There's definitely a database and library in LR, you just basically need to update them manually/semi-manually. I've been spoiled by Picasa basically. It does many things so very well, but some things rather poorly unfortunately. The thing is it's not as if I expect a free product like Picasa to do with LR does, rather I expect a several hundred dollar high-end app like LR to do the simple and/or cool things that Picasa does. Like, oh I dunno, *face recognition*! Hehe. Oh and auto-scanning and updating a folder tree of images. The latter seems very simple.

- Oshyan

Yes, exactly, I agree. Again that's only if they're not specifically targeting Google though.

- Oshyan

I just had an important revelation regarding all this and I may have to retract some of what I said. It seems *I* missed a key point in the original article, and that is that the people who were testing this at Google (from their home computers) were told to click on the top result in the bogus searches. So if you think about it, it could have nothing to do with the results being Google's necessarily, and everything to do with Bing simply tracking what sites their toolbar users click on from a search. Ah hah!

Now the question is whether the same thing would work on a different search engine, say DuckDuckGo or Yippy. If so it simply means Bing's toolbar is "learning" from user behavior and is quite frankly badly tuned and not rejecting clearly insane feedback (i.e. it puts too much trust in user's self-selection of relevant results). That just speaks to flaws in Bing's algorithm (surprise!). If however it's *just* watching what people click on in Google, then it's still kind of slimy.

I'd like to think Microsoft is only favoring links people click on - regardless of source - as that takes it well out of the range of slimy and makes for a much more sensible (if properly weighted) approach.

- Oshyan

Sorry, this all seems like typical Google hating to me. If this were any other company having its results directly mirrored (like, say, the spam "content" sites covered so heavily in other threads here) people would be thinking and reacting very differently.

Here's the issue: Bing is not just learning from Google, they're *directly copying*; not only that but they're doing so without *reasonable further analysis*. In other words they're not just looking at what Google is doing and saying "Hmm, I wonder what it is about that site that makes it come up high in the results, let's analyze further". That makes sense. What they're actually doing is looking at Google results and using them as a *direct contributing factor* in their ranking, and in the absence of other significant factors as with rare keywords, Google's ranking becomes *the significant ranking factor*. This can result, as Google showed, in entirely non-relevant, spurious results being ranked top in Bing. So what if Google really does make a mistake or their results really are less relevant than they should be? Well unfortunately Bing is going to just mirror that, so there's no real innovation happening here, no improvement. Given that Bing purports to provide a superior search experience and better results (you know, the "decision engine" thing), this is pretty ridiculous.

The TechDirt article ignores some key points in the original Search Engine Land article and seems to me to be another obvious case of Google bashing. They call out Google for "whining" about this unnecessarily and that they should be "reacting to the negative stories about their search quality by improving instead of complaining about competitors", but this completely ignores the fact that Google's test was setup *before* all the stories about Google's worsening search quality became the rage. Not only that but the same article ignores the test results discussed in the original SEL article which show that yes, in fact, Bing *is* copying results from Google, not just "learning from" (as demonstrated by the entirely spurious results Google seeded as a honeypot). Both articles even acknowledge that the tech media has a hard-on for stories about Google's search quality issues too, despite the fact that no unbiased tests have yet proven there to be *any demonstrable, repeatable problem* that other search engines do not also suffer from.

So tell me, who is biased, who is jumping on the bandwagon here? I swear, first it was Microsoft that everyone loved to hate, now MS has almost become an underdog and it's Google and Apple.  

- Oshyan

What are you talking about? Did you read the article? Google setup a test explicitly to see if Bing was doing this and got pretty conclusive evidence they were. Now if Google was doing the same thing, why would they call out Bing on it? They'd have a huge risk of having it fly back in their faces if Bing could prove the same thing in reverse. "Watching" is another matter; of course Google and Microsoft watch what each other are doing, but there's a big difference between that and outright copying *results* without actually figuring out algorithmically how to generate the correct (or similar) results.

- Oshyan

OK, I'm giving Lightroom a serious try now, and dammit it's not making it easy to love!  I'll spare the details for now until I get some more experience with it (and maybe do a proper write-up). For the moment all I want to know is whether it's possible to have it auto-import new photos. I see there is an auto-import function but all it does is import photos that I save to 1 specific directory (which must be empty when I first setup the auto-import function), and then it moves them to some other folder, etc. What I'm looking for is something very simple like Picasa has. I save a new image to one of the (100s of) watched folders and it detects this within a few seconds or at most a minute and then adds it to its catalog (without interrupting my workflow).

Here's my scenario: I use an image cataloger and "developer" to organize, rate, tag, and ultimately "develop" most of my photos. However there are several significant functions that - while not needed all the time - do come up occasionally, and require external programs. I tend to want to edit and save to separate files rather than save over an original (no surprise there), so when I'm done with these external tasks I end up with new images, usually saved to the same folder as the source. Here are a few examples: Photomatix HDR processing, Autopano panorama creation, Photoshop collage creation, etc. I use each of these apps to create new images based on other images so naturally I want to save them with similar names back to the original folder.

Picasa handles this beautifully. Can LR really not? So far all I've found is a plugin which isn't free (though it's very cheap). I'm willing to go the plugin route, but even the plugin seems more laborious than Picasa's approach. I'm off to do some more Google searching. *sigh*

- Oshyan

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture - no the acronym definition doesn't help understand it ) is basically just nVidia's proprietary implementation of GPU-based general computing libraries. For massively parallel tasks, GPU acceleration can greatly speed things up. Video encoding (and decoding) is one of those things that does benefit. CUDA is not currently supported by ATI, in the past it was expected it never would be but nVidia may now have ambitions of making it a standard in the future, which would require ATI support. ATI supports the more hardware-agnostic OpenCL (Open Computing Language).

- Oshyan

Got the y560p. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. For the price I got a wickedly fast CPU, 750GB HD, and discreet graphics card. All things that I wanted. On top of that I got a keyboard without numpad and a centered touch pad, both of which I prefer.

Unfortunately there are a few problems, some with workarounds, others... I don't know. *sigh*

First thing I ran into is the touch pad is actually rather *big*. Small problem, just takes some getting used to, it's the reach between left and right click that I have to adjust to most. Far from a deal breaker in any case.

Then there is the fact that the normal lower-left Ctrl key is now the Fn key. Many, many laptop manufacturers make this "mistake" (mistake IMHO) and I really don't understand why. Ctrl has been in this position on most keyboards for eons. Fn is a new-ish key that is only present on laptops. There's no particularly good reason not to put the Fn key where they always move the Ctrl key to. This one does really bug me. Admittedly it's something you can adjust to, but since desktop keyboards are all the "normal" way it's harder. I will be looking into a key remapper, but I saw that some people on the Lenovo forums were going so far as to use a custom (and obviously unsupported) *BIOS modification* just to get this system-wide. Yeesh

OK, now we get into the more serious stuff. The next thing I noticed was the touch pad would stop responding for a half second or so after any typing. This one I didn't understand at all. I figured it had to be a settings issue with the touchpad and I scoured around in there, eventually discovering that turning down the "palm guard" (supposed to help avoid accidental touch pad motion when typing) helped a good amount. Now the delay is minimal, though it's still there a bit. I also turned off most of the touch pad "gestures" as I find then being triggered at random too often. So fortunately this whole issue was minimized.

Finally, the biggest issue that still somewhat remains, the dithering on this laptop is some of the worst I've ever seen. For those of you not familiar with dithering, it's a color reproduction method used by cheap LCDs (on most laptops; Apple was even sued over this!) that basically tries to make up for lower color depth (6 bit vs. 8 bit) by using multiple colors in patterns (like newsprint) to simulate more subtle gradients. It's generally not that noticeable on your average laptop screen, but for some reason here it's pretty distracting, at least for me. Apparently the y560 has had this problem off and on for a while, even back into 6+ months ago with the previous model (before Sandy Bridge). That being the case it's frankly rather shocking and dismaying that the problem persists now. I may just be unusually sensitive to it, but it definitely bothers me, and is worse than my previous Toshiba, or even the cheap, generic replacement LCD I eventually had to get for it (when I cracked the original ).

There's a lot of discussion in the Lenovo forums about the display issue and various possible fixes. It seems as though it *may* be something Lenovo can fix with a BIOS update or graphics card driver fix. That remains to be seen. Fortunately I did find that turning the refresh rate down from 60hz to 50hz seems to help a bit and makes the effect almost invisible in many cases. It's still there if I look close, but it's better. This seemed odd to me, but I'm not going to argue. Surprisingly I didn't see any mention of this on the Lenovo forums yet...

Last but not least, there is the new Intel Sandy Bridge chipset issue which has just cropped up. It's unclear yet whether it affects laptops as I think they may use a different chipset, and certainly a different board design, but it's certainly still of concern. I will be waiting to see how it pans out.

Now this may seem like a lot of issues, but I've found issues with almost every product I've purchased. I will say I was more thoroughly pleased with my Eee when I bought it, and with the Toshiba 15" laptop that preceeded this Lenovo. But both also have some issues.

Ultimately I am not certain I am going to keep this thing, though I am leaning toward yes as the price is right and the basic hardware is solid. So far I've been able to work around or mitigate most of the issues I've encountered *except* the possible Intel chipset issue. Waiting to hear about that one...

Mostly I'm just frustrated at what seem like really obvious and, in many cases, preventable issues. These things should be caught in QA. If laptop makers stopped trying to reinvent the wheel with e.g. new keyboard layouts and whatnot, I think there would be a lot less of some of these issues. I just don't understand why they keep doing this as it usually causes more problems than it solves. I suppose they want to differentiate their products, but I say that sticking with what works would be different enough from the competition as it is! You should see HPs new nightmarish "all-in-one touchpad" on all their new laptops, widely regarded as absolutely awful to use. How do these things get out of the labs!?

Regardless of my satisfaction with this model, I think it's a clear case of wait-and-see for any 2nd gen i-series CPU laptops at this point given the Intel chipset issue. Wait and see if it affects laptops, if not then you're in the clear. We should know within a week or two.

- Oshyan

One additional factor, just to add to the confusion, is that 3rd party systems, e.g. video drivers/systems like Nvidia PureVideo, or video codecs like CoreAVC, can also enable GPU acceleration. So in some cases if you can configure a particular player to use a given codec to handle a particular format, you can gain acceleration even if the player itself doesn't natively support it. It's all entirely too complicated really.

- Oshyan

Uh... so basically all knowledge is questionable, especially any presented by anything resembling an "authority". Therefore believe whatever you want and feel free to try to convince others of it. For my part the lack of acknowledgement of basic physics in this thread (e.g. if a "dark" body passed close enough to obscure parts of the sky with its disc, it would cause huge gravitational issues for one thing) means I shan't continue in it. I'm afraid I'm just a bit too serious for the fun here.

- Oshyan

Erm, did no one see my post showing that the Mayan calendar is no more "ending" in 2012 than our own calendars end at the end of our year (or at the end of 100 years, or at the end of the date range current computers can show)? The entire basis for the question is spurious, it's like asking "Why is the moon made of cheese?" when in fact the moon is not made of cheese.

As for Mayan predictive ability, while it's possible they had a thorough understanding of orbital mechanics, an ability to predict seasons is certainly no proof of that; seasonal predictions are relatively trivial compared to orbital mechanics, some problems of which we haven't adequately solved to this day. Even assuming advanced orbital mechanics knowledge they would also have needed telescopes at the least to see any celestial body that we in modern times haven't noticed ourselves. Note that I leave open the possibility that there are unknown objects out there close enough to hit us *and* on a periodic cycle, even though this is extremely unlikely unless the cycle was long enough to escape being recorded in modern history (the past 2000+ years), which would mean it was longer than the Mayan civilization's lifetime anyway and there would be no way for them to know it would return even if they saw it once. That's a whole lot of if's!

- Oshyan

For me DNN is out because of hosting platform requirements. I'm a LAMP guy pretty much, and while I'd consider switching for something *really* good, DNN isn't *that* good.

- Oshyan

1.6 just came out. Hardly any plugins are ready for it, so that's no surprise. Give it a couple months. If you want to do a site *now*, go with 1.5 (if you go with Joomla at all of course).

Commercial software is far from any guarantee of longevity. In fact in the commercial CMS market it may be just the opposite. Due to the amount of stiff competition from free/open source options, many commercial vendors have gone under or gone into "minimal life support" mode. Being commercial they also tend to have smaller communities and less community support (the flip side to having commercial support, of course). That often means less modules/plugins too. The leaders in their respective categories do tend to rise above these issues, vBulletin being one good example (although have you seen the vB back end? UGH!) in that it has a strong community and lots of mods. But that's also partly legacy from being around longer than most other options, free or otherwise. CMSs tend to be even more fragmented, and the "big boys" in that market are quite expensive, while the littler (and cheaper) ones are just not all that well supported outside the company.

Anyway, it sounds like you've made up your mind. Not the choice I'd make of course, but if you're happy with it, that's what matters.

- Oshyan