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Seriously, an A7 and Linux for an IoT thermostat or glass break sensor? Linux is wonderful and all for servers and even little routers, but real IoT devices live on a dirt cheap processor in a few kbytes, not Mbytes or GBytes and last for a year on a single battery. FreeRTOS that just received support from Amazon is a likely solution for IoT. A survey by EE Times suggests that new embedded projects are adopting FreeRTOS and a slightly higher rate for new products than even Linux (page 63) while embedded linux still has a small lead for existing projects. I'll bet this pig ships will mono and C# built into it and that is why they pushing linux.

FreeRTOS's best feature is the name. It's a great name that almost sells itself. Once you get past the name things go downhill. Micrium is probably the best documented since it has a nice big book for just about every flavor of microcontroller under the sun. From what I understand if you use a Silicon Labs MCU it's free too.

Seriously, an A7 and Linux for an IoT thermostat or glass break sensor? Linux is wonderful and all for servers and even little routers, but real IoT devices live on a dirt cheap processor in a few kbytes, not Mbytes or GBytes and last for a year on a single battery. FreeRTOS that just received support from Amazon is a likely solution for IoT. A survey by EE Times suggests that new embedded projects are adopting FreeRTOS and a slightly higher rate for new products than even Linux (page 63) while embedded linux still has a small lead for existing projects. I'll bet this pig ships will mono and C# built into it and that is why they pushing linux.

Yeah, definitely dominated by BSD.

Your bias is showing.

Much of the EU's decision-making and litigation policy regarding the Microsoft case has been... suspicious to say the least. I'm no Microsoft fanboi - ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS SUCK - but it really seems like a case of "Let's bash Microsoft no matter what they do." There has been some evidence of collusion between the EU and competitors, documents hidden by the court, and outright bias by the court. Some of the outrageous demands that the EU has placed on M$ are ridiculous to say the least, and have nothing to do with "monopoly".
 
While I'm all for *nix and FOSS projects, a lot of this whole process seems to be driven by the EU's motivation to get some blood-money and dictate ever-changing terms to a corporation rather than the interests of its citizens. The EU is, BTW, not exactly known for their pro-American stances on many things - and would like to see America and American business socialized like their economy.

Microsoft's accusations of EU Court collusion are interesting reading to say the least:
MS Supplementary Response (16 Pages - PDF WARNING)
as covered in EETimes:
Microsoft accuses EU of collusion, bias

Said Kutaragi: "If asked whether Sony's level of manufacturing technology declined, I have to admit it under the present circumstance. But Sony intends to prove its technical capabilities by manufacturing the necessary number of blue lasers from now on."

Oops... this one works.

http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?a rticleID=169400754

Boy, I hope you didn'g graduate in 2002 or 2003. Those years, I got hundreds of unsolicited resumes each week from people who were plenty good, but there just weren't any jobs. That's when corporate America started sending the new programming jobs overseas in earnest. Now, it just a fad. Some of it make sense, the rest is just CEOs listening to their boards and investors who don't understand how software development works. They seem to think is just like making any of that stuff WalMart sells.

Are you in Silicon Valley? Most of the people I know there who had trouble in 2002-2003 were able to find work in 2004-2005.

The support is there, it's just that the technology licensing for the bits and pieces will have to be additional. HD DVD licenses will be included in the OS so OEM's prviding a bundled solution won't have to pay extra per system (already in the OS); while for blu-ray they are saying that if you want to bundle blu-ray with a system the OEM will have to pay for the licensing of blu-ray (but it will still be supported in the OS).

http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?a rticleID=175004773

In my understanding, the rule of equivalents meant that an item could infringe on a patent if it was even remotely equivalent.

But this is no longer valid, see this article.

I studied the alpha prior to the announcement that their new version would have out-of-order, so I don't know if they ever did go that route.

Yep, with the 21264 - aggresively out-of-order CPU. The 21064 and 21164 might not have executed instructions out-of-order, however they were highly speculative. AXP arch was designed for out-of-order from the beginning, the two early CPUs did memory IO out-of-order. 21064 had a 32 entry register file it seems, not 2, btw, according to a paperp on the AXP 21064 I found on google written by a DECy.

Their performance would be comparable to the AMD-64, but not much faster.

Agreed, cause guess what: AMD64 is Alpha's progeny-in-spirit. ;)

The AMD K7 is very alpha-like (hence so is the K8). Highly speculative, out-of-order, wide multiple issue CPUs like the 21264. Not co-incidentally given that Dirk Meyer, co-architect of the 21264, led the AMD K7 design team. K7 used the 21164/21264 EV6 PtP interconnect too. K8 made it routable with HyperTransport - just as DEC^WCompaq did with EV6 in the 21364. You would still expect this mythical equivalently developed Alpha to beat AMD64 though, given it'd be able to use the die-space 'wasted' on x86-decoding for something more productive (cache or somesuch).

Bah. Stupid n00bs. I was in awe when my 80486 machine could, at long last and at great expense, support a whopping 550 MEGAbytes of FAT16 bliss! It was the size of a brick, and pretty dense, too, if I'm not mistaken. Of course now, I carry around more in a device so small that it's not a mere choking hazard, but an inhilation concern should anyone inhale too deeply around it.

As for cost, right now they're being used in conjunction with existing hard drives as extra large buffers, so that anything "written" to the HDD very rarely needs to cause it to spin up.

The article you linked to has the REAL reason HD-DVD may win:

Asked whether Microsoft is now doing just that, Weber said that in the end, "It's about money and the cost to the PC industry." Whereas the overall Blu-ray royalty structure adds up to $30 per PC drive, she said, everything a PC vendor needs to support HD-DVD "comes free, shipped and integrated with Vista -- Microsoft Corp.'s next-generation operating system."

Am I the only one who remembers why USB 2.0 replaced Firewire in next generation PC standards? It was Apple's demand for a mere measly $1 per port licensing fee (admittedly on $30 is freaking enormous compared to this in the world of razor-thin PC profit-margins.

On the other hand, the PS3 will come with Bluray. That's its biggest saving grace. Even if Windows doesn't support Bluray, Sony or someone will be sure to write drivers for it, and Windows will thus have to support it in some fashion unless they take really blatantly illegal moves to block it. As is, MS is already treading on thin ice with their current actions.

I thought this was deemed illegal in the past. IIRC Microsoft was busted for kickback payments to system vendors who did their bidding, i.e. wouldn't bundle competing products on Windows installed computers. A "Coupon" wouldn't make it any different, it's an anti-competitive practice.

In October, when Microsoft and Intel Corp. announced their support for HD-DVD, Weber warned of "legal implications, if Microsoft is using its dominance in the operating system market -- virtually a monopoly -- to play favorites and hurt the competition" (see www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleI D=171202192).

Among familiar Microsoft tactics is to offer incentives -- promotions, discounts and credits -- to PC OEMs. If a certain percentage of an OEM's systems use Windows, Microsoft typically chips in on advertising campaigns and co-sponsors promotional events. When a PC manufacturer is living on a 3 percent margin, such market-development payments or volume-discount rebates can be make-or-break factors. Some industry observers have termed these in-kind subsidies from Microsoft "the heroin of the PC industry."

This effectively puts Microsoft's foot firmly in the door on writing the DRM, too. Of course, with their track record that means it'll be either easily cracked and/or your DVD player will become infested with worms and virii.

Expect it to go to court after it is fait accompli.

it's a new hope of return of the revenge of the menacing phantom clone empire striking back all over again.
"If I had time and a hammer, I'd track down every blue hd ray dvd and smash it"

I just got a chance to read the link you posted and I think we're talking about 2 different things. Your link mentions the price fixing scandal where several major players ganged up on Rambus and fixed prices in an effort to disuade companies from using Ram incorporating Rambus's technology. What I was refering to is mentioned here: http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20011128S0017 Rambus was part of the JEDEC committie that drafted the DDR syncronous specification and they "suggested" several bits of technology that they had previously patented but they never disclosed the patent to the committee. The spec went official and then, after a while to make sure parts were in circulation, Rambus tried to enforce those patents on unsuspecting companies that were just following the spec.

I agree completely. They are apparently losing money --but not on the basis of parts.
            That premise was that the parts were significantly more expensive than the whole. That is bullshit.
            Here's another report from Portelligent that specializes in tear-downs instead of taking the marketing hype directly from MS. Portelligent says MS is actually making ten bucks profit on the XBox360 assuming they bought all their parts retail. And of course Microsoft would never press a vendor to get a good price, right?

http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;j sessionid=WWMRXUMKDWH4AQSNDBESKHA?articleID=144015 45

        Furthermore, I would like to add that the plastic bottles that contain bottled water cost less than a cent to make in a machine that can produce thousands of bottles per hour. It drives me nuts when people think the reason bottled water costs so much is because of the bottle. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The problem is that the bottles are so cheap to produce new from fresh feedstock that there is no economic incentive to recycle them since the fuel to drive the recycling truck is more valuable than the raw bulk PET used to produce new bottles. The price of a manufactured good, particularly in plastics, is totally divorced from the cost of the materials. They don't even talk to each other anymore. The relationship is dead. They're trying to forget they ever met each other.

  It's the same thing as these ink-jet printers. The fact is, they're worthless gobs of plastic that are bought by the ton and spit out by the thousands. Get over it, they're not valuable. The box it comes in is worth as much as the stupid printer. All the money you pay is going to business expenses like whores for the CEO's quarterly trip to Vegas and coke for all the accountants that are being bought off and outrageous private health care bills and astronomically priced bandwidth and all these other ridiculously inefficient costs that are run up by the supposedly efficient "free market". Almost none of it has any bearing on the value of the materials that go into the product.

Erlang, Mumps, Oberon

---

Chuck Moore's "Sea of Processors"

That's not true at all. I worked on audio libraries for iCompressions's real-time mpeg encoding chip that ran on their hardware-based Java core.

Java works just as well for embedded systems as C. In either way, they need memory-mapped I/O ports (possible in each) or ASM hooks for non-memory-mapped I/O (possible in each) that are beyond the standard libraries of either.

Now C# - I agree that has little hope in embedded hardware; because Microsoft's being too sneeky about what patent-claims they may choose to assert down the road; and no hardware vendor will risk having his products yanked off the shelf once they becomee popular.

EE Times puts out a yearly salary report which is a good gauge for engineers.

http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=309 00112

The following charts are especially enlightening:

http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_3. gif
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_2. gif

Intel, HP part ways in Itanium 64-bit processor pact

IBM Drops Itanium Support

Microsoft kills Itanic XP

IBM Rolls-Out Chipset to Support x86-64 Xeon Chips, Plans to Cancel Itanium Servers

Ironically, the royalty per port is the same as the price of an iTunes song.

I think it's a little revisionist to say the royalty multiplied the FireWire price by 10. More accurately, I think, is that manufacturers were scared away by the thought of having to pay a couple bucks per card and so the virtuous cycle of adoption/competition never started.

The people in TFA are part of a larger group (see http://www.gpgpu.org/) that thinks about how to use graphics cards for a wide variety of math problems. Here's an abstract from one of their papers:

In our experiments we compare the execution on a midclass GPU (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700LE) with a high-end CPU (Pentium 4 3.2GHz). The results show that to achieve high speedup with the GPU you need to: (1) format the vectors into two-dimensional arrays; (2) process large data arrays; and (3) perform a considerable amount of operations per data element.

I'll repeat a cool link posted by somebody else: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~ibr/projects/paranoia/ - this is a program, originally written in the 80s, to characterize the performance and idiosyncracies of a floating-point processor. Recent work at UNC Chapel Hill has been done on Windows platforms. (Twenty years ago, UNC Chapel Hill was one of the hotbeds of computer graphics development that eventually gave us Shrek and The Incredibles.)

Regarding portability. . .

The team is actually running Cell at 3.2 GHz. Although the developers talked about the chip's going into handhelds such as next-generation Playstation Portables, that's not currently practical.

"The architecture is too power hungry for a handheld device," said Krewell. "They would have to do a significant re-design to get this into handhelds, and that's where a lot of the interesting business is these days, for things like portable MPEG-4 video players."

As for servers:

The high-end supercomputing option that Cell members have discussed may face hurdles as well. As currently architected, only two Cell processors can be directly attached to each other. A separate switch is needed to link more processors into the kinds of large arrays of CPUs used in supercomputers like IBM's BlueGene/L.

. . .

One thing the architecture clearly lacks is any of the peripherals, such as Gigabit Ethernet media-access controllers and packet-processing blocks, that would be of use in networking scenario.

Your logic is bogus as well. Mono c# is totally self-hosting. The mono C# compiller compiled itself Jan 2002, and by Mar 2002 it was able to compile it's own runtime.

not to mention OS cores

Not on an OS core I worked on. It ran directly on this chip that ran JVM byte codes natively. Not only was C not required, it would have been nearly impossible to write a C compiler for it (since the core itself didn't have the concept of pointers).

It is a poor article. I think the real sticking point is over software controls, and whether the systems will be running Java, as Sony wants, or MSTV system, designed by Microsoft.

A better article is here from the EETimes.

the IEEE news itself

The 12% lead is <1/4 the 50% margin necessary for passage.

Darn "<" entity.

From EE Times which someone else linked: "Duncan Stewart, a QSR scientist and the third author, performed most of the testing that demonstrated that the device actually works. The paper underwent rigorous peer review before being published."

Mass producable and all that stuff (which other people have brought up), maybe not, but if it can be made once, I'm confident it can be mass produced eventually.

EE Times article

EETimes story

It's Patent #6586965

Abstract:

It took Transmeta engineers $100 million, five years of secret toil, and a little magic to create fast low-power chips that turn into x86s in a microsecond. Transmeta Corporation's Crusoe chips look nothing like Intel's Pentium processors. They do not even have a logic gate in common. They are smaller, consume between one-third and one-thirtieth the power (depending on the application), and implement none of the same instructions in hardware. However the Crusoe microprocessors can run the same software that runs on IBM PC-compatible personal computers with Pentium chips-for instance, Microsoft Windows or versions of Unix, along with their software applications. The paper describes the development of the Crusoe chips

All that development and hype, yet now they are getting out of the market. Seems they should have been well positioned to dominate in the handheld and portable market. Bad business practices? The EE Times also has a good article on this.

If M$ ups the quality of their codec in time, they COULD be included in the second round, though (which requires someretooling and not something manufacturers are looking forward to).

Paraphrased (and anti-microsoft slant added for Slashdot) from here.

Check out http://www.eet.com/at/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsess ionid%3DKGP11Z2FQNY3SQSNDBESKHA?articleId=53700939 / Pairing a solar concentrator with a stirling engine is the most efficent way to produce electricity from the sun. Cool technology.

Nothing's official just yet, but this is WAY more interesting than studying for finals, so here we go:

Processor instructions are broken into an 'apulet', which contains data as well as code to perform an operation. This is probably why its claimed that if more processing power is needed, then its a simple task to add a new workstation and the work can be offloaded.

A cursory read suggests that its like creating a cluster of highly efficient yet simple nodes.

Corrections are welcome.

Reference: EETimes

Hmm, nuclear reactions? Isn't the point to get hydrogen to be used with fusion(w/ helium3) without any byproducts? If you need to start using nuclear reactions, this still isn't a 'great' way to get hydrogen. I still believe using solarpanels and using electrolysis for getting hydrogen is still the best way. No CO2, no nuclear waste... Well that's just my opinion...

Fusion of helium-3 would be divine. Pity there isn't much here on Earth. (The moon is another matter.) It also usually costs hundred of dollars per litre. Bear in mind that there are several other reaction paths to fusion that don't require He-3. They aren't as ideal - just more practical.

Solar panels have their place, but they're never going to produce the amount of hydrogen needed for even a single nation's infrastructure. Even if solar panels were much more efficient, electrolysis itself isn't very energy efficient.

(As an aside, I was pleasantly suprised to run across an article about using good old Stirling engines & an array of mirrors to generate power from the sun - at higer efficiencies than panels and at costs comparable to fossil fuels. Have a read)

Now, on to the point of the story. Basically, some of the Generation IV nuclear reactor designs* can be used to produce lots of hydrogen, more or less as a byproduct of their operation. (Because of the extreme temperatures) So the fact that you've suddenly got the means for a hydrogen economy is a side-benefit.

Gen. IV reactor designs are cleaner, safer, more efficient, and generally smaller than their clunky old (current) counterparts. Yes, they are still fission. And while MOX reactors (which compose some of the designs) have questions about fuel reuse, a bona fide fusion reactor can be used to re-enrich spent fission fuel. (ie, blanket of uranium around reaction chamber, etc.) Fusion lets you make fission clean, or as close to it as possible.

Why is that important? Because no one is going to initially drop the trillion or so dollars to build the first commercially viable fusion reactor, when and if one is ever designed. ITER itself will be just a stepping stone, if it ever actually gets built. In the mean time, we'll still be fissioning away...

*Because of irrational fear and paranoia in the USA, most commercial reactors are Generation I or II. Not much has changed since the 70s. Nuclear can be dangerous, but it generally isn't and needn't be. It's debatable whether government run power plants would be any better, but it scares the hell out of me that our reactors in the USA are run as cheaply as they can possibly get away with. Capitalism is great, but you just can't try to undercut safety.

this was on eetimes few days ago....
article on eetimes

here, here, here and here.

The idea is good and the physics is sound, but putting something like this into practice is much harder than you make out. Speed binning of chips goes part way to adjusting for process variation. Sophisticated chips have temperature monitors that will scale back the clock when things get too hot (but in a crude, broad-brush way). ARM is already working on more fine-grained closed-loop systems (see here), but as a way of saving power rather than going faster, and with an indirect link between chip speed and clock.

We've heard this all before ... in hard drives! Back in 1999, manufacturers started using electron spin rather than magnetic charge to store data. From the article ... "Magnetoelectronics manipulates electrons in semiconductors via electron spin, rather than charge." Most hard drives today are GMR (giant magnetoresistance), or technology derived from GMR.

So it's not too wild to think that they'll be able to do it in RAM and such as well.

SED seems to be the darkhorse of the display technologies. It doesn't seem to have as high a public profile as OLED but the tech is very promising. Lower manufacturing costs than LCD or PDP (mainly silkscreen/inkjet processes some lithography), better image quality than LCD (true black, no backlight, CRT like response times), right around the corner for big screen sizes (production to start next year).

http://www.eet.com/sys/news/showArticle.jhtml?arti cleID=47205034

Don't be naive. Microsoft will likely use its homegrown Digital Rights Management scheme, known as Janus

Within the 65-nm process, Intel has also devised a second-generation strained silicon technology. "The second generation of Intel strained silicon increases transistor performance by 10 to 15 percent without increasing leakage," Intel said. "Conversely, these transistors can cut leakage by four times at constant performance compared to 90-nm transistors."

EETimes covered this last month. http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=256 00132

This is the way it works. Every new handset generation comes with a compelling new set of features. Each is subsidized by service providers to get it on the market. But each feature set quickly triggers a market share war among service providers, causing them to offer the handset for bubble-pack pricing or to simply bundle it with a service contract and give it away. The only money for the service provider is in services -- not in hardware. This exerts incredible pricing pressure on handset makers, both to innovate and to ruthlessly eliminate their own margins.

This is just the way things go in electronics manufacturing, and it makes sense. Electronics technology moves much faster than manufacturing technology, so there is just inherent pressure in the market that eventually drives out profits. The nice thing about this is that it forces innovative new ideas to come along to a) Make improvements in manufacturing efficiency, b) Stay on the bleeding edge of technology with new products that can generate high margins for a good while (see Dell's foray into high-end "gaming" systems) and c) Build highly innovative products with killer features and high consumer appeal (see the iPod).

As for the commodity manufacturers, the market corrects itself. There is a glut in worldwide DVD-player manufacturing capacity. Some of these companies will continue to eek out meager profits building DVD-players, while others will retool and remain successful manufacturing the next generation of commodity electronics, and still others will die. But this is merely a sympton of progress. Those companies that survive will be the reason we can get LCD TV's for $200 by Christmas 2006, and the whole cycle will repeat itself.

...most 'modern' school systems do not teach their students how to THINK. The emphasis is always placed on getting the 'correct answer', to the point of spoon feeding the students a rote method of solving a problem. To some degree, I've heard that this happens over in Asia as well, where the answer is the most important thing.

Here in the US, most K - 12 teachers are grossly underpaid (or incompetent), we have parents who don't want to be bothered with their kids, while TV and Nintendo are the baby-sitters.

As a child, I always wanted to go into art. Coming from an Asian background, my parents 'convinced' me (more like forced) me into studying engineering. I went into EE and struggled most of the way through. In my junior year, I was able to finally figure things out, and went on to graduating in the top 15% of my class. I am grateful for all those hours spent in the lab, working til 5AM most nights, taking 19 hours of courses my senior year in college (with three design courses), and otherwise living the geek life.

Engineering helped me learn two important things I apply to my life on a daily basis: 1) problem-solving techniques and 2) perseverance.

I'm now working in IT, completing my masters in computer animation, while freelancing as a cartoonist for EE Times (and much happier for it!)

I'm not concerned about software-based DRM because so far it seems to be limited to Windows. What REALLY concerns me is the large number of news items I've seen lately about hardware based on "Trusted Computing".

TCG TPM is the standard settled upon for trusted computing. An interesting EETimes article is about TPM chips going into systems (costs & chipsets, etc). Described as "low-cost silicon safes for a digital key" the article states, "IBM plans to put the current version 1.1b TPM parts in all but its lowest cost notebook computers by the end of the year." As well as the inclusion of these chips in Gb Ethernet, storage, memory, and I/O buses. The TPM v1.2 standard is worth a look over to see what the future holds.

Much of the software that goes into DRM is moving up the chain (especially seeing how effective DeCSS was for DVD decoding) and into silicon. I do not quite see how Trusted Computing is really that different from a full-fledged DRM hardware system. It seems to be an easy step to make those buses and storage devices scanning for 'trusted keys' to be applied to digital finger prints of unauthorized DRM-licensed media moving around on your motherboard.

Three unidentified customers have already signed up for the 2-Gbyte hard drive, the company said. A dozen customers will be showing off products using Cornice's 1.5-Gbyte drive at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

IMHO, the most offensive is Pa for pascal. Why not P? To distinguish it from phosphorus?

Most especially, Kilo was capitalized - and indeed, kilobytes per second is still properly written Kbps, not kbps, isn't it?

No. it's kbit/s. The other abbreviations are dumbed-down gobbledygook. In tabloids such as the NYT "technology" section, maybe they write kbps or other aberrations. But in regular technical publications such as Electronic Engineering Times, you will almost always see the scientific kbit/s or Mbit/s. The only instances of "kbps" are press releases written by mostly clueless marketdroids. A search for kpbs in the EET archives revealed 8 hits, vs. 172 for kbit/s. Same for Mbps (13 bits) vs. Mbit/s (303 hits).

These days it would appear that all the above-unity multiplier prefixes higher than kilo are still capitalized, while kilo, hecto, and deka are not. All the below-unity ones are still lower case. Is this true, and if so, why on earth was this change made? It is so offensive to common sense of order. Well, the conventions are the same since at least the 70s (cannot vouch for earlier). The symbol for kilo has been k (not K) for as long as I can remember. Maybe you have pre-International System memories.

I don't know about any change in the capitalization convention. The only thing for sure is the list of standard prefixes, which I have learned at school in the 70s. According to the history of the Systeme International, these conventions have been unchanged since the 50s or so.

So if your memory predates this, then you, Sir, are certainly not usurping the Old Geezer title.

well that's what they're saying on eetimes.com

I got that Gartner statistic from EETimes.
In an article entitled Outsourcing Causes Jitters: Is my job next?

To quote the article:
Gartner Inc. (Stamford, Conn.), a market analyst firm, projects that 10 percent of the information technology positions will be displaced in the next 18 months as jobs go overseas.

That's a stunning figure. It's worse than we thought. I thought it was something like 10% over the next five years.

just go with hannibal's writeup and the eetimes article.

I didn't see anything on apple.com specifying the actual power dissipation, but this article has a blurb at the end saying each G5 processor dissipates 97 watts. I believe it is talking about the 2ghz chip.

Yup, g4s and g3s use substantially less power than their x86 foes, but the g5 is a different story altogether.

Each g5 dissipates a whopping 97 watts (see http://www.eet.com/sys/news/OEG20030623S0092, which is why the new powermacs have such absurd cooling systems and massive, mostly empty cases. The high-end powermacs actually come with an OUTRAGEOUS 600 watt power supply (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware /Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G5/PowerMacG5/Powe rMacG5.pdf.
Let's be clear, this power supply is not for peripherals: the g5 powermac only supports 3 drive bays and 3 pci slots.

The numbers cited by the author come from an early projection of power consumption for lower-spec ppc970 processors.

Sega is coming out with its DreamEye camera... article and pictures. Oh wait, it's already out. It was released in the summer of 2000.

Ok, maybe the dreamcast was pulled before they could sell this outside the japanese market. But, sony coming out with a product THREE YEARS after its competitors doesn't get me too excited. Sega had some other kick-ass hardware: its VMU had a much more usable screen compared to sony's almost useless pocketstation screen (which sony never released in the US), plus there is a dev community for it! I guess we just have to wait for Sony to come out with a fishing controller before we get excited with their innovation!

This article announces Suns' intention to create a DRM product that spans cell phones, smart cards & desktop Java.

Is sun receiving pressure from RIAA/MPAA, or are they just jumping on the IP protection bandwagon here? I suppose they must have received requests from *someone* for the technology, because they seem to think that it will increase their Java device sales, and therefore would also increase the sales of the servers to which these devices connect. I don't believe it will work, though. I can't see DRM driving consumer-end sales.