Sunday, 16 August 2015
Saturday, 15 August 2015
Samsung announces 16TB SSD | ZDNet
Not just the world's highest capacity SSD, but the world's highest capacity drive of any type. The PM1633 uses Samsung's new 48 layer V-NAND, itself a technical tour-de-force, and represents a new thrust in flash storage beyond performance: capacity.
I'm at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California. FMS is the premier flash storage event, so the industry heavyweights are here in force.
And the heaviest company in NAND flash is Samsung, who demonstrated their leadership in a keynote address. They announced several breakthroughs:
- The 48 layer, 256Gbit (32GB), vertical NAND flash chip.
- The world's largest - almost 16TB - drive.
- The world's fastest - 1,000,000 IOPS - drive.
- A 2U box with over 700TB of capacity - roughly 15PB in a single rack.
- And a continuation of their intelligent drive initiative.
That last is the most important. Modern drives contain powerful CPUs that can do much more than manage blocks of bits.
Rather than shipping raw data to hosts, these CPUs could perform local processing, giving hosts only the data they need while reducing network loads and latency. Samsung engineers are working with standards bodies to develop APIs to enable device computation.
THE STORAGE BITS TAKE
Because flash is essentially an analog storage medium - quantum wells holding electrons - continued shrinking of the storage sites is not feasible. To increase capacity, manufacturers have to go vertical, where Samsung has a 6 to 12 month lead over competitors Toshiba and Intel/Micron.
The large and fast drives are technical stunts made possible by Samsung's vertical NAND leadership, which is their crown jewel. The intelligent drive initiative is a long-term play that will benefit hyper-scale data centers first, but which should eventually filter down to enterprise users and perhaps even consumers.
Making the data driven backend processing that our mobile world depends on more efficient is a Very Good Thing. Samsung is helping speed the rate of improvement that flash makes possible, something that benefits us all.
Friday, 14 August 2015
Thursday, 13 August 2015
A very good THAWT: UK company turns tidal power into reality
Innovative turbines designed in the UK aim to harness tidal energy to produce cheaper electricity — without endangering marine life. Alex Kirby from Climate News Network reports.
A BRITISH COMPANY has announced plans for an array of unique marine turbines that can operate in shallower and slower-moving water than current designs.
Kepler Energy, whose technology is being developed by Oxford University’s department of engineering science, says the turbines will in time produce electricity more cheaply than off-shore wind farms.
It hopes to install its new design in what is called a tidal energy fence, one kilometre long, in the Bristol Channel − an estuary dividing South Wales from the west of England − at a cost of £143m (US$222m).
The fence is a string of linked turbines, each of which will start generating electricity as it is completed, until the whole array is producing power. The fence’s total output is 30 megawatts (MW), and 1MW can supply around 1,000 homes in the UK.
Power outputs
Peter Dixon, Kepler’s chairman, told Reuters news agency:
“If we can build up to, say, 10 kilometres’ worth, which is a very extended fence, you’re looking at power outputs of five or six hundred megawatts. And just to visualise that, it’s like one small nuclear reactor’s worth of electricity being generated from the tides in the Bristol Channel.”
The new Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine (THAWT) − whose design is compared to that of a water mill − will use the latest carbon composite technology and should be suitable for the waters around Britain, as well as overseas.
How the rotor blades look installed in a tidal fence configuration. (Image: Kepler Energy)
Because the turbines sit horizontally beneath the surface of the sea, they can be sited in water shallower than the 30-metre depth typically required by current designs. And because the water is slow-moving, the company says, fish can safely avoid the turbines’ blades.
Although the technology is regarded as environmentally benign, Kepler says it will still undergo a rigorous environmental impact assessment during the planning process to ensure that it poses no significant risk to marine life and to other users of the sea.
There is more good news for proponents of renewable energy after the UK government − which is no longer encouraging onshore wind and solar energy − gave the go-ahead for a large offshore wind farm that could provide power for up to two million homes.
The new wind farm is to be built near the Dogger Bank in the North Sea and will have 400 turbines.
Its developers say it could create almost 5,000 jobs during construction. And, earlier this year, they obtained planning consent for another installation nearby which, with the new development, will form one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world.
North Seas assets
But the fossil fuel industry is far from abandoning its own interest in British waters as the energy giant BP has announced that it is to invest about £670m (US$1,040m) to extend the life of its North Sea assets.
It said it would be drilling new wells, replacing undersea infrastructure and introducing new technologies to help it to produce as much as possible from the area, whose future would be secured 'until 2030 and beyond'.
In November, delegates to the UN Climate Change Convention annual negotiations will gather in Paris to try to conclude an ambitious and effective agreement on preventing the global average temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions exceeding 2˚C above its pre-industrial level.
Last year, the Convention’s executive secretary, Christiana Figueres, said the world’s long-term goal was to reduce greenhouse gases to zero by 2100 − a target she said would require leaving three-quarters of fossil fuels in the ground.
Said Ms Figueres:
“We just can’t afford to burn them."
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
Tuesday, 11 August 2015
Monday, 10 August 2015
Destiny’s Year One Legendary Weapons Staying Behind In Year Two | GameInformer
Destiny’s Year One Legendary Weapons Staying Behind In Year Two
Initial reaction to Destiny’s plans for old legendary gear for many long-time players will be sadness. As someone who is going to miss my Vision of Confluence, I share in the pain. However, I was lucky enough to get to experiment with many of the new weapons on offer in The Taken King, and many of the new weapons offer genuinely novel shooting experiences. While part of me enjoyed the chance to bring some of my old standbys into the recent House of Wolves expansion, I found after several weeks that I was uninterested in many of the new weapons, since few were as comfortable to shoot as existing favorites, particularly some of the older raid weapons. I’m excited to try out new options in the coming year, even if I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Fatebringer and its cousins.
The Great Gamescom 2015 Preview Roundup - Features - GameInformer.com
The Great Gamescom 2015 Preview Roundup
Battleborn
Call of Duty: Black Ops III
Crackdown 3
Dreadnought
FIFA 16
Fable Legends
Fallout 4
Final Fantasy XV (Also here and here)
Gears of WarHeroes Of The Storm
Hitman
The Life Of A Destiny Exotic: Designing Gjallarhorn’s New Competition - Features - GameInformer
The Life Of A Destiny Exotic: Designing Gjallarhorn’s New Competition
"We wanted to design a gun that matched the theme of cutting edge technology that was still in its infancy, but bears the hallmarks of a prototype that is not ready for mass distribution," says concept artist Jesse van Dijk. "One of the designs that exemplifies this concept to me is the prototype of the first stealth fighter. I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking it didn't look like a plane. In almost every conceivable way, it was a much more advanced version of what came before and yet it looked so much simpler. It had all these incredibly primitive geometric shapes, so it had that dichotomy of being super advanced on one end and being incredibly visually simple on the other. We latched onto that theme for the Sleeper Simulant, and also looked at images from NASA, such as the Mars rover."
"When it comes to exotics, anything goes," says gameplay designer Jon Weisnewski. "We have a joke in the design pod that we spend all this time building all these rules for how combat works, and then, when we make an exotic, we pick a rule to break. For the Sleeper Simulant our idea was to take a weapon archetype and move it out of its current role as a primary weapon and make it a heavy. We wondered how could we turn something like a fusion riffle into a heavy hitter. The creation of the Sleeper Simulant was a happy high-five. We said we wanted to make a laser that bounced off walls, and the art team showed us this image and we were like, 'Sweet, let's make these things kiss.'"
"We try to hit two fantasies for every weapon," Weisnewski says. "One is the emotional fantasy that the player has just by owning the weapon. How do you feel when you get this weapon? That's all dependent on how it looks, what it's called, its lore, what it sound like when it shoots, and just how devastating it feels to use. Our second fantasy is the gameplay fantasy, which is more like the water cooler line that someone will give you the next day after using it. For something like the Red Death it might be, 'That's the gun that heals me when I shoot.' For the Sleeper Simulant we're thinking it's, 'the laser that bounces off walls and kills a lot of guys."
"The design of a weapon is constantly changing through development, and it's critical for every weapon that it gets proven to work in first person," van Dijk says. "The perspective you have on a gun is so different when you hold it up close to your eyes. The field of view creates distortions that you might not even think of when looking at a weapon from the side view. What does the gun's heads-up display looks like? How well does it perform in a combat scenario? Can you actually see what you're shooting at, or is the weapon in the way? All this fine tuning generally takes a while to sort out. At this point, we never assume that a gun's design is final until we put it in the game and see how it looks down the barrel."
"We went back and forth on depth of view with this gun," Weisnewski says. "The nature of the gun is that you want players to take it into a base and fire it off and watch it ping-pong around environment and hit multiple guys. But in actual play, players kept wanting to use it like a precision weapon, and they would charge up their shots and try to take out their targets from a distance and continually miss. So we started playing with the zoom, and trying to dial that in so we could help them out a bit. Charge time was another issue. We wanted the gun to feel really heavy and feel powerful, but at first it was too slow and took a long time to charge up, so players didn't want to use it."
Path To Glory
Here's a look at Sleeper Simulant's upgrade path, charting how the gun grows as you level it up. Like all new exotics, Sleeper Simulant has an intrinsic property that is unlocked immediately upon acquisition, helping to make it stand out right from the start.
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