Another one for Bulgaria

A few days ago I participated in the regional level of the information technology olympiad. I participated with a web site that I and a friend of mine - Hristo Petrov - made together. You can see it right here: http://www.ko64eto.host-bg.info/ (Note: it's in Bulgarian, however, you can still see the design itself). A great web site - I'm sure you'll agree. We've worked hard to make a real best-view-in-any-resolution and not just some small rectangle, that can't fill even the half of your screen if you're monitor resolution is greater than 1024x768. The web site is light, intuitive and doesn't make you bother about anything while you are browsing it.
This article isn't realy to tell you how great my web site was, but to inform you about what happened at the IT Olympiad. Lets start with the fact that there were only 5 web sites to participate. If you ask me - they all deserved 75 out of 100 points or even more (in other words - they deserved to go to the national level) but one single web site, that not only had an awful design, but was made out of 41 PHP files and over 9000 line of code, according to the words of the girl who made it. You can see this particular site here: http://www.gsm.souvl.com/ (Note: it's also in Bulgarian. If you know Bulgarian you may find it helpful to know that the administrator's username and password and both "1", however, the booys that hacked the web sited didn't need that much information). At the end of the contest the jury had to score all of the participants. The first thing I have to complain to is that no actual score had been givven to any of the participants. We were either told "You're going to the national", or "Sorry, try next year". The second thing I complain about is that only 4 web sites had "scored" enough. The third thing is that one of them was the GSM services web site made by that moron Merlin.
After we were told who's going to the national, the jury (actually there were only half of the jury - the other half, including the chairman, had beed gone) hasted into leaving us, giving us no other information. Somehow I managed to get to them and asked them of curiosity what was my score and how come I had less than 75. They answered me that my web site had no speciffically set purpouse (the subject was leisure time, and for one thing I agree - it really isn't speciffic) and that was what cost me so many points, otherwise everything else (coding, functionallity, navigation, design and so on) was perfect. However I didn't get a speciffic answer what my score was.
When I got back home I read all over the rules again and saw that speciffically set idea is scored with only 5 points, and applicability of the web site was scored with 5 more. OK - this makes 90 points. Or does it? After all of that I've figured that the scores were measured by the equation 100 points overall minus 10 points for no speciffic subject and applicability minus corruption is less than 75. That's why I had less than 75, although Merlin had more.
The worst thing is that this is something normal in Bulgaria. And my attitude towards it is that this whole country SUCKS!

Homepage rearange by Google

Don't haste forward to going to http://www.google.com/ since you may not notice any change. Actually untill now Google has made modifications only to the Japanese version of their homepage. There isn't much information about it (at least not in English) but what I've read states that this is an innovation, which is quite well accepted by the Japanese (I guess that I'll also accept it well). Soon the version for all languages will look the same way. That is there will be tabs under the search form, as follows: "Featured," including Gmail, YouTube, News, Maps and Transit, "Various search," that hosts links to Image Search, Blog Search, Books and Google Desktop, "Useful tool," with Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Toolbar and, finally, "More enjoyable," and YouTube once again, Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.

Source: Softpedia

Apple notebooks with Blue-ray?

Rumor has it that Apple wants Blu-ray on its MacBook Pros since it's the winning format, yet there's this problem that Blue-ray eats all your battery life.
Blue-ray playback on a laptop turns out to be a huge concern because the laser used is a very high-powered one. On the other hand decoding all that data (25 GB per layer!) requires a lot of CPU work, which means a lot of battery power. Analysys point out that the first generation of Blu-ray-equipped laptops can't get more than halfway through a regular-length movie before juice runs out completely.

Source: Softpedia

Blue-Ray and HD-DVD

During the last few years we witnessed the development of the two High Definition formats and the war between them. Now it seems that everything is settled up, but hey, "it aint over, 'till it's over!" :P.
You can find a variety of different articles about Blue-Ray, HD-DVD and the High Definition Format war. Here I'll try to summarize the main things about all three of them.
Lets start by noting what HD-DVD has to offer. It may have smaller capacity (15 GB per layer) but it's much chepaer. Also the technology for the production of HD-DVDs is also cheaper and technology for ordinary DVD can easily be upgraded in order to produce HD-DVDs.
On the other hand we have Blue-Ray. It's better - much better. It not only has a bigger capacity (25 GB per layer, which is 167% of the HD-DVD capacity) but it's thinner. This gives producers the opportunity to make multi-layered BDs (the last thing I heared about multi-layered BDs was that there were going to be 10-layered ones). We should also not ignore the fact that BDs have a harder coat developed by TDK - it is said that it can stand even screwdrivers!
So BDs are definitely better, but HD-DVDs are cheaper. What do we do now? Everyone prefers what's better, but sometimes makes compromises with the quality because of financial issues. According to me - that's the key to the problem - people SOMETIMES MAKE (not always and not never) compromises. So we do need both formats.
Have you beed recently to the market for DVDs? Which ones do you usually buy - the cheaper or the better ones? I usually buy the cheaper ones but sometimes I need better quality and give about twice as much money in order to really preserve some data on an optical disk for more than a couple of months. We can also compare buying single- ot dual-layer DVDs with buying HD-DVDs and BDs. I guess that in 10 years I'll be doing almost the same. The difference will be that I'll be usually buying HD-DVDs and sometimes BDs depending on if I need better quality, more capacity or I want to save some money.
However some people think that only one of the formats should stay and the other has to go. The funniest thing was that in the beginning of the format war people said that in the end, the customers will be the ones that suffer. I never trusted this but if only one of the formats stays - it really will be customers suffering.