Overheard in the Tech Blogosphere: Project Blackbox = a “data center in can?”

“All told, I really like the idea of my brand new datacenter rolling in on the back of a tractor-trailer truck. It kinda reminds me of the setup the bad guys had in latest Die Hard movie. I just hope nobody buys one and hires only one person to run it.”

- Cliff R. Pearson

Project Blackbox (now officially called the “Sun Modular Datacenter S20“) is a modular virtualized data center housed within a shipping container.

For more, head over to our sister site, SearchDataCenter.com, whose writers and editors have been covering the development of Project Blackbox since its introduction:

• Sun renames, rejiggers Project Blackbox, a modular data center
• Prefabricated data centers offer modular expansion alternatives
• Sun Black box: A data center Winnebago

Video: IC Innovations at the Design-Manufacturing Interface

This lecture from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley describes how the manufacture design of integrated circuits (ICs) has evolved and improved over the years.

As IC’s routinely include more than a billion transistors, the interactions between the design and the manufacturing communities now must handle atomic-level variability, dozens of new materials, and patterning techniques operating at their theoretical limit.

In this talk, we will present several facets of this problem and discuss emerging innovations at the IC design-manufacturing interface.

Video: Sony’s flexible OLED

This clip demonstrates a prototype of Sony’s flexible OLED display. The color screen is only 0.3mm thick and fully flexible, even while content is being player upon it.

HowStuffWorks has posted a helpful explanation for how OLEDs work.

While the above video shows Sony’s prototype, the technology is actually licensed from Kodak. The Eastman Kodak Company, in fact, has been busy signing licensing deals with a number of electronics manufacturers, including an agreement with LG this past week.

GE’s announcement of a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLEDs lighting devices (press release) spurred the normal engaging commentary on a Slashdot thread.

Kyoto Prize winner Hiroo Inokuchi, whose organic chemistry work led to the development of OLEDs, is bullish on the techology. In this interview with Wired, he forsees applications in photovoltaics and improved energy conversion.

Will these thin, cheap and green color displays be embedded in surfaces around us within the next ten years? Maybe. Toshiba engineers are reporting problems with high OLED power requirements. In other words, cereal box cartoons may take a bit longer than that to play at a breakfast table near you.

Happy Pi Day!

Yes, today is March 14, 2008, abbreviated as 3.14. Mathematicians everywhere celebrate today as Pi Day.

You can join the fun over at PiDay.org.

Video: Scott Forstall demonstrates Touch Fighter at the Apple SDK launch

Two weeks and less than 10,000 lines of code result in this demonstration of a starfighter action game on an iPhone that takes advantage of the device’s accelerometer, touch screen and high contrast display. This is a great use of the interface and should inspire some creative thinking the software development community.

My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

Video: gOS installed on an old IBM Thinkpad.

This video from a 15 year old UK student demonstrates a successful installation of gOS on a laptop nearing a decade of service.

He installed some snark in his YouTube video notes as well, noting that:

I managed to install gOS on a 9 year old IBM ThinkPad 600E laptop. This video shows just how well Linux will run on pretty much any hardware. Vista doesn’t look much better than gOS and would never even boot on old hardware like this, let alone run demanding applications such as GIMP.

You can download and try gOS from ThinkgOS.com.

Video: New Features in the Next C++ Standard

This Google Tech Talk addresses each of the new features in the upcoming standard for C++. You can read more about them in depth at the Wikipedia entry for the new standard, C++0x.

Video: RFID Pet Food Access System

This canine version of access control combines radio transmitters with a high pitched warning signal to keep each dog away from the other’s bowl. The scenario is similar to many that role-based access control (RBAC) solves in an enterprise.

Unfortunately, programmers would still have to eat their own dogfood.

I wonder if this would help keep my roommate out of my beer.

Video: Ted Nelson, hypertext and the Web

In this Google TechTalk, Ted Nelson discusses implementing the original hypertext concept and how transclusion should be used now to fulfill its original potential.

While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

Video: FBI can listen even when a cellphone is turned off

Fox News aired a report in 2006 that described how the FBI can turn on the mic on a cellphone and eavesdrop — even if the phone is turned off.

Today’s Word of the Day, government Trojan, describes efforts by various governments to covertly survail traffic of all kinds to and from suspect hard drives, including VoIP, cellphones and email.

These kinds of measures are only likely to increase as groups of all stripes turn to the Web to organize and communicate about activity the government wants to monitor. I find the “analog hacks” used here intriguing. VoIP or cellphone conversations and email messages may be encrypted during transmission but if an agency can record a target on the microphone or by using a keylogger, even quantum encryptography could be sidestepped.