Kaizen Media Blog

Sony has developed a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-colour video

In the race for ever thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all – a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-colour video.

Sony Corporation posted video of the new 2.5 inch display on its’ web page.

In the video, a hand squeezes the 0.3 millimetre (0.01 inch)-thick display, which shows color video of a bicyclist stuntman, a picturesque lake and other images.

Sony will present the research and video at an academic symposium in Long Beach, California, for the Society for Information Display this week, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said.

The display combines Sony’s organic thin film transistor, or TFT, technology, which is required to make flexible displays, with another kind of technology called organic electroluminescent display, it said.

The latter technology is not as widespread for gadgets as the two main display technologies now on the market – liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels.

Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that’s so thin it bends in a human hand marks a breakthrough.

Sony said plans for a commercial product using the technology were still undecided.

“In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamp post or a person’s wrist, even worn as clothing,” said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. “Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper.”

Tatsuo Mori, professor at Nagoya University’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said some hurdles remained, including making the display bigger, ensuring durability and cutting costs.

But the displays pliancy is extremely difficult to imitate with LCD and plasma screens, he said.

“To come up with a flexible screen at that image quality is ground breaking,” Mori said.

“You can drop it, and it won’t break because it’s as thin as paper.”

from Daily Mail

RAPPERS HAVE STRONG WORDS ON CURSING ISSUE
Published in The Toronto Star on
Friday, May 18, 2007

Rappers 50 Cent and T.I. spoke their minds about the recent controversy over inappropriate language in hip hop Wednesday. A group of urban leaders has urged the music industry to censor some of the genre’s commonly used degrading words from hip-hop albums.

“I personally believe on every level that it’s easier to attack an individual than it is to go after a corporation. They’ll go after a specific hip-hop artist as opposed to a Paramount or a Columbia Pictures,” 50 Cent said.

“Music is a mirror and hip-hop is a reflection of the environment we grew up in, the harsh realities.”

T.I. continued, “We look to rappers, athletes and stars to raise our children instead of ourselves.”

I enjoy listening to the occasional rap music, I find it entertaining quite honestly. I don’t have children and if I did I would not give them my permission to listen to rap music. Just as I never swore in front of my parents until adulthood, it doesn’t mean that I never swore as a teenager.

When you need to transfer very large amounts of data over the Internet, sooner or later you will hit a limit where it will actually be faster to send that data on disks over regular mail (often called sneakernet). Internet transfer rates are simply not enough for large data sets.

Imagine a company with two offices in different cities, perhaps even in different countries. Each office has a 100 megabit Internet connection. If the company needs to send a large amount of data from one office to the other, theoretically a 100 megabit connection can muster about 45 gigabyte in one hour if there are no bottlenecks on the way. This ends up being just over one terabyte of data in 24 hours.

In other words, for anything larger than one terabyte, it would be faster for this company to just send the data on disks for over-night delivery.

What does Google do?

Google’s initiative to transfer all the Hubble space telescope data is a good case study. The Hubble data takes up 120 terabyte (120,000,000,000,000 byte). How does Google transfer it? Not over the Internet. Instead they send actual physical disk arrays via regular mail, something they have dubbed, for fun, FedExNet. This allows them to get the data within 24 hours.

To transfer the same amount over the Internet in 24 hours, Google would have to be able to achieve transfer rates of more than 11 gigabit/s running constantly maxed out. On a regular 100 megabit connection, transferring 120 terabyte of data would take almost four months (111 days).

Is Internet 2 the answer?

The basic point here is that the Internet still needs a lot more capacity. How soon can we reach such massive transfer rates? There is hope at the horizon, but FedEx probably hopes the answer is “never.”

From Royal Pingdom

We had a craving for cookies at the grocery store and found a package of white chocolate chips with a picture of dark brownie cookies covered in milk chocolate pieces. We even had all the ingredients at home!

They are delicious, in fact so great that we felt the need to blog about them. The cocoa gives them the sophisticated dark chocolate flavour that is so difficult to achieve at home usually.

Chipits Brownie Chip Cookies:

1. Cream together 1 1/3 cups (325mL) shortening or softened butter, 1 cup (250mL) packed brown sugar and 2/3 cup (150mL) of granulated sugar. Beat in 2 eggs and 1 1/2 tsb (7mL) of vanilla.

2. Combine 2 1/4 cups (550mL) all purpose flour, 2/3 cup (150mL) cocoa, 1 tsb (5mL) of baking soda, 1/2 tsb (2mL) salt. Blend into creamed mixture alternately with 3 tbsp (45mL) milk.

3. Stir in 1 package (225g) Hershey chipits white chocolate chips 1 cup of coarsely chopped nuts (optional).

4. Drop dough by tablespoonfuls (15mL) onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350°F (180°C) for 10 to 12 minutes. Makes about 4–1/2 dozen cookies.

I saw this article posted at my local news source: CityNews.ca and thought that everyone should be aware of this new email scam.

I think that it is awful that spam has gotten this out of control! I am very comfortable with my knowledge of online scams and security and have always been very careful about revealing my personal information. Even so reading this news article which contains the entire spam email, I feel threatened.

It just reminds us all to be very careful and cautious of our personal information and to not take any emails too seriously.