We Are Again Bringing You The Information You Need And Want.

Visit us @ tech-scales.com for the latest and best in electronics.

Panasonic Lumix CM1

Today, we present to you another addition to the hybrid crowd: recently announced during the Photokina show in Germany, Lumix DMC-CM1 by Panasonic is an Android smartphone and a connected camera packed inside one versatile and futuristic-looking device that should soon find its way to mass production lines.

I have nothing against artificial intelligence, except when it claims, with its universal calculation, to absorb all the other forms and reduce mental space to a digital one.

Jean Baudrillard (via inthenoosphere)

We are almost there. Soon and very soon.

For the latest and greatest in electronics, visit us @ www.tech-scales.com

Don’t forget to browse our catalog @ https://ogs-virtualcatalog.cld.bz/Tech-Scales-Digital-Catalog

Visit us @ tech-scales.com for the latest and best in electronics.

Come visit us @ tech-scales.com for the latest and greatest in electronics.

Also check out our digital catalog for all of your electronic needs @   https://ogs-virtualcatalog.cld.bz/Tech-Scales-Digital-Catalog

This supercapacitor battery can be recharged 30,000 times

A thin, flexible supercapacitor boasts high energy and power densities. Credit: University of Central Florida

Everyone and anyone with a smartphone know it is not long before your phone holds a charge for less and less time as the battery begins to degrade. But new research by scientists at the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida (UCF), USA, could change that. The team have developed a new method for producing flexible supercapacitors that can store greater amounts of energy and can be recharged over 30,000 times without degradation. This new method could transform technology such as electric vehicles and mobile phones in the future.

‘If you were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week,’ said University of Central Florida researcher Nitin Choudhary.

The UCF team has attempted to apply newly discovered 2D materials that measure just a few atoms thick to supercapacitors. Other scientists have also tried formulations with other 2D materials including graphene, but had only limited success. The new supercapacitors are composed of millions of nanometre-thick wires coated with shells of 2D materials. The core facilitates the super-fast charging and discharging that makes supercapacitors powerful, and the 2D coating delivers the energy storage ability.

‘We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials,’ said Yeonwoong Eric Jung, assistant professor of the study. Jung is working with UCF’s Office of Technology Transfer to patent the new process. ‘It’s not ready for commercialisation,’ Jung said. ‘But this is a proof-of-concept demonstration, and our studies show there are very high impacts for many technologies.’

Quantum RAM: Modelling the big questions with the very small

Griffith’s Professor Geoff Pryde, who led the project, says that such processes could be simulated using a “quantum hard drive”, much smaller than the memory required for conventional simulations.

“Stephen Hawking once stated that the 21st century is the ‘century of complexity’, as many of today’s most pressing problems, such as understanding climate change or designing transportation system, involve huge networks of interacting components,” he says.

“Their simulation is thus immensely challenging, requiring storage of unprecedented amounts of data. What our experiments demonstrate is a solution may come from quantum theory, by encoding this data into a quantum system, such as the quantum states of light.”

Einstein once said that “God does not play dice with the universe,” voicing his disdain with the idea that quantum particles contain intrinsic randomness.

“But theoretical studies showed that this intrinsic randomness is just the right ingredient needed to reduce the memory cost for modelling partially random statistics,” says Dr Mile Gu, a member of the team who developed the initial theory.

In contrast with the usual binary storage system - the zeroes and ones of bits - quantum bits can be simultaneously 0 and 1, a phenomenon known as quantum superposition.

The researchers, in their paper published in Science Advances, say this freedom allows quantum computers to store many different states of the system being simulated in different superpositions, using less memory overall than in a classical computer.

The team constructed a proof-of-principle quantum simulator using a photon - a single particle of light - interacting with another photon.

They measured the memory requirements of this simulator, and compared it with the fundamental memory requirements of a classical simulator, when used to simulate specified partly random processes.

The data showed that the quantum system could complete the task with much less information stored than the classical computer- a factor of 20 improvements at the best point.

“Although the system was very small - even the ordinary simulation required only a single bit of memory - it proved that quantum advantages can be achieved,” Pryde says.

“Theoretically, large improvements can also be realized for much more complex simulations, and one of the goals of this research program is to advance the demonstrations to more complex problems.”

Griffith University

you either play the sims for 10 minutes or 10 hours, there is no common ground ..

Part of the reason I maintain an extensive library of video game magazines is to get as complete a history as I can on any given subject. I don’t like loose ends! So when I was recently asked to talk on camera about how the American video game enthusiast media of 1995 felt about Nintendo’s RPG masterpiece, EarthBound, I was happy to be able to pull out what I believe to be every review written. And here they all are, lovingly scanned and restored by me! In order:

Electronic Gaming Monthly (July, 1995) Nintendo Power (June, 1995) Game Players (July, 1995) VideoGames (July, 1995) GameFan (”Viewpoint” capsule reviews) (August, 1995) GameFan (full review) (August, 1995) GamePro (July, 1995)

Next Generation and Electronic Games did not review the game. Game Informer appears to have not, but I don’t have the June or September issues, so I can’t say that with 100% certainty (also, if you have Game Informer issues from 1995-1999, we should talk).  It’s worth noting that Nintendo Power also had a ten-page extended feature that I did not include, as it’s an overview with no criticism as opposed to a review (heck, even the “review” included here barely qualifies)

The biggest takeaway I get, slapping all these magazines on my desk and reading them back-to-back, is just how completely offended the critics were by the game’s art direction. The “infantile graphics” made VIdeoGames’ Geoff Higgins “want to gag,” apparently. EGM’s John Gurka “laughed out loud” when he first saw the game, while GameFan capsule reviewer Skid’s initial impression was “no way! These graphics are just to [sic] fruity.”  Not one reviewer seemed to like the art direction, though some - particularly at GameFan - were able to power through it and enjoy the game underneath.

It’s tempting to look back and roll your eyes at how these critics just didn’t understand, man, just as it’s tempting to look at Nintendo’s “This Game Stinks” marketing campaign as coming from a marketing department that also didn’t understand, man, but I think they both tell us very clearly why this game didn’t catch on: this was a very difficult game to sell in 1995.

Sure, we all basically agree that the game is gorgeous now, but try to put yourself in the mindset of a video game critic in June of 1995, when the game debuted. RPGs were only just catching on in the U.S., ushering in what many felt was the start of “mature” games no longer being exclusively for those rich kids who had computers. Square’s Chrono Trigger was also coming out around the same time, so the sudden switch from the anime-inspired Square house style that most associated with the genre to a look that evoked childlike wonder must have been jarring.

And let’s not forget the rest of the video game industry at the time. Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s PlayStation were already out in Japan (and the former would see a surprise U.S. debut right about when these reviews were written), so for most cutting-edge game enthusiasts, it was starting to look like 2D graphics were a thing of the past. Even Nintendo was starting to leave 2D graphics behind: at that year’s Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January, when EarthBound was quietly shown for the first time, Nintendo’s main focus was on the 3D capabilities of its Super FX chip for the Super Nintendo. Literature from the time shows that its three spotlight games that show all had polygonal 3D graphics: StarFox 2, Comanche, and FX Fighter (literally none of these games actually managed to ship, but that’s another story).

And in the middle of all of this forward-thinking excitement, we’ve got this strange, backward-looking, reflective, beautiful game vying for attention. I can’t imagine a scenario where the game could have been a hit in this environment.

[Aggregating EarthBound’s contemporary review scores gives a figure of about 72%. If this was on Metacritic, that number would be in a yellow box.]

Visit us @ tech-scales.com for the latest and best in electronics.

junmyeon + sehun in nyc