Steganographic attempts are considered foiled if someone can detect that there is a secret message, they don't need to be able to retrieve the message in order for the attempt to be considered a failure. I did my Master's project on hiding data in the least significant bitplane of imagery. The trick is to "randomly" scatter your secret message throughout this plane. I showed methods that would allow you to do this so that the data was indistinguishable. You should always encrypt your secret message first so that it looks random, or better yet, shape the statistics of your encoded message to match the noise characteristics that were in the original LSB plane. If you use an image created from a very noisy source, such as a digital camera, and you encrypt the embedded message and scatter it using a reversible algorithm, and iteratively ensure that the statistics of the altered LSB plane look the same as the original LSB plane, I proved that it is not possible for someone to tell that there is a secret message hidden there. However, you need to be careful to use an original image you created yourself, and to destroy the original, because if someone ever compared the original to the one with the embedded message, they could definitely tell there was something altered by comparing the LSB planes.
I used to think that these solo player RPGs and multiplayer adventure games could be timesinks. Then I played the persistent MMORPGs....
There is no comparison. The other day I ran into someone in Everquest whose name was an odd Gold color. It turns out that is the reward for 500 days played... That's 500 realtime days, or 12,000 RL hours playing one character.
The reality is that with a good quality 3 megapixel camera, you can make 5x7 inch prints that are indistinguishable from silver if you use a silver print process, such as that provided by www.ofoto.com or one of its competitors. Even 8x10 is remarkably good. Anyone who tells you o/w probably has not actually tried such a print service. This assumes the images have not been victims of high digital zoom factors, cropping, etc.
BTW, megapixels is like megahertz... A marketing term that consumers foolishly believe is linear. Unless the sensor is made larger as the pixel count increases, the incident illumination is split up ever more finely, decreasing signal to noise. Also, the materials used, the color filter pattern selected, the quality of the electronics and firmware algorithms, lens quality, can all matter as much as pixel count.
JPEG2000 will not succeed as a direct replacement for JPEG. It is a much more complicated standard that has significantly larger performance costs. JPEG2000 will find big wins where it has big benefits, namely in networked progressive rendering that scales by resolution/quality/spatial-location. As a "stand-alone finished file format" it does not provide enough benefits to replace JPEG. The biggest advantages of traditional JPEG is its relative simplicity and it ubiquity. Time and again the world relearns that the world will not beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap, it takes huge benefits to overcome Metcalf's Law (paraphrased as: the value of something scales geometrically with its ubiquity)
As interesting as this is, it is ridiculous to think that anyone who is downloading and burning DivX files doesn't have a computer, or is even able to install hacked software into their Xbox. The whole idea of going into the living room is to make things easy, and solutions in the living room that rely upon a hacker mentality will never be more than a geek toy. As for MS, they certainly will NOT like this in any case, as they are very anti-piracy, and don't want to lose control of their platform (even thought the likeliness of this happening is low/nil). If you believe the XBox Live online service will be a big success, any games that want an online component are going to be forced to run on MS's servers, so they can control things and get their nickel (more likely dollar;) Will there be a way to hack your online game/app? Yes... Will MS allow you to get away w/ it for long if you are successful? No...
The point is not what is theoretically better; of course dedicated hardware is theoretically much more capable than a general CPU-based approach. What is important is the total system cost to provide an end use-case to the consumer. The fact is that leveraging the highly commoditized Wintel architecture taps an enormous economy of scale, particularly now that most x86 processors are faster than what most people need. If it meets the user's need at a total cost of ownership that is lower, then it should rightly see deployment and be worthwhile to all parties involved.
You can bet your bottom dollar that the console online community will be distinctly different from the PC online community, and nary the two shall meet... There are many good reasons for this, including technical, financial, and demographic ones.
EQ is a graphical MUD, a chat room with some role playing. It is not an action game, and a poor substitute for an adventure game. Streamline it for console? Hmmm... game is already mostly brain-dead... What makes it worthwhile is the human element provided by chat, and if this is missing from the console version what good is it?
Why do people assume anime will appeal to people who are technologically sophisticated? I wonder how many readers find this to be relevant news. News for Nerds... hmmm... it isn't news, an it doesn't seem to be "stuff that matters."
Anime = mass produced, low-talent artwork with minimal updates per frame = mass produced garbage
These people who performed this hoax are now acting like they should be comended for pulling one over on everyone, going so far as to post pictures of themselves. Hmm... should we think that they are some kind of geniuses? I think not. They have only shown their ability to create fantasy and to lie, having produced nothing.
I am an imaging scientist, an editor of a document related to the JPEG2000 document. This article is SO misleading. The reality is that wavelet compression is only 0-20% better (depending on scene content) compression to get to similar image quality than DCT/Huffman (which is what JPEG uses). Most of the advantages in wavelet are the ability to decompress on a "sliding" scale, allowing for obtainment of the desired resolution and for progressive decoding!
Slashdot Mirror
Steganographic attempts are considered foiled if someone can detect that there is a secret message, they don't need to be able to retrieve the message in order for the attempt to be considered a failure. I did my Master's project on hiding data in the least significant bitplane of imagery. The trick is to "randomly" scatter your secret message throughout this plane. I showed methods that would allow you to do this so that the data was indistinguishable. You should always encrypt your secret message first so that it looks random, or better yet, shape the statistics of your encoded message to match the noise characteristics that were in the original LSB plane. If you use an image created from a very noisy source, such as a digital camera, and you encrypt the embedded message and scatter it using a reversible algorithm, and iteratively ensure that the statistics of the altered LSB plane look the same as the original LSB plane, I proved that it is not possible for someone to tell that there is a secret message hidden there. However, you need to be careful to use an original image you created yourself, and to destroy the original, because if someone ever compared the original to the one with the embedded message, they could definitely tell there was something altered by comparing the LSB planes.
I used to think that these solo player RPGs and multiplayer adventure games could be timesinks. Then I played the persistent MMORPGs....
There is no comparison. The other day I ran into someone in Everquest whose name was an odd Gold color. It turns out that is the reward for 500 days played... That's 500 realtime days, or 12,000 RL hours playing one character.
The reality is that with a good quality 3 megapixel camera, you can make 5x7 inch prints that are indistinguishable from silver if you use a silver print process, such as that provided by www.ofoto.com or one of its competitors. Even 8x10 is remarkably good. Anyone who tells you o/w probably has not actually tried such a print service. This assumes the images have not been victims of high digital zoom factors, cropping, etc.
BTW, megapixels is like megahertz... A marketing term that consumers foolishly believe is linear. Unless the sensor is made larger as the pixel count increases, the incident illumination is split up ever more finely, decreasing signal to noise. Also, the materials used, the color filter pattern selected, the quality of the electronics and firmware algorithms, lens quality, can all matter as much as pixel count.
"Don't attack a new technology or development, find a way to adapt to make it work for you."
Hmmm, sounds like Bill Gates' strategy.
JPEG2000 will not succeed as a direct replacement for JPEG. It is a much more complicated standard that has significantly larger performance costs. JPEG2000 will find big wins where it has big benefits, namely in networked progressive rendering that scales by resolution/quality/spatial-location. As a "stand-alone finished file format" it does not provide enough benefits to replace JPEG. The biggest advantages of traditional JPEG is its relative simplicity and it ubiquity. Time and again the world relearns that the world will not beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap, it takes huge benefits to overcome Metcalf's Law (paraphrased as: the value of something scales geometrically with its ubiquity)
As interesting as this is, it is ridiculous to think that anyone who is downloading and burning DivX files doesn't have a computer, or is even able to install hacked software into their Xbox. The whole idea of going into the living room is to make things easy, and solutions in the living room that rely upon a hacker mentality will never be more than a geek toy. As for MS, they certainly will NOT like this in any case, as they are very anti-piracy, and don't want to lose control of their platform (even thought the likeliness of this happening is low/nil). If you believe the XBox Live online service will be a big success, any games that want an online component are going to be forced to run on MS's servers, so they can control things and get their nickel (more likely dollar ;) Will there be a way to hack your online game/app? Yes... Will MS allow you to get away w/ it for long if you are successful? No...
The point is not what is theoretically better; of course dedicated hardware is theoretically much more capable than a general CPU-based approach. What is important is the total system cost to provide an end use-case to the consumer. The fact is that leveraging the highly commoditized Wintel architecture taps an enormous economy of scale, particularly now that most x86 processors are faster than what most people need. If it meets the user's need at a total cost of ownership that is lower, then it should rightly see deployment and be worthwhile to all parties involved.
You can bet your bottom dollar that the console online community will be distinctly different from the PC online community, and nary the two shall meet... There are many good reasons for this, including technical, financial, and demographic ones.
EQ is a graphical MUD, a chat room with some role playing. It is not an action game, and a poor substitute for an adventure game. Streamline it for console? Hmmm... game is already mostly brain-dead... What makes it worthwhile is the human element provided by chat, and if this is missing from the console version what good is it?
Why do people assume anime will appeal to people who are technologically sophisticated? I wonder how many readers find this to be relevant news. News for Nerds... hmmm... it isn't news, an it doesn't seem to be "stuff that matters." Anime = mass produced, low-talent artwork with minimal updates per frame = mass produced garbage
These people who performed this hoax are now acting like they should be comended for pulling one over on everyone, going so far as to post pictures of themselves. Hmm... should we think that they are some kind of geniuses? I think not. They have only shown their ability to create fantasy and to lie, having produced nothing.
I am an imaging scientist, an editor of a document related to the JPEG2000 document. This article is SO misleading. The reality is that wavelet compression is only 0-20% better (depending on scene content) compression to get to similar image quality than DCT/Huffman (which is what JPEG uses). Most of the advantages in wavelet are the ability to decompress on a "sliding" scale, allowing for obtainment of the desired resolution and for progressive decoding!