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We are talking about certification here :

linky

It is impossible to have an exact figure, but an accurate estimate, at least an order of magnitude, is entirely feasible.

They say they lose billions a year due to piracy. Let's say they are right and are losing 10 billions, not an unrealistic figure, but still on the high side.
There are over 1 million people in America sharing music. We all know it's a lot more than that, but let's be conservative.

That would leave an average of $10 000 lost due to each file sharer, and that is an the upper limit. Sharing less than 30 songs is probably under the average if there are indeed only 1 million file sharers, so there is absolutely no way $220 000 can be a correct punishment in this case.

What was so tough about this?

1) MYTH: MSFT and Intel constitute the evil Wintel cartel. Fact: MSFT doesn't like Intel's Classmate PC - read the Wikipedia article on it and you'll notice that there are 3 supported OS (Mandriva Linux, Metasys 2.0, Windows XP). XP is poorly suited to the Classmate and some form of Linux would likely be the OS
2) MYTH: Intel hates OLPC. Intel is PART of the OLPC project (since summer 2007) - Microsoft is NOT. (The original poster doesn't even mention this) Perhaps this would imply that next gen XO unit will be Intel-based ( see this post for more on why )
3) MYTH: AMD Geode is superior technology. FACT: It's very lightweight, low power technology that AMD bought from National Semiconductor. It's not based on current technology. Intel is developing a whole generation of much lower power, but much faster processors - due partially to the magic of 45nm- in the Silverthorn cpus. coming in 2008. What's interesting about them is not so much the technical specs, but that the process technology lets the dies be so small that Intel will be able to put thousands of processors on a single wafer allowing Intel to make them very cheap and still get good margins for them. The whole target market for these cpus is phone/handhelds/MIDs and very basic systems that need x86 instruction set with sub-one-watt power consumption (and good performance). It is exactly what XO v2 should be built on.

I'm sure the "1000 times faster" figure is is just marketing, but the device does seem to have huge potential. Check out the two videos with the CTO doing a demonstration of the ioDrive: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34065/135/

In the first video, at one point the CTO claims that a "regular hard drive can do around 100 IOPS" and that their device can do 100,000 IOPS. So that's probably where they get the 1000 times faster figure from.

Months ago? That link is over 7 years old!

ZFS wasn't excluded because of a leak. It was excluded because there were problems with the kernel extensions and it was holding up Leopard. This is why Leopard was delayed. ZFS is coming soon to an Mac near you.

ATI got slapped by Jobs a few months ago: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/17800/139/

I was at the race and Tartan Racing won fair and square. First, their bot started about 20 minutes after Stanford because they had some issues with some electrical interference coming from a nearby Jumbotron television (yes crazy I know). Stanford was paused for the MIT versus Cornell collision and was also paused a bit for Cornell's 10 minute stop and go routine on Nevada street. That was when Stanford's Junior decided to car hop from way back in line to the 2nd behind Cornell. Both Stanford and Tartan (CMU) ran well and were very smooth, but Boss was a bit more aggressive on the straight aways. Here's race video footage so you can see yourself - http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34687/113/

A number of teams were eliminated this year without hitting anything. From what I could tell, those teams who did collide with either a stationary object or a chase car got eliminated before the 11 finalists announcement. This report indicates that the remaining vehicles that didn't make the cut were cut because they would have "caused traffic jams" due to not traveling as fast as other vehicles, which sounds like a pretty bogus reason to me at first glance.

Kmart to drop Blue Ray sales and Wal-Mart to sell a sub-$100 HD DVD player. http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34650/97/ See the pattern here? Both Kmart and Walmart are among the top leading names in budget department stores.

This Prius had a more spectacular escape attempt. Personally, though, I'm rooting for Team Oshkosh, formerly Team Terramax. They completed the grand challenge course (one of only 4 to do so), but they took way too long to place so here's hoping they do better this year! Oh, and here's hoping they're quick on the kill switch if that monster of a truck glitches out...

Otellini provided an overview of the history of the insulating layer which, in modern CPUs, is only five molecular layers of silicon dioxide (SiO2) thick. He explained that as far back as 15 years ago, Intels engineers saw this layer as problematic. The continued scaling of the insulating layer could not continue forever. And, we found out later in the day with Dr. Gordon Moores keynote, that five molecular layers is about the lowest you can go in practice. Its a form of wall, and Intel was right up against it.

The acrimony earlier in the week was because the name of the winning institutions were apparently explicitly listed in some documents posted on the NSF web site related to the NSB meeting earlier this week. Apparently some of the competing supercomputer centers are unhappy with the fact that this information was accidentally leaked ahead of the NSB meeting. Now that it's over, this seems rather like sour grapes though. The awards apparently aren't final just yet, but they are expected to be approved.

TG Daily is also covering this with more details, and has a picture tour of the current NCSA supercomputer facility.

TG Daily is also covering this with more details, and has a picture tour of the current NCSA supercomputer facility.

That's the right subject line, but for completely different reasons.

Best Buy is the company that reportedly exposed its customer data through an insecurely configured wireless network. And the company whose employees apparently used an internal site to fool customers. And the company involved with obstruction in overly aggressive MSN sales. In my opinion, they have always had dubious ethics.

They've done a very good job of creating an image of a "retailer that wants to fire customers".

Here's the whole article on a printer-friendly page.

Printable Link - All in one page.

My prediction is that in 10 years the place will be functionally obsolete as a result of processing advancements elsewhere.

"Core 2 kicks Barcelona's ass"

Do you know something the rest of us don't?

Info here: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000193,39284700,0 0.htm

There's also lots of info (much of it from Apple itself) saying flat-out that Apple will prolly have an 8-core rig pretty soon (relatively):

http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/macpro/
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31484/135/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/12/apple-store-error-r eveals-8-core-mac-pro/

HTH a bit... (and yeah, I'd kinda like to have one too)

/P

According to several articles regarding this subject, the questionable utility of Turbo Memory is not the fault of MS alone:

TG Daily reports that Intel's showcasing of Turbo Memory included benchmarks that's anything but real-world applicable: "The benchmark appeared to slam several pictures at lightning speed into Photoshop, something that would play to the strengths of flash memory because the pictures would already be stored in flash for fast opening by Photoshop. Realistically though, we think the average user wouldn't capture dozens of pictures and then open them all in Photoshop in one fell swoop."

Which leads to an Anandtech article showing that in many cases, performance suffered as a result of Turbo Memory implementation - particularly with boot and hibernation times. Now these are cases where users are MOST likely to notice performance differences.

Finally, in the cases where Turbo Memory would seem useful, it appears that HP discovered that using far more versatile, ubitquitous flash solutions such as SD and USB drives (not to mention just adding regular system memory (what a concept!)) yielded similar and more economically sensible results: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6188522.html

Maybe if Vista didn't need such obscene amounts of memory, this wouldn't be an issue; but I digress.

I submitted this story, linking to a better article, yesterday but I guess Anonymous Cowards don't get much respect here.

Well, I had said "If that's the real situation or if the campaign was really doing all the work and he just had the account, then fuck him." I won't defend a guy who really is trying to leverage extortion unjustly, but at the same time do you have any link to articles explaining the events the way you detailed them?

The last story I saw linked on /. was the piece about him having the MySpace since 2004 and them wanting control at which point he asked for $$ and they gave him the finger. I just hit Google News and the top 3 returns were all more-or-less saying the same thing. I don't put a ton of weight in that since they may have all read the same blog post before writing their articles, but I'm not going to sift through all 342 results to find the 1 dissenting opinion.

If I started a MySpace page called "Official Microsoft Windows Add-Ons", worked with Microsoft to give my products credibility...

We both know that MS would never allow such a stupid thing to happen. If Obama's campaign had been remotely responsible they wouldn't have participated in such a way that gave him all the power. They could've easily registered a different MySpace URL and allowed him to access it while they clearly retained control. If he didn't want to participate and wanted to keep doing his own thing all they would've had to do is make sure he explicitely labeled it as "Unoffical". I don't think anybody would have hated them for doing that.

# You know they'll be ready when there's a sudden drop in prices of the current Hot CPUs, which are all proven but suddenly look like last month's pizza from under the couch.

Intel is finally getting an on-chip memory controller with Nehalem. Nehalem will succeed the Core 2 chip family towards the end of 2008. Nehalem follows the Penrym 45nm shrink under Intel's new achitecture->die shrink->new architecture cycle.

Yeah, they're looking ahead too eagerly. That's what academics do.

Let's not forget that Intel and IBM both recently found a manufacturing process to keep Moore's law going for the next several years. Most people in 2006 thought we hit a wall, and that the multicore revolution was inevitably under way, but that just might not be true anymore. That said, it is always nice to have at least a few cores in available in your system.

At the same time, AMD's Fusion strategy looks pretty interesting. I really wonder what's going to become of that.

One of the primary problems with RFID is that it is "wireless" in nature. It is also designed to be "simplistic" for the simple case of economic savings.

While it is a great technology for information such as Barcode scanning and inventory tracking, its use in biometrics, identification and access controls is less secure. Transmitting significant and irrevocable information in an RFID pulse is irresponsible.

Where a barcode is ubiquitous and the concept of "stealing" it is silly, and even where the ID number of a "proxmity card" employee ID badge is easily revocable, information stored on a passport, such as biometrics, permanent identification numbers and the like are not revocable.

If you have such a passport, it is advisable that you either fry the RFID chip (i am not responsible for the legal issues surrounding it) or you store your passport in a metal safe, where RF cannot pass. There are already bags on the market with an integrated faraday cage, it is not entirely practical to keep your RFID identity perpetually in this bag while traveling (not to mention the headache at the airport screening area with a metal-laced bag).

In short, this new RFID identity system is one of the most ill-advised and potentially dangerous (vulnerable to easy identity theft) systems in recent history, and is simply ASKING for people to duplicate it, while providing no benefit other than the government control ("papers please") that it demands.

Stewed

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/03/nantero_cnt_memo ry/

At least they got this one right. That's what you get for upgrading: huge hole in your wallet, crappy OS and nvidia forum mods poking fun at you...

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/11/ces2007_hddvd_bl u_ray/

But, the price of Flash memory is dropping. Fast.

Not fast enough. You need flash prices to come down at least and order of magnitude to compete. I'm sorry, but I don't see the costs of a CMOS-based flash chip coming down to lower prices than a single-substance layer of film sandwiched within plastic. The manufacturing hardware alone makes for a significant difference of capital investment, and the input materials add another price difference.

Already you can get a 2 GB memory key for 19 bucks from NewEgg, which is just over the price of a DVD.

That's the cost of a piece of media with no licensed content on it. The majority of the cost of a DVD is not in the media, but in the content. Even if flash memory becomes possible to sell under the cost of of a current DVD movie, it needs to become more profitable than selling on optical media for studios to even consider it.

A single cent difference in the cost of a movie that sells 2 million copies is $20,000 lost. Why do you think manufacturers were up in arms many years ago when Apple talked about charging a small royalty fee for the patents it had on Firewire? If a few cents here and there hadn't meant so much, we wouldn't have USB 2.0 today.

Another important thing to note is that while we're probably a decade or more from flash memory catching up with BluRay's and HD-DVD's capacity, optical media is already getting ready to go to 300 GB and up when Tapestry discs come out. To convince consumers to switch away from DVD & the next-gen formats, there's going to have to be a major quality increase over the already too advanced next-gen formats. That's going to mean a significant increase in the size of content on the media, and your solution of flash memory is playing catch-up too slowly to compete.

The next step up from 1080i/1080p content that people are touting is 2160p. Encoding a movie at this standard will take up 4X the space that a 1080p movie takes up today. The next-gen optical media can handle it, though it won't be cost friendly for a while. So how long until flash catches up and does 100-200 GB in a cost effective manner?

Sadly SP1 will release in next couple months. http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/22/microsoft_sp1_vi sta_tap/

So what? Just because someone has a SSHD with 128GB doesn't mean that much. For one thing, how large is it? If it's larger than 1.8" by 5mm thick, it's useless for portable devices. For another thing, how much does it cost? If it costs more than $100 or so, it's too expensive (something that's been a problem with flash storage for a long time; only now is it getting competitive).

For your information, a few companies have introduced 1.8" form factor SSHDs. Here's a couple of articles about them:
article 1
article 2

There's a couple of problems with them. 1) The largest size is 32GB. While that's slightly larger than the 30GB drive in the Zune and iPod, it's only just-as-good, and not much of a reason to upgrade if you already have a 30GB mechanical drive. 2) They're expensive. They even admit this in the articles. While they do have much lower power consumption than regular drives, no one's going to pay $1000 for an ipod just because it has flash instead of a hard drive.

Maybe in 5 years when the prices are much lower, hard drive-based DAPs will be only a memory, but for now this technology isn't ready.

However, I do hope I can get my hands on some of these flash hard drives at that time, since my H320's drive will probably need to be replaced again by then. And since the DAP market is going steadily downhill, with less and less competition, I won't have the option of upgrading to a new DAP.

100 Gbp/s was the speed record back in 2004, I'm pretty sure they are magnitudes beyond that now.. http://www.tgdaily.com/2004/11/29/internet_speed_r ecord_quadrupled_to_101_gbit/index.html

Is it reasonable or usable by more than one research firm is the real question...

Which is why I listed statistics as the other reason. Those are quite easy to find, right? I believe this is all related to people not living within their means. Now if everyone cannot pay their bills, then perhaps they could buy less. Stay with me here. If supply-and-demand theory is correct, then less demand SHOULD lower the prices of good and services to where people can afford them again. The fact that it doesn't points to two possibilities: 1) Everybody willingly spend more than they make 2) Price fixing.

I don't know if this is true, but here is a quote from http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/12/22/opinion_buying_a _ps3/

While standing in line for the PS3, I overheard a discussion from a couple in front of, which was not really about the PS3, but more about some possibilities how they could tell their landlord that they couldn't afford their next rent payment because of the purchase of the PS3. I don't have to be Suze Orman to tell you that its plain stupid to buy a PS3 if that means you can't buy food or rent anymore.

About a year ago I watched a documentary about some welfare mother who wanted her kids to have a real Christmas. She also has a minimum-wage job at the local big-box store. I think many single mothers have this guilt-trip about not having a father around. So she went out to buy a big-screen TV to go with their xbox, which I think they have already. My question is of course, if she has the money to buy a big-screen TV, which is arguably a luxury, then perhaps she shouldn't be on the taxpayer's dough. Now on the other hand she could really be poor and must receive government assistance, in which case one wonders why she's blowing a wad of cash on the TV instead of socking it away for a rainy day.

I'm pretty sure these are NOT rare occurances. Many people are not responsible with their money. They stay poor. There's an old saying: "A fool and his money are soon parted." It remains true today as it always has been.

The System Rating tool is still buggy and can use some work like there may a game that needs a 4 cpu but only a 2 gpu or there may be a game that needs a 2 cpu but a 4 gpu and this tool makeing the part that has the lowest number the number for your entire system.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060529-6934 .html
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/16/vista_computers_ to_have_5_performance_tiers/
http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/2006/05/v ista_system_ra.html

Do you have a source for that?

Sunnyvale (CA) - A spokesperson for AMD confirmed to TG Daily that customers should expect AMD to announce a substantial price drop in its highest performance desktop processors, including Athlon 64 X2. The price drop should be announced at or about the time that Intel announces the release of its next-generation Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors - an announcement which is now expected before the end of the month.

Actually, I believe the stockmarket usually rewards a company for initiating layoffs, at least temporarily.

The stock market is not stupid. If the layoffs are because management is being stupid and the company is getting beat in the market they will pummel the stock. If the layoffs are due o say a general recession and a drop in demand throughout the economy then it is a move that makes sense.

Look at Intel this year. THey went through a round of layoffs, and their stock got a nice haircut.

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/07/enderle_where_in tel_went-wrong_with_layoffs/

PS3 fans quit jobs and postpone engagement to wait in line - Video
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/11/10/ps3_bestbuy_burb ank_line/

If AMD started adding ATI GPU instructions to their cores, and you get 4 of them on one slot along with the memory controller, what kind of frame rates and graphical shenanigans will happen then?

Well, AMD Fusion looks interesting. Of course, I also hope that we'll still be able to buy them separately, because it's cheaper to upgrade parts as you go, rather than all at the same time.

But the possibilities of a hybrid processor are pretty cool. For example, this type of CPU would be awesome in a home theater PC, cutting in half the number of super-hot, power-hungry chips you have to deal with. And if they scale it down far enough, portable media players and game consoles (i.e. Gameboys) could benefit from this as well.

Ironically, there actually is a product called AMD Fusion.

CPU and graphics on a single die. That's what you get when you buy ATI.

Perhaps SGI caught wind of AMD/ATI's new "Fusion" CPU/GPU combination?

Aikon-

From the article:

"Paul Otellini, Intel's president and CEO, kicked off this season's IDF by coining the phrase "It's what's inside that counts", and spoke about why processing power matters again"

But then this in another article covering the same event:

"Otellini briefly responded to concerns that Intel's first quad-core packages are simply "glued-together" dual-core processors while AMD is working on a native, single-die quad-core chip. "So what?," said Otellini, adding, "The public doesn't care what's inside a processor."

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/26/intel_core_2_qua d_announcement/

In yet another article in Ars Technica we read that Intel is look to an 80 core chip. I like the Core 2 Duo a lot but I hope the Intel megahertz fixation isn't just going to become a "core" fixation .

  http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060926-7840 .html

Robert Moses built a lot of bridges and roads around New york hoping to relieve congestion but it had the counter-intuitive effect of creating more traffic. I hope all the increases in size and power of computers doesnt just bring more garbage. With all the legacy code bloat, and things like video cards that get hot as toasters and power supplies that waste energy (the Google thing) I think computing could use a few reductions instead of increases. In that regard it's nice to see the Core 2 Duo bring down the wattage.

Now the problem isn't that the cell power can be optimized, it's just that there's NO TOOLS TO DO SO AT THIS TIME. That's right, it's up to DEVELOPERS to optimize their own code, and I'm going to be honest, the learning curve and time that's going to be spent doing so is just not going to help this system.

This is entirely inaccurate. They were demonstrating tools at GDC for this, and various vendors have engines already available. Also recall that the PS2 really was bare metal on release; it remains the most difficult of the last generation, and yet it was the top seller with the most games. And the PS3 is said to be very familiar to those who worked on the PS2, so...

There's LOADS of other problems, too. Lack of units. High unit cost.

Yeah yeah, it's the PS2 all over again.

Expensive cables that (opps!) aren't included.

Are you talking about HDMI? They're under $10. Which cables did you mean?

The fragility of the Blue Ray CRC (it's so dense that one tiny scratch can destroy an entire disc because it stops the error correction from even being able to do its job).

Well, since the Blu-Ray DURABIS2 can withstand steel wool, you'd really have to be mistreating that disc.

And the lack of any real online system to be demonstrated.

And XBOX Live! was going to kill the PS2.

The Xbox is in a realm of its own. It focuses on games that are not innovative, but instead improves ever so slightly on older paradigms. In this, those "hardcore" gamers who enjoy playing the best shooters on a *controller* will enjoy the XBox (yes, I know they're coming out with new controls).

The 360 is in the realm of FPS's and sports games, just like the original XBOX. Contrary to popular opinion, frat boys who play Halo are not hardcore gamers. They're casual gamers. Hardcore gamers are the ones that play all the games, especially the obscure and oldschool ones. They import the original before it comes out locally. They might have an XBOX, but only because they're completionists, not because having an XBOX makes them hardcore.

This is not because I was raised on Nintendo. It's not because I owned the Mario/Zelda Cerial, subscribed to Nintendo power throughout the 90's, got up early as a kid to watch Captain N and the Super Mario World TV shows, owned mario comic books, and even paid to see that crappy Mario Bros. Movie. I had all but abandoned that company after my two fav gaming companies, Squaresoft and Capcom, left Nintendo. I'm supporting Nintendo because after ALLLLLL these years of CRAP... I'm amazed to find a company that puts out a QUALITY PRODUCT, who gets THIRD PARTY SUPPORT for this product, who INNOVATES the market using this product, who will successfully INTEGRATE other products into this product, and who has made this ANGRY YOUNG MALE feel like a DOE EYED BOY again.

That is, you're a closet fanboy who has been waiting all these years to come out. Yeah, I grew up with Nintendo too, and read the magazines, saw the shows and movies, and didn't think much of anything else (Sega what? Sony who?). That said, "QUALITY PRODUCT" is premature, "THIRD PARTY SUPPORT" is hopeful, and "INNOVATIVE" is hype. Do you love your Wii? Is it bad?

Where to start? Old games. All of them.

Actually, the virtual console launch list is only 26 games. 26 games I've played, too. This is ni

The cease-fire agreement included the "Draft 1.0" of the standard that allowed manufacturers of consumer WLAN gear to spawn the current crop of "draft 802.11n" products. These half-baked, rushed-to-market products are buggy and interfere with legacy 802.11b/g WLANs. They also, with the rare exception, fail to crack the magic 100 Mbps mark under best-case conditions and mostly lack the gigabit Ethernet switches that should go hand-in-hand with products that prominently display speeds in the hundreds of Mbps on their product boxes.

Since you make it sound as if India is communications nirvana, I'll introduce a few elements of reality into the picture...

I spent a small amount of time in the US, and surprisingly the tarrif structure and the talk time etc., plans available in India are far better than in the US ... in case of cellular connections countries like India are way ahead of the US/Europe, and very soon 3G deployment will be mainstream

You know, you really shouldn't lump Europe with the US in terms of mobile penetration. According to some very rudimentary looking-up, India's looking at 30% penetration by 2009 (ref), whereas Europe is going to have near-100% penetration by 2007 (ref). Also, the US even with it's "dismal" record in mobiles has a penetration rate of 70% estimated for 2006 (ref).

On top of this you have other indicators, like the percentage of subscribers actually using GPRS (leave 3G aside for the moment because its uptake hasn't been huge anywhere), which is embarassingly low in India -- which is why Airtel has a Rs99/'unlimited' use GPRS plan: they're pretty much begging the market to use the service. This is analogous to their free MMS plan in non-Delhi/Bombay markets for a long time: they pretty much had to give it away because no one wanted to send MMSes at Rs 5 a pop.

Finally, most markets tend to reward staying consumers rather than random prepaid customers who use a cellphone for a few days. I'd say if you were living in the US for a longer time you'd have been pleasantly surprised with some of the offers available, including free night+weekend minutes, and free long-distance to selected numbers.

In broadband access developed nations have lot of lead over developing ones, maybe because to have good connectivity you require undersea cables as most of the servers are in west

While India definitely needs more fiber, it doesn't use what's available well -- I wrote this in 2002 and obviously things have improved since then (cf Anil Ambani's new FALCON cable) but the lighted capacity ratios haven't(check out how much of FALCON is unlighted). The net result-- even now, 256kbps seems to be the median connect speed for residential DSL in India, when even stodgy old UK gives away 2Mbps connections practically for free, and 16/24Mbps services are becoming common. I know telcos keep a certain level of unlighted capability but given India's population and demand, the sheer amount of unlighted fiber is wasteful IMHO.

Also, millions of people in India who've ditched their government-supplied copper-line phones for GSM/CDMA/WLL phones from private companies. This bites broadband growth in the back, because these technologies have a low data trasmission limit, which is shared by all subscribers in a given area.

Realistically, if you want good residential broadband you need decent copper wiring (a concept which MTNL's/BSNL's illiterate field staff don't understand -- which is why most of India's copperline phones cannot carry 8Mbps traffic even though theoretically they could do even more) or decent Ethernet/OFC wiring (and no one's done fiber-to-the-home in India just yet). And technologies like community wifi (and Wimax) are ill-suited to India's dense urban jungles.

I guess you haven't yet seen http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/08/30/defcon2006_janus _project/ :)