Founder's Blog - Jitbit: Chinese Magical Hard-Drive. This is Founder's blog - Subscribe - About Apr 7 2011 A Russian friend of mine has posted this absolutely amazing story.
He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town right next to the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. It's a 128-MB flash-drive. The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff...
Robots Invent Their Own Language. Australian scientists have invented a new breed of robots called Lingodroids, programmed to make, use, and share language. The bots can coin words to describe places they have been, places they want to go, and plans for getting there. “When they need a new word, they invent one,” says Janet Wiles, a cognitive scientist at the University of Queensland who leads an interdisciplinary team on the project. The rolling chatterboxes “see” using 360-degree cameras, laser range finders, and sonar.
A microphone functions as their ears, and a speaker acts as a voice box, emitting the familiar beeps of a touch-tone phone. As for brains, Wiles outfitted each Lingodroid with an alphabet of beeps that correspond to letters. Wiles notes that although the language may seem simple, for robots, grasping spatial information is incredibly complex. IBM, 3M glue chips into silicon skyscrapers. High performance access to file storage IBM and adhesive maker 3M are teaming up to cook up the packaging goo that will be needed to stack up chips into 3D arrays.
There is a growing consensus in the computer industry that more compact and three dimensional packaging of chips is necessary to keep increasing the performance and reducing the power draw of everything from smartphones to supercomputers. The industry has thus far reduced power consumption and the physical size of chips by shrinking the lithographic processes used to etch the circuits on the chips, but at some point in the future we will start reaching approaching the physical limits of these processes. So the idea is to take components that are often separate on a system – processors, main memory, networking and other peripherals – and etch them all onto chips and then stack them up in a 3D array, rather than solder them onto a motherboard and wire them together with metal stripes in a 2D array.
The Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated (June 2011) « Data Center Knowledge. Like this story?
Get the latest data center news by e-mail or RSS, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. The Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated « Data Center Knowledge. Like this story?
Get the latest data center news by e-mail or RSS, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Here’s a look at the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list, which was released Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010 ahead of the SC10 conference. High-Speed Laser Chips Move Data at 50 Gbps. A new research breakthrough from Intel combines silicon chips and lasers to transmit data at 50 gigabits per second — and someday, maybe as fast as a terabit per second.
The 50-Gbps speed is enough to download an HD movie from iTunes, or up to 100 hours of digital music, in less than a second. The technology, known as silicon photonics, can be used as a replacement for copper wires to connect components within computers, or between computers in data centers. “The fundamental issue is that electronic signaling relying on copper wires is reaching its physical limits,” says Justin Rattner, chief technology officer for Intel, which announced the breakthrough Tuesday. “Photonics gives us the ability to move vast quantities of data across the room or planet at extremely high speeds and in a cost-effective manner.” Photonics refers to the generation, modulation, switching and transmission of light, and can be done using lasers or light-emitting diodes. Recover a Dead Hard Disk.
Photorec is file/data recovery software originally designed to recover lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks, it ignores the filesystem and instead is looking for what is known as file headers, this is the very first part of every file and generally tells the OS what kind of file it is without the system having to read the file extension.
It has been seriously extended to search also for non audio/video headers. It can now search for over 80 different types of files. Photorec is part of the Testdisk package. To install the following package in a Debian based Linux Distro you would as the root user run the following command. apt-get install testdisk If you are not running as root just precede the command with sudo like you see below. sudo apt-get install testdisk There are some basic rules when dealing with Photorec. Antec. Backup and Restore to Bare Metal with Easy Open Source GPL Redo.