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Week Ending March 30, 2002

Change Windows 2000 Pro To Windows 2000 Server with Freeware Util
NTSwitch is a small freeware program that allows you to turn an existing NT Workstation or Windows 2000 Professional installation into an NT Server or a Windows 2000 Server environment.

It's well-known that Workstation and Server environments are virtually identical. The operating system decides which "flavor" to run in based on two registry values:

ProductType is "ServerNT" or "LanmanNT" for servers, and "WinNT" for workstations. The third bit in the last byte of the SystemPrefix value is set for servers, and cleared for workstations.

Since the release of NT4, Microsoft has taken measures to keep the user from changing these registry values. The operating system has two watcher threads that revert any changes made to these two registry settings, as well as warn the user about "tampering".

The good guys at SYSInternals have supposedly created an application called NTTune. They did not release it to the public, but only to the press - their intent was to demonstrate the fact that there's really no difference between Server and Workstation. However, they did not make their utility publicly available. The application disabled the system threads thus letting the user change the aforementioned registry values.

The public is curious - people came up with a way of changing these settings without NTTune. Details are here. It involves hacking the NTOSKRNL.EXE executable so that the watchdogs are looking at some other registry setting. While this works, it's definitely not for the faint at heart.

Our utility, NTSwitch, is not as slick as NTTune - it does not disable the system threads. It's not as horrible as the NTOSKRNL.EXE hack either.

Our approach is the following:

A quick-and-dirty hack. It works, and it's at least as safe as the two previous solutions. We're giving it away for free. Go here to download it. The readme.txt contained in the zip file might have some late-breaking information, be sure to read it.

google.com - Google Search ApplianceGoogle Search Appliance
Make your company's search capability as good as Google's—and just as easy to use. The Google Search Appliance integrates hardware and software to create a plug-and-play solution that takes minutes to install and can be maintained easily by one administrator.

Making Life Simple for Administrators

Once you plug the Google Search Appliance into your network, you'll be astounded at how much content it uncovers. From market research to engineering documents and customer service repositories, the Google Search Appliance puts all the web content on your network one click away.

Want to learn more? Check out the Google Search Appliance specifications, features, and FAQ. Or click here to contact us.

Yahooo News -Reuters HP Spent $150 Million to Sell Merger
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co. board member Walter Hewlett on Monday estimated the company spent $150 million to override the opposition he led to the proposed $20 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp...

...The company claimed a narrow victory after shareholders voted on March 19, but Hewlett has refused to concede. The final results were still being tallied and may take another two weeks to complete...

BetaNews - IE 6 Adoption Soars, Netscape Use Plummets
By Nate Mook,

According to the latest numbers released Wednesday by WebSideStory's StatMarket, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.0 has captured a 30 percent market share just seven months after its release - sending Netscape's usage plummeting to an all-time low of 7 percent. Netscape had previously held 12 percent of the browser market for over a year. IE 6 is now the second most-used browser in the world, only sitting behind predecessor IE 5.

"The fast adoption rate for IE 6 has been a definite threat to Netscape's usage share," said StatMarket vice president of marketing Geoff Johnston in a statement. "Although it looked originally as though Netscape had an entrenched core user base, IE6 has managed to take significant market share. It's do or die time now for Netscape."

However, Wednesday's report also cited news that AOL has finally followed through on its plans -- first uncovered by BetaNews last year -- to integrate Netscape's Gecko engine with its AOL client. Although only in beta at the moment, if AOL switches to Gecko in version 8.0 due this fall, Netscape's browser share would get a 13 percent boost, potentially breathing life into the browser war once again.

IT World Canada - Fewer women becoming programmers
By Gail Balfour
HONOLULU — Despite the perception of growing gender equality within IT, the number of women enrolled in North American post-secondary computer science courses is actually decreasing every year, according to an informal study...

...In 1984, 37 per cent of North American students enrolled in post secondary computer science and related courses were women. What Moore said she found surprising was that those numbers have declined yearly since then and are expected to be at only 16 per cent by 2005. These numbers don’t even include the percentage of women who drop out of computer courses after the first year — also a very high percentage...

...Ironically, other findings indicate that by the end of this year, women will outnumber men on the Internet by a 60-40 ratio, that the number of new Internet users who are women are growing exponentially, that women spend an average of nine hours a week online, 62 percent have Internet access and many are starting their own companies, Moore said. "So one of the questions that I think is on many of our minds is ‘where are all the women?’"...

Toms Hardware - DivX 5.0 Explained
 The new generation of DivX-Codec 5.0 is now ready for downloading at DivX.com. The main difference between it and its predecessors is that only the standard version is still free. The "Pro" version, with many new features, now costs $30. Anyone who cannot do without this program, and yet has no money, will have to develop a fondness for a banner ad-sponsored version. Despite this situation, which has generated controversy among many users, one thing must be said for the DivX Networks team: they developed a codec that compresses the data volume of DVDs to an eleventh of their original size, with almost the same quality. This makes DivX 5.0, which is compatible with MPEG-4s, ideal for transmitting audio and video data over the Internet. It also makes it possible for a Hollywood classic to be burned onto a CD-ROM. This last statement is true, if the film is no longer than 100 minutes and if you insert a blank CD with a capacity of 700 MB or more.

The New Features at a Glance
The DivX codec is intended to be a "Video for Windows API" (VFW standard). That's why it can be easily called up from within video editing software such as Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premiere. It can also be used in tandem with popular converter programs like Flash XMPEG or VirtualDub. Now let's compare the features of the pro version with those of the standard version.

Comparison with the previous version 4.xx reveals that quarter pixels (QP, also called quarter pel), global motion compensation (GMC), and bidirectional encoding (BD) have been added.

B-frames Through Bidirectional Encoding (BD)
A video data stream in the old DivX-4 format has what are referred to as "I frames" (intra) and "P frames" (predicted). An I frame is a single image from a video stream that is compressed in a procedure that is similar to a JPEG, i.e. the entire image is used. If every image in a film were to be compressed individually, the typically high compression factor of MPEG-4/DivX would not be reached. That is why P frames are also used. We can explain the principle of prediction by way of an example: imagine the anchorperson of a news broadcasting station. For the most part, the background does not change while the newscaster moves in the foreground. Here you could leave out the redundant background and simply describe the changes by means of instructions for specific areas of the image. The image is divided into individual blocks to do this. The time differences are represented in the P frame by precisely these changes from block to block.

In DivX 5, the "B frames" (bi-directional) are added. Let's take the weather report as an example. At the beginning, the meteorologist covers half of the weather map in the background. Then he crosses the entire picture. Behind his back, parts of the map that were hidden at first now appear. With a conventional forecast, the codec would now have a problem: the displaced blocks (i.e. the meteorologist) can be filled in with a P frame, but not so much with the new parts of the background (the weather map) that suddenly appear. The DivX-5 codec is "smart" and checks the "future" of a video sequence out in advance. It now uses forward and backward prediction simultaneously for a scene like that and calculates the B frames bi-directionally from them. This can effectively increase data compression. However, it only works in videos that have scenes similar to the example above.

Global Motion Compensation (GMC)
Global motion compensation (GMC) helps in zooming (bringing the camera closer) and panning (swivelling the camera), if the objects remain static in type and only change in size and position within an image. Activation of GMC is advisable if nature films or landscape documentation are to be compressed.

Quarter Pixel (QP)
Quarter pel or quarter pixel affects the precision in filtering of macro blocks. DivX 4 works with half pel (1.5, 1.5); 1.25, 1.75, etc. are possible starting with DivX 5. Conventional division of an image into macro blocks is refined on the basis of integers - 16x16 or 8x8 - using the supplementary information from what are known as virtual blocks. This allows the motions of objects in images to be reproduced more realistically.

BD, GMC and QP - Not In The Standard Version
QP, GMC and BD cannot be used for encoding in the standard version. But decoding is still possible, even if these functions were used for encoding.

Flow Heater: 1-pass and 2-pass
In general, the 2-pass process achieves a higher rate of data compression (smaller file sizes) and better image quality. But that's at the cost of speed during encoding. Normal video editing software like Pinnacle Studio enables the 2-pass process, but it is cumbersome. Both passes must be started manually, one by one. Applications that are optimized using DivX, for example Flask XMPEG 4.2a, can automatically trigger the two processes without anyone having to lay a finger on it. This is considerably more convenient.

In the test, the northbridge of the KT333 chipset caused problems on the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP (Athlon XP). It is only with an additional cooling unit for the northbridge that the sporadic crashes could be prevented in 2-pass encoding. All of the other three test platforms, however, ran flawlessly.

General Parameters: Now We're Getting "psychovisual"
Before we get to this feature, we would first like to explain the bases of "psychovisual" modeling. Human perception occurs in such a way that we can very quickly distinguish the important things in an image from the unimportant ones. That is the idea towards which psychovisual modeling is oriented. An algorithm scans a scene and is supposed to separate the important objects from the unimportant ones. A less precise compression process is allocated to unimportant objects; important ones are compressed more precisely. In our first tests, we experimented with this feature on a handful of video sequences. We have not determined any significant differences in quality up to now. We will inspect this function more closely at a later date. Even from DivX.com we hear: "This area is full of possibilities we have only just started on and will continue to explore."