Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog has posted a gorgeous picture from Thierry Legault showing the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle Atlantis transiting in front of the sun. In this image, Atlantis is turning to show its belly to the crew of the ISS. That way they can inspect the belly for any damage to the heat resistant tiles.
I have cropped the picture to show the relevant section, but you still need to click on the picture to see it at its full resolution. Even more impressive is to see the full 4,000 x 4,000 image. Click on the link below to see that 16 million pixel image, and read more about this shot.
The big yellow thing is the Sun. But look at the upper right section. See those two dark blips? The one on the left is the Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis and on the right is the International Space Station! Incredibly, Thierry caught them as they passed directly in front of the Sun! To give you an idea of how talented Thierry is, the entire transit lasted just over half a second.
Autodesk has just pushed out their first Service Pack for MudBox2011 that fixes several outstanding issues for all versions (Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit, and Mac OSX). Fixes include:
Edge Bleed option in Preferences > Paint now controls the edge bleed distance for map extraction
Error using Eyedropper to pick color on mesh with no UVs. Mudbox now creates UVs automatically.
Incorrect GPU RAM detection causing warnings to pop up.
Brush resize down/up hotkeys not working on values larger than 100
Flatten to UV space using mesh with no UVs causes crash
Shift hotkey not working for temporary weight painting smooth
Painting using stencil crashes if stencil is 24bit/pixel .tga
As well as several fixes for their FBX translation format. Get it on their website.
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing eleven men. The oil rig then sank on April 22, 2010. Since then, oil has been spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Attempts to stop the oil spill have been met with only limited success.
NASA has taken another picture of the oil from its Terra satellite using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. Up in the right hand side of the image you can see the Mississippi River delta as it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Down to the southeast you can see a long tail of the oil. You can click on the annotated image for a larger view.
Oil slicks are not always visible in natural-color satellite images. A thin sheen of oil on an already dark background may be impossible to detect. On this day, however, the slick was located in the sunglint part of the image, which makes the slick stand out.
Sunglint is the mirror-like reflection of the Sun off the water. If the ocean surface were as smooth and calm as a mirror, a series of perfect reflections of the Sun would appear in a line along the path of the satellite’s northeast-to-southwest orbit. Instead, waves blur the reflection, creating a wide, washed-out strip through the ocean.
A coating of oil smoothes the sea surface relative to the oil-free water, causing it to reflect light differently. Depending on where in the sunglint area it occurs, the slick may look brighter or darker than adjacent clean water. In this image, the slick appears as an uneven shape of varying shades of bright gray-beige.
The Nvidia GTX 465 graphics card will feature 352 CUDA cores with a core clock of 607 MHz, a shader clock of 1215 MHz, and a memory clock of 1603 MHz. It will come with 1 GB of memory on a 256-bit memory interface. The estimated cost for the GeForce GTX 465 is $249. The chip used in this graphics card is called the GF104 internally by Nvidia.
Guru3d is reporting rumors that it is canceling its dual-GPU GF100 graphics card due to heat concerns. Instead the same GPU that is in the Nvidia GTX 465 graphics card will be used instead.
Rumors have surfaced that NVIDIA has cancelled its dual-GPU GF100 graphics card, instead the company will release a dual-GPU card based on the GF104. The card that some roadmaps new as D12U-50 is internally canceled due to its too high TDP. A Chinese roadmap claims that such a card should end up with whopping 375W TDP.
The new dual-chip card based on two GF104, second generation Fermi chips should be coming this year, most likely for back to school but we can only speculate on the launch date.
Guru3d has posted a picture of the new Eyefinity12 graphics card from Powercooler. This graphics card is based on the AMD Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, and sports 12 mini-DisplayPorts. The graphics card will take up 3 slots. A normal Radeon HD 5970 would come with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. This new version has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory.
Remember that the Radeon HD 5970 is comprised of two Cypress graphics processors connected by a PCI-Express bridge. A normal Radeon HD 5970 has a core clock of 750 MHz and a memory clock of 1000 MHz. This is slower than Radeon HD 5870 with a core clock of 850 MHz and a memory clock of 1200 MHz.
While this is an interesting technological achievement, I do not think that we will see this sell very many units. The first problem is that not many people will be able to invest in 12 new monitors that support DisplayPort inputs. Not to mention that a 12 monitor wall is huge. Second, I am not sure how well it will perform with the latest games. Third, is that the bezels start to get in the way.
The Huron River platform is the seventh-generation Centrino platform. The mobile processor associated with the Huron River platform is a Sandy Bridge CPU. The Sandy Bridge codename refers to a CPU that is the planned successor to Nehalem. In addition to the Sandy Bridge CPU, the Huron River platform will include a new version of Intel HD graphics. This graphics chip will be capable of supporting version 1.4 of HDMI.
Fudzilla is reporting that this Intel graphics chip will support 3D Blu-ray:
When it comes to Blu-ray support, Huron River plans to introduce a Blu-ray Stereoscopic 3D playback support but we can only hope that notebooks based on Huron River will come with a display with refresh rate that can support Blu-ray 3D on your notebook.
Yesterday I was in a debate with a fellow over when we would have 3-D Blu-Ray available at work to watch movies on. I reminded him that there is only one movie currently available for 3-D Blu-Ray. Without any content, there is nothing to watch. That did not satisfy him at all. Randall told him that there were some hardware problems that we were working through since this was a new equipment. That did not seem to satisfy him either.
But what if you want to run a non 3D movie on the latest 120 Mhz monitor? Tom Petersen talks about that issue in a recent blog post.
Ok, so you’ve got yourself a new 3D-capable 120Hz monitor for playing back games and videos in stereo 3D mode, but then you also decide to take advantage of that higher refresh rate even when playing back non 3D videos like Blu-ray Movies. You set your display to 120Hz and try to run the Bly-ray movie and then something is not right and the reason for that is the HDCP protection that is being used with the Blu-ray video. But why it is not working when your new 120Hz monitor does say HDCP compliant? There is one interesting catch that nobody is focusing on and that is the fact that your new 120Hz monitor is indeed HDCP compliant, but only when used at 60Hz refresh rate.
Thirty years ago, on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens roared back into major activity with a massive eruption that leveled surrounding forest, blasted away over a thousand feet of the mountain’s summit, and claimed 57 human lives.
This short video shows the catastrophic eruption – and the amazing recovery of the surrounding ecosystem – through the eyes of the Landsat satellites, which have been imaging our planet for almost forty years.
HPC people have been investigating Tesla & other CUDA technologies for several years, but mainly through test & development servers and homebrew configurations. No longer will that be required, as now IBM is jumping in the game by packing the new Tesla M2050 card into their new systems.
“NVIDIA provides an innovative solution for customers who push the envelope in high-performance computing,” said Dave Turek, vice president, Deep Computing, IBM. “GPU acceleration provides performance boosts for many applications in energy exploration, science and financial services. It is among the significant emerging supercomputer technologies to watch in the years ahead.”
The industry standard benchmarking tool LINPACK boasts an 8x improvement when run on a server with 2 M2050′s installed, so the Top500 might see some amazing upsets from smaller IBM clusters this year.
At work we have made several PH SColograms (pronounced skol-o-grams). The term PH SCologram is an acronym for photography, holography, sculpture and computer graphics. (I just learned something new today! I never knew what it stood for.) A PH SCologram is created rendering a computer image multiple time from multiple angles. These images are then printed and laminated on a back-lit screen. It enables a viewer to see a photo in 3-D. While it is cool, I was less than enthusiastic after I saw our image this way. A 2-D poster looked better, in my opinion at least.
But that was several years ago. What about today? What if you used a lenticular lens? A recent article in gizmag answered that question.
Traditionally such animated or 3D images have been produced using of a technology called lenticular printing which combines two or more images attached to the back of a lenticular lens. Instead of these grooved lenses, the new display consists of 250,000 individual lenses with a diameter of two millimetres each. So unlike lenticular images that can only be viewed well at arm’s length, the new display allows 3D images to be seen clearly from a distance – the other side of the street for example – something that is sure to appeal to advertisers.
Autodesk has just pushed out their first Service Pack for MudBox2011 that fixes several outstanding issues for all versions (Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit, and Mac OSX). Fixes include:
HPC people have been investigating Tesla & other CUDA technologies for several years, but mainly through test & development servers and homebrew configurations. No longer will that be required, as now IBM is jumping in the game by packing the new Tesla M2050 card into their new systems.
VizWorld.com 
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