I know very few people that still use Yahoo as their first choice in search engines (and I am not talking about computer saavy people either).
Nonetheless, among search engines it's second only to Google in driving traffic to my site (ok, some people block the referrer, but not many). It isn't much, but it beats the rest of the crowd (Google brings ~45% of all traffic, Yahoo 3.4%, then MSN with 1.5%).
I saw some researchers (I think they were from Italy, not sure) present an early implementation of their algorithm to look for similar images to the one you select.
Content-based image retrieval isn't that new. Check out GIFT. It should even be possible on a grand scale, given Google's resources (hardware and know-how). However, personally I don't think finding similar images is that useful. I never had the necessity to find similar images. At least not the kind of similarity retrieved by those tools: similar in the sense of "another image containing a dog catching a frisbee" doesn't work, because a second matching image could have totally different characteristics from the first one.
Searching with keywords I do find useful. But it's a long time until image understanding will really work, I'm afraid. Until then, Google's approach (keywords in the file name and text near the image) must suffice.
Hopefully Microsoft, with their new stance on spam and "security" (not to be flamebait but they really haven't made me trust them yet), will get their act together and realize that there need to be substantial changes to the way they go about things in order to combat these problems.
I don't think they want to make substantial changes. It's convenient for the user having everything on by default, new users having admin priviledges, and so on. Microsoft employs some very smart people. If the company was serious about good security, they could have changed things.
But that would make everything harder for the end user. MS made a conscious decision against that. The statements about being really serious about security now which come up now and then are just cheap talk.
But isn't it relatively easy to spot "generic" texts of the kind you described? If there is no "meat" in a review, it's not helpful and therefore I continue reading.
By the way, given that this particular reviewer copied texts in verbatim, I guess Amazon would be interested.
When you read a review on Amazon.com, you are expecting an unbiased review. The person making a self-interested post is actively decieving you.
Actually, no, I don't expect an unbiased review. I'm very careful with statements in those reviews because I know about the spin somebody might add (in either direction).
I got contacted once because an author thought I had given an unfair rating. It wasn't me who wrote it, but since then I know how closely authors may follow their Amazon reviews.
I find those TOP 100/500/1000 reviewer labels useful when I'm reading reviews. Those reviewers have built up a certain credibility. Most of them can also express themselves well in written form so it's more pleasant to read them.
Victoria Livschitz is right when she talks about the complexity of today's systems being one of the major problems. But when she says that No one can comfortably negotiate a system with thousands of classes., she hasn't pointed out an OO flaw.
Whatever takes thousands of classes (or single components, to get away from OO terminology) will never be of low complexity, no matter what other paradigm you come up with. The task is to split these huge systems into parts which can be mastered and understood by single persons.
The connections (who uses what?) between classes (or packages) must be kept as low as possible, and as high as necessary.
I don't see this as an OO flaw. You are right that OO is not The One Way. Similarities between classes can be expressed elegantly with OOP (by inheritance), but other than that, OOP isn't a panacea. Your particular problem seems to stem from bad design. I don't think that the inevitably in your statement about that new Gravity class is true.
If the design for the problem is right, the solution can be expressed nicely with OOP, classical imperative programming and probably every other paradigm.
I don't know enough about physics to suggest a good design in this case.
One addition: This will probably make discussions of competent people on the merits (or lack thereof) of the code difficult. Or they will only be had in private. Which is sad, because I'd like to hear about some sort of code audit.
No, not necessarily. The person with low upload speed has the potential of getting good download transfer rates as soon as there are enough providers of complete file chunks. Obviously, this will be a disadvantage in the early stages of distributing a file, but later on (or if there are enough participants who continue sharing after they got a complete download) it's not a problem.
I'm having problems when Opera / Windows is running for a long time and has been used heavily. Maybe problems with the cache directory? There is enough disk space and free memory, but it has a limit in the preferences to what it can use. Maybe it has problems once that limit is reached.
I can't see why my statement should be false: Metadata can be inside and outside of a file. That's all I said. EXIF is inside of the file, additional database files (like the ones from ACDSee) are outside of the file.
These standards are already available, are already being used in cameras and imaging software, and are documented well enough that support can be implemented into your open-source imagebrowser or other app.
Unfortunately, they do not all support the kinds of information you may want to store. EXIF may miss a feature, JPEG2000 another one. The smallest common denominator is probably not desirable.
Besides, certain formats do not support metadata that well, or at all. But you may be forced to use those formats anyway. So data has to be stored outside of the file.
The most obvious shortcoming - it's not feasible to search all files for a certain query. The metadata has to be cached in order for the query to be answered fast. That caching can (and should) be done in some sort of database. If it's on the file system level, all applications can profit from it.
The idea is fine (although not that new, really). It's up to MS now to deliver a good implementation for their OS.
Does anyone have experience with video file metadata?
abcAVI does this for AVI files under Windows. It's nice, but I also have files in the formats MPG, MPEG-2, QuickTime MOV, RealVideo and probably some others. It would be better to have an application that does not store metadata inside of the file, there are just too many formats.
If I was a stockholder of HP I'd be pissed that the company spends money on things that do not bring benefits, just because some officials "asked" them.
In my experience forcing something on developers can also enforce better design. Not everybody checks out all the options, some people are just lazy and the result is less than par quality code.
As an example, the missing responsiveness of some Swing applications comes from the fact that there are no good and well-documented helper classes for running (more or less lengthy) tasks in different threads. You can find out how to do it right, but it's harder than necessary and many developers just don't care because it 'kinda works'.
I did, and there are other add-ons too (I remember some Sourceforge project). But I don't like that it isn't part of the core SWT library. Why didn't they support MVC from the beginning? I guess SWT is supposed to be relatively low-level. But that's not what everybody should use, in my opinion, to get back to the original argument.
I find it hard to imagine that anyone is still using Swing these days unless they are locked in to it,
SWT doesn't come with a MVC approach as Swing does. Besides, you'll have to deallocate your GUI resources with SWT yourself.
SWT is the future of Java GUIs
That's a very bold prediction. SWT is a valid alternative in some cases. Before picking a GUI one should think a bit about which toolkit is best-suited for the job. But in no way is SWT always the right choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I know very few people that still use Yahoo as their first choice in search engines (and I am not talking about computer saavy people either).
Nonetheless, among search engines it's second only to Google in driving traffic to my site (ok, some people block the referrer, but not many). It isn't much, but it beats the rest of the crowd (Google brings ~45% of all traffic, Yahoo 3.4%, then MSN with 1.5%).
I saw some researchers (I think they were from Italy, not sure) present an early implementation of their algorithm to look for similar images to the one you select.
Content-based image retrieval isn't that new. Check out GIFT. It should even be possible on a grand scale, given Google's resources (hardware and know-how). However, personally I don't think finding similar images is that useful. I never had the necessity to find similar images. At least not the kind of similarity retrieved by those tools: similar in the sense of "another image containing a dog catching a frisbee" doesn't work, because a second matching image could have totally different characteristics from the first one.
Searching with keywords I do find useful. But it's a long time until image understanding will really work, I'm afraid. Until then, Google's approach (keywords in the file name and text near the image) must suffice.
It's interesting however that the image index has been updated. That happens not so often and was long overdue.
...of the index but what you do with it. ;-)
Hopefully Microsoft, with their new stance on spam and "security" (not to be flamebait but they really haven't made me trust them yet), will get their act together and realize that there need to be substantial changes to the way they go about things in order to combat these problems.
I don't think they want to make substantial changes. It's convenient for the user having everything on by default, new users having admin priviledges, and so on. Microsoft employs some very smart people. If the company was serious about good security, they could have changed things.
But that would make everything harder for the end user. MS made a conscious decision against that. The statements about being really serious about security now which come up now and then are just cheap talk.
Interesting, I've never encountered that.
But isn't it relatively easy to spot "generic" texts of the kind you described? If there is no "meat" in a review, it's not helpful and therefore I continue reading.
By the way, given that this particular reviewer copied texts in verbatim, I guess Amazon would be interested.
That's funny, cause I explicitly avoid those top reviewer labels. I find them overwrought and too full of praise most of the time.
Maybe I was lucky so far? I remember most of the top reviewers including both praise and criticism.
When you read a review on Amazon.com, you are expecting an unbiased review. The person making a self-interested post is actively decieving you.
Actually, no, I don't expect an unbiased review. I'm very careful with statements in those reviews because I know about the spin somebody might add (in either direction).
I got contacted once because an author thought I had given an unfair rating. It wasn't me who wrote it, but since then I know how closely authors may follow their Amazon reviews.
I find those TOP 100/500/1000 reviewer labels useful when I'm reading reviews. Those reviewers have built up a certain credibility. Most of them can also express themselves well in written form so it's more pleasant to read them.
Victoria Livschitz is right when she talks about the complexity of today's systems being one of the major problems. But when she says that No one can comfortably negotiate a system with thousands of classes., she hasn't pointed out an OO flaw.
Whatever takes thousands of classes (or single components, to get away from OO terminology) will never be of low complexity, no matter what other paradigm you come up with. The task is to split these huge systems into parts which can be mastered and understood by single persons.
The connections (who uses what?) between classes (or packages) must be kept as low as possible, and as high as necessary.
I don't see this as an OO flaw. You are right that OO is not The One Way. Similarities between classes can be expressed elegantly with OOP (by inheritance), but other than that, OOP isn't a panacea. Your particular problem seems to stem from bad design. I don't think that the inevitably in your statement about that new Gravity class is true.
If the design for the problem is right, the solution can be expressed nicely with OOP, classical imperative programming and probably every other paradigm.
I don't know enough about physics to suggest a good design in this case.
One addition: This will probably make discussions of competent people on the merits (or lack thereof) of the code difficult. Or they will only be had in private. Which is sad, because I'd like to hear about some sort of code audit.
How does one take a quick peek to see such a file is circulating?
Some P2P network, I guess. Or one of the aforementioned IRC channels.
No, not necessarily. The person with low upload speed has the potential of getting good download transfer rates as soon as there are enough providers of complete file chunks. Obviously, this will be a disadvantage in the early stages of distributing a file, but later on (or if there are enough participants who continue sharing after they got a complete download) it's not a problem.
Thanks for pointing that out. I first read it as Windows 2000 with service pack 3, and that didn't make a lot of sense in the context.
I'm having problems when Opera / Windows is running for a long time and has been used heavily. Maybe problems with the cache directory? There is enough disk space and free memory, but it has a limit in the preferences to what it can use. Maybe it has problems once that limit is reached.
Older versions crashed on me more often.
I can't see why my statement should be false: Metadata can be inside and outside of a file. That's all I said. EXIF is inside of the file, additional database files (like the ones from ACDSee) are outside of the file.
These standards are already available, are already being used in cameras and imaging software,
and are documented well enough that support can be implemented into your open-source imagebrowser or other app.
Unfortunately, they do not all support the kinds of information you may want to store. EXIF may miss a feature, JPEG2000 another one. The smallest common denominator is probably not desirable.
Besides, certain formats do not support metadata that well, or at all. But you may be forced to use those formats anyway. So data has to be stored outside of the file.
The most obvious shortcoming - it's not feasible to search all files for a certain query. The metadata has to be cached in order for the query to be answered fast. That caching can (and should) be done in some sort of database. If it's on the file system level, all applications can profit from it.
The idea is fine (although not that new, really). It's up to MS now to deliver a good implementation for their OS.
Does anyone have experience with video file metadata?
abcAVI does this for AVI files under Windows. It's nice, but I also have files in the formats MPG, MPEG-2, QuickTime MOV, RealVideo and probably some others. It would be better to have an application that does not store metadata inside of the file, there are just too many formats.
Metadata can be both inside and outside of a file. Examples: EXIF headers, IPTC headers (inside), WinFS, ACDSee database file (outside).
If I was a stockholder of HP I'd be pissed that the company spends money on things that do not bring benefits, just because some officials "asked" them.
In my experience forcing something on developers can also enforce better design. Not everybody checks out all the options, some people are just lazy and the result is less than par quality code.
As an example, the missing responsiveness of some Swing applications comes from the fact that there are no good and well-documented helper classes for running (more or less lengthy) tasks in different threads. You can find out how to do it right, but it's harder than necessary and many developers just don't care because it 'kinda works'.
I did, and there are other add-ons too (I remember some Sourceforge project). But I don't like that it isn't part of the core SWT library. Why didn't they support MVC from the beginning? I guess SWT is supposed to be relatively low-level. But that's not what everybody should use, in my opinion, to get back to the original argument.
I find it hard to imagine that anyone is still using Swing these days unless they are locked in to it,
SWT doesn't come with a MVC approach as Swing does. Besides, you'll have to deallocate your GUI resources with SWT yourself.
SWT is the future of Java GUIs
That's a very bold prediction. SWT is a valid alternative in some cases. Before picking a GUI one should think a bit about which toolkit is best-suited for the job. But in no way is SWT always the right choice.
A layout that looks good on my system has buttons cramped in the corner on somebody else's.
Sounds like you're not using layout managers correctly (or to put it differently, to their full potential).
beacuse SWT is actually a nice cross platform toolkit, while Swing and AWT are horrible festering pieces of crap.
Ehm, no.
Swing is relatively hard to use properly.
But it can do a lot more than SWT. You'll have to program a lot of stuff for SWT that is already part of Swing.