NPR has a new interactive infographic online showing the US electric grid in its current state and with the projected expansions, location and outputs of power generating facilities, solar power, wind power, and state-by-state breakdowns. It’s a huge amount of information presented in a nice easy-to-digest overview format.
A Senior Panasonic Executive in Australia has dropped the bomb that Panasonic is currently working on an OLED Television that they hope to release in 18-24 months. It’s a bit of a shock since Panasonic didn’t have a word to say about OLED during CES2009, but apparently they’re currently working with Pioneer and Toshiba on a 37″ inch 50,000-hour OLED television.
Panasonic Working On OLED New 37″ TV In 18 months – Smarthouse”.
Now, this isn’t 100%, but I’ve heard from a reliable source that Rackable has beaten out Cray, HP, and Cisco to acquire SGI. The price isn’t known, but rumors have it that Rackable was willing to pay up to $50Million for it, which is still a paltry sum.
Either way, official word should be out Tomorrow or Friday.
Update: InsideHPC is reporting the same.
CGSociety has announced a new workshop on Architectural Visualization, to be led by Roger Cusson. It’s an eight week course using 3D Studio Max 2008 or 2009, Revit 2008, and AutoCAD 2008 for architectural visualization and rendering.
This workshop is aimed at students interested in kick starting or enhancing their existing skills in architectural visualization and rendering. It is a beginner to intermediate level class geared towards students who have some experience with 3ds Max and with 3D Architectural Modeling.
Upon completion of this workshop, it is envisioned that students will be able to produce rapid visualization studies and be able, with some additional effort, produce realistic images of their architectural projects.
Somewhat related to the earlier question of Should Data.Gov Visualize? is a new feature from Google. Google has just announced that they will “add search to public data“, meaning they’ll now index and present public records along with search results. Not particularly interesting, I know, but a side effect of this is that they will be presenting visualizations of this data. So go try it. For example, look at this search result for “unemployment rate MS“. After you’ve found the chart you want, you can click on it to be taken to an interactive version for further investigation.
Google Adds Visualization Graphs to the Search of Public Data – information aesthetics.
It’s been a few weeks since the AMD/StudioGPU deal was announced, and people are now getting to try it out and see just what it means. Working with MachStudio pro, Tony DeYoung of the FireUser.com site rendering a short video using the new technology and was amazed at how well it worked.
Now what’s not really apparent about this video is how it was created – what was the workflow. Traditional 3D workflows are model and animate, followed by lighting, materials, fx. Once you reach the lighting stage, you do a setup, then a test render. Then you adjust. Then you do another test render and repeat until you our out of time or until it is ‘good enough’. Same is true for materials, fx, etc. Each change no matter how small requires setup, a test render and then final render.
See his video after the break.
Just saw this on the ParaView Mailing List, MIRARCO has released a Wizard system to accelerate development of ParaView Plugins. Simply answer a few questions and it will create C++ Templates, an XML file, and the necessary CMake file to build it. Then just fill in the blanks.
Plugin Wizard is a free, GPL/OpenSource application developed by MIRARCO. Developed using Python and Qt (PyQt), Plugin Wizard will allow you and your developers to save incredible amounts of time when creating your Paraview plugins.
via Plugin Wizard.
CEI, the company behind the popular commercial visualization package EnSight, have today announced a new product called “EnSight CFD”. From the description it sounds alot like a slightly-tweaked version of EnSight.
This new CFD visualization product has an interface specifically tailored to the needs of CFD engineers, featuring improved readers for the analysis packages CFD engineers use most, including FLUENT and CFX. These enhanced readers automatically add a series of derived variables based on explicit dataset files. Therefore, quantities like radial velocity, pressure gradient, mach number, etc. are automatically available to the user, instead of having to manually create these quantities.
One interesting feature is that it seems to have additional functions added to the “Calculator” tool allowing the computation of values like mass flow average and mass flow rates.
via CEI Releases New Version of Software for CFD Simulation Problems.
The American Human Development Project has a special metric for measuring the progress and state of the US called the “Human Development Index”. This is computed by collecting data from a wide variety of sources and measuring health, knowledge, and the standard of living and presenting them as a uniform composite measure. They’ve got a fantastic PDF detailing how the index is computed and an interactive widget showing the data across various demographics (States, congressional districts, races, etc).
Extracts — Measure of America: American Human Development Project.
Shortly after I published my SGI Special Edition Podcast, I was contacted by a former SGI Engineer (who preferred to remain Anonymous) with several stories to tell of what happened to SGI. It’s an amazing story full of minor hardware glitches that wound up costing millions, bone-headed oversights during acquisitions, and basic mismanagement of a billion dollar company. The story is far too long and involved for a single post, so I’ll be adding it in chapters over the next few days. So come on inside and witness the saga of what really happened to SGI over the years.. The story has never been told, until now. We’ll begin at the Top:
VizWorld.com Got an idea for a story? Drop us a line at [email protected] or other means.
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