Michael Paukner has uploaded a beautiful infographic showing all of the stuff circling our little blue planet, and sorting it by the originating country.
What’s up there? How many countries have stuck satellites up into space, how many of those satellites are working, part-working or just bits of junk? This graphic may help to enlighten you.
The colors indicates if the object is a functional satellite, dysfunctional satellite, or simply space debris (over 10cm diameter). The two biggest ones are, of course, the US and Russia.
Jon Peddie has just published on his blog his info on what may be inside the new Apple iPad. He covers what we already know (the 9.7″ IPS LCD screen, 4:3 Aspect Ratio, LED Backlights, etc) and then gets into what he believes the fabled Apple A4 Processor is.
We believe that design includes a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor, and Imagination Technologies SGX 535 (see TechWatch vol.10 No.2, page 2) graphics core, and is being fabricated for Apple by Samsung.
The Cortex A9 is the same belief that BSN was passing around, but JPR has a much better track record than BSN on such details so I believe their SGX535 chipset theory much more. The Graphics Chipset, the SGX535, is the PowerVR chipset that runs the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch.
Doug Ellison has taken the high-resolution imagine from NASA’s HiRISE probe and crunched it with some high-end animation packages to create a pair of flyovers of the Mars Terrain.
HiRISE creates detailed digital-elevation models. Crunch that data, add perspective and some cinematic effects, and you have the movies that Doug Ellison, founder of UnmannedSpaceflight.com, posted to YouTube this morning.
Two are available, one of the Mojave Crater and one of the Athabasca Valles . Check them out after the break.
Visualization scientists have been using tiled displays for a number of years to look at their data. News media sites have been using tiled displays to show off how technologically hip they are. Why not have a tiled display built out of iPads! An iPad costs about as much as LCD monitor, admittedly with lower resolution, but includes multitouch. For some reason, I can see this showing up at SIGGRAPH or SuperComputing this year. ClarkeHopkinsClarke Architects from Australia came up with the idea, and even have a few conceptual images. From the blog post:
With the built-in features of the iPad and customisable applications, there is literally an endless number of things we can do on the wall. Interchangeable wallpaper pattern & video is just the beginning, but imaging a giant jigsaw that you can play using multitouch, an interactive aquarium scene, digital graffiti, interactive speaker wall, even a life sized digital bookcase for your iBooks! (If you can’t reach the top shelf, just drag it down with multi-touch!)
The Radeon 5450 has not been released, yet is already for sale at a number of on-line shops. The card comes with 512 MB of memory running at 800 MHz on a 64-bit bus. A 1 GB version of the card is expected as well. The GPU runs at 650 MHz, has 80 shaders, and is passively cooled. The card comes with DVI, VGA, and HDMI outputs. The card also supports ATI Eyefinity Technology which allows you to run up to 3 displays, not that you would want to do this with such a low-end card. You can buy the card today from the likes of Mwave for $53.99 and Provantage for $66.94. AMD is scheduled to launch the 5450 on February 6th.
The Radeon 5570 should also launch in February. The 5570 comes with either 512 MB or 1 GB of memory running at 900 MHz, and 400 shaders running at 650 MHz.
The launch for a different graphics card, the 5830, was to launch on January 25, but has been pushed back later into February according to an article on Digitimes. According to the article, the reason for the delay was that a problem on the circuitboard was triggering an error when it underwent testing.
Fantasy Sports fans live in the world of numbers and statistics, making the data they work with perfect for visualization. CBS Sport’s Jamey Eisenberg has an article up covering how 2009 went down in Fantasy NFL events, and visualizes some of the data using Tableau.
As you can see with the interactive visualization below, we have a breakdown of the players that ended up with the highest winning percentage for Fantasy owners this past season. You can also see how their win percentage compared to their average draft position and how they did each week based on their Fantasy points in a standard-scoring league.
Speculation runs rampant on what Fermi can do, but ExtremeTech takes a deep look and talks to NVidia to get some real answers, and shares them in a new writeup on their site. Most of this is stuff I’ve already heard and confirmed from multiple other sources, but it’s a good consolidated writeup with a few important nuggets. One such tidbit is in the C++ Support:
Before Fermi, Nvidia ran C natively on the GPU, but not C++. Fermi changes that and facilitates running C++ by supporting features such as virtual functions, function pointers, the “new” and “delete” operators for dynamic object allocation and de-allocation, and try/catch/throw exception handling. It is important to note, however, that full C++ support will not be available with the first shipments of Fermi-based boards, but will evolve over time as Nvidia continues to update its software drivers.
Also, in recursion support:
For example, despite the fact that Fermi has a stack, one extremely powerful programming technique called recursion will not be available until sometime after the initial launch. Recursion is the ability for a program function to call itself, a technique frequently used by algorithms to break a big problem or data set into smaller pieces—this is fundamental to certain powerful rendering algorithms like ray tracing. But despite the lack of recursion, ray tracing has been available on Nvidia boards for a few years now. The software vendors get around the lack of recursion by implementing a limited depth state machine or in-lining multiple nested function calls to emulate it. Once recursion becomes available, developers will no longer have to spend time performing additional coding acrobatics.
Another big feature is the “Concurrent Kernel Execution” via the new GigaThread scheduler, and how much better is it?
Fermi’s GigaThread scheduler, the master code that schedules all the threads on the board for execution, also has improved context switching. GigaThread can perform a context switch in as little as 20 microseconds, providing another important performance boost to programs on the GPU because the time penalty for swapping code in and out for execution is significantly less. Fermi’s context switching is ten times faster than the GT200.
Read the full details on everything Fermi at their site.
Intel’s Anthony Gallo shows off three augmented reality demos on an Intel Core i5 processor. For the first demo, he starts the web cam on the computer and then holds up the December issue of Esquire magazine. Robert Downey Jr. pops onto the screen. The 3-D image on the screen is changes based on the angle that the magazine is held relative to the webcam. There are four different animations that can be unlocked by the magazine. We reported about this augmented reality issue of Esquire back on October 29. For the second demo, he uses a new Avatar toy from Mattel to unlock two different animations. For the final demo, he takes a picture of a motherboard and manipulates it in 3-D on the screen.
Earlier we posted an infographic showing that the SouthWest region lead the United States in having the highest number of fastest growing companies. In particular, Texas had 25 of the top 100 list.
While correlation does not mean causation, Mint has published its own infographic showing that people are migrating from states, such as California, that have been hard hit by the Great Recession to places like Texas. Their take on the infographic is that people are moving from states where the cost of living is high, such as California and Ney York, to where the cost of living is low, such as Texas.
Jon Peddie has just published on his blog his info on what may be inside the new Apple iPad. He covers what we already know (the 9.7″ IPS LCD screen, 4:3 Aspect Ratio, LED Backlights, etc) and then gets into what he believes the fabled Apple A4 Processor is.
Here’s today’s Pixels:
Doug Ellison has taken the high-resolution imagine from NASA’s HiRISE probe and crunched it with some high-end animation packages to create a pair of flyovers of the Mars Terrain.
Fantasy Sports fans live in the world of numbers and statistics, making the data they work with perfect for visualization. CBS Sport’s Jamey Eisenberg has an article up covering how 2009 went down in Fantasy NFL events, and visualizes some of the data using Tableau.
Speculation runs rampant on what Fermi can do, but ExtremeTech takes a deep look and talks to NVidia to get some real answers, and shares them in a new writeup on their site. Most of this is stuff I’ve already heard and confirmed from multiple other sources, but it’s a good consolidated writeup with a few important nuggets. One such tidbit is in the C++ Support:
VizWorld.com 
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