Microsoft CEO: "No print media in 10 years". I say it may be sooner than that!!

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been quoted as saying there will be, "no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network." Ballmer continued to say there “will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

To this I say, duh!!!

Somebody sign me up for CEO out west and I'll shout from the mountain top obvious statements. I don't mean to be over the top here, but for many people including myself, this all digital media concept is already a reality.

Every morning, I wake up and turn on the TV (delivered via an IP network), eat breakfast, get dressed and check some news on my PDA. After that it's off to the office where a flurry of digital media is accessed via the desktop. I can browse any newspaper online, read RSS feeds from hundreds of different websites, and even watch a streaming feed of CNBC.

The fact of the matter is I already get every piece of news and media digitally, I can't even fold a newspaper very well.

I know there are many out there that don't realize this, but reality is that technology advances exponentially and in the past 5 years the proliferation of the mobile web and streaming media has been enormous. With wireless networks beefing up and PDA's, smartphones, and UMPC's getting faster and more accessible to the everyday user, this all digital future will become a reality before we know it.

Japanese Internet satellite hits 1.2Gbps

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Engineers testing a recently launched Japanese data communications satellite have succeeded in establishing a two-way Internet link running at 1.2G bps (bits per second) each way, they said Monday.

The speed represents a record for satellite communications, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

The tests were carried out on May 2 as part of verification of the Kizuna satellite. In the tests data was transmitted on two 622M-bps channels both up to the satellite and down to a receiving antenna. Together the combined data transmission speed was 1.2G bps.

Kizuna was launched on Feb. 23 and is intended to provide high-speed Internet links to homes and offices in remote areas, to organizations as a back-up during natural disasters and to improve regional communications links in Asia.

One of the satellite's special features is an on-board Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch. In other satellite Internet systems data sent to the satellite has to be sent to an earth station, demodulated, switched to its destination and then remodulated and sent again via the satellite to reach its destination. With a switch onboard the satellite is capable of doing all this in space thus making more efficient use of the available frequency spectrum, according to JAXA.

Tests carried out in March and April verified uplink communications at 1.5M bps and downlink at 155M bps using a compact 45-centimeter antenna and both up and downstream at 155M bps using a larger 1.2-meter dish. At the time JAXA said the 155M-bps downlink was the fastest in the world achieved with such a small-size antenna.

Can you define cloud computing????

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, you've even seen articles about it on this site. But can you provide the true definition of cloud computing? Can anybody!?!?

Well, Joyent hosting got together with some of the big boys in technology and tried to define cloud computing. Interviewees include Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Rafe Needleman, Brian Solis, and Stowe Boyd.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think of the cloud computing phenomenon.

IBM, Google stirring up a cloud environment

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Google and IBM are testing a cloud computing infrastructure that could become an important avenue for them to deliver software and services to consumer and business users.

Google's Eric Schmidt and IBM's Sam Palmisano addressed a gathering of IBM business partners in Los Angeles on Thursday and revealed the two companies have developed a cloud computing environment that runs on Linux and includes Xen virtualization and an Apache implementation of the Google File System called Hadoop.

Last year, the two companies teamed up on a parallel-computing initiative.

The IBM/Google cloud environment is being tested at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University.

The pair isn't the first to test the cloud concept.

Amazon is offering a cloud environment called EC2, which has companies or developers paying only for the capacity they need to run their applications or services that they in turn are offering to users or business partners.

While the two CEOs did not announce any future plans, they said the IBM/Google cloud would eventually be used to support an array of services and applications tailored for consumers and businesses.

Google already has a number of online services for consumers including calendars, photos and Google Docs word processing tools. Google also is positioning Google Docs as a suite of applications for corporate users, including offline capabilities.

IBM recently released IBM Symphony, a set of similar office productivity tools that users can download and run locally and can be tied into other services. It also has a set of social-networking tools that could be offered as a service.

The IBM/Google cloud initiative would compete with Microsoft's software-plus-services strategy and the recently announced Live Mesh, a storage and synchronization framework. Microsoft is attempting to tie the cloud to desktop and devices, and its on-premise business and server applications. In April, the company announced it had begun a beta to test a combination of Office and online services under the codename Albany.

Schmidt was quoted by the Dow Jones news service as saying Google's relationship with IBM is a "key plank" in its strategy "otherwise we can't reach the customers."

HP Breakthrough Could Spawn Computers That Don't Forget

Another sign of the apocalypse, it looks like HP has taken another step toward a scene out of The Matrix. The below article is from TechNewsWorld.com and it details HP's discovery of a potential 4th fundamental circuit element that has the ability to remember information.

For those of you that remember electrical engineering from your college years, you know that there are three fundamental circuit elements (resistor, capacitor, inductor). HP's development of the "memristor" is supposedly the first circuit element that can remember information.

Check out a sample of the article below and give us your thoughts.

Credit: TechNewsWorld.com

Researchers at HP Labs have proven the existence of the "memristor," a component of electrical circuits that could lead to computer systems with memories that never forget, the company announced Wednesday.

The memristor -- short for "memory resistor" -- was previously only theorized to be the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering. In the April 30 edition of the journal Nature, however, HP (NYSE: HPQ) researchers presented both a mathematical model and a physical example of one.

Consuming far less power than current systems, computers based on the memristor would not need to be booted up and could associate information in a way much the way the human brain does.

'Significant Implications'

"To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science," said R. Stanley Williams, the lead researcher on the work from HP Labs' Information and Quantum Systems Lab.

"By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated-circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers," Williams added.

Decades-Old Theory

The existence of the memristor was actually first proposed back in the early 1970s by Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the University of California at Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer sciences department.

Chua argued that the memristor joined the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

One application for HP's new research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today's commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM), HP said.

Computers that use DRAM can't retain information when they lose power, and must go through a slow, energy-consuming boot-up process to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system. Memristor-based computers, on the other hand, would be able to "remember" their information after losing power and would save both power and time by not requiring the boot-up process.

Cloud Potential

Such capabilities could be particularly significant as cloud computing becomes more prevalent, HP noted, since the memory and storage systems used by current cloud infrastructures require significant power to store, retrieve and protect the information of millions of Web users worldwide.

"I'm terrifically interested -- this is a very exciting piece of news," Susan Eustis, president of WinterGreen Research, told TechNewsWorld. "I think it's very clear the reason cloud computing works so well is because it works using memory."

In Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) searches, for example, "responses come up really fast, and that has to be because they're coming out of memory," Eustis explained. "It's not going out to a database, accessing the storage and then coming back."

Memristor technology "would be of enormous use, but not just for cloud computing," she added. "It will impact all of computing."

'The Grid' Could Soon Make the Internet Obsolete

Credit: FoxNews.com

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the Internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

See the whole article here.