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Several items are coming to a head in the laptop market that will drastically reduce power usage.

1) SSD Hard Drive. The hard drive is one of the biggest power consumers in the laptop today, by changing to an SSD, this can be drastically reduced. Yes, they are more expensive and they are smaller capacity than a HD, but in addition to being less power hungry, they are also much faster, smaller, and lighter.

2) Digital Paper Displays. The back lighting required by current LCDs is very expensive to run power consumption wise. They also require power 100% of the time to maintain the image itself even though this is much less than the back light power requirements. As the digital paper displays become more commercialized, we will see them start to take over the laptop market. Digital paper does not use back lighting and does not require power to maintain the image, only to change the image. Thus drastically reducing the amount of power required for the display.

3) Wireless network adapter. There are several changes coming in the Wireless world in the near future that will reduce the power requirements of wireless networking. As 802.11n moves from draft to production standards and the equipment become inter operable, we will see more usage of the N mode networking which will allow for most network cards to run at lower power for the same connectivity we see today. WiMax and other similar technologies will also bring lower power consumption for wireless networking.

4) Sub 40nm chips. As we shrink circuits smaller and smaller, we are finding that they, in general, require less power to operate. In addition, new materials, such as the new High-k materials, are required to allow circuits to operate correctly at this smaller scale and these new materials are also introducing power savings. As RAM, CPU, and main chipset chips are moved to the smaller die size we will find they use less and less power.

5) Non-Volatile MRAM. Another power consumer is main memory. Even if the system is idle, RAM requires power just to maintain the data stored in it. New technologies are just coming to fruition that will create RAM that does not require power constantly but will be just as fast as current RAM offerings and not have the life span problems that Flash RAM has.

Combine all of these changes with the fact that we may see Li-Ion batteries that have 3-5 times the capacity of today's Li-Ion batteries on a size to size or weight to weight ratio, I expect that over the next 5 years we will see personal electronic devices shrink to down to the point where they are practically non-existent

First. The Singularity. Nothing increases exponentially for ever in the real world, anyone who suggests otherwise is a fool or a fraudster (including bankers and politicians).

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm? featureid=2861

Second. Even assuming that we can make an artificial intelligence, what on earth makes anyone think it isn't going to have the same problems we do? It's going to be based on a very similar architecture to our brains. That means it's going to make mistakes just the way we do. Hell, it's going to be a pattern matching machine, it might even get religion.

Third. If it takes $50 million a year to run what's basically a human simulation, you're probably better off with a couple of real humans.

Besides, this is not like regulating the use of hyperdrive or some other sci-fi fantasy. RFID implantation for humans is real.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/06/01/ 224501/data-deduplication-rockets-ahead.htm

http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cf m?featureid=2976

It also lists the major providers of the solutions. Avamar (now owned by EMC) and DataDomain offer a software only solution that may be the most cost effective if you can provide the storage.

I'd've voted with my cash also once the OptiPlex 740 Energy Smart MT was made available with Ubuntu (or just, crazy idea: an OS free PC), except for the fact that Dell is now part of the Novell/Microsoft deal according to Techworld. No cash for Dell.

If that's not enough, you can read the TechWorld article he links to.

Is that all they can find to say about the OLPC. When was the last time you read a headline about schoolchildren viewing porn under MS Bisto? How about a story about an international news organization partnering up with US cable company's to deliver quality porn to cable and satellite subscribers. Here in Euroland we can always can rely on Murdochs Sky Adult channels.

Comcast cashing in on porn

AT&T porn channel challenged by religious investors

All we need now is OLPC contributes to a) terrorism, b) money laundering and c) contributes to third world poverty. Scratch the last one, its the GPL that does that, according to Jonathan Schwartz.

Microsoft is a thirty year old company, debt free, with tens of billions in liquid reserves, quarterly profits up and every other week or so another billion gets poured into the money bin. Microsoft plays for long-term gains.

"Nobody wants Vista." But Vista is selling.

Attracted by aggressive prices and the launch of Microsoft's Windows Vista OS, consumers purchased more notebooks during the first quarter than expected, pushing IDC to raise its 2007 PC industry forecast.
The PC industry is set to ship 256.7 million units in 2007, marking 12.2 percent growth over the previous year. IDC had previously forecast a growth rate of 11.1 percent and shipment volume of 254.2 million.
The primary engine of growth was a 28 percent jump in first quarter notebook shipments compared to the same period last year, a faster pace than the 25 percent increases seen in that segment for the past three quarters. Vista and notebooks boost PC sales

You know the Geek is living in a dream world when it is bad news for Microsoft that Acer's shipments are only expected to grow 30 to 40 percent this year. Vista knocks down Acer sales

Recently an article concerning high efficiency (~250GB on an A4 sheet) paper based storage was posted on Slashdot. Assuming that the article wasn't a scam, then this would provide a good solution for long term archival. Long term archival of paper documents is well understood, provides massive redundancy through easy duplication and requires minimal maintainance.

GArtner predicted that viriutalization would be a big factor in a next version of the next major OS.

once they realize we can store 256GB on an A4 sheet http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?ne wsID=7424 the cost of a sheet of paper will be as high as the RIAA execs. --- You can lead an idiot to reason, but you can't make 'em think.

Probably not in the next few months, but vendors will probably have products out in 2008.

I know the /. crowd is primarily concerned with video performance, but there is a lot more to PCIe than just video. The new speeds will probably be more benificial for switch to switch PCIe connections.

There is a lot of cool stuff going on in the PCI-SIG, the SR and MR (single root and multi root) specifications for I/O virtualization are especially cool. SR allows an endpoint (PCIe device) to export virtual functions to a host running a hypervisor. So for example, this means that Xen could use SR to provide physical access to a fibre channel HBA to each guest and the guest would load the native driver for the HBA.

MR is really cool too - it allows multiple hosts to share the same PCIe device. So think of a blade chassis where you have PCIe slots in the back, all the blades could share a single 10Gbps NIC or HBA or whatever. This also has the added advantage of separating the I/O from the blade (currently any expansion devices have to go directly on the blade).

A small blurb on SR and MR can be found here:

http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/iov/

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm? featureid=2728&pagtype=samecatsamechan

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?n ewsid=5312&pagtype=samechan, genius

I doubt they actually have even seen Vista or used it to know what exactly it is.

Would this be the Vista that's been available in beta form for months? That was reviewed five and six months ago?

Why would FSF launch this program without having reviewed the beta?

Authors of malware are trying to exploit the good reputation of Wikipedia to infect PCs with their malicious software. In a mass e-mail, recipients were told to download a "security update" for windows from a Wikipedia site.

The attackers had used a Wikipedia feature that archives all previous versions of articles when changes have been made. The malicious page thus continued to exist in the archive, and the attackers were able to point to it in mass emails.

See here , here and here.

Well you see it's not just the power supplies in the server.

Check out This Article
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm? featureID=2470&pagtype=samecatsamechan

Every 1kw used by a server needs another 1kw for cooling and other support equipment.

The average rack consumes 5KW plus 5KW more to support it..

Thats only 200 Racks to eat up 2MW

It all adds up quickly.

Is anybody reading slashdot truly stupid enough to believe that if Firefox had an 80% market share it wouldn't be just as readily targetted and exploited? It is really easy to wagon jump, and thats fine based on performance and features, especially if a feature is security. But rest assured that magic guaranteed security is itself a feature of low adoption, and an illusion. Firefox is definitely getting popular, it doesn't even hang or die much anymore. Keep in mind that it only takes 1 exploit to destroy a user's machine and either destroy or steal their data. Would you rather have a gun to your head with 1 bullet in it, or with 15? Can you answer that seriously?

Firefox, god's answer to the internet, shoots lightning bolts outta its arse. Safe beyond safe, if you're a sucker.

2005
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=103

2006
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jh tml?articleID=179101966
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/pssstyou-w anna-see-firefox-exploit-in.html
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1814056,00.as p
http://www.xatrix.org/article.php?s=4447
http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?n ewsID=6554&pagtype=all
http://hackcraft.wordpress.com/2006/08/02/firefox- exploit-exposed-by-hackers/

I don't see why not. We expect other countries to extradite their citizens for breaking US laws. It seems only fair. While in most cases they've broken the law in both countries, that's not always true.

... interesting article on TechWorld: A reality check for open source routing.

Does an install base of 14000 classify as 'mass migration'? I don't know if they did Novell though. I've run NLD9, and I didn't like it, but fortunately, linux is about my choice - not someone else's. I found a distro I did like - actually several.. so did Munich. So will others.

Silly American government, spending taxpayers money buying personal data...

The US Intelligence Agencies don't bother paying for British citizen's personal data; they just jack into the live feed

Alcatel is teaming up with the Government of India to set up a WiMax development center in the South Indian city of Chennai and the products developed there will be marketed worldwide. It appears that parts of Asia prefer to rollout wireless data networks as opposed to wireline ones, probably due to the fact that it is easier to deploy wireless networks. With Europe going ahead with the adoption of UMTS and HSDPA, it looks like wireless data networks are going to become pretty ubiquitous in many parts of the world. I wonder what new applications we will see once the pipe to the phone/wireless device gets much bigger than what it is today.

I think in reality the heaviest bandwidth users will just get disconnected and everybody else will totally ignore the TOS.

Interestingly, Skype is working to help you beat the TOS. Although it was already cracked, one of the unannounced features of the new 2.5 beta was to make Skype harder to detect.

Which is just as good, the sheer size obtainable using tape drives is just mind boggling.

On a side note, this article wasn't just light on details, it was shockingly devoid of all technical details as to how this was acheived. At least this article mentions the new density is acheived with a new tape medium coating.

Sheesh, the linked story might be interesting to stock-market droids, not slashdot readers.

Here's a better article.. They're claiming 8TB before compression on an LTO-sized tape. Tape record smashed with 8 terabyte format

one word XMAX (the future of wireless).
please, check out these links:
http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?N ewsID=4722
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/09/xmax/
http://www.codingheaven.net/

"Mr. President, the target has been acquired! Laser destruction imminent!"

"Heh...Hehh..heh..(imagine a Bevis & Butthead-type laugh), good thing those Asian people decided to be chipped. It makes all this tracking stuff so much easier. Heh...heh...heh...."

"That's the last critic of me and mine in that country. Heh...heh....heh....."

xmax will be the next wireless internet access technology to put the eyes on. Even wimax, will be put behind. no frequency band licence is needed, very low power, very cheap devices, any one could install an ISP, interesting signal range, what could we want more ? :)
please check it out!
http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/05/xmax-cheap-wire less-broadband/
http://www.xgtechnology.com/
http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?N ewsID=4722
http://www.codingheaven.net/

... Office doesn't support exporting to PDF yet ...

I would not hold my breath if I were you. Microsoft is promoting their own version called XPS. Then again, they did say they would support PDF. Which do you believe? Personally, I'm betting on them promoting their own technology over PDF.

and is the first desktop virtualization product to support Intel VT/Vanderpool CPU "partitioning".

Oh, I'm not saying it's going to work... just that they've foolishly embarked on that road. SCO paid a lot for the sort of technology that Linux distros now provide for free, so they had a choice of admitting that they had made bad investments in the past, or attempt to put the legal blame on others for their own bad decisions.

Their mistake was in going after IBM with the obvious goal of gaining a quick money settlement, which IBM wasn't about to pony up. Yet another bad decision from McBride & the gang. Even Microsoft (which partly funded the legal assault covertly) has evidently been getting tired of SCO's ineffectiveness in spreading FUD about Linux, choosing instead to trumpet their own equally baseless threats (Steve should remember that if it was baseless 18 months ago it's no better now).

Nah. They can't stop it anyway: http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?news ID=5712.

Besides, running an application in a box and having two operating systems running at the same time isn't nearly as comfortable as a native application, especially if you consider sharing resources like files, printers, etc..

HFS+: OS X uses it; XP doesn't recognize it

FAT32: Both OS X and XP can read and write to it, but it has limits in partition size and doesn't allow for files larger than 4GB (no DVD backup for you!)

NTFS: Both OS X and XP can read it, but OS X can't write to it

One solution is MacDrive, which allows Windows to read and write to HFS+. But I'd rather that OS X be able to write to NTFS.

Virtual PC lets you move stuff back and forth, but it has inferior performance and some software doesn't work with it (Thayer's guide to birds of North America doesn't run under VPC, for example). And of course VPC doesn't work on the Intel Macs at all.

Still, being able to run Windows is *excellent* news for Apple and for OS X. It means more people will buy Macs because many need to run Windows for specific applications but would rather use OS X for everything else. If they can address the filesystem incompatibility and get the OSs to run concurrently without any performance hit, Apple's market share will skyrocket.

But, some notes:

- Even the existing http://onmac.net/ solution wasn't "illegal" or against any Apple or Microsoft license agreement - not saying the summary said that, but it kind of implied it might be

- The HUGE difference with Boot Camp is that it includes Windows XP driver profiles for Apple-specific hardware - including video drivers! Hello games and video intensive Windows software!

- Another big difference is that it includes a live repartitioning tool so the drive doesn't have to be reformatted to install Windows as the current solution requires

- And, it wraps everything up in a nice "setup assistant"-like interface

- It does burn a custom Windows XP installation disc (no, this does not violate any Microsoft or Windows license agreement, as making custom Windows installation discs has been routine in IT shops for years)

- Currently, it looks like it supports only Windows XP SP2, not any multi-disc XP-based installations (or other non-Windows OSes), but since Media Center is already working with the other solution by making a custom installation disc, I have no doubts that it could work with this as well

It's pretty incredible that Apple has decided to do this, to say the least.

However, the true benefit for many people won't come from dual-booting, but from running Windows (or any other x86 OS) in a virtualization environment alongside OS X with no dual booting or rebooting needed.

Virtualization company Parallels announced that it will be bringing its Parallels Workstation virtualization product to Intel-based Macs. Parallels is a hypervisor-based (with a kernel module) virtual machine solution already shipping for Windows and Linux, and is the first desktop virtualization product to support Intel VT/Vanderpool CPU "partitioning". It's also only $50. Parallels also has a long list of officially supported guest OSes, and that's just the ones that are *officially* supported. So either way, we'll have a nice dual boot solution AND a nice virtualization solution!

So Boot Camp will be standard with Leopard...great. What about the thing that a lot of us actually want, virtualization from Apple, rumored to be in Leopard? And not just virtualization to run x86 OSes, but to also run multiple instances of Intel-variants of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (*as well* as any other x86 OS)? Now THAT would be the holy grail. Desktop virtualization for things like Windows and Linux/BSD environments, and server virtualization for multiple Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server instances on a single box.

Since Apple has shown it's been officially willing to acknowledge the alternate OS/Windows universe on Intel-based Macs, I actually have a lot more hope for native, integrated virtualization in Leopard as well!

The question is are you paranoid enough?

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?N ewsID=5466
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/27/142223 0
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/toolkit/security/e mail/0,39027176,39168559,00.htm
http://www.gridtoday.com/03/0526/030526.html
http://distributedcomputing.info/news.html

This thing has a lot of people's names on it. If it flops someone has to take the blame.

There is a reason air traffic control systems don't run Windows XP.

Yes, because they run Windows 2000.

The other posts responding to this made most of my points.

The idea that the read heads on a disk drive are particularly vulnerable compared to tape read heads is nonsense.

Hard drives are less vulnerable to failure than tape drives - and more importantly FAR less vulnerable than TAPE MEDIA.

It's the MEDIA that is vulnerable in tape - and responsible for most of the backup failures using tape.

There's no way tape can compete with disk for reliability.

This article from Techworld about the Baptist Memorial Health Care chain demonstrates the issues involved: http://www.techworld.com/features/index.cfm?featur eID=2254&printerfriendly=1

Money quote:

"People's lives will be affected by how well this works," Weiss says. "We are also saving brain cells," he adds. "This is a technology that we do not need to think about. It simply does its job. The stress of not knowing whether backups/restores will work is gone. Our backup failure rate has gone from more than 30% to absolute zero, and we have not had a backup/restore failure since installation."

At one point they did. But they dropped it. I'm not sure if the third party existed.

Hey, the trend is to manage less servers, not more. And in response to your other comment, installed user base does matter. More servers, more users, more passwords, more configuration.

Jabber is great, but the clients are leagues away from the usability that AIM, MSN, Yahoo and G-Talk provide. Sure, in a large corporate environment it might be important to have IETF/XMPP certification standards, but for a small company, less is more.

Ask Microsoft, they have sold billions of dollars in software which caters to the needs of people who just need to simply get stuff done....

Just using the conference to confuse, confound and inject a little fud ..

"I personally don't believe tech support calls for a commodity product is sustainable,"

No one ever made money out of Open Source ..

"In many regards, the Microsoft open-source story lends itself to a great metaphor of David and Goliath," "That is a challenge over perception"

One way of meeting the challenge is to hire on the best out of Open Source taking them out of the Gene pool.

"Microsoft has benefited from OSS, has participated in OSS projects, and feels that OSS will continue to have an important role in the ecosystem"

Pronouncments like this also give the impression that MS is in some way directing the development of the Open Source model. That and the use of the word 'open' at every opportunity. It's called stealing mindshare.

"We have an impact from what people call the ripple effect ... What would actually happen if we were in that environment?"

We hope to gain some control over that environment by engaging with it. He also had this to say previously ..

When we think about criteria around interoperability, we will have a great foundation in Longhorn to help exercise the criteria around that."

Open Source does not equal Open Standards.

But MS Open Standards does not actually mean the protocols and interfaces are in the public domain does it. A royalty free license is still tied to Microsoft. But keep on repeating the word 'open'.

"Linux is somewhat inferior to commercial offerings when considered as a general-purpose desktop operating system"

I'm sorry Bill, but you just lost your credibility. (Sent from a SuSE Desktop. No viruses, no blue screens etc ..)

http://fudwatcher.blogspot.com/

1. A thread about google news is posted to slashdot

2. I comment about a previous slashdot thread illustrating a algorithmic political bias in google news and how google censors
news in China.

3. My post, an on topic factual comment gets modded as "flamebait"

4. This new article about Google censoring news in China is posted:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.c fm?NewsID=5233&inkc=0

5. I repectfully question the integrity and the maturity of the slashdot moderators.

Disabling your CD will help, but just keeping it from spinning up is probably fine.

You could also replace your HDD with a flash drive, or better yet, get yourself a hybrid drive. In the past couple days I saw something about IBM trying this, but I don't remember where and I can't find the reference. Just Google for it, there are tons of references out there.

Not anyone like, say, the US Navy, for example:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282, 13758,00.html

Or air traffic controllers:

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?News ID=2275

Or nuclear power plants:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6767

Regardless of how you rate the intelligence of the parties involved in these little incidents I think you'll find that Windows is very often deployed in mission critical areas.

And yes, often with catastrophic consequences. >)

jibe with this?

Here's what we managed to get out of Skype. We asked about future plans for other platforms - and anything else we could think of.

"Today video calling is only for Windows, but our strategy in the past has been to roll out on other platforms reasonably soon," said James Bilefield, Skype's vice president of business development. "It depends on feedback and testing - and we have dedicated teams on those platforms."

The clear message there is to start bugging Skype to support other platforms.

We've kicked the tyres a bit, and it's pretty good. Shame it doesn't work on Linux or Mac, but Skype tells us these versions are on the way...

OK, now I know Slashdot's biased, but posting this twice and not posting this at all?

All your OS are belong to Sun!

Probably one of those RAM "hard drives" I saw on a slashdot article a while back. IIRC they have 4GB capacity max right now (four 1 gig sticks of ram)

While googling in an attempt to find what I was thinking about, I found this article from a year ago about a HUGE one of these bought by the US government for 'database crosschecking' (Spying on people in real time, for those of you wearing your tinfoil hats)

http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?Ne wsID=1176

Enjoy.

Chris Mellor, Holographic storage slow: Has holo storage got the write speed needed? TechWorld, November 21, 2005. "The InPhase Tapestry holographic storage device is expected to debut next year. It will store 300GB and transfer data at 20MB/sec. That means 1.2GB/min and 72GB/hour. It will take four hours to write 288GB. That's quite a long time..." http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cf m?featureid=1990&inkc=0

They said mast, not building, and sure enough if you click through the links in the article, there's a picture of it.

http://www.techworld.com/mobility/features/index.c fm?FeatureID=1939

Techworld picked it up today (November 02, 05): http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cf m?featureid=1931

It's on the lead page of Google News: http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8 &q= with links to the Washington Post article, and a C Net article, etc. Also a link to 47 more articles: http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8 &ncl=http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/index.php%3Fp% 3D690

So the news is on at least four continents, and in at least some mainstream press. Serves Sony right, and I hope this gives them a major black eye.