Microsoft Predicted to Back Away from Vista - GigaOM

Just recently bought a tablet pc and I just want to slam it on the wall and rip it into pieces, the cause of my woes... Vista! It's slow as fuck... copying a single 700mb took forever, my media server (500mhz pentium II running ubuntu beat it!) It also drained the battery by doing system restore every couple of fucking minute! Had to turn it off as it was trashing the hard drive.

HP's wireless assistant is also crap, in fact HP installed so much crap on it, its annoying. My wife hated it, each time she'd restart or resume from sleep the damn thing can't find the wireless!!! The tablet I'm talking about by the way is the HP Pavilion TX1410US.

http://www.amazon.com/Pavilion-TX1410US-Laptop-Processor-Premium/dp/B0010S2P9A


This thing also runs hot, I should have probably sticked with my instinct and bought a Core2Duo laptop. In fact I'm gonna return the damn thing and get me a Core2Duo, AMD has been doing a lot of sucking lately. And its not light either, the touchscreen is annoying, it has some sort of matte that makes the screen wobble when you move from side to side.

The touchscreen is not so great, I have a wacom tablet and this thing is no wacom. I think I'll stick to my wacom for my graphic needs.

Vista = Crap piece of shit
HP TX1410US = 3 of 10 ( too fucking hot, literally will burn your lap)

Firefox 3 Beta 5

Firefox web browser | International versions: Get Firefox in your language

Firefox 3 Beta 5, is now out, but you should probably wait before updating to the newest release. Cause this one breaks a lot of plugins and not even the lifehacker hack can enable them. Adblock appears on the toolbar but is completely worthless, it DOES NOT work!!!

Fix it!!!!Fix it!!!! Fix it!!!! Fix it!!!! Fix it!!!! Fix it!!!! NOW!!!

Dumb thief gets caught by online community

1991 skyline gt-r-stolen! calgary, ab - cash reward*pics of criminals inside* - Beyond.ca - Car Forums

-New member regretfully posts that his car has been stolen by someone with a fake ID that took a permanent test drive. Describes vehicle and thief.
-Thief encounters another forum member at Chinook mall, member recognizes stolen vehicle as described in this post. Snaps pictures, posts on beyond. Even in a city of 1 million people, thief is spotted within hours due to internet exposure
-Thief is found on facebook using said pictures, recognized by multiple members
-Full name, address, and workplace is found via facebook
-Multiple forum members drive to known address at 2:30am, car is parked outside. Dude peeks out the window, sees posse, gets scared.
-Car disappears at some point.
-Another member drives by later, finds car. Boxes car in, calls cops, calls rightful owner
-Hilarity ensues
-Cops show up 2 hours later, pictures and youtube video posted of stolen car, and Dr. Claw the fail car thief getting arrested
-Car is now safe at home, back up for sale, with a new test drive policy. Bonus: Thief leaves $22 in change, and a shitty wanksta hat.

Link is passed around to virtually every forum worldwide within hours, checking in to show community support. Appears on front page of digg.com.



Dumb thief LOL serves you right motherfucker!

Creative sucks!!!

Message to Daniel_K - Sound Blaster - Creative Labs

Daniel_K: We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make. Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting. Phil O'Shaughnessy VP Corporate Communications Creative Labs Inc. Forum Moderator Creative Labs

Used to liked Creative, but I guess now I would be staying away from them and actually I would refrain from ever recommending their products ever again, to anyone!!! What's sad about this is that them admitting that they knew the devices would have worked on vista but decided not to make it work, but instead sell something that would make it work. But here is this guy who made it work for free, some are saying he shouldn't take donations, well fuck them, everyone has to eat!

Also some of the forum members suggested he get hired, but I bet creative already got the programmers who can make those drivers but were told not to make them as it would drive their customers to buy newer products, Creative can suck dick, never will buy their products again.

ImageHost Grabber

This nice and nifty firefox extension is perfect for leeching those image hosting sites.

ImageHost Grabber - ImageHost Grabber

What is ImageHost Grabber?
ImageHost Grabber is a firefox extension that will download all images on a page that are hosted on an image host. You find this often in web forums where people will use a free image host to post a gallery of pictures. This extension will allow you to download all the images on the current page.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Update on GD vs ImageMagick

I decided it wasn't fair for me to compare gd and imagemagick when I was calling imagemagick through exec( "convert image.jpg -thumbnail 100x TN_image.jpg" ) so I decided to install the extension for php called imagick.

This had to be installed to PECL, it didn't work on my ubuntu 7.10 by just doing apt-get install php5-imagick.

Nice examples of how to use imagick on Mikko's blog. I couldn't follow his examples though as the version that was installed through PECL didn't have some of the functions he used. Would have been nice to put shadows on my thumbnails though.

Anyways I made the script that creates thumbnails through imagick and compared it to the script in my gallery that uses GD. It seems GD was ahead by just a bit this time, although the quality of the imagick thumbnails were far superior, probably because I had set the GD functions to use less resolution.


GD TEST


From this example the images were really huge (3000x4500 pixels 1.5-2mb), the thumbnails rendered by GD seems pixelated compared to what imagick produced.

IMAGICK TEST


Imagick created 12 thumbnails with very nice quality but was 2 seconds slower than GD.

Powered by ScribeFire.

GD vs ImageMagick

Well I've seen some code in php.net about creating thumbnails fast, basically some guy wrote an alternative to imagecopyresampled and called it fastimagecopyresampled. I decided to see how fast it really is, so to compare I created a script that would create thumbnails from a bunch of images using ImageMagick.

And here are the results:

Using ImageMagick to generate 6 thumbnails from a gallery.



Now using GD to generate the same thumbnails, I deleted the old ones.



It is clear who the winner is, definitely GD.



References:
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecopyresampled.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imagick-thumbnailimage.php
http://valokuva.org/?paged=2

Powered by ScribeFire.