And you have to figure that's pretty far behind, since the Larrabee launch timeframe was 2009/2010. The only way you'll be able to touch Larrabee now is as a development platform for graphics engines or high-performance computing, in order to develop for future Intel products.

Intel says they're going to announce new plans for discrete cards some time in 2010—mayyybe CES, where we talked to former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett about Larrabee last year? But, more likely at the Intel Developer Forum later in the year. [Intel]

Click to zoom in

It all started with Classmates.com, which apparently has 50,000,000 users now. On the top of the pyramid is Facebook and its 300 million users, followed by MySpace's 263 million. In the middle you have a huge constellation of sites, most of which I just can't recognize. Trombi? Vampirefreaks? Bigadda? Cafemom? Geni? Itsmy? Qzone? Xanga?

Please, stop saying words. [Focus—Thanks David Keyes]

In the first one, you can try to see how earthquakes propagate through the entire planet in three dimensions. I say "try" because, while the graphic looks very cool, the interpretation of all those information layers is not easy in 3D space. In this case, a classic bi-dimensional cut—using the latest scientific data—would do a much better job at explaining what is basically a symmetric movement through the planet's core. The only better technique would be to add time through animation.

The slicing of Earth's atmosphere has the same problems. It may be fun, but not necessarily clearer than the old 2D version:

The crosscut would show distances more accurately, and the whole representation would be easier to interpret than the fake 3D video. Not to talk about one undeniable fact: I like the Flash Gordon spaceships better. [Wired]

The $1995 Matrox M9188 comes with 2GB of video RAM, and works with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Linux. It can be combined with a second one to form a seamless desktop across 16 monitors. Apparently, this is perfect for "energy, transportation, process control, financial trading," and making your head explode. [Matrox]

According to developers Niloy J. Mitra and Mark Pauly, Shadow Art is a tool to create abstract sculptures that can cast three different shadows, depending on the angle they are oriented against the a light source. These sculptures can be built in the physical world with any material, not only Lego, as well as used in 3D rendering programs to achieve the same effect. [Shadow Art via bldgblog]

According to authors, their software can take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labeled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image.

PhotoSketch's blending algorithm analyzes each of these images, compares them with each other, and decides which are better for the blending process. It automatically traces and places them into a single photograph, matching the scene, and adding shadows. Of course, the results are less than perfect, but they are good enough:

The authors of the program—Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, and Shi-Min Hu at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, and the National University of Singapore—presented it at Siggraph Asia 2009. An event that will be remembered forever in the History of Humanity as the day in which a million dorks were finally able to put themselves in X-rated positions with Megan Fox. [PhotoSketch—Thanks Brice]

In that first shot with the swine flu guy, it seems the one on the right is a bit nicer looking, as in his head and mask don't look as polygonal as the one on the left. The two vents in his mask are actually round instead of octagonal, and there are more details all around. But that probably took you a while to spot.

I can't even see a huge difference in the second shot, where I reversed the DX10 and DX11 shots to make sure you were paying attention. Did you think the one on the right was better looking before I said anything? If so, you don't need to upgrade. More shots over at Firing Squad. [Firing Squad]

DirectX 67? Tongue-finity? My favorite quote: "Pulling a trigger is just as easy as pushing a button, only a lot more fun and healthy...You say babies, we say bootcamp" Nice.

There are three "commercials" in the playlist below, with the most interesting one loaded up first. A little too self-consciously viral, but too interesting not to share. [XFX 2118AD] Thanks Milo!

They Call It "Open" For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by... Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By "standard," we're talking about a format, interface or programming framework that a bunch of companies or people or organizations agree is the way something's going to get done, whether it's how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won't play on another, web sites that work in one browser don't work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don't make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn't the only open standard that Apple's had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you're the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto "standards" enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 percent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you're making everybody else do things the way you want them done. If you're doubting how important standards are, look no further than the old Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it'll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a "universal OS," or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It's so standards-compliant it tied with Opera's Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What's most striking about WebKit isn't the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn't just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the "real internet" is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple's been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole "free and open" thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it's too crappy to become the web's default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe's Flash. Apple says Ogg's quality and hardware acceleration support don't match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardized H.264 codec, which is tied up by license issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG's H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it's in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft's WMV didn't become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It's actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn't become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC's superiority to MP3: Microsoft's WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can't leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn't work out. It's a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple's shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that's also notably supported by Dell—which'll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don't see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That's just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple's had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn't always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple's position doesn't allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet broadly. They've actually made things better, at least so far. But, one glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they're the most gracious tech company second thoughts about that.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom's legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The first part of the graphic—created by David McCandless—shows how much space is actually used by the entire population. According to the Guardian Datablog and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, only 12.5% of the planet's surface is actually occupied by humans. A total of 18,617,500 square kilometers.

Click next above to continue or here to see the gallery in normal post form

Now, the most powerful active nuclear warhead in the world is the B83, which has a destructive power of two hundred Little Boys, the bomb that destroyed part of Hiroshima. That's a 14.9-square-kilometer total destruction area. Complete instant tanning, and obliteration of anything in sight. To give you an idea of what this space means, Manhattan is 58.8 square kilometers. Central London is 26 square kilometers.

Click next above to continue or here to see the gallery in normal post form

Now divide the total number of square kilometers by the destruction radius of the B83 to get the total number of nukes required for instant annihilation. As you can see, we need 123.36 times the amount of nukes available today: 10,227 nukes vs 1,241,166 nukes needed to completely disintegrate every single one of us in a millisecond.

Conclusion: WE NEED MORE NUKES, NOT FEWER. Better die instantly than having to survive nuclear winter and yet another horrible movie with Mel Gibson playing Mad Max. One that would last for a few hundred years at that. [David McCandless—Thanks David Keyes]

It actually boils down fairly simply to a mixed bag: ATI's Stream tends to be outright faster and pulls more of the load off of the CPU, but Nvidia's CUDA tends to produce better quality results. Interestingly, PC Perspective seems to like ATI's Avivo video transcoding application more than they used to, saying they're impressed by its simplicity. But which side are you on? [PC Perspective via Engadget]

* The CPU performance is Faster by 40-70%
* The fillrate* is 3x to 4x higher
* Texture effects and filters are about 10x faster

Keep in mind that it's also running OpenGL1.x on the benchmark test, and iPhone 3GS can run OpenGL 2.x. The upside is that when games do get optimized or developed for OpenGL 2.x, that's when your old phone will no longer be able to play them, or at least play them with better graphics. It's pretty obvious once you play with the phone that it's rendering your old games much faster, but it's good to get it in quantitative form. [glbenchmark via Extremetech via Ubergizmo]

It's a free download from Einar Andersson & Tor Rauden Källstigen that includes an installer and everything. In other words, you can pretty much double click your way to emoji bliss. And once you're done, maybe you could ping Jason Chen and remind him that I don't need to see that little poop guy every time he forgets his Lactaid. [Emoji for iChat via TUAW]

The first GeForce 200M notebook cards—the GTX 280M and 260M—were for crazy gaming rigs, and were actually based on the previous-gen G92 architecture. (Nvidia did pulled some confusing re-branding jujitsu a few months back.) The new 200M cards are based on the "current high-end desktop architecture" (so, actually the G200 architecture) and round out the 200M series, replacing the current 9M series across the board: GTS 260M, GTS 250M, GT 240M, GT 230M, G 210M. Here's how the specs break down:

So to recap in English, all the Nvidia notebook graphics cards that are like "GT 9600" are going to be replaced by ones that are like "GT 240" which are faster but use less power. I don't know why Nvidia went from 9000 to 200, so don't ask me. It's actually kind of a bummer they didn't make it into the new MacBook Pros, though, since they now have officially old and busted graphics chips inside. [Nvidia]

It's not just that the new graphics chip is more powerful, it's the jump from a fixed-pipeline graphics architecture to an OpenGL ES 2.0 architecture that he says is "like going from Half Life to Half Life 2." That's because a whole bunch of modern graphics techniques—ones programmers use on big boy computers and consoles for games like Doom 3 and Gears of War—are suddenly available to developers, like bump mapping, shadows, and multi-textures and lightmaps.

Obviously, you shouldn't expect Xbox 360 level graphics—besides developers not wanting to unceremoniously ditch the 40 million other iPhone users out there, the iPhone 3GS is running on just a 600MHz processor with 256MB RAM and that Power-VR SGX GPU, after all. It's just that programmers can do a whole lot more with that than they could the older iPhones, so games are gonna look way better and vastly more sophisticated than they used to on the iPhone, once devs decide to leave the old hardware behind.

Which should be pretty good, since EA said last year the iPhone was more powerful than the DS, and Sega said it was as powerful as the Dreamcast, the second greatest console of all time. [UberGizmo]

Engadget says details are scant, but mention that AMD says that new DX11 features, such as the Compute Shader, will help improve Windows 7 performance, among other things. They expect their DirectX 11 products to be available in late 2009. [AMD via Engadget]

NVIDIA ENERGIZES COMPUTEX WITH NEW ION-BASED PC PRODUCTS

Highly Anticipated Platform Takes Off With 21 New Products for Small PCs

COMPUTEX, TAIPEI, TAIWAN-JUNE 2, 2009-NVIDIA, the world leader in visual
computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, announced broad adoption of its award-
winning NVIDIA® ION™ graphics processor at the Computex tradeshow today. The new
products – introduced at an NVIDIA press conference in Taipei and on display at the show –
include small desktop PCs, thin and light notebooks, all-in-one PCs, and low power motherboard
solutions which all deliver a full PC experience in a small, low-power system.

The new products include:
Acer Desktop AspireRevo
AsRock Desktop ION 330
ASUS Motherboard C2N7A-I
ASUS All-in-one eeeTop ET2002
Colorful Desktop iHTPC
ECS Desktop 7AT-3L
ECS All-in-one Morph-I
Flextronics All-in-one Cobra-2
Flextronics Desktop Dove-2
Funtwist Desktop FION 330
ICD All-in-one Kitchen PC
Lenovo Notebook IdeaPad S12
MSI Desktop Windbox D200
MSI All-in-one Windtop AE2201
Pegatron Desktop IPP7A-CP
Pegatron All-in-one IPP7A-DF2
Pegatron Motherboard IPX7A-ION
TCL All-in-one Ruiyi 1010
Telcast Notebook TL-1000N
Weibu Notebook N10A
Zotac Motherboard ION-ITX

The new NVIDIA ION-based PCs and platform solutions are great for high definition video,
mainstream gaming, and GPU-accelerated video and photo editing applications that take
advantage of NVIDIA CUDA™ technology.

ION also supports DirectX Compute as part of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating
system. DirectX Compute running on NVIDIA's CUDA compute hardware architecture delivers
a major boost for small form factor PCs because it accelerates applications like video editing that
run poorly or not at all on today's low-powered PCs. Other GPU-accelerated applications like
vReveal and Badaboom let users quickly edit video and convert it for use on a portable media
player like an iPod.

"NVIDIA is really shaking up the small form factor space with ION graphics," said Rob Enderle,
Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group. "Netbooks and nettops are the hottest selling items in
the PC space right now, but most are severely limited. ION removes the major chunk of that
performance limitation allowing PC vendors the perfect blend of design, performance, and value
that drives sales in hard times."

"Consumer interest in the Acer AspireRevo featuring NVIDIA's ION graphics has been
overwhelming," said Gianpero Morbello, senior vice president of corporate marketing for Acer.
"The Acer AspireRevo clearly demonstrates the power of ION to deliver a full and unique
multimedia experience for an amazingly low price. We see strong consumer demand in this
space."

NVIDIA ION graphics processors deliver big performance from small PCs with up to 10X faster
graphics than similar systems1. ION graphics support:

• Windows 7 and Windows Vista Home Premium
• Low-power CPUs including Intel Atom, Intel Celeron, and Via Nano processors
• Outstanding 1080p HD video with true-fidelity 7.1 audio
• Popular games including The Sims 3, Lego Batman, World of WarCraft, and
Battlefield Heroes
• DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
• Accelerated video enhancement and transcoding using NVIDIA® CUDA™ and
DirectX Compute technology