With all the commotion lately about Net Neutrality, file-sharing laws, and related internet legislation regarding copyright protection and net citizen rights, you may have heard of the “Great Firewall of China.”

This government firewall has plagued the citizens of that country for the past few years, repeatedly censoring important world topics to the citizens of China, and been especially annoying to Google and other online advocates of free press and speech.

“Oh, you don’t need to read that…”

The Chinese government has taken it upon itself to block anything they decide is not acceptable to be read and browsed by their countrymen. The laws and stranglehold over their net citizens allow them to block websites from being accessed by any internet connection within their borders.

A glaring example of this practice is the fact that China, as a country…. BLOCKS GOOGLE. You know Chinese people love that their government does this for them. I mean, who uses Google nowadays?

Americans, prepare to be blocked

Now, in the same horrible fashion, the RIGHTS & FREEDOM of American net citizens are threatened as well.

The US Government wants to begin enforcing a bill that effectively undermine the freedom of the internet as we all know it. Without exaggerating, the Protect IP Act…. BREAKS the internet as we know it.

During a time when we should all be coming together to equalize things in the global economy and help spur the growth of things, it seems like a very broken approach that should not even be on the table for debate.

Help stop internet censorship legislation in the USA!

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

It’s official, the one and only Steve Jobs is dead.

It was announced on the Apple homepage with a full-page tribute to the company’s founder and technological innovator.

The man that pushed the tech industry, brought us the Apple II’s many of us played with as kids, the iPads and iPhones that brought Apple huge profits and pushed the world to embrace smart phones, and much much more, is gone.

If you haven’t seen Steve’s Stanford commencement speech, it’s a must watch. From it, one of my favorite quotes rings so true, even today. “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

The fate of this great man shows us all how short life is, and how much of a difference a single person can make.

Steve Jobs gave the world more than we’ve come to expect from an individual, and his vision continues to live on and will for many years, despite his passing. If anything, he is a huge inspiration to those of us trying to make a difference.

 
Apple’s Steve Jobs – The Crazy Ones:

 

Steve, you will be greatly missed by many people in this industry and world.
You made a huge difference in many of our lives.

Below is a touching tribute from Steve Wozniak, remembering Steve Jobs:

With all the frameworks and abstractions out there nowadays, it’s not surprising that developers don’t write web applications in PHP or raw Javscript as often as they used to. It’s awesome to consider the rapid development of ideas possible nowadays.

As responsibilities continue to grow, I’m finding myself needing to embrace more streamlined approaches to my work flow to really accomplish this year’s aspirations. It’s caused me a bit of stressful transition, but ultimately pushed me to leverage automation, quick reference, and the other standard trappings of an overloaded programmer.

I always found it a bit curious to see newer web developers completely shy away from PHP when starting out, and jumping on the Ruby or Django bandwagons, but after working more and more with frameworks… I’m beginning to see why. Things that yesteryear might’ve taken dozens of lines of code are doable without breaking a sweat. Gotta love progress.

Not really a point to this point besides one of those rhetorical -face/palms- we all do once in a while when we really step back and evaluate how productivity can be improved. Anyways, lots of big projects coming up that will really benefit from this, and I’m looking forward to some of the product announcements that will be coming up as a result.

Well, you have to hand it to the guys at IBM, they never cease to amaze. If the press release below is any indication, the storage scene is about to get really cool.

This new type of memory boasts 100x the speed of flash memory, better reliability (millions vs thousands of read cycles), and a lower cost to manufacture. The lower pricing and improved benefits of this new technology would make it a suitable replacement for everything from mobile devices all the way to enterprise-level servers.

The timing of this is great. The next life-cycle change across my networks and home systems, I’ll hopefully be shifting all my storage mediums to something similar to this new technology, if not more refined. They estimate it should be ready sometime around 2016.

Press Release from IBM:
Made in IBM Labs: IBM Scientists Demonstrate Memory Breakthrough for the First Time

• Reliable multi-bit phase-change memory technology demonstrated
• Scientists achieved a 100 times performance increase in write latency compared to Flash
• Enables a paradigm shift for enterprise IT and storage systems, including cloud computing by 2016

ZURICH, June 30, 2011 – For the first time, scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated that a relatively new memory technology, known as phase-change memory (PCM), can reliably store multiple data bits per cell over extended periods of time. This significant improvement advances the development of low-cost, faster and more durable memory applications for consumer devices, including mobile phones and cloud storage, as well as high-performance applications, such as enterprise data storage. With a combination of speed, endurance, non-volatility and density, PCM can enable a paradigm shift for enterprise IT and storage systems within the next five years.

Scientists have long been searching for a universal, non-volatile memory technology with far superior performance than Flash – today’s most ubiquitous non-volatile memory technology. The benefits of such a memory technology would allow computers and servers to boot instantaneously and significantly enhance the overall performance of IT systems. A promising contender is PCM that can write and retrieve data 100 times faster than
Flash, enable high storage capacities and not lose data when the power is turned off. Unlike Flash, PCM is also very durable and can endure at least 10 million write cycles, compared to current enterprise-class Flash at 30,000 cycles or consumer-class Flash at 3,000 cycles. While 3,000 cycles will out live many consumer devices, 30,000 cycles are orders of magnitude too low to be suitable for enterprise applications. (see chart for comparisons).

“As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies  are needed,” states Dr. Haris Pozidis, Manager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research – Zurich. “By demonstrating a multi-bit phase-change memory technology which achieves for the first time reliability levels akin to those required for enterprise applications, we made a big step towards enabling practical memory devices based on multi-bit PCM.”

Multi-level Phase Change Memory Breakthrough

To achieve this breakthrough demonstration IBM scientists in Zurich used advanced modulation coding techniques to mitigate the problem of short-term drift in multi-bit PCM, which causes the stored resistance levels to shift
over time, which in turn creates read errors. Up to now, reliable retention of data has only been shown for single bit-per-cell PCM, whereas no such results on multi-bit PCM have been reported.

PCM leverages the resistance change that occurs in the material — an alloy of various elements — when it changes its phase from crystalline – featuring low resistance – to amorphous – featuring high resistance – to store data bits. In a PCM cell, where a phase-change material is deposited between a top and a bottom electrode, phase change can controllably be induced by applying voltage or current pulses of different strengths. These heat up the material and when distinct temperature thresholds are reached cause the material to change from crystalline to amorphous or vice versa.

In addition, depending on the voltage, more or less material between the electrodes will undergo a phase change, which directly affects the cell’s resistance. Scientists exploit that aspect to store not only one bit, but multiple bits per cell. In the present work, IBM scientists used four distinct resistance levels to store the bit combinations “00″, “01″ 10″ and “11″.

To achieve the demonstrated reliability, crucial technical advancements in the “read” and “write” process were necessary. The scientists implemented an iterative “write” process to overcome deviations in the resistance due to  inherent variability in the memory cells and the phase-change materials: “We apply a voltage pulse based on the deviation from the desired level and then measure the resistance. If the desired level of resistance is not achieved,  we apply another voltage pulse and measure again – until we achieve the exact level,” explains Pozidis.

Despite using the iterative process, the scientists achieved a worst-case write latency of about 10 microseconds, which represents a 100x performance increase over even the most advanced Flash memory on the market today.

For demonstrating reliable read-out of data bits, the scientists needed to tackle the problem of resistance drift. Because of structural relaxation of the atoms in the amorphous state, the resistance increases over time after the phase change, eventually causing errors in the read-out. To overcome that issue, the IBM scientists applied an advanced modulation coding technique that is inherently drift-tolerant. The modulation coding technique is based on the fact that, on average, the relative order of programmed cells with different resistance levels does not change due to drift.

Using that technique, the IBM scientists were able to mitigate drift and demonstrate long- term retention of bits stored in a subarray of 200,000 cells of their PCM test chip, fabricated in 90-nanometer CMOS technology.
The PCM test chip was designed and fabricated by scientists and engineers located in Burlington, Vermont; Yorktown Heights, New York and in Zurich. This retention experiment has been under way for more than five months, indicating that multi-bit PCM can achieve a level of reliability that is suitable for practical applications.

The PCM research project at IBM Research – Zurich will continue to be studied at the recently opened Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center. The center, which is jointly operated by IBM and ETH Zurich as part of a
strategic partnership in nanosciences, offers a cutting-edge infrastructure, including a large cleanroom for micro- and nanofabrication as well as six “noise-free” labs, especially shielded laboratories for highly sensitive experiments.

The paper “Drift-tolerant Multilevel Phase-Change Memory” by N. Papandreou, H. Pozidis, T. Mittelholzer, G.F. Close, M. Breitwisch, C. Lam and E. Eleftheriou, was recently presented by Haris Pozidis at the 3rd IEEE International Memory Workshop in Monterey, CA.

Source

Had to make a quick blog post showing off my buddy’s new badass lazar. This thing will put your eye out! Our mutual friend, Larry Davis, built one of these beasts a few years back and spurred the interest, but this round of lazer madness (courtesy of MKD) is a bit more… intense.

Here’s a quick video of it being tested outside

If Morgan were a reddit Dos Equis-guy comic… it’d probably read something like, “I don’t build lasers often, but when I do.. they get blogged about, and burn things.”

Some assembly shots

Finished