The New York Times has a new minimally-interactive (more like animated slideshow) of some numbers about General Motors over the last 25 years. It shows the falling market share and sales numbers and the loss of employees compared to Toyota and Honda.
The Remaking of General Motors – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com.
Anyone working in Data Analysis and Visualization will tell you that the #1 problem facing them is file storage. As the datasets get bigger and bigger, moving them from the HPC’s to the Visualization Resources becomes a bigger pain. Oak Ridge National Labs has been facing this problem for a while now, and has just recently stood up a distributed fileserver named ‘Spider’ to fix this.
Once a project ran an application on Jaguar, it then had to move the data to the Lens visualization platform for analysis. Any problem encountered along the way would necessitate that the cumbersome process be repeated. With Spider connected to both Jaguar and Lens, however, this headache is avoided. “You can think of it as eliminating islands of data. Instead of having to multiply file systems all within the NCCS, one for each of our simulation platforms, we have a single file system that is available anywhere. If you are using extremely large data sets on the order of 200 terabytes, it could save you hours and hours.”
While this is nice, it still doesn’t solve the problem of then maintaining that data in Memory. But at least you don’t have to spend a month waiting on an FTP to finish anymore.
Update: I spoke with a source at ORNL, and they corrected a few things:
So if it’s not new, why the press release? Not really sure to be honest. Suspicions are it’s because it was previously in a testing mode, but has just officially entered “production” and general availability.
via HPCwire: Spider Up and Spinning Connections to All Computing Platforms at ORNL.
If you’re in the GIS/CAMA fields, you might want to consider submitting some work to the 14th Annual GIS/CAMA Technologies Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. This year’s theme is “Changing Values in Changing Times – Economic Influences on Property Valuation”. In addition to the usual economics and management tracks, they’ll be discussing modeling and visualization:
3. Property Valuation & Modeling Techniques – CAMA modeling has come a long way. What are the methods and results of mathematical models used in the appraisal of property? The presentations in this track focus on the use of location in models, visual display of results with GIS, advanced modeling techniques, 3-D visualization and other related topics.
4. Technologies & Techniques – Stay ahead of the curve and get the most return on the GIS investment. Take a look at the road to Enterprise GIS, best practices, new and emerging technologies, the latest in Web development, mitigating technological changes, LiDAR visualization, viewpoints on the Cadastral Fabric, and more.
Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Farrar sat down with the folks at Bollywood Hungama to talk about how they worked with the physical constraints in Transformers 2, such as measuring the pyramids and mockups of the Robots to use for Actor’s eyelines. Towards the end, the interviewer asked one interesting question:
Can you give an idea of the time and money it takes to bring just one of the robots to life for 10 seconds?
That is a great question because no matter how many times they appear in the movie it takes a certain amount of work. It takes roughly about six months to put a robot together. This may be surprising, but you have to build all the pieces. It is like going into your workshop and making those parts, except it is a computer graphics workshop. The men and women who make these characters, make the shapes and those shapes have compound curves, which is complicated. Then some shapes have 4 to 16 layers of information in the computer, so that it looks like plastic or glass or shiny chrome or brushed steel, plus all the pigments of colour. That is a lot of stuff, for every piece. The building of it is one thing, that takes 12 to 16 weeks, and then you go into paint and textures. Then there are the people who connect all the pieces and that can take even longer. You have to work it all out so that basically the skeleton hangs together in the computer.
Nobody thought building a transformer was “quick”, but 6 months. Wow.
via “It takes 6 months to put a robot together” – Transformers-2 vfx supervisor Scott Farrar.
The recent government DDoS, suspected of originating from Korea, has been hot news lately but the vague sensationalist comments appearing the media make it difficult to know the actual scale of the problem. ShadowServer aims to correct this by providing up-to-date visualizations of botnets and DDoS attacks through simple graphs that track historical activity over daily, monthly, and annual graphs. Shown above is the most recent chart of the weekly DDOS activity, with the huge spike on Thursday. Many more charts are available on their site.
ShadowServer DDOS Charts via Security Fix – Washington Post, White House, FAA, DoD, Others, Targeted in Online Attack.
Microsoft has just released Silverlight3 today, available for download from Microsoft.com/Silverlight. This version supports the new IE8/FireFox3.5/Safari4 browsers, and adds thousands of new API’s. But evidently taking an opportunity to get a lead on the Flash GPU Acceleration initiative, it also supports:
GPU Hardware acceleration for h264 video, among other things. They’ve also integrated “Smooth Streaming”:
In terms of streaming, Microsoft says Silverlight 3 brings “high-definition video in full-screen mode, with stutter-free live and on-demand video” to the table. There’s also Smooth Streaming (demo), which allows one to start playing an HD video at any point in time, instantaneously. Version 3 allows developers to create Web applications that can exist outside the browser. How does it work? Open a browser page. Launch the Silverlight application. Close the browser. The Silverlight program lives on.
Could this tip the tables in favor of Silverlight? A little bit, but Flash still has a huge marketshare to overcome.
Kickstand, makers of StretchMesh, have just announced v1.5. Working with Autodesk Maya, it’s a completely new character deformation pipeline. Director of Character Technology Daniel Dawson had this to say:
“Character skin is very elastic and difficult to animate. By giving polygonal meshes an inherent ‘stretchy’ characteristic, StretchMesh removes the time-intensive process of manually tweaking skin weights to streamline rigging of complex body and facial movements.”
Priced at $249 per set, the full 1.5 release is expected later this summer for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Read the full press release after the break.
Update: Image & Youtube Video from Kickstand added.
Just letting you know about some changes that I’m sure you’ve noticed already. The most visible change first is that I’ve condensed everything beyond the 5 newest stories down to just thumbnails & excerpts. This improves page load time, and the full test is still there for you to read. Doing this also allowed me to return the TweetMeme buttons and a few other things.
The other new features I’m proud to announce is an improved FaceBook Connect Integration. Now when you leave a comment you can use the real FaceBook Connect authentication, and you’ll have the option of displaying your comments on your FaceBook wall. This way your friends can see your thoughts, and chime in with their thoughts. Think of it as a combined Comment & Share function.
Of course, I’m anxious to hear what you all think about this, so use this as an opportunity to test out the new comment features!
Ed Ulbrich of Digital Domain has become a celebrity thanks to his TED talk on the amazing CG they created for Benjamin Button, creating a completely CG head to replace Brad Pitt. He sits down with Den of Geek to discuss the process, and unload some fantastic wisdom upon us all. My favorite is this:
The enemies of technology in the service of creativity are tradition, complacency and fear. People who fall into that tradition become complacent in the tools that they have, or afraid to pioneer and go beyond. And like that, you never will.
via Ed Ulbrich: Behind the extraordinary visual effects of Benjamin Button – Den of Geek.
Angel Diaz has a great “Making Of” on CGArena of a scantily clad, but armed, woman called “Hakara”. In the tutorial he shows his use of 3DSMax, ZBrush, Photoshop, VRay, and more.
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