Month: March 2012

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From Technology Review RSS Feeds: A123 Predicts a Good Year, Providing Electric Cars Sell

Despite losing over $250 million last year, the company remains optimistic.

A123 Systems—the battery maker that’s central to the Obama administration’s efforts to establish an advanced battery industry in the United States and to greatly increase the number of battery-powered vehicles on the road—announced today that it lost $258 million in 2011, compared to $152 million in 2010. In spite of the loss, the company remains optimistic, predicting lower operating and capital costs and a 45 percent to 89 percent increase in revenue in 2012. But hitting those targets will depend on more consumers buying electric vehicles, and so far, demand has been lower than A123 expected.




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From Discover Magazine: Defibrillators Malfunction at Shockingly High Rates | 80beats

spacing is important
Diagram for AED electrode placement.

Touted as life-saving devices, some 1.5 million automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are around the US. AEDs are designed to be used by anyone, regardless of training, to jumpstart the heart in a case of sudden cardiac arrest. And in this life-or-death situation, a surprisingly number of the devices fail.

Between 2005 and 2009, there were 28,000 reports of AED malfunction in the US, representing 1 out of 50 devices in the country. Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum investigates the cause of these failures. Surprisingly basic engineering errors were responsible for some of the malfunctions, such as parts that are just too imprecise for a matter of life or death:

One AED, the brand name of which the FDA would not disclose, was found to occasionally misdiagnose the heart’s electrical rhythm. It delivered some shocks that weren’t needed and failed to deliver others that were. The culprit was a resistor that could vary in resistance by up to 10 percent of its stated value. “When our engineer looked at this design, it was an instant ‘uh‑oh,’ ” says [Al Taylor of the FDA].

How could regulations on medical devices be so lax? …


from Discover Magazine

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From Ars Technica: Apple in antitrust crosshairs over e-book pricing


The Department of Justice has plans to sue Apple for allegedly colluding to fix the prices of e-books, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Until fairly recently, publishers sold books to retailers for around half the suggested cover price, and then retailers were free to set their own prices. In recent years, Apple has turned its e-books business in the iBookstore over to an “agency model,” where publishers decide how much the book will sell for at a given retailer, but must take into account the fact that Apple gets a 30 percent cut of each sale. On top of that, Apple stipulated that the publishers could not sell their e-books for lower prices anywhere else.

According to quotes pulled from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Jobs said that publishers then took the agency model to other e-book retailers and told the retailers they had to agree to the minimum retail price set by Apple’s pricing strictures, preventing other e-book sellers like Amazon from undercutting the competition. The five publishers under scrutiny for working with Apple in this way include Simon and Schuster, Hachette Book Group, the Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins.

The DoJ believes these actions constitute a violation of antitrust law, and are attempting to settle the case with the relevant companies. If a settlement is not reached, according to the WSJ, the DoJ will sue Apple and the five publishers.

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From Ars Technica: Holey chip! IBM drills holes into optical chip for terabit-per-second speed


IBM researchers have built a prototype optical chip that can transfer a terabit of data per second, using an innovative design requiring 48 tiny holes drilled into a standard CMOS chip, facilitating the movement of light. Much faster and more power-efficient than today’s optics, the so-called “Holey Optochip” technology could enhance the power of supercomputers.

Optical chips, which move data with light instead of electrons, are commonly used for interconnects in today’s supercomputers and can be found in IBM systems such as Power 775 and Blue Gene. Optical technology is favored over electrical for transmitting high-bandwidth data over longer distances, which is why it’s used for telecommunications networks, said IBM Optical Links Group manager Clint Schow.

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From Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi, activist tool


The tiny, $35, Linux-based Raspberry Pi computer has drawn a lot of attention in the last few months, and though it was originally developed to teach computer programming to young students, Internet activists have taken notice as well. A recent BBC interview with developer Nadim Kobeissi, creator of a web-based secure communications program called Cryptocat, shows off just one potential use of the low-cost hardware and free software system. Kobeissi says he’s looking forward to the arrival of Raspberry Pi as a way to bring extra-secure communication to web chat, especially in places where conversations might be watched.

Kobeissi’s Cryptocat is an open-source program that encrypts chat conversations before they’re sent to a server. For relatively little money, he plans to buy Raspberry Pi computers, set them up as servers running Cryptocat, and send them to areas where free speech is monitored or prohibited. The small, modifiable nature of Raspberry Pi computers make them well-adapted to foster chat privacy.

Considering general privacy concerns and recent NSA surveillance probes, the idea could be intriguing for westerners too. “Big Data continue to amass gigantic amounts of personal information without providing any guarantee of privacy, while encryption remains largely inaccessible,” Cryptocat’s website claims, “Cryptocat aims to bridge the gap for those who need easy, encrypted communication.”

Earlier this week, Raspberry Pi became available for pre-order through two Britain-based manufacturers, and the demand for the little open-source system was so great that both manufacturers sites went down on Tuesday evening. When the Pi becomes more widely available, Kobeissi plans to put the software for turning the Raspberry Pi into a chat server online for anyone to use.

 

 

from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: Two German suits between Apple and Samsung dismissed, at least 10 to go


The Mannheim Regional Court in Germany has thrown out two lawsuits between Apple and Samsung, adding to the pile of discarded lawsuits between the two companies.

One of the two suits dismissed on Friday was filed by Apple against Samsung asserting its slide-to-unlock patents in the iPhone, while the other dismissed lawsuit is the third Samsung 3G patent lawsuit in a row to be dismissed. Unsurprisingly, Samsung was displeased with the decision, telling the BBC that it planned to appeal. “We will continue to assert our intellectual property rights and defend against Apple’s claims to ensure our continued ability to provide innovative mobile products to consumers,” the company said.

Apple did not publicly comment on the decisions but pointed the BBC to a previous statement wherein the company accused Samsung of “blatantly copying” its hardware and UI designs used in the iPhone and iPad. And, as noted by FOSS Patents, this is just the beginning—only four of at least 14 Mannheim court cases between Apple and Samsung have been ruled on so far. (There are at least six left from Apple against Samsung alone.) Is anyone getting patent suit vertigo yet?

 

 

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From Ars Technica: Zemlin praises $25 Linux computer: a Windows license costs more than four Raspberry Pis


In a blog post written this morning, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin praised the Raspberry Pi foundation’s $35 Linux computer, which met tremendous demand when it launched this week. In his blog post, Zemlin discussed the important role that the Linux platform plays in enabling innovation around low-cost computing.

The Raspberry Pi foundation launched with the aim of building an inexpensive system that could be used to teach computer programming to young students. They developed a pair of bare ARM boards priced at $25 and $35 that include a 700Mhz ARM11 CPU and a 256MB of RAM. The devices are roughly the same size as a deck of playing cards.

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from Ars Technica