One of my favorite photographers on one of my favorite photographic subjects: the tremendously elusive (thank god) nuclear fission reaction. I’ve seen various shots on cobwebsites, but to my knowledge nobody has collected them in one place. (If anyone has more or higher quality images please comment.)

These impossible sights were captured by “Doc” Edgerton in 1952 at a distance of 7 miles (11.2km) using his recently invented rapatronic camera. He was an electrical engineer from MIT turned photographer and utilized an interesting technique to avoid slow mechanical parts in a shutter. Edgerton co-founded EG&G based on his work and it currently employs 11,000 for NASA and US defense contracts.

The first photo is approximately 1 millisecond after detonation while the blast diameter was 20m. The exposures are (ostensibly) 1,000,000,000/sec., or 10ns. In the later photos you can see rope effect; effectively vaporization of material traveling down the cables and trellising. Unlike modern high-speed photography only one shot could be taken per camera and Doc set up 10 cameras for this blast. I’m missing six photos…

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With the advent of Amazon S3 and its remarkably cheap storage costs, creating services based on scalable storage has never been so easy and inexpensive as it is today. One area where this is most apparent is the boom of network backup products. In years past, companies like Iron Mountain or EMC would have to create their own million-dollar server infrastructures to support client data. Now a days, you don’t need to pay for anything until you’ve collected payments from clients.

What am I getting at? Read more

Let’s take a brief look at what I would call the bottom-line total cost of ownership (TCO) of the original 8GB iPhone versus the forthcoming 8GB iPhone 3G. That is, the TCO of each iPhone with equal data (unlimited), voice (450 min), and SMS text messaging (200 txts).

(Above I’ve charted the initial cost of the iPhone + setup fees + monthly service over 2 years, including taxes and fees. I’ve added a $5/mo text plan and calculated the totals using California sales tax (8.25%) – so the bottom line in different states may be slightly more or less.)

More after the jump, plus another chart of TCO without a text plan… Read more

I want to take a couple of minutes and talk about how compelling the Intel Atom platform is for home servers. There has been lots of buzz around the Atom for the past few months since it’s a very low-cost, uber-power-efficient processor. The Atom can be likened to a vintage Volkswagen Beetle: low-cost and low-power and it will still get you to 65MPH on the freeway, but you wouldn’t really want to use it for anything other than to “get from point A to point B”.

Similarly, the Atom meets the basic computing requirements of average users but not much more. This means you can check email, browse the web, use Office but can’t utilize advanced HD video, 3D games, and so forth.

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I needed a replacement Superdrive and I’ve been really curious as to what exactly is inside the Apple Macbook Air External USB Superdrive. So I bought one for $108 at my local Apple Store and proceeded to destroy the case by opening it using metal clippers to ensure nothing inside got damaged. However, now knowing more about how it is encased using tabs, I’ve written instructions here on how to open it without damaging anything.

While the MacBook Air SuperDrive only works externally with the MacBook Air possibly due to the USB adapter (Update: confirmed), the internal drive component is interchangeable with the internal 12.7mm 17″ Macbook Pro and most G4 PowerBook drives. It will not work with 15″ MacBook Pro or 13.3″ MacBook models since they need a slimmer 9.5mm SuperDrive.

Since it appears nobody has written a pull apart anywhere else, you can view the gory details after the jump…

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