When a picture is taken with a traditional camera lens, the picture’s center appears brighter than its edges. This effect is more pronounced with wide angle lenses and long telephotos and is known as vignetting or light fall-off. Vignetting can occur by accident, which negatively impacts a photograph’s quality or the photographer may purposely do it to achieve a desired effect. Why does Vignetting Matter? When a minor or major fall-off in light results from the vignetting effect, it dramatically impacts the way people perceive the picture. The photographer’s original Read More

Some users type “www.topbits.com” into their web browsers when they want to reach this web page. Other users type in only “topbits.com”, leaving off the “www” portion. On a technical level, the two names do not refer to the same domain object. Google, and other search engines, often see these two objects as seperate web servers. Check the PageRank for several domains to see the results of this. For some domains, the PageRank will be the same for both the www and non-www domains. For other domains, the PageRank will Read More

A MKV file is a container format that can be used to store audio and video formats and is considered a competing format to the MP4 and AVI container formats. MKV (Matroska) is an open source format based on EBML (Extensible Binary Meta Language), and includes a greater number of features than supported by other container formats used in industry. The standard stores data in a compressed state along with an encoder. In order to play MKV files, a supporting codec is required. What is a MKV File? The MKV Read More

A constructor plays a vital role in initializing an object. An important note, while using constructors during inheritance, is that, as long as a base class constructor does not take any arguments, the derived class need not have a constructor function. However, if a base class contains a constructor with one or more arguments, then it is mandatory for the derived class to have a constructor and pass the arguments to the base class constructor. Remember, while applying inheritance, we usually create objects using derived class. Thus, it makes sense Read More

The kilobit per second (kbps, or kbit/s, or kb/s) is a unit of measurement for the speed of data transfer. One kilobit per second is 1,000 bits per second. Other common multipliers follow the metric progression; Mbps (megabits per second), Gbps (gigabits per second), and Tbps (terabits per second). A bit is the smallest unit of data; it cannot be broken down into smaller units. A bit is either on or off; 0 or 1. For example, seven bits are required to communicate a single ASCII character. Alternate Usage Another Read More

PKZip utilizes a proprietary stream cipher that is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack, as Eli Biham and Paul C. Kocher describes in A Known Plaintext Attack on the PKZIP Stream Cipher. In ZIP Attacks with Reduced Known-Plaintext, Michael Stay describes an improved known plaintext attack that works against files that non-PKZip zip programs such as InfoZip, WinZip, and NetZip create. The Stay attack requires the Zip archive to contain a minimum of five files. In addition to these two attacks, it is also possible to recover a Zip password Read More

SDHC stands for Secure Digital High Capacity. It is a format for new memory cards that is based on the 2.00 specification of the SDA (Secure Digital Association).The name Secure Digital is due to their ability to protect copyright, using digital copyright management. This has made these memory cards a favorite choice in the audiovisual industry. These flash memory cards are available in various capacities, the minimum being 4 GB. SDHC cards are removable and are used in compatible digital devices like MP3 players, camcorders, camera phones, etc. Why SDHC? Read More

All About DSP Tricks This tutorial provides information on some of the lesser-known DSP tricks for the optimization of algorithms. How Do I learn DSP? This tutorial provides excellent advice on how to find DSP information that you need. It also provides different strategies that are useful in fully understanding DSP. FAQs on Digital Signal Processing This link provides a highly authoritative FAQ listing on Digital Signal Processing. The FAQs range from general advice to algorithms and programmable DSP chips. The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing Aimed Read More

Hotmail is a free (i.e. advertiser supported) web based e-mail system that Microsoft Corporation provides. Those who no longer use their Hotmail account can delete it so that people who send them e-mail will receive messages telling them that the Hotmail e-mail address is no longer valid. How to Close a Hotmail Account Log into the Microsoft Hotmail account. Go to the Microsoft Hotmail Close your MSN account page. Select Close my MSN account and delete my credentials. Press Close MSN.com, Microsoft’s all-in-one online network, has been completely revamped and Read More

Radio has been a popular medium since it was invented over 100 years ago. While radio has definitely changed through the decades, most people usually listen to it to hear their favorite music, talk show, or sports broadcast. While most people listen to standard radios that broadcast over radio waves, recent technology has made it possible to listen to radio over the Internet. Internet radio is a rising pastime for millions of people all over the world. Not only does Internet radio provide more options and genres when listening to Read More