Nintendo’s new ad for Wario Land: Shake It, a new game on the Wii. It’s an excellent example of using something most people are used to (YouTube) and doing something totally unexpected with it. Simply out-of-the-box marketing.
This you really must see…
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Seems like PhysX from NVidia is going to be the next step in graphic card acceleration technology. No doubt it is also going to be a strong marketing point for NVidia as soon as more games start supporting it.
For a better read up on PhysX, do check out Wiki’s definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX
Just when I dissed M$ for their poor version of Windows a couple of days ago… haha!
Watch this video of the latest upcoming imaging technology from Microsoft, and be blown away. This is truly amazing stuff.
The technology he was showing took pictures and other image data and processed it the same way our brains might process images.
Like when we see pictures of a building from different angles - although we’ve never actually physically gone to that building before, our minds can somehow imagine moving around and exploring that building.
This is one of the things this technology can do.
And also, it seems to have no limits to how many times you can magnify a picture you can always see its tiniest of details…
More bizzare news…
Well not bizzare actually, cool in fact.
Proof that a dog is man’s best friend…
MASONVILLE, Colo. - Zoey is a Chihuahua, but when a rattlesnake lunged at her owners’ 1-year-old grandson, she was a real bulldog.
Booker West was splashing his hands in a birdbath in his grandparents’ northern Colorado back yard when the snake slithered up to the toddler, rattled and struck. Five-pound Zoey jumped in the way and took the bites.
“She got in between Booker and the snake, and that’s when I heard her yipe,” Monty Long, the boy’s grandfather, said Thursday.
The dog required treatment and for a time it appeared she might not survive the bites she suffered earlier this month. Now she prances about.
“These little bitty dogs, they just don’t really get credit,” Booker’s grandma Denise Long told the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald.
If you own an iPod, try not to show it off while jogging out in the open, or you may get more than just “electrifying” tunes.
Well doing anything these days can be dangerous, but hey… doesn’t hurt to know about this huh?
Experts warn of lightning-strike injuries with iPods
Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes.
A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning traveled through his music player’s wires.
Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn.
Emergency physicians report treating other patients with burns from freak accidents while using personal electronic devices such as beepers, Walkman players and laptop computers outdoors during storms.
Michael Utley, a former stockbroker from West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, who survived being struck by lightning while golfing, has tracked 13 cases since 2004 of people hit while talking on cell phones. They are described on his Web site, www.struckbylightning.org.
Contrary to some urban legends and media reports, electronic devices don’t attract lightning the way a tall tree or a lightning rod does.
“It’s going to hit where it’s going to hit, but once it contacts metal, the metal conducts the electricity,” said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an ER doctor at University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.
When lightning jumps from a nearby object to a person, it often flashes over the skin. But metal in electronic devices — or metal jewelry or coins in a pocket — can cause contact burns and exacerbate the damage.
A spokeswoman for Apple Inc., the maker of iPods, declined to comment. Packaging for iPods and some other music players do include warnings against using them in the rain.
Lightning strikes can occur even if a storm is many miles away, so lightning safety experts have been pushing the slogan “When thunder roars, go indoors,” said Cooper.
Jason Bunch, 18, says it wasn’t even raining last July, but there was a storm off in the distance. Lightning struck a nearby tree, shot off and hit him.
Bunch, who was listening to Metallica while mowing the grass at his home in Castle Rock, Colorado, still has mild hearing damage in both ears, despite two reconstructive surgeries to repair ruptured eardrums. He had burns from the earphone wires on the sides of his face, a nasty burn on his hip where the iPod had been in a pocket and “a bad line up the side of my body,” even though the iPod cord was outside his shirt.
“It was a real miracle” he survived, said his mother, Kelly Risheill.
The Canadian jogger suffered worse injuries, according to a report in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
The man, a 39-year-old dentist from the Vancouver area, was listening to an iPod while jogging in a thunderstorm when, according to witnesses, lightning hit a tree a couple of feet away and jumped to his body. The strike threw the man about eight feet and caused second-degree burns on his chest and left leg.
The electric current left red burn lines running from where the iPod had been strapped to his chest up the sides of his neck. It ruptured both ear drums, dislocated tiny ear bones that transmit sound waves, and broke the man’s jaw in four places, said Dr. Eric Heffernan, an imaging specialist at Vancouver General Hospital.
The injury happened two summers ago and despite treatment, the man still has less than 50 percent of normal hearing on each side, must wear hearing aids and can’t hear high-pitched sounds.
“He’s a part-time musician, so that’s kind of messed up his hobby as well,” Heffernan said.
Like the Colorado teen, the Canadian patient, who declined to be interviewed or identified, has no memory of the lightning strike.
In another case a few years ago, electric current from a lightning strike ran through a man’s pager, burning both him and his girlfriend who was leaning against him, said Dr. Vince Mosesso, an emergency doctor at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Eardrum ruptures are considered the most common ear injury in lightning-strike victims, occurring in 5 percent to 50 percent of patients, according to various estimates — whether or not an electronic device is involved. A broken jaw is rare, doctors say.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/07/12/ipods.lightning.ap/index.html
Again, we are changing so fast we don’t even realize it.
Here comes Microsoft Surface…
Microsoft Surface (Codename: Milan), is a forthcoming product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects. It was announced on May 30, 2007 at D5, and is expected to be released by commercial partners in November 2007. Initial customers will be in the hospitality businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, retail, and public entertainment venues.
Here’s a Microsoft Surface parody video just for laughs. Remember, this is just a parody.
Still cool though…
Anyway for real facts…
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special barcode labels on top of it.
Surface has been optimized to respond to 52 touches at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group’s marketing director, “dipped” his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.
In addition to recognizing finger movements, Microsoft Surface can also identify physical objects. Microsoft says that when a diner sets down a wine glass, for example, the table can automatically offer additional wine choices tailored to the dinner being eaten.
Prices will reportedly be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit.[1] However Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 3 to 5 years.[2]
The machines, which Microsoft debuted May 30, 2007 at a technology conference in Carlsbad, California, are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.
Watch out for it…
Global warming? Well, the experts don’t think so…
Prepare for Global Cooling.
Don’t blame rising levels of carbon dioxide (C02) for whatever global warming is now taking place; put the blame on “old sol” — the sun may be getting ready to put the world into the deep freezer.
So say a growing number of scientists who have studied the effect of the sun on the earth’s climate and concluded that the only thing scientists understand about climate change is that it is always changing.
“Climate stability has never been a feature of planet earth,” explains R. Timothy Patterson professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University in an article in the Financial Post.
“The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3 C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long ‘Younger Dryas’ cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6 C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s.”
Dr. Patterson insists that even though advocates of the global warming theory such as Al Gore are insisting that the “the science is settled,” that is far from being the case.
Read the rest of the article here http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/6/21/123227.shtml
Know the recent blockbuster 300, all six-packs, yelling, killing and especially stunning cinematography?
Well guess what. Adobe played a big role for the movie with its versatile After Effects and Photoshop software.
Adobe has posted a case study on its Web site detailing the use of After Effects and Photoshop in the VFX-heavy blockbuster 300.
Photoshop was used to create the concept and poster artwork, and for colour correction and rotoscoping of key scenes. After Effects was used to composite the live-action, bluescreen footage with the CG environments in some scenes.
The piece interviews the film’s visual effects art director, Grant Freckelton, and DFX supervisor Tyler Foell from Pixel Magic, one of the VFX houses that worked on the film.
The case study can be read here.
For Spaarta!!
A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit.
TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users’ activities on the site. The judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, however, granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal.
The appeal must be filed by June 12, according to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney.
TorrentSpy has promised in its privacy policy never to track visitors without their consent.
“It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users,” Rothken said. “If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.”
The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files.
Representatives of the trade group could not be reached for comment.
The court’s decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites, said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He calls the ruling “unprecedented.”
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EFF, which advocates for the public in digital rights’ cases, is still reviewing the court’s decision, but von Lohmann calls what he’s seen so far a “troubling court order.”
This is believed to be the first time a judge has ordered a defendant to log visitor activity and then hand over the information to the plaintiff.
“In general, a defendant is not required to create new records to hand over in discovery,” von Lohmann said. “We shouldn’t let Web site logging policies be set by litigation.”
Many Web companies keep visitor logs, which can include Internet Protocol addresses, as well as other information. Some choose not to record this data, including EFF, von Lohmann said.
