>> So by your logic, we can call any B&W display >> (meaning truly 1 bit) greyscale because I can >> dither or flash them on and off?
> Are you some kind of a troll? Those two > techniques are exactly how greyscale displays > work.
Yow, you're totally wrong on how a monochrome display works here... When you use a grayscale display (or a color one, which works the same way with three guns) the monitor hardware modulates the strength of the electron beam proportionally to the input voltage. The monitor makes grayscale because it was designed to. You could also make a monochrome-only display that doesn't respond proportionally, instead it has a set threshold and anything higher than that is on, anything lower is off.
Inside your computer, the video is all digital. There's a frame buffer that holds a multi-bit value of high bright you'd like the screen to be there. The last step before the signal leaves the computer is that it's run through a digital-to-analog converter that generates the appropriate voltage level out.
In a laptop, there a true digital->screen conversion, but it still looks at that multi-bit value, then transmits that value to the display's drive electronics.
What the original poster in this thread was talking about was something different. He knows that you can light a dot on the screen up, and if you turn it off, it takes a while (more than a refresh cycle) to dim to, uh, white in this case. So, he takes advantage of that hysteresis and the fact that the display's refresh rate much faster than the LCD responds. If he wants a dot to be black (all on), he writes "on" on each refresh cycle. If he wants it to be gray, then he writes "on" one cycle and "off" the rest. Instead of antialiasing in space, he does it it time, which is pretty cool, but probably has the effect of very uneven rendition of the levels (the decay of the LCD won't be linear and you probably can't tweak it much). And, obviously, it will be much less responsive to UI interaction, although you might turn this mode on only when looking at a picture.
I doubt that Palm is doing that, but if the original poster still has his code, I don't think he'll ever get any more money for it than from Palm RIGHT NOW!.
Back in the days before CDs, I believe there may have been a super-esoteric turntable that tried to do this (or perhaps it was just a press release gracing a CES show).
It's actually a good idea that doesn't have to sound like a CD. CD music=digitized music. A laser turntable can be used as a precise no-contact ANALOG reader.
In fact, they're obsolete now, but 12" laserdiscs are doing exactly this - the disk is an optical medium, but the signal on that disk is analog, not digital.
Now, you can't overcome the limits of the analog recording process, the cool thing about analog systems are that you can keep making them better and better. There is always hope.
The generic name for these units are "flight cases" or "ATA cases". They are built to Airline Transit Authority (I think that's right) standards, and can be checked on a plane without you signing a waiver for the value of the contents. That means a minimum of 1/4" no-void plywood, water/chemical-proof ABS sheeting on the outsides, aluminum channels all around the edges, 2" of foam on all sides of the object, and gnarly hardware like big steel ball corners that resist impact damage.
The problem is they case will cost more than the monitor inside. It will weigh more too.
Anvil custom builds cases to fit anything - grand piano, toupee rack, etc. If you really want to freak out your son's competition, then get a wheeled flight case that holds the LCD display AND his fencing gear. It will inspire fear in the competition.
These guys are best known for building cases for everything that a touring rock band uses and schleps around the country on a major tour. These are also the sorts of cases that you see TV crews carry their equipment in as well.
What about industry? Certainly you shouldn't be excepted to adhere to the contract if you work for Advance Micro Devices making motherboards and your invention has to do with a way to improve lipstick - your employer should have NO claim to your invention since it in no way had anything whatsoever to do with your employment or even your employers industry.
If the Alcatel agreement has been anything like the ones that I've signed in the past, then the way this works is that the IP of your lipstick improvement is owned by AMD without question. You may negotiate with your employer to license the invention from them, or even request an outright release of the invention to you. If you developed a lipstick process and you work for AMD, the chances are quite good that they will release it to you with no strings other than perhaps some compensation for the cost of reviewing by their legal department. With that release, you can continue to design motherboards all day and mix lipstick all night and see which one makes you rich first.
The key thing that can earn you the opportunity to regain ownership of the idea is that your invention didn't come about through a path directly related to what the company pays you for. In particular, the company will be protective of any ideas that spring from your direct work and could pose a competitive threat to their own products. Of course, there are many companies that have sprung from just these circumstances - the classic one here is Intel, started by a bunch of guys that thought Fairchild was too stodgy. The existence of so many of these examples is exactly the reason that your company asks you to sign a ridiculously overreaching agreement in exchange for an offer of employment.
If you're familiar with the gestation of Apple Computer, it's almost exactly like the cited case. Steve Wozniak was a red-hot who wanted to build a personal computer. That was a little different than his job at Hewlett-Packard, but not very. The protos were built in an HP lab, using HP parts. After he proved it was do-able, he offered it to H-P as a product opportunity. They didn't see how anybody would ever want a personal computer and released the IP to Woz. The rest is history.
I haven't read the thread fully, but people who write technical documentation often run into this wall as well. They may be approached to write a doc for a product unrelated to their "day job" or may choose to write a book on what they do work on but for the publisher rather than their employer. In both these cases, they typically must submit their drafts to the company for clearance and release.
Finally, this choice of motherboards and lipstick is an interesting one. One of the big, hip lipstick companies is called Urban Decay. They made their name with weird colors that had names like "Toxic" and "Pallor". I think she's left now, but the founder of that company, Sandy Lerner was one of the founders of Cisco Systems...
Yes, the display's just a display. These unusual resolutions called out for the Mac are the historical resolutions for Apple's non-multisync monitors. Those resolutions are still supported today, but on modern Macs (since the mid-90s), support for multisync monitors and most of the PC standard resolutions are included as well.
Well the first computer I ever had free reign of was one of those Commodore Pet computers with the little tiny calculator keyboard. Little memory, little keyboard, no disk, and I still managed to learn a little assembler to pep up my BASIC programs.
When I came out to the Silicon Valley to go to college in 1978, I left the PET behind, but still checked out the computer shops when I had free time (anybody remember The Byte Shop in Palo Alto? Computerland in Los Altos?). One of the things that I found pretty entertaining at a Commodore shop was a guy that was debugging by putting a little AM radio next to the computer. If you tuned to the right frequency (and I'm embarassed that I don't remember it), you'd hear the sound of your code executing as static. If you had the right loop coded, you would hear a burst of static when it executed, and this guy would drop in the little flag routine as a debugging aid. By putting in a marker like that in the different long-running repetious sections,you could actually tell where your code was running, or if you were stuck in an infinite loop.
Kind of cool back then, although I have to admit that I don't remember writing anything that ever took 2 minutes to execute. Well, intentionally anyway...
It was a shocking tale, that unfolded in the quietest of ways.
An epidemic spread, wiping out all of man's politicians. Average people, missing their senators and assemblymen, started again with their closest substitute - professional wrestlers. It started with just a governor in Minnesota, but soon, wrestlers were everywhere.
> The maximum people are willing to pay isn't > constant; it's variable. For example, if > somebody outbids you, you may discover that you > are willing to pay more than you thought. Quite > a lot of marketing works on this principle.
> Whether or not this is a good or wise thing, I > dunno, but it's a true thing.
Right on - increasing by increments is one of the driving philosophies behind auctions in general. If you're willing to pay $250 dollars for something, then wouldn't you be willing to pay $255 if somebody else beat you by bidding $252.50.
The other driving factors are that you want to "win" and you want to pay as few dollars as possible.
Living in the Silicon Valley, you could attend a live dot-bomb auction every week last year. I went to a few, and it was interesting to see the auctioneers work all these factors. These sorts of blowouts have a lot of negatives - you can't try out most of the gear and there's no warranty if it doesn't work, yet, the prices often surpass eBay where you generally get those things through artful mind games. Once you're willing to pay $10,000 for a $200,000 Sun server, another $500 is nothing right? Especially if you can keep that guy from getting it...
The bad part about eBay is that the proxy bidding system doesn't really help you against snipers.
If you put in your max with an hour to go, then somebody who's actually present can continually bid until they just pass your proxy limit.
OK, now the real picture. It's exactly the last sentence, except that that sniper is going to beat you if you only allow 10 *seconds* before the close of the auction.
I guess the good part about proxy is that you won't end up getting into a last minute escalation past what you wanted to spend.
An even better system would be for eBay to mod the engine so it works like a real auction - you set a time when you go into "closing bid mode" and after that point, you allow some small amount of time - 15 seconds or something for anybody to counter offer. I'm not sure why they don't do this - eBay's cut is a percentage, and I'm sure the seller wouldn't mind getting a few more bucks too. I guess this may have to do with trying to run the nighmarishly large eBay database like this in real time.
> When you just have some programmers writing > code and fixing bugs on the weekend, you can't > rely on that software for things that need to > be up and running all the time unless they are > thoroughly tested in the environment you plan > on running it in.
I understand the argument that you're making (and understand the traction it has in the CIOs office), but that logic doesn't really hold. The act of paying somebody to work on something doesn't mean that they will be capable or available to fix a problem when something critical arises - ask your CIO if he's been assfscked by a fatal bug but had to wait 3 months to the next maintainence release to get resolution. If that never happened, then you must work at a Fortune 25 company, cause everybody else is going to have to wait for the next train to leave the station.
Making the code free and the source open doesn't free it from being a balloon filled with spaghetti either. But if a bug is hosing me, then there's a good chance that it hosed someone else too, and that creates more pressure for a fix. And if a problem is so critical that my company's life depends on it, then I can't think of a better reason to find/grow a (highly-paid) person who understands this code and can fix it. Going open source means that I have a chance to do this, as opposed to paying a big support yearly support fee and hoping somebody inside Microsoft/Sun/Oracle headquarters sees fit to escalate my bug report.
I think the real problem that scares decisionmakers from open source is that the roadmap is often unclear and almost certainly un-influenable. One guy wants better multiprocessor support in Linux and another guy wants a faster filesystem - I still haven't figured out how half the customers aren't mad at the end of the day.
Tension isn't the problem - it really is the wear and handling issue that's mentioned here ad nauseum.
If you're serious about your server backups, then you'll throw away those expensive DLT carts after a couple of uses to avoid just this problem. Or you can send them to me.
Digital data recording is a lot more sensitive than video or audio. There are error detection and correction schemes in effect in both applications, but with the data recording, you have a true data loss when there's wear. If you have even a lot of bits dropped in a video tape, the error correction will just make up something plausible (which may be as simple as repeating the last good frame). People here seem to think that optical disks don't have errors, but that's not the case at all - they are employing their own error correction, and (for DVD or CD) making up data as they go along.
OK, I'll agree that M*A*S*H had a really great finale, even though the series was so stylized that I often found it difficult to watch. Saw some of the 30th reunion show on Friday and thought it was one of the best shows of that type I've ever seen as the cast were suprisingly literate. I hate to think of what the X-Files 30th anniversary show would be like...
And I'm a gigantic St. Elsewhere fan - I was working 80+ hour weeks at Apple back then, grinding out my little bit of what was going to be the first Macs with color and slots and I was stubbornly insistent on being home to watch St. Elsewhere each week to keep some tenuous connection with the outside world (OK, pretty darn tenuous). But I have to admit that I didn't like the finale. All the dream of an autistic son? Come on... (Should I have put a SPOILER ALERT around that?:-)).
There was actually a very good Buffy the Vampire Slayer earlier this season which explained the entire show in one fell swoop. No spoiler here, but if you're going to have it all be a dream, this was the way to do it.
Hmm.. Any other dream resolutions shows? Who killed J.R.? That one really takes the cake as worst deus ex machina that I can imagine, but I believe they painted themselves into a corner because of contracts back then.
I believe apc is right with regard to the venue for a lawsuit.
Another *great* point made here - contact the EFF and see whether they can review and advise your company on this matter. When the IP infringment letter arrived a regular lawyer would probably do a quick patent search, then tell the owner to get out their checkbook. The EFF is much better versed in online technologies and the law related to this topic.
This is so sad to see. PanIP is basically a technology squatter. They earn a questionable patent, then prey on small guys that really can't afford to vigorously fight back. Even if one of the victims, or even a group of them pooled their efforts, there won't be anything to be gained - the corporate value of PanIP will almost certainly be the patent. If you successfully defend against their patent claims, then they have no value, hence nothing to compensate your legal fees, etc.
Sort of like domain name squatting - PanIP is just using the system opportunistically.
Well, the helicopter probably really does take it, but in MI2, there's the scene were Tom Cruise skids across the intersection doing a front-wheel wheelie and swivelling around to shoot people.
Hmmm... Although you often can get a motorcycle into that position it's usually followed by a sliding, crashed motorcycle and fresh organ donor. Even professional motorcycle racers (who haven't got a bit of sense in their heads) must laugh when they see this.
I like to think that the special effects team trying to explain why they shouldn't have to do that stunt to the director.
AC wrote: > One benift of 3D I can think of off the top of > my head is z-order. Move a window ahead on > screen, all you have to do is rearrange the z- > order.
This is only a benefit at first glance. When you actually try to implement this, you'll run directly into the problem that IAmTheRealMike posed in his excellent post.
Using a 3D package for Z-order (actually, this is only 2-1/2D, as the layers are parallel to each other) lets you flip quickly, but for that to happen, you'll have to render all your layers. Where will you render them? If you want it to be fast, then you'll have to render them into video RAM - RAM that the hardware accelerator can access directly so it can do the fast compositing. Ouch. Now, instead of your display RAM being used for the composited image that you see on your screen, you now will eat a screen's worth for each of your layers. So, you'll eat your fast display RAM more quickly, and mostly for stuff that's obscured.
It's even worse than that. You need to keep all those layers updated which means that you'll be burning cycles drawing obscured stuff. In a conventional windowing system, you calculate the visible (non-obscured) region of your layers and only update that part. I guess you could do this with a hardware accelerated/composited system, but that calculation of what's visible for each layer is most of the expensive calculation that you were trying to avoid.
Don't get me wrong - a hardware composited system like this can work great if you have a specific app that takes control of the display surface. But for a general purpose windowing system like the Mac, Windows, or X, the resource problems that arise usually mean that you reserve a couple hardware windows for the front interaction, and composite all the other layers together in the traditional way. That's almost certainly going to be more work than less.
By the way, when I refer to videoRAM or display RAM, I don't mean vRAM devices (which don't really exist anymore). What I mean is the RAM (could be on a card or elsewhere in the system) which is directly accessible by the hardware compositor. Although AGP systems were supposed to allow access like this to motherboard memory, I don't think anybody actually implements this this way.
I guess I don't "get" any of these Kidman classic performances, either.
She's no Jodie Foster, that's for sure. Yes, I can see Nicole Kidman has at least a small amount of acting ability, but the fact that she has no apparent IQ when off camera doesn't seem very appealing to me, either.
> "Demolition Man," with Sly Stallone and > Wesley Snipes.
Well, yeah, but the *real* star of the movie is Sandra Bullock, right? The way she sings the Green Giant theme really makes me want to go to the nearest Taco Bell immediately.
And when you signed up for service, you likely agreed that the extent of damages are limited to the prorated cost of service. Contact the state, have your lawyer write a letter - and enjoy the $4 dollars damages your receive.
You can decide whether Microsoft's behavior toward end users is appropriate or not, but that's not what the lawsuits are about - it's how they handle OEM deals with computer manufacturers.
Since most people want MS software on their new computers, MS negotiates deals with the Dells and Compaqs of the world for Windows. The problem is that the deal usually goes something like "pay us $50/installed copy or, if you prefer, just pay us $25 licensing for each computer you build - even if you don't have Windows installed". You'd never have the balls to suggest that unless you had 90%+ market share at those manufacturers.
Now, there's always a few people that will want to install BeOS and Be has a retail box that caters to them. But the real money for them is when people can buy a new computer - even if it's only going to be used as a editing workstation - straight from the factory with BeOS installed. The MS licensing model basically makes that buyer pay for Windows even if it was never loaded.
If you were the BeOS salesman, you now have to go to a Gateway and try to convince them that BeOS is worth having as an option. The Gateway guy will tell them that until there are compelling apps, BeOS better be cheap or free for them to even consider messing with it. If Be has to charge a premium price (part of which is "paying for Windows" from the OEM's point of view), then they can play, but price elasticity says that will seriously reduce the volume.
The only way MS can push such heavy handed licensing tactics is because they're a monopoly, and that's where the lawsuits are coming from.
Characterizing perceptual color differences is pretty hard - as some of the earlier posts mention, this is the focus of a lot of research.
RGB space won't help you out. It was a good try to go to Lab space, but this actually will make the simple solution harder. Lab is great for retouching as it separates the monochrome information into the L (lightness) channel and the color information to the a&b channels. Practically speaking, that means you could scan an image in RGB or CMYK, convert to Lab space, then very easily apply a sharpening convolution to the image. This sharpens the detail in your image while minimizing or eliminating color shifts. If you tried to do this in RGB, you would need a ridiculously complex kernel to sharpen without color distortion. Try this in Photoshop and amaze your friends.
But if you do this in your case, you can't use the L channel as you've removed all the color info. And you need a weird vectorizing brain to understand what a value difference in a&b mean.
You actually want to go the other way, to HSV space. This is a polar space, where the the H channel represents the hue, S channel is saturation, and V is the brightness component. Once you do this matrix conversion from RGB, you'll probably want to establish a threshold value for differences in the H channel. That forces the colors to be a minimum "space" apart. You probably will also want to set a threshold on V as well so "light red" and "dark red" can be distinguished. As you describe the problem, you might want to look at whether S differences are meaningful, but I doubt that will be the case.
Because of the way your eyes work, a simple threshold won't provide perceptually proportional differences throughout the spectrum, but for a simple test as you describe, a basic threshold should be fine.
Good luck!
Re:dunno, most of my drives are pretty quiet
on
Harddrive Speakers
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· Score: 1
I never heard anybody describe it as popcorn, but now that you mention it, that's almost exactly what it sounds like...
It's a little pricey just to dink with, but I got some Fujitsu MAJ 10K drives for my Sun and they were much, much quieter on seek than the smaller (and older, yes, I realize this isn't a completely fair comparison) Seagate Cheetahs that they replaced. I believe Cheetahs 10Ks are the gold standard for reliability these days, but certainly for non-server use, these Fujitsus seem perfectly fine without the noise.
These days, there's a newer series of Fujitsu drives (MAN), and I don't know if they're still quiet or not.
Palm did purchase the intellectual property which includes the BeOS source, but I think they've already said that they're not planning to commercialize derivative products in any recognizable form.
What they largely were buying were the engineering team. They have a lot of experience building a non-MS, non-unix modern OS up from scratch and have also built this on desktop-level and appliance-type machines. That's a great match for what Palm is doing, completely indpendently from the fact that you'll rarely find a more rabid and dedicated engineering team than the one they built at Be.
Think Linux guys are rabid? Be was 100 guys visibly and proudly spitting in the face of Microsoft for years, and going it alone when it was hard to make sales, stock prices vacillating, and through the temptation of the dot-com boom.
A friend of mine moved into a new apartment in San Jose a couple of years ago and was shocked he too was seeing these enormous download rates.
The reason dates back something like 7 or 8 years ago. Pacific Bell (our local Baby Bell) picked that small corridor of new development in San Jose to do a field test of an everything-and-the-kitchen=sink broadband system. This included digital telephone service, digital cable tv, and broadband data comm. They were gunning for TCI at the time that had an antiquated two-coax cable system and no serious plan for getting things fixed (btw, even with AT&T's takeover of TCI, the situation hasn't really changed even today in San Jose). So they laid in a state of the art infrastructure and basically priced it at the prevailing low-tech rates.
That meant a gigantic OC-3 connection to his complex that would someday carry a building's worth of video on demand on top of everything else. But the other services never came, and even with a building full of nerds, it was a rip-roaring pipe.
PacBell eventually gave up on their cable dreams, and TCI/AT&T annexed this entire system, but two years ago, they were still serving giant bandwidth (perhaps there's no savings in providing less connectivity to the existing hardware?). I've fallen out of touch with the guy, but I wouldn't be suprised if it's still the same.
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>> So by your logic, we can call any B&W display
>> (meaning truly 1 bit) greyscale because I can
>> dither or flash them on and off?
> Are you some kind of a troll? Those two
> techniques are exactly how greyscale displays > work.
Yow, you're totally wrong on how a monochrome display works here... When you use a grayscale display (or a color one, which works the same way with three guns) the monitor hardware modulates the strength of the electron beam proportionally to the input voltage. The monitor makes grayscale because it was designed to. You could also make a monochrome-only display that doesn't respond proportionally, instead it has a set threshold and anything higher than that is on, anything lower is off.
Inside your computer, the video is all digital. There's a frame buffer that holds a multi-bit value of high bright you'd like the screen to be there. The last step before the signal leaves the computer is that it's run through a digital-to-analog converter that generates the appropriate voltage level out.
In a laptop, there a true digital->screen conversion, but it still looks at that multi-bit value, then transmits that value to the display's drive electronics.
What the original poster in this thread was talking about was something different. He knows that you can light a dot on the screen up, and if you turn it off, it takes a while (more than a refresh cycle) to dim to, uh, white in this case. So, he takes advantage of that hysteresis and the fact that the display's refresh rate much faster than the LCD responds. If he wants a dot to be black (all on), he writes "on" on each refresh cycle. If he wants it to be gray, then he writes "on" one cycle and "off" the rest. Instead of antialiasing in space, he does it it time, which is pretty cool, but probably has the effect of very uneven rendition of the levels (the decay of the LCD won't be linear and you probably can't tweak it much). And, obviously, it will be much less responsive to UI interaction, although you might turn this mode on only when looking at a picture.
I doubt that Palm is doing that, but if the original poster still has his code, I don't think he'll ever get any more money for it than from Palm RIGHT NOW!.
Back in the days before CDs, I believe there may have been a super-esoteric turntable that tried to do this (or perhaps it was just a press release gracing a CES show).
It's actually a good idea that doesn't have to sound like a CD. CD music=digitized music. A laser turntable can be used as a precise no-contact ANALOG reader.
In fact, they're obsolete now, but 12" laserdiscs are doing exactly this - the disk is an optical medium, but the signal on that disk is analog, not digital.
Now, you can't overcome the limits of the analog recording process, the cool thing about analog systems are that you can keep making them better and better. There is always hope.
David Fung
Anvil = the best brand of these cases.
The generic name for these units are "flight cases" or "ATA cases". They are built to Airline Transit Authority (I think that's right) standards, and can be checked on a plane without you signing a waiver for the value of the contents. That means a minimum of 1/4" no-void plywood, water/chemical-proof ABS sheeting on the outsides, aluminum channels all around the edges, 2" of foam on all sides of the object, and gnarly hardware like big steel ball corners that resist impact damage.
The problem is they case will cost more than the monitor inside. It will weigh more too.
Anvil custom builds cases to fit anything - grand piano, toupee rack, etc. If you really want to freak out your son's competition, then get a wheeled flight case that holds the LCD display AND his fencing gear. It will inspire fear in the competition.
These guys are best known for building cases for everything that a touring rock band uses and schleps around the country on a major tour. These are also the sorts of cases that you see TV crews carry their equipment in as well.
David Fung
What about industry? Certainly you shouldn't be excepted to adhere to the contract if you work for Advance Micro Devices making motherboards and your invention has to do with a way to improve lipstick - your employer should have NO claim to your invention since it in no way had anything whatsoever to do with your employment or even your employers industry.
If the Alcatel agreement has been anything like the ones that I've signed in the past, then the way this works is that the IP of your lipstick improvement is owned by AMD without question. You may negotiate with your employer to license the invention from them, or even request an outright release of the invention to you. If you developed a lipstick process and you work for AMD, the chances are quite good that they will release it to you with no strings other than perhaps some compensation for the cost of reviewing by their legal department. With that release, you can continue to design motherboards all day and mix lipstick all night and see which one makes you rich first.
The key thing that can earn you the opportunity to regain ownership of the idea is that your invention didn't come about through a path directly related to what the company pays you for. In particular, the company will be protective of any ideas that spring from your direct work and could pose a competitive threat to their own products. Of course, there are many companies that have sprung from just these circumstances - the classic one here is Intel, started by a bunch of guys that thought Fairchild was too stodgy. The existence of so many of these examples is exactly the reason that your company asks you to sign a ridiculously overreaching agreement in exchange for an offer of employment.
If you're familiar with the gestation of Apple Computer, it's almost exactly like the cited case. Steve Wozniak was a red-hot who wanted to build a personal computer. That was a little different than his job at Hewlett-Packard, but not very. The protos were built in an HP lab, using HP parts. After he proved it was do-able, he offered it to H-P as a product opportunity. They didn't see how anybody would ever want a personal computer and released the IP to Woz. The rest is history.
I haven't read the thread fully, but people who write technical documentation often run into this wall as well. They may be approached to write a doc for a product unrelated to their "day job" or may choose to write a book on what they do work on but for the publisher rather than their employer. In both these cases, they typically must submit their drafts to the company for clearance and release.
Finally, this choice of motherboards and lipstick is an interesting one. One of the big, hip lipstick companies is called Urban Decay. They made their name with weird colors that had names like "Toxic" and "Pallor". I think she's left now, but the founder of that company, Sandy Lerner was one of the founders of Cisco Systems...
DF
Yes, the display's just a display. These unusual resolutions called out for the Mac are the historical resolutions for Apple's non-multisync monitors. Those resolutions are still supported today, but on modern Macs (since the mid-90s), support for multisync monitors and most of the PC standard resolutions are included as well.
Hmmm...
Well the first computer I ever had free reign of was one of those Commodore Pet computers with the little tiny calculator keyboard. Little memory, little keyboard, no disk, and I still managed to learn a little assembler to pep up my BASIC programs.
When I came out to the Silicon Valley to go to college in 1978, I left the PET behind, but still checked out the computer shops when I had free time (anybody remember The Byte Shop in Palo Alto? Computerland in Los Altos?). One of the things that I found pretty entertaining at a Commodore shop was a guy that was debugging by putting a little AM radio next to the computer. If you tuned to the right frequency (and I'm embarassed that I don't remember it), you'd hear the sound of your code executing as static. If you had the right loop coded, you would hear a burst of static when it executed, and this guy would drop in the little flag routine as a debugging aid. By putting in a marker like that in the different long-running repetious sections,you could actually tell where your code was running, or if you were stuck in an infinite loop.
Kind of cool back then, although I have to admit that I don't remember writing anything that ever took 2 minutes to execute. Well, intentionally anyway...
David Fung
It was a shocking tale, that unfolded in the quietest of ways.
An epidemic spread, wiping out all of man's politicians. Average people, missing their senators and assemblymen, started again with their closest substitute - professional wrestlers. It started with just a governor in Minnesota, but soon, wrestlers were everywhere.
And then, they learned to say "no".
> The maximum people are willing to pay isn't
> constant; it's variable. For example, if
> somebody outbids you, you may discover that you
> are willing to pay more than you thought. Quite
> a lot of marketing works on this principle.
> Whether or not this is a good or wise thing, I
> dunno, but it's a true thing.
Right on - increasing by increments is one of the driving philosophies behind auctions in general. If you're willing to pay $250 dollars for something, then wouldn't you be willing to pay $255 if somebody else beat you by bidding $252.50.
The other driving factors are that you want to "win" and you want to pay as few dollars as possible.
Living in the Silicon Valley, you could attend a live dot-bomb auction every week last year. I went to a few, and it was interesting to see the auctioneers work all these factors. These sorts of blowouts have a lot of negatives - you can't try out most of the gear and there's no warranty if it doesn't work, yet, the prices often surpass eBay where you generally get those things through artful mind games. Once you're willing to pay $10,000 for a $200,000 Sun server, another $500 is nothing right? Especially if you can keep that guy from getting it...
The bad part about eBay is that the proxy bidding system doesn't really help you against snipers.
If you put in your max with an hour to go, then somebody who's actually present can continually bid until they just pass your proxy limit.
OK, now the real picture. It's exactly the last sentence, except that that sniper is going to beat you if you only allow 10 *seconds* before the close of the auction.
I guess the good part about proxy is that you won't end up getting into a last minute escalation past what you wanted to spend.
An even better system would be for eBay to mod the engine so it works like a real auction - you set a time when you go into "closing bid mode" and after that point, you allow some small amount of time - 15 seconds or something for anybody to counter offer. I'm not sure why they don't do this - eBay's cut is a percentage, and I'm sure the seller wouldn't mind getting a few more bucks too. I guess this may have to do with trying to run the nighmarishly large eBay database like this in real time.
> When you just have some programmers writing
> code and fixing bugs on the weekend, you can't
> rely on that software for things that need to
> be up and running all the time unless they are
> thoroughly tested in the environment you plan
> on running it in.
I understand the argument that you're making (and understand the traction it has in the CIOs office), but that logic doesn't really hold. The act of paying somebody to work on something doesn't mean that they will be capable or available to fix a problem when something critical arises - ask your CIO if he's been assfscked by a fatal bug but had to wait 3 months to the next maintainence release to get resolution. If that never happened, then you must work at a Fortune 25 company, cause everybody else is going to have to wait for the next train to leave the station.
Making the code free and the source open doesn't free it from being a balloon filled with spaghetti either. But if a bug is hosing me, then there's a good chance that it hosed someone else too, and that creates more pressure for a fix. And if a problem is so critical that my company's life depends on it, then I can't think of a better reason to find/grow a (highly-paid) person who understands this code and can fix it. Going open source means that I have a chance to do this, as opposed to paying a big support yearly support fee and hoping somebody inside Microsoft/Sun/Oracle headquarters sees fit to escalate my bug report.
I think the real problem that scares decisionmakers from open source is that the roadmap is often unclear and almost certainly un-influenable. One guy wants better multiprocessor support in Linux and another guy wants a faster filesystem - I still haven't figured out how half the customers aren't mad at the end of the day.
Tension isn't the problem - it really is the wear and handling issue that's mentioned here ad nauseum.
If you're serious about your server backups, then you'll throw away those expensive DLT carts after a couple of uses to avoid just this problem. Or you can send them to me.
Digital data recording is a lot more sensitive than video or audio. There are error detection and correction schemes in effect in both applications, but with the data recording, you have a true data loss when there's wear. If you have even a lot of bits dropped in a video tape, the error correction will just make up something plausible (which may be as simple as repeating the last good frame). People here seem to think that optical disks don't have errors, but that's not the case at all - they are employing their own error correction, and (for DVD or CD) making up data as they go along.
OK, I'll agree that M*A*S*H had a really great finale, even though the series was so stylized that I often found it difficult to watch. Saw some of the 30th reunion show on Friday and thought it was one of the best shows of that type I've ever seen as the cast were suprisingly literate. I hate to think of what the X-Files 30th anniversary show would be like...
:-)).
And I'm a gigantic St. Elsewhere fan - I was working 80+ hour weeks at Apple back then, grinding out my little bit of what was going to be the first Macs with color and slots and I was stubbornly insistent on being home to watch St. Elsewhere each week to keep some tenuous connection with the outside world (OK, pretty darn tenuous). But I have to admit that I didn't like the finale. All the dream of an autistic son? Come on... (Should I have put a SPOILER ALERT around that?
There was actually a very good Buffy the Vampire Slayer earlier this season which explained the entire show in one fell swoop. No spoiler here, but if you're going to have it all be a dream, this was the way to do it.
Hmm.. Any other dream resolutions shows? Who killed J.R.? That one really takes the cake as worst deus ex machina that I can imagine, but I believe they painted themselves into a corner because of contracts back then.
DF
I believe apc is right with regard to the venue for a lawsuit.
Another *great* point made here - contact the EFF and see whether they can review and advise your company on this matter. When the IP infringment letter arrived a regular lawyer would probably do a quick patent search, then tell the owner to get out their checkbook. The EFF is much better versed in online technologies and the law related to this topic.
This is so sad to see. PanIP is basically a technology squatter. They earn a questionable patent, then prey on small guys that really can't afford to vigorously fight back. Even if one of the victims, or even a group of them pooled their efforts, there won't be anything to be gained - the corporate value of PanIP will almost certainly be the patent. If you successfully defend against their patent claims, then they have no value, hence nothing to compensate your legal fees, etc.
Sort of like domain name squatting - PanIP is just using the system opportunistically.
Best of luck to the guys fighting this.
Hey!
It was a lot cheaper for Lucas to put the microphone INSIDE the Imperial Destroyer where there IS air and you CAN hear the engines.
What? There's not really an Imperial Destroyer? But how do they transport the AT-ATs then?
Well, the helicopter probably really does take it, but in MI2, there's the scene were Tom Cruise skids across the intersection doing a front-wheel wheelie and swivelling around to shoot people.
Hmmm... Although you often can get a motorcycle into that position it's usually followed by a sliding, crashed motorcycle and fresh organ donor. Even professional motorcycle racers (who haven't got a bit of sense in their heads) must laugh when they see this.
I like to think that the special effects team trying to explain why they shouldn't have to do that stunt to the director.
AC wrote:
> One benift of 3D I can think of off the top of
> my head is z-order. Move a window ahead on
> screen, all you have to do is rearrange the z-
> order.
This is only a benefit at first glance. When you actually try to implement this, you'll run directly into the problem that IAmTheRealMike posed in his excellent post.
Using a 3D package for Z-order (actually, this is only 2-1/2D, as the layers are parallel to each other) lets you flip quickly, but for that to happen, you'll have to render all your layers. Where will you render them? If you want it to be fast, then you'll have to render them into video RAM - RAM that the hardware accelerator can access directly so it can do the fast compositing. Ouch. Now, instead of your display RAM being used for the composited image that you see on your screen, you now will eat a screen's worth for each of your layers. So, you'll eat your fast display RAM more quickly, and mostly for stuff that's obscured.
It's even worse than that. You need to keep all those layers updated which means that you'll be burning cycles drawing obscured stuff. In a conventional windowing system, you calculate the visible (non-obscured) region of your layers and only update that part. I guess you could do this with a hardware accelerated/composited system, but that calculation of what's visible for each layer is most of the expensive calculation that you were trying to avoid.
Don't get me wrong - a hardware composited system like this can work great if you have a specific app that takes control of the display surface. But for a general purpose windowing system like the Mac, Windows, or X, the resource problems that arise usually mean that you reserve a couple hardware windows for the front interaction, and composite all the other layers together in the traditional way. That's almost certainly going to be more work than less.
By the way, when I refer to videoRAM or display RAM, I don't mean vRAM devices (which don't really exist anymore). What I mean is the RAM (could be on a card or elsewhere in the system) which is directly accessible by the hardware compositor. Although AGP systems were supposed to allow access like this to motherboard memory, I don't think anybody actually implements this this way.
I guess I don't "get" any of these Kidman classic performances, either.
She's no Jodie Foster, that's for sure. Yes, I can see Nicole Kidman has at least a small amount of acting ability, but the fact that she has no apparent IQ when off camera doesn't seem very appealing to me, either.
> "Demolition Man," with Sly Stallone and
> Wesley Snipes.
Well, yeah, but the *real* star of the movie is Sandra Bullock, right? The way she sings the Green Giant theme really makes me want to go to the nearest Taco Bell immediately.
Yes, the CIA/NSA has been doing this for a long time.
Now, I'll spend $45 on a SoundBug, stick it to my window, and all they'll hear is Britney Spears' songs.
Who said technology ain't great?
And when you signed up for service, you likely agreed that the extent of damages are limited to the prorated cost of service. Contact the state, have your lawyer write a letter - and enjoy the $4 dollars damages your receive.
You can decide whether Microsoft's behavior toward end users is appropriate or not, but that's not what the lawsuits are about - it's how they handle OEM deals with computer manufacturers.
Since most people want MS software on their new computers, MS negotiates deals with the Dells and Compaqs of the world for Windows. The problem is that the deal usually goes something like "pay us $50/installed copy or, if you prefer, just pay us $25 licensing for each computer you build - even if you don't have Windows installed". You'd never have the balls to suggest that unless you had 90%+ market share at those manufacturers.
Now, there's always a few people that will want to install BeOS and Be has a retail box that caters to them. But the real money for them is when people can buy a new computer - even if it's only going to be used as a editing workstation - straight from the factory with BeOS installed. The MS licensing model basically makes that buyer pay for Windows even if it was never loaded.
If you were the BeOS salesman, you now have to go to a Gateway and try to convince them that BeOS is worth having as an option. The Gateway guy will tell them that until there are compelling apps, BeOS better be cheap or free for them to even consider messing with it. If Be has to charge a premium price (part of which is "paying for Windows" from the OEM's point of view), then they can play, but price elasticity says that will seriously reduce the volume.
The only way MS can push such heavy handed licensing tactics is because they're a monopoly, and that's where the lawsuits are coming from.
Characterizing perceptual color differences is pretty hard - as some of the earlier posts mention, this is the focus of a lot of research.
RGB space won't help you out. It was a good try to go to Lab space, but this actually will make the simple solution harder. Lab is great for retouching as it separates the monochrome information into the L (lightness) channel and the color information to the a&b channels. Practically speaking, that means you could scan an image in RGB or CMYK, convert to Lab space, then very easily apply a sharpening convolution to the image. This sharpens the detail in your image while minimizing or eliminating color shifts. If you tried to do this in RGB, you would need a ridiculously complex kernel to sharpen without color distortion. Try this in Photoshop and amaze your friends.
But if you do this in your case, you can't use the L channel as you've removed all the color info. And you need a weird vectorizing brain to understand what a value difference in a&b mean.
You actually want to go the other way, to HSV space. This is a polar space, where the the H channel represents the hue, S channel is saturation, and V is the brightness component. Once you do this matrix conversion from RGB, you'll probably want to establish a threshold value for differences in the H channel. That forces the colors to be a minimum "space" apart. You probably will also want to set a threshold on V as well so "light red" and "dark red" can be distinguished. As you describe the problem, you might want to look at whether S differences are meaningful, but I doubt that will be the case.
Because of the way your eyes work, a simple threshold won't provide perceptually proportional differences throughout the spectrum, but for a simple test as you describe, a basic threshold should be fine.
Good luck!
I never heard anybody describe it as popcorn, but now that you mention it, that's almost exactly what it sounds like...
It's a little pricey just to dink with, but I got some Fujitsu MAJ 10K drives for my Sun and they were much, much quieter on seek than the smaller (and older, yes, I realize this isn't a completely fair comparison) Seagate Cheetahs that they replaced. I believe Cheetahs 10Ks are the gold standard for reliability these days, but certainly for non-server use, these Fujitsus seem perfectly fine without the noise.
These days, there's a newer series of Fujitsu drives (MAN), and I don't know if they're still quiet or not.
Palm did purchase the intellectual property which includes the BeOS source, but I think they've already said that they're not planning to commercialize derivative products in any recognizable form.
What they largely were buying were the engineering team. They have a lot of experience building a non-MS, non-unix modern OS up from scratch and have also built this on desktop-level and appliance-type machines. That's a great match for what Palm is doing, completely indpendently from the fact that you'll rarely find a more rabid and dedicated engineering team than the one they built at Be.
Think Linux guys are rabid? Be was 100 guys visibly and proudly spitting in the face of Microsoft for years, and going it alone when it was hard to make sales, stock prices vacillating, and through the temptation of the dot-com boom.
A friend of mine moved into a new apartment in San Jose a couple of years ago and was shocked he too was seeing these enormous download rates.
The reason dates back something like 7 or 8 years ago. Pacific Bell (our local Baby Bell) picked that small corridor of new development in San Jose to do a field test of an everything-and-the-kitchen=sink broadband system. This included digital telephone service, digital cable tv, and broadband data comm. They were gunning for TCI at the time that had an antiquated two-coax cable system and no serious plan for getting things fixed (btw, even with AT&T's takeover of TCI, the situation hasn't really changed even today in San Jose). So they laid in a state of the art infrastructure and basically priced it at the prevailing low-tech rates.
That meant a gigantic OC-3 connection to his complex that would someday carry a building's worth of video on demand on top of everything else. But the other services never came, and even with a building full of nerds, it was a rip-roaring pipe.
PacBell eventually gave up on their cable dreams, and TCI/AT&T annexed this entire system, but two years ago, they were still serving giant bandwidth (perhaps there's no savings in providing less connectivity to the existing hardware?). I've fallen out of touch with the guy, but I wouldn't be suprised if it's still the same.