They should have used Hugin, an open source GUI based on Panotools, for stitching that panorama, it could have dealt with the uneven light levels caused by falloff of the CCD, and made a much, MUCH nicer panorama out of it.
They need to visit the Vignetting page to learn how to fix things.
I had this idea for an FPGA design back in 1981... after reading Gilder's call to waste transistors... and I wonder if you think it might be worth doing even today? I believe that the design space for FPGAs may not have been adequately explored, and as a result we're all living with sub-optimal solutions.
It's very simple.. an orthogonal grid of 4 input, 4 output look up tables, wired to look like RAM to a host, and connect such that each output bit goes to one neighbor, and each input comes from a neighbor. Any logic function can be implemented in this manner (like all modern FPGAs). They could be clocked in A/B/A/B over B/A/B/A to eliminate race conditions, deadlocks, etc.
Bad cells could be routed around almost trivially... the big waste of course, is that without any dedicated routing fabric, all cells in the path of a given bit of data would have to handle it... and the propagation times would be long... but consistent. The advent of memristors makes this an extremely interesting idea to me, once again, as they make LUT costs almost zero.
So, none of this mentions the lack of a proper security design in the Operating System. When someone says run a program, it let it use this much ram, this much cpu, and this folder.... that should be it.
But no existing commodity OS lets you do that, does it? Until capability based security becomes the norm, this will never be fixed, and information security jobs will flourish.
Capability based security is rooted in the principle of least privilege. The user decides what they wish the operating system to give the program access to, at run time. Just like you decide how much money to hand to a cashier at the checkout line, instead of giving them well defined limited access to your wallet and paypal account.
Trusting software is stupid, the only thing we should have to trust is the kernel of the operating system, and nothing else.
Progress is slowly being made in the use of capability based security. This will eventually (15-20 years from now) mean that computer security will be a solved problem.
Additionally, computer security can be outsourced and managed remotely, so it is likely to be commoditized, in much the same way as IT Administration was.
Atomic hydrogen torches have been around since the 1940s... here's a GE training film about them. They produce insane amounts of heat and a reducing atmosphere, perfect for cutting almost anything.
The Orion project was to be the successor to Apollo, once we got done playing around with toy rockets. Imagine being able to launch 1300 TONS of cargo to Interstellar space. The technology was worked out in the 1960s, the engines were tested at full power, we just lacked the political will to do it.
With modern materials, we could do a better job now, and a launch would only result in the fallout equivalent of a single 10 Megaton bomb. Considering the stream of badness coming our way from Fukushima, this isn't really a bad trade off.
I wouldn't dare use this "map" for any serious purposes. It appears all they did was add the fine details from a topographic map to the rather low resolution results of other surveys. There's no high resolution direct measurement of gravity here.
That's only the #4 pool, and there are others that will go if there is a "gamma shine" event.... it could be worse than that. The article mentions that they believe 1/2 of Japan would be uninhabitable after that.
There's plenty of scare to go around in Fukushima, without any mongering
The radiation from the corium pockets underground is bad, but it's nothing compared to the mess is still waiting to make a disaster bigger (85 times bigger!) then Chernobyl..
The US tried this false flag a few months ago, and the UN found out it was the US supplying the poison gas to the "rebels".... now that's calmed down and they are trying again.
As for the US staying out of the Middle East, we can't do that, because it would cause the fall of the Petrodollar, and we'd all be at least 50% poorer, overnight, if not worse off. (Hopefully avoiding the fate of the Weimar republic).
Actually, we could do it. Here's a video of a prototype using high explosives to see if the concept would work at all. It turns out it's fairly self correcting for alignment, etc. The nuclear physics is well understood, and the launch of a 4000 ton vehicle (with 1300 tons of cargo!) would result in the equivalent fallout of a single 10 megaton H bomb.
It's time to send a few hundred volunteers to the Moon, Mars, and wherever else they want to go.
The Feds are shutting down the last bastions of free speech, have crippled the 2nd amendment by buying up all the ammo, have closed all our embassies in the Islamic parts of the world... it's just a question of time, in my mind, until we once again go to war for the petrodollar.
This tells me (along with the heightened "terror alert" level) that we're about to find out why the TSA has been buying up all the bullets.
WW3 any day now.
What Congress really wants is to strip away the possibility that some new innovation might happen within our borders, and bring jobs back into the country. This would result in real economic growth, and reduce the excuses to give Trillions away to their banker buddies as the Country swirls down the drain.
The combination of Windows 8 and UEFI BIOS makes it now impossible to buy a general purpose PC in a typical retail store. The new machines won't boot linux or Win7.
As I said last week, the root cause which enables cyberwarfare is persistently insecure endpoints all over the internet. Each and every system out running linux, windows, mac osx, etc... all are based on an outdated and useless security model. Those nodes can then be used to attack or DOS anything that actually happens to be secure. Unless we shift everything to a system based on capabilities (and the principle of least privilege) we're going to be in a "cyberwar" forever.
Our biggest "cyber security" problem is one of persistently insecure endpoints. The reason we have persistently insecure endpoints is that they can't be made secure, no matter who writes them, checks programs for virii, etc
All of them run a program within the context of a users permissions, leading to the possibility of privilege escalation. SELinux tries to fight this by locking down each program, but even that approach has some strong limitations
To be able to securely run a program on any operating system, you need to be able to specify the side-effects you're willing to allow, before running the program. This is the reason that Functional Programming is getting so much attention and the application level.
The IBM VM system was among the first to provide such an environment, back in 1972. (I'm sure someone will dig up an earlier system). The reason that VM systems can be secure is that when you set up a virtual machine, you specify all the things it's allowed to use, and to change. It can only affect it's own disk space, etc.
Modern systems such as VMware also offer the possibility of real security, but at such a gross level of granularity that it's unlikely to be used in this manner. The only system on the horizon that offers a way out (as far as I can see) is the Genode project which is a full on capabilities based system, built upon your choice of secure kernel.
This whole cyber-war mess can be shut down, if you folks wake up, and start acting in a manner to fix things... otherwise prepare to be serfs to our corporate lords and masters.
There's a reason for the rage, and no amount of apologizing is going to make it go away.
Windows 8 sucks so bad it can lift matter out of a black hole.
The idea of replacing a nice and simple multi-level menu / program launched with a billboard that completely obliterates the screen (and causes the user to be shocked out of flow) is one of the most assine moves M$ has made since they decided to deliberately make UAC act like such an asshole in Vista. Actually, I take that back, this decision is WORSE than that... because it happens every time you want to do something, instead of only when doing system work.
Windows was chosen as the name of the product because that is what it's supposed to do. Turning multiple monitors into a billboard that has to be scrolled SIDEWAYS instead of just showing a multi-level menu in the corner is beyond wasteful.
And to make more money by ensuring the space is useless for non-members.
Nice 'community' you have there.
PS:1 has a very nice community, thank you very much. You can learn almost anything if you ask around a bit, and get help on your projects from a number of sources.
As for the dues: People who have no stake in things won't respect the space, and will mine it for resources, leaving us with a pile of broken stuff. We're in an urban area, and it costs quite a bit just to keep the lights on, and the building warm, not to mention the rent. We're not in it for the money, but it all costs money to maintain the status quo.
PS:1 as an organization has liability insurance, and we require members and visitors to sign a liability waiver before entering the space. Only members are allowed to operate equipment, additionally the must have been certified on equipment that requires it.
We're also working on a set of interlocks tied into our membership system to ensure that only certified persons are able to operate the tools that represent hazards to the untrained. We're also always looking for ways to make the space safer, more useful for our members, and above all, more awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
They should have used Hugin, an open source GUI based on Panotools, for stitching that panorama, it could have dealt with the uneven light levels caused by falloff of the CCD, and made a much, MUCH nicer panorama out of it.
They need to visit the Vignetting page to learn how to fix things.
I had this idea for an FPGA design back in 1981... after reading Gilder's call to waste transistors... and I wonder if you think it might be worth doing even today? I believe that the design space for FPGAs may not have been adequately explored, and as a result we're all living with sub-optimal solutions.
It's very simple.. an orthogonal grid of 4 input, 4 output look up tables, wired to look like RAM to a host, and connect such that each output bit goes to one neighbor, and each input comes from a neighbor. Any logic function can be implemented in this manner (like all modern FPGAs). They could be clocked in A/B/A/B over B/A/B/A to eliminate race conditions, deadlocks, etc.
Bad cells could be routed around almost trivially... the big waste of course, is that without any dedicated routing fabric, all cells in the path of a given bit of data would have to handle it... and the propagation times would be long... but consistent. The advent of memristors makes this an extremely interesting idea to me, once again, as they make LUT costs almost zero.
So.. worth pursuing at all?
So, none of this mentions the lack of a proper security design in the Operating System. When someone says run a program, it let it use this much ram, this much cpu, and this folder.... that should be it.
But no existing commodity OS lets you do that, does it? Until capability based security becomes the norm, this will never be fixed, and information security jobs will flourish.
Capability based security is rooted in the principle of least privilege. The user decides what they wish the operating system to give the program access to, at run time. Just like you decide how much money to hand to a cashier at the checkout line, instead of giving them well defined limited access to your wallet and paypal account.
Trusting software is stupid, the only thing we should have to trust is the kernel of the operating system, and nothing else.
Progress is slowly being made in the use of capability based security. This will eventually (15-20 years from now) mean that computer security will be a solved problem.
Additionally, computer security can be outsourced and managed remotely, so it is likely to be commoditized, in much the same way as IT Administration was.
I would welcome limiting Comcast's ability to upload content to the internet. This would allow all the other content providers to blossom. 8)
Atomic hydrogen torches have been around since the 1940s... here's a GE training film about them. They produce insane amounts of heat and a reducing atmosphere, perfect for cutting almost anything.
The Orion project was to be the successor to Apollo, once we got done playing around with toy rockets. Imagine being able to launch 1300 TONS of cargo to Interstellar space. The technology was worked out in the 1960s, the engines were tested at full power, we just lacked the political will to do it.
With modern materials, we could do a better job now, and a launch would only result in the fallout equivalent of a single 10 Megaton bomb. Considering the stream of badness coming our way from Fukushima, this isn't really a bad trade off.
I wouldn't dare use this "map" for any serious purposes. It appears all they did was add the fine details from a topographic map to the rather low resolution results of other surveys. There's no high resolution direct measurement of gravity here.
That's only the #4 pool, and there are others that will go if there is a "gamma shine" event.... it could be worse than that. The article mentions that they believe 1/2 of Japan would be uninhabitable after that.
There's plenty of scare to go around in Fukushima, without any mongering
The radiation from the corium pockets underground is bad, but it's nothing compared to the mess is still waiting to make a disaster bigger (85 times bigger!) then Chernobyl..
The US tried this false flag a few months ago, and the UN found out it was the US supplying the poison gas to the "rebels".... now that's calmed down and they are trying again.
As for the US staying out of the Middle East, we can't do that, because it would cause the fall of the Petrodollar, and we'd all be at least 50% poorer, overnight, if not worse off. (Hopefully avoiding the fate of the Weimar republic).
He says steel tubes in his PDF, not aluminum.
What do old married persons (people who haven't talked to the opposite sex in years), have to do with this?
Actually, we could do it. Here's a video of a prototype using high explosives to see if the concept would work at all. It turns out it's fairly self correcting for alignment, etc. The nuclear physics is well understood, and the launch of a 4000 ton vehicle (with 1300 tons of cargo!) would result in the equivalent fallout of a single 10 megaton H bomb.
It's time to send a few hundred volunteers to the Moon, Mars, and wherever else they want to go.
The Feds are shutting down the last bastions of free speech, have crippled the 2nd amendment by buying up all the ammo, have closed all our embassies in the Islamic parts of the world... it's just a question of time, in my mind, until we once again go to war for the petrodollar.
This tells me (along with the heightened "terror alert" level) that we're about to find out why the TSA has been buying up all the bullets. WW3 any day now.
What Congress really wants is to strip away the possibility that some new innovation might happen within our borders, and bring jobs back into the country. This would result in real economic growth, and reduce the excuses to give Trillions away to their banker buddies as the Country swirls down the drain.
2 different purchases, and subsequent returns. 1 Toshiba, 1 Lenovo 64 bit bios on both
Who would buy a PC you can't use?
As I said last week, the root cause which enables cyberwarfare is persistently insecure endpoints all over the internet. Each and every system out running linux, windows, mac osx, etc... all are based on an outdated and useless security model. Those nodes can then be used to attack or DOS anything that actually happens to be secure. Unless we shift everything to a system based on capabilities (and the principle of least privilege) we're going to be in a "cyberwar" forever.
Our biggest "cyber security" problem is one of persistently insecure endpoints. The reason we have persistently insecure endpoints is that they can't be made secure, no matter who writes them, checks programs for virii, etc
All of them run a program within the context of a users permissions, leading to the possibility of privilege escalation. SELinux tries to fight this by locking down each program, but even that approach has some strong limitations
To be able to securely run a program on any operating system, you need to be able to specify the side-effects you're willing to allow, before running the program. This is the reason that Functional Programming is getting so much attention and the application level.
The IBM VM system was among the first to provide such an environment, back in 1972. (I'm sure someone will dig up an earlier system). The reason that VM systems can be secure is that when you set up a virtual machine, you specify all the things it's allowed to use, and to change. It can only affect it's own disk space, etc.
Modern systems such as VMware also offer the possibility of real security, but at such a gross level of granularity that it's unlikely to be used in this manner. The only system on the horizon that offers a way out (as far as I can see) is the Genode project which is a full on capabilities based system, built upon your choice of secure kernel.
This whole cyber-war mess can be shut down, if you folks wake up, and start acting in a manner to fix things... otherwise prepare to be serfs to our corporate lords and masters.
There's a reason for the rage, and no amount of apologizing is going to make it go away.
Windows 8 sucks so bad it can lift matter out of a black hole.
The idea of replacing a nice and simple multi-level menu / program launched with a billboard that completely obliterates the screen (and causes the user to be shocked out of flow) is one of the most assine moves M$ has made since they decided to deliberately make UAC act like such an asshole in Vista. Actually, I take that back, this decision is WORSE than that... because it happens every time you want to do something, instead of only when doing system work.
Windows was chosen as the name of the product because that is what it's supposed to do. Turning multiple monitors into a billboard that has to be scrolled SIDEWAYS instead of just showing a multi-level menu in the corner is beyond wasteful.
SO, I say to you
NUTS!
And to make more money by ensuring the space is useless for non-members.
Nice 'community' you have there.
PS:1 has a very nice community, thank you very much. You can learn almost anything if you ask around a bit, and get help on your projects from a number of sources.
As for the dues: People who have no stake in things won't respect the space, and will mine it for resources, leaving us with a pile of broken stuff. We're in an urban area, and it costs quite a bit just to keep the lights on, and the building warm, not to mention the rent. We're not in it for the money, but it all costs money to maintain the status quo.
PS:1 as an organization has liability insurance, and we require members and visitors to sign a liability waiver before entering the space. Only members are allowed to operate equipment, additionally the must have been certified on equipment that requires it.
We're also working on a set of interlocks tied into our membership system to ensure that only certified persons are able to operate the tools that represent hazards to the untrained. We're also always looking for ways to make the space safer, more useful for our members, and above all, more awesome.