Hasta La Gadget!

‘Let’s face it; a lot of people in this world are shortsighted. When warned about the future dangers caused by global warning, many people think so what? I’ve got a hundred years on this earth at most and then the next generation can deal with it? Our civilization has historically had a problem with planning […]

Billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has a long-term plan: to build a clock that runs for 10,000 years. (Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

High on a rocky ridge in the desert, nestled among the brush, is the topmost part of a clock that has been ticking for thousands of years.

It looks out over the ruins of a spaceport, built by a rich man whose name was forgotten long ago.

Most of the clock is deep inside the mountain, below the ridgeline. To get there, you hike for days through the heat; the only sounds are the buzzing of flies and the whisper of the occasional breeze. You climb up through the brush, then pass through a hidden door into the darkness and silence of the clock chamber. Far above your head, in the darkness, a massive pendulum swings slowly back and forth, making the clock tick once every 10 seconds.

No one knows who built it, or why. They built it well, and even now it keeps perfect time. All we know of these strange people is that they were obsessed with the future.

Why else would they build something that had no purpose except to mark time for thousands of years?

The rich man is Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and he has indeed started construction on a clock that he hopes will run for 10,000 years.

For Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the clock is not just the ultimate prestige timepiece. It’s a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. His hope is that building it will change the way humanity thinks about time, encouraging our distant descendants to take a longer view than we have.

For starters, Bezos himself is taking a far, far longer view than most Fortune 500 CEOs.

“Over the lifetime of this clock, the United States won’t exist,” Bezos tells me. “Whole civilizations will rise and fall. New systems of government will be invented. You can’t imagine the world — no one can — that we’re trying to get this clock to pass through.”

To help achieve his mission of fostering long-term thinking, Bezos last week launched a website to publicize his clock. People who want to visit the clock once it’s ready can put their names on a waiting list on the site — although they’ll have to be prepared to wait, as the clock won’t be complete for years.

It’s a monumental undertaking that Bezos and the crew of people designing and building the clock repeatedly compare to the Egyptian pyramids. And as with the pharaohs, it takes a certain amount of ego — even hubris — to consider building such a monument. But it’s also an unparalleled engineering problem, challenging its makers to think about how to keep a machine intact, operational and accurate over a time span longer than most human-made objects have even existed.

Consider this: 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had barely begun making the transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture, and had just figured out how to cultivate gourds to use as bottles. What if those people had built a machine, set it in motion, and it was still running today? Would we understand how to use it? What would it tell us about them?

And would it change the way we think about our own future?

The idea for the clock has been around since Danny Hillis first proposed it in WIRED magazine in 1995. Since then, Hillis and others have built prototypes and created a nonprofit, the Long Now Foundation, to work on the clock and promote long-term thinking. But nobody actually started building a full-scale 10,000-year clock until Bezos put up a small portion — $42 million, he says — of his fortune.

Last year, contractors started machining components, such as a trio of 8-foot stainless steel gears and the Geneva wheels that will ring the chimes. Meanwhile, computers at Jet Propulsion Laboratories have spent months calculating the sun’s position in the sky at noon every day for the next 10,000 years, data that the clock will use to correct itself. This year, excavation began on the Texas desert site where the clock will be installed deep underground.

And just last month, the Smithsonian agreed to let the Long Now Foundation install a 10,000-year clock in one of its Washington museums, once they can find someone to fund it.

It seems that the time for millennium clocks has arrived.

The Project

Making a clock that will run for 10 millennia is no small undertaking. In Texas, the builders have started drilling a horizontal access tunnel into the base of the ridge where the clock will live. They’ll drill a pilot hole, 500 feet straight down from the top of the ridge, until it meets the access tunnel. Then they’ll bring a 12-foot-7-inch bit into the bottom and drill it back up, carving out a tall vertical shaft as it goes.

Afterwards, they’ll install a movable platform holding a 2.5-ton robot arm with a stonecutting saw mounted on the end. It will start carving a spiral staircase into the vertical shaft, from the top down, one step at a time.

The clock, with massive metal gears, a huge stone weight, and a precise, titanium escapement inside a protective quartz box, will go deep into the shaft. A few years from now, the makers will set it in motion.

Some day, thousands of years in the future, when Bezos and Amazon and even the United States are nothing more than memories, or less even than that, people may discover this clock, still ticking, and scratch their heads.

Bezos says, “In the year 4000, you’ll go see this clock and you’ll wonder, ‘Why on Earth did they build this?’”

The answer, he hopes, will lead you to think more profoundly about the distant future and your effects on it.

Here are some of the people who are creating the most temporally ambitious mechanical engineering project in human history.

For months now, DigiTimes has been fueling rumors of Amazon’s first foray into the LCD tablet market. Today it ratchets up the specificity with sometimes contradictory claims that Quanta Computer will be responsible for assembling the tablet with a supposed TI (not NVIDIA) processor and Wintek (not EIH) touch panel among its components. According to DigiTimes, Amazon hopes to move some four million units in 2011 alone with plans to launch the new tablet as soon as August. Possible? Sure, likely even. But we’ll wait for Bezos to sing before updating our holiday shopping lists.

Amazon tablet with TI processor shipping as early as August? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 01:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Dropbox offer "cloud" services hosting data over the internet. (Photo: Extra Medium/Flickr)

With the recent announcement of iCloud, Apple joins Google, Amazon and Microsoft in their aggressive push into cloud computing, in a race to reel customers into their media ecosystems.

The general idea of the “cloud” is to store your media on the internet so you can access it from any device anywhere, as opposed to leaving it on a hard drive. Now with cloud services, we can juggle around our data between multiple gadgets.

Have music on your PC that you want to listen to on your smartphone? Boom, stream it from the cloud. Want to access a document on another computer? Bam, grab it from your web-connected “cloud” drive. Ideally, with cloud services you can access other types of media, such as photos, e-books and videos, across multiple devices, too.

But cloud services vary between companies so much that the buzzword can get awfully confusing. What exactly do you get? Is it just online storage? Or is it streaming media? Both? In the chart below, we give a side-by-side comparison of five major cloud services, in terms of features, device compatibility and storage space.

Pretty complicated differences, right? For further clarity, here’s what you need to know about how each service works.

iCloud

Apple designed its iCloud service to work as if it were invisible. Snap a photo on your iPhone and it pops up on your Mac or Windows PC. Edit a document in the Pages app on a Mac, and that same edit appears on the Pages app on your iPhone. Buy a song on iTunes on your Mac, and on your iPhone you can re-download it; same with e-books you buy through iBooks.

Additionally, iCloud enables automatic wireless backups for iOS devices. Each Apple customer gets 5 GB of free space for backups, documents and e-mail; the photos, music and books don’t count toward the 5 GB.

Apple has left some questions unanswered as to whether iCloud will have a web app interface for accessing these services from any device with a browser, like MobileMe did. However, we believe it’s shortsighted to think that iCloud would not eventually have a web app suite to complement the aforementioned services.

Amazon

Amazon’s Cloud Drive is as straightforward as a cloud service gets: It’s just an online storage locker. You put files in there, and they’re online. You can access the files from any device that supports Flash. (That means Cloud Drive is useless for any iPhone or iPad customer, since the devices do not support Flash.) Sign up for a Cloud Drive and you get 5 GB for free; you can pay an extra $1 per extra gigabyte each year.

Google

Google’s “cloud” suite can be confusing: There’s no one-stop destination that hosts all your media. You have to go to Picasa to deal with your photos, Gmail for your e-mail, Music Beta for online music storage and Google Docs for your documents. Each service offers at least 1 GB of free space, and you can plunk down an extra $5 per year to add 20 gigs for most of its services. You can rent up to 16 TB each year for $4,000 (you know, in case you’re trying to boot up Skynet).

We already knew it was coming — Samsung hasn’t been particularly shy about its teasing — but the big day has finally arrived, and the Series 5 Chromebook is now officially shipping to those eagerly awaiting the Google-powered laptop. If you weren’t among the high-end coupon clippers who snatched one up during the surprise sale at Gilt a couple of weeks ago, you can now pick up a Chromebook of your own. At least for now, however, it looks like you’ll have to settle for a white exterior — the “Titan Silver” (also known as black) edition is still in pre-order mode at both Best Buy and Amazon.

Samsung Series 5 Chromebook now shipping in Arctic White — Titan Silver edition still to come originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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