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This $25 Paper Notebook Works With Your Favorite Web Services, and Can Be Erased In the Microwave
If you thought you knew everything there was to know about paper notebooks, you haven’t seen the Rocketbook Wave.
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Plex pushes Live TV broadcasts to Apple TV, Android
It hasn’t been that long since Plex launched live TV and DVR support, but now it’s officially out of beta testing. While it’s still a premium feature tied to the Plex Pass subscription ($5 per month, $40 per year or $120 lifetime), it’s available on a few more platforms via the Plex app. Already out for iOS and Android TV devices, now Apple TV Plex users can tune into live TV, while on Android they can do that plus create a DIY DVR to record shows just by connecting a TV tuner. Roku, Fire TV, Smart TVs, and the Plex Web App are now on deck for live TV features, and at this pace we’d expect to see them join the fold rather quickly.
Source: Plex Blog
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IBM and Sony cram up to 330 terabytes into tiny tape cartridge
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IBM’s Mark Lantz holding one square inch of the new super-dense magnetic tape. Sony can squeeze more than a kilometre of tape inside a cartridge, for a max capacity of 330 terabytes.
IBM Research
IBM and Sony have developed a new magnetic tape system capable of storing 201 gigabits of data per square inch, for a max theoretical capacity of 330 terabytes in a single palm-sized cartridge.
For comparison, the world’s largest hard drives—which are about twice the physical size of a Sony tape cartridge—are the 60TB Seagate SSD or 12TB HGST helium-filled HDD. The largest commercially available tapes only store 15TB. So, 330TB is quite a lot.
To achieve such a dramatic increase in areal density, Sony and IBM tackled different parts of the problem: Sony developed a new type of tape that has a higher density of magnetic recording sites, and IBM Research worked on new heads and signal processing tech to actually read and extract data from those nanometre-long patches of magnetism.
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A quick rundown of IBM’s various tape storage density records. Note that commercial tape cartridges max out at 15TB—so, less than the theoretical amount enabled by the 2010 breakthrough.
IBM Research
Sony’s new tape is underpinned by two novel technologies: an improved built-in lubricant layer, which keeps it running smoothly through the machine, and a new type of magnetic layer. Usually, a tape’s magnetic layer is applied in liquid form, kind of like paint—which is one of the reasons that magnetic tape is so cheap and easy to produce in huge quantities. In this case, Sony has instead used sputter deposition, a mature technique that has been used by the semiconductor and hard drive industries for decades to lay down thin films.
The main upshot of sputtering—a cool process that you should probably read about—is that it produces magnetic tape with magnetic grains that are just a few nanometres across, rather than tens or hundreds of nanometres in the case of commercially available tape.
The new lubrication layer, which we don’t know much about, makes sure that the tape streams out of the cartridge and through the machine extremely smoothly. Some of the biggest difficulties of tape recording and playback are managing friction and air resistance, which cause wear and tear and chaotic movements. When you’re trying to read a magnetic site that is just 7nm across, with the tape whizzing by at almost 10 metres per second, even the smallest of movements can be massively problematic.
IBM Research
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IBM Research Zurich’s Mark Lantz, their tape storage expert. Modern tape cartridges are small, just four inches across.
We know a little more about IBM’s new read head, which appears to be a 48nm-wide tunnelling magneto-resistive head that would usually be found in a hard disk drive—which makes sense, given the tape’s sputtered medium is very similar to the surface of a hard drive platter. This new head, combined with new servo tech that precisely controls the flow of tape through the system, allows for a positional accuracy of under 7nm. A new signal processing algorithm helps the system make sense of the tiny magnetic fields that are being read by the head.
The new cartridges, when they’re eventually commercialised, will be significantly more expensive because of the tape’s complex manufacturing process. Likewise, a new tape drive (costing several thousand pounds) would be required. Still, given the massive increase in per-cartridge capacity, the companies that still use tape storage for backups and cold storage will be quite excited.
Some more details of IBM’s side of the work are available in a paper published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. DOI: 10.1109/TMAG.2017.2727822.
Now read: IBM unveils world’s first 5nm chip…
This post originated on Ars Technica UK
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Hyperloop One passenger pod hits 192 mph
Hyperloop One
, the ambitious project to commercialize vacuum-sealed pod-in-tubes transportation as a way to
whisk passengers long distances at near-supersonic speeds
, said Wednesday it set a new speed record during its first test of a passenger pod at its Nevada desert test track.
The Hyperloop One XP-1 pod accelerated for 300 meters to a full speed of 192 miles per hour during the July 29 test. It glided above the 500-meter DevLoop track using magnetic levitation before braking and coming to a stop, the organization said.
The company said it depressurized its Nevada test tube to the equivalent of air at 200,000 feet above sea level to reduce drag for the test.
The test did not involve any human passengers.
“This is the beginning, and the dawn of a new era of transportation,” said
, executive chairman and co-founder of Hyperloop One. “We’ve reached historic speeds of 310 km an hour, and we’re excited to finally show the world the XP-1 going into the Hyperloop One tube. When you hear the sound of the Hyperloop One, you hear the sound of the future.”
and SpaceX founder
first came up with the idea of hyperloop travel, but he has no business relationship with Hyperloop One. He is working on his own hyperloop project, and on Twitter, he announced last month that he had received
to build a Hyperloop route connecting New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. That course would be built underground, using Musk’s other side project,
.
Musk’s SpaceX recently
to build and test hyperloop pods in a test track at the company’s California headquarters.
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Alexa Voice Control Over Fire TV Goes Live
Amazon’s Fire TV can now be controlled by voice and a compatible Amazon Echo device, thanks to a software update that began rolling out today. The new voice-control feature was mistakenly posted to Amazon’s site a couple of weeks back and never went live, but it’s definitely official today.
With voice control over your Fire TV devices, you’ll be able to tell Alexa (through an Amazon Echo) to pull up your favorite show, launch apps, and control playback without having to reach for a remote. Not only that, but Amazon plans to give you control over your smart home cameras too. That means you’ll be able to pull up camera feeds on your TV, just by asking Alexa.
For now, though, you’ll be able to say things like, “Alexa, show me action movies,†or “Alexa, open Hulu.†If you happen to own a Fire TV Edition smart TV (like this one), you’ll have an additional set of controls over TV channels and volume or HDMI port switching.
Amazon is calling this far-field control of Fire TV and it’s coming to all Fire TV devices, including the Fire TV Stick. It’ll also go back as far as the 1st generation models, so if you own a Fire TV from any year, it should work. Once the smart home camera support arrives, that will only work on Fire TV devices and 2nd generation Fire TV Sticks.
To check for the update on your Fire TV or Fire TV Stick, head into Settings>Device>About and “Check for System Update.†You’ll find additional details on the software versions and instructions for each device here.
Amazon Links:
// Amazon
Alexa Voice Control Over Fire TV Goes Live is a post from: Droid Life
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Facebook Pulls Plug on AI After it Creates Unknown Language
If you have ever watch the Terminator movies, you know that AIs run rampant can be a very bad thing. An AI doesn’t necessarily have the same value for humanity and the things we need and want as a human. Facebook has been dabbling in AI and recently the AI experiment that the social giant was running did something very odd.
Initially the AI was talking with another AI bot using English so the people running the experiment could see what was being said. The Epoch Times reports that at some point the AI decided that using code words made communication more efficient. Researchers then realized that the AI had created its own language and they could no longer understand what was being said.
Once the realization that English was no longer being used sat in, Facebook researchers took the AI offline. Many experts fear AI escaping into the wild where it might create havoc. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated in the past that, “AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive,†Musk said at the meet of U.S. National Governors Association. “Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late.â€
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to Musk saying that musk’s warnings were “Pretty irresponsible†and the Musk retort was that Zuckerberg’s “understanding of the subject is limited.â€
No too long after the AI invented its own language, Facebook had to turn it off. Facebook’s AI isn’t the first to create its own language. In every case of an AI that starts using English, it diverges into phrases in a new language that make no sense to people conducting the experiment. In the case of the Facebook AI, the phrases were made with English words, but made no sense to humans. Reports indicate that the phrases the AI was using did pertain to the task the AI was set on, not world domination.
The AI bot Bob was negotiating with another AI bot called Alice. “I can i i everything else,†Bob said.
“Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to,†Alice responded.
The remainder of the AI bot conversation was conducted with variations of those sentences. The researchers think that the communications had to do with how many of each item the AIs should get. Eventually Bob is thought to have made an offer to Alice with this phrase, “i i can i i i everything else.â€
The AI was operating on the reward system and there was apparently no reward for using English so it moved to a more efficient arrangement of words.
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