VIDEO: Worldwide air traffic over 24 hours

Click play on the video. Now watch as the world’s aeroplanes cross continents and oceans. It’s strangely relaxing in the same way that watching a trail of ants in a garden on a warm summer’s afternoon is relaxing. One thing that’s worth looking out for – compare Europe at the start of the video to Europe at 0:45 – the flight volume changes dramatically between day and night.

Seen a similarly fantastic depiction of data? Post it in the comments below. I love stuff like this, so if you’ve got a favourite visualization of information then I want to see it too.

Nitmesh (via @damiano)

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SHINY VIDEO: Quad vs Dual – how many cores do you really need?

Just before Christmas, Dan and I took delivery of a dual core and a quad core machine, and we thought we’d see if it’s actually worth putting four cores into your computer, rather than two. We ran four processor-intensive concurrent tasks – a virusscan, a DVD encode, a 3D game, and then we measured how long it took to unzip a zip file.

The results? Well, you’ll have to watch the video to find out. I’ll just say that I was surprised by the outcome. Let us know your experiences of Quad core vs Dual core chips in the comments below.

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SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: Medion Akoya P8610 media centre laptop

Here’s the Medion Akoya P8610 which I got a sneaky look at just before Christmas, but only just remembered to post. To recap from our original post, it’s a good, cheap, multimedia laptop, with oodles of features. High specs, too – with a dual core processor, 4GB of RAM, dolby audio system and dedicated graphics. Impressive, and perfect for hooking up to a home cinema setup. Yours for £800.

Medion Shop

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YouTube shoots self in foot – mutes all video with 'unauthorized copyrighted music'

youtube-muting.jpg

In a strange, sudden and unannounced move, YouTube has suddenly muted a bunch of videos that it claims have ‘unauthorized copyrighted music’. Under the video, it says “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”

Two things bother me about this. Firstly, the users are going to absolutely detest it. They’ll leave in their droves for YouTube’s competitors. I don’t understand why YouTube would agree to something as ridiculous as this – they’re not stupid, and I’m sure they realize what the effects will be.

Secondly, how does this square with the deals YouTube made two years ago, when labels made their content “available for inclusion in sanctioned consumer uploads”. This move seems to run 180 degrees in the reverse to what those deals aimed to facilitate. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one, and update the post when I hear more and/or YouTube releases some sort of official statement.

(via Media Futurist)

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YouTube Video of the Week: Insane Japanese Water Jetpack

Whoa – this is awesome. Supersize a simple bottle rocket, and strap it to a terrified-looking Japanese bloke. The most impressive thing? The science involved, neatly summarised by PopSci. In short, this bloke leaves the launchpad at over 200MPH, experiencing acceleration of approx 10gs! Don’t try this at home, kids.

PopSci (via Digg)

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CES 2009: Cisco announces Internet-connected Media Hub: get your music and video organised

cisco-media-hub-linksys.jpg

Cisco has announced its new Media Hub (well, the Linksys by Cisco Media Hub, but that’s a bit of a “my company owns your brand” mouthful) which allows users to consolidate their home multimedia libraries and access them from their network or over the Internet.

The Hub comes preloaded with a general media server as well as an iTunes server, and automatically searches the network for other media devices, presenting music, pictures and video within a simple web browser…

CES 2009: Sharper Image rotating iPod dock

I’ve always scoffed a little at docks and generally anything that cradles your precious PMP but after a few annoying, arm aching hours of clutching my iRiver Spinn on the trip across the Pond, I was rather pleased to see Susi leap at the Sharper Image’s device at CES Unveiled complete with motorised rotator. You’ll see what I mean…