, so if you need less propellant, you also need less momentum to get the desired spacecraft speed. In the extreme case where spacecraft mass is negligible to propellant mass, 1/4 propellant means 1/4 of the mass to accelerate, and therefore 1/4 momentum, i.e. 1/16 energy needed. Which more than offsets the factor 4 above (i.e. in that extreme case, you'd need just 1/4 of the energy). The real spacecrafts are most probably somewhere in between those two extremes (I don't know how much of the spacecraft mass typically goes to propellant initially; of course at the end if the propellant gets used up, the extreme case of factor 4 is reached), but I could well imagine that there's a net win in energy for real spacecrafts.
So, you definitely save propellant mass, but if you save energy or even need more of it depends on how much of the spacecraft mass goes to the propellant.
iCall!