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IBM to Unveil Major Tech Advances
mr wrote to us to point out an article on IBM in today's SF Chronicle. IBM, starting on Monday at the Internation Electron Device Meeting, will be disclosing eighteen new inventions coming out of their labs. IBM goes to so far to say that it will keep Moore's Law [?] around for at least another decade. The article also talks about some of IBM's recent advancements as well as describing some of the new stuff to be unveiled.
Unfortunately the link doesn't work...it gives an error...so it doesn't appear to be /. effect yet...just a bad link :>>--
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Try this
Well, one day we will have our nano assembled cubic meter crystals of super conducting solid FPGA like computational powerhouses churning out trillions or teraflops with ease and having more L1 type memory at clock speed (10-50 gigahertz) than all of the information on the internet as a whole at this point. When that day comes, well, I will be one happy geek. So, anyone care to calculate according to mores law when this point will be reached? Its sooner than you think.. try it.
People sometimes seem to forget that IBM still has a lot of smart people working for it.
:-)
It's a pity that they are so big and therefore a bit less focused than other tech companies. Allocating resources and capital for a $180 billion must be a real pain. Maybe I'll get the chance to try that some day
I hate to whine, but this appears to happen quite frequently - I wish Rob would build something into the posting scripts for top level stories to automatically check the links.
I would say that usually about 10% of the links given in a top level story can be counted upon to be broken - pretty poor.
Sure, if you read the discussion someone usually figures out the correct link and posts it, but sometimes I would just like to read the link itself without having to sort through the comments to find the 'real' link.
-josh
here is a brief summary.
Yada, yada, yada, Silicon-On-Insulators, yada, yada, yada, Moore Law's, yada, yada, yada, still valid, yada, despite what the cynics say, yada, yada, copper instead of aluminum, yada, Moore's Law, yada, yada.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Motorola today said that they had found a way to make transistors 4 times smaller and be implementable in a short time-span. It reduces power consuption and allows for speed increases. This was on your favourite site.
The trench technology looks cool, burying the DRAM under the processor so it doesn't have to be next to it. That should increase yield whilst not compromising on capabilities of the processor. How much DRAM can you fit in 100mm^2? 400mm^2? That would be the amount of 2nd or 1st level cache your Athlon/Alpha processor could have built in, running at full speed!
i actually wish i had two years ago when a friend recommended, now if only i had the captial to dally in the market, my guess is i would make good money here.
- A new space age cereal that doesn't immediately become soggy in milk...
- Revolutionary new system that doesn't crash (guess which one).
- One-click power-on sequence for computers (amazon.com, eat your heart out!)
- An even *larger* harddrive to store pr0n and mp3s!
- Harddrives now come in designer colors like "tangerine" and "rasberry" (You'll note the lack of a "lemon" color, however!)
- Computers from Intel that actually boot.
- A new Office clone that has REAL useable features like "Extend Deadline", "Make pretty graphs", and "Create Bollocks" instead of a stupid animated paper clip.
Horrah for IBM - working for the common user. =)A "good" one is hard to find these days.
This is great that IBM will keep the speed increase for CPUs going for another decade. But will it really make the computers speed up that much? As the article points out, memory on the chip is faster than memory not on the chip. Part of the new technology involves putting more memory on the chip. But what is not mentioned is that the computer bus (used in moving data from memory to the chip) is not the biggest bottleneck today. Even slower is the network connection between computers. Sure, there is progress here, but the rate of increase is no where near as steep as the speed increase for CPU cycles. The problem is that the amount if information being transfered over the networks is increasing too.
Mike Eckardt meckardt@yahoo.spam.com
Ok, the article says we get a 50% improvement. How does that translate to sustaining Moore's law for 10 years, which requires a 100% improvement every 18 months?
What Nazi efforts?
Really, what Nazi technology in the 30s and 40s have anything to do with semiconductors?
Now if we were talking about rocket engines or aircraft wings you might have some basis in fact...
who needs fact- a creative mind and a six pack work just as well
Looks like all the money IBM has historically put into general R&D is paying off once again. That's one thing Big Blue has usually gotten right....and something other large tech firms can learn from. Fund your scientists, and don't necessarily expect products immediately from them. Let them do basic research, and the products will follow.
-- JackCat
Moderate me down if you wish, but it seems like a lot of folks (read: Slashdot readers who moderate) don't understand what the various moderation descriptors (especially "Flamebait" and "Troll") mean. The above post does not appear to be a troll -- constructive criticism of /. is just that.
:)
This is similar to calling the "first post" messages "Flamebait" (well, maybe hot grits and petrified are flamebait). They're not. Trolls at best.
The above is NOT a ulterior plea to be moderated up by folks who want to prove how "fair" they are. I moderate every week or two, just like a lot of you, and I am NOT looking for extra karma points -- each of my posts stands on its own merits (good, bad, or otherwise
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
could i spam you wyatt?
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
What's wrong with you? You don't have have enough drugs and whores?
Perhaps, Hemos, you should concentrate on articles that are more than marketing and advertising for companies. This remind me of the that trillion-giga-tera bit rounter from lucent that big comapnies couldn't even afford at this point and all those AT&T commercials a few year back with Tom Sellic(sp?) telling us how they were going to make heaven on earth with their technology. Lets have some articles with technical backing and insight.
I'd rather talk about offtopic-topics like the WTO discussion the other day. Now that was interesting...around 800 posts!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Now what I'm really wondering is this : at least one theory suggests that the government is in the process of doing to MS what it did to IBM back in the 80's. If that's true, and the DOJ keeps MS so tangled up over the next decade that competitors emerge, does anybody think that Microsoft will reinvent itself in a similar way? Sure, we can all hate MS as the big bad corporate enemy now, but we all did that 20 years ago, too, when it was IBM. Now we love them.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
... that Some govts have yet to learn. *cough*WAKEUP TONY BLAIR*cough*...
i would pay decent money (a couple bucks anyway) to see that! can you hook us up?
I don't know about you, but I'd REALLY enjoy faster & cheaper CPUs. I would LOVE to be able to compile my code faster, and part (not all, by any means) of that would include faster processors (the cheaper part is just so I don't go broke). While I am developing software, my debug->change->compile cycle is dreadfully slow sometimes. I would really like to have a very fast dual CPU system w/ Super-Ultra-Fast SCSI harddrive system (one of the other huge bottlenecks when compiling large projects) in order to reduce that cycle.
Of course, if I were independantly wealthy, I could just get a Penguin computing 8-way Xeon system w/ IBM 10,000 RPM SCSI harddrives. Buy I don't happen to have $100k lying around...
Of course network speed is important, but CPU speed is, too!
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Probably wrong, but fun to speculate nonetheless.
A lot of the article sounds pretty neat, but I admit I don't know if I like the bit about putting DRAM on the CPU...from a sheer speed perspective, it's obviously superior, but who wants to have to upgrade the CPU to put more RAM in the machine? Granted, I'm sure you'd still have DIMM slots, but those would be (of course) slower than the on-CPU memory.
What it reminds me of most is the old days of trying to configure 640K of main memory to squeeze every last byte out of it to run things...personally, I've rather enjoyed that sort of fading into a quaint historical oddity. Putting memory on the CPU just means software (by which I mean games, at the moment) is going to require a certain amount of "CPU RAM," and a certain amount of system RAM, and a certain amount of video card RAM.
*shrug*
Just $0.02 from someone who remembers reading the install guide for Falcon 3.0...
"Let's see...if I don't run an OS, I can get 604K main memory free..."
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Maybe, maybe not. Ask us again after the court battle is complete. I'd have to think it would be a Good Thing if MS was to become a force for good in the future.
I have to wonder if a direct correlation between MS and IBM is possible though? IBM can do general hardware research with no specific application in mind, but will MS (or any other software company) beable to do general software research?
Intolerant people should be shot.
These are all nice new technologies, but let' s hope IBM knows how to use them. Historically IBM has created quite a few technologies; unfortunately the management has, in the past, simply thrown the innovations away. Here are a couple examples:
On the other hand, many IBM innovations did make it, such as the magnetic hard drive. IBM still makes great hard drives.
The article didn't say it, but allowing RAM transistors to exist below other circuitry effectively doubles the data density of existing DRAM chips. How does tens of gigabytes of RAM sound? The problem: how do you cool double the amount of heat coming from those RAM chips?
I am looking forward to the faster and better computers and devices that will come from these innovations.
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Oh no! I've been sucked into
I am really sure that this could happen but what will happen to being able to actually buy this?
As I see this the more something costs in time and complexity the more it costs in terms of raw dollars. I really would rather not have to go back to the days of yore when computers had armed guards around them and required the use of a Phd in some obscure field to operate.
Having the 5 richest kings of Europe have access to all the technology makes me sick. I want to have a chance. The only reason that things like the open source movement actually succeeded was because of cheap but powerful/functional computers that everyone could and can now buy. I would hate to think of the world without affordable computing. Now people m,ay not like to think this way but think just how happy all these purists could be if they could have their Ivory TOwer back? They could do all their little research without having all the "rabble" to prevent them from their task.
If this can be done and actually have some useful stuff that can actually make the computer less of some kind of silly tool that still requires a great del of knowledge to get something working to it's full potential (for example to have say True AI, Instant linguistic translation, weather forcasting and the like). If people could write programs that did really interesting things then perhaps we would see an improvement in society. As it stands now most people would reason that *I* should spend the time/money/tallent/fatigue to write something that will do some socially enriching task. However most people don't have time time to go and get a Phd degree and then spend at least another 20 hours a day writing code and have just one area of a project take at least 120 years.
That's why we have crummy programs and systems of programs. People expect anyone who wants to make their life better to actually do it themselves. The whole perpetuated idea is that happiness exists outside computers in something that cannot and will not last be that marriage, family, career, wealth, health, or life. I maintain that existence could be viewed in relation to how well of a computer experience. If I could exist inside a computer even 5 minutes after my own physical death I would say that it would be a welcome thing.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Principals of Slashdot and Andover.net may have investments in the stocks of the companies discussed on this site and will disclose any interest if they are posting a story about those companies or their products. Contributors to this site may or may not have an interest in a company or product they are discussing. The decision to disclose that information is theirs to make. We do not guarantee the veracity, reliability or completeness of any information provided on our site or in any hyperlink appearing on our site.
it seems like a lot of folks don't understand what the various moderation descriptors (especially "Flamebait" and "Troll") mean. The above post does not appear to be a troll -- constructive criticism of /. is just that.
:-)
I agree. I think that the "overrated" and "underrated" should be used to simply mark a post up or down. The others should be used only if they're descriptive. Also, I wish that the term "Troll" was not a negative score. I'm not saying it should be positive, but not all Trolls are bad.
This is similar to calling the "first post" messages "Flamebait" (well, maybe hot grits and petrified are flamebait). They're not. Trolls at best.
Maybe there should be a "First Post Moron" descriptor.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Microsoft does do general research. Look at research.microsoft.com. Believe it or not, they do have some very influential people at MS research, such as Jonathan Grudin.
AC... listen very carefully. It's here. No one else sees it, because it hides in the light. I see it - I know where to look...
From what I've read about MS and their people, Mhyrvold apparently spends most of his time writing massive memos that nobody reads. :) This guy was around the company when Gates said the Internet was no big thing. You'd think he would have whispered something in Bill's ear :).
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I agree that some of IBM's commercials have been pretty funny, but a few lately have given me the creeps. In particular, that 'getting to know you' made me shiver...
...it was a big nasty kafka-esque bug like the kind you find in win9x apps.
I've been thinking about IBM's style lately, and I have a question. How long have they been producing subsystems? I know that other companies use IBM products/tech in their own offerings, which goes against the proprietary mentality I usually hold synonymous with Big Blue. Old Big Blue, anyway.
:) True. I'd probably be more worried about it if I wasn't surrounded by people who are very interested in that sort of thing. It's a fact of life that industry wants profiling information.
At least IBM is taking the right approach -- "We want profiling information so that we can help streamline the information we're providing to you." If I know you play tennis, there's two ways you can look at it. One is, "Oooo good, now I can sell him more tennis balls." Everybody hates this, of course, because nobody likes to feel like a target. But the second is, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I really am interested in knowing whose got a deal on tennis balls." Sometimes targeted messaging does actually work. It's really the same thing that the demographics have always been, only with better profiling they really know. They're not assuming "Oh, because you're in group X, there's a Y% likelihood that you play tennis."
There's a new movement in this area. That's to get away from the use of the word "targeting" and to start making use of expressions like "1:1" and "relationship". People are happier having a relationship with the businesses they use. The whole point of the IBM focusgroup commercial is a bunch of people being pissed off because the ad people don't know them.
And just in case anybody is prepared to argue that "1:1 relationship" is just new marketing hype for the same old spam, let me put it this way. When my grandfather walked into the local hardware store, the shopkeeper could say "Hello, Dan! Getting ready to send the kids off to college pretty soon, aren't ya? Got a good sale on bookcases down in aisle 3." And he would never, ever say "Have ya seen our sale on house paint?" if he knew that my dad had aluminum siding. And service like that was *appreciated*. People go on to the internet today and they ask where all the service went. The optimist in me says that all this 1:1 relationship stuff is actually a way to try and bring that *back*. If I really thought that I was just coming up with a better mousetrap (or in this case, spamtrap), I don't think I'd be working where I work.
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
The oft-repeated industry maxim, originally coined in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, holds that the capabilities of semiconductors double roughly every 18 to 24 months.
I always thought Moore's law said 18 months. Is IBM trying to fudge the numbers to make the article sound better?
(OT) does anyone know the equivalant laws for RAM, hard disks, monitor size, etc?
The shareholder is always right.
I think we would appreciate the shopkeepers "service" significantly less if he just busted up in your house yelling "I've got bookcases I've got bookcases" when the two of you have never even met before.
Quite frankly if someone just invaded my house (including spammers if I ever find one of the rat bastards) I don't care what they are selling whether it is bookcases or siding. If I want bookcases I will go to the shopkeeper who has given me such good service and never busted up in my house. On the other hand the house buster/located spammer is going to find an irate home owner holding a baseball bat ready to Laissez les bon temps rouller, let the good times roll!
> Wonderful commercials with a real sense of > humor.
Best commerical I ever saw went like this:
2 minutes of computer chips being put into life support systems and pacemakers, old people running around, celebrating 100year birthdays, with cheesy music in the background and a voice over saying "We have the power today, to help people last longer, the computer chips needed to make life support systems. With our new chips we could save lives, but we thought, Nah, forget it, lets play games" All the chips were removed from the pacemakers, the old people started having heart attacks mixed in with shots of Quake and racing games.
It turned out to be an advert for 3dfx's stuff.
I only saw it once, but it was hilarious.
It was probably axed for being offensive.
The story of IBMs comback has been pretty fun to watch. I believe that the antitrust suit did have a lot to do with IBM's decline in the 80's, but so did IBM's own corporate stupidity.
Pick up Robert X. Cringely's "Accidental Empires" for some fun stories about how IBM squandered it's early lead in the PC business. Most of the stories are pretty true.
Having said all of that, let me also defend IBM by saying that big companies faced with radical changes in technology almost always get killed, and IBM did what most other companies couldn't have done: somehow ride out the problems and rise from the ashes to play a new role in the techonology world. That's something to be respected, along with all of their recent initiatives mentioned above.
You're right. Spam sucks in all flavors. But if you've voluntarily walked through the door of my hardwareshop.com, I'm hoping that you will appreciate me knowing that you have kids ready to go off to college so I can point you to the deal on bookcases.
And now I bet somebody's gonna moderate me down as being overrated. I hate it when that happens. :) It's not my fault I'm posting at a natural 2!
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I thought that it went something like this:
"The ratio of transistors to area doubles roughly every 18 months."
Now, whether this directly translates into performance is to be debated. But by and large, Gordon was right...
...what IBM can do: basic research; or large scale research and development?
My list includes:
Intel
AT&T
Lucent
Nortel
Sun Microsystems
any others?
Motorola announced great advances today.
IBM says they can keep up with Moore's law for 10 more years.
Intel has said they don't know how they will increase speed after 2000 or so
IBM and Motorola make PowerPC
Intel makes x86
This could be fun for us Mac users.
More layers will lead to more lost dies, so the performance would have to be much better for someone to do that.
nee-nee.
I took a look at the microsoft Research site research.microsoft.com which just struck me as more of an after-thought than a real effort to "instutionalize" a dynamic and relevant research culture. Of course this is an "outsider looking in" perception of microsoft, but with that same sort of outsiders view of IBM its pretty clear they have always taken this approach.
I have great faith in fools. Self confidence, my friends call it.
the cereal you refer to is sold by phillip morris' as "grape nuts".
Somebody get our flag back!
Here it is; the page also contains links to two other ads in the same campaign.
See that check box next to "No Score +1 Bonus".
I suppose if it's a hassle to click on that you could ask Rob to add YASUO (Yet Another Slashdot User Option) that lets you have it checked automatticly.
"I'm worried. We have those press announcements on Monday, and you -know- Slashdot'll cover them. Our servers will never cope!"
"It's ok. I've just put up some web pages, pre-announcing the announcements. If the servers melt down this week, we'll still have the weekend to replace them, and Slashdot readers don't care about repeat announcements."
"That's cunning! Do you think they'll fall for it?"
"I think so. The system load was showing 490% CPU usage, and rising fast, the last time I looked."
* In the distance, the sound of a hard disk spinning out of the drive bay and colliding with a UPS unit. An IL&M techie is on-hand to supply the effects *
* Outside the building, the T1 link is glowing red, then blue, before finally exploding as the energy from the packets causes the fibre to undergo nuclear fusion. *
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I believe the actual innovation is that it's edible. Can't say the same for grape nuts.
But then again, I could be wrong.
I love the idea of open sourcing /.
/. like moderation style.
/. would be great, but I think
/. on each implementation :)
I can think of a couple different forums that
I regularly read/post to that could seriously
benefit from a
The benifits to
lots of others would benefit even more.
we could put a powered by
In fact reducing the number of off-die memory accesses may reduce the power (no need to source/sink to those external bus signal's caps)
The more complex anything gets - the lower the yield (basic rule of nature - I suspect it applies to life too :-)
The only complaints with releasing the latest /. source code, as Rob supposedly has been planning to do for a while now:
The code page claims it's not in a state ready for release - well then, tarball it up and that's good enough for me. It may not work right off the bat on another site, or there may be too many slashdot-isms hardcoded into the scripts, but we'll get things ironed out and smoothed out soon enough. Nobody wants to try and clone slashdot's style, just to use the cool forum design, customizability, and user moderation for sites covering other topics.
There is the security concern involved with open sourcing something suddenly - don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating "security through obscurity" - but while open source software may have fewer security flaws than closed source software, closed source software that suddenly is liberated is bound to have more bugs, more visible, for a while after the initial code release.
I don't think either of those things are a really convincing argument for keeping the code to the epitome of open source advocacy sites under wraps, though. I don't suppose Andover is against releasing the code, worried about competing web portals taking your ad revenue?
>Nathan Mhyrvold is supposedly their resident genius who is supposed to do nothing but think about the future of the technology.
Except that Nathan is one of the MANY people who have left/taken a long leave from Microsoft.
His leaving was hadly mentioned by anyone....which is shocking, IMNSHO
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
No way... Microsoft will never relinquish their stranglehold on their market. They will either go down in the deep, deep flames or continue lording over the rest of us. They are too smart and will weasil their way out of this little predicament. Don't expect the government to bail us out of this problem.
Only by creating superior products can we defeat this monstrosity.
There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, and they do a lot of things well. My personal opinion is that a lot of the problems with their software comes from making a deliberate effort to lock competitors out. If MS took half the time, energy, and money it appears to devote to keeping its competitors down, and focused on simplifying their software and supporting open standards, they'd be producing a lot better products.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Compared to the now-vanquished QUEL from ingres it's pretty weak.
And, of course, it has an icky COBOL-like look+feel.
All, in all, it's the EBCDIC of DB languages.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Yes, this is a definite possibility. Microsoft has a lot of very intelligent people working for them, particularly in Microsoft Research. About two months ago, Microsoft and MIT announced a long-term collaboration for innovation in higher education. At the same time, they celebrated by holding a small technology fair for MIT students on campus. It wasn't a sales pitch or a recruiting event. It wasn't taken very seriously by a lot of MIT students (copies of Office 2000 raffled off were promptly thrown on the ground and stomped upon by many), but it did illustrate many new technologies that Microsoft Research is working upon. Among some of the highlights are voice recognition, image processing, video processing, facial recognition, 3-D graphics, audio technologies, and portable devices. One thing that they were showing that was very cool was an electronic pen that used tiny accelerometers to detect movement of the pen and record it as hand-writing recognition, available to pump straight into some PDA, if the pen isn't already a PDA. If you ask me, the real value of Microsoft is not in its browser, applications, or operating system. It's in the products from Microsoft Research.
a
Jesus Christ, man!
Lay off the grape nuts. They're not bad.
monkeyjump.com/anti-linux .. dogs playing poker too!
monkeyjump.com/anti-linux .. dogs playing poker too!&@^&*$@
Jesus Christ, man!
Lay off the dude's grandfather! He's not bad!
No, relational algebra was invented at IBM. The idea for a "relational database" started with Larry Ellison and friends, who worked for IBM at the time and started that little "Oracle" company when their managers told them that their "relational database" idea was stupid.
Are grape nuts made from grapes? Are they like oak apples, which are caused by parasitic wasp infestation of oak trees, except they're caused by infestation of vines? Or are people actually eating grape pips? They're really bitter, and probably poisonous...
It wasn't really specified whether it was a terran native or not - having said that, it was very adapted to parasitising humans, suggesting it was supposed to ahve evolved alongside them...
Actually, IBM did create SQL. It was originally designed for an experiment relational DBMS called System R.
:)
To the A.C. in the other post Larry Ellison didn't come up with the idea for relational databases. It was a fellow named Ted Codd in 1970, quite a while before Oracle was founded. IBM developped several relational dbms-es in the 70s, so they didn't appear to think it was a silly idea.
Just happened to have my old databases textbook handy
Dana
I thought SRAMs are normally used for caches, due to their faster performance. SRAMs require more transistors than DRAMs, though, making caches cost more than main memory. On the other hand, being on-chip, the DRAMs could have a much wider bus connection to the processor (high pin count costs a lot in packaging, and tends to increase power consumption).
Why is this? Because it was Pixels: the little company that makes Pixels3d, a modeller/renderer etc for the Mac. I already knew them- in fact I keep a copy of Pixels3D 2.1.4 around because they are one of the many Mac vendors who have taken to releasing their last-year's model at no cost, and I grabbed it. Being allowed to fully use something like that left me with a good feeling about them, and they are the antithesis of a big vague corporation- it's a bunch of computer geeks running a company, and their product kicks butt (except that I hate the Lightwave-like interface :) )
I wasn't able to take 'em up on their promo, won't be buying anything today- but, you know, I am _very_ used to shutting off telemarketers. I don't give them three seconds. I interrupt, I firmly say I'm not interested and then hang right up. Yet in this case these people were able to keep my attention and get my sympathies- why?
Partly because they were ready to put some serious effort towards getting me what I wanted. I learned that the scripting language was like Renderman shaders. I learned people write plugins in REALbasic- hey, I have that! I even ended up talking to the main programmer for about ten minutes on how many semitransparent layers you could stack to simulate volumetric clouds (a POV trick I've been playing with), and he had all the techie details. It was so deeply about what _I_ wanted to know, rather than about what they wanted to sell.
I hear people saying IBM is also taking this approach. Well, good for them! The predatory thing only works when you have a lock on people. Pixels doesn't- they do Mac software, and compete with everything from Metacreations (Poser, Bryce, Infini-D) to Lightwave itself and who knows what else? Seeing this glimpse of how they work with their customers gave me a bit of insight into why they're still around at all. Did you know that you can go to their community page and they will put up _pictures_ of their users? (one wonders if it's pictures of _most_ of their users! ;) ) Looking down the row of faces, next to banner links to the respective websites, was a lesson in PR.
It doesn't always stay- that language I use, REALbasic, is very neat but the marketing people have taken to trying to get people to link to the RB site by offering space on the CD in exchange for posting 'Made With Realbasic' logos on things. That's a 'what can we get' approach, not a 'what do you want?' approach. I don't mind it but I'm not doing it. Pixels is smarter- or wiser. As, apparently, is IBM...
*hits backlight* (bip!)
*turns it back off, closes cover* (bip! clik)
This was $30. I once wanted an old Powerbook- just something that could take text notes and be carried around. B/W screen, some tiny amount of ram- never could get one, too expensive.
Now I have a toy with 256k of ram (that's an awful lot of little memos!). It has a backlight, which is more than the old Powerbooks had. It's got chiclet keys that go (bip!). There's a fourway arrow key thing that is occasionally relevant. The text editing is rather like vi or something- hell, the whole thing is extremely modal, and yet it's such a little thing that it doesn't matter- I don't need a trackball or color for this. So where a few years ago I could only wish for an old Powerbook (which wouldn't fit in my pocket without _serious_, er, percussive redesign ;) ), now I can actually have a little toy 'laptop' that goes (bip!) and takes notes and shows what time it is in Hong Kong or Berlin.
And this is totally cool- and I can't wait until I get to have one for $50 that's the same size, the same lcd screen with blue backlighting- but has 4M, bash, and vi ;)
That would just feel so good tucked into your pocket. Imagine. Hip-nix ;) (poc-nix?)
yeah lay off, it's great stuff... just ask the Minnesota highway department! They heat 'em up and spread them on the roads every winter to keep the Idiots Out Driving Around* from ending up in a ditch... not to mention the locals**. Post*** makes great road agregate.
*The 20th century finally caught up with Iowa . . . they're out driving now instead of wandering.
**If you think Iowans and New Yorkers are bad drivers then you've never seen Minnesotans... especially the natives. eeh gads!
***not phillip-morris
wasted as L3 cache? are you kidding??
you both missed the point here... the layered "memory" buys you the ability to have a huge amount of L1 cache at chip speed on the same wafer. after that screw L2... just jump straight to main memory across the fat memory bus someone really needs to cram down Intel's throat (not RAMbus). Imagine a chip like the athlon - in a socket mount, the way god intended - with the kinds of cache you see in PIII Xeons or s/390's G6s (and then some) at chip speed without that whole cartridge gimick.
other applications may include chips with huge register banks, or taking the TLBs and layering them into half the space. it also allows every chip to have it's own cache built right in... think about other than the CPU: gfx chips, dsp, comm controlers, network pumps (think about the i820).
X
Microsoft needs a real punch in their face before they will realize that they have taken the computer industry hostage through the 90's. If/When they adopt Open Source, just MAYBE they'll be lovable. But Microsoft will have to do like IBM, begin sharing more freely with the computer using community. Without nasty plans of conquering the world. You'd think people would have learned after WW1 and WW2, but some have just shifted the war to the business arena.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
SIG11 MUST HAVE FAILED HIGH SCHOOL, HE DOESN'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "ITS" AND "IT'S".
I'D LIKE TO TURN MAE LING MAK TO STONE.
HOW'S THIS FOR DOGMA??