Promise’s NAS media server offers cost-conscious businesses and home office users power and performance while reducing the amount of power needed to run it.
– Promise Technology, known as the originator of SATA/ATA redundant
array of inexpensive disks (RAID) products, announced a digital media server
aimed at small business and home office users, the SmartStor NS4600. The
server, priced at $399.00 and available through retail and reseller channels,
of…
Promise’s NAS media server offers cost-conscious businesses and home office users power and performance while reducing the amount of power needed to run it.
– Promise Technology, known as the originator of SATA/ATA redundant
array of inexpensive disks (RAID) products, announced a digital media server
aimed at small business and home office users, the SmartStor NS4600. The
server, priced at $399 and available through retail and reseller channels,
offer…
Microsoft has launched Silverlight 3, its rich Internet application technology competitor to Adobe Flash. The new version of the application includes increased support and new features such as enhanced video performance. It will be just one product demonstrated at Microsofts Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans July 13-16, along with Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010 and Windows Server 2008.
– Microsoft
has launched Silverlight 3, the newest version of its rich Internet application
(RIA) technology, meant to challenge Adobe on its own Flash-centric turf.
The release comes on the eve of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference,
scheduled to start July 13 in New Orleans.
In addition…
Expect accelerometers to be in one-third of mobile phones by 2010 and to reach sales of $1.6 billion in 2013, says iSuppli. The popularity of this screen-orienting feature has been encouraged by the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm, to name just a few of the devices they’re now inside.
– Accelerometers are expected to be included in one-third of mobile phones shipped
in 2010, according to new data from iSuppli. The Apple iPhone, Research In
Motion’s BlackBerry Storm and the newly released Palm Pre have boosted the
popularity of accelerometer technology.
iSuppli annually trac…
Novel ways of thinking about the digital world are needed, says Bill Thompson, and perhaps the arts can help.
One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those leading the digital revolution in many areas.
When I worked with the Community Computing Network in the late 80s it was hard work persuading charities and voluntary organisations that having a computer to handle their member databases and print letters was worthwhile.
But now that there really is a computer on every desk and word processing, spreadsheets and databases are standard, arts organisations seem to be far more willing to engage and experiment with the latest tools, especially online.
"We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp"
Bill Thompson
Many are making expert use of social media, moving from MySpace and Bebo to Facebook to follow the audiences, but also finding out how Twitter and other services can be used to help them engage and interact with people who may be interested in their art.
Stage craft
The much-loved Pilot Theatre brought in virtual worlds expert Caron Lyon to built them a stage set in Second Life. The team at Hoi Polloi used video diaries, Facebook and Twitter to establish an online following that has supported them as they tour from their Cambridge base as far afield as Australia, offering new audiences a chance to discover their work in all its strangeness while also ensuring that fans – including me – know what they are up to while they are away.
When it comes crossover organisations like Hide&Seek, who recently ran a social gaming festival in London, it is impossible to separate the art from the technology, and their work offers a real inspiration to those who wonder what the arts will look like in a digitised world.
This cross-fertilisation is important in several ways. It obviously makes sense for those committed to experiment and exploration in the arts to embrace new technologies as a way of exploring the creative potential of a new domain of human activity, just as painters explored the radical new technology of oils for for many decades, or sculptors turned from marble and limestone to work with welded iron or novel materials like frozen blood.
But there is something else going on, something deeper and potentially more important, because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.
They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.
The point was made clear to me at Shift Happens, a conference on the ways arts organisations are using new technologies that took place this week at York Theatre Royal.
Over a day and a half the audience, mostly made up of practitioners, was treated to a fascinating selection of arts-based technology, or technology-based arts, from the interactive animations of the always-engaging Sancho Plan through calls to ensure that tech-based arts are environmentally sustainable from Envirodigital and a demonstration of how to subtitle your online video from Internet Subtitling.
It quickly became clear that the network revolution is already happening in the arts even if its success on the political stage is sometimes sadly limited, as we saw this week in Iran.
One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.
Texting times
I wonder, however, if we can take some old stories and use them to explore the new world. Take The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s last play and one of his finest. Set on a remote island where Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, lives with his daughter Miranda and a strange creature called Caliban, the Tempest explores issues of redemption and forgiveness and the use and abuse of power.
Prospero rules his island thanks the the spells in the books he has studied in his exile, commanding the spirit Ariel to torment and manipulate his former enemies, who have been shipwrecked on the island by a tempest created at Prospero’s command.
A modern reading this tale would see Ariel as a representative of the digital realm, created from bits but able to have a real effect on the physical world. We discover during the play that Ariel was locked into a forked tree until released by Prospero, a good analogy for the effort needed to liberate the power of the digital revolution, represented by Prospero’s books of spells.
We can take this further. The witch’s child Caliban believes himself the true inheritor of the island as his mother was banished there before Prospero arrived and fails to realise that Prospero’s books have given him power over the unseen world that far outstrip Caliban’s physical prowess, just as the rulers of analogue distribution fear the world we have conjured from our code.
And when Caliban, wandering the island with shipwrecked sailors Trinculo and Stephano, hears an invisible Ariel playing on a pipe he tells them:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Today the thousand twangling instruments that Ariel and his sprites conjure up are replaced by millions of tweets, status updates, but they still fill the world with sweet sounds, and offer us a vision of a digital world that can be as rich and full of delight as we choose to make it. It’s reassuring to see that some of our best artists are working hard to make that happen.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
This looks like a week in which electric cars are going to be very much in the news – in part due to government initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. And there are plenty of announcements being made by the OEMs to coincide with that. Nissan’s yesterday about manufacturing electric plug-in vehicles – not hybrids – in the US is particularly intriguing.
It’s the latest news from Nissan on this subject and follows on from Carlos Ghosn’s consistently stated view that electric cars represent the long-term future for the automotive industry. He has perhaps stood out among car firm bosses as a real believer in electric drive technology and the opportunity presented – and on a business planning horizon that he earnestly believes is with us now. Working with partners like Project Better Place has demonstrated a serious intent to grapple with things like infrastructure, too.
At first sight, 100,000 units a year of production in the US sounds pretty ambitious. And maybe it is, given that we’re talking about electric drive vehicles that don’t come with a back-up gasoline engine. That raises the ‘range anxiety’ question alongside consumer acceptance of frequent battery charging rather than occasionally filling the tank with the black stuff.
How far can these cars really go on a single charge? (Nissan says the car will offer 100 miles of range, but what if the heater is on and there are hills to climb…); how often does it need charging?; how much will that cost me and just how robust is the battery? (And the truly environmentally aware may even ask how the juice coming out of the power socket was generated…but I suspect that question will be overlooked or fudged in the minds of many.)
Nissan will have to come up with a very good product to get initial consumer acceptance of this new technology. And – leaving aside the considerable product development and technology issues ahead – I’m sure there is a lot of discussion still to happen concerning the precise business model, too (like the retail price and how battery leasing might work in practice).
But that’s 100,000 units in a passenger vehicle market of almost 16m units (or wherever we are on the recovery path by 2012, when Nissan plans the start of US production). It’s way under a 1% share. Nissan can target sales in US cities where it thinks the car will sell.
Do Americans buy small, more energy-efficient cars? They are now buying more of them – look at the success of Smart’s Fortwo. And Nissan can be cute and look to market the car in places where city authorities are suddenly looking for more EV solutions (like Baltimore, for example).
Market analysts can argue about how quickly US market segmentation will shift, but there is a consensus that smaller and more energy-efficient vehicles will be growing in sales. Electric drive vehicles in various formats will clearly be a part of that broader trend, though it is far from clear exactly where the numbers will be and on what timescale (and the internal combustion engine is doing much to make itself more efficient).
But which way is the oil price wind blowing? I wouldn’t mind betting that in 2012, when global economic recovery is really kicking in, the price of a barrel will be a lot higher than today. That could provide a very fair wind to both hybrids and pure-electrics.
Is range anxiety really a big issue? Incremental improvements are helping, but the issue is not going away. Having said that, there is a point at which range becomes acceptable for many who would consider such a car primarily for relatively low-mileage daily use – the commute to the office, say.
And with that pattern of usage, range anxiety may not be as big an issue in America as in Europe because American households have more multi-vehicle ownership than Europe does.
Whereas a pure EV might be severely limiting in Western Europe (asking the single car household’s sole vehicle to do many jobs for the lowest cost explains why the C-segment is Europe’s largest – cars like the Volkswagen Golf are fine around town and for motorway cruising) US households are perhaps more likely to have a larger vehicle available for longer journeys. ‘I use the EV every day, but the F-150 is just great for the weekends.’
Ghosn is taking a gamble though, that he can lead investment in electric vehicles for ‘mass transportation’ and steal a march on rivals, who are playing much safer with hybrids and ‘range extenders’ (like the Volt) that deal with range anxiety up front. And it’s a pan-global strategy to spread the technology investment across as many units as possible under the Renault and Nissan brands. Later on, when scale economies permit, maybe a viable low-cost ‘Logan-style’ electric car can be developed for price-sensitive emerging markets – which will likely not be figuring too much early on.
If Ghosn gets it right, the EV push could leave Renault-Nissan as one of the most powerful groups in the global auto industry for a generation. But it could be an expensive drag on profitability at a time when the industry’s worst performers come under increasing pressure to cut capacity still further.
It’s a gamble. And Ghosn is perhaps a brave man. But you wouldn’t expect him to have a vision on where the industry is headed and not give it his best shot would you?
While performance-improving cache memory gets a lot of attention, there is an increasing need on today’s chips for programmable read-only memory (PROM) as well. This is used to permanently store information for such user-visible features as code storage and on-chip encryption keys, as well as yield-enhancing functions such as cache repair and post-silicon circuit tuning. PROMs rely on electrical fuses for in-factory programming. Salicided polysilicon has traditionally served as a fuse element in several generations of CMOS technologies, but Intel’s recent transition to high-k metal-gate technology requires a significant shift in fuse design to metal fuses. Intel has developed a new metal fuse-based 3-D high-density PROM technology that is fully compatible with high-k metal gate. The new technology has been developed for Intel’s 32nm process, on which it has a 1.37 square micron cell. It is readily scalable for future logic technologies. Details are being described this week at the 2009 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto, Japan.
