Alex Reid

Watch this talk from TED to understand the background and mechanisms of SOPA and PIPA.

A team from the MIT media lab has created a camera with a “shutter speed” of one trillion exposures per second, enabling it to record light itself traveling from one point to another.

The project began as an effort to see around corners. Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab, said he wanted to do this by  capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible.

From the project web site.

The new technique, which we call Femto Photography, consists of femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques. Our light source is a Titanium Sapphire laser that emits pulses at regular intervals every ~13 nanoseconds. These pulses illuminate the scene, and also trigger our picosecond accurate streak tube which captures the light returned from the scene. The streak camera has a reasonable field of view in horizontal direction but very narrow (roughly equivalent to one scan line) in vertical dimension. At every recording, we can only record a ’1D movie’ of this narrow field of view. In the movie, we record roughly 480 frames  and each frame has a roughly 1.71 picosecond exposure time. Through a system of mirrors, we orient the view of the camera towards different parts of the object and capture a movie for each view. We maintain a fixed delay between the laser pulse and our movie starttime. Finally, our algorithm uses this captured data to compose a single 2D movie of roughly 480 frames each with an effective exposure time of 1.71 picoseconds.

Even though the camera itself is bulky and takes a long time to process the frames, Dr. Raskar says the technology has a variety of interesting commercial applications. One of his graduate students, Jaewon Kim, published a thesis last year envisioning portable CAT-scanning devices.

(source)

I like Michael Geist’s blog, and especially this posting of the alphabetical rundown of the year.

Seagate and Western Digital, the largest hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the world, both announced that they will reduce warranty coverage on some of their hardware in the new year.

The two companies produce the hard drives in most major computer brands, and both companies recently bought out their competition (Western Digital bought Hitachi, and Seagate bought Samsung’s HDD business) making them the two largest HDD companies in the world.

It is believed the recent monsoon floods in Thailand are reason as the floods have crippled industry component factories. Thailand is the world’s 2nd largest producer of hard disk drives accounting for approximately 25% of the world’s production. The floods have impacted the industry greatly with pundits predicting a shortage and a price hike for hard drives in the coming year.

Seagate’s warranties for internal desktop and laptop drives will be reduced from five years to one year. Seagate warranties for hybrid drives will be trimmed from five years to three years. Warranties for Seagate’s external drives and enterprise-oriented drives will remain unchanged.

Western Digital warranties for the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced from three years from two years.

Overall, the maximum life warranty will be three years.

Seagate’s new warranty policies will become effective on Dec. 31, and Western Digital’s changes will begin Jan. 2, 2012. Hard drives bought before those dates will retain their original warranty policies.

The reason I’m writing this post is because this upset means a lot for the future of data use, as there is a growing demand for disk space – cloud or not – and this lack of supply will drive up the cost of HDDs. It may, hopefully, push other technologies such as flash storage.

Today, after 12 years, the company that sparked a revolution in how we purchase music online, is no longer.

Rhapsody, the largest on-demand music service in the United States, bought its assets, intellectual property and subscribers last month from parent company Best Buy for an undisclosed sum and a minority stake.

The acquisition nearly doubles Rhapsody’s subscriber base. They had 800,000 subscribers in July 2011 and at the time of the purchase, Napster had 700,000 subscribers.

Napster started in 1999 and almost immediately were being sued for distributing music for copyright infringement. It took two years for the service to be shut down by court order, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Napster finally declared itself bankrupt in 2002 and sold its assets to German media firm Bertelsmann for $85 million. However an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale and forced Napster to liquidate its assets, and it was sold to Roxio who in turn sold it to Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million.

Interestingly, when Napster was shut down, Rhapsody was started and will be celebrating their 10-year anniversary this Saturday (December 3rd). There’s also talk there might be a Napster documentary in play.