arully’s thought

A new codec that can compress 700MB video to 50MB. News is here:

Firm squeezes films into a download – The Boston Globe A Concord company called Euclid Discoveries says it has invented a video-compression technology that could spawn a lucrative new market for Hollywood or a major new crisis.

EuclidVision uses ”object-based compression,” which identifies individual objects shown in a video, then calculates the optimum level of compression for each of them. The current generation of EuclidVision is designed for videoconferencing over telephone lines with limited bandwidth. Euclid Discoveries says its scientists compressed a 25-megabyte conference video to just over 8,000 bytes using MPEG-4, but EuclidVision did four times better, shrinking the file to about 1,800 bytes.

Euclid Discoveries says a full-length movie that requires 700 megabytes of storage when compressed using MPEG-4 would use just 50 megabytes when compressed with EuclidVision. At that size, 14 movies could fit on a standard CD-ROM disk. As for video downloading, it would take an hour for someone with a 1.5 megabit-per-second broadband connection to download a 700-megabyte file. But 50 megabytes would take less than five minutes.

in another news: 50MB Movie Downloads · TorrentFreak, torrents and more

and video about Henry vs. C.Ronaldo vs. Ronaldinho

Dam completion washes away old China – Sunday Times – Times Online

THREE GORGES DAM World’s largest hydropower project

* Will produce 84.7 billion kilowatts a year in 2008
* Dam is 3,035 metres long and 185 metres high. Has 26 turbines capable of generating 700,000kw each
* By 2008 will supply electricity to 28 cities
* Dam creates 'golden' shipping route to centre of the country
* Has world's largest five-stage ship locks to lift vessels up to 10,000 tons
* Chinese government puts costs at 200 billion yuan (£14 billion) but analysts believe true sum is much higher

After Abu Graib, now a new massacred. How can someone trust a US military and intelligence report? They used to hide with collateral damage reasoning. But this time they can not use that kind of reasoning, although already tried it. It looks like they are the similar institutions with those who killed innocent people in 911.

Revealed: how US marines massacred 24 – Sunday Times – Times Online

PHOTOGRAPHS taken by American military intelligence have provided crucial evidence that up to 24 Iraqis were massacred by marines in Haditha, an insurgent stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates.
One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer. They have been shot dead at close range. The stain on the American military could prove harder to erase than the photographs of sadistic prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Comparisons are being made to the My Lai massacre in 1968 in Vietnam, in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers.

Miguel Terrazas, 20, a lance-corporal from El Paso, Texas, was travelling in a convoy of four Humvees in Haditha just after 7am on November 19 last year when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle, killing him and wounding two others.
The events that followed are the subject of two military inquiries due to report soon: one into the facts, the other into a cover-up.
One witness, Aws Fahmi, heard his neighbour, Yunis Salim Khafif, plead for his life in English, shouting: “I am a friend, I am good.”
“But they killed him, his wife and daughters,” Fahmi said.
The Sunday Times has reconstructed the events with the help of Abdul Rahman al-Mashandani, of the Hammourabi human rights group in Iraq. It appears the first killings took place when a taxi carrying four students pulled up at a checkpoint set up by the marines.
Hassan’s granddaughter, Iman Waleed, 10, was in her nightclothes. “About 10 marines entered the house,” she said. “They threw hand grenades and began firing in all directions. Grandpa was sitting close to the hall and they shot him dead.”
In a nearby room, her father was reading the Koran. “The American soldiers went into the room and killed him too,” Iman said. “They gathered all of us into one room — my grandma, my mama, my brothers and my uncles. They threw in two handgrenades and started shooting at us.”
The adults tried to protect the children with their bodies, but were slain. When Iman dared to look, she saw that “everyone was dead around me except for my brother and my uncle”.
Both were injured and Iman was hurt in the leg. The rest of the family, including her brother, Abdullah, 4, died.
Iman fled next-door, where her other grandfather Yunis lived, only to find everybody there appeared to have been killed too. There was in fact one survivor, Safa Yunis Salim, 12.
“My daddy tried to open the door to let the Americans in, but he was immediately shot in the head and body,” Safa said.
“I managed to hide under the body of my brother Mohammed. His blood covered me and protected me as I pretended to be dead.” They also killed her four sisters including Aysha, 4, and Zainab, 2.
Five hours passed before Safa managed to escape. “I was the only one who survived. I watched them kill my entire family. I am all alone now,” she said, crying.
When the marines stormed the third house they changed tactics. The men were separated from the women and stuffed into a large cupboard, according to Yussef Ayed Ahmad, the brother of the dead men, who lived next-door.

The marines paid $2,500 (£1,350) in compensation for each of the 15 victims who were shot in their homes. They refused to pay for the four brothers and five occupants of the taxi, claiming they were insurgents. Officials now say those men were innocent.
President George W Bush said last week that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was one of his greatest regrets about the Iraq war. If the photographs from Haditha surface, they could provide a set of images that would be every bit as shocking.

Di masa mendatang, Data Mining akan menjadi topik penelitian yg menarik. Selama ini banyak di terapkan pada dunia mata2/intelejen, tetapi semakin hari, seiring dengan kecenderungan industri atau teknologi militer yg juga di terapkan di dunia sipil, teknologi seperti Data Mining pun mulai banyak diterapkan di dunia bisnis. Berita dan link di bawah menarik untuk di cermati, khususnya para peneliti yg bergiat di bidang pengolahan data.

Will Data Mining Help NSA?, Some Experts Are Skeptical That Surveillance Of Phone Calls Can Help Find Terrorists – CBS News “It helps you understand trends, but I don’t know of companies that are using social network analysis to discover bad guys without an entry point, just looking at the network structure,” said Jeff Jonas, founder of Systems Research and Development, a company whose software analyzed records to tip Las Vegas casinos when people barred from gambling had associates working on staff. The company attracted investment from the CIA’s venture unit even before Sept. 11 and last year was acquired by IBM Corp.

Software Piracy Said Down in China, Russia – Yahoo! News The countries with the highest piracy rates, according to the study, were Vietnam, 90 percent; Zimbabwe, 90 percent, Indonesia, 87 percent, and China and Pakistan, both at 86 percent. The countries with the lowest piracy rates were the United States, 21 percent; New Zealand, 23 percent; Austria, 26 percent, and Finland, 26 percent.

Now, Sony E3 presentation video

Interesting breakhtrough for game’s controller from Nintendo’s Wii, although this is not a new idea. And Sony’s Playstation 3 also follow the lead in using motion detection controller. Lets see whether Microsoft’s XBOX 360 will also follow suit. News from BBC, and below is the presetation’s video.

This was a november 2005 case, but US military didn’t say anything until May 2006!

Lawmaker: Marines deliberately killed Iraqis – Conflict in Iraq – MSNBC.com On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said. U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong. Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that “there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” Military officials say Marine Corp photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the investigation hasn’t been completed.

An interesting data from WSJ in article WSJ.com – Thinking Global

New International Monetary Fund data show that official currency reserves of the developing world nearly quadrupled over the past decade to $2.9 trillion last year, while those of industrialized countries rose 150%. Last year alone, emerging-markets’ reserve holdings grew 18% from the previous year, against a 1.5% decline among developed countries. That has put nearly 70% of global currency reserves in developing-countries’ hands, “a staggering accumulation” says former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. The share of total reserves held in dollars was 66.5% in 2005, up from 65.9% in 2004. And the total amount of reserves has doubled in the last five years. So there are more reserves overall — and they’re concentrated in less reliable hands.