NEW NET Issues List for 04 Nov 2008

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 04 November 2008, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week's gathering is at the Stone Cellar Brewpub. It is located at 1004 S. Olde Oneida Street, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. They have food and beverages with a United Kingdom heritage and free wireless.

The ‘net

1. Will Online Office Apps Help or Hurt Microsoft? http://tinyurl.com/5m7jog (InternetNews) “…Part of Ozzie's mindset is that to retain customers, even as sales of the Office suite decline in the future, it needs to continue to ensure that its user interface is the one that everyone knows. Partly, this has to do with maintaining consistency between the retail and online products…Driving the transformation is…'persistent connectivity' – the ability of users to be connected virtually anywhere at any time using the most appropriate device. Whether that is a phone, a PC client, or a Web browser should be up to the user…it may not be much longer – perhaps as soon as three to five years from now – until traditional client-based apps are largely replaced by online cloud versions…”
2. Yuuguu Adds Support For Major IM Services http://tinyurl.com/5m6gqz (TechCrunch) “…Yuuguu has integrated its remote desktop / screen-sharing collaboration service technology with instant messaging platforms MSN, Yahoo, AOL and ICQ in addition to its recent integration with Google Talk. Users are now enabled to share screens, hold web conferences and work collaboratively with anyone using any combination of these major IM platforms. The basic version of Yuuguu supports up to 30 people at one time, for free and without time limit. The service also supports group sessions across multiple IM platforms, so several participants on different networks can chat and join the secure conference or share screens…”
3. 7 Top Tips and Resources for Google Chrome http://ostatic.com/176004-blog/7-top-tips-and-resources-for-google-chrome “…Google introduced the beta version of its open source Chrome browser nearly two months ago…Google has confirmed that many extensions are coming for it, and I expect to see it in a mobile version very soon. If you're running Chrome, here are seven tips for customizing and getting the most out of it…Lifehacker's tips for power users of Chrome are excellent…Run Chrome on Mac OS X and Linux. CrossOver Chromium from CodeWeavers can be used to run Chrome on Mac OS X and Linux. You'll find downloads specific to most popular Linux distros…Use the About: Pages…Google Chrome can pull up a ton of useful diagnostic and other types of information if you type about: commands in Chrome's address bar. For example, type about:plugins to get the list of plugins available for Chrome. The Google operating system blog has a good list of these. Get a Portable Version of Chrome for Your USB Drive. You can get a lightweight tweak of Chrome based on the Chromium code…”
4. Yahoo! Ends Live Streaming Video http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_live_streaming_video_exp.php “…When Yahoo! launched its live video streaming service, Y! Live, to the world earlier this year, it was admittedly an "experiment in live video" designed to elicit feedback from the market. Today, Yahoo! has decided that the experiment has received enough feedback - or perhaps too little. They're going to be closing the service down on December 3Yahoo! has seen little traction from its user base for the service during a period when services like UStream and Mogulus seem to be growing exponentially…”
5. AT&T plays with 20 GB to 150 GB bandwidth caps http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40038-113.html “…AT&T is using Reno, Nevada, area as a testing ground for a bandwidth cap experiment, with another market scheduled to be added before end of the year. AT&T will limit the monthly bandwidth to up to 150GB. The cap will apply to new users and existing users will be automatically put into the scheme if they exceed 150 GB within a month, regardless of their connection plan. Subscribers will be able to track their data usage in real-time on the web and will get a call from AT&T if they reach 80% of their set limit. Users who exceed the 150 GB bandwidth limit will pay extra…”
6. Firefox Reaches 20% Market Share http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_reaches_20_market_shar.php “…The good folks at Mozilla are trumpeting a new report by global analytics service Net Applications that documented a 20% global market share for two out of four weeks in October…Can you guess what percentage of ReadWriteWeb visitors came here using Firefox last month?...27% of our fabulously sophisticated readers came here using IE last month. That makes it the second most popular browser among our readers after Firefox at 55%. Our readers came in on 188 different browsers in October…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

7. Antiviral ‘Scareware’: Antivirus XP 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/technology/internet/30virus.html “…The program, whose name has recently been updated from Antivirus XP 2008 to Antivirus XP 2009, lodges itself on a victim’s computer and then begins generating a series of pop-up messages warning that the user’s computer is infected. If the user responds to the warnings, he is urged to buy a $49.95 program for disinfecting the machine… “The big problem with scareware is that you have voluntarily provided personal information to a Web site that you would not ordinarily want to have your name, address, credit card and date of birth…”
8. Microsoft: Trojans are huge and China is tops in browser exploits http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10080428-83.html “…Vulnerabilities are decreasing but becoming easier to exploit. Trojans are the biggest threat. And Chinese computers are infected with more browser-based exploits than anywhere else. Those are findings in the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, due to be released on Monday. Covering the first half of this year, the report provides statistics compiled from Microsoft's Malware Protection Center that reveal trends about threats, breaches, and infection rates…”
9. BBC's Magic TV Detector Vans Kept Secret http://techdirt.com/articles/20081030/2334082696.shtml “…Someone filed a Freedom of Information request to find out how these supposed detector vans worked, but the request has been denied, and these magic detector vans shall remain a state secret. The BBC claimed that it could not reveal the details of the van "because if it did so it would damage the public's perception of the effectiveness of TV detector vans."…I'm guessing that the vans are totally empty but someone drives by your place at night and looks for the flickering glow…”
10. Private Browsing in Firefox http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2008-11-04/dont-leave-trace-private-browsing-firefox “…Today, a major feature was added to the pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1, called Private Browsing…Private Browsing aims to help you make sure that your web browsing activities don't leave any trace on your own computer. It is very important to note that Private Browsing is not a tool to keep you anonymous from websites or your ISP, or for example protect you from all kinds of spyware applications which use sophisticated techniques to intercept your online traffic. Private Browsing is only about making sure that Firefox doesn't store any data which can be used to trace your online activities, no more, no less…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

11. Review: Aigo P8860 MID http://www.pocketables.net/2008/10/review-aigo-p88.html “…the Aigo P8860 recently became the first (and currently only) Intel MID to be available worldwide… after about two weeks of daily use, I still believe the device feels cheaply made, but it's undeniably portable and lightweight. It's bigger than I expected, yes, but it's considerably smaller and more pocketable than other devices with comparable capabilities and potential…the only way to get rid of or add new applications to the Aigo MID is to hack the OS (or install a completely new one; again, see "Hackability" section below)…”
12. The Mobile Web is Dead http://tinyurl.com/6b7x5w (Carnage4Life) “…I recently switched to using Skyfire as my primary browser on my mobile phone and it has made a world of difference in how a use my phone. No longer am I restricted to crippled versions of popular sites nor do I have to lose features when I visit the regular versions of the page. I can view the real version of my news feed on Facebook. Vote up links in reddit or Digg. And reading blogs is no longer an exercise in frustration due to CSS issues or problems rendering widgets. Unsurprisingly my usage of the Web on my phone has pretty much doubled…brings to the forefront how ridiculous of an idea it was to think that we need a "mobile Web" complete with its own top level domain (.mobi). Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket? Thanks to the iPhone, it is now clear to everyone that this idea of a second class Web for mobile phones was a stopgap solution at best whose time is now past…”
13. MasterCard gets the ball rolling on US cell phone payments http://tinyurl.com/69xgeg (Ars technica) “…Automation geeks here in the US often have a secret fantasy that, one day, we'll be able to just wave our phones and pay for things at places, ranging from vending machines to retail stores. Indeed, such technology is already out there and in use outside the US (most commonly in Japan)…MasterCard, one of the world's largest payment companies, is rolling out a service that will allow banks to incorporate payment cards into mobile devices so that people can eventually leave the wallet at home and simply use…cell phones to conduct everyday transactions…”

Open Source

14. Parallel SSH execution and a single shell to control them all http://www.linux.com/feature/151340 “…Many people use SSH to log in to remote machines, copy files around, and perform general system administration. If you want to increase your productivity with SSH, you can try a tool that lets you run commands on more than one remote machine at the same time…Why you would need a utility like this when, using openSSH, you can create a file containing your commands and use a bash for loop to run it on a list of remote hosts, one at a time? One advantage of a parallel SSH utility is that commands can be run on several hosts at the same time…if you want to interactively edit the same file on multiple machines, it might be quicker to use a parallel SSH utility and edit the file on all nodes with vi rather than concoct a script to do the same edit…Many of these parallel SSH tools include support for copying to many hosts at once (a parallel version of scp) or using rsync on a collection of hosts at once…parallel SSH projects let you use barriers so that you can execute a collection of commands and explicitly have each node in the group wait until all the nodes have completed a stage before moving on to the next stage of processing…”
15. Slow startup? Bootchart reveals all http://www.linux.com/feature/151496 “…Ever wondered what takes your Linux box so long to boot up? You can see for certain with the Bootchart package. Bootchart logs the entire startup process and produces a clean, graphical representation of its results suitable for everything from troubleshooting to good old-fashioned bragging rights. Bootchart is a common utility, so check your distribution's package management system first to see if it is available. If not, the Bootchart download page provides links to the official packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE, and Mandriva. You can also download source code in an RPM or tarball from bootchart.org…”
16. Four ways to monitor machines through Web interfaces http://www.linux.com/feature/151982 “…System administrators need to keep an eye on their servers to make sure things are running smoothly. If they find a problem, they need to see when it started, so investigations can focus on what happened at that time. That means logging information at regular intervals and having a quick way to analyse this data. Here's a look at several tools that let you monitor one or more servers from a Web interface…RRDtool, which includes tools to store time series data and graph it…The collectd project is designed for repeatedly collecting information about your systems…Monitorix shows you system information at a glance in three graphs: a central one on the left to give overview information and two smaller graphs on the right to give related details. It includes a Perl daemon that collects the statistics for your systems and a CGI Web interface that allows you to analyse the data…The Munin project is fairly clearly split into the gather and analyse functionality. This lets you install just the package to gather information on many servers and have a single central server to analyse all the gathered information…”

SkyNet

17. Google Using OCR To Index PDFs http://searchengineland.com/google-using-ocr-to-index-scanned-documents-15318.php “…It used to be that, if you hoped Google would index a PDF file, you had to create a PDF that was text-based, not image-based; Googlebot couldn’t recognize the content of scanned or image-based documents…Google says it’s now using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to read any scanned documents that it finds in PDF format...Countless new documents are now available to searchers — documents that were never available before. On the other hand, if you’ve been scanning and uploading image-based PDFs knowing that they’d never be found by searchers — and I know people who have — you may want to rethink that strategy…”
18. Google promises reliability for Docs, Calendar http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10079483-2.html “…Customers paying Google for Gmail are guaranteed the e-mail service will be available 99.9 percent of the time or they get a refund. Now the company has extended the promise to Google Calendar, Google Docs, and all the other elements of its Google Apps service…According to Radicati Group research, companies using Novell Groupwise, IBM Lotus, and Microsoft Exchange for their e-mail have somewhere between 66 and 150 minutes of downtime per month. According to Google's own measurements, which are recorded down to the last millisecond, Gmail has been available 99.9 percent of the time for its entire user base, which means downtime of about 10 to 15 minutes per month…”

General Technology

19. OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 http://www.pcworld.com/article/152991/os_x_snow_leopard_vs_windows_7.html “…At this year's WWDC, Apple announced that the next version of its operating system would take a break from introducing new features and focus on performance…The OS X update, expected to ship in June 2009, will be optimized for multi-core processors and enable "breakthrough amounts of RAM -- up to a theoretical 16TB." Apple also promised a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X…One major new feature confirmed for Windows 7 is a vastly improved touch-screen support. Taking its cue from the iPhone and the technology from Microsoft Surface, Windows 7 will see the same kind of multi-touch gestures applied to the desktop or laptop computer… resize Windows by dragging them to edges of the screen. Top to maximize, bottom to minimize and dragging to the left or right automatically resizes to half the display. If you're comparing documents side by side you can just move the documents to the left- and right-hand sides to automatically fit both on the screen. The combination of this with touch-screen support will be interesting to see…”
20. Intel, ASUS Launch Community-Designed PCs http://tinyurl.com/67urpu (Intel) “…Consumers become product designers at WePC.com, a Web site launched today by Intel Corporation and ASUS. WePC.com is where consumers can collaborate with each other and with Intel and ASUS to design innovative new products… addressing three of the most popular consumer PC categories: netbooks, notebooks and gaming notebooks. Intel and ASUS hope to bring to market a consumer-inspired product that simplifies and enhances computing needs with Intel and ASUS technology in each category…”
21. SecondLight: Surface on steroids http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/233511/secondlight-surface-on-steroids.html “…the highlight of today's keynote from Microsoft Research was a demonstration of a new Surface prototype called SecondLight,..The new table projects an image through the table itself, so that any translucent material (such as tracing paper or perspex) held above the Surface screen displays a different image to what you see on the table's display. This means you can have a satellite image of a town on the table, and have the street names projected on to a piece of paper that the user holds above the map. Or you could have a photo of a car, with the tracing paper displaying images of its innards as you pan the paper across the screen…”
22. Guide to election coverage http://newteevee.com/2008/11/03/the-ultimate-guide-to-live-election-coverage/ “…as Slate editor Joan Walsh told the New York Times, “At a time when almost anyone can check voter turnout in certain neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, I don’t think everyone is going to sit there and wait to be spoon-fed the election results in the order Brian Williams thinks is appropriate.” So if you’re planning to set up a multiscreen command center, here are some sites to pull up…”

Leisure & Entertainment

23. TiVo users can soon watch Netflix movies on-demand http://tinyurl.com/62rpxy (BetaNews) “…TiVo users can browse more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes available through Netflix's "Instant Watching" service, where it streams video over the Web instead of mailing a DVD… The new Netflix capability will only work with TiVo's newest high-definition DVRs, not older Series2 models…Users can browse their instant Queue, read synopses and rate movies, along with pausing, fast-forwarding, rewinding and re-starting video at any time with the TiVo remote….The feature is provided free of charge to users who subscribe to both Netflix and TiVo…”
24. Apple: Soon to Be a Mobile Gaming Force http://tinyurl.com/5cj2gd (BusinessWeek) “…I didn't expect much from games on the iPhone. I had visions of casual games, perhaps a fancy take on solitaire or a version of poker that takes advantage of the handset's touchscreen. Surely not a true mobile gaming experience. Boy, was I wrong. For the last few days I've been sampling some of the games available from the iTunes Store on the iPod Touch, and I've been stunned at how elaborate and involved they are. On the iPod Touch I've played a version of Gameloft's Real Soccer 2009 that rivals the version of the game on the Nintendo DS, and I didn't even miss the buttons. I've seen demonstrations of Sim City, forthcoming for the iPhone and the Touch from Electronic Arts (ERTS), that look more elaborate and sophisticated than any versions I've played before on a desktop PC or console. They're immersive, addictive fun…”
25. EA announces three Android games http://tech.yahoo.com/news/cnet/20081029/tc_cnet/83011377231007811252 “…Electronic Arts announced Wednesday three games for Google's Android mobile phone platform. The publisher said that Tetris will be available immediately and that two other games, the monster hit Bejeweled and Monopoly Here & Now, will be launched in November. EA has already released at least five games for Apple's iPhone, including Tetris, Spore Origins, and Scrabble…”
26. Find the fun http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/11/04/find-the-fun/ “…if you "find the fun, the job's a game."...Aaron Murray, co-founder of a game company called Tandem Games…is one of those genuinely good people who makes good things happen…He provides some insight into the game that they developed in about six weeks and making it work with Intel graphics…If you're out there making fun software things happen on Intel hardware - let me know. You can reach me at bruce.mossman@intel.com…”

Economy and Technology

27. Counterpoint: Bosses 'should embrace Facebook' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7695716.stm “…Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate… In today's difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional command-and-control techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity. "Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counter-intuitive, but it appears to create businesses more capable of maintaining stability…”
28. Hacking Education http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/hacking-educati.html “…But I also believe the the public school system in this country is badly broken. And it's not just the public school system in the US. It's the entire education system that's stuck in the past. I've been thinking a lot about it lately, and I've come to believe that we need to completely reinvent the way we educate ourselves. And, of course, I believe that the Internet is the tool we can use to do that…We also need to allow creativity to reign and walk away from the standardized model of education that we are stuck in. Sir Ken Robinson gave an amazing talk at Ted on this topic. It's 19 mins long so I can't imagine that everyone has time to watch it, but if you care about this issue, find some time in your day or week and watch this…”
29. A Big Loophole For Software And Business Method Patents? http://techdirt.com/articles/20081030/1647512692.shtml “…the Bilski ruling on software and business method patents…clearly limited the scope of software and business method patents. It rejected using the standard set forth in State Street in most cases…The part that I'm a little more concerned about is the loopholes that appear to have been left by CAFC in the decision. I was on a conference call with some of the lawyers who filed briefs (in favor of stronger patent protection), and they were spinning the ruling to be in their favor as much as possible -- but it became clear they were only doing so via loopholes. Specifically, they seem to think that as long as the software works on any device it qualifies for patent protection under the new test. In other words, they seem to be saying that so long as you add the words "on a computer" to a claim, then you're all good. In fact, when one reporter on the call (Joe Mullin) asked what sorts of patents this would impact, and after a moment of silence one of the lawyers blurted out that it invalidated Bilski's patent (the patent at the heart of this case) and that would be about it. Other lawyers basically said that it would only eliminate poorly written patents, which they seemed to define as those that failed to include that sort of "on a computer" language…”
30. iPod/iPhone exec leaves Apple; to be replaced by ex-IBM chip designer http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10676 “…Tony Fadell, the senior vice president in charge of Apple’s iPod division, is leaving the company to be replaced by Mark Papermaster, a former Big Blue executive who is being sued by IBM over a non-compete clause. The move…marks the departure of one of the executives behind Apple’s transformation into an entertainment and mobile handset company. Fadell had his fingerprints on two of Apple’s big hits: The iPod and the iPhone. You could argue that those two products transformed Apple into what it is today…”

Civilian Aerospace

31. SpaceX Introduces DragonLab™ http://tinyurl.com/64q62n (BusinessWire) “…Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is introducing a new commercial product called DragonLab™, a free-flying, reusable spacecraft capable of hosting pressurized and unpressurized payloads to and from space. DragonLab will launch to orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle. DragonLab provides a platform for in-space experimentation, including recovery of pressurized and some unpressurized payloads, as well as deployment of small spacecraft. As a complete system, DragonLab provides for all aspects of operation: propulsion, power, thermal control, environmental control, avionics, communications, thermal protection, flight software, guidance, navigation and control, entry, descent and landing and recovery…”
32. Progress and contrast on the commercial space frontier http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1242/1 “…Over the last several years, the entrepreneurial space, or “NewSpace” industry, has emerged in the form of a coterie of companies focused primarily, but not exclusively, on suborbital personal spaceflight. They have, by and large, been independent of the larger established aerospace companies (which predictably are called “OldSpace” in comparison): big aerospace companies have shown little interest in suborbital markets, and the interactions between the two groups have largely been limited to occasional contracts to develop technologies…Jeff Greason of XCOR emphasized suborbital as the means to an end: reliable, frequent, inexpensive access to space. “Space, for decades and decades, has been so expensive, so unreliable, so unsafe, so extremely difficult to do any reliable planning with, that the only time anyone does anything in space is when there’s no other way to do it,” he said. The solution is do to develop launch vehicles with reliability of at least high-performance military aircraft…“Suborbital is the way out of this,” he said. “It’s the way to find a profit-making enterprise that builds up all the infrastructure we need to do the bigger and better things.”…Kevin Bowcutt, chief scientist for hypersonics at Boeing Phantom Works, followed with Greason on the panel and asked, “Could the barnstormers of today—those trying to develop private suborbital flight—lead us to affordable, routine access to space and rapid point-to-point travel the way the barnstormers of 100 years ago led to commercial aviation?” He said be believes the answer is [yes]…”
33. Garriott talks about business in space http://tinyurl.com/6xg4y2 (FloridaToday) “…On Oct. 23, computer game entrepreneur Richard Garriott landed in the Kazakhstan steppes after a visit to the International Space Station…Garriott, long a proponent of commercial space travel, hopes to fund a second trip to space by performing work for commercial clients…."I took basically a two-liter thermos full of a thousand little capillary tubes, filled with protein and precipitant. In 12 days, I have substantially increased the total number of crystals that have ever been grown in space. A whole other suite of them were done to specifically create commercial products. A good number of those we have pre-sold to pharmaceutical companies. The space-born crystals are more numerous and larger, but we have not defracted any of them, so we don't really know if the quality is demonstrably better. If it proves to be true, not only will I earn a little bit of my money back with my flight, but it will then set up our ability to do this on a much larger scale…”
34. A new rocket in the making http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0811/02falcon9/ “…A makeshift rocket suspended more than 10 stories above the Texas prairie is progressing through a step-by-step series of ground tests to prove that SpaceX's new Falcon 9 rocket is ready for launch next year…SpaceX has invested about $10 million in the McGregor facility…A number of defense companies tested solid rocket motors at the site during the Cold War, according to Dreyer. The most recent tenant was Beal Aerospace, the start-up company founded a decade ago by a Texas banker with a vision to lower the cost of access to space. Beal used the facility for liquid-fueled rocket engine tests from 1997 until 2000, adding several buildings and constructing the tripod-like vertical test stand. Beal Aerospace abandoned the site when the company folded in late 2000…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

35. CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 9 http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/211800683 “…In CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 8 of this article series on CUDA (short for "Compute Unified Device Architecture"), I focused on using libraries with CUDA. In this installment, I look at how you can extend high-level languages (like Python) with CUDA. CUDA lets programmers who develop in languages other than C and C++ harness the power of thousands of software threads simultaneously running on hundreds of thread-processors inside of today's graphics processors. Libraries (discussed in Part 8) provide some of this capability, as most languages can link with C-language libraries. A more flexible and powerful capability lies in the ability of many languages -- such as Python, Perl, and Java -- to be extended through modules written in C, or CUDA when programming for GPU environments…”
36. NVIDIA Tesla and CUDA Technologies Transform the Oil and Gas Industry http://tinyurl.com/6hnmm9 (EarthTimes) “…Last year, SeismicCity migrated its depth imaging system from a 1,000-core CPU based configuration to a configuration based on NVIDIA Tesla 1U systems," said Claude Pignol, vice president of technology at SeismicCity. "NVIDIA's advancements in GPU computing are a major breakthrough. Transitioning to GPUs has given us a 10-20X performance boost, but more importantly, GPUs allow us to use computationally-intensive algorithms that we simply couldn't process with CPUs…”
37. SGI Returns to Visual Roots http://www.hpcwire.com/features/SGI_Returns_to_Visual_Roots_33549724.html “…This week SGI has announced a new product portfolio that signifies the company's return to their computer graphics roots. The VUE family of applications is a new lineup of software and services that the company says will change the way you create, distribute and use visual information…SGI sees a market opportunity in all of this data and, according to Pette, the company's goal is to enable customers to "visualize anything anywhere, at any time, on any device." Rather than trying to simply recreate their hardware past, they are focusing on the software side of the solution with this latest offering, the Visual User Experience, or VUE, lineup of software…Pette says that a key drawback of the modern crop of GPUs is that the amount of memory available to them makes rendering of large datasets slow, and although memory on GPUs will undoubtedly continue to increase, so too will the size of data being analyzed. SGI's solution to this is two pieces of software, PowerVUE and SoftVUE, both aimed at software rendering support on the CPU. SGI feels that, as the number of cores in CPUs continue to increase, the larger memory available to CPUs and the elimination of bus traffic needed to get data back and forth from a graphics card will make CPUs a much more attractive option for the real-time rendering of large data…”

*****