Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Better Clouds, Wind Coming to Second Life

secondlife1.jpg Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, has announced the acquisition of graphics technology from Windward Mark Interactive . Linden Lab will acquire WindLight, an advanced atmospheric rendering technology; Nimble, a realistic 3D cloud simulator; and associated intellectual property and interests.

Once the acquisition is complete, Linden Lab plans to open source the technology and integrate it into Second Life, bringing a new level of realism to the Second Life metaverse.

WindLight uses algorithms that imitate the ways in which light is affected by real-world atmospheric factors like dust and moisture, enabling the nuances of sunlight, clouds, water and weather to be accurately simulated in real-time. Nimble uses advanced physics models to realistically simulate clouds.

Alliance, an online game developed by Windward Mark Interactive does not form part of the acquisition.
slclouds.jpg
original image credit Tim Bray

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Western Digital's 250GB perpendicular Scorpio heads for laptops

Late last year, Western Digital decided to make the leap to the land of perpendicular magnetic recording with its 160GB Scorpio, and now the firm is stepping it up to a full quarter terabyte with its latest rendition. The 2.5-inch SATA drive fits nicely within the confines of most lappies, sports 8MB of cache, a 12-millisecond access time, spins at 5400RPM, and touts the company's WhisperDrive technology so you'll barely know its there. Additionally, the ShockGuard and SecurePark systems tag team to keep your data safe during turmoil, and the IntelliSeek system reportedly "calculates the optimum seek speed of the read / write head actuator to help reduce noise and power consumption." So if you're looking to up the storage capacity of your mobile machine, you can snag WD's latest right now for a penny under $200.

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DViCO's TViX M-5100SH offers 1080p, HDMI, and H.264 decoding

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Seems like only yesterday -- ok, 4 days ago -- we were telling you about the DViCO M-4000SA HD media player. Now they're back with the M-5100SH which bests the former with 1080p support, HDMI output, and H.264 decoding. It still packs Ethernet for plenty of in-home media streaming and of course DViCO will be more than happy to throw in a 3.5-inch, 512GB SATA disk for a fee. But why not save some bills-per-byte and double your capacity with a 1TB Hitachi disk purchased elsewhere. You can also add WiFi and an optional ATSC tuner to create a full-featured 1080i video recorder. Decent but standard stuff so far; what's odd is the pricing. The cylindrical M-5100SH is only available for pre-order and will cost $439 when it ships next month in Japan and presumably parts beyond. Meanwhile, the boxy M-4100SH offers all the same features as the M-5100SH yet costs only $359. Oh, and it's available domestically now. Of course, black MacBook owners already know the premium paid for aesthetics. Peep the M-4100SH slab after the break. [Via Impress] Read -- M-5100SH Read -- M-4100SH

Continue reading DViCO's TViX M-5100SH offers 1080p, HDMI, and H.264 decoding

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Plinkme.com - Free Exposure, Free Photos for Your Site

Bloggers like to spruce up their blog with pictures-- after all who really reads posts longer than two paragraphs in these Twitter influenced days? You can take your own photos with your handy camphone, or digital Leica , however, sometimes your photos don't make the cut, and you need something else. Now Plinkme has come up with a service to hook up bloggers with photos, while giving photographers plenty of exposure. You can browse through the site's growing gallery of photographs and pick something that suits your fancy; to use it in your blog just copy a snippet of code, et voila you've got a nice photo to enliven your post. All photos from Plinkme will include links back to the original source; one link goes directly to the photographer's Plinkme gallery, the other will go to his/her personal website. All photos are displayed via Flash, meaning photographers needn't worry about proper credits. So you photogs out there can get some exposure just by uploading your photos. Plinkme also encourages comments so you can get feedback on all your work. It's a great way to share content. In their own words: "Plinkme was developed to provide bloggers, article writers and content republishers with a means to easily and very quickly add a photo to their content to make it more visually appealing - simply by copying and pasting some JavaScript into their page. Plinkme is also a service for photographers to showcase their work, get them exposure and generate links to their site. We believe this service will give serious amateurs and professional photographers a means to get their pictures into the public eye; Plinkme automatically provides a link back to the photographer's own home page as well as their plinkme gallery whenever and wherever the photo is published." Why it might be a killer: Plinkme is a perfect marriage between publishers and photographers; bloggers get readily available photos, that are quite good, without having to go through the hassle of uploading etc; photographers meanwhile, get their work displayed all over the web, and they receive proper credits too. Plus the site is beautifully designed with tags and categories. Some questions: Will photographers be wary about submitting their work for others to use? Plinkme doesn't work with MySpace, Hi5, and a host of other networks because they use javascript, despite displaying as Flash- so what good is it really if you can't use it with your social networks?

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Convert HTML Web pages to JPG Images or PDF Documents

Total HTML Converter can convert HTML webpages into virtually every file format including JPG pictures, Word Documents, Adobe PDFs or even Excel Spreadsheets. You can also use this tool to extract plain text from HTML web pages. The utility supports batch conversion allowing your to transform any number of HTML files into other formats at the click of a button. Geeks would love the command line support. convert html to pictures Total HTML Converter supports different charsets and encoding tables and can fit HTML Width to the chosen PDF-Page-Size. Total HTML converter costs around ~$40 but you can have this useful HTML conversion tool for free providing you start your downloading engines within the next 24 hours. Download Total HTML Converter at Give Away of the Day for free. No watermarks.

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