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Great deal for those of you looking for storage: Amazon has a sale for the next few hours on a Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM SATAII drive for only $59.96, down from the regular $100 or more. Great for use in something like a Drobo (a 4TB Drobo for only $240!) or just in your workstation. Go get it quick!
The deal’s been going for 45 minutes already, and only 3% are claimed. So they must have a MASSIVE inventory of these things. Either way, the sale ends at 10am Pacific.
Amazon.com: Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA II 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02860: Electronics.
Hardware amazon, sale
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
Amazon has a new promotion this month for Magazine Subscriptions. First off, they have a huge number of magazines on massive discounts (several over 80% off). Also, select magazines have an extra incentive, 2 years for the price of 1! Some to check out:
And many many more.. Go check it out, and see if you can find any other great deals!
Graphics amazon, magazine
A quick note to all you gamers out there, Amazon.com is offering free trial downloads of all of their downloadable games. Classics like Jewel Quest III, Tales of Monkey Island 5, and many others are free for you to check out, and then buy if you want.
Check it out, and let us know if you buy anything neat!
Graphics amazon, free, video game
You’ve seen our “Resource of The Week” posts every Wednesday morning, and now we’ve taken it to the next level with out new VizWorld.com Store, powered by Amazon.com. The store contains everything you’ve seen in our Resource of the Week category, as well as other books, dvd’s, and hardware. If you’re in the market for HDMI cables, Graphics cards or equipment, or just training materials, we hope you’ll stop by the VizWorld.com store to see if we have it first. In addition, I’ve created a “Hot Items” category where I imported Amazon.com’s entire DVD, Book, Software, and Electronics categories so you can buy all the things you usually do, but kick back a bit to VizWorld.com.
Each purchase contributes a tiny (4%) amount to keep VizWorld.com open. If you want something from Amazon but it’s not on the store, feel free to shoot us an email and we’ll happily add it for you or give you a customized link, so that you can continue to support us in your purchases.
Graphics, Hardware, Science, Website amazon, feature, Website
Compete.com has taken their tracking data for the big shopping holiday weekend and compared the numbers on some of the largest merchants on the internet, taking particular interest in the price wars between WalMart and Amazon.com .
Generally speaking, mass merchants fared very well online last Friday. While more people are going online to shop this year, bringing cautious smiles to nervous retailers, consumers are continuing the trend of concentrating their shopping on large mass merchant websites in search of deep discounts and one-stop shopping.
Of course, these numbers don’t come from actual traffic but rather from compete’s “estimated” traffic, which in my experience is somewhat speculative (if you search for the VizWorld.com traffic, it’s waaay off from what Google Analytics & my own logfiles say), but the trends are interesting. In particular you can see how brick-n-mortar Walmart had a larger Black Friday than Cyber Monday, but Amazon was opposite.
via Walmart and Amazon.com Battle for Online Supremacy.
Science amazon, shopping, visualization, walmart
Houdini has just announced a new product offering called “HQueue”, an artist friendly cloud computing toolkit. Using it, artists can offload costly rendering or computation processes to local clusters and Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud right inside Houdini.
Mantra includes micropolygon, raytraced or physically-based rendering as well as depth of field, fast motion blur, high dynamic range image support, deep raster files and high quality displacement mapping. Renderings can be distributed on up to 20 machines while simulations can be set up on a single machine. Distributed fluid simulations are planned for a future release of the cloud computing tools.
Costs on the EC2 cloud are reasonable, a mere $1.99 per machine/hour for a 64-bit machine with 7.5GB of ram, and a mere 50 cents for 32-bit machines with 1.7G of ram.
via Cloud Computing for Artists – Side Effects Software Inc..
Graphics amazon, cloud, ec2, houdini, hqueue, software
SGI’s earnings call, covering the quarter ending September 25th, seems to show the company in a decent light, with sales of $100.1M. The merger with Rackable was a bit rocky, sucking up a good portion of Rackable’s cash and requiring some extensive restructuring, but:
“SGI delivered a solid quarter in terms of revenue, gross margin and operations,” said Mark Barrenechea, SGI’s president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “Operationally, our integration is ahead of schedule in most key areas. We also introduced new products that could expand our addressable market by over $1.7 billion while investing for long-term growth.”
Some other interesting tidbits is that over 10% of its quarterly non-GAAP sales come from “long-time” customer Amazon, which was news to me. A full third of their sales came from ISP’s, and a quarter came from Government and Defense contractors.
via SGI-Rackable combo posts big revenue gains • The Register.
Hardware amazon, economic, finance, sgi
MeetTheBoss has a fun visualization of the various acquisitions and mergers that Amazon has undertaken over the last several years. What I particularly like about this visualization is that it shows the various acquisitions of various companies prior to merger with Amazon.
There’s a reason that Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world, it realises that if a rival firm is too much of a threat, instead of competing with them, just buy them!
With news today that Amazon has dug deep for a US$928 million deal with online shoe retailer Zappos.com, it is clear that the Seattle-based company is desperate to corner the market in all retail sectors.
Despite starting off as online bookstore in 1995, Amazon quickly diversified and today sells music downloads, DVDs, clothes, electronics, furniture and clothes. As such, it has made a number of acquisitions over the years that have since their stocks soar and their profits rock
via Amazon Acquisitions and Investments | Zappos.
Graphics amazon, company, infovis, zappos
A press release today from Axceleon talks about a new product called “EnFuzion”. EnFuzion allows rendering packages to access the Amazon EC2 Cloud for rendering, making it a powerful tool for facilities that are unwilling or unable to manage a personal render farm.
“EnFuzion with EC2 provides “elastic rendering” within the cloud and changes the economics of rendering by allowing studios and end users to pay only for their usage. This notion of “elastic renderingTM” using EnFuzion decreases the management of a studio’s hardware and software stockpile. The EnFuzion render farm in the cloud shrinks and expands on demand. It can start with one render node and rapidly expand to thousands of render nodes transparently increasing the potential of the render farm within minutes using Amazon’s EC2,” said Mr. Duffy, President and CEO of Axceleon.
And the list of supported applications is pretty impressive too:
EnFuzion3D 2009TM runs natively on all OS platforms (Windows®, Linux®, Mac OS®) and all 64/32-bit hardware platforms. Plug-ins are available for Maya®, 3ds Max®, Toxik®, Softimage®|XSI®, Nuke™, Combustion®, After Effects®, Blender™, mental ray®, Vray®, Turtle™, 3Delight™ and more.
via EnFuzion® Optimizes Image Rendering on Amazon EC2, via InsideHPC .
Graphics, Hardware amazon, axceleon, cloud, enfuzion, renderfarm
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