LG begins mass production of first flexible, plastic e-ink displays

Posted on by

The new plastic display has a resolution of 1024×768 and is six inches across the diagonal, which is comparable to the Kindle and Nook. Because it’s made of plastic and not glass, though, the LG display is half the weight (14g) and 30% thinner (0.7mm) than a comparable, glass e-ink panel. Existing e-book readers need to be thick (and heavy) to protect the glass display, but LG is promising that its display is a lot more rugged. The press release says that the plastic display survives repeated 1.5-meter drop tests and break/scratch tests with a small hammer, and that it’s flexible up to 40 degrees from the mid point.

via LG begins mass production of first flexible, plastic e-ink displays | ExtremeTech.

According to LG, the first plastic display-toting e-readers are expected to emerge in Europe “at the beginning of next month,” with the US presumably following swiftly after.

As 60th anniversary nears, tape reinvents itself

Posted on by

The Ultrium Linear Tape Open (LTO) specification, by far the most widely used tape spec in the industry, has a road map that takes tape out to 32TB per cartridge and up to 1.2GB/sec. throughput. “We’ve done a public demonstration of 29.5Gbits of data in a square inch of tape,” said Brian Truskowski, IBM’s general manager of system storage and networking. “We see a lot of headroom in terms of areal density.”

via As 60th anniversary nears, tape reinvents itself – Computerworld.

IETF explores new working group on identity management in the cloud

Posted on by

IETF explores new working group on identity management in the cloud.

A specification already exists for Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) that is supported by security software vendors including Cisco, Courion, Ping Identity, UnboundID and SailPoint. SCIM also has support from key cloud vendors, including Salesforce, Google and VMware.

Keeping the Internet Competitive

Posted on by

But private ownership can also have serious drawbacks. Transportation and communications services are essential inputs to a wide variety of industries. When the government helps a firm enter a transportation or communications market, it gives that firm a lasting advantage over potential competitors. If given free rein, a shrewd firm can leverage its government-supported dominance of a communications or transportation market to undermine competition and extract rents in adjacent markets that would otherwise be competitive. In the long run, this kind of rent-seeking behavior may prove dramatically more costly to consumers than would direct taxpayer support for the infrastructure.

via Keeping the Internet Competitive > Publications > National Affairs.

HTML link tag

Posted on by

Definition and Usage

The <link> tag defines the relationship between a document and an external resource.

The <link> tag is most used to link to style sheets.

Tips and Notes

Note: The <link> element must be embedded in the head section, but it can appear any number of times.

Differences Between HTML and XHTML

In HTML the <link> tag has no end tag.

In XHTML the <link> tag must be properly closed.

via HTML link tag.

Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat

Posted on by

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat – Cringely on technology.

Bufferbloat, as you’ll recall from my 2011 predictions column, is the result of our misguided attempt to protect streaming applications (now 80 percent of Internet packets) by putting large memory buffers in modems, routers, network cards, and applications. These cascading buffers interfere with each other and with the flow control built into TCP from the very beginning, ultimately breaking that flow control, making things far worse than they’d be if all those buffers simply didn’t exist.

Bufferbloat was named by Jim Gettys of Bell Labs, who has become our chief defender against the scourge, attempting to coordinate what’s become a global response to the problem.

…

What AQM does is monitor the buffer, and signal the end points to slow down any time the buffer starts to fill, either due to that one transfer or competing transfers, by dropping or marking packets.  So the buffer is kept (almost) empty, except when it is handling a burst of traffic. So the steady state latency of the buffer, rather than being the size of the buffer, is set by the size of the bursts in traffic.  The size of the buffer becomes almost irrelevant.

Solar ‘towers’ beat panels by up to 20x

Posted on by

Now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a very different approach: building cubes or towers that extend the solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. Amazingly, the results from the structures they’ve tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area.

via Solar ‘towers’ beat panels by up to 20x | ScienceBlog.com.

Huawei claims 30Gbps wireless “beyond LTE”

Posted on by

Huawei says it has “recently introduced…Beyond LTE technology, which significantly increases peak rates to 30Gbps – over 20 times faster than existing commercial LTE networks.”

via iTWire – Huawei claims 30Gbps wireless “beyond LTE”.

However it appears that Huawei is using much greater bandwidth. Its announcement goes on to say: “Key features include: innovative antenna structure [that] greatly improves performance and meets wideband requirements [and] next generation direct radio frequency technology [that] reduces costs and power consumption, and realises ultra broadband carrier aggregation.” (our italics).

The LTE-Advanced specification is for up to 100MHz of bandwidth, which need not be contiguous and up to 8×8 MIMO (eight transmit and eight receive antennas) and a maximum downstream bandwidth of 3.3Gbps.