Secondary data — the Poor Relative of Business Continuity

Cable & Wireless Plc acquired Exodus on the 1st February 2002.You think you’ve got BCP covered because you take regular backups and store them safely off site and perhaps even encrypt them … Think again. There is a whole plethora of devices and programs that facilitate your users accessing that data after you have dutifully restored it from your backup medium of choice. These facilitators contain secondary data and this data needs backing up and security measures as well, otherwise your primary data will resemble a newly restored vintage car: great looks, but no leaded gasoline available to run on.     

Mapping the Internet

How can you determine what the Internet or even an intranet looks like? The answer is, of course, to draw it on screen. Once you can see the data succinctly, it becomes much easier to understand. The drawing itself can help locate bottlenecks and possible points of failure. Where is that newly acquired subsidiary connected? Which business units have connections to business partners? More important, visual displays of networks have another dimension-color. Color is an easy way to display link use, status, ownership, and network changes     

Future of Mining Software Archives: A Roundtable

This article looks at what happens when you combine the four goal-driven approaches to testing classification (requirements-driven, structure-driven, statistics-driven, and risk-driven) with the three phase-driven approaches (unit testing, integration testing, and system testing).     

宝马635csi车顶内饰改装

真正的改装车,就是要从头到脚彻彻底底地洗心革面。改装范围包括:钢圈、轮胎、油漆及影音系统。当然,动力改装和汽车内饰也不例外。汽车内饰和汽车喷漆能够让人带来视觉上的冲击,但我们能否真正从中得到美的享受昵?如果汽车内饰看起来极为赏心悦目,那么这种感觉就如同周日在     

基于单片机的倒车后视系统设计

一种基于单片机技术的倒车后视系统的硬软件设计。系统以单片机为控制中心,结合图像采集和超声波测距技术,以车载电视为显示平台显示障碍物的准确信息。     

Near misses: Murphy's law is wrong [design engineering]

It has been said that you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. Best of all is when you can learn from someone else's mistakes. So this article looks at three test cases. (1) What did engineers and computer scientists learn about product development when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded? (2) What did you resolve to do better after the Hubble Space Telescope error? (3) What did you learn from the Mars Climate Orbiter error? In all three of these cases, there is plenty of learning to be had for anyone doing design in any field. Murphy's law ("If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong") is clearly incorrect. When the Challenger exploded, the problem was quickly traced to the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters because those O-rings were already under suspicion due to charring and hot-gas "blow-by" in half of the previous 25 Shuttle missions. Murphy's law implies those earlier flights should have blown up, but the lesson embedded in those near misses went unheeded. NASA says there were even hints during the Mars Climate Orbiter flight that something was wrong. Perkin Elmer ignored several indications that something was wrong with Hubble's main mirror. Near misses are nature's way of telling us that something's wrong and we'd better fix it fast. If we ignore them, that's when Murphy comes calling     

Video mosaics for virtual environments

As computer-based video becomes ubiquitous with the expansion of transmission, storage, and manipulation capabilities, it will offer a rich source of imagery for computer graphics applications. This article looks at one way to use video as a new source of high-resolution, photorealistic imagery for these applications. If you walked through an environment, such as a building interior, and filmed a video sequence of what you saw you could subsequently register and composite the video images together into large mosaics of the scene. In this way, you can achieve an essentially unlimited resolution. Furthermore, since you can acquire the images using any optical technology, you can reconstruct any scene regardless of its range or scale. Video mosaics can be used in many different applications, including the creation of virtual reality environments, computer-game settings, and movie special effects. I present algorithms that align images and composite scenes of increasing complexity-beginning with simple planar scenes and progressing to panoramic scenes and, finally, to scenes with depth variation. I begin with a review of basic imaging equations and conclude with some novel applications of the virtual environments created using the algorithms presented     

A vision-based system for the prevention of car collisions at night

Keeping a safe distance from the car in front of you is important in car accident prevention. This paper presents the use of a single CCD camera to measure the distance to the car in front at night. The distance from the car in front is estimated using the taillight, the license plate (LP), and distance measurement. The two taillights of a car are detected and extracted to be the salient features in estimation. Based on the proportionality of similar triangles, the distance between the CCD camera and the car in front is calculated. Since the width of the two taillights of a car depends on its type and shape, LPs are detected for accuracy enhancement. From the results, less processing time and high accuracy rates have been achieved using the proposed approach.     

Signs of significance [digital displays]

Because they're so important, signs need to be very clear. Simplicity means that you don't risk having the style of the presentation conflict with the underlying message. Blandness means you avoid contamination or distortion of the message. So a simple, bland sign should be perfectly legible and perfectly boring. If you're careful and clever, you can work in some design as well. In this article, I focus on the purely electronic displays, typically implemented with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs) or light-emitting panels. The evolution of the electronic digital display provides a fascinating example of graphic design cooperating with technology. Digital displays also demonstrate the practical importance of economy: not only must they be easy to read but they must also be economical to make and buy     

Response Times for Auditory and Vibrotactile Directional Cues in Different Immersive Displays

ABSTRACT

Using multisensory signals in advanced driver assistance is continuously increasing as a way to increase the attention and reduce the reaction time. It is essential that driver assistance system is capable of providing directional cues to the driver to direct his attention to the sides of the car as usually the focus is in front of the car. These signals could be for blind spot information, navigation, lane departure warning, collision warning, etc. This study investigated the effect of auditory and vibrotactile on directional attention in driver assistance systems. Moreover, two types of immersive displays were used in the driving simulation, namely the Head Mounted Display (HMD) and CAVE display, to study the effect of the type of display on the human performance. Lane Chang Task was used to assess the attention by measuring the response time to directional information. Vibrotactile and Auditory cues induced equal response times, meanwhile, vibrotactile signal was significantly gained higher satisfaction than auditory.     

基于GPS／GPRS／Wireless IP Camara的社区智能警车系统设计

介绍一种社区智能警车的设计方案。本警车的位置信息可通过GPRS传送至控制中心,通过wirelessIPCamara可知道警车周围的环境信息。同时,控制中心的处理器集成模式识别算法,可对人、可疑车辆进行识别、跟踪,并将控制中心的指令传达给警车司机。     

“第三视角”在数字媒体游戏中的应用探析

第—人称就是指我，第三人称就是指他。人在玩游戏的时候。自然是要代入游戏的角色和场景中的。如果你看不到代入的这个角色（部分肢体还是算得），但是却可以看到这个角色所处的场景，那么这个游戏就是第—人称视角的，现在的大部分射击游戏都是用的这种视角，因为这种视角是鼹能够给人冲击力的。也是最身临其境的，比如使命召唤系列、战地系列等等；如果你能看到代入的这个角色及其周边的场景，但是这个场景却不是这个角色能够看到的（人是看不到自己后面的东西的），那么这个游戏就是第三人称视角，战略类动作类的游浅基本上都是采用的这种视角，因为它的可操作性强．而且易于上手。有些游戏能够做到一起包含这两种视角，但是却不能同时做到，比如极品飞车系列．你可以把视角调到车内．那便是第—人称视角，也可把视角调到车外，这便是第三人称视角。     

The top risk of requirements engineering

The worst thing that can happen in requirements engineering is that your set of requirements, however expressed, doesn't accurately represent your users' needs and consequently leads your team down the wrong development path. The whole point of requirements engineering is to steer your development toward producing the right software. If you don't get the requirements right, how well you execute the rest of the project doesn't matter because it will fail. The article looks at how we can be led astray     

Effects of in-vehicle warning information displays with or without spatial compatibility on driving behaviors and response performance

A driving simulator study was conducted to evaluate the effects of five in-vehicle warning information displays upon drivers' emergent response and decision performance. These displays include visual display, auditory displays with and without spatial compatibility, hybrid displays in both visual and auditory format with and without spatial compatibility. Thirty volunteer drivers were recruited to perform various tasks that involved driving, stimulus-response, divided attention and stress rating. Results show that for displays of single-modality, drivers benefited more when coping with visual display of warning information than auditory display with or without spatial compatibility. However, auditory display with spatial compatibility significantly improved drivers' performance in reacting to the divided attention task and making accurate S-R task decision. Drivers' best performance results were obtained for hybrid display with spatial compatibility. Hybrid displays enabled drivers to respond the fastest and achieve the best accuracy in both S-R and divided attention tasks.     

仿生智能电子油门踏板的设计与实现

为了让汽车更加安全,结合仿生学原理,设计了一个新型智能电子油门踏板;在普通油门踏板的下面,嵌入以微处理器为核心的电控单元,使洗车具有安全壁障和纠正错误操作的智能化;当汽车距离障碍物小于设定的安全距离时,电控单元就可以立刻自动控制汽车减速至最后停止;这样就可以让汽车像蝙蝠一样自由安全壁障;电控单元还可以检测出司机错误将油门踏板当刹车踏板的错误操作,然后会自动将汽车安全停止;电控单元还可以将车距、车况等信息实时送给汽车的音响系统,给司机相应的提示;本设计可以在不改变原来汽车任何结构和司机的习惯情况下,可以让汽车驾驶更加安全;研究对汽车安全驾驶领域具有一定的参考价值。     

Secure Enterprise SOA

SOA looks like a promising paradigm that could simplify the IT of future business. If you don’t consider security, however, you will probably fail by implementing your SOA roadmap. In this article we outline 10 (known and new) security challenges) and like to encourage to think more about Secure Enterprise SOA.     

After-effects of TFT-LCD display polarity and display colour on the detection of low-contrast objects

Participants performed a word–non-word discrimination task within a car control display emulated on a thin film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD). The task simulated an information read-out from a TFT-LCD-based instrument panel. Subsequently, participants performed a low-contrast object detection task that simulated the detection of objects during night-time driving. In experiment 1, words/non-words were presented black-on-white (positive polarity) or white-on-black (negative polarity). In experiments 2 and 3, display colour was additionally manipulated. A positive polarity advantage in the discrimination task was consistently observed. In contrast, positive displays interfered more than negative displays with subsequent detection. The detrimental after-effect of positive polarity displays was strong with white and blue, reduced with amber and absent with red displays. Subjective measures showed a preference for blue over red, but a slight advantage for amber over blue. Implications for TFT-LCD design are derived from the results.

Statement of Relevance: When using TFT-LCDs as car instrument panels, positive polarity red TFT-LCDs are very likely to lead to good instrument readability while at the same time minimising – relative to other colours – the negative effects of an illuminated display on low-contrast object detection during night-time driving.     

提高火灾报警控制器FLASH器件使用寿命技巧

火灾报警控制器经常需要使用非易失性器件FLASH,当改写FLASH扇区中任何一个数据时,都需要擦除整个扇区,如果不注意软件操作方法,容易对器件进行频繁擦除操作,造成器件损坏。本文介绍了几种提高使用寿命的方法和技巧,特别提出了当需要大容量信息滚动存储时,牺牲一小部分存储空间作为数据缓冲的方法,可以大幅提高Flash芯片的使用寿命。     

Crop art. Part 1. Computer graphics

There's a coolest display medium for computer graphics a field of living, growing crops. The medium is high resolution and capable of displaying large images viewable from dozens of yards or meters. The subject of crop circles is fascinating in two ways. First, they pose interesting geometric challenges by the limited number of tools that you can typically use when creating such a design in the field, typically under the cover of darkness in a single summer evening. Second, the social phenomena surrounding these designs include a rich mixture of people who create them, who study them, and who vigorously debate a wide variety of conflicting theories regarding their creation and meaning. In this paper, the author looks at some of the interesting geometry behind crop circles and related formations.