February 2013
2 posts
Apple TV + HBO →
bloomberg.com
Edmund Lee & Adam Satariano for Bloomberg:
Apple is in negotiations to start carrying Time Warner HBO Go application on Apple TV by mid-2013, according to two people familiar with the plans.
Great, unsurprising news. But:
HBO Go is only available to customers who subscribe to the network through their cable or satellite service, and would be the first app on Apple TV that requires pay-TV authentication. There are currently HBO Go apps for the iPad and iPhone.
Same old, same old. Imagine how powerful it would be if you could buy an HBO subscription without needing the cable subscription as well? How many millions of Apple TVs would Apple sell as a result? I would bet on many millions. Which is exactly why big cable won’t allow it.
In Scandinavia you can get a HBO streaming subscription without a cable subscription: hbonordic.com
August 2009
2 posts
AMC grabs "Walking Dead" →
hollywoodreporter.com
With Breaking Bad and this, AMC is quickly becoming a favorite network. I should start watching Mad Men too.
July 2009
2 posts
June 2009
7 posts
Play
Train surfing claims another young victim →
mg.co.za
“The group of boys said they were train surfing in memory of three friends who died doing the same thing last Friday. One boy fell off the train and died on the scene.”
(via Terry Blakey)
I… what… wow.
Sigh.
“Warner Bros. is among the labels that are already using this system to prevent users from ripping the CD into the digital file form (MP3/WMA etc.) The technology is all about limiting how the computer sees the disc – this means that when inserted into the computer only the packaged player (on the CD) can play the music.”
—
Guys… Have we learned nothing?
Record Companies Trying to Stop Music Sharing with New CD Security
(via copyrightfail) (via beingrandom)
“In its 3.0 incarnation, Pages still lacks autosave (come on Apple, even TextEdit has had this for years!), and it still has no idea whether it wants to be a word processor or a layout program when it grows up. It also still can’t do footnotes and endnotes in the same document, so some of the annoyances that plagued previous versions haven’t gone away. But the new Pages version does have a killer new feature that makes the upgrade worth it for freelance writers around the world: a running word count at the bottom left of the document window. (2661 and counting! Too bad Ars doesn’t pay by the word.)”
—
Rain check on taking that look at iWork as planned.
Ars reviews iWork ‘09: fourth time’s a charm? - Ars Technica
(via beingrandom)
Using any Office suite on Mac OS X is hell.
5 Reasons Why Terminator Salvation Sucks
Spoilers!
- Sony Vaio: Resistance Edition, i.e. technology far superior anything we’ve seen in the flash-forwards in the previous movies. I mean, isn’t humanity supposed to outnumbered and on the brink of extinction? Wouldn’t a military base be an easy target for Skynet? Also, 14 years have passed since the planet was nuked, but they still have helicopters, jets, high-tech equipment, ammunition, laboratories, and the equipment and skill to perform heart transplants?
- Common, and if that’s not enough: Common with sunglasses at night.
- GUIs that can be interacted with by humans at Skynet. Well, GUIs at Skynet in general.
- The fact that Skynet are trying to kill John Connor and Kyle Reese before they have any idea who they are and what they will do.
- Terminators with headbands.
This is how Project Natal works
The test system was an ordinary Xbox 360, connected to small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig. There are two cameras—one RGB, for face recognition and display video, and one infrared, for tracking movement and depth. Why infrared? The eye doesn’t see infrared light. And when you combine an infrared camera with an infrared emitter (also part of Natal), a room is flooded with a spectrum of invisible light that works in the dark.
http://gizmodo.com/5277954/testing-project-natal-we-touched-the-intangible
The 3D sensor itself is a pretty incredible piece of equipment providing detailed 3D information about the environment similar to very expensive laser range finding systems but at a tiny fraction of the cost. Depth cameras provide you with a point cloud of the surface of objects that is fairly insensitive to various lighting conditions allowing you to do things that are simply impossible with a normal camera.
But once you have the 3D information, you then have to interpret that cloud of points as “people”. This is where the researcher jaws stay dropped. The human tracking algorithms that the teams have developed are well ahead of the state of the art in computer vision in this domain. The sophistication and performance of the algorithms rival or exceed anything that I’ve seen in academic research, never mind a consumer product. At times, working on this project has felt like a miniature “Manhattan project” with developers and researchers from around the world coming together to make this happen.
http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html
Simply Amazing.
May 2009
7 posts
Play
“Apparently the first Transformers movie took up an ‘astounding 15 terabytes’; the new one required 140 terabytes.”
—Michael Bay on Transformers 2 and IMAX resolutions.
True-Friend-O-Meter →
meaghano.com
Our senior year of college, my friend Meg, changed her birthday on Facebook from the correct date of July 13th to an incorrect date some random day in March.
She then waited to see who would write on her wall or send her a message wishing her a Happy Birthday on the wrong date. Anyone who did was instantly unfriended.
Oh man, I’m so doing this.
