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Not to mention the blu-ray writers. While they aren't exactly compatible, 27 GB per side is a hell of a lot of p0rn! Think of all the multiple angles! And advertisements! But half-kidding aside, supposedly these could be in a store near me by fall 2003. How long would it really take before someone made a hybrid drive with a red and blue laser that could read both formats, and maybe write both too?

Gee, maybe someone should let cadence know about that .

They have Eyeglasses with a camera in them like Mission Impossible (the good first movie, not the sucky second one). I would like Eyeglasses with a cellphone in them. Convienient, Hands Free, Earpiece stays where it is supposed to, and with these you could even surf the net. Since I wear glasses anyway, it would be ideal.

At least for right now, the glasses can be just a "head unit" for your phone which would remain a belt unit and interface either physically or wirelessly.

It would be the answer to most of the issues raised here:
- Web access, certainly, no problem.
- Anyone can reach you anytime, take your glasses off.
- Too close to head, non-issue if the actual phone was on a belt pack
- Two Phones, keep using two phones.
- one conventional, one glasses
- two different pairs of glasses
- One pair of glasses, two belt units, maybe one pair of glasses with two i/o ports
- Change Carriers, no problem, change glasses or belt units
- Lunch, no problem (but please hit mute)
- Crazy people on the street - Assume they are all crazy. You will be more right than wrong.

Andy Farnsworth

From their site:" Meanwhile, the impact of the U.S. patent system on innovation is being studied by the National Academy of Science. The academy is expected to issue a report shortly."

Additionally from the National Academy" The question arises whether in some respects the extension of IPRs has proceeded too far. "

Guess I won't patent my perpetual motion device today.

FYI, AMD is phasing out the Duron. Information on this can be found here.

The Xserve has a DDR bus.

The G4 will remain at 133 or 166 MHz because all effort is going into the G5's pipe.

There's much more detail on the history, design, and development of the device in this EE times article. I was especially struck by how they persevered. They started on this in 1990 and things did not go entirely smoothly:

"There were 50 to 75 major hurdles from the time we started," Vincent Chow said. "The biocompatibility side represented probably 40 percent of the issues. The other 60 percent were really in the electrical performance of our structures. That's because the final stimulation is an ionic stimulation. We're basically trying to interface a solar structure so that the microcurrents produced by the solar cell have a very high efficiency or functionality factor to stimulate the cells that are touching these particular areas."

This version of the device contains about 3500 light detecting cells. If this version works out okay, they are planning to develop a much larger version of the chip.

If the ASR chip is successful in restoring some degree of vision, Optobionics will make modifications to a final and significantly larger chip design. Some possible ideas, said Alan Chow, include placing openings in the chip to allow nourishment to flow between the outer and inner retina; and changing the direction of the electrical stimulation on an ongoing basis, a technique referred to as biphasic stimulation.

As this article actually has no proof of these 'rumours' I would like to provide some proof that he's actually wrong.

Why would the US Gov, recently release plans to vastly increase spending on nanotechnology?

A quick Google search shows some press releases from from 1999 and 2002.

• Small Times, 2002
• EE Times, 1999

I think even the ignorant in the white house realise that not assisting the nanotech businesses would be suicide for the economy. As a result they need to provide research money and keep everything in the open, not behind closed doors.

... other countries have R&D programs too.

WRONG ! (next time check your facts)..

IBM drive spinout ends an era

"Disk pioneer sells bulk of operation to smaller rival Hitachi"
"By Rick Merritt and Yoshiko Hara"
EE Times
April 19, 2002 (5:34 p.m. EST)

Can you imagine a bunch of cubes filled with IBM's Deathstar drives?
Error, error, must assimilate, assimilate.. need more drives...

Why do nanobots have to be metallic and reliant upon the whims of EM?

You're right. They could be ceramic. But the leading research right now is using metallic atoms right now. Ceramic molecules tend to be on the large side for this scale work.

Virii and bacterium have been doing fine for millions of years without caring about magnetics except where it was an advantage.

Ok, a couple things here... first off, some of the nanotech that's going on make a virus look like a freaking planet. And bacteria are that much bigger yet than virii. So the scale is off.

Second, you are no longer talking about nano-technology here. You're talking about biologics. The two are vastly different (although there is some work being done using bacteria as transistors). Bacteria and virii tend to be self-replicating, which is not a necessary goal for nanotechnology (nor is it inherently a good thing for nanobots - c.f. gray goo). They are constructed entirely differently, and it's doubtful that we'd ever bother to build one "from scratch" instead of taking something that works and modifying it to do what we wanted to.

Yeah, I suppose you could try and build nanotech out of protein chains and whatnot as well, but that's another field of research that's in it's infancy, even as compared to nanotech.

David A. Thompson and John S. Best of IBM write: An engineer from the original RAMAC project of 1956 would have no problem understanding a description of a modern disk drive.

I'll admit though once they cover all that, the differences between SCSI/EIDE plus ATA will be a walk in the park.

Plus can IBM be sued for fraud or illegal trading because of their 120GXP drives being way off 200,000 hours MTBF specification? It must be written down in stone somewhere.

• Lay Language Summary of a paper presented by Stuart Parkin at the 1999 APS March Meeting
• Magnetic RAM cures your computer of short-term memory loss by Richard Butner
• IBM, Infineon looking to shake up memory market
• Instant Access Memory by David Voss
• How Magnetic RAM Will Work by Kevin Bonsor
• The Possibility of Commercial MRAM by John Dvorak
• Nanomagnetics (a chapter of Nanostructure Science and Technology: A Worldwide Study)
• Magnetic Random-Access Memory Promises PC Changes
• IBM says breakthrough will enable commercial MRAMs

Interesting highlights:

The trasentric paper quoted Electronic Buyer's News:

"Honeywell Inc. and Motorola Inc. are hoping to spin volume quantities of MRAM through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract that is also shared by IBM. DRAM powerhouses Micron, NEC, and Samsung are said to be developing the technology, while Hewlett-Packard has a design team looking into the viability of chip-level magnetic storage."

1. Much of this research is funded by a DARPA contract which means it is the money of US Taxpayers at work.
2. Samsung is part of the same contract.

The Wired article is fairly lengthy and also details the biography of Stuart Parkin. Parkin is the IBM fellow that has been driving most of the MRAM research.

Ciao.

No migration happens because photons have 0 rest mass, and therefore don't have intertia.

Ahh, yes... a very common mistake by the non-physicist. It seems to make sense that something that has zero rest mass cannot possibly have inertia. This is, however, completely wrong. The problem is that massless particals travel at the speed of light, which is where some interesting things happen in the equations. We start out with the general equation:
E^2 = m^2*c^4+p^2*c^2

Substituting 0 for m, we can solve for p = E/c. It's well known that photons carry energy, and thus they must carry momentum. (There are other methods of deriving this, however I will not get into them... pretty much all waves carry momentum, one way or another).

How else would projects like the Astronomical Society's Solar Sail function?

As for this being the primary reason that optronics are better than electronics, I'm not entirely sure... definately massless particals are in general better for things like this (where you want maximum information carried for a minimum amount of energy, in a minimum amount of time). Photons typically propagate faster than electronic signals, and optical circuits usually have a much higher bandwitdth due to frequency-level multiplexing.

Also, it is possible to use physical properties of photons to compute fast fourier transforms, which are especially important for digital signal processing. Not to mention the amazingly fast access times of ultra-huge holographic databases.

Dislaimer: I'm not a physicist, but I'm studying to become one.

-Justin

I remember a similar promise made about LZW compression in the GIF standard by Compuserve. What is to stop these companies from requiring license fees at some arbitrary point in the future once the technology is widely used?

Additionally, there doesn't seem to be very much due dilligence performed in regards to other patents over the techniques utilized in the standard. Even if all of the known patents are licensed royalty-free, there exists the very real possiblity that a submarine patent will be exposed, after the standard is widely utilized, of course.

Of course, this won't matter once all of our PCs are replaced with sealed, SSSCA-compliant, government issued "convergence appliances"... :-)

To really be deployable in an un-metered fashion with a reasonable business model, you need something much more spectrally efficient, like ArrayComm's i-BURST for high-speed data service. A recent demo in South Korea shows it working at 1 Mbit/s. Two of South Korea's big telcos, Hanaro and KT, are planning to roll it out next year some time. Remember that Korea is where CDMA got its start.

ArrayComm licensed some spectrum in Australia, where they plan to roll out a wireless broadband service in the major cities in just 5 MHz of TDD spectrum. It looks like recent FCC rule changes have made some national TDD spectrum licenses available in the U.S. as well

It uses IntelliCell spatial processing and spatial channels to get multiple users on the same spectrum, at the same time. I've been lucky enough to see the i-BURST system in action, and it looks pretty cool, is real, and actually works. There are other smart antenna companies as well that are working on broadband data products, but I don't think any of them are as far along as ArrayComm.

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.

there was also an EE times story on this recently with some details on their broadband gaming service they're going to unveil: "Okamoto also said that Sony will roll out broadband gaming features and services for the Playstation 2 this year, working with partners such as America Online, iMode, Telewest and Vodaphone. Those services will use a so-called Dynamic Network Authorization System for copyright management. The system is based on a disk ID that is read by a DNAS server, he said."

I'm going to openly admit my willful ignorance of the subscription issue. I probably won't pay for the site, if there's ads, I'll just block them, and if I can't do that, I'll move elsewhere. The value-add to my day right now isn't that high - slashdot is an interesting way to fill boring spaces in work. I might pay for higher quality content, pictures of Jon Katz being forced to read war and peace 5000 times, etc - that would require real editors, producing real content, maybe some technial articles.

There's too many replacements now.. I can just read the EE times all day, too. And block their ads. Ha.

What I see happening here is Slashdot is going to fill up the compuserve model from the old days. For us old geezers (ha, I'm only 25 and feel old) who remember Quantum Link, those services were basically just BBS systems on crack. They had lots of files, lots of people, lots of topics - but they weren't personal. What happened was that small BBSes with people in the local community sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain. I can see the same thing happening if slashdot goes to a commercial model - there will be an untapped demand, and lots of tools to fill it.

Folks, anyone can run a weblog site now.. I just finished configuring a scoop site (nicer than slash IMHO) for work. It's no big deal to kick a old pentium under a desk and start up a little local community.. this is happening all over as we speak. Slashdot is unique in the sheer volume of people it brings to the table.. anything which impacts the number of contributing users decreases it's only competitive advantage other than brand recognition.

Think long and hard about the subscriptions, guys. There's lots of content that I would pay here, but let me tell you, you're going to need a better carrot than "pay me or look at crappy ads". Make the pitch to the value-added service for the subscription and I might bite though.. for tips, you could start at perhaps letting paying users vote on stories in the submission queue, getting some real stories from real writers in there, and paying SOMEONE to check the front page for errors and duped submissions..

But the world is also full of new ideas for lower-bit-rate encoding, including wavelet, MPEG-4 and such proprietary codecs as Microsoft Corp.'s Corona. The DVD Forum's technical working group has already proved that encoding rates as low as 7 Mbits/s will yield HD video of acceptable quality.

1. Microsoft is let off completely by Justice largely due to the requests/lobbying of digital-content-providers.
2. In return for getting off the hook, M$ provides its new codecs to said content-providers, along with its current Digital Rights Management scheme.
3. M$ monopoly is secure as it helps other industry players squeeze the consumer, reduce choice, and further consolidate power in the hands of an incredibly richer and more powerful anointed few.

There is a large barrier to entry for designing huge processors, but I think processor startups will always exist. With resources a small fraction of the big guys, they can't design and manage a device this complex. Instead of designing a 25 million transistor beast, people are designing much smaller processors, making sure that each can network well, and then populating chips with multiple copies of these processors.

Startup Pact (with a staff of only 30!) has designed a 30 million transistor chip by iterating a 200k transistor processor 128 times, yielding a theoretical maximum 12.8 billion MACs/sec @ 100 MHz. Of course, that's the theoretical max... it will take the correct problem and/or some good programming to get anywhere near that maximum.

Lexra has put 16 MIPS32 processors on a single die. Again, with only 30 employees.

You'd be limited with UWB in "bandwidth" which should read transmission capacity only by the speed with which you couple pulse a radio signal. If I can get 100 pulses of a 30m signal that is a hundred bits per second I can send you. The more pulses I can transmit the more data I can transmit. At least this is the best understanding of UWB I have. Old habits die hard for a lot of people. Here is a good EE Times story about UWB.

The most contentious issue in the 3-1/2-year debate over UWB deployment was the potential for
interference with the Global Positioning System (GPS). Julius Knapp, deputy chief of the FCC's Office of
Engineering and Technology, said UWB communications devices will be required to operate above 3.1
GHz and that spurious transmissions in the 1.6-GHz GPS spectrum will have to be suppressed by 34 dB.

In last week's EETimes, there was a good intro to UWB and its challenges, as well as a discussion about the (considerable) importance of the FCC ruling that just took place (in a front page story). The Web versions are:

• Ultrawideband facts and fictions, a great intro to UWB principles
• Ultrawideband companies gear up for FCC ruling, mostly about FCC politics
• UWB MACs: build or borrow?, mostly about UWB network card engineering

-- SysKoll

In last week's EETimes, there was a good intro to UWB and its challenges, as well as a discussion about the (considerable) importance of the FCC ruling that just took place (in a front page story). The Web versions are:

• Ultrawideband facts and fictions, a great intro to UWB principles
• Ultrawideband companies gear up for FCC ruling, mostly about FCC politics
• UWB MACs: build or borrow?, mostly about UWB network card engineering

-- SysKoll

In last week's EETimes, there was a good intro to UWB and its challenges, as well as a discussion about the (considerable) importance of the FCC ruling that just took place (in a front page story). The Web versions are:

• Ultrawideband facts and fictions, a great intro to UWB principles
• Ultrawideband companies gear up for FCC ruling, mostly about FCC politics
• UWB MACs: build or borrow?, mostly about UWB network card engineering

-- SysKoll

They'll last untill some rocket-scientist figures out that some bizzare combination of fishoil and hairspray will neutralize the selfdestruct mechanism....which will take place 4.36 days after they get to market.

But really...who cares. Between broadband, DivX;-), the dropping costs of DVD writer/rewriters and the media, hardware DivX;-) cards (I know one or two have been announced) and the social acceptance of Napster....The MPAA is in the process of shitting itself.

Well at least until they get enough senators in their back pocket to pass that SSSCA shit.

virtros

H is not a good source of energy.

Correct. Hydrogen atoms are good resources to store energy. We have already spent years of research and development on how to produce the element.

But the availability of fuel cells makes it a nice way to store and transport energy, and that was the big missing link for most renewable energies. now the energy produced by wind or sun can be stored (relatively) cheaply, and solar powered houses might survive cloudy weeks.

Fuel cells are able to compact the architectural design of transportation engines and components. One example recently introduced is General Motors new roller chassis named after the financial investment; AUTOnomy.

There is some interesting work going on with XML/ASN.1 translation. Essentially, one can create a 1-1 mapping between an ASN.1 module and an XML schema, and use whatever encoding you're comfortable with (i.e., XML encoding, or ASN.1 [DBP]ER). The advantage here is that the encoding rules for ASN.1 (especially the PER (Packed Encoding Rules)) are very space efficient. Thus, by re-encoding the XML data as ASN.1, one can achieve remarkable levels of compression.

This site has some useful information on the proposed standardization of this effort. There was also a /. post about a recent EE Times article on the subject.

Yes, but the schedule they set is not being followed in the slightest, and even the FCC chairman admits that the date might slip, and unless things change they will slip.

"instead of Netscape Navigator, whose stock symbol has, umm, disappeared"

Netscape was bought by AOL back in 1998. That's why they're not listed anymore.

Just what I told them to do

However, another part of Philips has dopier ideas:

Philips is leading the charge to start yet another industry initiative to tackle digital rights management, this time focusing on the wirelessly networked home, EE Times has learned.

At stake here, said Leon Husson, executive vice president of consumer businesses at Philips Semiconductors, is the "free-floating" copyrighted content that will soon be "redistributed" or "rebroadcast" to different TV sets throughout a home by consumers using wireless networking technologies like IEEE802.11.

Rather than wait for Hollywood studios to raise a red flag over unprotected wirelessly transmitted content, some technology companies want to tackle the issue in advance and develop solutions together with content owners.

"We are dying to lobby Hollywood studios on this issue," Husson said

Meanwhile, Thomson's Lafaye seems to think people will buy lots of technology from him so they can be prevented from using it:

The SmartRight technology will honor a local "entitlement control message" -- such digital rights management rules as copy never or copy once, for example -- originally attached to the content. By putting the SmartRight technology in place, which enforces rights management in the home, said Lafaye, "we can help content owners create a new business revenue model." Content owners, for example, can start charging consumers every time their digital content is re-distributed within the home, or viewed several times during a certain number of days specified by them.

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020111S0060

Also at CES is a demo of interactive DVD set top boxes. All this convergence and integration, and this Moxi box doesn't even offer this feature. For now I think I shall keep my money for other things until the market matures... I'll let those people with more money than sense be guinnea pigs for this kind of technology.

I would also think the three huge companies mentioned -- IBM, Toshiba, and Sony wouldn't work together anyway On the contrary. I'm working as an IBM employee somewhere you may have heard of. Turns out, Sony, Toshiba and IBM each have different skills and needs that together strengthen a project. Sure, we each have our agendas, but as long as we all get what we want, it's all good, right? None of us is out to dominate the world. We each have our target markets, and I think we can all coexist. I can't say anything about the OS article, but the hadware will be cool.

No mention of UDP in the article.
No mention of distributed data in the article.
No mention of compression in the article.

Hmm, perhaps some sheeple*cough*people got lost on the way. Here is the link again. Read it over.

Take a chunk of data, reduce it to an equation. Break equation into symbols. Send. Receive a percentage of symbols. Perform XOR on symbols received. Rebuild equation, solve equation, recreate data. Stop send, stop receive. Thank you for using StarTrek FTP server, goodbye.

As the cost of the boxes are so high, they will probably only be used by backbones. I was hoping this would be a software only solution. The we would really see Digital Convergence. Hell, our processors are fast enough...

Nacny looks like it will rule the land. Compression so good and FAST to be able to stream video over cell phones, especially those new 3G phones that have broadband bandwidth capablilities.

Amazing how the word "breakthrough" can be abused.

Intel announced that they are going to go ahead and push their own high-k dielectric and modified silicon-on-insulator, which they took their time to refine instead of pushing this kind of stuff into fabs early (like IBM and AMD). That's it. They did the same with copper interconnects, waiting for .13 micron processes, IIRC.

There's nothing fantastically new, especially in the press release, except that they did it themselves instead of liscensing it. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

EEtimes has a better article http://eetimes.com/story/OEG20011126S0031

See this
EE Times story for the technical details
behind the announcement -- Intel does an
about-face on SOI.

more info at eetimes

The final proposal calls for two mandatory modulation/access schemes of complementary code keying (CCK) used in 802.11b and the newly allowed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) used in the 5-GHz 802.11a standard. As an option, however, the 802.11g proposal allows for the inclusion of Intersil's original CCK-OFDM scheme, which supports rates of 6 to 54 Mbits/s, and of TI's PBCC-22 (packet binary convolutional coding) method, which supports rates up to 33 Mbits/s.

Three possible coding schemes? This will either drive the price up (to support all three), or lead to incompatibilities when only portions of the spec are implemented. I'd love to find out more... is there some negiotiation in the protocol too see what coding methods are supported?

Hm, people have short attention spans.

Yes, e-paper/e-ink is great for unpowered use. Conceivably, that stuff could be made archival quality (whatever you choose that to mean) - although I imagine there'll be interesting problems with it 10+ years down the line, as we're now seeing with CDs.

However, if you want high resolution, color, and low power draw- try one of the emerging technologies that integrates the framebuffer with the display! - http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000809S0013 (Could've sworn I saw this mentioned as an OLED design first, but this is what Google finds...)

However, this still ain't perfect if you want to watch motion- in a display where the on-off cycle of each pixel is as 'slow' as the refresh rate (as opposed to the incredibly small time an electron beam highlights a patch of phosphor in a CRT), you get ghosting- your retina is 'exposed' long enough to produce an afterimage. That said, regular LCD ghosting seems to be more a function of incomplete turnover in the pixels (in other words, the screen ghosts, not your eyeballs- not directly a fault of having full-cycle pixels)- however, those big plasma displays miiiight be demonstrating this effect.

The moral of the story is that killing flicker the easy way can screw over motion- and to introduce enough 'flicker' to prevent afterimage formation can conceivably screw over the integrated framebuffer/SRAM concept- if you have to cycle each pixel at some multiple of the refresh rate, things get a bit more complex...

EETimes story

More stories available from the first link.

I think it's scary.

If you are a Californian, the contact info is here for California attorney general Bill Lockyer- you can call toll-free (800) 952-5225 inside California.

Given that MS has a history of astroturfing again and again pretending to have a grass-roots movement in its support, it would be a good idea to express bona fide concern about how fair the settlement is at a time when it might make some difference.

I actually believe Sony did do this very same thing last year (before Nintendo did, I might add), but it seems as if (a) there weren't any takers, or (b) the project(s) are still in the works.

Blue tooth is too slow to be a cable substitute except for the lowest-end applications. Going forward it is a dinosaur.

Here is the real picture:

900 MHz - portable phones (land line)

2.4 GHz - wireless ethernet (802.11b), wirefree (and more reliable) substitute for usb cable applications

5.4 GHz - hi-speed wireless ethernet (802.11a), wirefree substitute for firewire (and digital video) applications

low power versions of 802.11b are currently being worked on and will supercede anything developed by bluetooth - and if you really want to talk locally at bluetooth speeds use IR - direct lines of sight are easy to arrange in a PAN (personal area network) and IrDA operates at 4x blue tooth speeds and costs next to nothing

From the second link "A dual-layer rewritable optical-disk technology," and "disks that have a capacity of 50 Gbytes per side , which allows the recording of more than four hours of high-definition programs, two hours per side ." my emphasis.

Read 50 gigs or watch 2 hours of a movie in HDTV then physically flip the disk unless the reader/writer has dual lasers.

EEtimes Story

Everyone in the high-performance CPU market (except itanic) is doing either this or multiple concurrent thread contexts to speed overall system computational throughput.

Link to the article at EEtimes.

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010207S0037

In this editorial in a recent EE Times issue, Rick Merrit, discussing hardware spending, writes "I doubt [Fiorina] has the taste for the engineering costs. Maybe she really is poised to reverse HP's three-year slide in R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales, but the move to acquire a company [Compaq] that spends even less on engineering speaks otherwise."

In this editorial in a recent EE Times issue, Rick Merrit, discussing hardware spending, writes "I doubt [Fiorina] has the taste for the engineering costs. Maybe she really is poised to reverse HP's three-year slide in R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales, but the move to acquire a company [Compaq] that spends even less on engineering speaks otherwise."

The backdoors are in the implementation, not the algorithm.

Not neccessarily. But ciphers with backdoors have a low probability of surviving peer review. So the usual way to add a backdoor would be in the implementation. Actually a lot implementations have backdoors like bad random number generation, selection of weak ciphers or other mistakes. Have a look at this for a recent example.

But there are ways to leak key data without anybody able to detect it except the designers of the cipher. So probably it's a good thing AES comes from Belgium...

Gallium arsenide chips have been around for a long time, but as the article says, they are limited to niche applications due to cost. Still, there was one company which actually shipped a mainframe built on GaAs chips -- Convex. It's actually kind of hard to find info on them these days (they were swallowed up by HP in the mid 90s), but this EE Times article has a bit of info.