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Journal Journal: Pushing HD toward human limits

Journal by novus ordo
IEEE Computer has an article on limits of human vision and how were moving toward that goal. While the highest HDTV content has(all approx) 2MP, theaters' is 10MP, but human vision can discern on the order of hundreds of megapixels. That's not even taking in

Getting Development Group To Adopt New Practices? 125

Posted by Cliff from the pain-of-changing-work-habits dept.
maiden_taiwan asks: "At my software company, we occasionally need all engineers to adopt a new standard or 'best practice.' Some are small, like the use of Camel Case for function names, while others have tangible business value, such as 'every check-in must be accompanied by a unit test.' As you might guess, some new practices get ignored, not because people are evil or lazy, but because they're simply too busy to pay attention and change their work habits. So we are seeking creative ways to announce, roll out, and enforce a standard for 100+ engineers so they will actually follow it." What ways have you used to convince your developers and engineers to adopt a new set of practices that may or may not get in the way of their daily work habits?

Google Moving Strongly Into Radio Advertising 54

Posted by kdawson from the expanding-reach dept.
AvgGatsby writes to let us know about Google's move into radio. The company is hiring "scores" of radio sales people in major markets and is offering them 50% above prevailing salaries. From the article: "Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said this week that the company will begin a public test of Google Audio Ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same AdWords system they use to buy Web search ads. It made a clear move into radio in January when it agreed to pay more than $1 billion, depending on performance, for dMarc Broadcasting Inc., which connects advertisers to radio stations through an automated advertising system. It's all part of what Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said is an investment in radio advertising that could grow over time to include up to 1,000 Google employees — not just in ad sales, but also in engineering and operations."

HBO's Hacking Democracy Available Online 350

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the it's-only-slander-if-it's-not-true dept.
prostoalex writes "HBO's controversial special 'Hacking Democracy' on issues with Diebold voting machines is now available in full on Google Video." Covered earlier on Slashdot, the documentary seems to have gathered quite a bit of heat from Diebold in addition to the one that didn't air.

Flickr Search Hack Powered by Mouse-Made Doodles 79

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hard-work-to-find-what-you-want dept.
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Retrievr gives budding artists an impractical but addictive way to find photographs on Flickr: a search engine powered exclusively by mouse-made doodles. From the article: 'Retrievr, Mr. Langreiter says, "doesn't look at specific forms." Art history buffs might like to think of it as photo-search by way of Impressionism. The Retrievr engine dissects a photo like a gallery connoisseur who lost his bifocals: It focuses on regions of colors rather than specific shapes and lines. "It is, actually, a simple scheme," says Mr. Langreiter. Retrievr creates and stores a compact representation of each photo in its database. The system pulls only the most important features — broad shapes, blocks of color and spatial relationships between different colored areas — out of detailed images to create shorthand approximations of every photo. (The storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform," which contains much less data than the photo itself and facilitates lightning-fast searches.)'"

Vista DRM Prevents Kernel Tampering 428

Posted by CmdrTaco from the in-theory-anyway dept.
mjdroner writes "A ZDNet blog reports on a new DRM feature for Vista that 'protects' the kernel from tampering. The blog quotes a Microsoft document: 'Code (CI) protects Windows Vista by verifying that system binaries haven't been tampered with by malicious code and by ensuring that there are no unsigned drivers running in kernel mode on the system.' The blog says that much of the DRM in Vista is simply a port from XP, but that this feature is new to the OS."

Google Code Search Reveals Dark Corners 297

Posted by kdawson from the oopsie dept.
saccade.com writes, "The new Google Code Search isn't just for hackers sniffing for passwords. Jason Kottke and friends have discovered the new feature reveals all sorts of dark corners hidden in our code. And you thought nobody ever read your comments!" From the article: "Code search is a great resource for web developers and programmers, but like the making available of all previously unsearched bodies of information, it's given lots of flashlights to people interested in exploring dark corners."

Hans Reiser Arrested On Suspicion of Murder 1651

Posted by kdawson from the sad-day dept.
Many readers wrote about the arrest today of Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, by Oakland, CA police on suspicion of murdering his estranged wife. From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive... Police made the arrest based on circumstantial evidence and have not found Nina Reiser's body, [Hans Reiser's attorney] Du Bois said. 'I have no idea what the circumstantial evidence is,' he said. 'When I hear what the evidence is against him, I'll make a decision as to whether he'll talk to them.'" kimvette writes, "While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?"

Could I Run a TV Station on Linux? 321

Posted by Cliff from the broadcast-by-penguin dept.
JesusQuintana asks: "I'm working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they're using tape and I've been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won't sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. (They won't let us buy our own storage.) We have the expertise to build our own infrastructure (NAS, redundancy, etc.), but really just need the equivalent of iTunes for high quality video. There are lots of other pieces needed to complete the work-flow (such as encoding the media), which could be accomplished on Mac or Windows or even Linux. But what about playback? We need something that will play back these files at their scheduled times (perhaps scheduling cron jobs to change playlists) to broadcast quality hardware (SDI or YUV video). Could we run a TV station on Linux?"

OpenCyc 1.0 Stutters Out of the Gates 195

Posted by timothy from the it-knows-you'd-characterize-it-so dept.
moterizer writes "After some 20 years of work and five years behind schedule, OpenCyc 1.0 was finally released last month. Once touted on these pages as "Prepared to take Over World", the upstart arrived without the fanfare that many watchers had anticipated — its release wasn't even heralded with so much as an announcement on the OpenCyc news page. For those who don't recall: "OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine." The Cyc ontology "contains hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other, forming an upper ontology whose domain is all of human consensus reality." So are these the fledgling footsteps of an emerging AI, or just the babbling beginnings of a bloated database?"

So How Do You Code an AJAX Web Page? 231

Posted by Zonk from the hard-work dept.
PetManimal writes "Computerworld has a long excerpt from a book by Edmond Woychowsky about how to code Web pages in AJAX. It gives a good explanation of how the technology works, and also has some visuals and code snippets that you can play with. From the article: 'Beyond the XMLHTTP Request object, which has been around for several years as a solution looking for a problem, there is nothing weird needed. Basically, it is how the individual pieces are put together. When they're put together in one way, it is nothing more than a pile of parts; however, when put together in another way, the monster essentially rises from its slab.'"

RFID-enabled Vehicles: Pinch My Ride 429

Posted by Hemos from the dude-where's-my-car dept.
Billosaur writes "Wired has an excellent article on the problems with the theft of RFID-enabled vehicles and how insurance companies are so over-confident in the technology, they are denying claims when such vehicles are stolen. Example: "Emad Wassef walked out of a Target store in Orange County, California, to find a big space where his 2003 Lincoln Navigator had been. The 38-year-old truck driver and former reserve Los Angeles police officer did what anyone would do: He reported the theft to the cops and called his insurance company. Two weeks later, the black SUV turned up near the Mexico border, minus its stereo, airbags, DVD player, and door panels. Wassef assumed he had a straightforward claim for around $25,000. His insurer, Chicago-based Unitrin Direct, disagreed." Their forensic examiner concluded that since all the keys were accounted for, there was no way the engine could have been started, despite the evidence that the ignition lock had been forced and the steering wheel locking lug had been damaged."

The Whiz of Silver Bullets 244

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the you-wont-have-to dept.
ChelleChelle writes "In an entertaining yet well thought-out article, software architect Alex E. Bell of The Boeing Company lashes out at the so-called 'Silver Bullets' and those who rely on them to solve all their software development difficulties. From the article: 'the desperate, the pressured, and the ignorant are among those who continue to worship the silver-bullet gods and plead for continuance of silver-fueled delusions that are keeping many of their projects alive.'"

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