Software Reviews

Nanotechnology researchers at the University of California have made “nanotube ink” from the chemicals used in an ordinary battery, thereby making it possible to print batteries onto surfaces like paper.

Lead researcher George Gruner has revealed that he used the same zinc-carbon chemistry in his batteries as are used in ordinary non-rechargeable batteries.

He believes that the technique to print flexible batteries onto different surfaces may prove helpful in powering disposable devices like long-range RFID tags or small displays.

The batteries, less than a millimetre thick, are made from two layers containing carbon nanotubes and a third layer of zinc foil.

For making the battery, a layer of nanotubes is first deposited in the form of “nanotube ink” onto a surface. The layer acts as the charge collector, which removes current from the battery.

Thereafter, a layer of nanotube ink mixed with manganese oxide powder and electrolytes, which carries charge within the cell, is applied on top, which acts as the cathode. Finally, a piece of zinc foil is applied, which acts as the anode.

“The batteries are similar to conventional batteries, with the electrically conducting nanoscale networks replacing conventional metals and electrodes,” New Scientist quoted Gruner as saying.

He further said that the designs should make it possible to get more power than a conventional design would from the same materials, “an important factor for portable electronics applications.”

The research team has also developed supercapacitors using the inking technique, and they now plan to combine them with batteries for applications requiring more power.

They have revealed that both printed batteries and supercapacitors can be made entirely at room temperature, which is why it should be possible to mass-produce them using established printing methods.

Nottingham University chemist George Chen agrees that nanotubes may provide ways to improve battery performance.

He, however, says that Gruner’s batteries have been tested at low power only.

“The discharge currents are, so far, smaller than needed for practical use,” he said.

Gruner, on his part, says that his team is working to increase power output and to demonstrate suitability of the designs for industrial production.

The new technique has been described in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Singapore has lifted a ban on a Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) video game that contains a scene showing a human woman and an alien woman kissing and caressing, a local newspaper reported on Saturday.The Strait Times said Mass Effect would instead be sold with an M18 label, meaning it can’t be bought by anybody under the age of 18.

Mass Effect is the first video game to be given a rating in the country, and follows a public outcry over the ban. It effectively fast tracks a new ratings system that was due to come into effect in January, the paper said.

A similar move was made for the movie Lust, Caution, which was released uncut with a R21 age restriction after first being shown in a censored form.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz unveiled the company’s virtualization product line, xVM, at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week.

XVM consists of two components: xVM Server, a hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems; and xVM Ops Center, a management console. The Ops Center project will be released under the open source GPLv3 license, and Sun has set up a community site at www.openxVM.org.

“Our engagement with the community is not something we take lightly,” Schwartz said. “It is in every way the foundation of our company.”

The news comes just days after Oracle unveiled its own virtualization product, Oracle VM, which like xVM Server, is based on the open source Xen hypervisor project. Both companies join a crowded market dominated by leader VMWare.

Sun said it intends to put $2 billion behind its vXM push. Ops Center, which is expected to be available next month, has already been validated to run on 1,000 system configurations, according to Sun.

Sun’s vice president of software, Rich Green, took the stage to discuss xVM’s features in greater depth. He said the industry-wide drive toward virtualizing data centers has resulted in new challenges. “You have these consolidated systems where headroom has been dramatically reduced,” he said. “That’s a byproduct of server consolidation.”

Enterprises with heavily virtualized environments are also dealing with “server sprawl,” according to Green. “You have this sprawling nature of things to manage, a complexity greater than what you had before,” he said.

He characterized Ops Center as “a complete suite of data center automation technology” with an interface easy for less-skilled users to work with. “Not everyone is a hardcore UNIX admin,” said Sun’s Steve Wilson, who demoed Ops Center for the crowd.

XVM Server can be used to host all three major operating systems: Windows, Solaris and Linux. It also will provide access to features like ZFS and Predictive Self-Healing. “We’ve raised the bar technically on what a hypervisor can be,” Green said in an interview following the keynote. The product is set for a spring 2008 release.Like its other offerings, the software will be free, with Sun making money through support services. “Most people applying virtualization in the data center are not going to do it unsupported,” Green said. Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten said Sun’s announcement reflects the general drive to build virtualization offerings on top of the Xen project. “There hasn’t really been a leader emerging around Xen yet,” he said, adding that while one could point to Citrix, there remains a lot of room in the market. “What’s unique about Sun is that they’re marrying it to Solaris,” Staten said, describing Sun’s platform as well-used to running on massively parallelized systems. That could be “a huge advantage” for Sun as the industry increasingly moves to adopt multicore hardware, Staten said.

Sun said a broad array of companies has endorsed xVM, including AMD, Intel, mySQL, Symantec, Quest Software and Red Hat.

Also Wednesday, Dell CEO Michael Dell joined Schwartz onstage to announce the company has agreed to a deal to distribute Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system on its PowerEdge servers. “I’d like to believe Dell is going to have a much different conversation now with the Solaris installed base,” Schwartz said.

FFDShow is a set of DirectShow filters and VFW codec for video compression, decompression and processing and audio compression and processing.

FFDShow uses libavcodec from ffmpeg project or for video decompression (it can use xvid.dll installed with xvid codec too), postprocessing code from mplayer to enhance visual quality of low bitrate movies, and is based on original DirectShow filter from XviD, which is GPL’ed educational implementation of MPEG4 encoder.

- fast video decompression using optimized MMX, SSE and 3DNow! code
- support for different codecs: XviD, all DivX versions, MS WMV, MPEG-1 and - MPEG-2
- image postprocessing for higher playback quality
- automatic quality control: automatically reduces postprocessing level when CPU load is high
- hue, saturation and luminance correction
- experimental sharpening filter
- noising (of course if you want it)
- presets
- completely free software: ffdshow is distributed under GPL
- support for various subtitle formats.

>>> Download <<< 

WorkshopLive.com is a virtual music school that features dozens of professional instructors teaching lessons online for all levels of expertise, in guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. When WorkshopLive was in the early stages of development, the company had limited funds to devote to hardware, software, and human resources, so CTO Marilyn Hoefner decided to give open source software a try. “We’ve been extremely happy,” Hoefner says.

Hoefner’s mandate was to create a site rich in multimedia, including video teaching and animated fretboards to demonstrate chord fingering. “We needed a fairly powerful platform, but we didn’t have a lot of money to spend,” she says. “I come from a corporate background and hadn’t used open source before. But the developers here were very comfortable with it and felt it was extremely secure. Also, we had some outside contractors working on development and they were high on it.”

Though Hoefner was not familiar with Linux and other open source software, she was quite experienced when it came to proprietary platforms. “It’s extremely costly for support, and you end up paying huge license fees. So I went with the recommendation.”

To host what is now a collection of over 10,000 videos and animations and some 1,800 lessons, Hoefner chose Red Hat servers managed by Rackspace. She says that open source software, coupled with support and automatic upgrades from Rackspace, has made her job easy. WorkshopLive is coded with ColdFusion, but Hoefner has been so impressed by open source that she’s decided to use more of it in the development environment, including Subversion and other open source development tools. “In my previous life, I was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on these things,” Hoefner says. “My last job, the budget was over a million dollars for annual licensing alone. Here, I’ve got nothing in it. We don’t spend a penny on any of these development tools.”

Hoefner says the biggest benefit of using open source software has been the stability and security. “When you’re running on a Microsoft platform, you’re always worried about security, upgrades, and problematic patches. It’s more time-intensive to support the end user and to maintain the applications, and we just don’t have the staff to dedicate a full-time person to keeping the servers running. Our developers can spend their time developing code instead of administrating the network.”

Her experience has been so good, Hoefner recommends other Web developers take a hard look at Linux. “I would just research it according to their requirements. Linux servers integrate very easily and they will reduce the costs. We haven’t come across any pitfalls — there’s nothing negative. Test it out in a contained environment and I think they’ll be very happy with it. It’s definitely a platform I would invest in again.”