Techno Babble

Recently spotted this 3D Scanner application for the iPhone.

Not sure whether there is any practical use but found it  fun nonetheless…

More detail at

http://www.trimensional.com/

A couple of  interesting videos showing Architectural Projection Mapping

The LightLine of Gotham

http://vimeo.com/15887314

and another

ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 – Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle

http://vimeo.com/11160666

With the forthcoming General Election in the UK, this couldn’t have been timed better.

There is an exercise undertaken by students during the second term of the second year of their Undergraduate Computer Science degree course at Cambridge University called the Group Design Projects.

A number of projects are undertaken, and videos of the final presentations are available on the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/CambridgeComputerLab

This year the winning entry was tweetguv.

This application analyses tweets made by UK politicians to determine whether they are showing independent thoughts, simply following their party line, or are they adopting ideas from the opposition agenda perhaps?

See a presentation of the winning project at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKIbgjWUnNQ

and visit the dedicated tweetguv web-site at

http://tweetguv.co.uk/

13 September 1956 saw the first release of the RAMAC, the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.

It weighed a ton and was about the size of a refrigerator. It boasted fifty 24-inch disks, coated with iron oxide and stored five million characters – or about 5 MB.

The RAMAC generated so much heat that it had its own separate air compressor to protect the two moving heads that read and wrote information. That made the unit rather noisy. If the size and the noise didn’t deter you the price surely would. IBM didn’t sell them – the company leased them by the year. One RAMAC would set you back $35,000 annually. (Today that would be about $250,000)

Ok so what am I talking about ?

The Hard Drive, of course.

So Happy Birthday to the Hard Drive ….

CADAZZ is a history of CAD software according to Chris Bowd.

Something special happened this week (Wednesday) when the following event occurred at two minutes and three seconds after one am …

01:02:03 04/05/06 (US date format)

(of course it happens again on 4th May for us Brits…)

What is a petabyte ?

1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes (or 1024 terabytes)

But why would you want to know that?

Its actually the amount of data contained within the Internet Archive Wayback Engine (or at least it was ! ). If you want to see how a web site looked back in 1996 chances are that it is archived here.

In addtion to an archive of web pages, the Internet Archive has archives of Moving Images, Live Music, Audio, Texts and Software.

http://www.archive.org/