Rich Banks

Rich Banks
Originally uploaded by eyebe / aibe

its been quite sometime i didnt write here or visited but i happen to grab sometime to up something this is a shot taken at srilanka about a month ago nice place i would say.

Mr.Lonely

Mr.Lonely
Originally uploaded by eyebe / aibe

last shots from my 40D its shot from sri lankan zoo where i found this guy very sad cos he was separated from the ladies just there picking grass feeling so lonely

A shot from last years EID

A shot from last years EID
Originally uploaded by eyebe / aibe

this one of those memories of eid

photos from my mobile - Srilanka

thoughts of a rainy day?

photoby: unknown

Zimbabwe has introduce a 100-trillion Dollar Note

I have herd about the inflation in countries but this is not normal.

No matter how dark the night gets , Light prevails at dawn

No matter how dark the night gets , Light prevails at dawn
Originally uploaded by eyebe

the title says it all

street racing on facebook

Gets u addicted when u start playing it first it was kinda boring when i started it then again i got excited once the level goes high with cool cars and different types of properties i get to buy off its really cool only thing is i don't get to race only the race is generated automatically but its okay full off fun start off with a car drive in different cities soon u will see your adrenaline kicking.....

find it on face book and my space.....

Acer AspireRevo

NVIDIA and Acer collectively took the wraps off the very first NVIDIA Ion-based design win, with a sleek new SFF PC (Small Form Factor PC) called the AspireRevo. Built on the NVIDIA Ion platform, the AspireRevo consists of NVIDIA's GeForce 9400 chipset with integrated graphics in support of Intel's Atom processor. Specifically, this new Acer system comes with an Atom 230 on board, which is a single core variant versus the dual core variant NVIDIA was showing in their Ion reference system. The new little system looks a tad like Asus' Eee Box perhaps, but with a bit more styling and of course a lot more GPU horsepower under the hood for multi-media and full HD video offload processing on the Ion platform IGP. Here are a few of AspireRevo's specifics, to get you all lathered up...



As you'll note, the Acer AspireRevo has roomy capacity in both system memory (up to 4GB total) as well as its storage subsystem, with up to a 250GB hard drive. Additional storage capacity can be tapped into via eSATA and of course USB2.0. Other key I/O options include HDMI, VGA, and the obligatory Gigabit Ethernet port. The AspireRevo is actually a very stylish little machine. Let's salivate, shall we?

The AspireRevo measures a svelte and tiny 7.1-inch x 7.1-inch x 1.2-inches high. Bookshelf HTPC? It certainly does smack of that and if you tether a USB Blu-ray drive to it, you've got all the comforts of home in very little space.

Other key features of AspireRevo include:

* Windows Vista Home Premium
* Future Windows 7 support and compatibility
* 1080p HD video with HD 7.1 audio
* DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
* Runs games like Spore, Sim City 5 and even Call of Duty 4 at moderate resolutions and image quality
* Accelerated video and transcoding via NVIDIA CUDA technology

In a press briefing today NVIDIA commented that while the Acer AspireRevo offers a single-core Atom implementation, that dual core Atom-based Ion products will be forth coming. In addition, NVIDIA plans to foster VIA-based Ion designs as well. Pricing for the AspireRevo, though not confirmed just yet, is expected to be around the $299 mark. Availability for the AspireRevo is TBD currently but we will update this news release as more details become available -- and of course, we're looking forward to giving you a hands-on view of the AspireRevo in the weeks ahead as well.

Tornado - Artifical Beach

Batteries That Feed on Blood

this is WTF type a thing! but amazing at the same time..





Yesterday researchers at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver announced that they'd created a tiny battery (pictured) that could draw power from human blood. They're basically cyborg batteries, half biological and half technological.

The batteries are designed for use in pacemakers and other implantable medical devices. A small colony of yeast lives inside each battery, and this living core of the fuel cell can draw energy from glucose (sugar) in blood flowing around it. According to New Scientist:

The yeast-based fuel cell produces around 40 nanowatts of power, compared to the microwatt a typical wristwatch battery might produce, Chaio says. That might be enough power for some devices if it were coupled with a capacitor to allow energy to be stored. The yeast could also be genetically engineered to boost its power output.

Now that we can have bio-batteries implanted in our bodies, we're well on the road to becoming cyborgs. We can become biological organisms implanted with technology that is in turn implanted with biological organisms.

maybe someday there will be computer based babies kekek feed our blood and we will be extinct....

Human Lifespan Reach 1,000 Years

do you believe this i just came across some amazing stuff?


Can the Human Lifespan Reach 1,000 Years -Some Experts Say "Yes"
Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated, “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today …whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.”

Perhaps de Gray is way too optimistic, but plenty of others have joined the search for a virtual fountain of youth. In fact, a growing number of scientists, doctors, geneticists and nanotech experts—many with impeccable academic credentials—are insisting that there is no hard reason why ageing can’t be dramatically slowed or prevented altogether. Not only is it theoretically possible, they argue, but a scientifically achievable goal that can and should be reached in time to benefit those alive today.

“I am working on immortality,” says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. “Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”

Even the US government finds the field sufficiently promising to fund some of the research. Federal funding for “the biology of ageing”, excluding work on ageing-specific diseases like heart failure and cancer – has been running at about $2.4 billion a year, according to the National Institute of Ageing, part of the National Institutes of Health.

So far, the most intriguing results have been spawned by the genetics labs of bigger universities, where anti-ageing scientists have found ways to extend live spans of a range of organisms—including mammals. But genetic research is not the only field that may hold the key to eternity.

“There are many, many different components of ageing and we are chipping away at all of them,” said Robert Freitas at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, a non-profit, nanotech group in Palo Alto, California. “It will take time and, if you put it in terms of the big developments of modern technology, say the telephone, we are still about 10 years off from Alexander Graham Bell shouting to his assistant through that first device. Still, in the near future, say the next two to four decades, the disease of ageing will be cured.”

But not everyone thinks ageing can or should be cured. Some say that humans weren’t meant to live forever, regardless of whether or not we actually can.

“I just don't think [immortality] is possible,” says Sherwin Nuland, a professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. “Aubrey and the others who talk of greatly extending lifespan are oversimplifying the science and just don't understand the magnitude of the task. His plan will not succeed. Were it to do so, it would undermine what it means to be human.”

It’s interesting that Nuland first says he doesn’t think it will work but then adds that if it does, it will undermine humanity. So, which is it? Is it impossible, or are the skeptics just hoping it is?

After all, we already have overpopulation, global warming, limited resources and other issues to deal with, so why compound the problem by adding immortality into the mix.

But anti-ageing enthusiasts argue that as our perspectives change and science and technology advance exponentially, new solutions will emerge. Space colonization, for example, along with dramatically improved resource management, could resolve the concerns associated with long life. They reason that if the Universe goes on seemingly forever—much of it presumably unused—why not populate it?

However, anti-ageing crusaders are coming up against an increasingly influential alliance of bioconservatives who want to restrict research seeking to “unnaturally” prolong life. Some of these individuals were influential in persuading President Bush in 2001 to restrict federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. They oppose the idea of life extension and anti-ageing research on ethical, moral and ecological grounds.

Leon Kass, the former head of Bush's Council on Bioethics, insists that “the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual”. Bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Garrison, New York-based Hastings Centre, agrees: “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”

Maybe they’re right, but then why do we as humans strive so hard to prolong our lives in the first place? Maybe growing old, getting sick and dying is just a natural, inevitable part of the circle of life, and we may as well accept it.

"But it's not inevitable, that's the point," de Grey says. "At the moment, we're stuck with this awful fatalism that we're all going to get old and sick and die painful deaths. There are a 100,000 people dying each day from age-related diseases. We can stop this carnage. It's simply a matter of deciding that's what we should be doing."

One wonders what Methuselah would say about all this.

Clouds on a picnic

Gaumee Dhuvas

High Dynamic Range -HDR

- this is sample HDR i did -
is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDR is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows i am been doing some of these in my flickr photo stream

softwares to do the HDR
photomatix
photoshop

info from wiki
High dynamic range imaging was originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff's detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s. The process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range, was first reported in 1993,[1] and resulted in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was published in 1995 by Steve Mann and Rosalind Picard.[2] In 1997 this technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the computer graphics community by Paul Debevec.

This method was developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term HDR is now popularly used[3] to refer to this process. This composite technique is different from (and may be of lesser or greater quality than) the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

History
The idea of using several exposures to fix a too-extreme range of luminance was pioneered as early as the 1850s by Gustave Le Gray to render seascapes showing both the sky and the sea. Such rendering was impossible at the time using standard techniques, the luminosity range being too extreme. Le Gray used one negative for the sky, and another one with a longer exposure for the sea, and combined the two in a single picture in positive.[4]

The desirability of HDR has been recognised for decades but its wider usage was, until quite recently, precluded by the limitations imposed by the available computer processing power. Probably the first practical application of HDRI was by the movie industry in late 1980s and, in 1985, Gregory Ward created the Radiance RGBE image file format which was the first (and still the most commonly used) High Dynamic Range Imaging file format. Steve Mann developed the method for producing digital images having extended dynamic range at the MIT Media Laboratory and filed a patent on the technique in May of 1996. US patent 5,828,793 was issued in October 1998 for this work. In 1997 the technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the public by Paul Debevec and his research has since contributed significantly to the popularization of HDRI.[citation needed]

HDRI is commonly used in the real estate and architectural photography markets[5] due to its advantage of properly exposing both window and room areas simultaneously.

Until recently there were no "pure" examples of HDR based cinematography, since the effects were most commonly used during composited sequences in films. However with the advent of low cost consumer digital cameras, many amateurs began posting HDR timelapse videos on the Internet. In 2008 Mobius/Quark Films released "Silicon Valley Timelapse" which is said to feature almost 1.1 million frames of tone mapped HDR, making it the largest single source of tone mapped HDR footage available to date.

Comparison with traditional digital images
Information stored in high dynamic range images usually corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats are often called "scene-referred", in contrast to traditional digital images, which are "device-referred" or "output-referred". Furthermore, traditional images are usually encoded for the human visual system (maximizing the visual information stored in the fixed number of bits), which is usually called "gamma encoding" or "gamma correction". The values stored for HDR images are often linear, which means that they represent relative or absolute values of radiance or luminance (gamma 1.0).

HDR images require a higher number of bits per color channel than traditional images, both because of the linear encoding and because they need to represent values from 10−4 to 108 (the range of visible luminance values) or more. 16-bit ("half precision") or 32-bit floating point numbers are often used to represent HDR pixels. However, when the appropriate transfer function is used, HDR pixels for some applications can be represented with as few as 10–12 bits for luminance and 8 bits for chrominance without introducing any visible quantization artifacts.

Synthetic HDR images



Computer-created HDR images were first produced with various renderers, notably Radiance.[citation needed] This allowed for more realistic renditions of modelled scenes because the units used were based on actual physical units e.g. watts/steradian/m². It made it possible for the lighting of a real scene to be simulated and the output to be used to make lighting choices (assuming the geometry, lighting, and materials were an accurate representation of the real scene).

At the 1997 SIGGRAPH, Paul Debevec presented his paper entitled "Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs".[7] It described photographing the same scene many times with a wide range of exposure settings and combining those separate exposures into one HDR image. This HDR image captured a higher dynamic range of the viewed scene, from the dark shadows all the way up to bright lights or reflected highlights.

A year later at SIGGRAPH '98, Debevec presented "Rendering Synthetic Objects into Real Scenes: Bridging Traditional and Image-Based Graphics with Global Illumination and High Dynamic Range Photography".[8] In this paper he used his previous technique to photograph a shiny chrome ball to produce what he called a "light probe", essentially an HDR environment map. This light probe could then be used in the rendering of a synthetic scene. Unlike a normal environment map that simply provides something to show in reflections or refractions, the light probe also provided the light for the scene. In fact, it was the only light source. This added an unprecedented level of realism, supplying real-world lighting data to the whole lighting model.

HDRI lighting plays a great part in movie making when computer 3D objects are to be integrated into real-life scenes.[citation needed]

[edit] Tone mapping
An HDR image made from three exposures and tone mapped into an 8-bit JPEG image.



One problem with HDR has always been in viewing the images. Typical computer monitors (CRTs, LCDs), prints, and other methods of displaying images only have a limited dynamic range. Thus various methods of converting HDR images into a viewable format have been developed, generally called "tone mapping".

Early methods of tone mapping were simple. They simply showed a "window" of the entire dynamic range, clipping to set minimum and maximum values. However, more recent methods have attempted to compress the dynamic range into one reproducible by the intended display device. The more complex methods tap into research on how the human eye and visual cortex perceive a scene, trying to show the whole dynamic range while retaining realistic colour and contrast.

Images with too much "HDR" processing have their range over-compressed, creating a surreal low-dynamic-range rendering of a high-dynamic-range scene.


Here the dynamic range of the image is demonstrated by adjusting the "exposure" when tone-mapping the HDR image into an LDR one for display. The above sequence uses an image rendered with Radiance using Paul Debevec's light probe of the Uffizi gallery. The rendering software produces a high dynamic range image. When making the JPEG images, one selects a part of that range for display. This is similar to how a conventional camera captures only a portion of the dynamic range of a real physical scene.

The middle exposure is the desired exposure and is likely how this scene would normally be presented. The exposure to the left is 4 EV darker, showing some detail in the bright clouds in the sky. The exposure to the right is 3 EV lighter, showing some detail in the darker parts of the scene. This shows why compositing is desirable; a composite image can retain the interesting details from all three exposure settings.
The end result