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The difference is 20% compared to baseline profile at relatively high bitrates. The iphone 3gs, iphone 4, ipad and newer ipod touch model support high profile fine and then the difference is closer to 100%.

This is a misuse of the statistics. The trouble is they don't converge as the bitrate goes up - Theora converges to a lowest SSIM asymptote than H.264, so asking the bitrate it needs to have an equivalent SSIM is distorting things. It's good that those stats don't ask for the equivalent bitrate to reach 0.9999, because then there would be a lot of infinities being thrown around. (There's always some truncation error in the algorithm)

If you look at the previous graph of bitrate vs SSIM - which has a shifted Y axis to amplify the small differences - you'll notice most of the values in the usable bitrates are above 0.9. This is an amount which is viewable without artifacts causing things to look too bad. Don't take my word for it, have a look at this paper on SSIM.

The point is they're all into the region where they're acceptable quality. H.264 just gets closer to perfection, which is important if you want "high definition" video.

But this isn't an HD production we're talking about.

The Pentagon is spending millions on research designed to ensure it can trust the microchips in critical systems, especially those made outside the US.

- I think the only true way to be sure is to manufacture the microchips yourself, of-course this costs much more than millions.

This comes down to the old question raised by Ken Thompson of Trusting Trust.

I don't think he's alone when they say that the worst years of my life were, in fact, high school.

I take it that you've never been in the (adult) working world. Either that or you are just a liar and a Troll. High school is fluff compared to having to work with adults.

I've had to deal with both teenagers and adults. It has been my experience that teenagers are generally more mature than adults (despite the media mythology, money making (yellow) journalism), and mass media money pop-psychology (like Dr. Phil). Teenagers are amateurs (when it comes to bullying); adults are perfectionists, and will even smile and tell you how appreciated you are while they stab you in the back (if you're lucky).

Well, that's just tough. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion mean that whatever freedom someone else has to speak, a Christian has to pray.

Yeah, I get that attitude all the time from religious people, neoconservatives, and bullies; "That's just tough." And that "freedom of speech" read herring is another example of hypocrisy on your side (the pro-religious side). Of course (and this shouldn't have to be point out) that this issue has NOTHING to do with freedom of speech. It is all about social control, harassment, and peer pressure.

Hurting people and forcing your views on people is WRONG, it doesn't matter whether you call it "freedom of speech" or "freedom of religion" or not. If people (like you) make a conscious and deliberate decision to hurt people, then you should be punished. It reminds me of the times when I was bullied; nobody would do anything so I had to escalate things by slashing tires and even physically do violence to the perpetrators when they were off guard. Unfortunately mobbing is a very serious problem in America. Forcing your religious views on other people is also a serious harassment issue in other parts of the world as well, such as when pedestrians are harassed or even killed while trying to cross a street blocked by praying Muslims. It's attitudes like yours that make my somewhat social libertarian ideals make the exception for religion (and that is, it is probably better for the world for religion to be outlawed completely).

You say,

I have profound sympathy for his plight of being incessantly tormented.

And then you say,

However, I *DO NOT* condone his beating of the coworker, nor do I have any sympathy for him as far as a potential assault charge

Unfortunately your supposed "sympathy" has no relevance in the real world. Because, as the research shows, violence is almost always the ONLY solution to mobbing.

What most people here seem to be missing is that this incident didn't happen out of thin air (incidents like these almost never do). A SUPERVISOR was harassing him on the job, and instead of the supervisor being fired and arrested, the police, like is usual in cases of harassment, arrest the victim. According to the victim,

he had been made fun of by coworkers on a daily basis

Of course the victim of the harassment could have filed a formal complaint, but everybody knows how that always turns out. At the most he would be laughed at, but really, it's the harassers word against the harassed.

It's sad and pathetic that everybody here on Slashdot seems to be pointing the blame on the victim, like is always the case when it comes to school shootings and workplace shootings. When everybody is against you then violence almost always seems the logical solution. Of course I don't expect the supervisor or the Human Resource Manager who carefully selected these assholes to be fired or charged with harassment or human rights violations, because it's not the neoconservative thing to do. Violence is cool and if you can't take daily jokes then... you must be weak in the head. But that logic, in my experience, comes from hypocrisy.

Those co-workers should just be glad that he didn't show up the next day with an automatic rifle and a duffel bag full of ammunition. What goes around comes around. Work place mobbing should not be tolerated, and the supervisor and HR Manager should, at the VERY LEAST, be fired immediately.

There's no such school as "Waterloo University." It's the University of Waterloo.

Paul 1,
Susanna Kelley 0

Or wait a minute, probably he didn't mean that kind of Forth: http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~comp03a/misc/humour/shootfoot.html

Okay, I have done a fair amount of programming and yet with a new Mac I have not yet dived into the SDKs, etc. I once wanted to do some batch resizing of photos and yet couldn't get it done in Automator easily without being scared of losing the original photos, on my first dive into it. Yes, I actually wrote a great auto-compositing and resizing program once driving the Gimp on linux. It was awesome. But that was years ago and now I have a nice new computer. And where did that code go. Yes I'm sure Automator, Quartz Composer, my shiny new Xcode system and whatever else works on a Mac will be great. But I haven't had time to learn it.

Enter Sikuli. I wrote a hello world and it worked fast. I don't know if I could do it to do batch photo processing still but it just seems cool. I'd rather it was decoupled from a language and the editor was open sourced (maybe it is?) though, so others could build on that. For example if there was a binding to Perl and you could just use the IDE, then maybe someone could add Perl bindings and someone else might add use of CPAN modules for downloading web pages, etc.

Also the vision algorithm looks a bit slow.

There was once an experimental system created that allowed you to program graphic drawings drawn as if on a napkin which would animate in 2D, which is how the program would run. A true graphic language. Maybe someone can find it probably in the ACM SIGGRAPH proceedings several years ago. Maybe "graphic shell" and "napkin drawings" would find it.

ALso see VizDraw (pdf) where recognition is done on drawing with a pen tablet.
http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~akmishra/VizDraw2.pdf

Anyway, Sikuli is spectacular for using computer vision techniques to allow for slight changes, and for being immediately useful. I'd like to see it linked to Xcode for RAD of Objective-C apps; Apple should definitely license it or hire the developers for research on it. There is a vast field opened up by this, finally an a-hah experience and not just Apple but many developers should now consider how to get the computer to be smart and find out what you want to do.

This ought to make it possible to do easy mechanized data extraction from the web, analysis of webcam feeds, acting on audio and other types of sensor cues, accessing data and devices over networks, and taking action based on feeds from other devices that are minimally enhanced like my cellphone telling my mac and maybe my mail server when its battery is about to die. It could forward mail to another device, etc. This kind of thing even could work in video cameras and household devices. Even if you just consider it a way to turn people on to programming it is invaluable and fun. I'd like to see Sikuli's functional pieces broken off into standalone services that can be used by other things. As for the comment about window manager themes or operating system versions changing and breaking the script due to icon changes, I think the vision detection of a gui button actually is finding the button and window ids in Sikuli and ought to be able to hand those back.

The editor should also be broken off, of course it needs to be able to launch a screenshot capturing action but that does not mean it must be the sole application allowed to do this. And you could write (snap?) a Sikuli script to run a screenshot capture. Finally I think the Sikuli scripts ought to allow being compiled or otherwise optimized since obviously once it is run, Sikuli knows what the ID of the graphic element it finds is and thereafter need not do vision recognition, it seems.

A different link:

"The expansion in world film revenues since 1970 has grown from $1.2 billion to over $15 billion annually according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)."[link]

So, we have 10 billion mentioned, but another reference to 15 billion.

In 1970, an ounce of gold went for 35. Today it's 1,100. That's 31 times higher. So, in 1970 dollars (gold), the movie industry made about 320 million (@10 billion) or 483 million (@15 billion). That is forty percent (@15 billion) or 27 percent (@10 billion). I'm not saying they lost money, but that inflation is a killer.

[link]: http://www.architecture.uwaterloo.ca/faculty_projects/terri/dystopia/mcauley/filmcost.html

You don't know the system very well.

You'd have to modify the a program for the 6502 processor that runs the drive.

What? You were going to write it for the C64 as a basic program or assembler? Both will eat up valuable memory space and be very slow. A cartridge may help some but it will still be slow.

Yes I've written machine code in 6502 for the 1541 though I used a hack to get it into ram and executed properly. I implemented a no knock routine that would load off a floppy at power on based on clues from the reference guide.

Someone decompiled and documented the rom which may allow such a scheme to be implemented. I grant there's almost no wiggle room in a 1541 so it may require some code in the C65 as well via a cartridge or a hardware mod or both to both.
http://www.flavioweb.it/c64/docs/AsmDocs/1541-diss.html and you need an adapter to use burnable roms http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/roms.html

What is this? http://www.h64.de/ could be a useful modification. I must find out!
It uses an AT29C010A flash chip a static ram chip some gal chips and discrete logic.

C64 Geeking see the above links and:
http://www.c64.com/
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/personal.html
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=98

For more google can help.

You don't know the system very well.

You'd have to modify the a program for the 6502 processor that runs the drive.

What? You were going to write it for the C64 as a basic program or assembler? Both will eat up valuable memory space and be very slow. A cartridge may help some but it will still be slow.

Yes I've written machine code in 6502 for the 1541 though I used a hack to get it into ram and executed properly. I implemented a no knock routine that would load off a floppy at power on based on clues from the reference guide.

Someone decompiled and documented the rom which may allow such a scheme to be implemented. I grant there's almost no wiggle room in a 1541 so it may require some code in the C65 as well via a cartridge or a hardware mod or both to both.
http://www.flavioweb.it/c64/docs/AsmDocs/1541-diss.html and you need an adapter to use burnable roms http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/roms.html

What is this? http://www.h64.de/ could be a useful modification. I must find out!
It uses an AT29C010A flash chip a static ram chip some gal chips and discrete logic.

C64 Geeking see the above links and:
http://www.c64.com/
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/personal.html
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=98

For more google can help.

That's assuming that Mcgill and Harvard are equivalent schools.

They are.

Not even close.

I can provide quite a few more ranking lists for other sources with similar results. Canadian universities are generally a shit stain on the faced of the American continent who like to fantasize that they matter.

About the only thing our floppy-headed inferiority-complex-laden neighbors have that's worth a damned is here and here.

I really doubt it

Since I don't lie, you must be wrong. Though I'll leave you with one reference at least. There's at least one scientist (that I referenced) who doesn't believe in the "defective character" explanation that people like yourself and the vast majority of the media mythologize. Usually most people only here the journalism of these issues.

Wow, just wow, I have never had my political beliefs summed up so succinctly and so badly.

Granted, there are assumptions, perhaps you don't fit the stereotype. Maybe some parts of you do...

However if you believe that anyone has the right to indiscriminately kill...

No, I'm not talking about rights, and I'm not (even) talking about indiscriminate either. You seem to be implying that you believe in the philosophy of Free Will. If you keep on tormenting a dog it will generally grow up to be vicious, not necessarily all the time, and it's similar with other species like humans. Maybe you weren't born with enough testosterone or adrenaline, maybe you are just a coward, maybe you have "normal" parents, maybe your frontal lobes are not fully developed... Or maybe, just maybe, you free-willed yourself to be physically passive towards your tormentors. Sometimes people have some amount of "normal" that they can fall back on.

Privacy by design

Yes, but what exactly does one do a with a masters in political science. Other than proving that you can work hard, and that you are probably pretty smart, it doesn't give you any special abilities to do a specific job. There are some jobs which it would really help with, but not enough jobs to warrant the number of people getting degrees in things like political science. Just take a look at some statistics from the university I attended. Social sciences and arts are the two largest faculties even though there's probably the least number of jobs out there for people with degrees. Even science schools like Waterloo have a staggering number of students registered in the arts. You'd be much better off learning to be an industrial truck mechanical, or even just standard car mechanic than getting a degree in social science.

Cornflicker was a non-event for those who had installed the patch months before the worm began to do it's thing.

Although it's quite funny to see you so arrogantly prescribe incorrect grammar, I feel obligated to inform you that you've got it backwards.

In general your best bet would be to use an image quality metric that takes into account how the human visual system works. The 2D frequency response of the human eye looks something like a diamond, which means that we see vertical and horizontal frequencies better than diagonal ones.

In fact, most image compression techniques (including JPEG) take this into account, however, conventional ways of determining the noise in images (minimum mean squared error, peak signal to noise, root mean squares) don't factor in the human visual system.

Your best bet is to use something like the structural similarity method (SSIM) by Prof. Al Bovik of UT Austin and his student Prof. Zhou Wang (now at the University of Waterloo).

You can read all about SSIM and get example code here: http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~z70wang/research/ssim/

Or read more about image quality assessment at Prof. Bovik's website: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/Quality/index.htm

If you don't care about how it works, and just want to use it, you can get example code for ssim in matlab at that website and C floating around the net. The method is easy to use; essentially the ssim function takes two images and returns a number between 0 and 1 that describes how similar the images are. Given two compressed images and the original image, take the SSIM between each and the original. The compressed image with the higher SSIM value is the "best".

It sounds like for your problem you might NOT have the original uncompressed image. In that case you might try checking for minimal entropy or maximum contrast in your images.

Essentially entropy would be calculated as:

h = histogram(Image);
p = h./(number of pixels in image);
entropy = -sum(p./log2(p));

You will need to make sure you scale the image appropriately and don't divide by zero! Or better yet, you should be able to find code for image entropy and contrast on the web. Just try searching for entropy.m for a matlab version.

Good luck!

What does "punished for it is decision" mean?

Please re-learn 2nd grade grammar.

Thanks

What does "eat it is self" mean?

What does "pay for it is self" mean?

Please re-learn 2nd grade grammar.

Thanks

What does "weaseled it is way" mean?

Please re-learn 2nd grade grammar.

Sincerely,

The informed members of Slashdot.

What does it mean to "use gold for it is intrinsic value"?

Please re-learn 2nd grade grammar.

Thanks

What does "give it it is proper name" mean?

Please re-learn 2nd grade grammar.

Thanks

You need a Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) solution, there is no commercial DTN's out there that I know off but the DAKNet people at MIT were working on something and a group a U of Waterloo has an implementation. http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/ http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/tetherless/index.php/KioskNet

Mabye cosmic rays effect the ozone layer, I don't really know.

A recent paper shows that this may indeed by the case

However claiming that CR's increase cloud cover is stretching the science well beyond what is known.

Given that Svensmark's team has been granted an experiment slot at CERN, at least many of those in the Physics community believe it's a plausible hypothesis. There is research out there demonstrating some causal link between cloud cover and Cosmic Rays. Science is all about reaching beyond what is known. It would be pretty a pointless exercise otherwise.

and sea levels, but not for the pH balance of the oceans, which are acidifying as they absorb additional carbon from the atmosphere.

I remember reading about green roofs (growing plants etc on the roof of buildings) and the effect it had on temperatures when done in urban environments:

Reduce heating (by adding mass and thermal resistance value) and cooling (by evaporative cooling) loads on a building â" especially if it is glassed in so as to act as a terrarium and passive solar heat reservoir â" a concentration of green roofs in an urban area can even reduce the city's average temperatures during the summer.

The Fairmont Hotel, here in Vancouver BC does this, growing herbs for the hotel kitchens.

They wanted to have an Assistant Professor from the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization and Institute for Quantum Computing at University of Waterloo?

"I have to say in 1981 making those decisions I felt like I was providing enough freedom for ten years, that is the move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time".

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/1989%20Bill%20Gates%20Talk%20on%20Microsoft.html

To boil and old, tiresome argument down, Gates spent a lot of time backtracking on his comment because he gave misleading/incorrect estimation of the lifespan of the 640k architecture.

Not only that, but it seems this isn't the first mechanical foosball table built at the University of Waterloo. Back in 2003, my fiance saw the demo of a laser-guided foosball table made by some fourth-year engineers. So either this is built upon work done by past students, or is reinventing the foosball-playing wheel. It'd be nice if their website acknowledged it either which way.

There have been multiple other examples of machine discoveries before although mainly in mathematics. One example is Simon Colton's work using a program that was able to formulate definitions and conjectures in number theory. See http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/colton/joisol.html. Colton's program came up with the idea of refactorable numbers, that is numbers such that their total number of positive divisors was itself a divisor of the number (so for example 8 is refactorable since it has 4 divisors and 4|8). It then turned out that an earlier paper had already discussed this idea. However, Colton's program has come up with other constructions as well.

The Robbins Conjecture was also proven using an automated theorem prover that did almost all the work.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_conjecture and that was over a decade ago.

This isn't really a new thing, it is simply that this has extended to more physical systems.

bill@bill-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install lynx Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libmp4v2-0 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following NEW packages will be installed: lynx 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded. Need to get 1168kB of archives. After this operation, 4997kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ hardy/main lynx 2.8.6-2ubuntu2 [1168kB] Fetched 1168kB in 4min27s (4373B/s) Selecting previously deselected package lynx. (Reading database ... 265683 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking lynx (from .../lynx_2.8.6-2ubuntu2_i386.deb) ... Setting up lynx (2.8.6-2ubuntu2) ... bill@bill-desktop:~$ lynx slashdot.org #News for nerds, stuff that matters Search Slashdot Slashdot RSS Stories Slash Boxes Comments Slashdot News for nerds, stuff that matters Jump to articles * Submit Story * Help * Log In Search ____________________ Search Create Account * 17:51 (NORMAL LINK) Use right-arrow or to activate. Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back. H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search [delete]=history list

You could always try reading the most up to date research rather than quoting from Wikipedia. The latter does after all contain many articles that are "managed" by various activists and that therefore cannot be trusted. I find it's better to remain open minded. The Environmental movement would not agree with me however.

In 1897 Indiana passed a Bill setting the value of Pi to 3. Now that's seriously outside their jurisdiction!

On that note, Waterloo doesn't have any of this IP bullshit (or at least much less of it). Generally speaking, any IP belongs to the person who created it (Policy 73 for anyone interested) with some exceptions (I believe for students, the only applicable one is that the work cannot be part of an assigned task).

I'd say it has one of the sanest IP policies, and I'm surprised by the situation in other universities.

Usual disclaimer - IANAL, so the above is a lay analysis (and I didn't read over the whole thing either).

I actually am a technical writer, and I like it. Now that I have been working in the field for a while, I'm chary about getting involved with F/OSS projects because the F/OSS community in general tends to treat non-programmers as not worth bothering with or listening to, even though a lot of us who'd really like to get involved are working professionals with good track records. I don't need to get treated like shit and ignored on a volunteer project when, if I get treated like shit and ignored in the corporate world, I'm at least drawing a paycheque. (Nothing eats like food, after all.)

I've seen far too much of the attitude around that programmers should write the documentation, because the programmers know the application best (as if that's a particularly good criterion by which to create documentation!), and IME that really only accomplishes two things: It makes your programmers (who'd rather be programming, quelle surprise) cranky, and it pisses off your user base, when the documentation reads like something that has been hacked together by someone who doesn't know the first thing or care a whit about documentation. Brilliant.

Now, if someone were serious about getting technical writing students involved in F/OSS projects, I'd recommend contacting these folks: Cooperative Education and Career Services at the University of Waterloo, and the Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Communication Design programme people. They do co-ops at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in those programmes, and, at least when I was there, seem to be quite open to unconventional project ideas...

I actually am a technical writer, and I like it. Now that I have been working in the field for a while, I'm chary about getting involved with F/OSS projects because the F/OSS community in general tends to treat non-programmers as not worth bothering with or listening to, even though a lot of us who'd really like to get involved are working professionals with good track records. I don't need to get treated like shit and ignored on a volunteer project when, if I get treated like shit and ignored in the corporate world, I'm at least drawing a paycheque. (Nothing eats like food, after all.)

I've seen far too much of the attitude around that programmers should write the documentation, because the programmers know the application best (as if that's a particularly good criterion by which to create documentation!), and IME that really only accomplishes two things: It makes your programmers (who'd rather be programming, quelle surprise) cranky, and it pisses off your user base, when the documentation reads like something that has been hacked together by someone who doesn't know the first thing or care a whit about documentation. Brilliant.

Now, if someone were serious about getting technical writing students involved in F/OSS projects, I'd recommend contacting these folks: Cooperative Education and Career Services at the University of Waterloo, and the Rhetoric and Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Communication Design programme people. They do co-ops at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in those programmes, and, at least when I was there, seem to be quite open to unconventional project ideas...

I'd originally googled before posting, but didn't find the name; I thought I'd refer to my old textbooks next time I had access. But your post motivated me to try some new search strings, and this time I've found it, I think (or at least similar studies).

I believe the study I am referring to was carried out by Ceci (Cornell) and Bruck (McGill). [If not them, then perhaps it was a study by Goodman (UC Davis).] You might want to refer to this paper. In particular, see the section on p. 10 titled "Anatomically Detailed Dolls;" the study it describes is not exactly the same as I remember, but similar.

There's a Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (Waterloo, ON) that, based on web searches, looks like that.

http://www.optometry.uwaterloo.ca/prospective/od/lifeatuw.html

Now, I can't address whether the guy was photoshopped in, but there probably is an angle where you could take that photo of the sign.

You can in some circumstances get more than that. I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada from 2001-2006. My 6 internships paid roughly: 15,16,12,19,23,25 per hour (all in CAD, except the last which was in USD). The third was terrible and not really a technical position. Waterloo publishes a salary survey for its interns, so you can get an idea of what at least some interns are getting:

http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/students/salary.php

In the last of the six I got my boss to tell me that I was still effectively a cheap contractor.

I'm currently the president of the Computer Science Club at another Canadian university. We, too, have a variety of machine architectures, and provide web/email accounts to students. We've stopped seeing as many signups for the web hosting and email side of things, and we've shifted our focus recently to a number of other things. For example, we're starting to run tutorials to introduce first year students to both the University's undergraduate computing environment as well as our own, and advertising some of our more powerful machines as a method for students who want to run processor/memory-intensive experiments to do so cheaply. One other thing we did was to make a deal with the web-design club at our school so that they now host all club sites which they design on our servers, since we have the ability to set up subdomains under our university's domain on their behalf. Lastly, one other thing which we're working on improving is setting up a proper library with copies of the various textbooks needed by students, as well as various other recommended reference books.

Check out this talk where RMS explains his views on copyright in more detail.

The short version is that he thinks there should be different categories of copyright. Tools, i.e. software and manuals, should be freely distributable and editable. Creative works such as films should enjoy protection but for a much more limited time (I think he said 10 to 15 years) with more freedom to create derivative work. I think he also had another category which I can't recall.

Oh yea, and using RMS and IP in the same post? I'm surprised someone hasn't marked you troll :)

The results are somewhat misleading if you are just thinking about speed & times.

For example, the University of Waterloo team crossed the finish line in 2nd place ( http://www.midsun.uwaterloo.ca/www ) but finished fourth in the official standings. Not sure how that works but I assume there are penalty points for drinking too much Canadian beer en-route or something.

I don't know of any AI research other than Marvin Minsky who is even interested in or advocating a grand synthesis of current techniques to produce a first cut of general intelligence.

i would argue that this is true for many computer science-related fields. most of the research i've read lately is on optimising this or that or observing disk failure rates, but rarely coming up with some totally new idea of way of looking at things, and never bringing together many specific techniques into a general system

ps -- if anyone can think of some examples of nifty new research to prove me wrong, i'd love to have the urls

It depends on what you're doing and with whom you're working. For example, the equation editor changed between 2003 and 2007. If you create a document with equations using the native 2007 editor, there is no way for a 2003 user to edit the document. It's not a matter of the file format, the ability to edit that kind of equation simply doesn't exist in 2003. And similarly, 2003 equations are not readily edited in 2007 unless you find the old editor and make it available. So it's a mess, but upgrading everyone is one way to get compatibility going forward. Keeping everyone in 2003 is another solution. But, I mean, WTF?? Who makes decisions like this? I read the blogs from the Microsoft programmers about the new equation editor and my jaw hit the floor. They're goofing around with half-implementing things (such as equation numbering) that LaTeX nailed 20 years ago. They should be ashamed.

It's as if a kindergartner was in charge of the release process.

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/tsp/

They've bassically found bacteria where ever they've drilled deep. The stuff in oil deposits is obvious - that a source of buriend biomaterial transformation into oil and energy for the bacteria. Less obvious are bacteria found in igneous basement, perhaps from ground water over millions or billions of years.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso ----- Features: http://techwatch.reviewk.com/2008/04/ubuntu-hardy-heron-8-04-2/

The server was overloaded; it's back up now, but in case it becomes unstable again... Cached lists of mirrors (for all versions):

        * http://www.ubuntu.com.nyud.net/getubuntu/downloadmirrors
        * http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubuntu.com%2Fgetubuntu%2Fdownloadmirrors

Torrent for 8.04 desktop version i386 ISO:

        * http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
        * http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent
            (Piratebay mirror because official tracker is unstable)

Direct links to 8.04 desktop version i386 ISOs:

        * http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso

I think anyone should be able to standardize anything. MS is saying here is a file format we want to use, and we want to standardize it so everyone knows exactly how it works. How is this a bad thing? You don't have to like the implementation and you don't have to develop against it if you don't want to. You still are stuck for the most part because you need to interopt with Office users but how is this different then know? At least you'd know for sure what the file format is supposed to be rather than have to reverse engineer (which probably violates a crap load of EULAs and patents) as you currently have to do.