What must Kristy Lee Cook do to get eliminated from American Idol?
No offense to the lovely singer. We’d never wish an elimination on anyone. But her butchering of a Beatles classic seemed to make her the front-runner to be voted off the show last night. Instead, David Hernandez said goodbye.
At least he has a lucrative career he can go back to…
Do you think David Hernandez deserved to go home? Who do you think is the worst performer on American Idol?
Ashlee Simpson says a makeover changed her life. Somehow we imagine her pimp and all that plastic surgery contributed something as well.
Whatever the reason, the girl has come a long way since being a “style wallflower” in the shadow of older sister Jessica Simpson.
So Ash says as this week’s Us Weekly top story – which breaks a seemingly years-long run by Britney Spears and The Hills cast on the cover.
Not to worry, though – both are still in the sidebar.
“I used to look at a beautiful girl on the cover of a magazine and think I could never be that,” the 23-year-old Ashlee Simpson told Us.
But Simpson – who has churned through countless haircuts and colors over her six years of stardom – has graced many a celebrity news rag.
Now the lip-synching Pete Wentz plaything is the cover girl on Us‘ 2008 Beauty Makeover Special issue, whatever the heck that is.
“I definitely embrace my sexy side, but at the end of the day, I still feel like the girl next door,” the always-insightful Ashlee Simpson tells Us.
The girl next door with a new nose, lips and rack, apparently.
Simpson also opened up about her April 2006 rhinoplasty: “I think as long as people have two eyes, then you probably know the answer.”
“[Plastic surgery] is something that everybody should think about for a really long time,” the hack singer stated. “Once you know that it is something you really feel comfortable with, then to each their own.”
Still, the star downplays her own transformation (follow this link for another kind of Ashlee Simpson – the Oklahoma version).
“I was never really unhappy with how I looked, [and] I don’t think I am more beautiful than I was [before],” Ashlee Simpson said.
“I just see the same old goofy girl I see every day.”
Nicole Scherzinger and The Pussycat Dolls recently performed for the army in Kuwait.
We know most troops wanna come home and everything – but if remaining in battle means they get an up close look of Scherzinger and Jessica Simpson (who also made the trip), perhaps enlisting wasn’t such a bad idea.
A Nicole Scherzinger nude performance would do a lot to help troop morale. We’re just sayin.
The MySpace page of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, 22, provides a window into the life of a high-end prostitute and aspiring musician who went from a broken home in New Jersey to a lucrative “career” in the city that never sleeps.
In an August 30 posting on MySpace, Ashley Dupre (born Ashley Youmans, then Ashley Alexandra Dupre, then by her hooker alias, “Kristen”) wrote:
“The past few months have been a roller coaster with so called friends, lovers, and family … but its something you have to deal with and confront in order to move on …”
“What destroys me, strengthens me” is the deep slogan next to an Ashley Alexandra Dupre photo. There are other Ashley Dupre photos showing her at various places, including in a bikini on a boat in a tropical locale.
The number of hits to MySpace page soared to two million as the story broke linking Dupre to the prostitution ring frequented by Eliot Spitzer.
The New York Governor announced his resignation, effective Monday, after being snared in a federal investigation of Emperor’s Club VIP.
There is actually a photo gallery dedicated to Spitzer on Ashley Dupre’s MySpace page, including shots of the posh Washington hotel where their trysts occurred.
Now the Emperor’s Club’s most famous employee, the 22-year-old Dupre describes her favorite musical artists as Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Frank Sinatra, among many others.
Her Web site boasted a recording of a song, “What We Want.”
“I know what you want, you got what I want. I know what you need. Can you handle me?” Ashley Alexandra Dupre sings to all who will listen. Gulp.
“Kristen” briefly spoke to the New York Times last night about the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, but provided few sordid details. Sorry guys.
Law enforcement officials identified the governor as a “Client No. 9″ who had a February 13 sexual encounter with “Kristen” and paid her $4,300.
The rest, as they say, is political sex scandal history. Anyway, below is a look at some of Ashley Dupre’s MySpace friends. They look like a classy bunch!
It’s a tough call, but ForBiddeN aka Christine Dolce is our face! Follow the jump for a glimpse at a very special Ashley Dupre Facebook group!
Gov. Eliot Spitzer, with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, at his side, announced his resignation.
This is what you get when you capture 69,550 full resolution frames from the six Star Wars movies and combine them with a version of DaVinci’s Last Supper on a PC with mosaic-making software and a custom matlab-based algorithm. The 262-megapixel mosaic (24,168 x 10,864 pixels) took two weeks to complete, including 30 hours of computing power and manual retouching for the final version. Avinash Arora, the guy who did it, tells us about the process.
galleryPost(“starwarssupper”, 3, “Star Wars Last Supper”);
Jesús Díaz: What materials did you use for creating this huge thing?
Avinash Arora: The 69,550-image collection I made is from all the movies. Originally I extracted EVERY image using vlc’s image output plug-in from Episode IV, and used a photoshop programmed command to delete every 19 frames, and save the 20th. Only after that did I discover AndreaMosaic could do that for me, which saved me a ton of time in the other five movies. As the base, I used Eric Deschamps’ Star Wars Last Supper painting done for Giant Magazine.
JD: What kind of computer did you use to do this?
AA: An Asus M2N SLI motherboard with AMD 5400+ X2, eVGA nVidia Geforce 8800GTS 640MB, and 2GB DDR2 Corsair XMS memory.
JD: What about the software?
AA: The original software I used is AndreaMosaic, but I found that the algorithm wasn’t really producing the results I wanted. I ended up tinkering with the settings and producing dozens of sample mosaics to view, and I did some research and found out how it worked.
JD: Did you get what wanted at the end? What did you do to improve the quality?
AA: I created my own slightly modified algorithm to include pathlines of the strongest “importance” (or rather color distinction, so I could find pictures that followed the image’s contours for every detail) I got more satisfying results. I kept tinkering with this one and made six full-size mosaics, until I finally settled on the last one…
JD: And that was that?
AA: No, I went to work on it by hand after that. I replaced at least a thousand images by hand that looked like they were out of place (my programming isn’t perfect), and did some color corrections on others. The entire thing was done when I took sections and pieces from the mosaics I made with AndreaMosaic, my own matlab-based algorithm, and the original image I drew inspiration from, and put it all together in Photoshop (I also discovered that .psd files have a maximum size of 2GB, but luckily .raw files do not.)
JD: How long did it take you, then?
AA: Each movie’s image extraction process took about an hour, that was the easy part. Each sample mosaic I made for testing took about 90 minutes. Each full mosaic I made took about 6-8 hours. Once I had the final mosaic and went to work, I’d say I put about 25-30 hours of work into touching up by hand.
The process (not including extracting the images from the movies) took me about two weeks from the time I made the first full mosaic, about a dozen samples, second full mosaic, dozen samples, etc.
During the two weeks I missed all but about two classes, and the day I finished I took an exam for a class I forgot I had…
JD: Geezuss…
AA: Don’t worry, I still did well. 🙂
JD: How big is the thing?
AA: Each image was about 640×272, but when placed into the mosaic they were shrunken down to 120 pixel wide. Each image is a full-quality jpeg, and they’re cut up into folders (because my computer doesn’t take too kindly to one folder with 69,550 files in it).
The final resolution of the image 24,168 x 10,864 pixels… 262 megapixels. Unfortunately I couldn’t print it at the epic level I wanted to, which would have been a 5×11′ composite, not a 3×6′, and that would have been a 712-megapixel image. The guy who prints them says his computer is incapable of opening an image that large (which flattened would have been about 3GB… and uncompressed almost 40GB.) [Avinator]
Posted on: March 13, 2008
Update: Video of project Pwonage after the jump. The beta 2.0 firmware that comes with the iPhone SDK has been modified to unlock the iPhone and run any application. Part of the Pwnage Project, the hacked firmware will allow you to do anything you want, including the installation of both official and unofficial apps, and even patches. We got the exclusive details directly from the DevTeam, including the fact that it is going to be extremely hard for Cupertino to close this new hole:
pwned firmware means it’s custom [firmware], you can have it install anything you would ever want 🙂 Pwned works with some magic, it will be hard to close but nothing is impossible (from Apple) with a mindtwist. But first, we will enjoy 🙂
They told us that this is all part of their previous Pwnage project, which instead of trying to hack into the iPhone, directly patches the firmware itself to both unlock it, so you can use the iPhone with any carrier you want, and allow you to install any applications you want. You can see how it works here:
According to the Dev Team, the custom 2.0 firmware (technically, 1.2.0,) is now up and running without problems in many of their iPhones, running unsigned applications without a single problem. However, current Installer.app applications need to be changed: “they changed lots of the API, a lot. We will see how much has to be changed to the Toolchain [the previous development tool for iPhone independent developers] to still work after 2.0.”
The best news, however, is this: “the hacked 1.2 firmware works with anything. AT&T and others, it’s pwned. And Apple will not really be able to patch it this time… somehow :-)”
I’m flabbergasted. As Han Solo would say, “that’s one in a million, kid!” Once again.
The cool thing here is that Dev Team told us that this is 1) a true unlock and 2) Apple will have a very difficult time closing this hole. That’s the news, not just jailbreak—in fact, it’s not even jailbreak in the classic sense. It’s built-in the hacked firmware, which allows for installation of any application, unsigned or “Apple Approved”
In other words, true carrier and applications independence. And for a long time.
Note: as you can see, the Dev Team is still working hard in making the iPhone a completely open, carrier-independent platform. If you want to help them, please send a Paypal donation to iphone.devteam@gmail.com or join them at hackint0sh.org.
Today in New York, Acer’s big surprise is the Aspire “Gemstone Blue” notebook, equipped with a Blu-ray drive, true high-def screen, and CineReal sound, a second generation of Dolby Surround. Sexy, and yes, blue, and it doesn’t appear to suffer from port envy like some other notebooks, though it is slender. In size it’s somewhere between HP’s dv series and Dell’s XPS M series. That’s not just a size comparison, but a qualitative judgment call: this thing looks unambitiously nestled between the two other PC giants’ designs. With such mystery and fanfare, we were hoping for a tad more of an exciting, iconoclastic design. It is, however, a decent product, so have a look. UPDATE: Weights and model numbers below.
It’s got a cool touchdial on the left for some nice multimedia controls; it’s called CineDash, and it’s got volume, mute, hold, media transport and menu navi.
The largest of the two models, the 8920, has a 1920×1080 18.4″ screen, and a 90% (ATSC?) color gamut. The smaller, the 6920, is 16″ with same resolution and 60% of the color gamut. As you can guess from those screen resolutions, both can support full Blu-ray playback. (Another blue reference.) They’re saying 3 hours playback on the 18.4″, and 2.5 hours of movie playback on the 16″ one. There will be an “SD” version with 720p playback of either DVD or Blu-ray.
They’re shipping in a month. The starting price point is $1,700, with a typical config around $1,900.
UPDATE: The weights are a bit troubling for anyone interested in mobility: Over 9 lbs for the 18.4 incher, and nearly 8 lbs for the 16 incher.
Check out some additional specs:
[Acer]
Wired’s Megan McCarthy caught geeklover Julia Allison cozying up to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW. But, sadly, we can’t expect the pair to get together anytime soon. Zuck only cheats on his girlfriend with his girlfriend and Julia, well, she’s just not that into him. From a post to her blog, last summer:
Quite honestly, Mark pushes the boundaries of my “dorks can be hot” theory. He’s not there yet. Or maybe it’s that he’s a redhead? Hmm.
Posted on: March 13, 2008
Super director Bryan Singer is returning for a new Superman movie.
Despite speculation that the revamped franchise wouldn’t come back, Singer confirmed that the follow-up to Superman Returns is currently in development.
According to Bryan, the next installment will be more action packed. Translation: The studio is making demands! They want/need this next one to make more $$$$$$$.
Fans supposedly weren’t so into the last one because it was more story-driven and romantical.
Are you willing to give Superman another chance?
We say more Brandon Routh hotness in Superman tights is a good thing!
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