Tiny sapphire disk enables eternal, fireproof data preservation

Add / Remove This is part of a series of articles that looks at entrepreneurs hoping to get their ideas off the ground through crowdfunding. At the time of writing, each of these innovations is currently seeking funding. The cloud is certainly an incredible platform for making digital files readily available and enabling remote, collaborative work. But there is an uncertainty about it that makes many consumers uncomfortable, leading them to maintain or return to analogue backups of their data. While an external hard drive is sufficient for many users, those looking for something smaller and more fireproof can now have all their data laser-engraved on a tiny sapphire disk called a Nanoform . Made by French company Fahrenheit2451, Nanoform disks are one, two or four inches, and can store huge amounts of data — up to 10,000 letter pages or 2,700 pictures — at a miniscule size. The files are laser-engraved at a scale of 1/30,000th, onto a shock resistant synthetic sapphire disk, which is the second hardest material after diamond. Farenheit2451 claims that the data on the disks can be preserved for thousands of years. Users can access their pictures and text using a powerful magnifying glass, a digital microscope or a camera with a micro-lens. Fahrenheit2451 are currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to bring the personal Nanoform to market. Customers can pre-order a range of products at early bird prices, starting at USD 130. Are there other ways to make data storage more tangible and secure? Website: www.fahrenheit2451.com Contact: www.twitter.com/Fahrenheit2451

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Tiny sapphire disk enables eternal, fireproof data preservation

Comcast Launches Streaming Service and Unveils Pricing For 2G Fiber

An anonymous reader writes: Comcast has announced the release of its Gigabit Pro service which offers speeds up to 2 gigabits per second. The service is $300 a month (agree to a two year contract and get the early promotional price of $159 per month) with a $500 installation and activation fee. The new service is only available in the Jacksonville, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Florida area. This announcement comes on the heels of the $15-per-month “Comcast Stream” launch. The live TV and streaming video service does not require a cable TV subscription, but live TV channels can only be watched on customer’s home internet connections. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Comcast Launches Streaming Service and Unveils Pricing For 2G Fiber

The Material That Both Conducts Electricity – and Doesn’t

Metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which don’t, are polar opposites. At least that’s what we’ve believed until now. But we have discovered that a well-known insulator can simultaneously act like a conductor in certain measurements . We don’t yet know the reason for this mysterious behaviour but it is likely due to new and exciting quantum effects. Read more…

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The Material That Both Conducts Electricity – and Doesn’t

Comcast Has a New $15 Per Month Cable-Free TV Service Called Stream

Comcast has announced that it has a new at-home TV streaming service—called Stream—that Xfinity customers will be able to bolt on to their existing contracts for $15 a month. Read more…

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Comcast Has a New $15 Per Month Cable-Free TV Service Called Stream

Test run paves the way for over-the-air 4K TV

You may not have to pony up for a streaming video service (or any service, for that matter) to get 4K video on your TV in the future. GatesAir, LG and Zenith have started field-testing Futurecast, a system that promises to drag over-the-air TV into the modern era. Thanks to HEVC video compression as well as boosts to overall throughput, the technology can stuff both 4K and two mobile broadcasts into a relatively small 6MHz frequency range. With enough bandwidth, you’d only need a set of rabbit ears to watch at least a few basic channels in Ultra HD. Don’t rush to snag a 4K TV just yet. So far, Futurecast mostly exists as a bunch of technologies that will hopefully be rolled into the next-generation ATSC 3.0 standard. It’ll take some time before that standard is ready to go, and a while after that before you can buy a supporting set. Still, it’s good to know that plain HD will no longer be as good as it gets when you’re watching for free. Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD , LG Comments Source: LG Newsroom

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Test run paves the way for over-the-air 4K TV

Ditching RAM may lead to low-cost supercomputers

Many servers , supercomputers and other monster systems thrive on high-speed RAM to keep things running smoothly, but this memory is wildly expensive — and that limits not just the number of nodes in these clusters, but who can use them. MIT researchers may have a much more affordable approach in the future, though. They’ve built a server network (not shown here) that drops RAM in favor of cheaper and slower flash storage, yet performs just about as well. The key was to get the flash drives themselves (or specifically, their controllers) to pre-process some of the data, instead of making the CPUs do all the hard work. That doesn’t completely close the speed gap, but the differences are virtually negligible. In one test, 20 servers with 20TB of flash were about as fast as 40 servers with 10TB of RAM. This doesn’t mean that flash-centric computing will be useful absolutely everywhere. MIT has only demonstrated its technique helping out with database-heavy tasks like ranking web pages. This wouldn’t necessarily help much with tasks that depend more on calculations, and the networked design means it this RAM-less approach wouldn’t do much to help your home PC. All the same, this could help a lot if it lets your favorite cloud service run faster, or helps cost-conscious scientists devote money toward other projects. [Image credit: AP Photo/Jens Meyer] Filed under: Storage , Science Comments Source: MIT News

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Ditching RAM may lead to low-cost supercomputers

Nintendo asks GitHub to make Javascript-based Game Boy emulator disappear

This week, GitHub posted a takedown notice it received from Nintendo of America’s legal representation. The  Mario  makers believe that a popular Javascript-based Game Boy Advance emulator hosting its source on GitHub violated the company’s copyright for the games involved. “Nintendo requests that GitHub, Inc., disable public access to the website at http://jsemu.github.io/gba/,” the letter reads. “This website provides access to unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games and videos making use of Nintendo’s copyrighted Pokémon characters and imagery in violation of Nintendo’s exclusive rights.” The takedown notice cites both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and GitHub’s own ” Guide to Filing a DMCA Notice .” In total, Nintendo identified more than 20 games and two franchises ( Metroid  and Pokémon ) with patents being infringed, and the individual titles run the gamut of popular ( Pokémon  Silver  and  Gold ) to obscure (remember  Golden Sun ?). The company requested GitHub immediately remove 32 unique URLs corresponding to various emulators. The notice denotes each individual patent and infringing URL, and the sites in question now deliver 404s.  Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nintendo asks GitHub to make Javascript-based Game Boy emulator disappear

US Army National Guard reveals they, too, recently suffered data breach

The compromised data includes Social Security Numbers, Dates of Birth, and Home Addresses. Read the rest

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US Army National Guard reveals they, too, recently suffered data breach

Cops nab fugitives in Cabo San Lucas by tracking Spotify IP address

A seven-month search for two Colorado children came to an end days ago after the authorities tracked the IP address of the alleged abductors’ Spotify account to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Brittany Nunn, left, and husband Peter Barr. Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Husband Peter Barr and wife Brittany Nunn of Wellington, Colorado, were brought to Denver days ago and face felony charges in connection to the children’s disappearance. Nunn had lost custody of her children to their fathers, but did not appear when the exchange was supposed to happen in December. The duo had been on the lam ever since, and are accused of unlawfully taking the woman’s two biological children, 4 and 6, to Mexico, according to The Coloradoan . The case was broken by Larimer County Sheriff’s investigator Drew Weber. According to the paper: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops nab fugitives in Cabo San Lucas by tracking Spotify IP address