Another Sci-Fi Dream Come True: The Exoskeleton Unveiled

Earlier exoskeleton prototypes have emerged for Japanese manufacturers Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. The prototypes, in real world testing markets now, evoke images known to Sci-Fi fans from the original "Alien" movie, and reveal the birth of technology that could one day spawn characters from video games such as the Spartan Master Chief in the Halo storyline.

The modest begging to these Sci-Fi dreams is a wearable assisted-walking device from Honda works, unveiled by Honda in Tokyo on Friday. The device is designed to support body weight and reduce stress on the knees, as well as help people get up steps. The device was initially designed for use by workers at auto or other factories: being used to relieve stress on assemble workers peer underneath vehicles on an assembly line. As reported by CBSNews.ca Engineer Jun Ashihara said the machine is useful for people standing in long lines and who run around to make deliveries." "This should be as easy to use as a bicycle," Ashihara said at Honda's Tokyo headquarters. "It reduces stress, and you should feel less tired."

The walking-assistance is a lower body exoskeleton that you operate like a bicycle. The seat goes between your legs, while the user steps into shoes connected by mechanical legs and pushes the on button. Once wearing the device, just start walking around. A computer connected to motors, gears, battery and sensors embedded in the skeleton, allows it to respond to a person's movements. Pricing and product availability plans have not been released.

At the same time another device to help people walk has been reviled by Honda competitor Toshiba Motor Corp.; but this one reads brain signals. A set of mechanical legs, dubbed "HAL" for Hybrid Assisted Limbs, is designed for elderly and those with restricted movement ability. The belted device reads brain signals to help people move within the mechanical braces strapped to the legs.

If these examples aren't enough to convince you of the inevitable release of full body exoskeleton out of "Alien," this growing market in Japan has other competitor's including a device, being tested at one Japanese facility, that helps rehabilitation programs for the disabled by encouraging them to take steps. The future of robotics, and hybrid human machines is live and well in the Japanese marketplace. The evolving market raises hopes of improved quality of life, safer more productive work environments, and dream tech strait from our favorite SciFi sources. Of course the other question it raises, is why aren't we in any position to compete or even enter this market. But that's a topic for a seperate blog.

High-end Perfomance and a portable Gamming Laptop

Toshiba launched its Qosimo X305-Q706 and X305-Q708 line of laptop PC's. The systems come configured with with two GeForce 9800M GTS cards in SLI configuration, plus an integrated GeForce 9400M for when you want some peace and quiet, or need battery life over performance for day-today work.

Toshiba has tnow taken it's place in the high breed Gaming laptop market, alongside Dell and HP. Toshiba has trumped the competition though, by releasing a more versatile system with three GPUs. This system not only allows gamers the power they need, but for those with more modest needs of prolonging life during an endless work day, Toshiba allows power conservation to prevail over performance, by switching the the third GPU . Competing models rely on lowered GPU setting to relieve the strain on a battery, but the three GPU configuration promises to outperform the competitors in this area. In addition, three GPUs could help to speed up performance running GPGPU apps. Toshiba’s vice president of product development for Toshiba’s US digital products division, Carl Pinto, was quoted on CustomPC explaining that Toshiba ‘wanted to deliver an extreme-performance gaming machine that gives gamers a complete, non-compromising system in a laptop form factor.’ He added that ‘The combination of the NVIDIA GPUs and chipset allowed us to achieve a high level of performance, quality and flexibility that our customers are asking for, at a competitive starting price.’

Priced at $1,999 in the US, the Qosimo X305-Q706 are not for the casual user with modest needs. The system has a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the X305-Q708 is configured with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU. For the gamer on the run, looking for the best of both world between daily work and the need for a gaming fix, Toshiba holds the answer.

Broadband- Cost is a declining factor to highspped internet access

Point Topic, a UK analysis firm, released new broadband figures for worldwide use, as reported on Ars Technica. The summation: the cost of broadband access is plummeting, with a 20 percent drop in prices over the last year. And if the 20 percent decrease in price still leaves you questioning if your wallet is willing to handle it, there is currently no end in sight to the drop.

Average worldwide costs per month by users of DSL and cable connections are almost identical. However the cost per megabit has seen a widening margin with cable connections taking the lead for consumer best buy. DSL prices have seen the greatest decline in overall cost, dropping from $25 to $18 per megabyte (calculated by the maximum bandwidth use over a sustained period). At the same time, cable connections cost only $6-7 per megabit. While this study is a world wide reflection of broadband Internet access, and weighted by European operators, which offer lower prices and faster speeds than they used to, the report also shows that speeds available in the US have increased while cost has remained flat; thus the cost of access per megabit has dropped.

Huge regional variations still exist in the network access available both in the united states and abroad. Internet access is essential to many Americans but despite this trend, home access remains too expensive in many parts of the world. Countries in the Middle East and Africa, pay an average of $46 per megabit while areas of Western Europe average a mere $6 per megabit, comparable to rates in the US. DSL remains the primary delivery systems for broadband access throughout the world due to the existing infrastructure of telephone lines. In response to this world wide demand for broadband, and the lacking cable and optical infrastructures throughout the world, including parts of the US, AT&T has been boosting the speeds it delivers over phone lines to 18Mbps in the US breathing life into DSL markets despite the growth of fiber and DOCSIS 3.0 cable systems, which have far more bandwidth, and potential room for bandwidth growth.

As Internet applications grow in both the personal and business sectors, the demand for broadband access and an infrastructure to carry it will continue indefinitely in our life times. For the average home user here in the US, this means higher speed access at a slightly decreased price. However, if you're still in the market for a broadband connection the biggest factor is how you use the Internet. With prices between DSL and cable neck and neck, the only questions are availability and how much bandwidth you can use consistently. If you're into streaming video's, while carrying on a chat session, and downloading the latest release on a P2P network, cable is you only option for the cost. But for the average user, browsing the web, updating your MySpace and Facebook accounts, and spamming some friends with forwarded emails, DSL will yield the same performance. And depending on how rural your community is, DSL may be your only option with AT&T's quick fixes for boosting phone line speeds making it more economical for ISP carriers to offer DSL than invest in a cable or optical infrastructure. Only the ISP's with the highest degree of foresight will continue to expand their cable and fiber networks, and a generation from now, they will be providing all of our broadband needs.

Related Stories reported by Ars Technica:
Report: US broadband market edging towards saturation Pro-business think tank: US broadband market is peachy-keen US is #4 on Network Readiness Index—despite broadband woes Where are the broadband price wars?

Comedian Poised for the Senate: Poor tech maintence a potentail factor

If you haven't been following the Minnesota Senate race, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't, now is the time to take a look. Comedian Al Franken, perhaps best known for his Saturday Night Live persona's, is only 236 votes away from displacing incumbent Senator Norm Coleman. Coleman's razor-thin lead was narrowed from over 700 votes, just 0.01 percent, to the current 236 votes, when a hand recount was ordered due to state law involving such a narrow winning margin. Before officials began the ballot hand recount, corrections submitted from various precincts severed the gap by almost two thirds to a 236 vote lead in favor of the incumbent as of Friday morning.

The flood of corrections stems from the optical scanners used to tally the ballots in the election. Wired reported earlier this week, that the M-100 scanner, manufactured by Election Systems & Software, used for tallying votes recently failed accuracy tests in nearby counties. Ars Technica spoke with University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones, an expert on optical scan voting systems, about the accuracy of the ES&S readers.
"In the testing I've done on the M-100, it's been pretty good," said Jones. "It tended to count as a vote the things I naively thought it should count, and it tended not to count the things I thought it shouldn't count. A single pencil stroke through the oval was enough—it didn't need me to blacken it all the way in."
The problem in the counties plagued with failing scanners, noted Jones, was a product poor maintenance. The state refrained from maintaining its machines, due to concerns about voiding the warranty, but at the same time no efforts were made for the manufacturer to service the machines. "The more you look at it, the more fish you smell," Jones told Ars Technica. "The county says the machines haven't seen preventative maintenance in two years. You've got to at the very least blow the dust out of them! If you don't do that you end up scanning dust instead of scanning ballots." Either way, even with consistent maintenance, Jones explained, "It's not uncommon in the studies I've seen for 4 percent of ballots in absentee voting to need to be seen by human eyes... Even in precinct voting, you'd expect to have to look at 1 or 2 percent of ballots directly. Over votes should get caught right there on the spot, but under votes may not be."
With growing speculation about the accuracy of the optical scanners centered around this controversy, Al Franken is by no means out of the race yet. As the comedian readies himself for the Senate, hopefully Minnesota is re-evaluating the outdated technology it has relied on for this years elections. While no one can blame a government for not implementing the cutting edge of technology, electronic voting machines haven't been a revolutionary idea for the past few years. For Minnesota and all the other state governments dragging their heals over the upgrade, this instance demonstrates the need for the inevitable upgrade. At the very least, a lesson should be learned about general maintenance; no piece of technology is self sufficient over time.

Video Game console wars prep for the Holiday Season

Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are gearing up for the holiday season sales of their respective consoles. All three are expecting big software and hardware sales but who will come out on top when the season passes is still in question. New data, reported by Ars Technica, places Microsoft as the likely top performer.

A recent report from Gamasutra, which collected official numbers published by Nintendo, shows the Xbox 360 with the highest ratio of software to consoles sold, a figure commonly referred to as the "Tie Ratio." These ratios were calculated for all three competitors from the first 23 months on the market. Tie ratio represent how many games were sold for every console purchased, and typically increase overtime while the market saturates with a given console, causing software sales to increase while hardware sales decline. Of course, if hardware sales remain high, the tie ratio could actually go down, or remain flat. For the avid gamer the Tie Ratio takes on a whole new meaning. The higher the tie ration, or the more software sold for each console sale, means a stronger software market, hence a greater attraction for Software developers. In short, the console with a consistent high tie ratio will see the release of more titles than its competitors. Although quantity never equals quality, if you're in the market for a new console, or drooling over the possibility of unwrapping one this holiday season, you should beyond the current game libraries available to decide if you'll still be able to find a good game after you defeat the hottest titles from 2008.

The Xbox 360 is leading the market with a tie ratio of 6.6. Nintendo follows in second with the Wii, and Sony's PS3 is currently dead last, due to a combination of a poor launch, and slow sales increase as the highest priced model on the market. While Wii tie ratio's are lower than expected due to a stead sales rate for the consoles, the PS3 has no such excuse. Major title releases in 2008, including Metal Gear Solid 4 were a key variance point the PS3, as Sony witnessed a bump in ratio following the release of the significant title. But from the Tie Ratio, it can be inferred that cross-platform titles are sold more frequently on the Xbox 360. This lack of sales on the PS3, will inevitably lead developers to conserve their resources, and the future game market for the PS3 seems bleak with respect to variety. At the same time, the Wii has been abandoned by many third-party developers during cross-platform releases due to the unique design and requirements of the Wii's hardware. In short, the Wii's revolutionary gamer interface has reduced it appeal to software developers, and prohibited competition in the cross-platform titles war.

For avid gamers and prospective buyers alike, the Tie Ratio's point in primarily one direction. If you're looking for a console the best game variety, and highest new release rate on games, the XBox 360 is your only choice. Since a higher rate of games should never be confused with the volume of revolutionary must have titles like "Bioshock," "Assassin's Creed," or "Metal Gear Solid 4," the ratio does point toward the console drawing the most attention for the developers, and subsequently which console is more likely to be playing 2009's greatest games. So unless you're a die hard Sony fan, or demand the the blue-ray DVD player, and slightly increased graphics of the PS3, the XBox 360 is you're best choice. Likewise with the Wii, the hands on user interface has redefined what it means to play a game, but with the lack of software developers willing to convert their titles to the Wii platforms requirements, you will miss out on the biggest titles which the XBox 360 and PS3 will continue to wave over your head.

NVIDIA- Dwinlding Profoits despit the new 55nm transition

NVIDIA's third-quarter profits for 2009 dropped around 20 percent, from $1.12 billion in 2007 to $897.66 million 2008, as reported on Ars Technica. In addition to dwindling profits, operating expenses increased 16 percent, over the same quarter in 2007, due to additional R&D spending. While NIVIDIA was still profitable for Q3 of 2008, net income of the company dove sharply from 235.7 million in 2007 to 61.7 million in third quarter 2008. Year to date, NVIDIA's revenue is up two percent for 2008 over 2007, but the company's cost of revenue is up approximately $330 million or 21 percent over year to date figures in 2007.

The increase cost of revenue and slumping profits come despite the transition to the 55nm architecture that is ongoing for the current line of the 9400 GT, 9500 GT, and the 9800 GT/+ graphics cards-- a transaction that comes with a slight increase in performance, and a significant decrease to manufacturing costs. At the same time, the transition of these graphics cards to 55nm architecture has been significantly downplayed in the market, possibly due to the fact that these models in the 65nm architecture are abundant in the market place due to decreased sales year to date.

For consumers, this elicits a warning; if you're in the market for new NVIDIA cards shop with caution. The 9400 GT, 9500 GT, and the 9800 GT/+ mid range graphic cards are available in to versions, with the 65nm and 55nm architecture- don't settle for the lesser of the two, and a higher power consumption rate because you didn't do you're homework. At the same time, the entire GTX 260 and 280, lines of GPU's are not being manufactured in 55nm's, so shop with caution.

With the increased spending in R&D, NIVIDIA has poised itself for a successful jump in the upcoming quarters, however little information could be found about upcoming launches andthe next line of GPU's. At this time, with the confusion between the two architectures flooding the market and with overall performance of the current lines of NVIDIA's GPU's in respect to their competitor, upgrading your graphics card with a new NIVIDA card should be approached with caution. Unless you're looking for the best buy in a mid range card, die hard NVIDIA fans should hold off, and those with no allegiance to the manufacturer should stay clear.