Several sites have been reporting on the new NVidia plan to unify the Desktop and Notebook drivers into a single “unified” architecture. Their various desktop systems have been unified for quite some time, but laptop owners have long been at the mercy of the OEM providers to release updates which were frequently outdated and buggy. Embracing the laptop-buzz generated by Optimus and the new mobile chips, NVidia is seizing the opportunity to begin releasing a single driver for all platforms.
This is particularly important as of late, because the GPU is being used for more than just gaming. Owners of notebooks with discrete NVIDIA GPUs that wanted to take advantage of the increasing number of CUDA-enabled applications, for example, can’t do so if their notebook drivers didn’t enable CUDA.
The ReadWriteWeb and Tableau Public challenge is over and the victor has been named: Rina Bongsu-Petersen and her visualization of U.S. Obesity Data. The judges, including ReadWriteWeb’s co-editor Marshall kirkpatrick, had this to say:
“This entry was able to provide strong analysis with a view of the data that fits the subject, and the result is an incredible story anyone can discover,” Mackinlay said. “People will look at it, immediately select their state and see relevant results.”
Ronen Bekerman has another great ‘making of’, this time of the 2nd runner up from his recent GH House competition. This time it’s Ivo Sucur’s interesting “house under construction”.
This entry was very unique in that Ivo went far away from the usual orderly and clean theme most architectural visualization showcase and decided to tell us the story of a house in progress, during the last days of construction. I hope you’ll enjoy this article, learn from it and share your thoughts by commenting at the bottom of this article’s page.
I missed this when it came out at NAB, but Panasonic has now officially released their new AG-3DA1 professional stereoscopic camcorder. Some of what Engadget originally proposed is true, but the details are even better, such as the adjustable convergence point:
The twin-lens system adopted in the camcorder’s optical section allows the convergence point*** to be adjusted. Functions for automatically correcting horizontal and vertical displacement are also provided. Conventional 3D camera systems require these adjustments to be made by means of a PC or an external video processor. This new camcorder, however, will automatically recalibrate without any need for external equipment, allowing immediate 3D image capture.
The camera comes with dual lenses and dual 1/4.1-inch full 1920×1080 2.07 megapixel 3MOS imagers, and captures at 1080/60i,60i,30p,25p, and 24p (native), as well as some 720p formats. It can store up to 3 hours on dual 32GB SD cards, and offers dual HD-SDI out, HDMI, and a pair of XLR connectors.
Still definately not “consumer grade”, with a suggested price of $21k, but probably one of the best 3D cameras on the market (nearly the only one).
Today, Autodesk has pulled another project out of the labs and released it to the masses. In this case, they took “Project Cooper” and are releasing it as “AutoCAD Freestyle”, a 2D drawing and sketching package specifically targeted for fans of pen & paper.
“Many people—from do-it-yourselfers to home contractors to landscape designers—still use pen and paper or software that does not enable accuracy and is hard to use,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president, Autodesk Platform Solutions and Emerging Business. “AutoCAD Freestyle has been created to meet the needs of these users and anybody else who needs to generate quick, accurate and professional-looking designs without the need for or learning curve of industrial-strength CAD software.”
Specifically meant for people without the familiarity with complex CAD modeling packages, the result is a great took for not only creation of diagrams and images, but for markup of more complex graphics. The system integrates a common grid, to aid in lining up shapes and gauging distances, with a full library of predrawn shapes like doors and windows to help save time.
They offer a free 30-day trial for download from the Freestyle website, after which you can purchase it for only $49.
AMD has just announced the obvious step of refreshing the entire FirePro line of graphics cards with their newest Evergreen-based chip, that brings DX11, OpenGL3.2 & 4, and Eyefinity support to the entire line. Tony DeYoung of FireUser.com has a great chart detailing the new cards.
Obvious standouts to me: Faster memory, more memory (think VBO performance), huge increases in number of stream processors (a.k.a shader units), and Eyefinity support on all but the V3800. What I would like to also know is energy consumption in idle mode as well as some noise comparison to previous models. I know the V8800 was significantly better in both regards to its predecessor.
Sadly, it looks like none of them support the full 6-screen Eyefinity configuration, and only the highest-end (V8800) supports 4 displays. None of them support 3 displays.
Update 2:15pm: I was just contacted by AMD to state that all of the cards, except the lowest-end V3800k, support 3 displays. I’m currently uncertain of how (if it’s even true), as all of them (except the V8800) only have 2 Displayport connectors. Unless you can connect the DVI & both displayports at the same time (which seems unlikely to me)….
US Tax Brackets are constantly changing. As incomes change, inflation impacts the power of currency, and government needs come and go, how various incomes are taxed change widely over time. A visualization of a “Heatmap” style done by the teams at WeatherSealed shows how the tax rates have changed since 1910.
The colors indicate the marginal tax rate: black for low, red in the middle, and yellow for high. The horizontal axis is the tax year, and the vertical represents taxable income, log-scale, normalized to 2010 dollars with the Bureau Of Labor Statistics’ monthly CPI-U figures. The bracket data comes from The Tax Foundation and the IRS, and the effects of Social Security, capital gains, AMT, and other tax varieties are not included.
That bright yellow spot in the upper center is in the mid 40′s, 50′s and early 60′s when the wealthy ($1 Million +) were taxed at 90%!
Air traffic is almost back to normal after the lengthy delays caused by the Icelandic Volcano. A visualization from Ito, IdeasInTransit, and using data from FlightRadar24 shows the slow return to normalcy across Europe’s flight system.
A visualisation of the northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash. Due to varying ash density across Europe, the first flights can be seen in some areas on the 18th and by the 20th everywhere is open.
The flight data is courtesy of flightradar24.com and covers a large fraction of Europe. There are a few gaps (most noticeably France) and no coverage over the Atlantic, but the picture is still clear.
Over at OpenBible.info, they have this great visualization of the multitude of cross-references within the bible. A brief explanation:
The visualization is clockwise circular: eg. Lines above the timeline show references forward to later books, lines below sow references back to previous books
Red lines are New Testament targets, Blue lines are Old Testament targets
Across the tip are markers of important books so you can see where things are. Some great information here, such as :
Easy to see the huge number of references back to Psalms
The density of references from the Minor Prophets back to both the Major Prophets and earlier in the Old Testament.
The surprising density of cross references in Hebrew-Jude.
If you thought the 3-Way SLI GTX480 benchmark was a bit extreme, then check out this impressive 4-way SLI GTX480 review from Hardware.info . At least they don’t have any quams about stating up front that the entire test if a bit frivolous.
To date, no publication in the world is a 4-way GTX 480 SLI arrangement tested. EVGA assistant Peter “Shamino” Tan improved earlier this week have any 3DMark records and ASUS has on his Facebook page a Rampage III Extreme motherboard with four GTX 480 cards to show , but a comprehensive analysis of the performance of quad-SLI with The GeForce GTX 480 is not yet come.
No sensible person is likely a setup like this ever, but that should not spoil the fun: In this article you can read what benefits you’re actually in 4-way SLI GTX 480 expect!
The end result isn’t all that surprising either. The performance boost in most applications is negligible, with the CPU and bus bandwidth being the limiting factors. In certain (Very extreme) configurations, there is a boost, such as this gain from 53 to 57fps. Otherwise, I’ld save the money.
Several sites have been reporting on the new NVidia plan to unify the Desktop and Notebook drivers into a single “unified” architecture. Their various desktop systems have been unified for quite some time, but laptop owners have long been at the mercy of the OEM providers to release updates which were frequently outdated and buggy. Embracing the laptop-buzz generated by Optimus and the new mobile chips, NVidia is seizing the opportunity to begin releasing a single driver for all platforms.
The 
AMD has just announced the obvious step of refreshing the entire FirePro line of graphics cards with their newest Evergreen-based chip, that brings DX11, OpenGL3.2 & 4, and Eyefinity support to the entire line. Tony DeYoung of FireUser.com has a great chart detailing the new cards.
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VizWorld.com 
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