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Cosmic radiation is a pretty frequent cause of bitflips. Another frequent cause is alpha-emission from the chip packaging material. Lots of articles about the problem, like this one.

It seems Stretch is not the only company that announced such a product today: EE Times article.
Also, keep in mind, customizable ISAs have been around for a while -- in Tensilica and ARC processors. These guys do it dynamically.

Will this do?

EE Times has an article here. Apparently this chip has a competitor. There's also more details about the chip itself.

(Anonymous because logging in at work)

There is a much, much better article with lots more detail on EETimes.com.

Adaptive Cruise Control Article

true, but the idea of discreet little logic components that serve a specific purpose is nice. Research prototypes tend to be large, but couple this with research in say, a modified ink-jet printer and its starts to show some real potential.

People could then design individual little components, or put together already designed components to create larger devices (and glue/staple on any more advanced components that aren't able to be printed).

I believe this is how opensource will spread into hardware.

A large amount of it is from Japan.

Can you back that up with something?

I assume there is a typo there, but I am not sure where.

Check out EE Times article on the drive. Of course, you could always get a 60GB drive for less ($47 shipped) from pricewatch, but if Iomega can ramp this up quicker, it'll get price-competitive again.

Back then, people didn't have race condition detectors for VLSI designs.. The 6502 was a 1970s design. CAD barely existed. ICs were laid out using Kodalith and X-acto knives. There's been progress since then.

"The Taipei District Court on Tuesday here ruled that executives from Intel Corp. and other parties were not guilty of destroying Via Technologies Inc.'s property, including an alleged move to pop the company's balloons at a trade show in 2001"

It's about time a company started this - good job - and let's hope other tech companies take the hint.

Hello, wake up call. This is a major industry trend. Intel is following along. They're definately not the ones starting this, in hopes the rest of the industry will catch on. It is a European Union Directive that deserves the "good job" credit... and it is Intel and every other major manufacturer in the electronics industry that is "taking the hint".

Most new electronic components are being made with little or no lead. Major companies and contract manufacturers (who solder boards for most smaller companies) are switching to lead-free soldering processes.

Already this forum is filled with +5 comments about power consumption and how the solder contains much more lead than the chips. Well, here's the news... the whole industry is migrating to lead-free solder.

Much of the conversion is driven by an EU directive that all electronic products sold in Europe be lead-free by 2008.

Here's an EE Times Article about the trend, and a possibility that the deadline may be moved up to 2006.

I am an electrical engineer, and even at the US-based company where I used to work, they're having to go through the painful process of switching the wave solder and reflow ovens (surface mount soldering) to lead-free fluxes and solder alloys.

So give credit where credit is due. It's the European Union, not Intel, that deserves "good job". The whole industry is taking the hint, as selling or being able to sell in the EU is important to almost everybody.

See this article that introduces some of the complexities on why things aren't as simple for chip fabrication as it is for microscopy. It describes some of the challenges of immersion lithography in the latest processes. Problems include: not a lot of liquids transmit light well at 157nm wavelengths, contamination, lens/mask damage, and so on.

Still, the work of the researchers should eventually get us there.

You're spot-on with the heat issue, and thanks to some clever blokes at Purdue University, here's your new direction.

Unfortunately for you it's not the de-integration you predict, rather more still more integration with a very clever, very scaleable, amazingly efficient, built-in cooling system.

Not today, but probably very soon, chips will cool themselves thanks to nano-technology and Purdue University's clever self-ventilating technology where microfluidic-like layers pump heat-laden air off-chip using a classic "corona wind" effect.

It's very new news, and not a lot of people realize the impact yet. Cooling is the problem, not scaling. This will allow performance and levels of integration several orders of magnitude greater than otherwise possible.

Good article too (linked above). Check it out. The printed version off EETimes has some great explanatory graphics too, but those don't seem to be on the web version.

Apparently this device is to be used in a rental service there:

http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20031114S0027

It almost sounds like it's going to be used to distribute printed materials for a subscription. Depending on the pricing and whether I could use the eBook to carry my own documents, I'd snap up one of these in a microsecond...

The EETimes carried this same story with more technical details and a few criticisms as a cover story in the week's paper edition. It's also available online here at the EEtimes website.

As one of the engineers who is working on getting the shuttles back up and flying, I take offense to that. Just getting them back up to the ISS is extremely expensive and difficult. Examining the thermal protection system for damage is no simple task. And that's just detecting and measuring damage. Fixing damage in space is far more difficult and expensive to develop. Finally, the necessity for an alternate return method, i.e., a lifeboat, can't be met going to Hubble.

Can the shuttle be made to go to Hubble safely. Probably. But the expense and time involved would be astronomical. It'd probably be cheaper to build and send up a new Hubble on a rocket.

But if you think the problem is people making excuses, you're full of crap. Real engineers are working their asses off just to get the shuttles to return to the ISS. Hubble is a magnitude more difficult and expensive to reach. It's simply been decided that it is not worth it. Nobody is burying their head in the sand here.

I am not saying we shouldn't go to Hubble. But the problem, as I see it, is that nobody has even come close to demonstrating that the effort and expense are worth it yet. Yes, some areas of scientific work will suffer for a few years, but these are just a small fraction of the whole field of astronomy. There are alternatives to some of this work, like the Keck I and II observatories and other adaptive optics telescopes which can rival or better Hubble in many areas. Yes, admittedly, there are some wavelengths that can't be matched by ground-based. But I have yet to hear any convincing argument about why the work in these wavelengths over the few lost years of Hubble would be significant enough to make the expense and effort to get the shuttles safely to Hubble worth it. For the most part, it sounds more like impatience with a little bit of "spoiled" whining thrown in. (That is, a lot of "We've been able to use Hubble before so why should we give it up now.") No, I don't believe that is the "best" level of argument for keeping Hubble, but it's hard to find the good arguments through all the "noise".

To me, the "bullshit-mongers" are those who suggest that NASA isn't looking at this seriously, or those who seem to think Hubble is some sacred god that must be saved at any expense. Most people arguing it needs to be saved don't understand the amount of time, expense, and effort to do so. The opposite also applies somewhat, those who would have to make this effort (and time and expense) don't fully understand the importance of this apparently "short-term" loss of data over a "few" wavelengths. You'd do much better to make your case on why this is necessary than spewing untrue claims and insults about "heads in the sand". My mind is open, but all I'm hearing is insults and contempt, not reasons.

1. Let the blocking site shoot themselves in the foot (in the end).
2. Link to the article on another site.
3. Link to an unblocked redirect like this one.
4. Tell visitors to copy/paste the link -- http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20031203S0032 -- into the URL address bar, so the referer is blank.
5. Tell visitors to disable their browsers' referrer logging (F12 in Opera), or use a referrer rewriting proxy.
6. I think there's a way to do fake the referer with javascript links

Regarding the margin question, I like the "Under the Hood" series at EE Times. This particular entry concludes that the cost of goods sold for the iPod is way lower than the asking price. Their analysis puts the retail price at about twice the cost of the hardware... I'm not actually sure if that's "low", but as a consumer I rather hope it is not. Call me naive. :)

Regarding the margin question, I like the "Under the Hood" series at EE Times. This particular entry concludes that the cost of goods sold for the iPod is way lower than the asking price. Their analysis puts the retail price at about twice the cost of the hardware... I'm not actually sure if that's "low", but as a consumer I rather hope it is not. Call me naive. :)

I'm no expert on this, so go read online for more info.

Komi

Each robot uses a Pentium III processor as the main CPU along with a Real Time Linux OS. NEC supplied a customized lithium ion battery, which powers the biped robot for about 30 minutes.

And its done by someone with a new technology to get people talking about it. Look at all the debates and forum chatter that got sparked off by intels "Bluetooth is dead". "C is dead", "CISC is dead"....
,"Apple is dead".
When technologies really do die, its when noone gives a damn about them, and so noone will be writing a story about it.

E.g., Microsoft's Windows Media 9 may become mandatory for HD DVD

People seem to think there are RFID tags in Euro bills. Let me clearify that they are not there (yet). They try to add them by 2005, according to the eetimes.

To be specific, the VP6 license is $2 per player, $0 per disc. See here.

RSA is, of course, trying to sell a product, but I prefer this solution, which pretty much eliminates the RFID specific privacy concerns. If the tag is disabled when it leaves the store, the privacy concerns aren't any different than with bar codes. Other stories on this feature here and here.

Note that companies can combine UPC data gathered from the check out with credit and customer-loyalty-card information to create detailed profiles of their customers, so this issue isn't specific to RFID tags, and need to be addressed seperately.

The specs which encompass Wireless USB and Wireless 1394 are hoped to be used by the next gen Bluetooth as well. Read this.

EE Times is also reporting that Intel may be pushing a new kind of RAM interface to compete with existing DDR and RDRAM. At 2 Gbit/sec per wire, this is about twice the speed of current RDRAM and four times the speed of DDR SDRAM. But, more interestingly, this is a point-to-point architecture - unlike the traditional bus architecture, when you add more memory modules you can get more bandwidth. Also notable is that simultaneous bi-directional communications happens over a single wire. Infineon and Samsung have made test chips, and results are to be released at the International Solid State Circuits Conference today.

I wonder how this figures into their processor/chipset roadmap...

There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.

There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.

It's in electronics. Diamonds have plenty of intersiting properites that make them highly desirable for semiconducter applications, as well as heatsinks. See this article for some info. There's a problem, though, real diamonds simply don't come large enough, pure enough, and in the right kinds to make this practical on anything but a small scale. This will not be a problem with synthetics, they can cook up whatever kind they like, and Apollo at least makes them very, very pure. That's where the real money will be at. As big as jewelry is, it pales in comparison to eveltonics, espically given that we will eventually hit the limit of what silicon is capable of. The synthetic makers are basically just using jewelry as a means to an end, to finance their bussiness to get them to the state where they can start mass producing for other uses.

Better break out the liquid nitrogen cooling system.

I still don't get why Linux people persist in trying to cram a square peg in a round hole. Linux is no better suited to the embedded market than Windows or MacOS X are. It's a resource hungry pig, and other than a few exceptions, nobody is using it. This is just more of the same dumb-linux user ignorance.

EE Times Article

Then she states that India consumes goods as a result of their increased wealth.

Until just recently, India had huge tariffs on computers... Why were we shipping all these jobs there if they hadn't done that already?

Actually, I have been keeping up with state-of-the-art for quite some time, and I do know that HST isn't the best out there anymore for a lot of things. However, you are correct that I was wrong to make "sweeping statements", perhaps laziness on my part. There are still a few things Hubble is currently the best at, but much of its designed capabilities can now be done with ground telescopes, and in the near future with even better ground systems and next-generation space telescopes. Whether the remaining features are sufficient for the expense and danger is a matter for debate, one which Hubble proponents have apparently lost.

No, I don't think so, I know so. (Well, as long as I trust people, papers, and reports who are the actual experts in the field.) Adaptive optics have generated ground based designs that are several times better than Hubble in infrared. It's not hard to find journal papers on the subject, though I haven't seen them reported much in the press. I'm surprised you don't know about them.

This may not be true for all wavelengths that Hubble can see, but it is true for a large part of it.

With resolution at least comparable to CRTs, lower power consumption than plasmas without their reduced lifespan (burnout), inexpensive manufacturing and small form-factor, I think this is going to be the best bet when debuted by Toshiba/Canon next year (2005). See here and here for more details on Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Displays.

Disnel also tried, maybe is still trying, other ways to distribute their(?) contents directly to the masses. For instance, This idea seems quite interesting.

More than just a metal strip, it's the perfect currency counter. Once you have it, the centralized db can easily be used to ferret out:

1. counterfeiting: whether some serial numbers are appearing in too many different places too quickly indicates duplicates;
2. money laundering: are clusters of bills moving together with too much regularity;
3. terrorism financing: are monies being used in a pattern significantly correlated to terrorism; and
4. criminal apprehension: is someone spending their ill-gotten gains (from say, a robbery).

Luckily, my tinfoil hat & matching body suit block all RFID tag frequencies (that I know of).

I got this off of the SCOX yahoo board:

'Electronic terror' in Linux's shadow

You'll find this about 2/3 of the way through the article:

When SCO Group chief executive officer Darl McBride appeared at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas in November to deliver a keynote speech at CD Expo, the company brought a sharpshooter along for protection.

And they call the Linux community fanatical! :)

EE unemployment is 6.7% which the IEEE considers pretty high.

I'd go for synthetic biology. That will be the next technological wave.

I expect Itanium to replace Xeon, but not until 2003, when McKinley and its successors open a performance gap over Xeon.
[...]
Changes in servers never happen fast. But with Itanium now a reality, Intel's dominance is only a matter of time.

Ironically enough, It would last the same amount of time as normal ties for most slashdotters last without mustard/ketchup stains.

If they can move the circuitry of an active panel display from glass to flexible plastic, then they should be able to put the processor on the same flex material too. Back in 2002, they put a Z80 processor on glass. That Z80 had only 13,000 transistors and this roll-up display uses 85,000 so the feature count is not out of the question (the biggest hurdle is the transistor count for RAM).

It's $32. With a link in case people have trouble remembering which crazy statements are made up by hecklers and which SCO actually meant to be semi-seriously uttered.

After the moon program closed down in the early 70's, the republican administration at the time (Nixon) did some research into what the next logical step would be: going to mars.

The number NASA came up with then was 300 to 400 billion dollars. And that was 1972 dollars too. Adjusting for inflation, a trillion dollars looks real cheap.

I'm sure you can get NASA to give you any fantasy you want. Instead of mars, we got the fantastic space shuttle that was going to replace all of the unmanned rockets to deliver satellites for companies and the military once a week.

Let me ask you this, is the shuttle deliverying satellites?

Not Really

More delicious irony -- one of the biggest selling points NASA fanboys have been chattering off the top of their head is we need the shuttle to fix the hubble

Well, as you can see in the first link in the parent, that is no more. So much as the next space telescope is concerned, they are putting it in an orbit that is completely unreachable by the shuttle anyway.

I won't get into all the other fantastical promises made by NASA on the shuttle.

Was the shuttle program ever on budget? Not by a long shot.

How about the space station? I know they are going around and around and around in zero G.

What are they proving? That we can kleep a man a long time in space? The russians already did that with Mir.

The truth is the space station was "invented" to give the shuttle a purpose (which really never delivered on a fraction of the promises).

For the same reasons the shuttle was not useful, the space station really isn't either. At least the suttle could land.

Was the space station on budget?
No way (and these are old numbers).

NASA has long said they could develope a cheap space plane to replace the shuttle. After billions of dollars, they have yet to do so

If this was a rap sheet for NASA, they would be in jail.

The fact is there is not a reason for a man to be in space There is no sane argument that can be made for it. Sure "it's neat", but we already went to the moon, and we already know we could go to mars -- it's a question of money which boils down to being financially responsible.

Saying that it could be done for only 100 billion dollars is a bald faced lie, worthy of any other lie that a religious cult would propagate.

Saying that we could afford 90 billion dollars a year is to be blind to all the problems surrounding us now, like seniors having to choose between food and medicine. And don't mention that big lie of a medicare bill that just past too. Hell, to spend a trillion dollars because telepresence is a problem is freakin' insane when my senior citizen mother is about to cancel her health insurance because she can't afford it.

fsck the man on mars

Space travel fanboys need deprogramming, along with proper pharmaceuticals prescribed by a reputable shrink.

I am convinced of this.

This article gives good details on the differences other than media...

Seems that HD-DVD/AOD makes it cheaper for the manufacturer to screw us as they don't have update production lines... but make us buy new decoding chips... and new software players/libraries,etc.

while Blu-Ray makes us buy scaled up chips on new media... i can see how computer makers would like this over HD-DVD as the software already scales up easily...

Blind man can see thanks to a camera implanted in his brain
I thought I read somewhere they're unable to understand the processes in the brain,
but can reproduce the Outcome of the electronical / neurological process by chips in hopes to once understand how *that gray matter* actually works.
Neurochips detect brain's reaction to learning