Crazy Talk manipulates points on faces in images to make it appear as though the person or character in a picture is speaking.
Crazy Talk manipulates points on faces in images to make it appear as though the person or character in a picture is speaking with the words provided by the puppeteer.
The software, tailored for Macintosh computers, has been put to work on popular US television programs Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Jon Stewart Show, according to its creators.
Kimmel's studio used Crazy Talk to power a comedy sketch of Osama Bin Laden speaking from hell, Martin said.
The application is also used to make language learning more fun in some Silicon Valley grade schools, according to Reallusion, which has its headquarters in the California city of San Jose.
Crazy Talk jumped onto the "best of 2012" list at the Mac App Store after being made available there in November at a price of $30.
Versions of the software designed for use on iPhones or iPads will be released later this year,
This simple memristor circuit could soon transform all electronic devices.This simple memristor circuit could soon transform all electronic devices.Since the dawn of electronics, we've had only three types of circuit components--resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley researcher Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.
What is it? As its name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today's flash memory.
Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today's PCs.
Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.
When is it coming? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's up to the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) will likely appear first; HP's goal is to offer them by 2012. Beyond that, memristors will likely replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. As for memristor-based analog computers, that step may take 20-plus years.
8-core Intel and AMD CPUs are about to make their way onto desktop PCs everywhere. Next stop: 16 cores.8-core Intel and AMD CPUs are about to make their way onto desktop PCs everywhere. Next stop: 16 cores.If your CPU has only a single core, it's officially a dinosaur. In fact,quad-core computing is now commonplace; you can even get laptop computers with four cores today. But we're really just at the beginning of the core wars: Leadership in the CPU market will soon be decided by who has the most cores, not who has the fastest clock speed.
What is it? With the gigahertz race largely abandoned, both AMDand Intel are trying to pack more cores onto a die in order to continue to improve processing power and aid with multitasking operations. Miniaturizing chips further will be key to fitting these cores and other components into a limited space. Intel will roll out 32-nanometer processors (down from today's 45nm chips) in 2009.
When is it coming? Intel has been very good about sticking to its road map. A six-core CPU based on the Itanium design should be out imminently, when Intel then shifts focus to a brand-new architecture called Nehalem, to be marketed as Core i7. Core i7 will feature up to eight cores, with eight-core systems available in 2009 or 2010. (And an eight-core AMD project called Montreal is reportedly on tap for 2009.)
After that, the timeline gets fuzzy. Intel reportedly canceled a 32-core project called Keifer, slated for 2010, possibly because of its complexity (the company won't confirm this, though). That many cores requires a new way of dealing with memory; apparently you can't have 32 brains pulling out of one central pool of RAM. But we still expect cores to proliferate when the kinks are ironed out: 16 cores by 2011 or 2012 is plausible (when transistors are predicted to drop again in size to 22nm), with 32 cores by 2013 or 2014 easily within reach. Intel says "hundreds" of cores may come even farther down the line.
NEW YORK: As much as I like Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, I find the online software clunky at times. So I was skeptical when I heard Microsoft is trying to sell its new version of Office as an online subscription.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the subscription gets you the same software you'd get buying it at a retail store. In fact, I'm using the new Office 2013 to write this review, and it feels as smooth as the customized version ofOffice 2010 I regularly use.
With an online subscription, you keep paying Microsoft to use the latest version of the software, rather than pay the company once for software that gets outdated over time. It's pricey, at $100 a year, compared withthe traditional way of paying a one-time fee that starts at $140 and is good for years. Nonetheless, households with several computers will find subscriptions a good value, as one subscription is good for up to five Windows or Mac machines.
At first glance, Office 2013 resembles Office 2010, whether you buy it as a subscription or out of a box. There's a row of buttons - the ribbon - with quick access to the tools you need most. Files are compatible, so you can send Office 2013 documents to someone who has only Office 2010 (as I'm doing with this review).
What Office 2013 does, though, is embrace Microsoft's touch-screen philosophy. Microsoft'sWindows 8 operating system, which came out last fall, enables touch-screen controls so desktop and laptop computers work more like tablets. It's Microsoft's way of addressing a challenge to PCs brought about by the popularity of the iPad and tablets running Google's Android system.
So with Office 2013, you can access those ribbon buttons and menu options with your finger, as long as you have a touch-screen monitor. You can also move your cursor by touching the spot on the screen where you want to insert a paragraph into a Word document or edit a formula in an Excel spreadsheet. Of course, you can use the old-fashioned mouse and keyboard commands instead.
A button at the top lets you switch between touch and mouse modes, though you can still touch in mouse mode and vice versa. In touch mode, buttons and menus are spaced farther apart to reduce the chance of accidentally hitting the wrong one.
Microsoft also designed Office 2013 to reflect the fact that people these days tend to have multiple devices - perhaps a desktop at work, a laptop at home and a tablet on the go.
When you're online and signed in with a free Microsoft account (such as Hotmail, Live or Outlook.com), Office will push you toward storing your files online through Microsoft's SkyDrive storage service. That way, a file you save at home will pop up at work with all the changes you made. No longer do you have to email files to yourself - or kick yourself for forgetting to do so. If you prefer, you can still store files the traditional way, on your hard drive.
Other features reflect our continual connectedness. You can insert an image into Word directly from an online service such as Flickr, for instance, without first saving it onto your computer.
A "read mode" in Word temporarily reformats your document into something that resembles an electronic book. Commands for editing documents disappear, so you're left with the functions you'd need most, such as defining a word or translating a phrase. Word can also convert PDF documents into Word format so that you can make changes more easily.
Word and the other Office programs can access an Office Store, which carries apps you can buy or get for free to extend the software's functionality. That was how I got a free Merriam-Webster dictionary for defining words in read mode. Sadly, it works only when you're online. That means I'd have to wait to look up "defenestrate" if, say, I'm near the window of a skyscraper without Wi-Fi.
That gets me to my frustrations with Google Docs. It works well when I have a steady Internet connection, less so when I don't. You can enable offline use, but it's not the same. Since I travel a lot, I want to know I'll be able to access my Office files anywhere, especially with this push to save everything online.
The good news is Office 2013 works quite well without an Internet connection. SkyDrive is an Internet-based storage service, but it can also automatically save copies of all your files on every computer you use. That way, you can still open files when you're offline. Any changes you make will sync with the online copy later. I've tricked it by making different changes from different computers. Word managed to merge them.
And as I mentioned earlier, you're getting the full version of Office installed on your computer, not a copy that runs on your Web browser over the Internet. That means you're not losing most of the program's functionality when you're offline.
I've had only a few days to try out the new Office, so there are plenty of hard-core functions I have yet to discover. I've focused on Word and Excel for my test. The basic, Office 365 Home Premium subscription package also comes with PowerPoint for presentations, OneNote for note-taking, Outlook for e-mail, Publisher for desktop publishing and Access for databases. Packages geared for businesses will come later.
Microsoft will continue selling software the traditional way, for a one-time fee for one Windows computer. I use "traditional" loosely, though. If you buy it at a retail store, you're getting only a 25-character code, which you use to activate the software after downloading it at home.
At any rate, packages start at $140 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote ($20 more than the comparable Office 2010 package). You get Outlook as well for $220 and all seven programs for $400. You can also buy them a la carte - $70 for OneNote and $110 for any of the others. Consider that just $30 more gets you four programs.
If you have just one computer, the one-time fee is clearly for you. If you have two, it might still be cheaper to buy it the traditional way. You'd pay $280 for the basic package, compared with $300 over three years. I'm still running Office software from 2006 on an old iMac. That's less than $25 a year at today's prices, compared with $100 for a subscription.
Of course, the subscription gets you more, including access to all seven programs, not just four. You can change which five computers work with the subscription if you upgrade a machine or send a kid to college. You also get 20 additional gigabytes of storage on SkyDrive, on top of the 7 GB that comes for free, plus 60 minutes of free international calls a month on Skype.
Although Microsoft hasn't updated Office for Apple computers yet, the subscription will let you install Office 2011 on a Mac and give you a new version when it comes out, likely next year. The value proposition will grow even more if Microsoft ever makes versions that run on the iPad and Android devices. For now, the only tablets supported are those running Windows.
Office 2013 will require either Windows 7 or 8. With the subscription, you also get Office On Demand, which allows you to temporarily install copies on additional machines, such as that of a friend you are visiting. It's not the full experience, but it'll do. You won't lose your documents if you end your subscription one day, but you'll be limited to viewing and printing them.
Besides Google Docs, I've also used a number of free or cheaper options, including OpenOffice and Apple's Pages and Numbers. Yet I've repeatedly found myself coming back to Microsoft's Office. It's not cheap, but you're getting something far more versatile, whether you decide on a subscription or just a one-time payment.
(The author is deputy technology editor for The Associated Press)
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