Category: Computers, Science & Technology

We started out, many years ago as drbillbailey.net/blog, then, we were thecomputercurmudgeon.com, then we became drbill.cc (for Computer Curmudgeon), but as time went by, I added DrBill.TV as a separate web site for the video show… well, now, we have consolidated everything together under DrBill.TV. All the old site addresses still work, of course, but they all now point to DrBill.TV! So, make a note! Mark it down, you heard it here first! (Well, where else would you hear it!?!)

My favorite Virtual hypervisor for Linux clients has been upgraded!

VirtualBox Web Site

Oracle today (April 2, 2012) released VirtualBox 4.1.12, a maintenance release of VirtualBox 4.1 which improves stability and fixes regressions.

“VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. See ‘About VirtualBox’ for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.”

More on the Tricorder front… this time, an Open Source Tricorder!

Star Trek-like open-source tricorder sees magnetic fields and more

“Know the near-magical hand held analysis gadgets known as ‘tricorders’ that everyone carries in Star Trek? A cognitive science researcher has created a real-world version.

‘The open source science tricorders that I’ve developed are very much a way to help people explore and feed their curiosity for the world,’ Peter Jansen, who created and built the gadget, told me today in an email.

Jansen recently earned his Ph.D. in in cognitive science from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada where he taught computers to learn language like babies do. He is currently at the University of Arizona working on high-tech sensors.

A person with that level of smarts, apparently, has enough brain power leftover in his spare time to invent tricorders, not to mention the greedlessness to share the blueprint with DIYers who want their own. Instructions are available from his Tricorder Project website.

Like the Trek devices, Jansen’s gadgets will measure the environment, things such as ambient temperature, humidity and magnetic fields, as well as take spatial readings for distance, location and even motion. They won’t, however, identify aliens for you.

The idea is to ‘help kids learn science at a conceptual level and ground abstract concepts like magnetism or polarization by providing a way to intuitively visualize them long before kids learn their mathematical formalisms,’ he said. (That’s the uber-academic term referring to the logic and structure of math.)”

You can have fun and learn about physics! Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw at NC State in the 70s: “Physics R Fun!”

Angry Birds Space: How the Physics Works

“The Angry Birds franchise owes a lot to Isaac Newton. The legendary 17th-century scientist defined the classical laws of gravity, after all, and without them, the game’s designers would have had nothing to go on in crafting how things move in its virtual world.

Consequently, the game’s heroic-yet-furious birds wouldn’t be able to exact their high-impact revenge on those smug, green pigs. Without the laws of gravity to guide them, the pigs’ Rube Goldberg-esque structures simply wouldn’t come crashing down.

The thing is, the game doesn’t use real physics to model how things move. That’s according to Rhett Allain, an associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University. The latest version, Angry Birds Space, which escalates the avian-porcine conflict to the final frontier, uses science that’s even further from reality, he says.

Allain says he took on figuring out the game’s physics because it was a challenge. Without ever contacting the game publisher, Rovio, he wrote an extensive analysis of the physics of Angry Birds Space for Wired. The question remains: Why spend so much time analyzing a silly game?

‘My goal is to use this as an educational tool,’ Allain told Mashable. ‘I love doing analysis for Angry Birds because it’s a lot like real physics but it doesn’t have the same answers. Obviously in this case the gravitational force is not the same as what you could look up in a textbook. I want to to try to find the answer, just like we do in science.'”

Yes, it is available in the right hand column of the current web page… RIGHT NOW, Roku has a deal through this link, that will snag you a Brand New Roku box for $49.99 with FREE SHIPPING! Dewd! I ordered another one myself! (I ordered it for my bedroom!) Very cool!

Yes, don’t be an April Fool! Back up your data!

World Backup Day 2012

“As we live an increasingly digital life, we can’t afford to ignore the enormous amount of data that we create. We’re well on track to make well over 1.8 zettabytes of data this year. That’s almost 57 billion iPads or 210 billion movies worth! Think about all the precious baby videos, financial documents, love letters, business emails and wedding photos that you’d lose if it isn’t backed up.

When a hard drive fails and the data isn’t backed up, it’s gone. And it’s not a question of if your drive will fail, it’s when. Remember, every single computer component will fail eventually.

The hard drive is the component in your computer that has the highest chance of breaking unexpectedly. A hard drive consists of a head unit hovering over a special disc that spins 7,500 times a minute! One little bump and that head could crash into the spinning disk. And the crash itself isn’t what causes the most damage. It’s the loss of the data on that drive. If any other computer component fails, usually a new part can be switched out and the computer will be exactly the same as before. On the other hand when your hard drive crashes, you won’t be able to get your data back (unless you have an massive amount of money to spend on data recovery).

Backing up is really simple once you’ve set up the backup process. There are a number of different methods depending on how you want to back up, and how safe you want to keep it. You can even set up multiple backups to better protect your files. It’s just a matter of taking the first step of recognizing the value of your data. A backup isn’t just an external hard drive, it’s a plan to automatically create multiple copies of your data.

A final point – once a year is NOT frequent enough for backing up data. World Backup Day was created to spread awareness and to get those who have never backed up to understand how important it is to keep your data safe. Once you learn how easy it is, you’ll be able to backup your life automatically!”

And it has some cool new features!

Chrome 18 arrives with hardware-accelerated Canvas

“Version 18 of the Chrome Web browser has rolled out to the stable channel. The new version includes hardware-accelerated rendering for the HTML5 Canvas element on Windows and Mac OS X.

As we have recently reported, standards-based Web technologies provide an increasingly capable platform for game development. The major browser vendors are working to further increase the viability of open standards for browser-based gaming. Offloading Canvas rendering to the GPU helps reduce the CPU load of 2D games and improves performance. The feature has been available in Chrome for quite some time, but it’s now finally enabled by default.

Hardware-accelerated Canvas rendering is only available on systems with compatible graphics hardware. You can get some information about what features in Chrome have hardware acceleration enabled on your system by navigating to the ‘chrome://gpu’ URL.

Another key open standard that is relevant for gaming is WebGL, which provides JavaScript APIs for rendering 3D content in the Canvas element. In Chrome 18, Google has introduced a software-based backend for WebGL based on TransGaming’s SwiftShader. This will make it possible for users to view WebGL content on computers that don’t have compatible graphics hardware. Although it will open up WebGL content to more users, the software-based renderer doesn’t offer comparable performance to native hardware-accelerated WebGL.

In addition to these improvements, the Chrome developers have also been working to make various security improvements based on vulnerabilities that were exposed during the Pwnium competition. For more details about the Chrome 18 release, you can refer to the official release announcement. The software is available for download from Google’s website.”

Cross-posted from the Hand Held Hack:

Angry Birds! Space! What more do you need?! That appears to be the shared sentiment around the world, as Angry Birds: Space is soaring to new heights! Indeed, I must have it!

Angry Birds Space rockets to the top of the App Store charts in over 28 countries

“Only a few hours after its debut, Rovio’s Angry Birds Space has hit the top of the App Store charts in more than 28 countries. Released last night at 1:00 am PST, or 10:00 am Helsinki time, Angry Birds Space costs $0.99 on iPhone and $2.99 on the iPad.

The game — which was highly anticipated thanks to a smart marketing campaign by Rovio that included a video from NASA actually filmed in space and a promotional campaign with WalMart — is the No. 1 paid and No. 1 top grossing app in dozens of countries including: the US, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia, Columbia, Denmark, Norway, Mexico, India, Greece, Belgium, the UK, Spain and (no surprise here) Finland.

In Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland and Korea Angry Birds Space is the No. 1 paid iPhone and iPad app. The game is the No. 1 paid iPhone app and the No. 1 paid and top grossing iPad app in Australia, Hong Kong, Israel and the Czech Republic. It’s also leading the paid and top grossing charts in some capacity in Bulgaria, Italy, Argentina and Sweden.

At time of writing, the game hadn’t yet registered on the U.S. Google Play charts, which tend to be slower to update due to the algorithm Google uses to determine chart rankings. On Android the game comes in both the standard $0.99 paid format and a free, ad supported version. Neither of the app’s pages had updated yet to show how many downloads they have received, but the free version has already amassed 6,048 reviews and 4.8 star rating.

The game is available in the Amazon Appstore with a free, ad-supported app, a $0.99 paid app, and a $2.99 Kindle Fire App. It’s also available in the Mac App Store for $4.99.”

Awesomeness! 60 TB in a single hard drive! How amazing is THAT? Want!

Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives on their way

“Seagate has demonstrated the first terabit-per-square-inch hard drive, almost doubling the areal density found in modern hard drives. Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively.

To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic ‘bit.’ These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, ‘high density’ magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy or a sprinkling of table salt (really), are more stubborn when it comes to changing their magnetism (i.e. writing data) — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away.

HAMR, which was originally demonstrated by Fujitsu in 2006, adds a laser to the hard drive head. The head seeks as normal, but whenever it wants to write data the laser turns on. Reading data is done in the conventional way. Just so you understand how small the magnetic bits are in a HAMR drive, one terabit per square inch equates to two million bits per linear inch; in other words, each site is just 12.7 nanometers long — or about a dozen atoms.”

And, not in a good way! Turns out the new iPad runs very hot (temperature-wise!) So, users are complaining, and Apple, as usual, is not happy that they are complaining!

Apple’s Chilly Response to iPad Heat Complaints

“It’s not uncommon for Apple enthusiasts to start finding fault with their new gadget within a couple days of buying the latest and greatest.

In some rare cases — most famously, with the iPhone 4 antenna — Apple may end up acknowledging some validity to the griping.

But for now, at least, that’s not what’s happening when it comes to reports that the new iPad kicks out more heat than its predecessors.
Here’s their statement, via Apple PR’s Trudy Muller:

‘The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications. If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.'”