thenoobyorker:

portraitoftheartistasayoungman:

xkcd has the answer

The ending was incredible, read this if you have a few minutes.

Five years have passed since the first 802.11n devices implementing a draft of the now-finalized specification hit the market. Over the years 802.11n support has become ubiquitous in the industry. Everything from smartphones to high-end notebooks support the standard. Even low cost products like the $99 Apple TV or $49 Roku LT ship with 802.11n support. With real world transfer speeds ranging from 30Mbps at the low end to 150Mbps at the high end, 802.11n is simply too slow to quickly move large files. It wasn’t too long ago that 100MB/s was reserved for high-end hard drives in PCs. Today, with SSDs capable of sustaining transfers of over 500MB/s, the bottleneck in many wireless homes is increasingly becoming WiFi.

The IEEE has been working on the specification for the fifth generation of WiFi: 802.11ac. Today that spec is in its draft stages and is expected to be finalized by the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. The first 802.11ac chipsets have already been announced by Broadcom, with the first devices (routers, USB dongles, PCIe cards and OEM systems) shipping very shortly. Broadcom expects that the final version of the 802.11ac spec will be only marginally different from the current draft and any changes it expects to be able to address in software. 

 

If you’re wondering where the ‘ac’ suffix comes from, the IEEE simply ran out of single letters. Every technical paper released by the IEEE for the 802.11 project is assigned a letter. The vast majority of these papers aren’t broad, networking standards which is why you never hear about them. The ones that end up as standards gain popularity but the nomenclature is purely linear use of the alphabet.

I’m looking forward to this.

Soldiers could one day conduct covert operations in complete secrecy, now that Pentagon-backed physicists have figured out how to mask entire events by distorting light.

A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re counting). They’ve published their groundbreaking research in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

This is the first time that scientists have succeeded in masking an event, though research teams have in recent years made remarkable strides in cloaking objects. Researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, last year harnessed the mirage effect to make objects vanish. And in 2010, physicists at the University of St. Andrews made leaps towards using metamaterials to trick human eyes into not seeing what was right in front of them.

Masking an object entails bending light around that object. If the light doesn’t actually hit an object, then that object won’t be visible to the human eye.

Where events are concerned, concealment relies on changing the speed of light. We can see actions happening when, and because, light from those actions reaches our eyes. Usually, the light arrives on an ongoing basis. What Cornell researchers did, in simple terms, is tweak that flow of light — just for a mere instant — so that an event could transpire without being observable. They split apart a beam of light, making half the beam move extremely quickly and the other half more slowly. The “gap” between those speeds is where the event in question is hidden.

The entire experiment occurred inside a fiber optics cable. Researchers passed a beam of green light down the cable, and had it move through a lens that split the light into two frequencies, one moving slowly and the other faster. As that was happening, they shot a red laser through the beams. Since the laser “shooting” occurred during a teeny, tiny time gap, it was imperceptible.

Sure, the team’s got a ways to go before they’re able to mask 30 seconds of action, let alone several minutes. But the research certainly opens up new possibilities. For one, masking super-quick events, like those that occur with data transmission, could help conceal covert computer operations.

In the words of Nature editors, the research marks “a significant step towards full spatio-temporal cloaking.” But it could be decades before military personnel will basically be able to zap history, as it happens: According to Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 18,600 miles long to produce a time mask that lasts a single second.

Awesome and terrifying at the same time.

Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.

The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, said.

“This is evolution in action.”

I’ve seen Jaws and I don’t like where this ends.