Incidentally, the French page gives rather more relevant results (the first couple of hits are French language MS sites), and rather helpfully hit #7 links to http://www.linux-center.org/detaxe/ , a site with detailed instructions for reclaiming the 'Windows tax' (the cost of an unwanted pre-installed MS OS):-)
That's interesting - I hadn't tried the IE settings. In my browser the live.com Settings link is cunningly concealed by a 'make live.com yours' blue banner (another masterpiece of interface design) that can be closed with a click (also reveals 'what's new' and 'hide' links). As you say, the localisation needs some fine tuning! - it's actually sort of endearing that you have to scroll a long way down the UK list to get a link to MS - if this happened with google.co.uk they'd be accused of blatant anti-Micosoft bias...
...and for anyone who's still sceptical about this - go into the live.com Settings, select 'English (United Kingdom)', and you should be able to reproduce my results from a non-UK IP address.
'Definitely mod this parent down. The site looks good in Firefox, Opera, and IE. As with the other person who replied to the parent post, I search for Windows and get good results.'
It turns out that my strange hits for 'Windows' (which I'm still getting) seem to be limited to searches from a UK IP address (see my post above). I've now tried a couple of versions of Mozilla (a recent Solaris build works, an earlier Windows version just gives 'loading...'), Firefox (OK), IE (OK) and a Solaris version of Konqueror (neither works nor displays the search page properly).
No FUD - I'm still getting the same results. But I've just found that this seems to be limited to searches from a UK IP address. When I run the search via VNC from a browser running on a remote system in Italy, I get the same hits as general_re. With the UK search, the next few hits are for UK double glazing companies (!) and a UK poetry workshop site (www.windowsproject.demon.co.uk).
Nasty UI, doesn't work properly with the two non-IE browsers I've tried, and rather ironically a search for 'Windows' gives me (as the first four hits, & the only ones displayed by default):
(1) VLC media player for Windows (2) Windows downloads from The Register (3) A Windows font survey at codestyle.org (4) Oracle on Windows
cf Google:
(1) MS (2) Windowsupdate (3) windows.com (4) wincustomize.com
Of course the best solution of all is to get a DVD player that can be
set up to switch off the Macrovision pulses altogether. Oddly enough,
Samsung also used to make a player, the venerable DVD-709,
that could be made both multi-region and 'VCR-friendly' with a simple remote hack.
Even if you're not part of an International Analogue Piracy Gang,
switching off this dreadful system can be very useful when you have an
old TV with limited (or just co-axial) inputs and multiple devices to
connect to it - Macrovision blocks the obvious solution of routing the
DVD player through the VCR, since it messes up the 'live' signal as
well as degrading recordings. Unfortunately, Macrovision-free players
are becoming harder to find here in the UK, even though multi-region
hacks are more common than ever (even mainstream shops now sell
pre-hacked region-free players).
When AaronW mentioned white balance, he was specifically talking about raw conversion (Bibble is also a raw converter, as is Camera Raw, the Adobe plugin that has white balance control). This is the only stage when you have the 'uncooked' data available to adjust the white balance directly (which ought to give you the highest quality output and is easier than messing with the colour balance later on). Of course both Photoshop and GIMP have other tools (channel mixer, curves, levels, etc.) that can change the colour balance in an already processed image like a tiff or a jpeg. In this context, GIMP's main limitations are its lack of support for colour management (finally available in the developmental versions in a limited form) and for 16 bits per channel (don't hold your breath for this one!).
It doesn't have to. Just like with Photoshop, a plugin handles white balance adjustment at the time of raw conversion. For Photoshop, the plugin is Adobe Camera Raw. For GIMP, it's UFRaw or one of the other interactive dcraw-based packages like RougePhoto or RawPhoto:
When run in 'standalone' mode, UFRaw even has a 16-bit output mode (useful if you Cinepaint). When run as a GIMP plugin, you're obviously stuck with GIMP's 8-bit limit.
They're compressing the data to get this file size, though, probably using a lossy 'quantization' approach followed by a conventional lossless compression algorithm:
This is certainly true for typical consumer labs. However, if you can find a (reasonably priced!) pro-oriented lab that provides you with an ICC profile for the printer and paper they use, and you have a full colour-managed workflow with a properly profiled monitor, excellent results should be possible. There's a good guide to this approach here:
Most of this workflow is also applicable to home printing, but you'll need to profile your printer & papers as well (probably worth it in the long run, as it should cut down on the number of test prints).
Re:The 1957 influenza epidemic
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
'The influenza virus in the 1957 influenza epidemic may have actually been considerably worse than that in the 1918 epidemic.'
There's been a lot of speculation about relative virulence of the 1918 virus, but thanks to some very recent research we can now look at this directly:
It turns out that the (reconstructed) 1918 virus is indeed exceptionally virulent (at least in lab mice): "In fact, no other human influenza viruses that have been tested show a similar pathogenicity for mice 3 to 4 days after infection." This isn't the same as studying a human infection, of course, but it certainly lends weight to the theory that H1N1 1918 was unusually nasty.
(Open Source firmware for various portables - experimental iRiver version does gapless from Lame enc mp3 and OGG). I think the Rio Karma also respected the Lame tags - it was certainly gapless with later firmware.
The obvious answer is that sometimes you want to listen to the whole thing, and sometimes you want to access a specific track. There are plenty of mix albums, live albums, and 'concept albums' (not to mention Wagner-length operas and other extended classical stuff) where frequent gaps ruin the music, but encoding as a single (maybe hour-long!) track is massively inconvenient. The (discontinued) Rio Karma showed that it's technically possible to have continuous music from separate tracks in a portable player. Why can't the iPod (or most of its 'killers') do this?
Incidentally, the iPod is a particularly serious offender here, with bigger gaps than some of its competitors. See:
The references to Linux are largely recent Red Hat spin. Cygwin was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, who described their tools as 'ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows' that work by 'using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API':
This is the sort of thing that justifiably annoys GNU supporters (and even others who don't normally subscribe to the whole 'GNU/Linux' thing). Cygwin has no more connection with Linux than BSD does (except that nowadays it's developed by a Linux distributor, so perhaps userland tools are compiled for both operating systems from similar source tree versions?).
'I still can't calculate any shielding plates which will be light enough for the rocket fuel mass of Apollo 13 (28,945 kg) and yet still protect 3 astronauts from the radiation belts around the earth.'
"The recent Fox TV show, which I saw, is an ingenious and entertaining assemblage of nonsense. The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense." - Dr. James Van Allen, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts.
Only a minority of albums are badly affected, but if you like certain genres of music (live recordings/mix albums/'concept albums'/classical) you might find a lot of your favourite stuff is seriously marred by gaps.
Perhaps the IP transfer means there's an outside chance that the Rio Karma's gapless technology might make it into the iPod...
"And if you trace it all back to its roots, we need God, the ultimate in control, and we need evolution, the ultimate in chaos. Some of you may disagree with one or the other of those assertions, but I don't think it's entirely an accident that Charles Darwin is entombed in a church."
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is why Apple doesn't sue Apple and Apple for blatant use of Illustrations in their product packaging!
Incidentally, the French page gives rather more relevant results (the first couple of hits are French language MS sites), and rather helpfully hit #7 links to http://www.linux-center.org/detaxe/ , a site with detailed instructions for reclaiming the 'Windows tax' (the cost of an unwanted pre-installed MS OS) :-)
That's interesting - I hadn't tried the IE settings. In my browser the live.com Settings link is cunningly concealed by a 'make live.com yours' blue banner (another masterpiece of interface design) that can be closed with a click (also reveals 'what's new' and 'hide' links). As you say, the localisation needs some fine tuning! - it's actually sort of endearing that you have to scroll a long way down the UK list to get a link to MS - if this happened with google.co.uk they'd be accused of blatant anti-Micosoft bias...
...and for anyone who's still sceptical about this - go into the live.com Settings, select 'English (United Kingdom)', and you should be able to reproduce my results from a non-UK IP address.
'Definitely mod this parent down. The site looks good in Firefox, Opera, and IE. As with the other person who replied to the parent post, I search for Windows and get good results.'
It turns out that my strange hits for 'Windows' (which I'm still getting) seem to be limited to searches from a UK IP address (see my post above). I've now tried a couple of versions of Mozilla (a recent Solaris build works, an earlier Windows version just gives 'loading...'), Firefox (OK), IE (OK) and a Solaris version of Konqueror (neither works nor displays the search page properly).
No FUD - I'm still getting the same results. But I've just found that this seems to be limited to searches from a UK IP address. When I run the search via VNC from a browser running on a remote system in Italy, I get the same hits as general_re. With the UK search, the next few hits are for UK double glazing companies (!) and a UK poetry workshop site (www.windowsproject.demon.co.uk).
Nasty UI, doesn't work properly with the two non-IE browsers I've tried, and rather ironically a search for 'Windows' gives me (as the first four hits, & the only ones displayed by default):
(1) VLC media player for Windows
(2) Windows downloads from The Register
(3) A Windows font survey at codestyle.org
(4) Oracle on Windows
cf Google:
(1) MS
(2) Windowsupdate
(3) windows.com
(4) wincustomize.com
Of course the best solution of all is to get a DVD player that can be set up to switch off the Macrovision pulses altogether. Oddly enough, Samsung also used to make a player, the venerable DVD-709, that could be made both multi-region and 'VCR-friendly' with a simple remote hack. Even if you're not part of an International Analogue Piracy Gang, switching off this dreadful system can be very useful when you have an old TV with limited (or just co-axial) inputs and multiple devices to connect to it - Macrovision blocks the obvious solution of routing the DVD player through the VCR, since it messes up the 'live' signal as well as degrading recordings. Unfortunately, Macrovision-free players are becoming harder to find here in the UK, even though multi-region hacks are more common than ever (even mainstream shops now sell pre-hacked region-free players).
'PNG does have a reputation for being dangerous.'
n /ms05-009.mspx
Justifiably so, if you're running Windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulleti
When AaronW mentioned white balance, he was specifically talking about raw conversion (Bibble is also a raw converter, as is Camera Raw, the Adobe plugin that has white balance control). This is the only stage when you have the 'uncooked' data available to adjust the white balance directly (which ought to give you the highest quality output and is easier than messing with the colour balance later on). Of course both Photoshop and GIMP have other tools (channel mixer, curves, levels, etc.) that can change the colour balance in an already processed image like a tiff or a jpeg. In this context, GIMP's main limitations are its lack of support for colour management (finally available in the developmental versions in a limited form) and for 16 bits per channel (don't hold your breath for this one!).
It doesn't have to. Just like with Photoshop, a plugin handles white balance adjustment at the time of raw conversion. For Photoshop, the plugin is Adobe Camera Raw. For GIMP, it's UFRaw or one of the other interactive dcraw-based packages like RougePhoto or RawPhoto:
0 _on_Linux.html
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/pepe/d70/Nikon_D7
http://ptj.rozeta.com.pl/Soft/RawPhoto
'GIMP is probably never going to be able to support your RAW photos'
There's already an excellent solution to this problem:
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
It's been used to create several GIMP plugins, including:
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
When run in 'standalone' mode, UFRaw even has a 16-bit output mode (useful if you Cinepaint). When run as a GIMP plugin, you're obviously stuck with GIMP's 8-bit limit.
They're compressing the data to get this file size, though, probably using a lossy 'quantization' approach followed by a conventional lossless compression algorithm:
t ml
http://www.majid.info/mylos/weblog/2004/05/02-1.h
It's fatal in up to 2.7 million cases a year (mostly African children):
http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/facts.htm
This is certainly true for typical consumer labs. However, if you can find a (reasonably priced!) pro-oriented lab that provides you with an ICC profile for the printer and paper they use, and you have a full colour-managed workflow with a properly profiled monitor, excellent results should be possible. There's a good guide to this approach here:
e r_profiles.htm
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Frontier/using_print
Most of this workflow is also applicable to home printing, but you'll need to profile your printer & papers as well (probably worth it in the long run, as it should cut down on the number of test prints).
'The influenza virus in the 1957 influenza epidemic may have actually been considerably worse than that in the 1918 epidemic.'
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1621053 0&query_hl=2
There's been a lot of speculation about relative virulence of the 1918 virus, but thanks to some very recent research we can now look at this directly:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
It turns out that the (reconstructed) 1918 virus is indeed exceptionally virulent (at least in lab mice): "In fact, no other human influenza viruses that have been tested show a similar pathogenicity for mice 3 to 4 days after infection." This isn't the same as studying a human infection, of course, but it certainly lends weight to the theory that H1N1 1918 was unusually nasty.
"lame enc can put the actual track sample count into a special id3 tag but i'd be surprised if any hardware would support that."
See:
http://www.rockbox.org/
(Open Source firmware for various portables - experimental iRiver version does gapless from Lame enc mp3 and OGG). I think the Rio Karma also respected the Lame tags - it was certainly gapless with later firmware.
The obvious answer is that sometimes you want to listen to the whole thing, and sometimes you want to access a specific track. There are plenty of mix albums, live albums, and 'concept albums' (not to mention Wagner-length operas and other extended classical stuff) where frequent gaps ruin the music, but encoding as a single (maybe hour-long!) track is massively inconvenient. The (discontinued) Rio Karma showed that it's technically possible to have continuous music from separate tracks in a portable player. Why can't the iPod (or most of its 'killers') do this?
Incidentally, the iPod is a particularly serious offender here, with bigger gaps than some of its competitors. See:
http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/
for an analysis (and why crossfading is no solution).
The references to Linux are largely recent Red Hat spin. Cygwin was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, who described their tools as 'ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows' that work by 'using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API':
a re.cygnus.com/cygwin/
. redhat.com/cygwin/
c ygwin.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/19990210095919/sourcew
When Red Hat acquired Cygwin they kept this description around for a while:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815200506/sources
but later removed the reference to GNU:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030205205726/http://
(ironic since 'Cygnus' was derived from 'CyGNUs')
and eventually dropped Unix in favour of Linux:
http://www.cygwin.com/
This is the sort of thing that justifiably annoys GNU supporters (and even others who don't normally subscribe to the whole 'GNU/Linux' thing). Cygwin has no more connection with Linux than BSD does (except that nowadays it's developed by a Linux distributor, so perhaps userland tools are compiled for both operating systems from similar source tree versions?).
'I still can't calculate any shielding plates which will be light enough for the rocket fuel mass of Apollo 13 (28,945 kg) and yet still protect 3 astronauts from the radiation belts around the earth.'
"The recent Fox TV show, which I saw, is an ingenious and entertaining assemblage of nonsense. The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense." - Dr. James Van Allen, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts.
Perhaps you should check your maths.
There's a prety good summary of the issue (with some strong arguments in favour of gapless playback) here:
http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/
Only a minority of albums are badly affected, but if you like certain genres of music (live recordings/mix albums/'concept albums'/classical) you might find a lot of your favourite stuff is seriously marred by gaps.
Perhaps the IP transfer means there's an outside chance that the Rio Karma's gapless technology might make it into the iPod...
"And if you trace it all back to its roots, we need God, the ultimate in control, and we need evolution, the ultimate in chaos. Some of you may disagree with one or the other of those assertions, but I don't think it's entirely an accident that Charles Darwin is entombed in a church."
- Larry Wall
http://www.wall.org/~larry/keynote/keynote.html
'The downside is that you have to repeat the procedure for every page.'
C TICA.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print
(though you lose the pictures).
One workaround for this article is to feed Google the printer-friendly link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17GALA
They probably licensed the Amazon 'One Click Order' patent.