• letatio (unregistered) in reply to Jack
    Jack:
    Can't find anyone who understands networking? But why would you? Any computer guy with pride would learn it himself, right?

    Let's see... no Internet, so forget google and wikipedia.

    Maybe you can get a book at the local bookstore... yeah, lots of stuff on DOS and CP/M... networking??? Try the fishing aisle. No, not phishing, we don't have that yet.

    So you call the vendor. The one who charges $10,000 minimum for anything. You ask if they have a book. No, but they'll sell you a CD for $45 that includes an intro to networking.

    So you buy it. Never mind that your computer's CD drive rarely works because there's some kind of BIOS interrupt conflict.

    Oh, but you can't read the document on the CD. Hafta buy some reader software now.

    Finally you get it open (5 minutes to load a page) and you discover it is basically a catalog of the vendor's parts. Still not how the hell it fucking works if indeed it ever does!

    Ahhh, the good old days...

    Obviously the previous guy was a network expert, specifically, a token ring network expert.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to ochrist
    ochrist:
    jay:

    My perennial favorite is when the detective gets some computer image, zooms in on a tiny object that's about 2 pixels square in the original image, and then he tells the guy operating the computer "clarify that", he presses a couple of keys, and boom! additional resolution materializes out of nowhere. Now we can read the inscription on the suspect's ring or the serial number on his handgun from a grainy security camera image taken 100 feet away.

    You mean something like this:

    http://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration1.htm

    Hmm, that's certainly interesting, but (a) not what I was talking about, and (b) not quite as impressive as the first couple of examples would lead you to believe.

    (a) I wasn't talking about unblurring, but about adding resolution. I'm always cautious about saying that something is a technological impossibility, someone can always bring up how people used to say that man would never fly, etc etc. But if we have, say, a digital photograph taken from such a distance that the nametag on the person's chest is only two pixels, it's difficult to imagine how a piece of software, no matter how brilliantly written, could supply the additional information to determine what letters where on the nametag and thus read the name.

    (b) In the first couple of examples in that article, the writer takes images that were digitally blurred from an originally-sharp image, and reverses the process. Apparently the digital blurring was done with a deterministic algrorithm such that no information was actually lost, i.e. color information was manipulated by adding and subtracting pixel values, but according to a rigid formula. It is not all that startling to suppose that such a formula could be reversed and the original image reconstructed. The unblurring in this case was basically made possible because the writer either had the source code or was able to figure out the algorithm.

    Frankly, this reminds me of those magic tricks where the person says, "Pick any number, add this, multiply by that, blah blah blah, subtract the number you started with, your final number is ... 6!" It may look impressive to a naive person, but even without doing the calculations, it's pretty obvious that the magician just did a little algebra to insure that "x" would always cancel out.

    Later he deals with some images that were really blurry to begin with. His results there are far more interesting. And, you can see, while clearer than one might have expected, also clearly not what one would have gotten if he had taken a non-blurry picture of the same scene to begin with. I definitely give the programmer credit there, though. It's a technically interesting achievement and also quite potentially useful.

  • (cs) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Here's the hilarious part: you're not the submitter. You may have submitted a very similar story, but it's not the one I was looking at when I wrote this.

    Actually, that's not hilarious at all- that's just depressing. How common is this crap?

    Depressingly common, it seems...

  • (cs) in reply to jay
    jay:
    C-Derb:
    William:
    And Hackers is a hilarious movie!
    The unintentional comedy in movies like Hackers, The Net, Swordfish, etc. is off the charts hilarious. But kudos to Hollywood for even trying to portray technology to a general audience.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I need to re-position a Chinese government satellite for Jack Bauer.

    My perennial favorite is when the detective gets some computer image, zooms in on a tiny object that's about 2 pixels square in the original image, and then he tells the guy operating the computer "clarify that", he presses a couple of keys, and boom! additional resolution materializes out of nowhere. Now we can read the inscription on the suspect's ring or the serial number on his handgun from a grainy security camera image taken 100 feet away.

    I wonder if doctors and lawyers get the same amusement from seeing how their professions are portrayed by Hollywood. Do doctors sit around laughing, "Ha ha, he made a 100% accurate diagnosis based on THAT description of the symptoms?! Then got the insurance company to approve treatment when he didn't even have a CPT code? Hee hee hee."

    I suspect they cry at the amount of unrealistic expectation is creates in the general population, the same as people in IT do.

    I read somewhere that a lot of law enforcement and prosecutors hate shows like CSI because they make jurors expect impossible levels of proof.

  • thermionic (unregistered)

    I call foul

    "bridging" two NICs in DOS/Windows in 1995 ?

    captcha wisi - wistfully remembering replacing a 300 node thinnet network with 10BaseT and a stack of 3Com switches in 1996

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Bob:
    OP here. I'm not sure why my submission underwent a gender change. ...

    With every submission posted on this site, you get one free sex-change operation.

    Dammit, now I have Coke in my keyboard!!!

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter

    I think I'm the submitter. I don't know though.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    if it by anonymous though I am

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Paul Neumann
    Paul Neumann:
    jay:
    Bob:
    OP here. I'm not sure why my submission underwent a gender change. ...
    With every submission posted on this site, you get one free sex-change operation.
    Dammit, now I have Coke in my keyboard!!!
    Too bad this isn't that other thread a few days later. You could get 30 free expert sexchange operations just by scrolling down.
  • James (unregistered)

    It could be worse. I know of one company (a friend worked there, note the past tense) that put out a good chunk of change to get a UPS for every machine in the company. They did not get a UPS for the network switches. So every time the power goes out all of the machines keep humming along as they each become their own little island.

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