Eden.fm

Laser hard drives promise 1Tbits/s data transfer .

The Future of Things talks about the advances in the optical storage technology industry, the site claims we may see the first laser-hard drive hybrids within about five years. The first laser hard drives could reach speeds of 1Tbits/s while future femtosecond based laser drives may reach 100Tbits/s and beyond.

Although both major challenges have been solved, Stanciu still believes that it will take the industry approximately 5 more years before we can actually see commercial laser-hard drive hybrids. Even with the cheap picosecond lasers existing today, a laser hard drive could reach a phenomenal speed of about 1 TBits/s. In comparison, a top of the line hard drive today can reach a data transfer rate of about 1GBits/s, and advanced solid state flash drives can reach about 2-3 times that speed. In the more distant future femtosecond based laser drives could potentially reach unimaginable speeds of up to 100TBits/s and beyond.

Japan Optic Fiber Internet @ DannyChoo.com

The optic connection we got is a 100Mbps Hikari line from NTT which costs a measly 1,022 yen per month for the first year

Business lines do exist but cost about 40,000 yen per month for a 1Gb optic connection. For that price they guarantee a constant 1GB up n down.

Another nice thing about Japanese Internet connections is that there is no bandwidth cap

DailyTech – Scientists Ready New Nanobots to Swim in Human Blood Stream .

Enter the nanobots — scientists at Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia’s Monash University have developed tiny nanobot micromotors that are a mere quarter of a millimeter, powered by tiny piezoelectric motors, capable ofswimming in the human bloodstream.  They are putting the finishing touches on the motors and readying them for clinical tests on animals and, before long, humans.  

While the team is still devising ways to remote control the new robots, they feel that they have a solid solution for an autonomous motor design in the form of piezoelectricity.  Piezoelectricity is the ability of devices to generate electric pulses based on mechanical movement or vibrations.  Piezoelectric devices include computer’s clocks, electric guitar pickups, electric stove lighters, and some inkjet printer heads.

In the human body, the flow of blood provides abundant kinetic energy.  While a nanobot is too small to likely have a useful battery, it could exploit this kinetic energy to power tiny micromotors, the goal of the Australian researchers.  

18 Creative Modern Bath & Shower Designs | WebUrbanist.

Cool showers!

Click for more

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/round_trip_with_endeavour.html

I ran a 3DMark 2006 test today to compare Vista and W7 beta1 (both 64-bit):

Looks like you can link a progressbar of your application to its taskbar button now, looks cool!

I had been delaying this for a while and finally got around to it. I’ve had a watercooling setup for 1.5 years, but the past few months had been horrible with leaks in the CPU block and really bad performance. Also my PSU was being more noisy than I’d like. I was thinking of getting a new water cooling block, specifically the G-flow from Innovatek, which looked pretty good, but I was really tired with pita and expensive maintenance of water cooling.

So I decided for a heatsink/fan for the CPU and I’d close the WC circuit to the GPU. I bought a Thermalright Ultra 120-extreme and a Corsair HX620w PSU. I looked at many others before deciding for those 2.

My current setup: look at this horrendous picture, a damaged and patched numerous times CPU wc block which still leaks, and some rags behind it to save the GPU.

Also check these temperatures (load and idle): My CPU is an AMD Phenom 9850 BE (65 nm)

Really bad for a water-cooling setup, isn’t it?

Ok let’s go with the goodies. Let’s check the heatsink first. Thas thing is frigging huge and heavy, it’s scary thinking it will be hanging off my motherboard:

It comes with adapters for AM2 and 775, some anti-vibration rubbers, clips for a fan, thermal paste, and and the ULNA (Ultra Low Noise Adapter): this is simple a cable adapter which reduces the voltage from 12v to 5v.
The fan clips are a pita to insert, although Thermalright has a new fan adapter now for sale, and also a socket 1366  version (for i7)

The ULNA:

Now the PSU:

I had been wanting a modular PSU for ages to remove some unneeded cables from my case. It comes with many sets of SATA and IDE cables, 2x GPU, 4 and 8 pin extra motherboard plug, and some adapters for floppy etc. There is also a manual complete with a bunch of useless Euro languages.

Now the Noctua fan. This is a very famous brand for their awesome performance and low noise:

It took me a while to remove the CPU WC block and re-do the tubes to close the circuit to the GPU. While I was at it, I decided to finally arrange the cables in my case properly, which are currently a mess:

Yeah I know what you are thinking.. but I’m finally fixing it!. Also look at my older PSU, what a mess with those long cables.. most of which I didn’t need.

So I started re-arranging the cables for the motherboard (speaker, power-on, reset etc.. which go all the way to the top of the case), 4 UV tubes, front panel with card readers and e-sata, and my Aerogate II (fan controller and temp. display).

Next I proceeded to insert the new PSU. I had some trouble here because it seems to be larger than standard(?) and the anti-vibrations bar of the case won’t fit properly:

Applying the paste: these cards work great for this

Inserting the heatsink was quite a pita with the AM2 adapter: the back plate always moves back and I have to push really hard for the screws to reach the holes.
I had read some reviews which said the surface wasn’t properly flat, so I took a look but couldn’t figure out if it was like those or not.. what do you think?

Finally inserted:

Now tidying up the rest of the cables etc:
I love these sata plugs with the clip, you need to push slightly to unplug them so they don’t accidentally disconnect (very easy with the normal sata cables). Also the PSU has these nice IDE plugs where you press slightly and it comes off for easy removal.

Almost done:

Re-filling the coolant tank:

And we are finally done.

Both the Noctua fan and the Corsair PSU’s were incredibly silent. The PSU one barely moved at all (it adjusts according to temperature or load).

I plugged the Noctua to the AerogateII to check the RPM:

It’s rated 800-1200 RPM so I guess it’s ok. Hopefully it will work nicely when I enable C’n’Q to adjust the RPM according to load. I also tried with the ULNA, but with that it didn’t report RPM info (showed as 0) somehow..

After that I placed a temperature sensor in the heatsink and tested it in 3 ways: 1) without fan. 2) with the fan. 3) with fan and the ULNA. (Note: this isn’t the CPU temp., it’s the heatsink’s)

1)

2)

3)

Let’s close the case:

And finally the awaited testing..

1) Idle with fan:

2) Load with fan:

3) GPU idle (it should be better now as it has the WC all to itself)

4) Idle without fan (I gave it a couple minutes to warm up)

5) Load without fan It eventually reached 70-72 C

Ok, that’s pretty much it. After completely closing the case etc. the temp raised a little bit but that is to be expected: the fan orientation with the AM2 socket is awful, and my case fans setup is far from perfect. I will eventually get a new case with better air flow and the PSU on the bottom, and I will get a new video-card with passive cooling. (a heatsink without fan)

Price:

– Corsair HX620w PSU: 124 euro ($165)
– Thermalright Ultra 120-Extreme: 59 euro ( $78)
– Noctua 120mm fan: 19 euro ($25)
– 1L coolant: 20 euro ($26)
– Shipping: ~17 euro ($23)

= 239 euro ($315)

The Thermaltake Armor LCS case costed me ~250 euro back then ($330)

Final thoughts: These products rock, it was worth the money! (much more silent now). Also.. ThermalTake products suck, I’m not buying one ever again. (old PSU was also thermaltake)

Alright, thanks for reading!

NEC develops Japanese-English interpretation software for cell phones › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion.

The new software is specialized for compact cell phone CPUs and provides automatic interpretation from Japanese to English and English to Japanese. Demonstrations of the software have been embedded in NEC cell phones, which independently provide interpretation without the need for network connections or outside servers. Furthermore, only a few moments are required for the software to recognize a word or phrase before an interpretation is conveniently displayed.

NEC said the development stems from a high precision “compact and scalable voice recognition engine” and a “lexical-rule-based translation device.”

Saturn’s Titan -A Giant Organics Factory.

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

At an eye popping minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan has a surface of liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane with tholins believed to make up its dunes. The term “tholins,” coined by Carl Sagan in 1979, describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.

Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan’s surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth’s oil and gas reserves. Dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.

Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan’s lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.

Legit Reviews – NVIDIA Ion Platform Benchmark Preview – NVIDIA Ion Reference Platform .

At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, NVIDIA was showing off a new reference platformthat they were calling the world’s smallest fully capable visual computer. Features like DirectX 10 graphics, NVIDIA CUDA technology, and HD video are now possible in a 3″ x 4″ motherboard. This PC is so small that it fits in the palm of your hand with room left to spare. The system is made possible thanks to Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M core logic MCP with 16 integrated GeForce graphics cores. Together this chipset and processor make up the NVIDIA Ion Platforms, which is one of the most interesting PC designs that we have seen in years.

DailyTech – New Research Brings Organic Solar Cells Closer to Light of Day .

New U of T research looks to create organic solar cells by using special quantum effect

Imagine having cheap, printable solar cells at your fingertips, woven into your clothing, streaming power into your mobile electronics.  Organic electronics, a field which includes organic solar cells and organic transistor circuits, has many advantages, the biggest of which is the ability to be printed easily, and the ability to flex without breaking.

DailyTech – Researchers Discover Source of Moon’s Magnetism .

Moon rock harvested by Apollo astronauts unveils secret of Moon’s magnetism

One of the big questions that have stumped scientists since the early exploration of the moon is why lunar rocks are magnetic. Earth’s magnetic field is produced by its rotating, iron core; something that the moon lacks.

Scientists at MIT believe they have finally solved the mystery. The scientists believe that about 4.2 billion years ago the moon had a liquid core that produced a strong magnetic field, similar to what the Earth has today.

DailyTech – Researchers Make Cloaking Breakthrough .

The researchers say that the latest advance in cloaking technology comes thanks to the development of a new series of mathematical algorithms that are used to guide the design and fabrication of the required exotic composites needed for the cloaking process. These exotic composite materials are known as metamaterials.

Windows 7: Play Crysis Without a GPU – Tom’s Hardware.

Microsoft unveiled one of Windows 7’s new features, which will allow games and other DirectX 10 and 10.1-based applications to run fully accelerated on obsolete graphics hardware, and even on systems with no graphics acceleration at all.

WARP Capabilities:

* Fully supports all Direct3D 10 and 10.1 feature
      o Fully supports all the precision requirements of the Direct3D 10 and 10.1 specification
      o Supports Direct3D 11 when used with FeatureLevel 9_1, 9_2, 9_3, 10_0 and 10_1
      o Supports all optional texture formats, such as multi-sample render targets and sampling from float surfaces.
      o Supports anti-aliased, high quality rendering up to 8x MSAA.
      o Supports anisotropic filtering
      o Supports 32 and 64 bit applications as well as large address aware 32 bit applications.
* The minimum specification for WARP10 is the same as Windows Vista, specifically:
      o Minimum 800MHz CPU.
      o MMX, SSE or SSE2 is *not* required
      o Minimum 512MB of RAM.