VizWorld.com

Another entry in the growing HPC Remote Visualization space comes from “NICE” software, who has just announced a new version of their EnginFrame2013 product that offers tools for creating and managing remote visualization resources.

Designed for technical computing users in a broad range of markets (Oil&Gas, Automotive, Aerospace, Medical, Finance, Research, and more), EnginFrame simplifies engineers’ and scientists’ workflows through its intuitive, self-documenting interfaces, increasing productivity and streamlining data and resource management.

Leveraging all the major HPC job schedulers and remote visualization technologies, EnginFrame translates user clicks into the appropriate actions to submit HPC jobs, create remote visualization sessions, monitor workloads on distributed resources, manage data and many more.

via NICE EnginFrame 2013 Redefines Management of 3D and 2D Remote Visualization Sessions in the Technical Cloud – News & Events – NICE.

Science hpc, nice, remotedisplay, visualization

If you’ve ever wondered how these giant world-wide high-resolution maps come together, Wired has a great new article with the creators of “MapBox”.  MapBox is taking continuous streams of satellite data from the likes of NASA to construct giant near-realtime images of the entire globe at staggering resolutions.

“For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012,” says Loyd, “this amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.”

The first problem is even getting the data. It’s all available in the public domain, but just transferring it over to MapBox’s servers was a major task because of the volume. To do this render, they needed to download two thirds of a terabyte of compressed data. “We’ve got 30 to 40 servers pulling down data from NASA,” says Herwig. “We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?’”

via A Cloudless Atlas — How MapBox Aims to Make the World’s ‘Most Beautiful Map’ | Wired Design | Wired.com.

Graphics, Science mapbox, maps, nasa

Between smart phones, social media, and the everpresent “cloud”, Humans are creating data at scales previously thought impossible.  While great strides have been made in basic processing of this data for advertising and a few other areas, deep value remains buried in these mountains of information.  GigaOm takes a look at 6 new startups looking to find newfound gold in these mountains of data.

They are to big data what server and network configurations are to mobile-app development on platforms like Parse. If you’re going to find out new things from massive and highly complex data sets, or going to give new types of people the ability to analyze even simple data, the presentation of that data and the ability to create consumable presentations are critical.

via Visualization is the future: 6 startups re-imagining how we consume data — Tech News and Analysis.

Science bigdata, startups

FXhome’s HitFilm has made good strides into film-editing suites on Windows, but has always been a windows-only application.  Lots of reasons (I don’t want to get into “PC Rules, Mac Drools” arguments) exist for this, but with modern equipment and Microsoft’s new “features” like Windows8, they acknowledge that it’s time for a Mac version.  They’ve been working on it internally and mostly completed the project, but have opened it to kickstarter for a quick community-infusion of excitement (and cash) to finish it off, to the tune of £25,000.

The vast majority of the Mac version will be funded by FXhome. We’ve already invested heavily in the initial R&D. The challenge is in the immediate cost to equip our developers with the essential hardware, development tools, software licenses and test machines needed to create the Mac version.

That’s where we need your help.

This Kickstarter gives us the boost we need right now to accelerate development. It allows us to keep the software affordable and speed up development so that HitFilm Mac comes out this year.

via HitFilm for Mac by FXhome — Kickstarter.

Graphics fxhome, hitfilm, kickstarter, mac, osx, software

Did you know you can hone your roulette strategy by understanding physics?

Most people have always considered roulette to be a game of chance, but some experts beg to differ. Some say that having paid extra attention in your high school physics class may come in handy when playing your next hand of online roulette.

Applying Basic Physics to Your Roulette Strategy
If you are looking for a way to beat the house when playing roulette, look no further, except maybe to brush up on your physics knowledge, particularly the concept of chaos theory. However, most people playing online roulette are not physicists, so let’s break it down to simpler terms.

Using Physics as Roulette Strategy
The main key to the game is to remain focused. Always focus on the location of the ball when the wheel starts spinning as well as the speed of the wheel. When playing roulette, concentrate on a fixed point on the wheel and count to see how long it takes for the ball to pass that point one time. This will essentially determine the velocity of the ball around the wheel. This will only work well if the wheel spins at relatively the same speed every time.

Keep in mind that playing on any European style wheel will give the player a slight advantage than on an American wheel, since the American wheel has the addition of the number 0 on the board. This additional number gives the house the advantage.

Using this strategy does not necessarily mean that you have to guess one specific number over another, simply based on where you think the ball will land. If you have counted and notice a pattern, you can choose from a certain area or even half of the wheel, which will increase your chances of winning by a lot.

It is important to remember that although using physics as a strategy of increasing your odds, it is never a guarantee. Roulette, as any casino game, is about chance. Sometimes you win big though, and using any strategy can help your game.  Be a smart player, start concentrating on how long it takes the ball to complete a full turn on the wheel, and start winning big cash prizes right away.

Science casino, physics, roulette

Up in British Columbia, legislators are pitching a new film labor tax credit raise up to 40% that will “allow competition with other jurisdictions”. With a proposed cost per-film of $100,000-$120,000 paid by the taxpayers, there is obvious backlash.

But economists call it “corporate welfare,” and say B.C. should get out of what has become a “race to the bottom” with tax incentives.

“We know that we have the best crews in North America,” he said in one of his final rallies, where he was surrounded by close to a thousand supporters at Vancouver Film Studios.

“All they require is a level playing field and we will compete, and we will win, and we will bring jobs to British Columbia.”

via NDP’s ‘corporate welfare’ for film industry won’t save jobs: economist | Globalnews.ca.

Graphics canada, taxes, vfx

The Top 10 Foods for Exceptional Health

Compare 3G vs 4G

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

I’m gonna take a little departure from our regularly scheduled graphics content and introduce all of you (at least all of you who don’t already know) to a tool called “ack”. Affectionally calling itself “a tool like grep, optimized for programmers”, that’s exactly what it is.

It’s capable of searching text files with incredible speed, searching my entire OpenSceneGraph tree for occurances of “glBegin” in about 4 seconds (from the screenshot above).  It’s also smart enough to know to avoid VCS directories, eliminating the constant frustration of finding stuff buried in your .svn and .git folders.  Written entirely in perl, it’s available as a module for linux & Mac (port), or as a single script you can download and use.

Check it out at the link below.

Beyond grep: ack 2.04, a source code search tool for programmers.

Science programming, source code

ComputerGraphicsWorld brings us the news that on June 10th up in New York, there will be a VFX Town Hall moderated by Mariana Acuna (@vfxchick) to discuss the recent turmoils in the VFX space.

“The VFX Town Hall at COLLIDER promises to be a unique experience,” says Acuña. “There are so many vital issues at stake in our industry right now, and so many different opinions on the subject, that no two town hall gatherings are ever going to be exactly alike. Basing this discussion in New York will provide a distinctly East Coast perspective to the rest of the country and the world. This is an ideal opportunity to keep the conversation moving in the right direction.”

via Computer Graphics World – Collider Conference to Host NY VFX Town Hall.

Graphics collider, town hall, vfx

With 3d printers getting popular and cheaper, the ability to build and share models is becoming more important.  A new website called “FabFabbers” connects OpenSCAD’s open model creating tools with GitHub to allow full revision control and backup of your models.

“I was motivated to do this from discussions on the RepRap forums,” Marcos says “People seemed to have become disenchanted with some aspects of the Thingiverse terms of service, ownership/licensing of models, etc.”

via SolidSmack.com – FabFabbers is the New Site to Share and Edit Your 3D Models.

Graphics, Hardware openscad, reprap