How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer?

“With all the buzz about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing I got to thinking, how powerful were the computers that “took us to the Moon?” It turns out, they were nothing short of amazing. If you’ve never had a nerdy bone in your body, feel free to skip this post. But, if you ever laid on your back under the stars and thought about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the Space Shuttle, read on and see if you’re as geek-struck as I was researching this.”

Continue reading How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer?

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Adobe, NVidia working to improve Flash Player performance

I enjoyed my MSI Wind netbook while I had it, but there was one task that always gave it fits: running Flash-based anything. Games stuttered, YouTube clips were choppy, and the system’s tiny fan spun like a tin can in a tornado.

Owners of newer netbooks featuring NVidia’s upcoming Tegra system-on-a-chip or Broadcom’s Crystal HD will be glad to hear that Adobe is teaming up with NVidia to produce a version of the Flash player tuned for netbooks and MIDs. The goal is to provide full h.264-powered HD video to more mobile devices.

Another result of the partnership: Flash will likely see significant performance gains on other NVidia chipsets as well. At last you’ll be able to put your multi-GPU SLI configuration to good use while enjoying your favorite Time Wasters!

[ via ZDNet ]

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Amazon to release larger Kindle for newspapers and textbooks

Rumors have been floating around this week about a new, large-screen version of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. The New York Times seemingly confirmed that the device is for real, and it could be released “as early as this week,” according to their industry sources. The Times pieces focuses, not surprisingly, on the larger Kindle as a platform for newspapers and magazines, whose pages didn’t quite translate to the current Kindle’s smaller screen.

As much as a newspaper-friendly Kindle might matter to the future of print journalism there is some speculation about other important uses, like textbooks. Some websites are reporting that the new device will be tested at a handful of universities in the fall. It would be phenomenal not to carry around several pounds of reading material for classes, especially if the Kindle versions of the books cost less than the paper editions.

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Self-assembling Nano elements – Changing the face of storage

Imagine a world where you could store your entire life – Books, movies, music, your favourite VG’s, every tax document (hard to believe I know) on an array the size of a quarter? Well, it may be closer than you think. Super geniuses at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, demonstrated the feasibility of such a technique.

“Generating laterally ordered, ultradense, macroscopic arrays of nanoscopic elements will revolutionize the microelectronic and storage industries. We used faceted surfaces of commercially available sapphire wafers to guide the self-assembly of block copolymer microdomains into oriented arrays with quasi–long-range crystalline order over arbitrarily large wafer surfaces. Ordered arrays of cylindrical microdomains 3 nanometers in diameter, with areal densities in excess of 10 terabits per square inch, were produced. The sawtoothed substrate topography provides directional guidance to the self-assembly of the block copolymer, which is tolerant of surface defects, such as dislocations. The lateral ordering and lattice orientation of the single-grain arrays of microdomains are maintained over the entire surface. The approach described is parallel, applicable to different substrates and block copolymers, and opens a versatile route toward ultrahigh-density systems.”

1 Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
2 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea.
3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Department of Chemistry, University of Berkeley, and Material Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

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Washington & GE have their heads in the clouds…MS where are you?

First of all, what is Cloud Computing? 
These days, there is so much buzz around cloud computing! The problem is that majority of people out there talking about it can’t define it. They refer to terms like “distributed,” “clusters,” “parallel processing” but ask them to define the purpose and you’ll have them at a loss. FYI Buzz word killers – The purpose of cloud computing is to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software.

Definition of Cloud computing from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia…

Cloud computing is Internet-based (“cloud”) development and use of computer technology (“computing”). The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet (based on how it is depicted in computer network diagrams) and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals. It is a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet (“in the cloud”) without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing “Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc.”

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

So where does Washington & GE fit in?

Currently, more than 500,000 business and organizations utilize a cloud computing platform for SaaS & Utility Computing. And Washington has decided to ink a deal with Google that plans to move 38,000 municipal employees over to Google Apps. The agreement was signed in June 08 at an estimated cost of $500,000 per year. Included in this all-access-pass for Washington – Gmail, Google Docs, Google Video (for business…yeah?) and Google Sites.

Meanwhile, GE inked a deal with ZOHO (http://www.zoho.com) for use of their collection of online apps.

The real question that you should ask – where does Microsoft stand and what do they have up their sleeve? While the big dog (MS) may be content with the success of their offline Office Suite, right now, what’s going to happen if ‘Cloud Computing’ continues to take off like we all hope it does?

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Gmail – Now with Mp3’s…player included

 

By now everyone you know has a Gmail account and most likely they do not use all of the allotted storage. We suggest using your/new 7GB Gmail account for MP3 storage.

Try this out:

- Create a new Gmail account by sending yourself an invite. A fresh account is recommended for this particular purpose.

- Open your new Gmail account and email an Mp3 to yourself as an attachment. It will then show up in your inbox. Click on your newly received email and click the “play” button to open Google’s built-in Mp3 player.

Now that you know that it works, from this point forward you should always include the artist, title, album with each mp3 that you would like to store on Gmail servers. This way you can always quickly find the song you’re looking for.

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Toyota brings fuel cell dream closer to reality

 

TOKYO (AFP) — Toyota Motor Corp. said Friday it had developed a new zero-emission fuel-cell vehicle that has a longer cruising distance than previous models and can operate in freezing temperatures.

Japanese companies have been working to create a viable zero-emission car running on fuel cells, which produce electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, leaving water as the only by-product.

Toyota’s system “was enhanced to further improve cruising distance and low-temperature starts, which had presented obstacles to widespread fuel-cell vehicle use,” the company said in a statement.

Toyota engineers managed to control the amount of water produced inside the fuel-cell system, which previously interfered with electrical generation at low temperatures. Fuel efficiency was also improved, the automaker said.

Toyota said it would continue to strive to improve the durability and reduce the cost of fuel-cell vehicles to bring about their widespread use.

Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe has said previously that it will take years to make eco-friendly cars running on fuel cells commercially viable.

Besides the hefty price, motorists would also need an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations if they are to take the cars on the road.

Toyota was a pioneer of petrol-electric hybrid cars which are attracting growing interest at a time of soaring oil prices and increasing concerns about global warming.

The International Energy Agency estimated Friday that nearly a billion electric or fuel-cell vehicles may need to be put on the road as part of an “energy technology revolution” to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

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