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Comment The timing on this is deeply weird... (Score 1) 632

by nowhere.elysium (#25092371) Attached to: YouTube Bans Gun and Knife Videos In the UK
Only about an hour ago, there was a small anti-knife march going past my flat in East London. I have to admit that I reckon that licensed regulation has always been a better method for lowering misuse of weapons than an outright ban. However, that's going to be bloody hard to achieve with knives, given their prevalence as a tool in the real world. Oh well.
It's just a wonder that they haven't gotten as far as mounting an armistice on archery equipment, such as compound and recurve bows, or crossbows. Oh, that's right: it requires skill to use those. I guess I'm not so worried about the police coming to take my bows away from me, then.
Earth

Lack of Molybdenum May Have Delayed Life on Earth 89

Posted by samzenpus from the we-would-have-started-sooner-but dept.
esocid writes "Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth's ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years. Bacteria cannot fix nitrogen efficiently when they are deprived of molybdenum. And if bacteria can't fix nitrogen fast enough, then eukaryotes — a kind of organism that includes plants, pachyderms and people — are in trouble because eukaryotes cannot fix nitrogen themselves at all. Ariel Anbar, a co-author of the research of Arizona State University, stated that "eukaryotes depend on bacteria having an easy enough time fixing nitrogen that there's enough to go around. So if bacteria were struggling to get enough molybdenum, there probably wouldn't have been enough fixed nitrogen for eukaryotes to flourish.""
Microsoft

Time for a Vista Do-Over? 746

Posted by samzenpus from the better-luck-next-time dept.
DigitalDame2 writes "'There's nothing wrong with Vista,' PC Mag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff tells a Microsoft rep at this year's CES. 'But you guys have a big problem on your hands. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.' He goes on to confess that the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don't need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table. But will Microsoft really listen?"
Portables

Submission + - Symbian blasts Google's phone initiative.

Submitted by nowhere.elysium
nowhere.elysium writes: According to a BBC report (found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7082414.stm ) Symbian have suggested that Google are not experienced enough or capable of fully developing a workable mobile platform.
In the quoted statements in the article, Symbian's vice president, John Forsyth inferred that Google's interest in the field will also wane due to it being 'deeply unsexy', and that development is not likely for such a platform because "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed." In the same series of statements, Linux is likened to the common cold: "About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched. It's a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business."
Considering that Symbian touts itself as Open Source compliant, this is something of an interesting attitude, what with many Open Source developers using Linux as their preferred platform.
Graphics

Submission + - GIMP 2 for Photographers

Submitted by
Jon Allen
Jon Allen writes: "Gimp 2 for Photographers
Book review by Jon Allen (JJ)
Book homepage: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1933952032/

A glance through any photography magazine will confirm that Adobe Photoshop is the accepted standard image editing software, offering almost unparalleled power and conrol over your images. However, costing more than many DSLR cameras, for non-professionals it can be a very hard purchase to justify (and of course for Linux users this is a moot point, as Photoshop is not available for their platform).

Luckily, the free software community has provided us with an alternative. The GIMP, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program, offers a huge amount of the power of Photoshop but is available at no cost. Additionally GIMP is cross-platform, available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix.

The one downside to using GIMP is that most magazines and photography books use Photoshop in their articles and tutorials, so if you do choose GIMP there's a bit more of a learning curve. Now once you're used to GIMP you'll find that many of Photoshop's features have equivalents, albeit with a different user interface, but getting that inital level of experience and familiarity with the software can be rather difficult. The GIMP does come with a manual, but it is really more of a reference guide and while very comprehensive it is not particuarly friendly for new users.

GIMP 2 for Photographers aims to rectify this.

Written clearly from a photographer's point of view (the author is a photographer who also teaches image editing), this book takes a task-oriented approach, looking at the types of editing operations that a photographer would require and then showing how to perform each task in the GIMP.

Rather helpfully, the GIMP software (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is included on the book's accompanying CD. This means that you can follow each tutorial using the exact same version of software as the author, which really helps to build confidence that you're doing everything right.

I already have GIMP installed on OS X, so to test out the instructions in the book I performed an installation from the CD on a clean Microsoft Windows XP machine.

The exact filenames of the installation packages on the CD differ slightly from those in the accompanying README file, but the instructions in the book do list the correct files and after following this procedure the installation went without a hitch. The setup files do not ask any overly 'techy' questions, so it literally took less than 5 minutes to set up a fully working system.

As well as the GIMP application, the CD also includes all of the sample images used in the book, and for each editing tutorial the "final" image is provided so you can check your own work against the expected result.

Even more usefully, the CD contains an electronic copy of the complete book as a PDF file, so you can keep it on your laptop as a reference guide, invaluable when editing images on location (or on holiday!).

I'd have to say that this is without a doubt the most useful CD I've ever recieved with a book. Providing the applications and example files is good, giving readers instant gratification without needing to deal with downloads and websites (which may well have changed after the book went to press). But including the complete book on the CD as well is nothing short of a masterstroke, and something I'd love to see other publishers adopt.

So, the CD gets full marks but what about the book itself?

After showing how to install the software, the author takes us through basic GIMP operations — opening and saving files, cropping, resizing images, and printing. Once these basics are out of the way, the book moves on to a series of examples based on "real-life" image editing scenarios.

These examples are very well chosen, both in the fact that the vast majority of the technques shown are genuinely useful, but also in the way that they are ordered. Each example introduces a new feature of the software, building up your knowledge as you work through the book. By the end you can expect to be skilled not only in "standard" editing — adjusting colour balance, fixing red-eye, removing dust spots, and so on — but also in compositing, perspective correction, lighting and shadow effects, and building panoramic images.

Between the examples there is a good amount of more "reference" type material, with detailed descriptions of the various menus, toolbars, and dialogs you will encounter while using the software. Combined with lots of well-labelled screenshots this strikes a very good balance, ensuring that even after going through all the tutorials you'll still get value from the book as something to refer back to.

Overall the quality of the writing and general production standard is very high indeed. There are some points where it is noticable that the book was originally published in German, but this never becomes a stumbling block to the reader's understanding. Most importantly though, the author employs the "show, don't tell" philosophy throughout which is key to successful teaching.

In conclusion, I would have no hesitation in recommending GIMP 2 for Photographers to anyone with more than a passing interest in improving their photos. And even if you already use image editing software, the book is well worth a read — I have been using GIMP for several years and still learned a great deal. The accompanying CD is the icing on the cake, making GIMP 2 for Photographers a simply essential purchase."
Censorship

Submission + - Bloggers who risked all to reveal Junta in Burma 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Internet geeks share a common style, and Ko Latt and his four friends would not be out of place in cyber cafés across the world. They have the skinny arms and the long hair, the dark T-shirts and the jokey nicknames. But few such figures have ever taken the risks that they have in the past few weeks, or achieved so much in a noble and dangerous cause. Since last month Ko Latt, 28, his friends Arca, Eye, Sun and Superman, and scores of others like them have been the third pillar of Burma's Saffron Revolution. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2563937.ece

Feed The Register: MIT & DARPA build load-carrying mechanical boots (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
JackBoot? March-o-Matic? YompBot?

A team of researchers at MIT have developed a rather clever new twist on the conventional powered exoskeleton idea*. Rather than seeking to amplify the strength of the wearer's own muscles, the relatively simple MIT rig is intended merely to transfer the load of a heavy backpack directly to the ground, which allows very low power consumption.
Encryption

Submission + - Australia cracked US combat aircraft codes (news.com.au)

Submitted by SpamSlapper
SpamSlapper writes: FORMER defence minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft in the 1980s. The radar on Australia's Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region, but dispite many requests, the codes were not provided, so "In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves". The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made.

Feed Engadget: Fujitsu announces 3D image recognition chip for robots (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Robots

Fujitsu looks to be doing its part to keep robots well aware of their surroundings, today announcing a new 3D image recognition chip that promises an array of benefits, although it sadly doesn't have a robot to go along with it. Still, the company doesn't seem to think it'll have much trouble finding suitable bots for it, with its small size and low power consumption making it ideal for small, household robots in addition to those of the larger, more terrifying variety. Apparently, the entire system works in real time, and is said to be five times more efficient in recognizing images than similar system. While the chip has yet to find its way into an actual robot, that'll apparently happen before too long, with Fujitsu promising to put that final touch on the experiment before year's end.

[Via Impress]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
The Internet

Submission + - NSF-funded "Dark Web" to battle terrorists (nsf.gov)

Submitted by
BuzzSkyline
BuzzSkyline writes: "The National Science Foundation has announced a University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on "advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online." The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which "automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content" with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release. Of course, that means that Big Brother will be able to keep en eye on all the Anonymous Cowards posting on /. too."
Space

Submission + - Russia plans own moon base (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by
Socguy
Socguy writes: "After being rebuffed by NASA, Russia now plans to build it's own moon base by as early as 2027.

Russia plans to send a manned mission to the moon by 2025 and establish a permanent base shortly thereafter, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos said Friday.

"According to our estimates, we will be ready for a manned flight to the moon in 2025," Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov told state news agency RIA Novosti. A station that could be inhabited could be built there between 2027 and 2032, he said.

While Russia will be refurbishing existing spacecraft, the U.S. is taking a different approach after the space station is finished and plans to scrap the space shuttle program in favour of a new kind of spaceship to be called Orion.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/31/scie nce-russia-moon.html"

Feed Science Daily: Nature's Weapon Against Nerve Agents (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
An enzyme found naturally in the blood could help protect soldiers against the effects of the deadly nerve agent sarin. The US military is funding a three-year study to evaluate the effectiveness of the enzyme, known as GOT, in protecting animals against the damaging cognitive and coordination problems resulting from exposure to the organophosphorus nerve agent.
Microsoft

Submission + - How Microsoft beat Linux in China (com.com)

Submitted by kripkenstein
kripkenstein writes: An analysis on TechRepublic details how Microsoft beat Linux in China, and the consequences of that victory:

Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world's largest software maker
[...]
The fact that [...] Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop.
With the soon-to-be largest economy standardized on Windows desktops, desktop Linux does seem to have an uphill battle ahead of it.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Cross-OS file system that sucks less?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I recently got an external harddisk with USB 2.0/Firewire/Firewire 800/eSATA to be used for backup and file exchange — my desktop runs Linux (with a Windows partition for games but no data worth saving), and the laptop is a MacBook Pro.

So the question popped up: what kind of filesystem is best for this kind of situation? Is there a filesystem that works good under Linux, MacOS X and Windows? Linux has HFS+ support but apparently doesn't support journaling and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+.

Are we stuck with shitty VFAT forever or are there efforts underway to bring a modern filesystem (I'm thinking something like ZFS, BeFS, or XFS) to all platforms our there? Or are there other clever solutions like storing ISO images and loop-mounting those?

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