Compact Flash 5.0 Promises Petabytes

That’s 144 Petabytes to be precise, and if you want that in good old Gigabytes, that’s around 150994944 of them. Data transfer speeds are said to be in the order of 32Mb per second, but before you get too excited, no such card or storage chip exists, yet… The newly announced spec from the Compact Flash Association is basically a re-vamp of the way data on a memory card can be accessed, using a faster and more efficient 48-bit address, which opens the way for the theoretical 144Pb storage capacity. It’s sounds impressive but it’s worth remembering that 64-bit systems can theoretically address up to 16-Exabytes of data, which is 16384 petabytes, or 16777216 terabytes in old money. It sounds terrifying, but I only have to think back to the late 1970s and my first home-built computer, which had an impressive1 kilobyte of memory A few years later and my first hard disc drive had a massive 10 megabytes of capacity; I remember thinking at the time that it would take years to fill it up…

Fashionable Frequencies

You are normally fairly safe from the world of high fashion on this web site but we just couldn’t resist bringing you news of a new fabric, called Intimacy, developed by Studio Roosegaarde’s V2 Lab. Intimacy is used in a range of garments, made from something called Smart Foil, which becomes transparent when fed with a small current. Various ways of using the fabric have been touted, including sensing the wearer’s emotions to control the degree of transparency, or remotely, via a wireless interface, with the wearer able to vary the transparency by moving closer or further away from a transmitter. Scary stuff but we can see a good opportunity for joke shops with Smart Foil trousers and Y-Fronts…

Solar Nanotubes Make Light Work?

I have been reporting on developments in photovoltaic cells for as long as I can remember and there’s always some new technology or fabrication method that’s going to improve upon the woeful efficiency of today’s silicon based solar cells. I’m still waiting and outside the labs most commercial cells still only manage a fairly miserable 20 – 30 percent efficiency, which basically means that during their lifetime very few solar cells ever recover the enormous amount of energy put into their manufacture, let alone live long enough to generate ‘free’ electricity. I have no doubt that one day the problem will be licked and this might just be the development to do it. It’s a rolled up graphene layer nanotube and it’s the brainchild of a team of researchers at Cornell University. The first problem, though, is that it’s tiny, no larger than a DNA molecule, which means you’ll need an awful lot of them to do anything useful. The good news is that it’s very efficient and when exposed to light the tubular structure creates more electrons, and the cylindrical structure makes it easier for them to flow. I know, we’ve been here before so don’t hold your breath, but one day, it will happen, and maybe, just maybe this is where it started…

Windows on the Wall

Let me say straight away that so far I haven’t been overly impressed with the performance of so-called pico’ projectors I’ve seen to date. These tiny pocket size projectors produce a small dim image, not much larger then a big monitor screen that you can just about see in a very dark room. That’s fair enough, someone somewhere will find that useful. However, my gripe is with the way they’re often portrayed in publicity shots, showing vast bright displays in what appears to be well lit environments. Maybe one day that will happen, who knows, but as a display device they leave a lot to be desired, so I’m not too hopeful that the Guangzhou Darling DP200 is going to break the mould, and with a light output of just 9 lumens it’s not going to trouble the mainstream projector market, but it does have one other thing going for it. Built ino the case is a Windows CE PC so you have all that you need, in one handy box, to do a quick presentation on the nearest wall. Plug in a keyboard and mouse and you can do a spot of word processing, though good luck seeing the keys in the dark…

China Blue takes on Blu-ray

Just when you thought the format wars were over and it was safe to buy a Blu-ray player it looks like the losing HD-DVD format may be staging a stealthy comeback Although Blu-ray won the battle in Europe, the US and Japan, on the other side of the World, in China, it is trailing behind the recently launched China Blue HD (CBHD) format. CBHD is very closely related to HD-DVD thanks to some clever licensing agreements between the DVD Forum and China’s Optical Memory National Engineering Research Centre (OMNERC) based in Tsinghua University. The principle differences concern compression and CBHS has more powerful copy protection, as piracy is a big concern in China. Already Warner Home Entertainment has announced support for the format in China with titles such as the Harry Potter Series, The Golden Compass and Blood Diamond likely to be the first into the shops. There’s speculation other major studios could follow suit

Make Mine a Martin

Now I know I said my last Christmas present list revision would be the last but I’ve had to change it again because now what I want for Xmas is a Martin Jetpack. Okay, I know it’s not quite the compact rocket (or jet) powered strap-on flying gizmo I had hoped for, and it looks and sounds more like a monster leaf-blower, but the range (30 miles) and endurance (30 minutes) make it a near-practical form of transport, for Londoner like me at any rate. The twin ducted fans can drive it up to ceiling of 8000 feet, it’ll zoom along at 60mph, it runs on regular unleaded and if the motor conks out there’s a ballistic parachute to get you safely back on the deck. The bad news? Well, it will have to be a late Christmas pressie because they’re not due to go on sale until January 2010, and prospective buyers need to stump up a deposit of $10,000, and that’s without knowing the final cost, which Martin say will be about as much as luxury car. So start saving now, and maybe if a few of you club together we can rustle up that deposit. Read more

NVIDIA Is Still the King of Graphics

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA is reported to have recorded an impressive first quarter in 2009, as the company managed to maintain its position as the number one GPU vendor on the market. The news comes after earlier reports, according to which Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices grabbed a market share of approximately 40 percent in the third quarter of 2008. However, NVIDIA now claims that its market share has increased to an impressive 68 percent, compared to the company’s results in the fourth quarter of 2008.

According to a recent news-article on bit-tech, citing sources from research firms Mercury Research and Jon Peddie Research, NVIDIA succeeded in increasing its market share by 0.3%, in Q1 2009. Read more

World’s Smallest Camcorder

Over the past 30 or so years I’ve written ‘World Smallest Camcorder’ so many times that it’s set in Word AutoComplete. Here’s the latest, it’s from Shenzen AEE Wireless Technology and it’s called, rather confusingly, the ‘Mini DV’. In fact it has nothing to do with the camcorder tape format of the same name, it records in AVI format on Micro SD cards.

Whether or not it is the ‘World’s Smallest’ is open to debate but it is teensy, measuring just 55 x 20 x 118mm and it tips the scales at just 50g. Up front there’s a fixed focus lens and behind that a 2 megapixel image sensor, image resolution is 640 x 480 at 30fps. Power comes form a rechargeable Li-Ion battery that lasts for up to 2 hours. Read more

Is Your Keyboard Bugged?

No, not that sort of bug, we’re talking about the type that gives you nasty infections. If your keyboard is anything like mine it’s probably crawling with gems, but that doesn’t matter, they’re my germs and we’ve got used to each other. One place where germs are unacceptable is in hospitals, where doctors can carry all sorts of nasties around with them, tap in your details on a keyboard, and then the next person to use it picks them up on their fingers, you get the picture. Read more

WiFi to Replace Ancient Radio Waves Technology

Although these things have been around for quite some time now, I’ve only recently decided to give some more though and attention to the WiFi Radio concept, and I was pretty impressed to find out that’s it’s actually a lot more popular and widespread than I previously thought. I have never been a classic radio fan, since most radio hosts annoy me to the point that I just want to smash the radio with a baseball bat. But over the years I have tested some Internet radio stations and I can’t say I was disappointed. After Yahoo launched their new Messenger 9, I also had a brief “stint” at listening to some Yahoo music stations. Read more