Buying a Home Theatre System

What is the limit to digital photography?

My Nikon D50 and its 6 Megapixel chip is now old news, even the lowly D40x has a 10 megapixel chip. So what is the limit for digital photography? Will we need to go back to using 35mm film lenses on bigger chips to get higher resolution any time soon?

According to Wikipedia the DX film sensor is 23.7x15.7mm. The wavelength of red light is 700nm. Assuming that the wavelength of light turns out to be the limit for cell size we have an upper limit of 33,800 by 22,400 pixels or 760 Megapixels.

That allows for a 9'x6' print at 300 dpi or a 28"x19" high resolution 1200 dpi print.

While physics may well make it imposible to achieve the limit itself, electronics and smart interpolation will probably make up the difference.

A 760 Megapixel camera would be more than a match for the 8x10" film of large format cameras. The Nikon D200 is generally reconed to match if not surpass 35 mm film. Doing the math this means that the 760 Megapixel camera would be equivalent to 13x8".

Update: Mrs dotFuture tells me that the limit is two wavelengths. Apparently the proof has something to do with Fourier transforms. Which puts the resolution limit at about 190 Megapixels.

Palmer House Hilton

When a hotel charges $200 a night for a room I should not be woken up by a workman hammering at 8am two days in a row.

Waiting in lines

In the old days of the Soviet Union people used to spend their days waiting in line to buy food.

How may of the people waiting in line to buy Potter last Friday were waiting for an iPhone a few weeks earlier?

What is next month's must buy cultural event?

SPOILER! The end of Harry Potter

The folk at Slate are having difficulty with the end of Potter.

I think that the panel miss the point of Rowling's prophecy: 'Neither can live while the other survives'. The point is that Voldemort and Potter are both surviving rather than living. Both have spent the past 16 years in misery, the past 7 afraid that the other will destroy them.

Despite everything, Voldemort does have a way out: remorse. Redemption is possible even at the very end. If Voldemort feels genuine remorse he does not need to kill Harry and Harry does not need to kill him.

From a plot perspective Rowling plays fair. Voldemort is not destroyed by a deus ex-machina. The method of killing Voldemort is laid out in volume 6 and Rowling sticks to this. The scar was pretty obviously a horcrux. The new element that Rowling lays out is the means for Harry to survive.

At the point when Harry is blasted by Voldemort he is in posession of all three of the deathly hallows. He has the ring, cloak and the elder wand that blasts him recognizes him as the owner. Why shouldn't Harry survive when he is wearing a ring that allows him to recall people from the dead?

Due to the horcruxes Voldemort has to be killed eight times. It seems somewhat pikish to complain that he fails to kill Harry a second time with the same spell that failed the first time round. Voldemort decides that he has to kill Harry himself, which is somewhat illogical as all the evidence suggests that he is the only wizard who cannot kill Harry.

Airport Signs and the documentation problem

Arriving in at Chicago O'Hare this morning I leave the security area by means of the door marked 'Exit' directly opposite the escalators comming up from the walkway from the terminal. This seems to me a natural choice. The airport planners on the other hand do not.

In the airport planners view of the world passengers get off the plane and head straight to the baggage claim, whether they have bags to collect or not. And so there is no reason for a passenger standing in the departures hall to be told the location of ground transportation, and if it did this could wait until after the building work has been completed.

I point out the lack of signs to a customer service rep. "You should complain to the City of Chicago", she injudiciously opines. I point out that the City expects issues of this type to be raised by its tennants.

Finding a taxi may appear to be a trivial issue, but after getting up early the last thing you want to have to do on arrival is to spend ten unnecessary minutes walking about trying to find out information that should be easy to find. Consider the same situation with two small children who are up past their bed times after a long flight.

The same problem crops up again and again with computer system documentation. The information you need may be trivial, finding it is not. What separates an efficient programmer from a slow one is often the strategies that they use to find information that they do not immediately have at hand.

Often the response to questions is the one I got when asking the customer service representative 'not my job'. Often the conclusion is reached that the system is unnecessarily complex. But the real problem is that the right information is not available at the point where you need it.

One of the reasons that the GUI interface has largely supplanted the once ubiquitous command line is that the repetoire of commands is always on view. The user does not have to remember what the command to change font is called, the command is there in the menu. The problem with GUIs is that as the system becomes large, finding the command can become an exercise in itself. Why is the 'Insert Text' option in the menu called 'Edit' and not the one marked 'Insert'?

Finding a taxi is not a complex task, it is a simple task that is made unnecessarily difficult because the party responsible (United Airlines) did not make the necessary information available. I think that in a lot of cases 'complexity' is used as a cop-out, a way to avoid facing the fact that either the system implementation or design does npot provide the user with the information they need.

Slow motion impeachment

History is full of unnecessary wars, wars that were undesirable for all concerned but happened nevertheless because the sides found themselves in a situation where war appeared to be the only course left.

If George W. Bush is impeached it will be as a result of a similar set of circumstances. It is not in the interests of the Democrats to remove a deeply unpopular and widely discredited President from office. But the administration is doing its best to ensure that they have no other choice.

At the center of the issue is the theory of the unitary executive, the doctrine that a Republican President is supreme above all other branches of Government. Needless to say, the doctrine does not apply to Democrats.

Having advanced this ludicrous theory for six years the Republican party is now in a bind. If they continue to support the Whitehouse they risk creating a precedent that they are likely to regret. Meanwhile the Whitehouse advances the peculiar view that the doctrine of separation of powers puts the executive branch above scrutiny or accountability.

In particular the attempt to cover up the Gonzalez/Rove/Whoever US Attorney firing mess is now threatening to make a worse situation into a disaster. Congress issues a subpoena, the Whiteouse thumbs its nose. The next step is contempt procedings which the Whitehouse appears to assume will not go anywhere as long as they get to pick who prosecutes whom.

The judicial branch handling of contempt proceedings is however a recent practice and one that Congress created for its own convenience. Congress can at any time hear a contempt of Congress case and pass sentence itself.

The breaking point then comes when Bush pardons whoever is found to be in contempt. It would be a foolish step to take, but one that it is hard to see Bush not taking. He has got away with so much, it is hard to see how he would back down.

The distinction that Bush, Cheney and Rove are unlikely to grasp is that the Republicans in the Senate may allow him to thumb his nose at the courts with the Libby pardon, but thumbing his nose at Congress is something else entirely.

The clock is running out, certainly. But as the clock runs out the Republican party is forced to look beyond the Bush administration and the Iraq fiasco and how they might rebuild their party. They might well prefer six months of a President Pelosi and a chance of keeping three or four seats in the Senate they would otherwise lose to six months of Bush scandals and a possible war with Iran.

By this time next year the GOP nominee is almost certainly going to be running against the Whitehouse. The Senate cacus will follow.

What it takes to keep core DNS running

Scott Courtney recently gave a presentation on VeriSign's ATLAS system at the Google conference on scalability in Seattle.

The DNS runs without complaint despite constant denial of service attacks. This sometimes leads people to fail to understand just what it does take to keep core DNS running.

Military Papers Found Unprotected Online, Dozens Of Sensitive Documents That May Compromise Troop Security Found Available To Public - CBS News

It is quite amazing how frequently an obsession with keeping secrets goes with a
complete lack of interest in the technical and process controls necessary to protect those secrets.

Louis Freeh behaved in a similar way during the crypto-wars. For six years he waged a war against civilian use of strong cryptography on the grounds that it might impede law enforcement. In the aftermath of 9/11 it was discovered that at the same time Freeh had insisted on the right of the FBI to collect the information he had sabotaged FBI attempts to develop technology to deal with the information they already had.

What is important to these people is the sense of importance they get from knowing something that others are not allowed to know. Control of the information flow is an end in itself.

And the result is that the insurgents that the US is fighting now have complete access to a wealth of information that they should not and will be highly advantageous to them tactically.

We need strong DRM type enforcement techniques to prevent this type of data breach. But more important is an administration that cares about national security and not the protection of what it imagines is its privileges and perogatives.

Man flies 193 miles in lawn chair

What one idiot does, another will copy. If a third copies it becomes known as a sport.