I know that many of you readers are Gadget Geeks (myself included), so over the next day or two I’m going to include some of the bigger “Black Friday” deals available. For those overseas, “Black Friday” is the day after Thanksgiving (a very American holiday, always on a Thursday), and is typically the biggest shopping day of the year. So here’s a few of what I’ve found so far:
Best Buy
Best Buy is having their annual “doorbusters” sale. A few of the better deals listed:
Barnes & Noble Nook Wi-Fi e-Reader for $99
Wii (in Black or White), with Wii Sports Resort & Wii Remote Plus for $169
Sony VAIO laptop for $399
Insignia 10 Megapixel camera for $59
Toshiba BluRay Player for $59
$25 off Several of the biggest VideoGames for XBox360 & PS3
GameStop In addition to several sales, they’re offering free shipping for all of November.
We’ve put together some recent infographics about the current reality in America for today’s selection. First, Economic Crisis Blog brings us the Foreclosure Epidemic visualization, followed by Mint‘s cost of College overview. The folks at Credit Loan introduced us to America’s Richest and Poorest Cities, and the last two infographics are focused on transportation: Motorcycle Insurance looks at the Helmet laws in the US, and Automo Blog breaks down the auto industry state – after all, can you really tell where your car was made?
Next week at the RSNA 2010 Conference, Kitware will be making some big announcements of interest to the medical visualization community.
At the conference, Kitware will highlight a number of applications and technologies designed to deliver advanced medical imaging solutions based on free and open source software for scientists and engineers. In addition, Kitware will make an announcement in regards to VolView, a biomedical imaging research application that the company says will have a definitive impact on researchers worldwide.
They will be presenting a course on “Open Source Tools for Medical Research & Applications”, discussing use of VTK and ITK in the Biomedical space. In addition, they’ll be demonstrating tools like Slicer3 and MIDAS, and a new open-source lesion sizing toolkit.
Adobe Photoshop plugin masters ‘Filter Forge’ have just announced a massive 70% off Holiday Sale that drops the prices to never-before seen lows. The Basic Edition, typically $149 is now only $45, and the Pro Edition is now available for only $119!
“This is the first time in our history that we’re offering such a huge discount,” says Vladimir Golovin, CEO of Filter Forge, Inc. “Holiday discounts always worked great for us, but we haven’t tried anything this radical before. Let’s see how it goes!”
The sale ends Christmas Day, so go ahead and buy it now!
In a shocking $2.2 Billion deal, Attachmate will be acquiring famous networking company Novell and the popular ‘SuSE’ linux distribution that’s at the core of several large HPC’s. I have to admit, I’ve never heard of Attachmate before, and I’m having deja-vu of the Rackable/SGI deal all over again with this. In the letter to the customers:
We believe this transaction is great news for our customers. Novell has a long history of innovation and market leadership, and this tradition will be preserved and built upon through this transaction. We place tremendous value on the relationships we’ve cultivated with our customers and I can assure you that providing you with the innovative products, solutions and support you’ve come to rely on remains a top priority.
Now, Attachmate isn’t getting everything. Certain “intellectual property” assets (unnamed) are being sold to CPTN Holdings LLC. They claim this will not impact customers, but only time will tell.
Read the full “letter to the customers” After the break, and the official press release here.
A new tool in photographic 3D reconstruction hit the open-source pavement last week called ‘Insight3d’. Still in active development, it’s an open-source tool (available for Windows & Linux) that takes a collection of photos around an object and creates a point-cloud of the object, and then provides tessellation tools to reconstruct a textured polygonal model.
insight3d lets you create 3D models from photographs. You give it a series of photos of a real scene (e.g., of a building), it automatically matches them and then calculates positions in space from which each photo has been taken (plus camera’s optical parameters) along with a 3D pointcloud of the scene. You can then use insight3d’s modeling tools to create textured polygonal model.
It’s still very early in development, but fully functional. Check it out and see what you think!
MPC helped to bring the latest Harry Potter installment to life, with additions to the initial “escape” sequence and many others. Get an overview of their work in this short articl eon CGNews.
MPC’s concept artists explored different combinations for the transformed characters, blending features, sizes and skin textures from Harry and the other characters to create six different hybrid designs. The seven actors were shot motion control and a facial motion capture shoot was organised to obtain extra detail. MPC’s 3D team had to create digi-doubles for each of the actors, modeling and texturing photoreal heads and blending them with a CG model of Harry’s head. A custom rigging system was used to blend the data from the facial capture shoot, allowing animators to keep control of the fine details.
Infosthetics brings us a new method of visualizing large genealogy databases that was presented at Visweek this year. The original paper (download, view online) presents a method that can map thousands of individuals into a diagonal matrix view, with patterns indicating many interesting family structures.
Genealogies are represented in the form of a layered, diagonally-filled matrix, which eliminates crossings and accommodates very large datasets in the order of thousands of individuals. By depicting individuals as rows and families as columns, with parents always at a higher layer (generation) than their children, the visualization exhibits marriage and parent/children relationships, as well as other interesting relationships such as cross-generational and consanguine marriages.
If you just look at the sample chart above (of greek gods), you may not fully understand it. Watch the video below for a much better explanation.
It’s been a while now since the Deepwater Horizon accident, but there’s always room for another great design about this terrible disaster. This time, SocialSphere Strategies shows us the buzz on Social media around the BP’s failing strategy. Speaking on Social media, Mashable‘s overview about the main Brands on Facebook was quite interesting, as it was Search Engine Journal‘s deep analysis on Spam, and to close the first selection of the week, Kissmetrics evaluates the myths of Bounce Rate and. from Focus. comes a look at some recent high profile Data Breaches.
I know that many of you readers are Gadget Geeks (myself included), so over the next day or two I’m going to include some of the bigger “Black Friday” deals available. For those overseas, “Black Friday” is the day after Thanksgiving (a very American holiday, always on a Thursday), and is typically the biggest shopping day of the year. So here’s a few of what I’ve found so far:
We’ve put together some recent infographics about the current reality in America for today’s selection. First, 
Next week at the RSNA 2010 Conference, Kitware will be making some big announcements of interest to the medical visualization community.
Adobe Photoshop plugin masters ‘Filter Forge’ have just announced a massive 70% off Holiday Sale that drops the prices to never-before seen lows. The Basic Edition, typically $149 is now only $45, and the Pro Edition is now available for only $119!
In a shocking $2.2 Billion deal, Attachmate will be acquiring famous networking company Novell and the popular ‘SuSE’ linux distribution that’s at the core of several large HPC’s. I have to admit, I’ve never heard of Attachmate before, and I’m having deja-vu of the Rackable/SGI deal all over again with this. In the letter to the customers:
MPC helped to bring the latest Harry Potter installment to life, with additions to the initial “escape” sequence and many others. Get an overview of their work in this short articl eon CGNews.
It’s been a while now since the Deepwater Horizon accident, but there’s always room for another great design about this terrible disaster. This time, 
VizWorld.com 
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