cross pond high tech

A new highway in China is being built that will have dedicated lanes for autonomous vehicles. The lanes reserved for self-driving cars will be built on a new freeway connecting Beijing and the Xiongan New Area in Hebei province. The area is located about 60 miles southwest of Beijing.

The 100-kilometer (62 mile) freeway will be open to two-way traffic, with two of the eight lanes specially designed for autonomous vehicles, according to the Beijing Capital Highway Development Group Co. Construction on the project will begin this year. The speed limit on the highway will range from 62 to 74 mph.

The stretch of highway will also include intelligent road infrastructure and smart-toll facilities. This intelligent infrastructure system can acquire vehicle data and road information through wireless communication and internet technology, improving traffic flow and safety.

"It will be the most convenient freeway between Beijing and Xiongan," Zhou Xiaohong, deputy head of the group's department of technology and planning, was quoted as saying by Beijing Daily.

When the Beijing-Xiongan freeway is complete, travel time from the capital city of Beijing to Xiongan will be cut to one hour from the current two and a half hours, according to the outline.

The highway is one of several planned for the region. An outline for the Xiongan New Area lists four north-south freeways and three east-west expressways which will be built linking Xiongan with surrounding cities, including Beijing, Tianjin and cities in Hebei.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft want more control over the internet’s basic infrastructure

ON SEPTEMBER 21st Microsoft and Facebook announced the completion of a 6,600km (4,100-mile) cable stretching from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain. Dubbed Marea, Spanish for “tide”, the bundle of eight fibre-optic threads, roughly the size of a garden hose, is the highest-capacity connection across the Atlantic Ocean. It is capable of transferring 160 terabits of data every second, the equivalent of more than 5,000 high-resolution movies.

Such ultra-fast fibre networks are needed to keep up with the torrent of data flowing around the world. In 2016 international bandwidth usage reached 3,544 terabits per second, roughly double the figure in 2014. Firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft used to lease all of their international bandwidth from carriers such as BT or AT&T. Now they need so much network capacity to synchronise data across their networks of data centres around the world that it makes more sense to lay their own dedicated pipes.

This has led to a boom in new undersea cable systems. The Submarine Telecoms Forum, an industry body, reckons that 100,000km of submarine cable was laid in 2016, up from just 16,000km in 2015. TeleGeography, a market-research firm, predicts that $9.2bn will be spent on such cable projects between 2016 and 2018, five times as much as in the previous three years.

Top misconceptions

1. Driver assistance systems will evolve gradually into fully autonomous cars
2. The first models of fully autonomous cars will be targeted to the consumer and will be available for purchase
3. It will take decades until most of the vehicles on the road are capable of autonomous driving
4. Self-driving cars are controlled by classical computer algorithms (if-then rules)
5. Public demonstrations of self-driving cars provide an indication of their capabilities
6. Self-driving cars need to make the right ethical judgements
7. To convince us that they are safe, self-driving cars must drive hundreds of millions of miles
8. Self-driving cars will increase congestion in cities

Half a decade ago, Jonathan Heiliger compared the world of Internet data centers to Fight Club.

It was the spring of 2011, and the giants of the Internet—including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—were erecting a new kind of data center. Their online empires had grown so large that they could no longer rely on typical hardware from the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM. They needed hardware that was cheaper, more streamlined, and more malleable. So, behind the scenes, they designed this hardware from scratch and had it manufactured through little-known companies in Asia.

This shadow hardware market was rarely discussed in public. Companies like Google saw their latest data center hardware as a competitive advantage best kept secret from rivals. But then Facebook tore off the veil. It open sourced its latest server and data center designs, freely sharing them with the world under the aegis of a new organization called the Open Compute Project. “It’s time to stop treating data center design like Fight Club and demystify the way these things are built,” said Heiliger, then the vice president of technical operations at Facebook. 

Google was the first company to rethink data center design for the modern age.

With the Open Compute Project, Facebook aimed to create a whole community of companies that would freely share their data center designs, hoping to accelerate the evolution of Internet hardware and, thanks to the economies of scale, drive down the cost of this hardware. That, among other things, boosts the Facebook bottom line. It worked—in a very big way. Microsoft soon shared its designs too. Companies like HP and Quanta began selling this new breed of streamlined gear. And businesses as diverse as Rackspace and Goldman Sachs used this hardware to expand their own massive online operations. Even Apple—that bastion of secrecy—eventually joined the project.

Two big holdouts remained: Google and Amazon. But today, that number dropped to one. At the annual Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, Google announced that it too has joined the project. And it’s already working with Facebook on a new piece of open source hardware.