Month: May 2016

(credit: Bill Dickinson)

The Federal Communications Commission is making another $2.15 billion available for rural broadband projects, and it's trying to direct at least some of that money toward building services with gigabit download speeds and unlimited data.

The FCC voted for the funding Wednesday and released the full details yesterday. The money, $215 million a year for 10 years, will be distributed to Internet providers through a reverse auction in which bidders will commit to providing specific performance levels.

"We now adopt an auction design in which bidders committing to different performance levels will compete head to head in the auction, with weights to take into account our preference for higher speeds over lower speeds, higher usage over lower usage allowances, and low latency over high latency," the FCC said. Prices should be "reasonably comparable to similar offerings in urban areas," the FCC said.

Printing butterflies is just one possibility for the new inkjet/laser system. (credit: Lewis Lab / Wyss Institute at Harvard University)

Customizable, wearable electronics open the door to things like heart-monitoring t-shirts and health-tracking bracelets. But placing the needed wiring in a complex 3D architecture has been hard to do cheaply. Existing approaches are limited by material requirements and, in the case of 3D writing, slow printing speeds. Recently, a research team at Harvard University developed a new method to rapidly 3D print free-standing, highly conductive, ductile metallic wires.

The new method combines 3D printing with focused infrared lasers that quickly anneal the printed nanoparticles into the desired architecture. The result is a wire with an electrical conductivity that approaches that of bulk silver.

3D printed conductive wires

The new 3D printing approach starts like a standard inkjet: concentrated silver nanoparticle inks are printed through a glass nozzle. The ink is then rapidly annealed by a focused infrared beam trailing the print stream by 100µm. This laser annealing process increases the density of the nanoparticles, transforming them into a shiny silver wire. The researchers demonstrated its ability to print an array of silver wires with diameters ranging from the sub-micron up to 20µm through variation of a few key printing parameters.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Ars can confirm that at least one major developer is currently planning to release a new virtual reality game on the Xbox One in 2017 and plans to show that game at E3. The news lends credence to multiple recent reports suggesting Microsoft is planning a more powerful, VR-compatible Xbox One for 2017.

The information was provided to Ars directly by the developer as part of pre-E3 planning and was confirmed by a PR representative. Ars isn't at liberty to discuss the name of the game or the specific developer, but we can say that a well-known European studio is planning "a new VR game" set in the universe of an established, long-running franchise.

The game is also being planned for release on the PC and PS4, and while it seems likely the E3 demonstration will be on one of those platforms, the PR representative was clear that an Xbox One version was also being planned. The game's working title contains the word "VR," strongly suggesting this isn't merely a VR-compatible game that happens to have a more traditional Xbox One version.

(credit: CSPAN)

On Wednesday, the inspector general of the Department of State issued a scathing report on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private mail server during her tenure there, further securing the episode's legacy as perhaps the most historic case of "shadow IT" ever. Paying a State Department employee on the side to set up and administer her personal mail server, Clinton claims she just was doing what her predecessors did—but you'd be hard-pressed to find any government executive who ignored rules, regulations, and federal law so audaciously just to get mobile e-mail access.

If you've worked in IT for any amount of time, you've run across the shadow IT syndrome—employees using outside services to fix a problem rather than using internally supported tools. Sometimes (but rarely), it's actually mission-essential. For example, at a previous employer, when half the company lost access to e-mail and the content management system because a network card was stolen in a smash-and-grab at the telco's co-location facility, I set up a password-secured Wiki on my personal Web server to handle workflow and communications for a day. (The CIO was not happy, particularly when my boss wanted me to write an article about it. The corporate counsel had the story spiked because it exposed a Sarbanes-Oxley breach—not exposed by me, but by the company's failure to have a backup system.)

Often, people use shadow IT at work because of a lack of official IT resources to support a need. But they also use shadow IT for personal convenience—especially the personal convenience of executives and managers who want what they want and will twist the arm of someone in IT to support it whether it's within policy or not (or find someone else to do it for them and then tell IT they have to support it).

Normally Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft would require three parachutes to land. (credit: Blue Origin)

Spaceflight entrepreneur Jeff Bezos has promised to test his New Shepard spacecraft to the limit, and perhaps it is time to take him at his word. On Thursday, the founder of Blue Origin said his company has nearly finished planning the next test flight for his space capsule, and this time the crew vehicle will attempt to land with one of its three parachutes intentionally failing. The goal, Bezos said, is to demonstrate New Shepard’s ability to safely handle such a scenario. “It promises to be an exciting demonstration,” he wrote, perhaps understatedly, in an e-mail.

One of the maxims of spaceflight is that every launch is a test flight—rockets and spacecraft just don’t fly frequently enough, like airplanes, for spaceflight to become routine. So every time the space shuttle, or Saturn V or any other vehicle flew, engineers on the ground would learn more about the launch system, and how it operated. The same is true today, even for frequently flown rockets such as the Atlas V or Soyuz launch vehicle.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? With the New Shepard architecture, a capsule atop a propulsion module powered by a single BE-3 engine, Blue Origin has fashioned a suborbital launch system that is not only completely reusable but is one that also appears to be relatively inexpensive to fly, costing a few tens of thousands of dollars to turn around. Critically for testing purposes, it is also completely autonomous. This means Blue Origin can test New Shepard as much as it likes to ensure the vehicle is safe without taking any meaningful risk. It might even get to the point where, one day, each flight is not a test flight.