The company formerly known as Discreet has now been fully absorbed into their parent company Autodesk. The company will remain in Canada and the 3D Max staff have been moved to Montreal from San Francisco. The company will no longer be an independent company with a separate general manager and will now be a division called Autodesk Media and Entertainment. Autodesk is a US$1.2B company who have many vertical markets but the feel they are just seen as a CAD company and think discreet can change that. When we spoke to discreet this week, it became apparent that Autodesk's senior execs see discreet as providing Autodesk with sex appeal and Hollywood glamour.

Added a 2560x1024 wallpaper of a we the people bmx. You can watch the hires version here : http://www.onickz.com/gfx/photos-arty.htm (@ the bottom of the page).

I just got an email from Christophe Lambert anouncing me that JF Tarnowski, french writer and wonderful cinema professor has turned off. I really would every cinema student know school sessions masterised like he did. See you later over there, master.

A 14108 x 1819 pixels photo I shot from the Parc de Saint Cloud - warning: this image is about 7mb !



Added too, a photo of a blue eyes cat.


Both are available in the Photo Gallery : http://www.onickz.com/gfx/photos.htm

Colorization is a computer-assisted process of adding color to a monochrome image or movie. The process typically involves segmenting images into regions and tracking these regions across image sequences. Neither of these tasks can be performed reliably in practice; consequently, colorization requires considerable user intervention and remains a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task.

In this paper we present a simple colorization method that requires neither precise image segmentation, nor accurate region tracking. Our method is based on a simple premise: neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors. We formalize this premise using a quadratic cost function and obtain an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently using standard techniques. In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

Watch amazing examples here

A Baghdad police chief has been gunned down in an ambush in the capital's southwestern side that also killed two others, hospital sources say.

I left the domain NoTerrorism.com and will try in few years an other way to make people understand that all americans are not evil, all arabs are not terrorists etc.

In case you played Mario Bros videogame series, and missed that video, watch it here

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution forbids the execution of killers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes, ending a practice used in 19 states.

The 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of about 70 juvenile murderers and bars states from seeking to execute minors for future crimes.

The executions, the court said, violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling continues the court's practice of narrowing the scope of the death penalty, which justices reinstated in 1976. The court in 1988 outlawed executions for those 15 and younger when they committed their crimes. Three years ago justices banned executions of the mentally retarded.

Tuesday's ruling prevents states from making 16- and 17-year-olds eligible for execution.

"The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood. It is, we conclude, the age at which the line for death eligibility ought to rest," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.

Read more at CNN