(fast start, can set minimal interface, walk folders with space/backspace, crop, rotate, adjust curves/gamma/brightness, *no* drawing (lines etc), supports something like 9000+ formats e.g. also custom specified raw interpretation)
Paint.net: more of a lightweight editor ("mini-PS/PSP")
you know what it is
I use
-Irfan for viewing, batch conversion, simple stuff like rotate and resize photos
-PDN for labeling stuff on screenshots, collages (at work)
OTOH, often-used antialising does render at higher-than-screen-res, then scale down (interpolate) to make the jaggies less visible.
If your screen has twice the pixel/mm you can probably dial down the AA-ing by a factor 2.
So you render at the same resolution as before, have a little crisper image at the risk that people might be able to make out the jaggies a little better (or just not so, because the single pixel is too damn small and looks exactly the same as the larger interpolated value pixel before).
i cannot conclusively deny that there could be a use case for this, but my first thought after a hope of "bender for the lazy" on the title was "3D clipart".
If only the hipsters stopped inserting random silly featlets everyone will have forgotten about in 5 or 10 years, it might someday become almost as respectable as C.
/not so sure about whether i should add the joke icon too, or i'm actually serious.
Since i downvoted your post i feel the need to explain.
I'm not a backup guy, but i can assure you that a decent network link will provide you with close to spec transfer rates for gigbit/s links. We have cameras on 1Gbit reliably transferring somewehre around 110 to 120 million bytes per second (~90-95% of spec) of payload (pretty incompressible image data) over a single gigabit link (on "prosumer" intel/pro PC pci-e cards and windows xp).
One thing to be *very* aware of is however collisions. If you have a dedicated point to point link this is fine. But as soon as you have anyone else interrupting, throughput crashes - like divide by factors, not just subtract a bit IME.
If the US experiments with jumbojet-sized lasers for such, i doubt a shoebox device (LED laser source?) is sufficient. Of course there is a possibility they choose to use the big ones for show effect.
Sometimes with english texts i'm unsure which symbols are used for decimal and which for thousand seperators.
So, it wasn't immediately clear to me whether their income came from the coffee machine in the break room or whether they once sold a sandwich to a visitor while coffee is free.
i cannot completely rule out my PS3 ate the pet rabbit one of my neighbours misses since yesterday while updating to the new firmware, since that also happened yesterday.
The only 3d-display experience i have is from CAVE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment), and there i always felt disappointed, until one day during setup i saw it cycling through setting for different assumptions of eye-to-eye distance. At about twice the usually assumed distance it looked amazing, though definitly not "right" :)
So i'm definitly not blind to that "3d" effect but my brain seems to automatically expect anything on a screen to be 2d (resp. ignore "3d" if it is) unless it is severly exaggerated (to the point where i would get sick had i to sit through a whole movie at that setting).
>>It's so bad I'm actually thinking of downgrading.
i LOLed a little. It makes downgrading sound like a severe offence.
Often enough can't be arsed to even update if stuff already works. After all i don't find it a particular pleasure to update every software every forthnight.
Maybe i didn't really undestand what you want to point out, but..
Given that MPEG transport streams contain presentation timestamps on all content frames it is hard to believe that all of them would be unable to present stuff at the time specified in the stream, that is, not be proper MPEG decoders. And the clock has some quite high frequency (90MHZ IIRC) so it seems unprobable to be a source of inaccuracy or visible/audible jitter.
Of course if the program is already broadcast with desync, the TV doesn't magically know how to fix that :)
In my mostly engineering work environment, i don't think i could reliably identify a single person who has never made made a mistake with numbers or never had difficulties properly understanding a paper.
No big difference so far. Media and JS heavy pages i try to stay away from anyway.
But the aggregation of "firefox menu button" and tab headers into the title bar seems to cancel out on loading pages (at least some, i din't bother to investigate), leaving the UI with more top-of-the-page overhead (namely an empty toolbar or something) than i had before in the previous versions.
I tend to customize it so that there is few UI left and this was nicely taken over on the update - until that said canceling out.
XP by the way, maybe it has something to do with the XP titlebar not friendly to such unexpected customisation :)
While i understood what he meant the first time, it severly stalled my reading for a moment - during which i wondered whether el reg at least receives money for mentioning the name of the new owner whose almost-screen-sized logo now on the installer seems to me like the so far only contribution to virtualbox.
Even though comparing the size of two lossy compressed images is totally meaningless if you do not provide that both have the same viaual quality or at least something like a SNR ratio ...hell, even compressing one using the other as source is totally meaningless.
Anyway, the ratio of 40% sounds not too far off. If you'd took out-of the box h.264 and applied all the tools applicable to still images, you'd probalby end up with a similar figure compared to JPEG, at the same "computed visual quality". No surprise there ... It's almost 20 years since JPEG was born (well also almost 10 since h.264, but still 10 difference...).
Looking at JPEG2000, it also claims around that marging to JPEG. Frankly, i think it performs worse than JPEG at high quality. And while details are somehow better preserved at qualities you really don't want your eyes to suffer through, it looks like shit there. IOW, it is technically a worthy progress and may have some merit at the lowest quality levels, but no thanks.
Now, this web-P ...it's derived from VP-8 .. aren't On2's video codecs based on ..wait.. wavelets, like, um, JPEG 2000? Regardless of whether that is acually true or just a misunderstanding of mine, On2 videos damn well look like having the exacly same crappy degradation performance as wavelet compressed images do. Maybe it is technically not exactly wavelet but its failure mode looks a lot more like typicaly wavelet than typical block-transform. It just doesn't look pleasant.
I hope "40%" is just not enough. While h.264 got away with a "50% off MPEG-2" - basically because the industry needed some new video format to sell "HD", i hope google doesn't yet have the power to force this on everyone. I mean, i perfectly recognize JPEG is old and by now world and dog could do "better" compression wise, but just because google says "40%" i don't think it's worth it. After all, JPEG-2000 faceplanted with wavelets; if it wasn't for youtube/flash crap-league videos, nobody would even know how a wavelet-encoded video looks; h.264 isn't wavelet even though the tech "existed" at the time and the next MPEG codec doesn't smell like it were based on wavelets either. To me, hints at "wavelet compression isn't ready for humans to look at".
Sorry for the tirade. I like the wavelet concept technically (eg for computer image analysis like feature recognition), but my eyes don't like waveletted images at all.
While that may or may not be clear. Showing how a relatively cheap setup can intercept calls is still worth something.
Operators may chose to ignore that someone with a huge budget to invest into this kind of games is capable of it it is one thing, and maybe they were even kind of fond of knowing that for those "national security relevant" cases, the gov can just do it fine by itself without putting the operator into the unfomfortable situation to have to help.
But if basically any hobbyist can do it without ruining herself (and therfore a specialised company can provide it as a quite cheap service as they have to invest only once), that is an entirely other matter.
So the next round will be uncounted former site owners looking to get a rooted server at one of the 12 registered companies? (pardon me while i rofl at the thought)
possibly their reasoning for not doing so was along the line:
possibility that something goes wrong enough to destroy the computer center 1km away: 1e-3*
possibility that something goes just wrong enough to destroy the computer center 1km away but not the computer center 6000km away (through the earth): 1e-30*
cost of additional compter center: factor 2
(cost of transmission line able to transmit all experiment data ahead of the wave of destruction: huge?)
I'm assuming the thing worked by some kind of automated process (keyword, links analysis..), as human reviewing of their so called dark web is clearly beyond the capacity of any company.
Even if it works most of the time, if a significant amount of the mismatches actually block people out from relevant pages, the damage is potentially much larger than the gain in productivity.
E.g. if i implement a (non-trivial) algorithm in a software but am denied access to a site with information on it, the cost of that is quite unquantifiable. If that information was just a pointer to a more efficient implementation, maybe the cost is zero except we could have annoyed the user less by less waiting time, or the competitor could use that alternative and outperform us. If the site was about a significant flaw in the method, it could cause us very direct financial damage if wrong results are presented to the user.
Probably 90% of what the filter responds to is actually utter dross. Not hard, as that holds for all of the interweb. Nevertheless actually useful information is found quite often off large/established sites where it is most likely mixed with content on other topics (pets,children, other weird hobbies of the site author...). Err yes, there actually are blog-like sites which are not completely braindead.
/Considered the Big Brother icon. But BB knows what you are supposed to see. Whereas this new fangled filter thing clearly can't know.
"And Microsoft has renamed them "low cost small notebook PCs" - despite our help in sorting out the telltale markings of a netbook."
I'd like to remind you it was this website who called them Small Cheap Computers (excellent name) for a long time, before everyone seemed to agree on the most harmless and most meaningless of all names on the table. Microsoft once again may have adopted and bastardised :)
copying commercial investors is fail of governance
IMO it makes no sense for the public to invest into what commerical entities are willing to finance.
A sensible focus were for the public to invest into into fields where the public benefits from but where no commerical entity can or wants to invest. For example due to no direct commerical benefit, the investment will be too far into the future or, secondary projects supporting the "vision" where a society or country wants to go to.
Positive examples are for one projects with the outlook "to serve humanity" but a lack of potential for direct commerial exploitation, projects which promise maybe huge commercial potential but are so expensive no corporation or single country can bear the costs on its own or the risk of the technology being owned by a single company were unacceptable (e.g. cold fusion or basic research into understanding cancer...) or for the last one, supporting fields where a country or region feels it is strong and a favourable environment exists, but it is felt commerical investment is not enough.
(For the last point, As swiss i think switzerland is strong in material technology and micro-machinery and there exist many small enterprises in these fields which can benefit from their geographical proximity, so i think support for startups in these fields is something we'd want to invest in with technology-transfer and institutional backup-research as well as funding start-ups. I don't know the situation in the UK, but am sure the UK too has fields where it's commonly felt a niche fits the local circumstances).
Some negative examples where you'd not want to invest public money/effort into (related to above examples to make the point) were specific cancer relief chemistry (covered by pharma industry with massive sums, so "no point" there), more efficient motors (as opposed to tapping new energy "sources" like cold fusion, the investment is likely small in comparison) and for the swiss example reasearch into material favorable for, for example improving microprocessors (High-K, Intel invests lots already and other companies likely do as well) or coatings for this-and-the-other effect (low friction etc) - direct commerical benefit at moderate investment / "time for delivery of useful partial results" makes these interesting enough for commercial investors.
I haven't really looked into the compatibility issue giving birth to "XP mode", but i dropped one app of mine into W7 RC and it worked as usual. That's a 32-bit app (on 64-bit OS), using registry and writing to its own folder as well as using all 'old' GUI controls and GDI stuff as it did under XP.
Now if all that works, are the only apps that won't run those which did not even remotely fit into "NT5 programming model", such as with hardcoded writing to the root of the C: drive and similar monstrosities? *
If so, it's about ... time, the respective owners of those apps decide whether to throw in the money to bring those apps from year 1990 to 20xx or just put them onto a seperate (*offline*) machine running an old windows.
*Additionally, there is the inevitable class of those apps directly communicating with hardware / "integrated drivers". It's clear that those need to be updated for an OS version with different driver model. But for these apps i suspect "XP mode" won't cut it, most likely they need to run on an un-virtualised OS of the version they were made for, so a seperate machine to run them is probably the only sensible option if the app really won't ever be updated to a new OS version.
I'm not one who is keen to update the OS every so often for no tanglible benefit. w2k,xp,w2k3 (NT5 IOW) are perfectly fine for now and unless some app really needs >2GB on its own for the foreseeable future.
But if you on one side need features of new OSes you shouldn't expect that newer OS to drag on compatibility with apps that were written for a windows version of a time where consumer windows was basically a single-user, (mostly) offline, security-agnostic OS (win3x/9x/ME IOW).
While some obscure business critical in-house apps may no longer work without "XP mode" (never updated because their original author left in 1995), i can't imagine any irreplacable and un-updateable "off-the-shelf" app requiring "XP mode" in the long run.
(About on the same track as taken Paul, but anyway)
All that list at the end of the article says that three out of four people in Glagow have a sports complex while "only" two in three in Cardiff do? I think if anything can be read out of those figures, it's that these people succeded in making everyone unhappy with their sports propaganda.
Both numbers are WAY too high. If 10% or even 20% felt they should do more,OK. ....but 60% + ...hello??? (How about either do something about it, or just accept your lazy self as your natural form :).
PS /me is closer to the "no unnecessary moves" end of the spectrum, but then again i'm a programmer, not a construction worker or something.
Megane-kun sign, because he is not allowed to run or perform any risky movement in the lab. Deliberately ignoring the subtext of the icon, the guy just fits.
Dear Microsoft, have you not learned from the FAIL of the concept of "UMPC"?
You as foremost a software maker (yeah and some pehripherals and a huege black box) may not necessarily be the one who best predicts what customers long for as next "cool" PC form factor (hardware, that is).
Especially not so if you were to let yourself be lead by "what new computer type fits Windows" rather than by user feedback, field research and/and UI professionals and then ask yourself "how does Windows need to change for these".
"LeBlanc also confirmed Microsoft does indeed plan a family pack for installation on up to three PCs but that it will only be available in selected markets."
Makes sense, as clearly families exist only in a few countries...
"but Atom, at least the single-core version, has no obvious place in a mains-powered nettop PC"
no?
There certainly are applications where the atom is fully adequate on a netbook and i don't see why it should not be the same on a box.
You are probably right in pointing out what will be the most obvious limitation of the device (apart from the vista preinstalled, i assume..), but could have worded it differently.
All that verdict is doing is inviting manufacturers to repeat the feature creep that killed the "netbook"/portable SCC.
I have an aspire one SSD/linux. It way a buy out of mood - "i want this", not "i need a mobile computer" - but at a time i was already pretty convinced i'd never again buy neither one of the big laptops nor a harddrive based mobile device.
Turned out i quite like this machine. I'm really not a fan of linux. But for what i use the machine, i don't give a rat's what the OS is as long as it can has firefox, acrobat reader, open office, boots quick, and the handling is close enough to windows (keyboard shortcuts..).
The only concern was "interweb on a stick" but for that i found a vodafone app that could be bent (by me as reasonably noob user in the field) to work with the stick i have, which came only with windows support.
This is certainly a matter of personal taste, but for me a computer to do actual work on can never be a mobile computer and a mobile computer is not ment to do much more than provide an easy interface to read documents, the web and occasional writing some notes / work on a document ("work" for me +/- requires two screens, a *real* keyboard, proper desk for mouse etc).
Naturally the "original" SCC generation was basically the best mobile device that could happen to me. Maybe except for the eyewateringly short battery runtime.
Pingu because he can handle the darn SCCs, while microsoft seems to want to see SSCs as dead as it liked the bird.
There actually are small companies depending on web presence ;)
It might not be useful if you're after headlines, but still a mean little trick if your goal is to lock up your competitior's website/shop for some time (or whoeverelse's you might want to damage).
4. standard organisation hears about + considers X
5. company applies for patent for X
6. standard organisation produces standard of which a direct consequence is use of X, or not using X would require special, dedicated work around patent for X
if 3., 6. cannot happen
if at time of 4. there is 2. but not yet 3., there are two options: a) company insists on patent, thus 6. will not be able to happen, standards org drops idea. b) company retreats appliance, clearing the way for 6. (thereby losing exclusivity of tech but potentially gaining a large customer base knowing they can X)
if 3., 4. cannot happen (well, consider and immediately reject X, because 6. cannot happen)
if 4., 5. cannot happen (patent must be refused by relevant authority, respectively must be lost at first appeal if authority is too thick to realise situation/refuse patent). If it however happens, 6. cannot happen (fallback or whatever).
after 4., X is in the public domain so forget 5. (really!)
if we reach 6., profit for everyone, but company has the highest risk (needs to reclaim devel cost, but everyone knows it knows X)
if we can't reach 6., maybe profit for company
The stop icon is for Rambus as well as respective standards organisation (IEC?). This carpy algorithm with all its flaws is in the public domain by the time i hit "Post Comment".
The memcpy i used so far has always had three parameters - destination, source AND number of bytes to copy.
How will adding *another* size indicator help avoid buffer overruns ? If the programmer was wrong in specifying a proper and safe bytes-to-copy parameter, are the chances really any larger to get it right in a second guess ;)
*note: memcpy is distince to the basic strcpy et co in this. Vanilla strcpy does *not* take a paramet specifying how much to copy, in the hope there will be a '\0' in the source before the destination buffer overflows. strncpy cures this.
torrents have checksums over individual chunks, so if anyone tried to poison all this did was uploading some bad chunks to leecher X, leecher X drops these chunks as bad and bans rat.
All it does is reducing network efficiency but you can't inject bad data into a torrent you did not create yourself.
Condition to this is of course you downloaded the win7RC.torrent file from MS (or other actual source of data in other cases) and not fishytracker.com.
(disclaimer: i'm not a security expert, but seeing my client sometimes ban peers leads me believe this protection actually works)
I would expect a desktop application to be more than a browser hiding its usual user interface and "standalone" shirely needs no browser or other VM (eg compiled to *machine code*) and runs just as well when i unplug the interweb.
icon because joke is what calling such things desktop and standalone can only be
If only all of them prompting me with update availability messages also allowed me to update as restricted user, even though the program was installed "for all users" by Admin. OH WAIT...
Can this conflict even have a solution other than all programs be installed for each user by her own, which sounds really clumsy ? (Can't "they" just write bug free software!? ;)
"Tweak the encoding settings to your heart's content"
...with some 10 parameters?
Surely is an apple type definition of tweaking. Do "x264 --longhelp" sometime
I don't think that stick is a bad idea, but like others i'm somewhat not certain what the market is. It's certainly not a professional and on the consumer front it must be people who want to cling to old machines, not want to wait for an encode to complete and not care too much about quality (or is it quality-size-ratio).
Register
128 posts • joined Sunday 20th May 2007 20:14 GMT
Page:
Re: Irfanview
Irfan View: more of a viewer with limited editing
(fast start, can set minimal interface, walk folders with space/backspace, crop, rotate, adjust curves/gamma/brightness, *no* drawing (lines etc), supports something like 9000+ formats e.g. also custom specified raw interpretation)
Paint.net: more of a lightweight editor ("mini-PS/PSP")
you know what it is
I use
-Irfan for viewing, batch conversion, simple stuff like rotate and resize photos
-PDN for labeling stuff on screenshots, collages (at work)
OTOH, often-used antialising does render at higher-than-screen-res, then scale down (interpolate) to make the jaggies less visible.
If your screen has twice the pixel/mm you can probably dial down the AA-ing by a factor 2.
So you render at the same resolution as before, have a little crisper image at the risk that people might be able to make out the jaggies a little better (or just not so, because the single pixel is too damn small and looks exactly the same as the larger interpolated value pixel before).
i cannot conclusively deny that there could be a use case for this, but my first thought after a hope of "bender for the lazy" on the title was "3D clipart".
If only the hipsters stopped inserting random silly featlets everyone will have forgotten about in 5 or 10 years, it might someday become almost as respectable as C.
/not so sure about whether i should add the joke icon too, or i'm actually serious.
@trevor
I was downvoting AC, not you.
Probably should have made that clear.
Since i downvoted your post i feel the need to explain.
I'm not a backup guy, but i can assure you that a decent network link will provide you with close to spec transfer rates for gigbit/s links. We have cameras on 1Gbit reliably transferring somewehre around 110 to 120 million bytes per second (~90-95% of spec) of payload (pretty incompressible image data) over a single gigabit link (on "prosumer" intel/pro PC pci-e cards and windows xp).
One thing to be *very* aware of is however collisions. If you have a dedicated point to point link this is fine. But as soon as you have anyone else interrupting, throughput crashes - like divide by factors, not just subtract a bit IME.
oh, a title
If the US experiments with jumbojet-sized lasers for such, i doubt a shoebox device (LED laser source?) is sufficient. Of course there is a possibility they choose to use the big ones for show effect.
thanks for clarifying this
Sometimes with english texts i'm unsure which symbols are used for decimal and which for thousand seperators.
So, it wasn't immediately clear to me whether their income came from the coffee machine in the break room or whether they once sold a sandwich to a visitor while coffee is free.
not read into it
but i'd have assumed this standard is physical or at most link layer, not network layer (IP) and up (TCP).
oh, a title
>I don't think they should have to explain anything.
Probably they should not be using their job email for it, rather random webby or private (unless of course their interest in porn is professional).
oh, a title
i think we can safely assume the CRT existed before star trek
indeed
i cannot completely rule out my PS3 ate the pet rabbit one of my neighbours misses since yesterday while updating to the new firmware, since that also happened yesterday.
reporting in
D = 0.988m for my 25.something" (H=345mm measured) 1920x1200 (0.2875mm high pixels) computer display i watch TV and most movies on.
For other things i sit about 0.6m from it, but leaning back for movies gives 1.10m, well close to what the formula tells me to do.
re your rant
The only 3d-display experience i have is from CAVE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment), and there i always felt disappointed, until one day during setup i saw it cycling through setting for different assumptions of eye-to-eye distance. At about twice the usually assumed distance it looked amazing, though definitly not "right" :)
So i'm definitly not blind to that "3d" effect but my brain seems to automatically expect anything on a screen to be 2d (resp. ignore "3d" if it is) unless it is severly exaggerated (to the point where i would get sick had i to sit through a whole movie at that setting).
oh, a title
>>It's so bad I'm actually thinking of downgrading.
i LOLed a little. It makes downgrading sound like a severe offence.
Often enough can't be arsed to even update if stuff already works. After all i don't find it a particular pleasure to update every software every forthnight.
re: no comments
I always assumed that was a rather obvious form of sadism
hard to believe true in the general case
Maybe i didn't really undestand what you want to point out, but..
Given that MPEG transport streams contain presentation timestamps on all content frames it is hard to believe that all of them would be unable to present stuff at the time specified in the stream, that is, not be proper MPEG decoders. And the clock has some quite high frequency (90MHZ IIRC) so it seems unprobable to be a source of inaccuracy or visible/audible jitter.
Of course if the program is already broadcast with desync, the TV doesn't magically know how to fix that :)
oh, a title
In my mostly engineering work environment, i don't think i could reliably identify a single person who has never made made a mistake with numbers or never had difficulties properly understanding a paper.
tried it only biefly at work so far
No big difference so far. Media and JS heavy pages i try to stay away from anyway.
But the aggregation of "firefox menu button" and tab headers into the title bar seems to cancel out on loading pages (at least some, i din't bother to investigate), leaving the UI with more top-of-the-page overhead (namely an empty toolbar or something) than i had before in the previous versions.
I tend to customize it so that there is few UI left and this was nicely taken over on the update - until that said canceling out.
XP by the way, maybe it has something to do with the XP titlebar not friendly to such unexpected customisation :)
oh, a title
reverse direction, i'd rather have the web 2001 than the web 2011.
(and still prefer XP over 7 but i'm no longer overly religiouos about that and have started to accept that sad joke of UI)
oh, a title
When they ask to keep it a secret - no.
That's just the trade with patents, you get protection for some time with the tradeoff that you must (publicly) describe what you want protection for.
a last-resort option?
the idea of increasing traffic (noise!) on the net to obscure your identify feels wrong to me.
virtualbox
While i understood what he meant the first time, it severly stalled my reading for a moment - during which i wondered whether el reg at least receives money for mentioning the name of the new owner whose almost-screen-sized logo now on the installer seems to me like the so far only contribution to virtualbox.
about the ratio "saved"
Even though comparing the size of two lossy compressed images is totally meaningless if you do not provide that both have the same viaual quality or at least something like a SNR ratio ...hell, even compressing one using the other as source is totally meaningless.
Anyway, the ratio of 40% sounds not too far off. If you'd took out-of the box h.264 and applied all the tools applicable to still images, you'd probalby end up with a similar figure compared to JPEG, at the same "computed visual quality". No surprise there ... It's almost 20 years since JPEG was born (well also almost 10 since h.264, but still 10 difference...).
Looking at JPEG2000, it also claims around that marging to JPEG. Frankly, i think it performs worse than JPEG at high quality. And while details are somehow better preserved at qualities you really don't want your eyes to suffer through, it looks like shit there. IOW, it is technically a worthy progress and may have some merit at the lowest quality levels, but no thanks.
Now, this web-P ...it's derived from VP-8 .. aren't On2's video codecs based on ..wait.. wavelets, like, um, JPEG 2000? Regardless of whether that is acually true or just a misunderstanding of mine, On2 videos damn well look like having the exacly same crappy degradation performance as wavelet compressed images do. Maybe it is technically not exactly wavelet but its failure mode looks a lot more like typicaly wavelet than typical block-transform. It just doesn't look pleasant.
I hope "40%" is just not enough. While h.264 got away with a "50% off MPEG-2" - basically because the industry needed some new video format to sell "HD", i hope google doesn't yet have the power to force this on everyone. I mean, i perfectly recognize JPEG is old and by now world and dog could do "better" compression wise, but just because google says "40%" i don't think it's worth it. After all, JPEG-2000 faceplanted with wavelets; if it wasn't for youtube/flash crap-league videos, nobody would even know how a wavelet-encoded video looks; h.264 isn't wavelet even though the tech "existed" at the time and the next MPEG codec doesn't smell like it were based on wavelets either. To me, hints at "wavelet compression isn't ready for humans to look at".
Sorry for the tirade. I like the wavelet concept technically (eg for computer image analysis like feature recognition), but my eyes don't like waveletted images at all.
prognosis
>>Could it be that scientists are unable to make any long term measurements that *DON'T* somehow trend in some type of terribly worrisome direction?
Of course. Extrapolations need to either indicate up, down or stable. Each is terrible, regardless of what the subject is.
@Big Yawn
While that may or may not be clear. Showing how a relatively cheap setup can intercept calls is still worth something.
Operators may chose to ignore that someone with a huge budget to invest into this kind of games is capable of it it is one thing, and maybe they were even kind of fond of knowing that for those "national security relevant" cases, the gov can just do it fine by itself without putting the operator into the unfomfortable situation to have to help.
But if basically any hobbyist can do it without ruining herself (and therfore a specialised company can provide it as a quite cheap service as they have to invest only once), that is an entirely other matter.
it's just saving domain names
So the next round will be uncounted former site owners looking to get a rooted server at one of the 12 registered companies? (pardon me while i rofl at the thought)
@Remote transmission
possibly their reasoning for not doing so was along the line:
possibility that something goes wrong enough to destroy the computer center 1km away: 1e-3*
possibility that something goes just wrong enough to destroy the computer center 1km away but not the computer center 6000km away (through the earth): 1e-30*
cost of additional compter center: factor 2
(cost of transmission line able to transmit all experiment data ahead of the wave of destruction: huge?)
summary: nope
*numbers are obviously made up
As if that was a good idea
as the title says.
I'm assuming the thing worked by some kind of automated process (keyword, links analysis..), as human reviewing of their so called dark web is clearly beyond the capacity of any company.
Even if it works most of the time, if a significant amount of the mismatches actually block people out from relevant pages, the damage is potentially much larger than the gain in productivity.
E.g. if i implement a (non-trivial) algorithm in a software but am denied access to a site with information on it, the cost of that is quite unquantifiable. If that information was just a pointer to a more efficient implementation, maybe the cost is zero except we could have annoyed the user less by less waiting time, or the competitor could use that alternative and outperform us. If the site was about a significant flaw in the method, it could cause us very direct financial damage if wrong results are presented to the user.
Probably 90% of what the filter responds to is actually utter dross. Not hard, as that holds for all of the interweb. Nevertheless actually useful information is found quite often off large/established sites where it is most likely mixed with content on other topics (pets,children, other weird hobbies of the site author...). Err yes, there actually are blog-like sites which are not completely braindead.
/Considered the Big Brother icon. But BB knows what you are supposed to see. Whereas this new fangled filter thing clearly can't know.
Since 64-bit is about the only reason why you would want win7
it's only correct to require anything wanting to label itself with win7 compatibility to be so with the 64-bit version.
(i don't get why they still offer a 32-bit version at all)
SCC naming
"And Microsoft has renamed them "low cost small notebook PCs" - despite our help in sorting out the telltale markings of a netbook."
I'd like to remind you it was this website who called them Small Cheap Computers (excellent name) for a long time, before everyone seemed to agree on the most harmless and most meaningless of all names on the table. Microsoft once again may have adopted and bastardised :)
copying commercial investors is fail of governance
IMO it makes no sense for the public to invest into what commerical entities are willing to finance.
A sensible focus were for the public to invest into into fields where the public benefits from but where no commerical entity can or wants to invest. For example due to no direct commerical benefit, the investment will be too far into the future or, secondary projects supporting the "vision" where a society or country wants to go to.
Positive examples are for one projects with the outlook "to serve humanity" but a lack of potential for direct commerial exploitation, projects which promise maybe huge commercial potential but are so expensive no corporation or single country can bear the costs on its own or the risk of the technology being owned by a single company were unacceptable (e.g. cold fusion or basic research into understanding cancer...) or for the last one, supporting fields where a country or region feels it is strong and a favourable environment exists, but it is felt commerical investment is not enough.
(For the last point, As swiss i think switzerland is strong in material technology and micro-machinery and there exist many small enterprises in these fields which can benefit from their geographical proximity, so i think support for startups in these fields is something we'd want to invest in with technology-transfer and institutional backup-research as well as funding start-ups. I don't know the situation in the UK, but am sure the UK too has fields where it's commonly felt a niche fits the local circumstances).
Some negative examples where you'd not want to invest public money/effort into (related to above examples to make the point) were specific cancer relief chemistry (covered by pharma industry with massive sums, so "no point" there), more efficient motors (as opposed to tapping new energy "sources" like cold fusion, the investment is likely small in comparison) and for the swiss example reasearch into material favorable for, for example improving microprocessors (High-K, Intel invests lots already and other companies likely do as well) or coatings for this-and-the-other effect (low friction etc) - direct commerical benefit at moderate investment / "time for delivery of useful partial results" makes these interesting enough for commercial investors.
what kind of apps do even require this mode?
I haven't really looked into the compatibility issue giving birth to "XP mode", but i dropped one app of mine into W7 RC and it worked as usual. That's a 32-bit app (on 64-bit OS), using registry and writing to its own folder as well as using all 'old' GUI controls and GDI stuff as it did under XP.
Now if all that works, are the only apps that won't run those which did not even remotely fit into "NT5 programming model", such as with hardcoded writing to the root of the C: drive and similar monstrosities? *
If so, it's about ... time, the respective owners of those apps decide whether to throw in the money to bring those apps from year 1990 to 20xx or just put them onto a seperate (*offline*) machine running an old windows.
*Additionally, there is the inevitable class of those apps directly communicating with hardware / "integrated drivers". It's clear that those need to be updated for an OS version with different driver model. But for these apps i suspect "XP mode" won't cut it, most likely they need to run on an un-virtualised OS of the version they were made for, so a seperate machine to run them is probably the only sensible option if the app really won't ever be updated to a new OS version.
I'm not one who is keen to update the OS every so often for no tanglible benefit. w2k,xp,w2k3 (NT5 IOW) are perfectly fine for now and unless some app really needs >2GB on its own for the foreseeable future.
But if you on one side need features of new OSes you shouldn't expect that newer OS to drag on compatibility with apps that were written for a windows version of a time where consumer windows was basically a single-user, (mostly) offline, security-agnostic OS (win3x/9x/ME IOW).
While some obscure business critical in-house apps may no longer work without "XP mode" (never updated because their original author left in 1995), i can't imagine any irreplacable and un-updateable "off-the-shelf" app requiring "XP mode" in the long run.
simply shocking
(About on the same track as taken Paul, but anyway)
All that list at the end of the article says that three out of four people in Glagow have a sports complex while "only" two in three in Cardiff do? I think if anything can be read out of those figures, it's that these people succeded in making everyone unhappy with their sports propaganda.
Both numbers are WAY too high. If 10% or even 20% felt they should do more,OK. ....but 60% + ...hello??? (How about either do something about it, or just accept your lazy self as your natural form :).
PS /me is closer to the "no unnecessary moves" end of the spectrum, but then again i'm a programmer, not a construction worker or something.
Megane-kun sign, because he is not allowed to run or perform any risky movement in the lab. Deliberately ignoring the subtext of the icon, the guy just fits.
Dear Microsoft
Dear Microsoft, have you not learned from the FAIL of the concept of "UMPC"?
You as foremost a software maker (yeah and some pehripherals and a huege black box) may not necessarily be the one who best predicts what customers long for as next "cool" PC form factor (hardware, that is).
Especially not so if you were to let yourself be lead by "what new computer type fits Windows" rather than by user feedback, field research and/and UI professionals and then ask yourself "how does Windows need to change for these".
a title
"LeBlanc also confirmed Microsoft does indeed plan a family pack for installation on up to three PCs but that it will only be available in selected markets."
Makes sense, as clearly families exist only in a few countries...
ok, but for that verdict..
"but Atom, at least the single-core version, has no obvious place in a mains-powered nettop PC"
no?
There certainly are applications where the atom is fully adequate on a netbook and i don't see why it should not be the same on a box.
You are probably right in pointing out what will be the most obvious limitation of the device (apart from the vista preinstalled, i assume..), but could have worded it differently.
All that verdict is doing is inviting manufacturers to repeat the feature creep that killed the "netbook"/portable SCC.
sure din't happen to me
I have an aspire one SSD/linux. It way a buy out of mood - "i want this", not "i need a mobile computer" - but at a time i was already pretty convinced i'd never again buy neither one of the big laptops nor a harddrive based mobile device.
Turned out i quite like this machine. I'm really not a fan of linux. But for what i use the machine, i don't give a rat's what the OS is as long as it can has firefox, acrobat reader, open office, boots quick, and the handling is close enough to windows (keyboard shortcuts..).
The only concern was "interweb on a stick" but for that i found a vodafone app that could be bent (by me as reasonably noob user in the field) to work with the stick i have, which came only with windows support.
This is certainly a matter of personal taste, but for me a computer to do actual work on can never be a mobile computer and a mobile computer is not ment to do much more than provide an easy interface to read documents, the web and occasional writing some notes / work on a document ("work" for me +/- requires two screens, a *real* keyboard, proper desk for mouse etc).
Naturally the "original" SCC generation was basically the best mobile device that could happen to me. Maybe except for the eyewateringly short battery runtime.
Pingu because he can handle the darn SCCs, while microsoft seems to want to see SSCs as dead as it liked the bird.
they got it wrong way round
But horses are delicious. What else could you want a horse for if not for eating.
So what they should do is forbid to ride them and apply said unhealty chemicals, allowing all horses be eaten safely and at optimum age/condition.
/not french, but in my place, horses are tasty as well
@Tel
There actually are small companies depending on web presence ;)
It might not be useful if you're after headlines, but still a mean little trick if your goal is to lock up your competitior's website/shop for some time (or whoeverelse's you might want to damage).
silly them
is it really that hard...
1. company invents X
2. company applies for patent for X
3. company is granted patent for X
4. standard organisation hears about + considers X
5. company applies for patent for X
6. standard organisation produces standard of which a direct consequence is use of X, or not using X would require special, dedicated work around patent for X
if 3., 6. cannot happen
if at time of 4. there is 2. but not yet 3., there are two options: a) company insists on patent, thus 6. will not be able to happen, standards org drops idea. b) company retreats appliance, clearing the way for 6. (thereby losing exclusivity of tech but potentially gaining a large customer base knowing they can X)
if 3., 4. cannot happen (well, consider and immediately reject X, because 6. cannot happen)
if 4., 5. cannot happen (patent must be refused by relevant authority, respectively must be lost at first appeal if authority is too thick to realise situation/refuse patent). If it however happens, 6. cannot happen (fallback or whatever).
after 4., X is in the public domain so forget 5. (really!)
if we reach 6., profit for everyone, but company has the highest risk (needs to reclaim devel cost, but everyone knows it knows X)
if we can't reach 6., maybe profit for company
The stop icon is for Rambus as well as respective standards organisation (IEC?). This carpy algorithm with all its flaws is in the public domain by the time i hit "Post Comment".
ok now that netbooks died a horrible death of "bigger is better"...
Can we please have normal (u)ATX boards for these chips so we can have "desktops" @ approx 20W (screen not counted in, ofc) ? Thanks
new size parameter ..err, what?
The memcpy i used so far has always had three parameters - destination, source AND number of bytes to copy.
How will adding *another* size indicator help avoid buffer overruns ? If the programmer was wrong in specifying a proper and safe bytes-to-copy parameter, are the chances really any larger to get it right in a second guess ;)
*note: memcpy is distince to the basic strcpy et co in this. Vanilla strcpy does *not* take a paramet specifying how much to copy, in the hope there will be a '\0' in the source before the destination buffer overflows. strncpy cures this.
@Dr Patrick J R Harkin
torrents have checksums over individual chunks, so if anyone tried to poison all this did was uploading some bad chunks to leecher X, leecher X drops these chunks as bad and bans rat.
All it does is reducing network efficiency but you can't inject bad data into a torrent you did not create yourself.
Condition to this is of course you downloaded the win7RC.torrent file from MS (or other actual source of data in other cases) and not fishytracker.com.
(disclaimer: i'm not a security expert, but seeing my client sometimes ban peers leads me believe this protection actually works)
"desktop" and even "standalone"?
I would expect a desktop application to be more than a browser hiding its usual user interface and "standalone" shirely needs no browser or other VM (eg compiled to *machine code*) and runs just as well when i unplug the interweb.
icon because joke is what calling such things desktop and standalone can only be
update mechanisms
If only all of them prompting me with update availability messages also allowed me to update as restricted user, even though the program was installed "for all users" by Admin. OH WAIT...
Can this conflict even have a solution other than all programs be installed for each user by her own, which sounds really clumsy ? (Can't "they" just write bug free software!? ;)
security rankings
"Secunia considers the vulnerabilities "highly critical," its second highest rating on a five-tier scale."
Ye,ye, the standard five-point scale translated...
1. ARMAGGEDDON = probably evil and capable at it
2. HIGHLY CRITICAL = doesn't look too good
3. REALLY SCARY = all software goes here first by default
4. DONT PANIC = not known to have a security flaw this side of y2k (anything here but openbsd?)
5. ok = reserved for future use (in case this company does sell a software for their next version)
(go) sign for its subtext
worried
I'm worried XP might need to be rebooted after enabling this ipv6 thing.
/because if linksys (as my router maker) and my ISP are not totally incompetent that is all...
A title is required.
(TL;DR)
>>A call to action for the worldwide cloud community
Does this refer to more than two people who are not authors of the text? :)
"Tweak the encoding settings to your heart's content"
...with some 10 parameters?
Surely is an apple type definition of tweaking. Do "x264 --longhelp" sometime
I don't think that stick is a bad idea, but like others i'm somewhat not certain what the market is. It's certainly not a professional and on the consumer front it must be people who want to cling to old machines, not want to wait for an encode to complete and not care too much about quality (or is it quality-size-ratio).
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