If you’re a Netflix or Amazon On-Demand fan then you should check out today’s “Deal of the Day” on Amazon where you can pick up the Roku HD-XR for only $99.99.
Now featuring extended-range wireless, Roku is the easiest way to stream instant movies and shows directly to your TV – over 50,000 and counting, from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and more. The top-of-the-line HD-XR model uses the latest wireless standard (Wi-Fi “N”) to deliver the best quality video virtually anywhere in your home. It’s so easy and powerful; no wonder Roku is Netflix members’ top rated streaming player.
In northern Pakistan on January 4, 2010, a landslide blocked the Hunza river. Soon a lake formed behind the landslide, which inundated farms, roads, and homes. As water levels rose behind the landslide, people lost their homes and there was an increasing fear that a catastrophic collapse of the dam would occur. Since then, Pakistan has been working to form a spillway in order to stabilize the water in the newly formed lake.
NASA took an image of the new lake in mid-March. This most recent image shows the water flowing over the spillway. Recent reports are that the water levels in the lake have stabilized, reducing the threat of flood should the dam give way.
The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of the landslide lake and its newly functioning spillway on July 7, 2010. North is to the right.
What is the fastest laptop graphics you can buy? Well, from the image to the right you could easily guess that it is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M. However, no one seems to have one just yet for testing, until now.
Anandtech has posted a review of AVADirect’s Clevo W880CU with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M. But what makes the 480M special? From the article:
NVIDIA’s GTX 480M uses the same cut-down—but still Fermi—core found in desktop GeForce GTX 465 cards. That means 352 of NVIDIA’s “CUDA cores” and a 256-bit memory bus connected to GDDR5 memory. The difference is that while the GTX 465 only gets 1GB of GDDR5, the GTX 480M gets a full 2GB in our review notebook. Clock speeds aren’t as comparable, though, with the 480M’s clock speed down from the GTX 465′s 607 MHz to just 425 MHz. The shader clocks get cut down, too, dropping from 1.2 GHz to 800 MHz. Probably the most alarming drop is the GDDR5: running at 3.2 GHz on the desktop card, the 480M has its effective speed cut to just 2.4 GHz, the lowest speed we’ve ever seen on GDDR5 and actually a slower effective clock speed than the GDDR3 on the desktop GeForce GTX 285!
Now you know the specs, but how does it perform? Hit the link below to find out.
An odd little gadget from Loreo, the ‘3D Lens in a Cap‘ is a wide 2-element lens with a twin blade diaphragm, designed to turn your traditional Canon camera into a stereo-3d shooting machine. However, it looks like it’s based on some somewhat older technology.
The aperture can be opened up to a maximum value of F11, meaning your light intake will be, erm… frugal, while the minimum focusing range is a distant 1.5 meters away from the sensor. Still, it’ll get you two perfectly paired snaps and the Canon EOS mount version can be had now for $166. What are you waiting for — the future's just a few clicks away.
Prince of Persia’s VFX Supervisor Ben Morris sits down with ArtOfVFX to discuss the creation of the many ‘sand’ sequences in the movie, as well as his background in the industry and tips for newcomers. I was personally surprised to find that the flowing sand was not generated with a fluid solver, but rather with geometric approximations.
The whole sequence was blocked out by the animators using geometric surfaces to represent the sand’s surface, we were able to get most of the key movement of the sand signed off in this way before an fx artist became involved. Once the layout of the shot had been finalized we had a custom plugin in Maya that took the animated geometric surfaces representing the sand and were able to produce a flow of particles that replaced the geometric surface in the final render. The plugin was able to create particle movement that appear fluid like and was dictated by the gradient of the under lying surface. Any additional flow detail could be controlled via maps, allowing the artist to quickly and visually paint the sand flow direction, including any turbulence and spay.
EXPreview took 4 of NVidia’s GTX480 cars and slapped them in an EVGA X58 Classified motherboard to do some testing of 4-way SLI operations. The results:
4-way SLI has 116.76% advancement than single one, and gap between 4-way SLI and 3-way SLI is an average value of 3.50%.
Such situation lies in parts of drive and game, because at the moment 4-way SLI is not perfect, and there is no doubt that exist lots of problems, while 3-way SLI is three years old, also be mature enough.
Basically, the tiny little performance boost isn’t worth the increased cost and power consumption (Over 1.2 KW at full load). Most applications wind up being heavily memory and CPU bottlenecked with that much graphics horsepower, so it’s no surprise.
Unfortunately, he didn’t run any GPGPU benchmarks. Then I bet it would really shine.
We’ll begin today with RIA Novosti‘s piece on the bonuses for footballers at the 2010 World Cup, followed by some fresh social media stats, from Mashable and from HubSpot. And, finishing this selection, a couple of data visualization pieces about the United States: GOOD‘s look on the crimes committed by war veterans, and the rightfully named American Nightmare, by Steve Kinney.
This week’s recommended resource is an in-depth look at Mental Ray from Jennifer O’Connor, “Mastering Mental Ray: Rendering Techniques for 3D and CAD Professionals“. Complete with a DVD of examples and videos for 3dsMax 2010 and 2011, it gives you everything you need to get started using Mental Ray for rendering.
If you’re a busy artist seeking high-end results for your 3D, design, or architecture renders using mental ray, this is the perfect book for you. It distills the highly technical nature of rendering into easy-to-follow steps and tutorials that you can apply immediately to your own projects. The book uses 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design to show the integration with mental ray, but users of any 3D or CAD software can learn valuable techniques for incorporating mental ray into their pipelines.
Takes you under the hood of mental ray, a stand-alone or bundled product that is often used with 3D or CAD software in the creation of movies, games, architectural renders, and television
Focuses on only the most pertinent tools and techniques for busy professionals who need to quickly apply them on the job
Provides compelling, practical tutorials so you can start incorporating mental ray into your own production pipelines
Includes a DVD with step-by-step videos to help drive home concepts and techniques
Learn effective mental ray techniques with this great guide, then keep this practical book at your workstation for reference while you work!
You can find this book and many more in the VizWorld Store.
Damon Miller has a clever idea, rather than designing objects in CAD-space from geometric primitives, why not build them digitally just like you would in the real world. Using digital lathes, drills, and chisels to warp and mold the basic solids given you in a digital space, then have it produce instructions to replicate the process.
The tool is at an early stage, but don’t let the low-fidelity distract you—the possibilities of this concept are endless. See a demo in the video above. How many times have you wished you could just chisel a chunk out of a meticulously built volume, only to be thwarted by clouds of control points?
Prince of Persia’s VFX Supervisor Ben Morris sits down with ArtOfVFX to discuss the creation of the many ‘sand’ sequences in the movie, as well as his background in the industry and tips for newcomers. I was personally surprised to find that the flowing sand was not generated with a fluid solver, but rather with geometric approximations.
EXPreview took 4 of NVidia’s GTX480 cars and slapped them in an EVGA X58 Classified motherboard to do some testing of 4-way SLI operations. The results:
VizWorld.com 
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