Exotic
auction attracts a crowd at Casino Aztar Hotel
As reported by The Courier & Press
Tens
of thousands of dollars in antique furniture, Persian
rugs, precious stones and elaborate artwork flew through
Gavin Abadi's hands Sunday afternoon at the Casino
Aztar Hotel.
An
auctioneer for Atlanta-based State Liquidations Inc. for
10 years, Abadi is used to seeing items his company purchases
at government auctions, bankruptcy sales and consignments
go for a steal when he re-auctions them.
Sunday,
he cajoled the crowd into bidding on pieces with quips
like "It's not stolen!" and "Office Depot
charges more for plywood."
Most
items sold far below the value Abadi advertised, including
a $6,000 emerald and diamond ring that sold for $700 and
a hand-woven Persian rug valued at $12,000 that went for
$1,700.
Even
a loose pink sapphire that sold for $5,750, the highest
bid of the day, went far below the price Abadi gave of
"between $30,000 and $40,000."
The
sale was sponsored by State Liquidations Inc., an Atlanta-based
company. Abadi said the company holds two sales a week,
usually on weekends, all over the country. They visit
Evansville twice a year.
The
3D gaming mobile phone
The
race for better graphics performance on PCs is a long-standing
tradition. Now mobile device developers want to take cell-phone
graphics to the next level. The ATI Imageon 2300 claims
to be the first 3D graphics coprocessor for wireless handsets
and smart phones.. It comes equipped with a full-featured
graphics engine, including geometry processing of up to
1 million triangles per second, perspective correction,
and dithering. The chip also has an MPEG-4 video decoder
and video resolutions of up to 2 megapixels - making it
ideal for camera phones with high-speed data access.
The
result is far better picture quality, even on a 2-inch
screen, ATI claims. Are 3D games really something people
want to squint at on tiny displays? "Here in North
America, we're way behind Japan and Korea," points
out Azzedine Boubguira, ATI's director of marketing for
handheld products. "For a year and a half they've
been running 3D games there," he says, albeit with
slow software rendering. Boubguira also notes that when
ATI introduced graphics accelerators in laptops, "people
laughed at us." Now they are a standard feature.