Hasta La Gadget!

Speed. It’s a movie. It’s a drug. And it’s also something that throngs of internet users the world over cannot get enough of. Thankfully, the wizards at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology have figured out a way to satisfy the unsatisfiable, announcing this week a world record in the area of wireless data transmission. Researchers were able to achieve 40Gbit/sec at 240GHz over a distance of one kilometer, essentially matching the capacity of optical fiber… but, you know, without the actual tether.

The goal here, of course, isn’t to lower your ping times beyond where they are already; it’s to give rural communities across the globe a decent shot at enjoying broadband. Distances of over one kilometer have already been covered by using a long range demonstrator, which the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology set up between two skyscrapers as part of the project “Millilink”. There’s no clear word on when the findings will be ported over to the commercial realm, but given the traction we’re seeing in the white spaces arena, we doubt you’ll have to wait long.

Filed under: Science, Internet

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Via: Physorg

Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics

If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center.

In the blog post, Michael Manoochehri, Developer Programs Engineer, outlines his team’s plan to place hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors around the conference space to track things like temperature, noise levels, humidity and air quality in real-time. This was spawned due to a fascination with wanting to know which areas of the conference were the most popular, so it will be interesting to see what the information the team gathers actually tells us.

At first glance, this seems a little bit creepy, but it’s no different than a venue adjusting the cooling system based on the temperature inside at any given moment. As with anything that Google does, this could have implications for tracking indoor events or businesses in the future, as Manoochehri shared:

Networked sensor technology is in the early stages of revolutionizing business logistics, city planning, and consumer products. We are looking forward to sharing the Data Sensing Lab with Google I/O attendees, because we want to show how using open hardware together with the Google Cloud Platform can make this technology accessible to anyone.

Notice the wrap-up of wanting to show people how open hardware combined with Google’s Cloud Platform benefits everyone. Ok, sure. What could data like this mean for businesses, though? Well, a clothing store would be able to track how many people came in and browsed, which areas of the store were hot-spots for interest and then figure out how their displays converted. It’s like real-world ad-tracking. It makes sense, but still seems a long way off.

What will be interesting is not each dataset that is collected, but what all of them tied together tell us about our surroundings:

Our motes will be able to detect fluctuations in noise level, and some will be attached to footstep counters, to understand collective movement around the conference floor.

Of course, none of this information is personally identifiable, but the thought of our collective steps, movements and other ambient output being turned into something usable by Google is intriguing to say the least…and yes, kind of creepy.

If this particular team can share all of the data it collects in an easy to digest way, then businesses will be clamoring to toss sensors all over their stores and drop the data on whatever cloud platform that will host it the cheapest. Google would like to be that platform.

During the event, the team will hold a workshop on what it calls the “Data Sensing Lab,” so if you’re interested on learning more about what the team is gathering as you walk around, this would be the place to go. You’ll also be able to see some of the real-time visualizations on screens set up throughout the conference floor.

We’ll be covering all of the action as we’re being covered by Google.

Let’s admit it together. We all kind of suck at math. It’s okay! Numbers are evil. And back in high school when you were forced to struggle through Algebra and Geometry and Algebra again and if you were especially unlucky, Calculus, you probably thought to yourself when in the hell would you ever use all those stupid theories, equations and computational silliness in real life. And the truth is you won’t use them! Who needs math! More »

Facebook is reportedly the company that’s planning on building a $1.5 billion data center in Altoona, Iowa. Before, everything was kept hush-hush, and the only thing we knew about the data center was that it was referred to by officials as the cryptic “Project Catapult”. Des Moines Register stated that it spoke with lawmakers about Catapult and discovered that it is Facebook who is behind the project.

Facebook was said to have been scouting sites to launch its next data center. There was a location in Nebraska that Facebook was reportedly looking at, but apparently Facebook has decided to go in another direction. According to Data Center Knowledge, official’s approved the site plan for Facebook’s data center in Iowa back in June, and by November Facebook and state/local officials had a meeting to discuss the “fine details” of the data center in order to finalize the deal.

Many people had already speculated that Facebook was behind the data center in Altoona, mostly because the site plans looked very similar to Facebook’s site plans for its data centers in both Oregon and North Carolina. The entire building will be about 1.4 million square feet, with 3 separate data centers measuring 466,000 square-feet. It is said to be the “most technologically advanced data center in the world.”

Facebook is also said to be in talks with officials about tax credits for wind energy production, as well as a new payment rate on water. While there are various factors that point to Facebook as the company behind the data center, Facebook has yet to officially confirm it. But if it is, it looks like both Google and Microsoft’s data centers in Iowa will be getting a familiar neighbor pretty soon.

[via Des Moines Register]

Facebook is reportedly behind “Project Catapult” data center is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook has launched public dashboards for its Forest City, North Carolina and Prineville, Oregon data centers, providing easily accessible access to near-real-time Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) information. The dashboards provide continues information that is updated to the minute, also providing a 24-hour set of data and historial view containing the year’s numbers.

The reason for the change is a matter of pride, according to the announcement, with a desire to show the efficiency of the data centers. In addition, by providing the information, Facebook says that the centers are demystified, and that such a move follows naturally in line with its sharing of the hardware and building designs. The public now gets a peek at what the data centers’ technicians see daily.

The public dashboards won’t change the annualized averages, which are accessible via the dashboards beneath the near-real-time information. Facebook first made PUE information for Prineville available the second quarter of 2011, eventually rolling out WUE at the same center in mid-2012. Those who follow the dashboards are advised that some “weird” numbers might pop up occasionally because the data centers are still under construction and the variables frequently shifting.

In addition, the dashboards are available for others to use, with Facebook saying that the front-end code will be made open source and available “in the coming weeks”. Those who take advantage of the code once it is made available are encouraged to make changes to it, improving what is already there and providing an overall better experience for everyone.

[via Open Compute]

Facebook rolls out near-real-time public PUE and WUE dashboards for data centers is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.