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Windows

Submission + - Windows Vista Home Makes Hidden File Backups

Submitted by Overly Critical Guy
Overly Critical Guy writes: "Previous Versions" is a feature of Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate that uses Shadow Copy to allow users to restore past versions of a file like Apple's Time Machine. It turns out Vista Home also makes file backups but does not allow the user to access them. This means you automatically lose 15 percent of your drive to backups you can't access until you upgrade to Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate. Worse yet, disabling the "Previous Versions" service also disables System Restore and removes all restore points.
The Gimp

Submission + - Gimp VS Photoshop - Bloody battle of the giants

Submitted by
Rea Maor
Rea Maor writes: "Do you want to edit bitmap images on the home desktop? It's surprising, but really the choice of image editing applications comes down to just two: Gimp and Photoshop. And therein lies a dilemma.

Photoshop costs around $600 these days, and Gimp is free, so of course if cost is a factor you're going to swerve towards Gimp. But — and you knew there was a 'but' coming — it's not that simple. Photoshop has two leads over Gimp: (1) patented features, and (2) the interface that everyone is used to. Most especially, Gimp is out of the running for professional print shop editing, thanks to the patent lock on industrial features such as color correction and CMYK. Gimp can emulate these features with work-arounds, or it can get sued, and that's all there is to it.

A common misconception is that Gimp lacks many more features that Photoshop has. In fact, with the exception of features that depend on patented algorithms, Gimp is 99% on par with Photoshop in capabilities. It's just that Photoshop users try Gimp, are immediately lost in the baroque interface, and leave in terror. Having the features doesn't do you much good if you can't find them!

That's the real hanger is the user interface. Unlike other professions which happen to take place on a computer, graphics artists are almost never geeks. Geeks explore an interface, practice with it, read the manual on it, and when they discover the scripting language buried within (Gimp has scheme), they're bowled over at how cool it is. Graphics artists aren't like that. They're right-brained all the way; they're here to draw, not write programs. And when they learn one way to make the computer do what they want, that's a sacrifice of time which they can never again be asked to do. Learning a new interface is painful for anybody, but it seems to be simply unacceptable for the graphics artist.

For instance, let's say you want to draw a beard on a face. In both Photoshop and Gimp it is straight-forward enough to create a custom brush shaped like a few hair follicles. But to draw the beard on and have it come out looking like natural hair, in Photoshop you would open the brush dialog and change the shape and color dynamics, tweaking switches and knobs in each and setting them to randomize. In Gimp, however, you would create a layered brush (called an "image pipe") which is similar to how you would do an animated gif, then just tell it to use the brush layers in random order. You could manually set up the brush layers to be lighter, darker, and rotated and resized — in effect giving yourself more control over the final effect. It is possible to get the exact same effect in both programs, with even some room to argue that one result looks better than the other.

But what good is that going to do if you're used to the Photoshop interface? Nothing. In a nutshell, Photoshop is for linear thinkers, and Gimp is for lateral thinkers. Both of them can arrive at very nearly the same result, so close that it's a neck and neck race. Bottom line, for website graphics and simple editing jobs it's almost insane to spend the money to use Photoshop. And Gimp is likewise inadequate for the needs of a professional print shop.

Unless, of course, you're already a geek. Then it won't matter, because you learn new programs just for fun anyway. The only problem with that is... have you ever met a geek with good artistic skills?"
Windows

Submission + - Vista Sales Numbers Don't Add Up

Submitted by Overly Critical Guy
Overly Critical Guy writes: Vista's sales numbers don't add up according to Joe Wilcox of Microsoft-Watch. Going through the numbers and citing NPD, Gartner, and IDC, Wilcox describes the difference between licenses sold to manufacturers and actual consumer purchases, noting that there haven't been 20 million PCs sold since Jan. 30, contrary to Microsoft's numbers. In fact, only 3 million PCs have been sold since the start of the year.
Security

Submission + - Sen McCain's MySpace page gets hacked

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9014483&intsrc=hm_ list Visitors to Sen. John McCain's MySpace page were likely surprised today by a statement that the Senator has reversed his position on gay marriage and "come out in full support of gay marriage ... particularly marriage between passionate females." Most won't be surprised that the statement was apparently posted as a prank. The co-founder of an online news site, who said he designed the MySpace template used for McCain's page, claimed responsibility for changing the site . Mike Davidson, cofounder of Newsvine, said on his Web site that he commandeered the MySpace page because McCain's office used a design template of his without providing him credit. Davidson also said his imagery was used on the page and his server is used serve up McCain's MySpace images.
Networking

Submission + - IBM Announces 160Gbps Optical Networking Chip

Submitted by haddieman
haddieman writes: Ars Technica has a story about a new chip from IBM that can acheive blazing fast transfer rates.

FTA:
"IBM has announced a prototype optical transceiver chipset that can transmit data over optical fiber at speeds of up to 160Gbps. IBM informs us that it's fast enough to transmit "a typical high-definition movie" per second."
This is surely a great day for thepiratebay.
Announcements

Submission + - Present your project virtually at Web 2.0.

Submitted by
Zeus Jones
Zeus Jones writes: "Web-collaboration company Yugma is using its software to turn its booth at Web 2.0 into a live virtual presentation stage for "companies and individuals who wouldn't otherwise have a presence." They have set up a form on their site where you can pitch a not-yet-ready-for-primetime project you'd like to see included. http://www.yugma.com/stage2"
Software

Submission + - Croquet SDK 1.0 Released

Submitted by
InfiniteBits
InfiniteBits writes: "After nearly ten years of development (or more if you count the development of Squeak), the Croquet SDK has achieved its 1.0 general release. Also, the Croquet Consortium, an open source development organization, has been formed to further the development of Croquet and its user community. From the press release: "DURHAM, N.C. — March 27, 2007 — A nonprofit consortium of academic and corporate partners announced Tuesday the release of a free software tool kit for developers to use in creating 3-D "virtual environments." "We're seeking to enable the creation of a rich series of interconnected 'Croquet worlds' where people can engage in productive collaborative interactions in support of learning and commerce — worlds that can be created, maintained and continually modified without the constraints of proprietary computer code," said Julian Lombardi, assistant vice president of Duke's Office of Information Technology. The Croquet Consortium's new "3-D Virtual Environments Software Developer's Kit" (Croquet SDK 1.0) will promote collaboration among far-flung research teams working on everything from cancer cells to hurricanes, as well as active learning among students and their instructors. These networked 3-D teams from research, education and industry will be able to work together across a variety of computer platforms and devices, from laptops to cell phones." More info and downloads available at http://opencroquet.org/"
PHP

Submission + - Delphi for PHP Released

Submitted by Lou
Lou writes: Delphi for PHP, a complete PHP RAD tool for developing PHP web applications has been released by CodeGear ( the Developer Tools Group subsidiary of Borland). The tool only runs on the Windows XP/2000/2003 platform, but allows developer to target multiple platforms. The tool looks similar to its Delphi and C++ developer studio, only it generates pure PHP code. Bravo Codegear on your first new product. Supports several databases including MySQL and includes the VCL components library for PHP (over 50 useable controls), which will be managed as an Open Source project. Developing web applications has now become easier. Link to Announcement: http://www.codegear.com/AboutUs/News/DelphiForPHPN owAvailable/tabid/251/Default.aspx
Mozilla

Submission + - DTrace for Mozilla

Submitted by jayed_99
jayed_99 writes: DTrace is a'dynamic tracing framework' developed by Sun for Solaris 10 that's been ported to FreeBSD and Mac OS X. DTrace is performance analysis on steroids. Now there's an OpenSolaris project to port it to the Mozilla environment. Here are some examples of dtracing javascript.

With javascript's importance in modern application delivery, it's difficult to overstate the importance of having one tool that can probe every layer of the software stack from operating system to database to web server to application.
Microsoft

Submission + - ODF threat to Microsoft in US governments grows

Submitted by Tookis
Tookis writes: California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement for agencies when acquiring software, turning up the heat on Microsoft. The bill follows similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota and adds further to the pressure on Microsoft which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10150/53/

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