A Japanese engineer named Atsushi Shimizu has designed a new type of wind turbine that can harness energy from something more powerful than a strong breeze. Shimizu’s creation, which looks like a huge, upright egg beater, can withstand typhoons (or hurricanes, depending on where you live) and turn their destructive power into usable energy. Unlike ordinary turbines, it can stay standing even when assaulted by intense winds and rain, thanks to an omnidirectional vertical axis and blades with adjustable speeds. That makes them perfect for their creator’s home country, as well as other places frequently visited by storms, such as China, the Philippines and the US.
Shimizu says the energy from a single typhoon can power Japan for 50 years, and with the help of his turbines, the country could become a "super power of wind." Even if his creation can capture all that energy, though, it will likely be tough finding a way to store 50 years’ worth of power at this point in time. We might not have the battery tech capable of that just yet. Shimizu’s company installed a prototype earlier this year in Okinawa, and it’s now gunning to build one either on the Tokyo Tower or at Japan’s National Stadium, where the Olympics will be held in 2020.
A new Ethernet standard that allows for up to 2.5Gbps over normal Cat 5e cables (the ones you probably have in your house) has been approved by the IEEE. The standard—formally known as IEEE 802.3bz-2016, 2.5G/5GBASE-T, or just 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet—also allows for up to 5Gbps over Cat 6 cabling.
The new standard was specifically designed to bridge the copper-twisted-pair gap between Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps), which is currently the fastest standard for conventional Cat 5e and Cat 6 cabling, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which can do 10Gbps but requires special Cat 6a or 7 cabling. Rather impressively work only began on the new standard at the end of 2014, which gives you some idea of how quickly the powers that be wanted to push this through.
The current mix of Cat 5e, 6, 6a, and 7a Ethernet outlets.
NBASE-T Alliance
While Cat 6a and 7 are growing in popularity, the vast majority of homes, offices, and institutions use Cat 5e and Cat 6—and upgrading the cabling would be very expensive indeed. A wired 1Gbps connection is still fairly adequate for a single PC user, of course—but over the last few years, with the explosion of high-speed Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet is now one of the bottlenecks. For example, the top end of the 802.11ac spec eventually calls for a total aggregate capacity of around 6.5Gbps; even current consumer 802.11ac gear, which maxes out at around 1.3 or 1.6Gbps, is running up against the limits of GigE.
The new 2.5G/5GBASE-T standard (PDF) will let you run 2.5Gbps over 100 metres of Cat 5e or 5Gbps over 100 metres of Cat 6, which should be fine for most homes and offices. The standard also implements other nice-to-have features, including various Power over Ethernet standards (PoE, PoE+, and UPoE)—handy for rolling out Wi-Fi access points.
A handy diagram showing the various properties of different twisted-pair Ethernet standards.
The physical (PHY) layer of 2.5G/5GBASE-T is very similar to 10GBASE-T, but instead of 400MHz of spectral bandwidth it uses either 200MHz or 100MHz, thus not requiring a super-high-quality mega-shielded cable. (This is the same reason that higher-bandwidth variants of DSL such as G.fast, only work over very short distances.) Other differences from 10GBASE-T include low density parity checking (LPDC) rather than CRC-8 error correction, and PAM-16 modulation rather than DSQ128.
Now that the standard has been approved, we won’t have to wait long for enterprise 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps Ethernet networking gear. What’s less clear is whether we’ll get consumer-grade 2.5Gbps equipment; we probably will, but not for a little while yet.
This is not good. The only thing standing between my wallet and the more than 2,000 cards in the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game was all of that Japanese text. Now Square Enix is launching the game in English. On October 28. Great.
For nearly six years, Japanese Final Fantasy fans have been greedily devouring booster packs of cards featuring art from the likes of Tetsuya Nomura, Yoshitaka Amano and Akihiko Yoshida—bright and colorful cardstock coated with images of their favorite characters from the franchise.
Western fans eager to play the game themselves have been importing cards and doing fan translations for years. Those poor bastards will have even more to buy now.
Launching in Europe and North America on October 28, the English version of the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game is starting us off mercifully slow. The first set, Opus 1, features only 216 cards, which doesn’t seem like much at all! I can probably afford that. The set features brand-new cards featuring characters and art from the Final Fantasy VII Remake, Dissidia and World of Final Fantasy, and each card in the set will have a premium foil counterpart.
Of all the characters to put on the first set, they chose Lightning. Okay. Via the Final Fantasy Twitter.
Wait, so that’s 432 cards. A set to play, and a set to collect? And of course you can’t build a deck with just one of each card. Oh god. This is going to hurt.
Starter sets, featuring Cloud, Tidus and Lightning.
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