Kathleen Maher

Customers in charge

One sure sign of a successful launch in the game industry is the rise of an unruly fan base, and AMD has that in spades. Vega is a competi­tive graphics chip for AMD with bench­marks that challenge Nvidia in perfor­mance and have the edge in price. Unfortunately, as we have written here, that attractive price point and the ability to … Read more

Siemens PLM focuses on additive manufacturing

Now that the technology industry has survived the great 3D printing hype cycle, the real changes coming from additive manufacturing are coming into focus. The major CAD manufacturers are all en-thusiastic about the potential and most have made changes to their software to accommodate 3D printing, but Siemens PLM has signaled its intention to make AM a major business in … Read more

Khronos opens up its membership with new pricing

Associate membership expanded for smaller companies and a new membership tier created for nonprofit organizations If you’ve been planning to join the Khronos Group and you just haven’t had time, the open consortium for technology standards wants to make it easier for you. They have introduced new tiers of membership to enable smaller companies and individuals to participate in the … Read more

Adobe reinvents OCR

Really? Adobe’s Sensei teaches old dogs a trick or two It can be hard to get worked up about an innovation in PDF, even though the technology has become ubiquitous and we all depend upon it. On the other hand, it is ubiquitous and we do all depend on it, and it’s up to Adobe to keep it that way. … Read more

PTC’s Project Chalk makes AR accessible

A digital version of: look, do it this way Sometimes, it’s the obvious app, that makes the value of a technology screamingly obvious. People have argued that AR is soon to be ubiquitous. In fact, it is already commonplace if you consider all the ways in which we use our digital phone to get more information, translations, etc. PTC’s Vuforia … Read more

Lightworks Slipstream

Customizing visualization for enterprise CAD customers The CAD industry is nothing like the games industry or entertainment content creation in general. Yeah, pretty obvious. Just as obvious, there are great synergies between the fields and benefits to be gained by incorporating capabilities from the different fields into new apps. And maybe that explains why there is a stubborn persistence in … Read more

The economy of graphics

It’s all Ethereum to me Last week, as we all know, AMD strutted its stuff for a few days of talks and meetings to promote its new architecture. At those meetings, the company also pledged to protect the market for their first love, gamers. The company introduced gaming packs with the boards at special prices. They promised to restrict supplies … Read more

Alienware Area 51 desktop gets a Core X CPU infusion

In a brave switch from convention Dell rolled out the first update on the Alienware Area 51 machine, a real beauty of a gaming machine, with an AMD Threadripper CPU. Dell and AMD announced an exclusive, sort of, for Threadrippers through 2017. It was a cozy deal for AMD for a while, but not really a long while. Dell is … Read more

VR is not the answer

But the questions are a heck of a lot of fun. Aren’t you sick and tired of VR? Look, you can tell me, I won’t tell anyone. I swear. As it happens I’ve been on some juries lately (for papers, not criminals), and a few conferences and it seems no one would dare try and gather 10 people together without … Read more

HP gives gamers what they came for: big honkin’ power in a laptop

The HP Omen line is for committed gamers, and we are tempted to ask, is there any other kind? HP segments the gamer community into three categories: mainstream, performance, and enthusiast and they line up about how you’d expect, mostly male and mostly young. The large mainstream gamer group, tends to be younger, more cost conscious. They buy OEM machines … Read more

AltspaceVR hangs it up

AltspaceVR, a hang-out like Second Life, announced that it has run out of money and will be closing its doors. The company posted an open letter blog to announce the closing as of August 3, 7PM PDT. The company said they had been working on a second round of funding but that it fell through. However, since the company’s official … Read more