Tech Center Current

“I signed up for a 2mb Internet connection. Why can’t I ever download faster than 250 kb/s?”

Did you know 2 Mb is not the same amount of data as 2 MB? Did you know that a gigabyte can be a different size depending on who you’re talking to? Computer data units can be confusing, and there are lots of misconceptions out there. In this article, I explain the basics of computer data units and hopefully clear up the confusion.

It looks like Google is somehow involved in developing an online virtual world program called My World that will be available to Arizona State University students starting next month, and it’s likely to expand from there. There aren’t many details yet, but the source (Google Blogoscoped) is usually reliable. TechCrunch also has the story.

Google Docs is a free suite of online document collaboration tools, sort of like a simpler version of Microsoft Office with more focus on group editing and sharing. It previously offered text document and spreadsheet tools. Yesterday, Google added a new tool to the bunch: presentations.

OOXML, Microsoft’s new document format which I have written about here and here, appears to have failed to achieve the number of votes necessary for ISO standard fast-track approval. This means that additional review will be required before determining whether the OOXML specification should qualify as an ISO international standard.

Microsoft is attempting to get the International Standards Organization to fast-track the approval of its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format which it developed to compete with the already-established OpenDocument Format (ODF) ISO standard. The Linux Foundation has recently made an official statement urging ISO members to vote “no” on fast-track approval, citing numerous implementation problems and allegations that Microsoft is attempting to use its wealth and business connections to hijack the standardization process.

At the 2007 SIGGRAPH conference, an annual convention for computer graphics specialists to discuss new computer graphics techniques and applications, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories demonstrated an innovative new method for resizing the dimensions of images. The new method, called content-aware image resizing, preserves the size and visual quality of the more important regions of the image by sacrificing accuracy in the less important areas. It’s difficult to describe in words alone, so here is a video from the creators illustrating the impressive results:

Dave Gutteridge from the Tokyo Linux User Group speculates on why Linux, a free alternative to Windows, isn’t getting the attention from home users that a free MP3 player or a free car would receive, and he traces it to a general perception that Windows is also free.

Read the article: Windows Is Free

Several technology news sites have written about a recent survey from Netcraft which, at first glace, appears to show that Apache has suddenly lost a lot of market share in the webserver market. However, the change in numbers actually has more to do with how Google is reporting their server usage than people switching webservers.

If you’ve been closely following the world of software security, especially in relation to web browsers, you’ve probably heard about a recent URI handling problem found in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox which could allow a website to execute malicious code on your computer. There has been a lot of confusion about this issue, and even some major technology news sites have misunderstood the situation. I will attempt to clarify the issue here.

Picasa Web Albums is a free service from Google that allows you to upload and share photos, similar to the popular Flickr service. Although Picasa Web Albums’ interface is slick and visually appealing, it does have a few shortcomings to Flickr. One of the big ones is the fact that the PNG, GIF, and BMP image formats are not supported. However, I’ve discovered a solution