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Radiohead has released a new music video in a very unique format. The video was created entirely without the use of cameras. Instead the makers of the video employed visualisations from a scanning system called Geometric Informatics and location shots created using a Velodyne HDL-64E that utilises pulsers from a laser diode.
All this data is now available for the public to use and create their own versions of the video.
This has come about because of a link-up with the Google Code site, where the information can be downloaded along with a visualiser. You can essentially re-edit the video in an application of your choosing.
Once you have done this, you can upload it to YouTube, where a group has already been created to show off your work.
James Frost, the director of the video, had this very Radiohead thing to say about the project: "In a weird way [the project] is a direct reflection of where we are in society. Everything is [computer] data. Everything around us is data-driven in some shape or form. We are so reliant on it that it seems like our lives are digital."

Check out the video: Google Code
View Source: TechRadar

Nokia on Tuesday announced it plans to acquire all of Symbian, which develops an operating system for mobile phones. The Finnish phone giant currently owns about 48 percent and will pay €264 million ($410 million) for the rest. It has received thumbs up from Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic Mobile Communications, and Siemens, which represents about 91 percent of the Symbian shares subject to the offer, according to a statement from Nokia.
Samsung Electronics, a partial stakeholder in Symbian, hasn’t commented yet, but Nokia said it expects the company to agree to the sale. The deal doesn’t come as a surprise to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. "Nokia paid out more than $250 million in Symbian license fees last year, so it makes commercial sense to buy Symbian for about $410 million, rather than keep paying what is effectively a subsidy to the other shareholders," Blaber wrote in a company blog.

View: The full story @ Infoworld

If you think that you always get what you pay for, the just-released beta of OpenOffice 3.0 should convince you otherwise. This free, open-source software suite provides most of what anyone could want in an office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, database, drawing tools, and math equation editor. Although it doesn’t include all of the high-end features and the slick user interface of Microsoft Office 2007 (for the PC) and Microsoft Office 2008 (for the Mac), it will handle just about any job you need done. If you’re not working in an enterprise that has standardized on Microsoft Office, you should think twice before paying full freight for Office, and give serious consideration to this free alternative when the final version is released.
Keep in mind that OpenOffice 3.0 is in beta and should be used for evaluation purposes only. I tested the Windows version on a 1.83GHz Core Duo PC with 1 GB of memory, and found it to be somewhat buggy. For example, I was unable to create a document and save it without crashing — I had to first create a document in another program, and then open it in OpenOffice; at that point it worked fine. These types of problems should come as no surprise; the final version isn’t due until September, and this is a very early beta.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Symantec’s comprehensive security report on the malware industry from July 1 to December 31, 2007, is now avaible in its 100+ page glory. Symantec broke down information on patch development time by operating system and by the type of vulnerability encountered. Surprisingly, Microsoft had the shortest time-to-patch over both halves of 2007. In the first part of the year, Microsoft released 38 patches (two of which involved third-party applications) with an average deployment time of 18 days. From July to December, Microsoft released 22 patches with an average patch time of six days.
Red Hat came in second, at 32 days for the second half of the year and 36 days in the first half. That’s quite a bit higher than Microsoft’s average, but of the 227 vulnerabilities Red Hat patched in 2007, 226 of them involved third-party applications. Apple, Sun, and HP all lag well behind Microsoft and Red Hat, though the gap for each company differs significantly between the first and second halves of last year.

News Source: Symantec

The Mozilla Mobile team has posted two prototype mobile user-interfaces for you to play with, one for button-driven devices, and one for touch screen devices. Now is a great time to get involved with the mobile project, as the team would like feedback on these UIs. More information is available on Doug Turner’s weblog, and Ars Technica has published a short article about the prototypes.

Just a reminder that the Firefox 3 Beta 3 code freeze is today, with the string freeze for localization last Friday. The plan is to have a quiet freeze for the rest of the week before starting builds, on the same timeline as used for Beta 2. With this schedule, builds should begin the morning of Monday, February 4th. For further information see Mike Connor’s and Mike Beltzner’s posts to mozilla.dev.planning.

On January 22nd 1998, Netscape first announced plans to release the source code for Netscape Communicator, laying the foundation for the Mozilla Project. Now, ten years later, Mitchell Baker writes, “2008 is a year to celebrate — Mozilla turns 10 this year. 10 years of open source history, commitment, product development, community building and accomplishments. An open source project of astonishing scope and diversity. A portion of the Internet that is more open and participatory than almost anyone imagined. A strong voice for what the Internet can be. That’s 10 amazing years.” Read the rest of Mitchell’s post on her blog.

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. OpenOffice.org is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code to the Project. Over 180,000 people from every nearly every curve of the globe have joined this Project with the idea of creating the best possible office suite that all can use. They do so under the auspices of “open source.”
Release Schedule:

• first translation handover: January 18th, 2008
• UI and Feature_freeze: March 6th, 2008
• Translation update 3.0 start: March 13th, 2008
• Translation update 3.0 delivery: April 3rd, 2008, code freeze for Beta
• begin TCM testing: April 10th, 2008
• “last cws integration” for Beta: April 17th, 2008
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta: April 30th, 2008
• code_freeze, last regular translation delivery: July 4th, 2008
• Last cws integration for fixes: July 18th, 2008
• release candidate for all languages: July 25th, 2008, begin of TCM testing
• Product release: September 2nd, 2008 or OOoCon 2008 mid September ?

 

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