Tuesday, February 16, 2016

The 19th Century plug that's still being used

The BBC are on of the most trusted news sources on the planet,  so when stories fly around about the next iphone dropping it's 3.5mm jack plug and moving to using their own lightning port or bluetooth. We think this is one of the usual stories that flies around before they release any new apple product, but when the BBC picks it up we take note! and this brilliant article shows that the common 3.5mm jack plug has a more of a history than we knew.



After rumours that Apple was going to get rid of the headphone jack in its imminent iPhone 7, more than 200,000 people have signed a petition asking them to reconsider. This humble plug is a rare example of technology that has stood the test of time, writes Chris Stokel-Walker.



For what remains an unconfirmed rumour, a lot of people are upset about the new iPhone. It's alleged that Apple will be scrapping the 3.5mm socket, instead leaving headphones to be plugged into the "Lightning" port - the company's own design of socket.

Cynics have pointed out that while this might enable iPhones to be slightly thinner, it will render many headphones useless and force manufacturers to pay Apple a fee to use their Lightning plugs on products.

The petition says Apple's purported move would "singlehandedly create mountains of electronic waste".

Two stereo audio jacksImage copyrightiStock
It will also be a blow for a piece of technology that has been remarkably resilient. The 3.5mm headphone jack is essentially a 19th Century bit of kit - it is a miniaturised version of the classic quarter-inch jack (6.35mm), which is said to go back as far as 1878.

Both sizes of plug have a nubbin of metal that nips in before flaring out just before the tip. "It needed to be something that could be inserted and removed very easily, but still make a secure connection," says Charlie Slee, a member of the Audio Engineering Society.

Initially the quarter-inch jack was used by operators in old-fashioned telephone switchboards, plugging and unplugging connections. "The standard has always been quarter-inch jacks," says Dr Simon Hall, head of music technology at Birmingham City University.

1st November 1919: Switchboard operators at the telephone switchboard oft the House of Commons, London.Image copyrightGetty Images

Image caption1919: Switchboard operators at the telephone switchboard of the House of Commons, London
"Professional headphones in studios, guitar leads - they all run off quarter-inch jacks."

Of course, as miniaturisation changed audio equipment, so the plug had to have a smaller alternative.

The 3.5mm version quickly became popular, spread by the use of personal headsets on transistor radios in the middle of the 20th Century.

The jack is known as a tip, ring, sleeve - or TRS - connection. The "tip" transfers audio into the left-hand earplug of a stereo headphone set, and the "ring" the right. The "sleeve" is the ground or "shield". This set-up is stereo - the original mono plugs had only tip and sleeve. Certain modern plugs have a second ring to allow control of a headset microphone or volume.

Annotated photograph showing sleeve, ring and tip of TRS jackImage copyrightiStock/BBC
"Technically speaking, it's not a bad design," Slee says of the utilitarian, adaptable design. "If the parts are made cheaply they can break and lose contact, but ultimately it does the job it was designed to do."

And yet, if the rumours - which Apple is not commenting on - are true, it bodes ill for the 3.5mm jack.

Apple has a track record of being early to abolish things which then start to disappear from rival products too. It killed the 3.5 inch floppy disk early. It also was among the first to remove optical drives.

But those signing the petition on the Sum of Us site and social media users have suggested that Apple's motive is greed.

Apple lightning cableImage copyrightAlamy
The potential grief in a switch to Apple's proprietary Lightning connector is obvious.

"It feels painful because you've got hundreds of millions of devices out there that are using the old standard," says Horace Dediu, a technology analyst with in-depth knowledge of Apple.

If you're using £1,000 headphones with your iPhone at the moment, you're going to be slightly cross.

And Charlie Slee thinks consumers are also concerned about ceding control to Apple. "People are mainly upset because they like to think they're in control of their technology," he says.

But this sense of the consumer in control is misplaced, Slee says. "Actually, the contrary is true: The big technology companies have always been in control of how you listen to music and watch videos."

The headphones in history



Thomas Alva Edison (1847 - 1931) American scientist, inventor and industrialist, after spending 5 continuous days and nights perfecting the phonograph, listening through a primitive headphone.Image copyrightGetty Images

Image captionScientist Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931) listens to his phonograph through a primitive headphone
The "primitive headphones" (as above) used for listening to early phonographs were simple acoustic tubes.

Headphones are really just ordinary telephone receivers adapted to fit a headset, says John Liffen, Curator of Communications at the Science Museum. The headset usually had just one receiver for a single ear.

The first headsets with a receiver for each ear were just called "telephones". The name was supplanted by "headphones" by the beginning of the 1920s when they were being widely used to listen to broadcasting via crystal sets.

For many years headphone receivers were the simple "Bell" type with permanent magnet, coil and diaphragm. Today's high-end 'phones are considerably more sophisticated, similar to miniature loudspeakers.

Source: John Liffen, The Science Museum




"I think it's a storm in a teacup," adds Simon Hall. His reasoning? Having a standardised headphone jack on mobile phones and MP3 players is only a relatively recent luxury.

"If you look at the previous generation of phones, things like Nokia phones, you had to have an adapter," he reasons. "If you want to connect headphones to professional equipment, you also need a professional adapter."

As recently as 2010, Samsung phones came equipped with a proprietary headphone port not dissimilar to Apple's rumoured replacement for the 3.5mm socket, the "Lightning" port.

This isn't the first time Apple has aroused ire. Way back in 2007, with the first iPhone, it received complaints that the headphone jack was sunk into the casing.

One technology wag called it "a great business plan - break an important device function, and sell the solution for fun and profit." The problem was fixed when Apple released its second iPhone model in 2008.

But Apple is known for evolving technology: "They got rid of DVDs, they got rid of the floppy disk drive; they got rid of parallel ports, they're eventually getting rid of USB. This is how they move," says Dediu, the Apple-watcher. He reckons the switch to Apple's proprietary connection augurs a planned move to headphones that are akin to the Apple Watch.

Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones in a London recording studio in 1968Image copyrightGetty Images

Image captionMick Jagger of The Rolling Stones in a London recording studio in 1968
Owners of "old" headphones may find themselves having to buy adapters.

Dediu forecasts a rapid change. "What Apple does is catalyse transitions," he says. "It would have happened anyway, but if it wasn't for Apple it'd have taken 10-15 years, but now it'll happen in 5-7 years."

That the time may have come for the 3.5mm jack to be replaced shouldn't come as such a shock, believes Dediu. "Studying Moore's Law and the history of technology, it's clear we're not going to stick around with something analogue for long," he says. "It's almost puzzling that it's taken so long."

Monday, February 15, 2016

ETRI presents a blueprint of the 5G Future

We will see a huge change in the way we access the the internet in the future when 5G is here, at speeds that only big businesses and high level internet companies see at the moment, we will have this to hand on our smart phones and tablets. When 5G is hundreds of times faster than any of the UK's broadbands, households will be looking to the mobile phone companies to supply their home broadband.

A 5G future is no longer a distant one, but an upcoming reality. High quality videos of more than 10Mbps can be served simultaneously to 100 users even in a train running at up to 500km/h. People can experience data rates that are 100 times faster than currently available technologies.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea will hold a "5G technology demonstration" on the 18th December, 2015. It will demonstrate future SNS (social network service) and several 5G core technologies such as "millimeter wave", "Mobile Hot-spot Network", "in-band full duplex" and so on.

5G is the next generation wireless technology that would provide even faster data rates, even lower delays, and even more devices connected than 4G. Accordingly, distinct and differentiated applications are expected in 5G.

ETRI's "future SNS" is a kind of trial service model to apply 5G technologies that provides dynamic user-centric connection to neighboring people, things and spaces. It is characterized by instant content-sharing between users, communication with neighboring things, and Giga-bps(Gbps)-grade video applications in vehicles.



5G core technologies demonstrated by ETRI include the following:

-- MHN (Mobile Hot-spot Network) is a mobile backhaul technology that provides high-speed Internet access of Gbps in vehicles at speeds of up to 500 km/h (e.g. KTX in Korea). Almost 100 passengers can watch videos of high quality simultaneously.

-- ZING is a near-field communication technology that enables mass data to be transmitted with 3.5 Gbps data rate between neighboring devices within the radius of 10cm.

-- Single-RF-Chain compact MIMO technology enables a single antenna to simulate the effect of multiple antenna. It can reduce antenna volume and cancel inter-antenna interference in a multi-antenna system.

-- Millimeter wave (mmWave) beam switching technology provides fast switching of radio beams to mobile users, and therefore allows seamless Gbps-grade service in mobile environments.

-- Mobile Edge Platform (MEP) is a mobile edge cloud server on vehicles that enables passengers to enjoy customized Gbps-grade content and connects them with neighbors, things and spaces. It provides user-centric services.

-- In-band Full Duplex technology can transmit and receive signals simultaneously over the same frequency band. It can increase spectral efficiency by up to two times.

-- Small cell SW technology is designed for AP(Access Point)-sized small cell base stations that can reduce communication dead zones and improve data rates per user in a hot-spot area.

"With this demonstration event, we are officially introducing our R&D results on 5G. We will continue to lead the development of 5G technologies. Also, we are trying to develop commercialization technologies needed by businesses, and to construct a 5G ecosystem." said Dr. Hyun Kyu Chung, vice president of ETRI Communication & Internet Lab.

In January, 2016, ETRI will demonstrate Giga internet service and future SNS in a Seoul subway train installed with MHN and ZING kiosks. ETRI will also introduce hand-over technology on a millimeter wave mobile communication system and 5G radio access technology that satisfies 1 millisecond radio latency.

About ETRI

Established in 1976, ETRI is a non-profit Korean government-funded research organization that has been at the forefront of technological excellence for about 40 years. In the 1980s, ETRI developed TDX (Time Division Exchange) and 4M DRAM. In the 1990s, ETRI commercialized CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) for the first time in the world. In the 2000s, ETRI developed Terrestrial DMB, WiBro, and LTE-A, which became the foundation of mobile communications.

Recently, as a global ICT leader, ETRI has been advancing communication and convergence by developing Ship Area Network technology, Genie Talk (world class portable automatic interpretation; Korean-English/Japanese/Chinese), and automated valet parking technology. As of 2015, ETRI has about 2,000 employees where about 1,800 of them are researchers.

Friday, February 12, 2016

Lenovo to phase out the Motorola brand name

The Motorola brand, which has been a fixture in the technology world for 85 years, is about to be phased out by its parent company Lenovo.

The US-born company was bought from Google by the Chinese giant in 2014, with the company continuing the lineage of Motorola handsets.

However, the days of the Motorola name appearing on phones and in marketing materials will come to an end this year.

Motorola Chief Operating Officer Rick Osterloh told CNET: “We'll slowly phase out Motorola and focus on Moto."

The company plans to simply use ‘Moto’ and the familiar batwing logo for high end devices, while all other handsets will feature the Lenovo Vibe branding. Even the top devices like the Moto X will feature the blue Lenovo logo rather than the Motorola name.

The rather complex blending of the two brands will involve Moto devices being introduced to Lenovo stronghold territories and marketed it as premium devices.

The budget Vibe devices will also be introduced to western markets to complement the high-end Motorola devices according to the report.

If this wasn’t confusing enough, the Motorola company is being retained from an organisational perspective and that division will now oversee all of Lenovo’s smartphones activity.

Motorola is credited with inventing the first mobile phone with the DynaTAC released in 1984. Likewise, the company’s importance to the development of consumer technology in other sectors cannot be overstated.

In 1930 it released one of the first commercially successful car radios and in the 50s had a major role in the foundation of cable television systems. In 1969 a Motorola radio transmitted the first words from the Moon to Earth and in 1990 it launched the world’s first digital HD television.

Adios, Motorola.

Whilst the Motorola Brand name is strong in the mobile phone and two way radio industry it is an important institute in the communications field that should be preserved, as this article says it was there at the start of telecommunications and has been around for longer than most of us can remember, it would be a shame if it was pulled apart by Lonovo.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Hitler Escaped From Germany Through Tunnels Below Berlin

We all know how Adolf Hitler died, don’t we? It was April 30th, 1945. The Nazi cause had been well and truly lost and both the allied forces and the Red Army were invading Germany. Cowering in his bunker, the German dictator put a pistol to his head and fired. His new bride, Eva Braun, took a cyanide tablet and ended her own life shortly thereafter. Their bodies were then placed in a bomb crater, doused with petroleum and burned.

The official story effectively ends there. By the time Russian troops arrived at the scene, all that remained of one of history’s greatest mass-murderers was a charred lower jaw and dental bridge, which matched Hitler’s dental records and so proved that he had indeed died, with Braun, in the bunker.

However, declassified FBI documents reveal that the organisation was actively investigating a number of Hitler sightings during the post-war period. In fact, it appears that quite a few of the powers that be were treating Hitler’s apparent demise with understandably high levels of suspicion. These ideas gain a level of credence from the fact that the US Army was so convinced of Hitler’s survival that they actually mounted at least one covert operation to search for him.

Conspiracy theories abound that he may have faked his own death and escaped to South America, as a number of other high-ranking Nazi party members also managed to do.

Such theories are nothing new. Hitler’s post-war life has been postulated as taking place in locations as exotic and far afield as Brazil, Argentina and even the South Pole. In one instance, a clearly posed-for photo of a man purported to be Hitler made the news, although the facts that a) the man’s face cannot be properly seen, b) he is posing for a photograph in a relaxed and comfortable manner, something a wanted man would be extremely unlikely to do and c) he has a black girlfriend on his arm would suggest that this claim is utter nonsense.

Up until now, any theories of Hitler’s continued survival have had to rely upon elaborate, (often downright fanciful) descriptions of Hitler’s passage from Germany to wherever the authors assert that he ultimately ended up. Historians have exhaustively scoured travel manifests for clues (as if the most wanted man in the world would actually be listed as a passenger under his own name) and questioned scores of people who apparently knew, sighted or spoke to, an elderly Adolf Hitler.

In any instance, Hitler certainly had the means, as well as the motive, to fake his own death and flee Europe. Now, new evidence suggests that, whether he actually managed it or not, escape was almost certainly an option for him.

A hidden network of secret tunnels, located under the streets of Berlin, could hypothetically have enabled Hitler to escape. According to a new documentary series commissioned by the History channel, a false wall, located in a Berlin subway station, could easily have provided an escape route for the dictator.



The team assembled for this task is of a high pedigree, among their number are ex-CIA operative Bob Baer, upon whom George Clooney’s character in the film Syriana is based. He is perhaps best known as one of the men who helped track down Saddam Hussein. Joining Baer is Tim Kennedy, a US special forces operative who was tasked with tracking Osama Bin Laden after 9/11 and Sascha Keil, a German historian representing the Berlin Underworlds association. The team treated Hitler’s proposed escape as a cold case in the modern sense and began a lengthy and thorough investigation into the possibility and plausibility of Hitler’s flight from Germany.

According to the team’s research, a great many Nazis fled Germany from Tempelhof Airport on the 21st April, just one day after Hitler’s final public appearance. Among this exodus were eight planes apparently loaded with Hitler’s personal possessions. Calculating an underground route from Hitler’s last known location to Tempelhof, the team reasoned that he could have made the journey almost entirely underground, except for the last 200 yards or so. The discovery of the false wall/new tunnel, confirmed by sonar analysis, would have connected the subway station (then known as U6) with the airport, allowing Hitler and his entourage to slip away unnoticed as the Soviets marched on the capital and vicious fighting broke out in the streets.

According to The Daily Express, Keil knocked on the wall and the team scanned it after it made a hollow sound. Thus, a plausible escape route for one of the most evil men in history had been discovered. Though initially sceptical, Baer came to admit that it was entirely possible that Hitler survived the war and ended up living out the rest of his days in South America.

As the investigation continued, the team found themselves picking through the ruins of a jungle compound in northern Argentina. The location was full of Nazi artefacts, very possibly the same ones that were secreted out of Berlin in 1945.

The Hunting Hitler team are by no means the first to posit that the fascist dictator spent his final years hiding out in Argentina. Initial investigations and press releases of the 1940’s often allowed for the possibility of Hitler’s continued survival and nobody in either the Soviet, or the allied camps appears to have been 100% convinced of The Fuhrer’s death.

In June of 1945, The Chicago Times reported that Hitler and his wife had absconded to Argentina. This was followed by a number of books, all offering variations on the same story.

The 2014 book Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler by Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams contests that Hitler lived in a small village, not far from the foothills of the Andes and died in the early 1960s. The book proved controversial, and was publicly attacked by many historians, but Argentine journalist and historian Abel Basti, who wrote the bestselling book Hitlers Exile (and accused the aforementioned authors of plagiarism) has also claimed proof of Hitler’s arrival to the country. According to Basti’s book, Hitler underwent plastic surgery and then became an art dealer (remember, he was a painter and an art lover).

Basti’s intensive and meticulous research even produced alleged photos of Hitler, Braun and a daughter named Urich living in exile in the country. He also spoke with interviewees, one of whom remembers his family maintaining a close friendship with the exiled Nazi leader. According to Basti, who was interviewed by beforeitsnews.com, the Russian records present “abundant documentation that shows that Hitler had escaped”, all of which paints a chilling portrait of the exiled Nazi leader living out his remaining days in relative peace and never facing justice for his innumerable crimes against humanity.

For now though, the most disturbing piece of evidence for this theory is simply this, why would a man of Hitler’s ambition, drive and rampant egomania spend years building escape tunnels throughout Berlin and then refuse to use them when the time came to do so?

Of course, even if he did escape, Adolf Hitler would have died long ago. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, amongst a plethora of other ailments, he was 56 years old in 1945 and not in good health â€" and that was 70 years ago. So, any way you slice it, Hitler is definitely dead, which is no bad thing.

Did Hitler Escape Death And Escape To Argentina Under Berlin

We all know how Adolf Hitler died, don’t we? It was April 30th, 1945. The Nazi cause had been well and truly lost and both the allied forces and the Red Army were invading Germany. Cowering in his bunker, the German dictator put a pistol to his head and fired. His new bride, Eva Braun, took a cyanide tablet and ended her own life shortly thereafter. Their bodies were then placed in a bomb crater, doused with petroleum and burned.

The official story effectively ends there. By the time Russian troops arrived at the scene, all that remained of one of history’s greatest mass-murderers was a charred lower jaw and dental bridge, which matched Hitler’s dental records and so proved that he had indeed died, with Braun, in the bunker.

However, declassified FBI documents reveal that the organisation was actively investigating a number of Hitler sightings during the post-war period. In fact, it appears that quite a few of the powers that be were treating Hitler’s apparent demise with understandably high levels of suspicion. These ideas gain a level of credence from the fact that the US Army was so convinced of Hitler’s survival that they actually mounted at least one covert operation to search for him.

Conspiracy theories abound that he may have faked his own death and escaped to South America, as a number of other high-ranking Nazi party members also managed to do.



Such theories are nothing new. Hitler’s post-war life has been postulated as taking place in locations as exotic and far afield as Brazil, Argentina and even the South Pole. In one instance, a clearly posed-for photo of a man purported to be Hitler made the news, although the facts that a) the man’s face cannot be properly seen, b) he is posing for a photograph in a relaxed and comfortable manner, something a wanted man would be extremely unlikely to do and c) he has a black girlfriend on his arm would suggest that this claim is utter nonsense.

Up until now, any theories of Hitler’s continued survival have had to rely upon elaborate, (often downright fanciful) descriptions of Hitler’s passage from Germany to wherever the authors assert that he ultimately ended up. Historians have exhaustively scoured travel manifests for clues (as if the most wanted man in the world would actually be listed as a passenger under his own name) and questioned scores of people who apparently knew, sighted or spoke to, an elderly Adolf Hitler.

In any instance, Hitler certainly had the means, as well as the motive, to fake his own death and flee Europe. Now, new evidence suggests that, whether he actually managed it or not, escape was almost certainly an option for him.



A hidden network of secret tunnels, located under the streets of Berlin, could hypothetically have enabled Hitler to escape. According to a new documentary series commissioned by the History channel, a false wall, located in a Berlin subway station, could easily have provided an escape route for the dictator.

The team assembled for this task is of a high pedigree, among their number are ex-CIA operative Bob Baer, upon whom George Clooney’s character in the film Syriana is based. He is perhaps best known as one of the men who helped track down Saddam Hussein. Joining Baer is Tim Kennedy, a US special forces operative who was tasked with tracking Osama Bin Laden after 9/11 and Sascha Keil, a German historian representing the Berlin Underworlds association. The team treated Hitler’s proposed escape as a cold case in the modern sense and began a lengthy and thorough investigation into the possibility and plausibility of Hitler’s flight from Germany.

According to the team’s research, a great many Nazis fled Germany from Tempelhof Airport on the 21st April, just one day after Hitler’s final public appearance. Among this exodus were eight planes apparently loaded with Hitler’s personal possessions. Calculating an underground route from Hitler’s last known location to Tempelhof, the team reasoned that he could have made the journey almost entirely underground, except for the last 200 yards or so. The discovery of the false wall/new tunnel, confirmed by sonar analysis, would have connected the subway station (then known as U6) with the airport, allowing Hitler and his entourage to slip away unnoticed as the Soviets marched on the capital and vicious fighting broke out in the streets.

According to The Daily Express, Keil knocked on the wall and the team scanned it after it made a hollow sound. Thus, a plausible escape route for one of the most evil men in history had been discovered. Though initially sceptical, Baer came to admit that it was entirely possible that Hitler survived the war and ended up living out the rest of his days in South America.

As the investigation continued, the team found themselves picking through the ruins of a jungle compound in northern Argentina. The location was full of Nazi artefacts, very possibly the same ones that were secreted out of Berlin in 1945.

The Hunting Hitler team are by no means the first to posit that the fascist dictator spent his final years hiding out in Argentina. Initial investigations and press releases of the 1940’s often allowed for the possibility of Hitler’s continued survival and nobody in either the Soviet, or the allied camps appears to have been 100% convinced of The Fuhrer’s death.

In June of 1945, The Chicago Times reported that Hitler and his wife had absconded to Argentina. This was followed by a number of books, all offering variations on the same story.

The 2014 book Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler by Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams contests that Hitler lived in a small village, not far from the foothills of the Andes and died in the early 1960s. The book proved controversial, and was publicly attacked by many historians, but Argentine journalist and historian Abel Basti, who wrote the bestselling book Hitlers Exile (and accused the aforementioned authors of plagiarism) has also claimed proof of Hitler’s arrival to the country. According to Basti’s book, Hitler underwent plastic surgery and then became an art dealer (remember, he was a painter and an art lover).

Basti’s intensive and meticulous research even produced alleged photos of Hitler, Braun and a daughter named Urich living in exile in the country. He also spoke with interviewees, one of whom remembers his family maintaining a close friendship with the exiled Nazi leader. According to Basti, who was interviewed by beforeitsnews.com, the Russian records present “abundant documentation that shows that Hitler had escaped”, all of which paints a chilling portrait of the exiled Nazi leader living out his remaining days in relative peace and never facing justice for his innumerable crimes against humanity.

For now though, the most disturbing piece of evidence for this theory is simply this, why would a man of Hitler’s ambition, drive and rampant egomania spend years building escape tunnels throughout Berlin and then refuse to use them when the time came to do so?

Of course, even if he did escape, Adolf Hitler would have died long ago. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, amongst a plethora of other ailments, he was 56 years old in 1945 and not in good health â€" and that was 70 years ago. So, any way you slice it, Hitler is definitely dead, which is no bad thing.