3/16/10 - Objective: Design a 60 card, no sideboard, deck centered around 4 copies of Ruin Ghost. The deck type doesn't matter. What matters is that you make this the coolest deck possible while following the rules of the contest. Think originality, cool combos, casual perspective. Alternative formats are OK. No sideboards. Deadline: Your deck must be posted in this thread with all of the requirements filled by the end of the day on 3/31/10(that's a Wednesday). You may edit your entry up until that point. ~Streetz~ Enter here. Discuss here. P.S. Omegaprime9774 will be judging this time around!

[Image source: Shoryuken]
Based on some leaked shots of a supposed Super Street Fighter IV theme coming to the Xbox 360 (spotted by Shoryuken), Capcom's cast of brawlers are getting some fresh threads. In the case of Dee Jay above, it looks like he's getting a time machine back to the early '90s when those pants were still cool. But, we digress.

These costumes look all well and good, but what about newcomer Hakan? How do you clothe a man perpetually covered in baby oil?

[Via Kotaku]

Rumor: Super Street Fighter IV cast getting new costumes originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[Image source: Shoryuken]
Based on some leaked shots of a supposed Super Street Fighter IV theme coming to the Xbox 360 (spotted by Shoryuken), Capcom's cast of brawlers are getting some fresh threads. In the case of Dee Jay above, it looks like he's getting a time machine back to the early '90s when those pants were still cool. But, we digress.

These costumes look all well and good, but what about newcomer Hakan? How do you clothe a man perpetually covered in baby oil?

[Via Kotaku]

Rumor: Super Street Fighter IV cast getting new costumes originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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KIEVBASS @ SUB.fm Weds 12-02 pm (UK) archive rolling thread [104MB, 64 kbps]

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The moment I knew I was in love with Myth of the American Sleepover was a scene in which a recently dumped college senior (Scott, played by Brett Jacobsen) confesses feelings for a pair of twins he went to high school with. The twins (Nikita and Jade Ramsey) humor him with an ultimatum that I won't give away here, but there are so many little things going on in the scene that feel complicated, funny, and true. Scott's confession doesn't lack honesty, but it's motivated by the specific pains of being on the rebound -- the immediate need to feel a personal, intimate connection to someone else, no matter how ill-advised. His desire to be with both of the girls as a single unit is a Playboy magazine fantasy, and when the girls call him out on it, he faces the situation as honestly as he possibly can. Everyone has looked back at their past, not just at The One Who Got Away, something dozens of comedies and romantic dramas have covered, but at the one that Might've Been.

With the Might've Beens, we attach romantic daydreams to the people who pass in and out of our lives. Their fleeting nature doesn't make those minor attractions untrue, and they're rarely explored on film because of how difficult they are to express. They're something more than sexual desire, but something less than an honest-to-goodness crush. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell absolutely nails it here, just one true moment in a film filled with true moments. Myth of the American Sleepover may be cut from the same ensemble youth culture cloth as American Graffitti and Dazed and Confused, but there's more of a romantic thread that runs through this film than those.

Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Romance, SXSW, Theatrical Reviews

Continue reading SXSW Review: Myth of the American Sleepover

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On s'en doutait depuis plusieurs jours, c'est désormais officiel : Internet Explorer 9 est bien avancé du côté de Microsoft et plein de bonnes intentions, avec un lot de nouveautés qui ne nous laisseront pas indifférents. Lors de la conférence MIX 2010, la Platform Preview a été dévoilée, téléchargeable et accompagnée de démonstrations technologiques sur un mini-site dédié pour l'occasion : IE9 Platform Demos. Cette présentation suit 3 axes :

• La vitesse d'exécution (JavaScript)
• Le support HTML5, CSS3 et DOM
• L'accélération graphique et le début de support de SVG

Ainsi IE se rapproche de plus en plus des standards. On retrouve le support des sélecteurs CSS3, avec les composantes Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds, Borders et Polices.

On notera donc plus prosaïquement la fameuse présence de border-radius, des couleurs RGBA, d'opacity ainsi que des pseudo-classes :target, :enabled, :disabled, :checked, et :not(). Le test Acid3 affiche un score de 55/100 avec des promesses d'améliorations d'ici la sortie finale, bien que ce test ne soit pas toujours significatif ni une mesure exacte de ce que l'on peut attendre des technologies à supporter.

Le support HTML5 est engagé, bien que la spécification soit encore à l'état de brouillon et puisse évoluer. Il en va de même pour SVG de niveau Basic, langage XML de dessin vectoriel déjà supporté par les autres navigateurs modernes. Le DOM n'est pas oublié et bénéficie de perfectionnements significatifs en Level 2 (Range, Views, Core, Style, HTML) et Level 3 (Events).

Les performances du navigateur, qui dans le cas d'IE ont longtemps été à la traîne, n'ont pas été négligées. Microsoft annonce vouloir mettre à contribution le matériel et notamment l'accélération graphique (du GPU) via Direct2D pour tirer un meilleur parti des futures applications web HTML5. Ces accélérations matérielles (et c'est une nouveauté) sont aussi exploitées pour SVG.

Un nouveau moteur de script nommé Chakra fait son apparition. Ce dernier compile le code JavaScript en tâche de fond, et va jusqu'à exploiter les processeurs à plusieurs cÅ“urs pour répartir la charge en parallèle de l'exécution principale d'IE, dans un autre thread. D'après les résultats du benchmark Sunspider fournis par Microsoft, le navigateur joue désormais dans la même cour que Safari, Chrome et Opera, en parvenant même à faire mieux que Firefox 3.6 :

Vous pouvez télécharger IE9 Platform Preview (Windows Vista SP2 est requis au minimum). Celui-ci sera mis à jour toutes les 8 semaines environ jusqu'à la version finale car Microsoft espère une collaboration plus rapprochée des développeurs. C'est un changement dans le processus de développement et une ouverture que nous ne pouvons que saluer.

Plusieurs modes de rendu du document sont embarqués dans cette preview, respectivement IE5, IE7, IE8, et le petit dernier IE9, accessibles depuis le menu Debug, Document Mode et toujours manipulables avec l'instruction <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9">.

Un nouvel outil fait son apparition, en plus des Outils pour développeurs déjà accessibles via F12. Il s'agit d'un outil de monitoring réseau / HTTP permettant de capturer le trafic et de détailler son contenu avec précision.

On peut donc en conclure d'après cette annonce que Microsoft a saisi l'enjeu du support des standards, et de l'amélioration des performances. IEBlog fait mention à plusieurs reprises d'une volonté de conformité rigoureuse aux standards et d'une prise en compte plus importante des retours des développeurs web. Il ne faut pas oublier que ces critères se sont imposés à Microsoft, après une longue période de léthargie qui a permis aux navigateurs alternatifs la conquête progressive et victorieuse d'une grande part du marché. L'accent est mis sur le support des accélérations matérielles via le système d'exploitation (Windows), qui sera probablement un nouveau terrain de bataille pour Firefox, Opera, Safari et Chrome qui doivent quant à eux supporter des OS différents.

Consultez également :

• Release Notes Windows Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview
• Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide for Developers

Image courtesy Photobucket user morganeth.

You know, as long as human beings have been squinting and poking at the tiny eyes of sewing needles, it's pretty amazing that it's taken so long for some clever inventor to address the problem. These spiral eye sewing needles are available direct from their inventor, Pam Turner of Minnesota. I've never used one, but the user feedback I hear echoing through the tubes is uniformly positive. [via Boing and a Boing]

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Intel a ce matin annoncé sa nouvelle gamme de Xeon, les processeurs équipant les Mac Pro. Avec un cache de 12 Mo contre 8 actuellement, et jusqu'à 6 cœurs et 12 threads (simulation de 12 cœurs), ils intégreront sans aucun doute la prochaine version des tours professionnelles d'Apple.



Les séries X devraient avoir la faveur de Cupertino, avec probablement l'utilisation de deux modèles dans les configurations de base. L'un serait probablement très puissant pour l'entrée de gamme, comme le X5670, et si Apple maintient sa stratégie actuelle, l'autre logiquement un peu moins rapide mais présent en deux exemplaires, comme le X5660. Wait and see...

Orbino has unveiled its new Padova Case for the Apple iPad. This form-fitting flip-style case is hand-stitched with waxed thread and constructed from fine leather and exotic animal skins. Features include a brushed metal Home button cover, a protective front cover with magnetic closure that flips open to serve as a vertical or horizontal stand, cutouts for the volume buttons, screen rotation lock switch, speakers, and headphone jack, and compatibility...

Le DNS dynamique (DDNS) [1] c'est ce qu'on retrouve sur Internet avec des services comme dyndns.org ou no-ip.org. Ça permet de fixer un nom à une adresses toujours changeante.

Lorsqu'on est en entreprise, l'on a un serveur DHCP qui distribue des adresses IP et l'on aimerait bien fixer ces adresses à des noms permanents (genre ordi00.ordinateurs.example.com). Il existe la solution traditionnelle pour les utilisateurs de Bind et ISC DHCPD, mais pas pour les utilisateurs de l'excellent ldapdns [2].

C'est pourquoi j'ai écrit, il y a deux ans, un petit script Perl qui faisait toute la magie nécessaire à la création d'un DDNS pour ldapdns. Il est resté dans les entrailles des serveurs durant longtemps (tout bugué, les entrées étaient toujours fausses, mais c'était déjà pas mal).

Dernièrement, pour satisfaire Nagios, il a fallu attaquer le problème encore une fois avec la ferme intention d'en venir à bout. J'ai donc longuement médité et en cherchant, j'ai trouvé une RFC qui décrivait le chaînon manquant de l'ensemble : pouvoir mettre une durée de vie à une entrée LDAP. Il s'agit de la RFC 2589 [3].

Ma joie fut encore plus grande quand je découvris l'overlay DDS de openLDAP qui implémente justement cette fonctionnalité [4].

Pour arriver à mes fins, j'ai dû :
- Écrire une extension pour Perl-LDAP [5]
- Corriger un bug d'openLDAP (existant de la version 2.14 jusqu'à la version CVS) [6]
- Modifier mon script [7] pour utiliser cette fonctionnalité

Finalement l'ajout de cette fonctionnalité à mon script est devenu une réécriture de la majorité du script.
Pour la documentation, c'est sur mon wiki [8].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddns
[2] http://www.nimh.org/code/ldapdns/
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2589
[4] http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/overlays.html#Dynamic%20(...)
[5] http://markmail.org/thread/tay3nyjeixor6xyu
[6] http://www.openldap.org/its/index.cgi/Incoming?id=6490
[7] http://www.tchetch.net/code/perl/ldap_ddns.pl.txt
[8] http://www.tchetch.net/wiki/ldap/ddns

There was lots of press coverage about the FCC's broadband plan on Monday, as the commission released an exec summary of its nearly 400-page plan for broadband in the US. If you want to wade through the details, it's all there online for you. But, if you want a basic summary, it appears that, like pretty much everything this FCC is doing, it's a lot of talk and little of consequence. So far, I've seen statements from lobbyists on pretty much all sides of the issues "commending" or "applauding" or "supporting" the FCC. And that's because there's basically nothing controversial and nothing big at all in the plan. It appears to try to thread the needle and keep everyone happy -- and in doing so, it appears to punt on the all-important questions. If it was really about making the necessary changes, key players would be up in arms. But they're not.

The report pays lip service to greater competition and talks about getting better data and about making better use of wireless spectrum. Well, duh. But it takes no bold steps -- does nothing to really take control out of the hands of the incumbent telco providers -- just as we originally expected, even if really disruptive, but necessary, ideas were considered, they don't appear in the final plan.

In the end, it's the kind of plan you put forward if you're being political and don't want to make waves. It's not the plan you put forward if you're making a bold leadership statement about how to really expand broadband in this country. Too bad.

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Le 11 mars Google a libéré le code source d'une bibliothèque d'expressions rationnelles appelée RE2.
RE2 a été faite pour répondre aux besoins de Google, elle est optimisée pour la rapidité, a une empreinte mémoire réduite, gère les threads et propose une alternative aux méthodes utilisées jusqu'à présent.

Cet article revisite brièvement l'histoire des expressions rationnelles, puis le problème posé par les références arrières et, enfin, l'apport de RE2 par rapport aux implémentations existantes.


lien 1 : L'annonce de Google
lien 2 : Les explications de l'auteur
lien 3 : Le code source de la librairie RE2
(...)

Intel has launched its next-generation Xeon 5600 line, the 32nm "Westmere-EP." The new lineup brings more cores, more threads, Turbo Boost, and more instructions, all in the same socket format and thermal/power envelope as the older Xeon 5500 line.

At the top end of the 5600 family is the six-core, 3.33GHz X5680, and at the bottom end is the quad-core, 2.40GHz E5620. All of the parts in the 5600 range are hyperthreaded, have 12MB of cache, and support Intel Turbo Boost, the AES new instructions (AES-NI), and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Let's take each of these features in turn.

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Efax-gtk provides a GUI frontend for the efax fax program.

About this version
Fix regression in 3.0.19 which causes incorrect fault handling if efax-gtk is given an invalid postscript file (efax_controller.h and efax_controller.cpp).

Provide new Emitter/EmitterArg and SafeEmitter/SafeEmitterArg classes for thread-safe signalling (utils/emitter.h, utils/callback.h and utils/mutex.h).

Provide a Callback::post() function which provides for thread-safe disconnection of a callback if the object whose method it encapsulates has been destroyed (utils/callback.h and utils/callback.cpp)

http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/f39...rger-97194.html

Quick reminder, contest for the Gomadic 2-in-1 Charger ends this Friday. You can check out the details and the thread here. DO NOT reply to this posting as your entry won't count unless it is to the original contest thread. Thanks!

http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/f39...rger-97194.html

Quick reminder, contest for the Gomadic 2-in-1 Charger ends this Friday. You can check out the details and the thread here. DO NOT reply to this posting as your entry won't count unless it is to the original contest thread. Thanks!

In KDD '09: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2009), pp. 199-208.

Influence maximization is the problem of finding a small subset of nodes (seed nodes) in a social network that could maximize the spread of influence. In this paper, we study the efficient influence maximization from two complementary directions. One is to improve the original greedy algorithm of [5] and its improvement [7] to further reduce its running time, and the second is to propose new degree discount heuristics that improves influence spread. We evaluate our algorithms by experiments on two large academic collaboration graphs obtained from the online archival database arXiv.org. Our experimental results show that (a) our improved greedy algorithm achieves better running time comparing with the improvement of [7] with matching influence spread, (b) our degree discount heuristics achieve much better influence spread than classic degree and centrality-based heuristics, and when tuned for a specific influence cascade model, it achieves almost matching influence thread with the greedy algorithm, and more importantly (c) the degree discount heuristics run only in milliseconds while even the improved greedy algorithms run in hours in our experiment graphs with a few tens of thousands of nodes.
Wei Chen, Yajun Wang, Siyu Yang

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Zune -- along with Expression Blend, Silverlight, Visual Studio and XNA -- may yet save Windows Phone 7 Series. During the kick-off MIX10 keynote earlier today, Microsoft product managers showcased features, development scenarios and, most importantly, user experiences derived from Zune HD. Perhaps Windows Phone 7 Series isn't a hopelessly lost cause after all. Microsoft's competitive postion would actually look good, if phones were shipping now and not in six to eight months.

In September, I asserted that Zune HD should have been the Microsoft phone. The user interface and user experience (some of that derived from Zune 4.0 software) is exceptionally good -- particularly coming from Microsoft. Finally, Microsoft is carrying forward and extending a great user interface motif. Better: Windows Phone 7 Series is inheriting and extending the social sharing concepts imbued into Zune 1.0.

Microsoft launched Zune 1.0 in November 2006 with marketing tagline "Welcome to my social." Zune distinguished from iPod by making music a more social and sharing experience. It was a visionary approach for the time -- sadly held back by Microsoft's limited commitment (Zune distribution in United States only) and iPod's huge market share lead.

But social as executed by Microsoft was truly visionary in 2006. Many of the most popular social media/networking tools taken for granted today originated in 2006 or later. YouTube officially opened in November 2005. Facebook opened to the public in 2006 and Twitter a few months later. Most of the most popular or growing popular tools for community and self expression launched within the last three years: Disqus, FriendFeed, tumblr, Twine, Qik and USTREAM, among many, many others.

Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Program Management

What differentiates Windows Phone 7 Series from iPhone is the same thing that made Zune so different from iPod: Social sharing. Sure, there are other mobile phone social sharing alternatives available, like Motorola's MotoBlur user interface for Android phones.

Windows Phone 7 Series as social hub

But Microsoft is making social a platform that runs deep into Windows Phone 7 Series. I've repeatedly asserted that the smartphone will replace the PC as primary computing device. As the social hub for all communications, the smartphone already has replaced the PC for many people.

Shazam detects music and provides tools for social sharing

That's communications within limitations. It's one thing to use Facebook on a mobile phone. It's a whole other order of experience interacting around disparate content repositories, which is the differentiating direction Microsoft is taking Windows Phone 7 Series -- and it's a path Apple has failed to follow with iPhone.

Netflix app streams movies to Windows Phone 7 Series

Social is Apple's achilles heal, because it's not in the company's corporate DNA. Apple has historically only allowed social sharing where it has some control. The company has a deserved reputation for deleting negative forum threads, going back years. Try to comment on Apple's YouTube channel. Comments are disabled.

Every aspect of the Windows Phone 7 Series UI reminds of Zune HD

Then there are iPhone limitations to consider, such as truncated multitasking and (related) the fixed battery and battery life. Apple's idea of social interaction is the push notification. It's a weak compromise that Microsoft seems ready enough to exploit (granted, Windows Phone 7 Series has push notifications, too).

Comics in this app can be dynamically and quickly resized

By comparison, "Welcome to my social" is a platform on Windows Phone 7 Series. Social sharing and interaction are seemingly available from pretty much anywhere, including third-party applications.

This Associated Press app packs real-time social sharing features

I'm still not overly optimistic about Windows Phone 7 Series because Microsoft is restarting so late and from so far behind. That said, there's hope if Microsoft is willing to commit as much marketing -- and really loads more -- as Bing. What I saw today is encouraging. Finally.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

This morning got off to a roaring start, as a fast-filling thread plopped onto maemo.org seemed to have it from an authoritative source that there will not be a version of MeeGo to run on Nokia’s N900.  The fear, uncertainty and doubt spread like wildfire, naturally igniting the ideal 140-character vehicle for misunderstandings, Twitter.

It became obvious to me that the root problem was a misunderstanding by a Cnet Asia blogger that in was picked up by speed-readers and blown up into a noisy tornado of nonsense.

I’ll break this down for those interested.

Headlines as weapons

The title of the article was Nokia N900 not upgradeable to MeeGo, which sure seems definitive.  One could assume the writer had done his homework.

The offending quote

But then we start reading and realize the writer was tripped up by semantics of the quote, which by the way was unattributed.  The wording was “Maemo on Nokia N900 is not upgradeable to MeeGo. The first MeeGo device is targeted to be released during the second half of 2010. However, applications written for Moblin or Maemo Qt APIs will run on MeeGo.”

The first sentence is key.  To the speed-reader it appears to say the N900 will not be upgradeable to MeeGo.  But what it actually indicates is that the Maemo operating system itself will not be directly upgradeable to MeeGo on the device.  Take “on Nokia N900″ out of the sentence and it becomes very clear.

The safe assumption here is that any version of MeeGo designed for the N900 would need to be installed fresh, overwriting the original Maemo OS and very likely every user setting as well.  Odds are that means backups won’t work and applications will have to be reinstalled (Qt apps should work on either OS).

What Nokia has said

The true definitive word here comes from Valtteri Halla, director of Nokia MeeGo and a member of MeeGo’s Technical Steering Group.  His quote in this regard:

N900 is a natural tool for Nokia to drive MeeGo support for our designs and for the ARM CPU architecture in general. We want to have baseline HW that is powerful, easily available for anyone and form-factor stuff so that one HW works for most platform and application development needs.

That said, please do not take this yet as a commitment to fully productise MeeGo on N900. I am quite confident that we will end up having a really good developer distro for N900 already but committing to stabilise a consumer-grade MeeGo 1.0 (first half this year) for N900 is another story. That is a product business decision beyond my scope. Also, we do not yet know about MeeGo 1 release content. I am not yet sure if I would be personally ready to let my Maemo5 go for the first MeeGo release in my daily N900 use. Let’s see

Conclusion

So the plan is to create a developer distribution of MeeGo for the N900.  At a minimum this makes sense given that the N900 is the reference platform.  Note that as of this writing there is no released official statement on a commercial build for the N900, one way or another.

To try and prevent or at least minimize future FUD, I have updated the maemo.org wiki with a summary of the contents here.

Ultimately I blame blogger Damian Koh for not doing his homework before posting so irresponsibly.  It looks like he was so eager to get this juicy quote onto the internet he didn’t actually consider what it meant.  And I have to confess to getting testy on Twitter when attempts to clarify were met with resistance.  No excuse for that, and no excuse for the original sin.

There’s already enough uncertainty swarming around the N900, Maemo and MeeGo… let’s all avoid feeding it, okay?

Filed under: Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Write Stuff, Unusability Tagged: FUD, LinkedIn, Maemo, maemo.org, MeeGo, N900, twitter 0 0