A fantastic documentary chronicling the history of the Internet & Computing in general. It uses some very basic visuals, mostly iconography, to create a surprisingly powerful presentation.
“History of the internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from arpanet to internet. The clip shows a brief overview of this history and shall animate to go on discovering the history of the internet. The history is told with help of the PICOL icons, which are also a part of my diploma. The icons are available for free on picol.org in the size 32×32 pixel
The new feature film “The International” uses the Guggenheim Museum in New York City for a key scene. However, the museum was under construction and not suitable for shooting at the time. Through the magic of CG and Digital Editing, however, they were able to reconstruct the visuals of the building from photographs and reference images.
A pair of researchers at the US Military Academy, West Point, have adapted visualization techniques to computer forensics tools to create a powerful way of mining data from systems. Their results make use of the structure of data to attempt to automatically classify the type of data and can, in some cases, automatically decode and display it.
It is also important to note that the way in which the visual computer forensic tools written by Conti and Dean present the data to the examiner. They place more data in front of the examiner in a smaller amount of screen space. With some plots, Conti and Dean suggest that there are 300 to 900 times more examiner-viewable data on the screen at any one time when compared with standard text or hexadecimal viewers. When combined with the fact that the examiner views the data represented by pixels, the review speed of some file types dramatically increases. In short, visual forensic tools can save an examiner a significant amount of analysis time.
They presented this work at the Blackhat 2008 conference in Las Vegas, NV, and the software is available for download at their website.
One month ago Nvidia released their 180.22 video drivers for Linux OSes, which brought initial support for Linux kernel 2.6.28. Last night (February 11th) Nvidia proudly presented yet another improved version of their proprietary video driver for the Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris open source operating systems. The new version, Nvidia 180.29, offers full OpenGL 3.0 support for all GeForce 8 and newer graphics cards. It also provides support for the following GPUs: GeForce 9300 GE and Quadro NVS 420. The Nvidia 180.29 video driver was also updated yesterday, by the Ubuntu developers, in the daily build of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Among other features brought by the new Nvidia 180.29 video driver we can notice:
Improved OpenGL performance on workstations
Added an error checker of the layer data in VDPAU’s VdpVideoMixerRender function
The VDPAU setup handling on multiple GPUs was improved
The GPU video memory handling coordination, between VDPAU and Nvidia X driver was improved
The X driver was updated to support some GPUs that were not recognized
The nvidia-installer received the ability to run various post- and pre-installation hooks
The metamode parser of the X driver was updated to permit mode names with periods (i.e. ‘.’s)
Added power management workaround and better compatibility with newer Linux 2.6 kernels.
Nvidia 180.29 display driver for Linux also fixes the following issues:
Fixed a VDPAU crash caused by some invalid MPEG-2 streams in the 64-bit version of the drivers
Fixed a VDPAU issue which caused display corruption while decoding MPEG-2 video streams
Fixed an acceleration issue (Xid errors) in the X driver for all GeForce 6 and 7 graphics cards
Fixed a performance issue for integrated GPUs
Fixed a stability issue for OpenGL programs that used FSAA
Fixed AGP GPUs initialization issue, which caused them to be used in PCI compatibility mode
Fixed a stability issue when modifying the clock settings via the Coolbits interface
Fixed a hotkey switching issue on newer mobile GPUs
Fixed a VDPAU green screen issue
Fixed a VDPAU issue which caused it to crash after a restart of the X server, on various GPUs
Fixed a VDPAU crash when DisplayPort devices were used
Fixed a VDPAU hang issue when the blit-based presentation queue was used on multiple GPUs
Fixed another VDPAU hang issue using the overlay
Fixed a VDPAU issue which caused the overlay-based presentation queue to not be used on component video connected displays.
AWN has a great article talking about how 3D Animation is now not simply an afterthought, but is quickly becoming and an integral part of the movie-making process.
More than 50 years after its debut, 3-D movies are an idea whose time has finally come — and nowhere is that more apparent than in animation. It’s animation — CG, in particular — that to date has made the best use of 3-D and is in many ways best suited to the technique with its 3D virtual space.
Dreamworks in particular has declared that all future animated films will be entirely in 3D. Hopefully some other studios will start to do similar.
GE has created a neat little website using Augmented Reality technology to showcase Solar and Wind Farm technology. Requires Flash, a WebCam and Microphone for full effect.
A few other companies have done this, most notably the Mini Cabrio Ad in recent german automotive magazines. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed a link at the bottom to download the source code to it all.
Researchers in the US have teamed with a company named VisionGate and developed a new visualization tool for single cells that can create interactive 3D Visualizations.
The new microscope is known by the trademarked name Cell CT because it works similarly to a CT scan, though on a very small scale.
In a CT scan, the patient is immobile while the X-ray machine rotates.
In the Cell CT microscope, each cell is embedded in a special gel inside a glass tube that rotates in front of a fixed camera that takes many pictures per rotation.
Bloomberg is reporting that Midway Games has filed for Bankruptcy protection.
Feb. 12 Bloomberg — Midway Games Inc., the creator of the Mortal Kombat video-game series, sought bankruptcy protection from creditors, saying a change in ownership accelerated buyback requirements.
The company listed assets of $167.5 million and debt of $281 million as of Sept. 30 in Chapter 11 documents filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Nine affiliates also sought protection.
VizWorld.com 
Comments