Apple's 'Transparent Texting' To Make Texting Safe While Walking

U.S. tech giant Apple has filed a patent for new technology that aims to make texting while walking safer by replacing the text background with a live video feed of whatever is in front of the Smartphone user.

Many Smartphone users keep their eyes glued to the screens while texting and walking which can cause them to stumble over or bump into obstacles.

Apple’s ‘transparent texting’ aims to solve this problem by overlaying messages on a live video feed from the rear camera of the Smartphone.

This will allow users to see what is happening beyond their phone and text at the same time.

“A user who is walking while participating in a text messaging session may inadvertently collide with or stumble over objects in his path because his attention was focused on his device’s display instead of the path that he was traversing,” according to the patent filed in the U.S.

The patent describes how the transparency feature could be activated by pressing a tra

nsparency button within a texting session that switches on the video feed.

The feature would then ensure text bubbles appear overlaid over the live background video. The text bubbles themselves could be opaque or semi-transparent, according to Tech Crunch.

The patent, originally filed in September 2012, details potential extensions of the concept of transparent texting, including replacing the background of a webpage with a live video feed, so that the text of a website is overlaid over whatever environments the device user is moving through.

“Alternative embodiments of the invention can be applied to virtually any computer-executable application in which text is presented over a background,” the patent application said.

A recent study by researchers from University at Buffalo in the U.S. found that texting while walking may result in more injuries per mile than distracted driving.

The study found that though injuries from car accidents involving texting are often more severe, physical harm resulting from texting and walking occurs more frequently.

AMD vs Nvidia: who makes the best graphics cards?

AMD vs Nvidia: RIVA and Rage

The early days of graphics on the PC saw 3D cards like Nvidia's RIVA 128 and TNT2 take on ATI's Rage and Rage 128. But it was Nvidia who presaged the modern GPU or Graphics Processing Unit with the mighty GeForce 256 in 1999. It was the first graphics chip with hardware transform and lighting capabilities. And it was fast. Damned fast.

ATI responded in 2000 with the Radeon graphics card. Ever since, successive generations of GeForce and Radeon GPUs have been leapfrogging each other in the race for graphics supremacy. Nvidia had the early advantage with the GeForce, GeForce 2, GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 series arguably having the edge over ATI's Radeon, Radeon 7500 and Radeon 8500.

But in 2002 ATI turned the tables with the awesome Radeon 9700 Pro. The first GPU with fully programmable shaders, the 9700 Pro was massively more powerful than any graphics chip before. It took until early 2003 for Nvidia to respond with the ill-fated GeForce 5800 Ultra, a GPU that never lived up to expectations.

Nvidia was back on form a year later with the GeForce 6800 series. A tit for tat ensued with neither ATI nor Nvidia achieving a clear advantage. It was during this period that Nvidia introduced its revolutionary multi-GPU SLI technology and ATI responded with the copycat Crossfire platform. There really was nothing to separate them.

AMD vs Nvidia: Radeon rethink

At least, there wasn't until ATI released the underperforming Radeon HD 2900 XT. Like Nvidia's calamitous GeForce FX series, the 2900 arrived late, ran hot, underperformed and couldn't match its opposition, the GeForce 8800 Ultra.

But unlike the GeForce FX, it lead to a fundamental strategic rethink. AMD decided that in future ATI would no longer chase ultimate performance with its top GPU. Instead it would aim for maximum bang for buck and introduce dual-GPU boards to cater for enthusiasts demanding ultra-high performance.

The culmination of this rethink was the Radeon HD 4870. Launched in mid 2008, it was half the price of Nvidia's competing GeForce GTX 280 but delivered at least 80 per cent of the performance. It was a winning combination.

AMD vs Nvidia: The DX11 era

Of course, graphics technology waits for no man and much has changed since the Radeon HD 4000 series and GeForce GTX 200 hit the market in 2008. Late last year AMD unleashed the Radeon HD 5000 series, the world's first family of graphics chips with support for the latest DirectX 11 multimedia API from Microsoft, as seen in Windows 7 but also available as an update for Windows Vista.

It took a little longer for Nvidia to respond in kind with the GeForce GTX 400 family. It eventually turned up earlier this year and since then its been these two pixel pumping graphics architectures fighting it out for top DX11 honours.

Topping the current single-GPU tables, therefore, are the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Nvidia Geforce GTX 480. Thanks to AMD's greater emphasis on value, the GTX 480 weighs in around £100 more expensive at £430 or so.

For the money Nvidia gives you an extra billion transistors for a faintly ridiculous total of three billion. You also get a little more memory as standard, 1.5GB to the 5870's 1GB. However, it's worth noting that 2GB variants of the 5870 are now available for less than the 1.5GB GTX 480.

Anyway, what you don't get from the 480 is a huge performance advantage. Yes it's a little quicker than the 5870. But not nearly as much as it needs to be given the extra cost and complexity.

AMD vs Nvidia: Cut-down cards

It's a similar story further at the next rung down the graphics ladder. Both AMD and Nvidia offer slightly cut down versions of their top GPUs. TheRadeon HD 5850 is yours for £225 and retains 1,440 of the 5870's 1,600 stream shaders. Meanwhile, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 470 weighs in around £295 and packs 448 of Nvidia's mighty CUDA cores. The GTX 480, for the record, has 480 cores.

Once again, the 470 is a little quicker than its AMD equivalent, but it's also much more expensive. From there, things get a little more complicated. AMD does a silly-money dual-GPU Radeon HD 5000 board, the 5970. In most tests of pixel pumping prowess, it's the quickest thing out there (NVIDIA has yet to wheel out a dual-GPU take on the GTX 400 series). But just occasionally its dual-GPU architecture and split-memory set up gets the better of it.

Move into mid-range territory and direct comparisons between ATI and Nvidia are currently a bit tricky. That's because Nvidia has yet to release more affordable chips based on Fermi, the new DX11 architecture that underpins the GTX 480 and 470 GPUs.

Consequently, the Radeon HD 5770 (£125), Radeon HD 5670 (£85) and Radeon HD 5570 (£72) are lording it without any DX11 competition.

Instead, Nvidia makes do with older chipsets based on DX10 tech, such as the GeForce GTS 250 (£125) and GeForce GT 240 (£72).

Advantage Nvidia?

That said, Nvidia has recently released an even more cut-down version of the Fermi chip in the new GeForce GTX 465, on sale now from around £230. But what it really needs is some pukka mid-range DX11 chips to take the fight to AMD. And it needs them soon. AMD has already released its family of second-generation DirectX 11 GPUs.

Read our AMD Radeon HD 6870 review

In the meantime, it's not all bad news for Nvidia. Arguably, it has an edge in at least one important DX11 feature, the hardware tessellator. Designed to spew out huge numbers of polygons and therefore give games more geometric detail and realism than ever before, the tessellator could prove to be the killer feature in DX11. Early tests suggest Nvidia's chips have more tessellation power than ATI's.

Nvidia is also way ahead of ATI when it comes to stereoscopic 3D. Nvidia's 3D Vision technology is the best way to get 3D on your PC today. It works with a large number of games and is also compatible with certain formats of 3D movies including Blu-ray 3D. But like most other 3D display technologies, wearing a pair of geeky goggles is the price of participation.

AMD CrossFireX

Description 

·         Theoretically, the same GPU to GPU involving 2 × 2 increase performance. But in practice it is around 1.7-2 ×, when certain measurements, the resulting output more than doubled, but it is only for specific cases. When connecting more than 2 GPU is already smaller increase in performance. U 3 GPU that's about 250% 1 GPU. U 4 GPU performance increase is only SW that has it written support, otherwise the performance make about the involvement of 2 or 3 GPU.

·         At lower resolution may not be GPU performance increase 2 to 1 GPU noticeable. Therefore, involvement of two or more GPUs only recommended in full HD (1920x1080) and higher, while smoothing power (AA), and high-quality effect.

·         Under certain circumstances may occur in poor performance when connecting CF vs 1 GPU, it usually occurs in non-optimized game engines for multiple GPU.

·         Putting DirectX 11 slightly improved using multiple GPU support each other and improve performance, but still need optimization by game developers and driver developers.

·         CrossFireX can connect up to four graphics chips, so it involved one-chip card + 1-chip card, smart card-1 + 2-chip card, 4 × 1-chip card or a 2 × 2-chip card. The biggest performance gains can be recognized between one and two kartama, then in most applications, the performance rises up it was only a few tens of percent.

·         When using AFR may experience an issue where the image is slightly uncomfortable lugs, without influence on the course of FPS (so-called micro stuttering ).

·         To determine the active CF uses a specific algorithm, which is described in the documentation of AMD. The algorithm varies according to the needs of AMD as it
      develops hardware and software (VISION Engine Control Center).

·         AMD to design series GPU Radeon R900 more thought to use a CF because some GPU gives better performance compared to their predecessors.

Generation 

The first generation 

CrossFire was first released to the public on the 27th September 2005 . Technology called CrossFire compatible motherboard with a pair of ATI Radeon connected via PCI-Express (PCIe). Radeon X800, X850, X1800 and X1900 were published in two editions, in classical and CrossFire. CrossFire Edition is characterized by the "Master" built directly into the hardware card. As a "Master" is called with five integrated circuits for image composition , which helped to combine the outputs of both cards. Therefore enough to buy one "Master" card and pair of her classic of the same series. "Master Card" is supplied with a special DVI combiner (the so-called Y-Dongle), which combined the two main video outputs of both card into one input on the monitor . The combiner served as the main liaison between the cards that sent incomplete images and combining them into one complete monitor. Low-end Radeon X1300 and X1600 CrossFire Edition had, but it was CrossFire compatible with software that communicates over a standard PCI-Express slot. ATI has not yet infrastructure to enable CrossFire on their FireGL cards. "Slave" card must be the same model as the "Master".

Graphics Card X850 chip using Silicon Image (SiI 163B TMDS), which had limited the frequency resolution of 1600 × 1200 at 60 Hz or 1920 × 1440 at 52 Hz, due to this problem was applicable only to CRT 1280x1024 resolution, because not so interested in CF, price exceeded usability.

The second generation (Software CrossFire) 

When using the chipset CrossFire Xpress 3200 from ATI has no need of "Master" for all CrossFire compatible card (only exception being the Radeon X1900 series). With CrossFire Xpress 3200classic to two cards in CrossFire work, communication mediated through the PCI-Express slot . This is similar as in the communication card X1300, except that Xpress 3200 was specifically designed for low response and high-speed communications between the graphics card. Increased performance and eliminating the "Master" was considered an overall improvement in market strategy of the company as "Master" cards were very expensive, demand exceeded supply, and it is possible to get only at selected retailers. Although the CrossFire Xpress 3200 really lets you take advantage of CrossFire through the PCI-Express for each lower than the Radeon X1900, Radeon X1800 drivers have not yet been assembled. ATI said that support for the Radeon X1800 will be released along with their Catalyst driver, but the date was never specified.

X1800 graphics card using 2 chips Silicon Image (SiI 163B TMDS), because it was not limited to that of the first generation of the frequency and resolution.

The current generation (CrossFireX) 

Sample diagram with two CrossFire Radeon 4850 ( Radeon R700 GPU)

With the release of the Radeon X1950 series, ATI completely revised interconnection infrastructure CrossFire connectors eliminate the need for a division of the "Master" and "Slave" functionality for CrossFire technology. ATI CrossFire connector is now "more they were" attached to the side of each card, as is the case with the same technology SLI competitor nVidia , only with other physical and logical features. Thanks to cease "Master" card the highest performance, and therefore ceased to exist. Series cards Radeon HD 2900 and HD 3000 are two identical "braces" connectors, but the HD 3800 series requires only one connector, which makes it easier to connect CrossFireX. Unlike older series, card series Radeon HD 3800 may not be the same model (but of the same series should be), and can be connected via CrossFire, while controlling stroke each card separately.

19th July 2007 issued by AMD (which a year ago bought ATI Technologies) marked a new desktop platform codenamed Spider . CrossFire was subsequently updated to support up to four cards, disposing 790FX chipset, connected at the same time. Thanks to this designation was changed to CrossFire ATI CrossFireX. Involvement of four graphics cards in CrossFire, as referenced AMD internal testing should provide an increase in performance of up to 320% in many games and applications that require large graphics computing capabilities. This however is due to high cost focusing only on the market for real enthusiasts. Recent developments in CrossFire infrastructure includes support for cards with two GPU cores, which were issued in early2008 , the models Radeon HD 3870 X2 and younger Radeon HD 4870 X2 , which contain only one CrossFire connector, but thanks to the installation of 2 GPU and so achieves a performance of "four" cards.

Catalyst 11.1 and later supports CrossFire profiles, the AMD issue as soon as possible after the new games for maximum performance CF in the game.

The GPU R900 can have efficiency diagram 2 GPU to 200% power 1 GPU, because in some tests came over SLI performance.

Hybrid CrossFireX 

Hybrid CFX support only some chipsets with IGP . Allow you to work IGP with dedicated graphics card. Power it will only increase the involvement of the lowest class of dedicated graphics cards due to poor performance IGP.

Supported chipsets are the 700 and 800 known as Hybrid CrossFire X.

Facebook for Android beta testing program announced.......

With an intent to make updates for its Android app more reliable and better performing, social networking company Facebook has announced a new beta testing program for its Android app.

This program will help Facebook get performance data and feedback from users ahead of release of the final version of the app. Facebook's reasoning for opening the program to a wider audience is that the ability to receive feedback across a wider range of devices and versions of Android, compared to feedback received through internal testing which is limited to a few devices. Facebook mentions that it has already moved to four-week release cycles for updates on Android to fix issues, add new features via updated versions of the app.

This program provides regular users an option to get early access to new features that upcoming versions would introduce, at the cost of instability that comes with beta apps. Previously Facebook was testing apps through beta programs for its employees, select users and its industry partners.

Users will now be able to join the program by simply joining the Facebook for Android Beta Testers Google group and then clicking on 'Become a Tester' in the Play Store, following which they'll be able to download beta versions of the Facebook app directly through the Play Store. Some users might also see prompts to download the beta build in a special notification within the Facebook for Android app. The company has also set-up a group on Facebook where users can submit their feedback. A new 'Report a Problem' button is also part of the app's menu for reporting bugs and other issues.

The current version of the beta app (version 3.4) brings new functionalities and improvements including the ability to share News Feed stories in a private message, swipe left and right to open chat and bookmarks and the ability to store the app on the phone's SD card for users running Android 2.3.7 and lower. It also brings a new feature to Facebook Home allowing users to organise their apps with folders

IZArc One of the most powerful compressor.

Very Powerful Compressor ..........IZArc

IZArc (pronounced "easy-arc") is a freeware file archiver for Microsoft Windows developed by Bulgarian programmer Ivan Zahariev. In addition to the most commonly used archive formats, like zip, rar, gzip, tar.gz, bzip2, and 7z, IZArc handles a large number of less common formats (48 in total, see below). Another distinguishing feature of IZArc is its ability to convert archives into different formats (including CD images and conversion between self-extracting and standard archives).

Supported formats

IZArc (as of version 4.1.2) currently supports the following file formats: 7-Zip, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MDF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO.

Problems

As of version 4.0 beta 1 IZArc adds Unicode support and more 7-zip support which solves some problems mentioned below.

IZArc's lack of support for Unicode limits its use across various languages. IZArc does not support ISO editing. IZArc has incomplete 7-Zip support and lacks the add, move, or update actions, as well as encryption and parameter modification. Also unlike 7-zip, it does not appear to decipher Microsoft installer files (.msi) that include files compressed with LZX:21 and some setup files of type 7-zip.PE. While IZArc achieves a very high speed when compressing to the 7z format, and still a high speed with the widespread ZIP format, its compression is slow when handling other archive formats

Click here to download

Best Copying software for Windows TeraCopy .......

TeraCopy is a software application for Microsoft Windows that is designed to be used to move or copy computer files. As an alternative to the native copy operations within Windows, it is designed to be faster and have more functionality than the native too.

Design

TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives. The processes can be paused or resumed. In case of transfer errors, TeraCopy will try several times; after that, it skips the faulty file and proceeds with the rest of the operation. TeraCopy also shows failed file transfers and allows the user to fix the problem and recopy the problematic files.
TeraCopy can replace Explorer copy and move functions. The author asserts that it has full Unicode support.

Licensing

TeraCopy is freeware but may only be used in a non-commercial environment. TeraCopy Pro, a shareware version of the application, adds additional features such as having a list of favorite folders to be used as a copy destination and the ability to modify the copy queue.

Click to download