After more than a decade of research, scientists at Stanford University have created a working computer based on the physical movement of water droplets. It’s a breakthrough in physical computing that gets at the most basic definition of a computer: any programmable device that can carry about logical (mathematical) operations. By combining cutting-edge theory in fluid dynamics with very-much-not-cutting-edge theory in computing, the team was able to create a synchronous computer based entirely on the physics of water.
As you might imagine, a computer based on the physical movement of water is much, much slower than a conventional computer based on the movement of electrons — but that’s beside the point. Nobody expects a new, super-fast liquid CPU, but by applying the principles of computing to the manipulation of matter, lead researcher Manu Prakash and his graduate students hope they can computationally revolutionize other areas of science.

Prakash is actually a bioengineer — his main goal with the project is to create a platform for robust, super-quick chemical testing. Their technique can direct potentially millions of droplets around a chip, simultaneously, and each of these can be loaded with a different chemical for testing. A well-designed chip could make months of complex chemical experimentation into minutes — once the chip has been designed and built, the experiment designed, and the samples made and loaded onto the chip itself.
The system works based on the continual flipping of an applied magnetic field. The chips, which are at present about half the size of a postage stamp, are embedded with tiny iron bars that are easily magnetized; arranging these bars in “Pac-Man-like” mazes provides discreet channels for the droplets to follow. Each droplet is infused with magnetic nanoparticles that make the water responsive to an applied magnetic field, so by flipping the polarity of these bars the team can decide which path each droplet will take through the bar-maze.
The system only works as a general-purpose computer because it is “synchronous,” meaning that it keeps the various operations marching to the same beat — the researchers say they could potentially control millions of droplets at once, with a scaled version of the same technology. In a conventional computer, each of these beats is called a clock cycle — in a water-drop computer, this beat is controlled by the flipping magnetic field. In both cases, the central timing mechanism makes sure that even thousands of different paths and interactions all proceed according to the same schedule, and can thus work together toward computational goals.
Some of the very earliest computers, like the UNIVAC I, had computer memory based on liquid mercury — in essence, the idea of representing computer data with physical matter is not new. What is new is the idea that the physical structure of the chip could be used to direct the movement of matter in a robust, pre-programmed way. In a best-case-scenario, this sort of paradigm shift in the approach to experimental chemistry could cause the sort of exponential efficiency increase electronic computers allowed in regular mathematics.
One big push in the quest truly next-generation medicine is so-called “organ on a chip” technology, which would allow scientists to test the effects of drugs and other substances on certain organs by running those substances through small, high-throughput stand-ins for whole organs of interest. With the ability to quickly and systematically test the interactions of thousands of different substances, that idea might someday plausibly reach the point of “individual on a chip.”
In the more foreseeable future, water-drop computing is a fascinating realization of something that was always theoretically known: computing is a fundamentally physical process (until quantum computing comes of age, I suppose), and as such can be expressed in the medium of physical matter. It’s far less efficient that way — but efficiency isn’t the only goal worth pursuing.

The 55-inch and 84-inch interactive displays marry white boards with presentations, voice with video, speakers with addressees, Android with iOS, and Windows 10 with conference rooms. The Surface Hubs will go on sale July 1, and on Sept. 1, they'll start shipping out of a Microsoft facility about 200 miles south of the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters.
They're priced at US$6,999 for the 55-inch model and $19,999 for the 84-inch version.
The Surface Hubs were first shown to the world during a Windows 10 event back in January, but it appears the majority of onlookers' eyes were glued to Microsoft's augmented reality headset, the HoloLens, or searching out familiar elements in the new operating system.
Microsoft has been developing and manufacturing the Surface Hubs at a satellite campus a few miles outside of Portland, in Wilsonville, Oregon. All components except the screens were developed and produced at the facility, and Microsoft owns the company that produces the multitouch display technology for the Hubs.
The Surface Hubs are full-featured Windows 10 devices. The larger Hub features a 4K display, while the 55-inch variants output 1080p video.

Modernizing the Meeting

Meetings increasingly are dispersed, noted Brian Eskridge, a senior manager at Microsoft. About half of all corporate meetings include at least one remote participant.
"Surface Hub is designed to be engaging for everyone in a meeting," Eskridge told TechNewsWorld. "Remote participants that are dialing in have a great view of the conference room or ad hoc meeting space where the Surface Hub is located, and participants in the room have a great view of those remote participants."
That's all thanks to the dual 1080p cameras, inspired by Xbox's Kinect, that are built into the flanks of Surface Hubs, he pointed out.
The cameras "provide a full range of view for both people that are standing close to the Surface Hub, potentially whiteboarding on it, and for those who may be sitting at a conference table several meters away from the Surface Hub," said Eskridge.
As a full-fledged Windows 10 system "with all-in-one compute power," the Surface Hub is meant to be a workhorse in conference rooms, he added.
Businesses increasingly have been making decisions based on insights gleaned from data served up in real time, Eskridge pointed out, and it's that access to real-time data in an interactive experience that separates the Surface Hub from other displays on the market.
Real-time data access "ultimately enables a platform for amazing large screen applications that are powered by Windows 10 as a platform, but then extend out into a variety of industry verticals that may need business-specific or line-of-business applications," he explained.

At Home at the Hub

BYOD, or bring your own device, is now less a phenomenon and more the status quo, and the Surface Hub opens its arms to devices running on all major platforms. Hub users with Android, iOS or OS X devices can receive the same treatment that users of Windows or Windows Phone devices enjoy.
"Suddenly, you have a meeting room with that's live and active 10 hours a day," said Eskridge. "You have multiple individuals coming in and interacting with Surface Hub, and those people are bringing in their own devices and they're having great experiences on those other devices with our cross-platform applications like Office, or Skype for Business, or OneNote."
The Surface Hub is "incredibly impactful," and it's a worthy endeavor for Microsoft, which strives to empower individuals and groups alike, he added.

A Node in the Net

Microsoft last year started marching to the mantra "mobile first, cloud first." The development and release of touch-sensitive, big screen devices may appear to be a departure from that two-pronged strategy of mobility and cloud connectedness, but it is, in fact, integral to it.
"We're creating best-in-class experiences with our hardware that extend to our productivity software and services," Eskridge said.
Microsoft's mobile and cloud ambitions are trained on improving people's work lives and then following them home via their tablets and Windows Phone handsets.
The Surface Hub could serve as a new inroad into the workflows of enterprises, suggested Eric M. Jackson, CEO of CapLinked.
"Microsoft sees two trends that are threatening the longstanding dominance that Windows and Office have had with enterprises: Software as a service is rapidly expanding into the enterprise; and the number of non-Windows devices that people use for work is growing," he told TechNewsWorld.
Along with injecting itself into another area of enterprise workflows, the Surface Hub could inspire Microsoft's developer community as well, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
"The fact that the Surface Hub will also support common Windows applications and frameworks -- in contrast to the original Surface's less open environment -- means that many in Microsoft's developer community should be inspired to write applications for it," he told TechNewsWorld.

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

The Surface Hub and other hardware, such as the latest Surface Pro, indicate that Microsoft has a new attitude, and its OEM partners should be on notice that the company will produce hardware when they won't, King said.
"I believe that under CEO Satya Nadella, the company is moving aggressively to meaningfully highlight the capabilities of its core technology assets, far more so than when Steve Ballmer was leading the charge," he remarked. "At that point, numerous projects were left unfinished, or dropped after they faced initial challenges."

HGST (Formerly Hitachi’s hard drive division) has been talking about its helium storage devices for several years and the firm is finally ready to ship the new drives for enterprise deployments. The Ultrastar Archive Ha¹⁰ isn’t just filled with helium — it also uses new Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to write data to the disk. While this allows for unprecedented areal density, there are some caveats that make the drive ill-suited to conventional consumer applications. It’s an offshoot of the earlier-launched He⁶, which uses helium, but not SMR.
First, a word on SMR itself. SMR is the latest advance in recording technnology designed to ensure that consumers and businesses have enough storage space for… erm, office documents. It’s my personal opinion that hard drive manufacturers don’t get nearly enough credit for the work they’ve done to expand storage capacities. Imagine if Ford rolled out a new 2016 Escort capable of holding the population of China in a smaller footprint than its 1981 model year, and you’ve got some idea of just how drastically hard drives have advanced in the intervening decades.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and conventional HDD scaling (even assisted by perpendicular recording) is hitting a wall. Areal density becomes difficult to scale using conventional methods because it’s no longer possible to focus a sufficiently powerful magnetic field on a single bit of the drive. Shingled magnetic recording boosts drive density not by scaling the areal density to ever-higher levels, but by laying tracks across each other, in shingled fashion.

The advantage of laying the tracks down in this fashion is that you pack data more closely together. The disadvantage is that rewriting tracks will damage the data on subsequent tracks. The only way to prevent this is to read the entire data block, modify the necessary section, and then re-write the rest of the track. This can lead to huge write amplification — if a 4KB update needs to be performed to a 64MB area of track, then the entire 64MB has to be read into RAM and laid back down with the modified 4K section. To reduce the impact of this write amplification, the drives are divided into bands — contiguous blocks of data that are treated as a unit.
It’s important to avoid random reads and writes as much as possible when using SMR, however, which is why HGST is marketing these drives as “cool” to “cold” storage — meaning data that’s written very few times and accessed only on occasion. If the drive is being regularly written and re-written, the performance penalties will quickly become severe. The HGST drives also require extensive modification and drive software in order to operate properly.

Hitachi has an open-source project, libzbc, that can be integrated into Linux to implement support for its now Ha¹⁰ drives. Absent such support, the drives can’t function — these aren’t your typical plug-and-play hard drives.
Right now, it’s hard to see where SMR drives will fit into future consumer products. Tech Report, erm, reports that the rated performance on the new hardware is just 157MB/s sequential read and 68MB/s sequential write. Meanwhile, adding the helium capabilities to drive up storage densities will add its own significant costs. All drive technologies require a launch period before they start to hit attractive prices, but pushing the envelope on HDD storage through noble gases and particular recording methods with some noted drawbacks seems an ill fit for the larger consumer market. It’s worth noting that SMR isn’t the only game in town for pushing the envelope on hard drive capacity — another technology, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR, is currently expected to reach market by 2016 or 2017.

It has a new error handling model that works with Apple SDKs and NSError. Two new features in Objective-C -- nullability annotations and generics -- make Swift 2 work better with Apple SDKs.
"Generating higher-quality code is the central problem in software engineering, and anything that helps developers do that will help," said Al Hilwa, a program director at IDC.
Swift is "a modern language where memory management is internalized," he told LinuxInsider. "Having features that further reduce errors and allow writing of cleaner, more readable code is always welcome."

Hot New Stuff

The most important new features in Swift 2 include increased performance and improved optimization, as well as a new exception-based error handling system that features "throw," "try" and "catch" keywords, like Java and other languages, noted Bill Weinberg, senior director of open source strategy at Black Duck Software.
Others are use of the "#Available" keyword to discover properties of the underlying OS, easier transition across OSes and versions, and new platform-optimized SDKs -- primarily for current Apple devs.
A Linux port is slated to appear later this year. Key attributes devs should look out for, according to Weinberg, include choice of IDE, if any; support for Android; completeness of the port compared to Swift's native implementation under OS X and iOS; and volume of platform-specific code.

FOSSing Swift

Apple will release Swift 2 to open source under an OSI-approved permissive license. It will contribute ports for OS X, iOS and Linux at launch, and source code will include the Swift compiler and standard library.
Using the permissive license "would make Swift friendly to many commercial entities, but could also make it easier to fork the project and the language," Black Duck's Weinberg told LinuxInsider. "Community voices are already singing the praises of Apple's move."

Swift is among the top 25 programming languages, and open-sourcing it "will reduce friction to adoption by ushering the language into other platforms," Weinberg said.
Linux "is a logical target" for Swift, because "it's the platform of choice for new development, and where other next-generation languages were born, and where they're percolating today," Weinberg noted, in addition to being "a close sister operating system to OS X."
How open-sourcing Swift will impact the nascent Phoenix project, an attempt to implement the Swift spec as open source without the benefit of Apple's purview, remains to be seen.

Chrome developers have announced that an upcoming version of Chrome will prevent video ads from automatically playing when a website loads. The new feature has already been pushed out to beta builds and can be manually enabled by opening Chrome’s content settings and adjusting the plugin content options. This push comes as part of an overall effort to improve Chrome’s performance on modern laptops.
Last year, Chrome was dinged by the discovery that the browser would set the CPU clock interval as low as 1ms, waking the chip far more often than is necessary in order to improve responsiveness, but at the cost of battery life. That issue was apparently fixed by a browser update earlier this year, but Google has evidently been looking for other ways to improve laptop power consumption. Auto-playing flash video, of course, isn’t just a battery life issue — it’s extremely annoying to have multiple tabs start playing their own audio streams automatically.
This new feature doesn’t prevent the ad from loading, it just doesn’t play the ad unless the user manually chooses to do. The feature is controlled from within Chrome’s preferences, as shown below:

Google didn’t say that it was blocking ads, specifically, instead claiming to block content that isn’t “central to the webpage.” The implication, however, is that this is a shot across the bow of Flash advertising. One could also argue, cynically, that this is an attempt to push users towards alternative advertising platforms and text-based ads. Block ads that rely on flash video players, and you encourage the entire advertising ecosystem to switch over and start building ads that run on HTML5 or even Google’s own VP9 codecs. I’d argue that this is likely the point of the feature.
It’ll be particularly interesting to see how this interfaces with Facebook’s platform. As of last fall, the social network titan was using a mixture of HTML5 and Flash for serving up its auto-play videos. It’s not clear if FB has completely switched over or not, but if desktop users are still being fed the Flash version, Chrome might kill auto-play entirely (as a non-necessary feature) or speed Facebook’s transition to an all-HTML5 network.
Regardless of the reasons for the change, consumers who use Chrome can benefit from ad-blocking, though the degree to which this benefits you will obviously depend on how many websites you frequent with auto-playing ads.