Village Gamer

Don’t forget to give the Government your input on the Copyright Consultation process. The eConsultation web site has transcripts from the past Town Hall meetings held across the country, as well as areas for direct participation such as the site’s forum and the online submission centre which both give you an opportunity to respond to a few specific questions on copyright. You can also submit your own paper or report to on the site so that other people can view your work. Both the Copyright eConsultation process and the ongoing CRTC hearings have a direct impact on the digital media industry, so it’s important to get involved and have your say. The Education Medias web site also has important information for educators in regards to the new copyright process.

How many of you have been holding out for the new Palm Pre instead of snapping up the iPhone 3Gs? The new Palm Pre is now available for pre-order exclusively through Bell Canada in anticipation of its August 27 shelf date. The Palm Pre is comparable in price to the new iPhone – $199.95 with a three year contract or $599.95 without a contract, with a minimum 500 MB data plan. Bell smartphone clients can choose from a wide variety of voice and data plans, including Smartphone Combos that offer unlimited Internet browsing, personal email, text messaging and Windows Live Messenger.

Toronto’s digital distribution company YANGAROO Inc. has announced that, subject to regulatory approval, American media services company Horizon Media Inc. will acquire warrants to purchase 750,000 YANGAROO common shares. The warrants will become exercisable after various phases of a digital media workflow solution are successfully completed. These warrants will have an exercise price as permitted by the TSX Venture Exchange policies at the time of issuance and an expiry date of five years from the date of issuance.

Meanwhile, Science Daily has reported that researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing programming tools to enable engineers in the defense industry to utilize the processing power of GPUs without having to learn the complicated programming language required to use them directly. These tools are designed to take advantage of videogame computer and console GPUs.

“As radar systems and other sensor systems get more complicated, the computational requirements are becoming a bottleneck,” said GTRI senior research engineer Daniel Campbell. “We are capitalizing on the ability of GPUs to process radar, infrared sensor and video data faster than a typical computer and at a much lower cost and power than a computing cluster.”

The researchers are writing functions defined in the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) to run on GPUs. VSIPL is an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers and government labs. GPU VSIPL is available for download.

The researchers are currently writing the functions in Nvidia’s CUDA™ language, but the underlying principles can be applied to GPUs developed by other companies, according to Campbell. With GPU VSIPL, engineers can use high-level functions in their C programs to perform linear algebra and signal processing operations, and recompile with GPU VSIPL to take advantage of the speed of the GPU. Studies have shown that VSIPL functions operate between 20 and 350 times faster on a GPU than a central processing unit, depending on the function and size of the data set.

For the future, the researchers plan to continue expanding the GPU VSIPL, develop additional defense-related GPU function libraries and design programming tools to utilize other efficient processors, such as the cell broadband engine processor at the heart of the PlayStation 3 video game console. (1)

(1) Parts of report excerpted from “Georgia Institute of Technology (2009, July 31). Programming Tools Facilitate Use Of Video Game Processors For Defense Needs. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 4, 2009