A £400,000 PC downgrade: Rebooting Babbage’s Analytical Engine (Wired UK)

Media_httpcdniwiredco_gjgfy

From Wired UK:

"John Graham-Cumming is rebooting Babbage's Analytical Engine -- with its 1.7kB of memory.

Name: John Graham-Cumming
Occupation: Programmer and 3D modeller
Location: London
Why he's important: He's building a missing part in the history of the PC

With more than 40,000 moving parts and at nearly five metres long, Charles Babbage's steam-powered Analytical Engine is regarded as one of the earliest examples of a programmable computer. Yet remarkably, since the British mathematician first described it in 1837, the machine has never been fully built -- the only existing part is its printing mechanism, pictured above..."

read the full post on WiredUK

Gobbler Puts The Fun Back Into Collaborative Media Projects - Getting Raves! TechCrunch

Media_httptctechcrunc_qvmhh

From TechCrunch original post:

"So what is Gobbler? First it’s desktop software that keeps your media projects organized. Gobbler will locate all of your projects across your various internal and external hard drives, and then keep track of them. Even when you disconnect that external drive, Gobbler knows the project is there and keeps showing it in the file system. That alone makes Gobbler incredibly useful for people who keep grabbing new hard drives to store their terabytes of photo, video and audio projects. Do you even know where all your photos are? I don’t. A lot of them used to be on Flickr, but my pro account lapsed and Yahoo is holding them hostage until I pay up. But that’s another story.

Second, Gobbler will back up your projects to their cloud, powered by Amazon Web Services. And it’s also hyper intelligent. When a new version of a project is created, for example, Gobbler knows it only has to upload, and restore, the tiny number of files that were changed. In a multi-gigabyte project (as we regularly see for TechCrunch video projects), that’s a really big deal.

Finally, Gobbler lets people collaborate on project much more easily than before. FTP just isn’t a good solution for sending 5 gigabytes back and forth. It and other online solutions are so cumbersome that people often just fedex actual hard drives. It’s easier, and quicker...."

Wow. Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

Media_httptctechcrunc_swoye

From the TechCrunch original post:

"At age 15, most normal people are going to high school, learning to drive, not listening to their parents, and doing things that they’ll later tell their kids not to do. Josh Buckley is not a normal teenager. At 15, he was selling his first company for just over six figures.

Today, the 18-year-old entrepreneur and angel investor has partnered with 17-year-old engineer Tyler Diaz to co-found MinoMonsters, a social game in which players collect and battle pet monsters....

....As for the game: MinoMonsters is basically what Pokemon would look like if it were started today. The company that Buckley sold when he was 15, Menewsha, was an online community that produced customizable avatars. MinoMonsters’ impressive graphics owe their style both to Buckley’s prior work with avatar animations as well as the renderings of Pokemon and Japanese anime...."

Bobos Out as the Crocus Class Shift to Personal Responsibility- Re:thinking Innovation - Forbes

by Haydn Shaughnessy

"...The new naturalism is marked by a hard nosed interpretation of events, shorn of easy dreams. New naturalists draw on the natural world of ecosystems to explain the institutional world around them. They see decay and decline as well as growth and they are at ease with negatives because decline of some form is ‘natural’. To the new naturalist ideas, institutions, companies and people decline decay and die. And that’s all right.

Do the new naturalists belong to the creative class? No. Richard Florida’s creative class is a demographic with a broadly based skill-set where the new naturalist has a distinct frame of mind.

For those in the crocus revolution however the objective is to sidestep institutional decline and to aim for personal betterment. They will ally with other revolutionaries to achieve that. Therefore the recession has led to an uptick in websites where people help each other to access bargains and deals (and that’s why Groupon has been such a hit) or to share rides or even to share their car or to cook a meal or to lease out a spare room or let backpackers take the couch...".

Love this!

read the full article on Forbes.com

!!!. Crowdsourced Movie The Tunnel to be Released Simultaneously on BitTorrent and DVD #infdist

Here are some strange bedfellows: Paramount and BitTorrent. That’s right, the pirate-fighting studio just teamed up with producers who are hell-bent on using the pirates’ favorite peer-to-peer sharing software tool to release The Tunnel on May 19. At the same time, Paramount will release a DVD version of the horror film.

The DVD will contain content that’s supposedly compelling enough to lure those who downloaded the movie into buying the hard copy. The movie won’t be in theaters — it’s another one of those straight-to-video titles. But this is a first: The BitTorrent version, while full-length, serves as a tease. So if you buy the DVD, you’ll get alternate endings, along with extra material that won’t be available on the BitTorrent feed.

Another element of the unconventional monetization scheme is the sale of individual frames from the movie to fans and collectors for $1 apiece. The frames are offered as individual frames, or in groups of 1 second (25 frames), 2 seconds (50 frames) or 1 minute’s worth of the film or more. So far, the film’s producers have sold 30,000 frames, with more than 100,000 still available.

Are the film’s producers giving up the fight against movie piracy by taking a stance of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”? The movie’s producer/editor Enzo Tedeschi told Torrentfreak: “From day one we’ve maintained that The Tunnel is not supporting or condoning piracy, but instead trying to incorporate a legitimate use of peer-to-peer in our distribution strategy internationally.”

The Tunnel‘s official website offers more insight:

“We believe that if we stop fighting the peer to peer networks, they could become the biggest revolution we have ever seen in the way we share entertainment and information.

After spending years being frustrated by what we saw as the movie industry’s short-sighted and conventional outlook towards the online community, we decided it was time to try something different — The 135K Project was born.

We figured that movie posters and collectable frames from movies are being sold every day, so what if we could raise the money to make “The Tunnel” by selling every individual frame of it? We would be able to make a movie unencumbered by a studio’s need for box office. We could do what we got into the industry to do in the first place. Tell stories we like and get them out there so people could enjoy them.

What’s the key to doing that? You.

If you like the look of “The Tunnel” or the idea behind The 135K Project — buy a frame or two, blog about it, follow us on twitter, seed and embed the finished film when it’s released. Whatever you can do. It will all help and show the world there might just be another way. Who knows where that might lead?”

If nothing else, this is certainly a creative distribution plan. I’m just wondering this: Why do the film’s producers and backers think the DVD’s content won’t also be immediately placed on BitTorrent? Perhaps like locks, this scheme is designed to keep the honest people out.

So, commenters, will this work? Is this a new way to distribute films, or a fool’s errand?

Take a look at the film’s teaser: