Advances in Computers thread

[ScienceRocks]

Swyp aims to replace all your plastic cards with one that's electronic
By Chris Wood
February 13, 2015
1 Comment
4 Pictures

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a number high-tech cards that aim to slim down your wallet, all offering pretty similar functionality. The Swyp Card is the latest to make a bid for your hard-earned cash, promising to condense your wallet into a single metal card that stores info from debit, credit, loyalty and gift cards.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Neptune Duo flips the roles of smartphones and smartwatches ... for some reason
By Will Shanklin
February 17, 2015
4 Pictures

Will smartwatches ever replace smartphones? And, if so, how will we play Candy Crush and watch Netflix or Sling TV on the go? Neptune, the company behind the ridiculously oversized Pine smartwatch, is back with a new device that tries to answer that question.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Review: Zeiss VR One virtual reality headset (for iPhone 6)
By Will Shanklin
February 18, 2015
10 Pictures

Any company that's been making lenses for 169 years is probably good at adapting. So perhaps it makes sense that German company Carl Zeiss AG (better known today simply as "Zeiss") didn't waste time jumping into the new frontier of virtual reality. Gizmag has been playing with the company's VR One headset for the iPhone 6 – read on for our review.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Analogue quantum computers: Still wishful thinking?

Traditional computational tools are simply not powerful enough to solve some complex optimisation problems, like, for example, protein folding. Quantum annealing, a potentially successful implementation of analogue quantum computing, would bring about an ultra-performant computational method.

A series of reviews in this topical issue of EPJ ST, guest-edited by Sei Suzuki from Saitama Medical University, Japan, and Arnab Das from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkota, India, focuses on the state of the art and challenges in quantum annealing.

 

[ScienceRocks]

New Haptics That Can Trick Your Sense of Touch Could Be Crucial to Smartwatches and Virtual Reality

The offices of Immersion in San Jose, California, may be the touchy-feeliest place I’ve ever been. The walls of one conference room are lined with tablets, smartphones, smart watches, and other gadgets that all have the ability to stimulate your sense of touch.

I’m here to experience technology that can go far beyond the sometimes annoying buzzing that passes for touch feedback today in devices such as smartphones. Immersion and other companies are beginning to roll out a new wave of more real haptic feedback techniques. They could enhance our smartphones and tablets, and become crucial to new gadgets such as virtual reality headsets and smart watches. Apple has positioned haptic feedback as a central part of its smart watch, to be released in April, boasting that it will get your attention with what feels like a light tap on the wrist, not a crude buzz.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Intel: Moore's Law will continue through 7nm chips
Intel Moore s Law will continue through 7nm chips PCWorld

Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years.

Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Silicon Nanofibers could boost lithium battery energy density by ten times

The need for more energy dense and scalable Li-ion battery electrodes has become increasingly pressing with the ushering in of more powerful portable electronics and electric vehicles (EVs) requiring substantially longer range capabilities. Herein, we report on the first synthesis of nano-silicon paper electrodes synthesized via magnesiothermic reduction of electrospun SiO2 nanofiber paper produced by an in situ acid catalyzed polymerization of tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) in-flight. Free-standing carbon-coated Si nanofiber binderless electrodes produce a capacity of 802 mAh g−1 after 659 cycles with a Coulombic efficiency of 99.9%, which outperforms conventionally used slurry-prepared graphite anodes by over two times on an active material basis. Silicon nanofiber paper anodes offer a completely binder-free and Cu current collector-free approach to electrode fabrication with a silicon weight percent in excess of 80%. The absence of conductive powder additives, metallic current collectors, and polymer binders in addition to the high weight percent silicon all contribute to significantly increasing capacity at the cell level.

 

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5G speeds exceeding 1000x current (network capacity) 4G standards, to deploy in San Francisco

About a year ago, Artemis Networks CEO Steve Perlman said his startup was working on technology that could make your smartphone's internet connection 1,000 times faster than it is today. Now that technology is finally making its debut in San Francisco.

Artemis Networks announced that consumers in San Francisco would be able to purchase a SIM card from the company's website that allows phones to connect to the pCell network.

Because Artemis Networks has a partnership with Dish, the company will be using a certain block of Dish's spectrum for pCell's deployment in San Francisco.
Because the pWaves are so small, they can be placed practically anywhere, unlike cell towers. The idea is that numerous pWaves could be placed around cities to blanket an area more accurately than can traditional towers.

Although pCell could be used as an alternative to a traditional cell carrier in San Francisco, Perlman described the release as a sort of "showroom" for what pCell could do. He wants to work with larger carriers in the future.

"What we're trying to show is this thing's getting out there," he said. "Carriers are very interested to see how it performs."

 

[ScienceRocks]

Fiber internet popping up in Michigan, offering speeds 100 times faster than cable

The fastest Internet connections available to Michiganders are coming from small Michigan companies you've probably never heard of.
In 2011, Ann Arbor was vying with cities around the nation to get the first installation of Google Fiber, a connection that was faster and better than anything around. The city lost, but what once took an Internet giant to accomplish is now being done by small companies in pockets across the state.
What it is
Fiber internet runs on a fiber-optic line. That's a different material than most existing cable and direct service line connections, which run over copper. Fiber is capable of running at much higher speeds than connections that come over copper fiber.
Speeds offered to residential customers in Michigan via fiber connections vary, but reach at least 1 gigabit.

 

[ScienceRocks]

CenturyLink exceeds initial estimates, expands Seattle gigabit Internet to five more neighborhoods

CenturyLink is declaring its initial Seattle rollout of gigabit broadband Internet service a success, and is beginning work to expand it to five more neighborhoods.

Last August, CenturyLink committed to bringing the high-speed access to 35,000 Seattle households with an announced launch in Ballard, Beacon Hill and West Seattle. By December, the gigabit service was available to nearly 22,000 customers in Ballard and West Seattle.

 

[ScienceRocks]

AT&T is bringing gigabit Internet to Prairie Village and Fairway

In another mark of broadband competition in the Kansas City market, AT&T announced Wednesday that it plans to sell super-speed Internet to some customers in Prairie Village and Fairway.

That news come 10 days after the telecom giant announced it would challenge Google Fiber in the market by selling Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second in Kansas City and its largest suburbs.

Gigabit speeds are almost 100 times faster than what’s available to most American homes. Some neighborhoods in the Kansas City area now have such hookups available from three competitors: AT&T, Google Fiber and Consolidated Communications.

 

[ScienceRocks]

5G cellphone wireless speeds of 1 terabit per second done in the lab across 100 meters and will publicly demo in 2018

5G speeds of 1Tbps have been achieved during tests at the University of SurreyProfessor Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the university explained that the 5GIC has been working on new technologies to support 5G services, which have been instrumental in producing the 1Tbps results.

“We have developed 10 more breakthrough technologies and one of them means we can exceed 1Tbps wirelessly. This is the same capacity as fibre optics but we are doing it wirelessly,” he said.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Unlocking your door might soon be as easy as 'open sesame'

25 February 2015

Kids and adults alike have long jokingly said "open sesame" in the hopes those magic words might literally open doors. Dheera Venkatraman, a grad student at MIT, might be the first person to make the words actually work.

Venkatraman built an app called "Sesame" for Android Wear that lets him talk (or shout) the words "OK Google, open sesame" into his Android Wear smartwatch. The watch then sends a signal to his hacked-together Internet-connected door lock to unlock the door without a key.

http://www.cnet.com/...as-open-sesame/

 

[ScienceRocks]

Start-up Leia to demo Star Wars-inspired hologram display technology next week

U.S. start-up Leia is demonstrating its 3D holographic display technology at Mobile World Congress, promising a chance to see what mobile holography is all about.

Demonstrations of future technologies are among the more exciting exhibits at Mobile World Congress, and Leia looks sure to wow visitors at this year’s edition, which starts on Monday in Barcelona.

Leia’s goal is to make the company’s technology cheap and compact enough to be integrated into smartphones and other mobile devices. It can be used to produce imagery”that floats above the screen” and that users can interact with, founder and CEO David Fattal said in a presentation last year.

Potential applications include maps with buildings that pop out or games where a ball comes out the screen, according to Fattal.

 

[ScienceRocks]

SanDisk crams 200 GB into the world's highest capacity microSD card
By Nick Lavars
March 1, 2015

With all the high quality snaps, audio and video that we fill our mobile devices with these days, it doesn't take much to for the onboard storage to hit capacity. But SanDisk has just introduced a new microSD card designed to provide a little more storage breathing room. The SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card, Premium Edition, packs a whopping 200 GB of storage capacity, while retaining the same diminutive microSD form factor.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Samsung S6 Edge with curved screen unveiled at MWC

Samsung will sell two versions of its next flagship phone, one of which has a screen that curves round its sides.

The Galaxy S6 Edge uses the feature to provide a quick way to stay in touch with select contacts, and to alert owners to important information.

It will be sold for a higher price than the standard S6, which otherwise has the same specifications.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-31645426

 

[ScienceRocks]

Previewing The Machine

Both Fink and Whitman harped on the fact that what most of an operating system is doing these days is shuffling data in and out of various layers of storage, and HP intends for the Machine to have one layer as a universal memory pool, eliminating the need for various layers of disk and flash memory in the hierarchy. Presumably the processors in the SoCs in the Machine will have their own main memory – but perhaps not. Fink did not elaborate on that. But what he did say is that a rack of Machine modules would have 1 PB of memory, and that HP could envision up to 160 racks all linked together using the photonics fabrics to have any compute node in the system to be able to address any byte anywhere in those 160 racks in under 250 nanoseconds. He added that HP has “line of sight” to photonics that can deliver 6 Tb/sec of bandwidth on a single piece of fiber optics, and that if you wanted to do that with copper, you would need a bundle of wires about the size of a large dinner plate and it would require thousands of times more energy to pump the signals through it compared to the fiber. The memristors have a switching speed on the order of picoseconds, by the way.
As you might imagine, the new architecture of the Machine will require some changes to the operating system. In fact, just as HP is throwing out a lot of the storage hierarchy in the Machine’s design, researchers at HP Labs are right now gutting the Linux operating system for servers and its Android variant for clients of all the unnecessary code used to manage storage layers. This, he explained, was why it was called the Machine in the first place. It is not intended to be the basis of a server or a laptop or a smartphone, but rather used in all of these, and in fact, when he held up the memristor prototype above, he said we should consider this as the basis of a future smartphone that would have 100 TB of capacity on it and store our entire lives.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Qualcomm's ultrasonic 3D fingerprint scanner could one day give passwords the finger

2 March 2015

Right now, your secure fingerprint scanner is only as good as the integrity of your skin. If your digit is too hot or cold, slicked with lotion or sweat, that reader may not accurately pick up your prints.

Doesn't sound good, does it? That's what the Snapdragon Sense ID 3D fingerprint scanning technology Qualcomm announced at Mobile World Congress aims to address. It uses acoustic ultrasonics -- sound, basically -- to capture your print in just about any state of being.
CNET went to Qualcomm's headquarters in San Diego for a demo of what it's like and what you can do. Before I get into that, though, here's why you should care about sound-gathered prints to begin with.

http://www.cnet.com/...anner-hands-on/

 

[ScienceRocks]

Ikea unveils phone-charging furniture at MWC

By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News

Furniture giant Ikea has unveiled a range of furniture fitted with wireless charging spots for mobile devices.

The Home Smart range will initially include lamps, bedside tables and a coffee table as well as individual charging pads for any surface.

Ikea has used the wireless charging standard QI, which is also supported by Samsung in its latest handset, the S6.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth urged caution over the recyclability of such products.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-31693088

 

[ScienceRocks]

Prototype Fujitsu smartphone unlocks with the blink of an eye
By Colin Jeffrey
March 2, 2015
3 Pictures

Most smartphones require some sort of password or pattern input to unlock them, whilst some have voice print recognition, and a few – such as Apple's iPhone 5S and Samsung's Galaxy S5 – even use fingerprint scanning. But Fujitsu claims to have gone one better by introducing iris pattern recognition on its latest prototype smartphone on show at Mobile World Congress (MWC).