Yesterday’s trip down memory lane with the Gopher protocol got me thinking about all the other protocols I used to use, and those that I continue to use on a regular basis. There’s little doubt that hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is one of the most widely used protocols on the Internet today. But there are a host of other protocols used every day! Let’s look at a few of my current favorites, and some that have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

If you spend any amount of time using the Internet as we know it today, chances are you have suffered some inconvenience from the variety of interpretations of the various “standards” used to create the web. Every web browser renders web pages slightly differently; some Flash content isn’t compatible with older versions of Flash (and some versions of Flash aren’t supported on some operating systems at all!), etc. If you make your living creating web content, all of those problems may be amplified several times. Doesn’t it make you long for a real standard, where content is king, and presentation of said content is the same, regardless of whether you’re shopping for shoes or looking for an academic journal? The Gopher protocol, created in the early 1990s, had all that, and it ain’t dead yet!

Remember, remember, the 9th of November!
Gadgets, technology, and beer.
I see no reason why gadgets and tech
should ever bring little cheer.

Last year’s Columbus meetup was a huge success, and folks have been asking me when we’ll do it again. Well mark your calendars for Monday, November 9, and join us for a friendly evening of networking and libations at the Surly Girl Saloon, my favorite cowgirl/pirate themed bar!

Conventional wisdom regarding computer memory has for some time been that all RAM is created equal. Stated another way, it’s not really worth it to buy expensive ECC RAM because errors just don’t occur frequently enough to worry about. Even in server-grade products, designed to be running 24/7 in mission-critical environments, ECC RAM is often optional. Mainboards and RAM sold for consumer home use almost never even have the option of supporting ECC memory. A new study from Google indicates that this may be a problem.

So the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t like guys like you and me shining lasers into the sky at airplanes. But what about real scientists looking to use lasers for real scientific research? The current rules require, essentially, a spotter to look for aircraft within twenty five degrees of the laser. Obviously, this is extremely prone to human error. This sounds like a job for science!

To paraphrase my favorite Jack Handy quote, “If the Vikings were around today, they would probably be amazed at the number of wireless audio solutions we have.” Hopefully said Vikings would read reviews of said wireless audio solutions here at CrunchGear, since we’ve covered a fair number of these things. Today we’re taking a look at the Eos wireless audio solution. “Named for the Greek goddess of dawn, Eos lets you put great music all over your house — without the hassle of wires.” Read on for the whole review!

Meet AIDA, the Affective Intelligent Driving Assistant. This is a prototype robot that utilizes sensors inside and outside the car to create “a platform comprising of a personal robot and an intelligent navigation system that aims to bring an innovative driving experience.” I don’t own an automobile, so practically every driving experience is innovative to me right now! Rather than traditional destination-oriented GPS navigation, AIDA posits “a navigation system that mimics the friendly expertise of a driving companion who is familiar with both the driver and the city.” Hopefully AIDA won’t complain about my driving the way all my friends do. Video and more inside!

Reading e-books on a netbook is a nuisance, right? But e-readers are a pain because they’re a single-function device, which means your man-bag gets filled with yet-another-specialty-gadget. Behold the enTourage eDGe: “the world’s first dualbook, combining the functions of an e-reader, netbook, notepad, and audio/video recorder and player in one.”

Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory, with help from researchers at Pennsylvania State University, University of Chicago and Cornell University have confirmed the multiferroic properties of iron titanium oxide (FeTiO3). What’s a multiferroic, you ask? Why, it’s a material that is both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric! “Multiferroic materials show both magnetism and polar order, which are seemingly contradictory properties.”

It wasn’t too long ago that hackers were successful loading custom firmware onto Texas Instruments calculators. This hasn’t been sitting well with TI, who have been sending legal threats to the plucky hackers. I’m not surprised, are you?

With word that MySpace has swapped traditional hard drives for solid state drives, this “prototype” portable data center from a pioneering Dell employee may be a sign of things to come. This is a pretty marked departure from the shipping container data centers being constructed by Google, Sun, and seemingly everyone else. This datacenter-in-a-briefcase is not an actual product (yet!), but just something this guy threw together in his garage.

Graphene, as everyone knows, “is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.” (Seriously, I didn’t just check Wikipedia for that.) Scientists have been using the material for lots of different applications for some time now. Recent work at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center has focused on using graphene as a photodetector, and it turns out that it does a pretty good job in that role.

Full-body scanners are being tested in a variety of airports. I didn’t get the pleasure of using one on my recent trip to Japan, unfortunately, so I can’t provide a first-hand account of what it’s like. I suspect it’s quite unremarkable to walk through one of these. That won’t stop people from being outraged over the fact that some TSA goon sitting in a sterile room somewhere where he can’t see the individual walking through the scanner gets to drool over grainy black-and-white images of everyone’s naughty bits!

I mentioned a newly released hardware encrypted USB flash drive last week, and promised a full review. Here it is! The Lexar JumpDrive SAFE S3000 FIPS is a hardware-encrypted USB drive that satisfies U.S. government computer security standard FIPS 140-2 Level 3. “Physical security mechanisms required at Security Level 3 are intended to have a high probability of detecting and responding to attempts at physical access, use or modification of the cryptographic module.”

The SAFE S3000 FIPS accomplishes this by means of a Gemalto .NET V2.2 FIPS smart card, which provides “tamper-resistant storage, isolation of all security-critical computations, and strong authentication through a stringent PKI-based challenge-response process.”

The metal casing is water proof, and the entire thing is filled with “military-grade epoxy compound” to thwart physical access. This drive has some serious heft to it, compared to other USB sticks. In a pinch, you could probably cause modest pain to someone by throwing it at them. Seriously, this thing is solid. Read on for the whole story.

Great news, Linux users! The Linux Foundation is rolling out new individual membership benefits, including employee purchase pricing on Dell, Lenovo and HP devices. This translates to up to 40% off of store prices. Plus, you can get an @linux.com email address, and the peace of mind knowing that some portion of your membership dues will be going to directly support the continued work of Linus Torvalds! There are a few other perks, too. Full press release inside!

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute — the same Fraunhofer that holds many of the patents on MP3 — have a booth at CEATEC exhibiting some of their research efforts, shopping them around for potential licensees. Their Virtual Mirror display is, I think, a great example of augmented reality done right. It uses a camera, a display, and their special software to dynamically alter the image projected back to the viewer. Video inside!

USB media represents a double-edged sword: on the one hand, data portability is an extremely useful thing; but on the other hand, data portability can be a gigantic liability for your business operations. You can try to train your users not to put sensitive data on USB drives, but chances are that convenience will win out over security, and your data will slip out on USB media anyway. And then it’s all too easy for USB media to simply disappear: I can’t count how many thumb drives I’ve lost. New products are coming soon to help solve this problem.

While Sony is prototyping a single-piece flexible OLED netbook, Toshiba is going the modular route with their L01 series netbook thingie. A 7-inch display is paired with a separate QWERTYkeyboard, giving you something akin to a traditional laptop experience. Or you can leave off the keyboard and use the L01 as a digital photo display, if that’s your thing.

One of the more interesting booths at CEATEC is that of the Tagged World Project. It aims to deploy many RFID tags around an elderly person’s domicile, and then equip their slippers (or other house clothes) with RFID readers that will read the tags in its proximity. Then a variety of analyses can be performed on the data collected to determine, ostensibly, how healthy and active an older person is. Read on for more.

John mentioned TransferJet briefly during the Toshiba press conference at IFA in September. It’s a wireless data transfer system. It’s different from Bluetooth in that there’s no pairing required. It’s also extremely limited in range — like, two inches or less — so there’s less need to worry about someone sending pr0n to your mom’s TransferJet-enabled television. Sony’s got a live demo of TransferJet at their CEATEC booth, and I’ve got to admit that it’s pretty cool — and fast!

How much energy do you think is wasted every day powering devices that aren’t actually being used? I’m not talking about stand-by power consumption, but actually on-and-in-use without a user there. I know a lot of people who turn their TVs on just as “background noise”, without ever actually looking at the screen. Hitachi’s cooking up a system to place TVs in power consumption mode if it detects that the viewer isn’t actually viewing the screen. Click on through to see it in action.

Boy howdy could I use this thing at CEATEC today. Running on a Windows Mobile handheld, Toshiba has a real-time voice translation demonstration. It worked quite well. How much longer until we get the Star Trek universal translators? Video inside!

Sony, and just about everyone else, has been fooling around with OLEDs for quite some time, and they’re starting to come up with some pretty clever applications of the technology. Flexible OLEDs have been in the news this year, and Sony’s getting into that game, too. In this short video we see a 0.2mm thin OLED display being gently bent back and forth, while actively showing content on its surface.