VizWorld.com

The online magazine Good has published an infographic on the terrorist attacks that have been targeted against the United States. The graphic left me with more questions than answers. For example, on June 25, 1996 the Khobar Towers apartment complex in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia killed 19 US soldiers and left 372 wounded. We know that it was Islamic fundamentalists, but it does not show up on the graphic as such. Then there is the Centennial Olympic Park bombing on July 27, 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia in which 2 people died, and 111 were injured. We know it was committed by Eric Robert Rudolph. Again, all the terrorist attacks for 1996 are labeled as “unknown”. Click on the link below to see the full graphic.

The unsuccessful car bomb in Times Square two weeks ago occurred a mere four months after the unsuccessful attempt to bomb a plane on Christmas day. Are we under attack more than usual? This is a look at the Global Terrorism Database’s list of successful attacks (both foreign and domestic) on America since 1970.

via Transparency: A History of Deadly Terrorist Attacks @ GOOD.

Graphics infographic

Wow! This looks interesting! An Nvidia Tegra 2 tablet is being shown at Google I/O 2010.

Pleasant surprise at Google I/O to come across a brand new prototype from NVIDIA a Tegra 2 tablet. I tried to get do a device walk through on camera, but that was a no no, so you’ll have to settle for me telling you about the ports. This 8.9 inch tablet was running Android 2.1 with its 1Ghz Tegra 2 processor. It was also sporting a webcam & microphone and for connectivity on the left hand side of the device we have audio jacks, docking port connector and a microsd card slot. On the bottom we have some status LEDs for Power, Wifi and a lighting blot, not too sure what the lighting bolt LED was for, charging perhaps, hard to say. Moving around the device to the right we have two USB ports and the PSU all covered up with a silicon flap. On the top because it is Android after all we have back, menu and home we also have what appears to be a SIM card slot though it curiously looked a little bit too thin.

The unit measured around 1cm in thickness, but talking to Andrew from NVIDIA he did remind me that it is a protype and there are much thinner & lighter versions behind closed doors.

The game running was BackBreakers by NaturalMotion, it ran very smoothly which is a nice teaser to the beginning of the slew of Tegra 2 tablets we are expecting to see at Computex in two weeks.

via : NVIDIA Tegra 2 Prototype Tablet Running Backbreaker at Google I/O 2010

Hardware google, nvidia, tablet, tegra

How is it that some companies are so profitable, and yet pay no taxes? Mint takes a look at the question “How Are America’s Top Companies Taxed?” in their latest infographic. Click on the link below to see the full graphic.

Today, American households fork over anywhere from 10% to 35% of their annual income to Uncle Sam — not to mention the state and local governments’ cut on top. After all, nothing is certain, but death and taxes, right? Well, not quite, it turns out, if you’re a large corporation. Many of America’s 25 largest companies pay less – much less – in taxes than the average American. How so? Unlike most Americans, large companies can operate losing businesses in the U.S. – and profitable ones abroad, where tax rates are lower. That’s how a company like General Electric has managed to owe a negative $1.1 billion in income tax in 2009 ( that’s quite a refund), despite its $10.3 billion pretax income and $157 billion in sales. Some banks made out quite well last year, too: Bank of America did not pay a dime in taxes on its $4.4 billion income, thanks to a slew of deductions and provisions for credit losses; neither did Citigroup. Our latest infographic gives you a summary of the taxes paid by America’s top 25 companies, as reported by Forbes.

How Are America’s Top Companies Taxed? | MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice.

Graphics infographic

EON Reality’s CEO Mats W. Johansson spoke at Eurographics ealier this month on “Training and Learning in Virtual Environkments”.  He spoke at length about recent developments and various successes his company has had, and then got to a new product called “EON Coliseum”, first mentioned here back as a Pixel in March.

Mr. Johansson finished with a 3D Stereoscopic demonstration of EON Coliseum, EON Reality’s new online multiuser technology platform where people can present their ideas, communicate complex concepts and collaborate in 3D using rich media such as 3D worlds, slideshows, videos, avatars, voice, chat and interactive 3D objects virtually from anywhere in the world.

Marketed as somewhat of a combination of Second Life Enterprise meant specifically for meetings, it lacks some of SL’s flexibility for the sake of making it simple and streamlined.

via EON Reality’s CEO Presented Tech Talk at Eurographics 2010 in Sweden – MarketWatch.

Science eon, virtual worlds

The “Visual Effects” Category at the Academy Awards currently allows only 3 nominees, which in VFX-heavy years can leave several films and studios out of the running.  This year in particular saw several films left out as the wealth of films simply overwhelmed the nominations with Avatar, G.I.Joe, G-Force, and others, and next year looks the same as it’s only May and we already have Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, and others.  However, it’s not currently decided if this will actually happen yet.

There also seems to be some debate over whether a change like this would decrease the value of the award. Currently there are four Visual Effects artists from each film nominated with a total of twelve people for the category. Should the expansion of five nominated films occur there would be twenty nominated individuals in the category.

via Oscars Visual Effects Category Expands To Five Nominees | The Film Stage.

Graphics award, oscar, vfx

NextLimit has just released RealFlow5 into the world, boasting the new REnderKit and Hybrido solver.  Hybrido brings RealFlow from simulating small water effects into simulating large bodies of water complete with splashes, foam, and mist.  Already in use by several major films like Avatar and District 9, this new version is guaranteed to be a big hit.

RealFlow 5 continues in this tradition of innovation, introducing Hybrido, the revolutionary new hybrid technology, making RealFlow the only product on the market which enables the user to simulate large bodies of water with sophisticated secondary effects, like splashes, foam and mist.  And, due to its cutting-edge body dynamics solver, Caronte, RealFlow 5 also offers unmatched capabilities for large-scale, complex simulations.

RealFlow is available for $3995 for new licenses, and $1995 for upgrades.  Full pricing is available on their website.

RealFlow :: Fluids & Dynamics Simulation Tool.

Graphics, Science cfd, next, realflow, software

Anyone who’s worked with graphic design knows about Wacom Tablets and Cintiq’s, but may have never actually used one in practice.  A new collection of videos from Wacom is now on YouTube showing some of the amazing things you can do with the new Adobe CS5 collection and Wacom Tablets.

An overview of some of the new features in Adobe CS5 that become even more powerful when used with Wacom pen tablets and displays. This video covers: the new Adobe CS5 brush engine, icons, brush dynamics, the mixer brush, bristle-tip brushes, and more.

Above I’ve embedded their generic video, but they have more specific videos on Premiere, AfterEffects, Illustrator, and more that I’ve embedded after the break.

via YouTube – WACOM PRODUCTS & ADOBE® CS5.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware adobe, cs5, wacom

Today is Wednesday, home of our usual “Resource Of The Week” post where we pick some book and share it with you.  Today while browsing Amazon to find something suitable, I once again ran into what is quickly growing over Amazon faster than Kudzu and frankly, I’m sick and tired of it and can’t take it anymore.

As a word of warning, I depart from our usual visualization and graphics oriented coverage and bring you a word of warning about “VDM Publishing”, “BetaScript”, and “AlphaScript”, three companies that are colluding to turn my favorite online reseller of books into a junkyard of scraped internet content.  If you want to know the full details, read after the break.

For those of you who don’t care, then be sure to tune in again next week and I’ll have a real book for you :)

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware, Science amazon, feature, offtopic, resource of the week

Guru3d has posted an article on taking four GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards and putting them into a 4-way SLI setup. Nvidia has recently released a new driver that enables 4-way SLI. However, there is just one small problem. The only “game” that supports 4-way SLI is 3DMark Vantage, which is not really a game. To prevent the CPU from being the bottleneck, they needed to overclock the Core i7 980 Extreme processor. But then they ran into a new problem. What motherboard would support 4-way SLI? They finally realized that they would need two Nvidia NF200 integrated circuits embedded on the motherboard in order to be able to accomplish this feat. How did they do it and what was their final score? Click the link below to find out.

via : GeForce GTX 4-way SLI review @ Guru3d

Hardware gtx480, nvidia, sli

It’s been a while since Google bought On2, and today at the I/O event they’ve finally announced what they plan to do with it: Release it back into the wild as Open-Source video codec WebM.

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

Based on the VP8 codec, it offers better results than either h264 or Ogg and is already available in the Chromium & FireFox nightly builds as well as a prototype Opera build.  Looks like Google might finally end the Web Video Codec wars.

Update 1:42pm: Microsoft has just issued a response, and (in typical Microsoft Fashion) they aren’t impressed.  However, they do begrudginly admit:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

While that sounds good, there’s an important little nugget in there: when the user has installed a VP8 codec. Essentially, IE9 will support h264 out of the box.  If you want VP8, you’ll have to go find it yourself and download it (just like Quicktime today).  Where Chromium, Opera, and FireFox will be shipping “batteries included”, IE9 will require the user to go hunt down the codec themselves and maintain it for revisions separately.

via The WebM Project : about : About the WebM Project.

Science google, h264, webm