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From Autoblog: Hyundai, Broadcom to equip vehicles with built-in ethernet

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Hyundai is the second manufacturer after BMW – having put its Flexray ethernet system into the X5 – to pledge to install Ethernet technology in its cars. This isn’t a ploy to give you yet another place to work on those regional sales spreadsheets, it’s about reducing vehicle complexity while making the cars and their systems more efficient. The Korean manufacturer will be doing so in conjunction with Broadcom, the U.S. firm having created the “one pair Ethernet” (OPEN) special interest group that now counts 81 members.

Various in-vehicle electronics use a variety of protocols, primary among them being control area network (CAN), local area network (LAN) and low voltage differential signaling (LVDS). Broadcom wants to integrate those incompatible and highly specialized systems into one Ethernet system – the same plug-and-play one your computer can use all over the world – and in doing so make Ethernet “the backbone of the car.”

Developed with BMW and Hyundai, Broadcom’s BroadR-Reach standard uses two unshielded cables instead of four, which allows for light and inexpensive wiring that can be fit through a bodyshell’s tight spots. Achieving the kind of consolidation ultimately envisioned would bring numerous and wide-ranging advantages like lowering the cost and complexity of electronics, at the same time allowing for greater electronics capabilities inside the car like 360-degree car camera security systems, using the same IP standard familiar around the world, allowing for speeds from 100 Mbps to 1 GBbps for faster and better communication between systems, just for starters. Lighter wiring – and there’s a lot of it in a car – also means lighter cars.

That futuristic world is still in the future, though. Automakers are naturally keen to develop Ethernet applications in phases, such as focusing just on infotainment, to make sure it can stand up to the rigors of an automobile’s daily life. Hyundai hasn’t said which of its products will be the first in line or when that vehicle reach showrooms, but has cited infotainment, lane departure warning, park assist and telematics as the features likely to benefit. Read more in the press release below.

Continue reading Hyundai, Broadcom to equip vehicles with built-in ethernet

from Autoblog

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From Ars Technica: California universities to produce 50 open-source textbooks

California Governor Jerry Brown gave his pen a workout yesterday. In addition to signing legislation prohibiting social network snooping by employers and colleges, he also signed off on a proposal for the state to fund 50 open source digital textbooks. He signed two bills, one to create the textbooks and the other to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host them, at a meeting with students in Sacramento.

According to a legislative summary, the textbook bill would “require the California Open Education Resources Council to determine a list of 50 lower division courses in the public postsecondary segments for which high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials would be developed or acquired.” The council is to solicit bids to produce these textbooks in 2013. The bill makes clear that the council has the option to use “existing high-quality digital open source textbooks and related materials” if those materials fit the requirements.

The law specifies that the textbooks must be placed under a Creative Commons license, allowing professors at universities outside of California to use the textbooks in their own classrooms. The textbooks must be encoded in XML, or “other appropriate successor format,” to facilitate re-use of the materials.

from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: $99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” touted in Kickstarter project

Raspberry Pi-sized board called Parallella puts supercomputing power into a $99 package.

Chipmaker Adapteva wants to make parallel computing available to everyone, but there’s a good chance you’ve never even heard the company’s name. Founded in 2008, Adapteva focuses on building low-power RISC chips, which it sells to board manufacturers, and is trying to license its intellectual property to mobile processor vendors for use in smartphones.

“We’re way down the food chain,” Adapteva CEO and founder Andreas Olofsson told Ars. But Adapteva wants to bring its technology directly to the people who would actually use it, with a Kickstarter project to raise at least $750,000, and a stretch goal of $3 million.

Adapteva calls it “Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone,” a 16-core board hitting 13GHz and 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each. If the $3 million goal is hit, Adapteva will make a $199 64-core board hitting 45GHz and 90 gigaflops. (Adapteva seems to be counting GHz on a cumulative basis, adding up all the cores.) Both include a dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16- and 64-core RISC chips acting as coprocessors to speed up tasks. The Adapteva architecture hits performance of 70 gigaflops per watt, and 25GHz per watt, the company says.

from Ars Technica

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: Patent trolls face public scrutiny


A change to US law means patent and trademark officials must allow the public to report that a patent claim is bogus because the technology is already in use. That’s led to the creation of a dedicated website for making such reports.

The change comes in the America Invents Act, which became law last year. The clause in question took effect from September 16 this year and states that “Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent…”

Prior art means the process put forward for patent can be shown to have already been used anywhere in the world. If accepted, prior art will usually kill a patent application.

The legal change is significant because patent examiners have only a limited time (around 20 hours) to review each application, making it difficult if not impossible to look in every place an “invention” might have been used before.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has now asked for the help of Stack Exchange. That’s a company that runs dozens of question and answer sites where users can vote for how useful submitted answers are to give them added prominence: think Yahoo! Answers without the dribbling idiots.

Stack Exchange is working alongside the USPTO and Google Patent Search to produce Ask Patents, a searchable database with tags for keywords, classification and patent number. Once somebody submits an example of prior art, readers can vote on whether they think it is indeed a match. Patent officials can then concentrate on the submissions that appear most credible evidence of prior art.

According to Stack Exchange:

Collectively, we’re building a crowd-sourced worldwide detective agency to track down and obliterate bogus patent applications. Over time, we hope that the Patent Stack Exchange will mitigate the problems caused by rampant patent trolling. It’s not a complete fix, but it’s a good start.

 

from Geeks are Sexy Technology News

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From Ars Technica: Apple apes trademarked Swiss railway clock for iPad’s new Clock app

A comparison of Apple’s iPad clock to the SSB original.

Apple added a Clock app to the iPad in iOS 6, but the company may get into trouble for the visual look of the app’s analog-style clock face. According to Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, Apple’s designers copied the iconic—and trademarked—look of the Swiss Federal Railway (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, or SBB) clocks used in train stations all over Switzerland. And the SBB wants Apple to pay up.

This isn’t the first time Apple has used an iconic design for an iOS app. The original iOS calculator used a design that paid homage to the classic Braun ET44 calculator. Apple SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive is well-known as an unabashed fan of Braun designer Dieter Rams.

However, SBB noted that it has a copyright and trademark on the design of its railway station clocks, which have become an icon of both SBB and Switzerland itself. “We enjoy the fact that the Swiss railway clock is being used by Apple. It once again proves that it’s a real piece of design,” SBB spokesperson Christian Ginsig said. “This act, however, is an unauthorized use [of the clock’s design] by Apple.”

from Ars Technica

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: This Escape Pod Could Save Lives In A Tsunami

Safety Capsule Matt Duncan with his four-man Tsunami Survival Pod. Gold Coast Bulletin
Watching footage of the 2011 Japanese tsunami inspired Matt Duncan’s design.Australian business owner Matt Duncan usually builds steel-hulled houseboats, but he was so affected by last year’s devastating tsunami in Japan that he’s turned his focus to seaworthy survival craft. His bright orange Tsunami Survival Pod can accommodate four people for two and a half hours.

Duncan tells the Gold Coast Bulletin that he couldn’t take his eyes off the TV last spring after a tsunami ravaged Japan. “I was home the day the tsunami hit, watching it on television and just thinking, ‘What could I have done to save these people?'” he recalled. He watched hours of footage and observed how different objects responded to the action of the waves and the other debris pulled out to sea.

Within a few days, he’d designed this safety pod, using the spiral-welded steel he uses for his houseboats. It has crumple zones to absorb impacts; racing-style seats and five-point safety harnesses for four passengers; a flashing beacon to alert rescuers; and hooks for helicopters to grab and lift it to safety. It even has one-inch-thick polycarbonate windows so you don’t feel claustrophobic.

He said the pods will retail for $8,500 in Australian dollars, or about $8,872 USD, and they can fit in an average garage. A tsunami usually comes with at least some warning, so someone could conceivably wheel it out and hop in before the water rises. Check out some more images of it here.

[via News.com.au]

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: LIFX: The Light Bulb Reinvented

This is a project that I’m backing right now. A LED light bulb that generates as much light as a traditional 60 Watt incandescent bulb, can be controlled wirelessly, lasts up to 25 years, and consumes less power than a fluocompact bulb (without all the nasty chemical), now how awesome is that? Sure, it’s a little on the expansive side, but have you seen what it can do? Check it out in the video below!

[LIFX: The Light Bulb Reinvented]

from Geeks are Sexy Technology News