Really? You mean it is possible to take an 8MP image and squeeze it down to 2MP and get 4 times better dynamic range? How? Let us take a saturated pixel in the CCD. And its saturated neighbour. One might have been twice over the saturation threshold and the other four times over. They both register saturation thresholds. By combining these two pixels, how can we get more detail in the washed out portions of the image?
So you throttle down your aperture to make sure the highest intensity recorded is just the saturation threshold. At that point so little light hits the CCD that the "dark" area pixels are all below sensitivity threshold, or they all register 0 photons. Again combining them is not going to improve the dynamic range.
The article is quite skimpy on the technology. By the size of the camera I am guessing all they have done is to split the image optically into some 16 or 20 pieces and are using some 18 or 21 CCD image sensors to
capture the image. They read these chips in parallel and load it into an internal buffer. The dynamic range if each CCD sensor is exactly same as what you could get in 5 Megapixel camera.
What is the big point in churning up the pixel count, if the dynamic range is the same old 1.0e03? Human retina has a dynamic range 1.0e06, three orders of magnitude better. And it has about 2.7 million rod cells and cone cells. One can create amazing speakers with absolutely perfect sound fidelity at 150 KHz, but human ear cant hear it. There could be some applications not involving human hearing/cdplayers/boom boxes. But at that point it is not really a "speaker". Same way at 160e06 pixels or 720e06 pixels it is not a "digital camera". It is some exotic machine with really pathetic dynamic range and huge number of pixels.
Of course MSFT can find the bug as fast or faster than these thirdparty do gooders. And if the aim is to stop the exploit they can do that too as fast. Did you notice how fast they fixed the WMP DRM breaking exploit? They can do these things if they want to. Infact they can even make IE as exploit proof as FF if they want to.
But they dont want to. There are thousands and thousands of sites that have hacked up code to step around the bugs in IE. They all will break if they lost back ward compatibility to these harebrained hacks that depend on the bugs in IE. MSFT considers it a big loss of face if more sites work in FF than in IE. If they fix all their bugs and holes in IE, more sites will work in Opera and FF than in IE. That is a big no no. That is why they tread cautiously making sure they fix the hole, just that hole, and nothing but that hole, and fix it just enough, so that most of the other hacks can continue to work. That is why they are so slow in responding. That is why the fix has to be fixed and fixed again.
OK, Joe Sixpack does not know much. Blindly uses the default programs. IE, WMP whatever. Cant even tell where OS ends and applications begin. And MSFT takes him for a ride and locks his content to one PC and does what most monopolies do when they think their control will last forever.
Isn't that normal? Isn't that what will eventually provide a market correction? Eventually Joe is going to find that 500$ worth of music he has bought over the last two years is locked into a dying PC or a stolen Zune and he has to pay all over again to get his music back. Then his friend Smartli Nuxuser tells him why he would never have that predicament at the watercooler. Happens repeatedly. Gets retold repeatedly. Joe gets mad
When Joe Sixpacks gets mad, he really gets mad. He sues left right and center. Start class action lawsuits. When CA builds million miles of highways and sues the car makers fo CO2 emissions, why cant Joe Sixpack sue MSFT? It can write all the EULA it wants, but when you get millions of Joe Sixpacks mad, all bets are off.
I mentioned the problem of scaling down steam engines just as an example. Gas turbines are, infact, more difficult to scale down. Once the science got the physics of steamengines right, they have scaled down steam engines to extremely small sizes. You might have seen small steam locomotives just a few feet long.
There is a toy maker in
Pittsburgh who churns out real working miniature steam locomotives.
If gas turbines are easy to scale down you should see gas turbines at smaller horse powers. Gas turbines have a higher efficiency than diesel and gasoline engines. (40% vs 30%) and have simpler maintenance due to lack of vibration. IC engines hurl out high mass pistons and whip them back around the crank shaft. Gas turbines run smoothly without vibrations because they are inherantly symmetric. But you dont see gas turbines at smaller than 1000 HP. Even in marine applications, steam turbines dominate the high end and diesels dominate the low end. Only on a narrow range of power ratings gas turbines have an edge, even in marine applications. So many of the back-up diesel generators could be replaced by gas turbines if they could be scaled down. They dont.
You will be surprised at the range of issues where the 80-20 rule applies. 80% of all wealth in a society is in the hands of 20% of the population. 80% of the crimes are committed by 20% of the criminals. 80% of the inventions are made by 20% of the scientists. Computer executables spend 80% of the CPU time in 20% of the code. 20% of the hurricanes do 80% of the all damage done by hurricanes. 20% of the programmers cause 80% of the bugs.
Infact 80-20 split is the lower end of the scale. Most of the time it is skewed even more highly. For executables it is likely to be 95-5 split. I once profiled a complex (as in complex number with real and imaginary parts) matrix solver that spent 90% of the time in complex::operator*() and complex::operator+(). BTW just by correcting the rookie mistake of return result; to return &res; speeded up the code by 20%.
The last 20% of any project takes 80% of the time.
Whether it is hardware of software, getting all components to work in isolation qualifies as 20% completion of the total project. BTW, I dont work on web projects with PHP/java/javascript. I work in Computational Electro Magnetics. Mostly C++, non-graphical, non-event driven hard core simulation of physics.
When steam engines were invented and developed in England by Newcomen the science of thermodynamics was lagging the technology. The steam engines work obviously but they could not get scaled down versions of the steam engines to work at all in the lab. Mainly because real engines were made with cast iron but the lab models were made with brass and it conducted away the heat away too quickly. At this time a man named James Watt, an instrumentmaker by profession did lots of work on the lab models and made an improved steam engine by mainly making the steam condense outside the cylinder. Also he invented the Watts Governor to regulate the speed of the machine. The moral of the story is that, heat engines dont scale down as easily as electronics.
Fluids in general behave much more differently in microscopic quantities than in large bulk quantities. I expect to be lugging large batteries for some time to come.
ha, ha ha. How many times the rookies in my dept have come to me excitedly and said, "Great news Boss, Got all the functions implemented and unit testing checked out ok. All I need to do is to put it together. Finished 90% of the code in just 10% of the time. Want to take a month off to chill out in Aruba!"
Then they spend 200% of the allotted time to make sure what they wrote in the first 10% interact with one another correctly.
Well that city seems to love the losers named Pirates.
Even the stadium threatened to leave the city if better team is not found. Still they keep the Pirates. So the city is sending a clear message to the world. Are you a loser? Are you named Pirates? Welcome. You are now a honorory Pittsburgher
I wonder why slashdotters make comments disparaging the monicker "PlayForSure". It is named correctly and it works as designed. The problem seems to be that slashdotters think "PlayForSure" means the songs the chumps bought will play for sure. Nah. Common misunderstanding. Play for sure, simply means, MSFT will play these chumps who buy DRMed music for sure, play them like a fiddle, shake them down for music they have already bought.
The company Tesla Motors, developed a sports car that can out accelerate Porche, BMW etc. It can reach 60 MPH in 3.5 seconds (compared to 4 sec for BMWs and Porches).
Now it appears it can outburn a Dell too. It is built using some 7000 laptop batteries.!!!
OK. Since I am vulnerable, I tried to remove pdf plug-in from Firefox. Somehow the "Remvoe Action" button was greyed out. So I changed it to just save the file for the present. I am very careful with attachments. I just did not want to accidentally visit a malformed pdf that is all. Enough for present? May be I should dig a little more and see if open source implementation of bare bones pdf readers are available for windows.
I clicked on the link. I am using Firefox. It warned me that my pdf reader is old, (6.0) opened what appeared to be a pdf version of google home page then redirected to google.com/owned.html which did not exist. Does it mean that my machine is vulnerable?
The second test too failed the same way.
But in the tabs where I expected pdf docs now there is a 404 Not Found error. What does it prove?
What should I do to remove these fancy features from pdf readers?
Ramping up pixel count is like Detroit building bigger and bigger engines , 380 CuInches, baby vrrooom vrrooom.
Hope they improve the dynamic range of these screens, which are all pathetic 1000 for most screens. Human eye has 1 million. Also why not some real depth perception too.
If we rename spamming, e-mail-bombing, we may convince the spooks at Mother's Company, Langley, VA to do some extrodinary rendition of the Sapmhaus board of directors and executives. Just a thought.
I dont know why Spamhaus missed this great business opportunity.
It shoud send out the following email to everyone.
Dear Email Recepient,
My name is Sir Arthur Cunnigham, Bar-at-Law, Queen's Bench, City of London, the United Kingdom. The Illinois Supreme court, Chicago Illinois, USA has awarded a judgement against me for the sum of 11 million dollars. If you have received any unsolicited email from me, I will have to pay you, 535$ as your share of the settlement. Even if you have not received any mail from me before, this email itself will entitle you a share towards the settlement.
So please send me your name, your address, your social security number, your bank account number, the routing number of your bank so that I can remit the said sum without undue delay. In addition to verify your identity, please let me have a valid credit card number, its expiration date and the card verification number. Please allow six weeks for me to raid^H^H^H^H credit your account with the money I owe you.
If I am selling software, and my next release is going to require my clients to hire 50,000 more people install and minister it, I would keep it quite confidential.
If this is how one creates jobs, one can create even more jobs if Europe switches to CP/M or IBM 370/155 or Cyber 170 NOS.
You have a copy of Office97 and it works. So continue to use it as long as you could. OO version 2 is much more stable and less of a resource hog. Just be glad then if Vista or a future version loses backward compatibility and makes your Office97 CD worthless, there is OO.org for you as a fallback position.
Yes there was time more people knew WordStar commands than the entire population of Pakistan, but when WordPerfect out did WordStar, it did it with a better product. When Lotus outdid Visicalc it did it with a better product.
When Word out did WordPerfect, it was through bundling it with OS, getting steep discounts on the price of OS to the OEM installers if they DONT install or sell WordPerfectb by throttling the revenue stream of WordPerfect by leveraging MSFT's monopoly in the OS space. That is how it won. And what happens after it wins? Just look at IE after it won the war with Netscape. Just look at the price increase in MsOffice while the hardware prices dropped by orders of magnitude. Starting from a pale imitation of a competing software is not the bad part. It is killing a superior product with underhand tactics that hurts us users. All of us.
Slashdot Mirror
So you throttle down your aperture to make sure the highest intensity recorded is just the saturation threshold. At that point so little light hits the CCD that the "dark" area pixels are all below sensitivity threshold, or they all register 0 photons. Again combining them is not going to improve the dynamic range.
The article is quite skimpy on the technology. By the size of the camera I am guessing all they have done is to split the image optically into some 16 or 20 pieces and are using some 18 or 21 CCD image sensors to capture the image. They read these chips in parallel and load it into an internal buffer. The dynamic range if each CCD sensor is exactly same as what you could get in 5 Megapixel camera.
What is the big point in churning up the pixel count, if the dynamic range is the same old 1.0e03? Human retina has a dynamic range 1.0e06, three orders of magnitude better. And it has about 2.7 million rod cells and cone cells. One can create amazing speakers with absolutely perfect sound fidelity at 150 KHz, but human ear cant hear it. There could be some applications not involving human hearing/cdplayers/boom boxes. But at that point it is not really a "speaker". Same way at 160e06 pixels or 720e06 pixels it is not a "digital camera". It is some exotic machine with really pathetic dynamic range and huge number of pixels.
...every banner I clicked on, I might have made may be a nickel. But the PTR thing gives a new meaning to that old phrase.
But they dont want to. There are thousands and thousands of sites that have hacked up code to step around the bugs in IE. They all will break if they lost back ward compatibility to these harebrained hacks that depend on the bugs in IE. MSFT considers it a big loss of face if more sites work in FF than in IE. If they fix all their bugs and holes in IE, more sites will work in Opera and FF than in IE. That is a big no no. That is why they tread cautiously making sure they fix the hole, just that hole, and nothing but that hole, and fix it just enough, so that most of the other hacks can continue to work. That is why they are so slow in responding. That is why the fix has to be fixed and fixed again.
to that 105 page pdf file, please.
Isn't that normal? Isn't that what will eventually provide a market correction? Eventually Joe is going to find that 500$ worth of music he has bought over the last two years is locked into a dying PC or a stolen Zune and he has to pay all over again to get his music back. Then his friend Smartli Nuxuser tells him why he would never have that predicament at the watercooler. Happens repeatedly. Gets retold repeatedly. Joe gets mad
When Joe Sixpacks gets mad, he really gets mad. He sues left right and center. Start class action lawsuits. When CA builds million miles of highways and sues the car makers fo CO2 emissions, why cant Joe Sixpack sue MSFT? It can write all the EULA it wants, but when you get millions of Joe Sixpacks mad, all bets are off.
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large numbers.
If gas turbines are easy to scale down you should see gas turbines at smaller horse powers. Gas turbines have a higher efficiency than diesel and gasoline engines. (40% vs 30%) and have simpler maintenance due to lack of vibration. IC engines hurl out high mass pistons and whip them back around the crank shaft. Gas turbines run smoothly without vibrations because they are inherantly symmetric. But you dont see gas turbines at smaller than 1000 HP. Even in marine applications, steam turbines dominate the high end and diesels dominate the low end. Only on a narrow range of power ratings gas turbines have an edge, even in marine applications. So many of the back-up diesel generators could be replaced by gas turbines if they could be scaled down. They dont.
Infact 80-20 split is the lower end of the scale. Most of the time it is skewed even more highly. For executables it is likely to be 95-5 split. I once profiled a complex (as in complex number with real and imaginary parts) matrix solver that spent 90% of the time in complex::operator*() and complex::operator+(). BTW just by correcting the rookie mistake of return result; to return &res; speeded up the code by 20%.
The last 20% of any project takes 80% of the time. Whether it is hardware of software, getting all components to work in isolation qualifies as 20% completion of the total project. BTW, I dont work on web projects with PHP/java/javascript. I work in Computational Electro Magnetics. Mostly C++, non-graphical, non-event driven hard core simulation of physics.
Fluids in general behave much more differently in microscopic quantities than in large bulk quantities. I expect to be lugging large batteries for some time to come.
Then they spend 200% of the allotted time to make sure what they wrote in the first 10% interact with one another correctly.
Well that city seems to love the losers named Pirates. Even the stadium threatened to leave the city if better team is not found. Still they keep the Pirates. So the city is sending a clear message to the world. Are you a loser? Are you named Pirates? Welcome. You are now a honorory Pittsburgher
I wonder why slashdotters make comments disparaging the monicker "PlayForSure". It is named correctly and it works as designed. The problem seems to be that slashdotters think "PlayForSure" means the songs the chumps bought will play for sure. Nah. Common misunderstanding. Play for sure, simply means, MSFT will play these chumps who buy DRMed music for sure, play them like a fiddle, shake them down for music they have already bought.
Now it appears it can outburn a Dell too. It is built using some 7000 laptop batteries.!!!
That their minibars are as unsafe as Diebold voting machine.
OK. Since I am vulnerable, I tried to remove pdf plug-in from Firefox. Somehow the "Remvoe Action" button was greyed out. So I changed it to just save the file for the present. I am very careful with attachments. I just did not want to accidentally visit a malformed pdf that is all. Enough for present? May be I should dig a little more and see if open source implementation of bare bones pdf readers are available for windows.
The second test too failed the same way.
But in the tabs where I expected pdf docs now there is a 404 Not Found error. What does it prove?
What should I do to remove these fancy features from pdf readers?
Ramping up pixel count is like Detroit building bigger and bigger engines , 380 CuInches, baby vrrooom vrrooom. Hope they improve the dynamic range of these screens, which are all pathetic 1000 for most screens. Human eye has 1 million. Also why not some real depth perception too.
You are right. I misunderstood the synopsis, I had not read the details. I seemed to have completely misunderstood the case.
If we rename spamming, e-mail-bombing, we may convince the spooks at Mother's Company, Langley, VA to do some extrodinary rendition of the Sapmhaus board of directors and executives. Just a thought.
It shoud send out the following email to everyone.
Dear Email Recepient,
My name is Sir Arthur Cunnigham, Bar-at-Law, Queen's Bench, City of London, the United Kingdom. The Illinois Supreme court, Chicago Illinois, USA has awarded a judgement against me for the sum of 11 million dollars. If you have received any unsolicited email from me, I will have to pay you, 535$ as your share of the settlement. Even if you have not received any mail from me before, this email itself will entitle you a share towards the settlement.
So please send me your name, your address, your social security number, your bank account number, the routing number of your bank so that I can remit the said sum without undue delay. In addition to verify your identity, please let me have a valid credit card number, its expiration date and the card verification number. Please allow six weeks for me to raid^H^H^H^H credit your account with the money I owe you.
Have a nice day. Thank you
If this is how one creates jobs, one can create even more jobs if Europe switches to CP/M or IBM 370/155 or Cyber 170 NOS.
You have a copy of Office97 and it works. So continue to use it as long as you could. OO version 2 is much more stable and less of a resource hog. Just be glad then if Vista or a future version loses backward compatibility and makes your Office97 CD worthless, there is OO.org for you as a fallback position.
When Word out did WordPerfect, it was through bundling it with OS, getting steep discounts on the price of OS to the OEM installers if they DONT install or sell WordPerfectb by throttling the revenue stream of WordPerfect by leveraging MSFT's monopoly in the OS space. That is how it won. And what happens after it wins? Just look at IE after it won the war with Netscape. Just look at the price increase in MsOffice while the hardware prices dropped by orders of magnitude. Starting from a pale imitation of a competing software is not the bad part. It is killing a superior product with underhand tactics that hurts us users. All of us.