OT Article: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

In a rare move by any business these days, Tesla Motors has opened their patents to anyone who wants to use them. They are doing this to help promote the electric car market as they simply cannot keep up with demand.

From the blog:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

 We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

 You can read the full article over here.

~ brad

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." ~ Albert Einstein

OT: World War I in Photos: Technology

As this year marks 100 years since the start of the war, Alan Taylor of The Atlantic is running a ten part series of photo essays about the war. This third installment is about the change in technology used in the war.

When Europe's armies first marched to war in 1914, some were still carrying lances on horseback. By the end of the war, rapid-fire guns, aerial bombardment, armored vehicle attacks, and chemical weapon deployments were commonplace. Any romantic notion of warfare was bluntly shoved aside by the advent of chlorine gas, massive explosive shells that could have been fired from more than 20 miles away, and machine guns that spat out bullets like firehoses. Each side did its best to build on existing technology, or invent new methods, hoping to gain any advantage over the enemy. Massive listening devices gave them ears in the sky, armored vehicles made them impervious to small arms fire, tanks could (most of the time) cruise right over barbed wire and trenches, telephones and heliographs let them speak across vast distances, and airplanes gave them new platforms to rain death on each other from above. New scientific work resulted in more lethal explosives, new tactics made old offensive methods obsolete, and mass-produced killing machines made soldiers both more powerful and more vulnerable. 

American troops using a newly-developed acoustic locator, mounted on a wheeled platform. The large horns amplified distant sounds, monitored through headphones worn by a crew member, who could direct the platform to move and pinpoint distant enemy aircraft. Development of passive acoustic location accelerated during World War I, later surpassed by the development of radar in the 1940s. (National Archives)

~ Brad

"The machine gun is a much over rated weapon.." ~ Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1915

Article: Sony develops tech for 185TB tapes: 3,700 times more storage than a Blu-ray disc

Just as everyone is moving away from tape backups, Sony decides to change the game.

There was a time, in computing’s not-so-distant past, where magnetic tape was the best way to back up large amounts of data. In the mid-90s, tape could store tens or hundreds of gigabytes, while hard drive capacities were still mostly measured in megabytes. That would soon change, of course, with the advent of writable optical media and cheap, large hard drives, but even today tape drives still hang around as one of the best options for mass data backup. Now, Sony has developed a new technology that pushes tape drives far beyond where they once were, leading to individual tapes with 185 terabytes of storage capacity.

Read the full article here.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog.  The man will be there to feed the dog.  The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. " ~ Warren G. Bennis

OT Article: Astronomers May Have Witnessed The Birth Of A New Moon In Our Solar System

*Off-Topic*
These may appear on the blog from time to time for things I find interesting.

Astronomers may have just witnessed the birth of a small, icy moon within the rings of Saturn. And since it could be Saturn’s last natural satellite, this is a particularly rare and precious opportunity for us to learn about the formation of the planet’s many moons, including the cloud-wrapped Titan and the ocean-holding Enceladus.

Read the full article on the I F-ing Love Science! blog here.