As the technology behind popular printers, like the popular Dell all in one printers becomes ever more sophisticated, it is increasingly easier for the average customer to become lost in the constant stream of updates, configurations, capabilities and features of a product whose manufacturers consistently strive to one-up each other.
There is no standard for determining what makes one printer better than another. Ultimately, the decision to go with a certain product will depend on a combination of the features most desirable for each individual customer. For example, a typical family of four would not care much about print speed or whether or not the photographs a certain printer produces are of professional quality, but affordability and ease of maintenance might be primary concerns.
Additionally, small business owners might look more heavily into the faxing and emailing capabilities of all in one printers and care less about the scanning function; an amateur historian or small-town journalist might care very deeply about the quality of scans a certain machine delivers.
It might be advantageous for a consumer to look into specific features of a printer as well as its all-around capability to decide whether or not a particular printer is right.
Is the printer cloud capable? For a small business, it might help to be able to print straight from the cloud. Though their network may not be as expansive as some larger corporations, smaller businesses with traveling employees need to be able to access and print data just as quickly if they are to stay competitive.
Not every family or business has a resident wireless technology expert, so when wireless printers function slowly or not at all, it could be important to have an Ethernet port--which some wireless printers don't--to provide a second connection option.
While sticker price might be the first thing potential purchasers look at--and rightly so--ink and/or toner prices are the primary contributor to maintenance costs. If a consumer does not pay attention to how easy it will be to keep cartridges filled, then he or she might end up paying as much as or more than the printer for ink and toner.
Some amateur or professional photographers do not have the time or materials or simply don't want to upload pictures to a computer, save them and then print them out. For these people, printers that can print directly from a digital camera via PictBridge or a similar device aren't just convenient, they're necessary.
Even if a printer is old, it may have the opportunity to be upgraded through cutting-edge applications sold online by the printer's manufacturer. Unfortunately, many don't have that opportunity. If it's important to keep a printer up to date, this capability becomes a primary concern.
Just as with their customers, each printer is unique. In most cases, it's not a matter of better or worse, but what's right for the customer. Before buying an all in one printer, a savvy customer will first find out what specs he or she desires in a product, and make the decision based on that.
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TAMPA, Fla. (AP) ? The wife of Republican Mitt Romney is opening up with new details about her recently disclosed miscarriage.
Ann Romney spoke in a taped interview aired Tuesday on CBS' "This Morning," hours before she addresses the Republican National Convention.
She describes the initial shock and excitement of having learned she was pregnant in her 40s, only to realize early one morning she was losing the baby.
Romney says she chose not to wake her husband up around 3 or 4 a.m., opting to wait till 6 a.m. before telling him she needed to go to the hospital.
She describes her youngest son Craig's sorrow. She says she consoled him, telling Craig he probably won't have any more brothers or sisters but that he will have children of his own someday.
Posted in World Business News | Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 Trackback
With ABA America doing an excellent job in providing budding entrepreneurs the right Asian links and other networks for making their businesses flourish, several interesting and high profile ABA job opportunitieshave come up. One such area is business consulting. For getting a good and fast paced career in this regard one has to be highly motivated to learn all the various elements that crop up during interactions with Asian business markets. ABA focuses on Asia and those who want to build robust business setups in relation to Asian markets can take immediate help from the organization.? ?The importance of building your career through ABA job opportunities is that many techniques of the trade will be provided within a short span of time. In fact, the learning curve develops in a fast paced manner and many applicants who had joined were really amazed to find the rapid growth and increase in their profiles. Business consulting has been really dealt on the core ground level by ABA.
Magnetic vortex reveals key to spintronic speed limitPublic release date: 28-Aug-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Justin Eure jeure@bnl.gov 631-344-2347 DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory
Scientists measure key effect of electron spin essential to engineering the next generation of high-performing digital devices
UPTON,NY -- The evolution of digital electronics is a story of miniaturization - each generation of circuitry requires less space and energy to perform the same tasks. But even as high-speed processors move into handheld smart phones, current data storage technology has a functional limit: magnetically stored digital information becomes unstable when too tightly packed. The answer to maintaining the breath-taking pace of our ongoing computer revolution may be the denser, faster, and smarter technology of spintronics.
Spintronic devices use electron spin, a subtle quantum characteristic, to write and read information. But to mobilize this emerging technology, scientists must understand exactly how to manipulate spin as a reliable carrier of computer code. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have precisely measured a key parameter of electron interactions called non-adiabatic spin torque that is essential to the future development of spintronic devices. Not only does this unprecedented precision - the findings to be published in the journal Nature Communications on August 28 - guide the reading and writing of digital information, but it defines the upper limit on processing speed that may underlie a spintronic revolution.
"In the past, no one was able to measure the spin torque accurately enough for detailed comparisons of experiment and mathematical models," said Brookhaven Lab physicist Yimei Zhu. "By precisely imaging the spin orbits with a dedicated transmission electron microscope at Brookhaven, we advanced a truly fundamental understanding that has immediate implications for electronic devices. So this is quite exciting."
Speed Limits
Most prevailing technology fails to take full advantage of the electron, which features intrinsic quantum variables beyond the charge and flow driving electricity. One of these, a parameter known as spin direction, can be strategically manipulated to function as a high-density medium to store and transmit information in spintronics. But as any computer scientist can attest, dense data can mean very little without enough speed to process it efficiently.
"One of the big reasons that people want to understand this non-adiabatic spin torque term, which describes the ability to transfer spin via electrical currents, is that it basically determines how fast spintronic devices can be," said Shawn Pollard, a physics Ph.D. student at Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University and the lead author of the paper. "The read and write speed for data is dictated by the size of this number we measured, called beta, which is actually very, very big. That means the technology is potentially very, very fast."
Building a Vortex
Consider the behavior of coffee stirred rapidly in a mug: the motion of a spoon causes the liquid to spin, rising along the edges and spiraling low in the center. Because the coffee can't escape through the mug's porcelain walls, the trapped energy generates the cone-like vortex in the center. A similar phenomenon can be produced on magnetic materials to reveal fundamental quantum measurements.
The Brookhaven physicists applied a range of high-frequency electric currents to a patterned film called permalloy, useful for its high magnetic permeability. This material, 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick and composed of nickel and iron, was designed to strictly contain any generated magnetic field. Unable to escape, trapped electron spins combine and spiral within the permalloy, building into an observable and testable phenomenon called a magnetic vortex core.
"The vortex core motion is actually the cumulative effect of three distinct energies: the magnetic field induced by the current, and the adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin torques generated by electrons," Zhu said. "By capturing images of this micrometer (millionth of a meter) effect, we can deduce the precise value of the non-adiabatic torque's contribution to the vortex, which plays out on the nanoscale. Other measurements had very high error, but our technique offered the spatial resolution necessary to move past the wide range of previous results."
Disk Density
The high-speed, high-density hard drives in today's computers write information into spinning disks of magnetic materials, using electricity to toggle between magnetic polarity states that correspond to the "1" or "0" of binary computer code. But a number of intrinsic problems emerge with this method of data storage, notably limits to speed because of the spinning disk, which is made less reliable by moving parts, significant heat generation, and the considerable energy needed to write and read information.
Beyond that, magnetic storage suffers from a profound scaling issue. The magnetic fields in these devices exert influence on surrounding space, a so-called fringing field. Without appropriate space between magnetic data bits, this field can corrupt neighboring bits of digital information by inadvertently flipping "1" into "0." This translates to an ultimate limit on scalability, as these data bits need too much room to allow endless increases in data density.
Nanowire Racetracks
One pioneering spintronic prototype is IBM's Racetrack memory, which uses spin-coherent electric current to move magnetic domains, or discrete data bits, along a permalloy wire about 200 nanometers across and 100 nanometers thick. The spin of these magnetic domains is altered as they pass over a read/write head, forming new data patterns that travel back and forth along the nanowire racetrack. This process not only yields the prized stability of flash memory devices, but also offers speed and capacity exceeding disk drives.
"It takes less energy to manipulate spin torque parameters than magnetic fields," said Pollard. "There's less crosstalk between databits, and less heat is generated as information is written and read in spin-based storage devices. We measured a major component critical to unlocking the potential of spintronic technology, and I hope our work offers deeper insight into the fundamental origin of this non-adiabatic term."
The new measurement pins down a fundamental limit on data manipulation speeds, but the task of translating this work into practical limits on processor speed and hard drive space will fall to the scientists and engineers building the next generation of digital devices.
Zhu and Pollard collaborated with two physicists specializing in nanomagnetism, Kristen Buchanan of Colorado State University and Dario Arena of Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), to push the precision capabilities of the transmission electron microscope. This research was conducted at Brookhaven Lab's Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
###
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov .
One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.
Visit Brookhaven Lab's electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more at http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom, follow Brookhaven Lab on Twitter, http://twitter.com/BrookhavenLab, or find us on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/BrookhavenLab/.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Magnetic vortex reveals key to spintronic speed limitPublic release date: 28-Aug-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Justin Eure jeure@bnl.gov 631-344-2347 DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory
Scientists measure key effect of electron spin essential to engineering the next generation of high-performing digital devices
UPTON,NY -- The evolution of digital electronics is a story of miniaturization - each generation of circuitry requires less space and energy to perform the same tasks. But even as high-speed processors move into handheld smart phones, current data storage technology has a functional limit: magnetically stored digital information becomes unstable when too tightly packed. The answer to maintaining the breath-taking pace of our ongoing computer revolution may be the denser, faster, and smarter technology of spintronics.
Spintronic devices use electron spin, a subtle quantum characteristic, to write and read information. But to mobilize this emerging technology, scientists must understand exactly how to manipulate spin as a reliable carrier of computer code. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have precisely measured a key parameter of electron interactions called non-adiabatic spin torque that is essential to the future development of spintronic devices. Not only does this unprecedented precision - the findings to be published in the journal Nature Communications on August 28 - guide the reading and writing of digital information, but it defines the upper limit on processing speed that may underlie a spintronic revolution.
"In the past, no one was able to measure the spin torque accurately enough for detailed comparisons of experiment and mathematical models," said Brookhaven Lab physicist Yimei Zhu. "By precisely imaging the spin orbits with a dedicated transmission electron microscope at Brookhaven, we advanced a truly fundamental understanding that has immediate implications for electronic devices. So this is quite exciting."
Speed Limits
Most prevailing technology fails to take full advantage of the electron, which features intrinsic quantum variables beyond the charge and flow driving electricity. One of these, a parameter known as spin direction, can be strategically manipulated to function as a high-density medium to store and transmit information in spintronics. But as any computer scientist can attest, dense data can mean very little without enough speed to process it efficiently.
"One of the big reasons that people want to understand this non-adiabatic spin torque term, which describes the ability to transfer spin via electrical currents, is that it basically determines how fast spintronic devices can be," said Shawn Pollard, a physics Ph.D. student at Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University and the lead author of the paper. "The read and write speed for data is dictated by the size of this number we measured, called beta, which is actually very, very big. That means the technology is potentially very, very fast."
Building a Vortex
Consider the behavior of coffee stirred rapidly in a mug: the motion of a spoon causes the liquid to spin, rising along the edges and spiraling low in the center. Because the coffee can't escape through the mug's porcelain walls, the trapped energy generates the cone-like vortex in the center. A similar phenomenon can be produced on magnetic materials to reveal fundamental quantum measurements.
The Brookhaven physicists applied a range of high-frequency electric currents to a patterned film called permalloy, useful for its high magnetic permeability. This material, 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick and composed of nickel and iron, was designed to strictly contain any generated magnetic field. Unable to escape, trapped electron spins combine and spiral within the permalloy, building into an observable and testable phenomenon called a magnetic vortex core.
"The vortex core motion is actually the cumulative effect of three distinct energies: the magnetic field induced by the current, and the adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin torques generated by electrons," Zhu said. "By capturing images of this micrometer (millionth of a meter) effect, we can deduce the precise value of the non-adiabatic torque's contribution to the vortex, which plays out on the nanoscale. Other measurements had very high error, but our technique offered the spatial resolution necessary to move past the wide range of previous results."
Disk Density
The high-speed, high-density hard drives in today's computers write information into spinning disks of magnetic materials, using electricity to toggle between magnetic polarity states that correspond to the "1" or "0" of binary computer code. But a number of intrinsic problems emerge with this method of data storage, notably limits to speed because of the spinning disk, which is made less reliable by moving parts, significant heat generation, and the considerable energy needed to write and read information.
Beyond that, magnetic storage suffers from a profound scaling issue. The magnetic fields in these devices exert influence on surrounding space, a so-called fringing field. Without appropriate space between magnetic data bits, this field can corrupt neighboring bits of digital information by inadvertently flipping "1" into "0." This translates to an ultimate limit on scalability, as these data bits need too much room to allow endless increases in data density.
Nanowire Racetracks
One pioneering spintronic prototype is IBM's Racetrack memory, which uses spin-coherent electric current to move magnetic domains, or discrete data bits, along a permalloy wire about 200 nanometers across and 100 nanometers thick. The spin of these magnetic domains is altered as they pass over a read/write head, forming new data patterns that travel back and forth along the nanowire racetrack. This process not only yields the prized stability of flash memory devices, but also offers speed and capacity exceeding disk drives.
"It takes less energy to manipulate spin torque parameters than magnetic fields," said Pollard. "There's less crosstalk between databits, and less heat is generated as information is written and read in spin-based storage devices. We measured a major component critical to unlocking the potential of spintronic technology, and I hope our work offers deeper insight into the fundamental origin of this non-adiabatic term."
The new measurement pins down a fundamental limit on data manipulation speeds, but the task of translating this work into practical limits on processor speed and hard drive space will fall to the scientists and engineers building the next generation of digital devices.
Zhu and Pollard collaborated with two physicists specializing in nanomagnetism, Kristen Buchanan of Colorado State University and Dario Arena of Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), to push the precision capabilities of the transmission electron microscope. This research was conducted at Brookhaven Lab's Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
###
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov .
One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.
Visit Brookhaven Lab's electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more at http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom, follow Brookhaven Lab on Twitter, http://twitter.com/BrookhavenLab, or find us on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/BrookhavenLab/.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck in the Pacific Ocean off El Salvador late on Sunday, triggering a brief tsunami warning along a stretch of the central American coast but causing no major damage or casualties, early reports indicated. The quake hit about 74 miles offshore at a depth of just over 20 km (12 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said. It earlier gave the magnitude as 7.4. A small tsunami hit the El Salvador port of Acajutla following the quake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. ...
A robot performs pre-programed actions as a chef prepares food in the Robot Kitchen restaurant in Hong Kong, 25 September 2006.
Photo by Laurent Fievet/AFP/Getty Images.
"Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?" the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sarcastically asked Richard Nixon in the now infamous Kitchen Debate of 1959. That memorable exchange took place at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, where Nixon, then vice president, went to promote the latest innovations of the decadent West.
Today, even the most Pampered Chef has no such food-pushing machine, but the quest to make our kitchens smarter continues unabated. Today's technologies are no longer the dumb, passive appliances of the 1950s. Some of them feature tiny and sophisticated sensors that "understand"?if that?s the right word?what's going on in our kitchens and attempt to steer us, their masters, in the right direction. And if Khrushchev's rhetorical question sought to highlight the limitations of the consumer, today's attempts to build a "smart kitchen" highlight those of the culinary geek.??
A recent article in the British magazine the New Scientist has brought attention to several such initiatives. Meet Jinna Lei, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who has built a system in which a cook is monitored by several video cameras installed in the kitchen. These cameras are quite clever: They can recognize the depth and shape of objects in their view and distinguish between, say, apples and bowls.
With this surveillance, chefs can be informed whenever they have deviated from their chosen recipe. Each object has a number of activities associated with it?you don't normally boil spoons or fry arugula?and the system tracks how well the current activity matches the object in use. "For example, if the system detects sugar pouring into a bowl containing eggs, and the recipe does not call for sugar, it could log the aberration," Lei told the New Scientist. To improve the accuracy of tracking, Lei is also considering adding a special thermal camera that would identify the user's hands by body heat. The quest here is to turn modern kitchen into a temple of modern-day Taylorism, with every task tracked, analyzed, and optimized. Geeks hate making errors and love sticking to algorithms. That cooking thrives on failure and experimentation, that deviating from recipes is what creates culinary innovations and pushes the cuisine forward, is discarded as whimsical and irrelevant. For many such well-meaning innovators, the context of the practice they seek to improve doesn't matter?not as long as efficiency can be increased. As a result, chefs are imagined not as autonomous virtuosi or gifted craftsmen but as enslaved robots who should never defy the commands of their operating systems.
Another project mentioned in the New Scientist is even more degrading. A group of computer scientists at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan is trying to marry the logic of the kitchen with the logic of "augmented reality"?the fancy term for infusing our everyday environment with smart technologies. (Think of QR codes that can be scanned with a smartphone to unlock additional information or of the upcoming goggles from Google's Project Glass, which use data streams to enhance your visual field.)
To this end, the Japanese researchers have mounted cameras and projectors on the kitchen's ceiling so that they can project instructions?in the form of arrows, geometric shapes, and speech bubbles guiding the cook through each step?right onto the ingredient. Thus, if you are about to cut a fish, the system will project a virtual knife and mark where exactly that knife ought to go on the fish's body. And there's also a tiny physical robot that sits on the countertop. Thanks to the cameras, it can sense that you've stopped touching the ingredients and inquire if you want to move on to the next step in the recipe.
Now, what exactly is "augmented" in such reality? It may be augmented technologically, but it also seems diminished intellectually. At best, we are left with "augmented diminished reality." Some geeks stubbornly refuse to recognize that challenges and obstacles?of which initial ignorance about the right way to cut the fish might be one?enhance rather than undermine the human condition. To make cooking easier is not necessarily to augment it?quite the opposite. To subject it fully to the debilitating logic of efficiency is to deprive humans of the ability to achieve mastery in this activity, to make human flourishing impossible and to impoverish our lives.
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Public release date: 28-Aug-2012
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A robot performs pre-programed actions as a chef prepares food in the Robot Kitchen restaurant in Hong Kong, 25 September 2006.