NINE INCH NAILS live in Manila for one night only!

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NINE INCH NAILS live in Manila for one night only! Trent Reznor officially confirmed that Nine Inch Nails are set to tour the globe this year for one last time before going on hiatus indefinitely, as 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of their first release.

Catch them live in Manila on August 5 at the Araneta Coliseum! With a special performance by one of the most exciting local artists in the Philippines today — PUPIL!

Tickets are now available at Ticketnet, via www.ticketnet.com.ph or call the Ticketnet hotline at +632 911-5555.

Ticket prices are as follows: (please add 5% ticketnet commission)

Patron VIP (Reserved Seating) Php4500

Patron (Reserved Seating) Php3750

Lower Box (Reserved Seating) Php2500

Upper Box A (Reserved Seating) Php2000

Upper Box B Php1000

Gen. Admission Php500

Source: http://www.splintr.com/nin.php

Teen Falls Into Manhole While Texting

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I’m all for mobile technology, but when are we going to learn to use it properly? If it weren’t bad enough learning about a teen girl accidentally electrocuting herself while tweeting in the tub, another teen has fallen into a manhole while texting.

A 15 year-old girl in Staten Island preoccupied with sending a message while walking recently fell into an un-guarded manhole, right into a pile of … grossness. Aside from some scrapes and a bit of humility, the girl walked away relatively unscathed.

“It was four or five feet, it was very painful. I kind of crawled out and the DEP guys came running and helped me,” Longueria told the Staten Island Advance.. “They were just, like, ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

The teen and her family are planning on filing a lawsuit, because although she was texting at the time of her fall, the manhole should not have been left uncovered in the path of pedestrians. The workers had momentarily stepped away from the area to grab some more cones.

How is that even possible? It’s like something you’d see in a Wiley vs Roadrunner cartoon. Please, be careful while texting! No texting while driving! No texting while bathing! And no texting while walking in the street!

What do you think – does the family have a right to sue or is it her own fault?

Source: http://thevibe.socialvibe.com/index.php/2009/07/13/teen-falls-into-manhole-while-texting/

Understanding Vector Graphics

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Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.

Vector graphics formats are complementary to raster graphics, which is the representation of images as an array of pixels, as it is typically used for the representation of photographic images. There are instances when working with vector tools and formats is best practice, and instances when working with raster tools and formats is best practice. There are times when both formats come together. An understanding of the advantages and limitations of each technology and the relationship between them is most likely to result in efficient and effectiveuse of tools.

Overview

Computer displays are made up from small dots called pixels. The picture is built up from these dots. The smaller and closer the dots are together, the better the quality of the image, but the bigger the file needed to store the data. If the number of pixels is kept constant, the size of each pixel will grow and the image becomes grainy when magnified, as the resolution of the eye enables it to pick out individual pixels.

Vector graphics files store the lines, shapes and colours that make up an image as mathematical formulae. A vector graphics program uses these mathematical formulae to construct the screen image, building the best quality image possible, given the screen resolution. The mathematical formulae determine where the dots that make up the image should be placed for the best results when displaying the image. Since these formulae can produce an image scalable to any size and detail, the quality of the image is only determined by the resolution of the display, and the file size of vector data generating the image stays the same. Printing the image to paper will usually give a sharper, higher resolution output than printing it to the screen but can use exactly the same vector data file.

Editing vector graphics

Vector graphic drawing software is used for creating and editing vector graphics. The image can be changed by editing screen objects which are then saved as modifications to the mathematical formulae. Mathematical operators in the software can be used to stretch, twist, and colour component objects in the picture or the whole picture, and these tools are presented to the user intuitively through the graphical user interface of the computer. It is possible to save the screen image produced as a bitmap/raster file or generate a bitmap of any resolution from the vector file for use on any device.

The size of the file generated will depend on the resolution required, but the size of the vector file generating the bitmap/raster file will always remain the same. Thus, it is easy to convert from a vector file to a range of bitmap/raster file formats but it is much more difficult to go in the opposite direction, especially if subsequent editing of the vector picture is required. It might be an advantage to save an image created from a vector source file as a bitmap/raster format, because different systems have different (and incompatible) vector formats, and some might not support vector graphics at all. However, once a file is converted from the vector format, it is likely to be bigger, and it loses the advantage of scalability without loss of resolution. It will also no longer be possible to edit individual parts of the image as discrete objects.

Vector formats are not always appropriate in graphics work. For example, digital devices such as cameras and scanners produce raster graphics that are impractical to convert into vectors, and so for this type of work, the editor will operate on the pixels rather than on drawing objects defined by mathematical formulae. Comprehensive graphics tools will combine images from vector and raster sources, and may provide editing tools for both, since some parts of an image could come from a camera source, and others could have been drawn using vector tools.

Standards

The W3C standard for vector graphics is SVG. The standard is complex and has been relatively slow to be established at least in part owing to commercial interests. Many web browsers now have some support for rendering svg data but full implementations of the standard are still comparatively rare.

Sample Vectors

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Social Networking Sites – Hopped On!

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During the past months, years and days, there had been a rampant releases of what we called a SNS (Social Networking Site). As what wiki says :

  • A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

    Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people. (Source here)

These sites had invited people in different ages to communicate, meet and mingle through their services. Some of these famous Social Networking Site are the following:

  • Friendster- popular in Southeast Asia and no longer popular in Western world.
  • Facebook - a general network site open for 13 years old and above.
  • Adult Friend Finder – a hook up network
  • Multiply - a “real world” relationship and only popular in Asia not in Western world.
  • Hi5 – General. Popular in India,Portugal, Mongolia, Thailand, Romania, Jamaica, Central Africa and Latin America. Not popular in the USA.
  • See complete list.

There are lots of SNS site roaming around now in www, and those are just the examples that many people been familiar with.

Social network sites are based around profiles, a form of individual (or, less frequently, group) home page, which offers a description of each member. In addition to text, images, and video created by the member, the social network site profile also contains comments from other
members and a public list of the people that one identifies as Friends within the network. Because the popularized style of these sites emerged out of dating services, the profile often contains material typical of those sites: demographic details (age, sex, location, etc.), tastes
(interests, favorite bands, etc.), a photograph, and an open-ended description of who the person would like to meet. Profiles are constructed by filling out forms on the site. While the forms were designed to control the layout of the content, MySpace accidentally left open a
technological loophole and their forms accepted (and then rendered) HTML and CSS code.

Capitalizing on this loophole, participants can modify the look and feel of their profiles. By copying and pasting code from other websites, teens change their backgrounds, add video
and images, change the color of their text, and otherwise turn their profiles into an explosion of animated chaos that resembles a stereotypical teenager’s bedroom. The default profile is publicly accessible to anyone, but most social network sites have privacy features that allow
participants to restrict who can see what. For example, MySpace allows participants to make their profiles Friends-only (and sets this as the default for those who indicate they are fourteen or fifteen years old) while Facebook gives profile-access only to people from the same school
by default. After creating a profile, participants are asked to invite their friends to the site by supplying their email addresses. Alternatively, they can look at others’ profiles and add those people to their list of Friends.

Most social network sites require approval for two people to be linked as Friends. When someone indicates another as a Friend, the recipient receives a message asking for confirmation. If Friendship is confirmed, the two become Friends in the system and their relationship is included in the public display of connections on all profiles.