Recently my attention was drawn to a “Wikipedia” article on “Coltan” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan).  Coltan is an ore containing the metals Niobium and Tantalum.  The article reports that there is significant concern that the money generated from Coltan is fueling the civil wars in Africa and especially in the Congo.  It is suggested that 80% of the world’s Coltan exists in the Congo and that the micro-electronics industry is critically dependent on Coltan as the raw material in making Tantalum Capacitors.  This raises the question of whether the electronics industry is in danger of being “held to ransom” by current rebel gangs or even a future Congolese Government.  On studying the issue it seems that the fears are unfounded but nevertheless it raises some interesting issues.

Capacitors are extremely simple devices and the number of potential ways of making them is in all practical terms, infinite!  All you need is two materials that conduct electricity (usually metal plates but even a liquid will do) separated by an insulator.  When you connect a voltage across them a stable charge is built up between them due to electrostatic attraction.  But as with most things, the devil is in the detail.

If we consider two hypothetical metal plates separated by an insulator the amount of charge that can be stored (the “Capacitance”) is determined by three things.

1.     The Surface Area of the plates.  The larger the area the more charge can be stored.

2.     The distance between them.  The closer the plates are to one another the more charge can be stored.  Of course the plates must be insulated from one another. 

3.     The characteristics of the insulating material which separates the plates.  This insulating material (which could even be air or a vacuum) is called the “dielectric” and the important characteristic for capacitors is called the “dielectric constant”. 

It seems obvious that to make a capacitor of any given value, the closer we can put the plates to one another the smaller the device will be.  Also, if we can do something to the surface of the plates to increase their area (such as corrugation or scoring) this will also make the device smaller.  If our “dielectric” (separating insulator) has a high “dielectric constant” then again the resulting device will be smaller.  Tantalum is a wonderful material for making capacitors because it lends itself to a unique construction method.  You take a fine powder of pure Tantalum and compress it into a small

“slug” around a piece of Tantalum wire.  Then you “sinter” it by heating to about 1800 deg C (very hot but below the melting point of Tantalum).  The material forms a “sponge” with Tantalum particles stuck together but with plenty of space in-between.  The slug is then immersed in a liquid bath and a current passed through it.  This forms a uniform coating of Tantalum Oxide on the surface throughout the sponge. Tantalum Oxide is an excellent insulator AND it has a high dielectric constant (24).  All that needs to happen now is fill the spaces in the Tantalum “sponge” with a conductive material (usually manganese dioxide), seal it in a package, and you are done.

The “sponge-like” configuration of the Tantalum produces an enormous surface area.  The tantalum Dioxide dielectric is very thin, a good insulator, and has a high dielectric constant.  Thus in terms of capacitance per unit volume (i.e. efficiency), Tantalum is the material of choice.  In addition Tantalum capacitors are extremely tolerant of high-temperatures and thus can be used on circuit boards that are immersed in a bath of molten solder during the manufacturing process.  In addition, being completely solid-state they are extremely tolerant of mechanical shock and vibration and seem to last forever (some alternative capacitor types do not).

Of course there are negatives:

1.     The TaO coated Ta will conduct current very well indeed in one direction (as will all electrolytic capacitors) but the capacitors are absolutely intolerant of reversed voltage polarity (they can explode).  Thus you have to be very careful with circuit design to ensure that they never see reverse current.

2.     Even used as designed, Ta capacitors can only be used at relatively low voltages (maximum 35 volts today).

3.     You don’t get too much benefit from Tantalum versus other capacitor designs at low capacitance values (below about 1 micro-farad).  “Ceramic” capacitors are lower in cost and not much bigger.

4.     They can cost a lot more than competitive devices.

In the consumer electronics world of today there are three major uses for capacitors:

1.     Coupling high-frequency signals in Radio-Frequency transceivers.  Capacitors used here will typically be quite small and usually NOT a candidate for Tantalum devices.

2.     “De-coupling” digital chips as they mount on a circuit board.  Every large chip on a modern circuit board requires external capacitors to “short-circuit” unwanted high-frequency components to ground and to smooth power supply currents.  A quick examination of one modern circuit design shows a large ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) requiring 10 decoupling capacitors.  Based on the required values, four of these could be Ta devices.

3.     “Smoothing” to output of “chopper” power supplies.  These are the small, light power supplies used for mobile telephones, laptop computers and similar things.  This applies especially where size and weight is a factor, such as where a power supply is integrated within a portable device itself.  You often need quite large capacitance values here.

However, the use of capacitors in general in computer devices is reducing quite quickly.  If we remember any old computer circuit board (PC mother board etc) of the 1980’s, it had lots of large components on the top surface - but if you turn it over you find dozens - even sometimes approaching 100 “small components” connected to the underside of the board.  These were almost always very small capacitors and resistors used to smooth and distribute power and to “decouple” unwanted high-frequency noise.  NOW - as technology has progressed, many of the functions that were once performed by several interconnected chips, have been bundled up onto a single chip - these days a modern laptop has far fewer major chips - thus fewer interconnections and fewer points that require “decoupling”. 

Of course there are critical applications where reliability is of critical importance.  Implanted medical devices (such as pacemakers) are one example.  The spacecraft designed by NASA for the mission to Pluto uses tantalum capacitors exclusively.  Also, there are many military applications were ruggedness and reliability outweigh all other considerations.

So what if the world supply of Tantalum ran out or became unavailable.  In the short term some products would need to be re-designed to use other capacitor types.  This might result in these devices becoming a bit larger and/or heavier.  In the longer term there is an infinity of possible capacitor designs.  Niobium is a lot more plentiful than Tantalum and it looks promising as an almost direct replacement.  (Of course Coltan contains niobium too). 

However, there are other minerals that contain Tantalum and many of them have not been exploited.  We are told that (in theory at least) tantalum should be plentiful.  In addition it seems questionable that the electronics industry is even the largest user of Tantalum.  Because of its very high melting point and its other metallic characteristics, tantalum is in heavy demand for use in heat-shields.  It would be surprising if Ta were not used in at least some parts of modern jet engines and rocket motors.

Throughout history human conflict has been fueled by the desire for resources.  Today there is a continuing insurrection on the island of Bougainville (part of Papua New Guinea).  Bougainville has a very large and profitable Copper mine.  Many local Bougainville people want the money for themselves rather than see it go to the wider Papua New Guinea  government. Gold and diamonds were the root causes of South Africa’s problems over the years.  The Japanese involvement in WW2 was primarily motivated by a quest for resources.  The list goes on - today many believe that the “troubles” in the Middle-East are caused by the desire for oil and consequent profits.  But you can make a case against almost anything! Last week a newsletter arrived in the mail suggesting that I shouldn’t buy soap that contained palm oil (most do).  This is said to be because people are cutting down the Amazon forest to plant Palm trees for oil!

Many “rare earth” elements used in current electronics.  Some people feel that continued technological development is threatened by shortages in supply.  As recently as this week a bill has been introduced into the US Congress aimed at ensuring continuing supply in the face of shortage and monopoly suppliers.   Currently 95% of rare earth supplies come from China but the Chinese Government has stated that when their domestic demand becomes great enough to use all of the available supply then they will ban exports!  They could potentially “take over” the world technology industry by controlling the supply of essential raw materials! In many applications it seems possible to replace rare earths with other, less scarce, materials.  Indeed there is a big race on to find a replacement for the rare-earth metals used in large screen TVs.  Change of this nature of course takes time. 

In the immediate future I would think that the supply of Tantalum and of the ore Coltan is not our greatest concern.  After all. Tantalum is NOT a “rare earth”.

Easyjet has recently updated its booking site to use a newer, slicker AJAX/Web 2.0 GUI

Unfortunately the new booking process seems to be more hassle and slower than the old one. More than once when I used it recently I had to hit reload to get a page to display or to get the next page to show up.

I’m not singling out Easyjet for criticism here, I’ve seen similar “improvements” on other sites, both eCommerce and general interest. Part of the problem is that web 2.0 seems to load web servers differently (not necessarily more but placing the load in different places) and so when a site moves to the new interface various services are hit harder than they used to be and get overloaded. In particular web 2.0 sites seem to make more, but smaller, database transactions and I suspect that this is the heart of the problem as the existing database will be tuned to larger but fewer transactions.

To add to this it is entirely possible that Web 2.0 sites get hit by a perception in slowness that is in fact due to their attempts to provide a faster service. Because a Web 2.0 page will load (as far as the browser is concerned) quicker the delay as the bits of the middle of the page are loaded on top becomes noticeable. When there was just one loading thing at the top even if it was as slow or slower we put it down to network issues as opposed to something on the page, thus we were more tolerant of the slowness.

Of course sometimes it is the lack of horsepower in the client that causes the slowdown. By moving more of the processing to the client, web 2.0 sites suffer when clients lack the speed and resources needed to display the page. Some sites with masses of Web 2.0 content such as facebook and gmail have come up with special “lite” versions which load faster and do not place such a burden on the client browser. We may well see more of this as time goes on.

I use an open source ebook management package called calibre to handle my ebooks and most format conversions. It is a very good package and one that is updated and improved frequently. In many ways it is a classic example of the top quality software that more popular open source packages become.

One of the big problems of the ebook world is format conversion and here is where Calibre scores highly because it can create very good (not perfect but good) versions of the same book in multiple formats and convert between formats. Amusingly it seems to do this so well that Adobe now recommend that content creators who use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Digital Editions, should install Calibre to handle the conversion from the ADE standard output (epub) to the proprietary Kindle/Mobipocket (mobi) formats.

Given that currently the two major standards seem to be epub and mobi this white paper endorsement of open source software is somewhat surprising as it would seem to indicate that neither Amazon nor Adobe have put much thought into how to create multiple formats of ebooks. One can only hope that this attitude continues and that just maybe Adobe will donate a little money to the Calibre project.

One of the undoubted benefits of Google’s entry into the web-browser world with Chrome is that it has helped light a fire under the other broswer providers. Google’s reason for entering the browser wars was that it needed a better javascript engine to run the sorts of javascript heavy pages that its online applications use since javascript performance was frequently less than stellar.

This has had an effect with most major browser providers increasing the speed of their offering (interestingly while earlier tests had Chrome fastest, in a recent benchmark Apple’s Safari betas seemed to be slightly faster that Chrome) but it isn’t the only way that Google has influenced the browser wars. The other thing Google has done is given a kick in the pants to a number of HTML 5 features that might otherwise have languished.

Interestingly one of those features - downloadable fonts - is not yet supported by Chrome (though it is supported by Opera’s v10 beta and Firefox 3.5 (and supported differently by IE 8)). A couple of other features - the video and audio tags - are only available in the Chrome 3.0 alphas. While downloadable fonts are probably not that exciting - though this page explains why designers should cheer - the video and audio tags clearly have a major potential hit on Adobe because it pretty much removes one of the main drivers for flash. This recent Cringely column points out a related attack on flash via the codecs used and should probably be read as well.

Indeed the combination of downloadable fonts, javascript to download XML etc. and these tags mean that flash becomes almost entirely superfluous for web site creators. If web viewers don’t need flash for video or audio and web creators utilize HTML 5 to make flash like page effects natively in the browser then flash loses its status as a default plugin that all browsers have. Amusingly this may end up helping Microsoft because it potentially allows Silverlight to compete on a more level platform. On the other hand it is extremely unclear to me what benefits Silverlight will bring to the table that the same combination of natively supported browser features cannot also deliver.

The problem here, for both Adobe and Microsoft is that their proprietary development environments now look less like a basic requirement for a full service deb design house and more like an optional extra. It will be truly fascinating to see whether or not sales of Flash and Silverlight development tools drop.

On the other hand Adobe’s AIR potentially allows non browser based applications and applets to use the same AJAX and flash technologies that are used in web pages. The question then becomes whether users prefer to have 101 browser tabs/windows or 101 separate applets?

Google Voice has been finally (re)launched in the typical google manner of a closed invite-only beta. This is similar to how Google released Gmail. This somewhat closed process, and the limited easy to find descriptions of how it all fits together don’t really help. However ars technica has published a nice overview article that explains what it does quite comprehensively. It doesn’t quite explain how things work on the outbound side - e.g. where Google Voice substitutes your Voice number for the number of the phone you are calling from in other people’s callerID systems - but it does explain the features and what they do.

For the most part these features sound like the ones you get from a very high-end PBX which has been outfitted with speech to text voicemail handling and a bunch of other bells and whistles. However Voice works for individuals not companies and it is, currently, free. Unless Google figures out a way to make users get ads on the system I don’t see how it can possibly remain free unless the purpose of Google Voice is to kill the voice revenue of major operators and/or the IP PBX market. However it is quite possibly a service that I would be willing to pay money for and I suspect others would too, hence I will not be at all surprised if Google starts offering monthly subscriptions.

One thing is for sure, it won’t fly well in Europe or many other places outside the USA. At least one of it’s major features - the ability to redirect calls to a cellphone - will cost google serious amounts of money since, outside the US, calls to cellphones are significantly higher than calls to landlines. On the other hand if Google offers a subscription model where the subscriber pays for cell phone minutes then it could end up finally killing the rip-off roaming charges that many mobile subscribers gripe about. All a traveller would need to do is buy a pre-pay SIM in his new country and tell Google to forward calls to that SIM.

All of the features seem to come from an Internet view of the phone system. Essentially Google Voice adds a layer of virtualization to the phone system so that users have one number but depending on their mood, who is calling etc., callers get different service - including a fake “this number out of service” message for people you really don’t want to talk to. One suspects it wouldn’t be too hard for Google to extend this so that call forwarding would include forwarding to/from VOIP services like GoogleTalk (or Skype).

Finally I have to say that some of the call-forwarding by group and voicemail features would actually be interesting for pure IP services. If Google Voice could add some kind of chat feature (i.e. integrate Google talk) then this would quite possibly kill Skype and many other IM applications.

The current (online) edition of IEEE Spectrum magazine reports a very interesting “breakthrough” in memory technology. It is reported that a team of physicists the University of California, Berkeley, has developed an electromechanical memory device based on “carbon nanotubes”. Its developers, led by Alex Zettl, claim the reliable storage of data for up to a BILLION years!

Memory states are represented by the physical position of an iron “nanocrystal” inside a hollow carbon “nanotube”. If the iron crystal is at one end of the tube then a “1″ is represented. If it is at the other then we have a “0″ state. It is said that an expected data density of 1 terabyte per square inch can be expected in practical devices!

To me this seems a major breakthrough. Long-term storage of digital data is a serious problem for the whole of society. Most records today are created in digital form. In addition, all around the world people are digitising old (paper) records and making them available on the Internet. The problem is that we really don’t have a good technology for storing digital information reliably for any reasonably long period of time.

• Data stored on any magnetic medium (tape or disk) does decay over time. Personal experience shows that “Floppy Disks” recorded in the 1990’s have already decayed to the point where they cannot be read. Some people claim that magnetic tapes might last for 100 years - past experience suggests that this is more like 20 years. Albeit if someone came up with an archival magnetic tape storage technology using a serious amount of “Forward Error Correction” then perhaps we might think about 100 years.
• CDs can be very good. But plastic decays and deforms over time and the reflective backing (critical to the operation of the CD) is usually made of aluminium. If air can get to the aluminium it decays and you get the phenomenon called “CD Rot”. This has been a problem for CDs already. However, the CD architecture contains a very high level of “Forward Error Correction” (FEC). Originally intended to overcome the problem of dust and scratches on “music CDs”, the FEC technology used is brilliant! Kodak claims a 300 year life for its archival CD’s with a “gold” reflective layer (which will not “rot”). Of course then there is the potential longevity (or lack thereof) of the dyes used in “recordable” CDs. Of course to get any kind of longevity from a CD you have to store it in a dark place with stable temperature.
• One of the ways that DVDs got their higher capacity (versus CD) was to remove some of the “Forward Error Correction”. Thus Kodak only claims 100 years for its recordable DVDs.
• Flash memories will also decay over time.

Many people make the (legitimate point) that in years to come it is very unlikely that hardware will be available that can read today’s media or that there will be software that understands it. A good point! They say that all digital media should be refreshed (by copying and perhaps re-formatting) at 10 or 20 year intervals. Most of us do this with our business information simply because we change computers every 5 years and have to migrate the data. But how many businesses just store old tapes and disks expecting that the data will be recoverable if/when the time arrives?

Nevertheless - problems of reading the media and understanding the data formats are problems for the people of the future. Today’s problem is to save the information.

With “Carbon Nanotube Storage” it seems that we finally have a way.

Having just purchased a new HDTV set it seemed to me that the time had come start thinking about upgrading my old DVD player.  Full definition HDTV will take a lot more storage and “Blu-Ray” looks like a great idea. But for me there is a major problem.

Developing a blue semiconductor laser was a “very good trick”, but there is no “rocket science” about the idea of using blue light in a disk recording system.  The principles are exactly the same as before.  The red light used in a regular DVD has a wavelength of 650nm.  In the last few years low cost semiconductor lasers with a wavelength of 405nm have become available.  Wavelength limits the resolution of the light beam and the shorter wavelength means higher data density and therefore greater capacity.  Of course, while we are in the process of inventing a new standard, changes can be made in other areas of the protocols in line with experience gained over the years with DVD and CD. Blu-Ray gives about 6 times the data capacity of DVD (around 25 GBytes) with something less than half of this improvement coming from the change in wavelength.

Gone unnoticed in the hyperbole is a “feature” called “Region Coding”.  DVD’s had it too.  Region Coding is a totally artificial system which has only one purpose - to restrict international trade.  Players are manufactured with a “Region Code” theoretically “hardwired” into them. Disks are also encoded
with a Region Code.  If you try to play a disk with a region code that is different from that of the player
then it won’t play!

It must be emphasized that Region Coding has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with preventing people from making unauthorized copies.  Nor does it have anything to do with the technical standards used by the various TV systems.  Most TV sets and DVD players (outside the US) will play disks of any of the common technical standards.

The idea of Region Coding is to segment the “world market” into regions so that different prices can be
charged in different regions.  The Film Studio mouthpieces say that they just want to control release of new films into different regions at different times.  In the world today many people travel and if they see a DVD or Blu-Ray at a good price it is perfectly reasonable that they might want to buy it and take it home to use.  Region Coding prevents that.  It also prevents retailers in one country from buying their disks wholesale in another country - in most countries this is a perfectly LEGAL activity. Yet another effect is that it hampers Internet retailers like “Amazon” from selling “cross-border” - another LEGAL activity.
It is critical to realize that we are talking here about legally purchased disks with all royalties
paid - these are NOT unauthorized copies!

Clearly there is only one aim here - to charge different prices in different countries according to what producers think “people can afford”.

From the manual of a popular player

In the DVD world, most DVD players adopted Region Coding and after a while dozens of sites popped up around the Internet which gave easy directions for circumvention of the system in most popular players.  Usually this involved some patching of the player software - a one-time job which is easy enough to do from the remote control. Sony saw all this and just abandoned Region Coding in its players.

Enter Blu-Ray.  Apparently if you want to build a Blu-Ray player you have to enter into a contract with the
Blu-Ray Disc Association that guarantees that you MUST support ALL of their “Digital Rights Management” protocols.  Thus today’s Blu-Ray players enforce DVD Region Coding (when they play “regular DVDs”) as well as Region Coding for “Blu-Ray” disks.

It is true that about 70% of the Blu-Ray disks on the market are coded so that they will operate in any region. It is also true that “illegal hacks” for Blu-Ray players are becoming available from many web sites that circumvent the problem.  That is not the point.

How is that a technical consortium can get together with the objective of RESTRICTING world trade and
actually put it into practice!  To a simple Engineer it would seem that the restriction of trade conflicts with various “Trade Practices” laws and laws against anti-competitive practice enacted in most civilized countries.

The EU persues Microsoft and Intel for “restrictive practices” why not the “Blu-Ray Disc Association”.

For me - I am NOT buying one until I can have one that is totally Region Coding free.

The Google IO conference is providing a host of interesting announcements. One that is currently getting a good deal of coverage is “Google Wave“. Of course we have to see what actually shows up but what it looks like is a bunch of snazzy Web2.0 AJAXy (with added HTML 5!!!) frontends and tools to a wiki. This is not necessarily a bad thing - wikis tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic and also very poor at handling anything other than raw text - but a jazzed up Wiki doesn’t sound quite as revolutionary as perhaps Google would like us to think Wave is.

On the other hand the announcement of SaaS/cloud interoperability between Google and Salesforce.com, which doesn’t sound particularly novel, may in fact be truly revolutionary for the users. By combining the clouds it becomes possible to write applications that use numerous Google tools and utilities (including I suppose Google Wave) and access the business data in Salesforce.com. This sort of integration may end up having a signficant effect on the business world at large because it permits even very small companies to have the seamless IT backend that hitherto have required large MIS organizations and have therefore only been possible for large enterprises. Indeed many large organizations have problems integrating customer facing sales and support data/applications with internal ones so it is possible that this integration may actually tip the balance in favor of smaller nimbler companies.

The one downside I can see with this integration is that it potentially leads to worse security breaches because a poorly written google API app could now expose all the salesforce.com data to an infiltrator. This, on the other hand, is something that the Wave team seem to have thought about since Wave will, we are told, not be tied to Google’s servers and can in fact be installed inside the company firewall.

At present (16:00 GMT) it seems like many Network solutions DNS servers - the ones that are ns*.worldnic.com - are not reachable over the internet. Traceroutes that I have done from servers in the USA and France end up in xo.net or cybercon.com and then fail.

This would seem to be a major problem for all those who use these DNS servers (including unfortunately Extendance).

More irritatingly there seems to be no network solutions support page which will reports the status of its DNS servers - even to those of us who are customers of it. This makes it hard to be sure that this is the problem and even harder to tell whether it is a known issue that is being worked on or not. On the other hand the nwtwork solutions account page is extremely keen to sell the customer more services. One wonders whether these sales tools also use network solutions hosted DNSes…

Edit: Shortly after I wrote that everything started working again. However I repeat that it would be NICE if network solutions had an easy way to check status…

Edit2: Network Solutions’ blog has some kind of coverage of the issue - though that coverage appears to have showed up after the problem was resolved. In addition the two tickets I raised (for 2 domains) were only handled (and marked resolved) 22 and 33 hours later respectively. The 22 hour later response apologized, said that “Network Solutions encountered DNS issues at the time you submitted your support request” and then gave tips for help if there were still problems. The 33 hour later response was rather less helpful and made no mention of the DNS problems.

Science Fiction writers are, as a general rule, supposed to have a handle on the future and often this is indeed so. If they come from a computer/high-tech background then this is even more the case. Hence the recent speech by Charlie Stross at LOGIN 2009 is well worth reading and pondering.

The speech is about the future of computing, and particularly gaming, over the next 20 years and it has a number of somewhat controversial predictions. One of which is that Mr Stross predicts that we are approaching the end of Moore’s law with regard to chip power and density. Another, perhaps less controversial point, is that the race for CPU manufacturers and architectures appears to now be at “Game over” with two winners: Intel and ARM. What Mr Stross points out that is frequently missed though is that if one counts raw numbers then ARM is in fact the out and out winner. This is because ARM utterly dominates the modern embedded CPU market and embedded devices are far more numerous than PCs, laptops and servers. ARM’s numerical domination has actually been true for (almost) all of the last decade although in the beginning the major CPU types were venerable 8-bit designs. These days new designs all use ARM cores primarily for power reasons as it is rare than a controller actually needs the memory and CPU power of an 32 bit core.

More interestingly he points out that while processing power may be plateauing network bandwidth still shows plenty of potential for multiple generations of growth. Current bandwidth is in the Gigabit/second range and physics only starts predicting problems when we get in the multiple terabits/second range. Of course some media are probably almost maxed out (copper wiring for example) but wireless and fiber transmissions still have a long way to go before hitting limits.

I won’t descibe much more, really it is better to read the original and the comment thread it inspired.