Fifty years ago, there were about 1,000 animators in Hollywood - most likely employed by Disney, who worked in the Looney Tunes backlot of the movie industry. In the last few years everywhere you can throw a stick a digital animator jumps up and says "Hey you!", an effects specialist goes "Whatsup" , or a videogame maker gets very animated. The term "filmmaking professional" now covers the usual set designers and cinematographers, but have been joined or have morphed into computer-generated imagers, motion-capturers, and digital compositors. They are the spell-casters whose animated effects have even crawled into the "real world" of the documentary or the big budget blockbuster. There are some in the industry who are suggesting that it won't be too long before the Tom Cruises of today will be taken over by the an ultra-sophisticated improvement on the Shreks and Final Fantasists and only be paid those mega bucks for a voice over.

Continue reading ""Create me ..." said the digitally animated voice softly" »

Posted by digi.talk team at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No, it's not a law firm out of Dickens! We realise that we have been a bit backward in telling you about the forward track in the digital world. No one knows how many bits of the so-called Web 2.0 widgets, mashups and what-have-you have become available since the advent of the 2.0 meme around four years ago - all we know is that the growth is astronomical! So now let's try to make up for our laziness by taking you through a few things that have been "rocking the world" for the last minute of internet time.

Continue reading "Joost,Twitter, Digg, Jangle and Food" »

Posted by digi.talk team at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Forget your worries" exhorts the The Economic Times of Bombay, as they look at GPS and mobile devices which come together to make sure that you can keep track of your kiddos. Singapore is mentioned as one of the countries where the technology is being used.

Read the full story at Newsbank [cut and paste the article title above into the Newsbank search box]

Posted by digi.talk team at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's go to the dictionary (1)on this one
"The spirit of the time; the general intellectual and moral state or temper characteristic of any period of time.
"
Which sounds simple until you try to grasp individual instances of it - since once grasped perhaps it then is no longer a "spirit of the times" - becoming a mere fashion or a trend. So we have set ourselves a bit of a task here when we set out as part of the Lifestyle area to try to pinpoint key "geists" before their time slips through the glass.

[German : Zeit, time (from Middle High German zīt, from Old High German) + Geist, spirit]

(1) Oxford English Dictionary Online

Posted by digi.talk team at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Grid computing is the new thing for all the geeks out there and inevitably it is going to mean a great difference to our daily lives whether we know it or not. So what is it?
"Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed "autonomous" resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements(1)"

Mmm so what does this mean to you and me. Remember the SETI project that used the power of your own home computer via the screen saver to scan the galaxy for intelligible life? Well, grid computing is a bit like that, solving problems too big for any single supercomputer, but it also has the flexibility to work on multiple smaller problems. Its also enables better exploitation of available computing power.

Business(2) is keen on the commercialisation of the Grid framework. The 'big science' sector is also actively utilising its power. There are also "Grid-enabled" versions of High Performance Computing tools. CERN (the world's largest particle physics laboratory) is one of the largest users of Grid technology.

So it seems to be the cutting edge of the computer world right now and courses are being offered at a number of institutions including University of Melbourne, University of Minnesota, University of Southern California, Vrije Universiteit, and University of Leiden.

So what's the potential for the technology? North America's National Digital Mammography Archive(NDMA)(3), which runs on the University of Pennsylvania Grid that connects 4 hospitals in Pennsylvania, Chicago, North Carolina and Toronto enables the capture of healthcare files from any location on the Grid -- including patient medical images, records and clinical history.

NDMA has enabled access to current and past patient records in seconds, meaning faster diagnosis and reduced overhead costs associated with transferring paper or film records between hospitals and offices.

The Grid also enables the hospitals to take advantage of shared processing power to run sophisticated algorithms that enable them to identify disease patterns, as well as analytical tools to aid the diagnosis of diseases. The Grid also supports educational tools for radiologist training and computer-aided diagnosis.

But just in case you think that it is all in then "high end" world there are plans afoot to build platforms for online video gaming. Think 2020 (4) and the world is being run by these mega-servers. Shades of the Matrix and Terminator - scary huh?

Catch our Seminar series on Sept 1 "Grid is Good"

(1) IBM Solutions Grid for Business Partners: Helping IBM Business Partners to Grid-enable applications for the next phase of e-business on demand.
(2) Lock on to the grid. By: Davis, Brian. Professional Engineering, 7/12/2006, Vol. 19 Issue 13, p38-39,
[from EBSCOHost Academic Search Premier]
(3) http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/10/18/021104fegrid_1.html
(4) See 2020 Computing: in Nature 440
[from Nature.com]

Posted by digi.talk team at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)