World record set in data transmission

Dayou Qian of NEC managed a transmission rate of 101.7 terabits per second across 165 meters of fiber.
For a visual to ponder on that's equivalent to 250 double-sided Blu-ray discs or approximately three solid months of HD video. That's  a bit for sure. Current speeds between Washington DC and NY is only a few terabits per second currently.

      He did this by "squeezing" pulses of ligth from 370 lasers into the pulse received by the receiver. Each laser emitted it's own sliver of infrared that contained several phases, polarities, and amplitudes of light waves that was used to code the packets of information.

      Jun Sakaguchi of Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo, has his own version with a 7 light guiding cores in one length of fiber and each core carried 5.6 Tbps for a total of 109 Tbps total transfer.

      Both of these however are not especially practical currently with multi-core fibre being notoriously complicated to produce and amplifying the signals for long distance transmission for both. But data tranfer needs to ncrease witht he demand and this might be the answer, the first likely to adopt his technology would be the data servers in Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

MIT researches use M13 virus to increase solar cell efficiency

By adding a geniticaly modified version of the m13 virus to dye-sensitized solar cells to wrangle, position and coat carbon nanotubes in titanium dioxide. This will keep the tubes aligned and seperated for a boost in efficiency around 8-10.6% even though the virus' will be less than 0.1% of the weight of the finished cell.

      The virus' grab the nanotubes with thier peptides and can hold abotu 10 nanotubes with 300 pertides per virus.“It is likely that the virus template assembly has enabled the researchers to establish a better contact between the TiO2 nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes. Such close contact with TiO2 nanoparticles is essential to drive away the photo-generated electrons quickly and transport it efficiently to the collecting electrode surface.”

      The virus' also alow the process to be carried out in a water medium at room temprature. Since the virus' can be implemented in one simple step axisting amnufacturing should be able to easily adapt to the new process, keeping prices low.


Neat stuff again, more nanotubes, more soloar cells... good stuff.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/solar-virus-0425.html

Artificial synapse created useing nanotubes

Alice Parker and Chongwu Zhou of USC used carbon nanotubes to mimic synapses used in the human brain, they feel that while they are still decades away from true artificial brains that this is a big step in the right irection, the biggest problem is with scale, producing nanotubes on that scale is still not quite up to snuff.

      Artificial brains could be utilized for AI applications but the biggest problem is with the limited plasticity of the nanotubes, real synapses can adjust, multiply and die off as needed, as apposed o the inherently stactic nature of nanotube synapses.

      Mabye if they utilize some of the phase change materials being developed they could possibly create an artificial brain, but the technology is still ahead of us.


It was a pretty short article so there is not much else to say about it, but it is sort of neat to be up to date on the new breakthroughs in technology.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/researchers-build-synthetic-synapse-circuit-prosthetic-brains-s/

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 3

The Macintosh launch put a big goofy grin on my face, it was geektastic =p.
Oracle guy( Larry Allison) predicted cloud computing future for Internet. You hear about vision and such but until you experience it for yourself it really doe snto sink in how neat it is. How today the things Allison said are coming to pass, how apt it is that he heads Oracle.

      I found that I do not like Steve Jobs as a person... and it is amazing how such personalities succeed in so many ways, despite even open distaste for the person. A little bit off topic but I think it is an interesting note anyway. You expect something more from people you hear about but they are just people, and not even likable ones at that.

      I always like when i can feel like the information I have is useful or at least able to be referenced, such as when he talked about Windows 95 and how it did away with DOS, I was thinking "Well it combined DOS and the previous Windows GUI into something new but similar, DOS was not really done away with until Windows 2000/NT (If I recall correctly). Sorta nice to feel smart =p.

      Such rampant piracy would seem like a bad thing but I think that short of the open source philosophy it is one of the major ways things can change and get better, you see something neat and think "I could do better" is the heart of what drives innovation in my opinion. Some would say well how would you feel if someone blatantly stole your idea and got rich off of it. Sure I would be frustrated maybe a little angry, but really who can I be mad at besides myself, if I failed to capitalize on something someone else did after I had the idea. I would try to take the enlightened approach to the topic and try to use it as either a way to get better (so it does not happen again) or to gain some small solace in the fact that my contribution, even though unrecognized maybe, would still go towards making things better overall, an I would like that.

      I really liked the movie overall, but then again I also like cheesy horror movies, and Farside comics, so take from that what you will =p.

I realize this post had a lot more emoticons in it, but thats just the mood i'm in at the moment and you should just be thankful that I did not use internet/game slang the 4-5 time I could have >=P. Also I would not do you (read: no one, because this blog will never get read, except mabye the teacher) the injustice of shielding you from the full force of my textual charisma.

Ja

Laser sparkplugs!

lasers are always better, but besides that it is more efficient, you get  a cleaner burn because lasers can ignite leaner fuel mixtures without wearing like standard electrical arc spark plugs. They also can be focused closer to the center of the piston to produce a more complete burn, and achieve more power, with less waste and byproduct.

      Japanese researchers from National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Japan, have designed a ceramic two beam laser small enough to fit into a cylinder. Besides more complete combustion the lasers Will also produce a quicker combustion; normal plugs take milliseconds, but laser plugs will take nanoseconds to do the same thing better! How neato is that, they haven't actually started producing these plugs yet but are working with a large, unnamed spark plug company and DENSO Corp.

      They say they can be produced economically in large quantities so if things work out we could soon have laser plugs in most car engines, as Ford is working on something similar to this for itself. More fuel economy is a welcome change in this market with gas prices how they are, plus it is just plain cool =p


As usual I left out the techobabble for various reasons but here is the link to the article I saw as well as the main article.


http://gizmodo.com/#!5794073/your-new-cars-engine-will-work-with-lasers-not-spark-plugs

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-laser-revolution-internal-combustion.html

LED droop souce discovered

Researchers found out that the droop in effeciency Nitrade based LEDs experience at the higher power levels, is caused by indirect auger recombination, which is where electrons fall out createing a hole which nearby electrons try to fill in or get knocked out of.

Basically what it means is that at higher levels of power use (such as for household lighting) LEDs receive a drop in effieciancy, nad scientisits knew it happend but never knew why, and now they do. This could mean more effecieint LED lighting could replace incandecent or CFL bulbs.

Neat stuff, a little heady but interesting none-the-less.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110419164211.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Teleportation of Quantum data

Researchers at the university of south wales successfully "teleported" packets of light waves in a complex quantum data string.

"It opens the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via quantum communications networks."

it is a fairly brief article with a lot of technical data, I couldn't hope to explain it all here without making all involved in the process numb and reeling. Basically they transferred a complex string of linear equations with no actuall transfer. The subject was destroyed on the original end and created on the other. Since there is no real middle the data is duplicated with high fidelity at the other end. I really don;t know what else to do without spewing alot of jargon, so her eis the link and some wiki sites I used to try to figure out why this was a deal =p

 http://www.kurzweilai.net/beam-me-up-qantum-teleporter-breakthrough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 2

I thought it was very interesting  how cutthroat it became, in a nerdy way. I always had a vague idea of how lucky people like Gates had to have gotten but it really was a case of everything lining up followed up by some initiative and hard work. How cliche does that sound? I suppose though that cliches and stereotypes were all based off of something though. IBM really missed out with their stodgy bureaucracy, and yet they still managed to hang on and even thrive despite several setbacks, I guess that's the upside to being established or set in one's ways. That other fellow Killdal messed up as well, even when he got tipped off by Gates he did not foresee the impact of that moment, but I suppose that's how most great moments are, you never recognize them except in hindsight. Although it was an interesting movie I find myself lacking in words at the moment. Perhaps I'll add more later but probably not =P

IBM wants to kick out the jams with predictive software

IBM is working on and testing software to predict traffic patterns and help people avoid traffic jams. They apparently already tried something like that out in London and it caused crashes and was generally a failure. They apparently moved on (read ignored) since then and want to have some finished soon that runs on smart phones using the location tracking data alongside road sensors to receive data for where people are driving and when and use this data to predict where traffic jams are liikely to occur. Nothing amazing but then again evryday can't be nanomachines removing cancer cells, or microchips storeing lightwaves.

http://www.techeye.net/software/ibm-wants-to-kick-out-the-jams-with-predictive-software?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techeye+%28Tech+Eye%29

Rainbow trapping Scientist strives to slow light waves futher

In a paper published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Qiaoqiang Gan (pronounced "Chow-Chung" and "Gone") Published a paper march 29th that described how they slowed broadband light waves using a type of material called nanoplasmonic structures.

"Gan explains that the ultimate goal is to achieve a breakthrough in optical communications called multiplexed, multiwavelength communications, where optical data can potentially be tamed at different wavelengths, thus greatly increasing processing and transmission capacity."

It gets pretty heavy after that but basically he is trying to catch lightwaves of varying frequencies in nanoscale grooves in a metallic surface, which would slow down light waves and allow them to be processed better at the receiving end. If things keep advanceing as he hopes

"These plasmonic chips provide the critical connection between nanoelectronics and photonics, Gan explains, allowing these different types of devices to be integrated, a prerequisite for realizing the potential of optical computing, "lab-on-a-chip" biosensors and more efficient, thin-film photovoltaic materials."

Such applications are obviously awesome, really in my opinion, anything that gets us clsoer to SciFi is a win in my book, and light catching processor chips would definately fit that.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110412162406.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

Google Speeds up the web with SPDY

Google created a new internet protocol to speed up web page loading over HTTP, called SPDY (speedy). It is  already in use in Chrome if you go to a google website as a toggle option. According to the author of this article it sped things up by about 20% and the benchmarking tool they provide backed up what he had seen himself showing a 15% increase in performance.
      Google started working on this in November 2009, and currently it only works if both the browser and the website server both use SPDY. Currently only chrome and google sites and services use it but
Google plans on open-sourcing SPDY and the C++ code is available today. There’s also an experimental SPDY Apache Web server module and Ruby code if you want to tinker with it yourself on the server side.
      SPDY also won’t work equally well on all kinds of data. According to a note in the SPDY developers’ mailing list, “SPDY requires that the client support gzip compression [a data compression program] of payloads. The hope is that gzip quickly, simply and automatically gets pretty good compression of the payload.”
      That means that since it compresses the data , transfers of data that is already compressed will not see much of an improvement, but you should still see some improvement because SPDY compresses the HTTP header, and  more importantly, according to the second draft of the SPDY specification, SPDY “adds a framing layer for multiplexing multiple, concurrent streams across a single TCP connection (or any reliable transport stream). The framing layer is optimized for HTTP-like request-response streams.” Under SPDY, there is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection. Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the protocol is more efficient over TCP.
     Also something I found neat is with SPDY, a Web browser can also prioritize requests. This way you can get the most critical data first, say a video stream, rather than wasting waiting around for an ad to appear before starting the video.


Overall this seems promising and like the author of this article says: "I hope that Google will soon officially open the source and submit SPDY to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make it an official standard."



http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-speeds-up-the-web-with-spdy/930

Triumph of the Nerds Pt. 1

Well, I thought it was interesting to get some of the things I had heard about verified and clarified. Like why Silicon valley is called silicone valley and not computer valley (because the silicon chip got it's start there), and other such tidbits. I don;t know exactly what I supposed to do for this assignment. There were some questions on the board in class but to be honest I don't really remember what they were. So in lieu of any set guidelines I just figured I would give my thoughts on the film thus far:
      I really liked seeing how the whole industry got started, and what things were like for PC users back then as well as seeing how the big names got their starts. How the first PC didn't really do anything, but that they found ways to use it anyway, like playing the tune by putting the radio on top of it. That type of innovation and creative thinking is really how things developed to the point they are at now. Some people thought it was boring probably, and I suppose if you knew everything covered or were not interested in the topic it was a bit dry, and dated but I enjoyed it. There were several things covered that escape me as I sit here and type, but that does not mean I didn't absorb it, I'm just a little tired.
      I suppose the point of this whole assignment was to see if we payed attention to the film, and I watched it exclusively that day, but my memory is a fickle thing and can't be relied upon to produce facts from subjective material like a film, but I am fairly confidant I gained from watching the film and am looking forward to the next installment. If you are dissatisfied with my work, that's your prerogative I suppose and I shall have to take whatever judgement you render upon it and me.

Until Monday,  fare thee well

IEEE prepares to regulate the cloud

IEEE has announced that it will begin a new initiative that aim to put in place a set of global standards for cloud computing. The standards will be put forth in two projects: IEEE P2301 which they say will
provide an “intuitive roadmap” for firms such as HP, which is beginning to roll out cloud services.
It is hoped that the P2301 standards give more clarity to users over what they are buying into as the move to cloud computing gathers pace.
      The second project P2302 will define protocols and functionality that are required to enable the cloud-to-cloud interoperability demanded by users, which it claims will have the effect that for example, naming and routing protocols did for the Internet.


The man leading the proposals, Steve Diamond
believes that just as the early Internet caused an upheaval in the way information was transformed, the cloud is similarly “disruptive technology and business model that is primed for explosive growth and rapid transformation”.
     He also claims that “without a flexible, common framework for interoperability," innovation could become stifled.
No one knows how restrictive the regulations will be but there is talk in some quarters that over-regulation would not be beneficial. With the big companies like Microsoft and IBM pushing cloud forward and the responses of business to it, mass migration to the cloud will probably be happening sooner rather than later.

The cloud cometh...


http://www.techeye.net/internet/ieee-prepares-regulations-for-the-cloud?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techeye+%28Tech+Eye%29

Digital Nation assignment

1. In my opinion, multitasking can be a boost to performance in certain applications, but the human brain is not wired for it, and it is not good for your mental health if you excessively defy this biological basis. Can be very detrimental to the learning process.

2. Addiction is not something I will say is limited in it's targets, people with the predilection to additive behaviour can easily find themselves "hooked" on just about anything, but I am a firm believer that it is not set in stone and that all addictions can be overcome with enough willpower, and proper support. I don't know many people that I would say are addicted to games, most of them are sadly casual players, but my  mother does show a bent towards addiction and could easily be pushed into it given the right circumstances.

3. I do not feel that this is a good thing, such a limited depth of content suggests many more issues. While multitasking can be helpful, and give a powerful sense of achievement when pulled off, if it hinders the ability to focus on a single subject at a time then it begins to get into a troubling area.

4. Short term concentration may indeed be where things are headed, but I still believe that being able to focus for long periods on a single subject is very important. People are already to shallow for my taste.

5. I think that it is a powerful tool in solving America's education problem but not the sole answer. I was raised by  a humble family, we did not have the means to be early adopters of new technologies, I always got hand-me-downs or custom dinosaur computers, that barely ran, but from the moment I first used an Apple II in school to play the simple education games available I was changed, and as soon as I got regular access to my first computer (My aunt's Win3.1 machine with roaring fast 28.8 baud dial up!) my universe expanded so fast I swear I felt like a god for a second as I saw everything explode in front of me and I watched time begin, end and begin again and fast forwarded to where I was in that scale. A little dramatic, sure =p, but it really was a life changing experience. Alas, I digress... If I had a computer in school, things would have gone much better for me I think, but it wouldn't have solved all my problems. People seem to be keen on it because they see somehting missing in education, and there is, but throwing technology at the issue is not going to help raise well rounded students.


well that's about it.

Samsung laptops came with Keylogger

Mohamed Hassan, a graduate of the Master of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program at Norwich University, discovered an application called StarLogger had been installed on his brand new laptop.

Starlogger is a publicly available key logger that tracks keystrokes even in password boxes and can even take screenshots and sends this information to am e-mail account specified during the install.

He reported it and in a similar move to SonyBMG about the installing of rootkits, Samsung's support department denied the existence of any such software on its laptops., but after he got another model and it had the key logger on it to they said it was Microsoft's fault and they just make the hardware, after Mohamed told them that that didn't make sense he got pushed up the chain and the supervisor said he was "not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop," but confirmed that "yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

The two models currently known to contain this software are the R525 and R540. CNET has published a helpful guide on how to remove this software, to read it click here.

Whether Samsung faces a similarly global problem or merely one misbehaving reseller still isn’t clear. A statement from a company spokesperson says that it’s looking into the situation: “Samsung takes Mr. Hassan’s claims very seriously. After learning of the original post this morning on NetworkWorld.com, we launched an internal investigation into this issue. We will provide further information as soon as it is available.”

New artificial leaf can power a home

Scientists at MIT today revealed that they have created a more efficient artificial leaf that is the size of a poker card and when placed in a gallon of water and left in direct sunlight can separate the water into oxygen and hydrogen, that goes to a fuel cell to provide power.
     Artificial leafs were first made about a decade ago but they used rare, unstable materials. This version however makes use of readily available, less expensive materials used in a simple way. The new version can continue to function (in lab tests) for a minimum of 45 hours without a drop in production.
     The hope is to be able to use these to bring power to developing nations  or areas otherwise unable to have stable power.

Nifty thing, if they can make it even more efficient then I think it might be a nice way to get power to places without a grid.

Plastic from Bannanas (Nanocellulose Applications)

Brazilian Scientists have found a way to utilize fibers from, Bananas, coconuts, and pineapples to create a stronger, lighter and biodegradable alternative to petroleum based plastics. These nanocellulose plastics are 30% lighter and 3-4 times stronger than the current petroleum based plastics as well as being more resistant to heat, gasoline and water.
        They are first looking into automotive plastics such as dashboards, bumpers and some body panels for the material, but they think that it might eventually be able to replace steel and aluminum automotive parts as well.
    They create the material by cooking the leaves and stems of these plants in what is basically a pressure cooker, and it yields a material that looks like talcum powder but is actually strands of nanocellulosic fibres so small that 50,000 fit in the diameter of a human hair.
    The cost is realatively prohibitive at the moment but the lab is only working with small quantities of the material and they said that price would go down as production scales up, especially if the auto industry embraced the technology. One pound of nanocellulose can produce 100 lbs. of plastic.


Alcides Leão presented his findings today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California.



Sounds neat, a plastic stronger than Kevlar that weighs less and is biodegradable? Whats not to like?

Google Fined record amount by CNIL

CNIL (Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés) fined Google a record €100,000 for siphoning information from citizens unsecured WiFi networks, including Bank information, passwords and emails. Google got away with excuses in other countries but the frogs got 'em good. They were just letting the data sit on their servers untill Germany wanted to take a look at it, now

"Deleting the data has always been our priority, and we're happy the CNIL has given permission for us to do so." According to Google's chief privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer.

LOL:

That is all

Backup article: Fire Breathing Dragon Sculpture

Artists Dan Peppiatt and Paka  made a mechanical fire breathing dragon, out of pneumatics from e-bay, scrap metal, and articulated with wheelchair motors. Oh yeah, and it breathes fire! Propane fire.

Not much here I didn;t have enough time to develop my accelerated expansion of the universe or reversing the Doppler effect articles. Cest la Vie

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/meet-the-fire-breathing-scrap-metal-dragon.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Nanotube nonvolatile memory that uses 100th the power of current flash

Eric Pop and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have created a new type on nonvolitile momory useing carbon nanotube switchs rangeing between 1-5 nanometres switch between islands of GST a phase change material of 10 nanometers , current memory size is only 50 nanometers.

This seems really nice especially for mobile devices, to extend battery life. Not much to say, I mean there is but it is very technical. the link is:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35083/page1/

IE finally worth a look?

IE 9 is rolling out and has a few new features as well as improved performance. It is due out tonight at 9 PM.

Unified search box now has on the fly searching as well as changing search providers

add-on performance monitor, is a little thing that warns you if an add-on is causing the browser to slow and it can be set to different thresholds to raise the alarm at.

You can pin sites to windows 7 desktop task bar and depending on the site developer's coding you can get site-specific jump lists, unread e-mail notifications, or streaming media player controls.

This version of IE also uses hardware graphics acceleration to improve performance.

The Caveat in this is that it is not supported by Windows XP, Microsoft's official reason for this is that the hardware acceleration utilized by IE 9 does not work with the device drivers in XP. It seems that they are really trying to push upgrades to windows 7, since Firefox 4 release candidate offers full hardware acceleration across multiple OSs including XP.

Looks neat, but idk if it will make me change from my Firefox

Printed Bike

EADS, the European aerospace and defense group showed off their "Airbike", made out of nylon but strong enough to replace steel and requires no traditional maintenance or assembly.  They created it using a process know as Additive Layer Manufacturing or ADL where they take a fine metal powder or carbon reinforced plastics.  It was mostly just a demo for the technology that will be used in the aerospace industry.

Sorta neat but a little lean on content so i'll just link the article and shut-up.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-print-a-nylon-bike

Wargames help warriors reduce nightmares

According to an online survey 98% of military personal who regularly play games that include war and combat, like Call of Duty, decreased the level of harm and aggression experienced when they dreamed about war. Soldiers who did not play these games had more violent dreams combined with a sense of unhappiness.
 According to Jayne Gackenbach of Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

In the survey soldiers with predisposition to mental disorders were weeded out and the remaining "healthy" soldiers were put into two groups: "high gaming" and "low gaming" the former tended to play more intense,  immersive games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty,most of them played everyday or at least several times a week while the latter group gravitated towards more "casual" games and played rarely as a few times a year.

Soldiers in the "high gaming" group reported combat nightmares were less intense and they often could fight back against what was threatening them, while soldiers in the "low gaming" group reported more instances of feeling helpless against an aggressive violent enemy.

'Gackenbach theorises that playing violent games while awake may serve as a sort of "threat simulator," a way of conditioning the mind to better cope with intense, dangerous situations when they arise in nightmares.'

I love this because you always have the old fuddy duddies who have nothing but bad to say about violent games, well buster... chew on this! =p


http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/03/can-video-games-quell-nightmar.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Interactive Technology = Bad Sleep

A study by the National Sleep Foundation, shows that people who frequently send text messages or use their laptops before bed are less likely to get  a good nights sleep, because they are more alerting and disruptive to the onset of sleep. The got their data from a survey they commissioned from WB&A Market Research. 1,508 surveys were conducted among a sample of Americans. Some other interesting tidbits: 39% of Americans are bring cell phones into the bedroom and using them when they are trying to go to sleep, esp those under the age of 30. texting was the biggest use, in the hour before bedtime. 61% are using  computers or laptops regularly in the hour before bedtime. One thing I noted here is that I use my computer before bedtime nearly every night, and am indeed tired, and sleepy the next day, but what was funny is the activities they indulge in did not include anything I regularly do. Social networking, skype, watching video, etc. I just play games, then go to sleep. I bet I have more interesting dreams than these social butterflys =p
To cope with this detriment to sleep, the surveys found that younger groups were less likely consume caffeine than their older counterparts, although caffeine consumption was prevalent across all groups. The majority of younger participants also nap during the weekdays and those that do nap on weekdays are more likely to "catch up" on sleep over the weekend and tend to be more sleepy. well i could go on for awhile but I don;t need to so the link is: http://www.sleepfoundation.org/sites/default/files/sleepinamericapoll/SIAP_2011_Summary_of_Findings.pdf

basically use tech before bed = bad sleep  ;p

Windows System Backups

The top choices seem to be Macrium Reflect, Acronis and Norton Ghost

Macrium Reflect - $39.99
Automation options manage space on external backups for efficeint use
User Friendly, fully integrates with Windows Explorer
Integrates with VBScript and WScript
Image in Full, Incremental or Differencial
Can boot from the Macrium CD into a compact version of Linix with mouse and graphical interface to restore if unable to boot to Windows.
Can save backups as .XML
"Virtual Drive" browser to recover specific files and directorys using cut and paste



Acronis True Image 11 Home - $49.99
Fully integrates with Windows Explorer (windows 7)
Comes with "Try&Decide" which is like a Virtual Machine of your current machine that lets you change things and if the changes go well you can commit them to your actual system.
Automatically creates incremental backups every 5 mins

Select from various backup schemes to deal with limited backup space,or high security, or create a custom scheme.
U.S.B. 3.0 support

Refined G.U.I. with drag and drop and wizards
Works with acronis onine backup, fully integrated with the powerful Acronis True Image Home Plus Pack option, which allows you to restore your PC to dissimilar hardware regardless of make, model, or installed components, or to a virtual machine.
Acronis True Image Home Plus Pack - $29.99
Acronis Onine Backup - $4.95/month or $49.95/year
Cons:
For full functionality (web, pc restore to dissimiler hardware) you must buy and subscribe to extras


Norton Ghost 14.0 - $69.99
Advanced compression and encryption
NEW! Windows® 7 Bitlocker™ support
NEW! Symantec ThreatCon integration
Onsite and offsite backups
NEW! Cold imaging
NEW! Blu-ray Disc support
Windows 7/XP/Vista
Can convert HD to virtual disk format such as a VMware VMDK file
All the standard backups (file, full, incremental, differencial), as well as event based
Backups can be made to almost any media, includingCDR/RW and DVD+-R/RW drives, USB, FireWire® (IEEE 1394) devices, Iomega® Zip® and Jaz® drives.
Restore your system with an on-disk software recovery environment thanks to LightsOut Restore - no bootable CD required!
You can now copy recovery points to an FTP location in case you need to restore your data while being offsite.
You can back up your data to your network-attached storage devices (NAS), for instance a shared drive on your home network.
Remote management is supported: you can control other Norton Ghost installations (12.0 or higher) on your local area network.
Integration with Google Desktop™: you can now use this free, highly-efficient indexing tool to quickly search the data you have already backed up.

Cons:
Issue if you remove it from the startup folder it has to reconnect to something, and cannot preform an incremental backup
Issues with backing up to disk
It's a Symantec product! =p
Pros:
Feature Rich
Considered Reliable? (http://ghost.radified.com/)
Nice options (for networks [backup to disk, backup to network, remote management])
Works Fast (some speculation, incremental after full restore and defrag was half the size 15gigs, of the full restore, no files were opened/added/changed)


Just from a glance and reading what I have I would say while Norton looks promiseing I am a little gun shy when it comes to their products, too many problems, So for my personal use I would probably use somethign like Macrium Reflect because it has the features I need without  the complications I don't.

iPad 2 Malarkey

Lighter (by a whopping .2 lbs), Faster (dual core, whee), thinner (33% meh), 2 cameras (sorry nothing snarky) Alltogether it is nothign goundbreaking and not my cup of tea to start with and this just seems like the normal "New! Shiney!" whizz-bang thing, that keeps coming in an endless stream because people (sheeple?) keep buying them. It might work for some people but, for me, another pass.