Human Factor - Technology News

BUYING an HDTV usually starts with research. You then may make a decision based on what it looks like in the store.

Take the set home and the picture may look slightly different. Some colors are brighter than others, and the contrast between dark and light colors is heightened.

Now you need to calibrate the TV. Photographers and graphic artists have been doing color calibrations for years on their monitors in order to ensure that colors on screen accurately match what will appear in print or on a Web site. But now, with more consumers owning high-definition TVs — where every pixel pops off the screen — calibration becomes more important than with the old cathode-ray tube TV.

The easiest way to do it is to ask the electronics store to adjust it for you. It may also be one of the most expensive options. Geek Squad, the service arm of Best Buy, charges about $300 for the in-home service. But other people may find satisfactory results either with software included on some DVDs or by buying a special disc that takes the viewer through calibration steps.

The manufacturers tweak red, green and blue settings a bit to make the colors pop. They intensify blue, causing red and green to overcompensate in the image. Some people may like that look. But it creates an HDTV that is not only too bright, but won’t give an accurate color representation of the leopard leaping from tree to tree on the National Geographic HD channel. You can also improve the image quality on your HDTV by reducing the amount of light that creeps into the room. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spring for “room darkening” drapes, which are far more expensive than a Geek Squad visit.

Ultrasuede curtains, for instance, keep daylight out and are fairly inexpensive. Another trick that movie theaters use: Paint the walls a dark color, like burgundy, so less light is reflected. Putting the TV at eye level and at a distance of about three times the screen’s diagonal measurement can help you see a better picture.

The Geek Squad certainly puts on a show for its $300. Upon arriving at a customer’s home in Wilton, N.Y., Stephen Rhoades, a Best Buy technician who works out of the store in Crossgates Mall in Albany, N.Y., put on Shubee shoe covers — the company doesn’t want to risk marring floors or carpets — and begins by analyzing the customer, not the TV.

“What are your hopes for this service?” and “What do you think of the quality of your current picture?” he asks. Mr. Rhoades, whose title is elite service specialist, tries to calibrate their expectations before he adjusts the TV.

The technician then attaches an “eye,” a small circular camera like gadget that measures minute display changes, to the screen. The device, called the ColorPro V Color Analyzer, measures the red, green and blue levels to see just how far off the HDTV’s color settings are from an ideal level. From there, the technician uses Geek Squad’s software on a notebook computer that is connected to the eye to adjust the levels.

The customer’s TV was well out of whack. Mr. Rhoades said the TV, a 46-inch Sony Bravia, was overcompensating with blue and was making green and red work harder to create the picture. The result was an HDTV that wasn’t reproducing an accurate image and was using up almost 50 percent more energy than usual.

Upon completion, the difference was noticeable. Instead of an extremely bright image, the display showed every worldly imperfection in precise detail.

The Geek Squad said that other calibration methods address only about one-fifth of the factors necessary for a good picture. But according to Gregg Loewen, president of Lion Audio Video Consultants, which does color calibrations, people may get by just fine with a do-it-yourself method.

“Calibrating a display and using instrumentation does visibly make an improvement and is better than a test disc,” he said. “But I don’t think that instrumentation is five times better than a DVD disc. In fact, a test DVD, when used properly, provides the best bang for the buck.”

To calibrate your HDTV on your own, you might look for the THX Optimizer, which is found in the setup menus of a number of DVDs, including “The Incredibles” and “Toy Story.” THX Optimizer movies come with a pair of cardboard Optimizer glasses with blue lenses to help you adjust color and tint settings.

You can also buy the glasses from THX’s Web site (www.thx.com) for $2. THX-certified DVDs can be found at many retailers for about $20.

The Optimizer takes the viewer through a series of tests to set contrast and color. For example, eight white boxes that range from pure white to gray are used to set black and white levels. If you can see all eight boxes just fine, you’re in luck and can move on. If not, you should reduce your contrast settings until you can.

To configure color and tint, you don the THX Optimizer glasses and try to balance the brightness of individual letters displayed on screen. When the blue C-L-R of COLOR are the same brightness as the two white O’s, it’s calibrated. The same is done with cyan and magenta in the word TINT.

Although the THX Optimizer is a fine calibration tool, it adjusts the HDTV for ideal viewing only in the room with the TV; if you move the TV, you may need to recalibrate.

A number of companies sell similar calibration software on DVD, most of which you can find in an electronics store. Monster sells the HDTV Calibration Wizard for about $30. Digital Video Essentials’ High Definition costs about $35. The Avia II does more of the same for $40.

You could also try to do what the professionals do, though that entails investing in some equipment that will be used infrequently. Datacolor sells a $229 calibration device called the SpyderTV. The color-monitoring device connects to your screen with the help of suction cups and transmits information from your screen to your computer through a U.S.B. cable to tell you how to adjust the contrast, brightness and color levels.

A professional using this kind of tool can get an even better picture by tweaking a hidden service menu in the TV set that must be unlocked by a combination of codes or remote button presses. (It varies from one manufacturer to another)

The service menu gives the technician — or the TV owner if you can uncover the codes — greater control over settings, like individual red, green and blue changes. The codes are not secret. You can find them by typing the name of the manufacturer and the words “service menu” into a Google search. But be warned: fiddling with the service menu without a diagnostic tool like SpyderTV is risky.

It could make that leopard on the nature program change its spots.

Microsoft on Thursday plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams.

The new service’s software technology, called Clearflow, was developed over the last five years by a group of artificial-intelligence researchers at the company’s Microsoft Research laboratories. It is an ambitious attempt to apply machine-learning techniques to the problem of traffic congestion. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets.

The Clearflow system will be freely available as part of the company’s Live.com site (maps.live.com) for 72 cities in the United States. Microsoft says it will give drivers alternative route information that is more accurate and attuned to current traffic patterns on both freeways and side streets.

A system for driving directions that Microsoft introduced last fall was limited, because without Clearflow there was no information available about traffic conditions on city streets adjacent to the highways. Because the system assumed that those routes would be clear, drivers were on occasion sent into areas that were more congested than the freeways.

The new service will on occasion plan routes that might not be intuitive to a driver. For example, in some cases Clearflow will compute that a trip will be faster if a driver stays on a crowded highway, rather than taking a detour, because side streets are even more backed up by cars that have fled the original traffic jam.

The new service is part of Microsoft’s efforts to catch up with Google, the dominant search engine provider, by offering an attractive array of related services surrounding its Live search service.

Traffic updates have recently become a standard feature offered by the major Web portals as well as a number of specialized services that send the information to cars or to smartphones and other portable devices.

Greg Sterling, an Internet analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco, said there was consumer demand for traffic information, especially among mobile users. The challenge, he said, will be to demonstrate the improvement the company is claiming.

“This is a sophisticated layer of technology that will not be easily understood by the average person,” he said.

The project began in 2003 when Eric Horvitz, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Microsoft, found himself stuck on the freeway while looking for a new restaurant in Seattle. Thinking that he might avoid the traffic jam, he instructed the navigation device in his car to route him via side streets. The result was a nightmare.

“It was awful,” he said. “Everything seemed to be backed up.”

That set Mr. Horvitz, who is the current president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, to pondering the problem.

“It hit me that we had to do all the side streets,” he said. “We really needed to understand the whole city.”

The Microsoft researchers began trying to do just that by building software algorithms that modeled traffic behavior and collecting trip data from Microsoft employees who volunteered to carry G.P.S. units in their cars.

In the end they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data and 16,500 discrete trips covering over 125,000 miles. The system effectively created individual “personalities” for over 819,000 road segments in the Seattle region.

After creating the Clearflow simulation for Seattle, the Microsoft researchers were able to transfer the model by using the algorithms they had developed and then applying them to other cities. The city models are combined with live traffic data generated by networks of highway sensors to create about 60 million road segments, allowing the system to predict congestion based on time of day, weather and other variables like sporting events.

“I consider this to be the moon mission of our machine-learning research,” Mr. Horvitz said. “I’m still buzzing with the glow that this is actually possible.”

Positioning the social network as a breeding ground for television series, MySpace has signed a deal with a British-based production firm, ShineReveille International, to distribute its video content overseas.
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If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you’ll get an “out of office” reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone — “GMT +9” or “GMT -8” — so that when you do call, you may do so at a courteous hour.
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Windows XP refuses to die. When Vista was released last year, some users disliked it so much they loaded XP onto their new, Vista-loaded PCs. Microsoft had planned to stop selling XP to manufacturers this year, but now it appears the OS will live on in low-cost computers.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft has again decided to let Windows XP operating system (OS) live a little longer.

This time, the software maker has given the OS a reprieve in order to sell preloaded versions of Windows XP Home Edition in ultra-low cost PCs.

A relatively new and increasingly popular class of mobile computers, ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPCs) offer first-time PC buyers and consumers interested in a second or third PC at home an inexpensive, low-power alternative to standard PCs.

Microsoft’s decision was prompted by feedback received from consumers and the company’s manufacturing partners, according to Michael Dix, general manager of Windows Client Product Management.

“One thing we’ve heard loud and clear, from both our customers and our partners, is the desire for Windows on this new class of devices,” he said.
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As Microsoft adds new features and complexities to each new version of Windows it creates, the operating system becomes more at risk of collapsing under its own weight, according to two Gartner researchers. The OS has become so big that many low-priced, basic PCs, even if they’re brand-new, can’t run it well. To solve the problem into the future, Microsoft may need to go back to basics.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft Windows is collapsing under its own weight and must radically change for the sake of users, independent software vendors and Microsoft itself, according to research firm Gartner (NYSE: IT) Latest News about Gartner.

Because Microsoft Windows is so large and complex, covering 20 years of legacy code, it can no longer adequately respond to market forces, and Windows needs to be securely redesigned, said Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. They delivered the news at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas this week.

“It takes Microsoft too long to introduce new versions of Windows, and once a new version is released, it takes significant time for the ecosystem to support it and for the release to stabilize,” the pair reported. “Organizations need to wait for that support and stability and then deal with the enormous task of deployment and management for increasingly nebulous benefits. For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable.”
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Just as the ways in which we use the Internet are evolving, so are the threats to the security of our identities, Jim Bidzos, founder and chairman of trusted certificates vendor VeriSign, told attendees at the RSA Security Conference.

The face of online security Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. will change drastically, Jim Bidzos, founder and chairman of trusted certificates vendor VeriSign (Nasdaq: VRSN) Latest News about VeriSign, said in a keynote speech on Wednesday at the RSA Security (Nasdaq: RSAS) Latest News about RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

“In the ’70s in enterprises, there were mainly mainframes. The Internet, due to good work by Al Gore, who will be speaking later, was then just beginning,” he said. When local area networks came along in the ’80s, tokens were introduced and “they were good enough for this kind of access,” Bidzos said.

Over time, as the Internet developed, however, the face of security changed, with public key encryption, intrusion detection and firewall technology being developed. Again, those were good enough for the times. “It’s like your credit cards; despite the amount of credit card fraud occurring, the security is good enough to keep losses through fraud to an acceptable level,” he said.

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Though her attackers never posted the video to YouTube or MySpace, the fact that they planned to was enough for the parents of a Florida girl beaten in a videotaped attack to say the social-networking sites have “gone too far.” The case highlights technology’s effect on youths’ perceptions of violence.

For the eight Florida teens accused of imprisoning, beating and videotaping 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay as they brutalized her for more than half an hour, the events of March 30 have led to kidnapping and battery charges that cast a dark shadow over their future.

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Amazing trailer,

Brawl, a cartoon fighting game for the Nintendo Wii.

As with the previous games in this popular series — 1999’s Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 and 2001’s Super Smash Bros. Melee on the Nintendo GameCube — this new Wii brawler lets you duke it out with and against popular Nintendo mascots such as Mario, Link, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, Bowser, Wario and Zero Suit Samus, each with their own unique moves, abilities and special power attacks.

But the latest version — which sold more than 1.4 million units in the U.S. in the first week after its launch March 9 — also lets you fight against characters from other popular video games including Solid Snake from Konami’s Metal Gear Solid and Sonic from Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as other Nintendo favorites such as Ike (from Fire Emblem ), Wolf (from Star Fox ), Diddy Kong (from Donkey Kong Country ) and Meta Knight (from the Kirby games).

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