These macro photographies taken from the interior of actual music instruments make my head spin a bit. I would have never imagined the interior of musical instrument would look so beautiful and cozy. I would love to live in that violin. More »
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Awesome Photos of Musical Instruments’ Interiors Make Me Want to Live In Them [Image Cache]
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Dropbox’s Site Redesign: Now Built for Comfort and Speed [Dropbox]
Orbital debris is a large and growing problem, and no one is quite sure how to deal with it – polar lasers, nets and other concepts are still merely ideas. But we should at least monitor all that space trash, to be certain where it is and whether it’s heading for something we want to protect, like the ISS or a military satellite. The Air Force’s new Space Fence, designed to keep an eye on space trash, is getting closer to reality. More »
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Lockheed’s Space Fence Prototype Starts Tracking Space Junk With Advanced Radar [Space]
An anonymous reader writes “When Onlive, the network gaming company, started offering not just Microsoft Windows but Microsoft Office for free on the iPad, and now on Android, it certainly seemed too good to be true. Speculation abounded on what type of license they could be using to accomplish this magical feat. From sifting through Microsoft’s licenses and speaking with sources very familiar with them, the ugly truth may be that they can’t.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Is Onlive Pirating Windows and Will It Cost Them?
Tavis sez, “A mind-blowingly recursive poster that represents the AD&D rules for procedural dungeon generation as a flowchart which is drawn as a dungeon. From the The Mule Abides blog at NYC’s intersection between role-playing games, the gallery art scene, and how Kickstarter can jam ’em together. Cory’s linked the Mule before as HOWTO have a D&D party for 8-year-olds; also featured in this post is a nifty Kickstarter for the first publication from the Play-Generated Map and Documents Archive, similarly linked for Homemade D&D module, 1981.”
(Thanks, Travis!)
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Recursive D&D dungeon is a procedural dungeon-generation system
Tentsile has taken the hammock tent concept and pushed it to an extreme. The picture above doesn’t do it full justice. There’s a third segment projecting out the back. The entire assembly can house five to eight people. And Tensile’s website suggests that they’re working on a twelve-person tent.
Is it a good choice for backpacking? Probably not.
Continued here:
Massive Hammock Tent Is a Portable Treehouse
Heavy Rain creator David Cage was showing off Quantic Dream’s new game engine at GDC, which includes an innovative new performance-capture technology the company’s developed. He’s directed a seven-minute original short called Kara, which is the story of a female android as she becomes self-aware. Unlike traditional game production methods, this technology is able to record face and body movements at the same time as recording the actors voice — ensuring natural and consistent performances from the characters. Actress Valorie Curry wore 90 sensors on her face, unlike in, say, Avatar, where the performers wore head-mounted cameras. Cage promises that the short is nothing more than a demo (it was rendered in real-time on a PlayStation 3) and none of these elements will appear in his next game. You can catch the impressive-looking footage after the break with one disclaimer: there’s nudity throughout and a reference to adult themes, okay?
Continue reading Heavy Rain creators produce ‘Kara’ PS3 tech-demo (video)
Heavy Rain creators produce ‘Kara’ PS3 tech-demo (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Heavy Rain creators produce ‘Kara’ PS3 tech-demo (video)
Because of the way Apple structures its major announcements — iPad in the first quarter, WWDC and iPhone in the summer though perhaps with the iPhone, now it’s fall — the iPad event is a little weird, because it’s really only half an event. The first half is what happened yesterday — the unveiling of the new iPad. And the new stuff is mostly about hardware features. The Retina Display. The A5X. The new iSight. LTE. The Retina Display makes it purchase worthy alone, but the other specs Apple bragged about? Just specs. Moore’s Law at play. Talking about them always seem somewhat embarrassing for Apple, a holdover from the days when they used to talk about megahertz and were trying to convince consumers that Pentium chips sucked.
Even the software Apple showed is a little weird, conceptually. iPhoto certainly demoed impressively — but it’s also available on the iPad 2 and certainly doesn’t require you spending $500 on the new iPad. And if its release cycle is any indication, next year’s new new iPad will be a spit and polish update, like the iPad 2 was with the iPad 1.
But there’s a second half to the event, and it’s way more exciting than the first.
It happens in June at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
WWDC.
If history is any guide, that’s when we’ll see the release of iOS 6.0. And, again, if history is any guide, it’s going to be so much more important than the Retina Display or the A5X or any other hardware feature we can probably imagine.
Consider what’s happened at past WWDCs:
2008 — iPhone OS 2.0: The introduction of the App Store. In 5 years, Apple would distribute billions of dollars to developers and help create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. They would change the way software is packaged, delivered and developed. The App Store is arguably the single most important part of the iOS concept, the keystone that locks everything Apple now does together.
2009 — iOS 3.0: The refinement year. Copy and paste. Turn-by-turn navigation. MMS. HTML5 support for Safari. It’s clear now that it was also the year that Apple was spending on getting the OS together for the iPad release in 2010.
2010 — iOS 4.0: Multitasking and third-party Backgrounding. It’s still too early to tell what’s going to happen with many of these, but Background Support has made it possible for the creation of buzzy new startups like Highlight and Glassmap. Persistent social networks like Highlight are just one example of how Backgrounding is leading to new types of businesses and apps. AirPlay, which was released later with iOS 4.2, is still not a fully baked idea yet. But it’s shaping up to be — along with the AppleTV and iCloud — Apple’s attempt at reinventing content in the living room.
2011 — iOS 5.0: iCloud. Another biggie. The one that Apple is betting its future on and is going to change the way millions of people deal with things that have been around forever, like file systems. “Apple has its feet firmly planted in the post-PC future,” Tim Cook said yesterday, and that’s only possible because of iCloud. Oh, and they also introduced iMessage, which is causing the carriers a bit of agita over the prospect of losing the usurious fees they’ve charged for texting. Oh, and there’s Newsstand, which could help save print journalism. Oh, and that’s when Apple granted Twitter Most Favored Nation status, which probably sent some shivers among the hoodied at everyone’s favorite social network.
2012 — iOS 6.0: Let the guessing begin.
There’s no real equivalent to snuck-out panel displays feverishly studied under a microscope looking for extra pixels that we can turn to for iOS leaks. But there were was one bread crumb that may lead somewhere: Apple’s no longer using Google Maps data in their iPhoto app. Does that mean that Google Maps data is no longer going to be driving iOS’s Maps app? It seems increasingly likely and that Phil Schiller used Vimeo to demo LTE instead of YouTube was just another tweak in the Plex’s nose.
But my money is that the bulk of iOS 6.0 is going to be on tightening and refining iCloud. A 2009 year. We’ve seen some of that already with the Mountain Lion preview. That Apple is moving OS X to the same yearly release schedule as iOS is further proof of that. iCloud is still far from being finished but it’s the glue that is going to hold everything Apple now does together.
The disappointment people feel about the new iPad is not surprising. It’s even understandable. That rumored haptic feedback system did sound pretty cool. Of course we want to be amazed every year. But the revolution already happened. It fomented during the years before the iPad was released. That was when Apple tinkered with the screen size, the OS, the very concept of what a post-PC device is. The first shot was fired when Steve Jobs sat down on Le Corbusier chair, crossed his legs and slid-to-unlock. And we didn’t know it then, but it succeeded on April 3, 2010 when the original iPad went on sale.
Now, we see Apple trying to perfect the iPad. It’s not even close to the Platonic ideal they imagined it to be. And the stuff that’s going to shake the ground, like the App Store and iCloud? That’s got nothing to do with how the iPad looks or how many CPU cores it has.
It’s not that specs aren’t important. With all consumer devices, the sum is more than the whole of their parts. But specs are tactical decisions in order to execute a larger strategy. Let me ask you this: what were the specs of your computer when you first fired up a web browser? What was ultimately important about that experience?
“We’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center of the digital world, but is just another device.” Cook again. And we’re going to get important details about how that world is going to be built in three short months.
Excerpt from:
Yesterday’s iPad Event Was Only Half The Story
In Changsha, China, a 30-story hotel project went from blueprint and prefab parts to finished building in fifteen days. Some are questioning how the construction project could possibly be safe, but the builder defends it. From reporter Jonathan Kaiman, the Los Angeles Times‘ man in Changsha:
In early December, Liu Zhangning was tending her cabbage patch when she saw a tall yellow construction crane in the distance. At night, the work lights made it seem like day.
Fifteen days later, a 30-story hotel towered over her village on the outskirts of the city like a glass and steel obelisk.
“I couldn’t really believe it,” Liu said. “They built that thing in under a month.”
Architects and engineers weigh in, too. Read the story here.
Video Link: Time-lapse of the project, showing the prefabricated building assembled on-site.
(via @RamCNN)
Excerpt from:
China: 30-story prefab skyscraper built in two weeks. Of course it’s safe!
Here’s a scathing editorial from Public Knowledge’s Michael Weinberg on the Warner Home Entertainment announcement of a new “service” that allows you to legally rip your DVDs by driving over to a special DVD-ripping depot and paying a fee to have them converted to DRM-locked formats that only play in approved devices. Warner calls this “safe and convenient.”
You did read that last paragraph correctly. The head of Warner Home Entertainment Group thinks that an easy, safe way to convert movies you already own on DVD to other digital formats is to take your DVDs, find a store that will perform this service, drive to that store, find the clerk who knows how to perform the service, hope that the “DVD conversion machine” is not broken, stand there like a chump while the clerk “safely” converts your movie to a digital file that may only play on studio-approved devices, drive home, and hope everything worked out. Oh, and the good news is that you would only need to pay a reasonable (per-DVD?) price for this pleasure.
To be fair, this plan is easy, safe (safe?), and reasonably priced compared to the movie studio’s current offer to people who want to take movies they own on DVD and turn them into a digital file to watch on, say, their iPad. That offer is a lawsuit, because personal copying of a movie on DVD requires circumventing DRM, which is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Furthermore, right now all of the major studios are arguing passionately (pdf) to stop the Copyright Office from granting a exemption that would make personal space shifting of movies on DVD legal.
Try to picture the real alternative to this hokum – people making their own copies of their movies at home. Luckily you won’t have to use your imagination too much because people making their own copies of media they own is exactly what people do with their CDs. They download a free program, make a copy of the CD at home, put the MP3 files on whatever device they want, and go on with their lives.
Warner Bros. Embarrasses Self, Everyone, With New “Disc-to-Digital” Program
(via Hack the Planet)
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Warner wants you to go to a depot and pay to rip your DVDs to DRM-locked formats