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Comment Re:No TV (Score 4, Insightful) 234

by haijak (#52639359) Attached to: TVs Are Still Too Complicated, and It's Not Your Fault
Nope. Even ignoring all the "Smart TV" features. No TVs these days are "monitors". Monitors, weather you're talking about screens or speakers, are built with the expressed purpose of accurately rendering the signal you feed into them. TVs these days do all sorts of video processing to make the picture look "good" not "accurate". They intentionally increase (distort) the contrast and color saturation. They apply additional sharpening, predictive motion smoothing, and who knows what else. You have to dig into the settings and try to find and disable all those setting to get an accurate picture that looks like it was intended to. Computer monitors don't do any of that. They have a few settings to adjust contrast, brightness, and color; but those are only there to fine tune for better accuracy. I want my TV to be a monitor, not a video filter processor.

Comment Re:Oh well (Score 1) 532

by haijak (#27168113) Attached to: Microsoft Says IE Faster Than Chrome and Firefox

That was the first thing I though of when I read it. Microsoft's unreleased next gen browser is faster than current generations of it's competition's browsers.

That would be the minimum bar of acceptable speed improvement in my mind. If it was faster than the others in-development versions I would be impressed.

Comment Nothing to see here... Move along (Score 2, Informative) 417

by haijak (#26822165) Attached to: MS To Offer Free Windows 7 Upgrade To Vista Users

This is not news at all. This is the same thing they did with the Vista launch. This plan was rumored months ago.

During a period before the next OS release anyone who buys a computer with the old OS will be able to upgrade to the new OS for free, via their OEM.

The are NOT giving all the Vista users a free upgrade.
Microsoft

IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise? 329

Posted by Soulskill from the not-too-promising dept.
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting: "In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."

Microsoft's Biggest Threat - Google or Open Source? 240

Posted by Zonk from the by-your-powers-combined dept.
Glyn Moody writes "Google always plays down suggestions that there's any looming clash of the titans between itself and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the search giant is pushing open source in every way it can. They're contributing directly by contributing code to projects and employing top hackers like Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison and Guido van Rossum, and indirectly through the $60 million fees it pays Mozilla, its Summer of Code scheme and various open source summits held at its offices. Google+OSS: could this be the killer combination that finally breaks Microsoft?"
Microsoft

Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats 555

Posted by Zonk from the always-so-helpful dept.
time961 writes "In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives."
Biotech

Submission + - Girl's heart regenerates due to artificial assist (www.cbc.ca) 1

Submitted by
Socguy
Socguy writes: "A 15-year-old girl has become the first Canadian to have an artificial heart removed after her own heart healed itself.
Doctors at the Stollery Children's hospital implanted the Berlin Heart, a portable mechanical device that keeps blood pumping in an ailing heart, so she could survive until a transplant became available.
But over the next few months, Melissa's overall condition improved dramatically, and her heart muscle regained much of its strength. After 146 days on the Berlin Heart, Melissa underwent surgery to have the device removed.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2007/08/28/ artificial-heart.html"
Software

Submission + - Pidgin 2.0 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After nearly two years of development, Pidgin 2.0 has finally been released! Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is a powerful and robust open source instant messaging client that supports many protocols. Pidgin 2.0 features a completely redesigned interface with attractive new icons and and a new status management system that was designed for optimal usability. Pidgin 2.0 also adds support for universal buddy icon management and smooth-scroll functionality for conversation windows. A comprehensive review at Ars Technica explores the new features in Pidgin 2.0 and demonstrates how to use the new D-Bus bindings with Python to make Pidgin's status system send updates to Twitter.
The Internet

Registerfly's Accreditation Terminated by ICANN 111

Posted by CowboyNeal from the enough-of-that dept.
Punker22 writes "Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly.com's accreditation. Between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously. 'Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers,' Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today."
Music

Best Practices for a Lossless Music Archive? 176

Posted by Cliff from the we'll-all-have-terabyte-RAID-arrays-in-5-years-anyway dept.
Sparagmei asks: "I'm a big music fan, and I like listening to the music I own on various pieces of digital gear. Right now, my library's at about 20,000 tracks, ripped from CDs to MP3 at 256kbps (enough that I can't tell the difference on my low-end playback gear). However, with the MP3 judgement rippling through the world, I'm interested in perhaps moving to a different compression standard. Before I do that, I'd like to ask a question: what lossless format would you recommend for making a digital 'master library' that could be (relatively) easily down-sampled to a compressed format?"
United States

Submission + - How can we convert the US to the metric system?

Submitted by
thesolo
thesolo writes: "Despite past efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, the United States remains one of only three countries (others are Liberia and Myanmar) that does not use the metric system. Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy. Attempts to get Americans using the Celsius scale or putting up speed limits in kilometers per hour have been squashed dead. Not only that, but some Americans actually see metrication efforts as an assault on "our way" of measuring.

I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement to be extremely frustrating. Are we so entrenched with imperial units that we cannot get our fellow citizens to simply learn something new? What are those of us who wish to finally see America catch up to the rest of the world supposed to do? Are there any organizations that we may back, or any pro-metric legislators who we can support?"

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