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  • Super capacitors in the news

    I first read about supercapacitors (Ars Technica-2007) some time back when gas prices were starting to reach an all time high. The Summer of 2008 everyone wanted to own a battery powered car, or hybrid drive car. Many writers were speculating then about the car of the future. All the hype surround hydrogen fuel cells was proven to be premature. But Tesla Motors was showing off what you could do with off the shelf Lithium ion batteries. And there were some announcements of new materials being used to create a possible adjunct to the Lithium ion cells. It was called a Super capactior.

    In the time since Ars Technica wrote the article about supercapcitors, Zenn has created a car using the EEStor supercapacitor technology

    EEstor Cell
    EEstor Cell

    In the rest of the high tech manufacturing world the electronics industry has recently adopted the supercapacitor as well. Why? Well, as this article from the Register states, more restrictions are being placed on Lithium ion batteries after some unfortunate accidents were splashed in picture form all over the Internet. But more than that, replacing failed lithium ion batteries on disk controllers is very inconvenient when you are a customer at a Lights Out style data center. In expensive flash memory has been around for a while now. And I have wondered when disk controller manufacturers might start using it for the high end disk controllers. Enter the Adaptec RAID controller with super capacitor backed Flash memory. This device should handle any amount of power outages and still keep all your disk writes from being corrupted. And the recharge cycle rate with a supercapacitors is much faster than any battery technology currently manufactured. So after full power is recovered, the recharge cycle is short enough to get full safety almost immediately.

    Adaptec has done away with the need for battery back-up of its RAID controller cards by changing to a NAND flash cache and capacitor set up.

    via Adaptec adds NAND cache to RAID cards • The Register.

  • links for 2009-07-11

  • The Google Chrome OS or As Public Enemy sez’: Don’t Believe the Hype

    Google Chrome OS
    Will Chrome end Windows headaches?

    Everyone has been weighing in on the Google announcement of Chrome. Why last night even the News Hour on PBS did a short sales job on Google. They called it “Cloud Computing could Transform Data storage, Internet use”. The idea was selling software as an online service with all your data housed on the servers of a remote data center might change the software publishing business. The timing of this story on the heels of Chrome OS was a little too convenient. I wouldn’t have minded so much by Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes two appearances in the piece to argue on behalf of Google’s view of the Future of Computing. In some ways the whole piece comes of as a sales promotion for Cloud Computing.

    Meanwhile on the Interwebs, I have entered into at least one discussion with an avid Google user who is swallowing the Google propaganda. I pointed out how poorly the first generation netbooks sold once unsuspecting or naively hopeful buyers tried to use them with the default Linux derived OSes installed on them. I’m not saying the majority of the early adopters were unprepared to adapt to a new operating system. But in fact after trying to adapt, they gave up and returned the computers. A mad scrambe occured to get a version of Windows on the next revs of the netbooks and voila! Microsoft entered a new market for the so-called ‘netbooks’ completely without trying. That is the end user/market inertia equivalent of falling into riches. Microsoft never saw this market, instead concentrated on the desktops and smart phones. Out of nowhere Asus and Acer along with all the other Taiwan manufacturers created a new product, trying to make it cheap they chose a Linux derived operating system. But the customer is always right. The customer learned how to use a computer on a Windows OS of some sort, old habits die hard.

    So will Chrome OS beat the odds and succeed where Acer and Asus failed? Will they drive the next wave of innovation and make an OS that a Windows user won’t find unusable? I doubt it for a number of reasons. First off let’s address what you get with Windows in the ‘multimedia’ category. You buy a Windows OS, you get a whole layer of stuff in there called DirectX. It helps you play games, play audio, watch video all that stuff. You move from Windows to a Linux derived OS you get a loose aggregation of individual progams some of which play certain file types. Some require special program language libraries to be installed to work properly. There’s many dependencies, vast differences in the User Interfaces, and darned little of it is integrated into a seamless whole. If Google can bridge that gap, maybe the transition won’t be so onerous for the new Google Chrome OS users.

    “Chrome is basically a modern operating system,” Mr. Andreessen said.

    The first wave of netbooks relied on various versions of the open-source Linux operating system, and major PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell have backed the Linux software. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has worked on developing a Linux-based operating system called Moblin as well. The company has aimed the software at netbooks and smartphones in a bid to spur demand for its Atom mobile device chip.

    via Google Plans a PC Operating System – NYTimes.com.

  • Yahoo Pipes via Dan Dube dot Com

    Yahoo Pipes plus Twitter = Good
    Yahoo Pipes plus Twitter = Good

    There is nothing cooler than discovering you can take a feed from one bit of RSS and plug it into another service and slowly create your own custom feeds based on simple keyword filters. But that service is here today using the mechanism of ‘pipes’ ala Unix style input/output of character streams from one application into another. Take for instance in Unix the ability list the contents of a folder in a long detailed format:

    ls -al

    Now what good is that if there’s a thousand files that get spit back in your face? Now add the power of Unix pipes, and the search command known as ‘grep’

    ls -al | grep interestingThings*.txt

    So now I can take the output of the first command and rather than send that output directly to my computer screen, I ‘pipe’ i t over to the grep command and let it do a search in real time on all that text output. I get a list of things as a result:

    interestingThings1.txt
    interestingThingsFoo.txt
    etc.

    So Yahoo Pipes extends this metaphor into the real of http and rss/xml feeds of data from Twitter, Blogs, Web based RSS news readers and allows you to find stuff as soon as it is sent out for mass consumption on the Interwebs. And like all things, it also allows you to add your own personal spin by blogging about that which you have discovered through the Yahoo Pipes. Flame On!

    For example, suppose I wanted to search for news on Google, specifically about Chrome. There could be useful things popping up at any minute, and I could easily miss them (like leaked screenshots!) This is what you could consider doing:

    * Create a twitter search for #google

    * Subscribe to the RSS feed of that search

    * Send the RSS feed to the pipes, where it is filtered for the word “chrome”

    * Subscribe to the RSS feed that comes out of the pipes

    Now you can monitor any breaking developments about chrome as they happen (more or less)!

    This is the real power of the web 2.0 stuff, the ability to make your own stuff. No longer will we have to rely on any one place to get info. I am using twitter, google, and yahoo to get my information here!

    via Yahoo Pipes.

  • Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries

    You may remember High School chemistry class when the topic of reactive metals came up. My teacher had a big slab of pure sodium he kept in a jar under kerosene. The reason for that was to prevent any water, even humidity in the air from reacting with that pure metallic sodium. He would slice pieces off of the sodium to make the surfaces completely free of tarnish. Then pull out the pieces with forceps. And in a display of pyrotechnics and sound and fury, he would place the metal in a flask of water. And it would fizz violently racing around on the surface of the water. It was reacting with the water creating Lye (NaOH-Sodium Hydroxide) and Hydrogen Gas(H2). He would then light the gas to show it was really combustible Hydorgen gas.

    Well, Lithium is also a very reactive metal too. Which means it has lots of energy stored up in it that can be tapped to do useful things, like being a battery electrode. Lithium Ion batteries exploit this physical trait to give us the highest energy density batteries on the market save for some exotic specialty chemistries, like Zinc Air. Lithium Ion uses all kinds of tricks to keep the water and moisture out of the mix inside the battery. However these tricks take away from the total energy density of the battery. So now the race is on to use pure metallic lithium in a battery without having to use any tricks to protect it from water.

    A company based in Berkeley, CA, is developing lightweight, high-energy batteries that can use the surrounding air as a cathode. PolyPlus is partnering with a manufacturing firm to develop single-use lithium metal-air batteries for the government, and it expects these batteries to be on the market within a few years. The company also has rechargeable lithium metal-air batteries in the early stages of development that could eventually power electric vehicles that can go for longer in between charges.

    via Technology Review: Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries.

  • Intel to double SSD capacity • The Register

    Things are really beginning to heat up now that Toshiba and Samsung are making moves to market new SSD products. Intel is also revising it’s product line by trying to move it’s SSDs to the high end process technology at the 32nm design rule. Moving from 50nm to 32nm is going to increase densities, but most likely costs will stay high as usual for all Intel based product offerings. Nobody wants SSDs to suddenly become a commodity product. Not yet.

    Intel is expected to bring forward the projected doubling of its SSD capacities to as early as next month.

    The current X18-M and X25-M solid state drives (SSDs) use a 50nm process and have 80GB and 160GB capacities with 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) technology. A single level cell (SLC) X25-E has faster I/O rates and comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities.

    via Intel to double SSD capacity • The Register.

  • PowerVR maker – Imagination Inc.

    Imagination is the name of the of company making the wicked cool low power graphics chip called PowerVR SGX. In the handheld manufacturing market Imagination scored two huge design wins. First was the Apple iPhone and iTouch. Second is the Palm Pre. It is very encouraging that the designers at Palm chose the PowerVR in order to create the iPhone killer. No doubt Palm benefited directly from inside knowledge of the iPhone when they hired former Apple VP Jon Rubinstein to head this new iPhone killer project at Palm.

    Now Apple realizes it needs to protect it’s competitive advantage. They are sinking some several million dollars in Imagination stock to prevent any hostile takeover of their strategic partner. Even more interesting than this move on Apple’s part is Intel has already staked a huge claim on Imagination without having a single design win to announce. There’s some word out that future netbooks will use an integrated PowerVR chip. But the next revision of the Atom CPU and chipset will definitely have PowerVR integrated in, scoring some bigger more strategic design wins on the low power front. Intel hopes to best Apple at the low end, low power, long battery duration category.

    The investment is considered important for Apple, which uses only PowerVR graphics in its iPhone and iPod touch devices. Its most recent launch, the iPhone 3GS, uses a PowerVR SGX video core now believed to be the SGX535.

    via Electronista | Apple more than doubles stake in PowerVR maker.

  • Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground

    I watched this program this past Tuesday and I noticed Slashdot and some other vetted link-sharing websites are picking up on it too. My own feeling about this is it’s bad form for any government contractor to allow their computers to fall into the hands of anyone outside their own IT organization. If the folks that manage and audit the computers cannot encrypt, wipe or destroy hard drives on their computers, they need to be fired. It’s that simple. I’m sure some manager felt that the computers they were managing didn’t need top secret level procedures performed on them when they were de-aquisitioned and ‘recycled’. But who knows what little details are swimming around in those Word documents (stuff like the revision controls for instance). Too often everyone who manages computers lives by the dictum, “Do the absolute minimum necessary.” But no one even imagines what ‘could’ happen later on, like having your computer wind up in Ghana. It proves anything can happen and you should treat every Hard Drive like it needed to have the Top Secret procedures performed on it before it’s taken off your property list.

    PBS: Frontline World

    Thats particularly a problem in a place like Ghana, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as one of the top sources of cyber crime in the world. And its not just individuals who are exposed. One of the drives the team has purchased contains a $22 million government contract.It turns out the drive came from Northrop Grumman, one of Americas largest military contractors. And it contains details about sensitive, multi-million dollar U.S. government contracts. They also find contracts with the defense intelligence agency, NASA, even Homeland Security.When the drives’ data are shown to James Durie, who works on data security for the FBI, hes particularly concerned about the potential breach at the Transportation Security Administration TSA.

    via: FRONTLINE/World Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground | PBS

  • Intel ready to launch new 34nm SSDs?

    Check back in two weeks from today

    via Electronista | Intel ready to launch new 34nm SSDs in two weeks?.

  • Samsung develops mini-card SSDs may drop 1.8″ HDD

    Industry insiders in Taiwan today have claimed Samsun is dumping it’s 1.8″ Hard Drives in favor of providing devices like the Mini Card based Solid State Disk drives.

    The Mini PCI Express or Mini Card form factor is available as an expansion slot on many PCs. Samsung is manufacturing Flash Drives in the Mini Card format using it’s latest Flash chips. Compared to traditional 2.5″ Flash Drives from Intel and others, Mini Card devices are going to consume a little less battery power. I wonder if any netbook sized laptops have the MiniCard expansion slots built in. It might prove to be a good marketing direction if enough manufacturers decide to add open slots to their motherboard designs. I also know that Samsung manufactuers 1.8″ Hard Drives and at one point that was the preferred form factor for netbook devices. It was also heavily used by Apple iPods. Getting rid of a SATA or PATA disk controller is a good thing. Hopefully connecting to the Bridge chips through PCIe might provide better throughput than going through a disk controller then through the same Bridge chips.

    Mini PCI Express Card aka Mini Card
    Mini PCI Express Card aka Mini Card

    The denser memory also permits a level of storage that isnt normally found in this class with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities coming on launch. All of them use just 0.3W of power and so contribute little to the total power drain.

    via: Electronista