Slashdot Mirror

From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

Also:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."

A related post I made here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/98e7c08690c377cf

And from eetimes:
"Engineering: The next generation"
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daughters from entering the profession. Their reasons vary, but most have reached the conclusion that globalization has made it impossible to build a career, much less make a living, as an engineer.
This is a sad state of affairs. One result is that too much talent has been diverted to unproductive pursuits lik

The Qualcomm part likely regards the baseband radio, not the SoC.

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4208685/Analyst--iPhone-to-sole-source-Qualcomm-chip-semiconductor

So, the comments about Qualcomm being inolved in the SoC may be wrong, but they are dropping Infineon for Qualcomm, for the baseband.

Graphene actually can be made to have a bandgap so this problem may only be a temporary one.

Here's a paper which discusses graphene's band gap: Direct observation of a widely tunable bandgap in bilayer graphene

Here's a free article discussing this: Tunable Graphene Bandgap Opens The Way To Nanoelectronics And Nanophotonics

In fact, here's an article about IBM doing research on this very topic: IBM opens bandgap for graphene

Note that the date of the article discussing graphine with a bandgap is after the date of the article linked in the slashdot summary discussing that graphine can't have a bandgap. Sounds like the authors of the articles need to talk to some more people and get their facts ironed out.

there is also the upcoming Cortex-A15 (Eagle)

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4207494/ARM--in-servers-push--describes-the-Cortex-A-15-CPU

In related news, and also very interesting: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210263/Intel-to-fab-FPGAs-for-startup-Achronix

If "they all suck", then it's probably more like "non-compliant websites suck". Flashblock helps a lot, but I still run into sites that jack up my CPU utilization with javascript. For instance, the ticker on an eetimes.com article pushes my core 2 duo to 70%. A little absurd for a 2 page article.

Unfortunately, everyone wants a flashy website these days, and the people paying the web developers don't really care about how it effects the end user... as long as it's pretty and it attracts page hits.

Obviously that's not always the case... but still, blame the websites. At this point you basically wind up with the the decision to (SLOWLY) see everything as intended, or live with some quirks for a faster browsing experience.

It has been 4 + decades since the space program dominated electronics development.

Anyway, by the time any piece of electronics gets radiation hardened and goes through the "soak" - i.e., a few simulated years or decades worth of cycling through heat, usage, etc., plus fixing any uncovered problems, it is by definition not going to be cutting edge.

It's good that space computers are more commonplace, anyway. Viking 1 died because JPL couldn't afford to keep the people who understood the archaic assembly language for the landers in the ramped down extended mission team.

After Samsung "announced that it is adopting the Mali [GPU]...for its future graphics-enabled ...SoC ICs", it sounds plausible that the speedup and the lack of information about the GPU could relate to this Mali technology from ARM.

ARM has recently released source for some parts of the Linux drivers for current Mali GPUs under GPLv2, which might be the first step towards ARM SoC's with fully-open GPU drivers.

There are no guarantees, but at the moment it appears that ARM is much more receptive to the idea of open GPU drivers than Imagination Tech (PowerVR GPUs) or NVidea.

I think it's a shame that AMD isn't moving faster w.r.t the embedded/mobile market. Sure, they're planning to make SoC's with a GPU on the same silicon, but as of last week they're not currently interested in competing with ARM for market share. And AMD's the chipmaker that's most actively supporting and creating open drivers for their graphics hardware.

It'll be interesting to see where the hardware goes in the next couple of years. Can Intel (and AMD, if they get serious) pull marketshare from ARM, or will the RISC chip reign supreme?

I have to admit I'm a little surprised to see Canon on that list though. I've heard so little about Canon lately they were sort of pushed into the back of my head towards the list of "tech companies circling the drain"

Canon had only 9% market share in 2009; indeed they don't seem to do well at the moment. However, 2009 numbers are probably distorted by the recession.

Here is a good technical description of the actual terms:

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4205889/Intel-not-fined--agrees-to-restrictions-in-FTC-deal

Read it. All it does is require that Intel stop engaging in the monopolistic practices that it has been using for the last 10 years. So their punishment is that they have to obey the law for the next 5 years. They pay no fine. They don't admit that they did anything wrong.

The best part is at the very end of the article. This is where the juicy details are always buried.

The settlement gives the FTC authority to appoint technical consultants to monitor Intel's compliance with the settlement agreement. These technical consultants will be subject to Intel's approval and paid by Intel. The settlement requires that the technical consultants be given access to technical information on Intel products as well as other information like company personnel and finances. The total amount that Intel is required to pay for the 10-year duration of the FTC's order is limited to $2 million to all technical consultants.

Two million dollars to monitor a company a size of Intel for 10 years? Pathetic.

Despite the hype that the press will put out, this is a complete win for Intel. No fine. No one in the company is held responsible. No admission of guilt.

You have been getting ripped off for 10 years by Intel/Dell/HP in the form of higher prices and decreased innovation. Remember it was AMD that created the x86 64 bit architecture, not Intel. When Intel was paying bribes to Dell none of that money was going into R&D. The EETimes article makes it clear that Intel was modifying it's architecture to make AMD look bad, not to make any real world code run faster.

Your will not get a dime in compensation for the higher prices you have been paying. When you see figures that Dell paid $500 million in fines, or Intel paid AMD $1.2 billion to settle a court case, they are paying with money they stole from you, the consumer.

This settlement is a joke. Non of the people who profited will be held accountable or loose any real money. Consumers had untold billions of dollars stolen from them and the crooks got away clean. Welcome to our so-called capitalistic market driven economy, sucker.

Maybe this is in the works. Just read that they are getting the ARM core.
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4204863/Microsoft-takes-ARM-license

Obtaining the leading processor core for mobile phones positions them well to create a mobile phone, don't ya think? :)

The truth is that code was reused (if not copied, exactly, in the same way you don't submit a copied essay which you've taken from a classmate) from a UNIX derivative, which is now (somewhat disputably) owned by SCO.

Um, citation needed? Nothing in TFA suggests to me any code reuse.

Don't mistake writing for the same API as "code reuse". You seem to have no clue that APIs are not a subject of copyright protection -- either you're badly underinformed, or you're a troll.

If you write for given API, where variable/parameter/function/field names are either part of the API or are a de-facto standard, there is no helping creating structures that look the same, creating same function declarations that look the same, etc.

Again, let there be no mistake: in my opinion, there is no code "reuse" or "plagiarism" in any of the samples TFA refers to. So most of your rant is a waste of steam. The fact that Linux-is-a-UNIX makes certain things look similar, but that's simply because to be a UNIX, you must implement a bunch of APIs, and by necessity functions and structs will have same signatures, and there will be a bunch of C macros that are same as well, perhaps to the letter. When it comes to C macros, sometimes there is only one way to write them correctly, save for whitespace, and function dictates form, to the letter. This does not imply any reuse of code, merely implementing same thing.

What code of yours was plagiarized, again?

Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies.

High efficiency cheap plastic solar cells covering an area of about 230sq km would power the whole Earth. The technology is in the research phase now, and is expected to be rapidly commercialised. 230sq km of plastic is easily achievable - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area of 700,000 sq km to 15,000,000 sq km, and that was made by accident.

Nuclear power is here now.

Yes, we already have a working nuclear fusion energy source.

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224701036&printable=true&printable=true

Next time guys, save us the effort and use the link that doesn't require us to click next 4 times to read an article that fits on half a page.

Oh ... timothy, nevermind.

The Fine Article states "The City's gossips were pushing two tales: that Apple is considering a bid for ARM Holdings and that Vale could make an offer for Xstrata." (emphasis mine) not "An article in the London Evening Standard claims that Apple has made an $8 billion offer to acquire ARM Holdings." as the summery puts it.
Yeah yeah, I must be new here. Still, it is the first sentence of the article. As many have pointed out, given ARM's core strength is how just about anyone could license their IP and modify it to suit their needs, for Apple to buy the company as a whole makes very little sense. On the other hand, I can see Apple making a substantial investment (but not a controlling stake) in ARM, not unlike the investment in Imagination Technologies.

This is a piece of useless article just for some kind of publicity. Let me put more interesting one for who have been tricked in to this thread for more information about polymer self assembly.

EETimes has "IBM Research claimed a keystone achievement in on-chip optical communications Wednesday (March 3), saying its 40-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) germanium avalanche photodetector completes what it calls the nanophotonic toolkit." (link) (A few days before announcing 2,500 layoffs, hmmm...)

...And the same news from Semiconductor Intl.

Just stumbled over this:
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222601042&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS

Part of the plan would surely involve getting into the IP core business, like ARM. AMD are doing it, and some Intel researchers already have a prototype.

Didn't the EEtimes come to a similar conclusion last year?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/03/1943247

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=207001533

I recall it had more to do with planning skills than anything else.

Nobody has even attempted to prove that any copying has occured.

I don't know why you want to pretend that MS isn't a criminal organization, but come on, dude.. It's not hard to find this stuff.

-jcr

Water can be used to fuel an engine. It's split into hydrogen and oxygen. Patents have been issued for such. For example: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601111

BBC uses a simple huffman compression to reduce the volume of the EPG data.

Is this really a big deal?

You have a multi-Mbps stream and you're worried about a few KB every few minutes?

Yes, lets break a standard and screw over the users just to recover between 0.5 and 3 percent of the available bandwidth.

Must be the BEEB is using the EPG stream as some sort of subliminal messaging system.

• Intel receives massive subsidies from local and national governments to build its fabrication plants. For example, After a year and a half of negotiations, Israel's finance minister announced the government has agreed to grant Intel Corp. a 12.5% subsidy for a new wafer fab.
• Intel has been the beneficiary of massive amounts of knowledge from research fed into the public sphere by government funded projects. In fact, Intel is presently lobbying for increased government investment in various types of research from which Intel will directly benefit. Intel supports increased government funding of research and development in security innovation, including peer reviewed cryptography.
• Intel present receives a tremendous number of tax credits for the R&D they do. Further, they are lobbying to increase these credits. Intel supports making the U.S. R&D Tax Credit a permanent part of the tax code.

If you took out all of the profits from direct and indirect government subsidies, it would be an open question whether or not Intel would a profitable concern. The largest difference between the firms being bailed out now and Intel is that Intel got on the gravy train earlier and spread its subsidies out over its entire lifetime.

Well NASA has had balloons take multi-ton payloads to 171,000 ft.

So at that extreme altitude we could rail gun materials into space.

As for ppl we can't rail gun them into space as it would kill them past
a certain rate of acceleration.

From that height though we could launch something like the rumored
Blackstar rocket plane to reach space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstar_(spaceplane)

To fuel the rocket planes we could use hydrogen, also as lift for the balloons.

Biological hydrogen production would need some refinement but it
would be a semi low cost fuel via the new production method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production

Once we get to L5 position we can build a space station that doesn't
need boosts back into higher orbit like ISS.

Form there we can use robots to collect all the space junk in orbit
and we can recycle what is usable or de-orbit it into the pacific
like what was done with Skylab.

Once at L5 we can build a star ship hopefully with Fusion power system
or something better that we have yet to discover or has not been yet
released by the governments of the world.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216200272

Ion drive would be one system, beyond that I do not know.

Fuel propellants is not really practical over the long haul.

It would be best to man the starship as much as possible with
robots to cut down on the need for O2, food, medical care, etc.

If we need to get materials up there we can railgun them from the
high balloon platform or have solar powered robots similar to the
pathfinder series mine them on the moon.

mining the moon is not popular with all crowds so it may
just come from earth to save the bickering.

Ballooning and rocketing more than 200,000 ppl per day
would be a herculean task, and until we had a colony to
sustain them not very viable.

Also to be honest at some point it is going to be hard to
beat a robot at physical labor in a harsh environment.

The early colonies in space will be best served by very
durable robots that at some point have the ability to repair
robots like them.

The moon is the best 1st colony because it is close,
and emergencies can be dealt with all 12 months of the year.

With mars you get an approach vector to that planet MUCH
less often and thus you are on your own if something goes wrong.

They would also need the ability to gather raw materials
and make more robots ( que terminator fears here )

They could setup the place for the humans with robots only
needing solar power.

Fragile humans would need food, water, medical care,
and several other things to make it on a remote colony.

Once you have a working colony that has undergone
testing by the robots then you can bring some humans
to beta test it on a small scale, then gear it up later.

Once a few large reactors were setup on the moon,
then mars, full scale colonization of qualified humans
could begin.

What I mean by qualified is, you are mentally and physically
capable of benefiting the further mission.

If you are of reduced ability, you stay on earth until we
can get to a level where the robots do almost all the work
and fusion or better systems is providing limitless power.

I agree, this article as written makes no sense. To "open source an API" is muddy thinking, a non-concept. At least in the US, there is well-established legal precedent allowing companies to duplicate APIs at a functional level. E.g., the function of APIs is not copyrightable in the way that source code is. So anybody that wants to can come along and implement their own versions of the EC2, S3, etc. API. They don't need any approval from Amazon.

Now Amazon may decide it's in their best interest if other cloud providers adopted their APIs. Presumably they would do this to encourage more companies to adopt cloud computing (i.e., eliminate lock-in as a risk). They could advance their APIs as standards in a number of ways, including making some of their own specific implementations open-source. Is this what the article is trying to say?

I don't know what Obama policies you are referring to, unless it is closing offshore tax loopholes.

This thinking is prevalent. The value a multinational corporation makes or is worth is often up for debate. Often the tax rates are based on the company bottom line regardless of how much of the work is done where.

Examples are Nike where most labor is overseas and Intel where the US fabs produce the chips that are packaged overseas. The completed product is made in 2 countries. If both countries try to tax for the total income, the company will most likely shut down operations in the expensive place.

It is true that a few tax havens exist where the corp headquarters is just a seal in a box somewhere in the Cayman Islands and this is a problem.

On the other hand, how much of the value of a completed microprocessor is manufactured in the USA and how much is manufactured in China.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198000380 Some corporations have manufacturing in many places. Often the government will look at any overseas operation as a tax loophole. Closing these tax loopholes may mean the corporation may close operations altogether in the business unfriendly countries. The result is loss of jobs and a trade deficit as that country now has to rely more and more on foreign imports like the US. The US is rapidly becoming a service industry nation writing software and providing medical services, but most goods are imported. Try it, Visit Wal * Mart and look to see where the products are made. Notice an abundance of American brands?

Sony, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Samsung, Panasonic, Pioneer, HP, Asus, Lexmark, Philips, Visio, RCA, Olevia, Viore, Sanyo, AOC, Wenzel, Coleman, Rubbermaid, Kalisto, etc.. Some of the above are built in the US. Many US brands are now just importers who re-brand.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202603163

Phoenix rolls environment for PC apps

Rick Merritt
EE Times
(11/05/2007 12:00 AM EST)

SAN JOSE, Calif. â" Phoenix Technologies Ltd. is using virtualization technology to carve out a new market in PC software beyond its traditional BIOS code. The company is working with notebook makers to roll out HyperSpace, a basic application environment for mobile systems intended to be a kind of complement to Windows.

HyperSpace aims to provide access to simplified versions of applications at times when Windows is not available because the system is booting, in a deep sleep mode or stalled. It will include a simplified Web browser, media player and e-mail client as well as systems management and security utilities.

While Windows can take as long as 45 seconds to boot, the HyperSpace environment should be ready in as little as 5-10 seconds. "No matter what Windows is doing you can access programs in HyperSpace," said Gaurav Banga, chief technology officer and senior vice president of engineering at Phoenix

The Phoenix moves comes on the heels of the launch of FlashMate from competitor Insyde Software. FlashMate aims to provide similar functions, however it rides a new flash module from Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.

Phoenix believes users will be able to switch between HyperSpace and Windows more quickly than they can toggle between Windows and FlashMate environments, said Banga. That's because, unlike its competition, Hyperspace is based on creating a single environment that hosts both Windows and the Phoenix software.

The trade off in that approach is that some Windows applications could take a performance hit of as much as ten percent. However, the degradation is so small users should not notice it, Banga said.

Phoenix is now working with OEMs to customize Hyperspace and expects initial systems using the software could ship in about nine months. However, so far the company has not garnered any public support from any PC makers or third party software companies supporting HyperSpace.

The new direction emerges as Phoenix completes its transition to BIOS based on the Extensible Firmware Interface promoted by Intel Corp. EFI moves BIOS from its heritage in the 1980's as assembly language code running in real mode to a more high-level and open environment developed in C.

With EFI, BIOS also updates its table of hardware system resources. Today BIOS, operating systems and even applications sometimes each build their own separate tables of available hardware on a system.

"With EFI, that will go away. There will only need to be hardware discovery done once," said Banga.

Support for HyperSpace is embedded in the latest EFI-based BIOS code from Phoenix. The company will also make HyperSpace available on its legacy BIOS.

Rechargeable zinc-air battery, 4 years ago:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903727

I wonder whether they managed to take it anywhere. rechargeable zinc-air would be cool, because there's much more zinc than lithium on Earth.

There is next to no information in the first article... this one is much more informative:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/lithium_oxygen_stair_battery/

The concept (taking one of the reagents from air) is not new. There were zinc-air batteries for decades, and they are widely used. They have one of the highest energy densities of all types of commercially available batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_battery

Seems like four years ago somebody even figured out how to make them electrically rechargeable (before that, the usual method of recharge was to replace the zinc plates and remove oxide waste, which was facilitated by cell design).
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903727

However, if those new batteries use carbon instead of zinc, they might have a higher theoretical upper bound on energy density. It looks like they're using graphite-lithium intercalate for the negative electrode (a standard thing), and the positive electrode is essentially a combined catalyst/adsorbent for Li2O2 which forms during electricity generation.

CnLi ---> Li+ + Cn + e
2Li+ + 2e + O2 --cat.-> Li2O2

Note that the first article is rather bogus: O2 does not "recharge" the battery, it is only a reagent.

I'm not familiar with the cost breakdown for the components of Li-ion batteries, but lithium seems like a major contributor, so this might not be much cheaper than the traditional Li-ion.

Except on everything not x86. The speed you currently see on desktop/server java is only accomplished by very good JustInTime compilers. Which are tweaked for x86. So everything else runs java like crap.

Have you not heard of Jazelle? It supprots just in time and ahead of time compilers for ARM and is mentioned in the wikipedia link you gave.

It provides direct execution of Java bytecode and was announced in 2000.

TFS leads off with 'OMG! Pandemic next week!', as does the tiny, uninformative blog TFS links to, despite lack of citation to a source that might be more authoritative than a 2-paragraph pseudo-article. Fortunately, that blog links to a story that is actually informative and somewhat related to technical matters. It leads off with the less exciting, but probably more accurate 'Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic.' Nowhere in the eetimes.com article does it say a pandemic is predicted within a week, and nowhere in the blog TFS links to is there a citation for the author's pandemic prediction.

I'm not saying the disease isn't serious, but will someone please beat some sense into the fearmonger who cut/pasted this shitty summary together? It makes my eyes hurt just to read it, and stinks of someone trying to drive up their blog's hit count.

If you trace back to the original EETimes article (http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217201126) you'll see this in the opening paragraph:

Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic, according to computer models developed by Virginia Tech's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL).

So why is this Slashdot story claiming:

"Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week"

So is the author just panicking unnecessarily or is this another case of using fear tactics to push an agenda, in this case boosting sales of a flu detection chip?

Pair programming is more to get the senior person train up the junior person and extract their knowledge, then shuffle them up into management, so they can't pass the knowledge onto anyone else:

ST exec turns from topsoil to silicon

EET: What was the culture of the EE like back then?

Bosson: They were gurus, and you needed the OK to talk to those guys. You had to be very shy and approach them [as you would] wild animals. Our wish was to try to grab as much as we could from them. But they were guys who were protecting their jobs, too. You had to have a lot of white and gray hair, Monsieur Le Engineer.

You were trying to observe them because you wanted to get as much as you could from their behavior, their approach, their way of working. It was like [being] with a teacher. A teacher is ready to share with you. But those EEs -- as with the wild animal, you had to get close to them step by step, watching their emotions step by step.

This is non-news.

There is no single "Smart Grid" device technology. At present there are many proprietary solutions from many different vendors, each using different communication protocols, computer hardware and firmware, and security methods. Each one of these vendors has its products in a very, very small fraction of the utility meters in the nation, most of which, of course, have no Smart technology at all. So the fact that these guys found one architecture vulnerable to a particular stack-overflow attack is bad for the vendor(s) that use it, but not indicative of an approacing nationwide catastrophe.

Smart Grid system standards are under development, however, and those doing the development are exceedingly aware of the need for high security. The IEEE, for example, recently started a Smart Grid standardization effort, P2030, and the IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Neighborhood Task Group effort is already underway. Since the utilities lose revenue -- potentially all revenue, plus destruction of capital assets -- if their equipment is cracked, they are very much a part of these standard development activities, and security is of constant concern. (There will undoubtedly be an industry consortium tasked with reviewing implementations of these standards.)

H1-B wages are not the problem. By law, an employer is required to pay H1-B at least as much or more than the US market average for the given position.

But this is America - the only people required to obey the law are American citizens who fall into the category of "employee" or "unemployed".

Obeying that particular law is...ummm...unpopular. See http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189401976/, as just one of many similar sources.

Obligatory EE Times link with a slightly different emphasis..
http://eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=214502566
which has a link to another implementation (for remote USB access) available for pre-order at $ 79
http://pogoplug.com/

In China, USB charging has been mandatory for new mobile phones since 2007. By and large, phones will also sync using standard USB cables. However, I have noticed that my smartphone will actually drain the battery when "charging" if I have WiFi turned on... I guess there's just too much power drain when powering a GSM, bluetooth, and WiFi radio simultaneously.

http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199800238&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS

--s

It's not dual-booting really, you either run Linux on an ARM, or Windows on a Core2.

Link at end to the original EE article, rather than gushy blog.

Did we not cover this earlier this week?

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3TF41VYEZTQY0QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=213402554&printable=true&printable=true

I'm surprised the environmental crowd isn't mounting an insurrection. According to the eetimes website http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212901071 there are 33.5 million of these converter boxes shipped with another 9 million in the pipeline. The box listed here - http://www.ezdigitaltv.com/Channel_Master_CM-7000.html, draws 8 watts when it's on and 2 when it's off.

All those millions of watts squandered while people are stomping their feet, demanding that I unplug my sub 1-watt cell phone charger to save the environment.

I know, digital transmission supposedly uses less power then analog. Still, one transmission tower versus how many converter boxes?

This EE Times article confirms that it's 1.6 PB. http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489

It also says they'll be 16 cores per processor!

Another reference article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489 Mentions "up to" 4,096 processors per rack. So, at maximum, this would be 393,216 processors. Perhaps they are quad cores and someone took the liberty of multiplying the 393,216x4=1.6M (rounded). A more reasonable assumption may be 100,000 quad-core CPUs (400,000 cores). That would make the summarization of by only 16 times, lol.

it is indeed 1.6 petabytes: http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489

Not only that, but this new hardware isn't sporting ECC. ECC single bit correction rates as indicated by Google and EETimes are much higher than you would expect. Ever have a memory read error, or a "BSOD" or panic you cant explain? I don't. All my rigs have ECC. Until one converts to a no-compromise on ECC stance, one never knows 2 things:

Are my bits really safe? (both in memory and on disk)?
Is my memory actually working ?

Its tiresome to see that at the end of 2008 ECC isn't standard fare yet.

EETIMES: Microsoft says PCs may need DRAM upgrade http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601761

By the way, if the anti-ECC crowd comes into play (It seems there is a religion against ECC memory - who would have thought), I have rigs with ECC that blow away most machines. The GPU does most of the work, and for the most part GPU memory can be unprotected due to a bit flip in a frame buffer doesn't result in corrupted files or machine-death for the most part.

Not only that, but this new hardware isn't sporting ECC. ECC single bit correction rates as indicated by Google and EETimes are much higher than you would expect. Ever have a memory read error, or a "BSOD" or panic you cant explain? I don't. All my rigs have ECC. Until one converts to a no-compromise on ECC stance, one never knows 2 things:

Are my bits really safe? (both in memory and on disk)?
Is my memory actually working ?

Its tiresome to see that at the end of 2008 ECC isn't standard fare yet.

EETIMES: Microsoft says PCs may need DRAM upgrade http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601761

By the way, if the anti-ECC crowd comes into play (It seems there is a religion against ECC memory - who would have thought), I have rigs with ECC that blow away most machines. The GPU does most of the work, and for the most part GPU memory can be unprotected due to a bit flip in a frame buffer doesn't result in corrupted files or machine-death for the most part.

Beijing's investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarisation of outer space

Funny, I thought it was the US stance of space dominance that was accelerating militarisation of space.

In case somebody missed it: this is the same as phase change memory.

EETimes has the following interesting view on it. It seems that it's not for tomorrow yet.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191900450

As uncle poster points out, oil isn't used in America to generate electricity, so it helps reduce oil imports dramatically as well. I wouldn't count "green" power out. Enhanced geothermal, for example, could provide all the power we need, just not as cheaply as dirty coal. If we're willing to pay around $0.20/KWh, rather than $0.10/KWh, there are many ways to provide green alternative energy, including solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear. Solar alone is projected to reach 23GW/year of production capacity, or around 10 nuclear plant equivalents per year, and rising exponentially. Building a HVDC power grid has already been done in Brazil... imagine Brazil leading the US in such a useful technology, and they built it in 1987!

I agree that open source is a distraction from the real issue(though it is, I would argue, a likely part of the solution to the real issue, so it comes up for a reason); but I think that the real issue is slightly different. For the purpose of discussion, I propose a measure, call it the "Nixon Number". A system's Nixon Number is the smallest plausible number of people who would have to conspire in order to subvert that system successfully. The real problem with electronic voting is not closed vs. open per se, it is the fact that, thus far, we keep building systems with pitifully low Nixon Numbers in order to do the job, when what we need is the exact opposite. A system's Nixon Number depends on hardware, software, procedures, and institutional safeguards.

Open Source licencing is not necessary to build a system with high Nixon Number, nor is it assured that an OSS system will have one. However, I would argue that(barring substantial advances in static analysis of binaries, or the like) publicly auditable code, along with a publicly available trusted compiler, publicly disclosed hashes of all binaries, etc, etc. is in practice necessary to achieve a Nixon Number high enough to be considered for critical uses like voting. The code doesn't have to be under a licence allowing free reuse, or reuse at all; but it must be available for inspection by anybody, for any reason, without limitation or expense.

That alone is by no means good enough, the other main issue is hardware security. Unfortunately, techniques for assuring that hardware is doing what it ought to be are as yet immature(see this from EETimes). In practice, voting and similar critical systems should probably be conducted on minimal complexity systems, so that the necessary chips can be manufactured with oversight, in secure fabs, and optically or otherwise verified.

Even, that, though, isn't enough. Beyond hardware and software security and transparency, a high Nixon Number requires that the technology be surrounded by a robust institutional structure. We have, thus far, failed here as well. The election commissions have, on the whole, done an awful job of enforcing oversight of voting system vendors, and have rubber stamped known broken systems.



Ultimately, I think the difficulties of electronic voting have two parts. The first is that it isn't an easy problem. The second is that we don't take it nearly seriously enough. If elections are not free and fair, democracy has fallen. Period. Full Stop. No ifs, ands, or buts. E voting is not something to be done on the cheap. It is not something we can trust vendors to do. We are treating E voting like a minor IT procurement project, when we should be treating it as Democracy's Manhattan Project.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10810046

Though a more recent article stated that the first plant using 15nm won't be online until late 2011, or early 2012 at the latest.

In the silicon production market there is usually about a 5 year, or more, period between when something is announced, and when it is in production. Which means we will see IBM's 22nm process as early as late 2013.