Who hasn't been here? Filled with everything from copyright-infringed television show clips to low-quality video blogs, Youtube.com continues to become a favourite pastime on the Internet.

"We're creating a stage for everyone, and allowing everyone to take part in this process," said the website's co-founder Chad Hurley.

He started the site in his garage with Steve Chen, while they were looking for jobs. The idea behind California-based Youtube is simple: users can upload videos for free, and post them for anyone to watch and rate.

"It's just one great place for anybody to go to, to get any kind of video that's happened," said Mike Farrell of Youthography, a marketing and communications consultancy.

"It started out as a bit of a small community, but it's totally blown up now."

The site now attracts more than 100 million hits a day.

The rising attention has made Internet stars of countless silly attention seekers, like a pair of Chinese students who used a webcam to record a performance of a popular boy band song.

Popular videos often create imitators and spread like wildfire, like a video showing what happens when a roll of Mentos candy mints are dropped into a bottle of Diet Pepsi.

Other videos are far more serious. Troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have started posting their own videos, offering insights into their day-to-day lives in some of the most violent places on the planet.

Companies have also taken notice. Some have released so-called "viral ads" on YouTube.com - edgy commercials, often purposely made to look amateurish, that are designed to be passed on through word of mouth.

Now companies like Google and Yahoo are rushing to try and catch up to youtube, with their own online video sites.

But the founders aren't worried.

"We are at the forefront of this cultural shift," he told The Associated Press earlier this year. "They are all going to be chasing us."

Microsoft's Photosynth takes collections of images, analyses them for similarities, and then displays them in a reconstructed 3D space.

The system, to be previewed at a computer graphics meeting in Boston, will allow users to walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.

Microsoft says Photosynth should be available for use later this year.

Richard Szeliski, principal researcher at Microsoft Research who developed the technology with Noah Snavely and Steven Seitz, of the University of Washington, said: "The system builds a 3D model just from a raw collection of photographs."

'Geometry problem'

He said the technology works by scanning collections of photographs, which can be taken from different cameras at different times.

It picks out distinctive features in each image and cross-references them against the other photographs, checking for similarities.

This allows it to pinpoint a feature's 3D position and to also calculate where the position of the camera would have been when the picture was taken.

"Then basically, it is just a geometry problem," explained Dr Szeliski.

"You are simultaneously adjusting the position of the camera and where those little pieces of images are until everything basically snaps together."

The prototype can use as few as two pictures but, said Dr Szeliski, it becomes a lot more exciting when several dozen images are used.

The 3D model will enable people to move through a scene, looking at pictures from any angle, click on specific photos, zoom in or out of a feature, and see where snaps were taken in relation to other images.

Dr Szeliski said: "I think the photo-sharing websites will be early-adopters of this technology.

"Wherever people share photos, instead of just seeing a gallery of unorganised photos, now you can pull everyone else's photos together and make a rational sense out of it."

The other obvious application, he added, would be for tourism and property, where a city could provide a virtual tour or a hotel could potential visitors walk through its lobby.

The researchers will be presenting a research paper detailing the technology at this week's Siggraph 2006 conference in Boston, which looks at the latest developments in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Microsoft have said they believe the technology will almost certainly be web-based, and people should be able to run the application later this year.

"Within the next year we hope to see this in wide usage," added Dr Szeliski.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5235724.stm

Depending on your combination of processor and motherboard, you may also be able to change the actual internal frequency multiplier of the CPU itself, which multiplies the FSB speed to arrive at the actual speed of the CPU in GHz or MHz.

For example: an Athlon XP 3000+ 'Barton' processor has a multiplier of 13 and uses a FSB speed of 166 Mhz. 166Mhz x 13 equals approximately 2.16 Ghz. Change the multiplier to 13.5 and you get (166MHz x 13.5 =) 2.24 Ghz.

Although a small change to the multiplier has a larger proportional effect on your systems speed than increasing the front side bus a considerable amount, the actual performance advantage of increasing the CPU multiplier is not so simple. As the multiplier purely effects the processor's performance, the performance gained by increasing it is not felt system-wide, as is the case with overclocking the FSB. It merely enables the processor to do more work per second. In fact, it may well serve you better to decrease the CPU multiplier in order to overclock the FSB to a higher frequency than would otherwise be possible.

This is something to consider if you have high-quality memory that is rated for greater speeds than the FSB of your computer requires. Many memory producers make DDR memory that is capable of running at much higher frequencies than modern computers normally use, specifically for overclocking purposes.

The option for changing the multiplier is found in the BIOS in the same location as the FSB options, generally the 'frequency\voltage control' section.

Raise the multiplier only a step at first, in concert with overclocking the FSB. Find the maximum stable speed you can achieve, then benchmark. If you have high-spec memory, consider lowering the multiplier and increasing the FSB, then compare the new set of benchmarks to the previous ones.

For those of you with Linksys Routers
Here's how to stealth your port 113.

Open your Internet Explorer home page and in the address bar type in
http:// (then your ip address given to you by your router). If you dont know
it follow this thread: Start/All Programs Accessories/Command Prompt.
In Command Prompt type in ipconfig(spacebar)/all - now dont type in the
spacebar but hit your spacebar then forward slash/all. your ip address will
come up.
If we have the same router it should be 192.168.1.1
So it should be http://192.168.1.1 -  when you click go an NR041 window should pop up.
Now in the Password box type in the password given to you by Linksys or if
we have the same it should be admin <--- (in lowercase). You wont need to
type in a Username

When the Cable/Router Basic Setup window opens it may open to the Basic
Settings so if this is the case click on the Advanced Settings tab.
When the Advanced Settings window opens click on the Forwarding tab. - The
Advanced Settings may automatically open at first so the better.

Now when the Forwarding window opens, on the left hand of that window go
down to Customized Applications.
In the box below Customized Applications type in a title called Port 113
Stealth.

Now in the following boxes to the right you should type this:

Ext. Port         - 113

Protocol TCP -  put a check in this box by clicking on it.

Protocol UDP - leave blank.

Int Port           - 113

IP Address     - 192.168.1.250

Enable            - put a check in this box by clicking on it.

Now click on the Apply button below.

Now go to http://www.grc.com and do a port scan and vollia your port 113 will now be in
stealth mode.

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