MachStudio Pro 2 – Price Cut From $4000 To Zero!

A product price reduction is one thing, but reducing the product price from $4000 to zero, zilch, nada – well, that’s a whole other thing. In a rather surprising move, StudioGPU, the developers of MachStudio Pro 2 (which has an excellent reputation in the 3-D industry), has done just that. Sort of beats a Wal-Mart rollback hands down!

If serious animation is your thing, and you have the hardware to support it – then rush on over to StudioGPU, and download their flagship product – MachStudio Pro 2.

I should point out; this application is not a toy – this is the real thing; designed by artists for artists, and shaped by the actual demands of a production environment.

Sample screen captures from video productions available at the developer’s site.

Fast facts:

• Real-time rendering on your desktop — say good-bye to expensive render farms.
• Groundbreaking levels of interactivity giving the power back to the artist instead of the pipeline.
• Provides revolutionary workflow allowing manipulation of cameras, lighting, ambient occlusion, animation, and materials in real-time.
• Seamless interoperability with most leading CG software programs including Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max .
• Resolution independent, allowing renders at any resolution and format (e.g. 1080P, 720P, 16:9, 4:3, NTSC, PAL and even 2K and beyond).
• Render as final frame, or as passes for additional compositing work.
• Generate higher quality CGI results for less time and money.

System requirements:

Windows 7 – 32 bit or 64 bit, Vista Business – 32 bit or 64 bit (SP1 or higher).

Minimum Hardware Requirements:

• Intel Pentium 4 or higher, AMD Athlon 64, or AMD Opteron processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 2 GB of available disk space
• 1 GB DirectX 11 compliant video card (tested w/ ATI and NVIDIA)

Download at: StudioGPU

If you’ve got a creative streak, and you have a drive to create imaginary worlds populated with imaginary characters, then this is a terrific opportunity to harness the power of your computer with the magic of MachStudio Pro 2.

Checkout the video at the developer’s site.

I’m not an artist, a movie producer or director, but I’ve been playing with animation creative software since the days of Autodesk’s ground breaking 3-D applications in the 1980s. You can be sure, I’ve already downloaded MachStudio Pro 2.

Special thanks to Michael F., who brought this to my attention.

If you found this article useful, why not subscribe to this Blog via RSS, or email? It’s easy; just click on this link and you’ll never miss another Tech Thoughts article.

The Never Ending Debate: Does Social Belong in Business?

Guest writer Grace Kang takes a look at social media, and lays out a logical and persuasive case for employing social media tools as a business builder. 

The term “social” may sound like it belongs anywhere but the office, but the truth is, the success of the world’s best businesses can be traced to their leadership’s reliance upon increasing their workers’ networking, relationships and and transparency.

Instead of having individual employees focused on completing tasks alone, by encouraging employees to expand their own networks formally and informally, businesses are able to leverage their employees’ communications for better growth. Business collaboration software and online tools can help make the process easier.

Why does social belong in business?

• People everywhere are choosing to communicate through social media. In a survey by Central Desktop, the participants indicated that 49% were using document collaboration tools, 19% said internal social networking tools, 18% were using wikis, 9% using discussion threads, and 5% using activity feeds.
• Social media is a great place to build long term relationships
• It makes it easy to engage prospects and customers with games, contests and more. In the survey, 22% said they used social tools to connect with customers, and 18% to win customers.
• Social software for business is getting better. To see the evolution of social collaboration tools, check out “The State of Social Collaboration”, a neat infographic that illustrates how social tools have changed since they were first introduced in the 1970’s.
• Its only going to get bigger, and you need to be there.

Even if a business is physically spread out across the country or even the globe, using social networking within the organization can have a dramatic positive impact on the company’s current and future returns. Collaboration software and online project management meld together through Central Desktop, which is a social software for business that provides employees who are located at separate locations a cohesive means of sharing ideas, planning projects and ultimately adding value to their shared business.

As transparency increases between groups located on different continents and between business units and functional centers, efficiency also will increase. Concerns that would normally have to be fed up and down their respective feeding chains are shared immediately for a fast response from the appropriate personnel.

Avoiding triangulation, wherein a the party in need of assistance goes to a third party instead of the party who can actually assist him or her, reduces staff time devoted to a project while empowering employees to take ownership of their work. As a result, employees take more pride in their work, act more efficiently and are more likely to produce a high quality product.

Social Collaboration Promote Employee Ownership and Morale

Employee ownership of work also makes it easier to identify supply chain problems early on and correct them before they snowball into larger concerns. The increased communication between departments bleeds into increased communication within departments. Greater clarity of duties, concerns, issues and other tasks at all levels reduces the chances that employees will spend their time working on the wrong types of projects, while increasing employee morale.

Allowing employees to mingle at a virtual water cooler means fast tracking discussions of interdepartmental issues, so that resolutions can be found in a timely manner.

A business group located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, can benefit greatly from learning about the solution that a group located in New York City or Hong Kong implemented, rather than working to try to figure out a solution to the problem themselves, which would take more time that they may not have to spend on the problem. Business collaboration software and tools like Central Desktop are leading the way.

Bio:

Grace Kang is a writer for Central Desktop, the leading social collaboration software solution for mid to large sized businesses.

If you found this article useful, why not subscribe to this Blog via RSS, or email? It’s easy; just click on this link and you’ll never miss another Tech Thoughts article.

BitDefender Releases Free Antispam for Linux Mail Servers

BitDefender styles itself as “an award-winning provider of innovative Internet security solutions”, and I must admit that I agree. Moreover, BitDefender has taken a leading role in providing free security solutions, including a host of specialty malware removal tools – particularly, in the past few months.

Yesterday, BitDefender released a Free Antispam application designed specifically for Linux Mail Servers. This new application is driven by BitDefender’s award winning anti-spam engine, and according to Alexandru Balan, BitDefender’s Innovation & Technology Product Manager, the application is aimed at “small businesses and individuals who run mail servers in environments other than Windows, but are dissatisfied with the lackluster performance of existing open-source or proprietary antispam solutions.”

Fast facts:

Antispam – Using constantly updated blacklists and whitelists of known Spam sites, Bayesian learning provides another layer of detection that adapts to the changes made by Spammers to bypass static Spam filters.

Antiphishing – While considered more of personal threat than a corporate threat; phishing sites can also harvesting information from your company’s employees. Using a combination of constantly updated blacklists and whitelists, BitDefender prevents users from known accessing phishing sites and preventing compromise.

Content Filtering – Content filtering allows for the detection of predefined information such as credit card or account information, report names, client databases, etc. from passing outside the company’s control.

High performance NeuNet technology (advanced adaptive neural network).

Easy installation and easy to use web-based and command line administration interface.

Highly compatible kits that are available for all major Linux distributions (available as RPM, DEB, IPK) and are Linux FHS compliant.

System requirements:

Linux – Linux Kernel 2.6.18 or newer, glibc 2.3.1 or newer, libstdc++ from gcc 4 or newer.

Supported Distributions:

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 or newer, Fedora Core 1 or newer, Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, Linux 8.2 or newer, Mandrake/Mandriva 9.1 or newer, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, Linux 9 or newer

BitDefender Security for Mail Servers, is the only product to have won a VBSpam award in every single VBSpam test – and with one of the highest spam catch rates in this test, and no false positives, it outperforms all other products and achieved the highest final score in the September 2010 test.

Download Free AntiSpam for Mail Servers at: BitDefender – registration required.

A user guide, in PDF format, is available here.

If you found this article useful, why not subscribe to this Blog via RSS, or email? It’s easy; just click on this link and you’ll never miss another Tech Thoughts article.

News From Symantec Hosted Services

We know, only too well, that cyber criminals take advantage of every opportunity that new and emerging technologies provide to expand their trade – data theft.

So, with the huge adoption rate in smart mobile devices, and our increased reliance on these devices (which are literally powerful computers), there is a more pronounced sense of urgency to protect the data stored on these sophisticated mobile devices from the threat of cybercrime.

Symantec Hosted Services, recognizing this need, recently announced enhancements to its MessageLabs Web Security Service roaming support options, that will allow organizations to further support the security needs of their mobile workforce.

According to Symantec – “The new enhancements will monitor and secure the online activity of a highly distributed workforce.  Drawing on findings from the recent MessageLabs Intelligence report highlighting the inappropriate web usage of mobile workers, SmartConnect and RemoteConnect for MessageLabs Hosted Web Security protect against malware, and enforces Web acceptable use policies for teleworkers, or employees, at remote offices.”

____________________________________________________

If you’ve noticed a significant drop in Spam in your inboxes lately, like I have, there’s good reason – according to Symantec Hosted Services.

On Sunday, October 3, Symantec Hosted Services noticed that global spam levels dropped to their lowest in a while. Symantec Hosted Services believes this drop was due to a decrease in output by the Rustock and Cutwail botnets.

For additional insight on how Symantec Hosted Services tracked last weekend’s spam drop via sophisticated botnet intelligence, what contribution to global spam each of the major botnets makes, and what factors influence botnet output, check out the MessageLabs  Intelligence blog report here.

About Message Labs Intelligence:

Symantec’s Message Labs Intelligence is a respected source of data and analysis for messaging security issues, trends and statistics. MessageLabs Intelligence provides a range of information on global security threats based on live data feeds from our control towers around the world scanning billions of messages each week.

About Symantec:

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world.  Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available here.

If you found this article useful, why not subscribe to this Blog via RSS, or email? It’s easy; just click on this link and you’ll never miss another Tech Thoughts article.

I’m InTouch Online Meeting – A Cost Effective Online Collaborative Solution

In the early 1990s, I was involved (as a partner), with an organization that both developed, and provided, training programs to the Insurance industry (I won’t bore you my personal opinions of the Insurance industry, except to say – they’re not positive).

Through this exposure, I became well aware of both the hard costs, and the soft costs, involved in hosting “in the flesh”, training seminars, meetings, round table discussions, and so on. Not surprisingly, the costs could be, and often were, prohibitive. The development and broad scale distribution of Online meeting software  has essentially changed all that.

An overriding hallmark of Online meeting software is its cost effectiveness, since the need for companies to absorb travel and accommodation costs, employee downtime costs, etc,. no longer exists.

Despite the fact, that this type of application has been available for years, I have not taken an opportunity to review an Online meeting application – until now. I was recently invited to participate in a Beta Online meeting application developed by 01 Communique, a Toronto based technology company, and I’m glad I did.

I’m InTouch Meeting is an Online meeting solution which is notable for its cost effectiveness, highly intuitive user interface, and a simple three stage process that allows a user to host meetings for up to 15  attendees – directly from their computer’s desktop.

Since I’m InTouch Meeting is a Windows driven system, Online meetings and participant collaboration, can easily be achieved without the need for a heavy backend IT infrastructure – and, it’s easy. How easy? Take a look at the following surprisingly easy 3 step process.

The three step I’m InTouch process:

1. The Moderator logs in at www.imintouchmeeting.com

Alternatively, you may select “Host an instant meeting” from http://www.imintouchmeeting.com to quickly start hosting a meeting.

2. The moderator creates and starts a new meeting

A Meeting ID will be provided. Simply use the provided tool to send invitation emails to your attendees.

3. Attendees click the link on the invitation email to join

All the attendees are now sharing the screen of the moderator in real time. To join the meeting, attendees do not need to subscribe to I’m InTouch Meeting; however, the moderator can require a password to join the meeting.

How easy is that!

Fast facts:

Unlimited usage

Shareable licenses

Real-time screen sharing

Enhanced File Transfer – Instantly send a copy of your presentation or report during the meeting to all participants using I’m InTouch Meeting’s File Transfer capability. Perfect for securely sending files too large for email.

Remote printing

Text and audio chat (VoIP)

Whiteboard (drawing tools)

Attendees’ access rights control

Support up to 15 attendees

Administrative/Statistics tools

The one thing we know about the Internet is – from a security perspective, we need to be proactive on a continuous basis. I’m InTouch Meeting addresses security issues, straight out of the gate.

Security fast facts:

256-Bit SSL Data Encryption – Ensures your transmitted data stays private with end to end encryption and authentication.

No Ports Opened – No new ports are opened on your firewall or router ensuring your current security measures are not compromised at all.

Dual Login Passwords – Passwords are required to from the moderator and attendees to initiate and join an online meeting respectively.

Account Protection – Multiple failed login attempts will result in your account being temporarily locked out to protect against unauthorized access.

Security Settings Maintained – I’m InTouch retains your OS-level access controls already in place on the PC.

Session Time-Out – Your remote access session will automatically terminate after a period of inactivity you define.

No Session Data Kept – None of your remote session data is kept on our servers ensuring your work stays private.

The I’m InTouch Meeting “how it works” video – click on the graphic.

System requirements: Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7

To signup for the free beta: go to the developer’s site. There is no obligation to subscribe during the Beta period.

About 01 Communique:

Established in 1992, 01 Communique is an innovative force in the development
and delivery of remote access, online meeting, support products and
integrated communications software.

We develop and market a suite of remote access services designed for small-medium sized business, mobile professionals and IT service providers.

Our software as a service offerings are deployed on-demand and include functionality enabling on-line meetings, remote computing and IT support.

All offerings are developed using our patented remote access technology and marketed under our I’m InTouch.

If you found this article useful, why not subscribe to this Blog via RSS, or email? It’s easy; just click on this link and you’ll never miss another Tech Thoughts article.