Why a Google tablet store could succeed where the Nexus One failed

Google’s tablet strategy has, thus far, been the same as its phone strategy. Mountain View makes the software, then gets out of the way as OEMs build and market devices. This might have worked for phones, but it’s no secret that Android tablet sales have been less than thrilling. A new report regarding the still-unconfirmed Nexus tabletclaims that Google is actually looking to upend its tablet ecosystem completely by selling multiple tablets direct to consumers via an online store.

This conjures up painful memories of the last time Google dared to do an end run around the carriers with the Nexus One. The device was stellar, but Google lacked the retail experience to make the online phone store work. However, this is a different time, and tablets are a different kind of product. This time, Google might be able to pull it off.

With Android phones, Google was essentially struggling against a system that, while dysfunctional, really moves phones. Android phones were selling briskly in early 2010 when the Nexus One came out, and users were accustomed to getting a device subsidized on a 2-year contract. Google’s calls to free ourselves from the US carriers fell on deaf ears; apparently almost everyone was happy with their cellular shackles.

Tablets are still a very new product category, and people don’t buy them in the same way they do phones. Getting a tablet on a 2-year contract is rare, especially when you already have data plans and contracts on smartphones. For this reason, carriers have had little success moving these slate devices. This weakness, and some might even say disinterest, on the part of carriers is Google’s opening.

The overwhelming majority of iPad buyers get the WiFi only model, and there isn’t even a 3G version of the Kindle Fire. When almost everyone uses tablets at home, it’s foolish to predicate a strategy on selling mobile broadband plans with them. Carriers don’t do a good job of promoting tablets for this reason, and who could blame them? There is little risk of alienating its carrier partners, so Google risks less than it did with the Nexus One.

Google wasn’t able to convince Americans to spend over $500 on a phone, but tablets are another story. The market has shown that consumers are willing to spend a few hundred dollars on a tablet without expecting a subsidy, but tacking on an additional $100 at retail for a $5 3G modem just isn’t going to work for Android tablets.

It is widely acknowledged that Amazon makes next to nothing on the Kindle Fire itself, but relies on the revenue from its content ecosystem. This might be an angle Google could take in its rumored tablet store. It would be smart to offer OEMs a small subsidy, and maybe a cut of sales to entice them to add tablets to the online marketplace.

Google Play is not the money maker that Amazon or the App Store are, but the service has beenstrengthened over recent months with music, and expanded selections of other content. The missing piece of the puzzle is a vehicle for all that content — which is exactly what the tablets sold in Google’s online store could be.

If the search giant does end up deploying a tablet store with devices from multiple OEMs, it’s going to be a gamble. Google is going to be looked to for support, and that was one of the major failings of the Nexus One. Having a second direct sales initiative collapse would be a black mark on Google, and on Android. The fragile Android tablet market might also be sent spiraling into disarray. Google needs to plan carefully, but it has a better shot than it ever did with the Nexus One.

Source

PlayStation 4: Sony’s chance to redeem itself

Sony aims to not make the same mistakes twice when it comes to the PlayStation. While we’ve been hearing that the Japanese electronics maker would be sticking with the PlayStation 3 for the foreseeable future with no plans for a new console, that is apparently no longer the case.

Gaming news site VG24/7 reports that sources say Sony is determined to get the PlayStation 4, codenamed “Orbis,” out before the launch of Microsoft’s next console, referred to as the Xbox 720. Rumors have suggested a late 2013 release for the 720, and Sony wants the PS4 out first.

Sony’s hard lessons with the PS3

Do you blame them? The PS3 launch was a mess. While Sony came hot of out the gate at E3 2005 with a console that captivated everyone with its power and gameplay, those were the good ‘ol days. A holiday season launch that year was not to be, and repeated delays pushed the launch back to November 2006.

This gave Microsoft a year head start. Frustrated game developers turned to Microsoft and Nintendoas a result of Sony’s mistakes, and PlayStation exclusives like Final Fantasy were offered on rival consoles. Worse yet, Sony (and Microsoft for that matter) probably never factored in the surprising success of the Wii.

It was a perfect storm that nearly washed the PS3 away.

All these factors permanently damaged the sales potential of the PS3, something that has taken a half decade to recover from. While sales of the console now are nearly equal to the Xbox, it is still in third place. This is a far cry from the past where the PlayStation 2 crushed the competition, and had no trouble in attracting exclusive rights to the hottest game titles and franchises.

PlayStation Orbis: Sony’s mea culpa?

Sony needs a home run with the PlayStation 4. From what’s being rumored, it appears the company is fully aware of this fact. The device is said to move to the x86 platform, and will support games at a resolution of 4096×2160. This means the PS4 has the capability to do 3D games at 1080p, an improvement over the 720p supported by the PS3. The processor would jump from eight to 24 cores, so there’s a heck of a lot of power inside this thing.

With gamers demanding more realistic games, it’s only a natural progression for Sony and other manufacturers to pack more power into its consoles. Whether game developers will have the capability to take advantage of it right away is another story; many game developers still aren’t using the current console to its maximum potential.

One thing that may disappoint gamers is Sony’s apparent decision to take an aggressive stance against used games, akin to what Microsoft is expected to do in the next Xbox. Discs would be locked to the console once they are played. This will kill the massive used game business that GameStop and other retailers have built over the years, but on the other hand it puts more profits in the pockets of the developers.

Add all of this together, along with a maturing online gaming system (hopefully unhacked) in the PlayStation Network, and the PS4 could be exactly what the doctor ordered for Sony’s video game business. Whether it will be able to compete with Microsoft’s Windows 8/Windows Phone 8/Xbox 720trifecta, though — all of which are rumored to have extensive cross-platform compatibility — remains to be seen.

Read more at VG24/7, or read about the rise and fall of the Sony empire

[Image credit]

Source

It’s World Backup Day – Are you ready for a drive failure?

In case you hadn’t heard, March 31 is World Backup Day. This year marks only the second time that this commemorative day will be celebrated, but we’re giving it our full support. After all, if we can all come together and get behind World Rubber Day (September 12) and National Hot Dog Month (July), why not promote data protection?

In observance of World Backup Day part of the ExtremeTech staff is going to walk you through how we each backup our data. This has the potential to be one of the most interesting or most boring things we’ve ever done, so we’ll be brief and try to keep the explanations of our byzantine strategies as clear as possible. When you’re done reading, leave a comment below explaining how you protect all your precious 1s and 0s.

Tim Verry

I backup to two external drives, and one of them I send to either my parents or my friend’s house to keep safe.  Those backups are done every 6 months or so, which means a huge file dump. I also backup to a second internal hard drive regularly (I should probably look into just RAID1′ing the drives as it would accomplish what I’m doing automagically). I also use Skydrive, Dropbox, and Box.net for various important files, like photos and documents.

I don’t have enough digital stuff hoarded to require a multi-drive NAS (yet) but that’s what I would use if I needed more backup space than I could get from a single USB hard drive.  Ever since The Great Formatting Disaster of 2009, I’ve learned that I can never have too many backups.

David Cardinal

As a photographer my images are my business’ largest asset. Digital images are easier to backup than a wall of file cabinets full of slides, but they present their own problems — especially once they get into the terabytes. In my case, I start by having all my images on a high-speed, fault-tolerant, RAID5 array attached to my Photoshop workstation, for fast access and reliability.

Then, on a regular basis, I copy them to two separate NAS boxes, both configured for RAID5. The tool I use computes md5 checksums on the images and is smart enough to not overwrite a good copy with one that has been corrupted by some type of bit rot. It can also tell me when one of the backup images has been damaged the same way. RAID1 is even more reliable, if you can afford the additional drives needed.

Finally, at least once a year, a full copy gets made onto another set of drives and stored at a friend’s house. I used to keep tapes in a safe deposit box at the bank, but eventually my backups got too big for an affordable box.

If you do use a cloning tool to help with your backups, make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot by inadvertently deleting a file or folder on your main hard drive and having your tool merrily propagate the deletion on your backup drive.

Sebastian Anthony

I keep copies of important files in multiple locations and I don’t mess around with RAID. I keep photos and documents synchronized between my desktop (10TB of hard drives), my NAS (another 10TB), and some are also stored on DVDs (in another physical location, instead my house burns down). I just use SyncToy (a basic Windows tool) to keep the copies mirrored and up-to-date.

Ray Walters

I, like many of you, use multiple services, all of which are free. I use Google Music for my tunes and then Dropbox (10GB) for files and the occasional media. I use RAID to store my crucial photos and media locally. Open Filer serves the rest at my home and office.

Sal Cangeloso

I keep all of my non-archived documents, videos, images, and so forth on a 2TB external hard drive. That drive is mirrored nightly onto a NAS using SyncBackSE. It’s doing a differential so the updates are quick, the task is scheduled it happens when I’m sleeping, and the program logs everything so I know what’s happened to my data. Past that I have a few important files that I’ve put in Dropbox and/or emailed to myself.

Before this I used the NAS with the 2TB disk in the middle, but as the NAS aged that was no longer a quick enough option. Now I get an extra layer of redundancy and I didn’t have to replace my NAS. One day (soon) I’m going to backup the NAS and leave a copy at my parents’ house.

I used to backup my laptop (a MacBook Pro) using wireless Time Machine but since Lion broke AFP I’ve started to just use an encrypted 1TB external hard drive. I usually do this on Mondays and Fridays. My only real offsite backup, sadly enough, is for my phone and tablet which use iCloud.

Ryan Whitwam

I try to make use of cloud services as much as possible to minimize the amount of manual backing up I need to do. All my documents are in Google Docs, and if anyone emails me a document, I immediately add it to Docs myself. My music too is kept in the cloud with Google Play Music.

I try to separate other files into two categories; content that I’m constantly updating, and long-term storage. Anything that I need to access often goes into Dropbox. I consider most photos to be in this group, and the Android Dropbox app makes this process automatic; I snap a photo, and it’s in Dropbox.

Older files, and those that I don’t need to update often, get backed up to a less convenient service like Box.net or Skydrive that offers more space. Anything of a sensitive financial or personal nature get encrypted before it goes into the cloud, though.

Lastly, once a month or so, I take out my external hard drive, and copy over all the local files I think I might want if the unforeseen happened. When I’m done, that drive goes in the fire safe at the back of the closet. This gives me at least a little security for the files too large to realistically live in the cloud.

Do you have an interesting backup strategy? Maybe you built something with FreeNAS or you have a 135TB storage pod? Leave a comment below.

Source

The inescapable ’80s: 8-bit, SimCity, and Wing Commander all make a comeback

I do everything I can to not dwell too much on the 1980s and early 1990s, but sometimes I just don’t have any other choice. I think it’s a generalized problem you experience as you get older: try as you might, you can’t completely abandon your formative years, full of the most important firsts that define the standards by which you’ll live the rest of your life. That’s where I am right now. But I have a good defense for being tormented by the ghosts of 20 or so years ago: those years just won’t stop coming back! Every time I’m positive I’ve managed to evict them from my mind, they come catapulting back into the culture, as obnoxious as Garbage Pail Kids and just as difficult to forget. And maybe it’s just me, but the last week or so has been bringing more of these to the forefront than I’ve seen in a while. Though, hey, at least they’ve been interesting intrusions into the pseudo-serenity of the present.

Linux is in an unusual place. I’m a fan of Linux, and not just because of the terrifying direction in which Windows 8 is heading. No, I like it for the same reason I like building computers: the sense of being on the frontier, and of having complete control over something in ways that Microsoft and Apple are increasingly unwilling to bestow me. So I was thrilled to discover a project that Dmitry Grinberg wrote about called “Linux on an 8-bit micro?“, in which he… well, you can probably figure it out. Yes, he got Linux 2.6.34 running on an ATmega1284p, if you can believe it. Grinberg’s story is worth reading in full, both for the sheer novelty value of it, but also for what it can teach you about solving problems. (One spoiler out of many possible: He ended up writing his own modular ARM emulator.)

A project like this isn’t going to be within everyone’s grasp, admittedly, but it’s a nice reminder that the enterprising computing spirit is far from dead in the homebrew technology world. As you may know if you’ve been reading me for a while, that’s something I worry about quite a lot, so this gives me some modicum of hope for the future. (You can download the source code he used, too, and be sure to watch the accompanying video as well.) By the way, if you’ve done something as adventurous as this — or even close to it — I’d love to hear about it.

Sim old, same old

SimCity is coming back! I was unreasonably excited at the news, I must confess. I played the original back in 1989 and fell in love with it before it spawned its own industry of sequels (rememberSim Ant?) and spinoffs (of which The Sims is, at this point, undoubtedly the most famous). And though I’ve never been quite as taken with the later versions as I was with the first, I still enjoy playing mayor now and then in a way my natural aversion to political sucking-up would never allow me in real life. But my elation quickly turned to annoyance when I encountered the inevitable caveat: playing it will require an always-on internet connection. This isn’t quite as onerous as copy protection schemes I’ve previously complained about from Ubisoft and on Batman: Arkham City, but it’s still a pain given the apparent reason: “the game’s emphasis on multiplayer and regional impact, and the use of a global economy that all players can influence.”

Some of that sounds intriguing, but sometimes I just want to lose myself in my own experience and not worry endlessly about what other people are doing — why am I not being given that chance? The good news, that the game won’t have to be bought through Origin, doesn’t quite compensate. I’m willing to consider extending Electronic Arts the benefit of the doubt, but I’d really like to see better justifications than this.

Wing Commander wings back

In the sepia-tinted era of the earliest years of full-motion video in PC games, three titles stand out:The 7th Guest (I’m still tormented by visions of soup cans), Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, and Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. The last two were notable because of the zettawatt acting talent (well, in sci-fi terms) they attracted — Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, Tom Wilson — but also because they were good games, packed with action and stories you could really care about. So the arrival of Wing Commander Saga: Darkest Dawn (pictured top) is a major occasion: this fan-constructed companion piece to Wing Commander III has been in the works for a decade or so, and gives diehards a chance to rekindle the love affair with frenetic space combat that few games today have been able to replicate with the same panache.

ExtremeTech regular Joel Hruska penned a thorough rundown of the game that’s worth reading if you want an idea of what you’re in for. Whether you’re a veteran fighter of the Kilrathi or you’ve never set eyes on them before, you owe it to yourself to sample this labor of love and see (or be reminded of) why not everything about the late ’80s and early ’90s was as bad as it’s so often portrayed today.

Source

LG begins mass production of first flexible, plastic e-ink displays

LG, that South Korean conglomerate that has mostly spent the last few years fading into Samsung’s shadow, has just announced that it has begun mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

The new plastic display has a resolution of 1024×768 and is six inches across the diagonal, which is comparable to the Kindle and Nook. Because it’s made of plastic and not glass, though, the LG display is half the weight (14g) and 30% thinner (0.7mm) than a comparable, glass e-ink panel. Existing e-book readers need to be thick (and heavy) to protect the glass display, but LG is promising that its display is a lot more rugged. The press release says that the plastic display survives repeated 1.5-meter drop tests and break/scratch tests with a small hammer, and that it’s flexible up to 40 degrees from the mid point.

Technology-wise, it’s not very clear how LG’s e-paper actually works. The press release suggests that LG is using a conventional TFT process, which hints that they’ve cracked Electronics on Plastic by Laser Release (EPLaR). EPLaR is basically a technique of embedding electrophoretic ink capsules in a plastic substrate, but using existing manufacturing processes, rather than building a whole new factory (unlike E Ink, which makes displays for the Kindle and other e-book readers). The press release constantly refers to EPD as an “E-Paper Display,” but that acronym is usually reserved for ElectroPhoretic Display.

In short, though, LG is promising plastic e-ink displays that are thinner and more power efficient, and because anyone with a TFT process can make displays in this way (Samsung, Sharp), they will also be cheaper. Everyone wins! (Well, except E Ink).

Now, suffice it to say, flexible e-ink displays have some rather exciting applications. Unlike flexible OLED displays, which have been around for a while, e-ink displays are cheap to produce and can run for months on a small battery. I’ll be the first to admit that I adore my Kindle, but I’d love a device that’s slightly less rigid. With plastic e-ink displays, you could actually create an e-book reader that’s the size, shape, and flexibility of a book; it could even be made predominantly of paper!

In January last year, the head of LG R&D said that it had produced a plastic, e-ink 19-inch color display — the same size as a tabloid newspaper. The amount of energy (and money) that we would save if we used e-paper instead of paper would be astronomical. And then there’s product packaging, credit cards, and so on. Our sister site Geek.com has a feature on the future of e-inkthat’s well worth reading. Just thinking out loud, I wonder if larger e-ink displays will be able to put a dent in the popularity of tablets like the iPad. It’s unlikely that e-ink will ever compete with LCDs when it comes to watching videos or playing games, but e-ink definitely has the edge on reading.

According to LG, the first plastic display-toting e-readers are expected to emerge in Europe “at the beginning of next month,” with the US presumably following swiftly after.

[Image credit]

Early Snapdragon S4 benchmarks could spell trouble for Tegra 3

When Nvidia began talking about its next-generation Kal-El chip, the one that would eventually become the Tegra 3, it seemed like 2012 would be Nvidia’s year. Tegra 2 was Nvidia’s first ARM part to gain any real traction, but Tegra 3 was promising to solidify the company’s mobile presence with quad-core power. However, the more news that comes out about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4, the more it looks like Nvidia might have miscalculated.

HTC’s LTE-packing One X Android phone is due to arrive in a few months, and it will be bringing with it the first Snapdragon S4 system-on-a-chip (SoC). The international HSPA+ version of the phone will have a Tegra 3 inside, but some new benchmarks are making it look like the S4′s two cores could be better than Tegra’s four. An AT&T employee who claims to be testing the HTC One X has posted some impressive benchmarks that show the dual-core device soundly beating the Tegra 3.

Quadrant is a benchmark that most Android users should be familiar with by now. This tool measures the raw CPU, I/O, and GPU performance of an ARM chip. The Snapdragon S4 was able to hit a very high score of 4952, whereas the Tegra 3 SoC usually pulls down just shy of 4000. To put things in perspective, the Galaxy Nexus with a TI OMAP4 scores roughly 2200 in Quadrant, and the original Transformer with Tegra 2 gets a little over 2400.

A more real-world test is the Vellamo web benchmark, which runs a device through various scripting and rendering tests. The HTC One X with a Snapdragon S4 attained nearly 2500 in Vellamo, with Tegra 3 scoring less than 1500. Not only is that a huge gap, but it could indicate a real difference in the user experience. A device running a Snapdragon S4 could render web pages faster and scroll more smoothly than one using a Tegra 3. A Galaxy Nexus manages almost 1200, and the first Transformer hits almost 1300. Frankly, the Tegra 3 should be doing better.

The problem here is that Nvidia is emphasizing cores, not architecture. The Tegra 2 SoC used two ARM Cortex-A9 application processor cores, which was standard for the time. In designing the Tegra 3, Nvidia upped the number of cores to four, but kept the 40nm Cortex-A9 architecture. Nvidia did innovate with the 4-Plus-1 “companion core” for low-power computation, but Qualcomm went another way entirely.

Qualcomm has always designed its own ARM cores instead of licensing the architecture from ARM Holdings. The Snapdragon SoCs do license and make use of the same ARM instruction set, though. In Snapdragon S4, Qualcomm shrank its manufacturing process and designed the 28nm Krait core. This part is now showing itself to be incredibly fast, even in a dual-core arrangement.

Krait was built to compete with the next generation Cortex-A15 cores from ARM, not Cortex-A9. Nvidia isn’t getting to A15 until late in 2012. In the meantime, Nvidia will have to do what it does best: schmooze with developers. Nvidia has a lot of experience working with game designers, as evidenced by the great Tegra-only games in the Play Store. Despite not being the fastest part, the Tegra 3 might still play games better than the new Snapdragon.

Nvidia works with developers to tie gaming engines into Tegra at the hardware level. Shadowgun from Madfinger Games might be the most prominent example of this, but many other games simply work better on Tegra chips. It is this experience, especially on tablets, that Nvidia will need to push in 2012 as faster Snapdragon parts start to hit the market.

The other point of view is that benchmarking tools don’t really take advantage of all four cores in Tegra 3 efficiently — but then again, neither do most regular apps. The ultimate test will come later this spring when The HTC One X appears in both Tegra 3 and Snapdragon S4 variants. Then we can compare the two chips running the same software and see how much difference that new ARM architecture really makes.

Source

Researchers create flexible, transparent, 3D non-volatile memory

Speaking at the American Chemical Society, James Tour of Rice University has apparently demonstrated non-volatile 3D memory chips that are transparent, flexible enough to be folded like paper, and capable of withstanding temperatures up to 1,000F (537C). According to Tour, devices based on his 3D memory could survive an accidental trip to the tumble dryer, or “even a voyage to Mars.”

Furthermore, and perhaps most excitingly, this 3D memory is fashioned from silicon oxide, an age-old, cheap, and very-well-understood darling of the semiconductor industry that can easily be manipulated using existing CMOS processes.

While the American Chemical Society press release is infuriatingly short on details, PubMed actually has the (paywalled) research paper in question. In short, it seems like applying voltage to the (non-conductive dielectric) silicon oxide creates conductive channels of silicon nanocrystals — a conductive pathway that persists until a different voltage is applied. The silicon oxide needs to be fashioned into a thin channel (pictured below), but apart from that Tour’s resistive switch seems very simple. α-C, in case you’re wondering, is a thin layer of carbon that acts as the electrodes.

If this sounds a lot like the memristors being developed by HP, you’d be right. Like memristors, Tour’s new silicon oxide memory is capable of very fast switching (sub-100ns) and has a high switching threshold. Because the device is so simple (it’s really just a thin layer of silicon oxide with two terminals — no metal at all!), and the silicon nanocrystal pathway is so small (on the scale of 5nm), Tour seems hopeful that his memory can be scaled to very high densities. Like memristors, there’s also the possibility that conventional logic can be built from these silicon nanocrystal gates, though little research has been done in that area yet.

Moving forward, Tour says that the technology is patented and that he’s talking to OEMs in the hope of getting his 3D memory into products. It isn’t clear why the new memory is transparent (or whether it’s transparent at high densities), but if this is really the case then it would be killer to embed memory in displays and touchscreen assemblies, or combined with OLED tech and transparent lithium-ion batteries this could be the basis of a semi-transparent, flexible e-book reader or similar. Moving memory into the display could result in thinner smartphones and tablets, too. Being amenable to 3D stacking is obviously a boon, but to be honest, Samsung, Micron, and co are already working on 3D DRAM and flash.

Personally, I would remain a little dubious about Tour’s new memory until we actually see a photo of it in practice. It seems odd to make claims of transparency and flexibility, and then fail to provide the proof.

Updated: Rice University has furnished us with a photo! If you look closely, you can see some faint structures. There’s no word on the density of the memory, however. We also have a video of Tour’s presentation at the American Chemical society (embedded below).

http://www.ustream.tv/embed/recorded/21406611

Read more about the future of flash memory, and the death of CPU scaling

Source

500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up

You’ve heard of the Manhattan Project — the Allied research and development program that resulted in two nuclear bombs being dropped on Japan and the end of World War II — and now it’s time to learn about one of its successors, Project Matterhorn, a Cold War program to control and harness thermonuclear reactions to create fusion power.

Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms fuse together (usually hydrogen) to form a heavier atom (helium), and releasing a vast amount of energy in the process. This process can only occur at incredibly high temperatures, such as the center of a star (such as our Sun). Every second, the Sun fuses 500 million tons of hydrogen into helium, releasing about 5 million tons of gamma rays that eventually heat and illuminate Earth. For a long time (Project Matterhorn started in 1951), nuclear fusion has been considered a very desirable power source because the fuel is virtually free, and the process releases vast amounts of energy and no pollutants.

There are two competing approaches for the artificial creation of nuclear fusion: Magnetic confinement, which uses massive magnetic force to contain the fusing plasma within a tokamak(doughnut) device, and inertial confinement, which uses lasers to create enough heat and pressure to trigger nuclear fusion. Magnetic confinement is usually considered a better prospect for the limitless production of clean energy — and indeed, magnetic confinement will be used by the 500-megawatt ITER fusion reactor in France — but a lot of work is still being done on inertial confinement by the likes of California’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), which uses 500 trillion watts of laser light to kick-start fusion reactions.

So far the main problem with fusion power generation is that it doesn’t actually produce more thermal energy than the electrical energy required to keep the reaction going. In its current form, fusion power is useless. Hopefully, though, a new discovery made by Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) — the home of Project Matterhorn in the ’50s and ’60s — could result in magnetic confinement fusion that breaks even, or even produceselectricity.

Basically, to keep fusion going you need to sustain a temperature of around 11 million degrees Celsius, which requires a huge amount of electricity. Fusion chambers are usually lined with heat-resistant carbon tiles in an attempt to reduce wastage, but the problem is that protons and neutrons escaping from the fusion reaction hit the wall, cool down, and then bounce back into the reaction, reducing the temperature. Electricity must then be used to increase the temperature back to 11 million Celsius.

The PPPL, led by Bruce Koel, have found that a thin layer of lithium metal (the third element in the Periodic Table) absorbs these protons and neutrons, preventing them from bouncing back into the pot, and thus reducing the power requirement of keeping the fusion reaction going. The research is still in its early stages — Koel and co are now analyzing whether lithium is viable over the long term — but so far, PPPL seems fairly confident that lithium will enable the construction of smaller, more efficient fusion reactors.

Meanwhile, at ITER, a vast fusion chamber that’s three stories high is due to begin fusing deuterium-tritium fuel in 2026. ITER is hoping to produce 500 megawatts over 1,000 seconds from just 50 megawatts of input power and 0.5 grams of hydrogen fuel. If it’s a success, an actual fusion power plant, called DEMO, will be built. NIF, the 500-trillion-watt “star power” laser fusion center, hopes that 2012 will see the first experiment that produces more power than it consumes — and pending successful ignition, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will begin full scale planning on the LIFE power plant.

The Lithium Tokamak Experiment (LTX), where Bruce Koel and his coworkers are carrying out their lithium-related experiments.

The exterior of the National Spherical Torus Experiment, the PPPL’s main fusion chamber. The flag is a nice touch, I thought.

An interior shot of the NSTX’s fusion chamber (looks a lot like the fusion chamber at the National Ignition Facility, eh?)

Another internal shot of the NSTX, with a human for scale.

A technician fiddling with the magnetic systems that will create plasma at NSTX.

Source

It’s all just bits

bit [bit] noun 1. A single, basic unit of information, used in connection with computers and information theory. Abinary digit.

Modern society is ruled, dominated, and slavishly beholden to one of mankind’s most simple machinations: The binary digit. Whether it is a flash of light, surge of electrons, or rug held over a smoky fire, the bit merely represents on or off, and yet it underpins almost every facet of human life. Without bits and bytes, almost anything that is more complex than opening a window or taking the trash out would be impossible.

Without bits, your computer would not work. Heck, without bits the equipment used to make your computer wouldn’t work — your computer would simply cease to exist. Without bits, you wouldn’t be able to make telephone calls, or surf the web on your phone. Without bits your house’s heating system wouldn’t work (and neither would the timer on your oven, or your Tivo DVR). Bits and bytes are the basis for modern banking, the stock markets, television, and of course the internet.

Binary is the underlying language by which modern humans interact with the world. We might usehigher-level languages such as English or Chinese or C++, but when it eventually comes down to transmission across a network or controlling a machine, it’s all binary. When you IM a friend, your words are encoded into bits, squirted across a network, and then decoded back into words. Ditto telephone calls, SMS, and email. When you tap the brake or accelerator in your car, your foot’s movement is translated into a stream of binary bits that control an array of motors, pumps, and actuators. When you click Print in Word, your document — words, images, formatting and all — israstered as a dumb bitmap and sent to your printer.

Perhaps more chillingly, binary is also the language by which computers and machines communicate, often autonomously. Many robots, such as the pork ham deboner or Petman, are primarily governed by sensory feedback, which always boils down to bits and bytes. To take a more common example, even your home computer has a huge number of system processes that constantly communicate using binary, often without any human interaction.Stuxnet, the virus that reportedly damaged Iran’s uranium enrichment program, was only possible because most of the world’s industrial machines are controlled by SCADA computer systems, which of course solely operate and communicate using bits.

Our reliance on bits grows every day. It was only a few years ago that TV (and cinema!) was predominantly analog, and now it’s almost entirely digital: Free-to-air digital TV, DVDs, Netflix, Hulu, Tivo, cable, satellite, 5K Red cameras; it’s all digital. Radio is moving slower, but eventually it too will make the jump. Even the printed word — the technology that bootstrapped this scientific, high-tech world that we live in — is going digital, thanks to the Kindle and iPad.

Your household probably still has a lot of analog equipment — taps, door locks, toasters — but with digital thermostats, smart appliances, automation, multi-room sound systems, and blanket WiFi, digital is definitely making inroads. Homes aren’t rebuilt very often, so it will take time for digital bits to fully usurp their clunky, rusted, whirring, analog ancestors, but eventually your house will just be another node on the internet. If you look at offices, shops, and other commercial spaces that are constantly rejuvenated, you can already see automatic faucets, automatic doors, digital displays and billboards, and myriad other binary-powered devices.

In short, bits are incredibly important, and will only become more so. It stands to reason, then, that whoever controls the transmission, storage, and computation of binary data would also be very important.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the PC market, where manic competition has vied for supremacy since the ’70s, and has recently been redoubled with the emergence of internet portals, smartphones, and tablets. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to be the focal point of your binary existence is the lifeblood of companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Then there’s the continuing development of larger and larger hard drives; the very rapid growth of the flash memory industry; and barely a week goes by without the launch of a new interconnect like Thunderbolt or through-silicon-via, or a group of researchers breaking a wired or wireless transmission speed record.

It’s a little bit humbling when you stop to think about it, but our digital lives — from driving a car to checking Facebook to watching Fringe — are constructed from just two numbers: 0 and 1. Pushing the gas pedal and posting an emo status update are as disparate as it gets, but they’re both performed by transmitting a long stream of binary digits.

It is this universality that imbues binary with such power: There’s absolutely nothing to stop you from using the same network for any digital device. Take USB, for example, which allows you to connect multiple devices to a computer over a single pair of copper wires. We usually only wire up high-tech devices with USB, but Boeing you could just as easily use USB as the central network in a fly-by-wire airplane. If you really wanted, you could connect an Xbox, some game pads, and an aircraft’s controls to the same network — it’s all just bits.

Cable and cell networks are also a good example. Cable TV started off as just that — a network of coaxial cables carrying analog TV signals. Over time, the networks switched to digital, and thus became a viable pipe for any binary data. It’s now common to receive TV, internet, and telephone over a single copper pair (or optic fiber, as the case may be). Cellular networks started off as analog and voice-only (1G), but as soon as they made the switch to digital (2G GSM) and then packet-switching (3G, 4G LTE) they began squeezing more and more over the air: SMS, MMS, video calling, internet access, and, well, just about any other digital service. It’s all just bits. Other wireless topologies exist, such as satellite and infinite-capacity radio vortexes, but due to low throughput, short range, and high transmission power, these all play second fiddle to fiber for the bulk, backbone transmission of binary.

Eastern Telegraph Co. (British Empire) cable network in — 1901!

Fiber is the undisputed king of bits. Just look at the billion-dollar fiber optic cables that are about to being laid in the Arctic Ocean — and these are just three of the hundreds of fiber optic cables that already wrap the world in a web of high-speed, low-latency connectivity. In these cables, small cores of just a few dozen glass fibers carry the bulk of the world’s binary data. TV, radio, multi-player Call of Duty, encrypted intelligence and military missives, lectures broadcast by universities, terabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider — it’s all just bits, and it all travels at the speed of light along glass fibers that are hundreds of miles long and yet only the width of a human hair.

At some point we will need to transmit binary data across the Galaxy Network (Galnet) to far-off space ships and planets, and unless we work out a way to communicate using quantum entangled particles (or neutrinos?), wireless will eventually usurp fiber.

For the time being, then, whoever owns the cables owns the bits, and whoever owns the bits owns the world. It’s a little bit worrying when you consider that almost every cable in the world is privately owned — including national fiber and telephone networks — but when you bear in mind that bits are universal and can be transmitted using technologies as low tech as Morse code or cups-and-string, you really have nothing to worry about.

What you should worry about, though, is the inexorable march of every technology from analog to digital: From mechanical clocks, to quartz movements; from analog tuning knobs, to digital receivers; from paper and pen, to screen and keyboard. Sometimes, late at night, I try to predict the next technology that will fall victim to binary. There aren’t many analog things left — and really, short of heading into the wild to set up some kind of tribal, hyper-Luddite civilization, there isn’t anything you can do about it.

Source

James Cameron reaches the deepest point on Earth

After years of preparation culminating in a frenzy of test dives in the South Pacific,James Cameron has become the first solo explorer of the Challenger Deep, which is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench — the deepest point in the world’s oceans. Previously measured at about 35,800 feet below sea level, we’ll know a great deal more about the Deep as the data from Cameron’s effort is analyzed. His submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, has already been to the bottom and back without him, helping give Cameron and his team confidence that it would safely survive his attempt.

One of the frustrating issues with deep sea exploration is the difficulty of spotting marine creatures. With almost no natural light and a very low density of life, its easy to come away empty-handed and not learn about life far below the ocean’s surface. As with so many aspects of the effort, Cameron and his team have an answer even for that challenge. They sent down an unmanned “lander” to the bottom armed with chemical bait to begin to attract fish and other sea creatures that might be around. Cameron’s plan has been to use sonar to rendezvous with it. His massive 8-foot panel of LED lights and high-tech 5K RED video camera gives him a good chance to capture — in image only — for posterity some previously un-recorded denizens of the Challenger Deep.

The lander is just the icing on the cake of the technologies Cameron’s team has employed in his effort. Multiple fail-safe systems to bring him back to the surface in case of emergency may be obvious life-protecting features, but he can even collect and drink the perspiration that collects on the inner surface of his 4-foot spherical cockpit if he runs out of water. The sub’s robot arm is capable of collecting and storing up to 60 pounds of samples, so there should be plenty more interesting news as scientists are able to work through them, assuming Cameron has been able to successfully pilot the sub and run the robot arm in the very challenging environment. Cameron did slow the final portion of his descent at least partially so the sub wouldn’t kick up so much sediment when it reached bottom that he couldn’t see — a mistake the Trieste made when it made the same trip over 50 years ago.

Not one to miss out on maximizing a historic moment, Cameron invited Lieutenant Don Walsh — the only living person who has been to the Deep — to join him on his surface ship, the Mermaid Sapphire, to celebrate. Paul Allen has also joined the fun, motoring his 414-foot super yacht, Octopus, to the area Friday. For those without their own means of transport to the Ulithi atoll to see Cameron in person, National Geographic has helpfully provided a 2-minute video outlining the major milestones of the dive.

Read more about the technology behind James Cameron’s submersible

Source