Author: coutinho

By (author unknown), The Big Picture – December 07, 2010 at 11:45AM

Aerial view of Battleship Row in the opening moments of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7th, 1941. (U.S. Navy)

By Sam Biddle, Gizmodo – December 07, 2010 at 10:20AM

There are plenty of ways to get a camera in the air—but few are cheap. Even fewer of them are as clever and (downright pretty) as cinematographer Tom Guilmette’s floating balloon and fishing rod contraption. And it’s HD! More »

By nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson), Ars Technica » Infinite Loop – December 07, 2010 at 12:30AM

The original MacSpeech Dictate was a decent product with some real flaws. Its best feature, the stunning voice recognition engine, was licensed from Nuance, so we’ve been waiting eagerly to see just what Nuance could do with the product after it purchased MacSpeech last year. Now we know.

The newly christened “Dragon Dictate” appeared last month, and we’ve been putting it through its paces ever since. The new release does bring Dictate more in line with its excellent PC counterpart, but the changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary. If you want better control over your machine, nice vocabulary editing tools, and an improved recognition engine, you’ve got it in Dragon Dictate. If you want to be free from the shackles of Dictate’s “golden rule”—about which more later—you’re out of luck.

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By Gareth Branwyn, MAKE – December 06, 2010 at 06:00PM

Man, and I thought the hacks on the Wii sensor bar came fast and furious. Amazing what people are doing with the Xbox Kinect and how viral all of these hacks quickly become. This one, an autonomous quadrotor, uses the Kinect Sensor for navigation and obstacle avoidance. It was done as part of the STARMAC Project in the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley (EECS department). [Thanks, Blake!]

Quadrotor Autonomous Flight and Obstacle Avoidance with Kinect Sensor

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By jacqui@arstechnica.com (Jacqui Cheng), Ars Technica – December 06, 2010 at 04:20PM

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to mimic the efforts of its music industry counterpart and put pressure on universities to curb student piracy. The organization notified its partners this week that it would begin sending out letters to college and university presidents in the US “calling their attention” to the anti-infringement provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The letter—copied to the campus CIOs—asks universities to cut off infringing students or face potentially crippling consequences.

What are those consequences? The HEOA now requires universities to take steps to stop copyright infringement on campus in order to receive state funding and student aid. Of course, the MPAA isn’t capable of pulling university funding over some shared movies, but the organization is capable of spending millions of dollars to lobby state and federal officials to enforce those parts of the HEOA.

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By Brian Barrett, Gizmodo – December 06, 2010 at 09:40AM

Uh oh. I’m not sure who gave the green light to go from “fun and playful” Kinect hacks to “terrifying Predator-vision drone” Kinect hacks. But after watching this video, it’s clear that that person has clearly doomed us all. More »

By Noemi Twigg, ForeverGeek – December 06, 2010 at 09:00AM

Winter is coming, and George R.R. Martin readers cannot wait till Spring 2011, when it actually does. Confused? In a world where the Starks, the Lannisters, and the Targaryens are the main players, summers last for decades, and so does winter. The longer and more pleasant the summer is, the colder the winter will be. In Spring next year, those of us in the real world will have the chance to (visually) enter the world that George R.R. Martin has created, courtesy of HBO.

It really is not a secret just how much I get excited about The Song of Ice and Fire series, and much like other fans, I have been awaiting the premiere of HBO’s take on the story. They released a teaser earlier this year, and that was enough to get me all worked up. You can just imagine how enthralled I was with this video showing more insights about the making of the show.

A little background for those yet unfamiliar with the series. Considered high fantasy, the story is set in a world that is not that different from our own, but is totally not restricted by geographical boundaries as we know it. This makes for a realistic enough setting, but also allows for imagination to run freer. Politics, sex, drugs, war, dragons – it doesn’t get any better! Here, see it for yourself.

As far as I am concerned, I think they did the casting very well. For the most part, the characters look pretty much how I pictured them in my head. Only Jaime Lannister – played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau – didn’t meet my expectations. I thought that he would have been fairer and “prettier”. As for Ned Stark – played by Sean Bean – I think they did excellently.

The sets and costumes will definitely make you stare. The attention to detail is amazing, and since there are no real historical references to stay true to, the artists behind the production really went all out.

Needless to say, I am wishing that it were Spring 2011 right now. In the meantime, I shall keep these words in mind:

“My sweet summer child, what do you know about fear? Fear is for the long night, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep. Fear is for the winter.”

Here are some photos from the making of Game of Thrones to further whet your appetite. ¹

1. Source: HBO – Making of Game of Thrones

By Darren Murph, Engadget RSS Feed – December 06, 2010 at 08:42AM

Just in case you were concerned that the 3D revolution hadn’t yet taken over the scientific research field, EPFL is here to convince you that all is well. Researchers from a pair of EPFL laboratories have recently invented a fly-inspired dome camera that’s not only loaded down with cameras to snag views from (nearly) all angles, but also equipped with an output algorithm that constructs a bona fide 3D image. The trickeration lies within the hardware platform, which calculates depth on each camera image and then reconstructs a 3D visual based on how far away things truly are. That’s a far more sophisticated approach than the stereoscopic one used on existing 3D televisions, as the depth would (theoretically) change as your angle of view changed. There’s an outstanding patent application on the approach, and if the world at large latches on, we could see this thing used for “video surveillance, movie making, and creating backgrounds for video games.” Among other things, of course. A demonstrative vid awaits you just after the break.

Continue reading EPFL’s fly-inspired 3D camera takes omnipresence to the third dimension (video)

EPFL’s fly-inspired 3D camera takes omnipresence to the third dimension (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By (author unknown), MacNN | The Macintosh News Network – December 15, 2010 at 11:55AM

Flash Player 10.2, currently in beta, has just a tenth the CPU consumption of the v10.1 plugin in some cases, says Adobe product manager John Nack. A primary feature of v10.2 is Stage Video, which can shift most of the burden for Flash video to a GPU. GPU acceleration was first introduced in v10.1….

By Becky Stern, MAKE – December 15, 2010 at 11:00AM

The latest from art pranksters Ariel Schlesinger and Aram Bartholl in Germany is Looptaggr, a simple fixture for a spraypaint can that spins a stencil in front of the nozzle, effectively printing the same message over and over in a line. Photo tutorial included.

More:

• Bike accessory leaves a trail of chalk behind you
• Tour de France chalkbot

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