LED traffic lights have an overlooked problem in the snow, compared to traditional incandescent bulbs — they don’t melt the snow.  This has led to some accidents where snow piled up against the traffic lights.  Old-school incandescent bulbs are inefficient and produce heat which melts the snow.  But new LED lights produce very little heat, and so the snow blocks the lights.

The ever more realistic graphics in game consoles and PC’s are based on approximations.  Over the years, graphics card makers have improved the approximations, but there are still lot’s of short-cuts.

Ray tracing, on the other hand, is the way to accurately render computer graphics.  The process “traces” simulated rays of light as the bounce around a scene.  Unfortunately, ray tracing uses so much CPU that it’s only used for still-frames, or else as the final phase of movie making.  An individual image (or frame in a film) takes from several seconds up to several minutes to render.

Caustic Graphics recently announced they plan to ship specialized hardware in mid 2010 that can ray trace scenes 200 times faster then the best current solutions.  If they actually deliver on their promises, and it’s not too expensive, this could lead to real-time ray traced graphics on game consoles and PCs equipped with their hardware.

If you need another reason to hate annoying animated banner ads, a paper published on Monday shows that that the worst sites require your computer to use an additional 11 watts of power handling the animated ads.  So these banner ads contribute to global warming!

The study was not exactly rigorous, but the animated banner ads, based on technologies like Flash, clearly use an additional amount of power.

The study went on to try popular ad-blocking technologies like Adblock Plus and NoScript, and found that these reduced the power consumption to the same level as if the ads didn’t exist.  Scare-mongering advertisers claim ad-blocking will will cause the Internet to fail.  But now you can reply that you’re using ad-blocking to save the planet.

[via The Register]

Very clever.  [via Techdirt: Coffee Shop Advertising Via Its Free WiFi ID]

… reader Jon, alerts us to a story of a cafe in Holland, called CoffeeCompany, who is constantly renaming its WiFi SSID name with gentle reminders to buy something. Among the names being rotated around:

OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate, TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree

It’s a cute, and probably somewhat effective way to get the folks hanging out in the coffee shop to feel good about buying something at the shop though, the cheapskate claim might piss off some.

Lately I’ve been asked a few times about which is “better”, plasma or LCD?  In 2004 I posted “The display technology guide”, but that’s now kind of out of date.

Bryan pointed me to this more recent May 2007 article, Home Theater: Plasma Vs. LCD.  Since I had last looked, plasmas have dealt with some of their negative aspects, like the risk for burn-in.

So what about the question on which is better?  First, I’d ask this simple question:

Will you be watching in a typical family room?

Yes:  You should get an LCD, because most family rooms are brightly lit, and the one major strength of LCD is that they are bright.

No: You should get a plasma, because they are better than LCD in almost every other category other than brightness.

Don’t be tempted by plasma’s superiority in every category except brightness, because most family rooms are very bright which means LCD’s win most of the time.