'Tis the season of giving... and we've got Mobile Tricks to help you navigate your way through it.
Terrence Diggle checks out new watch styles....
momola90404 shows off a whole new twist on a mobile headset...
and pizzazzery finds a friend in the mall.
And from the Google Mobile team, check out tips on seeing stores before you get there, and checking store stock. Remember to send us your video tips and tricks through the Mobile Tricks YouTube channel! We'll continue posting our favorites to this blog.
A Sparkling New Microwave Idea for the Holidays
In case you did not see this news item, I just thought I had to share it since it is so appropriate for the holidays (Source: Carnegie Institution for Science):
If you are still deciding on what to give the woman (or microwave engineer) who has everything this holiday season, then researchers in Washington may have solved that last minute gift problem � microwaved diamonds. Members of Carnegie Institution�s Geophysical Laboratory have used a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method to grow synthetic diamonds for their experiments. Unlike other methods, which mimic the high pressures deep within the earth where natural diamonds are formed, the CVD method produces single-crystal diamonds at low pressure. The resulting diamonds, which can be grown very rapidly, have precisely controlled compositions and comparatively few defects.
The Carnegie team then annealed the diamonds at temperatures up to 2,000� C using a microwave plasma at pressures below atmospheric pressure. The crystals, which are originally yellow-brown if produced at very high growth rates, turned on the size of crystals or the number of crystals, because the method is not limited by the chamber size of a high pressure press. The microwave unit is also significantly less expensive than a large high-pressure apparatus.
Unfortunately, those late holiday shoppers will still have to go to the store rather than the lab for that diamond ring because the high-quality, single crystal diamond made possible by the new process has a wide variety of applications in science and technology rather than for jewelry. These include the use of diamond crystals as anvils in high-pressure research and in optical applications that take advantage of diamond�s exceptional transparency. Among the more exotic future applications of the pink diamonds made in this way is quantum computing, which could use the diamonds� NV centers for storing quantum information.
If you are still deciding on what to give the woman (or microwave engineer) who has everything this holiday season, then researchers in Washington may have solved that last minute gift problem � microwaved diamonds. Members of Carnegie Institution�s Geophysical Laboratory have used a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method to grow synthetic diamonds for their experiments. Unlike other methods, which mimic the high pressures deep within the earth where natural diamonds are formed, the CVD method produces single-crystal diamonds at low pressure. The resulting diamonds, which can be grown very rapidly, have precisely controlled compositions and comparatively few defects.
The Carnegie team then annealed the diamonds at temperatures up to 2,000� C using a microwave plasma at pressures below atmospheric pressure. The crystals, which are originally yellow-brown if produced at very high growth rates, turned on the size of crystals or the number of crystals, because the method is not limited by the chamber size of a high pressure press. The microwave unit is also significantly less expensive than a large high-pressure apparatus.
Unfortunately, those late holiday shoppers will still have to go to the store rather than the lab for that diamond ring because the high-quality, single crystal diamond made possible by the new process has a wide variety of applications in science and technology rather than for jewelry. These include the use of diamond crystals as anvils in high-pressure research and in optical applications that take advantage of diamond�s exceptional transparency. Among the more exotic future applications of the pink diamonds made in this way is quantum computing, which could use the diamonds� NV centers for storing quantum information.
System Status Dashboard, Quota Details Page, and a Billing Sneak Preview
We're excited to announce a couple new features and a preview for you today:
- an App Engine System Status Site that monitors the latency and uptime of various components and provides real-time visibility into their performance
- a new Quota Details Dashboard, detailing all of the resource quotas that affect your application
- a sneak peak at our upcoming billing feature, which will enable your app to grow beyond our free quotas!
System Status Site
The new System Status Site provides a detailed view into the performance of various App Engine components using some of the same raw monitoring data that our engineering team uses internally. This includes:
- up-to-the-minute overview of our system status with real-time, unedited data
- daily overall serving status for each of our APIs, including any outages or downtime
- detailed historical latency and error-rate graphs for the App Engine Datastore, Images, Mail, Memcache, Serving, URL Fetch, and Users components
In addition to the Downtime Notify Google Group, we'll use this dashboard to announce scheduled downtime and explain any issues that affect App Engine applications. You'll be able to see real data behind any issues that we experience along with explanations from our team.
We'll continue to tune this dashboard to make sure we're providing useful and accurate information about App Engine's uptime. We expect this tool will complement others offered by other companies, such as Hyperic's CloudStatus.
Quota Details Dashboard
For each App Engine application, we now provide a Quota Details Dashboard. This makes it easier to track how much of the free quota your app is using up across bandwidth, CPU, etc. Use it to get detailed information about all of the resource quotas that affect your application.
To use the Quota Details Dashboard, click the "Quota Details" link on the dashboard for any app.
Sneak Preview: Purchasing Additional Resources
As mentioned in the product roadmap, soon you'll be able to buy additional capacity beyond the free quotas. (For reference, we described our expected pricing earlier.) In the mean time, we wanted to give you a brief update on this feature.
You'll be able to buy capacity based on a daily budget for your app, similar to the way AdWords spending works. You'll have fine-grained control over this daily budget so you can apply it across CPU, network bandwidth, disk storage, and email as you see fit. You'll only pay for the resources your app actually uses, not to exceed the budget you set. Here are a couple screenshots from the beta interface:
Of course, we're still working on this feature, so we'll likely make additional changes before releasing it.
We hope you like these new features--please let us know what you think in the discussion group!
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