I once ran a site that used cartoon character names. You could track the age of the server and the popularity of a particular animated show pretty easily.
You knew that Spongebob, Squidward, and Patrick were older machines than Fry, Leela, and Zoidberg, which were in turn older than Finn, Jake, and LumpySpacePrincess.
I haven't been at the location in years, but I get the pick list mailed to me every so often. It was fun to see that all the new servers have names like Rarity, TwilightSparkle, Applejack, FlutterShy, etc.
Manning took the same oath that everyone entering the military takes, to defend the Constitution of the United States.
Part of every soldier's training states that if you see an officer or other members of your squad, platoon, battalion, or even Joe Random Officer committing crimes, treason, or acts unbecoming of an officer or enlisted man of the United States military, you are to take the appropriate action.
I feel he took most of the appropriate action. He saw how the war in Afghanistan was being handled, and how civilian casualties and torture of prisoners was condoned by those all the way up the CoC. He also saw how our allies were smoking up before patrols and putting the lives of every single American soldier they were near at risk.
Manning did the right thing. In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have turned the data dump over to someone like Asange, but he didn't seem aware of anything other than "Wikileaks is a safe place to get the word out and not have the data suppressed."
The response from the military and the government has been absolutely deplorable.
I read 'Crime and Glory' after 'A Planet Named Shayol' and it took me a couple of readings before I realized that the giant that is sleeping in the field is the same Captain Suzdal in both stories.
That's pretty much what fused the switch on my love of Cordwainer Smith's writing. Everything was connected. Everything. Hints and back story and explanations were found about every story in every other story. The mind that could conceive of all of that is just amazing.
Not bad for a fella that started his writing career with THE book on psychological warfare and pulp romance novels.
I can't remember the name of the story, but it concerns a hostile alien race attacking the Instrumentality. They deploy the Golden Ship, a space vessel that is 93 million miles long and shines like gold. At the same time, they dispatch a single ship with some crazy misfits on-board that do all the actual damage.
It was also because of "Psychologial Warfare" that I read "Defense at Duffers Drift."
Ahhh Cordwainer Smith. What an amazing but seemingly forgotten writer. I've read as much of his work as I could fine and am constantly amazed at how deep and through provoking his stories and concepts are.
'The Crime and Glory of Captain Suzdal' is one of my favorite stories, as is the 'Ballad of Lost C'Mell'.
I think one of my favorite lines comes from the Rediscovery of Man period, after the Instrumentality decides that the differences are what made us unique and they order everyone to have their genes unmodified.
"Then went in to the reassignment chamber happy and content and they emerged French."
So, if I got this then I could guarantee that all of my spam would be about weight loss, masturbation aids, and (naughty) maid services? I don't see the difference from my current crop of spam.
If I'm understanding this correctly, there is no polarization. The receiving antenna is getting it's voltage changes from the amount of spin energy in the beam and it's location in space, sort of like the way a QAM signal uses phase shift and amplitude changes to create a waveform that wouldn't be possible with either method alone.
You're correct that the price rise is artificial. It used to be that while unleaded gasoline and oil were traded as commodities, there were limits on the exchange that prevented the sort of out-of-control prices we're seeing. When those regulations were removed, traders were free to drive up prices, and here we are.
The solution to this isn't necessary drilling more. Any undeveloped lease has a lag time of 10 to 15 years before stable production is reached. The tar sands and shale oils in Canada and the Dakotas are amazingly difficult to produce. You don't simply drill a hole and dance around like an 1870's prospector when the oil comes raining down on your head. To get oil from tar sands you have to strip mine the sand, then heat it to a couple hundred degrees until the tar liquifies. Once liquid, you run the tar though the distillation and cracking process like any other crude oil. The kicker is that tar sand oil is mostly heavy ends and is amazingly high in sulfur.
When you talk about ends in oil, that is a measure of quality and viscosity. Light sweet crude from the wells in the Brent North Sea fields is far easier to refine than West Texas crude because the Brent oils already have a low viscosity, are low in sulfur, and have a naturally occurring percentage of light and medium end products like petrol and diesel. In fact, Brent Light Sweet crude is so light that it can be used as six oil, also called bunker fuel which is the main form of liquid fuel for large ships, right out of the ground. This means that Brent North Sea crude requires fewer steps to distil the product you want and will leave less residue products. Less steps means cheaper refining means higher profits.
Tar Sand and Shale Oil require a massive amount of refining. At room temperature, both products are about as viscous as glass and need to be run through the coking process to even get up to the status of a heavy fraction. From there, additional cracking (adding heat and hydrogen to chemically change the oil) is required to produce medium and light ends which are then distilled to diesel and kerosene which can be distilled or hydrocracked to produce petrol, naphtha, octane, or natural gas.
This is why tar and shale are usually left alone until per barrel prices reach a certain level. They simply aren't profitable to extract and refine without massive investment. You've also got all of the sulfur to deal with, and that stuff recombines to form all sorts of nasty products that tend to be highly corrosive and acidic and require a whole new set of industrial processes to convert in to useful products.
The real kick to the testicles in all of this is that the tar sands oil that Canada produces is already on contract to China. The Keystone XL pipeline that is in the news would connect the tar sand fields of Canada to the refineries at the Port of Houston and the Port of Houston would be shipping all of the refined products to Asia.
Should we have laws that say domestic oil stays domestic? I'm not sure, but I do like the idea. The problem with that is that Canadian oil isn't domestic and they produce more than the US. The other problem is that cheap oil is only going to encourage the kinds of things we should be working to prevent. Namely, I hate being able to see the air I breathe.
What I'd really like to see is all of this drilling technology and know-how be re-purposed for harnessing geothermal energy. Less pollution and it all stays domestic.
I wish I had known this years ago when we were writing and printing The Evil Platy-hell-minthes, Planaria of Destruction comics. Then more megalomanicial rants about the benefits of immortality could have been included and they would have had a good grounding in biology instead of Pullingitoutofmyassology.
And let me reply to my own post here. The whitepaper says the sensor is going to be 10x7mm, which is a little under half an inch diagonal. Nothing about that sensor can equal 38mm, so I'm wondering which measurement is a misprint.
Reading the article, it states that the sensor size is 1.5 inches. (38.1mm) If we assume that the measurement is like other camera sensors, that is the diagonal measurement and a little trig tells us that we can get a ~27mm a side right triangle from that, which is on par with APS-C sensors, or most DSLRs in production today.
The smearing is probably coming from the focal distance between the lens and the sensor and a fixed aperture. Unless there is something they aren't telling us, the lens has to be focused to infinity and the aperture is f2.4, which is going to produce a very wonky area of critical focus. Plus, as you mentioned, diffraction is going to be a huge problem. The formulas for focus to infinity that close to the image plane are going to be very limited and your CoC is probably going to be well outside optimal. I would also guess that when oversampling, they are averaging the images to simulate critical focus, but using one sample to also simulate bokeh.
Those are nice shots, but they were also taken by a professional photographer in perfect lighting conditions. The ability of the average user to reproduce these will be reduced to "Happy Accident."
Now, a person with a good eye for composition and lighting will be able to turn out some pretty nice stuff on a consistent basis, and if you're looking to be able to make calls and play Angry Birds on your camera, more power to you.
Typical consumers don't buy a camera based on the quality of it's optics. People could give two shits about Carl Zeiss and probably only know the name because someone on TV oooh'd and awww'd about something with a Zeiss label.
Typical consumers don't understand the circle of confusion or why a small cell-phone or compact camera sensor is going to produce inferior images to a larger sensor.
Typical consumers don't understand depth of field, fstops, the zone system, tonal quality, dynamic range, or any of that other nonsense.
A typical consumer CAN compare two numbers and figure out which one is larger. Since this something everyone can do, that is where camera marketing has focused.
Canon, for instance, pushes sensors with huge megapickle numbers, but side by side their resolution is the same as the competing level Nikon or Sony. The only way you're going to get an actual resolution increase over the ASP-C sensor is going larger. All other factors being equal, a full frame sensor (35mm) produces a better image than an ASP-C. A medium format sensor (60mm) produces a better image than full frame (35mm), and so on.
So why is Nokia peddling on the megapickles instead of the oversampling or the digital zoom abilities, or the sensor size?
I'm going to have to ask that you cease and desist any "chiming in" as I hold the copyright to all chiming, ringing, or gonging sounds, regardless of the entity or group of entities that produced them.
As such, I will be sending you an invoice for this instance and my team will be computing an additional fee based on all other probable instances of your use of chiming, ringing, or gonging sounds.
I'm sure you'll understand that there are profits to be made here, and I'm just trying to protect my intellectual property rights. Also, please remember that our terms are Net 15.
"Users are noticing high latency during certain times of the day. Tier 1 support has narrowed the time to between 11am and 3pm. Further investigation shows an unusually high amount of traffic with a source of 0:0:0123:9AB6:0:0:FDEB:F90A which is in the block used by the base station for the satellite TV feeds. The destination address is the loopback for the Emergent core. After decryption and packet sniffing, the traffic was identified as an MPEG4 stream. When this stream was demuxed and viewed, the content was TranStar West 2/30-34 which is soap operas in those time slots. The Emergent has been queried about this feed and responded that latency would continue until Michael regained his memory, Tiffany and Jacob made up and got back together, and Blake 4, 5, and 6 were finally accepted by their father as his rightful clones. Escalating ticket to Tier 4 Psychological Support."
It really only takes a double hand-full of networking engineers to deny access to the entire Internet. We're not where we were some moons ago when Saint Postel moved the DNS root servers to his home computers for a while, but we're not too terribly far.
If some engineers got together and decided to take down DNS, well, for most people that would be the end of internet access.
A far more disastrous scenario would have some of the larger nodes advertise bad BGP around 2am on a Friday night, and the engineers responsible being "too ill" to come in to fix it.
You are correct about the contrarian factor though. I've known IT people who will take the opposite stance simply because an certain number of people are already on the other side. I've known IT people who will enjoy a movie until it gets popular, then suddenly it is the worst movie ever. I've known IT people who believe in certain things politically, but consistently vote the opposite to 'piss off "those" people.'
Slashdot Mirror
I once ran a site that used cartoon character names. You could track the age of the server and the popularity of a particular animated show pretty easily.
You knew that Spongebob, Squidward, and Patrick were older machines than Fry, Leela, and Zoidberg, which were in turn older than Finn, Jake, and LumpySpacePrincess.
I haven't been at the location in years, but I get the pick list mailed to me every so often. It was fun to see that all the new servers have names like Rarity, TwilightSparkle, Applejack, FlutterShy, etc.
How do your Minmatar servers hold up?
I'll say. I've got optical phase-contrast technology in 4 of the 9 cameras currently in my house.
So, are you predicting some sort of coal-mine gap?
Manning took the same oath that everyone entering the military takes, to defend the Constitution of the United States.
Part of every soldier's training states that if you see an officer or other members of your squad, platoon, battalion, or even Joe Random Officer committing crimes, treason, or acts unbecoming of an officer or enlisted man of the United States military, you are to take the appropriate action.
I feel he took most of the appropriate action. He saw how the war in Afghanistan was being handled, and how civilian casualties and torture of prisoners was condoned by those all the way up the CoC. He also saw how our allies were smoking up before patrols and putting the lives of every single American soldier they were near at risk.
Manning did the right thing. In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have turned the data dump over to someone like Asange, but he didn't seem aware of anything other than "Wikileaks is a safe place to get the word out and not have the data suppressed."
The response from the military and the government has been absolutely deplorable.
I read 'Crime and Glory' after 'A Planet Named Shayol' and it took me a couple of readings before I realized that the giant that is sleeping in the field is the same Captain Suzdal in both stories.
That's pretty much what fused the switch on my love of Cordwainer Smith's writing. Everything was connected. Everything. Hints and back story and explanations were found about every story in every other story. The mind that could conceive of all of that is just amazing.
Not bad for a fella that started his writing career with THE book on psychological warfare and pulp romance novels.
I can't remember the name of the story, but it concerns a hostile alien race attacking the Instrumentality. They deploy the Golden Ship, a space vessel that is 93 million miles long and shines like gold. At the same time, they dispatch a single ship with some crazy misfits on-board that do all the actual damage.
It was also because of "Psychologial Warfare" that I read "Defense at Duffers Drift."
Heh, after I read "Scanners Live in Vain" I can't help but thinking Darth Vader is sporting a Haberman device.
Ahhh Cordwainer Smith. What an amazing but seemingly forgotten writer. I've read as much of his work as I could fine and am constantly amazed at how deep and through provoking his stories and concepts are.
'The Crime and Glory of Captain Suzdal' is one of my favorite stories, as is the 'Ballad of Lost C'Mell'.
I think one of my favorite lines comes from the Rediscovery of Man period, after the Instrumentality decides that the differences are what made us unique and they order everyone to have their genes unmodified.
"Then went in to the reassignment chamber happy and content and they emerged French."
So, if I got this then I could guarantee that all of my spam would be about weight loss, masturbation aids, and (naughty) maid services? I don't see the difference from my current crop of spam.
What do you think the Van Allen Belt is doing up there? It ain't for holdin up our trousers.
I'm not sure about Imperial, but there are 100 metric shitloads in a metric fuckton
You still have Zoooooiiidberg. You ALL still have Zoidberg!
I'm sure Bender doesn't endorse the cool crime of election fraud. He just needs a big government network to get down with maximum efficiency.
If I'm understanding this correctly, there is no polarization. The receiving antenna is getting it's voltage changes from the amount of spin energy in the beam and it's location in space, sort of like the way a QAM signal uses phase shift and amplitude changes to create a waveform that wouldn't be possible with either method alone.
You're correct that the price rise is artificial. It used to be that while unleaded gasoline and oil were traded as commodities, there were limits on the exchange that prevented the sort of out-of-control prices we're seeing. When those regulations were removed, traders were free to drive up prices, and here we are.
The solution to this isn't necessary drilling more. Any undeveloped lease has a lag time of 10 to 15 years before stable production is reached. The tar sands and shale oils in Canada and the Dakotas are amazingly difficult to produce. You don't simply drill a hole and dance around like an 1870's prospector when the oil comes raining down on your head. To get oil from tar sands you have to strip mine the sand, then heat it to a couple hundred degrees until the tar liquifies. Once liquid, you run the tar though the distillation and cracking process like any other crude oil. The kicker is that tar sand oil is mostly heavy ends and is amazingly high in sulfur.
When you talk about ends in oil, that is a measure of quality and viscosity. Light sweet crude from the wells in the Brent North Sea fields is far easier to refine than West Texas crude because the Brent oils already have a low viscosity, are low in sulfur, and have a naturally occurring percentage of light and medium end products like petrol and diesel. In fact, Brent Light Sweet crude is so light that it can be used as six oil, also called bunker fuel which is the main form of liquid fuel for large ships, right out of the ground. This means that Brent North Sea crude requires fewer steps to distil the product you want and will leave less residue products. Less steps means cheaper refining means higher profits.
Tar Sand and Shale Oil require a massive amount of refining. At room temperature, both products are about as viscous as glass and need to be run through the coking process to even get up to the status of a heavy fraction. From there, additional cracking (adding heat and hydrogen to chemically change the oil) is required to produce medium and light ends which are then distilled to diesel and kerosene which can be distilled or hydrocracked to produce petrol, naphtha, octane, or natural gas.
This is why tar and shale are usually left alone until per barrel prices reach a certain level. They simply aren't profitable to extract and refine without massive investment. You've also got all of the sulfur to deal with, and that stuff recombines to form all sorts of nasty products that tend to be highly corrosive and acidic and require a whole new set of industrial processes to convert in to useful products.
The real kick to the testicles in all of this is that the tar sands oil that Canada produces is already on contract to China. The Keystone XL pipeline that is in the news would connect the tar sand fields of Canada to the refineries at the Port of Houston and the Port of Houston would be shipping all of the refined products to Asia.
Should we have laws that say domestic oil stays domestic? I'm not sure, but I do like the idea. The problem with that is that Canadian oil isn't domestic and they produce more than the US. The other problem is that cheap oil is only going to encourage the kinds of things we should be working to prevent. Namely, I hate being able to see the air I breathe.
What I'd really like to see is all of this drilling technology and know-how be re-purposed for harnessing geothermal energy. Less pollution and it all stays domestic.
Ahhh, thank you for the correction. I assumed the sensor plane was measured the same as the film plane.
I wish I had known this years ago when we were writing and printing The Evil Platy-hell-minthes, Planaria of Destruction comics. Then more megalomanicial rants about the benefits of immortality could have been included and they would have had a good grounding in biology instead of Pullingitoutofmyassology.
And let me reply to my own post here. The whitepaper says the sensor is going to be 10x7mm, which is a little under half an inch diagonal. Nothing about that sensor can equal 38mm, so I'm wondering which measurement is a misprint.
Reading the article, it states that the sensor size is 1.5 inches. (38.1mm) If we assume that the measurement is like other camera sensors, that is the diagonal measurement and a little trig tells us that we can get a ~27mm a side right triangle from that, which is on par with APS-C sensors, or most DSLRs in production today.
The smearing is probably coming from the focal distance between the lens and the sensor and a fixed aperture. Unless there is something they aren't telling us, the lens has to be focused to infinity and the aperture is f2.4, which is going to produce a very wonky area of critical focus. Plus, as you mentioned, diffraction is going to be a huge problem. The formulas for focus to infinity that close to the image plane are going to be very limited and your CoC is probably going to be well outside optimal. I would also guess that when oversampling, they are averaging the images to simulate critical focus, but using one sample to also simulate bokeh.
Those are nice shots, but they were also taken by a professional photographer in perfect lighting conditions. The ability of the average user to reproduce these will be reduced to "Happy Accident."
Now, a person with a good eye for composition and lighting will be able to turn out some pretty nice stuff on a consistent basis, and if you're looking to be able to make calls and play Angry Birds on your camera, more power to you.
BECAUSE MEGAPICKELS!
Typical consumers don't buy a camera based on the quality of it's optics. People could give two shits about Carl Zeiss and probably only know the name because someone on TV oooh'd and awww'd about something with a Zeiss label.
Typical consumers don't understand the circle of confusion or why a small cell-phone or compact camera sensor is going to produce inferior images to a larger sensor.
Typical consumers don't understand depth of field, fstops, the zone system, tonal quality, dynamic range, or any of that other nonsense.
A typical consumer CAN compare two numbers and figure out which one is larger. Since this something everyone can do, that is where camera marketing has focused.
Canon, for instance, pushes sensors with huge megapickle numbers, but side by side their resolution is the same as the competing level Nikon or Sony. The only way you're going to get an actual resolution increase over the ASP-C sensor is going larger. All other factors being equal, a full frame sensor (35mm) produces a better image than an ASP-C. A medium format sensor (60mm) produces a better image than full frame (35mm), and so on.
So why is Nokia peddling on the megapickles instead of the oversampling or the digital zoom abilities, or the sensor size?
Because of understandable marketing.
Hey there Paul,
I'm going to have to ask that you cease and desist any "chiming in" as I hold the copyright to all chiming, ringing, or gonging sounds, regardless of the entity or group of entities that produced them.
As such, I will be sending you an invoice for this instance and my team will be computing an additional fee based on all other probable instances of your use of chiming, ringing, or gonging sounds.
I'm sure you'll understand that there are profits to be made here, and I'm just trying to protect my intellectual property rights. Also, please remember that our terms are Net 15.
What a hell of a support ticket.
"Users are noticing high latency during certain times of the day. Tier 1 support has narrowed the time to between 11am and 3pm. Further investigation shows an unusually high amount of traffic with a source of 0:0:0123:9AB6:0:0:FDEB:F90A which is in the block used by the base station for the satellite TV feeds. The destination address is the loopback for the Emergent core. After decryption and packet sniffing, the traffic was identified as an MPEG4 stream. When this stream was demuxed and viewed, the content was TranStar West 2/30-34 which is soap operas in those time slots. The Emergent has been queried about this feed and responded that latency would continue until Michael regained his memory, Tiffany and Jacob made up and got back together, and Blake 4, 5, and 6 were finally accepted by their father as his rightful clones. Escalating ticket to Tier 4 Psychological Support."
It really only takes a double hand-full of networking engineers to deny access to the entire Internet. We're not where we were some moons ago when Saint Postel moved the DNS root servers to his home computers for a while, but we're not too terribly far.
If some engineers got together and decided to take down DNS, well, for most people that would be the end of internet access.
A far more disastrous scenario would have some of the larger nodes advertise bad BGP around 2am on a Friday night, and the engineers responsible being "too ill" to come in to fix it.
You are correct about the contrarian factor though. I've known IT people who will take the opposite stance simply because an certain number of people are already on the other side. I've known IT people who will enjoy a movie until it gets popular, then suddenly it is the worst movie ever. I've known IT people who believe in certain things politically, but consistently vote the opposite to 'piss off "those" people.'