Who’s Suing Whom In The Telecoms Trade?
12:30 pm
Graph Fail
12:00 pm
You just have to love this graph. The graph shows that the iPhone has 25% market share in new phone purchases. It is losing to all the new Android phones on the market, which are now up to a 33% of all new phone purchases. Not only that, but RIM is now in third place with 26% of all new phone purchases. Wait. What? Apple is in second place with 25% and RIM is in third place with 26%? Go figure.
VISTA Reveals the Secret of the Unicorn
11:00 am
The VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is a 4.1-metre wide-field telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile and is run by the European Southern Observatory.
In this zoom sequence we start with a broad panorama of the Milky Way, including the familiar constellation of Orion. As we close in on part of the adjacent constellation of Monoceros we start to see faint clouds and in the final part of the video the full glory of the Monoceros R2 star-forming region is revealed in a new image from the VISTA infrared telescope.
Credit:
ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA/Digitized Sky Survey 2/A. Fujii. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Davide De Martin. Music: John Dyson (from the album “Darklight”)
More after the break.
Toshiba A665-3DV: 3D or Not 3D?
10:00 am
AnandTech takes a look at the Toshiba A665-3DV laptop, which, as the name implies, is 3-D capable. The laptop has 3-D capable Blu-Ray player in it for you to watch movies with. There is a free Toshiba BD Player, but you might be better served buying PowerDVD 10. At least now there are more 3-D Blu Ray movies to purchase. There used to be only Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs available.
The Toshiba A665-3DV laptop is also capable of playing 3-D enabled games. However, since it is a laptop, the graphics card is only a NVIDIA GTS 350M. The real question is, how good is it?
This is a first generation 3D Vision notebook. What’s that mean? It means the 3D emitter is a separate USB device just like on desktops. There are next generation 3D Vision notebooks coming this fall (Acer’s recently announced Aspire 5745DG for example, scheduled for availability later this month) with the 3D emitter built into the LCD bezel. If you’re ready to buy into the whole 3D experience, integrating the emitter is definitely the way to go. Right now, if you want to take your laptop on the road, you’ll need the power brick and cable, your 3D glasses, the 3D emitter, and possibly an extra USB cable to charge your glasses (though you can use the cable for the emitter). That’s quite a bit of extra “stuff” to carry around, and you’ll also need space to set the emitter when in use. If you have an NVIDIA desktop GPU and a 120Hz LCD, you can use the same 3D Vision kit that comes with the A665-3DV on both systems, but that’s about the only positive for the separate emitter.
Wraparound plasma screen is one good turn
9:00 am
Erica Ogg from CNET shows us a plasma display that is 1 centimeter thick that can wrap around a standard building column. I can easily see this device being used for advertising, or perhaps at conferences when your company’s booth gets a bad location and has a building column in the middle of it.
The display uses cameras to sense a person’s location and movements in reaction to elements on the screen. The camera on one side displays the person’s interactions on both sides of the column, making it appear see-through.
via Wraparound plasma screen is one good turn | Circuit Breaker – CNET News.
ATI FirePro Peformance Plug-ins for AutoCAD, 3ds Max
8:00 am
AMD is looking to recapture a bit of CAD glory via a new collection of AutoCAD and 3dsMax plugins that look strangely familiar to the old NVidia MAXTreme drivers for the same packages. Using the plugins and a compatible ATI FirePro or FireGL card, you can see some pretty significant performance boosts, as shown above.
ATI’s FirePro application support team have devised a way to drastically increase the performance of FirePro or FireGL workstation graphics cards when running AutoCAD or 3ds Max. AMD has just released a set of performance plug-ins designed to provide additional optimizations for AutoCAD 2010, AutoCAD 2011, 3ds Max 2010, and 3ds Max 2011. With these plug-ins, ATI claims their “FirePro graphics cards offer more than double the performance over comparable consumer graphics cards.” AMD claims users can expect significant improvements in visual quality as well.
It looks like they’re trying to fight back to regain some of the market they’ve lost to Quadro in the high-end workstation space. AMD’s (it still seems unnatural to call them AMD instead of ATI, but I digress) FirePro cards are nice cards, but the custom GL support in Quadro has really crushed them in the workstation benchmarks. Hopefully these new plugins will close the gap.
via ATI FirePro Peformance Plug-ins Optimized for AutoCAD, 3ds Max – HotHardware, and FireUser and their followup
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 06/10/2010
7:00 am
October, among other things, is the month of the Oktoberfest, one of the most well known events worldwide, and Travel Insurance made a great graphic about it. Medical Insurance throws some light into some Food labels, and One Mint looks back at the Gold Cult throughout history. Finishing today’s selection, Sharenator proves that reading the entire English Wikipedia is possible, and from Flowtown comes the rise of Facebook Mobile, .
Toshiba To Sell Glasses-Free 3D REGZA TV In December (In Japan)
3:00 pm
Toshiba has announced two new TVs that do not require glasses in order to see the 3-D effect. The first TV is a 20 inch model. This version has a resolution of 1,280×720, and is LED backlit. What makes it interesting is that it comes with a CELL engine, similar to what you might find in a Playstation3. This model also comes with an HDMI interface, a USB port, and LAN.
The second TV is a smaller 12 inch model. This version has a resolution of 466×350, and is LED backlit. It does not come with a CELL engine. This model also comes with an HDMI interface, a USB port, and an SD card slot. The SD card slot will allow you to for view JPEGs and AVCHD movies.
At Ceatec , Toshiba is also showing off a 56-inch model of the television. However, this model is just a prototype. Unfortunately there are no plans to make this into an actual product.
But what about the 3D effect? Toshiba promises that buyers will be able to view 3D images in high quality and without glasses – provided they look at the screen in one of nine distinct viewing angles (more technical background can be found here). The company’s recommended viewing distance is 90cm in the case of the 20-inch model and 65cm in the case of the smaller one.
You can view a video of it after the break.
NVIDIA starts selling own-brand GeForce’s at Best Buy
2:45 pm
One eagle-eyed shopper found an interesting discovery at their local Best Buy: It seems NVidia has taken their previous Quadro offerings and extended the self-manufacturing process into the GeForce line. Historically, the GeForce product line was manufactured by 3rd parties like EVGA, BFG, and many others. Apparently NVidia has decided to go head-to-head against them.
HardOCP has discovered Foxconn will be responsible for building these perfectly generic GeForces and NVIDIA is promising a pretty generous three-year warranty to go with their luxurious packaging. The company’s official response to these revelations has been to say that Best Buy will be the only place the own-brand cards can be purchased and that the effort is intended as a “complement” to products from its partners.
Of course, you can see from the pics that it’s a pretty baseline offering. None of the “free games” or other junk (that most people toss anyway), and probably none of the fancy bells & whistles that make some of the other offerings attractive. In particular would be some of the nicer monitoring and overclocking tools available by companies like BFG and EVGA.
Only time will tell how their other vendors will react to this ‘invasion’ of their territory.
via NVIDIA starts selling own-brand GPUs at Best Buy, AIB partners left befuddled — Engadget.
HIPIX Image Format to challenge Google WebP
2:30 pm
I just received a press release from a company called ‘Human Monitoring Ltd” for a new still image compression technology similar to Google’s new WebP format, however this is not based on their WebM standard but rather based on the existing H.264 standard. This means it can re-use existing H264 encoding hardware already in place in millions of cameras and chipsets worldwide.
Unlike Microsoft’s JPEG-XR and the recently announced Google WebP format, hipix™ is designed to answer the market needs from cameras to web applications and mobile phones. hipix™ is unlimited in resolution, supports higher quality 422 color format than WebP, and allows importing and exporting of EXIF data and even audio! HM preferred implementing hipix™ using H.264 due to its superior tools, although the patent pending technology covers any inter-intra coding scheme including VP8 and VC1.
They already have tools available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and the Android mobile platforms that will allow you to view hipix images and convert existing imagse to the Hipix format. The benefits are somewhere in the 15% to 50% of JPEG, meaning you could (potentially) convert a 1Meg JPEG to a 150k hipix image. In fact, it also maintains EXIF data and can store audio ( more advantages from re-using h264 standards).
Human Monitoring’s hipix™ patent pending technology utilises the existing h.264 video Codec to achieve two to seven times more effective still image compression compared to JPEG images. The utilization of the deployed hardware support of H.264 is what differentiate hipix™ from any new compression scheme like JPEG-XR and WebP. By using existing and popular codecs there is no need for new hardware. hipix™ images can be converted back to JPEG and be used as a highly efficient “Photo Zip” format.
All the tools are, for a “limited time only” (I always cringe when I see that), freely available for download from their site. Read the full release after the break.
VizWorld.com 
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