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Part of my professional job is to develop new light sources. So a recent Physical Review Letter on the development of a very special optical parametric oscillator caught my interest. Of course, many of you are now saying 'a what?' Relax. As usual, I will bore you with the details.
Almost everyone is familiar with lasers. A laser is just a gain source—a way to get a medium glowing with a particular wavelength of light—surrounded by mirrors to provide feedback. We give the gain medium energy—a lot of energy, in fact—which puts most of the medium into an excited state. Nothing likes being excited for very long, so the atoms or ions or molecules that make up the gain medium relax back to their ground state. As these molecules relax, they emit light, some of which is captured by the mirrors and reflected back and forth through the gain medium. As the light field builds up, this causes the excited gain to emit in sympathy with the existing light field. This process of stimulated emission is one of the things that makes a laser special.
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"The tablet market may still be very young, but some tablet users are already reporting heavier usage than on their computers or televisions. According to the March 2011 survey from the now-Google-owned mobile ad firm AdMob, hours spent on a tablet are beginning to displace hours spent on other popular electronics, and tablets are increasingly being used to read books, shop online, send e-mail, and play games.
AdMob surveyed 1,430 US-based tablet users during the month of March and discovered that a whopping 77 percent said their desktop or laptop usage decreased after getting a tablet. That may be technically true for many users—I definitely use my computers less at night and on the weekends now that the iPad is around—but 43 percent also said that they use their tablets for more hours of the day than their computers. One third said they spend more time on their tablets than watching TV.
How is this possible when today's tablets are still catching up to 'real' computers in some areas of productivity? A hint lies in some of AdMob's other statistics: more than two-thirds (68 percent) reported using their tablets for a minimum of one hour per day, and 82 percent said they primarily use it at home. If you assume the majority of those surveyed are not huge at-home computer users, then the numbers begin to make more sense.
In fact, 59 percent said they spend more time on their tablets than they do reading paper books, but 46 percent said they use their tablets to read e-books. That isn't surprising, and neither is the fact that 84 percent of tablet users use the devices to play games. (Another 78 percent use it to search for information and 74 percent use it for e-mail.) Content creation wasn't on the list of tablet uses, but perhaps it falls into the 19 percent who indicated they use their tablets for 'other' purposes.
Still, although the majority of respondents undoubtedly still use their laptops or desktops to get work done, 28 percent indicated that their tablets were now their primary computing devices. That's a pretty hefty slice of the computer pie, but it's important to note that most people who currently own tablets are either early adopters or experimental newbies who might be trying to avoid home computer use in the first place. We may see the trends change again in a year when even more mainstream users get on board, thanks to the success of the iPad and growth of Android and RIM-powered tablets.
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"One of the minor 'features' Microsoft included in the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview released earlier this week was reduced operating system support; it will only install on Windows 7, leaving Windows XP and Windows Vista users out in the cold. Microsoft confirmed to Computerworld that this was no accident, with a spokesperson saying 'Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware.'
That's a claim that's hard to make any sense of.
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"In part one of this series, we looked at selecting an enterprise virtualization platform, and at some of the benefits gained. In part two we looked at some of the challenges involved in selecting hardware to run the platform on, and we also discussed storage, networking, and servers/blades. Part three took a closer look at networking issues, and in Part 4 we gave some practical, nuts-and-bolts advice for how to tune your VMware enterprise setup. In this final installment, we look at the issue of physical-to-virtual conversion, and give tips on best practices.
The biggest challenge facing a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration in an enterprise setting is not actually technical—though there is a technical challenge, as well. Rather, the actual challenge is the timing, paperwork, and ample red tape to you'll have to face on a system-by-system basis, as well as a general cultural clash against the status quo.
In any sufficiently large environment, there are multiple tiers of service, ranging from mission-critical to development to lab systems, each with different uptime expectations, and different levels of expendability. So it's a good idea is to begin at the bottom, with the least important systems, and work your way up. The benefit of this approach is that any kind of early failure in the process won't be cared about too much, and because you'll have more experience with the P2V process by the time you migrate the mission-critical systems. But before we get to talking about various P2V migration strategies, we have to look at a very large reality in most enterprise environments: legacy systems, and red tape.
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"Several years ago, Chet Kanojia was enjoying a brisk career providing data collection and ad exchange services to broadcasters and cable companies. He'd sold his business to Microsoft, and was working on integrating his operation into the huge firm.
Then something occurred to him. Why should consumers have to rely on unreliable home antenna systems or expensive cable services for access to local broadcast television, when they could get it over the Internet?
'I have sort of a real passion for the video sector in general and in particular solving some key consumer access problems,' Kanojia explained to us in an interview. 'The light bulb went on in my head that if you could solve the consumer's access to broadcast television in a smart way that they did not have to get it exclusively from the cable or satellite company, you really had a great starting point for any over the top service, because then a consumer could combine that with Netflix and Hulu.'
And once someone had both over-the-air network channels plus access to Hulu and Netflix--well, why bother with cable TV?
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"Apple has long offered a $30 discount on both MobileMe and iWork to new Mac buyers. But according to a memo sent to resellers, both promotions were discontinued effective Monday night, which is a likely signal that updates to both the MobileMe service and Apple's iWork software suite are imminent.
MobileMe has been rumored to be slated for a major upgrade as far back as mid-February, when the Wall Street Journal reported that 'Apple is considering making MobileMe a free service that would serve as a 'locker' for personal memorabilia such as photos, music and videos, eliminating the need for devices to carry a lot of memory.' Since then, rumors have suggested wide-ranging changes, including new social media services, cloud storage services, and streaming audio or video which may or may not be linked to iTunes. The new service is expected to be cheaper than the old $99 per year price—perhaps even free—to better compete with Google's cloud services which are heavily used by Android.
Other factors add fuel to the fire that a MobileMe update is coming soon. First, Apple removed MobileMe from its online store and ceased shipments of retail MobileMe boxes in late February. The company has since continued to offer free 60-day trials too, suggesting the update could be timed for the end of April. Furthermore, Apple said during its annual shareholder meeting that its $1 billion data center in North Carolina would finally come online this spring. Combined with the cancelled discounts, a launch appears imminent.
Apple has also discontinued the $30 discount for its iWork suite of productivity software, which includes Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. The individual apps have been available via the Mac App Store since day one for $20 each, itself representing a $20 discount off the $79 suggested retail price. However, iWork hasn't been updated on Mac OS X since early 2009. In the interim, Apple has launched iOS versions for the iPad, and slightly updated its iWork.com 'collaboration' service, which after over two years is still in beta.
Best Buy in Mexico kicked off rumors of an update earlier this year when it briefly showed an iWork '11 update scheduled for February 19 on its website. That date came and went, but with the synchronized discontinuation of the $30 discount promotion, Apple may be readying an update around the same time as MobileMe—perhaps with updated iWork.com cloud services—or in time for WWDC in early June.
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"In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.
For Ask Ars, we typically respond to a reader question about some specific tech quandary, but this time around we've got something special. We've put together a new PC-building guide, complete with video selections that both inform and entertain. Our original guide hasn't been updated since the Celeron overclocking era, and many readers wrote in to let us know that it was long in the tooth. So if you've been thinking about building your own, or you're curious about what goes into the build process, this Ask Ars is for you.
This guide is aimed at people who have not built a PC before, but who know the basics ins and outs of DIY life.
In recent years, building your own computer has become more of a niche technophile activity than it was in the earlier part of the decade. Few people see the benefits of expending the effort to figure out how all the different components of a PC fit, screw, and plug together when you can just as easily fill out a customization form at any number of online retailers and have your own custom build arrive in just a matter of weeks.
But we know that there are still good reasons to go the do-it-yourself route. Our System Guides continue to see amazing traffic, and staff members (some, but not all) are still exercising their Type A personalities and building their own PCs. Ars has a long history of supporting PC builders, and this guide is designed to bring first-time and relatively green builders into the fold.
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"
In May of last year, Apple's market capitalization passed Microsoft's, making Apple the world's largest tech company and cementing Steve Jobs' status as one of the greatest creators of shareholder value in the modern era. But for all of the shareholder value that Jobs has created in the past thirty years, can he also spot undervalued shares? Or are running a company and running money two different skills, entirely?
Steve Jobs hasn't historically been in the business of giving investment advice, but at one point in 1979, just a year before Apple Computer went public, Alice Schroeder reports that he did just that. Courtesy of a brief aside on page 470 of Schroeder's extraordinarily good biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball, we meet the young Steven 'Glenn Beck' Jobs, confirmed goldbug.
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"After reading AT&T's massive argument (PDF) for why the government should allow it to purchase T-Mobile, you might wonder just why AT&T wants the smaller company at all. And you might have a few questions about AT&T's own network, which the company says will shortly be under severe capacity constraints that its rivals won't face.
The whole document is a rather amusing exercise in making both AT&T and T-Mobile look like underdogs in a field of unbeatable competitors. Actual quote from AT&T: "With sharply declining prices, dazzling innovation, soaring output, enormous product differentiation, new entr[ies], and fierce advertising, the intensity of the competition in the US wireless marketplace is extraordinary."
And here is AT&T's own description of the company it plans to buy for $39 billion:
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"In developed nations, the number of PhDs given in the sciences each year has grown by almost 40 percent since 1998, reaching about 34,000 doctorates in 2008. This type of expansion sounds great in theory: interest in the sciences is growing, and we now have a population that is more educated than ever. However, the effects of this worldwide trend are troubling. The workforce cannot absorb all these highly trained graduates, there is little money to support these expensive programs, and the quality of education is often low, among other problems. This week’s issue of Nature examines the problems with the expansive growth of the PhD.
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"The rumors have been numerous: Nintendo has a new system that will be more powerful than the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360. The controller will include a large touch-screen. It will be out in 2012. While the particulars are still a mystery, Nintendo has confirmed that there is new system is on the way, and we'll be playing it at the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo.
'Nintendo Co., Ltd. has decided to launch in 2012 a system to succeed Wii, which the company has sold 86.01 million units on a consolidated shipment basis between its launch in 2006 and the end of March 2011,' the company said in a statement. 'We will show a playable model of the new system and announce more specifications at the E3 Expo, which will be held June 7-9, 2011, in Los Angeles.'
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata may not have told us what will be in the system, but he definitely gave hints about what we won't see. “We would like to propose a new approach to home video game consoles,” Iwata said, as reported by Bloomberg. "It's difficult to make 3-D images a key feature, because 3-D televisions haven’t obtained wide acceptance yet."
While Nintendo's portable systems are still doing very well, sales of the Wii have slowed significantly, and profits are down year over year. Nintendo needs a new hit soon to keep shareholders happy, although it's unknown how rumors of a more powerful system with an intricate controller would fit with the company's trend of releasing clever systems using off-the-shelf components and sold at a profit.
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"ExtraBackup copies files and folders from one location to another on the same drive, another drive, or across the network. You can set up Tasks that describe the source location, the destination location, and the frequency at which you want to copy the files.