The Wait Is Over
Let’s say you just got to work and you are booting up your PC, this is where the waiting begins. You have to wait for your hard drive to turn on and get its head in the game. Oh and of course as you are waiting for your system to boot up your boss walks by and definitely notices you sitting there not doing anything. “But it’s not my fault I was waiting for the computer to…” Next thing you know you are putting all your stuff in an empty Hammermill paper box. Well this my friends may be a thing of the past. Japan and the Netherlands teamed up to reinvent the hard drive; a year after its 50th anniversary. The physicists reign from Rabboud University Nijmegen of the Netherlands and Nihon University of Japan. They have devised a way to use lasers to flip the magnetic memory bit in hard drives. Currently, as it is, data is stored on hard drives via magnetic moments that are either in an ‘up’ or ‘down’ position. Then, a certain number of ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ correspond to a binary bit, which then in turn correspond to a piece of data as a whole. An actuator arm with a head at one end and a voice coil on the other control the amount of electricity that gets through the voice coil and on to the platter(the spinning disk inside) which may be spinning at speeds upwards of 15,000RPM. The physicists’ hard drive would use a laser concentrated to 5 micrometers on a piece of magnetic film. The pulse used to flip the bit would be 40 femtoseconds (10-15 s). “Ok, who cares and what does that mean?” Well it means that hard drives will be able to access data 50,000 times faster. Let’s put this in perspective: it takes you 10 minutes to get from your house to the grocery store, now we apply this hard drives speed to your trip now it only takes you 0.012 seconds to get to the store. This is an incredible feat and it is a commercially viable product. If a few minor kinks get worked out, like finding materials with a higher coercivity than the gadolinium, iron, cobalt alloy that they used in the experiments, the hard drives could be on the market in less than 10 years. One of the researchers has already patented the process, he says that anyone could do what they did the only problem would be concentrating a laser to a 50 micrometer spot. By the way 50 micrometers is smaller than the wavelength of the laser itself. So the Hammermill box will soon be a thing of the past, well at least in this instance…
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/30762
Labels: computers, Computing, Electronics, Industry
What’s Estonia?
Whether Al Gore made it or not, the internet maybe one of the only unadulterated pinnacles in America, right? Well according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the US ranks 24th worldwide in “broadband penetration”. Right behind Estonia, the country to the west of Russia, yeah that’s the one. The OECD describes “broadband penetration” as the percentage of homes connected. However, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) measures this problem in a very peculiar way: as long as a single building in the ZIP code- a school, church, private business- has a broadband connection, then everyone in the area gets counted as having access. The FCC’s definition of “broadband” is a little iffy as well. Anything over 200 Kbps is considered to be “broadband”. Other parts of the world blaze through the web at speeds up to 10 times faster. Some say that the lack of competition is the real problem. With only two real companies offering cable and broadband connections: AT&T and Verizon, it’s no wonder Americans have grown complacent to paying $40/month for 4Mbps while in Japan they $30/month for 50Mbps. Yeah that’s right 50Mbps. Despite all of this overwhelming evidence that the US is lagging in the broadband area FCC chairman Kevin Martin stated, “I think our polices are a success”. So hats off to Estonia.
Labels: Computing, Networking
Invensys Aquires Cimnet
Last week
Invensys announced completing the acquisition of
Cimnet.
Invensys today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Cimnet, Inc (OTC BB: CIMK), a Manufacturing Execution System ("MES") software company based in Pennsylvania, USA, and this acquisition is now being fully integrated into the Wonderware software business unit of Invensys. This acquisition has closed under the terms of the original agreement that was announced on May 3, 2007.
Existing Cimnet offerings will continue to be made available and enhanced for customers under the Wonderware Factelligence and the Wonderware DNC Professional brands. In addition, the acquired MES technology offerings are being integrated with Invensys' open industry standard based, ArchestrA technology, to ensure rapid deployment and ease of use by the large Invensys and Wonderware installed base of over 100,000 plants around the world.
Wonderware is one aquistion of Invensys that has enjoyed dramatic growth after being aquired by Invensys. If there is any such thing in this industry its become the defacto standard.
Labels: Computing, Industry
LCD Burn In
We are using a LCD's more and more. They have promise of not burning in the screens even though they monitor never changing displays. Images seem to get etched into them sooner than it did for our old glass screens.
First of all the LCD's don't really get burnt like the old CRT phosphors. The Liquid Crystal structure sort of gets tired. Lifehacker suggests:
- Create an all-white screen in a graphics application such as AppleWorks or Photoshop, and save it as a JPEG file.
- Use this as the image displayed by the screen saver.
- Turn the display brightness down (but not off) to preserve backlight bulb life.
They recommend leaving it like this for as long as the screen was left on. This might not make sense when we are talking about screens that have been on display for months. Leaving it on for several hours or over night can work also.
Labels: Computing
News Readers
While Gary Michell
hasn't joined the borg with
Google's new Reader.
I get most of my news through a "news aggregator" or "river of news." I've been using Radio Userland for over three years for this. Many people have switched over to Google Reader, but Google has gotten so big, that I'm hesitant to use it. A river of news means that I get a long list of feeds from the most recent to the oldest. My feeds consist of blogs and other news sources. Sometimes there's a serendipity of juxtaposition.
I think its worth a try. Its simple and works well. I've used a bunch of aggregators and this is one of the better ones.
Labels: Computing
The New Sneakernet
First, we had the original sneakernet. Moving files from one computer to the other using the venerable floppy. Some of us remember using 90K floppies, which seemed reasonable enough considering that the microcomputers at the time only supported 64K of memory. Although floppy sizes grew it didn't take long to figure out that floppy disks just didn't have a enough capacity to do the job. Along the way there were Bernoulee drives, optical drives, zip drives and LS 120 SuperDrives. The problem was that the drives were expensive and proprietary, none of the drives ever achieved a real acceptance among most users. CDs worked somewhat. They have 720 Megs of storage and the media is relatively cheap. The problem is that burning to them is time consuming and requires special software that isn't always compatible. Anyone who has burnt CDs have been a victim to Nero, or the Adaptec/Roxio suites. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It never seems to work correctly when you are in a hurry and is troublesome if you want to run real applications that might need real read write access. Even RW CDs are primarily a write once and read many times media.
Flash memory disks are nothing new. PCMCIA flashcards have been around forever and have a standard interface in most laptops. We at PCO installed a flashdrive run system in
MEPS 2. A bootable flash drive using DOS 6.22 and another drive that accepted flash cards. It held the programs, experiment procedures, and the collected data. A sneakernet in its finest hour.
USB thumb drives have evolved with the realization on how handy Digital camera memory can be. They are getting cheaper every day. It used to be that laptops were taken everywhere along with a box heaped full of floppies. The Texas heat and humidity helped assure that the files could be read from the floppies only every once in a while. The Laptop assured that I had all my utilities well in hand and carting it around was pretty good for body building. It also had my email programs with my contact information. Handheld PCs, a Personal Information Manager, work pretty good, but they don't work well for sneakernet functions.
USB thumbdrives are a good method of moving files around and can be a powerful tool. For instance:
- We enter a control room and the Unix based system needs to have some of its configuration and script files restored. We ask to borrow a networked PC. I plug in a USB drive.
- Open up Firefox, Thunderbird, or a FTP program on the USB drive. Fetch the file into my thumb drive.
- Unzip the file and use the command file2disk.exe to make a tared floppy.
The significance in this situation is the fact that I only needed to bring a thumbdrive into the control room and maybe a blank floppy. No tools I used left a footprint and there was no install process, because all the programs are "portable" (meaning there is no installation procedure, no writing to the registry, and no passwords are left behind).
A good place to start looking for portable programs would be at PortableApps.com. A suite of programs can be found there and a whole pile of other applications. Most notably OpenOffice.org Portable. This is a full featured office suite capable of presentations, spreadsheets, word processors and more compatible MS Office documents. It's free and can be compared to high priced applications.
An invaluable tool to me is Calc98, This is a scientific calculator that not only has any practical function I am ever going to use but has a great units conversion feature.
File2dsk & dsk2file Useful for storing Tarred Diskettes to PC files and back again. These are command line programs.
There are also versions of Thunderbird, and Firefox.
These days I find my self running around with a few thumbdrives in my pocket. Some for data backups, a couple for specific software installs, a couple to run a few utilities while "borrowing" a computer, and even a couple for crash recovery.
Labels: Computing
