Slashdot Mirror

For a team to work together, you need each participant to volunteer...

Of course, I sincerly think people (whether US, EU, or other world citizen) want cooperation. But I seriously doubt governements reflect their people opinion.

McBride countered that Novell is wrong about the patent and copyright issues, but added that "none of SCO's enforcement actions have been based on copyrights or patents, anyway."

The company said that its enforcement actions have been based on the contract rights that flow from its 30,000 Unix system licensees, not from patents.

Would this have anything to do with the US claiming 'Negation' of space for other countries?

Unless you want to imply that the USmilitary is going to attack europe to stop them from lauching its satelittes...

Good summary from the BBC

Techie details from EE Times

god I hate PPC infact I nearly hate it as much as x86 but...

now ARM a nice little design there is the same deal but with a ARM that altera do and see www
and MIPS have been doing a dev board with a hard and soft core mix for a while

well you never guess they ALL come with GNU tools and as they use standard arch that linux is already ported to

really what you want to get into is a CPU on a FPGA and one that you dont have to pay a licence for this is what opencores.org is about and credit to them flextronics have started looking at it for a solution see

news about the use of open hardware at

the openRisc 100 project at

See the FAQ at

hope that helps

regards

John Jones

That Murky News article had its facts a little mixed up. The real, though not as sensational (and thus not as slashdot-worthy), story is that Intel delayed the "Montecito" processor for a year so that it could make it dual-core. Read that sentence again (this means you). The original plan for Montecito was for it to be a single-core CPU. What they've just done is decided to make it dual-core and pushed back the schedule a year. Try reading a more accurate account in the EE Times.

<slashdork>Gee whiz, from my vast knowledge of the industry, I can see that Intel is going down the toilet. It takes them a whole year to design a dual-core processor! Egads!</slashdork>

A 2D object's area (or "volume" if you will, since there are only two dimensions) changes as x^2 as you scale the object. A 3D object's volume changes as x^3 as you scale the object. An object with fractal dimension has a volume that scales as some non-integer power as you scale the object.

(additional story link where Epstein confirms this)

Here's a link from an old /. story about Belluzo's decision to move to NT. Here's the /. discussion on his resignation from SGI shortly thereafter.

Skip the NYTimes reg crap and read it here: STMicro claims light-emitting silicon breakthrough

Blu-ray Disc Specifications

Recording capacity: 23.3GB / 25GB / 27GB
Laser wavelength: 405 nm (blue-violet laser)
Lens numerical aperture (NA): 0.85
Data transfer rate: 36 Mbps
Disk diameter: 120mm
Disk thickness: 1.2mm
Optical trasmittence protection layer: 0.1mm
Recording format: Phase change recording
Tracking format: Groove recording
Tracking pitch: 0.32um
Shortest pit length: 0.160/18.0/19.5 Gbits/in2
Recording phase density: 16.8/18.0/19.5 Gbits/in2
Video recording format: MPEG-2 video
Audio recording format: AC3, MPEG-1, Layer 2, etc.
Video and audio multiplex format: MPEG-2 transport stream
Cartridge dimensions: Approx. 129x131x7mm

Source: EE Times February 25, 2002

The companies supporting Blue-ray are: Hitachi Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Thomson Multimedia.

Blu-ray Disc Specifications

Recording capacity: 23.3GB / 25GB / 27GB
Laser wavelength: 405 nm (blue-violet laser)
Lens numerical aperture (NA): 0.85
Data transfer rate: 36 Mbps
Disk diameter: 120mm
Disk thickness: 1.2mm
Optical trasmittence protection layer: 0.1mm
Recording format: Phase change recording
Tracking format: Groove recording
Tracking pitch: 0.32um
Shortest pit length: 0.160/18.0/19.5 Gbits/in2
Recording phase density: 16.8/18.0/19.5 Gbits/in2
Video recording format: MPEG-2 video
Audio recording format: AC3, MPEG-1, Layer 2, etc.
Video and audio multiplex format: MPEG-2 transport stream
Cartridge dimensions: Approx. 129x131x7mm

Source: EE Times February 25, 2002

The companies supporting Blue-ray are: Hitachi Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Thomson Multimedia.

that makes cell phones?

Everybody has mentioned Sony and (sp) Eriksson, but even if there was a chance in hell of this kind of product getting sold, I don't think they'd buy from either of those two. (Apple isn't selling its own PDA because the market is saturated and no one is making money. The cellular handset market is 10 thousand times worse, so don't look for this any time soon. Eriksson might make a likely partner, but longterm Sony is a major competitor in the digital-lifestyle space, so I don't see them going there. Eriksson or Nokia, maybe.)

Who does Apple know that makes phones? A company established in the cellular industry, maybe down on its luck in recent years, looking for a breakthrough product? Maybe one that sells things like phones and has been getting good press lately for Bluetooth gear seeing as how Apple loves Bluetooth. If oonly there was a company that Apple already had a relationship with, then we'd know who they might go to for this sort of thing.

If only I could think of a company like that...

"Eleven of the 45 companies that build passenger cars worldwide already use some kind of black-box technology, according to representatives of the IEEE. The best-known of those is General Motors Corp., which said three years ago that it includes the device, known as a sensing and diagnostics module, as part of its airbag sensing systems on most GM vehicles. The module can store such information as engine speed, vehicle speed, airbag deployment, seat belt deployment and the state of the brakes before and during an accident. "

For data storage, this will be a godsend - and the prospect of a 1080i high-defintion movie on a single disk has me salivating.

The problem with the format, as I see it, is twofold:

• When can it be introduced? HD-DVDs for data can't be introduced soon enough - but the entertainment companies will logically want to wait until "standard" DVDs thoroughly saturate the market before introducing HD-DVD.
• Will the MPAA and its ilk keep their hands off it? With a good projector, screen and viewing environment 1080i will be within spitting distance of a true theatrical experience. Naturally, the MPAA will be terrified of this experience being compromised, and at the prospect of HD films being distributed on the web (on the other hand, the sheer file size of HD movie files might preclude that - I don't see cable companies increasing their user bandwidths anytime soon.)

Anyway, my $0.01 (the Canadian exchange rate sucks)

"Don't critisize. Create a better alternative."

Currently, LED lights are fairly directed (ie, they are not as good for filling a room).
So they won't necessarily replace the light bulb yet.
However, they are excellent replacements for flashlights, traffic lights, car lamps -- ie, any kind of directed light.

They are brighter, more efficient, and last longer than regular incandescent or fluorescent bulbs.
They do cost more though, but that might change with economies of scale.

Some links:
EETimes Article: White LEDs to overtake the light bulb, keynoter says
TechWEB Article: LED: The End Of the Light Bulb As We Know It?

Judging from what I've read elsewhere, the submitter may have interpreted the article a bit wrong. It's not so much that MS and Intel (also mentioned in the article) want to have the WinModem equivilent of 802.11, but that they want to make the access points cheaper by providing a software solution.
Apple has had a similar product, the "Software Base Station," available for Mac OS 9 for quite some time!
See this (much better) article for details.

If you steal source code from another proprietary project (say microsoft), once you get caught microsoft doesn't neccessarily own your project. You usually just pay fines and restitution, maybe get jail time, and of course be forced to remove the offending code. Its copyright violation. You don't need to "accept" any terms of any license to steal the code.

An example of pure copyright violation is the Cadence vs. Avanti settled last year. A few ex-cadence employees took cadence code with them when they left to create Avanti. They payed hundreds of millions in restitution, one guy (Yuh-Zen Liao) even got 1 year jail time. I submitted this story when it happened as it involved source code and would seem to be a good story for the slashdot crowd, but sadly it was rejected. A full recap here. May this story act as a deterrent to anyone thinking of stealing source code.

The EE Times has an article on the Embedded Linux Consortium. The tone of the article is discouraging, but it also says that embedded Linux will be number one by the end of 2002! Is the truth somewhere in-between?

The EE Times has an article on the Embedded Linux Consortium. The tone of the article is discouraging, but it also says that embedded Linux will be number one by the end of 2002! Is the truth somewhere in-between?

EETimes has a nice article with a good graphic comparing the internal workings of the Itanium vs. McKinley ... a good level of detail: 10 vs. 8 pipeline stages, differing bus widths and speeds, execution units, etc.

The article also talks about other intel innovations disclosed at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference

These guys in Nebraska did it. They made plastic magnets, just not very high yield yet.

IBM's power4 chip has 4 processing cores on a chip. Intel and Sun have plans in the works. Intel will do this to follow up with the IA-32 Xeon processor. Here is a story on this

Check out this story on EETimes.

According to this article, Intel has chosen ZrO2. This is very interesting, since the big industrial research consortia (Sematech and IMEC), as well as many semiconductor companies (ie. Texas Instruments, IBM, Motorola, AMD, and others) have been studying ZrO2 for several years. Some of these report intrinsic problems with the stability of ZrO2 during dopant activation anneals. I wonder if intel has really solved this problem, or if this is just a premature announcement by some marketroid.

Getting ZrO2 to work on a few specialized experimental transistors in an R&D lab is much different than getting it to work on all of the billions of transistors in a chip or cpu. The former has already been done by several companies. I seriously doubt that intel has achieved the latter.

Considering that the announcement is coupled with an announcement that intel is finally going to join the other Big Boys (IBM, Motorola, AMD) in endorsing SOI, I doubt any real breakthroughs have been achieved.

The most interesting parallel architecture I heard about at the MPF was Siroyan's OneDSP architecture. This is a clustered VLIW machine that can execute up to 64 instructions each cycle! See the EE times article and their MPF paper

http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20000831S0019

As for the article, itself, It looks like aninteresting development -- but I'm kinda disappointed that they're looking at a few years for the next substantive step.. At this rate, I may be retired by the time a 'real' quantum computer is produced.

At http://www.eet.com/printableArticle?doc_id=OEG2001 0924S0101

Try this one (http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20010924S0101)

Blah, blah. Lameness filter doesn't like short posts so I'll put a little padding here. Sorry to ramble, but you know how it is...

Tiny 'big bang' performs quantum computations

Using a computer model that "explodes" a single particle into an infinite regress of quantum waves, University of Arkansas physics professor William Harter has demonstrated a new approach to quantum computation. "Our model reveals a fractal interference pattern emerging from quantum waves -- after what we are calling a tiny big bang -- that can perform useful calculations, such as calculating all the prime factors of any size integer," said Harter.

Like I said, this could be difficult to manufacture into a chip.

;-)

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Also there was an EET article that came out last December in which an Intel engineer confessed that the released Pentium 4 falls short of what they originally envisioned it to be. They scrapped the L3 cache, cut the L1 size in half, and gdumbed downh the FPUfs.

Read this story regarding some follow up info related to this. The story is titled Windows XP will support USB 2.0, somehow.

Cheers!

> Is DataPlay the next big thing, or
> something to avoid?

Moving the conversation from SDMI, which is just a technology good for keeping honest people honest...

In general, people should be somewhat leery of rotating drives for digital content storage.

Rotating drives simply consume too much power for battery-powered apps-- you have to drive a motor and a laser. I picked up a Dataplay datasheet at CES and power dissipation figures were curiously absent.

Furthermore, to make a Dataplay-ready device, I have to assume that manufacturers will have to incorporate a proprietary drive slot, adding to the cost. Ergo, to reap the cost/MB benefits of a Dataplay disk, a consumer has to swallow the hidden cost of the special drive. Consumers like cheap, though. Sure, flash memory may be costly, but the slot costs practically nothing thanks to the existence of standards bodies like the CompactFlash Association.

In short, Dataplay (and Iomega's HipPocketWhateverzip, by extension) are gonna get creamed if the following comes to pass-- The introduction of a low-cost, high-capacity, solid-state technology that uses standard flash slots (CompactFlash, SmartMedia, etc.)

Based on what any self-respecting tech-head reads in the trades, this isn't too far off, right? For example, process shrinks (0.13-micron and below?) are making it possible to produce chips with higher densities and at higher volumes. The first chips to be run on such processes will be memories, since companies will test out a process with a memory product first before qualifying it to make other products.

All things considered, I fall into the "avoid" camp, myself. From a silicon and hardware perspective, there are just too many nifty advancements on the horizon. I'd love to hear what Slashdotters might have to offer from a hardware and design perspective.

Broad layoffs barely touch EEs

excerpts:
With layoffs striking everywhere from high-flying Internet companies like Amazon.com to brand-name corporations like Xerox and Motorola, engineers are so far thanking their lucky stars for that EE degree. The engineering ranks appear, for the most part, to have escaped the ax -- at least for now.

"Unemployment [among engineers] is still tenaciously low."

Though engineering departments have largely been spared, they don't always avoid the hatchet. "Our job reductions are worldwide, pervasive around the country except for the sales force. It's likely that some engineers will be included," said a Xerox spokeswoman.

Nevertheless, Hoover said that as a job hunter, he has seen that corporate cutbacks can go hand in hand with engineering hiring.

slow ass slashdot. this story is obsolete by the time it got posted. check out this eet story about continued dreamcast availability(sort of): http://eet.com/story/OEG20010130S0076

A nice link to a readable and somewhat technical overview of fuel cells.
http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/feature s/pems/pems.html

A nice Scientific American article.
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122396exploratio ns.html

Two nice links to NEC's proton polymer battery.
Asian Biz Tech article.
EE Times article (short and sweet).

I'm still waiting for the car that runs on happy thoughts and chocolate that John Stewart promised me.

The article says that bacteria can encase themselves inside "armored shells of semiconductor". Could this also mean that bacteria could encase themselves inside other minerals, such as the rock in meteorites and survive for an indefinite peroid?

"When we started this study, we were just trying to find the source of bacteria in the fab, and how they could remain alive after all the heroic measures to eradicate them with ultraviolet light, ozone and everything else including a dollar a gallon to purify the water," said Baier, who is director of the Center for Biosurfaces at SUNY

...[the fab contamination problem] concerned some clever bugs that just wouldn't die, no matter what -- bacteria that can survive in the vacuum of space, or inside a volcanic vent at the bottom of the sea. They can hibernate indefinitely and only need the slightest bit of light to wake up and thrive anew.

In short order, the bacteria have encased themselves inside armored shells of semiconductor, making them impervious to all the attempts by clean-room personnel to kill them.

The next round of this debate? Digital Television! While the FCC is telling us that we'll be enjoying this wonderful new technology by 2006 - don't count on it. The MPAA and others are fighting like mad to control the delivery, and playback of digital content that will become HDTV (or DTV). You think they are going to transmit a digital signal and let you receive and record a perfect copy on to box or hard disk? Ha! Not likely...

The Digital Transmission Content Protection Method (DTCP) currently being debated will morph into some new standard controlled by the MPAA and others to control what you can see, and how you can see it. Check out some of these links:

Fourth digital-TV interface spec tossed into fray

US digital TV strategy "in disarray"

Digital interface debate resurfaces at Western show

FCC sets deadline on DTV interface issues

The next round of this debate? Digital Television! While the FCC is telling us that we'll be enjoying this wonderful new technology by 2006 - don't count on it. The MPAA and others are fighting like mad to control the delivery, and playback of digital content that will become HDTV (or DTV). You think they are going to transmit a digital signal and let you receive and record a perfect copy on to box or hard disk? Ha! Not likely...

The Digital Transmission Content Protection Method (DTCP) currently being debated will morph into some new standard controlled by the MPAA and others to control what you can see, and how you can see it. Check out some of these links:

Fourth digital-TV interface spec tossed into fray

US digital TV strategy "in disarray"

Digital interface debate resurfaces at Western show

FCC sets deadline on DTV interface issues

this has been about for at least a year now, and green for a couple of years. heres an artical from december 98 Cambridge claims blue light emitting polymer and heres a good one from feb 98 it clames that Seiko-Epson and Cambridge Display Technology were working on a momocrome version.
want to find out more .

Ow, and the ad claimed it did MPEG 2 so that's why that ended up in the /. article. The ad was on page 6-7 of NRC Handelsblad of may 4th 2000.

Salivating Americans beware that this is a PAL (perhaps SECAM too) unit, not NTSC.

BTW this article also says that D-VHS does MPEG-2. Also mentions bitrates.

Some-one mod this up?
--

The EE Times has this related story. Also the Feb. issue of the IEEE Spectrum has a nice story on magnetoelectronic memory.

Overcome?

The skills to interact with a machine are learned. Period. Sometimes the machine is a hand planer, other times it is a fighter jet.
Sometimes the skill is reading. (how many of you remember mastering that skill?)

But overcome? You make it sound like a command line is some big smeging thing, worthy of praise if you somehow manage to figure out how to type something that gets you a desired response.
By painting a command line as an obstacle, you make it so.

Think back to the 1950's (not that many of you can). When making silicon transistors was considered impossible. No EE felt it was possible. Yet, Willis Adcock did it. Why? Because he didn't KNOW it was impossi ble.

In case anyone was interested, according to this (towards the bottom), the processor that the TiVo uses is an IBM 403GCX PowerPC. Cheers!

Such a system requires an extra set of headlights to properly illuminate the road ahead.

supposedly IR headlights... Does anyone know if this is what Cadillac has done, or do they just detect what IR light is out there? The shockwave thing seemed to indicate that it just detected the heat of what is already out there, which would make more sense to me (a complete non-expert).

Military hardware with night vision, when they don't work so well, and admission that they do cause mishaps in some instances.

Now we'll know what sheets floating across the road are.

Get them while they last, goggles for Y2K. So when you drive around in your caddy on Jan 1, you'll know where to swerve in order to hit those nuts running around in the dark.

Finally, some (real?) statistics about how night vision in cars increases safety.

• New this fall is Sun's MAJC
• Patriot shBoom (a 1996 relabelling of Chuck Moore's 32 bit FORTH chip)
• IBM's Java Chip - 1997 - apparently some extra logic hung off a PPC logic set
• Sun Scrapped their initial Java Chip
• UC Berkeley students designed one for a CS course
• Rockwell had one...

None of these have really gone anywhere in terms of influencing Java deployment.

The only way they would have been important is if:

• Network Computers had taken off, but they didn't.
• Java was getting deployed heavily in embedded systems. That factor is not evident.

The displays are completely viewable at any angle and at any light level (even with big halogen lamps shining right on it).


Assuming your retinas don't burn out while looking at it! j/k

Of course, if your link wasn't broken... I wouldn't have fixed it here

It apparently has REALLY GOOD anti-glare properties, which make it suitable for a LOT of purposes. This sounds interesting.

The prototype AM OLED has a simple structure, consisting of one glass substrate with an EL layer 150-nm thick and a metal cover. The prototype is 1.8 mm thick -- "thinner than a quarter," said David Williams, general manager of display alliances at Kodak. In the future, he said, today's 1.1-mm glass substrate will be replaced with plastic.

That's some thin display there. I want these to be layered into my glasses/contacts very soon. Either that or embedded into my wall, for a 4M x 3M screen!

Apparently tho, it still needs work in colors, as it's only hitting 256 thousand (not quite true color millions)

Check out this EETimes article.

The displays are completely viewable at any angle and at any light level (even with big halogen lamps shining right on it).