Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson 4255 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
1.7 million people can be wrong. Never underestimate humanity's ability to get things very very wrong indeed, PREFERABLY all at once, in large unthinking masses. Think of all the people who believe in <INSERT DEITY OTHER THAN PERSONAL CHOICE/ ANY DEITY AT ALL IF ATHEIST>.
This is not an anti-Apple point I am making. Just stating the bleeding obvious.
And of course, I might be wrong ;-)
because of Planck's law
E = h f
with E the energy of a photon, H Planck's constant and f the frequency. Only at very short wavelengths (think visible light) do individual photons have a measurable effect (such as the photo-electric effect, explained by Einstein using Planck's law, which got him his Nobel prize (NOT relativity)). At radio wavelengths you have so MANY photons that the statistics of individual photons average out and only the wave behaviour is evident.
Patent law explicitly forbids me to patent mathematical equations. I invent new ones quite frequently, but cannot patent them. They are not even covered by copyright (in most legal systems). Every program can be expressed in Lambda calculus as a (very complicated) equation. Therefore, every prgram should be excluded from patentability.
The core of this argument was put forward I think in IEEE Computer Magazine a few years back. Still makes sense to me.
Predicting sunspot cycles is not such an accurate science. At the moment the sun is very quiet. The sun has gone through much longer periods of very low sunspot activity (Maunder minimum). I do not know of any reliable models that can predict such activity over even a short time span.
Scaremongering?
A rather feeble ad hominem reply to an actual argument that sharing files between apps has been made very difficult, and is an obstacle to ease of use. Apple touts ease of use as important (rather hard to deny), so why this set up which will not just make life harder, but creates all sorts of duplicates, eating up file space.
Please indicate what this has to do with earnings?
Apple's stance might well be illegal. If you simply do not allow an app, that would probably be OK, but throwing it out AFTER it previously had been approved, that is unreasonable, UNLESS the developer made changes which make it unacceptable. Even then the previously approved app should still be allowed.
Given the great asymmetry in power between Apple and most of its developers, a judge in the Netherlands might quite easily throw out the catchall "we can reject anything for any reason we like, and change our minds any time" parts of any contract as being unfair and unreasonable.
not very good. I tested software which ran beautifully on a 24 core (6 quad-core) opterons (18-22 x speed-up) crunching through multi-scale analysis of a 1.2 gigapixel image in 60 seconds. On a 64 core (4x 16 cores if I am right) ScaleMP box performance was DISMAL. As more threads are added, the performance tends to drop severely. On a single thread I would get a timing of say 60 seconds for a smallish data set, on 2 threads it took anything up to 5 minutes. The scheduler NEVER puts two threads of the same program on a single board, but scatters them far and wide. You can only gain speed up on these boxes if you have many light-weight processes which do not need to share much memory. Did we not have clusters for that?
you learn to program with energy efficiency in mind. Talk to guys doing sensor-network coding, they design communication protocols specifically with ULTRA low energy consumption in mind.
Other than that, it is just a case of efficient coding. If I can reduce the number of instructions by an order, I save energy by the same order. Lazy programming and reliance of Moore's law to do YOUR work of getting things running quickly causes these problems.
After all, we now assume you need the computing power of a Cray Y-MP to edit letters or do some spreadsheet work effectively.
"If we have enough data, the problem will be solved"
You want information, not more data. As more data are added, the problems of finding what you need get harder and harder. It's like Pratchett's omniscope: becase it can show you everything, it is practically useless at showing anything in particular.
THINK before you add more sensors and more data.
I experienced near 50 degrees C in the Negev desert, but because the humidity was in single figures, your body can get rid of excess heat through sweating. If the humidity is too high, you cannot release the excess heat, your body temperature exceeds 42 deg and you die.
Divers in certain areas carry alarms to tell them the water is above 37 deg C for this reason
when it was first released?
I remember teaching web design at that time, and reading up on all the vitriol spewed over the product by web designers right then (and on IE5 as I recall). Some students wanting to create really fancy designs had a seriously hard time getting it to render reasonably on a wide range of browsers.
At least MS-Oz is being candid about the product's quality, albeit rather late.
I found one patent on making a blinking cursor by repeatedly XORing the cursor content with current screen content (DUH). In the US this is more than innovative enough to get a patent. The USPTO does a disastrously bad job of checking for prior art, leaving it to courts to find out which patents are innovative, and which not.
No Nokia, you cannot take deep-space photos with your camera phone, and you cannot replace a 400 mm F5.6 APO telephoto with a lens that fits into a thimble.
The guy probably believes the image enhancement effects in CSI.
I get so tired of this sort of idiots (highly paid at that). For those still doubting:
The first issue is all about photon counts. The noise in an image is determined (apart from detector noise) most fundamentally by photon noise. Because emission and detection of photons is a random process, the noise is equal to the square root of the number of photons detected. So if a pixel captures 100 photons, the expected noise is 10. If you capture 10000 photons the noise is 100, but the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) is 10 in the first case and 100 in the latter. S/N is very important in image quality. This is why astronomers want BIG scopes, because doubling the diameter quadruples the amount of light, and doubles S/N.
No matter of post-processing can alter these facts. I teach computer vision and image processing at the University of Groningen, and have worked quite a bit on developing ways to counter the effects of noise.
The second issue is resolution: the limit of resolution is determined by the ratio of wavelength to aperture. This is why we are building a synthetic aperture telescope HUNDREDS OF MILES ACROSS for long radio wavelength. There used to be al sorts of wild claims on what deconvolution methods could do, but in the field it is now accepted that whilst you can enhance details that are faint (at the risk of increasing noise) you cannot reconstruct information that has simply been lost at the aperture of the lens.
Diffraction only quits being a problem in the near field (as in NSOM (Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopes)). Otherwise -> big surface area = better S/N + better resolution (if properly corrected by whatever means). Improvements can be made in weight/bulk, but aperture is irreplaceable.
A phased array design you seem to be proposing works fine in radio for three reasons: (i) wavelengths are long so mechanical tolerances are fairly relaxed, (ii) photon counts are HIGH, due to low energy per photon, and (iii) phase can be measured. This allows digital correlation of the signals. All three properties are lost in visual range. Optical heterodyning is very difficult and requires very bulky equipment. Getting solid optics down to the tolerances need is hard, fluid is worse. If the ESO Very Large Telescope in finds it hard to do, I do not think a portable version will be around soon
and a developer, I would love to see WebOS take off. I am probably not going to get my hands on a WebOS phone any time soon, more's the pity. If WebOS fails, it is due to business decisions and not technical merit (remember Betamax?), Nokia buying Palm could prevent that happening.
Please do not speak for all Europeans, and if you feel an irresistible urge to do so, please try to sound more sensible
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