Nov 10th, 2008 · The Windows 7 unveiling garnered largely positive coverage, with many hands-on testers praising it for being faster than Vista. But is it actually? To find out, this blogger ran a suite of benchmarks to see just how much quicker Windows 7 really is — …
Nov 9th, 2008 · After more than four years, a new MP3@128kbps listening test is finally open at HydrogenAudio.org! The featured encoders are: LAME 3.97, LAME 3.98.2, iTunes 8.0.1.11, Fraunhofer IIS mp3surround CL v1.5, and Helix v5.1 2005.08.09. The low anchor is l3enc …
Nov 4th, 2008 · The Xiph.Org Foundation announced Monday the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is a free/open source video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties. Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera will play natively …
Nov 4th, 2008 · Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is …
Oct 18th, 2008 · It's sometimes easy to forget that the PC graphics market isn't owned by ATI and Nvidia, and the company that first gave us 3D acceleration, S3, is very much still around. So much so, in fact, that it's now even developed its own GPGPU technology. S3 …
Oct 2nd, 2008 · arcticstoat writes with an excerpt from Custom PC: "After developing a brand new CPU architecture from the ground-up, you'd expect that Toshiba, Sony and IBM would have more uses for the Cell architecture than the PlayStation 3, and Toshiba has been quick …
Sep 17th, 2008 · JagsLive passes along the intelligence that New York has become the second state to issue drivers licenses with RFID tags (Washington was the first). The new "enhanced drivers licenses" cost $30 more than the old ones. They can be used instead of a passport …
Aug 19th, 2008 · I don't watch TV but keep an HTPC for watching movies. One of my relatives is very ill and I'll have a lot of family rotating through my apartment and I'd like to have a few more options for entertainment. I'm running Vista MCE and bought a Hauppauge …
Aug 10th, 2008 · Naturalist writes with an excerpt from a New York Times story about the need for a more secure method for identification than the password-based system almost everyone currently uses. The article also discusses the weaknesses of the OpenID initiative …
Jul 27th, 2008 · Recently YouTube seems to have started applying extreme compression to the audio of uploaded clips. This is the type of compressions used by radio stations to make everything louder, but in this case applied extremely badly. In quiet passages, breathing …
Jul 23rd, 2008 · After building my new Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC, I was ready to unleash video conversion activity the likes of which I had not seen before. However, I was disappointed to discover that a lot of the conversion tools either don't use SMP at all, or don't balance …
Jul 9th, 2008 · jamie found this blog post wherein an Australian Web technologist, Cameron Adams, wondered whether the handwriting of his favorite type designers encoded some sort of influence on their designs. So he wrote to them and asked for a sample. The result will …
May 21st, 2008 · The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along …
Apr 8th, 2008 · Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its …
Apr 2nd, 2008 · Steganography is a technique to encode secret messages in the background noise of an audio recording or photograph. There have been attempts at steganalysis in the past, but scientists at FH St. Pölten are developing strategies to block out secret …
Mar 11th, 2008 · The New York Times is reporting that book publishers are beginning to phase out DRM-protected audio books. This month the world's largest publisher, Random House, started offering DRM-free mp3s; Penguin has announced that it will follow suit. Their logic? …
Mar 10th, 2008 · The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was launched in March 1998 — the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded …
Dec 18th, 2007 · C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple's iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse …
Nov 1st, 2007 · People possess a remarkable ability for recalling pictures and researchers at Newcastle University are exploiting this characteristic to create graphical passwords that they say are a thousand times more secure than ordinary textual passwords. With Draw …
Sep 27th, 2007 · The first quantum computer chips have been made by two US groups, New Scientist reports. Both NIST and Yale have demonstrated chips where information was transferred between two superconducting qubits using a 'quantum bus'. The bus is made from a cavity …
