Here’s a taste of an amazing fantasy scene made by Finn Meinert Matthiesen using CryEngine 2, the graphics engine behind Crysis (click the images for larger versions):
May 2010
Google just announced Google TV at Google I/O today. It’s basically a giant TiVo with Chrome built in:
Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.
It’ll be interesting if they can keep the streaming quality high. YouTube certainly doesn’t have the best track record in that department.
These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.
Here is some jaw-dropping time-lapse footage of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano over the first two days of May:
Thanks to Lumenilux for the hint. Photography/video by Sean Stiegemeier, music by Jónsi.
See also Pictures of Eyjafjallajökull for some images of the lightning-filled initial eruption.
From NASA APOD:
Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex. About five light-years “tall”, the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.
Credit: Marco Burali, Tiziano Capecchi, Marco Mancini (Osservatorio MTM)
From NASA APOD:
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars in the two galaxies cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 don’t collide in the course of the ponderous, billion year or so long event. Instead, their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. Of course, the visual appearance of the far-flung arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name – The Antennae.
Credit: Star Shadows Remote Observatory and PROMPT/CTIO (Jack Harvey, Steve Mazlin, Rick Gilbert, and Daniel Verschatse)
This is oddly entrancing and definitely the most creative use of the technology that I’ve seen. Speeches by well-known scientists.. auto-tuned and set to music! It’s The Symphony of Science:
More songs, videos, and MP3/FLAC downloads. Awesome stuff.
Stephen Hawking recently stated that the human race should refrain from trying to make contact with any alien life out there. Why? Because they just might run us over and take our ‘resources’, that’s why. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a very important observation in this interview:
The assumption that an intelligent, alien race would be as primitively hostile as we have been is based entirely on us looking at ourselves in retrospect, not on any actual knowledge. Urging us to ‘just hide’ based on a sample size of one doesn’t seem very constructive. We won’t know before we’ve made contact; trying to hide is probably only going to delay that a little.
Whether or not you’re a gamer, if you’ve been following the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” prophecies over the years, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed that incompatibility with today’s popular games has been a significant obstacle to wide-spread adoption among the young, gaming crowd; the sons, nephews, brothers and sisters who are their families’ go-to IT guys. The people who are asked, ever so often, “What should I use?”, “What’s best?”, “What do you use?”. Their response to these questions might soon change; Valve is going to release Steam for Linux:
If Valve makes Steam on Linux a success, many of the people who are on other platforms today because they practically don’t have a choice will give Linux on the desktop a second thought, and might just recommend it to others if they stick with it. By now, there are plenty of other reasons to recommend Linux on the desktop as a serious alternative, after all.
But okay, let’s not kid ourselves. PC gaming is a much smaller market than console gaming, and adoption among gamers surely wouldn’t cause the Year of the Linux Desktop by itself. The side effects, however, will be interesting to observe. If Valve ports all of their games, including the Source engine, to both Mac and Linux, there could very well be a shift in the industry, away from the DirectX monopoly, that will benefit both Mac and Linux and widen public interest in the development of OpenGL. Not a significant shift on an Xbox scale, perhaps, but enough to shine a spotlight on Linux. That spotlight could be what Linux needs to gain momentum with the gaming generation, and, as a side effect, in general. A snowball, if you will.
Word of mouth is the most powerful kind of marketing, after all.
It sounds a little shallow, but one of the largest obstacles in my personal desktop Linux adoption in the past has been the lack of overall polish across applications in most major distributions. It doesn’t get to you right away, but eventually, you grow tired of aesthetic artifacts like huge fonts in some applications (Thunderbird and emacs-gtk were complete messes), font colors that are nearly indistinguishable from the background, non-transparent tray icons, and, of course, unappealing default themes (Ubuntu’s old brown, for instance).
I’m happy to see that Canonical have done a near-perfect job of solving this problem in their latest installment of Ubuntu Linux, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. It has a few problems (namely, I think the relocation of the Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons was unnecessary), but I’ll be damned if it’s not the most polished and aesthetically pleasing Linux release I’ve used to this day.
I’ve always liked dark colors, but when the majority of the screen real estate is occupied by the browser — which is almost invariably displaying something contrast white — it quickly gets tiring, so I’ll admit that my first thought when seeing the new default theme was, “Bah, not dark!”. To my surprise, Ubuntu 10.04 hits a perfect balance that is classy and easy on the eyes; the kind of look that competes with OS X’s Aqua and Windows’ Aero. Pair this with X.Org’s superior font rendering and it’s clear that Linux isn’t the laughing stock of the aesthetics department any longer.
Best of all? This look is unique. Canonical isn’t copying anyone.
X.Org font rendering