The Rise of E-Filing
1:40 pm
AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB
1:00 pm
The latest video cards have been launched by AMD in an attempt to spoil the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti launch. These include the Radeon Radeon HD 6950 1GB and the Radeon HD 6870. The Radeon 6950 1 GB has 1408 unified shaders, 88 texture units, 32 Render Output Units (ROP), and a core clock of 800 MHz. It comes with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus running at 1.25 GHz.
The price for the card is expected to be $259, which you can find on this
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6950 1GB Video Card, which is very similar to the price for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Anandtech has posted a new review of the AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB video card.
In practice the 1GB 6950 is just as fast as the 2GB 6950 at 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 – the essential resolutions for a $260 card. It’s only at 2560×1600 and Eyefinity resolutions that the 2GB card makes a difference with most games at this time. This is likely to change in the near future, but for the time being –and as you’ll see – there’s little disadvantage to a 1GB 6950 right now.
via : AMD’s GTX 560 Ti Counter-Offensive: Radeon HD 6950 1GB & XFX’s Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition
Sorenson Squeeze 7 goes GPU for 7x Speed Boost
12:29 pm
The newest version of Sorenson Media’s Sorenson Squeeze 7, an application for video encoding to a wide variety of formats, adds support for NVidia GPU’s and CUDA acceleration. The end result is a 3x boost in rendering speed, taking those hour-long jobs down to a mere 20minutes.
By utilizing GPUs such as NVIDIA Quadro® professional graphics solutions, the specialized microprocessors that power graphics in professional workstations, Sorenson Squeeze 7 delivers significantly faster encoding times. Sorenson Squeeze 7 automatically recognizes when the user’s primary CPU or GPU may be faster and will use the better resource for the encoding job. The software is optimized for NVIDIA CUDA, the parallel computing architecture created by NVIDIA that powers a variety of their popular GPUs. Internal benchmark tests have shown Sorenson Squeeze 7 is up to three times faster than Sorenson Squeeze 6 when encoding in the H.264 format using GPU acceleration.
Now, that’s only in H.264 for the 3x boost, which as much as Google complains about it is really still the de-facto standard for Web Video. The new version also adds adaptive bitrate support and several new formats like BluRay and WebM, and is available for $799. for new users. Full details after the break.
The Staggering Size of the Internet
11:58 am
3 skills a data scientist needs
11:51 am
O’Reilly’s Strata 2011 Conference is coming soon, and O’Reilly has updated their site with a great interview with LinkedIn Senior Scientist Pete Skomoroch. A short 4-minute video, he discusses important skills every data scientist needs ranging from statistics to knowledge of external API’s.
The first skill, as you might expect, is a base in statistics, algorithms, machine learning, and mathematics. “You need to have a solid grounding in those principles to actually extract signals from this data and build things with it,” Skomoroch said.
Second, a good data scientist is handy with a collection of open-source tools — Hadoop, Java, Python, among others. Knowing when to use those tools, and how to code, are prerequisites.
The third set of skills focus on making products real and making data available to users. “That might mean data visualization, building web prototypes, using external APIs, and integrating with other services,” Skomoroch said. In other words, this one’s a combination of coding skills, an ability to see where data can add value, and collaborating with teams to make these products a reality.
Registration for StrataConf is still going strong, and using the special VizWorld conference registration code ‘str11vzw’ you can get 25% off, dropping the current $1895 price tag down to $1421!
Or, much to my disappointment again, you can use O’Reilly’s own str11rad code for 30% off.
VizWorld.com 
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