AT&T has brought down new Terms of Service for its network customers. From now on, AT&T can terminate your connection for conduct that “tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” So AT&T customers aren’t allowed to write/podcast/vlog critical things about AT&T, its billing-practices, or its coopera

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Disks are way more complex than you know
Chips have a lot of brilliant technology, but disk drives are just as
complex. For example, current disks use 50 nanometer (nm) track sizes,
equivalent to the 45 nm feature sizes in the very latest chips. And
they read and write those tracks while spinning 120 times a second at a
10 nm flying height!

To illustrate this I’m going to focus on a presentation at DISKCON 2007 by longtime Toshiba researcher Dr. Hiroyuki Hieda.

200 Gbit/in² now
Disk platter size is a constant, so drive vendors have to get more bits
per square inch. Currently disks are at about 200 Gbit/in², close to the grain size of the plated metal.

When the grain is the same size as the track, the track starts to
bounce around quite a bit, making it difficult to read and write the
data.

[image courtesy Toshiba]

10 Tbit/in.² then
Current technology takes drives to the 1 Tbit/in.² range, or a 1 TB 2.5″ drive. Then where do we get the next 10x of drive density?

There are 2 good candidates, HAMR and BPM.

HAMR, BPM or both?
Most of the DISKCON engineers agreed that HAMR - Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording
- is the leading candidate. HAMR uses a laser to heat the recording
media before writing. The makes the spot easier to magnetize and, when
cool, makes the data much more stable.

[diagram courtesy Toshiba]

Bit patterned media
The other leading contender is BPM - Bit Patterned Media.
The dots magnetize as a group so they are more stable and they can be
tightly packed for density. Here’s a picture of a kind of BPM:

[photo courtesy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies]

This BPM sample is only 300,000,000,000 bits/in², far
short of the goal. Research into the self-assembly - i.e. the
spontaneous organization into ordered structures - of polymers has
shown that nice regular patterns of the requisite density can be
created, but then there is one more problem: how do you get the
patterns to line up in circular tracks?

Combine HAMR, BPM and electron-beam lithography
HAMR offers magnetic stability at very small feature sizes. BPM provides the tiny features. How do you get them lined up?

E-beam lithography. Often hailed as the next step
in chip manufacturing, but avoided because of cost and complexity,
e-beams enable much smaller feature sizes than visible or deep
ultraviolet light. The problem for chip vendors is that e-beams are
highly focused and slow to scan across a chip’s mask. Light is much
faster.

E-beams are viable for disks though. The e-beam creates a master
that stamps out millions of disk platters with nano-scale features.
That’s how CDs and DVDs are manufactured today, except for the e-beam
feature sizes.

Prototype self-assembled BPM + e-beamed groove
If current thinking holds, the 10 TB notebook drive will be built using
HAMR and self-assembled BPM on disk platters stamped out by e-beamed
masters. Here’s what a laboratory prototype looks like, up close and
personal:

.
[atomic force microscopy image courtesy Toshiba]

The Storage Bits take
Disk capacities double about every 2 years, so the 10 TB 2.5″ drive is
about 10 years away. While I’ve focused on the problems of the physical
media, disk storage researchers are banging away on a dozen major
research areas - including signal processing, servos and heads - to
make higher capacity storage possible.

I’d like to see the disk vendors do a better job of communicating
the incredible work they are doing. Storage is the hardest part of
modern computing, disk vendors are doing the heavy lifting, and they
get very little credit for all their hard work.

That is just wrong. Disk technology is even more amazing than chip
technology, but the engineering-driven disk companies are wallflowers
at the big technology dance

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The next big thing for Intel is little. The company has used its
Developer Forum, here, to extol the virtues of its forthcoming handheld
device platforms for allowing consumers to connect to the Internet.
Intel calls this “Internet in your pocket.”

Intel has been chasing the handheld space for some time without much
success. It started with the Xscale processor, recently sold to
Marvell, and is now taking aim with its own Intel Architecture or x86
processor technology. The first generations of its IA-based handheld
platform, which use its low-power notebook processors and chipsets,
haven’t done much to wow thus far. That’s partially because they have
been wrapped in Ultramobile PC hardware, which costs around $1,000 and
does not have a straightforward method to gain access to wide area
wireless. For that price, you might as well just buy an inexpensive
notebook. And that’s what most people do.

But Intel is touting significant improvements in device size,
battery life and connectivity for its forthcoming handheld platforms,
including one dubbed Menlow that is due in the first half of next year.
It appears as if the Menlow has begun to win over some. The company
listed companies including Samsung and Fujitsu as designing MID devices
here at IDF.

To be clear, Menlow is not a device. It’s a collection of chips that
make it possible for a manufacturer to build a device. This new
platform contains Silverthorne processor, a sub-1-watt chip that is
smaller than the size of a penny, yet still powerful enough to run
Windows Vista. Not that it will in every case. Silverthorne will power
next year’s UMPCs, based on Windows Vista. But Intel thinks that Menlow
will also spawn a range of handheld, network-connected MIDs or mobile
Internet devices. Intel believes these MIDs, some of which are
analogous to Apple’s iPod Touch, will gain in popularity through the
end of this decade. Intel has already been working with software
developers to create device-specific applications, based on Linux, for
MIDs. However, Intel believes that the primary application will be the
Internet—whether that’s Web browsing or specifically accessing social
networking sites or looking up directions.

It’s also working with a partner to create a cellular broadband
add-in card to allow MIDs to connect to 3G networks. Intel’s own
networking technology will allow MIDs to connect to Wi-Fi and or WiMAX
networks. So, for a few hundred bucks in 2008 consumers should be able
to purchase an Internet-connected handheld device. This presents a far
different value proposition than plunking down about $1,000 for a
non-connected UMPC. UMPCs are also fairly bulky given their 7-inch
screens. MID devices are likely to offer 3.5-inch to 5-inch screens,
making them a little more portable.

Some will say that Apple has beaten Intel to the punch with the iPod
Touch, which starts at $299. But remember that Intel will be offering a
platform, not an end device. (The chipmaker would be more than happy to
sell Apple the guts for the next iPod Touch I am sure.) Keeping in mind
that the comparison involves a device that’s available in 2007 with a
device platform due in 2008, it does make some sense to contrast the
two.

How would an MID device differ from what Apple’s iPod Touch has to
offer right now? MID devices will have more connectivity. MIDs will be
capable of offering broadband wireless connections via WiMAX or
cellular networks, whereas the iPod Touch now only offers Wi-Fi
(remember we’re comparing an 07 device to an 08 device, so Apple could
certainly add to the iPod Touch). MIDs won’t offer cellular phone
capabilities like Apple’s iPhone, upon which the iPod Touch is based.
But they will support VOIP, which could work when combined with WiMAX.

That’s not to say there aren’t barriers to adoption. MIDs need to
offer broadband wireless Internet for under $500 to be compelling.
Currently WiMAX, one way of offering broadband wireless, is currently
very limited in availability. Wide-area cellular-based wireless is
expensive, costing roughly $80 per month, and relatively slow. That’s
another couple of barriers. Meanwhile, people will have to decide what
they want. The question is, do I want a device that is primarily a
phone or do I want one that’s primarily for Internet access, messaging
and data?

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An international team of European researchers has implanted an
artificial cerebellum — the portion of the brain that controls motor
functions — inside a robotic system. This EU-funded project is dubbed SENSOPAC,
an acronym for ‘SENSOrimotor structuring of perception and action for
emerging cognition.’ One of the goals of this project is to design
robots able to interact with humans in a natural way. This project,
which should be completed at the end of 2009, also wants to produce
robots which would act as home-helpers for disabled people, such as
persons affected by neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

You can see above how a SENSOPAC robotic system with an artificial brain will learn (Credit: SENSOPAC flyer (PDF format, 2 pages, 520 KB). The European SENSOPAC project started on January 1, 2006 and will take 4 years to be completed. The 12 organizations
participating to the project come from 9 different countries and have
provided physicists, neuroscientists and electronic engineers.

The microchips which incorporate a full neuronal system have been
designed at the University of Granada, Spain. “Implanting the man-made
cerebellum in a robot will allow it to manipulate and interact with
other objects with far greater effectiveness than previously managed.
‘Although robots are increasingly more important to our society and
have more advanced technology, they cannot yet do certain tasks like
those carried out by mammals,’ says Professor Eduardo Ros Vidal,
who is coordinating the work at the University of Granada. ‘We have
been talking about humanoids for years but we do not yet see them on
the street or use the unlimited possibilities they offer us,’ the
Professor added.”

The SENSOPAC website gives more details
about the project. “The SENSOPAC project will combine machine learning
techniques and modelling of biological systems to develop a machine
capable of abstracting cognitive notions from sensorimotor
relationships during interactions with its environment, and of
generalising this knowledge to novel situations. Through active sensing
and exploratory actions the machine will discover the sensorimotor
relationships and consequently learn the intrinsic structure of its
interactions with the world and unravel predictive and causal
relationships. Together with action policy formulation and decision
making, this will underlie the machine’s abilities to create
abstractions, to suggest and test hypotheses, and develop
self-awareness.”

This very ambitious project has been divided into 5 modules.

• Active sensing
• Structure and statistics of sensorimotor interactions
• Movement and coordination for active perception
• Computation and learning in neural circuits for sensorimotor processing
• Towards an Artificial Haptic Cognitive System

It will certainly be interesting to see the progress of this EU project.

Sources: CORDIS News, August 27, 2007; and various websites

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Engineering
• Innovation
• Robotics
• Sensors
• Technology

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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed self-assembling nanowires which will allow to access data 1,000 times faster
than current technologies such as Flash memory. They’ve used nanowires
made of germanium, antimony and tellurium which can switch between
amorphous and crystalline structures — the equivalent of 0’s and 1’s.
The scientists say that their technology will use less space and power
than current technologies. But more surprisingly, they add that their
nanowires will be able to store data for 100,000 years. I really wonder
how they can make such a claim.

You can see above several “elemental mapping images of an isolated
nanowire showing uniform spatial distribution of germanium, antimony
and tellurium elements obtained by energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy
(EDS) in scanning transmission electron microscope (TEM) mode. (Credit:
Penn University) This research has been led by Ritesh Agarwal, an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and several colleagues of his research group.

So how these new memories were tested? “Tests
showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (0.7mW per
bit). They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval (50
nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash memory
and indicated the device would not lose data even after approximately
100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize terabit-level
nonvolatile memory device density. ‘This new form of memory has the
potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data
and even download entertainment as consumers,’ Agarwal said. ‘This
represents a potential sea-change in the way we access and store data.’”

Here is why the Penn researchers decided to use phase-change
nanowire memory. “Phase-change memory in general features faster
read/write, better durability and simpler construction compared with
other memory technologies such as Flash. The challenge has been to
reduce the size of phase change materials by conventional lithographic
techniques without damaging their useful properties. Self-assembled
phase-change nanowires, as created by Penn researchers, operate with
less power and are easier to scale, providing a useful new strategy for
ideal memory that provides efficient and durable control of memory
several orders of magnitude greater than current technologies.”

And to whet our appetite, Agarwal added: “Imagine being able to
store hundreds of high-resolution movies in a small drive, downloading
them and playing them without wasting time on data buffering, or
imagine booting your laptop computer in a few seconds as you wouldn’t
need to transfer the operating system to active memory.”

For more information, this research work has been published in Nature Nanotechnology
as an advance online publication on September 17, 2007 under the name
“Highly scalable non-volatile and ultra-low-power phase-change nanowire
memory.” Here is the beginning of the abstract.
“The search for a universal memory storage device that combines rapid
read and write speeds, high storage density and non-volatility is
driving the exploration of new materials in nanostructured form.
Phase-change materials, which can be reversibly switched between
amorphous and crystalline states, are promising in this respect, but
top-down processing of these materials into nanostructures often
damages their useful properties. Self-assembled nanowire-based
phase-change material memory devices offer an attractive solution owing
to their sub-lithographic sizes and unique geometry, coupled with the
facile etch-free processes with which they can be fabricated.”

Please note that the above illustration comes from the supplementary info provided along with the above article.

Finally, if any of you has some additional information about the
claim that these nanowire-based memories can last for 100,000 years,
please drop me a note

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ySpace has bagged itself some more professionally-produced online
video content, to “air” exclusively on the social networking site.
“Quarterlife”, a production developed by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward
Zwick, creators of the TV shows “My So-Called Life” and
“Thirtysomething”, will debut on MySpaceTV on November 11.

“Quarterlife”
will follow the lives of six twenty-somethings and “chart the sometimes
excruciating, sometimes comic, often emotional experiences that
comprise coming of age as a part of the digital generation.” In classic
post-modernist fashion, the lead character, Dylan, is a video blogger
(in the trailer she coughs on camera, as if to demonstrate her
authenticity).

“Quarterlife” provides yet more evidence of News Corp.’s strategy to
make MySpace a home where user-generated and professionally-produced
content can live side-by-side and with both benefiting from the online
communities that blossom as a result.

paidContent, however, picks up on one curious aspect of the “Quarterlife” partnership. A separate social network will exist for the show, away from MySpace.

Herskovotz and Zwick are creating a closed social net for quarterlife… Members of quarterlife
the social net (not live yet) will have the chance to participate in
writing the creating the show through writing and video submissions.
That in turn puts MySpace in the business of helping a potential rival.

There will of course also be a MySpace page for the show.

It’s interesting to see the balance of power between the show’s
producers and MySpaceTV as the exclusive “broadcaster”. Perhaps the
right to run their own social networking site, which ties directly to
the show, was the compromise needed to give MySpaceTV exclusivity.
Otherwise MySpace would have a monopoly on the show’s relationship with
its fans.

Having said that, quarterlife.com isn’t just a social network for
people wishing to interact with the show — but goes quite a bit further.

From the site:

quarterlife.com is a social networking
site for creative people. Whatever your interest - photography,
writing, music, filmmaking, dance, design - quarterlife.com
will help you go to the next level. Connect with like-minded people,
gather information about schools, grants, and internships. It’s a place
to explore the issues in your life, where changing the world is as real
as the friends you meet.

Come back to quarterlife.com when we launch and
participate in the ongoing creation of the series, be discovered as a
writer, director, composer, photographer - find your next step as an
artist and as a person.

Doesn’t sound too far from MySpace itself.

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This is a very quick follow-up to my previous post documenting my experience with HD DVD and Blu-ray playback on Windows Vista. (If you haven’t been following this story, you’ll want to read that post and its predecessor, Blu-ray, HD DVD, and Vista to get the proper background.) DRM doom-and-gloomers
have tried their best to scare you into thinking that you’ll need to
scrap your older monitors, video cards, and even HDTVs to play back HD
content. They’re wrong, as I was able to demonstrate with a two-buck
VGA cable.

In the Talkback section, several commenters expressed skepticism
over my contention that Windows Vista’s DRM didn’t come into play at
all. Here’s one typical comment:

You said that Vista’s DRM was not used. If PowerDVD
supplied the complete end to end protected pipe, then why did MS add it
into the OS? I think you mistake the PowerDVD app displaying the HDCP
non compliant warning that Vista supplied to the application as not
Vista DRM? (i.e. Vista’s monitoring reported to PowerDVD the problem,
and PowerDVD displayed the information)

Another commenter thinks my measurements of CPU usage (Blu-ray disks required only 9% CPU on average) were out of line:

The statement regarding CPU usage is complete fancy. HD
playback beats the crap out of your CPU. On an AMD Opteron 180/8600GT
on an Abit mobo it pegs both cores at 90% on Vista using the XBox 360
drive and on a AMD 6600+/8800GT on an Asus board it hit’s 50% across
both cores.

Well, there’s a very easy way to put both assertions to the test. I
pulled the HD DVD/Blu-ray drive out of the system I had been using and
plugged it into an older, slower system running Windows XP Media Center
Edition 2005. I installed the same copy of PowerDVD Ultra. Neither the
monitor nor the video card were HDCP-compatible.

When I tried to play either of the HD discs using a digital (DVI)
connection, I was greeted with the exact same HDCP error message I
showed in the previous post. The older operating system reported HDCP
information to the player software, which in turn decided whether to
allow playback. That proves to my satisfaction that Windows Vista isn’t
involved at all in this playback restriction.

Ah, but that error message says I should try plugging in an analog
connection. So I powered down the system and connected the same monitor
using a VGA (D-Sub) connector instead. When I started the system back
up and tried to play the same HD disc, everything worked just fine. As
promised, PowerDVD Ultra pays no attention to HDCP over analog
connections.

Now, the monitor I used for these tests is an old 18-inch LCD with a
native resolution of 1280 x 1024. As a result, it displayed the HD
content in letterbox format, at 1280 x 720 (720p) resolution.
Obviously, the results couldn’t compare with the output of a 50-inch
living room display, but the picture was rich and detailed and it
looked great from a reasonable viewing distance. If I had connected it
to a larger LCD monitor with a 1920 x 1280 resolution, there’s no
reason why I shouldn’t have gotten full 1080p output.

To measure CPU usage, I ran Performance Monitor as a background task
while I played a Blu-ray and HD DVD disc in the foreground. For a video
adapter, I used a spare Nvidia 7600GS board I had lying around (similar
adapters sell for $80 or so new). That’s nowhere near as capable as the
8600 GT I used earlier. The CPU in this system is an AMD Athlon 64 X2
3800+ (2.0 GHz). It’s considerably less powerful (and less expensive)
than the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz) on the XPS 410 I used for the
earlier tests. These benchmarks at Anandtech peg the difference at 30-40%, and that feels about right to me. So how did this lesser system do?

• On the Blu-ray disc, CPU usage was consistently in the 35-36%
  range. That’s considerably more than the 9% I measured using the other,
  more powerful PC, but it still leaves plenty of room to do other tasks
  in the background without overheating.
• On the HD-DVD disc, CPU usage was in the 50-52% range, compared
  with approximately 24% for the same disc on the more muscular Core 2
  Duo-based system. That still isn’t even close to overtaxing the system,
  though. (And I certainly wouldn’t recommend this older system as the
  centerpiece of a high-definition Media Center.)

I wouldn’t dream of trying to do HD playback with an underpowered
video card. The latest generation of GPUs from ATI and Nvidia (even
those found in relatively inexpensive cards) do an excellent job of
offloading decompression from the CPU.

Analog playback has its own set of complications. If you use
composite or S-video connectors, you get only SD output, regardless of
the source media. A composite connection works just fine up to 1080i
(sorry, no 1080p), but very few video cards offer composite
connections, and adapters cost as much as a new video card. A VGA
connection like the one I used here is your best bet. Just about
every LCD monitor has this type of connection, although they’re not as
common on HDTV equipment. And, of course, the entertainment
industry has the option to disable or constrain analog output anytime,
although it’s unlikely to happen for at least another three years, and
maybe considerably longer. In hardware terms, that’s a long, long time.

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A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together
to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope.
The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China
and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per
second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said
that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to
instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that
‘the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely
separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.’ So he’s
almost right by cliaming they created ‘a telescope almost as big as the
Earth.’

You can see above a map showing the location of the seven telescopes
involved in this networking experiment (Credits: Image created by Paul
Boven, Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) in The Netherlands;
Satellite image: Blue Marble Next Generation, courtesy of NASA Visible Earth) For more clarity, here is a link to a CSIRO page where you’ll have access to a much larger version of this map (3,456 x 2,048 pixels, 3.81 MB).

The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation)
news release adds that the initial data was captured by a single
22-meter dish located near Coonabarabran in New South Wales, known as
the Mopra telescope. This telescope is operated by the Australia Telescope National Facility (ANTF) and you can find more details here.

The observations were then transmitted to Xi’an, China, ‘where they
were watched live by experts in advanced networking at the 24th APAN
(Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) Meeting,’ and streamed to Europe.

The technique used to link the various telescopes is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI, Wikipedia link). According to Tasso Tzioumis,
VLBI operations and development manager at CSIRO’s ANTF, this technique
used to take weeks or months. “‘We used to record data on tapes or
disks at each telescope, along with time signals from atomic clocks.
The tapes or disks would then be shipped to a central processing
facility to be combined,’ Dr Tzioumis said.”

For more information, you can take a look at the European VLBI Network. And if you want to see some pictures of the telescopes involved in this experiment, you can read this Environment News Service article, “First Instant World Telescope Views Distant Galaxy.”
You’ll also find that the EXPReS project, known formally as the Express
Production Real-time e-VLBI Service, aims to implement up to 16
simultaneous 1 Gb per second network connections between the central
processor at JIVE and partner telescopes across Europe, Asia,
Australia, South Africa, South America and the United States by 2009.

It looks like astronomers are highly connected people…

Sources: CSIRO news release, September 5, 2007; and various websites

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Astronomy
• NASA
• Networking
• Science
• Space

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