[Thanks Damo!]

I don’t know how it calculates the numbers. Maybe it’s just a speed display, maybe it uses some logic to come up with the accident bills costs or the chance of a crash. I do know, however, that people respond to fear more than to fines. 46 days in the hospital won’t be fun at all, so grab your steering wheel with both hands, and please drive safely. [Direct Daily]

One of the drivers interviewed by The Indy Channel in Hamilton County said: “it’s kind of crazy. I’m totally confused. I’m kind of expecting… dinosaurs to run down the road, or something.” Yes Beavis, zombie raptors are going to eat us all. [The Indy Channel]

On top of the “Nobody has ever loved you” message, the pranksters (you know who you are) also programmed in “All your signs are belong to us” and the fan favourite: “Warning Zombies ahead.”

So, as I’m sure the roads ministers around the country will agree with me, I hope that nobody else comes up with some witty comment that will cause inadvertent hilarity when hacked into a road sign…

[Goldcoast.com.au - Thanks Andrew!]
[Photo source: Michael Ross, Goldcoast.com.au]

Jones, who has one of only two keys to the locked access panels on the portable signs, said that the hacker broke into the panels on each sign and bypassed the passwords before leaving five different zombie messages and even changing one of the passwords. Jones said he had to wait until 8 a.m. to call the manufacturing company to figure out how to override the hacker’s work.

OK OK, but here’s the punchline:

He speculated that the hacker could be a computer genius from UT.

Yes, kids. You too can be a computer genius. [Statesman and No Fear of the Future]

The multi-part displays, measuring at 1m x 3.2m and supporting a 240×768 resolution have been placed alongside a few main thoroughfares in the city, and are intended to give pedestrians disaster response instructions. E-paper is perfect for application like this, for a few reasons. A dynamic display is incredibly valuable in a disaster, as it can change its contents to suit the details of a specific situation. A traditional LCD panel would be the most obvious choice for such a thing, but it suffers from excessive power requirements and a lack a durability, which are crucial limitation for the earthquake-prone region.

Power consumption for the whole unit, which can pull data from servers via Wi-Fi, is a mere 24W, and E-paper can keep displaying data after power has been cut, though it can’t change it. A smaller unit, installed at bus stops, consumes just 9W. This test is just to explore the possibilities of low-power digital signage, but the advantages seem obvious—deployments like this are being held up by price more than anything else. [Tech-on]

Apparently, while most road sign control pads are placed in a lock box, that box is rarely actually locked. And while most road signs are under password protection, that password is most generally just the default code “DOTS”—or you can easily reset the password by holding “shift” and “control” while typing “DIPY” (so that it just defaults to “DOTS” again).

Of course, it makes sense that road signs aren’t all that protected. Most of us would hope that you wouldn’t be such a jackass as to take swap useful information for some joke about ninjas and/or pirates. [iHacked via Geekologie]

Each side of the sign, designed by D3 LED, requires a 48-drive RAID pumping data at a rate of 3.2GB/second to a custom-built PC. From there, the data is fed through graphics cards to multiple DVI pipes, which lead to six DVI pixel splitters (known as a Spyders). The splitters take video data of a specific resolution and upscale it to the size needed for the display. Once the data is crunched and formatted for the sign, it’s sent out via 4Gbps ethernet to one of more than 12,000 display modules that make up the ginormous billboard.

Each module is a mini-computer, complete with MAC address, redundant 4-gigabit ethernet ports, power supply and a fan. Each panel can report all kinds of vital statistics, including its temperature. If there’s a problem, the panel reports itself to the main computer for easy troubleshooting. (Like a good communist, it can report problems with its neighbours, too.) The majority of the electronics are accessible from inside, so dangerous repair jobs on scaffolding suspended over Times Square are a thing of the past.

The sign’s modules are split into three sections, low-, medium- and high-resolution grids based on their distance from the street. (Why waste pixels for objects way high up?) The top, as you probably guessed, has the largest pixels, at 24mm, while the middle has 12mm and the bottom has 10mm.

The animators are faced with a tough challenge when creating content for the signs, as they must keep the different display sizes in mind so the animation appears cohesive throughout the sections. To help out the animators, sign creator D3 LED made a virtual copy of it that is 10,000 pixels high by 4,000 pixels wide, the equivalent of 43 megapixels. (It’s 20 times the resolution of HD, too.) They use an Adobe After Effects template to help coordinate placement of the animations on the slash-shaped sign.

As previously reported, a single 30-second spot on the billboard requires a staggering 150GB of data transferred through the system. But before you accuse D3 and Walgreens of hogging all of the power in New York, they attest that they are not. With the Con Ed bill in mind, their design reduced unnecessary copper wiring by over 300,000 feet and increased the voltage for more efficient power. They also set up an auto-dimmer (like you might have on your laptop) that adjusts the luminosity of the LEDs based on the ambient light outside. All of this makes it not necessarily cheap but at least cheaper than you’d think to operate.

The Walgreens sign is a complex, fascinating testament to the sheer power of LED displays. While most people living in New York avoid Times Square exactly because of things like this, tourists will undoubtedly flock to the centre to observe the sign up close, even though it can be seen from as far away as Bryant Park and the Port Authority. For now, it’s something that even this semi-jaded NYC resident can appreciate.

The display, which wraps around the three most visible sides of 1 Times Square, is capable of playing contiguous video using all of its surfaces at once. Made up of a mix of 13 60in plasma TVs and over 12 million individual LEDs arranged in diagonal panels, the screen is purported to display a resolution of “20 times the resolution of standard HDTV,” though it’s not completely clear what that’s supposed to mean. As far as the back-end goes, to play just 30 seconds of video calls for 150GB of data sent from 30 computers, all of which, I hope, one day conspire to make the greatest BSOD of all time. The sign was flipped on officially last night, though the trial run, featuring the awesome test pattern picture in this article, took place on Wednesday. Check out the local news report below for some more background and neat little renderings to put the whole thing into perspective. [NYT, image from Gothamist]

If the economy has taught us anything, it’s that the traditional caution sign has been a failure at warning us of the dynamically shifting troubled waters ahead. For example, whereas a traditional caution sign might warn of a rock falling on your house, a more modern caution sign might warn of said rock falling on you, as the subprime mortgage crisis has already sucked away everything you hold dear. And it’s with this necessity for new warning systems that we present to you this stickman caution sign. It’s $US12 and completely posable, depending on which way you think you’re most likely to kill yourself given the particular day. [ThinkGeek via bbGadgets]