Mind your head, here comes MIR

A 3D visualisation of MIR's descent from the heavens is being provided on the Web so that if you can't be there at the moment of impact, you'll be able to watch it nice and safely from your browser. And then re-run the event at your leisure. ParallelGraphics is using streamed data from NASA for what they believe is the only real time visualisation of MIR on the Internet. ...more

Intel turns the light on 3D graphics

More news from the graphics industry's SIGGRAPH conference as Intel announces a new software technology to vastly speed up movie-effects processes and bring highly detailed games and 3D scans. Known as Light Field Mapping, the technology accurately models the light reflectance properties of textures, allowing interactive photo-realistic 3D objects, both moving and still (and even with degrees of transparency), to be rendered in real-time. Radek Grzeszczuk, senior research scientist with Intel's Microprocessor Labs, said: "The combination of a fast and simple rendering routine, small data sets and ease of content creation features in Light Field Mapping will help bring more realism to computer graphics without sacrificing interactivity. ...more

Wanadoo wants to become Orange

A little over a year since it changed the name of its UK ISP from Freeserve to Wanadoo, France Telecom is to spend another 200mn Euros rebranding it as Orange. The change will bring together the company's Internet offerings and its Orange mobile phone services under a single name. Ultimately consumers will be able to get all their telecoms and Internet services from a single supplier as the various arms of France Telecom converge. ...more

Apple rivals claim iTunes is doomed

Two of the main rivals to Apple's ongoing dominance of the music downloads market believe that the iTunes model, where users pay $1 per song, has no future. Both Napster and Yahoo! are staking their futures on subscription models, where customers pay a fixed fee each month for the right to stream, but not download, an unlimited number of songs. The drawback is that these cannot be copied onto a portable device such as an iPod, but new technology from Microsoft will change that. ...more

IT Forum 2004: Microsoft revises TechNet 2.0

Microsoft has rejigged its TechNet support offering. While version 2.0 of TechNet Plus 2. ...more