Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Rarely have I seen such an indepth discussion of the VFX pipeline for a film/short/trailer. While I really like medieval settings but not so much the war side and while I probably never will have the time in my life to play a MMPRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game or whatever they are called these days) I quite enjoy the the all 3d trailer with a huge amount of attention to detail. This must be one of those project that revieved a lot of personal love (you can tell from the little stories inside the bigger stories - the off the main focus details) and most of the stuff is very much handiwork - no automated scripts like Massive for the battle scenes (that means you have to place 7.000+ 3d orks by hand battling it out against each other). The crew talking is funny and engaging and even if you do not have a vested interest in 3d and vfx stuff this (2+ hours) talk is very mind opening and much of it is digestible for the non techie crowd - even if it is just to see the amount of work being put into a 4 minute trailer.

Blur Studio talks about the Warhammer Online Trailer

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In this time of the year when the chinese plastic made with iraqis blood oil toys painted in toxic chemicals hang from the flashy led lit christmas trees (that could have grown to big trees and eat up some CO2 to prolong the time global warming becomes catastrophic or be used as a carbon neutral energy source) and the children lick their corn syrup phtalate soked chemical mixed lollipops made from gene manipulated corn plants that are 50% pesticides 50% useless energy and the family gets together to eat the goose that was force fed the same gene manipulated corn full of pesticides but also sprayed and fed with antibiotics so that the bacteria and viruses can get immune to them - all happily not talking but watching the glowing tube on the other end of the room making them feel guilty that they have not bought more chinese plastic toys - at this time of the year its great to see that there are sane people out there that actually understand that the world as we know it has to come to and end and a new beginning has to look at the faults of our current past. So my christmas present this year is the following paragraph by the author of "Citizen Renaissance":

It is estimated the US economy needs to grow at 3-5% just to stop unemployment from rising. Unfortunately people don’t have insatiable needs (an annoying disagreement with neo-classical economic theory) so we need a huge industry to keep creating desires and wants – called advertising and mass-media. This advertising created consumption fixation merely locks us in to the ultimate lie that extrinsic-values satisfaction will make us happy. As all the stuff we consume does not satisfy our spiritual needs we keep consuming more and more hoping the next fix of our addiction will do the job. So it’s growth for growth’s sake. Not with any philosophical endpoint of seeking ‘good lives’ for all. Just to keep the machine going. What a dull old job politicians have given themselves. Surely a not so sophisticated computer could replace them all if that was all we wanted from politics? Clearly someone needs to pull the power on this crazy merry-go-round and think again with some vision about how we attain ‘good lives’ for all within the carrying capacity of the planet?

The carrying capacity of the planet - that is the phrase of the year. With overpopulation, destruction of natural habitats through expansion of an economic system that just wants growth instead of survival we are somewhere around the threshold of human survival on a large scale. Remember that the current economic and cultural living has only been in place for round about 100 years - a blink in the universal timescale. Look at past empires collapsing out of the blue mostly because the planet could not feed them, water them, shield them.

So when you go shopping for a goose try to get a goose that had a happy live or get a organic tofu goose. When you consider a toy for your toddler instead of giving him 10 plastic toys that will break withing a month give him one solid locally produced handmade wood toy. Don´t give away shit that you wouldn´t see any need for yourself. Don´t give away shit at all. Don´t consume for the sake of consumption. Resist the urge the bling bling and keep your wallet to your chest. Don´t make yourself buy something just to support de economy (read the paragraph above again if you are not getting it). Go to your local farmer market and buy your food there - it might be more expensive but you might also not need as much. Just WAKE THE FUCK UP before its too late for everyone including those who already woke up and see the problem and have not much to stem against it other then little words.

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This is going to be a multipart series on my view on the webdesign process in this day and age with nitty gritty details - to much for most casual readers but not enough for the more professional webbers but just about right to those making websites coming from a more design perspective touching each and every part that touches webdesign as a whole - from the artwork to the programming to the content management to the hosting problems to the philosophies, existing standards nobody cares about nonexisting standards everyone seems to care about. Guaranteed not flash bashing free and guaranteed full of sarcasm. Here is the intro to this never ending saga.

About ten to twelve years ago I got into developing my first website - back then I was neither designer nor programmer but had experience in the latter and was about to study the former. I made this website with a lot of javascript and made the mistake of using images as text as I wanted one font throughout the site. The site looked alright (to me ;) and functioned fine but was unmaintainable for a person who wants to do something else with their time then hacking pure HTML. It had one nice feature so - that was swappable images - something you see nowadays a lot in those fancy iFrame galleries - back then I did not encounter another site that had it. Oh javascript that was something I could identify with as it came so close to BASIC programming which I learned while the east was still the east and the west the bad. "You can´t use javascript, its bad practice - nobody should use javascript ever" was all I got for my month long effort of making a webpage. The site was sitting there for a long long time without any updates and got very stale - at one point - right after the only update it ever recieved -the browsers started to break the site and I decided to pull it.
Since then I have been pondering on making a new site - one with a cool content management system that would enable me to easely update the site, one that is very cutting edge and puts technology to a good use. The longer I pondered the more it became clear that I did not want a website for myself - but rather a framework that could be an umbrella for the myriads of my interests and those around me wanting to produce something cool together with me. On the design end I was still learning and trying to find my style my design mojo. The years went by and the website did not really progress other then in my head. There was a quick attempt at it about 3 years ago that had already an interface designed but that never off the ground because I actually had to finish my diploma and all. Then last years pushed by a lot of different things I actually started to take the plunge - and man if I would have known back then what a journey it would become I would have thought twice about going along, but now 35.000 lines of code and about a year later I am extremely happy with the outcome so far.

Next Part in the next days: Choosing the right Content Management System

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Ok I have my feelers out for a while to see how long the ruling elite can surpress the boiling feeling of the masses and for the last months I was amazed at how great the distraction with bailouts and carcompany dramas has worked to put the focus away from the real underlying problem that is the system itself. In a way I was quite happy because the longer its dragged out while still correcting itself somehow the more chance there is that the transition to any kind of new system might be a smooth one. The worst possible scenario that I can see is a sudden world wide collapse as this will be mayhem.
Now then came Greece with its street protests which were quelled but then flared up again and still do not seem under control - yet these were still not portraing the message of system change as for the mass media the "culprit" of the problem was easely found in the corrupt politicians. Yet some reports from there were already a bit discouraging - like neo nazis helping the government retain control (and if you look at the riot photos you see "police" without uniform beating protestors.) Still the media was very very successful to quell any and all underlying system critique and did everything in their might to make it a local problem - which after all might have been not the worst thing for the world.
But I do sense a great great dissatisfaction among the netizens and its growing and people - normal people with family and older and not radical - are definately starting to wonder if those riots in greece are just the beginning and are starting to feel they should take their feet to the streets en masse. What had been comments I rarely came across over the last years - mostly on ultra leftist website with a know anarchist undertone is slowly but surely spreading out like a fungus to the mainstream. The more people loose their job their home their future the more people wake up from the dystopian capitalistic dream of endless resources and energy and toys and distraction and find themself in a reality that is much more gruesome then they ever expected. These are people who lived in comfort for most of their live being completely disengaged from the real problems of the world and suddenly find themself in the same situation as the somali pirate - trying to survive after being robbed of land and humility by multimillion dollar companies trying to make the fastest buck and passing it on to the superrich.
Over the last couple of days this dissatisfaction is rising quickly and what has been a little match that was reignited only by a few carers has already become a campfire that is slowly spilling its deadly flames over the boundary here and there.
I am deeply worried that this might become an uncontrollable and - most sadly - violent wildfire that might spread around the whole world not very distant in the future. I think they still "hope" that the new president of the center of the capitalistic universe might be able to pull out a miracle but judging from the people he choosed to help him pulling off that miracle I would say there will be more "politics as usual" then anything else - there might be some short sighted painkillers but when they wear off it will be even worse then before. There is no time for bickering and discussion and making compromises - if the system will gradually change to a more sustainable future the departure from bussiness as usual will have to be drastic - it will still be much less drastic then what would happen if those people with the last bit of hope loose their spirit alltogether - in a sense everyday passing will accelerate the feeling and the voices do grow louder - slowly but if you have your feelers out you might start to sense that this is happening - I do and I am trembling with fear of a world in total mayhem - yet I do not see much ways out of it other then somebody somewhere with enough power wake the fuck up - kill big companies alltogether get back into organic small farming - on a big scale, push clean energy - even putting to rest all and each coal, oil and gas production that is not needed to pull us out of the mess (meaning everything that is not essential to survival and to make the switch to sustainable clean environmental friendly energy). I am afraid - very afraid.

the comment that tipped me over the top with my fear:

Thank God we still have guns in America,
because Americans may unfortunately need them to take their county back, and statments like this energy shipping company owner made are just more evidence that it may be sooner rather than later.

Of course he is right and there must be real deep change coming - I was really hoping that the other side wakes up before the general consensus is that it will never wake up and grab the next best weapon of choice and start civil war - not between nations but on economic lines.

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…it was the kind of year in which circulation should have boomed. If you live for a story, this year was an embarrassment of riches.

And yet the decline didn’t just continue. It accelerated.

Andrew Sullivan about the newspaper industry.

I also subscribed to my third Twitter stream - I do not like Twitter that much for the personal stuff like game highscores and such but its kinda great if you want focused updates on something and themediaisdying is such a very focused channel bringing you up to date news on whats going on with the media - in just headlines. Well its been a rough rough week for the media let me tell you that. Every day there was at least one local newspaper ceasing publication, at least 200 people where layed off in some media company - even advertisers and ad agencies seem to start hurting badly - Digitas for example cuts 2.100 jobs in the US alone (big ad agency for print stuff). Now as the cries for a media bailout get louder (its the media with its own voice and while nobody has yet used the "b" word it is coming through in numerous articles around the web that this is indeed what "needs to happen") nobody seems to listen and that is something that should be exactly like that. The old media has done nothing in the past to distract the population, fed it with a lot of bullshit, sided with last century copyright laws and has been slower then a the biggest fattest dinosaur in adapting to the new reality that is realtime news, networked and linked news, crowd publication.
I am sorry for all the authors that are layed off and the content producers - but I am looking forward of seeing an uptick on original stories around the web. Stories that are wonderfully written and researched - stories from real journalists.
Now as for earning money - sorry there is no sound bussiness model (except maybe spot.us if it takes off). So maybe you the journalist side with those who are looking for an alternative monetary system? I am going to ask again in six month…

Posted by fALk at 19:23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You can say what you want but sometimes you get officials that are surprisingly bright - not very often but it happens. So I read today that the german government is considering bringing 50 Mbit/s broadband to every household until 2018 - including remote villages. I was about to close the page with the thought that it might be another scam by the german telekom who is already offering 50Mbit/s via VDSL - which is clearly aimed at broadcasting TV through it and makes the recievers the same couch potatoes they have always been. For me any advancement in internet speed that is not bidirectional can stay where it is. How is 50Mbit/s download going to help when the producers of podcast have to wait for 2 hours to upload their stuff through 1Mbit/s upload speed - the only persons who are capable of broadcasting are again those with money those that are the brainwashers the media elite those that the internet can not use at all if it is to strive - those that are to big to fail but are failing.
Then I clicked on an adjustant link and my eyes almost came out:

Die von der Deutschen Telekom derzeit angebotenen 50 MBit/s via VDSL seien "lächerlich", befand die Regulierungsexpertin am Donnerstag bei einer Anhörung über Next Generation Networks (NGN) im Unterausschuss Neue Medien des Bundestags.

Thats the vice president of the "Bundesnetzagentur" or German Network Agency - regulating our communication networks - saying that a 50Mbit/s VDSL network is laughable and absurd. I could not agree more and that this agency is aware of the scam that DSL and even more so VDSL is, bodes very well for the future of the german internet - now if only the companies would start offering SDSL for prices that are affordable (at the moment SDSL prices are in the range of 3x -20x as those of the high end DSL connections - starting around 60 euros a month for 1Mbit/s up/down). Oh and they finally see the light in putting in empty pipes in the ground when its dug open anyway for future networks with for example glasfibre (different story but here in my hometown they ripped out glassfibre 5 years ago after installing it after the wall came down 15 years ago because they did not want to invest in the backend infrastructure to make internet work over fibre - no joke - that is the German Telekom if you don´t know them yet). What a novel idea - too bad that everyone and their grandchildren already had this idea 15 years ago when you dug up everything anyways.
Anyway its not the worst news you can get in the morning especially since you are investigating how to transmit streaming video from a remote location in the past week.

The quote is from an article in Technology Review and is in german.

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Sometimes you come across an idea that is so intriguing that it changes the world around you and your perception of things of the future. The interface in Minority Report was such a thing. Now I stumbled across Fluid Tunes and I think that goes even further then the interface in Minority Report as it lets you control your screen without touching it and without wearing goofy gloves. The demo program is just that - a demo - you can flip through your iTunes library - but the interaction model is astonishing - you can even push buttons by tapping in the air - the possibilities are AMAZING for a performer that is on the lookout for fast easy interaction with big buttons (VJs for example ;). I know this might be old hat and I have been sitting on it for a while but I am sure there are people out there who have not heard about it. Now imagine this together with Apples patent of a screen that acts as camera (two years ago) and a screen that can detect IR 20 cm away (about 2 month ago) and you might see that this is exactly where Apple might be going with their bigger computers.

Fluid Tunes

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Its design evolution day. Here is a very telling graphic that depicts the evolution of game controllers and the difference on how you pwn the enemy with an xbox vs. a wii vs. a ps3.
I guess you could make the company logos of the gaming consoles out of the hand gesture you use with their controllers.

Originally found here.

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In CI class in university there was some talk about how logos evolved and I have some outstanding books on the logo design with some of these evolutions in it - yet here comes a webpage that has the biggest collection of logo evolution on it that I have seen - from the know (apple, shell) to the more unknown (nokia - hahah). Its a VERY good look at logo culture. Shown here is the IBM logo - the most interesting evolution to me.

Get the rest over at best-ad.

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We should have taken care of basic human needs, by taking them out of profit markets. But we haven't, and so supermarket shelves will be as empty as electronics stores, though both serve entirely different needs and demands. Governments, meanwhile, use what money they can get to prop up an insolvent financial system, whereas their prime concern should be to feed and clothe their citizens, and make sure they have shelter and clean water. If you know of a government that is looking at these issues today, I’d like to know about it.

from the automatic earth .

But then there are people who believe the absolute godly math is more accurate then human peception like this person who is buying stock because they are nice and cheap now. Its by the way the same computer models that just six month ago predicted that we are over the worse spurring a lot of media articles that all will be well and fine. Meanwhile the US has seen the biggest job loss since the great depression and the S&P stock market return on investment is in its lowest category - at a point where it only was once before - yes you guessed right - in the years of the great depression.
The real math says there can not be indefinite growth there are no indefinite resources on this planet - and the only path to our survival as a whole is to reduce our consumption not increase it - you know back down to earth lifestyles where its about survival and advancement of knowledge - not how to make the quickest buck the easiest way with doing the least amount of productive work.

Banking and investing as we've known it won't be back for at least decades. The upcoming round of bank failures, which will leave very few, if any, standing, cannot be prevented. A lot of the suffering among ordinary people can, if only through using the current bail-out funds to make sure every American and European can get at least their basic needs fulfilled . But no politician anywhere is even looking at this reality, and the citizenry has been kept in the dark. It makes the implosion of entire societies an easily predictable fact.

More automatic earth goodness - Its very relieving that there are sane people out there - makes yourself not feel to insane. What we are seeing at the moment are the headlights breaking in slow motion as the 1000km/h dragster that is the kapitalistic system runs into the solid block of concrete that is our earth resources.

Posted by fALk at 12:25 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Adobe needs some fire under its pants and while those designers in Adobes arms are rarely looking for alternatives its still refreshing to see that there is a thriving market for Adobe program alternatives. I know that there are quite a few photoshop contenders out there that are shaping up to become real contenders (and I am not talking about Gimp which some argue is already there as PS replacement - I don´t), what I didn´t know is the huge market for lightweight vector programs of all sorts and kinds and most are programmable - something Adobe will not include into Illustrator in a million years (except for AfterEffects and maybe Flash (out of necessity) Adobe has avoided direct scriptability that they can´t control). The list in the linked article is long and intriguing and covers not only Mac apps but also a LOT of Linux apps and some Win apps - yes I am eying Linux if people haven´t noticed yet - Apples DRM crap and pure consumer orientation is coming to a tipping point for me very slowly (I have been using Apple since 1994 btw). So back to topic - the list of programs is stunning and includes everything from chart drawing to 2d cad oriented programs to experimental vector programs like NodeBox which lets you Python program your art (something very dear to my heart) and then lets you save it as Quicktime animation or PDF still. If you are a graphic designer and have ever needed a vector program you should have a look at this list and see if you might want to replace the worst program in Adobes lineup or finally put your copy of Freehand 10 to the old peoples home.

20 Vector Graphic Editors Reviewed

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I have voiced a lot of disdain for the closed source proprietary slow resource wasting crap that is flash. Flash is not good for video playback (for a number of reasons everyone but google would admit too) its also quite dumb to jail images in flash containers - but both of those things are a common practice around the net (flickr, youtube) - both things will be a part of an ugly past once HTML5 hits the street and moves toward a 50% usage point. SVG, video, animation and audio tags are just too cool to pass up on as a developer - and its all open and standard and complient and such.
Yet there was one thing where flash was until recently considered the only viable option: browser based games and interaction projects. Well in the offline world there is a programming language called processing that is used to make games and physics simulations and interaction models and and and. Its a breed of its own when it comes to programming languages - quite easy to learn and follow and very powerfull in what you can create but unless you are a java fetishist there was no way to run processing stuff inside the browser.
Now with the new breed of browsers around the corner - those that will support HTML5 and have advanced Javascript engines that support the canvas element - its is possible to use the processing language inside javascript with the javascript processing library. Just check out the demos (you might have to use a nightly build of your favorite browser to see the demos working) and see the potential. I did test them with the latest WebKit nightly and all demos are extremely smooth fluid and amazing. With these there is absolutely no excuse to use flash anymore. I will be surprised to see one major website with any kind of flash content in three years - mark my word. Javascript and HTML5 and SVG are going to be the solution to all your pain very very soon - and as a good side note it has to be said that there will be so much kick ass content that people with internet explorer will want nothing more then to upgrade to a browserto something modern (and I do not think there is any way for MS to catch up to either the firefox or the safari or the chrome javascript engine and make HTML5 and SVG available in any amount of time).

Posted by fALk at 12:28 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Lasst euch nicht von dem gewaltigem Krisentitel der Sendung verschreckt fühlen, denn wir chitchatten da nur drüber. Der Rest sind tolle Links: chinesische Unterwassbetonroboter bauen Fotoapperate und kochen Biovitaminzahnpasta. Neues aus der Protosynthese-Pipeline von der GrüneBohnenFraktion und Natürlich nicht zu vergessen die 0.9999beta Radio Webseite. Hat Spass gemacht, uns jedenfalls.
stephan und fALk

Die Sendung befindet sich nun in ihrem neuen Zuhause:

http://radio.prototypen.com

Posted by fALk at 15:28 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature is so beautiful and strange and most of it we haven´t understood or even seen. This sea slug eats sea weeds and takes up the chlorophyl. With that it can then generate power by using photosynthesis. It also harnesses some genes from the plant matter to make its own chlorophyl basically becoming a plant-animal hybrid. It can then live for days off the sun without the need to feed itself. Crazy....

New Scientist Movie about it

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Bank Implode O Meter has some serious "fun" these days as everything they ever predicted is happening exactly as they predicted. Its by now a safe bet to look at the website and see what financial woes coming next. First of all the bailouts ain´t working other then to maintain the status quo just a tiny bit longer. First 700 billion now another 7 trillion and all it does it throwing it to the monsters.

Just as Mish long ago predicted this behemoth will not survive with it’s current high risk, over leveraged business model, the model which took it from the biggest bank on the planet to one on the brink, on life support. Which means that leveraged reckless speculation can build bad assets faster than all the bailouts put together can bail it out which means that and any new fangled, derived short term credit crack fix will transfer the patient from intensive care to the morgue, which means that it would better to shoot the patient yourself than prescribe any those measures that served to put the bank in its condition.

More crank is a waste of time and money, but in the sociopathy of the elites driving the train wreck it is exactly what will be prescribed.

Who is footing the bill? American taxpayers and the frenzy can´t go on much longer because at one point the USofA will be bankrupt and there won´t be anyone bailing them out.
Thats just Citygroup but there is now word on the street that Prime mortgages - you know those mortgages that had been token up by people who could actually afford a mortgage - are now going bust - the subprime market was just a tiny tiny percentage point of all mortgages the biggest chunk is the prime mortgages and its just a matter of time until that market completely collapses - then everything we have seen at the moment will look like a joke. Oh and credit card companies are starting to get worried too. The thing is that you can bailout banks as long as you want - if the people feeding the bank or take up credit are not able to feed the banks anymore because they have not even enough to feed themself then it might be that you put the money into the wrong site of the equation.

Oh and by the way a nice documentary where does the money come from"? Do you know it? I didn´t.

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Take a small aircraft and a good camera, fly to a highaltitude, tip the nose of your aircraft downward 90° let go of your stearing wheel, slowely take out your camera, make all the right setting on it (while the plane slowly accelerates downward to higher and higher speeds), and at just the right moment, when the framing is right, the sun is in the right position breathe in and push the camera trigger, then put the camera safely away take back the steering wheel and pull up the plane just shortly before crashing headways into an amusement park. This is the live of architect and photographer Alex MacLean(attention heavy flash site with no deeplinks - go to "preview new book" to see the pics) who might need some very good meditation techniques to endure this stress at any level. But the outcome are really cool photos of american cities and landscapes and the destruction the american population brings to their own land (purple earth?). The overgrown cars in the forest are interesting not from astetically standpoint but from the idea that is a common thing to do in the US. When I was in South Dakota the forest behind the house was littered with really great 70s cars that actually still worked when you brought a full battery to start them. This is not good for the environment - at some point the oil will leak into the water system - especially on the one shown here. Anyway the photos are mesmerizing and amazing and a warning sign (the suburbs - omfg - who wants to live there?).

Brought to my attention by my parents (yes this makes me proud of them).

Posted by fALk at 21:16 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh the irony is nothing short of breathtaking. Big city investments for cultural heritage points like museums etc are always the prestigious project that talented or big architectural firms look for to make themselves more prestigious. Now apparently the trend in this day and age is to make the building flowing and blending with the environment. Now instead of trying to figure out how a good flow is achieved the architects are looking for the masters of the flow - the skateboarders and they do that without consulting their clients and without making it too public. That tactic has resulted already in three huge projects around the world becoming skaters paradises. A park in Barcelona, the new Phaeno Science Center in Germany and the Oslo Opera House are all designed this way and have already been placed as the best skate spots in the world as a result.
Now if city planners could take that concept and apply it streets and ask the longboarders how to make gentle slopes and what the best pavement is I would be even more happy ;)

Original info from wired.

Posted by fALk at 20:38 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple has opened up the DRMed, stripped down propitiatory miniDisplay port that is to be found on all MacBooks for free licensing.
I beg the gods of hardware heaven to have Apple fail with this endeavor. For humans not intelligent enough to learn from past mistakes there is no place on earth.
This "idea" has failure written all over it. First its a display port standard from apple. Something they have tried at least two times already without any kind of success - just leaving a lot of customers in the dust with exotic connectors that you can not buy any adaptors for anymore (I still have a fully functioning G5 with three adaptors dangling on its back just to get to VGA because a ADC to VGA adaptor is hugely expensive and hard to come by (so its ADC to DVI to VGA) . Secondly - I would be all over this spec if they actually managed to improve upon a spec that is far more versatile and robustly designed to begin with - HDMI. They could be in heaven if they would have made display port not broken by design and integrating degrading DRM in it. You know make it the antithesis of HDMI. But but what they do is try to release a new spec just after they have been blasted with criticism all over the netosphere about their inclusion of DRM so this is a now a hostile market and they think anyone is picking in up? HDMI - while having the same DRM problems at least does not have a marketing problem at the same time. Oh and what about freaking audio? At least the novelty of the failed ADC adaptor was to reduce cable clutter. Now apples "mini" version of the "standard display port" is ommiting the audio spec so you still have to add an audio cable to your clinical clean apple desk? (nothing I mind personally I would like to add - cable clutter has its charme ;)
It will be an epic failure again and I am totally unsure why Apple is putting itself in the same hot waters again as they must have learned from ADC at least a tiny bit - and ADC had a LOT more going for it then the miniDisplayPort - no bad press, not broken by design, less cables.

Posted by fALk at 19:06 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

You know you can sense a kind of cheering in the media for more and bigger bailouts and rarely do you hear voices of concern in the deceasing matter. If you look deep and have read my previous article on why the media might need its own bailout its quite clear that they might not need their own bailout - a bailout of other failing industries is enough to sustain this failing industry as well. Here is a chart to think about if you want to trust the mass media with any information on any bailout - and let me say the US is just an example the list is pretty much the same (just switch us car makers and banks with local car makers and banks). So here is the list of the top advertisers of the american mass media market. There should be a light going on in your head - if not you might be living in a cave.

Hmm 21 billion of advertisment revenues - the top 20 - and all thats in it is cars and banks. Empty words like "too big to fail" and "5 million jobs" and "end of world" take on a whole new meaning if you look at it from the perspective of the media industry. They might be just talking about them self instead of the banks and the cars.

From the excellent media death watch blog newscorpse.

Posted by fALk at 13:10 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its rare that you get a peek into research development of a big software company but Adobe is pursuing a more open path lately with a high profile blog that spills some inside beans and now some researches allowed to put their pet projects on youtube some video sharing site. Now the stuff they are developing is insanely great but the guy ended a totally let down statement "I can´t guarantee that any of the stuff you are seeing is making it into adobe products". Anyway they seem to have found the holy grail of motion tracking if anything that the movie shows is an indication. The part with the two people in the woods and a million trackers are totally stuck to creases on their grey sweaters must be the best motion estimation out there and it seems to work in almost realtime, it can differentiate between different objects and is 2.5D at least (I would venture to guess to get the different objects it has to be actually a 3D tracker). Adobe would be well advised to put out well working easy to use realtime 3d tracker on the market - but then they have to watch out - they might be bought out by the Autodesk 3d monster.

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

Posted by fALk at 12:44 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)