Starforce is a firm that specializes in copy protection. In my personal experience their product has done nothing but cause issues with any computer I have ever been unfortunate enough to expose to it. I am not saying they are malware, but my experience has never been a positive one. Their "copy protection" schemes have even led to me rebuilding PC's to restore normal functionality AFTER I uninstalled the software they came with, and I find this unacceptable. I chose to vote with my dollars and have stopped buying ANYTHING they touch. Nothing should remain on a computer, especially a "virtual driver" after the game/software is uninstalled. They have never treated this in my opinion as a serious matter and it is what I feel is their greatest failure.    more »

LightSpace Technologies has formally introduced the world's first solid-state volumetric 3D display, a concept they've been developing since 1996. It's called the DepthCube z1024 3D Display System, a front-viewed display with Cartesian display geometry with an image volume of 15.7" x 11.8" x 4.0". Sending 1,000 image slices per second, the whole display volume is refreshed 50 times a second and can support 3-D video at up to 20 fps with a 90° field of view with full motion parallax in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Its display stacks 20 different thin screens in front of one another, and —takes turns rapidly flashing an image on each one, smoothly building out the whole 3-D image.

You can forget those cheesy cardboard glasses. It doesn't require any special headgear either. The images can be viewed by multiple viewers simultaneously. It operates on any PC compatible computer running Windows 2K or XP. It requires a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 with NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, and 256 MB RAM. Right now, the unit sells for aproximately $50,000 but LightSpace aims to get the price down to $5,000 for consumers in the next few years.

Click for details:    more »

C'mon, make digital postmodern modernist algorythmic art with the click of a button. You know ya wanna: link

What is the Digital Postmodern Modernist Generator? Find out here.

"While the program generates abstract modernist looking output the overall concept of creating an automated artist process is somewhat of a postmodern concept, hence the title "Postmodern Modernist Generator". -Don Relyea

What's my take on it? While it's cool that a computer can mimic artistic behavior, it kinda reminds me of the output I see from some fractal artists out there. After you've seen a few of them, you've seen them all.

That's the way you do it, get your money for nothin' and your videos for $1.99. That's right, iTunes has added MTV programming to their video repitoire. Now users can pay $1.99 to download episodes of shows like "Beavis and Butthead", "Jackass", and "Punk'd". The downloads can be viewed on the new iPod that can hold up to 150 hours of video.

MTV Networks-owned Comedy Central recently announced that it would offer 56 episodes of "South Park," "Drawn Together" and "Comedy Central Stand-Up" on the iTunes service. The service, which started out providing audio downloads, nowprovides a wide range of video downloads as well from music videos to television episodes. Other popular networks that are participating are NBC Universal, Sci Fi Channel, USA Network, ABC and Disney/Pixar.

iTunes has sold over 8 million videos to date. At $1.99 each, you do the math!

"Canada's biggest record label, publisher and management company is helping out a family sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)for copyright infringement. The privately-owned Nettwerk Music Group is intervening, it says, because the songs downloaded by the Gruebel family include Avril Lavigne, a Nettwerk management client. Nettwerk will fund the Gruebel's defense."   more »

There is a deep interconnection between art, science and technology and when these worlds collide, the results can be phenominal. The Khronos Projector is a perfect example. It is an interactive art installation that allows people to visualize movie content in an entirely new way. By actually touching and deforming the screen, the user can send portions of the image forward or backward in time. Since the detection is based on optical technology, the screen can also be driven by light beams.

The Khronos Projector helps us percieve the truth that the universal Time Arrow is just an illusion, "although a convincing one" as Einstein put it. Einstein's Theory of Relativity says that the temporal relationship between two physically separate events is a perception relative to the observer.

This is very cool! You must see the pictures and video on the website to get a good grasp on the concept because words just can't explain.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could organize multiple computers with an Internet connection into a virtual network for direct secure communication? Wouldn't it be even cooler if you could do it for free? Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. It allows two or more computers to connect directly, even though they might be sitting behind different firewalls or broadband routers. Using Hamachi, users can access computers remotely, use Windows File Sharing, play LAN games, instant message, and run private FTP servers... for free!

The interface is clean, functional and polished. It installs quickly and painlessly, and uninstalls completely. The first time you launch the software, it opens a tutorial to help you get started. From there, it's a snap. My husband and I had it installed, running, and were able to communicate with each other in minutes flat. It's unbelievably easy to setup and operate!

Though it's still in beta, there are versions of Hamachi for Windows, Linux and OS X. Could this be the future of P2P?

Oh my, this report makes it clear what I have been saying all along. Far left and right wing people are incapable of processing information REGARDLESS of FACT! The quote below is a quick summation, but I really encourage anyone who is able to learn (obviously our partisan fools are incapable of doing so) to READ this information. We, the normal have to speak up because no one else will speak intelligently and it is a proven fact that they are incapable of doing so.    more »

There's bad news for malicious software this morning. A new site launches today that seeks to inform consumers about "badware" which can be defined as spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. The site is called StopBadware.org and it's aim is to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and those who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.

StopBadware.org points out that the badware industry is big business, amounting to a $2 billion-a-year industry. They say, "It's the Wild West of aggressive marketing and an industry supported by shadowy online marketers, small application vendors, and website operators."

"For too long, these companies have been able to hide in the shadows of the Internet," says John Palfrey, who heads the Berkman Center of Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is spearheading the project. "What we're after is a more accountable Internet."

Google and Sun Microsystems are two of the corporate sponsors of this "Neighborhood Watch". Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid special advisor. Even with the backing of these high-tech heavyweights, StopBadware.org is putting emphasis on creating a community by encouraging the public to get involved and report their encounters with badware.

The ignorant blame everything on the sitting president, and they even give them the credit for things they have not done. The current president takes years to effect economic conditions, and the overall tone of government changes slowly also...   more »

The good folks over at Adobe are always thinking up new ways to make our lives as designers easier. They have just released a software product called Adobe Acrobat 3D, that converts 3D designs created in major CAD apps (Adobe provides a list of 29 supported CAD applications) to Adobe PDF. Probably the biggest benefit of this functionality is the ability to share CAD designs with those who do not have the expensive CAD applications without the need of specialty viewers. Users can capture their 3D designs from apps like 3D Studio Max, Maya, and Inventor in one easy step to create new PDF files.

Pretty sweet!

Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, designed a stainless-steel sculpture that's not only an aesthetically interesting work of art, but a mental portal to the fourth dimension used as a teaching tool.

"In the three-dimensional world, there are five regular solids -- tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron -- whose faces are composed of triangles, squares or pentagons. In four dimensions, there are six regular solids, which can be built based on the symmetries of the three-dimensional solids. Unfortunately, humans cannot process information in four dimensions directly because we don't see the universe that way. Although mathematicians can work with a fourth dimension abstractly by adding a fourth coordinate to the three that we use to describe a point in space, a fourth spatial dimension is difficult to visualize. For that, models are needed." -Penn State, Daily Science News

The sculpture is titled "Octacube" and it's on public display in the lobby of the Mathematics Department at the Pennsylvania State University campus. It measures 6 x 6 x 6 ft and weighs 1200 lbs.

Want to read more about the fourth dimension?
Hyperspace Structures - The Hypercube
The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space
The Fourth Dimension
Signifying Nothing: The Fourth Dimension in Modernist Art and Literature

Professor Ian Ayres wrote in the NY Times, "In time for the new school year, the Government Accountability Office has released a sobering report on the soaring price of textbooks. Over the past two decades, the report tells us, 'College textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation.'"

The outlandish price of college textbooks isn't even the most offensive part of it. The truth is, the textbook industry is run by a small group of huge corporations who care very little about education. Like most huge corporations, their interests seem to lie solely in maximizing profits. When I was in college, I noticed that I had to pay outrageous prices for new textbooks because the sale of used textbooks was in decline. Why? Because those corporations found that the easiest way to make big money was to make small changes in the text or layout of the book every year or two, and release a new edition, which renders the previous edition obsolete. Colleges will not permit a student to use an older edition even though it probably has the exact same information as the new book because they want to make sure everyone is "on the same page". These companies have even gone as far as to bribe professors into making their expensive books a requirement for their class.

In light of this, Jason Turgeon, of Textbook Revolution has put together an archive of free online text books, some of which can be downloaded and printed. Unlike some sites that host pirated copies of print textbooks, all of the material at Textbook Revolution is legally made available by the individual copyright holders. There's no log-in or fee to access the advertisement-free repository. That's right! Free brain candy! Similarly,The Assayer also offers an online collection of free books and collects user-submitted reviews. Combined with the seemingly endless amount of information that can be collected on the Internet on just about any topic imaginable, there's absolutely no excuse for ignorance in this day and age.

Other interesting articles about the topic:
All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books by Ben Crowell
Are Copyrights A Textbook Scam? By Dean Baker
Sticker Shock by Cyndi Allison

Bathsheba Grossman is an artist who creates 3D geometric scupltures out of metal. They are remarkably beautiful, not just because of their unusual shapes, but because of the 3D printing technology that allows the artist to build a physical metal sculpture from a digital 3D object created in CAD.

The handheld sculptures are very reasonably priced. I love miniature objects, so I'm very taken by the mini sculptures that are less than 2 inches in size. Grossman's gallery contains many awe inspiring sculptures, but my favorites are the lighting designs because they combine art with function. There are a lot of wonders to behold on this website so take time to read about the work that goes into making these little wonders in order to fully appreciate their beauty.