Win 8 has less memory footprint than Win 7

One common & ongoing complaint about Windows 7 is its memory (or ram) requirements. A typical Windows 7 system can use anywhere between 1.5-2.5GB+ of RAM, while most recent systems only have around 4GB total. This is how much capacity your system has for live open programs. Many complex programs including Firefox can often use anywhere between 200-500mb of this ram as well. So what's the problem with having too little memory? Once it's maxed out, your system can take a major dive in performance as it starts to use your hard drive for memory instead.  If you don't have a fast Solid-State hard drive, then performance will drop significantly until there is free space in your memory

So Windows 8 will reduce this problem apparently by using a lot less memory in the first place with its operating system foundation (30%+ less).  Second, Microsoft has implemented a new memory organization technique into the new OS called memory combining.  This new technique will consolidate duplicate memory blocks into a single block.  Instead of cluttering memory with duplicate copies of the same block of data, it creates multiple paths to single blocks of data with no duplicates allowed.  For example, you could open 10 copies of the same image in both operating systems and Win 7 will theoretically require 10x more memory to open the image than Win 8.

Donate Idle Computing to Benefit Humanity

 On November 16, 2004, IBM launched a project called World Community Grid in an effort to collaborate idle computers into benefiting humanity.  It shares project resources and processing tasks across multiple computers through a concept called grid computing.  There over several dozen projects to choose from including research processing for AIDs, Cancer, Alternative Energy, Clean Water, and Muscle Dystrophy.  The software can currently run on all the major operating systems including:  Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. You can even configure it to only use a small fraction (like 10% of your power) when the system goes idle (which can also be configured).  The program immediately pauses once your system resumes from an idle state to give you back full performance.  Setting it to use a small fraction of your computer's idle power shouldn't raise electric bills much at all either.  Download the World Community Grid software here at: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp.

Live Global Statistics for World Community Grid:

Underrated Game Review: Lead & Gold

In terms of underrated video games these days, Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is one to top them. It's one of those intriguing online 3rd person shooters with greater depth than excepted.  Like Team Fortress II but with less complexity and frustration as you relive the violent era of the Wild West with style and elegance.

It features a 4 character classes that form teams in six engaging game modes. There's The Blaster, a shotgun wielding miner who can toss (and cook off) dynamite; The Trapper, a sniper with bear traps to "hunt" opponents like bears; The Deputy, wielding a repeater carbine and ability to "mark" enemies for everyone; and The Gunslinger, who can quick draws 6 shots under a second.

 Each character is part of a unique synergy system that allows each player's significant progress to provide performance enhances to everyone else.  A system that naturally provides collaboration between teammates.

The main replay value is the 82 Steam achievements you can earn through various challenges. Controls are easy to pick up and you learn a lot of different strategy as you progress.  Those who used the Steam game provider (which pc gamer doesn't?) can often find this for about $2 during one of their major sales and $10 retail outside the sale.  It's still bound to pass through the next 2 sales.

There's something about the brilliant western shooting mechanics and vivid atmosphere than makes this game feel like an overlooked gem with the current small size of it's online community. It also runs great on many decent laptops as well! View the official steam page for this game here: http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/42120/.

Techie Sleep Tips 3: Improve your Sleep Quality

A study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley found a correlation between MRI brain scans of people with severe sleep deprivation and documented emotional disorders.  The scans of sleep deprived began to mimic those of clinically depressed. Tired participants also began showing greater involvement with negative thinking.  Here are some tips to reduce/avoid these complications by improving the quality of your sleep.

Photo from ChugginMcCoffee

1- CUT THE LATE CAFFEINE & ALCOHOL - Some obvious things to generally avoid before sleep are caffeine, heavy meals, heavy liquids, and alcohol.  Alcohol may help you fall asleep faster, but excess can fragment sleep and especially reduce the quality during a hangover.  Caffeine also has a half life of relatively 5 hours in your system so try avoiding it after 3pm.

Photo from GreenLife

2- DRINK DECAF TEA - Drink decaf tea to reduce stress and balance your mood during sleep.  Many teas, particularly green tea, have something called theanine that contains healthy efficient stress reduction (almost sedative) for the mind and body when it comes to sleep.  Oddly enough, it also combines very well with caffeine during the day to counter its side effects like anxiety and tension. Drinking Kava tea during the day can also help combat daytime stress that interferes with sleep later.

3- CUT THE LIGHT & NOISE - Reduce as much light and noise as possible in sleep environment – that includes even the most subtle light and noise.  Shutting off those LED lights on many electronics and buzzing fans of computers. In fact, one study actually discovered certain colors of light (like white and blue LEDs) suppress our melatonin production which can seriously disrupt our quality of sleep.  You can read more about melatonin here.  It might be tough, but take a week or two to train yourself sleep with the TV off before going to bed and see if you feel a difference.  If need to run a lot of overnight computer tasks, I recommend running them on a laptop or desktop in another room that doesn't interfere with your sleep environment.  Laptops are usually quiet but the fan(s) do cut on and off unpredictably and noise-proof desktops require expensive cases and fan controllers.  Your best bet is to just not have them run overnight in the same room.

See the full collection of Techie Sleep Tips

Techie Sleep Tips 2 : Improve your Sleep Duration

A recent poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation revealed 95% of 1,500 surveyed Americans used some form of electronics before bedtime.  43% of them also said they rarely/never get enough sleep; and 60% said they also experienced one or several chronic sleep problems.  The National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR) estimates 70 million Americans have sleep problems from insomnia to sleep deprivation. 

In regards to the number of hours someone needs to sleep, it’s highly debated that people over 17 need somewhere between 6-10 hours depending on your chemistry and sleep quality. The numbers are even more crucial for athletes who require additional sleep. In fact, one study by the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic discovered athletes who got 10 hours of sleep held even greater physical and mental performance compared to getting 8 or 9 hours.  Learn which hours you need and respect them most nights in your schedule. With this being said, here are some tips to improve your hours of sleep:

Fitsugar.com POLL: How Many Times Do You Hit Snooze?

1 - TRANSITION TIME: Take into consideration the transition time it takes you fall asleep and wake up. Add these transition times to your sleep schedule in addition to the hours you want to sleep. Unless you immediately collapse to sleep and spring out of bed in the morning, you need to respect these transitional periods also as they can deceive you of how many hours your really getting.

2 - COMBAT INSOMNIA: If you have insomnia that makes your hours unpredictable, plan at least an hour or two ahead and develop a sleep ritual that involves no electronics and very little light such as reading under a lamp. Or perhaps take a brisk walk or jog outside in the dark for 20-40 minutes and reflect on your day. Many studies say people shouldn’t exercise too close to sleep, but insomnia is a special case where extra exercise and meditative rituals (perhaps meditation itself) are certainly more necessary and beneficial.

Image from  North Shore Medical Central

3 - STOP OVERSLEEPING: It's possible you might be getting too many hours of sleep.  You may oversleep till noon or take a long time to get out of bed and continue rolling back to sleep.  To combat this, you can retrain yourself to spring out of bed by as soon as you wake up near the time you intend to.  If your full of energy before your intended wake up time, go ahead and wake up anyways and reward yourself with a nice breakfast.  It's also important to plan ahead and give yourself a comfortable amount of time to transition from sleep to wakefulness after you get out of bed. You need to have a comfortable morning routine to adjust with – whether it takes 10 minutes or an hour. Give yourself something very motivating to wake up to.

See the full collection of Techie Sleep Tips

Review: Asus K53TA - A High-End $450 Gaming Laptop

This past summer, I’ve been interested in a laptop upgrade to replace my 6 year old HP dv5000 (& selling the old unit to recoup the costs). I did a lot of product research to find a new laptop at a reasonable price I could afford.  At first I was curious about budget gaming laptops under $750, but couldn’t find anything decent without going above $1000.  Well, until I came across a ridiculous deal for the Asus K53TA.  In terms of performance for the price, this laptop stood outside of the current trends for both the standard and discount price gaming laptops for an astonishing $450 price. 

 
Let me explain why this was a good deal in terms of product specifications.  To start, the most notable feature of this device is an extraordinary dual pair of ATI brand graphics processing units (or GPUs).  This is a feature unheard of in laptops cheaper than $1,000.  When combined in parallel computing, multiple ATI graphics cards utilize a technology called CrossfireX to share their processing and significantly boost gaming performance.

One card is built-in to the quad-core central processing unit (CPU) with a new hybrid technology AMD calls an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), the other is a dedicated removable graphics chip.  There are now four different kinds of GPUs in laptops:
1. Internal: built-in to the mainboard and often standard/low performance.
2. Dedicated: a removable card that's often highest performance.
3. External: a rare portable card that plugs into the laptop with mid-high performance.
4. APU: a removable hyrbid cpu+graphics card with mid-high performance. 
The GPUs featured in this unit are an APU 512MB A6-3400M & a dedicated 1GB ATI HD 6720G2.  With CrossfireX, ATI combines the performance of both GPUs into 1.5GB DDR3 (0.5GB+1.0GB) of raw graphical horsepower.  Powerful enough to run games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with maximum graphical settings at 60 frames per second (FPS) – the best rate most games can run at these days.  I remember when many gaming desktops from 5 years ago struggled to barely play this game on medium graphics at 30FPS!  Who’d have thought a laptop for $450 in 2011 would run it at the highest settings. CrossfireX can also combine 2 dedicated GPUs or a dedicated and internal GPU.

So moving on to the quad-core CPU aspect of the APU (also called the A6-3400M) – it features 4 solid cores with a stock speed of 1.4Ghz each and turbo boost of 2.30Ghz when processing hits 100%.  1.4Ghz might sound like a draw-back at first, but I came across a highly compatible and safe overclock tweak that locks in a new speed of 2.0Ghz by using the program K10Stat & applying these settings. This barely raises the idle and max-load temperate of the APU beyond a few degrees Celsius.  So does this actually increase performance with the 2.3Ghz turbo boost already prevalent? Yes, in fact it increases it a lot because many applications including games don’t use a constant 100% and thus only call in Turbo Boost in short (and often unnoticeable) durations.  Locking in 2.0Ghz absolutely leaves a noticeable boost in everything and I’ve been using the overclocked setting for months without a single crash or temperature rating above 65C on max load and relatively 45C idle.  Be aware these APUs can safely handle up to about 90C with performance taking some impact after 75C.

Now for the active memory and storage specifications, this laptop features 4GB of high performing DDR3 memory and a 500GB hard disk drive that unfortunately isn’t a solid-state or hybrid hard disk/solid state drive but still don't anchor performance either.  A solid state upgrade could certainly boost the performance further, but the current drive does use SATA2 technology that is considerably faster (and larger) than the 160GB IDE drive in my old HP dv5000.  In terms of hard disk technology, SATA2 is basically newer and more responsive than IDE.

The other components are fairly standard more or less.  The removable disc drive is a fast DVD-CD/RW reader that isn’t Blu-Ray, but upgradable to one.  There’s a built-in webcam and microphone.  It has two soundcards – one is your standard Realtek HD audio card, the other is ATI’s HD Sound processor for the HDMI output.  What’s nice is both don’t have that annoying buzzing and interference noise found on many older laptops.  The speakers are standard sounding Antec laptop speakers (it’s no sub-woofer & tweeter), but I generally use CreativeAurvana Live headphones instead which sound a heck of a lot better.  I like the simple yet solid touchpad and keyboard with status lights below the touchpad and a clean power button in the upper right.  The battery holds a massive charge of 5 hours with general processing and about 3 hours with gaming/heavy processing.  The Network/Internet components are an integrated Atheros 802.11n WIFI & a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet jack with an upgrade slot for Bluetooth. Other connection ports include 3 USB and a VGA video output. 

The 15.6" LED monitor features a native 1366x768 resolution with an adjustable backlight that provides more than enough picture illumination.  I used ATI’s fantastic color control software to further calibrate the monitor to my personal tastes with 100% backlight, 60% gamma, 90% brightness, and a 110% contrast.  Before the color quality of the screen was just bright and standard looking; now the color looks spitting image of a plasma’s deep vivid color with these settings.  The backlight, gamma, and brightness are all highly different settings – but it’s most important to have the backlight all the way first, then tweak the other settings. Else your picture will be too dim and washed out regardless of your tweaks in ATI’s Catalyst color controls.  However, it’s good to use as little backlight as possible when running on the battery for the maximum power duration.

Now for the appearance and physical attributes, this laptop features an elegant charcoal black that mostly composes of textured matte with glossy black around the monitor.  The predominant texture consists of a backslash pattern (literally the “\” character in a pattern).  A much nicer sharp brushed texture is featured around the keyboard.  I do have to note that the black backslash texture is a bit of a fingerprint magnet and needs cleaning with alcohol every month or so to keep it clean.  The brushed texture doesn’t show fingerprints near as bad however, and would have made for both a cleaner and more pleasant design if it covered the entire exterior instead (except for around the glossy monitor border perhaps).

Overall, I’m seriously impressed with this whole laptop for the price I paid and many others for this price range don’t compare.  I originally got it from BestBuy’s online store as a bizarre limited time deal between them and Asus which doesn’t appear to be available anymore after several months have passed now.  However another site called FatWallet.com originally led me to the deal so they are literally found just about anywhere (even outside of NewEgg.com when it comes to laptops). 

If you do get it, I recommend you upgrade the K53TA BIOS immediately to the latest version since the latest BIOS firmware (download here) improves a ton of things including the monitor’s picture quality.  Asus’ preinstalled Windows 7 is a bit bloated with unneeded software (or bloatware) that I recommend you remove with PC Decrapifier (it does what it says) or just install a fresh copy of Windows 7 if you have the disc (or have someone else do it).  AMD's A6-3400M APU is more than capable of handling long-term 2.0Ghz instead of relying on bizarre 2.3Ghz boosts.  Why didn’t they just lock it at 2.3Ghz from the start? Many people have had no problems running it at a constant 2.3Ghz, but I prefer the cooler 55C load temperature of 2.0Ghz instead.  The APU overclocks so well that I’m strongly wondering if it was originally designed to run at over 2.0Ghz and was underclocked to 1.4Ghz. Either way, the Asus K53TA is definitely a gamer laptop in disguise for half the price!  It appears the deal I got is no longer active however I'm still seeing a few decent prices on other sites around the $500 mark (with many around $600-$700+ now as well shockingly enough).  Keep an eye on the prices and you'll most certainly come across one for around the $500 range if your interested.

4D Plenoptic Cameras Revolutionizing Photography

Photo from Geek.com

Ever take a photo only to later discover something went wrong with the focus and/or exposure?  Ever hate the difficulty of taking pictures in dark or extremely bright scenes?  What about images with too many things to focus on and not enough time to capture the multiple focus levels?

This can all be solved with a plenoptic camera. A revolutionary new camera technology that essentially captures a full range of lighting and focus levels (or a 4D light field) for adjustment later.  Not only do these devices save the trouble of getting the right focus and exposure on the spot but they will reduce the time needed for setting up equipment and leave more time for actual shooting.

So which cameras use plenoptic technology? This Lytro Light Field Camera is the latest buzz of the news right now.  It captures 4D light information with an array of micro-lenses that capture 11 million rays (or 11 megarays) of light at once. In terms of the image quality, these 11 megarays produce professional 22 megapixel images in addition to the 4D light field capturing. You can view a large gallery of the plenoptic captures (or "living pictures") to see just an example of this camera's raw photography power.  I'm betting we'll also have plenoptic video cameras soon enough to revolutionize the film industry as well - reducing the number of retakes needed due to focus and/or lighting.

Be Ahead of the Internet Arms Race with PeerBlock

Download the latest version of PeerBlock

Firewall, Antivirus, & Antispyware software are essential security protection, but what about taking things further and blocking all activity from many known sources of threats? Meet PeerBlock, a program that maintains updated lists of verified bad, potentially suspect, and good IP addresses based on your choosing.  It's a bit more advanced than your average firewall and can safely be combined with (or reinforce) existing firewall software or hardware.

Strangely enough, most operating systems already have built-in IP blocking functionality with a Hosts file but these still remain empty & ignored by official security updates in OSs such as Windows. PeerBlock takes care of this issue with an alternative to the Hosts file that's constantly updated based on a massive community that stays up to date with the latest sources of threats on the internet. Whether you do a lot of file sharing or work with a lot of sensitive information, PeerBlock can protect you further in what is constantly an internet arms race between security and attackers.

The initial setup comes with the essential lists to choose from including known sources of intrusive surveillance (Anti-P2P), spyware, advertising, and education institutions for those paranoid of their theoretically above-average traffic monitoring. For advanced users, there are many additional lists to use at http://www.iblocklist.com/lists.php, however the initial lists should be fine for casual users.  If your interested in more lists, I've tested many & highly recommend adding: Primary Threats, Level 2, Level 3, Hijacked, DShield.  I don't recommend blocking education institutions unless you have no affiliations with them & no need to access their info whatsoever. Also be sure to Allow HTTP connections (website connections) or else you'll find a lot of pages with ads won't load as fast or at all as this feature is still a work-in-progress. You can turn this feature on and off as you please when you not browsing though.  The developers are still working on smoother web browsing with HTTP blocking.  In the rare case that a genuine connection gets blocked and you can temporarily disable PeerBlock or permanently allow that specific IP.

Acoustic Cryptanalysis - Keylogging through keystroke sounds

When it comes to keystroke logging (keylogging), a lot of people think of software and hardware that secretly records all of this input.  But what about recording and interpreting the sound of the keystrokes themselves?  It's called acoustic cryptanalysis and with the right equipment, one can literally record and interpret audible keystrokes - particularly with computer keyboards.

The Silent Keyboard EX

One obvious reason for each key having a unique sound is their location on the keyboard and most computer keyboards are relatively universal (especially with their letters and numbers).  Of course, an attacker would still have to know the keyboard's region settings and the language being typed.  Basically, the decryption process requires a fine tuned algorithm that can intelligently differentiate & identify keys in the sound of typing.  A study by the University of California, Berkeley even confirmed this security threat with 96% accuracy on the recovered keystrokes.

Acustic Cryptanalysis can also decipher other machine noises

So how could someone prevent this kind of attack?  There are many simple methods of covering up or preventing the sound monitoring in the first place.  One humorous but effective method is to have prerecorded audio of scrambled keystrokes from the same keyboard play while you type (as long as the speaker quality isn't terrible).  Another is to blast loud white noise or music that distorts the same frequencies of sound produced by the keys. Then there are the opposite methods of typing information with no discernible keystroke sound, such as typing on a touch-pad or writing on a piece of paper.  If anything, it's good to at-least be aware of this potential surveillance - especially with an increasingly number of electronics such as laptops including built-in microphones near the keyboard.  It's also wise to first consider how much of a target you really are to this threat before worrying about it.

Van Eck Phreaking - Remote Viewing of Display Monitors

When it comes to privacy and security of computers, there are some areas that still remain highly overlooked and unsecured.  I recently came across information on how someone with the right equipment can literally view what's currently displayed on a computer monitor from a remote location.  The equipment basically reconstructs a monitor's radio waves (all electronics give these off) to see what it's currently displaying.  This apparently applies to all monitors - even the latest ones.  It's called Van Eck Phreaking and it's named after the Dutch scientist Wim van Eck who first discovered the phenomenon in 1985.

So what's the problem with this phenomenon?  There's still no personal computing security measures against it.  One difficult solution is to use a Faraday cage around the monitor (or you and the monitor so it doesn't block your view) to contain the radio waves.  Professionals dealing with highly sensitive computing may have radio-wave blocking materials integrated into their buildings to protect themselves from attacks such as Van Eck Phreaking.  Perhaps having several monitors on at the same time could also make it more difficult to hone in on a single monitor's displayed information.  

I find it interesting how there's a great emphasis on encrypting wireless internet radio waves but not the waves of other electronics - especially monitors.  The unencrypted radio waves from monitors of all kinds sounds like a serious security flaw but you have to remember they only emit what is currently visible unlike wirelessly hacking into a shared computer and potentially gaining access to everything stored on it.  Interestingly enough, the Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in many new electronic magnetic cards are also remotely viewable with the right equipment.  To protect these, you can create a Faraday Cage Wallet (or perhaps a aluminum fitted wallet).  You can read more about this phenomenon in this PDF document titled Electromagnetic Eavesdropping Risks of Flat-Panel Displays.

Techie Sleep Tips 1: Cut Night Owl Habits & Reduce Daytime Stress

Many of us know the obvious negative effects of not getting enough sleep.  Then there's the lesser understood quality of sleep.  One specific factor of this quality I've been more curious about lately is the case of being a night owl. It seems pretty obvious that technology influences this habit for more people now with internet social media connected 24-7 and essentially so much to do besides sleeping. Being a full time college student with five classes, homework, twenty hours of work, and social life can certainly make this habit harder to avoid, but it's still not impossible to change.  So I looked into some reasons why I along with many should probably take care in reducing our night owl habits.


Think about it - it's obvious that when we go to sleep later, we also have to finish up our sleep while everyone else wakes up.  A night owl's last few hours of sleep are generally exposed to more noise and light than earlier risers.  This wouldn't be a problem if everyone had a night owl schedule but they clearly don't.  Unless you live in a house in the middle of nowhere with night owls (or no one) and dark drapes, your night owl sleep could be getting more interruptions than you think.  Several studies have discovered that those who generally went to bed after midnight also shared unusually higher arterial stiffening which raises the risk of heart disease.  Those who went to bed before midnight had much less (if any) arterial issues.  Getting between 6-8 hours didn't effect these results either - going to bed past midnight was the problem.  However, those who slept less than 5 hours were at a 40% greater risk of heart disease as well.  Getting the right quality and quantity are both necessary to loosen the arteries and probably relax more in the day with smoother blood circulation.

Wikipedia: Sleep Deprivation

As for the mental side effects,  I think it's safe to say that less sleep leaves one with less focus, mental alertness, and less control of emotions because of this fatigue.  It makes sense that chronic fatigue could lead to a depression over being less able to engage in life because of this lack of energy.  What's really interesting is how depression and many sleep disorders share a lot of the same symptoms. These sleep problems include: sleep apnea, circadian rhythm disorder (seasonal affective disorder), and general insomnia. Perhaps taking the challenge of not being a night owl for a few weeks could produce some interesting personal results in our daily lives.  For those who have physical ailments that make it less possible to obtain good quality sleep,  I say continue the battle against them to reduce these conflicts. Whether if it requires medications, new exercises, lifestyle changes - continue to reduce them.  As for how our day effects our sleep, Leonardo da Vinci once said, "A well-spent day brings happy sleep."  Perhaps we can counter a downward spiral of being a night owl with an upward spiral of being an early riser.

See the full collection of Techie Sleep Tips

External Graphics Cards for Laptops

The PE4H by HWTOOLS

Computer graphics are a growing industry for both desktops and laptops as computer games and media production grow more prevalent.  However, laptops are still newer to the gaming industry compared to desktops.  The vast majority of the most powerful cards are still designed for desktops.  Annual benchmark tests from sites such as Tom's Hardware support this notion with desktop graphics cards still topping the charts.

To help provide laptops have this same graphics processing edge, one innovative Taiwanese company HWTOOLS has created an adapter for literally using these desktop cards with laptops.  It's called the PE4H and it provides a connection of the latest graphics cards (using PCI Express) to laptops with an ExpressCard input.  The current cost revolves about $90 including shipping and handling.  Unfortunately, the unit is still experimental and won't work with every laptop.  However, two helpful communities found at notebookreview.com & villagetronic.com have provided detailed compatibility results for many specific laptop models.

There are several significant drawbacks to this device as well (being that it's still extremely new). The first is the fact that not every laptop has an ExpressCard slot and using an add-on adapter to install one is not recommended either due to severe performance reductions.  Another lesser catch is the necessity for running it with Windows 7 for maximum driver support.  Third is the fact that, although these graphics cards have their own onboard memory, this external device requires this memory to work in conjunction with the laptop's memory (so if you have a 1GB graphics card, it will instantly take away 1GB of your laptop's memory).  Finally, some laptops with the ExpressCard slot still won't work with this device for a number of known and unknown reasons.  

Besides all of these complications of the experimental device, some users will certainly benefit from the greater flexibility of beefing up their graphical horsepower whenever needed.  If these devices are improved over time, they can certainly expand the desktop graphics card industry into the portable computing market as well.  All we need now is an external enclosure for these cards to make them safer to transport with their laptops.

Scientists use mirages to create an 'Invisibility Cloak'

Artistic Depiction by Liu Bolin - Urban Camo Art

Most of us have heard about the mirage effect in hot settings.  The optical phenomenon of light rays bending to form a reflected image (or optical illusion) that covers something up.  In the desert, it is commonly seen as fake water on the ground from a distance - which is actually a displaced image of the sky above.  This simply involves the temperature of the ground being significantly hotter than the temperate above the ground.  Now imagine if the circumstances of this phenomenon could be emulated upon command.

Artistic Depiction by Liu Bolin - Urban Camo Art

Scientists at the University of Dallas, Texas have done just that! They started by constructing a panel of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). These are basically tightly rolled up sheets of carbon as thin a single molecule.  These CNTs were equipped with electrical heat generators and fine controls for the heat's dissipation to surrounding areas.  Finally with just the right heat settings per-configured, these scientists could instantly switch on a steep temperature manipulation that literally bends the light of objects surround the CNTs to form an illusive mirage in front of them.

A powerful illusion of invisibility is formed by fluidly mirroring nearby sources of light.  The scientists also discovered that combining this device with water (or putting it under water) enhances the illusion even further.  Although it doesn't produce absolute invisibility, this device still surpasses many previous attempts for cloaking devices with great potential for future applications.  The two images featured in this article are merely artistic deceptions of this technology's future potential for camouflage clothing.  See the video below for an actual demonstration.

More info here: http://www.iop.org/news/11/oct/page_52313.html

OCZ Unleashes Evolution for Storage

For those of you who want to combine the capacity of hard disk drives (HDDs) and performance of solid-state drives (SSDs), the company OCZ is providing great promise with their latest enterprise storage devices.  The problem with today's storage market in computers is that you still have to choose between high capacity HDDs or high speed SSDs.  The highest capacities are still found in the HDDs with moving parts (slower and less durable), while the highest speeds are found in non-moving SSDs with much lower capacities. At the moment, you can either choose between a 2TB (2000GB) HHD for about $70 or a 60GB SSD for over $100.

OCZ is bridging this serious gap between capacity & performance with their enterprise Z-Drive R4s.  Not only do these drives bring together these capacities and speeds, but they literally hold up the five times the speed of the fastest non-enterprise SSDs.  The lowest end model (CM84) features 1.2TB (1200GB) at 2GB/s read/write speeds while the most powerful model (RM88) features 3.2TB (3200GB) at 2.8GB/s read/write speeds.  

The pricing for these units will be way above the budgets of even the most enthusiast of computer users. OCZ estimates they will go for around tens of thousands of dollars at the moment. However in time, the production of these devices will become cheaper and efficient for non-enterprise computing thus giving media production and gaming enthusiasts a significantly lesser need for slow HDD storage that still - to this day - only runs at about 40-80mb/s read & write speed  Personal non-enterprise SSDs hold these speeds at 200-600mb/s.  Then the Z-Drives run them at 2000-2800mb/s.

See more details here:  http://www.anandtech.com/show/4879/ocz-zdrive-r4-cm88-16tb-pcie-ssd-review