Don’t get too excited just yet, but PCIe 4.0 is coming. PCI-SIG, the body that governs the standard, has announced the next evolution of the interface, which should start popping up in servers, desktops, laptops and even tablets around 2015. Sadly, details are pretty slim on the slot — final specs aren’t expected to be announced before 2014. All we know is that PCIe 4.0 will be able to perform 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), which tells us only slightly more than jack squat. It simply means that a PCIe 4.0 card will be capable of transferring 16 billion discrete chunks of data per second, twice that of PCIe 3.0. What that doesn’t tell us though, is the size of those chunks. If they’re the same size, 4.0 will provide double the current bit rate of 1 GB/s per-lane. If, for some reason, the channel width were halved there would be no speed increase — but we seriously doubt that’s the case. So, will we be looking at 32 GB/s PCIe 4.0 x16 GPUs in a few years? That is a definite maybe.

Continue reading PCIe 4.0 inches towards reality, hits 16 gigatransfers per second (that’s a thing, right?)

PCIe 4.0 inches towards reality, hits 16 gigatransfers per second (that’s a thing, right?) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PCIe 4.0 inches towards reality, hits 16 gigatransfers per second (that’s a thing, right?)

The F5 documenting a truck rollover on the street.

When was the last time you saw a Georges Seurat painting? The father of pointilism pioneered the technique of a canvas full of points to make a complete picture. Like Seurat, the new F5 from Mantis Vision gets the point. The 3D scanner boasts 50,000 points per video frame and sets a new standard for the industry by taking what might be thought as a traditional camcorder recording and translating data into 3D data points. Their tag line “The first 3D Camera for non-experts” seems like one of those marketing catch phrases that seem too good to be true, but rest assured, this product delivers.

Offering continual 1 hour use, the F5 is lightweight with the two pieces weighing in at 1.7 kg for the Camera and 1.0 kg for the UMPC/data storage and display (Camera-3.74lb; UMPC- 2.20 lb).

Key features of the F5:
– MVP Software transfers the 2D coded video to 3D models and also offers the ability to stitch multiple frames together.
– Supplements hard to reach/see places that spherical 3D scanners can’t.
– Simultaneous Imaging range: 55 cm – 3.0 m with a Single frame Accuracy: up to 0.5 mm at a range ≤ 1m.
– The ability to capture reflective models.
– Very little, if any, prep worked required ahead of time to start scanning.

Over the past 5 years the accessibility, cost and ease of use of 3D scanners has improved as products appeared on the market with an affordable price tag (under $3k) with the ability to scan color. Designers, engineers and architects already make clay, foam and sketch models to flesh out ideas so it’s only a matter of time until a 3D scanner is added into the process to help bring the analog models into the digital world. With its portability, the F5 can be used in hard to reach places or help to supplement what other scanners might have missed. Take a look after the jump to see actual footage of the F5 in action.

(more…)

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Mantis Vision’s F5 Handheld 3D Scanner for the Field

A team of Columbia researchers say they’ve discovered an exploit involving the embedded systems found in printers in which hackers can gain control of the device and rewrite the firmware without anyone knowing, and then use that to steal information or potentially cause printers to catch fire. More »

Read the original:
Can Hackers Really Use Your HP Printer to Steal Your Identity and Blow Up Your House? (Updated) [Printers]

People who make toys, dollhouses, or other miniatures know that certain laws of physics apply that make miniaturization difficult. Certain laws of biology apply, too, but the fairy wasp seems to do an end-run around some of those rules. How else could an insect exist that is smaller than many single-celled creatures? Some are revealed by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has studied these tiny wasps for years.

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the fairy wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.

And yet, the fairy wasp has thousands of them. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes, “It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five days during the pupal stage.”

There are other tricks tiny insects use to maintain life in miniature, which you can read at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link

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Fairy Wasps are Smaller than Amoebas

One of the issues hindering the widespread adoption of 3D is the relative lack of content available. So Acer’s new 27-inch display takes matters into its own hands by automatically converting 2D content to 3D in real time. More »

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Acer’s 3D Display Fleshes Out 2D Content Without Any Clunky Software [Displays]

Google has changed its procedures to enable “forward secrecy” by default on all its search-traffic. This means that part of the key needed to decrypt the traffic is never stored, so that in the event that there is a security breach at Google, older, intercepted traffic can’t be descrambled. It’s the absolute best practice for secure communications, and Google is to be commended for adopting it.

Other web sites have implemented HTTPS with forward secrecy before — we have it enabled by default on https://www.eff.org/ — but it hasn’t yet been rolled out on a site of Google’s scale. Some sites have publicly resisted implementing forward secrecy because it is more CPU intensive than standard HTTP or HTTPS. In order to address that problem, Google made improvements to the open source OpenSSL library, and has incorporated those changes into the library for anybody to use.

Forward secrecy is an important step forward for web privacy, and we encourage sites, big and small, to follow Google’s lead in enabling it!

Long Term Privacy with Forward Secrecy

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Google implements “forward secrecy” in its encrypted traffic, releases improvements to SSL library for all to use

Two hacking groups, Anonymous and Team Poison, have joined forces to take on the banks, steal money and donate it to charities and protests. Reclaiming the “99 per cent’s money back”. More »

Original post:
Anonymous and Team Poison Join Forces For OpRobinHood to Target Banks and Give to Charities [Video]

MrKevvy writes
“An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography: ‘Sussman’s Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. … It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. … What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman’s lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
Physicist Uses Laser Light As Fast, True-Random Number Generator

Are you unemployed? More to the point, are you underemployed and have extra time, but no job to fill it? A website called TaskRabbit is one of several that are hiring people to do immediate, temporary jobs for anyone. Need someone to do a chore for which you don’t have time? There might be someone who has time right now to do it:

Erika Dumaine, 24, logged onto TaskRabbit this April and saw the following plea for help: “Buy me shoes ASAP. I stepped in dog poop.” So Ms. Dumaine, now a full-time nanny, bought and delivered a requested new pair of navy blue Toms shoes from Nordstrom’s to the poster, Guillermo Rauch. (Her payment: $17.) Aura Montano, a 21-year-old nursing student, stood on the Brooklyn Bridge holding an “I heart Anie Lewis” sign one Friday evening in August so she could attract the attention of Eric Lewis’s wife and hand her flowers as she walked home from work. (She earned $19.)

Those handful of dollars per job can add up to a substantial sum:

After submitting an online application, completing a video interview and going through a Social Security number trace and a federal criminal background check, Ms. Greenham joined the San Francisco-based company’s crew of about 2,000 “TaskRabbits.” She does odd jobs via the service every day, aiming to clear at least $25 an hour. So far, she’s completed about 250 jobs and has racked up around $1,500 a month.

Like the guy who started renting out his personal possessions, we’re seeing more and more people using the Internet to create their own jobs and run microbusinesses. Isn’t that awesome?

Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user mahalie

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Websites That Let People Farm out Their Chores

Lucas123 writes “President Obama this week issued a directive to all federal agencies to upgrade records management processes from paper-based systems that have been around since President Truman’s administration to electronic records systems with Web 2.0 capabilities. Agencies have four months to come up with plans to improve their records keeping. Part of the directive is to have the National Archives and Records Administration store all long-term records and oversee electronic records management efforts in other agencies. Unfortunately, NARA doesn’t have a stellar record itself (PDF) in rolling out electronic records projects. Earlier this year, due to cost overruns and project mismanagement, NARA announced it was ending a 10-year effort to create an electronic records archive.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Obama Orders Federal Agencies To Digitize All Records