What would Johnny do? Post: 302825085

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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? What would Johnny do? Post 302825085 by figaro on Sunday 23rd of June 2013 11:08:56 AM

06-23-2013

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What would Johnny do?

This year is the 110th birthyear of John von Neumann (born "Neumann Janos"). Interestingly, despite his achievements, both in number and in profoundness, he is hardly known among the general public. He played a fundamental role however in the development of the computer, being the first to understand that a computer program is a special type of data and that therefore a program fits as much in memory as does the data it works on. This is where the name "Von Neumann architecture" is from. This idea lead him to design a computer and he subsequently set out to build one. It was used in ballistics calculations and weather predictions.
He possessed a blazingly fast mind and a fearsome intellectual prowess:

He designed a self-reproducing program and is therefore considered to be the theoretical father of computer virology.
He is the co-inventor of Monte Carlo simulation methods and developed the field of cellular automata.
Among others he understood that having a faulty component in a machine, does not necessarily make it less accurate. This lead him to develop a random number generator by debiasing the output stream using an algorithm that he invented.
Then there are his many contributions he made to the fields of mathematics (both pure and applied), quantum machanics, nuclear physics and geometry, among others.

The fields most of us work in have an inherent level of problem solving that is required. Whenever I encounter a problem which even after a day seems intractable, I try to step back and think and wonder what he would have done. When faced with the same problem, no doubt a solution would have come to his mind which would have been both instantaneous and structural.

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

ppmshift

ppmshift(1)						      General Commands Manual						       ppmshift(1)

NAME

       ppmshift - shift lines of a portable pixmap left or right by a random amount

SYNOPSIS

       ppmshift shift [ppmfile]

DESCRIPTION

       Reads a portable pixmap as input. Shifts every row of image data to the left or right by a certain amount. The 'shift' parameter determines
       by how many pixels a row is to be shifted at most.

       Another one of those effects I intended to use for MPEG tests.  Unfortunately, this program will not help me here - it creates  too  random
       patterns to be used for animations. Still, it might give interesting results on still images.

EXAMPLE

       Check  this  out:  Save your favourite model's picture from something like alt.binaries.pictures.supermodels (ok, or from any other picture
       source), convert it to ppm, and process it e.g. like this, assuming the picture is 800x600 pixels:
	 # take the upper half, and leave it like it is
	 pnmcut 0 0 800 300 cs.ppm >upper.ppm

	 # take the lower half, flip it upside down, dim it and distort it a little
	 pnmcut 0 300 800 300 cs.ppm | pnmflip -tb | ppmdim 0.7 |
	    ppmshift 10 >lower.ppm

	 # and concatenate the two pieces
	 pnmcat -tb upper.ppm lower.ppm >newpic.ppm
       The resulting picture looks like the image being reflected on a water surface with slight ripples.

SEE ALSO

       ppm(5), pnmcut(1), pnmflip(1), ppmdim(1), pnmcat(1)

AUTHOR

       Copyright (C) 1993 by Frank Neumann

								 16 November 1993						       ppmshift(1)