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Watching this video of this guy making his own model of the Starship Enterprise D – then making it fly – is truly inspirational. It is a fully functional R/C model. It’s even illuminated by super bright LEDs and fiber optics. Honestly, I was in geek heaven watching this.
YouTuber TheMiro59 built this functional model of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D last year. It doesn’t fly perfectly, but it does fly. The video takes you through the build process and all of the test flights. The first flight is kind of funny as it nose dives into a net like it had been caught in a Tholian web – though after a while, he does get the hang of flying the decidedly less than aerodynamic starship.
Still, all I can say is this guy did an awesome job. The man believed it and lived the dream. Now somebody needs to start mass-producing these so we can all own one.
[via GeekTyrant]
The first city in the country to get the incredibly fast Google Fiber Internet service was Kansas City. Earlier this month, Google announced the second city to get access to its incredibly fast Internet service would be Austin, Texas. I continue to be insanely jealous that people in these cities will be able to get gigabit Internet speeds while my “broadband” at home is measured in Kbps on a good day.
Google has now announced that the next city to get Google Fiber Internet will be Provo, Utah. Google says that the city of Provo currently has an existing fiber-optic network that it has agreed to purchase and upgrade. That network is called iProvo and all that stands between Google and the city of Provo on the quest to bring incredibly fast Internet speeds is a city council vote scheduled for next week.
Google will offer every home along the path of the existing fiber-optic network free access to Internet service at up to 5 Mbps speeds for seven years with the only out-of-pocket cost being a $30(USD) activation fee. I currently pay more than twice that per month. 25 public institutions including schools, hospitals, and libraries will get free gigabit access. Google also plans on offering its faster Gigabit service and Google Fiber TV service in Provo as well.
If you happen to live in Provo, you can sign up to register your interest in Google Fiber service here.
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Fiber optic cables are usually made of glass or plastic but those materials actually slow down the transmission of light ever so slightly. Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have created a hollow fiber optic cable filled with air that's 1000 times faster than current cables. Since light propagates in air at 99.7 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum, this new hollow fiber optic cable is able to reach data speeds of 10 terabytes (!) per second. Now that's fast. While the idea isn't new, it's previously been hampered by signal degradation when light travels around corners. This new hollow fiber optic cable reduces data loss to a manageable 3.5dB/km, making it suitable for use in supercomputer and data center applications. Isn't science wonderful?
[Image credit: qwrrty, Flickr]
Via: ExtremeTech, Gizmodo Australia
Source: Nature
What good is a spectacular view if you can't use your phone to tell people about it? London's newly opened 95-story skyscraper, The Shard, measures 1,016 feet, making it the tallest building in the European Union. From the 69th and 72nd floors, you can get 360 degree views of the city, up to 40 miles out, according to the building's owners. But what happens when the 200 people who can fit on the platforms at any one time want to user their mobile devices? Vodafone's implemented a fiber optic system that converts signal into light, allowing it to travel upwards at a rate of 100GB per second. Once they've hit the proper spots, its converted into a radio signal, which is then beamed to several antennas located on different floors. More information -- and some cool imagery -- can be found in the source link below.
Filed under: Mobile
Source: Vodafone
I know hordes of Internet geeks out there like me were hoping that Google would roll out its insanely fast gigabit Google Fiber Internet service all around the country. I’ve been wishing that Google had plans to make the service widely available after it saw how successful it was within Kansas City. However, new details have surfaced that all but rule out a broad rollout of their crazy-fast Internet speeds – at least any time soon.
According to a report from Business Insider, Telco analyst Jason Armstrong of Goldman Sachs published a note estimating it would cost Google nearly $140 billion or more to deploy its epically fast Google Fiber service to the entire United States. If Google chose to target only major metropolitan areas in the US, the price would be a slightly more modest $70 billion.
Google is certainly worth a lot of money, but the search giant has under $45 billion in cash on hand. That’s a far cry from the $70 billion mark needed to service major metropolitan areas. Unless it takes many, many years to build out the network, Google would need some large partners or a massive loan to equip any significant portion of the country outside of Kansas City with Google Fiber service.
The report estimates that if Google were to go a more conservative route, spending about 25% of their annual $4.5 billion Cap Ex on the project, they could roll out the service to only about 830,000 homes per year, or 0.7% of US households. At that rate, they wouldn’t be able to cover the whole country for about 142 years.
[via BGR]
Light. What is it? What isn't it? Such are the questions left to the experts at Caltech, which have just concocted a new device that can focus light to a point just a few nanometers wide. That kind of precision has never been done at scale, and the university is hoping that the invention could help "pave the way for the next-generation of communication, computing, and even imaging technology."
In lay terms, it could allow increased bandwidth for fiber optics, and since it's built on-chip, integration with existing doodads shouldn't be too much of a hassle. Previous on-chip nanofocusing devices were only able to focus light into a narrow line, making them inefficient, whereas Caltech's contraption can be focused in three dimensions, producing a point a few nanometers across, and using half of the light that's sent through. Hyuck Choo seems to think that it can be put to use in short order in the medical field, but it remains to be seen if we'll see this in the next wave of Google Fiber rollouts. But hey, a lowly DSL user can hope, right?
Source: Caltech
It’s not like I live out in the sticks or anything, I’m only a few miles outside of a city of well over 100,000 people. However, I’m stuck with one DSL provider with 5 Mbps download and a scant 0.73 Mbps upload speed for $70 a month. Now, Google has gone and made me so jealous of its Google Fiber service that went live this week in Kansas City that I can hardly stand it.
A Google Fiber subscriber named Mike Demarais ran a speed test on his blazing fast new web connection the second it was live and racked up some very impressive numbers – though lower than the service’s theoretical top speed of 1 Gbps. He recorded a download speed of 696.38 Mbps and upload speed of 620.49 Mbps. Granted those speeds could go down as more users are on the service, but still that is insanely fast for $70 a month. In addition, speeds drop down to about 200Mbps over a Wi-Fi network, which is still plenty fast for most things.
The man says he was able to download a entire torrent of Ubuntu in about 2 minutes, though he doesn’t indicate how much data that involved. My DLS connection can hardly muster enough bandwidth to stream Netflix and play Call of Duty II at the same time – and you can forget having enough bandwidth to stream two TV shows at the same time.
Hopefully, we’ll start to see Google Fiber service roll out in more cities in the not-too-distant future.
[via Ars Technica]
Today marks the launch of the
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Internet, Mobile
EE switches on 4G in 11 UK cities, offers fiber broadband to 11 million sites and opens 700 stores originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Oct 2012 03:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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