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Don't believe for one second that Nokia is being altruistic in its motives for changing the license of Qt to LGPL. They have said that the monetary reward to their business would be greater by LGPL'ing Qt than selling licenses. Remember, this is the same company that closed down a profitable production plant laying off thousands of workers, some of whom have has 20+ years with the company, after receiving millions in subsidies from the EU. Only to move production East, where they could pay workers less.

While I am pleased with this move, as Qt is generally technically superior to Gtk. It is, nonetheless important to keep in mind that Nokia does not, and probably will never, have the best interests of the Open Source society in mind.

http://www.edn.com/article/CA6465468.html

Why not read a op-ed piece from someone who both knows about electrical engineering and doesn't have a vested (i.e. profit) interest in the outcome one way or the other?

EDN editor Paul Rako wrote this edotiral recently, "White spaces and black hearts".

Why not read a op-ed piece from someone who both knows about electrical engineering and doesn't have a vested (i.e. profit) interest in the outcome one way or the other?

EDN editor Paul Rako wrote this edotiral recently, "White spaces and black hearts".

The recent note on the avalanche effect and work on bringing light to the edges of windows and putting cells only on the edge have given promise that the watts per dollar will be going up, even if the watt per area figure does not rise as fast as hoped. Another new direction is printing cheap low efficiency cells on windows and possibly even clothing.

I know you're trying to be cleverly ironic here, but you can buy ultracaps today. The higher power capability, swifter charging, longer life, wider thermal operation range, more flexible packaging, and lower maintenance are already there and have been for years along with the superior environmental characteristics. However, "lighter" isn't true yet, since the energy density of an ultracap is an order of magnitude lower than that for a dry cell. That's why a breakthrough such as in this article is such a big deal.

If grapheme could reliably be utilized to create the sort of energy density posited here, any application requiring large amount of batteries (such as electric cars) would benefit greatly. Unfortunately, since capacitors are more prone than dry cells to losing energy over time due to internal resistance, this won't eliminate the need for dry cells entirely.

EDN magazine has electronic design ideas with instructions (not "kits" however): http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=news&spacedesc=designIdeas&industryid=44217 Here is the website's summary: "EDN's Design Ideas, contributed by practicing electronics engineers, deliver practical, innovative circuit designs in a concise format complete with circuit schematic diagrams, application details, and even software code. Design Ideas focus on topics/applications including analog functions, filters, power management, display drivers, FPGAs, microcontrollers, sensors, and much more."

ROHS has been a billion dollar expense to the electronics industry, and it is argued the solutions are causing more enviromental damage than the original problem which was based ONE scientific paper out of the USA which was since retracted.
Lead free is a huge pain.
All soldering processes run 20deg hotter, consuming more electricity and stressing components, especially MLS devices (Mousture absorbed by components turns to steam fracturing parts if you are not careful). Wetting is poorer. Tin whiskers is a problem the industry is still trying to fully understand.
All because some beurorats in the EU listened to one faulty research paper.
http://www.edn.com/article/CA6355639.html

Fluorescents are more efficient than incandescents but they have many disadvantages: slow startup, limited operating temperature, can't be used with dimmers or motion detector switches, contain mercury, and low power factor (a significant problem if reducing strain on the power grid is the goal). Fluorescents are a step in the right direction, but not the final solution.

If you're interested in performance, forget the over-hyped speaker wires. Buy heavy gauge zip cord at the local big-box store. Use the money you save to buy better speakers. From an engineering aspect, it makes no sense to spend large amounts of money for a minor improvement of something which has trivial impact on system performance (speaker wires). It makes good sense to spend more to improve the weakest link in the system (speakers, the last remaining electro-mechanical analog component under your control). Randi and Bob Pease have also weighed in on "high end" audio cables.

Dos games program the system DMA controller directly. It's located at ports 0x00-0x0f, 0xc0-0xdf and 0x80-0x8f. When DMA is active the ISA DMAREQ line is pulsed by the card and the system answers with DMAACK. The actual memory access is done by the ISA system DMA controller.

Now PCI cards are assigned memory/IO space by the Bios and the chipset does the address decoding. Originally the bios would work out how much IO and memory space is needed at boot and program the PCI bridge to forward that region to PCI, and then program all the PCI cards to use resources in that region. E.g. if you have two IO cards requesting 16 port locations, the Bios would set the PCI bridge up to forward ports from 0x4000 to 0x4020 and then assign 0x4000-400f to the first device and 0x4010-0x401f to the second. It won't forward 0x00-0xff, since they are implemented in the chipset. PCI cards have their own DMA controller - they just request the bus and then drive the address bits to whatever memory they want to access themselves - this is called busmastering.

Now consider a PCI Soundblaster card and a Dos game. The game will set up a buffer with samples and program the address into the system DMA controller. The PCI card can't see the IO port accesses since the PCI bridge won't forward them. It can't see DMAREQ and DMAACK since they aren't on the PCI bus.

Now the first solution to this was a to have another connector on the motherboard with the DMAREQ and DMAACK lines for the soundcard. This was called a sideband connector, which is the PCI jargon for a connector that provides access to to signals not on the PCI bus.

http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/112395/graph/24df4fg1.htm

This is bad though, because the fast PCI bus needs to be locked during each slow ISA DMA transfer. The next solution, Distributed DMA essentially splits the system DMA controller into a bunch of single channel slices and allows PCI cards to implement one or more of them using bus mastering. It's quite complicated though and requires support in the PCI bridge, the soundcard and probably in the system Bios too. You can read about it here -

http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/112395/24df4.htm

Now all this really mattered to Creative. They sold Soundblaster cards because lots of Dos games used the SoundBlaster standard - essentially a way to set up IO ports including the ISA system DMA controller. But initial PCI motherboards stopped PCI soundcards from implementing this standard because those cards couldn't support software that used ISA DMA. Then a bit later people started to make motherboards with sideband connectors and finally Distributed DMA. Realistically DDMA support on the motherboard is the only way that the Creative API can be implemented efficiently by a PCI soundcard. So they should have lobbied the PCI SIG to implement it.

Meanwhile of course, Microsoft was promoting DirectX where applications use a Win32 API to access the soundcard and the register interface was hidden in the driver. Which ended up winning - eventually Dos games died out and all soundcards ended up implementing whatever register interface was convenient for them to implement. The Soundblaster register standard effectively died out.

Dos games program the system DMA controller directly. It's located at ports 0x00-0x0f, 0xc0-0xdf and 0x80-0x8f. When DMA is active the ISA DMAREQ line is pulsed by the card and the system answers with DMAACK. The actual memory access is done by the ISA system DMA controller.

Now PCI cards are assigned memory/IO space by the Bios and the chipset does the address decoding. Originally the bios would work out how much IO and memory space is needed at boot and program the PCI bridge to forward that region to PCI, and then program all the PCI cards to use resources in that region. E.g. if you have two IO cards requesting 16 port locations, the Bios would set the PCI bridge up to forward ports from 0x4000 to 0x4020 and then assign 0x4000-400f to the first device and 0x4010-0x401f to the second. It won't forward 0x00-0xff, since they are implemented in the chipset. PCI cards have their own DMA controller - they just request the bus and then drive the address bits to whatever memory they want to access themselves - this is called busmastering.

Now consider a PCI Soundblaster card and a Dos game. The game will set up a buffer with samples and program the address into the system DMA controller. The PCI card can't see the IO port accesses since the PCI bridge won't forward them. It can't see DMAREQ and DMAACK since they aren't on the PCI bus.

Now the first solution to this was a to have another connector on the motherboard with the DMAREQ and DMAACK lines for the soundcard. This was called a sideband connector, which is the PCI jargon for a connector that provides access to to signals not on the PCI bus.

http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/112395/graph/24df4fg1.htm

This is bad though, because the fast PCI bus needs to be locked during each slow ISA DMA transfer. The next solution, Distributed DMA essentially splits the system DMA controller into a bunch of single channel slices and allows PCI cards to implement one or more of them using bus mastering. It's quite complicated though and requires support in the PCI bridge, the soundcard and probably in the system Bios too. You can read about it here -

http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/112395/24df4.htm

Now all this really mattered to Creative. They sold Soundblaster cards because lots of Dos games used the SoundBlaster standard - essentially a way to set up IO ports including the ISA system DMA controller. But initial PCI motherboards stopped PCI soundcards from implementing this standard because those cards couldn't support software that used ISA DMA. Then a bit later people started to make motherboards with sideband connectors and finally Distributed DMA. Realistically DDMA support on the motherboard is the only way that the Creative API can be implemented efficiently by a PCI soundcard. So they should have lobbied the PCI SIG to implement it.

Meanwhile of course, Microsoft was promoting DirectX where applications use a Win32 API to access the soundcard and the register interface was hidden in the driver. Which ended up winning - eventually Dos games died out and all soundcards ended up implementing whatever register interface was convenient for them to implement. The Soundblaster register standard effectively died out.

You will find that the current rating for 14 AWG cables (you probably wouldn't use anything smaller) is typically 18A. Granted there are some derating factors, but you'd be unlucky to have thermal overload on a 14AWG cable from a 10A fuse.

Dude, if all you worry about is thermal overload and such, you have totally missed the point.

Here is a short example... Assume a 12 volt supply. After all that is what the discussion is all about. Now again lets assume a 100 foot extension cord. Again, no problem. That's 14 AWG wire with a 200 foot round trip. Put a 10 amp load on it so we don't overheat the wire. After all overheating is the worry in your example. Pray tell, how many volts will you get to the load with a 10 Amp draw.. The heat isn't the problem. The voltage drop is the problem.

A loss of 5 volts on a 120 volt line is less than a 5% drop. A 5 volt drop in a 12 volt line is a major brownout of about 40% which is unacceptable even though the 10 amp current in the wire is the same. Feed your 12 volt laptop 12 minus 5 or 7 volts and see how well it does.

Back to the math. That 200 feet of wire has a resistance of .00297 ohms per foot or .594 ohms. At 10 amps, a safe current for a 14 guage wire, the voltage drop is 5.94 volts or just about half if you round off the 5.94 volts to 6. You could safely connect the 100 foot extension cord to a 6 volt deep cycle golf cart battery and put a dead short on the end and not overheat the wire, or blow a 15 amp fuse. The current draw would be just over 10 amps.

At 12 volts a shorted 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord would be 12 / 0.594 or only 20.2 amps. Needless to say you would never consider using a 100 foot extension cord for an 18 amp load as you would only deliver a couple volts at that current. The rest of the power would be used for heating the wire.

Anyone doing the math for a DC data center has to deal with this real math to power the load. DC distribution is not done at 12 volt. It still is delivered at a much higher voltage and is still dropped at the load with a switched mode power supply. The DC to DC supplies are more efficient than AC to DC supplies in all the computers and much more efficient than distributing 12 volts to the floor.

Here is an article on using 48 volts and the problems of going more than 35-50 feet.
http://powerquality.com/mag/power_data_center_power/
http://www.leonardo-energy.org/drupal/node/2239

Often Data Centers use 72 volts to 350 volts.
http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=955&Itemid=99999999

575 volts is proposed here;
http://www.edn.com/blog/1470000147/post/1670020967.html

This is a problem with the "Blogosphere" in general. The vast majority (not all but certainly most) just echo news from other sources, or worse other blogs. They do not offer any insight, commentary or additional information on top of their source information. It's a crapshoot whether or not they actually write ANYTHING original rather than copy+paste.

The worst is when you have a blog linking to a blog linking to the original info. FFS people...

The net effect is old news gets constantly recycled and real news gets diluted. How many times have you seen a new blog post about something that actually happened months ago? The "9V battery contains AAAA cells" thing stands out as the most recent example for me: here (2 Jan 2008), here (9 Jan 2007), here (3 Jan 2007), here (23 Dec 2006). You have a "story" at LEAST a year old that has been copied verbatim at least four times!

Original here (No date) as far as I can tell, since all of the above blogs link to it.

Plus, all of these blogs have comment sections, which make them twice as redundant because the comments themselves also fail to add anything most of the time. If they do you'll never find them because there are so many other palces that run the same "story."

Fight the watering down of information! NEVER link to a blog unless it provides something EXTRA to the news! ALWAYS take a few minutes to get as close to the original source as possible! If you run a blog yourself, work to ADD to articles you link to - personal thoughts, additional information, insightful discussion on the topic at hand - be UNIQUE. That's how you get a readership... by having something worth reading.
=Smidge=

The latest CPU voltage-regulator specifications from Intel and AMD call for load-current slew rates of 50 to 200A/sec and peak currents of 60 to more than 120A. These demands are transforming the design of portable power supplies to levels almost like those of utility power. Designing high-current, VRM-compliant CPU power supplies

Shielding and other techniques to reduce the noise. It's not a new problem. An article from 1998 discusses it here. You can google for "emi cpu emissions" for more stuff on this.

...which means it's NOT a standard at all.

And draft standards have large-type caveats on their first pages: DO NOT DESIGN PRODUCTS TO THIS DRAFT STANDARD.

The implication, of course, is that the final released standard most likely will deviate from draft standards in some manner. Some deviances might be fixable via a simple firmware update. Other deviances may require ASIC respins ($$$$) or PCB spins due to form-factor changes.

Yet the various network-products manufacturers got themselves into a bind: in order to make their products seem faster than the next guy, someone jumped the gun and released a product based on a draft standard. Of course, since that industry is made up of sheep, the others followed in short order, releasing products also based on a draft. And guess what? The stuff from Vendor A doesn't play well, if at all, with the stuff from Vendor B.

There's a reason why various vendors' so-called 802.11N products have serious interoperability issues: there's no standard yet!

This particular standard is quite complex (see the article in EDN magazine) and it seems like every vendor implements different features in their own way. Of course each vendor wants their particular features to be part of the standard, and that's one reason why the standard has been delayed. The industry can't stand the delay; after all, 802.11g products are dead since 802.11n became "imminent," and if they can't sell anything, they have problems. So they sell products that are not ready for prime time, promising firmware upgrades if/when the standard is actually ratified. It'll be interesting to see how that all shakes out.

In that same issue of EDN, an editorial makes clear that basically consumers should just wait for the standard. Gimme gigabit Ethernet on a wire any day.

...which means it's NOT a standard at all.

And draft standards have large-type caveats on their first pages: DO NOT DESIGN PRODUCTS TO THIS DRAFT STANDARD.

The implication, of course, is that the final released standard most likely will deviate from draft standards in some manner. Some deviances might be fixable via a simple firmware update. Other deviances may require ASIC respins ($$$$) or PCB spins due to form-factor changes.

Yet the various network-products manufacturers got themselves into a bind: in order to make their products seem faster than the next guy, someone jumped the gun and released a product based on a draft standard. Of course, since that industry is made up of sheep, the others followed in short order, releasing products also based on a draft. And guess what? The stuff from Vendor A doesn't play well, if at all, with the stuff from Vendor B.

There's a reason why various vendors' so-called 802.11N products have serious interoperability issues: there's no standard yet!

This particular standard is quite complex (see the article in EDN magazine) and it seems like every vendor implements different features in their own way. Of course each vendor wants their particular features to be part of the standard, and that's one reason why the standard has been delayed. The industry can't stand the delay; after all, 802.11g products are dead since 802.11n became "imminent," and if they can't sell anything, they have problems. So they sell products that are not ready for prime time, promising firmware upgrades if/when the standard is actually ratified. It'll be interesting to see how that all shakes out.

In that same issue of EDN, an editorial makes clear that basically consumers should just wait for the standard. Gimme gigabit Ethernet on a wire any day.

Thanks for the link.

I was seeking who were "Parallel Processing Corp." (IP corp or are they actually producing something ?) but having such a generic name doesn't help,
and searching for
"parallel processing corp" / "parallel processing corporation" only gives links related to this lawsuit.

I found the filing, and a short but interesting explanation here

Also when searching for "parallel processing" "newport beach", I found the related announcement of Acacia Technologies.

There also seems to be quite a few events about parallel processing in Newport Beach, like the Seventh International Parallel Processing Symposium (April 13-16, 1993)

So has someone a clue about that "Parallel Processor Corp." ?

The new (or not even so new) wave in portable gadget batteries and charging circuitry is the battery-authentication IC. Companies like Microchip, TI and Dallas/Maxim offer these for around $1 in quantity, with levels of nastiness all the way up to SHA-1 encryption between the battery pack and the charger. Of course, the companies behind them claim they're necessary to protect the consumer from counterfeit or underspec'ed aftermarket battery packs.

http://www.edn.com/article/CA6301616.html

Yes folks, slapping in a replacement battery pack for some discontinued gadget can now be a DMCA violation. I wouldn't be surprised to see other manufacturers following Apple's "lead" by using the existing chips to tie a specific battery and charger together, rather than just a specific model of battery as they currently do. At any rate, it just means more inconvenience, frustration and expense for end-users, and more ability for manufacturers to get away with anticompetitive practices while claiming all the while they are in the consumer's best interest.

"this is Slashdot and you're bashing Microsoft."

No, he's quite correct.

Plus, I'll heap some more numbers upon you, just out of spite.

Apple is going to sell 9.5 million iPods ending this quarter. 9.5 _million_ iPods in _one quarter_ , while it took _two_ quarters to sell 1 million Zunes.

9.5 million versus 500 thousand/quarter. Please also note that I'm splitting the Zune sales evenly between two quarters, ignoring the initial early-adopter bump. You're not going to see many Zunes, period.

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articl eid=CA6428719

"According to the firms latest report, global PMP/MP3 player unit shipments will rise to 268.6 million units in 2011, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 percent from 128.7 million units in 2005. In 2007, player shipments are expected to rise to 216.9 million units, up 21.8 percent from 178.1 million in 2006, iSuppli said."

So the market is going to grow by nearly 39 million units _this year alone_ and the Zune will be 2 million of that, roughly. That's not enough to be visible.

--
BMO

not as simple as printing on your inkjet printer but printed circuits (actual circuits, not like a PCB which should really be called a "printed wiring board" since there aren't any *circuits* on it until the components are soldered on) but some people are already doing things like this: http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articl eid=CA6365831&partner=enews&ref=nbth

THe Samsung site says these new drives are based on single cell level NAND technology. It doesn't have as high a density as MCL NAND. Bbut each cell can do 100K rewrites as opposed to the 10K rewrites of the more common MCL NAND. See EDN article on difference between SCL and MCL NAND http://www.edn.com/article-partner/CA6319917.html

Five years ago, you were right. Not anymore.

SiGe is killing GaAs.

Many of the devices communicating in the higher frequences of the microwave range are based on Silicon Germanium. This includes cell phones.

Almost ALL WiFi radios are SiGe [PDF warning]. Some have even moved to RFCMOS.

Most GPS devices are SiGe.

Oh, and TV Tuners, too.

Gallium Arsenide *is* exotic, because it has to be done in specialized fabs, not those that run silicon wafers. That significantly drives up the cost vs. SiGe and RFCMOS.

How do your opinions rank against:

IBM
Department of Energy,
Medical device OEMs,
university researchers
and so on...

opinion of the Cell processor's potential?

While I'll grant you the frame buffer access on the PS3 sucks, it would only take a driver from Nvidia or Sony to remove that restriction.

Electronic News: What's the defining factor that makes some chips better than others?

Reeves: Defects. It becomes a bigger problem the bigger the chip is. With chips that are one-by-one and silicon germanium, we can get yields of 95 percent. With a chip like the Cell processor, you're lucky to get 10 or 20 percent.

Source

Sounds like a good idea for the mass market to me...

I wonder which will come first?

processors with 10 cores
or
razors with 10 blades

Sparc is up to eight cores.

Razors have better hurry.

Good points. Another point is by using PPC architecture they are trying to prevent people buying the console and hack it then use it as a Windows PC. It was a question Bill Gates asked when they present the product to him. I am sure the 360 will be hacked eventually, but it would be a lot harder than the original XBox. What is better is that it will run Linux. Thi sarticle is interesting: http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articl eid=CA6328378&partner=eb&pubdate=5%2F1%2F2006

Ever since news started filtering out about Conroe, the AMD fanboys have been deserting their old object of worship faster than it takes to cook an Athlon XP. It was a 'no-brainer': Conroe was turning the tables on the Athlon 64, and 'ass mastering' it at lower clock speeds -- with faster versions already on the way.

Intel has clearly made a huge comeback, and intends to drive home its advantage still further with the Kentsfield quad-core part.

At least one engineer who thinks changing standards and calling power supplies inefficient is absurd: http://www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1660004766 .html

A friend of mine did an internship at STMicroelectronics in Italy last year, and he told be about the phase-change memory they were developing. This non-volatile memory is based on special materials which can assume two different stable solid states, one amorphous with high resistance, the other crystalline with low resistance, and can be thermically switched between the two. As far as I understand, you can create a memory cell using a tiny spec of this material and an addressing transistor; then you can read it by applying a low current (there will be a large voltage drop in the amorphous state, and a small one in the crystalline state), or write it by applying a higher current (which heats the cell enough to change its state; the final state is determine by the temperature reached). Since the memorization element can be made very small, high densities can be obtained, and because of its tiny size it takes a very little time to heat and cool, so transitions are fast.

I just found an article from 2004 about STMicro's developments; as far as I can tell, Samsung's new memory is based on the same principle. Actually, the entry on phase-change memory on Wikipedia seems to confirm that it is, and lists other companies that are working on this kind of memory, so expect a large influx of PCM devises as more manufacturers bring their products to market.

Its better than working on TURD

So far, all of the USB-over-Ethernet devices I've found support only bulk and interrupt transfers, not isochronous transfers. That means no USB audio devices, and no cameras. (Some of them mention "digital camera" support, by which they mean "mount the card as mass storage or use PTP", not live viewfinder mode.) Several vendors specifically point out "in this firmware release", leading me to suspect that they plan to add isochronous support in the future. Except these products have been out for years and no such update has happened.

That's a shame, because a pile of cheap webcams at the end of such a device would be ideal for home security, machine vision on a tethered robot, and lots of other applications. Being able to pass USB data over a wifi link (using the integrated wifi in a laptop) would mean one less jack to snap off the motherboard. Looks like it's just not meant to be.

I should note: The USB-over-Cat-5 (or USB-over-fiber) devices DO support all types of transfers, because they're working at layer 1, just boosting the USB signal so it'll survive a few extra feet of UTP wiring. It's only the higher level devices, which wrap USB frames in Ethernet frames or IP packets, that can't support the stringent timing requirements of isochronous transfers.

How are transmission lines coming into the picture here?
Transmission lines are defined by thier R,L & C components and so they need to be matched to thier loads to maximise power transfer and minimize reflections. random semi related link
Also doesnt such current flowing through closed loop structures cause good EM waves which can interact with other links in the circuit?
Probably. The trade-off between that design and a open loop square clock strategy, which is very rich in harmonic content, calls out for a proper study.

Cell phones probably aren't powerful enough to cause cancer, but they sure as hell aren't powerful enough to drive a speaker cone from across the room.

But hey, why listen to me? This article by an electronics engineer was just a quick google search away!

"If you want to learn it you gotta either go to the original research articles from the 70s."

http://www.edn.com/archives/1995/080395/16df4.htm

"The extra element theorem is used for analog circuitry. The gist of it is that you remove the reactive elements ( or dependant sources ) from a circuit and then put them back in through a process of correction factors."

[n-extra element theorem]
http://ece-www.colorado.edu/~ecen5807/course_mater ial/nEET.pdf

[Middlebrook's extra element theorem]
http://ece-www.colorado.edu/~ecen5807/course_mater ial/slidesAppC.pdf

Here :

http://www.edn.com/article-partner/CA503389.html

"The endurance of MLC Flash memory is a minimum of 10,000 write/erase cycles per cell, compared to around 100,000 cycles for SLC Flash."

http://www.electronicproducts.com/ShowPage.asp?SEC TION=3700&PRIMID=&FileName=TOSHIBA.apr2004.HTML

"Currently, life expectancy of SLC flash is rated at approximately 100,000 cycles and MLC flash is rated to have approximately 10,000 cycles."

and so on, better? Anybody with a clue about flash memory knows that. Guy from Anandtech was a consumer, not an engineer, that why this "test" is just a "test".

Behind the Gravity Probe B is here and here . It is a fascinating read, esp. about the gyroscopes.

"The four gyro rotors are made of fused quartz, fabricated to an extreme level of material homogeneity and then ground to the near-absolute sphericity (Figure 1). The spheres are round to within 40 atomic layers, which is proportionally equivalent to an Earth-sized sphere with surface height variations of only 16 feet...."

"It's one thing to have a virtually perfect gyro rotor, but that alone does not provide the necessary performance for this experiment......The electric fields center the rotors to a few millionths of an inch. They did not perform the spinning up electrically, however. Instead, they directed a precise stream of helium gas, traveling at nearly Mach 1, at the rotors. It takes about half an hour for the rotor to reach full speed, and it loses less than 1% of this speed over 1000 years in the super-vacuum of the cavity."

GPU != CPU GPU's are VERY good at graphics. More like an "SSE chip" vector processor than a CPU with SSE/3DNow/Altivec tacked on. a good read on GPU's as general purpose photo & video processors. http://edn.com/article/CA6262535.html

NIST has developed a cooler that uses the preferential tunnelling of hot electrons to cool a semiconductor (also reduces vibrations).

Since so many posters complained that the Peltier coolers in the A.C. described in the article are so inefficient, I thought I'd point out that there's a chance that this new NIST invention could make this sort of A.C. a more viable option than it is now.

Electrical is freaking great if your engine is electric or a turbine with stirling voltage ring (it has other names; magnetos is not one of them.) Otherwise of course the generator is on a belt. (Someone made a car with it on a -clutch-; a gearbox is inlined when it's in starter mode. Pricey spare, there.) There are several implementations now, in Volvos and Mercedes (european ones only!?), but the commitment is soft and the exposure of that kind of voltage is limited for obvious reasons (...for use with: http://www.powerstream.com/48v-switchmode.htm ) (plus golf carts and some solar systems) but the 1000s-strong ranks of 48v controllers and electronic accessory devices are still thin in ways. Must've been EDNmag..... http://www.edn.com/article/CA624964.html?spacedesc =newProducts Yes, I think that's our source of choice. That said, shorting your current-gen RoHS-compliant peltier across 48v instead of 12v is not going to run it in a more efficient mode. :) All good kids building efficient amperage supplies is a good thing, though. http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&a rticleID=CA624962 --Utah, Hong Kong: Fiiiiiight! 'Better' electronics though, you say: Remember when ATX power supplies didn't weigh 4 stone? A way to 'jump' a car safely at 48v while keeping voltage tolerance within 4% is its own enigma. Reusing all those old Athlon XP HSFs to condense and cool air though, is really going to help save then environment.

Electrical is freaking great if your engine is electric or a turbine with stirling voltage ring (it has other names; magnetos is not one of them.) Otherwise of course the generator is on a belt. (Someone made a car with it on a -clutch-; a gearbox is inlined when it's in starter mode. Pricey spare, there.) There are several implementations now, in Volvos and Mercedes (european ones only!?), but the commitment is soft and the exposure of that kind of voltage is limited for obvious reasons (...for use with: http://www.powerstream.com/48v-switchmode.htm ) (plus golf carts and some solar systems) but the 1000s-strong ranks of 48v controllers and electronic accessory devices are still thin in ways. Must've been EDNmag..... http://www.edn.com/article/CA624964.html?spacedesc =newProducts Yes, I think that's our source of choice. That said, shorting your current-gen RoHS-compliant peltier across 48v instead of 12v is not going to run it in a more efficient mode. :) All good kids building efficient amperage supplies is a good thing, though. http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&a rticleID=CA624962 --Utah, Hong Kong: Fiiiiiight! 'Better' electronics though, you say: Remember when ATX power supplies didn't weigh 4 stone? A way to 'jump' a car safely at 48v while keeping voltage tolerance within 4% is its own enigma. Reusing all those old Athlon XP HSFs to condense and cool air though, is really going to help save then environment.

The Itanium is the hardware equivalent of this Joel on Software parable, and a close relative to IBM's biggest blunder.

AMD64/EM64T provides a solid upgrade path from x86, whereas the horrible x86 perfomance of the Itanium (first in hardware, then in software) makes it a clean break. In the real world, where we depend on cheap, commodity x86 server hardware and applications, a clean break to a more expensive, incompatible, unproven platform was just not attractive to customers.

And don't discount the AMD factor. Even Intel-only shops benefit from the price and performance pressure any measure of competition in the x86 market provides. Moving to an Intel-only platform would remove the last barrier to permanent hardware lock-in.

I'm a technical editor for EDN Magazine, and am scheduled to be in Maui on vacation in early May. While I'm there, I've scheduled (several weeks ago) an onsite interview with Maui X-Stream, the promoters of CherryOS. Yesterday morning I got an email from company president Jim Kartes clarifying Slashdot's earlier heads-up that the software had been pulled, and yesterday's CherryOS website revision; "Due to Overwhelming Demand, Cherry Open Source Project Launches 5.1.2005".

Here's what Jim says: "Brian. Here's the deal. We have decided to change CherryOS to an "open source code" product. We will do so May 1st because we need a few weeks to prepare for this. We will be charging only $14.95 for this to cover our cost of development, plus ongoing development as well as marketing costs. We are doing this because we want all to see that we have not lifted source code from other sources."

I suspect that the PearPC development team, and many of the rest of you, have lots of questions for the folks at Maui X-Stream. Please visit my blog posting at EDN's website and suggest general topics for discussion during my interview, along with specific questions that you want me to ask Jim and other company representatives I meet with. I'll report back to Slashdot after the meeting, both here and on my blog.

I'm a technical editor for EDN Magazine, and am scheduled to be in Maui on vacation in early May. While I'm there, I've scheduled (several weeks ago) an onsite interview with Maui X-Stream, the promoters of CherryOS. Yesterday morning I got an email from company president Jim Kartes clarifying Slashdot's earlier heads-up that the software had been pulled, and yesterday's CherryOS website revision; "Due to Overwhelming Demand, Cherry Open Source Project Launches 5.1.2005".

Here's what Jim says: "Brian. Here's the deal. We have decided to change CherryOS to an "open source code" product. We will do so May 1st because we need a few weeks to prepare for this. We will be charging only $14.95 for this to cover our cost of development, plus ongoing development as well as marketing costs. We are doing this because we want all to see that we have not lifted source code from other sources."

I suspect that the PearPC development team, and many of the rest of you, have lots of questions for the folks at Maui X-Stream. Please visit my blog posting at EDN's website and suggest general topics for discussion during my interview, along with specific questions that you want me to ask Jim and other company representatives I meet with. I'll report back to Slashdot after the meeting, both here and on my blog.

http://www.edn.com/article/CA341449.html
Written by yours truly. Any and all feedback always welcomed!

We've seen hand cranking chargers, now windmill charging... How long until someone packages and sells a DIY Dam & Hydroelectric Cell Charging kit?

Also, I understand that Iran is currently importing plutonium from Russia in an attempt to make a personal, portable nuclear reactor capable of charging cell phones.

They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.

Then explain why Divx failed.