Decade of Storage: From USB to Cloud Storage

From the first USB drives to the latest iPhone, for the last decade we’ve been carrying gigabytes of data… in our pocket. We’ve certainly come a long way from storage strategies of the past which usually required a 500-pound machine the size of a refrigerator. Back then, you would definitely need a bigger pocket!

Rackspace has created an infographic illustrating the latest storage advancements of the last ten years. From the death of the floppy disk (may it rest in peace) to the introduction to the cloud, all have made a major impact on the way consumers and IT staff alike are able to store and access information.

via www.rackspacecloud.com

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The State of Cloud Computing

Leading data visualization firm JESS3 today released "The State of Cloud Computing," which narrates the history of cloud computing and demonstrates the growing cloud economy in an interactive video. This video helps everyday folks understand that they are actually in the cloud – whether it’s through their online email account, bank account or tending to their Farmville crops while on Facebook.

via www.thestateofcloudcomputing.com
(click above link to see an interactive video)

Is Google a Monopoly? A Historical Perspective

Sure Google has 66% of the search market.  But what defines a monopoly, at least as far as the government is concerned, is shifting and interpretive set of criteria. Search isn’t steel, or oil. Monopolizing ‘finding stuff on the net’ can have a huge far reaching impact, as it operates as a gateway to information.

So is Google a monopoly? Have a look at a this infographic.

via www.scores.org

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MovieReshape: Tracking and Reshaping of Humans in Videos

Three researchers (Arjun Jain, Thorsten Thorm¨ahlen, Hans-Peter Seidel and Christian Theobalt) at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have developed MovieReshape, a software program that can alter the images of people on the film in order to change their body type.

Abstract: A system for quick and easy manipulation of the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage. The approach is based on a morphable model of 3D human shape and pose that was learned from laser scans of real people. The algorithm commences by spatio-temporally fitting the pose and shape of this model to the actor in either single-view or multi-view video footage. Once the model has been fitted, semantically meaningful attributes of body shape, such as height, weight or waist girth, can be interactively modified by the user. The changed proportions of the virtual human model are then applied to the actor in all video frames by performing an image-based warping. By this means, we can now conveniently perform spatio-temporal reshaping of human actors in video footage which we show on a variety of video sequences.

The software is still in development, and will not be officially debuted until Siggraph, the computer graphics conference in Seoul, South Korea that takes place in December.

The software will save costs in any instance where special effects can be employed, including in commercials, where one ad could be filmed, then the actor's body-type could be manipulated to meet local "standards of beauty".

For more information read reaearch paper (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 6.6 MB).

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The Growing E-Waste Situation

As technology advances and we build more and more devices, the number of obsolete electronics in need of disposal is growing as well. The issue of global e-waste is a mounting concern. And as the problem piles up, many countries are finding it easiest to just ship their e-waste overseas.

via awesome.good.is

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The Internet Is Still Not For Everyone

It radically changed the way we all interact and it has become the main medium of mass communication of our (if not all) time. Nevertheless it is used by just a few. How and why the Internet is still a technology available to less than 29% of the global population.
via woorkup.com

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