Herman "Hy" Goldman turned 101 this weekend and won't quit after 73 years working at the same New Jersey job.
Goldman still shows up four days a week at light fixtures company Capitol Lighting in East Hanover. His co-workers celebrated his birthday with him on Monday.
Aside from a brief absence to serve in the U.S. Army in World War II, Goldman has worked at Capitol Lighting since 1941. The store says he was first hired to sell items and stock and
Lighting repair specialist Herman "Hy" Goldman, 101, refurbishes a light fixture in his workshop at Capitol Lighting where he has worked for 73 year, in East Hanover, N.J. Now that he has turned 101.
Samsung is hoping to regain momentum in its battle with Apple, announcing global product launches of a virtual reality headset, another big screen phablet, and updates to the Galaxy smartphone and Gear line-ups. Conway G. Gittens reports.
What’s 27 inches across and
has almost twice the pixel count of your puny 4K monitor? Dell’s new
UltraSharp 5K monitor, that’s what. With a resolution of 5120×2880, the
27-inch monster has seven times as many pixels as your 1080p monitor, or
four times as many as your 2560×1440 (1440p) monitor. It has a PPI of
218, which puts it on about par with the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina
display (2880×1800). When it goes on sale around Christmas time — for
$2500 — it will finally replace IBM’s mythical 13-year-old T220/T221 as
the highest-res desktop monitor.
The Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD
5K monitor, to give its full name, is, unsurprisingly, a
workstation-grade piece of hardware. It has all the usual trappings of a
professional monitor, such as Dell PremierColor calibration, and an
anti-smudge/anti-reflective coating. There’s six (!) USB ports and a
media card reader, too. Curiously there’s also two integrated 16W Harmon
Kardon speakers for some reason — presumably because Dell thought you
should get a little extra if you spend $2500 on a monitor.
At
5120×2880, Dell’s new monitor has a total pixel count of 14.7 million
(14,745,600 to be exact). A 4K monitor or TV, by comparison, clocks in
at just 3840×2160 – 8.3 million pixels. Your puny 1080p monitor or
smartphone has just 2 million pixels. 5120×2890 at 27 inches works out
at 218 PPI — comparable to high-res laptops such as the Asus Zenbook or Apple Retina MBP, but lower than the 300+ PPI of modern tablets and smartphones. Most importantly, though, 218 PPI is more than double your current 22- or 24-inch desktop monitor, which is probably sitting at around 100 PPI.
Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K monitor, side, portrait mode
As for how
Dell got to 5K when everyone else is just starting to hit 4K, we have
to do a little guesswork. As far as we’re aware, no one is actually
making 5120×2880 panels, especially not at 27 inches diagonal– so what
we’re probably looking at is two 2560×2880 panels squished together as a
“tiled display.” This is the same approach that we’ve seen with some 4K
monitors, which use two 1920×2160 panels rather than a single 3840×2160
unit. In the case of Dell’s 5K monitor, it is probably driven via two
DisplayPort 1.2 connectors with Multi-Stream Transport (MST).
If Dell’s UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K monitor
really is a tiled display, then that just reaffirms that is for
professional users who need as much resolution as possible — and not for
gamers. With 2880 vertical pixels, the Dell 5K screen will be amazing
for looking at entire websites or page layouts without having to zoom or
scroll. 5120×2880 is close to the resolution of top-end DSLRs, too. I’m
sure some gamers will be tempted to pick one up, but considering the
poor state of 4K gaming — both in terms of raw GPU grunt and software
support — and the fact that the Dell 5K monitor has almost twice the number of pixels, you better have one hell of a rig. Two Radeon R9 295X2s ought to do it.
The
Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K monitor should be out in time for
Christmas, priced at $2500. Yes, it seems those high-res desktop
monitors, which have been surprisingly absent for so many years, are finally coming. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and start writing a letter to Santa.
Engine technology being developed for a British space plane could also find its way into hypersonic aircraft built by the U.S. military.
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory is studying hypersonic vehicles that would use the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), which the English company Reaction Engines Ltd. is working on to power the Skylon space plane, AFRL officials said.
"AFRL is formulating plans to look at advanced vehicle concepts based on Reaction Engine's heat-exchanger technology and SABRE engine concept," officials with AFRL, which is based in Ohio, told Space.com via email last month. [The Skylon Space Plane (Images)]
SABRE and Skylon were invented by Alan Bond and his team of engineers at the Abingdon, England-based Reaction Engines.
SABRE burns hydrogen and oxygen. It acts like a jet engine in Earth's thick lower atmosphere, taking in oxygen to combust with onboard liquid hydrogen. When SABRE reaches an altitude of 16 miles (26 kilometers) and five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), however, it switches over to Skylon's onboard liquid oxygen tank to reach orbit. (Hypersonic flight is generally defined as anything that reaches at least Mach 5.)
Two SABREs will power the Skylon space plane — a privately funded, single-stage-to-orbit concept vehicle t-hat is 276 feet (84 meters) long. At takeoff, the plane will weigh about 303 tons (275,000 kilograms).
The SABRE heat exchanger is also known as a pre-cooler. It will cool the air entering Skylon's engines from more than 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) down to minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 150 degrees C) in one one-hundredth of a second. The oxygen in the chilled air will become liquid in the process. [Skylon's Many Possible Missions (Video)]
"The [pre-cooler] performance has always been pretty much what we predicted," Bond explained in an interview with Space.com at the Farnborough International Airshow in England on July 16. "We've now done over 700 actual tests. It's now done as much service as a pre-cooler would in a real engine."
Bond's team has also successfully tested the pre-cooler for a problem aviation jet engines have to deal with: foreign objects being sucked in.
"We know it [the pre-cooler] can take debris, insects, leaves," Bond said.
Bond estimates that the pre-cooler is now at a technology readiness level (TRL) of about 5. NASA and AFRL use a 1-to-9 TRL scale to describe a technology's stage of development. According to NASA's TRL descriptions, 5 represents "thorough testing" of a prototype in a "representative environment."
The AFRL work is being carried out under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Reaction Engines that was announced in January. AFRL officials told Space.com that they are using computers to model SABRE.
"The Air Force research laboratories in the States have carried out some modeling to verify that the SABRE does actually work, that it is a real engine, and so I am hoping they are going to confirm that very soon," Bond said.
"This is obviously opening doors in the United States, and again, I can't say a great deal about that, but we have very good dialogue going across the Atlantic," he added. "In the next couple of years, it's going to be quite exciting."
Bond declined to confirm rumors of organized support within the U.S. aerospace community that involves former senior program managers of the U.S. military's most high-profile defense projects.
Bond sees Skylon as an international project that would include the U.S. and Europe.
"We're in dialogue with people across Europe in regard to supplying [rocket engine components]. We don't want to reinvent the wheel; we'd like to be the engine integrator and put it on our test facilities and run it," he explained.
Two SABRE engines are expected to be tested in 2019. "Hopefully, the earlier part of 2019," Bond said. "I'd like to feel we can test them on Westcott. That is where the rocket propulsion establishment used to be." (In the 1950s and 1960s, the United Kingdom had its own space program; the nation launched a satellite called Prospero with its last rocket, Black Arrow, in 1971. Westcott is about a one-hour drive from Reaction Engines' headquarters).
The SABRE development program is expected to cost 360 million British pounds ($600 million at current exchange rates). "We've got 80 million [British pounds] of the 360 million lined up. We're well on our way to that," Bond said.
Of the 80 million pounds, 60 million is from the U.K. government. As with the commercial ventures NASA supports, Reaction Engines has to meet milestones to acquire those government funds.
"We have to meet milestones, but those are programmatic issues," Bond said. "There is nothing contentious about that; it is just a matter of getting the work done to get there. I think of it as an R&D program, and we've done the 'R' bit, and this part forward is the 'D' bit. We've spent years making sure the technology actually works."
In January, this R&D program reached its third phase, which is split into four sections, known as 3A, 3B, 3C and 3D. Sections 3A and 3B are being carried out in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA).
Section 3A began in January and will last until April 2015. It involves the engine's system design, revising the engine's layout and studying the impact on Skylon's performance. This work will cost 8 million euros ($10.7 million, or 6.4 million British pounds), half of which will come from the U.K. government and ESA and the other half from Reaction Engines' private investment.
"This is it for real now; this isn't studies anymore," Bond said. Section 3A will continue until spring 2015, and section 3B is due to start in January 2015, he added. "That is the preliminary design phase,." Bond said.”
Section 3B will last until the end of 2015. During this section, the characteristics of the engine components will be defined and technical specifications produced.
Section 3C, which starts from mid-2015, will see 10 million euros ($13.37 million, or 8 million British pounds) from the U.K. government spent. The section 3C work with suppliers overlaps section 3B. This is because some of the components will get specifications during 3B before other parts of the engine are fully defined. Those detailed components with specifications can then be given to prospective suppliers during the first few months of section 3C.
"In 3C, we start to do detailed design — what the bearings will look like, who is the supplier going to be, that sort of stuff. This is really exciting stuff. We're starting to pull the real engine together during the course of next year," Bond said.
He explained that for section 3C, his company will spend "some of the U.K. government money alongside some of our own private investment." The government money has "enabled us to raise quite a few millions of private investment to go alongside that, and we're continuing that [fund-raising] activity," Bond said.
