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NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) are developing the Hyperwall-2, a 23 by 10 foot liquid display wall, 128 screens, 128 GPUs, 1024 cores, 74 teraflop processing power, and half a petabyte of storage.
Impressing, though, to be completely honest…i don’t fully comprehend the true use of such a gigantic display…as long as the supercomputer crunches it, it should be easily seen on normal screens, its not like the zoom function doesn’t exist.
But heh, if NASA wants to make a giant screen with ridiculous backend, I won’t say no…heck, let me at it 😛
Thanks NASA for all the fun 😛

Funny…Comcast High Speed internet is slowly throttling their bandwidth, cutting off their customers slowly, have crappy customer service, and what do they do?

Lets install a super high def video demo at our HQ of 10 million pixels and let the 1 person who walks in marvel at our awesomness 😛

But, enough with that, Comcast installed this “screen” of 10 million LEDS at their headquarters and demonstrates super HD video quality.

It includes an automated video room that handles the 27 terabytes of video that is required to fully use the thing.
Check it out at DVICE

FF3 has a large number of improvements to FF2, but a few of them have been auto disabled because of performance hits. Firstly is the improved color management system which, if turned on will make a performance hit of ~10%. Then again…if your on a modern computer with relatively good cpu and ram, I doubt you can see a difference. However…if you are like me and regularly open high res images that are enormous…proceed with caution.
Type about:config into the address bar.
Convince FF3 that you will be careful
type gfx.color_management.enabled into the filter field and change it to True.
Restart FF3, and you’ll get much better looking images.

So, Firefox 3 is coming closer to release and so are all the pros and cons of an update to firefox. Theres always the problem that alot of extensions that you have come to depend on go pop, and many developers do not continually update their plugins.
For FF3, quite a few improvements are slated. A new Bookmark system is being implemented, its become more of a searchable tool and lets you filter bookmarks.
A very useful tool, Whole-page zooming is also being developed. We all know what happens when you jack up the text size, it becomes huge, layout dies, images stay tiny. Well…whole page zooming will solve that 🙂 I wonder how well this will work with multimedia, but we shall see.
Major performance fixes are in place, so hopefully it won’t start sucking ram and cpu. I know I can’t wait for this, as I check my ram usage and see that FF is using an enormous 1.3 gigs of ram (I blame too many tabs)
It’s also changed the address bar so that what you type there searches your history, be it in the page, the title, the url, its pretty nice when you can’t remember the url of a page you’ve visited in the past.

All in all, some very good features and fixes for FF3, I just hope my beloved extensions don’t all bite the dust 😉

Scientists have found a way to encase oil drops with a nanoparticle that behaves very interestingly. In water, these particles, which look like batons, orient themselves to surround oil. The reason they do this is because the carbon nanotube portion of the baton points inwards towards the oil and encases the oil. The other side of the baton is a gold particle. These nano-gold particles point the other way in a water solution as they are not as hydrophobic. This makes the oil droplets in water gold colored. In oil, the baton flips itself, so that the gold portion points inwards to the water. This makes water droplets in oil black colored. What is quite interesting, is that when hit by UV light or magnetic fields, the particles instantly flip and release whats inside.
This creates two interesting uses. It could be used to isolate oil spills by isolating oil, which requires some studies both on the environmental side, and on the practical side regarding actually implementing this. The second use that pops into mind is using these to deliver medication, site specifically. This of course depends on if the particles are harmful, if the encasement is strong enough, and if the amount of magnetic field is low enough to be used on humans. Interesting thoughts…

Check out the whole article on physorg

For those who have been following the news, disregard this 😛 but the NASA/Canadian Space Agency made Phoenix has landed on Mars and has broadcast pictures 😀
Just a quick little newslet hehe.

For those of our readers in England, heres a post for you guys. Firstly, before we start, if you’ve been reading this blog all this time, we apologize for spelling words in the US way, although some of the spellings make more sense without the -u- in them..but, enough about that.

If you live in the UK, most likely, your ISP is BT and have had dealings with Virgin Media. Chances are…you have a program installed on your computer called Phorm which sits at your computer and reports browsing activity and sends it back to the company. This is such a ridiculous piece of software, that really, if it got installed on my system, I would be writing rant after rant. Instead, however, theres AntiPhormLite, which is a program for XP and Vista that runs in the background generating fake browsing activity. To save up bandwidth, it only loads the text of a page. Pretty much, it lets you do whatever you want, and screws with the company who installed it. As i quote:

Just run it and go and watch TV if you want. Someone somewhere will
assume you like to shop for red shoes and caravans and be rubbing their
hands with glee.

Brilliant! Thank you AntiPhorm

Here is a nifty tool that you normally wouldn’t just think of.
You know of those programs that convert powerpoints into flash files so their portable anywhere? Well, heres a program that converts audio and video to an executable that will work on any pc, sadly, mac is not supported.
There is a PRO version, that lets you set bitrates, etc, the free version uses a default bitrate which is likely lower quality. However, for normal applications, a quick conversion, this is a nice little addition to the already quite large toolbox 😛

Check it out: a2e

For those of you who own Macs, AND desktops….
do you sometimes miss the expose feature in macs? Even I miss it, and I don’t even use macs!
Well…DExposeE2 will do what you need, on a windows computer 🙂
You hit the F10 button, and heh! it does what you want it to do.
Check it out: DExposeE2