Financial Infographics has published a detailed look at the real facts surrounding the outsourcing of jobs. Personally, it sounds like a defense of firing American workers and replacing them with cheaper jobs overseas. That is, until you get to the bottom of the graphic. There they point out that 31%of the workers displaced by outsourcing are not fully re-employed, and of those that are re-employed, they earn only 47% of what they used to make.
Fans of the RED camera series might want to check out the latest episode of fxguidetv (Episode #076) where they get into some nitty gritty details.
A look at shooting with the new RED MX sensor as well as changes and improvements in post using REDCINE-X.
The episode is available, featuring the lovely Angie Dale, in both high-bandwidth and low-bandwith Quicktime’s.
via fxguide – vfx blog.
NASA has recently announced that they have released version 1.2 of the NASA iPhone Application. You can explore ongoing NASA missions, view NASA images and videos, and receive updates on happenings from NASA. Personally I like that you have the ability to find out when the International Space Station or Space Shuttle will be viewable from your location.
Best of all, this application is free of charge. You can download it onto your iPhone, iPod Touch, or within iTunes. Some of the new features are listed below.
What’s new in version 1.2:
- Facebook Connect for easy sharing of images, videos, tweets and mission information
- Integrated Twitter™ client for posting, retweeting, replying to, and direct messaging
- NASAImages.org collection – With over 125,000 new images to browse and search
- “Center” button for the orbital tracking feature
- Advanced search option
- Offline caching system
It was back in January when we first brought you news of the Arion hybrid GPU+CPU renderer from the makers of fryrender, and while it looked impressive it was sadly not for sale. That’s no longer the case, as now you can buy Arion in several configurations directly from the website. So far the loadout looks like this:
Hit their site for all the details, with some impressive gallery and example shots.
AMD has just released the Catalyst 10.3a preview drivers. These drivers offer improved support for Eyefinity by including bezel correction. In addition, these drivers also offer improvement in games by about 5%, depending upon the game. Some games will see a larger improvement (DiRT 2 improves up to 30% on ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products), while others will see less.
The Catalyst 10.3a preview drivers are not WHQL drivers. The Catalyst 10.3 WHQL drivers will not contain Eyefinty6 updates and an optimization for Alien vs. Predator. The Catalyst 10.3a preview drivers will have this extra feature.
Now, NVidia is set to release the GeForce GTX 480 next week, which is rumored to be about 5% faster than AMD’s card. In other words, AMD has released this driver in order to improve the performance of their product which will (hopefully) spoil some of their rivals thunder. These next couple of weeks are going to be interesting.
Update from CatalystMaker: The download links are wrong – the page went up about one hour too early.
Update from CatalystMaker: The download links are fixed.
You can download the new drivers from the AMD Underground.
ATI Catalyst Control Center – ATI Eyefinity technology enhancements
- Display Bezel Compensation
- Easy-to-use wizard shows users how to adjust their display layout to remove the pixels occupied by their display bezels
- Per-Display Color Adjust
- Individual Color, Brightness and Contrast controls
- Multiple ATI Eyefinity Groups
- Create more than one ATI Eyefinity group from multiple displays
- Improved Display Configuration switching
- Support for ATI Eyefinity groups and the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center profile manager
- Easy to toggle between cloned and extended desktop modes
ATI Catalyst™ support for 3D Stereoscopic glasses
- AMD has updated it’s Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors such as iZ3D to output stereo L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye)
via : ATI Catalyst 10.3 Preview Update Driver Coming Out Tomorrow
via : CatalystMaker
Floating Sheep has taken user generated Google placemarks for references to four types of Christianity: Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal and Protestant. Now placemarks depend upon user generated content, and is thus not scientific. Much of Eastern Europe shows up as Orthodox, while Western Europe shows up Catholic, and Germany shows up as Protestant. Looking at the United States, Pentecostal shows up in the Southeast where most of the rest of the country is Catholic. This raises a red flag with me.
Since I live in the Southeast United States, I know for a fact that there are more Protestant churches (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian) than Catholic. In other words, the term Protestant is overly general a term. Thus, they then take a look at the United States with more relevant terms, such as Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, etc. This leads to the second image to the left, which pretty much confirms that there is not a town in the Southeast United States without multiple Baptist churches.
So after the last week of alcohol and drug related postings I guess you can say that we’ve found religion! Hallelujah! And returning to our earlier analysis of the cyberscapes of religion, the following three maps take a more fine grained look at representations of Christianity on the internet.
via floatingsheep.
For the past six months, AMD has brought us the fastest DirectX 11 graphics card on the planet. Not only that, but they have created a new market with their Eyefinity technology. Nvidia has not been sitting still. They have chased after the GPGPU, game developers, and 3D market. Now AMD is starting their push into the 3-D market with the Open Stereo 3D initiative. From the article at Softpedia:
AMD spoke briefly of its plans for an Open Stereo 3D environment at the game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Apparently, the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU maker will encourage the more rapid creation and adoption of such products as 3D notebooks, 3D monitors, Blu-ray 3D movies, DirectX 9/10/11 graphics cards and, naturally, 3D software, including media and, of course, 3D games. To do this, the company will supposedly collaborate with vendors of all such products.
It sounds to me like this Open Stereo 3D initiative is just beginning. A search of the AMD website turns up no mention of Open Stereo 3D.
via AMD Brings Up Open Stereo 3D at GDC – Wants to speed up adoption of 3D – Softpedia.
NVidia’s Brian Burke brings us news of a new NVidia Driver that’s out, and while not WHQL certified this time, it does resolve the previous Fan issue found in 196.75 (supposedly, we haven’t tested it ourselves yet). From their own release notes:
This is a WHQL-candidate driver for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, and 300-series desktop GPUs and ION desktop GPUs.
This driver resolves fan speed issues reported with version 196.75 drivers. NVIDIA asks that you remove 196.75 drivers and update to either 196.21 WHQL drivers or to this 197.13 WHQL-candidate driver.
If you currently have 196.75 installed, please first uninstall it before installing 197.13.
You can hit their website and download it now for:
I don’t see anything online yet about Linux drivers.
Full-size (1950 Square)
On December 14, 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. This space-born telescope has a 16 inch diameter and surveys light in the infrared wavelengths. The telescope’s focal planes and optics are cooled with a two-stage solid-hydrogen cryostat. This gives the mission an expected lifetime of 10 months. Over that time, it will take one image about every 11 seconds for about 1.5 million images in total.
We have posted images from WISE before, and yesterday the WISE team released another beautiful image of a portion of our universe. WISE has taken an image of NGC 7822, which is in the constellation of Cepheus. This area has a young star forming region, and contains a young cluster of stars called Berkley 59.
Smaller, 600 Square
Click on the thumbnail for a full-resolution, high-quality Jpeg image. We took the original 1960×1950 Tiff image and processed it through Photoshop to bring you something with excellent quality at a reasonable size (513 KB). Be warned, this is a large image. The second image to the right is a more reasonable 600×600 Jpeg image. Click on it if the first one is a bit too large for your monitor.
From here on in, I will let the WISE team describe the image.
The rosebud-like red glow surrounding the hot, young stars is warm dust heated by the stars. Green “leafy” nebulosity enfolds the cluster, showing the edges of the dense, dusty cloud. This green material is from heated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, molecules that can be found on Earth in barbecue pits, exhaust pipes and other places where combustion has occurred.
Red sources within the green nebula indicate a second generation of stars forming at the surface of the natal cloud, possibly as a consequence of heating and compression from the younger stars. A supernova remnant associated with this region, called NGC 7822, indicates that a massive star has already exploded, blowing the cloud open in a “champagne flow” and leaving behind this floral remnant. Blue dots sprinkled throughout are foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
The image comes from the NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team.
Fudzilla is reporting that Nvidia is aiming for lower prices for the new Geforce GTX 480. That would be nice if it is true, but I have to admit that I am skeptical. To me, the quote below from the article makes no sense because €450 is about $620 while €600 is about $826. Since the Geforce GTX 480 is not for sale, we can look at another graphics card to see the same pattern. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 sells for $450 at newegg.com which would be about €326. In France it is selling for about €349, which is close to the figure I calculated. We will see in about 10 days what the price, and performance, really is.
People have expected single GPU Geforce GTX 480 to end up at close to $600 or €600 in Europe after tax but it turns out that the amount Nvidia wants for its new high end card should be closer to €450.
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