Good Bye Floppy !!!!!!!

Stop us if you've heard this before: the floppy drive is dead. Sony has announced that it will stop selling the long-running storage medium next year.

According to the BBC, the end of floppy sales in Japan coupled with Sony's dropping international floppy sales earlier this year sticks the proverbial fork in the finicky, low-capacity storage medium.

Well, almost. The venerable 3.5-inch floppy is still available from the likes of Verbatim, Imation (3M), and Maxell- although Sony's abandonment of the once-ubiquitous media moves it another giant step towards utter irrelevance.

But the floppy's journey to inconsequentiality has been one long, slow slog.

When Steve Jobs announced his company-saving iMac in May of 1998, its lack of a floppy drive was met with an outcry of outrage - but the handwriting was on the wall. And it said: "Goodbye, floppy."

When the iMac shipped in August of that year, reviews of its floppylessness were mixed.Macworld, for example, wrote: "The most shocking part of the iMac isn't what it offers, but what it lacks. The iMac has no floppy drive, which might be forgivable if there were a Zip drive or other removable-media option, but there isn't."

Others, however, were more understanding. Ars Technica for example, noted: "Apple has gotten a lot of heat for dumping the floppy, but I don't have any problem with the action in principle. It's high time we move ourselves away from this pathetically small kind of storage."

Soon, more rumors of the floppy's demise began to circulate. At its 1999 Developer Forum, devs were told to prepare for a floppy-free future. In 2001, Intel hustled to deny that it was advising the removal of floppy drives from PCs, as had been revealed in internal documents.

Then, in 2003, Dell said it would drop the flop, which hastened the inexorable decline of the sales of the diskettes. In 2007, floppies disappeared from UK retailer PC World's shelves.

Not that there wasn't a gaggle of floppy replacements floated by various and sundry manufacturers. Insite's Floptical drive - which guided the read-write head optically but used standard magnetic storage techniques - increased the little fellow's capacity to 21MB. This hybrid tech resurfaced in Imation's 120MB SuperDisk - but that drive met with only limited success.

Other manufacturers tried putting flexible media into different high-capacity removable-disk technologies even before the floppy's demise - Iomega's 100MB Zip Drive, introduced in May 1995, being arguably the most successful.

In those removable-disk salad days, cartridges based on rigid-disk technologies were also being popped into internal and external drives - most notably SyQuest (bought by Iomega in 1999), followed by Iomega's 1GB and 2GB Jaz and 35GB "Son of Jaz," the Rev. During the waning days of rigid removables, SyQuest founder Syed Iftikar's start-up Castlewood flogged the 2GB Orb drive to little success.

And no trip down removable magnetic-media memory lane would be complete without at least a passing nod to Iomega's two-inch Clik!, introduced in 1999 and rebranded in 2000 as the Pocket Zip. As Iomega admits, "These products met limited market acceptance and were eventually discontinued."

The Zip drive - which was boosted to 250MB in 1998 and to 750MB in 2002 - was a follow-on to Iomega's Bernoulli Box technology. It was the only high-capacity flexible-media removable adopted to any great degree by OEMs. That success was never matched by other attempts such as Sony's 200MB HiFD, Samsung's 123MB Pro-FD, Matsushita-Kotobuki's 32MB FD32MB, or the aforementioned Imation SuperDisk.

Floppies, on the other hand, were everywhere during their heyday. Starting out in the early 1970s in an 8-inch form factor, they became de rigueur in early S-100 CP/M systems, especially after the DSDD (double-sided, double-density), 1.2MB version was released in the late 70s.

Floppies then shrank to 5.25 inches, popularized in the Apple II and IBM Personal Computers. When the 3.5-inch floppy appeared in the early 1980s the magnetic disk itself remained flexible, but it was encased in a hard-plastic case - which undoubtedly led to puzzlement among the younger generation of PC users, who wondered where the term "floppy" came from.

The most popular of those 3.5-inch disks began at 400KB (as in the original 128K Macintosh), then grew to 800KB (as in the Macintosh 512ke) and finally stabilized with 1.44MB FDHD format in the late 80s - which Apple, in its characteristically understated marketing-speak, dubbed the SuperDrive.

But as file sizes grew, floppies were doomed. Their first serious competition were CD-R andCD-RW drives - although the latter never managed to deal the floppy the final death blow.

That coup de grâce came with the introduction of flash-based thumb drives, which soon became the new hotness. Not only did thumb-drive capacities quickly rise and prices quickly fall, but their portability, relative speed, and reliability soon made them sneakernet's go-to media. Faster LANs, simplified PC-to-PC file-sharing, and broadband also made both simple drag-and-drop file-sharing and emailing more-secure methods of transfering files.

To be sure, floppies put up a good fight. Witness, for example, Maplin's combo floppy-drive-cum-card-reader of 2008. But thumb drives were not to be denied - although Memorex did give a nod to nostalgia with its retro FlashDisc offered by Buffalo and Verbatim.

And now with Sony's announcement, Steve Jobs gets to say "I told you so." ®

World’s largest complete functional plastic building in Taiwan

You are about to get bewildered because what you are seeing is no doubt a building but one that has been constructed from recycled PET plastic bottles. This three story building in Taipei, Taiwan reuses about 1.5 million discarded bottles accumulated from trash cans. The building which is 130m in length, 40 m in width and 26m in height has walls, made of bottles that have been given a brick like structure with special honeycomb geometry.

The structure of the bottle bricks allows it to be filled with air so that it could act as an insulator in hot summer months.There’s also a provision for filling the bricks with sand or water to let them absorb sunlight for keeping the interior warm, as required in cooler places.The bricks are even strong enough to empower buildings to withstand natural calamities like earthquake or typhoons. For protection against fire the outer part of the building has a fire proof coating while the interior implements the usual safety measures.

In addition to the recycled bottles the building adds on certain other green factors as well.In the morning the rooms would be lit by the entering sunlight while in the evening the building would use energy saving LEDs. This pavilion presently called the EcoARK would be used as an exhibition site for the Taipei International Flora Expo in November.

PlayStation Portable 2

There has recent predictions that the Sony’s future handheld game console, PSP2 will have a scrolling OLED screen. The following design by Tai Chiem is ridiculously catchy and hard to miss. It sould supposedly have wireless connectivity, bluetooth 2.0 and dual speakers. And exactly how would Sony keep the screen straight? This seems to be done using an electrical charge. Overall PSP2 looks to be an awesome product.

Honda’s revolutionary Great Race of 2025 vehicle

Honda Research North America is coming up with a revolutionary vehicle. The purpose…Great Race of 2025! This truly all-terrain power-packed vehicle will navigate on land, air and water.

The race will actually require all vehicles to circumnavigate the globe within a 24 hour period which would consist of navigation on land in United States, by sea through Asia and by air over Europe!

This vehicle will have specialized sensors to assist in the determination of changes in speed, altitude and the type of terrain which would help it to switch to the required configuration.

Super vision from Nike for bicyclists

If you are an avid bicyclist, finally your prayers may have been answered. There are many irrational motorists on the road, from whom you have to keep yourself safe.

The Nike Hindsight gives you near super-human powers by providing you extended peripheral vision

By using fresnel lenses on the two sides of the glasses, cyclists can view area beyond the normal 180º! Although the vision is distorted across the periphery, the eye detects only motion in that area and therefore only nominal clarity is lost overall. Because of the powerful fresnel lenses the cyclist can view an extra 25º on both sides.

You do not have to turn your head everytime you think a vehicle is behind, the Nike Hindsight will pretty much take care of it. Although originally intended for bicyclists, these glasses can be used for quite a number of other sports.

X-36

Soon Fighter Planes are going to loose their tail

McDonnell Douglas and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have developed a tailless research aircraft that could dramatically change the design of future stealthy fighters. Named the X-36, the vehicle has no vertical or horizontal tails and uses new split ailerons to provide yaw (left and right) and pitch (up and down) directional control. This innovative design promises to reduce weight, drag and radar signature and increase range, maneuverability and survivability of future fighter aircraft. The 28-percent scale prototype was designed, developed and produced in just 28 months for only $17 million. The X-36 began a six-month flight test program in the summer of 1996.

McDonnell Douglas and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) embarked on a joint project in 1994 to develop a prototype fighter aircraft designed for stealth and agility. The result -- after only 28 months -- was a subscale tailless aircraft called the X-36. The 28 percent scale, remotely piloted X-36 has no vertical or horizontal tails, yet it is expected to be more maneuverable and agile than today's fighters. In addition, the tailless design reduces the weight, drag and radar cross section typically associated with traditional fighter aircraft.

In a series of flight tests, the low-cost X-36 research vehicle demonstrated the feasibility of using new flight control technologies in place of vertical and horizontal tails to improve the maneuverability and survivability of future fighter aircraft. During flight, the X-36 used new split ailerons and a thrust-vectoring nozzle for directional control. The Ailerons not only split to provide yaw (right-left) control, but also raise and lower asymmetrically to provide roll control. The X-36 vehicle also incorporated an advanced, single-channel digital fly-by-wire control system developed with commercially available components.

Fully fueled, the X-36 prototype weighed 1,300 pounds. It is 19 feet long and measures 11 feet at its widest point. It is 3 feet high and is powered by a Williams Research F112 engine that provides about 700 pounds of thrust. Using a video camera in the nose of the vehicle, a pilot controls the flight of the X-36 from a virtual cockpit -- complete with head-up display (HUD) -- in a ground-based station. This pilot-in-the-loop approach eliminates the need for expensive and complex autonomous flight control systems.

McDonnell Douglas has been working under contract to NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., since 1989 to develop the technical breakthroughs required to achieve tailless agile flight. Based on the positive results of extensive wind tunnel tests, McDonnell Douglas in 1993 proposed building a subscale tailless research aircraft. In 1994 McDonnell Douglas and NASA began joint funding of the development of this aircraft, now designated the X-36. Under the roughly 50/50 cost-share arrangement, NASA Ames is responsible for continued development of the critical technologies, and McDonnell Douglas for fabricating the aircraft.

McDonnell Douglas built the X-36 with a combination of advanced, lowcost design and manufacturing techniques pioneered by the company's Phantom Works research-and-development operation.

Among these techniques are:

• advanced software development tools for rapid avionics prototyping;
• low-cost tooling molds;
• composite skins cured at low termperatures without the use of autoclaves, and;
• high speed machining of unitized assemblies.

Two identical subscale research vehicles were produced by the team for use in the flight test program. Including design and production of the two aircraft and flight testing, the total cost of the X-36 program was only $17 million. A total of 25 flights, conducted by McDonnell Douglas, took place during a six-month flight test program designed to prove the aircraft's superior agility. Initial tests focused on the low-speed, high angle-of-attack performance of the X-36.

Researchers designing all-electric warship

A University at Buffalo electronic-packaging researcher is helping the U.S. Navy to develop a next generation all-electric warshipthat will revolutionize the Navy’s use of weaponry and manpower.

The electric warship’s system architecture to be designed by Cemal Basaran, director of the Electronic Packaging Laboratory in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and other researchers working on the project for the Navy will make available throughout the entire ship onboard electric power generated by the ship’s power plants and mechanical propulsion system…

The Navy plans to have the electric warship operational by 2012.