Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, are the oldest known biblical manuscripts. Five scrolls are currently available on the Israel Museum's website: The Great Isaiah Scroll, The Temple Scroll, The War Scroll, The Community Rule Scroll and The Commentary on the Habakkuk Scroll. They were photographed in up to 1,200 megapixel high resolution, high enough that you can zoom in and see cracks and discolorations in the animal skin the verses are written on.

The Great Isaiah Scroll is divided into chapters and verses, shown on mouse-over, and gives you an English translation of the verse when you click on it. The website also allows you to leave comments, a sort of marginalia for the modern age. Learn more about the scrolls and their digitization in the video below.

The team, from the Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork in Ireland, has demonstrated in a new paper how qubits--the basic blocks of quantum computing--can travel over standard fiber optics networks. This has been shown before, but not in a real-world kind of way. In other words, you can move qubits over fiber optics in theory, sure. But to feasibly do so--especially alongside traditional data streams--is a huge step forward.

The problem has always been one of interference. Qubits are carried by single photons, while traditional data packets are carried by strong laser pulses. Those pulses flying throughout a network result in spontaneous Raman scattering of photons within the optical fiber, and that in turn interferes with the quantum channels, causing a rate of error that’s high enough to be prohibitive.

So the Cork team figured out how to squeeze the qubits in there in between the Raman scattering. When the pulses of laser light are moving through the optical fiber, the interference pulses along with it--that is, there are quiet moments in between bursts of Raman scattering that lead to interference or crosstalk on the network. By carefully controlling the timing and wavelength of the quantum data, the researchers showed that they could slip quantum data generated by a QKD scheme in between the noise areas, where they can travel untouched by the interference.

All that is key if we’re ever going to practically begin a shift over to widespread quantum computing (first we’ll need some good quantum computers of course, but it never hurts to be prepared). It would be really expensive to build a second quantum network alongside our existing classical data networks. Using this scheme, it appears you could get classical and quantum streams running alongside each another, making quantum IT more commercially viable.

[PhysOrg]

The suitcase will use a mesh network technology, which creates a wireless web from cell phones and personal computers that can transmit messages, pictures or videos to one another without the need for a central, official network. This sort of tech has previously been used in remote or disaster-struck areas to provide web connections--it's like a cell phone swarm that in concert is strong enough to operate without the need for nearby towers or even satellites. Wireless antennas would increase the range of the network. Other projects within this effort, financed by the State Department, include building stealth wireless networks and independent cell phone networks inside of foreign countries. The U.S. has already spent $50 million to create such a cell phone network in Afghanistan, to counteract the Taliban’s ability to shut down official Afghan cell phone service at will.

[New York Times]

That’s according Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, in an interview with Network World. And this is not some pie-in-the-sky idea — they’re already doing it.

This week we heard a lot about Comet Tempel 1, into which NASA smashed a probe a few years back and to which it returned via the Stardust probe. What we didn’t hear was that Stardust’s mission partner, EPOXI (formerly called Deep Impact), has apparently been updated with these new InterPlanetary protocols, and Google has tested it at 80 light-seconds.

Cerf explains that Google realized as far back as 1998 that space-based Internet has problems that don’t face the traditional Internet design — speed-of-light communications are instant on Earth, but at interplanetary distances, that’s slow, and can cause problems. An interplantary network could help overcome these problems.

The approach uses delay-tolerant networking, or Bundle Protocol, as distinct from Internet Protocol. The International Space Station uses Bundle Protocol, which defines blocks of data as a bundle, each of which contains enough information to avoid processing interruptions even in a delay.

This year, Google wants to standardize the interplanetary protocols and make them available to all the space-faring countries. As he tells Network World: “Potentially every spacecraft launched from that time on will be interwoven from a communications point of view. But perhaps more important, when the spacecraft have finished their primary missions, if they are still functionally operable — they have power, computer, communications — they can become nodes in an interplanetary backbone.”

Ghost spacecraft reincarnated as an interplanetary Internet to support the next generation? Seems worthy of a little evangelizing.

[Network World]

The map cost about $200 million (provided by the National Recovery Act of 2009), and offers a database of over 25 million documents showing the type, speed, provider, and location of broadband service. The most obvious way to use the map is simply to search for an address or zip code, and then narrow down results by type of broadband. Then you can see the maximum advertised speed of broadband, if it's available, which theoretically could be of use to businesses (they might not want to move to a location without reliable internet access) and consumers (ditto).

It also throws into sharp relief the fact that much of the country lacks broadband. Major population centers, like the Northeast Corridor, Chicagoland, Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, and Los Angeles-San Diego are blanketed, but much of the west, and even much of the southeast, are spotty at best. According to a survey released alongside the map (which was conducted last June), 68% of American households now have broadband access, up from 63.5% last year, but that leaves a pretty significant number out. This map may help the national broadband effort to spread the gospel of high-speed to more of the country.

You can search for yourself at the Broadband Map itself.

Robocop’s supporters created a page on the fundraising site Kickstarter, with a goal of $50,000 dollars. They’ve now surpassed that amount, thanks in large part to a $25,000 contribution from businessman Pete Hottelet at Omni Consumer Products. Robocop fans may know OCP as the evil megacorporation from the films, but this OCP is real, and manufactures licensed versions of fictional products from entertainment, such as Tru Blood and Stay Puft Marshmallows.

According to the Kickstarter page, the 7-foot iron statue will be designed by Casey V. Westbrook. Imagination Station in Detroit has offered a piece of its property on Roosevelt Park to be Robocop’s new home, where he can look over Detroit for all time.

[Jalopnik]

Martin Hilbert and Priscila López took on the unenviable task of figuring out how much information is out there, and how its storage and processing have changed over time. Some of their findings seem obvious, like the fact that Internet and phone networks have grown at quite a clip (28 percent per year), while TV and radio grew much more slowly. But others are more surprising, like the nugget that 75 percent of the world’s stored information was still in analog format in 2000, mostly in the form of video cassettes. By 2007, 94 percent of the world’s info was digital.

In 2007, all the general-purpose computers in the world computed 6.4 x 1018 instructions per second, according to the study. Doing this by hand would take 2,200 times the period since the Big Bang.

In 1986, the first year the team examined, 41 percent of all computations were still done by calculator, the researchers found. By 2000, personal computers were doing 86 percent of the computing; by 2007, video game hardware accounted for 25 percent of the work. On the whole, gaming consoles have more computing power than the world’s supercomputers, the study found.

Cell phones are catching up, too — they accounted for 6 percent of all computing in 2007. It’s worth noting that’s the year the first iPhone debuted, and a year before anyone could buy a mass-market Android phone, so it’s a fair guess this number has increased exponentially since then.

Hilbert and López surveyed more than 1,000 sources and sifted through an incredibly thorough 60 categories of analog and digital technologies, from paper to vinyl records to Blu-ray discs. In all, they say the world was able to store 295 trillion optimally compressed megabytes; communicate almost 2 quadrillion megabytes; and carry out 6.4 trillion MIPS (million instructions per second) on general-purpose computers.

If you sympathize, and feel a bit overloaded as this work week ends, remember that in the grand scheme of information, this is but a speck. It’s still smaller than the number of bits stored in all the DNA molecules of a single human adult, the authors say.

“To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4 x 1018 instructions per second that humankind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,” Hilbert and Lopez write.

Feeling smart now?