10 Daily Things

Among the interesting sessions I've been to at WinHEC was one on something I'd never heard of before: Microsoft's Windows Media Photo file format. It is, basically, a counterpart to Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video for photo images. And Microsoft says it's dramatically better than JPEG, the current photo lingua franca, from a technical standpoint.

Judging from the demo this morning, that could be true. Windows Media Photo is designed to preserve more of a photo's information (such as dynamic range) than JPEG does, and to provide better-looking photos at a higher compression level. (Microsoft says that it'll still produce a reasonable-looking photo even at 25X compression.)

WMP also has various other technical advantages, such as allowing devices and software that support it to render a region of the image, or a lower-res version, without having to wrestle with the entire photo at full resolution. And it provides for both lossy and lossless compression with one algorithm.

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A potato battery out of 500 pounds of potatoes. It powered a small sound system.

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The official site for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany

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Last Friday, the Motley Fool had an interesting article that's getting some discussion about how Google is killing the internet. The argument is basically that Google killed its own golden goose of Adwords, with its introduction of Adsense contextual advertising for other sites. Once that began, so began a huge (and ever growing) industry of creating totally bogus sites whose only purpose is to run Adsense ads and collect money. Because of this, the author feels, the internet has become so cluttered with crap, that basic things like search are no longer particularly useful. That's a bit extreme, and while the article claims Google's overwhelming position atop the search leader boards makes it impossible to "self-correct" that seems unlikely. If advertisers feel they're getting bogus clicks, they're going to start to opt-out of buying ads on content sites. The real issue is that there still hasn't been a great competitor to Adsense. However, that may be changing.

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