Tag: wide

Albania is riddled with decaying Soviet-era bunkers

Wired’s Pete Brook talks with Dutch photographer David Galjaard , author of the 2012 Aperture Foundation/Paris Photo First Photobook Award-winning book Concreso , a photo-essay on the insane “bunkerization” practiced by the paranoid Soviet Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Hoxha built a one bunker for every four Albanians, 24 per square kilometer, and now the country has no idea what to do with all these decaying, apocalyptic concrete blobs. “I’m telling a story about a country and I’m using bunkers as metaphors,” says Galjaard. “Albania is an Eastern country but it wants to be part of the West. It has one foot in each, and the split is sort of unnatural. Albanians still have not found their identity so they struggle with the past, but also struggle with the future. And future for them is being part of Western Europe.” The Communist leader Hoxha rose to power in 1944 as leader of the Party of Labour of Albania and ruled until his death in 1985. Hoxha was on constant alert for political threats and maintained his position with routine immobilization, imprisonment and eviction of his people and political opponents. Hoxha’s suspicions also extended beyond Albanian borders and the bunkers, which number 24 to every square kilometer, and were built in preparation for a multi-front war Hoxha expected from invading countries, East and West. Every citizen in Hoxha’s plan was a reservist. Twelve-year-olds were trained to fire rifles. The bunkers never saw action. Today, Albanian authorities are at a loss for what to do. The reinforced concrete domes are as difficult to repurpose as they are to destroy. Tourists are fascinated by the bunkers strewn like confetti across scenery, but for locals they’re a largely uninteresting, if obstructive, part of the landscape.” Paranoid Dictator’s Communist-Era Bunkers Now a National Nuisance [Pete Brook/Wired]

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Albania is riddled with decaying Soviet-era bunkers

Dial-up handshaking illustrated

Oona Räisänen has written a thorough and engrossing article about the noises emitted by dial-up modems while they connect and handshake, and the accompanying graphic (ZOMG HUGE) is nothing short of spectacular. It would make a great full-size poster — maybe a framed art-print. Now the modems must address the problem of echo suppression. When humans talk, only one of them is usually talking while the other one listens. The telephone network exploits this fact and temporarily silences the return channel to suppress any confusing echoes of the talker’s own voice. Modems don’t like this at all, as they can very well talk at the same time (it’s called full-duplex). The answering modem now puts on a special answer tone that will disable any echo suppression circuits on the line. The tone also has periodic “snaps” (180° phase transitions) that aim to disable yet another type of circuit called echo canceller. Now the modems will list their supported modulation modes and try to find one that both know. They also probe the line with test tones to see how it responds to tones of different frequencies, and how much it attenuates the signal. They exchange their test results and decide a speed that is suitable for the line. After this, the modems will go to scrambled data. They put their data through a special scrambling formula before transmission to make its power distribution more even and to make sure there are no patterns that are suboptimal for transfer. They listen to each other sending a series of binary 1’s and adjust their equalizers to optimally shape the incoming signal. The sound of the dialup, pictured ( via JWZ )

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Dial-up handshaking illustrated

China’s Princelings: descendants of Mao’s generals who control the country’s wealth

This long-read from Bloomberg about China’s “Princelings” — the generation of hyper-rich oligarchs’ children, descended from Mao’s generals — is endlessly fascinating. Wealth in China is even more concentrated than Russia, Brazil or the USA, and the Chinese looter-class use complex screens that take advantage of different ways of representing their names in English, Cantonese and Mandarin to obscure the ownership of former state assets, flogged at pennies on the dollar in sweetheart deals for the hyper-privileged. The Princelings are western-educated, mostly in the USA, and flaunt expensive luxury-brand accessories on their social media profiles. The accompanying interactive graphic lets you explore the intertwining relationships between the families of the “eight immortals.” Opportunities for the princelings surged in the 1990s after Deng kick-started another wave of economic changes. They jumped into booming industries including commodities and real estate as new factories and expanding cities transformed China’s landscape. Two of Deng’s children — Deng Rong, 62, and her brother, Deng Zhifang — were among the first to enter real estate, even before new rules in 1998 commercialized the mainland’s mass housing market. Two years after Deng Rong accompanied her father on his famous 1992 tour of southern China to showcase the success of emerging export center Shenzhen, she was in Hong Kong to promote a new development she headed in Shenzhen. Some apartments in the 32-story complex were priced at about $240,000 each, according to a front-page story in the South China Morning Post. Corporate records show that by the late 1990s half of the company was owned by two people with the same names as Deng Rong’s sister-in-law, Liu Xiaoyuan, and the granddaughter of Wang Zhen, Wang Jingjing. Deng Rong and Deng Zhifang didn’t respond to questions sent by fax to their respective offices in Beijing. Liu couldn’t be reached for comment through one of the companies with which she’s associated. Wang Jingjing didn’t respond to questions couriered to her office in the Chinese capital and a reporter who visited on two occasions was told she wasn’t there. Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility [Bloomberg News]

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China’s Princelings: descendants of Mao’s generals who control the country’s wealth

Bunnie Huang is building a laptop

Virtuoso hardware hacker Bunnie Huang is building an open hardware laptop. Want. We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers. Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology. You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs. Building my Own Laptop

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Bunnie Huang is building a laptop

Golden Spike Company announces plan for commercial lunar space expeditions

Apollo 17: Last on the Moon. Photo: NASA . An announcement of note this morning about The Golden Spike Company, a new private space travel venture, backed by private investors. Their tag line? “Extend Your Reach.” Snip from today’s press release: On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17, the last human exploration of the Moon, Former Apollo Flight Director and NASA Johnson Space Center Director, Gerry Griffin, and planetary scientist and former NASA science chief, Dr. Alan Stern, today unveiled “The Golden Spike Company” – the first company planning to offer routine exploration expeditions to the surface of the Moon. At the National Press Club announcement this afternoon, Dr. Stern, Golden Spike’s President and CEO, and Mr. Griffin, chairman of Golden Spike’s board of directors, introduced other members of Golden Spike’s leadership team and detailed the company’s intentions to make complete lunar surface expeditions available by the end of the decade. Their board of directors (PDF) is an interesting hodgepodge, and includes Newt Gingrich, Esther Dyson, and the set designer for the movie Star Trek. The company says it plans to “maximize use of existing rockets” and market the resulting system to “nations, individuals, and corporations with lunar exploration objectives and ambitions,” promising “prices that are a fraction of any lunar program ever conceived until now.” A tall order, to be certain. Those I’ve spoken to in the space biz are skeptical, but of the mind that the more entrepreneurial efforts and private sector innovation we see in the Space space, the better. More background on the company in a Wired News article from a few days ago, and from this New Scientist piece back in November. The company is registered as a business in Colorado, where medical marijuana was just made legal. COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT. Here’s more from today’s press release from Golden Spike: This approach, capitalizing on available rockets and emerging commercial-crew spacecraft, dramatically lowers costs to create a market for human lunar exploration. Golden Spike estimates the cost for a two-person lunar surface mission will start at $1.4 billion. This price point enables human lunar expeditions at similar cost as what some national space programs are already spending on robotic science at the Moon. Dr. Stern and Mr. Griffin described Golden Spike’s “head start” architecture that has been two years in the making and vetted by teams of experts, including former space shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby, former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale, and Peter Banks, a member of the National Academy of Engineering. It has also been accepted for publication in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, a leading aerospace technical journal. All of this will be available on Golden Spike’s website , launching sometime today. From 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. (EST) today, Thursday, December 6, 2012, company executives will host a press conference in DC at the National Press Club.

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Golden Spike Company announces plan for commercial lunar space expeditions

New Apple iTunes 11 interface revealed

Vintage ad scanned and Flickr’d by James Vaughan . Wouldn’t it be nifty if the newest iteration of iTunes , which in my opinion is one of a great company’s poorest products, looked like this? The Ping-less iTunes 11 is set to launch this month, likely today, according to hints dropped in this Wall Street Journal profile of Apple exec Eddy Cue. It’s not that big a secret, anyways; the Apple.com iTunes splash page says it’s “coming in November,” and there aren’t many days left in November. Below, *actual* screenshots of the new interface. Come to think of it, the new UI resembles the vintage ad more than iTunes 10 does! But I don’t like it. I wish iTunes were a skinnable, interpret-able service with an API, like Twitter is (for now, anyway)—imagine if you could use any third-party client you wanted to access the service, as cleanly and free of cruft as you please. Library view Album view

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New Apple iTunes 11 interface revealed