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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 05 - 10 AUGUST, 2024
Hello and Welcome,
Meeting This Week
2024/08/06 — 18:00-20:00 — August, Tue — Main Meeting
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84608773479
Meeting ID: 846 0877 3479
Passcode: SydPCMain
Meeting Next Week
2024/08/17 — 14:00-16:00 — August, Sat — Web Design
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86141133224
Meeting ID: 861 4113 3224
Passcode: WebDesign
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official Sydney PC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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ASCCA News:Tech News:
How Optical Discs Could Make a Comeback Thanks to This Breakthrough
See the How-To Geek article by Sydney Butler | Published Jul 20, 2024.
Say Hello to the Petabit Disc!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Optical storage, once the future, is in decline due to slow speeds and solid-state storage rise.
A breakthrough: a research team developed a 200TB DVD-sized disc for data storage.
This 1.6 petabit disc signifies a new era for optical storage, promising vast data storage potential.
In the 1990s, every sci-fi movie featuring data storage invariably had some far-future version of a CD in it. It may have been in a caddy, or have a weird holographic sheen, but everyone thought optical discs were the future. Today that seems unlikely, but continuing research into optical storage might prove those movies right.
What Is "Optical" Storage?
It pains me to write this, but there are probably some of you reading this who only have vague contact with optical media. While you can still readily get Blu-ray, DVD, and CD media, many people have grown up in a digital download and streaming age, with little need to touch a disc. This means there's a good chance you don't actually know how it works. Everyone else can just skip to the next section, but here goes:
Optical media use light to store and read data. An optical disc has microscopic pits and lands that reflect or diffuse light. When you shine a laser beam at these discs and measure the light that comes back, you get a series of ones and zeros — all you need to store digital data. While optical discs are "pressed" in a factory, homemade discs use a laser to create these pits and lands by altering the chemistry in a particular dye layer within the disc.
Why Is Optical Storage in Decline?
Optical storage has many advantages, but it's largely fallen out of favour thanks to the rise of fast solid-state storage. Optical discs are too slow to read data from, so if you buy a game for your console on Blu-ray, it must be copied to the internal SSD first before you can play. Right now, optical media is most useful for long-term cold storage of data, but at one time it was used as a live storage medium for software in order to save precious hard drive space.
While the largest current Blu-ray disc clocks in at around 100GB of storage space, even that's becoming a little tight. With high-speed internet becoming more common and affordable, it's sometimes faster to download something from the internet than to copy it from a Blu-ray!
Modern PCs and Macs don't come with optical drives anymore, and gaming consoles are moving in this direction, with disc drives becoming optional and central stores phasing out physical media. It hurts to write this as a physical media collector, but it looks like the writing is on the wall for optical media. However, the technology is far from a dead end, and a breakthrough in optical storage might bring back the optical disc!
Say Hello to the Petabit Disc!
A team of scientists at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, headed by Professor Min Gu, developed a 1.6 Petabit disc. Remember the difference between bits and bytes since a petabit is around eight times smaller than a petabyte. This means you're looking at 1.6 million Gigabits [ 200,000 GigaBytes — Ed ]. Either way, this means a DVD-sized disc that stores around 200TB of data!
You can read the paper published in Nature, but the gist of it is that the team managed to create a disc with a 3D structure and hundreds of layers. Consider that the best Blu-ray disc has only four layers, and you'll understand that this is a monumental improvement.
These discs have been designed for data centres and require expensive and complex femtosecond lasers. Multiple lasers are needed to activate and deactivate the recording layers, so it's hardly a disc drive that will fit in your laptop bag, but it does show how much potential there still is in optical storage. In data centres, these discs promise safe, long-term data storage that doesn't need to be accessed constantly but should be in an accessible archive. The paper suggests these nanoscale discs can be stacked to create "exabit-level storage", which could be a huge deal given how fragile the internet can be.
What Does This Mean for Us?
This is all very interesting, but what does data centre storage have to do with you and me? Well, apart from the fact that we all use data centre storage every day of our lives, I'm hopeful that some aspects of this discovery can be scaled down to the consumer level.
After all, I don't need a 200TB optical disc, but 2TB? 5TB? Yes, please! These researchers have shown that we can blow far past the limits of Blu-ray and use optical storage to store heaps of data using very little physical space. Ultimately, those little sci-fi optical discs might have been prophetic after all!
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review: The Same, Only Better
See the How-To Geek article by Cory Gunther | Published July 26, 2024.
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Review
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 6 boasts a sleek design, improved camera, and battery life.
Samsung took a safe approach with the Z Flip 6, offering minor upgrades but raising prices.
While the Z Flip 6 may not bring many groundbreaking changes, it excels in build quality and performance and has a camera suitable for everyday use.
Folding phones are still relatively new, but Samsung is now in its 6th generation, and they're getting better with each release. Unfortunately, the new Galaxy Z Flip 6 looks identical to last year's model but packs several notable upgrades over the previous generation. While the competition is heating up, Samsung is getting complacent and raising prices. It might still be the best folding phone for most people.
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6
8 / 10
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 is a sleek, foldable smartphone with a dynamic AMOLED 6.7-inch internal display and a robust hinge mechanism. Powered by the latest Snapdragon processor, it offers exceptional performance, a vastly improved dual-camera system, and Flex Mode for hands-free selfies and video calls.
Pros
+ Excellent build quality
+ Improved IP48 dust and water resistance
+ Better 50MP main camera
+ Longer battery life
Cons
- The cover screen has to get better
- Frustrating price increase
- Speakers aren't that great
HOW WE TEST AND REVIEW PRODUCTS
Price and Availability
The Galaxy Z Flip 6 retails for $1,099.99 with 256GB of storage, $100 more than last year's Fold 5. You can also upgrade to 512GB of built-in storage for $1,219.99. It's available from almost every carrier or third-party retailer.
Both storage models have Qualcomm's Snapdragon Gen 3 CPU (for Galaxy) with 12GB of RAM. This year, Samsung offers colours, including Silver Shadow, Blue, Mint, or Yellow. Those who buy directly from Samsung can also opt for Crafted Black, White, or Peach.
Specifications
SoC — Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 3 for Galaxy
Display — 6.7-inch AMOLED (2640 x 1080) adaptive 120Hz inside screen, 3.4-inch AMOLED (720 x 748) 60Hz cover screen
RAM — 12GB
Storage — 256GB, 512GB
Battery — 4,000 mAh
Ports — USB-C
Operating System — Android 14 / One UI 6.1.1
Front camera — 10MP, f/2.2
Rear camera — Main: 50MP, f/1.8 OIS, Ultrawide: 12MP, f/2.2
Connectivity — 5G, 4G LTE, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax 2.4GHz+5GHz+6GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, UWB
Dimensions — Unfolded: 165.1 x 71.9 x 6.9 mm, Folded: 85.1 x 71.9 x 14.9 mm
Colours — White, Black, Yellow, Silver Shadow, Mint, Blue, or Peach
Weight — 187g
Charge speed — 25W wired, 15W wireless, Wireless PowerShare [ NO SPEEDS GIVEN — Ed. ]
IP Rating — IP48
A Very Familiar Design
See the remaining points in the original article:
A Very Familiar Design
The Inner Screen Is Where Things Shine
Improved Cameras
Software and AI Goodies
Battery Life Gets An Upgrade
Should You Buy the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6?
As I'm sure many of you have, I've toyed with folding phones and quickly dismissed them, as I'm sure many of you do. After spending two weeks with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, I consider getting one as my daily driver. This is a well-rounded phone with much to offer; it's fun and a conversation starter. It's probably the best folding phone for most people.
Eventually, I might get sick of constantly having to fold it open, and I still have longevity concerns with the screen on the inside. It's almost always shut until I need it, meaning everything stays safe. I noticed I was distracted by my phone less throughout the day, and my screen time went down, which I'm perfectly okay with. That's probably not Samsung's intention, but I'd see notifications on the cover screen, swipe them away, and be done. Only when it was pressing would I open the phone, which led to fewer moments when I'd hop on my device and get distracted by social media.
Don't get me wrong, the Z Flip 6 could be better. There are plenty of areas for improvement, and Motorola's RAZR series has some notable software advantages. The Z Flip 6's cameras could still be better, and the price increase isn't ideal. It was already expensive for a phone that's not as good as the flagship Galaxy S series, and now it's $100 more. That puts it in an odd spot.
Throwing the compact Z Flip 6 in my pocket has been a joy for the last few weeks, but there aren't many advantages over getting a regular phone. It's an excellent device and would be suitable for a first-time folding phone buyer. However, those looking for a giant screen that'll let you get more done may consider the new Galaxy Z Fold 6 instead.
Google admits it can't entirely quit third-party cookies
See the MalwareBytes article by Pieter Arntz | Posted: July 23, 2024.
Third-Party Cookies
For more than a year, Google has said it would phase out the third-party tracking cookies that power much of its advertising business online, proposing new ideas that would allegedly preserve user privacy while still providing businesses with steady revenue streams.
This week, Google tossed much of that work aside.
In an update about Google's Privacy Sandbox, the tech giant said that, due to feedback from authorities and other advertising stakeholders, it is considering a new path forward in finding the balance between privacy and an ad-supported internet.
The underlying grounds for the difficulty in finding the balance are easy to understand. Advertising effectiveness is determined by whether you're able to reach your target audience, but the processes involved in determining whether a website visitor belongs to your target audience often mean that the website publisher gathers information about said visitor, which can quickly become a privacy issue.
Third-part cookies were and still are the most common method of tracking a visitor's online behaviour. You can think of them as small files your browser drags along the Internet while sites record your interests and online behaviour in them. They are why you suddenly see advertisements for an article you have looked at in an online store.
When the advertising industry decided they needed something better than cookies, Google introduced the Privacy Sandbox as a "secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy." The idea was to eliminate third-party cookies altogether.
Later, Google started experimenting with FLoC, or "Federated Learning of Cohorts." FLoC aimed to become a privacy-focused solution that delivers relevant ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This way, user behaviour would be processed as anonymized accounts grouped by interests. Most importantly, user information would be processed on-device rather than broadcast across the web.
The goal was to eliminate third-party cookies by 2022, but the implementation of FLoC caused so much opposition from privacy experts that Google abandoned the plan.
Then Google came up with Topics, an idea based on Privacy Sandbox in which the user is not tracked based on the sites they visit but where each site displays contextual advertising, which means the ads match the content on the page. However, Google had to ask websites not to abuse the Topics API, and other browser developers showed no interest in adopting the API.
Despite Google Chrome's browser market share (>60%), it does not have the influence to persuade its competitors. And the pressure is on since other browsers like Safari and Firefox have already started blocking third-party cookies. It's ironic because Google set in motion the push to eliminate third-party cookies, and now it's lagging behind.
So, Google is back with a new path for the Privacy Sandbox. It proposes:
"An updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they can adjust that choice at any time."
Strengthened with a new feature called IP Protection in Chrome's Incognito Mode, this should protect the user from being identified by third parties as a potential target IP address for web-wide cross-site tracking.
Does that mean another prompt will ask the user what they want? It looks like it does. But first, Google intends to send out feelers to find out what regulators and the advertising industry have to say about this new approach.
This will not end this saga; we will keep our readers informed about new developments.
Fun Facts:
Perfecting Polygonal Masonry: A New Explanation of the Ancient Engineers' Construction Methods
See the 6m42s YouTube video by Daniel | Published on Apr 20, 2021, Updated July 2024.
Clay model demonstrating ancient stone wall construction.
Perfecting Polygonal Masonry
Many of these walls have been attributed to the Incan civilization in Peru, and they have also been found in places in Egypt, India, and many other places. This is a demonstration of why I believe the stone nubs are there and their use. Also, I demonstrate how they could have achieved the precise, tight joinery in the stonework.
UPDATE July, 2024:
Thank you for all the comments. There are many great praises and critiques that I'd like to address.
1. Protrusions on Stones: Many have questioned why some protrusions were removed while others were not. There could be multiple reasons for this:
a) Removing protrusions is time-consuming. In areas of the wall that are out of sight or covered, such as beneath a first-floor ceiling, the extra time and effort to remove them might not have been deemed necessary.
b) They could have been used for a secondary purpose, such as hanging items or serving another function unrelated to their original use.
c) It could also be that the civilization encountered some disaster or change in leadership during construction, which could've led to other priorities outside of completing some structures.
2. Natural Stone Fractures and Quarrying: A common comment relates to the ability to split off long layers of stone from a quarry. Pictures and videos show natural fractures in exposed rock outcrops (search on the internet: "Exposed Rock Outcrop Fracture"). Although such outcrops are not common today, I believe they were more prevalent in the past. Like other natural resources, the easily accessible ones were used first, much like early oil reserves, compared to today's deeper reserves that require more complex extraction methods like fracking. Another observation of mine is that this might be why they had to bring these stones from great distances. Early civilizations likely travelled long distances to find stone outcrops with favourable natural fractures.
[ How did they easily separate the front stones from the rest of the solid rock face? — Ed. ]
Rocks falling on 'nubs'
3. Consistent Grain Pattern Through Each Stone: This could be the Achilles' heel of this theory. However, if this technique works precisely, it may not be necessary to abut neighbouring stones to their original placement. It could be that some of the stones we see are placed back in the order from where they fell naturally, but there could be others that were not in the original location or order to their adjacent stones. This could explain why some polygonal fittings are more precise than others.
Rocks align exactly
Although this theory is original, I'm not married to it and have no stake in it. I hope someone smarter than me can provide a better explanation. Like many of you, I don't believe these protrusions were used as props to hold the stones up while chiselling, nor do I think it was some super-advanced technology.
It's been a couple of years since I made this video, and I hope to create another soon to delve deeper into how these stones were chiselled efficiently using dolomite stones with small labour crews.
[ It would be amazing to see an actual demonstration of these techniques with solid rocks. Then, we could judge how practical they would be. It sure does look convincing — Ed. ]
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