The Ethernet connection was Comcast's "100 Mbps" connection, which was running at 85 Mbps (due to the cap being hit as DHCP handed out the IP address). The other 9 connections were just there to make it "look fancy".

Sigh where are my mod points today?

It's not about "more" or "less" important. It's about how a child needs their parents in their lives. The single AC and you and your wife can easily come up with something just as important as that, and you have every right to say the same thing we parents do: "I won't work more than 8 hours."

Those of us with kids are simply saying they are *our* reason for refusing to be abused.

Well, there's one button you REALLY go after (sometimes my nose gets sore, and the bottom of my tongue gets rubbed a little raw) but the other button is pretty fun to track down, too.

Hmm.

A beast with a lightly curved back, rounded corners, placement of a single [easy to touch] button, and [desirable] placement of ports? Sexy, indeed.

Also a little interesting: Typically people want to match colors across color spaces; as in "I want my print to look like my monitor!!!".

This case is the opposite; the goal is to punch the saturation, contrast, and luminescence to that of a randomly chosen Earth standard. We want to take the equivalent of a printed image (small color gamut) and see what it looked like on a monitor (large color gamut) prior to printing.

In general sweeping terms, this is pretty easy to do, provided an educated guess is good enough, but from a truly precise point of view, it's much harder, since a lot of extrapolation is going on. The data wasn't there when the picture was taken, so we're sort of fabricating it, based on what we know about other processes.

Imagine taking a picture of a basketball waaaay up north during the dark season of the year. Then imagine trying to determine what that basketball would look like at noon on the equator. You can do it, especially if you have a bunch of pictures between 10:00 pm, 6:00 am, and 4:00 pm (more datapoints allows you to scale luminescence, saturation, and color balance more accurately) but not as well as if you just took the picture of the basketball at noon on the equator.

Since we can't very well ship Mars to our equator, we extrapolate the best we can.

Need to be careful here; what you say happens, definitely, but it's not the eyes that do it. It's one of those "zomg my brain adjusted the data to a known pattern" type things.

Kind of like a sommelier's nose, you can train yourself to see the differences in white points without having to place swatches next to each other, and it's very useful when switching through several temperatures of light sources for simulation purposes. What sucks is once you do, you can't turn it off. ;)

A VERY common thing, since blue is mentioned a little further up; blue can EASILY look purple in very slightly different light. That's partly the brain adjusting for white point; but if take, say, sonic the hedgehog, who should look like a known blue, and manipulate light to make him purple, the brain tries to force the purple to blue, but fails at it. It's one of those situations that make people cringe; like chalkboard scratching for ears.

Even on earth we have this issue (I've made a fairly healthy living navigating through color space to color space and light source to light source over the years). People seem to forget that our own sunlight can vary during the day, geographical location, cloudy days, etc, and indoor lighting is the beast with a billion backs. Even your own eyes can betray you, needing a moment to adjust, and often one eye sees color slightly differently from the other.

Color scientists have had an absolute color and light source standard to measure against (CIE LAB) or 40+ years; Mars (or anywhere in the universe that receives light in the visible spectrum) fits just dandy into this model for color transformations, it's just a bit further away than usual. The less light there is to measure, the smaller the total color gamut will be, but you can extrapolate pretty well, if you don't mind some +/- errors along the way.

Typically, a true simulation would need several hundred color swatches for analysis, plus an iterative scanning approach to nail down the color gamut points that are furthest away (say, blues could be further off than reds, so require more attention for a transform). Still, for a general "this is approximately how it'd look on Earth" a 4 swatch RGBY spectrum is close enough.

It's something like the difference of having a precision of tenths to a precision of hundred-thousandths, when all you're doing is counting apples. You may be plus or minus a tenth of an apple, but so what?

The only thing that's a little surprising is that they didn't include a calibrated black strip, but I suppose they didn't really need to account for the variation between deep shadow areas or very dark objects in this case.

Content-aware clipping is a great feature. Wand a plant, hit delete, choose content-aware, hit enter, gogo Mars! Easier than removing zits from Romney.

Nah. I'd probably just pee on it.

1) Open bathroom door.
2) Unzip and yank out filled up pee spout.
3) Pee on white thing.
4) Giggle at the pink lady's hair all mussed up cuz she's flying about while surfing a whale's blowhole.
5) Think about how cool it'd be if those weren't butts but boobies instead.
6) Decide they are.
7) Decide, also, that the sandy desert picture to the right has nothing to do with peeing, but is, instead, a ploy by the bar owner to make me thirsty while I'm peeing.
8) Make sure nobody's about to sneak up on me and give me a hug (that really did happened once, but NEVER again. Shudder)
9) "Diabolical" is the word that I was trying to remember to describe step 7.
10) Realize I've been done for a minute or two and zip up, taking the utmost care I can muster not to damage the exit spout that beer comes out of (that's not all it does, ladies!)
11) Wash hands thoroughly, like a boss even, but then wipe them on my pants without realizing it (edit by sober me: I figure that, while not super efficient, it's better than just strolling out with spout-y hands).
12) Hope the next guy's less drunk than me, and capable of flushing that weirdo toilet with the awesome squigglies.
13) Order a beer and a shot.

That's how I do public restrooms, sir.

I've never understood that quote. We "reinvent" the wheel all the time; more lug bolts, higher strength alloys, sexier cut lines, etc.

I suppose the quote is to point out that "round" is the best possible shape for "wheel", but there's nothing wrong with improving existing things (so long as it really is an improvement).

It won't flush? You're shitting into it wrong. Push so the vein on the *other* side of your forehead head pops out, instead.

Best part? The tank will be sealed, so you have to replace the entire unit when it runs out of water.

I think your quote is quite apropos in this case.

Art is simply creation; anything created with an intent to capture a feeling, or a moment, or perform a feat, or any other "stamp" on existence is "art". That said, art that is typically considered "good" is aesthetic, evokes emotion, and makes a statement. There are, of course, many ideas on what makes art "good", but artistic creations are the ultimate form of "if you don't like it, don't view it."

Lastly, you can get into realms where things are offensive, dangerous, or downright obscene, and projects like this are often started for that sole reaction in the overall population. To me, that isn't art, though to others, it just may be. It'll never be an easy thing to determine.

I agree with you that some things simply don't take much talent or artistic creativity, but narrowing the definition of the word "art" would be like changing the word "life" or "up". Art is a very, very broad term for a reason.

More generally, there's something wrong with our infrastructure if Microsoft's failures have the power to cost a company 3 million dollars in lost revenue. Of course, losing "3 million dollars in lost revenue" is just management's way of screeching "Fix it fix it fix it fix it!!". Get caught up too deep in "lost revenue" and you'll function like a dying chicken instead of a sysadmin.

Shit happens, and preparing for shit to happen is probably the single best investment that can be made. Too bad management only sees lost revenue in hindsight, and not preserved availability in foresight. Between practicing as many of the old tasks in Win 2003 and Win 2008, you could have prepared for disaster, or preparing a redundant box using 2003 you could fall back on in the case of a dire emergency, you could have saved 3 million bucks, but the 2 grand or whatever it would have cost was "prohibitive". Shrug. Ain't my lost revenue.