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China’s Tech Blast-Off
In October the Shenzhou V, China’s first spaceship, zipped into outer space from the Gobi desert. Although China certainly benefited from Soviet and U.S. know-how, its first mission demonstrates substantial technical prowess: an alarm system to avoid collisions between the craft and chunks of speeding space flotsam, advanced solar energy arrays, and a sophisticated “abort” system to protect its crew at high altitudes. The computational resources China has mustered to get the mission accomplished would have made early astro- and cosmonauts drool with envy.
And if the rocket launch weren’t enough to convince the world that China was a global computing player, keep your eye on Shanghai.
According to recent announcements, soon the world’s most populous country will have the world’s largest high-performance computing grid. Propelling its student body into the 21st century, the China Education and Research Grid, built in conjunction with IBM, will have the storage capacity of more than 500 terabytes—with computing power estimated to reach 6 teraflops (6 trillion floating point operations per second) by 2005. With 200,000 students linked together through CERNET (the nifty acronym for the China Education and Research Network), that’s 30 megaflops (30 million flops) per student. Not bad.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/13/HNchinagrid_1.html
Thou Shalt Not Print
In October Amazon.com launched its controversial “Search Inside the Book” program allowing shoppers to search the full text of thousands of titles. Shoppers can search the contents of all titles submitted by participating publishers and view a substantial amount of each book’s content online. They can even print up to 20 percent of a book’s contents.
Well, at least they could, until recently.
Soon after the launch, the Authors Guild, very concerned that Amazon visitors could download and print recipes, short stories, or travel-guide entries rather than purchase the books online, advised all concerned authors to contact their publishers and assert their rights to opt out of the program.
Amazon giveth and Amazon taketh away. Although book sales for all titles associated with this program jumped 9 percent within the first five days, without explanation Amazon.com disabled the print function a few weeks after the launch.
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http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5102917.html?tag=nl
Dust Dreams
Hello “smart dust.” Born of the union between RF (radio frequency) communication technology and MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems), these cubic millimeter-size silicon chips are organized into networks to operate “bucket-brigade style.” They are cheap, efficient, and designed with basic security, tracking, and industrial concerns in mind—able to explore the atmosphere for chemical agents or the floor of a forest for a fire, make an exploratory trip up an artery, or be implanted in more consumer products than you would like to think about. Sounds dreamy, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, dreamy is an all-too-apt description. You see, these worker mites come in multiple flavors and none of them lives up to the “dust” hype. First, there’s the clunky mote, a chain of wired-together film-canister-size containers that are likely to go dead if someone innocently plods through the delicate arrangement of wires. Then there are the wireless versions. They are smaller and do solve the trip-wire problem; however, they introduce a problem all their own: power. Batteries are too big, and solar doesn’t work in the dark—both problems precluding a trip up your aorta. Keep dreaming.
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http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/enterprise/story/0,2000048640,20264505,00.htm
Originally published in Queue vol. 1, no. 9—
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