The Computer Thread

WATCH: Skype has launched an instant translator: "Earlier this year, we reported that Microsoft was creating a real-time translator that would allow people who speak different languages to have normal conversations across Skype.

Now, the company has launched the first preview of the app, which will initially translate calls between English and Spanish before expanding into other languages.

The Skype Translator Preview app works by either adding real-time subtitles to people's conversations, or actually playing an audio translation of the foreign language dialogue to the person on the other end."

BPG image format judged awesome versus JPEG: "If these three letters could talk, BPG, they would say something like "Farewell, JPEG." Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a new image format based on HEVC and supported by browsers with a small Javascript decoder. The format is intended to replace the JPEG image format when the file size or quality is an issue. BPG's advantages include a high compression ratio, whereby files are much smaller than JPEG for similar quality."

https://lwn.net/Articles/625535/

edited 17th Dec '14 5:21:58 PM by Sixthhokage1

Proving once again that which standards go and which stay is not determined by silly factors such as objective superiority or inferiority.

Also, considering how many computers still run Windows XP, I am not surprised that new formats for something as basic as pictures are not implemented on any sort of wide scale.

edited 17th Dec '14 9:06:12 PM by lazybanshee

It will never take off as long as its patented.

Isn't PNG.

It did.

PNG was actually created in response to it becoming known that GIF's compression algorithm, LZW, was patented.

Instant-start computers possible with new breakthrough: "If data could be encoded without current, it would require much less energy and make things like low-power, instant-on computing a ubiquitous reality. Scientists have made a breakthrough in that direction with a room-temperature magnetoelectric memory device. Equivalent to one computer bit, it exhibits the holy grail of next-generation nonvolatile memory: magnetic switchability, in two steps, with nothing but an electric field."

Newest computer neural networks can identify visual objects as well as the primate brain: "For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to design computer networks that can mimic visual skills such as recognizing objects, which the human brain does very accurately and quickly.

Until now, no computer model has been able to match the primate brain at visual object recognition during a brief glance. However, a new study from MIT neuroscientists has found that one of the latest generation of these so-called "deep neural networks" matches the primate brain.

Because these networks are based on neuroscientists' current understanding of how the brain performs object recognition, the success of the latest networks suggest that neuroscientists have a fairly accurate grasp of how object recognition works, says James DiCarlo, a professor of neuroscience and head of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the senior author of a paper describing the study in the Dec. 11 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology."

edited 18th Dec '14 9:24:07 PM by rmctagg09

Computers think these random patterns are real objects: "Computers are getting better and better at recognising objects - we’ve now taught them to distinguish individual faces, certain objects and even emotions. But how does the world look to a computer?

Researchers from the University of Wyoming and Cornell University in the US decided to test what differences remain between computer vision and human vision, and discovered that, unsurprisingly, technology sees the word very differently to us.

In order to work out how computers see, they worked with an image recognition algorithm called a deep neural network (DNN), which is capable of identifying objects in images with near-human precision."

It looks like, once again, I'm close to losing a pair of headphones to the cable getting twisted or tugged once too often.

In the interests of avoiding that again, can anyone recommend a good Bluetooth headset (or headphones, but I'd rather have a microphone as well)?

Budget?

£40-ish?

Check if you can find Plantronics in stock somewhere else. I checked scan.co.uk and the only one within your budget is out of stock. LOL

I'm hoping that I'll be able to stretch my budget a bit further in the post-Christmas sales.

New programming language automatically coordinates interactions between Web page components: "A Web page today is the result of a number of interacting components—like cascading style sheets, XML code, ad hoc database queries, and JavaScript functions. For all but the most rudimentary sites, keeping track of how these different elements interact, refer to each other, and pass data back and forth can be a time-consuming chore.

In a paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Adam Chlipala, the Douglas Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology, describes a new programming language, called Ur/Web, that lets developers write Web applications as self-contained programs. The language's compiler—the program that turns high-level instructions into machine-executable code—then automatically generates the corresponding XML code and style-sheet specifications and embeds the Java Script and database code in the right places.

In addition to making Web applications easier to write, Ur/Web also makes them more secure. 'Let's say you want to have a calendar widget on your Web page, and you're going to use a library that provides the calendar widget, and on the same page there's also an advertisement box that's based on code that's provided by the ad network,' Chlipala says. 'What you don't want is for the ad network to be able to change how the calendar works or the author of the calendar code to be able to interfere with delivering the ads.' Ur/Web automatically prohibits that kind of unauthorized access between page elements."

edited 24th Dec '14 12:31:18 AM by rmctagg09

Sounds like just another web application framework. Don't know why they'd bother writing an article about it.

I'm gonna try to drop my old graphics card into my new computer. I hope it goes well, my old computer didn't like it too much.

Hmm. Resolution is all off now. Should be 1440 by something but its 1280 by something. It's annoying

Did you update the drivers?

Yep, drivers solved the resolution problem just fine and it seems to have installed properly.

But I just got hit with some kind of something. It froze and showed nothing but lots of white and blue vertical lines and then the computer restarted itself. The error report says blue screen and I've never had that happen before.

I hope it's not the graphics card, that seems to be ok but with my luck I probably fucked something up.

It's running ok now though but then again it was running perfectly before.

Also startup time has increased a lot since I put the card in.

Just happened again. Something's fucky.

Error report says bluescreen, doesn't say anything about the card but this is way too much of coincidence.

Still running fine right now but to be honest I'm expecting another one soon. I'm trying to think what could have fucked me up before.

edited 27th Dec '14 12:32:47 PM by LeGarcon

I had a similar problem. New graphics card crashed constantly. Fortunately the driver usually managed to recover without bluescreening the system, but I eventually had to give up on the card and try a different one.

Well it hasn't crashed yet and still everything seems just fine. Nothing's out of place, drivers are up to date, card is running fine, everything looks good now. Maybe it was just a thing.

Just happened again. Vertical lines but the pattern was different.

Still no clue why it's happening. Error reports still don't mention the card and everything is working great. I was trying to open like 7 tabs at once both this time and one other time but that should do anything.

I was playing games and doing my normal things and it was working fine. I really can't think of anything that might be causing this. It boots up just fine and the card runs just fine too.

How much overhead do you have on your power supply?

A few years back I upgraded my graphics card and kept the old PSU and had somewhat similar issues. Start-up and basic use were fine but as soon as I did anything vaguely graphics intensive(read: open more than a single window, or try to play any game even Minesweeper) it'd draw more power and blue screen.

If that's the case with your system stop using it, or go back to the old card till you get a new PSU; feeding components less power than they need is one of the fastest ways to brick a computer as I learned the hard way.