This is a movie made and released for free under the creative commons license.  Made with free software [Blender] by regular (very talented) people.

It's about 60% of the way there in comparison to a Pixar movie.  No words, slightly simplified graphics, slightly amateurish acting.  But I'm splitting hairs, it's great.

Here is the project Blog: http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

Ties right in with Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus speech: [linky]

You've heard of SETI@HOME I'm sure.  In one sense it has been a resounding success, on the other it has been a abject failure.  It has been the most successful grid computing effort on record so far and yet it has essentially stuck a fork in the chance of there being technologically advanced aliens.

People are now forced to hypothesize that a more advanced civilization will no longer use radio to communicate.  This seems somewhat far fetched to me because of the simplicity of using radio waves for said communication.

Current Grid Computing Projects

Anyways, here is a list [Grid Computing Projects] of other grid computing efforts you can participate in.

Currently this one might provide the most value: Malaria Control Project.  Which illustrates the problem of what do you do with all the data that you generate? [update]

If climate change floats your boat (it does NOT float mine) there is a distributed computing project for that: [linky]

Future Grid Computing Projects

The ones that look interesting me:

Artificial Intelligence System:  This one looks quite cool and is right up my alley.

This distributed computing project is part of a larger project that is reverse engineering the brain in order to build a large scale artificial intelligence system. The first of its kind. Because we are a very small company (i.e. 2 people) that is tackling an enormous challenge, we are asking the public at large to get involved by donating computer time. In order to be able to support and accelerate its development we will also pursue an alternative path, through commercialization.

Quake Catcher Network: And this one too.  This uses the accelerometers built into existing laptops as a distributed network for detecting earthquakes.  Flippin' cool!

If you have a MacBook, iBook, or Powerbook (purchased 2005 or later), you can join our beta testing laptop network. Click here to learn how.

You will soon be able to download free software to turn your Thinkpad and HP laptops into a seismometer.

This is an INPUT side to distributed computing.  Very, very cool!

Those are just a few ideas.  Take a look to see if any of the others interest you.  Participate if you wish.  It's a good use of unused cycles.

Charlie Martin makes some fairly straightforward "in-the-box" predictions about the power of computing coming in the next ten years.  Even so there are some remarkable facts buried in the article.

What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do?

We haven’t talked about networks much yet, but the same kind of rule applies to them as we’ve applied to computers: the total speed of the network at the house should go up by between 16 and 32 times in ten years. My cable modem: 8 gigabits a second, at least in theory. My home network in 2018: 128 gigabits a second, or call it 12 gigabytes a second. That’s a whole HD movie in around 5 seconds.

Mind-Reading Game Headset to Hit Market

Brain computer interface is coming.  And it's coming fast.  There are several companies set to hit the market with products over the next couple of years: Emotiv and NeuroSky.

Both of these products are focusing on the gaming market segment to begin with.  There they have a ready customer, willing to spend money on accessories, looking for new gadgets and typically younger, typically male.

If done correctly the experience gained from entering that market could lay the groundwork for many other segments: quadraplegics, fighter pilots, surgeons, artists, equipment operators, data/security experts. 

Eventually how about an everyday person in a wired world...

I was just having this conversation with my brother. Essentially Hard Drives have overshot their market segment.  They consistently provide more and more storage capacity and have now exceeded the needs of their customers.  Do you really need a terabyte in your home?  Unless you are ripping your entire DVD collection (ummm...not legal right now) to your HD, you are probably fine with a couple of 120gig drives.

Enter solid state.

Quieter, more energy efficient, better I/O.

...and now you can get them up to 128gig: Toshiba to Offer 128 GB Flash Drive

done and done.

The envelope was seriously pushed in Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

That scene was probably the biggest cinematic event that's happened to date.  Up until about 20 years ago there was only one side, and that was us, and now there's two sides.  and uh it's made movies better.

John Frazier - Effects Specialist, of the physical/mechanical variety.

Wired Article: How Physics and Computers bring an Ocean to Life for the Movies

Free.

Probably available this month.

Made Robert Scoble cry.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Official WorldWide Telescope site: 

you can zoom in and zoom and zoom and zoom...

It stitches together views from all the best telescopes in the world...

It's "like a magic carpet ride".

Technology rocks.  We are living in the age of miracles.

Over at Direct Neural Interface Brandon has put together a very good list of non-free and free applications to solve all your media needs.  He lays out some good options and has some good advice.  Go check it out.

An email exchange with a colleague gave me the idea to post this. So here goes: anything and everything you (reasonably) need related to multimedia (images, movies, audio).

Related post: techRivet's Free Media Pack 2007

Excita bytes!  Xtreeeeem Bytes!

An exabyte is one-quintillion byte unit of information.  That is equivalent to 50,000 times the size of the Library of Congress.

The amount of data that is flying around the Internet right now is measured in that scale.  This opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out a bunch of fascinating statistics, this one caught my eye.

Cisco's newest video-conferencing system requires 15 megabits per second in each direction. A one-hour conference call could thus produce 13.5 gigabytes, which is more than a high-definition movie. Just 75 of these Cisco conference calls would equal the entire Internet traffic of the year 1990.

...75 video conference calls == the entire Internet traffic of 1990.  Admittedly there weren't a whole lotta people on the Internet for that time, but still..75 calls.  My previous company did that many video conference calls by themselves in a month, maybe in as short a time frame as a week...and that was a company of about 200. 

It's not stopping here folks, you realize that don't you?  There are 1 Billion people connected...there are 5 Billion people not connected....even a simple arithmetic operation is staggering let alone an exponential one.

We have not idea what we will be using computers for and how integrated they will be in our lives in 10 years...heck 5 years may be too long.

Are you ready for the ride?

BTW, that site is a great resource for finding wallpaper candidates.

oh and BTW I'm on a dual monitor system.

oh yeah one more thing, here is an indispensable tool for spreading an image over two screens in Vista: Display Fusion.

Egypt.

Indeed.

We are in the 21st century all right.  The sta tement in that article that truly sticks out to me is this one:

"People should know how to use the Internet because people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do."

Businesses in Egypt are so tied into the Internet now, just like the rest of the world, that when there is bandwidth issues the Egyptian government steps in and requests people refrain from needless downloads to protect commerce.

The world is truly connected now. 

I liked this comment as well.

Egyptian blogger The Arabist said he would "resume posting after the problem is resolved" and predicted, with a hint of sarcasm, "complete social breakdown in vast swathes of (upmarket Cairo districts) Heliopolis and Mohandiseen as thousands are unable to update their Facebook status."

heh.

...and their famous waggle dance.

Scientists abuzz over more efficient Web servers

Tovey said his collaboration with Seeley demonstrated that the communication [bee waggle] provides a “beautiful” feedback loop to prevent one flower patch from being abandoned while another is depleted. For a superior patch, more bees will shake it on the dance floor and recruit workers to join them. As the nectar level drops from all the hubbub, the bees take longer to fill up, delaying their repeat performances back at the hive. The drop-off in dance routines gives scouts returning from alternative sources a better chance to create their own dance fever and transfer worker allegiances. With the shifting allocations, the system continually equalizes itself and offers a steady stream of nectar.

The emulated the load balancing of the "bee waggle" to divert traffic where it is most needed.

very interesting read.

This is cool and actually one of the clearest explanations of what makes up the header information of the packets that are flying around the intertubes.  Gallery includes: IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP and ICMP.

So you've probably seen this chart or one like it:

We aren't holding tightly to Moore's law  which states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.  But we are holding a line that is close.

And that's pretty cool but the human brain looks at that and says, "big deal...it's getting faster...so what?"

Let's take a look at that chart in a way that the human brain can clearly see what "doubling" does over time.  Here is a representation of Moore's law (not the actual observations) changed into an arithmetic scale. [click on the image to see a larger view]

This stretches across the time frame from 1981 to 2021. It is only approximate, but does illustrate what is actually going on when we speak of doubling the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. 

Oh and by the way...the knee there, where the graph turns north?  That's 2007- 2009.

This also explains why the graph of Moore's law is displayed in logarithmic scale.  We quickly run out of paper.  If I stretch it backwards to 1970 and forward to 2040 and want to still have something intelligent to read...well, that becomes a big graph.

Would Deep Thought have been so dismissive about the new supercomputer from NEC?  The NEC SX-9 Vector Supercomputer System.  (Although Milliard Gargantubrain is a much cooler name for a super computer.)

• Consisting of 16 nodes.
• Capable of a peak vector performance in excess of 100 GFLOPS.
• Available in six colors including periwinkle.

The SX-9 is the current fastest supercomputer in the world.  It closes in on the PFLOPS range.  World's fastest vector computer goes live.

 Update: Ok I lied about the colors, you can only get it in black.

Quantum chip rides on superconducting bus

The connection of two Qubits on a chip for the first time.  This is a crucial first step, a proof of concept, that will lead to true quantum computers.

In effect, says Johannes Majer, a member of the Yale team, the researchers have created "a quantum bus". A bus is used in conventional computers as a conduit for information among the various components – but its quantum chip equivalent has never been made before.

With the predictions for the end of Moore's law I refer you back to Ray Kurzweil's great essay on accelerating change that stipulated the doubling of computing power was not bound to the integrated chip.  The phenomena both preceded the integrated chip and will in all likelihood continue after the silicon chip is no longer viable.

The creation of a working quantum computer might be as momentous an event as the creation of the transistor.  History will of course judge.

I wanted to start out by saying, unbelievable, but then I realized that it is COMPLETELY believable. It was practically inevitable.

Then I said, "Actually it is unbelievable that it was inevitable...wait...that's a bit of weird logic."

Anyways. We now have available to us a standard 3.5 inch hard drive that has a 1 terabyte capacity. For the layman that is 1000⁴ = 10¹² or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Here is the full review: Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive

Being first to the terabyte mark gives Hitachi bragging rights, and more importantly, the ability to offer single-drive storage capacity 33% greater than that of its competitors. Hitachi isn't banking on capacity alone, though. The 7K1000 is also outfitted with a whopping 32MB of cache—double what you get with other 3.5" hard drives. Couple that extra cache with 200GB platters that have the highest areal density of any drive on the market, and the 7K1000's performance could impress as much as its capacity.

Unbelievable. heh.

He who compiles wins.

Update: I thought this was somehow fairly appropriate. It kind of states that he who compiles does not care to win, he only cares to goof off...which from my experience is more true

techRivet.com has been trying to stay on top of the whole Brain Computer Interface [BCI] technologies for awhile now. [here] We've even talked about NeuroSky themselves and their almost-ready-for-consumer BCI unit.

Now we can see it in action

The games look somewhat basic at the moment, but give it time. If it is anything like the Wii controller and how fast people are adapting and mod-ing its uses...well it might be an interesting phase of computer interface development coming up.

This has got to be one of the coolest things I have read about in a long time. [linky]

This would be exactly something that I could devote my volunteering efforts towards. The synchronicity statement at the beginning of the video lays it out very well: "People need computers, people had too many computers, they'll come together...one problem will solve the other."

Awesomeness occurred. They do actually defray their costs a tiny bit with some small required fees and suggested donations. But if you need a computer and can't afford one...this is your way to get it. It also encourages the "teach someone to fish" philosophy. One way people earn a computer is to work in the shop putting computers together for donation. You build 6: 5 for others and the 6th you keep.

Like I already stated awesomeness.