Hummm, I wonder what's going to happen to all those instances of the PACS Centricity system that GE has deployed. They are all based on a large Sun box, usually a V880, running Solaris and Informix. The systems weren't known for getting along with much else, being that all of the software used to fetch the diagnostic images from the various modalities (PET, CT, X-RAY, etc) was proprietary to GE. Hell, most of their CT machines that were network enabled didn't even support DHCP.
If that whole mess needs to be ported to an MS platform and some version of MSSQL, me thinks that some PACS engineers with Windows and Solaris experience are about to see a couple of very very rich years. I also have a feeling that Siemens' competing product is going to see a boost when the hospital administrators get an estimate of what all that Windows licensing is going to cost, and how many more IT people they are going to have to hire to support it.
Oh god, and if they suddenly want the PACS system to be AD integrated...
There was a bar near the Johnson Space Center in Houston called The Outpost. It was torn down this year, but when the place was jumping you had a reasonable chance of finding some old guy who would be happy to show you his collection of space artifacts, including lunar samples.
Yes, it is just a camera, but Panavision cameras have never been cheap, especially with the dollies and the follow focus which has to be custom geared to the dolly's wheel diameter and the lens you're using.
Wow, your angry rant is fascinating and displays a complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about.
HIV = Human Immunodeficiency Virus, like rotavirus or rhinovirus or cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus, is the name we give to the retrovirus entity with a very narrow and specific set of viral proteins, very specific physical characteristics, and the unique reverse transcriptase enzyme method used by viral entities in the same family to unbind host cell DNA and copy in their own RNA strand.
AIDS = Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, like the common cold or diarrhea, it is a set of symptoms and physiological changes to the body, characterized by the drop in CD4+ T cells below the threshold that confers cellular immunity to pathogens. (I can't remember the exact number this takes, look it up.)
So, could AIDS be caused by something else in the body that targets the CD4+T cells in the immune system? Yes, that is possible. However, no research to date has shown any vector that attacks our immune system so specifically.
However, decades of research has shown that a majority of persons infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that attacks a specific set of helper T-cells in the body's immune system, will develop... are you read for this... ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME or AIDS, a set of symptoms and changes to the body characterized by the drop in CD4+T cells below a certain threshold.
So, is that simple enough for you? Do I need to get out the crayons and a special sheet of science paper and draw you pretty pictures of googly-eyed virus phospholipids shooting little DNA guns at similarly googly-eyed CD4+T cells?
Though, that probably won't help. One of the worst things that the internet has brought the world of science has been the ease with which crackpot conspiracy theories can be distributed to a gullible public that is either too stupid, lazy, or unconcerned to look it up for themselves. Rather than believe the people who spend their entire lives dealing with deadly pathogens for little money and even less recognition, the people who have sunk small fortunes in to an education system full of ideologues who often do require you to parrot their preferred theories in order to get a degree thereby depriving you of some of the best opportunities for research, the people who already have to deal with a whole raft of ignorant fucksticks with MBAs who spout such winners as "I'm not sure we have the budget for basic research after spending so much on administrator bonuses" and "Can't you pick a more profitable topic for study"; they believe the mouth-foaming twonk who spouts utter bullshit, anonymously, on the fucking internet.
Demonize you? Gladly. You deserve it. My hope for you sir is that you develop a disease that your tin-foil hat wearing friends convince you is from chem trails, or fluoridated water, or government mind control lasers on the moon and you spend your entire estate on quack doctors who prescribe drinking your own urine and sell you ten thousand dollar machines chock full of magnets and blinky lights, and make sit under a pyramid shaped tent while a large Turkish man gives you an enema with a ten horse-power pressure washer. After all of this, you die in a fashion most agonizing and painful, while fully aware that a seventy-nine cent dose of antibiotics from some "evil big pharma" company with their "science" and their "research" that you distrust so much would have knocked that thing out in a couple of days.
Cable workers don't often have that sort of flexibility. If there is a line cut, they are working it till it is fixed. Often times, there is a huge amount of work to be done, but only so much overtime budgeted, and a lot of these guys live off overtime.
It isn't a high paying job, but it is better than most for someone with no degree. One of the glib responses here is that they should just get a degree or some other sort of schooling and get a better job, but that gets difficult when you're paycheck to paycheck just keeping a roof over your head and food on the table.
As for other IT people, overtime is a big deal because IT is one of the few professions that is routinely required to work long hours and be on-call, usually without additional compensation. Everyone's situation is different. In my experience, the guys with families, children, or other obligations were more likely to sacrifice the money for the stability. Guys without ties were happy to be contractors.
I've been a contractor and it was sometimes a better gig. I never had to worry about showing up at 3am because someone couldn't get in to their e-mail, but for that I sacrificed job security, benefits that didn't rob me blind, and a reasonable tax bill.
On the other side of the coin, my job satisfaction was always higher when I was perm because I didn't have the end of the contract always looming off in the distance.
Yep. That whole thing about "network" is what will screw the cable workers. Most systems now use a DNCS, or Digital Network Control System, about half of which are provided by Cisco acquisition Scientific Atlanta.
At the heart of the headend is a big Solaris machine that handles provisioning for all of the cable boxes and acts like a supervisor blade in a large router. From there, the individual set-top boxes are addressed via IP on a hybrid fiber-coax network, making nearly every cable TV system in the United States a large network.
Headend engineers are already pretty much IT people, but the line techs have clung to their non-exempt blue collar status for years and it costs the cable companies out the wazoo. They've tried to enforce no-overtime policies, but their customer service rates and rate at which they can install new customers plummets.
This isn't the first time the industry has gone out of it's way to screw line techs either. About 8 years ago, Time Warner, Adelphia, Cox, and Comcast all, right around the same time, put policies in place to prevent workers over a certain weight from being certified to climb poles or operate in bucket trucks. The restrictions were based only on weight, not accounting for height, build, or experience, so tall muscular guys were being pulled off of poles that short fat guys were allowed to climb. The effect of this was that fewer and fewer line techs were allowed to do the work that paid a premium and were stuck in jobs like customer premise installation which had some very strict hour restrictions. Again, voila, less overtime.
Jim Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of External & Legislative Affairs, said. 'Unfortunately, the preliminary FCC Staff Analysis offers none of the things we paid for.'"
Only forty? Lets make that a bit more like IT work and require them to work 60 hours a week, without overtime pay, on-call 24/7, vacations to be determined by the voters, and absolutely forbidden if there is any sort of crisis facing or potentially facing the nation, because... you know, we don't want them out of reach if we think something is going to go down.
Time Warner and Cox tried to get all of their headend engineers and line tech qualified as IT workers so they could make them all exempt and voila, no more huge OT checks for being hip deep in a muddy hole trying to splice fiber.
Luckily, the unions jumped all over this and TW and Cocks quietly rolled back that idea. I guess they finally found another patsy.
The squid is the wrong cephalopod to reference here. The motion is much more octopus-like, as octopuses only have a single hard structure in their bodies, the beak, while squid and cuttlefish both have an internal shell. In the case of the cuttlefish, the cuttlebone is roughly the length and width of the cuttlefish's mantle. In the case of the squid, the pin shell is slightly less than the mantle length, and usually only a few centimeters wide, depending on the size of the animal.
Ahhh damn, thank you no script for blocking unwanted crap AND ensuring that my browser experience is different from everyone else. Thank you for pointing that out!
As you said, you can do HDR with a single camera, and that's usually what is done, but work is still needed to ensure that the transition between zones is smooth and pleasing to the eye. A stereoscopic mount would be terrible because your images wouldn't be aligned.
Most DSLRs have "HDR" capabilities. I know that on Nikon it is called bracketing and you can take three or four images with up to a 2 EV increase or decrease on on either side. That still only gives the image out of your camera 10 - 12 EV of range, which bumps right up against what most monitors are capable of displaying.
Even the image on the landing page has been retouched. If you were taking a picture down an outside corridor like that, you would either blow-out the highlights and have a dark grey blob where the tree is, or you would under-expose the shadows and not see the corridor at all. That image is a composite of at least two images taken with different f-stops and probably different shutter speeds.
See that room? See the Hong Kong sky-line? Notice how the exposure on both the room and the outside are perfect? Notice how the exposure on everything in that room is perfect? Even with good lighting equipment you can't get that sort of perfection with a single exposure. Go look at any other hotel site and notice their pictures too. That takes time and expertise.
The point of all of this? Marketing and advertising. Even paying someone like I've mentioned a couple of thousand for some really excellent images is worth it when you're selling million dollar condos or multi-million dollar office spaces. If you can close on a property even 10% faster due to a really well done image, that's 10% more time you have to find and move other properties. Time==Money and people are swayed by advertising images all of the time.
When was the last time you ordered food because it looked damn good on the menu? When was the last time you listed after a car, or gun, or other piece of hardware because it looked so god damn cool? When was the last time a picture of someone in a magazine or ad got your blood pumping and hormones raging?
If by "HDR rig" you mean software like Topaz Adjust, then no. That software typically produces the sort of sliders-to-the-right, grainy, neon-lit abortions that people on Flickr call HDR but tend to be referred to by photographers as PCS, or pastel colored shit.
When you're doing high dynamic range in an attempt to present more tones and contrast in an image than your camera is capable of reproducing, you're almost forced to take multiple exposures and combine them. Once you've done that, there is still work to be done to ensure that it doesn't look artificial or retouched.
Just like with human skin, you can grab the clone stamp tool and smooth someone out so much they look like a porcelain doll, or you can dodge and burn until the skin tone is even and you've preserved the texture. One looks obvious, the other is very subtle. Magazines prefer subtle and pay for subtle.
By no means would I consider myself a professional re-touch artist, but I am familiar with the techniques and have produced a few works that were high enough quality for advertising and magazines.
I gotta say, the amount of work that goes in to even the meanest image is staggering. An acquaintance of mine does interior photography for commercial real estate and multi-unit dwellings (apartments, condos, etc.) and while his photography is top notch to begin with, his re-touching is on another plane all together.
He was excited when Photoshop got an upgrade in CS5 to handle more layers because he was routinely bumping up against the limit in CS4. Usually, his work flow consisted of him selecting and making a separate layer for every surface that had a different texture or zone of light, then manually adjusting the levels to bring the brightness and contrast to where he wanted. While tedious and mind-numbing, the over all effect is beautiful true High Dynamic Range images.
There is a poster calendar in my office from Breitling that shows a picture of Mr. Rossy in formation with four Breitling aerobatic jets from an airshow in 2009.
Human subject medical testing is amazingly expensive and requires a huge series of steps to satisfy a laundry list of ethical concerns, and rightly so.
Beside the fact that our culture is amazingly litigious, medical trials run the real risk of irreparably damaging a person's mind, body, or both.
Yes, that is quite the dirty business. That poor poor man, having to deal with government goons coming and shutting down his business that sells false hope. Thankfully they haven't come after the homeopaths because, boy, if those guys add enough water to something they can really open up a can of oh my goodness!
According to Dante, the lowest, deepest, circles of Hell that are reserved for the most terrible sins like treason are covered in ice and battered by cold cruel winds. Quack doctors and the like are forced to slog through a canal filled with shit, and every time they talk, shit comes out of their mouths.
Slashdot Mirror
Hummm, I wonder what's going to happen to all those instances of the PACS Centricity system that GE has deployed. They are all based on a large Sun box, usually a V880, running Solaris and Informix. The systems weren't known for getting along with much else, being that all of the software used to fetch the diagnostic images from the various modalities (PET, CT, X-RAY, etc) was proprietary to GE. Hell, most of their CT machines that were network enabled didn't even support DHCP.
If that whole mess needs to be ported to an MS platform and some version of MSSQL, me thinks that some PACS engineers with Windows and Solaris experience are about to see a couple of very very rich years. I also have a feeling that Siemens' competing product is going to see a boost when the hospital administrators get an estimate of what all that Windows licensing is going to cost, and how many more IT people they are going to have to hire to support it.
Oh god, and if they suddenly want the PACS system to be AD integrated...
Short answer: of course.
There was a bar near the Johnson Space Center in Houston called The Outpost. It was torn down this year, but when the place was jumping you had a reasonable chance of finding some old guy who would be happy to show you his collection of space artifacts, including lunar samples.
So tell us, oh wise one, how do you classify spent fuel rods and what exactly is done with them after they have been removed from the reactor.
Remember, we're talking about first generation GE BWRs here.
Panavision doesn't sell their cameras, they operate as a rental house only.
And then lets not forget you can't actually purchase one.
Yes, it is just a camera, but Panavision cameras have never been cheap, especially with the dollies and the follow focus which has to be custom geared to the dolly's wheel diameter and the lens you're using.
Wow, your angry rant is fascinating and displays a complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about.
HIV = Human Immunodeficiency Virus, like rotavirus or rhinovirus or cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus, is the name we give to the retrovirus entity with a very narrow and specific set of viral proteins, very specific physical characteristics, and the unique reverse transcriptase enzyme method used by viral entities in the same family to unbind host cell DNA and copy in their own RNA strand.
AIDS = Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, like the common cold or diarrhea, it is a set of symptoms and physiological changes to the body, characterized by the drop in CD4+ T cells below the threshold that confers cellular immunity to pathogens. (I can't remember the exact number this takes, look it up.)
So, could AIDS be caused by something else in the body that targets the CD4+T cells in the immune system? Yes, that is possible. However, no research to date has shown any vector that attacks our immune system so specifically.
However, decades of research has shown that a majority of persons infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that attacks a specific set of helper T-cells in the body's immune system, will develop... are you read for this... ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME or AIDS, a set of symptoms and changes to the body characterized by the drop in CD4+T cells below a certain threshold.
So, is that simple enough for you? Do I need to get out the crayons and a special sheet of science paper and draw you pretty pictures of googly-eyed virus phospholipids shooting little DNA guns at similarly googly-eyed CD4+T cells?
Though, that probably won't help. One of the worst things that the internet has brought the world of science has been the ease with which crackpot conspiracy theories can be distributed to a gullible public that is either too stupid, lazy, or unconcerned to look it up for themselves. Rather than believe the people who spend their entire lives dealing with deadly pathogens for little money and even less recognition, the people who have sunk small fortunes in to an education system full of ideologues who often do require you to parrot their preferred theories in order to get a degree thereby depriving you of some of the best opportunities for research, the people who already have to deal with a whole raft of ignorant fucksticks with MBAs who spout such winners as "I'm not sure we have the budget for basic research after spending so much on administrator bonuses" and "Can't you pick a more profitable topic for study"; they believe the mouth-foaming twonk who spouts utter bullshit, anonymously, on the fucking internet.
Demonize you? Gladly. You deserve it. My hope for you sir is that you develop a disease that your tin-foil hat wearing friends convince you is from chem trails, or fluoridated water, or government mind control lasers on the moon and you spend your entire estate on quack doctors who prescribe drinking your own urine and sell you ten thousand dollar machines chock full of magnets and blinky lights, and make sit under a pyramid shaped tent while a large Turkish man gives you an enema with a ten horse-power pressure washer. After all of this, you die in a fashion most agonizing and painful, while fully aware that a seventy-nine cent dose of antibiotics from some "evil big pharma" company with their "science" and their "research" that you distrust so much would have knocked that thing out in a couple of days.
Cable workers don't often have that sort of flexibility. If there is a line cut, they are working it till it is fixed. Often times, there is a huge amount of work to be done, but only so much overtime budgeted, and a lot of these guys live off overtime.
It isn't a high paying job, but it is better than most for someone with no degree. One of the glib responses here is that they should just get a degree or some other sort of schooling and get a better job, but that gets difficult when you're paycheck to paycheck just keeping a roof over your head and food on the table.
As for other IT people, overtime is a big deal because IT is one of the few professions that is routinely required to work long hours and be on-call, usually without additional compensation. Everyone's situation is different. In my experience, the guys with families, children, or other obligations were more likely to sacrifice the money for the stability. Guys without ties were happy to be contractors.
I've been a contractor and it was sometimes a better gig. I never had to worry about showing up at 3am because someone couldn't get in to their e-mail, but for that I sacrificed job security, benefits that didn't rob me blind, and a reasonable tax bill.
On the other side of the coin, my job satisfaction was always higher when I was perm because I didn't have the end of the contract always looming off in the distance.
Yep. That whole thing about "network" is what will screw the cable workers. Most systems now use a DNCS, or Digital Network Control System, about half of which are provided by Cisco acquisition Scientific Atlanta.
At the heart of the headend is a big Solaris machine that handles provisioning for all of the cable boxes and acts like a supervisor blade in a large router. From there, the individual set-top boxes are addressed via IP on a hybrid fiber-coax network, making nearly every cable TV system in the United States a large network.
Headend engineers are already pretty much IT people, but the line techs have clung to their non-exempt blue collar status for years and it costs the cable companies out the wazoo. They've tried to enforce no-overtime policies, but their customer service rates and rate at which they can install new customers plummets.
This isn't the first time the industry has gone out of it's way to screw line techs either. About 8 years ago, Time Warner, Adelphia, Cox, and Comcast all, right around the same time, put policies in place to prevent workers over a certain weight from being certified to climb poles or operate in bucket trucks. The restrictions were based only on weight, not accounting for height, build, or experience, so tall muscular guys were being pulled off of poles that short fat guys were allowed to climb. The effect of this was that fewer and fewer line techs were allowed to do the work that paid a premium and were stuck in jobs like customer premise installation which had some very strict hour restrictions. Again, voila, less overtime.
Jim Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of External & Legislative Affairs, said. 'Unfortunately, the preliminary FCC Staff Analysis offers none of the things we paid for.'"
There, I fixed that for them.
I've said this for years. Imagine the chaos if unionized routing and switching engineers all advertised bad BGP en masse.
Only forty? Lets make that a bit more like IT work and require them to work 60 hours a week, without overtime pay, on-call 24/7, vacations to be determined by the voters, and absolutely forbidden if there is any sort of crisis facing or potentially facing the nation, because... you know, we don't want them out of reach if we think something is going to go down.
Time Warner and Cox tried to get all of their headend engineers and line tech qualified as IT workers so they could make them all exempt and voila, no more huge OT checks for being hip deep in a muddy hole trying to splice fiber.
Luckily, the unions jumped all over this and TW and Cocks quietly rolled back that idea. I guess they finally found another patsy.
The squid is the wrong cephalopod to reference here. The motion is much more octopus-like, as octopuses only have a single hard structure in their bodies, the beak, while squid and cuttlefish both have an internal shell. In the case of the cuttlefish, the cuttlebone is roughly the length and width of the cuttlefish's mantle. In the case of the squid, the pin shell is slightly less than the mantle length, and usually only a few centimeters wide, depending on the size of the animal.
Ahhh damn, thank you no script for blocking unwanted crap AND ensuring that my browser experience is different from everyone else. Thank you for pointing that out!
As you said, you can do HDR with a single camera, and that's usually what is done, but work is still needed to ensure that the transition between zones is smooth and pleasing to the eye. A stereoscopic mount would be terrible because your images wouldn't be aligned.
Most DSLRs have "HDR" capabilities. I know that on Nikon it is called bracketing and you can take three or four images with up to a 2 EV increase or decrease on on either side. That still only gives the image out of your camera 10 - 12 EV of range, which bumps right up against what most monitors are capable of displaying.
Counterpoint: The property owners aren't the market for these images, their potential tenants and customers are the market.
For example, when you're viewing images of hotel rooms on-line:
http://www.fourseasons.com/
Even the image on the landing page has been retouched. If you were taking a picture down an outside corridor like that, you would either blow-out the highlights and have a dark grey blob where the tree is, or you would under-expose the shadows and not see the corridor at all. That image is a composite of at least two images taken with different f-stops and probably different shutter speeds.
http://www.fourseasons.com/accommodations/
See that room? See the Hong Kong sky-line? Notice how the exposure on both the room and the outside are perfect? Notice how the exposure on everything in that room is perfect? Even with good lighting equipment you can't get that sort of perfection with a single exposure. Go look at any other hotel site and notice their pictures too. That takes time and expertise.
The point of all of this? Marketing and advertising. Even paying someone like I've mentioned a couple of thousand for some really excellent images is worth it when you're selling million dollar condos or multi-million dollar office spaces. If you can close on a property even 10% faster due to a really well done image, that's 10% more time you have to find and move other properties. Time==Money and people are swayed by advertising images all of the time.
When was the last time you ordered food because it looked damn good on the menu?
When was the last time you listed after a car, or gun, or other piece of hardware because it looked so god damn cool?
When was the last time a picture of someone in a magazine or ad got your blood pumping and hormones raging?
Advertising.
If by "HDR rig" you mean software like Topaz Adjust, then no. That software typically produces the sort of sliders-to-the-right, grainy, neon-lit abortions that people on Flickr call HDR but tend to be referred to by photographers as PCS, or pastel colored shit.
When you're doing high dynamic range in an attempt to present more tones and contrast in an image than your camera is capable of reproducing, you're almost forced to take multiple exposures and combine them. Once you've done that, there is still work to be done to ensure that it doesn't look artificial or retouched.
Just like with human skin, you can grab the clone stamp tool and smooth someone out so much they look like a porcelain doll, or you can dodge and burn until the skin tone is even and you've preserved the texture. One looks obvious, the other is very subtle. Magazines prefer subtle and pay for subtle.
By no means would I consider myself a professional re-touch artist, but I am familiar with the techniques and have produced a few works that were high enough quality for advertising and magazines.
I gotta say, the amount of work that goes in to even the meanest image is staggering. An acquaintance of mine does interior photography for commercial real estate and multi-unit dwellings (apartments, condos, etc.) and while his photography is top notch to begin with, his re-touching is on another plane all together.
He was excited when Photoshop got an upgrade in CS5 to handle more layers because he was routinely bumping up against the limit in CS4. Usually, his work flow consisted of him selecting and making a separate layer for every surface that had a different texture or zone of light, then manually adjusting the levels to bring the brightness and contrast to where he wanted. While tedious and mind-numbing, the over all effect is beautiful true High Dynamic Range images.
mmmmm I forgot your change. Let me just go back to the car....
There is a poster calendar in my office from Breitling that shows a picture of Mr. Rossy in formation with four Breitling aerobatic jets from an airshow in 2009.
Human subject medical testing is amazingly expensive and requires a huge series of steps to satisfy a laundry list of ethical concerns, and rightly so.
Beside the fact that our culture is amazingly litigious, medical trials run the real risk of irreparably damaging a person's mind, body, or both.
Yes, that is quite the dirty business. That poor poor man, having to deal with government goons coming and shutting down his business that sells false hope. Thankfully they haven't come after the homeopaths because, boy, if those guys add enough water to something they can really open up a can of oh my goodness!
According to Dante, the lowest, deepest, circles of Hell that are reserved for the most terrible sins like treason are covered in ice and battered by cold cruel winds. Quack doctors and the like are forced to slog through a canal filled with shit, and every time they talk, shit comes out of their mouths.