a (near) future announcement for their widescreen iPods. That's what I really want...
Me, too! I was following along on macrumors.com's live transcript and I was under the impression that Jobs was actually announcing two devices with the same interface, one with phone features. I was pretty bummed after the fact when I got to apple.com and found no new iPods:(
I just hope my 3G iPod's battery doesn't totally crap out before that day
I hear ya. My 20GB 2G is still chugging along, it get's about 6.5 hours ( only ~3.5 while snowboarding unless I put it in a pants pocket to keep it warmer ), but I can't see it lasting much longer. I'm pretty happy it's doing that well after over four years. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for a new iPod before this summer. I remember the 3G's coming out in late April / early May of '03, hopefully the new ones come out then or sooner.
I was worried Sprint was going to do the same thing with it's music store. I bought a RAZR v3m for my wife. It plays Mp3/AAC and supports micro SD cards ( I've found a 2GB card for $79 ). Unfortunately no play of encrypted iTunes tracks ( not legally, anyways ) and no slick sync feature. Not too shabby for $50.
iPhone is awesome, but I was hoping for the same functionality with a 40GB or more hard drive ( and could actually care less about the phone part ).
At first glance I was surprised to see that Fort Collins, CO didn't make the list. Looking at the criteria I see why, the study is kind of lame. Soooo... anyone who's been to Fort Collins lately would see the place is crawling with nerds. Most of the population of 130,000 work for or are family of the engineers at HP, Intel, AMD, Avago (formerly Agilent), Broadcom, Microsoft, LSI Logic and others ( I think there's a small NVidia site somewhere ). Perhaps "number of EE's per capita" would've put Ft Collins in the list ( even the MS site is full of EE's, it's where they design the optical mice ). For the university factor there's Colorado State, but it's kind of pathetic as far as tech goes. But then there's the beer factor. I'd put up a large wager that Ft Collins has the highest number of microbreweries per capita. The whole microbrew movement practically started in Ft Fun at New Belgium (mmmm... Fat Tire). After the micros, Budweiser also has one of it's top five largest breweries in Ft Collins. Not too shabby for a little mountain town...
Actually, the way it happened was that they had to keep reshooting that seen. Harrison eventually tired of it and after hearing "I love you" many times, he finally uttered "I know" instead of his line and that is what made it into the film. Some of the best lines ever are ad-libbed.
I believe the "stock" clock speeds are lower than the part can actually operate at so that they function within the power envelope of a mobile environment. The forthcoming desktop/server chips will have a much higher power envelope so expect higer core voltages and clock speeds, so these overclocked parts give a (somewhat) decent picture of what the desktop parts will look like.
Next take into account that the new parts will be at the 45nm tech node - lower delay per logic stage, rumoured to have lower subthreshold leakage (which would mean higher core voltage for a given power envelope, hence higher clock speed), higher density (more on-die SRAM), etc and you will begin to realize that Conroe/Penryn/Woodcrest are going to be very tough competitors.
WRT getting the serialid out of the processor, you should be able to read it out through a simple JTAG instruction
If this key is part of some encryption scheme, it's more likely a private JTAG instruction. Good luck trying to figure out the secret handshake necessary to unlock the TAP. Being able to execute private JTAG instructions will give you full access to all scannable latches in the microarchitecture, not something chip manufacturers are going to let you do. Here's some more info I dug up on JTAG for the uninitiated.
And they did it using ordinary semiconductor manufacturing methods. It was in spectrum a couple months ago, you can find it here: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/1915 They're planning it for use in single-chip optical networking solutions.
I have not studied general relativity, so I've a question about gravitational waves. Their electromagnetic counterpart requires that electrons are travelling at significant fraction of c for sustainable waves to be propogated. Classically there are two forces, the force between stationary charges (electric) and the force between currents (magnetic). Using special relativity we can prove that these are really two different views of the same force ( the magnetic force arising due to changing charge densities due to contraction/expansion at relativistic speeds ). Does the propogation of gravitational waves require that the masses are travelling at large fractions of c relative to one another? Is this why I keep hearing that the detectors will most likely pick up binary systems (high angular velocity)? Is there a proposed gravitational equivilanet of the magnetic field but we haven't named it as such b/c we've learned from electromagnetics that it's just a relativistic view of gravity and should not be named separately to avoid confusion? I picked up a book on GR a year ago and it's just collecting dust, maybe this stuff will renew my interest...
blu-ray has the potential to have more capacity but currently it does not. The 54GB capacity is dependent on a dual layer blu-ray, and the latest I've heard is that tech isn't reliable enough for affordable widespread use, hence the dual layer 30GB HD-DVD is currently higher capacity than blu-ray.
It's really annoying to see posters rallying behind blu-ray and Sony just because they're not Microsoft. The reason blu-ray is getting accepted by Warner and others in the industry is b/c of super-strict DRM. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Intel are more "on your side" with HD-DVD with a relaxed DRM that allows backup copies to home computers and portable media devices. Note they aren't acuting purely in your interest, they see greater profits from it, a company exists to make money. However, they are trying to give consumers what they want. This is the way business is supposed to work, let's bring both formats to market and let consumers decide. Sony et al are trying to ram blu-ray down consumers throats yelling "this is the way it's gonna be and you're gonna like it!". On the technical side, the HD-DVD guys are a couple years ahead of blu-ray in terms of storage capacity. The only reason blu-ray has a chance is because of the DRM. Arrrgggghhh....
I think you made the grandparent poster's point -- it's about quality. You paid more for your VAIO than for an HPaq. You expect a certain level of quality from Sony that you don't get from HPaq, Dell, Gateway, or any other. I tend to buy Sony electronics because they tend to work better and longer than other brands I've tried. They're the closest thing to Apple in the PC world. But other posters have also been correct with the other side of the story -- you need to beware of products that are higher priced but don't exhibit higher quality than the generic or lesser-known brands. I think people are most vulnerable to this kind of thinking when buying food and clothing. Wow, we're way off-topic here...
works for MS. All through college he was completely anit-MS, with various UNIX workstations in his dorm room (Next, SGI, SUN). He interviewed not planning on taking the job, just for the free trip to Seattle. When asked what he could bring to MS, he replied "I believe I can make your products suck less". He got an offer and has been there for several years. I don't use MS products so I can't comment much on whether or not the suck less than they did five years ago.
Why not just replace the whole list with "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"?
Joking aside, I'm surprised there are no Ayn Rand books in the list. Perhaps her work is just a derivative of some of these other works. I haven't even begun to make a dent in this list.
I'm working on a GL-based compositing window system to replace X, no bull. When I heard the news, I figured with OS X available for x86 my project would be rendered (no pun intended) irrelevent. It turns out that with the OS still limited to Mac hardware, this is not the case.
I wonder if Jobs realizes that if he could pull that off (make everyone's crappy old hardware work on OS X x86), he could take down Microsoft and the fledgling Linux desktop with one blow.
In other news, I'm about ready to release my project;) The rendering part has been complete for some time, I'm working on support for server-side objects, almost there... The thing is, it seems most people in the community don't want to work on "boring" projects like this one. However, once complete it will be anything but boring. Also, if I release it incomplete I won't attract anyone to the project, they'll see it as another Berlin/Fresco.
Anyways, I'm glad Steve is giving desktop Linux a stay of execution.
I'm pretty sure the idea here is that when new Mac software is released for x86, it will run on older PPC Macs, with the 50% speed hit you speak. Hopefully it's not that bad. Moving forward everything will be x86. Lots of people are saying this will be a huge problem for developers, but most of the big ones already build for x86 anyways, they simply replace their Altivec code with their (already coded) SSE code. This will only tick off developers that are Mac-only. It would tick off Apple's in house developers the most, but it sounds like they've already got their apps ready to go.
Hrm, actually, that weapon was on a plane on the edge of space, not quite a space-based weapon. I guess to be on topic I'll have to mention that I work for the Ace Tomato company.
There's not much detail in TFA on how it works. FYI a pn junction is nothing new, it's aka a diode, and is the basis of other more complicated semiconductor structures (FETs, BJTs). Does anyone know how this works? I'd imagine it's similar to the way a BJT works. In a BJT, two pn junctions join to make pnp or npn bipolar transistors, the n or p in the middle is the base and it is a very thin layer. Injecting a small amount of charge in the base causes electrons to diffuse across one of the pn junctions (of of them is doped differently than the other). The base is thin enough that before the electrons can recombine they are swept across the other junction. In this manner you get very high current gains -- a small base current results in a much larger current in your bjt. Anyone know anymore about the battery tech in the article?
Smaller transistors, smaller capacitive loads to drive, lower supply voltages, and shorter wires. A good baseline for power in a synchronous digital system is P=C*V^2*f. From physics we know that q=C*V, therefore current (I) dq/dt = (C*V) * f, where f is the frequency the digital circuit is switching at. Power = current * voltage = C*V*f*V. Power goes down linearly with smaller devices and by the square of the supply voltage.
There are other factors in making smaller devices that keep you from getting a linear decrease in power, all in the form of various leakage currents. Some solutions to these are SOI (semiconductor on insulator) to reducue substrate leakage, high-k gate dielectric to reduce gate leakage.
There are also some circuit techniques to decrease power consumption. One example is clock gating (keep ckts that aren't in use from switching). Another is shying away from dynamic ckt design, a technique that is high-speed but switches twice per clock cycle, even when logic values aren't changing.
I read a while back in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that the Zen Buddhists have an answer for these language-game questions that means "please unask the question". The answer is neither true nor false, it implies ambiguity in the question. I wish I had the book with me so I could quote it. Lots of good stuff in that book. I am not an expert on the subject, if anyone can expound please do so.
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a (near) future announcement for their widescreen iPods. That's what I really want...
:(
Me, too! I was following along on macrumors.com's live transcript and I was under the impression that Jobs was actually announcing two devices with the same interface, one with phone features. I was pretty bummed after the fact when I got to apple.com and found no new iPods
I just hope my 3G iPod's battery doesn't totally crap out before that day
I hear ya. My 20GB 2G is still chugging along, it get's about 6.5 hours ( only ~3.5 while snowboarding unless I put it in a pants pocket to keep it warmer ), but I can't see it lasting much longer. I'm pretty happy it's doing that well after over four years. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for a new iPod before this summer. I remember the 3G's coming out in late April / early May of '03, hopefully the new ones come out then or sooner.
I was worried Sprint was going to do the same thing with it's music store. I bought a RAZR v3m for my wife. It plays Mp3/AAC and supports micro SD cards ( I've found a 2GB card for $79 ). Unfortunately no play of encrypted iTunes tracks ( not legally, anyways ) and no slick sync feature. Not too shabby for $50.
iPhone is awesome, but I was hoping for the same functionality with a 40GB or more hard drive ( and could actually care less about the phone part ).
At first glance I was surprised to see that Fort Collins, CO didn't make the list. Looking at the criteria I see why, the study is kind of lame. Soooo... anyone who's been to Fort Collins lately would see the place is crawling with nerds. Most of the population of 130,000 work for or are family of the engineers at HP, Intel, AMD, Avago (formerly Agilent), Broadcom, Microsoft, LSI Logic and others ( I think there's a small NVidia site somewhere ). Perhaps "number of EE's per capita" would've put Ft Collins in the list ( even the MS site is full of EE's, it's where they design the optical mice ). For the university factor there's Colorado State, but it's kind of pathetic as far as tech goes. But then there's the beer factor. I'd put up a large wager that Ft Collins has the highest number of microbreweries per capita. The whole microbrew movement practically started in Ft Fun at New Belgium (mmmm... Fat Tire). After the micros, Budweiser also has one of it's top five largest breweries in Ft Collins. Not too shabby for a little mountain town...
Actually, the way it happened was that they had to keep reshooting that seen. Harrison eventually tired of it and after hearing "I love you" many times, he finally uttered "I know" instead of his line and that is what made it into the film. Some of the best lines ever are ad-libbed.
Maybe he thinks this is an Itanium? East Asia seems to be in love with that thing. At any rate, I've found my new sig.
-- Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology.
I believe the "stock" clock speeds are lower than the part can actually operate at so that they function within the power envelope of a mobile environment. The forthcoming desktop/server chips will have a much higher power envelope so expect higer core voltages and clock speeds, so these overclocked parts give a (somewhat) decent picture of what the desktop parts will look like.
Next take into account that the new parts will be at the 45nm tech node - lower delay per logic stage, rumoured to have lower subthreshold leakage (which would mean higher core voltage for a given power envelope, hence higher clock speed), higher density (more on-die SRAM), etc and you will begin to realize that Conroe/Penryn/Woodcrest are going to be very tough competitors.
WRT getting the serialid out of the processor, you should be able to read it out through a simple JTAG instruction
If this key is part of some encryption scheme, it's more likely a private JTAG instruction. Good luck trying to figure out the secret handshake necessary to unlock the TAP. Being able to execute private JTAG instructions will give you full access to all scannable latches in the microarchitecture, not something chip manufacturers are going to let you do. Here's some more info I dug up on JTAG for the uninitiated.
Everybody knows that Jesus 'rode into town' on a Harley Davidson. Stop trying to spread your revisionist theories on history
Wow, this is way off-topic... but I'm pretty sure Jesus was stoned off his ass.
And they did it using ordinary semiconductor manufacturing methods. It was in spectrum a couple months ago, you can find it here: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/1915 They're planning it for use in single-chip optical networking solutions.
I have not studied general relativity, so I've a question about gravitational waves. Their electromagnetic counterpart requires that electrons are travelling at significant fraction of c for sustainable waves to be propogated. Classically there are two forces, the force between stationary charges (electric) and the force between currents (magnetic). Using special relativity we can prove that these are really two different views of the same force ( the magnetic force arising due to changing charge densities due to contraction/expansion at relativistic speeds ). Does the propogation of gravitational waves require that the masses are travelling at large fractions of c relative to one another? Is this why I keep hearing that the detectors will most likely pick up binary systems (high angular velocity)? Is there a proposed gravitational equivilanet of the magnetic field but we haven't named it as such b/c we've learned from electromagnetics that it's just a relativistic view of gravity and should not be named separately to avoid confusion? I picked up a book on GR a year ago and it's just collecting dust, maybe this stuff will renew my interest...
Thanks,
Mike
Also, Blu-Ray has more storage capacity than HD-DVD.
not yet, it doesn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD
blu-ray has the potential to have more capacity but currently it does not. The 54GB capacity is dependent on a dual layer blu-ray, and the latest I've heard is that tech isn't reliable enough for affordable widespread use, hence the dual layer 30GB HD-DVD is currently higher capacity than blu-ray.
It's really annoying to see posters rallying behind blu-ray and Sony just because they're not Microsoft. The reason blu-ray is getting accepted by Warner and others in the industry is b/c of super-strict DRM. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Intel are more "on your side" with HD-DVD with a relaxed DRM that allows backup copies to home computers and portable media devices. Note they aren't acuting purely in your interest, they see greater profits from it, a company exists to make money. However, they are trying to give consumers what they want. This is the way business is supposed to work, let's bring both formats to market and let consumers decide. Sony et al are trying to ram blu-ray down consumers throats yelling "this is the way it's gonna be and you're gonna like it!". On the technical side, the HD-DVD guys are a couple years ahead of blu-ray in terms of storage capacity. The only reason blu-ray has a chance is because of the DRM. Arrrgggghhh....
Spaceball.
Hats off to you, best... "In Soviet Russia" joke... ever ;)
My sony vaio box ... the hp compaq's are crap
I think you made the grandparent poster's point -- it's about quality. You paid more for your VAIO than for an HPaq. You expect a certain level of quality from Sony that you don't get from HPaq, Dell, Gateway, or any other. I tend to buy Sony electronics because they tend to work better and longer than other brands I've tried. They're the closest thing to Apple in the PC world. But other posters have also been correct with the other side of the story -- you need to beware of products that are higher priced but don't exhibit higher quality than the generic or lesser-known brands. I think people are most vulnerable to this kind of thinking when buying food and clothing. Wow, we're way off-topic here...
works for MS. All through college he was completely anit-MS, with various UNIX workstations in his dorm room (Next, SGI, SUN). He interviewed not planning on taking the job, just for the free trip to Seattle. When asked what he could bring to MS, he replied "I believe I can make your products suck less". He got an offer and has been there for several years. I don't use MS products so I can't comment much on whether or not the suck less than they did five years ago.
Why not just replace the whole list with "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"?
Joking aside, I'm surprised there are no Ayn Rand books in the list. Perhaps her work is just a derivative of some of these other works. I haven't even begun to make a dent in this list.
I'm working on a GL-based compositing window system to replace X, no bull. When I heard the news, I figured with OS X available for x86 my project would be rendered (no pun intended) irrelevent. It turns out that with the OS still limited to Mac hardware, this is not the case.
;) The rendering part has been complete for some time, I'm working on support for server-side objects, almost there... The thing is, it seems most people in the community don't want to work on "boring" projects like this one. However, once complete it will be anything but boring. Also, if I release it incomplete I won't attract anyone to the project, they'll see it as another Berlin/Fresco.
I wonder if Jobs realizes that if he could pull that off (make everyone's crappy old hardware work on OS X x86), he could take down Microsoft and the fledgling Linux desktop with one blow.
In other news, I'm about ready to release my project
Anyways, I'm glad Steve is giving desktop Linux a stay of execution.
I'm pretty sure the idea here is that when new Mac software is released for x86, it will run on older PPC Macs, with the 50% speed hit you speak. Hopefully it's not that bad. Moving forward everything will be x86. Lots of people are saying this will be a huge problem for developers, but most of the big ones already build for x86 anyways, they simply replace their Altivec code with their (already coded) SSE code. This will only tick off developers that are Mac-only. It would tick off Apple's in house developers the most, but it sounds like they've already got their apps ready to go.
Hrm, actually, that weapon was on a plane on the edge of space, not quite a space-based weapon. I guess to be on topic I'll have to mention that I work for the Ace Tomato company.
their PROM with my EEPROM and ... Popcorn!
There's not much detail in TFA on how it works. FYI a pn junction is nothing new, it's aka a diode, and is the basis of other more complicated semiconductor structures (FETs, BJTs). Does anyone know how this works? I'd imagine it's similar to the way a BJT works. In a BJT, two pn junctions join to make pnp or npn bipolar transistors, the n or p in the middle is the base and it is a very thin layer. Injecting a small amount of charge in the base causes electrons to diffuse across one of the pn junctions (of of them is doped differently than the other). The base is thin enough that before the electrons can recombine they are swept across the other junction. In this manner you get very high current gains -- a small base current results in a much larger current in your bjt. Anyone know anymore about the battery tech in the article?
Smaller transistors, smaller capacitive loads to drive, lower supply voltages, and shorter wires. A good baseline for power in a synchronous digital system is P=C*V^2*f. From physics we know that q=C*V, therefore current (I) dq/dt = (C*V) * f, where f is the frequency the digital circuit is switching at. Power = current * voltage = C*V*f*V. Power goes down linearly with smaller devices and by the square of the supply voltage.
There are other factors in making smaller devices that keep you from getting a linear decrease in power, all in the form of various leakage currents. Some solutions to these are SOI (semiconductor on insulator) to reducue substrate leakage, high-k gate dielectric to reduce gate leakage.
There are also some circuit techniques to decrease power consumption. One example is clock gating (keep ckts that aren't in use from switching). Another is shying away from dynamic ckt design, a technique that is high-speed but switches twice per clock cycle, even when logic values aren't changing.
I read a while back in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that the Zen Buddhists have an answer for these language-game questions that means "please unask the question". The answer is neither true nor false, it implies ambiguity in the question. I wish I had the book with me so I could quote it. Lots of good stuff in that book. I am not an expert on the subject, if anyone can expound please do so.