One idea that I did not see anyone mention is a thermoelectric cooler. A TEC (also called a pelimiter juction) is basicaly a solid state heat pump. Apply a current and one side gets hot while the other gets cold. Because it has no moving parts it is silent and has a low failure rate. They are often used to cool lasers. You would put the TEC between the CPU and heat sink, with some thermal grease. The heat sink would then get hotter than the CPU. Note that if the hot side of the TEC gets above the melting point of solder then the TEC will self destruct, so you will still need a large heat sink and good air flow. A small TEC is about $20 US.
Firewire vs GigE is not realy a very usefull comparison. They are targeted at very different markets. Firewire (IEEE 1394, iLink, whatever you call it) has gained ground in the consumer electonics and digital video market. The one area where the two overlap is in storage. Currently there are several Firewire storage devices available (external hard drives). Ethernet is going to gain some of that market with iSCSI.
Firewire and USB 2.0 are going to fight it out on the desktop. They both have about the same speed and both have a strong install base (Firewire with Apple and Sony products and USB with legacy 1.0 devices). Firewire is going to hold on to its nitch in the audio-visual market and some high speed apps with its IEEE 1394b speed boost. USB is going to remain king of keybord and mouse type devices due to lower cost.
The integration outlook is better in the data networking space. GigE and 10GigE are looking to replace the gaggle of layer1/layer2 solutions out there. That would include ATM, Frame Relay, Fiber Channel, Packet over SONET, etc.
IMHO simply strapping a desktop style user interface (text or GUI with keyboard and pointer) to your skull seems wasteful. It would be much more efficient to use a palmtop or laptop form factor in most aplications. No matter how compact you make the hardware or how high res the display it will never be more than a geek toy unless you change the way you interact with it. If your display is superimposed over reality, then your computer should interact with reality.
GPS adds some interesting posibilities (see the article on GPS tags). Scanning RFID or barcodes also lets you gather information. Take a picture of a sign, OCR the text then run it through a translation program and you can find the bathroom at any airport in the world. Do the same with speach to text and reality has subtitles. If your display seems to "hover" out in front of you, then why not treat it as being there? Point your stylus in the air where you see an icon to click on it.
I have long thought that the "killer app" for wearables would involve GPS and some way of determaning what direction the user was facing. You could then overlay the virtual on top of the real. Instead of a map or direcions how about a "yellow brick road" to follow and a giant arrow floating in the sky over your destination. I realise that most of this is pie in the sky with the current technology but wearables will never go mainstream untill you give people an application worth looking like a borg drone for.
Xilinx has a free book if you want an overview of home networking standards, including a few that you have never heard of.
I think that everyone agrees that if you are building a new house Cat5 is your friend. It can run anything from voice to gigabit ethernet. FireWire is making a play for the home netowrk but it is not there yet. For wireless you would want 802.11b. HomeRF is on the way out. Note that wireless networks are insecure and prone to noise. X10 is enough for home automation.
What is your strategy for embedded systems? Embedded distros from the likes of MontaVista and LynuxWorks are quikly taking larger chunks of the embedded market. WindRiver has a strong foothold with its proprietary VxWorks RTOS and now has bought BSDi. How do you counter that? Also, any plans for supporting more embedded hardware (XScale for example)?
The criminal mastermind "Godfather Christmas" (alias "Santa Clause" alias "Kris Kringle" alias "Saint Nick") was arested the night of the 24th during a home invasion robery. He had boken into the house through the chimney and after eating a some of the homeowner's food (posibly cookies and milk) he was discovered heading toward the presents under the tree with a large sack, obviously intending to steal them.
Mr. Kringle was also charged with several violations of the endangered species act when it was found that he had several reindeer chained to a sleigh. Further proof of abuse was found when opon the examination of the reindeer the lead one was found to have a nose reddened by infection.
There is also an ongoing investigation into aligations of the stalking of children. By his own admission he saw them when they are sleeping and knew when they were awake. The police found a list of names on Mr. Kringle's person and will be checking and rechecking the list for posible witnesses. Mr. Kringle is also under suspicion for his habit of getting children to sit on his lap by promissing them presesnts.
Mr. Kringle is also under investigation for operating a swet shop in the far north. Investigators will check if these "elf like" workers are realy children working in violation of child labor laws.
Mr Kringle is being held without bail pending a phychological evaluation. Other charges under consideration include smuggeling toys and flying without a pilots licence. When asked to comment why he broke into the house Mr. Kringle relied that he was there for the "good little children."
I have been following this company for a while now. That SB-1 core looks sweet. The lead designer worked on both the Alpha and Strong Arm, so the VC pitch has been Alpha speed at StrongArm power levels. They are privatly held,otherwise a lot of my old coworkers would have bought some shares. Assuming that a chip with the core makes it through tape out and into a product they are either going to have a skyrocketing IPO or (more likely) get bought out by the big guys. Cisco is an early favorite (they buy everything) but Intel should not be discounted (recently bought Level1). I dont think that a smaller company will want to pay the premium that will be on the company's worth if the SB-1 core works as advertised.
Of course this assumes that everything goes well. High frequency/low power stuff at Very Deep Sub Micron (VDSM) can run into a lot of problems during tapeout (crosstalk, timing, DRC violations, buggs in the back end tools). Still, that core is sweet.
Did they originaly plan on having 16-bit color and then have to switch due to hardware/software/OS constraints? Was it simply a mistake by marketing? Or did HP decide to create some FUD ("Why settle for a Palm IIIc when you can have 16 bit color?") and forget to change the adverts when it whent from vaporware to product?
The curse of WinCE strikes again. One should steer clear of anything that built up enough of a bad reputation to neccesitate a name change. So now the choices are get a Palm/Handspring, get a laptop, get a "smart phone", wait for Palm on StrongArm, wait for Linux on PDA, or wait for MS to iron the bugs out of WinCE (I estimate Y3K).
I know someone (who know works at parallax) that created a visual mouse for his Sr Project at CSU Sacramento. It used a pair of IR phototransistors to detect where you were looking and moved the mouse accordingly. The sensors mounted on a standard set of eyeglasses and the source for the IR was an incandessent lamp next to the screen. The remarcable thing is that the whole thing was run off of a Basic Stamp. Most such input devices are fairly pricy and specialized. He has not had time to fully debug it but what I have seen looked very cool.
Photosensors:$3 Lamp:$5 Dictation Software:$20 Basic Stamp OEM:$34 Being able to use the computer without carpel tunnel: Priceless
I reacently picked up a coppy of MaximumLinux magazine that included two distro disks. I was suprised to read the licence agrement in the back of the mgazine. It forbid the copying of the disks or any portion of them. In other words it forbids the redistrobution of the GPLed software on the disks, and if I change any of the GPLed source code I cannot distribute the changes. Smells like a violation to me.
Actualy there is one situation that I can think of that one would prefer a robotic driver. One of my professors is doing research for CalTans (California department of Transpertation). He is designing and prototyping a "shadow vehile" that would follow a truck driven by a human. The theory is that a lot of caltrans workers are hurt when the car the the drive (very slowly) down the road is rear ended by a speeding car. Under this setup the "shadow vehicle" may be totaled but the workers would be safe (the speeder is toast either way). Klaus may put him out of a job.
Linux need a DVD player that is not caught up in legal dificulties. The reason is not so that we can all watch movies on our PC, it is set top boxes. Linux is a very tempting OS to use in a set top box. It is open source, stable, and has no licencing fee. It does lack one important element that the upcoming consoles/settops have: DVD playback. The X-box and PS2 both have the ability to play DVDs and both are targeted for use as set top boxes for internet access, etc. Now idealy the player would be free and open sourced, but that is not likely any time soon.
How detatched should the user be from the comand prompt? Or put another way: The average windows user can get away with never seeing a dos promp during normal use, the would not know a dos command if it bit them on the behind. Should / will linux GUIs get to the point that you never have to open an xterm other than for the most arcane issues? Linux bassed embedded apps (set top boxes, etc.) shield the user from the details of the OS but should that be the case on a PC?
If you look at Einstien's equasions then a particle with a real, non-zero rest mass (like an atom) can only go slower than the speed of light. A particle with a zero rest mass (like a photon) can only go at light speed. A particle with an "imaginary" rest mass (a mass that is some real number times the square root of negative one) is called a tachyon and can only go faster than the speed of light. In fact the more energy that a tachyon has the slower it goes, with an infinite speed at zero energy.
Because no known particle has an imaginary rest mass we need another way to send data or people. A wormhole could act as a "shortcut" from point A to point B without traveling the space in between. It was thought that one could use a wormhole as a time machine by accelerating one end to reletivistic speed, but it now looks like any attempt to use it as a time machine would cause it to explode.
A gravity drive could "warp" space time and let you travel at any speed without acceleration or time dialation but first you need anitgravity.
Quantum particles may be able to break (or at least bend) the universal speed limit. A photon can sometimes seem to "quantum tunnel" from one side of a very thin barrier to the other without existing in the space between. It stayed at light speed but skiped part of the journey. You can also speed up photons with a vacume chamber and two copper plates. By placing two grounded conductive planes in close parallel you prevent any particle with a wavelength longer than the distance between the plates from existing in that space. Normaly in empty space particles pop in and out of existance all the time. These are called "virtual particles", "quantum soup" or "quantum fireworks". With less virtual particles in the way a lazer seems to move faster between the plates.
This is all simplified and may be out of date. Serve with a hefty sprincle of salt.
Well I guess the CIA and No Such Agency, etc. just had too much time on their hands after the cold war ended... Actualy many of the USA's cold war alies suposedly had a long standing tradition of spying on US corperations and using the data for their own economic or defence uses. I am suprised that the US intelegence comunity did not get in on the game sooner. There has been presure in that direction for years.
You may want to look at something a little bit smaller. The Natcar competition sponsored by National Semiconductor is a contest to see who can build the fastest miniature autonomus electric vehicle. These RC car sized units follow a signal in a wire along the floor. Contestants not only learn how to let the car controll itself, but they have to build the motor controll and power management systems.
As for the coments on fuel cells: Bill Gates is investing in fuel cell research. Why? Because a small fuel cell can run a laptop for a very long time.
Any word on support for the Intel i810 chip set? Has anyone gotten the Xserver up and running on 3.3.6 or 4.0? I know that you need a kernel module for sharing the system RAM with the video card.
You should boycott Amazon.com, but not for the reasons commonly mentioned. Amazon is loosing money hand over fist. With every transaction they loose more money. Amazon should be aplauded for useing pattent law to limit the damaging spread of parts of an unprofitable business model to companies that might otherwise have a chance of showing a proffit this decade. You can help Amazon's bottom line by not buying anything from them, thus reducing the amount of money that they loose.
Of course if you actualy *wanted* to hurt them you could join the affiliate program, link to a specific title (15% commission), buy a best seller with "one click" (30% discount), pocket your 40% net savings, and watch Amazon sink deeper into a sea of red ink.
I am sure that everyone reading this has heard of Moore's Law. And a think most of us realize that very few people actualy need the speed of the newest chip on their desktop. The real advantage of a new generation of chip coming out is that the older generations come down in price, size, heat, and wattage. This applies to more than just getting a cheaper PC. Chips tend to flow from server to PC to notebook to palmtop to embedded.
Apple used to make a desktop that ran off of the Motorola 68000. Motorola added analog to digital, pulse width modulation (for music or motor control), serial and IR interface, and LCD control on dye. They called it the dragonball and sold it for $12 a pop. It now runs 3Com's PalmPilot.
Anouncements the such-and-such has a prossesor at X Mhz for $1000 at 50 Watts with no mobo ready does nothing for me. When someone releases a Pentium class MPU for $20 with on chip peripherals that runs off of AAA batteries, then I will sit up and take notice. Transmeta may be a step in the right direction but we are not there yet.
A friend of mine is designing a linux on dragonball device for his senior project. He plans to use the Linux on Palm Pilot source to run a fingerprint ID unit.
Its strange, untill recently I had not heard much about the dragonball. I have mostly heard the Palm core simply refered to as a 68k. Unlike other Motorola microcontrollers (esp the HC11) there does not seem to be many protoboards or development/hobyist kits available.
I dont know if this aplies to this particular tech but some forms of magnetic storage have a problem when the magnetic domains get too small. The domains become unstable at room temprature and spontaniously "flip".
This is one of the limitations of hard drive capacity, one can only fit so many bits onto the platter before the domains get too small. You can try more or larger platters but that is basicaly just adding another HD. One solution is to use a substance with greater stability at low tempratures and then heat the sector with a tight laser when you want to write.
I used to work at a computer place that was one block over from a Frys. Half of our customers were people that had a bad experiance there and vowed never to do buiseness with them again. Thank you Frys, your lousy service made me a mint in commisions.
As for the idea that Cyrix is under "new management" remember that Via got them from National Semiconductor who bought them from... Never seem anxios to catch a hot potato.
First of all the PR raiting scam is just that, a scam. When I sold PCs customers would look at a cyrix233 and think that it ran at 233MHz. They would then see sub par proformance on a game that wanted a high MHz rated pentum and think that they got a lemon. What they did not understand (often even after a lengthy expanation) was that the chip did NOT actualy run at 233MHz. These cyrix emachines were embarasing to have on the sales floor. The constantly crashed and blew chunks when it came to game play. End of rant
Second Item Here is an interesting idea (altho I doubt that it will ever happen): Motorola could buy cyrix (or better yet Transmeta) and gain access to the x86 market. They already make the chips for Macs, Palms, and many wireless devices. Transmeta looks like it may present a threat to Motorola's handhend dominance. This is especialy true if the Transmeta's chip can be set up to emulate a 68000, the chip that Motorola makes for the PalmPilot. Right now everytime someone buys a Palm Pilot it is money in Motorola's pocket. There are plenty of reasons not to do this of course (like cyrix's rep stinks to high heaven and no one has made it profitable) and I dont think the Motorola is in the mood for a radical change to their product line.
Slashdot Mirror
One idea that I did not see anyone mention is a thermoelectric cooler. A TEC (also called a pelimiter juction) is basicaly a solid state heat pump. Apply a current and one side gets hot while the other gets cold. Because it has no moving parts it is silent and has a low failure rate. They are often used to cool lasers. You would put the TEC between the CPU and heat sink, with some thermal grease. The heat sink would then get hotter than the CPU. Note that if the hot side of the TEC gets above the melting point of solder then the TEC will self destruct, so you will still need a large heat sink and good air flow. A small TEC is about $20 US.
Firewire vs GigE is not realy a very usefull comparison. They are targeted at very different markets. Firewire (IEEE 1394, iLink, whatever you call it) has gained ground in the consumer electonics and digital video market. The one area where the two overlap is in storage. Currently there are several Firewire storage devices available (external hard drives). Ethernet is going to gain some of that market with iSCSI.
Firewire and USB 2.0 are going to fight it out on the desktop. They both have about the same speed and both have a strong install base (Firewire with Apple and Sony products and USB with legacy 1.0 devices). Firewire is going to hold on to its nitch in the audio-visual market and some high speed apps with its IEEE 1394b speed boost. USB is going to remain king of keybord and mouse type devices due to lower cost.
The integration outlook is better in the data networking space. GigE and 10GigE are looking to replace the gaggle of layer1/layer2 solutions out there. That would include ATM, Frame Relay, Fiber Channel, Packet over SONET, etc.
IMHO simply strapping a desktop style user interface (text or GUI with keyboard and pointer) to your skull seems wasteful. It would be much more efficient to use a palmtop or laptop form factor in most aplications. No matter how compact you make the hardware or how high res the display it will never be more than a geek toy unless you change the way you interact with it. If your display is superimposed over reality, then your computer should interact with reality.
GPS adds some interesting posibilities (see the article on GPS tags). Scanning RFID or barcodes also lets you gather information. Take a picture of a sign, OCR the text then run it through a translation program and you can find the bathroom at any airport in the world. Do the same with speach to text and reality has subtitles. If your display seems to "hover" out in front of you, then why not treat it as being there? Point your stylus in the air where you see an icon to click on it.
I have long thought that the "killer app" for wearables would involve GPS and some way of determaning what direction the user was facing. You could then overlay the virtual on top of the real. Instead of a map or direcions how about a "yellow brick road" to follow and a giant arrow floating in the sky over your destination. I realise that most of this is pie in the sky with the current technology but wearables will never go mainstream untill you give people an application worth looking like a borg drone for.
I think that everyone agrees that if you are building a new house Cat5 is your friend. It can run anything from voice to gigabit ethernet. FireWire is making a play for the home netowrk but it is not there yet. For wireless you would want 802.11b. HomeRF is on the way out. Note that wireless networks are insecure and prone to noise. X10 is enough for home automation.
What is your strategy for embedded systems? Embedded distros from the likes of MontaVista and LynuxWorks are quikly taking larger chunks of the embedded market. WindRiver has a strong foothold with its proprietary VxWorks RTOS and now has bought BSDi. How do you counter that? Also, any plans for supporting more embedded hardware (XScale for example)?
Mr. Kringle was also charged with several violations of the endangered species act when it was found that he had several reindeer chained to a sleigh. Further proof of abuse was found when opon the examination of the reindeer the lead one was found to have a nose reddened by infection.
There is also an ongoing investigation into aligations of the stalking of children. By his own admission he saw them when they are sleeping and knew when they were awake. The police found a list of names on Mr. Kringle's person and will be checking and rechecking the list for posible witnesses. Mr. Kringle is also under suspicion for his habit of getting children to sit on his lap by promissing them presesnts.
Mr. Kringle is also under investigation for operating a swet shop in the far north. Investigators will check if these "elf like" workers are realy children working in violation of child labor laws.
Mr Kringle is being held without bail pending a phychological evaluation. Other charges under consideration include smuggeling toys and flying without a pilots licence. When asked to comment why he broke into the house Mr. Kringle relied that he was there for the "good little children."
His eggplant gelato went over well though (no, realy).
Of course this assumes that everything goes well. High frequency/low power stuff at Very Deep Sub Micron (VDSM) can run into a lot of problems during tapeout (crosstalk, timing, DRC violations, buggs in the back end tools). Still, that core is sweet.
The curse of WinCE strikes again. One should steer clear of anything that built up enough of a bad reputation to neccesitate a name change. So now the choices are get a Palm/Handspring, get a laptop, get a "smart phone", wait for Palm on StrongArm, wait for Linux on PDA, or wait for MS to iron the bugs out of WinCE (I estimate Y3K).
Photosensors:$3
Lamp:$5
Dictation Software:$20
Basic Stamp OEM:$34
Being able to use the computer without carpel tunnel: Priceless
I reacently picked up a coppy of MaximumLinux magazine that included two distro disks. I was suprised to read the licence agrement in the back of the mgazine. It forbid the copying of the disks or any portion of them. In other words it forbids the redistrobution of the GPLed software on the disks, and if I change any of the GPLed source code I cannot distribute the changes. Smells like a violation to me.
Actualy there is one situation that I can think of that one would prefer a robotic driver. One of my professors is doing research for CalTans (California department of Transpertation). He is designing and prototyping a "shadow vehile" that would follow a truck driven by a human. The theory is that a lot of caltrans workers are hurt when the car the the drive (very slowly) down the road is rear ended by a speeding car. Under this setup the "shadow vehicle" may be totaled but the workers would be safe (the speeder is toast either way). Klaus may put him out of a job.
Linux need a DVD player that is not caught up in legal dificulties. The reason is not so that we can all watch movies on our PC, it is set top boxes. Linux is a very tempting OS to use in a set top box. It is open source, stable, and has no licencing fee. It does lack one important element that the upcoming consoles/settops have: DVD playback. The X-box and PS2 both have the ability to play DVDs and both are targeted for use as set top boxes for internet access, etc. Now idealy the player would be free and open sourced, but that is not likely any time soon.
How detatched should the user be from the comand prompt? Or put another way: The average windows user can get away with never seeing a dos promp during normal use, the would not know a dos command if it bit them on the behind. Should / will linux GUIs get to the point that you never have to open an xterm other than for the most arcane issues? Linux bassed embedded apps (set top boxes, etc.) shield the user from the details of the OS but should that be the case on a PC?
Because no known particle has an imaginary rest mass we need another way to send data or people. A wormhole could act as a "shortcut" from point A to point B without traveling the space in between. It was thought that one could use a wormhole as a time machine by accelerating one end to reletivistic speed, but it now looks like any attempt to use it as a time machine would cause it to explode.
A gravity drive could "warp" space time and let you travel at any speed without acceleration or time dialation but first you need anitgravity.
Quantum particles may be able to break (or at least bend) the universal speed limit. A photon can sometimes seem to "quantum tunnel" from one side of a very thin barrier to the other without existing in the space between. It stayed at light speed but skiped part of the journey. You can also speed up photons with a vacume chamber and two copper plates. By placing two grounded conductive planes in close parallel you prevent any particle with a wavelength longer than the distance between the plates from existing in that space. Normaly in empty space particles pop in and out of existance all the time. These are called "virtual particles", "quantum soup" or "quantum fireworks". With less virtual particles in the way a lazer seems to move faster between the plates.
This is all simplified and may be out of date. Serve with a hefty sprincle of salt.
Well I guess the CIA and No Such Agency, etc. just had too much time on their hands after the cold war ended... Actualy many of the USA's cold war alies suposedly had a long standing tradition of spying on US corperations and using the data for their own economic or defence uses. I am suprised that the US intelegence comunity did not get in on the game sooner. There has been presure in that direction for years.
Does anyone know what kernel is likely to be in Red Hat 6.2? What about other upcoming distros? What Version of Xfree is likely to be included?
As for the coments on fuel cells:
Bill Gates is investing in fuel cell research. Why? Because a small fuel cell can run a laptop for a very long time.
Any word on support for the Intel i810 chip set? Has anyone gotten the Xserver up and running on 3.3.6 or 4.0? I know that you need a kernel module for sharing the system RAM with the video card.
Of course if you actualy *wanted* to hurt them you could join the affiliate program, link to a specific title (15% commission), buy a best seller with "one click" (30% discount), pocket your 40% net savings, and watch Amazon sink deeper into a sea of red ink.
Apple used to make a desktop that ran off of the Motorola 68000. Motorola added analog to digital, pulse width modulation (for music or motor control), serial and IR interface, and LCD control on dye. They called it the dragonball and sold it for $12 a pop. It now runs 3Com's PalmPilot.
Anouncements the such-and-such has a prossesor at X Mhz for $1000 at 50 Watts with no mobo ready does nothing for me. When someone releases a Pentium class MPU for $20 with on chip peripherals that runs off of AAA batteries, then I will sit up and take notice. Transmeta may be a step in the right direction but we are not there yet.
Its strange, untill recently I had not heard much about the dragonball. I have mostly heard the Palm core simply refered to as a 68k. Unlike other Motorola microcontrollers (esp the HC11) there does not seem to be many protoboards or development/hobyist kits available.
Just my 2/100 of a dollar.
This is one of the limitations of hard drive capacity, one can only fit so many bits onto the platter before the domains get too small. You can try more or larger platters but that is basicaly just adding another HD. One solution is to use a substance with greater stability at low tempratures and then heat the sector with a tight laser when you want to write.
As for the idea that Cyrix is under "new management" remember that Via got them from National Semiconductor who bought them from...
Never seem anxios to catch a hot potato.
Second Item
Here is an interesting idea (altho I doubt that it will ever happen): Motorola could buy cyrix (or better yet Transmeta) and gain access to the x86 market. They already make the chips for Macs, Palms, and many wireless devices. Transmeta looks like it may present a threat to Motorola's handhend dominance. This is especialy true if the Transmeta's chip can be set up to emulate a 68000, the chip that Motorola makes for the PalmPilot. Right now everytime someone buys a Palm Pilot it is money in Motorola's pocket. There are plenty of reasons not to do this of course (like cyrix's rep stinks to high heaven and no one has made it profitable) and I dont think the Motorola is in the mood for a radical change to their product line.