Fraction

Autodesk University 2008: Cabbages, pumpkins and crumpled paper bags -- where Scott Robertson gets his inspiration. — It'd be difficult to overstate how excited we were to hear Scott Robertson talk about his work live an in person...though a little apprehensive given that the presentation was entitled "Creativity and Narrative Imagery," and much of the audience wasn't all that familiar with his work. Not to worry; he blew everyone away, despite hardly referencing the incredible digital concept paintings for which he is so justly famous. Instead, he took the audience on an hour and a half trip through the cognitive process that he uses to generate concepts like this alien noggin...out of a crumpled paper bag.... [Tags: audience, autodesk, autodesk university, cabbages, cognitive process]

Adobe trimming Expo budget, possibly jobs — Filed under: Macworld, Software, Graphic DesignMacworld notes today that Adobe won't have a booth at Macworld Expo, but will still be offering training sessions at the conference. Traditionally, Adobe's booth has been a major presence on the show floor. The bad news might not end there: A tipster with purported connections inside Adobe told us that the company is considering laying off a significant fraction of its nearly 7,000 employees, including management. This points to some serious, knee-jerk cost-cutting at Adobe, since Macworld Expo has been so valuable to Adobe's relationship with the Mac user base in the past. "Adobe... [Tags: adobe creative suite, apple weblog, bad news, budget, demo sessions]

MySpace CEO: Acquisition Targets Dirt Cheap And Getting Cheaper — One upside of the Web 2.0 shakeout: As companies with great ideas or innovative tech start to run out of money, they can be gobbled up cheap. That's what MySpace (NWS) CEO Chris DeWolfe told a Reuters conference closed to outside reporters: DeWolfe said companies worth between $200 million and $300 million just six months ago are now running out of money and willing to sell themselves for less than one-tenth of that value. But he's not ready to buy just yet -- we still haven't hit bottom. "At the lower levels the money dries up, everyone's looking for some... [Tags: acquisition targets, acquisitions, ceo chris, chris dewolfe, dirt]

Notebooks Could Run 40 Hours With Power-Saving Displays — We don't have super batteries yet, but soon we might see ultra-low power displays that could keep a notebook running 20 to 40 hours before needing a charge. Mary Lou Jepsen, designer of nonprofit One Laptop Per Child's famous green-and-white XO netbook, has plans to ship energy-efficient screens for laptops and e-books in the second half of 2009. Like the XO's screen, the new low-powered displays will be readable under direct sunlight and consume a small fraction of the power of a traditional display. Battery life has become a prominent issue as the tech industry demands smaller, more powerful... [Tags: batteries, e books, fraction, gadgets, jepsen]

Creative30 announces winners — We mentioned the Vice Magazine sponsored Creative30 competition here a bit more than a month ago, in which 30 young British artists and designers presented their work in a fascinating collection of 3-minute videos ranging from music and graphics to furniture and conceptual art. The two winners, announced today, are extraordinary milliner William Chambers (see one of his many precise, exotic toppers above) and artist Katie Paterson, whose video describing records made of ice (above) and bouncing Morse Code off the moon made it into our initial post. Congratulations to Willilam and Katie--judging by the videos, it couldn't have... [Tags: british artists, conceptual art, designers, fraction, furniture]

Handling Angry Clients — You can’t please everybody. There’s a reason why that line is a cliché.  I’ve yet to hear of a freelancer who never encountered a client who was disappointed in their work.  Some clients keep their frustrations to themselves or simply stop working with you.  Others, however, expect you to hear out an entire rant about what went wrong and how they feel about it. In cases like those, it’s important to take calculated steps in fixing what went wrong. Don’t panic. Your client is probably emotional the first time they contact you about a problem.  Since that’s the case, it’s... [Tags: email, fraction, freelancer, frustrations, job]

With the economy as turbulent as it is, most people are trying to save a few bucks whatever way they can. CabEasy, a 1-man startup that launched earlier this month, is looking to help people save some cash on their Taxi rides. The site allows people to post a public listing of their upcoming taxi travel plans, and pair up with someone else who is traveling a similar route to split the ride. The concept is very similar to Hitchsters, a startup that helps pair up travelers so that they can share a limo on the way to the... [Tags: airport travelers, audience, ball games, crunch, drool]

Mallplace.com - The World Of Shopping Revolutionized — What it doesMallplace dubs itself as “the new way to shop”, and that description encapsulates the essence of this UK-based initiative quite well. Generally speaking, Mallplace can be compared to a portal that gives you immediate access to major retailers on the WWW using an interactive interface that is the closest to actually being there that has been devised so far. Such an approach benefits all parties. Consumers are provided an immersive shopping experience that has no precedents, whereas retailers become part of the first all-encompassing shopping center on the Internet as of this date. As it is stressed out... [Tags: array, buddies, consumers, endeavors, fraction]

iPhone 3G ad banned in the UK by Advertising Standards Authority — Across the pond in the UK, they do in fact have something very foreign to us here in America called advertising standards. Apparently, in some cases at least, companies are actually held accountable for claims made in their advertisements. Crazy, we know. The body responsible for ensuring that advertising is up to par with UK standards, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), was none too happy with a recent iPhone 3G commercial and ended up banning it from UK airwaves. Apparently it received complaints from 17 people claiming that the commercial was very misleading, citing one point in the ad where... [Tags: advertisements, advertising standards authority, apple, asa, distant future]

Report: Future online ad growth slow — No surprises here. Growth in U.S. online ad spending will slow next year, according to the latest projection by eMarketer — a downward revision from the research firm’s pre-economic crisis projection, made in August. The new projection sees online ad spending growing 8.9 percent to $25.7 billion in 2009, compared to the $23.6 billion that it expects to be spent by the end of 2008. In August, it estimated 14.9 percent growth next year. This is the first time eMarketer has projected single-digit annual online ad revenue growth. The firm also projects there will be a slow recovery in online... [Tags: advertisers, downward revision, economic crisis, emarketer, fraction]

Serious Materials Makes Serious Windows — Kevin Surace and his company, Serious Materials, have been on TreeHugger before; they invented and are producing EcoRock, a new drywall substitute that generates a fraction of the carbon dioxide released in the production of conventional board. They also make Quietrock, a soundproof drywall where one sheet is equivalent acoustically to eight sheets of regular stuff. They "aim for breakthroughs in product performance, without requiring changes in customer behavior or in how products are used – thus speeding market adoption." But from board to windows? That is a stretch, the only thing they have in common is tha...... [Tags: carbon dioxide, customer behavior, fraction, market adoption, product performance]

The Blogosphere is Not Dead. So What’s Really Happening? — Who Killed The Blogosphere? Thats the title of a new piece by Nicholas Carr that examines the seeming decline in the number of actively updated blogs since Technorati started keeping statistics in 2002: Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent “state of the blogosphere” study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. 133 million blogs? That’s the experimental phase. New... [Tags: 5 million, audiences, bloggers, blogosphere, decline]

Remote Real-time Rendering On-demand -- Now Just A Mouse-click Away — A new technology has the potential to dramatically change the way that architects operate. Architects and engineers teamed up to develop an on-demand service that allows architects to submit designs for rendering from a remote location at a fraction of the time that would be required on a local PC.... [Tags: architects, fraction, mouse click, new technology, real time]

Currency Traders Deal With Ups, Downs — Currency traders buy and sell everything from U.S. dollars, pesos, yen and Euros. They profit by betting correctly that a currency might move up or down a fraction of a percent. The financial turmoil of the last two months has turned their world upside down. Chana Joffe-Walt reports for member station KPLU.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us... [Tags: currency traders, e mail, financial turmoil, fraction, joffe]

Shrink your URL-s like never before — If you use Twitter or any other microblogging tool a lot, you know that character count is limited, while URL-s are very long. I’ve whipped up a new service called Shrink-O-Matic which lets you shrink your URL-s to a fraction of their size, but I also aimed to raise the bar a bit and create soemthing unique. If you have a really long URL from ebay for example, you can input it into the shrinker and instead of this: “http://cgi.ebay.com/YAMAHA-DGX-520-PIANO-88-KEY-PIANO-DIGITAL-KEYBOAR-STAND_W0QQitemZ280287067006QQcmdZViewItemQQptZKeyboards_MIDI?hash=item280287067006&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1308″ you would get a much nicer URL, something like this: “http://somurl.com/er45A”. Apart from this basic feature, Shrink-O-Matic offers a lot... [Tags: amp, bookmarklet, c0, character count, compromise]

The $70-Per-Hour Lie — Have you heard the one about the union autoworker making more than $70 per hour, forcing American auto companies into bankruptcy? There are two very small problems with that. First, there's something wrong with workers making a good living? As wrong for a blue-collar worker to make $70 as for a CEO to make $11,000? Second, it's not true. Average wages for Big Three workers are around $28 per hour. But then what's the source of that $70 hourly figure? It didn't come out of thin air. Analysts came up with it by including the cost of all employer-provided benefits--namely,... [Tags: american auto, auto companies, average wages, bankruptcy, blue collar worker]

Nvidia Launches Tesla Supercomputer. up to 960 Cores for $10,000 — “Personal” and “supercomputer” aren’t words that would usually appear side by side, unless you’re a mastermind at Nvidia. With the announcement of their latest machine, the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, they’re looking to bring what was normally thought of as gigantic, to the small time.The Tesla only costs 1/100th of what a normal supercomputer cluster would cost, and only takes up a small fraction of the space. Thanks to heterogeneous computing, the process of CPUs acting in tandem with GPUs, it all fits right into a desktop form factor.It’s reported that the Tesla is based off of Nvidia’s CUDA architecture,... [Tags: acting, architecture, bargain, c language, cambridge]

Rewarding Breakthrough Innovation — I understand that design patents are worth only a fraction of their utility patent namesakes. Each year, the number of design patent applications are only a small fraction of the number of utility patent applications filed., and design patents are – on average – less valuable than utility patents. I do believe that utility patent law can learn something from design patent law. Let's start with the recent en banc design patent case of Egyptian Goddess v. Swisa. In that case, the Federal Circuit defined the meaning of "infringement" of a design patent. The test created by the court looks... [Tags: art designs, breakthrough design, breakthrough innovations, design patent applications, design patents]

Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to get life saving antisniper device — British and American forces fighting the guerilla insurgence in Iraq and Afghanistan could soon be protected by an antisniper device that can pinpoint the position of the shooter within a fraction of a second.... [Tags: afghanistan, american forces, fraction, guerilla, insurgence]

Canadian Solar: Q3 EPS Light; Sees Q4 Revenue Collapse [Voices] — By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily Canadian Solar (CSIQ) this morning forecast a dramatic drop in revenues for the fourth quarter as the solar sector continues to struggle with falling demand. For Q3, the company posted revenue of $252.4 million, above the Street at $248 million. But profits of 41 cents a share were 13 cents short of the Street consensus of 54 cents. The shocker is the guidance: For Q4, the company now sees revenue of $70 to $85 million, just a fraction of the Street consensus of $270.1 million. For the full year, the... [Tags: 1 million, barron, blogger, collapse, columnist]