bmcmurphy - Slashdot User

How Do You Visualize 100 GB of Google Text Data? 117

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @02:03PM from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There is an amazing series of charts that visualizes trigrams and bigrams, portions of sentences that have been extracted from Google's web data set. The graphs highlight word associations and the frequency with which we use them on web pages. Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University found, for example, that the word 'he' is often tied to 'argues,' while 'she' is found often with 'loves.' There are also word-relation charts that highlight words used in combination with their opposites, such as good and bad, peace and war, and PC and Mac." There are a lot of these things, and they're really interesting to browse through.

Is the Line-in Jack On the Verge of Extinction? 411

Posted by timothy on Monday March 22, 2010 @07:59PM from the erasing-the-analog-hole dept.

SlashD0tter writes "Many older sound cards were shipped with line-out, microphone-in, and a line-in jacks. For years I've used such a line-in jack on an old Windows 2000 dinosaur desktop that I bought in 2000 (600 Mhz PIII) to capture the stereo audio signal from an old Technics receiver. I've used this arrangement to recover the audio from a slew of old vinyl LPs and even a few cassettes using some simple audio manipulating software from a small shop in Australia. I've noticed only recently, unfortunately, that all of the four laptops I've bought since then have omitted a line-in jack, forcing me to continue keeping this old desktop on life support. I've looked around for USB sound cards that include a line-in jack, but I haven't been too impressed by the selection. Is the line-in jack doomed to extinction, possibly due to lobbying from vested interests, or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?"

Comment Re:IT Pros don't make policy. (Score 1) 460

by bmcmurphy on Sunday January 03, 2010 @01:28PM (#30632566) Attached to: Do IT Pros Abuse Their Power?

I agree. IT workers should have input on things that should be blocked for technical reasons (e.g.,known malware sites), but where I work management tells the IT folks what to block for non-technical reasons (gay furry porn). Not saying I'm in agreement with management's idea of what should be blocked--my point is that they call the shots and IT folks push the buttons. Oh, and they live by the same rules.

Baby Monitors Killing Urban Wi-Fi 348

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday May 11, 2009 @10:55AM from the along-with-my-full-night's-sleep dept.

Barence writes "Baby monitors and wireless TV transmitters are responsible for slowing down Wi-Fi connections in built-up areas, according to a report commissioned by British telecoms regulator Ofcom. The research smashes the myth that overlapping Wi-Fi networks in heavily congested towns and cities are to blame for faltering connection speeds. Instead it claims that unlicensed devices operating in the 2.4GHz band are dragging down signals. 'It only requires a single device, such as an analogue video sender, to severely affect Wi-Fi services within a short range, such that a single large building or cluster of houses can experience difficulties with using a single Wi-Fi channel,' the report claims."

Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native 493

Posted by timothy on Friday February 13, 2009 @08:33AM from the that-sounds-hard-to-swallow dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"

Comment Re:My method (Score 1) 805

by bmcmurphy on Friday June 20, 2008 @04:07PM (#23877961) Attached to: Best Way To Store Digital Video For 20 Years?

I back mine up to HDD and rsync it to my inlaws' place on Cape Cod.

Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes 525

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:04PM from the no-i'm-an-expert-really-i-am dept.

Dak RIT writes "In a blog post this week, Microsoft's IE Platform Architect, Chris Wilson, confirmed that IE8 will use three distinct modes to render web pages. The first two modes will render pages the same as IE7, depending on whether or not a DOCTYPE is provided ('Quirks Mode' and 'Standards Mode'). However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here."

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