Life Stream

Visual search, with an iTunes-like visual scrolling (Cover Flow), seems like a the logical next step in the user-interface of search. searchme.com shows off an excellent demo of their visual approach.

Is this the next killer app? Should Google be concerned? It’s too early to tell how this will work in real life settings. Like the, thumbnail-focused www.pixsy.com, searchme believes that the future of search is visual.

The history of visual approaches to search, including 3D flythroughs and other graphical models, has been littered with failure. VRML comes to mind, in the 1990s this was going to be “next-gen” the 3D web. In early-2008, with broadband and ubiquitous dual-core cpu power, we still have not seen a visual approach to user-interface gain much traction in the marketplace. (The desktop metaphor–invented at Parc in the early ’80s, popularized by Apple, and copied by Microsoft–has been the last major epoch in user-interface development. We really haven’t moved much past overlapping windows in the past 28 years.)

Enabled by Adobe’s® Flex 3® software Searchme emphasizes that their technology is more than a slick UI.

“The Searchme visual search engine, which leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex, is an innovative rich Internet application that could help fundamentally change the Internet search experience,” said Chris Rogers, West Region Leader, Adobe Consulting at Adobe. “It’s more than a slick UI; it’s an engaging search experience that emphasizes relevance and usability to help users more easily find what they’re looking for on the Web.” [press release]

I believe that people think primarily in verbal concepts, our brain has uniquely evolved to the complex task of reading in ways that cognitive neuroscientists like Dr. Maryann Wolf are just now discovering. While, plain text is not as sexy as animated flipping thumbnails, I believe that relevance and simplicity are still king.

Once again Moore’s Law continues to surprise and delight gamers and technology enthusiasts. I had a couple of 7900GS cards that I sold on eBay in Dec 2007. Not a moment too soon, now I have an 8600 that has very little value. It seems that the smart move is simply to rent technology, if possible. Smart people say “rent things that depreciate and buy things that appreciate.” Now, where can I rent a 9600? 

 
NVIDIA Corporation has unveiled the first graphics processing unit (GPU) of its next-generation GeForce 9 Series that may offer the largest single-generation performance jump in the Company’s history. Introduced today, the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU delivers up to 116% more performance than its predecessor at a price below $199. 

“After going to all the GeForce LANs and seeing the rigs that gamers play on, we wanted to kick off the GeForce 9 with the perfect GPU for gamers,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at NVIDIA. “The first product to be introduced in the GeForce 9 family gives gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they will love and can afford.” 
A point has been reached in PC gaming where the graphics horsepower requirements to play popular games such as Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3 at high-definition resolutions such as 1900×1200 and above, with high-image-quality features enabled, may have outpaced a lot of the installed hardware. Until now, graphics processors capable of delivering playable frame rates at those stressful settings have cost in excess of $400. With the GeForce 9600 GT GPU, immersive gaming with incredible graphics is now within the reach and budget of PC gamers for less than $199. 

“NVIDIA continues to innovate in hardware technology so that game enthusiasts and consumers can fully experience the incredible graphics offerings in Microsoft’s operating systems, including Windows Vista,” said Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Games for Windows, Microsoft. “The new GeForce 9600 GT GPU further extends NVIDIA’s ability to deliver improved DirectX 10 performance on Windows Vista at an affordable price point, so that anyone and everyone can have an amazing gaming experience.” 
The new GeForce 9600 GT GPU shows an improved performance-per-watt ratio compared to its predecessor as well as improved compression efficiency. In addition to 64 stream processors—each individually clocked at a blazing-fast 1625 MHz—and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900 MHz, the GeForce 9600 GT GPU is designed for the new PCIe 2.0 bus standard and features backwards compatibility with the original PCIe standard. 

The GeForce 9600 GT GPU also improves high-definition video playback on everyday PCs by leveraging NVIDIA PureVideo® HD technology to deliver high-quality playback of HD DVD and Blu-ray movies. The new programmable video-processing engine takes on all of the high-definition H.264 video decoding, freeing the CPU to perform other tasks, while significantly reducing power consumption, heat, and noise. Spectacular picture clarity and vibrant color is achieved with advanced video processing technology. 
GeForce 9600 GT-based graphics cards are available now from leading add-in card manufacturers, retailers, and system builders. 

Source: NVIDIA

NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Processor Ushers In the Era of Personal Supercomputing

Sometime’s Moore’s Law is simply ignored. This is a discontinuous leap of performance for some vertical computationally-intensive markets and brings the cost/gigaflop down dramatically.

A dedicated, high performance GPU computing solution, Tesla GPU computing processor, deskside supercomputer, and GPU Computing server brings supercomputing power to any workstation or server and to standard, CPU-based server clusters.
“NVIDIA Tesla™ is going to make discovery of huge oil reserves possible through faster and more accurate interpretation of geophysical data.” —Steve Briggs, Headwave, Inc.

“NVIDIA Tesla will give us a 100-fold increase in some of our programs, and this is on desktop machines where previously we would have had to run these calculations on a cluster.” —John Stone, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“NVIDIA Tesla has opened up completely new worlds for computational electromagnetics.” —Ryan Schneider, Acceleware

“Today’s science is no longer confined to the laboratory; scientists employ computer simulations before a single physical experiment is performed. This fundamental transition to computational methods is forging a new path for discoveries in science and engineering,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “By dramatically reducing computation times, in some cases from weeks to hours, NVIDIA Tesla represents the single most significant disruption the high-performance computing industry has seen since Cray 1’s introduction of vector processing.”

Suggested Reading:

PC Hardware Buyer’s Guide: Choosing the Perfect Components

ZDNet reports on Google’s social networking APIs
» Google’s OpenSocial: What it means | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Google’s open social networking platform play is the buzz of the blogosphere tonight. see Techmeme. Indeed, it is called OpenSocial in that the set of APIs allows developers to create applications that work on any social network that joins Google’s open party. So far, besides Google’s Orkut social net, LinkedIn, hi5, XING, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning see Marc Andreessen’s post have joined the party.

Thanks to Google I already have (almost) unlimited email storage, and my calendar and contacts are linked together pretty tightly, and my Google groups enable me to effectively manage group communications. I look forward to see how these social networking APIs are used by creative developers to bring tighter integration among the people and resources in my life.

Cupertino, CA — The following scene took place at lunchtime in a crowded Cupertino sushi bar.

Mighty Mouse: Waiter! Who’s that at my seat?

Waiter: Hey Mouse! That’s the new guy in town, that’s iPhone, with multi-touch.

Mighty Mouse: I’ve had that seat since 1983 when Steve hooked me up with Lisa.

Waiter: I know. You had a great ride. You were the King.

Mighty Mouse: WTF! I AM the King! I’m calling Steve right now!

Waiter: He has a new number, Mouse, he’s got an iPhone now.

Mighty Mouse: iPhone! Who cares about some friggin’ iPhone! I’m on hundreds of platforms — Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, every major operating system uses a mouse and pointer. Everyone rides the mouse train. I’m wireless, I’m Mighty. I lost my big ball, but I have a new one now — see here on top?

Waiter: That’s great, Mouse. It’s really cute. But the new guy, he doesn’t need a sidekick — no Arrow — he stands on his own.

Mighty Mouse: No Arrow! WTF! How do people know where they are pointing?

Waiter: That’s just it, Mouse, they just point and touch right on the iPhone screen. The Finger needs no arrow. Hey, you were the first direct manipulation user interface, the “people’s interface”, but The Finger’s got some tricks up his sleeve. You’re sliding on the desk, telling Arrow to do her stuff, but The Finger is already up there on the screen hiding behind each pixel, waiting to be flicked, tapped, and pinched. The Finger is just an infant right now, but he’s got papers, 200 patents in fact. The Finger redefines “direct manipulation.”

Mighty Mouse: Who are you kidding? You call that a screen? It’s tiny! Whose going to surf the web on that thing?

Waiter: Mouse, I hate to break it to you, but more iPhones will be sold today than all the Lisa’s ever made. At this pace, iPhone sales will top all Mac sales in 528 days. My sources tell me there’s a deal in the works for The Finger on the big screen too. Multi-touch is the real star today.

Mighty Mouse: No! This can’t be! You mean…ma…ma…mmaa…Mac?

Waiter: Oh yes, OS X “Leopard” is already running inside the iPhone. In October, the new machines may be running with multi-touch, and maybe even no Mouse in the box! Isn’t that Steve’s way? Look what he did to Mr. Floppy.

Mighty Mouse: No! I don’t believe this. This isn’t happening!

(Mighty Mouse sobs uncontrollably)

Waiter: I’ve got a nice quiet table in the back. It’ll be OK, I’ll get you some saki — on the house.

(Waiter takes the sobbing Mouse by the hand and walks him, to a dark corner of the restaurant where he joins a forlorn Flashing Green Cursor, aka “DOS prompt”.)

This column inspired by the talented John Gruber, whose UI anthropomorphications make me laugh out loud.
Photo courtesy, Incase Designs

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The iPhone’s multi-touch user interface heralds the day when the mouse, as we know it, follows the fate of the floppy disk. Here’s a video review by my old Yale colleague, David Pogue.

Jeff Han’s multi-touch demonstration at TED illustrates that natural interaction and direct manipulation are possible and desirable on workstations. Direct touch interfaces are a natural evolution of Doug Engelbart’s mouse/pointer GUI invented in 1968 and popularized by Macintosh in 1984.

multi-touch